You give me fluff I’m striking back with angst! Or not you can run it either way lol
Buck kept the picture of Daniel from Maddie’s box. Tommy notices it one day and asks who the little boy is. 👀
He's not sure why he kept the picture.
It started off innocently enough when Maddie sat him down after he asked her to tell her more about Daniel and the intelligent, precocious child he had been.
He had taken the picture out of the box while she was telling stories of simpler times and stared at it for a good long time.
"You know, if you want it, you can keep it."
He'd questioned why he would want to keep it but after a beat, he told her he would take it, no explanation why. And she was great about not asking questions, because he had no reason for it that he could explain.
He'd taken it home and stuck it in between a couple of books and had forgotten about it for a long time.
Until Tommy, who had been perusing the shelves of Evan's modest book collection to borrow one to read during his downtime at work, pulled out an old worn copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, causing the picture to fall off the shelf.
Curious, he abandonned Mark Twain, returning the book on the shelf and picked up the photo. A less observant man would have assumed that it was an old picture of Evan, but Tommy noticed a key feature missing from the boy's face.
He took the photo to the kitchen and asked his boyfriend, flitting about in the kitchen nearby, "Hey, what's for dinner?"
"Pasta," came the reply from Evan, who hadn't turned around, still busy in the kitchen.
"Can I ask you something?" Tommy carefully asked as Evan turned around with the sauce he'd been working on to pour over the pasta on the counter. "Who's this in the picture?"
Evan stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of the photo he hadn't thought about a couple of years. And then he launched into the whole story about Daniel, and how he'd been the savior child whose parts hadn't been enough to save his older brother.
"I'm sorry, I hadn't meant to bring anything up, I just...the photo fell out of your book collection upstairs."
"It's okay...Maddie and I have talked about him and our parents...they're trying, but you know me, I do my best not to expect much from them. Therapy's been helping, you know?"
With a proud and happy smile, Evan announced, "Dinner is served."
