eternity || epilogue

Buck ducks his head slightly, a little sheepish. "I got excited," he explains, pink-cheeked and bouncing a little on his feet. Reflexively, Bobby checks the tenor of his movements, looking for any sign of strain or pain or distress. He finds none. He exhales.

When he looks back up, Buck's smile is a little softer, something understanding and awed in his eyes. Bobby forgets, sometimes, how much Buck sees, when he's given the tools and permission to look.

"Spaghetti?" he asks, instead of making a bigger thing out of this than Buck would want.

A little tension that Bobby hadn't even realized was there loosens from Buck's shoulders as he claps a hand to Bobby's shoulder, moving him with easy presumptive familiarity towards a faintly bubbling sauce on the stove.

"Chris," he explains, which says very little except for the part where it explains everything. Still, Bobby waits for elaboration, and Buck's fingers twist together in front of him, the way they do when he's deciding how to tell a story. "It's the-- it's the first time that I'm making dinner for him again, since..." a little shrug, as if to encompass the past several months of tsunamis and lawsuits and strained conversations. He hesitates, then, in a lower voice: "Eddie said that-- uh, that Chris has been, um, having nightmares."

Bobby exhales, sadness pressing against him. He thinks about the little boy he'd held by the firetruck, all megawatt grins and endless questions. He wishes he could've stopped any of this from happening to him. He knows that the man in front of him, as well as Christopher's father, would both have done anything to do the same.

Still, they cannot change the past, so Bobby asks: "And because of that, you're making...spaghetti?"

A sheepish grin. "Oh- yeah! That's, uh, that's because, well-- Chris said that--" a little flicker of his smile, something sadder melting into his expression. " He said that he missed his mom's cooking. And when I asked what she used to make for him, he said--"

"Spaghetti," Bobby nods, something warm filling his sternum as he begins to understand.

Buck nods, bobble-headed, curls not slicked back on his day off. "I've been, um-- I've been trying to make it taste the way Chris remembers it, and I think I've almost cracked the code, but..."

He looks at Bobby helplessly. "I keep getting Eddie to taste it, and he keeps saying that there's something off. I thought that-- you know, an outside perspective might give me some ideas. I feel like I've tried everything."

Bobby looks around and can't quite help smiling a little. Littered on countertops are little shakers of dollar-store parm, tinned marinara, powdered garlic. Nothing that resembles the kinds of pasta that he's been trying to teach Buck to make in the station loft, but the kinds of ingredients that a tired, determined single mother would reach for when her baby's stomach started grumbling.

Buck tracks his gaze, and something a little embarrassed comes across his expression. "I know it's not the kind of stuff you usually cook, but..."

And Bobby thinks about late nights with two kids, eating leftovers out of pans, frozen dinosaur nuggets stacking in the freezer. He smiles, pulling out the apron he brought over. "I'm proud of you, kid," he says, watching confusion and delight alight on Buck's expression. "Cooking's not about following a recipe-- it's about making something for the people you care about, even if it means--"

"-- fake parmesan?"

Bobby laughs, nods. "Fake parmesan."

---

"Hey, Buck?"

Buck looks up, harried, feeling like a tornado has just whipped him around and dropped him from fifty feet in the air. "Yeah, superman?"

Chris wrinkles his nose a little, the way he always does now, at that nickname. Buck tries not to show in his expression 1) the deep heartbreak that comes whenever he remembers that Chris is no longer seven years old and will be a full adult soon, or 2) extreme and (reportedly) embarrassing fondness for every expression that Christopher has ever put on. He's pretty sure he's only about 70% successful on both.

"Can you..." Chris hesitates a little, which makes Buck bite back the urge to jump in and reassure him that there's literally nothing he could ask that Buck would refuse him. Except maybe if he wants to go back to Texas again.

(Okay, maybe even then, if he gave Buck a little bit of a cry break first.)

"Yeah?"

"Theo didn't want the dino nuggets," Chris says, which seems like a non-sequitur but doesn't feel like one.

Buck nods, because the statement is both true and also expresses the frankly dire state of their current household. Dino nuggets were his last bet. He's about five minutes from just chucking snickers bars at the toddler. Nougat was good for kids, right?

Chris sways in place a little, thinking, his hand braced on the wall beside him. "I thought..." he looks at Buck. "Maybe we can try making him, um, spaghetti for dinner?"

The breath rushes out of Buck's lungs. "Oh," he says.

Chris ducks his head down, looking a little embarrassed. "It worked for me," he says, like he needs to defend himself. "And I know that it's-- I know that it's because it's mom's recipe, but it's good, too, right?"

Buck nods, his heart expanding big and fluffy into every available space in his body. "It is," he agrees, remembering less the taste than the brilliant smile Chris gave after he'd tasted the result of Buck's weeks of experiments.

"So I thought--" Chris shuffles a little into the kitchen, and Buck wraps an arm around him instinctively. Chris, mercifully, lets him, leans into him, even. "Maybe you could teach me?"

Buck is not going to cry. He is going to be so normal and cool about this, about Chris coming and asking him to help him recreate his mom's spaghetti dish, so that he can share it with Theo. Buck feels normal amounts of feelings about this and can express them in normal ways--

"Buck, please don't cry."

"I'm not gonna," Buck maybe lies. He blinks rapidly, then swivels his head to the hangers at the door of the kitchen.

He grabs another apron, tugging it on Chris. It's a bit big, because it's one of Buck's spares, because Chris has been shooting up like a weed and also wants to hang out in the kitchen with his Buck less and less these days. Buck runs a hand through Christopher's curls after he ties the straps at the back, all fondness. "My favorite sous-chef," he says, warbling just a little.

"Don't let Jee hear that," Chris grins at him, rolling his eyes a little at Buck's emotionality.

"My tied favorite sous-chef," Buck corrects immediately. Then, turning to the fridge: "Okay, remember what we do first?"

"The mis-en-place," Chris says, with the tone of long familiarity. Buck beams at him, and begins to set out little shakers, plastic bottles, metal cans. Chris watches him, eyes assessing.

"That's not the kind of parmesan you use when we make pasta," he notes.

Buck shrugs. "Eddie said that it's what your mom used."

Chris looks at him, something that Buck can't quite place in his gaze. "We haven't had mom's spaghetti in years."

And, oh. Buck ducks his head a little. "I keep the stuff around," he admits. "Just in case you miss her."

He pretends not to catch the little wobble of Christopher's lips, before he nods determinedly. "Is that everything?" he asks, when Buck puts the can of marinara on the counter.

Buck winks at him. "Just one last thing, superman," he says. "The secret ingredient." he reaches into a cabinet, pulls out a half-empty condiment bottle.

Christopher blinks. "Ketchup?"

Buck laughs. "You will not believe the time it took to figure this one out," he says. He remembers, with an ache that'll never quite fade, a sunny afternoon, a loft kitchen, Bobby smiling at him as he holds the bottle out to a skeptical, young Buck.

"Kids like the sauce sweet," he'd said, eyes twinkling with his own aches, his own beloved, painful memories. "Try adding a bit-- it might just be your missing ingredient."

It was, of course, confirmed in Eddie's wide eyes later that day, Christopher's laugh. And Buck had bounced into Bobby's house the next day and watched him smile knowingly as he told him, feeling little-kid awe in his chest at Bobby's own brand of magic.

And now, as Buck lets Chris stir a little into his own sauce, he watches that little bit of magic, a little golden thread between Shannon and Bobby and the children they loved with all their hearts, pass on through Buck, through Christopher, to another little boy.