“Dad, please.” Christopher turned in the kitchen doorway to fix Eddie with a thousand-yard stare. “We can’t keep living like this.”

Eddie nudged past Chris to take in the horrifying sight of their kitchen: the stacks of filled Tupperware with color-coded lids, the foil-wrapped loaves, the pies on cooling racks. Eddie knew if he opened the fridge right now, it would be so overstuffed that something would immediately tumble out. He’d gotten so used to catching stray jars and trays that he just automatically put his hand out now every time he cracked the door.

And eeriest of all — somehow worse than the finding aid taped to the refrigerator door — was that everything else about the kitchen was utterly spotless. There were no dirty dishes in the sink. The stand mixer was put back in its cabinet. Even the drying rack was empty.

It was like standing inside the world’s most sterile gingerbread house. All it needed was Buck clad in an apron and witch’s hat to complete the picture. But Buck — much like his eggbeaters — was worryingly absent from the scene.

Buck had been living with Eddie and Christopher ever since they came back from El Paso, but you wouldn’t know it from how much they saw him these days. Eddie had no idea where Buck was spending all that time, except that it wasn’t here.

“You have to talk to him,” Chris insisted.

Eddie sighed.

Yeah. He really did.

***

In Eddie’s defense, Buck was being shockingly elusive for someone who was also managing to make most of their lunches and dinners. Eddie was genuinely concerned that Buck just wasn’t sleeping. He’d wake up in the mornings to find Buck gone and the fridge packed with some new meal that hadn’t been there the night before, accompanied by reheating instructions on Post-Its in Buck’s familiar, borderline-illegible scrawl (the less said about the time Christopher had misread “boil” as “broil” the better; the important thing was that Eddie had managed to shut off the fire alarm and clear the kitchen of smoke before he had to do the firefighter’s version of a walk of shame).

Eddie still saw Buck at work, of course, and he’d tried to corner him during downtime to talk, but every time Eddie started with a hesitant “hey, so about the rows of canapés on the counter this morning,” Buck would just turn his big blue eyes on him and say, “did I overdo the lemon? It’s okay, you can tell me the truth, Eddie,” with an air of Tiny Tim discussing his own impending death. And then his eyelashes would do this sad little flutter, and Eddie’s brain would turn staticky, and somehow what would come out of his mouth would be something like “the lemon was perfect; it was actually my favorite part.”

And then they’d have to go put out a fire, or rescue someone who’d gotten impaled while trying to pole vault over a fence, and the topic would have to be tabled.

***

And maybe if it had just been Buck and Eddie, they could have lived in that holding pattern forever. But as it happened, Christopher was much less willing to endure intolerable conditions than either Buck or Eddie. This was usually a fact that Eddie thanked God for every day, but in this particular instance, he wished Christopher could have found it within his heart to endure intolerable conditions for at least 1.5 more hours, because it was currently 6:02am on their day off and Eddie was being awoken by what sounded like an air horn coming from the kitchen.

He stumbled out of bed and into the hallway to find Christopher and Buck already locked in a silent standoff in front of the stove. Christopher’s curls were going in ten different directions and he had a pillow-crease on his cheek, so he’d clearly just woken up himself, but he seemed far more alert than either Eddie or Buck, who was hunched frozen over a pan like he’d just been caught slipping poison into their breakfast.

The air horn sound continued to blare.

“Why,” Eddie shouted over the noise as he made a beeline for the coffee maker.

Christopher, with the air of Benoit Blanc revealing a damning clue, lifted his phone and prodded at an app. The air horn thankfully went silent.

“Why?” Eddie tried again, quieter this time. The coffee was still percolating; Eddie couldn’t be expected to offer up multiple words on his *day off *before he’d even had coffee.

“No matter how early I set my alarm, Buck’s always out of the house when I get up,” Christopher explained. “So I set up a motion sensor.”

“You what!”

Okay, now Eddie was awake enough for multiple words. He looked frantically around their kitchen for whatever dystopian nightmare his son was responsible for crafting.

“Christopher, that’s…a huge violation of our privacy. And what if someone had gotten up to get a glass of water in the night?”

“Good,” Christopher said viciously. “Then we all could have gotten up to get water together.”

Which was Eddie’s second warning — after the literal alarm bells — that this conversation was about to go poorly.

“Okay, well, I was gonna make shakshuka,” Buck contributed, finally seeming to shake off his paralysis. His smile wobbled as he gestured to the pan he’d managed to pull out before he’d tripped Christopher’s sensors. “It’s still your favorite, right, Chris?”

“I do not,” Christopher intoned with a level of wounded dignity only achieved by wronged teenagers and cats who’d fallen off tables, “accept your shakshuka.”

“Uh!” interjected Eddie, now more alarmed but still too under-caffeinated to be fully useful.

“Oh.” Buck wilted in a sort of awkward, jolting way, like a time-lapse video of a dying bouquet. “Well, that’s fine. I can always do something else?”

“No thank you,” Christopher replied primly. “In fact, I am informing you both that I’m going on a hunger strike. Starting now.”

“Okay,” Buck tried, clearly struggling to keep up with the twists in this conversation. “But what about, like. Cereal? I think we have some Lucky Charms on the top shelf.” (They did. Eddie had hidden them up there and did not appreciate Buck throwing the location of his secret stash under the bus).

Christopher scowled. “No. No Lucky Charms, no shakshuka, *no *scones, no lasagna. I am invoking my First Amendment right to protest.”

Eddie snorted into his newly filled coffee mug, and then had to pretend it had gone down the wrong pipe when both Buck and Christopher turned to stare at him.

“You know I always want you to stand up for what you believe in, mijo,” he soothed, once he’d taken another gulp of life-saving caffeine. “But. Uh. I think we’re wondering about your manifesto. Your list of demands?”

To Christopher’s credit, he really did consider the question, before finally addressing Buck with painfully teenaged bluntness: “I get that you’re sad about Bobby, but if I have to eat another brownie, I’m going to lose my mind.”

Buck’s hesitant smile dropped into a hurt little ‘o.’ Eddie straightened from his vaguely amused slouch against the kitchen counter, appalled at Christopher’s lack of sympathy, his unkindness.

“Christopher, that’s—”

But Christopher wasn’t done: “You act like you’re doing all this stuff for us, but it’s all just…” And to Eddie’s shock, his face screwed up like he was trying not to cry. “…it’s not even what I want.”

Buck sucked in a breath like Christopher had punched him, and his own eyes filled with tears.

“Chris…” he started, reaching out, but Christopher shook his head in a sharp, quelling motion, dashed the tears from his eyes angrily, and darted out of the kitchen. Eddie heard his bedroom door slam a few seconds later.

Buck and Eddie were left to stare at each other in the ringing, awful silence that Christopher had left behind.

“What just happened,” Eddie said blankly.

“Uh, as far as I can tell? That was two for two on the Diaz boys calling me a selfish asshole for doing their chores.” Buck’s voice was wry, already hard at work transforming the deepest hurts of their argument — both of them, Christopher’s and Eddie’s — into something gentler. A shared joke with all its sharpest edges dulled down to a butterknife.

Eddie winced anyway.

At the time of their argument, Eddie couldn’t have been able to explain clearly why he was so angry at Buck. Even in the days after, he’d looked back at his words and actions during that fight in the same way you’d look back on the embarrassing actions of your drunk self: aware that you’d done something stupid, and willing to own up to it, but also vaguely incredulous that it had happened at all, unable after-the-fact to find any logic in the thought process that would lead someone to notice it was raining and conclude they needed to take off their own jeans to use as an umbrella.

…As just one hypothetical example that may or may not have happened to someone when they were seventeen.

At the time, Eddie had been filled to the brim with emotions that made no sense. They rose up as capriciously as a summer storm and vanished just as abruptly, leaving behind nothing but Eddie’s hollow determination to stay miserable in penance for acting on the rest of it. He’d assumed that his anger at Buck had been nothing but a symptom of this strange irrationality. He’d felt intensely guilty about feeling it, but he hadn’t considered the emotion itself to be relevant beyond wishing it would stop.

It was only now, faced with Christopher’s anger, that Eddie finally realized that maybe his own had mattered; that not addressing it had just made the situation worse. He was realizing that he might still be a little angry, actually, now that Christopher had shone Big Brother’s spotlight on the issue and literally forced Eddie to look at it.

“Okay, well! Guess I’ll do French toast instead!” Buck added, in such a painful facsimile of his usual overeager tone that Eddie felt genuinely insulted that he’d even tried it.

“Really?” Eddie found himself spitting out. “Christopher’s mounting Nanny Cams on the fridge to force a conversation with you, and we’re still not gonna have it? You’re just gonna make French toast like everything’s normal, like there’s not a literal steamer trunk full of scones under my kitchen table right now?”

…Alright, so maybe Eddie was more than a little angry.

“It’s an insulated food carrier, actually. And I got it at Home Depot, it’s not that weird.”

“Have you started running a catering business from my kitchen? Is that why you’re never home, because you’ve picked up a second job? Because that’s the only reason I can see for why a box the size of a wall safe would need to be filled with breakfast pastries!”

“Look, if you didn’t want French toast—”

Eddie threw his hands in the air — so he wouldn’t strangle Buck with them instead — and stomped out of the kitchen without another word.

***

Eddie went for a long run to cool off. He expected that when he came back, Buck would be gone again. To his surprise, he swung open the front door to find Buck on the sofa, staring up at him with big sad eyes while Love Island played on the TV on mute.

“You better not have gotten ahead of me,” Eddie said with a nod toward the TV, and Buck scrambled to pause it.

“I’ll rewatch with you,” he promised, and Eddie probably should not be as reassured as he was about the prospect of catching up on shitty reality TV with his best friend, but here they both were.

Eddie opened his mouth to respond, but Buck twitched and said, “I know we need to talk, but first: can you check on Christopher? I don’t think he was kidding about that hunger strike thing, man. He hasn’t come out of his room in hours, and it’s nearly lunch time.”

Eddie — who’d tensed in anticipation of whatever excuse for avoiding a conversation that Buck was about to throw at him — felt his whole body ease at Buck’s words. Of course he was sitting here on the couch obsessively worrying about Christopher.

Maybe things between them really would be okay.

“I’ll talk to him,” Eddie promised.

After Eddie had showered and changed, he knocked on Christopher’s bedroom door with a steaming bowl of some leftover mac and cheese in his hands.

“Christopher? It’s me.”

At Christopher’s muffled invitation, Eddie nudged open the bedroom door. Christopher was flopped on his bed, scrolling through his phone unhappily. He perked up when he saw the mac and cheese and then tried to pretend he hadn’t.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Eddie promised as he handed Christopher the bowl.

Christopher inhaled half the bowl before saying abruptly, through a full bite of noodles, “he’s not the same. As when I left.”

“Who, Buck?” Eddie asked, surprised. “I guess not. But I don’t think any of us are quite the same as we were last summer. Including you.”

“I know that,” Christopher grumbled and stuffed another bite of mac and cheese into his mouth sullenly. “I just…I don’t get why he’s baking weird-looking croissants instead of just talking to us.”

Eddie was struck, suddenly, by how young he looked here: eating what had been one of his favorite meals when he was 10, from one of the plasticine Avengers bowls that Eddie could never bear to throw away and still used mainly for TV snacks now, grappling with the knowledge that Buck wasn’t a universal constant — not some ageless, idyllic childhood best friend that Christopher could leave in stasis until he came back for him.

Eddie didn’t think Christopher had any illusions that Buck — any more than Eddie himself — was some perfect being. But when you grew up with someone, when you rarely spent any time apart, when you could feel safe with the assurance that their world revolved around you just as much as yours did around them, it was so easy to miss all the ways that you were changing, and they were changing, and your relationship was changing, until suddenly you were watching them wave in your rear-view mirror as you—

Wait.

Oh, fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Eddie could not be having this crisis while his son slurped up cheddar sauce two feet to his left. He forced himself to reel it back *at least *until he’d concluded this highly consequential Teachable Moment with his emotionally vulnerable child.

“We’ve all changed,” Eddie repeated, once he’d managed to get himself under control (thank God). “And especially when people die, it can shake us up. We might question the things we used to count on, or hide a little bit from the people around us. It might take us a minute to act like ourselves again, and some things might never go back to exactly what they used to be.”

Christopher looked stricken at that, eyes flickering down to his mac and cheese as he stuffed another spoonful into his mouth. Eddie waited until he was certain Christopher was looking directly into his eyes before continuing gently onto his next, most important point.

“Buck might be struggling right now, but the one thing I know he’s not struggling with? The way he feels about you.”

Christopher shrugged awkwardly and started to look away again, embarrassed. Eddie nudged at him, not willing to let him hide from this truth: “Christopher, that has never changed, not for a single day since you met. I think you could run away to Antarctica and stay there for a decade, and it wouldn’t matter. Buck would love you the exact same way, the whole time you were gone.”

The hypothetical made Christopher snort with reluctant laughter. “Why would I want to live in Antarctica for a decade?”

“Hey, I’m not recommending it,” Eddie retorted lightly, lifting his palms up in a gesture of self-defense. “In fact, I’d really rather you didn’t. I’d miss you too much. Even though I’m sure you’d see some cool animals there.”

“I guess I’d probably miss you too,” Christopher allowed generously. “So if Buck is hiding from us, how do we get him to stop?”

“That,” said Eddie on huge sigh, somewhat dreading the far more difficult conversation to come, “is an excellent question.” He ruffled Christopher’s hair and then laughed when Christopher squawked and ducked away from his hand. “Maybe we can try being honest about how we feel? Without stalking anyone or insulting their food? Sometimes, a good way to let people know they’re safe with you, is to trust them with your feelings first.”

Christopher scrunched up his nose. “I guess that makes sense,” he allowed. “But I don’t have to like it.”

Eddie laughed ruefully. “You and me both, kid.”

***

When Eddie emerged from Christopher’s room, Buck was no longer on the sofa. Eddie felt a flash of anxiety that Buck had left the house after all, once Eddie had come back to handle the Christopher situation. But Eddie walked into the kitchen to discover Buck with his back turned to the door, frantically consolidating Tupperware containers of baked goods. When he heard the creak of Eddie’s footsteps in the doorway, he whirled around, half an almond crescent cookie hanging out of his mouth like he’d been trying to eat as much of the damning evidence as he could.

“Okay, so before you say anything, I do acknowledge that the cannoli were a bridge too far,” he said through the cookie, crumbs spraying everywhere.

Eddie stared at Buck, face covered in powdered sugar, hands busy piling snickerdoodles into some sort of pyre in the center of the kitchen table. And he just couldn’t help it, he—

He started laughing.

The look of betrayal on Buck’s face only made Eddie laugh harder, and soon Buck was chuckling too, until both of them were sinking into kitchen chairs, howling with laughter. The heap of snickerdoodles slid pathetically to one side, which only made them laugh harder.

And then Buck’s breath hitched, and his laughter turned into more of a hiccup, until suddenly he was crying. Big, messy, unstoppable tears that seemed to startle him at first, but which — for Eddie — came as a relief.

He had barely seen Buck cry at all, before this moment. He’d seen Buck running errands; and flitting from person to person in anxious, repetitive cycles; and sniping at Eddie in their kitchen; and cooking and cooking and cooking like the food would fill all the spaces in the house that Buck should have been inhabiting and wasn’t — but Eddie hadn’t seen him cry.

Instinctively, Eddie reached out for Buck, but since they were both seated at the kitchen table, they ended up with Buck awkwardly knelt on the floor, his face buried in Eddie’s stomach, Eddie’s hands cradling Buck’s head as he hunched over him, whispering meaningless, soothing words against the crown of his head.

“Eddie, I can’t — I can’t—” Buck gasped into the fabric of Eddie’s sweatshirt, over and over again.

And Eddie understood every word that Buck couldn’t articulate, because he was feeling exactly the same way: I can’t stand this. I can’t handle the world without Bobby in it.

So told Buck what he himself had wanted to hear (maybe what he still wanted to hear): “I’m here, I’ve got you, you’re not alone, you don’t have to go through this alone.”

Gradually, Buck’s sobs tapered off, but Eddie didn’t force him to move until he lifted his head of his own accord. His face was red and puffy, smeared with tears and snot. He was undisputably just…*so *gross right now.

And Eddie’s lungs ached with how much he loved him. Snot and all.

“I haven’t been handling things well, have I,” Buck croaked, like that notion was coming as a genuine shock to him. Eddie snorted with gentle laughter as some longstanding dad instinct made him wipe at Buck’s damp face with the hem of his own sweatshirt. Oh well, it was a lost cause anyway.

“Eh,” Eddie tilted his head. “Could’ve been worse. At least you didn’t adopt another dog.”

Buck scowled at him, but Eddie could see the hint of a reluctant smile that tugged at the corners of his mouth, so he didn’t feel too bad about it.

A moment later, Buck sobered again: “I really thought I was. Dealing with it, I mean. Taking care of you both. Looking for a new place to crash so I wouldn’t—”

“So you could leave before you lost someone else,” Eddie guessed, and Buck made a small, wounded sound that confirmed Eddie was right.

“I mean, what the hell was I thinking? There are three quiches in the fridge right now. All different flavors! Eggs are so expensive, Eddie!”

“But you don’t even like quiche,” Eddie pointed out, bemused.

“I don’t even like quiche!” Buck cried. “And now you’re mad at me, and Christopher’s mad at me, and for what? Some caramelized onions?”

Buck was still knelt awkwardly on the floor in front of Eddie, where he’d landed when he’d started to cry. So Eddie took a minute to tug Buck to his feet and back into a kitchen chair while he thought about how to respond.

“Look,” he said finally. “I can’t put words in Christopher’s mouth. Obviously. Because never in a million years would I have landed on ‘invoking my First Amendment right to protest’ to convey that I was pissed at someone.”

Buck snorted, and the two of them shared a commiserating grin — a familiar acknowledgement that Christopher had always been smarter and sillier than the two of them combined. A constant source of joy, even when he was furious at them.

Eddie broke eye contact for this next part, fiddling with one of the snickerdoodles on the table until he’d rubbed it down to crumbs.

“But if I was pissed at someone, what I might say next was: I miss you. And it just…it sucks that I miss you more now, when we’re living in the same house, than I did in El Paso when I was 800 miles away. I don’t care if you’re sad, I don’t care if you’re not handling things well. I’m sad. *I’m *not handling things well. I just…”

Eddie shrugged. He knew what he wanted to say next; he just wasn’t sure if he should. But Buck nudged at his shoulder, his blue eyes steady and attentive, and it gave Eddie the push he needed to continue.

“As for what the hell you were thinking? I think you’re doing all this crap — all the cooking and the baking, and your daily disappearing act — because you can’t stand to be in your own head right now. And I think deep down, you know it’s not what you actually need, but if you convince yourself it’s what we need, then you’re allowed to do it. Am I close?”

Buck wrinkled his nose in annoyance, which Eddie took as confirmation that he was spot on.

“Okay, well, I’m telling you right now: that’s not what I need. What I need is you. Here—” Eddie gestured around at the kitchen they were sitting in, “—with us*.* And here—" Eddie gestured at the space between the two of them before tapping gently at Buck’s temple, “—with me.”

Buck laughed shakily. “That simple, huh?”

Eddie smiled and shook his head. “Not quite. Now that I’ve told you what I need, you get to tell me. Buck. Evan. What do you need?”

Buck’s lower lip wobbled, once, like the words were pressing for escape, before he grit his teeth and swallowed them back down.

“I can’t,” he gasped, repeating that same phrase from before. “You don’t understand what it’s like inside my head right now. It’s like…a black hole. I can feel it dragging at me, all the time, and if I stop — if I let myself fall in — I’m scared that I won’t be able to climb out. So I have to do it this way. I don’t have a choice.”

“I dunno, Buck. Sounds like all you need is someone on the outside to handle the winch. Someone you trust to pull you back up.”

At once, all of Buck’s resistance seemed to collapse — along with his body. He sprawled out on the table with a groan.

“I’m just…I’m so tired, Eddie. I don’t even feel sad. How fucked up is that? It’s like there’s nothing left.”

“Well someone did wake up the entire household at 6am this morning,” Eddie teased as he rubbed the tense muscles of Buck’s shoulder. “When’s the last time you actually slept?”

“Uh,” Buck said, his uncertainty an answer in-and-of-itself. “What day is it?”

“Yeah, we’re napping,” Eddie decided. “Come on.”

Since Eddie and Chris had returned, he and Buck had been trading nights in the bed. Even though there was only ever one of them using it at a time, they’d each naturally gravitated toward their own preferred half of the bed. Which was convenient now, since Eddie could lead Buck gently over to the left side, and it was already set up with his weirdly shaped Tempur-pedic pillow and the extra blanket he liked to burrow into at night.

Before Eddie could leave, Buck caught at his wrist and looked up at him with those tragically consumptive Tiny Tim eyes, and said, “Wait. Don’t—” before he seemed to feel too awkward to finish asking Eddie to stay. But since the right side of the bed was already set up with Eddie’s (normal) pillow and his tablet charging on the nightstand, it was the easiest thing in the world for him to climb in.

He propped himself up against the wall, perfectly angled for Buck to wedge his face against Eddie’s hip. Meanwhile, Eddie’s left hand floated down to stroke soothingly through Buck’s hair and ease the tension in the nape of his neck, leaving his right hand free to scroll through his favorite recipe blogs.

He had some meal-planning to do.

***

Buck was out for several hours — a heavy, motionless, deep sleep that meant he’d really needed the rest. Eddie messed around with his tablet for a little bit, then took a quick 20-minute nap just because he was too comfortable not too, and finally eased his way out from under Buck when it became clear that Buck wouldn’t be going anywhere for a while.

Christopher was already in the kitchen when Eddie walked in, reading a book and munching absently on one of the snickerdoodles from the now-much-depleted pile in the center of the kitchen table. He’d put his mac and cheese bowl in the sink, which was better than it could be (left in his bedroom for days) and worse than it was supposed to be (in the dishwasher), but Eddie supposed he could let it slide just this once.

“Hunger strike is concluded, then?” Eddie asked.

Christopher looked up and flashed Eddie a smile. “I would have come out sooner, but I heard crying so I didn’t.”

“Fair enough,” Eddie allowed, ruffling Christopher’s hair on his way to the fridge. He wanted to take stock of what was actually in there, behind Buck’s wall of grief-casseroles (Eddie had always thought that people were supposed to bring you those, rather than the other way around, but what did he know).

A while later, late enough that they were already approaching dinnertime, Buck stumbled out of the bedroom, looking flushed and dazed, but at least slightly better-rested than when he’d gone in.

Christopher had moved to watching TV on the couch, but Eddie was still in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the soup he’d been pulling together for dinner.

“Hungry?” he asked Buck, who was staring blankly at the pot on the stove like some internal process was glitching.

“Uh, not yet,” Buck said, once he’d regained the capacity for human speech. “Give me a few minutes to wake up, though.”

“Yeah?” Eddie tilted his head unsubtly toward Christopher on the couch. “Think you’re awake enough for this?”

“Two minutes,” Buck promised. He nudged Eddie to the side with his hip so he could grab a glass from the cabinet, filled it with cold water, and chugged it. When he came up for air, he did look moderately more conscious.

“Okay,” he exhaled, like he was psyching himself up for a complicated rope rescue. “Let’s do this.”

Eddie checked his soup once more, decided he could leave it on simmer for at least a few minutes, and followed Buck into the living room.

Christopher, who’d been doing a valiant job of pretending he hadn’t noticed Buck waking up, glanced up and paused his TV show once it became clear the conversation was unavoidable. And, apparently deciding it was best to rip off the Band-Aid, he jumped right into it:

“I’m sorry I yelled about your brownies, Buck. They’re actually pretty good. Also I’m sorry I used your Amazon account to order a motion detector. And then added a cool light-up mechanical keyboard to the order because I was mad. I can pay you back for it.”

“That’s okay, Chris,” Buck replied awkwardly.

Eddie could see — as clearly as if he’d been spiraling about it out loud — the panicked internal journey that Buck was going on: I would have bought him the keyboard if I’d known he wanted it —> did I just not notice that he’d wanted it? —> hold on, it’s not great that he bought it without asking —> but is it bad of me to just let it slide? —> those keyboards are expensive, I’m not gonna make the kid buy the whole thing —> crap how long have I just been sitting here…

“We’ll talk about the keyboard later, Chris,” Eddie interjected to rescue Buck from his suffering.

“R-right, yeah, and um. I’m sorry too, Christopher. I was trying to show you that I cared, with all the food I was making, but you were right: I wasn’t paying attention to what you actually needed.” Buck flashed Eddie a half-cheeky, half-self-deprecating smile at this echo of their earlier conversation. “I’m paying attention now. So, what do you need, Chris?”

Christopher’s eyes widened in alarm at the idea of honestly and vulnerably expressing his desires to an adult — the least cool thing a teenager could ever do. So Eddie was endlessly proud of his brave kid for taking a deep breath and saying: “I want you to take me to the zoo.”

Eddie blinked. Okay, not where he was expecting that one to go. At his side, Buck twitched subtly enough that Christopher probably didn’t catch it, but Eddie could tell that he was equally surprised.

A few years ago, the zoo had very much been Buck and Christopher’s thing, but as time had gone on, their zoo trips had naturally dwindled. The pandemic had shifted all their habits enough that, by the time the zoo had reopened, Buck and Christopher had found other things to do together. They’d gotten really into a shared Stardew Valley farm at one point, whereas Eddie hated farming simulators and was perfectly happy to leave them both to it (he’d never understood the appeal of playing video games about real jobs. If he’d wanted to be simultaneously bored and stressed out at the same time, he would have gone back to Dispatch).

In any event, Eddie didn’t think Christopher had even been to the zoo in the last several years, let alone sought it out deliberately.

“Uh, well, of course, Chris,” Buck said slowly. “I always love the zoo, you know that. But. Um. Why?”

Eddie and Christopher both shared an amused look; they’d teased Buck about his tendency for awkward bluntness enough times that it had become a running joke between the three of them.

“I know I’m not a little kid anymore, and I know we can’t, like, go back in time. But I haven’t been there in a while. So I kinda wanna see which animals are new, and which ones feel the same. You know what I mean?”

“Oh,” Buck said thickly. He cleared his throat and added: “Yeah, Christopher, I do. And I’d love to do that with you. You just say when.”

***

Eddie, Buck, and Christopher ate their soup on the couch (just this once, Eddie vowed, to which Christopher and Buck shared one of their own amused looks at the running joke of Eddie’s wavering commitment to the dining room table). They let Chris un-pause his TV show, and instead of forcing him to restart from the beginning, they let him cheerfully explain some incomprehensible context about a killer robot that loved TV but nobody knew it loved TV.

Maybe tomorrow, Eddie would tell Buck he loved him. Maybe Eddie would ask him to move in permanently and stay with them forever.

Maybe tonight, Eddie would coax Buck back into their bed and hold him together within the protective cage of his arms, a bulwark against any stray 3am urge to caramelize something,

Or maybe in an hour — after Christopher had retreated back to his bedroom to set up his contraband keyboard, and Buck and Eddie were cleaning up after dinner — Eddie would kiss him. Softly. To the steady rush of the kitchen sink filling with warm water.

But right now, what Eddie did was catch Buck’s eye over Christopher’s head and share a quiet smile. Buck’s expression was slightly less shadowed than it had been this morning, his eyes crinkled at the edges with uncomplicated happiness. And Eddie knew that he and Buck were thinking the exact same thing: they would have been just as happy doing anything that Christopher had suggested, simply for the sake of doing it together.