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I feel like a child, Buck thinks as he looks in on Eddie, Hen, and Chim tossing his place.
But aren't you?
[How do you mean?]
We both know you're not where you're meant to be, Der-
"You're letting me win?" Chris, clearly surprised, interrupts Buck's trapped cycle of thoughts before it can turn into a spiral.
You should respond to him. This boy is worried about you.
He blinks rapidly, coaxing both his eyes into focusing on the same thing: Chris's game of cards. Buck still isn't sure if Eddie's kid being here is helping or hurting, landing on the positive that at least Chris isn't going to make him talk about how he wants to rip the skin off his own body and burn alive whatever remains.
"Uh-" Buck's brain short-circuits as he picks up his cards and flicks through them to see how badly he's losing, "yes, sorry. I, uh, I got a little…" his eyes land instinctively on Eddie, sorting though something at his dining table, "…distracted."
"It sucks to have people touching your stuff." Chris offers sympathetically. Buck decides that the teen's presence is helping.
He misses… does he miss when people were more honest with him? Aren't they honest with him now? There's a difference, he supposes, between being honest with someone on principle and delivering the truth with teeth bared and eyes narrowed. Surely this, this baring of his soul, this invitation for those around him to walk inside and fix what they wish, will gain him more respect from his friends and family. He needs to believe that, though, otherwise he will never be able to tell anyone anything that is not a lie.
Regardless, Buck affirms Chris's statement. "Yeah," he forces a faint laugh, tearing his stare away from the stripping bare of his home, "also just sucks 'cause… they're doing it 'cause they don't trust me." Chim has moved on to the rug from the couch, he can see.
Chris asks, very plainly, "Would you trust you?"
Buck's thoughts silence themselves as a great gravitational force brings his focus back to Chris.
Ha.
An involuntary scoff escapes him at the boy's words, but they land a little harder than he'd been expecting.
"Probably not," he sighs, reluctant.
He thinks back to when Eddie freaked out over Chris wanting to learn skateboarding; how instead of allowing his fears to overpower his love for his child, Eddie had implemented a workable solution that still gave his son the experience he craved. Had Eddie not trusted his son? No, Eddie hadn't trusted Chris's body to protect him the same way it would other children.
If Buck doesn't trust his own body not to hunt for something to give him his next high, why should his friends?
It's ignorant, stupid, and selfish of him to want the people he loves most to trust him unconditionally, but he wants them to do it anyway.
Who speaks for you?
[What?]
Do you say these things to yourself in the voice of Evan Buckley, or does your disease say these uncomfortable, beautiful lies to you so that you will keep giving it the space it needs to fester in your body?
[I speak for myself. I have free will, I make my own decisions, and I speak for myself.]
If you really had free will, would you have made the same choices? Would you have listened to the first doctor when the first prescription ran out too soon; would you have accepted admonition from the fifth, chastisement from the tenth? Would you have ever slid your fingers inside that drawer in the ambulance? Would you have stayed behind when the bells rang, knowing you weren't fit to be on duty? Would you have come forward sooner? Would you have come forward at all?
[But I did come forward. I went to Chimney, and I told him what had happened. My character won over the drugs, I executed my free will, and I admitted my fuckup.]
This disease works within us in twisted, revolting ways. Your brain will force you to open your mouth and inhale if you have been away from oxygen long enough. But if that happens when you're underwater, you die. If you die, your disease no longer has someone to infect— much better to force you to inhale while there is still air to breathe. This disease wants you dead, but it won't let anyone else kill you. It will wait until you let your guard down and then it will choke you out slowly.
[I can be the exception. I need to be the exception. How long do I have to stay clean until I'm no longer like… this?]
This is a disease, Buck. An illness. There is no cure; there is only recovery. There is recovery or there is death. The decision is yours.
[If this 'disease' has taken away from me my free will, how in the world am I to use my free will to stop it?]
That is a very good question, Evan Buckley.
Buck's home becomes one large hospic- hospital room. Someone draws his blood here, velcro rips as an inflatable blood pressure cuff is pulled off his arm there, and his head is a piece of driftwood floating over ocean waves. An ice pack drips water from his forehead into his hairline and heated socks stuffed with dry rice are tucked around his feet, overlapping with each other. He's learned not to fight it when the aches and the shakes and the tremors come— locking his muscles only seems to make the pain worse.
Beyond the rotting ant trap that has been made of his physical state, what frustrates Buck most is his emotions… or rather, the lacking of them. They are there, but not here, and he cannot access them. This drought of life is going to be what kills him.
It sounds silly in his mind, this stifling of his nerves is remarkably similar to the way it had felt to watch Bobby die on the other side of that glass— he knows that the emotions are there, he can see them— but he's drunk on the pain of withdrawals, numbed by the humdrum hum droning in his ears. Skin-to-skin, holding hands through the window with seven layers of gloves.
Buck's too tired to be angry, his vision shivers when it smells sound and he struggles to keep his eyes open.
You should not be wasting this life you've been granted, not in this manner. Do you want to live this way?
In what way? He is not an addict.
What makes you feel so sure of that?
He doesn't know… his eyes still sound heavy.
Can you move your fingers and toes?
Yes, he thinks, but it is hard. I don't want to go on like this?
You don't want to go on like this?
No. Please, for the love of God, make it fucking stop.
I think you are finally ready.
WHAT FOR?
To recover, Buck. Let's get you to a meeting.
Okay.
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