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Buck has no idea why Eddie isn’t wearing pants, and he honestly doesn’t care.
Best friend code means Eddie can be pantsless, mustachioed, de-mustachioed, get a bad dye job or start fighting in an illegal street boxing ring (crazy that they’re at four out of five on that list), and Buck will be there to support him, make fun of him, or pick up the pieces.
And best friend code also means Eddie silently takes the bottle Buck hands him, leads the way to the couch, and lets Buck get through at least two and a half beers without talking.
There’s something comforting in the silence, besides the obvious comfort of Eddie next to him. In the silence, the break up is still only in Buck’s head (and Tommy’s, he guesses). The liminal space between having gone through it and then not speaking about it out loud yet lets him live, for just a moment, in a place where it hasn’t quite happened.
Where it might be a bad dream because Buck had too much pad thai at the restaurant they were going to.
Where it might be something Tommy will take back.
Eventually, though, Buck needs to say it, even with how much it hurts.
“Tommy broke up with me.”
It feels like a bomb going off, saying it out loud, just like it felt when he was actually going through it. Devastation upon devastation.
Eddie hisses a breath next to him.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “I’m sorry, Buck. I’m, uh. I’m guessing it wasn’t mutual?”
Buck snorts into his beer and regrets it immediately when bubbles drift into his nose. Truly, can’t he have this one thing? Like, successfully drinking a beer?
“I asked him to move in with me.”
Eddie is quiet for a moment, and Buck doesn’t even need to look at him to know he’s raising his eyebrows and making a silly face trying to figure out what to say.
“Well. You know I’ve got your back,” he says after a moment, putting a bracing hand on Buck’s back. “Whatever you need, whenever, I’m here. You know that.”
And Buck does, truly. But also—
“I know you do. And I’m definitely finishing this six-pack and also probably the one you have in your fridge and passing out on your couch for at least three to five days,” Buck tells him. “But I need you to have his, too.”
Eddie frowns.
“D’you mean—”
“Yeah,” Buck nods. “I know that bros before, uh. Bros, or whatever, but I think that’s kinda dumb when the other bro is also your friend. And I think he’s just kinda expecting you to vanish, too, and leave him alone.”
Tommy’s face back at the loft flashes in his mind, and then Tommy in the cemetery, and Tommy in a million different moments, revealing—whether he meant to or not—just how much he craved belonging to people.
And maybe he doesn’t want to belong to Buck, but he’ll be damned if he contributes to Tommy’s goddamned self-fulfilling prophecy that has him choking back tears on Eddie’s couch.
“It’s what he’s most afraid of, I think—being left alone,” Buck says softly. “So he tries to leave people first.”
Eddie hums in agreement, takes another drag from his beer.
“Alright. I promise I’ll have Tommy’s back, too.”
They go through two more beers, and somewhere in the middle of them Buck finally figures out how to make Eddie’s phone stop playing Old Time Rock and Roll.
“You’ll be okay, Buck,” Eddie eventually says, rolling his head to look over at Buck—he’s almost lying down on the couch, at this point, and so is Buck. “You’re bisexual! There’s, like, even more fish in the sea than usual. Like, one hundred percent of the fish.”
Buck sighs.
“Yeah, but I don’t want other fish. Tommy’s the only fish I want—he’s, uh. He’s the whale. The white whale, even.”
Eddie sputters out a surprised laugh. “Like Moby Dick?”
“I mean, listen, Eddie, if you ever saw his—”
“I’m gonna stop you right there,” Eddie interrupts. “Way too much information.”
“You’re the one who started talking about fish!” Buck complains. “Just for that, you’re in charge of getting more beer from the fridge.”
“Fine,” Eddie says, rolling his eyes, but dutifully standing up and heading to the kitchen.
He only almost trips a couple of times.
He hands Buck a fresh beer and sits back down next to him, and they keep drinking. It’s going to be a long, long night, but at least it won’t be lonely.
He announces the breakup as soon as he arrives at his shift, and immediately after tells everyone he’s just fine and doesn’t want to talk about it.
Hen and Chim stare at him, then back at each other, and then back at him.
Bobby clears his throat.
“What?” Buck asks.
“Buck, you’re not wearing pants,” Eddie says behind him, voice a little tired, like he’s said that a few times already.
Buck looks down and realizes that, yeah, he’s wearing a t-shirt and briefs along with Eddie’s house shoes, which are at least one size too small for him. He has a vague memory of Eddie trying to remedy the situation before they left for their shift, but Buck woke up today with the firm idea that if he thought about anything besides getting to work on time he’d probably start crying and never stop.
“How about you put on some pants and I’ll make some breakfast,” Bobby offers quietly.
Buck nods, and if he tears up a little into his waffles fifteen minutes later, everyone’s kind enough not to draw attention to it, except for Hen putting one more waffle on his plate.
Once he gets into the rhythm of work, it’s as absorbing as usual: there’s no real room to think about getting his stupid heart broken by a stupid hot pilot when trying to figure out how to extract someone from a malfunctioning cybertruck, and there’s something frankly liberating about deconstructing the stupidest car he’s ever seen with a saw and hammer.
It’s when his shift is over that the grief finds him again, and some unadvised, petty part of him decides to take Tommy up on his presumption.
“D’you want pizza tonight? Or Chinese?” Eddie asks, as they’re walking out of the firehouse.
“Neither,” Buck replies. “I’m going to a bar.”
“You are?”
Eddie looks disbelieving and a little worried.
“Yep,” Buck confirms, voice firm, projecting cool confidence. When he realizes Eddie is staring down at his feet—Buck’s back to wearing his too-small house shoes because the only other shoe option he had were his work boots—he adds, “I’m gonna go change first.”
“Alright,” Eddie says after a moment, voice still cautious. “But take an Uber, okay? And come back to mine after, no matter what time it is.”
Buck puts on his tightest pants and tightest shirt, puts enough product in his hair to settle his curls down.
He hadn’t been doing that, lately, because it felt unnecessary: he’s felt so calm and free and he feels like his spine melts every time Tommy grabs his hair when they’re in bed.
But they’re not going to be in bed anymore, and his curls feel like they belong to someone else right now: to a Buck that was finally at ease, a Buck that was kidding himself thinking he was moving forward into a version of himself he wouldn’t have to upgrade again.
So he orders an Uber and walks into the first bar in WeHo that feels right, and he’s only had a shot and half a beer before there’s someone sidling up behind him.
The guy is a little taller than him but not as buff, and he has jet black hair and striking green eyes. He looks absolutely nothing like Tommy.
It’s enough for Buck to lean back into him, to let a couple of lackluster dances turn into grinding and then a blowjob in the bar’s bathroom, because if he’s going to do a rebound, at least he’s not pathetic enough to be having casual sex with someone who reminds him of his ex.
When he eventually leaves the bar, though, shivering in the cold night air while he’s waiting for his Uber, he has to admit that he is pathetic enough to feel like he’s twenty-four years old again, making losing bargains with his body over and over again while desperately trying to find someone who’d stay.
Tommy said he was meant to be Buck’s first and not his last, and on the sidewalk outside of a bar Buck never wants to go back to, it feels like a curse.
A day after Buck finally stops crashing on Eddie’s couch and makes his way back to the loft, Bobby shows up at the door.
Buck was kinda half-expecting him—he wasn’t sure if it was Maddie, Hen, or Bobby that Eddie was texting as Buck was packing up the things he’d taken over to his house, but he did suspect that another “Buck Up Buck” operation was ongoing.
Instead of carrying tupperware with comfort food or a bag of ingredients, though, Bobby is holding a round potted plant.
“Uh, what’s this?” Buck asks, gesturing towards the pot.
“It’s an olive tree,” Bobby says.
Buck tilts his head. “It looks more like a branch.”
Bobby rolls his eyes and walks past Buck into the loft, right toward the balcony doors, and sets the pot gently down in front of them, before turning back to Buck.
“About three months after I first got sober, my sponsor got me a plant,” he begins, and whatever Buck was going to say dies in his mouth because Bobby so rarely talks about his sobriety with Buck.
It’s the sort of thing he knows Bobby talks about with Chim and even with Eddie whenever they’re sharing Catholic angst, but Buck only has that one really, really rough day where Bobby asked him and Hen for help.
“I was at this dangerous stage in the process, I think, where I’d finally been sober long enough that it seemed like I might stay that way for a bit longer, but where that also meant I’d now been sober enough to have so much of the damage I’d done to others and to myself sink in,” Bobby continues.
“And so I got a plant, and very clear instructions to keep it alive for one month. It seemed like such a small thing, but it turned out to be pretty hard—I under-watered it the first week, over-watered it the second… by the end of the month, though, the plant had made it and so had I. And I figured out that’s what my sponsor wanted. For me to focus on something outside of myself: outside of my own grief and my own demons, if only for as long as it took to keep some leaves green.”
Buck blinks quickly, trying not to tear up. It always makes him hurt to think about Bobby back then—so alone and in so much pain.
And it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate Bobby sharing, or the plant, because the olive tree actually looks pretty cute now that he’s gotten a better look at it, but…
“Thanks for sharing that, Bobby, and for the tree,” he says cautiously. “But, um, I promise I’m not gonna drink my broken heart away or something.” He pauses, thinks about the three to five days he spent on Eddie’s couch and the perhaps unadvisable number of beer bottles that ended up in the recycling bin. “Not anymore, anyway.”
Bobby gives him a small, warm smile. “I know, Buck—but grief of any kind has a way of draining purpose from us, until we think maybe we’re nothing but that broken heart. So I brought you a plant, and whatever else you do, I want you to keep it alive for a month.”
Buck wonders if maybe Bobby knows about the bathroom hook-ups and feels a zing of discomfort. He really doesn’t want to be Firehose in Bobby’s eyes ever again, or in his own.
“Okay, I promise.”
And maybe Bobby knew exactly what he was doing because instead of more beer or random blowjobs in a bar, Buck goes on a research spiral to figure out the best light and watering schedule for his little olive tree.
Then, he decides it looks a little lonely and buys a couple of snake plants which seem to be pretty resilient and also apparently help with oxygen circulation. And then he starts reading even more and gets worried about the bees, so he sets up three big pots of lavender out on the balcony.
He also buys a small string of hearts, sets it up upstairs on the bookshelf, and refuses to think too much about why it makes his chest hurt a little, to see the pairs of little leaves flowing downwards.
By the end of the month, he has a watering calendar up on the fridge and on his phone, a bright blue watering can, and three different types of plant fertilizer.
The olive tree is alive, and so is Buck, and he knows that he’s more than his grief.
But his heart still feels pretty broken, like a small leaf from a string of hearts left without a pair on the string, withering.
Nearly two months to the day after Tommy broke up with him, Buck is at the firehouse when he gets a call from Lucy Donato.
He hasn’t talked to her since the last time he went out with the Harbor people with Tommy–probably a good three months–so he answers with apprehension. “Hello?”
“Hey, Buckley—if anyone asks, you and I didn’t have this call, but I happen to think someone was an idiot, and you deserve to know. Tommy got hurt on a call today.”
The bottom drops out of Buck’s stomach.
He’d thought about getting a call like this when they were together—it was impossible not to think about it, really, but given their mutual track records he always figured that the call was probably going to be the other way around.
“Is it bad?” he manages to ask, after clearing his throat twice.
“It’s not great. He’ll make it through, but recovery’s going to be a bitch.”
“Can I—is it okay if I go to the hospital?”
“Why the hell do you think I called in the first place? We’re at LA General.”
When Buck hangs up, taking a shaky breath, he looks up to find Eddie, Hen, and Chim all staring at him.
“It’s Tommy,” he explains. “He’s stable but, uh. Lucy said recovery would be hard.”
Chim nods. “We figured. How about Eddie drives you, and right after we’re done with the shift, the rest of us will follow.”
Buck looks towards Bobby’s office.
“We’ll talk to Cap, it’ll be fine,” Hen reassures him. “Get going, and let us know what we should get for him as soon as you can, okay?”
Eddie steers him towards the locker room and more or less coaches him through getting changed and getting into his giant stupid truck, and usually Buck never, ever misses the chance to make fun of it but he can’t really think of anything beyond Tommy got hurt on a call today and finding out because Lucy called and not because he’s Tommy’s emergency contact.
They’d talked about doing that, is the thing, a couple of weeks before the breakup, and then obviously didn’t.
Maybe it’s something they should’ve done, before Buck asked Tommy to move in: exchanged “I love yous” and emergency contact numbers and probably learned a little more about each other’s dating history.
Maybe it was classic Buck, after all, overcorrecting how taken aback he’d felt about the Abby reveal by going for a big gesture.
But even with those maybes, he still can’t find it in himself to regret asking, because he really meant it.
For the first time in his big gesture history—from hot air balloons to waiting in an empty apartment for months and months to proposing a move-in instead of confessing to a kiss to donating sperm, he truly, genuinely feels he did it because he finally felt at ease with someone and like he was enough for them, rather than too little or too much.
And maybe it turns out it wasn’t true on Tommy’s side, but that doesn’t take away from how true it felt for Buck.
When they make it to the waiting room it’s only Lucy and Tommy’s captain waiting, and Buck remembers that Tommy gets along well with the Harbor crew, trusts them, obviously, but that they’re not like the 118.
They don’t do the whole waiting together, plus-ones and a lot of contraband food included.
So after getting an update—the captain’s been in to see Tommy, he’s hanging in there, recovery will be long because it was a pretty bad leg injury, they’ll let another round of visitors in at six—Buck sits down and hunkers over his phone calendar, taps out a painstaking rotation of cooking and cleaning and driving to-and-from doctor and rehab appointments, and sends it to the 118 A shift group-chat.
He gets four immediate thumbs up, even from Eddie who’s literally sitting next to him, and a request from Bobby to update him on whether Tommy’s still partial to his gnocchi.
Buck promises he’ll ask and then, with Eddie’s help, puts together a list of basic stuff Hen, Chim, and Bobby can bring over after their shift which might make Tommy’s time in the hospital more comfortable—between all of the members of the 118, they have exact blanket types, non-itchy sweatshirts, and the perfect warm socks down to a science.
Once the planning and the lists are done, Buck doesn’t have anything else to distract himself with, and the wait feels as interminable as it always has, being on this side of the doors with someone he cares about on the other.
The time is good for something, at least, because Buck finally gets the go ahead to visit Tommy right after everyone else arrives and Hen hands him the bag they put together, so at least he’s not going in empty handed.
His first glimpse of Tommy is rough.
It was obviously never going to be easy to see him after the break-up, but seeing him look inexplicably small in the hospital bed, grimacing in pain as he shifts without trying to jostle his elevated leg, it makes it a million times worse.
“Hey,” Buck says, softly.
Tommy glances up, and Buck can read so much on his face: shock, mostly, and a little sadness, but also what Buck can only call yearning.
“Hey,” Tommy replies. “How did—Donato called you.”
“Got it in one,” Buck says, walking farther into the room, wanting desperately to make it all the way to Tommy’s side so he can hold his hand or kiss his forehead, but forcing himself to stop by his feet. “I brought you a few basics we put together because Lucy and your captain said you might be here a while.”
He sets the bag carefully in the space next to Tommy’s good leg and opens it, taking out a pair of socks and one of the crossword books to show Tommy.
“We’ve got socks in here, and some stuff to pass the time—there’s also a deck of cards—and a blanket that the 118 has stress-tested as the absolute best hospital blanket because it’s not too heavy but it’s super warm.”
Tommy’s frowning a little, looking confused.
“Uh, I’m sure it’s a good blanket, but,” he pauses, visibly swallows. “Evan, who’s we?”
Buck feels some kind of way because Tommy’s using his first name again, but he tries to stay focused.
“Well, the 118, of course,” he says. “Eddie, Bobby, Hen, Chim—they’re out in the waiting room, and, uh, we know that recovery is going to be long, so we’ve got a roster together to help out once you get out.”
Tommy just stares at him, wide-eyed, mouth a little open, and it’s disarming to see him so shocked, nearly… fragile.
Tommy is many things—confident and capable, a little bitchy, dry-humored, sexy—but fragile is not something Buck has ever really thought of him.
Maybe he should have, though.
Maybe they both should have given each other a little more space to be more than their best qualities or best selves, instead of proposing to move in together and succeeding in breaking up instead.
“I told you you were one of our people,” Buck explains, a little defensive. He was talking to Billy Boils back at the cemetery, sure, but he was also obviously talking to Tommy. “So even if you don’t want to be my boyfriend or love me or whatever, you still have us. You still have a family.”
Tommy blinks quickly, and then says, “Of course I love you, that’s why I broke up with you.”
Which. What?
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Buck says. “And I’ve heard some pretty dumb things.”
“You’re—you deserve so much more, Evan,” Tommy tells him, shaking his head. “I told you, you’re this brilliant, impulsive, hot as hell package, and I’m—I’m a guy on the other side of forty who wasn’t gonna survive it when you decided to pull the plug.”
“Who the hell ever said anything about deserving anything?” Buck exclaims, frustrated. “We’re not, like, prizes at the fair, Tommy, we’re people. We don’t go around deserving or not deserving each other, we love and want each other or we don’t, and I want you.”
“Well I want you, too,” Tommy says, sounding just as pissed as Buck does.
They stare at each other for a beat, and then start laughing in unison.
“Okay, then,” Buck says, after catching his breath. “Is the stupidest break up in the world over? Can I kiss you now?”
Tommy smiles, and it’s the soft, perfect smile he gave Buck on the deck of a rescue ship, and while giving him a tour of Harbor, and after rearranging his brain and his worldview in his kitchen.
“Please,” he says.
So Buck does.