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prologue
“i want, and i want, and i want”
Buck sat in the bathtub for hours.
He watched the sun hide itself away and he saw the moon replace it, glowing. He watched the drowsy yellow and muted red drip down the canvas until it turned to a pitch black, sewn in lit up dots spread throughout. He watched until sitting up started to make the muscles of his shoulders ache, and the porcelain lip of the tub started an unpleasant twinge in his neck.
He sunk down, down, down. Until the back of his head was against the bottom, and his legs were squished in uncomfortably side by side. He kept his feet in place, worrying he’d accidentally turn on the faucet and damp his clothes.
He was surrounded by the border of the cold and clean white, his arms strewn over his stomach. He looked up to the ceiling and counted the tiles there, the cracks within them. He listened to the air turn on, turn off, turn on, a repetitive sound and feeling of cool air on his skin that made his hair raise.
In a tornado, this is where you go. You gather yourself together, and through the panic, you’re meant to head to the bathroom and get into the tub. It’s the safest place to be. Buck read an article about a man who hid here, in his bathtub during a tornado, and he was thrown miles away from his house, and he survived. Not a scratch on him. His death that he thought would come was taken from him. The end was not the end. The world was still turning. There was an inch of more chaos in it, but it still existed.
Buck read that before he died. His first perspective on the article was, Lucky guy. He thought of what a miracle it was. He had the same idea everyone else did.
But when lightning hits him, and it strikes him down, and he dies, he reads it again. And he wonders if the guy feels so lucky. If he isn’t torn to shreds by his control being lost, being thrown around by the force of the Earth, getting told straight out that was it, that he was a goner, just to live.
All that trouble. All that shock. All that trauma. All that—for nothing.
If death does not even amount to death, then where, within the universe, is something promised of this life?
Buck stares at the ceiling and counts the seconds. He breathes as deeply as he can. He holds himself in his own arms. He can never get warm enough in this loft. Even when he’s in Eddie’s sweatshirt and it’s ninety-eight degrees outside.
He’s still cold.
He wants to reach for his phone when it rings, wants to get up, wants to eat something, wants to go to the bed instead of laying in the bathtub, but he can’t. It feels a useless effort. This is borrowed time, a clock ticking past twelve, onto 13 o’clock. Nothing he does in this time holds weight, or matters. The only trusted thing he knew would happen to him—it didn’t follow through.
He’s still here. The world still turns. But now, he feels slightly less okay with that.
—
The sun wakes him up, not an alarm or a knock at the door. It blinds him no matter how he turns his head, doesn’t want him to sit in the bathtub anymore. The phone wants him to answer, the clock wants him to get dressed for work, the days want him to earn money, the month wants him to pay his rent, and the year wants him to survive. It’s too many demands too early, and so he doesn’t try and do any of them.
Eventually, Buck sits up. His muscles complain the whole lift up, and he winces. He only reaches far enough to answer the phone that’s been ringing all day, heard everytime Buck wakes from being half-asleep, drifting.
“Hey,” the voice says, sounding more accusatory than a greeting. “Not answering our phones now?”
Buck closes his eyes and falls back into the tub. “I was sleeping. Sorry.”
The phone crackles. Buck hears a car door slam. “I thought you were on shift.”
Slowly, he puts his watch in front of his face, and blinks. “Oh,” he says. “Yeah.”
He watches the time move on. Isn’t it funny, a privilege, that humans can see that? Time passing? Instead of being left in limbo, there it is. Keeping you grounded.
“You didn’t go in,” Eddie says, distracted. Driving while talking. He isn’t good at that.
“I guess not.”
“Well,” he sighs. Buck hears the blinker. “Should I call Bobby?”
“Why?” Buck covers his eyes with his hands. “You don’t work there anymore.”
Eddie doesn’t answer for a while. Either because he’s driving, or because he’s embarrassed.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t place a phone call, Buck.”
“Aware,” Buck says. “You’ve called me 19 times today.”
“That’s because you weren’t answering,” he replies. “You always answer.”
The cracks of the ceiling stare down at him. They could fall. “Did you need something?”
“What?”
“Why did you call, Eddie?” He asks, a little meaner than he wants to.
“We always talk in the mornings,” he says, soft. “Or do you not want to anymore?”
Buck covers his eyes with one hand, frustrated. “What I want—why does that matter?”
Deeply, Eddie asks, “What?”
Buck crosses his legs, sitting upright in the tub. He keeps his head supported by his hand, the phone in his lap. The tears burn at his water lines. “It’s not like I can ask for what I want. And I don’t—want to. I want you to stay there, heal things with Chris.”
“I know you do,” Eddie whispers into the phone. Must’ve stopped the car. Buck can hear him close now, the rhythm of his breath. “What do you want, Buck?”
He sobs into his hand. Bites it to not let out any noise. He sniffles, looks up at the ceiling. “I just had a shitty day,” he gasps. He rocks, back and forth, slow. “I’m just not feeling good. That’s all.”
Eddie sighs, gingerly asks, “What happened, honey?”
“Nothing, I just—“ he shakes his head. “Everything is—it’s . . . unraveling, Eddie. Inside me. I feel like I’m suffocating. Like I’m being tortured. I’m scared of—scared of my own brain, what-what I could do to myself. I can’t be here alone anymore. I can’t. I need you to come home, please. Please? Just—please?”
If things were easier, Buck would’ve said that—what he wanted to. Instead, he says, “I just miss you. So much. ”
“I know, love,” he said. Buck pressed the phone as close as he could to his ear. “I miss you too. I’m gonna come back, okay? Soon.”
Trying not to sound so desperate, Buck slowly asked, “W-when? When is soon ?”
“A couple of weeks.”
Weeks. Buck shook his head. “Okay. Weeks. Yeah.”
“Unless—“
“No,” he quickly said. “You-you do what you need to. I’ll just see you in a couple weeks, then. It’s okay.”
It took all of him to not fully cry. To keep his voice level.
“Buck,” Eddie whispered. Of course he knew. He reveals it, in the saddness of the one word, how much he fucking knows.
“Don’t,” he said. “Just—don’t.”
The other line was deafeningly silent for too long. Then, “If you ask me, I’ll come.”
“That’s why I can’t,” Buck whispered to him. And so they came to a standstill.
Buck hung up the phone.
section one
death
“my orion”
The truth is, Buck thought he was past it.
He went on from death into life with a beating heart and warmth throughout his body and his smile came back and, slowly but surely, he could laugh and joke again.
The fact of it was, it took three minutes and seventeen seconds for his heart to begin beating again, but it took a couple weeks to feel alive once more.
There was this unspoken rule of chronic pain—the aches of limbs and bones could only be complained about once, two times, before your local able-bodied friend got sick of it. It’s meant to go like this— shit, hey, I think I have chronic pain. My body really fucking hurts. And then you get the preachings of, sorry to hear that, if I can help, let me know.
Everyone gets so supportive at the start of things. Especially counting in the reason for Buck’s chronic pain was a firetruck on his leg and lightning striking down his shoulder through his body out of his leg.
But, eventually, you’re supposed to be done. Done talking about it everyday. Done making people worry. The problem is meant to be fixed externally so the people around you aren’t brought down by your pain. Like the uncontrolled feeling of stiffness in Buck’s shoulder or the sting in his calf was something he turned off and on.
It’s a lot of things, to continue on about it—selfish, self-centered, gloomy, depressing, annoying, exhausting, mood-ruining, and at the very height of it, boring.
Yeah, you’re hurting. What else is new? It’s the look his doctors give him six months, eight, a year later, two, six. Who cares anymore? Get over it.
Because you’re meant to build your pain tolerance. You’re meant to manage it. You are meant to learn so you don’t make the people around you uncomfortable.
You’re not supposed to be like Buck.
You’re not supposed to die, gain more pain, and start the process over again of My Body Fucking Hurts And I’m Here To Make It Everyone Else’s Problem Until Everyone Gets Back To Not Caring And Forgets.
Death isn’t the final nail in the coffin. Not when you come back to life. It opens up a thousand more doors. Like you’re reborn. So fucking noble, Buck is, for going back to work, for fighting the good fight. He gets called a hero a lot, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to him—he was only climbing a ladder. It’s not as if he was going up to the sky to defeat the very action of lighting. It wasn’t a fight. It was a one-sided battle that Buck did not agree to.
It was chance.
It was death.
It was getting resuscitated and opening his eyes again to color and shapes and noise and smells and it was the fucking world again, there, at his feet, like it used to be.
Living after death is a lot like chronic pain. You might think it isn’t, because if you die and live to tell the tale, why wouldn’t you drone on about it everyday? But people have lives. They have other stories to hear, other places to go, other things to worry about, and your story no longer interests them, it returns to you.
It’s only a couple weeks before things get back to normal, and no one asks Buck how he’s feeling. Not related to that, at least.
Move on. Buck wishes he could’ve, as everyone was. But there was pain that remained. There was fear of rainy nights. There were nightmares in his head. There was a scar on his chest.
There was still death, and it was rotting him from the inside like a slow poison.
It makes him think of Eddie.
Not in the way that Eddie is death. He’s the furthest thing from it, really. But it makes him wonder how he got on after getting shot and he never showed fear over walking the street again and didn’t flinch at the sight of firearms holstered on every LAPD officers’ side.
Fear is—matter. It can be created, but it’s never truly destroyed. It’s gotta be somewhere in there, lurking in Eddie’s heart.
Where the fuck is it, and why does Buck want to see it so much? More to that, why does he want to see everything else?
Maybe it’s because of the pet names. Yes, that’s the logical answer—it’s those damned terms of endearment that start coming out after the lightning strike, like Eddie saw all this shit piling on him and decided he needed little breathers in between the hell of his mental state.
It only lasted so long that Buck could hide how he was feeling from him. It all came rushing out a couple weeks after the fateful day, where Buck was over at his house. He just—broke. He couldn’t contain it anymore. He cried till he was emptied out. They were outside because Buck did not want Chris to hear. They were lying on the grass and it felt ridiculous, to be crying his eyes out, while Eddie pointed constellations out to him.
He didn’t care about constellations, he felt like he embodied death. He was as deserving as the ground was of shoes stomping on it. But damn, Eddie just kept telling him where the beauty was in the world. Lied close to him so he could accurately point out the shapes the stars made.
Buck’s tears got onto his shirt, and Eddie didn’t care. He said something like, “That’s Cepheus, do you see? Huh, honey?”
He had so much hope in his eyes. Like if the stars twinkling and the sweet nickname of ‘honey’ could not save Buck’s soul then he was at a loss.
Buck didn’t respond, so he pointed in another direction. “Look there then,” he said. “It’s bigger. That’s Ursa Major. What do you think?”
He darted his eyes over the sky, drowsy from crying, barely left with energy to speak. But he saw the constellation of stars, there, above him, set into the sky. Eddie bumped his shoulder with his, and Buck hummed. “I see it. It’s beautiful.”
Draco, Lynx, Cassiopeia, Orion, he showed him. The boundaries of the trees and the house stopped them from seeing more. Even after Eddie had told Buck as much as he could and tried to tell him all the stories he knew behind them, they stayed lying on the grass.
“Orion,” Eddie whispered, “I think it’s like you.”
“How come?” Buck whispered back.
“For one, you can find it in the sky no matter where you are. And I think—you would find me. No matter where I was, even if I were lost. For another, it represents strength, and there’s a lot of that in you, too.”
How sickly sweet he was that night to him. How gentle and kind, patient. How perfect he looked, with his hair back off his face, the moon and stars making his skin glow, highlighting the curve of his jaw and sitting beautifully on the tip of his nose, dancing over each of his eyelashes, admiring the honey glaze of his brown eyes.
If Buck was a constellation of stars, then Eddie was what he shined on.
“You’re beautiful,” Buck admitted, breathing through the statement like he needed to let it out as much as he did his exhale. He shook his head as if he were in disbelief of just how striking he was.
Eddie glanced at him, turned his eyes to him straight from the stars. “You’re beautiful,” he countered. “A guiding light, Buck. My Orion.” His voice dipped into a sweet quiet, and he tilted Buck forward with his index finger on his chin. It was a blessing, really, to kiss him. To share Eddie’s love of stargazing, to cry with him and share his pain, and then for the two things to be such clashing topics, but still in the middle of that, be able to turn into the peaceful action of a soft kiss.
Buck hears Eddie’s voice in his head from this night all the time. Specifically, when he said against his lips, “Do you feel alive now?” And Buck’s heart jumped like it was finally starting up again, as if it had been stalled for all that time.
He closed his eyes, and his breath hitched. Eddie kissed his silent tears and held him close.
section two
taxes
“how can you bring me back to life just to kill me again?”
Buck mourns his absence, for what is a star without its world to shine on?
He misses his warmth. His kisses. His hands. His eyes. His laugh. He sends him a lot of yearning texts in the middle of the night when he’s cold.
“It pains me to think of all the things about you I am missing. I don't mean anything specific like that baseball game you and Chris went to, though I would have liked to be there for that—I mean those simple, mundane tasks you perform everyday that I had grown so used to. Your laugh, for one. It colors me a certain shade of green to imagine all of the people who have seen and heard your laugh today, and I was not among them. Maybe it's naive to say I think no one appreciates the sound of it as much as I do, but I've certainly mourned it now that I don’t have it.
“All that said, don't worry for me here. I miss you every second, but that's no surprise. I'm sure you feel the same. And if we do, if we’re on the same wavelength here, yet you’re able to keep your want for seeing me contained, then know that I can, too.”
Buck falls asleep after sending it, the admittance off his chest and into Eddie’s knowledge. He wakes up to a text sent back, only written to Buck a mere hour ago.
“Hi, honey. You were up late last night, then? Did you miss my laugh that much? I’ll assure you now so you don’t feel so burningly jealous, there’s no one else I enjoy sharing my certain laughter with more than you and Chris.
“I think that want cannot be contained. If it is, then it’s just sitting there in your heart, unshared, unseen, and it’s such a beautiful thing to love someone. I love you oh so loudly and with so many layers and I’ve hoped everyday that you’re able to feel it.
“Goodmorning, by the way. I looked at Orion last night, and I thought of you until I was asleep.”
Buck enjoys his theory of love being beautiful, of it consuming, but he also thinks, clashing with Eddie’s idea—that it can be daunting, and at times, a bit exhausting to feel it so closely. Especially when the one you love is miles and miles away.
He attempts to distract himself with work, and it goes his way. At least, for a couple of weeks.
And then, he feels that poison again. Branching vines around his organs and poking thorns at his heart. What had Eddie done? Taken his life with him? Or did Buck surrender it, so easily, without even realizing he’d done it?
He has a close call when they’re out on a run, but it’s not as if it’s an irregular occurrence. He’s moving around in burning buildings all the time, literal and figurative. If he stays just a minute or two more to find a little girl's cat she had to leave behind, then what does it matter—his life against this cats’ is no contest, the girl starts wailing about how she needs to go back for him as soon as she’s out of the house. A love so fierce Buck can’t just stand still.
He rushes in, with people yelling for him in his radio and behind him. He doesn’t go far in before he spots the animal running across the hall. He scoops him up into his arms, hears a bannister from the ceiling fall behind him, but he’s out before anything can truly crash down on him and the cat.
It’s silly, but Buck goes away from it a little disappointed. He didn’t get to learn the cat’s name. Something so loved and dear and adored should have a name, but the little girl just takes him and hugs him. She didn’t need to name it to love it, to know it, to recognize it by sight alone. She saw love as a simple thing and gave it without recluse.
Buck wondered if it could be that easy with Eddie. Would he still love him if he had no name? No identity to him? If he’d met him a year earlier? If he’d never met him at all ? There is so much within Buck that is consumed by this fire of love for him, and love— love is matter like fear is matter, and—
In an alternative universe, Buck does not know Eddie. But in this one, he does. So where does the love go for his alternative self? There’s not a chance it goes to someone else—what this love is, it’s specific. Maybe it’s shrunk. Maybe it’s turned into small little molecules within this Other Buck, swirling in his stomach and leaving him empty every night.
Maybe there’s a world where Eddie is not Eddie, and Buck is not Buck, and instead, Buck is a star, and Eddie is a tree or a monument of history or something smaller like a rock or leaf. Maybe even then, they love each other. Maybe it’s stronger, because they’re far from one another. Buck could believe that, with their current situation in this world.
He thinks about other worlds, and love, and Eddie, and suddenly, he’s back in the present, and Bobby pulls him away from the scene, running them behind the rig. He points a strong finger at Buck’s chest, hitting him in the heart. “You're gonna get yourself killed.”
“Already did,” Buck says, a mention of it after a year that he hasn’t let out to anyone but Eddie. “And guess what? I lived anyway.”
He’s bitter. It doesn’t feel good to say. It leaves a connotation that Bobby has done anything with his feelings but worry about them, and that just isn’t the truth. But Buck wishes—for more. He wanted the world to admit what had happened was fucked up and people should’ve been more sensitive, if only he hadn’t lied and told everyone a thousand times that he was fine.
He put himself in the position of being okay, and so everyone else did, too. Why the hell was there a problem with that? Why did he want to lie and for everyone to just be able to read his mind? Maybe he got so used to Eddie doing it he expected it from the rest of his family. He said he was good, and—what did he want, someone to wrap a blanket around him and rock him to sleep? A little mercy from the universe.
What did he want? What did he expect, when all he’s done for years is hide his emotions away? They were all human. They did not have powers that let them know when Buck was about to spiral. So of course, Bobby is shocked when he puts himself in this position of danger again and wants to know what’s wrong, cause he said he was fine. He said he was ready, that he was capable.
“I don’t know what that was about, but we’re talking when we get back to the station.” Buck nodded his head, and felt embarrassment settle on his cheeks and in his eyes, starting tears.
What the hell was wrong with him?
—
He felt like he wasn’t himself. He couldn’t specify, really, what his identity even was anymore. It gets him thinking about those other alternate Buck and Eddie’s again, as he’s laying in the bathtub once more.
It’s not helping his chronic pain, his body, to do it, but it’s comforting to be in a confined space sometimes and to feel small and inadequate and hidden. It gets better when no one is around and there’s no sound and it can be convinced that you aren’t real and aren’t tied to anyone for a few seconds.
It shouldn’t be such a great thought, to disappear, but it’s about the only thing that makes him feel better these days other than talking to Eddie and telling him he loves him. Love is alive, he knows that, it doesn’t die, it’s the only thing of him that’s really shining anymore, and he isn’t using it for himself, so he gives it to Eddie.
The lights are off. The sky is dark, save the stars. It’s freezing. It’s lonely. Eddie is calling him, and his picture shows up. It’s him and Chris, sitting on the couch, assembling a gingerbread house together. Chris is focused on putting gumdrops down, while Eddie is frosting a wall. Both of them are focused, the similarities in their expressions almost uncanny. Buck is behind the camera, probably smiling at them, taking the picture slyly so Chris wouldn’t walk away and get annoyed at the phone pointed towards him.
It accidentally rings out, and so Buck calls him back. Before he can move, Eddie is answering. “Hi, honey. Are you looking at the stars right now?”
Buck turned to the window, and pulled the blinds up even further. “Yeah, I am. Are you?”
“Of course,” he said, and Buck could hear the wind on his side, crackling the audio. He was outside, then. Probably had a blanket over his knees, sat on the back porch, a half-drank beer at his feet. “You in the bathtub again?”
Must’ve heard the echo. Or he just knows Buck that well. “Yeah. Sorry. And you’re outside?”
Eddie hummed. “What happened? You only go in the tub when you’re sad.”
“I’m sad a lot these days, Eddie.” He sat back against it, instead of being on his knees to see out the window. He stretches his legs over the sides. “It’s hard without you.”
He sighed on the other end. “Tell me to come home. I—I’ll tell Chris we gotta go. That we’re done here.”
“You don’t wanna do that, Eddie,” Buck said, knowing the fact of it. “I said it was hard. I didn’t say it was unbearable.” Though it is, Buck whispers to himself, in his head.
“Would you—“ he cuts off, and Buck hears the backdoor slide closed of his motel room. Chris could be there, inside. Good sign if they’re together. “Would you tell me, though? If it was?”
Buck laughed bitterly. “Wouldn’t that be a little pathetic? Saying I can’t live without you?”
“No, ” Eddie strongly replied. “It would be brave to say that.”
Buck stared at the white bottom of the tub, dark from no light shining but the moon. “Eddie?”
“Yes, honey?”
Buck bit his lip, nervous. “If I—imagine, after the lightning strike, I was completely different. I wasn’t myself anymore. Imagine if I wanted to be called another name. Or if I didn’t want a name at all. Do you think you still would’ve loved me?”
Buck’s voice breaks a bit, and he realizes how stupid he sounds, how desperate. He can’t take it back, though.
“You wouldn’t be completely different,” Eddie says. “You’d still be the same, at the core of yourself. If you’re asking about the boundaries of my love for you, then I don’t think there are any. The journey to loving you—maybe it would’ve been different. But it would not have been harder or resisted. I would’ve accepted it no matter what.”
Buck rests his chin in the palms of his hands, dragging them down to cup the sides of his neck. “It wouldn’t have mattered? You’re sure?”
“Buck,” he said, barely audible. “What’s wrong? You know you can tell me.”
He shook his head. He took the phone off of speaker, and held it to his ear. “I feel like that again, Eddie. Like I did after the lightning strike. I don’t know where it came from, it just jumped out at me. It’s dragging me somewhere, I don’t know. It’s killing me.”
He pressed the phone as close as he could to hear Eddie’s breath. He held his own wrist, his hands shaking. He started to rock back and forth. He was falling. He was exhausted.
“You want me to come home.”
“Yes,” Buck said, quickly.
“But you don’t.”
“No,” he agreed.
“I showed you the stars after you died. You remember that.”
Buck nodded, though he couldn’t see him. He bit his lip to keep the sobs in.
“I showed you Orion, honey. Do you remember that?”
“Y-yeah,” Buck choked out, closing his eyes, trying to focus solely on Eddie’s voice.
“You said you felt alive. You were kissing me, Buck, and you were there. You were so beautiful that night. I knew it then, I loved you.” Buck is too drowned by tears to say anything back, falling victim to everything in his mind that tells him he’s dead, dead, dead, and has been since he went over the side of that ladder.
He closes his eyes, weakly holding the phone, rocking, close to praying. “Honey. Evan. You’re still alive. You’re still my Orion. You are so, so loved.”
“Eddie,” is all he can say, for minutes on end. “It meant something. It meant everything. That kiss. I wanted to do it again, but I thought—I thought it was just a favor. Just you helping me. I didn’t know it could be more—“
“It was. It was all I could give you, though, at the time. And it was all you could take. It was the wrong time, but it was the right action. And I would do it now. I would. ”
I love you, Buck thinks. I love you, and it’s the only thing keeping me upright, and I’m terrified.
section three
evan buckley
“in every universe”
The kiss reminds Buck of fairy tales—Eddie is the prince, and Buck is Snow White or Aurora, and magic surrounds them that night as easily as the stars do.
To put it respectfully, it was lovely. To put it dramatically, it was powerful.
It takes a few reminders from Eddie, him getting into specifics so Buck can feel the power again, like he loses his memory every night and Eddie has to place them back into their respective spots.
He feels this heavy weight of pain on his shoulders, and it becomes lighter as the day of Eddie coming back approaches.
He counts the weeks down. And then the days. And then the hours. And then, the minutes.
It takes a lot of self control to not just drive to Eddie’s house and wait on his doorstep like a lost puppy. He’d feel right at home there, laid at his front door, waiting. It would only be putting his desires into action.
But he sits at home instead, in his living room, checking his phone. His heart is speeding, his stomach unsettled. He hasn’t been able to eat all day. He keeps glancing at the time, reading over Eddie’s texts, counting down the hours.
Hey, we’re at a rest stop. About two hours till home. Chris is acting casual, but I can tell he’s just as excited to see you as I am.
That was the last one. They must’ve kept on the road the rest of the time. Buck wishes he could feel it when they arrive, like a surge of energy in his heart. He stays a mix of anxious/excited, pacing every now and then and sitting back down.
Buck got them gifts. That’s okay, right? They’re small things. Well, sort of. They’re already in his Jeep, waiting to be in the hands of their new owners so Buck can stop staring at them and doubting that they’ll like them.
The two hours bleed to minutes, and Eddie messages him again, something short but beautiful and all the allowance Buck needs to slip his shoes on and go see them.
Home, he texts.
—
Buck does not even lock the car before going in. He forgets the presents, his phone, his keys in the passenger seat. He doesn’t need items. He doesn’t need anything else, but them. Just Eddie, just Chris, just their smiles, just their presence, just their love.
There is something of both of them that belongs to Buck. He’s not saying he owns parts, or that they gave them over—it’s more like, there are these precious and shining pieces of their souls that are bright and draw Buck in like a moth to a flame, like they are lighthouses in Buck’s dark sea. It keeps within the chamber of Buck’s heart, these small lights, and they are—they’re more like parts of Buck that he has created for them, and they are them, but he carries them around.
To reunite with a loved one—it’s an emotional power. It’s one that Buck has not confronted much, before Maddie came back to him. He’d forgotten how it feels, like a baseball to his sternum, a sudden rush of love and held-back feelings that couldn’t be fully recieved 800 miles away.
There are not many that Buck has loved that have made the trip to come and be with him again. There are those that have left and never turned around, those that went and came back only to depart once more.
Among departures and arrivals within this door of love that opens to Buck’s heart, there are two that had never left—and when they did, it ate him up inside.
For them to come back—baseball to the sternum. He hugs them too tightly, presses too many kisses into Chris’s hair, says, I missed you, so many times that the words do not even sound like words anymore.
It’s like chains go around his and Eddie’s bodies when they hug, and there is a lock that Buck has the key to, but he can’t, for any reason, see why he should undo them. They should stay like this forever, in each other’s personal space, in holding arms and support.
Even when they separate, Buck wants to feel it again. His fingers caressing his back. His breath on his neck. His whispered hello—hi, honey— his wet laugh when Buck kissed his shoulder blade, because he was so close to him that his head was fully behind Eddie’s, and he could reach that space with such ease. He couldn’t get close enough to him.
It’s all very hazy and slow for the rest of the day—both of them are exhausted from the trip, and Chris only asks of Buck to help him get his blankets and pillow from the car so he can sleep the rest of the day.
It’s then that Buck remembers his gifts. He’s wrapped them as nicely as he can. Him and Maddie had FaceTimed, and she gave a slow tutorial. Buck was sat on his floor with wrapping paper, scissors, tape, the gifts, and bows circled around him, overwhelmed with the fact that he could make them perfect if only he tried a couple more times.
Maddie got him to accept the way they were—a little extra wrapping paper tucked in at the sides made them creased, but what mattered were the bows on top. Those, at least, looked nice.
They’re both surprised, and Eddie pouts because he hadn’t gotten Buck anything, but truly, he did. He brought himself, and he brought Chris, and that was enough.
He gets Chris a chess set—explains as he looks at the state of the box, the picture faded and the lid a bit torn—“That used to be mine. Me and Maddie’s, I mean. We’d play when I was laid up in bed, my leg broken or something or the other. Anyway—your dad told me you like chess, too. And I haven’t used that in a while. I figured you’d get better use of it.”
Buck would stare at it, all wrapped up, and think, that’s a family heirloom. I’m giving him a family heirloom. I’m passing it on. He wondered if that was too much. If Chris would think of it as regifting or would understand how much it meant to Buck to hand such a precious thing over that used to get his mind off his pain or his parents.
By the genuine smile on his face, and the way he runs his hands over the lid, gently opening it, Buck can tell—he gets it. He knows. It feels hot in the room, suddenly, to have that between them—I’m giving you a family heirloom because you are my family— hell, he could have waited and gave it to Jee, or gave it to Maddie. But he didn’t. He was giving it to Chris.
The set is quite nice. The pieces are made from stained glass, all packed into plastic bags Buck got earlier in the month to make it more presentable. It was around fifteen years old, after all.
“We can play together,” Chris said. He took the board in his hands. It was made of glass as well, the squares in pretty good shape, considering.
“I’m a little rusty,” Buck answered.
“You’ve gotta be better than Dad.”
Eddie smiled. Had been smiling the whole time, really, his cheeks red. He looked wonderful. He’d gotten more tan, had been working out more? He looks more relaxed, too, his body language speaking to it with one arm over the couch and the other on the arm rest. His legs were spread, his gift sat on the table. He was too busy looking at the chess set and defending his own skill to see how Buck was watching him, but after all, the sun was still out, and so it made sense that he did not see the star shining on him.
The gift is somewhat heavy because of the glass board, so Buck carries it to Chris's room while he has one of his blankets slung over his shoulder. “I’m sorry I’m tired,” he said, and sat his crutches up against the wall. Buck sat with him on the bed.
“It’s alright. It’s a long trip. We’ll hang out tomorrow, kiddo.”
He nodded his head, looking down at his hands. “I missed you,” he whispered.
“I missed you too, Chris.”
He thanked him for the gift, and Buck got up to close the curtains for him. He closed his door when he went, and it felt right for him to be there, in his bedroom again. So many times, Buck’s excitement to go to Eddie’s was sunken down because he knew Chris wouldn’t be there. Sometimes, before, Chris would only come out of his room for a couple minutes, just to say hi and have a small talk before he went back to his video games.
Still, he got to talk to him, though. It was a part of the routine to see him. Not having it was terrible, so much so that a lot of the time they’d decide to hang out at Buck’s instead.
It’s only lucky that Buck is not in charge of the rules of life, of society—otherwise, he’d decide for all of them to stay in this house, together, time never moving on. He hoped that feeling would fade over the weeks, because of how ridiculous it was. He loved his job and the rest of his family, and he wanted them too—his mind is just in the state of catastrophizing right now, or of doomsday prepping.
He has to remind himself they aren’t going anywhere just because Chris has to go to school or wants to see his friends. That Eddie will not be gone forever just because he’s going out to the store or has a shift without Buck.
They’re going back to normal. Buck will say goodnight to Chris a thousand more times and close his door for him and Chris will open it a thousand more times and say hello.
So there is Eddie, waiting for him on the couch, in his spot. Looking down at his smaller, lighter gift. “You wrapped this very professionally,” he says softly.
“I tried.” Buck takes his seat on the couch, and turns towards Eddie. “Open it.”
He takes the bow off first and sits it on the coffee table. He unwraps it slowly, teasing at Buck’s nerves, probably doing it on purpose. When he pulls open the small container, his hands freeze.
“Do you like it?” Buck questions, his voice quiet.
Eddie takes the necklace from the box, holding the charm in his hand. “You got this for me?”
Buck nodded his head, his face heating. “It’s important to you. Orion. I thought you might like it with you all the time.”
Eddie made eye contact, clasping the necklace to his chest. “I do have it with me all the time,” he said. “I have you.”
A slow smile formed from Buck’s lips. He scooted over to take the necklace, and clasped it around Eddie’s neck. “Well,” he whispered. “You can never have too many stars on you, Eddie.”
He blushed again, a light pink down to his neck. Buck watched it happen, the color forming on his face, it was like a small miracle, to see the way Eddie worked.
It sat on his chest a bit higher than his medallion, near the top of his sternum. Before Buck could overthink it, he reached and took the charm in his hands, and lightly kissed it. He then pressed it back to Eddie’s chest.
They were so close, Buck could feel his breath. “You truly are a thing to admire, Eddie,” he confessed to him, and looked down to his lips.
“I wanna kiss you,” Eddie said, each word passing from his lips and setting against Buck.
“Then kiss me,” Buck responded. He pressed his thumb to Buck’s collarbone and did.
There was fluidity to their movements, like they’d done this on multiple occasions. Buck kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him, and he felt alive.
epilogue
“the stars in the sky”
Buck caressed Eddie’s face in the moonlight. Touching him was close to electricity. It was surreal to have him, to gather him in his hands and to overwhelm him. He couldn’t close his eyes against the sight of him, of his lips parted and his necklaces in the hollow of his collarbone.
They were two colliding beings, a mix-up of stars and flames and light and smiles and beauty and pain and longing and desire. Eddie was a curious subject among darkness that ran hot and he was a planet that Buck’s star orbited around and would for millennia. He keeps his eyes on him and studies his every expression, committing them to memory, kissing his face like he’s blessing him with more and more stardust.
There is something magical to them—to everyone. There is stardust in the bloodstream of every human on Earth, coursing through them, lighting them up. Buck can feel it on the heat of Eddie’s skin, on the goosebumps on his arms.
Really, he doesn’t blame the moon for shining so brightly onto Eddie. He believes it is a fact that he is meant for it, meant to be something special and loved in all universes by every planet and star. Buck can only dream of giving him that—universes worth of love.
He supposes it was worth it; to die and to rise up to the sky, and for a moment, his soul turned into a star like millions of others’ had. This was something he took back with him, a star’s capability of admiration and patience.
Death was sudden, a shock. Death was his, then not. Death showed him love rose from the Earth and out of the atmosphere, and planted it within his heart.
The very basis of life was to love. Maybe it was destiny all along, in every world, even the ones where Buck had no name, to keep it alive.