Bread And Jams For Frances

Tommy answers on the first ring. 

“Hey, Evan,” he says warmly. Like it’s just that easy. Like he wants to talk to Buck. 

“Hey,” Buck says back. 

“If you need another helicopter, I have to warn you it won’t be as quick this time. I just got home an hour ago.” 

I know, Buck wants to say. I still remember your schedule. 

“It’s not that,” he says instead. “I’m, uh, I’m at home too.” 

“Okay.” Tommy’s voice grows more cautious, more serious. “Can I ask why you’re calling, then?” 

“I don’t, uh, I don’t-“ Buck cuts himself off with a deep breath. 

“Did something happen? Is everyone okay?” 

“No, everyone- everyone’s fine. No viruses, no hospitals. This isn’t that kind of call.” 

“Can’t be too careful with the 118,” Tommy teases. 

Buck laughs. “That’s fair.” 

“Are you okay?” Tommy asks. 

Buck doesn’t know how to answer that. He is okay. Despite everything, he’s as okay as he could be. He has a lot of good things in his life. He has a lot of people who love him and who he loves. The 118 went through a rough patch after Bobby died, but they’re back to being a family now, or close enough. He could call any one of them and they’d come over tonight. 

But he didn’t. He called Tommy. 

“Did you, uh, did you ever finish that Charles Lindbergh documentary?” 

“No,” Tommy says slowly, amused. “I was watching that for you.” 

“Oh.” Warmth floods through Buck. He ducks his head, even though he’s alone. “I was watching it for you. Famous pilot and all that, you know?” 

“That’s sweet,” Tommy says, fondness dripping into his voice. “I already know more than enough about Charles Lindbergh, though. I think I watched you sleep longer than I watched that documentary.” 

Buck’s heart races at the admission, at the familiar tone in Tommy’s voice. 

“Yeah?” 

Tommy hums an affirmation low in his throat. “Your snoring is a lot cuter than the childhood of a Nazi sympathizer.” 

“Thank you, I think?” Buck laughs. “Wait, he was a Nazi?” 

“I wouldn’t say it’s the main thing he’s known for, but yeah. You should really watch the documentary.” 

“Sounds like I should. Would you, uh, would you want to watch it with me? Maybe tonight?” At the sound of Tommy’s hesitation, Buck rushes ahead. “I moved. I don’t still- I have a new place now. Big back yard, bedroom with walls. You’ll like it.” 

“Bedroom with walls, huh? How’d you manage to find a house with one of those?” 

“Shut up,” Buck laughs. “Come finish this documentary with me. Please. My house is like ten minutes from yours.” 

He can hear Tommy’s raised eyebrows through the phone. 

“And you know this off the top of your head?” 

Buck does. It was far from the deciding factor in buying this house, but it was certainly on the list. 

“Maybe. Is that a yes?” 

Tommy says nothing for a moment, then heaves an amused sigh. 

“I should say no, but… yeah, okay. Send me your new address.” 

“I will. And, hey, uh, maybe- maybe after the documentary, we can talk.” 

“Talk, huh?” 

Buck knows he has earned the amused skepticism in Tommy’s voice. Even when they were together, they rarely spent their time talking if they were behind closed doors. That was probably part of the problem. 

“Yeah,” Buck says. “Talk. I miss you. I want- I want to talk, yeah.” 

“I miss you too. Fuck, I… ten minutes, you said?” 

“Maybe fifteen with traffic.” 

“I’ll be there in ten. See you soon, Evan.” 

“See you soon, Tommy.” 

Just saying the words brings a smile to Buck’s face. 

He hangs up and texts Tommy his address. Tommy heart reacts it immediately and Buck ducks his head again, grinning. 

He paces his living room and tries not to get his hopes up. There’s a million reasons why Tommy might not want to get back together. There’s a million reasons why they might not work even if he did. Buck can’t get ahead of himself again before they talk things through, before he knows how Tommy feels and what he wants. There’s a million ways this could break Buck’s heart again. 

He recovers enough to move on to the aisles. Brown rice, beans, chickpeas. A refill of his garlic powder, dried basil. There’s a sort of ancestral guilt he feels buying dried basil instead of fresh, but he knows himself, he knows his lifestyle. Fresh basil will go bad before he gets the chance to look at it twice. 

Evan always kept fresh herbs, probably still does. They’re like two dollars at the farmers’ market, Tommy, who cares if half of it goes bad? 

Remind me of your credit score, Tommy would deadpan back. Evan would roll his eyes but push in closer, catch Tommy’s hand in his, and promise to make Tommy see the error of his ways once Tommy tasted his cooking. 

He wasn’t wrong, is the thing. Tommy was just too stubborn to listen. The dried basil rattles against the sides of its plastic container as Tommy tosses it into his basket. 

Tommy turns down the cereal aisle and makes a beeline for the raisin bran. He has recently come to accept that he’s an old man, and is doomed to be one for the rest of his life. He stubbornly ignores the siren call of the sugary, chocolaty, turns-your-milk-blue kinds of cereal. Not that he ever really allowed himself to have the sugary cereals when he was young, either; too worried about his body image and how unmasculine it was to eat fruity cereals past the age of six. His dad always had a comment along the lines of You are what you eat ready with a mean little smile whenever Tommy tried to add it to their cart as a kid. 

Well, Tommy thinks. Maybe his dad was onto something with that one. 

He puts the bland old man cereal into his basket. It doesn’t matter if it’s the one he wants or not. It’s too late. You wait too long to let yourself have the things you want, and suddenly the thought of having them becomes terrifying. He missed his window. 

Further down the aisle, there’s a woman with her back turned to Tommy. She has medium length reddish hair. For a moment, Tommy gets a flash of Abby, but this woman’s hair isn’t the right shade of red, that gorgeous natural strawberry blonde. He would run his hands through it for hours while they watched tv, untangling knots and adding little braids, enraptured by the color. She’d compliment him on how nice it was that he took care of her like this, that he tended towards these gentle forms of physical intimacy, that he never pushed for sex, but never made her feel unwanted. 

The memory flips his stomach. The guilt he has long since pushed down bubbles up in the back of his throat. It does this sometimes. That couch was another war zone. 

The woman in the aisle is not Abby. Her hair is obviously dyed, the red cascading down from dark brown roots. She stands in front of a cart with two small kids inside: one around five years old, the other a newborn. She’s up on her tiptoes trying to grab a box from the very top shelf, but she’s not nearly tall enough to reach. 

“Here,” Tommy says without thinking. He grabs the box that she’s reaching for with ease and puts it into her grasping hand. 

“Oh, thank you!” she says, voice bright and relieved and familiar. 

The woman turns around in what feels like slow motion. As her face comes into view, Tommy realizes two things about her with dawning horror. One: this is Maddie Han. Two: her throat has a long line of scar tissue across it—like it had been slashed, like she had been in a horror movie. 

He tries to greet her when he realizes who she is, but the force of his surprise and fear makes his voice shake. It comes out as, “Hey, MaAAAddie,” and is accompanied by an instinctive step back. His right hand has come up in front of his chest defensively, as if the mere sight of a scarred-over injury could mean his neck was in danger of being slashed next. 

Maddie startles when she recognizes him too, the box of cereal audibly shaking in her hand just once before recovering almost disconcertably well. She doesn’t quite smile, but she doesn’t frown either, doesn’t close off. Neutral: a brick wall disguising itself as an open book that just so happens to be blank. Tommy has the sudden sensation of looking in a mirror. 

“Tommy, hi,” Maddie says. “Thank you, for…” 

She shakes the box again, intentionally this time. 

Tommy shrugs, nods. “No problem. I have the wingspan.” He clears his throat, can’t take his eyes off of hers. “I’m so sorry about- Evan, he mentioned the abduction. He didn’t mention the, uh…” 

Tommy makes a motion across his throat. Her eyes fall to the cereal box she’s denting with the force of her grip. Instantly, he knows that he said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing. Par for the course, especially where Buckleys are concerned. 

Maddie shrugs, overly casual. “Why would he?” 

“Of course, yeah. That’s fair.” 

Maddie lived through a horror movie. She lived through her own war zone—more than one, from what Evan has told him. Why would he remind her of that? 

There’s an awkward beat where neither of them say anything. In the cart, the five year old coos over the newborn. Jee-Yun, Tommy realizes belatedly, kicking himself for not recognizing her. In his defense, he hasn’t seen her in the better part of a year, and only ever in context. She’s so big now. She’s a sister now. An entire person has been created and released into the world since Tommy last saw Jee-Yun, and still he can’t shake Evan from his mind. 

Tommy wants to run. He needs to figure out how to get out of here. The aisle is closing in, the shelves are pushing closer together. 

Tommy takes a step back. 

“I should, uh-”

“Wait!” Maddie calls after only a few steps, voice urgent. “I never... I never got the chance to thank you.” 

Tommy’s eyebrows pull together. “You just did. Twice.” 

Maddie waves that away. “Oh, no not- not for the cereal. For, uh, for what you did that night. For saving Chimney.” 

“Oh.” Tommy shrugs, flashes an embarrassed smile. Needs to run. “It was no problem. Just doing my job.” 

When Maddie tilts her head, she looks just like her brother. 

“Mmm, from what Buck told me, it very much was a problem, and it definitely fell outside the scope of your job. So thank you. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be raising these two little monsters all on my own.” 

Her voice turns playful and motherly at the end, teasing her kids. Jee-Yun squeals with laughter. Maddie’s smile almost reaches her eyes. 

Tommy rarely feels all that good about himself, but looking at Maddie and her kids, knowing that he helped put those smiles on their faces… this is one of those moments. He relaxes a little. The walls stop closing in. 

“I’d do it again,” Tommy says, a wave of earnestness rising in him; a decade of working side by side with Howard Han and knowing in his bones that the world is a much better place with him in it. “He saved my life first, in more ways than one. What’s a two month suspension compared to that?” 

Maddie looks at him, assessing. It’s clear that his punishment is news to her, and why wouldn’t it be? She’s taking it in, taking him in, and biting her lip, deciding if she’s going to say what’s on her mind. 

“You haven’t met the new baby,” she settles on, inviting him to step closer again. “This is our son, Robert Nash Han.” 

Tommy freezes. 

“Robby!” Jee-Yun yells, delighted. She leans over and pets her brother’s cheek softly, clearly keeping in mind an instruction to be careful with the new baby. She pets him like he’s fragile. 

Bobby. Baby Bobby. Christ, Howie. 

Tommy can’t think of anything to say. He can feel his eyebrows high on his face, knows it’s rude, but he has no idea how he feels about this. He has no idea how anyone is supposed to feel about this. 

“Wow,” he says, trying to save the moment. “That’s, uh… Congratulations. He’s adorable.” 

He is, in the way that all babies are: small and smooth, breakable and precious; pulling at something deep and strong inside of you that says protect. But the name… 

Maddie sees right through Tommy, but she isn’t upset. Her eyes have a twinkle of amusement as they fall to her son. 

“Don’t worry,” she says. “Everyone reacts like that. It seemed like a good way to honor him, to thank him, but already it’s… heavy. Buck doesn’t know what to do with it either.” 

Tommy’s heart squeezes in his chest. “Yeah, I bet.” 

Evan didn’t just lose his captain but his father figure; the man he loved more than his real flesh-and-blood dad. Tommy had seen him break down in that hallway, had watched through the monitors as Evan screamed himself empty. Tommy had seen him during the funeral, face unusually blank, fists clenched tight, big eyes wet but never spilling over—keeping himself together by sheer force of will. 

Tommy hadn’t comforted Evan. It hadn’t looked like it would’ve been welcome—either by Tommy or by anyone else. It had looked like the smallest soothing touch would shatter him to pieces, would have brought him back into his body and the horrible reality of Bobby’s death. 

But god, Tommy had wanted to try anyway. 

“For what it’s worth…” Maddie says slowly. “I think if you called him, he would answer.” 

Tommy wishes. He aches for that to be true. That one night in the spring, having Evan under his hands again, against his body again, laughing into his mouth again—it had made him think, just for a moment, that Evan could want him back, that maybe he hadn’t destroyed any chance of happiness between them. 

Evan had brought him swiftly back to reality the next morning. 

“My window is closed,” Tommy says with a shrug. “The last time we talked about it, he said he didn’t have feelings for me.” 

Maddie raises her eyebrows. “Yeah, and then he came to my house and told me how bad he felt for letting you think that.” 

Tommy just looks at her. When he sees how serious she is, something dangerously close to hope shakes inside of him like dried basil, like high shelf cereal. 

“Are you sure it’s not… the wrong time?” Tommy gestures to baby Robby. 

Maddie shrugs. “It’s the 118. Is there ever a good time?” 

Tommy laughs. I feel like you guys at the 118 should have your own dedicated wing at the hospital. Maybe she’s right. 

“Besides,” she continues. “He could use something good in his life.” 

So could Tommy. He’s just not sure if he’s brave enough to let himself have it. He’s not sure if he’s the kind of person who would raise Evan up instead of pulling him down. 

Tommy turns to leave, flashing a small smile. 

“It was nice to see you, Maddie.” 

Maddie’s smile reaches her eyes this time. “You too, Tommy. I really hope this isn’t the last time.” 

Tommy nods and gives her a little wave. He starts walking down the aisle towards the checkout. 

This time, when the fruity cereal sings its siren song, he grabs it. The cereal inside the box shakes enticingly as Tommy throws it into his basket. 

Fuck it. He’s not that old. He feels a breeze against his face when he exits the aisle, heads for the express lane. Maybe the window is still open, just a crack. Maybe there’s still time to reach out and take the things he wants.

He sends the text before his cowardice gets the best of him again. The worst Evan can say has already been said. What’s one more disappointment in a lifetime of disappointments? What’s one more grasp towards the high shelf? 

Who knows. Maybe Tommy will get lucky this time. 

Evan sends three texts in quick succession, messy and enthusiastic. Fruit, bright and sugary, bursts across Tommy’s tongue. 

He has a date.