Chapter Text
For all the time Danny spends with Buck, Buck never asks about their parents.
Sometimes, Danny wishes he would, if only so Danny could start to work through his own feelings on the matter. Mostly, he’s grateful. He has no clue what he’d even say.
Instead, they carefully dance around the topic. Maddie talks about the time he pissed himself at a horror movie he snuck into (he was twelve and it was rated R and she doesn’t mention that Dad had promised to take him to see it then kept putting it off and off and off until he took matters into his own hands). Danny talks about Maddie coughing up snot in the middle of her solo in chorus sophomore year (Mom and Dad didn’t show up even though it was all she’d talked about for a month). Buck laughs as they throw french fries over the diner table at each other and never asks the obvious question.
Maddie doesn’t say anything, either. Not to him or to Buck. He knows she feels the specter of Philip and Margaret Buckley hovering over them every time she excises them from a story, two skeletons huddled next to Doug Kendall in their closet.
(Buck doesn’t even know Doug Kendall exists, that even though it’s been two years since Maddie left him, she still looks over her shoulder for him every time she goes to the grocery store. Danny has no idea how to bring him up, and Maddie isn’t talking either.)
When it’s Buck’s turn, he tells them about growing up with Eva and the others, skipping school and stealing cars, long afternoons spent together in the library where they learned most of their life skills that no one else bothered to teach them. He doesn’t mention Annie Jones or anything about his life after the other kids left when he was twelve. Danny laughs when he talks about Eva waddling out of Walmart so the candy shoved in her pockets doesn’t crinkle too much and pretends he doesn’t know there are horrors hiding behind the silly stories.
He thinks maybe it’s a Buckley gene. Don’t talk about your problems and they will go away all on their own.
So maybe it’s fitting that the person to finally break their silent embargo isn’t a Buckley at all.
“Have you thought about your parents?” Athena Grant says on a sunny afternoon, walking up to Danny’s table at his favorite cafe. He comes here most days to work on the podcast, scripting and editing and sound designing, all skills his parents had said were useless and thus the basis of their appeal. Maddie had gotten a new job at dispatch, leaving the bulk of the podcast work to him. It’s a good idea, not least because the podcast isn’t exactly raking in the dough, but sometimes it feels like his life has narrowed down to his siblings and the podcast, with no room for anything else.
So he blinks up at Athena Grant in the bright afternoon and tries to remember the last time he talked to someone other than Maddie and Buck.
“Um, hi?” he says.
Athena Grant needs no further invitation. She sits across from him at his table and raises an eyebrow until he closes his laptop. “Your parents,” she says. “Have you thought about what to do with them?”
“Like… like what?”
“Taking them to court.” Athena leans forward, hands clasped on the tabletop. “Placing a Curse on a child is a crime, even if they weren’t the ones who benefited from the Blessing.”
Danny winces.
“I—no.” This is a lie. He has thought about it, considered giving all the information he had to the Hershey Police Department and washing his hands of it, but he shies away from the idea. Imagines his mother in an orange jumpsuit, crying, and switches tracks in his brain to the cute dog he saw in a park once. “I haven’t.”
He takes a sip of his lukewarm coffee.
Athena hums. “I’m not asking for an answer. Not right now. Lord knows what I’d do if I was in your shoes. But you and your siblings should probably start thinking about it. Statute of limitations in Pennsylvania for a criminal case has expired, but for a civil case it’s two years from discovery and you’ve used about six months of that already.”
His mug bangs against the table. “Wait, what?”
“The statute of limitations—”
“No, I heard you, I just—what do you mean it’s expired? How can it be expired?”
Athena sighs. “Statute of limitations says ten years from the time of the crime.”
“Ten ye—ten years? None of us even knew until this year! How were we supposed to—to—” Danny doesn’t even know if he wants his parents in jail, but the idea that the justice system doesn’t either tastes sour on his tongue.
“And I agree with you,” Athena says, even though Danny isn’t sure that he had a coherent enough statement to agree with, “but there’s nothing we can do about that. However, if it’s something that you and your brother want, you do still have the right to sue. Get some monetary compensation for everything those people put you through.”
Danny drags a hand down his face. “I—I don’t know. It—I think it should be up to Buck. I’m not the one who…”
“Not the one who what? Suffered? Because I’m not an expert, but I’d say your parents did a number on all three of you.”
He looks away and takes another sip of lukewarm coffee.
“Look, I’m not telling you what to do here. I’m just letting you know that there’s a time limit, so you three need to decide sooner than later.”
“Have you mentioned this to Buck?”
“No,” she says, “but I think you should. This is a family conversation.”
Family. Right. What is that supposed to look like? He’s got two parents he doesn’t speak to, a brother he’s just met, and a sister he’s still relearning since she left Doug behind.
“Thanks for telling me, Sergeant,” he says, lips pressed in a thin smile. “We’ll figure it out.”
“I’m worried about Terry,” Eva says.
Shortly after breaking their Curses, Eva and the others went back to Pennsylvania. They hadn’t wanted to go, but none of them had the money to move out to LA, and Buck wasn’t really in a position to support them all singlehandedly, despite having more money now than he ever had before. So instead, Eva had insisted on weekly video chats in his early morning. Sometimes, Tyesha and Mary would join her, but they were still the only ones working (Eva was trying to get a job of her own, but she had no formal education to speak of and no social security number, which made it tough). Terry used to be there with Eva most mornings, quiet and stuttering, but there. Buck hasn’t heard from them in two weeks, now.
“I’m a little worried, too,” Buck says, scooping a bite of his omelet and mumbling around the food. “They’ve never been talkative, but—”
“—but they’ve just gone totally silent!” Eva says. The phone shakes around a bit, but he can’t see what she’s doing. “They’re not talking to you, either?”
Buck shakes his head. “I know they’re reading my texts, but other than that it’s been radio silent. Did something happen?”
Eva groans. “I don’t know. They’d been going out more, to the store and such, but they stopped like two weeks ago. I’ve asked, but they just say it’s fine.”
Buck hums around another mouthful of omelet. “Maybe they’re just overwhelmed? I mean, to go from no one seeing you to everyone seeing you…”
“But that’s just it: I saw them more when they were still Cursed! Now, it’s like they’re a ghost. Whenever I walk into our room, they’re either gone or asleep, and I don’t see them anywhere else. Not dinner, not in the living room. The bed was cold when I woke up this morning. Tyesha and Mary haven’t talked to them either. If I hadn’t seen them last night, I’d think they’d run away or something.” She nibbles at her fingernail. “I’m worried, Evan.”
Buck heaves a breath. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I really don’t know what to do.”
“I know. I know. I just feel like I’m going crazy. Tyesha and Mary keep saying that they’re fine, that I need to be patient, but it’s different. I mean, they never… they could never really see Terry before, so it isn’t any weirder for them now.”
“And you knew I’d get it,” he says.
“Yeah.” She bites the inside of her cheek. “Okay, enough troubles. How are you? How’s the firefighting business?”
“The other day we had a call where a woman got on a freeway sign wearing nothing but a bathrobe to get her husband to pay attention to her.”
(Buck does not mention the moment where the woman pointed a gun at him. Doesn’t mention that it was the first time since his Curse broke that he has had the thought: I can die now. Doesn’t mention that for a moment, he forgot that that was scary.)
Eva’s eyebrows shoot up her forehead. “And has the husband filed a restraining order?”
“That’s the really crazy part—I think it worked?”
“What?”
“I think it got the spark back, you know?” Eva starts giggling, so he keeps going, speaking past his own laughter. “Like the romance was dead and she fixed it by flashing her tits to the greater Los Angeles area.”
Eva full-on cackles, throwing her head back. “Nothing says love like public nudity.”
The conversation smoothes out, winds its way through silly calls and Eva’s struggles to get an official government ID (she is making headway, though, she says. Precious Fortner has been her advocate in navigating the legal bureaucracies). When the call ends, Buck has almost forgotten about Terry.
As he heads out the door to go to work, he stops, pulls out his phone, and opens his text conversation with Terry. It’s a wall of blue, texts he’s sent for the last two weeks, all unanswered. He scrolls back up to the last message from Terry: a single thumbs up emoji, two weeks earlier. Is everything okay? he types out, then deletes, then retypes and sends.
He checks his messages again after he pulls into work, parking his Jeep next to the Channel 8 news van. Taylor Kelly, back again for a third day straight.
Read 8:32 AM.
Well, shit.
When Maddie and Daniel were young, shortly after Evan—after they lost Evan and Daniel was better, a few months after they moved to Hershey, they asked their parents if they could bring Evan’s favorite stuffed dog to Evan’s grave.
“I don’t want him to be lonely,” Maddie said, holding the dog in her arms. They’d found him in one of the boxes, forgotten in the corner of the garage, still packed from the move. “Maybe Mr. Butter can keep him company.”
“Absolutely not,” Mom said, snatching the dog. “That—you—no. No, it’s too far away.”
“But—” Daniel said.
“No buts.”
And Mom stalked away, and Maddie and Daniel cried into each other’s shoulders, sniffles stifled in the sleeves of their shirts. Maddie used to think that her mom made everything better, but now she thought that her mom just made everything worse.
Their father came by later to explain that Mom didn’t mean to snap, but that she was still very sad, and they needed to be extra nice to her, and they shouldn’t leave stuff at Evan’s grave because it was littering anyway.
Shouldn’t Mom be nice to us, too? Maddie didn’t say. She had learned in the last year not to ask questions like that.
That night, Daniel tiptoed into her room and slipped into bed with her like he hadn’t since before he got sick.
“Are you awake?” he said, face so close to hers she could feel his breath on her nose.
Keeping her eyes closed, she moved her head just slightly. “Mmm.”
Something soft and plush pushed into her chest.
“I stole Mr. Butter from Mom and Dad’s room.”
Maddie’s eyes flew open. “You what?”
Sure enough, between the two of them was Evan’s stuffed dog, with the torn ear where Evan had played a little too hard. Maddie swallowed around the sudden lump in her throat.
“Shh!”
“Daniel, they’re gonna be so mad.”
“Not if they don’t see it,” he said, pout on his face. “They never talk about him anyway. It’s like he never existed. They won’t even miss it.”
Maddie wanted to argue, to insist that their parents still cared, but it was hard when the facts were staring them both in the face. Daniel was already ten, and old enough to notice the differences in their parents Before Evan and After Evan. Instead, she snuggled him closer, tucking his head under her chin.
“I think we should still give Mr. Butters to Evan,” Daniel said into her collarbone.
“Yeah, I think it’s a good idea, too,” Maddie said. “We’ll go when we’re old enough to go ourselves, I promise. No Mom and Dad allowed.”
Daniel snorted, the breath tickling the hairs of her neck, and she giggled at the sensation.
(It would take twenty-four years, but they would, one day, keep that promise.)
Maddie doesn’t know why she’s remembering that day now, but it’s on her mind as she leaves her lawyer’s office, Danny waiting for her out front. They still only have one car between them—they still only have one apartment, even, but when she ran from Doug two and a half years ago, she’d run to the only place that felt safe. It’s harder than she thought to leave that security blanket behind, not when she’s been depending on Danny for so long now.
“Everything good?” he says, leaning against the Jeep. He’d wanted to come in with her, but she needs to start taking small steps on her own. She’d let herself be distracted by searching for Evan—for Buck—and now she needs to get back to fixing her own life.
“Yeah,” she says. “Doug should get the divorce papers in two days.”
“Are you,” Danny says, “sure about this? He’ll find out where you are.”
“If he doesn’t already know, he will soon enough. We’ve gotta start giving people a location on the podcast so more Cursed people can come by.”
“But we can figure something else out.”
No, they can’t. If they want to help Cursed people, they have to push the information as far and wide as they can. Danny knows it. Maddie knows it. And Maddie won’t make her brother choose between protecting her and helping people like Buck, so she took the choice from him. He’s done enough for her.
And, even more than that, she’s so sick of being afraid.
“It’s done. And I want to do this.”
“You don’t have to pretend.”
“I’m not! I don’t want to look over my shoulder anymore. I don’t want to hide. I’m… I’m ready to move on.”
The pinched look of Danny’s eyebrows fades and his lips twitch in a smirk. “Oh, moving on? Anyone I know? Maybe short? A paramedic?”
She swats at him. “The way you switch from worried to obnoxious in half a second…”
“Hey! I’m the little brother, it’s my right!” He stops and shakes his head. “Or, well. The middle brother.”
Her smile slides from her face. “Yeah, of course.”
Danny shifts his weight and clears his throat. “Well, um, speaking of Buck—”
And he tells her about his conversation with Athena Grant.
“So,” she says when he’s done, “we have like a year and a half to—what, to sue our parents?”
“I mean, I have to assume that Buck would be the main plaintiff.” And yeah, that makes sense. He was the one who was hurt the most, who suffered the most. “But Athena said we should all talk about it. Together. As a family.”
Maddie laughs like someone who forgot how. “Do we even deserve a say? I mean really, if he wants them dead, who are we to say no to that?”
“Yeah, that’s kinda how I feel about it, too. But Athena told me, and left it to me to tell Buck. And,” Danny says, looking away with a blush, “I’d like it if you were there, too.”
“Hey,” she says, touching his arm. “Of course I’ll be there.”
They lapse into silence. Danny gestures for them to finally get in the car, and they ride in silence for a bit.
“I’m still so mad at them,” Danny says.
“Me too.”
“I don’t want them dead.” He whispers it like a confession.
“Me either,” she says, just as soft.
They don’t say anything for the rest of the drive.
Hen has known Buck for a year and a half now. She knows that he likes coffee best when he can’t taste the coffee. He plays air drums instead of air guitar when he listens to rock music. His favorite color is yellow.
And he doesn’t know how to ask for help.
Buck has Bobby to teach him how to cook, Chimney to teach him about pop culture, Eddie to teach him… well, she’s not quite sure what all is going on there. Still, this is something that Hen can do.
“So, Buck,” she says, plopping next to him on the couch and rubbing her arm against his. Ever since his Curse broke, he wears short sleeves most days. Hen takes every opportunity for casual touch that she can, both for him to get used to it and for her. Touching Buck used to be like slime slipping under her skin, but now it is the first warm sunshine after a terrible storm. She’s fallen asleep like this more than once.
“So, Hen.”
“You’ve been looking at your phone a lot today.” It’s a q-word shift, so they haven’t even left the station yet. Usually, Buck spends the time playing games with Eddie and Bobby or reading a book or watching a movie with Chimney, but today he’s been glued to his phone.
“O…kay?”
“You’ve been frowning at your phone a lot.”
Buck squints at her. “I’m sorry?”
“Is something wrong?”
“Oh. No. I mean, yes. I mean, kind of? It’s not your problem.”
“You gave me four different answers to a yes or no question. I’m kind of impressed.”
“It’s not your problem,” he says again.
“That doesn’t mean I can’t help. Be a listening ear.”
He stares at her for a beat too long, and Hen thinks he’s still going to turn her down, but he glances around, spots that Bobby’s office is shut (Taylor Kelly went in there ten minutes ago to interview Johnson) takes a deep breath, and talks.
“I’m worried about Terry,” he says.
“They’re one of the kids you grew up with, right?”
He nods. “Their Curse was no one will notice you which is… as bad as it sounds. Maybe even worse. They were basically invisible.”
Hen remembers the small person that had seemingly appeared out of nowhere back on the day Buck first broke his friends’ Curses. “That must have been difficult to live with.”
“It was, but I think… I think maybe living without it is worse. They knew how to deal with being invisible, you know? But now—they aren’t talking to me or Eva.” He shows her the unanswered texts. “What if… what if when I broke their Curse, I broke them, too?”
Hen curls her arm around him and pulls him in close. “I think change is scary. Even when it’s good change. I think Terry is scared of how things can go wrong, just like you are.”
He pulls his head back enough to look her in the eyes. “You think I’m scared?”
She laughs. “Hon, you’re terrified. I would be, too, if I were you. But you’ve got all of us, and we’ll be here to pick you up if you fall. Make sure Terry knows you’ll be there for them in the same way.”
“I don’t want them to fall.”
“I know, but you can’t protect them from everything. People fall.”
He sniffles. “I just want everyone to be okay.”
“Sometimes, we have to be not okay so we can get better.”
“Who told you that, Karen?”
Hen squawks. “Why do you think if I say something wise it must come from my wife and not me?”
“Oh, so you came up with it?”
“...I heard it from a therapist.”
“Ha!”
She digs her finger into his side. “Still wasn’t Karen.”
“Yeah, but I’d believe Karen if she said she came up with that. You, on the other hand…”
She shoves him away and throws a pillow at his head for good measure.
“Firefighter Buckley?” Taylor Kelly says, poking her head out of Bobby’s office and halting their laughter. “If you have a minute for another interview.”
Buck sighs and rolls off the couch to a standing position. “Duty calls.”
Hen waves after him as he goes, and hopes that someday he’ll be better, too.
“Alright,” Taylor says as he takes a seat across from her, “as you’ve probably already heard from some of your friends, but I need to have two separate interviews with you.”
Buck shifts in his seat. “Yeah, they mentioned. Your bosses want one story, and you want another?”
“My bosses want you to be a villain,” she says, looking him square in the eye. “I want the truth.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay, I get it.”
“I won’t tell you how to respond to the questions they want me to ask you, but fair warning, it’s a little brutal. You won’t come out of this looking good.”
“I get it.”
“Do you? Because I still want to make that other story, but it will take way more time than the hatchet job my station is planning for you.”
Buck tilts his head. “I’m confused.”
“She means that you’re gonna get really negative press first,” Grant-the-cameraman says, speaking for the first time Buck’s heard. His voice is rough and low, but steady. “And we can’t guarantee how fast the real story gets out. Bad press like this… well, you probably won’t be Monica Lewinski, but it’ll still be bad.”
“Who?”
Taylor arches a perfect eyebrow at him. “What rock do you live under? Is it nice there?”
He rolls his eyes. He hates when people do this: make fun of him for not knowing something and then don’t tell him what it is. All of his pop culture knowledge is from watching the same five movies in the Curse House on repeat, days spent in the library, and whatever Chimney has made him watch. Sometimes he doesn’t know obvious things! Sue him!
“Look, the point is that you should brace yourself. This won’t be pretty.”
“That’s not really anything new for me,” he says with a shrug.
“If you’re sure,” Grant says.
Taylor clears her throat before Buck can say anything to that. “Let’s get started then.” She waves at Grant, who turns on the camera and microphones.
“Can you please state your full name and occupation for the record?”
“Uh, I’m Evan Doe. Buckley. Evan Doe Buckley. I’m a firefighter with the LAFD.”
“You seem a little confused about your name.”
He ducks his head and blushes. He’s already off to a great start, and they haven’t even gotten to the bad questions. “Yeah, sorry. I was born Evan Buckley, but when I was put into the system they didn’t know my last name, so I was just Evan Doe. I’m getting used to being Evan Buckley again.”
The questions after that are mostly easy. Smooth. Basic background information. This time, Taylor doesn’t seem surprised by anything he says, not the homelessness or the construction work in Arizona or the first time his Curse activated back in the Curse House.
“You did listen to the podcast,” he says when there’s a lull in the conversation.
She smiles at him. “Of course. I take my job seriously.”
It’s comfortable. He almost forgets about her warning, then—
“Tell me about the circumstances in which you quit this job a few months ago.”
“Well, my Curse had started to activate a few days before. Some of my friends were being pulled away, to other jobs or family. But they all decided to stay here, instead.”
“With you.”
“Yeah.”
“And you left anyway?” Taylor’s gaze sharpens, her spine straightens. The atmosphere is charged, and Buck knows exactly what’s coming.
“Well, that’s not quite what happened.”
She jots something down on her notepad. “We’ve spoken to a number of your colleagues who mentioned that when your coworkers decided to stay with you, your Curse instead brought a building down on them.”
And, well. That is true, is the thing.
“Yeah,” he whispers.
“It nearly killed them and a civilian, unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Buck’s throat closes up at the memory, the fear of knowing that his friends were going to die and it would all be his fault. He nods once, sharp.
“What happened next?”
Buck opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. He swallows, coughs, and tries again. “Since—since it was my Curse, I figured that if—if I left, and stayed gone, the Curse would be appeased.”
“So your Curse made you incapable of performing your job adequately?”
“I—no! No, it made me better, really, because I couldn’t die, so I could do dangerous rescues.”
“So it protected you, but it hurt everyone else?”
“I don’t…” He trails off. He wants to say no, but she has a point. Physically, his Curse kept him safe while nearly killing at least five other people. “I… guess. Yeah.”
Grant-the-cameraman winces. There’s a moment of quiet as Taylor scribbles another note. Buck’s heart is pounding so loud in his chest that they must be able to hear it, a meaty slap slap slap in the cavernous silence of the room.
He really did almost kill them. He can dress it up however he wants, his friends can say they don’t blame him, and it won’t change the cold, hard truth.
They nearly died, and it would have been his fault.
“Are you the best firefighter here?”
He jumps a little at the question. “Um… no.” He’s good at his job, he thinks, at least most of the time, but Bobby has the experience and know-how of ten guys and Eddie just oozes competence, and that’s not even considering Hen and Chimney as firefighter-paramedics, with the skills of two different jobs. Buck will consider himself lucky to come in fifth after them, but even then…
“Do other firefighters perform dangerous rescues?”
“Yeah, all the time.” He frowns, nonplussed at the direction the questions are going.
“So, if you aren’t the best firefighter, and other people do dangerous rescues all the time, then the Curse didn’t make you more capable, did it?”
He curls around himself, hugging his arms to his chest. “I guess not.”
“Okay,” she says, turning off her microphone and pushing the camera to the side, “that’s enough for today.”
Buck looks up for a moment, nods, and looks down at the floor.
“I did warn you that it was brutal.”
“You did.” He laughs once, short and sharp. “You did warn me.”
There’s a long pause. He can feel them both looking at him, but he keeps his eyes on the floor.
“Are you… okay?” Grant-the-cameraman asks.
“I’m fine.”
Taylor sighs above him. “Look, I won’t lie and say that this story won’t be rough for you. But, those questions I asked aren’t real journalism, okay?”
Buck blinks, then lifts his head to stare at her. “How does this help me?”
“I mean—they were all guiding the story. They were made with the ending already in mind, instead of looking for the actual truth. It was about forcing the worst possible interpretation of events. But I also asked everyone in this firehouse about that night when the building collapsed, and not one of them blamed you. Okay? They won’t put any of that into the final piece, of course, but—” She runs a hand through her hair. “The people that know you best don’t think anything like what I just cornered you into.”
She looks so awkward and stiff, standing there, hand half extended like she might pat him on the head. The corner of his mouth tilts up and his heart settles, just a bit.
“Thanks,” he says.
“Don’t thank me just yet,” she says with a wink. “We still have your real interview to get through. Meet me here tomorrow at four PM.” She tears out a sheet of paper from her notepad with an address on it.
“I’ll look forward to it.”
Taylor and Grant turn to put their equipment away, giving him a moment of privacy.
He takes a minute, collects himself, calms his breathing, and slips back out to the station.
Buck looks pale.
He was fine when he walked into the interview, but now, as Bobby pokes his head out of the kitchen sees Buck come out (and no, Chimney, he wasn’t staring at the glass the whole time. Taylor Kelly had covered it, anyway, so it isn’t like he could see anything) he’s ashen, shaky. His eyes are red, like he was crying, or trying not to.
Bobby knew this was a bad idea.
(He is an adult. He won’t say I told you so.)
Bobby turns back to the peppers he’s chopping. An upset Buck is a Buck who needs something to do with his hands. Give him a minute to collect himself, and soon enough he’ll walk into the kitchen and ask to help.
Bobby puts the peppers in a dish to be roasted with some other vegetables and there is Buck, stiff, with his mouth stretched almost like a smile. Bobby can’t help it: he flinches. He’d known, even, that Buck would come, but there are times when Buck moves without making a sound, entering or leaving a room without anyone the wiser. Bobby’s still not quite used to it.
“Hey,” he says. “Need some help?”
“Of course.” Bobby hands him a head of garlic that he’d put aside for exactly this purpose. Smashing garlic to peel the cloves can be its own form of therapy. “Could you mince this?”
Buck stares at the head of the garlic for a beat too long. “The… the whole thing?”
“We’ve got a big firehouse to feed.” And Buck could probably use the distraction. So what if the veggies are a little extra garlicky? “Just do as much as you can and don’t worry about the measurements.”
Buck grabs a knife and a cutting board, setting up shop next to Bobby, and for the next few minutes the only sound in the kitchen is their rhythmic chopping and the occasional slam of Buck smashing a garlic clove.
“I keep waiting for you to ask,” Buck says, slamming another clove.
Bobby halves a red onion. “Do you want me to?”
“No.”
“Should I do it anyway?”
An aggressive chop. “I just feel like everything should be fine already. But now there’s all these new problems, so much of it is my fault but I can’t fix anything. It was supposed to be over, Bobby.”
Bobby puts his knife down and looks directly at Buck. “What do you mean it’s ‘your fault’?”
“Well, Taylor Kelly is here because of me.”
“Taylor Kelly is here because of the Chief and her bosses. Not anything you did.”
Buck gives him an unimpressed look before turning back to his garlic.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Bobby sighs and touches Buck’s shoulder, turns him so they face each other. “Look,” he says, “I’m not a counselor, but I can tell you’ve been struggling with this… guilt for longer than just now. I won’t force you to do anything, but it could be really helpful to talk to someone. You’ve had a lot of trauma in your life. If you’re amenable, I can get it set up for you through the department. Healing’s not just physical, after all.”
“I don’t know that I’d call it trauma…”
“Everyone else on the planet would, kid. You’ve been hurting since the moment you walked into this station a year and a half ago.”
Buck flinches. “That obvious, huh?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Buck bites the inside of his cheek. “Okay,” he says after a moment. “If you think it will help?”
Bobby nods, unable to hold back a proud smile. “I do.”
(He’s had the forms for this filled out since that terrible day when Buck first revealed his Curse. When Buck mentioned his attempted suicide like it would make them feel better about the situation.)
“You’re way too happy about this,” Buck says.
“I’m normal happy about this.”
“It’s just therapy.”
“And I’m just happy to see you take steps to get better.” Bobby bumps his shoulder. “We’ll see what times Dr. Welles has available after dinner.”
“Okay. And Bobby?” Buck holds up a handful of finely minced garlic. “This is too much garlic.”
Bobby winces. “Okay, yeah. We’ll put some in the fridge for tomorrow.”
The alarm rings, and just like that they’re off on a call. If Bobby hums a little tune up in the front of the engine, that’s nobody’s business but his.