Work Text:
When they finally get everyone out of the lab and evaluated by a medic, Buck is exhausted. His head aches from the day’s stress and he can’t remember the last time he ate anything. All he wants is to go home and shovel cold leftovers in his mouth and pass out for the next two days.
He throws his turnout and his helmet into one of the engine’s compartments and exhales. His adrenaline has worn off now and he feels dead on his feet. Not for the first time, he finds himself missing Eddie at the end of a call. He never crashed from the adrenaline quite like Buck did, never had the shaking hands or searing headaches that Buck was prone to, and he was always there for Buck to lean against on the engine’s bumper or on the bench in the backseat, warm and steady against Buck’s side.
He’s not here now, probably won’t ever be again, so Buck leans against the truck instead and watches his friends reunite with their families. Maddie checked on him while Chimney was being evaluated, meaning she squeezed him in a hug so hard it made his ribs hurt and sobbed into his chest while she told him how glad she was they were both okay. Now, she’s running her hands through Chimney’s hair and laughing through her tears at whatever horrible joke Chimney has made.
Karen is on an ambulance bumper with her forehead resting against Hen’s, a textbook picture of love and adoration. Athena is standing in front of Bobby with her hands on her hips while he looks up at her like she hung the moon.
Ravi comes up beside him and slaps him on the back. “Thanks for the save,” he says, earnest and sincere.
Buck grins at him. “No problem. Just – don’t ever do that again.”
“I promise,” Ravi laughs. He follows Buck’s line of sight and jerks his head in Hen and Karen’s direction. “You ever wish you had that?”
“Had what?” Buck asks. “A wife?”
“Yeah, I guess. Or,” Ravi shrugs, twisting the shock blanket he’s supposed to be wrapped in between his hands. “Just someone to go home to.”
Buck rubs at his sternum as a sudden sharp pain shoots through it. “Yeah. You?”
“Not quite ready to settle down,” Ravi says, a devilish gleam in his eye as he grins. He laughs when Buck rolls his eyes fondly. “But someday, yeah.”
He heads off to help with clean-up and to check on everyone again before they load the engine up, leaving Buck alone again with nothing but his exhaustion and the ache in his chest.
His phone has been dead since this afternoon – he wonders what Eddie is up to. Maybe he tried another recipe from the cookbook Buck sent him. He’s been obsessed with the slow cooker and he’s getting pretty good with it. Maybe he and Christopher had movie night like they used to do and Eddie poured his M&Ms in the popcorn like the Diaz boys always do. Maybe they went out and did something fun – Christopher is out of school, the possibilities are endless now. They used to have so much fun during the summers. They let Christopher stay up way too late and Eddie was more laid-back, always sunkissed and smiling lazily at Buck from the other end of the couch. It’s not the same over the phone, but Buck figures he’ll call when he gets home if it’s not too late. Maybe Eddie will –
“Hey, Buck,” he hears someone say behind him.
He turns and finds – Eddie and Christopher, matching smiles on their faces, standing there like all of Buck’s dreams as of late.
He freezes. Part of him wonders if it is a dream, some kind of hallucination brought on by something he inhaled inside the lab. Eddie, smiling and gripping Christopher’s shoulder, a gleam in his eyes that never quite computes over FaceTime. Christopher, taller than he had been the last time Buck saw him, hair shorter, looking more grown up than he has any right to.
“Well,” Christopher says impatiently. “Are you just going to stand there?”
Eddie’s laugh bursts out of him, sparkling and gorgeous, echoing through Buck’s head like a song, and Buck is spurred to action, rushing the eight steps it takes him to cross the pavement and get them both in his arms. He nearly cries when he feels them, solid and real, under each of his arms. Christopher’s giggle gets muffled somewhere near his chest and Eddie’s breathy oof of surprise fans across his ear. Eddie’s day-old stubble against his cheek and Christopher’s tangled curls under the palm of his hand. He twists his hand in the back of Eddie’s henley and he holds on too tight, but they both let him.
“You miss us?” Eddie says, teasing, his voice like a melody.
“Not at all,” Buck lies, a sob caught in his throat.
“You’re smothering me,” Christopher mumbles.
Buck lets him go in a hurried motion, an apology on the way, but it dies when he gets his first really good look at Christopher. His eyes well up with tears immediately and he couldn't help but laugh a little. He crouches in front of him even though he almost doesn’t need to anymore – he’s far taller than he was when Buck saw him last. He’s already standing almost up to Eddie’s shoulders. A year ago, he’d been eye level with Eddie’s chest. Buck remembers when Christopher was barely tall enough to get his arms around Buck’s waist, let alone his chest like he had moments ago.
“Wow,” Buck finally manages. “You really grew up on me, huh?”
Christopher just smiles and shrugs. “Maybe you got shorter.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll go with that,” Buck says. He ruffles his hair and pulls him into another hug. “God, I missed you so much. I can’t believe you’re here.”
When his leg won’t tolerate the crouching any longer, he stands up and faces Eddie again. His best friend, looking incredibly fond and – more beautiful than Buck remembers him being, smiling at him in a way that puts a whole new meaning to having butterflies in his stomach. When Eddie touches him, his blood sings. His voice is soft, concerned, better than it ever sounded over the phone when he asks, “Hey, you alright?”
Buck chokes out a half-laugh-half-sob and nods. “I’m okay. Are you okay? What the hell are you doing here?”
Eddie’s cheeks flush and he stutters out the beginning of an explanation, but Christopher interrupts them. “He saw what was happening on the news and then freaked out when you didn’t answer the phone. Then he bought plane tickets and said we were going on vacation.”
“That – isn’t exactly how it happened, okay?” Eddie stammers, wringing his hands together in an old telltale nervous gesture. He glares half-heartedly at Christopher and then looks back at Buck. “I just wanted to come visit. This was unrelated.”
Christopher snorts. “Yeah, right. He was a complete trainwreck til he saw you.”
“Thank you, Christopher,” Eddie says loudly, trying to drown his son out. “God forbid you leave a man his dignity.”
Christopher shrugs. “You were.”
“A trainwreck, huh?” Buck says, smirking at Eddie. “You worried about me?”
Eddie levels him with a look. “No. I actually hoped you’d get a really terrible infectious disease.”
Buck can’t help the way his grin widens. “You’d have to get a new subletter.”
“You’re a terrible tenant.”
“You haven’t even seen the place,” Buck laughs.
“I know what your interior design taste consists of,” Eddie says with an exaggerated shudder. “I felt a shift in the force when you hung that damn bike up.”
Buck hugs him again because he has to, he needs to. He missed him so much that he felt like he was choking on it all the time, couldn’t get through a conversation without saying his name, couldn’t sleep without seeing his face in every dream.
Eddie comes willingly the same way he always has, his arms strong around Buck’s torso, and he sighs. “I’ve been worried about you the entire time, Buck.”
Buck buries his face in Eddie’s shoulder the same way he did all those months ago when Eddie left and inhales Eddie’s cologne – citrus and sandalwood and something like the ocean, Buck’s favorite scent that no candle or air freshener has ever been able to replicate. Trust him, he’s tried. “I’ve been worried about you, too.”
Eddie pulls back with a pleased but nervous expression on his face. He starts to talk but they both hear Hen say is that Christopher? followed by Chimney saying Maddie, does that guy look a scary amount like Eddie or am I losing it?
“You should –” Buck gestures behind him at everyone else. “Say hi.”
Eddie looks over Buck’s shoulder and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, um. Can we talk? Later? At home?”
At home rattles in Buck’s ears. “Home. Yeah, of course.”
Eddie smiles at him – Buck gives himself credit for not going weak in the knees despite the fact that it’s as killer a smile as it’s always been, better than anything else Buck has ever laid eyes on – and squeezes his arm once before following where Christopher has already started walking towards the rest of their team – their family .
Buck watches everyone greet them with pure love and excitement, like they’re a reward for the horrible day they’ve had, and it hits him.
In love doesn’t even begin to encompass everything he feels for Eddie.
–
Some of the other stations take over clean-up on the scene, so all Buck has to do is get the rig back to the station and get his bag. He tries to help with shift change, but they all shoo him out after his shower. He guesses word already got back that Eddie is home to visit, because several of them wink at him when they tell him he needs to get home.
Eddie didn’t want the ruckus seeing everyone on the other shift, so Buck paid for them to uber back to his place – because he quite literally cannot imagine what last minute plane tickets into LAX must have cost him.
It doesn’t mean anything, really. Eddie flew eight hundred miles at the drop of a hat because he thought Buck was in trouble. He showed up at the scene instead of just going to the station or back to the house to wait for him or wait to hear something about him. It doesn’t mean anything. This is what they do for each other. This is what they’ve always done – gone the extra mile or maybe gone too far just to make sure the other person was safe.
Eddie showed up and he hugged Buck like he missed him and he smiled like this was the happiest moment of his life and he asked if they could talk and then he went home to wait for him. And it doesn’t mean anything more than it ever has.
Buck just really, really wants it to.
He opens the front door and is greeted by the smell of something cooking. Eddie and Christopher’s laughter rings through the house. For the first time since he’s lived here, he feels like he’s home .
He used to think the 118 was the only place he ever felt at home, but then he started hanging out at Eddie’s house. And it was always so warm there, so bright. The porch light was always on, no matter what time of night he showed up, like they were waiting for him. Eddie never asked him for a reason, never sent him back to the loft – he just made up the couch and made him a cup of coffee the next morning.
And so then he thought – that’s home. That’s what it’s supposed to feel like. It’s supposed to feel safe and comfortable. It’s supposed to be inviting. It’s supposed to be somewhere you want to be all the time, somewhere you know will always be waiting for you no matter how long you stay away. He didn’t realize until Eddie and Christopher were both gone that the house itself had never really mattered – it wasn’t the walls and the lighting and the pictures and the couch that made the place. It was them .
He doesn’t realize he’s just standing in the kitchen doorway watching them until Eddie says, “You hungry? I didn’t know how long you’d be, so I just threw something together. Macaroni and cheese – I found Bobby’s recipe card on the fridge.”
Buck is starving, so he lets Eddie slide a bowl of it across the island to him before he takes it and sits down at the table next to Christopher. It’s easy to take his usual seat. It’s a different table, but it’s the same shape and the same number of chairs – maybe when he bought it, he’d been subconsciously trying to keep things the same as they had been when Eddie was here. Christopher is already halfway through his bowl and nearly falling asleep in it.
“Long day?” Buck asks, smiling when Christopher startles upright. He nods. “Go crash. There’s a bed in your room.”
Christopher mumbles something that might be goodnight before he ambles down the hallway and closes the door behind him. Buck smiles into his bowl knowing that tomorrow morning, he’ll have a request for him to make breakfast.
“His room?” Eddie says, sliding into the chair Christopher had been occupying.
Buck shrugs. “I always think of it as his. I’ve barely gotten out of the habit of calling this place yours.”
Eddie huffs a laugh and tugs the chair closer. “C’mere, let me look at that cut.”
There’s a small wound, only an inch or so long through Buck’s eyebrow, right through his birthmark, that he’d gotten early that afternoon during the initial call. One of the paramedics from the 133 had looked at it for him and she said it was fine, didn’t even need stitches. She had put a butterfly bandage over it, but he’d lost it in the chaos of getting his team out. “It’s fine.”
“Humor me. My medic skills are getting rusty.” Eddie reaches over and puts gentle fingers against Buck’s jaw, turning his face so the light hits more of it. The angle is a little off, but Buck can still watch his careful, steady touch and gaze as he examines a wound that he wouldn’t give a second thought to most days. The light hits his eyes in a way that highlights their hazel tone among the dark warmth and Buck wonders if he’s always been quite this ethereal or if this is just how love makes him feel.
“What’s the diagnosis, Diaz?” Buck says after a couple of minutes. “Think I’ll make it?”
Eddie laughs softly and runs his thumb just under it and past the corner of Buck’s eye on his way down. “Didn’t mess up your pretty face, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Buck turns his head a little and realizes they’re close enough that he can see the scar on Eddie’s lower lip and the beauty mark under his eye clear as day. He smiles a little. “You think I’m pretty?”
Eddie’s eyes flit around his face and he drops his hand, leaving it to brush against Buck’s forearm. “Don’t fish.”
“You said it,” Buck teases. “Not me.”
The corner of Eddie’s mouth quirks. “I think you might have some head trauma, actually. Or maybe you’re delirious with exhaustion.”
“Must be, cause I still can’t believe you’re really here.”
“Believe it, Buck,” Eddie says, standing up from the table and taking Buck’s empty bowl with him.
Buck watches him move through the kitchen. He realizes, as Eddie pulls tupperware out of a cabinet to put the leftovers in, that the reason Eddie knows where everything is is because Buck put everything exactly where it had been before they moved out.
“What, uh,” Buck says, clearing his throat. “What’d you wanna talk about?”
Eddie freezes for a split second, almost unnoticeable, before he slides the container into the fridge. “It can wait until tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?” Buck asks.
“Yeah,” Eddie assures him. “You’re practically dead on your feet. You should get some rest.”
Buck nods slowly. “Right, uh. You can take my bed, I’m good on the couch.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. “You’re not sleeping on the couch. You think I didn’t see you limping when you walked in here?”
“Couch’ll kill your back,” Buck says around a yawn.
“I’ll live.”
Buck starts to wonder if the argument is even worth it because Eddie is so goddamn stubborn that he’ll sleep on the floor just to prove he doesn’t have the back of an eighty-year-old man, when some delirious, exhausted, half-functional part of his brain says, “My bed is big enough for us both.” Eddie’s jaw drops slightly and his eyes widen, and Buck clamors to take it back. “I, uh, sorry, I don’t –”
“I don’t mind,” Eddie says, sudden and too loud. He winces and clears his throat. “I mean, uh. Yeah. I’m good with that. Sharing the bed. With you. Cool.”
“Cool.”
“Cool,” Eddie repeats, his voice trailing off.
“I’m gonna –” Buck gestures at the door and ducks out of it, kicking himself as he walks down the hall. He’s about to open the bedroom door when he hears Christopher’s door open. He turns back.
Christopher gives him a sarcastic thumbs up. “Real smooth.”
Buck lets out a long sigh and says, “Thank you, Christopher,” and curses the thin walls in this house as he changes for bed.
–
The gravity of his mistake doesn’t hit him when Eddie doesn’t come to bed for another twenty minutes, or when his brain is imagining all the incredibly compromising positions they could wake up in tomorrow morning. No, his mistake hits him when Eddie walks into the room, hair wet from the shower and skin red from the temperature, in a towel , and says, “Forgot my clothes,” casual as anything, like Buck hasn’t had this exact dream before.
Eddie leaves again, and Buck wonders what he did in a past life to deserve this.
It gets worse , unimaginably worse, so much fucking worse, when Eddie comes back for a second time smelling like Buck’s shower gel and wearing one of Buck’s old academy t-shirts that he left here once and never saw again.
“Is that my shirt?” Buck blurts before he can think better of it.
Eddie looks down at where it hangs off his narrower frame and blushes. “Uh. Yeah. Guess when I packed for the move, I thought it was mine.”
“Cool,” Buck says again , and he’s pretty sure he’s never said cool so many times in his life as he has tonight.
Eddie slides in on the side of the bed that Buck never touches – they don’t even have to argue about it. In some perfect twist of fate, they naturally sleep on opposite sides of the bed. Buck feels like the universe is pointing and laughing in his face. Eddie shows up like the beautiful whirlwind he’s always been in Buck’s life, showers with Buck’s body wash, comes to bed in Buck’s clothes, and climbs in on the other side of Buck’s bed like it’s been waiting for him to come home and take it up.
Buck waits a couple of minutes, and then he flips the bedside lamp off.
For somewhere between ten minutes and a hundred years, they lay in silence, not touching, with two very careful inches between them. Buck is going to crawl out of his skin.
“I’m gay,” Eddie blurts out, breaking the silence so suddenly that Buck nearly jumps out of the bed. “That’s… not how I was going to say that. Jesus.”
Buck’s heart hammers against his ribcage. “It’s fine. That’s – I’m proud of you. How did you – You – did you – I mean – did you meet someone?”
“No,” Eddie says, still staring at the ceiling. “No, there’s no one.”
“Oh,” Buck says dumbly. “Cool.”
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“I don’t know,” Buck groans, running one hand over his face. “I’m sorry, I’m – I’m really happy for you, Eddie. Thanks for telling me. That’s – huge, man, really.”
“Thanks,” Eddie whispers, the smile in his voice audible.
Silence settles back over the room and Buck listens for Eddie’s breathing to even out, the soft snores that always give him away when he’s fallen asleep, but they never come. Eventually, Buck rolls onto his side and faces him.
Eddie looks over. The moonlight seeping in through the curtains illuminates his face and Buck thinks I could look at him for the rest of my life . “Christopher told me he hates El Paso,” he says, barely above a whisper.
Buck keeps his earnest hope in check when he says, “Oh. Chess and El Paso? Long list.”
Eddie snorts out a laugh and pushes himself up a little in bed so he’s leaned up against the headboard. He looks down at Buck. “What do I do?”
“Uh,” Buck starts, moving to sit up a little. He pulls at a loose thread at the hem of Eddie’s – his – shirt. “What do you wanna do?”
“He wants to move home,” Eddie says, his voice velvet smooth, a low rumble that Buck feels in his bones. He watches Buck’s hand. “I can’t afford a new place.”
“You don’t need one,” Buck offers immediately. “I can –”
“I’m not putting you out, Buck, stop –”
“It’s your house, Eddie –”
Eddie’s hand darts out and covers Buck’s, dropping them down so they’re resting against Eddie’s hip, bare where his shirt has ridden up and his shorts are slung low. “What if I just don’t want you to go?”
Buck looks up at him and sees his face, open and vulnerable like he’s afraid of Buck’s answer. Like Buck would ever want to be somewhere besides where Eddie and Christopher are, like he’s ever belonged anywhere else.
“I – I’d stay. If you wanted me to,” Buck says, his throat impossibly dry. “It’d be cramped to have all three of us here.”
“How come?” Eddie asks, his thumb rubbing a distracting pattern over Buck’s wrist.
“Uh,” Buck says, his eyes drawn to their joined hands. His tongue feels flimsy in his mouth and he can’t really think straight. There’s nowhere to look – down at their hands or up at Eddie’s eyes, and both options fill him to the brim with feelings he doesn’t know how to express. “It’s, uh. Two bedrooms.”
“Okay?”
“Eddie,” Buck says, sitting up straight. He doesn’t pull his hand away. “You don’t know what you’re asking me for here.”
Eddie scoots into their two inches of untouched space and leans closer, his eyes flitting over Buck’s face and lingering on his mouth. “You wanna know how I realized I was gay?”
“Yeah,” Buck rasps.
“I kept talking about you,” Eddie says, holding his and Buck’s hands up between them like he’s studying them. He lets go only long enough to place their palms flat together and then slide his fingers into the spaces between Buck’s. “It was like – everything reminded me of you, you know. God, I couldn’t get through one conversation without mentioning you. And one day, I’m talking to Adriana and I’m telling her that story about when we went to the Lakers game –”
“When you changed my tire even though it had a boot?” Buck asks. Eddie nods with a grin. “You never told me how you knew how to do that.”
“I’ll tell you about my criminal teenage past some time,” Eddie says with a wink before going back to his story. “Anyway, I’m talking to Adriana, and she’s bored to death with the story, and she tells me she hasn’t heard somebody be that lovesick since Sophia met her husband.
“And I thought, I should deny it. I’m not lovesick, right? I just miss him. And then I just – didn’t say anything. I went back to the house and I just kept wondering if – if that's how you sounded when you talked about me, too. I wondered if you were missing me enough that people thought damn, he’s gotta be hung up on that guy. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted you to be.”
“Hung up on you?” Buck asks, watching the shadow Eddie’s eyelashes paint over his cheeks.
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Awful, right? But I couldn’t help it. I wanted to be the only person for you. I wanted you to miss me so much that –”
“That it had to seem like I was in love with you?”
“Yeah,” Eddie whispers, looking back up at Buck.
It knocks the air out of his lungs, but Eddie has been known to do that. When he showed up at the firehouse seven years ago, when he told Buck he could have his back, when he swam out of the well, when he told Buck that he wanted him to have Christopher, when Buck thought Eddie had found someone he liked better. When he showed up tonight and Buck felt all the wrong pieces of his heart slide back into place. Eddie has always been breathtaking.
“I don’t think I’ve made it through a conversation without mentioning you since we met, Eddie,” Buck says around a laugh. “I think I’ve always seemed like I was in love with you.”
“Yeah?” Eddie says. “Are you?”
“In love with you?” Eddie nods and Buck squeezes his hand tightly, using his other to brush a strand of hair out of Eddie’s eyes. “Eddie. How could I not be?”
“Thank God,” Eddie breathes into the nonexistent space between them just before he surges forward and steals Buck’s breath again with a kiss.
Eddie kisses like he does everything else – with careful, measured, gentle movements and single-minded focus. Buck feels like they’re the only two people in the world in this moment, like the universe ceases existence outside their bedroom door, outside Eddie’s hand threading through his hair and the other one clasped tight in his own. Buck feels the divot of the scar in Eddie’s lip with his tongue and wonders how many other perceived imperfections on Eddie’s body will feel like they were crafted by the gods under his tongue.
“If this isn’t what you wanted to talk about earlier,” Buck pants when Eddie reluctantly lets him go, “It’s definitely gonna have to wait til tomorrow. I think you’ve dropped enough bombs on me for one night.”
“I can’t have one more?” Eddie asks, head tilted to the side and bottom lip poking out. Buck wants him so bad that he’s dizzy with it. “What if I wanted to get married?”
Buck stops cold. “Do you?”
Eddie raises an eyebrow. “Do you? ”
“Eddie, I would do literally anything you asked me to do, bar none,” Buck says, cupping Eddie’s face in his palm and melting a little when Eddie turns and presses a kiss to his palm. “But that is not what you were going to ask me.”
Eddie grins, devilishly pleased with himself and bumps his nose against Buck’s. “I was just going to ask if we could move back in.”
Buck fakes a wince and shifts their weight to start pushing Eddie onto his back. “Well, we’ll have to talk about that one.”
Eddie goes down willingly, malleable and taffy-soft, and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, seems like you really wanna talk.”
Buck braces himself over Eddie and kisses along his jaw, down his neck, pulling aside the loose collar of his shirt to get to his collarbone. “So much talking, Eddie, you have no idea.”
Eddie’s laugh gets trapped under the comforter as Buck pulls it over them.
–
In the morning, Eddie brings him a cup of coffee and sits on the edge of the bed, sleep-rumpled and gorgeous.
“Morning, sweetheart,” Eddie says as he leans in for a kiss, morning breath be damned.
“Sweetheart?” Buck mutters against his mouth.
“Yeah, I’m trying it out,” Eddie says, brushing a kiss to Buck’s cheek. “You don’t like it?”
“Mm, say it again,” Buck says, turning his head to try and catch Eddie’s lips again.
Eddie smiles. “Sweetheart,” he says against Buck’s lips.
Buck likes it so much that his coffee is cold by the time they make it out of bed.