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(brother)
Colin Reilly was 29 years old, a bartender in Dallas, and went missing on his way home from driving his baby sister back to her university in Arizona after the holidays. In the pictures, he has a square jaw, blue eyes, and copper-brown waves in a stylish bun.
He looks, Buck thinks, barely like Buck.
There are nothing but pictures of him, at the funeral. Photos on a memorial table, an empty coffin, an urn clutched in his sister's hands. She was the one who emailed him. Buck couldn't say no.
Colin's parents stare at him when he lands, their eyes asking questions to which Buck has no answer. Why you? What makes you different? Why do you deserve this, when he didn't?
And, beyond that, a more familiar gaze, one that follows Buck throughout the funeral. From his old friends, his former partners, his family. Each watching him, searching, trying to find something in Buck that they recognize. Someone they recognize.
This part is easy, at least. If there's one thing Buck has always known, it's how to exist as a memorial.
Colin's sister does not look at him. Buck doesn't blame her. He wonders, in a brief, distant way, if Maddie couldn't look at him after Daniel's funeral, even for a moment.
Or maybe she didn't have that luxury. Buck gets a call from Jee-yun to wave her uncle Buck goodnight. Maddie doesn't ask about the funeral. Buck doesn't ask about Daniel. It's good. It's fine.
(friend)
Arnold Calhoun's friends give Buck a candle at his memorial, the flash-flicker of flame familiar. His firefighter's mind flashes through contingencies, escape routes, the nearest hydrant. He cups the flame carefully in his hands.
They talk about him with a smile tucked in the corner of their mouths, something secret and sweet. Buck finds something familiar in the cadence of their voice, their easy stories. He remembers Peru, sand beneath his feet, drunken karaoke nights and stupid dares. For a moment, he misses Connor so much that it feels like the air's been punched out of him.
He wonders if it's wrong to grieve your friend at somebody else's memorial. He wonders if Arnold resents him. Maybe. Probably.
Arnold had a terrible sense of direction. Buck overhears some of his friends weeping, half-drunk, kneeling on the grass, about how they shouldn't have told him to take the back roads.
Buck goes back to his hotel room and throws up. Eddie texts him later, a picture Chris and Theo cheek to cheek, grinning over stacks of waffles.
They might not have had this. They might not have ever gotten this.
(Why do you deserve this--)
Buck sends a thumbs-up emoji back.
(father)
There is a little boy at Zachary Hayes' funeral.
He clings to the back of a woman's jeans -- Zachary's cousin, Lynn, who had called Buck in the middle of a shift and given him a date and a brusque name, dropping the call and leaving him staring at his phone in the middle of the loft.
Chimney asked who it was. Buck asked for the time off. His team looked at each other with the expressions of a group of people who have been cataloguing exactly how many uncharacteristic days off Buck has been taking, recently.
He doesn't explain it to them. He's pretty sure they know. It's not hard to connect the dots, given the givens. He tries not to wonder what Bobby would've said, if he would've approved, if this is the kind of peace he had once spoken to Buck about. Bobby's ghost isn't here, after all. Not except in those he left behind, in Buck, and the memorial he's made of his body and soul.
Lynn doesn't look at him when he shows up, standing in a small group of people that are stoic and silent in a way that doesn't come naturally to Buck. He tries, still, looks at the picture of him holding a pint on a bar stool, teeth glinting bright. He has a little fuckoff goatee, a baseball cap on. Buck can't find his ghost here, either.
The toddler seems mostly unconcerned by it all, sitting on the muddy ground. After the pastor has said a few words, people linger, awkward, quiet. Buck goes over to the child, crouches to his level. The toddler blinks up at him, hands him a handful of wet earth. Buck takes it. It feels strangely apt. Maybe there is something of him, here, under this piece of earth.
Or maybe he's reading too much into the actions of a fucking child.
"His ma died in the hospital," Lynn says, startling Buck. She's watching them with shadowed eyes, a baseball cap pulled over her forehead. Buck knows how that one goes. "When Zach went missing-- I agreed to take him in." Then, almost defensively, though Buck hadn't asked-- "There wasn't anyone else."
There never is, Buck thinks. "What's your name?" he asks the child.
"Zach," the little child tells him. He hands him another handful of dirt. "Like pa."
Buck's heart twinges. I'm not Derek. He smiles. "Thank you, Zach."
"Are you like my pa?" he asks. Buck freezes. Lynn exhales, murmurs something that might be a curse.
"I--" Buck looks at Lynn. Lynn ruffles Zach's hair roughly.
"He brought your pa back," she tells him, in the stiff way that someone who was never given enough gentleness tries to be gentle. "He brought him home."
It is not quite true, except for the ways that it is. Buck swallows, looks at the dirt in his hands, tries not to wonder if he and Zachary bled into the same hardwood, the same earth. Forgive him, he didn't claw through six feet of earth for Zachary's bones. He didn't know he had to.
Zach hums, shuffles forward, drops his entire weight on Buck's leg. Buck's hand comes up, automatic, to cradle the back of his head. He remembers the back of an ambulance. He remembers the top of a firetruck.
He knows how to do this part, he tells himself. He knows how to stay for the worst day of a child's life.
(Christopher calls him that evening to help with his math homework. He complains about the annoying kid in his AP bio class, what schools he's thinking of checking out in the summer. Buck laughs and asks him questions and loves him so much it burns through him.
Afterwards, he looks at the dirt beneath his nails, and wishes he had dug deeper.)
(lover)
Cain Pollard's husband thanks him after the funeral.
Buck had almost refused his invitation back to his home, but the wan lines of his face had convinced him otherwise. He brings out iced tea, too sweet, sticky in his throat. Buck looks at the picture frames around the house, two men smiling, a plethora of dogs, a home. A life, until it's not.
"I told him," Mateo says, something almost wry in his voice. "That he shouldn't go through some weird ass town in the rural south. You're gonna get your ass beat, I said. You have our wedding photo on your dash, idiot. I didn't think I'd have to worry about fucking serial killers."
Buck thinks about men in a diner, Eddie's tense shoulders. "You weren't wrong, either," he tells him. Something like recognition, a grieving sort of solidarity, passes between them. Buck wishes he didn't understand. He is terribly glad that he can at least give this to him.
"He was alone," Mateo murmurs, looking down at his cup. "I couldn't take the time off to go with him to his conference. We said we'd make a roadtrip of it, next time."
Roadtrip, Buck remembers saying, watching the little quirk of Eddie's lips. He remembers the desperation in his stomach, the need to do something, something, something to fold them back into a shape he knew how to hold.
"It wouldn't-- I was with my partner, and I got taken anyways. It's not your fault."
Mateo looks at him. "At least you knew someone was looking for you. At least you knew you wouldn't be alone. Cain-- Cain--"
Buck holds him as he weeps. He's not as heavy as Eddie was, when Buck had caught him once, twice, every single time. It is harder to hold on anyway.
"He was alone," Mateo weeps. "He was all alone."
And there is nothing to say to that, no comfort that Buck can give. After all, one thing that he's always known he wasn't, in comfort and in fear, tied to a post and rattling the bars of his cage, was alone.
Mateo asks if he wants to sleep in the spare room, after. Buck smiles, tells him he needs to go home.
"To your partner?" Mateo asks him, which is around when Buck realizes what he thinks Buck had meant. He doesn't correct him.
"Yeah," he says instead. "He'll be waiting for me."
(buck)
There are very few people at Derek Sheets' funeral.
He's been dead, in theory if not practice, for years now. The body in the coffin is a stranger to most, a boy lengthened, grown, become strange. Perhaps it would have been easier to accept this stranger, if it were not for everything else. If Buck wasn't here, standing at the edge of his plot, watching this boy that he was not and could never have been be lowered into the earth.
He thinks he should be thinking about Daniel. For some reason, he thinks of the catfish instead. The feeling of seeing someone else wrap your skin over their face. The strangeness of it, the horror.
I'm sorry, he wants to say, even though Eddie and Maddie and Hen and Chim and Athena and everyone in his life would frown at him for it. It is not, despite what they would think, because Buck feels bad for being kidnapped, nor does he feel bad for escaping. However, there is no denying that there is a boy that was lost in all of this, who's face has, ironically, been sublimated in the minds of many into Buck's.
Buck knows the terror of having your life be consumed. He wishes that this boy didn't.
The air in New Mexico tastes the same, and Buck grieves, quietly, for this boy that never managed to run away. He feels people's eyes on him, the questions in them. Why are you here? To mock him one last time? To act like the bigger man?
You did this. You did this. You did this.
Bonnie and Earl are here, too. They are surrounded by police, stopped whenever they so much as take a half-step towards Buck. Buck feels, more irrationally this time, guilty about that, too. They deserve to grieve properly. If anything, not grieving properly led to all of this, all these funerals, the scars on his side where a cattle prod hit his broken ribs, the months of dependency and recovery afterwards. Buck wants to give that to them.
Still, he had to come. It is, he admits, a selfish decision. But that is the only kind he knows how to choose, sometimes.
He leaves first, this time. He doesn't linger. He does not run, but something dogs at his steps, anyway. At the gate, he turns back one last time. Catches Earl's eye.
I'm sorry, he sees. He does not give him a response. Bonnie does not look at him at all. This, too, Buck understands very well.
Behind the gates, parked at the edge of the road, Eddie is leaning on his truck, a distant expression on his face. When Buck walks up, their eyes meet.
I had to do it, he thinks, watching Eddie.
I know you did, he sees. This time, Buck allows himself to hold his eyes, allows himself to take Eddie's outstretched hand.
"You done here?"
Buck searches his heart for catharsis, for meaning, for the kind of full circle that will bring a true end to all that has come before. He does not find it. Maybe it is still in a basement, somewhere at the edge of town. Maybe it is back in LA, where a sister, two sons, a dozen friends, every memory of the only father who ever mattered lie in wait. Maybe it is further than that, inside a lab, hanging from a ladder, bleeding out in a street, in a well, under a truck. Maybe he'll find salvation in Eddie's hands.
Or maybe not. Buck is glad to hold them anyway.
"Yeah," he says, a lover and brother and friend and father and son all at once and beyond that, just Buck, not anyone else. "Yeah, I'm ready to go home."