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It’s a Friday evening when Christopher announces, over dinner, that he wants to go and stay at Eddie’s new house.
It wreaks instant chaos— on Eddie’s heart which promptly erupts into firework bright palpitations, as well as on his parents’ expressions and the general atmosphere around the table.
“Oh, Christopher,” Eddie’s mother says, leaning in over the table with her eyebrows creased in concern that Eddie can’t entirely determine the authenticity of. “Maybe we should think about that.”
Eddie clenches his fingers into his palm and looks up at Christopher’s face.
“I already did think about it,” he answers simply, and shovels a forkful of rice into his mouth like Eddie’s whole world isn’t on the verge of stitching itself back together beneath the weight of his words.
Helena looks to Ramon, seemingly for help, and Ramon glances at Eddie, and Eddie holds his breath while Christopher chews his food. Ramon doesn’t seem to know what to say, so Helena sighs and looks back over at Eddie, then Chris.
“Well, honey,” she says cautiously. “Your dad’s place isn’t quite fixed up—”
“It is, though,” Eddie interjects, unable to stop himself as his mother turns her sharp gaze in his direction. “I mean, it’s— it’s not finished, or anything, but it’s fine.” Eddie can recognize that he’s flailing and he turns in Christopher’s direction, gathering himself slightly and adding, “Of course you can come and stay with me if you want to, Chris.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Christopher says before Helena can respond. “Can I bring my stuff over tonight?”
“Christopher,” Helena says, sounding extremely tense. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
There’s silence around the table.
And then Eddie says, “Yeah, bud. You can bring your stuff over whenever you want.”
The rest of the meal is somewhat awkward for seemingly everyone except for Christopher, who appears to be largely unaffected by the tension in the air. Afterwards, Christopher disappears to pack his things and Eddie is left alone with his parents.
“Edmundo,” his mother starts, the same way Eddie had known she would beyond the shadow of a doubt.
“Mom,” Eddie answers, holding up his hands. “Can we not?”
Helena sighs, looking back at her husband. It’s a dance that Eddie has watched them perform countless times— or at least, as many times as he could count them being in the same room to have this exchange in the first place.
“It’s just,” his dad begins, “Christopher has a routine here, Edmundo. He’s happy here. Your mother told you about the pool, right?”
Eddie sighs, shaking his head.
“This is getting out of hand,” he says. “You guys knew that Chris living here was never supposed to be permanent.”
Helena lets out a little displeased scoff, and it inches Eddie closer to a mental ledge. He draws himself deliberately back from it— Christopher had asked to come home with him. Christopher is leaving with him, and tonight they’ll be sleeping under the same roof. It’s all the reminder he needs to reign himself in.
“Maybe it should be,” his mother suggests, and Eddie looks at her blandly.
“Christopher,” he says lowly, “is my child. My child.”
Silence follows. It’s sticky and momentary, because the weight and stillness is shattered almost immediately by the ringing of Eddie’s phone. He’s thankful for it even as his mother sighs, even before he pulls it out and looks down at the screen and is thankful even more at the sight of Buck’s name over a years-old photo of him and Christopher that flashes over the screen.
Eddie loves this picture. Loves the sight of their cheeks smushed together, both beaming. Loves the way Christopher’s too-big glasses tilt on his nose and the way Buck’s blue eyes light up and the closeness that seeps into every centimeter of the frame. He can’t even remember when it was taken— truth be told, he has dozens of these photos on his phone from dozens of zoo trips and aquarium outings and ice cream runs and movie nights that piled up over the years. He aches a little at the sight of it now, at the distance between them. At how long it’s been since Christopher was smushed against Buck.
“I’m gonna step outside,” he says. “Let Chris know I’m ready when he is.”
He’s a little surprised by the steadiness he hears in his own voice as he makes his way down the hall and out the front door into the warmth of a Texan twilight. The air buzzes and so does Eddie as he perches on the steps and answers the phone.
“Hey, Buck.”
He hears the inhale on Buck’s side of the phone— soft and cloudlike, a verbal habit that soothes every jagged edge of Eddie’s mind every time. He couldn’t say how long ago he noticed that: only that he did, and Buck does it before he speaks almost every time, and that it reminds him of home.
“Hey,” Buck answers. His voice sounds different over the phone, but still familiar, and Eddie doesn’t stop to think about the way he clings to that feeling. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
Eddie lets out a little half-laugh, not really amused but not meaningless, either. “No,” he admits, crossing one ankle over the other on the steps beneath him. “Actually, your timing is amazing.”
“Really?” Buck says, and Eddie can picture him so vividly that it hurts— perking up, enthused, nearly canine in his enthusiasm with the hint of a smile on his face.
“Yeah,” he answers, and this time the half-laugh leans further into amused territory. He is amused, and relaxed, and feels a little bit like certain pieces of his life are drifting closer to one another. “My parents were laying into me.”
“Oh,” Buck replies, his tone colored with concern suddenly. Eddie realizes he’s being misleading, then, and rushes to correct it with a shake of his head that he recalls too late Buck won’t be able to see.
“No,” he clarifies. “It’s okay. They were pissed because Christopher asked to come stay at my house.”
“Oh,” Buck repeats, sounding a lot more upbeat. Eddie closes his eyes against the glow of the westward sunset and looks at Buck’s face in his mind instead, finding that he can conjure this expression just as easily. “Wait, that’s— that’s great, Eddie.”
He sounds so warm, so sincere, so present. Eddie can see the way he must be leaning in, eager and earnest.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. He opens his eyes and glances back at the closed door behind him. “I feel like we’re really getting somewhere.”
The PS5 that Eddie had refused to return is at his house, still, and Chris comes over with increasing frequency to play it. There are a handful of things there, left in haste by a forgetful and somewhat careless teen. Eddie hasn’t been able to move the hoodie that’s slung over the back of one of his kitchen chairs for the last week because it reminds him so vividly of a time when Chris was living under the same roof as him. And now, he’ll be sleeping there again. It would feel hazy, if not for how sharply real Buck’s enthusiasm remains in his ear.
“That’s amazing,” he says, meaning it so sincerely that it carves out a space in Eddie’s chest. He’s been— emotional, lately. Being away from LA, away from the place he’s considered home, seeing Christopher so frequently, the tumultuous start to his time here and his only slightly less derelict house: to say the least, it’s been a lot. But there are good moments. This is a good moment.
“Thanks, Buck,” he says softly. Behind him, there’s a creak and the distinct clack of crutches as Eddie glances up at Christopher, who’s wearing his backpack on his shoulders. “I gotta go,” he adds. “I’ll— uh, call you tomorrow, probably?”
“Sure, yeah,” Buck says. “Say hi to Chris for me.”
“Course,” Eddie answers. Soft. He means it. “Bye.”
He hangs up and turns to his son just as his parents appear, disapproving and shadowed, in the doorway.
“Was that Buck?” Christopher asks him. His voice is sort of unreadable.
“Yeah,” Eddie answers as his mother shifts her weight on the other side of the threshold. “He says hi.”
“Are you ready?” Chris replies, and Eddie nods.
“Ready,” he affirms.
“Christopher,” Helena starts, inching forward. Eddie watches her fingers twitch at her side and fights the urge to pull Christopher out of her reach. Just as he’s contemplating that, Chris takes two quick steps closer to Eddie, and away from his grandmother, and then looks back at her as something glows in Eddie’s chest.
He isn’t sure exactly what has clicked into place that has apparently made Christopher’s feelings flip like a lightswitch, but he’s fucking grateful and he knows better than to question it after the hell that the last year has been.
Helena blinks at the sight in front of her like she doesn’t know what to do with it, and all Eddie can think is that he can’t wait to tell Buck about this.
“Are you sure about this?” she asks eventually, finding her words. Christopher nods, barely looking at her.
“I’m sure,” he says. There’s a tone in his voice that Eddie recognizes, impatience bordering on irritation like when Eddie didn’t understand his vision for his science project and they had to call Buck over for a volcano emergency. That, Eddie reflects now, had been a fun night in the end.
“Well— you have school on Monday,” Helena says, a tinge of desperation in her voice. And Christopher—
Christopher rolls his eyes. He looks like Eddie, so startlingly much like Eddie that even Eddie knows it.
His heart threatens to burst out of his chest, and he might have to find another priest to forgive him for how good it feels to break the fourth commandment, but right now in this moment Eddie truly can’t find it in himself to care. To feel anything but justified and forgiven. Washed clean, somehow.
“I know that,” Chris says, and Eddie reaches out to put a gentle hand on his shoulder. As good as this feels, Eddie would actually rather not ruin the rest of the evening with a knockdown dragout.
Helena is staring at her grandson suddenly the way she’s stared at Eddie for so long he can’t remember how she looked at him before— like Christopher is foreign to her, somehow, someone she doesn’t recognize. Eddie feels a pang of something close to pity for her, then. He knows what it feels like to experience the sting of rejection from a child whose heart and smile have always been open and freely given. Truthfully, he doesn’t wish that separation on anybody. Not even when they maybe kind of deserve it.
Eddie turns to Christopher and says, “Do you want to come back here before school on Monday? Pick up your stuff?”
“No,” Christopher answers frankly. “I have my stuff.”
There’s duality in the stricken look on his mother’s face and the way air floods Eddie’s lungs like new spring. Parenthood, Eddie thinks, is a deep and multifaceted thing with so many faces that every time he turns around it brings a new season, a new mask, something unexpected and fresh and blinding. At the center of this learning, there’s Christopher, who remains bright and beautiful and tender.
And that’s the difference, maybe, between Eddie and the people whose DNA he carries.
Eddie would rather die than to push his own agenda onto his child. Would rather suffer and wilt at the hands of his own mistakes— as he has been— than to be too proud to love his son. At any rate, he squeezes Christopher’s shoulder and nods his head.
“I’ll take him to school,” he says to his parents.
And so in the awkward, stilted silence of a sunset in El Paso, Eddie and Christopher step off of the porch and walk away together.
The evening dissipates into darkness and the sun takes with it the tension as the tires of Eddie’s car trundle over the road between his parents’ place and his. Christopher sits in the front seat and fiddles with the radio and when Eddie glances over at him, he’s looking at the little picture affixed to the dashboard.
“You know,” Chris says, “your truck was a lot cooler than this.”
Eddie huffs a laugh, nodding. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I know.”
Christopher keeps looking at the picture, but doesn’t say anything. He looks thoughtful, but Eddie doesn’t press. He’s more sure now than he’d been just yesterday or the day before, that Christopher would tell him if he was ready for him to know what he was thinking about. The certainty feels good, at home in Eddie’s chest.
The radio plays softly and Chris leaves it on a country station, and Eddie cracks the window against the approaching darkness to let the air of night whistle into the car between them. And it’s easy, surprisingly.
It remains easy through dinner— Eddie orders pizza and lets Christopher rib him about being able to afford it. It remains easy through some of the ice cream in Eddie’s freezer, and through the round of games they play in which Christopher kicks his ass like it’s nothing, and through the documentary about chimpanzees that Chris inexplicably demands they watch and then largely ignores in favor of scrolling through his phone. It’s easy still when Chris gets up and says he’s going to bed, like it’s nothing, like they still do this every night. It’s all easy, and normal, and Eddie thinks if he allowed himself to reflect on it too much he might cry.
There is, however, a sort of underlying tension in the way that Christopher carries himself, which Eddie watches as he walks away and disappears down the hall. He worries about it even though he won’t push and won’t ask until Chris is ready— he can’t help being curious, what it is that brought on this shift, what it is that’s lying beneath the surface of his easy drifting back into Eddie’s life and space. He’d like to believe that Christopher just missed him— and he thinks that’s part of it, yes— but something tells him that there’s more to it.
He finds out what it is at one in the morning, on his first night under the same roof as Christopher in months.
Eddie wasn’t asleep, exactly. More like dozing, his arm slung over the back of the couch like an empty frame of the seat that’s left unfilled, his lashes fluttering at a distant sound that startles him into awareness.
Eddie was not a light sleeper before Christopher. Since the very first night he’d slept in the same house with him— two days old, freshly home from the hospital and sleeping in a bassinet on Shannon’s side of a bed that didn’t really feel like it belonged to Eddie at all— Eddie has slept feather-lightly, woken by every creak and breath and brush of wind. The drop of a pin could wake him now, and after more than fourteen years, he’s used to it.
On that first night, Shannon had been exhausted, understandably. She hadn’t stirred when Christopher did, and Eddie had found himself hovering over the bassinet with anxiety fluttering in his chest like a swarm of butterflies as he looked down at the baby who was brand new and so fragile and half him. Christopher had been awake, but not crying, for what felt like the longest time and Eddie had watched him and ached and ached and ached at the thought of being away from him.
It still hurts just as much. Maybe more, because now Christopher is not only Eddie’s heart in human form but also a human being that Eddie really, really likes— one who is funny and smart and brave, one whose company is sparkling and who Eddie had missed so much in their time apart in so many different ways that he couldn’t begin to count them.
Tonight, though— it’s not the absence that wakes him, not the brush of wind on branch outside the window, not anxiety climbing fire-bright into Eddie’s throat. Tonight, it’s the sound of a soft, muffled whimper that cuts into Eddie’s consciousness like a hot knife through butter, so sharp and clean that he’s wide-awake and on his feet in a matter of several urgent seconds and standing in the doorway to Christopher’s bedroom in a matter of several more.
Ten, fifteen seconds at most and Eddie already feels panicked and fearful. But beyond the threshold of the bedroom whose scarce walls make his heart hurt a little, Christopher is sprawled on his bed in a pool of Texas moonlight, silvery and wan where it shines on his skin and illuminates the faint sheen of sweat sticking his curls to his forehead. And he’s tense, not quite awake, his sweet face looking younger without his glasses where it’s pressed against his pillow and his fingers tight around the sheets.
Eddie can recognize the sight of a nightmare in his baby’s shoulders and the furrow of his brows and the turn of his lips as easily as he could recognize his own face in the mirror, and he moves without thinking into the darkness until he’s in a crouch by Christopher’s bed and his hand is sliding of its own accord into the soft dampness of Christopher’s hair, smoothing his curls off of his face and brushing his thumb over the softness of his skin, still as sweet and unmarred as it had been on that first night fourteen years ago.
Chris whines lightly, his lashes fluttering and his breath catching with a painful raw gasp that cuts the quiet and slices Eddie’s heart in half. The sight of his blue eyes mends it again just as quickly, a constant back and forth that Eddie has been living with as long as Christopher has been alive.
“You’re okay,” Eddie murmurs without second thought or hesitation. “I’m here, you’re safe.”
Christopher half-wakes, jerks slightly and then leans into Eddie’s hand all in the space of a heart-stopping second. And then, without preamble, he bursts into tears. Shaking, deep, raw sobs accompanied by grasping hands and heaving chest. Eddie is in his bed before he can even blink, wrapping him up in his arms without pause. He doesn’t have it in him to consider if he’s doing something wrong by this action, the instinct of being Christopher’s dad easily overriding any anxious thought that might threaten at the edges of his mind.
“Dad,” Christopher gasps, barely there, softened by fear. Eddie holds him closer, wraps him up more securely, doesn’t care that he’s fourteen, and buries his nose into his baby’s curls.
“I’m here, sweetheart. I got you,” he whispers. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”
“I was—” Chris gasps, ragged and raw.
“Shh,” Eddie soothes. “You’re safe. You’re okay.”
“Drowning,” Christopher mumbles. “Drowning.”
Eddie’s heart drops out of his chest as he smooths his hand over Christopher’s trembling shoulders.
“No, baby,” he mumbles against Chistopher’s head as he rocks him slightly. “Nobody is drowning.”
He’s well aware that Chris might be embarrassed about this later, knows that the moment could break at any given second, knows that this is fleeting and momentary. But right now, Christopher’s slender fingers are wrapped up in the fabric of Eddie’s shirt and it’s like he’s little again— so little, needing his Dad, needing Eddie. His heart breaks and stitches, shatters and heals, fractures and comes together again with each beat and in the space between it whispers Christopher like it has from the moment he drew his first breath.
He holds him close. Lets him be little. Kisses the top of his head and—
Eddie wonders, with a flare of fury, how long this has been happening. It’s not the first time. He doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows, he knows Christopher has been struggling as surely as he knows his own name and the beat of his child’s pulse beneath his ribs, ribs Eddie counted when he was a baby and again while Christopher slept beneath the sky in California. He just knows.
Christopher whines softly, and Eddie runs his hand over the terrain of his spine, the curve of it familiar to him like the most trodden path. He could traverse it from memory with his fingertips, but no longer has to because it’s shuddering beneath his touch with every breath of Christopher’s lungs.
“You’re okay,” he murmurs over and over again. “You’re okay.”
Chris tilts his head back, blue eyes shifting and swimming. And Eddie looks at him, really looks at him in all his grown-up and little glory. His heart hurts in all kind of ways, and then breaks again when Christopher clutches his shirt tighter and whispers in the smallest voice—
“I want Buck.”
Eddie will look back later and think that this is the moment his world should have stopped. The realization hits him hard and fast and instant and it should have been like the meteor for the dinosaurs, earth-shattering in the most true and literal sense of the phrase.
But the understanding that Buck is as essential to their family, to their hearts, to Christopher, to Eddie, comes in the middle of the night on the brush of his child’s whisper into the darkness. It comes with softness, like the moonlight spilling in through the window and with certainty like the knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow to replace it. It comes with the turning of the planet beneath them, miraculous and impossible and sure.
What else could it have been, Eddie wonders as he reaches for his phone and is grateful he fell asleep with it in the pocket of his sweats, but this? What else, but love— the real kind, the kind that turns the earth and chases the seasons and appears night after night in the darkest moments— could allow for such certainty? What but love would allow him to open a Facetime call in the middle of the night and fear nothing, because what but love would allow Buck to answer?
Which, of course, he does.
Christopher is still buried awkwardly into Eddie’s arms, and Buck’s voice crackles over the phone with soft, straining disuse infused with deep concern into the darkness of the room.
“Eds?” he asks. “What’s going on?”
Eddie opens his mouth to answer, but Christopher has scrambled upwards, disrupting the blankets around them and damn near clocking Eddie in the jaw in the process— not that he cares.
“Buck,” he says— sobs, really, because the sound of Buck’s voice has apparently unlocked something in him and the spaces left between his soft whimper and the curl of his fingers into Eddie’s shirt are filled, suddenly, with feeling.
“Christopher?” Buck says. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
He sounds very awake now, and outright panicked. Eddie has just enough presence of mind to reach for the light next to Christopher’s bed and turn it on, flooding the room around them with soft gold as Chris sobs, knees drawn to his chest.
“Eddie?” Buck asks, frantic. “Chris? I—”
“It’s okay,” Eddie says— even he is not sure whether he’s talking to Buck or to Christopher, or to both. “We’re okay. Christopher, honey, look. Buck’s right here.”
“He’s not,” Chris sobs, though he reaches for the phone and looks at Buck on the screen through his tears.
“Hey,” Buck murmurs, voice softening all at once to a low, soothing timbre as he catches a glimpse of the child on his screen— their child, theirs, how could Eddie ever have missed it? How could he ever have thought they might be anything but BuckandEddie, that he could go back to doing this alone, that without Buck this would ever work?
He feels like an idiot. It isn’t the moment.
“Hey,” Buck is repeating. “It’s okay. I’m right here. What happened, bud?”
Eddie puts his hand on Christopher’s head. “He was dreaming,” he says gently. “He said—”
“You were drowning,” Christopher interjects, voice wavering. “You’re always— always drowning.”
It’s not lost on Eddie that Christopher used to dream of Shannon, and that now he’s dreaming of Buck. The parents he lost, Eddie thinks with a resounding crack that opens wide in his chest and steals the breath from his lungs. The parents he lost.
Buck is looking at Christopher through the screen like it’s all he can do not to cry, shaking his head so vigorously that his curls tumble loose and sweet over his forehead. Just like Christopher’s. Eddie could laugh, if there weren’t hot tears pricking the backs of his eyes.
“No,” Buck answers steadily. “I’m not drowning, Chris. Everybody’s okay, sweetheart.”
Eddie’s heart trips and stumbles.
“I—” Chris starts. He seems to be calming, though one hand is still holding the hem of Eddie’s shirt and the other is grasping the phone. “I keep having this— this dream.”
“Okay,” Buck soothes. “It’s okay. I still— I still dream about it, too, right? It’s okay. You’ve got your dad right there with you.”
“I want—” Christopher starts, and then pulls himself back.
Eddie rubs his back soothingly. “You want what, Chris?” he asks softly. “It’s okay, you can tell us. We’re listening.”
Christopher takes a breath, and then he looks at Eddie, and then he looks at Buck.
“I want to go home,” he whispers miserably.
Eddie’s world tilts on its axis.
On the screen, Buck’s face flickers through a complex series of expressions.
“Hey,” Eddie murmurs. He zeroes in on his son— as much as he wants to look at Buck, Buck is also staring at Christopher and it’s all so clear, so suddenly. Chris looks up at him, tearing his eyes away from the screen, and his blue eyes are red-rimmed and soft and Eddie aches with the desire to fix everything that’s ever hurt him. “You can come home, baby. You can always come home, Chris.”
Christopher’s expression flickers. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles.
“What?” Eddie asks. “For what?”
“I— I made you come here and I made you bring me to this house and I woke you up. I’m sorry.”
Eddie stares at him, floored, as the pieces of this whole fucked situation rearrange themselves in front of his face.
Miraculously, expectedly— Buck finds his voice first.
“Chris,” he says, oh so gentle, drawing the kid back to him. “Nobody’s mad at you.”
There’s something that pulls tight in Eddie’s chest at the certainty with which Buck delivers this— like he knows Eddie, like he knows Chris, like he doesn’t ever, ever need to check. He just knows. Eddie feels like an idiot again, and it is still not the time.
“I’m mad at me,” Chris whispers.
Eddie is spurred into action.
A few minutes later, he’s pulled Chris out of bed and into the kitchen, where Christopher trails after him to the table with the call open in his hand and sits in the soft light while Eddie makes hot chocolate. He sets mugs in front of his place and Christopher’s and leans in to look at Buck and says, “Sorry. No teleporting mugs.” And Buck laughs a little, warmly. It’s almost perfect— there’s pain, and heartache, and a shining horizon with the imprint of the Los Angeles skyline.
Home. Christopher wants to go home.
He looks up at Eddie from his chair, owlish and soft. “Dad,” he says. “I can’t see.”
Buck laughs through the phone propped up against a tin that holds tea bags, and Eddie slips away to grab Christopher’s glasses from the side table in the bedroom. He re-emerges and takes a chance that Christopher will let him set them on his face, which he does without comment, and Eddie feels warm and soft all over as he takes his seat next to his son.
“Okay,” Eddie says softly. “Chris, do you want to tell us what’s been going on?”
Christopher takes a breath, and for a moment the night hangs tense and gentle around them. And then, he starts talking, and Buck and Eddie listen as he explains that he’s been having this nightmare since his grandparents encouraged him to join the pool club. That it’s been the same since then— the tsunami, Buck drowning, Christopher in his place searching for him and finding nothing but destruction.
“Honey,” Eddie ventures, reaching out to brush his hand over Christopher’s curls, “did you tell anyone about this? Did your grandparents come and check on you?”
Christopher hesitates, and Eddie knows the answer before he ever opens his mouth.
“No,” he admits. “I thought— I thought they might hear me, but they didn’t.”
Eddie burns with fury, and then he looks at Buck whose face is thunderstorm dark, and knows that parenthood has grasped them both in its finicky, gentle, tender fist.
“Okay,” Eddie murmurs. “Here.”
He pushes Christopher’s hot chocolate closer to him, and they’re quiet while he takes a sip of it, the mug cradled in his hands.
He gathers his thoughts, glancing at Buck.
“Christopher,” he says eventually. “You know we’re not mad at you, right?” His son hesitates but says nothing, and Eddie leans in, pressing. “Chris, nobody is mad at you, and there’s no reason to be mad at yourself, okay? You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Chris looks down.
“I shouldn’t have left,” he whispers. “I was just so mad.”
“I know,” Eddie murmurs. “It’s all okay. I promise.”
Christopher looks up, his gaze drifting between them.
“Can we really go back to LA?” he asks.
Eddie looks to Buck— for reassurance, for guidance, he isn’t sure. But Buck doesn’t hesitate.
“Of course you can come back to LA, Chris,” he says. “Your room is right where you left it, okay?”
Eddie could cry, suddenly.
Christopher looks like he could, too, if he’s honest, and Buck is just looking at both of them— wide awake and soft in Eddie’s old bedroom, bathed in soft light from the sconce on the wall behind him. Eddie wants to reach out and draw him in, wants to put his hand on Buck’s cheek and touch the hair that curls at the back of his neck, wants to drown in blue eyes and kiss him until he can’t breathe.
Eddie is discovering a lot about himself tonight.
Christopher looks over at him.
“Dad?” he says.
Eddie nods. “Yeah, Chris. Whenever you want.”
Christopher lets out a breath.
And two weeks later, they’re turning onto South Bedford Street.
It’s been a journey to get from that night to this afternoon, but El Paso remains in the rearview mirror and Eddie hums with the promise of homecoming as he squints into the California sun. Christopher cranes his neck from the passenger seat of Eddie’s new truck— a smaller, more modest model than the Denali, but something that feels like him— and searches the side of the street.
“Can you see him?” Eddie asks lightly, as if his heart isn’t hammering behind his ribs at the thought of looking up and seeing Buck.
They haven’t talked about it, but there’s something that’s shifted between them since the night of Christopher’s nightmare. It’s shimmering and light and it doesn’t scare Eddie as much as he thinks it should. It’s just that—
Well. It’s Buck. There’s nothing scary about that. Which is, perhaps, the most freeing thing about it all.
Eddie’s parents were livid, but at the end of the day, they relented. There was nothing else for them to do. And so Christopher packed his things, and climbed into Eddie’s truck, and now they’re coming home. And—
“There!” Christopher’s voice brings Eddie into the moment, and he leans forward in his seat, and as Eddie pulls the truck to a stop alongside the curb and all at once there’s Buck.
Christopher pushes the door open and Buck is there all at once, reaching into the car and tangling himself with Chris, both of them laughing as Eddie’s heart leaps out of his chest at the sight of them together.
“Christopher!” Buck cheers, and Eddie rounds the truck in time to watch Buck lift him off his feet as Christopher giggles like he’s little all over again.
Memories of this scene chase each other around Eddie’s head and he wonders— how had he ever missed it? How had he not seen what was right in front of him for all these years?
And then, before he can think, Christopher’s feet are on the ground and Buck is in front of him.
Eddie flashes back to a conversation he’d had with Christopher several days ago— one in which he’d been open with his son, about everything. His feelings for Buck, his feelings about himself, what it meant in hindsight for his relationship with Christopher’s mother.
And Chris— the shining, sweet, perfect boy that he is, that Eddie still can’t believe is somehow half of him— had leaned in and put his hand on Eddie’s cheek, like an echo of the little child he’d been and isn’t anymore.
“It’s okay, Dad,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”
Eddie had burst into tears on the spot, and Christopher had rolled his eyes good-naturedly, and Eddie had never in his life felt lighter.
Until, maybe, this moment.
It’s funny, he thinks as he looks at Buck grinning wide and bright beneath the orange tree next to what is now— effectively— their house. How a person can feel so much like home. How a human being has the capacity to crawl into someone’s chest and become part of the fabric of beating heart and expanding lungs. How thoroughly love could mold someone, against all the odds.
“Buck,” Eddie says, and knows that he must be giving himself away and doesn’t care.
“Hey, Eddie,” Buck says, and then— all at once— he’s wrapped in the tightest, most familiar hug.
And Eddie just knows. He thinks back to the tsunami and finds that he’s grateful. Finds that it has given him so much that he feels weak in the knees at the gratitude that sweeps over his whole being— that bittersweet, ocean salty, mixed feelings gratitude that something designed to take had given him everything, with time and patience and the inoutin recession of the tides. This, Eddie finds, feels rather like a tsunami too. This feeling. This love.
He looks at Buck, and jumps.
“I love you,” he says.
And— because Buck is Buck, and because they are who and what they are— he smiles, not a trace of uncertainty.
“You do?” he asks, all tenderness, and Eddie nods.
He’s all certainty, too. Later that same night, he and Buck will get out of bed together and go to Christopher’s room and hold him and it will not even be the last time, but it will feel right and whole. They’ll go back to bed together, too. They’ll wake up tomorrow morning and there will be orange juice. Days will pass in the sun of California. And sometimes, it’ll be hard. But it’ll be.
“I really do,” he says. Means it, with his whole heart.
Later, there will be lots of things. Good and bad ones; ones that are both. But right now— for this moment— there’s just home, and Christopher, and Buck, and all that Eddie has ever, ever wanted wrapped in the bright stucco of this little house that holds all his dreams.
Buck smiles, sweet and low and easy. Like it’s just for Eddie.
“I love you, too,” he says.
Eddie’s heart leaps. Christopher groans and Buck laughs, and Eddie pitches forward and hugs him again because he can, looks at Chris over his shoulder and sees no tension in his frame.
Now, there’s all that the tsunami left him with.
And most of it, Eddie finds, is joy.