i'm taking a nap

2. The math didn’t fade. He didn’t use it to cheat at cards again and he definitely didn’t take his trick to Vegas. He didn’t care that the mob no longer ran it because he liked keeping his kneecaps and also being alive, Eddie. It did come in handy on the job. Instead of taking precious time they usually didn’t have to figure out dosage or how much weight a compromised floor could hold or the force needed to take down a wall, they just asked Buck, who did the math and came up with an answer.

And then a bridge fell out from under them. The ambulance went over the edge. Hen knocked her head so hard she lost consciousness. Chimney was impaled. Eddie was slowly being crushed in the camper. Bobby was lost to them entirely.

Buck did the math and he didn’t like the answer. So he changed it. They all went home.

And now Eddie was asking him to change it again.

“He wants to go to Texas,” Eddie said. “Buck, he wants to leave.”

Buck did the math (it was impossible not to do the math). There was, of course, a probable future where Eddie didn’t have a son—he had seen it, after all, in his coma—but it was unthinkable. Buck wouldn’t think it.

“I’m leaving,” Chris said when Buck quietly let himself into the bedroom. “You can’t make me stay.”

“Hey, I’m not here to make you do anything,” Buck said, not a lie. “Your dad loves you.”

Chris rounded on him furious, and Buck remembered being seven and twelve and fifteen and twenty-one, on fire with anger and unable to breathe. So angry that he took Maddie’s money and her Jeep and ran away from home. He never went back.

“I thought my mom was alive,” Chris spat. And then, quieter: “He made me think she was alive.”

“Come here,” Buck said, and a single gentle tug had Chris folding into him, shoulders shaking as the kid tried not to cry his heart out.

Buck had never tried to change the past. It was hard enough running the numbers to get the outcome he wanted in living moment. The math needed to change an event that happened years ago probably didn’t even exist. And there was no telling what would happen if Shannon lived (if Daniel lived). Would he and Chris still ended up at the pier? If they weren’t there, what would happen to the people Buck pulled out of the water? Would Eddie have still gotten shot if he hadn’t felt the need to befriend that mother and her son? If Shannon lived and he was unhappily divorced, would he have told Buck to call Tommy? Would Eddie need him at all?

“It’s okay if you have to leave,” Buck said, one heartbroken kid to another. “But you can always come back.”

“What if I never come back?” Chris asked.

“Then you never come back,” he said, and helped him finish packing.

When he stepped out of Chris’s bedroom, backpack in his hand, Eddie said, furious, “What is the point of you?”

That was a good question that couldn’t be solved with math.

3. The intermittent showers were getting worse. The wind kicked up enough that he could feel the helicopter shudder around them. Tommy Kinard’s hands upon the controls didn’t waver.

“Hey, Tommy, on a scale of one to ten, how good of a pilot are you?” Chimney asked, snapping his gum.

“The scale goes to eleven,” Tommy said.

Chimney snorted. “Does that mean the odds of you crashing us into the ocean are low?”

Buck automatically calculated the wind speed and the intensity of the rain and visibility (let The Uno be x) and gave an answer.

“That was a rhetorical question,” Chimney said, giving him a look that Buck chose to ignore.

“Hey, kid,” Tommy said, and even though Buck only had a view of the back of his head, he knew Tommy was smiling, “never tell me the odds.”

“That’s from Star Wars,” Chimney helpfully pointed out even though Buck knew that. Everyone knew that (let Tommy be y).

A flare lit up the sky. The Uno was capsized. Tommy brought the helicopter lower and then lower still, hands steady. Buck didn’t need to do the math. The helicopter set neatly down on The Uno’s belly.

4. By the time he crawled out of the tunnel and to Tommy, Buck had screamed his throat bloody.

“Evan, you have to stop,” Tommy said, down on his knees better to gather Buck close. “Please, sweetheart, stop trying.”

He was still screaming, Buck realized, even as he ran the numbers, again. The probability was stacked against them; there was no equation where they all lived. Bobby got the antiviral and Chim died. They split it between them only to die, in agony, hours later. There was no time to synthesize a second dose. He couldn’t undo the explosion or Moira Blake’s firing or even the fire that had brought Bobby to Los Angeles. Someone was always going to die.

The only two certainties in the universe was death and numbers.

5. After the funeral, Tommy took him home. Their dress uniforms were returned to the back of the closet and one of the endless grief casseroles went into the oven. They ate one handed, their free hands locked together, and then Tommy did the dishes and Buck shoved the leftovers back into the fridge. Tommy put on an old black and white movie they pretended to watch. Buck liked the accents if not the words.

“Eddie blames me,” he said.

“Come here.” Tommy tangled them together, his head on Tommy’s chest, his ribcage slotted against Tommy’s ribcage, and his long legs threaded through Tommy’s legs. They wee touching everywhere two bodies could touch. “Eddie blames himself.”

“When Chris left for last year,” Buck said, even though he knew where this would ultimately lead, but it wasn't like his world could end twice, “Eddie asked me to make him stay.”

Tommy’s hand, sweeping along his spine, stuttered to a stop. “You didn’t do it.”

“I couldn’t,” Buck said. “Not to Chris.”

“Can you do that?” Tommy’s hand stuttered back to start. “Make a person do what you want.”

“It’s probability.” The numbers were still fucking running. Buck closed his eyes. “It’s just math.”

Tommy tenderly combed his hair back from his face. “Did you ever do math on me?”

The calculations were laid out in a neat row. All he had to do was pick the right one.

“Yes No,” he said. Probability became fact. “I would wouldn’t do that to you.”

Tommy kissed his brow. “Sorry. I know that. I know you.”

“You do,” Buck said, and turned his face into Tommy’s neck and wept.