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“Uncle Buck! We’re here!” Jee yelled as she and Maddie let themselves into his house. Buck had known they were coming over, Maddie asked three days ago if he could watch Jee for the evening and texted him before she began driving over, and Buck had the front door unlocked.
“Hey,” he popped his head out of the kitchen to see his niece come running up to him and wrapping his legs in a hug. “How’s it going?”
Jee smiled up at him, large and wide. “Can we watch the baseball game?” she asked.
“Baseball?” Buck asked. Where did baseball come from? Last time he had babysat Jee they were working through all of the Disney Princess movies.
“Chimney signed her up for the T-ball league at the park last week,” Maddie said as she walked inside. “Baseball has become her new obsession.”
“Oh,” Buck said. “I don’t know if I get any baseball games on my TV.”
Jee’s smile fell slightly, on its way to turning into a frown. “But we can check, okay?” he said.
Jee looked to debate his offer for a second before she nodded. “Okay.”
“I can order pizza for you two if you want,” Maddie said as she helped Jee take off her shoes.
“You don’t have to do that,” Buck said. “I have food.”
“Buck, you’re watching our daughter for free,” Maddie said. “And we have points at Marco’s pizza that are going to expire soon, please?”
“Well, when you put it that way, sure.”
Maddie left a couple of minutes later, after she put the pizza order in and made sure she had Buck’s correct address for the delivery instructions. Which left Buck hoping and praying he had some sort of baseball game on TV.
Buck honestly had no idea if he got any of the baseball games on his TV, it wasn’t a sport he watched. Sports in general weren’t something he watched. He was much more of a ‘play rather than watch’ type of person, and baseball was something he never played either.
So he was pleasantly surprised to find a game pop up. The Orioles versus the Padres. He knew from growing up right across the state border from Baltimore that the Orioles were from Baltimore, and he was pretty sure the Padres were down in San Diego.
“Do you know either of these teams?” Buck asked Jee as he sat next to her on the couch.
Jee nodded. “The brown team is from San Diego,” she said.
“And do you know where the other guys are from?” Buck asked.
“No,” Jee said.
“They’re from Maryland,” Buck said. “All the way over on the other side of the country.”
Jee’s eyes widened. “That’s where you and Mommy are from, right?” she asked.
“Well, we’re from Pennsylvania, which is slightly to the North,” Buck explained as a notification on his phone went off. “The pizza’s here,” he said. “Can you stay here while I go grab it?” Jee nodded as Buck stood up to go to his front door.
As Buck got the pizza and made a stop in his kitchen to grab plates on his way back to the living room, he heard Jee call out to him. “Look Uncle Buck, it’s Tommy.”
“What?” Buck asked as he walked over to her.
Jee pointed at the TV. “Tommy’s the batter,” she repeated.
Buck looked at the guy in the center of the television, expecting to see a man who looked vaguely like his ex-boyfriend. Maybe a tall muscular guy with curly brown hair or something.
But no, that man looked almost exactly like Tommy, even down to the slightly curly hair that was shown when he took his helmet off.
He had a cleft chin too.
It was crazy.
“That guy does look like Tommy, doesn’t he?” Buck asked.
Jee nodded vigorously.
The man who looked like Tommy’s name popped up on the bottom of the screen.
Trent Fox.
As Buck watched the guy hit the ball and go to first base, all he could think of was how much the guy eerily looked like Tommy.
And now Buck was going to go to bed fantasizing about a world in which Tommy was a baseball player. Great.
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Everytime he thought back on it, Buck still thought it was weird that there was a baseball player who looked almost exactly like Tommy. It was almost like he was being sent a sign. But no, every other time he thought something like that, it had spectacularly blown up in his face.
So no, it was just a crazy, almost unbelievable coincidence. The baseball player probably didn’t even look that much like Tommy in person.
It had to be something with watching the game on TV though, right? Something about the camera distorting images and stuff?
But then Buck had googled the man’s name, trying to find another picture of him. And crap, the photos online looked even more like Tommy than the grainy TV footage.
It was a month later when Buck ran into the man in person. Or well, not the man. He didn’t run into any baseball player and the guy he ran into definitely wasn’t Tommy.
Unless Tommy went from being a firefighter pilot to a police officer, that was.
And Tommy wouldn’t do that, would he?
Buck was pretty sure that Tommy loved being a firefighter and pilot just as much as he did. Tommy definitely loved being a pilot as much as Buck loved firefighting.
Still though, first a baseball player, now a cop?
They had been called out to a SWAT call, just in case any injuries resulted from it and someone needed to be rushed off to the hospital when it was all over. Honestly, after they arrived at the call, it was a lot of waiting for someone to wave them over to respond to any injuries.
But after a while, about a dozen guys in handcuffs were led out of an old warehouse style building, and they had been called over the radios, none of the officers had been injured, and among the guys arrested, there weren’t any major injuries, but some that had a couple broken bones that needed to get taken to a hospital.
“Come on guys,” Chimney said as Hen drove one of the ambulances closer to the building. “Lets get this over with so we can go back.”
As he and Ravi were splitting one of the guys’ arms, Buck looked behind him as two of the SWAT officers were walking by. For a split second, he made eye contact with the taller guy, and then took in the man’s features.
Cleft chin.
Strong jawline.
Some blueish - gray eyes.
He looked like Tommy. Which was a strange thing to think about someone he had just glanced at.
Buck watched the officer walk away. He had a body profile just like Tommy too.
“Is it just me, or does he look familiar?” Buck asked Ravi, quickly pointing over at the Tommy lookalike mixed in with the group of SWAT officers.
Ravi squinted his eyes as he looked over at the group of officers. “Who are you talking about?” he asked.
Buck took a quick glance at the group of officers. “The guy all the way on our right,” he said. “Who does he remind you of?”
Ravi studied the man for a long moment. He didn’t ring any bells, and Ravi was pretty sure he had never met any of the LAPD SWAT officers before. “Never seen him before,” he said.
“Really?” Buck asked. “He doesn’t at all look like anyone we know?”
“No Buck, he doesn’t. Unless you want to be weird and go up to him.”
Buck took one more glance at the officer, and God did that man have a very uncanny resemblance with Tommy. Okay, maybe the guy had some dirt on his face and he was wearing a helmet, so Buck couldn’t exactly see what kind of hair he had, but Buck still had to think he looked like Tommy.
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Buck arrived at the hospital parking lot and looked at his phone screen as he got out of his car, seeing a text from Maddie just come in.
Maddie: Room 452, on the fourth floor
The other day, Chimney had gotten sick once again, not viral encephalitis or some weird lab virus, but some form of the flu that was bad enough Maddie had to take him to the hospital. The kids were at the Lee’s, and Buck had just gotten off of shift when Maddie asked if he could bring her something over for breakfast.
It was a simple enough ask, Buck figured, and Hen wanted him to send everyone an update on how Chimney was doing, despite the man himself texting all of them that morning that he was on his way to recovery and would probably be discharged later that afternoon.
But still, Buck went, picking up a bag of croissants and two coffees from a bakery along the way. He walked into the hospital’s main entrance, and walking down the main hallways, found the elevators about halfway down.
Pressing the button, he waited about thirty seconds for it to arrive, then Buck got onto the elevator without really looking at who else was inside. From seeing their legs out of the corner of his vision, he saw scrubs pants, so probably a doctor or nurse.
“What floor?” he heard the person ask.
“Oh, uh, fourth,” Buck said as he glanced up at the man for a second before turning back to his phone. Then after another second, something pulled him to look at the man’s face again.
And Buck couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
The man had gelled and slicked back hair, but if he replaced that with some curls on top…
He would have looked exactly like Tommy.
Even the man’s muscles were huge like Tommy.
For a long second, Buck thought it was Tommy standing on the elevator next to him.
But no, this man wasn’t Tommy. Tommy never styled his hair like that, all slicked back and everything. It looked wrong on him. And well… Tommy obviously wasn’t a doctor or anything.
But God, did he look like Tommy. From the chin to the muscles to the cheekbones.
“Can I help you with something?” the doctor asked. And yeah, he sounded nothing like Tommy with that gruff and cold tone.
“Um… no,” Buck said right as the doors opened to the fourth floor. “You’re just… you look like someone I know.”
The man hissed out a breath as Buck stood in the doorway of the elevator, stopping it from closing. “Please don’t say that stupid baseball player again.”
Buck blinked, surprised. So he and Jee weren’t the only ones who thought that. “No, a firefighter actually,” Buck said as he stepped out of the elevator, letting the door close, not waiting to see the doctor’s reaction.
As he walked down the hallway in search of Chimney’s room, Buck’s mind continued bouncing around. Another guy that looked suspiciously like Tommy, almost like he was being given a sign or something, but that was crazy thinking.
No one even agreed with him that the other two guys looked like Tommy, who would think that that doctor also did?
Buck sighed. He didn’t even have a picture of the doctor to show people how he looked like Tommy. And going to find the man was the last thing that Buck was going to do. The energy he was giving in the elevator made Buck feel like he wanted to bite Buck’s head off or something.
“Are you okay Buck?” Maddie asked when he finally walked up to Chimney’s room. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost?”
Buck shook his head, trying to rid his mind of the next Tommy lookalike he had found. Maddie and Chimney would never believe him no matter how he went about explaining it.
“No just… it’s nothing,” Buck waved Maddie’s questioning gaze off. Luckily, she went right along with him as he began telling her the story of how he had to stand in line for over twenty minutes for two croissants and two coffees.
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Buck never would have thought that someone could have a common face. Common facial features, sure that made sense. But a common face? That was impossible, wasn’t it? Especially among four people in the same city?
It was impossible. Yet it seemed that his ex-boyfriend, one Tommy Kinard, did in fact have one of those ‘common faces.’
How would he even explain this to Tommy the next time Buck saw him?
At this point, Buck thought that if he saw Tommy’s face again, he just shouldn’t get his hopes up. What was next, a truck driver? Grocery store clerk? Maybe even one of Jee’s school teachers or something?
He had never met any of Jee’s teachers though, so it probably wouldn’t be that.
Buck debated it with himself as he got out of the uber and walked into the bar Ravi and Eddie had begged him to come out with them that night. Why this one? Buck had no clue, but apparently both Ravi and Eddie had gotten into craft beers recently and this particular place had some good varieties.
The beer Buck ended up picking out was … alright. By no means great, and he probably wouldn’t order it again, but for tonight, it was the best sounding thing on the menu.
After Eddie finished his second drink, he stood up with the excuse of ‘going to talk to a friend across the bar real quick,’ leaving Buck and Ravi alone.
“Hey, do you see him over there?” Ravi said, pointing over Buck’s shoulder.
Buck turned around, expecting Ravi to be talking about Eddie doing something they’ll be able to rib him over on their next shift, but no, Eddie wasn’t over there. Who was over there…
Another Tommy lookalike standing at the bar.
It was a guy, yes. Even a guy that looked like Tommy. But he was what, the fourth guy in Los Angeles that Buck had seen in as many weeks.
“Yeah,” Buck said as he looked back at Ravi. “What do you want me to see over there?”
Ravi looked at Buck, wide eyes and silent. “That’s-” he pointed at the Tommy lookalike across the bar.
“A guy that looks like Tommy? There’s a lot of guys that look like him,” Buck said as he took another sip of beer.
Ravi was still looking at Buck like he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Are you… you’re not even making sense,” Ravi said. He stood up. “Wait here,” he told Buck as he walked up to the Tommy-lookalike at the bar.
Buck watched Ravi walk up to the man, tapping him on the shoulder and bringing him into a conversation. Well, this Tommy lookalike was definitely not the doctor guy he saw on the elevator last week.
Then Ravi pointed at Buck and the man looked over at him. Not wanting to look like a complete idiot, Buck was watching them after all, Buck tipped his glass at them in a wave.
The Tommy lookalike smiled at Buck, and then, to Buck’s great surprise, both he and Ravi started walking back over to the table. This Tommy lookalike was acting like he recognized Buck, and what was up with that?
“Evan,” Tommy greeted him when he came to stand in front of Buck’s chair.
Oh, this was a first, Buck thought. This Tommy lookalike knew his name.
“Tommy?” Buck asked, making sure the word sounded like a question. “You are Tommy, right?”
Tommy blinked, looking taken aback. “Um… yes?” he said. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
“You know there are a lot of guys that look like you?” Buck asked as he looked Tommy up and down. His build did look like Tommy’s, but so did the other three guys’.
Tommy laughed, and asked, “What?”
“See? I told you, man. He’s been seeing visions of you for the last month,” Ravi muttered from where he stood next to Tommy.
Buck sent Ravi a glare. “I wasn’t making any of that up,” he said.
Ravi rolled his eyes, while next to him, Tommy’s eyes gazed at Buck deeply. “So, who are these guys you think look like me?” he asked.