slut enthusiast

Buck would protest in any way he could reasonably think to do so. "Oh, I already ate dinner… I already saw that one, actually… You know, it's getting pretty late… I shouldn't drink while on my meds…"

Sometimes it would work. Sometimes Eddie would find a way around it. Sometimes Buck couldn't get the words out quite right, or at all, and so he'd be there in the Diaz kitchen rummaging through the spice cabinet looking for the smoked paprika because Chris had asked for him to make Bobby's baked mac & cheese recipe and he couldn't find the words to explain the inexplicable—the driving force behind the no that threatened to push passed his lips. So, sometimes, yes had been the easier of the two options in the moment, and later he'd go home, lay in bed, and think of new ways to say no.

He had gotten really good at it—really good at lying.

Baked mac and cheese turned into pizza delivery—"there's actually a new place that opened up near my house, how about I pick some up"—and movie nights turned into video games which turned into nothing at all, skipping over it, directly to drinks—"I drove here, so I can't."

It seemed that Eddie may have been practicing those conversations too.

"You could always just stay the night."

Good thing Buck had already prepared for that one.

"We were in a car accident less than two weeks ago, neither of us should be sleeping on the couch."

He would watch Eddie's mouth open, then close, and for a split second he felt a smug satisfaction, like he'd just won at something—just a short, zap of relief that faded nearly as quick as it had appeared, dissolving into dread as the plan he'd mapped out all on his own was going accordingly. Eddie would concede, Buck would say his quick goodbyes, and step out of the bright warm light of the south Bedford street house, and travel into the heavy darkness of his own, alone.

By the time they reached their final week off, Buck had everything going his way, leaning into the excuse of a busy schedule to throw a wrench in Eddie's plans to keep him on a short leash. Grocery shopping, babysitting, doctors appointments, whatever he could think of, true or not.

Eddie would ask him if he wanted company, and Buck's heart would swell up with something warm, and then instantly collapse, shrivel up and die as he'd spit out the word no, and follow it up with the two words he'd been practicing over and over again in his head, whispering them to himself on repeat until they stopped sounding foreign—two words that described someone else, not someone in the same room as him, most certainly not himself—until he found a way to start believing it.

I'm fine.

After saying it once, he couldn't stop saying it.

"I'm fine. Really, Eddie. You don't have to worry about me."

He had said the exact same thing to a dozen other people all asking him the same exact questions. Chimney, Hen, Athena, Ravi, Harry, May, Maddie…even Maddie believed him—or at the very least she let him think she did.

Eddie didn't. He'd squint his eyes, looking at him like maybe if he stared long enough, the truth would somehow reveal itself like words written in plain English across his forehead. He'd push and pry and ask him if he was talking to anyone about what happened to him and Buck would lie like it was second nature and tell him he did and that he would.

He actually did go, once, right after they got back.

Well, technically, that is. He made the appointment, drove to the office, checked in and sat in the waiting room listening for his name to be called…

Then they called the name Derek and Buck's head shot up and he nearly stood up as if it were his own name—I'm Derek I'm Derek I'mDerekI'm—and then he bolted. Out the glass doors, into his truck, and onto the highway, driving in circles around the city until the voice went away and his heart stopped pounding against his chest like it was a parasite. Until the Los Angeles landscape stopped looking like the Los Nietos desert. Until day faded into night and his gas light turned on and he had no choice but to turn back towards home.

Home.

There were several moments when he truly believed he would never make it back there. Never walk through that front door again. Never see Bobby's picture on his way into the kitchen again. Never live the life he was chasing by moving there in the first place, instead resigned to die in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar people while wearing unfamiliar clothes being called an unfamiliar name.

All he thought about on the drive back was how good it was going to feel when he finally passed through the threshold, into his house and his room. How good it would feel to fall asleep in his bed. It was supposed to feel safe. When he got home, he would finally feel safe, and all the images and flashes of memory from inside that bedroom could finally be put to rest.

He didn't know it at the time, but that had just been wishful thinking.

There was something he said to Bonnie that rang in his head on a constant loop. It was weird, thinking about it now, how the truth came out of him as easily then as the lies that would come after. Logically, he could figure it probably had something to do with the lethal weapon in her hand.

Sometimes I don't know who I am without him.

It was a truth he hadn't admitted even to himself, let alone to anyone else, and there he was laying himself bare in front of her of all people. A person who didn't care who he was, just what she wanted him to be. So when he got home, he was hoping he'd find a sliver of that person—the Buck that everyone knew and loved. He was hoping that home would bring safety and clarity in his own identity—though, he didn't exactly have those words to describe it at the time—but when he walked inside it was so dark.

The lights were on. The blinds were open. But it was so incredibly dark.

Before he boarded that plane for Nashville, he really thought he was starting to like the person he had become. He wasn't quite where he wanted to be, but he was certain he was finally on a positive trajectory, but the darkness had him feeling like he was crashing into the floor. He felt cold—a type of cold you felt in your bones; one not easily thwarted by use of a blanket or cranking up the thermostat. It persisted with each step he took, his ears stinging as the sound of his floorboards creaking was amplified over such an enormous silence. The pain from his injuries grew more intense as he moved further inside, like the gravity had been cranked up, making each step more difficult to take, putting extra pressure on his abused limbs.

He was home. He was safe. He kept telling himself that, and yet he kept looking at the walls and they offered him no additional comfort. He was in pain, and he was tired, and he was so so cold and he was losing himself and he was terrified and he just wanted to shut it all off.

The thing is, with things like this, they just sneak up on you, and you don't realize it's happening to you until it has already been done.

In the time he wasn't spending with Eddie watching over him those first couple of weeks, Buck tried desperately to pick up the scraps of whatever was left of the person he once was. He leaned on past practices and rituals—the tried and true methods for coping and healing—the kitchen. Baking had started out for him as something of a strategy to get his mind off of the things that were bothering him, sprouting in excess after an especially upsetting breakup left him feeling in what he thought was a similar boat. That feeling of not knowing who you are anymore. While it had started out that way, it had transformed itself into something he genuinely enjoyed. Something that made him feel happy.

Whatever baking did for him before New Mexico, it didn't have that effect anymore.

It didn't work to clear his mind. It didn't work to make him feel like himself. It didn't work to bring him any semblance of joy. He stood there in the kitchen, his hands helplessly kneading dough as he stared like a dead man through his kitchen window. His eyes straining to stay open, bloodshot and watery because he was afraid to blink because the last time he let his eyes fall shut his window grew metal bars and the view outside turned arid and vacant of any sort of life. The last time he closed his eyes he was back in that room, and his name was Derek.

The dough ended up in the trash. Later baking attempts failed just the same. Buck initially wrote the whole thing off as something else. Perhaps he had just been tired, or feeling a bit off, but later he'd come to realize that Eddie might have saved his life back there, but a piece of himself still died in that room. A huge chunk of himself was carved away, and all the precious and joyous things he'd once held dear had vanished along with it, as those things belonged to the man he was before.

He hated it.

He hated her.

She took something from him, and he was letting her do it. Why was he letting her do it?

That was what was going through Buck's head when he made the conscious decision that he was going to be okay. That he had to be okay.

At least, everyone else needed to think so, because she might have been able to take away Buck's own sense of self, but she wasn't going to take that away from everyone else. Buck decided he was going to keep being Buck, however possible.

Of course, that was easier said than done. It involved a lot of lying. A lot of trips to the bakery down the road for desserts he could pass off as his own. A lot of practiced speeches and pretend-scheduled therapy appointments to paint himself the picture-perfect image of healing.

When the three weeks were up, and they were both back on duty, Buck poured himself into work, bouncing around the station from task to task ensuring his hands were busy and occupied at all times. He was single-handedly reducing Harry's probie scut by about fifty percent, and that alone seemed to clear anything up between them. Chimney was more or less concerned with his physical well-being over anything else—Buck assumed he was still pretty rattled after what went down with Hen—so he kept a close eye on him. He even kept him behind on a few calls. But after a while he too warmed up to the idea that he was fine.

Yep. He kept saying it. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.

The others were just as easy. Hen and Ravi asked him a couple times how he was doing, and he even caught some shared glances that he knew he wasn't meant to be seeing, but it didn't take long for the initial worry and doting to dissipate as they all fell hook, line, and sinker for Buck's heavy fronting. So nobody even batted an eye when Buck ordered pizza his first night on dinner duty.

Well, nobody except Eddie.

Eddie, who had been on his case from the very beginning.

Eddie, who knew more about what happened to him out there than anyone else did.

They hadn't exactly talked about it. Buck had recounted the events of what happened to him exactly once since it happened, and it was in that hospital room to the sheriff, and Eddie just so happened to have been within earshot to hear the whole thing. Well, at least as much as Buck felt was imperative to the investigation.

As far as the others knew, Buck had been taken, and Eddie had found him, and that was the extent of it. Everything else in between was territory nobody was interested in learning more about, or that there was even a something more to learn. Buck had made certain of that on the drive home. He and Eddie didn't talk about what happened to him, but Buck did make Eddie promise that he wouldn't tell the story to anyone else.

"It's not my story to tell, Buck," he had said, and he had stupidly hoped they could leave it at that.

He had been wrong.

Buck could see how it had been gnawing at him. How Eddie had questions he wanted to ask. He was constantly telling Buck how he should talk about it to someone. If not him, than to someone else. But it would be obvious to anyone that Eddie wanted Buck to choose him to be the one to burden that weight. He couldn't let him do that. Eddie didn't know what he was asking him to reveal. He knew more than anyone and still, he didn't even know the half of it.

And there were things that Buck just couldn't tell him. There were things that he could still barely let himself think about because those memories would taint every interaction between himself and Eddie. Every visit between him and Christopher would be overshadowed by a nagging, twisting inside of his gut. He'd feel the latent sensation of panic start to set in and he'd find it in himself to stave it off for as long as possible until he could find a way to excuse himself to calm himself down—rub at his eyes until he'd eventually stop seeing the tear-filled blurry image of himself staring down the barrel of a gun.

Please. He has a son. Christopher. He's fifteen years old. Eddie's all he has. I'll do anything.

I'll be Derek.

He shook the memory away every time it crept up on him. He was so terrified of what it could do to him—what it could do to them.

Several years ago, Eddie had cradled Buck's heart in his hands and given him the world on a silver platter, all in the name of reminding him how much he mattered.

"You act like you're expendable, but you're wrong."

When Buck looked in the mirror now, he could no longer see the same man that Eddie was speaking to in that moment. He only saw the man who took those words and crushed them into fine sand. This wasn't stupid recklessness. No. He was being a martyr. Doing to Eddie what Bobby did to Chimney, the thought along made him violently ill.

Eddie couldn't know. He could never know.

When it came to everyone else, sure, Buck was playing the part. Saying he was fine. I'm fine I'm fine I'm fine. But looking back, he really didn't have to lie all that much to them. The only person he was consistently lying to with almost every word out of his mouth, was Eddie.

There was a time in his life when that would've bothered him more than it did now, and just that fact alone scared him.

As the days passed, he grew more and more avoidant of Eddie, creating as reasonable a distance as he could that wouldn't be seen as suspicious. He didn't even know why he was doing it at first—at least, he couldn't identify any one singular reason of the many he so clearly had rattling around inside his head. All those conversations he knew Eddie wanted to have with him that Buck never wanted to broach. Those eyes that looked at him like they could shred off his only protective layer of skin. There was what Eddie represented. What Eddie could reveal about himself. There was that deep lingering fear that somehow, someway, Eddie had the power to both fix him and destroy him if he just opened a box, but Buck wouldn't know the outcome until he did just that, and how could he deem it worth the risk? There was the risk of losing Eddie. There were so many jumbled thoughts surrounding Eddie and they kept getting mixed up with flashes of Bonnie and Bobby and screams of the name Derek and…

And Buck would reach for the kill switch. That was new. It wasn't long-lasting, but it worked well in a pinch.

In the meantime, Buck was busying himself, and playing pretend as the Buck everyone else knew. He was doing a damn good job at it, he thought.

He had become a regular at the nearby bakery, coming in every-so-often for freshly baked bread and muffins and cookies and scones and a variety of other pastries and baked goods. He would take these items home to repackage into his own Tupperware—nuke it in the microwave for good measure—to bring over to Maddie's or Hen and Karen's or to the firehouse because the old Evan Buckley would bring dessert when invited over for dinner.

The new Evan Buckley didn't bake anymore.

It was okay, though. He quite enjoyed his trips to the bakery. When he was there, talking to the baker about lemon squares, he almost felt normal.

It was a fear that Eddie had once been able to articulate to him, but Buck for some reason hadn't been able to do the same.

"What are you afraid of?"

"That I'm never gonna feel normal again."

He'd actually thought about that conversation once before, back when Bobby died, when for a split second he let himself feel the same fear that Eddie had. But he shook it off rather easily. Bobby's loss tore him limb from limb but Buck knew that somehow, someway, he was going to find a way to put himself back together. Through each and every day that passed since his death, Buck clung tightly to that belief that he would feel normal again.

And he did. He was starting to, anyway. He saw Eddie do it so he knew he could do it. Knowing this should have given him hope now that he would get through this too. He would feel normal again. He would feel like Buck again.

But that was the thing. As he stood in that bakery, normal and Buck were two very different things. Buck didn't have to pretend to be someone else to the man behind the counter. The man behind the counter didn't know about the horrifying situation he'd been in a little bit over a month ago. Buck was just able to be the person he was at his current and present moment—a man he didn't recognize, but a man nonetheless. Normal. His new normal. He managed to find a little bit of peace in it.

Nobody noticed anything off. They even started saying that his baking was getting better, which the old Buck would've been offended by. But he couldn't be bothered, too caught up in the fact that nobody noticed. It was slowly starting to scare him just how good he was at hiding. It was like being a little kid, playing hide-and-seek and finding the best spot in the whole house. For a while you were giddy, almost shaking with excitement and having to calm yourself down as to not give yourself away because it was just so good. Laughing inside your head, internally chanting they're never gonna fine me! Then time would pass, and then even more time would pass, and you would start to get uncomfortable because you had been sitting in that same position for so long it was starting to hurt. You soon started to worry they were never going to find you, and you would call out for help, and you worried you waited too long that they already stopped looking for you.

Eddie was still looking though.

It all happened after Buck got caught in a lie about going to therapy, when he was actually spending that Tuesday night at the Han's, passing off a cheddar-jalapeño sourdough loaf as his own.

Eddie had been hovering over him a lot over the last month and a half, but he had a lot of tact when he approached him about anything pertaining to what had happened. That was the first time Eddie had met him with that little tact, and on the spot, Buck had to quickly change strategy. He got defensive.

It worked. In the moment. Eddie backed off for the rest of that shift.

Later, he went home and sunk into the couch cushions, letting the darkness consume him. He realized something then. Something sick and twisted, burning deep inside his gut. There was something comforting in all the lies he was telling Eddie. To Eddie, Buck was a person seeking help in therapy, who was trying to do better, who was moving past his trauma. To Eddie Buck was happy, and unaffected, and still loved to bake, and loved being at work and loved being touched and Buck needed that. He needed not just anyone to believe that, but he needed someone who knew what he went through to believe that he could come out on the other side alright. Maybe if Eddie could believe it, he could believe it enough for the both of them. Maybe Eddie could will the old Buck back into existence.

In the meantime, Buck just did what he had to do.

It got dark.

Suddenly there were voices outside of his house, and Buck's heart was racing a mile a minute.

Eddie and Christopher were outside and they were arguing about whether pineapple belongs on pizza and Buck stood there by the window with tears in his eyes and his breath caught in his throat because he should have been at the door. He should have been telling Chris he's right, that his dad is wrong and that fruit absolutely does belong on pizza, but his whole entire body had gone rigid. He watched them through the gap in the curtain debate whether or not they should leave and Buck felt his heart break, and he didn't even know he was capable of feeling that anymore. But he was. He so was, and it was killing him.

Bonnie took so much more from him than baking. She took everything. She took his whole world. How had he let her take his whole world from him?

Buck had decided that night that he was going to get better. He had to get better. She wasn't going to take anything away from him. She wasn't going to take away the man he once knew.

He invited Eddie and Chris over a few days later, apologizing for being out of the house when they came by the last time—he was still lying, of course, but he was going to be better now so it was different.

He told them he would bake them dessert. He didn't even go to the bakery. He found ingredients around his kitchen and laid them all out on his counter—flour, eggs, milk, salt, baking soda, vanilla extract, brown sugar, cinnamon, etcetera. He had all the makings to create anything he could possible want to bake.

Hours passed, the time on the stove clock counted up, and up, and the ingredients on the counter remained untouched while his fingertips just bounced back and forth along the kitchen table. Every part of himself was numb. He felt a little bit like he was dying, and dread started creeping up on him, starting to worry less about what he was going to bake, and more about what might happen if he didn't open that door again. He couldn't let her take both. She couldn't have both.

Buck put everything away, and instead reached for the box of macarons from the fridge that he'd been convinced to buy on his last trip to the bakery. He set them up on a plate, and then spent the next several minutes until they showed up googling how to make them because he knew they were incredibly complicated, and he needed to have something to say to make the whole thing at least somewhat believable.

In the end, after several deep breaths, Buck managed to open the door. Bonnie managed to take away his sense of self, but she didn't take away his whole world.

The two of them walked inside, and his house was suddenly ten times lighter.

Chris got settled at the table, already staking his claim over the macarons he intended to eat, while he and Eddie moved into the kitchen to transform the food from the to-go containers into something resembling a prepared meal—tossing the salad in one of Buck's nice bowls. Maybe it was delusional thinking, but was that really any different from what Buck was doing with the macarons? Maybe it would be if Eddie had lied about it.

Buck could tell the truth. He could. He could wave his arms up in the air, shouting I'm here! I'm over here! You found me!

He could do it. It was always an option. He could start by telling him where he got the macarons from.

There was an incredibly heavy tension weighing over the whole kitchen. He could tell by Eddie's posture that he was gearing up to say something, and Buck braced for impact like he had been doing since New Mexico.

He wasn't prepared for an apology. Buck's stomach sunk to the floor. His only instinct was to keep lying.

He plastered on the fakest smile and walked towards him, "I admit it, yeah, things were weird out there. But I'm feeling like myself again. Really, Eddie, I'm-I'm doing good."

Lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie—

"Well you seem good," Eddie said, "I was worried the man I knew didn't make it out of New Mexico."

Buck nearly dropped the plate in his hands.

It was too late. He was too late. He'd spent too long hiding that Eddie had finally stopped looking for him. What did he do? What did he do?

Buck opened his mouth to try to speak. He could feel himself trying to say he didn't, Eddie! He didn't! I'm not so sure he even made it off the floor of that lab last year! I need help Eddie! I need help!

But he slammed his mouth shut as Eddie had already turned around. The game was already over, and Buck had won.

Eddie sipped his coffee, thinking more and more about that day. He hadn't been back to the church…Hell, he hadn't even left his house save for a trip to the corner store when they had run out of creamer yesterday. He was sipping that same creamer now, cringing at the taste. Stock had been low when he'd stopped by, and all they had was the sugar-free kind. He tried to make up for it by adding his own teaspoon of sugar, but it just didn't taste the same. Something was missing.

He wasn't alone with his thoughts for very long, as he only barely got to the third news story on the TV before he heard Chris shuffling down the hall. When Eddie turned around, he saw that he was dressed already. Not even Eddie had gotten dressed yet—he hadn't gotten dressed in days, actually.

"Good morning, Chris," Eddie said, looking him up and down, checking him over like he was giving him a mental x-ray—he had been doing that a lot more as of late.

"Morning Dad."

"What are you doing up?" Eddie asked, cogs turning a bit slower than usual. "I figured you'd want to sleep in a little longer."

Eddie didn't fail to notice the way Chris averted his gaze. It was one of his many tells—this one told Eddie that he was afraid to say something.

"What's up?" Eddie pushed.

Chris kept his head down, staring directly at his feet like they might do the talking for him. Normally, Eddie looked at Chris and could only see his mother—in the curls and the eyes and the smile—but right then, all he could see was himself.

"I was sort of hoping you would drive me to school," Chris finally said, and that was what separated the two, because Eddie would've never caved so quickly. He had a bad habit of never asking for what he wanted, so he'd been told.

The request initially surprised him. "What?" he asked, trying his best not to sound too surprised, but he wasn't sure how good of a job he did when his volume and tone caused Chris's head to shoot up. "Sorry, I mean, I just didn't think you'd want to go back yet," he explained, "If you're worried about falling behind I've already spoken with your teachers, they want you to take all the time you need."

Chris shook his head. "That's not it," he said, "I just think I'm ready to go back."

Eddie searched the room, and he couldn't help but let his eyes land back on the ofrenda. He looked at his abuela, he wished he could talk to her. "Are you sure?" Eddie asked, and there was a sliver inside of him that begged Chris to change his mind. No. Stay here. You can't move on without me. He shoved that sliver deep down, stabbing parts of himself in the process, making himself feel just slightly ill. It was a selfish ask. How could he want his son to suffer with him? He should want him to move on. To heal. Eddie couldn't help but hear his own mother's voice in his ear. Don't bring him down with you, Eddie. Is that what he was doing?

Eddie let the question settle as just that, and he waited for his answer, prepared to accept it, whatever it was.

It still felt like a punch.

"Yeah, I'm sure."

Eddie took the words, inhaled them, and breathed them out in a heavy sigh. His heart felt like it shriveled just that much more, but he hid it with an "Okay,' pushing himself up onto his feet, rubbing at his eyes, "let me make you breakfast."

Eddie was already making his way towards the kitchen when Chris stopped him. "That's okay," he said, "I can pour myself a bowl of cereal. You should shower and get dressed."

That prompted Eddie to smell himself, and he hated to admit it, but Chris was right. It was Christopher's polite way of saying "hey, dad, you stink." It was weird, he felt like he was being parented by his own kid. But he just did as he was told, turning on his heel and heading for the bathroom.

His mind sort of shut off when he was beneath the waterfall of the shower, hot droplets coating his face. He liked it, because he would have no idea if he was crying, tears disappearing into the constellations. He didn't feel like he was crying this time. He felt numb, actually, the only sensation breaking through the impenetrable barrier of the walls he spent decades building was the heat of the water—warm, safe, and slightly disorienting. He let it wash over him, that feeling, sinking into it, letting it consume him. He knew he couldn't stay under there too long, he needed to get Chris to school.

He felt another pang in his chest.

He was in the car, his hair still a bit damp from his shower, slowly drying from the car heater blowing directly on his face. He was driving on autopilot, which wasn't very safe, but it was easy to do with the way he knew the route like the back of his hand. He was able to get them there in one piece. They got there a little bit past the first bell ring, that was his fault, but Chris didn't say anything about it to him.

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" Eddie asked him just as the car had slowed to a stop right out in front of the building. Eddie knew it sounded like he was asking Chris that question, but really, he was asking himself.

"I'm sure." He didn't say it like he was annoyed with him, like he wished he'd stop asking. Chris had been very calm lately. Gentle. He wasn't saying it out loud, but Eddie could hear the vow in his actions. I'll say it as many times as you need to hear it. "I'll be okay."

Eddie took a deep breath, holding it a bit longer than what might be perceived as natural. "Okay," he said, "but if you want to come home, for any reason, just call and I will come get you, okay?"

"Thanks, Dad."

Eddie helped him out of the car, pulling his crutches from the backseat, and standing on the sidewalk, letting him walk himself the rest of the way into the building. The autumn breeze against his still-drying hair sent a chill down his spine, aggravated by the sight of his son disappearing behind the doors, leaving him standing there, alone. In the silence.

It just got quieter when he got back inside his car—the sounds of traffic muffled, the airy breeze vanishing in the temperature controlled environment. It was a lonely feeling, a crushing feeling. He felt it once before, in those hours directly after finding out that Bobby had died, still too early to wake up Chris, too early to call anyone. Sitting alone in the dark, letting grief, despair, denial, and disbelief consume him, ripping every sense from his body, leaving him there floating in the ether. He had Bobby's prayer book near him, and every instinct was screaming at him to reach out, touch it, but he feared that it might burn him. He spent those hours searching for God in darkness, but he came up empty handed every time. He spent his whole life in uncertainty. He'd shout to the ends of the earth that spirits, signs, jinxes, and curses and anything else that could not be seen were not real. But he was more agnostic than anything else.

But, in those hours, where he begged God to show himself—just a sign that he wasn't alone—it was the first time in his whole life where he felt so sure that God didn't exist.

"Mi niño, you were looking in the wrong place."

He looked over at his empty passenger seat, then in his rear view mirror, backseat also empty. He looked back and forth between the two, hoping someone would show up. He didn't care if they were real or not. He just wanted to talk to someone. He wanted to feel less alone.

Call someone.

He didn't recognize the voice.

He couldn't call Pepa, as much as he wanted to. She had traveled back to El Paso to be with family. The funeral was going to be there, but not for another week, so Eddie was left alone to stew in his grief.

Call someone.

He sat there in that car, phone in his hand, open to the list of people who had called him recently. The list was full of unknown numbers and family members states away, each call lasting just barely over a minute. His sisters were on there a lot, many of them were missed calls, names highlighted in red. Sometimes the phone would ring and he would start to panic, worried there would just be more bad news to hear. He answered only about half of the time.

Call someone.

At least if he was the one to make the call, there probably wouldn't be bad news on the other side.

He scrolled down, a little further. There were so many contacts in red. Sophia, Adriana, Mom, Chimney…

Buck.

There was a number next to his name—the eleven in parentheses jumped out at him. A voice in his head told him to check his voicemails.

Buck's name was at the very top. His name littered the list, in between every unknown robocall, he was there. The most recent one was left yesterday. He clicked play.

"Hey, Eddie. It's Buck. I just wanted to check in and see how you and Chris are doing. I know we didn't leave things in a great place the last time we talked but I wanted you to know I'm here. If you need to talk, or drink, or whatever. I'm here. I'm so sorry, Eddie. Call me anytime. I'll answer. Okay, bye."

Eddie blinked at his phone, staring blankly at the screen, his thumb hovering over his contact, the little phone icon. It would be so easy.

Call someone.

The phone was ringing before he even knew it.

Buck answered on the first one.

"Eddie?"

Not a hello. Just Eddie.

"Buck." Eddie nearly broke down right there, right there in the driver's seat of the Prius outside of his son's school. His voice cracked around the emission of his name, gravelly from lack of use. He really hadn't been talking much lately. "Hi."

"Hi." His voice was so soft, so gentle, so warm. Eddie couldn't help but lean his ear into his phone, the glass screen flush against his cheek, as if there was a possibility if he got close enough he might be able to feel him through the phone, just a bit of human touch, just enough to make him feel grounded again. "It feels weird to ask this, but are you okay?"

Eddie sucked in a shaky breath, he was certain Buck had to have heard it. It was the most restraint he could manage. There was something violent creeping up his throat, lodging itself right there in the middle, leaving an uncomfortable weight in his chest. He imagined a scream could dislodge it, or maybe not. He wasn't willing to test it. He was imagining his scream flying through the receiver, sending a signal up into space, picked up by a satellite, and sent back to Earth and into Buck's ear. He wondered if anyone else would have been able to hear it, if signals could be intercepted, who might intercept them? Could only the living hear him, or did they reach high enough, beyond the satellites up in space. Could it have been that easy to speak to the dead? Were they just a phone call away. Of course not, there was no hotline to Heaven. But he still wondered.

"Eddie?"

Eddie shook his head. "Sorry," he said, "I was just thinking about something."

He only realized right then that he never answered Buck's question. He didn't think he could answer honestly if he tried. Buck didn't press him for an answer, perhaps no answer was an answer in and of itself. Instead, he said something else, not a question.

"You called."

Eddie let out a breath, less shaky that time. "I called," he said.

There was a beat where it was just silent, and all Eddie could hear was the sound of Buck's breathing—slow and even—he steadied his own breathing to match, using Buck as his own personal metronome. It was a comfortable silence—although, it wasn't really silent at all, was it? He could still hear Buck and all his signs of life echoing through his phone speaker, every bit of evidence absorbed into Eddie's being. Still, though, he itched for something more, something real, something tangible.

Something was weaseling its way beyond the lump in his throat, pushing through, breaking past the barrier.

"Can I come over?" Eddie asked.

And at the same time, Buck asked, "Do you want to come over?"

They both laughed, and Eddie was pretty sure that was the first time he had laughed since she died.

It was just a spark, not enough to fully ignite anything inside him, not enough to light up the darkness long term, but he caught a glimpse of it, of what was there waiting for him on the other side of it all.

Joy.

"Come over, Eddie." Buck said, not a question that time.

"I'm on my way."

He drove to Buck's house in silence, eyes more focused on the road and making sure he was going in the right direction. He couldn't rely on muscle memory like he used to. He didn't know this route like the back of his hand, but he hoped to soon.

He'd only visited once before, prior to Buck fully moving in, helping him out with little repairs here and there. Eddie had gotten a little better at his handiness after all that trial and error with his house in El Paso. Eddie was somewhat grateful that house never became somewhere he'd grown comfortable enough to call home.

It looked different now from when he first saw it. The lights were on, there were plants in the windowsill and kitschy statues lining the front porch. It breathed Buck more than the loft ever had.

Eddie parked in the driveway. Buck had a driveway, he thought to himself. His days of searching for street parking in downtown L.A. were finally behind him.

Gravity pulled him in like a vacuum, sucking him in, drawing straight to the front door. It was almost as if Buck had a lasso wrapped around him, tugging him towards him, but it didn't feel as brutal as he would imagine. It was gentle, alluring, like he wanted nothing more than to fall in that direction. He could feel the blood in his veins getting warmer with every inch closer, every millimeter of distance dissolved between him and Buck.

Buck must have been experiencing the same gravitational pull, because Eddie didn't even have to knock before the door was swinging open, familiar blue eyes and blonde curls awaiting him on the other side.

"Hi," Buck said, bright teeth flashing through his signature smile.

"Hi," Eddie said back, his own smile more subdued, his lips just slightly pulling themselves together with just a hint of an upturn. It was the best he could manage in the moment, and even though Buck didn't say it, Eddie knew he understood.

They just stood there for a long moment, staring at each other, taking each other in. Eddie hadn't realized how long it had been since they hung out like this. Just the two of them. What happened to them? Was he losing Buck too? Had he just not lost him yet? Was it merely a matter of time? It had been weird, being on different teams, no longer working as partners. Eddie would have been lying if he said he didn't notice how he was pulling away, leaning into the new partnership. He didn't realize at first that leaning into Hen meant leaning away from Buck. Why did it have to? There was already a gaping hole in the foundation of the 118. A wound that still had yet to fully scab over. Eddie knew what he was thinking, knew the reason behind every choice. This was their new reality. Eddie thought it better to just accept that fact and learn to live with the new dynamics, no matter how much it ached to have so much stripped away.

"Eddie?"

"Sorry," he said.

He needed to stop doing that.

"It's okay," he said, "it just seemed like you went somewhere else for a sec."

Buck smiled back at him, more timid now, matching Eddie's smile from earlier. Eddie noticed some hesitation, he even felt it inside himself—that gravitational pull tugging harder and harder, trying to drag him through the threshold. His arms were firmly at his side, stiff and straightened, but they ached to move away from his body, reach out, make contact. Eddie found himself lost in the little details on Buck. Noticing the way his hands twitched at his sides, like maybe he wanted to reach out and touch him too. Hug him. Feel each other's all encompassing warmth. Eddie couldn't make the first move, and something told Eddie that Buck wouldn't be making it either. So they stood there, and Eddie just noted all the other details. He was dressed casually, sweats wrinkled in a way that suggested he pulled them from the hamper. Had Eddie woken him up? He did, didn't he? Eddie looked at his eyes, and he looked wide awake, but that didn't mean anything for a firefighter who had spent years learning how to get up and at 'em at the sound of an alarm. Was Eddie and alarm? Was he just another fire Buck needed to put out?

"Eddie?"

Shit. "Mhmm?"

Buck smiled, something sympathetic, something Eddie couldn't totally grasp. "Come inside," he said, moving out of the way, making room for entrance, like a gentleman. They didn't hug, and a part of Eddie—a very small part, so minuscule it could not be visualized by the naked eye—was grateful. He wasn't sure he would be able to stave off the inevitable breakdown if he found himself close to another human being.

Close enough to hear a pulse echoing inside their chest. Close enough to feel the rise and fall, the living breathing truth that he wasn't trapped in a nightmare.

Eddie did as he was told, making his way through the door, taking in a deep breath through his nose, his senses perking up at the smell of cinnamon.

"I whipped up some French toast," Buck said, drawing Eddie's attention back in, "I wasn't sure if you'd eaten yet, but I made enough for the both of us, you could even take some home for Chris if you'd like. It reheats well!"

Buck was already walking to the kitchen as he spoke, and Eddie just helplessly followed him like he was being pulled on a leash. He looked around, and if the outside of the house screamed Buck's name, the inside had a microphone and a loudspeaker. Everything was so him. Warm, cozy, it breathed of life and joy and the whimsical nature of Evan Buckley.

And it smelled like cinnamon.

"I haven't eaten yet, actually," he said, rounding the corner of the kitchen island, taking note of all the little knickknacks lining the counter—ones Eddie noted as missing when helping him pack up a few months ago, Buck telling him he never even took them out of the boxes—he caught sight of a photo, sitting upright and center, a spot perfectly fit for a photo like that. Eddie didn't say anything about it, just let his eyes fall there for a little bit longer, thinking of it like the ofrenda in his living room. "Chris misses your cooking."

Buck smiled—well, actually, he hadn't stopped smiling, but this one was just a bit brighter. His eyes were big, the wrinkles around his lips more pronounced. It almost, for just a second, distracted Eddie from feeling like the grief was swallowing him whole. Only for a second. A beautiful, blissful second.

"Well then I'll pack some up to go for him," he said, reaching into one of the cupboards and pulling out a Tupperware container, a big one. He must have noticed Eddie eyeing it. "Seriously, Eddie. I made plenty."

Buck started loading up the container with slices of french toast from the top of the pile, still steaming just a bit. "Take aa seat, Eddie," Buck said, gesturing to the stool by the island—the island set for a breakfast of kings. There were plates set out, butter, a variety of different flavored syrups, sliced fruit, and a large bowl of what Eddie immediately recognized as Buck's homemade cinnamon whipped cream. "Dig in."

Eddie didn't have to be told twice, quickly loading up his plate with a few slices, and preparing it with all the fixings Buck provided. "This is great, Buck," he said, licking the tip of his finger where he'd gotten a little but of the whipped cream on it, "usually you don't make any of this until Christmas time."

Buck laughed, "Was that a call out?" he asked.

Eddie paled. "What? No, I—"

"It's November, Mariah Carey has already defrosted."

"…Huh?"

"I'm kidding, Eds," he said, and Eddie felt his face flush scarlet, "I made it because I know you like it."

"Oh."

Buck just smiled that same big smile at him again. "Would you like some coffee?" Buck asked, already pouring himself some into a mug. Eddie had already had coffee, but he was still feeling tired. Logically, he knew the his fatigue was likely a symptom of something else, but he figured another cup couldn't hurt.

"Sure," he said, "if you could add milk that would be great."

Buck grabbed another mug from the rack and Eddie watched as he filled it only about halfway before meandering across the kitchen towards the fridge. "I'll do you one better," he said. Upon opening it up, Eddie couldn't help but notice the familiar looking bottle sitting inside the door.

French vanilla coffee creamer—not sugar free.

"Wait," Eddie said, the word just spilling out of him on impulse, "you hate creamer." Buck almost always took his coffee black—sometimes he'd take it with a splash of steamed milk. He liked his coffee as hot as it could get. Eddie used to crack jokes about how he's burned off all of his taste buds, and that was the only reason he could bear the taste of bitter, burnt, black coffee. But Eddie couldn't crack any jokes at that moment. All he could do was stare at the bottle. The bottle of his favorite creamer.

Buck looked at him in a way Eddie couldn't quite dissect. He was still smiling. But there was something else there, something he didn't recognize.

"I do," he said, "but you don't."

Buck poured it into his mug and gave it a ceremonious swirl with a spoon before setting the steaming mug next to his plate of food, and taking his seat next to him. Eddie couldn't help but continue to stare into the mug. The light brown color, the steam wafting into his face making his cheeks even redder, the warm vanilla scent entering his nostrils and making him feel a sort of peace he hadn't felt in over a week. He couldn't stop staring. His heart was beating faster and faster and his mind was trying to race it. Running wild. Eddie had driven straight over. Christopher's school was only about fifteen minutes from Buck's place. He would've had no time to go to the store and get it before Eddie had gotten there. There was certainly not enough time for him to do all that, and have breakfast waiting for him on the table. Did Buck know he'd call? Was Buck planning to call him? Eddie hadn't exactly been answering his calls so that didn't make sense. Nothing made any sense. The only thing that made sense was—

"Eddie," Buck said, pulling him from his spiral, "you with me?"

Eddie looked over at Buck's plate. He'd already eaten half a slice, and his coffee was already half-empty. How long had he been out?

"Eddie?"

"Sorry," he said.

Buck frowned at him, and that shook Eddie awake. Buck had been smiling the whole time, right up until that moment. "Stop apologizing," he said, "it's okay." Oh.

"Sorry." he said.

"Eddie!"

"Sorry!"

They laughed.

Eddie looked back down at his coffee. There was still steam, so he hadn't been out that long. He took a sip, and he felt parts of his brain start to light up like a fireworks show. Parts of his brain he thought had gone dormant or died forever. He really missed that taste.

"You have my favorite coffee creamer," Eddie said, without thinking, "why?"

That got Buck smiling again, and Eddie couldn't help but notice the irony, but inside of his head, he was saying thank God.

"I always have it," he said, "you know, for whenever you come over."

Eddie felt something in the pit in his stomach, growing and growing. A physical manifestation of a mountain of guilt, a mountain he thought he was climbing, overcoming, but the summit just kept getting higher and higher, and Eddie just kept on falling, lower and lower, further and further away. Eddie hadn't come over. Sure, Buck had only been actually living there for about two weeks, but even then. While he was staying at Maddie's, he didn't really visit either. Eddie wondered if he had Eddie's coffee creamer there too. Wondered if he was expecting him to come over then too. Was Eddie a bad friend? He sure felt like he had been a bad friend. Were they still friends? That was a weird question to ask considering he was sitting in his house, eating breakfast Buck made for him, drinking coffee with creamer that he only had because Eddie liked it.

"Your food's gonna get cold," Buck said, his voice always finding a way to break through the barrier. "You should eat."

Eddie didn't talk much for the rest of breakfast. He didn't think, either. He just savored every bite of thick-cut french toast topped with strawberries and cinnamon whipped cream. Eddie didn't talk, but Buck did. Buck told him all about the calls they had yesterday. Eddie hadn't gone back to work yet, and from the way Buck spoke about their shift, he hadn't missed out on much.

"It was nasty," Buck said, "It got literally everywhere. I think I can still smell it, like it has been burned into my nostrils."

Eddie had just looked at him, a bit disgusted.

"Sorry," he said, "probably not the best breakfast conversation."

Eddie shook his head. "If I'm not allowed to apologize, neither are you," he said, taking another bite of his french toast and pointing at Buck with the pointed end of his fork, "but you're right, probably not."

It was okay. Buck found other things to talk about. He told him a lot about baby Nash.

"He's crawling already," Buck said, "isn't that crazy?"

And Eddie found it a bit easier to talk back.

"He's six months now, right?" Eddie asked.

"Almost seven!" Buck almost screamed. "How old was Chris when he started crawling?"

Eddie felt something lift inside of him, like some of the weight had disappeared, thinking about his son. "He didn't crawl, actually," Eddie said, the memory came to him fondly, "he found a way to get places by just rolling since he couldn't crawl. It was cute until Shannon figured out that it was a sign of his CP."

Buck had a mouthful of a mixture of chewed up fruit and boiling hot coffee, but that didn't stop him from speaking. Most people found it gross, Eddie just found it endearing. "I didn't even think about that," he said, at least, Eddie was pretty sure that was what he said.

"Yeah," Eddie said, "he didn't walk until he was almost four, I still managed to miss those first steps though, I was still in Afghanistan."

Buck frowned at him again, and Eddie wanted nothing more than to take it back. Buck's smile made him feel lighter. It made him feel like everything would be okay, as long as he was smiling.

"Where is Chris anyway?" Buck asked. "Is he at school?"

"Yeah, it's his first day back, you know, since…" Eddie trailed off, still having trouble saying the words out loud without breaking down, "that's sort of the reason I called you in the first place."

"You didn't want to be alone." It wasn't a question.

Eddie took a deep breath. He didn't bother trying to stifle it.

"I didn't want to be alone," he confirmed.

There was a beat of silence, Buck was still not smiling, he was just…looking at him, strangely. Being stared at made Eddie uncomfortable, sure, but what he was more concerned with was the fact that Buck wasn't smiling anymore. He looked down at Buck's plate. It was empty, scraped clean, just the remnants of sticky bread crumbs and strawberry syrup. Eddie's own plate was still rather full. He hadn't been doing much of a good job lately of being able to tell whether or not he was hungry, like the signals were getting intercepted—washed away by the flood of grief on the way. In that moment, though, Eddie could tell. He was still a bit hungry—not starving by any means—but hungry. And yet, still, he said…

"I think I'm done eating."

He didn't really know why.

Buck just continued to stare at him. "Okay," he said, "that's okay." His voice was as soft and as sad as ever.

Part of Eddie wished Buck would pry. Maybe Buck would have better luck figuring out what was going on with him. Maybe Buck could fix whatever was broken inside of him. He would at least try, Eddie thought, he was always trying to fix things.

But he didn't pry, didn't push. didn't question. He just kept that sad frown plastered on his face as he picked both of their plates up off the table and carried them over to the sink. The sound of running water hitting the porcelain was like white noise. Eddie let his eyes fall closed, and allowed himself to be transported somewhere else. He had found that to be easier and easier to do over the past couple of days. Sometimes his mind would race, thoughts going a million miles a minute. But, other times, there was nothing going on. Sometimes his brain would just turn itself off. He wouldn't feel anything, hear anything, see anything. Time would cease to exist. Just the other day he found himself alone on the couch, Netflix open on his screen with the 'are you still watching' screen burning into the TV. The sun was already beginning to rise, the bright of dawn peaking in through the gaps in the blinds. He had just been sitting there, in silence, for hours. The weight of the world was sitting directly in his lap, refusing to let him up, forcing him to be swallowed by the dark stillness of the night.

It was unlike him to be able to do this—this empty, thoughtless, nothingness—during the day, though. And certainly not when he wasn't alone. There was usually something to ground him, to remind him that time was passing around him, and that he was missing it. But the sink was still on, and his eyes were still closed, and for a moment there, he just stopped existing.

That was until the water shut off, his eyes blinked open, and his vision slowly came into focus as he saw Buck standing there with a dishrag slung over his shoulder—again, staring at him.

"Did you need to go anywhere today?" Buck asked him, and even in his current state, Eddie could tell Buck was being hesitant.

He tried to read between the lines, even though he knew he was just opening himself up to another spiral. Was it a spiral if he was conscious of it happening? If he was letting it happen? If he was willing it to happen? He wasn't sure, and he wasn't even sure he cared. The only thing he was sure of was that Buck had just asked him a question, and for whatever reason, it made his stomach lurch. There was something alive in there. It had teeth, and it was gnawing at him. It could speak, and he could hear it, echoing inside him, traveling through his veins like they were telephone wires. Why was he asking him that? Did he want him to leave? Eddie hadn't exactly asked if he could come over for the whole day—or for at least as long as Christopher was at school. What if Buck had things he needed to get done? He probably did. What was Eddie thinking, taking up all of his time like that? He looked at the clock on the stove. He hadn't even been there an hour yet. Why did it feel like it had been multiple? Why was Buck trying to get rid of him so soon? Why—

"Hey."

Buck was standing just a foot away from him, his hand firmly on his shoulder, slightly shaking him. Eddie hadn't even felt it, not until Buck said anything.

Eddie was about to apologize, but Buck spoke first.

"You keep going away," he said, "did I say something wrong?"

"No," Eddie responded almost too quickly, "No, of course not. Sorry."

"Eddie, stop apologiz—"

"No, it's okay," he said, already lifting himself to his feet, moving towards the exit, "I'll get out of your hair, thanks for breakfast."

"You're leaving?" Buck asked, and he somehow sounded even sadder, and Eddie was even more confused than he was before.

"I thought you had other things to do."

Buck's hand was back there on his shoulder, almost powerful enough to completely stop him in his tracks. Eddie did the rest of the work for him though, pausing his movements, two parts of his brain dueling it out, one begging him to stop, stay, remain in the warmth of Buck's presence for as long as he was allowed, the other half begging him to run, flee, escape the possibility of becoming the burdened he feared he was being.

"No," Buck said, "I asked if you had anything to do."

"But I thought…" Eddie let that thought trail off, not really wanting to get into his slip and slide logic.

"I just wanted to know if you had things you needed to get done or arranged," Buck said, and he sounded a bit surprised, like Eddie was surprising him, "you know, so I could come with you. So you didn't have to do it alone."

Oh.

Eddie thought back to what he said earlier, and everything just felt silly after that. He felt like he couldn't trust himself anymore. His instincts were all out of whack. Buck was just trying to be a good friend, and there Eddie was, trying to retreat into himself.

"I don't have anything to do." Eddie said, his voice flat, without emotion. He was afraid to let even a drop of it out.

"Then stay," Buck said, and finally—finally—he smiled, "because neither do I."

Eddie stood there, standing in the doorway separating the kitchen and living room, unsure of what to do, or what to say. An enthusiastic yes was sitting on the tip of his tongue, begging to be released from the confines of his tightly sealed lips, but he swallowed it down. He wasn't sure why. Maybe the reason was right down there with it, swallowed down, boiling in his stomach. He scanned the dictionary in his mind for something else.

He found other words. Less revealing words.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

Buck was still smiling. Eddie took the win.

"I just got the TV set up," Buck said, moving past him and into the living room, breaking Eddie from his tightly held stance, joints loosening. He hadn't realized how stiff he was. "We could watch a movie. There's this one I've been meaning to watch that I think you'll like! It's about this—"

Buck was abruptly cut off, and it took Eddie a moment to figure out why. Buck was standing there, halfway to the center of the living room, his posture awkward, staring down at the coffee table. The sight of it was temporarily obscured by Buck, but eventually, as he drew closer, Eddie saw what Buck saw that stopped him in his tracks, and Eddie too found himself without words.

The Ouija board.

"Sorry," Buck said, his voice so small, "I forgot to put it away."

Eddie felt something crack inside of him, his heart split open, aching with every passing glance at the board. Not just the board itself, but everything surrounding it. The empty beer bottles, the takeout containers, the crumpled up pieces of notebook paper, the blankets strewn around on the floor… It swelled inside of him, every detail building itself up, climbing up his throat until it escaped out of him with the utterance of one word—a name.

"Buck…"

"It's fine, I'm fine," he said, but he clearly wasn't fine, indicative by the way his voice cracked each time he muttered the lie. He quickly got to cleaning up the mess, tossing the blankets in the corner and piling up the trash and the bottles into his arms to make for a quick one-trip to the kitchen garbage, averting Eddie's gaze the whole while.

While Buck was gone, Eddie heard something. There was that voice again, reverberating in his skull. There were no words as far as he could tell, nothing as explicit as he had been hearing earlier. It sounded like a song, dancing about in his mind, wordless, yet, understandable by him. Each note carrying its meaning to his subconscious. His eyes were fixed on the coffee table, the Ouija board still there, set up and ready for use. The planchette was still sitting in the center, not resting over any particular letter. Eddie couldn't help but think back to their last conversation. He had been cruel, he knew that now, as he stared down at the evidence. He felt sick to his stomach. Every mental image of Buck sitting alone, fingertips on the planchette, praying to hear from someone important that he had lost.

Eddie knew what that felt like. There was someone he was aching to talk to too.

The voice in his head got a little bit louder as Buck reentered the room, hands free, making a b-line for the coffee table and almost taking Eddie out on his way there. "I'll get this put away," he said, his voice a little frantic, "just give me one second, sorry."

Eddie shook his head at that. "What happened to not apologizing?" he asked.

Buck sighed, heavy. Breath powerful enough he was certain it could uproot a tree. Eddie put his hand on the center of Buck's back, causing him to stall, his arms stuck in a weird position, awkwardly hovering over the board.

"Buck," he said, using his own tricks against him now, "stop for a second."

Buck barely moved. He barely reacted, his head only turning slightly to finally make eye contact with Eddie. That was the moment Eddie noticed he had tears in his eyes.

"Buck…"

"Sorry." It was practically a whisper. Buck's hands moved up to his face, wiping away at what had already managed to escape his ducts, taking a shaky breath in through his mouth. "Sorry."

Eddie decided not to say anything about the two apologies.

A few moments passed, Eddie allowing the situation to breathe, and settle, before speaking again. Buck was trying to calm himself down all the while, smile forced. It wasn't the smile Eddie wanted to see. It didn't make him feel any lighter. It didn't make him feel like everything was going to be okay.

It made him feel like the sky was falling, and he didn't know how to stop it.

So he listened to the voice inside of his head.

"Have you been using it by yourself?" he asked, his voice cutting through the silence almost violently.

"Yeah," he said, "I don't know what I was thinking. It doesn't work. You were right, Bobby isn't in my house. I'm not even really sure he's out there at all."

If Eddie's heart hadn't already been ripped up and shattered to pieces, that right there would've broken it completely.

Buck was halfway to the ground, bent over the table uncomfortably, his arms still stiff and stuck in that position Eddie had left him frozen in earlier. "Come on," Eddie said, making a vague gesture between the two of them before lowering himself down on the floor on the opposite side of the coffee table, "sit down."

Buck hesitated, but eventually followed suit.

Eddie started fiddling with the pieces on the table, sliding the planchette back and forth across the board, feeling like an electrical current shot out of it, passed through his fingers, and woke up every nerve inside of his body. The voice was even louder, and it was singing a different song. Eddie listened.

"I heard these things only work with two or more people," he said, no longer looking at Buck. His eyes were stuck darting back between the yes and no on the board, like he was looking for an answer himself, hoping one of them would shoot out at him. It felt like a bad idea, but, at the same time, like it was the only correct one.

"Eddie…"

Eddie just continued to look down at the board, and something settled into place—like one of the many missing puzzle pieces in his mind was found, connecting with another, his world slowly rebuilding itself into something complete, and whole again. It still wasn't a pretty picture, full of gaps and holes and jagged edges that cut like a knife. But it was a piece, slotted and secure. It was enough to let him ponder the innocent word of maybe. The word that he'd been avoiding using, running from his whole life. He didn't like to wonder. He liked to know things.

For a moment there he was starting to find it in himself to let that word back in, embrace the things he had long since sworn off—even if at first it was just a way for him to feel closer to Bobby. That feeling had died in that old church, then found a resurgence when Pepa had called him and Chris swore to the ends of the earth that he saw her standing in his room that night. But that was just the immediate aftermath, when Eddie was so desperate to feel close to someone he lost that he begged for God's presence. He begged for hers. He hadn't felt it before, and he hadn't felt it then, and he certainly wasn't feeling it now. Now—now that the dust had been given time to settle, where he wasn't feeling God, but he was feeling something, and he felt like he was tied to a rope, being tugged between the maybe and the maybe not.

He didn't feel God, but he felt Buck. He felt his aching desperation and a grief so large it casted its own shadow. He felt Buck and his need to believe in something bigger than himself, some larger meaning, some great beyond that turned Bobby's death into something less tragic…or belief just for the sake of being able to talk to him again.

It wasn't sympathy—at least Eddie was pretty sure it wasn't. Buck's belief in things—curses, jinxes, ghosts and fucking Ouija boards—it radiated. And Eddie caught it like a cold, except, unlike a cold, the symptoms didn't feel so bad.

His eyes continued to dart back and forth between the yes and the no, and his eyes stopped on the yes. He wasn't sure if he believed in hotlines to heaven, or any other communication method with the dead, but part of him wanted to. Part of him needed to—and an even bigger part of him figured that, regardless, maybe Buck's belief could be large enough for the both of them.

"Do you want to?" Eddie finally spoke, his chest tightening, "With me?"

Eddie looked up and Buck was just staring at him blankly. "No, you don't have to—I should have never suggested—you were right, Bobby's not here it's—it's fine—"

"Buck," Eddie said his name, and he didn't fail to notice the way the roles had switched so easily, "I want to. If you want to, I want to."

"You want to?"

Eddie had spent the past week thinking about a lot of things. About conversations he never had, and will never have the chance to have in the future. Thinking about things left unsaid, questions never asked, and answers never given. That kind of thinking had been a burden on his life for years after Shannon's passing, and he nearly blew up his entire life in an effort to find some semblance of closure. He didn't want to go through that again.

It just felt like a less explosive option.

"Yeah," he said, his voice soft, a hint of uncertainty peaking through the veil, "there's someone I've been really wanting to talk to."

It was timid, small, so very quiet, but it was heard—Buck's soft whisper. "Okay," he said, "I'd like that."

The room felt like something shifted, like the atmosphere had doubled in weight, and all that dense air was sitting right on top of him, pushing him deeper and deeper into the floor, his bones feeling like they might snap underneath the pressure. It was suddenly…awkward…tense. In a way it hadn't been between the two of them in a long time. Not even when they were fighting about something. It had never felt quite like this, like they were both afraid to do anything, not even move.

"I've never used one of these before," Eddie said, the words thoughtfully chosen and forced out, making a valiant attempt at releasing a little bit of the crippling tension, "how do we start?"

Buck worried his bottom lip, "um," he said, a slight rattle to his voice, "put your fingers on it like this." Buck demonstrated, placing his index and middle fingers from both hands around the pointed edge of the planchette.

Eddie followed suit. "Like this?" he asked.

Buck nodded.

"What next?"

Buck looked to be lost in thought, his eyebrows furrowed, eyes narrowing at him like he was trying to unpack an optical illusion. He must've figured something out, because suddenly he was shaking his head back and forth and pulling his hands back.

"Wait," he said, his speech slowed and unsure, "aren't Catholics taught to like, avoid these things like the plague? Aren't you like, inviting demons in or something?"

Just like that, the tension was gone.

Eddie laughed. Then. Wait.

"How did you know I was going back to church?"

Buck looked like a deer caught in the headlights for a split second. "I didn't know that," he said, "I just…assumed you were trying to reconnect somehow. You know, with all the talk about leaving room for the unknown, how upset you were about Abigail…plus I sort of saw the prayer book in your locker," Buck took a deep breath, then continued, "I didn't want to say anything cause you seemed, off, I guess? I don't know, I just figured you probably had a good reason for not telling me."

Eddie pulled his own hands away at that, finding the crushing urge to pick at the skin around his nails, just like he always did when he was feeling nervous. Why was he feeling so nervous? Well, talking about this sort of thing always tended to. The only people he ever talked to about religion that didn't make him feel like that, they were both, well…

"I was…or I am?" Eddie said, stumbling over his words, "Honestly, I'm still not sure where God and I stand right now."

There was a beat, like Buck was really talking the words in.

"I mean, I'm not really religious," he said, looking at him intently now, the gloss from earlier's unshed tears still making themselves known, "but from what I learned from Bobby, that's a relationship you get to define."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Eddie said, "and I'm starting with the fact that I don't think a Ouija board is gonna hurt me."

Buck smiled. "So you're not afraid of demons?"

Eddie smiled back, placing his finger tips back onto the planchette. "I'm not if you're not."

Buck didn't immediately follow his action, instead, saying, "Well now you got me worrying about demons possessing my house!"

"I'm not the one who brought them up!" Eddie said, smile still plainly written on his face, joy creeping in, feeling more permanent than it had in a while, "besides, you've used it already, they're probably already here."

"Nuh uh," Buck said, shaking his head almost comically, "when I was using it I didn't have your negative energy to worry about."

"My negative energy?" Eddie asked, "I'm not the one thinking about demons!"

Buck rolled his eyes and finally placed his fingertips back onto the planchette, and Eddie felt a kick in his stomach when Buck's fingers slightly brushed his, and electrical current surging through him, setting him briefly aflame.

"Promise not to call me an idiot?" Buck asked around a pained chuckle.

Eddie paused his breathing, saddened by the slight shift in his demeanor. "Why would I do that?" he asked, genuine.

Buck sighed. "No reason."

Eddie let that one go, and instead chose to focus on the board in front of him, his fingertips lightly touching an object he knew would have his mother flying off the walls if she were to find out about it. That part in and of itself was somewhat exhilarating.

"Okay," Eddie said, the word exiting on a heavy exhale, "what next?"

Buck's face did something weird. It wasn't a frown, nor a smile, but something in between, unreadable.

"Now we ask a question." Buck said.

Eddie had a lot of questions. Too many questions. Questions he wasn't even sure how to begin asking. Questions that lingered inside of him for so long, he got comfortable with the unknown feeling. He got used to it. Or at least that was what he told himself. Sometimes, though, at very specific moments in his life, he had flare ups—days when the questions inside of himself screamed their name, trying to claw their way out through his skin.

Eddie had a lot of questions, but he didn't know how to ask any of them yet.

"Do you wanna go first?" Eddie asked, and he hoped Buck could hear the parts of the sentence that he wasn't saying out loud. I need you to go first.

"Sure," Buck said, smiling knowingly, and Eddie let out the breath he was holding, "I'll go first."

Buck's tapped his fingertips rhythmically in thought, searching the air for something with eyes shifting back and forth between nothing.

"Are there any spirits here with us?"

Eddie had to stifle the eye roll that was begging to come out of him. This was silly, wasn't it? They were two grown men playing with a Ouija board on the floor of Buck's living room. It was silly and cheesy and stupid and yet Eddie decided he wanted nothing more than to lean into that feeling. Lean into the craziness for just a minute to forget about the craziness that had been his life lately.

Although, it only felt silly for a short few seconds until he felt the widget start to move. Eddie watched Buck closely, that skeptical part of himself watching Buck's movements carefully, trying to prove itself right that these things weren't real. It was a battle he kept trying to fight, and he thought it was getting easier, but then Buck's fingers twitched in a specific way and Eddie was suddenly skeptical again.

He kept his mouth shut.

The planchette came to a stop right atop the yes, and Eddie just looked at Buck, searching his face for a reaction. It was blank.

"Yes," Buck said, his voice flat, reading the word directly off the board.

Eddie looked at him expectantly, urging him to ask the question, begging him to take the lead. Because beyond the skepticism, Eddie was hopeful, and the atmosphere felt a little bit too heavy for him to open himself up just yet.

"Bobby—Cap," Buck started, voice stuttering just a bit trying to get the name out, "are you here?" he asked.

The planchette did not move. It stayed right there over the yes. Eddie had never used a Ouija board before, but he was pretty sure—at least from what he'd seen in the movies—that it still had to move to be counted as a separate answer.

Buck was watching him, his eyes locked in tightly on his own, somehow seeming both hopeful and discouraged at the exact same time. The stare felt like a knife between his ribs, twisting and turning. He was already doing it before it became a conscious choice, but hindsight only told him he made the correct decision as he slowly, carefully, and meticulously moved the planchette in a circle, landing right back in its former place.

"Yes," Eddie said.

Buck looked like his brain was malfunctioning, his mouth hung open, staring wide-eyed down at the widget on the board. Suddenly Eddie was second-guessing himself. Was this cruel? It felt a little cruel to let Buck believe Bobby was speaking to him—but, the look on his face, the light coming back to his eyes that Eddie had only just realized hadn't been there before. How could that be cruel?

"He's here," Eddie whispered, choosing his words carefully, like he was afraid he might spook him with the wrong one, "talk to him."

Buck took in a deep, shuddering breath, like a man submerged in water, finally coming up for air.

"Hey Cap," he finally said, and Eddie felt something cut through him at the sound of his voice, choking on a sob, eyes welling up with tears. Eddie wanted nothing more than to reach across the table and touch him, offer him some semblance of comfort—wipe the still-forming tears from his eyes. But that wasn't something he could offer him in that moment, and he wasn't exactly sure it was what Buck needed. So, he gave him the thing he could offer. What he was pretty sure he needed.

The planchette started to move—not on its own.

Two letters.

H-I.

Buck gasped, and the momentary shock wore off as soon as Eddie looked back up and saw Buck was smiling again.

"Hi," Buck said, and even though he was trying to hide it, Eddie could hear the joy in there.

Buck turned his head to wipe away his tears on his shoulder, making sure his fingers didn't leave the planchette.

"Talk to him," Eddie urged again.

Buck took a deep breath and closed his eyes, tears dripping from his lashes and collecting on his cheeks as he did so. Each tear was another stab to Eddie's heart, another twist and turn of the knife embedded in his ribcage. But, at the same time, every smile, every laugh, they healed every added wound, like they had never even been there in the first place.

"Um," Buck started, his lower lip trembling, "I miss you, Cap—Bobby…sorry, it's been difficult to try and figure out what to call you now. We've been calling Chimney that now, it's…different…sorry."

"Hey," Eddie cut in, his voice soft, "you don't have to apologize."

Buck nodded, and continued.

"I lost a few of your recipes during the move," he said, "I figured out the snicker doodles, but now I've moved onto lemon bars. I haven't been able to get them to set quite right yet. I was going to ask you to tell me what I'm doing wrong but…I think I like not knowing. I think I just want to keep trying until I get it right, you know? I don't know, it just makes me feel like you're closer. Like you're still my captain, trying to help me solve my own problems without telling me the answer…does that make sense?"

Eddie moved the planchette.

YES.

"Good," Buck breathed, "thanks for not telling me."

Buck took another deep breath, then kept going.

"It's been hard without you, Cap," he said, his voice going quieter, "It feels like I'm standing next to a black hole sometimes, a hole that you left, and sometimes it feels like it would be easier to let that take me away than to have to keep dealing with all the change I've been forced to accept now that you're gone. A new captain, a new partner. It's still all the same people, but—it just doesn't feel like the 118 without you there in the captain's seat."

Eddie took all of that in, every last word, sinking into the pit of his gut, pressure pushing him deeper and deeper into the floor. Maybe Eddie was right before. Maybe he had been a bad friend, because he hadn't noticed any of that. Eddie had been pulling himself so far away from Buck, that Eddie hadn't even bothered to notice Buck had been pulling himself away from everything else.

Eddie sniffled. He didn't mean to, it just happened, and Buck noticed. Eddie chanced a glance up at him again, and found him there, still smiling, the upturn of his lips not succumbing to the weight of his own words.

"But," Buck continued, "I think I'm slowly starting to come to peace with you being gone. Little by little every day." He took another long, deep breath, "It helps to know that you're here."

Eddie felt a wave of guilt crash over him at that last line, it was just so conflicting. While Eddie had missed a lot of things over the past several months, he didn't fail to notice that Buck was taking Bobby's death especially harder than anyone else at the firehouse. He had been slow to come to terms with it, constantly looking for signs that he was still around. It just felt so unhealthy. For some reason, they all thought the best course of action was to just ignore it. To not play into it. To let the grief run its course. Eddie felt that it sometimes came across as rather mean-spirited, but it felt like he was doing the right thing.

It wasn't feeling that way anymore.

But simultaneously, neither was this. He felt dishonest. He felt like he was leading Buck down a dangerous path. It felt so wrong.

But Buck smiled, and Eddie couldn't fathom a reality where making Buck smile like that could ever be deemed wrong.

The widget was still beneath his fingertips, unmoving. He nudged it slightly.

It took him a bit longer than the simple yes and two-letter responses had, and because of that. Eddie was forced to sit in the uncomfortable silence, hearing nothing but the sound of Buck's breathing, and the planchette sliding back and forth across the board.

Six letters. Two words.

I-M H-E-R-E.

Buck looked up at the ceiling and smiled. "I know that now," he said, "thank you, Bobby."

Eddie felt a crushing weight on his chest, like a boulder, unmovable from its home right on top of his ribs. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't speak. He could only sit there, letting himself get compressed into something small, frail, molded into the wood flooring like they were one in the same.

"You should say something too," Buck said, and for a second there Eddie didn't even recognize that Buck was speaking to him. The fact of that was delayed by a short few seconds, hitting him suddenly, and snapping him back to life. Buck was looking at him again. He was smiling at him again. "Only if you want to, of course."

It felt odd not to. It was his idea after all.

Eddie shrugged his shoulders. He wondered if Buck would do the same thing for him. If he'd paint up some false reality in an effort to bring him some sort of comfort. Or, would Eddie have to do it? Would the planchette just sit there, unmoving, until Eddie nudged it in some direction? Would Buck immediately catch on to the fact that Eddie had been lying to him the whole time? All of the thoughts and all of the questions made him feel sick to his stomach.

But then he looked at Buck, and hope surged through his body in faint, zaps of energy. More like static electricity, less like lightning bolts. Small, harmless.

"Okay," he said, voice broken, worn, barely above a whisper.

He took a deep breath, willing the weight on his chest to lift enough to get the rest of the words out.

"Hey, Cap," Eddie said, his voice shaking a little bit, something swarming in his chest. Eddie had done quite a bit of praying since his death, searching for answers in what might exist above him, but he never spoke to Bobby directly. It stung at first, but the pain of the shock eventually went away, and Eddie found it in himself to keep going. "I've been going back to church," he said, staring down in prayer, rather than up to the heavens, "I remember when you gave me you book of prayers. I don't think I understood it then, but I think I'm starting to now."

"Eddie, I was going through some things, and I found this. It made me think of you."

"I've been trying—I don't know. I'd be lying if I said you weren't the reason for me stepping back through those doors but," he said, his throat growing tight as he thought about what his next words would be, "but now I've got two people I'm doing it for." he almost choked on them, "I know, I shouldn't be doing it for anybody but myself but. I just. The idea seemed comforting at first, and I kept finding myself looking at the book you gave me and I just—"

"Just hang onto it. It might come in handy."

"But I still just, don't feel Him, you know?" he asked, and he felt a little bit stupid, as he got disappointed when he didn't hear Bobby's voice in answer, "my abuela said I've been looking in the wrong place, but I'm not sure I know where to look."

The planchette flinched, and so did Eddie as it started to move slowly across the board, jutting over the uneven surface until it found somewhere to land. A letter.

It moved again, and Eddie stored the information away, letting his hands follow the movements. Silently building the word in his head, piece by piece. Four letters in total.

Eddie blinked down at his hands, where the planchette found its resting place over the letter E.

L-O-V-E.

"Love?" Buck asked, and Eddie swore that someone had their hand wrapped around his heart, squeezing it tight. For a moment there, he stopped breathing.

"But what is love if not a sign of God's presence?"

"Abuela?" Eddie rasped.

All skepticism had been flown out the window as he called out for his grandmother. There was no way for Buck to have known about that conversation, and the confusion written all over his face just further confirmed that thought.

But…how?

Eddie, again, didn't know much about Ouija boards, or any spiritual connections with the dead, for that matter, but for everything he'd heard in passing and in media, it shouldn't be able to work in that way. They were in Buck's house. Why would she be haunting him there? What was typing her there?

He was starting to sound crazy.

Eddie looked down at himself, down at that chest of his that still felt like it was being crushed underneath the weight of the entire world. He looked at his chest, where his heart was beating so hard he thought surely it could be seen pounding through his shirt. He looked at his heart, where his abuela once laid her hand as she said the same thing to him in just a few more words than that.

"But what is love if not a sign of God's presence?"

"So when I was looking for him in church…"

"Mi niño, you were looking in the wrong place."

He could hear her voice so clearly it was as if she was sitting right there next to him, speaking directly into his ear, every word echoing in his skull like choral music.

Suddenly, it was as if he was standing outside of himself, looking down at his own figure, sitting a criss-cross on his best friend's living room floor, looking like a desperate man seeking answers. He looked down at himself, frozen in time, and listened to the sound of her voice echo, the words transforming into those exact answers he had just been searching for.

He was transported back to the age of six, sitting on the sofa in his abuela's living room hugging a stuffed bear tightly to his chest, the distant echo of his parents arguing in the other room making him hug the bear tighter and tighter. She had found him in there alone, and sat next to him, saying nothing, just rubbing circles into the ill-fitting suit jacket his mother had forced him into. They were setting up for his bisabuela's funeral, and Eddie had a lot of questions. It was his first experience with death.

"What happens when you die?" he asked, his prepubescent voice pitched up high, but quiet behind the shy whisper.

She looked down at him and smiled, and looking back on that day, he was amazed at her strength, seeing as it was her mother who had just passed, and there Eddie was, asking her uncomfortable questions about life and death. But she just took it in stride.

"Mi niño," she started, continuing to rub circles into his back, "when we die, we join God in heaven." she said.

Eddie knew that part. He had heard it said in church on several occasions. That wasn't the question he was asking.

"Does that mean she's gone forever?" he asked.

And she just smiled at him again, and laughed. "Physically, she's not here anymore. You won't be able to see her, or talk to her directly," she said, and he could tell even at that age that she was struggling to get through it, but still, she persisted. Answering the questions his own parents brushed off. "But, my Eddito, they're never really gone."

Eddie had just looked at her confused.

She just placed her hand gently over his heart, and with her other hand, her own. "She's in here," she said, "with us, always."

Eddie put his small hand over hers. "In here?"

She just smiled at him, and leaned in close, whispering the words directly into his ear.

"En el corazón de los que amamos, nunca morimos."

In the hearts of those we love, we never die.

And suddenly, Eddie was thirty-four again. Sitting across from his best friend with a Ouija board separating them.

Eddie released one of his hands from the planchette in front of him to rest it over his heart, feeling it beat, feeling her within the steady rhythm.

Suddenly, her presence in Buck's house made perfect sense. He was there. So she was too.

He placed his fingers back onto the widget after a few more beats—just a few more seconds of feeling the echo of her breathing life inside his chest. He only realized then, as he stared down at the board, that he was crying—letters and numbers blurring together into something unrecognizable. He squeezed his eyes shut a few times, willing the tears to fall the rest of the way out, collect on his cheeks, leaving tracks in their wake as Eddie made no effort to wipe them away.

"Are you okay," Buck asked, and Eddie finally felt like he was fully back inside of himself, anchored by the sound of Buck's voice, "do you need a minute?"

Eddie shook his head. "No," he said, "I'm okay."

He'd said that a lot over the past week. Each time he said it, though, it felt like a lie. That was the first time it felt like it might be the truth.

"Ask again," Buck said, quiet, hesitant. "You should ask again."

It took a moment for Eddie to realize what he was talking about, but it all came back to him as Buck tapped his fingers across the widget again.

Eddie sucked in as much air as he could possibly let into his lungs, and he breathed it out like he was trying to expel something from his body.

"Abuela," he started, and even in his efforts to avoid it, his tone still reeked of nervousness, "are you there?"

The planchette started moving immediately, and faster than it had the entire time they had been doing it.

YES.

"Yes," Buck said.

Eddie just stared down at the board, his mind going completely blank.

Buck filled in the gaps for him.

"You should talk to her."

He could, couldn't he? It was all he ever wanted, all he had been asking for, all he had been thinking about for days. Hope had dwindled almost immediately after the first question asked, not even Buck's had seemed to be enough. But now—now? Could he actually?

"Hi Abuela," he said, and he swore his heart stopped when he could hear her voice ringing inside his head, "I've really been wanting to talk to you."

A million words started to fly around in front of his eyes, looking like a swarm of bees, stinging, striking, injecting him with venom and making it feel like his airway was closing on him. The words flew around in his head, buzzing and bouncing off the walls—a cacophony of chaos that Eddie was struggling to bypass just sitting there.

He had spent every waking minute since he got that damn call thinking about what he would've said to her if he knew that the last time they spoke would be the last time. In just a week of thinking about it, he came up with a list so long he would need several Ouija board sessions to get through them all. The pit in his stomach was formed by regret, carving itself out more and more with each revelation of yet another conversation he failed to have with her.

The questions he never asked.

The truths he never revealed.

The answers he never received.

His mind kept going back to their conversation outside the church. It kept going there. It wouldn't stop going there.

"I've been thinking a lot about our last conversation," he began. "Leaving the church, it was never about rebellion," he said, "it was because of the rejection. Like, I always had this voice inside of my head telling me I wasn't welcome there. That I wasn't safe there. There were all these people telling me I was supposed to walk through the doors and read scripture and instantly feel God's love, but all I felt a lack of belonging. Like I was standing in somebody else's house, and I was not invited to enter."

He took a second to steady his breathing.

"It definitely didn't help that I was being dragged there against my will," he said, "told what to believe and how I was supposed to feel about certain things and having the threat of the Lord's wrath constantly dangled over my head." Eddie thought back to all those times he spent alone in his room in the dark of the night with a flashlight shining down onto an open page of the bible, searching for meaning beyond the words. Thinking back to all those times he'd finally stumble upon a section that he saw himself in—his own likeness rising from the pages—just to watch the smile fall from his face as the lines to follow looked him directly in the eye, and called him wrong. "I felt like I was broken," he said, "and that not even God would be able to fix me, because he was never there."

Eddie took his next breath of oxygen to chance a look up at Buck, who appeared entirely lost in thought, and yet, simultaneously, the most focused he had ever seen him. Eddie took the breath, and the moment, and searched Buck's face like he was looking for answers in the lines around his eyes. Looking at Buck sent something rushing up his throat, climbing, clawing, trying desperately to escape. Something that was tired of being locked away in the prison of Eddie's mind, taking the break in the glass as its chance to escape.

For the first time in his life, Eddie didn't feel like shoving it back down. He let it continue to rise, taking his moment of peace as he continued to look into Buck's blue eyes.

"There's so much that I never got to tell you, Abuela," he said, and he started to choke on that thing, it was so high up, so close to being out, so big that it was terrifying, "so much."

He was still looking at Buck, and he watched the shift in his expression in real time, something inside of him waking up at the sound of Eddie's words. His ears perking up, his brows raising just slightly, his eyes becoming somehow even softer and brighter.

"Tell her," he said, and he was back to smiling and the lump in his throat didn't move, but it almost felt like it shrunk, just a bit, "she's here, so you can still tell her."

Eddie smiled at that. She's here. The words continued to echo. He still didn't know if he believed if she was actually there, listening to him, talking to him through a Ouija board medium. He couldn't shake the disbelief completely. He probably never would. But for now, he ignored it, leaning into the possibility, and embracing maybe.

That didn't solve his other problem, though.

"In order to do that," he said, his voice thick and heavy, "I'd have to tell you, too."

Buck's face went flat. "Oh," he said, "okay."

The two of them liked to pretend they didn't keep secrets from each other, but they both knew they did, probably more-so with each other than they did with anybody else. Some things just felt bigger between the two of them than they would with anyone else, and Eddie had only recently allowed himself to actually unpack why that was. He had yet to put a name to that thing between them, but looking at him then, sitting so close to him, their fingertips mere centimeters apart laid over the planchette of a Ouija board…it gave itself a name.

Eddie smiled at Buck, and spoke to her again.

"You always told me I had bad luck with love," he said, and he didn't take his eyes off of Buck, "but I think I've been pretty lucky. My love for Shannon brought me the greatest love I'll ever know—Christopher—and that feels extraordinarily lucky to me."

He watched Buck smile at that, and it gave him all he needed to keep going.

"Shannon was my first love. Chris was my first great love," he paused, sucking in a sharp breath, preparing himself for what he was about to say next, "and for a while I agreed with you. I thought I'd never find a love like I had with her. Every attempt felt like a failure—"

He had to cut himself off, the lump climbed up higher, he was sure if he opened his mouth up wide enough, you might be able to see the truth. He swallowed down, and it didn't move it from its place that time, just opened up a big enough gap to allow himself to pick up where he left off.

"But it turns out I had been looking in the wrong place."

Eddie looked at Buck with intention that time, trying to gauge how much of the vagueness he caught with that. It didn't look like it totally registered, but he was smiling. He was smiling and that was all Eddie needed to know that it was going to be okay. It was okay. He didn't need to see it spelled out on a Ouija board.

"I spent so long feeling wrong for it," he said, "shoving it down, ignoring it. But it's so loud now. It's so loud and even if I could ignore it, I don't think I want to anymore."

Because love wasn't just in Christopher, and Shannon, and his abuela. It wasn't just in his friends and his family.

Love was homemade cinnamon whipped cream, and french vanilla coffee creamer with all the added sugar bought just for him. Love was Buck. Love was his smile, and the way it made him feel a hundred pounds lighter each time he saw it. Love was in the way that same smile allowed him to find comfort and peace even as he was wading through the depths of his own turmoil. Buck was love. Eddie loved Buck. And for so many years in his life, he'd found piece after piece of evidence to the contrary of God's existence, but looking at Buck—loving Buck—it felt like all the proof he needed to be certain that he was real.

He felt God. He had been feeling him the whole time. Because just the existence of Evan Buckley, and the fact that Eddie had him in his life, now that was an act of God.

Eddie had more he wanted to say. More he wanted her to know.

So, he did what she always did when she wanted to talk about someone who was also in the room.

He spoke to her in Spanish, and he felt more connected to her than he ever had since she passed.

"Estoy enamorado del hombre que está sentado justo delante de mí."

I am in love with the man sitting in front of me.

Eddie saw Buck's ears perk up at that.

He knew that Buck knew Spanish. He hadn't forgotten. He wasn't speaking it so Buck wouldn't understand. He was just hoping that Buck would forget that Eddie knew he did.

It was something they could tackle later, he hoped.

Judging by the smile on Buck's face, he thought he had a pretty good chance.

"I hope that's okay," he said, and at that moment, he wasn't totally sure he knew who he was talking to. Abuela, Buck, or God himself. Maybe it was all three.

The motion at his finger tips caught him off guard. He had almost forgotten where he was and what he was doing, so lost in thought and in the sea of Buck's blue eyes.

Five letters. It took him a second to decode.

T-E A-M-O.

"Te amo." Eddie said.

I love you.

Eddie felt his heart surge, and his body felt like it lifted multiple inches off the ground. He felt like he'd been hollowed out, so much weight had been taken off his shoulders. The lump from his throat was gone. Disappeared. Vanished completely.

He felt so warm. He felt her again, over his shoulder, her weight pressed into his back, whispering the words into his ear.

Te amo. I love you.

Then he heard Buck's voice right along beside hers, and for a second he thought Buck was actually speaking to him, but his mouth didn't move. Still, Eddie heard the words.

Te amo. I love you.

Eddie had dissolved into a complete mess of tears and shaky breaths, feeling the weight of the world lifting off his chest, breathing deeply for the first time in not just the week since his abuela's passing—but in years.

"What do we do now?" Eddie asked in between his choked out sobs, smiling through each and every one.

Buck inched his fingers forward along the planchette, letting his fingertips rest directly on top of his own. It was as close as they'd ever gotten to holding hands, and Eddie sat there and thought about how much he wanted to do it for real.

It was blurry, but Eddie could still see enough through his tears to notice that Buck was crying as well.

"We say goodbye." he said.

That hit Eddie like a ton of bricks.

Goodbye. Goodbye. He looked down at the board where it said that same word at the bottom. Goodbye. He didn't want to say goodbye.

"Just for now." Buck said.

Her voice was back in his head.

"She's in here, with us, always."

He could feel his heart beating in his chest, She was there. Goodbye wasn't really goodbye. "Just for now," Eddie echoed.

Together, they moved the planchette down towards the bottom of the board, saying the word in unison.

"Goodbye."

They just sat there for a long time, crying together, grieving together. Finding some catharsis in the silence of the living room.

The silence didn't last long, as Eddie's phone started to ring. It shook him from his trance immediately, sending his hands flying off the widget and reaching into his pocket with one hand, and drying his tears and snot with the other.

Christopher's name and photo lit up the screen. He answered immediately.

"Hey kiddo," he said, schooling his voice as best as he could, "what's up?"

There was shaky breathing on the other end of the line, and Eddie felt his chest crack wide open.

"Can you come get me?" he asked, and it was clear in his voice that he had been crying, "I want to come home."

Eddie frowned, and it was hard not to start crying again himself. "Of course, buddy," he said, "I'll be right there, okay?"

Chris shuddered through the phone. "Thanks Dad," he said, "I love you."

"I love you too, mijo." he said, "I'll see you soon."

Eddie hung up the phone and he immediately looked for Buck again, looking for a smile, looking for the reminder that everything was going to be okay. It was right there as he turned his head, waiting for him, knowing just what he needed at any given time.

He was right. He was so damn lucky.

"You have to pick up Chris?" Buck asked, and Eddie didn't fail to notice the sadness in his voice.

"Yeah," Eddie said, fiddling around with the phone in his hands, "I hate to leave you like this, after that. I'm sorry."

"Don't—"

Eddie waved his hand at him. "Apologize. Yeah, I know."

"He needs you more that I do," Buck said, and Eddie decided, even if he wasn't totally sure, to believe him. Not because he wanted to, but because he had to. "It's okay."

They both got up off of the floor—Eddie's knees cursing him a bit as he got to his feet—and they just sort of, stood there, for a second. Neither one of them know what they were supposed to do next. The longer he stood there, looking at Buck, the more time he gave everything to settle, the more time he gave to that guilt from earlier sneaking back up on him.

"Let me go get the food I packed up for Chris," he said, stalling Eddie's train of thought, but only momentarily, "one second."

Buck wasn't gone for very long, but he was long enough for Eddie to let his mind wander again. He knew deep down he should tell him the truth, that he was the one moving the board piece—but part of him wondered how that would be any different from what he and the rest of the 118 had been doing to him for the last few months. Shutting down and ignoring his desperate search in the things he could not see. Eddie was conflicted, stuck between wanting Buck to have this—have something—yet at the same time not wanting to be dishonest with him.

He couldn't stop himself from speaking up once Buck reentered the room with that large Tupperware container in his hands.

"Buck," he started, slightly panicked, "there's something you should know. Earlier…when you were talking to Bobby—"

Buck held his hand up at him, passing him the container when he stopped speaking.

"I know, Eddie," he said, "thank you, for doing that for me, I needed it."

He knew. Oh. He knew.

"Buck…"

"It's okay, Eddie," he said, "I'm okay. Really. I am."

Eddie shook his head. He'd said those words before and not meant them, and Buck was suddenly very hard to read.

"Are you sure?" he asked.

Buck smiled. He smiled big and he smiled wide and he could almost no longer tell that he had just been crying not just minutes ago. And Eddie knew right then, that regardless of whether or not Buck was telling the truth in that moment, he would be okay.

They would be okay.

"I'm sure."

Eddie tapped his fingers on the top of the container in his hand, and took a deep breath in through his nose. He could still smell the cinnamon, like the whipped cream had just been made fresh.

"I better go," Eddie said, but his feet didn't move.

"Can I hug you?" Buck asked, and Eddie thought it was strange. Different. Buck had never had to ask before.

But things were different now, weren't they? Eddie was pretty sure that was a good thing.

"Yes," Eddie said, and he couldn't help what followed after, "please."

Buck didn't waste a second, crashing into him, wrapping his arms firmly around him, and Eddie cursed the container in his hands from preventing him from hugging back. But he took it in. Buck hugged him and he felt the warmth of a thousand suns encompass his entire being, filling every crevasse, every deep, dark, cold part of himself. It was warm, and bright, and everything he needed to feel just a little bit like a whole person again.

It was short—too short for Eddie's liking. If he didn't have somewhere to go, he would've happily lived the rest of his life, stuck just like that.

"Hey Eddie," Buck said, "before you go…"

"Yeah."

Buck fiddled with his hands, they were shaking just a bit.

"If you decide you want to keep going to church," he started, and Eddie couldn't tell why he was so nervous, "if you'd like someone to go with…I'd like to go, with you."

That was…not what he was expecting Buck to say. "Yeah?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'd—" he started, hesitating, "I think it might help me feel a little closer to Bobby, maybe."

Maybe.

Eddie smiled at him sadly. "I'd love that, Buck," he said, "I'll call you next time I go."

"That sounds perfect."

Eddie smiled, and part of him wondered if his smile had the same effect on Buck as Buck's had on him. He hoped it did. He hoped that he could bring him comfort—that he was bringing him comfort.

"Bye Buck," he finally said, breaking the silence, because he knew if he didn't he'd stand there forever, "Call me whenever," he said, "I promise I'll answer this time."

"Same goes to you, Eddie."

The next thing Eddie knew, he was walking down Buck's driveway and piling into the drivers' seat of the car. Chris needed him now. As he turned his key in the ignition, he heard his abuela's voice in his ear once again, harmonizing with the purr of the car starting up.

"En el corazón de los que amamos, nunca morimos."

In the hearts of those we love, we never die.

He looked in his rear-view mirror, and for a split second, he swore he saw her. She was gone in an instant, but she was there. He could feel it.