thinking about theo asking to cook with buck one day and accidentally setting a pot on fire. buck laughs it off but theo frowns and pouts, and buck kneels down and boops his nose and goes "hey, this is nothing, kid, i used to burn pancakes all the time. bobby would-"
and his works crackle into silence into silence for a moment, a habitual hitch of the breath, a preparation for the kind of pain that fills the room like a flood or a tsunami. but theo doesn't crumple, doesn't go quiet or pitying or sympathetic. theo is four years old and he asks "who's bobby?" straightforward and curious and not at all afraid.
buck looks at him and thinks: my captain. he thinks: my mentor. he thinks: the man who raised me. every word feels inadequate.
"he taught me how to make pancakes," he settles on, eventually. it is not enough. it is the only thing that seems to matter, right now.
theo peers at him with eyes that makes buck understand years of swats to the arm and hissed stop staring's, piercing and unsettlingly canny for a toddler. "bobby is you?" he asks, little head flopping to the side like a curious bobblehead.
it punches the air out of him, something too sharp to be joy but too tender to be agony. no, he almost snaps. what bobby did for him was-- special. sacred. what buck is doing is a band-aid over a child's broken heart.
but. but. he feels bobby's hand on his shoulder, a silent reminder. take a breath. take a beat. take count of what is around you: a kitchen. the smell of burnt sugar. a little boy who needs a home.
and buck is not the man who raised theo. not now, and perhaps not ever. but he can be one thing to this little boy: he can be the man who taught him how to make pancakes.
so: "a little," buck concedes, running flour-stained fingers through theo's unruly hair, a smudge of white over his dimpled cheek.
later, there will be more little smudges, in the shape of small fingers, running along the edge of a photograph of two men at a concert, faces bright. there will be a little voice announcing to a littler face that you have the same name as pancake bobby, two pairs of eyes that will turn to buck with grief, with joy. there will be more questions, and as many answers as buck can give, in honor of another man who tried to give buck his answers, and in honor of the man buck wants so desperately to become.
right now, though, buck scoops theo up, grinning at his shrieking giggles. he walks over to a pan, and dumps out a disk the color of char.
"you know what the first thing bobby taught me about making pancakes?" he whispers, conspiratorial, as theo leans in with star-bright eyes. "the first one never counts. wanna try for a second, spiderman?"
theo cheers. behind him, he can feel a hand on his shoulder, a kind smile, patience that lasted a lifetime. i miss you, buck wants to say. there is nobody to say it to.
that's alright. in the meantime, there are pancakes.
