After two nights at Chimney's place, Buck finds himself passed on to Hen. Chimney drives, chattering the entire way, about everything and nothing all at once. Somewhere in the midst of it he mentions that Hen now 'gets to have her turn' with him, and as if somehow sensing exactly the cringing, guilty thought that sprung into Buck's mind upon hearing this, immediately continues with, "You know she was never gonna let me get away with keeping you all to myself. Can't hog our favorite Bourne Identity protagonist, me and Hen and Bobby have joint custody, it just wouldn't be fair."

There's an easy grin on Chimney's face like he's talking just to talk, but there's also something knowing in the look he shoots at Buck out of the corner of his eye at the next red light. It gives the impression that he'd said what he'd said for a pointed reason, like he'd known exactly what Buck had taken 'her turn' to mean. While Buck had gone straight to 'her turn to be stuck with him', Chimney course-corrected immediately to 'her turn to get to spend time with him', like that was some kind of valued commodity. The distinction sparks something warm in Buck's chest and he looks out the window, hoping it's not too obvious on his face.

The hand-off is executed without a hitch, Buck passed from Chimney's metaphorical custody and into that of Hen and her wife, Karen. He's introduced to Karen, waving and smiling awkwardly at her, saying, "Nice to meet you, ma'am." It was an instinct born of the uncomfortable, unsteady ground Buck feels like he's standing on, defaulting to the most placatingly respectful form of address he can think of.

"Ma'am? Ma'am?" The response, shocked and slightly amused, indicates they have most definitely met before, and this is not what Buck is generally supposed to call his coworker slash friend's wife. She shakes her head and frowns at him with a combination of amusement and unnerved surprise, like she hadn't quite believed what she'd been told about his memory being gone completely until just now, and says, "I'm not that much older than you."

"Sorry, what, uh…" Buck clears his throat. "What do I usually call you?" He's got to get used to this, to asking these kinds of questions. It's been essentially three days since his injury and his memory shows no sign of returning. Until it does, he can't trip over the question every time he has to ask someone basic information about himself or their relationship.

"Karen," she tells him, the answer simply presented and without any of the stilting inflection the inquiry had held. "Come on in, we'll get you set up in the spare room."

The spare room in the Wilson house is nice, the bedspread comfortable and neatly made over the mattress. There's a duffel on a chair that Hen points out, saying that she'd gone back to his house and retrieved some of his clothes and things while he was still at Chimney's apartment. He thanks her absently, still looking around, searching for something familiar, trying to figure out if he's ever stayed in this spare room before. Just like every other time he's exercised that particular instinct in the last few days, it yields no results save for frustration and negative space, and Buck shakes his head, dismissing it and feeling foolish for having tried at all.

Since the hospital-prescribed waiting period has passed, Buck is allowed to get his head wet now. He's not supposed to soak his stitches but he's at least permitted to wash his hair, and he spends a long time just standing under the hot water, trying to let go of the tense ache in his muscles, built up over the last three days. By the time he's out, dressed in clothes Hen retrieved from his house, dinner is well underway, and Hen and Karen's son is home from his after-school program.

Denny is a good kid, who looks at Buck with wide, curious eyes when they 'meet' in the living room. Buck smiles at him and tries to look normal, whatever his normal looks like. He's not quite sure what, exactly, Denny has been told about what's going on with him, and he's not about to be the one to reveal more than the boy's supposed to know.

"You really don't remember anything at all?" It's blunt and to the point, Denny's voice fascinated and baffled, and Hen's head snaps up from where she'd been stowing her son's backpack in the hallway closet.

"Denny," she says, sharp and rebuking, cringing apologetically at Buck.

"It's okay," Buck tells her, then turns his attention back to Denny. It's kind of refreshing, honestly, that there's at least one person who isn't tiptoeing around his condition, the swiss cheese that's been made of his mind, his identity. "Nothing at all," he says, shrugging. "They had to tell me what my name was at the hospital."

"Wow." Denny responds, eyebrows up high. Rather than scared or uncomfortable, he seems impressed and interested, which is definitely preferable to what Buck had been half-expecting. Before he can ask anything more, he's quickly distracted by a sound from the kitchen, darting in to see what Karen is doing.

"Sorry about that," says Hen when he's out of earshot, shaking her head. "We told him not to ask any rude questions, but y'know… Kids. If you don't want to talk about it, you can just tell him, he knows not to bother people when they don't like to answer questions about something."

"It really is okay." And, somewhat surprisingly, Buck is telling the truth. He hadn't known what it would be like to actually get directly questioned about what was going on with him, Chimney, Hen, and Karen thus far taking the approach of letting him guide conversations on the topic. "It's gotta be weird for him, if I was a kid I'd probably ask."

"Well, if you're sure. Just tell him to knock it off when you're tired of it. You know, he's really excited you're staying," Hen tells him, smiling a little and looking in the direction her son's run off to, chattering faintly in the background with her wife. It's an excruciating domestic sound, and the pause in the conversation is just long enough that Buck feels a sharp squeeze in his heart. It's like his body itself knows he's not supposed to be here, that he's a strange, lost interloper, interrupting something safe and calm and stable.

Throughout dinner, there's enough steady, idle chatter that Buck isn't left in his thoughts for long enough for the feeling to return. Denny talks endlessly about his day, his school, his friends, the snake the local zoo's reptile keeper brought in for a hands-on learning day. Hen looks faintly ill at that part of the conversation, and Buck seizes ahold of that piece of information, filing it possessively away with all of the other tidbits he's managed to collect about the people he apparently spends the most time with. Hen doesn't like snakes.

After dinner, Buck doesn't know what to do with himself. Denny takes off after being excused to do his homework, and he hovers uncertainly in the doorway of the kitchen, until spotting the sink, filling up slowly as Hen brings dishes in from the dining room. He walks over and turns the faucet on, grabbing a green and yellow sponge off the edge of the sink and starting to clean the plates. Footsteps sound as Hen brings in a set of water glasses, but they don't retreat like he was expecting. When she is still and silent for long enough that something has obviously interrupted her clean-up routine, Buck pauses, glancing to the side.

Hen, standing by the counter, is regarding him with an odd expression, contemplative and soft in a way Buck can't quite describe.

"What?" he asks, unable to help the hint of reflexive defensiveness that creeps into the word.

"Nothing," she says, still smiling slightly at him.

Unable to bear the gently piercing scrutiny of her attention directly any longer, Buck turns back to what he's doing. The plate he was washing is clean now, and he looks around for what to do with it. His hands, clutching the water-heated ceramic, are wet and soapy, unhelpful for the next step of this process. It's in looking for some kind of drying rack or towel that he catches sight of the dishwasher, built very obviously into the cupboard maybe five feet away from where he currently stands. In his searching need for something constructive to do, Buck has inadvertently created more work for everyone, when he really ought to have just been loading the dishwasher. Before he can apologize or get too deep in that line of thought, someone else's hands come into view, warm brown passing over pale peach to take the plate from him.

A towel set on the counter on her right, Hen is now standing right next to him. She dries the dish wordlessly, putting it away in the cupboard, then holds her palm out expectantly. Together, they wash and dry the dishes, nothing to break the calm quiet of the room save the running of the water, the sound of Karen humming along to the radio out in the other room. The water is pleasantly hot and the routine of cleaning the dishes and passing them off to Hen is soothing and Buck loses track of time. It feels like before they've hardly begun, they're finished, and he's draining the sink while Hen wipes down the errant spatters of water and soap that have escaped during their process.

"Can we keep him?" The question comes abruptly, Karen's voice sounding from the kitchen doorway, flatly serious, but her eyes, when Buck looks over, contain a twinkle of mirth. Hen snorts and when Buck looks back at her, she's shaking her head, laughing. "Look, I'm just saying. He does dishes, babe. Buck," Karen says, now addressing him directly, "if this whole firefighter thing doesn't work out, how would you feel about live-in nanny?"

"I'll send you my resume," Buck says tentatively, unsure if this is something he usually does, if theirs is the kind of relationship he can tease in. Seems to him, your friend's wife could poke fun at you, but poking fun back might not be the best bet. The risk is rewarded when Karen's wide smile crinkles her eyes and Hen chokes on another laugh.

In the hour that follows, Denny Wilson very quickly moves very high up on Buck's list of favorite people - a list admittedly extremely short at the moment, limited severely by the fact that he doesn't really know any people, at least any who aren't Chimney, Bobby, or the Wilsons. For the most part, Denny is treating him like everything is completely normal, like he's got a cool firefighter over at his house, which is the peak of excitement at his age, even when your mom is one too. Sometimes he asks questions, about Buck's memory, his injuries, but they're direct and curious. Like this one.

"Does your head hurt?" the kid asks without looking up from what he's doing.

He's sprawled out on his stomach on the living room carpet, brightly colored plastic bricks scattered around him, sorted into various piles. The instructions for the Lego firehouse he and Buck are now building together are spread across Buck's lap, where he sits cross-legged, facing Denny. Glancing up, then looking back down, Buck shrugs.

He answers the question with the same casual ease Denny asked it with, saying, "Yeah. Not as much as it did at first, though. I hit it pretty hard."

"That sucks," Denny says solemnly, and Buck nods, the corner of his mouth twitching up faintly.

"Yeah, it does."

They work on the Lego set for a while longer, until it's time for Denny to go to bed. He does so with only minor protests, and as Karen leaves with him upstairs, Hen comes out into the living room. She leans on the wall by the doorway, doesn't say anything for several long moments. Buck looks down at his hands, gathering the Lego pieces up into a plastic tub. He puts the half-finished structure in last, lifting it with slow, careful movements to avoid breaking it apart. It wouldn't be right, to destroy his and Denny's evening of hard work.

"You're the one that gave that to him, you know. The Lego firehouse set."

Buck looks up at that, making eye contact with Hen. A light frown takes up residence on his face, and he tries not to seem too eager for it, any amount of insight into his life, information about what kind of person he is.

"I am?" He's proud of the way his voice doesn't shake, though his mouth is dry and his fingers have stilled completely on the lid of the Lego storage tub.

Nodding, Hen walks farther into the room and sits on the couch, next to Buck's shoulder. "Yeah. He's been waiting to put it together until you came over, you promised to do it with him. You were gonna come over sometime next week, actually, so when Den found out you were coming tonight instead, he was ecstatic." There's a pause, and her face is so fond that Buck has to turn away from it. "Kids love you. It's kind of funny to watch, honestly, you're like the pied freakin' piper with them. Chim and I tease you about it, say it's because they know you're one of them."

There's mirth in her voice, light and happy. Buck's chest feels the same, and his laugh bubbles up in his lungs, joining hers. It's an odd feeling, to consciously realize this is the first time you can remember laughing.

Nobody drops him off when the next switch happens. Bobby comes to the Wilson house to pick him up. Walking to the car with his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, Buck feels like a kid being picked up after a sleepover. Once actually in the car, the a talk radio station playing quietly in the background and Bobby driving next to him, Buck feels oddly shy. His head hangs low, chin knocking against his chest when the vehicle hits a crack in the pavement, and though he searches, he doesn't find anything to say. All he finds are questions he doesn't ask, despite the fact that Bobby seems like the kind of person who has answers.

What do we talk about? Do we talk at all when it's not about work? Why did I forbid you from contacting my parents? Do I want to know? Is this what I'm normally like, or am I somebody you don't recognize? Do you think I'm ever going to remember?

What's going to happen to me if I don't?

It's a nondescript apartment complex they end up parked outside of, Bobby greeting one or two of his neighbors on the way inside. He holds the door for a woman who ends up entering the apartment across the hall from the one they stop at, and she gives Buck a friendly nod too, which brings about yet more questions - Are you just a friendly person? Or do you recognize me?

The inside of Bobby's apartment itself is on the small side but overall pretty nice. Buck likes the decor, mainly calm shades of blue and grey, with an old but comfortable looking couch taking up a wall in the modest living room already set up with blankets and pillows. It doesn't seem to pull out like the one he'd slept on at Chimney's place had, but it looks like the cushions are already deep enough and soft enough that it won't matter.

Setting his duffel carefully down next to the couch-turned-temporary-bed, Buck looks around again, and then over his shoulder at Bobby, who is depositing his keys in a dish by the door.

"It's a nice place, I like it," he says, feeling ridiculous the moment after it leaves his mouth. It's a truly pathetic, empty thing to say to somebody who you're at the very least close enough to that he's willing to sign up on the 'babysitting amnesiac Buck' roster. Bobby doesn't seem to have noticed the inadequacy of the first thing Buck has found to say since they were left alone together, instead taking his own survey of his apartment.

"I should hope so, you helped me get it set up like this."

It's a piece of information that startles Buck, unable to help the reflexive, "What? I did?" that comes out of his mouth, absolutely baffled. At least that explains why he's taken such an instant, approving stance on how things look, in a more specific way than he had in either Chimney or Hen's places of residence.

"It was in a bad way for a while," Bobby says in explanation, something odd about his tone of voice. His expression has gone strange as well, distant and contemplative like maybe he isn't just talking about the apartment. This theory is confirmed when he takes his focus off the walls and carpeting, the furniture and books stacked on the kitchen counter, and looks over at Buck. "So was I. This place and me, we were both a mess. You helped. You all did, but you especially. You were really insistent that my apartment needed fixing, so I have curtains now, and they match my lamp."

The curtains do indeed match the lamp, Buck notes. Getting focused on this distracts him from the lump in his throat for about five seconds, and then it's all he can think about, everything present in and missing from that sentence. Bobby doesn't explain what he'd meant by that, when he'd said he'd been a mess, and Buck doesn't push him on it. He's got at least some grasp of tact, or at least he hopes he does, and besides. He's supposed to already know. Whatever it was, he'd been there for it, and Bobby shouldn't have to explain whatever had been wrong with him all over again just because Buck can't remember.

Maybe it's still going on, and here Buck is, memory a whiteboard that's been erased completely clean, unaware that he's intruding when Bobby is already having a difficult time. It's impossible to know for sure, and so Buck is going to have to take it on blind faith that it's not a problem that he's here. It's something he's had to rely on a lot since the accident. Blind faith.

Bobby doesn't leave him a lot of time to get settled, which is probably a good thing. There's not a lot of settling to do, really, and too much empty space and nothing to fill it with hasn't exactly been a good thing for Buck these days. Soon enough, they're both in the kitchen, Bobby rummaging around in drawers and in the fridge, pulling things out and setting them up on the counter. Buck, assessing the items selected, couldn't for the life of him say what they were intended to make together.

"Where I'm from," Bobby tells him as he goes, placing a large glass pan on the cold, dormant stove-top, "there aren't a lot of occasions in life where it's not appropriate to make a hotdish. And though I've gotten to teach you a lot, this is one thing I hadn't gotten around to yet. Figured I'd teach you something new, so you wouldn't have to waste time learning something you were gonna remember anyway."

It's the first time anyone has said something like that with such a degree of certainty, firm in the belief that Buck will get his memories back, and soon enough that he won't have to relearn everything in the meantime. Hearing it makes his breath catch a little, and Buck clears his throat, irritated at his own response. He's been getting oddly emotional and off-balanced by far too much since waking up in the hospital, though he supposes at least part of that can be blamed on the concussion still spreading its effects across his behavior.

"Where is that, exactly?" he asks, instead of thinking too hard on Bobby teaching him things, on not being able to remember any of it now, on how that feels something akin to having failed. "Where you're from?"

"Minnesota."

Buck about chokes. "Minnesota? You're from Minnesota? And you moved here? I know Los Angeles has a hockey team, Bobby," though it's news to Buck that he knows this, the words coming out of his mouth without thought, "but we don't have any, like, ice."

The laugh he gets in response is more enthusiastic and lasts longer than Buck necessarily thinks is warranted, and he wonders a little bitterly if Bobby is humoring him or trying to make him feel better, until the older man straightens up and tells him, a little breathlessly, "You said, word for word, the exact same thing the first time you found that out." A long ten seconds while Bobby gets his breathing back under control, resuming his goal of organizing ingredients on the counter, and then he says, "You're not from here either, actually." Before Buck can ask, Bobby answers. "Pennsylvania. Wilkes-Barre, I think. Now. Hotdish."

Wordlessly, leaning back against the opposite counter in the small kitchen, Buck nods.

"Normally I'd make it with cream of mushroom soup," Bobby says, reaching up to pull a can out of the cupboard, "but you're allergic to mushrooms, so we're gonna go with cream of chicken."

Allergic to mushrooms. From Pennsylvania. Buck files the thoughts away, next to good with kids and estranged from family, adding them to his meager but slowly growing autobiography.

They cook together, side by side in Bobby's kitchen. Bobby gives him directions, telling him to cut carrots or grate cheddar cheese, with an easy familiarity that leads Buck to believe this is something they do together with some degree of frequency. The apartment is warm, and gets a few degrees warmer as the oven preheats, ground beef browning on the stove top with a soundtrack of quiet sizzling. Eventually, after the timer is set and the dishes are cleaned up and set in the dishwasher, all that's left to do is wait. While the hotdish cooks, Bobby waves Buck into the living room.

"Humor me for a minute," he says, lines deepening on his face as he takes Buck by the shoulders, pushing him to sit on the edge of the couch. "Let me check your stitches, make sure everything looks alright."

Rather than point out that Chimney and Hen would have noticed if there was something wrong with his stitches in the fifty-six odd times they checked, either by actually sitting Buck down to look or by stealing glances when they thought he wasn't paying attention, Buck obeys. He agreeably tilts his head when Bobby takes ahold of his jaw and moves him so that the stitches are illuminated by the lamp, the same one that matches the curtains. His other hand moves carefully through Buck's hair to get better visualization, and then a little longer than is justified by that, smoothing down wayward strands until he's satisfied, though satisfied with what, Buck couldn't say.

"Bruises doing alright?" Bobby asks, his voice a warm rumble from over Buck's head. Still and pliant in Bobby's hands, Buck just hums his agreement.

The fall from the roof had left him with more than just stitches and a scrambled brain. There was also deep, painful bruising, marking up his back and left side, where he'd taken the majority of the landing. He'd seen it when changing out of the hospital gown and each time he's changed his shirt or showered, and he knows from how it feels that there's worse damage where he can't see, and Buck is sure that if he were to try and get a glimpse, his back would still be painted in now yellow-green splotches. It feels better now than it had that first day, though, by leaps and bounds, so it's not a lie to say they're 'alright'. Something about that, not lying to Bobby, feels like it's important.

"Good. That's good." To the sound of a deep, measured breath from in front of him, Bobby's palm comes to settle over Buck's neck, thumb moving in a short, protective arc over the point of his pulse, thudding quietly in his throat. It's something that could feel deeply threatening, he supposes, the position of that hand, the strength he knows lies behind it, but it's not. It's the opposite, even. "Well, looks to me like you're going to be okay," is the final verdict on his condition.

Buck closes his eyes, focuses on the feeling of strong, gentle fingers still holding the side of his neck, and tells himself that he believes it. There's a dip in the cushion next to him, a shift in the touch, but Bobby doesn't let go. And in the time remaining not consumed by clean-up or the brief exam, Bobby continues to not let go, right until the moment the timer goes off, and dinner is ready.

It's not familiar, Buck wouldn't go that far. But something about this, standing here in this apartment he apparently helped decorate, looking at something he and Bobby made together - something Bobby taught him how to make… It doesn't feel familiar, but it feels right.