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They didn't so much decide to stay on the couch as fail to leave it.
There'd been a loose plan to get up as civilized people do and go to bed, but that required movement, and neither of them could find it in them to do so. Buck was propped in the corner of the couch with his slung arm arranged across a pillow at the angle the ER had threatened him about, which meant sitting more or less upright, which meant Eddie had ended up tucked along the rest of the couch with his head near Buck's good shoulder. Now it was too late to really do anything about their sleeping arrangements.
The house had gone all the way quiet. Theo's noise machine hummed from down the hall. The dishwasher had quietened down about an hour ago, and the silence no longer felt enormous; it felt comfortable.
"You're gonna regret sleeping sitting up," Eddie said, not moving.
"I regret a lot of things. This is way down the list." Buck shifted, winced at the arm, and never opened his eyes.
"The doctor said a lot of things you nodded at and didn't listen to."
"I listened to some of them."
"Name one."
"No pasta jars for six weeks." Buck's mouth twitched. "That one I'm going to hold onto forever, actually. Medical exemption. You have to open all the jars now. It's in writing."
Eddie huffed out a laugh and let his eyes close. He chose very deliberately not to go where his brain was trying to take him, which was that not that long ago, he had stood on the edge of a riverbank and watched the water take this man, and he had genuinely not known if he'd get to have this again. The couch. The dumb jar joke. The weight of Buck against him. He'd known Buck a long time. He'd never let himself have this before, and now he had it, and it had cost a flood to get here, and he was too tired and too wrung out to be anything but quietly and ferociously grateful.
"Hey," Buck said, low.
"Mm."
"Thanks…for today. For all of it, really. I know it was a lot."
"Go to sleep, Buck." Eddie chose deliberately again. They were both too tired to argue over how hard Buck considered himself to handle or how easy Eddie found it. They could have that conversation when there was coffee and pastries.
Eddie only stayed conscious until he could tell Buck had fallen asleep first.
He should have known better.
The pier was wrong in the way dreams are often wrong. Too bright, too noisy, too crowded. But Buck knew where he was instantly. His body knew before the rest of him did. His body had been here before.
Chris's shirt was in his fist, as the little boy leaned on the railing looking off into the ocean. That part was right. That part was always right. Chris was chattering about the games, wanting to try again with the plastic ducks, and Buck promising him they'd go back in a minute, Superman. Just an ordinary day on the Santa Monica pier, which was the worst part, because Buck knew what ordinary meant. Ordinary came right before everything went to hell.
Then Chris asked the question, the way he always did: where did all the water go, and the water was already coming. The sound of the pier as everyone slowly understood what was about to happen enveloped them, the sound that never quite left him. Buck didn't have time to think. He just reacted. Sweeping Chris up and running, zeroing in on the baseball toss stand. Their only hope. But the boardwalk was syrup under his feet, and salvation was too far and getting farther somehow, the way these things tended to do in dreams, and the water was a freight train, and Chris slipped away.
In his nightmares, it always happened faster than it ever had in reality, but there was never any denying it. He had lost Chris. He was gone, and there was nothing he could do about it, and that feeling was unfortunately rooted in reality. When Buck broke the water's surface, he was screaming a name into unforgiving waves. He whipped his head around, desperately searching, but the face that surfaced in the water where Chris should have been was Eddie's.
Not Chris. Eddie. Pale and stricken, mouth open around a shape Buck couldn't hear, and he was wearing an expression Buck had never seen on him, or had he? No, he had. Today. Some part of Buck had seen exactly this face today and filed it somewhere below where he could reach if he tried, the look of a man watching the water take the person he—
The scenarios blurred together. The ocean and the creek ran together the way only water could, seamless, and Chris was gone and Eddie was gone and Buck was in both of them at once, forty feet of tether and hanging onto the side of a firetruck engine, voice horse from screaming and saltwater, and he couldn't reach either of them, he was going to lose both, he was going to—
"Buck. Buck. Hey—"
And the water let go of him all at once, and it was Eddie's hands on his face, both of them, and the lamp was on, and it was his living room. He was dry, warm, still wearing the sling he had cursed twelve times since it was bestowed upon him.
"You're here, you're okay, cariño. Nobody's in the water. Breathe."
Buck breathed. It came out ragged at first, calming as he grabbed for Eddie to stay close. He was never going anywhere to begin with. His shirt was stuck to his back with sweat, and his heart was going as he'd actually been running, and the dream was peeling off of him in strips slowly.
"Sorry. I'm sorry, I—"
"Don't." Eddie cut him off gently, his thumb moving once against Buck's cheekbone, and then his hand dropped to Buck's good shoulder, staying in contact, grounding him. "Don't apologize. Just breathe for a second."
Buck did as he was told. He allowed the house to reassemble itself around him, the noise machine, the lamp Eddie must have hit on his way up out of sleep. Down the hall, there was silence. Whatever sound Buck had made, it hadn't traveled. Good. Good.
"Tsunami." Buck offered, finally, and once the word was out of his mouth, he realized he probably didn't even need to say it. "Guess I should have seen that one coming, huh?"
"Wanna talk about it?" Eddie knew it usually helped. Buck would spiral otherwise. They sat in silence for a few minutes; Eddie watched Buck weigh his words carefully.
"I was back there today, just for a minute after I went under." His good hand had found a loose thread on the pillow, and he picked at it. "I had lost him all over again."
Eddie didn't say anything. He'd been doing that a lot lately, but he found it was the only way Buck got to where he needed to go.
"We've talked about it a hundred times, I know. You've said your piece, I've heard it, it's not — It's different now. I can't just — it's different now that you know."
"Know what?"
"What I am — or was. All the stuff that came out this week." Buck said it to the coffee table. "Because every other time we've done this, you're telling me it wasn't my fault, I could take it. I could let it land, some days. Because underneath it, the thing that made it okay was that I was just a guy, right? A guy loses a kid in a tsunami, that's — that's a tragedy. Could have happened to anyone. Nobody could have done better; water's water, God's hands, whatever. That's the version you forgave."
Eddie could feel the shape of where this was going, and he didn't like one inch of it.
"But that's not the version that happened. The guy in the water was a SEAL, Eds. The guy that lost your son. I've done next-level chaos water extractions. I've handled debris fields, currents, low-vis, searches in the worst, unforgiving waters. I have literally trained for the exact thing that day was, and I still lost him. Not once. Twice. The first wave took him off me before I even got my head above water, and okay, fine, the first wave fucks everybody. Doesn't change the fact that I can still feel him slip out of my hands. But then I got him back; I got him to the 136's truck. I put him up there myself. I had him. We were good. We were safe. I turned around to help pull some other people up, and the truck rocked in the recession, and he went in behind me and— I went in after him. It felt like forever. I did everything I could. I pulled everything they ever taught me, and I never found him. Right before you found me, I called Maddie. I told her I thought — He was gone, Eddie. That's all I knew. I did everything I possibly could, and it didn't change anything. I didn't know he was alive until I saw him in your arms. So yeah, it's different now."
Buck finally looked up, and Eddie could see it in his eyes that he was braced, ready for the verdict to change. "The guy you forgave doesn't exist. The real guy had every skill it takes and lost him anyway. So if you want to take it back, now that you know, I'd— I'd get it."
For a long moment, Eddie just stared at him. And then, quietly, with something that wasn't quite anger, but definitely lived in the same ZIP code: "You think being a SEAL is the part that makes it your fault?"
Buck didn't answer. Which was all the answer Eddie needed.
"Buck, look at me." Eddie waited until he did. "Run it the other way. Just once. That wave hits Santa Monica Pier, and that kid, eight-year-old, on crutches, goes into that water. In the whole city, in that entire disaster, out of every single person he could've been standing next to when it hit—" Eddie's voice was climbing, and he let it "—he was standing next to the one guy who'd trained for exactly that. That's the fact that you just laid out like a death sentence. What were the odds that day for a kid like Chris? Do you know what the number is for disabled kids, alone, first wave, no adult?"
"Eddie—"
"It's zero, Buck. It rounds to zero. And he's asleep down the hall right now because the person who had him was combat-trained to keep a body alive in moving water, and did, through the first wave, through the debris, all the way to a truck, hours until somebody else could take the handoff." Eddie's hand had found the back of Buck's neck, and it was not gentle now; it was gripping, holding him in place for it. "You keep saying you lost him twice like it's the whole story. You saved him twice is the story. He fell in twice, and you had already gotten him out of the impossible once, and the only reason there was a live kid to go over on that truck is that you'd kept him breathing long enough to get there. You didn't fail at being a SEAL that day. Christopher is alive because you were one."
Buck's breath went out of him in pieces.
"You've had it upside down this whole time. You think the training is the thing that convicts you. You were too far away to hear him that day. The first words out of his mouth were telling me his buck saved him."
"I thought he was dead."
"I know. I could see it. There's never been any chance of denying how much you love that kid, Buck, but especially not in that moment. I know exactly who was in that water. I've known it since the day it happened."
Buck let his weight go against Eddie, his forehead on top of Eddie's shoulder, finally allowing Eddie to pull him in.
Buck woke to daylight and the specific smell of someone else running his coffee maker, and for one disoriented second, his whole chest seized at it, the ghost of two mornings ago and three people at his table, before he remembered that this was more likely a different ambush, a much younger one.
Christopher. In the kitchen, crutches leaned against the counter, working the coffee maker with the studious care of a kid doing a thing he's watched adults do for years, and when he heard Buck stir, he looked over, and his face shifted.
Buck clocked the concern in about half a second.
"You sleep okay?" He tried and failed to play it as casual.
"I know you had a rough night." Chris allowed for Buck to take over the task of coffee once the cup was full. Pushing buttons was one thing, but he knew from his dad's meticulous coffee runs that Buck was particular about his coffee, and Chris didn't even know where to start. "I heard a little bit. Not enough to count for much, though." He added in a rush when he saw the look on Buck's face. "Theo woke up, so I got him back down before he could really get going. Read him the new dinosaur book we bought last week. He was out in like ten minutes. Figured you and Dad had it handled, but…I don't know, I guess I just wanted to see if you were okay."
Buck stared at the fifteen-year-old sitting across from him. This sweet kid who had heard him coming apart in the night, and without any fanfare, had gotten up, soothed a little boy, put himself back to bed, and then made sure to wake up early enough to take care of him. He wasn't sure what to say to that.
"Chris," he said, and had to stop and gather himself before starting again. "You didn't have to do any of that."
"I know, I wanted to. And also—" He hesitated, picking at the hem of his sleeve in a gesture that was so much Buck's own, it hurt Buck's chest. "I know it was about the tsunami. You don't have to tell me anything, but I could just tell, after yesterday. I have them too, sometimes."
"You do?"
"Not a lot. Not like I used to." Chris kept his eyes on his sleeve. "But yeah. It's like I know how it ends now; I know we're both fine, but the part in the middle, when we weren't —" He stopped. Buck didn't dare breathe. "Anyway. When your friends showed up, and everybody found out you were a SEAL, I didn't really know what that meant. So I looked it up." He glanced up, clearly nervous about the reaction to that. "What SEALs do, how the training's different than what Dad did. It's a lot. It's way more than I thought. And then I kind of couldn't stop thinking about the pier, because it lined up. You went into some other mode that day. I didn't really know it then, because I was eight. I just thought that was how you were when shit got serious. But now I think that was the training."
Buck sat there with a coffee he wasn't drinking and could not, for the life of him, find a single word.
"I didn't tell Dad or anything. I wasn't going to mention it because I didn't want you to think I was, like, digging into your stuff. But you had a nightmare, and I've had the same one, kind of, and I thought maybe it was okay to say it. That I get it. More than I used to, at least. Anyway, that's why I looked it up. 'Cause when my friends ask stuff about my dad being a SEAL, I wanna actually know what I'm talking about instead of just saying he did cool secret stuff, which is what I was going to go with until I could get Grace to spill something better."
He said it plainly, on his way to somewhere else.
Buck did not move.
It went through him all at once and from every direction, the way Grace's statement had the other day. My dad, said easily, said like it had been the word for years, which Buck understood in a slow-dawning way that took the floor under him; it clearly had been. Chris had been telling his friends about his two dads for probably who knows how long. Like it was just true. Like it had never been a question anybody needed to ask.
And Buck, who had just spent the whole night saying the hardest true things out loud, who had cried on his own couch and confessed the worst day of his life, found that he did not have it in him to make this a moment. Twenty-four hours had emptied him and filled him back up past the line, and there was simply no more room to feel anything as big as what a teenager had just handed him without noticing. So he didn't. He just, for once in his life, let it be true, and let himself be happy about it, and said nothing at all, and let the kid keep talking.
Across the room, in the kitchen doorway, Eddie stood. Buck felt the look before he found it, and when their eyes met over the top of Chris's head, Eddie didn't say a word, either. He just held Buck's gaze with an eyebrow slightly raised, and an expression that was pure, insufferable, seven-years-in-the-making told you.
Told you, the look said. Told you what you are to him. Told you it was never a question. You want to keep arguing with me about it at three in the morning, or you want to drink your coffee, Dad?
Buck looked down at Chris and had to blink hard and drink his coffee cold so he wouldn't have to talk, and Chris, blessedly oblivious, had already moved on.
As Buck also forced himself to move forward, two other things Chris had said clicked into place. The first was that Chris had done this quietly, on his own, in the space of two days. He had gone and studied the machinery of a thing he'd only just learned about Buck, out of nothing but wanting to understand him better, the way his whole family kept doing, kept seeing him and doing the work to see him more clearly, and it had broken something open in Buck's chest that he couldn't name because he had never had it before, not once.
The second was smaller and colder, and he wished he didn't have to file it anywhere, but the words were spoken, so it was too late. Chris had started to talk about their time in the tsunami when they were separated before stopping himself. Hours Buck and Eddie never fully accounted for, the part where the boy had been alone in the water doing God-knew-what to survive it. There was more there. They always knew there had to be, but when you look at a traumatized eight-year-old knowing something like that, you hope like hell that his brain locked it away somewhere, that he didn't remember. But that wasn't true. Buck trusted that Chris would talk when he was ready. And the difference between Chris and Buck was that Chris would be ready someday. He would have the option and the strength to open the box himself because Chris had people who'd been proving his entire life that they'd be there for him. Chris would never have to know what it feels like to have to pack your life into boxes and seal them shut.
"Thank you for telling me," Buck said, an echo of Eddie's response from the day before. "It means a lot, bud. More than you know."
Chris shrugged and leaned into his good side, careful of the sling without being told, the way he'd learned to be careful of a lot of things too early, and Buck put his good arm around him, and for a minute it was completely enough.
"BUCK!" Theo had clearly discovered the house was awake. He came running into the kitchen at full speed, and Buck got his good arm up just in time to catch him and absorb it against his good side, and Chris fielded the coffee mug closer to the center of the table without hesitating.
"Careful of his arm, Theo," Chris said before either adult got the chance.
"S'okay." Buck wheezed. "Hey, Spiderman. Good morning."
Theo settled against him, warm and soft. He looked up at Buck with the specific gravity of a tiny human about to make a big request.
"Can we see Auntie Maddie today? Auntie Maddie was supposed to see us, and she couldn't. And I didn't get to show her my new dinosaur. And you," he pointed a slightly accusatory finger at Buck, "got to see Nana Thena yesterday at the water place without me. Can we see both of them today?"
Yes, obviously Buck had been holding out on him on purpose. How dare he?
Theo had no idea that he had just pulled the softest possible lever in the entire world. A four-year-old with a dinosaur and a list of people he missed, and Buck felt the whole thing he'd been avoiding come to rest very gently on his chest with Theo's full weight behind it. Because he couldn't say no to that. Nobody on Earth could say no to that. Buck had been finding reasons to keep these two particular women at a careful distance.
Because for as easy as it was for Chris to accept all of this newness, Buck wasn't sure that the people that helped raise him would feel the same way once it was handed to them. Chris made it all look easy. And Buck was a chicken.
He looked up at Eddie, who was still standing in the doorway, allowing him to have his choice the way he had been for days.
"Yeah," Buck said, and his voice was rough. "Yeah, let's…um…let me text Aunt Maddie and Nana Thena right now, okay? See when they're free."
Theo cheered like Buck had promised him the moon.
And Buck had the phone open to Maddie's text thread, thumb hovering, the fear right there, treading water, the not-knowing of whether all of it, the SEAL years, the boxes, the things he couldn't take back, whether any of that would change how she looked at him, whether the people who'd helped build him could hold the whole weight of what he actually was, the way the kid next to him already did—
The soft knock at the door brought him out of his thoughts.
Two raps, unhurried, familiar. Buck knew that knock. He'd known that knock anywhere.
Chris was already up, moving faster than either one of his severely uncaffeinated parents. He crutched to the door and opened it, and there was Steve on the front step in the gold morning light, coffee in hand. He took one look at the scene inside as everyone moved into the living room, the kid with his arms around Buck's thigh as they walked, Buck with one hand on Theo's back and the other still holding his phone, Eddie standing just behind them, ever supportive, and he read everything.
"Morning," Steve said. "Danno's still asleep, and Grace insisted on surfing, so I figured I'd come check in on my kid. Rough night?"
"Something like that." Buck smiled softly.
"Auntie Maddie's gonna come see my dinosaur," Theo informed Steve with authority.
"Is she?" Steve looked back up at Buck, really looked at him, and read him like a book. "That's good, Buck. Real good."
And Buck stood there for a moment, and something in him, some old reflex that had spent so much time keeping people on the far side of thresholds, just let go.
"You gonna stand out there all morning? Get in here. Theo wants to show somebody this dinosaur, and you're the only one who hasn't seen it forty times."
This was met by a chuckle from Steve and a resounding cheer from Theo, who immediately took off to his room for his new toy, as they all settled into the living room.
He thought about the text he was about to send out, the one that would start pulling them all into the same room. Maddie, then Athena, and if he was truly honest with himself, Steve had a seat at that table, too. Then the whole truth to the people that helped build him, the ones who were still here to hear it, anyway, the ones who've known him the longest. The ones who he still, even now, did not know what they would say when it was all said and done.
The fear was there, but so was the security. It was a home made up of a couch and a nightmare survived and a kid who had done his homework and a man in the hallway who carried the same weight, and a father figure crossing his threshold uninvited on a Saturday morning because this was simply what these people did: they came, they stayed, they refused to be kept out. He didn't know if the rest of them would take it half as well as Chris or Eddie had.
But for the first time in a decade, he was going to find out.
He looked down at his phone and started to type.