Chapter Text
incredible cover courtesy of @itzsmooches
(2025)
The thing that makes Buck lose it is, of all things, a goddamn frying pan.
To be fair, the monstrosity almost takes Buck out on a literal rather than metaphorical level first, spilling out of Eddie’s overhead kitchen cabinet alongside a veritable treasure trove of other knick-knacks. Eddie had only taken a few things out of the kitchen, saying with that devastating quirk of his lips that most of the stuff here’s yours anyways, Buck, making Buck bite back the words crawling up his throat in response -- but you’re not.
Because that’s the truth of it: Eddie’s not his, and neither is Chris. And even the possibility of it, the facade that Buck had clung to for years upon years, has now finally been lifted away, revealing an empty house in its wake.
Or maybe Buck is being mopey and dramatic. He thinks he deserves it.
So that’s where Buck is, emotionally speaking, as he holds the stainless steel monstrosity that almost took him out in his arms, sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor and trying not to cry. It’s not the pan’s fault that he feels tender and heart-worn. It’s a good pan, a pan that Buck had used to make the nice pork chops that Eddie was partial to, a pan that Buck had to wrestle away from Eddie when he caught him trying to make pancakes in it, scraping away dough from a charred bottom that he only just managed to save. It’s a little dinged up, sure, but it still has a place in the kitchen, it still has a place to belong.
“And now,” Buck says to the still air. “I’m overempathising with a frying pan.”
The sound of his phone is so sharp against the kitchen that for a second Buck thinks that the room is trying to answer him. He blinks at the light of his smartphone, Tia Pepa displayed on the screen like a mirage.
“Hello?” he answers, voice stuffy and half-expecting it to be an accidental dial. It’s not that Pepa never calls him- actually, she calls him fairly often, for repairs and updates on the Diaz boys or sometimes just to chat with her favorite white boy. It’s just that, well, Buck had somehow expected that to have disappeared, now that Eddie and Chris were both gone. After all, Buck had always been the hanger-on to the Diaz boys, trailing them and soaking up the affection they left in their wake like a stray begging for scraps.
“Evancito,” she says, warm and brusque in her tia Pepa way. “I need your help.”
Buck is on his feet before her sentence is finished, kitchen utensils scattered around him as he scrambles for the front door. “Are you alright? Do you need me to call dispatch? I’ll be there in fifteen- no, ten-”
“Ve más despacio, Buck,” Pepa interrupts him. “It is not an emergency, and I am still perfectly capable, as you are well aware.”
“Yes, tia Pepa,” Buck replies sheepishly, grabbing his keys with considerably less panic. To be fair, they had all been worried about Pepa after her heart attack, even though she always insisted that she was fine. It’s one of the things that Eddie had stressed over when he decided to move to El Paso, muttering about how none of the cousins lived in LA anymore, and Pepa being on her own.
It was a foregone choice that Buck offered to check up on her and keep her company, something he would’ve done regardless. He’d already been over to her house multiple times since the incident anyways, bearing loaves upon loaves of sourdough and tupperwares of soup and trays of sopapilla cheesecake bars, lingering afterwards for tea and subtle fussing that Pepa always saw straight through.
Still, Eddie had looked at him like it was a burden Buck had offered to take on instead of an offer happily made, eyes going big and dewy in that way that made Buck want to scream and hide away simultaneously.
Now, as Buck drives over to her house, he feels- not happy, not yet, with the spectre of the empty house still heavy behind him, but there’s something light in his chest at the fact that she called him first, that his promise will be fulfilled by her inviting him into her life, rather than him barging in.
He pulls into Pepa’s driveway exactly ten minutes later, walking up wooden steps that he helped fix months ago. The door swings open before he can even knock, Pepa pulling him down into an embrace that feels enveloping in the best way, despite the fact that she only comes up to his shoulders.
“Evancito,” she murmurs into the fabric of his tee. “It has been far too long.”
“It’s been a week,” Buck protests half-heartedly, wrapping his arms around her back and holding her tight. When they finally pull apart, she’s looking at him with a raised eyebrow, making him duck his head rather than hold her gaze. He’s pretty sure she can see the redness of his eyes, the blotchiness that his birthmark always takes on after a bout of tears. She’s merciful enough not to mention it.
“It has been far too long,” she repeats meaningfully, and Buck doesn’t bother arguing this time.
She pulls him into the doorway, and the interior feels so homey that Buck wants to cry a little more. Pictures line the walls, of Pepa and her kids, her and abuela, her and Ramon and Helena (Buck looks away from those), her and a young Eddie, painfully cute, her and Eddie and Chris, her and Eddie and Chris and Buck, all smiling for the cameras like they don’t know that life is coming for them like a train to the face.
“What’s the emergency, tia Pepa?” he asks, following her through her home with a little thrill that always came when he’s welcomed so easily by a Diaz.
“My church,” she explains. “They are having a potluck, and Lucia-” a low string of spanish that Buck, armed with Peruvian bar slang and Mexican spanish acceptable for abuela and Christopher ears, can only understand the general tone of. “- neglected to inform me until today that she cannot bring anything. Now I have to make twice the entrees, and I need someone with strong arms to prepare.”
She looks at him pointedly, and Buck smiles. “I do have strong arms,” he says, feeling like a child when Pepa pats his biceps approvingly.
“Yes, yes,” she says, entering the kitchen with him. “Now, you remember mama’s recipe for enchiladas rojas?”
Buck ducks his head, because yes, of course he remembers. It was perhaps the proudest moment of his life when, after coming over to Eddie’s for dinner, she’d walked into the kitchen where Buck was washing dishes, complimented his lasagna, and told him that next time, he should come over early to help her make enchiladas, si? When Buck had stared at her uncomprehendingly, she had patted his cheek and said that she was glad that somebody in her Eddito’s home could find their way around a kitchen, smiling at him until he stuttered out something in agreement.
Pepa’s kitchen is controlled chaos in the best way, warm-colored tiles and a gas stove setup that is old enough that both Buck and Eddie have offered to help install something less fire-hazardous. Pepa insists that this stove makes dishes taste better, though, so apparently the advice of two full-time firefighters doesn’t count for much in comparison.
“Now, Evancito,” she says, ruling with benevolent tyranny. “Prep the chicken, and I will get started on the sauce.”
“Yes, m’am!” Buck does a little salute, and Pepa flicks him with a dishtowel, a smile tilting the edges of her lips.
They work easily together - not with the effortlessness that Buck feels whenever he cooks with Bobby, after seven years and change of mentorship and the captain molding the foundations of his cooking skills, but with ease nonetheless. Debone, sear, braise, shred. Frying and flipping corn tortillas that Pepa grouses about having to buy because she doesn’t have time on such short notice to make so many by herself. Rolling delicate cigars of dough and meat with the uniformity of someone who remembers overfilling the tortillas and getting a lecture about it. Arrange, draping with sauce, cheese, and a little more sauce.
It takes the entirety of the day, and Buck has never been more thankful.
The kitchen fills with the scent of pepper and chicken and warm spices, Buck’s stomach giving a loud rumble in response. Buck flushes, ducks his head. Pepa just laughs.
“All those bites you snuck, and you’re still hungry?” she teases.
“Those were to test the flavor!” Buck insists, looking away at Pepa’s raised eyebrow. She shakes her head fondly, still, and hands him some leftover tortillas and rummages in her fridge, pulling out a cornucopia of leftovers, meat and beans and rice and homemade salsas. Buck wants to say that he doesn’t devour it all, but the truth is that Pepa barely manages to microwave anything before he’s descending on the food like a starved dog.
Pepa joins him, less ferociously but with equal appetite, and by the time the over timer goes off they’ve more or less cleared the table of anything edible.
Buck stays to help her package each tray, foil-wrapped with instructions written in marker on top. He washes dishes, clears the table, takes out the compost. Anything to stay. Still, he knows that he has to go back at some point, and as the afternoon turns to dusk he takes a deep breath, steels himself, puts on a smile that he hopes looks even a little convincing.
“I should be going,” he says, trying for something lighter than what he feels. Pepa looks at him with keen eyes over bags of enchiladas, the wrinkles in her brows furrowing, smoothing out. She shakes her head, takes a bag, hands it to him.
Buck fumbles for a moment. Blinks. “W-what?”
“Your portion, cariño,” she says, warm.
“Pepa.”
She pinches his cheek before he can say anything else in protest. “Shush,” she tells him. “You didn’t think that I would have you work all day for nothing, did you?”
“I wasn’t- I don’t need-”
“You don’t have to need anything for me to offer this to you,” she says plainly, devastating in the way that Diazes tend to be. “Evancito -- you are family, and we take care of each other.”
Buck opens his mouth, closes it, doesn’t know how to untangle the knot of love and grief in his heart. Pepa smiles like she knows anyways.
“Take it,” she says. And he does.
Later that night, Buck puts the tray in the fridge before lying down on the sofa. Outside of Pepa’s house, he doesn’t feel very hungry.
(2017)
Eddie doesn’t regret leaving El Paso, taking Christopher to somewhere where they can both breathe, but sometimes he…thinks, about the whole LA thing.
Finding an accessible place for Chris had been hard enough, working up the courage and swallowing his pride to ask tia Pepa and abuela for help taking care of Christopher while he’s at the academy was another task, but the academy itself is- well. He’s been through basic training and battlefields and fought his way through times worse than both, so it takes him a while to admit, even in the security of his own mind, that the academy is kicking his ass.
To be fair, it’s less the academy itself and the whole of things, the shock of suddenly being a single father and a firefighter-to-be and trying to hold all the pieces together without dropping anything. Christopher is his baby, his whole world, and the best kid on earth, but he’s also a small child with a lot of health complications, and Eddie finds himself sitting on the couch some evenings, head between his knees, trying to get himself together enough to face another day.
It’s worth it, he tells himself, again and again and again. For Chris, for Shannon, for Chris.
Still, at some point, it’s worth it begins to sound a lot like you deserve this.
(You deserve it, for Chris, for Shannon, for Chris.)
In between all of this, it doesn’t help that Eddie’s diet has dwindled to consisting mostly of takeout, frozen meals, and desperately-needed pockets of homemade food at abuela’s or Pepa’s. It’s usually leftovers, because Eddie doesn’t have time to have dinner with them despite their repeated requests, but reheated tamales made by abuela is still ten times better than plates of his kid’s dino-shaped chicken nuggets and increasingly spotty bananas.
It’s not dire, because at least Christopher is getting regular meals and vegetables into him, even if those vegetables are sometimes just microwaved frozen peas covered in ketchup. Eddie can survive.
Eddie tells himself this again after another long day at the academy, stumbling through his front door in the evening light. Abuela is in the living room, knitting something, the click of needles the loudest thing in their still house.
“Thanks again, ‘buela,” he sighs, dropping his bag to the floor and crossing the floor to press a kiss to her cheek. “Chris in bed?”
“The little corazón is asleep, si,” she confirms, patting his cheek as he sits beside her on the couch. She smells like rose-scented powder and warm spices, and Eddie wants to sink into it like he’s five years old again and she was the strongest person in his world.
He doesn’t, because he’s twenty-five and a father, twenty-five and a man now, as his dad would tell him. Instead, he smiles at her, and hopes that the dark circles under his eyes aren’t as visible in the shadows in his living room.
“Do you need a ride home?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “I am still capable of driving, mijo,” she scolds him lightly. Eddie ducks his head, suitably chastised. “I will be fine. But you, you make sure to have dinner, and go to sleep properly.”
“Si, si, abuela,” Eddie says.
“And remember to come over for dinner sometime, I know you have your academy, but is that an excuse to skip Sunday dinners?”
“No, abuela,” Eddie says dutifully. “Lo siento, I just have a lot on my plate right now- not just the academy, I also have to find a new pediatrician for Chris, and switch over all his medical paperwork, and see if there are any schools nearby, and check their accommodations-”
“Eddito,” she interrupts him. “One thing at a time, or you will work yourself to death.”
“But, ‘buela-”
“No le busques tres pies al gato sabiendo que tiene cuatro, mijo.” she says, an air of finality in her voice. “Focus on what is in front of you. You are struggling right now, and you need to take care of yourself before being able to take on the world.”
“It’s not the world, it’s- Christopher,” which is to say that it’s more important than the world, to Eddie.
Abuela shakes her head again, but drops the subject. She kisses his cheek before leaving, drawing a cross in front of his chest. He lets her, doesn’t tell her that he has stopped having faith in any kindness given freely a long time ago.
Afterwards, he showers off the sweat from a full day’s work, slips into his son’s room. Christopher’s face is small and slack, a stuffed dinosaur Shannon got for him in his arms. Eddie leans down, presses a kiss to his forehead. Chris only shuffles slightly, curling towards him like a sunflower to the sun.
“Night, mijo,” Eddie murmurs. If nothing else, he can take pride in this, that his son reaches for him even in sleep.
He walks into the kitchen, intent on scrounging up whatever he can from the bare shelves. He blinks when he opens the doors to find the light of the interior illuminating an aluminum tray, wrapped with more aluminum with sharpie’d words on top.
Bake at 400°F for 10 minutes with aluminum on, then remove and bake for another 5-10 minutes, or until the cheese is golden brown. Enjoy :)
Eddie stares. Blinks. Stares some more. Slowly, like it’s a dream, he takes the tray out, removes the aluminum foil. Red sauce and cheese stare back at him, the scent potent enough that he’s tempted to take a spoon to the cold tortillas.
He takes out his phone: Abuela, you shouldn’t have.
She doesn’t answer, probably still on her way home. Still, he puts his phone on the counter, hesitates, then leaves the tray in the fridge and fishes out some leftover takeout instead. It’s ashes in his mouth, but it’s worth it for the next day, when Chris near shrieks in delight as Eddie places the full, steaming tray on the table at dinner.
For a moment, Eddie is full and warm, his kid is grinning with sauce-stained cheeks, and making LA home feels almost within reach.