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Chapter Text

The last morning before Eddie’s life began to change forever started with a nightmare. 

He wasn’t always so lucky to wake up before the helicopter crashed. 

The feeling of falling was what jolted him awake and Eddie barely processed the world moving around him before he found himself sitting upright in his bed in the bunk room, sheets twisted across his waist and shirt clinging to his chest with an uncomfortable dampness that often accompanied his worst dreams. His throat felt dry as he drew in a shaky breath, planting his hands against the mattress to keep himself steady as he felt a tremor snake up his spine. 

Something about this one had felt more real than the others- he wasn’t sure why.

My name is Eddie Diaz, he thought to himself, mentally repeating the grounding mantra Frank introduced him to in one of their recent sessions.  I am in Los Angeles, California. I am safe.

The more Eddie ran through those words, the more he started to actually believe them. 

Slowly, the thudding rhythm of rotors in his head was replaced by the hammering of his pulse in his ears, but it was steadying by the second, fading and settling into a more familiar pace with each breath. Finally, Eddie released a shuddering exhale as he settled back down onto the bed and adjusted his head on the pillow, gripping the sheets beneath him so tight he was worried he might tear through them as he tried to adjust to the reality of his surroundings once again. 

The darkness of the bunk room was a stark contrast to the blinding brightness of the desert hellscape in his nightmare, so dissonant and jarring that he was almost tempted to get up and pull aside the shades on the window to see the lights of the city outside. Just to convince himself that the horizon of sand and death was only inside his head and not outside these walls. That the way his LAFD shirt was plastered to his chest with cold sweat wasn’t because of the unbearable Afghanistan heat. That the soft snores he could hear rumbling over the short wall separating the bed next to him were from Chimney, not Norwhal or Mills. 

Dios, he could still hear her screaming. A scream that pierced through the haze of sand and blood in the air and echoed through his nightmares. 

A scream that followed him home. 

He needed to know he was home. 

Without thinking, he turned to look at Buck. 

Although their beds were more informally claimed than assigned, Buck and Eddie had been sleeping in the same arrangement since the day he started at the station and it hadn’t stopped since then. The beds were grouped in twos, each pair split by a low wall between the mattresses to offer privacy, and Chimney was on the other side of Eddie’s. Buck lay asleep in the closest bed of the pair next to them on the open side, perfectly in view with only a few feet of floor and space separating him from Eddie. If he were to reach out his left arm, his fingertips would almost brush Buck’s shoulder as he slept precariously close to the edge of the full-size mattress. The closeness was enough so that on sleepless nights they could pass their phones back and forth, steal the other’s charger when needed, or simply just turn and look at each other, exchanging whispered or wordless conversations that they always seemed to perfectly understand until one or both or neither fell asleep. 

All these years combined, Eddie had spent more time sleeping beside Buck a bed apart than in the same bed as Shannon. There was a joke in there somewhere. Maybe one of them had told it before. 

But something about having Buck right there in front of Eddie always settled him. It wasn’t just pure proximity. They’d be physically closer if Buck was sleeping where Chim was with only three inches of painted wood to keep them apart, but the idea of having a wall barricading him and Buck apart like that just unnerved him for a reason he couldn’t quite manage to articulate. He slept easier when they were in each other’s sight, parallel, within reach, where Eddie could see the rise and fall of his chest and know he was breathing, or the flutter of his eyelids as he started to wake up. 

He wouldn’t admit it to anyone other than his therapist, but lately he was beginning to suspect he slept better at the station than in his own bed at home. 

There was a cabinet door in Eddie’s room because of it. He’d found it in the garage when they first moved into the house, probably left over from the kitchen being remodeled by the previous owners to spruce the place up before putting it on the market, and always told himself it would make it to the curb one day but just never did. Now, he used it to keep his door shut at night, propping it up against it so the weight of it pushed the door shut and kept it there. 

It was both irrational and practical, in his mind because when Buck broke his door down last year he’d snapped through the old lock, but he’d also inadvertently brought the whole thing off the hinges a bit so it never closed all the way anymore. Eddie forgot that detail when they were patching up the walls, just accepting that he’d have to go to the hardware store on a day off and get what he needed to fix it himself. Except he never did. He wasn’t sure why. But not being able to keep his door shut at night began to fray at the edges of his psyche and send unease crawling up his spine until one night he shoved his full laundry basket in front of it and got a decent six hours of sleep because of it. 

But his laundry basket wasn’t always full. 

Hence, the piece of wood. It was a little heavy, solid, and while it didn’t fully calm the prickle of anxiety in his mind at night it dampened it enough for him to close his eyes and hope for the best. Sometimes that was all he could do. It made enough sense to him, except Marisol once asked why he kept a random piece of wood in his room, suggesting he just throw it out, so he just shrugged and tumbled into bed with her to avoid answering the question. 

Eddie slept worse when she was over anyway. Even when she held him or stroked her hands through his hair, nothing could take his mind off the fact that somehow, for some inexplicable reason, something was incredibly wrong.

It only stopped when he slept in the bunk room. 

“It’s called hypervigilance,” Frank explained during one session after Eddie haltingly opened up about his coping mechanism, fearing judgment but hoping for answers all the same- which he got more often than not. “It can present in many different ways for individuals with post-traumatic stress. Some people find it difficult to eat food prepared by others during episodes because they’re afraid it’s been poisoned but don’t know why. Some sleep with a weapon under their bed. Others-”

“Others keep a piece of wood in their room to hold the door shut,” Eddie muttered, following along as he fought against the urge to curl in on himself where he sat on the couch, his mind feeling a little too flayed apart by this session already. 

“And to alert you if someone tries to come in- it would fall and make a sound,” Frank pointed out to him, and he realized how true it was despite never consciously noticing that aspect of it. “It’s your mind’s way of trying to protect yourself in the real world.” 

He supposed it made sense. 

“So, Eddie, what else makes you feel safe?”

The answer had been easier to find than he thought.

He reached out for his phone on the nightstand and flipped it over, squinting at the sudden brightness of the screen and blinking until he could make out the time that overlaid the background- a picture he’d taken of Buck and Christopher at the botanical gardens a few weekends before, the two embracing with arms wrapped around the other’s backs and clasped in front, faces glowing with identical smiles of giddy joy as they looked toward Eddie. It had done something strange to his heart to see how tall Chris was growing now, no longer clamoring for piggyback rides from him or Buck to get a higher vantage point- or even just for fun. Here, Chris stood side by side with Buck, taller than he’d ever been, and he could already see the young man he was becoming. 

Eddie loved that kid more than life itself, but damn, he really needed that growth spurt to slow down before they had to blow another couple hundred dollars on a new wardrobe because all his sleeves and pants were too short again. 

The screen began to dim and he tapped it so the background lit in full color again. In the photo, the top of Chris’ curly-haired head was tilted close to Buck’s shoulder, his fingers wrapped securely around the double banded tattoo on his friend’s forearm for stability as Eddie struggled to both take the picture and keep hold of the crutches at the same time. The two of them looked so heartwarmingly amused, Chris frozen in a laugh and Buck’s grin almost as teasing as it was adoring.

Oh, Eddie realized a little late, the ghost of a tired grin sliding across his face. They’d been laughing at him.

Well, that explained it. 

Looking at the time again and actually paying attention to it, he stifled a groan when he saw there were still three more hours before their alarms went off and B shift started trickling in to get an early breakfast or workout in. He already knew this was going to be a long three hours. There was no going back to sleep now- not when he knew what was waiting for him behind closed eyes. 

Sliding his phone into his pocket, Eddie grabbed his boots from under the bed and put them on quietly, keeping a careful watch on any shift in Buck’s features that might indicate he was about to wake up. Nothing. 

Lucky bastard, Eddie thought fondly, hoping his dreams were treating him much better than his own as he made his way out of the bunk room.

The station held a liminal calm at this hour of the night but it was a familiar kind of silence, one that felt comforting and reassuring as he cataloged the background sounds that made up the breath and blood of the building. The sound of water in the pipes, the whisper of the ventilation, and the dance of lights across the bay doors as cars rumbled past on the street. It was a different world than the one that held the silent symphony of conversations, the clattering of machinery and the blaring of alarms. 

It was always strange being the only one awake. 

Sound traveled in the truck bay and his own footsteps seemed to follow him as he went through the motions of his task list. He showered off the uncomfortable layer of sweat that clung to his skin and replaced the scent of blood and metal with Old Spice, changed back into his uniform with the sleep clothes stowed into the laundry bag in his locker, and convinced himself to get through half a glass of water as he sat down on the couch up in the loft, passing the time by scrolling through his phone. 

Sometime after catching up on emails from Christopher’s school and checking the weather for the day, he ended up on Instagram, staring down at a profile that hadn’t posted anything in over a year. Still, he went through the photos post by post, looking at the captions and smiling faces and how a certain woman stood out to him among all the others like she was the only one who mattered among them. Because to Eddie, that was true. 

In that world of digital squares and photos, he could almost believe she was still alive.

Frank would actively discourage that kind of thinking. 

“Who’s that?” a voice suddenly asked out of nowhere and Eddie wasn’t proud of how he visibly startled, close to dropping his phone as he looked up to see Buck looking over his shoulder, somehow making it all the way from the stairs without him even noticing. He’d been fast asleep when Eddie left him in the bunk room, but upon waking up and seeing that Eddie was missing likely just decided he should check on him wherever he was.

It wasn’t Buck’s fault that Eddie’s head was thousands of miles away, but still-

“Dios, tu idiota,” Eddie gritted his teeth, splaying a hand flat against his sternum and willing his heart to slow down. “Buck, you scared the living hell out of me.”

“I think I scared the Spanish out of you, actually,” Buck noted, but he looked genuinely apologetic as he sank down on the couch beside Eddie and left a Christopher-sized amount of space between them just like he did on their movie or video game nights. The fact that making space for Chris was ingrained as a habit for him, even when he wasn’t there, made Eddie’s heart swell with a sudden surge of affection that took him off guard in the way only Buck seemed to be able to do. 

It made him feel slightly selfish considering Buck probably had his own reason for not being able to sleep anymore, but he was glad he was awake with him now. 

“Anita Mills,” Eddie found himself finally answering. Buck looked thrown for a moment like he’d forgotten that he even asked the question a few seconds ago, glancing at Eddie’s face curiously before understanding and turning his focus back to the photo of the woman on the phone screen. 

The confusion seemed to ease from his expression as he connected the name to the story associated with it- one that ended with Eddie taking a baseball bat to almost everything he owned and Buck breaking down his door, staying by his side until they were ready to pick up the pieces together. That was all Buck knew about her- what her death had done to him. It had always been enough until now.

“Your friend from the army?” he asked anyway and Eddie nodded, passing the phone over to him so Buck could see the photo he’d been staring at when he walked up. It was a post from a couple years back showing a grinning Mills posing on a hiking trail with an expanse of water and mountains behind her. The location tag said it was in Yosemite which made sense- she’d once mentioned she grew up somewhere around Vallejo before moving to Santa Barbara with her girlfriend. All those years after he left El Paso they’d been living two hours from each other with traffic. Eddie just didn’t know why it never occurred to him to try and find her out here while she was still around to be found.

Grief was a strange thing, Eddie was learning as the years went on, though. Out of everything in their unit, Mills was the person he’d been closest to. She’d been his confidante and therapist at times when he was trying to take in all the information about Christopher’s condition that Shannon had been relaying to him. She knew enough Spanish to keep up in a conversation and they’d get a kick out of trash-talking the others without them knowing it. Still, even after they parted ways, they’d only exchanged maybe one or two phone calls and a handful of texts before drifting apart as he struggled through working three jobs and navigating single parenthood, too overwhelmed and burnt out to fathom something like maintaining a friendship. 

Her death had impacted him the most out of anyone’s. 

“She had an Instagram account,” Eddie gestured at his phone in Buck’s hand, feeling a little strange about the fact that her face now existed in someone else’s head when it had been haunting his dreams not too long ago. “I found it last week. Her-” he swallowed roughly, unsure why he was even telling Buck this. “Her middle name was Grace. I never knew that.”

They sat in reverent silence for a few minutes as Buck looked through the photos, leaning in so their shoulders were touching in a way that meant Eddie could see everything he was seeing or even take the phone back if he wanted to. But some part of him wanted Buck to see- to know about Mills and share these memories, even as he scrolled back far enough to find a picture Mills had taken together with Barnett in the rec tent, the two in their fatigues with Eddie in the background hunched over a tablet- probably on one of his calls with Shannon and Chris at the time. He wasn’t sure Buck had ever seen a photo of him in his army uniform. 

Looking at the date the photo was posted, it seemed like she’d put it up after coming home from that tour. It was long after the helicopter crash, but still too close. 

Buck passed the phone back and Eddie turned it off, gently tossing it onto the coffee table with a clatter. He wasn’t sure what to say or do now, leaning back into the couch and the reassuring pressure of Buck’s shoulder against his. They hadn’t been this close since the night of Chimney’s bachelor party- it had been a bourbon-tinted blur for the most part, but he swore he still had the sense memory of an arm slung around his neck, Eddie trusting his weight into Buck’s chest as he leaned back into him. He couldn’t believe that was weeks ago already. 

In the present, he could see the nervous tap of Buck’s fingers atop his thigh, the crease of his brow as he considered a question. “Will you talk to me about her?” 

Eddie was almost surprised enough to pull back, unable to hide the expression on his face. “Why?”

“Because she matters to you, Eddie,” Buck said softly and simply like it explained everything in the world, and Eddie didn’t miss the deliberate use of present tense that- well, he didn’t know how that made him feel. 

His throat was thick with emotion as he looked away, focusing on the dark screen of his phone on the table in front of them. “I didn’t even know her that well.”

“You did, though,” Buck sounded so sure, so confident, that it was enough to draw Eddie’s eyes back up to his, striking and pale in the dim light of the station’s loft. “Just because you didn’t know her middle name doesn’t mean you didn’t know who she was.”

Eddie scoffed doubtfully. “How do you figure?” 

Now it was Buck’s turn to look uncertain, the tapping on his leg ceasing as his eyes flicked down to the floor, broad shoulders rising with a measured breath so that his next words came out like an exhale, a confession. “Because…I feel that way about Daniel.”

Despite sitting on the couch beside Buck, Eddie felt like the floor had been knocked out from under him as he watched the empathetically solemn expression cross over Buck’s face like an eclipse. 

Just like Eddie never talked about the army, Buck almost rarely ever gave mention to his older brother- the child stopped in time whose legacy had shaped so much of who he had become. His heart ached with the memory of the day Buck found out about Daniel, unsure how he was supposed to comfort someone who discovered their very existence had been brought about for one specific purpose- and that every day following was irrevocably impacted by a grand lie. The ethics of what Buck’s parents had done were deeply questionable- and even though it wasn’t illegal, the implications and risks involved were on the extreme end of things. Eddie knew from his own research afterward, and what he’d heard from Buck, that savior siblings tended to develop psychological struggles that continued on into adulthood and that they were often less valued or cared for than the first child- which seemed to have been the case for him growing up. 

It was a kind of pain that he couldn’t fathom, but Buck somehow lived with that every single day. 

“Buck, you don’t have to-” Eddie’s heart stuttered as it was overtaken with guilt, hoping he wasn’t feeling obligated to share this just because he’d opened up about Mills first. Buck just shook his head so he fell silent, giving him the space to speak. 

“I never got to know him when he was alive, obviously, and I- I think I kind of mythologized him a bit after I learned about him,” Buck admitted, picking at the drawstring of his sweatpants. Eddie quickly got the impression from his nervous motions that this was the first time he was sharing this with anyone. Still, he seemed determined to get through it, taking a breath to steady himself. “I started thinking about what life must have been like for him- the fear he must have felt as a kid with cancer, always being shuffled in and out of hospitals and getting sicker by the day. The strength and bravery he must have had as he fought against this incurable mutation of cells in his blood,” his voice was brittle, cracking at the edges, but he swallowed and continued on. “Kids with juvenile leukemia tend to become anemic because of it- they get tired easier and develop shortness of breath while playing and things. He missed being able to ride his bike. Maddie told me that.”

There was a burning behind his eyes and Eddie was seized by the urge to reach out and take Buck’s hand, to pull him into his arms and never let go. After all these years he still hadn’t managed to work out how Buck managed to draw his protective impulses out so intensely, but that was also a two-way street if he’d ever seen one. 

“I think about Daniel holding me as a baby,” Buck said with an almost shy smile as he looked over at Eddie, the words close to a whisper as their faces were mere inches apart. This close and Eddie could smell the aftershave Chris got him for his birthday, a brand that came in a blue bottle and reminded him of the ocean- something Buck was still afraid to touch. “But he was probably too weak to do that near the end. I think about him seeing me as a human being, a part of his family, and not just some spare parts that were supposed to be his last chance at life. Nobody told him I was a savior sibling- he died not knowing about the failed cell grafts. All these years-” 

He dragged his hands down his face and released a shuddering sigh that Eddie felt through their touching shoulders. “He was such a huge part of my life and I didn’t know about him for almost thirty years. I don’t even know what his favorite color was, Eddie. Maybe it was red, or blue, or- or- I don’t know. But the idea of him exists so strongly in my head that I dreamt a whole life for him when I was in my coma. So…I know him. He was my brother and he- he was a fighter.” 

Suddenly, that was all Eddie could take before he made the final decision to grab Buck’s hand, giving it a comforting squeeze that was instantly returned because they almost never needed words to know how to reassure one another. Buck’s smile was tired when he met his eyes again and that tracked, it was probably almost four in the morning, but it still stirred a warm feeling in Eddie’s chest that was enough to thaw the remainder of his doubts away. 

“You knew Mills,” Buck assured him, gripping his hand tighter. “You knew her through her actions, the experiences that you shared, and the memories you made together. That’s enough.”

Eddie believed him. Coming from Buck, he could believe it. 

He just needed a little time.

A few minutes drifted by and neither made the first move to untangle their grasp between them but eventually Eddie began to lose feeling in his fingers, his scarred knuckles tensing reflexively at the change in sensation. Buck seemed to silently catch on and their hands slid apart at the same time, remaining close in what little space was left between them on the couch. Shadows danced in the truck bay below as another car drove past. 

And then he was ready.

“I knew Mills was gay,” Eddie told Buck as he stared off at the opposite wall, unsure why that was what he was leading with, only that it was a place to start. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Buck pull his hoodie tighter around himself, tucking his hands under his arms to keep warm as he settled in to listen. “It was one of the first things she told me about herself. She didn’t mind who knew and she wasn’t shy about putting people in place if they had a problem with it, so I think sharing that was her way of scoping people out. Her wife- widow-” he paused at the correction, remembering a woman’s voice as she stumbled over those same words, still not used to it. “She was the one who answered the phone that night. Sarah. She’s an elementary school teacher in Santa Barbara. There’s one of those military homecoming videos on YouTube of Mills coming back from her second tour and surprising Sarah in her classroom.”

“That’s amazing,” Buck slouched down on the couch to tip his head against Eddie’s shoulder with a light smile. “You’ll have to show me sometime. If you want to.”

Maybe he would. It didn’t seem like an impossible thought now. They could watch it together on Buck’s iPad on a better night than this, one without nightmares and half-awake conversations in a sleeping firehouse. 

“It got about eighty views and I’m pretty sure I’m probably a quarter of them,” Eddie confessed, huffing out a small laugh as he remembered how many times he’d gone through that thirty second clip posted by Mills’ sister. Mills posted about her a lot and spoke of her just as much when they were passing time on assignments. “She has a sister- Aubrey- but she liked to call her Breezy. She just joined the Air Force a couple years back. I don’t really know what she’s up to now, or if she stuck with it.” 

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, either. The life of Aubrey Mills wasn’t one that his intersected with in any tangible way other than through her sister. She might not even know his name which made him feel a little odd knowing hers because he wasn’t even close enough for people to think of notifying him about Mills’ passing. Their shared grief as strangers would continue to be one that ran parallel, never crossing. 

“Mills, uh- she had ADHD. It’s not one of the disorders that automatically disqualifies you, but I think there were some pros and cons for her being in the army,” he explained, remembering some issues she’d mentioned about the strict guidelines and waivers, none of which deterred her in the least. “Her ability to focus was incredible. She was a sniper, total deadeye, and she was actually the one who clocked the missile on our three before the chopper went down. Hell of a lookout. But…”

Buck was patient as Eddie paused, working to choose his next words carefully. 

“There were moments where she’d just- I don’t know- she’d say things out of nowhere and they’d be kind of inappropriate or offensive given the situations we were in,” I didn’t name it, Eddie could hear her say cheerily as he tried to keep Greggs’ blood inside his body with his own hands. All the dead guys did. “Sometimes she’d lose that focus, though, and it really confused me because the night we crashed- when we were taking on heavy fire, I- I saw her look away. That’s when she got shot. I always got scared of something like that happening again.”

Hours later, she was smiling at him in the hospital tent like nothing had gone wrong to begin with. He was in the worst pain of his life, but Mills just smiled through it. That was how strong she was.

Eddie drew in a breath, pushing that memory aside as it threatened to bring others cascading in with it. There was only so much he could handle at a time and he was reaching his limit for the night, but he needed to get through this. “She was hilarious and brave and just so warm to be around. She was like a shot of espresso, always bringing us up when we were feeling down. We survived hell together so even if I didn’t know anything else, I know she was a fighter too. That’s who she was.”

Buck had been so quiet since his one comment that Eddie almost thought he’d fallen asleep in the middle of him talking, but when he turned his head he saw that Buck was staring back at him, lips parted and eyes shining with pride. That was the most he’d spoken about anything related to his time in the army outside of sessions with Frank, even counting the day he had to help Chris with his fourth grade presentation and explain the story of his silver star. There was no way Eddie could have foreseen taking this massive step at four in the morning on a random Friday, but of course Buck was the one who’d led him by the hand and shown him the way. Of course it was. 

“Wow,” Buck breathed as he shifted to sit up a bit more on the couch,  jostling Eddie slightly in the process. Any concept of personal space had seemingly left town as they’d drawn closer and closer without even thinking about it, but Eddie was getting too tired to analyze that. All he could focus on was the amazed look on Buck’s face as he processed the story and what it had taken for Eddie to even tell it. “I kinda feel like I know her now, too.”

It almost felt like a small weight had been lifted, distributed between the two of them. He felt lighter with each following breath, the nightmarish sound of Mills’ screams echoing in his mind  now replaced with a distant memory of her singing over their headsets as they struggled to keep an injured soldier they were transporting awake. Dios, she was a really bad singer. 

He cracked a smile. 

Maybe this was what healing was supposed to feel like. In the beginning, at least. 

“Thank you,” Eddie said, knowing it was utterly inadequate for two words to convey how much it meant for someone to take the time and patience to help alleviate even a fraction of the pressure that had been weighing on his thoughts as he fought to wrangle his grief. Somehow, like always, all it needed was Buck to take the tangled mess away from him and lay it out straight. 

There was that look again in Buck’s eyes, quiet and proud. “Ah, don’t mention it.”

Neither of them showed any intention of moving and whatever energy had gotten him out of bed and dressed at this hour was rapidly fading, leaving him sinking back into the comfortable couch and feeling some of the tension begin to leave his back and shoulders. With Buck there now, maybe Eddie could fall asleep again, even with the fear of the nightmares lurking behind his eyes. His arm had become wedged slightly behind Buck at some point and he was almost tempted to lean in further and trust him with more of his weight, chasing a sense of comfort he hadn’t been able to rely on someone for in a long time. 

But he didn’t. He wished he could, but he didn’t. 

“Can you-” Eddie’s mouth felt dry, the words heavy on his tongue. He hated asking for things, especially after all Buck had done for him in the past few minutes. “Can you talk to me about something?”

Buck made a half amused, half inquisitive sound. “Like what?”

“Anything,” he deferred, grateful that Buck didn’t seem put off by the request, just genuinely curious about what Eddie needed. Right now, that was a distraction. “There’s always something interesting going on up in that head of yours.”

“Thanks, I think?” Buck snorted, sounding like he was flagging a bit as well. “You really know how to make a guy feel special.”

“Buck,” Eddie closed his eyes, exhaustion washing over him. “Please.”

There was a brief moment of quiet where Eddie thought that Buck might have possibly just fallen asleep, but eventually he spoke, sounding a little excited like he’d suddenly gained a second wind. “Okay, do you remember that guy who had a stroke while on the road and his self driving car busted through the wall of the hospital?”

“Hard to forget.” 

“Well if you think those cars are bad here, San Francisco is on a whole other level. I've been reading about some of the issues they’re having with them lately and apparently since January of last year the San Francisco Fire Department reported almost ninety incidents where self-driving vehicles interfered with their emergency responses,” Buck explained, his tone as animated and enthusiastic as it always was when he went on his informational rants even as he kept his voice down. 

There was a certain joy he got, Eddie thought, when getting to talk about the things that interested him and having someone actually want to listen, and he was happy to indulge whenever possible. 

“The cars don’t recognize when first responders have blocked off scenes and so they just keep driving right into them- they’ve blocked ambulance access and stopped in front of hydrants- and it’s this whole massive problem,” Buck continued on, gaining traction with each word. “Thing is, with all the tech companies in the area, it’s like the city has become this testing ground for new technology, and the reduced frequency of incidents lately actually directly correlates to the slowing of operations at this one company…”

The next thing Eddie knew, the lights were coming on and he was waking up with a crick in his neck. 

Somehow during the night he’d ended up slouched into the corner of the couch with his head tilted onto his shoulder at a rough angle, and Buck-

A soft snore reached his ears and he blinked blearily, trying to make sense of the lack of sensation in his left arm and weight on his shoulder when he realized that it was all just because of Buck. The man had fallen asleep on Eddie, his upper body leaning against his side and head resting almost in the crook of his neck, enough for Eddie to hear and feel the slight warmth of each gentle exhale. 

This wasn’t the most compromising of positions, but he couldn’t gloss over the fact that despite the closeness of their relationship, something like this was incredibly new to them. He wasn’t sure of how to name the emotion that stirred in him, only that it was probably significant. Eddie fell asleep first, he knew that, because the last thing he remembered was the sound of Buck’s voice as he talked about the demonic robot cars of San Francisco. He fell asleep and Buck could have easily left him to return to the bunk room and get a couple more hours of shuteye in an actual bed.

It said something that Buck stayed. Eddie just couldn’t translate it. 

The sounds of the waking station eventually filtered into focus, footsteps and distant voices, the clank of weights shifting on the racks, and eventually someone’s throat clearing, only that one was much closer- and that was when Eddie saw Bobby walking over to them from the stairs with an amused smile tugging at his face as he surveyed their position on the couch. 

“You two know we have bunks downstairs for a reason, right?” Bobby tilted his head, eyes crinkling at the edges in the way they did when he was holding back a laugh. 

Eddie felt his face grow warm. “It’s not what it looks like.”

He wasn’t even sure what he thought it looked like, the two of them sprawled together on the couch like this. 

But Bobby just held up his hands in a steadying gesture, shaking his head. “I don’t think you have anything to be defensive about, Eddie, nobody’s calling HR. I’m just glad to see you got some sleep, I know you mentioned it’s been a little hard lately.” 

The reminder of how he ended up in this situation to begin with was a brutal crash back to reality and Eddie sighed, rubbing his eyes and running a hand over his hair. “I’m working on it.”

“I know you are, kid,” Bobby managed to sound so overwhelmingly sincere when he said it, patting Eddie’s shoulder with a proud smile and heading off the kitchen space behind them to get a start on breakfast.

Eddie was slightly floored by the affirmation of his efforts, the faith that Bobby had in him to know that even when it was hard he was trying- damn. His bar was a lot lower than he thought. Or maybe Bobby just had that effect on people. Both things could be true.  

He should have gotten up. Clearly it was sometime around six because the sun still hadn’t risen outside and the light chatter down below seemed to indicate the early birds of B shift were slowly trickling in either for an early workout or the promise of breakfast, but between the comfort of the couch, the reassuring warmth of Buck’s body heat, and the gentle clattering of Bobby cooking, it wasn’t hard for Eddie to be lulled back into a light sleep. 

That was until the unnecessarily loud snapping of gum woke him and he opened his eyes to see Chimney standing over them just as Bobby had- only he was staring with a curiously smug look on his face, jaw working as he chewed his gum and smiled at the same time.

“Oh, this is too cute,” he drawled in that cheerful way of his, waving a hand to indicate Eddie’s bleary face and Buck’s calm, sleeping one.  “Does this mean I won the bet?”

Bet?

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Eddie grumbled, pretty certain his left arm had either been secretly amputated or was pinned between Buck and the back of the couch and had lost all feeling in his sleep this second time around. The sun was out now and Buck was still down for the count, the only sign of life being that he was still letting out those soft little breaths against where his face was pressed into Eddie’s shoulder, sure to get creases from the seams of the uniform.  

Chim’s eyes widened like he had been struck by some divine epiphany, immediately fumbling for his phone with such urgency that his gum almost fell out of his mouth in the process. “Oh my God, you’re right, Maddie and Hen won’t believe me without evidence-”

Madre de Dios, it was too damn early for whatever this was. Eddie groaned and ran a hand down his face, sure he was about to get a headache from the change in atmospheric pressure from Hurricane Han. “I’m going to have Bobby write you up for harassment.” 

“Nah, he would never.”

“Maybe not in this instance, but I could put cayenne powder in your French toast if you don’t put your phone away,” Bobby chuckled, evidently entertained, and Eddie could almost imagine him holding the spice over the bowl like some Midwestern Bond villain. It was enough to get a laugh out of him after seeing the horrified look on Chim’s face. 

“Consider me a Luddite, Cap,” Chim tucked his phone into his back pocket and held his hands up in surrender, summoned over to their captain with the promise of coffee as the brewer clicked off.

The caffeine was clearly a compelling amnesiac for whatever harebrained bet he was talking about and Eddie was finally awake for good once the smell of coffee reached him, but Buck was only just starting to rouse as he let out a yawn, shifting a little but making no move to get up. Truthfully, Eddie could have gotten himself off the couch and let Buck fall without him there as support, but he wasn’t a dick like that, even when he couldn’t feel his damn arm. 

Still, he needed coffee. And it was way past get-the-hell-up o’clock for both of them. The last thing he needed was Hen or Ravi coming up and teasing them even further for sleeping through the final hours of their 24, especially when Chim was so convinced it would make some kind of comedic blackmail bait. Maybe he hadn’t fully kicked the encephalitis yet. 

Eddie never grew up with a brother but he was expecting this was something quite close to it- he loved Chim like family and it was actually really nice until it came down to who got the last of the mandu Albert taught Bobby how to make. Moral of the story- Eddie was not above buying replicas of the cursed bracelet off Amazon to hide around the station about it. 

“Buck, get up,” Eddie gently shook Buck’s shoulder, wondering how someone with so much energy during the day was infamously the opposite of a morning person.

“Don’t wanna,” Buck murmured, awake enough to respond but not enough to comply. 

“Babe, come on, I can’t feel my arms.”

Oh, hell, where did that come from? Eddie felt his face get hot again, certain it was at least visibly red to some degree. Maybe he wasn’t as awake as he thought because the term had just tumbled out like he’d said it a million times, but if Buck noticed his slip up he did a great job of hiding it. 

At least Chim was too far away to hear. Small mercies and all that. 

Eventually, Buck yawned and relented, getting up to go get changed into his uniform while Eddie went to go burn his mouth on his long overdue coffee. 

They parted ways at nine in the morning- Buck to go grab brunch with Tommy and Eddie to help Marisol start moving back out of his house. He talked about his nightmare with Frank at his appointment that afternoon but made no mention of how he managed to fall back asleep, or with whom, and neither of them pretended his lies of omission were a sign of progress. 

He slept horribly that night at home. 

———

“Engine 118, this is Dispatch,” Linda’s voice abruptly crackled over the radio frequency. “Please reroute to assist officers at an 11-80 on the corner of Sunset and 6th Avenue. Be advised, officers on scene have reported an active vehicle fire.”

“Copy that, Dispatch, en route now,” Bobby was swift to respond, the tone in the fire engine quickly shifting as they began to prepare for what they were heading into. Vehicle accidents with major injuries were some of the worst calls they could get- they had years of experience to back that up. 

The lights and sirens switched on and Hen and Chim did the same in the ambulance ahead of them. 

The first two calls of their next shift were relatively typical- birthday decorations too close to the grill in the backyard and a man who accidentally threw corn starch on an electrical fire instead of baking soda in a house he was renting from his step-uncle. That one had been a little ugly, but by the time they got back into the engine they were already cracking jokes about giving those scorched walls the landlord special and trading stories about times they’d lost their own security deposits on leases. Ravi looked like he was about to get gray hairs just listening to them which only made Buck laugh harder when he got a look at his face. 

And then the third call came. 

Eddie saw the playful smiles drop off each person’s face in the back of the engine, exchanging his own grim look with Buck before casting his gaze out the window. Out of habit, he reached up to pull the St. Christopher medal from beneath his turnout, absently running his thumb across the ridges of the seal and trying to ignore the uncanny sense of deja vu that was sinking into his bones and sending a visceral chill up his spine.

He felt Buck knock their knees together- it could’ve been an accident, their legs were slotted between each other as they sat in their opposite seats- but then he did it again, clearly trying to get Eddie’s attention. Frowning and turning away from the window to face Buck, he noticed his somber expression and realized there was no way to ignore the gravity of the situation at hand.

Are you okay? Buck seemed to silently ask, tilting his head in question.

Of course he knew Eddie was thinking about Shannon. 

They’d responded to a few vehicle accidents in the area over the years since her death, but never this close to the place she was hit. Sunset and 6th was only one block southeast of the intersection of Rose and Rennie- the place where a three-way stop met a crosswalk and a car drove through a crowd of pedestrians on a sunny day. Coming from this direction, they could take Lincoln Boulevard onto Sunset and never even catch a glimpse of that crosswalk, but he would know it was there, hidden from view by the businesses and apartments between Rennie and 6th, but still there. 

Eddie couldn’t believe Buck remembered the street names. He knew them himself- it was hard to forget the place where your wife’s blood once stained the ground, but Buck- he had no reason to aside for Eddie’s sake. He didn’t even have to say it out loud, Eddie knew just from the look in his eyes. They were always good at that unspoken communication, perpetually existing on the same wavelength. 

I’ll be fine, Eddie gave a short nod and hoped it was true enough to be the end of it

He’d never been more wrong.

The houses of Mar Vista gave way to Venice storefronts and within minutes the sound of sirens was tearing through a mostly quiet residential block as they approached the scene of the wreck. With his back to Bobby, there was no seeing the full extent of the damage until he, Buck, Ravi, and West were piling out after their captain and heading toward the destruction.

Police cruisers blocked off the other points of the broad intersection, blue and red lights flashing across the pavement and nearby houses as a steady fire burned in the hood of one vehicle crushed up against a light pole on the sidewalk, the passenger side dented in from the impact of the second vehicle that sat eerily dead in the street against the curb. The front was facing the engine and ambulance so Eddie had a clear view of the crumpled front bumper and inflated airbag through the windshield, marks of red visible on the glass, and he tried to take a breath to prepare himself but the air tasted bitter like burnt rubber and smoke. Sensing Buck somewhere to his right, he held his fist slightly out from his side and felt Buck nudge it with his own fist- their own little sign of reassurance that whatever they had to take on, it was going to be together.

“We have got to stop meeting like this, Captain,” Athena approached them from where a group of officers was huddled together on the sidewalk keeping curious and concerned neighbors at bay. She patted her husband on the shoulder in greeting and fell into step with the team, leading them over to the two vehicles and gesturing toward a woman sitting on the opposite curb with another officer. “Alright, that young woman over there was the driver of the vehicle that got hit- looks like the collision sent her car into the pole she managed to get out on her own before it caught fire. Minor injuries as far as we can tell, but the other driver- it looks bad. A neighbor broke the driver’s window open with a hammer to try and get him out before we pulled him back.”

“Thanks, Athena,” Bobby gave a stiff nod and drew his shoulders back as he turned to assess his team. “Okay, Buck, you and I are going to get that fire under control- West, grab the CO2 canisters. Chim, go with Athena to check on the woman. Hen, Ravi, Eddie, I want you to focus on the other driver that’s still trapped- get him stable and get him out.”

“Copy that, Cap,” Eddie followed Hen’s lead with Ravi as everyone else voiced their assent and dispersed, watching as Buck jogged off with their captain toward the fire ahead of them- all too familiar of a sight. 

Their small group rushed over to the quiet car in the street- dark, sleek, slightly sporty. Eddie wasn’t much of a car person when it came to modern vehicles- his 1975 Chevelle was proof enough of that- but this thing looked too expensive to be in the state it was now. The front hadn’t sustained severe damage, yet it had clearly been enough to deploy the airbag which must have been where the extent of the injuries Athena alluded to came from. From the way the cars were aligned, the hoods were only a few feet apart- not enough room to get to the driver’s side window as Buck, Bobby, and West worked to get the fire under control. 

“Sir, can you hear me?” Hen called out as Ravi pried open the locked passenger door, holding it steady so she could slide into the seat and get close enough to the driver. Clearing aside the airbag, the worst of the injuries quickly came into view- a broken nose, a steady bleeding head wound from where his head cracked off the since-shattered window, and his left collarbone-

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Ravi admitted, coughing and turning away from the sight. Normally these kinds of injuries didn’t turn Eddie’s stomach as much after having seen them enough over the years, but he sympathized with Ravi as he surveyed the flushed face of the young man in the driver’s seat. He couldn’t be much older than an undergrad, barely an adult, and the bloodstained Caltech shirt that barely shifted with each shallow breath seemed to support this assessment. 

“Compound clavicular fracture, probably from the seatbelt,” Hen confirmed as she assessed the unresponsive man, sounding a little concerned as she looked out to Ravi and Eddie. “This is a lot of blood loss, the bone could have nicked the subclavian vein or artery. We can’t get the c-collar on like this without shifting that broken bone in a direction we don’t need it going. Eddie, can you climb into the back seat and see if you can get the foam one around his neck at a better angle?”

“On it,” Eddie took a smaller foam neck brace from her and reached through to manually unlock the back passenger side door. 

With the smell of the burning vehicle and the CO2 canisters going five feet away from him, he didn’t even notice the stench of alcohol until it hit him in a strong wave the second he got the door open, his feet sliding across bottles and crushed cans on the floorboard as he gingerly got himself into place behind the driver and got to work stabilizing his neck as Hen took his vitals as best she could. The smell was still strong when Eddie got closer to the young man, realizing that he could now notice the scent of beer on his breath. 

“Ravi,” Hen said carefully but firmly, jarring him out of his nauseated stupor. “You don’t have to look, but I need you to hand me some things from my medical bag while I work, okay?”

Swiftly, Ravi nodded, clearing his throat and taking on a more confident posture as he accepted the bag from her and followed her instructions, seemingly put more at ease by knowing what to do now. “Yeah- yeah, I got it.”

Eddie was attentive as Hen noted a probable concussion and had Ravi pass him a figure eight splint to immobilize the driver’s shoulders and keep some pressure off the broken collarbone. The air was far too warm inside the car and his hair was uncomfortably plastered to his forehead with sweat but it looked like Buck and the others seemed to have gotten the fire under control, the wave of heat inside the vehicle now slowly diminishing. Eddie raised an arm to wipe the sweat from his brow and as close as he was to the driver now, he could see that his face was discolored, almost chafed, rash-like, and- aside from the blood- strangely dry. 

“That looks like heatstroke,” Ravi observed as well and Eddie felt a small surge of pride toward him for overcoming his unease in the situation as adeptly as he’d been able to. “It’s barely spring, how is that possible?”

“I think he has anhidrosis,” Hen’s eyes were tight with concern behind her glasses as she assessed the man again like she was seeing him in a new light, pressing her lips tight as she mentally ran through her extensive medical knowledge to take stock of this new information. “See his skin?” she pointed at the driver’s face, lips scarred and cracked, his forehead and temples dry and flaky like a pale rash had overtaken them. “He’s been trapped less than five feet from a burning vehicle and hasn’t even broken a sweat. His body’s not regulating his temperature so that heat is just building. It might be due to a serious vitamin B12 deficiency- that can reduce bone mineral density which would explain the severity of the collarbone break.”

Eddie kicked at some of the liquor bottles littering the floorboard behind the passenger seat to draw her attention to them. “Alcoholism causes anhidrosis too, right?”

Hen’s eyes found him in the rearview mirror and she craned her neck around to see the floor, a worried crease forming on her brow. “Or in this case, likely exacerbated it.” She climbed out of the vehicle and waved over the top. “Cap!” 

Bobby looked up from passing off his empty canister to West and quickly wove his way between the vehicles to reach them. Buck was close behind, curious on what was going on now that the front of the Prius was reduced to a charred mess of parts rather than a blazing one. 

“Alright, guys, what’s the situation?”

“The situation is that it smells like the floor of a bar in here- our guy’s gotta be at least three times the legal limit, Cap,” Eddie reported grimly as Bobby ducked down to see through the broken driver’s side window.

“There’s probably enough empties in the back seat to stock one too,” Hen continued to explain, a familiar expression of stony resolve affixed itself to their captain’s features as he took in the scene before him. She’d managed to get some nasal packing into the driver’s nose to stem the flow of blood but it was still a gruesome sight, especially paired with how much was smeared alongside the kid’s face and neck. “This bleeding isn’t slowing down fast enough and based on the way his broken collarbone is sitting we’re one wrong move from nicking an artery or vein- I don’t know how we can transport him, but it’s gotta be careful and it’s gotta be quick.”

“With that much alcohol these wounds won’t clot anytime soon- he’ll bleed out before anything else clears his system,” Bobby agreed, eyes adamant as flint as he reached for his radio and stepped back, tugging Buck with him by the shoulder. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. Eddie, help Hen so she can keep assessing for more injuries. Buck, I want you and Ravi to go get the tools to work on detaching the driver’s seat completely. If we can’t move him we’ll have to take him as he is.” 

“On it, Cap,” Buck gave a quick salute as he jogged backwards, turning around and heading off to the engine with Ravi in tow. 

“Dispatch, this is Captain Nash, 118, tell Cedars-Sinai they’re gonna need a trauma surgeon standing by ready to do a blood transfusion,” Bobby rattled off the order into the radio as Eddie climbed out and made his way over to the driver’s side, carefully working on opening the door like he had with the other. “We have a young adult male presenting with severe blood loss, head trauma, potential alcohol poisoning, and serious trouble clotting. Hospital should do a complete body scan to check for any unknown internal injuries.” 

Glass rained down across Eddie’s gloved hands as he brushed the pieces loose to reach for the lock, the remains of the shattered window scattering on the ground next to a hammer- probably what the neighbor used to smash the window in. They were running on a ticking clock here but his instincts were keeping his head level as he went through the mechanical motions of his task at hand, glancing up only briefly to find Buck. He was still sorting through the tools with Ravi, his face and hair streaked with soot from the fire that made his light eyes stand out in stark contrast to the blackened marks, crystalline and adamant even from a distance. 

Eddie couldn’t explain it, but it was second nature to seek him out whenever they were separated, just to have that spatial understanding in his mind- it was as instinctive as wanting to know where Chris was, almost like they were an extension of himself. 

Whatever nerves had raised in that millisecond were settled now, leaving him to deal with the mess of twisted metal, broken glass, and a life that was fading by the minute.

“How’s he looking, Hen?” Eddie grunted, kicking the hammer away toward the curb as he pulled the door open, forcing Bobby to step aside to avoid getting hit by it as he shuffled in closer to the driver. He tried to tell himself that it was just the sheer amount of blood making the injuries look worse up close but there was no denying the reality that this was the type of call that could go either way now. The man was starting to stir a little bit, eyes fluttering beneath his closed eyelids, but that wasn’t a promising sign on its own- he was going to be in a world of pain once he was awake and field sedation was too dangerous with this level of intoxication.

“I think I should take your spot over there, he’s starting to wake up,” There was a beep as the forehead thermometer in her hand completed its reading and she held it back to read it, clearly not liking what she was seeing. “His temperature’s just over 102 degrees. I’m gonna need you to go grab some cold packs and a bag of saline in the back of the ambulance, we’ve gotta cool him down and run a line to start replacing some of his fluids.”

“Alright, take this side, I’ll get everything,” Eddie nodded and worked his way around the vehicle, rushing off to get the supplies as Hen began to move to take his place on the other side. 

And that was the moment everything went wrong. 

Eddie was feet away from the front of the ambulance when he heard the guttural sound of an engine starting behind him, turning sharply at the sudden burst of noise to see the wrecked car jerk forward and accelerate toward him on a collision course with the emergency vehicle. 

How the hell-

“Woah, woah, woah! Kid, stop!” Bobby shouted, slamming his hands on the side of the vehicle as Eddie stood his ground, waving his hands to catch the attention of the young man behind the wheel who was too disoriented to likely even understand what he was doing or that it was going to get him killed.

“Hey! Stop!” Eddie yelled as he flung his arms out desperately, every fiber in his body telling him he needed to run and every thought reminding him that this kid was going to die if he didn’t at least try. “Come on, stop!”

It all happened in less than five seconds. The car moving, Bobby and Eddie’s attempts to get his attention, a sudden jerk of the wheel, a too slow realization that everyone was out of time, and then-

“Eddie!”

There was no time left to run as Eddie heard Buck scream his name, barely catching the movement out of the corner of his eye as a heavy weight barreled into him, arms wrapping around his waist and his feet lifting from the ground, the world turning-

And impact. 

He braced himself for pain that didn’t come, hearing a gut-wrenching thud and a shocked cry that wasn’t his own as the arms around him abruptly slackened and the world became a blur of sky, glass, and weightlessness when Eddie tumbled over the windshield of the car and slammed into another body. The vehicle didn’t stop and neither did he- the street rising up to meet him as he nearly met a faceful of pavement, remembering to tuck and roll at the last second. Pain shot through his shoulder as he struck the ground just as a deafening crash sounded behind him, forcing him to throw his arms over his head to protect himself as glass shattered and metal screamed, a horn blaring and then going eerily, hauntingly silent.

The screams didn’t stop. They sounded like his team.

Eddie’s heart was in his throat as he stared wide eyed at the pavement under him, rapidly processing what had just happened as his arms, trembling from the sudden surge of adrenaline, almost gave out as he tried to push himself up. He could feel a sharp stinging on his brow where his head scraped against the rough ground when he rolled, but nothing else hurt, he was fine- but he’d just been hit by a car-

No, he hadn’t. Because Buck grabbed him. 

Because Buck saved him.

Buck.

Buck took the impact. 

A sharp gasp tore itself from his chest and the world caught up to him like a punch to the face. Eddie quickly stumbled to his feet, head snapping to the side as he sought out Buck once again, eventually catching sight of him-

“Buck!” 

He didn’t remember deciding to yell, the primal sound tasting bloody in his mouth as he ran toward Buck who was crumpled on his side only a few feet away, his body still and unmoving. Eddie’s head was spinning, his heart racing at a speed he hadn’t felt since the night he looked up at an angry sky and saw his friend dangling from the thundering heavens like a discarded angel, but he crashed down to the street once again with enough force to bruise his knees as he grabbed hold of Buck, dragging him half into his lap.

No, no, no, please, God, no-

“Dispatch, this is 727-L-30, we’re going to need two more ambulances at the Sunset and 6th collision, send them fast, we’ve got a firefighter down!” Eddie heard Athena shouting into the radio as he tore his gloves off, his shaking fingers scrambling to find a pulse, almost missing the fact that Buck’s eyes were wide open and tight with pain, his mouth moving soundlessly as he gasped for air in ragged gasps that didn’t seem to quite fill his lungs. 

Tears streaked through the grime on his face, scraped and bloody like Eddie’s surely was, but there was an expression of indescribable fear as he weakly raised his left arm, sounding almost like he was choking as he tried to grasp Eddie’s hand and pull it away from his pulse point, fingers not quite catching on to the motion. Eddie grabbed his hand just as Chim and Hen hit the ground beside him, trying to pull him away. He couldn’t tell what they were saying over his own senseless rambling as he fisted his hands into Buck’s turnout, refusing to let go, to let them take him away-

“Buck! He can’t breathe, he can’t breathe-” Eddie distantly heard himself saying, feeling a sharp, numbing chill spread through him that he recognized as the beginning of a panic attack that only made him hold onto Buck tighter. The edges of his vision were growing hazy and dark as he felt himself listing slightly to the side, reaching down with a shaking hand to cup the side of the face in front of him like it was the only thing in the world that would ground him, and those blue eyes that were so full of fear- and a horribly familiar feeling of dread began to coil around his bones. He’d been here before. “Shannon, please-”

No, that wasn’t right- he thought, and it was like his mind was stumbling through a daze down a familiar path but all the signs had been changed. This fear wasn’t new, this feeling wasn’t new- But that wasn’t right- 

“Eddie, you need to let go!” Hen gave him a rough shake, her voice thick with panic and urgency. She grabbed hold of his arm and he just shrugged her off, the whole of the universe tunneling down to just him and his hold on Buck and the fact that his heart was screaming at him to never let go again, he couldn’t lose anyone else- “Bobby, he’s in shock, he needs to back off-”

“No, I can’t, he-” Eddie gasped, almost pleading, praying Hen would understand the desperation coursing through his veins and distorting every thought as he began to break down into full-bodied sobs even while Buck’s labored wheezing finally turned into stuttering breaths that he could barely hear over the roaring of blood in his ears. “That’s it, Shan, just breathe.”

He was calling someone else’s name, but it wasn’t what he meant to say, they had to understand-

Ravi and West were tugging the driver from the car somewhere in his periphery, their forms barely perceivable to him, but it was enough of a distraction to get his mind back on track as he remembered the condition the younger man had been in- what they were even doing here on this godforsaken street in the first place. They weren’t supposed to move him like that- why-

Hen watched Eddie warily, looking him over in the same way she did with her patients on calls, and that was when it suddenly clicked for him. Even while the team knew about his history with panic attacks, his trauma, they’d never seen it manifest. Only Buck had.

And this was a hell of a way for that to happen in front of all of them.

“Let go, Eddie,” Bobby urged him gently, tugging on his shoulder as Chim spoke to Buck and gingerly moved him to lay flat on the ground, the words not quite reaching Eddie’s ears but giving him the sense that they were something reassuring. “You have to let us help him.”

“Bobby-”

“He’s not Shannon,” Bobby’s voice was steady and firm even with the terrified look in his eyes. Maybe he was remembering the last time they were gathered around Buck in the street like this- a night of bombs, fire, shattered glass, and screams that Eddie wished he’d never have to hear come from his friend in any lifetime. “We can still help him.”

It was like a string had been cut loose somewhere inside of him. Eddie collapsed backward on his heels and surprised himself by not putting up a fight when Bobby crouched down beside him, wrapping an arm around his chest to keep him back. He hadn’t released Buck’s hand but nobody seemed keen on breaking that hold, least of all Buck who held on like a lifeline, his eyes fixing on Eddie’s and tracking down his face.

“Eddie,” Buck gasped hoarsely, sounding like the wind had been knocked out of him. Which it had. By a car. “Are you hurt?”

Hen was in the middle of opening Buck’s turnout for Chimney to check his lungs with the stethoscope, but even she paused at that, looking over at Eddie while he just stared at Buck, something twisting in his heart and burning behind his eyes as he held his hand that much tighter. The hysteria from whatever shock he’d slipped into was struck from him in that instant because how else was he supposed to comprehend the fact that Buck was the one that took the hit from that car and he was worried about Eddie? Worried that- what? He’d failed to keep him from getting hurt?

I don’t deserve you, Eddie wanted to start screaming, but he knew it would just turn into some kind of agonized, delirious wail as his heart decided to rend itself into pieces. You don’t deserve this. 

But instead he swallowed, shaking his head and attempting to offer something close to a reassuring smile, but he could feel the muscles in his face trembling from the effort and it probably wasn’t all too great to look at. “Don’t worry about me, Buck. You had my back.”

A relieved exhale slipped past his split lips and his eyes fluttered shut in a way that had Eddie’s heart threatening a revolt again, but they opened soon enough and he let his head roll to the side, blinking as he tried to focus on something in the distance. 

“No, no, Buck, don’t look,” Chim paused with the stethoscope dangling from his hands to shift on his knees and block Buck’s view, but Eddie made the mistake of glancing in that direction in time to see a couple officers helping draw a blanket over the driver’s body not fifteen feet away from them. 

Even if Bobby hadn’t already been holding him still, Eddie wouldn’t have been able to move, his body frozen with despair as he closed his eyes, gritting his teeth to bite back the frustrated cry that wanted to escape. That kid was barely an adult- he shouldn’t have gone like that. 

“Bobby, we don’t have enough paramedics for this scene, I need you to go get the backboard and gurney with Hen,” Chimney’s voice cut across his thoughts and Eddie brought his focus back to Buck who was still working on catching his breath, wincing with every inhale. 

“You got it,” Bobby nodded, releasing Eddie with a cautioning look to not get in Chimney’s way as he stood, deferring to Hen on next steps. 

Hen seemed hesitant to leave Buck’s side, her hand curled around his arm protectively. “Chim-”

“I’ve got him, Hen,” Chimney promised as he met her eyes, confident and unwavering. “Grab a c-collar, too.”

It took another second but Hen finally nodded as well, drawing in a shaky breath and patting Buck’s shoulder comfortingly before leading the way to the back of the ambulance and avoiding looking at the crushed front of it that seemed to almost merge with the car that struck it. 

Without Bobby supporting him, Eddie let himself fall forward onto his knees, drawing his and Buck’s clasped hands into his lap as he watched Chim work, actively fighting down the swell of panic that was making its second rounds. He couldn’t fly apart again like that, not when Buck needed him. 

“Alright, Buck, I know it might be hard right now, but I need you to take some deep breaths for me, okay?” Chim kept his voice steady and upbeat like he would with any patient he was trying to encourage, working his stethoscope under the open front of Buck’s turnout and listening attentively as Buck did his best to breathe deeply, discomfort evident in his face as he made the effort.

Eddie didn’t realize he’d been holding his own breath until Chimney sat back and wound the stethoscope up, the two of them letting out identical sighs of relief at the same time. 

“Lungs sound good, I don’t think there’s any damage we need to worry about right now,” Chimney nodded at Eddie to reassure him and he felt gratitude rising in his chest somewhere alongside the quelling panic. He gave a faint laugh, looking down at Buck as he shone the penlight in his eyes to check his pupils- even Eddie could tell they were equally reactive and surprisingly just…fine. “Damn, Buckley, you really know how to get the wind knocked out of you, huh?”

“It’s a gift,” Buck coughed, trying for a smile, but it just looked wrong with all the grime and cuts on his face. 

“Can you tell me what hurts?”

“We actually doing triage or is that a tr-trick question?” 

“Looks like you didn’t injure that sense of humor,” Chimney huffed out another dry laugh, but he sounded at ease now that Buck was as alert and responsive as he was. 

“Neck’s stiff,” Buck admitted with a grimace as he swallowed roughly, his throat bobbing uncomfortably. “Left arm feels weird, and-” he grunted as he tried to shift his upper body where he lay, legs sprawled out in front of him. “My back really hurts.”

“I wonder why,” Chimney quipped and Eddie felt a tremulous laugh bubble in his chest but it never made its way out, dying behind his clenched teeth. He was holding Buck’s left hand- the side that he said felt off, which explained the weak grip. “Does it hurt like something’s broken or like it’s sore? Any feelings of tightness or a burning sensation?”

“Jus’ sore. I know broken ribs when I feel ‘em,” Buck scoffed and braced himself as Chim moved behind him, looking like he was briefly considering helping moving Buck into a sitting position because he adjusted his upper body again when the paramedic suddenly stilled, brow furrowing deeply as he blinked a few times in rapid succession.

Eddie felt a sharp spike of dread in his gut. He knew that look from Chimney. That was him realizing something, putting together pieces that no one else had, and usually that picture wasn’t a good one. 

“What is it?” Eddie felt like he was swallowing sand as he spoke, mouth going dry with anxiety as he tried to understand what Chimney was seeing that he couldn’t. “Chim, talk to me.”

“You tried to get up just then,” Chimney said to Buck, fully ignoring Eddie. “Just- don’t try that again right now, okay?”

Buck mirrored Chimney’s look of confusion, blinking in the same curious way, but he did it again anyway, digging his elbows and forearms into the ground and pushing up. He shifted his torso an inch or so to the side, twisting his upper half a bit. 

Just the upper half. 

That was when Eddie saw it too. 

He wished to God he hadn’t.

“Buck,” Chim sucked in a sharp breath, glancing over at Eddie with poorly veiled concern just when Hen and Bobby returned with the backboard, gurney, and c-collar, hovering off to the side as they seemed to recognize the gravity of the situation Chimney was handling while he gingerly removed Buck’s boots. “Stay calm, okay? I’m gonna ask you something and you might not like the answer, but we really need to know this.”

Looking anything but calm now, Buck swallowed nervously, his gaze flicking between Eddie and Chimney where they were kneeling on either side of his body. “Sh-sure, Chim.”

“Can you wiggle your toes?”

“What?” Buck just looked even more confused, blinking up at all of them. He was familiar with the line they used on spinal patients, they all were, but it didn’t seem to quite click with him why he was the one being asked it now. “Yeah, I-” 

A look of concentration crossed over his face as he tried to lift himself up with his arms again to look at his feet but Hen knelt to hold his shoulders down, gently pressing him back to the ground and leaving Buck only working on moving his toes. His brow creased even further as he struggled, slumping back and tilting his head to look at Chim imploringly, knowing he had an answer of some kind to give- like this was just a trick question on a test, a pop culture reference he didn’t understand or a joke that he just wasn’t grasping the punchline of.

“I don’t- I don’t get it-”

All Eddie could hear was a ringing in his ears as the world seemed to crash to a stop around him. 

They didn’t move. Buck’s right foot slipped a bit where it was crossed over the other leg at the ankle, but it might’ve just been gravity. A twitch. 

“Buck?” Hen’s voice sounded more fragile than Eddie had heard in years as she gently lifted Buck’s head to fix the c-collar around his neck. “Can you feel your legs?”

“I can feel them, but they’re- they’re kinda numb, like they’re asleep or- or something,” Buck admitted, still confused as Hen finished clipping the brace closed. The second that pleading gaze fixed on Eddie he was sure something inside him fractured right then and there. The pieces finally connected and Buck’s eyes widened. “But I- I can’t move them.” 

He started to repeat those words over and over again until Hen shushed him, running her hand over his curls in a soothing motion as Eddie brought their clasped hands up to his chest, holding them firm above his heart as if in prayer. Bobby set the backboard on the ground beside them, eyes tight as he fought to keep his face neutral for his team’s sake. They’d faced their share of bad injuries before, but the fear in Buck’s voice was enough to shake any of them to the core. 

Chimney brought a pen from his bag and maneuvered Buck’s legs to test his reflexes, murmuring words of encouragement as he tapped beneath his knees and brushed the point over certain areas looking for a reaction. The right leg gave a weak jolt and the left shuddered slightly, the same pattern holding when he ran the pen along the underside of Buck’s socked feet. The right kicked up a little and the left just twitched feebly. Still, it was something. 

When he asked Buck to try wiggling his toes again, this time it looked like they were actually responding a little more. 

Sirens sounded in the distance. The ambulances were getting close. 

“These effects are often only temporary after crashes, you know that,” Chimney tried to reassure Buck, nodding at Bobby and Hen to start moving him onto the backboard and get him up on the gurney for transport, but Eddie couldn’t help notice he was avoiding saying the one word they were thinking. “I can’t make any promises, but you don’t have the main signs of neuropathic pain, you’ve got decent sensation, and it seems like you’re slowly getting movement back. You took a hard hit, Buck- it could just be that there’s swelling putting pressure on the spinal cord or some misalignment making things a little wonky, so just try to relax and we’ll get you checked out properly at the hospital, okay?”

“I- I like the sound of temporary,” Buck nodded up at the sky, closing his eyes as he tried to steady his breathing again. 

Eddie didn’t trust himself to speak- he was starting to feel a little numb from the adrenaline crash himself but managed to finally let go of Buck’s hand, hating every second of it as he stepped back for Hen to take Buck’s shoulders and Bobby to grab his ankles, the two swiftly sliding him onto the long board. One strong heave and Buck was up on the gurney, Hen’s hands flying to take his vitals so she could be sure of them herself. 

Athena soon joined them as other officers waved the approaching ambulances over, Bobby rushing over to meet them. Her eyes went soft as she took stock of Buck on the gurney with his arms curled around his middle in a self-soothing embrace. “How’re you doing, Buck? Hanging in there?”

“You know me, ‘Thena, s’just another Sunday,” Buck tried to sound jokingly casual but he was looking more stressed by the second as a new team of paramedics from the 133 arrived on scene, half directed by Bobby to prepare the other driver for transport to the hospital for evaluation while the other two hovered near the captain waiting instruction. 

Sensing his growing distress, Athena placed a gentle hand on Buck’s chest and leaned down to press a brief peck on his forehead in the one spot that seemed clear of either injuries or soot, the worried crease on his brow smoothing out almost instantly as he leaned into her touch. Just another way that Eddie knew she was there for him more than his biological mother ever could be. 

“You’re in good hands, Buck, just let them take care of you,” she reassured him with a smile, giving his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

“You mean don’t move around too much.”

“That, too,” Athena admitted with a pointed look that got a weak laugh from him, the sound enough of a balm on Eddie’s nerves to let him breathe a bit easier. 

Bobby returned after a few more seconds with a member of the 133 in tow- Morano, his name badge read- and shored up any emotion on his face that might have betrayed how worried he actually was that Buck had taken another hard hit like this barely half a year after the lightning strike. He was mostly successful.  

“Alright, Chimney and Hen, you take Buck. Morano’s driving you three,” Bobby told them with a wince as he massaged his arm- Eddie distantly wondered when he’d gotten hurt. “The 133 can take Eddie and the other driver in the second ambulance so I’ll meet you all at the hospital with Athena. Ravi and West are going to bring the engine back to the station while the rest of the officers wait for the coroner.” 

“I’m going with Buck,” Eddie protested even as Hen and the paramedic from the 133 already began taking him away, his own attempt to follow being stopped by Bobby’s firm hand planting on his chest. 

“Eddie-” Bobby’s voice was full of caution and he could already tell they were going to have a lengthy conversation later about everything that had gone down. They both knew they were dangerously close to repeating history and this was the last chance to walk back from it. 

But Eddie couldn’t handle being apart from Buck right now, even if the guilt of seeing him on the gurney in his place tore him apart on the way to the hospital. 

“I’m fine,” he spat bitterly, his voice still hoarse to his ears and hating that he was in a position for that statement to be true- at least physically. He was unharmed because Buck wasn’t, and that fact was going to haunt him for a good while, regardless of how things went at the hospital. “He made sure of that.” 

“Fine might not be the word, Eddie,” Chimney sighed, but he looked Eddie up and down and seemed to reach a decision. Don’t make me regret this, his expression clearly communicated before he turned back to their captain. “I don’t think he’s too injured, Bobby, it’s probably just the shock. Let him ride with Buck, it’ll do them both some good and I’ll make sure he gets those scrapes looked at.”

Bobby hesitated for only a moment, looking between the gurney lifting into the back of an ambulance and the two men in front of them, eventually relenting. “Check for a head injury, too.” 

“Roger that, Cap,” Chimney threw a salute and took Eddie by the arm, walking fast toward the ambulance just as Morano hopped out to hold the doors for them.

“Chim, thank you,” Eddie whispered gratefully, feeling like his legs were on the verge of giving out. He couldn’t explain it, he knew it was irrational, but now was not one of the times he could bear to have Buck out of his sight. 

A tired chuckle. “Ah don’t thank me, let’s just get you to your man, Diaz.”

They climbed into the back of the ambulance and Eddie didn’t miss the way Buck’s eyes immediately found his again as he settled onto the bench next to the gurney, the two of them sharing yet another wordless look that was full of far too many emotions to fully decipher in his current state. Morano shut the doors and jumped into the driver’s seat, the ambulance peeling away from the scene in a matter of moments toward Cedars-Sinai Marina del Rey Hospital.

He knew why Bobby had been so hesitant to let him go along with Hen and Chim- there was no denying that he was getting a migraine inducing level of deja vu as he looked down at Buck, his blue eyes a little distant with pain as he shifted his gaze from Eddie toward the ceiling when Hen fit a pulse ox on his finger to check his heart rate. 

They both knew.

It was one street over. 

One street over from the place where they’d done this all before. Hen, Chim, and Eddie in the back of the ambulance with part of his whole world lying on the gurney between them. 

Buck wasn’t Shannon. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not today. 

Not ever. Not if Eddie could help it.

He barely heard Chimney’s warning to hold still before he began cleaning out the scrapes on his face, gritting his teeth to suppress his groan even as he flinched. Buck threw him a worried look, somehow managing to look equally concerned about Eddie’s incredibly superficial injuries as he was his own inability to move the lower half of his body. His fingers twitched against the vinyl of the gurney mattress and Eddie reached for them without hesitation, gripping his hand just as they were doing before they were separated. Buck seemed to visibly relax and deflate a bit as he exhaled, giving in to Hen’s barrage of questions as Chimney carefully placed butterfly strips across the cut on Eddie’s brow and checked for a concussion.

Running his thumb over the back of Buck’s hand, the universe finally stopped screaming. 

His mind was still anything but quiet. 

———

Eddie managed to hold himself together right until Buck was wheeled through the double doors to the emergency room.  

The second the nurses turned the corner and were out of view it was like the invisible tether keeping him upright decided to cut him loose, Eddie’s legs once again on the verge of collapse as he stumbled out of Chimney and Hen’s reach and into the single stall bathroom down the hall. He didn’t even think to throw the lock, tripping over his own feet as his breaths came in shallow, ragged gasps and colliding with the sink counter with such force that he was barely able to catch himself on the edge. Eddie couldn’t contain the trembling in his hands as he thrust them toward the automatic sensor and let a rush of cold water flow over them from the faucet. It didn’t help in the way he hoped it would- the panic attack was far too intense, already drawing him into the riptide. 

Fighting it was exhausting. 

So he let go. 

It was all the permission his body needed before Eddie broke down into violent sobs as everything caught up and crashed down onto him with the force of a tidal wave, knuckles white from where he was gripping the counter and his shoulders shaking convulsively beneath his turnout jacket. The weight of the stiff material became too overbearing and he all but tore it from his body, throwing it across the sink like he couldn’t get it off fast enough. 

Making the mistake of looking up at the mirror, Eddie saw himself properly for the first time since the accident and understood why Bobby had been so concerned about him at the scene. Even without the full blown panic attack tearing him apart at the seams, he could tell that he was a mess. His hair was a disaster and his face wasn’t any better- even though Chimney had taken care of what few injuries he’d sustained from the accident there were still red scrapes clawed along his jaw and across his right cheekbone with the beginnings of a couple bruises smattered around it. Bringing it all together were the two butterfly bandages taped over a cut above his eyebrow where a bit of broken auto glass nicked him. 

It was surreal. 

He’d gone over the hood of a moving car and the worst injury was a fucking scratch. He was the one who tried to stop the driver and yet it was Buck in the emergency room paying for his bad judgment. 

Replaying the moment when everything went wrong, it had all come down to him. He should’ve known that the man behind the wheel was far too disoriented to even recognize they were trying to help him, should’ve ran before the car had the chance to jerk toward him as it hurtled at the ambulance, but he hadn’t. He actually believed that he could save that kid and accepted the consequences of that attempt.

And then Buck was suddenly just there, no time to shove or haul Eddie aside, just throwing his arms around him and jumping and then the world became a blur- 

If there had been a second to hesitate, Buck didn’t take it. He saved Eddie like it was as instinctive as breathing, like it was no different than saving himself. 

Without warning, Eddie’s mind brought back the image of Buck lying in the street, still and unmoving. 

He wasn’t moving. 

Darkness started to tinge his vision again, his breaths coming in heaving gasps, and before he knew it he was hitting the floor just as the door to the bathroom flew open. 

“Eddie? Eddie, hey-!” Hen surged forward and wrapped her strong arms underneath his own, hauling Eddie up to his feet and propping him up against the wall between the sink and paper towel dispenser. “You might be having some delayed shock, just breathe for me, okay?”

She locked the door and reached for him even as he buried himself further in that corner trying so desperately to regain some form of stability. His field of view was swimming with static but he managed to focus on Hen long enough to grab onto her forearms for balance, trying his best to not cut off her circulation as he felt his knees buckle again. 

“He- Hen,” Eddie gasped, swallowing roughly when the next words didn’t come, but she didn’t need his explanation on what was happening. She just gave his arms a reassuring squeeze back, her gentle, worried eyes tracking his as he looked around, sure the room was somehow growing smaller-

“Jell-O,” Hen suddenly said, her voice steady and calm as she remembered the coping mechanism he’d shared only weeks before. “That’s what you told the patient in the hot tub, right? To think about Jell-O?”

I think I’m a little past that, Eddie wanted to admit, but his body revolted against his mind and he gave a short nod that earned him a relieved smile from Hen as she walked him through the steps of the mental exercise. He closed his eyes and tried his best to follow along to his own mental monologue of the practice, focusing on his breathing as the dissonance in his head seemed to clear and make way for the rest of the world around him. Hen’s voice began to filter through much clearer, the light tap of water dripping from the faucet reaching him over the subsiding tide of blood in his ears, until he choked out one last sob and was able to let go of Hen to reach for a paper towel and blow his nose. 

She grabbed a handful from the dispenser and wet them at the sink, dabbing at Eddie’s face to get the tears that were staring to sting once they reached the scrapes on his jaw. The paper towels came away slightly discolored with specks of blood, his skin itching a little from the stimulation, but watching Hen’s clinical yet caring ministrations helped him calm down significantly in a way he hadn’t expected. 

A minute passed where all Eddie did was try and regain control of his breathing, something twisting in his chest with gratitude when he realized Hen was demonstrating her own measured breaths for him to mirror, inhaling deeply through her nose and out through her mouth. They kept at it until Eddie eventually nodded and she stepped back to give him space to peel himself away from the wall, taking a few steps to brace himself on the edge of the sink again. 

“You good, Eddie?” Hen rubbed her hand in soothing circles between his shoulder blades, her tone heartwarmingly patient as she waited for him to gather up the energy for a response. 

Eddie cleared his throat, sniffling and staring at the face before him in the mirror where red rimmed eyes looked back with exhaustion. “I fucking hate Venice.” 

“Yeah, well get in line, pal.”

The bluntness startled a strangled laugh from him and Hen cracked a wan smile in spite of herself, but his laughs soon devolved into coughs and he fought to get his breathing back under control. Pain lanced across his brow from the cut above his eye and Eddie sobered in an instant as his thoughts came back to Buck again.

“He wasn’t getting up.”

Somehow those four words were enough of an explanation. 

“I know,” Hen nodded, her own gaze falling to the ground. She had been scared too, Eddie understood, but he’d been far too deep in the clutches of his trauma response to recognize much more than that back at the scene. “This was a rough one, I’m not gonna lie, and a hit like that would take anyone down that hard, even Buck. You saw he was already started to regain some more movement while we were transporting him, though, so we’ve just gotta let the doctors do what they can and try and stay positive in the meantime.”

If Buck had started to get better, Eddie didn’t remember. Between fighting down each burst of guilt and shame that flared up when Buck’s eyes met his in the back of the ambulance and the memories of Shannon’s death breaking through every barricade he put up against them, there was probably a good amount he missed over the course of the ride over. The one thing his mind had been able to anchor onto was Buck’s hand in his, his grip loosening and then tightening again each time they hit a bump in the road and jostled the gurney, drawing a pained hiss through his gritted teeth. 

Still, if Hen said Buck was showing signs of improvement, he’d just have to believe it until he saw it himself.

Eddie let out a sigh and shook his head, slapping his hands against the counter before pushing himself off of it to pace around the small room. The more he thought about it, especially with a clearer head now that the worst of the panic had left his system, he was realizing that there were a handful of missing pieces to what happened out on the street. The first that came to mind was the way Bobby had been clutching his right arm when he came back with the paramedic from the 133.

“Is Cap okay?” Eddie asked, stopping his pacing to grab one of the handrails built into the wall.

Hen was quick to nod, leaning back against the counter and crossing her arms over her chest. “Bobby’s fine, he just got clipped by the edge of the open door when the car sped off.” 

“And what about-” he began, unsure of how to delicately phrase his concern as he recalled the bottles on the floorboard and the way Bobby seemed to visibly brace himself as he took in the situation.

As usual, Hen was already way ahead of Eddie. “He knows we’re here for him. I just talked to him out in the waiting room and he mentioned something about a meeting tomorrow morning.”

Of course. When it came to using the support networks at their disposal, Bobby was admittedly much better at it than the rest of them, even if that bar was set piteously low. Eddie knew Bobby worried about Buck in a way that only a father could- that seeing him hurt was like sustaining an injury of his own- and the events of the past half hour had harrowing enough without any other triggers. It brought him some comfort to know that their captain was already being proactive about processing all of this. 

The rest of them, though- well, their journeys would look a little different.

“The kid died on the scene, didn’t he,” Eddie looked to Hen for confirmation, not quite a question because he was certain he knew, he just needed to hear the answer from someone else.

Hen nodded again, closing her eyes as her lips drew together in a tight line to try and hide the pained expression on her face. It was always hard to lose someone on a call no matter the circumstances, and these had been especially horrific. Ever since he started at the 118, Eddie and Hen had been able to bond over their shared experiences of raising a son and he’d found himself finally able to rely on another parent for support knowing that there was no agenda behind it, just good-natured solidarity and compassion. That was how he knew they were thinking the same thing in that moment. Today, someone’s son wasn’t coming home. A nameless young man in a Caltech shirt who’d made the wrong decision to get behind the wheel of a car in his condition. That was all they would know about him. 

“Ravi said he’d already passed before they pulled him out of the car. One of the paramedics from the 133 confirmed it before they took the other driver, I heard it over the radio,” Hen said, meeting his eyes again and giving him one of her quietly reassuring looks. “You did a good thing trying to stop that second crash, you know. He honestly might’ve had a chance if it wasn’t for that.” 

“Yeah, maybe,” Eddie couldn’t ignore the bitter taste of bile that rose up in his throat at that. It didn’t bring him any consolation to know he’d done the right thing because it still felt like he’d failed. The young man had still died and now Buck was in the hospital after saving Eddie- who shouldn’t have needed saving in the first place. “I just don’t understand how he was even driving.”

“He was drunk and suffering from a traumatic brain injury- he wasn’t thinking straight, probably wasn’t even fully processing the pain he was in,” she explained while throwing her hands up in uncertainty, shrugging a bit. “There may have even been some underlying problems that contributed to what happened today, but we won’t know that for sure. I remember that he started to regain consciousness when you walked away and he sounded really disoriented, so I left his side for a second to grab the smelling salts from my bag and that’s when I heard the engine turn over. Everything happened so quickly after that.”

That’s an understatement, Eddie though, huffing out a small scoff. It was at least enough to complete most of the picture and help him start to make sense of things, maybe even answer Buck’s questions if he had any later once they were able to see him again.

He reached for his phone in his pocket to check the time, surprised that the screen was miraculously intact with no cracks obscuring the background photo of Buck and Chris at the botanical gardens. 

Chris. Oh, God, Eddie was going to have to explain this to him- even more so if Buck needed to stay in the hospital to recover. They both made an agreement with each other to be as transparent as they could be with Chris about their hospitalizations after the lightning strike- he was getting older, more mature, and deserved to know what was happening if and when one of his guardians was hurt. He knew more about death and tragedy than Eddie wanted him to at his age, but he couldn’t be coddled or lied to when he had questions about what was going on. Chris had made that demand himself. 

But Eddie knew Pepa was taking Chris to a friend’s house for a sleepover soon- it could wait until after their shift ended tomorrow morning, or maybe until after school. He could delay until then, let Chris have one more worry-free day where he didn’t have to think about his Buck being hurt again.

Why did this keep happening to them? he wanted to scream at the universe. It was the only thing left to be outraged at because Eddie knew he couldn’t be angry at God and not believe in religion at the same time, but he had a handful of choice words he’d send up if he did. If the guy didn’t respond to prayers anyway what harm was a little hate mail thrown in among them? Bobby might have some thoughts on that one. 

Eddie sighed. It was almost five in the afternoon now and they couldn’t stay hidden in the hospital bathroom forever, even if it had only been about ten minutes since he stumbled his way in. He put his phone away and Hen stepped aside from the counter so he could get to the sink. “How long do we have until we need to head back to the station?”

“Eddie,” she fixed him with a tired, slightly exasperated look, passing him a few pieces of paper towel as he finished washing his hands. “You and Buck got hit by a car, I don’t think any of us were expecting to go back to work. Bobby’s taking the 118 offline until B shift arrives tomorrow, we’re done for the day.”

“I wasn’t the one that got hit,” Eddie pointed out, unsure why that was the part he fixated on, only that he was feeling oddly pedantic about that fact.

“Argue with the wall, Diaz,” Hen snorted and rolled her eyes at him. “He who hath made bodily contact with the windshield of a moving vehicle hath totally been struck by it.”

“Funny, I don’t remember that passage from the Bible.”

“Book of Wilson,” she replied, unlocking the door and holding it open for him to exit first. “Read it and weep.”

They met Bobby in the waiting area outside of the emergency room, the captain sitting straight up in the uncomfortable white chair like it was a church pew with his thumb running over the knuckles of his own clasped hands as if he was imagining the beads of his rosary dangling between them. Eddie wondered if he even knew he was doing it.

Chimney was pacing on the phone near the window- most likely talking to Maddie, keeping his voice low to be respectful of the other visitors as he wore a path into the tiles on the other side of the room. Hen all but pushed Eddie into the chair next to Bobby, saying something about going to wrangle some coffee for them before heading off with a nod in Chimney’s direction that seemed to say Keep an eye on him . 

But Eddie wasn’t the only one having a hard time, though it would have been a lie to say that Bobby looked shaken. His body and expression didn’t tend to betray his emotions as much as the others on the team, but Eddie knew the look of a man with too much being bottled up behind his eyes. He’d just seen it in the mirror. 

“You okay, Cap?” Eddie asked carefully. Bobby seemed to shift out of his stupor and his eyes flicked over to Eddie, his thumbs tapping out an unfamiliar rhythm against each other. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

The rhythm stopped. Bobby let out a breath and tipped head head backward toward the wall behind them, neck craned up toward the ceiling like he was looking for some sign from above. “Not a ghost, no. Just…a glimpse at another life.”

“Yeah. I get that.” Eddie sighed heavily, leaning forward in the uncomfortable chair and attempting to breathe around the lump building in his throat. “Bobby, I’m sorry-”

“You don’t have anything to apologize for, Eddie,” the response came in an instant as Bobby gently cut him off. “I understand. You were triggered. We were only a couple blocks over from where Shannon was hit and I can imagine seeing Buck hurt in such a similar way wasn’t easy for you.”

That wasn’t what he meant. He wanted to apologize for putting himself at risk even with Hen’s assurance that he’d done the braver thing, and yet that wasn’t what was on Bobby’s mind. It was difficult for Eddie to comprehend. Losing Shannon had been one of the worst days of his life and he dealt with every detail ingrained into a painful corner of his memory, but it was starting to seem like he wasn’t alone there. It felt easier to talk about now, knowing that Bobby was on the same page. He understood what this had meant to Eddie. 

Maybe he could understand this as well.

“I called Buck by her name.”

It felt almost shameful to admit. Despite being as out of it as he had been, he remembered that much clearly. Reaching for Buck, seeing him lying there, wanting to comfort him- and somehow the wrong name spilling from his mouth. His partner was on the ground in front of him and a dead woman’s name was on his lips instead.

“I know,” Bobby reached out to place a hand on his shoulder. A nurse appeared and called an elderly couple back, laminated pages of magazines flipping shut and landing on the side table as they departed. “I wasn’t sure if you had a flashback, or-”

Eddie shook his head, twisting his hands in front of him. “No, Bobby, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t see her, I saw Buck. I didn’t get confused about that. It was- it was the feeling that threw me. It was the feeling of seeing Buck lying there, seeing him hurt, and the way it affected me- it- it felt the same.”

The revelation had come to him somewhere between Venice and Washington Boulevard, Buck’s voice cutting through the noise in his head as he made a joke to Chimney that Eddie barely heard and couldn’t remember enough to repeat even if he was paid to. It was like a fog had been lifted, even if the panic was still coiled tight in his chest just waiting to strike again. 

He hadn’t seen Shannon in Buck’s place, he’d seen Buck in Shannon’s place. That was what threw him. The fear of seeing Buck in that kind of pain, of imagining losing him in the same way- it had been too much for his mind to handle. 

It was still too much. 

“I survived losing Shannon,” he closed his eyes, the St. Christopher medal feeling warm against his chest. “But I don’t think I could survive losing Buck. I don’t know what that means.”

Bobby’s hand tightened on his shoulder. “It means that’s how much you love him. You love him enough for it to hurt the same.”

“I think it would hurt worse,” Eddie confessed and his heart seemed to stutter as he took himself off guard with that admission. “Am I horrible for saying that? She was my wife, but Buck, he’s-”

Then, the words ran out. 

What was Evan Buckley to him? His best friend? His family? His partner? Those words were full of meaning and significance, but trying to neatly fit Buck into one or any of them was like attempting to pour the ocean into a drinking glass. He was all of that and indescribably more.

“I know,” Bobby said again, but Eddie wondered if he really did because he wasn’t even sure of the answer himself. 

If you know, tell me, because I’m so fucking lost about it right now. 

“His legs,” he apparently had a masochistic streak going on today because he couldn’t open his mouth for five seconds without something miserable spilling out. “If it’s not temporary-”

“Eddie, don’t,” Bobby’s voice took on an almost pleading edge. “Don’t go there. Not until we know. Chimney said his vitals were decent on the way in and he was already improving. But I promise that whatever happens, he won’t be alone.”

Six words of self flagellation disguised as penance. “It’s my fault. I should’ve moved.”

“Eddie, you were trying to save the kid’s life, you knew he was one wrong move from life threatening damage. That kind of car can accelerate from zero to sixty in under four seconds, you barely had time to react and your first instinct was to try and save the patient.”

“And Buck’s was to save me.”

Bobby couldn’t argue with that. Those were the last words on the matter, their attention thankfully diverted by Hen returning with a precariously balanced armful of coffees for the four of them. 

“Just got off the phone with Maddie,” Chimney waved his phone and reached for a coffee of his own, a pinched look in his eyes as he took a long drink of it. Black coffee from a hospital vending machine wasn’t anything close to his opulent coconut milk macchiato. “She was on her way to work but there’s a bug going around at the daycare so she had to drop Jee-Yun with Mrs. Lee first, she’ll be here as soon as she can.” 

“That’s good,” Bobby nodded, nursing his own mediocre coffee. If hospitals were churches then this was the sacrament of the whole ritual- one they’d done too many times before. 

Chimney hummed in response, glancing over at Eddie with a wary yet assessing look in his eyes like he was trying to diagnose how he was doing. He didn’t have to wonder long because Eddie was on his feet and pulling him into a brief hug. The two of them weren’t usually physically expressive with each other, but the impulse couldn’t be helped, not after everything that had just happened. 

“Thank you,” Eddie said as he stepped back, giving a short nod and hoping his gratitude was reflected in his eyes. “For everything you did for Buck. For me. I- I wasn’t at my best out there.”

“Don’t mention it,” Chimney patted his back warmly with a familiar, knowing look on his face. “You reacted pretty understandably, Eddie. I’d be the same way if it was Maddie.”

The comparison wasn’t lost on him. But he couldn’t let Chimney know that- not when he was still trying to figure things out for himself. 

“Tommy didn’t pick up, by the way.” 

“What?”

“Tommy,” Chimney repeated, waving his phone. “I tried to call him after Maddie. It went straight to voicemail.”

“No, I got that, Chim,” Eddie crossed his arms and gave him a look. “But why did you call him?” 

“That’s…kinda just what we do, Eddie,” he arched an eyebrow, looking a little confused that it was even a question. Even after what he’d said just moments before. “They’re dating, aren’t they? You know we would’ve called Marisol if it was you.”

“Don’t,” Eddie said without even intending to, the word somehow manifesting itself in his voice before he had a chance to finish thinking it.

Chimney frowned and even Hen cast them a glance over her coffee, sensing something was up. “Don’t what?”

I don’t know, Eddie wanted to snap, his confusing mess of emotions already stretched far too thin from his conversation with Bobby. He couldn’t deal with his feelings running away from him any further than they had. Not today.

“Just don’t,” Eddie replied thinly without any elaboration, turning away to take Chimney’s abandoned spot by the window. He spent the next hour or so completely silent, too embarrassed by his outburst to apologize and yet still irritable enough to not trust himself to open his mouth. 

Part of this sudden surge of anger was probably due to the irrational part of his brain that was  not only irritated that Chimney called Tommy, but that Tommy hadn’t picked up the phone. This was Buck, after all. He should be running to the hospital, maybe even breaking a few traffic laws. Eddie would. 

This was Buck. 

But it wasn’t fair of him to think like that, right? If Tommy wasn’t answering, it was because he was busy at work and had his phone off, likely even flying a helicopter at that very moment. It wasn’t like Eddie hadn’t missed his fair share of calls while he was on shift. Logically, Eddie knew he couldn’t hold that against Tommy despite how much he wanted an excuse to. 

Oh. That was new. 

Before he could keep ruminating on that line of thought any further, he noticed a doctor approach them- a tall Asian woman with a rainbow badge reel clipped to her white coat and the kind of smile that could only mean optimistic news. Eddie quickly recognized her as an ER doctor- one of the people who met them when they brought Buck in and someone they’d encountered in passing when bringing in patients from other calls in the area over the years.

“Hi, folks, my name’s Dr. Seang,” she greeted them warmly, looking around the small group of firefighters assessingly. “Could someone tell me which of you are Eddie Diaz and Bobby Nash?”

“I’m Bobby, this is Eddie,” Bobby swiftly responded as he stood, taking the lead and gesturing to Eddie in turn. “How’s he doing?”

“Mr. Buckley said he wanted to show the two of you himself,” Dr. Seang beckoned to both of them, already heading in the direction she’d come from. “You can come back with me to see him now.”

Eddie didn’t even hesitate to follow her, leaving Bobby a few steps behind as he said something to Hen and Chimney, maybe an apology. Dr. Seang held the door for them and Eddie tried to temper the swell of unease that rose in his gut from crossing that threshold, unable to keep the bad memories from surfacing. 

“I apologize that I couldn’t bring all four of you back,” Dr. Seang said sincerely once Bobby caught up. The three of them stepped closer to the wall to make way for a nurse pushing a cart past them as they entered the familiar bay of the emergency department, the rooms partitioned off with sliding glass doors and beige curtains that Eddie wished he could see so much less of in his life. “It was just going to get a little cramped for a conversation that really shouldn’t take all that long. I told him I could stretch it to two, and you were the ones he asked for.”

“We understand,” Bobby said diplomatically, patting Eddie’s shoulder reassuringly like he could sense the worry radiating off of him. “We appreciate you being able to accommodate us back here, it means a lot.”

“Short conversation is good news, right?” Eddie couldn’t help himself from asking as they passed the nurse’s station, but evidently he didn’t have to wait much longer for an answer because Dr. Seang stopped them in front of one of the occupied rooms, grabbing the clipboard out of the slot on the wall and using her elbow to seamlessly slide the door open like she’d done it over a thousand times- and probably had. 

“See for yourself,” the doctor smiled again, stepping into the room and ducking aside to give them space. 

Bobby motioned for him to go ahead first and Eddie barely took one step before he felt his knees go weak with sheer relief, almost dropping to the ground right there in the doorway. 

Buck was standing. He looked a little less banged up than Eddie remembered, less bloody and scared and more like his usual self, flashing a brilliant grin when he caught sight of Eddie, but the smile soon shifted into something softer when Buck took in his expression. Eddie really needed to get better at hiding his worry from him. 

“I’m not fired again, am I?” Buck threw a weak grin in Bobby’s direction. Each movement looked like it pained him, but he made a valiant effort with the aid of the nurse to take a few steps and settle into a wheelchair. 

The scrapes on his face had been cleaned and treated, shining a bit with ointment and already scabbed over, but that was only the extent of his visible injuries. There was more to be seen the longer Eddie looked at him. The soot was wiped from his skin but his hair was still dark with it, and there was a stiffness to the way Buck moved as he adjusted his posture in the wheelchair like he was favoring his right side. Nothing had seemed overly off about this gait, though, aside from the fact that he was clearly and very understandably hurting. 

Hen and Chimney were right as usual- the paralysis really had just been temporary. Some things just stuck around long enough to scare the hell out of them. 

“Your job’s safe, kid,” Bobby assured him, stepping over to rub his shoulder in that soothing paternal way of his. His chest rose and fell with a brief sigh of relief but he managed a smile as he looked down at Buck. “I’m just glad to see you’re upright.”

“Yeah, me too,” Buck chuckled a bit, wincing as he raised his arm to indicate his side and Eddie was quick to notice the reduced range of motion. “I just have some pretty impressive bruising on this whole side and a mild case of whiplash.”

“That’s it?” Eddie raised an eyebrow doubtfully and Buck mirrored his expression as if to challenge him, causing him to huff out a small laugh in spite of himself. “What about the temporary paralysis?”

“Like you said- it was temporary,” Dr. Seang confirmed, offering Bobby an affirmative nod as well. “Paralysis often can occur immediately after an injury and even just a bit of pressure on the spinal cord can cause milder symptoms to manifest. Sometimes temporary paralysis can last up to three days, but in a handful cases- like this one- it can resolve in as quick as half an hour, which tells us that whatever the compression was to the spinal cord, it was only moderate.”

Moderate . That word should’ve been a relief, but Eddie could still remember how it felt to see Buck lying in the street- like his own heart had torn itself out of his chest and was on the pavement beside them. 

“There’s the possibility it may recur if inflammation sets in so Mr. Buckley will need someone to watch him at home until he returns for a check-up next week,” she added, emphasizing it with a click of her pen against the clipboard as she looked over at Buck. “You’re quite fortunate, you sure know how to fall right.”

“What can I say?” Buck grinned a little cheekily. “I’ve had lots of practice.”

“Oh, I know, I’ve seen your medical history. Mark my words, you’re going to give a doctor a hernia some day and all I can do is hope it’s not me,” Dr. Seang tucked the pen away into her pocket, following the nurse out past the doorway. “I’ll leave you all to talk and get sorted, another nurse will be back with your discharge paperwork in a few minutes and you’ll be free to go after that. Take it easy, Mr. Buckley, okay? Doctor’s orders.”

“I’ll do my best,” Buck promised with a small wave goodbye. “Thanks so much for everything.”

As soon as she was gone, Bobby planted his hands on his hips and fixed Buck with a look that invited no nonsense. “You’re really okay? No concussion? No broken bones?”

“No, I’m all good. Really.”

“I don’t know about ‘all good,’ but I’m glad to hear you’re doing okay, kid,” Bobby leaned down to give him a careful hug. If Eddie noticed their captain blinking a little harder than necessary to fend back the dampness of some tears, he kept his mouth shut about it. “I’ll give you two a few minutes together, I’m just going to tell Hen and Chim the good news.”

“We’ll meet you in the lobby once we’re done with the paperwork,” Eddie nodded and Bobby stepped out, leaving the sliding door open behind him. 

It was then that Eddie realized he hadn’t made it any further in the room the entire time, still planted close to the doorway. That was much too far from Buck for his liking so he moved to sit on the edge of the hospital bed like the magnetic pull they were perpetually connected by deciding to reactivate, bringing him close enough that his shin knocked against the footplate of Buck’s wheelchair. 

“Did they say how long do you need this for?” Eddie asked, tilting his head to indicate the wheelchair. He was already mentally working through logistics of what it would take to make a ramp just small enough to get up the front step of his house and how they would need to talk to Buck’s landlord about using an accessible parking space, but based on the look on Buck’s face it seemed like it probably wasn’t going to come to that.

“Just to get from here to the outside,” he shrugged and instantly looked like he regretted the motion, reaching his left hand over to carefully touch his injured shoulder. “They checked my mobility and honestly everything feels fine to me, I’m just really sore and kinda exhausted.”

“Can't blame you there,” Eddie nudged Buck’s arm with his elbow. “You know, this might be a record for your quickest hospital visit ever.”

“I aim to impress,” Buck grinned at him and it felt like something warm was settling back into place in Eddie’s chest to see him smile again. “Someone should’ve set a timer. You think they’ll still give me a punch on my frequent flyer card?”

“I’ll put in a good word with the nurses and see about a Spider-Man sticker at the very least,” he promised solemnly. 

“Keep sweet talking me like that and I might need to readmit myself before we make it out the door,” Buck clapped his hands to his chest over his heart dramatically, still smiling and surely oblivious to the acrobatic feat Eddie’s own heart had just launched into. 

Even with the comforting familiarity of the warm banter and quips between them, Eddie could still feel the tangible weight of tension between them like the air pressure had been heightened in the room. They could joke, but they couldn’t forget why they were there in the first place. 

“Eddie, we-” Buck paused and sighed, reaching over to give Eddie’s forearm a gentle squeeze. His touch felt radiant, steady, reassuring and gentle as sunlight, and Eddie hadn’t realized how cold he was until Buck lent him some of his warmth through his fingertips. “We should talk about what happened today. Not now, but…soon.”

There was no arguing around that even as Eddie felt the hot spike of shame spread across his throat when he thought about what he was going to have to try and understand about his reaction out there. And what he would need to tell Buck about that. He wasn’t ready for that- not now. 

But Buck wasn’t giving him a deadline or an ultimatum. Those weren’t the kinds of things he dealt out. He was more patient with Eddie than any saint could ever be as he sat before him and suggested that they do the emotionally healthy thing by not isolating their feelings on this shared trauma from each other. 

“Okay. We will,” Eddie nodded, placing his free hand over Buck’s and Dios, it felt like he was touching the sun. If he held on any longer he might get burned, but there were worse things. 

The moment lasted for just that- a moment- before worry consumed Buck’s features as he looked at the cuts on Eddie’s face more closely now. He wondered if Buck could tell he’d been crying earlier. “You’re not hiding any injuries, are you? You don’t need someone to look you over before we leave?”

Eddie shook his head, waving off the concern but remembering what Frank had him working on. Honesty about his mental health- if not with others, at least with himself. “It looks worse than it feels, I promise you. Physically I’m fine, I just- I had another panic attack after we got here. So.”

Buck only looked more worried, and maybe even the slightest bit guilty, his hand sliding from Eddie’s arm. “I’m sorry you had to deal with that. Do you- do you want to talk about it?”

He did. He should. But the words just weren’t ready to come out then. 

“When I’m ready to,” Eddie found himself saying, and he meant it. 

That seemed to appease Buck just enough and he sighed, meeting Eddie’s eyes evenly. “Alright, but I’m gonna hold you to that.”

“I’m counting on it.” He meant that too. 

There was a beat before Buck made a face like he’d remembered something he forgot. “Hey, by the way, can you call Maddie for me? My phone screen is kind of busted, I couldn’t even unlock it and it’s buried somewhere in my patient bag.”

“Chimney already did, she’s on her way now,” Eddie promised him, pulling out his own phone in case she’d updated their group chat of the three of them and her husband with an ETA. Nothing there. “I don’t know how much he told her, but considering it’s Chimney…”

He spread his hands like what can you do?

“She probably knows everything,” Buck surmised wryly, but suddenly looked hesitant, fidgeting with the seam on the knee patch of his pants. “Does- uh- does Tommy know?” 

Is Tommy coming? was what it sounded like he meant to ask, especially with the inquisitive lilt to his tone as he looked up at Eddie. 

In that split second, Eddie knew he would have grounded the damn helicopter himself if it would make Buck happy. 

“He wasn’t answering his phone,” he told Buck apologetically instead. “He’s probably on a call.”

There was a flicker of something on Buck’s face before his expression fell behind his shield of neutrality, the man managing a small shrug this time with his good shoulder. “That’s probably for the best. I don’t think we’re at the point in the relationship where he swoops in to pick me from the hospital. Actually, that’d be pretty new for me overall, I think.”

“Buck, I’m sure he-” Eddie began, but the feeble platitude was already dead in his throat before it reached his lips. He couldn’t make excuses for Tommy and if he wasn’t being honest the only reason he’d even want to was for Buck’s sake. 

Thankfully, Buck was already cutting him off with a shake of his head, his smile tight but turning a little more hopeful as he looked up at Eddie. “So, I’m guessing I’m getting abducted to your place for the night?”

“No, I’m staying with you at the loft,” Eddie decided as he remembered the worries he’d already been having in the morning hours before the accident- and the fact that he’d already been dreading going home after the end of their shift tomorrow. Having been let off early didn’t help things at all. “Besides, Christopher’s having a sleepover with Blake Ayers today, he’s not even going to be home.”

“Blake- the kid that lives in Los Feliz, right?” Buck remembered, probably flicking through his mental rolodex of all-things-Christopher. “Mom’s a human rights lawyer?”

“Yeah, Janine. They’ve got some kind of video game tournament going on and she offered to get them both to school in the morning,” Eddie fidgeted with his phone, his nervous tapping almost matching the cadence of his heart rate. “Anyway, that’s not the whole reason. I uh- I left Marisol my key to finish moving out tonight. With all those boxes she had and her crazy work schedule, my house is still full of all sorts of trip hazards. We’re probably better off crashing at the loft.”

Buck was so convinced that the universe screamed at people, but Eddie just felt like it was constantly laughing at him. In the grand scheme of things he must have been relegated the role of the slapstick comedic relief, the missing third wheel to Abbott and Costello, because there was no one more adept at self-sabotage than he was. In the same night that he told Buck to try for a second chance with Tommy, he’d essentially kicked his girlfriend out of his house. Who did something like that? Forget killing two birds with one stone- he’d thrown the stone, missed the birds, hit a tree, and had the rock ricochet back and strike him in the head. And the headache just didn’t end. 

“I guess getting hit by a car is as good an excuse you’re gonna get for dodging your girlfriend,” Buck teased, trying to lighten the mood. 

“Finally, a silver lining,” Eddie managed to joke back, ignoring how the words tasted bitter and coppery in his mouth like he’d bitten his tongue. Maybe that was how truth tasted. No wonder so many people were liars. 

Buck looked like he was about to say something else but thankfully Maddie picked the perfect time to burst in through the open door and rush over to her brother, already fretting before she even got her hands on him. All Eddie really saw was the maroon of her dispatcher shirt before she was suddenly standing in front of him and leaning over Buck, taking stock of every single injury that her eyes could pick up on. 

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here sooner-” Maddie paused her rapid-fire speech to take a breath in the same way Buck had to sometimes when he got carried away with his ramblings, but the worried crease in her brow didn’t waver for a moment. “God, are you okay?”

“I don’t know how God’s doing but I seem to be pretty okay all things considered,” Buck grinned, which might have looked a little more endearing if his split lip hadn’t reopened from smiling so wide. 

Maddie seemed to relax a little bit, reaching behind him for the tissue box on the nightstand and dabbing at his lip even as he tried to squirm away from her. “I guess I should take it as a good sign that you’re joking like that, huh?”

“I’m fine, Maddie. Really,” Buck insisted, plucking the tissue from her hand and holding it to his mouth on his own. 

She didn’t look convinced, planting her hands on her hips and raising an eyebrow. “We’ll see what your better half has to say about that. Eddie?”

That was a hell of a way to be cued in. 

“He had some moderate spinal trauma, he couldn’t move his legs for a bit,” Eddie told her honestly, trying to temper down the little bubble of warmth in his stomach from Maddie’s words. Better half.  “The doctor says we need to watch for inflammation, but aside from that it’s meds and bed rest until they reassess at his next appointment.”

Maddie seemed satisfied enough with that answer, turning to face him with a smile. “Did you tell them that he’s pretty much allergic to the concept of rest?”

“Yep. Naproxen and rest, it’s all on the chart,” Eddie smiled back, earning a small laugh from her. 

“Hey, I’m right here,” Buck complained, but judging by the expression on his face he didn’t really seem to mind all that much, especially when Maddie dropped a small kiss on his temple in apology. 

“The nurse at the front desk said you’re already being discharged, were you all going to head back to the station in the ambulance?” she asked, taking a seat in the visitor’s chair against the wall. 

“I think so,” Buck sounded unsure, looking over at Eddie as if maybe he had the answer. “We didn’t really plan that far ahead.”

It was true. Eddie hadn’t even really thought of that until Maddie mentioned it, but none of them had their own vehicles and Bobby had probably been dropped off by Athena after finishing up at the scene. And they both knew how it had worked out the last time the whole team tried to cram themselves into the ambulance after the 

He’d have to get Buck and himself a Lyft or something. It didn’t matter how wildly expensive the rideshare rates in Los Angeles were, if he was in the back of that ambulance again this year it would still be much too soon. 

Maddie seemed to pick up on their shared hesitation to get in the back of the ambulance again in such a short period of time and spun her keys on her finger. “How about I drive you two? I got my shift covered so I’m more than happy to do it.”

Relief flooded Buck’s face and Eddie was pretty certain his own expression didn’t look that different. “That’d be great, Mads, thank you.”

“Yeah, seriously, thank you, Maddie,” Eddie seconded Buck’s sentiment, more grateful for the gesture than he had the energy to express. “I can pay you for the gas-”

“Eddie, it’s only a few miles, don’t worry about it,” Maddie smiled and swatted his arm gently. “Besides, you’re family, this is what we do for each other, right?”

Maddie Han must have been on a personal mission to give Eddie a heart attack because all he could do was stare, once again floored by something that she somehow said so easily. Better half. Family. Sure, he thought these things about Buck, but it was something else entirely to hear them reflected back at him by others. By Buck’s sister, of all people. 

“Yeah, Eddie,” Buck’s voice seemed to catch in his throat, his expression surprisingly unreadable for once. “You’re family.”

There wasn’t anything he could do to argue with that. 

———

“Do me a favor, both of you. Stay off the news today. Or really any social media,” Maddie warned them as she pulled up to the station, going past the bay doors to the parking lot around the corner. “Josh called me on my way over and apparently a couple bystanders got the second crash on video, Channel Eight has already started running the footage of you two getting hit.”

Taylor’s network, Eddie mentally cursed, making the mistake of looking at Buck and catching a flash of the wounded expression on his face before he hid it away. He really had too much practice doing that.

“You didn’t see any of it, did you?” Buck sounded worried, but Maddie just shook her head, pulling into the open parking space next to Eddie’s truck without even asking.

“No, and I don’t need to, I just need to see you okay and breathing,” Maddie pressed another kiss to his forehead, carefully avoiding the edge of a scrape that was reaching toward his eye. “I’m guessing you’re going home with Eddie?”

“More like he’s coming home with me,” Buck corrected, but Eddie was just happy with how ether of those sentences sounded. 

“Okay, but be careful on those stairs, got it?” Maddie insisted and didn’t let up on her gaze until Buck relented and nodded. “Good. Is there anything you need? Anything at all?”

Eddie knew that Buck hated asking for things but after a few more seconds of Maddie staring him down he eventually gave in, waving awkwardly toward the patient bag on the floorboard. “Actually- my phone screen got shattered, do you think you’d be able to drop it somewhere to get repaired?”

“Of course, how else am I going to send you pictures of your favorite niece while you recover?” Maddie tugged his ear playfully, drawing a laugh from him, and Buck passed over the phone for her to stow in her purse. She then turned into her seat to point at Eddie, fixing him with the same stare she used on Buck. “Eddie, you’ll text me if there’s anything I can get you two? And Buck, you’ll ask Eddie if you need either of our help, okay?”

“Okay, okay,” Buck agreed, rolling his eyes. 

“You got it, Maddie,” Eddie nodded. 

She made Buck pinky-promise and twisted in her seat to extend her little finger out to Eddie behind her. “Come on, you too, Eds. Let’s go.”

Taken off guard, Eddie managed to recover quickly and linked his finger around hers at an awkward angle considering he was left handed and she wasn’t, but they made it work and the deal was sealed.

Buck seemed to be watching the encounter closely, more than a little surprised, and…something else. That same unreadable expression from before. It didn’t take a genius to know that this moment was more significant than Eddie really knew, even when Maddie was shooing him out of her car so he could grab his keys from his locker along with their duffel bags. As he walked through the familiar space of the station and put his and Buck’s turnouts away, looking at walls he’d seen hundreds of times over, he could feel that something- somehow- had changed. Had shifted between them. It had probably been shifting for a while. 

And it was very likely he wasn’t the only one that noticed. When the earth shifted, there were tremors. He wondered what that would look like for them. 

Eddie drove Buck to the loft with a promise to get the Jeep in the morning, knowing he was going to have to ask someone for a ride over but deciding that was a problem for tomorrow. He was exhausted and Buck was flagging before they even pulled away from the station, fully falling asleep by the time they even got to the exit to head south toward downtown. 

He took the the longer way even though it was only the difference of a mile so he could avoid waking Buck for a couple extra minutes- which ended up being even more than that once they hit a bad spot of traffic because of course it was a game night. Still, as Eddie drove past the lights of Dodger Stadium and glanced over at Buck’s face, peaceful and calm in sleep, he knew he’d made the right call. 

The hard part was having to wake Buck up when they finally got to the apartment building, but between him, their duffels, and the bag of medication from the hospital pharmacy, Eddie was going to have his hands full without trying to carry his 6’2” partner. Luckily, Buck roused fairly easily and lost the argument when he offered to take his own bags, only grumbling slightly as he led the way into the complex. 

After a few minutes, Eddie was depositing their duffels by the kitchen counter and nudging Buck into a chair at the table so he could look over the instructions for his meds. While he was busy with that, Eddie finally checked his phone for the first time since leaving the hospital, seeing he had three missed calls from Marisol in the last hour and a half. 

Three. Shit. She must have seen the news. She’d only left one voice mail and instead of letting it play through he just read the transcript, but it confirmed his initial thought. 

His thumb hovered over the notifications as he thought about calling back to explain that they were fine, but wasn’t sure he really felt the need to. He didn’t know why. Maybe it would’ve been easier if she’d sent a text or left a voice message, something he could directly respond to instead of launching into an open ended conversation. 

Or maybe it just wasn’t her that he felt like talking to. 

Except despite what he felt about himself sometimes, he wasn’t a complete asshole. So he just sent a quick message explaining that they were doing okay, that he was going to be looking after Buck at the apartment, and to just leave his house key under the mat by the side door in case she finished moving out before Eddie got back- just to cover all of the bases. Instantly, Read 6:23 PM appeared beneath it. No three dots showing she was typing. No reply. 

After a full minute of waiting, there was still nothing. He didn’t expect that was going to change. 

"Want something to drink?” Eddie gently tossed his phone over on the table and opened the fridge, looking over the contents to see if there was anything blatantly missing that he needed to pick up tomorrow from the store. 

“I could really use a beer,” Buck groaned as he got up and leaned his good side against the kitchen island, but Eddie just slid one of Christopher’s juice pouches across the counter from the well-stocked shelf of them. 

“Tough luck, Buck,” Eddie smirked but decided to play fair and skipped over a beer for himself, instead fishing out a can of mango tepache that Buck still had from when they’d been given an extra one with their takeout delivery a week ago. “You’re on pain meds and your split lip will thank you for using a straw.”

Buck mumbled something that was unintelligible over the sound of him aggressively punching the straw through the top of the pouch so Eddie just chuckled and started opening cupboards to assess what would be the easiest thing to fix up.

“Are you hungry? I can make something while you take a shower,” he offered, turning over a box of chickpea pasta in his hands that looked like it came with some kind of tomato curry seasoning packet inside. “This doesn’t look too bad.”

Buck just stared at him over the juice pouch, arching an eyebrow dramatically. “You’re going to cook? You want me back in the hospital that quickly?”

“You’re not cute,” Eddie snorted but Buck began to make a pouting face that was as comedic as it was- well- cute. At that point there was nothing he could do but give in. “Fine, what’re we ordering?”

He was glad he phrased that in the way he did, leaving the choice up for Buck, because he already had his answer locked and loaded. “Do you remember the Mediterranean place on Second? The one you like that I always forget the name of? We took Chris there for lunch after getting those architecture books from the library.”

Of course Eddie remembered, it was one of their new go-to places lately after their other restaurant they frequented temporarily closed so the owner could undergo chemo. The only issue was that Buck was still adjusting to the change in routine and kept switching the name with that Tunisian place closer to Eddie’s house. 

“Sure,” Eddie grabbed his phone and pulled up the website to start the delivery order. “You want the same thing as last time?”

Buck blinked twice in quick succession, almost comically surprised. “You remember?”

“I remember your embarrassing aversion to olives,” Eddie snorted by way of answer, watching Buck’s face light up as he laughed bashfully before he turned back to the order. “I’ll put a note this time.” 

“You’re my hero,” Buck praised with a happy grin, pulling out one of the stools at the island to sit closer to where Eddie stood. 

“I think that’s my line,” he replied wryly, but his expression quickly sobered as he felt a worried twist in his chest from the memories of it all, of everything that had gone on today. He finished placing the order and put his phone back down, taking the seat next to Buck with a tired sigh. “Buck, are we gonna talk about what happened earlier?”

“I think that’s my line,” Buck repeated back to him, causing Eddie to turn to meet his eyes instead of staring intently at the countertop. There was something fragile in Buck’s eyes, the pale blue glinting like the thin layer of ice above a pond that was ready to give way with the slightest bit of pressure on top of it. “I was starting to think that maybe you forgot. Or maybe you just didn’t notice-”

Eddie frowned, confused. “You got hit by a car saving me, I don’t think I missed that.”

“No, I mean-” Buck looked hesitant about continuing, taking a deep breath before committing to the jump. “I mean when you called me her name.”

It was like a dam broke somewhere inside of him. Eddie felt the instant flood of shame in his chest and couldn’t look at those eyes any longer without fearing they’d see straight through him. “Buck, I-”

He didn’t even know what he was going to say, but Buck saved him- like he always did- reaching over and squeezing his hand. “Hey, you don’t- you don’t have to feel bad, Eddie. I get it. I’m just sorry you were reminded of that day.”

Eddie felt close to tears and kept quiet for a moment so he could rein in his grief before it started to run loose again. It felt like a wild animal going stir crazy from being caged up for so long, and maybe it was going to escape and get the better of him one day, but not now. 

He would set it free someday. He would. Just not tonight. 

“Buck,” Eddie said again, firmly this time. “It’s not your thing to apologize about, okay? It’s like I told Bobby earlier- I didn’t mean it. My head was all over the place and the only thing it could make sense of was the fact that someone I cared about was hurt, and yeah, it reminded me a lot of- of what I imagine happened to-”

That was all he could get out before he felt his voice catch in his throat and he forced himself to stop, trusting that Buck would be able to fill in the blanks for himself. They always seemed to complete each other any way, always filling in the blanks, the missing pieces, the words they didn’t or couldn’t say. Eddie didn’t need to lay it all out for Buck to know that Eddie had probably played out a hundred different scenarios in his head of the day Shannon died- of what happened in the minutes before they got to her- and today with Buck…reality had borrowed way too much from his nightmares. 

Eddie’s vision suddenly went fuzzy as a memory cut across his thoughts, his senses suddenly overcome with the smell of explosives and smoke and blood. Fire and glass and a dark intersection. A half destroyed ladder truck. Buck’s hand in his as he screamed-

“Hey,” Buck’s voice was gentle and coaxing as he brought him back to reality, light and safe in a way that got Eddie to finally look back at him again, the smoke and blood clearing from his mind the longer he listened to Buck speak. “I understand. I- I care about you too, Eddie. I know we don’t say that kind of thing often- I know there’s a lot of things we don’t really say- and I think we just kind of assume we know. But I care about you. That’s why I did what I did.”

And you care about me, his eyes seemed to say. So I understand why you did what you did. 

Eddie didn’t trust himself to speak so he just nodded. That was all the progress they were going to get for right now, and it was fine. 

They were going to be okay. 

While they waited for their takeout to show up, Eddie set up the large air mattress they used for when Chris stayed the night which required some moving of furniture because despite being all of eight years old when Buck first got it for him, he’d gone all out for a king-sized one that took up most of the living room. Chris had been thrilled, naturally, and Eddie had been quietly touched at how quickly Buck had begun spoiling the kid. That really came in handy today, though, because there was no way Eddie was letting Buck handle the stairs with the danger that his legs might give out again. As for Eddie- well, once Buck worked up the nerve to ask if he wouldn’t mind sharing with him, all he could do was say yes. Neither of them had made it through the day unscathed and weren’t in a hurry to be apart. That was at least how Eddie could make sense of it. 

Dinner took twice as long to finish eating because Eddie kept fielding calls from the team who were eager to check in on Buck and see how he was doing, so after a FaceTime from Hen, two calls from Bobby and Chimney, a text from Ravi, and another text from Maddie, radio silence finally ensued. Buck took his meds, leftovers went into the fridge, and Eddie took a quick shower first at Buck’s insistence because they both knew it was going to take much longer with him and his injuries. 

It immediately proved itself impossible for him to manage alone because Buck’s shoulder was too stiff for him to get his shirt off after two nurses helped put it back on for him, but as Eddie helped him undress he started to see the edges of something dark on his skin beneath his shirt. It was dark enough for him to think it was new tattoo or something, except it just kept going-

Eddie got Buck’s shirt off and stared wordlessly at the massive bruise that spanned from the back of his lower ribs up to his shoulder blade, stopping himself just short of accidentally touching it. His hand hovered over the darkest portion of the bruise, feeling the heat radiating from Buck’s skin and Buck seemed to be holding his breath as Eddie assessed the injuries in their entirety for the first time. 

“Holy shit, Buck,” Eddie said hoarsely, taking in the mottled mess of black, blue, and red on Buck’s back. There was no way this didn’t hurt more than Buck was admitting it did and it was nothing short of a miracle that he’d gotten away without anything actually breaking. It was unreal. It was lucky. 

Pure, sheer, dumb luck, that Buck hadn’t broken his ribs, hadn’t been paralyzed for longer than thirty minutes, hadn’t-

“Is it as bad as it feels?” Buck asked with a thin smile, cutting off Eddie’s spiral as easy as that. “The mirror the nurse used to show me was really small.”

There was no angle that Buck would see his back in the mirror without turning his head more than the whiplash was letting him, so Eddie used his phone to take a picture and show him that way. 

“Wow,” was all Buck said, promptly deleting the photo with two taps of his thumb. Eddie wished it was that easy to get rid of the real thing.

“I’m so sorry, I-” 

“Eddie,” Buck gently squeezed his forearm in an attempt to ground him, his gaze unyielding as they stood no more than a foot apart in the small space of the bathroom. “This isn’t your fault and I don’t regret what I did, okay? We have each other's backs. Today that just meant I took a car to mine, but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat.”

That wasn’t reassuring in the slightest. Eddie didn’t want Buck to do something like that again- he wanted him to promise the exact opposite. He shook his head, moving out of Buck’s space until his back hit the door, his guilt blossoming out in the distance between them. “I should have moved. I should have run. You should’t have been the one who had to get hurt.”

“You were never going to anything else than what you did, and neither was I,” Buck told him patiently, and Eddie couldn’t help but think that those words sounded a lot like something he would tell Buck instead if their roles had been switched. “You were always going to try and save that kid. I was always going to try and save you.”

It was the truth. It sounded so simple when Buck said it, so clear and indisputable. Absolution was something that came so easily from him, the difficult part just came from Eddie struggling to accept it. Maybe he could begin to now, though. 

Showering ended up being a two-person job that they managed with near-clinical efficiency, but soon the remains of the day had been washed away and Buck was bundled up comfortably in sweatpants and a zip up hoodie that Maddie had gotten him from the New England Aquarium in Boston. There was a little penguin logo on the front and seeing Buck so comfortable, warm, and sleepy from the shower might have been one of the most adorable things Eddie had ever seen. 

“It’s kind of strange, actually,” Buck said out of nowhere as he sat on the edge of the tub while Eddie brushed his teeth at the sink. He’d never forget the long-suffering look Hen gave him when Buck offhandedly mentioned that Eddie had a toothbrush at the loft. “I did a lot of research on lightning strikes and only about five percent are direct hits like what happened to me.”

Eddie almost choked while he was rinsing out his mouth, definitely not expecting that to be something Buck brought up after today. 

“The rest are usually things like contact strikes,” Buck continued somewhat warily as Eddie managed to survive without almost aspirating again. “Bobby told me you were thrown off the ladder truck by the charge. So you- you were struck by that lightning too, actually.” 

Buck let the comment hang there, suspended in the humidity from the shower, and it was all Eddie could do to brace himself against the sink and let the gravity of those works settle in. 

Struck by the same lightning. Hit by the same car. And somehow Eddie was always the one who got up first. Somehow Buck was the one that always got hit harder. 

Except for when-

I think it might’ve been better for him if I was the one who got shot. 

“Please don’t tell me you did this for him,” Eddie rasped out quietly, and it didn’t take Buck longer than a second to piece together that he was talking about Christopher. Maybe they were both already thinking of that day, the one that nearly topped the chart of their greatest hits of near death experiences. 

“I did it for me,” Buck assured him, tucking his hands into the pockets of his sweater and leading the way to the living room, pausing to make sure Eddie was following. “I wasn’t going to stand there and watch you get hurt when I could do something about it this time. You’d do the same for me.”

“Without hesitation,” he swore, and this time the truth didn’t taste like blood. It was clear, sharp, and a lot like the scent of Buck’s herbal shampoo that was heavy in the air around them.

“I’m not sure what we’re arguing about, then,” Buck smiled easily and carefully maneuvered himself onto the air mattress, his face tightening only a little as he accidentally put too much pressure on his bruised side. “Come on, let’s- let’s just get some sleep, okay? You’re kinda making me tired just by looking at you.”

“Jerk,” Eddie said fondly.

“Ah, you love me,” Buck smirked and turned off the smart light with his phone, leaving them only the moonlight spilling through the glass of the balcony door to see by. 

“Yeah, and you’re lucky I do,” Eddie let out an exhausted groan as he eased himself onto his side of the mattress, careful not to jostle Buck too much as he adjusted the comforter over them. “Because there’s a big comfortable bed upstairs with my name on it if you start hogging the blankets.”

It was an empty threat and they both knew it. Buck laughed into the side of his pillow and Eddie briefly wondered what life would have been like for them if they met decades ago when they were around Christopher’s age in that childhood era of sleepovers, scraped knees, and growing pains. Maybe they’d have driven to Galveston to see the ocean in high school because Buck didn’t get his passport until college and couldn’t go through Mexico- he’d made that road trip with Shannon once just to check an adventure off a list, but he would’ve wanted so many more adventures than that with Buck back then. Eddie was older so he would’ve gotten his license first, but seeing as his first vehicle was his cousin’s old Toyota Tacoma with a quarter of a million miles on it already, he would’ve let Buck drive on the back roads and probably cheered if they wrecked it somehow. He’d have taught Buck where the speed traps were and how to drive stick and would even let him pick the least awful music from the CD case in the glove box that was inherited with the truck. 

It was a beautiful life, the one in his mind. 

There were things Buck wasn’t telling him about the other life he saw in his coma. Eddie knew that. But no matter the worlds in their minds, no matter the different paths fate might have paved for them, he knew that he was still always going to end up on I-10 West toward the California state line. He’d still learn they just called it the 10 here because Chimney kept reminding him in the beginning, and he’d still learn Hen’s coffee order within his first week on the job because the team all went for breakfast the morning after a grenade blew up an ambulance. 

Above all, he’d still be here. Right at Buck’s side. Maybe not in this loft which they both quietly hated or on this air mattress that wasn’t made for two grown men, but they’d be together. He didn’t believe in much, but he believed that. 

Even though Eddie still didn’t have the words to describe what Buck meant to him, he at least knew what he was in that moment. 

He was Eddie’s solace. He was his peace of mind. 

“Goodnight, Eddie,” Buck murmured in the darkness to his right, still not as close as when they’d fallen asleep on the couch together two nights before. 

“Goodnight, Buck,” Eddie whispered back, closer than when they slept three feet apart in the bunk room. He closed his eyes and mapped Buck’s presence with the rest of his senses- the sounds of his soft breathing and the light scent of bergamot from his deodorant. The brush of his hair against the pillow and the dip in the mattress from his weight that they barely evened out.

There was a cabinet door in his room at home. This felt safer. 

———

“You’re really fucking lucky, Diaz,” Tommy said on the drive to the station in the morning, flipping his visor down to shield his eyes from the sunlight cutting through the buildings. “I saw the videos on the news. If it weren’t for Evan you would’ve gone down and under that car instead of up and over. You probably would’ve died.”

“Well, aren’t you just a ray of sunshine?” Eddie scoffed, barely caring to sound like he was only teasing because that line between sarcasm and cynicism was so thin for Tommy anyway. “Buck must really like that about you.”

“That’s your response?”

Tommy had eventually responded Chimney’s call in the morning and got redirected to Eddie, agreeing to stop by between his double shift in the morning to take him to retrieve the Jeep. Eddie couldn’t pretend to not be the tiniest bit annoyed that Tommy had finally shown up, purely because of how minimal his presence even was. He’d only come up to the loft long enough to ask how Buck was doing and wait for Eddie to put on his boots.

If Eddie averted his eyes when the two hugged goodbye was his own damn business. 

So yeah, he was maybe in a bit of a mood. 

“Nobody calls me Diaz if they want me to respond nicely, Kinard,” Eddie snarked back at him from the passenger seat, opting to completely ignore the rest of what Tommy said. Which, honestly, was pretty easy to do. 

He saw Tommy raise an unimpressed eyebrow out of the corner of his eye and felt a prickle of irritation at the sight of it. There was a time where his cockiness had seemed like part of his charm, but generally it just made him look like an asshole. This was definitely one of those times. 

“Okay,” Tommy said slowly, glancing sideways at Eddie. “But my point still stands. You two put yourselves in a really bad spot yesterday, you know that, right?”

“I know,” he conceded, rubbing at his temple. 

“He really cares about you, Eddie,” Tommy continued, sounding like he was trying to get at something and becoming kind of impatient that Eddie wasn’t following along.  

“I know.” If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be hurt.

It was when they stopped at a red light on Pasadena Ave. that Tommy turned to fix Eddie with a look, arching an eyebrow again with some significance. “If you’re going to keep saying the same two words over and over again this is going to be a pretty long drive.”

I know, a petty part of him wanted to retort, but the impulse fizzled and died as soon as it came up. Maybe it was because he hadn’t had coffee yet- Buck had been out of it so Eddie promised to bring some back with him, or maybe he was just tired of feeling like he was arguing with a brick wall, but he finally just sighed and tipped his head back against the headrest as they merged onto the freeway. 

“It’s early and I’m tired, Tommy,” Eddie rubbed his eyes, half tempted to open the window just to dilute the unnecessarily strong scent of the car freshener clipped to the air vent. “I don’t know what you want me to say, so why don’t you just get whatever it is off your chest, okay?”

“Okay,” Tommy nodded, pressing his mouth shut in a thin line as he thought hard about what he was going to say next. “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told you after that double date we had last week. If there’s something-”

Eddie instantly knew where this was going and he nearly gave himself whiplash with how fast he turned to look at him. “Tommy, no, man-”

“You said I could talk, so let me finish,” Tommy waved a hand to stop him, clearly disinterested by anything Eddie had to say on the matter that wasn’t in agreement with him. “If there’s something between you and Evan- or even if you think there could be, I don’t want to be in the middle of that. One of you just needs to tell me.”

Being sucker punched in the gut would’ve been a quicker way to knock the wind out of him, but this came in close second. Eddie understood what Tommy was saying- it wasn’t like people hadn’t thought he and Buck were a couple before- but this was sounding suspiciously like Tommy wasn’t certain that Buck was being entirely faithful. And beneath that-

“It’s that easy for you?” Eddie finally said when his lungs decided to cooperate again, a little struck by the hard edge in his own voice as he dug his fingernails into his palms. “It’s that easy for you to just let him go?” 

Who the hell talked like that about someone they were dating?

“That’s not really what I said,” Tommy deflected, and Eddie knew he wasn’t going to get anything more out of him on that subject without it turning into a shouting match at eight in the morning. “But I think you should watch those videos they had on the news, Eddie. If you believe you’re really being honest with me, I think there’s definitely something you’re not being honest with yourself about.” 

They spent the next twenty minutes in complete silence. 

As soon as they arrived at the 118, Eddie muttered a quick thanks to Tommy and got out of the truck in front of the fire station, mostly because he didn’t feel like enduring the extra thirty seconds it would’ve taken for Tommy to just pull around to the parking lot. That seemed to suit Tommy just fine, even if he was idling in a red zone.

Just moments after Eddie used Buck’s borrowed keys to unlock the Jeep and get behind the wheel, his phone suddenly buzzed with a text from Tommy that contained nothing aside from a link to the Channel Eight website and a thumbnail that gave away exactly what it was he’d been sent. It was news coverage of the accident. 

Persistent bastard, Eddie thought irritably.  

He stared at the thumbnail for a few seconds before curiosity won over his irritation and he sat there in Buck’s car in the parking lot to watch a short clip containing one of the videos submitted by a bystander at the scene. After an ad played through, he turned on the subtitles and muted the audio so he didn’t have to hear Taylor’s voiceover, mentally bracing himself for what he was about to see.

The video had been cut to start when the car began speeding toward Eddie, the person filming catching a decent angle from his left side- enough to see the expression on his face. It was one thing to live this moment, but something completely different seeing it from another perspective, how someone else saw it happen from the sidewalk. As he watched himself soundlessly yell at the kid driving, waving his arms frantically, Eddie realized that he hadn’t looked scared in the slightest. 

And neither had Buck. He ran into frame from the other side in an instant, his face set with determination as he charged forward and wrapped his arms around Eddie in a swift and practiced rescue maneuver. It was kind of magnificent to witness, but overwhelmingly horrifying to know what would come of it.

He didn’t need to see what happened from there, looking away for a few seconds as the whole crash played out. When Eddie looked back at the screen, the camera was shaking a bit as the person moved to get a better view, now catching Eddie and Buck on the ground in the aftermath. 

Through the eyes of a stranger, Eddie saw himself screaming for Buck, rushing over and collecting him in his arms. After a few seconds a dark shape moved in front of the camera as an officer likely intervened to move them further away from the scene and the video ended there, switching to Taylor Kelly speaking from a desk with the Channel 8 background behind her. He paused and rewound to the last clear frame there was of him and Buck, feeling something tight in his throat as he was able to dissect his own expression frame by grisly frame. 

As he knelt in the street, holding onto Buck, Eddie wasn’t sure he’d ever seen himself look so terrified. So frantic and concerned. He looked half mad with worry and had definitely felt it at the time. But there was something else in his face beneath all that, an expression that bled into all the others. An unmistakable look that he couldn’t describe even if he tried. And people did try. They sang songs and wrote poems, made paintings and carved sculptures, all trying to capture and express that look.

It was how you looked at someone you loved. 

It was how Eddie looked at Buck.

This was what everyone else saw. This was what Marisol saw when she called him three times and left him on read. This was what Tommy saw before waking Eddie up with a phone call at seven in the morning after being unreachable for over twelve hours before. This was what he wanted Eddie to see. 

He understood now.

Eddie stared at that still for a minute longer, the part with him and Buck holding onto each other like a hundred wild horses couldn’t tear them apart, before his phone vibrated as a notification banner dropped from the top of the screen, cutting off part of the image. 

A text from Marisol. 

Three missed calls from her, one unanswered text from him, twelve hours of silence between them both. Now, just four words.  

‘We need to talk.’

———

Eddie really wished the next week had gone slower.

After watching the news clip at the station he’d stopped to fill up the Jeep’s gas tank on his way back to the loft and pick up the coffee he promised for Buck, snagging a few of their favorite bagels and pastries as well because, hell, he could use some cheering up too. 

They spent most of the first day inside watching movies and rotating ice packs, eventually leaving to go pick up Christopher from school together because Buck insisted on coming even as he winced with every step he took toward the elevator. Once back at the loft, Eddie left Chris and Buck alone for a bit to go pick up the order Buck placed for a late lunch after Chris complained about being hungry the second he got into the car, which was honestly quite understandable. It wasn’t like he forgot what his own metabolism had been like at thirteen, hormones and puberty raging up a storm. 

Buck had apparently ordered them Vietnamese food at a place closer to Chinatown because even with living on the edge of Little Tokyo where some Vietnamese restaurants were scattered amongst the authentic Japanese sushi bars and ramen spots, the man was a little too particular about where he got his phở and banh mi. Not that Eddie was complaining- it just meant he’d have to wait a minute before eating so Buck could pick out the excess cilantro and pass it to him. Soon after Eddie got back with their food, Maddie dropped by with Jee-Yun after her shift to surprise them, immediately wrapping Chris in a warm hug and giving in to his demand that she tell him about the craziest call she’d gotten that day. Eddie busied himself with clearing the kitchen table off as she doted on her brother and gave him his repaired phone. From there, he could see how Christopher was so sweet with Jee as they sat together on the couch, taking out some of his school supplies so she could draw while he worked on his pre-algebra. 

Swept away by the sight of the familial scene, he was taken aback when he suddenly found himself seized in a fierce hug with Maddie thanking him for taking care of Buck. 

I’m not the one who saved his life, Eddie thought, but he hugged her back anyway and hid his face against her hair so she couldn’t see the tears he was blinking back, only letting go once she did. 

Taylor called Buck about five times for an interview that afternoon- all of which Buck steadfastly ignored until Eddie finally answered the phone for him and told her to lose Buck’s number. It was one of the most satisfying moments in his life to hear her outraged gasp cut off as he hung up and promptly blocked her contact. Buck looked incredibly pleased by Eddie’s petty protectiveness, but not as pleased as Christopher had been to learn that not only were they staying the night at the loft, but Chris would get Buck’s bed upstairs all to himself, marveling at how giant the mattress was. 

That night, they got halfway through a rewatch of Rogue One before Chris was passed out in his pajamas between them on the couch, clearly worn out from staying up so late playing video games the night before. Eddie carried him upstairs and put him in bed, thankful he had the foresight to have Chris brush his teeth before they put the movie on. Pre-teens had life hard enough without getting cavities. 

The whiplash and swelling in Buck’s shoulder had subsided enough for him to be mostly self sufficient but he still had Eddie accompany him while he showered just in case anything happened. 

You don’t have to make it weird, Buck had laughed at him, pointing at the sink counter for Eddie to sit while he ducked behind the shower curtain to change. Who knew you were so modest?

Nah, I just don’t want to develop an inferiority complex from looking at your abs, Eddie quipped back, laughing when Buck poked his head around the curtain to throw his socks at him. 

It was oddly domestic, sitting there in the bathroom and being able to talk to Buck through the curtain, joking and ranting as the vent fan hummed and steam fogged the mirror enough for Eddie to draw little doodles on with his finger. The two of them in the small room that had been filled with so much trust and honesty the night before, seeing his toothbrush next to Buck’s in the holder by the faucet and Chris’ spare electric one in the cabinet- it was just nice. 

This was what he’d been craving when he asked Marisol to move in with him after only dating for a handful of months. These soft, easy, small moments of life that felt like warm memories he could look back on even as they were being made. Only he hadn’t found it with her. He was doubting he ever would. This wasn’t something that could be manufactured. It was either real or it wasn’t. 

And this - this right now- this was very real. 

‘We need to talk,’ Marisol had texted him earlier. Four words. 

He’d responded with only one word more. ‘I think we do too.’

“Buck?” He asked once there was a lull in their conversation, suddenly remembering the news clip he saw earlier. 

There was a hum behind the shower curtain. “Yeah?”

“Were you scared?” 

He could picture the questioning frown on Buck’s face. “When?”

“When you- when the car hit us.”

The water shut off and Eddie heard the towel slide off the rack, a few hissed breaths breaking through the steam filled air as Buck probably pressed his bruises too hard. 

“Yeah,” came Buck’s strained voice, followed by a heavy sigh. “I was scared.”

“You knew what you were risking,” Eddie slid off the counter and held out the bundle of sleep clothes for Buck to grab, his arm appearing and then disappearing between the double layers of blue patterned curtains. “When you ran after me.”

“I knew what I was risking if I didn’t,” Buck countered, his tone hard but the words wavering a bit with emotion. There was a pause as he took a minute to focus on getting his clothes on. “I told you I was scared, Eds. But I was more scared of losing you. I’m pretty sure I could handle everything else aside from that.” 

Eddie could hardly breathe around the lump in his throat, thinking back to the expression on his own face in that video. How he’d seen himself and thought, that’s how you look at someone you love. 

“But that everything else- I can’t handle that, Buck,” Eddie sounded wrecked as he directed his words to the curtains, his heart hammering uncomfortably against his sternum. “I can’t handle anything bad happening to you because of me. I’m not worth that risk, and you’re worth more than that. You’ve gotta understand. I can’t handle that.”

I’m barely handling this right now. 

Buck came out of the shower dressed and by the time both feet were on the mat Eddie was wrapping him in a hug, not caring that water was dripping down his back from Buck’s wet curls pressed against his neck. He knew he was shaking as he dug his hands into the material of Buck’s sweater, careful to avoid his bruises but holding on like the man in front of him like he was a lifeboat, as if letting go was tantamount to death.

Eddie clung to him like he was drowning and Buck- Buck was so gentle, rubbing his hands down Eddie’s back in soothing motions that somehow were enough to send his emotions over the edge into full fledged tears. His ribs ached with the exertion of each sob that was wrung from him and his hands were starting to cramp from how tight he was holding on to Buck, but the pain was worth it. It was worth the chance to finally feel his feelings. Instead of caging them, he let them go. 

“I can’t be the reason you get hurt again,” Eddie said into the space between Buck’s neck and shoulder, drawing in a shuddering breath to even get the next words out. “I can't lose you . I can’t ever be the reason you- you-” 

It wasn’t a sentence he couldn’t finish. Eddie didn’t even want to think about it.

You would’ve died, Tommy’s words echoed in his mind. 

But in some other scenario, in some universe where things had gone even a little worse, Buck might have. Permanently. 

“I know, Eddie,” Buck said quietly, so quiet that Eddie wondered if he was crying too. Later, he’d see that he was. “But I can’t lose you.” 

It sounded like the end of an argument, the crux of a promise, the beginning of something sacred. 

Something had shifted, and these were the tremors. 

They fell asleep to the sound of each other’s breathing for the second night in a row. 

———

He’d taken a sick day for his last shift at Bobby’s suggestion- a suggestion over the phone that heavily implied if he saw Eddie in the station at all that day he’d revoke his promised cooking lesson they’d long since been planning. It was pretty easy to concede to a paid day off staying home to help Buck hot glue popsicle sticks together for Christopher’s architecture project, the three of them forming an effective assembly line even when Eddie had accidentally gotten a stick glued in his hair and Buck had to cut it out with safety scissors. Buck’s hands had been shaking so badly with laughter that Eddie threatened to just let Chris do it instead, not that Chris was faring any better as he filmed the whole thing while in peals of cackles on the floor.

Being back in his own home was nice and Buck seemed a lot happier with finally getting out of the loft. Three days ago, the morning after the words I can’t lose you seated themselves into his mind forever, Marisol had texted to confirm that she’d finally moved everything out and suggested they pick a time for them to talk in person despite Eddie’s avoidance of doing just that. They settled on meeting for coffee the morning of Buck’s next doctor’s appointment. It gave them a time limit and a little more space to get their thoughts together, especially with it being exactly a week since everything started drifting in the way it had. 

But today, Eddie had his home, his boys, and a newly missing lock of hair. 

Life couldn’t be much better. 

It was the second day of his forty-eight off and going on the third day Buck had slept over at Eddie’s house. Even though Buck was clearly doing better and the bruises and swelling had shown marked improvement, Eddie had asked if Buck would consider it as a precaution, only a little surprised that he’d agreed to it right away. They shared Eddie’s bed and didn’t raise any questions about it even though Eddie was certain this was one of those things that they definitely needed to talk about. 

Well, at some point. 

For now, their new normal looked like Buck’s toothbrush next to Eddie’s and Chris’ at the sink, the two of them moving around each other in synchrony as they took turns shaving, and dropping Chris off at school together in the morning and picking him up again in the afternoon. 

It was the kind of normal that wouldn’t last- especially when their regular schedules resumed after they went back to work- but Eddie was determined to enjoy every second of it while he could and it seemed like Buck was doing the same. He would catch Buck smiling to himself when he thought no one was looking, or casting these immensely fond glances over at Chris as he talked about his day at school that warmed Eddie heart to know how loved his son was by both of them. Everything together was easy, even when they disagreed over what to make for dinner or had to join forces against an irritated pre-teen because Chris was decidedly still too young to play an MA rated video game. He swore he’d never speak to either of them again, but within the hour he was over it and asking Eddie to help him teach their made-up card game to Buck. 

One thing kept sneaking to the front of Eddie’s mind, and that was the thought that despite being married for all those years, despite loving her as much as he did, this just wasn’t how it felt with Shannon. 

He felt guilty, ashamed, confused, and liberated all at once. 

That was what was on his mind when he finally showed up early at the coffee shop to meet Marisol, ordering their drinks and waiting in a visible spot by the window. He waved at her with an awkward smile when she came down the sidewalk and her returning smile looked more like a grimace, but she waved back and came in to join him. 

“Hi, sorry I can’t stay long, I need to get to an interview in an hour and a half,” Marisol said as she took the seat opposite from him, accepting the coffee with a more genuine smile. 

“That’s okay, I have to get Buck to his appointment at ten,” Eddie said, wondering why they were reiterating their schedule again after discussing this over text. He knew she had the interview- it was for a shop class instructor at school in San Gabriel. She’d passed the first round before Eddie even asked her to move in and they’d taken so long to reach out after that she assumed she’d been passed over. But the invite for a second round had come less than a week ago so she’d been consumed with preparing her presentation. 

At least that was the reason Marisol gave for why she hadn’t been talking to him lately. He was pretty certain he remembered her having that presentation done before the second round was even finalized. Still, it wasn’t like he’d made much of an effort on his part either. Together, they had essentially said all they needed to without saying anything at all. This was just making it official.

Her dark eyes scanned over his face and seemed to catch on the smattering of healing cuts and small bruises, but she made no remark about them and he was kind of glad about that. 

“Edmundo,” Marisol finally said, pursing her mouth tight as she seemed to wrestle with her next words. “What’s my favorite flower?”

He’d be lying if he said the odd question didn’t take him off guard, but the expression on her face told him that it was one he sincerely needed to answer. 

The paper coffee cup was too hot in his hands but he couldn’t let go, focusing on the heat radiating through his fingers and the din of scattered conversation and soft music in the cafe around him. It drew his attention away from the woman in front of him, turned her into an abstract amalgamation of sensory input and overly romanticized ideals. She became more questions than answers, more secrets than memories. 

Eddie could have guessed, cast his chances, but nothing came to mind. All he ever bought for her were roses- twice. Not even because he thought they were her favorite she would like them, but because they were a safe choice. Something he could pick because he didn’t know any better. Simply another prop in this whole performance of trying to play by the conventions of romance in the hopes his method acting would be enough to delude himself into some semblance of contentment with a relationship. 

“I don’t know,” he said honestly, a nauseating coil of shame stirring in his gut and proceeding to wind around his insides like a vice. “I’m sorry.”

There was a soft sigh that escaped Marisol’s lips and he could only think that while she looked disappointed, it almost seemed like she had expected as much. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

“Marisol,” Eddie started, unsure why he was trying to fight for them to stay together but knowing that it was the expected thing people were supposed to do in his situation. “Just because I don’t know what your favorite flower is-”

“It’s not because you don’t know,” Marisol shook her head lightly, dark eyes fixing on the space between their hands on the table- space that seemed to be growing like a rift right in front of him as she drew her hands back, painted nails curling in on her palms. “It’s because you admitted you didn’t know and then didn’t even try to ask for the answer.” 

Dios, this was just like with Bosko. 

“I know I’ve hid some things from you, and that was my mistake,” Marisol reached across the table to place her hand over his, the metal of her rings cold and uncomfortable against his skin, the smell of her woodsy perfume too different from the eucalyptus in Buck’s shampoo. “But I feel like there’s some things you’re hiding from yourself too, and I don’t want to be around when you find them.” 

That sounded awfully close to what Tommy said to him almost a week ago. But from Marisol, it seemed almost like a pitying condemnation. Like she was looking at a lost cause, a sinner she couldn’t save. Eddie’s throat felt dry and he found his eyes catching on her necklace- delicate cross dangling from the fine chain, nestled in the hollow of her throat. It didn’t look new, but he’d never seen her wear it before. He wondered why she chose to today. “What does that even mean?” 

“It means goodbye, Eddie,” Marisol told him with finality, taking her hand back and and taking a sip of her coffee. Immediately, she made a face, pushing the drink back towards Eddie. “Oh, I think you grabbed the wrong cup. This definitely isn’t mine.”

Eddie looked at the scrawled barista shorthand on the side and immediately saw his mistake. He had accidentally ordered Buck’s coffee instead of hers. 

Thinking of Buck made him think of Shannon. But when he thought of Marisol, he thought of Buck. 

He needed to get himself together.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and he was apologizing for far more than either of them knew. “I’ll get you another one to take with you. I know you have to leave soon.”

It was quite honestly the least he could do after what he’d put her through, but based on what he was beginning to suspect about himself and Marisol’s particular reaction to that, it seemed like they were both dodging a bullet by not continuing this relationship any further. Eddie might be missing some things about who he was, but he wasn’t comfortable with what he was beginning to see in her. 

He went back to the counter and ordered Marisol’s coffee, handing it to her as she walked out of the coffee shop and out of his life. The barista at the till probably thought he was insane because as soon as she was gone he went back up and ordered Buck’s coffee. Again. 

———

“The next time I see a ‘Welcome Back, Buck’ sign will be too soon,” Buck groaned into his locker as he fished around for his missing pair of socks that he swore were in there. Even though Buck had moved back to the loft after his follow-up appointment with Dr. Seang had gone well last week, Eddie was pretty certain those socks were still folded in the laundry room at his house. 

After being off for two weeks, though, they could call it a small win if forgotten socks was the worst thing they had to deal with on Buck’s first shift back at the station. He tossed Buck the spare pair of his own, sitting on the bench as he laced up his boots. “What, you don’t want to be welcomed when you come back?”

“It just reminds me that I’ve left,” Buck shrugged a little, his expression suddenly more tired and guarded than it had been a moment ago. Eddie opened his mouth to say something but Buck just closed his locker and headed toward the door, almost knocking his shoulder into Ravi as the younger man suddenly came around the corner of the cubbies. 

“Woah,” Ravi blinked, recovering from the near collision quickly and casting a significant look between the two of them. “You two look exhausted, and not for any fun reasons I’m guessing.”

Exhausted was fairly close to being an understatement, at least for Eddie. He’d slept worse that past week than he probably had since the night Buck was struck by lightning, and all those sleepless nights that followed until he came out of the coma. Eddie went back to work the day after Buck returned to the loft and spent the entire night tossing and turning in the bunk room to the point that Hen had sleepily grumbled something about giving him a tranquilizer if he didn’t settle down. During the next two shifts he was running five miles on the treadmill at two in the morning and got lucky if he could wear himself out to sleep until seven. At home, he became used to the dull rattle of melatonin gummies and got back in the habit of barricading his door again- something he hadn’t realized he stopped doing while Buck was over. 

So yeah, he was exhausted. And it was because every time he turned on his side to look for Buck, every time he held his own breath to listen for Buck’s quiet exhales in the darkness, he hadn’t been there. 

Looking over at Buck, though, Eddie knew that Ravi was right. It was both of them. He’d seen Buck a few times over the week and had gotten him to admit he was struggling with a little bit of sleeplessness, but it hadn’t seemed like a massive concern at the time. Mostly because Buck had dismissed his concerns and Eddie decided to yield and give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t underselling his exhaustion. 

Eddie arched an eyebrow at Ravi, swiftly deflecting the subject toward their younger teammate. “How come you don’t look tired with all these double shifts?”

“I use vitamin E oil under my eyes to reduce puffiness,” Ravi looked far too excited to have finally been asked, making a beeline for his cubby of personal hygiene products. Eddie immediately knew he’d made a grave mistake once Ravi turned around with a small bin of multicolored tubes and tins of facial products. “I learned that from a tutorial I watched. Here, I’ll show you the brand I use-”

“You have fun with that, Eds,” Buck grinned, patting his shoulder with a cheeky glint in his eyes as he started heading toward the locker room door again. 

“Wait, Buck, don’t you dare-” Eddie made a grab for the back of his shirt and missed, Buck letting out what could only be described as a cackle as he left Eddie to endure Ravi’s diatribe on the culture of neglect around men’s skincare routines. 

He wouldn’t admit it even at gunpoint, but Ravi actually managed to teach him something, eventually accepting a packet of eye masks and running away before he could hear him finish his sentence about phosphate-free hair conditioner. 

Thankfully breakfast hadn’t gone cold by the time Eddie made it up to the loft, taking his usual seat next to Buck at the table after calling out a greeting to Bobby in the kitchen area. All joking vows of revenge for leaving him with Ravi disappeared when Buck passed Eddie his coffee, already fixed up in the way he secretly liked but never ordered or asked for. 

Eddie always drank black coffee. He liked it, he was fine with it. It was simple, no-fuss, and it made life easy for everyone. But if anyone ever asked Buck how Eddie took his coffee, he would say Eddie actually preferred it with a splash of oat milk and brown sugar. Buck had him try it that way once, fed up with his asceticism when it came to coffee, and it quickly became the default when they were together. 

He liked that Buck knew that about him. He liked that Buck knew this little thing no one else did. Hell, he liked all the things they knew about each other, the good and the bad. 

“Thanks,” Eddie said sincerely, his voice sounding a little strangled as he tried to speak around the lump in his throat. Maybe he was more sleep deprived than he thought if he was getting emotional over a cup of coffee. Or maybe that was just the effect Buck had on him. 

“No problem,” Buck smiled in that warm way of his, knocking his knee against Eddie’s under the table before turning to listen to Hen update them all on how things were going with Mara, the little girl she and Karen were now fostering. 

The subject eventually changed and Bobby started talking about rising rent costs in Los Angeles, his eyes pinched in the stressed way only a parent could be as he explained that May didn’t want roommates anymore and was considering moving closer to campus before the fall semester started. Living alone in LA was expensive enough, even when you weren’t a full-time student.  

“Tell me about it,” Buck’s expression looked weary over the rim of his mug as he drained the rest of his coffee. “I’ve been trying to get rid of my loft for almost a month now. I finally found someone to sublet it to until the lease ends in August, except now I kinda realized I still need to find a place for me to go.”

It took all Eddie had not to drop his fork in surprise, shooting a questioning glance over at Buck. He’d never mentioned this until now. 

“Oh, well you’re in luck!” Ravi brightened, clearing his throat and taking on what Chimney had taken to calling his ‘salesman voice’ as of late. “The contractors just completed renovations on this stunning one-bedroom unit in La Brea, it’s-”

“You can stay with me.”

The words came out of Eddie’s mouth before he could listen to another second of Ravi’s real estate spiel and all of the conversations around the table tumbled to a halt as Buck’s eyes widened, wordlessly staring at Eddie with a mixture of apprehension and something that was probably close neighbors with hope. Still, he didn’t say a thing, and Eddie had a sinking feeling it was because he wasn’t sure he could believe what he heard.

Living space was a touchy subject for Buck. 

There were things they didn’t talk about, and that was one of them, so it made sense that he hadn’t told anyone he was trying to move out of the loft. They just didn’t talk about it. They didn’t talk about Eddie finding a can opener in the back of the Jeep’s glove compartment when he was looking for napkins to clean up the soda Chris spilled in the back seat after some asshole with out of state plates cut them off, because that was how he learned Buck had been functionally homeless for most of the years between Pennsylvania and California, living out of his car or cheap motels if he’d found a job nearby. They didn’t talk about how easy it was for Buck to sleep on the couch because he’d crashed on so many throughout the time he was without one of his own. And they definitely didn’t talk about when Buck was living in Abby’s apartment, his heart buried so deep in denial and hope that he was willing to keep the metaphorical light on in the window for someone who was never coming home, even if that meant getting burned by it in the process. 

They just didn’t talk about it.

But now they were. 

“Eddie,” Buck began hesitantly, wariness and hope dancing in his eyes as he set his empty coffee mug down. “Are you sure?”

“Come stay with me,” Eddie rephrased the invitation, somehow managing to not look so imploring despite knowing he wasn’t above begging in this instance. 

He’d never been more sure of anything in his life. If Buck needed a place to go, Eddie wanted him to know that his house was always an option- the house with him and Christopher, not some empty, minimalist studio apartment or condo all the way across town. He never liked the thought of Buck being the only one alone like that. Out of all the members of the 118, he was the only one who didn’t have someone to come home to. Maybe now he could. 

“You already have a key, I have a two car driveway, and you wouldn’t have to worry about rent,” he kept going, trying not to pay attention to the wide-eyed glances Hen and Chimney were throwing at each other. “Chris would love it. Besides, the number of times you’ve stayed over, you know what it’s like to live there anyway.”

Live, Eddie realized he’d said. Not stay. 

Buck was staring at him with such a wondrous look in his eyes. Still, he seemed a bit torn, almost like he wasn’t certain he wanted to believe what was being offered to him. “I don’t know, Eddie, I think my days of couch surfing are kind of over.”

“Don’t consider it couch surfing, then,” Eddie suggested gently, even as his heart tried to beat its way out of his chest. “Think of it as moving in for now. Sure, one of us will still sleep on the couch, but you do that twice a week after our movie nights anyway. It’s not that different.”

There were a few seconds of silence where he was certain they would be able to hear a pin drop in the station.

Then, Buck smiled, his face lighting up like the sun coming out from behind clouds. “Air mattress.”

Eddie blinked. Okay. This was happening. Okay, okay, okay. “You have to put the coffee table back in the morning.”

“Ah, you’ll help me,” Buck’s eyes were bright as he grinned, nudging Eddie’s shoulder.

“Some of us are immune to your charm, you know,” Eddie couldn’t resist smiling back because why would he ever not smile back at Buck when he looked at him like that?

“You think I’m charming?” Buck arched an eyebrow, his smile growing even wider as he poked Eddie in the arm. “That’s embarrassing for you, Firefighter Diaz.” 

There’s a fine line between Buck teasing and Buck being flirty. And that- that sounded way too close to Buck’s flirting voice. 

Or maybe he’s had too much caffeine already. 

Buck poked him again and Eddie moved to flick his neck in return, but faltered, instead dropping his hand onto Buck’s shoulder. The levity was slowly giving way to the true gravity of their conversation and as they locked eyes, they both seemed to understand the significance of this. Buck wasn’t just crashing at Eddie’s, he was moving in. They were moving in together.

“Boys, no PDA at breakfast,” Hen teased, a peculiar glint in her eyes as she turned and mouthed something to Rosen that looked like it might have been pay up. 

Bobby coughed pointedly from the head of the table, drawing the attention to himself as he pointed a finger between Buck and Eddie. “You two really had to pick the week our usual HR person is out getting knee surgery?”

Buck seemed to be doing his best impression of a deer caught in headlights, or maybe he was just genuinely surprised by whatever Bobby was implying. “Uh- what?”

Their captain watched him for a moment, almost like he was assessing whether the reaction was legitimate or not, before he eventually deflated and cast a meaningful look in Eddie’s direction. Bobby must have found some answer there in his traitorously expressive face because he dropped his stare after only a few seconds.

“Nothing,” Bobby shook his head, rubbing his temple like he was nursing a six-year headache. Eddie had a suspicion of what it was about but that really wasn’t something he was looking forward to Bobby bringing up again anytime soon. “I’ll have your change of address form ready by the end of shift.”

“Thanks, Cap,” Buck beamed, reaching across the table for the hot sauce that Chimney never seemed to give back. “We should send Lauren a get well basket, d’you think we can get that approved in the budget?” 

“Wait, Eddie, I thought you already asked your girlfriend to move in with you?” Chimney pointed out, sounding confused. Without even looking, Eddie could tell Bobby’s eyes were on him again, likely wanting to know the outcome of their conversation a couple weeks back- the one that had precipitated this whole crisis he’d landed himself in.

You don’t seem to have a problem committing to certain things, Bobby had said to him in that very loft only a few weeks back. That discussion had left him feeling like he’d been turned inside out like some anatomy specimen in tenth grade lab and he wasn’t sure he’d gone a full day without thinking about some part of those words since then. 

Bobby had been right to question Eddie’s feelings about Marisol moving in- Dios, he’d been more right than Eddie wanted to admit. In the aftermath of it all, the truth of it was so glaringly visible. He was right. Eddie didn’t have a problem committing to certain things. Now, those were more blatantly obvious than ever. 

“We broke up,” Eddie said simply, making sure his tone let the others know that it wasn’t something he wanted to take any further questions on. “It was mutual. Things just stopped working out for us pretty quickly and we both agreed it was time to end things.” 

The mood seemed to drop a little and he wished he could take it all back, but Hen was quick to pick things back up again, planting her hand on her shoulder with an approving smile. “Communication. I’m impressed. Very mature of you two.” 

Eddie wasn’t sure how much communication really played into things, but that awkward coffee shop breakup was probably better than the ghosting they’d started to drift into after the accident. Still, he forced a thin smile back and turned his focus back to his breakfast, ignoring the worried look he caught from Buck out of the corner of his eye. 

“Well, Ravi, looks like you’re no longer alone in the singles club,” Chim grinned, patting Ravi on the back as he passed behind him to get a second bagel. 

“Oh, I’m not single,” Ravi chirped out happily, cutting his waffles neatly across the lines. Hen whistled and snapped her fingers while Buck even gave a little cheer of his own. Meanwhile, Chimney just gaped at him like he’d experienced some Shakespearean level of betrayal. 

“But- but I was going to set you up with someone!” Chimney abandoned his half sliced bagel and planted his hands on the counter, leaning over to stare at Ravi. “Who are you dating?”

All eyes turned to him for an answer but Ravi just grinned smugly, tilting his head in a way that suggested whatever his secret was, it was a damn good one. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” 

Disappointed groans sounded around the entire loft and even Eddie found himself amused by the whole ordeal, allowing himself to smile on Ravi’s behalf and laugh at Chimney’s suffering expression before the bell went off and everything else was forgotten entirely. 

Almost everything. 

———

After talking things through both during and after their shift and consulting Chris on the subject- an emotional conversation that ended in a long group hug with the three of them, Buck called the prospective subletter to see if she was still interested in the loft. Miracle of all miracles, she was thrilled to take it. 

Eddie met her when she came over to the loft while he was helping Buck pack. He learned that her name was Hania and she had just completed her pediatric surgical residency up in Oregon and accepted a job at the children’s hospital in East Hollywood. Buck had apparently once lived in Pacific City during his nomadic years and it was enough for them to establish a pretty quick rapport which really just made the whole process as smooth and painless as possible as they talked over logistics and cleared things with the landlord. She didn’t have much to bring with her since she’d just been crashing at her aunt’s house in Pasadena and was extremely grateful when Buck shared that he didn’t intend to take a single piece of furniture with him, casting a look of disdain over at the couch that was so very clearly not his style but Hania seemed to be just fine with it. Whatever dishes and cookware neither Buck or Hania wanted were promptly donated and Buck took a box of clothes to the Trans Wellness Center and another local place Eddie couldn’t remember. 

Athena, Maddie, Karen, and every member of their team had stopped by at one point over the next two days to either lend a hand or just sit and work through the beer and juice boxes in the fridge. Tommy showed his face for all of five minutes and made some comment about figuring that Buck wouldn’t be able to keep affording this place on his salary. Eddie was sure Karen was glaring daggers at Tommy after that, and that Tommy noticed, because he made his excuse to leave pretty quickly. 

All things considered, the move was surprisingly efficient. When Eddie had uprooted his life from Texas to California he and Chris only brought what could fit in his truck at that time, replacing everything else once they got settled, and this honestly wasn’t too different. Buck initially thought they would need to do it with Tommy’s help too since he had another truck, but they managed everything in one trip between their two vehicles. In fact, most of the boxes just fit in the Jeep. 

Eddie’s kitchen cabinets and spice rack were now overflowing with small jars- some of which he wasn’t even sure he could pronounce right. Five new video games were added to Chris’ collection in the television stand along with Buck’s video game console, and as for the shoe rack by the door- yeah, he might need a second one of those. 

As far as personal possessions went, though, Eddie learned that Buck had very few. Boxes of clothes and books, sure, but he didn’t have many things that seemed like they had sentimental value. Nothing except for a few framed pictures, a photo album, and an old shoebox decorated with stickers that looked like the kind you could get at the zoo gift shop. Written in large letters on the top was Buck's name in his own handwriting. He wondered what that was about, but Buck didn’t seem eager to talk about it. Besides, the question was derailed pretty quickly when Chris brought out Buck’s housewarming gift- a pair of slippers that he’d asked Eddie to get from Target and wrapped with some of their leftover tissue paper from Christmas. 

Evan Buckley moved into the Diaz house on the second Saturday of May, and that was when Eddie’s life began to change forever. 

———

Given how many times Eddie heard Buck wax poetic about the lead actor in the show they were watching he couldn’t believe neither of them had realized he wasn’t straight until last month. 

It was just a given fact that anything Star Wars related was ten times better with Buck’s running commentary and Christopher was all for pointing out the scientific improbabilities that he learned about. Eddie was just happy to be around the both of them, listening attentively while half in awe that these two were so similar without being related by blood. Looking at Buck and Chris, he saw a father and his son. 

He’d never been that certain about Marisol being a mother to Chris. Like with Ana, he’d been waiting for that feeling to come and it just hadn’t yet. Eddie tried to hold out some hope that they’d get there someday, but their incompatibility started to become far too apparent. 

Besides, there was one major thing that he was never going to be able to get past. He was in love with his best friend. He wasn’t sure he even remembered how it felt to not be in love with him.

Looking back on everything, it really shouldn’t have taken Eddie that long to figure out he was in love with Buck. They’d been stumbling toward each other in the dark for as long as he could remember, and then one day it was like someone had finally turned on the lights so he could see who he was really reaching for all this time. 

Maybe most of it was denial. Every relationship that he touched seemed to crumble beneath his fingers and some part of his subconscious was probably trying to keep that distance so he didn’t ruin one of the best things in his life- and that much easier to do when he didn’t know that he was in love with the man. Especially considering Buck was dating someone else and very possibly didn’t feel the same way about Eddie. 

Not to mention that until Buck came along, Eddie had been carefully ignoring a particular part of himself that he wasn’t sure would be able to survive enduring the years of Sunday mass, warnings of hellfire and brimstone, and the slurs so casually thrown around by the kids his age. He thought that flame had been smothered for him for good when he stood on that altar with Shannon. But Buck was all the oxygen those embers needed to spark up again. 

No one knew that about him. Sophia might have suspected it at some point when they were growing up, but that was it. It was his best kept secret, so much so that he used to be able to convince himself that it just didn’t exist. 

He thought about the things Bobby and Marisol had said to him. About the running bet that Chimney and Hen thought he didn’t know about. Carla’s insistence that he follow his heart and not Christopher’s. He thought about what Tommy told him that day at the station. 

They might not know he wasn’t straight- not in so many words. It likely didn’t even matter to them. But they definitely knew he loved Buck. That secret had been out long before Eddie realized it was something he needed to keep close. 

“I can’t swim,” Kino Loy was saying on the TV screen just before Cassian Andor got knocked into the sea by the rushing crowd of escaping prisoners. Buck and Chris let out identical gasps of shock and Eddie just held his breath, feeling something uncomfortable twist in his chest as he saw Andy Serkis’ character just standing there, still trapped on that prison ship as everyone else leapt to freedom. 

That was how it was for him, wasn’t it? So many people like him got to be free, and Eddie- he just felt like he’d been left behind at some point. 

It wasn’t a perfect metaphor, but it made enough sense to him. 

Dios mio, he couldn’t even get through a night off without his repressed feelings ruining everything. 

Buck’s arm was stretched behind Christopher across the top of the couch, his reach long enough that his fingertips touched the top of Eddie’s far shoulder, having maintained constant contact throughout the entirety of the episode. Eddie felt them brush down his back as he stood up, earning a confused look from the two of them.

“Dad, the episode’s not over yet!” Chris protested, fumbling for the remote to press pause. “You can’t wait ten more minutes?”

“I’m just gonna go start on packing your lunch for tomorrow, mijo,” he dropped an apologetic kiss atop his curls, trying not to look at how bright Buck’s eyes looked reflecting the light of the screen. “You two can start the next episode without me if I’m not back in time.”

“Are you sure?” Buck asked, still looking perplexed at Eddie’s abrupt departure, but Chris was already pressing play again.

“I’m sure,” Eddie gave him a convincing smile and didn’t let it drop until he was safely in the kitchen, heaving a shuddering breath as he busied himself with actually making Chris’ lunch. It was the best excuse he could come up with that would give him as long as he needed to pull himself together, with the added bonus that it actually needed to get done. 

After a few minutes of sitting at the table assembling a sandwich and cutting up fruit, though, he just stopped. His gaze caught on a dried rose petal that had remained unseen the last time he cleaned the kitchen, half tucked underneath the fruit bowl. It must have come from the bouquet he gave Marisol for an anniversary well over a month ago now. 

Their short breakup conversation at the coffee shop came flooding back in that split second and he was left quietly mulling it over in the dim light of the kitchen, his son’s half packed lunch temporarily forgotten in front of him. 

I feel like there’s some things you’re hiding from yourself too, Marisol had said to Eddie. And I don’t want to be around when you find them.

Well, he’d found it. More accurately, it had found him again. 

She’d been right about a lot that day. There was so much that they still didn’t know about each other in the end. He wondered if she actually even liked roses or was just pretending for his sake. 

He’d never know. It wasn’t important anymore. According to her, it never had been. At least to him. 

Was he really that shitty of a person?

“Are you okay, Eddie?”

Eddie looked up sharply, surprised by Buck suddenly appearing in the doorway, watching Eddie with a worried look on his face. The Andor title theme was playing in the other room so he must have left Christopher to keep watching on his own. It didn’t make him feel great to know that he gave Buck enough reason to be concerned about him to leave behind the show he’d been so excited for them all to finish together. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Eddie assured him, untensing his shoulders as he leaned back in the chair and kicked out the one opposite him for Buck to take when he moved to join him at the table. “Just…thinking about things.”

Something shifted in Buck’s expression and he wrung his hands together, resting his arms on the table and very pointedly not meeting Eddie’s eyes. His body language projected so much nervousness that he was probably going to give Eddie the anxiety version of a contact high. “Listen, if you’re having second thoughts about me staying here-”

Eddie blinked, sitting straighter in his chair and trying not to stare at Buck like he’d lost his mind. What? “Where’d that come from?”

Buck seemed to recognize how genuine Eddie’s shock was, relief smoothing out the tension in his face. “So that’s not it?”

“No, nothing like that,” Eddie told him quickly so he could erase any and all doubts on the matter, exhaling deeply as he dragged his hands down his face. “I’m just thinking about some things Marisol said to me when we broke up.”

“Oh,” Buck’s voice took on a much softer tone, recognizing the delicate subject for what it was. For a brief moment it looked like he was reaching across the table to take one of Eddie’s hands but paused halfway, his fingers flexing against the surface before he withdrew them. “Do you, uh- do you want to talk about it?”

Eddie wished Buck would have closed the distance, but life just wasn’t fair like that. He picked up the juice box he was supposed to put in Chris’ lunch bag to have something to fidget with now, flipping it around in his hands by the corners. “You’re starting to sound like Frank.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” Buck huffed out a small laugh and Eddie chuckled in spite of himself.

The two lapsed into silence for a minute, but it wasn’t entirely quiet. He could still hear Chris watching their show in the other room and the gentle electric hum of the green light in the breezeway between the kitchen and the garage. He could hear his pulse in his ears and the sound of Buck’s shirt rustling against his skin as he adjusted in his seat. 

The rose petal was still on the table. 

“Hey, Buck?” Eddie breathed out, trying to feel brave as he looked up to meet his eyes and ignoring the twist of nervousness in his gut. 

“Yeah, Eddie?”

His throat felt drier than sand and he swallowed roughly, committing to the jump. “What’s my favorite flower?”

Buck looked confused, which was understandable. But what surprised Eddie was that he didn’t seem confused like he didn’t know the answer, but more that he was surprised by the question itself. Marisol had caught him off guard with it two weeks ago and it wasn’t like he was trying to make a point or test Buck by posing it to him now. He couldn’t fully explain why, but Eddie just genuinely wanted to know if Buck had an answer. 

After a couple seconds, Buck reached to pluck the juice box from his hands to finish what Eddie had started with packing Christopher’s lunch. 

“California poppies. But you also like lavender,” Buck said confidently, neatly arranging the juice box into the bag among the containers Eddie had already put in. “You know, I think we should just start putting the juice in one of Chris’ other water bottles instead of buying these packs, we can cut down on a lot of single-use waste that way.”

Eddie nodded, only half catching on. We, Buck had said. He liked the sound of that, the way he made it sound like Christopher was their son. And he was. He’d just never heard Buck say it like that. 

But the answer to his question was equally as pressing. 

“I never told you that. About the flowers.”

I didn’t even know that. Not really.

He’d been ready to accept any answer that Buck provided, trusting it would be enough just like he did when Buck stumbled on Eddie’s secret favorite way to get coffee. He hadn’t expected to hear Buck name those flowers and feel a tug in his chest because of how true it actually was. 

“They grow in the yard, Eddie,” Buck cast him an amused look like it was obvious and honestly plain silly that Eddie wouldn’t consider this. He zipped up the lunch box and stowed it in the fridge, grabbing the water pitcher to pour him and Eddie each a glass before sitting back down. “Christopher told me he picked the poppies for the garden, but you must have liked them enough to agree to plant them. Actually, I think the tags say they’re golden poppies but it’s the same thing.”

Eddie nodded along, curling his fingers around the glass of water that had done nothing to combat the dryness in his throat, his voice still rasping as he spoke. “But we don’t have lavender.” 

“The lavender is outside of Pepa’s house,” Buck didn’t miss a beat and Eddie felt like he was looking at him in a light so different from any he’d ever viewed the man in throughout all the years they’d known each other. “She made us those sachets with dried lavender buds last summer and you still have one in your linen closet. Mine’s in the locker at the station.” 

A meteor could have landed in the backyard and that still wouldn’t have been enough to wipe the quietly awestruck expression off of Eddie’s face. The longer Buck spoke, the more something seemed to blossom and unfurl within his ribs, expanding his lungs and letting each breath come easier, each thrum of his pulse singing through his bones. 

This was what it felt like to be known. 

“You like flowers that remind you of home.” Cheeks flushing a little, Buck ducked his head when looking at all the emotions directed toward him got to be too much. “But I also think that’s kinda why you dislike cone flowers so much.”

“Why do I hate cone flowers?” Eddie sounded almost desperate for the answer even though he knew it already, because every second of hearing Buck voice his inner thoughts was like watching him untangle that mess inside of him and spin it into gold. He could live a thousand years and no one else would ever be able to do that. No one else would ever be willing to get close enough to lay hands on that mess of pain and confusion that existed within him all his life and no one else would be able transform it into something beautiful. 

No one else would ever know him like Buck did. 

I love you, Eddie thought, those three words ringing in his mind like a sonorous mantra. No matter what parts of him were still trapped deeper within, that much could leap free.  I love you, I love you, I love you. 

“You described these flowers that grew outside your parents’ house in El Paso and I looked them up to understand what you were talking about,” Buck’s eyes lit up in the way they always did when he got to explain the things he researched.  I love, you, I love you, I love you. “They’re pretty common in Texas, actually, so I figured that’s what they were. There’s types that are native to different parts of the state so I think the one you probably like the least is the narrow-leaved purple coneflower. That one grows in West Texas.”

He could see them so clearly in his mind, those tall, thin-stalked flowers with the narrow light purple petals that grew beneath the window of his childhood bedroom. They grew outside of his high school, in the ditch by the bus stop three blocks away in front of Tavo Guttierrez’ house, and he even used to see them on the side of the interstate when they drove through prairie land to visit one of his second cousins further east. 

They weren’t ugly flowers. Honestly, he thought they were kind of pretty. But Eddie remembered that Sophia and Adriana used to get yelled at all the time by their mother for constantly picking them to make flower crowns or bouquets for their shared room. It wasn’t like they would never grow back. That, though- that was why he didn’t like those flowers. Because something as innocent as his sisters picking flowers had left his ears ringing. Because there was beauty in the world that his mother would deny to his little sisters. 

Buck couldn’t possibly be aware of that particular story, but had somehow gathered enough to put the pieces together and reach his conclusion. Eddie didn’t know how he did it. 

“You-” he cleared his throat, tears stinging behind his eyes. “You did all that research just to figure out the name of a flower I told you I hated as a kid.”

Whatever he seemed to glean from Eddie’s expression, Buck looked pleased to have gotten it right, a fond smile tugging at his lips as he met his gaze. “I like knowing everything you like and all the things you hate. You’re worth knowing, Eddie.”

That was almost enough to do him in. Eddie thumbed away a rogue tear that came dangerously close to escaping, his heart stuttering in his chest in a way that was probably concerning to most cardiologists west of the Mississippi. 

You’re worth knowing sounded so close to you’re worth loving. If Eddie had been the one to say those words to Buck, that was what he would have meant. He couldn’t make assumptions about how Buck felt about him, but for that brief moment he allowed himself to dare to consider that there was a chance, no matter how small, that his feelings could be reciprocated. 

It felt selfish. It felt delusional. It felt possible.

It felt dangerous. 

I love you, Eddie couldn’t stop thinking at him. And you’re dating someone else. I love you, and you’re making that really hard to not tell you. 

From the living room, Christopher’s outraged shouts at the TV echoed into the kitchen and Buck took one look at Eddie before the two of them had to cover their mouths to stifle their laughs. Whatever was happening on that screen, they were definitely going to be hearing about it once they rejoined their kid. 

“So,” Buck finally said, blissfully oblivious to the struggle that had been going on in Eddie’s mind before it was derailed by Chris. “What’s my favorite flower?” 

It didn’t feel like a trap or an ultimatum in the way Marisol asked it. The answer still mattered to Eddie, though. This was Buck after all. It would always matter.

“Pretty much all of the yellow ones, I think,” Eddie said after struggling to come up with a specific type and realizing he just couldn’t. Buck was drawn to all sorts of bright yellow flowers, whether they were daffodils, sunflowers, tulips, or roses. Sometimes when the firehouse went grocery shopping together to restock the kitchen, he would find Buck wandering over to the floral department to look at them, but he never got any for himself. Eddie made a note to himself to get him some the next time he went to the store. “You don’t like any kind of lilies, though, because those are funeral flowers.”

"Yeah, you got it," Buck’s whole face lit up when he beamed and it felt like absolution. “I also like California poppies, though. Even though they’re a little more orange, they just look like little bursts of sunshine.”

“And I like yellow flowers too,” Eddie told him honestly, but what he didn’t say is that he loved how happy they made Buck more. “We should plant some more in the garden the next time we have a day off. Chris has been asking do to a plot of vegetables back there.”

“That’d be great,” Buck looked genuinely elated by the prospect and Eddie could practically see the gears turning in his head as he likely already began planning what they would need to buy and the schematics for how to build a raised garden bed. 

A blanket of comfortable silence settled over them and they just sat together, satisfied just by being in the other’s company. That was something Eddie realized was also unique to Buck- how easy it was to both talk to him or sometimes just say nothing. Those quiet moments were never awkward. Devoid of words, they were still complete. 

“Buck, thank you,” he eventually said. Not breaking the silence, just bending it a little. 

He cocked his head to the side, questioning. “For what?”

“For being you.”

Buck hooked his slippered foot around Eddie’s ankle underneath the table, chuckling when Eddie tried to foot-wrestle him back. In that moment he felt like they were a couple of kids just waiting to be told off by their teacher for messing around too much- that was how carefree the easy joy that Buck always knocked loose in him was. 

“Lucky for you, I don't know how to be anyone else.” 

———

It was going to happen eventually. 

Buck needed to get into Eddie’s room to look through his half unpacked boxes of clothes for a shirt he was willing to get dirty doing yardwork in, going through the piles he unceremoniously dumped on the floor while Eddie sat on the bed and folded Christopher’s laundry, offering his advice as needed. Once Chris finished up with his homework they were going to head to the garden center and finally work on beating the backyard into shape for the summer, and even sans clipboard, Buck was approaching the task with his usual keen, borderline obsessive determination. It was honestly one of the most endearing things he’d ever seen.

“How about my shirt I got from the hospital’s 5k we ran last fall?” Eddie eventually suggested, raising an eyebrow at the sea of fabric that had taken over the ground at the foot of his bed, Buck standing in the middle of it all like some really bizarre iteration of Moses. “They ran out of my size at registration and gave me that one that was two sizes too big.”

“That could work,” Buck clapped his hands together, looking around at his own clothes like it would just materialize from Eddie saying it. “Do you know where it is?”

“Come on, Tubbs, you don’t want to put those detective skills to use?” Eddie laughed, getting a kick out of the vexed look on Buck’s face that seemed to appear every time someone reminded them of their costume disaster the morning of Chimney and Maddie’s wedding. 

“Hey,” he protested, waving a finger at Eddie as he shoved his clothes back into the boxes. The only reason they hadn’t gone into Buck’s half of the closet yet is that they’d run out of hangers, but they were on the shopping list for today. “We settled this. You were Tubbs. I was Crockett.”

“No, you settled that,” Eddie defended readily. “I was just too hungover to keep disagreeing because you were making me seasick from shaking your head so much.”

“I did not.”

“I was convinced the floor was moving.”

“Alright, then, Crockett,” Buck conceded for the time being, kicking the boxes back into the corner to be dealt with after the garden. “Where’s the shirt?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie shrugged unhelpfully and grinned, stacking the folded clothes back into the basket. “Probably on the floor of the closet somewhere.”

Buck rolled his eyes in a long-suffering way that he definitely picked up from Christopher- only teenagers were that skilled at conveying their annoyance so effectively in a single gesture, but he turned to address Eddie’s untouched side of the closet in search of the shirt. 

Eddie was stepping around him to get to the door to put the basket of laundry in Chris’ room for him to put away later when all of sudden-

“Hey, what’s this for?”

That was when Eddie saw that Buck found the old piece of cabinet he’d been using to hold the door to his room shut. He forgot he kept it in the closet so that he would stop accidentally stubbing his toe on it by leaving it near the door all the time. 

It shouldn’t have been a massive deal, but Eddie couldn’t help but start to feel embarrassed at the thought of having to explain this. He never thought he’d have to try to make it make sense to anyone but his therapist, let alone Buck.

“This looks like it came from the garage,” Buck held up the plank of wood, frowning in recognition. “No, this definitely came from the garage, you used this to keep the hood of the Chevelle popped open when you were doing those repairs last summer.” 

“Now why do you remember that?” Eddie snorted and set the laundry basket down, reaching out for Buck to hand it over and hopefully let the conversation end there. No such luck.

“I happen to have an impressively good memory when it comes to you,” he replied deftly, flipping it over in his hands. “Why’s it in your room? I can put it back in the garage-”

“No!” Eddie said a bit too loudly, grimacing when Buck’s eyes flicked wider in surprise.

If he ever sincerely hoped to avoid this discussion, he’d shot those chances straight to hell. 

Eddie felt essentially frozen in place while Buck gingerly set the wood back down, taking a deliberate step away from it to sit on the edge of the bed, his light blue shirt complimenting the olive green bedding. Maybe that wasn’t important at the moment, but Eddie noticed it anyway. He also noticed the patient, yet expectant look Buck was giving him- one that said that if Eddie was going to raise his voice at him, he was owed an explanation, and it better be a damn good one. 

They’d gotten pretty good at keeping each other accountable like that. 

Shoulders dropping, Eddie sagged into the doorframe and waved halfheartedly at the piece of cabinet. “My door doesn’t close all the way. After you broke it down, we replaced the doorknob with the spare in the junk drawer. It doesn’t lock or even really fit right so the door never fully closes, it just drifts back open an inch.” Buck watched as he demonstrating pushing the door shut, noticing it slowly swing back open the was Eddie said. “I never got around to replacing it. I use the wood to keep the door shut at night. It’s weird but it’s- it’s comforting. Frank calls it hypervigilance and- yeah. It’s weird. I’m sorry.”

He started rambling near the end and had to cut himself off once he saw the expression on Buck’s face. Eddie couldn’t tell what it was, but Buck hadn’t stopped staring at him the entire time he’d stumbled through that explanation. 

See, this was exactly what he was trying to avoid. He could deal with having these little ticks- habits, compulsions, whatever, as long as he didn’t have to worry about someone else was going to think. Eddie already knew it was irrational, but he couldn’t override his brain, couldn’t get over the fact that most nights he didn’t even feel safe in his own room. 

“Eddie,” Buck said, his voice suddenly closer, and when Eddie looked up from the floor he could see they were standing less than a foot apart now, Buck’s hands coming up to hold Eddie by his upper arms. “I don’t think that’s weird.”

“Then what’s that look for?” Eddie asked him, almost not daring to speak with how close they were. He could smell the cinnamon on his breath, see the light smattering of divots on his cheeks from his acne scars, and the stubble that was starting to grow in since the last time he shaved. It was all thoroughly distracting. 

“Eddie,” Buck said his name again, bringing his focus back and letting out an exasperated huff that sounded like it was disguising a small laugh. “I destroyed your door and screwed up fixing it, you should’ve told me.”

“You didn’t screw up,” he tried to shrug but it was kind of hard with the way Buck was holding him- not that he minded. “Having the barricade made me feel safe. It was enough.”

And that was true. Most of the time. They weren’t going to talk about how he was still sleeping poorly at night even though Buck was now under the same roof. 

“Do you want to fix it?” 

Eddie blinked. “What?”

“You said the wood against the door makes you feel safe,” Buck reasoned, his hands falling back to his sides. The feeling of the pressure from his touch still lingered, though, two imprints of slowly fading warmth sinking into Eddie’s bones. “Would it make you feel better if we just fixed the door?”

Would it? He wasn’t sure. It was something he always thought about doing but just never followed through with. Marisol offered once before, even showing up with her toolbox without him agreeing, but he just insisted it was something he could handle himself. He just never did. 

But standing there in his room with Buck, looking around at the walls and how some small sections of paint appeared a little rougher in the sunlight, he figured there were some things that were better off getting fixed together.

“Yeah,” Eddie nodded, suddenly certain. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

They went to the hardware store to get a new door handle, one that would be easier for Chris to turn if he needed to get in when it was closed. It locked from the inside, same as the old one, and went on the cart with a new set of hinges. 

Chris always liked riding on the flatbed carts and insisted on Eddie pushing him around right up until they stopped at the garden section and he needed to make space for all the plants he wanted to get. Pulling out a list, Christopher led Buck and Eddie around the pallets and directed them to load on eggplants, bell peppers, and a strawberry plant. Buck picked out two different kinds of tomatoes and a couple trays of small, vibrant yellow flowers. After the insistence of the other two, Eddie found a potted Spanish lavender to put on the porch and selected some more poppies to go in the backyard, Buck’s face lighting up when he saw them. 

They got bags of soil, plant stakes, netting to keep birds and critters away, and headed home to get to work on their project. Hours flew by as the three of them laughed under the sun, following Chris’ detailed diagram of how he wanted the garden plot to look and making it their solemn mission to transform into reality. By the time the sky began to turn pink on the horizon, all the fruit and vegetables had gone into the soil and the flowers were looking vibrant in their own space, everything in perfect view from the bedroom and bathroom windows. 

Eddie watched Buck plant their yellow flowers in the garden with Chris and it was like something in the world had shifted into alignment after having been out of place for as long as he could remember. 

Maybe this life was more beautiful than any he could imagine. 

That night, sore and sun-drunk, Eddie should have been able to stay asleep without a problem. But the digital alarm clock on his nightstand was telling him that it was past one in the morning and he was still staring up at the ceiling, his mind refusing to quiet down enough after having been jolted awake from a nightmare an hour earlier.

He wished it could have happened on a shift, that way all he would have to do was roll over onto his side and see Buck within arm’s reach. But Buck wasn’t there. He was sleeping on the mattress in the living room, so close yet so far away. 

A frustrated groan bubbled in his throat and Eddie dragged his hands down his face, sighing deeply. He couldn’t afford to not sleep tonight- they had a shift in the morning and Bobby was this close to making Eddie the man behind if it didn’t look like his rest was improving. 

It shouldn’t have been an issue. His door was fixed, the wood was back in the garage, and he’d had a good day before. One of the best days. He was happy and safe. 

He was just missing Buck. 

Just as Eddie was entertaining going to sleep on the couch and making up some excuse for it in the morning, he heard the pressure of a floorboard creaking out in the hall and was on his feet within his seconds, instantly recognizing Buck’s footsteps.

By the time he opened his door they were practically face to face, Buck’s hand in the air like he was about to knock but Eddie had beaten him to it. 

“Fuck, you scared me,” Buck breathed, jumping back a little. Even in the dark, Eddie could still see the way his pupils seemed to eclipse the blue in his eyes and-

“Sorry,” Eddie cut himself off before he could get distracted any further. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m fine,” he whispered, but the way he was tugging at the sleeves of his hoodie told a different story. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“I- it’s fine, I was already awake,” Eddie reassured him, still unsure why the two of them were now standing in the doorway of his room at 1 a.m. if there was nothing wrong. 

“That’s what I was hoping,” Buck looked relieved. “I mean- I- sorry, it was just too quiet and I couldn’t sleep-”

Oh. 

“Do you want to-” was all Eddie had to say, heart in his throat as he took a step aside from the doorway in invitation.

“Yeah,” Buck exhaled before Eddie could even finish his sentence, almost like he’d been waiting for him to verbalize what he was too hesitant to ask. “Yeah, I do.”

They fell asleep on opposite sides of the mattress with half a foot of space between them. 

The door was cracked open. 

But it didn’t matter. They were safe.

———

They stopped sleeping in separate rooms after that night.

———

The universe worked in strange ways. Eddie just wished it would make sense for once.

That next week, Abuela came to town to celebrate Pepa’s birthday but showed up a few days before the party to spend some more time with her grandchildren- and her favorite great-grandson of course. One of Pepa’s sons was insisting on having a massive party which left a lot to prepare for, so while Buck took Chris to his physical therapy appointment after one of their shifts, Eddie had begrudgingly taken on the difficult task of trying to find a gift at the last minute all by himself. His cousin had suggested checking out some of the stores on the Third Street Promenade and that was how, on some random Thursday in May, he found himself in the middle of an overpriced Santa Monica boutique staring at a ghost. 

“Is there something I can help you find?” The woman asked him kindly, her red lips curving in way that seemed to suggest she was at least a little amused by Eddie’s wordless floundering. Somewhere in the store, a diffuser was misting tea tree oil in the air, giving the place an earthy sort of atmosphere, but he’d never been less grounded. 

She looked almost exactly like Shannon. 

That just wasn’t possible. 

It was everything from her face to her stature, her eyes to the sound of her voice. But instead of brown wavy hair, it was a dark, mixed shade of blonde like Buck’s. There was a birthmark- a Mallen streak, split at the part. Her outfit was something Shannon would never have worn in a million years- slim black pants and a beautiful light blue vest that looked like it was the same color of at least three different jackets and shirts that now hung in Eddie’s closet after Buck moved in. 

Trying to figure her out was like trying to untangle the distorted faces in a Picasso painting. After a few seconds, it started to give Eddie a headache and it was enough to snap him out of his daze so he could set down whatever he’d picked up off the table that led her to ask him that question. Evidently he’d been looking at a mug with floral designs on it. He completely forgot. 

“I- uh- I don’t know,” Eddie stammered a bit helplessly, his feet rooted to the spot as this impossible woman drifted closer to him. That didn’t seem to deter her in the least and she just smiled again, still amused, but a little more assessing like she was now trying to figure Eddie out too. 

He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

“I don’t knows,” she tapped a finger thoughtfully against her chin and hummed, fluidly circling around him to the other side of the table. “You know, I think we might just have one of those.”

Eddie could only watch as she picked up a jar candle and popped the lid off, holding it out toward his nose. 

“Here,” she said, her voice rasping slightly in a way that was so uncannily familiar. “Smells like a day at the beach.”

Remembering how to be a functioning human being again, Eddie leaned forward a little more to try and see what she was talking about. He supposed it kind of did smell a bit like the beach- but only in the way that some body washes or aftershaves marketed themselves as ‘ocean’ without actually smelling like brine, sunbaked sand, or sunscreen. Still, it was objectively nice, and he accepted the candle from her with a polite smile, placing the lid back on while her eyes flicked up and down his face.

“I’m Kim, by the way,” the woman introduced herself, extending a slender hand to shake.

“Eddie,” he shook her hand, a little surprised by how cold it felt against his skin. Icy, like she was either sitting in front of an AC before she came to talk to him or just had poor circulation. He let go fairly quickly. 

“So, Eddie,” Kim stretched his name out like she was testing how it sounded, tilting her head for him to follow her as she wove around the various store displays. “Are you shopping for a girlfriend?”

Alarms started going off in his head and Eddie stopped in his tracks, suddenly struck by the realization he’d been to disoriented to reach before. Oh, she was definitely flirting with him.

That- okay- wow. 

“No, no girlfriend,” Eddie told her, unable to stop the words once they started coming. “It’s just me and my son, Christopher. And my…” And Buck. “My partner. I’m actually shopping for my aunt’s birthday present.”

He didn’t know why he was suddenly spilling his life story to some stranger like that, but it seemed to have the needed effect, especially since Kim seemed to pick up on the word ‘partner’ pretty swiftly. Not that Eddie even meant it like that- he and Buck weren’t together- but ‘friend’ was now just so woefully inadequate to describe how he felt toward him now. And for some reason that was something he just decided to share.  

"Oh, I’m sorry!” Kim looked deeply embarrassed, blushing a little. “I should know better than to assume-”

“Oh, no, it’s fine-” Eddie tried to quickly reassure her, but she was already dismissing it with a wave of her hand, heading over to a small bowl of golden keychain charms near the register.

“Still, I feel bad,” she insisted, sifting through the bowl with a very deliberate kind of focus. The metal created light tinkling sounds against the glass that sounded like a thousand little bells rustling together.  “What’s your partner’s name?”

Well, in for a penny. “Buck. His name’s Buck.” 

“B and C,” Kim muttered to herself, fishing through the keychains. “I know I’ve got those two- aha.” 

She reached out and took Eddie’s wrist to flip his hand over, setting two gold letters into his palm with a soft smile. Two keychains. B and C.

Buck and Christopher. 

Two initials, two names, his whole world. 

“Here,” Kim said, closing his fingers over them. “If you’re buying the candle then you can have these on me.”

Eddie balked, looking down at the keychains in his hand even as his heart was doing something strange in his chest. “Oh, I can’t accept these.”

“Well lucky for you, I’m the manager, so yeah, you can,” Kim told him with some finality, hands on her hips. That seemed to settle things and Eddie followed her to the register to pay for the candle, the metal of the two initials growing warm from the heat of his palm. 

“I’m sorry for staring at you earlier,” Eddie belatedly apologized as Kim wrapped up the candle in a pretty gift bag that Pepa was definitely going to like. “But you just- you reminded me of someone. That’s all.”

Kim hummed, not sounding too surprised, and slid the bag over the counter with a wry grin. “Maybe I just have one of those faces.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, not wanting to get into any more details than that. Thanking her for everything, he stepped around another customer and headed to leave, not picking up on the sound of heels following him until he was at the door and Kim was four paces behind him.

“Hey, Eddie?” she called out to him, her expression imploring as he looked back at her, still mostly seeing Shannon. It felt almost wrong, knowing that Shannon was dead and somehow this woman was walking around with her face. 

He kind of hoped he never saw Kim again. 

“Yeah?” Eddie paused, watching as she chose her words as carefully as she had selected those keychains. 

“Good someone or bad someone?” 

Eddie might’ve thought that was a line if she wasn’t under the impression that he and Buck were a couple. Now, it just sounded like she genuinely wanted to know. Almost as if she was a little self conscious about it. 

Luckily, he didn’t have to lie. 

“Good someone,” Eddie told her honestly, heading out the door and not looking back. 

———

That night, Eddie sat in his truck in the driveway with the lights and radio off as he took in the silence and prepared himself to go inside. 

There were times where he would lie about construction or traffic just so he could take drive longer to drive back from things, building up a fantasy in his mind that was too delicate to shatter. He used to like to pretend he was coming home to Buck- that when he pulled up to the driveway there would still be a lamp on in the living room and when he opened the door, Buck would be standing there. Everything about him would be softened in the warm light, his eyes, his birthmark, his hair, his hands, everything looking and feeling and sounding like home. 

With Buck living there now, he sometimes got that for real. So now he switched to pretending that all of this was permanent. 

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t permanent. He wasn’t coming home to Buck tonight. He was parked next to the Jeep, but its driver wasn’t in the house. Buck was out on a date with Tommy and just that morning had been browsing for apartments on his iPad during breakfast at the station. He was dating another man and, at some point, would be moving back out of Eddie’s house. Since he was looking for apartments it seemed like he already wanted to anyway.  

Eddie sighed and tapped his forehead against the steering wheel, closing his eyes against the lapping waves of little grief and guilt that wore away at his resolve. 

He wanted to tell Buck everything he felt about him. He wanted to ever since that night in the kitchen where he was practically bursting at the seams with how much he wanted to tell him, and maybe even a little before that. God, Eddie wanted to tell him. If only so Buck would know that there was someone in the world who loved him that much. He deserved that. 

But what Buck didn’t deserve was Eddie putting him in that position. It was the absolute worst timing. On top of dating Tommy, Buck lived with Eddie. If things backfired, Buck would move out into one of those apartments he was looking at and Chris would never forgive Eddie for driving away the one person who swore he’d never leave. Things at work would be a nightmare and Bobby would probably just cut one of them loose to a different shift- or worse, a different station. There was more than just his feelings at stake and he needed to uphold his self control for the sake of everyone he cared about. 

Because in nearly all the scenarios where Eddie told Buck he loved him, he ruined both their lives in the process. 

He couldn’t do that to them. But he couldn’t stop this feeling. So he just suffered in silence. 

Besides, he wasn’t even positive that Buck felt the same way. He could hope, sure, but at some point that stopped being enough.

With another monumental sigh, Eddie grabbed Pepa’s birthday present from the passenger seat and pulled his keys out of the ignition, clattering a little more than they used to with the B and C promptly fixed on the loop next to his house key. That was all he had of Buck tonight. His car in the driveway and his initial in gold. 

But as he walked up to the front door, the lamp in the living room flicked on and he could see Buck’s unmistakable silhouette behind the curtains. He wasn’t supposed to be home, but there he was, framed in light by the window. 

By the time Eddie got inside, the living room was empty and he half thought he had imagined things until he heard glasses clinking in the kitchen. Dropping his keys in the tray by the door, he hurried through the house to find Buck standing by the stove and making a mug of peppermint tea in his shorts and hoodie like there was nowhere else in the world he was supposed to be at that moment. 

“Hey,” Buck’s voice was soft, almost fond, as he greeted Eddie with an impossibly gentle smile, leaning back against the counter while he waited for his tea to cool enough to drink. He looked so comfortable and at home that Eddie was half tempted to take a picture so he never forgot how he looked in this moment. 

Self control, he reminded himself. Have some, Diaz. 

“You’re home early,” Eddie said obviously, finally unsticking the words from his teeth as he set the gift bag on the table and stared at Buck’s damp curls like they outmatched all the wonders of the world combined. He must have showered to get the product out of his hair as soon as he got back. 

Based on the time he shared earlier, Buck couldn’t have been gone with Tommy for much longer than hour. Eddie had gotten back later than he planned to anyway, having been stuck helping his cousins go over their catering options for the party, but it still didn’t make sense for Buck to be there before him. 

“Oh,” Buck blinked, looking down at the tendrils of steam curling up from the mug. It was the one he got the last time they took Chris to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with little sea creatures that appeared in the ocean design whenever something hot was poured in it. “Yeah, I uh- I cut the night short, I guess.”

“Did you two have a good time?” Eddie managed ask despite the acrid bitterness it lef tin his mouth, stepping around Buck to see if there was enough water left in the kettle for him to make his own cup of tea. There wasn’t and he didn’t feel like waiting to boil more, so he went back to the fridge to search for something else. 

“Hey, I don’t kiss and tell,” Buck joked at him, swatting Eddie with the nearest dish towel, but it looked like there was something he was holding himself back from saying.

It was just an innocent phrase, but Eddie had to tear his eyes away, opening the fridge door and pretending to take too long to find a bottle of sparkling water so he didn’t have to think about anything that did or didn’t happen between Buck and Tommy on their date.  

Jealousy churned in his stomach and all he managed to offer was a polite laugh before Buck asked to see the gift he got for Pepa. Even as they talked about everything and anything other than Tommy, Eddie couldn’t stop that ugly feeling in his gut that was steadily building closer and closer to full-on nausea. 

His one consolation was that while Tommy got Evan in his tight-fitting date night outfits and done-up hair, Eddie got Buck. He got Buck in his comfortable LAFD hoodie, loose curls, and the steam from his favorite peppermint tea dancing in the dim light between them. 

Tommy wouldn’t even be able to take that away over Eddie’s dead body. 

If jealously was really a disease, his case was chronic. 

He needed to get over this.

As the next few days went by, Eddie almost convinced himself that he could.

———

And then the party happened.

They took every chance to celebrate that they could, and when Pepa extended a blanket invitation to everyone from the 118 and their family it was just naturally expected that everyone was going to show up because, well, why wouldn’t they? According to Pepa and Abuela, any family of Eddie’s was family of theirs, so there was no arguing with that, just like there was no arguing with Maddie when she kept referring to him as “Uncle Eddie” to Jee-Yun. 

It ended up being a perfect night. Cars curved around the block and music played from the backyard, the fences decorated with lights and lined with tables of food and drink. Chimney quickly endeared himself by bringing his favorite tequila to share with everyone and Buck surprised Chris by bringing out the tote bag of s’mores supplies he’d hidden in the trunk of his Jeep. 

Eddie didn’t even try too hard to feel bad about how quietly thrilled he was that while everyone had brought their significant others- Ravi had shown up with Albert which launched a million questions from Hen into how that started- Buck hadn’t chosen to extend his invite to Tommy. 

“I’m here with you and Chris,” Buck told him simply as if that explained everything, shoving the box of graham crackers toward him with a bright smile. “Come on, help me start breaking these up for the kids, your cousins already got the fire started.” 

Mara and Denny were engrossed in playing the game of giant lawn Jenga that Hen brought along and Karen had struck up what was probably a very interesting conversation with Pepa’s son-in-law who worked in aerospace engineering. Meanwhile, Chimney kept failing to corner Ravi long enough to shovel-talk him about dating Albert, but ultimately seemed content with how happy his little brother looked to be with him. Athena was thrilled at the opportunity to catch up with Maddie and while Bobby seemed like he had something on his mind he looked like he was still having a good time. 

Evidently Eddie’s parents were away visiting Helena’s sister in Sweden but Sophia and Adriana were able to make it at the last minute and as far as he was concerned that rounded off the family affair pretty perfectly. 

They sang, ate cake, exchanged gifts, and mauled a piñata- not necessarily in that order. At some point Sophia had gotten ahold of the music system and, a little tipsy, insisted it was time for everyone to dance. 

He wasn’t sure he knew what to call whatever they ended up doing, but it was some slightly convoluted dance where everyone was paired up and switched partners at set intervals in time with the music. Eddie had been originally paired with Maddie somehow, but it didn’t take much longer until he was turning around and finding himself clasping hands with Buck, almost knocking his forehead into his nose with how startled he was.

“Easy there, Eds, I’ve got you,” Buck laughed, his hands fitting perfectly in Eddie’s, warm, calloused, and perfect. 

“I know you do,” Eddie said sincerely, and there must have been something in his voice, maybe his expression, because Buck’s face lit up in a dazzling smile that never even came close to dimming as they danced across the grass.

The music changed after a few minutes, cueing them to turn around and switch to whoever was nearest to them, but even when Eddie let go of Buck’s hands to turn away they were suddenly on his waist, pulling him closer again. Buck’s lips parted in silent surprise like he hadn’t really thought about what else to do from there, just standing still among the crowd of dancing bodies, holding Eddie close with the lightest touch of his hands atop his hips. Heart beating in tempo with the music, Eddie reached to do the same, allowing his fingers to span across the thin material of Buck’s shirt above where it was tucked into his jeans.

Not for the first time, Eddie was struck with the knowledge that something shifted in that moment. And the result was far more than just a tremor. This was a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that no one but them could feel. 

“You’re supposed to switch, Buck,” Hen laughed at his expense, and he eventually relented, allowing Karen to pull him to her and watching as Eddie was then spun away by Hen. 

“But there’s nobody I’d rather dance with than Eddie!” Buck called back over the music and chatter, loud enough that anybody near either of them would be able to hear if they were paying attention. 

Eddie turned back to watch Buck with something akin to awe, but his stomach sank the further they grew apart, a gnawing ache longing for that stolen moment again. He could still feel Buck’s hands on his waist and the way his smile seemed to warm him through his bones.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

Hen looked between them both and fixed Eddie with a knowing grin that told him she somehow knew exactly what he was thinking.

“Boy, you are in so much trouble.”

Impossibly, his stomach plummeted even further. 

———

“How have you been coping since we last spoke?” Frank asked on the way into his office, leading the way and holding the door for Eddie to enter first before he shut it behind them. This week’s session would hopefully fare better than the last one where Eddie told Frank about Shannon’s doppelgänger, Kim, and ended up unpacking about six years of grief in the span of an hour. He cried even more when he told Buck later that night. 

“Good,” Eddie told him honestly, taking his usual seat on the couch while Frank set his crutches against the bookshelf and himself into his wheelchair across from him. “It’s probably easier since Buck’s living with me. Not permanently, just until he finds a place.” 

“I’m glad to hear things have been working out better for you. How long has he been living with you?” Frank asked, hardly sounding surprised that he hadn’t been able to get past one question without bringing Buck into things.

Eddie had to think, counting back to that first night. “It’s been almost a month now.”

“Nothing’s come up for him since then?” 

This is LA real estate we’re talking about, Eddie would have replied if he wasn’t actively doing his best to not snark at people who were just trying to help him.

“He had some options,” he admitted. “One of our coworkers actually offered him an apartment in a building he owns, but I asked him to stay with me. We went on a couple of tours of some places last week but he didn’t like any of them. Problems with the foundation, too far from Chris’ school or the station, a little small to have people stay over or host a party, there’s always something wrong.”

It was true. Not that Eddie wholly disagreed with Buck’s judgment, though. He’d seen how ancient the pipes were in the last place they’d looked at. But after going on five different apartment and condo tours, not counting the two open houses at, well, actual houses, that Buck went to with Maddie, Eddie was starting to become convinced that Buck was looking for very specific reasons to hate every single place he checked out. Maybe he was just particular about certain things, but Maddie was quick to tell Eddie that Buck had never been like this when it came to apartment hunting before. 

It really made Eddie wonder why it started now. 

According to Buck, all of the places had something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with them. The chipped tiles in the mudroom looked like they had designs painted with cadmium blue glaze, and no, he wasn’t going to pay to have it refloored, so that condo in Culver City was out. The walk-up in Alhambra obviously didn’t have an elevator and yeah, Eddie was with him on crossing that one off the list pretty swiftly, but he thought the place a couple miles away from his house wasn’t too bad. Two of Chris’ classmates lived in the complex and it even had a pool. Everything was ADA compliant and some people had Pride flags flying from their balconies. The rent was a steal for the area and it definitely wasn’t a scam. Buck had been struggling to come up with a fault, and he even seemed to give the leasing agent the impression that he’d be coming back with Maddie to get her opinion before finalizing anything. But the second they got back into the Jeep, Buck just looked at Eddie and said two words. 

“Beige carpet.”

It was evidently the nail in the coffin for him. They never called that guy back. 

At this rate, Buck was never going to find a new place. But despite all the setbacks, he was still looking. 

“A month is a long time to be living on someone else’s couch,” Frank commented, balancing his elbows on the armrests of his wheelchair as he interlocked his fingers. 

You don’t know Evan Buckley, Eddie thought wryly, but he just shrugged it off. “We share the bed, actually.”

Frank blinked, a pair of thick eyebrows raised in surprise over the frames of his glasses. “How do you feel about that?”

He got the sense that Frank was fishing for an answer in some way, unsure why such a straightforward answer had gotten a reaction out of the religiously impassive counselor. Eddie was almost completely certain that redwoods emoted more than Frank ever did in front of a patient, so clearly this was supposed to be going somewhere.

Sharing a bed was now normal for them, as was Buck hogging the blankets, grumbling about Eddie’s cold feet sometimes touching his leg because he didn’t wear socks to sleep like Buck did, and Eddie waking up plastered to Buck’s back like an octopus or a human shield. Sometimes it was the other way around with Buck’s head tucked in the crook of his neck or an arm thrown over his waist as he snored in Eddie’s ear. 

It was just their normal. A blissful kind of normal. 

“It’s fine,” he settled on saying, not wanting to get too deep into the mess of issues he was having with his sleep lately. He certainly wasn’t looking to go talking about the night he had to wake Buck from a nightmare- the last night they slept in a different room than each other, and that streak hadn’t been broken yet. “It’s not that different than at work, we sleep together all the time.”

“That’s in separate beds, though,” Frank pointed out, familiar with the layout of the bunk room from their previous conversations on the subject of Eddie’s degrading quality of rest.

“Well, yeah, they’re too small for two people,” Eddie was genuinely confused at this point. “The one at home is fine.”

Frank hummed in acknowledgement. “You said Buck is living with you now. What does that cohabitation look like for you two?”

That was an oddly simple question coming from him- enough to make Eddie think that there was definitely something he was missing behind this, but it was either answer or sit in silence, so he decided to humor the man and go along with it. Eddie ran him through what their weeks tended to look like. One of them drove them both to work, switching between the truck or the Jeep 

They had at least one outing with Christopher a week- not any different than before, because while Chris had started to outgrow the zoo, the planetarium still captured his attention well enough, as did the art museum. They went back to the UCLA botanical gardens again, and this time the three of them made a game of who could get the closest to guessing which plant everyone’s favorite was- and ignoring Buck’s knowing grin when he pointed out the burst of orange-gold poppies growing up out of the ground just off the walking path. 

Buck usually woke up first to make coffee and breakfast for everyone, and Eddie would do his part by handling the dishes while Chris got himself ready for school. Most days they took him together unless one of them had their own errands to run- Buck might need to go meet Maddie for lunch or Eddie had to go get a haircut, so responsibilities seamlessly became shared between them as their schedules flowed together. Karen had always regularly picked Chris up with Denny on the days Eddie worked so that didn’t change, but sometimes Maddie stepped in to let him stay overnight and her guest room suddenly turned into Christopher’s by the second week and Eddie found him leaning on her for as much support as he did Pepa. Chris started calling her Tia Maddie, and Eddie made no promises to pretend both his and Maddie’s eyes didn’t start watering at that.

They quickly learned it was better to do grocery shopping together because Buck would come home with only ingredients and genuinely seemed allergic to the concept of anything that needed to be prepared with a microwave, whereas Eddie seemed to forget they needed to account for two adults in the household and that they flew through beers and boxes of cereal a little faster now. 

“I imagine living together full-time makes it harder for you to date,” Frank prompted, clicking his pen idly. 

“Buck manages fine.”

“He’s seeing someone?”

“My friend- well, this guy- Tommy. They’ve been dating about two months now,” Eddie shrugged, picking at his nails. Buck had very pointedly thrown a set of new nail clippers into the shopping cart last week for the sake of his cuticles, but old habits died hard. “Usually the three of us hang out together about once a week- Buck asks me to come along whenever they go to trivia or watch a game. The two of them have only really gone out four or five times counting the wedding, though.” 

“So your friendship with Tommy and Buck’s romantic relationship with him don’t really exist without some involvement of the other person,” Frank pointed out and- fair point- Eddie hadn’t even really thought of it that way. “You and Buck spend most of your time together outside of work, even taking into account the fact that your only non-work friend is someone Buck is seeing romantically.”

Eddie laughed dryly. “I don’t think there’s anything romantic about the three of us drinking beers and kickboxing in Tommy’s garage.”

Frank didn’t say anything to that, just fixing Eddie with a look and waiting for the pieces to fall into place. And fall they did. 

“Wait-” he sat forward on the couch, staring wide-eyed at his therapist. “You think I’m sabotaging Buck and Tommy’s relationship?”

“I didn’t say that. But I do think it says something that the two of them apparently haven’t been on a date together since the car accident- a day that you’ve refused to talk much about- and you haven’t met up with your friend to do activities that don’t include Buck in over a month now,” Frank addressed the situation candidly, pausing for a moment to let Eddie consider what he said. “This tells me that you and Buck spend more one on one time with each other than you both do with anyone else in your lives, current romantic partners included. You share a bed, you share domestic responsibilities, and you’re effectively raising a child together- your biological one who you assigned a legal connection to Buck by entrusting guardianship in your living will.”

Eddie’s skin felt warm and he fought the urge to cross his arms in a defensive stance. “We’re not codependent.”

“And that’s not the word I’d use,” Frank agreed, steepling his fingers patiently. “You two are clearly capable of functioning and spending time apart, but what I’m more interested in is the sudden escalation of proximity in what has historically already been a deeply close relationship. With all of this in mind, I just want to ask- if you did have to pick a word to summarize your relationship to Evan Buckley, what would it be?”

“Partners,” Eddie said easily. “He’s my partner.”

“In what sense?”

All of them, the traitorously honest part of his mind supplied. Every single one. 

He tried to think of anything else to say, some vaguery or dismissal that would satisfy the question and let them move on to some other topic, but nothing came. When faced with it, it seemed like Eddie was physically incapable of minimizing just how much Buck meant to him. 

Dammit, Frank, you don’t make it easy to hide anything. Not even from myself. 

“Tommy thinks I’m in love with Buck.”

The words tore themselves from him like a confession, not a revelation. This wasn’t new, not by a long shot, not after everything Tommy had said to him the day following the accident, but what Eddie slowly realized had changed over the course of talking with Frank was that he wasn’t able to negate that assessment any longer. 

It wasn’t exactly an answer to the question he’d been asked, but it seemed to be enough for Frank to catch his meaning. He just nodded like it was a reasonable segue, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “And what do you think?”

“I think-” Eddie rubbed his forehead and sighed, exhausted by the uphill battle in his head and finally surrendering to the inevitability of truth. “I think he’s right.”

“That’s a very significant thing for you to acknowledge, Eddie,” Frank’s voice was low and gentle, patient as ever, even in the face of what was one of the biggest steps that had ever been taken in one of their sessions. “Is this something you want to take time to address right now, or would you like to set it aside for next week?”

Frank was always good enough to provide him with an out whenever they came across significant developments because Eddie would just shell himself off anyway until he was ready, and that usually took another week if not longer. He was half tempted to take him up on it like he always did. 

But things were different now. He was different now. 

So instead, Eddie said something he never thought he would. 

“Let’s talk about it.”

Chapter Text

“Dad, are you and Buck dating?”

Eddie almost dropped a carton of oat milk in the refrigerated aisle at Ralphs but there was not an ounce of pity in his son’s expectant eyes as he waited for the answer. 

It was a small blessing that Buck was out of earshot and getting laundry detergent a few aisles down, otherwise Eddie probably would have melted through the tiled floor in embarrassment and that was definitely not on his agenda for the day. Buck insisted that they buy their produce from the farmer’s market first, then get everything else from the store and Eddie while had to admit he was enjoying this routine they’d settled into with the three of them, it apparently meant that Chris had just learned to get creative about choosing his times to ambush them individually like this. 

“Uh- what makes you think we’re dating, bud?” Eddie asked carefully instead of answering. He placed the oat milk in the cart before any close calls struck again, doing his best to appear nonchalant even while his stomach twisted itself into a wicked knot. 

Teenagers really did know all the right buttons to press. 

Christopher just rolled his eyes, crutches clacking against the linoleum as he led the way over to the juice section. “I’m almost about to graduate middle school, dad, I know how to formulate and test hypotheses. I’ve already reached my conclusion, I just want to know what you have to say about it.” 

“Hey, I did middle school too, Einstein,” Eddie ruffled Chris’ hair, chuckling when he made an irritated whine and ducked out of the way. “I’ll play along, though. If that’s your hypothesis, why don’t you tell me the evidence you’ve collected?”

“You two were dancing together at the party even after almost everyone else stopped,” Chris pointed out immediately, ever the observant one. He was right- Buck and Eddie had managed to get a second dance later that night and he was certain at least five different people got it on video, Christopher included. “You even sleep in the same bed. You didn’t do that before a few weeks ago.”

Okay, this game wasn’t fun anymore. Eddie had really tried to dismiss it without having to outright lie to his son about things, but it was clear that Chris actually wanted to have a serious conversation about this. In the middle of their grocery shopping. In Ralphs of all places. 

Well, at least he didn’t have to worry about having a panic attack in another suit store again. Now he could make a go at checking a supermarket off that list. 

“The air mattress was just hard to keep setting up all the time and you know the couch isn’t good for Buck’s back after the accident.” It wasn’t a compete lie, these things were all true. Still, Eddie was praying to a god he didn’t believe in to let him dodge explaining the fact that both him and Buck had come to the conclusion that for some reason, sleeping in the same room seemed to be better for their overall sanity. Life was just weird like that. “Besides, I don’t think it’s for much longer. He’s looking at another apartment next week.”

After everything he told Frank about Buck’s struggle to find a new place, the search had not ceased yet and they were still running into those same old impasses and starting all over again. Eddie was learning to develop a lot of sympathy for Sisyphus. 

“It’s okay if you’re dating, you know,” Chris looked at him pointedly, taking advantage of how much he’d thrown Eddie off guard to put some absurd strawberry-mango-pineapple fusion juice into the cart that probably had more grams of sugar than vitamins in it. “I’m not homophobic. That’s just a stupid thing to be.”

“I never thought you were homophobic, buddy,” Eddie reassured him, averting his gaze from the strange look an elderly woman shot their way as she rolled by in her electric wheelchair. They really knew how to pick their moments. “Besides, we’re not dating. Buck’s still with Tommy, remember?”

“Doesn’t seem like it to me,” Chris screwed up his face in a frown. He definitely didn’t sound convinced, blocking the front of the shopping cart so Eddie couldn’t go any further. “What about the fact that Buck’s in love with you?”

Forget skipping a beat, Eddie’s heart might as well have just stopped as he stood stock still, staring at his son while Chris looked back at him like he hadn’t just taken a wrecking ball to the wall of doubt he’d been building up to keep himself from confessing his love to Buck every single day. 

Chris was a good kid. The best kid. He never would have said something like that if he didn’t have a good reason, and never just to mess with Eddie. 

What about the fact that Buck’s in love with you?

He’d clocked Eddie fair enough, so who was to say he hadn’t done the same with Buck? 

“He looks at you sometimes when you’re not paying attention,” Chris told Eddie when it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything in response. Not that he even could with how Chris had knocked the wind out of him like that. “He looks happy. You look at him like that too.”

Eddie swallowed roughly, daring himself to ask. “Like what?”

“Like you love him. Like you’re happier with him,” he replied, smiling when he saw Eddie’s eyes widen a bit. “You never looked at Marisol like that. You smiled at her, but she didn’t make you happy like Buck does. Do you love him?”

When asked outright, especially by his own son, Eddie just wasn’t able to lie. He could hide it, evade, but never outright deny it. 

“Yeah, mijo,” Eddie breathed out, feeling like a weight was lifting from his chest when he did so. “I love him. I really do.”

It was out there now. No more dancing around it, no more confirming other people’s suspicions without saying those words. 

I love him, I love him, I love him. 

A beautifully joyous expression blossomed over Christopher’s face and he smiled so wide that his eyes creased behind his glasses. “You promise?”

“I promise,” Eddie met his gaze evenly and Chris stuck out his little finger for them to pinky swear like Maddie had done with him all that time ago. 

His heart soared when he shook their interlocked fingers and wondered which of them had taught Chris that. 

Buck picked the perfect moment to come around the corner and deposit an armful of things into the cart, pointing an accusing finger at Eddie once his hands were free.

“You said you two were going to stay put by the cereal,” Buck fake-scolded, doing a horrible job at feigning disappointment in them. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Uh oh, did we promise that, Chris?” Eddie arched an eyebrow, looking to his son who was double-checking that the granola bars Buck got for him didn’t contain any tree nuts since his new classmate had an airborne allergy. 

“I plead the Fifth,” Chris declared, the granola bars having passed muster. He stepped out of the way of the cart, falling to pace with Buck as they started moving again. “Buck, are you ready to go home?”

Home, Chris said . Like it was something they shared. 

Because it was. 

Home could be the three of them. It was the three of them. 

And it always would be. 

“Yeah, buddy,” Buck nodded, sounding a little breathless as he met Eddie’s eyes over the top of Christopher’s head. “Let’s go home.”

———

Chris was on the phone with one of his friends in his room while Buck and Eddie put away the groceries, the conversation at the store still playing through his mind. He was glad that Buck was the one who drove them back, because he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop thinking about it long enough to be an effective driver.

Of the many things Chris said that stuck with him, one that stood out was his assessment of Buck and Tommy’s relationship. Particularly the fact that he said it didn’t seem like they were still together. 

Eddie thought about Buck coming home early from his date the other night and the fact that he was pretty certain he hasn’t gone out on any others since then. In fact, he wasn’t even sure either of them had so much as mentioned Tommy since Pepa’s birthday party. And Buck would mention him, right? If they were still dating?

Sure, he didn’t know much about how things were between them, but in his better moments he liked to think that they were at least happy. 

What about the fact that Buck’s in love with you? 

“So, you uh- you got any plans with Tommy this week?” Eddie decided to throw caution to the wind by casually asking as he put the ice cream away in the freezer. “Because you know Chris loves spending time with his Tia Maddie, you don’t always have to watch him when I go to my appointments. I’m sure they-”

“If I have any plans with Tommy they’d be news to me,” Buck gave a rueful smile, cutting him off before he could ramble along any further. “We’re putting a pause on things.”

“Oh,” he said dimly, still standing at the freezer as his brain screamed a million incomprehensible things at him. Eddie wasn’t sure what his face was doing because he was suddenly hit with a wave of guilt that was greatly at odds with the elation he wanted to feel. “I’m sorry, Buck.” 

“It’s fine,” Buck shrugged a little cagily, glancing over at Eddie and his unreadable expression. He looked like he was about to say something more, lips parting slightly before he dropped his gaze and started to work on folding up their reusable bags. “You’re letting all the cold air out.” 

———

Eddie called Tommy as soon as they cleaned up dinner that night, stepping into the backyard while leaving Buck and Chris to work out what they were going to watch before going to sleep. Even with all those studies about how blue light messed with sleep cycles he just couldn’t deny his family their movie time together. 

Before they did that, though, there were just a few things that he really needed to know.

Unfortunately there was only one person who had those answers.

Surprisingly, that person picked up on the fifth ring. 

“Evan told you, didn’t he,” Tommy said before Eddie could get a word in edgewise, not even offering a greeting first. He was glad they were cutting to the point right off the bat even though it bothered him that Tommy somehow seemed to actually have been anticipating this very call. If one of them had to be surprised, why did it have to be Eddie?

“Yeah, he did,” Eddie ground out, leaning against the side of the house and staring out into the yard as far as the porch light would reach. “Tommy, man, please fucking tell me you didn’t do this because of me.”

It sounded a lot more succinct than ‘please tell me you didn’t tell your boyfriend you needed space because you accused me of being in love with him.’ But it still got the message across.

“I’m sorry you’re upset, Eddie,” Tommy told him, not seeming apologetic in the slightest. “But you should know that it was his decision, and I fully support his reasoning behind it.”

He sucked in a breath, taking a moment to process that. Eddie realized he’d just assumed Tommy had been the one to put a pause on their relationship. He’d been so ready to blame him that he completely overlooked the possibility that it was Buck who wanted space.

“Wait, Buck was the one who-”

“Yep,” Tommy confirmed shortly, sounding a little annoyed that it wasn’t obvious. “We talked some things over the last time we went out and just pressed pause after that. Basically, he said he needed some space to figure out what he wants because he wasn’t sure it was with me.”

Eddie exhaled deeply, his blood thrumming in his veins as he paced along the back of his house. Somewhere in the distance a cricket was chirping and if he strained his eyes enough he could see the bed of beautiful yellow and gold flowers near the back fence. Buck’s flowers and their California poppies.

All of this felt like some impossible fever dream. Chris saying that Buck was in love with Eddie. Tommy confirming that Buck asked for space from him because he might not be what he wanted. That didn’t mean he was going to look for it with Eddie, but still- it was all just a little surreal. 

Especially the fact that Tommy just seemed…fine. 

“You said Buck just asked for some time,” Eddie felt like the breath had been knocked from him with the force of his next realization. “But you- you’re going to break up with him, aren’t you?”

“I’m not looking to be anyone’s consolation prize,” Tommy said without any trace of bitterness, and it wasn’t exactly an answer but Eddie understood anyway. 

Still, it threw him. Tommy wasn’t going to fight. He wasn’t going to fight for Buck, for their relationship. Hell, he didn’t even sound sad about it. 

Losing someone like Buck would break Eddie. For Tommy, it sounded like it was just Wednesday. 

Eddie had been such a fool for thinking their relationship was going as well as he thought it had been. This- this was just abysmal. 

“I was right, though, wasn’t I?” Tommy asked after a few more seconds of silence, the trace of smugness evident in his tone. “You do love him.”

“Yeah, I love him,” Eddie admitted, hating that such a sacred admission was being boiled down to a point being proven. “But I- I can’t tell him.”

“I don’t think this is just about you, though, Eddie. If you love him as much as I think you do, maybe that’s something he should know.”

It was quite possibly the only piece of good advice Eddie would ever get from Tommy in his life, and it was wholly unexpected, but it helped that it was something Eddie thought once before. Buck deserved to know how much he was loved by someone. By Eddie. Even if he didn’t return those feelings, he’d still know he was loved. 

Eddie hummed thoughtfully, resuming his pacing. “Can I ask you something?”

An amused scoff came from the other end of the phone. “You just did.”

He sighed, frustration causing him to hold his phone harder against his ear. “Tommy.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you-” Eddie paused before taking that final leap, knowing there was no going back from whatever answer he was going to get, no matter how much it stung. No matter how much it might burn, might flay him alive and make him a martyr, the new patron saint of heartbreak and selfishly won love. “Did you ever love him?”

He could hear Tommy take a deep breath through the phone and pictured him dragging a heavy hand down his face, eyes dark with thoughts and regret. “Love’s not really what I was looking for with Evan, and even if it was I don’t think I would’ve found it. I’m pretty sure I spent more time being jealous of him and your family at the 118 than actually trying to get to know him as a person. We need different things and it’s honestly really clear now that we weren’t going to get them with each other. Turns out this just isn’t what I wanted.”

Something about that confession didn’t sit right with Eddie and he was quiet for a few moments as he processed, understanding that it was because it felt like a lie- if anything, it was maybe the most honest he’d ever heard the other man be. It was unfamiliar in a way, as if a filter had been removed and he was seeing things in their truest colors for the first time, no matter how unflattering the hue. 

He thought about how Tommy befriended him first, throwing out all these grand gestures and good times together until he all but dropped from his life once he started dating Buck. From how things sounded, though, Eddie was the only one of them he’d gone all out with like that. Maybe he’d been trying to impress him for some reason, but he could never figure out what that reason was. Especially since they stopped talking so quickly after that fateful basketball game.

In fact, the last time Tommy had even reached out to him since the day after the car accident was when Buck let it slip that Eddie and Marisol had broken up. That night, Tommy had called Eddie to see if he wanted to get together for drinks at some club, and the phrasing seemed to imply that this wasn’t an invite that extended to Buck. Eddie hadn’t thought much of it at the time and just gave some vague excuse to not go. 

Now, he was pretty sure that had meant something. 

There was a cold twist in his stomach as he made to speak again and Eddie swallowed roughly, lowering himself to sit on the old lawn chair tucked by the back door to the kitchen. “Hey, Tommy?”

“Yeah?” Tommy replied again, this time sounding tired like he was ready for this conversation to finally be over now that he’d finished saying his piece. 

Well too fucking bad, Eddie thought to himself, gripping the phone tight. I’m not done here. 

“You said you were jealous of the 118, that you wanted to be a part of the family. But you didn’t want to be anyone’s consolation prize. Was Buck-” Eddie didn’t realize he was clenching his other fist until he felt his knuckles begin to pop under the strain. “Was Buck your consolation prize?”

A beat of silence from the other end of the line. 

Then, a sigh. 

“Goodbye, Eddie.”

The call ended and Eddie was left staring down at his phone, too thrown by that confirmation to do much else. A significant part of him wanted to believe that this was all just a ruse, that Tommy was turning himself into the bad guy to make this easier for everyone else, but if that was the case then Eddie should have felt more comforted by the sacrificial gesture than anything. But he didn’t feel relieved. Relief was sweet, and this left a bitter, acrid taste in his mouth to think about. 

This wasn’t sacrifice, he knew. This was candor. This was the painful truth that Buck had been spared about Tommy Kinard, and even as the night grew colder Eddie would never stop being grateful that he was the one who intercepted that hurt before it could reach him. Buck didn’t deserve that. Tommy was right about that much- observant enough to recognize it, but unable to change the part of himself that was causing the harm. 

Eddie quietly wondered if that made Tommy a bad person. That was too much for him to deal with now, though. Not when the motion sensor light had long since gone off, leaving only the warm glow of the kitchen light through the window to fend away the dark. Not when inside there were dishes to put away, blankets to fold, and the two halves of his whole life probably struggling to decide on a movie without him as the perpetual tie-breaker. 

He went back into the house and filled up the hot water bottle Buck used for his bad leg since it seemed to have been bothering him earlier in the day, feeling lighter than he had in months. 

I love you, Eddie almost said when he brought Buck the hot water bottle on the couch, taking a seat between him and Chris so Buck could stretch out and lay his bad leg across Eddie’s lap. Buck had stared at him with such gratitude, letting Eddie carefully massage out the cramps with his fingers as Chris looked for the remote. 

I love you, Eddie nearly told him when he sided with Chris on watching The Princess Bride over Knives Out.

I love you, he came so close to actually saying after he fell asleep and Buck woke him up to go to bed, nudging him toward the bathroom first because he knew how much Eddie hated how his teeth felt if he went a night without brushing them. And I think you love me too. 

———

A few hours later, Eddie awoke to a nightmare that wasn’t his own, the sheets twisted over onto one side of the bed as Buck tossed and turned fitfully, fighting against something behind closed eyes. 

There was a sharp pang in his chest to see Buck suffering and there was no way he could let this go on for a second longer than it had. 

“Buck,” Eddie whispered, inching closer to gently shake his trembling shoulder. He knew Buck tended to run pretty cold sometimes after the lightning strike messed with his nervous system, but right now he seemed to just be shuddering from the cold sweat that had soaked through the back of his shirt. “Buck, wake up.”

Rubbing his upper arm to work some warmth back into him, Eddie kept coaxing him awake until eventually Buck rolled over onto his back, blinking dazedly up at the ceiling. 

“Eddie?” He croaked out, turning his head against the pillow to seek him out in the darkness, squinting a little as his eyes adjusted. “Y’wake?” 

“I’m awake, I’m here,” Eddie promised, and Buck slid his hand over Eddie’s, bringing them both to rest atop his sternum. As his fingers curled over Eddie’s, he could feel Buck’s heart rate start to stabilize beneath his palm, beating slower and more in harmony with his own. “You had a nightmare, but you’re safe. You’re safe, baby.”

Buck smiled sleepily against the pillow, huffing out a small laugh that tickled the tip of Eddie’s nose. “‘Course ‘m safe. I’m with you.” 

Eddie could have cried. It was a very near thing. 

“Is there anything I can do to help?” He asked instead, swallowing the lump in his throat. While he knew what helped him after his nightmares- just being reassured of Buck’s presence- he wasn’t entirely sure if it was that simple the other way around. Maybe he could go make him some tea or they could watch a documentary together on the couch until they fell asleep again. Whatever it was, Eddie would do it. 

Buck didn’t say anything for a few moments and Eddie almost thought he wasn’t going to answer, but Buck’s hand suddenly disappeared from his own and pushed against Eddie’s hip until he was lying on his back again. The blankets were adjusted to cover them both fully and Buck rolled over so he was nestled up against Eddie’s left side, neatly tucking his head under his chin.

“Is this okay?” Buck asked quietly, wrapping an arm around Eddie’s waist. His breath was warm against Eddie’s chest, each word bleeding through his shirt, his skin, right down to his heart. 

This was real. He was awake and this was real. 

“Yeah,” Eddie breathed carefully, freeing his left arm from underneath Buck to wrap around his shoulders, holding him even closer. “Is this?”

“It’s you, Eddie,” Buck yawned, and even though Eddie couldn’t see his face he could hear the soft smile in his voice. “It’s perfect.”

I love you. 

I’ll tell you in the morning. 

———

The day started off just like any other. They took Chris to school, stopped to get coffee again on the way back home, and eventually set to work on cleaning up the kitchen from the combined mess of preparing both breakfast and Christopher’s lunch. 

Chris had finally outgrown the simple ham sandwiches that Eddie used to make for his school lunches so it had turned into a bit more of an intensive effort for both him and Buck to rotate out different nutritious combinations of items that would be agreeable for kids that age, which did come at the cost of more dishes. The school year would be ending soon, though, and Chris would be coming home with their tickets for eighth grade graduation in his homeroom folder, so Eddie supposed he would have to hold onto these moments while he could because despite all odds, time was flying by. In the fall, their little boy would be going into high school. High school. 

Eddie didn’t think either him or Buck were nearly old enough to have a kid going into ninth grade, but here they were. 

And there was nowhere else he would rather be. 

He just wished Shannon could be there to see the amazing young man their son was becoming. Maybe Chris would want to go visit her grave afterward to tell her. 

Maybe Buck would want to come, too. 

They handled the dishes together while Eddie was lost in thought, forearms brushing as they worked side by side over the sink with Eddie washing and Buck drying. No matter the task, whether it was dishes or a rope rescue, they always seemed to work in perfect tandem, never more than a step behind the other. 

Eddie really needed that today. He needed them to be in sync because he was about to take one of the biggest risks of his entire life. Bigger than cutting his line forty feet beneath the surface of the earth, and almost as big as becoming a father and husband at nineteen. 

But he wasn’t scared. Not anymore. Not when he was standing at the sink, looking at their garden through the window. The sky was gray but the flowers were like a small patch of sunshine all on their own, brightening up the gloomy June day with ease. Yellow flowers in the garden of a yellow house. 

They both loved flowers that reminded them of home. Eddie had just been too slow to realize that Buck had been saying the same thing as him all this time. 

“Do you think Chris will be embarrassed if I cry at his graduation ceremony?” Buck asked as they were putting the dishes away a few minutes later, bumping Eddie’s shoulder with a smile. “Because I’m pretty certain I’m gonna cry and I’m not-”

“I love you.” 

“-sure he would think that was cool.” Buck finished, reaching over Eddie to put a plate away in the cabinet. Then, he stopped, turning to look at Eddie as those three words finally seemed to sink in. 

Eddie was already looking back at him, turning to fully face him where he stood in front of their sink in their kitchen. In their home. He was finally taking the risk, finally making the jump, more sure of where he would land than he ever was before. Every time that he thought I love you at Buck led up to this moment of finally telling him what he deserved to know. 

And Eddie wasn’t afraid of it anymore. 

His heart wasn’t in his throat or in his chest or sinking through his stomach toward the floor. At that moment, it was exactly where it needed to be. Eddie’s heart was in Buck’s hands now. Right where it belonged. 

Buck seemed to be holding his breath, pale eyes widening as he stepped closer into Eddie’s space, drawn forward until there was no way he could keep going without forcing Eddie to take a step back into the counter. His lips parted ever so slightly as he finally remembered how to breathe, his chest almost brushing against Eddie’s as he inhaled. 

“Say that again,” Buck rasped, still sounding like he was out of air. Eddie understood how he felt. He was getting a bit dizzy the longer he looked at Buck, his gaze falling down to his lips, red and a little chapped, then back to his eyes, pupils blown wide and dark in a sea of blue. “Please.”

It felt like the air had been stolen from the room and all that was left to breathe was what was in those few inches of space between them. 

“I love you, Buck” Eddie told him again, placing his right hand in the curve between his neck and shoulder, thumb falling into the dip above his collarbone where he could feel his pulse in his throat. They were standing so close and he couldn’t stop looking at Buck’s lips now, couldn’t stop leaning closer, but he didn’t want to stop until he could feel them against his. He didn’t want to stop. Not anymore. “Buck. Can I-”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence before Buck was surging forward and curling a broad hand around the back of Eddie’s neck, hauling him into the last first kiss of his life.   

It took a few seconds for Eddie’s brain to catch up to what was happening even though it was what he was going for. But like always, he wasn’t more than a step behind, his body falling into perfect sync with Buck’s as he brought his left arm around his waist and kissed back with all he had, tears stinging behind his closed eyes as his heart sang three words over and over and over again.

I love you. I love you, I love you, Eddie thought as he brought both of his hands up to frame Buck’s jaw, thumbs brushing gently against his cheekbones. His fingertips would know this face in the dark, whether he was blindfolded or the sun had gone out. He would always know Buck. 

The kiss intensified as they wordlessly shifted so Buck was pressed back against the counter, arms around Eddie’s waist as he pulled him impossibly closer. Their legs slotted together and Eddie almost lost his balance, but Buck’s arms were there to hold him steady. Just like they always would be. 

And then suddenly Eddie had to break away, the air rushing back into the room and leaving him gasping for breath against Buck’s lips as their foreheads rested against each other. His head felt bubbly like a glass of champagne, vision spinning a little as he stared at Buck with a wonderstruck look on his face that he couldn’t believe was being reflected right back at him. 

He’d heard people talk about getting lost in a kiss, so overwhelmed and taken in that they couldn’t tell up from down, but this right now with Buck…it felt like being found. 

Buck kissed him first. That really happened. 

Eddie told Buck that he loved him and Buck had kissed him first. 

If this was a dream, he never wanted to wake up from it. 

“We should talk about this,” Buck murmured against Eddie’s mouth, lips barely brushing in the ghost of a second kiss. Neither of them had made a move to fully break apart just yet and Eddie could still feel the warmth from Buck’s hands radiating through his waist, leaving him almost drunk from the sensation.

“Okay,” Eddie promised softly, ducking forward to chase that high and capture Buck’s lips with his own again, the two finally sinking into that second kiss that went much longer than they intended it to. Right up until Buck’s hands snaked up to Eddie’s chest and applied just enough pressure for him to get the hint to take a step back.

“Now, Eds,” Buck’s voice cracked with urgency and Eddie sobered immediately, watching with bated breath as Buck held his hands, cradling them gently between the two of them. “Okay?”

And suddenly the cold prickle of fear kicked back up and Eddie felt the urge to run, except there was nowhere to run because this was his home and it was Buck’s too.

And he was done running. He wasn’t that man anymore, even when his old fear told him otherwise. 

“Okay,” he repeated, and they sat at the kitchen table where Buck had packed Christopher’s lunch that morning while Eddie made oatmeal and cut up fruit for their breakfast. Where they had once talked about lightning strikes and bullet wounds, flowers and home. 

“Eddie,” Buck started slowly, hands splaying across the tabletop in front of him. “I’m never going to be Shannon. I- I can’t do this if it’s just because you’re still trying to replace her.”

The fear in his voice was evident and it pained Eddie to know that a part of Buck, no matter how small, could think that was all he was. A stand-in for a dead woman. 

“That’s not what this is, Buck,” Eddie swore to him, reaching across the table to take both of Buck’s hands in his. He swore his heart kicked up a notch when Buck reached for him back, swiping the pads of his fingers over the pulse point in Eddie’s wrist as he did so. “I love you, Buck. I’ve been in love with you for so long and it’s been killing me to not be able to tell you until now. I wanted to tell you every time I woke up next to you, every time I see how much you love our son, every time you look at me like I’m something worth seeing-”

It was impossible not to choke up then and he took a moment to gather himself. Buck’s eyes glistened as they watched him and Eddie was certain he was holding his breath again.

“I’m not trying to replace Shannon. I want you. This. Us,” Eddie kept going, emphasizing that last word with a squeeze of their joined hands. “Taking Chris to school and getting groceries together. Living in the same house and working at the same station until they kick us out or we retire. You’re the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. You don’t have to want that too, but that’s how I feel. You deserve to know that.”

After thinking it all in his head for so long, it was easy to finally say out loud, but mostly because they were some of the truest words he’d spoken in his life, and likely ever would. If there was a world where he went a day longer without telling Buck exactly how much he meant to him, that was a world that Eddie didn’t want to live in. Patience had stretched its status as a virtue, and that was overrated anyway. 

Besides, patience had never been in love with Evan Buckley. 

Buck let out a shuddering exhale, watery eyes meeting his as he pulled a wan smile, his lips tugging up slightly at the corners. “Eddie, I think I’ve been in love with you for years without realizing it. I just never questioned what those feelings were. Honestly, that seems to be a common thread for me because I didn’t even figure out I was bisexual until about two months ago even though the signs had been in front of me for years. I love you too, and I know what I want that to mean. I want all those things you said and more, just-”

He paused and took a breath, his smile flickering a little wider as Eddie traced his fingers over his knuckles in a reassuring gesture. All while he tried to comfort him, though, Eddie couldn’t stop hearing those words cycle through his mind on a never ending loop. I love you too. 

Eddie loved Buck. And Buck loved him back. 

No other life could be better than this one.

“I just need you to be sure, okay?” Buck stressed, blinking back tears as his voice took on a much more hopeful edge to it. “Please. I can’t bear it if we make it to tomorrow, or a week from now, or years down the line and you look at me and realize you’re still chasing someone else. I love you so much and it’s taking everything in me to not jump feet first into this so hard that I break my ankles, but I know I have to be more careful with myself now. I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like I wasn’t enough, and I don’t think I could ever take that coming from you.”

Eddie swallowed roughly, nodding a little as he broke their gaze to just stare down at their hands. It wasn’t unfair, what Buck was asking. He’d watched that happen twice already to both Ana and Marisol and they all knew the end to that story. It didn’t deserve a third act, not with Buck cast as the doomed love interest. 

If Eddie screwed this up and hurt Buck, he would never forgive himself. 

A part of him wanted to protest, to assure Buck that he’d already thought this over a million times and was certain this was what he wanted- because it was. But he had to see things from Buck’s perspective, now. Buck wasn’t doubting that Eddie loved him. He just wanted to ensure that Eddie didn’t have any doubts. That there weren’t any questions about himself still left unanswered in a way that left him unprepared to walk into the future he’d just promised to Buck. 

It wasn’t a no. It was a wait. Soon. 

If he pursued this with Buck, Eddie knew there would be nobody else- not ever. Buck would be it for him. 

He had to get this right. No running away when things got hard. 

He could live with that. After all, Eddie had wrestled with a lot to finally get to this point. All his confusion with Shannon and Buck, what happened with Ana and Marisol, and the fact that he was still unsure about what his feelings for Buck meant about himself. He told himself that part didn’t really matter and skipped right back over it again, even as it cried for his attention, its voice worn thin from decades of screaming inside of him. 

It was time to listen to it.

“You’re right,” Eddie conceded, because of course he was. This was Buck. Buck, who knew Eddie inside and out, better than he knew himself sometimes. “I think I need to resolve a few things before going into this relationship because I- God, Buck, I want this to work. I want this so badly.”

“I do too, Eddie. And I’m not doubting that,” Buck assured him quickly, sounding as breathless as Eddie felt. “I just need you to be absolutely confident that I’m the one you want it with because if we do this, you’re it for me.” 

“You’re it for me too,” Eddie smiled, his heart feeling safer than it ever had been now that it had its home in Buck’s hands. “Will you- will you give me time to figure this out?”

Buck nodded. “Of course. And I promise we’ll be okay no matter what. Whatever happens, we’re not losing each other.”

“You promise?”

“I’m not going anywhere, unless-”

Eddie didn’t even want to hear the end of that sentence. “Stop looking for apartments. I don’t even know why you kept looking after the fourth one. Beige carpet? Really?”

Buck let out an embarrassed laugh, eyes crinkling at the edges. “I didn’t want to leave, I thought that was pretty obvious. I just didn’t think staying here forever was an option.”

Forever. It sounded like such a beautiful word when it came from Buck. Eddie wanted to capture that word and let it wash over his hands as he held it as close to his heart as he could. Forever. 

“Well it is,” Eddie promised, those words feeling like a vow. Forever. “Stay. Please. I- I want you to be here when I’m ready. Because I will be. Even if it’s not today. This- this doesn’t have to change anything between us.”

He was quiet for a moment, watching Eddie carefully. “What if I want it to?”

Buck raised Eddie’s hands to his lips and pressed a feather-light kiss against the dark scar that danced across the back of one of his knuckles. There were four more marks like that between both of his hands- scars from fights, walls, and their job. Each one soon knew the feeling of Buck’s lips against them. 

“I think it does change things, Eddie. But that’s not a bad thing.”

And that was it. Neither of them were trying to pretend like nothing had changed. The earth had shifted beneath their feet and they were still standing, just in a different place now. 

Things had changed. And it was beautiful. 

He wasn’t sure how long they ended up sitting there, staring at Buck like he hung the stars and moon and even spun the nebulas in his spare time. But eventually, Buck stood and pulled Eddie to his feet, his hands feeling a little clammy from being held so long, but fuck it, he didn’t care one single bit.

“Come on, we’ve gotta finish cleaning up our mess,” Buck said with a laugh, untangling their hands and giving him a gentle shove toward the dishes they still needed to put away. 

Our mess. 

Dios, he loved the sound of that.

They ordered Thai for lunch and ended up cleaning the whole house together. 

That night when Eddie came back from playing basketball with Chimney- Tommy noticeably absent- he didn’t try to sneak back into his own home and avoid Buck, and Buck wasn’t trying to hide from him. Instead, Eddie had opened the door to sounds of laughter and automated fight sounds coming from the television, the smell of popcorn, and open cans of soda on the coffee table.

The couch wasn’t made up to sleep on, there were no sheets or pillowcases in sight. No cardboard boxes in the corners or letters left on nightstands. 

This was what love looked like when both people wanted to make it work. When they expressed their needs and boundaries and didn’t make it awkward. This was easy, confident love that could survive them needing a little time to make sure they were ready. 

“I leave you two alone for a few hours and you turn the place into a frat house,” Eddie mock scolded, dropping his keys into the bowl by the door and watching the B and C charms glimmer in the light of the lamp before turning his attention back to the real thing on the couch. “I’m surprised you boys remembered to use coasters.”

“Ooh, Chris, you hear that?” Buck risked a quick glance over at Chris, his focus returning back to the fight he was losing against his son’s digital blue-haired fighting avatar. “Sounds like someone doesn’t want the tres leches that Pepa dropped off for our movie night!” 

“Yeah, dad, it’s all for us now!” Chris grinned, relinquishing his hold on his controller long enough to give Buck a high-five. 

Oh, that was just pure evil. 

“Wait, no, where the hell is my tres leches, tu diablos?” Eddie stood and blocked the screen, waving his arms out like a scarecrow and laughing as they struggled to play with most of their view obscured.

“That’s a dollar for the swear jar!” Chris crowed, throwing his controller down onto the couch when Buck’s avatar succumbed to his superior manouver of fight moves. The game played a comedic bout of sad music in consolation.

“I think we can call that two, technically,” Buck raised two fingers and Eddie made a face at him but dug out his wallet to shove some singles in the metal tea tin they kept under the TV that served as their new swear jar/video game fund. Conveniently, Buck didn’t usually carry cash on him, so inside was a little IOU sticky note to tally how much he still needed to contribute. It was up to five dollars now. Go figure.

After dinner and a little too much tres leches, Chris sat in his new beanbag chair while Buck and Eddie took the couch, settling in to watch another movie because as far as Chris was concerned, every night they spent together had the potential to be movie night. Well, as long as he got his homework done in time.

Daring, Eddie put his arm around Buck and Buck leaned into it, resting his head against Eddie’s shoulder and wrapping an arm around his waist to hold him close as the familiar Jaws theme began.

“How are you doing?” Buck asked quietly, and Eddie turned to press a light kiss against his forehead with a smile.

“No broken ankles, can’t complain.” Another kiss. I still want this. I’m still here.

I still want us.

Buck huffed out a small laugh and pulled Eddie’s arm tighter around himself, cuddling closer. On the screen, Chief Brody was driving off to work, promising to bring his wife’s coffee cup back. Eddie wondered if he’d ever look that good with glasses when he was older. Maybe he’d ask Buck what he thought. 

“Hey, Eddie?” Buck said a few minutes later and Eddie made a humming sound against the top of his head. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this but- you’re worth waiting for.”

Tears stung his eyes and he kissed Buck’s temple a third time, pressing his lips right over his birthmark. “I love you.”

A couple feet away, Chris sighed. “Finally.”

———

Karen answered the door almost immediately after he knocked, giving Eddie a surprised look when she saw him standing on her porch. Which made sense, considering he was probably one of the last people she expected to show up at her home unannounced on a random afternoon.

“Uh, hi, Eddie?” Karen blinked, his name sounding almost like a question as she looked him over. “You know we have a doorbell, right?” 

Oh. So they did. “Hey, Karen, how are you?”

“I’m good!” She beamed, leaning her hip against the doorframe and nodded back toward the inside of the house. “If you’re looking for Hen, she’s not home. Nathaniel pulled something in his back doing yard work so she took Denny to baseball practice for him today. You know her, she wants to stay for the whole thing, take all the pictures.”

“Oh, sure,” Eddie nodded and followed along, stowing his hands in his pockets so he didn’t start tapping them nervously against the side of his leg. “Actually, I- I was hoping to talk to you.”

He was about to lose his nerve so fast.

Karen’s expression sobered in an instant and she stood straighter, starting to look concerned. “Is something wrong?”

Eddie opened his mouth, imagined actually saying it, and regretted ever even pulling into the driveway. Maybe he could feign amnesia and just pretend this never happened. That sounded like a pretty good idea, even though it only ever worked out in movies. Still, Chimney made a valiant effort at it sometimes when he forgot it was his turn to unload the dishwasher after Bobby made lunch. 

“No, well- it’s complicated?” Eddie eventually offered, hoping that was enough for her while he wrangled his runaway thoughts together. “Are you free to talk for a little bit?”

Karen just stared at him with an expectant look and Eddie was feeling outrageously out of his depth the longer he stood there like an idiot on her front porch. 

He drew in a breath, the words tumbling out in an instant. “I’m in love with Buck, and I just came here because-”

“You need to talk to a queer person,” Karen nodded sagely, quickly catching on. If she was thrown by his admission, she definitely didn’t show it. “Preferably one who doesn’t have monetary stakes on your love life, right?”

“I- yeah, I need to talk to a queer person,” Eddie relented, cringing a bit at the bluntness of the phrasing even though she was the one who said it first. “And that other thing. I hear there’s some kind of ongoing bet?”

“Chimney owes Hen so much money,” she grinned, her eyes gleaming in a way that made him realize he might’ve been intimidated by the wrong Wilson all these years. “Come on in, Eddie, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

———

Karen ushered him inside and he almost tripped over two pairs of Mara’s shoes as he closed the door behind him. He could count the number of times he’d been to the Wilson house on one hand but it looked mostly how he remembered it, save for some rearranged furniture and double the amount of kids’ things lying around. It was a nice, cozy feeling home. 

“I’m in love with Buck,” Eddie said again, unsure of why he felt the need to, but damn it still felt amazing to hear those words out loud. Karen just smiled broadly, her bright eyes twinkling with joy. She wasn’t the first person he’d told who wasn’t Buck, but aside from Chris, she’d been the only one who seemed so blatantly happy for him. 

“But you don’t want to talk just because it’s Buck, you want to talk because he’s a man,” Karen reasoned as she led the way to the kitchen where a half finished glass of wine and basket of laundry sat on the counter.

“You get it, then,” Eddie exhaled with relief, sitting at the dining table when she motioned for him to do so. The wood grain felt waxy beneath his palm when he placed his hand down and he looked to see fresh crayon marks on the tabletop. He subtly shifted a placemat to cover them so whichever kid was responsible could stave off a scolding a little while longer. 

Not all heroes wear capes.

“Well, some of us knew we were gay around the time our aunt took us to our first Whitney Houston concert,” Karen shrugged, moving to grab a second wine glass before Eddie shook his head and gratefully accepted a cup of water instead. “I imagine it’s a little different to realize later in life with all your experiences behind you. You’d probably be better actually talking to Buck about that.”

“I feel like I need to preface this with the obvious, but I’m not exactly skilled in the art of discussing attraction to men,” he deadpanned, earning a snort from her as she sat across from him with the basket of laundry, allowing Eddie to take a handful of towels to fold when he wordlessly reached out to help. 

“What about the dispatcher you worked with- the one at Maddie’s wedding?” Karen suggested. “Josh. He’s gay, right?”

Eddie nearly laughed at the thought of discussing his personal life with him. “Josh can barely keep a secret to save his life, especially from Maddie. Besides, we’re not close like that.”

“So I’m your default queer confidante?” Karen gasped dramatically, placing a hand over her heart as she fluttered her eyelashes. “I’m so honored.” 

Eddie arched an eyebrow, setting aside the towel he was folding. “I can leave.”

“No, no!” Karen tried to pretend to look serious for a second before giving up and laughing, reaching over to pat the back of his hand insistently. “Come on, ask me all your questions, young padawan.” 

Eddie snorted and finished handling the towel, working through a few more just to give himself something to do as he thought. It helped him get his words together a bit better when he was doing something else. Stimming, Buck had called it. He did that too sometimes. 

“Have I always been like…this?” Eddie decided on asking, landing on something way too big and vague but unsure of where else to really starts 

“Starting off with the hard ones, huh?” She flicked a braid out of her face and twisted her lips together as she thought. “Well, I only took the gender studies classes that were needed to satisfy my Gen Ed requirements, but from what I understand about all this-” Karen waved her hand expressively to indicate the two of them. “-is that attraction is fluid. It definitely can change as you have new experiences or learn more about yourself, but a lot of people also say it’s something that they’ve experienced as latent and innate throughout their life, even if they’ve had relationships that might suggest otherwise. Which is completely valid and honestly really common. Does that answer your question?”

It did. He’d done his own research trying to figure out what labels worked best for him, thinking that maybe he was bisexual like Buck, but everything just came back to the suspicion he had while he was dating Shannon in high school and balked at taking some of the steps other teenage couples were taking- and bragging about taking. It all came back to one conclusion. That he was simply just gay. 

But nothing about it was really that simple. One of the biggest reasons Eddie struggled with identifying himself as gay, not just back then, but recently, was that he had started to think it would require him dismissing his relationship with Shannon as illegitimate- and if he didn’t, someone would swoop in and dismiss him.

How could he reconcile being gay with the way he felt looking at her the day they met at Ascarate Lake? How could he align himself with that identity when he’d once loved her with almost everything he had?

And now here was Karen telling him that both things could be true. 

She understood the gravity of what he was silently unpacking and took a sip of her wine, patiently waiting for him to come back online again. 

“I’ve never felt this way about other men,” Eddie said quietly, feeling like it was some secret admission that might ruin everything for him. 

“You don’t have to,” Karen shrugged easily. “Nobody’s going to ask you for the receipts. If they do, they’re just an asshole.”

Eddie let out a small laugh. “Well, I did have kind of a crush on Kurt Russell when I was a kid, so maybe that’s something.”

“But we’re not talking about Kurt Russell.”

“Definitely, definitely not,” Eddie agreed. 

“Well when was the last time you had a close friendship with another man like you do with Buck?” She asked, giving him a moment to think things over. 

“Never,” he answered readily, not needing any longer than a second to produce that response. In his whole life, there’d never been any man who came close to being what Buck was to him. He always felt like he was on the fringes of his friend groups as a child and teenager, and even when he joined the army and bonded with the members of his team in life or death situations, it still wasn’t the same. 

No man ever had, or ever would ever compare. 

“So it just seems to me like maybe you never had a change to explore these feelings until someone triggered them, and when Buck came along it happened for a man,” Karen summed up, the delicate gold bracelets on her wrist clinking together as she accentuated her point by tapping her hand against the table. “But it’s not exactly men in general you’re attracted to, it’s also men you have a deep emotional connection with. Does that sound right?”

It did. It really did. For the first time in his life it felt like someone was reaching into his brain and gently untangling the scrambled mess of confusion and unease that always snared itself around his relationships in one way or another. 

He just nodded. Yes, that sounded right.

Karen hummed thoughtfully, contemplating her next question. “Eddie, how many relationships have you been in? I’m not asking to judge, I think this might help figure some things out.” 

“Three. In my whole life, there’s only been three before Buck. All women.” 

“Okay,” Karen nodded. “Why those three?”

Eddie blinked. “What?”

“Those three people before Buck. Why did you date each of them?”

It was an odd sort of question, but it wasn’t like Eddie hadn’t considered that before in the aftermath of each of them as he wondered where things had all gone wrong and kept on ending up right back at the source. Him. 

Marisol had been a mistake, that was clear as day. He expressed his disdain for ‘performance’ in his relationships and then went on to put on an Oscar-worthy one that would probably land in the Criterion Collection someday. He really did like her, he just hadn’t been in love with her. Same with Ana. She really hadn’t deserved what he put her through. Without knowing it, he’d strung them along only to cut the line months later, crashing right alongside them in the end. 

But Shannon-  

Fuck, he cared about her so much. She’d been so ingrained into every corner of his life that loving her was the only natural next step and when they took that jump together they never looked back. Shannon was beautiful, strong, kind, smart, funny, and he still remembered those days in his teenage years where he would take any excuse to get out of his home, always ending up at Shannon’s house. Her mother had always been so welcoming to him. Unlike his own mom, she never acted like he was a fuck-up. At least not when he didn’t deserve it. 

But when Shannon told him he was pregnant, that her mom knew, and that Janet had already told his parents- well, they hadn’t been left with many other options for their future. Whatever semblance of choice they thought they had about how they would go on from there was nothing more than an illusion. 

You have to do the right thing, son, Ramon told him sternly. 

So he did, even though it felt wrong. Everyone else just insisted on it, blaming him when he never seemed to be able to get it right. 

For the first time, he was genuinely considering that not all of that had been his own fault. 

“I- I think I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do.”

Karen raised her eyebrows. “That’s a huge realization, Eddie. Like, taking a sledgehammer to compulsory heterosexuality type of huge.” 

“Compulsory- what?” Eddie faltered, still working on catching back up.

“Never mind, we’ll get to that part,” Karen waved it aside, moving on to her next question. “Does it bother you that Buck’s a man?”

“No, it doesn’t bother me, I’m just- it’s a little different,” Eddie admitted, starting to feel awkward despite the fact that he’d already practically bared half his soul to his friend’s wife over the past handful of minutes. “And I’m struggling to understand why-”

“Okay, it’s okay, I’m trying to help you understand too,” she interjected patiently, holding up a hand to still him. “Let me try this again. Are you physically attracted to Buck?”

“Yes,” Eddie said without pause, and he was surprised at how unsurprised he felt admitting that to both Karen and himself. Of course he was attracted to Buck- he was beautiful outside and in. It was unquestionable, regardless of what he thought about his own identity. 

“Would you consider yourself physically attracted to other men?”

Trying to think about that felt like barreling through a minefield of unexploded ordinance that he’d spent so many years of his life carefully stepping around. That had always been something he felt was dangerous to think about. Maybe it was the Catholicism, living in Texas- hell, maybe it was even just the nineties, but thinking men were attractive? Eddie learned to shut that down even while the raging hormones of puberty were still trying to have their way with him. 

Except sometimes there were these singers on stage when Adriana watched music videos on the TV. Sometimes there were actors in movies and Eddie would save up money from his part-time job in high school to take Shannon to see them. While she gushed over the dashing male leads and talked about their hair and arms, Eddie would quietly agree. There was one boy on his baseball team who Eddie had taken to staring at so much that the coach once took him aside and told him to leave his problems out of their dugout because he thought Eddie was staring out of anger at the guy for replacing him as DH. It reminded him a lot of when he first met Buck when he joined the 118 and couldn’t keep his eyes off of him long enough to remember that Buck kind of hated his guts that first day. 

So yeah, there were a few guys. But not many. Not even Tommy whose abs essentially made him a Californian Adonis and who Eddie had grown to suspect was actually trying to hook up with him when they initially became friends. Sure, Tommy was an okay looking guy, Eddie could recognize that, but as far as attraction went- it just wasn’t the word he’d ever use for him. 

In any case, that aspect of things had always been so latent and tertiary in his relationships, but he’d never felt it as strongly as he did with Buck.

He was definitely attracted to him.

“Maybe,” Eddie settled on, still feeling a little confused but not expecting for it to get any clearer than that at the moment. “There’s never really been anything that serous about them, but I don’t think it’s a no. So far it’s just really been the one.” Buck. 

Karen didn’t even need to ask before Eddie flipped the question around on his own and started thinking about how he had felt with women. There hadn’t been a period in his life where he was physically attracted to a woman behind aesthetic appreciation and an objective understanding of beauty. Shannon shared a lot of the qualities Eddie admired in Buck, but those were more personal attributes than anything purely physical.

The more he spent time with someone, the more he got to know them, he might start picking up on those things and his potential feelings about them. He thought of Ana’s smile, Marisol’s laugh, and none of them compared to the warmth that blossomed in his chest when Buck’s eyes lit up with a grin or he let out a wheezing, high pitched cackle after a particularly ridiculous call left them all flying to bits. 

Something would still be off.

He just never considered that it would be gender. 

“I-” Holy fuck, Eddie buried his face in his hands. “I’m not attracted to women.”

“That makes one of us, pal,” Karen snorted, reaching for another sip of her wine as if the thirty odd years of everything Eddie thought he knew about himself wasn’t just crumbling apart across the kitchen table two feet away from her. 

The order wasn’t Shannon, Ana, Marisol, Buck- it was Shannon, and then it was Buck. Ana, Marisol, and then back to Buck again. 

He’d gotten it right on the second try and never even realized. It never even struck him as an option. 

“I’m gay,” Eddie said out loud for the first time. “Oh my God, I’m gay.”

He let out a shuddering exhale, feeling his hands trembling a little bit from the vibrations that were singing through his nerves. There he was, thirty three years old, accepting that he was gay. Accepting that he had loved Shannon then and loved Buck now. That he was gay even then, and still was now. 

It was a lot to process.

“Thank you for sharing that with me, Eddie,” Karen smiled kindly. All he could do was nod in response. “I understand this was a lot for you to hold inside all this time.”

“I think it was my family. Their faith, I mean,” he said faintly, all the pieces falling into place. “Nobody I grew up with was blatantly homophobic but it was just quietly expected of us not to shake things up in the way something like that would. Don’t be different, don’t cause trouble, be good and go to mass.”

The more he spoke, the more the words just seemed to finally come to him. It felt strange to finally be putting a name to these things, but it was starting to become easier for him to breathe as he finally did so. Like all these things that were weighing him down were finally being freed. 

Buck was right. He needed this. 

Eddie sighed, continuing. “I never felt too different being both Mexican and Swedish in my community, especially with my mom’s family not really being around that much. But I think I understood that being gay would cause some problems that I definitely wasn’t equipped to handle, even if I didn’t know it would apply to me back then.”

“I can imagine what that must have been like for you,” Karen empathized and Eddie actually believed it as she said it, reaching over to give his arm a comforting squeeze. “It can be difficult on any child to grow up fearing the consequences of nonconformity.” 

Conformity. That was the word. The missing word that highlighted and laid out the majority of his life up until now. He could think of the grief and stress it caused him all this time, the sleepless nights and constant worry that the sun of his parts would never add up. 

And then he realized- the happiest parts of his life came from breaking the mold. Going against his parents wishes and running headlong into single-parenthood as he packed up everything that he couldn’t replace and took Chris away from El Paso. Becoming a firefighter even when they told him he needed a steadier job and somehow ending up walking into the 118 and finding the family he’d needed all his life. He refused to bend to those pressures and liberated himself in an unbelievable way. The life he lived today was because he’d gotten fed up letting other people dictate who he was. 

So why was he doing that to himself?

“It was as much of an obligation as the Catholicism was,” Eddie answered his own question out loud, tracing his fingers along another set of crayon marks on the tabletop as he drew in a steadying breath. “I just went along with what I thought I was supposed to do. It was easy because I thought I knew the rules, the instructions, you know? The idea of it was so easy to picture because I’d seen it a million times. Marry a nice woman, have a cute kid, buy a house, live life and…roll credits.”

“Well, you definitely got the cute kid part down,” Karen commented, bringing a surprised laugh out of him that helped ease his nerves some. 

Yeah, he sure did. Christopher was one of the best things he would ever get right. That kid was the light of his life and his savior all in one. The St. Christopher medal beneath Eddie’s shirt right above his beating heart was a testament to that. 

“The conformity was part of what made the military so appealing in the first place,” Eddie realized suddenly, staring intently at the table so he didn’t have to see Karen’s reaction to that- he didn’t know if he could bear it. “You get your orders, you put on the uniform, look and move and talk like everyone else, and suddenly being different doesn’t seem like a massive concern because they’ve decided who they need you to be already,” he closed his eyes, dropping his head into his hands. “Conformity. God, I ran away from myself every chance I got. But now that I’m finding myself for the first time, I- I don’t know what to think of him- of me. I feel like a stranger to myself.” 

But Buck feels like coming home.

“It’s always so much simpler in the movies,” Karen said after a beat, her voice tinged with emotion. “It sounds like you romanticized these expectations but were always disappointed when you didn’t feel fulfilled by them. It’s a lot to deal with.”

He could feel fulfilled if it was with Buck, though.

This time it would be without that pressure pushing them together like with his late wife. This time it was entirely his choice- one he was fighting to make sure he was prepared to handle. 

He was fighting for Buck in a way he never fought for Shannon.

“You don’t need to put a label on things if it doesn’t help you, Eddie, but I don’t think this is an uncommon experience for many people like us,” Karen reassured him, pushing the towels aside to cover his hands with hers. The touch grounded him and he met her eyes again, shocked to see that they were a little damp with tears. “Whether you’re gay, or something else, it seems to me like you have a pretty good understanding of what you’ve been looking for. And I’m damn happy for you.”

People like us. He liked the way that sounded. 

Us . Like he wasn’t alone. 

“Thank you, Karen,” Eddie choked out, trying his utmost not to start bawling in her kitchen. He hoped those words would be enough to convey his gratitude and it seemed like they got close enough because she smiled and gave his hands a gentle squeeze before sitting back again.

“I guess I have to ask now,” she told him, her smile turning even softer. “Do you think you’ve found what you’re looking for in Buck?”

“I know I have,” Eddie said with certainty, feeling the tightness in his bones- his soul. “I love him, Karen. I really do. I just- I think that there’s a few more things I need to settle before heading into this, but I need to handle them on my own.”

That seemed to be the end of things for the time being. 

“Don’t tell anyone,” Eddie blurted out a handful of minutes later as he was walking toward the door, Karen’s eyebrows darting up in surprise. “I mean, you can tell Hen because she kind of clocked me already at the party and I don’t want to ask you to keep secrets from your wife for me. But I’m not ready for anyone else to know yet, not when I’m just figuring things out.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I completely understand,” she nodded sincerely, holding the door for him as he stepped out onto the porch. “But aren’t you worried that Hen will try to tell Chimney so she can cash out?”

Eddie hadn’t even considered that. These stupid bets were going to be the end of him. 

“Hen can collect her winnings,” Eddie decided, thinking things over. “On the condition that she tells Chimney to keep his mouth shut or he has to double down.” 

“I think we can work with that,” Karen said with a grin, chuckling a little. “Oh, poor Chimney. That man has suffered more than Jesus.”

“Not yet he hasn’t.”

She closed the door just in time for Eddie to hear her laughing on the other side of it.

———

“I talked to Karen the other day,” Eddie said out of the blue, dropping onto the couch next to Buck. The loft of the fire station was surprisingly empty for the middle of the afternoon- the only other person up there was Ravi who was fixing a snack in the kitchen and singing along to whatever song was playing through his AirPods. Bobby was doing paperwork, and as for Chimney and Hen- he might have to send up a small prayer for both Chimney’s wallet and sanity. 

Buck shifted so he and Eddie were sitting with their sides pressed up against each other, bringing his bad leg up to stretch out on the coffee table in front of them, the book he was reading now forgotten. “About what?”

“Me. Being gay,” Eddie said, that word leaving a pleasant tingling sensation on his tongue, no longer afraid to say it. “Having the feelings that I do. How I’m in love with you.”

He looked over at Buck in time to see him draw in a surprised breath, reaching over to twine his fingers through Eddie’s right hand. “How’d that go?”

“Really well. I learned a lot about myself just by having someone take me out of my head about it,” Eddie rubbed his thumb in small circles over the back of Buck’s hand, brushing over the light spray of freckles he found there. “I spent so many years of my life trying to be someone for other people that I think I had a difficult time trusting that I was being someone just for myself. Does that make sense?”

“More than you know,” Buck said softly and yeah- Eddie believed that. He’d gone through his own version of this well before Eddie, and that hadn’t even been about his sexuality. 

He quietly gave Buck the highlights of what he had figured out while Ravi started making popcorn behind them. Somewhere downstairs, Bobby was calling for Hen and Chimney to do an inventory check on the ambulance but seemed to be having trouble finding them. Eddie had a fairly decent idea of what the two of them were off talking about and he couldn’t help but smile a little just thinking about Chimney being sworn to secrecy over something as huge as this. 

"What if you took some time for yourself?” Buck suggested quietly, turning his head to meet Eddie’s eyes. “Just you?”

Eddie chuckled as he nudged Buck’s shoulder, leaning further into the couch. “What, like a vacation? You want me to hit the road and do some soul searching on the PCH?”

“I’m being serious, Eddie,” Buck rolled his eyes fondly. “It might actually help you to step away from the situation.”

That sobered him immediately. “You’re not a situation, Buck.”

“You know what I mean,” Buck insisted, bringing their joined hands over to rest in his lap and fidgeting with the band on Eddie’s watch. “I just think that you tend to get caught up in your feelings before your thoughts reach them, and this- this is a lot for you to take in right now, Eds.”

“You don’t believe I’m ready for this?” For us?

“I know you’re ready,” he promised Eddie, his voice soft and sure as he spoke. “We’re doing this, there’s no question about it. And I swear I’m not one of those people who thinks you have to be completely healed and self-actualized to be in a relationship. I don’t ever need you to be perfect for me. You’re perfect the way you are.”

Eddie was finding it incredibly difficult not to kiss him. “So what are you worried about now?”

“What I’m worried about is the fact that you always put everyone else before yourself,” Buck used his book to prod Eddie in the chest. “And now that I’ve seen what it looks like when you finally prioritize yourself- I guess I just wonder if you’d want more time to see where that takes you. You know?”

Eddie knew. 

But all he could see in his mind’s eye was a note on his nightstand and Chris curled into his side on the bed where he thought Shannon would be when he woke up that morning. Five words that changed everything.

I need some time too.

This felt different to him now, though. Buck was the one offering him that space- not distance, not a chasm he couldn’t cross to bring Eddie back to them, but enough breathing room between Eddie and his own mind burdened with over thirty years of unresolved conflict and pain. Nightmares that he really expected to stop. 

It was tempting. He couldn’t lie about that. For so many years of his life he’d felt like a hare in the desert, a rabbit in a snowstorm, unable to spot himself among the expectations of his surroundings and the people in his life. It never felt like that with Buck, though. This wouldn’t be that. But he couldn’t just keep running headlong into things without being certain of his own footing because wherever Eddie went in life, Buck would always follow him, and if he fell then he sure as hell wasn’t going to bring Buck down with him too.

Eddie was so deep in his feelings that he couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But it wasn’t just that. Buck had talked to him about this before, pointing out that for as long as Eddie had been fighting to be the perfect father, the perfect partner, perfect firefighter, he’d so rarely prioritized himself and his own needs. It was like Eddie never considered himself worthy of rest, always pushing himself from one thing to the next, testing any limits like they were just another thing to prove. 

“I’ll think about it,” he said, even though he already had his answer. 

“Okay,” Buck smiled softly and gave his hand a small squeeze, leaning against him on the couch. “I love you, you know.”

Eddie did know. If Ravi wasn’t standing ten paces behind them, he would have turned his head to kiss Buck senseless right there and then. 

This was going to be a long shift.

———

“Hey, Cap?” Eddie knocked on the open door of Bobby’s office a few days later. Their shift was practically over and Buck was eager to drag him to this brunch place in Malibu he’d been wanting to go to since forever, but there was still some unfinished business he needed to take care of before heading out. “I need to request some time off.” 

Bobby’s fingers paused on the keyboard as he looked up from the report he was finalizing for the B shift captain, sending a slightly confused look Eddie’s way. “That’s fine, Eddie. You know I leave the written request forms on the file cabinet outside my office.”

Eddie did know that. In fact, those forms were in a tray less than two feet behind him, placed there so anybody could access and submit them when needed. He could do all of this without a conversation, except- 

Well, there were some things he wanted Bobby to know. 

“Unless there’s something more you want to tell me about,” Bobby tilted his head, picking up on Eddie’s hesitation. He pushed his keyboard aside and gestured for him to take a seat in front of his desk, so Eddie closed the door behind him and did just that. 

“Yeah, uh, there is,” Eddie’s throat felt way too dry and he couldn’t believe he was actually doing this, but he was sitting there in front of Bobby now and there was no going back from it. Not now. “It’s just- I just don’t how much time I’m going to need.”

A concerned shadow spread across Bobby’s face and he clasped his hands together on top of the desk, looking him in the eyes. “Eddie, is there something going on that I need to know about?”

Oh, you have no idea, he thought a little hysterically. It was nothing short of a miracle that he’d avoided bringing any of this to the firehouse now, but things were getting more real by the second. This wasn’t just in the kitchen of his house, Frank’s office, Karen and Hen’s dining table- this was his life now. This was all of it.

“Come on, Bobby, we both know what happened,” Eddie deflected nervously, managing a small self deprecating smile. “Buck almost got himself killed trying to save me.”

“I know,” Bobby admitted, but he didn’t seem wholly convinced that this was the extent of it. “But the car accident was over a month ago now. I have to wonder if something has changed since then- something that maybe you’ve been hesitant to share about what things have been like for you after all that.”

For all Bobby’s soft warmth and paternal reassurance, Eddie sometimes forgot how sharp he could be. How those hazel eyes sometimes looked like flint, adamant and wise. Almost nothing escaped him for long, which was probably why Bobby had such a hard time dealing with the things that sometimes did. 

“You told me once that there are certain things I don’t have trouble committing to,” Eddie found himself saying, trying not to make life any harder on them as he treaded closer to the point.

Bobby nodded, following along. “I did.”

“Of everything you listed, though, you didn’t say Buck.”

“I wanted you to reach that conclusion on your own,” he confessed, the corners of his eyes crinkling slightly like he was holding back a smile but they hadn’t quite gotten the message. “It didn’t seem like it was my place to say that, and I was concerned I might end up influencing your thinking somehow.”

Eddie supposed that made sense. He briefly closed his eyes and sighed, mentally preparing himself for what he came here to say. It was just taking a lot longer than he thought to be able to. 

“Bobby, I’m gay.” 

To his credit, Bobby didn’t even blink. “This relates to you needing time off?”

“You don’t have anything else to say to that?” Eddie stared, outwardly gaping at his captain at this point. He kind of thought this whole coming out thing would involve at least a little more fanfare than that. Some kind of reaction, at least. Even just a blink. 

Bobby gave him a vaguely amused smile, eyes crinkling even further. “Well, I hoped you would know by now that you being gay has no impact on our relationship aside from the great deal of respect and gratitude I have that you were comfortable enough to entrust sharing that part of yourself with me.” 

Okay, he was definitely going to tear up about that one later. 

“Thanks, Bobby,” Eddie cleared his throat, his eyes burning a little. “I really appreciate that.”

“No, thank you, Eddie. I really appreciate you coming to me about this,” he said, sounding so incredibly earnest and- proud. Bobby was proud of him. “So, you said you need time off.”

Right. Back to the point. 

Eddie coughed, rubbing at his eyes in a way that he hoped wasn’t totally obvious he was trying to keep from crying in front of his captain. 

“This is a really new realization for me and it’s…it’s changing a lot of things. Well, kind of,” he admitted, spreading his hands a little awkwardly. “A lot of things are the same, actually, which is great, but there’s some big things that might look a little different going forward. Especially with- with Buck.”

“I see,” was all Bobby said, accentuated with a slight quirk of his eyebrow. 

“You’re not surprised,” Eddie noted, not that he was at all shocked by that lack of reaction either. 

“Eddie, I’ve had the HR paperwork filled out for years,” Bobby snorted, reaching down to open the file drawer of his desk. After a couple seconds of rifling through papers, he produced an unlabeled manila folder whose tab had been dog-eared in the corner so it would still stand out from the rest. “Every time they update the form, even by a few words, I print out a new copy and do it all over again.”

“That’s- wow, okay,” he stammered, moving his mouth wordlessly as he took the folder and looked over the document inside. Sure enough, his and Buck’s names and now shared address were in all the right blanks, with Bobby’s flourish at the bottom. All that was missing were Buck and Eddie’s signatures, as well as some various notations and approvals from HR. “Lauren’s back from knee surgery, then?”

“She’s back tomorrow,” Bobby smiled, outright beaming now. “You and Buck both need to sign the papers, though. If he’s still here I can probably get everything approved in time for your next shift.” 

“Maybe not just yet, Cap,” Eddie swallowed, pushing the form back toward him with a nervous twist of his mouth. “Uh- we uh-”

Now, Bobby seemed surprised, unsure of what to make of Eddie’s stumbling. “Buck doesn’t know?”

“He knows. Well- he knows enough,” Eddie assured him, suddenly feeling a little strange discussing their personal details with the man who was essentially Buck’s surrogate father. “He knows how I feel about him and we’re working toward a relationship, but he had some understandable concerns given my recent track record with the people I’ve been with.” He gave a dry laugh at that, looking up at Bobby with a sheepish smile. “You may have noticed I have a habit of setting land-speed records for moving too fast too soon.” 

Bobby was comfortable enough to chuckle a bit as well, leaning back in his chair. “To be fair, though, I think you and Buck have been a long time coming.”

“That’s how I feel too. But I- I really respect that he wants to be careful about things, especially considering everything we have at risk. Our friends, this job-”

“-Christopher,” Bobby finished and Eddie nodded, thankful he understood as well as he did. 

“Buck and I talked about this the other day and we agreed that if we did this, I needed to be sure first. Neither of us want to risk it. And I am. I’m sure. But I also know I’m…going through a lot right now,” he gave another sigh, the admission taking more out of him than he liked. “Therapy is going fine, but ever since last week I think we’ve kind of hit a standstill and that’s…well, that’s on me. I know something has to give, though, otherwise there’s no moving forward.”

That session with Frank hadn’t been fun. None of them were fun, most of them left him feeling wrung out and worn down like an old dish rag, but the last one had just been…empty. He shared a little about what he talked to Karen about and they’d gotten some good insights out of that, but Eddie had run out of things he was willing to share pretty quickly. He had another nightmare about Mills dying, except this time she had been fatally shot in the desert and only survived long enough for him to try and fail to save her. In that dream, he’d been the one to present the flag to her sister at the funeral. Someone in the crowd had shot him in the shoulder and Eddie fell into the open grave. He was still falling when woke with a shout loud enough to accidentally wake up Buck as well. 

Eddie didn’t tell Frank about that. It was starting to get boring having to tell him every time Mills died in his head. Besides, if he was still having the nightmares, it clearly wasn’t helping. 

So yeah, they were a little stuck now. But ever since the nightmare, he’d lapsed a little into what Frank had once called a ‘low-grade depression’ the first time it happened. Buck had noticed too. Hence the suggestion that maybe it was high time Eddie took a break for himself. 

This time, he wouldn’t run into a war zone about it. 

“I just need some time away to take care of myself,” Eddie finished with a shrug, not to dismiss it, just because he didn’t know what else to do or say now. 

Bobby was quiet for a few moments, thinking things over. 

“Well, how about this,” Bobby started to suggest, producing a copy of their work calendar and crossing out the days as he went. “After today you’ve got one more 24, then your four-day. Why don’t you take tomorrow and the next shift after that off. Including the 24 after that shift, that’ll buy you a week. And don’t worry about those two days off because I’m donating some of my PTO to you.”

“Bobby, no-” Eddie protested, staring at those crossed out days. He couldn’t just take Bobby’s time off like that, he had enough sick time to spare over something like this, even after he used some up to take care of Buck after the accident. 

But Bobby didn’t seem to be having any part of it, reaching an eyebrow as if daring Eddie to challenge him further. “I hope you’re not about to correct my math, otherwise I might get concerned about Christopher’s grades in that area if you’re the one helping with his homework.”

“Please, Buck’s the one he goes to for math help, he’s learned his lesson,” Eddie chuckled wryly, still looking down at the schedule in disbelief. A week. A whole week. “I just didn’t expect you to approve the time for this week. With Chimney going on his honeymoon tomorrow-”

“Oh, you mean five days off watching reruns of The Bachelor and Selling Sunset on the couch because he and Maddie are both convinced honeymoons that involve actual travel are cursed for us after mine sank like the Titanic?” Bobby shook his head, folding his arms across his chest with a smile. “He’s going to be across town, not across the ocean. Besides, I’ve got both Ravi and Simmons from C shift pulling doubles, Hansen is covering for Chim, and I’m sure Quintana could use the overtime after Rosen cleaned him out at poker last week. We’ll make it work.” 

Eddie felt his heart seize with gratitude and he sat their wordlessly as Bobby typed the request into his computer, putting it into the system right there and then. 

“This is a huge step for you, Eddie,” Bobby told him when he got up to leave, his voice heavy with respect and empathy. “Sometimes the things people are going through require solitude. You deserve time for yourself, and now you’ve got it.” 

———

“I thought we said we weren’t going on any kind of vacation until August?” Buck looked up from the book he was reading in their bed as Eddie carefully lowered his small suitcase from the top shelf of the closet. “You know Chris’ school doesn’t let out for another week and a half.” 

“Chris isn’t going anywhere right now,” Eddie shook his head, ripping off the ELP to LAX baggage claim tag that was still stuck on the handle from the last time he came back from Texas. “It’s- it’s just me. Taking some time for myself.”

Buck sat up straight, carefully setting the book aside. “You’re really going to do it?”

“Mhm,” Eddie hummed, practically melting under the sheer amount of pride in Buck’s face as he gazed at him. Definitely melting when Buck got to his feet and wrapped his arms around Eddie’s waist, drawing him in for a slow, syrupy sweet kiss. 

“I’ll help you plan.”

———

Christopher took it well. 

Evidently eighth grade teachers had progressed a lot since Eddie was in school and now taught their students what things like ‘mental health days’ meant, so all-in-all it felt pretty good to not just be understood, but to get his son’s blessing as well. 

Buck had been a godsend when it came to helping Eddie plan things out. He decided to get a rental car since he had good insurance and it would be better for him not to worry about putting all the excess miles and strain on his truck since he planned to do a fair amount of driving over the next week. 

It also assured him that he couldn’t just abscond with the damn thing- he’d need Buck or someone to pick him back up from whichever rental location he returned it to. Not that it was a concern. But wilder things had happened. He did run away to Afghanistan before, after all. 

A day of planning, packing, and talking things over left him with six days to himself before he needed to either go back to work or dip into more sick time. Six days seemed like enough from where he stood, so the plan was to just start off with that and see where things went from there. 

Buck and Chris went with him to pick up a car from one of the rental places near the airport. Surprisingly, the second cheapest vehicle class had landed him with a nice Nissan Rogue and not a compact or smaller sedan. They wished Eddie safe travels and he promised to call them every night, but they all knew it was going to be a lot more often than that. 

Eddie’s first stop was in Santa Barbara. Even without the morning traffic and construction it would still be over a two hour drive, but it ended up taking closer to three hours before he even crossed the city limits. He found a place to grab lunch and walked to the nearby grocery store to buy a bouquet of lilies. 

Half an hour later, he was placing them underneath the inscription:

Anita Grace Mills

November 2, 1993 - August 14, 2021

The three year anniversary was in a little over two months. Maybe then, the small, sun-bleached American flag that was planted in the ground would be replaced with a new one. It looked like it had been a couple of months since anybody had left something there. He could see dried out husks of flowers in the vase at the base of the gravestone and a colorful pulpy residue that looked like it must have once been a hand drawn card or some kind of little painting. Mills didn’t have any kids so it might have been something from one of her wife’s students. 

“Hey there, Mills,” Eddie croaked out, taking a seat on the small memorial bench beneath a tree opposite her grave. “Sorry I never came up here before now. I hope you understand.”

The branches of the willow tree danced in the wind and he sniffled, clasping his hands and leaning forward on the bench.

“There’s, uh- there’s some things I guess I want to say to you.”

Eddie talked. He talked to her about her sister, Breezy, and how she became a pilot. He talked about how Sarah still posted on Facebook sometimes and seemed to be doing well, but that he hadn’t spoken to her since the night he found out Mills died. He told her about his nightmares and apologized for not saving her, even though it was becoming a lot easier to stop blaming himself about it now. 

He told her about Buck. Eddie thought she would have liked him a lot. 

It was a nice, quiet cemetery and only a few other people showed up over the course of the next hour to visit other graves, so he stayed and sat there and even let himself cry, thinking about the songs she liked to sing to try to cheer the medic team up after some of their worse days when the homesickness got to be too much. He hummed one of them to himself as he cleared up a handful of broken branches around hers and some of the surrounding headstones, unable to remember the words. 

Eddie spent the remainder of that day in downtown Santa Barbara. He walked the streets she must have walked and it felt less like he was chasing a ghost and more like he was leaving one behind. Like she’d been latched onto his back all these years and finally let go at the same time he did. 

From there on, he went further upstate, spending the next couple days between Yosemite and the southern border of Oregon because he’d never been that far north of anywhere in his life. He saw fields of wildflowers and skipped the main area of the Redwood National Park in favor of the smaller state park outside of Crescent City to avoid the tourists, listening to the recording Buck sent him talking about various redwood and conifer facts because they knew he would be on shift that day and likely wouldn’t be able to stay on the phone for long. 

I love this man, Eddie thought to himself with a smile, watching the sun filter through the giant trees as Buck’s voice and the forest air danced together inside the car. 

Buck and Chris FaceTimed him to say goodnight at the end of every day, sometimes together if Buck wasn’t working, or sometimes a group call if he was at the station and Chris was staying the night at Maddie’s per their usual arrangement. They demanded all the details of his day, asking what he ate for lunch, the coolest birds he saw, why it looked like he stopped shaving, and what his favorite part was.

This is, mijo, he would tell Chris each time with a smile, grinning when he accused him of being a sap. This is my favorite part of the day. 

He’d press a kiss to tips of his fingers and tap it over Chris’ face on the screen, getting a, “Da-ad!” out of him every time, followed by a brilliant smile that told Eddie he was secretly happy, just too much of a teenager to admit it anymore. 

They’d talked about this before he left and Eddie did it each night he was away, propping up his phone on the nightstand of whatever hotel he was in with the screen facing him. Buck did the same in their room back home, or sometimes in the bunk room at the station, so they could still fall asleep beside each other even while hundreds of miles away. 

“I love you, Buck,” Eddie said at the end of each day, his heart light and so full all at once. 

“I love you too, Eddie,” Buck would smile back each time.

———

“Buck?” Chris’ voice whispered from the phone one night as Eddie lay in the bed of some AirBnb in Carmel-by-the-Sea, eyes closed because sometimes if he pretended he could imagine he was in the room with them and not anywhere else. But if Chris was whispering, they must have thought he was actually asleep. “When’s dad coming home?”

“Soon, buddy,” Buck’s voice was equally as soft, but a bit quieter- so much so that Eddie almost missed the last part. “We’re gonna go bring him home.”

———

Carmel-by-the-Sea was both a good and bad place to be in early June. 

The bright side was that Eddie was just missing the start of the peak season later in the month. The weather was still quite cold there, as it usually was throughout the year, so it didn’t have a major draw for the kinds of tourists who generally flocked in to California for warm sunshine and beach tans. The downside was that it was a Friday so things were probably going to get a little busier with people driving in for short weekend trips and also, yeah, it was pretty cold. 

He trudged out of the bed with great reluctance in the morning, his feet stinging on the cold tiles as he hopped over to adjust the thermostat on the wall. According to the small screen it was barely scraping fifty degrees outside, and only a bit over sixty indoors. 

No wonder he was cold. Eddie wasn’t even sure what he was doing in Carmel anyway. Most of the places he’d gone on the trip were his own idea, and when he ran out of days to fill he relied on Buck to provide him with a list of suggestions that he eventually picked through- all of which had been good. Carmel-by-the-Sea, however, had been kind of a heavier suggestion. Buck even insisted on splitting the cost of renting a nicer place to round off the end of the trip, that way Eddie could have a better home-base to return to instead of just flitting nomadically between hotels the whole time. 

He wasn’t really complaining, though. It was genuinely a nice place to stay, full of comfortable furniture and colorful artisanal accents. The one detail he kept coming back to ever since he arrived the night before, though, was the piece of stained class art that hung in the window facing the driveway.

It was of a California poppy. 

Maybe he was where he was meant to be after all.

So, with today and tomorrow left of his trip, and the third remaining day set aside to drive back home, Eddie found himself in the small house that Buck helped him reserve. It was a nice place in a quiet area, close enough to things he needed, but it was a little big for just one person. There was a second bedroom with a half bath, a full kitchen, and it just felt odd having this place to himself for nearly three days. He didn’t even know what he was going to do with that time, which Buck insisted was kind of the point of relaxing. Maybe he could walk around town, sit by the ocean, or make the drive to the Monterey Bay Aquarium- but it just didn’t feel like the kind of thing he wanted to do by himself. So he went into town to get breakfast, went on a run, and took a nap when he got back, impatient for the day to be over with.

He really wished Buck and Chris were there with him. 

Just as he was lying on the couch after his nap and browsing on his phone for a good place nearby to get a late lunch, though, his phone started buzzing and the screen lit up with Buck’s contact photo. 

Perfect timing.

“Hey, Buck,” Eddie smiled even though Buck couldn’t see him when he answered the phone. “How are you?”

“Tired,” Buck said honestly, and there was the sound of a car door shutting, followed by the jangling of keys. Someone said something in the background that Eddie couldn’t make out, but it kind of sounded like Chris. “Hey, Eddie, you didn’t change the plan and go to a hotel, did you?”

“No,” Eddie frowned, wondering why that was suddenly a concern. 

“Good, ‘cause- uh- this could’ve been kinda weird-”

Just then, there were three sharp knocks against the front door that sounded a lot like six because as he heard them with his own ears, they seemed to echo through the phone. Like they were happening on the other end at the same time, the call just lagging a bit.

No fucking way. 

Eddie dropped his phone on the couch and sprinting to the door, throwing it open and finding himself face to face with both the love of his life and their son, the two of them standing there with packed bags and identical grins. 

“Hey, Eddie,” Buck said again, this time to his face with a broad smile that Eddie could see with his own eyes, not just on the other side of the screen. “Surprise?”

“What- Buck, how-?” Eddie breathed, sinking forward into his arms without a second thought and relishing in the way his ribs vibrated with the force of Buck’s surprise laugh as he was forced to drop one of his bags to hug him back. He clawed his fingers into the back of Buck’s hoodie and inhaled the familiar herbal smell of his shampoo, the scent of the laundry detergent at his house, and the too-sweet flavor of an energy drink on his breath. 

He let go of Buck to sweep his son up into a hug that was a lot easier when he was seven and half this size, but Chris was happy to be held, throwing his arms around his dad’s neck and not even complaining when he got a loud kiss on his forehead once he was set back down. 

“Well, I’d planned for us to just do the weekend together,” Buck explained, watching fondly as Eddie couldn’t resist pulling Chris into another hug, just holding him close against his chest and smoothing his hands across his head of curls to reassure himself that he was here and this was real. “But we had some good news come up, didn’t we, Chris?”

“Ms. Mackey had her baby!” Chris crowed happily, squirming out of Eddie’s grasp to head past him into the house to explore. 

“She went into labor in the middle of their morning assembly,” Buck explained a little more, picking up Chris’ abandoned bags and letting Eddie take his as they headed inside to finish this conversation out of the chilly air. “They let kids go home after that.”

“Class dismissed, huh?” Eddie chuckled, catching up to Chris and ruffling his son’s hair affectionately before the kid ran off to claim the second bedroom as his own. Then he looked at Buck, taking in the fact that he had just driven over three hundred miles from Los Angeles just to surprise him like this. He wasn’t sure what he had ever done to deserve this man. “You really planned to do this?”

“Why do you think I picked a place with shower rails and two beds?” Buck tossed his bag onto the couch and folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head like it should have been obvious. But his teasing didn’t last long because he just started staring at Eddie, eventually drifting forward, closer into his space like he was being pulled there by gravity. “Eddie, you have a beard.”

Eddie shrugged. He kind of did, but that was what happened when someone who grew facial hair as fast as him went almost five days without shaving. It wasn’t quite a full beard but sure as hell longer than any of the five o’clock shadow he got away with having on shift while still staying within regulations. 

What he didn’t understand, though, was Buck’s awestruck reaction. 

“We did video calls every day, Buck,” Eddie told him, flushing a little under the attention. “You knew I had a beard.”

“I know, but you have a beard,” Buck insisted on telling him again, reaching his hands up so his fingertips could dance along Eddie’s jawline, his eyes falling straight down to Eddie’s lips.

“I sent you pictures,” Eddie reminded with a laugh, but that laugh was soon smothered by a kiss that tasted like an energy drink and felt like coming home. 

———

In their hurry to head over in the morning, it turned out that Buck and Chris didn’t pack warm enough so they found themselves picking out new hoodies in a boutique gift shop a couple hours later.

The place was small and didn’t have a changing room so Chris had to wriggle in and out of three different sweaters that just didn’t fit his shoulders following his latest growth spurt while one of the women who worked there kindly held a mirror for him to look things over. 

Chris finally found a fourth one that seemed to suit him much better. It was a handsome navy blue with dark green lettering and even though it bunched up a little at his wrists Eddie was sure he would grow into it soon enough. 

“It doesn’t look weird?” Christopher asked doubtfully, screwing his face up as he turned away from the mirror, looking down at the sleeves. 

“Well, hon, why don’t we see what your dads think!” The woman suggested cheerily, turning to address Buck and Eddie together. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie could see Buck watching him expectantly, looking a little nervous all of a sudden. 

“His dads love it,” Eddie answered without hesitation, something old and painful finally loosening in his chest and giving way to a beautiful sensation that was more akin to joy. 

Buck’s eyes looked teary and he just nodded his assent, wordlessly helping Chris roll up the sleeves while Eddie followed the woman to the register to pay for Buck and Chris’ sweaters. 

They went to a coffee shop and got blueberry muffins to eat on the beach, no longer deterred by the chilly breeze now that they had sweaters and hot beverages to warm their hands. Chris had gotten a hot chocolate, Buck decided on a latte, and Eddie got his coffee with oat milk and brown sugar. Buck had smiled at that. 

After looking for shells and kicking sand around for an hour, the three eventually made their way back to the town and spent some time walking around the various shops and whimsical little streets, taking breaks when Christopher needed them or if they found somewhere worth looking around in. 

Chris was enamored by the novelty of it all and Buck only seemed to be half paying attention to the surroundings, content to hold Eddie’s hand and just stare at him as he told Buck all the things he hadn’t said on the phone or through text. It didn’t amount to much, but the point was that Eddie was doing much better. Trips like this didn’t magically cure depression, but he had a degree of freedom and solace that he hadn’t experienced in a long damn time. Maybe ever. 

Eddie grieved Mills, his old team, and he let them go. He reconciled his love for Shannon with the man he'd been then and who he was now. Who he loved now. As he drove through forests of trees older than any ancestor he could name, he thought about the heavy specters of his childhood and how even all the bad parts of it had somehow led him to where he was today. He thought about a lot of things he was too scared to think about, had called Adriana and Sophia to tell them about Buck, and came close to forgiving himself for some of his worse mistakes as of late. 

He was starting to heal, and while he knew how much effort that took on his own part, it wouldn’t have been possible without Buck. It wouldn’t have been possible without the love and trust and strength they shared between them. 

The sun was growing lower in the sky by the next time they took a break, sitting on the outdoor chairs of some cafe while Chris was in the store next door buying snacks. 

Eddie held Buck’s hand across the table as they worked through their second cups of coffee, the taste of brown sugar light on his tongue. There were so many distractions in this place, so many different things to look at, but as they sat there his eyes would only ever see out the man before him. 

Buck’s hair had taken on a much more golden tone from all his time spent outdoors lately and his curls lay free across his forehead, beautiful and perfect. His birthmark was the same pink hue as his lips and Eddie thought about how he knew how it felt to kiss both places. 

He thought about how lucky he was to love this man who was beautiful inside and out, and how fortunate it was to be loved by him in return. 

I love you. 

“Marry me,” Eddie said instead, those two words filling all the space between them and igniting a spark deep in his chest. 

“What?” Buck stared back at him and searched his face for some sign that he was messing around, but Eddie knew that all he found was genuine sincerity, because that was all he had. “Eddie-”

“You said you needed me to be sure about things. And I am,” Eddie insisted, squeezing his hands reassuringly. “I love you. You’re it for me. I also think you’ve spent too many years raising our son with me and I don’t want to spend another one where you’re not legally his father. I’m not replacing Shannon because she can’t be replaced. And neither can you. So I’m asking you to marry me.”

Buck was speechless, gripping Eddie’s hand so tight it was cutting off his circulation, but he could care less about that right now. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t even been in a relationship until a couple of weeks ago, that it hadn’t been that long since they were confessing their love in the kitchen with the dishes half put away and their garden growing in the yard. The flowers were already in bloom and soon the vegetables would be ready to pick. Eddie’s home had become Buck’s home. They were going to live the rest of their lives together no matter what, so it was time to make it official. 

“This is me jumping in feet first and knowing where I’m landing,” Eddie breathed, infusing all the love and devotion he had for him into his words. Christopher had appeared over Buck’s shoulder in that moment and was stepping closer slowly, realization dawning on his face as he listened and understood what was happening. “No broken ankles. Just us, Christopher, and our future together.”

Buck swallowed roughly, glancing between Eddie and Chris, then back to Eddie, his eyes full of love, hope, and the rest of Eddie’s life. 

“Ask me,” Buck said breathlessly, blinking back tears. “Eddie-”

“Buck, will you marry me?”

“Yes,” he gasped, and before he could even get up to try and kiss Eddie, Chris was throwing his arms around him in a hug, shoulders shaking a little as he laughed with joy.

“You should get married today,” Christopher insisted as soon as he let go, plopping down in the chair between the two of them and rummaging through the bag of jelly beans he’d bought. “This seems like a nice place to do it.”

“It’s not that simple, Chris,” Buck explained as he thumbed away his tears with his free hand even though every fiber of Eddie’s being was screaming yes, yes, let’s do it today. “We’d have to find somewhere that’s still open and has the paperwork, get an officiant, file everything-”

“It doesn’t have to be an official wedding,” Chris interrupted, refusing to be deterred. He offered some of his jelly beans to Buck who picked through a few of the blue ones for himself. “One of those gift shops back there sold rings. You two can exchange rings and I’ll be your pretend ofish- whatever person. You can get married today, here, by me, and then do the real paperwork and stuff back home whenever you want.” 

Eddie’s head was fizzing like a live wire, his heart singing and the universe screaming. All it took was one look at Buck and those three words came tumbling from his lips.

“Let’s do it.”

———

Buck and Eddie got married by Christopher beneath the shade of a pine tree on the beach, exchanging a pair of wedding bands they bought at an actual jewelry store nearby because apparently Carmel-by-the-Sea saw a lot of elopements meaning wedding materials weren’t in short supply. Eddie promised Buck that they could redo it all when they got back to Los Angeles if he wanted, get engagement rings and new wedding bands for whatever kind of ceremony they ended up doing, but he had a feeling that Buck was going to insist on just keeping these ones. And he did.

That sounded perfect to him.

No ceremony would ever top the one they had, standing there with the sand, the sea, and Christopher at their side.

Chris was the best officiant Eddie could ask for. He was also the funniest. The only wedding Christopher had ever been to aside from Hen and Karen’s vow renewal was Chimney and Maddie’s at the hospital, so his lines were a mix of whatever he could remember from Bobby’s speech and bits and pieces of things from telenovelas which made for a very interesting and memorable experience altogether. The language got a little dramatic at times and the pacing was very off, so at one point Chris started to get impatient when he forgot the order of things and just told Buck and Eddie to exchange vows and take over for him. 

After successfully making each other cry to the point that Chris threatened to leave them if they didn’t get it together since it was growing colder outside, they composed themselves enough for Chris to finally look between them and say, “I now pronounce you husband and husband.” Then, with a sigh and a hand smacking over his glasses to cover his eyes, “Buck, you may now kiss my dad.”

And Buck definitely did.

———

Eddie woke up that first morning of newly married life to Buck trying to sneak back inside the house without waking him up, but he failed miserably when Eddie stumbled out of bed and into the living room just in time to see him gingerly turning the lock on the door again.

“It was supposed to be a surprise,” Buck groaned at him over the top of the paper takeout bags he was balancing in his arms. Eddie could see the gold glint of the wedding band on his hand and all thoughts seem to disappear as he stared at it. “Come on, I know I’m a catch but stop staring and help me with these.”

Chris was roused by the noise and smell of food, finding them in the kitchen as they unpacked the takeout bags and spread out the containers of pancakes, fruit, French toast, bottles of orange juice, and a various assortment of random breakfast items.

“You snuck out to surprise us with pancakes?” Eddie didn’t know whether to smile, laugh, or kiss him. Maybe all three. At the same time. 

“Well, if we only get one day for our honeymoon I figured I’d make it count,” Buck grinned, sitting down to eat while Eddie slowly followed suit, overcome by the swell of emotions in his throat.

Eddie never had a honeymoon with Shannon. They were broke teenagers with a baby on the way and only one fully functioning car between the two of them. It just wasn’t possible, and even after he started getting money from the military, there was the house and medical bills to pay for and-

Eddie had just never been on a honeymoon. 

It seemed he and Buck were in for a lot of firsts in this relationship

He couldn’t wait to do them all.

They ate breakfast and decided to cut their time in Carmel a day short to spend the rest of Eddie and Buck’s time off back at home. Once they packed and had lunch at the same place Eddie went the day before, they returned the rental car to the nearest branch location. Buck drove them home in the Jeep, first making a detour at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to spend the day like any other outing together as a family, except this time they had rings on their fingers and were technically on their honeymoon. Even if they didn’t get new rings and just had a civil wedding instead of another ceremony, maybe they could manage enough time for a second honeymoon. That definitely didn’t sound too bad to Eddie. 

“You two eloped?” Maddie shouted over the phone when they called her after they stopped for gas in Calabasas. She’d been wise to the plan Buck and Chris had to surprise Eddie, but she certainly hadn’t expected this turn of events. 

“In our defense, it’s not legally binding,” Eddie pointed out, holding the phone further from his ear as she bombarded them with a million and a half questions on what exactly happened.

“Yet!” Buck interjected fiercely, making sure she knew there was no mistake about that. “We’re doing it as soon as the courthouse opens tomorrow.”

They definitely hadn’t discussed that yet but Eddie was silently thrilled by the prospect of getting to marry Buck twice in one week, making a note to place the appointment online once they hit the road again. 

“I don’t think that makes it sound any better,” Maddie laughed, but she sounded genuinely happy to hear how excited her brother was about it. “You two better drive safe so I can kick your asses when you get back.”

That night they cooked dinner with the vegetables Chris grew in the garden and picked some of Buck’s yellow flowers to put in a vase in the kitchen. Christopher made them both cry again when he asked if them getting married meant Buck would formally adopt him- and yes, yes of course it did. 

Their luggage was left half unpacked in the living room and the kitchen was half a disaster, but Eddie didn’t mind, holding Buck close beneath the covers as he lay awake listening to him breathe and familiarizing himself with the feel of the wedding bands on their fingers. 

It was their mess and they’d get to it in the morning.

They had all the time in the world