Controlled Burn

Theo’s favorite place in the world turns out to be the wilderness park in Redondo Beach, probably because he’s determined to drown himself jumping in the pond after gigantic koi fish. It turns out that the wilderness park is a hotspot for little kid birthday parties, which is how Buck makes this discovery—they go out there for three birthdays in two months, and every single time, Theo winds up in the pond. The gross, algae-slick, surprisingly deep, surprisingly expensive pond full of giant koi fish and turtles and bugs. 

Buck has tried literally everything, okay? Bribery doesn’t work. Theo accepts the ice cream and then jumps or falls or trips into the pond anyway. Threats (I’m going to count to three, Theo. One, two….two and a half….two and three quarters….THEO!) don’t work.  He’s even tried hiding birthday invitations to the wilderness park from the kid, which is truly pathetic, and that didn’t even work, because birthday parties are the hottest gossip four year olds at a daycare have to talk about. So: they keep going back to the wilderness park. Theo keeps jumping in the pond, and Buck has to keep rescuing him from snapping turtles and terrified three-foot-long koi fish and the wrath of park employees and the judgy eyes of all the actual parents who manage to keep their four year olds on dry land the whole time. 

So here they are, on a Saturday morning birthday party at the wilderness park, and Theo is (for now) running gleefully through the tall mustard grass on the other side of the park from the pond, and Buck came prepared with a tote bag with a towel, a giant bottle of hand sanitizer, neosporin, band-aids, and a change of tiny clothes. He’s chatting with Peyton’s mom while he keeps one eye on Theo, doing his best to make normal small talk—but the conversation gets weird when she starts telling him about sending Peyton to church camp and he asks some polite questions about that and then she’s showing him how to sign up for it on her phone before he can explain that he’s not actually Presbyterian and Theo won’t be going to vacation bible school.  A weird thing about parenting, even the weird almost-parenting that Buck’s doing, is that your social life isn’t just your social life anymore. If you want the kid to have friends, you have to hang out with their parents socially, even if you don’t like their parents. Which is weird! Nothing else in adult life really prepared him for that. He complained about this at work the other day, and literally everyone except for childless Ravi and Harry laughed at him about it.

“What church do you two go to,” Peyton’s mom is saying, and Buck winces and knocks back his lemonade. 

“Whoops, looks like I gotta go avert disaster,” Buck says without looking at the kids, and jogs over to Theo—who, in fairness, is climbing a tree and getting uncomfortably high up. 

He rescues a wiggling Theo, who complains that he did not want to be rescued because there’s a BIG SPIDER up there, so then Buck has to hold Theo on his shoulders so they can both solemnly investigate the BIG SPIDER until Theo gets wiggly again, which happens in about thirty seconds. Theo manages to drop Buck’s sunglasses on a tall branch next to the BIG SPIDER, then tugs on Buck’s hair. “Put me down,” Theo orders him.

 “Theo,” Buck says, wincing. “What do we say?”

“Put me down PLEASE,” Theo says, his tiny hands tightening to fists in Buck’s hair. 

“Okay,” Buck says, bending carefully over so that Theo doesn’t wiggle right off his shoulders. “Could you be a little more gentle with my hair, though, bud?”  “SORRY,” Theo says, loud in his left ear, somehow kicking him in his right ear before he jumps the rest of the way down to the ground. His feet barely touch the grass before he bounds off after the pack of four year olds in the mustard grass.

Buck looks up at his sunglasses perched on a branch that’s juuuust a little too high for him to reach, sighs, and climbs up into the tree. He tries to avoid disturbing the big spider, but definitely can’t avoid the judgy stares coming from the parent cluster by the picnic tables. 

So, like, how is parenthood going? He doesn’t know. He feels like crying at least five times a day, and sometimes it’s because Theo is driving him crazy, and sometimes it’s because Theo is stupidly cute and sucks his thumb in his sleep. Sometimes it’s because he’s sad about Connor and Kameron, and sometimes he tears up because he doesn’t know if he’ll get to keep Theo or even if that’s what would be best for Theo, and he tears up that he took a step back when Theo was born, because look at the beautiful person he was missing. He also gets teary because Theo wakes up at six am every day, even when Buck was up at one am the night before. Buck’s a little teary right now, up a tree in the Hopkins wilderness park, for literally no reason, except that Theo just kicked him in the head, and he looks so happy, playing with his friends. 

Buck retrieves his sunglasses and levers himself down out of the tree. 

rating: G | words: 1,802

Morale is flagging here at the ass end of a 24 hour shift where they’d been bounced all around the city for a never ending stream of calls. The first week of summer is always like this, every kid in the district flooding out of the confines of the classroom and stretching their wings in the form of minor traffic accidents and what Eddie’s heard Athena refer to as “stupidity induced injury.” It’s not just the kids either, the frantic energy spreading to even the oldest citizens. They’d had to confiscate illegal fireworks from a retirement home some uncountable amount of hours ago, Bobby doing his best stern dad lecture at a man 30 years his senior. Nothing’s been too drastic, no death or mass destruction, but it’s three AM and they’re at their fourth block party fight mop up in a row and even Hen and Chim are snapping at each other and Eddie can actually see Bobby thinking through damage control.

“Buckley, Diaz.”

Buck and Eddie are loading gear back into the truck, still sweating in the dead of night because the June gloom settled thick over the city has just trapped the heat in, turning the air into an oppressive muggy sludge. Eddie doesn’t have the energy to respond, just turns generally in Bobby’s direction. Buck, behind him, leans against the engine.

Bobby sighs, fishing around in his pockets to pull cash from his wallet and press it into Eddie’s hands. He nods over at a couple of food trucks down the street that still, somehow, have lines. “Get food. Anything.”

So Buck and Eddie shuffle down the road, more distance between them than usual, the normally comforting brush of shoulders suddenly an unpleasantly sticky concept. The options are bougie cheeseburgers with lobster or kimchi or peanut butter and jelly piled on them, or a fried chicken truck with an obnoxiously flashing neon sign on the roof. Buck raises an eyebrow in a question and Eddie shrugs, and they get in line for chicken.

Buck stands with his hands in his pockets and Eddie feels his palms sweat just looking at him. He’s holding his arms slightly away from his torso, begging from the universe a breeze, trying to escape his own body heat. The neon flashes red and that makes Eddie feel hot too, the burning color of fire washing over Buck’s features, swallowing his birthmark whole. It makes his face look strange, young and unfamiliar, and Eddie doesn’t realize how intently he’s studying him until Buck makes surprised eye contact. He raises an eyebrow, Eddie shakes his head with dead-exhausted eyes, Buck nods and stares back out at the street.

“How’re Peppa’s dates going?”

Eddie barely resists groaning at the question. Bad, is how they’re going, and Buck knows that because Eddie calls him after each one to complain about it. He hasn’t hit it off with a single one of the women his tia keeps plucking out of her mysterious bottomless pit of single young hopefuls, because he doesn’t like their job or their interests or their laugh or the way their hand feels on his arm. Manicured nails, soft skin. Buck’s head tilts lazily to the side, a little grin pulling up one side of his mouth, and the sound of the neon feels like it’s buzzing around the inside of Eddie’s skull.

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

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