Archive of Our Own ^beta

1.

Eddie has a problem with Texas. Always too hot, too humid, too stuffy, too unwilling to understand. Every few street corners there’s an American flag up on a pole twenty feet high and you can pass by a hundred identical houses all lined up in rows. 

He probably could have lived in one of those identical houses if his parents weren’t so frugal, his dad hated to spend his hard earned paychecks unless it was on the occasional big purchase. He hated a lot of things, but at least some of that money went into a college fund that was never used. 

Like most people in late ‘90s Texas, both of his parents were pretty close-minded. Supervise your sister, you don’t join in, Eddie. And get that garbage off your face. 

Right before he was told this, Sophia had dressed him up like he was her life sized doll and used kid-safe eyeshadow in a pink tray to spread the glitter all over Eddie’s eyelids. He let her, he was only seven and thought the rosy color was nice.

A few years later when both his sisters were messily painting each other’s nails—Adriana worse off since she was only about three—he supervised. When they played with their wide array of Barbies they’d give him the one dumb Ken doll they had because they must have known Eddie wouldn’t let himself participate otherwise. 

Maybe it was that house, maybe it was his parents, but whenever Tía Pepa or Abuela came to visit or sometimes babysit, it didn’t feel like such a pressing issue. When Sophia and Adriana played pretend in princess dresses while Eddie watched, Pepa had once said to him, “You look so bored Eddito, you can be a princess, too.” 

With bated breath, twelve year old Eddie puts on one of Sophia’s dresses—the pink one from Sleeping Beauty, it’s her second favorite other than Cinderella, which she has on—and joins in their playing for the first and only time. Adriana stumbles a little in her golden Beauty and the Beast dress to plant a tiny tiara on Eddie’s head. He giggles and pulls her into his lap. It’s the lightest he’s ever felt.

They have a princess tea party all the way up until Pepa tells the three of them their mother will be home soon, giving Eddie a pointed look he somehow understands.

He makes up a weak excuse of having homework and changes.

-

Don’t slouch, a man stands up straight, Edmundo. 

He doesn’t think he gets it. Sometimes he needs to have a straight back with his head high and sometimes he needs to be kneeled with his head pressed to the floor. Men stand tall, but kneel before God. Why?

As a kid, Eddie felt like he was playing pretend and like everyone else was too. One collective act. Because nobody really believes it, right? Magic doesn’t exist, ghosts don’t exist, God doesn’t exist. He can’t see them, and everything people say about each fits into the same box of conspiracy to him. But some people put all of their faith and energy into this life, and he can’t understand it. He feels like an outsider by default.

Then there are the times that the words really do dig deep. Burrowing under his skin to become a permanent fixture in his nerves for the rest of his life. The ‘what ifs’. The shame, the guilt. They all seem so, so sure that this is correct, that Eddie could be punished and burnt for eternity if he turns his back on God. He doesn’t believe it. Or…he doesn’t want to believe it. He has his free will, but how free is it, really? God feels like a cop more than an all-powerful and loving deity. Like those ones that sit around in unmarked cars with their lights off so they’ll catch you doing something bad. They wait for it. They want you to slip up. 

Eddie thinks his dad is like that too. At ten years old he’s told to step up—be a man—but he’s never told how to do anything. Even a year earlier when his mom was in labor and needed to get to the hospital, Eddie’s first instinct was to take charge and drive her there. He scraped his dad’s car up and got blown up on for trying to help. Later on, no adults are present and Adriana and Sophia need food, so Eddie uses what he has and tries to make eggs. He burns the stove top and gets reprimanded. 

His mother laughs about it months afterwards at family gatherings, but there’s nothing but a pit in his stomach. It wasn’t funny to him when his dad shouted about how he ‘can’t ever just do things right’ and ‘I’ve had such a long month, now I have to come home to this? You’re driving me crazy, Edmundo’.

His dad hates a lot of things, and sometimes Eddie wonders if he’s one of them. 

-

Eddie stops going to church when he’s eleven. He supposes he’s lucky that his parents will even allow him to make that decision, most people around here wouldn’t be so open. He’s thankful, he guesses. It could be worse for him.

When everyone’s gone on Sundays for Mass, he’ll turn the radio up and take care of things like the dishes and getting that stain off the counter that’s been there for months. The sunshine through the windows is warm on the tiled floor and he’ll dance a little to the music, keeping an eye out for someone even though he knows no one else is there. It’s just a habit. Because what if there was, and they saw him?

Eventually when everyone other than his dad return, his mom doesn’t point out the empty sink or clean counters. Eddie didn’t tell her about it, but he wishes she would tell him he did a good job. 

There’s a very different relationship there, a little harder to define for him. With his dad it’s easy. He’s not around, when he is around he gets angry, his dad is like his dad, and Eddie wants to be nothing like him when he gets older. With his mom, he finds her taking a space in his chest in a more complicated way.

Usually she makes the same points his dad would, but she doesn’t yell like he does. She’ll take him by the hands and tell him she knows what’s best for him and is trying to do right by him, and maybe she does. Most of the time she’s right, Eddie always falling short and looking like the idiot while she gives him the knowing look . She knew he’d slip up, and she makes sure he knows she knew. 

She’s also judgmental, making her passively rude comments about people when they’re out.

Doesn’t she know not to wear that with her shape?

Eddie is seven when his mom quietly makes fun of another woman while they’re out shopping for new shoes. He frowns and watches the woman getting a pair of shoes for her own daughter. The pattern of her summer dress is lovely.

What the Romeros have done with their yard is just awful, it makes us look ridiculous! 

The Romeros had decided to ditch the traditional short cut green lawn for a lawn full of tall grasses and a variety of flowers. Eddie had gone next door when he was nine just to look at it because it was so unique and beautiful. Mr. and Mrs. Romero retired and had been working on the garden for the past few months. His favorite flower was pink, but it was almost lilac—called a pink lady as informed by Mrs. Romero. Eddie thought it was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. 

What on Earth gives those people the idea that that’s acceptable in public? There are children around, for God’s sake.

Eddie’s eleven years old when she scowls at the sight of two men on a park bench together, one having just kissed the other on the cheek. It looked like it was just for them, and Eddie wasn’t meant to see it. It’s an odd sight, but he doesn’t really get why the presence of children matters. He thinks his mom should really just mind her own business for once, but he wouldn’t dare say that to her face. 

Thank God I didn’t raise you to behave like that, their parents should know better. 

Eddie had been eyeing the group of boys his age roughhousing with a yearning in his chest, quickly smothered by his mom and her disapproving glare. 

It’s not like he doesn’t have friends, he does. His parents get him into baseball so he can meet other boys and maybe be more like them—maybe stop being influenced by his sisters. They get along and he isn’t half bad at the sport, though it isn’t really what he wants. Then again, Eddie doesn’t think much about what he does. He ends up quitting when he’s thirteen because he broke his ankle out on the field. It was the only game his dad had gone to and he left it crying in the car on the way to urgent care. 

“Stop crying Edmundo, men don’t cry over broken bones,” he’d said.

Eddie sniffled hard, quickly nodding. “Sorry.”

Then there’s the people he knows from school. They don’t hang out outside classes too often, but he knows people. They’ll have fun at the lunch table and sometimes he’ll laugh so hard his cheeks hurt. One time his friend Benji had taken one of those gross wet baby carrots they keep in plastic bags and pinched it hard enough it shot from his hand into a girl’s chocolate milk a whole table over. It somehow escalated into a baby carrot war and everyone made a huge mess on the floor. All who participated had to clean up every carrot and receive detention to learn about why wasting food was bad. Then the news got to his mom. He'd never gotten detention before.

Most of what he received was a ‘We didn’t raise you to act stupid’ and then he was sent to his room before dinner. Eddie got the message, no rewards for bad deeds. He went to sleep hungry. He still keeps his friends, he just doesn’t act stupid anymore.

On those rare occasions he does hang out with his friends outside school, he sees the way some of them talk to their parents. Their mothers will come in with treats on plates and they’ll shout at them to get out because they’re playing a game, maybe Madden or Mario Kart. Eddie always gives a quiet thanks and takes the plate. His mom doesn’t do this kind of thing, though he never brings people over. It’s not a hangout house. 

Maybe he doesn’t want his parents to know he has friends, which sounds so ridiculous, they know he does. But knowing the way they act is different than knowing they exist. 

It feels like some kind of shame thing, Eddie’s secretly ashamed of most things, he wouldn’t be surprised. Like dancing alone in the warm sunlit kitchen and the kid-safe makeup Sophia once messily spread on his face. Like knowing there’s something he’s missing but never truly had in the first place. Like how he walks and talks and always lets his parents down and isn’t the best in school but just alright. Like how he doesn’t believe in God but thinks he probably should since that’s what everyone else does.

Eddie is so ashamed of himself.

It’s something so set in stone, a constant shadow that looms over his shoulders. He doesn’t want to be truly known or perceived by anyone, even himself. He hates to think about himself, to question, to wonder why he feels so alone even when surrounded by other people. So he doesn’t. 

-

Growing up is strange. Eddie’s thirteen and he’s starting to change, emotionally and physically. No one really wants to talk about that sort of thing and his health classes love to go on about good eating habits, basic anatomy, and abstinence. Eddie doesn’t like the changes his body makes, but he doesn’t think about it too hard. He also can’t go to his dad for help with these things, and his friends aren’t close enough to him to talk to in that way, so he deals with it how he deals with everything else. Alone.

Being lonely feels worse when the world is less colorful. No longer blinded by the inherent joy of just being a kid, the hours he finally gets in his bedroom drag out. 

When his mom is out with Adriana and Sophia doing ‘girl shopping’ or ‘girl days’ or whatever else, Eddie lays down and feels cold. He likes being home alone—but seeing his sisters come back with their hair done or nails painted, giggling about how pretty they look, he can’t help feeling left out. But one day he starts doodling just to pass the time, puts on music every now and then. At some point they become more like drawings. They’re all in the back of his math notebook because he doesn’t like math and thought it was a better use for it. 

Sometimes he tip-toes outside onto the front porch just to draw the Romero’s flowers next door with a stubby #2 pencil. They don’t have any color and they usually look a little wonky because passion doesn’t always come with talent. And he keeps it all hidden. He doesn’t know why it’s a secret, like drawing is a bad thing. Like everything he does is embarrassing and something he needs to hide away. 

Just talking about himself feels wrong.

His mom will tell him she knows him better than he knows himself when they get into their arguments, and Eddie can’t express how wrong she is. When does he ever speak his mind? When has he ever just sat down with someone and spilled all of his thoughts? Is that ever something that could come naturally to someone like him? 

Eddie hardly knows himself and yet he knows himself better than anyone else ever will. 

But still, he hardly knows himself. So when his classmates start dating and making comments about crushes and whoever else, Eddie can’t understand why he doesn’t care. Everyone else seems to, this must be another one of those inexplicable things that make him different. Like not believing in God. Like the pit in his gut when he sees groups of girls playing tag out in the park. But why does there always need to be something? Can’t he be like everyone else?

-

He’s fourteen and standing by a drink cooler, feeling far out of his depth. He’s never drank before, and he doesn’t plan to. The last thing he needs is to come home smelling like alcohol when all he said was that he was going to Benji’s house. 

It’s a bit of a party right at the lake with his friend’s friends and a group of girls and their friends. Eddie feels a bit disregarded when he’s left behind a box of ice and everyone else is on a rowboat or drinking and talking. That is, until Shannon Carter makes her way over to him with a bright smile on her face. 

“Hey, I think I know you,” she says, sweeping the bangs from her forehead to squint at him. Eddie thinks he knows her too. Well, he does. They haven’t been in classes together, but she’s pretty well known just for being so friendly. “Are you Eli?”

He presses his lips together in disappointment. “Uh, no. No, just…I’m Eddie. Benji’s friend.”

Shannon nods with little recognition. “Oh…! Yeah, I think I’ve seen you around,” she lies, Eddie can see it plain on her face. “I’m…Shannon.”

“It’s alright that you didn’t know, I’m a little bit of a nobody,” Eddie jokes, pulling out a cold drink from the ice. Before he can even offer it out, she frowns and interrupts.

“Oh, come on, you don’t really think that, right?”

Shannon takes the can from his hand and Eddie just shrugs.

“I’ve been put on ice box duty. Not usually the job for the fun friends.”

“I don’t know, everyone else here is the same to me,” she says, pulling the tab open. She looks so free, he wonders what that’s like. “Sorry for thinking you were someone else.”

“It’s okay—“

“You know you don’t have to stay here, right?” She asks him with a sweet head tilt. “Ice box duty isn’t really a thing, you’re not stuck there.”

Eddie glances down oddly enough, as if his feet really could have been planted into the ground. “What else can I do?” 

Shannon purses her lips and looks behind her at the lake. Like a lightbulb has gone off in her head, she spins right back. 

“Wanna get in a boat?”

-

Eddie doesn’t date her at first. They’re good friends for about a year before they drift apart the first time. He’s fairly certain her laughter is made of sunshine the way it makes him feel warmer. Shannon might have been his first real friend. They sat on that boat for hours just talking—though she did most of it.

Her hair is long and a light brown and she wears a lot of florals and bright colors his mom would probably call garish and he’d call pretty. Eddie feels a pang of something in his chest just looking at her, but he can’t place it. Maybe it’s whatever he’s meant to be feeling.

They drift for normal reasons, simply because they don’t have classes together and Eddie is always elbow deep in being the man of his family. They still smile when they see each other, though.

-

Eddie’s fifteen years old and his dad is actually here; he’s next to him and teaching him how to drive, showing off all the handles to pull, pedals to press, and buttons to hit. It’s a big responsibility, hence why he’s been put in an empty parking lot instead of starting out on a real road. Is it because of a mistake he made six years ago? As if he’s going to scrape up the sides again when he was too short to see above the steering wheel back then.

His mom takes him out after that first time with his dad, too busy to follow through with teaching him. But he’ll be back for the holidays. 

She comments on every little turn he makes, complains when he hits the brakes just a little too hard for her liking, makes him redo parking over and over. It’s weeks before he’s allowed on an actual road with other cars. Eddie starts to hate driving. 

Is that their goal? To make him frustrated with everything he does?

After she tries to spontaneously take over and nearly gets them into an accident, Eddie escapes to his room for hours. He had it under control until she wanted to do it for him. Eddie must have inherited his father’s anger because he feels like punching something, some one. 

The thought skirting along the corners of his mind makes him feel heavy—guilty, like usual. There was no face attached to the ‘someone’ in his thoughts, but he still lies down until the sun sets and the only thing that can get him up is the sound of his sisters arguing in the other room. He pushes to his feet and quickly resolves the issue, just some quarrel about sharing things. Eddie fishes out some ice cream from the freezer and gives them both a couple scoops in secret.

He sleeps hungry that night. 

-

By the time he’s seventeen, knowing what he deserves and doesn’t deserve is like breathing. If he gets this right, he’ll give himself this, if he doesn’t fuck it up, he’ll let himself have something nice. 

When Shannon pops up in his life again, he decides he deserves someone nice. They finally share a class and reconnect, spend plenty of time outside of school together, too. Eventually people just…assume. Eddie thinks he gets it, she’s pretty and actually likes him for how he presents himself. So he does what any seventeen year old with a pretty girl as a friend does and gets a girlfriend.

A couple months in, he brings her home to meet his mom. Dad’s up in one of the central states, he isn’t sure which one. 

She hates Shannon, he can tell. It’s that look on her face, the same one she uses to judge everyone else around her. She asks about if she’s going to college, where she’s going, what she wants to do — the like. 

Eddie bites his tongue when Shannon says she wants to study the arts. Maybe go up north, like New York or California. 

His mom raises her brow and tuts, saying, “Well, if you plan on keeping this up any longer, Eddie, you’ll actually have to do some heavy lifting, won’t you?” 

He sighs. “Mom, we’re not talking about this right now.”

“Well, why not?” She asks, like airing out his problems at the dinner table is normal. “You haven’t even started applying anywhere, you don’t know what you want to do. So I’m just saying, if she’s doing art, then you need to…y’know. Step up a little.”

Eddie’s fork scrapes against the china as he places it down. “Really?”

“Eddie,” Shannon mutters beside him, “It’s okay.”

He doesn’t feel so hungry anymore, and his sisters are awkwardly silent on the other end of the table. 

“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, Eddie,” she continues on. “I don’t control her choices, but you’re my son—and is it so bad for me to want you to have a good future?”

He blinks down at his lap. “No,” he says stiffly. Eddie abruptly gets to his feet and cleans his plate off. “I’m going to my room. Shannon?”

“Yes, I’m—I’m full,” she easily agrees. She thanks his mom for dinner and cleans her plate as well before following Eddie across the house.

“Keep the door open!” His mom calls out.

“Alright!“ Eddie shouts back with a groan. It’s unlike him, but he likes his privacy, having a place to debrief. The dining room isn’t that far from his bedroom, it feels like being watched. “I’m gonna lose my fucking mind,” he mumbles.

She snickers, taking the time to look around his room. It’s rather bare with just family pictures, his one baseball trophy, school books, his equipment, and some clothes he really should have picked up.

“C’mon, she’s your mom, of course she’s gonna be a little harsh just meeting me,” Shannon whispers, though he doesn’t think she gets that this is just how his mother is. It doesn’t get much better than this. “I…I like your room.”

“Well, you don’t have to lie.”

“I’m not!”

-

Later in the night, when they know everyone is definitely asleep, he feels safe enough to close the door. Not for anything sexual, that’s not what he wants, especially not with his mom and sisters in this thin-walled house. Just so he can stop feeling like there’s someone lurking over his shoulder and waiting for him to mess up. 

-

Shannon doesn’t come over that often, he tends to go to hers. It’s just not a hangout house. 

But one time she is, and the house is empty and they’re getting somewhere. She’s on top of him in not a whole lot, and he worries someone will walk in even though no one else is here. But it feels good, even when she pulls back to ask him if he has ‘anything’.

Eddie furrows his brows. “Anything?” Then it dawns on him, face warming. “Ah—yeah, right. Uh, I think I have it in a drawer—“

Shannon is leaning over and digging through his things a second before he can even finish. He kind of hates that. But then he watches her pause while a warm smile spreads along her face. She pulls out a piece of paper and turns it to him.

“Did you make this?” She asks sweetly, and despite both of them being in their underwear, he feels more exposed by the stupid drawing she’s presenting to him. 

Eddie blinks, voice caught in his throat. “Uh…no. No, that was Adriana.”

“Your nine year old sister did not make this.” Shannon giggles and turns it back to herself. “It’s really nice, the flowers. I didn’t know you draw, you should’ve told me!”

Despite the praise, he can’t help the shame and embarrassment that floods him. Why is everything so embarrassing? 

“It’s not…it’s just a stupid hobby,” he mutters, snatching it back. 

They still have sex, but Eddie thinks he just didn’t want to talk about it anymore. 

-

Months later, Eddie gets the news. 

He thinks he feels the universe restructuring itself to compensate for the weight of it.

-

The only person he can tell is his mom. The most judgmental woman on the planet is going to be sat down and told her son accidentally got his girlfriend pregnant at eighteen. 

She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and Eddie’s hands shake where they’re clasped behind him. Eventually, she stands up and sighs. Like she’s exhausted of his mistakes, exhausted of him. 

“Are you sure it’s yours?”

Eddie clenches his jaw. “That’s the first thing you say?”

She throws her hands up in defeat. “Well, Eddie, I don’t know what to tell you. I’d prefer if it wasn’t. Is she keeping it? I know her parents are more liberal—“

“They’re Catholic.”

“Okay,” she mutters, beginning to pace the room. “In any case, you cannot be having a kid out of wedlock, so you’ll be getting married before she shows.” His mom sighs loudly again, disappointment so blatant on her face. “You realize you’re tied down for life , Eddie? I mean—you know you’ve just thrown your entire future away, right? And I’ve got to tell your dad, he’s going to be furious…”

She begins to ramble away about mistakes and how Shannon was always that kind of girl—not right for Eddie, and now she’s ruining his life. Applying to college is of no use now, neither of them can go, not with a baby to take care of. Not with a wedding to plan. 

He feels out of his body, like a stranger living in his own skin. The world is just a blur for the next two months, he hardly remembers the proposal, the wedding, the enlistment, the light slowly fading from Shannon’s eyes as he tells her he’s leaving. All he remembers is the quiet of the early morning of the wedding where they’d sat side by side. They didn’t say a word, but they understood.

He can’t even legally drink yet but he’s a father, a husband, a soldier. Some nights he spends staring up at the ceiling or the night sky with more stars than he’s ever seen before, wondering if he should just die out here. But he can’t of course, he has a family to return to now. It was why he did this in the first place. 

Eddie remembers the birth. It was like for a brief moment, his heart beat correctly again and the world didn’t feel like it was ending. 

That was his baby. His baby boy. His sweet Christopher.

But something makes him keep running, maybe it’s that intangible thing misses, maybe it’s the constant confrontation from Shannon. They have stress lines at nineteen and he’s sorry about that, but he still leaves them. 

Maybe the universe punished him for that.

He walks out of it with bullet wounds and a Silver Star he doesn’t deserve. And that’s it. 

-

Back home, he has to be somebody, and it’s a strange feeling. Out there, he was allowed to fade into the background and just work . Do what he had to do and return to base. Here, he can’t.

Here, he’s a father to a child he knows through video calls and his own DNA. Christopher is already so big, he feels like throwing up every time he doesn’t know something about him. It’s his own fault, he’s the only guilty one. He feels like his dad.

Here, he’s a husband to a wife who hardly seems to enjoy his company anymore. Her mother has cancer again, and it seems to be the only thing on her mind other than Christopher. Eddie doesn’t even crack the top five anymore, not that he deserves that. 

Here, he’s a son to his mom and his dad who have given up on him. They talk down on him and make sure he knows how much they disapprove of everything he’s ever done. But they never act like that to Christopher, always doting on him and treating him like their own. 

Eddie isn’t mad about that, he’s happy his son has people who love him all around him. He deserves love.

Christopher isn’t much like him at all. He gets his sweet charm from how Shannon used to be and all that happiness from God knows where. Certainly not from him.

He and Shannon mostly just argue now, and he misses how they were before this. She wants to go to California to help her mom, but he needs time—time to think, time to become somebody first. He’s twenty-five and sometimes he wakes up shaking, thinking he’s still out there with his only purpose being to save everyone else. 

Obviously not everyone can be saved. Shannon packs up her life and leaves him and Christopher behind before he can see her go and make sure she existed in the first place. 

-

From there it’s constant berating from both parents. His dad is home a little more often now, meaning he can get on Eddie about what being a good father means. His mom corrects him every time he slips up with Christopher just to one-up him. Both of them get on Shannon for leaving, but he doesn’t blame her for leaving him. He just wishes Chris didn't get caught in the crossfire like this. He misses her, he knows.

Suddenly, there’s California, his Tía and Abuela who always treated him oh, so kindly no matter what the circumstances were. There’s the 118, there’s Buck, and then Shannon again.

It’s bad, the way he falls back into line with what he knew. He loops her back into his and Christopher’s life because Chris had wanted it so badly, Eddie couldn’t mess this up any more than he already had in the past. She didn’t change much at all, and he thought he did, but perhaps not. 

It’s hard to talk, but Eddie isn’t bad in bed, so that’s where they go for both familiarity and avoidance.

Eddie’s been avoiding things his whole life, it’s like second nature by now. He hardly even recognizes it’s there. 

But before she found her way into his life again, Eddie really thought he changed. The firehouse is full of sweet people he could see becoming more than just coworkers—especially Buck after the way he jumped into his mess to help tidy it up. Eddie didn’t even have to ask him. He just did it.

They go places with Chris together, and it feels easy. With Shannon, there was always that expectation to be a good husband, but here he’s just Eddie—a not so terrible father anymore. The knot in his chest feels loosened for the first time in his life, it’s sort of terrifying. What is he without everything he is stored away and in a place Eddie can’t reach?

-

He never stops getting punished, though. Shannon dies at twenty-six, the 118 nearly blows up, Buck gets his leg crushed, Buck and Chris nearly die in a disaster, Buck sues the department and therefore restricts them from speaking, and Eddie feels like there’s some kind of sign there. He doesn’t like to believe in these things but the single time he asked for one from the universe, Shannon supposedly got pregnant again so he reproposed, only she wasn’t pregnant and wanted a divorce and then she died in front of him. That’s one hell of a fucking sign.

So Eddie, acquainted with what he deserves and doesn’t deserve, doesn’t let himself feel. His hair is buzzed and he works out and he’s angry and he hurts himself and other people over and over. He’s out of his body again, the only thing grounding him is the prickling of barbed wire around his throat every time he breathes. It’s like he’s nearly always on the verge of tears, but they never actually come. 

Not until Bobby, but Bobby has a way with words no one else does. Eddie cries in front of him at work and it feels like suffocating, it feels weak . His dad had always reiterated that ‘men don’t cry’, but Eddie knows it’s not true. He’s trying to teach Chris that it’s not bad to cry and it’s normal. It is. But he can never take his own advice. 

It’s just so hard to break away from it, he won’t even let himself cry on his own. It’s just a waste of time that doesn’t fix anything. And he’s stronger than that. He has to be.

Something obviously has something against him and it nearly kills him for good this time. Buried alive. It’s almost ironic. He only lives for Chris, for Buck, and the family he chose at the 118. He makes sure Buck has a reason to live after that, too.

-

Eventually, the world doesn’t feel like it’s on fire, and Eddie thinks he’s…okay. Of course, just his luck, the pandemic rolls in and separates him from Chris; trapping him, Chim and Hen in Buck’s loft. Not that there’s anything wrong with Buck’s place of residence, but he misses his kid like hell even if this is to protect him.

He and Buck share his bed because he was the only one actually somewhat willing to do it. Hen and Chim had a feeling he was a blanket hog and bought their own air mattresses instead.

They were right, Buck is a blanket hog because he runs cold, usually wearing a hoodie, shorts, and socks to sleep. Nearly every morning Eddie wakes up to his side of the bed bare and the rest of it burrito-ed around Buck, and he just chuckles and hops in the shower.

Sometimes he wakes up with an arm around his waist or Buck’s face smushed into his shoulder. He actually doesn’t mind it at all, he’s missed having people close. 

There’s something aching in him. 

He shoves it down.

He dates Ana because people tell him he should have moved on from Shannon by now, and something is so deeply lodged in his chest he doesn’t notice it’s there until a bullet hurtles through him again. 

The first thing he thinks is a simple ‘I can’t die, people need me’. It resonates through him as he hits the ground and blood pools beneath him. The second is ‘I can’t die, I haven’t figured it out yet’. 

-

Eddie thought he would after that, because most people come to world changing realizations amidst the threat of death. All he gets is his heart in his throat and a terrible dread that leaves him out of breath every time his girlfriend is considered more than that, like a wife is somehow a sentence worse than death despite how much Chris loves her. 

Buck tells him to call it off, so he does. 

He can’t do it, and he doesn’t know why. There must be something wrong with him. 

-

There is. And he knows that because sometimes Eddie wakes up and he doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to work, doesn’t want to talk to people—but he does it anyway, pulling on his firefighter uniform to head to the Dispatch building. He feels like a fraud, but he has plenty of people to talk to and take his mind off how heavy his soles are. 

He wishes Maddie were here, god knows they don’t talk nearly as much as they should. But Linda gives him recipes and has a great sense of humor, and May finds vocabulary and life advice to throw at him. She’s an incredibly smart kid, Athena and Michael did well with her.

Maybe she felt like she was missing out on the life she could have had if she'd been born someone else or made different choices. Don’t you wonder about stuff like that?

… Not really.

But he does. It’s all he ever thinks about alone. That sort of idea could mean he doesn’t have Chris, though, and he wouldn’t change a thing in the course of his life if it meant he would lose him. So entertaining ‘what if he was someone else’ always makes him feel queasy. There are so few good things, he wouldn’t dare change and risk fucking them up. 

He’s losing sleep, going through the same day over and over, he’s lying to Buck, he’s lying to Bobby, he’s lying to Chris, he’s lying to himself. Suddenly, the ground is ripped away from him and he crashes all at once, violently and alarmingly far from himself. A culmination of all his failures, every time his parents talked down on him, every time he had something good he didn’t deserve. 

He falls, and falls, and falls—and Buck’s there.

Buck’s there, talking to him gently and taking the bat from his bruised shaking hands. There’s no scolding, he’s not mad at him. Just scared. 

What are you afraid of?

That I’m never gonna feel normal again.

Eddie isn’t even sure if he knows what normal ever felt like, but he wants it. Buck spends the next forty minutes bandaging his damaged hands and it calms the waves crashing in his head. He doesn’t feel better, but he doesn’t feel like he’s dying, either. 

He doesn’t have a bed to sleep on right now, but Buck settles him down on the couch he usually sleeps on when he’s over, then honest to god finds a pillow and a blanket for himself and sleeps on the rug right beside him. Eddie cried out all the tears he possibly could tonight, but if he hadn’t, he probably would have cried again. 

-

Buck has always been family to him, but it feels like after that night he truly cements himself as the most important person he has right next to Chris. Eddie comes home from therapy and Buck’s already there, waiting for him. The three of them go to the zoo, to the movies, to restaurants—but most of the time they’re in each other’s homes playing games or having dinner together. It’s unlike anything he’s ever had, it’s so normal . Eddie watches Buck ramble about work as he checks on the finished lasagna in the oven, and he does it with a stuttering heart and a heavy chest. He used to associate that feeling with panic, but it’s not that. It’s that ache he’s been getting around Buck in various intervals over the years, never quite able to understand what it means. 

He thinks he almost gets it when lightning strikes and he’s got Buck’s heart and cracked ribs beneath his hands. Eddie doesn’t think, doesn’t let himself think anything other than two separate counts in his head. One goes to thirty then back to zero, the other to three minutes and seventeen seconds. 

Buck’s not dead anymore, but he’s not alive either. Eddie can hardly look at him. He wonders if there’s anything in Buck’s head or if it’s just as empty as it was when he died. 

The week without him is hard, it feels like he’s being dragged around with weights on his feet. The only reason he gets up is for Christopher or to visit Buck since they’re pardoned off working for now. The house is quiet and somehow feels too big without his presence. Like it was built for three all along but he’s only just noticed it. 

And Buck springs back—of course he does. That’s what Buck does. Eddie doesn’t want him to be out of his sight for even a second, but he knows he’s about to be bombarded by everyone who loves him, so he waits him out. Eventually he does come, and he crashes on the couch before Eddie can even get back with a couple drinks. 

It doesn’t scare him at all, it’s the most at peace Buck has looked in a long time, and his chest is rising and falling without the aid of machinery. He’s so alive, and he’s in Eddie’s house in the middle of the night, so Eddie watches him for a while. Maybe that’s weird, but it’s hard not to. 

Of course, now that Buck’s found his way home, Eddie tries anything to keep him close. And somehow —though he’ll never understand this— Buck gains the ability to do math like a calculator, so Eddie thinks fuck it. He dresses him up and shows him off and he spends the whole night just watching him with his new found confidence that makes his heart drum against his throat. 

The warm dim light of the room looks good on him. Eddie can’t stop looking at him.

-

He will say, he’s been trying to avoid dating after Ana went so poorly, but somehow everything and everyone keeps telling him to get back out there at the same time. The telenovelas he watches with Chris do it, Tía Pepa does it, Hen and Chim do it, Bobby does it, and eventually he just gives in. Pepa’s right anyway, he can’t end up alone. 

Marisol is…fine. Eddie asks her to move in.

Sometimes Eddie thinks he’s wasting time. 

He’s still missing something he never had in the first place. 

-

He meets a new friend through Bobby and Athena’s cruise disaster, and suddenly he’s being whisked away to all these places he’s never been before. Him and Buck don’t do big trips like this, so it’s different, it’s fun. All week long he can feel Buck’s gaze, but Eddie doesn’t mind it, in fact he thinks he likes it. He even joins in to play basketball with him for the first time ever—after Eddie’s probably asked him twenty times in the past—and he’s so giddy about it the sun seems to shine ten times brighter. 

Whatever happens after that is a bit of a blur of pain in his ankle, a quick apology from Buck with a new kind of light in his eyes, his girlfriend being a former nun making it hard to look at her anymore, seeing Buck and Tommy at that restaurant, and now hiding out in Buck’s kitchen. 

He thinks he could hide here forever if time came to a stop everywhere but here. Just him and his best friend who’s now friends with his new friend, so maybe they could all start hanging out—

It was a date.

Eddie thinks he feels the universe restructuring itself to compensate for the weight of that.

I can’t stop thinking about him.

Is that weird?

This changes nothing between us.

Eddie does what any reasonable person does when their best friend comes out at thirty-three and promptly blows his entire life into pieces. Of course, that comes after a night of drinking and partying and karaoke and a strong arm around his shoulders and a pair of lips right next to his ear. Then he blows it all up. 

He’s wasting time, he and Marisol don’t live together anymore, not after he practically kicked her out—but they go on dates sometimes. Chris spends more time with her than he does. 

He’s missing something, he knows he is. And when he sees a woman with Shannon’s face, he thinks— that’s it . He still misses her even though he doesn’t think about her much anymore. At least he thought he didn’t. Eddie can’t stop thinking about Shannon again after he finds her—Kim, that is. He’s started thinking about her around Marisol, it’s probably a bad sign that he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t even dare think about her around Chris, though, because sometimes he feels like that kid can read his mind and he doesn’t want him to ever know about her. 

The worst part about this arrangement is that Eddie still doesn’t feel whole. He doesn’t kiss her or sleep with her. But he does bring her out on a boat. Like how he met Shannon at fourteen behind the ice box. Kim isn’t her, not so bright and bubbly the way Shannon was once.

-

Why haven’t you tried to kiss me?

I didn’t know you wanted me to.

Mmh, no…that’s not it. I think it’s something else.

-

Buck finds out about his latest spiral and he still doesn’t seem to think of him any less. The way Buck spells it out makes it seem more insane than he thought. Eddie didn’t think about him going on dates with Kim as cheating because she was Shannon, and that doesn’t make sense now, but it did once. 

Buck tells him to call it off, so he does. 

That should’ve been it. Eddie thought it was over. But he never gets off easy, and soon it’s the middle of the night and he’s having a hard time telling what’s real and what’s fake and he’s crying and lost . There’s something broken in him, and nothing he does makes it better. Not ever.

She hugs him, freshly cut bangs of the wrong color against his neck. Eddie feels raw and scared and like this woman shouldn’t be here even if she was trying to do the right thing, she’s not Shannon and she never will be.

Christopher walks in. 

-

Eddie is thirty-three years old and well acquainted with what he does and doesn’t deserve. 

He deserves the silence, the disregarding, his mom’s smug face as she talks about how much Chris likes it away from him. He deserves feeling wrong, because he is. He deserves that longing for something that he can’t understand. He deserves the silence of the house once filled with so much joy. He deserves to feel like a failure of a father and a person. 

He doesn’t deserve a full fridge, most of the sweet things he had expired because he won’t eat them and Chris isn’t here. He doesn’t deserve that good Chinese takeout that’s on the way home from work. He doesn’t deserve to feel good. He doesn’t deserve to look at himself. He doesn’t deserve Buck. He doesn’t deserve Chris. 

They’re all neatly sectioned and filed in his brain and after three months have become like second nature. If he feels hungry, he thinks serves you right , and heads to sleep. No rewards for bad deeds. 

He doesn’t go out of his way to hang out with Buck, and he’ll only stop by if Buck asks. Even then, he’s still thinking he should go home and be surrounded by the sharp silence of a childless house. He’ll never tell Buck that, because Buck has enough insecurities about people not wanting him around. It’s not that Eddie doesn’t want Buck, it’s that Buck shouldn’t want Eddie.

But it keeps him going, really. The knowledge that he has to punish himself for his mistakes gets him up in the morning so he can pour himself black coffee and hate it. Then he won’t get gas in the morning so that he has to get it after he’s exhausted from working. Then he’ll walk into work to see—formerly Gerrard, which worked out punishment wise—Buck, and he’ll tell him he’s sorry but he’s busy and can’t hang out. Buck knows it’s a lie, but that’s the whole game. 

Basically, Eddie’s living to make himself feel worse. 

But he deserves it, his son hates him and is living eight-hundred miles away with the parents who finally learned how to be good ones, just not for him. 

He thought his dad had turned around a few years ago. He did, just not for him. 

Was Eddie the roadblock for them all along? Was he really that much of an issue?

-

Eddie is seated next to the father of a cheerleader, a male cheerleader. The father of a son he sees as weak, as a disappointment, unwanted. He can’t help feeling like he’s talking to his own dad in El Paso again. 

You think I want to watch my only son be a cheerleader?

Why didn’t you tell us?

You think being a cheerleader makes your son weak?

You didn’t want to seem weak.

It’s the same conversation to him, and he can sense deep down the ‘I spent my whole life trying not to be like you’ ready to fall from his lips. Eddie thinks, maybe, this could’ve been him if he really had been too much like his father. 

Sometimes he wonders if his dad thought like this man while watching Eddie grow up from the sidelines. He’d see him in small bursts, the here and there weekends that Adriana and Sophia would love and he’d hate. It was just a reminder of how long he’d been gone. 

But when his dad did come back from his trips, did he ever look at how Eddie was changing and think— I don’t want to watch my only son turn out this way .

-

He’s running out of options, of new ways to make himself feel worse. That’s how he ends up in a church. It wasn’t technically a deliberate scheme for him to feel bad about himself, but that is simply how Eddie’s been operating for months. It’s subconscious now.

He sits in a confession booth for the first time since he was ten years old and tells the priest…well, everything and nothing, really. He wants to be told he’s despicable and doesn’t deserve forgiveness as much as he secretly yearns to be excused. Eddie doesn’t believe in God and hasn’t for his entire life, but this man one wall over is real and someone to talk to. Despite that, he runs away just as he used to run before. He feels like a different person, but he hasn’t changed at all.

However, there’s a second instance. The priest comes to him instead and at first Eddie can’t help the way his lungs contract when he thinks the man is coming onto him. He looks over his shoulder like someone’s watching him, but no one is. It doesn’t stop him feeling embarrassed that someone has even thought that about him—not that he’s homophobic, it’s just. Not him.

Oh, uh—listen, um…no offense, I’m—I’m straight.

It trips and stumbles its way out of his mouth until it almost sounds ridiculous. Eddie’s never said that out loud before, never had to. It’s just…what he’s always been assumed to be.

Then comes the second wave of embarrassment when he finds out it’s Father Brian, the priest who knows he traumatized his son by going out with the lookalike of his dead wife. Ex-wife? They never got that far. 

Something must crack, because suddenly Eddie’s spilling his innermost thoughts for the first time in months and he can tell how it sounds. He’s a person undeserving of forgiveness, of joy, he’s wearing a disguise, he knows how it all sounds. Eddie hates himself.

Father Brian takes it in stride, he’d been analyzing him before he’d even sat down. Eddie didn’t feel like the water was a punishment, something in his brain just made him want to put the sugary juice down for something clean, something pure. Like an instinct. He tells Eddie to allow himself to feel good, to do something that gives him joy, something frivolous. 

Stop punishing yourself. 

-

It’s difficult, standing on cool tiles with a razor in his fist. He didn’t think he would keep the mustache forever, but shedding his disguise sooner than he expected makes him hesitant to actually go through with it. 

But once he’s freshly shaven and smooth-faced, he looks in the mirror and for once—doesn’t feel sick. He’s softer than he used to be and his hair curls lightly over his forehead. It’s kind of…pretty.

Eddie sees the smile in the reflection before he realizes it’s on his own face. A real one, gentle and a little awkward, private. Real.

Then comes the frivolous part.

He’s giggling, almost grateful for once that the house is truly empty and no one will be there to see him doing this. It’s for him. Eddie pulls out a baby pink button down and the shortest pair of underwear he has and sets up Old Time Rock & Roll to a speaker—that takes longer than it really should. 

Maybe he’s eleven dancing on the sun-warm tiles or maybe he’s thirty-three dancing on soft wood. It doesn’t really matter. 

Eddie isn’t keeping an eye out for somebody there, no one is watching him. Not God, not his family, not a judgmental passerby, not the invisible shame that’s been weighing him down for months.

For the first time in—who knows how long…Eddie feels good. He feels light, and he runs his hands through his sweat-slicked hair while laying down to catch his breath. The song hasn’t ended, and in the midst of it—

The doorbell.

Eddie startles a little, like his bubble has been burst. It’s only for a moment since he realizes there is only one person who would be showing up on his doorstep in the middle of the night. The only person in the world Eddie wouldn’t mind looming over his shoulder. The person whose full name lives in his will and testament. The only person he’d open the door for. 

Why has he been denying himself of Buck? 

Eddie quickly fixes his hair and adjusts his collar before checking the peephole. He isn’t sure what he expected, but it’s zeroed in on Buck’s face filled with an intense emotion—a little sad, a little of something else. 

He pulls the door open with a grin, not caring about his state of dress or the way Buck’s looking at him. For a moment he lets himself think what if? 

And it’s the most loaded question he’s ever asked in his life. 

What if? 

What if…what? What if Eddie’s not who he thinks? What if the thing he’s been missing all his life is something he could have had for a long, long time? A tangible thing he could reach for instead of a dream he can’t remember in the morning. 

Buck hands him a lukewarm beer and walks in like he’s coming home.

-

“Tommy dumped me,” Buck finally says after twenty-five minutes and two emptied beer bottles. 

Eddie glances over, slightly tipsy and suddenly aware of his bare legs. “Shit, man.”

“Yeah.” He takes a swig of bottle number three. “The worst part is, I’m not even that sad about it.”

“So is all this beer just for fun?”

Buck chuckles quietly. “No. I’m sad, but not because I’m not dating Tommy anymore.” Sadness flickers over his expression. “I just feel like I’m wasting time. Everyone’s…got someone. Maddie and Chim, Hen and Karen, Bobby and Athena. What have I got?”

Eddie’s chest feels heavy. “You’ve got me,” he mutters like a confession. 

“Yeah, but…” Buck furrows his brows, eyeing him. “Not…not like that.”

What if?

What if what if what if?

“…What if?”

“What?”

The room spins and his throat tightens like how he gets pre-panic attack. Too soon, Eddie shouldn’t have opened whatever can of worms or possibly grenades that he just did. 

Supervise your sisters, you don’t join in, Eddie. 

You know you don’t have to stay here, right? You’re not stuck there.

Maybe she felt like she was missing out on the life she could have had.

I don’t want to watch my only son turn out this way .

You look bored, Eddito.

Stop punishing yourself. 

What are you afraid of?

I can’t die, I haven’t figured it out yet.

There’s something aching in him. 

And for the first time he can see that it’s never been one thing causing him this deep anguish, it’s two. One of them is here, beside him on the couch searching his face in quiet disbelief. The other Eddie shoves further down. He can think about it another time. 

“I’ve been wasting time, too,” he whispers, eyes suddenly stinging with tears as he finally meets Buck’s gaze. 

“Eddie…” Buck breathes, moving closer and reaching out to loosen Eddie’s grip on his own hand, leaving crescent shaped indents in its wake. “You know…Tommy said to me. He said. He wasn’t going to be my last.”

Eddie says nothing, throat too knotted up from the emotions running wildly through his head. Buck’s hand is colder than his and keeps him grounded.

“I think I get it.” The corners of Buck’s lips slightly curl up into a sweet smile. His other hand ghosts along Eddie’s smooth shaven face and his thumb rubs at the corner of his wide, wet eyes. His smile fades when Eddie still can’t say anything back. “You can cry,” he murmurs, “it’s okay.”

His face instantly collapses hearing it and he just— sobs . Sobs for all the time he’s lost, for his younger self, for himself now, for how much he’s been hurting himself after what he did to Chris, for whatever he’s still pushing down that feels too big to leave alone forever. But it’s horrifying, he can’t face it yet. 

He’s tucked into the junction of Buck’s neck and shoulder, and a hand cards through his hair while lips press to his forehead. Eddie thinks it’s all he’s ever wanted. 

Once he can’t even try to form more tears to shed, he apologizes profusely for fucking up Buck’s shirt. It’s wet and kind of snotty and he feels disgusting, but Buck’s looking at him like he’s the most beautiful thing in the universe. 

“You’re the one who got broken up with and I’m—I’m the one who’s crying,” Eddie rasps, trying a laugh but it just comes out sad and wet. 

Buck pulls him back gently by the jaw, giving him the sweetest look he’s ever seen. “I can’t even tell you how much I don’t care that I was broken up with tonight,” he assures. “There’s never been anything so far off my mind.”

He frowns a little, grasping the hand on his face to pull it closer and kiss Buck’s palm. He relishes in the texture of Buck’s skin against his lips and the way his lashes flutter. What the hell was he doing before? Why was he denying himself Buck?

“Eds…” Buck purrs, hardly making a sound. “God, you’re beautiful.”

His heart stutters. The words hit him right in his core, no one’s ever called him beautiful before. It’s always handsome, hot, sexy, fine. Never beautiful. Eddie likes being beautiful. Buck must be able to see it plain on his face.

He finally takes in the state of Eddie. Pantsless, mustacheless, and his underwear just slightly covered by a delicate pink shirt. He was copying Tom Cruise, but it holds a different meaning on him.  

“So what happened here?”

A quiet laugh falls from his lips, it is ridiculous when you say it out loud. “I uh…I wanted to be happy,” he admits. Because really, he did. Living to feel worse was going to drag him down eventually. 

Buck’s eyes wander his features curiously. “Yeah? Did it work?”

“Mhm.”

“You look good.”

Eddie flushes. “You like it?”

“Like you.”

And god, he feels like a middle schooler the way he beams so hard his cheeks turn red and go sore. He even has to glance away, it’s embarrassing . Buck brings him right back, thumbing his cheekbone.

“I can’t take this—Eddie,” Buck huffs out, “I really need to kiss you I’m like—I’m getting—you know like, cuteness aggression? Please say I can before I do something drastic.”

He bursts out into laughter, not wasting anymore time before pressing his lips to Buck’s. Or at least he tries, only they’re both smiling too hard and it sounds like click clack for the first four seconds. Then they really get to, and it’s perfect.

Buck’s lips are soft and pillowy, the same shade as his bright pink birthmark and really great for kissing. A hand finds its way to his outer thigh for Buck to ground himself and draw Eddie in closer. He has some stubble and it scratches against his smooth skin, but he’d take beard burn any day if he could feel like this all the time. 

He’s choosing Buck, and he’s choosing joy, but distantly, he knows something else is there. Something missing—and he doesn’t mean Chris. Eddie puts it in the back of his mind so it doesn’t plague him as Buck gets in bed and pulls Eddie into his chest. 

“Eddie?”

He angles his head up to see him a little better. “Yeah?”

Buck searches his eyes in the dark, considering something. His hair is being gently combed through, tiring him out. “I’ll tell you in the morning,” Buck says softly, leaning down and pressing a kiss to his forehead. 

Eddie knows he’ll uphold that promise, so he accepts it and tucks his face back into Buck’s warm embrace, letting sleep get a hold of him, too.

2.

What he ends up saying that next morning is ‘I love you’ , and Eddie gets so giddy about it he practically jumps his bones right in the kitchen. He didn’t know he was in love with Buck just twenty-four hours prior, but he was. He must have been, these kinds of feelings don’t just appear out of nowhere, especially when Buck’s presence fills every corner of his life. 

He still does his facetime calls with Chris, and they’ve made progress, it just doesn’t feel like enough. He hasn’t been able to tell him about Buck since his mom still hovers. At least his dad doesn’t join in the calls at all. Eddie asked him once over the phone and he said he wanted to give them privacy. Thanks, Eddie just would’ve preferred the privacy in his own home in L.A. But whatever.

The only real good thing he has right now is Buck. Knowing they’re going home together gets him shy and giggly, they make dinner together, watch movies, the sex is amazing—Eddie didn’t know that’s how it’s supposed to feel, and he cried about it during their first time, which was embarrassing. Buck’s perfect though, and he didn’t make it awkward or poke fun of him. He bets the thought didn’t even cross his mind.

Eddie and Buck might be mind readers but for exclusively each other, which comes in handy. They’ve always been able to move around each other and coexist without thinking twice about it, but lately it's been amplified. Buck groans awake in the night—Eddie grabs an ice pack for his bad leg. Eddie’s a little too quiet one day—Buck gives him the silent company he didn’t ask for but secretly yearned. Buck’s in his head—Eddie assures him he’s not going anywhere.

Eddie’s attention is briefly stolen by a bracelet in the mall he and Buck are aimlessly exploring. Currently, Buck’s in the bathroom so Eddie went to look around for himself. The bracelet is thin and layered, gold with small white gems on the first layer and a chain on the second. It’s not for him , he knows that. But he can’t help the way it holds its gaze, imagining the way the dainty metal would look around his own wrist.

“Hi, there!” A woman behind the display case greets, “Looking for something for a girlfriend? A wife?”

Eddie’s eyes snap up, reading her name tag as Melissa while his heart catches in his throat.

“Uh—no, no,” he stammers. “Just um…”

“Baby, you went so far from the bathrooms, I was looking—“ Buck practically appears at Eddie’s side and he jumps. “What’s going on?”

Melissa must have realized her mistake by now because she looks very guilty about it. Eddie doesn’t really care, he’s still getting used to being in public like this anyway. 

“Oh, your partner was—“

“Was just leaving,” Eddie finishes with a stiff smile. He takes Buck by the wrist and attempts to pull him away, only his boyfriend is over two-hundred pounds and if he doesn’t want to move he just won’t. 

Buck quickly assesses the situation like the mind reader he is. “What? No, c’mon, these are nice! You were looking at this one, right?” 

He’s pointing at the exact one, and being called out like this makes Eddie flush. Is Melissa judging him? Probably. The only piece of jewelry he wears is his Saint Christopher pendant, never letting himself indulge in even minor luxuries. 

Still, before Eddie can even give a verbal response Buck’s already getting it into a box to purchase. His heart flutters in embarrassment—but also in affection for how Buck knows him without them having to say much at all. 

Eddie puts it on as soon as they get home. It’s very pretty and fits perfectly, he even wiggles his wrist to make the layers lightly cling together.

“It’s really nice,” Buck says, gently taking him by the hand adorning the bracelet to kiss his knuckles. “You have good taste.”

“You think so?” It comes out a little too quiet by accident. Eddie’s a little busy thinking about the heat of Buck’s lips lingering on the hand he still holds. 

Buck hums, giggling as he presses two more quick kisses to the same spot. “Yes, you should wear more jewelry, it suits you. Seriously.”

Eddie watches him for a moment, a sweet smile spreading across his face before he can help it. “I love you,” he swoons, stepping into Buck’s space to peck him on the cheek. “I mean it.”

“I hope so.”

“Shut up.”

Buck beams. “I love you, too.”

-

Sometimes when Eddie’s alone, he’ll go into Chris’s bedroom that’s been practically untouched for the months he’s been gone. But he’ll go in and he’ll just sit at the foot of his bed for hours at a time. As if he’ll appear behind him and say Dad, get up, you’re being silly. He never does, obviously. 

It’s after a particularly poor phone call that Eddie presses his palms to his eyes and breathes heavily. The slight softness of the rug over the hardwood floor is grounding, but he still doesn’t feel right.

His parents weren’t there, but Chris must have had a bad day — Eddie has no idea why, and that fact already killed him. It was like the only reason he was even on the phone was because it was something they scheduled, but he didn’t talk at all, as if it was day one all over again. Eddie felt like a liar for keeping the news of him and Buck from Chris, but he tried normal conversation. He really did try. But he feels like he doesn’t know his own son anymore, that’s like dying to him. 

Buck finds him eventually, he’s never seen Eddie doing this. He isn’t sure how much time passed between when he sat down and when Buck opens the half-ajar door. But he does know there was sunlight in the room before and it isn’t here now.

Wordlessly, Buck sits beside him and overlaps their pinkies on the floor. Eddie blinks him into focus, trying for a smile—mostly failing—then presses his cheek into Buck’s shoulder.

Buck didn’t know why this was happening, but he stepped into Eddie’s mess anyway, as he always does without complaint. He doesn’t deserve Buck at all, but he also knows Buck would hate it if he said that, assuring Eddie he’s not some failure of a person and that he does deserve people who love him. Eddie knows that…he just…forgets.

“I have to see him,” Eddie finally whispers, glancing up at Buck’s profile for a reaction.

“See him?”

He nods slowly, the soft fabric of Buck’s shirt feeling good against his face. “I need to go to El Paso, Buck. I need to see my son. This isn’t the life we were supposed to have. Facetimes and—and being in the dark.” Tears well up in Eddie’s eyes. “It feels like. Like everything I did was a waste, because it was always going to lead us here. I feel like my—“ He chokes out, breathing unsteadily, “My dad.”

Buck turns fully, then, gently holding him by the shoulders with a shattered expression. “Eddie, listen to me.” He does. “Chris felt like he could leave because you are a good parent. He is such a good kid, always has been. That’s because of you, you raised him and—and that doesn’t mean every decision he’s going to make is perfect. I wish he was here, too, okay? But…everything you’ve done is for him. You’ve been through so much together and you’ll get through this, too.”

His hands move from his shoulders to encase around Eddie’s face, just to hit the point home. “If going to Texas to see him is what you need, then you should go. Honestly, I think the distance doesn’t help either.”

Eddie faintly nods, though slightly confused by Buck saying he should go. As if Buck isn’t a part of the equation by default.

“Come with me.”

Buck’s breath hitches in his throat. “Really?”

“Mhm,” Eddie hums. “I’m sure Chris misses you. And even if he’s upset about me showing up…”

“Am I your buffer?” Buck teases. 

“No…no. Well, first of all, I love you and I don’t want to leave you here.” Eddie sees the way Buck preens at that, it makes him smile. “Second of all, things are definitely gonna get awkward, but I’d rather it be awkward under the same roof than eight-hundred miles apart. So—no, not a buffer. Just…someone I have for support.”

Buck smiles softly, pressing a chaste kiss to his lips. “Okay. I like being support.”

“Good, cause god knows I’m not gonna get it from anyone else while I’m there.”

“Baby, c’mon…”

-

It doesn’t take much convincing to get PTO from Bobby who’s always too willing to help Eddie—and consequently Buck—out. They’re tethered in that way, each other’s mirror image. Sometimes Eddie wonders if Bobby looks at him and just sees himself.

Two days later, an Airbnb rented, and suitcases packed, Buck and Eddie sit side by side as Buck drives the full eight-hundred miles from L.A to El Paso. His nerves thrum beneath his skin the whole way there, and he keeps a firm hand around Buck’s for most of the day-long trip. 

Eddie has never really liked Texas, and passing by all those identical houses and churches and American flags just reaffirms that notion.

When they arrive, Eddie spends the first night pacing around the unfamiliar bedroom, the reality of the impulsive decision hitting him in waves. He’s going to be in his childhood home again, and not for a brief gathering, to just be there. He’s going to have to talk to his parents in his childhood home while they think him incapable of being a good parent again. He’s going to see Chris face to face, finally be able to see how much he’s grown without him. He’s here with Buck , and the implications of it might be enough for his parents to simply just know.

He hasn’t really ‘come out’ to anyone in his life. Eddie and Buck have been together for about a month and all Eddie knew when he told Buck he was wasting time was that he loved him. Eddie hates to think about himself further, so that’s all that has come from it. Everyone at the 118 knows, simply because they don’t actively hide anything, Eddie didn’t want to, not around his chosen family. He just never… came out.

So the idea of his parents questioning him when Eddie still doesn’t know who he is is terrifying. 

But somehow he manages to pull it together, and they drive to his parents’ house the next morning. Buck murmurs it’s gonna be okay in his ear maybe fifteen times on the way.

And once the house is in front of him again, Eddie already feels like he doesn’t belong. Chris is in his old bedroom, and they don’t have a guest room, so no matter what, Eddie doesn’t have a place here anymore. But he walks up the front porch and knocks on the door anyway, though hesitating before doing so.

Buck squeezes his hand one more time before taking a step back—a reasonable distance, like the kind two people who are just friends would have. Eddie hates it. He almost reaches back when—

“Eddie?”

His mom.

She’s looking at him in disbelief, like he’s an apparition she’ll be able to blink away. Eddie tries a smile. “Hi mom,” he says.

“What…what are you doing here?” She chuckles stiffly. 

The door is only open by a crack, her hand stuck on the doorknob. Her son is half a stranger to her. Eddie tightens his jaw at the quiet realization. Helena’s eyes flicker to Buck, then back to Eddie with confusion painting her expression.

“What, am I not allowed inside?”

Helena bristles, quickly opening the door further to allow Eddie in. He can practically feel the way her eyes sweep over Buck again. Of course she recognizes him, he was there when Chris left, too.

Eddie feels the outdated tile beneath his shoes, sees the cross over the fireplace, smells the lemon spray cleaner his mom has bought for the past fifteen years. It’s like it’s been frozen in time, Eddie and Buck sticking out like a sore thumb. He wants to hold his hand again, but plays with the gold bracelet around his wrist instead.

Helena sighs, turning back to them with crossed arms. “Chris and your dad are in his room practicing chess, he’s got a tournament soon,” she says like she’s bragging, like look what I have and you don’t. “You know he’s in chess club, right?”

“Yes, I know he’s in chess club,” Eddie exhales. He knew about the tournament, too. “Mom, I’m…I’m just here to see him.” Stop acting like I’m a threat.

Some of the tension seems to release from her shoulders, gaze once again flickering back to Buck. “That’s fine, Eddie.” Though it doesn’t seem very fine with her. “I just wish you gave us a heads up, maybe we would’ve…prepared or something.”

Eddie shrugs, biting back a comment of how they showed up unannounced in the middle of two separate crises and gladly let Chris walk out the door with them. 

“What’s there to prepare for? I’m not exactly a guest.”

“Well…” Helena starts, “We don’t have anywhere for you to sleep, you or…Buck. So I’m not sure what you—“

“We have it covered, don’t worry,” Buck finally speaks up, and Eddie’s so thankful for him simply existing. “We won’t be staying here.”

“So where are you staying? A hotel?” She laughs. 

Buck frowns. “Uh, no. We rented out a house for a few weeks—“

“Weeks?”

Eddie holds a hand out to not send her into some frenzy. “Mom, relax, I won’t be here every second of the day.” Just because he’s a little shit, he adds, “I know how exhausting it must be for you to have your son around.”

He isn’t doing a very good job at keeping Helena from a frenzy.

“Oh come on, that’s a ridiculous thing to say!” She exclaims. “I am not exhausted, I am just unprepared, okay? Does Christopher know?”

“Not yet—“

“Who’s over there?” His dad calls from across the house, quickly crossing the threshold and meeting Eddie’s gaze. He doesn’t look so annoyed to see him, which is actually quite the relief. At least he wasn’t really lying about not wanting to miss any more of his son’s life. “Eddie!” He grins, walking over and patting him on the shoulder. 

He isn’t sure which of them is worse; the one upsetting him on purpose, or the one upsetting him without even realizing it. Does Ramon know how this arrangement has made him feel? Probably not, since he’s shaking Buck’s hand with a polite smile.

“Are you here to see Christopher?” Eddie nods quietly. He wonders if Chris has heard them by now and is choosing to ignore it all. “Ah,” his dad continues, “How long are you staying?”

“They’re renting a house,” Helena says, hypercritical. “For a few weeks.”

“Huh.”

Somehow Eddie can sense Chris listening in now, right beyond the living room hiding behind the kitchen wall. There’s no physical sign, but Eddie just… knows.

“Yeah, it’s nothing crazy,” Eddie assures, hoping Chris understands it’s for him. “I won’t be here every day—unless you want me to be. No pressure at all. I just want to see my kid.”

Ramon shrugs, looking to a disgruntled Helena. “I don’t see a problem, then.” 

“Dad?”

Eddie’s gaze pulls over to the kitchen like gravity is tugging it—and Chris is coming out behind the wall, just where he thought he’d be. 

Eddie’s first thought is oh, god, he’s so grown up. 

It’s been four months, but teenage boys grow like beanstalks and he’s… taller. His hair is curlier, voice deeper than it sounded on facetime. Eddie bites his tongue thinking don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry don’t cry.

“Hey, Chris,” he says quietly.

Chris looks to Buck, eyes lighting up a fraction. “Buck!”

“Hi, kiddo.” Buck waves, cheeks pink. He looks pretty, but Eddie’s just watching his son process the scene before him. Giving him time.

Chris walks further in the room, taking in the sight of his dad standing some fifteen feet away from him. Eddie loves Buck here, but he kind of hates an audience right now. He wishes the world could be put on pause for a minute so the eyes on them wouldn’t feel so piercing.

Chris glances down, scuffing his sock on the floor. “I didn’t know you were coming,” he mutters.

“Yeah, I didn’t…announce it or anything.” Eddie sounds ridiculous, but he’s missed his heart and soul standing there with a conflicted face. “Is that…okay?”

Something like inner turmoil washes over his son’s face for thirty whole seconds. Eddie both does and doesn't want to know his thought process.

Eventually, he looks back up and nods once. “That’s okay.”

-

That night, Eddie curls his body around Buck’s wide frame, pressing small kisses to the back of his neck. He wants the comfort of having someone to hold onto right now, usually Buck’s the hugger. 

Chris seems accepting of his presence, which Eddie knows is better than nothing. He just longs for where they used to be, where Eddie could climb into his bed after a long day of working and embarrass him by telling him how much he loves him. Press their foreheads together and kiss the tip of his nose while Chris pretended to hate it. 

Buck’s not sleeping yet, and although he hates to keep him up, Eddie misses him.

“Buck,” he whispers, thumbing at the soft skin on his waist. 

He looks over his shoulder, eyes lidded and sleepy in this adorable way. It almost makes him forget about the pit in his gut. 

“Hm?”

Eddie actually doesn’t know what to say. He’s just missing so much it’s eating at him.

“I’m…” he breathes, “I’m really sad.”

It comes out childish, but the admission carries weight in its own way. He’s never really said it so plain and simple before, always coming up with ways to skirt around what he really means. But sad. Eddie’s just so sad.

Buck turns some more, frown apparent even in the dark. “C’mere,” he slurs, wrapping his arms around Eddie’s torso because he just can’t help himself. They’re fully wrapped up in each other like a zipper or a weaved basket the way their limbs alternate and intertwine. Holding and held all at once.

Eddie falls asleep to the beat of Buck’s heart against his.

-

Little remnants of the past start to pop up. On the second day, Ramon goes through the attic to clean up—or maybe just keep himself busy—and he comes to Eddie with a medium sized box of very old school supplies.

“I was gonna throw it out, but I didn’t know if you wanted to keep any of it,” his dad says, “So if you don’t want it, just leave it in the bags outside, someone’ll pick it up. But flatten the box first, so it doesn’t take up too much—“

“Dad, I know,” Eddie smiles stiffly. As if he hasn’t lived without the man for most of his life anyway. 

Ramon nods, promptly leaving Eddie and Buck at the kitchen table with this box to go back upstairs.

Buck’s chopping up some vegetables for breakfast, given permission by his parents to use the kitchen if he wants since Chris had given his cooking skills a very high approval rating. 

“What’s in the box?” Buck asks, trying to peer over his shoulder to the table, but it’s not very successful. 

“Just some high school stuff. I didn’t even know these were here,” he replies. Eddie picks up a couple books and sets them aside to start emptying the box out. “I probably stuffed it all in here after—“ He frowns, knowing his memory of the time is a bit hazy. “After I enlisted. Maybe before the wedding.”

Buck hums thoughtfully. “Anything fun in there?”

“Uhh…probably not.” Eddie quickly flips through some old notebooks, finding nothing but stuff he hardly remembers anymore. “I wasn’t doing anything exciting, really. Unlike you, football star.”

He chuckles, dipping his head between his shoulders—Eddie thinks he sees his ears go pink. “It was high school football, c’mon. I really only joined for the attention anyway.”

Eddie’s practically itching to walk up and hold him from behind, saying he’s got attention now. But his dad could come back with more junk, or Chris will smell the food and walk in, or his mom will just sense he’s doing something he’s not meant to. He’s not ashamed of himself for loving Buck, he’s just not ready for his parents to know. Chris can know, but he wants them to be in a better place first.

“I’m sure you were great,” Eddie says instead, busying himself with taking out his one baseball trophy and printed photos of him and Shannon. The box is nearly empty now, the last of it being a red notebook labeled ‘PRE-ALGEBRA’ and some loose paper underneath it. “Oh, shit,” he mumbles, the corners of his lips curling up as he pulls it out. It’s not from highschool, but a year prior, and he kept it around for one sole purpose.

“Hm? Something cool?”

Eddie hums, flipping through it until he reaches the first of his doodles from when he was thirteen. It’s not very good, just some stars and other squiggly shapes, but it makes him smile anyway. He glances at the archway entrance of the kitchen before siding up next to Buck. 

“Wouldn’t say cool, but I think I just found an old hobby of mine,” he says, unashamed to tell Buck. Because he’s Buck and Buck isn’t going to make him feel weird for once being a kid who liked to draw. 

Buck places the knife down and looks over, eyes lighting up immediately. 

“That’s cute!”

Eddie laughs. “Get serious, Buck, this one is shit. I’ve got more th—“

“Oh, breakfast can be put on hold, Chris probably won’t be up for another hour,” Buck exclaims, grabbing Eddie by the shoulders and shuffling them over to the kitchen table. “You never told me you used to draw.”

His face is heating up from both the manhandling and the praise on something he used to be ashamed of. Eddie shrugs shyly. “Yeah, I mean it’s—it was only for a few years just to keep me calm. You can look through it if you want.”

Buck picks up the loose paper and nearly gasps—Eddie loves him. “Woah, are you kidding? When did you make this?”

He turns the paper towards Eddie, and his eyes soften. One time when he was drawing the Romero’s flowers, a stray orange cat had come by and sat around like his very own muse. He misses those flowers, that garden. The couple passed away about nine years ago while Eddie was in the military.

“I think I made that when I was seventeen…ish?”

Buck turns it back around to look at it in awe. “It’s got like shading and everything, baby, this is awesome!” Eddie glances at the kitchen entrance again, just in case. “How come you don’t do this anymore?”

He flushes, skin suddenly a bit too tight. “Uh, it was just…I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it back then. And one day Shannon accidentally found one of them. She really liked it, but I don’t know. I just couldn’t do it after that.”

Buck’s eyes go sad, he kind of wants to say sorry for killing the mood. 

“Well, I love it,” he says honestly. “If you ever wanna do this again, I will be your number one supporter.”

Eddie laughs breathily, reaching out to briefly grab Buck’s hand. “I know you will.”

-

On the third day, Sophia stops by the house for a visit, aware that Eddie was going to be there—just not Buck. When Eddie pulls open the door she breaks out into a smile, pulling him into a hug. She’s thirty-one now, completely an adult, but that doesn’t surprise him. Seeing Adriana being an adult always takes him off guard.

She points to Buck and squints. “You…have gotta be Buck,” she says like it’s just a fact. They’ve never even met.

Buck chuckles and gestures outwards, like yes, I am. “What gave it away?”

“You look like a Buck. Also I think Eddie sent me a picture of you two and Chris like…a few years ago.” Sophia does a quick scan of him. “You look different, though.”

“Yeah, kinda just what happens when you’re a firefighter,” Buck remarks, referring to his…size. “Little bit of a unit now.”

“Oh!” 

Eddie cannot stop the heat that swells in his face. “Uh—hey, Buck, maybe you could… real quick make something for Chris for when he gets back from school soon?”

Sophia snorts. “Very subtle.”

“I’m not like—I just…” He sighs, looking back to Buck with big eyes. “Please?”

“…Okay,” Buck mumbles, playing up his dejection. If he actually felt bad, Eddie would know. He walks out of the living room with his head down, and Eddie watches him go with an amused eye roll.

He finally turns back to Sophia, and she’s eyeing him curiously. 

“What?”

“What,” she mocks, laughing. “What’s going on there?”

Eddie blinks hard, heart picking up its pace. “What are you talking about?”

“Eddie…”

“What!”

She rolls her eyes at him now, like she got it from him, which…maybe. Sophia and Adriana got a lot from him, mostly because he spent more time raising them than their dad and probably their mom, too. 

Sophia taps him on the elbow, saying, “I actually had something I wanted to show you, I was gonna text it to you before I knew you were here. So it’s good you are, even if you haven’t sent me anything in like four months.”

Eddie winces. “Yeah…sorry. I was…busy.”

“What had you busy for four months?”

“Oh, I don’t know. My son living with our parents.”

Sophia winces now, his mirror image. He forgot how much they have in common. “Right…yeah,” she mumbles. “How did this happen? No one wants to tell me.”

“Long story short, but…”

-

After he quickly explains the doppleganger situation, Sophia ends up bringing him outside to her car where she pulls out a large binder and drops it into Eddie’s waiting arms. It’s heavy, and over the cover it reads Mis Muñequitas. 

“Thought you’d wanna look at it,” she says, but there’s a slight hesitance in her voice. “Tía Pepa and Abuela made it and um…well, Pepa came to me to let me have it. I didn’t even know it existed.”

Eddie opens the binder as she rambles a little, the first page is full of baby pictures of himself. “They made this for us?” He asks quietly, rather stunned. Their parents have photos of them, too, but nothing like this. This binder is nearing sixty pages. “Have…have you looked through all of this?”

“Uh…I might have skipped to when I was born,” she admits. “But there was just so much of you for those first two years. They really love you, y’know.”

He flips to the second page, seeing a picture of him swaddled up in a blue blanket. Eddie smiles at it. “Yeah. I know.”

“So…I’d definitely look through it,” Sophia smiles. “I want to scan the photos just so we can share them, though, so I’ll make sure to stop by again in the next couple weeks.”

Eddie shuts the binder and tucks it under his arm, exchanging goodbyes and getting a recommendation to call Adriana for once. He hugs her firmly and watches her go off on her own again. He briefly wonders why she didn’t say anything about showing this to anyone else like their parents or Chris, but he knows the former’s guilt of not being present enough would ruin the experience, and the latter still isn’t ready for full conversations with him yet. 

Buck’s an option, though.

-

After an awkward dinner and a brief goodnight with Chris—he’s trying not to overload him with affection so soon—Eddie’s sitting on the bed with the photo book in his lap. He’s a very small toddler where he’s gotten to.

Buck exits the bathroom, hair curly and wet, smelling like his shampoo. Eddie’s just drawn to him entirely, he looks pretty with his face flushed from steam. 

“Saw you put that in the car earlier,” Buck comments, pulling on a t-shirt and sweats to cuddle up next to him. “Oh, a photobook?”

Eddie smiles sheepishly, showing the cover. “Yeah, Sophia said Pepa and Abuela made it for us. Never knew about it until now.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Hm?”

Buck points at the label stuck to the front. “The title, it’s—y’know. Spanish.”

Eddie reads it again and flushes a little. “Uh it’s…my little dolls,” he mumbles, face suddenly burning up a storm. The fact that muñequitas is feminine tries to cross his mind, but he ignores it. It was probably done that way because it looked nicer than to tack on the masculine version at the end.

Buck doesn’t catch it, though, thankfully. “Aw, that’s sweet! Wait, let me see!”

“I was gonna, baby, hold on.”

Eddie decides to go through it from the beginning again just so Buck can gush about what a cute baby he was. Then about how cute of a toddler he was. And then Sophia’s born, and now every picture is of them together. Sophia was always swaddled in pink with Eddie dressed in blue with a car or a spaceship or a dinosaur on the front. 

A few pages over and Sophia might be five, Eddie about seven. He recognizes the background, it’s Abuela’s house. Sophia has her hands covered in bright yellow paint and Eddie’s got yellow all over his nose and cheeks. The same scene is captured for the next few pictures, ending at a point where Sophia looks to be chasing him with her paint-stained hands and Abuela must have had to stop and step in. 

“I don’t know how many times I can say you’re adorable,” Buck mumbles, pressing a kiss to his cheek. Eddie’s heart swells.

It must have been a weekend in L.A with Abuela and Pepa, because the next page is in Pepa’s home. This time, Eddie and Sophia are laying on their stomachs on the carpeted floor, but the most obvious thing about the picture makes Eddie’s brain come to a halt. 

He’s wearing a dress.

It’s Sophia’s, he can tell since it looks a bit snug and it might have been featured in one of the many photos from earlier. It’s not his. It’s not.

“That—“ Eddie chuckles without a drop of humor in it. “That’s not mine. It’s Sophia’s. I remember this, she was dressing me up.”

“Mmm,” Buck simply hums. “Maddie used to doll me up sometimes, too. It’s a cute picture.”

He looks back at it. Buck’s not wrong. 

Sophia’s spreading glitter on Eddie’s scrunched up face while his legs are kicked up behind him. The sunlight filters through the windows and makes the pink and yellow fabric bunching around the back of his knees look like it’s glowing. 

But he really does remember this—more so what happened afterwards. Supervise your sister, you don’t join in, Eddie. And get that garbage off your face. 

Beyond that, he manages to recall hiding behind a corner of the house to hear his dad talking to Pepa sternly. It had been in Spanish, but he still remembers it clearly.

You can’t be confusing my son like this, Pepa. He’s going to get some crazy ideas in his head, it’s not good for a boy and you know it. I will not let him spend the day here again if you don’t stop, I don’t care that you’re my sister. I want my son to grow up normally. Got it?

“—Eddie?” Buck repeats, pulling him from his head. He looks at Buck, who just seems concerned for him. “You okay?”

“Uh…yeah,” he mumbles, turning the page twice to be able to move on and away from it. Buck wraps his arm around his shoulders and rubs his thumb there. He doesn’t think Buck believes him at all, but he isn’t pushing for an answer yet. Eddie doesn’t think he has one.

The pictures start becoming a little more sparse with larger time jumps, and in just a few pages, Adriana is born. Ramon isn’t in the picture. Sophia’s there with a big bright smile next to her mom and baby sister—and Eddie, of course, just fucked up the car a few hours prior. 

Eddie’s told the story to Buck, so he seems to get that one pretty quickly. 

He sighs as Adriana’s baby photos end after two pages. “I feel bad,” Eddie says truthfully. “They couldn’t visit as much at this point. So, less pictures. Maybe we just don’t tell Adri she’s got a fourth of what I have, it’s not her fault and she’d just get upset.”

Buck squeezes his shoulder. “You’re a good brother.”

“You think?”

“Yeah,” he quickly assures. “And I know that because Maddie did the same thing for me, and she’s a very good sister.”

Eddie’s heart just about breaks.

“Oh, god, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

He gestures to the book, guilt weighing down his movements. “I’ve been showing you all these pictures of me growing up, but you...I wish I could see yours, too.”

Buck just smiles and kisses the top of his head. “Stop feeling guilty for something that’s not your fault, Eds, c’mon. I love looking at this.”

“I know, I know,” Eddie quickly replies. “But don’t you wish you—“

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Of course I do. But it’s in the past, and sometimes…you just have to…move on.”

Eddie isn’t so sure what to say to that, so he curls up further into Buck’s space, practically just laying against his chest by now. Maddie did a great job despite the circumstances. Buck’s perfect.

“Can we look at more now, please?” Buck quietly pleads, and Eddie chuckles, continuing to flip through. 

They comment on anything silly, like Adriana making a big mess with her food, even though Eddie had to clean it up at the time, it’s amusing to look back at. Eventually Adriana turns three, Sophia ten, and Eddie twelve. 

They’re in Pepa’s house again, and immediately he knows what happened that day. The only photos starting out are of Sophia and Adriana in respectively blue and yellow princess dresses, meaning the rest of the day must be on the next page.

Eddie’s hand tightens over the right side of the binder, something swirling in his gut. He feels paralyzed suddenly, and Buck must feel the tension that’s possessed his entire being in seconds.

“Is something wrong?”

His thumb rubs back and forth on the page to calm himself, because—it’s ridiculous to freak out, right? Is he overreacting? There’s something aching in him again, and he can’t—move.

“Eddie, hey,” Buck rushes out, reaching out for Eddie’s jaw and angling him to face him. “What’s going on? You’re panicking.”

“I—I’m not.”

He is, and he doesn’t know why he’s lying about it. His breathing is shallow and eyes can’t focus on one thing, he knows how this goes. The first time it had landed him in the hospital with a cardiologist. 

“Okay, just—“ Buck gently pries the binder from his  tight grasp and sets it down on the bed, then gets them facing one another to put his hand on Eddie’s heart, telling him to breathe.

He does, and this feels stupid. He’s been over his panic attacks, and he knows it doesn’t make him weak, but this feels… ridiculous. Who has a panic attack over possibly having to see themself wearing a princess dress?

Why is he aching to look at the same time?

“There you go, that’s good,” Buck murmurs, rubbing his thumb over Eddie’s slowing heart. “Feel any better?”

Eddie eyes the binder and shrugs, chewing on his lip. “It…it wouldn’t be weird if I just look at the next page first, right? You can stay there, I just—“

“Why would that be weird?”

“I don’t know.”

Buck offers a small smile. “So, there’s your answer. It’s not weird. Go ahead.”

Eddie reaches out for the photo album again, the thing somehow feeling twenty pounds heavier now. He moves to sit at the end of the bed, facing Buck so he can’t see the pictures, not until he’s ready for him to.

He can do it, it’s just a stupid dress, right? He didn’t freak out about Sophia’s dress he had on a while back, though he was only seven there. There’s a difference between being coerced into doing something at seven and deliberately at twelve. 

Eddie flips the page, and the first picture is already of him. Pepa must have been snooping from somewhere. His arms are crossed and back slouched, pink fabric bunching up as he enters the living room. 

The next two he’s sitting in a circle with his sisters, still holding himself and visibly…not uncomfortable. Maybe self-conscious. 

The next three Eddie thinks are the prettiest photos in the world. 

Eddie’s sitting on his knees as Adriana places a tiny tiara in his curling dark locks. He’s beaming brighter than in nearly every other picture in the book, and realizing that makes him nauseous. The second one shows the beginning of their tea party, Adriana settled in Eddie’s lap as they play.

The third picture is of Eddie alone. Sophia and Adriana must have gone off to the bathroom and left him with all the plastic tea cups and the long pink dress. He’s sitting with his knees pulled in slightly, arms laying overtop as he slouches, but not in an insecure way like earlier. It’s different. Comfortable. The light of the window behind him illuminates his hair like a halo and leaves a shadow reaching towards the camera. And the angle of the picture obscures most of his face, his hair that had been grown out at the time curls over his ears and nape.

If Eddie didn’t know this was him, he would have said this was a picture of a twelve year old girl.

She looks pretty.

He blinks and suddenly his vision blurs and a knot forms in his throat that he can’t get rid of. Eddie wipes his eyes, but they just come right back up, and he knows Buck is watching him, but he can’t stop it. He feels like he’s mourning someone.

Before he knows it, Eddie’s sobbing—somehow he always ends up here. Buck’s holding him again, carding a hand through his hair with the other on his back. Eddie isn’t sure why he’s crying, but it doesn’t seem to want to stop, not for minutes, or even an hour. The photo album isn’t on the bed anymore and Buck’s still holding him and he feels undeserving and selfish.

Here Buck is, in another state for him, dealing with awkward dinners and his terrible situation for him, holding him over and over because Eddie is inexplicably sad down to his core, and Eddie has done nothing for him lately but drag him down. 

“I’m sorry…” He chokes out, it might be two hours later. “I—I feel like I’m wasting your time.”

“You aren’t, Eds,” Buck murmurs against the back of his neck. “I promise.”

Somehow he manages to squeeze out more tears, his eyes are sore, and his throat is beyond dry. “After…after I realized I was in love with you, I thought it would go away…”

“What would?”

“The… aching ,” Eddie gasps, screwing his eyes shut against the pillow. “I thought it was over.”

He can practically hear the way Buck’s heart picks up. “Aching…?” He repeats quietly, brokenly.

Eddie nods. “Always aching. Used to be because I love you and I didn’t know. But there’s more, and I can’t…Buck, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He takes a minute to answer, trying to pull the ribbons of his shredded thoughts together into one coherent image. He manages, eventually, the clock is ticking.

“Because then I’ve been wasting my life away.”

Buck’s silent, then. 

“I just want to feel okay.”

The arms around his waist tighten, and he can feel Buck pressing his forehead onto his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I want to help you.”

“I know you do.”

Eddie isn’t sure he can be helped.

3.

Five days in, Chris decides he wants to have dinner out with Eddie and Buck. They still haven’t spoken about it, but it’s a step on the way. Eventually, Eddie wants to be alone with Chris without Buck having to act as mediator and lovely support. 

They land on Italian, not too expensive, easy and no pressure to dress or act a certain way. Well—other than the BuckandEddie elephant in the room that they aren’t sure what to do with yet. 

They’re sitting side by side in chairs while Chris is in the booth, and Eddie isn’t sure how he never caught onto how they looked before. The three of them used to go places together all the time, and while they’ve been mistaken as a family before, he’s never thought of it like this. Like Buck being his and Chris being theirs. But he thinks of it now. He has a hard time not letting his gaze linger on his boyfriend and his pasta sauce stained lips. 

“So, your friends cool over here?” Buck tries for conversation. It’s sweet.

Chris nods, but he’s in the middle of chewing his own food so it takes a few extra seconds of silence. “Yeah, my friends at my pool club are cooler than my chess friends, but they’re all nice to me.”

“Well, that’s great,” Eddie replies sincerely. If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that Chris is one of the most deserving people of love out there. Even if he’s away from his friends back in L.A, he’s still able to keep people around him wherever he goes. 

Chris shrugs, hesitant like there’s something he wants to say, but he doesn’t say anything in the end.

Buck, their ever present support, then blurts out, “Any new girlfriends?”

And Chris goes red, rolling his eyes. “No, and don’t say girl-friends, I’m not doing that anymore. Because now I know how it feels.” He shoots Eddie a brief look after the snarky yet deserved comment. 

He winces. It’s the first time the topic has been brought up since Eddie arrived, and Chris is clearly still bitter about it. Rightfully so.

At least he taught his kid a couple things in the end. Don’t two-time. Your dad is a disaster. 

Buck nudges his ankle with his own and lets it rest there for a while.

-

“I just don’t know what to say, it’s killing me,” Eddie groans, scrubbing at his hair a little too aggressively. It’s making his scalp sting, but maybe he deserves it.

Buck purses his lips, stilling Eddie’s hands and replacing them with his own, washing his hair slowly and carefully. “I have an idea, but I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

He sighs, shoulders untensing under Buck’s gentle touch. “Just hit me.”

“…I think we should tell him,” Buck suggests quietly.

Eddie’s eyes fall shut and he tries not to frown, because it isn’t Buck, it’s him. Chris being the first person he really tells is exactly what he wants, he just doesn’t want Chris to hate him even more.

“Because really, what started all of this was…y’know. The lack of honesty,” he continues, guiding Eddie back to let the water spray rinse his hair. “Obviously, do it whenever you’re ready. But still. Sharing something like that should loosen the uncertainty.”

Eddie feels a little doted on right now, so he opens his eyes to condition his hair himself. “I mean, I’m sure. I just don’t want him to hate me.”

“What? Why would this make him hate you? Chris isn’t homophobic by a long shot! ”

“Yeah, for other people,” he mutters. “But I’m his dad, I was married to his mom, I’ve told him I loved her, I’ve dated other women since then, I just—Buck, I just cheated on my girlfriend with another woman! And she looked like his mom!” Eddie huffs a breath, shaking his head. “He’s gonna think I lied to him even more, I—I can’t. I don’t even know how to tell him about me since I…I don’t even know.”

Buck furrows his brows. “You don’t?”

“No, because I just…I don’t know. I don’t care. I love you, and I’m gonna love you for…forever. So…” 

He can see the way Buck suppresses a smile, because this is meant to be a serious conversation. Maybe Eddie wanted him to move past this, but he was still telling the truth. 

Buck gets shampoo in his own hair and sighs loudly. “Well, just so you know, finding what works is pretty life changing,” he says. “And I would know.”

“So, I’m not saying you have to have it all figured it out this second, but I am saying that actually thinking about yourself helps. Trusting and knowing yourself is what’s gonna get Chris to trust and know you, too.” 

Eddie is silent, already vulnerable enough from being bare, but it’s like Buck can see even beyond that. Buck’s more than a mind reader, he’s a soul reader.

-

He decides to think about it. About himself. About Shannon. About Buck. 

Chris has school and hasn’t said anything about wanting to see them today, so Eddie spends most of the day just…thinking. 

He remembers that first time he and Shannon spoke, he was jealous of her and her freedom. Her carefree spirit and brightly colored floral blouses. Every time he saw her, he’d get a pang in his chest, and he assumed it was affection, then love. 

Eventually, she was trapped with him. Eddie managed to break her spirit and drag her down until she died beside him.

The mother of his child. The first person to try and understand him. But what he felt for her had been nothing compared to the way he feels about Buck. He’s magnetizing, always pulling Eddie in his orbit. They can have a conversation with a single touch, a single glance. Eddie doesn’t feel trapped, he wants Buck for the rest of his life. Eddie, Buck, and Chris—as a real family.

Because he has a blood family in his relatives, a chosen family at the 118, but this is his life . A word that doesn’t exist in any language is what he would use to describe what the three of them mean to him. 

He ran from a life with Shannon.

Eddie runs from what he’s afraid of. Always has. 

-

He never did feel right about the idea of dating girls in school. It was strange, like an afterthought. But he did it anyway all because of those mistaken pangs in his chest. He just wishes he knew the root of them. Why seeing Shannon in the halls with all her girl friends made him want to lie down, hidden away. 

It’s the same way he always went cold when his mom and sisters would go out without him. Or the pit in his gut when he saw girls at recess playing tag or making friendship bracelets. 

Eddie’s always felt lonely, but this is different.

-

“Buck,” Eddie says two nights after their conversation in the shower. 

Buck’s reading a wiki page about a fish called a chubsucker, which is very cute, but he can’t focus on anything with the nerves setting his skin alight. 

“Hm?” He hums, briefly looking up at Eddie and seeing the look on his face—then doing a double take. He sets his phone down. “Everything okay?”

He’s holding himself, Eddie realizes, so he drops his arms and quickly shuffles to sit beside Buck on the couch. There’s about four inches of space between them, and he lets it stay that way.

For about. Fifteen seconds.

He pushes himself closer and practically silently begs Buck to wrap his arms around his waist. Buck does, of course. They settle in that way, quiet and comfortable.

“Not that I don’t love this,” Buck murmurs in his ear, pressing his cheek to Eddie’s shoulder. “But what’s going on?”

Eddie is silent for a minute. Though he had already been preparing what he wanted to say for three hours.

“I wasn’t in love with Shannon,” he starts with. It’s not a bad jumping point, he thinks. “I loved her, but…not in love.”

“…Okay,” Buck says quietly, prompting him to continue.

“There was…something else, too, but I don’t know what it is yet. I just know. When I looked at her sometimes, I was…jealous.”

“Of?”

Eddie exhales, melting in the soothing back and forth of Buck’s hands on his waist. “Her life. She had all these friends, popular, y’know. Her parents were gonna let her go to an art school. They were Catholic, but not that Catholic.” He breathes in again, practically holding his breath. “I always liked the way she dressed, no one else really looked like her at the time. Y’know, it was the two-thousands, no one was wearing blouses with flowers on them.”

She died in one, too.

“So, I mean, I loved her, I loved having someone to be married to. She gave me Chris and she was my closest friend once. But it wasn’t like that. I think I wanted to— be her—“

Eddie shuts his mouth. That wasn’t planned.

Buck let’s him sit with that for a moment before asking, “Because of what you said? Or something else?”

He should say yes, he should just go along with what Buck’s trying to insinuate. It’s an easy out, it would be so easy—

“I—I don’t know,” Eddie breathes, air stuttering in his chest. “I didn’t…that’s…I had a thing planned, that wasn’t it.”

“You don’t have to do this, Eddie,” Buck assures him, reaching up to move him by the jaw to meet his eyes. “I don’t want you to force yourself to do anything, or—or shove yourself in a box. It took me months after kissing a guy to know I was bi.”

Eddie blinks rapidly, disappointment flooding him. He couldn’t even do this right without freaking out.

“And you should know, however you define yourself, however you feel in here,” Buck taps his heart, “I’ll love you no matter what. Okay?”

He nods, feeling like somehow Buck knows more than he does. But he just…he wants to know, too. “I want to be honest with Chris. And you. But I can’t even…can’t even be honest with myself.”

“It takes time, baby.”

“I don’t have time!”

Buck frowns, eyes glossing. “You do,” he whispers, caressing Eddie by the cheek. “There is still time. I promise.”

-

Eddie realizes he’ll never be in love with a woman three days later at dinner in his parents house. Chris is at a friend’s house. His mom cooked, and it’s fine. Buck’s here, and that’s good. But he doesn’t seem to know if Eddie needs him to intervene or not tonight.

He realizes this dinner is an ambush as soon as she begins to grill him with questions. 

What have you been doing while Chris has been here?

So you just mope around the house all day?

Have you started seeing anyone new? If so, Chris won’t be happy about that. 

No? But you’ve gotta settle down one day, right?

Well, no one wants to date a single father in his forties or fifties, that’s a huge load to take on! 

I know Chris would be old enough to live on his own by then. But really, that could be worse, no? Single middle-aged father with a son who lives eight hundred miles away from him. Not a great look. I’d get back out there.

Don’t look at me like that. If you’re still not over Shannon, that is just not my fault.

“I am over Shannon, trust me,” Eddie smiles bitterly. He’s not hungry anymore. 

“Trust you?” His dad finally butts in. “After you just slept with some woman who looked like her twin?”

“I didn’t sleep with her.” He brings his fork down on the porcelain plate. Buck taps his ankle. It helps. “I didn’t even kiss her. I just saw her a few times, and I wasn’t in a good state of mind.”

“Are you now?” Helena interrogates.

Eddie bristles. “Well, no, but—“

“Then how are we supposed to trust you moving forward? To not fall back on Shannon again or hurt Chris?”

“Because I just said I’m over her,” he exasperates. Heat starts to boil in his guts. 

Ramon shakes his head, like he’s being ridiculous. “You’ve said that in the past, Edmundo, you have to see this from our perspective, too.”

“Okay, but I mean it this time, I really do!” 

Helena tsks, eyeing Buck. She sits up straighter. “Listen…Buck. You have been very helpful around the house, and Chris seems to like you very much, but I invited Eddie here. I wanted to talk about family matters.”

“Buck is family,” tumbles from Eddie’s mouth before he can stop it. He can feel Buck’s nervous side glance without even looking at him. His parents are silent. “I just mean—he’s been helping me with Chris for so long, and we’ve…been through a lot together at the station, so—“

“That’s not what family is, Eddie. We’re your family.” Helena sighs, quietly shaking her head in disbelief. “I’m not kicking you out of the house, I just want us to be able to talk to our son. Alone.”

Eddie taps Buck’s ankle. He hopes it helps.

He thinks it does, since Buck taps him back again, pushing to stand with a fake, but sweet smile. “Okay, that’s perfectly fine, Mrs. Diaz,” he says politely. “Have a good night. Sorry for intruding.”

Eddie nearly jumps to his feet at that. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

The moment they’re out of sight, he grabs Buck’s hand with both of his. “You’re not intruding,” he whispers desperately. “I promise.”

Buck smiles thinly, placing his other hand over both of Eddie’s. “I am a little, it’s okay.”

“No, no, you are my family. I meant that. I didn’t put you in my will for no reason. I love you and I trust you with everything I love.”

“Baby, it’s okay,” he breathes, cheeks pink. “I know. I’ll just wait in the car, put on some music, keep myself comfortable…and hope that you’re okay in here.”

“Prolly won’t be,” he blurts. “It—it’s okay, though. I dealt with them for the first twenty-six years of my life. I can do a dinner. I’ll see you in a bit.” Eddie glances to make sure they’re not watching, then pecks Buck on the lips. Mostly because he hasn’t in a few hours and really needed it.

He returns with his heart in his throat. It’s the first time since he’s gotten here that he’s been around his parents without Buck there. 

“God, really, Eddie,” his mom says the moment he sits down. “He’s very nice, but he does not need to be coming to our family dinners. I’d like to talk to my son without a guard dog in the way.”

“He didn’t even say anything.”

“It’s the presence,” Ramon mutters. “Largest man in the room, making eyes when he doesn’t like what I say to my own son. He really has no right.”

He does. He has every right.

Eddie rubs his eyes, food cold and stomach empty. But he doesn’t think he wants to eat anything, he feels like he’s going to be sent to his room with no dinner soon. 

“Okay,” he mumbles. “Fire away, whatever you’ve got to say to me.”

Helena makes a firm hm noise, then looks back up to him. “Why do you think you’re actually over Shannon this time?”

Eddie takes a deep breath, playing with the gold bracelet on his wrist, ready to drop a bomb on them. “I was never in love with her,” he says.

“What?” Ramon sputters. “That’s ridiculous, you were married for—seven years? You dated, knocked the woman up, married her, but you didn’t love her?”

“Yeah.”

His mom rubs her nose bridge in exhaustion. “Eddie, you’re overcompensating. You loved her, but she’s been dead for as long as you were married, so you’ve moved on. That’s what you should’ve said, because you know we don’t believe that. Not after what you did with that lookalike.”

Eddie shrugs, sipping his glass of water. “Well, I didn’t. I married her because she was pregnant, which you know. Because you were the one who said I would.” He thins his lips out and gives her a look. “And then we proceeded to avoid each other for the entire marriage.”

“And the lookalike?”

He hates the way she talks about her, even if she kind of helped ruin his life. 

“Kim was…I was trying to…recreate something that never existed in the first place. That was my overcompensation. Pretending like I did love her.”

Oh.

Suddenly, Eddie thinks he gets it.

The panic attacks, the scrambling for any woman so he could pretend the picket fence could still be built. Kicking them out once he couldn’t handle it anymore. Wondering why he couldn’t feel anything as a teen, assuming he was just broken as an adult. 

Eddie’s heart isn’t broken, he’s just…gay.

Having this realization with both of his parents in the room means he has to hide the way the word makes him airy and light for the first time in a long, long time. 

“I’ll take that,” Ramon says, accepts. 

He blinks, remembering he was having a conversation. “Really?”

“If that’s how you really feel, then fine.” Helena looks at her husband like she disagrees. He gives her a look back. “I was hardly around to see you two together, anyway. When I was, you didn’t seem very happy.”

The only thing going through Eddie’s head after that is he knew? He knew Eddie was unhappy and still got on him like that about being a bad father? It’s a bittersweet sentiment. His dad could tell how he felt for once. He just didn’t care back then. 

“Oh,” he mumbles.

Is it worse to be seen and ignored than not seen at all?

-

“Hey, how was it—“

“Buck, I’m gay.”

Buck’s eyes turn into saucers, and Eddie fights a smile at the way he’s trying to calm his own reaction. 

“Wow—you—you figured that out in there?” Buck shakes his head. “No, shit, wrong thing to say. I’m—I’m really so proud of you, Eds, seriously.”

Eddie giggles, leaning over to really kiss Buck now that he doesn’t have to watch out for someone else. He pulls back, kissing Buck’s nose, too. “And yes, realizing you’re gay while your parents are sitting across from you is very awkward. Do you wanna go somewhere? I’m starving.”

Buck laughs, kissing Eddie once more before pulling back to get the car running. “Yes, please, they kicked me out before I even got to eat!”

-

Eddie knows there’s more. There is always more. 

-

Chris comes over to their Airbnb a couple days later, in a good mood after his chess tournament went very well. There’s a second place trophy sitting on the mantle of his parents house now. 

Regardless, he says he wants to see where they’re living for now, so they go show him. It’s much more modern than the other house and a bit larger because most homes in Texas just…are. 

“Woah, how are you paying for this?” Is the first thing he comments on when they bring him inside. 

Buck chuckles. “That’s what our PTO is for, bud.”

Chris pouts and squints. “That means paid time off, right?”

“Yup.”

“Nice, you get paid to do nothing!”

Buck and Eddie burst into laughter. Even with everything that happened, his kid is still just as funny. 

“You don’t just get PTO’s willy nilly,” Eddie explains, grabbing three glasses of water because he wants one, thinks Buck will want one, and can tell Chris needs one. “Bobby has to approve them.”

Chris shrugs and goes to grab the water. “Yeah, but Bobby would approve anything Buck wants. So. That’s a W on your part.”

“A W?”

“Ugh, you can’t say it, you sound old.”

-

Buck very discreetly decides to make them all lunch and give Eddie the time to show Chris his hypothetical bedroom if he ever wanted to stay over. It’s completely unused, sheets still tucked, pillows unused.

“So…where does Buck sleep?” Chris questions. “There’s only two bedrooms, and this kind of looks like it hasn’t been used in a decade. Dad, are you making him sleep on the couch? In an Airbnb?”

Eddie props his hands on his hips, nerves working overtime. “No, Chris, Buck is…not on the couch.”

“…Okay. I mean…okay,” He seems to be thinking about something, ready to say something, but doesn’t. Eddie notices he does that a lot. 

So he inhales to gain some courage and maybe finally talk about why he left. “Listen, Chris, about what ha—“

“Are you two dating?” 

Eddie blinks. “What?”

“You and Buck,” Chris says bluntly. “Because. I mean. I know he cares about me a lot. But, like. This feels like a lot.”

He pretends like his breath isn’t caught in his throat, as he speaks next. The way Chris struggles to express the way he feels feels so reminiscent of himself it’s dizzying. “Are you okay with Buck being here?”

“Yeah. Obviously. It’s just…when we were at that restaurant it felt like you were dating. And it still feels like you’re dating, but you’re also not…telling me if you are. So—I don’t know, maybe you aren’t,” Chris admits, scuffing his foot on the ground. “But it feels like you are. And I really…I want you to…can you tell me the truth?”

He’s so grown up. Eddie forgets his son is perceptive and so smart. He knows Eddie, too.

Eddie bends slightly to meet his eye better, no longer having to get down on one knee to do so. “Okay, bud. Yeah. Yeah, we…we are.”

Chris looks down and away, biting his tongue on something new. 

“Is that…is that okay?” He whispers, holding back the urge to hold his son by the shoulders. 

“I guess so.” Chris still won’t meet his eye. “I’m just. I’m confused.”

Eddie nods, relieved that Chris doesn’t hate him for this. He can talk away confusion, not hate. “Okay, that’s fine. I understand that. How about we start talking about it over lunch with Buck?”

Chris purses his lips and agrees. There’s still something else there, Eddie wishes he was a mind reader.

They come back to the main room and Buck’s plating their grilled cheeses with some potato chips. Three plates. Eddie likes that.

Buck looks up to them and waves with a cute smile, then really catches the look on Eddie’s face. He raises his brows and Buck nods, inhaling deeply. Silent conversations. 

“Alright grilled cheese for everyone, Chris, this one is extra cheesy for you,” Buck points out and Chris smiles again. He grabs it and heads to the dining room. “You told him?” 

Eddie nods, grabbing his plate. “He figured it out, actually.”

“Smart kid.”

“I know.”

Buck leans in to kiss his cheek. “I’m proud of you, still.”

Eddie flushes, and he cannot walk into the room with a red face, so he calms himself down and heads in. 

Among buttery bread and really great cheese pulls, Chris begins to ask questions.

“So…like…when did you start dating?”

“About a month and a half ago.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“Yes, but you’re the only one we’ve explicitly told.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

Eddie frowns deeply, knowing this is a time to be completely honest. Lying or even half truths will get them nowhere. 

“Things between us still weren’t great, and…I was…scared you’d hate me more.”

Chris practically drops his grilled cheese. “Hate you more?”

Eddie thumbs his bracelet. “Yeah.”

“But I don’t—I don’t hate you, Dad.”

His heart just about swells, eyes immediately threatening him with salty tears. Buck’s glancing between the two of them with hidden glee. 

“…You don’t?”

Chris looks freaked out, actually. “No, I don’t hate you. I’m just mad at you and confused because of—I mean that was really messed up. But you’re my dad, like…”

“Like?”

“I still…love you and stuff.”

And stuff. Eddie thinks his heart will beat out of its cage. He didn’t know. In the back of his mind for all this time he was functioning off of the idea that Chris hated him. But he doesn’t. Because he’s becoming a fully fledged human being who doesn’t see everything in black and white, who is starting to understand complicated feelings and—unfortunately—how hardships affect that. 

Eddie could cry, his son is so grown up. But he didn’t miss it, not really. It’s been happening, the eight years he was fully there were when he got to see it developing, but now it’s growing, expanding. Chris is multifaceted and he’s his own person, and Eddie raised him.

That’s his boy. God, he’s perfect.

“You look like you’re gonna cry,” Chris comments quietly, still a little awkward to know how to comfort people. 

“Yeah, I might,” Eddie sharply breathes through his nose. Buck holds his hand and presses his thumb into Eddie’s palm. “But—but that’s okay.”

“I know it’s okay.”

“Okay,” he laughs wetly. His demeanor falls back into empathy. “And…I know what I did was wrong, I know. I’d go back and erase it if I could.”

Chris nods slowly, popping a chip into his mouth. “You know what, maybe we talk about that next time. No offense, this was kind of a lot. Not that you and Buck dating is weird, it’s just different.”

“Understandable,” Buck murmurs. “Uh—but, you can’t tell your grandparents—“

“I know how it works!”

“Okay, I’m sorry.”

Eddie snorts.

-

Telling Chris he and Buck are dating was easy. He’s not ashamed of that, he loves Buck. Chris loves Buck. 

It seems so natural, where the two of them ended up, like it was always going to be this way—he doesn’t word it that way to Buck because he’s gonna get on him about how he does believe in all that universal stuff. Eddie still doesn’t, it’s just that there was always a pull between them, a something that he was only able to understand at the exact right moment in time. Eddie’s quite sure it would’ve taken him much longer to get here if Buck hadn’t shown up on his porch that night.

But in the end, it was easy to look his son in the eyes and say he’s dating the most important person they have. Yet there’s much more to be said. Eddie held back on telling Chris he’s gay, mostly because it’s a lot more to process. They haven’t gotten to talk about it either.

That’s what he’s eight hundred miles from L.A for, though, so he manages to get around to it.

A few days after showing Chris the house, Eddie tells Buck he’s going to drive Chris out to talk. Buck gets it, of course. He hugs him and wishes him good luck, but everything will be okay in the end. Chris already told him he still loves him.

So Eddie takes that and uses that as motivation when going to his parents house to ask Chris if he wants to take a quick trip somewhere. Chris gets it, too. 

The lake is only about a twenty minute drive away, and Eddie wants both of them to feel relaxed—no point in unnecessary tension. This is supposed to be a good thing, them talking.

He tries his own music, which is also mixed with Buck’s music, and Chris does not like it. 

“You grew up in the two-thousands, how are you listening to music that’s like fifty years old?!”

“Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad,” Eddie says, turning up Jim Croce because he likes it. “Once you’re older, you’ll appreciate it.”

Chris blows raspberries and shakes his head. “No way. I don’t like country music.”

“You live in Texas, now, bud, might as well get used to it.”

“Well…” Chris trails off. “Not forever,” he mumbles.

Don’t freak don’t freak out don’t freak out.

The car jolts a little, Eddie’s foot slipping on the gas. Buck would make fun of him and call him a bad driver for that. 

They arrive not long after, Eddie pulling the truck onto the dirt since there’s no real place to park. 

He hasn’t been back here for a long time, the memories take shape and make him feel younger. Eddie looks around at the clear blue lake, mirroring the large trees surrounding the area. There are a few small docks for someone to fish from, get on a small boat with, or…sit on to open up to their son about being gay. 

He brings himself down with a quiet groan—thank you, old man joints—and lets his legs dangle close to the water’s surface. Chris joins him and looks around, taking in the view. 

“You said you met Mom here, right?” 

Eddie’s actually surprised Chris started the talking, but he nods slowly, letting every word they say have time to settle into the tranquil setting.

“Yep,” he sighs, knowing the exact spot he stood at with that stupid cooler. “You already know the gist of the story, but…I’ve been looking back at my life differently lately.”

He takes a breath for courage. “Back then…it was a different time, y’know? Especially down here in Texas, they don’t teach you about certain things, and it certainly wasn’t normal to be different. Like…for you, you grew up in a place full of love, and acceptance. And got to see people that love differently, like Hen and Karen, Buck…”

“And you,” Chris quietly adds. 

Eddie glances at him, chest heavy. “Yeah. And me. But I…I didn’t know that back then. It wasn’t even something that crossed my mind, I didn’t think it was possible for someone like me. What I’m saying is…when I started dating your mom, I thought I just had to. We were good friends, and I just assumed that meant I should date her—not—not that I didn’t love her. I did,” he affirms, holding Chris’ gaze. “I need you to know, I did love her.”

“Okay…”

“And despite that…” Eddie tries, his composure fading slightly. “I wasn’t…in love. It was a different kind, because she was my friend, and she gave me you. The best part of my life. When I met…y’know. Kim. I thought I had another chance to make it right, to love her the way I should’ve been able to. But it was misguided, and it was stupid, and wrong for me to do that. I’m sorry.”

Chris is looking out at the water again, eyes flickering around as he tries to take that in. It must be a lot, he’s sorry for that, too.

“I wish I could have loved your mom, but for someone like me it just doesn’t work that way,” he says softly. “For…for any woman. Because I’m…I’m gay.”

Chris nods very, very slowly. He doesn’t say anything for a couple minutes. The quiet kills Eddie, but he doesn’t want to rush any reaction. 

A hummingbird flies by, and oddly enough, Eddie recalls one of Buck’s many rambles. Hummingbirds are known as a sign of good luck and healing. Even if he doesn’t believe in signs, having Buck in his mind feels like a good thing. 

Eventually, Chris smiles. It’s slight, but a smile. He leans into Eddie’s space enough that their shoulders bump, and he stays that way.

“Okay,” he says. “I still love you, Dad.”

Eddie beams, wrapping his arm around his son’s shoulders and unafraid to press a kiss to the top of his head. “I love you too, Chris.”

“I was really confused about the…woman who looked like Mom thing. Like…why you would do that to me. But. You weren’t trying to hurt me.”

“God, no, Chris. Never.”

Chris further settles into their side-embrace. “Good. Also, I thought about it. It’s kinda cool that you’re dating Buck.”

A smile spreads across his face before he can help it. “You think so?”

“Yeah. Because that means Buck can stay over all the time, right? Back home?”

Oh, god.

Back home.

Eddie’s eyes water again. He rubs Chris’ shoulder. “Yeah, bud. He can stay over all the time. Bet he’ll love that, actually,” he chuckles.

There’s more. 

It’s like being dropped into cold water the way he tenses and the back and forth on Chris’ shoulder stops abruptly. 

“Dad?”

It digs into him.

There is still time.

“There’s something else you should know,” Eddie nearly whispers. “I haven’t really said this to anyone else yet, not even Buck.”

Chris stiffens up.

“I’ve…been trying to figure something out. For a long time. All my life, probably. And…” Eddie exhales. “I think I’m getting close, I still just don’t know what it is yet. But it’s big and really important for me, I know that. Like the last piece of the puzzle. Everything in my life makes sense except for that missing spot. And I want to know what it is. Because I want to be honest with you, with Buck, and with…with myself.”

“So when I do find out, I am going to tell you. I’m not gonna hide anything from you anymore. Never again.”

Eddie ruffles Chris’ curls, feeling exposed and raw, but it doesn’t hurt him. All he feels is a greater yearning to know. What has he been missing, mourning, and looking for within himself? 

Chris wraps his arms around Eddie fully now, and they listen to the light chirping and low vibrations of the hummingbirds flying by. Good luck and healing.

4.

The photobook is still hiding in an unused drawer in the bedroom, and as the next few days go by, Eddie starts to feel something like a pull towards it. Always in the back of his mind when he’s in the room, and at first he pushes it down and away. But he realizes purposely hiding things from himself and not letting himself have the things he wants is why he’s in this situation in the first place. 

After a long but incredibly enjoyable day of hanging out with Buck and Chris—they went to the movies then grabbed some ice cream afterwards—Eddie keeps eyeing it while getting changed for bed. Buck has a long night routine, so he’s still in the bathroom with an array of hair products he’s been trying out lately. It’s cute, but he does smell like six different scents at once. That’s besides the point. 

Eddie quietly heads on over to the drawer with the binder in it, and pulls it out. He doesn’t open it, just stares down at it for a minute. Mis Muñequitas.

“Hey, Buck!” He calls out before he can even think twice about it.

“Yeah?” 

“Whenever you’re done, I uh—I have something I want you to see.”

Buck pokes his head out of the bathroom, eyes wide and curious. Cute. 

“How ‘bout now?”

Eddie chuckles, glancing back down at the album. “That’s fine, too, baby.”

Buck must see what he’s holding because he doesn’t respond for a moment. “Uh—okay, yeah,” he stammers. Soon enough, Buck’s sitting at his side on the floor with hair that yes, smells like five different products next to his face. Eddie turns and kisses him, just cause. 

“So,” Eddie begins, “Obviously…a couple weeks ago I decided to have a mental breakdown. Again.”

“I don’t think you decide to—“

“Shhh.”

Buck flushes. “Sorry.”

Eddie smiles at him. “I’m just saying I want your help now. Because obviously I had a reaction, and—and that means something. And I want to be honest with myself about whatever it means.”

“…Have I told you how proud I am of you?”

“Yes, many times.” He leans in for another kiss, this time on Buck’s pink birthmark emphasized with a mwah. “So you’ll help me?”

Buck scoffs, “If I ever say no to that I’ve been kidnapped and replaced with a clone.”

Eddie side-eyes him. “Don’t say that, I’ve had enough of clones. And kidnappings.” Maybe he’s just stalling it. Besides, Eddie hasn’t even seen the rest of the pictures from that day, it was just that specific one that sent him into a frenzied spiral.

So he takes a deep breath and presses his knee to Buck’s for comfort. There’s no point in explaining himself anymore, he’d just end up rambling and trying to defend what he did even though there’s no reason to do so.

Eddie begins to flip through, pausing first on the array of photos where he was seven in Sophia’s dress. Just to look at it again, maybe. He bites back a smile, continuing to skip pages until he reaches where Buck saw last. And he nearly hesitates again.

“God, this is so stupid,” he mutters. “It’s not even anything.”

“If it means something to you it’s not nothing,” Buck tells him. Eddie thinks Buck is the smartest person in the world. Damn him.

He raises a brow, thumbing the page. “I guess you’re right. I just—“ Eddie sighs and takes the leap, flipping the page over. “Tell me what you think.”

He shoves the binder into Buck’s lap and looks away all shy and…stupid. Shame threatens to curl into his ribcage and pull him under, that constant guilt he had once been so used to trying to grab at him again. Eddie sneaks a glance at Buck to see if he’s weirded out or not, but he’s just…

Smiling. 

“I love this one,” Buck notes, angling it so he can see it. It’s the picture, and Eddie’s trying not to feel ashamed and embarrassed, or like the ground is going to swallow him whole. 

“You—you do?”

“Mhm. I think Pepa should start doing photography full time. I mean seriously, like, the composition, the colors, the lighting? It’s so nice.”

Eddie presses his tongue to his cheek and somehow scoots even closer to him. “I mean…yeah, it’s a good picture,” he mumbles. “But…you…c’mon, Buck, I…”

“What, the outfit?”

He nods.

“You look pretty. What’s so bad about that?”

Eddie lets himself really look at it again. The way the light had reflected off the pink glittery skirt and the way Eddie held himself like they were weightless.

She looks pretty.

“It’s wrong, though. Isn’t it?” Eddie whispers, feeling like that kid. Like he’s standing just out of sight to hear his dad say he’s going to get confused, it’s not good for a boy to act like this. 

Buck’s eyes fill with a deep empathy, snaking its way into his heart to keep him feeling so, so loved. “You’re just a kid here, Eds. It doesn’t have to mean anything if you don’t want it to.”

Eddie mourns that child, so settled and carefree, nothing could touch them except for the glow of the sun holding them in its warm embrace.

“…Do you want it to?” Buck asks gently.

The immediate answer that comes to mind is I don’t know. Uncertainty is so easy to cling onto and squeeze into until it suffocates and all you’re left with is its limp body in your arms. It’s necromancy, trying to keep a dead thing alive when something so beautiful with its own beating heart stands right behind you.

All you have to do is turn around and face it.

Eddie’s crying again, but it doesn’t feel so hopeless and sorrowful, like the world is ending and there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s something new, something different, yet something old all at the same time. 

“Yes,” she sobs, pressing her forehead into Buck’s shoulder. “God, I—I want it to mean something. I do.” 

Eddie sniffles and feels so ashamed of herself, but it’s there, that thing she’s been missing all her life. Eddie looks at it, and it’s so bright—like the sun.

Buck pulls her in and holds her firmly, so comfortably. “Then it does mean something,” he whispers. “It means everything.”

-

The world has shifted beneath Eddie’s feet, and she seems to be seeing life with new eyes. It’s just as she thought, that final piece locking into place and completing Eddie as a whole. Everything just…makes sense.

She’s started calling herself ‘she’ in her head, and it’s something like slow waves on the shore. Calm and gentle, something easy to float in. ‘He’ doesn’t cause negative feelings for Eddie—it’s what she’s used for so long—but it doesn’t give that same calming effect. It’s not drowning, but it’s swimming, eventually you get tired and need a break.

Buck, like the lovely Google warrior he is, decided to spend the entire night searching for what felt right. He asked if it was making her uncomfortable about fifteen times, but she assured him everything was okay. 

Eddie briefly tried ‘they’ out for a spin, and it’s actually not bad. So Buck brought up a she and they situation which Eddie is frankly unprepared for and honestly confused by. Mostly in a ‘can you do that?’ sort of way that made Buck realize they should put anything complicated on the backburner until Eddie’s more sure of herself. So. She it is. 

It’s nice. Like a hug.

She hasn’t left the house since they hung out with Chris, and the next time she sees him she’ll have to tell him…this. Really, it’s probably going to be a lot on both of them.

Eddie doesn’t want to tell her parents, but in the back of her mind it just feels like she has to. Not out of any moral obligation, Eddie doesn’t have to tell them anything. But she knows Chris wants to come back home eventually, so before she goes she can do this as one last ‘fuck you’ for helping ruin her life.

Maybe they’ll never speak to her again. 

Maybe she’s okay with that.

-

Eddie knows what she promised Chris, she just needs a day to process it all. Coming to terms with not really being a man at all after thirty-three years of living as one is going to take getting used to. But it’s like suddenly all her clothes feel wrong. They never have before, but now she’s noticing all the little things she ignored for so long they became numb, background noise. 

It’s eating away at her where she sits beside Buck on the couch watching a Netflix show. Eddie curls up into Buck’s side, he wraps an arm around her shoulders as she sighs. 

“Should I start dressing differently?” She wonders aloud. 

“You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to.”

Eddie grumbles low in her throat, making Buck chuckle. “Maybe I don’t have to. But I think I kind of want to.”

He perks up a little, glancing over at Eddie with a twinkle in his eyes. “Really?” Buck asks, practically wagging his tail in excitement.

“Oh, god, I shouldn’t have said that. You gonna make me your dress up doll now?” She says with a big grin, just so he knows she doesn’t mean it offensively. 

Buck pouts. “We can go on Pinterest.”

“…Pinterest?”

“Ugh, god, baby, you’re like a dinosaur.”

“I’m younger than you!” Eddie retorts. It’s only by a few months, but it’s very worth noting.

“So what?” Buck sends right back. “Doesn’t mean anything when you’re basically tech illiterate. Dinosaur aura.”

Eddie shakes her head in disbelief. “What the fuck?”

“I—I actually don’t know that one, Chris said it to me.”

She gasps. “About me? ”

 “…Yeah, sorry, Eds,” Buck mumbles, and Eddie settles back into her spot against his chest—though a bit more stubbornly this time. “And we can find you good outfit ideas on Pinterest. It’s an app.”

“Ohh.”

-

“Buck, I have awful style already, I don’t know what I want,” Eddie mutters miserably. 

It’s been two hours of scrolling and adding various pictures into a board, at one point there were about seventy pictures because Eddie thought all the clothes looked good on the women in the photos. But then she realized she’d have to put that on, and told Buck to make another so they could start over. Buck hasn’t complained for a second, thankfully. In fact, he might be more invested than Eddie is.

“What? You do not, I love what you wear.”

She barks a laugh. “Buck, I wear jeans and a stupid Henley every day. If it’s not that, then it’s jeans and a t-shirt. Or jeans and…fuck, I don’t even know. That’s it.”

Buck angles the iPad her way again, displaying the thousands of ideas to pick apart. “See, that’s what I thought, too! But then I found what works,” he remarks.

“And…what works?”

“All I wear are button downs over t-shirts with baggy pants, it’s like—literally the only thing I have in my closet now. Other than some hoodies.” Buck taps the search bar and lets it hold on the search history. Outfits for women. Eddie’s face warms. “So let’s narrow it down. What’s something new you wanna try?”

Immediately, her mind jumps to the dresses from the old pictures, how much she longed for that feeling again. Eddie wants to know what she’d look like with a dress that’s her own that fits her. It might be difficult, Eddie’s nearing six feet tall and rather muscular. That’s mainly what made her want to start the Pinterest board over again. She doesn’t look like they do, clothes won’t fit her the same.

Not that Eddie’s ashamed of how she looks. She’s a firefighter, she needs to be able to move equipment and people, and she likes working out. That’s fine, anyone can work out.

It’s just…well, Eddie is not going to look the way she did in a dress back when she was twelve. 

She quietly voices some of these concerns to Buck, eyes diverted as she does so. Eddie already knows the look on Buck’s face will upset her. 

“If you just weren’t comfortable, I’d say we wait until you are, but I think you might need it,” Buck says quietly. He reaches out and takes Eddie’s hand, smoothing over the knuckles with an encouraging smile. “Cause sometimes you just gotta take the leap, y’know?”

Eddie chews her lip and glances at their joined hands, because he’s right. “Feel like I’ve been taking a lot of leaps lately,” she mumbles. “You, my sexuality, my—my gender now, too, it’s a lot.”

Buck brings her hand up closer to press a gentle kiss into. “You just haven’t had time to think about yourself before.”

“I know, it’s all just crashing down on me at the same time. So much is changing.”

“But…it’s a good change.”

“Yeah,” she smiles. “It is a good change.”

Their gazes linger for a minute, Eddie’s hand held between Buck’s as something passes between them. Buck always says he’s proud of her, but she truly sees it in his eyes without a word said. Just the light twinkling of his baby blues and the wrinkles starting to form around his eyes.

Eddie wants to be there to watch more years line his features, for his hair to thin and gray—and eventually they can retire together. Maybe they’ll still have Eddie’s house back in L.A, or maybe they will have bought another. Then again, they’re both sentimental people and the memories made in there hold more value than any physical item. They’ll probably stay.

She wants to learn how to garden, and she’s absolutely certain Buck will jump at the opportunity to learn something new. They can go out and buy the seeds and the fertilizers and make sure to keep everything watered and healthy. California is pretty dry, they will need a lot. But that’s okay, Eddie will go out as many times as she needs to to get their garden going.

She wants to be the owner of something that older, more close-minded people will pass by and call repulsive but she’d call beautiful. 

Her garden, her flowers, her home, her family, her life, herself. 

Eddie wants all of it, and she wants it with Buck for as long as she lives and through every change in the tides they need to overcome. 

She stands, pulling Buck to his feet too—he goes without questioning—and kisses him chastely, pouring all her love and adoration into one action, hoping Buck gets it. 

Of course he does. Of course Buck gets it.

Eddie pulls back, keeping them close as she tucks her chin over his shoulder and holds him. “Maybe we could just go to the mall,” she says, muffled.

“Y'know what? You’re a genius, Eddie. Maybe we can get Chris a treat there, too.”

“As compensation for the whiplash I’ve been giving him?”

Buck quickly pulls her back by the shoulders with wide eyes. “No— no, I just want to get him something because I love Chris and think he would want something it’s got nothing to do with you, also that’s not even your fault— and you’re joking, aren’t you?”

Eddie grins. “Yeah. Come on, mall time!”

-

Given how it’s noon on a weekday, the mall they go to is pretty much empty. This is Eddie’s best case scenario, because now she can tread into the women’s section and not feel like she’s being watched by fifty people—it’s more like three. Buck, the bored cashier, and a lesbian sorting through the men’s flannels. Eddie thinks she’ll be okay. 

“Kinda like these jeans,” she mutters. They’re nothing like the many pairs Eddie already has—lower-waisted and wider at the bottom. “But I have so many jeans…”

“Yeah, but those are like your ten dollar Costco jeans,” Buck remarks, earning a playful slap to the chest. He giggles. “Seriously, these are nice. You think they got it in your size?”

“Lots of women are six feet tall,” Eddie says, immediately burying herself in finding a size that works because referring to herself as a woman makes her face burn. 

“You’re five eleven at best, sweetheart…”

Eddie bites her tongue. Her face is probably red enough that her ears are flushed, and she refuses to look at Buck. Sweetheart, god he’s awful. 

“What the fuck are these sizes?” She scrutinizes. The ridiculousness is pulling Eddie out of her daze. “They don’t have like…leg and hip measurements? What is size three? Three out of what?” 

Buck grimaces, sucking air through his teeth. “Uh…not sure, but it’s probably too small.”

Eddie frowns and wonders why the jeans just get wider instead of longer as the sizes increase. She sorts through the rack until one looks like it might work, then grabs that and the adjacent two sizes in case it doesn’t. She drops them into the basket Buck’s holding, going around the store until there’s enough to try on. 

Buck takes a seat on the benches, giving Eddie two big thumbs up as she gets behind the curtain to change. 

The jeans are what goes on first, and she ended up needing one more size up, so grabbing three pairs was a good choice. The boots she already had on kind of work with the cut of them.

Regardless, Eddie doesn’t think too much about it yet, pulling on a maroon leather belt and a shirt she thought would pair with the jeans. It’s brown, buttons and short-sleeves—blouse-like—with flowers embroidered on the front. It kind of reminds her of something Shannon would have worn. 

Oh, god.

She looks good.

The feeling is reminiscent to when she’d seen herself without the mustache for the first time in months, only way better because she thinks Buck is going to pass out when he sees.

The shirt is short and a little tight on her, she might need a size up—but still. It’s snugly around her waist and tapers out, revealing a handful of torso because the jeans sit low on her waist. Eddie isn’t sure if they’re meant to be so snug on the thighs, but…it’s still perfect. Maybe she turns and looks over her shoulder to check herself out in the mirror. Maybe.

It’s masculine in a feminine way, like dipping her toes into new waters. While her arms aren’t super toned right now, they’re still muscular, the look of them in the delicate top actually doesn’t bother her. 

Eddie pulls the curtain open enough for her head to poke out. Buck perks up. “Hi,” she says shyly. 

“Hi,” Buck giggles. He quickly clears his throat. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, I have the outfit on.”

“…Okay…can I—can I see? Do you want me to come in there—?”

Eddie glances around, the lesbian from before is checking out with the cashier, both distracted.

So she pulls the curtain aside with her arms out, practically presenting herself. Eddie does a turn in place to give him the whole view, when she makes it back around…

“Buck?”

His body is still, like breathing isn’t an option anymore. The way he’s scanning Eddie over and over like he needs to make sure he’s not hallucinating makes her blush again. She needs to get that under control, but it’s hard when Buck kind of looks like he wants to eat her.

“Oh my god.” Buck rubs his palms over his pants and stands, bringing them to his hips. “Oh my god?”

“Better be a good ‘oh my god’,” Eddie tries quipping, but it’s a little more breathy than she wanted. 

Buck reaches out to grab her hips in awe, thumbs warm just above the waistband on her skin. “You’re the prettiest girl in the world, oh my god,” he gawks, kissing Eddie before she can even properly react to the compliment.

A delighted little noise passes from Eddie’s throat right against Buck’s lips. He pulls back and slides his hands up to Eddie’s shoulders. “Wait, let me just—“

Buck gets his hands in Eddie’s hair, ruffling it and pulling it around, all she can do is let him.

“First fashion now hair styling, what else you got for me, Buck?”

He pulls away after laying a strand right over her forehead. Buck brings her back to the mirror and smiles at his good work.

Eddie didn’t seriously gel her hair before going out, it’s just kind of like instinct to push it back, and if a strand falls out then so be it. Buck’s just broken the gel cast entirely, leaving it messier and curling over her forehead. 

“Perfect, you’re so, so pretty,” Buck whispers, kissing her on the cheek. Eddie isn’t sure how many times she can blush in one day before it becomes a health issue. “We are gonna spend so much money today.”

“Oh, god.”

-

They end up coming back to the house with six bags of clothing and many apologies from Eddie for loving all the outfits she tried on. They even got a few pairs of shoes. Buck says it’s okay because he’ll ask his parents for money and because they feel perpetually guilty about what they did to him they’ll give it. Eddie doesn’t know how to feel about that, but Buck wouldn’t let her even try to pull out her wallet. Something about chivalry, even though it’s silly at this point.

But Eddie did just triple her closet in one trip and is now able to walk around in long skirts and lacy tank tops, swiveling her hips just to see it bloom outwards. 

When she put the first one on in the mall, she had to sit down and cry for a few minutes. It was perfect. Buck came in and let her lean against his side until the tears stopped. Eddie used to feel like she was mourning who she could have been, but like Buck’s words there is still time, it was a startling realization that she can still be that person. Eddie was never running out of time.

The rest of the day she spends in a thin patterned skirt that reaches just above her ankles. Pale green with orange flowers that she threw a white tank over. It’s simple, but it’s everything. 

She does catch Buck watching her even though he’s clearly trying not to make a big deal out of it. Like Eddie has always dressed like this. 

She’ll have to take it off later to go to her parents house, so she’s making the most of it. While the sun starts to set, Eddie turns an old love song up on the speakers and manages to get Buck up and holding her in the low light of the kitchen. 

At last

My love has come along

My lonely days are over

And life is like a song

“You are such a romantic,” Buck mumbles into her hair.

“For you.”

Buck kisses her.

-

After getting a taste of real freedom for the first time, Eddie now feels trapped when she’s in this house. Back in her clothes she’s been wearing for years before this afternoon and being referred to the way she’s been referred to for thirty-three years is now stifling. 

It’s not like they know, but they’re at the dinner table and Eddie just wants to tell them to stop. She hasn’t even told them about Buck, which was what she was nervous for when they first got to Texas. That’s a walk in the park compared to the information she has now. 

Eddie is sitting on a bomb.

Buck is doing a lot of the talking today, not about to get kicked out for it since they were both invited. Chris is chatty, too, so Eddie feels okay taking the backseat. Buck’s ankle is crossed with hers. 

It grounds her a little, even if she’s quite literally sitting on information that would blow up her life for the—she’s lost track of how many times. At the same time…Eddie wants them to know. She doesn’t know why, Eddie’s sure she could just tell Chris and then the three of them come back home and she cuts her parents off forever for tampering with their relationship. 

If they know and hate Eddie for it, at least it would make the cutting off portion easier. 

She plays with her gold bracelet and eats dinner bit by bit. It doesn’t settle well.

-

When Eddie tucks Chris into bed later and kisses his forehead—Buck at her side—Eddie whispers to him, “Have you thought at all about going home, bud?”

Chris hesitates, but nods. 

Eddie smiles. “Okay. Our rental’s up in a week, so…I’m saying…you could come back with us if you want.”

“Would Grandma and Grandpa be okay with that?” 

“That doesn’t matter, alright?” she says, hands on his shoulders. “I know you’ve started making a life here, so…if you don’t want to come back yet—or at all—that’s…okay.”

It’s not, but Eddie wants Chris to be happy more than anything. Even though she knows he’s mentioned this being temporary, she isn’t sure just how temporary.

Chris juts his bottom lip out contemplatively and glances between Eddie and Buck for a while. “I think I wanna come home,” he finally confesses. 

There’s a long exhale of relief behind Eddie and a hand suddenly on her lower back. She tries to hold back the tears that threaten her eyes, but to her own avail, her vision blurs.

“Are you gonna cry?”

Always so blunt. Eddie laughs, pressing another kiss to his forehead then pulling him in close. “No, I’m not. I’m just—I’m happy. I love you, Chris.”

“Love you too, Dad,” Chris says against her neck. There’s a pause. “Buck, you don’t have to stay back there.”

Eddie glances over her shoulder, seeing Buck taken off guard from being called out. “Yeah, Buck,” she teases. “C’mere.”

They huddle in together for a long, warm hug. The puzzle is complete. Eddie, Buck, and Chris—her family. They’re almost home.

-

A couple days later, the three of them go back to that ice cream place they’d gone to after the movies. It’s a little cold for ice cream, but it’s indoors—so who cares, right?

Buck and Eddie both knew what was going to happen here when they brought Chris along. Eddie promised him she’d tell him as soon as she figured it out. 

So maybe she did get Chris the treat as compensation for the whiplash she’s going to give him. Eddie’s ice cream has turned all soupy with the amount of time she’s taken to get the courage to speak.

“Chris,” she blurts, grabbing his attention. “I uh…I’ve got to tell you something.”

He seems to get the gravity right away, lowering his cone and sitting up a little straighter. “Okay.”

Eddie inhales shakily. Buck crosses their ankles. “You remember how not too long ago I said. I said I had something to figure out, something big, and that I’d tell you once I knew?”

Chris nods slowly. “Did you figure it out?”

She thins her lips out a little awkwardly, breathing out a, “Yeah, yeah I did.” It’ll be okay, Eddie tells herself. “I uh…well for a long time now I’ve been feeling something, but I didn’t want to think about it. Not when I was a kid, not when I got older. Not until…until I got here, really.”

“Uh,” she breathes, trying to reel in whatever she’s trying to say, it’s just hard to really say it aloud. She probably should have prepared better. “Basically. I’m not…I’m not a man anymor—or—I guess I never really was, but uh—“

“Wait, really?” Chris interrupts her rambling, eyes wide.

“Mhm. I—I know, it’s probably a little weird or confusing, but um…”

“It’s not,” he says quickly. But Eddie can tell he means it. “You mean like…like transgender?”

For some reason, Eddie’s been ashamed to put the label on, something so big with all of the connotations people have about it. But when Chris says it so easily, that seems ridiculous.

Eddie nods, trying a smile. “Yeah. I um…I think it’s always been there, I just had no idea until a few days ago.”

Chris hums, licking up the melting ice cream off his cone. “One of my friends I play Fortnite with is, too. But like—the other way around. He’s a guy.”

Right. Somehow, Eddie forgot Chris is growing up in a completely different universe than the one she was raised in. This is just…normal. Maybe shocking because Eddie’s his parent, but it’s not a new concept for him. 

Eddie glances at Buck, who’s just smiling. “So, this is just fine for you? Cause I—I don’t wanna force you to talk to me differently, it’s just. Me and Buck went through like…pronouns and things and I’d just. Prefer. If you used she for me,” she finishes quickly like a spark sizzling out and dying. 

“Okay, I will,” Chris says, starting to chew his cone. Eddie could laugh. “Sorry if I mess up.”

“That’s fine—“

“Wait, are you changing your name and can I still call you Dad?”

“Oh.” Eddie actually hasn’t thought about that. Being a father is sort of just a part of her by now, and she’s never had a problem with her name. “Right now both feel fine. But in the future if I change my mind, that’s okay?”

Chris rolls his eyes like duh. “Obviously. I’m not transphobic.”

She can’t help the laugh that falls from her lips, or the way Buck joins in, rubbing the space between her shoulders as they revel in the fact that their son is perfect. 

-

Their things are starting to be all packed up, new clothes getting folded more carefully than the old. Eddie hasn’t told her parents yet, and she’s still not sure how good of an idea it would be to do so. She’s told Chris to keep the packing discreet until she gets to do so.

Currently, she and Buck are trying to enjoy one of the last few days they’ll have with an empty house. Buck’s licking into Eddie’s mouth, then down to her jaw and along her neck.

Suddenly, Eddie gets the urge to breathily ask, “Should I tell my parents?”

Buck hums confusedly into her jugular. “About us going home?”

“No, about me.”

He pauses, pressing up to hover and make Eddie feel a little cornered. It’s mostly in a hot way.

“Uh…if—if you really want to, then you could,” he replies.

Eddie wrinkles her nose. “You think it’s a bad idea.”

Buck sighs. “Yeah, I’m sorry. I don’t know them very well, but they just don’t seem like…tolerant…people.”

“They’re not,” she mumbles, gently wrapping her hands around the back of Buck’s neck. “But I don’t know. I don’t wanna lie to them.”

“You’re not lying to them, Eds, you’re keeping yourself safe.”

She plays with the curls at the back of his head with a deep frown. Maybe she shouldn’t have brought it up. “They’re not gonna hurt me,” she whispers. “They got mad at me a lot when I was younger, but they never hurt me. I mean, I’m already a disappointment to them, it can’t get that much worse, right?”

“Eddie…”

“I’m just saying!”

Buck sighs, leaning back down to nip just below the angle of her jaw. “If you really wanna, I’d do it the day we leave.”

“What, like being in therapy and dropping a bomb on them five minutes before the session is up so you don’t really have to talk about it?”

Buck breaks into quiet laughter against Eddie’s neck, trying to kiss there but failing miserably. “Yeah, baby, something like that.”

-

The first thing Eddie drops on them is the fact that they’re all leaving in two days. Ramon seems understanding enough—clearly worried about how Eddie’s going to fare as a parent despite the fact that she did it for seven years just fine. Helena is…upset, to say the least.

When Eddie tells her it was Chris’ choice he made on his own, her arguments run thin. There’s not much you can do when the boy you said should be allowed to choose what he wants actually does so. She’s just like Ramon, but more taunting Eddie with the possibility of her failing. Like he could always decide to come back, y’know. 

Meanwhile, Eddie and Chris have come to a point where they realized talking about their mistakes and the hard stuff is the best thing for them. So really, Helena has no idea what she’s talking about and it upsets her that her mom seems to be scrambling for a reason to be mad. To one up Eddie as usual.

Well, Eddie doesn’t care, she won’t let her do that to her anymore.

-

The night before they leave, her mom is out getting groceries—likely just so she has something to do that isn’t scoffing every time Eddie’s in the room. Chris is in his room packing with Buck, and her dad is sitting  at the kitchen table doing a crossword puzzle.

Eddie thinks back to what Ramon had said to Pepa all those years ago. About boys getting confused and not being able to grow up normally. About how Eddie had to wipe off the makeup Sophia did for her. About how men don’t cry over broken bones. About Eddie being the man of the house, and that meant she couldn’t be weak because she would have been a failure of a man. 

She can’t imagine his views have changed much. But she wants to hope that maybe, just maybe, she can sit in front of her dad and he won’t think she’s a disappointment for not being what he wanted. 

Eddie walks in unannounced and takes a seat across her dad, who glances up at her and makes a sound of acknowledgement. 

“Any luck with that?” Eddie asks, trying to start this conversation somehow.

“Ah, I don’t know,” Ramon replies. He puts his pencil down and sighs. “A lot of these are references I don’t know, this says a hit song from Paul Simon from like fifty years ago, I mean, who is that? Fifty years ago I was in Mexico, I’m not cut out for this.”

Eddie snorts. “Eh, maybe not. I know that name, not any songs, though.”

He slides the paper away from him and gives Eddie a long look. “So. Is Christopher’s bedroom too crowded with the three of you or something?”

“No, they’re just doing their own thing right now, so I thought I’d come out here,” she half-lies. “What, I can’t just want to talk to my dad?”

“That’s not what I said, Edmundo,” he mutters, quickly moving on. “It’s your last night here, Chris’ last night here. I think I’ll miss a kid in the house. Never really had that for this long before.”

She can’t stop her jaw clenching or the way her eyes get stuck to the table. Why did you only learn how to be a dad after I was gone? Why did you only care after the damage had been done?

“Don’t make that face, Eddie, I wanted to be there. You know I did.”

Eddie sighs, running a hand down her face. “Maybe you did. But you weren’t, and that impacted all of us, even if you regret it. I know we’ve been over it, I know we wanted to move forward from it…” She swallows hard. “But then you let my kid walk out of my house and you didn’t ask if I was okay. I was…having one of the worst days of my life. And nearly every day after that felt… awful. You know what it’s like to be away from your kids, and you regret having had to do it. So…why would you take that from me?”

Ramon is silent, maybe thinking, reevaluating, Eddie isn’t sure. This wasn’t what she came here for, but it starts to spill from her mouth before she can think twice about it.

“When you hopped on a flight the moment Chris asked you to, how come you didn’t even try to convince him to stay? He was thirteen and having one of the worst days of his life, too, and you weren’t there for him as much as you like to think you were. All you did was agree with every impulsive decision he was making, helping him run away from me when we just needed to calm down and talk. That was all we needed, Dad.”

She quickly wipes her eyes from the tears that started to brim there. “Y’know, I was really just looking at you that day wondering what happened? Why you started seeing right through me again after I thought we were working on it. On—on this, y’know, our relationship as father and…and child.”

“And then I come here, practically forced to because there was no way in hell I would’ve been able to get Chris to come home without doing so, and you— it still feels like you don’t care. After you said how much you didn’t want to miss out on any more of my life.” Eddie chuckles bitterly, shrugging with wet eyes. “You still don’t know anything about me.”

“That’s not true,” Ramon finally cuts in, he can finally defend himself.

“How many baseball tournaments did my team win?”

He pauses. “You quit because you broke a bone, you didn’t win any.”

Eddie sighs. “No, I actually did win one. You just weren’t there. I had the trophy in my room for years. Did you know I went to church a couple months ago?”

“What?”

“Yeah, I went and I did my first confession since I was ten years old,” she affirms, heat behind every word. 

Ramon sits up straighter. “What were you in confession for?”

Eddie frowns, tilting her head at him. 

“Guess.”

Chris’ laughter travels across the hall into the room, and Ramon shuts his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose and quietly cursing to himself. “Listen Eddie, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you again.”

“But you did,” Eddie sharply whispers. She leans back in her chair and looks away. “Y’know, I haven’t even…the whole time I’ve been here I’ve been hiding from you and Mom. I come here and I feel like I can’t be who I am around you two. It’s exhausting. And I’m really tired of it.”

She continues on, even though it’s starting to feel like trying to swim through syrup. “Because…I’m not who you raised. I’m so far from it that I’ve been putting off telling you in case you’d never want to see me again.”

Eddie almost wishes Ramon would stop her, tell her she’s being ridiculous instead of quietly listening and hanging onto every word she says. 

She reaches into her jacket pocket and pulls out the photo of her, twelve years old covered in that pink dress. She’s given the photo album back to Sophia by now, but this one she kept all for herself. She doesn’t want any duplicates. Eddie takes a moment before sliding it across the table.

Ramon looks down at it, quietly examines it, then looks back to Eddie. “What is this? Is that you?”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

He looks into it further, squinting and pulling it back. “When was this? I told Pepa…” He sighs, meeting Eddie’s eyes again. “What are you making me look at this for?”

God, she can already feel it. The negativity. The way her dad’s scrutinizing the image. 

“When I was twelve, Sophia, Adriana, and I played dress up at Pepa’s house,” Eddie explains. “There’s a whole photobook of us going on for years, and this day is one of the only ones where I look…happy.”

“What? You don’t look happy in this, you’re not even smiling. Eddie, I don’t understand what this is.”

You don’t know me at all.

“Pepa told me I should dress up because she knew I liked it, and she told me to get changed before Mom came back because she knew what you two thought about it. It didn’t have to mean anything, I was a kid,” Eddie repeats Buck’s words of old. “But it did mean something. It… does.”

Ramon looks at her and places the photo back down on the table. It looks like he’s close to getting it, but doesn’t want to believe it. 

“Eddie…what are you saying?”

She inhales, looking him dead in the eyes. “I’m not the son you wanted,” she confesses quietly. There’s nothing she can do about her watering eyes anymore. “I’m not your son at all.”

He’s fallen completely silent, eyes falling back to the photo. The sunlight holds the girl in its gentle hands. 

“And I’m not…who I am because I dressed up as a kid. I’m not this way because I used to cry when I got hurt. Or—or because I couldn’t be the man of the house like you wanted. I’m not confused, I’m not acting out or being crazy. It’s always been there, you just didn’t wanna see it. See me.”

The first tear streaks down her face, Eddie lets it run. She hears Buck and Chris’ muffled voices again, making her fully cry. “And the man in the room helping my son is—the most amazing person I’ve ever met. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.” 

Shot dead, most likely. 

“I know that I was never in love with Shannon because I know what love actually feels like.” Eddie’s breath stutters in her chest. “It’s nothing like what I thought it would be. And I’ve never felt more free and—and alive in my whole life than I do now, knowing who I am. It’s nice. It’s—it’s really nice, Dad.”

Her heart feels flayed open, like someone’s taken a scalpel to her chest and left her exposed on the surgery table. 

“I just hope you can still see me as your child. Your…your daughter, even. Maybe. You said you don’t want to miss out on my life anymore, so this is it. This is my life. And I’m so proud of it.”

Eddie exhales, wiping her eyes dry as the analog clock ticks away in the silence. 

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

It’s deafening.

Eddie sits through the agonizing wait for her dad to say something to her. It must be five whole minutes before he opens his mouth to respond.

“So…you’re happy this way?” Ramon questions quietly. 

It isn’t a jab, or a passive aggressive comment about her life, or undermining her feelings. He really means it. 

She nods once. 

“Then…no matter how I feel about it, I can’t stop you living that life,” he says. “I don’t want to keep my…my…daughter. From being happy. That’s not what a father does.”

Eddie cries again, hands pressed to her eyes as she nods faster, a sad noise crawling out of her throat. “Thank you,” she whispers shakily, throat all knotted up and aching. 

“Have you told your mom?”

“No…”

Ramon hums. “Are you going to?”

Eddie shrugs. “I’m not sure.”

“Okay.” There’s another long silence. “So I—I don’t get it, what should I call you when…”

-

Eddie ends up telling her mom. It’s the morning, the sun has just fully come up by the time she leaves her childhood home once again. Maybe she’ll come back, maybe she won’t.

Helena hadn’t been nice about it. She was never the kind to listen and learn, always judgmental, always thinking she knew what was best. She took Eddie by the hands and told her she was going through a midlife crisis, that just because things were going bad didn’t mean she had to flip her life upside down. She’s being ridiculous. And just because Shannon didn’t work out doesn’t mean she has to start dating men, there will be someone out there for Eddie. Because Helena knows best.

Eddie doesn’t say goodbye to her.

The truck is packed up and Chris is in the back with his Switch, phone, and headphones all piled on his lap. Buck’s driving, because he always does. He even joked about it earlier, calling Eddie his ‘passenger princess’, which she both loved and hated at once. It’s embarrassing, because Eddie hates driving, and it’s cute, because Eddie hates driving. 

She gets in the truck, the warm sunrise melting against her skin through the window. She leans into it, head angled towards the glass while Buck starts the engine up.

“You ever see those pictures of cats?” Buck says suddenly.

Eddie doesn’t even look at him. “What?”

“Like—there’ll be some sun coming through the window, just a little bit that hits the floor. And the cat will always sit in that spot.”

She cracks an eye open now. “So…?”

Buck gets shy about whatever he’s trying to say. “That’s you,” he smiles. “Cat in the sun.”

“Oookay, Buck.”

“Aw, come on, not even a smile?”

Eddie opens both eyes and makes a wide closed-mouth smile that they both know is exaggerated. Buck leans in and kisses her on the cheek. 

“You are so gross,” Chris comments from behind.

Eddie sighs. “Thank you, Chris.”

“You’re welcome.”

Buck chuckles, quickly checking the GPS and all the mirrors before exclaiming out, “Alright, team, time to head home!”

“Jesus Christ.”

5.

The lease on Buck’s loft lasts for about another month, so he isn’t able to fully move in yet, but he sure as hell can act like he is. There wasn’t much over there that he didn’t have a spare of in Eddie’s house. Like a toothbrush, clothes, uniforms, shoes, groceries. He’s basically already moved in, but sometimes has to go over there for, say, the exact mug he really needed to use in that moment, or the pair of socks he happened to be in the mood for. 

Currently, it’s main use is Designated After Date Zone because…well, they have a kid and are both very noisy people. They’ve gotten two complaints, but Buck disregards it because it’s not like they can soundproof the loft, there is almost no way to get them to shut up, and Buck’s lease lasts for two more weeks. These people are never going to hear from them again.

All of Buck’s belongings fit in about four boxes—one that will stay very far out of sight—and Eddie’s shocked by the lack of things, she would’ve thought Buck had some hidden trinket drawer somewhere.

So Buck moves in, which Chris is ecstatic about because now he ‘doesn’t have to waste anything on the loft’ and can ‘buy him more Fortnite skins’. It’s good, this way, waking wrapped up in him every day. She feels safe and warm, like she’s being held by a teddy bear or maybe a weighted blanket with arms and legs. 

When they come back to the station, there’s already a bit of a celebration, but then Eddie comes out…and Bobby plans a barbecue at his and Athena’s new house. 

She wasn’t nervous about telling them all, and had no reason to be. They all kind of knew about her and Buck anyway, it’s the second thing that was the surprise. Bobby hugs her first, telling Eddie he’s proud of her for finding herself. Chim has a similar statement, telling Eddie she just has to come to Buckley-Han game night now so she can see how much of a competitive little shit Buck is. 

Hen invites Eddie to girls' night, which is apparently a secret thing she, Karen, Athena, and Maddie do sometimes, but the invitation is now automatically extended over to her. Eddie remembers all those girl days she was excluded from as a kid and almost cries about it, but manages to keep it together. She’s starting to think something out there is really trying to get her to talk to Maddie, though.

And Eddie casually starts wearing her new clothes around the house like she did the first day she bought them. She’s found a love for really long skirts or—maxi skirts. You can pair them with almost anything and it’s pretty. Eddie likes gold jewelry and the color maroon, and she’s learning how to walk in heels. Mostly because she bought these leather boots that make her about Buck’s height and he loves them.

After a couple months, her hair starts to grow out more, curling up around her neck. It’s not long, but it’s the longest it’s been in years and makes her feel very pretty when she gets to tuck it behind her ears. 

Eventually, she sits Chris down again and feels comfortable enough to ask him if he could call her mom instead of dad, knowing it might be hard because of Shannon. Chris is very okay with it, saying he was wondering if he should start doing it anyway. 

She likes this life. Everything is easy without all that weight pulling her down.

-

Eddie is accidentally proposed to in the middle of the day on a couch wearing sweatpants. 

She’d fallen asleep on the couch the second they got back from work, not even giving herself time to get to the bedroom before conking out for about four hours. She wakes up, hair a mess with her cheek probably slightly indented from the fabric pattern. Seconds later, Buck walks through the door with three bags of groceries that he sets on the table. 

She rubs her eyes, groaning and alerting Buck to her consciousness. 

“Hey, I didn’t wanna move you in case you woke up, thought you needed the sleep,” Buck says from the other room. She watches him put yogurts and meat in the fridge without even thinking about where they should go.

Eddie clears her throat, sitting up with a slight crick in her back. “I don’t think an earthquake would’ve gotten me up,” she mumbles, stretching her arms up. “What time is it?”

“‘Bout one.” Buck instinctually goes through the cabinets, and Eddie watches him through the open archway. Two minutes later, and Buck’s coming back in the living room to take one look at her, eyes practically sparkling. “Wow, you look really pretty right now, Eds.”

Eddie laughs, looking down at herself. “Baby, I’ve got a bedhead and I’m in a t-shirt and old sweatpants. Nothing pretty going on here. Wait till I’m dressed up.”

Buck scoffs, rounding the couch. “What, are you kidding? You—“ He says, planting a knee on the couch and holding Eddie’s warm face in his hands, “—are the most beautiful girl in the world!”

“Buuck…”

“I’m serious!” He exclaims, planting a kiss on Eddie’s nose. “You should see yourself right now, you look so fucking cute. I’m getting cuteness aggression.”

Eddie ducks her head and whines in fake annoyance, not really trying to pull out of Buck’s grasp, but it’s a fun act. “Why do you feel aggressive when you think I’m cute?”

“I have no idea, I just feel like I gotta,” Buck mutters, pressing his lips to Eddie’s forehead, then her cheeks, the mole under her eye—

“Gah, Buck—!” Eddie giggles as he pulls her in for a longer lingering one on the mouth that she melts into. They fall back onto the couch as Buck continues to pepper her with kisses, and it’s nauseatingly sweet. Eddie didn’t think she’d ever get to have this. 

Through all their kisses on the couch, Buck starts getting to her neck, too, murmuring little compliments all while Eddie’s still laughing into the side of his head.

“—Oh my god, I can’t wait to marry you.”

Eddie stills, and Buck pops up, mouth sewn shut.

“Uh…” Buck says stupidly.

She beams, heart full. “You wanna marry me?”

Buck flushes, biting his lip. “Well…yes, but—“

“Okay,” Eddie says.

He tilts his head at her. “Wait, what?”

She giggles again, pressing her thumb into Buck’s birthmark. “I said okay.”

Buck blinks like he just learned how to do it, it’s adorable. “Wait, but—Eddie, I didn’t—“

“You don’t want to?”

“No—! No, no, no, I do! But—“

“So, okay!” Eddie interrupts again. She’s fucking with him, but her heart is beating so loud she doesn’t even care. Buck wants to marry her!

“Eddie, I wanted to propose and like—like get a nice pretty ring for you, like a gold one with a big gem, but not too big cause you aren’t into that. And—and I’d take you out to a really nice place, but I wouldn’t propose there because you’d get embarrassed, so I’d wait until we were here and I’d tell you all the stuff I really really love about you, and I know you’d say yes so I wouldn’t even be worried about it, and it would be so perfect, but I haven’t even bought a ring let alone made dinner reservations, and—“

Eddie kisses him.

Buck pulls back to ramble even more, face the same color as the pink splotch on his eyebrow. “Seriously, Eddie, I know you are so so happy right now, your big brown eyes are literally so mesmerizing baby girl—“ He cringes hard. “But I really just. Jesus. Fucking. Eddie?”

She makes a happy little noise and grabs Buck by the face. “Hey, Buck?”

“Mmh?”

“Will you marry me?”

“…Yes…”

6.

It’s five months down the line, and Eddie has a very pretty ring on her finger now. Well, she would if her hands didn’t have paint on them. 

Before the wedding four months ago, she really needed a way to get her nerves and feelings about it out because she kept getting distracted at work thinking about the wedding. Buck was in a similar spot, so they decided to get into art together. Thing is, there was a clear gap in skill, so after they got married, Eddie continued on and Buck decided to support her from the sidelines. 

They have paintings of flowers hung up all around the house now, Buck might be her biggest fan. Chris was shocked, to say the least, when his mom suddenly had art skills while he didn’t know they existed for fourteen years.

She’s just painting one of the petals of this pink lady flower when the door opens and Buck shouts out ‘Honey, I’m home!’. It’s a big joke he started after they got married, because apparently he’s always wanted to say it.  

Buck was just at therapy, and Eddie wants to see how he is. 

“Hi, baby, how was it?” She asks on her way to the living room, hearing Buck drop his keys into the little bowl by the door.

“Good, actually, I think—woah, you are pink.”

At one point into Eddie’s new painting hobby, she decided to buy a pair of cheap overalls so paint didn’t get on her actual nice clothes. She makes a lot of pink flowers, so…the overalls are very pink. Her hands, too, actually.

Eddie shrugs. “Painting. You miss me?”

“Obviously,” Buck says deeply, pulling her in—state of cleanliness disregarded. “Talked about you a little.”

“Oh? All good things I hope?”

“No, sorry, I went to talk shit about my beautiful wife I love very, very much.” Buck pulls her in and kisses her softly. “Of course all good things.” Eddie smiles all big and bright while he pushes her hair behind her ear. “Oh, your hair is getting so long.”

“Mmh, I was thinking about getting a trim soon.”

“Really?”

Eddie nods, swaying into Buck’s hold. “Yeah, past the shoulders is a little awkward. Just above the shoulders was cute, right?”

“Yes, but you’re always cute,” Buck murmurs, kissing her again, making Eddie giggle.

She’s probably covering Buck in pink paint right now, but neither of them seem to care at all, gently swaying in the afternoon light, tracing hearts into each other’s skin.

And later, once Chris is home from school and done with his homework, the three of them settle on the couch to watch a movie together. It’s perfect, the three of them. Her family.

The glow of the TV basks them in an array of colors, and Eddie, who once felt like she was out of time to make a life for herself, finally feels complete. 

———