Still not done. For reasons. Wacky brian go brrrrr. Happy new season, peeps!
This Future We Choose
Part 3/???
Part 1 • Part 2
Buck knew this was going to bite him in the ass eventually. He just had hoped it would be a while longer until he’d have to face the consequences for his actions. He will blame his stupidly bruised ribs for it, but of course his research material had to slide out of his folder and sail to the ground, just as he was about to show his sister the seating table he’d prepared for the wedding.
And of course, Maddie instantly recognized what those papers were, picked them up before he could bend down himself, and gave him that look.
While everyone knows by now that him and Natalia are no longer a thing, this was the thing he’d meant to keep between himself and Eddie a while longer. But fortune continues to be anywhere but on his side.
So his time is up, as his sister’s stern look at him will tell him with utmost surety.
“What are these?” Maddie asks.
“Research?” Buck answers, tight-lipped.
“Why are you researching that?”
“Coz I wanted to?”
Maddie rolls her eyes at him. “Evan.”
“Well, what do you think?” he grumbles.
“So you… seriously consider adoption? Or fostering a child?” she asks, her tone shifting to something more serious and thus something Buck knows he will find impossible to escape from.
Buck can feel his jaw tensing up. “That’s what started it, yeah.”
It started out feeling great, actually. Buck felt the usual excitement he has bubbling up in his stomach when he finds a new field of interest and learns all about it. It felt like it was all coming together, like he was coming back together, like he was heading in all the right directions at long last.
But it doesn’t matter how you start the journey, it matters how you end it.
And Buck got the sinking feeling a while ago that this journey ended before it ever truly began.
“I had… no clue, to be honest. That this is something you were considering now. I mean, I always knew you wanted kids, but… this is much more concrete than just a general wish to want children further down the road,” Maddie mutters pensively, her eyes drifting back to the brochures.
Buck rolls his shoulders. “Well, I guess actually dying sheds some light on how short life is.”
Maddie shoots him a stern look yet again, the kind of look that makes him cringe the same way it did when he was still a kid. Buck knows he shouldn’t be joking about it as much as he still does, especially with Maddie present. But sometimes, he can’t help himself. Not because he thinks death is funny, that his death was. But, as of late, he starts to think that his death was indeed some kind of cosmic joke at his expenses.
So why shouldn’t I laugh it up, at least?
“A lot’s happened this year that made me look at what I really want in life,” Buck chooses to say instead. “And… and one thing I can say for sure is that I want to become a father.”
Maddie touches his forearm lightly. “That’s great. It really is. And I’m not… I’m just surprised, that’s all.”
“I get that. I was surprised, too,” Buck replies.
“But… why would you keep this from us, from me? This is great news!”
Buck makes a face. “Because it’s weird?”
Because it’s futile?
“You wanting kids is not weird at all. Honestly, I’m still surprised you don’t have one already. You always loved kids, so much. And you’re great with them. I mean, just look at Jee doting on you. And you sure came around a lot, so I wondered that you didn’t…,” Maddie says, her voice trailing off.
Buck nudges her lightly. “Hey, I got the talk early on in my life. And I was taught very emphatically to always use protection, always.”
“Don’t remind me,” she grunts. “Because I was the one who had to give the talk to you.”
“I appreciated the diagrams and the flash cards. Has me very sure you’re gonna put out the greatest PowerPoint presentation ever for Jee, once it’s time to talk about the birds and the bees,” Buck laughs.
“So, there’s nothing weird at all about you wanting kids. I find it weird that you’ve been keeping this to yourself for so long, though. I mean, judging by the dates on some of the printouts, you’ve been doing research for a few weeks, at least,” Maddie says, gesturing at the apparent evidence of his own failures.
“Well, once it dawned on me that this is what I wanted, I guess I just wanted to get a better understanding of what’s involved in the process before announcing my intentions,” Buck explains. Which is true enough. He figured that research would make it less scary, less daunting. While Buck is considered to be somewhat the “daredevil” on the job, he can’t say the same is true when it comes to those private matters. That’s why he actually went through the hassle to print things out, to have physical proof, to make this just a bit more real.
But in the end, none of it worked.
In the end, it’s all just fantasy and make-believe.
“But why not talk to me?” He can hear the pain there, which Buck probably should have anticipated.
“I wasn’t trying to keep this from you,” he tells her in all earnest. Sure, Buck didn’t want to talk about it, but he didn’t want to leave Maddie out of the picture in particular.
I just wanted to have something to show for it. And look at me now, winding up empty-handed yet again.
“But you did not want to tell me, even though you’re sure that this is what you want,” she argues. “I just want to understand why.”
“I… I don’t know. I felt like I needed more information before saying anything, to anyone. I just started out with the premise that I wanted to be a father, really. But how? That was a big question mark for me. It still is. So I figured that I’d want to know what to announce at least, like… I wanna foster, I wanna adopt…”
She shakes her head slowly. “That’s not why you wouldn’t say anything, though.”
And of course she is right, of course Maddie sees through it. She’s been trained at reading him since they were children. Maddie raised him, so she sees the things that Buck is always busy to hide. And while it still saddens him that his big sister had to shoulder that responsibility, Buck knows that she will keep watching out for him the same way he looks out for her.
Us against the rest of the world, right?
“If you know the answer already, then why do you keep asking?” Buck doesn’t meet her gaze, he can’t.
“Because I’d rather hear it from you,” Maddie answers.
He sighs. “Honestly? I feel like it’s a good thing I didn’t announce anything, because I feel like this isn’t going anywhere.”
Maddie blinks at him. “So you don’t want to… be a father anymore?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then why doesn’t it go anywhere?” She frowns.
Buck did, too, frown a lot, at himself. He frowned at the reflection in the bathroom mirror, his faint outline on the computer screen. He frowned at his own thoughts, and his own feelings. Because they didn’t make sense anymore. Whatever he thought he had figured out about himself, it did not fit together. Like he found some puzzle pieces, but they come from different sets.
“Because the more I look at those brochures and papers, the more I realize that this isn’t… that’s not me,” Buck admits.
“Well, there’s other options.”
“I know.”
He researched, he looked, he tried to find something different. Only to come back to the same spot over and over again. To be stuck, all over again.
Because fortune is not my friend. Because I seemingly have to keep living in waiting mode.
“But?”
“But I don’t want any of those options,” Buck says.
“So you want to be a father… but you don’t want to go for any of the options that’d make you a father?” Maddie asks, looking rightfully confused.
And if you put it like that, it really makes absolutely no sense at all. Which seems oddly fitting. Because Buck has a tendency to want the things he knows for a fact he can’t have. His parents’ love, for who he is, and not just for who he can be to other people. The feeling of being enough, of no longer needing any software updates. A world where he’s enough to protect the people he loves from all harm there is.
And someone to love me anyway.
“I didn’t pretend like this was making any sense, so I won’t start now,” Buck grumbles. He fixes his gaze on Maddie, looking at her with pleading eyes. “Can we just pretend like this never happened?”
He is really good at that, for better or worse.
“No,” is the definitive answer from his big sister, which he knew would come.
“Pretty please with sprinkles on top?” he bargains anyway.
“Evan.”
Buck knows that when Maddie uses that tone of voice when saying his name, there is really no escape anymore. Because Maddie is one of the few people who can actually speak to Evan. The vulnerable kid who only ever cried wolf to be loved by the people who refused to see him. The kid that was willing to bleed out for just one concerned look from his mother and father.
Buck keeps Evan deep inside his chest, for precisely that reason. Because he is that fragile, that broken, inside and out. Buck is stronger than that. He has grown. He has matured. He built up enough scar tissue and callouses. His bones broke often enough, and grew together strong, so he can catch himself if he falls. And he found other people to look at him a different way, to help him back to his feet.
Perhaps foolishly, Buck still tries to protect Evan as much as he can from the outside world. Because Evan doesn’t know how to seem fine. Evan only knows how to get hurt to be seen. Evan knows how to bleed, but not how to stop the bleeding. Buck knows how to become good at bearing the pain without anyone seeing. So not to become a burden.
But he knows he can’t fool Maddie. Because she knows Evan as well as Buck. She loves them both. And she will always manage to lure Evan out of the box deep inside Buck’s chest, the way she’s always managed since they were kids. But once he is outside, Buck knows he can’t shield him, and he can’t keep him from showing all the places he aches that’d Maddie mean to kiss better.
“You want to be a father, but you don’t want to go with any of the options that might make that wish come true,” Maddie tells him. “And you can’t even look me in the eye, saying it. Why?”
Buck’s eyes drift back to the brochures and printouts still on the floor, the ones in her hand, and he can feel his chest tighten to the point that it gets hard to breathe. And it’s not because of the bruised ribs. It’s because Evan long since crawled his way out, begging to be loved anyway. And Buck can’t tell him to go back and keep waiting.
Because the time won’t come.
Because the more he looks at those brochures, the more he is reminded of the reason why he can’t get there after all. Why his hopes are yet again in vain.
“Because the more research I do, the more I realize that I don’t want any of that. Not like this, at least,” he admits at last.
It’s no use anyway.
And he can bear that pain. He will have to, for Evan and himself.
“I… still don’t understand what you mean by that,” Maddie answers faintly.
“I don’t either! I thought I finally figured it out. The great epiphany! That I wanna be a father, more than anything. And that’s still true. It’s so damn true it hurts. I want to be a father, so bad. I want a child that’s mine and that I don’t have to give to anyone else.”
Tears sting in Buck’s eyes, though that’s just about the smallest pain he feels. Even his stupid ribs don’t hurt as much as this. And it just isn’t fair. To finally know what you want, only to realize that you can’t have that. Because being aimless is one thing, but knowing you won’t ever come to the shores you call home? That’s damn well a curse.
Maddie moves into his line of vision. She places a warm hand on his back, extends her other hand to squeeze his forearm.
“Hey, hey. It’s alright,” she soothes.
“It’s actually not.”
It hasn’t been in a long time, but the fool he is, he failed to see it. Because he wanted to seem fine, because he wanted to be fine again. For everyone else and himself. So Evan would remain where he put him, protected, so Buck could get back to his feet and find a way to move forward again. To maybe find a life where Evan could come out and not bleed out from a lack of love.
“Why not? I can only repeat it, there’s plenty of options to fulfill your dream,” Maddie tries to reassure him.
“There really isn’t. And that’s what makes this so damn stupid.” Tears now roll freely down his cheeks. Buck wipes at them angrily, relishes the small burn that comes with rubbing skin against skin.
“Why?”
“Because I know I want to be a father, but I… I want to be a father to a child I know I can’t be a father to,” Buck whimpers, almost choking on those truths that should have no business burning so much down his throat.
“You mean Connor’s and Kameron’s…,” Maddie mutters, but Buck interjects rather harshly, “No.”
Oh, and how he wished that was true. Because that would be easy. Anyone would understand, everyone assumes anyway. Buck wished it was that easy, but this situation only made him realize what he wanted, and just like he had to give over that child, he had to realize that he couldn’t ever get to where he wants to be.
“What child, then, if not their son?”
“Eddie’s son. Christopher.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
Biggest fuckin’ joke of my life.
“Christopher.”
“Yeah,” Buck croaks.
Christopher, always Christopher. In every brochure, every stock image, he saw that little guy with his dorky smile and glasses, heard his giggling, felt the way only that little guy could hug him. The boy he thought he had to give up on, knows he has to learn to let go, to be what he wants to be: A father.
Buck swallows thickly. “You know, I’ve tried to put some distance between us, lately. Between Eddie, Chris, and I. To, to figure this father thing out. Because I felt like I was… like I was using them, to have the second-best thing to being a father. But I… I miss them so damn much.”
Maddie keeps rubbing circles on his back, just as she’d done when they were both still kids and he could not be consoled after their parents looked right through him yet again.
“I… I keep seeing Christopher every time I turn the page in one of those stupid brochures. I don’t just want to have a kid that’s mine. I want that one specific kid to be mine. Even though I know he ain’t, even though I know he won’t ever be,” Buck cries, no longer able to hold it in, to contain it.
The love he can’t express, he pours it right out, like bad blood, but it just keeps on coming and coming and coming.
He might be what Eddie would want for his son, should something happen to him, but Buck isn’t that outside that scenario. So long there’s Eddie, and God knows he will make sure of it, he won’t be that for Christopher. He can’t be that for Christopher.
In the end, always the backup plan, isn’t it?
“Christopher loves you,” Maddie argues.
“But not as his dad, never as that. Because I’m not his father. Even in the event that something should happen to Eddie, and I’d take care of him… he wouldn’t be mine, not really. Inside my heart, yes, but… never outside it.”
Bobby once told Chimney that having a child is like having a heart outside of yourself. But Buck know he can’t have that, that he won’t ever get there. He can only treasure that child inside his heart, so no one can see just how much he loves that kid. Because the love he feels for him, he knows he is not entitled to.
I won’t ever be enough to them to be entitled to it. Because that isn’t my place. Not really. More than a guest, but only ever temporary. Never forever.
“Eddie would let me, that’s not the thing. But… but I can’t go on pretending, in my heart, that… that we are a family, in that sense,” Buck whimpers.
“Eddie considers you family.”
“Yeah, but not in the way I’d want him to consider me.”
Which is the icing on top of that shit sundae.
“What?”
“Forget it,” Buck replies quickly.
Because he doesn’t know how much more he can take. Because everything hurts, hurts more than his stupid ribs, more than his stinging eyes, or his inflamed cheeks. And Buck doesn’t want any more pain. He doesn’t want any more pain for Evan who is outside his little box right now, for that part of him to come to the realization that there is yet another thing they failed at.
“No, tell me, please,” Maddie begs. “I want to help.”
“I just know that this is nothing you can help me with,” Buck whispers. “Even though you’re my big sister and I grew up thinking you’re my personal superhero. But this… you can’t fix. And I think I can’t either.”
Maddie takes a deep breath, considers his words, then searches his eyes again. “Alright, then maybe I can’t fix this. But I… I know for a fact that not talking about things that hurt us, scare us, terrify us… those darkest spots in our lives… that’s even worse. And I won’t have my little brother repeat the mistakes I’ve made.”
“You didn’t…”
“It doesn’t matter,” she interjects sternly. “What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want you to keep pretending like all is fine. Like you have to keep something from me, or anyone else. You can always tell me these things. Always. Even if you may actually want to say them to someone else, you can always say them to me first. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I can listen. And I always will, Evan. But I need to hear it from you.”
Buck looks at his sister for a long moment. He thinks about how far she’s come, how much she’s overcome. And how glad he is that she finally gets some of the pay off for the years of sacrifice. In the end, Maddie is still his personal superhero, not because she is invincible, but because she wears her scars and comes out stronger every time. Because like him, she never gives up, or even if she almost did, she fought her way back.
He takes a deep breath, then another. Maddie is right, he should say those things to someone else. But the person he’d normally go to for this? He can’t say. Buck screws his eyes shut, trying to forget all that, if only for a moment.
“Losing something can sure make you realize how much you loved it, even if you knew you loved it all along. I remember reading that, when I was still recuperating after the lightning strike.”
Buck read a lot, while at the hospital. Not just self-help books. When he stumbled over that quote, he had some sense of how that rang true for him. He just couldn’t put his finger on it, not really. Then his life took one sharp turn after the other, with Kameron and Connor and the baby, with Natalia.
The book fell back into his hands when she got the last of her things. And when he flipped to that page, it felt like lighting was striking through him again. Because he was right back in his coma dream, and it was glaring at him, laughing at him.
Who wasn’t there? Who was the one person who’s so close to you you didn’t see? Who, hm?
“I’m not following,” Maddie mutters, blinking at him.
“The more distance I put myself between myself and Eddie and Christopher, the more I realized just how alone I feel when I don’t have them near me,” Buck says.
“As I said, they love you, too.”
“And I love them, God, I love them. But I can’t love them like I wanna love them. And that fuckin’ hurts.”
Buck loved before. He knows what heartbreak feels like. But he never loved like this, and at some point, he wished he never found out that he could love like this. Because it’s a kind of love that burns even worse than the one he still feels for his parents. Even though they can’t love him back. Even though they made him walk through fire every day of his life. Because it’s the kind of fire he will keep walking into, against better judgment. Because he could learn to live without his parents, but he can’t learn to be without them.
“I can’t love Christopher like a father. And I can’t love Eddie like a partner. I can’t love them as my family I go home to every single night. I can’t love them like I do, and it sucks, and it hurts, and I just want it to stop.”
“P, partner?” Maddie stammers, still taking that in.
“Yeah, that’s about the face I made when it dawned on me,” Buck huffs bitterly. “I mean, in true Buck fashion, I kept missing all the signs. It’s always been there, and I… not even all of those epiphanies I feel I had in my coma dream prepared me for that one. Eddie wasn’t in it, in that dream, not really. Though that’s probably the great message, and I waltzed right past it.”
That his heart wasn’t in it, literally. That his heart wasn’t in that supposedly perfect life. The man who let him into his own, wasn’t there. The man who’d given his heart over to him, telling him that he is not expendable. The world that was without Eddie was the one without Christopher. And that world may have had his parents loving him in it, may have had Daniel alive, but it didn’t have them. And how can such a world ever be any good?
Buck has been wrecking his brain about it. Ever since he broke up with Natalia, he felt like he was finally gaining perspective. Only for the light to switch and put Eddie and Christopher in the spotlight. At first, he liked to think that they were simply his measure to go by. Because Buck wants to be a dad like Eddie, loving, caring, kind. And he wants a kid just like Christopher. So that seemed straightforward enough. Until it became even more twisted. Because the harder he looked, the more he realized they weren’t just the model Buck was going by, they were it. Both of them. Not just Christopher. But Eddie.
Always Eddie.
Buck can’t say he thought about Eddie as someone he wanted to be with, romantically. Sure, an attractive guy, always. Someone Buck could unashamedly say he learned to love dearly. But he can’t say he longed for him the way he is doing it now. Or rather, he now sees all of those signs he missed, all the chances he missed. The things he didn’t see, because he looked at Eddie through the lens of friendship, of what it was, and not what it could be. Because Buck didn’t even dare to think outside that box. Despite his bravado, he was not brave enough. He liked not being a guest in Eddie’s house. And he was fine with that, just that.
I never thought I could be more than that.
But Buck grew, and he’s coming to terms with it that he gets to want more, be more. He took a step back and saw more than he used to. But once you start to think outside the box, you can’t go back to its confined space. You can’t go back to only just. Once you open your heart to wanting more, it won’t be satisfied with the lesser.
How can I be enough, if I am not enough to have them?
So now, he’s left with longing and missing again. He wants the things he can’t have. And Buck won’t jeopardize the happiness either Eddie or Christopher or Marisol have found together. He won’t be that person. He can’t sink that low. Even if that means he is back to greedily stuffing the crumbs of life with Eddie and Christopher into his mouth, like a guy who’s been left out in the desert for weeks without a single thing to eat.
So maybe he’s good enough for Eddie and Christopher, to be a part of their family. But he won’t be that part of the family. Maybe Marisol will fill that seat. Maybe it’s going to be someone who’s not even in Eddie’s life yet. But no matter what, this person won’t be him.
So what is he even doing, researching ways to have a child, to be a father? How could it be fair to that child? When, in the back of his head, he’d always wind a string around the mere image of Eddie and Christopher as part of the family he might build?
“I’m still wrapping my head around you being into guys. But then again, I never tried too hard to look at that as your sister,” Maddie says, shaking her head wide-eyed.
“I never dated guys, I just got down dirty with them.” Buck shrugs.
He never made it a secret, but he didn’t make it explicit either.
Except for when I told them about my track record in dating yoga instructors. Because those definitely weren’t all ladies…
Buck never had a serious relationship with guys. He just fooled around with them. And especially in the beginning, it may well be that he liked things a bit too rough. Which should show that he belonged in therapy since a young age, because no, that was surely not healthy at all.
“Yeah, no, I don’t need to know that. At all. Ever.” Maddie screws her eyes shut.
“I figured.”
Buck never cared for a label to put on that, he still doesn’t. Had anyone asked him back in the day, he would have said that he’s simply not picky. Today he can safely say that he is extremely picky, to the point that he reduced his entire happiness to two people, to the point that he can’t look at anyone else the way he looks at Eddie these days.
“Alright, I’m… I’m sorry, that caught me off-guard a bit. But… but in all seriousness now, yes?” Maddie goes on to say.
He blinks at her. “Yeah?”
“There’s nothing wrong with realizing that you love people, or that you’ve fallen in love with someone, even if it’s your best friend,” she tells him.
“But there’s something wrong with wanting to say it, to make them love you back in kind, when you know you really shouldn’t,” Buck argues. “Even if it’s your best friend.”
Or precisely because he is.
“We all just want to be loved in the end. And I know for a fact that you love big. But it’s not wrong to want to be loved back in kind,” Maddie points out.
“It’s wrong to want that, knowing where Eddie stands in life right now. Knowing…” He doesn’t have to finish for Maddie to understand where he is going with this.
“People break up, you know,” she offers, which only ever has him snort. “Like I’m going to hinge my hopes on him breaking up with Marisol.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“The problem is that Eddie loves me, but only as a friend. And even if he broke up with Marisol tomorrow… he won’t ever look at me any other way than that. And I can’t unsee what I’ve seen. I can’t look at him any other way than… this. And… and I feel like I’m losing them because of that. Because if I keep getting too close, I will… I will fuck it up, I know I will. Because I wear my emotions on my sleeve and I… this will come out eventually. And I will make a mess of everything. And I… I can’t do that.”
Fresh tears well up in his eyes.
Sure, he wants more. Sure, he wants to feel like he is enough. He tries to get there. But he knows he can’t have Eddie and Christopher, no matter how hard he tries. Not like this, at least. Because this is not about his worth or lack thereof. It’s just now how they see him. But what he can afford even less than this pain is the thought to lose the ways he has them.
He’d rather be less to them than nothing at all.
“But I also can’t keep away from them,” he continues, almost choking on the words. “I just… I don’t know what to do. I just know it hurts, no matter what I do. And I want it to stop, but it just doesn’t.”
Maddie pulls him into a hug, trying to cover up as much of him as she can, despite their difference in size. Buck sinks against her, tries to soak up her warmth to cast out the cold dread of being back where he began, only to remain stuck there.
Because there is no longer a world for him he can escape to, where he isn’t in love with Eddie, where he doesn’t want Christopher to be his son, where he doesn’t want them to be his family. It vanished, slipped through his fingertips.
“Oh, Evan.”
Buck used to think that Maddie’s hugs would always heal him. He still wants to believe that, but he can’t trust it. Because Evan is out there, and he looks back at him, begging to know why they can’t be loved anyway.
And Buck has no answer to that.
And he fears he never will.
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