Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

My sister shakes me by the shoulders and says:
Mom will never be the mother you need her
to be. She cannot give you the love
you deserve to receive.
This is something I am trying to accept.

- blythe baird, 'when my family discovers i do not love the way they taught me to love'

Eddie’s uniform shirt is covered in paint.

He’s laid it out on the bench, sleeves out to the sides, and is standing looking at it like he can divine something from the pattern, stark white on blue. The station is alive around him, the door to the locker room creaking open again and again as people gather their things in a hurry and sprint out, headed home for the first time in days.

That’s what he should be doing, too. The fact that he’s still here an hour after they were dismissed sits heavily on his conscience, because he has a son, and a girlfriend, and a whole house that’ll be in disarray after the blackout. All of them need him, and instead he’s—

He can’t tear his eyes away from the handprint. The outline of Athena’s long, slim fingers where she’d grabbed him in a death grip as they pulled Harry out of the wall. A phantom of it still lingers around his forearm, cold and strong and desperate.

Her son. Her son who’s okay, for now.

“Eddie?” Buck’s voice echoes in the locker room. Something that had been wound tight at the very top of Eddie’s spine relaxes involuntarily. “What are you still doing in here?”

Eddie shakes his head slowly in an effort to dislodge this—this.

“Just feels weird, man,” he says. “To be leaving.”

Buck laughs. “Tell me about it,” he says, pulling his locker open. He’s usually careless about it, letting the door slam all over the place; this time, he keeps a white-knuckled grip on it, holding on even as he digs through the contents with his other hand.

Eddie looks away.

He turns the words over in his mind, letting them tumble and tumble and tumble, collapsing on themselves in a never-ending spin cycle. He’s never had a problem talking to Buck before, and yet here they are.

He takes a breath.

“Hey, you okay?”

Buck stills. Eddie’s not looking at him, but he can feel it in the air: the fake nonchalance, entering the room like a whole extra presence. That’s how much energy it’s going to take for Buck to grin and say—

“I’m good,” he smiles, his head popping out from behind the open locker door. He looks just this side of manic. “I mean—as good as I can be, I guess, with everything. But the important thing is we got there on time. And we get to go home and go to sleep for a few days.”

“Mm,” Eddie hums. “Taylor waiting for you?” he asks, and reaches for his ruined shirt. He crumples it into a ball and throws it, unseeing, into his locker.

He makes a feeble mental note to fill out the form to have it replaced when he comes in for his shift in a couple days’ time, and then slams the door closed, which he realizes too late is a strategic mistake.

“Nah, she’s still covering the blackout,” says Buck, and a beat of silence rings, so very loud, between them. “See you on Thursday?” he asks finally, latching onto the fact that Eddie now has no excuse to be lingering.

Eddie wants to claw out of his skin. If he could just—leave it, for a minute. Let it pool on the floor and go wash himself clean in the shower so he feels like a person again, and not whatever the fuck this is.

He swallows more words. Do you want me to pass on a message? and You’re not going to ask? and I didn’t know how to tell you that I heard you.

“Sure,” he says instead, pulling the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder. He lets himself look at Buck, really look: at the clean, dry curls drooping over his forehead; at the smile that has wilted into something vaguely sour; at the way his hands are shaking and shaking and shaking where they’re curled around the hoodie he’s holding.

Really, Eddie takes one look at those, and immediately barrels through his own walls.

“You want to come home with me?”

Buck’s eyes snap to him like a shot. “What?”

Against his will, Eddie smiles. “I’m going home,” he says. “To see my kid. Do you want to come with?”

Buck blinks at him. His eyes are huge and blue and a little terrified in the bright morning light that’s flooding the station.

“Can I?” he asks, in the smallest voice Eddie’s ever heard.

He’s pathetically helpless against it.

“I just offered, didn’t I?” Eddie asks, because he sort of wants to see a different emotion on Buck’s face. Something less terrifying. “I—kinda assumed you’d just come, actually.”

Because there is one emotion he can identify with certainty in the whirlwind that are his insides: longing. Longing to cross his own threshold and fall to his knees and just hold his not-so-little boy until he’s forgotten that anything else exists.

And if there is one thing he knows with certainty about Buck, it’s that he’s feeling the exact same thing.

“I didn’t want to, um,” Buck bites the inside of his lip, looking down at his trembling hands, “to assume, or whatever. I didn’t know if you were going to—“

“I’ll think about anything that isn’t Christopher once I’ve had at least twelve hours of solid sleep,” Eddie interrupts, because he refuses to hear the end of Buck’s sentence. Refuses to be brought back to that gross sweaty cot, to Buck’s eyes on him that screamed how disappointed he was.

Eddie’s used to disappointing people. He’ll get used to the idea of disappointing Buck too, eventually.

But it won’t be today.

“Christopher,” Buck repeats, smiling a whole other smile, still not looking at Eddie. “Does he know you’re coming?”

“We’re coming,” Eddie raises his eyebrows. “And no, he doesn’t. I still kind of feel like we’re going to walk out of here and the lights will go out again. Didn’t want to jinx it.”

A familiar spark in Buck’s eye. “You believe in jinxes now?” he grins, and finally pulls the hoodie on over his head. Eddie doesn’t linger to watch it pull tight across his chest.

“I do when I’ve been at work for five days,” he replies instead, taking a step backward because he knows Buck’s going to follow. “So hurry up.”

Buck’s eyes glint. Eddie opens his mouth to goad him a little more, because this Buck is familiar ground, but then all six foot two of the man barrels past Eddie and through the doorway, sprinting across the bay out to the parking lot.

Something soft and quiet and happy trembles in Eddie’s chest. He knows this, like he knows that he’s going to come outside and find Buck leaning back against his already running Jeep, grinning, probably calling Eddie some variation of an old man. He knows he’ll back his truck out of its spot and immediately see familiar headlights in his rearview that won’t let go until they’re home.

Then he takes a step, and everything falls back into place with a clang, caging him in. It’s not that simple anymore, and maybe it never was.

Maybe Eddie’s just been that good at pretending.

It’s nine in the morning, and Eddie’s lights are on.

“Your lights are on,” Buck says as he hops out of the Jeep, something newly jittery about him. Eddie can relate: now that he’s here, every inch of his skin is itchy and alight with nerves.

“I can see that,” he frowns, grabbing his duffel bag and locking the truck. Behind him, Buck locks the Jeep without taking anything out of it. “Guess they’re just enjoying having electricity again.”

He almost says her name – her, as if he isn’t in a relationship with her, as if she hasn’t been holding down the fort with Christopher for almost a week straight – but it gets stuck in his throat and doesn’t budge, as if his subconscious knows something he doesn’t.

Buck frowns, and quickly tries to hide it.

Eddie turns away from him to open his front door.

A loud yell of “Dad!” immediately echoes through the living space, and then Christopher spills out of the dining room and throws himself at Eddie, and then Eddie’s closing his eyes and breathing him in and thanking a God he might no longer believe in. Christopher is okay and alive and shaking with suppressed laughter in his arms, and how could anything else matter?

Eddie clutches his son so tight he can feel him breathing, and holds on to him knowing he could never hold on long enough. Christopher squeezes him once, twice, three times, and then pulls back.

“Buck!” he says in the exact same tone as before, and Eddie’s letting him go before he realizes he’s doing it.

He turns around just in time to see Buck lift Chris into his arms in the kind of giant hug they usually share, the two of them spinning in place in Eddie’s hallway, gripping each other tight but quieter than usual. Buck’s face is buried in Christopher’s neck, out of Eddie’s sight, and he’s mumbling something that Chris must hear, because he responds just as carefully.

Eddie’s hands twitch at his sides. Maybe he could—

“Oh, you’re home,” Ana’s voice comes from behind him, and Eddie startles. He—forgot. In the three steps it takes to get from the truck to his front door, he fucking forgot she was here.

He tears himself away from Buck and Christopher, who are talking with matching soft smiles on their faces, and turns to Ana.

A now-familiar feeling coils at the base of his throat at the sight of her. He’d been hoping, a little pathetically, that something might change in the darkness that swallowed them all; that after a few days away, after everything she’s been doing to help, he might step over the threshold and finally feel like she does belong there.

But it’s all the same: her hand on his elbow feels like a vice, her big beautiful eyes wind the noose tighter with every blink, and her feet hidden in a pair of Eddie’s slippers just make him feel—hollow. Completely so, like his heart is the only living thing in the vast emptiness of his body, ricocheting like a bullet that’ll deal damage no matter where it lands.

He smiles anyway. He has more practice at that than he’d like to admit.

“Yeah, finally,” he says, convincing himself to lean into her touch, pressing his face to hers when she leans in to kiss his cheek. Already, Buck’s reproachful voice is echoing in the back of his mind.

“I bet you’re exhausted,” Ana says, running her hand over his forehead, smoothing out wrinkles he hadn’t realized were there. “I made breakfast, if you want to eat before you go to bed.”

And then those big beautiful eyes move off Eddie’s face and over his shoulder.

“Hi, Buck,” she says. Eddie feels those two words echo off the walls and come back to reverberate in the hollows of his skull, ring inside his teeth.

Buck’s eyes, molasses-slow, leave Chris’s face, make a brief stop on Eddie, then land on Ana. He does something with his mouth that could pass for a smile in front of a stranger.

“Hey,” he says, quietly, still holding Eddie’s son so close, so very tight. “Sorry to barge in like this. I just came to say hi to my favorite guy,” and he grins at Christopher, a real one this time.

Eddie’s almost positive he doesn’t imagine Ana’s fingers on his arm tightening to the point of pain.

The thing about Buck and Ana—well, the thing about the two of them is that they’ve spoken, ostensibly, over Eddie’s unconscious body at the hospital. They’ve spoken when just missing each other in the doorway as Ana went home and Buck came in to help Eddie shower and change for bed and to be there when one or both of them inevitably woke up screaming. They’ve spoken. They know each other. They get along just fine.

But Eddie has kept them separate.

He’s forced to reckon with that decision at nine in the morning, after over a hundred straight hours at the firehouse, standing like a lone tree between two rushing tides. Buck’s voice echoes in his head, and Ana’s voice echoes in the hallway, and the ceiling is suddenly so low it reminds him of the ground coming down on him, and he has to remember to breathe.

He hasn’t really interrogated his own reasoning before now – and, honestly, he doesn’t think he needs to when he looks between the two of them, at this invisible something that’s pulling dangerously taut in the empty space.

“Of course,” Ana says, after what must be years. Eddie breathes, and imagines that the suffocating weight in his lungs isn’t there. “I wish you would’ve let me know,” she smiles at Eddie, squeezing his arm again, “I would’ve made more food.”

Buck blinks, and suddenly snaps out of—something. Turns on People Pleaser Buck, who makes an appearance so very rarely within these walls.

“Oh, no,” he says, finally setting Chris on the ground. “Don’t worry about it. I wasn’t planning on coming or anything, we just—had a thing happen, at work.”

He grimaces like he hadn’t meant to say so much, and Eddie knows Ana’s going to ask once they’re alone, but he can get through all that later. Once he’s cured that familiar empty, yawning feeling brought on by a chronic lack of sleep, and absolutely nothing else.

Chris winds his arms around Buck’s waist and whispers something. Buck bends down to whisper back, an emotion Eddie can’t identify flashing over his face, and when he straightens back up again his smile has grown impossibly more strained.

“I’ll head out,” he says to the end-of-year picture of Christopher’s class that hangs on the wall. “Get out of your hair. We can set up an ice cream date once they’re actually making ice cream again, huh, buddy?”

He runs his hand through Christopher’s curls, gentle and thorough in actually getting the hair out of Chris’s face so he can look down at him. They’re having a conversation with their eyes that Eddie can’t decipher.

And Ana’s still holding on to him, and his own house smells unfamiliar and feels too warm despite the AC running, and his fucking lights are still on—

“Let me,” Ana says, finally letting go and reaching for his bag, as if she could tell that it suddenly contains the weight of the entire world. She sets it down next to the shoe rack, which is where Buck usually puts his things, except his things aren’t even here because he’s getting in his car and heading home.

Eddie looks at them. At his son, with his fists curled so thoroughly into the soft fabric of Buck’s hoodie that he’ll definitely leave creases. At Buck, whose hand on Christopher’s shoulder is as tight as his other hand on the side of Christopher’s face is gentle. At the awkward way he fills the doorway, hunching to make himself smaller, making no move to leave. He’s still just this side of trembling.

The painful knot in Eddie’s chest eases at the sight, if only a little. He feels momentarily set free, now that Ana’s hands aren’t on him anymore, and he doesn’t quite catch himself before his thoughts slip out of his mouth unhindered.

“Buck,” he says, and a hundred other things besides. Buck hears them all, and lifts his eyes to meet Eddie’s. “It’s okay.”

They both know what he means. Chris knows what he means, because he immediately whoops so loud it rings off the ceiling and grabs Buck by the hand.

“Sleepover,” he announces, and Eddie’s so busy looking at his giant grin that he almost misses Ana stiffening where she stands. “We’ll blow up the air mattress in my room. I’m gonna read you a bedtime story.”

“Uh,” Buck says, eyes impossibly wide when he looks at Eddie. For a fraction of a second, his gaze wanders over to Ana. “Christopher, I don’t think—“

“I’m gonna read you a bedtime story,” Chris repeats, tugging on Buck’s hand. “Dad’s coming too, and then we’ll kick him out because he has his own bed. Right, Dad?”

Eddie smiles, widely, helplessly, for what feels like the first time in weeks.

“Sure, kiddo. Are you sure you want Buck to sleep in your room though? You’ll have to be really quiet.”

Christopher rolls his eyes, tugging Buck deeper into the house. Buck stumbles over his own feet, and Eddie has a front seat to everything that plays out on his face; the longing, above everything. The same thing that still thrums through Eddie’s body, viciously alive.

“I know how sleeping works, Dad,” Chris replies, drawing a laugh out of Eddie. “Buck can sleep. I have important videogame business in the living room.”

“Chris—“

“Homework’s done!” he says, his back turned. Eddie could swear Buck chuckles. “We didn’t even have school. There was a blackout.”

Eddie watches as Buck and Christopher disappear in Christopher’s room, and as Buck subsequently reappears to get the air mattress out of the hallway closet. He’s studiously not looking at anything, avoiding Eddie’s eye as if he’s afraid Eddie would—what, change his mind? As if.

Buck might not know, but Eddie’s aware of a few fundamental truths: the sun sets in the West, the tide comes and goes with the moon, and Buck could never do anything to make Eddie send him away.

Once the hallway is silent, Eddie turns around. To Ana. Who is still there, still forgotten. At the sight of her everything that had been unfurling, relaxing, stretching out in the familiar comfort of home, snaps back to wind tight around him.

God, but Eddie’s a piece of shit.

“Harry got kidnapped,” he shrugs one shoulder, suddenly missing the weight of the duffel bag.

Ana’s eyes widen. “Sergeant Grant’s son?”

“He’s okay,” Eddie says, fighting the urge to cross his arms. He grabs his own elbow with the opposite hand instead, and discovers a dried fleck of paint he hadn’t managed to shower off. “But it was—yeah. I was thinking about Christopher all night.”

“Of course,” she says, softer now, crossing the space between them, asking to be let in. Eddie can’t exactly keep her out, so he allows her thin arms around his waist, her face hidden in his neck. Puts his own hands on her back, and feels her breathe. “You could’ve called. I would have sent you a picture, or something. So you could see he was okay.”

“Yeah,” he sighs, closes his eyes and inhales the scent of her coconut shampoo. It should feel—good. Comforting, even if only in the animal sort of way, to have someone hold him, but the comfort doesn’t come. Something under his breastbone trembles, tight and unpredictable, and he’s acutely aware of the sounds of the air mattress being blown up, a door opening and closing and opening and closing, Chris giggling about something. “I was just…”

And he doesn’t know how to finish, because the end to that sentence is thinking about what Buck said.

He won’t bring him up until she does.

The flushing of a toilet, the sink running. Eddie has opened his eyes, and over Ana’s shoulder, he watches Buck exit the bathroom in a sleep shirt and a pair of sweats that he keeps here, barefoot and crumpled. There’s no real expression on his face, nothing but a blankness too careful to be casual, and he doesn’t look up until he’s opening Christopher’s door and smiling and disappearing inside.

Eddie doesn’t realize he’s swayed in his direction until Ana laughs against him, and the sound travels from her ribs to his.

“You’re dead on your feet,” she says, in a soft voice he has never deserved. His heart, he realizes, is pounding. “Raincheck on the breakfast?”

Eddie convinces himself that something in him softens.

“If you don’t mind,” he says, pulling away but staying close, putting his hand on her cheek. “Thanks. For the food, for all this.”

“Of course,” Ana says, and her eyes sparkle. “I have to go to work in an hour, everyone’s running around in a panic now that the power’s back on, but I’ll come back after?”

A fork in the road. Eddie pulls and pulls and pulls on the reins, and the stubborn animal of his heart scoffs at his efforts and keeps on going.

He’s exhausted, and a little sick, and just—stripped. Like an exposed wire. Like every minute that ticks by flays off another layer until he can’t muster the energy to pretend, driving him closer and closer to something dangerous.

“You don’t have to,” he says, even as he bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself. “You’ve had a hell of a week too, you deserve to relax. We’ll probably just sleep until tonight.”

She takes a step away. Eddie rewinds his own words in his mind, and contemplates banging his head against the wall until everything just settles back to how it used to be.

They won’t sleep until tonight, because he doesn’t have childcare arranged, and Christopher can’t be by himself playing videogames all day. But he can tell, by the calculating tilt of Ana’s head, by the wrinkle that’s etched itself in around the corner of her mouth, that the lie isn’t the issue.

It’s the we.

“Are you sure?” she asks, throwing him another opportunity. He feels like taking a breath and just—screaming. “The house is a bit of a mess after all this, I could at least help you clean up.”

Up the hall in his room, Christopher laughs uproariously. Buck’s probably providing a running commentary for whatever book they’re reading. Eddie wants to be in there with them, and it’s the only clear emotion he’s currently capable of feeling.

Maybe he can admit the truth to himself, now that he hasn’t managed to navigate a single conversation with his girlfriend without stepping on a bunch of mines.

And the truth, really, is simple: he needs Buck here.

He doesn’t know why; why now, why today, why after they spent nearly a week living in improvised conditions on top of each other. He’s been wanting to get away from Buck’s constant eyes on him, right up until the moment he was faced with the real possibility. He tries to imagine letting him walk out of the door, and he just—can’t.

“How about tomorrow?” he tries, knowing he’s on borrowed time on about six different clocks. “We could go out for food, if anything’s open.”

He can practically see Buck’s name taking shape in her mouth. If she doesn’t ask now, she’ll ask tomorrow, or the day after, in that weird gentle way she has whenever he comes up in conversation. What’s Buck up to and I don’t know what kind of research Buck did, but you have this answer wrong and maybe Buck and his girlfriend would like to double date.

Buck, like something delicate and dangerous. She always lingers too long on the k.

But instead of saying it, Ana’s brow furrows.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” she asks, reminding Eddie of those four months she was always lingering in doorways like she was hoping he’d change his mind and let her see the ugly parts. Hoping that he’d turn Buck around in the door and tell him that no, actually, they’re good now and he can go. “I could—cook you dinner, maybe? Actual food on a stove?”

Buck will do that, probably.

“Honestly, I feel like my appetite’s going to take a while to come back after the powdered eggs,” Eddie says, keeping a careful hand on her waist. “And I won’t be great company when I’m this tired. Tomorrow, okay?”

And she relents, goes easily when he puts his other hand on her and pulls her in.

“Dad!” Christopher’s voice cleaves through the thickness in the air. “Come on!”

Eddie grins, and it feels real.

“Sorry,” he says, as she strokes his freshly washed hair, “I’m being summoned.”

He steps out of her grip easily, trying to keep the smile up as he walks backwards and blindly stumbles into his son’s room.

Inside, the air mattress is pressed up against the side of Christopher’s bed, and he and Buck are both sitting on it, wrapped in a nest of blankets. Christopher is holding the book, sitting half on Buck’s lap, Buck’s chin propped up on the top of his head. They look up at the same time when Eddie comes in, and he releases a breath he didn’t even know he was holding, because Buck’s eyes are soft and unguarded and not—not disappointed.

“Saved you a spot,” he says quietly, inclining his head toward the foot of the mattress, where a couple of pillows are propped up together, one to sit on and one to lean against. Eddie doesn’t need to be asked twice before he falls into them.

Christopher grins at him and leans back against Buck’s chest, raising the book as he starts to read. Eddie’s eyes flit back and forth between them, in this light that’s as dim as they could manage on a bright summer morning. The sun that still makes its way through the blinds lights up their curls in near-identical shades of gold. Christopher’s glasses are a bright, bright red, and Buck’s birthmark stands out starkly pink against his pale skin, and it’s only because Eddie’s looking at him that he notices the quiet, content smile that settles on his face as his eyes flutter closed.

Later, in-between Eddie helping Chris leave his room on tiptoes and changing into his least constricting clothes and falling into bed, Ana goes in and out as she gathers her things, smiling at him with her teeth full of words.

After he’s pulled the covers up to his chin, she kisses him goodbye, and the emptiness inside him echoes with something he can’t name.

Unlike LA, Ana’s sister’s San Diego neighborhood had not been plunged into a full week of chaos, and so the christening, apparently, is still going ahead.

Eddie has the suit, which he wore in a fucking hospital bed where he put himself because he can’t control his own emotions, hanging off the door of his closet in a bag. The shiny gold logo of the store mocks him every morning when he wakes up.

He could put it inside. Hang it alongside his other suit – the one he wore for Christopher’s school visit and for Shannon’s funeral and for the quasi-reception Bobby and Athena had months after they got married – but then he’d forget about it, and he’s not going to allow that. He doesn’t deserve to be comforted by its absence.

No: he wakes up every morning, and opens his eyes to see the future looming, and a hard lump grows in his throat before he’s even put his feet on the ground. It’s a bit of an old friend at this point, hanging around all day, pushing on his windpipe at the most inopportune moments.

Three days before they’re supposed to go, he has a panic attack in an alley behind a smoothie store. He’s picking up a treat for the team and Buck is with him, because of course he is. Thankfully, he ducks out of the endless line and goes to the bathroom, so he’s not there when the woman at the counter grins and says she’s seen Eddie there with his girlfriend, and Eddie’s hands suddenly don’t belong to him, and then he’s dropping his wallet and almost keeling over when he bends to pick it up.

He just manages to mask it, because the only thing worse than this situation is this situation with strangers involved, and he spills into the back alley just in time to crash back-first into the wall. The stupid pamphlet he got at the hospital swims in front of his eyes: he’d read it in the middle of the night, under the covers with his phone flashlight on like it was something illicit. Most of the letters blur in his imagination, but he remembers the section headings, at least. How to manage an oncoming panic attack: close your eyes, try to breathe if you can, find a focus object—except he opens his eyes to do that and the light makes the dizziness worse, makes his lungs crumple like they’re made of paper because it feels like the world itself is watching him lose it, a billion eyes blinking down from the sky.

He runs out of time to focus, and everything – his body, his mind, his hands that are there but aren’t there, cramping and out of control – feels far away, like he’s shrinking into that empty darkness that’s lived inside him for weeks, for months.

Recognize you’re having a panic attack flashes through the darkness on the back of his eyelids, so he pushes against the damp brick and lets his head fall back with a satisfyingly painful thud and thinks, I’m having a panic attack.

Some of the tension bearing down on his chest eases, and he imagines Dr. Salazar laughing at him somewhere. Of course his most effective way to stop panic is to acknowledge that he’s panicking.

There are colors exploding in the darkness, tiny explosions of static and these pulsing, web-like things that are probably the blood vessels in his eyes trying not to burst. He tries to take a breath, and finds that it comes, if only in very, very small increments. Slowly, he runs a check: feet, firmly on the ground, pulsing with a heartbeat like the rest of his body; legs, kind of there, kind of feeling like empty air that connects his feet and his torso; chest, constricted, but not much more than usual; arms tingling, too light, but he can actually feel that they end in fingertips.

I’m having a panic attack, he reminds himself; he knows it rationally, and besides, there can’t be anything actually wrong with his heart when it’s beating this strong.

“Jesus, here you are,” Buck’s voice breaks in, severing whatever was tethering the panic to the center of his chest, and the whole thing slides off him like so many cut ropes. His hands are still shaking, but they’re back; and when he opens his eyes, the first thing he sees is the bright pink of Buck’s birthmark, blocking out the ever-present sky. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He’s not lying, either: the blue of his eyes has darkened, and there’s a tremor in his hands where they’re extended towards Eddie, hesitating to touch.

Eddie’s whole body jerks, drawn forward, drawn to the very possibility. It’s not like Buck to hold himself back physically. In some alternate universe, where everything is about twenty percent less fucked up, this wouldn’t even be a situation. Buck would already be holding him, and they’d be swaying in this disgusting alley behind a smoothie place, and he’d be mumbling nonsense into Eddie’s hair to help him forget, to make him laugh. They’d trip over a dumpster full of apple cores and rotting fruit peels, and only then remember where they are, and they’d probably walk back to the station with Buck’s hand hovering over the space between Eddie’s shoulder blades.

Eddie wants it so much he could never, never actually speak it.

So Buck trembles for another few seconds, and clears his throat, and drops his hands. The wrongness of it all coats Eddie’s tongue, putrid, begging him to open his mouth and say something so it can be released.

“Are you okay?” Buck asks, and that, at least, is familiar.

Eddie is too ashamed to look him in the eye, but he nods, studying the mess of wrappers and waterlogged paper straws at his feet.

“Do you need to do the five-four-three? Five things you can see?”

Eddie looks down at one of his hands, which coincidentally also means looking down at Buck’s shoes with the toes turned just a little inward.

“My fingers.”

“Okay,” Buck says, and his legs move, so he might be nodding. “What else?”

“My fingers,” Eddie repeats. “There’s five of them.”

Buck huffs. Eddie can’t quite tell if it’s frustration or an almost-laugh. He could, if he looked up, but. Looking at Buck feels like something of a danger, these days.

“You’re such a fucking asshole,” Buck says, but it’s good, it’s kind, and then Eddie looks up and his skin is thrumming and Buck’s pulling him in by the shoulders before Eddie can catalogue his facial expression.

They don’t quite sway, but Eddie feels like crying anyway. Because this—this. He needs it so much, and it feels like it’s crumbling right under his hands.

They make it back to the station unharmed and with smoothies, but the day after that, he almost has a panic attack in front of Ana’s school. They’re sitting outside, sharing the lunch he brought her because he’s trying to make an effort. She puts her hand over his on the tabletop; gaggles of students and teachers, of Ana’s colleagues, pass by and see them, and Eddie feels a million eyes on him again. Thankfully, he’s just about finished his food when he feels his fingers starting to tingle around his water bottle, and he begs off and runs to his car and looks into his own eyes in the rearview mirror. Panic attack, he thinks, and then says it out loud. “Panic attack. I’m about to have a panic attack.”

And then he doesn’t, because he’s parked far enough away that he can’t see any of it anymore: not Ana, not the mess of takeout containers he left her with, not the art teacher that had reached out and nudged Ana’s shoulder and winked as she was passing by. It’s just him, and whatever’s been rattling in his air conditioning, and an empty suburban street.

So really, he could count that one as a success.

He’s okay, really, most of the time. Ana comes over, more comfortable at Eddie’s house than ever before, resting her feet on the coffee table and dusting off the picture frames and turning random trinkets just a little this way and that until she’s satisfied with how they look. She’s the one who talks him into letting Christopher have a sleepover with Denny, even though Eddie’s still a little uneasy about having Chris out of his sight, and then he finds himself with a lapful of her on his own couch with a long night and an entire morning after stretching out ahead of them.

The good news is he doesn’t have a panic attack.

But that doesn’t mean he knows what to do with his hands.

“I missed you,” Ana says, her voice a little quieter, a little higher than usual. The movie they’d put on is still playing behind her, and Eddie has to focus to keep looking at her face. “Feels like we haven’t had a minute alone since the world went crazy.”

They haven’t. It’s by design, and Eddie has been trying his hardest not to think about it.

“We’re here now,” he tries, and has no idea how she’s buying any of it anymore. He needs to put a stop to this sooner rather than later, because she’s going to notice how out of it he is, but—maybe. Maybe if he holds on for a little longer.

It’s not like they haven’t had sex. They have, and the first few times felt like shaking off cobwebs, but they got going eventually. Eddie learned how to navigate someone else’s body, years after he’d last touched Shannon. He’d been out of practice, so it was okay that things didn’t always feel exactly right; they would, with time, and Ana told him in no uncertain terms that she was satisfied. Eddie—was kind of to the left of that. Satisfaction.

“You’re right,” she grins, all impish and delighted, and he should be in love with her, he should be fucking enamored with the way she gets when they’re like this. Instead, something familiar and jittery pulses in the hollow between his collarbones, just below the skin. Not panic, but a suggestion of it.

She kisses him, and he puts his hands on her waist, feeling cold all over with the fact that his fingers almost span the entire circumference of it, the fact that he can hold her so completely, could pick her up like a doll. She feels breakable, and she cannot break, and he’s terrified of accidentally touching too hard.

He opens up when she licks into his mouth, because—what else is he supposed to do—and he tries to think back to the times they have had sex, to figure out what’s different this time. Because, okay, it’s a dick, not rocket science. It responds to friction, to the proximity of another human being, and it should definitely be responding to the things she’s doing with her tongue in his mouth, but the usual heat that should be creeping in low in his belly just isn’t there.

Still, he kisses her back, breathes in her perfume and the still-lingering smells of the dinner she’d cooked for them; he touches the spot where her waist gives way to her hips, feels it gone hot and a little damp with sweat.

He opens the top button of her blouse, and Ana grins as she sweeps her hair onto her back to give him room. She hasn’t noticed, how has she not noticed?

And then he doesn’t have time to be wondering about it, because she’s running open palms down his chest, slipping underneath his shirt, rucking it up as she touches her fill, devouring him with her hands the way he should be doing to her, the way any sane, unbroken person should do with a woman who’s this beautiful and eager.

Eddie figures he can at least do the gentlemanly thing and get half-naked first, so he helps her tug his own shirt off, feeling the air as if it was solid, touching his naked skin.

“Eddie,” she breathes, and kisses his jaw, and Eddie looks up at the ceiling and feels tears burning in his eyes.

He wishes she just—wouldn’t. Wouldn’t say his name, wouldn’t keep trying when he backs away at every turn, wouldn’t tolerate his cowardice. She’s a perfectly good person, and what he’s doing, it’s—

“Since when are you so polite?” Ana laughs, because that’s how it usually goes: he jumps right in and focuses on giving her pleasure, partly because it’s what he knows, partly because it doesn’t give her time to wonder about him.

He laughs back, or tries to, and isn’t sure what kind of sound actually comes out. The buttons are tiny, the buttonholes annoyingly tight, and his hands are shaking, but it still barely takes any time at all for her to shrug the blouse off and throw it, unseeing, somewhere into the darkened depths of Eddie’s living room. One of her bra straps has slid down her shoulder; the low lamplight paints the curve of it, darkness pooling in the hollow of her collarbone when she bares her neck to him, looks up from underneath her lashes, and he should want, God, he should want.

His hands trailing up her back must be too slow, because she lets him go and reaches back to undo the clasp herself. She falls forward and into him before the bra is off, her chest hot and heaving against his, miles of skin that he could and should touch, the swell of her breasts under his hands, and she’s laughing as she pulls her arm out of the other strap and Eddie’s cold and almost painfully soft in his boxers, like she hit a kill switch inside him.

She throws the bra aside. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie watches it fly and land in the corner, just shy of a flowerpot – the pink one that clashes with absolutely everything else in Eddie’s living room, and is only there because Buck bullied him into buying it.

He looks back, into Ana’s eyes that are blown wide in the low light, and he suddenly knows exactly what’s wrong. One stupid, absentminded thought, and then it’s echoing around the inside of his skull loud and demanding like a church bell: I know what it’s like to be in love with someone who’s not all the way in.

You owe it to her to be honest.

He swallows it back, breathes against the nausea that’s pushing into the bottom of his throat. Closes his eyes, imagines the times before, when he could kiss her and actually want it, when the way she moved against him was welcome, was encouraging, was a sign that he was doing something right.

But then Ana takes his hand and puts it on her thigh, high where the hem of her skirt is digging into the flesh, and he’s imagining someone hurting Buck the way he’s hurting her right now, and his entire body is a block of ice.

She’s angry as she leaves, finally. She doesn’t look at him once as she shrugs into her clothes, and her hands are trembling on the doorframe where she grips it while she steps into her shoes. Her hair is loose, a little wild from where his fingers were in it not twenty minutes ago. When she yanks it back off her face, it’s with so much force it makes Eddie wince.

He watches her let herself out, shoulders pulled tight like a rubber band that’s about to snap in his face, and he knows his cheeks are burning. It’s just shame, all the way down, everywhere he looks: their wine glasses, still half-full on the table; the TV, back on the Netflix home screen, where the chicken icon in the top corner tells him he’s logged into Buck’s account; the stray Legos he’d hastily swept under the bookshelf.

And, above all of that, he’s ashamed of the sheer relief he feels. He thinks he might want to cry with how humiliating it is, but the thought of crying feels about as foreign as whatever it was they just did.

After the door closes behind her, Eddie lasts all of five seconds before he’s throwing up his dinner in the sink.

“Why are we doing this in public?” Ana asks, like she doesn’t know the answer.

Eddie shreds a whole napkin before he answers, peeling it into strips and balling them up until they’re piled on the table in front of him. Like he’s a child; like he can’t sit still and straighten up and just look at her, because he can’t.

“You know why,” he replies, leaving out the rest. He knows what he deserves, and he also knows she’s not going to deliver that judgment in a sidewalk café. He’s nothing if not a true coward until the end. “And you know what we’re doing.”

Ana clenches her jaw. He wonders if this is what she looks like in the classroom, when she’s at the end of her rope.

“I have an idea,” she says, taking a sip of her coffee and somehow managing to make it to look lethal. Eddie’s own cup sits untouched in front of him, the elegant foam heart on top long dissolved. “The christening is tomorrow, you know.”

Eddie’s sure everyone at this fucking café is staring at them. He looks over to the next table, where a group of people is completely immersed in conversation and paying them no mind, but they have to be staring somehow. Telepathically.

“I know,” he says, pressing on that forever tight spot between his collarbones. It’s been—pulsing, since he woke up, his heart skittering out of rhythm in a way that makes him vaguely nauseous.

Not long now. Not long until he can get up from this table and start processing the fact that he’s a failure of a human being.

“I assume you’re not coming,” says Ana, coffee cup clinking against her plate as she sets it down and picks up a fork to eat her eggs. Eddie’s barely managing to swallow his own saliva.

He wants to offer to go, so she doesn’t have to field awkward questions, but then he thinks about the kinds of questions that would come after he’s met her entire extended family.

“No,” he says, and even that sounds more like a question, as if he isn’t the issue, as if he’s not the one who called her here and then proceeded to stare at her in silence, hoping she’d take the first shot. “No, I’m not.”

She tears off a piece of bread with her fingers. Her hands are shaking.

“Just as well,” she nods, watching the tabletop. A car passes by, stirring a breeze that blows Eddie’s stupid napkin balls off the table, over the sandalled feet of the woman sitting to his left, and into the street. “I told Diana I wouldn’t be needing my extra seats, anyway.”

Suddenly, Eddie’s looking right at her. “When?”

“A couple of days into the blackout,” she shrugs a shoulder. It’s bare, her dress the kind that ties behind the neck, and Eddie remembers looking at that same curve a few days ago, sloped gently towards him where it now shakes with tension. “When you were at work.”

Eddie blinks. “Before you came to see us at the station.”

She smiles at that, but it’s thin, almost showing the outline of her teeth where they’re pressing against her lips from the inside.

“I had to fall over myself to tell a random stranger I wasn’t your son’s mother,” she raises an eyebrow, “and then you ended up in the hospital anyway. Your whole life flashed in front of your eyes when your coworker called me your wife.”

Eddie doesn’t know her like this: back ramrod straight, chin raised, so unlike the way she’d always fold and curl to fit under his chin, and tilt her head just so until she was looking up at him with big round eyes.

He thinks he might like this Ana more.

“That’s fair,” he says, even as the ground under his feet feels a little like it’s trembling. He’d been sitting on a cot in the middle of the firehouse, figuring out how to look Buck in the eye, and at that point she was—already decided.

“I just wanted to give it more time,” she says, somehow still eating, and then she looks up at the sky and her expression cracks a little. “I’ve always respected that you needed to move slow.”

Except Eddie’s starting to think he didn’t so much need to move slow as he needed to just—not move.

“But then I got this call,” she says, grimacing, “so I guess the clock’s run out.”

Eddie just blinks at her, and doesn’t understand how she isn’t throwing things. He wants to—well, he doesn’t know, put it into some official words, finally sever this thing between them, but what comes out instead is:

“Why?”

Another sip of coffee, and her perfectly drawn eyebrows climb up her forehead. “Why what?”

“Why give it more time? Why would you put yourself through that when I was so—“

He bites his lip, hard, on the slew of words that want to come out all at once. He can’t decide what he was, actually. Apathetic. Cruel. Blind. In denial.

Defective.

She tilts her head, and that shimmering, liquid thing in her eyes is definitely pity.

“Because you’re such a good man,” she wraps a small, cold hand around his wrist. It should feel less claustrophobic now that he’s letting her go, but his first instinct is still to pull back.

But he presses his pulse point down into the tabletop, and stays.

“You’re such a good man,” Ana repeats, and Eddie thinks he might be shaking his head. She’s supposed to be yelling at him. Please, God, let her yell at him. “And you’re a wonderful father, you’re a firefighter, you’re easy on the eyes. I was kind of imagining walking in on your arm and my sister and all my cousins going green with envy.”

Eddie has imagined walking in with her on his arm, somewhere back in Texas, and turning the heads of a room full of people that have, at one point or another, expressed their disappointment in how he’s turned out.

It’s a little hilarious, actually, that he’s finding common ground with her right now.

He thinks about laughing, but his throat has been constricting steadily ever since he sat down, and it’s about to meet the hard lump that’s always sitting in there these days. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen once he reaches that point; he doesn’t know what’s going on with his body at all, because he has to focus on getting through this right now.

It occurs to him, when he opens his mouth, that this is an out. That he could—he probably could get out of it, somehow, could convince her that more time is what he needs. She could go to the christening, and come back still his girlfriend, keep putting her feet on the coffee table and helping Christopher with English homework and caring like Eddie’s something worth giving a damn about.

But the thought feels like the lid of a coffin sliding into place over his head, and Eddie knows better than most what it’s like to be buried.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and at the first suggestion that he’s going to pull his hand back, she lets him go. “I think—I think it’s best if we end this.”

Someone definitely turns to them at that: he can just about see it in his periphery. With his luck, he’s probably going to end up on that stupid Overheard in LA Instagram account Buck is so obsessed with.

And he needs to not be thinking about Buck. Thinking about Buck feels distantly like relief from the many vices squeezing Eddie tight, and he doesn’t get to feel relief right now.

“If you’re sure,” Ana says, very slowly, like that time she tried to tell him his son couldn’t ride a skateboard.

Eddie thinks about that one restaurant she likes, where the menu is only one option that the chef chooses for you. He thinks about spending five days at the firehouse missing his son and only his son. Thinks about the way she breathed his name the other day, about the weeks she spent calling him Edmundo, about sticking it out. Thinks about her hand constricting around his arm at the sight of Buck in the doorway.

He thinks about things being that way forever, and he’s sure, he’s sure, he’s sure.

“It wouldn’t be fair to you,” he says, and it’s true, even if it also feels like he’s slipping his own head out of a noose at the last possible second. “I haven’t been fair to you. I shouldn’t have treated you the way I did, or taken you for granted the way I did. I just thought—I thought I’d get better. At being in a relationship with you.”

“Not at loving me,” she says, and it isn’t a question. “I figured.”

Finally, she puts down her fork. Her hands, somehow, are steadier than they had been before. When she looks up at him, his breath freezes on its way out of his chest, and a familiar tightness settles in, constricting his lungs.

“Tell me, Eddie,” says Ana, with a heavy emphasis on his name, “do you even like me? Was any of this real?”

“Of course I like you,” Eddie replies, more petulantly than he should. He did like her – does like her – perfectly fine. It had been nice to be with her.

At least until he got shot. Until the skyline was bending out of shape in front of his eyes, and he was falling, and the only thing he could think was—

“I guess,” she laughs a little, and picks up her own napkin to shred. “I’ve just been wondering. Can I ask you something?”

He could say no. He wants to say no. But then he will definitely end up on Overheard in LA.

“Sure.”

She nods, and takes another sip of her coffee. “Are you actually into women?”

Someone chokes on their drink right behind him.

“Uh,” Eddie says, because he somehow wasn’t expecting this question, despite the whole thing the other day where he couldn’t get it up with a lapful of a beautiful woman. “I have a kid?”

“That’s not an answer,” she says, and something sparks in her eyes that might have been amusement approximately one break up ago.

Eddie’s pretty sure he’s into women. He can still remember the way it felt when he had Shannon back, the way he lasted about a day without kissing her again. He’d ached to touch her, to be close to her, had wanted her in his bed even when he didn’t know how to trust her with his heart. It feels like that should definitely count.

“Yeah, I’m into women,” he replies, and resists the urge to add something far cruder than that, because didn’t she once say he had a tongue like—anyway. People are watching. He wanted to do this with people around, so this is what he gets.

He breathes in, slow, trying to fill the empty spaces inside his body in preparation for what comes next, because she’s going to ask the other half of the question. And that—yeah, he has no idea what to do with that.

But instead, Ana tilts her head again, sizes him up for a second, and nods. He can’t tell if it’s clemency, or if she can tell that the one question was enough.

“So it’s over, then,” she says, and Eddie feels like the weight of the world is perched on his shoulders, waiting to take flight. “Us.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again, eyeing her knuckles clenched tight around the coffee cup, half expecting the last of her drink to end up in his face. “I really—I couldn’t have done these past few months, or the blackout, without your help.”

It’s not really true in the strictest sense. They both know it, probably, but the fact remains that she did help, she chose to, when Eddie didn’t deserve it in the first place.

“I’m sorry, too,” Ana says. “This could have been a good thing.”

Eddie huffs. “Yeah, I fucked it up,” he says, and chances a sip of his gross, cold decaf. He’s starting to think he might actually get up and away from this table and be fine, and isn’t that an overwhelming thought. “It’s my fault. You’ve been great. You will be great with someone who knows how to appreciate it.”

They grimace at the same time.

“Really, though,” Eddie says, feeling the residual pain slowly unwind from his ribcage. “Thank you.”

Ana nods. “I don’t really want to see you again,” she says.

“I know,” Eddie smiles at her, feeling like his face is cracking into pieces. He wouldn’t want to see himself, either.

She finishes her eggs in silence, and Eddie stares at his bagel and can’t even think about touching it.

They came from opposite directions, which means they part right where they stand up from their table. She squeezes his elbow in her small, warm palm, and Eddie thinks she might lean in for a kiss on the cheek, is already making to step back then mentally yelling at himself for being scared of getting one, and anyway, Ana must see something happening on his face, because all she does is tilt her mouth in an imitation of a smile and tell him goodbye. She holds herself tall as she walk away, heels clicking on the sidewalk loud enough to be heard until she disappears from view.

Eddie turns around and takes a few steps, watching where he’s putting his feet like they’re brand new. He feels—shot, actually, riddled with holes that are bleeding things he can’t name. One of them is a tension he had no idea he was even carrying: he only notices it because his own shoulders get heavier, drooping forward and down now that there’s nothing left to hold them.

Still, he keeps his breathing steady and tries to straighten up the best he can, and as he squints up at the late morning sun he allows himself to consider the possibility that this was the right thing to do.

And then he turns the corner and has a fucking panic attack.

Buck picks up halfway through the second ring.

“You okay?” is what he opens with, sounding just this side of out of breath.

“I’m fine,” Eddie croaks, because he isn’t in need of urgent medical attention, and so he’s fine. He always is. “Fine.”

“Okay,” Buck replies, dragging out the a, disbelief plain in his voice. “What happened?”

A door snicks closed on his end of the line. Buck’s apartment only has the two doors, so if he’s at home, he’s probably in the bathroom.

Thinking about familiar things is supposed to help, per Dr. Salazar’s stupid pamphlet, so Eddie closes his eyes where he’s sitting behind the wheel of his parked car and takes himself to Buck’s bathroom. He imagines the pale grey tile, the washout white lighting, the big round mirror on an arm that can be positioned out and away from the wall.

Buck’s probably sitting on the edge of his ostentatious tub, feet buried in the shaggy mat he loves to own and hates to clean, phone pressed between his ear and his shoulder as he fiddles with the taps because he never can just be on the phone. His voice still has a bit of a rumble to it, so he probably slept in on his day off. Is definitely still in his pyjamas, which consist of threadbare hoodies, old LAFD-issue shorts, and socks, a combination that apparently allows for ideal temperature control during the night.

He might be a little cold this morning, and sitting here wrapped in his comforter; or, if he forgot to close the blinds last night, the loft will be on the warm side, so maybe he’s—

“Eddie,” Buck says, with the inflection of someone repeating themselves for the hundredth time. “Something’s wrong. Where are you?”

Eddie opens his eyes and presses back into the seat. He’s vaguely familiar with this part of town, and knows Buck’s apartment is a ten-minute drive away, give or take. It’s pathetic, but he also just—

“Eddie.”

He takes a rattling breath, feeling things shift around in his chest, the remnants of the panic that had been wrapped around him tight a few minutes ago. It’s difficult to breathe, to move, the air itself oppressive, like someone’s caked him in clay and left him in the sun until he’s turned into a statue. Like he needs to fight his way to the surface, even when there’s nothing to fight through.

He’s fine. He got through it on his own. Didn’t even need the hospital this time.

But he’s also single. Ana’s gone, and with her the idea of them becoming a family, of her occupying a space in Christopher’s life, of staff at places recognizing her as his girlfriend. He’s supposed to be better now.

“—Eddie! I swear to God, you better not be unconscious, just tell me where—“

“Sorry,” Eddie interrupts, Buck’s voice lifting some of the pressure off him. “Sorry, I spaced out.”

Buck huffs, and it doesn’t sound amused. “Where are you?” he asks again.

Eddie opens his mouth. Pathetic, he thinks, to always be running to someone else. Be leaning on someone else. Of course things are crumbling, but he should be able to fucking hold them together.

“Did you have another panic attack?”

And he says it so—casually. So completely without judgment. Even that first time, he wasn’t judging Eddie for spinning out of control, just for stringing Ana along.

Which. Maybe Eddie should tell him what he’s just done, to make him understand that he’d been heard, to ensure that he’ll never have to see Buck look at him all hollow and disappointed ever again, or at least until the next time he fucks up.

“Yeah,” he says, tilting to rest the side of his face against the window. He’s been in here so long that the glass isn’t really cool anymore, but at least it’s nice and solid. “’M fine, though.”

“You’re not fine, and I’m coming to get you. Tell me where you are.”

Eddie closes a hand around the steering wheel, watching his own veins slither under his skin.

He can’t ask for what he wants, but Christopher is safe at school, and Eddie is hyperventilating in his car barely knowing which way is up, so maybe, for a few hours, he could allow himself to be pathetic.

Buck’s offering. And Eddie knows, even if he struggles to believe it, that Buck won’t judge him. Not for this.

He takes a huge, painful breath. “I’m—“

“Are you ever coming out of there?” another voice comes through the phone, more distant but perfectly clear. “I’m cold. Come back to bed.”

Buck breathes in sharply, surprised, the sound loud in Eddie’s ear.

Eddie almost, almost laughs.

“I’m fine,” he says, managing to push his voice out of the depths of his throat until it sounds almost normal. “Honestly, Buck, I’m good. I’m not even sure I panicked, it was just close. I’m okay, I shouldn’t have called.”

And he jabs at the end call button with a force that’s completely lost on the smooth glass screen of a smartphone, then throws the thing blindly into the backseat. It immediately starts ringing again.

Eddie’s already hard-wired to respond to the sound, and with everything heightened the way it is, it feels like a hammer banging into his temple, sharp and overwhelming. He lets it ring out once, as he tries to decide what to do, but when another call follows he reaches back and viciously flips the silent mode button. Then he opens his texts, trying to ignore yesterday’s conversation he had with Buck about how to get Christopher to like soups.

I’m ok. conscious, not dead. PROMISE, he types out, and hits send before he can change his mind. He puts his phone on the passenger seat, and it lights up with another call, then one more, and then finally stays silent.

He feels like dirt about it, but—Buck will text. He always does, ever since the shooting, chasing Eddie until he receives written proof that he’s okay and alive and reasonably healthy.

Eddie just. Can’t handle talking to him right now.

And he can’t ask for what he wants, because what he wants is for Buck to look at him the way he does sometimes, with the corners of his eyes all bunched up from smiling, and tell him he’s good. He wants Buck to throw in one of his off-handed compliments at the end of a random sentence. He wants Buck tell him that he’s a good father like he does so often and so casually, as if it was obvious; he wants to hear that he’s not irreparably hurting Christopher by cutting Ana out of their lives, because he can’t stop thinking about the expression on Chris’s face once he tells him, can’t stop thinking about walking up the steps to his abuela’s house and telling his little boy that his mom’s never coming home and feeling something break that never quite healed right.

He wants someone – wants Buck – to look at him and tell him that this wasn’t his only shot. That he hasn’t ruined Christopher’s chance at a real family just because he couldn’t get over himself.

But Buck has Taylor in his bed, and Eddie’s not about to become the friend who asks people to drop things when he has a minor crisis. He’s gotten this far, and he can get through this too. He can be fine.

So he straightens his spine one vertebra at a time, cracks the window to get some fresh air in, and starts the car.

“Look at you,” Hen whistles when Eddie jogs up the stairs. “What’s up? What’s got you so bouncy?”

Eddie freezes with one hand on the railing.

“Yeah,” Chim joins in, leaning into Hen’s shoulder with a grin, the two of them staring him down like the world’s unlikeliest detective duo. “You’re looking happy today.”

Eddie clears his throat. “No happier than usual,” he says, finally stepping into the loft with both feet.

He’s really not sure what it is they’re seeing. To say he’d struggled through yesterday would be an understatement: he’d barely managed to make sure Christopher was taken care of without just shaking apart right where he stood. After Chris was in bed, he’d sat on the couch, and the next time he looked up it was four hours later; sleep didn’t come for him until about three in the morning, and even then he woke in fits of feeling like the entire world was sitting on his chest.

He’s had a headache from the moment he got up, so he will not be doing this today.

But at least Buck’s not here yet.

“Sounds believable,” Chim says, snapping his gum. “You practically skipped up those stairs, Diaz. Spill.”

Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose and looks straight up into one of the overhead lights. Maybe if he burns out his retinas, he can go home for the day.

“You’re seeing things,” he says, sidestepping them and going for the coffee machine, reaching for two mugs because Buck’s not here yet. “I’m the same as the last time you saw me.”

“No,” Bobby pulls his head out of the fridge, looking him up and down. Eddie hadn’t even known he was there. “You do look different.”

Maybe he does. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep, or the million emotions swirling in him that he can’t actually feel, or that thing where he’s pretty sure he’s failing at fatherhood and at being a functioning human being and also at being Buck’s friend.

“Thanks, Bobby,” he says, not a touch bitterly, and accepts the creamer Bobby is holding out to him.

“Yeah, thanks, Cap,” Hen grins, and fixes Eddie with a Look. “We’re listening.”

Eddie lets out a sigh that’s been trapped behind his breastbone since before he got out of bed to get Christopher to school, and pours his creamer in as slowly as humanly possible so he doesn’t have to look at anyone.

But he can feel them staring, and he knows they’re waiting for something, either way. They’re actually pretty good at taking a hint. If he tells them to drop it now, they will.

So he opens his mouth to do just that, and nothing comes out.

The thing is, it kind of—itches. The secret feels a little alive, right under his tongue, squirming as he tries to hold it back. It could be good to tell someone. Not Buck, because he was there when the thought was born in Eddie’s head and that’s something he’ll think about another time, but someone.

Someone like his family, who have somehow never judged him for a single thing that mattered.

He stirs his coffee, and goes through the familiar one-sugar-and-a-splash-of-creamer motions of making Buck’s, before he says anything.

“This is going to make me sound like a dick,” he warns, because he is, apparently, looking extra happy today, and isn’t that a kick in the teeth. “I think it makes me a dick, actually.”

It does, and there’s no ‘think’ about it.

“Try us,” Chim says. He and Hen sit down in perfect sync, pulling out chairs next to each other, their knees knocking together under the table. Bobby walks over and joins them, the three of them sitting in front of Eddie like a jury, except the way they’re looking at him makes him feel a little like he’s being hugged.

He even manages to hold Bobby’s eye, for all of two seconds, before he has to look back down at his coffee.

“I broke up with Ana yesterday.”

Silence.

He wonders if they’re expecting him to say something else. He wonders if there is anything else to say.

“Okay,” Bobby says slowly, carefully, after a couple of beats have passed. Eddie bites the inside of his lip and makes himself look up. “And how do you feel about it?”

To Eddie’s never-ending horror and humiliation, his eyes instantly start burning. The way Bobby’s watching him, the way they’re all watching him – like they’re expecting an answer and nothing more – is completely overwhelming.

They’re not asking why.

He watches his shoes, the way his toes twitch up out of their own volition, and thinks of an answer. His face goes blazing hot in the span of seconds, because the shame is never too deep under the surface, these days.

But he sucks in a slow, shallow breath, and tells the truth.

“Relieved,” he says, and it trips out of him the way water rushes off the edge of a waterfall, free-falling and urgent.

He’s all twisted up inside, and he only really has room to feel one emotion at a time because of it; and, despite the panic that still sleeps curled around his shoulders, he knows what it is that’s been thrumming through him since he walked out of that café: relief, relief, relief.

Someone breathes in a little too quickly to cover their surprise. Eddie chances a look, and finds Chim and Bobby communicating via eyebrows, and Hen’s gentle eyes staring right at him.

She always understands far more than she lets on. Like one of those iceberg illustrations: the bit above water is what she says out loud, and the bit underneath is what she actually knows.

Eddie’s a little worried he might be the Titanic to that imperfect metaphor.

Their silent conversation finished, Chim and Bobby open their mouths at the same time, and the back of Eddie’s neck itches with the need to get away.

This time, he’s not saved by he bell, but by the sound of LAFD standard issue boots thudding up the metal stairs. He recognizes Buck by the rhythm of it, skipping every other step and landing a little harder on his good leg.

“Morning, 118,” he very nearly yells once he’s up, grinning with his hair a little messy like he’d run out of time to get ready. “Damn, it’s quiet up here.”

Bobby’s eyes jump between Eddie and Buck at the speed of light, and somehow, he figures it out.

“Firefighter Buckley,” he smiles as he gets up from the table, “you’re late.”

Buck’s mouth drops open, offended. “By like—“ he checks his watch, “forty-three seconds! Hen came in at quarter past the other day and you didn’t say anything.”

“That’s because I brought baked goods,” Hen grins, grabbing one of her highlighters off the table just so she can point it at him. “You’re looking a little empty-handed there, Buckaroo.”

“I don’t condone bribes, Henrietta,” Buck frowns, crossing the loft towards the coffee machine on the same path Eddie used a few minutes ago.

Bobby clears his throat pointedly.

“But I can get us something next shift,” Buck adds, his mouth curling all soft and private on one side only. Eddie’s the only one who can see it. “If I can be forgiven for the grave crime of walking up the stairs half a minute late. Respectfully, Bobby. I mean, Captain Nash.”

Bobby crosses his arms and lasts all of three seconds before he breaks into a smile.

“Why do I even bother,” he says, leveling Buck with one of those looks he saves especially for him. “I have paperwork. Behave out here.”

As soon as the door closes behind him, Hen’s eyes are back on Eddie, and Eddie’s trying to kind of—vaguely look out toward the app bay where it’s flooded with sunlight, while Buck is something like two feet away.

He hadn’t texted yesterday. They haven’t looked each other in the eye since he walked in. Eddie’s vibrating out of his skin, a little bit, and his hands are freezing cold where they’re wrapped around his hot mug.

“Hey Buck,” Chim says, leaning back with his head titled contemplatively, “you see the state of the ladder truck yet? C shift got into it with some guy who just happened to have a wheelbarrow full of cow shit parked in his garden.”

“And they didn’t clean it?” Buck squawks, scandalized. Eddie chances a look out of the corner of his eye, even though he already knows what he’s going to find: Buck’s brow furrowed so deep his eyebrows are almost touching, his mouth open at the sheer injustice. “I’m supposed to deal with manure before I’ve even had my coffee?”

Eddie figures now’s as good an opportunity as any to figure out where he stands. Carefully, he reaches over and pushes Buck’s mug closer to him with a knuckle.

The sound catches Buck’s attention. His eyes jump from Chimney straight to Eddie, suddenly and startlingly blue, then down to the coffee.

Wordlessly, and slower than usual, he picks it up. Closes his eyes, takes a sip, sighs in relief. The corner of his mouth quirks.

“Thanks,” he says, his eyes still shut, and then he’s pushing off the counter and pulling Chim out of his chair by the collar, clearly headed to inspect the damage to the 118’s pride and joy.

Which means Eddie is left alone with Hen. It’s only now that he realizes that was probably the intention.

“You want to come sit?” she asks, inclining her head towards the seat Chim’s just vacated.

“Not particularly,” Eddie replies, already walking over. His knee knocks against Hen’s when he sits down, just like Chim’s did, and the warmth of her is so intense, so comforting, that even his freezing bones have to admit some of it in. He sighs at the feeling and leans back, closing his eyes for just a second. God, he’s tired.

“That’s a big sigh,” Hen says, talking to him like he’s breakable. “You doing okay?”

Eddie opens his eyes and takes a sip of coffee. Scratches at the hinge of his jaw, where the stubble is longer than it should be because his hands shook dangerously when he’d tried to shave.

“Apparently,” he raises his eyebrows. “At least according to all of you.”

“We’re just calling it as we see it,” she shrugs, “and you said it yourself. You’re relieved.”

He doesn’t know what it is about someone else saying it, but it feels—realer. More solid.

“Yeah,” he huffs, moving to rub at the tingling, itchy skin of his face, “Yeah, I really am. And I feel like shit about it.”

“Breakups happen,” Hen says, her hand halfway in the space between them like she wants to touch him but isn’t sure she should. Eddie, honestly, also isn’t sure that he wouldn’t just blow up in her face like a landmine.

“Not like this,” he replies, thinking of the way he froze up under Ana’s hands and asked her to leave, of her pitying eyes in that café.

Hen laughs quietly. “So you’re special, huh? You think there’s no one else out there stuck in a relationship they don’t want?”

Eddie’s eyes snap to her. “I—“

“What? You wanted it? That’s why you look happier today than you have in months?”

Of course he wanted it. Of course he wanted—of course.

“She was basically the perfect woman,” he says, watching bubbles pop in the dregs inside his mug. “It’s like—if it didn’t work out with her, then who’s it going to work with? How do I even—“

“Eddie,” Hen interrupts, and her hand on the tabletop twitches. “You know perfection is subjective, right?”

Eddie blinks.

“Karen’s the perfect woman for me,” Hen says, smiling a little just at the thought of her wife, which makes something ache dully in Eddie’s chest. “Maddie’s the perfect woman for Chim. Athena’s the perfect woman for Bobby. And they’re all completely different people.”

“She was perfect for me,” Eddie grits his teeth, a familiar pain shooting along his jaw and up to his ears. If this ever gets better, he’s going to be drowning in dental bills. “That’s what I’m saying. I managed to scare away my ideal partner. I shouldn’t be relieved.”

Downstairs, Buck is yelling something indecipherable, probably cursing C shift or trying to goad Chim into a water fight before they clean the truck.

Hen sighs. She pushes away her empty mug and the textbooks that had been closed since Eddie came in, sending a couple of pens rolling halfway down the table.

“Eddie, you didn’t scare her away,” she says, leaning forward, and something about her makes him understand that she wants him to look her in the eye, so he does. There’s something about Hen he never could quite explain. She’s safe. “Right? You said you broke up with her. And from the way you said it, I’m going to guess she would have been fine keeping it going.”

“Uh,” Eddie says.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Hen asks. She leans closer still, forgoing the tabletop in favor of turning bodily towards Eddie, their knees still touching. “So you’re the one who broke up with her, because you knew it wasn’t right.”

Eddie runs a hand through his hair, plowing through the gel he’d haphazardly combed in after his shower. Once he reaches the crown of his head, he tugs, just once. Just to see if he can’t slip out of his skin after all.

And then he exhales, and his words spill out with the breath he’d been holding.

“I’m the one who’s not right,” he says, so quietly he barely hears himself. “Hen, I’m—I’m so fucked, I—there’s something wrong with me.”

A strand of hair falls into his face. A mess. He’s such an absolute mess.

“If there is,” says Hen, her head tilted to the side like she’s trying to see into him, “that’s okay. You just have to figure it out. It doesn’t mean you deserve to punish yourself.”

Eddie relaxes his death grip. He pulls his hands away from his head, and watches them settle on the tabletop like they belong to someone else.

That’s—not right, he thinks. He deserves to punish himself. He has to suffer first, and then he can do better. Be better, so no more punishment is necessary. That’s how it works.

Hen knocks her foot against Eddie’s booted ankle.

“You know,” she says, going even quieter, “I’ve been to your parents’ house.”

The back of Eddie’s neck starts itching again. He’s not about to panic, at least, but he—doesn’t want to talk about this. Doesn’t want to think about his parents, about the fact that he’s already told them about Ana because he felt like he owed it to them somehow, and now Ana’s gone.

“It was very nice,” Hen continues, one of her eyebrows raised. “Very neat. Lots of pictures of Christopher, and of you with your gorgeous prom date. Who was definitely not your wife.”

Eddie barks a surprised laugh that scrapes his throat on the way out.

“No,” he shakes his head. “No, that was Mackenzie. She was cheer captain, and old money, so she was one of those names everyone knew. My parents loved her, she needed someone to pretend date for the last few months of high school before she went to New York for college and moved in with her girlfriend, so.”

Hen’s eyes on him are soft in a way he definitely doesn’t deserve.

“The perfect woman, huh?”

And there’s that fantasy again: some kind of grand ballroom, the most extended of his extended family all gathered and judging each other through smiles; and Eddie in the midst of them, with his beautiful vice principal girlfriend, so perfectly put together.

The thought of it alone turns his stomach.

“Hey,” Hen says, and she finally reaches out and closes a gentle hand around his wrist. It’s the same way Ana touched him yesterday, yet worlds removed. “Did Bobby ever tell you about his notebook?”

Automatically, Eddie looks toward the door to Bobby’s office.

“Yeah,” he nods. “For the names of the people he saved.”

“One hundred and forty-eight spaces,” Hen says, one of her fingers running absentmindedly over Eddie’s pulse point, “all laid out. Did he tell you what he was going to do once he filled them?”

He did not, but from the haunted look in Hen’s eyes, from the way he sometimes sees Bobby staring out of a window like he’s not exactly there, Eddie can fill in the blank.

“Hen,” he says, because he doesn’t have any other words.

“What were you going to do, Eddie?” she asks, reaching for him with her other hand, too, and Eddie doesn’t even have time to think about it before he’s taking it and intertwining their fingers, desperate for the touch. “Once you ticked off all the boxes. Once you had the smart pretty wife and a couple more kids and a thirty-year mortgage. What then?”

Eddie shakes his head. Something feels like it’s rattling in there, knocked loose without a place to return.

“I don’t know,” he says, and he’s not sure it’s the truth. His tongue feels like it’s burning out of his mouth. “I was going to—“

“Settle,” Hen interrupts, the line of her jaw hard, but holding Eddie’s hands soft like he’s going to break under her touch. “Live unhappy. Die unhappy. You were going to see to it that your son grew up and found his place in the world, and then you were going to take yourself out of the equation,” she says, and the way she’s looking at him makes it clear she’s not guessing this time. “Just live out what you were supposed to and get snuffed out. Like who you were, what you wanted, never mattered.”

Eddie swallows, and the lump in his throat doesn’t move.

“What else is there?” he shrugs.

“Eddie,” Hen blinks at him, and there are sudden tears glistening in her eyes. “Everything.”

And he can’t tell her that it doesn’t feel that way; that the world is full of happiness other people get to have, of things that aren’t meant for him because he hasn’t earned them.

He can’t tell her that this was probably his last chance.

“I feel like you need someone to say this to you,” says Hen, blinking the sheen out of her eyes just like Eddie is doing, except her tears are on display and he’s barely looking at her because he doesn’t want her to see. “I’m proud of you, Eddie. I’m proud of you for making the right choice. Okay?”

Eddie blinks at her, completely dumbfounded. This—is the way Buck speaks to him, usually, and he’s known for a long time that Buck thinks Eddie a far better person than he actually is.

But Hen’s not like that.

“Just think about it,” she says, smiling, the corners of her eyes damp. “And if you ever need to hear it again, I’m right here.”

Eddie doesn’t know how to get his voice to work. In place of words, he squeezes Hen’s fingers where they’re threaded through his, and she doesn’t let go of him.

He nods, once, twice, daring to look at her for a second or two before his gaze skitters away. Buck looks like he’s bullying Ravi about something downstairs, and Ravi’s looking at him with those stupid sparkles in his eyes that don’t make Eddie jealous, but they make him—something.

He inhales. Looks up at the lights again, the bright shapes imprinting themselves on his eyelids the next time he blinks.

“Hen,” he manages, finally, his voice like sandpaper. He finds her looking at him, still, her eyes so gentle he imagines he can feel them like a touch. “Thanks.”

He doesn’t even know what he’s thanking her for, exactly, because it’s not like he can believe what she’s saying, but. Just the fact that she’s sitting here, that she’s bothering with him, that she clearly understands some of this mess and is turning toward him instead of away, deserves a thank you.

“You really are an iceberg,” he says, absentminded, and Hen’s eyebrows nearly fly off her face as she opens her mouth, presumably to ask what the hell he’s talking about, but then the first call of the day comes through.

Hen gets up first, moving without loosening her hold on him. They end up running down the stairs holding hands, the movement of it a little awkward in a way that makes Eddie actually smile.

Buck and Chim are already pulling up their suspenders by the time they get to the turnout gear. Eddie and Hen let go, and Hen gives him a little parting wave that has Chim raising his eyebrows at a very specific angle. Thankfully, they don’t have time for another interrogation at least until they’re in the truck.

Feeling a little lighter, a little more excited to get out there and do his job, Eddie chances a look and a gentle nudge to Buck’s ribs. Even that feeble point of contact through layers of heavy fabric is enough to have his skin thrumming with something, and he wants to just slice through the tension, to tell Buck about Ana, to invite him over, to offer every apology in the book just to get him curled up on Eddie’s couch under Abuela’s crocheted blanket again.

But Buck looks up at him, and his eyes are blank like Eddie’s never seen them.

It takes about ten steps to get from the turnout hangers to the truck, and about as long for Eddie’s tentatively good mood to pop like a soap bubble.

Eddie’s not a fan of planes.

It’s not so much the whole helicopter crash thing, because being in a giant metal tube operated by Alaska Airlines and balancing in the back of an MD-530 in the middle of a desert are two entirely different experiences. It’s not that he’s an anxious flier, and Christopher still loves the novelty, so he doesn’t have to worry about him either. And, after the Army, he’s not exactly fussy about being in cramped spaces for extended periods of time.

No: Eddie’s issue with planes is that they drop you off thousands of miles away from where you started, and then just fucking fly away.

“Shoulders back, Eddito,” Abuela says, spinning in place in the middle of baggage claim as she unwraps one of the many shawls she travels with to battle airplane air conditioning. “You just slouched for two hours. It’s bad for your back, I’d know.”

Christopher giggles tiredly from where he’s slumped into Eddie’s side. It’s only four in the afternoon California time, but they’ve been on the move for hours, and if Eddie’s exhausted, it’s a wonder Chris is still standing.

“I didn’t slouch,” Eddie grumbles, even as he pushes his shoulder blades back and down. “Careful, Abuela, you’re going to trip over that.”

Pepa, thankfully, swoops in and lifts the offending shawl before anything bad can happen, handing the end of it back to her mother with a tsk so loud it makes half of baggage claim turn around and stare at them.

Eddie’s never been more grateful to have them with him.

“How far is it to Grandma and Abuelo’s house?” Chris mumbles somewhere in the vicinity of Eddie’s ribs, hanging on to Eddie’s shirt to keep himself up. He knows how and when to ask for help, so Eddie’s doing the usual thing of letting him decide how far he wants to push himself, but looking at Christopher’s cheek all smushed into him and his eyes falling closed, he’s also kind of nearing the point of asking his son if he’d be okay with being carried.

Maybe it’s something in the air in El Paso. He’s only just landed, and he’s already second-guessing himself.

“Probably about an hour in the car,” he replies, bending down to ruffle Christopher’s curls, matted on one side from where he’d leaned against Eddie on the plane, then drop a kiss to the crown of his head. “Plenty of time to nap, if you want.”

“Yeah,” Christopher replies around a yawn. “Can I call Buck first?”

Buck had come over to help them pack; it’s not often that they go on trips like this, and Eddie’s kind of useless at it. Turns out neither he nor Chris need seventeen pairs of underwear, but they do need more than two shirts each, because Chris is a kid and Eddie’s about to spend two full days sweating in the lion’s den that is his parents’ house.

Maybe Eddie did know that, a little bit. But Buck had let himself in the door, heard Chris screech with incoherent delight, and answered with a screech of his own. He’d been all smiles, all whispered jokes at Eddie’s expense that made Christopher giggle so hard he had to muffle himself with his hands; frowning when he couldn’t figure out why Eddie was taking slippers, soft and patient as he showed Chris how to pack t-shirts rolled up instead of folded.

He didn’t really look at Eddie, just kind of through him, and his smile was some shade of haunted whenever Christopher turned away, but still. Eddie would have gladly packed the kitchen sink just to keep Buck with them, just to see his nose wrinkle like that.

“Sure you can,” he replies, gently guiding Christopher toward Abuela, who’s just found a couple of empty seats. “Don’t keep him long, though, okay? He might be busy.”

Chris frowns like he doesn’t understand the idea of Buck being too busy for him, and he’s probably right. Eddie has only ever known Buck to drop everything at a moment’s notice where Christopher is involved.

At the same time, his mentally unstable best friend who’s given him the cold shoulder one too many times is out of town. Maybe it’s the perfect opportunity for Buck to have a nice weekend with his girlfriend, without worrying about unhinged calls.

But then he hands Christopher his phone, and Buck answers before the first ring is through, and his greeting is loud enough that Eddie can hear it from where he’s standing.

Eddie really is the fucking worst. If he could just—just speak, just open his goddamn mouth and ask about all the things that are going wrong between them.

The problem is that he’s terrified of the answer.

Their flight pops up on the screen over the carousel with an estimated wait time of another ten minutes. Eddie sighs and perches on the armrest of Chris’s chair.

“We just landed,” Christopher says into the phone, smiling absentmindedly. When he notices Eddie sitting down, he turns on speakerphone, and they just catch Buck asking what it’s like so far.

“Uh,” says Chris, and he looks around the baggage claim teeming with people, “ugly.”

Buck’s laughter, tinny and distorted as it is, is a drop of sweet certainty in this tide of unpredictability that’s already pulling Eddie in. They’re only here for a couple of days. A couple of days, and then they’ll be returning to their little house, to their best friend, to the station. He’s only here to visit.

“Not the airport, silly,” Buck says, and it has the intended effect of making Christopher laugh. “I meant El Paso. Did you see any of it from the plane?”

Christopher shrugs. “It just looked like home,” he says, and Eddie, yet again, feels like he might do something stupid, like cry. “Dad says it’s even hotter here.”

“It’s the humidity,” Buck says, and the memory is a square punch to the chest.

It seems so uncomplicated now, in comparison: rattling in the back of the firetruck with Buck’s thigh pressed to his, pointing out weird billboards sticking out of the desert, arguing with Hen and chasing each other into gas stations.

“El Paso’s usually pretty dry, but it’s more humid than usual because this summer has actually been extra rainy,” Buck continues, because he just knows that, somehow. Abuela gives the phone a look so fond Eddie has to avert his eyes.

“Cool,” Chris says. “Will it rain while we’re here? I want to see rain.”

“It rains in LA,” Eddie points out, watching Pepa slam quarters into the vending machine.

“Not like it does on TV,” says Christopher.

Eddie wonders if Buck is also thinking about the last time it did rain like it does on TV; when it rained so much the earth ran like water and sealed Eddie under.

Then again, Buck probably barely remembers that. Is probably over it, like Eddie should have been years ago.

“They have rain machines on TV, buddy,” Buck says, a little light and a little strangled. “Hey, maybe we could build one for that science project you have coming up.”

Eddie—is not sure he’s aware of a science project coming up. Isn’t he just the father of the year.

“Really?” Christopher whispers, his eyes wide when he looks at Eddie, already turning on the patented Buckley puppy eyes that Buck denies teaching him. “Can we, Dad? Can we can we can we please build a rain machine?”

Buck laughs on the other end of the line, and Eddie shakes his head to dislodge anything that isn’t paying attention to his son.

“Maybe, buddy,” he says, going to ruffle Chris’s hair and ending up just sweeping it off his face instead. “We’ll have to figure out if we have room for it. And buy whatever we need.”

“Just some wood, hose, zip ties,” Buck rattles off, reading off whatever website he just pulled up. “I can get all that, and then I just need someone to come back to LA and supervise.”

“We’re coming back Monday!” Chris yells, bouncing in his seat, attracting yet more attention that doesn’t bother Eddie in the slightest. “Six o’clock, right, Dad?”

“I know,” Buck says, low and warm, before Eddie has a chance to nod. “You’ll probably need your rest, but I’m free as a bird on Tuesday, so you just tell me when you want me to be there, Superman.”

“After school, please,” Chris says, grinning like it’s that easy, because it is, because it’s Buck. “Can you pick me up?”

Pepa comes back over to them, handing Abuela a bottle of water, her eyebrows high as she looks between Eddie and his phone clutched in Christopher’s hand, something secretive curled in her smile. It would set Eddie on edge, except he’s already there.

“I’m sure I can arrange that,” Buck laughs. His voice is pure affection, and Eddie wishes he could see his face, the way he’s no doubt smiling with his eyes. “Be good in the meantime.”

“I’m always good,” Chris puffs out his chest proudly just as the carousel beeps and finally starts moving. “Oh, I think our bags are coming.”

“Go get them, then,” Buck replies, the smile audible in his voice. “Say hi to your grandparents, okay? And Pepa and your bisabuela.”

Pepa grins at Eddie over Christopher’s head, but says nothing.

“Okay, Buck,” Chris says, looking at the women in question to pass on the greeting. “Love you.”

“I love you too, Christopher,” Buck says, and then Eddie’s grabbing the phone with a hand that’s definitely not shaking, walking off toward the suitcases that are making their way along the edges of the room.

“Buck,” he says, still hearing him breathe on the other end. “Hey.”

A beat of silence. “Hi.”

“Sorry, I just—“ and he bites his tongue, because there’s no just about any of it. There’s no way for him to say exactly what he’s thinking, which is that Buck is too important, and even if Eddie will inevitably screw all of this up, it doesn’t have to be now. It can’t be now, not yet, not when he and Chris have learned how to need him.

“Just?” Buck asks, and he sounds so tired. Eddie’s chest tightens, a whisper of panic that’s there and gone again. Buck is stable ground. Eddie knows him. If he panics about him, he might as well panic about his own reflection in the mirror.

“Can we talk?” he bites out finally, his cheek clammy where it’s pressed against the warm screen of his phone. “After we come back?”

Buck lets out an unsteady rush of breath. Eddie aches to touch him, to ground them both. He doesn’t understand why any of this is so difficult.

“Of course,” Buck says eventually, barely audible over the carousel and the rumbling of a hundred luggage wheels on the tiled floor. “Whatever you need, Eddie.”

And Eddie takes too long to think of a response, too long deciphering the tense tremble in Buck’s voice. By the time he inhales to say something that’ll probably come out hollow or stupid or else just a little too honest, he’s met with the dial tone.

Crumbling, Eddie thinks as he numbly shoves his phone in his back pocket and shoulders past someone to get Pepa and Abuela’s bags. It’s all crumbling, and trying to hold it back is like trying to stop an earthquake with his bare hands.

“Why doesn’t Grandpa like his own birthday?” Christopher whispers, from where they’re both sitting on the living room floor pretending to play with Legos. “He looks so grumpy.”

Eddie looks up and through to the kitchen, where his father is staring into the tabletop with an ugly twist to the corner of his mouth.

Normally, he’d encourage Christopher to go and ask himself, because Ramon definitely wants the entire house to know he’s in a mood. But he also can’t really bring himself to let Christopher out of his sight, and besides, he normally would be asking without needing to be encouraged.

But not here. Not in this house he’s spent so much time in without Eddie, being taught God knows what about what he can and can’t do.

Eddie hates that both of them are a little wrong; that Christopher has definitely picked up on how ridiculously tense Eddie is, and isn’t his usual self as a result. He can’t really do anything about it, at least not until his sisters get there for the party tomorrow, other than rely on Abuela and Pepa, actual saints sent from heaven, who are keeping his parents on their toes.

“I don’t know, buddy,” he finally replies, as if his own birthdays aren’t beginning to feel a little like crises. “Some people think birthdays are a reminder that they’re getting older, and not everyone likes that.”

“I want to be older,” Christopher says, as Eddie knew he would. “Buck said he’ll take me on a real rollercoaster when I’m tall enough.”

Eddie’s mother must have an actual sensor for these things. It’s the only plausible explanation for why she shoots Eddie a sharp look over her shoulder, apparently having heard all the way in the kitchen.

“You’ll get there,” Eddie says, separating two Lego blocks a touch too aggressively. “And then we can all go on a real rollercoaster together, huh?”

Christopher laughs, which had been the goal, and slumps sideways until he’s resting against Eddie.

“You hate rollercoasters, Dad,” he whispers, like it’s a secret. “It’s okay. You can watch from the ground.”

And Eddie doesn’t get to reply to that, or figure out how to swallow past the lump in his throat, because Abuela steps in with a plate in her hand and a suspicious tilt to her eyebrows.

“Here,” she says, quickly shoving the plate into Eddie’s hand, the fork she’d brought clattering. “Try.”

It’s tres leches, a perfect rectangular slice topped with cinnamon, just like she used to make in the few years Eddie got with her before she moved back out to California.

It’s right before dinner, which Christopher points out with awe in his voice like he can’t quite believe this is his life, but Eddie looks down at the cake and then up at his abuela – whose eyes are shining like she, too, is remembering this same scene except decades ago, when he’d get the whipped cream all over his face and tangle in her feet begging for seconds – and doesn’t say anything about it.

“Thank you,” he says quietly, and thinks he might actually be smiling for the first time today. He leans forward and peeks into the kitchen again, just to see what his mom thinks about cake as an appetizer, and finds her stuck mediating a heated conversation between Ramon and Pepa with a hopeless expression on her face.

He’s not—pleased about it. He’s not. But for as long as he can remember, his mother has been the kind of presence that commands any room she walks into, that bends everyone to her will. He can’t deny that it’s a little nice to see her like this, second-guessing herself in her own house in front of the in-laws.

The tres leches is – no surprise – delicious, and he and Christopher share it with heads bent close together until they’re allowed in the kitchen to eat.

“Christopher,” Helena says as soon as they clear the doorway, “honey, come sit next to me.”

Christopher shrugs and waits until his grandmother pulls out his chair for him. The table, Eddie notices as he sits down opposite his son, is set with five water glasses, five wine glasses, and one of those reusable plastic glasses with a straw in it where Christopher sits.

“This looks great, Helena,” Abuela says, in a tone that makes Eddie choke on his water, but apparently doesn’t give either of his parents pause. “Let’s eat.”

Ramon gets up to pour everyone a glass of white without asking; Helena stirs through the pot of chili sitting in the middle of the table, releasing a cloud of steam, and grabs Christopher’s bowl to fill it. She does the same with her own, and with Ramon’s, and then turns the handle of the ladle Eddie’s way, ostensibly so he can serve his side of the table, barely looking at him.

The ever-present tension in Eddie’s chest ratchets up just a notch. It’s not that he expected anything different, not when it’s been years since they last saw Christopher, not when they don’t have Eddie’s coworkers in the house to pretend for.

But it still smarts, in some stupid, childish part of himself he just hasn’t learned how to kill.

“Thanks, Mom,” he says, barely audible over the rock music coming out of the ancient radio on the fridge that has been there for the entirety of Eddie’s life. Pepa smiles at him as he hands her bowl over, apparently at ease in all this tension, and Eddie wants to cry a little with how glad he is to have her in his corner.

He just has to make it through two days. Two days, and then he can go home to the things he knows.

“So, Christopher,” Helena starts, sprinkling cheese on his food, “tell us about school.”

Christopher shrugs, discreetly pushing the cheese to the side with his spoon. “It’s okay,” he says, which is so unlike his usual excited chattering that Eddie’s breath freezes in his chest. “I just got an A on my English assignment.”

The first one in a while that he wrote without Ana’s help, which had been a relief. Eddie allows himself a smile, and manages a bite of food that turns gluey in his mouth the second he realizes what the next question from his mother is going to be.

“That’s wonderful,” she grins, looking at Ramon, who actually musters up his first smile of the night. Bile sinks its claws into the walls of Eddie’s throat. “What was it on?”

“It was an essay about ‘overcoming difficult things’,” Christopher quotes from the assignment sheet. Eddie swallows, just barely, and looks up at the kitchen lamp for something to focus on. “I wrote about the tsunami.”

A couple of sharp intakes of breath. Pepa’s warm hand rests on Eddie’s shoulder for a second.

“The tsunami?” Eddie’s mother says, and he has to muster every ounce of courage left in him to meet her eyes. He has to repeat it on a loop in his head: it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay. Christopher’s therapist, an actual medical professional, told Eddie to let his son find his own ways of coping with the trauma. If he wants to put it on paper for Mrs. Henderson to read, Eddie’s not going to stop him.

Judging by the furious set of her jaw, Helena would. Luckily, Christopher’s not her child.

“Yep,” Christopher nods happily, putting the tiniest spoonful of chili in his mouth. He’s still doing better than Eddie, who’s kind of forgotten there’s food on the table. “I wrote about me and Buck on the firetruck and about how he saved people, and then about the nice lady who stayed with me, and about the bad dreams and how they went away.”

He looks perfectly happy as he says it, focused on avoiding the beans in his bowl, and Eddie’s breath comes in a little short at the sight of him. The brightest, most beautiful thing Eddie has ever touched, shining like a beacon even after everything.

Eddie’s mom is staring a hole in him, and in his periphery, he can tell that his father has also turned in his direction.

And to think he’d hoped they’d be on their best behavior tonight, while it’s just the six of them with no house full of family to take the heat off.

“Is that a good idea?” Ramon starts, and Abuela’s chair creaks where she leans forward to rest her elbows on the table. Eddie wants to be five years old again, just for a second, just so he can go and hide in her arms the way he used to. “I thought he was doing better.”

“He is,” Eddie replies, incredulous. Look at him, he wants to say, and he hates more than anything that they’ve decided to have this play out in front of Christopher. “He’s great. Doesn’t mean he’s not allowed to talk about the things he’s been through.”

Ramon’s nostrils flare, the slightest movement that Eddie can only spot because he’s hard-wired to look for it.

“That seems counterproductive,” Eddie’s mother says, gesturing with her spoon. “Reliving something so horrible? You could have written about something else, Christopher. You’ve had three surgeries, I bet no one in your class can say that!”

So much for not reliving horrible things.

“Jaden had six surgeries on his heart,” Christopher says, bouncing in his seat. “They put a little machine in it, it’s so cool. He brought a fake one to show us in science class.”

Helena blinks, and something in Eddie’s chest purrs with satisfaction.

“Oh, and Zafrina had a limp that was hurting her so they had to put these metal things in her leg—“

“Pins,” Eddie fills in gently, smiling at his son.

“Pins,” Christopher nods. “She was out of class for ages, but she showed us pictures. She had a whole cage on her leg. I don’t remember what I had after my surgeries.”

“Casts,” Helena fills in, and whatever vindication Eddie was feeling pops like a pierced balloon. She was been there for that part, and he wasn’t. “But we drew all over them together, so they didn’t look as boring.”

Christopher frowns and squints at the ceiling, like he’s trying to dig for the memory in the back of his brain.

“I don’t remember,” he shrugs finally, “so it was easier to write about the tsunami.”

“It didn’t make you feel,” she glances up at Eddie, then at Ramon, “sad?”

Christopher shakes his head, curls flying every which way. Eddie wonders if his mother’s going to bring up the fact that he needs a haircut.

“Not really. Dr. Kimura said I should talk to Dad about it if I feel sad, and then I did and I wasn’t that sad anymore.”

Dr. Kimura is a tidbit Eddie hasn’t shared with them, and the look they give each other reminds him exactly why. He’s self-aware enough to admit that he wasn’t the biggest fan of therapy for himself when Bobby made him go, but it did wonders for Christopher, not to mention Eddie’s peace of mind. He’d felt, however briefly, that he was doing the right thing for his son in the aftermath of something seemingly impossible.

And then he joined an underground fighting ring, but that’s another thing they’ll never be finding out.

“Dr. Kimura was Christopher’s therapist,” he fills in, because sitting here at all feels like repeatedly scraping rock bottom anyway. “He was really helpful when Christopher was dealing with his nightmares.”

Eddie’s father, judging by his face, has something to say about that, and Eddie feels a familiar panic wrap around the base of his throat, silken and then suddenly cutting.

“And Buck helped me with some of it,” Christopher jumps in, seemingly unaware of the conversation his grandparents are having with their eyes. “He said his doctor also says it’s good to talk about it.”

Eddie, even through his constricted windpipe, chokes on an absurd laugh. How’s that for a single sentence his parents will be bringing up for a decade to come.

“Ah,” Helena says, leaning back in her chair, “the illustrious Buck.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Mom. You’ve met him. Twice.”

What he doesn’t say is that they haven’t really met him until they’ve seen how he is with Christopher, and the million little ways in which he keeps Eddie’s life on track, but he’s trying not to think about that too hard himself.

“Yes,” Ramon says, putting his spoon down, having actually managed to eat around all this. Eddie looks down at the chili he grew up on and thinks he’s never seen anything less appetizing. “Your friend.”

“He’s our best friend,” Christopher says, unusually firm, and Eddie wants to reach across the table and scoop him up and hug him for as long as he can possibly get away with. “He says I’m his favorite Diaz.”

Ramon scoffs. “I bet he does.”

Next to Eddie, Pepa tenses and shifts and scoots her chair closer to the table until she’s leaning right across it, leveling her brother with a look that makes Eddie cower.

“We’re not talking about this, Ramon,” she says, perfectly pleasant unless you know her. “Buck is part of this family. I think he should have been invited to come here, honestly.”

Ramon’s mouth drops open, and he turns to his mother, who’s in the middle of taking a very loud sip of wine. Eddie’s chest burns a little with how much he loves her.

“He cleaned out my gutters the other week, you know,” she says once she puts her glass down. “He’s a wonderful boy.”

“He’s a hero,” Christopher grins. “You should’ve seen him in the water, Grandma. He was the coolest.”

Eddie puts his spoon down and wipes his suddenly sweaty palms on his jeans. There’s heat collecting under his collar, a flush that’s probably working its way up his neck.

It’s just that it feels selfish, most of the time. To take over so much of Buck’s life the way he has been, because his presence just—lifts something, gets under layers and layers of burdens that Eddie’s been carrying for so long he forgets they’re there most of the time. Buck feels like something he shouldn’t be allowed to have. A transgression.

Except Christopher adores him, and Pepa taught him the Diaz family hot chocolate recipe, and Abuela calls him her grandson and crosses him whenever he’s on his way out, just like she does to Eddie. And that must mean that somehow, improbably, Eddie’s doing something right.

“I’m sure he was, sweetheart,” Helena says, taking a sip of her own wine. “He must have saved a lot of people.”

“Twenty-one, that we were able to track down,” Eddie says, before he can think to stop himself. “Probably more, but it’s basically impossible to find them all.”

And then his mother smiles at him, with teeth, and Eddie realizes too late that he played right into her hands.

“It’s a shame he lost you,” she says, to Christopher. Eddie’s vision goes black for a second.

And Christopher just laughs, like that’s a common misconception; like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.

“He didn’t lose me,” he says. “The water came back and I fell off. And then I looked for him and he looked for me and we found each other again.”

Eddie tries not to think about that night; about those thirty or so seconds when he thought he’d never be alive again, when he stared at Buck’s bloodstained face and couldn’t feel anything other than numb.

But then they did find each other. All of them, like the fucking universe was handing them another chance, and Eddie would like to think he’s not wasting it.

Helena shakes her head. “You’re too young to understand, Christopher,” she says, sighing, and Christopher frowns at her, because that’s something he’s never once heard from Eddie and never will. “It’s just not responsible, to trust someone—“

“We’re not talking about this,” Eddie echoes Pepa’s words, and bites down on sadness, on grief, on rage. His hands are shaking in his lap. Just two days. “Buck’s one of Christopher’s caretakers, and everyone involved is happy with that arrangement. Leave it alone, Mom.”

She will not leave it alone, that much is clear from the hard set to the corner of her mouth, but she does press her lips together and stay quiet. It’s probably stupid to hope that she realizes she shouldn’t be saying this in front of Christopher, because it must be her ultimate dream to turn him against the life he has in LA—

Eddie shakes his head to dislodge the thought. He’d promised himself he’d come here and give them the benefit of the doubt.

“Thank you for dinner,” Pepa says, pushing her chair back with a noise. “I think it’s time for coffee.”

And she makes herself at home in Eddie’s parents’ kitchen, moving from cabinet to cabinet like she’s here every day. Eddie bumps into her a few times as he gets up and starts clearing the table, because the muscle memory from his childhood seems to have finally lapsed, and every time he does so, she gives him an uncharacteristically soft smile.

Two days, he thinks as he scrapes the leftovers from his bowl into the garbage disposal. Two days, he tells himself as he pushes his own water glass over to Christopher so he can have a drink without a straw, and as he passes his undrunk wine to his abuela, and as he helps his son get ready for bed in a bathroom that used to be much bigger when he’d stood in it as a child.

Two days, and he can go home.

Paradoxically, it gets a little easier to breathe once the house is full of people. Eddie gets to kiss his sisters on the cheek and hug his nieces and nephew, which relaxes something inside him, and as he watches the younger kids yell at the sight of each other and immediately put their heads together to figure out an itinerary while the adults have their boring party, he thinks today might actually go okay.

He offers to help in the kitchen, where his mother, Adriana, Abuela and Pepa are working assembly line and churning out platter after platter of food, but his mother scoffs and shoos him away, so he ends up at the door greeting guests. He gets his cheek pinched a hundred times for his trouble, and about eighty percent of them have something to say to him about how the last time they saw him he was this tall.

Once everyone has arrived – or at least Eddie hopes they have, because the house is so full the windows are starting to fog over – he moves out to the backyard to help Sophia and Damian, his brother-in-law, put finishing touches on the decorations. It’s a beautiful day, as was to be expected, and the sun that glints off the prepared glasses and cutlery blinds him for a second. Their mother had insisted on arranging the 6 and 0 balloons in reverse order, so they spell out 06 just like the cake, and Sophia rolls her eyes every time she walks past, which makes Eddie smile for a change. On her instruction, and to the unrestrained delight of several of his parents’ septuagenarian neighbors, he moves the patio tables so they can cover them and make space for people to eat, then helps carry and arrange the chairs just in time for the food to come out.

Eddie picks a chair to Sophia’s right, which earns him a grin, and Adriana sits opposite him with a kick to the shin. Christopher, despite appearing to be surgically attached to his cousins, comes to sit next to him, with Helena coming down on his other side. Eddie takes a dry-looking piece of cornbread that someone brought and helps Christopher assemble his plate, content to sit and let the dozen surrounding conversations wash over him while he convinces his stomach to accept food.

Then he catches movement in his periphery, and looks over to see his mother leaning over Christopher’s plate, cutting into his food with a smile. Christopher’s already looking at him, wide-eyed, wanting to ask a question Eddie can already read in his expression.

He smiles, trying to make it as reassuring as he can, and nods.

“Grandma,” Christopher says immediately, a little more confident in himself than he’d been yesterday, “can I please do that myself?”

Helena freezes, already halfway done with the meat on Christopher’s plate.

“Christopher,” she says, slowly, “I don’t think…” she starts, and then doesn’t say anything else.

“I can do it,” Christopher says, still so sweet, like he understands that asking his grandmother to allow him basic agency is hurting her somehow.

Eddie takes a gulp of water and reminds himself to breathe. They’re halfway done with today already, and his parents’ attention is split between three dozen people. The likelihood of things blowing up is significantly lower than yesterday.

When his mother doesn’t move, frozen with her cutlery mid-air, he has to clear his throat.

“Mom,” he says quietly. “Christopher asked you something.”

She raises her eyes to his, looking at him with an emotion he couldn’t name if he tried: something diffuse and soft until it isn’t, until that line around her mouth hardens into something intimately familiar.

“It’ll be faster this way,” is what she chooses to go with. Eddie hooks an ankle around the leg of his chair so he doesn’t get up and just—scream. Just scream.

She’s always been so very good at taking people apart with her words. Eddie had just hoped, against hope, that she loves Christopher enough to watch what she says.

“That doesn’t matter. We’re not in a hurry,” he says, and tries to shrug, but his shoulders are so tense they feel like any movement is going to break them. “Please respect what he wants.”

He almost wants to laugh as he says it, too.

“I use cutlery all the time,” Christopher says importantly, with only a hint of an eye roll, and picks the knife and fork out of Helena’s lax grip with a gentleness that Eddie wants to cradle in his hands and protect with everything he is. “I even use the big spoons and the spatula. Buck’s teaching me how to cook.”

Helena’s eyebrows draw together. Eddie, in retrospect, had really not expected Buck to come up in conversation this often, but he thinks maybe that was him being stupid. Buck is at home with them nine days out of ten; of course Christopher will mention him in nine out of ten conversations.

Eddie almost wishes his father, who is firmly of the ‘I expect my wife to have dinner on the table when I get home’ persuasion and has never let anyone forget it, was within earshot. He’s at the head of the table with a drink in his hand, laughing with one of his friends, and something dark and petty and deeply twisted inside Eddie wants to stand up and draw attention to himself, to Ramon’s fuckup of a son.

But before he can do that, or prepare for whatever his mother is about to unleash, Adriana steps in.

“That’s awesome,” she leans forward, pushing her plate away to get closer to Christopher. “What can you make?”

“I just learned how to flip pancakes,” he says proudly around a roast potato. “Buck says if two out of three end up back in the pan, I’m allowed to say that I know how to do it.”

And Eddie leans back in his chair and wishes, with his entire being, that Buck was here.

He’d grin, and say something that would make Christopher laugh so hard he throws his head back. He’d charm Eddie’s sisters, and his nieces, and his brother-in-law. He’d know how to diffuse the tension every time it gathered over them like a storm cloud or, if he couldn’t do that, he’d know just how to put himself between Eddie and everything else, just where to touch to make the panic recede. He’d do it without thinking.

But Eddie’s taken enough from him. He’s trying to do that less, and besides, this whole clusterfuck is Eddie’s to bear. He’s the one who caused it.

“Wow,” Adriana says, and Eddie feels Sophia also leaning in on his other side. It’s been a running hypothesis of his that he does not, in fact, deserve his sisters. “What else?”

“Rice,” says Christopher, “because Dad won’t let Buck get us that machine that cooks it by itself, so he showed me how to do it on the stove. But I’m not allowed to rinse it.”

That had definitely been An Evening. It’s been several months, and Eddie’s still finding rice underneath his cabinets.

“I can’t believe you’re making this poor man cook for you and you won’t even let him get a rice cooker,” Adriana says, something vaguely dangerous sparking in her eyes.

“It’s because of Hildy,” Christopher whispers, and ducks his head to hide his laugh.

“Okay, not everything is about Hildy,” Eddie replies. “We just don’t need it. You can make rice on the stove, it’s not hard.”

Christopher raises his eyebrows in such a perfect imitation of Buck it makes Eddie’s heart skip a beat.

“Your rice is bad,” he says, and then keeps eating.

Sophia bursts into laughter, and Adriana grins at him like she’s not far behind.

“Unbelievable.”

“It’s not my fault you never let me cook,” Eddie grumbles, but he can’t find it in himself to be actually annoyed when Christopher is laughing like that for the first time since they arrived.

“You had a wife to cook for you,” their mother breaks in, acidic, and he’s brought right back to reality. “And you have a girlfriend now. Why is your friend making your meals?”

“Mom,” Sophia says around a bite of food, rolling her eyes, “they don’t live together, she can’t be around all the time. How was Eddie supposed to cook with one arm?”

A blink.

“One arm?”

Eddie takes in his mother’s expression, the dawning realization in her eyes, and then the air disappears like someone’s snapped their fingers.

Oh fuck.

The panic moves in swift and familiar, settling on his chest, tingling in the tips of his fingers, down his arms. A band like steel snaps into place around his lungs, and he has to inhale through his mouth, breathe out forcefully through his nostrils to get in any air at all.

With the edges of his vision blurring, he looks a few seats down, to Abuela and Pepa, who aren’t paying him any mind. He’d kind of—assumed they would just tell his parents at some point. Drop it into conversation.

But they didn’t. Of course they didn’t; they’re on Eddie’s side, and not in the habit of sharing his business with his parents without asking. He should have figured that one out when his recovery went by without frantic phone calls from his mother, who would have probably demanded to know who’s taking care of Christopher before anything else.

He looks at her, feeling like death itself is wrapping its hands around his throat.

And she surprises him by pursing her lips and giving him a look that clearly says they’re not remotely done with this.

For the rest of the day, Eddie doesn’t let Christopher out of his sight, just because—because. That’s always his default when something’s wrong with his parents, because they know him, and they know where to hit him so it hurts.

He moves automatically to help clear dishes, rinses and dries and loads the dishwasher when he thinks he can get away and not be missed. He hides in the shadow of the house when it’s finally time to sing Happy Birthday, because his jaw is shut so tight that no amount of effort could get his mouth to open.

The darkness comes slowly this time of year, so it takes a while for the guests to start picking themselves up and heading home, and then Eddie puts himself in charge of wrapping leftovers, finding handbags, ordering Ubers, anything to keep his mind occupied, to keep his hands moving so he can’t tell how badly they’re shaking.

But finally, it’s just his sisters left, and they’re both looking at him seriously when they converge in the hall.

“You can come stay with either of us, you know,” Sophia says, wrapping a warm hand around his elbow. “I feel like this is my fault.”

“Nah,” Eddie smiles, even with his face puffy and stiff. He considers grabbing Christopher from where he’s sleepily watching TV in the living room, just hoisting him up into his arms and making a break for it. “You didn’t know.”

Because people tell their parents when they get shot and almost die. Generally speaking.

“If anything happens—“ Adriana starts, and then their bites her tongue as their mother rushes by with a stack of empty trays. “Just come. Don’t even bother calling, just come. Take Abuela, take Pepa, we’ll put them up somewhere.”

“We’ll be okay,” Eddie says, without any actual faith to back it up. “But we could probably—I could really use a ride to the airport tomorrow. I don’t know if any of us will be up for an hour in the car together.”

“Take mine,” Sophia says immediately, stepping backward and reaching into the living room, where Damian is sitting ramrod straight in the armchair and trying to look like he’s not eavesdropping. He pulls the car keys out of his jacket without a word and hands them to her.

“Soph, I can’t—“

“Shut up,” she says, all older-sister business-like. “Take my car. For tonight or tomorrow or whenever. Damian has the day off, he can take the bus to pick it up.”

Again, Eddie looks at Damian, who has been drawn into a quiet conversation about whatever Christopher is watching on TV, and resolves to ask him a few more questions about himself when they’re all in the same place again. Christmas, probably, if Eddie makes it through tonight and is actually welcome in here afterwards.

“Okay,” he breathes, and takes the keys. Takes the help, because they’ve been taking care of him his whole life, and the thought of being stuck out here in the middle of the night with nowhere to go makes the panic breach the surface, lunge out of the artificially still waters of his thoughts until he can’t breathe with it. “Okay. Thanks.”

They each hug him for longer than necessary and make him promise to text, and then he’s pressing a kiss to his sleeping nephew’s forehead and watching them walk down the driveway, his last defense.

The door closing feels like another coffin lid, but he can’t get out of this one.

Christopher comes to bed without needing to be convinced, stumbling sleepily through the unfamiliar hallway and up the stairs. Eddie takes longer than he normally would helping him change into pyjamas, sitting on the tub while Christopher’s brushing his teeth, tucking him into bed.

And then he takes a breath, makes himself think of the moment he steps on the plane back to Los Angeles, and goes out onto the patio.

The furniture’s been put back, so he finds his parents sitting side by side with glasses of wine in their hands, the dark yellow light of the outside lamp painting their faces gaunt and skull-like. Eddie considers having a drink before he steps out, but the stupid pamphlet he never should have read said that alcohol can make the panic worse, and if he gets any worse he might actually just keel over and get put in the hospital and then his parents would never let Christopher leave and—okay. Okay. Breathe in, slow. Buck’s shoes on the dirty pavement in that alley. Buck’s concerned voice on the phone.

“Sit down,” his father says, and the words have teeth.

Nothing in the world could train Eddie out of reacting to that tone of voice. He sits, and his heart beats a tattoo in his temples.

“What happened?” asks his mother, and Eddie is all of twelve years old, coming home with a bleeding lip they never let him explain.

He makes himself sit straight. He has to brace his arms on the armrests to keep himself upright, but he won’t allow visible weakness.

“I got shot,” he says, and almost manages it without a tremble in his voice. “In the shoulder. Four months ago.”

“Four months—“

“And I’m okay now,” he interrupts, cutting his mother’s dramatic gasp in half. “Clean bill of health, back at work. There’s nothing to do about it.”

“Oh, I think there’s plenty to do,” Helena says, calm and vicious right off the bat. Like that time she said the words that haunted Eddie all the way to LA, that rose to the surface of his mind sometime between breaking up with Ana and picking Christopher up from school that day, and have been bobbing there like a sick reminder: Don’t drag him down with you.

“What, you want to yell at me? Fine. I’m listening.”

Ramon takes a big, heaving breath. “How did you get shot? You’re a firefighter.”

“Sniper,” Eddie shrugs, and the word sends a shiver down his spine. “He was targeting firefighters specifically. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Yes, that seems to be a habit of yours,” Helena says.

“Kind of like I showed up in your life, huh?” Eddie replies, because if they’re going to get into it, he wants to be in it now. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

Ramon’s fist comes down hard on the wood of the table.

Eddie doesn’t flinch. It’ll take more than that.

“How dare you say that to us,” he growls, and even in the face of his anger, his eyes blazing behind the lenses of his glasses stained yellow by the light, Eddie just feels—nothing. Feels dead. “How dare you say that to your mother? She took care of you. She took care of your son when you weren’t there—“

“Because I was at war,” Eddie growls, and his shadow stretches across the table towards his father. “And I was wrong to go. I came back to be with him.”

His chest is heaving, but he doesn’t feel panic. This is something else; something very like the never-ending darkness that landed him in a parking lot wearing Lena Bosko’s turnout coat.

“We love you, Eddie,” his mother says, and the but is implied. “We want to know if something happens to you, that’s all.”

And he wishes it was a different time, just a few years ago, so he could believe it. But he’s had people love him since. He knows what it looks like, and it’s not the tears his mother is struggling to shed.

“I’m sorry,” he tries anyway, watching their hands where they rest together on the table, all of their knuckles white. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. It was a hectic time. I was a little preoccupied.”

“We could have helped,” Helena says. “We could’ve—God, Christopher must have been so confused. We could have taken care of him.”

“I had it handled,” Eddie says mildly, allowing his hands to uncurl from the cramped fists they have become. “Chris was fine. Is fine. He got to see me recover, and I think it’s important that he did.”

Ramon rolls his eyes. Eddie grits his teeth so hard his ears hurt, and doesn’t take the bait.

“How?” Helena shakes her head. “How did you even—your hired help? You can’t afford that, Eddie.”

“You know full well her name is Carla,” Eddie presses through his teeth. “And she helped, yes. Among other people. I know you hate to think about it, but I have a support system in LA. A family that was there for me.”

“Your family is here,” Ramon says, just as Eddie knew he would. “And we should have been there for you.”

Eddie shrugs with a lightness he doesn’t feel. “I had it handled.”

His mother’s hand snakes across the table. She touches his shoulder, the one with the older scar, with her fingertips.

“What if—“ she starts, almost whispering, her bottom lip trembling, and Eddie sees through her like he would through a pool of water, this performance of what she thinks she should be. She’s passed that particular skill on to Eddie. “What if you’d died? We wouldn’t have known anything, and Christopher would have been all alone—“

“That would have been handled too,” he pulls back, away from her touch. This, he thinks, is the one thing still keeping him upright. The knowledge that no matter what happens, Christopher won’t have to be here, won’t have to be with them at all. That he has someone who wants the right things for him, and there’s nothing Eddie’s mother and father can do about it.

He thinks of Buck, so small in a hospital bed with that cast on his leg; of the fact that he never once asked for his parents, the fact that they never came even though Eddie was in the waiting room with Bobby as he was making the call.

He’d asked Bobby not to do the same for him, if it ever came to that.

“What do you mean?” his mother asks, almost breathlessly, and this time the emotion is genuine. “Not your girlfriend? You haven’t even been together for a year.”

“No,” Eddie shakes his head, and puts his elbows on the table to brace for whatever comes next. “I broke up with her, actually, a little while ago.”

In his defense, even Buck doesn’t know about that one yet. He suspects his parents would not find that comforting.

“Broke up—Eddie,” Helena says. “What’s going on? You’re not acting like yourself.”

“It wasn’t working out,” he shrugs, because at the most basic level, that is true. “There was no point in prolonging it.”

“How can it not work out with a woman like that?” Ramon scoffs, and it cuts clean through the anger in which Eddie has been cloaking himself. His grip on it slips, and something else takes its place: something softer, vulnerable, breakable. Something that might just shatter with a well-aimed word.

His hands shake again, so jittery he has to squeeze them between his knees to stop them from seeing. He blinks, and blinks, and blinks, and the world is still a haze.

“It just didn’t,” he says, almost normal. “We weren’t a good fit. Relationships break down all the time.”

For a bizarre second, he entertains telling his father exactly why, in graphic detail. But he’d let it slide off him, just shake off and move on. The way Eddie has always strived and never quite been able to do.

“Well,” Helena raises an eyebrow, “you won’t find a better fit than that. Didn’t you say Christopher loves her?”

“Sure,” Eddie grits out. His throat is closing rapidly, and he feels so much like a child he can’t stand it.

“Then you should apologize,” she says, finishing off her glass. “Apologize for whatever you did and try to work it out. Christopher doesn’t deserve to have another person walk out on him.”

And Eddie wants to tell them that he’s been trying to muster up the courage to talk to Christopher. He wants to tell them that he’s trying, that his entire existence has been trying and trying and trying for the sake of his son; that this time, he’s failed, but something so wrong couldn’t have possibly been right for either of them.

He wants to tell them about Buck. About the brightest thing that has ever happened to them, and the legally binding documents safely stored in his lawyer’s office. He wants to look his mother in the face and tell her that he was thinking of her words when he was sitting with the pen hovering over the paper. Don’t drag him down with you; so he’s given Christopher to the one person who has always kept them afloat.

Most of all, he wants to tell them something that will hurt them back.

“Christopher needs something more stable,” Ramon says, in his reasonable voice. “He should be close to his family.”

“He is,” Eddie growls, because his voice is free-falling somewhere into the hollow of his body. “He has a family in California.”

“What, Buck? Don’t be stupid,” Eddie’s mother says, crossing one leg over the other, looking at him like he’s lost his mind. “That boy wouldn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Christopher needs responsible people around him. Caring people.”

And then Eddie’s chair is skittering backwards, tipping over when it catches on a slat of wood, falling with a clatter that barely registers. He can still feel his hands, but his legs are fuzzy, like his body ends at the torso. But he’s standing, so—so—so there must be something there.

“I’m not doing this with you,” he manages, with the last of his air. He gets a look at the satisfaction on his parents’ faces, blurry as they are, tries to commit them to memory.

Then he turns and staggers back into the house, out into the hall, to the front door where he left Sophia’s car keys in the key bowl. His hands are there: he grabs them on the first try, manages to turn the doorknob, to close the door without slamming it. He’s pulling out of the driveway before he can change his mind, just for a moment, to get somewhere he can breathe.

The streets are dark, completely still where the headlights brighten blurry shapes into something more concrete. His vision clears a little as he puts distance between them and himself, but nothing else abates. It’s one step, one minuscule knock from spilling over: his heartbeat pulsing loud and insistent in his fingertips, in the tip of his tongue, a pain that claws at his bones like his own body wants to disassemble itself. He’s freezing cold and burning up at the same time, his skin bubbling, his skin going numb.

He makes it there by memory alone: the field they used to drive to with Mackenzie, lying in the bed of the pickup that had been Sophia’s before Eddie got his license, pretending they were doing something other than talking.

There’s nothing planted in it, just hard earth and dried clumps of what may have been grass some months ago. Eddie stumbles out of the car and falls straight onto his knees, the pain of it radiating through his body. Even out here, there’s barely any air; he presses his forehead to the cool ground and thinks it, like a prayer nobody will hear: I’m having a panic attack I’m having a panic attack I’m having a panic attack.

But it doesn’t ease. His entire body convulses, like he’s going to be sick, like he already is and just doesn’t know it. He gets up onto his hands, with rocks and dirt digging into the flesh of his palms, and stumbles, stumbles. The world is inky blue darkness and the bugs buzzing around the headlights, is a flat sky and a shadowy moon that blurs and winks out in front of Eddie’s eyes.

He pulls on his own hair, scratches at his arms, throws himself on his knees again just to get himself under control, to feel one thing instead of a million, and instead a shiver rocks through him as strong as a tidal wave and curls his hands into claws.

The scream that tears out of him feels like it draws blood, and maybe it does, and it doesn’t stop. He screams straight at the sky, and all it returns is dark blue indifference, and it doesn’t stop. It won’t; not when he uselessly kicks at the earth like he can move it, not when he closes his hands on handfuls of dust, not when his body collides with the side of the car and howls in pain.

Not until he’s falling to his knees and the scream is a sob.

It takes everything with it on the way out; scrapes him clean and empty, leaves him skin and nothing else, all of him spilling out into the cracked earth that’s still holding on to the heat of day. He sobs and chokes so hard he almost throws up with it, coughing around a mouthful of stomach acid that burns his tongue, that glistens sickly where he spits it out. His eyes burn, and the tears start falling without him noticing, landing as dark as bulletholes in the dusty ground.

His lungs seize with pain around another sob. There’s blood in his mouth, a familiar sensation at last. He can’t see anything, can’t hear anything but the sickening rush of his heart, but he knows the taste, the smell when he spits it out. Blood, like he’s being ripped apart on the inside.

He moves away from the mess he’s made, crawls on all fours because his own body won’t bear him up. He’s crying so hard his face has gone numb already, cold and shapeless under his hands when he reaches up to wipe himself clean only to find new tears rolling down over his knuckles. He wipes and wipes and wipes until he thinks he’s got it, can swallow the rest back like he usually does, but—it’s only the heaving that eases. His body, trembling, all of it soft and wrung out and dirty, relaxes around the next sob instead of choking it down, and it echoes in the night, over the rumble of the engine.

He presses his palms over his ears and just prays for it to pass; kneels in the dirt and speaks to a God who has never been there and asks to be released.

The tears don’t stop. There seems to be an endless well of them, dug years ago somewhere in Afghanistan, or maybe at birth, that place where the urge to cry needs to go before anyone sees. But the sobbing, at least, abates. Eddie returns into his body, into his head, but only in increments: his burning lungs, his trembling hands, the phantom pain pulsing through the scar on his shoulder, breaching then dissipating, over and over, coming in from the back every time.

Every inch of his skin feels torn open, scraped, raw. Under the moonlight, in the distant yellow glare coming from the headlights, he turns his forearms over and watches the scratches appear, raised red welts dotted with blood. The bones of his wrist are dappled with the blunt imprints of fingernails.

From the distance, the sound of a busy road carries over, fading in with the hum of nighttime insects, with the engine still dutifully ticking after however long he’s been here. The air smells like rust, like blood, like bile; not unlike the kind of death he’s used to seeing out in nameless deserts, when a man dies so fast he chokes on everything at once.

He spits, and takes a breath in through his mouth that hurts every step of the way. One knee up, and he tests whether it’ll bear his weight. When it does, he presses his palms to the dry ground and gets on his feet, staggering a few steps in every direction, the blood that’s still improbably in his veins struggling to make its way up with him.

But eventually, the spots in his vision clear. The sounds of a mostly-sleeping suburb settle in his ears, and Eddie becomes aware of the vast emptiness that surrounds him. He shivers; rolls down the sleeves of his shirt so they cover the mess he’s made of his arms, and takes a breath that spills over his tongue tasting a little more like cool, dry air.

He doesn’t really trust himself to move, the same as when he has a fall at work that leaves aftershocks. But at work, he’s not alone. Anytime something happens to him, Buck is at his elbow like he’d been summoned, taking all the weight Eddie is willing to put on him, taking even more than that.

Buck’s not here. He’s not here, and Eddie has just coughed up everything that would let him pretend he doesn’t desperately wish for him. It’d be selfish beyond belief, to put any of this on Buck, but—just the touch of his hand on Eddie’s arm. The way he unconsciously rocks them every time they hug. Any of it, and Eddie could stand on his feet again.

A step and a half, careful over the deep ruts in the ground, the cracks that run deep enough for Eddie to break an ankle if he’s not careful. His vision is still blurry, the tears making their way down his face like old friends, but he can pick his way through, stumbling as if drunk.

He doesn’t look at anything after he slumps into the driver’s seat, just pulls the door closed behind him and drives, suddenly needing to make sure that the world is still there. That he didn’t die, even though he can’t feel his own heart beating in his chest.

He runs over one of his mother’s bushes when he parks. The living room window is lit up with the muted blue of a TV playing, but the rest of the house is dark, and he slips in quietly, leaves the keys in the bowl, walks to the downstairs bathroom.

There, he stares in the mirror and doesn’t recognize anything about the man staring back. He has dust all over his face, dirt, some of it all cracked open and spiderwebbed where he’s still crying. There’s dried blood in the corners of his mouth, ragged flecks of earth in his hair.

He scrubs at it, all of it, washing away another layer of himself in the sink, feeling nothing when he sprays antiseptic on the scratches. No one is there when he walks out, his skin raw and still damp, his nose overwhelmed with the smell of the soap his mother has been buying for three decades.

He stops by the living room on his way upstairs. The TV’s still on, a 24-hour news channel, and his parents are asleep turned towards it: his father in his chair, his mother on the couch. They look wan like this, washed out by all the blue. Old. His mother has a blanket wrapped around her that’s slipped all the way down one of her shoulders, and Eddie feels no urge to go fix it. Feels nothing, really, except broken into pieces that don’t fit together – and then, as a gunshot sounds on the news and they both frown, both shift, away from each other: a sudden clarity.

Eddie walks up the stairs to change, then softly cracks the door to the bedroom he’s sharing with Christopher and slips under the covers. His son immediately turns to him, rolls over, clutches onto Eddie’s t-shirt in his sleep.

Eddie curls an arm around him, runs a careful hand through his curls, and only knows one thing: if he ever makes his son feel a fraction of what he’s feeling right now, he won’t be able to live with himself.

His mother’s words have burrowed right under his skin already, taking root in places where he may never be able to rip them up again. He thinks maybe it’s something that’s grown in her since she was young, too; that maybe she looks at him and sees the things she’s done wrong, and that’s a thought that terrifies him more than anything else. The idea that, one day, he could turn on Christopher the way his mother turns on him, like he bears blame for things that happened long before he was born.

So maybe Eddie’s failing his son as they speak. Maybe he’s ripping away another person Christopher loves, upending his life again, upsetting what he knows. Maybe he’s dooming him to a childhood with just his father, who’s on the wrong side of okay more times than not.

But that’s as far as he’s going to let it get.

With his free arm, he reaches over to the bedside table where he’d thrown his phone. His heart makes a sudden reappearance out of the depths and settles right on his tongue, filling his mouth, pulsing and alive and making it impossible to speak.

He pulls up his texts instead.

Hey, he types, and thinks of his own blood seeping into soil, caked in the creases of his lips. Do you know if Frank’s back to in-person sessions?

His thumb is shaking, and he has to try five times before he actually hits send. Then he lies there in the dark, with Christopher’s snuffly breaths tickling his neck, and watches as the screen dims, as the text delivers, as it’s read.

Not sure, Bobby texts back. Let me find out for you.

And then, in a move so unlike Bobby that it makes Eddie’s throat squeeze tight, he follows up with a single blue heart.

Chapter Text

Slowing down your body enough to feel.

Thought you were at a standstill
but you were only slowing down enough

to feel the pain. There are worse things

than running to catch the train, twisting
your ankle, the afternoon fucked.

Running to get to or away from?

the stranger who helps you up
wants to know, you who are so used to

anything scribbled on a prescription blank.

Just want the pain to go away, you say,
surprised to find yourself

reaching for someone else's hand.

- timothy liu, 'all trains are going local'

“We don’t actually have to talk, you know,” Frank says, his hands folded in his lap. “These are confidential sessions. No one’s standing out there waiting to grade you on how you did in therapy. If you want to be silent, we can do that.”

Eddie sucks his bottom lip into his mouth and resists the urge to break it open with his teeth.

“I get the impression you don’t sit with your thoughts very often,” he continues, and that almost, almost makes Eddie snort. “If you want this to be that space for you, then by all means, take the hour.”

And he rolls across the room to his desk, where a thin folder is sitting open on a couple of sheets of paper. Probably whatever notes he took in Eddie’s previous foray into therapy.

Eddie looks away from the back of Frank’s head and out of the office window, where a bird feeder hangs, swaying just so in the wind. He doesn’t remember it being there last time, but then he doesn’t remember much from last time at all. He’d felt—chased, every time he was made to go in here. Like someone was standing outside waiting to grade him, because they kind of were.

“I think I want to be here,” he says, surprising himself. Frank glances up casually, like he’s just been waiting for Eddie to open his mouth.

“Okay,” he says, inscrutable, and God but Eddie’s forgotten how infuriating that is. “But you’re not sure?”

Eddie looks down at his hands, which are steady for the first time in days.

“I don’t know how it’s supposed to help,” he tells his own fingers. “I don’t—it doesn’t come naturally to me. Sitting and talking about myself. I’ve always been taught to get off my ass and do something about stuff that was bothering me.”

Frank hums. “Can you specify what you mean by something?”

Eddie’s mouth twists of its own volition, something bitter settling on the back of his tongue. What does he mean?

“Just—something. Study harder if you get bad grades. Find a better job if you don’t have enough money. Find a way.”

“Okay,” Frank nods, scratching at his beard. It’s longer than the last time Eddie was here. “So what if the things that are bothering you can’t be changed?”

Bizarrely, he thinks about Buck. The way hurt had seeped out of his very skin after that dinner with his parents. How he’d rearranged his entire body before walking up to the loft to meet them. His face brighter as he told them that his parents had agreed to therapy, and the night a few weeks later when he came to Eddie’s at eleven, with his eyes bright red from crying, and wouldn’t talk about it.

At least not until Eddie pushed, and then it came tripping out of him like he’d wanted nothing more than to tell somebody.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, surprised to find his voice rough. He can’t change being shot. Can’t change his parents. Can’t change so many things he doesn’t even realize need changing. “I think that’s the part I haven’t figured out.”

“Okay,” Frank says again, moving closer. “So let’s start there.”

Eddie comes back, and Maddie is gone.

He has to hear it from Hen, which smarts more than he’d like to admit, so he sits with it for five minutes before he buries it and focuses on being there for his friends.

They know where she is, at least, perfectly safe at a treatment center in San José, never more than a phone call away. But when Buck and Chimney arrive at work together Eddie’s first shift back, they’re both baggy-eyed and a couple of days away from clean-shaven, and the station is unusually quiet the entire shift without either of them wisecracking.

Eddie lets it go on for a few shifts, walking around the station after them offering coffee and water and snacks because they’re both the type to forget to take care of themselves, but a couple of weeks in, he grabs Chim by the elbow as he stands to make his way out of the bunk room one morning.

“I can help, you know,” he says, and Chimney yelps in the dark. “With Jee, with cleaning, with groceries. Whatever.”

Chim sighs. “Okay, first of all, don’t ever do that again. And second of all, it’s just that—“

“I know,” Eddie says, letting him go and sitting up. It’s just the two of them, as far as he’s aware, so he doesn’t really need to keep his voice down, but it’s habit. “I’ve heard literally all of it, from myself. And then I ended up with Christopher on calls with us because someone blew on the house of cards. I’m right here, Chim. I got time. I can help.”

He can just about see Chim blink in the darkness, his eyes glinting. “You have your own kid,” he says.

“Yeah,” Eddie rolls his eyes, and moves over so Chim can tip forward and slump into the bunk next to him. “So does Hen, and she also has a wife and is in med school. You need help, we can rearrange things.”

Chim’s quiet for a second. He shifts, his knee knocking into Eddie’s, puts his head in his hands and scrubs his fingers through his hair.

“Yeah,” he sighs, pulling at the corners of his eyes, the outlines of him barely visible even up close. “That’s rich coming from you, you know.”

“Oh, I’m aware,” Eddie says, and almost grins. Of course it doesn’t make sense to Chim, who’d tear himself into pieces just to be there for the people he loves. He deserves all the help he needs. Eddie—is a different case. “But I’m serious. Even if you just want to—talk, I guess, I don’t have the same experience you do, but. You know.”

“I don’t know how you could’ve done it,” Chim says, blinking, furiously rubbing his nose. “I know exactly where she is, I talked to her twice yesterday, and still it’s—it’s like I can’t breathe without her there.”

Eddie hums, swallowing around the pain that pulses through him once, twice, squeezing around his heart in that way that’ll never quite be gone.

“Shannon leaving was my fault,” he shrugs, and manages to make it sound like just a simple fact. “I felt like I wasn’t allowed to miss her, you know? Like I deserved it. Just kind of grit my teeth and got on with it.”

Chimney gives him a Look. Eddie’s not sure if he picked it up from Hen, if Hen picked it up from him, or if it kind of evolved simultaneously in both of them.

“You’re allowed to miss her,” Eddie says, “so I can’t imagine how it feels for you. But every day you make it through is a day closer to her coming back.”

They sit in silence for a while, listening to the station going about its morning outside the door.

“Jee-Yun spent the night at Mrs. Lee’s,” Chim says, just as someone drops something that thuds to the floor so hard it shakes the walls. “I’m gonna go pick her up, and Buck was supposed to take the afternoon, but I think he’s sleeping even less than I am. Do you think—?”

“Yep,” Eddie replies. There’s a pleased kind of warmth wanting to wrap around his ribs, but it flickers and fades when he realizes that he, actually, has no idea how much Buck is or isn’t sleeping. “What time?”

“Go pick up Christopher first,” Chim says, stretching out his legs, his knees cracking. “If he’s okay with coming to ours? I don’t want to throw anything off for him.”

Eddie waves a hand. “It’s a Friday,” he says. “And he keeps asking me about Jee-Yun anyway. I think he’ll be a fan.”

And Chim grins, then, his teeth a bright flash in the darkness. “Okay,” he says, digging in his pocket for chewing gum. “Cool. Thank you, Eddie.”

He pats Eddie on the knee, stands up, then changes his mind and reaches down to squeeze Eddie’s shoulder, too. Eddie flushes a little, because—this is what he’s meant to do. Be there. Help other people.

“Anytime,” he replies, and squints to prepare for the flash of light Chim lets in as he opens the door.

He sits with himself in the darkness for a little while longer, staring at the monotone wall opposite him for so long it starts to look like it’s moving. When he gets up, he stretches up towards the ceiling, wincing at the way his bones pop in the quiet of the room, and opens the door to go join in on whatever breakfast efforts are probably happening upstairs.

At the last second, he realizes he forgot his phone, and steps back into the room to get it. It’s then, as he reaches for it, that he catches a new sound: someone else’s breathing. It’s loud, a little shaky, and as Eddie stands there and doesn’t dare move, it gets wetter until it becomes a sniffle.

And that, Eddie recognizes.

“Buck,” he says, and the sound stops, but he already knows it was coming from the furthest bed from the door, the one where the frame’s been broken ever since the C shift probies did something unholy on it. “Buck. You’ve been in here this entire time?”

Buck must realize that he’s been caught. He blows a big breath out through his nose, then coughs on the inhale. He doesn’t say anything, though, and it’s like Eddie’s entire world shifting a few inches to the right, so fundamentally wrong in a way he can’t pin down exactly.

“Are you okay?” he asks, quietly, quietly. He can barely make out Buck’s outline, the steep slope of his shoulder rising from underneath the comforter, his back to Eddie and his face nearly pressed into the wall.

Eddie crouches by the bed, just close enough to touch.

“I can cover for you, if you want,” he says, putting his hand palm down on the mattress, so close he can feel the heat Buck is emanating. “If you want to catch some more sleep. We’re off in a couple of hours.”

Buck doesn’t reply. His shoulders shake, and some kind of sound dies just before it makes it out of his throat.

Eddie frowns. He hesitates in the grey space between them, just shy of the worn fabric of Buck’s LAFD t-shirt. Something’s always in the room between them, lately, this thing he’s been trying and failing to grasp so he can look at it, dismantle it, fix it. He’s sure Buck’s angry at him over the phone call, at the very least, and he doesn’t know how to apologize, how to explain.

But he knows what Buck needs. He’s always known, on some instinct he’d never realized even existed until he was kneeling by an overturned ladder truck and Buck was grasping at thin air and Eddie offered his hand to hold without so much as a conscious thought. Somehow, he always knows how to find the words, or at least he did until a few weeks ago.

It’s so simple sometimes, figuring out what Buck needs him to do, giving it to him, that he’s had to start watching himself. Here and there, he’ll look at the miserable slump of Buck’s shoulders, or at the way his eyes squint in the corners when he smiles, and thinks he knows exactly how Buck needs to be touched right then.

It’s just that he can’t be the one to do it.

But here, now, Buck needs comfort. He needs grounding. And of all the things Eddie’s failed at in his life, helping Buck out of his head was never one of them.

So he reaches out and lays a careful palm on the curve of Buck’s shoulder.

And Buck shrugs him off.

“I’m fine, Eddie,” he finally says, his voice like sandpaper. “Go have breakfast. I’ll be out in a minute.”

Eddie stays there, frozen, with his hand hovering mid-air. The little pocket of peace that had grown inside him when Chim accepted his help collapses right in on itself, replaced with the familiar chill of panic. It’s not threatening, not like he’ll need to find a secluded corner to lose it in anytime soon, but it’s all the more terrifying because it feels like it’s there to stay.

He doesn’t know what to do with this; can’t recall a single occasion on which Buck had rejected his touch. He’s always pulling toward it, even when he doesn’t realize, shuffling closer and closer and closer after rough calls until Eddie wraps an arm around his shoulders, standing so near Eddie at the kitchen counter that they’ll inevitably bump into one another. That’s how it’s always been between them: as long as Eddie can touch him, he knows he can help.

Buck has always wanted him to, until he doesn’t.

Eddie gets up, measured, methodical, relying on muscle meomry. He stares at the unsleeping form of his best friend, right there and still an ocean away. He bites his lip, breathes in, thinks of screaming himself hoarse and bloody alone in a field in El Paso, and then turns around and walks out of the room before he can shake apart where he stands.

He waves away Bobby’s offer of breakfast, politely shakes his head at the mug of coffee Hen holds out for him. Instead, he presses himself to the railing, moving until he has a good view of the door to the bunk room, and waits.

It takes more than a minute, but Buck does come out. Eddie instantly knows that Chim’s right about his sleeping habits, because he looks a little like a skeleton under the fluorescent lights, exhausted to the marrow of his bones. He rubs a hand over his face, cracks his neck, his expression tentative in a way Eddie hasn’t seen since he haunted the station after the lawsuit.

And then something quirks in his face, and Eddie’s suddenly aware of the click of heels echoing through the bay. Taylor Kelly comes into view with a smile on her face that has something distinctly off about it, her hair so bright it rivals the firetrucks. She’s holding a coffee, extending another one towards Buck, and he moves to her and turns his back on Eddie’s watchful gaze.

He can’t hear what they’re saying, and judging by the look on her face, he wouldn’t want to. It’s enough to see her expression shift: a wrinkle appears between her eyebrows, and her eyes track whatever’s happening on Buck’s face. She reaches out, lays a hand on his cheek, then draws him into a hug.

And he accepts it.

Of course he does, Eddie tries to think rationally. She’s his girlfriend. She’s supposed to be his person. Of course he wants comfort from her.

But he can’t stop the darkness that usually lies dormant, the way it rolls over and whispers inside him, reminding him that it’s always there should he need it. He can’t quite swallow the wave of bitterness that erupts out of his throat and coats his tongue.

He watches Taylor kiss Buck, watches her touch him where he can’t, and something inside him howls.

“Dispatch said we have a fifty-three-year-old male with a stab would to the shoulder,” Bobby says, craning his neck into the back. “They were a little unclear on the weapon.”

And, in Eddie’s experience, “a little unclear” usually just means some type of knife. Chef’s knife, pocket knife, he’s seen a couple of butter knives, even.

Before today, he had not seen a fucking sword.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” the guy tells them after his girlfriend lets them in, and Eddie finds himself hesitating in the doorway. It sure looks bad: their victim is pinned to the floor, the long blade sticking out of him glinting casually in the sun. Most importantly, he’s lying in a rapidly spreading pool of his own blood.

“Buck,” Bobby starts, but Buck’s already coming back from where he ran to the truck to get the saw, and Eddie’s still just standing there.

“Ma’am, did you try to pull this out?” Chim asks the woman who called them, falling to his knees right in the dark red liquid, unwrapping gauze as he goes. “There shouldn’t be this much blood.”

The woman, who looks about as pale as if she was losing all that blood herself, puts a hand over her mouth. When she sways in place, Eddie reaches out and grabs her elbow, then guides her into an armchair.

“Is that bad?” she whispers, horrified. “It just seemed—“

“I told her to,” the guy says, followed by a nasty-sounding cough. Eddie doesn’t even have to look to know there’s blood in his mouth, but he can’t help imagining it. Can’t help tasting it at the back of his throat.

The man takes a breath to say something else, but it bubbles, and rattles, and he chokes. Chim’s immediately unwrapping a suction tube, and then Eddie needs to be there as an extra pair of hands to help Hen intubate, holding the laryngoscope steady and feeling blood, sickeningly warm, stain his hands.

“We have to get this floorboard out,” Bobby says, and Buck’s already in position at their patient’s shoulder; his knees, too, are covered in blood. He looks the way he usually does on calls, wide-eyed but laser focused, watching Bobby for his cue.

To anyone who isn’t Eddie, he’d look fine. He’s breathing normally, blinking normally. His hands are steady on the saw.

But his wrists, his arms, his entire chest, are shaking.

Once the patient has oxygen again, with Eddie pumping and Hen and Chim packing gauze around the sword so they can hold it steady for transport, Bobby shows Buck where to cut up by the man’s head and down by his feet, far enough to be safe but not so far that the chunk of floor won’t fit in the ambulance. The blood, shiny and slick, has settled in the grooved padding on the knees of Buck’s turnout pants, and as he and Bobby walk around, both of them are leaving footprints, horror-movie clear.

Maxwell tugs on Eddie’s shoulder to get his attention, and Eddie blinks up at Bobby. He’s saying something Eddie can’t quite hear over the rush of his heartbeat in his ears, but he gets the gist from the gestures. He lets Maxwell take over, happy to let go of the bag, and then Buck’s handing him a Halligan and they’re kneeling opposite each other. Their eyes meet over the dying man between them as they pry up the floor, then scramble out of the way because the gurney’s there and the guy needed to be in an ambulance the moment he got stabbed with a fucking sword.

The house is quiet in the aftermath. A police car has pulled up outside, and an officer is kneeling by the sobbing woman in the corner, but Eddie can’t tear his eyes away from the floor.

The stain has spread, is still spreading, slowly soaking the corner of the dining room carpet, running under the bookshelf. Dark red footprints lead through the hallway and down the cement steps outside, all the way onto the sidewalk and the road, only cutting off where the ambulance had been parked. There’s a smear where Buck had knelt and then stood up, the outline of a bloody hand on the floor and on the doorframe where they had to maneuver carefully.

It’s so much blood. Too much for the patient to make it to the hospital alive. Eddie has to close his eyes and focus to convince himself that none of it is his, his blood that’s safely inside of his body and straining at the walls of his veins. His head spins, and the panic trills in pleasure when he can’t quite get in enough air.

On instinct, searching for something to make him feel better, he looks up to Buck. Wide blue eyes meet his, and Buck is the one who looks like he’s panicking. He looks down at his hands, his grotesquely stained pale blue gloves, and then he’s shoving past Bobby and Athena in the doorway and disappearing outside, leaving more footprints.

Eddie closes his eyes and centers himself; breathes, just for a second, because he can’t be panicking when Buck needs him. Then he’s out on the lawn, following the red trail in the grass around the side of the house. There’s a gate leading out into a side street, just the grey façade of a building and a collection of dumpsters. It’s one of them Buck is leaning against, bent forward in the waist, vomiting.

Eddie crosses to him in a blink, and lays a hand between his shoulder blades as Buck’s entire body convulses. He doesn’t seem to have registered Eddie, or anything else around him, breathing so hard and so fast Eddie wonders if he’s getting any air at all.

“You’re okay,” he murmurs, and wants to smack himself in the face for it. “It’s all right. You’re okay.”

Buck breathes, once, twice, and a third, heaving one. He straightens up, braces his hands on his knees, and they come away bloody again.

Before he can think about it, Eddie takes them in his, hides them away, turns them over at the wrists so neither of them are looking at Buck’s stained palms. He forgets to let go.

“Okay,” he says, and chases Buck’s eyes, which have something profoundly haunted, something dead, behind them. “What’s going on?”

But Buck only blinks, slow, uncomprehending. Sunlight slants into the alley in patches, and he’s standing in one, all the paler for the way it lights him up. His lips are unnaturally dark in contrast to his face so devoid of color, and Eddie can’t shake the feeling that Buck isn’t seeing him. That he’s somewhere completely different.

“Buck,” he tries, squeezing where Buck’s pulse is racing under his fingers. “What’s going on with you? Where did you go?”

He has to bite down on the urge to be firmer, to push, because Buck hasn’t been okay for longer than Eddie has been seeing it.

Buck blinks, syrupy slow, a sweep of lashes that look gold over his pallid cheeks.

“Eddie,” he says, a little bit of him back to Earth. “Eddie, y—you’re shaking.”

And Eddie is. He looks down at their hands, at Buck’s that are trembling a little but still forcibly steady like they were on the saw; at his own, shaking so hard the tremor transfers into Buck’s arms. He becomes suddenly aware of his skin, which feels like it’s expanding, like Eddie’s slipping out of it against his will all small and cold and uncomfortably newborn.

Buck pulls his wrists out of Eddie’s grip. To step away, probably, to put more distance between them because Eddie can’t even touch him anymore—

Except then he’s ripping off his gloves, staining his fingers with blood as he does, and reaching forward.

Reaching for Eddie’s shoulder.

It’s barely a touch, really, just the softest brush of fingertips, but the brand new skin of Eddie’s scar is so sensitive it may as well be a brand. Buck touches him and Eddie feels—something—a flash of a memory, metal on his tongue, Buck—Buck—

“Hey,” Bobby says, and the two of them flinch in unison, take the exact same pronounced step back. “You guys okay? We’re good here, let’s go back to the station and change out of this.”

Eddie shakes his head to dislodge the haze, blinks the memory out of existence. He turns to Buck, but Buck’s already marching back across the lawn, his shoulders drawn so tight it must be painful.

He doesn’t look Eddie in the eye for the rest of the shift.

“So,” Frank says, “I have a hypothesis.”

Eddie groans, and attempts to take a sip of his decaf that the receptionist so kindly made for him, but it’s still too hot. He still has so many minutes to go.

“I assume you’d like to tell me about it,” he says instead, choosing what to look at today in lieu of meeting Frank’s eye. The bird feeder is overrun with birds to a point that inexplicably makes him anxious, so he tries the plant in the corner.

“If I may,” Frank says. He leans so far forward his wheelchair creaks, his eyes burning in the side of Eddie’s face. “You’ve told me about the sniper. Thank you for that, by the way.”

Eddie rolls his eyes. “You already said that.”

“It bears repeating,” Frank replies. “But I can’t help noticing that whenever we mention it, you talk about it like a news report. I was standing over there, he was in this or that building, he shot me in the shoulder, I fell, I woke up in the hospital. I feel like I’m listening to that redhead reporter Channel Eight’s putting everywhere right now.”

Eddie puts his head in his actual hands.

“What I’m getting at,” Frank says, because he can’t possibly know that Eddie maybe definitely hates Taylor Kelly, “is that I think you don’t remember a whole lot of what happened. That’s my hypothesis.”

Eddie hums.

“Your memories are your business. If you don’t want me to know—“

“I don’t have to tell you, yeah, I know,” Eddie interrupts, suddenly jittery, rubbing a hand over his face, tapping his feet. “I don’t, okay? I don’t remember. I get snatches, and I get nightmares, and I don’t know if any of them are real, so. I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” Frank nods. He makes a note on his clipboard in that way he has, where his eyes don’t leave Eddie’s face for a second. “So the question that arises is, why didn’t you tell me this in the first place? It’s not your fault that you have no memory of a traumatic event. You don’t get to control how your brain works.”

Eddie bites down on his lip. He’ll give in and bite through it one of these days, he knows, because the desire to release the tension somehow is so strong it makes his ears ring a little.

“It’s not your fault that you have no memory of a traumatic event,” Frank repeats. Eddie really, really can’t stand him sometimes.

“I remember Afghanistan,” he forces out. “Every second of it.”

“This is not Afghanistan,” Frank replies, like that makes any sense. “Every trauma is different in how it affects you. A lot of people are lucky enough that they never get to find that out.”

“And I’m just lucky to be alive,” Eddie says, and feels the corner of his mouth twist until it hurts. “Again.”

“You are,” Frank nods, “but you don’t have to feel lucky right now. That’s part of why we’re here.”

“We’re here so I can be better for Christopher,” says Eddie, beacause that was a question Frank asked him as soon as he saw him walk through the door, and it feels true. He doesn’t want his son to be like him, and God, he doesn’t want to be like his own father. He’s a lost cause, but maybe he can become—half-lost. Stay the way he is instead of getting worse.

“Sure,” Frank concedes, with that glint in his eye like he knows something, but Eddie hasn’t unlocked that level of therapy yet. “And part of that is unpacking why you wouldn’t tell me that you don’t remember.”

Eddie sighs. He scrubs his hands through his hair, feels more of the skin there than he used to, and wonders, just for a second, if therapy can actually be making him bald.

“I don’t know,” he ducks, to buy himself time to think. “It’s just—everyone has a version of the story, you know? My team, Christopher, Ana. Carla, my grandmother, my aunt. Everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing. How they felt. What they did.”

And Buck’s name forms in his mind, curls on his tongue. But he doesn’t say it, and he doesn’t know why, because—it’s about him, really, isn’t it. He’s not lucky to be alive; he’s lucky that Buck was there.

Buck, with his hands covered in blood. In the alley yesterday, but also—not.

“Eddie. Do you feel guilty for not remembering?”

Eddie snorts, looking at the ceiling as his eyes sting. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Whatever you say,” Frank shrugs, mild. “But you didn’t answer the question.”

For a week straight, Buck ducks, and dodges, and comes up with excuses. He’s busy with Taylor then Eddie sees her live on TV; he has to look after Jee-Yun when Eddie knows for a fact it’s Hen and Karen’s night to do it.

So Eddie plays the dirtiest hand he can come up with.

He’s not proud of it, but it goes off without a hitch: Buck and Christopher arrange one of their endless zoo days during the September break, and Christopher spends four straight days talking about nothing else. Eddie encourages him, nods in all the right places, goes on the website and reads out loud about everything that’s been added since their last visit to drum up the enthusiasm.

And then, over bowls of cereal on the morning of, he asks if he can tag along.

Christopher’s eyes go so wide they nearly pop out of his head, and he texts Buck so fast his fingers are a little blurry. As Eddie expected, Buck doesn’t say no, because he’d never break Christopher’s heart like that.

Eddie feels awful about it. This is something Buck and Christopher share together, a thing that is genuinely special to them. Eddie knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that being with Christopher recharges Buck the same way it recharges him, and he was probably looking forward to this, and now Eddie’s presence is going to make him as cagey and jittery and anxious as he has been for the past few—weeks? Months? How long was Eddie too consumed with himself to even notice?

So he adds it to the pile of things he needs to apologize for. And he will. He will, if he can ever get Buck alone, can get him to actually look Eddie in the eye.

Buck knocks on the door when he arrives, another thing he’s gotten into recently, as if he hasn’t spent enough time in this house that it may as well be his own. Christopher opens the door for him, and Eddie has to rub his chest at the sudden warmth that ignites there as he watches them grin at each other.

And then Buck looks up at him, and the flame is extinguished.

“Hey,” Buck says, hiking some kind of—weird plasticky mask of a smile up onto his face. For a bizarre, breathless second, Eddie thinks he might actually panic about it, because he doesn’t know what to do with a Buck who doesn’t let him in, who doesn’t soften at the sight of Eddie even when he’s upset and keeping everyone else out. Eddie has never seen him like this, and he just—doesn’t know. “Heard you’re coming with us today?”

Eddie thinks about being on the receiving end of Christopher’s puppy eyes combined with Buck’s pout more times than he can count: when he wasn’t sure about the aquarium, when he sent them grocery shopping alone, when he picked up an extra shift and told them he’d eat breakfast when he woke up in the afternoon. They have their own thing going on, but they always want him with them if he’s willing, and he hadn’t realized that was something that could change.

“Yeah, if that’s okay,” he clears his throat. He smooths down his shirt – which is nicer than he’d usually wear for a casual outing like this, a choice he’s really trying not to think about – then buries his hands in his pockets because they’re itchy and too big and have nothing to do.

They might have hugged, once upon a time. Now Eddie’s not sure how he’s going to stand being in the passenger seat.

The drive’s not tense, at least not like he expects it to be. Christopher has memorized every random fact Eddie had read out for him, and Buck has done his own research, so they bat things back and forth while they sit in traffic: did Buck know that the giraffes had their shelter remodeled? Did Christopher know that that there’s a brand new batch of baby tamarins?

But Buck’s hands never really relax on the wheel, the bones of his knuckles jutting tensely out from under his skin. The muscles of his neck strain when he smiles, and he takes turns with an uncomfortable, surgical precision.

Once they step out of the car, though, he and Christopher are off. Buck’s definitely not okay, isn’t running after Chris with limbs going everywhere and imitating animal noises like he’s wont to do, but he looks better than Eddie has seen him in a long time. He picks Christopher up to look at the birds of prey in the tall corners of their enclosures, reads the small print on the information boards, and grins down indulgently every time Christopher rapidly changes directions.

Eddie, walking a few paces behind with Christopher’s backpack slung over one shoulder, thinks he could maybe be fine with this. Could pretend like this.

And then someone who sounds suspiciously like Frank tsks in his head. Pretending has never made anyone happy, Eddie, or whatever.

By the time the sun’s right overhead, blazing down with an intensity that has Eddie regretting his long sleeves, Christopher needs to rest. They pick a table by the gorilla enclosure, with a few concession stands nearby. Buck jumps up and says he has to go to the bathroom, and Chris does not, so he sits next to Eddie and leans back against his shoulder, squinting into the sky.

Eddie presses a kiss into his curls, content to hear him laugh quietly.

“You having a good time, buddy?” he asks, even though he can read the answer in every happy line of Christopher’s face, because if he doesn’t keep his attention on something else, he’s just going to be watching the bathroom door.

“The best,” Christopher confirms, squinting into the distance. “The zoo with Buck is always the best.”

“I bet,” Eddie smiles, runs a hand through Chris’s hair, and convinces himself that the pull he feels in his eyes isn’t tears. “You think you’re up for a couple more hours of exploring?”

“Duh,” Christopher says, rolling his eyes. “We haven’t even seen the tamarins yet, Dad! They have babies.”

“I heard,” Eddie grins. “Aren’t they over on the other side, though?”

“Yep,” Chris nods, straightening up. Eddie misses the weight of him before it’s even fully gone. “I need to keep my strength up, you know.”

Eddie masks his laugh as a cough.

“Maybe if I could get some cotton candy, we’d get there faster.”

“I see how it is,” Eddie raises his eyebrows, already digging his wallet out of his back pocket. “Buck usually get you cotton candy?”

“Always,” Chris grins sunnily. “He says we walk it off anyway.”

So Eddie hands him a few bills, and watches Christopher head, without hesitation, to the closest concession stand. The teenager working there grins at him when he approaches, and it looks like an actual smile.

“Christopher!” she greets him. Eddie blinks in surprise. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

Christopher heaves a sigh that has Eddie biting down on a smile. “I had so much school,” he says, handing over the money to presumably get his usual.

“Oof,” the girl grins, and Eddie gets his wallet out again to scrounge a couple of bills together for a tip. “Which grade?”

“Fifth,” says Christopher, putting his weight on his crutches so he can lean up and watch the cotton candy spin through the dome. “I even have art homework now. It’s not fair.”

She nods solemnly, turning the stick inside the machine a couple more times, producing a giant pink cloud that’s definitely bigger than it’s supposed to be.

“Well,” she says, “I hope this makes you feel better.”

“Thank you,” Christopher grins his most charming smile. “It will.”

He reaches out an expectant hand that makes Eddie laugh again, his eyes damn near sparkling when the girl gives up the cotton candy. She’s smiling at him, and Eddie’s about to get up to give her a tip when she looks around, and a little frown settles between her eyebrows.

“Hey,” she says, watching Christopher with her head tilted. She looks much younger that way. “Where’d you leave your dad? Is he not with you today?”

“Oh,” Christopher shrugs, already ripping into his treat, “he’s just in the bathroom.”

And then Eddie’s sitting back down, falling like someone cut his legs right out from under him. Something small and hysterical in him wants to go over there and ask what she’s talking about, because he’s Christopher’s dad and he’s never seen her in his life, but he’s not stupid.

He knows exactly who she means.

He squeezes his eyes shut, just for a second, digging his fingers into the wood of the picnic table until there are splinters poking at this fingernails. The last time this happened, he was looking at Ana’s panicked face and then at the ceiling of a hospital room, and he can’t do this again, can’t pass out in front of Chris, can’t look another fucking doctor in the face and say he doesn’t panic because he does, he can’t go back to Frank and tell him about this and have to sit there and talk through how he’s apparently made no progress in fucking anything—

“Oh, there you are! I was just asking Christopher where his dad was.”

Eddie opens his eyes to see Buck staring at him, wide-eyed, frozen mid-step, his hands dripping water.

And then he realizes he’s not panicking.

“I got cotton candy,” Christopher says, squinting happily up at Buck, lifting the stick up high as if Buck can’t see it just fine.

Buck opens his mouth and says nothing, still looking at Eddie. There’s something completely foreign, completely wild, in his eyes.

And Eddie’s not fucking panicking. That girl just called Buck Christopher’s dad, familiar enough that it can’t have been the first time, and Eddie isn’t so much as breathing hard. He’s just looking between his best friend, who is white as a sheet, and the easy expression on Christopher’s face, and the poor kid in the cotton candy stall, who’s ignoring her next customer in favor of eyeing Buck warily.

He has to move. Someone has to do something.

Buck shakes his head like a wet dog, blinking, opening his mouth on empty air, and Eddie thinks—thinks it’s Buck who might be panicking, actually, because he’s almost lost it enough times to know it intimately, the way the fog sneaks up on you and then attacks all at once.

“Dad,” Christopher says, and Eddie startles, because Christopher is here, and if he sees Buck collapse with a panic attack Eddie will never, never forgive himself. He turns to his son to figure out what to do first, because he will also not let Buck go through a panic attack alone, and finds Christopher looking at him with his head tilted and half the cotton candy gone, his cheeks stained pink. “Can I go on the carousel?”

The carousel, which is just visible from here, a spinning top against the bright blue sky.

“Of course you can,” Eddoe says, and his legs finally listen and allow him to stand up. “You want to ride the dung beetle again?”

“Obviously,” Christopher says, and before Eddie can figure out the logistics of dragging a catatonic Buck with them, Chris reaches out and wraps a sticky hand around Buck’s wrist. “Come on, Buck,” he says, and pulls just a little, and then starts picking his way through the crowd.

The effect is instant: Buck takes a breath, huge and gasping like he’s emerging from underwater, and his eyes clear. One second, he’s still staring at Eddie in shock, and the next he’s dropping his gaze in that way that’s become so painfully familiar. Then he’s turning and jogging after Christopher, and Eddie’s left standing there alone with a handful of crumpled bills.

“S—sorry,” the girl at the cotton candy cart whispers, and when Eddie looks over, she seems to be on the verge of tears. “I said something, didn’t I.”

“No,” Eddie shakes his head, gathering Christopher’s backpack and water bottle as he fights a bizarre urge to laugh. Everything’s wrong, but it’s also—they’re making a scene. At the zoo.

He takes a couple of steps towards her. “I’m, uh,” he shrugs his free shoulder, “I’m also his dad. For future reference, I guess. You got a tip jar?”

Impossibly, her eyes widen, and she shakes her head silently. From up close, Eddie can actually read the nametag pinned to her pocket flap: Tracie.

“Then here you go,” he says, handing the money over, only a little embarrassed about how wrinkled it is. “Sorry about this, Tracie.”

He doesn’t wait for her reaction. He turns away and just catches a snatch of Buck’s yellow shirt in the crowd, so he pushes his way through a little too aggressively and catches up just as Buck and Christopher get to the front of the ticket line.

Eddie’s still not panicking, but he’s also not sure that he’s ever been less okay. His skin is buzzing, from the top of his head down to the soles of his feet, and when he looks at Buck, bent forward so he can speak into the little window, he feels—dark. Like something is swallowing him up again.

He holds on through helping Christopher onto the carousel and making sure he’s seated; he waits until the music starts, until it’s gone around once and he’s waved to his son.

Then he grabs Buck by the shirt and hauls him off to the side, scattering other unsuspecting parents who back away when they see the look on his face.

Miraculously, there’s a free bench that still allows a sliver of a view, so he can keep an eye on Christopher, and he pushes Buck onto it more gently than he means to. There’s a heat stirring in his gut, a familiar thing that put down roots in his helplessness last time and grew into something warped and dangerous, and he doesn’t want it there, he doesn’t want to be hurting Buck when he’s already in so much pain, but—God. God.

It’s been weeks.

Buck gasps a little when he slumps down onto the bench, falling all over the place like a bag of bones. His eyes are paler than usual, and Eddie knows what the emotion is on his face, knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Buck is terrified, and he just hopes – he has to hope – that he’s not terrified of Eddie. That Eddie hasn’t broken yet another thing in trying to fix it.

“We have three minutes to have this conversation,” he says, and he thinks he should be spitting the words, baring his teeth like he did in that fucking grocery store all those lifetimes ago, but Buck’s complete and temporary absence from his life back then had been a scratch, easy to inflict and easy to heal.

This is an unmaking.

“What the fuck is going on with you?” he asks. “Tell me you didn’t almost panic back there.”

Buck swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing in a way that looks painful. Eddie’s entire body - the tips of his fingers and the points of his elbows and the hollows at the back of his knees – aches to touch him, and he has to rein it in with a yank that definitely draws blood somewhere. Buck doesn’t want his comfort.

“I didn’t,” Buck croaks, as if he wasn’t still blinking too fast, wasn’t flexing his fingers to get feeling back into them where he thinks Eddie can’t see. “I’m fine, Eddie. I’m fine.”

He looks like saying it makes him want to throw up.

“You’ve never been less fine,” Eddie steps closer, taking some sick pleasure in the way Buck has to lift his chin to keep looking him in the eye. “It’s like—Buck. I feel like I don’t know you anymore.”

Buck’s jaw tics. Eddie’s close enough to see the tears spring into his eyes and then disappear as Buck blinks them away by sheer force of will. There’s a ringing in his head, a pit in his stomach, the anger climbing hot and tantalizing up the back of his neck, because he’s standing here and he doesn’t know this man.

“It’s just me,” Buck says, and Eddie wants to slam him against a wall and wants to knock their foreheads together and wants to crawl on top of him until Buck has no chance but to crack. “I’m—I haven’t been sleeping that well since Maddie’s been gone. Just trying to work through stuff. But I’m still me.”

Eddie wonders if Buck’s seen himself in the mirror lately. How pale he is, how sick he looks. It’s even more obvious in the sun, which makes him look like he’s about to turn transparent, the tips of his lashes almost white.

“You’re not,” he says, quiet, reined in. “You were pissed at me, right? When I hung up on you? I’m sorry, Buck. I’ve been trying to tell you I’m sorry, but you can’t even stand to be in the same room with me.”

Buck’s eyes harden. Eddie’s brought right back to the day in the firehouse when Buck had almost torn the heavy bag off its stand. The way an armor had snapped into place around him, click, click, click. To keep out his parents, who neglected him, who lied to him his entire life.

And now to keep out Eddie.

“It’s fine,” Buck says, robotic, leaning forward as if to get up. Eddie steps between his legs to stop him. “You texted me. It doesn’t matter.”

But he’s tapping his feet, is grinding his teeth. He’s simmering, and Eddie knows even without ever having seen him truly angry, because he’s feeling the exact same thing, flooding his chest with a sickly, syrupy heat. He wants this to hurt because he’s in so much goddamn pain, but he’s so hard-wired for protecting Buck. For taking care of him.

“So it’s going to be like this, then?” Eddie asks, the fight spilling down his arms, into the pit of his stomach. “This is how we are now? You push, I take your advice, you keep me out without telling me why? How can you say it’s the fucking same when you—“

When you haven’t looked at me in weeks, he wants to say. When you haven’t touched me in just as long.

“You take my advice?” Buck asks, frowning.

Eddie almost laughs. Almost. “I broke up with Ana,” he waves a hand, because she already feels so, so far in the rearview. “A while ago.”

Buck’s left eyebrow twitches, but that’s the only reaction he allows.

“Oh,” he says, and Eddie’s just—Eddie’s so absolutely fucking done. It hurts, and Buck’s always been the one to take the pain away.

“You need to get your shit together,” he says, and hates the way it feels on his tongue, cruel, metallic from where he bit into his cheek too hard. “If you want to keep convincing yourself you’re fine, okay, knock yourself out. But Christopher’s going to notice. He probably already did when you almost lost it right in front of him. So you either talk to me, or talk to Bobby, or talk to your therapist, I don’t care. Sort this out.”

Buck’s nostrils flare. Eddie’s so close he can feel the heat radiating off him where he’s sweated through his shirt.

“Christopher won’t…” he starts, and doesn’t seem to know the end to the sentence, looking instead over his shoulder to where the carousel is probably about to stop any second. The muscles in his neck are tense, severe like mountain ridges rising up from under his skin, and his hands are fists. Eddie’s head spins and spins and spins.

“He will,” he says, looking where Buck’s looking, watching as the back of Christopher’s curly head disappears from view. “He knows when I’m not okay and I actually hide it from him. You don’t. So if you don’t want to listen to me, just—look at him. He loves you, and he wants you to be okay, and you should want to do better for him.”

Buck twists back around and screws his eyes shut. His entire face is so tense Eddie expects to see bones through his skin any second. He frowns even deeper, clenches his teeth until the hinge of his jaw is jutting out sharp enough to cut.

Then he looks up, and his eyes are empty, and this thing howling inside Eddie finally breaks free in search of an emotion, any emotion. He shakes from head to toe, ignoring the tilt of Buck’s chin upwards, how easy it would be to kiss him on the forehead, how easy it would be to grab him by the neck.

He doesn’t need to do that. It’s a curse in that moment, knowing Buck so well, because he knows exactly where to reach in, and how to twist just right to break Buck’s heart.

“I mean, you’re his dad. Right?”

For a second, a moment so fleeting Eddie half-thinks he imagined it, the real Buck breaks through the mask, wide-eyed and hurt.

And then Buck’s on his feet, bodily slamming into Eddie and knocking him backwards, uncurling one of his shaking hands, using it to pull at his own hair so hard his eyebrows move upwards. The part of Eddie that wanted him to hurt purrs in satisfaction, even as, still, he just wants to touch.

“I can’t,” Buck shakes his head, his eyes blazing. He extends his other arm toward Eddie, like he’s about to hit him, or shove him further, then snatches it back. Hugs it to his body as he trembles and trembles, as he breathes heavy with something Eddie can’t identify. “I can’t do this. Tell Christopher I wasn’t feeling well, okay? Tell him I’m sorry.”

And he’s gone before Eddie can so much as make a sound, much less move, his bright shirt blending into the crowd.

The music cuts out, and the carousel creaks to a stop.

Eddie’s anger winks out just as easily, and leaves behind an emptiness that feels terrifyingly permanent.

They’re working the next day. Eddie did not consider this when formulating his no good, terrible, extremely stupid zoo plan, but he also didn’t plan on breaking things more than they already were.

Fascinatingly enough, it’s not that different. Buck looks away, moves away, shies away every time Eddie is in his vicinity, unless they’re on a call. The tension he’s been carrying around has grown so obvious that Eddie catches Hen and Bobby and Chim passing concerned looks back and forth like hot potatoes.

And then, over dinner that doesn’t get interrupted for a change, Bobby levels Eddie with a Look across the table, and Eddie knows there’s no way he can let it be like this. End like this.

Because yesterday, after Christopher got off the carousel and immediately looked around for Buck, after Eddie told him that Buck wasn’t feeling well and had to go home, the first thing Christopher wanted to do was leave the zoo and go look after him. To go make sure he’s okay, because Eddie is somehow, improbably, raising the world’s most compassionate kid.

So he takes a leaf out of his son’s book and tries one more time.

It’s four in the morning on a Thursday, and almost everyone’s asleep: Eddie knows because he checks when he gets up from his bunk, peeking in as uncreepily as possible at a frowning Chim and Hen with her phone on the pillow next to her. Bobby’s not there, but also isn’t anywhere in sight when Eddie walks out into the bay, and the light in his office is off.

Slowly, Eddie makes his way up to the loft, hesitating on every step. He’s not sure how, but he knows that Buck is up there, and he’s proven correct when he drags his feet up the last couple of stairs and sees a familiar back over the armrest of the couch. The lights are dimmed as they usually are during the night, and the TV is on with no sound, painting the space a strange mix of blue and yellow.

He takes a step. Stops. Takes another.

His hands are sweating, and the material of his uniform pants does absolutely nothing to help when he tries to wipe them off. It’s just that—he’s most of the way to broken already, and he doesn’t know if this is about to tip him over the edge. His heart is drumming in his ears, but he’s going to do this, has to try, because being angry with Buck was never going to be the way to get through to him in the first place.

So he takes another step.

“I’m tired, Eddie,” Buck says, his voice barely there.

Eddie shoves his stupid sweaty hands in the pocket of his hoodie. “How are you so sure it’s me?”

“I just know,” Buck shrugs a shoulder. He hasn’t turned around, steadfastly watching the TV, the back of his neck tense and pale in the muted light.

“I’m tired, too,” Eddie offers, and keeps walking until he’s level with the couch, until he can see Buck’s sharp profile, the rigid line of his jaw. He sits down on the armrest, right by Buck’s feet.

He’s taken his shoes off. Eddie looks down at his socks, dark blue with little frog faces on them, and is hit with a wave of longing for something he can’t put into words.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asks, and watches Buck’s eyes, which stay glued to whatever cheap procedural drama rerun is on.

“Why aren’t you?” Buck returns, the corner of his mouth pulling up into what’s probably supposed to be some kind of smirk, but he gives up halfway, like he doesn’t have the strength. He looks beyond exhausted, hollow-cheeked and baggy-eyed. Eddie spares a petty second to wonder what exactly Taylor’s doing to take care of him if he looks like this.

He sighs, and rubs a hand over his cheeks, one then the other, trying to chase away the inexplicable flush rising there. It’s like talking to a stranger, if the stranger was also under every inch of Eddie’s skin, burrowed so deep that tearing him out would cause irreparable damage.

“I wanted to apologize,” Eddie says, again, always, because he’s never met a good thing he didn’t screw up. “For yesterday.”

Buck blinks, still turned to the TV. For a second, he closes his eyes, scrunches his entire face together.

“I’m tired,” he repeats.

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, “me too.”

Then he reaches out and wraps his hand around Buck’s ankle.

Buck’s reaction is instant, and he doesn’t exactly manage to hide it: his entire body tenses, tendons going taut under Eddie’s hand, and he lets out a whoosh of breath like someone punched him in the stomach.

And one of his hands, originally folded tersely on his lap, moves towards Eddie before he snatches it back.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, and thinks he would do anything Buck asked just to get to look him in the eye. “It wasn’t—I didn’t want to come with you yesterday to make a scene. I didn’t mean to ambush you like that. I just want you to know that.”

Buck doesn’t react. His nostrils flare, and the delicate bones of his ankle tremble under Eddie’s palm, his pulse so strong it beats through his skin and the fabric of his sock right into Eddie’s fingers. Completely on autopilot, Eddie runs his thumb soothingly over the spot, trying to calm down the tremor there.

Buck’s not saying anything, but he’s also not pulling away, so Eddie goes on, untethered, hoping he can say something that will land.

“It’s just—I know I hurt you. I know. But it’s been, uh. Hard. It’s been hard,” he says, keeping his eyes on the side of Buck’s frozen face. “Without you next to me. I was just trying—“

“I’m sorry,” Buck interrupts, the words themselves bleeding for how they’re torn out of him, and then he’s shaking in earnest, shivering so hard he has to gasp for breath.

Finally, finally, he looks at Eddie, and Eddie wants to fold him into his arms and never let go.

“I’m sorry,” he repeats, his teeth chattering, tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. “I pushed you and you listened to me and you let me in and let me see Christopher and then I shut you out in return, but I’ve just been—I don’t know how to deal with all these things, I—“

He presses a hand to his chest, struggling to take in breath.

Eddie leans forward, alarmed, everything in him screaming to get closer and protect Buck from whatever this is.

“I’m here, Buck,” he says, leaning forward, almost back on his feet except for the little seed of doubt that still replays it over and over, how it felt to have Buck shrug him off. “I’m listening. I always want to listen to you. That’s my job, to make sure you don’t have to go through things alone.”

Buck laughs through his tears, presses the heels of his shaking hands into his face, and Eddie thinks fuck it and goes to let go of Buck’s ankle and go to him, but then Buck hiccups.

“Don’t,” he says, in the smallest voice Eddie’s ever heard him use. “Don’t let go of me.”

“Okay,” Eddie responds before Buck’s even done speaking, tightening his grip. “Okay, I won’t. It’s okay.”

But Buck’s shaking his head, leaning forward until his elbows are almost on his outstretched knees, heaving for a breath.

Eddie’s never seen him this upset, and in his head, he has no idea what to do, but something else takes over. The instinct, this wondrous warm thing that’s grown in him over the years, that hums in satisfaction every time he does something right and Buck smiles at him.

So Eddie stands up, never taking his hand away, and sits on the sliver of couch that isn’t taken up by Buck’s legs.

“Hey,” he says, his voice caught somewhere in his throat, cowed by the pain radiating off the hunched shape of Buck’s back. “Come here, huh?”

He puts a careful hand on the swell of Buck’s knee, squeezing, a question and a reassurance. Buck wipes his face aggressively, back and forth and back and forth until his nose cracks with it, and looks up at Eddie with red-rimmed eyes.

Eddie thinks he might be about to cry, too. Around anyone else, he’d try to hold it back; for Buck, he lets the tears show, tries to smile, inclines his head as he lifts an arm in invitation.

“Come on,” he says, just audible, and then Buck’s pulling his leg out of Eddie’s grip and scrambling forward and wrapping his arms around Eddie with so much force he knocks him back into the couch. His head comes down to rest on Eddie’s shoulder, Buck’s tear-stained face in his neck, his hands intertwined in the small of Eddie’s back pressing them together with a force that takes Eddie’s breath away.

He moves them around, lifts his legs onto the couch so he can stretch them out long, tangle them with Buck’s, have Buck rest on top of him in a semi-comfortable position.

He runs a hand through Buck’s hair, messes it up, breathes it in. Wraps his own arms around Buck’s shoulders to keep him in place, and just—exhales. It feels like something sloughing off of him, something disgusting and dark and unrecognizable, the anger and the hurt and the confusion.

He exhales, and Buck is in his arms, shivering. Buck’s tears are running down his neck.

“It’s okay,” he says, scratching at Buck’s scalp, holding him so close he thinks he can feel Buck’s ribs against his where the points of them might tangle if only their skin wasn’t in the way. “You’re okay.”

Buck sniffles. “No,” he says, thick, “I’m really not.”

“Yeah,” Eddie laughs into his hair, a little high on Buck’s presence, on the way his voice already sounds more like the Buck he knows, all of it so sudden and so much. “I figured.”

Buck sighs, and slowly, with every tick of the clock over on the kitchen wall, his shivers subside. He’s still just this side of shaking, the same as Eddie. He doesn’t move, doesn’t relax his grip, doesn’t pull back to look Eddie in the face, so Eddie tries with everything he can to telegraph his intention with his touch. I’m here in the sweep of his thumb over Buck’s damp cheekbone, I’m here in the dry kiss he presses to the crown of Buck’s head, I’m here in the way he hooks his ankle over Buck’s.

Eddie lies there, holding Buck close, and watches the world righting itself right in front of him.

“So,” he says, once his own tears have receded without falling and Buck’s breathing is back to normal. With the urgency of the moment dissipating, Eddie’s becoming increasingly aware of the places they’re touching, which is—pretty much everywhere. Shoulder and chest and thigh, wedged together on the couch. “You want to talk about it?”

Buck actually laughs this time. His hands relax a little on Eddie’s back, but he doesn’t pull them away. Eddie’s absurdly grateful for it.

“I don’t know,” he says, and Eddie could and might cry again at the life in his voice. “Do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean—“ Buck sighs, the air breaking over the tendons in Eddie’s neck. “You were right. I was mad at you when you hung up on me. I was—God, okay, hold on. I need to see you.”

And he does pull away then, carefully extricates his legs until he can stand up. Eddie sits up higher and pulls his own legs in to give him room to sit, and then they’re side by side on the couch. Eddie’s cold, and he tries not to think about it too hard.

Buck draws one of his knees up and turns to Eddie; Eddie does the same, and they’re close enough that their kneecaps touch, an anchor point. Buck is hunched, smaller than he should be, rolling his lip between his teeth over and over, but he looks like Buck. His eyes look like Buck’s.

“I was mad at you when you hung up on me,” he repeats, picking at a hangnail. The blue rectangle of TV flashes in the face of his watch as his hand moves, in and out. “And I’ve been—I’ve been mad. Sometimes. When we’re on a call and Bobby tells you to do something and then I can’t see you. When I don’t know if you’re in danger or not, I just—I get so angry at you. And it makes no fucking sense,” he laughs humorlessly, scratching the tip of his nose. “It’s not rational, because you’re doing your job, you’re just existing and doing nothing to piss me off but it’s like—like that’s the only emotion I can feel about it, because everything else is just,” and he shrugs, falling silent.

“Just what?” Eddie asks anyway, blinking at him, trying to put the pieces together and coming up with one warped picture after another.

“I can’t,” Buck shakes his head. “I don’t know how to—it’s not fair of me. To put that on you.”

“Buck,” Eddie reaches out, wraps a hand around Buck’s wrist and tugs it towards him. Focuses on the warmth of Buck’s skin, on the thump-thump-thump of Buck’s pulse. “I just told you—“

“No,” Buck shakes his head, and leans back to pull out of Eddie’s grip. Eddie doesn’t let him. “I can’t, it’s—you were hiding your panic attacks from me. You would’ve just pretended you were fine if I didn’t pry.”

Eddie’s breath hitches. He’s hit, out of nowhere, with a sense of how long ago those conversations feel, Buck chasing and chasing. It’s only been weeks, really.

“They got better,” he offers, because he doesn’t know what Buck’s getting at, doesn’t know what he wants.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” Buck says, and he looks anguished. “The point is you were having panic attacks about Ana, of all people. About—having a girlfriend you weren’t happy with. Not about the rest.”

Only then does Eddie get it, finally, and he opens his mouth to talk but Buck is on a roll, the words falling out of him one on top of the other like it’s their only chance.

“And it’s so fucking—it’s so pathetic, because you were the one who got shot, and you got back to work and you kept going and you’ve been so steady like you always are. You’re the one who got shot, and you’re past it, and I’m still waking up screaming every night and seeing danger around every corner and the—the blood, the other day, it was like—“ he breaks off on a cough that turns into a heave, and Eddie looks around in alarm for something to hand him, but Buck doesn’t throw up. He breathes in through his nose, methodical like he’s done it a hundred times, and straightens back up. It’s an expression Eddie has seen on him too many times to count in the last couple of months, but never before that, and that realization is enough to make him feel sick.

“I’ve been trying,” he says, and turns his hand over to grip Eddie’s wrist right back. “I’ve been talking to Dr. Copeland and I’ve been trying to be okay with it like you are, but then this is what happened and I just don’t think I can—“ he sucks in a breath through his teeth, “I think I need,” he says, and then nothing else.

Eddie breaks. Only for a second, only a little, and he’s right there to hold himself back together, but the snap of it is so loud it’s a marvel Buck doesn’t hear it too.

This whole time, it’s been hanging over their heads. The worst day of Eddie’s life, or at least he thinks so, because he can’t fucking remember it.

And it’s—of course Eddie knows Buck wasn’t okay afterwards. Of course he knows. They’d spent enough nights sitting up together on Eddie’s couch with mugs of the terrible sleepytime tea Buck bought as half a joke that Eddie’s aware of just how many nightmares plagued them both. But he’d just—decided to be better, and Buck stopped coming over every single night, and then they were okay.

Except. Except he looks at Buck and sees a flash of something, in the far corner of his mind. His shoulder throbs, like it always did when he woke up because he was screaming himself hoarse, and something sickeningly like a gunshot echoes in his ears.

“What do you need?” he croaks, and thinks if he closed his eyes he’d smell it again, gunpowder and the unmistakable stench of asphalt on a blazing hot day. Blood, and blood, and blood.

“To talk about it,” Buck says, almost desperately, “with you.”

Eddie blinks. He’d just told Buck the panic got better, but there it is, familiar like a favorite coat, and for the first time Eddie considers that maybe it’s not a symptom, but a new state of being. That his body knows, on a instinctual level, the way he’s been living on borrowed time, and has decided to remind him.

“I’m not,” he says, before he can change his mind, and tastes something foreign and metallic in his mouth. “I’m not okay with it.”

Buck’s mouth opens a little in surprise.

“But you—“

“I want to be okay with it,” Eddie laughs, the words choking him. “But I’m not. I never am okay, but it’s just—what the fuck else am I going to do? Put it on you, after everything you’ve been through?”

He lets go of Buck, finally, the sight of their hands blurring around the edges like he has vertigo, but Buck doesn’t let him pull away. Buck keeps holding his hand, and grabs the other one too, and pulls him in.

“Eddie,” he says, his voice cracking in the middle. “Yes. That’s all I want.”

“I’m not going to burden you like that,” Eddie shakes his head, and thinks, bizarrely, of Frank. Maybe he should mention Frank. “It’s all this—this weight—“

“I can take it, Eddie,” Buck interrupts, a fire burning in his eyes. “I want to. You’re not a fucking burden, are you kidding me?”

Eddie sits with it, sometimes, and wonders. Really wonders what he’s done that Buck somehow landed in his life, and he’s managed to keep him for so long. He wonders what would make him leave.

“That day,” Buck says, so pale his lips look bright pink, shaking a little, but determined, “was the worst day of my life. Will be the worst day of my life forever, because if something like that happens again, I’m not sure I’m gonna make it through.”

“Buck,” Eddie frowns, and wants to simultaneously lean in further and pull so far away he’s pressed into the kitchen wall.

“We were just talking,” says Buck, his eyes liquid when the TV goes dark for a second then lights up again. “I was talking to you. Mehta was talking to you. You made that stupid face you try to claim doesn’t make you look like Kermit the frog.”

Eddie laughs despite himself, the sound dragged out of him all thorny, scraping him raw.

“And then I was covered in your blood.”

Eddie has—an image in his head. Of Buck, red-faced, with specks of color smeared in the corner of his mouth, on the bridge of his nose, in his eyebrows. For months, he’s thought it one of those things you brain manufactures inside nightmares: a combination of things you’ve been through, something so horrific only your own trauma could make it up.

But he looks at Buck now, and closes his eyes, and sees a snatch of memory that looks terrifyingly real. Not just Buck’s face, but the wrinkled collar of his shirt, the pale one he was wearing that day, his neck bloody, his shoulders bloody.

It’s real.

And Eddie didn’t know. He doesn’t know, not really. He only has the half-formed things he remembers and tries never to think about, and what other people have told him: that Buck was there, that Buck pulled him to safety, that Buck saved his life.

But now he has Buck, with blood in the creases of his eyelids, opening his mouth around something Eddie can’t hear. The grey ceiling of what looks like a firetruck above him.

Buck saved his life, and this is what that means.

He pulls his hand out of Buck’s, reaches up, his fingers just shy of brushing the bridge of Buck’s nose.

“You had,” he breathes, because he thinks he remembers, now. He blinks and it’s there, blinks and it’s gone. “Here.”

Buck doesn’t move away, but he’s breathing hard.

“I didn’t know,” Eddie says. He looks down the length of his arm, at his fingers that don’t feel like his own. His hands, going away again, but it’s not panic, just—something. One of those somethings he’s been running from. “I only remember—flashes. Not even that.”

But he’s starting to think that maybe, just maybe, he remembers more than he thinks.

“But then in the alley, the other day,” he blinks, and the air feels too thin in his lungs, passing in and out without leaving any oxygen behind. “I thought—you touched me, and I thought—Buck.”

“Yeah,” Buck swallows, his eyes a dark, dark blue.

“Did you,” he looks down at his own hand, where the phantom of a touch pulses around his wrist.

He’d had bruises. He only really saw them through a painkiller haze, never questioned why they were there, but Buck’s touching him now, and something inside Eddie’s head is unspooling so fast he can’t keep track.

“You pulled me out,” he says, and knows it’s true.

Buck bites his lip until it goes white, jiggling the leg that’s on the ground. Eddie looks at him and sees someone else. Someone new.

“I had to pull you by the bad arm,” he says, so close to a whisper. “I cared more about keeping you alive, but after—after. When they took you inside and I had time to wonder about it. I was so worried I made it worse.”

His eyes fill with tears again, and Eddie wouldn’t be far behind except for how he’s afraid that if he closes his eyes for a second, if he so much as blinks, it’s all going to come rushing back.

“Buck,” he says, and doesn’t know how to continue.

“There was so much blood,” Buck says, and looks up at Eddie with his lashes wet like he’s willing him to understand something. “There was a pool of it, just—on the street, I had it all over my hands, in my mouth, and I just couldn’t—I couldn’t think about it as your blood. It didn’t feel real.”

“But it was,” Eddie murmurs, nods, squeezes Buck’s knee. “And you remember all of it, and I made you go through that alone.”

Buck’s entire body softens, almost collapses forward as he covers his mouth with the back of his hand, swallows down a soundless sob.

“You didn’t make me,” he says, always so gracious even as Eddie’s already thinking back, tracing the thread of Buck looking like he wanted to say something other than he was saying, of being there but not quite, of biting his lip as Eddie told him about a nightmare that was just sound and light and phantom pain. He’d turned away from it, from Buck, on purpose.

And then yelled at him for being in pain.

“I don’t remember all of it,” Buck continues, and gives a wilted approximation of a smile. “I remember the street, the firetruck, and I think—I think I remember Hen taking me to clean my face off. I remember coming to your house and passing a lamp on my way to talk to Chris and still seeing blood under my nails. I remember breaking down right in front of him.” His mouth twists.

“Hey, you did nothing wrong,” Eddie breaks in, because he can’t do anything else. “There’s nothing wrong with being overwhelmed, or with breaking down. I can’t imagine what you were going through.”

Buck shakes his head. His hair is messed up from Eddie’s fingers, from Buck’s own, and a strand of it falls sideways over his forehead. Eddie reaches out and pushes it back. Buck’s hand squeezes tighter around his own.

“I was keeping it together,” he says, gruff. “I was. But then he said you were going to be okay, and I couldn’t lie to him but I had no idea what to fucking say, and then Bobby texted that you were out of surgery, and I just—I lost it.”

Eddie’s palms itch with the urge to pull him in. To hold Buck in his arms, because he’s so brave and so hurt and so blind and Eddie could never do anything to feel like he deserves him.

He slumps sideways, leaning the side of his face on the backrest. “Thank you for losing it,” he says, and smiles a little when Buck blinks at him. He’s exhausted, and this whole conversation feels a little like wading through a river upstream, but it’s worth it. If Buck’s going to be better, it’s worth it. “It’s okay for him to know when the people he loves aren’t okay.”

Buck sniffs.

“Could you—“ Eddie bites his lip, wondering how to ask, wondering if that’s going to make it better or worse. He feels like he has one foot extended over a precipice, and anything, anything, could tip him over.

It’d be so easy to pull back, now. To push down the snatches of memory that have come through.

But if he can help it at all, Eddie will never, never leave Buck standing alone.

“Can you touch me?” he asks, and hates how breathless he sounds. “After the call with the sword, when you—“

He doesn’t get to finish, because Buck bridges the space between them in a flash, his warm fingertips ghosting over the scar. Even through Eddie’s hoodie, he finds the spot with perfect accuracy, without needing to see it. He hovers for a second, just the suggestion of a touch, and then presses his whole palm to it.

And just like that, it’s there again, a taste like metal on his tongue, the distant warmth of a hand just touching his face, pain and pressure, so much pressure it takes Eddie’s breath away, like the world is bearing down on him.

There’s Buck, and he’s so real Eddie doesn’t know how he never realized. He closes his eyes, sees him come into focus and fade, saying something over and over, a soundless litany. There is blood on his teeth. That grey metal ceiling again, the cold, the edges of his vision white like color is bleeding out of the world, pain, and he’d wanted—he’d wanted to raise his hand because he had to check, make sure Buck was—Buck—

“Hey,” Buck says quietly, and Eddie’s eyes snap open.

Buck’s okay.

Eddie forgets to breathe for a second, and when he does the air stumbles on the way in.

“Hey,” Buck says again, his face softer, so much softer than what Eddie’s just seen in front of him, but some of it is the same. He blinks, and for a moment Buck has a red stain down the bridge of his nose, long drips on his cheek that got smeared on the edge of his jaw. “You with me?”

“You’re okay.”

“I thought we just established that I’m not,” Buck replies, but he’s wearing a grim little smile like he knows – and he does, because he lived it, in terrifying Technicolor while Eddie was barely hanging on to consciousness. “But yeah. Physically, I’m okay.”

Eddie reaches out again. Traces the spot where that big red smear should be and meets clean skin, the smallest hint of stubble. He must be warm, but all Eddie can feel is freezing, a cold like life leaving his body, like his veins devoid of blood. He closes his eyes again, with that reassuring touch in the palm of his hand, and goes back. To the skyline bending right in front of him, the part he’s always remembered, to meeting Buck’s eyes on the ground over a pool of something dark and oil-slick, to reaching for him because if—if this was it—

“You looked at me,” Buck says, and he sounds betrayed. “Before you passed out. Your eyes were rolling into the back of your head, but you held on just long enough to look at me. I thought—I’ve thought maybe I made that up, but.”

“I looked at you,” Eddie says, opens his eyes back up to look at the Buck that’s sitting, all hunched and wrong, in front of him. It’s a strange memory, not black, but a blinding white, everywhere except for Buck’s terrified eyes. White like ice, or maybe like heaven, if Eddie ever believed that he could get in there. “It was—everything was white, and I was—cold? I remember being cold.”

Buck nods, the fingers of his hand curling under, making a cage around Eddie’s scar.

“I must have known,” Eddie says, and he doesn’t remember that part, but he does know death. He’d know it if it was coming up to meet him. “I thought, if I don’t ever open my eyes again…”

At least let me die looking at you, he doesn’t say, because the thought of putting it into words makes his throat close.

But it’s as true as anything has ever been. He’d looked at Buck; and Buck, he knows, never once looked away.

“But you did,” Buck says, with urgency. “You did, okay? Whatever you—whatever both of us left behind out there, at least we made it through, and that’s how it’s going to stay. I couldn’t lose you. I can’t lose you, Eddie.”

Eddie shakes his head, trying to dislodge the whiteness lingering around the edges of his vision.

“I’m alive,” he says, takes Buck’s free wrist, and wishes one of them would stop shaking, finally. “You’re alive, and I’m alive.” He presses Buck’s palm to his own chest, over where his heart is skipping beats left and right. “That’s what matters. Everything else, we can figure out.”

Buck bites his top lip, for a change, and the way it pulls at his nose makes the heavy breaths he’s taking all the more pronounced. For a minute, Eddie lets him feel his own heartbeat, out of rhythm as it is, and takes solace in the touch on his shoulder.

His shoulder, ripped apart by a bullet, out of his field of vision in the snatches of memory he’s unearthed. His shoulder, on which Buck must have been leaning with his whole weight to stop the bleeding.

He listens to the tick of the clock, methodical and unchanging. Breathes, and tries to envision some kind of path forward. One where Buck wants his weight.

He doesn’t really, of course, because he doesn’t know the depths of everything he’d be taking on. But Eddie finds that, in Buck’s presence, when they’re close like this, it’s near impossible to draw up the kind of wall he tires to put up around other people.

So maybe he can—lean. A little bit. Because God knows that being near Buck helps more than he will ever admit to himself. Helps so much he’d fallen to pieces in the middle of a barren field, so many pieces he’s still not sure he’s brought them all back to LA with him, and he still couldn’t bring himself to feel ashamed about how much he wanted Buck to be there.

“Buck,” he says when he catches a glimpse of the sky outside, the warmth of a sunrise rapidly creeping in. “We can figure it out, okay? Just talk to me.”

“You talk to me,” Buck chuckles wetly, taking his hands back. Eddie doesn’t miss him, but—no, he misses him. Their knees are still touching, but it’s not enough. “Can we just—let’s make a deal? To talk to each other when we’re not okay?”

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, hesitant and certain all at once. “You want to shake on it?”

Buck rubs his cheek, still a little damp, and pulls at the corners of his red eyes. Neither of them have slept, and they’re probably about to be hit with a barrage of accidents courtesy of Friday morning traffic before they can go home, but looking at the way Buck’s cheeks squish to accommodate his smile, the first real one Eddie has seen in a while, it’s worth it a thousand times over.

“I’ll do you one better,” Buck says, and extends a hand towards Eddie, his pinkie sticking out.

“Really?” Eddie asks, even as he does the same thing. “It’s not enough that you infected my kid with these?”

“You can never have enough pinkie promises,” Buck says, and watches their little fingers curl into each other, both of them squeezing so tight it hurts. “You know the rules, right? These are sacred. If I catch you doing that thing where you scrunch your entire face up to avoid saying something you should definitely be saying, the pinky promise gods will put a curse on you. Last time I broke one, all of my left shoes disappeared.”

Eddie—is crying, actually, but he blinks and blinks until the haze clears. Buck is looking at him with eyes that are as bright as they are haunted, but he can work with that. They can work with this.

“God, I missed you,” he says, because he can’t hold it back, and then Buck’s laughing and lunging forward and hugging him again.

“Me too,” he mumbles into Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie breathes in the familiar scent of his hair product, and the smell underneath that’s just Buck, immediately relaxing.

“And I’m sorry,” Eddie says, because it doesn’t and won’t sit right with him, “about what I said yesterday. I sounded like my fucking father.”

Buck huffs. “It was a little grocery store meltdown of you,” he says, “but you weren’t wrong. I deserved it. Again.”

“No,” Eddie shakes his head, his jaw bumping Buck’s temple. “No you didn’t. You’ve been hurting, and that’s okay. You could never fail Christopher. You wouldn’t.”

Buck doesn’t say anything. Eddie catches some kind of sound down in the bay and strains his ears for it, trying to figure out if it’s someone who can see them like this.

It lingers on his tongue, the other thing he wants to say, stuck there like a piece of hard candy. He knows he shouldn’t, because the last time he let that kind of thing out of his mouth he flew entirely too close to the sun, but—he’d said Buck was Christopher’s dad like it was preposterous.

Like it couldn’t possibly be true.

So he takes another breath, and prays to whatever lives in the station’s ceiling vents and makes that weird rattling noise sometimes.

“Hey, you know—“ he starts, and then there are definitely steps on the stairs, and Buck is tensing and pulling his face away from Eddie’s neck.

“I think it’s just Bobby,” Eddie tells him, because no one else does the little hop-skip that hits every step, and he’s proven right when the top of Bobby’s head crests the top of the stairwell.

Buck sighs in relief and slumps back down.

“Ah,” Bobby says when he spots them, turning the lights back up to daytime brightness. “Breakfast helpers. Fantastic.”

Buck grumbles, tightening his arms around Eddie, and Eddie laughs, but he also kind of can’t catch his breath at the look on Bobby’s face. He’s seen it before, aimed at Buck, but now Bobby’s looking right at Eddie, his eyes bright, continuing the wordless conversation they’d had last night.

Eddie bites his lip. Nods, and Bobby nods back with a grin that makes him look ten years younger.

They do get up eventually, after Bobby has pointedly banged something on the counter one too many times. Buck looks exhausted as he drags himself over and accepts egg breaking duty, but the tension that had been holding him up like a string is gone. His shoulders curl forward a little as he grinds the pepper, down and relaxed.

Eddie’s eyes sting because Bobby’s started chopping onions, and not for any other reason.

“What do you do when Christopher cries?” Frank asks.

Eddie frowns. What kind of question is that?

“Comfort him,” he says slowly, trying to figure out what Frank wants to hear. “Try to figure out what’s wrong, if he’s willing to tell me. Help him fix it if I can.”

“Hm,” Frank, the infuriating motherfucker, smiles down at his notes. “Do you remember any instances in which you cried as a child?”

“Uh,” Eddie says, feeling his forehead crease without any input from him. “I guess? Probably when my father went on business trips when I was really young. I definitely cried when I broke my arm, and then when I lost my first Little League game.”

He can’t really remember any in which he wasn’t a little kid, younger than Christopher is now, but he elegantly skirts that fact. Christopher still tears up all the time, over trivial things and serious ones, and Eddie thinks he’s the strongest kid in the world for it.

“Right,” Frank nods. “So in these instances, when you cried. What did your father do?”

And Eddie, maybe, suddenly understands the point of therapy.

He sighs, feeling it come out of somewhere very, very deep, and puts his head in his hands.

“Okay,” he says, because thinking of being seven and ten and fifteen is always exhausting. “I understand what you’re getting at.”

“Eddie,” Frank says. Eddie hates the sound of his voice. “If at all possible, I’d really appreciate a specific answer.”

Fuck you, Eddie thinks, and doesn’t say it, because Frank has this thing about letting your feelings pass through you and evaluating them before you react, and against his better judgment, Eddie hasn’t been able to stop doing it.

“You already know,” he says, because you don’t talk circles around the topic of your parents without a licensed therapist zeroing in on it. “He’s—old school, or whatever. Men don’t show emotions, et cetera.”

“Okay,” Frank says, and makes a note, another one of those quick ones. Probably whatever shorthand he uses for daddy issues. “So tell me how that manifested when he was talking to you.”

Eddie remembers. He remembers, with a startling clarity, as soon as he lifts the lid on it.

But God, he doesn’t want to lift it.

“He’d just—“ he starts, and has to stop right away for the lump that grows in his throat. He’s cried more in the last few weeks than he had in the previous thirty years of his life, and he’s not exactly sure how he feels about it. There’s a part of him that ducks it, every time, just sidesteps the reality of tears. It’s not Eddie that’s crying; it’s just his eyes. “He had this thing he always said. ‘We don’t do that’. When I lost that game, I don’t think I was even crying about losing it, more about the—the way he was looking at me. And he clapped me on the shoulder and said ‘we don’t do that. Just try harder next time’.”

“And you tried harder,” Frank says, because they’ve talked about this, haven’t they? Eddie sat on this same couch that first time he came and said he just needed to do better. Frank probably clocked him then and there. Has probably been lying in wait.

Eddie thinks he might go home and just. Shred something. Into very tiny pieces. With his hands.

“I tried harder,” he says anyway, because he did. He begged to stay later at practice, and then his grades got worse, and then he had to try harder with those, too. Always, always trying. Never quite measuring up. “And he, uh. He used to call crying gay. Just—using the worse word.”

Frank hums. He looks out of the window for a second, which Eddie has actually never seen him do. He taps his fingers on his clipboard, once, twice.

“Is crying gay?” he asks.

Eddie barks a surprised laugh, and when Frank looks back at him, there’s a suggestion of a grin hiding under his mustache.

“Frank,” he says, as Frank stares him down, “come on, man.”

“It’s a yes or no question,” Frank shrugs, and Eddie’s back to hating him.

“No,” Eddie rolls his eyes, “crying’s not gay. Crying’s not weak, being gay’s not weak, nothing wrong with either of those things. This is basic stuff.”

“You’d be surprised.”

And then Frank lets the silence linger, which is a tactic Eddie caught on to immediately, and he’s also powerless against it.

“He doesn’t do it anymore,” he says. “My father. He doesn’t use the word anymore. He got a gay business partner a few years ago, so I’m guessing if some rich guy tells him something’s offensive, he actually listens.”

Frank raises an eyebrow. “Do you think he’s actually changed his mind?”

And Eddie wishes, with a childish desperation, that he wasn’t so certain of the answer.

“Nah,” he says, and something in him—moves. Lurches, like snow in the second before an avalanche. “He doesn’t change his mind about things.”

I don’t want to be like him, he thinks on a frantic loop, like someone might hear him and send the note up to God. I don’t want to be like him.

“Why don’t you tell me more about why you think that?” Frank says, and the end of his pen taps and taps and taps away.

A Buck in love is a dazzling thing.

Eddie doesn’t actually realize he’s never seen it until it’s happening right in front of him.

They’re on a call, helping an elderly woman who tripped and broke her leg, and they’re struggling to get to her. Bobby already has the door rammed open, but the problems to access are multitudinous and very furry.

“This has to be illegal,” Buck says, walking out opposite Eddie with one cat on his head, one wrapped around his neck, one under each armpit, and one in each hand. “There has to be some kind of limit.”

“Only if you live in an HOA property,” their patient yells from inside. She gave very particular instructions on how to handle her cats; the cats, being cats, are not even remotely bothered by the fact that half a station’s worth of firefighters need them to be in a specific spot for a minute.

Eddie gets stuck with an armful of kittens, because that’s just his life. He’s not heartless: deep down, he can admit that they’re actually unfairly adorable, even as one of them bites at his radio wire and another climbs up onto his shoulder. He’d had a shitty morning, complete with oversleeping and traffic and a dangerously teenage tantrum from Christopher, and having so many wiggling little things crawl all over him, meowing away, actually feels like it sets something right.

That is, until he walks outside, and notices Taylor Kelly across the street.

“Oh my God,” Hen says, somewhere to his right, and then she’s tugging on his elbow to get him out of the others’ path and brandishing her phone in his face. “Eddie. I need you to look at how unfairly adorable you look right now.”

“I don’t look adorable,” Eddie returns automatically, eyes straying from the lens of Hen’s phone over to the news van, where Taylor’s weirdo of a camera guy is setting up his equipment. “I’m, uh,” he pauses to unhook a kitten paw from his collar, “classically handsome.” The kitten on his shoulder nips at his earlobe, where he’s definitely not ticklish, and he bites down on a laugh. “Extremely rugged.”

Hen lowers her phone only to hit him with the Judgmental Eyebrows.

“Adorable,” she repeats. “Now look over here.”

So he does, trying his best to smile in some way that looks natural. Hen walks around him to get a couple more angles, but the kittens don’t care for the photoshoot whatsoever and start climbing everywhere, so Eddie has to look down and try to keep them from falling as the shutter clicks next to him.

While the two of them are distracted, the rest of the team make some approximation of a clear path, the cats crammed into the back of an Animal Services van and extremely displeased about it. Hen says something that’s impossible to hear over the yowling and heads inside with Chim, just as Bobby comes out onto the front steps, stands there, and takes a few deep breaths.

“You okay, Cap?” Eddie calls, still holding the kittens because it’s not like he’s needed with two paramedics on one broken leg already.

Bobby looks over, and his eyebrows make a steep climb up his forehead.

“You look adorable,” he says, deadpan. He comes over, and one of the kittens stretches clean out of Eddie’s hold in curiosity. Bobby just manages to catch it, and it immediately climbs up onto his shoulder and settles there like a parrot.

“Oh, you guys look adorable,” Buck says from somewhere behind him. Eddie turns to see him walking towards them with his hands in his pockets, his mouth set in a grin. Eddie frowns, because his girlfriend’s right there, so surely he should be doing whatever it is boyfriend Buck does around his significant others, not that Eddie cares. Then he realizes that, from this angle, the truck and Animal Services would probably be blocking his view.

So he doesn’t point her out.

“Oh, there’s so many,” Buck says once Eddie’s facing him and he has a view of all four of the kittens still left in Eddie’s grip. One has started chewing on his uniform button. “And they’re so tiny. Is it safe to put them with the bigger cats?”

He looks over his shoulder, to where the van is rocking a little, emitting some truly terrifying sounds.

“I mean, they live together in there,” Eddie shrugs, looking over his shoulder to check whether Hen and Chim are done yet. “Hopefully they’ll be fine. I’ll just hang on to them until we go.”

Buck stretches out a hand, fingers curled gently in on themselves as he rubs one of the kittens on the head with a knuckle. It immediately moves toward him, stepping on what are presumably its siblings, closing its eyes in bliss until Buck picks it up and holds it against his chest, grinning like the sun. It looks even tinier compared to the bulk of him.

Eddie’s chest feels—unusually tight. Not panic-tight, but. Something.

“Oh, you’re so cute,” Buck coos, rubbing under the kitten’s chin with the tips of his fingers. Eddie’s eyes get stuck on the movement, the gentle back-and-forth of it, the way Buck’s bones move under his skin. “Why didn’t I get to rescue an armful of you guys, huh? I had to carry that fat white cat, and he was grumpy. Do you know him?”

The kitten tips its head back in ignorant bliss, and Eddie is, once again, hit with just how much he’s missed Buck. How much richer his life already is a few days later, after Buck’s come over for movie night, after he drove Eddie to Ralphs because Eddie hates driving, after he grinned at him all wide and uninhibited over their respective cups of coffee this morning. He went on a rant about types of crustaceans for a full twenty minutes before their first call of the day, and Eddie’s pretty sure he just sat there and listened the entire time with his chin in his hands.

It’s just—a relief. To know that he can reach out again. That he could press close to Buck’s side now, if he wanted, and feel the way his body heat radiates off him even through the uniform.

Not that he’s ever done that before. Not that he ever would, because something about it makes him a little itchy. But he could touch the soft point of his elbow, flick the dimple in his cheek.

A scuffle breaks out in Eddie’s arms, and one of the kittens goes flying overboard, only just managing to hook its claws in his sleeve and, by extension, his arm.

“Ouch,” he says, only half-serious, because it’s really hard to be mad at such a small thing with silly little triangle ears. “What are you guys doing? Why can’t you sit still for two minutes?”

“Nice to see LA’s finest working hard,” Taylor says, emerging from somewhere Eddie couldn’t identify. He instinctively bristles at her presence, and has to do a couple of box breaths to calm himself down, because. This is Buck’s girlfriend. He’s dating her, so he must like her, so Eddie has to become okay with her presence in their lives.

It just might take a minute, is all.

“Taylor,” he says, and thinks he manages to sound neutral.

“Taylor,” Buck repeats, his voice jumping, and he’s beaming before he even turns around. “What are you doing here?”

She closes the leftover space between them in two elegant steps.

"False tip,” she rolls her eyes, smiling that weird smile she has where it looks like she knows everyone’s secrets. It reminds Eddie of Frank a little bit, but Frank at least has multiple college degrees that entitle him to poke around in people’s heads. “One of the neighbors here said it was some kind of hoarding animal abuse situation.”

As if to punctuate her point, one of the cats in the van lets out an uholy scream. Eddie’s kittens wiggle in his grip; Buck’s starts purring in bliss where he’s still absentmindedly stroking its back.

“Miss Kelly,” Bobby says from behind them. Eddie had completely forgotten he was still standing there.

“Captain Nash,” she smiles, perfectly pleasant, but Eddie’s looking at Buck, and after months of overanalyzing his every move, it’s easy to see the hint of tension that creeps into his posture. “No worries, we’re not here to film. I’ll be out of your hair in a minute, I just came to say hi.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie watches Bobby nod, then walk off with the kitten still sitting on his shoulder.

By the time he looks back, Buck is—oh.

It’s a look Eddie’s never really seen on him. He hasn’t had a reason to: he wasn’t around when Buck was in love with Abby, and Ali was out of town so much Buck wasn’t really focusing on having her meet his friends.

And now Eddie has a front seat, and the ground feels a little wobbly all of a sudden.

Because Buck is overwhelming at the best of times. He feels so much, pours so much of himself into every conversation without reservations, and the way he talks, the way he moves when he’s really passionate about something has been a lot to handle for as long as Eddie has known him. It’s one of his favorite things about Buck: the fact that he treats everything and everyone as important.

But this Buck is quieter. If Eddie didn’t know better, he’d call him subdued, but it’s not that; it’s that everything he’s feeling has etched itself into the lines of his face, speaking without words. He’s only just smiling, his head titled gently to the side, and there’s so much affection in his eyes that Eddie really does look away.

He’s seen Buck love people. He knows Buck loves him, loves Christopher, loves their family at the firehouse, and some of it is always written on his face.

But it’s never been this. Eddie doesn’t know what he’d do if Buck looked at him like that.

“Are you working late tonight?” he’s asking, and Eddie feels like the third and the fifth and the seventh fucking wheels all at once, but he can’t move.

“Not sure yet,” Taylor says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear that wasn’t in the way in the first place. Eddie accidentally squeezes a kitten and gets a gummy bite to his finger in retaliation. “I’m on call until midnight, but it’s been a quiet day, so it’ll either keep being quiet or all hell’s about to break loose.”

Buck moves toward her, pressing them together in at least three different places, and puts a hand on her waist.

“You can go to mine if you want,” he says, and he’s not even being suggestive about it, just bright-eyed and honest and sweet. “We could have breakfast when I get home?”

She wrinkles her nose. It’s so quick Eddie nearly misses it, and she irons out her expression with the air of a true professional – but she wrinkles her nose as Buck offers her breakfast with possibly the most earnest expression Eddie has ever seen, and just like that, one second to the next, the ship sails on him ever liking her.

“How about we do Tuesday instead?” she asks, wrapping her small hand around his arm. Her nails are a shade of red that makes Eddie feel vaguely sick. “You’re working Monday, right? I can come over that night. Make sure I warm up the bed.”

Her teeth, artificially bright, glint in the sun. Eddie’s head is spinning a little, and he thinks he might need to go throw up in a bush somewhere.

A kitten paws at the flap of his left pocket, sinking its claws in with a ripping sound that’s going to cost the LAFD money. He lets it.

Buck’s eyes fall to the ground for a fraction of a second, the corner of his mouth twitching downwards, but then he blinks and his face clears.

“Sure,” he says, and Eddie would have missed the way his hand tightens on Taylor’s waist, except he’s already looking at it and spots Buck’s knuckles going pale. “Tuesday sounds good.”

“Great,” she grins. She really is pretty in a way that makes Eddie bizarrely self-conscious about his own looks. He’s not usually bothered about what he looks like beyond making sure he’s dressed and his hair is out of his face, but her presence makes him uncomfortably aware of just—having a body and a face. Like Shannon’s used to do, which is a thought he never wanted to have. “We could spend the day together? If you cook dinner, I can call in a favor and get us a nice red.”

“He doesn’t drink red,” Eddie says, before he’s even aware he’s saying it.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Buck’s head snaps to him, startled, like he forgot Eddie was even there, which is probably the case. Taylor looks over much more leisurely, kind of like a cat, or maybe Eddie’s just seeing cats everywhere today.

She raises a single, perfect eyebrow. Eddie raises one right back, then pivots on his heel and marches off after Bobby before he can embarrass himself even more.

It appears that, while Eddie was busy putting his foot in his mouth, the homeowner has mobilized a neighbor to come and look after the animals, so those of them who aren’t busy flirting while at work wait for the gurney to be out and then carry the cats back inside. Eddie will admit to being a little sore about having to let go of his kittens, but only a little.

The real problem is that Buck is still holding one, and he’s also pressed right up against Taylor, just out on a stranger’s lawn. And Eddie can’t even be mad at him, because Buck deserves a person who makes him smile like that.

He’s just sleep-deprived, or something. He can work on liking Taylor another day, because that’s what has to happen, eventually, if Buck and her build the kind of life Buck wants; the kind of life Eddie’s heard plenty about during maudlin bar nights and the times they’d sit up together when Eddie’s arm was still screwed up, neither awake nor asleep. Kids and dogs and a beautiful, beautiful wife.

If he’s choosing her, he must think she’s the kind of person who can give him that. Maybe Eddie doesn’t see it yet, but Buck’s eyes spell out all sorts of deliriously happy futures, so Eddie’s clearly the one with the issue.

“Lighten up,” Bobby says, clapping Eddie on the shoulder as he passes, walking toward Buck and Taylor with his back ramrod straight. Eddie almost laughs at Buck’s caught expression when he hands the kitten back, but it feels wrong somehow, and dies in his throat halfway through.

Once the last cat is safely inside the house, their work is done. Taylor catches on quickly, and even in heels has to go on her tiptoes to ask Buck for a kiss.

In his own interest, Eddie turns away before Buck can oblige.

He steps up into the truck with a sigh, ignoring the look Bobby shoots him over his shoulder. This is not a Thing. They do not need to talk about it. Buck finally has someone he so clearly loves, without reservations, someone who takes time out of their workday to come see him and kiss him in public.

And besides, they’ve only just stepped back on semi-solid ground. Eddie’s only just relearning how to breathe normally.

He’s not going to risk that over a grudge.

“Buck, sit down,” Pepa says, reaching up to grab his sleeve. Buck dodges her expertly, spinning away from her, the plates he’s carrying safely up over his head.

“Nope,” he grins, the shadows of his dimples enormous in the fading evening light. “You’re having a glass of wine and having a good time. I got this.”

And he’s running back up the steps into Abuela’s house, dirty dishes clinking in his arms. Pepa tuts after him, then looks back at her glass of white and shrugs.

Eddie, sitting on the corner of the table on Abuela’s left, takes a sip of his own beer.

“You look tired,” Abuela says, apropos of nothing, and before he’s even done swallowing she’s put a warm hand on his cheek and is tilting his head to the side. “How many hours of sleep?”

“Abuela, come on,” Eddie rolls his eyes, but he isn’t and never has been strong enough to pull away from her touch when she’s willing to give it. “I promise I’m sleeping fine.”

Which isn’t, technically speaking, a lie. He sleeps through about nine nights out of ten.

“He was texting me about the party at one in the morning,” Buck dutifully reports, materializing out of nowhere with a fresh pitcher of water and another platter of the delicious pizza wheel things he baked from scratch, because that’s a thing he does. “And he was up with Chris at five thirty.”

“Traitor,” Eddie hisses. “There were—circumstances.”

“Mmm,” Buck hums around a tomato slice he’s fished out of the massive bowl of salad on the table. “Such as?”

“Such as, I was awake at one in the morning because you wouldn’t stop texting me pictures of your dough, you dick.”

Abuela gives him the gentlest slap on the cheek. When he looks at her, she’s smiling, her eyes knowing somehow, though Eddie’s not sure what she knows.

Buck blinks down at the spread on the table, which is half his doing. He looks—embarrassed, Eddie thinks, but he must be seeing things. Buck’s never shy about bothering him with things he’s interested in, because Eddie has specifically encouraged him to share.

“I think it may have been worth it,” says Bobby, who’s somehow ended up attending because he helped Eddie with Abuela’s broken porch screen a couple of months ago and asked questions about her cooking for several unbroken hours. “These are amazing, Buck.”

Buck beams. The light catches in his eyelashes, and Eddie can only look at him for so long before his chest goes tight with how good it feels to see Buck again.

“Thanks, Bobby,” he grins, and then he’s off, carrying the empty lemonade pitchers and Eddie’s finished beer bottle. He gets stopped three separate times on the way, twice by Abuela’s friends from bridge and once by Christopher, who requests a slice of lemon and plunges his entire arm into the empty pitcher when Buck gives him a nod.

Eddie’s skin is alive with something warm and very, very bright. It feels skittish, and he’s trying not to poke at it too much, but he lets the warmth drape comfortably over the back of his neck for just a minute as he watches Christopher’s face scrunch when he bites into the lemon, and the delighted crinkles in the corners of Buck’s eyes.

And then Christopher’s looking over to the gate and yelling “grandma!”, and Eddie’s plunged into darkness so fast he has to grab the edge of the table to keep from actually falling. A swift punishment from the universe.

Of course a single good day was too good to be true.

Sure enough, when he looks up, his mother and father are making their way into Abuela’s backyard, without bags, but holding a bottle of something each. Automatically, Eddie seeks out Christopher – on his way to greet his grandparents, which is fine, it has to be fine – then Buck, who’s nowhere to be seen, hopefully safely inside the house. That still leaves Bobby, suddenly straight-backed, and as soon as the sudden animal panic beating in Eddie’s temples subsides, he’s going to be too embarrassed to look him in the eye.

Abuela leans out of her chair, and Eddie jumps up to help her stand.

“Mama,” Eddie’s father says, wearing a smile that looks mostly natural, and kisses her on the cheek. “Feliz cumpleaños.”

“It’s not my birthday yet, mijo,” she says, but she smiles back, and accepts a hug from Eddie’s mother.

Eddie’s just kind of—standing there. He should be moving, should be making introductions, to Bobby if no one else, but his throat is tight in a way it hasn’t been in weeks and his fingers are numb where they’ve fallen to rest on the arm of Abuela’s chair and Christopher’s coming up and hugging them, smiling, already telling them about the lemon he just had, and Eddie’s vision whites out for a fraction of a second, leaving hundreds of flickering lights in its wake.

God, please don’t let him pass out. Anything, anything else, but if he collapses in front of his parents he’s not going to hear the end of it for as long as they live.

The last time he saw them, not long enough ago, they’d stood in the doorway and looked at him with something like contempt, something like determination. He sees it again written right into the curve of his mother’s smile when she comes up to hug him, and she smells like that same soap. Eddie’s stomach jerks.

“Edmundo,” his father says when he reaches out to shake Eddie’s hand, “you’re looking better.”

Eddie’s not going to throw up. He just—needs a fucking minute to get himself together, to adjust. He’s a grown man, and they don’t scare him.

They don’t scare him.

“Mr and Mrs Diaz,” Bobby says, all jovial, because everyone else has only just noticed the new arrivals and started making their way to the table. “Bobby Nash. I’m Eddie’s captain.”

They both shake his hand, their eyebrows set in identical scowls for just a moment before they iron them out. They don’t understand why he’s here, and to be fair, neither does Eddie, but what he feels about it is a sort of wonderful, warm confusion. What they feel is—well. He can imagine.

Eddie automatically abandons his chair, pulling it out so his father can sit, and Pepa does the same with hers, leaving it for Eddie’s mother, moving to the other end of the table where some of the seats are empty because people have clumped on the garden swings and the porch steps and the old wobbly chairs pushed up against the fence that Eddie has been meaning to throw out for weeks. Pepa slips right into conversation with Abuela’s next door neighbor, who’s been cutting his lemonade with wine since he got here and has a corresponding glow about him, but she looks at Eddie where he’s a little frozen in the middle of the backyard, and gives him another one of those strangely soft smiles.

He wishes he could be angry about it, because he’s not made of glass, but. But.

Eddie looks around, and nobody else is watching him lose it. He takes a breath, and convinces himself that the knot at the base of his throat is loosening.

And then he hears familiar heavy steps on the wood of the back porch. He’s close enough to catch Buck’s quick, surprised inhale, and when he looks over his shoulder, Buck’s already looking at him.

There it is, finally: something easing, dissipating, an overwhelming headrush and then a calm. The panic’s gone.

Eddie tries to pull together something that would pass for a smile, but all that does is draw a concerned line down the middle of Buck’s forehead. He keeps going, carefully sets the refilled pitchers on the table, brushes his hands off on his jeans.

“Mr and Mrs Diaz,” he says, in a voice that would pass for welcoming to anyone that isn’t Eddie – and Bobby, possibly, because Eddie catches him looking up at Buck with a momentary frown. “It’s so nice to see you again.”

Neither of them gets up or extends a hand. That, finally, gets Eddie to move, and he’s at Buck’s side in three big steps, accidentally knocking into Buck’s hip in his hurry.

“Mom, Dad,” he says, leaning on the table. “You remember Buck.”

His own tone scares him a little, because it bites. Bobby’s face is doing something in his periphery, and Eddie won’t be able to look him in the eye when they see each other at work in a couple days’ time, but this is more important.

“Of course,” Helena says, and Eddie wonders if she’s remembering what she said about him last, because he is, and it has another kind of tension coiling just at the top of his spine. “Nice to see you again.”

“You too,” Buck grins, and it looks so genuine. “Can I get you anything to drink?”

Ramon’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. It’s really getting dark now, and someone has turned on the porch lamp and the lights they’d strung up specifically for this, which paint bright yellow spots in the lenses of his glasses and obscure his eyes.

“Are you…hosting?” he asks, with just the slightest whiff of derision.

“Of course not,” Buck shrugs, carefree, reaching for the wine, pulling the cooler under the table toward him with one foot. “But I helped plan this, so the least I can do is make sure everyone’s having a good time.”

He smiles at Abuela then, and she smiles right back, and Eddie’s parents actually look some shade of impressed, which is certainly not what Eddie was expecting.

“Which reminds me,” Pepa calls over, louder than usual after a few drinks, “sit down, Buck. Have some food. Enjoy yourself.”

Buck scratches the back of his neck. “I just—“

“Sit down,” Eddie says quietly, brushing a touch over Buck’s lower back. “You’ve been on your feet the whole time. We’re all okay.”

Buck sighs and rolls his eyes. He’s so good at acting fine that Eddie almost doesn’t notice the way his smile trembles, like it’s taking extra effort to keep it on.

“Fine,” he says and, to Eddie’s surprise, takes the seat right next to Eddie’s mother. He stretches his legs out as far as they’ll go with the table in his way, leans down to grab a beer out of the cooler and then halfway over to Bobby to get one of the sandwiches Eddie allegedly helped make, though all he remembers doing is slicing tomatoes. “I’m sitting. Happy?”

Eddie can’t go do anything other than sit right next to him, because this is definitely his fault, and he’s not about to throw Buck to the wolves. It lands him opposite Bobby, who’s sipping lemonade with one hand and texting with the other, and Eddie can practically see the thoughts popping up above his head like comic bubbles. If the next couple of hours fulfill their trainwreck potential, they’ll probably be having another kitchen talk about this.

Then he looks at Buck, unusually sprawled in his chair so he takes up room, the bulk of him a physical barrier between Eddie and his parents, and feels—small, almost. Almost safe.

He thinks of his mother’s voice, on the patio all the way back in Texas. Christopher needs responsible people around him. Caring people.

“Very happy,” he confirms, flicking Buck on the arm and reaching for another beer for himself, twisting the cap off with more force than necessary.

There’s a beat of silence, all the more pronounced because there are lively conversations happening all around them. Eddie’s certainly not going to start, because uncomfortable silence is better than what happens when his parents open their mouths.

Bobby is the one who ends up leaning forward.

“So,” he says, with the kind of subdued smile he reserves for the most ridiculous of their calls, “what brings you to town?”

Eddie’s father pours himself a glass of lemonade.

“It’s been a while since we came out here,” Eddie’s mother smiles, and she’s incredibly normal about it. This is probably what she’s like – it’s just that Eddie’s never really seen it. “I just retired, so I’ve got too much time on my hands, and we’ve missed Christopher, and since it’s Isabel’s birthday next week, well,” she shrugs, “we figured it was as good a time as any.”

Eddie doubts they showed up in the middle of Abuela’s party by coincidence, but. He’s not going to start.

Bobby’s eyes flash to Eddie and away. Under the table, Buck’s knee knocks into his and stays, warm and solid. Eddie doesn’t even know why – they haven’t said anything bad yet.

“And you’re from El Paso, correct? I think Eddie mentioned my team stopped at yours when they went out to help with the wildfires.”

“That’s right,” Eddie’s father nods, taking a sip of his drink and making an appreciative noise. Eddie nudges Buck’s knee, because he’d made the lemonade. “We’re all very grateful you were able to spare them, Captain Nash.”

Bobby grins. “Oh, most of that was their time off,” he says. “But you know what they say. LA’s finest. They definitely did us proud.”

He smiles right at Eddie then, his eyes bright in the lamplight, and Eddie feels a bizarre and very strong urge to get up and give him a hug.

“Oh, I see how it is,” Buck says, brushing sandwich crumbs off the front of his hoodie. “When you’re talking about us to other people, it’s LA’s finest this, did us proud that. But when I forget to clean the mud off the truck one time—“

“Bobby,” Eddie interrupts, laying an automatic hand on Buck’s arm to stop the rant. “What Buck’s trying to say is that he understands it’s our responsibility to keep the truck clean, but he feels it’s unfair to point out his little mud spot after what C shift did a couple of months ago.”

Bobby laughs, loud, throwing his head back. “Oh, don’t worry, Gabe definitely heard from me about that.”

“Yeah,” Buck sighs, “but he didn’t have to clean it. Two hours, Bobby.”

Eddie can’t stop his smile at the pout that appears on Buck’s face for a second. Across the table, Bobby’s grinning, and Abuela’s smiling next to him, and it’d be good, it would be normal, except.

“I didn’t realize you did so much cleaning at work,” Eddie’s mother says, and she’s smiling too, but Eddie can practically see her thinking five steps ahead in the conversation. He’s never been good at catching what she’s trying to do until he’s in it, so he squirms in his seat. Takes his hand off Buck, but presses their knees together a little tighter, and Buck meets him there.

“It’s all part of it,” Buck says, taking a careful sip of beer. “It doesn’t exactly reflect well on the LAFD if we’re out there in dirty trucks, and we’re usually the ones who get them dirty, so it’s only right we also get them back into shape.”

And there are days when it’s Eddie’s favorite part of the job, actually. When he gets to spend a couple of hours of downtime checking the stock with Buck, or arguing with him about what made the spot on the truck’s side mirror that’s been impossible to get out for months now.

“Except for when C shift forgets,” Bobby says.

“Exactly,” Buck points the neck of his bottle at him. It serves to highlight the tension in his shoulders, all bunched up there so the rest of his body can appear casual. So he can sprawl, even though uncomfortable situations usually make him hunch in on himself, and act a dam for whatever tide Eddie’s parents might unleash.

Eddie wants to hug him in thanks and never let go. He’s actually contemplating it when he catches a shadow out of the corner of his eye, and then Christopher is wedging himself in-between their chairs, his hair flying everywhere like he’s been running around, even though Eddie knows for a fact that he’d been reading on the porch.

Buck and him turn to Christopher at the same time, and both of them reach out automatically to sweep the hair out of his face. They spot what’s about to happen; all it takes is one look exchanged to agree on the best course of action, and then they’re digging a hand each into Christopher’s curls, and he’s giggling and shaking his head to dislodge them.

He still hasn’t had a haircut since before they’d gone to Texas. He’s decided he likes it longer like this, and that’s more than enough for Eddie to get off his case about it.

“You okay, bud?” he asks, because his eyes are obviously drooping.

“Yeah,” Christopher smiles. “Can one of you pull out a chair for me? They’re too heavy.”

Eddie reaches over to the free seat on his other side, but Buck leans in close.

“You sure you don’t wanna sit up here?” he whispers. “I think you can probably reach the last of the rocky road.”

Immediately, Eddie has a set of the Buckley puppy eyes trained on him by his own son. The resemblance is uncanny.

He sighs. “You can have rocky road if you get Buck to come over and put you to bed,” he says, as if it’s not very close to a given that Buck will be going home with them.

Chris looks up at Buck, puppy eyes still in full effect, and Buck scoffs in reply, grinning because there’s no need to even ask.

Eddie grabs Christopher’s crutches, and Buck gets his hands under Chris’s armpits and lifts him up, exaggeratedly oofing with the weight of him as if he doesn’t pick him up all the time, and sits him sideways on top of his legs.

Christopher, naturally, reaches for the mostly empty plate with the rocky road. Bobby may or may not nudge it closer to him, grinning when Christopher notices and tries to wink, which ends up being more a very thorough blink.

Eddie takes a second to watch his son’s face stretched into a smile, the mop of his hair lit up all gold, content to lean back into Buck’s chest and pick out the marshmallows first, because they’re obviously the best part. Then he closes his eyes, just for a blink, inhales, and looks at his parents.

For a ridiculous second, he’s surprised to see that they haven’t burst into flames. He’s just made a dozen little parenting decisions, the kind he has to make every minute of every day, and he’d bet all his money that they heartily disapprove of every one, and yet the only hint that they have something to say is the tick in his mother’s eyebrow and the tight set of his father’s mouth.

Eddie’s absurdly grateful for Bobby’s steady presence. It’s him, more so than Buck, that’s keeping them reined in, because Buck – what was it? Wouldn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground?

Eddie meets his mother’s eyes.

She ducks him.

“Christopher,” she says, “sweetheart, how are you? How’s school going?”

“Awesome,” Chris says, with chocolate somehow already smeared around half his face. Before Eddie can move, Buck’s swiping a napkin from the table and handing it to him, smiling the whole time in a way that’s familiar and relaxed and real. “I’m going to be in the Christmas play.”

Quietly, Buck meets Eddie’s eye over the top of Christopher’s head, hiding a grin in his curls. They’d picked Chris up together the day he found out he was cast, and Buck would swear up and down he didn’t cry about it, but Eddie knows what he saw.

“No way,” Eddie’s mother says, and she looks so genuine that Eddie, for just a second, allows himself to think this might actually be okay. “What are you going to be?”

So Christopher tells her, and by extension the entire corner of the table, about his upcoming acting debut as Rudolph. Eddie listens to him with a quiet, content bubble of joy in his chest that can’t be quashed even with the circumstances being what they are. The entire time, Buck keeps his leg pressed against Eddie’s, an insistent line of warmth, an anchor.

Slowly, the guests start drifting out, stopping by to shake hands and kiss Abuela on the cheek. Several specifically thank Buck for taking such great care of everybody, which makes his cheeks flush so red it’s visible in the half-dark. It doesn’t take much longer for Christopher to start flagging, either, and once he’s exhausted the topic of the Chrismas play and his upcoming science project and the new puppy his classmate Connor got, complete with an unsubtle look at Eddie, he leans his head on Buck’s chest and drifts off in between two sentences.

Buck cleans away the last smears of chocolate on his face, and rolls down the sleeves of Christopher’s sweatshirt to make sure he stays warm. Eddie feels bright at the sight of them, down to the blood in his veins.

But with Christopher down, he has to put his guard back up. It’s only after eight on a Friday, and it’s Abuela’s party, and Buck won’t leave without wanting to clean up the whole thing. They can’t beg off for a while yet.

Buck, probably thinking along the same lines, meets Eddie’s eye, and inclines his head towards the house just so. Eddie nods.

“Abuela,” Buck says, leaning forward, getting his legs under him. His knee finally unsticks from Eddie’s, and for a truly bizarre second, Eddie could swear it hurts. “Is it okay if I put him down in the guest bedroom?”

Ramon looks between Buck and his mother with his eyebrows sky-high.

“Of course, nieto,” Abuela reaches across the table and pats Buck’s hand. “You remember where the extra blanket is?”

“I think so,” Buck frowns, looking up at the sky as he tries to remember. “I’ll have a look.”

He pushes his chair back gently, careful not to make too much noise.

“Won’t he have trouble sleeping through the night if you put him down now?” Helena asks, looking at Eddie.

“He’ll wake up in the car,” Buck answers, and Eddie holds his mother’s gaze until his eyes start watering. “Always does, and then I bet the chocolate’s going to kick in. Probably better if he gets some sleep now.”

He holds up Christopher with one arm, extends the other so Eddie can hang Chris’s crutches on it, and carefully picks his way through the clumps of people in the backyard and into the house.

Eddie takes a breath. Holds it for four. Lets it out.

“I see what you were saying,” Eddie’s mother says, and it startles him so much he almost chokes on nothing. “About Buck.”

“Really,” Eddie says, and he’s back to feeling like the earth is shifting underneath him, imperceptibly until he’s falling through the cracks. He hates the way she starts conversations, the way she draws him in before she gets to the point. At least his father isn’t like that.

“Absolutely,” she nods, taking a sip of the wine she’d poured herself at some point.

“And we think it’s concerning,” says Ramon, his eyes on where Buck disappeared through the back door. He hasn’t so much as exchanged a look with Eddie’s mother to confirm that they do, in fact, think it’s concerning, but she nods anyway. Eddie’s stomach quivers. “How old did you say he was?”

“I didn’t,” Eddie pushes through his teeth.

“He’s turning thirty this year,” Bobby says. Eddie wants him to leave, and he desperately wants him to stay. “He’s matured a great deal in the last few years, and I think Eddie and Christopher can actually take some credit for that.”

Ramon’s jaw ticks. “This is a family matter,” he says, and Eddie blinks in shock.

“Of course,” Bobby smiles. Eddie feels like a little boy sitting opposite him, jiggling his foot to indulge his impulse to flee without actually doing it. “Buck’s like a son to me, so believe me when I say I understand your concern.”

Can I get sued for harassment if I kiss Bobby on the mouth, Eddie thinks, and has to fight the urge to pull out his phone and actually text it to Buck or Chim or somebody.

Then his second of levity passes, and he tries to straighten up only for his spine to curl right back on itself. Here he is, all hunched and pathetic, barely able to speak while looking his parents in the face. Bobby, of all people, has to take the heat off him, because that’s absolutely what he’s doing, stepping in to protect his team.

He’ll feel bad about it later, but he’s not strong enough to say no to it right now.

“What’s your concern, exactly?” he asks, also watching the door to make sure Buck’s not coming back yet. “I told you everyone involved is happy with the way things are.”

His mother purses her lips.

“I’m just not sure you see what’s happening,” says his father, putting his elbows down on the table like he’s going to actually try to explain. “That man is putting your child to bed right now.”

“Uh,” Eddie tilts his head, “yeah? What, you want me to go supervise or something? He’s done it a million times.”

“Why?” Helena asks. Eddie starts bouncing his other knee, too.

“Because,” he shrugs. “Christopher loves him and likes it when he’s there for bedtime. His stories are better, apparently.”

“And you don’t see anything wrong with that?” asks Ramon.

Finally, Eddie thinks he knows where this is going. He’s not going to derail it if they’re determined enough, but he’s sure as hell going to try.

He mirrors his father, elbows on the table, and desperately tries to look like the grown man he is.

“Do I see anything wrong,” he says, “with my son having another adult in his life that loves him unconditionally and would do anything for him?”

His mother scoffs. Don’t drag him down with you, Eddie thinks when he looks at her.

“I trust Buck to take care of him,” he says, “and that’s my decision. I don’t need your input.”

Our of the corner of his eye, he thinks he catches Bobby moving. He doesn’t check, because if he drops his parents’ gazes, he’s not sure he can look back at them again. He bites down hard on his tongue and relishes the sudden burst of pain. Thinks of Buck picking Christopher up from school and helping him with homework and sneaking him candy after dinner that Eddie pretends not to see, and knows, knows it’s right. He’s sure of that, and he’s not been sure of all that many things, lately.

“You two already work together,” Helena says, all delicate, like he’s going to shatter, but all it does is help Eddie raise his chin a little higher. He can do this, he thinks. Maybe, maybe, maybe. “Don’t you think that’s too much time to—“

“Mom, you guys are retired,” Eddie interrupts. “You’re together every minute of every goddamn day. If you’re going to tell me to find other friends, you better look at your own life first.”

“We don’t have anyone depending on us,” she hisses. “Certainly not anyone as vulnerable as Christopher. He needs stability—“

“Buck has been in his life nearly every day for the past three years,” Eddie interrupts again, satisfied to see his mother grit her teeth. She used to drill it into him back when he was inching into his teens, unable to keep his mouth shut when she told him to do something and wouldn’t explain why. Let the adults finish speaking, Edmundo. “It’s probably the most stable his life has ever been.”

“And whose fault is that?” Ramon asks, predictably.

“Nobody’s,” Eddie replies, even as his mind screams mine, mine, mine. “We all made decisions. Not all of them were good. He’s a forgiving kid, Papi, so I’m working on fixing my mistakes every day. I don’t know about you.”

God, he’d be shaking from head to toe if he let himself. But he can’t show weakness, so he thinks of Buck tonight, the way he put himself in front of Eddie with no hesitation. He deserves at least the same in return.

“He was happiest when he was with us,” his mother says. Eddie tries to deal with that the way he’s started dealing with his own emotions: let it pass through, then evaluate. And he thinks, he thinks she’s wrong.

“He’s happiest here,” Eddie says. His parents’ nostrils flare in unison, the pair of them staring him down like angry bulls. He contemplates waving a red flag.

He wipes his palms on his jeans, and checks the door again. The light has come on in the kitchen window, and Buck’s clearly visible through the lace curtain, hunched over the sink, probably starting on the pile of dishes. Eddie imagines just getting up and joining him, leaning back against the counter to dry like they do most nights at his own house.

“We’ll see about that,” Helena says, quiet, in a tone that chills Eddie to the bone.

“We talked about this last time,” Abuela pipes up, her eyes dropping tiredly at the corners but also blazing fire. “Now, Ramon. Stop this.”

“Mama—“

“I don’t understand you. It makes my heart sing when I see our boys, how happy they are together. Why aren’t you the same?”

Eddie reaches across the table, so far he has to stretch forward, just to squeeze her hand. It’s a touch he’s known all his life, her palm warm and smooth and dry, just as reassuring now as it was when he was so small her hand could engulf his whole cheek.

“He doesn’t know any better,” Eddie’s father says. “It’s not right for a boy to grow up with a single father. What does he know?”

Eddie squeezes Abuela’s hand one more time and lets go, because he’s a little afraid he’s going to accidentally hurt her. He clenches his hands into fists in his lap, lets everything he’s feeling crest and break over his head and pass out of him with a shudder.

“I’m not you,” he says, quiet. “I’m there.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” his mother asks, too agitated to keep casually sipping her wine. “You know your father had to work hard so you would be taken care of. Sometimes that means being away, Eddie. He was gone so much because he loves you.”

“So loving me makes people leave,” Eddie raises an eyebrow, raises his chin, as if this isn’t the kind of bleeding wound he’s been limping around with since he was a child. It’s not true, he tries to convince himself, even with the thread of his life stretched out behind him as evidence. “And you were just arguing with me about Buck being too involved. So which is it? Am I supposed to be his only parent or not?”

The words tangle on his tongue as he says them, because—there’s something about them that feels significant, but he’s just trying to breathe through the mess of emotion clogging his throat and can’t quite pin it down.

“You know exactly which it is,” Helena hisses. “He needs a mother.”

“He has plenty of women in his life,” Eddie shrugs, because Frank’s been dismantling his idea of what children need with so much earnest effort it’s become impossible not to listen to him a little bit. He’s tempted to point out how much time Christopher spends at Hen and Karen’s, because he’d love to hear what they have to say about that, but he won’t put his family’s names in his parents’ mouths if he can help it.

“You know it’s not the same,” she replies, trying to sound like she’s reasoning with him, but Eddie can hear the quiet rage. “You can’t love him like a mother could—“

“His mother’s dead,” Eddie points out, and wonders just how much of this Shannon had to sit through over the years. “I can’t just pick another one up at the store.”

“You could try,” Ramon scoffs, “and you’re not.”

Eddie chews on his lip, and considers. The bridge isn’t burning yet, and he can’t burn it down, can’t rob Christopher of his grandparents. But he could light a match. Just to indulge in the fantasy for a minute.

“I grew up with a mother,” Eddie says, finally. “And I turned out wrong anyway. “

Ramon waves a hand. “You were always like that,” he says, dismissive, in the same tone he’d receive a B Eddie had studied for all week. “Soft.”

Eddie blinks down at his lap, breathing through the tightness in his throat. He will not allow his father to see tears.

“Well,” he chuckles mirthlessly, “then I’ve got bad news for you about Christopher.”

Under the table, Bobby crosses his ankles. He’s been silent his whole time, but Eddie can feel his searching eyes in his forehead, and he can’t, he can’t look up.

“He’s soft, too,“ Eddie says, and the foreign mass of his face arranges itself into a smile. “And he’s better than me. He’s so much better than me in all the ways you hate,” he says, and lets himself bare his teeth, “and you will beat that out of him over my dead fucking body.”

Eddie’s mother gasps, somewhere, but Eddie’s focused on his father’s eyes, with the lights burning in them. His father, who’s sitting with his jaw set in a way that indicates he’s not going to move. His father who once told Eddie that not every problem can be solved by talking.

His father, who never hit him in a way that mattered to anyone but Eddie. Who’d laugh and say a tap on the cheek couldn’t possibly hurt until Eddie agreed with him.

And he knows they wouldn’t be the same with Christopher; they wouldn’t dream of knocking him around, verbally or otherwise. They’d just smother him, come down tighter and tighter under the guise of care until he couldn’t do anything without them. Until they could make him exactly what they want.

“You don’t need to lash out at us,” Helena says. “We only want what’s best for him.”

“I’m what’s best for him,” Eddie’s says, and his voice cracks in the middle, but he won’t let them see how much they’ve made him doubt it. “Buck’s what’s best for him. Being here, in LA, is what’s best for him.”

Ramon hisses, and shakes his head so violently the lights blur into streaks in the lenses of his glasses.

“If you can’t see it, maybe you deserve it,” he says. “That man,” he points toward the house, where Buck is still plain to see puttering in the kitchen, moving a stack of plates, “is preying on you. He’s inserting himself into your family, for whatever sick reason, and you have to know what it looks like—“

“I don’t appreciate that implication,” Bobby says, at the same time as Eddie and his Abuela bark a near-identical “enough”.

“What’s wrong with you?” Eddie asks, halfway out of his seat before he catches himself. “You literally just saw them together. You saw how much Buck cares about him, and Christopher loves him, not that it’s any of your goddamned business in the first place—“

“Of course it’s our business!” Helena says, and she’s not yelling, but she wants to be. “He’s our grandson!”

“And he’s my son,” Eddie spits. “Mine. And I’m trying so hard not to cut you out of his life, because he doesn’t deserve that from me, but you’re making it really fucking hard, Mom. Leave us alone. If you’re not going to take us as we are, then don’t come back here.”

His head hurts with the force of his heartbeat in his temples. It’s a familiar rage, the kind that turns inward, that makes Eddie want to tear himself to pieces.

“This isn’t your house,” Ramon scoffs, looking at his mother. Abuela pulls her shawl tighter around her body and levels him with a look that should make any reasonable person cower.

“You heard your son,” she says, perfectly calm. Eddie hates, hates that he’s putting her in the middle of this, can’t imagine how much it would hurt to see his own child act like this, but he’s—so grateful. So unbelievably glad that all he had to do to earn her love was turn up on her doorstep in LA with Christopher in tow.

A soft hand lands on Eddie’s shoulder.

“Ramon,” Pepa says, overly sweet. “Stop giving Mama ulcers on her birthday. You’re not here to celebrate, so get out.”

She runs her fingers through Eddie’s hair like he’s a little kid, and just like that the fight goes out of him and leaves behind an all-consuming exhaustion.

“It’s not my birthday yet,” Abuela repeats, smiling a little.

Ramon and Helena exchange a look. Bizarrely, their eyes jump to Eddie, as if he was going to suddenly ask them to stay, and—God, he still feels bad, somewhere deep down. Like he’s not trying hard enough to fix this, even though they’re the ones who are breaking it. Like they’d love him if he could try just a little harder, but he doesn’t know how.

Love shouldn’t be conditional, Frank says in his head, and he may be the most annoying man alive, but he has yet to be wrong about the things that go on in Eddie’s fucked up brain.

He thinks of his own son; tries to come up with something Christopher could do for Eddie to want to treat him this way, to willfully misunderstand him at every turn, and just—can’t.

“Just go,” he sighs, and looks away from them, at the peeling green paint of Abuela’s garden table.

To his surprise, they get up.

“We’re not done with this, Eddie,” his mother says, and there’s a genuine darkness behind it that would terrify him if he were any less exhausted.

Ramon doesn’t say anything, and doesn’t linger, setting off on the same path they took to come down here probably a little over an hour ago. Pepa squeezes Eddie’s shoulder again and goes after him.

“You’re making a mistake,” Eddie’s mother says, throwing the strap of her handbag over her shoulder with so much force the leather creaks. “You think you can play house with him? Pretend he has Christopher’s best interests at heart? You’re being a fool, Eddie, and we won’t be there to pick up the pieces afterwards.”

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, still watching the table. His hands have gone strangely numb. “Okay, Mom. Bye.”

The backyard is mostly quiet around them, with the few stragglers having moved to the porch, and Eddie closes his eyes and listens to his mother’s steps in the grass, the click of her shoes on the pavement until it fades.

Slowly, he lets his head come down on the surface of the table.

“Oh, Eddito,” Abuela says, and comes around with surprising speed to lean down and press a kiss to the side of his head. “You should go home, yes?”

He should. He wants to. He wants to hug Christopher and tuck him into his own bed and take a second to feel grateful; to lock the door and slump into his stupid lumpy couch and let his head knock sideways into Buck’s while they pretend to watch something and slide into sleep. He wants—his family.

His family.

He straightens up so fast his head spins, the world a blur of light and inky blue night and the smell of the half-drunk beer on the table in front of him.

That’s what had felt odd, he realizes, now that he’s not under assault and his head can clear a little bit. Am I supposed to be his only parent or not? he’d asked, because—because—

God, because Buck is Christopher’s parent. Of course he is, and a piece of Eddie has known since he put it down in writing, since he sat Buck down and told him, but it’s now that his own words from forever ago finally make sense. A ready-made family, he’d said, with a pervasive sense of wrongness thrumming under his skin. He’d heard mother, heard wife, heard permanence implied where there was none, and felt the world disappear from under his feet, and then the poor girl at the zoo called Buck Christopher’s dad and Eddie barely had a reaction, because she wasn’t wrong.

Buck isn’t ready-made. He’s anything but, and that story is written in ocean water and blood and the splatter of pancake batter on Eddie’s ceiling.

They built what they have; Buck wormed his way in without Eddie really noticing, without minding it, until he couldn’t imagine his life without Buck in it anymore.

“Eddie,” Bobby says softly. “Where did you go?”

Eddie almost laughs. “Wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he says, because—does anyone else know? Does everyone know? “I’m sorry about this, Bobby,” he says instead.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Bobby replies. His eyes on Eddie are gentle, and it’s after he takes in the look on his face, after he compares it to his parents, that Eddie realizes Bobby hasn’t judged him once for as long as they’ve known each other. “I’m sorry you had to do this in front of me, I imagine that wasn’t easy, but. I didn’t really want to leave you.”

Eddie tries to smile at him, absurdly grateful, but he’s so tired his face will barely move.

“Are you gonna sit me down about this?” he asks, and isn’t sure he hates the idea.

“I don’t think you need a talking to,” Bobby raises an eyebrow. “But if you want to talk to me about it, I’m there.”

“Wow,” Eddie mumbles. “I don’t need a talking to, huh? Is this the personal growth thing Frank’s always telling me about?”

Bobby laughs. “Hey, you’re putting in the work,” he says, and then his face grows serious. “I see it, and I’m proud of you.”

Eddie absolutely will not tear up again. He blinks up at the sky, tries to find the sliver that is the moon in all the light pollution, and curses therapy as a concept, except for how he doesn’t at all.

“You guys keep telling me that,” he says, remembering Hen’s earnest eyes on him that morning in the loft. “I might start believing it.”

“Who’s believing what?”

A familiar set of hands comes down on Eddie’s shoulders. When he tips his head farther back, he’s met with Buck’s familiar face, smiling, but not like he usually does.

“Nothing,” Eddie says, and when Buck’s fingers dig into the tense line of his shoulders, he lets out a breath and a thousand other things with it. It all lifts, just like that, and he can’t help closing his eyes, letting his head relax all the way back until it’s bumping against Buck’s stomach. “It’s not important.”

Buck makes a surprised little noise, but doesn’t stop rubbing at Eddie’s hopelessly sore muscles.

“Abuela kicked me out of the kitchen,” he says, quietly. Eddie wonders if even Bobby can hear them, and he’s right on the other side of the table. “She actually pointed a spoon at me like a sword. I think my life’s in danger.”

Eddie chuckles.

“Can you drive?” he asks, because now that he’s closed his eyes he’s not sure how to open them again. “I’m beat.”

“Of course I can drive, Eds,” Buck replies, his voice warm, his hand in Eddie’s hair warm, all of him warm. Family, Eddie thinks, and wonders how he’d missed it. “I can even carry you to the car if you want. I’m a firefighter, you know.”

Blindly, Eddie reaches out a hand to poke Buck in the stomach.

“Fuck you,” he says, blinking his eyes open. “I can walk.”

“Impressive,” Buck grins, and there’s something sad about it still, the same kind of thing that’s probably written all over Eddie’s face. “I’ll get the kid and meet you at the truck?”

“Yep,” Eddie nods. He digs his keys out of his pocket and hands them over, because Buck will probably be faster, and then he has to deal with Buck suddenly stepping back, his absence bitingly cold.

He moves his head from side to side, cracks his neck so satisfyingly he can feel it all the way in his teeth. When he looks forward again, he finds Bobby still sitting there.

“You’re smizing,” he says, to which Bobby actually grins.

“I won’t say anything,” he says, inexplicably, and gets up with a groan. “I’ll go find your grandmother to say thank you and head out. See you in a couple of days?”

Eddie gets up as well, and every joint in his body creaks with the motion. “See you then,” he nods, shaking out the pins and needles from his feet. “Unless I have another dramatic family crisis, then I’ll call you. You’re involved now.”

Bobby reaches out as he passes, and puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder.

“Feel free,” he says, staring into Eddie’s eyes all unblinking until Eddie nods. Satisfied, he smiles and makes his way towards the house. “Bye, Eddie.”

Eddie stands in place for a second, swaying as if there was a breeze. There’s no one left outside to say goodbye to, so he puts his hands in his pockets and steps carefully through Abuela’s grass, avoiding the drier patches.

As he expected, Buck is already standing by the truck, just leaning back out after buckling Christopher in. He looks up when he hears Eddie coming, and smiles, and Eddie thinks—yeah.

Yeah.

“Ready?” Buck asks. There’s a hollow inside Eddie that he can’t really put into words, the kind of thing that’s going to gnaw and gnaw once he’s less tired, but he also has Buck in front of him, and it feels like those two things might almost cancel each other out.

Without a word, Eddie steps up and wraps his arms around Buck’s waist, accidentally pushing him back against the open car door.

“Whoa,” Buck says quietly, his arms already winding around Eddie’s shoulders. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Eddie repeats, and rests his forehead on Buck’s chest. He can’t articulate what he wants, but his body knows anyway, and it presses in and in until Buck gets the idea and holds him tighter, until he gently rests his chin on the top of Eddie’s head. “We pinky promised, right?”

Buck’s chest rumbles with a laugh so quiet it doesn’t even make a sound. “We sure did,” he says. He lifts one hand, runs it over the hair on the back of Eddie’s head, and sways them in place like the world’s slowest slow dance. “Okay’s a tricky thing, huh?”

“You can say that again,” Eddie replies, but something that feels suspiciously like okay is spreading its wings in its chest, settling down. “You wanna watch your ghost nonsense show when we get home?”

Buck laughs out loud, this time, muffling it in the top of Eddie’s head with a warm puff of breath.

“I would love to watch my ghost nonsense show,” he says, and Eddie should pull away and get in the car so they can actually go, and he will. In a second.

“Hey,” he says, after he’s taken in a couple of breaths of his own detergent wafting off Buck’s hoodie and the last hints of body spray applied hastily this morning. “Thank you.”

Buck makes an inquisitive little noise, like he doesn’t know why Eddie’s thanking him, but doesn’t push. He squeezes Eddie’s shoulder, presses a warm palm into the middle of his back that feels like being tethered back to earth.

Eddie finally pulls away. He looks at Buck haloed by the streetlamp above them, the orange light woven into his hair and spilling over the bridge of his nose.

Buck smiles at him; there’s a beat of that not-panicked tightness again, just a squeeze and then gone.

Eddie rubs at the spot in the middle of his chest as he gets in the car. It’s only the barest suggestion of cold outside, but Buck has already put the heating on – for Eddie, because he prefers to be cool. Eddie checks on Christopher in the backseat, not awake yet but stirring already, then curls his whole body sideways, toward the driver’s side. Buck grins at him as he gets in, turns down the radio, and puts the truck in reverse.

Eddie closes his eyes to the sight of him, and breathes.

“So. We’re feeling like a silent day today?” Frank asks.

Eddie pulls at the skin around his eyes, trying to will himself to be more awake, to feel something other than just—hollow.

“Is that okay?” he asks.

“Sure,” Frank shrugs, half his mouth up in a smile. “We’re doing hard work here, Eddie. Even if we’re silent.”

So Eddie grabs a stupid decorative pillow, puts it under his head, throws his legs out long on the couch and spends the hour watching the birds fight over seeds outside.

And the worst part is, he feels better afterward.

Hen sighs, again.

Chim gives Eddie a Look across the kitchen table. Eddie frowns back, because Hen is Chimney’s best friend, and this seems like a best friend type of issue.

Chim jerks his chin in Hen’s direction. Eddie rolls his eyes.

“Hen,” he says, crossing the loft to the couch and throwing himself down by her side with so much force she bounces a little. “What’s up?”

She gives him a withering look over the top of her glasses. “Why would anything be up? What’s up with you?”

The back of Eddie’s neck goes hot, and he scratches at it, which only makes it worse.

“Buck canceled on me,” he offers. “Christopher’s going to yours, so I invited him to hang out, and he canceled to go on a date, so. That’s up with me. Your turn.”

She didn’t even have to ask twice. Eddie hates therapy.

“I guess,” she sighs, frowning when a notification pops up on her screen, “I guess that’s the problem.”

Eddie blinks. “Buck canceling on me is the problem?”

Now that Eddie has done this part, Chim is apparently happy to wander over, sitting down on the coffee table with his head tilted like a dog.

“No, the sleepover,” Hen says, waving her phone too fast for them to see anything on it. “Denny invited like a dozen kids and half of them said they couldn’t come. But now I’m getting texts from their parents about plans changing so they can come after all, and I can’t tell them no, and Karen’s filling in a last minute opening at a conference.”

Eddie’s pretty sure that if she had more hair, she’d be tearing it out.

“And I mean, Chim’s coming—“

“Chim is coming?”

“Hey,” Chimney points an offended finger at Eddie. “My baby will be in the loving care of her grandmother, and my best friend needs help wrangling preteens. Of course I’m coming.”

“I promised him we can have a drink after they go to sleep,” Hen tells Eddie, poking an elbow into his ribs.

“You do remember my kid is going to this sleepover?” Eddie asks, putting his feet on the coffee table, close enough to Chim that he gets a frown for it. “I’m not sure you should be telling me this.”

“Wait,” Hen says, just as her phone lights up with another message. “Your kid is going to this sleepover. And you don’t have plans.”

And the thing is, Eddie was already going to offer, because the thought of haunting his empty house all night is a little scary for reasons he won’t be examining, but they don’t need to know that.

“I didn’t say I don’t have plans,” he says, just as Buck comes up the stairs. Ravi’s at his heels, hanging on to every word of whatever Buck’s saying, which is—fine. Normal. Bobby says it’s good for Buck to try leadership on for size, and it’s not like Eddie’s jealous of someone hanging around his best friend, because this isn’t elementary school, and he also kind of has a legal document tying Buck to him, so it’s fine. It’s fine. “I said my previous plans got canceled.”

“Ah,” Hen nods solemnly. “So you called one of your many other friends and you’re going to paint the town red.”

“That tone’s unnecessary,” Eddie says. “And there’s nothing wrong with a small social circle.”

“Yep,” Chimney nods, and pats Eddie on the ankle. “But I hate to tell you this, buddy, you don’t even have enough friends to make a circle.”

Hen, in the middle of typing a text, laughs so hard she honks.

Eddie’s mouth isn’t twitching, because he’s a serious man who would never make fun of himself.

“Fine,” he shrugs. “I guess if you don’t want my help.”

“Now,” Hen says, immediately serious again. “Nobody said that. Eddie, you’re my favorite coworker—“

“Hey!” Buck and Chim say in unison.

“—and you have experience with kids that age, so you might be an actual help, so will you please, please come to this stupid sleepover at our house. You can also have a drink.”

She puts her hand on his knee, looking at him very earnestly, but the corner of her mouth is pulling up.

“Fine,” Eddie rolls his eyes, warm on the inside. “But I’m trying not to drink right now, so I guess I’ll supervise the two of you.”

They both perk up at that.

“Any particular reason?” Chim asks, not even pretending to beat around the bush.

Eddie shrugs. “Panic attacks,” he says, his heart beating all frenzied on the tip of his tongue for a blink and then calming back down. “I, uh. Was having them. They’re much better now, but. Yeah.”

Buck drops down onto the armrest of the couch, opening a banana with his teeth and leaning into Eddie’s side hard enough that Eddie has to put a hand out to keep from falling. There’s something burning in his eyes that Eddie can’t name.

“Oh,” Chim blinks, probably unused to Eddie just being forthcoming with information, which. Yeah. He doesn’t know when that happened either.

All he knows is that when Hen reaches out, wraps an arm around his shoulders, and shores herself up along his other side until he’s squished between her and Buck, and when Chim reaches over and squeezes his knee, he doesn’t feel like his skin is burning where he’s being touched. He doesn’t feel like he’s choking, or like he needs them to get off him, and so they don’t.

That night, after he’s had a few hours of semi-solid sleep and a greasy dinner, he packs a bouncing Christopher into the car and heads for Hen and Karen’s. Chim’s already there, pouring snacks into bowls looking a little spooked, and Hen’s untangling a ball of HDMI cables in the living room, trying to figure out why Denny’s Switch won’t connect.

“Eddie,” she says when she spots him standing in the doorway, possibly enjoying himself a little too much, “I need you to bring the cups in from the kitchen. Kids, Denny has a marker, put your name on your cup and don’t drink out of other people’s.”

Eddie ruffles Christopher’s hair and nudges him into the pile of children occupying the couch and floor. Hen glares at him impatiently, so he holds up his hands and does as he’s told, bringing out the cups, pouring drinks, making sure all of them are set on the table and not all over the floor once the Switch is on and everyone’s clamoring for their turn. Christopher, predictably, forgets Eddie’s even there, too busy cheering Denny on in Mario Kart and making fast friends with the kids he’s never met.

Over the next hour, he and Chim gather every spare pillow and blanket in the house and move aside unnecessary living room furniture to make space for the kids to sleep. Hen blows up a couple of air mattresses, unfolds the old camping bedroll Chimney brought, and arranges the kids’ sleeping bags in a kind of wonky rectangle that still allows them to move around. Eddie’s on napkin duty when the pizza gets there, then supervises tooth brushing and pyjamas before they all settle down to watch a movie; though settle down really isn’t the most accurate way to put it. Hen keeps looking out of the window, worried about noise complaints.

Finally, full of carbs and crashing after soda, the kids are mostly out by eleven, the last couple of stragglers blinking quietly at the TV. Eddie and Hen and Chim move to the kitchen, where they have enough of a view, and sit around the table with a matching set of sighs.

“I think we did it, guys,” Hen whispers, her arms thrown out to the sides like she’s sunning herself under the kitchen lamp. “And we will never be doing it again.”

Eddie laughs, rubbing a hand over his face. His ears are still ringing a little, but he’s pretty sure it could have been worse. There was no crying, no puking, no blood, and Christopher made friends.

“My kid’s not going to grow up, right?” asks Chim, also staring at the ceiling, hands folded on his stomach. “I can’t imagine her being old enough to go to someone’s house for a sleepover. I mean—I’ll have to let her out of my sight? Just leave her in the care of a stranger?”

“Your other option is to host one of these,” Eddie grins.

“Hey now,” says Hen, “it might not be a stranger. Karen and I will probably still have kids around in ten years’ time.”

“And Buck might have his own kids soon,” Eddie says, without stopping to think about it, watching as the headlights of a passing car paint shapes on the ceiling.

Silence. Of course it’s fucking silence, and then Eddie’s thinking about it again, kids and dogs and a beautiful wife. Buck, with a life that may not include Eddie by default. Why did he even—

“I mean,” Hen says, unusually slowly, and Eddie’s glad he’s not looking at her. “I don’t know that I can see Taylor Kelly settling down anytime soon.”

“Doesn’t have to be with her,” Chim says. Eddie straightens up, and finds the two of them already looking at each other across the table, having an entire eyebrow conversation in addition to the verbal one. “He might find someone else.”

“And have babies in time to host sleepovers for someone Jee-Yun’s age?”

“Hey, you know what he’s like,” Chim says, and Eddie’s hackles rise automatically before he registers that Chim’s also smiling, and not in a mocking way. “He only met Abby over the phone and then he started showing up for her like nobody’s business, and that was years ago. If he met someone as into the idea of a family as he is, I could see it,” he shrugs.

Eddie’s stomach is doing some kind of uncomfortable twisty thing. He’s a little hot, despite the window being cracked open, and his mouth is dry, and he’s not sure why it’s sitting so wrong with him to be talking about Buck, except that—that he’d been hoping to bring him up, and not to talk about this.

“You guys don’t like Taylor?” he asks, and it comes out so bitter he doesn’t have to say the either at all.

“Nah, she’s fine,” Hen shrugs one shoulder, leaning all the way back to peek into the living room. “I respect her thing. But is she right for Buck? No way.”

Eddie hates how freeing it is to hear her say that. Not that it lets him off the hook, because he’s Buck’s best friend, and he’d never tell Buck to stop trying with something that seems so clearly to make him happy, but. He doesn’t see it, and it’s nice that Hen, who is probably the most emotionally well-adjusted person Eddie’s ever met, doesn’t either.

Chim gets up to get a glass of water. “Yep,” he says, with his back to them, snapping his gum. “Buck’s ultimate fantasy is like, making pancakes for his family of seven on a Sunday morning. Taylor doesn’t seem like the type.”

Eddie’s tongue feels suddenly and acutely awkward in his mouth. Slippery and stumbly and reluctant to make words.

“Does he tell everyone this?” he asks eventually, managing to sound almost casual. “I thought I was special.”

Hen, for some reason, snorts.

“He doesn’t have to,” Chim says, sipping his water in an unnecessarily loud way. “We just know him. Didn’t mean to make you jealous there.”

“I’m not jealous,” Eddie says, a touch jealously. Hen snorts again, and then keeps laughing to herself as she gets up and stops on the living room threshold. A few seconds later, the blue light spilling out of the doorway disappears, leaving the room in darkness.

“Everyone’s asleep,” she whispers. “I’m breaking out the wine.”

Chim, who seems to know Hen’s house far better than Eddie does, gets a couple of wine glasses out of the top cabinet, tipping one towards Eddie in question. Eddie, honestly, thinks he might need a little bit of a boost to actually open his mouth and ask what he wants to ask, and the panic’s been pretty manageable lately, so he holds up his fingers in the universally understood sign for ‘a little bit’, and Chim gets another glass.

They end up with the door open in Hen and Karen’s bedroom, the only room left besides Denny’s that has any soft surfaces in it, with Eddie and Hen sitting cross-legged on the bed and Chim slumped on the ground against the side of it.

“This is nice bedding,” Eddie says, running his hand over the shockingly soft surface of the duvet. “I feel like Karen’s not going to like this.”

“Karen left me at the mercy of twelve tweens,” Hen replies, leaning back against the pillows with her eyes closed. “She doesn’t get a say.”

“She’s also out there presenting a paper on literal rocket science,” Chim points out from the ground, raising his glass in the air.

“Mm,” Hen nods, the corner of her mouth turning up in a smile. “That’s my wife.”

Eddie’s chest aches. His breath echoes inside it like it’s empty, so he tries to inhale slower, into his stomach, the way he’s supposed to, but it doesn’t help. The wine doesn’t either, but it also doesn’t hurt, so he finishes his glass and sneaks a little bit more from the bottle. It doesn’t really do much, but maybe he just needs the placebo.

“Speaking of wives, I’ve been thinking,” Chim says, “like, a lot, like can’t stop thinking about it thinking—that I might, uh. I might ask Maddie if she’d like the idea of being married. To me, I mean.”

“Aw, Chim,” Hen sits back up, beaming down at him. Eddie aches, and aches, and aches. “That’s huge!”

“Yeah,” Chim laughs, a little breathlessly. “I’m not going to spring it on her now, that wouldn’t be fair, I’ll wait—I don’t know, probably at least another year, but—you think it’s a good idea? Because her last marriage—“

“Chim,” Eddie interrupts. “I think you’d know better than either of us if and when it’s a good idea. The two of you do that whole creepy wordless communication thing, I think you can manage to communicate this too.”

“Ugh,” Chim groans, throwing his head back until it bounces off the mattress. “Stop being all utilitarian.”

“It’s just logic,” Eddie says, taking a sip. “You know her best. You’re looking for reassurance, so I’m giving you reassurance that you know her best. Hen?”

She rolls her eyes at him, but when she looks down at Chim, there’s a soft sheen to them. “The Grinch is right, Chim. I think the two of you are meant to be, in whatever form that takes.”

Chim closes his eyes and smiles up at the ceiling, and Eddie just—well. He doesn’t know. He’s suddenly feeling like he’s been put through the actual wringer, his limbs heavy, his bones tired. He tries to take in the soft joy on Chim and Hen’s faces, to feel it with them, but it’s such a struggle he ends up feeling guilty about it.

Of course he’s happy for Chim, but it’s also a reminder. Like he’s back in the café, watching the breeze blow curls off Ana’s shoulder, realizing that he’s not just giving up her, but giving up everything, because if she didn’t fit, how could anyone else?

Except.

“So I’ve been seeing Frank for a couple of months,” he says, once a minute has gone by in silence, just the hum of the fridge and one of the kids snoring indistinctly in the living room. His cheeks feel hot; maybe the wine is doing something, after all.

They take it in stride, and of course they do. Hen squeezes his thigh, touching him without hesitation, another kind of smile on her face, though it’s no less soft. Chim opens his eyes and grins, all boyish.

“That’s really great to hear, Eddie,” Hen says, and only when he relaxes does Eddie realize he’d been afraid of condescension. “I assume it’s been helpful?”

“He makes me want to scream sometimes,” Eddie says, picking at a seam on the bedspread, “but I think that’s the point. He’s been—yeah. I have a lot of shit to unpack. Who would’ve thought.”

“I don’t get how they do it,” Chim says, looking Eddie right in the eye. “Therapists. They just disassemble your brain and they’re like—actually you’re afraid of crows because of this thing that happened to you when you were five and you’ve been repressing it your whole life.”

Eddie coughs around a laugh. “That’s weirdly specific, Chim,” he says, but he’s thought the same thing more or less every time he leaves Frank’s office feeling heavier or lighter or like he’s been put back together in haste. Those days, he has to sit in the parking lot for a few minutes before he can drive. “But I’m—yeah. He’s been good for me, I think.”

He swallows, and shakes his head to clear it. Let the emotion pass through.

“There’s—something I don’t really want to talk to him about yet, though.”

He hasn’t looked too closely at why that is, but he’s sure his subconscious has its reasons.

Hen blinks and straightens up. As if she, too, is remembering the last serious conversation they had, she extends her free hand towards him, and he grabs it, just as warm, as reassuring, as last time.

On the ground, Chim turns around, sitting cross-legged opposite them, immediately alert. Eddie’s not going to cry about it, he’s pretty sure, but he might rig the station’s Secret Santa so the two of them get multiple presents.

“It’s not that serious,” he says, because it probably isn’t, but his voice comes out hoarse anyway. “It’s—probably stupid.”

“It’s definitely not stupid,” says Chim. Eddie tries for a grateful smile and halfway pulls it off.

“Okay,” Eddie breathes. “Okay,” and he watches the light break in his last sip of wine, dappling the duvet, “I need you to be honest with me here. Are Buck and Christopher and I a family?”

Silence again. Eddie gauges the distance from the bed to the door. Less than two steps, really, if he makes them long.

“Uh,” Hen says. Eddie has the guts to look at her for all of two seconds, and he finds her blinking rapidly. “I mean, uh. I feel like that’s something only you can answer, Eddie.”

Eddie wets his lips, and it feels like gritting them up with sand. “I think we are,” he says, because that’s the truth, and he felt it just the other night when Buck’s arms came up around him. “I think—he loves Chris like I do. Takes care of him like I do. And he does way too much shit around my house for someone who doesn’t live there.”

Which was another one of those things he hadn’t really realized until it was gone, Buck’s presence in their life reduced to the occasional movie night he couldn’t get out of. Eddie’s laundry had smelled weird, and it took several loads to figure out it was because Buck actually followed the recommended detergent dosage; his fridge, usually orderly and organized, descended into a chaos of week-old tupperware of leftovers next to produce on the middle shelf. Little things that weren’t little at all.

“I rely on him, like—like when we’re out of something, I’ll text him to stop for it on his way over, and it doesn’t even feel like I’m imposing anymore. He drives me everywhere, he picks up Christopher’s prescriptions and picks him up from school and the other day we went to the fucking zoo and this kid selling cotton candy was like ‘oh, Christopher, where’s your dad’, and she didn’t mean me.”

“Uh,” Hen says again, and Eddie would laugh, except his chest his heaving a little and he has to breathe through it before his body thinks he’s panicking again. He doesn’t panic at the thought of Buck being part of his family. That’s the whole problem.

“So, like,” Chim says, sounding a little like he’s picking his way through a minefield, “did you correct her? The kid with the cotton candy?”

Eddie sighs. Just for a second, he puts his head in his hands, and the darkness helps a bit.

“Right,” says Hen. “So you don’t mind other people thinking Buck is Christopher’s father.”

Eddie can’t figure out her tone. Maybe he could, if he looked up, but he likes it here, in the shelter of his own palms. It’s nice and warm and makes him feel less seen.

“I don’t think so,” he says, mumbles, really, but they both knew the answer before Hen asked the question.

“Okay,” she says. “I think that’s petty conclusive.”

“No, but the thing is,” Eddie says, rubbing his hands over his face once then coming back into the light, “the thing is, the first panic attack. I had it because someone called Ana Christopher’s mom.”

And if he’d thought the silence was absolute before, well – he’d been wrong. He’s pretty sure the two of them actually stop breathing.

“And then Ravi,” and he has to stop for an absurd laugh at that whole situation, even if he just remembers it in snatches, “then Ravi assumed she was my wife, and I almost panicked again.”

“Eddie,” Hen says, and her hand squeezes tight around his.

“And I thought I was just that fucked up, you know? That I just couldn’t accept the idea of anyone filling those roles in our lives, but I’m like—starting to think maybe it was Buck,” he says, and he hears the way it sounds, all wrong, but he doesn’t have any better words. “Was I—oh my God. Was I cheating on my family? Is that why it felt so wrong?”

Chim’s eyes fly to Hen’s. They do their eyebrow thing again. Wordlessly, Chim holds out his empty glass. Hen lets go of Eddie, tops it up in perfect silence, then returns to holding Eddie’s hand.

“I don’t like that reaction,” Eddie says, and his palms are sweating, and he’s—is he drunk off half a glass of wine, or just going insane?

“We needed a second to process what you just said,” Chim says. “Okay. So—you pretty much rely on him in all the ways you would rely on a partner.”

And the thing is, Eddie has very limited experience with serious relationships. He has experience being a shitty husband and folding under the weight of expectation. He has experience promising to be by Shannon’s side and then breaking that promise multiple times over. He has experience watching everything crumble as he touches it, because he can’t do anything right. He barely had time to think about what he’d needed from Shannon, because he was so focused on what she needed and wasn’t getting from him.

“I guess,” he says, scratching at a tear in his jeans that’ll probably become a hole soon. “But it’s like—this isn’t how it usually works. Family.”

Hen squeezes his hand. “Families don’t have rules, Eddie. They just are.”

“Yeah,” Chim nods, leaning forward to chase Eddie’s eyes. “The family you’re born into and the family you choose, remember?”

Eddie pulls at his bottom lip. Because this isn’t—that’s not—

“You can choose Buck to be your family. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

And the way Hen says it, it sounds like the simplest thing. Like whatever Buck is to him can just be.

Eddie doesn’t think it can, because—because he was thinking about Shannon just now. Because Ravi called Ana his wife, and both of those things make him feel like someone’s stabbing him right in the middle of the forehead, a relentless pressure until his head splits clean in two and something terrifying and unknown emerges from the wreckage.

“I, uh,” he bites his lip, considering, always considering. They should have all the facts. Maybe this will make it better. Maybe it’ll make it worse. “I put him in my will? To be Christopher’s legal guardian if I died.”

Hen chugs the rest of her drink.

“You what,” she says, blindly reaching out for Chim, who’s already nudging her in the thigh. Eddie would be a little freaked out at them communicating without even looking at each other, but he thinks him and Buck do the same thing without realizing sometimes. “Like—over your parents? Your sisters?”

“Fuck my parents,” Eddie says, the wine paving the way. It feels good to say, but also irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, because his parents aren’t here to hear it, and if they were, Eddie knows he would barely dare to open his mouth. “And my sisters are in Texas, and they’re—I mean, they’re busy, and I know they’d take care of Christopher like he was their own if it came down to it, but, like. Buck knows him better. He knows what I want for him, and what Christopher needs.”

“Right,” Chimney nods, so fast as to look a little manic. “Right.”

“You just said I can choose him to be my family,” Eddie says, and what little buzz he’d been feeling dies down just like that, the lightness crushed under the weight of all this, because it’s ridiculous and unsustainable and selfish and terrifying. Mostly selfish. Mostly terrifying.

“You can,” Hen nods, but it’s significantly less gentle this time. Eddie knows that particular wrinkle between her eyebrows. It makes a frequent appearance on calls. “And if you trust him with Christopher, nobody can take that away from you. But the other thing is—“

“You said Ravi called Ana your wife,” Chim interrupts. Eddie’s looking down at his fingers clenched tight in Hen and Karen’s expensive duvet, but he’s sure Chim and Hen are having a conversation on top of this one. “And someone called her Chris’s mother. So she was something to him, but she was also something to you.”

Eddie reaches down to put his glass on the ground, and presses both his thumbs into that spot in the middle of his forehead, where the headache is rooted and spreading, reaching into the space behind his eyes, crawling toward the top of his head.

“Yeah,” Eddie frowns, squinting to keep some of the light out. “That’s the part that doesn’t fit, because obviously Buck and I are—aren’t. Like that.”

“You aren’t like that,” Hen repeats, very quietly.

“So it’s like—selfish, isn’t it? What I’m doing. It’s not right. He has a girlfriend, I can’t keep treating him like this.”

But even as he says it, the darkness behind his eyelids dissolves into the memory of Buck’s face as he got in the truck a few days ago, his grin when Christopher asked to be carried into the house, the way he’d lingered in Chris’s doorway and lingered at the kitchen counter while Eddie got their beers and lingered after they put on his ghost thing and slumped into the couch cushions and let themselves sink lower until their heads were knocking together, exactly as Eddie had wanted.

Buck had asked if he could crash on the couch.

“He can make his own decisions,” says Chim.

But can he? Because Eddie just—Eddie dropped an absolute bomb on him that day in the hospital, or a year before that when he asked his lawyer to redraft his will, and he knows better than anybody how far Buck will go for the people he loves, what he’ll do to keep belonging somewhere. Eddie knew he wouldn’t say no, and so he just—God.

“I just feel safe,” Eddie barely says out loud, the words spilling off his tongue like ash. “With him. I feel safe. I like how things are. But that’s not fair to him.”

“Maybe you’re not being fair to yourself either,” Hen says. Eddie doesn’t know what that means.

“I assume you won’t want to hear this,” Chim says, leaning forward, “but if you’re that worried about it, talk to him.”

Eddie scoffs. Although this probably falls under ‘not okay’, seeing as Eddie’s unloading on his coworkers on a Friday night, and the pinky promise thus applies to it, there are things Eddie just—can’t.

What the fuck would he say? Hey Buck, can you give up your life to hang out with me and my kid all the time, because we somehow became a unit without me looking and now I’m not sure how to do anything without you?

“Eddie,” Hen says, and she’s somehow dead serious and amused at the same time. “Just—listen. You basically just said he’s your partner in every way except romantic.”

“He’s with Taylor,” Eddie says. It falls out of him, automatic, and then he stops and blinks and thinks—romantic? Him and—

“I’m not so sure that will last,” says Hen. “And you make it sound like she’s the only obstacle.”

“She’s not,” Eddie frowns, “obviously.” The headache pounds and pounds on the inside of his skull, like something is demanding to be let out of there. He pinches the bridge of his nose, rubs his temples, and none of it helps.

“Obviously,” Chim nods, very slowly. “So if he wasn’t with Taylor—“

“Look,” Eddie interrupts, and he doesn’t know when the swing in his mood happened, but he’s suddenly jittery, caged in by the concerned bookends of his friends around him. “I don’t—it doesn’t matter who he’s with. I just wanted to know if I was thinking in circles again, so. Thanks.”

He gets the urge to bounce his knee, but his legs are crossed underneath him, so he settles for tapping his fingers on his thigh.

He does have to talk to Buck. He does, because they haven’t actually spoken about it, everything that shifted in the way they do things when Buck was practically living at Eddie’s house, everything that felt just this side of wrong after he left. They haven’t talked about Eddie’s grand fucking gesture, which is looking more and more sinister as time passes.

He’d thought he was showing Buck that he had something, someone to live for, but what if he’s just put more pressure on him? God, he didn’t even ask. He just drew Buck in, just swept through every boundary like they were so many lines in the sand, and now he’s so fucking deep in something he doesn’t understand.

And his fucking head hurts, God.

“Okay,” Hen says, and her voice is so gentle again, and Eddie’s just—wrong. Something’s wrong, and he doesn’t have the faintest clue what it is. “You’re welcome. Just—we’re here for you, okay? If you ever need to talk through things.”

Eddie nods, too short. He should be thanking them for real, should be thinking through what to do next, but all he can bring himself to do is close his eyes and tilt his chin toward his chest, trying to find something to make the headache go away. He focuses on his breathing, reminds himself that air’s going in and out of his lungs, because there’s a familiar heaviness settling on his chest, but he doesn’t—he doesn’t panic at the thought of Buck. Right? Buck is the only thing that helps, sometimes.

“Ugh,” is what he manages to say, and he has enough presence of mind to fall forward instead of backwards onto Hen and Karen’s fancy pillows.

“Yeah, buddy,” Chim says, his voice too loud for whatever carnage is playing out inside Eddie’s head, “I know.”

No, Eddie thinks, and feels like shit about it. No, you have no idea.

“You know,” he tells Frank one Thursday morning, shivering under the blanket that’s kept in the office for basketcases like him, “I remember wanting to be like—a gardener, or a florist. When I was little.”

And he’s not sure what he expects, at this point. A furrowed brow, a tilt of the head, something that passes judgment.

It’s not for Frank to smile, just so.

“What gave you that idea?”

Eddie closes his eyes, and the memory comes bright, clear, untainted.

“There was this rose garden,” he says, wrapping his freezing hands in the ends of the blanket. “Next to—my grandmother, on my mother’s side, they moved her to America when I was like five or six, and she needed round-the-clock care, so she was in this senior center. And on the weekends Sophia and Adriana were out with friends and I was too young to be at home by myself, so I used to go see her with my mom, every Saturday morning. And my mom was…” he opens his eyes, then, no longer surprised when he realizes they’re stinging. “I don’t really remember, I just know she was really, really upset every time we went. And there was this municipal rose garden right across the street, and we’d go and sit in there afterwards, and I used to just—run from bush to bush and beg her to read me the plaques. I felt like it cheered her up.”

He hasn’t been there in decades, now, but he remembers the sandy paths winding around thousands of flowers in every color imaginable. He remembers looking down at his shoes and finding them dusty, bleached a pale yellow that always made his mother tut in disapproval because she’d have to clean them by hand.

But most of all, he remembers the amazement: simple, easy, childish. The kind of emotion he’s forgotten how to feel.

“It was kept up by volunteers, you know? And I couldn’t believe that actual human people could grow something so amazing. I wanted to do that, for the longest time.”

“How long?” Frank asks, hands folded across his notes, the pen lying calmly over the top of the clipboard.

“Don’t know,” Eddie says, and looks out of the window. The bird feeder is empty today, but a lone sparrow is sitting on top, swaying with the motion of it. “Until some career day. Sixth grade, maybe. One of my classmates had a dad who was a gardener, and I spent the day hanging off of him and then came home and told my parents all about it.”

“Okay,” Frank nods. “Based on what I know about them,” and he flips over the glaringly blank sheet of paper on this clipboard, and Eddie laughs, wet as it is, “I’m going to guess it didn’t go over well.”

Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose, because he suddenly remembers that, too, coming home so excited about something and being met with the equivalent of a brick wall.

“You can probably guess,” he mumbles.

“Probably,” says Frank. “So do you think gardening is unsuitable for a person like you, somehow? I don’t know - unmanly? Degrading?”

“No,” Eddie laughs, and thinks of Buck and Christopher re-potting plants on his living room floor, talking to the leaves. “I think it’s amazing. Just not for me.”

“Why not?”

Eddie sighs. “Because it’s one of those things I’m just not supposed to be.”

He’s said some iteration of it in this office probably a dozen times now, because he thinks it’s what Frank expects to hear, but it’s kind of been sinking in a little, lately.

“I just—wanted to grow things. And now my ten-year-old and my best friend have to take care of our plants, because I kill everything I touch. That’s gotta be some kind of metaphor, right?”

“No,” Frank says, shrugging, “it doesn’t.”

And the simplicity of it steals a little bit of Eddie’s breath away.

“Do you think you’re a killer?” Frank asks.

Silence.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Eddie nods. Outside, the sparrow hops up onto its little stick feet and takes flight.

“And do you think you were supposed to be one?”

And—God, when he says it like that. When he lays out the mess, the insurmountable tangle of it, all neat and straight like it’s the simplest thing in the world, it makes Eddie want to scream.

He takes a breath, and it feels like shards of glass sliding down into his lungs.

“No,” he says, so quietly it might as well be the wind, and watches the cup of his palms until the tears start falling. “Fuck. No. But they—“ and he looks up at Frank, needing him to see, to understand, “they made me a killer.”

He doesn’t even know who they are. That’s probably part of the problem.

“You can make yourself something else,” Frank says quietly. “That’s part of what we’re doing here, too. Reclaiming agency.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I don’t even—“ he breaks off, takes in a wet breath, “This is just who I am. I don’t have anything to reclaim. There’s nothing left.”

“You know that’s not true,” Frank says, and Eddie’s not looking at him, but he sounds like he’s smiling a little. “You just told me. You remember an Eddie who wanted to grow roses.”

“I’ve killed everything I’ve ever tried to grow,” Eddie says, repeating himself. He pulls the edge of his sleeve down over his hand and dries the tears away, ignoring the box of tissues placed prominently in the middle of the table in front of him. It’s—better, like this. If he doesn’t leave evidence.

He looks up, and his eyes are dry.

“Well,” Frank shrugs, “flowers are fragile.” Eddie blinks at him. “Right? They’re pretty easy to kill. So maybe start with a cactus.”

Eddie blinks again.

“A cactus.”

“Yep,” Frank nods, scratching his chin. “Something sturdy. Get a cactus that’s yours to take care of, keep it somewhere you can see it, just water it every couple of weeks. Boom, you’re growing a plant.”

“I—what,” Eddie says. His throat is tightening again, and he simultaneously wants to break straight through the door and run to his car, and to stay here when his hour is up.

“Don’t overcomplicate it, Eddie,” Frank says, with that look in his eyes again. “How did Christopher learn to grow plants?”

Eddie frowns. “At school,” he says. “And then when he liked it Buck and I got him some books, and they’ve been learning together.”

“Okay. Did you learn how to grow plants at school?”

“No,” Eddie scoffs, and then wants to take the scoff back.

“Did anyone ever get you a book about plants? Did they ever sit down and learn with you?”

“I hate you,” Eddie mumbles, and holds his other sleeve to the corner of his eye. “No, okay? I get it. I never told anybody I liked plants because I thought I wasn’t supposed to, so nobody taught me how to do it, so now I kill them. I get it, Frank.”

Frank grins. “Right,” he says. “And do you see how that’s not your default state?”

And that lands like a kick straight to the chest.

Eddie looks up at the ceiling, which is vaguely beige and blank except for an elaborate ceiling light that he’s never seen on, because he has his sessions while Christopher is at school.

“You think so?” he asks, and he sounds like a child. Like the boy that had stood in the kitchen and cowered in surprise when his father raised his voice over flowers and trees and ornamental hedges, which was a new expression he’d picked up from Mr. Winterman earlier that day.

“I know it, Eddie,” Frank replies.

“So you just went to Target and got this,” Christopher says, frowning over his math homework. “Without asking Buck about it?”

Eddie is—going to push that can of worms aside. Somewhere into the very back of the cupboard, ideally.

“I just went to Target and got this,” Eddie confirms, staring at the cactus that sits in the middle of their kitchen table, the little paper tag still attached. “And I’m going to take care of it.”

Christopher purses his lips. He blinks at Eddie once, twice, three times, then goes back to writing.

Eddie’s not sure what he’d been expecting. Probably teasing, the same way Buck and Christopher team up and tease him about his perfectly passable cooking, or more questions that he could possibly answer. It wasn’t for Chris to just be—silent.

He sits down, reaching out for the pot. There’s a tiny book on cactus care wedged underneath, recommended by the bright-eyed member of staff who happened to be looking after the garden section when Eddie came in, probably looking a little hunted. She’d taken one look at him and smiled like one would smile at a toddler, but he also walked out the new owner of a spiny pincushion cactus, a clay pot into which he’s supposed to replant it because they don’t do as well in the plastic ones, and a bag of soil she’d also recommended. He could tell, just by the set of her eyebrows, that she had no idea why he looked like he was going to vomit over choosing a cactus, and he was exceedingly grateful that she didn’t ask.

But now he’s home with it. His cactus. His fucking homework assignment from his therapist.

“Do you, um,” he starts, watching the way Christopher is a little too focused on his work, “do you want to name it? I can’t think of anything good.”

He doesn’t know when he’s had time to become tentative around his son; just that he’s here, suddenly, sitting at their kitchen table with his elbow in a ring of something sticky left over from breakfast.

Christopher puts his pen down and closes the notebook over it, marking his place. He looks up at Eddie and folds his little hands on the tabletop, and he looks so grown up it makes Eddie’s head spin.

“Dad,” he says, and something cold and sinking and dangerous yawns open in Eddie’s stomach. “Are you okay?”

Eddie just has time to bite his lip and stop whatever wounded noise was going to come out of him. Not this again, not—God, he’s supposed to be doing better. He’s not supposed to be burdening Chris with his shit anymore.

“I’m okay, buddy,” he manages, but his voice shakes, and he knows Christopher picks up on it. “Is it that weird that I got a cactus?”

“It’s not the cactus, Dad,” says Christopher. He’s almost eleven, and he has a chocolate stain on the side of his nose, and he’s sitting Eddie down like this is an intervention. The look in his eyes is so much older than he is. Eddie hates himself for everything he hasn’t protected him from. “It’s you. You’re weird.”

“Uh,” Eddie says, his mouth dry.

“You look sad,” Christopher says. “And Buck wasn’t here for ages, and when he was here he was sad too, and now he’s here and he’s better but you’re still both sad. I know you are.”

Eddie rubs a hand over his face. Of course his eyes are stinging, because he’s the kind of person who cries every day, now. And he wants nothing more than to get up, to step around the table and wrap Christopher up in his arms and not let him go until absolutely necessary – but he knows that this time, that isn’t going to cut it. There’s a hurt, real and tangible and heartbreaking, swimming in Christopher’s eyes, and what’s the point of Eddie if he’s the one who puts it there and doesn’t try to take it away?

So he takes a breath, slow and long, and says: “I am sad, Chris.”

Christopher nods, just as seriously, like he’d already suspected that much.

“Can I help?” he asks. Eddie presses the back of his hand to his mouth and swallows—something.

“You already do, buddy,” Eddie says, his voice all over the place, and he thinks about biting his tears back and then he thinks about Buck, Buck who thinks he did something wrong by showing Christopher that he couldn’t always be strong. “Every day. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, I promise.”

Christopher blinks down at his math notebook. It’s one Buck got for him on one of their many zoo trips, with a herd of giraffes on it. He’d saved it all year for his favorite subject.

“But you’re still sad,” he mumbles, taking his hands off the table and folding them in his lap. “If I help, then—then how come?”

Eddie wipes his face dry, and doesn’t know where to go from here. Because—where’s the line? How is he supposed to know the difference between communicating and traumatizing his kid? How can he tell until Christopher grows up and then he has to go to therapy because Eddie couldn’t handle his own shit?

“Sometimes,” he starts, with no real idea where he’s going to end up, “sometimes it’s not as easy as just being with the people you love. Because I love you more than anything, you know that, right?”

Christopher nods, just a small dip of his chin, and doesn’t look up.

“And I love Buck, and I love Carla, and Pepa, and your bisabuela, and everyone at the 118. You all make me feel better and happier, okay? But I also—got hurt. I’ve been hurt for a while now.”

The kitchen clock, a housewarming gift from Abuela, ticks down a second and a second and a second, all of them blurring into one sound. Christopher’s brow furrows, like he’s turning Eddie’s words over in his head. He picks up a pen with the cap on, and draws slow circles with it around one of the giraffe babies.

Eddie watches him, shaking, something sour and uncomfortable clawing up his throat. It would be just like him to go to therapy so he doesn’t ruin his son only to manage to do it in some other way.

And he wishes—he wishes Buck was back already, that he was here so he could help navigate this conversation, because he’s always so good with words, somehow. He always knows what to say to put Eddie at ease, and Christopher listens to him like he hung the moon.

Eddie’s just clumsy, in comparison. His mouth is full of fragments of meaning, and he can’t assemble them into a whole.

“And,” he says finally, when the silence stretches so taut it threatens to snap back into his face, “the things that hurt us don’t always just go away. Sometimes we think they did, but we just put them away—I just put them away, because I think I’ll forget about them.”

“Like a pantry in an earthquake,” Christopher nods, and Eddie’s mouth freezes halfway to open.

“What?”

“Like a pantry in an earthquake,” Christopher repeats, nodding again, his expression clearing. “That’s what Dr. Kimura said. That when something hurts to think about, we put it on a shelf in our head and put other things in front of it. But then something else happens and it shakes the whole shelf up, like an earthquake, and things fall out and we remember they’re there. That’s why I was dreaming about mom in the water.”

Eddie sits, and stares, and forgets how to breathe a little bit. It’s just—Christopher. His kid. This is his kid?

“That’s right,” he rasps, his voice completely wrecked, and blinks to clear his vision. “Yeah. So I’ve been putting a lot of things on that shelf. Things that—that hurt me pretty badly. And I guess they’ve been falling out lately, which makes them hurt again and I can’t really control how I feel about it. Does that make any sense to you?”

Christopher tilts his head. Slowly, he puts his pen down, slides out of his chair, and makes his way around the table to Eddie. He barely holds his arms out before Eddie’s scooping him up and hugging him close, inexplicably relieved to feel the rise and fall of his chest. He’s so little, still. He feels like something Eddie could crush if he touched him wrong.

“So,” Christopher says slowly, leaning his head back on Eddie’s shoulder, “is it like when Mom went to heaven? Because I was sad then. Even when I played with Legos or when we had pizza or when Buck came over. And I miss her all the time.”

Eddie sniffs, and hides his face in Christopher’s curls.

“Me too,” he says, and it never hits him more than when he looks at this miracle they created together and wishes she could see him now, wishes she could have seen him for everything he was when she was alive. “I miss her too, and I think—I think it’s kind of like that. Like I’m happier when I’m with you than when I’m not, but I can’t just stop being sad. So I’ve been,” he takes a breath that stops somewhere halfway down into his lungs, “I’ve been seeing a therapist.”

“Like Dr. Kimura?”

“Exactly like Dr. Kimura,” Eddie nods, reaching out to trace the temporary tattoo of a horseshoe on Christopher’s arm that he’d begged Buck to put on him a couple of days ago. “His name is Frank, and he helps me—unpack things, I guess. I put them in the pantry in little boxes, and Frank opens all the boxes and makes me look into them.”

Christopher giggles, just a little.

“And some of the boxes,” Eddie says, looking up at the ceiling, praying for something he can’t put into words, “I open, and it turns out there’s barely anything in there, so I can look at it and put it in a smaller box, and then it doesn’t take up that much space. And some of the boxes are falling off the shelves because they’re overflowing, so I have to get a bigger box and put it on the front of the shelf and figure out what to do with it.”

“Like Buck did with the exs—expired cereal,” Christopher nods, stumbling over the word. Eddie squeezes him a little tighter still.

“Like Buck did with the cereal,” he smiles. They’d made enough rice krispie treats to last three days even in a station full of firefighters. Eddie wonders if he could just—grind it all up, somehow: a bullet wound in each shoulder like some fucked up riff on a crucifixion, all the hurt he never got to scream out as a teenager because he had to be in control, the water in his lungs and the mud in his teeth and Shannon’s blood on the crosswalk and the things he sees when he closes his eyes; Buck’s face, pale like a moon right above him, but covered in red. Grind it up, mix it with marshmallow fluff, have a bite every now and then instead of trying to carry it all, all the time.

He will not bring this up to Frank, because Frank may send him to a different kind of professional then.

“But—I saw Dr. Kimura because I didn’t talk to you,” Christopher says, picking at scuff on his jeans. “You could have talked to me, Dad.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Eddie breathes, as his throat squeezes shut and more tears crawl out. “I’m sorry. You’re right, I should have told you I wasn’t doing that well. But it’s not your job to look after me, Christopher. I’m working on getting better, and I didn’t want you to worry about me.”

Christopher pulls away a fraction, just so he can look Eddie in the eye. There’s something sharp in his gaze, something that feels like it can see right through to the core of him. It reminds him, actually, of Buck.

“I didn’t want you to worry about me,” Christopher says, like Eddie’s slow, “and that’s why I didn’t talk to you, and that’s why I went to see Dr. Kimura. Come on, Dad.”

Eddie laughs, and wipes his face. “Okay,” he says, “point taken. But you’re my kid, and I’m your dad. It’s my job to be there for you, and that means I can’t always talk to you about everything that’s bothering me.”

“Because I’m a kid? I’m almost eleven.”

“Yeah you are,” Eddie grins. The mix of emotions inside his chest is making him a little dizzy, but he thinks he can weather it if the end result is Christopher’s smile, minus the molar they pulled out a couple of days ago. “Hey. You know how I never tell you you’re too young to understand something?”

Christopher nods.

“I just explain things to you because you’re the smartest kid I know, and I know you’ll understand them,” he says, poking a gentle finger into Christopher’s cheek. “But sometimes I need to have things explained to me, and that’s Frank’s actual job. Just explaining things to me like I’m a kid.”

“Dad,” Christopher rolls his eyes, and Eddie thinks he spots the ghost of a smile. “You’re so old. You know everything.”

“Hey,” Eddie says automatically, even as something soft and content settles down in his chest, because he doesn’t think he’d mind that so much, being old, if that comes with being the kind of father Christopher can look up to. Eddie kind of feels like he’s on the precipice of figuring out how to be that. Any day, now. “I definitely don’t know everything. I don’t know how to grow plants, which is why Frank told me to get a cactus.”

“So the cactus is homework?”

This is his kid. God.

“The cactus is homework,” he nods, and sweeps Christopher’s hair out of his face. “So I can maybe learn something new about myself. And then once I know what I learned about me, I can explain it to you. But I have to talk to other people about it before I can do that. Is that okay?”

Christopher bites his lip until it goes white. Eddie tugs at his chin, exaggerating a little to see if he can’t tease out a laugh. He can’t, but Christopher does tangle his fingers in the hem of Eddie’s shirt, closing them into a fist, just holding on for a little while.

“Okay,” he breathes, finally, “but you’re happier when you’re with me than when you’re not, right?”

“That’s right,” Eddie nods.

“Okay. So you have to promise to tell me when you’re extra sad, so I can give you a hug.”

Eddie wipes his eyes again. He’s—not actively crying anymore, he thinks, but the entire inside of his chest feels like it’s on fire, like whatever’s in there is trying to suffocate him with sheer and absolute love.

He wants so badly to believe that a feeling like that would prevent him from ever hurting Chris, but. But.

“I promise,” he says, and holds out his pinkíe before he’s even consciously aware of it. “And you promise to do the same, okay? Whatever you’re feeling, I want to know.”

Without hesitation, Christopher curls his tiny finger around Eddie’s, squeezing tight.

“Promise,” he whispers, and then he’s tipping forward again, wrapping his arms around Eddie’s neck, clinging tight. “Can I ask you one more question?”

Eddie runs his palm up and down Christopher’s back, feeling where it rises with his breath, and inhales the scent of his favorite strawberry shampoo.

“Always.”

“Did Ana make you sad?”

“Uh,” Eddie tries to say around the abrupt hitch of his breath in his throat, “why do you ask?”

Christopher sighs with a weariness no ten-year-old should possess, and Eddie’s chest rapidly goes cold.

“You looked happier after she left,” he says, pulling back. He pokes a finger at the corner of Eddie’s mouth and pulls it up. “When people break up on TV, they’re always sad afterwards.”

Eddie blinks up at his son, at the earnest way he’s mapping Eddie’s face with his eyes, and has no idea what to say. There’s no way he can tell Christopher he’d been doing it for him, and he doesn’t have another explanation. Doesn’t know how to put into words the things she could have and should have been to him, the things he couldn’t be for her. He doesn’t want to tell Christopher that someone he loves made his father sad.

It’s only now that Eddie realizes he hasn’t even brought her up in therapy, because she didn’t really seem important enough. But she’d started the panic attacks, theoretically, and Eddie thinks he can still taste nausea on the back of his tongue sometimes from that night he asked her to go home, and he was apparently so bogged down with her that Christopher noticed, so. That’s looking like something he might want to delve into.

And the thought doesn’t really scare him, for a change. He thinks of bringing it up with Frank, of Frank cracking his jokes and then stilling and looking Eddie right in the eye and peeling him like he’s a goddamn banana in two sentences flat.

He thinks he might want that, actually.

“She didn’t make me sad,” he says, finally, weighing every word. “She took good care of us, right? She’s nice, and you love her.”

Christopher shrugs. Which—huh?

“But,” Eddie continues, watching Christopher’s shoulders droop and feeling kind of like he’s missed a step going downstairs, “sometimes people date and don’t—fall in love. It’s not the kind of thing you can force.”

I think I’m just gonna stick it out, his own voice echoes pettily in his head.

“So when we broke up, I was sad that she’d be leaving our lives,” Christopher’s life, really, because he could barely look at her as she turned her back and took off down the sidewalk, “but I also knew that—that I didn’t feel the way I should feel about a girlfriend, and so I guess—maybe I felt a little bit relieved, as well?”

A little bit. Lying to Christopher is the last thing he ever wants to do, but there would be no point in admitting how it felt to leave her behind. How it feels now, barely remembering she was in his life when there was a point at which she’d squeezed him from every direction like a vice.

Christopher’s still looking down, his eyebrows scrunched.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “I know you didn’t want to miss any more people, and I—“

“No,” Christopher interrupts. “Ana was okay, but she didn’t—she didn’t really make me happy, either. She was nice.”

Eddie knows he’s still sitting on his chair, but he also feels a bit like he’s free-falling.

“Christopher,” he says, and something desperate creeps into his voice. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“You liked her,” Christopher shrugs. “She was nice,” he says again. “I want you to be happy, Dad. Like you want me to be happy.”

And isn’t that the easiest and most complicated thing in the universe.

“God,” Eddie laughs, of all things, a soft thing that slips out under his breath. He’d been putting both of them through something they didn’t really want, and for—what? Who was it for? “Okay. Okay, Chris, can I get one more pinkie promise?”

Slowly, cautiously, Christopher nods.

“If I ever date someone else,” he says, even as his entire body recoils at the thought, “I want you to be completely honest about how they make you feel. I know you want me to be happy, but I won’t be happy if I know you’re holding something back from me. Can you promise me that?”

Eddie’s perfectly aware that he’s a hypocrite, because his life these past few years has been a seriously steep learning curve of how to be emotionally present for Christopher’s sake – but when he imagines this again sometime, pushing himself kicking and screaming toward someone because he thinks his son will benefit, and Christopher pretending for his sake, it kind of makes him want to throw up.

“Okay,” Christopher nods, very seriously, and wraps his pinkie around Eddie’s again. “Even if you look happy?”

“Even if I look happy,” Eddie nods. “Even if I am happy. I always want to know what’s going through your head, okay? I love you more than anything, and I always want to know.”

Christopher wraps his arms around Eddie’s neck, his little body shaking a little with emotion or exhaustion or both, and Eddie aims a pointless prayer at the sky that he didn’t make anything worse than it already was.

He doesn’t know how to feel anything other than broken, with something so beautifully pure right there in his arms. Eddie’s afraid to touch him, sometimes, afraid that the darkness will crawl out of his fingertips and take hold of Christopher, too.

But—maybe, he thinks, as he looks at his stupid Target cactus. Maybe, please, please.

Buck finally gets home a few minutes later, crashing through the door with six grocery bags on him. He stumbles when he steps into the kitchen and sets them down, and turns around and freezes with a greeting frozen halfway out of his mouth when he spots Eddie and Christopher.

“What are you guys doing?” he asks, soft, his eyes going all wide with concern. He crosses the empty space in a single step, leaning down to press a kiss into Christopher’s curls, his hand landing automatically, almost absentmindedly, at the very top of Eddie’s spine. Immediately, Eddie feels his body relaxing back into the touch.

“Just talking,” he says, when Christopher offers nothing. “Half asleep because we’re hungry, Buckley.”

Buck’s laughing when he straightens up. “Okay, it’s not like you don’t have hands,” he says. “And there was a line at the brewery for your weird beer, so it’s your own fault.”

Eddie tips his head back to look him in the face, and feels—just feels. Wonders how it suddenly got so much easier to breathe.

Buck’s eyes travel over his face, and then to the table.

“Hey,” he smiles when he notices the cactus, soft and delighted. “That’s a pincushion. Did you know they can flower in spring?”

Chapter Text

One of the students said, "I thought homophobia meant fear of going home after a residency."
And I thought, how apt. Fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We're afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged.

- gloria anzaldúa, borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza

Eddie knows it’s going to be a rough one before he even gets out of the truck.

“Jesus,” Bobby mutters under his breath, watching the scene through the windshield as they pull up, the inside of the truck completely silent.

It’s a boulevard, and the sidewalks on both sides of the road are teeming with people, a heaving crowd that the police aren’t quite managing to push back. The 118’s ambulance is already there, just ahead of them, and Eddie thinks he can see Hen and Chim pushing their way through the crowd, so many people gasping and screaming and spinning in place like they’re the ones who are hurt.

They’re not.

Eddie jumps out on autopilot, and feels Buck land on the road behind him just as rigid. Without a word, they grab the Halligans, and Buck beings to carve their way to the actual site.

“Excuse me,” he shouts, his voice booming over the heads of the people around them, “make way, we’re coming through. LAFD, coming through!”

Eddie pushes his elbows out to the sides, already out of patience, colliding with people holding their phones up in the air. Another cruiser pulls up, a handful of officers tripping out while it’s still moving to hold people back, and over the noise Eddie catches Bobby instruct a couple of their own guys to stay behind and help, because it doesn’t look like they’re going to need to do much.

Eddie looks up at the sky. Blue, he thinks, blue, blue, blue. The exact opposite of red.

But then the last of the crowd is parting, and Buck’s broad back, which had heretofore served as a shield, moves aside. Eddie has a perfect view of what they’re just been called to.

A crosswalk, stark white lines on the asphalt that’s dark grey in the midday sun.

And a grotesquely long red stain, all over the white then veering wildly into the intersection, like a brushstroke abandoned halfway.

Buck stutters. He fumbles the step he’s about to take, tripping over his shoes, and Eddie tears his eyes away from the road to put a hand on his chest, to stop him from tipping forward.

“Deep breath,” he says, because he needs the reminder himself. They exchange a look – the same one that always passes between them in the middle of an inferno, and when one of them has to go over the edge with nothing but a rope and a prayer – and then they’re both looking forward, moving forward, following the beacon of the reflective strips on Chim’s turnout pants.

It’s—God, Eddie doesn’t even know. An older man and his wife. She’s sitting on the curb with a police officer, rocking back and forth, her eyes unseeing, and Eddie’s not sure he can blame her. Not sure he’s brave enough to blink, because the darkness behind his eyelids has turned into a bright yellow, a floral dress stained with the grime of a Los Angeles street. The woman’s hands are covered in blood, because she would have tried to help, would have wanted to be with her husband, who’s still conscious somehow, and when Eddie realizes that he has to breathe in through his nose so hard it hurts, just to push the nausea down.

They have to step around him, first, to the car that ran him over, but the driver’s side door is open, the airbag deployed, the seat empty. Eddie takes a minute to stare at it, just blinking until he notices Buck coming around the other side, checking in the back.

“Empty?” Bobby asks, jogging up to them. He’s a little pale, but present, eyes always scanning the scene and the crowd.

“Yeah,” Buck confirms, slamming the passenger side door closed. “Nothing in the back.”

“Sergeant said it was probably a drunk driver,” Bobby says. “Swerving from side to side. You can see it in the—uh. Stain.”

Eddie doesn’t want to look at it, but it’s pretty hard to avoid. It’s like some kind of street art gone wrong; it doesn’t seem possible that a human being made it.

“How did that even happen?” Buck asks, frowning at where Hen and Chim and Julie are working, his lips pale. “And how—how is he alive right now?”

“God knows,” Bobby says quietly. “I think the car probably hit him with the front end then ran him over. He got caught, somehow.”

Buck steps back to Eddie’s side. It’s difficult to feel the usual heat of him through the turnouts, but he’s still a steady presence at Eddie’s side, and that makes it a little better.

“He pushed his wife out of the way,” Bobby says, even quieter than before. “That’s what the witnesses said. The car was going to hit her, so he got in front of her and pushed her back.”

Buck takes in a sharp breath that he doesn’t quite manage to mask. When Eddie looks up at him, he finds him a little wide-eyed, more out of sorts than he had been at the sight of the blood.

Wordlessly, they move forward to be at hand if there’s a need, but their victim is already on a backboard, still with his eyes open, and his leg—Eddie’s pretty sure there’s nothing where his leg should be.

“Maggie,” he’s saying when Eddie gets close enough to hear, trying to move his head in the C-collar. “Maggie, Maggie’s okay?”

“She’s just fine, sir,” Chim says, in a tone that suggests it’s not the first time he’s saying it, but his voice is still shaking. “She’s just in shock, okay? She’ll come with us to the hospital, you can see her there.”

“Maggie,” the man repeats again, like he doesn’t know any other words, blinking up at the sky like he isn’t seeing it.

“Yeah,” Hen smiles, all wobbly. “You got her out of the way in time, you saved her life.”

They lift him up, their feet a blur as they start in the direction of the ambulance. The whole way, his wife’s name doesn’t leave the man’s lips, getting weaker and hoarser like a toy with a dying battery. There is so much blood left on the ground, and Eddie makes himself look and hold, two seconds, four, eight, ten. When he closes his eyes, his stomach rolls, and his heart’s thrashing on the back of his tongue like a fish, but there’s no highlight reel waiting to spring out at him from the darkness, no blood in his mouth, just the dark. Just the dark.

“Let’s go, guys,” Bobby says. When Eddie opens his eyes, he’s already on his way back to the truck, the crowd finally parting to allow him through. Eddie watches the ambulance doors slam shut, the lights come on, and hears the howl of the siren long after it fades among the high-rises.

“You okay?” he asks Buck as they both give the blood a wide berth, following their captain.

Something ticks in Buck’s jaw, an emotion that trips Eddie up for a second because he can’t identify it, but he exhales through his nose and bites through it.

“I will be,” he says, and they made a promise and still have twenty hours left of this shift, so Eddie leaves it, at least for now.

They get back to the station just as Hen and Chim do, a little droopy in the shoulders, but with the confirmation that their victim was alive when they got him to the ER. They get enough time to eat a quiet lunch together, and the rest of the day is a couple of minor car accidents, a man stuck in the kids’ slide at a McDonald’s, a cat in a tree, a child with their hand in a sewer grate. Everyone catches a couple hours of sleep at midnight, then they patch up the usual Friday night drunk crowd, and the tail end of the shift, between four and eight, is blissfully quiet. Eddie rolls out of a bunk only to walk straight into the locker room, wordlessly checking in with Buck, asking where he’s planning to go. Buck doesn’t nod, like he usually does when he’s agreeing to follow Eddie home, but he doesn’t shake his head either, just kind of shrugs and scrunches his nose and then runs out of the room before Eddie can ask him what’s going on.

He figures he’ll let them both get some more sleep, and then he’s distracted with the new project Christopher was assigned and laundry and trying to make some kind of cohesive plan for the weekend so his ten-year-old doesn’t bounce off the walls.

And that night, as he finally has his phone in his hand and is trying to formulate a text, Buck knocks on his door.

“Why are you knocking?” Eddie’s asking before he even opens it fully, but it becomes immediately obvious.

Buck’s standing on the porch in just a hoodie and a pair of shorts, his hair loose, his shoes unlaced, shivering like a dog.

“Sorry,” he says, and gulps so loudly it sounds painful. His eyes are red when he raises them to Eddie’s, and the hand he runs through his hair is trembling. “Sorry to just—Christopher’s in bed, right?”

“It’s midnight,” Eddie says so, so carefully, reaching out to tug at Buck’s sleeve and get him inside. “Of course he’s in bed.”

“Shit, it’s that late?” Buck says, somehow rooted to the spot even as shaky as he is. “I didn’t—fuck, Eddie, I’m sorry, I’ll just—“

“Come inside,” Eddie interrupts, wrapping both his hands around Buck’s forearms, bodily pulling him over the threshold. He’s stiff, barely managing to lift his feet so he doesn’t trip, and Eddie has to pull him and prop him against the wall so he can close the door and lock it, because he’s not letting Buck leave in this state. “What’s going on?” he asks, and his voice is doing—something, something he’s never really noticed it doing before, coming out as gentle as if a single loud word would be enough to break Buck into pieces.

Buck closes his eyes, and exhales in a rush. When he breathes in it’s slower, measured, the kind of calming breathing Eddie is intimately familiar with.

Wordlessly, Buck extends a hand into what little space remains between them, his pinkie outstretched. Eddie wraps his own around it in a second, and uses that grip to drag Buck forward into a hug.

He’s heavy in Eddie’s arms, dangerously close to lifeless. He’s still shaking, but he’s not crying, not really breathing hard, just—absent. So Eddie tries, the only way he knows how, to bring him back: he runs his hands through Buck’s hair, pulls him forward until his forehead is resting on Eddie’s shoulder, whispers whatever nonsense pops into his head into the soft skin behind Buck’s ear. Slowly, carefully, a pair of arms comes up to wrap around Eddie’s waist, too heavy, but Eddie will take it.

“You wanna talk about it?” he asks quietly, swaying them in place just a little, trying to listen out for the usual little hitch in Buck’s breathing, for any sign of life.

“I don’t know,” Buck mumbles into Eddie’s shoulder. “I want to sit down, I think.”

So Eddie nudges him through the doorway and into the living room, where he falls onto the couch limb over limb, leaning into the backrest, then coming forward to rest his elbows on his knees. Eddie sits close, not touching but barely a breath away from it, and watches Buck’s back expand underneath his hoodie.

Watches as Buck puts his face in his hands and heaves a single, painful sob.

Eddie’s entire body lurches towards him of its own volition. He has to stop himself from touching even when he wants to, because Buck looks a little like he might shatter.

But when he straightens up, his eye are dry, his knuckles white where he grips his own knees.

“It’s happening again,” he says, and when he looks up he looks almost like a child, so completely lost Eddie forgets how to breathe.

“What is?” he asks, the sound of it almost drowned out by the distant hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen.

“Just,” Buck waves a hand, and slumps against the backrest, “this. Me. I’m fucking it up again.”

Carefully, Eddie leans back too, legs curled under him so he can face the line of Buck’s profile, the tip of his nose pointed at the ceiling. He bridges the distance between them with a tentative hand, lays his fingertips on Buck’s shoulder.

“I’m gonna need more words, I think,” he says, and the corner of Buck’s mouth ticks up.

They’re silent for a breath, two, three. Eddie feels all jittery on the inside, like he should be shivering, but Buck is blazing warm under his hands.

Finally, Buck says: “It’s Taylor.”

Eddie can’t stop the way he squeezes Buck’s shoulder, probably tighter than he should.

“Is that were you came from?” he asks, gentle, just poking at the edges of the thing, because he knows Buck. He’ll talk if he wants to, if he wants Eddie’s opinion, or else he’ll just close his eyes and draw his legs up and slump sideways into Eddie, asking to stay on the couch as Eddie would ever say no.

“Yeah,” Buck says, on a sigh. “We were just,” he starts, then laughs, but it’s a creaky, bitter kind of sound that doesn’t fit in Buck’s mouth at all, “we had sex, and then she kicked me out. Been a while since she did that, so I guess I forgot how fucking shitty it feels.”

Eddie blinks, and blinks, and blinks, and the world is still tinted red at the edges. He’d thought—fuck, he’d thought Buck was happy, because he hasn’t said anything, hasn’t shown any signs that his relationship was in trouble. And Eddie hasn’t asked, because he’s a petty asshole.

But he can be here now. He can be present here, where Buck needs him, can help him sort out his thoughts. That’s what Frank would say, anyway.

“And I’m not usually—like, I don’t know, it’s fine, she’s trying and I’m trying and we don’t have to be together every minute of every day, I’d never ask that of her, but it just—we—“ he runs a frustrated hand through his hair, which is half-messed up and damp at the temples. “I think it’s the call.”

Eddie, somehow, knows exactly what he’s talking about. “The one from yesterday,” he says. “The crossing guy and his wife.”

“Maggie,” Buck says, with a rueful tilt to his mouth.

“He pushed her out of the way,” Eddie says, with something dangerous and foreign sparking in his fingertips, his fingertips that are still curled into the shoulder of Buck’s hoodie.

“Yeah,” Buck nods, and rubs his eyes. “Even when we were there, I just couldn’t—he kept asking about her, right? Everyone kept saying she was fine, and he was asking and asking until she got in the ambulance with him. And I thought—I don’t know, I just started thinking about the kind of devotion it takes. To put himself in the path of certain death just so she’ll live. To lie on the street bleeding out with your fucking leg amputated and only care that the person you love is safe.”

His lashes are wet. He’s not crying, really, so there are no tears to wipe, but Eddie’s hands are itching to reach towards his face, to touch, to rub away smears of red that aren’t really there.

“I don’t think I have that with Taylor,” Buck says, and bites his lip. He looks at Eddie with his eyebrows drawing together, like he’s begging him to understand. “I don’t know that I’ll ever have it with her.”

Eddie’s throat is tight. There’s something rushing through his veins that doesn’t feel like blood, and his face is too warm, and he has no idea why, and Buck—Buck needs help.

He breathes in, controlled, through his nose.

“Okay,” he says, squeezing Buck’s shoulder another time then finally letting go. “Why? You haven’t been together for that long.”

It’s been—something like six or seven months, probably. Eddie’s not sure precisely when they got together; he wasn’t privy to the fact until he walked into his house for his own welcome home party and saw her there.

“Actually,” Buck swallows, “I think this is technically the longest relationship I’ve ever had. Ali was gone so much we barely spent time together, and—“ he swallows again, and doesn’t say Abby’s name. He doesn’t need to for Eddie’s hands to curl in on themselves of their own volition. This isn’t about her, but there’s always a sadness in Buck when she’s brought up, the kind of bone-deep thing Eddie’s afraid will never go away.

He wishes he knew how to make it.

“And it’s not working out?” Eddie asks.

Buck leans forward again, elbows slipping on his knees.

“Can I have a beer?” he asks, and Eddie’s on his feet before he’s done speaking, crossing over into the kitchen and back in as few strides as possible. Buck takes the bottle from him with a grateful sigh, and presses it to the back of his neck for a while before he opens it.

Eddie settles back down next to him, opens his own drink, and waits.

“It’s like,” Buck starts, taking a sip, staring at the blank screen of Eddie’s TV, “I went to hers when she got off work. And we got food, and we, uh—we had sex, and I’m rolling over to go to sleep, and then she’s like, actually, I need to get up really early, so you should probably go home.”

“Yikes,” Eddie says, before he can stop himself. Buck huffs a humorless laugh.

“And I told her that it’s fine, because my sleep schedule’s whatever on a good day, right? And I could make her breakfast so she doesn’t have to rush around when she wakes up, and she, uh.”

“She told you to go anyway,” Eddie says, as the pieces slot into place. As the heat behind his sternum clarifies into anger, a hard, painful lump that sits there and pushes, pushes Eddie to say or do something stupid.

“Yeah,” Buck says, staring at the ground, running his hand through his hair. “And I don’t actually know. That’s the worst part, I don’t know if this is normal, or if this is how it’s going to be with her, like, did she just not want to tell me she wanted to be alone? Or was she—was that her way of being considerate?”

“What, kicking you out?”

“Yeah,” Buck shrugs, and he looks so small. Eddie wants to put his hands on him and unfold him, piece by piece, until he takes up all the space he’s meant to. “Maybe she didn’t want me to have to get up that early for her. Like she thought I’d be cranky and regret it or something.”

“You’re a morning person,” Eddie points out, holding a sip of beer in his mouth for so long it goes all warm and disgusting. He just doesn’t get it. He never actively wants Buck to leave, when he’s here. “I think—do you want to know what I think?”

“Always,” Buck replies.

Eddie nods, careful. “I don’t think she was being considerate,” he says, and doesn’t even have to try to be gentle about it. His voice just comes out that way on its own.

Buck leans back, one of his knees bouncing, the beer bottle just hanging on in his fingertips.

“Yeah,” he nods, watching the ceiling again. “You’re right. That’s what I told her, too.”

“Oh,” Eddie blinks. “You—what, had a fight?”

“Nah,” Buck grimaces. “I lost it a little bit and she just stood there and then asked if I was done.”

Eddie grits his teeth so hard he hears his jaw creak.

“Buck,” he says.

Buck shakes his head. “No, it’s—I was just being stupid. Or dramatic, or whatever.”

Eddie’s chest feels like it’s on fire. He wants—about a dozen things simultaneously, but mostly to drive to Taylor Kelly’s house and do something seriously reckless.

“What did you say?” he asks instead, and has to set his bottle down on the table so he doesn’t drop it. He wants to touch Buck, at least squeeze his knee, somehow communicate that this isn’t his fault by pressing it right into his skin, but he knows the way Buck’s holding himself: he’s not done yet, and he wants to be done.

He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter. I left, went home, tried to think through it and see what I did wrong, but I got so—so tangled in it, it’s—fuck.”

His hands are shaking, and he drinks instead of setting the bottle down like he should.

“I keep telling myself it’s like—self-respect, or something. When I push back.”

Yes, Eddie wants to scream, thinking of high heels sinking into the soft soil of a front lawn, of red nails curling around Buck’s cheek like injuries, of red wine. Yes it is.

“I really don’t think she does it on purpose most of the time,” Buck continues, tugging on his bottom lip with his fingers, hard enough to make the skin around it pale. Eddie just resists the urge to grab his wrist and hold it. To tell Buck to stop hurting himself. “But I have to fight to even be a consideration sometimes, and it feels like no matter what I do it’s,” his mouth twists, “not good enough.”

And that’s another thing Eddie can’t imagine: having Buck in your life and not being grateful for it. Hell, Eddie’s still grappling with all the spaces Buck has somehow filled, all the absences he soothed that Eddie hadn’t even known were there, but he knows there hasn’t been a day for as long as they’ve known each other that he hasn’t been grateful beyond words.

Because that’s Buck’s thing. He figures out what people need, and tears himself to pieces to give it to them, and Taylor fucking Kelly must be blind not to see him this tangled up in knots, or she just doesn’t give a shit, and Eddie doesn’t know which is worse.

“Don’t tell anyone I said this,” Buck squints up, pointing with his bottle, as if Eddie is in the habit of broadcasting their private conversations, “because it makes me feel so fucking pathetic, but I just wish someone would—fight for me.” He looks away, blinks into the dark hallway. “That’s so needy.”

Eddie moves closer, until their knees are knocking together just so.

“It’s really not,” he says, nudging Buck’s foot with his own. “It’s not needy to want to feel wanted, Buck. That’s a basic prerequisite in a relationship.”

Buck raises his eyebrows. “Prerequisite? Look at you, dictionary man.“

“Fuck you,” Eddie replies automatically, and something cracks in the air above them, so distant it’s impossible to pinpoint, the way the sound of an iceberg cracking carries over miles and miles. “You’re not needy.”

Buck snorts. “Eddie,” he says, slowly like Eddie’s not getting it. “I’m the neediest person you know. I’m the neediest person anybody knows.”

And Eddie wants to say it: you’ve never taken anything from me. Everything you’ve asked me for has been something I’ve wanted to give.

But he also has something loud buzzing in his head, insisting that’d be a bad idea.

“You’re not needy,” he repeats instead, and Buck looks at him so skeptically it almost makes him want to laugh.

“I always end up thinking I’m alone,” he says. “I assume people disliking me is the default. Dr. Copeland’s been trying to get me to flip it, so I default to knowing that people love me and want to be around me unless they tell me otherwise, but I just don’t think—I think I’m hardwired this way,” he grimaces, picking at the label of his beer. “Poor little Evan Buckley. Needs to be told people love him every five minutes like a fucking toddler. Of course that’s needy, Eddie, who’d want to deal with that in a relationship?”

The response jumps up Eddie’s throat, ready and simple, a single word. He swallows it back down before it can register, before he can allow himself to think it.

“Buck,” he says, and it fizzes a little on his tongue. “You said you went home then came here.”

Buck frowns. “Yeah?”

“So when you were in the car,” he says, slow, reaching out with soft fingertips to put on Buck’s knee, “what were you thinking?”

“Uh,” Buck scratches his jaw, and finally puts the beer on the coffee table. “I don’t really—know. I guess we promised to tell each other when we’re not okay, so I—was thinking that? That I won’t be bothering you because you’ll want to know.”

Eddie shivers, a live thing that runs through him from head to toe.

“Exactly,” he says, and has to focus on breathing in and remembering to breathe out. “I always want to know. Pinky promise aside, I always want to know, because you’re my best friend and I want to hear what you have to say. And you knew that, didn’t you? Coming here?”

“I—“ Buck blinks, looking down at his hands like he’s seeing them for the first time. “Maybe? I guess I—huh.”

“So you don’t assume people disliking you is the default,” Eddie says, and can’t help a smile at Buck’s bewildered expression. “Not with everyone, anyway. Therefore, not needy.”

“This is some real armchair psychology,” Buck says, his lips pursed to hold back a smile of his own. “Frank’s rubbing off on you.”

“Don’t let him hear that,” Eddie says. He scratches the back of his head, and almost feels—fond, thinking about Frank. This has somehow become his life. “So where’d this needy thing come from?”

Buck looks down, and just like that, Eddie knows the answer. He digs his nails into the couch cushions, and breathes out for four until that angry knot inside him loosens just a little. Buck’s a grown man, and he can take care of himself, but it’s also—Buck. Buck who thinks there’s something wrong with wanting to be loved out loud.

“Does she know anything about you?” he asks, and Buck startles a little. “Like—anything you’ve been through?”

“Uh,” he blinks. “Like…”

“Buck. Come on.”

He sighs from somewhere very deep, head drooping down between his shoulders.

“Not really, I guess. There hasn’t really been a good occasion to—dump all of that on my girlfriend.”

Eddie doesn’t point out the fact that Buck told him everything, that time his parents came to town, or the way he’d sat them all down and told them about Daniel the second he learned about him, because Buck looks miserable enough.

But he also has to bite his lip on what he does want to say.

“Just tell me, Eddie,” Buck says, and Eddie looks up to find him with an eyebrow raised. “I came here to talk about it, and I’m a big boy. I can take it.”

Eddie huffs. “It’s just—I think you’re worried about what she’d do if she knew.”

Another one of those startled blinks. “Yeah,” Buck says, very slowly. “Yeah, I’m worried about what she’d do.”

“Become a little more understanding, maybe,” Eddie says, though he’s pretty sure the chances of that are low. “If you don’t share anything of yourself, she’s not going to know where you’re coming from.”

“Holy shit,” Buck rubs both of his hands over his face. “Stop sounding like a therapist, Eddie, it’s freaking me out.”

“Stop ducking, then.”

They look at each other in silence, for an amount of time that’s impossible to define in the way it stretches, starts off relaxed and comfortable and grows less so. Eddie watches the way Buck blinks, slow and deliberate, watches the thoughts take shape in his head. A couple of times, he licks his lips like he’s going to speak and ends up not making a sound, instead resorting to picking the pills off of Eddie’s terrible couch.

He looks away, at his hands. The breath he takes feels like it draws all the oxygen out of the room.

“I don’t want her to leave me,” Buck finally says, his head bent so low his chin’s almost resting on his chest. “That’s it, I think. I don’t want her to leave.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and without thinking he reaches out to bring Buck’s face up, both hands on Buck’s cheeks.

Buck makes no effort to pull away, but his entire face droops, crestfallen. “That’s pathetic, isn’t it? I’m so afraid of another relationship ending that I’ll put up with feeling—used and uncomfortable and second place. I’m so messed up it’s a miracle she hasn’t left yet.”

Eddie’s heart stumbles painfully into the wall of his chest. He knows, of course he knows how Buck thinks, but it jars him every time. That someone so unequivocally good could be so awful to himself.

He pulls Buck in, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Buck goes easily, boneless when he slumps into Eddie and rests his forehead on Eddie’s shoulder.

“What am I going to do with you, huh?” he asks, running his hand through Buck’s hair in circles like he does for Christopher after he’s had a bad dream.

“Tell me to get my shit together,” Buck mumbles into Eddie’s shirt.

“You have it together,” Eddie replies, smiling. He tugs on one of Buck’s hoodie strings. “You’re just looking at it through your Buck glasses.”

Buck huffs, his breath warm and familiar on the side of Eddie’s neck.

“You don’t deserve to be second place, okay?” Eddie says, one of his knuckles catching on the shell of Buck’s ear. “And you don’t deserve to be made to feel like there’s something wrong with the things you need.”

Buck snakes an arm around Eddie’s waist. His next exhale is quiet, but it shakes his whole body.

“Thanks, Eds,” he says, in a tone Eddie recognizes from the many times Buck has silently begged him to stop pushing. “I guess—I guess I should talk to her.”

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, trying to tame all the feelings that are trying to snake up his throat and just—put them away. He can’t tell Buck to break up with his girlfriend, not when he’s so determined to make it work, not when it sounds like he hasn’t been as open with her as he should be.

He just wants to tell him to do it.

Buck leans back, and Eddie lets him go. He’s wiping his face with the sleeve of his hoodie, even though he’s not crying.

“I just don’t know that I’ll ever find anything better, you know?” he says, his voice small, and Eddie wishes he could shake him by the shoulders, wishes he could grab him by the chin and make him raise his head and look at this living room covered in pictures of the three of them. Wishes he could put into words the thoughts that have been taking root in his own head, lately: even if I never have anyone else, I think this would be enough.

Except, of course, Buck deserves better. He deserves to be happy and whole with someone who loves him the way he should be loved. He deserves to have a family he built.

So Eddie swallows the heaviness on his tongue, and blinks up at the ceiling, and looks back down in time to see Buck pick up his beer and take a swig.

“I mean,” he says, “look at you and Ana. I thought that was a solid relationship for months, and then it was over so fast.”

Eddie almost snorts. “Depends on your definition of solid.”

Buck tilts his head at him, a question clear in his face. Ready-made family, Eddie thinks, and kind of wants to tear himself apart with his own hands.

“We were—we weren’t. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that was unsalvageable.”

Buck keeps watching him. Eddie always forgets that his whole knowing thing goes both ways more often than not; that even Eddie’s best attempts at walls tend to crumble when Buck is involved.

Eddie shakes his head. “I just,” he says, closes his eyes, shakes his head, “I didn’t even want her to—to touch me.”

“Eddie.”

Buck’s voice is so suddenly firm, so serious, that it startles Eddie into opening his eyes.

“Not like that,” he rushes to say, but the rest of whatever he was going to say just crumbles into dust in his mouth. Because he can’t remember, actually, any of the parts he’d told himself were good. The way he’d made her feel, the way she looked at him when she combed his hair with her fingers. All of it blurs in comparison with the feeling of her hands on him, so readily recalled it makes him flinch. He thinks about her smile and can’t see it; he thinks about her hands, and every place they’ve ever touched him burns. “Or I guess,” he says, as his stomach turns over, “I guess kind of like that.”

“Eddie,” Buck says again, his voice weaker this time, Eddie’s name leaving his mouth like he’s afraid to speak it. “I didn’t—fuck, I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Eddie shakes his head. He reaches back out, because it doesn’t feel right, to keep this space between them. “I didn’t even know. It was—what it was, I guess.”

Buck looks at him in silence. It takes what feels like an eternity for one corner of his mouth to quirk up, but there’s no apparent joy in it.

“Look at us,” he says, and collapses back into the couch like his strings have been cut. Every atom in Eddie’s body itches to do the same, to give in to the pull and just lean into Buck’s familiar warmth and drift off to sleep, but—but. When he lets himself imagine it, something about the thought feels new. Dangerous. “You ever feel like you were just meant to be alone?”

Yes, Eddie wants to say. I am, but not you. Never you.

“Anyway,” Buck blinks, and heaves another sigh like he’s cleansing himself. “I better go.”

“As fucking if,” Eddie rolls his eyes. “I’ll get you a pillow.”

He picks his way through his own hallway in the dark, because the thought of turning the light on is a little terrifying for some reason. He gets the pillow and brings it back, throws it to Buck from the doorway, smiles, wishes him goodnight. He shuts the door of his own bedroom with way too much force for one in the morning and leans back against it, trying to untangle the mess of emotional live wire sparking just under his skin.

He thinks of Buck, kicked out of by a girlfriend who didn’t want him with her, running from his apartment that doesn’t look lived in even after years, ending up on Eddie’s lumpy couch with a pillow that should’ve gone through the wash weeks ago.

He thinks of Buck holding on so, so tight to people who don’t or can’t love him, and tries not to let any of it mean anything.

“I have to say,” Frank says, shuffling papers, “it was a pleasant surprise to see you come with a topic you wanted to discuss.”

“I feel like there’s an insult in there,” Eddie says. Today, he’s elected to stare at the floor, where the corner of Frank’s fake Persian carpet is curling up and distracting the hell out of him.

“Not at all,” Frank says, but his voice is amused. “You know that’s not what I do. It’s just great to see you take initiative.”

“Mmm,” Eddie says. His hand itches to reach out and uncurl the damn thing. “So. Any thoughts?”

“On your ex-girlfriend?”

“Preferably,” says Eddie.

“Well,” Frank says, and folds his hands in his lap, “I have a lot of thoughts. But the main thing that concerns me is why you brought her up in the first place.”

Eddie picks at a hangnail next to his thumb, staring at the translucent piece of skin like it holds answers. This is part of it, he knows. If he brings something up, it’s because it’s on his mind, and he pays Frank money to poke around up there. So he has to talk about it. He has to talk about it. He has to talk about it.

“It’s—it feels like she’s chasing me, a little bit. Christopher brought her up the other day, and then Buck did as well. Felt like a sign, or whatever.”

“And by sign, you mean thinking about her brought to the surface feelings you’d repressed?”

Eddie reaches out and stomps the curling carpet down with his foot.

“Something like that,” he says. “I’m just—I’m still trying to figure out why it felt so wrong, all of a sudden? Because we were fine for months. I think.”

Frank rustles the notes he’d made over the last half hour, pale sheets of paper quivering between his fingers as he holds them up.

“You did say you had intimacy issues throughout your relationship.”

“I don’t know if I’d call them intimacy issues,” Eddie says, and twists his fingers together, and tries to ignore the chorus of broken broken broken that’s started up in his brain. “I don’t know what—actually, Frank. You’re a shrink.”

Frank laughs under his breath. “Sure.”

“How would you define intimacy?”

“That’s a good question,” Frank says, as if Eddie brought up some kind of excellent point, and scratches his chin with the blunt end of his pen. “You’ve got the physical kind, of course, but there’s a lot more that goes into being intimate. It’s a deep connection, a personal one. So you could maybe think about it like—being able to be intimate with someone means not minding them in your space, but by ‘space’ I mean both your body and your mind. So you can and want to touch, you want to kiss, you want to have sex. But you also can and want to communicate about your emotions, you can exchange ideas in a way that’s mentally stimulating for each other, and maybe they’re privy to your personal value system, or ideally it’s something you share.”

Eddie blows a rush of air out through his lips. “Okay,” he says, leaning forward, elbows on his knees because this is shaping up to be that kind of session, “we definitely had intimacy issues.”

Frank doesn’t laugh, which Eddie appreciates, but he does have that annoying sparkle in his eye.

“I don’t even—I don’t think we ever got that close,” Eddie says, but he actually knows the truth of it down to his bones. His bones that still remember how wrong her touch was, and not much else. “Because, uh. I think it’s because I didn’t let her in.”

“In what way?” Frank asks. He clicks his pen, gently as he’s in the habit of doing. Eddie thinks it’s so he doesn’t feel quite so much like a lab specimen.

“I don’t know, it’s,” he starts, rubbings his hands over the back of his head until the hair’s all frizzy under his fingertips. “I think I thought I let her in, because I—I brought her into my house, I introduced her to Christopher. And he’s the most important thing in the world to me, so if she met him, that meant I trusted her, right?”

Frank stays silent.

“Everything I ever do is about Christopher,” Eddie says, and something shivers through him. “If he’s happy, I’m happy. So if he loved Ana, I figured I’d get there eventually, too.”

“But you forgot about Eddie as usual,” Frank smiles. “So he reminded you that he exists.”

Eddie groans.

“You know, it’s funny,” he says, “I feel like I’ve never been less sure of who the fuck Eddie is."

“Yeah,” says Frank. “I’m told that’s what it feels like to be a person.”

“Ew,” Eddie says miserably to the floor, and Frank’s laughter echoes under the bizarrely tall ceiling of his office.

“Hey, you don’t have to have him figured out,” he says. “But I think you know how Eddie feels about Ana. So when you think about her, what—“

“Disgust,” Eddie interrupts, and he’s not sure when his hands have started shaking. “I feel disgusted, okay, just—gross. I feel like—I spent months and months trying to feel something about her, leading her on, and every time she touched me I wanted to crawl out of my fucking skin but I just told myself it was—growing pains, I don’t know, fuck.”

He rubs his hands over his face. No tears, for a change, because he’s more—angry, he thinks, coiled tight like a spring, but there’s nothing to lash out at. Nothing that’ll bring relief.

“Take your time,” Frank says, quiet.

So Eddie does, listening to the clock tick some twenty-odd times before he loses count.

“I’m disgusted with myself,” he says, “for letting it get that far. And for dragging it out for Christopher’s sake, because he told me he didn’t even care about her as much as I’d thought. I don’t—I feel so guilty about it, but then I’m also angry at her, for some reason, even though it wasn’t her fault.”

Frank clears his throat. “There were two people in that relationship, Eddie,” he says. “You’re—exceptionally good at pretending, I’ll give you that, but I don’t think you were the only party willing something to exist where nothing did.”

Maybe, Eddie thinks, and tries to remember the café, the way she rolled her words around in her mouth before she let them out, deliberate and so, so careful.

“So your anger. Give yourself a minute to think about it. Do you think you know where it’s coming from?”

Eddie cracks his knuckles. Clenches his fists until his hands are bone-white, unclenches them to feel the blood rush back in again. It’s sitting on the tip of his tongue, the truth, torn in half with how much it wants to stay in and how much it wants to come out.

“I feel,” he says, his voice trembling around the lump in his throat, “I feel violated.”

In his periphery, and through the blur or tears in his eyes, he thinks he can see Frank nodding.

He hadn’t even realized, until he came in and brought up Ana and started talking Frank through everything that happened with her, that he hasn’t so much as touched himself in months. Since before he got shot, even, because they’d started having sex at that point, and it was easy to convince himself that he was satisfied enough, but the truth—the truth is that his body hasn’t felt like his own in a long time, and her touching him only made it worse.

“She didn’t do it on purpose,” he says, reaching out to where he knows the tissue box is set out, always the exact same spot, the exact same angle. “Obviously she didn’t, and I always encouraged it because it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? You have sex when you’re in a relationship.”

“That’s not a given,” says Frank, way too gentle about it.

“But now I’m just left with—this. And it’s a thing I’m not allowed to feel, right? Because I’m fucking—tough and strong and indestructible and nothing like that can ever happen to me.” He wipes his face into a tissue, another tissue, the sleeve of his sweatshirt. His eyes don’t even sting anymore when he looks up. “But I feel it, Frank. I do.”

Frank nods. “And allowing yourself to feel things—“

“—is important, yeah, I know. I’m trying.”

“You are,” Frank says.

“It sucks,” says Eddie, and he crumples a clean tissue into a ball just for something to do with his hands. “Because then it’s like—I let myself feel it. Let it pass through, like you said, and it gives me so much time to think about it.”

“Well, that’s kind of the next step,” Frank says, and reaches over to the desk to set his notes down. “First you learn not to flinch from the emotion by feeling it then letting it go. But you can’t let go of everything, or you end up at square one.”

“So then it just rattles up here forever?” Eddie says, knocking on his forehead, bizarrely relieved to feel the pain that blooms there.

“Depends,” Frank shrugs. “Why don’t you tell me what’s rattling?”

Eddie huffs. “It’s—just the way she made me feel. The way I feel when I remember her. I keep thinking about it, and I’m kind of starting to—“

The lump in his throat grows again, pushing until it’s hard to breathe. Opposite him, Frank is steady, patient, sharp elbows on the armrests of his wheelchair. Focused, like Eddie is the only thing he cares about despite the next person probably already waiting outside.

So Eddie takes a breath that tastes bitter when he lets it out.

“I’m starting to think that maybe I don’t deserve that.”

Eddie doesn’t realize that he might have a problem until he’s sitting in Bobby and Athena’s backyard, trying to soak up whatever warmth the sun can provide in early November, and struggling to take his eyes off Michael and David.

He’d helped with the setup like he always does – setting out chairs and carrying the tables out of storage and ferrying platters and dishes between the kitchen and the patio – but it’s been at least an hour of not having a whole lot to do, and Eddie’s starting to feel like a creep.

Especially because it’s not like they’re—a novelty, or anything. He’s met them plenty of times, has spoken to both of them plenty of times. He went to the anniversary party they threw and got talked into an unwise amount of shots, and he vaguely remembers Michael very enthusiastically telling him about his telescope. For all intents and purposes, they’re his extended family, and he knows them, and still—

Still, Michael leans down over the barbecue and says something to Bobby that makes them both laugh, and David passes by and runs a hand over the line of Michael’s shoulders, and Eddie’s so mesmerized with it he almost forgets to breathe.

He’s been weirder than usual, lately, and he can admit that much to himself. Off-kilter ever since he decided that bringing Ana up to Frank would be a good idea, because that also brought the memory of her up from the depths, and now it refuses to sink. Last night, Eddie had woken at four in the morning with a start, her face hovering in the darkness in front of him for a couple of seconds before it dissolved, the morning sunshine hitting her long lashes and the way she’d looked when she blinked up at him and asked if he actually liked women.

He’s pretty sure the answer to that is still yes, but the rest of that memory sits in his stomach like a stone, ever-present and rolling nauseatingly. She didn’t ask the other half of the question, but Eddie had heard it, because people have asked him before.

They’ve asked before, and Eddie has always turned away from it, because what was the point? He was the youngest brother and the only son and a baseball player and married and in the army and a father; the path was laid out, and there was no point in that line of thought. He was a man and a protector and a provider and a soldier. He was his father’s son, and there was no room, there was never room, for anything else.

But these days, with every time he leaves Frank’s office, with every morning he wakes up and doesn’t immediately feel a weight make itself at home around his shoulders, everything he has known blurs behind him; a path blown over and disappeared like footprints used to do in the dust back at Bagram.

And Eddie has no idea how to take a step forward.

“Dad,” a tiny hand waves back and forth in front of his face. “Are you there?”

Eddie blinks once, twice, taking his eyes off where Michael’s helping plate burgers with David at his shoulder. On the next pass, he snatches Christopher’s hand by the wrist, making him giggle.

He looks to his left, and comes face to face with what sounds like his son, but looks like some kind of weird lizard-butterfly hybrid.

“Don’t worry,” Christopher grins, the white of his teeth breaking through the blues and greens and yellows dappling his face. “Buck said to tell you they come off. But look how cool I look.”

It’s impossible not to grin back at him. Eddie grabs his chin, careful not to smudge anything, and tilts Christopher’s face back and forth.

“You look very cool, buddy,” he confirms. “What are you actually supposed to be?”

“He’s an alien butterfly, duh,” Buck’s voice comes from behind him, and Eddie looks up just in time to see him shake off Denny and Harry, who had both been dangling off his back, holding him by the neck. There’s an angry-looking red welt where their arms had been, but Buck is smiling with the little pouches under his eyes, so it can’t hurt too badly.

“I’m an alien butterfly,” Christopher nods. “The yellow stuff is their goo.”

Eddie has questions about the placement of it, at the corners of Christopher’s eyes and under his nose and around his mouth, but he doesn’t get to ask them before Christopher’s off again with Denny and Harry, both of whom are also covered in what Eddie really hopes is washable paint.

Buck falls into the chair next to him with a creak, limbs going everywhere, craning his neck until his head is hanging off the backrest. He groans at the sky. Eddie’s pretty sure this is the first time he’s sat down since he got here, because he’s always the designated fun adult at these things.

“Do I want to know where you got face paint?” Eddie asks, knocking his foot into Buck’s and then just kind of keeping it there. Because this is normal, this has been normal. Him and Buck touch all the time.

“Denny smuggled them in,” Buck says, tipping his chin back down. He rubs the corner of his eye with his knuckles, leaving a smear of purple over the pink of his birthmark. “They were going to do it by themselves, so I stepped in to supervise.”

“You could have confiscated them,” Eddie says, but he knows he’s grinning like a fool.

Buck puts an affronted hand on his chest. “Never,” he says, and reaches out to take a sip of Eddie’s beer. Eddie’s stomach swoops a little, the stone inside it rolling. “I will not be the person who stifles a child’s artistic expression, Eddie, what do you take me for?”

You, Eddie wants to say, stupidly. His hands are cold, and suddenly weirdly itchy, so he sticks them in the pockets of jacket, picking at the lining inside.

Buck looks warm, he thinks. For a second, he wonders what it’d be like to just get up and move seats and tuck himself under Buck’s arm, here, in the middle of the day, in the middle of their captain’s backyard. It’s the kind of thought he’d normally wave away before it could register, let it skitter off the surface of his mind with a practiced ease, but he’s off-balance enough to allow it, just for a second.

It makes his chest constrict, a sudden struggle to take in breath. He watches as Buck carefully places the bottle back on the table, the tendons in his hands moving in perfect sync, up and down like piano keys.

“You’re making sure Athena’s sink is clean after they wash that off,” he manages to say. “I want no part of it.”

Buck grins. “I was hoping she wouldn’t notice until after we’re gone,” he says. “Hen can’t say anything because Denny’s the one who smuggled that stuff in in the first place, so we’d each end up with one kid to clean up in our own house.”

Something passes over his face as he says it, a quick shadow that wilts his grin a little and puts a wrinkle between his eyebrows. Eddie can’t quite figure it out, because he’s more focused on the we. On our own house.

Buck opens his mouth, still frowning, taking that big breath like he does when he wants to say something fast, and then his phone starts ringing in his pocket. He deflates, fishes it out, and frowns even deeper when he sees the screen.

“Sorry,” he says, “be right back.”

Eddie watches him disappear into the house, towering over most of the people present even as he ducks to go inside.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Bobby says, from his other side, and Eddie flinches so fast he bangs his ankle on the chair. He turns to find Bobby setting a plate down in front of him, a still-steaming burger and a side of hand-cut fries for which Eddie had helped peel the potatoes.

“Oh,” he blinks at the food, then at Bobby, who sits down right opposite him with his own plate. “Is—“

“Double cheese,” Bobby says, carefully unscrewing the lid on whatever glass bottle gourmet ketchup he keeps at home. “And pickles, because I know you’re a man of taste.”

Eddie stares at the burger for a bit, and slowly registers the fact that he’s hungry, and can’t really remember whether he ate breakfast.

“Thanks,” he says, biting into a fry that’s so good it almost makes his eyes roll back. “I should go—“

“Christopher said he’ll eat later,” Bobby says, chewing with that self-satisfied look Eddie kind of hates on him. “With the other kids.”

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Okay.”

So he eats, tentatively, watching as Bobby fields back pats and well-deserved praise for what might be the best burgers Eddie’s ever had. Chim comes to sit next to them with Jee-Yun in his arms, then has to get up two minutes later when she squishes a piece of banana in her first with so much joy it makes all of them laugh and gets it all over Chim’s shirt.

Buck doesn’t show, and Eddie tries not to feel his absence.

“So,” Bobby says once he’s finished his own food, far ahead of Eddie because he’s a chronically fast eater. He leans back in his chair, eyes on Eddie, and Eddie feels a little like a mouse in a trap. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“Why would I be having thoughts?” Eddie asks, mild, running a fry through a drip of sauce on his plate.

Bobby laughs. “It’s what separates us from animals. Allegedly,” he says, his shoulders relaxed. He looks uncomfortably like Frank in the way he’s looking at Eddie, like he knows all sorts of things that Eddie doesn’t.

“Well I’m not,” Eddie shrugs. “Having thoughts.”

But Bobby’s presence alone is enough to put a crack in that illusion.

He’s supposed to—share things with his loved ones, or whatever, because they care about him and don’t think he’s a burden when he just wants to talk. He’s been told this, and he’s trying his best to believe it, and he even did it when he accosted Hen and Chim the other week.

But Bobby’s different. Not in the least because the last two times he sat Eddie down for a Talk, it came back to Shannon. Who had been Eddie’s wife. Romantically.

“If you say so,” Bobby says. “I just noticed you staring, is all.”

Eddie lets his head thud gently down onto the table. His blood rushes like a waterfall in his ears, and distantly, over the roar, he hears Bobby chuckle.

“I’m not trying to push you, Eddie,” he says, and his foot knocks into Eddie’s under the table. “Just making sure you know you have options, if you’re looking for someone to talk to.”

“I feel like all I do is talk,” Eddie mumbles into the tabletop, because it’s fucking true. That’s what life is when your therapist’s disembodied face starts floating in front of your eyes whenever you think about clamming up: you talk and talk and talk until you find that, this whole time, you’ve had things to say.

But he does raise his head, and his forehead throbs where it was pressed into the slats.

“That’s fair,” Bobby says, sipping from a glass of lemonade Eddie’s only just noticed. “We can just sit here in silence, then. Hang out.”

Eddie huffs a laugh. He meets Bobby’s eyes and, as expected, finds nothing but a steady, gentle light in them.

Then his gaze travels over Bobby’s shoulder, to one of the other tables he’d helped set up when he got here. Hen is there, laughing about something into Athena’s shoulder, and Karen and Chim are both hovering with their hands out in front of Jee-Yun, who’s sitting on the edge of the table, rocking side to side, waving her stuffed penguin.

But next to them, with their chairs right up against each other, are Michael and David. They’re not doing anything remarkable, just talking, half-hidden in the shadow of the house, their feet tangled under the table. But David’s hand is intertwined with Michael’s on the tabletop, easy enough to be absent-minded, and their shoulders are brushing just so, and something inside Eddie aches and aches and aches when he sees the way they’re curled towards each other like parentheses.

Most of all, he’s struck by how comfortable they look, here, surrounded by family, and he just—knows.

He has no idea why now. No idea what it was that broke through the dam: maybe this is his own work in sloughing off years of heaviness and guilt and shame that runs so deep he might never completely uproot it; maybe now, almost in his mid-thirties, he’s excavating an Eddie he only met for the briefest of moments when he was young and immediately buried as deep as he could in hopes he’d suffocate. Maybe his mind is just lighter than it has been in years, unmoored from the murky waters of right and appropriate and necessary, moving toward things Eddie hasn’t ever really considered before: what he likes, what he deserves, what he desires.

Things Eddie might want, for no reason other than wanting them.

And he has no idea what to do with it, where to put it, this singing of the blood in his veins and the pain that doesn’t have a source but blooms when he looks at David and Michael and sees what’s possible. He has no idea how to take a single goddamn step forward, but he knows what the truth is.

Down to the aching, terrified core of his bones, he knows.

“Bobby,” he says, and Bobby doesn’t look at all surprised to hear him speak after such a long silence. “Do you know anything about midlife crises?”

“I know you’re not having one,” Bobby says, no-nonsense.

“No, I—“ Eddie blinks, tearing his eyes away from the other table, focusing on Bobby in front of him. “I really think I am. I’m having a, uh. Discovery. I think.”

Bobby, of course, is a smart man, but he’s not direct in the way Hen or Chim might be if they saw him stammering like this. He won’t ask the question until Eddie has the answer ready.

“Discovery’s part of life,” he says instead. He’s trying to hide it, but one side of his mouth is stubbornly tilting up in what might be amusement or might just be a smile. “And surprising yourself is, too. I discovered the other day that I’m pretty good at knitting, if you can believe it.”

Eddie can, and the thought of Bobby with a pair of knitting needles, hunched over working on something like Eddie’s abuela used to do before her arthritis got bad, is actually oddly soothing.

“This isn’t knitting,” he says anyway. “I’m—“ freaking out a little, he’s about to say, except he realizes that he isn’t. He’s terrified, that much he knows. There’s an icy cold gathering at the base of his neck, in the crooks of his elbows, in the tips of his fingers, and his palms are sweating, and he thinks if he allowed it, if he so much as moved a muscle, his entire body would start shivering, teetering on the edge of the unknown.

But he’s not freaking out. He’s not in a panic, not even close to it.

Bobby leans forward, putting his clasped hands on the table between them. “I figured as much,” he says, watching indulgently as Eddie tugs at his bottom lip with his fingers, then worries at it with his teeth until it stings. “But maybe it’s the same in theory. May offered to teach me, and I thought, why the hell, that seems so needlessly complicated, and why would I ever need to know how to knit anyway? But she talked me into it and I tried it with her and I had a great time, and that’ll always be true. Even if I never pick it up again, I spent a couple of hours having fun with my stepdaughter, learning a new skill that’ll apparently come in handy once the zombie apocalypse hits,” he smiles. “All because I didn’t listen to that knee-jerk voice in my headtelling me that I don’t knit.”

“I don’t know if that works as a metaphor,” Eddie croaks, and has to clear his throat a solid four times to keep the emotion back.

“Eddie,” Bobby raises an eyebrow, “all I’m trying to say is that the only person who’s allowed to tell you what you can and can’t do is yourself.”

“Dad!” Christopher’s voice pierces through the din of conversation clear as a bell, or maybe Eddie’s just attuned to it. He looks over to where the boys are all sitting on the grass, crowded around Harry’s Switch. “Can you get Buck? We need his help.”

“Maybe he’s allowed to tell me,” Eddie grins at Bobby, the stinging in his eyes receding.

Bobby smiles back, but he shakes his head. “No, but he can have suggestions,” he says, and Eddie could swear his eyes sparkle like they’re in a cartoon. “And I think he’s pretty well-versed at figuring out what’s good for you.”

Eddie blinks, wrong-footed, because he has no answer to that.

“You better go get Buck,” Bobby grins, with teeth this time. “I’ll be here if you need to talk later.”

Eddie sighs as he gets up. He ignores the jackrabbit racing of his heart, and the fear and apprehension that settle, a little bitter, in the back of his mouth.

“Why are you always so damn cryptic, huh?” he asks, picking up their plates if he’s going to be walking through the kitchen anyway. “That a Minnesota thing?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say,” Bobby laughs, crossing his arms behind his head. Eddie leaves him there, carefully making his way around the table and into the house in search of his best friend.

It’s an obnoxiously sunny afternoon, so he’s not surprised to find the house empty, the kitchen occupied only by a growing mountain of dishes. He adds his own plates to it and strains his ears. It only takes him a few seconds to pick up on Buck’s voice coming from the bathroom. He must still be on the phone, and when Eddie approaches to door he realizes Buck sounds—upset. Verging on angry, a voice that Eddie hardly ever hears him use.

“We’re just talking in circles. I don’t understand how it’s complicated,” he’s saying, and Eddie gets the sudden and urgent sense that he needs to leave. It’s very, very wrong for him to be standing here eavesdropping, regardless of how much he and Buck share with each other, but—

“You have non-negotiable deadlines,” Buck says, and the anger has gone from his voice. “And I’ve never once tried to interfere with that, because I know how important it is to you to be professional.”

The back of Eddie’s neck starts itching. Of course it’s her.

Pulled forward by something invisible, something equal parts tantalizing and awful, Eddie steps closer to the door, hands balled in his pockets.

“But this is important to me. I have one non-negotiable night a week. Always the same day, never changes. You’ve known this about me for years.”

She must say something else then, because Buck is quiet, the only sound made by the floor creaking under his feet and the loud, snuffly breaths he takes, which make Eddie want to set the world on fire on his behalf.

“Of course it’s disappointing,” he says eventually, spitting the last word out. “I know that. But we’re adults. We’re busy. It’s completely normal that we have to carve out time to spend together. So let’s do that, okay? Let’s agree on a night. This week, next week, we can put stuff in the calendar for two months in advance if you want.”

Eddie, so unspeakably proud of him and so angry at whatever’s going on on the other end of the line, digs his hands into his pockets so hard he probably pokes holes in them. Holes that Buck will offer to mend, because he got into a sewing spiral on TikTok the other day and bought a sewing kit and has been patching up Eddie’s threadbare things for fun.

“Yeah,” Buck sighs out, “I know you might have to cancel on short notice. It happens sometimes, and I tell you I’m disappointed about it because I like spending time with you, and then I don’t call you in the middle of whatever you’re doing to try and change your plans.”

What if Eddie just—ran in and grabbed the phone and—

“Okay,” Buck huffs, trying for nonchalant, and the hurt underneath it is so clear, so close to the surface, that it takes Eddie’s breath away. “I’m not going to walk out on Eddie and Christopher because you want me to fuck you against the front door and then not even let me spend the night.”

That mental image alone is enough to have Eddie slumping back against the wall. God, he needed to leave as soon as he heard.

“I’m not shaming—oh my God, okay. I have plans, and you’re not capable of a constructive conversation right now. Bye, Taylor.”

And the tell-tale thud of a phone against something hard. Not tile, because Buck’s considerate above anything else and would never risk breaking something in Athena’s bathroom, but he definitely throws it, and the sound alone is enough to have Eddie wanting to break the door down.

“Buck,” he says, quieter than he means to, but the rustling on the other side of the door stops. “Were you on the phone for half an hour?”

Buck blows out a quiet, measured breath. Something thumps against the door and, by the sound of it, Buck slides down it to sit on the floor. Eddie doesn’t even think before he does the same, leaning into where he imagines he can feel the heat of Buck’s broad back through the wood.

“She talks for a living,” Buck sighs, and then stays silent. There’s a rustle from time to time, and Eddie imagines he’s probably rubbing his hands over his face, pulling at his hair a little like he doesn’t know what to do.

And Eddie doesn’t know what to do either.

“She want to go on a date or something?” he asks eventually, and feels a faint rumble from the other side when Buck laughs without joy.

“Nah,” he says, “just a booty call. She has an interview that got moved back by a couple of hours.”

Probably to right around the time they’ll be leaving Bobby and Athena’s, going home for their standing movie night: Pirates of the Caribbean, as already chosen by Christopher.

And Eddie should tell him to go. He should be a good friend and shrug and say, hey, she’s your girlfriend, you can always come later or we can reschedule, but he sits and listens to Buck’s loud, upset breathing, and thinks: no. I will not be doing that.

Not to mention the fact that Buck coming to his house after he’s done with Taylor, when Eddie knows with certainty where he’s just been and what he’s been doing, is more than a little nauseating, because—because.

There’s a rustle on the other side of the door, and then Eddie’s just barely catching himself on the doorjamb as it swings back and opens.

Buck’s still on the ground, just leaning against the bathtub now. He looks about as bad as Eddie was expecting: red-eyed, messy-haired, wilted.

“I’m not going,” he says as soon as Eddie catches his eye, with a quiet, terrifying kind of fervor. “I’m coming to movie night.”

“Okay,” Eddie nods, reaching across the divide to squeeze Buck’s ankle, just a second and then gone. “Of course, Buck. Whatever you want.”

And he can’t shake the feeling that there’s more he could be saying, that he should be saying, because Buck doesn’t smile as wide these days, and Eddie has already let him suffer in silence once.

But Buck also comes into work every other day talking about something Taylor-related, and her face pops up on the TV in the loft far more often than Eddie would like. Sometimes Buck picks up the phone with a smile that only gets wider as he talks, and it tends to be Eddie’s favorite one, the one that deepens the wrinkles around Buck’s nose into grooves. His lockscreen is still a picture of him and Eddie and Christopher at the aquarium, but he’s changed his wallpaper to one of him and Taylor up at Runyon Canyon. Eddie finds that he can recall it in perfect detail when he closes his eyes: Buck, shirtless and squinting into the sun, sunglasses perched on top of his head, Taylor under his arm with her hair in a ponytail, arms around Buck’s waist, curved right into his side like she was made to fit there. They blend right in with the usual crowd, a couple off the pages of a magazine.

Which isn’t fair to Buck. He’s just about the least superficial person Eddie knows. But the picture they make together – how can anything compete? What gives Eddie the right to question the little moments of happiness he catches sparking on Buck’s face? They might be closer than most people, but he’s still just a best friend, still a degree removed. He can’t interfere in Buck’s relationship, not when he doesn’t see into it, not when he knows just how badly Buck wants to find happiness with a partner.

And besides, it’s not like there’s an alternative. It’s not like Eddie has any suggestions, and so he doesn’t say anything, and tries not to think about it, and squeezes Buck’s ankle again.

At least he tries not to think about it until a few days later, when he has the worst idea he’s ever had.

“This is the worst idea I’ve ever had,” he whispers to Chim, who is reclined on his elbows on the picnic blanket. “It’s like watching a nature documentary.”

“It wasn’t your idea,” Chim says, chewing on an unflavored corn puff. “Technically, I think it was Buck’s.”

“Ba,” Jee-Yun confirms, squirming in Eddie’s arms. She, at least, is beautiful and tiny as always, and has been in a standoff with Eddie for the past twenty minutes over whether she will or won’t wear her hat. They’ve currently settled on won’t, but Eddie thinks he might still win.

“Yeah, sweetheart,” he says, softly plopping it on Jee-Yun’s head, hoping she doesn’t notice. “Your uncle’s a real genius sometimes.”

“Again, technically,” Chimney says, and Eddie has to call on every ounce of his willpower not to glare at him, “this shouldn’t be that weird. It’s a day out with his best friend and his son and his girlfriend and his niece. And me, because I’m a doting father.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow at him.

“Yeah, okay, it’s weird,” Chim concedes, lying back. He grabs another corn puff, so Eddie steals one for Jee-Yun while there are still some left. “But it shouldn’t be, right? You guys are a huge part of his life. Jee-Yun is a big part of his life. Taylor’s—his girlfriend, I guess. He’s just trying to build bridges between the people he cares about.”

Eddie sighs. Jee-Yun starts tugging on his nose, which is a favorite pastime of hers. He knows it’s what Buck’s trying to do, which is exactly why it weighs on him so much that he can’t bring himself to feel anything but awkward.

It’s just that Taylor literally just got here, running late as she’s in the habit of doing, and made a beeline straight for Buck, and now they’re doing—whatever the fuck it is they’re doing, Eddie can’t really look—and Buck had been pushing Christopher on the swing before and now he’s distracted and Eddie’s kid is just sitting at the bottom of the slide that’s a little too small for him, poking at something on the ground with a stick. Eddie needs to do something, and he’s completely blanking on figuring out what it is.

“Jeez,” Chim says behind Eddie’s back. “That’s—I mean, it’s his life, but I’d feel weird about having my ass squeezed in a public park.”

Eddie chokes on saliva, producing a sound that makes Jee-Yun laugh all bright and wide-eyed. God, Eddie wishes sometimes his life could be as uncomplicated as hers.

With a sigh that burns a little as it comes up his throat, Eddie twists where he’s sitting to have a look. As expected, Taylor and Buck look like they’re surgically fused: he has his arms wrapped around her shoulders, holding her all sweet and close, and her hands are both in the back pockets of his jeans, definitely—yeah, definitely squeezing. Eddie’s stomach rolls so suddenly it feels like the whole thing wants to come out of him.

“Okay, little miss,” he sighs, and lifts Jee-Yun up so she can put her little feet on his thighs. Her hat is off again. “Time to go back to your dad. I gotta go run interference.”

Chim snorts, but he does sit up and extend his arms, and Eddie pretends to fly Jee-Yun into them like she’s a plane because it makes her laugh and kills an extra few seconds before he has to go step into the belly of the beast, the beast being excessive PDA.

But by the time he’s up, and has wasted the maximum amount of time possible brushing off his jeans, Christopher is on the move. Eddie watches in quiet fascination as he approaches the two of them, yelling Buck’s name and then something that’s impossible to make out across the distance.

Buck pulls away from Taylor immediately, almost suspiciously fast, and he’s grinning wide at Christopher so he doesn’t notice the face Taylor makes at the sudden distance. He bends down to scoop Chris up into his arms, both of them already chattering away about something, dimples in both of their cheeks and so similar it makes the ground shift a little under Eddie’s feet.

And then Buck’s saying something and glancing at Taylor. Christopher sticks out his hand to introduce himself, which would be adorable in literally any other context, and Eddie takes a step forward out of sheer protective instinct, except—except then Taylor smiles, a far softer thing than Eddie has ever seen on her face, and shakes it.

Eddie almost keels over right where he stands. It feels a lot like the panic, actually, a vice that wraps tight around his chest and doesn’t let go, and a sense of wrongness he hasn’t felt in weeks, in months, floods in so fast he has to gasp for breath a couple of times. He blinks at the scene in front of him, trying to bring it into focus. He watches Taylor talk to Christopher with her head tilted, smiling, only the slightest bit strained, and something ringing and absolutely feral inside him screams mine, but he’s not only looking at Christopher.

Christopher, who giggles at something Buck says and then asks to be put down and heads back to the blanket, picking his way through the grass on his crutches because the path is too far.

“Hey Dad, I’m hungry,” he says when he approaches, wearing an expression Eddie has possibly never seen on him. “Can I have a sandwich?”

Behind him, Eddie’s distantly aware of Chim rustling with the food Buck had brought for everyone to share, which is a thing he, Eddie, should be doing, but he feels like he’s somehow managed to put down roots by accident, unable to move. He can’t take his eyes off the scene in front of him.

Beause, as soon as Buck is sure that Christopher is safe, he turns back to his girlfriend. And she doesn’t put her hands in his back pockets again, at least, but instead she grabs his elbow and pulls him close, leaning up to whisper something in his ear. Buck ducks his head, looking at the ground with a smile that makes something squirm uncomfortably in Eddie’s chest. Taylor crooks a finger under his chin, the suggestion of a touch enough to pull him forward into a kiss, and Eddie really needs to be looking away and is doing the exact opposite instead.

It’s just that—that Buck puts a gentle hand on the side of her face, so big he can bury his fingers in her hair, and wraps an arm around her waist so, so carefully, like she’s something precious, and—and Eddie stands there and falls into pieces, shattered by this uncatchable pitch from the universe, because—God.

Because he closes his eyes when he can’t stand it anymore, but the image stays, of the way Buck loves someone openly, the way he pours himself into a kiss, the gentleness that Eddie knows to sleep under his skin actually on display.

And he’s not strong enough to stop himself imagining.

What it’d feel like to be—held. To be safe. To be kissed like the world begins and ends with him. It feels thrilling, and completely forbidden, and like the easiest thought he’s ever had; it comes down on him a little like the mud did, feels a little like the unexpected breathlessness of a bullet tearing a piece out of him that he never got back.

He sees Taylor in Buck’s arms, the sole object of his focus, and then he sees somebody else.

And he manages to suffer through the rest of the afternoon, to act like a semi-normal human being when Taylor comes over and attempts conversation, and to look away from the way her and Buck walk off towards the Jeep, her shoulder wedged underneath his arm.

But the inside of his head is a five-alarm fire at best, and he feels it already as he and Chim pack up, and when he’s idling by Chim and Maddie’s waiting for him to get Jee-Yun’s car seat out of the back, and when Christopher bullies him into singing along with the radio when they’re finally on their way home.

It’s a fissure, or maybe an absence. Like something came down from the sky when he wasn’t looking and split him in two: the Eddie that’s walking through the door and starting on dinner and letting Christopher go ham with choosing a movie for them to watch, and the Eddie still standing in the park, still rooted to the ground.

And he has no idea what exactly he left behind.

“I’m curious about the chain of events that led to us ending up here,” Frank says, leaning over his clipboard.

“There is no chain of events,” Eddie lies, because there definitely is a chain. It’s just that he has yet to be brave enough to tug on it and figure out how long he’s been dragging it along with him. “I shut myself in my bedroom with my laptop like I was fifteen again. And I did some research.”

“Fifteen?” Frank asks, mild, with one eyebrow stuck mid-rise. His hair’s a little messier than usual today, like maybe he woke up late and had to rush into the office, or maybe the appointment before Eddie’s was particularly frustrating. It’s more comforting than Eddie would like to admit, because he’s sitting on Frank’s couch in the same sweatpants he slept in, for reasons he’s not going to think about.

“I mean,” he says, waving a hand. “That’s the usual age for like—sexual awakenings or whatever, right? Not when you’re on the wrong side of thirty.”

“There is no wrong side of thirty,” Frank says conversationally, “and there definitely isn’t a set age by which you need to have things figured out, sexuality included.”

Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose. “Stop being reasonable.”

“Never,” Frank says, definitely smiling. “So. Fifteen?”

Eddie breathes in through his nose. Lets out the breath for a count of five. Looks at the ceiling with its ridiculous light fixture, and out of the window where two comically round birds are sitting on top of the bird feeder back to back. Robins, he thinks, something he picked up when Buck and Christopher were on a bird kick.

“I think I maybe—felt something,” he says, watching them ruffle their feathers. “Around that time, maybe earlier, I don’t know. I don’t like thinking about being a teenager.”

“I’m aware,” says Frank, and Eddie chokes on a laugh.

“But it was like—I already felt like my parents didn’t get anything about me, didn’t like anything about me, and I was trying so hard to tick all their fucking boxes and prove them wrong, so it was just—one of those things I put away. Not even worth considering, you know?”

The thought of putting things away makes him think about Christopher’s pantry in an earthquake; of Christopher, who was in an exceptionally good mood this morning on the drive to school, chattering away about the Christmas play rehearsal.

Of Christopher, who wants Eddie to be happy, however unattainable that seems.

“Does it feel worth considering now?”

Eddie scratches the unshaven side of his face. “It’s—“ he starts, and immediately has to stop, because his brain feels a little like it’s collapsing in on itself. “That’s the part I’m not sure about, because, like—what’s the point, you know?”

He hasn’t told Frank about the park. He definitely hasn’t told Frank about the dreams he’s had the past couple of nights that are nothing but sensation, a big warm hand on the back of his neck, on the side of his face, on his hip. Touch that doesn’t make him want to turn himself inside out to escape it.

“By that same logic,” Frank says, “what’s the point of therapy?”

Eddie looks back at him.

“Uh.”

“You hated it here,” Frank smiles, just a little. “When you first came to see me, after the fighting. You didn’t relax for a second. I was worried you were going to snap in half.”

“Yep,” Eddie nods, because it’s not like he can dispute that. He can barely remember those few sessions for how wound up he was during them, constantly expecting some kind of attack.

“And still you came back. Not just that, but you came back to see me.”

“That’s because I already let you in my head once,” Eddie says. The corner of the carpet is curling up again. “I think I thought it’d be easier.”

Frank hums. For a second, his gaze jumps to the window too, and he spends a quiet second looking at the two birds still there, now looking half-asleep.

“But you do know what that was, right?” he asks, finally, slow and careful in the way he puts the words in order. “You deciding to go to therapy again.”

“It was me asking for help,” Eddie says, and not a whisper stirs inside him. His heart stays steady.

“Yeah. And if you reached for this, then you must have recognized that it helped you the first time around, too.”

And the thing is, Eddie knows it did. He’s always known, because Frank had looked right through him and irrevocably shifted something when he told Eddie that children learn less from words and more from the way parents model behavior.

The problem, back then, was that needing someone else to figure that out for him was weak.

“Asking for help,” Frank says, probably watching Eddie’s train of thought make its way through his head like it’s being projected on the ceiling, “is one of the strongest things a person can do. And I feel like if I tell you that now, you’re not going to do your whole ‘cross the arms and legs and avoid eye contact’ thing.”

Eddie closes his eyes. “I cannot believe how much you get on my nerves.”

“And I do it with the utmost joy,” Frank grins. “Because the first time I saw you walk through that door, I felt like I needed to draw the blinds and go sit all the way in the corner so I don’t spook you into running out of department-mandated therapy.”

“And now?”

“And you’re sitting here in sweatpants.”

Eddie opens his eyes again. Frank is making a paper boat out of a blank piece of paper. “I thought you weren’t supposed to judge me.”

“I’m not judging you, Eddie,” he says, pulling the ends apart to make the boat spring into shape. “I’m making an observation.”

Eddie tugs at the pants in question; at what he’s pretty sure is a hole beginning to form on the inner thigh right by the seam. The kind that’s easy to patch, according to Buck’s newfound passion for mending.

“So your point was—what, exactly?”

“My point,” Frank sighs, “is that you probably could have kept going without therapy. You’ve built up some formidable coping mechanisms.”

Eddie’s pretty sure that’s an insult, in therapist speak.

“But instead you made the choice to work toward something better. Something that’s been hard, right?”

“Yeah,” Eddie huffs.

“But it’s changing you. In positive ways. You come in here sometimes and start talking about something that’s been on your mind without me needing to prompt it. I’m not sure you realize how much of a change that is.”

Eddie presses his thumbs into the middle of his forehead, where a headache is beginning to coagulate. It’s not the violent kind, though, just the kind that happens sometimes when Frank drills his way too deep into Eddie’s brain.

“And you think that—that considering I might be—that reconsidering my sexuality might change me too?”

Frank hums. “Actually, maybe—maybe what we’ve changed is the way you view yourself and the world around you. I don’t think anything has changed about the Eddie who’s been under there all these years. You’re just allowing yourself some breathing room, and I can’t help thinking that if you really did put this away almost twenty years ago, getting to know that part of you might—help. With breathing.”

Eddie shudders. He’ll be the first to say that he doesn’t really know who Eddie is, because most of the things that have been cornerstones of his identity have washed away over the past few months, a makeshift life raft that dropped him right into the water when the burden grew too heavy. But even then, it just doesn’t seem possible that he would have—that he could have—

“You know you don’t have to figure this out now,” Frank says. “There’s no clock for you to beat. Slow and steady is perfectly fine.”

Eddie’s not so sure that’s true, because of—the dreams, and everything that’s come before, everything that’s been burrowing its way in for years, settling into place underneath his skin. If he allows the desire, the desire will have a face, and then he’ll be out of time.

“I had a girlfriend senior year,” he says, around the nail he’s chewing on. “She was—actually, she never told me and I never asked, but she had a girlfriend in New York, and I don’t—I don’t think anyone else knew? She only told me. Like she chose me, specifically.”

He hadn’t thought about Mackenzie in years, actually, until Hen brought her up, and it’s kind of an awful feeling to realize that. He’d been too young, then, to recognize the courage it would have taken. To understand her asking him out for the honor it was.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Frank says, all cryptic.

“And that was,” Eddie swallows, and for once it’s not a lump in his throat, but something that feels like glass shards, “I think, looking back on it, I think it was a relief, you know? My parents would ask my sisters about their boyfriends at dinner and then do their whole meaningful look thing when they thought I wasn’t looking, because I guess there was something wrong with being seventeen and not sneaking around having sex behind their backs. My mom cried when I brought Mackenzie home, and I felt so good because the fucking box was ticked, but looking back on it I think—I think maybe she gave me the same thing I gave her.”

“Room to breathe,” Frank says, not even a question, because he knows he’s right.

Eddie blinks through his tears. He sees Mackenzie’s face in front of him, so many years removed from what she must look like now, and feels like he needs to apologize.

He clears his throat. “But then I met Shannon,” he says. “And I liked her, and then I fell in love with her, and you know how the rest of that went down.”

“And your feelings for Shannon,” Frank says carefully, “do you remember if those—“

“Were a relief?” Eddie interrupts, laughing a little because he’ll cry otherwise. “Yeah. I don’t know if I knew that, but I definitely felt like—it uncomplicated a lot of things, you know? Even before she got pregnant, I felt like she could be the person I spend my life with, and there’s a nice clear path for how you do that.”

Frank doesn’t reply right away. He might be leaving a moment of silence for Eddie’s point-by-point picket fence future, which Eddie appreciates.

“And now there’s no path,” he says, finally.

“And now there’s no path,” Eddie repeats, and a shiver spills down his back.

“So you’re going to have to make one.”

And that, exactly, is the part Eddie has been trying not to put into words. This stretch of life that’s still ahead of him – it’s not quite the brick wall he imagines it to be. It’s not remotely set in stone, and Eddie’s got things within reach to help him tear the whole thing down, to rebuild it into some kind of road forward. The reaching out is the terrifying part.

Eddie leans back. He stretches his legs out, stomps on the curling carpet again, and says a silent prayer to Frank’s stupid ceiling light that he’s not about to make a mistake.

“Frank,” he says, and Frank hums in acknowledgment. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

“I’m straight,” Frank grins, a hint of mischief in his eye that reminds Eddie oddly of Bobby. “And I’m happy to help you figure this out, but if we find that you could benefit from more specialized help, I have—“

“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie interrupts. “I’m not going to spiral.”

Spoken like a person who’s about to spiral, Buck’s voice says in his head.

Frank allows it, putting his clipboard aside. Eddie’s pretty sure their time is almost up, because he’s spent the better part of an hour having an existential crisis without actually saying any of the words out loud.

“So as a straight person,” Eddie says, and gets the bizarre urge to laugh, because this is his life, “have you ever—like, okay. You asked about the chain of events leading up to this, and I really don’t know where it starts, but I went to my captain’s for a barbecue the other day, and his, uh. His wife’s ex-husband was there with his boyfriend?”

Frank’s eyebrows climb a little.

“And they were just minding their own business and I was staring at them like a freak—“

“Not a freak,” Frank corrects quietly.

“—and I couldn’t—I looked at them holding hands and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

Frank nods, and leans forward. “Why?”

Eddie screws his eyes shut, so tight he imagines he can see the darkness itself trembling. One of his hands finds the other blindly, digging a couple of knuckles into his palm, the kind of touch his abuela would use to soothe him when he was little except firmer, because pain is the easiest thing to handle right now.

He takes a breath, and feels it stretch his back and drip all the way down to his toes, firmly on the floor.

“Because,” he says, clears his throat, “because it was the first time I didn’t look at it as just something other people get to have.”

He thinks of wanting to curl into someone’s side, someone familiar and safe and perpetually warm as a furnace. He thinks about the shame that’s been crammed down his throat all his life, piece after piece, all the way down. Thinks about hurting with how much he wants to reach out, sometimes, and he doesn’t give the desire a face, but the truth of it is already tucked up underneath his ribs, well-worn from years of waiting.

“So as a straight guy,” he says again, watching his own hands and trying to convince himself he recognizes them, “have you ever thought about that? Being—with a man? In a relationship?”

“Well,” Frank tilts his head, his eyes on Eddie unusually heavy. “I have, is the thing.”

Eddie blinks.

“And I came to the conclusion that it’s not something I’m likely to ever want.”

And Eddie—yeah.

Even if he doesn’t put a face on it, even if he doesn’t give it a name.

He knows he could never say the same thing.

So he lets the truth come down on his shoulders, lets the weight of it crack him open.

He puts his face in his hands. Breathes. Frank lets him sit in silence even as the door to the waiting room creaks outside, definitely over time, Eddie stealing therapy from some other miserable bastard who’s maybe also way past thirty and apparently has no idea what he wants.

He could swear there’s a phantom of a touch on his shoulder, down his spine, the same sensation that’s been dragging him out of his sleep the past couple of days. He wonders if it’s possible, actually: to hold something inside for so long it takes on a life of its own once you let it into the light.

Eddie presses a hand to his forehead.

“So,” he says, and breathes out through his teeth. “I guess I have news.”

They are, somehow, all the way out in Santa Monica, assisting with a couple of boats that capsized in the dark, when the call comes in.

Eddie doesn’t hear the address, because he’s too busy trying to do something about how wet he is. They’d managed the entire rescue on boats, ferrying people up to the pier, but a kid had slipped off the edge in the throng of people and fallen into the water. Eddie was closest, and it was a kid.

And now there isn’t a single dry thread on him, and Bobby’s about to—

“Dispatch, this is captain 118,” Bobby says into the radio, looking at Eddie with what could pass for an apologetic expression if Eddie squinted. “We’re finished here and a couple of streets away.”

Chim grimaces, and puts out a hand for Eddie to take so he can haul him up to his feet.

“Sorry, Eddie,” he says, but he’s also looking suspiciously amused.

Buck is the only one whose sympathetic look doesn’t ring fake, because he’s too genuine to fake something like that. He’s waiting for Eddie by the truck with a dry towel and a fresh uniform shirt that looks like it’s been forgotten in one of the storage compartments for months if not years, but at least it’s dry.

Eddie thinks I could kiss you, just a random thought that leaves as quick as it came and absolutely does not come out of his mouth where it once might have, because it may have been a joke once, and—he’s dealing with that. He is.

He changes on the short drive over, grimacing when the shirt just about fits over his arms and barely buttons in the middle of his chest. It doesn’t gape, exactly, but it might not make it if he has to do anything strenuous.

“Here we go,” Bobby says, as they turn a corner and suddenly find themselves in the midst of a crowd of people. “Dispatch says we have someone, uh. Stuck on a streetlight, direct quote.”

“On a streetlight?” Buck asks. Eddie can’t see him because he’s furiously toweling his hair dry, but he can picture his confused expression down to the wrinkle by his chin.

“I’m just the messenger,” Bobby says, and then they’re rolling to a stop and jumping out, the crowd parting on either side of the truck to let them. Eddie, blinking into the sudden glare of lights, registers the far-off booming of music before he realizes where they are.

“Ah,” Hen comes up, med bag over her shoulder, grinning with her arms spread wide, “WeHo.”

She’s standing on a rainbow sidewalk, which Eddie blinks at to make sure he’s not seeing things, and then he’s overcome with an urge to laugh that’s so strong he has to pretend to cough for a second.

“Over here!” a voice breaks through the cacophony. The crowd right in front of the truck parts again to make a path for a tiny black-haired woman. She’s shaking as she runs up to them, her eyes huge and only emphasized by the glitter all over her face. “Please, it’s my friend Ryan, he tried—“

But Eddie doesn’t need to hear what Ryan tried, because he looks up and sees him. He really is stuck on the streetlight, right on top of it, lying on his stomach and teetering with his limbs not quite touching the light. It looks like an LED, but if it’s big enough to hold a grown man, it’s probably still dangerously hot.

“Cap, did we—“

“Already radioed,” Bobby replies, shouldering his way through just ahead of Eddie. “If they do it remotely, they can only turn off the whole street, and they said it might be an hour to get someone out.”

“Don’t think he has an hour,” Edde squints up, his eyes watering at the brightness of the glare. “He’s basically balancing on his stomach, Bobby, he’s going to fall.”

“You can turn them off with a laser pointer,” Buck says as he jogs up, a little out of breath, barreling into Eddie’s back to stop his momentum. “I have one for cat calls, you just need to get me high enough. There’s a sensor on the top, I’ll shine the pointer on it to turn it off, and I can get him down while I’m there. Wham, bam—“

“Don’t say it,” Hen says, appearing at Eddie’s elbow with Chim in tow. “Ma’am, how exactly did he end up there?”

Ryan’s friend shakes her head, burying her hands in her hair.

“I swear I’m sober,” Ryan yells down to them, and he sounds it, even if he is appropriately freaked out. “Just get me off this fucking thing.”

“We’re going to do our best, Ryan,” Bobby shouts, hilariously calm. “I’m putting my best guys on it, you’ll be down in no time.”

There’s a wolf whistle from the crowd. Eddie tries not to think about his dripping wet pants or his offensively tight shirt.

“We’re going to need the air cushion,” Bobby says, looking from one side of the street to the other gauging the width. “Chim, get the others, set it up. Okay, everyone, can I have your attention?”

Some faces in the crowd turn towards him.

“We’re going to need to clear as big of an area as you can give us so we can set up a nice safe landing for the gentleman up there.”

“Definitely not a gentleman,” someone in the crowd says, and a laugh ripples through, but people do start moving out of the way, some going back into the bars and clubs they’d come out of to watch the commotion.

“Fuck you,” Ryan says miserably into the night, and Eddie loses the fight against a smile.

He’s—aware of where he is, but trying not to think about it. It’s Los Angeles; he’s been through West Hollywood before, passed by a hundred places with rainbows over their doorways, but it’s always been an off-limits thing. The kind of place he wouldn’t want to invade because he doesn’t belong there, because it’s not for him.

But now it might be.

Not that he’ll ever be a club guy, but—a lot of these places are calmer. Relaxed. The kind of place they might go with the team on the rare night out. Places Hen mentions sometimes, where everyone knows, and nobody questions your right to be there.

But then, how could he? It’s barely been a week. He doesn’t even have a word for what he is, just barely manages to gently prod at the thought when Christopher’s asleep and he’s staring at the midnight blue of his ceiling. I am, he always says in his head, and gropes in the dark for something that will fit, something that doesn’t require a trip down memory lane through every moment that has ever made him feel different.

It’s an overwhelming thought, one that knocks him out of the groove of the job for a second. Guiltily, he’s grateful for the uniform that gives him a reason to be here.

There are still a few people lingering, standing in a circle around the bottom of the streetlight, all with their heads tilted up. A couple of them are in drag, towering over everyone in heels so high they make Eddie’s eyes water.

“Excuse me,” Buck says, an easy smile on his face. Eddie’s half a step behind him, just in case, because they have to wait for the ladder to pull in anyway.

“Excuse you,” one of the drag queens replies, painted eyebrow arched, but her smile matches Buck’s easily. “I’m Gina, and that’s our friend up there, unfortunately. We’re just here to catch him if he needs it.”

“I’m Buck,” he says automatically. “And that’s, uh, really nice of you, Gina, but I promise we’ve got it from here. The cushion can be kind of aggressive when it’s getting blown up, wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“That’s what she said?” says the woman who first came to get them, her nose scrunched.

“I don’t know,” says the other drag queen, a redhead with aggressively sparkly green earrings. “Four out of ten.”

“Ouch,” Buck says under his breath, his hands half-extended into the empty air in front of him like he’s not sure what to do.

Eddie steps up to his side. “We’ve got it from here,” he grins at the little circle of people, and gives Buck a pathetically gentle slap on the back. “You heard our captain, we’re his best guys.”

“I bet,” a man leans away from the lamppost to look at them, light-haired, square-jawed, a little on the short side. He sweeps his eyes over Eddie in the world’s slowest, most deliberate appraisal.

Eddie shivers with it. He’s had people hit on him plenty of times, on the job and off it, but this feels—different.

“There a reason your pants are all wet, cowboy?”

Next to Eddie, Buck chokes on nothing.

Eddie has to swallow a couple of times to be able to speak. “I, uh,” he shrugs, “pulled a kid out of the ocean.”

A burning, persistent heat crawls its way out from under his overtight collar.

“Damn,” the guy says, smiling a smile that lights up his face and softens his features. He’s—really, really handsome, actually, and Eddie turns the word over in his head, trying to get used to the weight of it. Not handsome like Eddie’s envious; not like he wants to be him. It’s more that—

“Jackson,” Gina grins. “Play nice, they’re on the job.”

Jackson opens his mouth.

“I promise you we’ve heard every existing pun on getting off the job,” Buck smiles, and the tips of his ears look weirdly red under the pale white light of the streetlamp. They were already standing close, but he leans into Eddie in a way that feels deliberate, a line of heat down his side.

“Hey,” Jackson says, raising his hands palm out, eyes never leaving Eddie’s, “can’t blame a guy for shooting his shot. You are a cowboy though, aren’t you?”

Eddie tilts his head. Crosses his arms. He can’t help smiling back – it’s instinctual, somehow, and he’s trying to think too hard about it.

“I’m from Texas,” he says. Jackson’s eyes glint with a suggestion that’s impossible to miss. Eddie opens his mouth again to intercept the inevitable joke about saving a horse, because he’s probably heard that one a solid hundred times, but he’s interrupted.

“I’m still up here!” Ryan shouts, his voice hoarser than last time. “What’s the holdup?”

“We’re working on it, Ryan,” Buck calls, still leaning into Eddie.

The redhead drag queen shakes her head. “Can’t believe I’m volunteering to catch this guy.”

“You’re not,” Buck says, very firm for him, but it’s still Buck. It’s like a puppy trying to be stern. “We are.”

Eddie nods. “You’d definitely break something if he fell,” he says.

“Meh,” she waves a hand, rhinestoned nails glittering, “it’s just bones, honey.” Then she looks back up. “Ryan, you freak! They’re sending a couple of firefighters up for you, you better enjoy it!”

“Can’t enjoy it if I’m fucking dead, Sasha!” Ryan yells back, and the streetlight shakes ominously. “Stop distracting them!”

Sasha rolls her eyes. “You try to help a guy,” she says, but she finally steps away, and the rest of the group follows her lead.

“We’ll take good care of him,” Eddie promises.

“Yeah, look,” Buck points over his shoulder, “one of our guys is coming with the cushion right now.”

Chim is, indeed, leading the rest of their team in dragging the cushion into place.

“Oh, the one with the gum?” Gina asks. “He’s adorable.”

Buck blinks, surprised. “Really, Chim? Why does everyone—“

“It’s because he’s hot, Buck,” Hen says, grinning as she backs up, getting out of the way and keeping her eyes on Ryan at the same time. “Focus.”

Eddie should do that, too. Focus. The truck is finally pulling up behind them, and he goes to help with the familiar process of putting Buck in the harness. He grumbles about it not being that high, at which both Bobby and Eddie glare at him, so he waits obediently as Eddie checks the straps. Buck, as always, is perfectly capable of gearing up by himself, but there are no other emergencies for Eddie to be attending to right now, and he doesn’t have peace of mind unless he’s checked with his own hands.

Buck’s weird laser pointer thing works: he stands in the basket for a minute or so just shining the light at the sensor he claims is up there, and the lamp winks out. It makes a noise that spooks Ryan, and he starts screaming, but Buck’s got him before he’s even run out of breath, pulling him into the basket and clipping him in.

The people left on the street cheer, and a content little bubble of happiness inflates in Eddie’s chest as he watches his best friend duck his head and try to hide his pleased grin. There are few things in the world he loves more than watching Buck do his job, his quiet competence breaking through to the surface.

Ryan’s friends are there to catch him once Buck carefully deposits him on the ground and his legs, predictably, give out under him. Hen and Chim guide him to sit on the curb and check him over, and Eddie hovers close by on the off-chance they’ll need help, but Ryan seems to have gotten away with nothing other than scraped palms from where he somehow managed to scale the light pole.

“Thanks for that,” he says, leaning back against Gina’s chest, and fanning himself. He’s being incredibly dramatic about the whole thing, but Eddie really can’t blame him. “I really thought I was going to die up there.”

“It’s your own fault,” Sasha says, sipping on a cocktail she’d had time to obtain from somewhere. “Come back in when you can walk. Jeff’s getting you a free drink.”

“I have never felt pain,” Ryan replies, and jumps up to his feet so fast Gina almost topples over. “Thank you, firefighters,” he says, and gives Chim a smile that borders on a leer, which Eddie is filing away to tell Buck in a minute. The rest of the little group follows him in one by one like ducklings, and Eddie’s kind of sad that he didn’t manage to get the story.

“Everyone good to go?” Bobby shouts over from the truck, tucking his gloves into his pocket, Buck opening the door and jumping inside just behind him.

“Yep,” all three of them say in unison. Hen snaps off her gloves, and Eddie helps her put the med kit back together, and then, just as he’s turning on his heel:

“Hold on one second, cowboy.”

Eddie just has time to see Hen’s eyebrows climbing up her forehead, and then he’s turning back around because—God, he doesn’t know why, but he wants to. He wants to, so he turns.

Jackson’s leaning back against another streetlight, hands in the pockets of his jeans. His head is tilted sideways, so he’s looking up at Eddie through his lashes, and Eddie feels profoundly naked under his gaze.

“Yeah?” he says, because he doesn’t actually know how to do any of this, doesn’t even know what this is, because he’s slightly more self-aware but not exactly emotionally available.

Jackson grins and pushes off the pole, taking a couple of steps to bridge the distance between them.

“Can I borrow your hand?” he asks, and it’s so out of left field that Eddie just—blinks at him, and then watches in fascination as he lifts his own hand without knowing how.

Jackson grabs him gently by the wrist, and the touch burns for about a thousand different reasons.

“I’m old school, you see,” he says, and grabs a marker from his jacket pocket, “I don’t like the kids with their DMs and their iMessages.”

He uncaps the marker, and then he’s—he’s writing a string of stark black numbers onto the inside of Eddie’s forearm, the touch raising goosebumps in its wake.

“When you’re not pulling kids out of oceans,” he says, leaning down to see in the dark, close enough that his breath breaks over Eddie’s skin, “give me a call. If you feel like it.”

Eddie opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. He has no idea what to say, how to speak, and every inch of his skin is buzzing with something warm and so, so dangerous, and he can’t do this. He was an idiot for thinking he could ever do this.

“No pressure, though,” Jackson grins. “See ya.” He drops Eddie’s arm, puts his marker back in his pocket, and pats him on the chest, a single firm touch that feels like it resets Eddie’s heart. He’s gone in the time between blinks, disappearing into the crowd, and Eddie’s left staring with his arm still half-suspended in the air.

He’s blushing. He knows he is, the heat so acute it stings in his cheeks, and it’s only when he takes a breath that he realizes he’d been holding it.

Slowly, carefully, he folds his arm back to his side. His heartbeat is hammering in his temples, screaming and insistent like something’s demanding to get out. He has to turn around. He has to turn around. He has to turn around.

He turns and finds Hen and Chim looking at him, wide-eyed, slack-jawed. Behind them, Bobby’s still standing by the truck, an unreadable expression in his eyes, and behind him—God, behind him is Buck, crouched in the door with his head poking out, probably back to see what was taking so long.

Eddie blinks. He meets Hen’s eye, meets Chim’s. Presses the numbers that burn like a brand into the side of his borrowed uniform shirt.

“Let’s go,” he says, in a voice that somehow manages to be steady where he’s anything but.

The drive back is quiet for a couple of minutes, until Chim cracks a joke about the rescue, which devolves into an argument about cats and laser pointers. Eddie doesn’t participate, leaning back against the headrest and watching the blur of lights that is Santa Monica pass him by.

Buck’s knee knocks against his on every turn, and the touch feels like it draws sparks.

Hen pulls him into the ambulance at half past three in the morning.

“Uh,” Eddie says when he finds himself sitting in the passenger seat, looking out at the bay with its lights dimmed for the night. He’s pretty sure he was asleep thirty seconds ago, and then got up to get some water, and now he’s—here. “Hen? Is—everything okay?”

Her eyes are wide, almost liquid-looking in the semi-darkness.

“Everything’s fine,” she says, in a tone of voice that sounds decidedly not fine.

Eddie straightens up and tries to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He’d only gotten a couple of hours, which is the worst amount of time: too short for real rest, too long for a nap, and it messes up your hair.

“I just wanted to apologize,” Hen says, and Eddie’s hands drop into his lap like stones. “For earlier tonight. Or last night, I guess, who knows.”

Eddie blinks to clear the fog hovering over his mind. Last night—he remembers being interrupted halfway through a game of cards with Chim, and Buck grinning brilliantly when they lowered the boats into the water, and walking around in wet pants, and—oh.

That.

“Why would you be apologizing?”

Hen looks at him like he’s not getting something. “You can’t think of anything?”

“That’d require an apology? Definitely not,” he says, and brings his legs up onto the seat so he can turn towards her fully. He’s wearing clean boots, and Chim’s not here to yell at him about the seats, so.

Hen sighs. Looks at the ceiling of the cab like she’s praying for patience.

“Okay,” she says finally. “I wanted to say sorry,” and she reaches out to touch Eddie’s knee, just a squeeze and then gone, “because we put you on the spot at that streetlight call. I shouldn’t have frozen up like that. Shouldn’t have let Chim stare at you.”

Eddie blinks, and blinks again. He’d changed into a long sleeve as soon as they got back to the station, carefully avoiding looking at his forearm, but now that he remembers them the numbers may as well be burning holes through the fabric. He’d made no attempt to wash them off, because he’ll shower in the morning, and it’s permanent marker anyway.

“I—“ Eddie starts, ready to say he didn’t feel put on the spot, but the words tangle into an annoying little ball in his throat and won’t come out.

“We put you on the spot,” Hen says, unbearably gentle. “It’s none of our business, and I should’ve been better about it, so. I’m sorry.”

“No,” Eddie shakes his head. “No, Hen, you’re not—it’s not your job to look out for my feelings.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“And I didn’t have to turn around,” Eddie says, praying that he’s imagining the tremor in his voice. “Or—or give him my hand, Jesus Christ. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Hen purses her lips. She looks out through the windshield in silence for a minute, arms stretched out over the steering wheel. Eddie does the same, scanning the floor for Maxwell, who’s in the habit of restocking the cleaning closets when he can’t sleep.

Finally, Hen takes a big breath: “You sure?”

“About?” Eddie asks. The corners of his eyes are starting to feel heavy again, now that he knows there’s no emergency.

“About what you were thinking.”

Eddie looks down at his undone laces.

It’s not strictly true. He knows what he was thinking, and it’s easier to admit at this sleep-soft hour: that Jackson looked good, and was giving him attention, and Eddie, in his fourth decade of being alive, has never really allowed himself to acknowledge that before. That someone might want him, based on how he looks. That a man might want him.

That, in a universe where Eddie doesn't already belong to someone else heart and soul, he might want that man back.

“I guess not,” he sighs out. “It’s—I’ve been over all this with Frank. Twice, actually. But there are things about it that—God, I don’t know. I feel like I need—“

“Someone to talk to?” Hen interrupts, and when Eddie looks up at her, he’s pretty sure there are tears in her eyes. “Someone who might get it a little better than Frank?”

Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose. “He’s trying to recommend another therapist, but I’m really not—I’m not actually freaking out about it.”

Hen clears her throat.

“Most of the time,” Eddie corrects.

“Okay,” Hen nods, her voice still soft, and she’s smiling now, gentle and knowing. “So if you need someone to talk to about your sexuality, and one of your best friends is a lesbian, why am I only hearing about this now?”

Eddie laughs. “I don’t know,” he says, trying to sweep his mess of hair off his forehead. “I didn’t want—I guess it sounds stupid when I say it out loud. I didn’t want to just come to you and assume you’d want to deal with my shit. You’re like—a whole person, you know? I didn’t want you to think I only think of you as my lesbian friend Hen.”

Hen puts a hand over her mouth, and Eddie’s pretty sure it’s to hide a grin.

“Eddie,” she smiles in a way that comforts him down to his bones. It feels a little like being held. “You are so sweet, and so unbelievably stupid. This comes with the whole gay thing, okay? What am I gay for if not to help one of my best friends figure things out?”

Eddie laughs, and it’s all relief. Something he hadn’t even known he was carrying cracks into pieces and falls right off his shoulders.

“Technically,” he says, reaching over the center console to take the hand Hen’s offering, “I don’t think you’re gay for anything.”

“Oh, no, I’m definitely gay for my wife,” she grins. “You want to come over to ours? Tonight, if you’re free? Denny puppy-eyed his way into the new Pokémon game, so he can entertain Christopher for pretty much any amount of time.”

Eddie is free, because Buck’s going out with Taylor, which is a piece of information that enters Eddie’s head and leaves it without eliciting any emotion whatsoever.

“I’d really like that,” he says, and feels—unusually soft inside. Warm. Something he might tentatively label ‘content’. “If you’re sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure, Diaz,” she grins, squeezes his hand, then lets go. “We’re going to have a great time.”

Eddie is, predictably, not having a great time.

“Dad,” Christopher says. “Can we knock? I’m kind of cold.”

Eddie switches the bottle he brought from one hand to the other, and wipes his now-free palm on his jeans. He’d changed three times back at home, and put on actual cologne, and then looked at himself in the mirror and laughed hysterically for a minute because it occurred to him that he was acting like he was going to audition to be not straight.

He’s not really laughing anymore.

“Christopher,” Karen says when she opens the door, because it has a little window in it, and she’s probably been watching him stand here for the past five minutes. “It’s so nice to see you.”

“Hi, Aunt Karen,” Christopher says dutifully, and puts his head on her shoulder when she bends down to hug him, but the second he’s released, he’s disappearing into the house and making a beeline for Denny’s room.

“Sorry about him,” Eddie says, and relaxes a little when she reaches out to hug him too. “I don’t think I’ve seen him that excited since at least his birthday.”

“No, thank you for bringing him,” Karen says, motioning him inside and closing the door, “I’ve been listening to nothing but my son waxing poetic about something called a Dialga for a week straight, I’m very ready for a break.”

She accepts Eddie’s wine with a grin, leads him into the living room, and steps into the kitchen to get a corkscrew.

“Eddie, you here already?” Hen shouts from inside a second later.

“He’s on time, babe,” Karen says, “you’re just taking ages with the fancy Lunchables.”

“Baby,” Hen says, in the same voice she uses with Buck when he won’t stop fidgeting, “it’s fancy cheese and fancy crackers and fancy cold cuts. We’re adults, I’m not going to serve Eddie a bowl of snack mix.”

“If it helps,” Eddie says, fighting the smile the wants to settle and stay on his face, “I eat my own cooking all the time. I can’t afford to be picky.”

Hen comes out to lean in the doorway, a wooden board piled with food in her hands. “That’s a lie,” she grins. “I know for a fact Buck cooks enough that you have leftovers.”

Eddie opens his mouth to defend himself, but there’s not much to say when it’s the truth. Just yesterday, Christopher was beside himself about how good Buck’s lasagna was, even reheated.

“Fine,” he rolls his eyes. “I eat my own cooking sometimes.”

“That’s what I thought,” she says, and comes over to set the spread on the coffee table, Karen at her heels with two glasses and the open bottle Eddie had to have the sales assistant recommend, because he has yet to reach the level of sophistication required for distinguishing wines by anything other than color. Still, he accepts his glass gratefully, and downs about half of it in a couple of gulps. For courage, or whatever.

He’d settled on the couch, but Hen and Karen sit on the ground with their legs crossed, cheersing their forks as they dig into the food. Eddie shrugs and joins them, a little mesmerized by the way they move around each other, beyond comfortable. He doesn’t know if him and Shannon ever spent enough time together, after they were married, to develop that kind of ease, and he’s—curious, he thinks. Whether it’s something he’s even capable of.

“So Eddie,” Karen says, spearing an olive, “did you end up calling that guy—what was his name?”

“Jackson,” Hen supplies with a grin that’s just this side of sadistic. “I’ve gotta say, I don’t know how you could resist those eyes. And he seemed like your type.”

Eddie sighs. “I don’t have a type.”

“No? Blondish hair, blue eyes, built like a tank, doesn’t ring any bells?”

Eddie bites through a cracker more aggressively than necessary. He came here to talk about this. Hen invited him here to talk about this. No one’s trying to catch him out.

It’s just that he’s been guarding this part of himself, has been wrapped around it to suffocate it so tight and for so long that he’s not sure how to stop.

“This your way of easing me into the conversation?”

Karen’s eyes glint. Eddie’s kind of had it with people looking at him like they know something he doesn’t, but he’s also aware that Karen’s infinitely smarter than him, and if she can do rocket science, she can probably decode every thought Eddie tries and fails to keep off his face.

“I take it you didn’t end up calling him, then,” she says. Eddie wraps a hand around his forearm, where the skin is still a little pink from all the scrubbing.

“I did not end up calling Jackson,” he says, and thinks of Buck poking his head out of the firetruck, of the way he’d bumped his knee into Eddie’s and didn’t look at him once on the drive back. “I will not be calling anyone at any point.”

Hen hums. “Why not?”

“It’s—I don’t know. I’m not interested in that. Hookups. Dating.”

“You’re not interested in dating,” Karen repeats.

“It’s the baggage,” Eddie says, twirling his fork in his hand. He can practically see Frank breathing down the back of his neck, but he’s just being factual. He does have baggage, no matter how you slice it. “It’s just easier.”

“To be alone?”

Eddie bites his lip.

To be alone, sure. To be alone in a world where his best friend sleeps over on his couch an average three nights a week, and wakes up with Christopher so Eddie can get a lie-in, and fills Eddie’s life all the way up to the brim.

It’s a world that is, by necessity, temporary, and Eddie’s not insane enough to destabilize it more than it already is by trying something stupid like another relationship.

“I did just break up with my girlfriend,” he points out.

“Three months ago,” Hen says, but when Eddie looks at her she’s softened. He wonders if she’s remembering their conversation, too, if she remembers what she told him back when there was no way for him to hear her.

Everything.

That still doesn’t feel real. Doesn’t feel like something Eddie might get to have. But maybe, on his good days, he can come to believe that he also doesn’t deserve a life that hurts.

“Three months ago,” he nods, looking at the ceiling. It’s less perfect than Frank’s, bumpy in one corner where the plaster meets, with a couple of hairline cracks. “She asked me if I was into women.”

Karen, mid-sip of wine, chokes.

“Okay, well, she wasn’t great,” Hen says, and shrugs when Eddie looks at her with wide eyes. “No offense. I feel like it’s been long enough that you deserve my honest opinion.”

And Eddie—Eddie laughs, because it figures.

“I guess,” he says, swirling his wine. “But we were in public and she didn’t ask if I was into men, so I feel like maybe that was her being considerate.”

Karen puts her face in her hands.

“I am, though,” Eddie says, before the rush of adrenaline brought on by the words has time to flood his whole body, to make him shake. “Into men. I like men.”

It’s the first time he’s put it that way. The first time he’s allowed the thought fully formed and coherent, and his mouth feels burned after it comes out, screaming at a sensation that is no longer there.

“That’s the first time you’ve said that, isn’t it?” Karen smiles, and reaches out to squeeze his wrist.

“In those words,” he nods, determinedly not freaking out. He’s breathing hard, hard enough to be loud, but he won’t allow anything else, because—this is him. This is him, reaching for a part of himself that has been buried and forgotten and frozen for as long as it’s existed. Pulling it from the ground. Giving it room to breathe. “It’s, uh. Fuck, it’s scary.”

“Yeah,” they say in unison, and Hen reaches out for his other wrist, and Eddie’s not going to get through this without crying.

“But you know you’re surrounded by people who love you just as you are, right?” Hen asks, and then her face blurs. “No matter what. Anyone who has a problem can go through me, and I actually mean that.”

Eddie laughs. He tugs on own hand, so Hen lets him go, and he wipes his tears into the sleeve of one of his nice shirts. They’re not followed by more, and he blinks the sting out of his eyes easily enough, but it feels like they change something anyway. Show him things in a new light.

“I know,” he says, because he does, but it’s another thing to hear it. It’s Buck’s thing, usually, needing to hear that people love him and want him and appreciate him, and Eddie will be first in line to provide that reassurance any day of the week, but God, it feels good. It feels good to be told that someone loves him, just because they do. “It’s—not that, I don’t think. I’m not worried about—” his parents, a thought that’s so viciously biting it might as well have teeth, “—about anyone at the 118, or—or my aunt and my abuela, or Christopher. It’s the whole—not knowing. I have no idea what to do with it.”

“Not knowing what?” Karen asks.

“Who I am. What I am,” Eddie says through his teeth, and the warmth recedes. “Like—I don’t even have a word for it. I don’t know what fits. How am I supposed to—I don’t know, own it, or be proud or whatever, if I don’t even—“

“Okay, whoa,” Hen reaches out again, gently pushing Eddie’s shaking hand back down onto the tabletop. “Eddie. This isn’t—okay, I’m not saying labels aren’t important, they can be. But as far as—what? Being valid, being accepted, being part of the community? That’s a non-issue.”

Eddie blinks.

“How would you describe what you feel? In as many words as you want?”

He looks down at the coffee table. There’s a dent in the side of it, the kind that litters every piece of furniture Eddie owns. Comes with having kids.

“I, uh,” he swallows, “I’m not sure. I know I loved Shannon. And I know I love—“ he presses his lips together. “I know I like women, and now that I’ve been on the internet, I, uh. I’m pretty sure I like men. That’s about as far as I’ve been able to get.”

“Then that’s who you are,” Hen smiles. “At least for now. You might figure out a label or not, whatever you want, but you’re not—there isn’t like a waiting room to be queer, Eddie. You just are.”

Queer, Eddie thinks, and it makes him shiver all the way down to his bones.

“I just am?” he repeats, and can’t stop it coming out like a question.

Hen’s smile widens. “Yeah. That’s all you need to do. Just exist, right now. As you are.”

Eddie pulls his hands back again, and they let him go, both looking at him with a gentleness that makes it hard to breathe. He lets his fists fall into his lap, holds his own hand, tangles his fingers. Squeezes until he can feel the way his blood pumps through his veins.

I am, he thinks, the way he does every night in the dark, groping for an answer. I just am.

But then he thinks about the questions. The questions everyone will have, about his age, his kid, the reasons he’s apparently incapable of just picking a word to describe himself.

“I mean,” he says, tentatively looking up at Hen and Karen, a little afraid where he has nothing to be afraid of. “I feel—I feel like if people ask—“

“If people ask, you tell them it’s none of their business,” Hen shrugs. “If it’s somebody who matters to you, they won’t mind an explanation instead of a label, and everyone else can go fuck themselves.”

It’s the same thing Frank keeps telling him in therapist speak: that the only one whose vision of Eddie’s life matters is Eddie.

But he doesn’t know how to do that. It’s been a box to check as far back as he remembers, when his father told him that his classmates in elementary school who made the girls cry by being mean to them were doing something right. Eddie had friends who were girls in high school and never mentioned them at home for fear of the pressure they’d put on him, and would run from the dinner table when Sophia’s first boyfriend came up in conversation, because it was hanging over his head, still unchecked and growing more urgent by the day: be something we understand. Be something we know. Be something we can explain to others.

“It—it feels,” he starts, and has to remember to breathe, “it feels, like. Too big, right now. Because I think I’ve been—like this, this has been a part of me, for a really long time, but it just wasn’t allowed, and I’m—I don’t know how to box it up. I don’t want it to be another thing I push down before I can even see all of it, you know? Does that make any sense?”

He takes a stressed gulp of wine, only to realize he’s run out. Karen tops him up, smiling in a way that makes him feel safe.

“It makes perfect sense,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like she’s just humoring him.

“But then most of the time that feels—selfish, because if I’m ever actually brave enough to tell someone, I’ll be asking people to accept this new thing about me when they already thought they knew me—“

“Eddie,” Karen lays a careful hand on his forearm. “It’s okay to change. Maybe it is new, and maybe it’s always been a part of you. Doesn’t mean it’s somehow not allowed,” she says. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re an overthinker?”

Eddie huffs. “Buck says I overcorrect.”

“Mm,” Hen hums as she takes a sip of her water. “Do you think you might be doing that? Because you’re doing something really, really brave, and from what I know about you, being queer sounds like the complete opposite of what you were raised to be. So you’re—does it feel scary, right now? To think about it?”

“Terrifying,” Eddie says, thinking of all his stolen nights of sleep. “All the time.”

Hen nods. “So you’re scared. You’re uncomfortable because you’ve never been here before, and you can either keep walking toward the unknown or make yourself into something other people can digest.”

Eddie blinks. Clears his throat, and almost coughs up his heart right along with it. “Okay,” he says, “damn. Don’t pull your punches, Hen.”

Karen laughs around an olive, and looks at her wife with things in her eyes that make Eddie drop his gaze back down to the tabletop.

“I’m just saying,” Hen says, back to gentle, “you just spent, what, twenty years? Making yourself smaller for other people’s benefit.”

And now he’s been in twice-weekly therapy for months. There’s probably a correlation there.

“When I joined the LAFD,” Hen says, “I tried to do what you’re trying to do. I was the first woman in the firehouse, the first Black woman in the firehouse, the only queer person as far as I knew. And the old captain, Gerrard, he treated me like shit. All of them did, except Chim. And for so long I kept my head down—“

“You kept your head down?” Eddie asks, because Hen is—Hen. He has never known her to be anything other than certain of who she is and what she’s worth.

“Yes,” she purses her lips at him, “I kept my head down. All the way down. When he left me behind and made me shine the truck, I smiled and said ‘yes sir’, and when he wouldn’t let me do anything in the field I tried to convince myself that it was normal, that he was just testing me.”

Karen reaches out and tangles her fingers with Hen’s.

“Do you think I changed his mind with any of that?”

Eddie sighs. “No.”

“No,” Hen grins, just this side of triumphant. “All I did was make myself miserable just to appease someone who was never going to take me for who I am. I’m not letting you do that on my watch.”

Eddie swallows his tears, and rubs a hand over his face like that will help settle the thoughts that are scattered in his head like puzzle pieces that refuse to fit together.

Okay, he thinks. Okay. Okay.

“It’s still scary, though?” he says, only a little petulant, and they both laugh.

“Yeah,” says Karen, “that’s what it’s like a lot of the time, especially when it’s new. But you’re not a coward, Eddie.”

Eddie sighs. “Jury’s out on that one,” he says, swirling the wine in his glass, because this isn’t the only thing he wants to say, but he doesn’t know that he’s brave enough to get the rest of it out.

“Remember you only owe the truth to yourself,” Hen says around a bite of cheese. “And you want to know what I think?”

“Uh,” Eddie says, “I’m not sure.”

“I think,” she points at him with a skewer, “that you are so incredibly full of love, Eddie, and it kills you a little every time you decide to keep it inside.”

“Uh,” Eddie says again, blinking a haze out of his eyes. “I don’t—“

“I don’t just mean romantic love,” says Hen, with a spark in her eye that tells him she has him all figured out. “I mean all of it. I notice it sometimes, you know. When you stop yourself from saying things, or from touching people. I don’t know who taught you that you have to do that—“

“I think you have an idea,” Eddie throws in, grinning into his glass.

“Fair,” she grins back. “Maybe that’s all the more reason to let it go.”

Eddie puts his glass down. He doesn’t know if Hen’s right, because—he’s plenty affectionate with Christopher. He touches Buck way more than he should, and in the past few months he’s spent more time holding Hen’s hand than he ever thought he would.

But he remembers every instance of it, somewhere in the back of his mind. Every time he’s touched someone who wasn’t his son, just because: a voice that could be his mother or could be his father telling him to stop being clingy, to leave people alone, to stand up straight. He used to go to his sisters for hugs when he was little, after Abuela moved away, and then that wasn’t allowed either and none of them were old enough to challenge it.

So he remembers, now, even after years of going against it because Buck is tactile and Eddie can’t tell him no, an endless catalogue of every time he’s transgressed.

Unconscious, but still there: to touch is to be weak.

“I did say there was something wrong with me,” he says, reaching forward, and Hen and Karen somehow both manage to hold his hand at the same time. “That time we talked. “

Softly, Hen shakes her head. “That hasn’t been there for a long time, Eddie,” she says. “You looked—I don’t know. Hunted. And you haven’t looked like that in a while. There’s nothing wrong with you the way you are right now.”

Eddie looks away from her, and chuckles humorlessly down at their striped rug. Okay, he tries to think, but that makes him anxious, growing in his throat like a cork and stopping up his breathing. Maybe, he tries instead, and a little bit of air comes.

He’s been getting a lot of mileage out of maybes, lately, but he figures they’re better than outright nos.

“So,” he says, “I’m—thirty-four and fucked in the head in about seven different ways because of whatever garbage my parents conditioned into me so long ago I can’t even remember it.”

Karen sighs. “You’re not fucked in the head,” she says, which Eddie finds funny, for some reason. A wine-related reason, probably. “You just trusted them to know what’s best, because you were a kid, and now you have to unpack all of it. That’s what parents do,” she raises her glass, “they mess you up.”

“And that’s how you know where to do better,” Hen adds.

Eddie takes his hands back, just to hide behind them for a second. It’s still a relief, the almost-silence and the tinged-pink darkness behind his eyelids, a second to let himself settle. He’s always up in the air, these days. Always in the middle of a hurricane, and he doesn’t know where any of the pieces are going to fall.

Hen and Karen leave him be, which makes his throat tighten in gratitude. He runs through it again in his head: queer, and I just am, and maybe. Pieces that might make some kind of whole, if only someone could hand him the instruction manual.

“Christ,” he says eventually, muffled behind his palms. “I think you’re changing my life here.”

“Nah,” Hen says. When Eddie looks up, she’s rolling her eyes, but also smiling. “You’re changing your life. That’s the point. Although we really could’ve had this conversation, what, weeks ago?”

Eddie shakes his head. “Like a—a week and a half, I guess. Since the barbecue at Bobby and Athena’s.”

“I knew you were staring at Michael and David,” Karen points her fork at him. Eddie’s face goes hot.

“I wasn’t doing it on purpose,” he mumbles, reaching for whatever’s left on the board just to have something to do with his mouth. It ends up being a piece of cheese he definitely, definitely doesn’t like, and that’s what he gets for trying to deflect. Frank will get a kick out of it.

“But you were doing it,” says Hen, with a question clear behind it.

Eddie remembers it in painfully vivid detail, actually. “They just look happy together,” he says, and it comes out kind of—cracked open. Fragile.

“You can be happy with someone, too,” Hen says, and. That’s the part that trips Eddie up. “You can be happy with a man, if you want to.”

He tries to think that one, too. I can, he manages, and then the darkness that’s always curled up in his chest stretches like a particularly lazy cat and sinks its claws in.

He’s allowed to not suffer every hour of every day. He’s settled on that, Frank has confirmed it. It’s a fact, at least the times he manages to get out of bed and make a cup of coffee and go about his day. It’s okay to not be suffering, and it doesn’t mean there’s a pendulum hanging over him just waiting to fall.

But happy is—different. Something in him flinches at the thought. He doesn’t know when he was last happy; doesn’t know what it is, and it’s hard to divine the concrete shape of something that seems as intangible as fog.

“But,” Karen says, staring a veritable hole in him until he looks her in the eye. “You’d have to be open to dating for that, so while we’re having a heart-to-heart, why don’t you explain that one to me?” she asks. “And don’t give me that baggage bullshit again. We all have baggage.”

Eddie sighs. He traces the dent in the tabletop with a fingertip, and doesn’t know how to shift all the words that have built up in him over the years. A mountain, and he can’t make it move.

“It’s,” he says. Sighs. He can’t say it out loud. He can’t say it, because then it’s finally, irrevocably real. If he puts it on the coffee table between them, if he lets go, it’ll spill everywhere. He’ll never be able to take it back and hide it again.

But Hen is looking at him like she knows, and if Hen knows, then Karen does too. Everyone does, probably. Eddie’s caught up in this, a storm he’s just trying to make it through, but everyone else has been looking from the outside, and they—yeah. They know.

“I don’t think I could,” he grimaces, “commit. To someone.”

Hen keeps looking at him, unblinking.

“To someone who isn’t Buck.”

And he has to curl in on himself, for a second. Draw his knees up and wrap his arms around them and hold himself together through one, two, three jerky inhales.

It does feel like that: like he’s spilled it everywhere. Like it’s ruining Hen and Karen’s rug, and soaking into the baseboards, and spilling out through the back door to where he can never catch it again. Inhabiting the world, all on its own.

Eddie’s never been more terrified.

When he raises his head, rests his chin on his knee, he finds Hen and Karen still watching him, their eyes softened by understanding.

“You love him,” Hen says, and she sounds a little like Eddie feels – like she knew, but hearing it said out loud is something different altogether.

I love him, he thinks, easy, because those words have lived inside him for years.

“I—yeah,” he laughs, choked.

He loves Buck.

Eddie loves him, and loves him, and loves him.

“It’s your first time saying that, too, isn’t it,” Karen says. Eddie could swear she has tears in her eyes.

“If you couldn’t tell from the everything about me,” Eddie says. They look at each other for a breath, in a silence that presses into every corner of the room, and then they’re dissolving into laughter all at the same time, tipping sideways until Eddie’s lying on the floor, looking through the gap under the table at where Hen has a hand pressed over her face.

Eddie turns on his back, watches their ceiling again, follows the cracks that all lead to the same spot, a piece of wall knocked off in one of the corners.

He closes his eyes, and sees Buck’s face in front of him before he even consciously thinks about him. Sees Buck furious and broken trying to hurt a punching bag, and watching Eddie with his mouth half open at that grocery store like he’d never thought Eddie would miss him, and torn to shreds in front of the VA hospital. He sees him hugging Christopher in the doorway like the world around them doesn’t exist, putting together a 500-piece Lego set on a Friday evening, giving himself carrot fangs to convince Christopher that vegetables are good. Sweeping in to patch Abuela’s front step and volunteering for school pick up and trusting Eddie to check that his harness is safe.

He sees Buck wide-eyed and pink-lipped and beautiful, staring at Eddie like Eddie’s giving him the world when he’s just offering a shoulder to lean on or a trip to the aquarium or a night on his shitty couch.

There never was another path. From the moment Buck offered to drive him after the earthquake, and smiled at Christopher in the rearview mirror so wide his dimples came out, Eddie was always going to end up here.

“God,” he says into the silence, and in his periphery he catches Hen’s head rolling over to face him. “I really am in love with him. I have been, for—I don’t even know, actually.”

“It sneaks up on you,” Karen says. Eddie can’t see her, but the smile in her voice is clear enough that she has to be talking about Hen.

Eddie’s not sure it snuck up on him so much as it just dug in so fast and so deep that it took him a while to notice. It’s been there for a long time, because he remembers what it felt like to kneel in the chaos left after the tsunami with Christopher in his arms, lost for less than a minute and found again; he remembers looking as Buck crumpled to the ground, and thinking, oh, and extinguishing the thought as soon as it registered, because it was impossible.

Still is impossible.

“I just,” he says, and his vision blurs, erasing the cracks in the ceiling, “it’s like—he says something or does something no one’s ever done for me before and just smiles at me like it’s nothing, and I—I can’t even look at him, sometimes.” He takes a breath, ignoring the way it stings in his nose. “How could I ever deserve that?”

Someone sniffles.

“I swear,” Hen says, her voice thick “if you weren’t so far away, I’d smack you.”

Which makes Eddie laugh hard enough that it excuses the couple of tears that make his way past his lashes and down the side of his face.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he says once it’s a little easier to breathe. Karen kicks him in the shin. “It doesn’t matter, because he’s with Taylor, and he seems determined to make it work, so.”

“Maybe he’s not aware that he has other options,” says Karen, in her Reasonable Voice. “So before you go making assumptions, make sure he knows.”

“Before I go making assumptions about—him staying in his long-term relationship?”

Hen rolls over onto her stomach, peering under the coffee table until Eddie looks at her. She’s a little fuzzy around the edges, and Eddie has maybe drunk more than he meant to.

“Taylor’s not lasting,” she says, staring him down without blinking once. “You know that as well as I do. So if everything takes you as long to process as this did, you better start preparing for what you’re going to say once she’s out of the picture.”

Eddie throws a stray skewer at her, which sets them off laughing again, and that’s how Christopher and Denny find them when they come out of Denny’s room complaining that they can’t beat some guy’s all-water Pokémon team. Eddie’s never felt more judged than when he’s looking up at a couple of deeply unimpressed tweens.

It does remind him that it’s pretty late, though, and he still has to get Christopher to bed at a reasonable hour, so he gets up only a little woozily and tries to find the words to say thank you – but Hen just stands up and wraps him up in a tight, tight hug, her arms around his waist as she sways them side to side.

“I’m always here, okay?” she says when she pulls away, holding him close with a hand on his forearm. “Always. So’s Karen, if you want someone smarter than you.”

She ducks the swat he aims at her and disappears in the hallway, herding Denny and Christopher out with her. Eddie gets another hug from Karen, which somehow feels like it pieces him back together a little bit, and he holds on for a few seconds longer than he should.

Hen – who, apparently, didn’t drink for this exact reason – drives them home, with Eddie in the passenger seat, Christopher in the back and Denny tagging along. It’s barely ten minutes, but it’s enough time for Eddie to lean his head against the window and get just a little sleepy, so that when Christopher gets out before him and opens his door he almost falls out, to the great amusement of the ten-year-olds present. Hen gets out, too, coming around the front of the car just to wrap him up again, and Eddie figures he really can’t blame the younger version of him for wanting to be hugged all the time, because it’s so fucking nice. It makes him feel—more alive, he thinks, to be defined against someone else like this.

“Thank you,” he says, squeezing Hen’s shoulder and letting go, but only after it’s been long enough that there’s a danger of some of his more gossipy neighbors running away with it. “I mean it. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

“Good thing I was there, then,” she says, squeezing his hand, “and I always will be.”

Eddie smiles, and his face folds around it easily. Maybe it’s more familiar these days.

“Not that I can be much help with a,” he waves a hand, “sexuality crisis, but if you ever need anything—“

“Yeah, yeah,” she grins, bright in the streetlights. “I’ll hold you to it, Diaz. Go get some sleep, and try not to freak out when you wake up in the morning?”

Eddie scratches the back of his neck, which is suddenly itchy. “If I do, can I—“

“Text me,” Hen says, already settling into the driver’s seat. “Bye, Christopher!”

“Bye Aunt Hen!” Christopher waves back, smiling but with only about half his usual enthusiasm. He meanders a little on the way to the door, too, so Eddie gets him through his bedtime routine in record time, holding the duvet back so he can climb into bed less than twenty minutes later.

He helps take his glasses off and sits down on the edge of the bed, heavy with his own tiredness. But then he looks at Christopher rubbing his eyes, smiling just because; Christopher, who wants him to be happy, who doesn’t know that Eddie has no clue what happiness is, but maybe it goes a little like this.

Maybe it goes a little like—

“Hey, Christopher? You still awake?”

“Duh,” Chris replies, bleary eyed and still managing to look unimpressed. “What is it?”

“I, uh,” Eddie twists his fingers together in his lap. Every time he’s faced with one of these things, these brand new fawn steps toward something Frank calls recovery and Eddie just kind of hand-waves, it’s the hardest thing he’s done yet. He’s not sure he likes what that spells for the future. “You know how your aunt Hen and aunt Karen are married?”

“Dad,” Christopher says very seriously. “Did you hit your head?”

And Eddie exhales the tension, the fear, all of it, all at once. It’s just Christopher, who insists on every bug in the house being trapped and let back outside.

“No, buddy,” he says, reaching out to wrap a hand around Christopher’s wrist. “I just mean—they’re two women, right?”

“It’s called lesbians,” Christopher says with a furrow between his eyebrows. “When girls like girls, they’re lesbians. Right?”

They’d covered the basics in school already, so it’s pretty safe to say that Eddie’s son knows more about sexuality than Eddie does, and he doesn’t actually know how to get through any part of this conversation, but he’s in it now. Christopher’s blinking at him, suddenly awake, and he’s not going to let it go.

“Right,” Eddie nods, fussing with the edge of Christopher’s duvet for something to do with his free hand. “And boys who like boys are—“

“Gay!” Christopher shouts happily, and Eddie just manages to turn his laugh into a cough. He thinks of his mother, of all people, and wonders what she’d think of what he’s about to do.

“Right,” Eddie says again, smiling. “And then—“

“But there are people who aren’t boys or girls,” Christopher frowns at the ceiling. “Do they have a word?”

Eddie blinks. “Uh, I—“

“Because Miss Cannon said that not everyone’s a boy or a girl, but then if someone like that likes girls or boys, or—or if someone who’s not a boy or a girl likes someone else who’s not a boy or a girl, do they have a word? We should make them a word.”

“Christopher,” Eddie says, and has to clear his throat three times to sound some approximation of normal. “I love you, did you know that?”

Christopher smiles, wide, easy. “Love you too, Dad. But do they have a word?”

“Actually,” Eddie tilts his head, “that’s kind of what I want to talk to you about, I guess?”

“You don’t seem very sure,” Christopher whispers, for which Eddie tickles the bottom of his foot, making him shriek.

“I’m not,” Eddie shrugs, leaning in close. “I’m not very sure about how to tell you this, but you’re the most important person in my life, and I want you to know, okay?”

Christopher’s eyes go wide. “Okay.”

“I like girls,” Eddie says, starting with the easy part, and even that has him holding on to Christopher’s hand tighter than he probably should. “Which you know.”

“Because you love Mom and you were married,” Christopher says. He’s pulled the duvet up to his chin, and he’s peering out at Eddie a little timid, like he’s trying to figure out where this is going. Eddie needs to talk faster, but—this is difficult. It’s difficult, even for the third time in a week.

“Exactly,” he tries to smile anyway, smoothing Christopher’s curls off his forehead. “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I think,” he closes his eyes, reminds himself to breathe, “I think I like boys, too.”

Christopher blinks, his eyes liquid in the orange glow of his nightlight. “Oh,” he says, and Eddie’s heart shoots all the way up into the back of his throat, racing, racing. “Okay.”

And it sinks back down like a stone, leaving Eddie a little breathless.

“I just wanted you to know,” he says again, “because it took me a long time to figure it out, and I’m—I’m really glad that I did. A lot of things make sense to me now.”

“So it’s like math homework,” Christopher nods. “Where you have all the numbers but you have to figure out what they mean. And you solved it?”

“I—guess it is kind of like math homework,” Eddie laughs. “Yeah.”

Christopher nods again, and pulls his hand out of Eddie’s grip, but it’s only so he can sit up. He reaches forward, tongue poking out of his mouth.

“You get an A, Dad,” he says, clumsily writing one on Eddie’s forehead with a fingertip. “I’m proud of you.”

Which is—that’s what Eddie always says when Christopher struggles with something and finishes it anyway, and it shouldn’t make him burst into tears while clutching a space-themed duvet like it’s a lifeline, but here he is.

Here he is.

“Thank you,” he says, sniffling, praying to anyone who’ll listen that he doesn’t just lose it, because crying might be fine, but he doesn’t exactly want to sob hysterically right in front of Chris.

He leans forward, and Christopher wraps his arms around Eddie’s neck easily, squeezing so tight Eddie sees stars for a second.

“Thank you, Christopher,” he says again. You save me every day, he doesn’t say. “I really appreciate it.”

Christopher nods, but when he pulls away his forehead is creased in thought.

“Do you have a word?” he asks.

And Eddie finds it a little easier to straighten up, this time.

“No,” he says, squeezing Christopher’s ankle as he settles back down, hair going every which way on the pillow. “There are—lots of different words you can choose from, if you want, but I’m not sure if any of them fit me, you know? And I’m sure the same goes for everyone who’s like me. You can have a word if you want, but you can also just be you, and everything you are is already included in that. So—maybe I can just be me for now?”

Christopher dips his chin, considering. “So you’re my dad. Who likes girls and boys.”

Eddie bites his lip until it stings. “If that’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, Dad,” he shakes his head, and Eddie almost falls into pieces for a fraction of a second, “it’s cool. You’re like—a cool dad.”

Eddie laughs, and leans forward to plant a noisy kiss on Christopher’s forehead.

“Let’s see if you’re still saying that in a couple of years,” he says, poking a finger into Christopher’s cheek, his heart growing so big in his chest it feels like it’s trying to squeeze through the cage of his ribs. “But for now, I am your cool dad,” he smiles, and when he gets up, he almost staggers with how light he feels. “And I’m keeping you up.”

He crosses the room to the door, and lingers for another minute, just to look, just to let this feeling settle. “Goodnight, Christopher,” he says, “thanks for listening. I love you.”

“Love you,” Christopher says, already closing his eyes, probably about to fall asleep between one breath and the next like only kids can.

Eddie paces his house for another half an hour, just an endless round of kitchen – dining room – living room – hallway, too full of restless energy that fizzes in his fingertips and makes him want to do something stupid.

He can’t call Buck, because Buck’s doing something with Taylor, and it’s a bad idea anyway, but he also kind of wants—

Well. Doesn’t matter what he wants, because Buck’s out with Taylor. He makes another circle, five, ten, then finally stops by the bathroom. He brushes his teeth staring at himself in the mirror like he’ll see something different, like an identity’s going to sprout, fully-formed, out of the middle of his forehead.

I just am, he thinks, winding a piece of floss around his finger, watching it cut off the blood flow. I just am.

He cries after he turns out the light, but it’s—okay. He’s pretty sure he’s not sad, anyway, just calibrating. Crying for the places inside him that used to be empty and never will be again, crying for an Eddie who denied a part of himself so thoroughly he forgot he ever buried it, crying for the empty left side of the bed.

He puts on Joni Mitchell, because it’s his bedroom and his Spotify account and he can, and slowly calms down by watching the blank white of his ceiling. He rolls onto his side, pulls the duvet up, closes his burning eyes.

And he wakes up in the middle of the night screaming.

“If you’ll allow me,” Frank says, leaning back in his wheelchair, “a metaphor.”

“Oh boy,” Eddie says, but he sits up straighter anyway.

He hasn’t looked at the bird feeder yet. Hasn’t really looked anywhere that isn’t his own hands in his lap, his own feet when he walked in and crossed the familiar distance between the door and the couch.

He’s wearing his last clean pair of jeans. The rest are in the hamper, and the hamper’s been overflowing for a few days, and he’s getting to it, but he’s had a lot on his mind, and anyway, the point is, his last clean pair of jeans has a ketchup stain on it, which he only notices when he’s sitting down.

“Recovery,” Frank says, “is kind of like whack-a-mole.”

Eddie’s eyes leave the ketchup stain and land on him.

“Okay, don’t go leaving a Yelp review yet,” Frank laughs, “I have a point. Imagine that, when you first came to see me a few months ago, you had this garden, and it was full of moles.”

Eddie tilts his head at him. “The moles being—my issues?”

“Exactly,” Frank points a pen at him. “And because you were traumatized and standing at the beginning of recovery, they were constantly popping up. So you pick up a mallet and start hitting. You with me so far?”

“I guess,” Eddie shakes his head, but he does smile for the first time today, so maybe Frank’s onto something.

“And as you keep whacking, some of the moles get tired. Take—the shooting, for example. That trauma was acute, and it was swallowing you up, and you’ve processed it with me, and with Buck, and it’s become a little easier to think and talk about it, right?”

Eddie’s shoulder throbs, as if on cue. He could—if he closed his eyes, he’s pretty sure he could recall the exact way the air tasted on his tongue when he stopped being able to take it in. Could recall waking up to the stench of hospital, and the exact pull of the stitches between his ribs, and Buck’s face painted red that spent so long haunting his dreams instead of his memories.

But he could remember all of those things, and then exhale and come back. Remember where he is, who he is. Remember that he survived, and is moving forward.

“Right,” he says, and looks out of the window. No birds.

“So maybe that particular mole doesn’t pop up as often,” says Frank. “But that means there’s now room in that molehill for another one. And once you whack that one into submission, the next one might take its place.”

Eddie rubs a hand through his hair. Pulls at the short strands on the crown of his head, a reminder. Here. Alive.

“Are you, like—trying to be reassuring? Because I’m not sure it’s working, no offense.”

Frank laughs, rolling up the corner of his note paper between his fingers.

“I’m just trying to answer your question,” he says. “It’s actually perfectly normal to have a nightmare about something that happened a long time ago.”

Eddie shakes his head. He could swear he has sand between his teeth, and sucks on them until his mouth is flooded with saliva, but it doesn’t relieve the sensation.

“Years, though,” he says, “it’s been—that was the first time I almost died, and there have been so many since then, so why—“

“There are things,” Frank interrupts, uncharacteristically gentle, “that weigh on you heavier than others. Sometimes there’s more emotion tied up in them, or they happened more recently. The way you’d been dealing with things, it was a game of which trauma you can live with and still keep going. You didn’t really have time to process war, did you?”

And Eddie remembers, like it was yesterday, his back pressed to his mother’s kitchen cabinet, staring at Shannon and asking for help for what would be the last time for years.

“I—I knew I needed it,” he says, because there are a lot of things he doesn’t remember from those few months, just shapes and sounds and an overwhelming feeling of suffocating, of groping for a foothold in the darkness. His mother’s drawn face every time he left the house at five in the morning, every time he came back at midnight after pulling back-to-back shifts and stepped into Christopher’s room to kiss him on the forehead. “But it just wasn’t important enough.”

“To whom?” Frank asks. Eddie preemptively takes a tissue.

“Anyone,” he shrugs. “Shannon—wasn’t in a place to give me that kind of help, you know? She was mad at me, she had my parents to deal with, and she was halfway across the country from her dying mother, so I don’t—I can’t blame her for that. But without her, there just was no time. I had to take care of Christopher, I had to provide.”

Nice work, his father had said the day he came home, the ribbon of a Silver Star held carefully between his fingers. He’d clapped Eddie on the back, told him to help with the barbecue, and then, over a rack of ribs, asked what Eddie was planning on doing now that he couldn’t run away.

The real answer to that was take a fucking minute, but silence had just about the same effect.

“They tried to—they gave me the contact info for a counselor, at the VA back in El Paso,” he says. Remembers turning the card over in his hands, almost picking up the phone. He lost it, somewhere in the chaos that his life became not long after. “My CO recommended him personally, and she was—she was wonderful about it, actually. Said there was no shame in asking for help.”

“There isn’t,” Frank says, raising his eyebrows as if to say look at us.

And that Eddie, unmade and hole-ridden and still feeling so much like a child in all the wrong ways, had believed her. Just for a minute, for the two seconds it took to say can I just get a little damn time, for the next two that it took Shannon to turn her back.

“Yeah,” Eddie shrugs, and hates the way his mouth twists of its own volition. “But there was no way for me to arrange appointments, or even go to the group meetings. I was working three jobs just to make ends meet.”

Frank nods. He makes a note, so short it has to be a single word at most. Eddie wonders what it is.

“And you said you went to see your friend yesterday, yes? To talk about your sexuality?”

“My sexuality crisis, yeah,” Eddie says, leaning back. He finally untangles his hands, and starts rubbing feeling back into his fingers. “And she helped a lot. And I—I told Christopher, actually. I hope. It seemed like he got it, anyway.”

“That’s great,” Frank says, possibly the most straightforward expression of enthusiasm Eddie has ever heard from him. “Good work, Eddie. I don’t imagine that was easy.”

“I’d had wine,” Eddie admits, squinting at the spines of Frank’s many books in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf behind him. “And I was—they were so nice about it. Hen and Karen, I mean. They were so nice about it that I think I was a little high on it.”

“You don’t need to justify your decision to share something important about yourself with your son,” Frank says, laser-precise. He does that more often than Eddie would like: just grabs him like a butterfly mid-flight and pins him down before he can fall into a pattern he doesn’t even realize is there.

“Right,” he tells the ceiling.

“Right,” Frank echoes. “He’s your son, and you’re currently his only parent. You’ve built up an intuition for these things over the years. It’s okay to listen to it.”

Eddie sighs. He leans back, leans forward, tries to put his elbows on his knees but misses, almost kneeing himself in the jaw.

He taps his feet instead, and tries to resist bouncing. Frank is silent on the other side of the coffee table, doing that thing where he keeps completely still and lets Eddie sift through his thoughts.

“I gotta say,” Eddie says, and rubs his hands over his face, “it does seem a little like the universe is trying to tell me something. Congratulations on figuring out you’re queer, here’s the most vivid nightmare you’ve ever fucking had.”

It zings on his tongue as he says it, just a little, and once it comes out he has to lean back again, shying away from his own words. Queer, he thinks, an adjective. Something he is because he exists in the world the way he does; something that becomes infinitely scarier as a noun.

“That’s why I was asking, actually, because it does make sense,” Frank says, and Eddie blinks in surprise, because Frank doesn’t usually stand for any esoteric bullshit. “Not the universe thing, no one’s sending you a message. But if you made progress in resolving something that’s been weighing on you for a really long time, it’s possible you’ve whacked that mole into submission, and another one popped up to take its place.”

“Please don’t say ‘whack’ again,” Eddie says, laughing only a little raggedly.

“No promises,” Frank grins. “So. Can I ask you about it?”

“You don’t usually ask for permission.”

“We haven’t really talked through this one in that much detail,” Frank shrugs. “I figured it’s only polite to ask before I drill into a new place in your brain.”

Eddie takes a breath, all the way down, feeling his stomach expand under his folded hands.

“Ask away,” he says.

Frank nods. “How do you feel when you think about it? Afghanistan?”

“Angry,” Eddie says. It’s an easy answer. Terrifyingly easy.

“That’s good,” Frank says, and makes another note.

Which— “It is?”

“I’d say so,” says Frank, running his pen down the page, which Eddie’s pretty sure is almost empty. “I like to think of anger as the part of us that recognizes we’ve been hurt. That knows it’s not fair.”

Finally, Eddie ends up needing the tissue, and he holds it to the hollow under his eye way before it actually ends up damp. He looks down at his free hand; remembers, vividly, what it looked like with knuckles split open, with someone else’s blood dried in the grooves of his skin.

It used to hurt in a way that lingered: the scratches and scuffs would bleed and scab over in a couple of days, but the bruises stayed, taking their time to bloom deep, deep under his skin. He liked that part, having a map of places he could push so he could be angry at the pain that shot through him, and not the pain that was trying to claw his chest open from the inside.

It wasn’t fair. None of it was.

“But it still happened,” he says, balling the tissue up, stuffing it into his jacket pocket. “So I’m—what? Just going to be angry forever?”

“No,” Frank shakes his head. “You get better. You process what happened to you, acknowledge that you didn’t deserve it.”

“And that I can’t change it, either,” Eddie nods. He thinks he has a vague memory of Frank saying something like that years ago, too, when Eddie had told him that Shannon wasn’t supposed to die.

“Exactly. We’ve talked about the avoidance—“

“The avoidance cluster of PTSD symptoms,” Eddie interrupts, because it’s a little easier to cope with when he slaps the labels on himself. “Yes. My favorite set of words in the English language.”

“You do have PTSD,” Frank says, raising his stupid nonchalant eyebrow.

“I do have PTSD,” Eddie tells the ceiling. He knows; he’s not stupid, and besides, Frank laid it out in no uncertain terms during their third session together.

“And the first time you came to see me, all of that avoidance had made you go numb,” says Frank, reaching over to set his clipboard on his desk. “You’d been avoiding the negative feelings, but you can’t shut them off without also shutting off all the good things. Like the pride that comes from saving someone from dying, or your kid doing something awesome.”

“I can’t believe you remember that.”

“I remember everything,” Frank smiles, and taps his temple with his pen. “But what I’m getting at is that this time, we’ve been able to work past the anger at some of the things that happened to you. So it’s not as painful anymore, and you don’t have to avoid it, and you don’t have to shut off all your other feelings.”

Eddie picks at the edge of his sleeve, breathing carefully against the tension that wants to settle on his shoulders.

“I hate it when you make sense,” he says.

“I know,” says Frank. “But since I’m making sense, what do you say we take a stab at talking about Afghanistan a little more the next time you’re here?”

“Don’t say stab,” Eddie groans. “That’s like—the one way no one’s tried to kill me yet.”

Frank laughs. “Attempt, then,” he says. “Let’s attempt to work through how you feel about Afghanistan.”

“Sure,” Eddie sighs, rubbing the middle of his forehead where another Frank Headache is building. “If you think it’s going to cure me, or whatever.”

“Well, the thing is—you can heal trauma. You can’t exactly cure it.”

“So it’s going to be like this forever,” Eddie sighs again. “Just—dealing with shit only to find more shit buried underneath.”

“Not necessarily,” Frank smiles. “But you are going to need to keep whacking.”

Chapter Text

I envy my imagination embracing you, silencing you, kissing you, caressing you, holding you tight and letting you go, bringing you near and pushing you away, lifting you up and putting you down, making you submit and submitting to you, and doing all the things I never do.

- mahmoud darwish, 'i am jealous of everything around you'; translated by catherine cobham

Eddie secretly loves the Christmas toy drive at the firehouse.

Hen loves to call him the Grinch because of that one time he didn’t show sufficient enthusiasm for decorating the station Christmas tree, but he doesn’t think anyone could actually look at all the kids milling about in their tiny Christmas outfits and feel anything other than charmed.

Anyone who isn’t Taylor Kelly, anyway.

“She’s looking delighted today,” Chim says from behind Eddie, glued to his phone instead of greeting the people who come in to donate like he’s supposed to be doing. “Is that what they like to show on the news these days? This is Taylor Kelly, Channel Eight News, sorry I look like I’m sucking on a lemon.”

“Chim, that’s not nice,” Hen says from Eddie’s other side, reaching out to slap her best friend on the arm with zero intent behind it. Eddie has to concentrate very hard on not laughing.

“It’s not nice,” says Bobby, “but it’s true.”

Eddie’s not sure when he showed up, and is pleasantly surprised to turn around and find Bobby with his hands on his hips, looking unimpressed.

“I don’t get it,” Ravi says, stopping at the table to drop off donations with a candy cane hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette. “What’s so bad about covering a Christmas drive? It’s a Christmas drive. In a station full of firefighters in uniform. If you don’t like the wholesomeness of it all, I’m sure you can at least appreciate the eye candy.”

Bobby chokes on a laugh.

Eddie—doesn’t say anything, because it’s true, and he’s been studiously avoiding looking at Buck all morning.

Hen, who has now apparently progressed to reading his thoughts, elbows him in the side.

“It’s probably too small-scale,” Chim says, typing furiously. “She could be crashing in another helicopter, and instead she’s interviewing Buck in a Santa hat.”

At that, Eddie’s head snaps in Taylor’s direction. She’d been idling by the tree, looking over the sea of kids milling around kind of like she was going to be sick, but she’s got her reporter face on now, her camera guy at her shoulder, the lens trained on Buck, who’s hunching awkwardly.

They haven’t talked about her in a few weeks. Not that there’s anything to talk about, necessarily, because it’s Buck’s relationship and he’s supposedly happy in it, but Eddie’s had some not insignificant revelations in that time, and they’re making it difficult to keep his mouth shut.

Which reminds him that Buck still doesn’t know. Eddie’s been thinking about it, but he’s not sure that he could actually sit Buck down and say it, because—well. There’s no real way to keep those pieces of him separate.

To tell Buck he’s queer is to tell him he’s in love with him, and the fact that Eddie’s in love with him doesn’t really matter, because Buck has a girlfriend.

“You know she has like—fans? On Twitter?” Hen says, smiling absentmindedly as someone hands her a puzzle. “They know Buck from the couple times he’s been on TV. I saw someone post that interview he did after the rollercoaster.”

Bobby tuts so loudly it makes Eddie flinch.

“What rollercoaster?” he asks, frowning in their direction again. Buck sweeps the pompom of his Santa hat away from his face, a dimple popping up in his cheek, but Eddie can’t shake a sense of wrongness that has goosebumps rising on the back of his neck.

He’s almost definitely sure it’s not just jealousy.

“You weren’t here yet,” Chim says, finally slipping his phone into his pocket, but he doesn’t step up to the table. “It was the first time Buck lost someone on a call. He was pretty torn up about it. I think he went to the guy’s funeral.”

Eddie’s heart swoops in his chest. They’ve known each other long enough that he knows what to do with Buck when they lose people, that Buck knows how to get through to Eddie if he’s too deep in his head. He hates thinking about Buck so young, as earnest as always but with no one he’d let wrap their arms around him and just hold him while he shakes.

“And someone did an interview with him?”

“He agreed to it,” Bobby sighs, and stands next to Hen to pick up Chim’s slack. “He said it was the least he could do, since it was his fault.”

“It wasn’t,” Eddie says, frowning at a roll of Garfield wrapping paper that someone apparently donated.

“We know that, Evan Buckley Defense Squad,” Chim pops his gum. “But I think he could use some defending in the here and now.”

Eddie looks over again, and not a whole lot has changed. Buck’s squinting into the light aimed into his face. He doesn’t really have to lean down to speak into the microphone, and it’s only then that Eddie realizes Taylor’s standing on a box.

He looks—fidgety. Eddie’s not sure he could put it into words, but he knows Buck like the back of his hand.

He opens his mouth to ask for ideas on how to intervene, but before he can, Karen emerges from the crowd and steps up to the table, leaning over it to give Hen a peck.

Eddie’s not jealous of them, exactly. It’s just that he looks at them and feels something inside him ring hollow, and then he looks over at Buck and feels a hurt in the same place that he can’t define, like missing a phantom limb.

“Hi, Eddie,” Karen says, and he blinks in surprise when she leans across the table again, this time to give him a hug. Warmth flares in his chest like striking a match. “How are you?”

“Um,” Eddie grapples for an acceptable answer to that question. “I’m—“ lovesick, confused, tired, afraid all the time and I’m not sure why, and also sometimes okay. “I’m good, yeah. Everything go okay with Carla?”

“Yep,” Karen says, craning her neck to see over the people surrounding them. “She dropped him off with me, but Denny dragged him away as soon as they got out of the car, sorry.”

“Typical,” Eddie sighs, but he’s smiling. “Can’t even say hi to his boring old dad. I guess I’ll find him later.”

Another surge of people comes up, with Karen accidentally creating a bottleneck, so she waves at him and disappears somewhere with Chim, elbows linked. Eddie smiles as he’s handed gift after gift after gift, stacking them according to Hen’s very precise grid system, and doesn’t have time to wonder where Christopher is.

Until he spots him a few minutes later and freezes in the middle of a conversation with Bobby.

“Not again,” he mutters, but he’s too far away, would be too late to intervene. All he can do is stand and watch as Christopher comes up to Buck, Denny helping part the crowd in front of him to make way. His joyous call of “Buck!” is so loud it makes half the firehouse turn.

And definitely ruins Taylor’s tape, which doesn’t please Eddie, because he’s not a petty person.

Except for Fridays, and hey, what a coincidence, it’s a Friday today.

Hen bumps into him from the other side. “I got you covered,” she whispers, “if you want to go eavesdrop.”

“I should go stop it,” Eddie whispers back, but he’s not sure what he’d do at this point, and before he can think about it, his traitorous feet are already carrying him over there. He hides behind a pile of presents just in time to see Buck peer into the crowd and spot Christopher, and he couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with Buck before, but he can definitely pinpoint when it changes.

Buck’s entire face transforms at the sight of Chris. He’s tense one second, with soft lines at the corners of his mouth, in the middle of his forehead, like he’s concentrating hard on holding that specific expression on his face; and then he spots the boys making their way towards him, and lets go. The smile that stretches his mouth is wide and brilliant and real.

“Sorry,” he says, which Eddie’s close enough to hear now, “sorry, Tay, I just need one second.”

And he doesn’t wait for her to reply before he’s crouching down, straight out of her shot, and opening his arms.

“Christopher!” he hollers, at least as loud as Christopher had yelled his name, and then Christopher’s throwing himself into his arms with the absolute certainty of a kid who’s never been dropped before. “Merry Christmas, bud.”

“It’s not Christmas yet,” Christopher laughs, his hands just meeting on the back of Buck’s neck, smiling happily when Buck presses a kiss into his hair. “There’s still three whole weeks left.”

“I know,” Buck says seriously when they separate, his hands engulfing Christopher’s shoulders as he looks him over like they didn’t just see each other two days ago. “Three weeks is forever to wait for presents, but we can say Merry Christmas through the whole holiday season. Your dad’s the only person in the world that doesn’t like it.”

Eddie frowns, and takes a step back to hide himself more thoroughly. He is not—

“I know,” Christopher tries to whisper, but it ends up being louder than his speaking voice. “I’ll have to say ‘merry Christmas drive’ when I find him.”

Buck laughs, bright, making something stir low in Eddie’s stomach. There’s just something about Buck, in his Santa hat, his head thrown back and the long line of his neck on show.

There’s something about Eddie’s son making him look like that, but that’s not a train of thought he can hop onto while at work.

“You haven’t seen him yet?” Buck asks, tucking Christopher’s hair behind his ear.

“No,” Christopher shrugs.

“Well,” Buck grins, “you should probably find him, then. And maybe don’t tell him you saw me first, or he’ll get jealous.”

“You’re my best friend,” Christopher says, holding out a hand for a fistbump that Buck readily gives, his knuckles on Christopher’s. “Dad’s going to have to deal with it.”

Eddie puts a hand over where his heart is doing something that feels oddly like somersaults, swooping up with hope then falling as soon as the reality of the situation trickles in. But it’s getting harder, with every second that he stands there and watches Buck and Christopher in their own little world, to remember where the line is.

This is right, he thinks as he watches Buck dig under the Christmas tree next to him and produce a child-sized Santa hat. This is what we’re meant to be. Why is she there?

And he has the reply, too: because she can give Buck something Eddie can’t. Even with kicking him out, and calling him over just to have sex, and looking like she’d rather be anywhere else right now, Taylor must love Buck in the way he wants. She probably knows his insecurities and how to soothe them, knows how and where to touch him just right to ground him back in the present, roles that used to be Eddie’s only, things he came to accept for what they were just a little too late.

Plus, she can’t be anywhere as messed up as Eddie is. Buck sure as hell doesn’t need more trauma on top of what he already has.

So Eddie straightens up, and rams his hands in his pockets, and tries not to envision it too much. Chris and Buck, his family, the framework of his future. He knows he’s going to get to keep Buck in some capacity, because he’s loyal to a fault and would never leave them behind, and Eddie was prepared for that to be enough long before he realized how he feels.

He tunes back in just in time to watch Buck and Christopher share another hug, just as tight as the first one and eye-wateringly joyful.

“Okay,” Buck says, his eyes closed, his head on Christopher’s shoulder, a content smile curled up on his lips, “go have fun, alright? Ravi’s in charge of the candy canes, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

Christopher mimes locking his lips, and then he’s making his way around the tree and into the back of the bay, where Ravi’s sorting presents.

Eddie turns his attention back to Buck. He’s still crouched, brushing off the knees of the turnouts he’s wearing, back to looking small. It finally occurs to Eddie to look at Taylor, too, and the expression on her face makes him go cold.

“Sorry,” Buck says to her, finally standing up. “I just, ah.” He scratches the back of his head, dislodging his hat.

“You really can’t give me ten uninterrupted minutes of your time?” Taylor asks, her lips pursed. “You know I need to bring back something to make into a report.”

“Hey, I’m giving you my time,” Buck says, mild. He’s been trailing after her since she showed up, wrong-footed at her attitude, but sticking by her anyway. Eddie’s barely spoken to him today. “We can film another interview, you know I don’t mind.”

But the camera guy’s already off to the side, tapping away on his phone, looking about as bored as a human being conceivably can.

“We already have one,” Taylor says, throwing her hair over her shoulder. She sets the microphone down with the rest of her stuff, and when she straightens up, she looks a little less stiff. “Or most of one, but now I’ll have to cut around you dropping out of frame in the middle of a question because you—“

“Taylor,” Buck says, quiet, resigned. Eddie’s temples pound with something very, very dangerous. “Come on. It was Christopher, you know he—“

“Yeah, comes first,” Taylor says, and her lip curls. “I get it.”

Buck reels back, stumbling over his own feet. He just manages to stay upright, but the look on his face is devastating.

“You should,” he says, only just audible. “We talked about this.”

She unbuttons her blazer with shaking hands. Looks at the ground, the brilliant orange of her hair obscuring her face, and exhales. When she looks back up, she’s a little softer, her eyes liquid when she looks at Buck.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and when Buck takes a step towards her, she takes one backwards. “Sorry, I—you know it’s been a shitty day. I shouldn’t have said it that way.”

Buck puts away his hurt, just like that. It’s smooth, practiced to perfection: his shoulders drawing back, his chin lifting, his face going from wide-eyed and furrowed to a uniform softness that’s so perfect it can only be a mask.

“I know,” he says, reaching for her, and Eddie viscerally wants to slap his hand away. “I know,” he says again, and she steps into his embrace, her hands small on the bulk of his back. “But you’re going to bring back an amazing report, and next time you’ll be the one covering the bank robbery, huh?”

Eddie had caught something about a robbery on the radio on his way in. Of course she’s upset about covering a toy drive instead, Eddie thinks, and doesn’t have time to get pettier because his eyes catch on the expression on Buck’s face and won’t let go.

His eyes are closed, and his lips are resting against Taylor’s forehead, a lingering kiss that makes Eddie’s throat tighten. The way his arm is wrapped around her, the soft hand on the back of her head, it’s—Eddie has to blink the fog out of his eyes and look away before he falls to pieces, because he wants—

“Can we talk about it later?” Taylor asks quietly, and by the time Eddie’s composed himself, she’s no longer in Buck’s arms, just standing with her hand in his, plenty of space between them.

Eddie takes a step back. He shouldn’t have been here in the first place, eavesdropping like a child, and he’s only made it worse for himself; the image of Buck stepping up, stepping in, pouring all of himself into comforting the woman he loves over something that Eddie can’t help but think of as trivial, is burned into the back of Eddie’s eyelids, tattooed there like a reminder of what he’ll never have.

“About what?” Buck asks. Eddie’s trying to sneak past behind him, so he can’t see his face anymore, just Taylor’s, and she’s wrinkling her nose again.

“Our priorities,” she says. “I think we’re in a place in our relationship where it’s becoming necessary. We both have to be in this equally.”

“We—Taylor,” Buck says, and the hurt in his voice pulls Eddie up short. “You barely even talked to me before you needed to interview me because you’re upset about work.”

“I’m allowed to be upset about something that’s important to me,” she says. Eddie takes a few steps, headed back for Hen who’s swamped with boxes, but something pulls him up short. Like a string between him and Buck, going uncomfortably tight. Like Eddie can’t leave him in this, even when Buck doesn’t know he’s there.

“Of course you are,” he says. “And I’m allowed to take a minute to say hi to Christopher, who’s important to me.”

Eddie’s eyes burn. He doesn’t close them, out of sheer stubbornness, just so he can see the way Taylor huffs, and looks away, and starts to roll her eyes before she catches herself.

Another thing she catches, unfortunately, is Eddie. He has a plausible enough cover – he’s about halfway between the donation table and the pile Ravi’s sorting – but he doesn’t try to move away when she pins him down. Instead, he straightens up and meets her stare head-on.

There is something in her eyes dangerous enough to make Eddie shiver.

“Buck,” she says, and then she’s looking up into Buck’s face with a sour kind of smile, “I just worry about you. About that whole situation. He’s not your child.”

Buck flinches. Even from here, Eddie can see the tension that wraps around him, squaring off the lines of his back. He tries to pull his hand away, and Taylor doesn’t let him.

“I know,” he says, his voice thick. Eddie desperately wishes he could see Buck’s face; that he could walk up and pull him away and shield him from whatever litany of doubts has no doubt started up in his head just because Taylor Kelly, who doesn’t know the first thing about absolutely fucking anything, said Christopher isn’t his.

Even if that were true – which it so plainly, painfully isn’t – nobody who knows Buck, who’s seen him with Christopher, would say it to him this way.

“I know he’s not,” Buck repeats. He sounds so suddenly wrecked that Eddie’s fists clench at his sides. “You don’t need to remind me.”

“So can we talk about it?” she asks, somehow pushing where that’s the exact opposite of what she needs to do, raising her hand to Buck’s cheek, and Eddie just, just bites down on some horrible, primal scream. She shouldn’t; she can’t.

“Yeah,” Buck shrugs a shoulder. “Sure. Whatever. You know when I get off, just wait at mine if you want.”

And he ducks in for a kiss on the cheek, so fast she can’t pull a response together, and marches off. He doesn’t notice Eddie, thankfully, because he’s going in the opposite direction – toward Christopher, who’s roped Denny and Harry into helping with the presents, all three of them happily sitting on a bench and handing Ravi stickers. Buck high-fives them when he gets there, and presses a kiss to Christopher’s temple when Harry and Denny aren’t looking, settling down cross-legged on the ground.

Eddie leaves him in the more than capable hands of his son, for now, and takes a minute to get himself under control. Taylor has slinked off somewhere, at least, probably to film some B-roll she can then narrate in a monotone, so he looks down at his hands and carefully breathes in.

His heart is racing, slamming against his breastbone with how frantic it is. To do what, he doesn’t know – to go to Buck, to pull him away, to tell him Eddie would never treat him like this? To go after Taylor and give her a piece of his mind? To go back to Hen and lean on her shoulder and ask if she sees it too, the way Buck pours all of himself into other people, the way he’d dash himself to pieces if someone else could use them to float to safety?

He digs his nails into his palms, and thinks of Taylor’s eyes, with something in them like a challenge. His skin itches, burning hot under the collar of his uniform, and he can’t shake the feeling that he’s unleashed something just by meeting her gaze.

He goes back to the table eventually, with Hen and Bobby watching him the whole way. They must see something on his face that stops them from asking, though, and they let Eddie stew in his thoughts as the crowd finally peters out, as he turns his thoughts over and over and over in his head, incapable of forgetting the way Buck’s eyelashes had fluttered when he pulled Taylor close.

And what he’s left with is the knowledge that he could never do enough to deserve Buck.

But Taylor Kelly doesn’t deserve him either.

Eddie sees her as soon as he steps out of Frank’s office.

He only has a split second to make a decision, and what he decides to do is duck behind the giant potted palm right beside the door, except—

“Eddie?”

He pokes his head out. She’s turned toward him, smiling, not looking like she wants to be left alone.

So Eddie lets himself relax. Lets himself smile back, and take a step in her direction, and wrap his arms around her when she goes in for a hug.

“Maddie,” he says, and squeezes her tighter than he’d meant to. “God, it’s good to see you.”

He doesn’t really realize how true it is until he’s saying it. They’ve never been particularly close, but she has this thing about her that she’s passed on to Buck: the ability to make an entire room feel warm and loving and lived in just by being it.

“You too,” she smiles. Her hair is shorter, and Eddie can read the time that has passed in the suggestion of darkness in her eyes, the way she holds herself like she’s a little more fragile than before. “You’re looking great.”

“Uh,” Eddie blinks down at himself: he’s wearing sweatpants again, but this time it’s the nice black ones, and a hoodie that used to be Buck’s something like a year and a half ago, before Eddie decided it belonged to him. “Thanks. I think.”

She rolls her eyes, familiar enough that it chokes him up just a little. “I meant your whole,” she waves an arm to indicate all of him, “vibe.”

“My vibe,” Eddie repeats, unable to stop a smile. “Are you in a relationship with Chim, by any chance?”

“Shh,” she puts a finger to her lips, “it’s a secret.”

She reaches for the chair behind her, which Eddie just notices is piled high with her things, a folded trench coat and a handbag and an umbrella, because it’s supposed to rain one of these days.

He’s not entirely sure what to say. He can’t really put into the words all the ways in which the world has just been righted on its axis, and he doesn’t want to pry, but, well.

“What are you—“ comes out of him before he can convince himself not to ask, and he feels himself blush in the cool air of the mostly-empty waiting room. “I mean, not that I have the right to know or anything, but I didn’t expect—“

She laughs, a familiar sound he hasn’t heard in entirely too long.

“Hey, we’re both here,” she says, pulling the strap of her bag over her shoulder, “probably for some of the same reasons.”

“Probably,” Eddie says, and finds himself grinning down at her, at the common ground between them that’s so much bigger than a few inches of ancient hospital tile. “But you’re—you’re not seeing Frank, are you? I wouldn’t wish him on you.”

“Oh, no,” Maddie shakes her head, inclining her head in the direction of the door. Eddie puts his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, shrugs, and follows her. “Not anymore. I’m a few doors down, I got a referral. They just took me through all the paperwork today, and I had to fill out, like, seven checklists that I’ve already done three times.”

She dodges a cluster of people coming up the stairs, and Eddie has to jog to keep up with her.

It doesn’t look like rain outside. The sky’s a pale blue that bleeds into grey, wintery-bright, reflecting off the lines that dissect the half-empty parking lot. Maddie’s tan coat is a spot of warmth in the chill. Eddie follows it like a beacon, then slows down at her side when she stops just short of stepping off the curb.

“So,” he says ,waiting her out, picking up the conversation from the stairwell, “did you just get back?”

She looks a little more lost when she looks up at him, but she’s still calm. Steady.

“Yeah,” she says, blinking out at the cars glinting in the distant sun. “Yeah, Howie picked me up this morning. And now I’m supposed to get an Uber and go see Buck, but I’m, uh. I’m not so sure.”

Eddie frowns. “Why are you getting an Uber?”

“Don’t worry,” Maddie says, the corner of her mouth twitching, “he didn’t leave me here voluntarily, I had to argue with him about it for an hour. I just wanted—a little bit more time, I think,” she says, “to process. But now I wish he was here.”

“I mean,” Eddie clears his throat, looks down at his feet, “you can always call him. You know he’d come running. He’s probably around the corner somewhere, just in case.”

It makes him smile to think about it: Chim, a little more whole than when Eddie last saw him at work yesterday, a little less haggard. Buck, no longer turning around to say something to someone only to find them gone.

Maddie laughs, soft. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m just—I don’t now. I wanted to be back in the real world. I don’t really want to admit that it’s too real.”

And that feeling rings true in some soft, vulnerable place inside Eddie, too. He’d just finished walking Frank through the time between coming home and leaving for LA, so it’s right at the forefront of his mind, what it’s like to feel constantly small and vulnerable and just this side of disgusting, like a snail without a shell.

“Well,” he shrugs, watching the side of her face, watching as she looks at people coming and going, “if you want another option, I can always drive you. My schedule’s wide open.”

He was, in fact, going to head home and take a post-therapy nap, because he’s caught up on laundry and he vacuumed two days ago and he has leftovers in the fridge and Christopher’s safely at school and the daytime is a little safer, in terms of the intrusive thoughts that worm their way into his brain when he sleeps.

But he can push that back for Maddie. He wants to, because he thinks they might kind of be in the same place, stripped bare of the things they took for granted and trying to figure out how to keep walking with so much weight gone.

“Oh,” Maddie blinks. She looks at her hands, at her phone clutched tight in her fingers. “I wouldn’t want to…” she starts, and then stops. Blinks again. Looks him in the eye, and he looks back, smiles at her the best he can. “You’re sure?”

“I wouldn’t have offered otherwise,” he says, and takes a careful step off the curb. He offers his elbow, which she frowns at for a second. “We can stop for coffee or something, if you want more time.”

And that, finally, has her smiling at him again. She reaches out to thread her arm through his, and Eddie leads her across the parking lot pretty sure they’ve never touched or spoken this much, but it feels like they’ve been doing it forever.

“I would love some coffee, actually,” Maddie says once she climbs up into the truck, buckling her seatbelt on the fourth attempt. “Believe it or not, the stuff they give you in a psychiatric institution has nothing on a good sugary Starbucks.”

Eddie, in the middle of starting the car, wheezes out a laugh.

“Sorry,” Maddie shrugs, digging in her handbag until she produces a tube of lip balm. “I’ve been told I cope via inappropriate humor, apparently.”

“Oh, I get that,” Eddie says, because Frank’s been on the receiving end of many, many fucked up jokes. “Sorry I was trying to hide earlier, by the way,” he says, watching the rearview as he reverses out of the spot. “I was trying to pretend I didn’t see you. Wasn’t sure if you wanted anyone to know you were there, you know? I wore a hat and sunglasses the first time I came.”

Maddie laughs. “I’d try to hide it if I stopped going to therapy,” she says. “It’s—I broke up with it, for a while, but it can also be really good. It’s nice to just dump all the puzzle pieces on the table and have some help putting them together, if you find the right person for you.”

“Your therapist sounds like a dream,” Eddie says, making a right in the direction of the closest Starbucks drive-through instead of the left he’d take for Buck’s apartment. “Frank just does the eyebrows at me for an hour and somehow I come out understanding the meaning of life.”

“Yeah, they do that,” she says. They pass a couple of streets in silence, him watching the half-empty roads, her twirling the lip balm between her fingers. She turns to him when he rolls to a stop at a red light. “How have you been?” she asks, something urgent behind it. “Anything new?”

“Well,” Eddie says, tapping his fingers on the wheel because he doesn’t have the excuse of watching the road. “I’m in therapy, obviously. I got a new kitchen table. I’m single. I’m queer,” he says, and it just falls out of him, easy as anything. He blinks, hearing the words reverberate. “And I keep coming out to people without meaning to, apparently.”

And isn’t that a phrase. Coming out. One of those things he’d never dreamed of doing, not even for the split second when he was a teenager and let himself look at the captain of the football team; and now his newfound identity is stumbling over itself to be out in the world. Demanding to be heard, now that he’s let it in.

When he looks at Maddie, her eyes are wide, her mouth halfway open like she’s not sure what to say.

“Sorry to just drop that on you,” Eddie tries to smile, and the light turns green.

“No,” Maddie breathes out in a rush, “no, no, that’s—oh my God, Eddie, I’m so happy for you.”

Her voice has the hint of a tremor in it. Eddie doesn’t look over, because he’s pulling into the drive-through line behind a muddy white Toyota.

“Thanks,” he sighs, turning the radio down by a couple of notches. “I don’t know why—I just keep saying things. Frank’s always making me share, and then I just,” he waves a hand, “do this.”

“I think that’s the point,” Maddie whispers conspiratorially, and wraps a hand around his forearm, just a quick squeeze and then gone again. “But seriously. That’s wonderful. You look—lighter.”

Her smile dims a little on the last one, so he reaches right back over center console, his fingertips just brushing her shoulder.

“So do you,” he says, because he remembers the way she’d looked when he last saw her, curled into Chim’s side, full of smiles that wilted at the corners. “I don’t look any different to myself in the mirror, so just in case you—you know. You do look lighter.”

She nods, pursing her lips. Eddie gives her a second, letting the truck roll forward when the Toyota moves.

“Hey Eddie?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you ever feel like you’re the worst parent in the world?”

He looks at her, then, at the way her eyes track the cars whizzing past on the road, following along and jumping back to the beginning.

“Every day,” he says. “Multiple times a day. All the time.”

She blinks, and her eyes still, settling on the side mirror of the car in front of them. “Oh.”

“It’s just—“ he starts, but then there’s room in front of them again, and he’s rolling up to the order point. He gets a latte for himself, because this is shaping up to be that kind of day, and a white peppermint mocha for Maddie, who grimaces a little as she says it. He waves away her offer to pay, pulls to the next window, gets their drinks, and circles around to stop in the parking lot.

He takes the lid off his cup, a habit he picked up from Buck; to his right, Maddie does the same thing.

“But it goes away, right?” she asks, watching the bubbles pop in the foam on her drink. “Like—sometimes?”

“Of course,” says Eddie, looking out at where a jogger’s running across the lot with a big yellow dog on a leash. “It’s more that—I question myself, you know? Because anytime I do something, I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing or messing him up forever, and I won’t know until it comes back to bite me in the ass.”

“I know the feeling,” Maddie says, smiling joylessly.

“And if I have to make too many choices, I just start feeling like I must be the worst father to ever live, because I shouldn’t be this unsure about everything. But then he turns around and does something that blows my mind and it’s—I’ve been letting myself think that maybe I have a little bit of a role in that, too. The good things, not just the bad ones.”

“Of course you do,” Maddie says. “What, you think a kid with a heart the size of Christopher’s just happens?”

But Eddie doesn’t think of Christopher; here, looking at Maddie parked by a Starbucks at noon on a Friday, he thinks of Buck, the kindest, most loving person he’s ever met. Thinks of Buck’s parents, the one time he met them as they shuffled awkwardly into the station like they were worried they’d catch some kind of disease.

He looks at Buck’s sister, who seems particularly small in her big coat, and thinks she might need to hear it out loud.

“No, you’re right,” he says, taking a sip of his coffee. “I mean, look at Buck.”

And it’s enough to draw a couple of lines; she can read between them, and her eyes fill with actual tears for the first time today.

“You know,” she sniffs, and he hands her a pack of tissues, which he’s started keeping in the car for post-therapy drives home, “one of the first things Buck ever said to me about you?”

“Oh, this should be good,” Eddie says.

“It is,” she smiles, wobbly. “He said, ‘he loves that kid like crazy. He’s a really great dad’.”

It’s Eddie’s turn to hold his breath. “Oh.”

“And you are,” she say, turning in her seat to face him. “Just watching you do it sometimes is like—I don’t know, like you’re playing the Superbowl and I’m learning how to throw the ball.” She wipes the corner of her eye, dabbing where her eyeliner has bled a little bit. “I mean, God, don’t get me wrong, but it’s—it’s kind of nice to hear that you don’t always have it figured out.”

Eddie laughs, all the way from the bottom of his throat. “I’m not even in the neighborhood of having it figured out,” he says, and realizes he’s tilted his cup too far to the side when hot milk spills down his fingers. Maddie hands him a tissue, her smile as teary as it is amused.

“Frank,” Eddie says, “says that being aware of your decisions as a parent means you’re doing something right. Because people who mess up their kids the worst don’t usually weigh things like that.”

Maddie hums. She blows on her drink, the sickly sweet scent of it filling the car. “That sounds like a generalization,” she says.

“I’m sure it is,” says Eddie, “but it’s nice to hear, you know?”

“So,” Maddie bites her lip. “Do you think it’s possible to like—get better at it? Without screwing up your kid forever?”

“God, I hope so,” Eddie says, looking up at where his roof liner has started sagging. “I’d like to think I’m doing better than I was when I didn’t even know how to hold Christopher right.”

“How do you mean?”

Eddie shrugs. “Exactly how it sounds. I was—I came back, between tours, and he’d grown so much and only knew me through a computer screen. I was terrified of touching him. Of messing him up somehow.”

Maddie nods, frowning in thought.

“I left him,” Eddie says, looking at her until she looks back. “On purpose. By choice. Because I was overwhelmed by the idea of having to stay, having to be a husband, having to learn how to take care of him. And he still—I came back, and I asked him if he ever missed me when I was gone, and he said he missed me all the time. That’s all he wanted from me. Just that I stay.”

“Right,” Maddie whispers, nodding furiously, sweeping her hair off her face with a hand that shakes, but only for a breath or two. “Right. They keep telling me that—that I left so I could get better, and I am better, but there’s this part of me that thought until the last minute that I was just going to—go forever. I was going to just get in a car and drive so she’d be as far away from me as possible. So I couldn’t touch her and make her worse.”

“I know the feeling,” Eddie echoes.

“And now I’m back,” Maddie says. “And I have to just—go on.”

Eddie sighs. “That’s how it is,” he tells his coffee. “We have to go on. Knowing everything we’ve done.”

She exhales, and closes her eyes, turning toward the front of the car and tipping her chin up until her head settles against the headrest.

“But we have—well, we have therapy. You have Chim. And Buck, and me, and everyone else who’s been helping, we’re not just going to up and take it all back. I’m told it takes a village.”

She nods, and doesn’t say anything. Eddie takes his cue from her, and watches the sky in the distance, where something that could possibly pass for a raincloud seems to be gathering. The radio’s still on low, all Christmas songs this time of year, and he’s pretty sure this is the third time he’s heard Last Christmas today, but there’s something comforting about it all when he listens in: his quiet breathing, Maddie’s, and the song just silent enough that he can’t make out anything other than the familiar beat.

After a few minutes, Maddie sniffles.

“I should go see him,” she says, looking out of the passenger window. “I want to go see him.”

Eddie nods. “Then let’s go,” he says, setting his drink in the cup holder. “Is he—do you know if he’s expecting you?”

She opens her eyes then, blinking at him confused. “He’s not,” she says. “I didn’t want to tell him and then back out if I couldn’t do it, but—doesn’t he just have the day off like the rest of you?”

“No, he does,” Eddie says, pulling out his phone, “it’s just the Taylor of it all.”

It comes out way pettier than he intends, and he bites his tongue as he opens his texts and sends a quick hey, you @ home?.

“Eddie,” Maddie says. He knows that tone, somehow, and knows that if he looks up, he’s toast.

“Just checking with him,” he says, waiting as the three dots pop up. “You know, just in case.”

“I’m sure Taylor would understand if he asked her to give us a minute,” says Maddie. “Since she’s, you know, his girlfriend. She’d know that he’s looking forward to seeing me again.”

Yep, Buck sends back. You ok? Need anything?

Eddie doesn’t need anything. He would like to crawl into Buck’s bed and take his post-therapy nap there, ideally with Buck’s arms around him when he and Maddie are done talking, but this is real life, so he shakes his head like a dog and pretends that got rid of the thought.

No, just got something for u. Ok if I stop by?

Buck sends a thumbs up emoji right back, so Eddie locks his phone and squishes it into the cup holder next to his coffee.

He braves looking up, and finds Maddie with her eyebrows halfway up her forehead.

“Don’t say anything,” he says, knowing he might as well be transparent as she searches his eyes. “Everything’s fine.”

“Eddie,” she says, with a warning clear in her voice.

“Nice weather today, isn’t it?” Eddie says, navigating back onto the road the way they came. His tongue feels a little burned, and his mouth tastes acidic, because he never learns his lesson about Starbucks.

“Mm,” Maddie agrees, squinting at the road outside. “Looks like it’s raining obvious firefighters who think I can’t see right through them.”

“No, I know you can see right through me,” Eddie says, because he does have a little bit of self-awareness. “I just don’t want to talk about it.”

She sighs. They pass the hospital with all of its blank glinting windows, and Eddie briefly longs for an hour ago, when he was still in Frank’s office talking about how it made him feel to work sixteen-hour days across three jobs.

“You know you can though, right?” Maddie asks at another red light, about two minutes away from Buck’s building. “Talk about it. I know him almost as well as you do.”

Eddie scoffs. “You know him better than anyone.”

But she’s watching him with something quietly warm in her eyes as she shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says, “and that’s a good thing. I’ve waited a long time for it to happen.”

Green light.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Eddie says, turning onto an intimately familiar street. “Not now, anyway.”

Except for how he’s been sitting up alone, these past few days, watching the darkness outside reflect his own face back at him in the kitchen window, and thinking and thinking and thinking until his ears are ringing with it.

And he’s been thinking that maybe—maybe it is the way Karen said. That Buck doesn’t know he could have something else. That he could have anything he asked of Eddie, the minute he asked it, his heart and his hand and his son and his home.

But he’s stepped back from the ledge, every time, just feeling the intangible possibility under his tiptoes without taking the leap. It’s ridiculously presumptuous of Eddie to think that he could ever be enough; that Buck, bright and kind and overwhelming in every sense, would settle for him when he could have anything.

It’s impossible, and yet.

And yet.

“Okay, well,” Maddie says, peering up at Buck’s apartment building, “as the world’s second ranking expert on my brother, can I tell you something?”

Eddie sighs. “That’s a rhetorical question, right?”

“Right,” Maddie grins with her canines out. She’s beautiful when she smiles, and looks so much like Buck it makes Eddie’s breath hitch a little bit. “And I’m sure you know this already, but I just want to make sure you know. He needs words.”

Eddie’s hackles rise for a fraction of a second, because he’s not sure what other words he could use, not when he still remembers how it felt to hold his heart in his mouth, you act like you’re expendable cutting into his tongue, bleeding everything onto the bedspread. He hadn’t even known, then; he only knew grey and green and red bleeding together, a terrified pair of blue eyes, and still he couldn’t leave it unsaid.

“And before we go in,” Maddie says, turning to him, “I wanted to say thank you. I mean, I’m going to have to thank like a dozen people, but you too. For being there for them.”

Eddie waves a hand. “You don’t need to—“

“Shut up,” she says, raising a finger at him, reminding Eddie so much of Adriana it makes him laugh a little. “Thank you for being there for my brother, and my partner, and my daughter. You need to specifically set aside time and effort to do that kind of thing, especially when you’ve been going through so many changes, so,” she pokes the finger into his chest, “thank you.”

“Uh,” Eddie laughs, a little hoarse, and rubs the damp corner of his eye. “You’re welcome, Maddie. Sorry I taught Jee how to blow spit bubbles.”

She blinks. “You what?”

“Oh, look at that,” Eddie says, hopping out of the cab, “we better go, Buck’s expecting us.”

She tumbles out after him laughing, catching up just as he buzzes the door open, holding it for her to pass through. She only starts looking nervous once they’re in the elevator, balling her hands up in her pockets.

“Try not to worry too much,” he says, trying to figure out what to do with his arms to put her more at ease, and settling on putting them in his pockets too. “Just wait until you see how excited he’ll be.”

She smiles, but it’s fleeting, and when the door dings open, Eddie has to hold it for a while before she’s comfortable getting out.

“Can you knock for me?” she asks, tugging at the hem of her sweater. “I swear I’m a grown woman.”

Eddie laughs. “I can just go in, if you want. See what he’s up to.”

He’s opening the door before she even nods, knocking on it as it creaks to let him into the apartment.

“Buck?” he calls, and it takes a little while for Buck to appear upstairs, very rumpled, evidently taking his own nap or close to it. Eddie does not think about something ridiculous like snuggling into the spot where his neck meets his shoulder, which would probably be warm from bed and smell like him.

“Hey,” he says, rubbing his eyes. His shirt is creased in a million places, and it makes him look adorable instead of a mess, which isn’t fair. “What’s up?”

“I brought you something,” Eddie grins. “Come down here.”

Buck looks down at himself, crumpled shirt and shorts and bare feet, and shrugs before he pads down the stairs. Eddie takes a few steps inside, and debates whether a hug is acceptable, which should be a definitive sign that he’s overthinking it, because Buck just hops off the bottom step and wraps him right up like they always do, a quick, all-encompassing squeeze.

“You don’t have anything with you,” he frowns when he pulls away, looking down at Eddie’s hoodie like it betrayed him.

“It’s outside,” Eddie says. “I’m just—gonna go, give you some time. Just wanted to make sure you’re decent.”

Buck’s frown deepens, his mouth settling into the suggestion of a pout. “I have no idea what’s happening,” he whines, and Eddie can’t resist reaching out and running a hand through his hair.

“Don’t worry,” he says, taking a step back, and is about to say something else when the door creaks behind him, and Buck freezes where he’s standing.

“Maddie?” he breathes, moving forward and stopping himself like he’s not sure if she’s real.

Eddie turns to her. She’s rolling one of her coat buttons between her fingers, and has tears in her eyes, but the warmth in her smile is breathtaking.

“Hi, Evan,” she says, and then Eddie barely manages to get out of the way as Buck barrels toward her, wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her into the air, spinning. She shrieks, and Eddie wipes a tear into his sleeve as he carefully steps around them to the door.

“Maddie,” Buck says, his voice shaking. “When did—how—Eddie?”

Eddie turns around. “It’s a long story,” he says when he sees the questions swimming in Buck’s eyes. “I’ll let Maddie tell you, okay? I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

Buck looks down at his sister, flushed and so happy it’s almost palpable in the air around him, the way he should always look if Eddie had any say.

“Okay,” he says, a little dazed. “I—talk later?”

“You bet,” Eddie grins, and softly closes the door behind him.

There’s no one out in the hallway, and most of Buck’s neighbors work regular hours, so they shouldn’t be peeping. Eddie allows himself five seconds of weakness, just a couple of breaths to lean his forehead against the cool wood of Buck’s door and think about the way he looked, like Eddie handed him the entire world when all he did was buy a coffee and drive.

It gnaws at something inside him, how much he’d like to make Buck look that way again and again.

He’s just not sure he could ever know how.

“I think what it boils down to, Eddie,” Frank says, “is that you’re allowed to need things.”

“Don’t like that,” Eddie says, taking a loud sip of the coffee that the receptionist, once again, so kindly made for him.

Frank makes some kind of honking noise.

“Sorry,” he says, pausing to cough into the crook of his elbow, “you don’t like that you’re allowed to need things?”

Eddie sighs. “Yeah.”

He’s not in a therapy mood today, as Frank would say. He’s here, and he’s letting his therapist dig through his very entrails like an annoying bearded vulture, but he’s a little more annoyed about it than he normally would be.

Which Frank says is fine, and that’s a little infuriating.

“Right,” he says. He hasn’t even picked up his clipboard today, and Eddie doesn’t know whether that’s a good or bad. “Could you walk me through your thought process there?”

Eddie sighs, and picks and pick and picks at a loose thread in the seam of his jeans. It’s offensively bright outside today, and the way the sun slants in just now paints long, thing stripes on the floor that Eddie would compare to prison bars, if he was feeling melodramatic.

“It’s just annoying,” he says, and Frank chuckles. “Because it’s—I can’t remember the last time I did something that I wanted, like, just for me. I can’t remember—“ wanting something, he almost says, but that’s a fucking lie, because Buck is always there, and Eddie always wants him. “I guess I know what it feels like to want, but I don’t know if I know how to need things. Because there’s a difference, right? Between wanting and needing?”

“There sure is,” Frank says, spinning his pen between his fingers. “But the way they interact is important. Like, say—sometimes you may need to eat because you haven’t eaten all day, but you don’t want to because you feel sick, or have no appetite. That ever happen to you?”

“All the time,” Eddie nods. Less so when Buck is around, because he’ll just relentlessly present Eddie with foodstuffs until Eddie finds something that looks at least vaguely appetizing, but—yeah. It’s embarrassingly overwhelming sometimes, just having to feed himself.

“Or let’s say you need therapy, but don’t want it.”

Eddie sighs. “That’s low.”

“And yet it’s true,” Frank raises an eyebrow. He rolls up his sleeves and leans forward, which never spells anything good. “Or it was, at least. I think I spotted a hint of a smile when you said hi to me today.”

“Optical illusion,” Eddie says, fully looking around him for the first time today. There’s a gaggle of finches fighting over the contents of the feeder, and a ridiculously fat squirrel watching from the branch above them. “You get on my nerves.”

“I know,” Frank says, content. “Now let’s say you go to the store and walk past your favorite beer, and you somehow end up with two six-packs in the cart. You don’t need the beer to survive, or even to have a good time, but you wanted it, so you got it.”

“Right,” Eddie says, tilting his head at Frank, because he has no clue where this particular detour is taking them. “And that’s related to my interpersonal relationships how?”

“I’m getting there,” Frank raises his hands, palms up, annoyingly amused. “I’m just making sure you get the difference. A need is something we need to function and lead stable lives, so you need food and shelter, but you also need interpersonal relationships, you need to feel safe, you need to feel loved and trusted. And a want is something that makes your life better, but you could do without it if you had to, like a specific meal, or a fancy house.”

So it turns out Eddie might not want Buck after all.

“And you, Eddie,” Frank says, pointing with his pen, “are a breed of person whose wants sometimes sabotage his needs.”

“Yeah,” Eddie blinks at him, “I’m still lost.”

“Okay, well,” Frank reaches for something on his desk, which turns out to be Eddie’s file, “not that I know your entire life, but I hope you’ll agree when I say that you’ve shared a significant part of it with me over the past few months.”

Eddie runs a hand through his hair. “Sure,” he says, watching the light pool on the floor, right where he usually ends up spilling his guts as soon as his mouth opens.

“So the first thing that comes to mind,” Frank says, “is Shannon.”

Eddie shivers.

“Is it okay if I ask you to think about her, for a little bit? I’d really like your opinion on what you thought you needed from her when she came back into your life.”

“I mean,” Eddie looks down at his hands, blinks and is back to holding a folded yellow sundress. “ I think—I needed her to be someone I could trust. Everything else was secondary, because if I couldn’t trust her then she couldn’t be my partner, or Christopher’s mother.”

“Okay,” Frank nods, carefully watching the way Eddie wrings his hands together, like he could squeeze the bones out if he tried hard enough. “Why do you think you had sex with her before you were sure you could trust her?”

Eddie’s talked about far more embarrassing things in this office, but as he looks away from Frank, up at the ceiling, the tips of his ears are burning anyway.

“Because I wanted—yeah, okay. I wanted to have the kind of connection we used to have. I wanted—God, I wanted someone to touch me. I wanted to be close to her, I wanted to feel good.”

“And how did it feel?”

“I guess—it did feel good?” Eddie asks the air. “Physically. And when I was with her, I liked being with her. But it was like we got out of bed and just immediately fell apart.”

“Because you didn’t trust her,” Frank says, like putting the final flourish on a painting. Eddie’s Fucked Up Psyche, oil on canvas.

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs. “So what you’re saying is that when I do decide to want something for myself, it’s basically self-sabotage.”

“Not at all, actually,” Frank says. “I just think you internalized the wrong things after what happened with her.”

“I wished for a sign, and then she died,” Eddie says. “It’s not complicated.”

Frank sighs. “And is it possible,” he says, in that infuriating tone that presumes the answer, “that you think you somehow had a hand in causing a complete accident?”

Finally, after all these months, Eddie bites clean through the inside of his lip. The blood that floods his mouth is sickly-warm, pulsing out of the wound in a way that turns Eddie’s stomach, but he doesn’t reach for a tissue to soak it up. He doesn’t move at all, just swallows the blood, tastes it sliding down his throat.

“I was what drove her to the brink in the first place,” he says, because he was. “She left me. And she—she didn’t come back when I expected her to, so she left Christopher too, which is why I didn’t know how to trust her again, but I’m the one who started the whole thing, Frank. I was the last drop in the bucket. She couldn’t stand to be with me for two days before she was gone, and if it didn’t happen that way, she wouldn’t have been crossing that fucking street.”

“Eddie,” Frank says quietly. “This is what I’m talking about.”

“This isn’t like—like me not remembering the shooting,” Eddie says, pulling on his hair at the roots. The inside of his mouth tastes like metal. “It’s not your misplaced guilt over something I couldn’t control. I did this. All my life I’ve been—“

“All your life,” Frank interrupts, reaching forward to lay a hand on the coffee table, like a displaced touch to where Eddie’s digging his nails into his forearm. “You’ve been trying to meet standards set for somebody else. All your life you’ve been under pressure that should’ve never been put on you. And you’ve made plenty of mistakes, but those are part of existing in the world. You make a mistake, you acknowledge it and make amends, and you try to move forward.”

Eddie shakes his head.

“But Eddie,” Frank says, and Eddie can’t see the look on his face anymore because he’s closed his eyes, to get away from it, to stop the tears from falling, “you live your life like you’re a mistake.”

His mouth feels full of blood, all the way to the brim; like if he breathes in, it’ll slip into his lungs and drown him.

“I’m sorry,” says Frank, even quieter than before, or maybe Eddie’s heart is just drumming in his ears so loudly the entire world is echoing with it. “But you know what I’m saying. I know we’ve come far enough that you can see it, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. You’re always trying so hard to be what other people need. You put yourself in the line of fire, body and soul, because you want to be useful or the guilt will eat you alive.”

Eddie presses the inside of his elbow over his face to muffle the sound that claws out of his chest. His eyes burn until he opens them, and then he’s staring at the sleeve of his white sweater smeared with red.

He has to—breathe, God, he knows this. Knows how to bring himself back into his body, into the feeling of his feet firm on the ground. In, hold, out, hold. Focus. Think of Buck, because Eddie’s way past pretending that he doesn’t make everything just a little bit more bearable.

“I can’t absolve you, Eddie,” Frank says. “You’re the only person who can do that, and I think maybe now’s a good time to start thinking about how to do it. Because you’ve found a person who fulfills your needs and then some, and you want to be with them, but you’re still holding on so, so tight to the way you’ve been punishing yourself. You want to suffer because you think you have something to atone for, and it has a tendency to override your needs because it’s all you’ve known for so long.”

Eddie takes another breath, and holds it until it’s just starting to hurt. He clears his throat, rubs at the bloodstains on his sleeve.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Frank.”

He laughs, almost, but it comes out more like a wheeze, like the dying breath of something ancient inside Eddie that’s just been dragged into the light and crumbled to dust.

“I did try to ease you into it,” Frank says, annoyingly gentle.

“Yeah, with beer at the grocery store,” Eddie pinches the bridge of his nose, and finally reaches for a tissue to wipe his mouth, another one to blow his nose, balling both of them up and throwing them across the room into Frank’s weird basket of a trash can. “I just—this is a lot, man.”

“Of course it is,” he nods.

“And it’s like—every time I come here thinking I have it all figured out, you put more shit in front of me and tell me to dig through it.”

Frank scratches his chin. “You remember the whack-a-mole?”

“Do not bring up another metaphor,” Eddie says, rubbing at the underside of his wrist where his pulse pushes uncomfortably into the skin. “I’m not whacking anything else, I mean it.”

“I’m just extending it,” Frank grins. “I think this might be like—the mother mole.”

“Frank.”

“You know what I mean,” he says, and Eddie hates that he does. “And it’ll be difficult to keep this one down. It’ll probably keep popping up for years and years down the line.”

Briefly, Eddie has the thought that he didn’t sign up for this, but then—that’s a lie, isn’t it? He signed up for whatever it would take to stop his demons from sinking their claws into Christopher too, and maybe this is part of that.

Maybe Eddie needs to be an actual person, moles and all, so he knows how to get them under control. So he can hold the darkness back and stop it from ever reaching out to swallow anyone else.

Which—

“So it’s a no on the romantic relationships, then,” he says, because that was the original thing he brought up: whether there’s a way for him to be there for someone else without completely fucking them up.

“Now, when did I say that?” Frank asks.

Eddie blinks. “I mean, with the whole,” he waves a hand, “I’m basically just fifteen traumas in a trench coat.”

Frank laughs, belly-deep and delighted. Eddie might be acing therapy, actually.

“I hate to tell you this, Eddie,” he says, folding his arms, “but everyone has their own thing. I don’t know Buck, but even just the things he’s been through with you would land him with plenty of trauma of his own.”

Eddie thinks about Buck’s eyes, bloodshot, Buck’s mouth, smudged, a shade of red it shouldn’t be. He thinks about running into an inferno to help Buck pull his line, about opening the door at midnight to Buck small and shivering.

“That’s why it’s so scary to try.”

“Because you’re trusting the other person with the parts of yourself that no one else sees,” Eddie nods.

And he thinks, maybe. Because Buck comes to him now, came to him before the shooting set them on separate paths for a few weeks that were the wrongest Eddie remembers feeling. He looks at Eddie like he doesn’t need to have answers; like all he needs to do is be there and hold Buck together.

And Eddie—Eddie’s been so focused on not letting anyone see inside him that he missed Buck coming in, somehow. Just looked up and Buck was already there, knee-deep in the mess with him with a smile on his face.

“Exactly,” says Frank. “And that kind of thing can be really, really difficult, especially when you didn’t have anyone to model it for you.”

Eddie snorts. He’s been trying not to think about his parents, or how weirdly insistent they’ve been that he come to Texas for Christmas next week, but he can indulge this thought, just for a second.

“My dad just,” he shrugs, “wasn’t around. And then when he was, it was just—pretending, and—actually, it’s funny. I feel like the times they seemed most in sync was when they were turning on one of us.”

Frank raises an eyebrow in a way that lets Eddie know he’s taking a mental note.

“Buck and I would never be like that. Aren’t like that. He’s not—he’s the kindest person I know.”

“Sounds like the kind of person you’d want by your side when raising your son,” Frank raises an eyebrow. “And the kind of person who wouldn’t consider their partner a burden, as you so elegantly put it, but what do I know. I’m just your therapist.”

As if on cue, the first hint of a headache stabs Eddie gently in the middle of the forehead. He’s pushes it away, busy rolling up his sleeves, trying to hide the blood.

“Maybe—maybe not a burden,” he mumbles, smoothing out the soft knit with his fingers. “But it’s like—when I have the nightmares, or when I wake up and it’s a really bad day, how can I ask him—“ but he sucks his lip into his mouth halfway through the sentence, because memories flood in: of Buck sleeping on Eddie’s shitty couch for a week, and spending the next month’s worth of nights in Eddie’s bed, helping him change and bathe and changing his dressings so gently it made Eddie feel disgusting, undeserving, broken. Of the way he took all of Eddie’s broken pieces and held and held and held them together when it took them a while to start knitting back together.

But that was two months. This is, potentially, the rest of their lives.

“Okay, well,” Frank looks up at the clock, which is definitely about two minutes from cutting their session off, “you’ve been accusing me of reverse psychologizing you at least once every week, so let me actually try it. Does Buck ever have nightmares?”

Eddie sighs. “Yeah.”

“Does he ever have bad days? Are there ever times when he shuts down, or doesn’t want to speak to anyone, or snaps at people?”

“Yeah,” Eddie rubs the corner of his eye. “Yeah, sometimes.”

“And when you see him going through that, what goes through your head?”

“Um,” Eddie says, blinking in surprise. “I guess—just the ways I can be there for him. I know him pretty well, I usually know what he needs, so I can make sure he’s okay.”

Frank just stares at him.

Eddie opens his mouth to defend himself, because—Buck’s the best out of everyone, with a heart of such solid gold it feels like a sin to even think about tarnishing it with his touch, and Eddie is just—Eddie. Eddie who tries his best and just scrapes together an okay.

“It can’t be that simple,” is what he ends up saying.

“Or it can,” Frank shrugs. “Won’t know until you try.”

Eddie goes back to picking at the seam of his jeans.

“Listen,” Frank says, turning toward his desk. “I know all of this is a lot to wrap your head around. It’s weird to think that there’s a part of you that just clings to being unhappy, and you’re not going to exorcise it overnight, but,” he sets Eddie’s file down, and turns back around to smile, “you also came here actively wanting to be a good father to your son, and you wanted to talk about the way your ex-girlfriend made you feel, and we’re here today because you want my opinion on whether you can be a good romantic partner. You have been listening to what you need, taking back agency, this whole time,” he shrugs, “so it’s not really a blind leap you’re taking. Just—I don’t know. A big step over a giant burning pit.”

“Oh, well,” Eddie says, just on the edge of a laugh, “I do that for a living.”

Buck doesn’t smile anymore.

It’s not an abrupt thing, which is why it takes Eddie a second to notice even though he spends most of his days watching him.

But then Chim tells some awful, awful joke about Minnie Mouse, and Eddie turns around to watch a reluctant grin bloom over Buck’s face and finds a mask in its place. Bobby makes his baked mac and cheese, widely known as Buck’s favorite meal in the world, and the corner of his mouth just barely twitches. One of the probies turns on Channel Eight when the news is on with the express purpose of putting Buck on the spot, because he’s usually good-natured about it, looking bashfully at the ground as people elbow him in the side – but this time, the sight of Taylor on the screen makes him freeze, and then he’s excusing himself to the bunk room so quietly no one but Eddie hears.

The point is, he doesn’t smile, and Eddie hates Taylor Kelly from the very bottom of his heart for taking his favorite smile away.

He lasts exactly three days before he snaps.

“Dad,” Christopher says from the backseat, his eyes barely unstuck, “I’m hungry.”

“I know, buddy,” Eddie says, and tries a smile, but he’s so jittery his face just kind of wobbles and falls. “We’ll go get pancakes, okay? Just have to pick up Buck first.”

Buck, who texted him a sloth video at half past five in the morning, marking the unlikely last straw, because Eddie’s sick of this, of waiting, of reaching over the line only to pull back.

He’s sick of Buck being so far away when he could be in Eddie’s bed, comfortable enough to sleep through his alarm. Sick of the way he holds himself these days, like a doll that’s had its limbs torn off and reattached in the wrong places, a wax figurine. Sick of the way the love sleeps, patient, quietly eternal, just under his skin. He wants to scream it loud enough that Buck hears, tell him in every way he knows how, and he wants—

He just wants Buck to know that he has options. That there is someone who’ll fight for him just like he wants.

Which is how he finds himself pulling up in front of Buck’s building, just long enough for Buck, who’s already waiting outside, to jump into the passenger seat.

“Morning, Diazes,” he says, and he’s smiling, which almost makes Eddie look away. He wants to; he would, but then Buck’s not going to see, and he’s done hiding.

So he lets his face show whatever it will, and reaches out to squeeze Buck’s shoulder.

“Morning, Buck,” he says, letting it come out soft.

“Morning Buck!” Christopher yells, the entire car reverberating with it, and Buck twists in his seat to hold his hand out for a fistbump.

“There he is,” he grins, bright like this is the way he’s been looking this entire time. Like he didn’t stress Eddie into an emergency phone session with Frank in the firehouse parking lot immediately post-shift. “Do you know what this mysterious trip is about, buddy?”

“Dad won’t tell me,” Christopher says, the eyeroll audible even when Eddie’s looking out at the road. “But we’re getting pancakes before. I’m so hungry.”

“Me too,” Buck says, matching his inflection. Eddie’s waiting to enter an intersection, so it’s fine that he looks over just to see Buck’s big hand splay over his stomach. He makes a noise in the back of his throat that’s probably meant to mimic a stomach growling; Christopher immediately tries to imitate it, and then they’re off, trying to outdo each other with ridiculous noises. Eddie turns off the radio when neither of them is looking.

He might as well not be there as he pulls up in front of Sally’s, which is their favorite but also a little too far to make it a regular thing. Christopher peers out of the window and whoops loud enough to make Eddie’s ears ring, and then Buck is out of the truck and opening the back door, unbuckling Chris, throwing him over his shoulder, and running off across the parking lot.

He finds them already seated when he makes it inside, opposite each other in a booth by the window. Eddie takes a second to watch them, passionately debating something that has Buck picking up the saltshaker and gesticulating so hard salt sprays into the air. They both burst out laughing as some of it lands in Buck’s hair and scatters all over the table, and in this diner with its ratty Christmas decorations and Tom Jones on the speakers and the morning light dappling the bench just right to paint the ends of Buck’s hair gold, Eddie can’t imagine a world in which it’s wrong for him to want this.

But he’s still nervous as he sits down, as he slides into the booth next to Buck and moves close enough to knock their knees together, to brush his elbow against Buck’s on the sticky laminated menu. The kinds of touches he would have prevented before, because they reveal too much in how accidental they are.

Buck turns to him with a laugh still frozen on his face, his eyebrows high.

“You okay, Eds? We’re just getting the same as usual, right?”

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, and smiles at the waitress that stops by to fill him up on coffee. She smiles back, and her eyes sweep over where he and Buck are on top of each other in a booth big enough for three, the smallest hesitation. Eddie wishes Buck would assume the same thing as she is. “Same as usual, Christopher?”

Christopher scratches his chin with a toothpick, pretending to consider it. Their usual is two full stacks of pancakes the size of their faces, with one pancake off each then going to Christopher, and Eddie can practically see the sugar high twinkling in his eyes already.

“Okay,” he grins, his elbows on the table. “But Buck’s pouring my maple syrup.”

“Christopher, for the last time—“

“Give it up, Eddie,” Buck says, and he leans into Eddie, all the overwhelming weight and warmth of him pressing into Eddie’s side. “So you can’t make maple syrup smiley faces, that’s okay.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Christopher nods, “you have other talents.”

Buck giggles so hard that Eddie ends up having to order for them, and he only stutters once when Buck pushes his shoulder into his, slumping with his forehead on the table like he can’t stop laughing now that he’s started.

Eddie, for his part, can’t stop looking at him. He’s letting himself, because he’s spent years looking away, and he can have one morning, if nothing else.

Buck catches him when he straightens up, wiping tears of laughter from the corner of his eyes.

“What?” he blinks, and he looks caught off-guard.

“Nothing,” Eddie shakes his head, and his eyes, just for a second, fall to Buck’s lips, half-open and still curled up in one corner. “Just nice to see you laugh.”

Something behind Buck’s eyes shutters, like drawing a curtain. He looks away, out of the window, the remnants of his smile carried away by the motion.

“Thanks,” he says, drawing toward his end of the booth, his knee, his hip, his shoulder all tilting away, and Eddie loses his nerve.

He should push – he needs to, at this point, the way Buck trailed him like a bloodhound and wouldn’t leave things alone when Eddie tried to keep the panic attacks a secret; but Buck isn’t in love with him, so he probably wasn’t this worried about accidentally treading on something that can never be put back together again.

Maybe, hopefully, today will be enough until Eddie can find the words.

Christopher, thank God for him, draws Buck into a conversation about the different forms pancakes take all over the world. They’re both leaning over Buck’s phone, elbows on the table, arguing over something or other to do with spinach crepes, when their food arrives, and by then Buck looks a little lighter again.

Christopher gets his pancakes and, as promised, Buck pulls the plate close so he can pour the maple syrup.

“Any special requests, bud?” he asks, squeezing a dollop out of the bottle to test the texture.

“Give them hair, please,” Christopher says. “The rest can be a surprise.”

So Buck shrugs and gets to work. Eddie could and should be eating, but he can’t tear his eyes away from the tip of Buck’s tongue poking out of his mouth as he concentrates, the meticulous care with which he draws wiggles on the plate to represent hair, and then so, so carefully makes a smiley face on the top pancake. He’s hunched over and barely blinking, encouraged by Christopher who doesn’t breathe as he watches him.

He straightens up to survey his work, turns the plate left to right as he considers the angles. Eddie wants to pry his fingers away and kiss the inside of his wrist, just because.

“Okay,” Buck says, “one more thing.” And he goes about filling the empty space with hearts, some of them so small they run together and form a blob, which he then reshapes into a bigger heart. Christopher grins with delight when his breakfast finally lands in front of him.

“Wow,” he breathes. “Thanks, Buck.”

“Anytime, Christopher,” Buck replies, and his tone has Eddie looking away from his son just in time to catch the way Buck’s eyes are shining, a little too liquid in the bright light of the morning.

He has so many things to say; too many, and they wrap and wrap around his tongue until it feels strangled and useless in his mouth. He hates feeling like this around Buck, nervous and small and barely holding it together, the complete opposite of how Buck usually makes him feel.

He’s just—worried. Worried about Buck, worried about how dangerously close he’s coming to imagining their life together not as an abstract daydream, but as a real possibility, worried that whatever he does won’t be enough to make Buck see that he’s miserable.

So Eddie eats his food and swallows the words, hoping they’ll come back up again.

After the diner – which Buck exits the way he came in, sprinting across the parking lot, with Christopher riding piggyback this time – Eddie turns the truck in a familiar direction. Christopher’s singing along to Jingle Bell Rock in the backseat, and Buck hums it under his breath, but doesn’t sing the words; instead, he puts his elbow on the window and watches the pale colors of Los Angeles winter blur into each other as they pass.

“Dad,” Christopher says just as Eddie signals for the exit, “can we know where we’re going now?”

“Yeah, Eddie,” Buck joins in, and Eddie’s so surprised to hear him speak his hand slips on the wheel. “Where are we going? I think this counts as kidnapping.”

“You kidnap Buck and Christopher?” Christopher says from the back.

“You kidnap Buck and Christopher like they don’t have a say in where they’re going?” Buck says dutifully.

“The internet was a mistake,” Eddie says, but he can barely hear himself when Christopher yells:

“Jail for dad!”

“Jail for dad for one thousand years,” Buck confirms, giggling. Eddie has to remind himself to keep his eyes on the road like he’s sixteen and being a menace on the I-10 again, because “Buck was giggling in the passenger seat” is not a good enough excuse to merge dangerously.

But he’s still got ears, and he can at least listen to his two favorite people in the world snickering at his expense, which is not the worst situation to be in.

“If you’re done laughing at nothing,” he says, which sets the two of them off again, “try looking out of the window and maybe you’ll figure it out.”

Buck moves in Eddie’s periphery, pressing his face into the glass. He spots it right away, because Eddie’s less than a mile from turning into the parking lot.

“Eddie,” he says, quiet, a little shaky in a way Eddie can’t place. “Are you, uh. Is this a good idea?”

“Yep,” Eddie says resolutely, taking a right for the LA Zoo. “You haven’t been in forever, and you won’t get to go until next year. We’ve gotta see the baby monkeys while they’re still at least a little cute.”

“They’re tamarins,” Buck corrects automatically, just as Christopher also realizes where they are and lets out a battle cry entirely too intense for the zoo. In that and every other moment, Eddie adores him more than he could possibly put into words.

“The baby tamarins, then,” Eddie smiles, navigating the parking toward the front. He hopes he’s managing to be casual, because the truth is he’d checked three times that the Rainforest of the Americas is open, that the baby monkeys are accessible to the public, and he has the feeding schedule saved in his notes app, because the feedings come with the opportunity to hold one of the tamarins if they’re so inclined.

He’s not really sure what he’s trying to do, here. It just feels like the right place to go, because he broke something here, and he’d like to think it’s since been mended, but it also feels like he needs to revisit those broken pieces they left behind if he wants to start something new.

Maybe he also, selfishly, wants to see Buck gently cradling a tiny defenseless thing in his palms, and holding Christopher’s hand. Wants to watch him get so sucked into looking at animals he’s seen a hundred times and reading plaques he can recite from memory that he forgets Eddie’s there, so Eddie can just hang back and watch and wish and hope that he’s making himself clear, somehow.

Buck needs words. Eddie knows, he knows, but he’s never been good with the damn things.

“Buck,” Christopher whispers once they’re out of the car, standing between the two of them and leaning so far back to look at the arch over the entrance that he almost tips backwards. “Why did dad bring us to the zoo?”

“I can hear you, bud,” Eddie, who’s standing about a foot away, says. He reaches out to ruffle Christopher’s hair. “What, do you not want to go? I thought you love the zoo.”

“I do!” Christopher nods quickly. “But Buck got sick last time. I don’t want him to be sick again.”

Eddie’s a little grateful that he didn’t have to bring it up himself, but that doesn’t stop a lump from growing right at the top of his throat.

Next to him, Buck blinks, setting startled eyes on Eddie for barely a second before he’s crouching down to be on Christopher’s level.

“Hey, no,” he says, reaching out to squeeze Christopher’s hand. “I didn’t get sick because of anything here, I promise. I just wasn’t feeling well on that day, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come here. You know I love going to the zoo with you. We can go whenever you want.”

“Even for the nighttime tour?” Christopher asks. Eddie can’t see his eyes, but he knows they’re lit up by equal parts excitement and mischief.

And he can see the same expression reflected on Buck’s face, anyway.

“We can talk about a nighttime tour,” he points a finger at Christopher, trying so hard to be some shade of stern and failing miserably, “in the summer, when you don’t have school. Okay?”

“But I don’t have school on the weekends either.”

“No,” Buck smiles, “but if you stay up really late on a Saturday, you’ll sleep late on Sunday, and then you’ll have a hard time going to bed when you actually do need to get up the morning after. We don’t have to worry about that so much during break. That make sense?”

Christopher heaves a sigh, probably rolling his eyes. Eddie would step to the side so he could look, but he’s kind of—frozen to the spot, putting roots down into the ground through the warm asphalt of the parking lot, watching Buck parent without checking the answer with Eddie, effortless, like he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.

“I guess,” Christopher says, and Buck grins at him. “You promise we’ll at least talk about it?”

“Absolutely,” Buck replies, holding out his pinkie, and Christopher easily curls his own around it. “You. Me. This summer. Talking about a night tour at the zoo.”

Eddie rubs his eyes, which are stinging for reasons that have nothing to do with the painfully bright day.

“Thanks, Buck,” Christopher says, and then finally turns to Eddie like he’s just remembering him standing there. “Dad, Buck and I are going doing a night tour next summer. Just letting you know.”

Buck muffles a bark of laughter in his elbow.

He must see it. Buck’s always unsure of his place in the world, but he’s not stupid, not oblivious. He must know, and Eddie wonders how much of a difference it would make if he could say it out loud. You’re his dad, too. Be his dad with me.

Eddie tries to catch his eye, but Buck dodges him.

“Come on,” he says, and complies easily when Christopher asks to ride on his back again, carefully arranging Christopher’s crutches with one arm so they’re not swinging out to the side. “I bet CJ’s missed your adorable little face.”

“Who the hell is CJ?” Eddie asks, but they’re already off again, a good few paces ahead of him by the time he realizes.

CJ, it turns out, is the resident Sumatran tiger. He’s bright in the drab landscape of his enclosure, stretched out on a platform in a tree, with paws the size of serving plates and a very long tail that he flicks disinterestedly as he watches people crowd behind the glass. They spend a solid ten minutes just with him, and Buck and Christopher are barely breathing with fascination even as all he does is change sides.

“Look,” Christopher whispers when there’s a noise. CJ’s tail, which has been hanging over the edge of the platform, disappears and is replaced with one of his paws. “Is he getting bigger? His feet are as big as my head.”

“Maybe you’re just getting smaller,” Buck teases, messing up Christopher’s hair. “Eddie, are you looking? You telling me you would’ve been fine meeting him on Hollywood Boulevard?”

“I like him nice and far away from me,” Eddie says, watching the rise and fall of the tiger’s ribcage where it’s just visible from the ground. “He’s beautiful, though,” he says, looking at Buck, because he’s a cliché.

“Yeah,” Buck says quietly, his eyes still up in the sky, his hands on Christopher’s shoulders. “Beautiful.”

They’d already been to see the hippos and the bears, so when they leave CJ, Eddie gently steers them down to the Rainforest of the Americas. They only have twenty minutes before the next feeding, and Buck and Chris are having fun stopping at every plaque and trying to pronounce the latin names correctly, which makes Eddie’s chest feel full to bursting, but is also very time-consuming.

None of them mention the carousel as they pass. Eddie’s just wondering if he should say something, open with a wound they’ve mostly healed to broach the topic of feelings, when he’s the first to make it to the door of the Rainforest and it doesn’t open for him.

He steps to the side, trying to catch the sensor’s attention. Steps back when that doesn’t work, then forward.

Nothing.

“Oh,” Buck says when he and Christopher catch up. “Shoot. We missed them again.”

Eddie shakes his head. That’s not right, because—he checked, he planned this, and he brought them all here so they could do something cool and new together and Buck could maybe magically look around and realize that he already has someone who loves him unconditionally if only he wanted it and—

“Technical difficulties?” Christopher reads from the sign on the door, which is actually right in front of Eddie, and he somehow hasn’t noticed it. “What does that mean?”

Eddie turns to Buck.

Technical—what?

“I’m not sure, buddy,” Buck says, with a hint of a frown. “Maybe something inside broke that means we can’t go see the animals. The lights, or the water, or something.”

“Oh,” Christopher frowns. “So we can’t see the tamarins?”

“I guess not,” Buck sighs, his smile wilted. “But I bet they have babies every year, so we just need to wait a little while, and then we can come see them when they’re brand new, huh?”

Eddie should—say something. He should be there for his kid, whose expectations he raised and who is now disappointed. He should comfort him like Buck is, because it sucks but also isn’t that big of a deal, and they’re still having a good time.

But.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience, the sign says, next to a little cartoon of a sad chimpanzee. But Eddie—Eddie checked, he checked it over three fucking times—

“Hey Chris,” Buck says, just above a whisper, “you want to go look at the aviary instead? I bet the flamingos will be there.”

Christopher smiles a little. “Okay,” he shrugs, just like that, carrying on even disappointed, moving on to the next cool thing to see. Eddie’s an adult, and he should be doing the same thing, but there’s a weight on his chest, bearing down with so much force it makes him stagger in place.

“Alright, lead the way,” Buck says, letting Christopher go ahead. Eddie can barely hear him through the pounding in his ears.

“Eddie,” Buck grabs on to his sleeve. “Come on. I know you’re freaking out, just—come over there so Chris has something to look at, okay? Come on.”

He tugs, gentle, and Eddie sways on his feet. What is—what—

“Fuck, okay,” Buck murmurs, his voice the only thing left in the cacophony. Everything is white noise, and there are spots dancing in Eddie’s vision, bright like little explosions that duck when he turns to look at them. “Okay. Eddie, can you hear me? I’m going to take your hand. It’s just me, it’s Buck, everything’s okay.”

And then he does as promised and threads his fingers through Eddie’s.

Somehow, like Buck’s pushing a button Eddie didn’t know was there, his knees unlock, and he sways so far forward he almost falls on his face, but he does take a step, and then another. Buck pulls him forward; when Eddie stumbles into him, he wraps a careful arm around Eddie’s waist as he steers them down the path and around the corner, and like a focal point in the blur the world has become, there’s Christopher standing at the fence, already looking up at where the aviary nets are hanging high in the sky.

“Okay,” Buck says again, and he sounds—breathless, maybe, Eddie can’t quite tell, because the thing on his chest is sinking in, through skin and bone to where his heart is already struggling, and he can’t—God, he can’t—

“Eddie,” Buck says, and he’s firm this time, loud enough that Eddie hears it, his name falling from Buck’s mouth the way it always does, soft at the edges. “You’re having a panic attack.”

No, Eddie tries to say, but the words won’t come through the blanket weight on his chest and, oh, of fucking course he’s having a panic attack.

He reaches forward. Buck, Buck makes these better, and as soon as his fingers find fabric he closes his fist and tugs.

I’m having a panic attack, he thinks, and then Buck’s engulfing him, one arm around Eddie’s shoulders, the other on the back of his head, a warmth so intense it leashes him to the present, dispels the cold little by little.

I’m having a panic attack, he thinks. On the next breath he takes, he imagines the air as a tangible thing, in through his nose, down his throat, into his lungs that open up to accept it. He can’t hold it for more than a second, but it’s better than nothing.

Some of the sounds come back in: the rasp of Buck’s breathing and a kid somewhere yelling at his parents, a flat-sounding Christmas song from the speakers over by the entrance.

His forehead is against Buck’s chest, his neck bent so far down it should be uncomfortable, but he’s glad for it – this little point of pain, Buck’s hand soothing over it when he runs it down the back of Eddie’s neck and up again.

He can only half-feel his fingers, but he’s pretty sure he manages to uncurl them from the fists they’ve become, one of them still hanging on to the edge of Buck’s jacket. He puts his palm up next to his face right in the middle of Buck’s chest where skin and muscle thin, where the cage of his ribs rises just a little with every breath.

The movement slows as soon as Buck notices the touch; becomes more deliberate, Buck changing the way he breathes just so Eddie has something to follow. He tries again: the air going in, down his throat, into his lungs, and this time it’s allowed to linger in there for a while. Eddie exhales through his mouth, and smells Buck’s cologne, his skin, lavender detergent; the dust and earth and metal always hanging in the air, unnoticed until they’re absent.

Buck runs his fingers through Eddie’s hair, slow, deliberate. He lingers in the hollow on the back of Eddie’s neck, a gentle touch with no pressure to it, just a presence, cradling Eddie to him.

He takes a breath that goes in and holds.

“Better?” Buck asks quietly, not putting an inch of space between them. His other arm has moved down to wrap around Eddie’s torso, a warm underscore just at the point his ribs end, his thumb moving in soothing circles.

Eddie takes his hand off Buck’s chest just to wrap both arms around him, pull him as close as he can get. He clenches his fists in the back of Buck’s jacket, and has the presence of mind to realize he should feel bad about creasing it, but he doesn’t.

And Buck doesn’t care, anyway, because he makes a surprised noise and holds Eddie that much tighter, maybe tight enough to bruise, and Eddie wants the bruises, wants the reminder of being swallowed up in this, the warmth and safety of the man he loves.

He’ll be ashamed of in a few hours, and he knows that as certainly as he knows that the world is ever-turning under his feet. This is exactly what he’d been afraid of, the kind of thing that makes it impossible for him to genuinely put himself forward as an option. One wrench in his plans for whatever pathetic attempt this stupid day was supposed to be, and he almost shakes apart right in front of the rainforest exhibit.

“Sorry,” is the first thing he says, only a little rough in the way it comes out. “Jesus.”

Buck holds him, his big hand splayed on Eddie’s back. “No,” is all he says, and Eddie reads the world of meanings behind it.

They sway a little, side to side, like some weird death grip slow dance. Eddie becomes aware of the shifting of gravel under his feet, the way Buck’s toes accidentally bump his from time to time.

“Chris?” he asks.

“Just fine,” Buck replies, the words reverberating through the bones of Eddie’s face. “Got an eye on him. He just caught a feeding, so I think he’s a little freaked out about the way pelicans eat, but otherwise perfectly fine.”

“He didn’t—“

“No,” Buck interrupts, gentle. “And even if he did, there’d be nothing wrong with that.”

Eddie sighs into the soft fabric of Buck’s sweater. It rises inside him like a tidal wave, everything at once: he wants to cry, and he wants to scream. He wants to pull back so he can ask Buck to kiss him, so he can see the way Buck always looks at him, so he can run away. He wants to stay here, to nuzzle into Buck’s chest like he’s allowed, to make a home for himself there, under Buck’s sweater, under his skin. There’s a cold, terrified part of him that always wants to be this safe, and another cold, terrified part of him that doesn’t want to let him.

He doesn’t do helpless, or protected, or saved. He should be the one protecting, the one saving, the one everyone can count on to keep his cool, but he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t want to, in this moment where the water is closing over his head he wants this, he needs this.

So he lets himself have it.

“You know, the other day,” Buck says, his thigh bumping into Eddie’s as he sways them gently, “when I made the pasta alfredo? I went to get groceries, and they didn’t have that brand of conchiglie I always buy.”

“The one that’s rounder than the other brands,” Eddie says into Buck’s chest, because this is a thing he knows, for some reason.

“That’s the one,” Buck chuckles quietly. “And I kind of stood there for a good minute with just—no idea what to do. Like, I was going to get this pasta. And now I couldn’t get it.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything. He unclenches his hands because the bones are starting to hurt, but he just lays his palms flat on the endless expanse of Buck’s back, the back shielding him from the word.

“Do you know what I did?”

Eddie shakes his head, just a suggestion of movement. “What did you do?”

“I breathed through it, and I bought tagliatelle,” Buck says, then sighs so heavily it ruffles Eddie’s hair, whistles a little where Eddie’s ear is resting on Buck’s chest. “And then I put my bags in the car and got behind the wheel and just cried like a baby.”

Eddie’s breath stutters. “Buck.”

“Because I,” Buck clears his throat, “I had this specific picture in my head, right? That was the day Christopher got a C on his test and you were exhausted after that bitch of a shift and I’m like—I’m good at alfredo sauce, right? You guys love my alfredo. So I went out to the grocery store to make everything better, and then it all fell apart over pasta shapes.”

“Buck,” Eddie says again, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He’s flushed, a sickly heat crawling up his neck and into his cheeks, and he knows how to breathe through a panic attack but has no idea how to breathe through this, all of Buck, an avalanche.

“So what I’m trying to say is,” Buck says, and his heart picks up, painfully audible, “that sometimes small things can set you off, and that’s—it’s normal, okay? We’re both a little messed up.”

Eddie’s throat is bone-dry. “But,” he says, and he’s going to have to let go soon, but how is he supposed to do that? “We did have conchiglie.”

“Yeah,” Buck exhales. “I drove to another store to get those.”

And it turns out letting go is easy.

“Hey,” Eddie says, his hands up on Buck’s shoulders, pulling back just far enough to look Buck in the eye. “You didn’t have to do that. We would’ve been happy with anything, as long as you were there with us. We would’ve been happy with takeout.”

Buck’s jaw twitches. His hand slides from the back of Eddie’s neck to his shoulder, but he doesn’t let go, doesn’t relax his grip.

“It’s not that we don’t see or appreciate everything you do for us,” Eddie says, suddenly finding words so easily he can’t say them fast enough. “Of course we do. But you don’t have to, okay? You were just as exhausted as I was that day, so if—if you say you’re going to make food and then you’re too tired to do it, you don’t have to push through it. You don’t have to drive to another neighborhood just to get a specific type of pasta. You don’t always have to be doing things. You can, if you want. But there are no conditions on any of this. On us. Even if we’re miserable and you want to make us feel better, you just—you make it better by being there, okay?”

Buck blinks, slow, uncomprehending. His eyes are the color of the sky overhead.

“There are no conditions,” Eddie says again.

Buck looks away.

And Eddie knows, he knows that this doesn’t begin or end with Taylor, far from it. But he does know that Buck’s cagier since he’s been with her. That he weighs his smiles, something he’d never done before her. That he’s shrinking, contorting himself into something he can never be, and Eddie doesn’t know—he doesn’t know how to break that shell again, how to tear everything open and pull Buck out, without letting love spill off his tongue in as many words.

Come on, he thinks as he chases Buck’s eyes. Look at us. The two of them, holding each other, a push and a pull that balance each other on a knife’s edge. Buck’s holding him because he wants to give comfort, and Eddie’s accepting it, because it means getting to hold Buck and comfort him in return.

Maybe it really can be that simple.

“Buck!” an excited voice comes from behind Eddie, and then Christopher is there, so fast the gravel shoots out from under his crutches and gets Eddie in the ankles. “Did you see? Pelicans are gross.”

Buck laughs, his face folding into a smile that’s reluctant but true.

“I did see,” he says, his hands still and steady on Eddie. Not letting go until Eddie asks him to, which may actually be a superhuman feat. “They have like—a weird bag for a beak.”

“I love them,” Christopher grins. “Dad, can we look up pelican books in the library?”

“You bet,” Eddie says, his own smile coming just as slowly as Buck’s, but it’s impossible to stop it in the face of Christopher’s loud enthusiasm. “Did you ask the zookeeper about them?”

“Yeah! She said they’re millions of years old, and they fly super high, and they have different personalities like people do! That one’s name is Cindy,” he points over to the enclosure, where several pelicans are sitting in the grass digesting their lunch. Eddie does not know which one Cindy is.

“Awesome,” Buck says, and when Christopher turns to go down the path toward the reptiles, he moves to follow. Somehow, he manages to not let go of Eddie, leaving one arm draped over his shoulders.

Eddie should let him go. If he was being responsible, he would smile and put some distance between them, something that isn’t his arm on Buck’s waist, their hips bumping into one another with every other step.

It takes no time at all for them to fall into sync, following Christopher as they move slowly past the kangaroos and the Komodo dragons. Christopher pulls them toward the koalas, where a small crowd is gathered watching breathlessly as one of the bears makes a clumsy transition from one branch of its tree to another.

Christopher leans against the fence. Eddie half expects Buck to follow, to put his hands on Christopher’s shoulders like they did at the tiger enclosure, whispering back and forth like the world’s foremost experts on all things big cats.

But Buck stays, even then. Eddie’s hand burns where it’s curled loosely on the outside of Buck’s hip, and with every breath in he tries to convince himself to let go and fails.

They look like a couple. If any of the people gathered there were to look behind them, they would make an assumption that’s factually incorrect but maybe not entirely wrong.

Eddie catches their reflection when they’re moving on, a glimpse of the two of them wrapped around each other in the glass panels of some bird enclosure, and it terrifies him with how right it looks; how effortless, as if this is what they normally do.

Christopher finally gets tired mid-afternoon and asks to sit down for a bit, then leads them to the nearest rest area from memory. There’s a cotton candy stall nearby, so he naturally ends up holding a giant pink sugar cloud within minutes, but it’s not Tracie who sells it to him, thankfully.

Eddie has finally let go, and he’s resisting admitting just how cold he suddenly feels. He pulls one of his knees up on the picnic bench and hugs it close to keep himself warm, resting his chin on his kneecap and watching Buck and Christopher compete to see who can melt cotton candy in their mouth faster. It’s pretty gross, and Christopher’s definitely going to end up sticky enough to glue his own hands to his face, but Eddie can’t do anything other than grin and stare and feel the sight wrap around his bones like a familiar blanket.

The knowledge that settles in his heart isn’t quite a certainty, and it feels as brittle as the haze of sunlight on the winter air, but it’s a knowledge nonetheless: he can’t let a chance at this go just because he’s afraid. Eddie’s made it through a helicopter crash and dragged his team to safety under gunfire and dug his way out from under ground so deep it had never known warmth, but he’s never considered himself particularly brave for any of those things. They came with the job; they were what he signed up for, what little he could do to make himself useful.

With Buck, he’s going to have to be brave.

He tries as they make their way back to the entrance and to the car. He doesn’t quite have the guts to lay his arm on Buck’s waist again, because something about doing it once they’ve let go feels too much like staking a claim he doesn’t have yet, but he does stay much closer than necessary. Their shoulders bump into each other every few steps, their arms brushing, the backs of their hands just missing each other in the small space that exists between them. Buck looks at him, every time they almost touch, and hides a smile in the collar of his jacket.

Eddie tries when they stop for dinner at a drive-through, rattling off Buck’s order without having to ask what he wants, getting extra fries for them to share that make Buck light up when he discovers them at the bottom of the bag, quietly surfing the radio channels while they sit and eat in the parking lot until he lands on whichever’s playing Mariah Carey.

They’re not words, but they’re something, and by the time they’re just about done with the day, the horizon a dark orange where it peeks through the gaps between office buildings, Buck is sprawled content and quietly bright in the passenger seat.

Until the evening dark finds Eddie behind the wheel of his idling truck in the parking lot of Buck’s apartment building, and Buck stops in the middle of telling a story to check his phone when it chimes, and then something heavy snaps into place around him in a fraction of a second, like a cage slamming shut.

Eddie raises his gaze to the rearview mirror. Christopher, exhausted from the zoo and full of food, is asleep with his chin tilted up, snuffling every time he breathes in.

So Eddie steels himself, and unbuckles his seatbelt, which suddenly feels like it’s choking him.

“You okay?” he asks, and it’s unbearably loud in the quiet truck.

Buck blinks up at him. They’re parked just under a streetlight, so the darkness bisects his face, half of it lit up a vivid orange, the other one in shadow.

“Yeah,” he frowns like he’s not sure why Eddie’s asking. “Sure.”

“Are you?” Eddie asks. “Sure, I mean?”

Buck’s hand tightens around his phone. Slowly, like he’s trying to avoid spooking Eddie with sudden movements, he undoes his seatbelt.

“Yeah,” he says again, nodding only a little mechanically. “I, uh. I had a really great time today, Eddie. Thank you.”

Eddie’s hands are sweating on the wheel. His knuckles are a sickly white even in the dark, but he’s afraid to let go.

“You’re welcome,” he says, the words squirming as they come up his throat, wanting to say something else, resisting as he bends them into shape. “Anytime.”

He clears his throat.

“And thank you,” he says, staring at the colorless wall of the apartment building in front of them, at the artificial-looking shrubs planted exactly three feet apart. “For having my back. For coming with us.”

Buck shifts in his seat. “You know there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

Are you sure? Eddie wants to ask again, but he thinks that might not be fair. Instead he blinks once, twice, watching his own hands uncurl like they have a will of their own, letting go of the wheel, folding into his lap.

He looks at Buck, whose eyes are unreadable in the shadows.

“Thank you anyway,” he says, his voice small, stuck somewhere in the back of his throat. He wants Buck to hear the words the way he means them. He wants.

They fall silent, then, with their seatbelts off, with Buck’s knees curled toward Eddie, with the approximation of goodbyes said. Eddie’s painfully aware of his own breath, of his legs that only feel like they’re trembling because the engine’s shaking the floor as it idles.

Buck’s phone, face down on his thigh, chimes again. He doesn’t pick it up to check.

Eddie’s teeth itch. He bounces his knee, bites the inside of his lip, the spot that’s still tender from when he bit it open.

And then—

“Who’s texting you?” he asks, like he doesn’t know the answer.

Buck purses his lips. Breathes loud enough to be heard across the center console, over the radio, over the panic-quick racing of Eddie’s heart.

“Taylor’s waiting for me upstairs,” he says, clearly aiming for neutral and ending up squarely at miserable. Eddie wants to reach out and erase the groove between his eyebrows. “I should, uh. Go. See her.”

“Sure,” Eddie says, and pointedly hits the unlock button for Buck’s door, the whir of it deafening in the quiet that hangs between them, keeping them apart like a moat. Eddie’s line of orbit, Buck’s, fighting not to intersect.

Buck doesn’t move.

Eddie can’t bring himself to be pleased about it, or even to feel petty, because he’s just spent the day trying to build Buck up and is watching him crumble right in front of his eyes.

He’s been turning it over and over and over in his mind, the entire drive, the entire day. The thing he wants and is terrified to say, because it’s too much like showing his hand, but—he can’t let Buck keep doing this. Can’t leave him in it alone.

“Can I give you your own advice back?” he says, his tongue zinging with it.

Buck raises his eyebrows, surprised.

“Break up with her.”

Buck’s lips part on an inhale, just this side of sharp like he didn’t expect it. Eddie curls his hands into the denim covering his thighs, holding himself back.

“That’s,” Buck clears his throat, and his eyes flick to the backseat where Christopher’s still sleeping soundly, “that’s not the advice I gave you.”

“No,” Eddie allows a smile. “You were a little more poetic about it, but the gist was the same.”

Buck shakes his head, jerky. “You told me to talk to her, remember?”

“Yeah, weeks ago,” Eddie says. “And you didn’t.”

“I could have.”

“You didn’t,” Eddie repeats, and knows he’s right from the way Buck’s shoulders curl in. “And—I mean, look at yourself, Buck.”

Buck straightens up, then. Tenses, like he’s expecting a punch.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Eddie sighs, and his hand is halfway to Buck’s shoulder before he realizes and pulls it back, “that you were happier today than I’ve seen you in forever. It means you’re sitting in my car trying to find a reason to put off going home, where she’s waiting for you. And you know I’m right, you know—“

“Eddie,” Buck breathes, and Eddie’s voice gives out at what he hears in it, a single half-whisper of his name. “I—I can’t, alright? I know you think—you all think she’s bad for me, but we just—we haven’t hit our stride, okay? It’ll come as we get to know each other. Love’s hard work, right? You have to work on it.”

“Not like this,” Eddie shakes his head, his throat convulsing around the words. He wishes he could drive Buck away from here, make up the couch for him, have him stay forever so he never has to face the moment it breaks. And he can’t, but—he can be there, at least. He can be steady again, the kind of steady he used to be before his life fell to a thousand pieces he’s still hunting down. He doesn’t know if that Eddie can ever really come back, but for Buck, he’s ready to be anything. “It’s work like—like talking through the hard things, and compromising, and being willing to meet halfway. It’s not making yourself someone you’re not. It’s not dimming your fucking light just because she can’t handle looking at you as you are, Buck.”

Buck presses the heel of his hand to his left eye. “I don’t know,” he says, his voice cracking at the end of the word. “What if it can be better down the line?”

Eddie loses the fight and touches him, a hand reaching over the half-full cup of soda he got with dinner, his fingertips grazing Buck’s knee.

“When?” he asks. “When do you think it’ll get better?”

Buck shakes his head. He hunches lower, the bow of his back painful-looking.

“Don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe when I—if I get better. If I’m the one fucking it up.”

“Unless you’re not,” Eddie says, fighting to keep control of his breathing, of himself. He can’t put the weight of his own feelings on Buck when he’s like this, even if he could say it out loud. “Unless you’re just—not good together, because you don’t fit.”

“She wants me,” Buck says. He manages to straighten up and somehow avoid looking at Eddie’s face altogether, staring out past the windshield. He keeps his legs where they are, and Eddie keeps his hand on Buck’s knee. “She’s always asking to spend more time with me. That doesn’t really—happen.”

Eddie looks into the backseat. At his son, their son, who’d chain Buck to their kitchen table if he had the chance just to never have him leave. Looks at his own hand, holding on to Buck trying to do the same thing.

“And you enjoy that,” Eddie says. “Spending time with her. You enjoy it. Right?”

Buck bites his lip. Opens his mouth, but Eddie beats him to it.

“Don’t fucking ask me if that matters. Don’t you dare, Buck.”

Buck hangs his head. The streetlight outside exaggerates the already-sharp lines of his face, makes him look hardened in a way that tugs at Eddie’s heart.

“You owe it to her to be honest,” says Eddie. “That’s what you said to me, right? So if you don’t like being with Taylor, you owe it to her to tell her that. And you owe it to you. Can you imagine this for the rest of your life?”

Eddie wouldn’t even need to be touching him to feel the way Buck flinches, full-bodied and immediate. He closes his eyes, the golden fan of his lashes sapped of color in the two-toned light.

“No,” he whispers. Eddie lets the ensuing silence push into his ears, and breathes, and holds onto him. “But I can’t imagine ending it, either.”

“It’s scary, right?” Eddie asks, so gentle it makes him flush.

“It shouldn’t be,” Buck says, looking up, blinking. “I’m thirty, I don’t know how I can be such a baby about it.”

Eddie exhales.

“Hey,” he says, before he can change his mind. “Tell you a secret?”

Buck blinks. “Anything.”

“You know how you asked me the other day when Hen and I suddenly became best friends?”

Buck’s forehead scrunches. “Yeah?”

He’d been teasing, mostly, or at least Eddie hopes so. Hen had smiled at him, grinned at Buck, mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key, and that was the last of it, because Eddie’s still sure he can’t say this without spilling out his love along with it.

But it’s time, he thinks. It has to be time.

“We’ve been talking a lot,” he says, watching something flicker in the hedges that’s probably a rat on the prowl, “because she’s been helping me figure out that I’m—well. I’ve been saying queer. Maybe that’ll stick, maybe I’ll end up with something else, but—yeah.”

Buck’s watching him. His eyes are on the side of Eddie’s face as heavy as a touch, and he tries to pull himself together and look back once, twice, three times. It doesn’t work.

“And it’s been one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, figuring it out, because it’s like—I’m almost thirty-five, right? I should have figured out I liked men too something like twenty years ago, and I didn’t know if there was a point, but—there was,” he says, and runs a hand through his hair. He might cry with it, the fear or the vulnerability or the sheer relief. “There really was. So don’t—don’t settle for this just because the other option scares you. That’s not the Buck I know, anyway.”

Buck sniffles. “Eddie,” he says, his voice shaking, and then Eddie’s looking at him, finding his mirror in the tears staining Buck’s eyelashes. “Eddie, that’s—“ he presses the back of his hand over his mouth, and takes a noisy breath in through his nose. “I’m so proud of you. I’m—thank you, I don’t even know what—thank you, for trusting me, for—this is—huge?”

Eddie laughs, and wipes his face with the back of his own hand. “Yeah,” he says, and exhales when he feels Buck thread their fingers together. “Yeah, I guess. But we’re talking about you.”

And isn’t Eddie always.

Buck sighs. He makes a feeble attempt to pull his hand away, but Eddie’s not letting him go now that he’s got him. He squints through the dark to make out Buck’s expression, to try and gauge whether Buck automatically jumps to the same conclusion Hen did: that allowing himself to love a man just means allowing his love for Buck to finally settle in and take its place.

“Now my thing seems silly in comparison,” Buck says, and Eddie lets the joke lighten the air between them a little bit, laughs and feels Buck’s laugh reverberate through his body. “I—I have to think about it,” he says. “I don’t know if—“ he trails off, and huffs at whatever’s going through his head. “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone, Eddie.”

“You won’t be,” Eddie says, the simplest truth.

Buck opens his mouth and closes it.

“I heard what she told you,” Eddie says, no idea he’s going to say it until it’s coming out of his mouth. “At the toy drive. About him,” he tilts his head toward the backseat. Buck goes completely still. “And she’s wrong, you know.”

Buck blinks at him, his pupils so wide they almost make his eyes look black. “Eddie,” he says, and doesn’t seem to know how to continue.

“You won’t be alone, Buck,” he repeats, and squeezes Buck’s hand. “Okay? Remember that, and go see your girlfriend.”

“Eddie,” Buck says again, broken in the middle. Eddie smiles at him with the weight of everything else he wishes he had the words to say, with everything he wishes he could do.

“You’ll be okay,” he says, and slowly pulls his hand back, curling his fingers in to keep hold of some of the warmth. “I’m just on the other end of the phone if you need me. Go.”

And Buck looks at him with something like fear, or maybe awe, before he’s blindly reaching for the door handle and stumbling out.

“I’ll—see you at work tomorrow?” he breathes into the night, and Eddie almost doesn’t hear him.

“Of course you will,” he says, and thinks it might be best for everyone if he doesn’t give Buck any more chances to dawdle, so he puts the truck in reverse and makes a turn that leaves Buck in the rearview, a briefly frozen silhouette that stumbles into motion and disappears inside the building.

Only then does Eddie allow himself to shake, head to toe, clenching his hands around the steering wheel again in hopes of maintaining some semblance of steady.

In, hold, out.

Hope you didn’t just ruin everything; close your shaking hands around that hope, because it’s all there is.

Jolene comes on on the radio as soon as he turns out of Buck’s street. Eddie almost crashes into a streetlight.

Eddie’s mother won’t stop blowing up his phone.

It’s not like her, is the thing. She doesn’t like repeating herself, so for her to be texting every hour asking for a definite confirmation that he’ll be coming for Christmas, there must be something Eddie’s not privy to.

“Don’t make me write you up,” Bobby says, his back thunking against the truck right next to where Eddie’s leaning, trying to formulate yet another response.

“Sorry, Cap,” he sighs, slipping his phone back into his turnout pocket. “Sorry. I’m not doing it on purpose. Just my parents being incredibly weird about Christmas.”

Bobby raises an eyebrow. There’s something about his expression that sets Eddie on edge, but he can’t figure out what it is. “You’re still going to Texas, right?”

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, letting his head thud back. “But I’m driving, which is going to be a mess, and they keep being like, oh, we have something we want to talk to you about, and you absolutely have to be here in person, and it’s just—it’s making me nervous, you know?”

“Who’s nervous?” Chim asks, walking up to them and in the process of removing his gloves.

They’re at what turned out to be a bar brawl in the middle of the day. Hen’s sitting on the curb holding a cold pack to an impressive black eye on the guy who appears to have started the whole thing, and Buck’s shielding her from the rest of the crowd like a bodyguard, but the rest is mostly in the cops’ hands.

And if Chim’s not needed anymore, they’re probably going to leave soon. Which is fine with Eddie, because he, apparently, has a part-time job of carrying on a text conversation with his mother.

“Me,” he says, squinting into the sun, at Buck’s tall silhouette with his arms tensed away from his body, probably read to bodily drag Hen away if someone comes out swinging. It’s so painfully sweet Eddie can’t look at it for very long. “My parents are being suspicious about Christmas. I don’t know what to think.”

Chim tilts his head, a little surprised. Eddie keeps forgetting that him just sharing things with minimal prompting is a relatively new thing for his friends.

“Well,” he says, measured, “I don’t know them, so I can’t really be helpful here, but are we talking like—dead body suspicious, horrible family secret suspicious, or—“

“No,” Eddie interrupts, shaking his head, “it’s—they’re fine, in general. Everybody loves them back in El Paso. Upstanding members of the community, or whatever.” He looks back at Buck, every line of him familiar, and lets the sight soothe him before he takes a breath to finish. “But they’re being too nice, which is the suspicious thing, because I think they just don’t, uh. I get the impression they don’t like me very much.”

“Eddie,” Chim says.

“I’m not just finding this out now,” he says, scraping together a grin. “It’s okay. I’m just not what they expected, I think. Their youngest, finally a boy, and he’s—like me,” he shrugs. “Turned out wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Chim and Bobby say in unison.

Eddie clears his throat to shift everything that suddenly grows inside it, choking him off. He doesn’t really know what to say, because—he doesn’t think he’s as wrong as his parents have always made him out to be, has learned to think differently about the things he was always taught were weaknesses. But there’s something about standing in front of his mother, about withering under his father’s gaze, that will always make him feel like a little boy who can’t put a foot right to save his life.

“Thanks,” he remembers to say. Up on the sidewalk, someone stumbles out of the crowd and almost falls into the road, but he gets dragged back into the dying skirmish by the shirt collar.

“Listen, Eddie,” Chim says, leaning back against the truck on Eddie’s other side. “My dad doesn’t like me. I know because he literally told me, on multiple occasions.”

Eddie tries to imagine what that’s like. He imagines Ramon Diaz, eyebrows raised over the rim of his distinguished glasses, saying “I don’t like you” instead of a hundred other things.

I don’t like you instead of stop crying.

Instead of you’re too old to be hugging.

Instead of pain builds character, Edmundo.

Instead of don’t cross my threshold again if you’re not going to do right by that girl.

I don’t like you, and I never will.

He thinks it sounds a little freeing, actually, and then looks at Chim and immediately hates himself for the thought.

“And it took me a long time to figure this out,” Chim says, and he doesn’t look upset. “but that’s his problem. Alright? When it comes to this, something is wrong with him. Not with me.”

Eddie blinks, only a little overwhelmed at the warmth that glows in his chest. “There’s plenty wrong with you,” he says, hoarse, and then Chim’s grinning and wrapping an arm around his shoulders, knocking their heads together.

“I’d offer a couple of seats at our table,” Bobby says, squinting into the sun, “but—“

“We know,” Eddie and Chim say at the same time.

“The in-laws,” says Chim.

“Terrifying,” says Eddie.

Bobby runs a hand over his face. “I’d just feel better if they were coming to our house, not the other way around,” he says.

And Eddie does have to admit that it feels a bit—weird, to be putting off the usual Grant-Nash pre-Christmas family dinner until New Year’s. He’s gone to Bobby and Athena’s every holiday season since he moved to Los Angeles, and it’s a little upsetting that he won’t be bumping elbows with Buck while fighting for Bobby’s turkey at the table.

“I wish I could relate, Cap,” Chim says, folding his arms behind his head and tilting his face up into the sun like he’s at the beach. “But as you all know, I will be going wrinkly in the hot tub attached to our luxury cabin, so.”

Eddie kicks him in the shin. Chim and Maddie got a Christmas retreat as an early gift from the Lees, which Eddie actually found out from Maddie, who has acquired his number and now texts him her most random thoughts apropos of absolutely nothing.

They’re going to be gone; Eddie’s going to be gone, Hen and Karen are taking Toni up to Washington to meet Karen’s parents, and Buck’s supposed to be going to Taylor’s aunt’s place with her. Theoretically, everyone’s going to be with someone they love, and they’re planning a firehouse Christmas when they’re back at work on the 27th anyway, but Eddie’s just—a little unsettled about it.

Which is only punctuated by the buzz of yet another text in his pocket.

Thankfully, he doesn’t have time to check it, because Buck and Hen finally shuffle back to them through the dispersing crowd. They manage to ride back to the station without catching another call on the way, which is a minor miracle this time of year, and five hours into their shift, they finally get to eat the breakfast they optimistically started preparing when they came in.

It’s only then, over a fresh cup of coffee and a bowl of Bobby’s homemade granola, that Eddie realizes how off Buck is. He’s exceptionally good at turning on the calm, competent first responder when they’re out, and they’ve been out all morning, so Eddie blames his delayed realization on the pre-Christmas craze, and not the fact that it’s a little difficult to look Buck straight in the eye after yesterday.

He had another one of those dreams, after he came home and put Christopher to bed and lay down himself – just sensation, a firm touch on the back of his neck, lips under his ear – except this time he recognized the hands, because he’d had them on him only a few hours before.

And it’s not like he didn’t know that it was Buck before, that it’s been Buck that whole time, but it’s a little more difficult to compartmentalize when Eddie’s whole life lately is criss-crossed with lines that constantly blur and have to be drawn anew. It’s difficult to remember the things he told Buck, the easy way they came out of his mouth after all, a chorus of I love yous as loud as Eddie has ever said them; to remember touches that Eddie’s never received except in his dreams but that feel so real they set his heart racing, and still just look at Buck the way he normally does, speak to him, work with him, function around him.

Buck had walked in, a little tired around the eyes but smiling, and said “morning, Eddie,” and Eddie had flushed from his toes all the way to the top of his head, the skin of his chest burning under his fingers as he hastily buttoned up his uniform.

He’d said good morning back, but the first thing on his tongue was something far more embarrassing that he forced himself to swallow.

Because Buck never has tilted Eddie’s chin up with the tip of a finger, and he’s never pressed his thumb insistently into Eddie’s bottom lip until he opened his mouth, and he’s certainly never gripped his hips in that way that had Eddie gasping awake last night, but—he could.

He could, and Eddie’s worried the whole thing might be playing out in his retinas like a movie, so it’s been easier to look just to the left of Buck, to focus on the space between his eyebrows instead of his eyes when they were talking.

Until Eddie looks up and sees Buck repeatedly miss his bowl with his spoon because he’s staring at nothing over Hen’s shoulder.

They’re in the cleaning closet two minutes later, and the joke kind of rattles around Eddie’s brain deciding whether it wants to come out, but he swallows it when he notices the telltale lines of tension by the corners of Buck’s eyes.

“What’s going on?” he asks, straight to the point, partly because the bell will go any minute, and partly because this close proximity is a thing he absolutely didn’t think through. “Let’s skip the whole ‘I’m fine’, ‘you’re not fine’ part of this.”

The corner of Buck’s mouth twitches. “We pinkie promised, Eddie. I wasn’t going to say I’m fine,” he says, and Eddie can’t quite tell if he’s telling the truth, but his chest hurts with it anyway, because Buck’s making himself small again, curling forward lower than he needs to to avoid hitting the upper shelves.

“So what’s up?” he asks, and resists taking Buck’s hand. Last night, in the car, was a different world; it’d mean something else under the fluorescent lights in the station.

Buck rubs his hand over his mouth, and says something so quietly there’s no way for Eddie to catch it.

“What was that?” he asks, embarrassingly gentle.

Buck heaves a sigh, taking in so much air his chest almost touches Eddie’s where they’re standing in the narrow space.

“I said,” he says, looking away, scratching his chin, “that I did it. Last night.”

Eddie’s thoughts screech to a stop.

“You did—it?” he asks, even if he knows that realistically, there’s only one it they can be talking about, but he needs to hear it in words.

Buck shrugs a shoulder, the tilt of his mouth a little amused and a little miserable. “I broke up with Taylor,” he says. “It’s,” he exhales, the air around them rippling with it, “it’s over.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, because he’s drawing an absolute blank. “Oh wow.”

Buck looks at him with tired, tired eyes, but Eddie’s almost sure there is something quietly amused in them.

“I mean,” Eddie blinks, “fuck, I mean—I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t sound sorry last night,” Buck tells the ground, kicking at a mostly empty bottle of disinfectant.

Eddie swallows, but he has to remember how to do it, has to take a deep breath and wait for his throat to open up.

This is—this is. Fuck.

He can’t let himself think about the chain of events: the diner, the zoo, the parking lot of a burger place, the parking lot of Buck’s building where the darkness made it a little easier to speak; him telling Buck to break up with Taylor, telling Buck he’s queer, telling Buck that Christopher’s his son, and then—then, apparently, Buck breaking up with his girlfriend because Eddie said so.

“I wasn’t,” he manages finally, and waits until Buck looks at him, surprised. “I wasn’t sorry that I was telling you to leave a relationship that made you miserable,” he says, and his voice only wavers a little. He has to put his hands in his pockets to stop them from shaking. “But I am sorry it didn’t work out. I know how much you wanted it to.”

But I’m here, he doesn’t say. If you want me, whenever you want me, I’m here.

“Yeah,” Buck nods slowly. “But you were right. About us not—not being right for each other. She, uh. Had things to say.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and knows that’s all it’ll take.

“It’s nothing I haven’t heard before,” Buck says, scanning the shelves, even as Eddie obviously leans so far out to the side he almost tips over in an effort to catch his eye. “Probably nothing I didn’t deserve, honestly. Neither of us were exactly being—functional.”

“Did she call you needy again?”

Buck scoffs, and erases his own frown from his forehead with so much pressure the tips of his fingers go white.

“Among other things,” he says. “Which is pretty funny, considering—“ he bites his lip, his eyes sweeping elegantly over Eddie to look up at the ceiling. “Anyway. It’s over. Her stuff’s gone. I’m—“ he holds his hands out to the sides, “all alone again.”

Eddie runs his tongue over the inside of his teeth and begs his mouth to open. It’d been so much easier yesterday.

He lets a breath gather behind his breastbone, big enough that he can say it all in one go, remember what I said yesterday and you’re not alone and I’m here I’m here I’m here I’m here—

But then his eyes catch on the floor, where they’ve somehow managed to bring in little loose strands of tinsel with them, and reality crashes into him with so much force he’s glad to be leaning on something.

“Buck. You were supposed to be going away with her.”

And he didn’t even think about that yesterday, in all his selfish spiraling over how much he wants Buck for himself. He didn’t think of the fact that if Buck breaks it off before the holiday, he’s going to have to spend it alone.

“Eh,” Buck says quickly, like he knows the direction Eddie’s panicked thoughts are about to take. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s definitely better than I didn’t meet her family only to dump her a few weeks later.”

“But,” Eddie says, and his heart hurts, a sharp pointed pain in the center of his chest at the thought of Buck, sitting up alone in his apartment that’s cold even in the hottest days of summer. “There’s nobody—everyone’s out of town, where will you go?”

“I have an apartment,” Buck raises an eyebrow. He crosses his arms over his chest, apparently okay, but Eddie knows all his tells, and he’s scanning Buck head to toe with an intensity that makes his eyes water. “I’ll just stay in. There’s millions of people in this city who don’t celebrate Christmas, so I’ll just do whatever it is they do. Normal Saturday, I guess.”

Which sounds reasonable, but also completely unacceptable. Buck, much as he might like to deny it, is a Christmas person through and through. He’s helped Eddie decorate the house this year and the past two Christmases, has come into the firehouse on his days off just to help hang the decorations and put up the tree, and has somehow managed to convince Christopher that while some of the presents are, of course, from his dad, he still also gets help from Santa.

“Buck,” Eddie says, helpless, “no. We’ll stay here.”

The air inside the closet smells like lemon and bleach, and it burns in his nose as he takes a breath, or maybe he’s just about to cry because he’s entirely bowled over by the thought of leaving his best friend alone for less than three days.

“You will not be doing that,” Buck raises an eyebrow. When Eddie keeps staring at him, he shakes his head with a smile that doesn’t even look strained. “Eds. You haven’t been there for Christmas in years. I bet it’ll be nice to celebrate with your sisters for a change, and Chris is so excited to see his cousins. We drew them each a Christmas card literally last week.”

“I know,” Eddie croaks, his own breath scraping his throat raw. “I know, but—“

“I’ve probably spent more Christmases alone than not,” Buck shrugs. “I promise it’s not a big deal. We’ll have the New Year’s party at Bobby and Athena’s, and the firehouse Christmas next week, and everyone I care about is going to be there, so. I’ll just cover the numbers on the calendar, or something.”

He reaches out and squeezes Eddie’s shoulder, a grounding, present touch, but it’s all Eddie can do not to flinch back from it because it’s so fresh in his mind, too fresh, even if that was just his exhausted brain at work.

Buck looks fine. He’s an adult, and he looks fine, but Eddie’s body, his whole self, has spent years accepting Buck in and regrowing around him, knowing him down to the marrow of his bones. His eyes might just be dim from the lack of light, but that’s not how they feel when they land on Eddie and try to convince him to go.

“You’re not going to budge on this, are you,” he says, because he also knows that specific set of Buck’s jaw.

“Nope,” Buck grins.

Eddie doesn’t think too hard about why that is. Buck’s self-sacrificial to a fault; surely this is just him not wanting to change Eddie’s plans last minute, and not—not that he doesn’t want them. Doesn’t want Eddie.

He takes a lemon-tinged breath, and takes one of his hands out of his pocket to wrap it around Buck’s wrist where it’s still resting on Eddie’s shoulder.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Compromise. We’ll come back a day early, how about that?”

Buck tilts his head, confused.

“We’ve always done the main dinner on Christmas Eve anyway,” Eddie says, “so we can—we’ll open presents Christmas Day and stay for lunch and then we’ll go back. We can have our own mini-Christmas the day after?”

“Uh,” Buck says, momentarily without words. It’s a miracle the bell still hasn’t gone off. “No. Eddie, that’s not—you can’t.”

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “I can’t?”

“You can’t,” Buck repeats, suddenly vehement. “I won’t let you, okay? I’m telling you it’s fine, just—go be with your family, and I’ll be here when you get back, alright?”

But he’s pulled his hand back, and he’s not grinning anymore, and he won’t look at Eddie, and Eddie just—won’t do this.

“No,” he says, quiet, trying to communicate how sure he is, because his sisters will understand, and he hadn’t been planning on going in the first place, and he still hasn’t shaken that ominous feeling about whatever awaits him eight hundred miles away. He was fine leaving Buck with Taylor, but now Taylor’s gone, and Eddie selfishly wants to fill all the empty spots she left. “No. We’re staying.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, now frowning wildly. “Why won’t you—just go, okay? You’re meant to go, I’m not going to mess that up.”

“You’ll only mess it up if I leave,” Eddie thinks, and then startles when he realizes it actually came out of his mouth. “Because I’ll be thinking about you the entire time, wondering how you’re doing, when we could just be with you. Come on,” he says, reaching out to squeeze Buck’s wrist, letting go just as fast. “Sounds good, right? You, me, and Christopher? I don’t know what we’ll eat, but I’m not picky, so.”

He wants to crack some terrible joke about overpriced last-minute turkeys, or just step close and give Buck a hug, or give in to the urge to fidget and look at the floor and hide the burning tips of his ears.

I’m trying to be brave, he wants to say. I’m trying to be brave for you.

“I,” Buck clears his throat. “You can’t stay. I don’t—“ and he looks away, then, out through the little window on the door, his eyes searching. His voice comes from somewhere deep in his throat when he says: “I don’t want you to.”

And that—hurts. It hurts like a bitch, actually, and it’s all Eddie can do not to move, not to raise his hand to rub at the sharp ache in his chest.

He wants to tuck tail and run, slip into a dark corner somewhere so he can compose himself and exist around the hurt for the rest of the day, but he must have gotten braver somehow, without noticing, because what he actually does is ask:

“Why?”

Buck shakes his head, his eyes edged with a desperation Eddie doesn’t understand. “Because,” he says, “I’m not—“ and he mumbles the end to his sentence, raises his hand to his mouth at the last second so the whole thing slurs and Eddie has no chance of making it out.

And that, of course, is when the alarm finally goes off, calling them to a mass crowd collision at an indoor skating rink. As he checks pupils and brings out one cold pack after another to give people for their bruises, Eddie watches Buck over the heads of the crowd, slipping on the ice and smiling all charming handing out hot drinks, and he knows, he knows he’s not imagining the sadness that lingers about the edges of his face, that pulls his smiles just a little too taut.

Buck needs him. Buck needs him, but he doesn’t want him, and the knowledge is heavy on Eddie’s shoulders when he hoists himself back up into the truck.

He should take Buck at face value.

He can’t take Buck at face value, because he knows him.

And he wants to tell him that, to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until the impenetrable things behind his eyes shift just enough for Eddie to see what he’s thinking. He tries, once, when there’s a lull that night, but Buck dodges him expertly and goes to sit next to Hen on the couch.

Left alone and staring into his cup of cold coffee, Eddie has one more idea.

The next time he has a second, he pulls out his phone and texts his mother, ignoring the newest set of questions about how he’d prefer the potatoes.

Can we bring Buck? His plans fell through, he sends, not at all subtle about incorporating Christopher into the we.

There’s been an empty chair at the Christmas table in the Diaz house for as long as Eddie’s memory serves. For a stranger who might need a meal and a place to rest, his mother used to say, because no one should go hungry or alone on Christmas.

No one’s ever taken it, of course. But for some reason – maybe because of her urging him to come to Texas for the holiday, or the unusually pleasant tone of her texts – Eddie actually holds out a tiny hope that she might say yes. That his parents have turned around, somehow, maybe. That they’ve actually decided to take Eddie as he is, and all he had to do was ask for it and not back down.

I don’t think that would be a good idea, says the reply.

They get to El Paso late enough that his parents are already asleep, for which Eddie’s never been more grateful.

Adriana is the one who opens the door for him, grinning with the corners of her eyes crinkling as he shuffles in sideways, duffel bag on one shoulder, crutches hanging off his wrist, his arms curled around a mostly-asleep Christoper. He’s just awake enough to grumble something about being tired, and turn his head and refuse to speak when Eddie asks him a direct question.

He’d been cranky since Tucson, where Eddie accidentally let it slip that Buck was spending Christmas Day by himself. Probably doing something fun, Eddie had said, but it came out just dead enough that he wouldn’t convince anyone.

After that, he had to stop at every other gas station because Christopher inexplicably needed to pee in half-hour intervals. He’d bought every snack under the sun, put on the road trip playlist that’s repetitive enough to make him want to smack his face into the steering wheel, and even offered Christopher’s favorite soda that he usually only has on special occasions. None of it worked: here they are six hours later, two days before Christmas, and Eddie’s kid is barely speaking to him.

Not that Eddie’s in a better mood. All he’s thought about since he crossed LA city limits in the wrong direction is Buck, more that likely haunting his own apartment, all decorated for Christmas for no one to celebrate with. He hadn’t even wanted to tell anyone that he was single again and would be at home, no matter how much Eddie wheedled.

He’d at least made him promise to keep in touch with everyone via phone, but not being there to make sure he’s alright has made him more and more uneasy with every bit of distance put between them. By the time they get in, his body feels like a ball of live wire, buzzing angrily, just waiting for something to make contact before it goes up in flames.

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Adriana says when he bumps the door closed behind him.

“Who pissed in your cornflakes?” asks Sophia, leaning in the living room doorway.

Eddie sighs. Christopher rolls his head over to the other side, lifting one of his hands to wave tiredly at his aunts.

“Christopher!” Sophia beams. “At least someone’s looking happy to see us.”

“I’m tired,” Eddie grunts, even if the sight of them does make him feel a little more relaxed. “Been a long trip.”

“And I’m mad at you,” Christopher mumbles into Eddie’s shoulder. “Don’t forget that I’m mad at you.”

“I haven’t, buddy,” Eddie replies, and allows the smile that tugs at the corner of his mouth when Christopher won’t look at him, but clutches tighter onto the back of Eddie’s shirt. “Believe me.”

Eddie’s sisters coo, but they also set their eyes on him with matching curious expressions.

Eddie has no idea how to even begin explaining any of this. He opens his mouth to try, at least, but Christopher wiggles in his grip.

“Aunt Sophia,” he says, a little more awake. “Do you want to read with me before I go to sleep?”

Sophia grins. “You bet,” she says.

Eddie closes his eyes for a second, willing back the exhausted sting in them. They’ll be fine. They’ll get through these couple of days, Christopher will have a good time with his cousins and hopefully love his presents, and they can come back and make sure to spend as much time with Buck as he’ll let them. Christopher’s allowed to be angry, and Eddie would never want him to bottle up his feelings.

But he’d asked Eddie why they weren’t staying behind, and Eddie couldn’t give him an answer.

He sets Christopher down gently, making sure he’s got his feet under him before he lets go.

“Dad,” he yawns, rubbing his eyes and leaving smudges on the inside of his glasses. “Aunt Sophia’s gonna help me with bedtime, okay?”

Eddie raises his eyebrows in his sister’s direction. The glint in her eyes gets more pronounced, but she also nods.

“Okay,” he tells Chris. “If you’re sure. But we’re going to talk about this tomorrow. That alright with you?”

Christopher sighs like only a ten-year-old can. “Okay, Dad. Goodnight.”

He does allow a hair ruffle, but then he’s making his way over to Sophia, who mouths I got this at Eddie over her shoulder. She’s probably going to have the whole story within the next ten minutes, because Eddie’s aunt is an incorrigible gossip and passes it on to Christopher with great joy.

“Hey,” Adriana says, as she takes a couple of steps into the hallway, reaches out and squeezes his shoulder. “You look different.”

Eddie knows he does. Even if no one else had told him the same thing, he’s actually started seeing it in the mirror, has started feeling it in the way he smiles sometimes, absentminded, not having to think about the shape of it or how it feels on his face. Hopefully, it’s the therapy, and also—everything else.

Eddie kind of wants to just tell her, her and Sophia both, but that kind of thing has a way of seeping into the walls in this house. He’s half-convinced that the ancient wallpaper has somehow learned how to play telephone over the course of decades, because he never could keep a secret under this roof growing up. He had to bury the very thing he doesn’t trust not to get back to his parents somehow, and he will absolutely not be dealing with that on top of everything.

Whatever it is they have in store for him.

“It’s the therapy,” he shrugs, setting his bag down by the shoe rack. “Turns out it’s like—helpful. For making me a functioning human being.”

“You’ve always been functional, little brother,” she grins, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “Also, just so you know what to expect tomorrow,” she says, her face turning serious so quickly Eddie’s stomach swoops in dread, “we’re under strict instructions to take everyone to the park in the morning.”

“Oh fuck,” Eddie says.

In the morning, he wakes up well after nine, Christopher already out of the bed they’re sharing, the covers on his side bunched into a lump. There are still voices echoing up the stairs, the distant sound of the little kitchen radio, the familiar cadence Christopher’s steps. Everyone’s still here.

Eddie takes a minute to rub sleep out of his eyes and stare at the ceiling. He’d actually slept, which is a bit of a surprise, and also makes him kind of uncomfortable. He has a distinct image in his head of his parents coming into the room to stare at him while he sleeps, and that thought finally gets him out of bed and dressed.

“Eddie!” is the first thing his mother says when she spots him in the kitchen doorway, turning away from the stove to smile at him so wide it’s a little scary. She sidesteps the table, where Adriana is sitting stirring something with a frown on her face, to give him a hug. Eddie stutters a little before he raises his arms to wrap around her, his skin uncomfortably tight. “How are you? Did you sleep well?”

Eddie blinks at her when she pulls away, a little lost for words.

“Yeah, uh,” he says, looking over to his father who’s nose deep in a crossword then back, “I’m—good. Doing good, Mom.”

“Glad to hear it,” she smiles again, patting him on the cheek, handing him a cup of coffee. Eddie has to turn all his attention to keeping his feet planted on the spot, because the urge to turn around and run becomes terrifyingly strong.

He hates that there’s a part of him, however small, that wants to lean into her touch, that turns toward her affection like a flower turns to face the sun. That part wants so badly to believe her, to sit down in the kitchen and accept whatever food she’s about to have him sample throughout the day, to lean back and talk to her and swing his feet under the table the way he wasn’t allowed to do as a kid. He wants his mom, even if it’s been decades since she last gave him the kind of comfort he’s hard-wired to seek from her.

“Morning, Papi,” he says as he passes his father, who looks up with the end of his pen between his teeth and smiles too, like any of this is normal.

“Eddie,” he nods, with pronounced smile lines by his eyes that Eddie so rarely gets to see. “I was just telling your sister that—“

“We’re good to go,” Sophia interrupts, shrugging into a jacket as she steps into the room. “Adri?”

“Yeah,” Adriana sighs with relief, depositing her bowl in an empty spot on the counter and dusting off her hands. “We’re not going for long though, right? Do I need a scarf?”

She gives Eddie an unsubtle look that makes him want to get up and give her a hug.

“Half an hour,” Sophia says, staring at their mother’s back. “I had a hard enough time getting Damian out of bed, we’re not going to—“

“Dad,” Christopher says, suddenly appearing in the other door. “I’m being forced to go to the park.”

He seems to have forgotten that he was mad in the face of a prospect as horrific as a walk with his aunts and cousins, and at the sight of his pout Eddie actually laughs for the first time today.

“It’ll be good for you,” he grins, but he also reaches out so he can pull Christopher into his side and press a kiss into his hair, which he only gets away with because Christopher’s cool older cousin Maya can’t see them. “We were in the car all day yesterday, some fresh air’ll be nice. Help you make room for all this amazing food.”

Christopher squints at him. Eddie’s probably overselling it, but one of his eyes is still half stuck together with sleep, and his parents have been replaced by weird smiling pod people, so getting Christopher out seems like a good idea.

“You’re weird,” Christopher says finally, a little on the tart side, but he also grins just a little bit. “Can I have cookies when we get back?”

Eddie runs a hand through his hair, slow, getting a good look at him. Trying to memorize the angles of Christopher’s face, so he can remember the things that matter, sift them from the things that don’t.

“Only if I don’t eat them first,” he says, but something of the silent dread settling around his shoulders must show on his face, because Christopher frowns. “Go have fun, okay? I promise your aunt Adriana’s cooler than she seems.”

Adriana, in the middle of wrapping her scarf around her neck, huffs. “Uh, hello?” she says, and Christopher giggles. “Just for that, I’m gonna tell you about all the embarrassing things your dad did when he was a kid. Come on,” she holds out her arm, and Christopher, laughing, hurries around the kitchen table to her.

While he passes through and into the hallway, she looks up at Eddie, and mimes putting a phone to her ear. Call if you need us, she mouths, and Eddie has the distant thought that this entire situation seems a little fucked, even for the usually dysfunctional Diaz family dynamic.

He does some box breathing while everyone puts on their shoes and jackets. His father’s still looking down at his crossword, barely blinking, glasses slowly moving toward the tip of his nose.

The front door shuts. For a minute, it’s just the Christmas classics on the radio, the creaking of the oven as it cools down, morning light spilled like liquid gold on the table and the smell of rosemary in the air. The kind of peace that can turn on a dime.

Eddie reaches for his phone where it’s resting, quiet, in front of him on the table. He’d texted Buck intermittently yesterday, during most of the many pee breaks they took, and only received a reply to some of them.

how’s it going over there? he sends now, ignoring last night’s question that Buck never answered. confirmed parents are being weird. i think i’m sitting in an intervention.

“Eddie,” his mother says, finally familiar. The induction hob beeps as she turns it off; in perfect sync, Eddie’s father folds his newspaper and folds his glasses and folds his hands on the table.

“Mom,” he replies. He puts his feet more firmly on the floor, straightens up, checks in from head to toe: his heart is steady, just loud in his ears, and though his hands kind of want to curl into fists on the table, it’s easy enough to convince them to stay open. He’s okay, for now. “What’s up?”

“Eddie,” she says again. “Thank you for coming.”

“You’re welcome,” Eddie says, because he’s already pretty firmly decided he’s never letting her talk him into something ever again.

His father frowns, a violent scrunch of his eyebrows that’s there and gone so fast Eddie almost thinks he imagined it.

“I hope we didn’t take you away from work for too long,” Helena says, untying her apron, slipping the tie over her head, folding the whole thing into a nervous little rectangle that she sets on the counter. “It’ll be nice, you’ll see. To have a family Christmas.”

She pulls out the chair next to Eddie’s father, the one closer to Eddie, who’s sitting at the head of the table.

“Sure,” he says. He debates whether to agitate her this early, and then he looks at his father’s white knuckles, his grip so tight his bones should be creaking, and thinks, fuck it. “Would’ve been nicer if you’d let me bring the rest of my family, though.”

Her lips thin. Eddie’s long past pretending that it doesn’t bring him satisfaction.

“That’s still going on, then,” his father says, dry.

“Define that,” Eddie says, and takes a drink of his coffee.

“Don’t play stupid, Eddie,” his father spits, so suddenly harsh it makes Eddie flinch back with years of muscle memory. “You’re still letting that man near Christopher. Letting your son think that this is normal—“

“What about it,” Eddie interrupts, leaning forward, and the tabletop’s freezing cold under his elbows but his heart beats steady, steady, steady, “is abnormal, Papi? I’d like to hear you say it. Tell me exactly what’s wrong with Christopher and I having Buck in our lives.”

Eddie thinks of the zoo, just a few days ago, the happy crinkles at the corners of Buck’s eyes as he made fake stomach growling noises, Buck and Christopher squinting into the snowy owl enclosure and gasping at the exact same time when they finally spotted it; he thinks about eating their dinner in the car and making a mess he had to vaccum before they got on the road to Texas, about Buck laughing, reaching over to wipe a smear of ketchup from Eddie’s cheek.

Those are things Eddie gets to keep for himself. He gets to hold them close, safe locked up in his ribcage, the kind of happiness his father wouldn’t understand, would never think to want for one of his children.

It makes it easy, actually, to lean back, to raise his chin, to feel bigger than either of his parents.

Ramon opens his mouth. Helena reaches over to put a hand on his clenched fists, rubbing a thumb over his knuckles.

“Now,” she says, in a placating tone of voice that sounds grotesquely out of place coming out of her mouth, “Eddie, let’s not argue. It’s Christmas.”

“I didn’t start,” Eddie smiles, even if he did kind of start.

He takes another drink of his coffee, still hot and painfully acidic in his mouth. Black, the way his parents take it.

His mother sighs. “We wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Here I am,” Eddie says, spreading his arms wide. “Talk.”

Ramon frowns again, and takes a breath to do something like demand respect under his own roof, but Helena’s hand tightens on his, the skin of both their knuckles taut.

“We see how hard you’ve worked to build a life for yourself,” she says. Eddie blinks in surprise. “You’ve done so well at work, and you know how we felt about Christopher being left alone for twenty-four hours at a time—“

Eddie snorts. Does he ever.

“—but we talked to him this morning, and he said he spends more time with you than most of his classmates do with their parents.”

“As I told you when you were trying to talk me out of it the first time,” Eddie replies, focusing on his feet on the floor, the dull ache in his elbows from leaning on the table, because the thought of them catching Christopher alone to interrogate him about Eddie’s choices makes him see red.

“Well,” Helena smiles, small, awkward, “you were right.”

And Eddie should just shut up and take it. He should let himself lean into it, to indulge the part of him that will never stop wanting his parents’ approval, because he was never right about anything growing up, always saying the wrong things and being around the wrong people and taking the turns his parents drew for him on the map of his life only to do it wrong, wrong, wrong.

But all of this is so painfully fake it makes his teeth hurt. He may have been fooled by it, once upon a time, but the morning light makes it clear in the set of his father’s jaw, the way his mother automatically straightens up then rounds her shoulders to seem smaller. They’re not changing their minds after thirty years; they’re just seizing on the empty places inside him that they created. They know an Eddie who’ll step back and duck and give them more chances, and Eddie’s fresh out of those.

“Wow,” he raises his eyebrows, looks her in the eye,” how difficult was that for you to say?”

She closes her eyes for a second, and exhales in a way that’s painfully familiar.

“Stop that, Eddie,” she says, her voice wobbling with how much she wants to raise it. Eddie smiles at her. “We just want to talk. In good faith. I think you owe that to us.”

You owe me, Eddie thinks, and then he looks over his mother’s shoulder to the pots on the stove and the foil-covered roasting pan and thinks of Buck, alone in LA while Eddie’s putting up with this fucking circus.

“You owe me,” he says out loud. “At the very least, you owe it to me to get through this quick. I’m not fucking interested in your pleasantries, Mom.”

“Watch your language,” Ramon bites out. He looks—small. Eddie can only hope it’s because Eddie himself has learned how to take up more space.

“I’m a grown man,” he replies. “And you practically bullied me into coming here because you had something important to say, so please.”

He swallows, his mouth uncomfortably full of spit. He’d had the thought on the drive over here, turning it over and over in his mind until the rough edges of it smoothed out, until he came to think of it as something that really could have happened: that his parents had seen how happy Christopher is in LA, had seen the support system they have around them, seen Pepa and Abuela on their side, and just—changed their minds. Worked on themselves, like Eddie’s been working on himself, clawing his way to something better.

It had been a nice thought, but he’s worn it so smooth it suddenly slips out of his hands. He imagines it shattering irreparably on the floor of his childhood kitchen, this idea of his parents ever making the effort to understand who it is they raised smashed into so many glistening pieces he could never hope it find them all.

There’s no love for him here. He’s just a fool who won’t stop looking for it.

“Okay,” Helena says, getting up to reach up to the top of the fridge, where a plain brown paper folder has been lying unnoticed. “Okay.”

She brings it over to the table, sits back down, passes it to him. Eddie’s suddenly freezing cold all the way down to his toes.

“We’ve been thinking,” Ramon says, and Eddie knows he must look afraid when he looks his father in the eye, but there’s nothing he can do about it. “And we think the time’s right for you to move back home.”

Eddie’s breath leaves him in a rush.

“You think—“ he starts, then chokes on an incredulous sound that’s not quite a laugh. “This is why you insisted I come? So we could have this conversation for the million and first time?”

He thinks about Buck first; Buck, who’s without his family when he doesn’t have to be just because Eddie’s so, so fucking stupid.

He swallows the nausea, and instead lets his stomach fill with an acidic, burning rage.

“Wait,” his mother says, and Eddie curls his fingers in, squeezes his hands into fists so hard they shake, just to give the anger somewhere to go. She’s the one who raises her voice; he’s not going to be like her. “Just wait, Eddie. We’ve thought about what you said back in LA. About taking you as you are.”

Eddie laughs, a bitter, twisted thing. “And the conclusion you came to is that taking me as I am means telling me to move back here?”

“It was always meant to be temporary,” Ramon says, which isn’t remotely true, because they yelled at him plenty about making permanent life-altering decisions back in the day. “We understand, now. You’ve grown, you’re self-sufficient. You can be those things here at home, too.”

He says it slow, measured, like he’s in a business meeting, obfuscating if not just openly lying. Eddie’s absolutely certain of how they expect this to go: they go soft on him, tell him what they think he wants to hear, and talk him into giving this another chance, just waiting to pounce the second he severs his ties.

They expect him to yield, because that’s what he’s like to them. Soft. Weak.

“We already took care of some things,” Helena smiles, patting the folder. More dread trickles down into Eddie’s stomach, cooling the rage until the whole thing congeals into an immovable lump, something foreign that wants to crawl up his throat and make him violently sick. “Go on, open it.”

He does, with a hand that doesn’t feel like his own. It’s full of paper, pristine white sheets all perfectly lined up, not a corner out of place.

The top one has his mother’s name on it, his parents’ address, and an unfamiliar school crest in the top right corner.

Eddie’s mouth goes so dry he can’t speak.

“We got lucky,” his mother says, distorted through the ringing in his ears. “It’s the best inclusive school in the state, and your father knows someone on the board, and they even have a veterans’ discount on the tuition, so we—“

“What is this,” Eddie manages to say, and he doesn’t recognize his own voice. “What the—what the fuck?”

He doesn’t wait for them to answer as he yanks on the contents of the folder, scattering white sheets everywhere. The letters blur in front of his eyes, spilling into each other and barely legible as his head spins, so he takes the calmest breath he’s capable of, letting the air flow around whatever’s stuck in his throat: a scream or a sob or something else entirely.

The writing comes into focus when he opens his eyes. He grabs at it with clumsy hands, creasing the corners, bending the pages. More letters from the school; one asking to confirm the place they’re offering for Christopher Diaz to start in September 2022, the signature from the headmaster on it in actual pen. A brochure so shiny the pages squeak under his touch, full of kids in bright Technicolor grinning at the camera; underneath, a list of required supplies like it’s fucking Hogwarts, a couple of business cards held together with a shiny paperclip.

Then, fanned out in to the farthest corner of the table where his father has stopped it from falling with the tip of an index finger, a black-and-white picture of a house, and another one over by his mother, another in Eddie’s lap, a couple more scattered on the floor.

3 bds 2 ba 1302 sqft, says the writing under the blurry photo of a bungalow with a barren square of a front yard, the color impossible to tell. Eddie holds it in his hand for a beat, for two, feels his heart beating in the fingertips that curl around a future his parents would want for him, and then crumples it into a ball.

“One of my friends is a realtor,” Helena says, somehow still sitting there primly, one leg thrown over the other, straightening up to her full height.

“We went to look at this one,” says Ramon, pushing the paper he’d been holding toward Eddie. “It’s very nice. Respectable. Only a few streets away from here.”

So they could have him back in their grip. So they could let themselves in whenever they pleased, slip into every nook and cranny of Eddie’s life, decide how he does things, step up to look after Christopher as soon as Eddie steps foot out of the house.

Only a few streets away. Walking distance to ruin Eddie, over time, in a million little ways, so he doesn’t remember how to leave this time.

“Think about it,” his mother says, trying so hard to sound like something she’s not. Eddie can hear the steel underneath, is familiar with it because he barely knows anything else. Just don’t touch, straighten up, behave, fall in line, so much of it said at this same kitchen table. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Christopher would be so close to us, and to his aunts. He could grow up in the same neighborhood as you did.”

Or he could grow up at home, Eddie tries to say, but he only just has enough air to breathe. He has to get himself together, fast, but he didn’t come here thinking they still had something left to break, and now here they are.

“And,” his mother says with a flourish, “you really wouldn’t have to give anything up. We took care of it.”

She slides a couple of sheets toward him, fingers delicate on the paper. Eddie’s struggling to read the letters again, but there’s a crest in the letterhead that looks familiar, dark blue and white: the El Paso Fire Department.

A solid, ice-cold lump of dread falls into Eddie’s stomach. He rubs at his face furiously, trying to dislodge the burning, this feeling like his skin is stretched too thin, so he can make out what the letter says.

“Mom,” he says, and it comes out raspy, broken, “what are you doing? What is this?”

“It’s correspondence with the department chief,” she says, her smile just this side of twisted when Eddie looks at her. “Saying he’s asked about you and looked at your record, and would love to have you become part of the force.”

“He—asked about me?” Eddie gets out, and the rage, blessedly, returns. He knows what to do with that, and he doesn’t care what he burns in the process. “He—who did he ask, mom? Do you realize how that looks? This could get back to the chief back in LA, to my captain—“

Oh God, he thinks. God, he has to call Bobby.

“Your captain seems like a reasonable man,” Ramon says, only sneering a little. “I’m sure he understands this is what’s best for you.”

Eddie leans back in his chair. He lets the crumpled paper in his fist fall to the ground, and looks at his parents.

His mother, her hand halfway across the table to him, with a plea in her eyes as she asks him to give up his life, the way Hen said it so long ago: like who he is, what he wants, doesn’t matter.

His father, with wrinkles gathered by the corners of his eyes that seem to have always been there, with his jaw set the same way Eddie’s probably is, the two of them alike in anger, at least.

They’re both looking at him, and neither of them sees him, the way it’s always been. They’ve looked through him at his accomplishments, never quite enough, looked through him at his disappointments, of which there were plenty, and then looked through him at Christopher, the next person in line, because Eddie’s always been a write-off.

He remembers, out of nowhere, coming home, coming home to raised eyebrows and taut expressions and words that were immediately biting. Remembers the way it felt to sit on the patio while his father took the Silver Star and went knocking on the neighbors’ doors to show it off, the medal without the son who brought it home. He’d followed all the rules, and still, he was a stain on it. Came back too damaged, not good enough at hiding his pain, even when all he did was grin and bear it and try to go forward when the earth felt like it was cracking apart under his feet.

That’s what he’s always good for: suffering for the sake of somebody else, shrinking and shrinking and shrinking to make room, and he’s done with it.

He’s done.

The tears feel unnaturally hot when they gather in his eyes, teetering for a breath in that moment where he could hide his face and wipe them, or let them fall.

With all the defiance he can muster, Eddie blinks. He looks his father in the eye as a tear trickles down the side of his nose, as another lands on his cheek; looks and looks until his father frowns and turns to gaze out of the window.

“That’s what you think,” he says when he finds his voice, looking from Ramon to Helena and back over this sea of paper between them, a folder of what they think Eddie wants, more than they think he deserves. “You think this is what’s best for me.”

“You weren’t meant to be so far away from home,” his mother says, her voice hard, her eyes still soft and pleading. Give up, she doesn’t say, but Eddie hears her loud and clear. Don’t drag him down with you. “Come back, Eddie. We can all do better. We can work this out.”

Eddie shakes his head. He runs a hand through his hair and pulls on it, which brings him right back to Frank’s office, sitting in front of a man who pushes every single one of his buttons, who makes Eddie fall to pieces and then sits there with his stupid all-knowing eyebrows and helps put him back together.

“There’s no—we can’t work this out,” he scoffs, and his voice is a little stronger. “This isn’t home.”

His home is back in LA, alone, because Eddie’s been taught to second-guess what he wants and needs since before he could speak and wasn’t strong enough, even now, to stand his ground.

Home is what he’ll feel in a few days’ time, when he parks in front of the firehouse and helps Buck unload whatever crazy number of food trays he’ll have made, when he carries them upstairs and follows Bobby’s instructions on where to put them and sits down in the kitchen, where the 118 eats meals as a family. Home is stomping on Chim’s feet under the table and fighting over the last of the potatoes with Hen.

This house, this city, are just places on a map, and Eddie’s never been any good with those.

“Maybe not now,” his mother says, and it doesn’t even surprise Eddie, at this point. She’s reaching for him, and he’s pulling away; she’ll say anything. “But it can be. Whatever you think is so irreplaceable, I promise it isn’t. We can help you build a life here, Eddie, a good life.”

“I don’t want your help,” Eddie laughs, more tears welling and falling, not needing permission anymore. “I don’t want anything from you, how can you—look at yourselves,” he says, and waves his arm over the table. “Look at this. You’re—I don’t even know. You’re actually deranged.”

He doesn’t quite sob, but a noise crawls up his throat, and he doesn’t make an effort to keep it quiet.

“Get yourself together,” Ramon growls, and Eddie stops halfway to wiping his face dry. He chases his father’s eyes, and doesn’t catch them.

“What, Papi?” he asks. “You can’t handle making your son cry? Is it that fucking repulsive that I allow myself to feel an emotion?” His voice is shaking, but he lets it, lets the hurt coat the back of his throat just so they’ll maybe get it, for once in their lives. “I’m too soft, is that it? You’ve always known, and now I’m proving your point because, God forbid, it makes me fucking sad that my own parents don’t love me?”

His mother flinches back, but Eddie barely notices.

“Look at me,” he says to his father.

Ramon’s eyes flick back to him, linger for less then a second, and slide away.

“Eddie, we love you,” Helena says, and manages to make it sound like an attack. “Of course we love you, how can you think we don’t?”

Eddie blinks at her. “Sure, okay. You love me. But I love my son,” he says, quiet, the words raw at the edges. “I love my son, and I’d never do this to him, Mom. I could never watch him drowning and—and put a hand on his head and push him down.”

She presses her lips together until they go white. Eddie sniffs, and wipes his face, and waits her out, because he’s sure she has things to say.

When she speaks, it’s cool, the usual tone she uses when she’s pointing out the many ways in which he’s wrong.

“Is that what you think we’re doing?”

“Yeah,” Eddie smiles, the movement of his puffy face uncomfortable. “That’s what you’ve always done, because you want to forget that I exist. You push me and push me and push me because you think I’ll eventually snap and give in to you, and then you can take Christopher and use him as a do-over.”

She sucks in a breath and opens her mouth to argue. Eddie leans forward with a scrape of his chair over the floor.

“But you don’t get to fix your mistakes with him,” he says. “You’re just gonna have to live with it, because I’m going to fix them. I’m going to sort through this fucked up mess in my head and I’m going to love him the way he deserves,” he looks and looks at her, and she won’t duck him, won’t hide the same way his father’s doing. “This ends with me.”

“You’re wrong,” she says, quiet. “And selfish, as always. Christopher—“

“Christopher is mad at me right now,” Eddie interrupts, curling his fingers around the edge of the table to stop himself from standing, from storming out. This has to end here. “Because we came here. Because you kept insisting I come, and I let you get into my head, and I let the man I love spend Christmas alone—“

“What did you just say?” his father asks, and Eddie almost, almost laughs. It fucking figures.

He raises his chin. “You heard me.”

And he realizes he’s not afraid of what his father’s going to say. He can’t be, because his father’s wrong; his father’s scared of him, of the way he acts and feels and loves.

Ramon scoffs. “Of course,” he says, grimacing in a way that feels like a punch to the stomach, but Eddie’s used to the sensation and breathes right through it. He doesn’t matter, not if Eddie doesn’t let him. “I was always worried.”

“Worried,” Eddie says, crossing his arms over his chest. There’s nothing wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him. He loves a man who deserves to have the world set down at his feet and there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Buck could never be wrong.

“Like I said,” says Ramon, “you’ve always been like that.” He looks out of the window again. Picks up his glasses and sets them on his nose. “Your poor wife.”

Eddie does laugh, then. “My wife? Shannon?” His mother frowns at the name. “Shannon, who only ever mattered to you because she was the mother of my son?”

“It must have been hard to be with you,” his father says. Eddie’s chest pangs with an ancient, lifelong hurt, and he turns Frank’s words over in his head, trying to hold on to them. You make a mistake. You try to move forward.

“It was,” he says. “But she knew I loved her. And I love Buck. It really doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

His mother blinks at him, slow, like she’s trying to figure him out. He can’t remember a time he felt anything other than small and exposed under her gaze, and he hopes—God, he hopes she’s seeing something new in him. He hopes he makes her afraid.

“There’s always a choice,” she says.

Eddie unfolds his arms. His palms are damp, so he wipes them on his jeans a couple of times, looking at the dregs of coffee in his mug. His eyes have dried, and they feel a little raw, every blink a scrape, but he’s not going to shed any more tears over these people.

“You keep taking things from me,” he says. “You keep taking things, and I keep hoping that if I give them to you maybe it’ll be enough.”

“We’ve done right by you,” Ramon hisses. “You never wanted for anything when you were a child, and you turn around and become an ungrateful—“

“But you’re not taking this,” Eddie continues, relishing the way his father’s mouth snaps shut. “LA is my home. It’s Christopher’s home. We’re happy there, we have a family there that loves us and would do anything for us. We have Buck, and I love him in a way you couldn’t comprehend if you tried. You won’t take any of that away from me,” he breathes in, grits his teeth. “You’re not taking anything else.”

He stands up, the chair loud over the quiet hum of the radio, over the silence that hangs between them.

“That’s my choice. Maybe you should think about yours.”

They say nothing. Neither of them are looking at him now, like acknowledging his presence is not allowed, even though they’re the ones who dragged him all the way over to Texas, and actually—what’s Eddie doing here? What the fuck is he doing?

“Papi,” he says, and his father’s jaw tics. “I know Abuelo probably didn’t go easy on you. I know how much you had to work to make sure we had what we needed, and that meant you were always gone, and Mom,” he turns to her, “I know it was hard. Dad was always gone, and I know three kids were a lot to handle, but this?“ He waves an arm, encompassing the three of them, the kitchen, the house, their lives, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair to me, and I won’t sit here and take it anymore.”

Silence.

“So I—after I go back to LA, if you show up unannounced again, if you come and try to take Christopher from me, I swear I’ll be getting a restraining order. If you want to be in my life, it’ll be on my terms.”

His mother stands up, sending her chair falling backwards, a deafening crash on the tile. She takes a deep, furious breath, and is just about to unleash things that Eddie will have to try very hard to forget, but then there’s the sound of keys in the front door, and the rest of the family is coming back.

Eddie looks at her one more time, looks at his father who’s studying the ceiling, and something inside him breaks just as another part of him knits back together.

“We’re back!” Sophia hollers from the hallway. Eddie turns on his heels and leaves his parents in the kitchen, stepping through the doorway to see everyone red-cheeked and smiling.

Adriana’s the first to spot him, and her grin goes brittle then disappears at the sight of him.

Eddie tries to smile. This is right; he knows it in the steady beating of his heart, in the solid ground under his feet.

“Come to LA next year,” he says, looking at his sisters, his brother-in-law, his niece, his baby nephew asleep in his father’s arms. “For Christmas. All of you. Come spend it with me and Christopher and—“ he blinks, and wants to laugh a little at how easily Buck’s name forms on his tongue, “well. Maybe someone else, if I can get my shit together.”

“Bad word,” Christopher grins from where he’s unbuttoning his coat, just as Sophia’s mouth falls open.

“I knew it,” Adriana grins.

“I knew it,” says Sophia. “I said it first, Eddie, I want it recorded—“

And then they’re off, filling the hallway up to the top with their squabbling about who, apparently, knew first that Eddie was in love.

He grins at them, the inside of his chest warm even as his face still stings, and then Christopher fights his way out of the tangle of everyone trying to take their shoes off at the same time. He stumbles forward and faceplants right into Eddie’s stomach, wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist.

“Hey,” Eddie says, squeezing the back of Christopher’s neck tighter than is probably comfortable. “You have a good time?”

Christopher blinks up at him, his face pink from the chill. “Are you okay, Dad?” he asks, straight to the point. The most perceptive, most caring, kindest kid Eddie has ever met, and he’s Eddie’s. Eddie’s to shelter and take care of and not fuck up completely, God willing.

“Actually,” he says, holding out his arms and grinning when Christopher agrees to being picked up, “I’m thinking of doing something a little crazy, and, uh. I was thinking maybe you’ll talk me out of it.”

Christopher puts his hands on the sides of Eddie’s face, beaming.

“Is it going home to spend Christmas with Buck?”

“Oh boy,” Eddie says, and an hour later, they’re on the I-10.

Chapter Text

When he places his mouth near my mouth
because he’s so obviously thirsty,
when he moves to the well
where my tongue spouts out
because we’re mostly made of water
two-thirds of me is certain:
este infierno vale la pena.
         This hell is worth the risk.

- sjohnna mccray, 'i do'

_________________________

Christopher’s laughing at him. Eddie’s a grown man with a house and a job and about two solid hours of sleep under his belt, and his ten-year-old is standing there openly giggling at him.

“It’s not funny,” he says. Christopher laughs so hard he has to lean back against the wall to stay upright. “Christopher. It’s not funny.”

“It’s so funny,” Chris replies, smiling so wide his eyes are practically shut. “I can’t believe you’re afraid of Buck, Dad.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” Eddie says, staring at Buck’s door, definitely a little afraid. “I’m just nervous.”

It’s seven in the morning on Christmas Day. Eddie rolled out of bed all of half an hour ago, when Christopher, already dressed with his teeth brushed and not remotely interested in the presents Eddie managed to pile under the tree when they got home from Texas after midnight, told him it was time to go see Buck.

He feels a little hung over, actually, standing in the familiar corridor, staring down the wreath circling Buck’s apartment number. Like everything he said and did yesterday is just catching up with him, sinking in.

He wants Buck, more than anything. He wants to be there to make sure he’s okay, and he wants to reach out and pull him in and draw on the endless comfort he always provides. But he hasn’t called, hasn’t texted, and Buck had said—

“Oh my God,” Christopher says, rolling his eyes. He gets his crutches under him, covers the three steps between him and the door, and uses the end of his left crutch to knock.

“Christopher,” Eddie hisses. Briefly, he entertains actually throwing his kid over his shoulder and running away, but—no. No, he’s being brave. For himself.

They stand there for a couple of minutes, listening in.

“Maybe he went somewhere,” Christopher frowns. Eddie knows for a fact that he didn’t, because he’d sent out texts last night, chugging a gas station coffee somewhere outside Phoenix city limits, leaning on the hood of the truck in the dark with Christopher asleep inside. Everyone else’s plans went ahead as scheduled; no one’s home, and no one has Buck with them.

“Let’s try again,” Eddie shrugs, and he’s the one to knock this time, three quick raps that he hopes Buck might recognize.

Christopher leans forward. “Buck,” he whispers through the keyhole, “it’s Santa.”

Nothing. Eddie knocks one more time, louder, four, five, six knocks. Something shuffles inside, a low grumble in a familiar voice, and Eddie couldn’t stop the ridiculous smile that stretches his face if he tried.

Steps on the other side of the door, a heavy tread Eddie could pick out of among thousands. The chain rattles as Buck unbolts the door, and then he’s opening it, standing there lit up by the pale winter sun that’s only just rising. His hair’s a mess, sticking up on one side, and he has soft pink pillow creases down the left side of his face. Eddie wants to curl his fingers into the cozy-looking fabric of his hoodie, and kiss him, and never let go.

But Buck’s blinking like someone hit him over the head, his mouth open around a question he never got around to asking. He rubs his eye slowly with a knuckle.

So Eddie takes a breath and lets it out, his hands crammed awkwardly into the pockets of his jacket.

“Now,” he says, and has the guts to look Buck in the eye, “before you say something cheesy about a Christmas miracle—“

But he doesn’t get to finish, because Buck’s stumbling forward over his own threshold, falling into Eddie, wrapping his arms around Eddie’s shoulders, and he’s—oh. He’s shaking.

“Okay,” Eddie says, as his body automatically curls around Buck to keep him safe, an arm around his waist, a hand tangled in his hair. “Okay, you’re okay. We’re here.”

Buck breathes, shallow and startled, against Eddie’s collarbone. “Eddie?” he asks, like he’s making sure.

“Yeah,” Eddie murmurs, soothing, pressing a kiss to Buck’s temple. “I’m here, we’re here. We’re with you.”

Buck shakes his head, clumsy on Eddie’s shoulder. “I lied,” he says, his voice stronger but still trembling. “I’m sorry, I lied. I didn’t want you to go.”

Eddie breathes out into Buck’s neck and inhales the scent of him, just Buck and the fading remnants of laundry detergent that might actually be Eddie’s, a hint of something sweet like sugar cookies.

Everything falls off him at once, the blooming grief of everything that happened with his parents and that creased, dirty feeling that comes with an overlong drive. The anxiety, the doubt, all of it falling onto the tile between them, stacking discarded around their ankles.

This, he thinks, might be the only place in the world where he can just—be. Eddie knows this man, anywhere, everywhere. Buck didn’t want him to go. He didn’t want Eddie to go.

“I know,” he says. “We shouldn’t have left in the first place.”

Buck curls his hands into the back of Eddie’s jacket, presses impossibly closer, warm and soft along Eddie’s front.

“Hi, Buck,” Christopher says, very pointedly, and Buck chokes out a watery laugh.

“Sorry,” he says as he pulls away, his eyes lingering on Eddie’s for a second before he turns his attention to Christopher. “Sorry, buddy. Just hugging my favorite Diazes in reverse order.”

Christopher frowns, even as he lets Buck sweep him up in a bear hug.

“That means you’re his favorite,” Eddie whispers, and Christopher, whose chin is resting on Buck’s shoulder, starts laughing again, squealing when Buck spins them right there in the hallway, their voices echoing off the high ceiling.

Eddie takes a step back to avoid getting a crutch in the shin and just watches them, feeling full to the brim with warmth. The contrast with yesterday is pronounced enough to have him feeling a little weepy, because—even if Buck isn’t his, not yet and maybe not ever, Eddie knows he was right about where to look for home.

Carla had told him to follow his heart instead of Christopher’s, all those months ago, and it’s only now, looking at Christopher and Buck grinning at each other, whispering, both still a little sleep-rumpled, that Eddie understands.

Their hearts have always been in the same place, held safe by the same pair of hands.

“You know,” Buck says, flicking Christopher on the chin, “I think Santa may have left something here for you.”

Christopher raises an eyebrow. “Santa?”

“I swear,” Buck grins. “Wasn’t me. You should go check it out.”

Christopher doesn’t have to be asked twice: as soon as Buck sets him down, he’s off like a shot to look under the tree they’d helped Buck set up.

As soon as Chris safely inside the apartment, Buck raises his eyes to Eddie’s, and Eddie is pulled across the distance like his feet have a mind of their own, slotting under Buck’s outstretched arm for another hug, because if there ever was a time to be greedy with Buck’s affection, it’s now.

“Hi,” Buck murmurs into Eddie’s temple, the two of them pressed together tight in the doorway, listening out for a squeal from Christopher that comes a few seconds later.

“Hi,” Eddie replies, and he can’t stop a grin from taking over his face, stretching his mouth so wide his cheeks hurt a little bit. He nuzzles into Buck’s neck, just for a second, because neither of them is severely emotionally compromised for a change, and he wants to chase the high of feeling content and safe and held like he always does in Buck’s arms. “Sorry we’re late.”

Buck sways from foot to foot, and Eddie relaxes into the easy movement.

They should go and help Christopher with the mountain of presents Eddie knows Buck got him. Eddie should let go and straighten up and brush himself off, get it together at least a little, but he can’t shake the image in his head of walking into the living room with Buck, hand in hand.

“What happened?” Buck asks.

“Ugh,” Eddie says ever so eloquently, and it gets him a quiet chuckle that brushes through the hair on the top of his head. “Just—my parents. I’ll tell you another time.”

He pulls away a little, just enough to look Buck in the eye, enough to be able to put his hands on Buck’s shoulders.

“All I know,” he says, distracted by the way Buck blinks at him, slow and focused like Eddie’s the only person in the world, “is that I made a mistake going in the first place. I shouldn’t have let you convince me that you’d be fine.”

Buck ducks his head. “Yeah, uh,” he scratches the back of his neck, “about that—“

“Dad!” Christopher shrieks from inside, his voice ringing out into the doorway. “Dad, oh my God Santabroughtmeatelescope!”

Buck barks a laugh. “You get any of that?”

“Santa brought him a telescope,” Eddie smiles, and his face must be all sorts of embarrassing, but he doesn’t care. “Even though I specifically remember telling Santa that it was way too expensive.”

Buck’s blushing, unbearably pretty as he shrugs and looks inside with his face so soft it takes Eddie’s breath away.

“Okay, well,” he says, the corner of his mouth curled up mischievously, “maybe Santa just couldn’t resist the opportunity to spoil his favorite kid in the world.”

“I thought he wasn’t supposed to have favorites,” Eddie says, taking a step inside. He has to shove his hand in his pocket, squeeze the lining between his fingers so he doesn’t reach out to grab Buck’s.

He’s pretty sure Buck would let him, is the thing, and Eddie’s courage has taken a bit of a beating in the last twenty-four hours. He hasn’t figured out what to say, how to say it, what he is and isn’t allowed to hope for.

He just knows what he wants, and it’s Buck just like this, standing in the doorway at seven in the morning in his sleep shorts with his knees all bumpy, a dark blue bruise on the bottom of his thigh from when he missed a step getting up into the truck. He’s lit up in shades of gold, with his cheeks still a little pink, and Eddie’s so, so close to figuring out what to say so there can be no mistake. So close to knowing how to ask Buck for the rest of his life, to feeling like that’s something he’s allowed to ask in the first place.

He was awake until three in the morning last night, staring at his neighbor’s Christmas lights flash over the ceiling of his bedroom, thinking about getting out of the elevator and knocking and finding Buck on the other side with that same shuttered look in his eyes. About what Buck said, I don’t want you to turning into I don’t want you effortlessly, because of course Buck doesn’t want him. He couldn’t; he wouldn’t.

But in the light of day, he’d almost fallen on his face in his haste to get to Eddie, and that has to count for something. It counts for enough that Eddie owes it to Buck to be honest.

He’s so close, but today, his son demands his attention, so he steps into the living room and waits for Buck to catch up. They spend the next half an hour dodging flying scraps of wrapping paper, Eddie sitting on the couch, Buck sitting on the ground and leaning against his knee as they both dutifully inspect everything Christopher has received, from the telescope through a stack of books about aquatic birds to an unreasonably large plush replica of CJ the Sumatran tiger. They put on the TV and demolish a Tupperware of cookies that Bobby had dropped off, spend a little too long playing video games, and Eddie may or may not get gently tipsy at one in the afternoon off the eggnog that Buck carefully spikes for them.

They make pasta alfredo for dinner, because Buck just so happens to have the ingredients on hand. Once it’s dark, Christopher decides they need to take a walk around the neighborhood to look at the lights, and that’s how Eddie finds himself staring at a six-foot blow-up reindeer with a sleepy Christopher in his arms, with Buck smiling at them in a way that makes Eddie’s knees feel like they’ve been turned inside out.

He’s been like that all day: smiling easily, beautifully, at the drop of a hat. Like he’s shed all the weight of the past few months; like he’s just as happy as Eddie on this, the perfect day.

Eddie can’t help glancing at him ever few steps on the way back, the lines of his profile sharp in the glow of a million lights. Every time he looks forward again, he spots movement in his periphery, and thinks Buck might be doing the same thing.

“Hey Dad?” Christopher mumbles just as Buck buzzes them into the building, the bright light over the door waking him up.

“Yeah,” Eddie replies, smiling at Buck as he holds the door for them.

“Thanks for bringing us home for Christmas,” Christopher says into his neck, arms tightening around Eddie.

Eddie’s vision blurs for a second when he steps into the elevator, but he blinks to clear it. Buck’s back is to him because he’s pushing the button, but he must have heard, and Eddie wishes the door could show him a reflection as it slides shut, just so he could know if Buck’s heart is showing on his face the way Eddie knows his own is.

Christopher dozes off again in the minute it takes to ride the elevator up, snuffling into Eddie’s shoulder. Eddie runs a hand through his hair, and wonders how it’s possible to feel this certain that he’s done right by his kid this time.

It’s a little bit of a revelation: taking the right turn, for once.

The firehouse Christmas, naturally, gets interrupted half an hour in.

It had been a quiet day so far, so it’s not like Eddie can complain, exactly – at least not until they arrive on scene and Captain Mehta meets them with both of his hands pressed to his forehead.

“What are we looking at?” Bobby asks, squinting up at the high-rise. It’s mid-afternoon, late enough for the sun to be going down this time of year, and the glare of it is reflecting off a hundred windows, making it difficult to see. “Someone’s trapped on a balcony, right?”

“Right,” Mehta sighs. “Among other things. Building manager’s already here with the blueprints, if you want to have a look. I could use another set of eyes.”

Bobby nods, and motions for them to hang back. Eddie’s content to do just that, leaning against the door of the ambulance next to Hen, ready to go when called. Buck and Chim, naturally, wander after Bobby like a pair of curious puppies, one of them because heights are involved, the other because he has a compulsive need to know what’s going on.

“I wonder what this is,” Hen says as soon as she realizes Eddie’s there, looking around warily. “That’s a lot of people for some dumbass who locked themselves out.”

Eddie, who hadn’t really thought to look on the other side of the truck until now, follows her gaze and almost chokes in surprise. The road is taped off, but the sidewalk on the other side of it is crammed with people, heads tilted up, dozens of phones raised into the air.

“Damn,” Eddie says. “You think this is a celebrity call or something?”

Hen groans. “Take that back, Diaz. I’m not over the gold toilet incident, and I will not be over the gold toilet incident until—“

“Fancy meeting you here,” a voice Eddie had hoped to never hear again carries over to them, cutting Hen off. “The famous 118.”

“We’re a firehouse,” Eddie says as Taylor comes into view in another one of her perfectly fitted blazers, not a hair out of place. “We respond to emergencies.”

Hen elbows him in the ribs. Eddie crosses his arms and ignores her, focused on the way Taylor sways toward them in her too-high heels, a smile on her face that borders on a smirk, with a world of danger behind it. Her eyes sweep over Hen without stopping, and land on Eddie.

“Firefighter Diaz,” she grins, “always so witty. Nice to see you again.”

“You too,” Eddie forces through his teeth. It’s barely been a week since Buck broke up with her, and he can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be like this, but he’s never met a person who pushes his buttons so thoroughly by just existing.

Hen elbows him in the ribs again. He elbows her back.

“I see you’re not on the Christmas drive circuit anymore,” Eddie says, and bites his lip too late to stop it from coming out.

One of her eyebrows twitches, but the smile stays firm on her face, blankly professional.

“The higher ups weren’t too happy with the bank robbery report,” she shrugs, looking up at the building. Eddie hates how absolutely beautiful she is. “Pat just doesn’t have the same kind of drive. He doesn’t care about the truth like I do, so, another robbery…” she shrugs, grinning at them. “Taylor Kelly to the rescue.”

“Wait,” Hen says. “This is a robbery?”

“Oh, you didn’t know?” she asks, still smiling, something a little sadistic about it when she realizes she knows more than them. “Makes sense. They’re keeping it off the scanners just in case, but all the cops are just behind the 133 over there,” she tilts her head in the direction Bobby, Buck, and Chim had gone. Eddie can’t see anyone other than firefighters when he looks over, but even across all that distance, the wild frown on Bobby’s face spells nothing good. “They’re mostly office units, supposed to be empty for the holidays, but they somehow picked the one office that was having a Christmas party.”

“So who’s trapped on the balcony?” Hen asks, frowning into the heights.

“No idea,” Taylor shrugs, her arms folded. “I’m hoping to get that out of one of you guys.”

Eddie has to fight the urge to march up to her, turn her around, and push her behind the do not cross line. He can’t manhandle a veritable stranger, no matter how annoying.

“Sounds like a clusterfuck,” Hen says, slumping into Eddie’s shoulder. He plants his feet to support her weight and looks over to the right again, where Bobby and Buck have managed to get into something, if their wild gesticulating is anything to go by.

“So,” Taylor says, either unable to sense when she’s not welcome or not caring, “you finally won, huh?”

Eddie doesn’t realize she’s talking to him until she, too, leans back against the ambulance.

“Excuse me?” he asks, a little afraid of the venom in his own voice.

“You know,” she waves a hand. “Him.”

Eddie doesn’t have to ask who she means.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“I think you do,” Taylor smiles, tighter this time, her teeth hidden behind her lips. She’s wearing a shade of red lipstick that ages her, but Eddie’s not about to point that out.

He looks at Buck instead, equal parts adorable and effortlessly powerful as he pouts at Bobby with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s not Eddie’s – but he’s not Taylor’s anymore, either.

“I didn’t do anything,” he shrugs. He gets another elbow from Hen, and then a longsuffering sigh when he doesn’t react. “I just like to meet him where he is instead of trying to force him to be something he isn’t.”

Taylor snorts. “How altruistic of you,” he says, her heels clicking as she re-crosses her legs. “And how’s that working out? I can practically smell the sexual frustration coming off you, Diaz.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, and keeps looking up at the sky for a second so he doesn’t say something he’s seriously going to regret.

“As a medic, I have concerns about your sense of smell,” he says. He’s pretty sure Hen puts her head in her hands.

“See, this is what I mean,” she says, and when Eddie looks at her, her teeth are out again. “Maybe if you got laid occasionally you wouldn’t be wound this tight. It’s not good for you.”

“I’m not wound tight,” Eddie says, tightly. He’s only on edge because she’s driving him there.

And the thing is—of course she’s got him figured out. Eddie’s not exactly keeping it a secret these days, couldn’t even if he tried because it’s too big to keep contained, the way he feels about Buck.

And he wants him, God, of course he does; his body asked to have Buck’s hands on it even before Eddie figured it out. But the way she says it, like that’s all Buck could possibly be good for, when she knows firsthand the way he dotes on Christopher, knows how much he would give for the people he loves – yeah, Eddie’s a little fucking tickled. Sue him.

“Whatever you say,” says Taylor, biting the inside of her cheek as she watches whatever’s going on by the 133’s truck. “I have to say I’m confused, though. He broke up with me because I was basically the other woman, but here you are, still un—“

“Okay, I think that’s enough,” Eddie sighs, and straightens up. Judging by the way the captains are nodding at each other, the situation seems to be moving. “Look, Taylor,” he says, and is a little impressed with how normal he sounds, “I’m sorry you got broken up with, that sucks. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about Buck like he’s a piece of meat.”

Her eyebrows fly up toward her hairline. “Wow,” she says, the hint of a smirk hanging about her expression as always, whatever it is that sleeps under her skin and has the ability to make her ruthless when she wants to be. “God, you really are in love with him, aren’t you? I wasn’t sure, you’re always so,” and she makes a face, making her eyelids droop and her mouth pull down at the corners.

Eddie looks down at the ground for something to do, and kicks a bottle cap he finds there. His arms are still crossed, and he squeezes his own biceps, just to hold himself together a little, because she’s probably the first person to know that isn’t and never has been part of his family.

If, improbably, all of this works out, then plenty of other people are going to know, and Eddie’s not exactly opposed to the idea, but Taylor is Taylor, and if anyone can find a way to use his own feelings against him, it’s her.

Still. Eddie’s done enough pretending for a dozen lifetimes.

“You’re a reporter,” he shrugs, squinting up into the sun. “I thought you were supposed to have good observational skills.”

She tilts her head at him. “Huh,” she says. “Okay. Interesting.”

And then, to Eddie’s endless amazement, she pushes off the ambulance and brushes off her blazer.

“I will be seeing you,” she says, not a little ominously, and just walks off. Eddie watches her go, all business, headed straight for the news van that’s blocking some of the crowd, her usual camera guy sitting in the open door.

“Jeez,” Hen says, and Eddie can’t help a laugh. “I like—reluctantly respect her thing,” she continues, watching along with him as Taylor sets up her microphone and walks up and down, facing the crowd then facing the building, smiling for the camera while they figure out which shot to use. “But I have no idea how our Buck dated her for so long.”

“Yeah,” Eddie sighs, “I know.”

He actually does, because it’d be impossible to forget even if it didn’t happen last week, the way Buck had hunched in on himself when he said I don’t want to be alone.

He hadn’t wanted to reach for anything better, and as he watches Buck huffily make his way back to the truck, Eddie wonders if they might have that in common. Buck, stuck with a woman he couldn’t possibly love; Eddie, committed to his loneliness, because the idea of being happy is so absurdly abstract as to feel impossible, is too scary because if it were real it’d be impossible to keep.

But Eddie looks at Buck with his helmet tipped sideways and feels that ever-expanding feeling grow a little more in his chest, and thinks, hey, what if it wasn’t? What if happy is real, and they can weather how terrifying it is together, the same way they weather everything?

“What’s going on?” Hen asks when the rest of their team makes it back, all of them serious enough that Eddie’s body snaps to attention. “Taylor said it was a robbery.”

Buck startles at the name, looking around until his eyes settle on the van. Eddie reaches out and squeezes his forearm through his turnouts.

“It is,” Bobby sighs. “And it’s—this is so fucking stupid.”

Eddie jumps a little at the frustration in Bobby’s voice.

“There are kids,” Chim cuts in, pointing up into the air, “on a balcony on the twentieth floor. One of them called 911, said the robbers took them hostage to get their parents to cooperate and then the balcony got stuck.”

“It got stuck,” Eddie repeats.

“They burned a bunch of documents,” Bobby says, clipped. “In a trash can. Right next to the balcony door.”

“Which has a rubber seal,” Hen nods.

“Yeah,” Bobby pinches the bridge of his nose. “There are no guns involved, as far as we can tell, but we have at least three attackers with knives, possible other weapons, seven terrified kids stuck outside, and no eyes on the inside because they forced the adults into another room. Police are on their way up now, but—“

“We need to get them out,” Buck interrupts, and his agitation makes such sudden and perfect sense that Eddie reaches out for him again, and this time he doesn’t let go. “The balcony door is reinforced glass,” he says, and looks imploringly at Eddie, of all people, “but they’ll figure out a way to break it if they need to. This is the safest it’s going to be.”

“Unless the police can just neutralize the attackers and then break the glass themselves. Pull the kids inside,” Chim raises an eyebrow.

“They’re the police, Chim,” Buck says. “They have guns.”

They’ve all seen enough stray bullets to be able to imagine it. If the robbers don’t have firearms, which is a miracle in itself, waiting for them to be introduced into the situation when they have a group of kids with nowhere to hide is—not a great idea.

“The ladder won’t reach that high,” Hen says, at the same time as Eddie lets out a sigh that comes from somewhere terrifyingly deep, because he knows exactly what Buck and Bobby’s argument was about.

“You want to do a roof rescue.”

“Which will not be happening,” Bobby says, but Eddie knows him by now, knows the downturn at the corner of his mouth that means he knows they only have suboptimal options to choose from.

“Bobby,” Buck says softly. “Please, I’m—look, Mehta said we’re about to get access to the office right underneath, so once I get on the balcony with them that’s—what, less than twenty feet for me to cover? Send Eddie up there with me, we’ll have them out in less than five minutes.”

“It’s unnecessarily dangerous, Buck,” Bobby says. “Especially with you. You pulled a stunt less than two weeks ago.”

Buck blinks, his eyes wide. “A stunt,” he says, “but I wasn’t—reckless, or anything. I listened to everything you said, I was on the radio the entire time.”

That one was a rope rescue as well, a woman just barely managing to stand on her windowsill as smoke billowed out of the window of her apartment. There wasn’t time to stand and make a plan, then – Buck had just suggested it, and then he and Eddie and Chim were all on the roof, looking for something to secure the rope. Buck had gone down in less than twenty seconds, secured the woman to him, and with another ten feet of rope fed to him by Eddie, he landed safely in the apartment below. The whole thing took less than five minutes too, and Eddie just about managed to keep his heart from jumping into his throat, but Buck’s right. He hadn’t taken risks; he shut up, listened, let Bobby lead him.

“Captain Mehta agrees that they can stay put,” Bobby says, his jaw clenched. “We have other first responders on their way up there. We can check everyone over once they’re down.”

Eddie looks at Hen, who’s already looking at Chim, having one of their silent conversations.

“Cap,” Buck says, calm, even. “Why? It’s not like it’s unprecedented, we drill roof rescues all the time.”

“You know as well as I do how rarely we do them in the field,” Bobby replies. “This isn’t like grabbing one woman, or securing that bus, you’re going into a situation we don’t actually know much about and making multiple trips, and we both know that if something goes wrong halfway, you’re not going to leave half the kids behind.”

“It won’t go wrong,” Buck shakes his head. “I’ll be secured, there’s other balconies on the way to help me move down and back up. And if nothing else, at least I can be there if—if anything happens. Pretty sure I can fight off anyone stupid enough to botch a robbery this way.”

Bobby sighs. “You know how you get when kids are involved.”

Buck’s jaw jumps, but they all know he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. “Yeah,” he says, and shrugs, his palms open toward Bobby, “but I’ll be careful. I swear I’ll be careful, Bobby. No unnecessary risks.”

Bobby looks at him for a long while, the five of them silent, the air around them buzzing with the voices of the steadily growing crowd. Eddie bites the inside of his lip, looking up to try and find the kids trapped in the air, but the gleaming glass and metal make it impossible. Buck wants to go all the way up there, and Eddie already knows he’ll be right on his heels.

By the time he’s looked back down, Buck’s eyes are already on his turnout shoes, his mouth turned down in the corner.

And Eddie knows Bobby’s not wrong, exactly; if they wait, there are safer ways to get the kids out, and Eddie’s not exactly fond of seeing Buck in dangerous situations, but—but.

“Cap,” he says quietly, and all of them turn to him like they’re startled to hear someone speak. “I don’t think you’re being fair.”

In his periphery, he can just see Hen’s mouth physically drop open. Buck’s eyes are burning a hole through him, but Eddie’s looking at his captain, trying to get him to understand.

It’s not like him to challenge Bobby, maybe, but it’s not like Bobby not to listen.

“You know how he gets,” Bobby says, his mouth quirking up. “You know why I don’t want to risk it.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He does look at Buck this time, just to make he’s not hearing them wrong, and finds him blinking at Eddie like he’s never seen him before, his lips parted just a fraction. “But I think—“

“Wait, hold on,” Chim breaks in. “Do you know about the crane?”

Buck groans. “Eddie, listen—“

“What did you do,” Eddie interrupts, fighting the sigh that wants to come out of him, and also fighting the urge to wrap himself around Buck and maybe kiss him and maybe shake him a little.

“I, uh,” Buck squints into the sky, “I climbed a construction crane surrounded by high rises with no protective gear.”

“While a sniper was targeting us,” Chim adds, frowning wildly.

“And I was fine,” Buck says, taking an aborted step in Eddie’s direction, like maybe he was going to touch just to prove that he’s here and unharmed. “I climbed it, I saved the guy’s life, I got down, and not a scratch.”

“While a sniper was targeting us,” Chim repeats.

But Eddie looks at the tremor in Buck’s hands that he’s trying to hide by adjusting his gloves, looks at the way Buck’s eyes go a little wide before they drop to the asphalt under their feet, and knows exactly what happened.

“This was when I was in the hospital, wasn’t it,” he says, not a question.

Buck takes off his glove and puts it on again. “Yeah.”

“And you wanted to take the bullet you couldn’t take for me.”

Bobby moves, his hand shooting out into the empty space between them and hovering, like he wants to touch one of them and isn’t sure how, or maybe isn’t sure which one.

Buck blinks at him, and there’s a look in his eyes that Eddie’s never seen, somehow.

“Yeah,” he says, so quiet Eddie’s not sure anyone else heard him.

Eddie holds his breath without realizing, all the oxygen in his lungs stopping somewhere at the bottom of his throat. He has to step away, has to do something, because his fingers are already unfurling, already reaching for the edge of Buck’s sleeve to pull him closer, and once he’s close enough to touch, Eddie is going to kiss him: as a thank you, as a promise, as a reminder.

“Bobby,” he says, instead of one of the million ways he wants to claim Buck for himself here and now, and fights to tear his gaze away from Buck, to look at his captain. “I get it. I know you’re worried. But he’s going to be safe.”

Bobby frowns, his mouth open around a question.

“Trust me.”

Hen clears her throat, and squeezes Eddie’s shoulder. “You seem awfully sure, Eddie” she says, the kind, careful Hen he’s gotten used to seeing when he’s doing something just a little stupid. “You two both have a track record of getting reckless where kids are involved.”

Eddie straightens up, squares his shoulders.

“I know,” he says, quirking a smile at Buck, whose face is too slack in surprise to return it. “But we have one waiting for us at home.”

Buck’s eyes widen, if that’s even possible, but Eddie doesn’t have time to pull him aside, to reassure him, to say anything real, because Bobby’s keying his radio and telling Captain Mehta a few of his guys are going to attempt a rescue and—

Buck is grinning at him, wide and just a little wild, his teeth flashing before he rounds the truck to get at the ropes.

It ends up all over the internet.

It’s no surprise, really, considering the number of smartphones present on the scene, but there’s something incredibly weird about Eddie’s pixelated bright red face being plastered all over social media and the news.

The rest of the shift is busy, more intra-holiday parties and a firework incident and an MVC because four drops of rain fell down in Inglewood. They all go down at five, get a couple of hours of sleep, and when B shift start trickling in one by one, every one of them starts clapping as soon as they walk through the door.

Buck, the hero of the hour, is the last to get up, just before their twenty-four is up.

“Buckaroo,” is how Hen greets him, grinning into her coffee, waving her phone at a speed that makes it impossible to tell what’s happening on screen. “Look at you go! You’re on Youtube.”

Buck doesn’t say anything. He smiles at the floor with a pretty blush high on his cheeks, and rounds the kitchen island to take his spot next to Eddie, where his coffee is already waiting. He bumps their shoulders together, presses his thigh to Eddie’s for a second, then leans away again.

“I barely did anything,” he mumbles, hiding behind his lashes. Eddie’s a little sleep deprived and a lot tired of looking away, so he doesn’t, staring at Buck with what must be an actually besotted expression, because he can feel his cheeks starting to hurt from smiling after a while. “I just walked down a building. No biggie.”

Chim throws an apple slice with incredible precision, getting Buck right in the middle of the forehead. It thunks down into Buck’s mug, and he grimaces at it for a second before he fishes it out with his fingers and throws it into his mouth, to the great disgust of everyone present.

Eddie stretches out a foot to kick him in the shin, but he can only bring himself to make the gentlest contact. If he’s being honest with himself, he’s still a little undone by the mental image of Buck once he was back on the ground, a gaggle of the younger kids running to hug him in thanks, the badly shaken parents squeezing his hand with tears in their eyes. It was one of those moments Eddie couldn’t quite believe his life, because there Buck was: an inarguable hero, exhausted and dirty but just charming enough to have everyone swooning, subdued but still bright when Taylor approached him for an interview carefully like she was going to spook him, and now the absolute all-American sweetheart of every local news station and every social media website.

But he’d done all that, accepted thanks and smiled at pleasantries and said “just doing my job” six dozen times, and after all of it was done and it was time to leave, he’d turned to Eddie.

Not just that: he’d turned to Eddie like, out of all the hubbub and adoration and his ex-girlfriend twirling her hair all flirty and looking a little floored, Eddie was the only thing that mattered. They hugged by the side of the truck with Eddie’s arms hopelessly tight around Buck’s waist, Buck’s mouth at his ear whispering a shaky thank you, and they haven’t really spoken since.

Eddie has needed the time to work through it, if he’s honest. It’s an overwhelming reality; but for the first time, it’s a kind of overwhelming that doesn’t make Eddie want to run.

Buck only ever draws him closer, has done since the day they met, and Eddie’s blood fizzes in his veins at the thought of giving in to the pull once and for all; at the thought of being allowed.

Eddie’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He picks it up to see a flurry of notifications in the group text with his sisters, and he knows what he’s going to see as soon as he spots the video link at the top of the thread.

If this is him don’t say anything, Adriana has written under – predictably – a video of Buck hanging off the side of a balcony with a five-year-old in his arms.

NOT FAIR he’s literally at work, says Sophia’s text underneath.

Then a couple of screenshots of Eddie’s face peeking out of the window of the apartment below little more than a red blob from all that distance, but embarrassing nonetheless. Naturally, they’ve set it as the main groupchat photo.

Soph: alternatively if that is not him I will be leaving my husband

Addy: WAIT

Addy: that’s Buck isn’t it. Christopher’s Buck

A screenshot of what has to be Taylor’s report, Buck’s face dusty and a little scraped from where he didn’t manage to get back up on the roof without hurting himself, the bright white crescent of his smile breaking through the grime.

Soph: oh

Soph: oh Eddie

Addy: you know what.

Addy: I approve of you blowing up the family for this man

Addy: (it’s a yes on next Christmas btw)

Soph: watch him open this and say he’s in love with another random teacher

Addy: Eddie if you’re not in love with Buck you need to date an eye doctor

Eddie hides a laugh behind his mug. His hands are shaking a little, for reasons he’s not going to examine just now.

Soph: by the way

Addy: oh no she’s about to be sincere

Soph: shut UP for two seconds

Addy: no

Soph: Eddie. we’re so proud of you

Addy: assuming that you are in fact in love with a man, which we didn’t bother to fact check at any point

Soph: we’re his older sisters

Addy: point

Soph: anyway. we love you and are always on your side

Addy: also say hi to Buck. tell him I can’t wait to tell people my brother-in-law is youtube famous

Eddie laughs out loud at that one, and pecks out a reply with one hand.

Me: yeah

Me: it’s Buck

Me: have you seen him smile

“What’s so funny?” Buck asks, bumping their shoulders.

Eddie looks up to find half the loft turned toward him, heads tilted like a pack of curious dogs.

“Oh,” he coughs, his cheeks heating. “Just—uh. My sisters say congrats on the newfound fame.”

Buck lights up. “No way,” he grins, “tell them I said hi. And thanks. Please.”

Eddie does just that, but not before he catches Hen with her eyebrows raised meaningfully, eyes bouncing between him and Buck like she’s at a tennis match. He shakes his head at her, trying to be subtle, and she smacks herself in the forehead with an open palm.

“Pepa texted me,” Buck says, smiling down at his own phone. “She says I looked very strong and handsome.”

“My aunt has your number,” Eddie says, somehow not at all surprised.

“Oh, she’s had my number, Eds,” Buck says, his grin turning dangerous. “I’m just saving all the things I’ve heard from her as ammo.”

Just then, the clock finally ticks over to eight. Chim’s down the stairs before Eddie can blink, eager to get to Maddie and Jee-Yun, and Hen follows right after at a more sedate pace. She spares a second to blow Buck a kiss and wave at Eddie with a look in her eye that makes him want to duck.

“You guys going home?” Bobby asks, chewing on a croissant that Lieutenant Williamson definitely brought for his own shift. “I hear that’s a thing you’re allowed to do when you’re off shift.”

“It’s two minutes past eight,” Buck rolls his eyes, and it’s only when Eddie straightens up that he realizes they’ve somehow ended up leaning against each other, just sharing warmth, both of them absorbed in their phones.

Buck hops off his stool, headed to the stairs at a leisurely pace, saying hi to the B shift people he knows on the way.

Bobby clears his throat.

“Bobby, I slept for like an hour and a half,” Eddie says, studiously watching the ceiling as he locks his phone and puts it in his pocket. “Can I get it in writing, or something?”

Bobby chuckles. “I mean, if you want,” he says, “but I just wanted to say good job yesterday.”

That, finally, makes Eddie look at him. “Huh?”

“Yesterday?” Bobby asks, way too amused for this hour of the morning. “That roof rescue downtown, you may have heard of it? Good job.”

Eddie hates that the tips of his ears go warm. “I didn’t do anything. Pretty sure I challenged your authority, actually.”

“That’s healthy sometimes,” Bobby shrugs, cramming the rest of his croissant into his mouth and washing it down with the last swig of his coffee. “I can get a little stuck on the Buck I met when he was still a kid, and that,” he inclines his head in the direction of the bay, where Buck is fielding pats on the back with embarrassed little laughs, “isn’t him.”

He gives Eddie one of those heavy, meaningful looks that Eddie couldn’t decipher if he tried.

“Okay,” Eddie says, slowly getting off his bar stool. “Thanks, Cap. If that’s it, I guess I’m gonna,” he points over his shoulder. He knows it’s obvious he wants to catch Buck, but he’s already embarrassed himself just enough that he’d rather not say it in so many words.

“Sure,” Bobby smiles. “See you later.”

Eddie nods, his body alight with nervous energy, and takes a couple of steps.

“Hey,” Bobby says from behind him, “you ever make progress on your knitting? Metaphorically?”

“Goodbye, Bobby,” Eddie laughs, but he only gets halfway out of the kitchen before he turns around, an embarrassingly affectionate kind of warmth sinking its tendrils into his chest. “Maybe. I know how to, uh, knit, now. Haven’t made anything yet, but I’ll let you know. Maybe by the end of this forty-eight.”

The smile Bobby gives him is so fiercely kind that Eddie completely forgets to be nervous when he enters the locker room.

He finds Buck just slamming his locker closed, the room filled with his quiet whistling and the incessant buzzing of his phone in his back pocket. He turns to face Eddie with a grin that’s a little too bright, but it softens as soon as he realizes who it is.

“Sorry, am I allowed to come in?” Eddie grins. “Will security let me through?”

“Ugh,” Buck says, bumping his forehead against the locker door. “Not you too. Everybody’s betraying me.”

“I’m just calling it like I see it,” Eddie says, passing behind him, running a quick hand over the curve of his shoulder to reassure him. “You’re too famous for the rest of us. Next thing you know, the 118’s going to end up like One Direction.”

Buck, still leaning forward with his eyes closed, laughs.

“You joke,” he says, “but I got a message from some guy in New York who was on TV rescuing someone, and then people started setting fires and calling 911 asking for him by name.”

Eddie opens his locker, glad to have something to hide the ridiculous width of his grin. He pulls out his bag and his hastily folded pile of clothes.

“I don’t know,” he says, putting his hands, palms up, either side of him like scales. “Going to prison for arson,” he says, raising one higher than the other, “and seeing firefighter Buckley in the flesh. They’re pretty evenly matched.”

Buck snatches Eddie’s own shirt off the pile and throws it at him.

“You can see me whenever you want,” he says, quiet enough that Eddie almost doesn’t hear it through his own laughter and the fabric over his face. When he frees himself, he comes face to face with Buck with his bag over his shoulder, his hand curled overtight around the strap. “So don’t go getting any ideas.”

Oh, I have ideas, is on the tip of Eddie’s tongue, so close to coming out he can practically taste the words until something stops him, and he’s not entirely sure what it is.

“Anyway,” Buck shrugs, still a little red from all the teasing and the praise. “I’m, uh, gonna head home.”

Eddie blinks. “Ahead of me?”

Buck stares at him. Eddie stares right back, feeling like he’s accidentally missed a step somewhere.

“Uh,” Buck says. “I’m—I meant.” And he goes even redder, if that’s possible, clumsily tangling his feet together where he stands. “I meant my, um. My—my apartment.”

Oh. Oh.

“Oh,” Eddie says out loud. His arms, still halfway raised from teasing Buck a second ago, fall to his sides like stones.

It didn’t even occur to him. He didn’t even think that Buck might want to go somewhere that isn’t Eddie’s house, where Christopher’s enjoying his winter break and waiting for them to come home so they can catch a few hours of sleep and do something fun together afterwards.

“Yeah, I—yeah,” Buck says, staring at the tiled floor. “Yeah.”

And Eddie’s—sleep deprived, and tired down to his bones, and has been showing his hand for days now, kind of desperately shoving the cards in Buck’s direction, so he figures he might as well.

“Why?”

Buck opens his mouth, then closes it. A B shift straggler, Travis something or other, runs inside and around them to the other side of the room. They watch him in silence as he opens the door at superhuman speed, already in uniform, throws his stuff inside, toes out of his sneakers and tucks his boots under his arm, running back out and up the stairs in just socks.

At least he doesn’t clap.

“I just thought,” Buck says, and Eddie turns back to him, his heart beating all the way in his fingertips. “I think I need to like,” he waves a hand, “catch up on sleep. Get my thoughts in order, because I’m—my head’s been a bit of a mess.”

Eddie raises a threatening pinkie finger.

“Not that kind of mess,” Buck laughs, only a little choked. “I’m okay, Eds, I promise. I just need a minute, but I can—can I come over tonight? Christopher’s been texting me about that octopus movie he wants to watch.”

“You can come whenever,” Eddie shrugs, adjusting to this new reality in which he won’t drive home with that familiar pair of headlights in the rearview. “You know that.”

It’s okay for Buck to go to his own place. He’s a grown man with an apartment on which he pays ridiculously gouged rent every month, and sure, Eddie would like for Buck to cross the threshold of his house one day and never leave again, but that’s something he has yet to put into words, and he shouldn’t assume these kinds of things just because Buck spends most of his time there, but—

“Okay,” Buck says, and his tone suggests it’s not the first time he’s tried to get Eddie’s attention. “Should I make dinner? Bring dinner? Everywhere’s open today, we can have our pick.”

Eddie thinks about pasta shapes, and wants to cry a little bit.

“Whatever you feel like,” he says, and hopes to God it comes across not as disinterest, but as the slightly desperate plea it is. “Long as it’s something Christopher will eat.”

That makes Buck laugh, and the hand clenched around his bag finally relaxes a little.

“It’s like you’ve never met me,” he tuts, fishing his car keys out of the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll see you tonight, then?”

And the way he asks it, a little breathless, with an invisible weight behind it, makes Eddie’s answer feel like the most important thing he’s ever said:

“See you tonight.”

Eddie does not see Buck that night.

Eddie gets home just before nine and relieves Carla, who has a lot to say about what she’d seen on TV last night, and then looks in on Christopher, who’s in bed under every blanket they own, absorbed in reading.

He showers, and changes into sweats and a t-shirt. He goes downstairs to have a glass of water. He checks on Maggie the cactus, and looks out of the kitchen window at his next-door neighbor picking up week-old dog turds in his front yard.

Then he turns around to exit the kitchen and go catch some sleep, and someone bangs on his door with enough force to break it down.

Eddie rubs his eyes sleepily. He hasn’t had that little sleep, so he shouldn’t be hallucinating, but his nightmare of a brain has put him through weirder things.

He stands in his hallway, barefoot and a little cold, actually, and waits.

Another knock, this time a little tamer. Eddie goes to get the door.

“I’m a fucking idiot,” is what Buck says as soon as his face appears, spilling past Eddie straight into the hallway like he’s tripping on thin air. “Eddie. Eddie.”

He’s also wearing his sleep clothes: a hoodie that’s so worn it’s lost its shape, sweat shorts. Two different socks in two different slides. His hair is messy, curlier than Eddie’s seen it in a long time, and his eyes—his eyes.

Eddie’s breath stutters and dies, right there in his chest.

“Eddie,” Buck says again, and he reaches forward, right in front of the door that’s still open, giving the entire street a view. His hands settle on the sides of Eddie’s face, gentle fingers cradling his jaw, the soft pads of Buck’s thumbs on Eddie’s cheeks. “Eddie.”

“That’s my name,” Eddie says, a little impressed that he can still form words. Buck’s looking at him like no one has ever, ever looked at him. Like the world starts and ends with Eddie, here, in this hallway.

“Yeah,” Buck says, and his smile is wobbly, his hands so warm where they’re cradling Eddie like he’s something precious, where Eddie never wants them to let go. “Yeah, it really is.”

He leans to the side, taking the weight off one of his legs so he can gently kick the door shut. It cuts off all the little sounds of life outside, the distant traffic and cars clattering over speedbumps and distorted rap music coming from somewhere down the street where a teenager’s probably home alone.

It’s just Buck, just Eddie, just their breathing.

And Buck licks his lips.

“Do you remember when I said,” he starts, and Eddie doesn’t have enough breath in him to tell him that the answer is definitely yes, “that I wanted someone to fight for me?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, more of an exhale than a word. “Yeah, I remember.”

Buck runs his thumb over Eddie’s cheekbone, and Eddie can’t help the way he closes his eyes. He takes a step closer, pulled by that invisible string he never could resist.

“Yeah, well,” Buck says, and Eddie should look at him, but the way Buck’s fingertips feel on his face is making him want to weep, to break into his own chest and carve the whole thing open if he still can’t find the words after this. “That was a stupid fucking thing to say when—when I was sitting right over there,” he tilts his head toward the living room. “When I was here. With you.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and finally gets himself to move, quiet and careful so he doesn’t snag any part of this moment, spiderweb-delicate, and ruin it. He wraps one of his hands around Buck’s wrist, reaches out with the other until his fingertips just brush Buck’s waist. Buck gets the message and moves in closer, closer still, stepping up to meet Eddie’s touch.

“Yeah,” he smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “God help me.”

Eddie frowns, and Buck’s gentle fingers are there before the wrinkle in his forehead can fully form, smoothing it away.

“You said it’s,” Buck licks his lips again, “you said it’s okay to want to feel wanted.”

“It is,” Eddie says, his hand curling in Buck’s hoodie, his other thumb right over where Buck’s pulse hammers under his skin. “You deserve someone who sees all of you, because there’s—God, Buck, there’s a hell of a lot to see.”

Buck laughs, a giggle with a tinge of hysteria to it, and somehow, Eddie understands him perfectly.

“That’s you, Eddie,” he says, his voice choked. “You know that, you have to know. All of that is you, and it always has been.”

The stillness that settles between them is absolute. Eddie loses the beating of his heart somewhere, stops feeling his fingertips; all he’s aware of is the feeling rushing through him, like closing your eyes before a leap into the deep, the last breath of an old life and the first breath of another.

“You’ve always fought for me,” Buck says, a soft touch over Eddie’s eyebrow, the hinge of his jaw, thee shell of his ear. “Just—just yesterday with Bobby and when you told me to break up with Taylor and—when I say something out loud and you get that look in your eyes like I’m hurting you,” fingers on Eddie’s neck, on the point of his chin. “You won’t—you won’t let me think about myself the way I always want to, and I know you think I don’t hear you because you always get that wrinkle between your eyebrows—“ he breaks off, to laugh just a little breathlessly, “but I hear you, Eddie, I swear I do. You’re always in my head telling me to be better to myself and it’s so fucking annoying sometimes but I—Eddie,” he breathes, and leans his forehead against Eddie’s, “I keep convincing myself that I got this wrong, but I really don’t think I did, and—and this is so fucking scary and you’re the brave one out of the two of us so if I can just ask you for one more thing, just this once—“

“Buck,” Eddie says, and presses the pad of his finger into the soft flesh of Buck’s bottom lip, one of the only spots he’s never touched. “You’re rambling. Just ask.”

Eddie knows what it’s going to be. He knows it in the feeling like his feet aren’t on solid ground anymore, the pounding in his temples, the terrified knock of his knees. He knows what Buck’s going to say, but nothing could prepare him for hearing it.

“Kiss me,” Buck says, and his voice breaks off on the second syllable. “Kiss me, Eddie, please, I—you have to be the one to do it, because otherwise I can’t be sure—“

So Eddie kisses him, gentle, easy. Like a step forward that is a step off the precipice that is the last step to the summit of a mountain that’s been keeping the sunrise a secret this entire time.

Buck makes a wounded sound in the back of his throat. He erases whatever distance is left between them, moves into Eddie but doesn’t push him back, just drops one of his hands to wrap an arm around Eddie’s waist, to pull him so close Eddie has to raise his chin a little.

Buck changes the angle of his jaw with a gentle hand, and kisses him back, all hungry and a little sweet, like Eddie’s two seconds of bravery were all he needed to pour himself into this, into Eddie, as overwhelming in this as in everything he does.

Buck kisses him, and Eddie just—sways. Loses his feet and leans into Buck, wraps his arms around him.

And he exhales, maybe for the first time in his life.

“Eddie,” Buck whispers when they separate just far enough to breathe, their foreheads touching. Eddie runs his hands over Buck’s chest, heaving as Buck struggles for breath, the muscles jumping in a way that makes Eddie dizzy. He touches the back of Buck’s neck, the round caps of his shoulders, the arms wound tight with a careful tension that Eddie wants to unleash.

He leans in, and finds Buck’s mouth already open for him, waiting to brush his tongue against Eddie’s. Eddie digs his fingers into Buck’s shoulders at the sensation, probably sharper than he should, but Buck whines high in his throat and presses impossibly closer. Eddie bites his bottom lip softly, tugs on it just a little, scratches his nails over the back of Buck’s neck as his fingers fly up to tangle in his hair, come on, come on.

Finally, finally, Buck puts a quick hand on the back of Eddie’s head and pushes him into the front door. It’s nowhere near as hard as it could be, not as hard as Eddie could take it, but it rattles his bones in a way that leaves him unmoored and breathless for a moment, drowning in a slow, building kind of pleasure, a heat that sits around his neck heavy as a chain, just tethering him to the moment.

Buck’s on him in a second, one hand on the spot between his rolled-down waistband and the hem of his shirt, the smallest sliver of his skin on Eddie’s. He kisses like a brand, that time, relentlessly slow – and Eddie tries to give back as good as he gets, but he has to fight to not let his eyes roll into the back of his head with how good this feels.

Yes, he thinks when Buck cages him in, covers Eddie’s body with his own with his back to the door; yes when he grabs Buck’s wrist and feels the strength in it give as Buck lets him ask, lets him put his own hand on the feverishly hot skin of Eddie’s hip; yes when Buck sighs and kisses a trail down his neck, open-mouthed and filthy and perfect.

And then Buck bites at his collarbone, and it slips off of Eddie’s tongue, out loud. Buck raises his head, his hair a mess from Eddie’s fingers, his mouth so, so obscenely pink.

He doesn’t quite look like he’s all there, for a second, his eyes a little glassy like he’s seeing through Eddie; but then he blinks, and focuses, and smiles one of those smiles that take over his entire face.

“Eddie,” he says again, a little like a benediction. “I—Eddie,” and he’s laughing, is pressing a soft kiss to Eddie’s lips, to his cheek, to the ticklish spot behind his ear. Eddie interlaces his fingers on he the back of Buck’s neck, pulls him as close as he dares, not bothering to control his own grin. He closes his eyes, leans in, inhales the lingering scent of Buck’s shampoo, and—realizes his face feels a little like he’s burning, because Buck hasn’t shaved since before he clocked in yesterday morning.

“Oh my God,” he says into Buck’s shoulder, his voice so wrecked it comes out tumbling out with all sharp edges.

“Yeah,” Buck says, his other hand sneaking under Eddie’s shirt, just to sit there, to touch him, to hold him where he is.

“No, I—“ Eddie tugs on Buck’s hair, the gentlest suggestion of a pull, and it still has Buck’s breath coming out in a hot rush that breaks over Eddie’s collarbone and lingers for a little while.

Buck raises his head, dazed.

“You’re a man,” Eddie finishes his thought. He traces the line of Buck’s jaw with careful fingertips, the sharp cut of it, the gentle rasp of facial hair.

“Uh,” Buck blinks. “Yeah, I—oh,” and he straightens up then, but Eddie doesn’t let him go far. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—should we—“

Eddie pulls him into a kiss, face-first, careful, careful. Sweet, now that he has the time to breathe in a couple of times and realize that this is Buck, it’s Buck he’s kissing, and the reality feels too enormous to comprehend.

“No,” he says when he pulls away, feeling furnace-warm at how wide-eyed Buck looks. “No, we shouldn’t stop. I just—“ he raises his hand automatically to scratch the embarrassed itch on the back of his neck, and realizes halfway that it isn’t actually there. “I can’t believe that’s what this feels like.”

Buck smiles slowly, thoroughly, the corners of his eyes creasing. “This, like—“

“You,” Eddie shakes his head, trying to dislodge the disbelief that’s already spreading, a cool tendril of doubt that joins the hot rush of blood in his veins. “I think it’s just you.”

There it is again: that only-person-in-the-world look, the kind of thing Eddie thought he saw weeks and weeks ago aimed at Taylor, whatever version of love Buck had felt for her. This, though, is it in its full force, a look like Buck’s asking to be unmade in his hands just so Eddie can put him back together.

Buck, whose hands haven’t left Eddie since he crossed the threshold, whose skin has been warm and yielding under Eddie’s touch for just as long. Eddie wants to crawl all over him, inside him, wherever gets him closest, whatever ensures he never has to let go.

This, he thinks, is what the touch of someone you love is supposed to be. He’s drunk on it, his tongue clumsy in his mouth when he needs to say so many things.

“Me, huh?” Buck asks, and steals the kind of kiss that feels like it’s landed on Eddie’s lips a million times before, a hello or a goodbye or a thank you for picking up milk on your way home. “You know I used to go by—“

“No,” Eddie laughs, tracing the ridge of Buck’s hipbone under his hoodie, the little cords of muscle between his ribs. “No speaking that name under my roof.”

“But Eddie,” Buck whines. “I’m trying to impress you.”

Eddie runs his fingers through Buck’s hair, thorough the way he’s never allowed himself before. There are so many places he’s already touched on Buck’s skin, and so many he hasn’t, and with his other hand he starts compiling a list in his fingertips on the smooth skin above Buck’s bellybutton, the soft ridge of his stomach.

“Listen to what I’m saying, then,” Eddie says, and lets his head thunk back against the door. He feels smaller, like this, as if the difference between him and Buck is more than a couple of inches, and he lets himself lean into the feeling. Tilts his head, and feels his blood buzz within the confines of his veins when Buck’s eyes fall to the exposed line of his neck. “You impressed me the day we met,” he says, tugging Buck closer by a hoodie string. “You don’t need to do it again.”

“Not the day we met,” Buck says, so close Eddie can almost taste the words. “When you were all sweaty and adorable and condescending?”

“Which you deserved, a little bit,” Eddie says, and that version of Buck is easy to imagine in his mind’s eye, even after years, all leg with his chest puffed out like he could hide the hurt that had made permanent home in his eyes. Eddie was drawn to him then and couldn’t yet put his finger on why, and he thinks – when Buck puts his hands on him, brushes a curious thumb over Eddie’s nipple through his shirt, grins when Eddie’s breath hitches – he thinks whatever woke up in him that day has just been biding its time. Leading him here, crumb by hard-won crumb. “But no. The impressive part was when you got in an ambulance with two strangers and a grenade after thinking about it for all of two seconds.”

“Hey,” Buck grins, his entire face a little flushed, ”it was at least three.”

“Three, then,” Eddie raises an eyebrow. Buck tracks the movement with his eyes, and leans forward like he’s not really aware he’s doing it, pressing a kiss to the arch of it. Eddie blinks at the sudden sting in his eyes. “Doesn’t matter, because that’s actually one of the less impressive things about you.”

Buck pulls away with an offended noise, his mouth halfway open, but whatever he sees in Eddie’s face has the lines around his eyes softening instantly.

“Really,” he says, soft, shy.

Eddie offers his hand, palm-up, into the space between them. Buck intertwines their fingers.

“I like you better alive and safe,” Eddie says, just as soft, his face still a little hot from Buck’s stubble and from the anxiety of standing on top of his own walls knowing he’s about to watch them crumble. “When you’re making us pasta. Or fussing over Christopher when he’s sick.” He takes a breath that trembles on the way down. “Or when you’re here and touching me like this.”

“I never want to stop,” Buck breathes. He flinches a little as he says it, like it fell out of him without permission, so Eddie steps forward and chases the tail end of the words right inside Buck’s mouth, a kiss like the best kind of drowning with his hands on Buck’s neck.

“Eddie,” Buck murmurs, his hands on Eddie’s hips so big and so dangerously close to Eddie’s dick that he has to focus on breathing through his nose. Buck presses him backwards again, but there’s no force in it this time. Buck spins them around, easy, putting his own breadth between Eddie and the door, making for a soft landing.

Eddie can lean his whole weight against him like this, press into him chest to knee, and his mouth waters at the thought.

“Eddie,” Buck says again, but he meets Eddie’s kisses, shivers when Eddie licks past his teeth. “We should—“

“Yeah,” Eddie interrupts, replacing the words in Buck’s mouth with his own. “Yeah, we—you’re just—“ he huffs, because he has no idea how to finish that sentence. He rests his forehead on Buck’s collarbone. Shakes his head.

There are things they’ve done without talking about it: falling into each other’s orbit, letting their lives grow around one another until they were inextricable, falling into Eddie’s bed to sleep next to each other because they just kept meeting in the kitchen multiple times a night.

This—isn’t one of those things. Eddie doesn’t want it to be, because this may be the most natural pull he’s ever answered, but the longer he stands in Buck’s arms the louder the ringing in his head, a distant sound like church bells that will clarify into thoughts before long. This doesn’t belong to me and you make me feel beautiful when you touch me like this and what do I think I’m doing ruining you this way.

“I know the feeling,” Buck says, his forehead against Eddie’s.

Eddie finds his hand again, with the thick fingers and the gentle touch and a little damp spot in the middle of the palm.

“Why did you come now?” he asks, and when he pulls away to see Buck’s face, he finds him frowning in confusion. “Now, in the morning,” Eddie says, and hopes he makes sense, because he’s pretty sure he’s as close to being kissed silly as one can get. “You said—you specifically said you’re going to your apartment. You were meant to come tonight.”

“Oh,” Buck blinks. “Oh, it’s—let’s not stand in the hallway, actually,” he says, and leads Eddie through his own house into the living room. They fall into the couch at the same time, as close as usual, except now when Eddie wants to throw his legs over Buck’s lap, he can.

And – judging from the grin on Buck’s face as he stretches his arm out along the back of the couch, brushing his fingertips over Eddie’s shoulder to get him to come closer – Eddie’s not the only one who’s been sitting here for months wishing for something just a little different.

It’s then, just as he settles his chin on Buck’s shoulder ready to listen, that he realizes they’re sitting in the same spot as he and Ana sat the last time she came to his house. It’s daytime now, and the living room doesn’t smell like whatever dinner she’d made that day, but even without the shadows it’s still the same room, the same couch, the same pale pink flowerpot in the corner.

He shudders involuntarily. Buck, in the middle of pulling his phone out of the back pocket of his jeans, pauses.

“You okay?” he asks, and his fingers on Eddie’s shoulder uncurl, leaving an escape route should Eddie want one, demonstrating exactly why he doesn’t.

Eddie weighs his answer for a minute, turning it over on his tongue. He’s more than okay, and he isn’t, and he doesn’t know how to tell Buck the bare truth of it, even when he just had his tongue in Buck’s mouth two minutes ago. It’s easier to be open in that way than this one.

But that, too, is a revelation.

“You feel good,” he says to Buck’s neck, because he doesn’t have it in him to raise his head and look Buck in the eye. “I’m just—remembering.”

Buck’s hand curls back over his shoulder.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says, and Eddie smiles when he hears him, nuzzles into the spot behind his jaw just because he’s close enough, because he can.

Because Buck touches him, and it feels like relief.

“I already told you, remember?” he says into the addictive warmth of Buck’s skin. “I didn’t want her to touch me.” He sighs. “I didn’t want her to, but I let her, and I touched her back, and I feel like it—stained.”

Buck finds Eddie’s hand. He brings it up to his mouth, Eddie’s fingers curling a little around the warm puff of Buck’s breath like they want to catch it. Then, Buck presses a kiss into the middle of his palm, so light his lips barely make contact.

“You don’t look stained to me,” he says. Eddie wishes he could look at him, wishes he could be greedy and take more of whatever look is sure to be simmering in Buck’s eyes. “You look like Eddie. Like the bravest person I know.”

Eddie sighs, and feels the air chip off little pieces of him on its way out.

“I contain multitudes, I guess,” he says, managing to plaster a weak chuckle over the truth; the fact that, as Frank so happily reminds him, his mind is a fucking garden full of moles, and he’s going to be holding a mallet for the rest of his life.

“Yeah,” Buck chuckles back, Eddie’s hand now safely in his, lying on Eddie’s thigh, “and I know all of them.”

Eddie leans back a bit, just enough to be able to look up. To be able to tilt his chin in a way that makes him feel flushed and needy and—unashamed of it, actually.

Buck grins with delight. He brings Eddie closer with the arm curled around his shoulders, all-encompassing, and kisses him soft and light, twice, three times, coming back for more until Eddie’s smiling against him.

“So I was watching some videos from the roof rescue before I went to bed,” Buck says suddenly, between one kiss and the next. He worries his lip between his teeth.

“Of course you were,” Eddie grins. He hasn’t seen any of them himself, because Buck doing his job competently would be ridiculously hot even if it didn’t involve a harness, and thinking extensively about what’s under Buck’s clothes seemed like a bad idea until a few minutes ago.

“Not like that,” Buck groans, looking up at the ceiling. “I wanted to look at, uh—my technique.”

Eddie snorts. “Your technique looked very impressive in that long sleeve,” he says, intending to pat Buck on the chest and pull back, but his hand just kind of—stays.

“Oh,” says Buck, a little surprised. “You thought so?”

It’s Eddie’s turn to blink in incomprehension. “Did I—sorry, did I think you were hot scaling a high rise building in a harness to rescue a bunch of children?”

Buck looks down, hiding behind his eyelashes.

“Did I think you were hot in that shirt, which is definitely a size too small for you, I don’t care how much you argue?”

“Well,” Buck says, shrugging his free shoulder, “did you?”

Eddie pulls him in by the collar. He’s only really kissed a handful of people in his life, is not entirely sure he’s good at it, but doing it with Buck is some level of instinctual, and Eddie’s fingertips burn when Buck opens up for him so easily, so greedily, when he groans so low in his throat it’s barely a sound.

He brushes his tongue along Buck’s as slowly as he can handle, leaves everything in the perfect heat of Buck’s mouth, and the obscene sound Buck makes when they separate makes him shiver.

“Maybe,” Eddie says after he’s caught his breath. Buck leans his forehead into Eddie’s temple, laughing, and then leaves a kiss there.

“Okay,” he says when he straightens back up. “Okay, so I was watching myself be super hot and impressively competent, or whatever it was you said—“

Eddie pinches his side.

“—and there was this one video,” he says, pulling his phone out of his pocket. As soon as his gaze leaves Eddie’s so does the fake confidence, and he looks a little nervous as he taps in his passcode, his fingers unsteady. “I thought I was imagining it, but you can—well. Listen.”

He presses play on a video he already has pulled up, and rewinds it to the beginning. It’s clearly taken by one of the onlookers, shaky and noisy and focused on the South-facing side of the building instead of the West-facing side, where the balcony actually was.

Which also means it’s close enough to have the 118’s ambulance in view. Buck turns the sound all the way up, but Eddie already knows what he’s going to hear.

“You finally won, huh?” Taylor’s voice comes through the speaker, far-away and just discernible, but clear enough. Eddie’s own “excuse me?” follows right after, and he grimaces at the way he sounds. He’d imagined he was being cool and a little condescending, but he kind of sounds afraid.

“You didn’t tell me she came over,” Buck says, his fingers absentmindedly dipping under the edge of Eddie’s sleeve.

“Didn’t seem important,” Eddie replies, watching the terrible footage tremble. “She was just trying to get a rise out of me.”

“And she did,” Buck says, with something in his voice that makes Eddie look up at him, find him smiling softly with no hint of teasing. “That’s what—when you said—“

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk about Buck like he’s a piece of meat,” yesterday’s Eddie says.

Eddie bites back a groan. There’s obvious, and then there’s—whatever the fuck his voice was doing, just then.

“And then I paused it and just—got in the car,” Buck says, and hits pause again. “I almost turned around like five times and then I actually turned around and then when I changed my mind the road was closed for construction in the other direction so I was like, hey, maybe this is a message from the universe and I shouldn’t come after all—“

“Buck,” Eddie says, and Buck’s mouth snaps shut. “You paused it?”

Buck frowns at him. His lips part a little bit as he does it, and Eddie can’t kiss him or they’ll never get through this, but he can at least reach out a fingertip and trace the hypnotizing shape of Buck’s cupid’s bow.

“Uh,” he says, clearly as distracted by Eddie’s touch as Eddie is by him just existing. “That’s what I said. You were defending me in front of my ex where nobody else could hear you, and she wasn’t even implying anything that bad, and I just thought—I have to take the chance before I lose my nerve.”

And of all the things that have happened so far this morning, this may be the one that makes Eddie cry. Because Buck didn’t know, doesn’t know. He just reached for Eddie the same way Eddie’s been trying to reach for him, clumsy and missing each other in the dark, but both in the same place.

“Buck,” he grins. “You could’ve saved yourself the detour.”

And Buck’s still looking at him like he doesn’t get it, so Eddie grabs his phone and taps the play button again.

There’s a few seconds of silence, the time Eddie knows it took for Taylor to arrange her face into an incredulous expression that bordered on cartoonish. “Wow,” she says, half lost under a passionate argument someone in the crowd is having. “God, you really are in love with him, aren’t you?”

Buck’s eyes snap to his, and all Eddie can do is smile helplessly, to hold it carefully at the corners of his mouth so he doesn’t show just how badly he wants to shake apart.

Buck takes a breath that only gets halfway before it hitches, and hits pause again. He doesn’t blink as he searches Eddie’s face, and Eddie can’t look away from him, waiting.

“What did you say?”

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “You can just listen to it.”

“No,” Buck shakes his head, trembling when he sets his phone beside him on the couch. He puts his hands on Eddie’s thigh, suddenly tentative, his palms warm and careful when they settle there. Eddie reaches out to cover them with his own. “No, I don’t—“ he clears his throat, “I don’t want to hear it that way.”

Eddie looks at the two of them – touch on touch on touch and hopelessly tangled, Buck’s hair a mess, Eddie’s lips just bruised enough to feel it – and wonders if Buck can doubt this, still. If he thinks a reality exists where he’d press play and hear Eddie say no.

It sounds ridiculous, but then—Eddie’s shaking just a little, too. Unwilling to let go of the trace of tension right in the middle of his back that keeps him from relaxing, from melting completely into Buck the way his body is screaming for. He doesn’t want to lose himself so thoroughly he can never be found again, because that’s what would happen with Buck if he really let go; not when he doesn’t know if this might be snatched away from him.

Eddie takes a breath. He knows, has always known, that it would come to this: with Buck, he’s going to have to be brave.

But the corner of Buck’s mouth twitches into the smallest nervous smile, and he makes it easy.

Eddie puts his hand on the side of Buck’s face, to turn his gaze on Eddie, to keep him from ducking away.

“I told her she’s an idiot,” he says, close enough to the truth. “And I was mean about it, because she makes me so mad, and at first I thought it was just because of the way she treated you, but it’s—it’s also because she had what I wanted.”

Buck blinks slowly, carefully. Eddie brushes his thumb underneath his bottom lip, trying to press the truth right into his skin.

“She’s gone,” Buck says, that nervous little smile wobbling and falling off his face. “And she never—“ he huffs, “she never had me anyway.”

Eddie lets him go. He pulls his hand off Buck’s face, off his trembling knuckles, and doesn’t give Buck more than half a second to look scared before he’s wrapping his arms around his neck, throwing one leg over him to settle in Buck’s lap, as close as he can manage to get; just to feel him there, a reassurance.

He runs the pads of his fingers over the pale skin under Buck’s eyes, the creases where his laugh lines are starting to linger even when he’s not smiling.

“I didn’t tell her that I love you,” he breathes, gently resting his forehead against Buck’s, “but I love you.”

Buck makes a noise, something like a sob that doesn’t quite make it out of his mouth. “Eddie,” he says.

“I love you, okay?” Eddie says, kisses it into the top of Buck’s cheekbone and the corner of his mouth and the shivering skin of his eyelid. “I don’t know if that’s—something I have the right to tell you, but—“

“No,” Buck interrupts, another sound that feels punched out of him, high and disbelieving and so, so sweet when Eddie kisses Buck and chases it on his tongue. “No, please,” Buck says. He’d felt a little frozen underneath Eddie, but he thaws into motion now, leaning up into the kiss, his hands on Eddie’s hips. “Please tell me.”

“I love you,” Eddie says, and it practically leaps out of him, covers his skin and bleeds onto the floor and knits itself into the wallpaper, impossible to take back. “I love you, I’m sorry if—I—“

“Eddie,” Buck says. He scratches his fingers over Eddie’s scalp, exhales sweet and surprised when Eddie buries his face in his neck. “Don’t apologize. Do you have any idea how long—hey.”

He tugs on Eddie’s hair to pull him back, puts a knuckle under his chin so they’re looking at each other.

“Do you have any idea,” Buck says, and his palm lands right over where Eddie’s heart is beating so frantic it must be shaking his bones, “how long I’ve felt this way about you?”

And he says it so unassuming, so simple. As simple as it can be.

Eddie tries to find words, to quip something stupid like I’m guessing it’s not since this morning, but it won’t come. Won’t let him ruin this, hide from it. He has to sit there, with Buck’s hands on him, with his eyes so, so sweet, drowning in the gravity of it all.

“It’s been a long time,” Buck says, like he knows Eddie can’t actually answer him. His hands are steady, his voice anything but, and Eddie loves him all the more for it. “Long enough that I should’ve probably—gotten over you, or something,” he touches his fingertips to the hollow between Eddie’s collarbones, “but I don’t think that’s in the cards for me.”

“Buck,” Eddie says helplessly, because that name is the only thing in his mouth, the only thing in his head.

“I love you,” Buck says, looking him in the eye with an unshakeable certainty. “If you’re not freaking out about it already, I know you’re going to, and that’s okay, but—I love you. Now, and whenever you let yourself believe that this is real, and after that. Whatever you need from me, whatever you want. You already have it.”

“I might not freak out,” Eddie says, but his chest is already tight, his grip gone a little desperate in the back of Buck’s hoodie.

Buck reaches out and rubs his fingers over the top of Eddie’s spine, at the exact spot where the tension is curling into a knot.

“It’s okay,” he says, quiet. “It’s a lot for me, too, so just—if you want me to leave, or anything—“

“No,” Eddie almost barks, and then ducks his head and laughs at himself, at the desperation that leaps to the surface and wants to hold Buck and kiss him and mark him and write mine all over his skin. “No. No leaving.”

“Okay,” Buck laughs right back. “Okay. No leaving. I think I can manage that.”

He tugs with a careful arm around Eddie’s waist, pulling him into a hug that feels like water closing over his head in the most comforting way possible. Eddie curls into him, feeling every point of contact between them like a brand. Buck squeezes the back of his neck, kisses the shell of his ear, murmurs a steady stream of you’re okays that eventually gets lost under the white noise rushing Eddie’s ears.

He breathes through the tightness in his chest, the voice in his head that’s never been more particular about all the ways in which he’s broken everything he’s ever touched.

But he’s doing the work. He’s keeping a journal of his nightmares to show Frank in therapy and talking to Christopher and spending his evenings scrolling through a subreddit for men who came out later in life and growing a fucking cactus on his kitchen windowsill. His parents haven’t called or texted, and for the first time in his life, he doesn’t feel like he’s done wrong by them.

So he can work on this, too, and Buck—Buck says he loves him, and if Eddie’s going to trust anyone to tell the truth, it’s Buck. Buck who sees him for all his broken pieces, even and especially the ones he tries to hide.

Buck’s already everywhere, anyway. Eddie knows there’s no part of him left unaffected; not even the blood thrumming through his veins, because Buck has touched that, too.

It can be this simple. It can be this simple, if he lets it.

“I’m very fucked in the head,” he says, eventually.

Buck chuckles, a rumble that echoes in Eddie’s chest. “I’m not exactly the poster boy for well-adjusted, myself.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, “but you’re—you.”

“Mm,” Buck hums. “And you’re you. I wouldn’t want anyone else.”

Eddie’s eyes, even closed, fill with tears. He’s a little impressed it took this long.

“I thought—“ he starts, and has to stop to clear his throat, “I thought maybe you didn’t. Want me.”

Buck stiffens under him. “What?”

Eddie pulls back, wiping the tears from the corners of his eyes as he goes. “I mean, you—you told me to go,” he says, not looking Buck in the eye, tracing invisible patterns into the fabric that covers his chest. “You said you didn’t want me to stay. And I tried—Frank’s going to tear me a new one for expecting you to understand something without me ever saying it, and I know it’s not fair, but—the day I took you to the zoo, I really thought I was being, like. Pathetically obvious.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, the sound of the name in his mouth making Eddie shiver.

“And you held on to her,” says Eddie, now picking at where part of the seam on Buck’s pocket is gone, the corner hanging loose from the rest of the hoodie. “For so long, because—because you didn’t want to be alone, and I didn’t know how to tell you that I’m right here, and eventually it was like, well, maybe—maybe he doesn’t. You know? Maybe I got this wrong.”

Buck sighs, slow on the exhale, stirring the air between them.

“You just freaked me out,” he says. Eddie looks at him to find a painfully familiar self-deprecating expression twisting his features. “You were being obvious, and you panicked over the tamarins and let me hold you and you reached for me and—in the car, you looked at me like,” he waves a hand, “like this. The way you’re looking at me right now.”

Eddie tries to change his expression, somehow, but he doesn’t know what he looks like to begin with. Buck smiles at him anyway.

“And everything in me was screaming to lean over and just kiss you,” he says, quieter. “And that was terrifying, Eddie. Because I thought—I’d thought I trained myself out of it years ago, right? Back in the day, when,” he ducks Eddie’s eyes, looks to the side at the frames they’d nailed to the wall together and filled with the most mundane pictures they could find: selfies from diners and Christopher with his face sticky from ice cream and that one time they shined the truck so perfectly they asked Hen to take a picture of them, aiming thumbs ups at the camera with their hands still curled around rags, “when you were still married, there was no question about it. I couldn’t feel these things for you, and, uh—rebounds didn’t work, so,” he shrugs, “I’d think about kissing you and just—stop the thought and turn away and remind myself that I couldn’t. And it kind of worked, I think. I thought I—buried it. That part of me.”

“You can’t,” Eddie says, wiping his face. “You can’t bury a part of you without holding back the rest.”

Buck grins at him. The edges of it are sad, but they soften a little when Eddie presses a salty, damp peck to his bottom lip.

“That sounds like another Frank original,” he says, and Eddie laughs, stays where he is so he can kiss Buck slow, shallow, comforting.

“It’s an Eddie Diaz original,” he says, and threads his fingers through Buck’s. “I know a thing or two about being buried.”

Buck nods, his smile falling. “Yeah,” he says, looking at their hands, wrapping his fingers around Eddie’s wrist. “So when—when it came back like that, out of nowhere, I just got scared. Because—there you were, right, and if you’d felt that way about me I figured I would have known by then, and the thought of making myself forget about you all over again,” he shakes his head, “it just hurt too much.”

Eddie nods. “So you told me to go.”

“So I told you to go,” Buck grimaces, and Eddie chases the lines it makes on his face, smooths them out with his fingers. “And then you came back, and I thought—maybe, you know? Maybe.”

“It’s a yes,” Eddie replies, smiling, his eyes stinging. “I, uh. I came out to my parents, actually. Before I got out of there.”

Buck’s eyes widen. “Oh. Is that why…”

“I left because you were here,” Eddie says, and digs his hands into the muscle on Buck’s shoulders, chasing the tension there to erase it. “Because I got there, and they said they understand they need to accept me as they are, and their version of acceptance was basically starting the paperwork to get me to move back to El Paso.”

Buck inhales so sharply he chokes on it.

“Which is never happening,” Eddie smiles, and kisses him, just in case his lips can say it better. “The whole time I was thinking about being here with you, so I told them they took me away from the man I love. I’d love to see how they try to accept that one.”

“Oh, Eddie,” Buck frowns, squeezing Eddie’s forearms like he’s not sure what to do. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” Eddie shakes his head, because he isn’t. He’s a little proud of himself, actually, but that’s a feeling so new he’s nowhere near having the guts to say it out loud. “But, you know. Just in case we ever see them again. They know.”

“I love you,” Buck says, fierce. “God, I’m so—look at you.”

Eddie looks down at himself, and gets a smack to the thigh for his trouble.

“I’m so proud of you,” he says, soft. “It’s such a fucking privilege to know you, you know that?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Eddie replies, running his own hand through his hair. He knows he’s blushing, and he feels—liquid, somehow, like he’s just being held together. Like he’ll spill everywhere, stain everything, if Buck says anything else.

“I would,” is Buck’s reply, and he frames Eddie’s face with his big, gentle hands. “It’s like—you know when you’re a kid on the football team?”

Eddie—stops. Blinks.

“And you’re kind of middle of the pack,” Buck says, pausing to kiss into Eddie’s mouth quick and thorough in a way that makes Eddie decidedly excited for the future. “And you know you’re never making it big, but sometimes you still kind of just—sit there and daydream about holding the Superbowl trophy?”

“I played baseball,” Eddie says.

Buck grins, one of his hands resting over Eddie’s heart again, the fingers curling under like he’s trying to hold it in his palm.

“I just mean,” he says, “that you make this—I don’t know, this mental retreat. A happy place you go to in your mind when everything’s a little too much. Something that’ll never be real, but the thought’s enough to make everything a little more okay.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says around a lump in his throat. “I get it.”

“Okay, well,” Buck smiles a smile that makes Eddie feel inexplicably held. “That’s what you are to me. You, Christopher, this house, this life. The Superbowl.”

“Buck,” Eddie says, and has to sniffle because he’s crying again, “how do you—why is that the most romantic thing I’ve ever fucking heard?”

Buck laughs when he kisses him, presses his laughter into Eddie’s mouth until they’re both grinning a little, until Buck wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist and tips them sideways and they’re lying down, so tangled it should be uncomfortable.

“What can I say,” Buck says, his lips catching on Eddie’s, “I’m the king of romance.”

“The Superbowl,” Eddie says, dry, but he can’t keep the smile off his face, can’t even get it under control long enough to kiss Buck properly.

Buck smiles back, so close Eddie can only really focus on one of his eyes at a time. “Plenty more where that came from,” he says. “I’m going to romance the hell out of you, Diaz, just you wait.”

Eddie doesn’t shiver at that, because he’s not in one of Pepa’s cheap novels, but it sounds—God, it sounds good.

“I can’t wait to see which sport you take on next,” is what he actually says.

Buck presses him into the couch with no effort at all; braces himself over Eddie with enough heat behind his smile that Eddie fights the urge to look away.

“Not to go for the low-hanging fruit,” he says, his eyes trailing down Eddie’s body, “but I’d love to tell you how I feel about you and me at third base.”

Eddie throws an arm over his eyes and groans – not so much because of what Buck said, but because he feels hot all over with it, a trembling tension low in his stomach that he hasn’t felt in years.

“Buck,” he laughs when Buck takes the opportunity to get at his neck, a little harder than before, hooking his fingers in the neck of Eddie’s shirt to pull it aside and suck an actual bruise into his skin. “What—“ he swallows back a moan when Buck bites the underside of his arm, “what am I going to do with you?”

Buck pulls away, then, the already-familiar heat of his mouth gone. Eddie pulls his arm off his face, blinks to bring him into focus, and finds Buck looking at him with his bottom lip caught carefully under his teeth, still a little pink and a little golden lit up by the morning.

“Keep me?” he asks.

Eddie pulls him in before he so much as thinks about it. He wraps his arms around Buck’s neck, puts a leg over his hip, holds him closer even when there’s no closer to be found. Buck clings to him, arms around Eddie’s waist, caught under their weight that must be hurting him, but he makes no move to extricate himself.

“Yeah,” Eddie says into his hair. “Yeah, I think I will,” he runs a hand up Buck’s back, the ridge of his spine that feels surprisingly delicate under Eddie’s fingers. “If—if you’re sure. If you want this mess.”

Buck raises his head. “I want everything, Eddie,” he says, his nose brushing Eddie’s, his voice shaking. “Everything if it’s with you. If I can just—be there for you, if you’ll let me, that’s all I want.”

“Right back at you,” Eddie says, a little stupid from all the kissing, a little high on the fact that this sounds and tastes and feels like the kind of forever he’s never been allowed to have.

“Eloquent,” Buck grins. He’s so close they’re breathing the same air, and all Eddie can see of him is his dimple; the left one, his favorite.

“Rich, coming from Mr.‘or you could have mine’.”

His heart twinges at the memory even as he says it, two versions of them that feel like they existed a lifetime ago. Looking over at Buck in the low lights of the parking lot, and thinking, oh. There’s something about you.

“Do you have any idea how hot you were?” Buck asks. “With your—your stupid eyes, and the hair? ‘I’m familiar with the ordnance’? You should be impressed I said words at all.”

Eddie kisses him, a little thrilled at just getting to do that. “I’m very impressed, remember?” he murmurs into Buck’s lips, kisses him again. “You’re an impressive guy.”

“I’d like to be your impressive guy,” Buck says before they’ve pulled away from each other, with darkness still between them. “If that’s okay with you.”

Eddie lets out a shaky sigh. “We’re really doing this?”

“We’re really doing it,” Buck says, his hands in Eddie’s hair, soothing tension away. “I promise I’m going to love you so—“

“Shh,” Eddie smiles, presses a finger to his lips. “I know. Save it for the vows.”

Buck smiles like the sun. “Eddie—“

“Just—be my guy,” Eddie says. “Please. Be my boyfriend or my partner or anything else you want.”

Eddie wants. He wants, and he knows it’s real by the fear that’s trying to squeeze his throat tight, but there’s no doubt anymore. Buck chases it away so, so easily, without knowing he’s doing it, by showing up at Eddie’s door and holding him when he loses it over a baby monkeys and loving him quietly for as long as it took Eddie to catch up.

“You save it for the vows, Diaz, you secret romantic,” Buck laughs, with one hand tracing lazy patterns in the hair on the back of Eddie’s head, the other one resting in the middle of his back, skin on skin. “I’ll be all of those, you don’t even have to ask.”

“Okay,” Eddie breathes, and breathes, and breathes. He might wake up tomorrow and this will have been real.

“Okay,” Buck says, finding Eddie’s hand and wrapping a hand around his wrist, right over the pulse point, soothing the frantic beating of Eddie’s heart, because he knows. “Also, I’m not sure if we just implied something about a wedding, so just to clarify—“

“Maybe one thing at a time,” Eddie says, even though it’s something else on the tip of his tongue, something that feels a lot like a yes. “Your sister would murder me if we eloped, so we should probably start by like—existing outside of this house. As a couple.”

“A couple,” Buck outright giggles, and Eddie’s not sure he’s that far behind, because—he knows it’ll come back, all the second-guessing and the doubt and things Buck will have to talk him through, but for now it’s morning and Buck is in his arms and his blood may as well be champagne. “Yeah, I should actually—maybe we can—“ and then he stops and freezes so thoroughly Eddie can feel him lock up under his hands.

“Oh God, it’s winter break,” Buck says. “Christopher’s been here this entire time?”

“He’s okay,” Eddie says, although he does crane his head back a little. He’s sure he would have heard Christopher coming out of his room, but it doesn’t hurt to check. “He’s reading, I doubt he knows about anything happening out here.”

Buck sits up, careful when extricating himself, all rumpled and messy-haired and—Eddie’s, then. He might really be Eddie’s.

“Okay,” Buck exhales, elbows on his knees, running his hands over his face. “Okay, thank God.”

Eddie sits, too, leaning right back into Buck’s side. “Do you—not want him to know?” he asks, careful, because he knows in his head that he has no reason to doubt this immediately, and he’s not letting the perpetually terrified animal part of him win today.

Buck frowns at him. “What? No, I—I want to follow your lead when it comes to him, obviously. I just didn’t think.”

“I mean,” Eddie says, weighing his words as he wills his heart to calm down, “it wouldn’t have been ideal if he walked in on you talking about third base.”

Buck huffs a laugh, but it’s weak at best.

“But otherwise…” Eddie starts, and then looks at the way Buck is bouncing his knee, wringing his fingers so hard they’re going white in spots, and changes course. “Do you think I wouldn’t want him to know?”

“I don’t know what you want,” Buck says, and he sounds honest, but the way he looks up at Eddie is a little caught. “I do know that the last time you told him you were dating someone, he Ubered across town to get to my place,” he licks his lips. “And—and if he’s not okay with it, who’s he going to run to this time? I’m just worried that—“

“Okay,” Eddie nods, reaching out for Buck’s hand and holding it tight. “Come on. We’re telling him right now.”

Buck looks at him with his mouth open, eyes wide. Scared. “Eddie—“

“Unless you don’t want to,” Eddie says, because Buck’s grip has gone hard enough to bruise, his fingers pressing painfully into the divots between the bones on the back of Eddie’s hand. “If you don’t, then that’s okay with me.”

Buck shakes his head a little too aggressively like he’s trying to get water out of his ear. “I—want to,” he blinks at Eddie, leaning back a little, but Eddie doesn’t let him pull away completely. “He’s the most important person in the world to me, of course I want him to know, but—we only started kissing like half an hour ago.”

Eddie stands up. He tugs to pull Buck along, and relishes the little thrill that runs through him when Buck gets up unquestioningly, stumbling forward, into Eddie.

He looks down at his watch, and waits until the second hand ticks past twelve.

“There,” he says, and when he smiles up at Buck he lets everything he’s feeling show on his face, the wild rush of his heart and all the words crowding his throat that haven’t quite become words yet and the little tinge of fear that makes this worth having. He wraps his arms around Buck’s shoulders, pulls him in, and pauses in the little hair’s-breadth moment just before their lips touch to inhale, every one of his sense filled with Buck up to the top.

He licks into Buck’s mouth slow, deep, thorough, because his body hasn’t stopped screaming its need to stake some kind of claim. Buck whines, his hands tightening on Eddie’s waist, trying to come closer even when he can’t anymore.

“There,” Eddie says again into the space in-between kisses. “Around half an hour and an extra minute. Does that change anything for you?”

Buck blinks, dazed, and takes a while to come back, to see Eddie standing in front of him.

“Come on,” Eddie says, as reassuring as he can. “Let’s tell him. Unless you’re planning on going somewhere?”

“I,” Buck frowns, “no, of course not, but are you—“

Eddie drags him into another kiss, lighter, sweeter; kisses him hoping he’s got all the time in the world to do it again and again.

When he pulls back, Buck’s eyes are wet.

“Eddie,” he says, running his fingers over where a dimple sits in Eddie’s cheek. “You look—wow.”

Eddie tilts his head. “I look what?”

Buck sniffs, and bites down on the soft smile that stretches his mouth. “Happy.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He looks down at himself, like maybe there’ll be a sign hanging around his neck declaring him the winner of the search for happiness, but there’s nothing there: just his chest, Buck’s, both of them rising just a little too fast, close in a way they’ve never been before.

But maybe—maybe that’s it. The unseamed pocket of Buck’s hoodie, one of his arms a frame where it rests on Eddie’s waist. Buck’s mismatched socks, Eddie’s bare feet, on the living room floor that Buck helped mop during the Christmas clean.

Happiness.

And if that’s not it, well—it still is something new, something Eddie’s never felt before. Of course Buck is the one showing it to him.

“Come on,” he says again, taking a step back and looking up into Buck’s eyes, a darker blue than usual. “I’ve got your back, okay?”

Buck doesn’t look entirely convinced, but he’s wearing a look Eddie’s familiar with: a little scrunch between his eyebrows, a stack of wrinkles on the bridge of his nose. Concern for someone else.

So Eddie turns around and leads him down the hallway, to where Christopher’s door is still shut. When he feels Buck’s hand tremble in his, he squeezes tighter and doesn’t mention it.

“Hey Christopher,” he says behind the door, and knocks a couple of times. “Do you have a minute?”

There’s a sigh from inside that makes Eddie grin, and he looks over at Buck to see him wearing a matching expression.

“Okay,” Christopher says, almost managing to hide the eye roll in the words, “come in.”

Eddie cracks the door open.

“Hey, buddy,” he says, trying not to be suspicious, but as soon as he peeks in he remembers the last time they had a serious conversation, him a little wine drunk and a little heartsick, and now—now Buck’s standing just behind the door, worrying his lip between his teeth. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

Christopher doesn’t let go of the book that’s lying closed in his lap, so Eddie must not look too bad.

“Remember how we talked about, uh,” he starts, and finally flags a little bit, because he’s as close to certain as he can be about Christopher’s reaction, but—what if? “How we talked about the next time I dated someone?”

Christopher flops back onto his back. “You’re dating someone,” he tells the ceiling, not a question.

Eddie looks away from him, to Buck, who looks equal parts terrified and devastated. He squeezes his hand, mouths an it’s okay, because it is, and the off-chance that it isn’t now, it will be later. Eddie’s certain of that, and certainty is not something he comes by easily.

“I’m dating someone,” he nods, watching Christopher carefully. He sighs, one of those put-upon, full-body pre-teen things. “And I want to hear your honest feelings about it, okay? We pinky promised.”

Christopher sits back up. He sets his book aside, and grabs the plush CJ that now lives at the head of his bed.

“Is it a girl or a boy?” is his first question. Next to Eddie, Buck breathes in sharply in surprise, so Eddie squeezes his hand again, not taking his eyes off his son.

“It’s a man,” he says slowly, unprepared for the thrill it sends through him. “And, uh—you know him, actually. Pretty well.”

Christopher’s eyes sharpen, the way they do when he’s sitting over a math problem. He tilts his head at Eddie, and follows the line of his arm, which stretches out of view of the door, to where Buck’s pressed with his back to the wall, looking at the ceiling. Eddie wants, more than anything, to put him out of his unnecessary misery.

“How well?” Christopher asks, tugging on his lip as he frowns at nothing, trying to figure it out. “I only know my teachers—you’re not dating one of my teachers, Dad, right?”

Eddie coughs through a laugh. “No, bud,” he shakes his head, “I am not dating one of your teachers.”

“Thank God,” Christopher says, and that makes Buck laugh, too. “But—then I only know your friends, and they’re all dating someone.”

Except one, which Christopher knows, because Eddie unwisely explained it to him somewhere halfway through Arizona.

“Unless,” Christopher squints. “Dad.”

“Christopher.”

And then Christopher’s face darkens, and Eddie’s chest constricts. “Is this a joke?”

But he’s not asking it like he’s angry. He’s asking it like he’s—afraid. Like he doesn’t want Eddie to tell him something just to take it away.

“No,” Eddie shakes his head, and steps a little farther into the room, pulling Buck along until he’s just out of sight. “I wouldn’t joke about this, Christopher, I promise.”

Christopher blinks, his eyes big behind his glasses. “So then…”

He searches Eddie’s face, looking for something, but all Eddie has to offer is a nod.

“You want him to come meet you?” he asks, unable to keep a smile off his face that Christopher mirrors, all the more genuine for the brand new gap in his bottom row of teeth.

“Meet me,” he giggles, and Eddie leans back to catch Buck’s eye. Their hands have started sweating by now, but he only squeezes tighter, trying to drag Buck into sight.

“Come on,” he says, quiet, sure. “It’s okay.”

Buck’s trembling like a leaf, but he nods. Takes a long, steadying breath, and then crosses the distance in one big step, coming to stand at Eddie’s side, hands clasped between them.

“Uh,” he says, and he’s so nervous he makes Eddie want to wrap around him and never let him go. “Hey, Chris.”

Christopher, still giggling, screeches, and then he’s removing the duvet from where it’s tangled around his feet and carefully lowering himself off the bed.

Eddie lets go of Buck’s hand, kisses his shoulder, and nudges him forward.

In two steps, Buck crosses the room, and kneels just as Christopher gets off the bed and throws himself forward. He wraps his arms around Buck’s neck painfully tight, still laughing, and when Buck lifts him up he shrieks and hides his face in Buck’s shoulder.

Buck turns around, his eyes seeking out Eddie’s, and he looks—unmade.

“This is the best day ever,” Christopher mumbles into Buck’s hoodie, perfectly content where they’re standing rocking side to side in the middle of the room.

“Oh,” Buck says, so quietly Eddie’s not sure how he hears it. He looks at Buck – his guy, his boyfriend, his partner, his whatever else Buck wants to be – and watches as he closes his eyes, as he presses his face into Christopher’s hair, holding and holding and holding him.

Eddie’s eyes fill with tears between one blink and the next, and he’s deliriously happy to let them fall.

They come to work in Eddie’s truck. Buck drives, because Eddie makes the compelling argument that that’s what a boyfriend is for, and Buck would agree to anything as soon as he hears Eddie call him that.

The point is, they come to work together, after a couple of days spent hanging out with Christopher and making out in bed after dark like they’re sixteen, after a couple of mornings on which Eddie woke up with arms around him, with Buck’s lips on the back of his neck, with a breathless “hi” kissed into his shoulder that made him so happy he couldn’t say anything back for a minute.

They come to work together, half an hour early so they can kiss over the center console before they go in, and agree to see what it’s going to feel like before they tell anyone anything. Eddie kisses the back of Buck’s hand before they get out of the car, and makes his peace with twenty-four hours with no chance at privacy.

And then they walk up into the loft, single file, and Hen, who’s already there, does a double take when she looks at them.

“Morning, Hen,” Buck grins at her, walking over to the kitchen to get their coffee. Eddie does not let himself look at Buck’s ass in the uniform, and settles on the bar stool next to Hen.

“Morning, Hen,” he says, looking anywhere that isn’t Buck, not trusting his face.

She says nothing, just narrows her eyes at him, and keeps looking until Buck comes up from the other side, sliding over Eddie’s favorite LAFD mug with the chip in the rim, the coffee in it the perfect shade.

“Oh,” Hen breathes, quiet like she didn’t mean for it to slip out. She puts a hand over her mouth when they both look at her. “Oh, boys.”

Buck’s eyes widen. “How?”

Eddie, honestly, has the same question. They’ve been here for five seconds, and he’s so sure he’s been careful, so sure he’s let his eyes linger on Buck for a normal amount of time, like he’s still just wondering what Buck looks like under his clothes and doesn’t know it for a fact. Like he hasn’t spent an inordinate amount of time over the past two days trying to make sure he’s had his hands on every inch of skin.

Hen blinks a little too fast. “Oh,” she says again, waving her hand in front of her face, and they both reach out at the same time to wrap a hand around her forearm. “Stop it. Look at you two.”

Eddie meets Buck’s eyes.

“What’s up, 118?” Chimney’s voice echoes off the ceiling, and he skips up the stairs as usual, then freezes when he notices them there. “Uh,” he says, his eyes jumping to Hen, who’s trying to wipe a tear off her cheek, then to Buck, then to Eddie. “Is everything—” he squints, “oh. Oh.”

“Not you too,” Eddie says, at the same time as Buck says “what the hell?”, and Hen bursts into wet laughter next to them.

Chim jogs across the loft, practically throwing himself into the chair at Hen’s side.

“We’re right, though, aren’t we,” he says, looking up at Buck, who’s still standing behind Eddie holding his own untouched coffee. “We’re right.”

And he doesn’t say it the way he usually gets when gossip is involved, with the grin tucked into the corner of his mouth that spells trouble. He’s—if Eddie didn’t know better, he’d say Chim looks a little amazed.

Eddie looks up at Buck again, and Buck tilts his head to the side, not really a question. This is their family, and if Hen and Chim spotted it right away, so will Bobby; and Eddie, if he’s being completely honest with himself, kind of wants to drag Buck down into the middle of the bay and kiss him in full view of everyone, just to show off a little.

Which he won’t do, because he’s capable of basic professionalism, but—but.

“Yeah,” he says, not looking away so he can watch Buck’s eyes spark, see the smile bloom and take over his entire face until he’s grinning so wide he’s squinting. “Yeah, Chim. You’re right.”

Buck takes a step closer, close enough that the heat of him seeps under Eddie’s uniform shirt. Eddie can’t look away from him, and can’t do anything other than grin helplessly when Buck wraps an arm around him from behind, palm on Eddie’s chest, and presses a quick kiss into Eddie’s temple.

He doesn’t move away, doesn’t take his hand back. Being pulled into his now-familiar warmth makes it easier to look back at Hen and Chim, and when Eddie does, he finds them with their shoulders touching, leaning into each other with matching hands over their hearts.

“Oh God,” Chim says, and his smile morphs into a grimace. “Christ, you’re adorable.”

“Thanks,” Buck says, a touch vindictive, which Eddie suspects has something to do with how nauseatingly perfect Maddie and Chim are together. “We try.”

“No we don’t,” Eddie says, reaching up to squeeze Buck’s wrist where it’s draped over his chest. “Just wait until we’re not at work,” he grins, because of the two times they’d gone outside, the urge to put his hands all over Buck didn’t dissipate any. Eddie had been worried, and then Buck reached over and took his hand as they entered the grocery store, and then he was only warm.

And the fact that referring to him and Buck as a we gives him full-body chills is neither here nor there.

“I am going to give you so much shit when I get over this,” Hen says, dabbing at the corner of her eye with a tissue Chim hands her. “You’ll never hear the end of it, I swear.”

But she also reaches for Eddie’s hands, both of them, and wraps them up in hers so tightly his bones creak.

“So,” Chim says, grinning across the table at Buck, “I’m assuming your sister doesn’t know, or she would have told me all about it already.” He turns to Eddie. “She’s had a lot to say about you, lately.”

Eddie groans. “I bet.”

“Just to me,” Chim says, suddenly serious. “Because I’m her, you know—possible future fiancé, or whatever, and she tells me everything, but we’re not trying to be—in your business, or anything.”

“I think that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Eddie grins, going for reassuring, but behind him, Buck sputters.

“Hold on,” he says. “Wait just a—what did you just say?”

Chim takes an innocent sip of Hen’s coffee. “That Maddie’s been talking to me about Eddie?”

Hen grins. She squeezes Eddie’s hands another time, then lets go and parks her knee against his under the table instead.

“The other thing, Chim,” Buck says, the arm he’s still got wrapped around Eddie tightening reflexively. Eddie rubs at the underside of his wrist to remind him to relax. “You know I can help you—“

“Ah,” Bobby says, clapping his hands together when he reaches the top of the stairs. “Everyone’s hard at work, I see.”

As one, they look up at the kitchen clock.

“It’s seven forty-seven,” they say in unison, and Bobby raises his hands in surrender.

Then Eddie remembers what’s changed between this morning and the hundreds of others he’s had in the firehouse, and he freezes. Bobby’s their captain. There are rules; Eddie’s sure there are rules.

But even the idea of that doesn’t make him want to move away from Buck. If anything, it makes him want to press closer, just to remind himself what it is he’s being brave for.

“Morning,” Bobby says as he passes them on his way to the kitchen, going straight for the pans and not bothering to remark on Buck and Eddie curled around each other. “I’m thinking French toast, so if anyone’s got anything to say about it, now would be a good time.”

Hen and Chim look at each other with a matching raised eyebrow. Eddie looks up at Buck, just to check they’re still on the same page, and then lands on Bobby, who’s standing with one of his precious copper pans in one hand, the other propped up on his hip.

And smiling directly at Eddie.

“Cap,” Eddie says, and intertwines his hand with the one Buck still has on his chest, steady, always steady.

“Yes, Eddie,” Bobby says.

“I, uh. I made something,” Eddie says, the words clumsy in his mouth. He feels a lot like a kid. “You know, with the knitting, and all.”

“I helped,” Buck, who has absolutely no idea about Bobby’s weird ongoing metaphor, chimes in, and Eddie wants to pull him down and kiss him within an inch of his life.

What he does instead is grin, and tip his chin most of the way up until Buck catches his eye.

“You did,” he says, too intimate for where they are.

Hen sniffs again. “Tomorrow,” she says, snatching another tissue out of Chim’s hand when he offers it. “I’m gonna give you shit tomorrow morning. Before we leave. Write it down.”

“I’ll put it on the board for you,” Bobby says, pointing to the whiteboard they keep on the fridge mostly to pull pranks on each other. “So you don’t forget.”

“Thanks, Cap,” Hen smiles, wobbly at the corners.

“And you two,” Bobby points the pan at them, which has both of them shrinking back a little bit, “are allowed to only bring one thing to the New Year’s Eve party, but it better be good.”

“Uh,” Buck says.

“Not the spinach dip,” says Bobby, opening the fridge, plucking one egg after the other out of the tray. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s delicious, but Athena found a recipe she wants to try, and it’s her house, so she has dibs.”

“Uh,” Buck says again. “Yeah. Sure.”

Bobby keeps moving around the kitchen easily, pouring oil into his pan, weighing the bread in his hands to decide which loaf is more stale. It takes a couple of minutes of no one saying anything or getting up to help for him to stop and turn to them. He puts his hands on his hips again, frowning, but he softens when his eyes land on Buck and Eddie.

“Congratulations,” he says, “I think you probably need to hear this, so: I’m beyond happy for you,” and it’s so easy to believe him it makes Eddie choke up a little. “There’s a couple of things of paperwork to fill out, but God knows how much peace we’re going to get the day before New Year’s Eve, so we should eat first.”

And he turns back to his food. Buck pulls Eddie closer, his fingers closing in the fabric of Eddie’s uniform shirt.

“And that,” Buck clears his throat, “that’s it? Just—paperwork?”

Bobby turns to him with a dripping slice of bread in hand. “I mean, the decision on what to do with you is at my discretion,” he shrugs. “So I’m discretioning.”

Buck pats Eddie on the chest before he finally lets go, crosses the loft in four big steps, and pulls Bobby into a hug so tight it makes both of them oof.

Slowly, the rest of the shift trickles in, but Eddie barely notices them. He leans forward into the patch of sunlight painting the table, knocks his knee into Hen’s, and marvels at how uncomplicated, how easy, it feels to just breathe.

When it’s time to set the table, Eddie gets up to help, but Chim stops him.

“This might be a new experience for both of us,” he says, “but I’m going to give you a hug and hold on for an uncomfortably long time.”

That startles a laugh out of Eddie, and he doesn’t have time for a response before Chim’s pulling him in. They’ve—probably never hugged before, not really, and Eddie treasures it all the more for the way Chim pats him on the back, heavy and comforting.

“Good job,” he says as he pulls away, still squeezing Eddie’s shoulder. “And thanks for making him look like that.”

Eddie follows Chim’s eyes, and his gaze lands on Buck, helping in the kitchen doing his weird synchronized dance thing with Bobby where they should somehow collide and never do. He almost looks the way he normally does, except—except he’s wearing a smile that doesn’t go away, the softest, private little thing.

He looks up on his way to the trash can with a handful of eggshells, like he can feel Eddie’s gaze on him, and breaks into a dazzling grin.

“So it won’t go away,” Eddie says.

“Well,” Frank shrugs, “I don’t want to lie to you. Remember what I said about healing trauma, not curing it?”

Eddie rubs at the ridge of his eyebrow, where a headache has been sitting, squeezing his entire head like a goddamned lemon. “Which means it won’t go away.”

“It means it’ll change,” says Frank. His wheelchair creaks, but Eddie doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look at anything other than the darkness on the back of his eyelids. “Some of the small things will go away, some of the big things will get smaller, and some of them are just here to stay, but the important thing is that you’re not repressing any of them. That you come here and we can talk about them.”

Eddie sighs. “Doesn’t it get exhausting?” he asks. “Hearing about the same thing over and over?”

“No,” Frank laughs, “because it’s not the same thing over and over.”

“We must have talked about this shooting twenty times by now.”

“And we ended up in twenty different places,” Frank replies. He’s going sans clipboard again, hands folded in his lap, two fingers playing with his wedding ring. “Didn’t we? Your performance at work, your relationship with your son, the fact that you find it difficult to be in open spaces some days. All very different conversations stemming from the same event, and today you’re worried about the future.”

“I just,” Eddie waves a hand, circling through looking at all the familiar touchpoints: the window, the ceiling light, the box of tissues on the coffee table. There’s a new carpet underneath, finally. “I’d just like to think it’s a possibility. That one day I’ll remember it and realize it’s been, I don’t know. Two months since I last dreamed about watching my own blood explode out of me. That doesn’t feel like I’m asking too much.”

“It’s not,” Frank shakes his head. “But Eddie, it hasn’t even been a year. These things just take time. You’re putting in the work, and you just told me that most days are good days. All you can do at this point is enjoy those, and weather the bad ones.” The corner of his mouth twitches. “Maybe even find someone to weather them with you.”

Eddie sighs, and feels it all the way down in his toes. “You know.”

“You’re worried about the future,” Frank points out, gentle. “And it’s just—hard not to notice, if I’m being honest.”

Something sparks in Eddie’s chest, the barest suggestion of a flame. The first time he’s felt warm since Buck let him go this morning.

“I woke him up,” Eddie says, staring at Frank’s shoes. “With the nightmare.”

“That’s happened before, hasn’t it?”

“Not since—“ Eddie shakes his head. “Not while we’ve been together. It’s different, when he’s,” he pinches the bridge of his nose, “when he’s holding me and I wake up screaming into his chest. Worse.”

Frank leaves a little silence, just in case Eddie wants to continue, which he very much doesn’t.

“Worse how?” he asks, finally.

Eddie bites his lip, just hard enough to hurt, to focus him.

“Like I can’t—I don’t know, hide. He’s right there, he’s going to wake up. I don’t have a choice.”

“Why would you want to hide this from someone you love? Someone who makes you feel safe?”

Eddie pushes his toe into the leg of the coffee table, an old, ornate thing that doesn’t give an inch, but it steadies him.

“You know why,” he says.

Frank’s silent again. When Eddie looks up at him, he’s watching the calendar hung by the door, scrawled all over with things he probably has memorized.

Eddie’s gotten better at withstanding the silence. Better, but not perfect, especially not when the words are knocking on his teeth, asking to be let out.

“I was a bad husband,” he says into the quiet. “Before.”

Frank’s eyebrows practically fly up his forehead.

“I was a bad husband, and a shitty partner, but that—that doesn’t mean I will be again. It doesn’t have to repeat itself. Right?”

He hopes he doesn’t sound quite as desperate as he feels, holding on to what he thinks he knows, to the words Buck pressed into his feverish skin in the middle of the night. I love all of you, and you’re okay, his hands on the sides of Eddie’s face, on the scar on his shoulder.

“That’s right,” Frank nods carefully. “Though I have to say I’m a little surprised to hear you bring up marriage.”

“Oh,” Eddie waves a hand, “that’s just—eventually, you know? I already have the ring.”

“After—what, a week?”

“I’m not about to do anything reckless,” Eddie says, though he’s not entirely sure he believes himself, because he’s recently discovered that waking up in the morning only to find Buck making breakfast in the kitchen and being able to wrap around him from behind is a hell of an addictive thing, and he’d prefer not to go without it ever again.

Still, he’s not going to propose to Buck two weeks into dating. Probably.

“If you’re sure,” Frank says, amused. “But you’re right. It doesn’t have to be a vicious cycle. Especially when you’re aware of what went wrong last time.”

“Communication,” Eddie says, even though Frank knows this perfectly well. “Me assuming what other people want and need, not talking about my feelings, et cetera.”

“Right,” says Frank. “Your partner’s in therapy, right?”

Eddie bites down on a smile about your partner. “Yeah.”

“And you’re in therapy,” Frank says, spreading his arms like Eddie’s somehow forgotten who he is and what they’re doing here. “We’re pretty good at reminding people to communicate, which might help. And if it doesn’t, just try going together.”

Eddie scoffs. “Together like—like couples’ therapy?”

“Hey,” Frank laughs. “I’m pretty sure that’s how you felt about coming here at first, too.”

Which—is true.

“Just talk, Eddie,” Frank shrugs. “Talk to him. Talk to him like you talk to me. I always see you take that big breath like you want to explode yourself before you let anything slip, and then you get over it and decide to do the hard thing that’s good for you. Do the same with him, and you’ll be giving yourself a fighting chance.”

“Right,” Eddie nods. The hard thing that’s good for you, he thinks. “Right. Talk.”

“Not talking clearly wasn’t working out for you,” Frank says, and Eddie spots a grin flashing over his face. “You want to know something?”

“Sure.”

“I think this suits you,” Frank says, and this smile is kinder, softer at the edges.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, turning his head to watch the birds fight outside. “Yeah, I think it might.”

Eddie reaches out.

Buck’s still asleep, or at least not quite awake, sleeping through the alarm that woke Eddie up with the smallest frown on his face.

Eddie reaches out and erases the wrinkles, watching as Buck rubs his cheek over the pillow, turns his face into it, the tip of his ear almost lit through by the morning sun fighting its way in through the blinds.

It’s a morning like any other in the past few months: wholly overwhelming. It’s always a little bit of a surprise to wake up: held, or holding Buck to his chest, clothed if Christopher’s home and the oops-accidentally-fell-asleep kind of sticky if he’s not, sometimes with Buck’s hand trailing down his stomach, sometimes with a kiss so sweet it makes Eddie’s eyes water.

Today, he wakes up first. He gets to look his fill at the fan of Buck’s pale eyelashes, the pretty pink of his birthmark, the slight parting of his lips as he breathes. They do, actually, need to get up, but when the snoozed alarm goes off again, he clumsily reaches behind him to silence it.

With his other hand, he runs gentle, gentle fingers through Buck’s hair, finding a path through the curls.

Buck’s nose wrinkles. “Eddie,” he murmurs, the first word out of his mouth today, and on its heels a smile that’s somehow even sweeter because his eyes are still closed. “You’re so good to me.”

Eddie freezes for a second. He doesn’t know that he’s ever been—good. He’s not even good enough, usually.

But Buck thinks he is, and Eddie had vowed a long time ago to listen to what Buck has to say, so he keeps going, gently touching Buck’s temple and the spot where his birthmark creases when he smiles.

“Just didn’t want the alarm to wake you,” he says, “when I can do it better.”

Buck opens his eyes, alight with something quietly happy that takes Eddie’s breath away every time.

“Okay,” he grins, stretching his arms up over his head, “you’re not getting into a pissing contest with an alarm clock at seven in the morning on a Saturday,” he says, and rolls into Eddie, pressing a kiss to his neck, to the underside of Eddie’s jaw, to the corner of his lips.

“Morning, baby,” he says, chuckling when he feels Eddie’s chest rumble at the pet name, because he has turning Eddie to mindless putty down to a science. “I know you’re going to ask me about this, so yes, you’re better than the alarm.”

“Wasn’t gonna ask,” Eddie, who was going to ask if only to rile Buck up, says.

“Liar,” Buck grins, and kisses Eddie proper, still sleepy and sweet. “Now let’s go. Busy day today.”

It is, mostly because they worked yesterday and slept longer into the afternoon than they’d planned. They managed to set up the backyard, and move the furniture around to make it easier for people to get around. This morning is mostly about cooking. Christopher is already in the kitchen, bouncing off the walls with excitement at the prospect of helping, and Eddie – once he says good morning to the single flower Maggie the cactus has managed to grow, which Buck and Christopher somehow never make fun of him for – is immediately put on cleaning duty. He’s happy with that not because he’s worried he’d ruin the food – Buck, as it turns out, can be a very motivational teacher when he puts his mind to it – but because he gets to stand on the periphery and watch the two great loves of his life throw essential ingredients at each other and then sheepishly pick them up off the counter. Add to that the fact that Buck kisses him every time he passes by on his way to the fridge, and Eddie doesn’t have a single thing to complain about.

At least not until he opens the door to see Chim on the other side, sunglasses perched on his nose.

“I’m at this house at least once a week,” is what he opens with, standing in the doorway with Jee-Yun in one arm and a tray of cupcakes in the other, because he’s just like that, “I don’t understand why I’m housewarming it.”

“Howie, we talked about this,” Maddie says, walking up from the car with grocery bags in her hands, squeezing past him into the house. “Hi, Eddie,” she says, pressing a rushed kiss to his cheek, and then she disappears in the kitchen to help Buck with whatever overly elaborate recipe he’s found and then adapted until it barely resembles the original.

“It’s because Buck’s lease is up,” Eddie says, stealing Jee-Yun when she reaches for him, laughing when she grins with all four of her teeth. “So it’s, you know,” he shrugs, “a housewarming for this being our house.”

Chim puts his sunglasses on the top of his head. “So…Buck wanted to have a party.”

“Buck wanted to have a party,” Eddie smiles, probably looking more than a little lovesick. Buck’s been more or less moved in since the day they got together a few months ago, only going to his apartment when he wanted to bring something over until there was nothing left to bring. Eddie’s kitchen is filled with his utensils, Buck’s clothes mixed in alongside his in the dresser, and they just bought a second bookshelf last week to house his and Christopher’s growing collection.

But there’s something about it, still. The fact that there is nowhere else, now; that Buck is home here, and Eddie’s never been less scared of anything.

“It’s a Buckley thing,” Chim sighs, setting the cupcakes on the dining room table. “I don’t know how they do it. They just bat their eyelashes and suddenly your house is full of people because of some absolutely made-up occasion.”

“This about your wine tasting party the other week?”

“I don’t ever want to see a spit bucket again,” Chim says, pointing a warning finger at him as if Eddie’s his fiancée he can’t say no to.

“You love it,” Eddie accuses, because he happens to know this feeling intimately, and he’s proven right when Chim glances longingly at the kitchen door, which is just holding back Christopher’s laughter and the wild shrieks of both the Buckley siblings getting up to something very, very messy.

“I love it,” Chim says, and follows Eddie out into the yard.

With Maddie there, and Chim not quick enough to steal his daughter back, Eddie gets promoted to babysitting duty. He spends a solid fifteen minutes showing Jee-Yun the balloons they blew up at Christopher’s insistence, and once more people arrive, she’s happy to greet everyone at the door: Hen and Karen and Denny, Bobby and Athena and Harry, Albert, and Ravi, back on B shift and still invited for a reason entirely unknown to Eddie, who is not at all jealous. His abuela arrives on Pepa’s arm fashionably late, but bearing three bags of food, which grants her and no one else entry into the kitchen.

Eddie is, at least, allowed to bring everything out once it’s ready, enough food and drinks and dessert for double the people, even when Michael and David get there. Eddie still can’t quite look at them, all these months later, even after Michael pulled him aside at Bobby and Athena’s New Year’s Eve party just to congratulate him.

But—it’s a process. Maybe one day, he can thank them for being part of his not-so-grand bi awakening.

When it starts getting dark, Buck brings out the ridiculous speakers he’d migrated over from his place, and puts on dancing music at an appropriately adult volume, just enough that he can grab Maddie and twirl her around a flat patch of yard, their joy infectious enough that even the teenagers come out to join them.

Eddie, as usually happens at these things, ends up with Hen. There’s been something just a little off about her all night, and he’s pretty sure if it was serious he’d already know about it, but he still trails her like a puppy until she gives up and sits on one of the garden chairs, Eddie next to her on the ground.

Buck’s currently spinning with Karen to an ABBA song, so both of them are looking in the same direction, probably looking equally lovesick.

It’s why Eddie almost chokes on his beer when Hen suddenly looks down at him, her hand squeezing his shoulder.

“Eddie,” she says, and nothing else, her eyes dark in the weak light of their dying outdoor lamp.

Eddie straightens up. “What is it?”

“I’ve just—“ she looks away, over at where Bobby and Athena are slow dancing without paying any mind to the song, “I’ve wanted to say this to you all day, and I don’t know if I should.”

Her eyes definitely have a sheen to them. Eddie tilts his head, and covers her hand with his own.

“Hey, it’s me,” he says. “It can’t be any worse than the things I’ve told you.”

“No,” Hen shakes her head. “It’s not that, it’s—“ she looks at him, unblinking, and he nods, trying to encourage her. “I just—don’t think I’ll ever forget being in the back of that ambulance with you.”

Eddie, of course, knows exactly what she means. His body knows before him, even, because by the time he checks in, he’s already freezing cold.

“And I don’t want to remind you of it,” she says, patting his cheek a little clumsily. “But it’s the kind of thing that sticks, you know? To see—see someone shatter like that.”

“Yeah,” Eddie croaks, because he remembers looking in the mirror in the hospital bathroom, where he’d ducked to while they were bagging up Shannon’s things for him to take.

“And I’m just,” she sniffs, which makes Eddie look up at her in alarm, because since that first day, she’s mostly stuck to her promise of not getting emotional and giving him and Buck shit when they get a little too handsy at work. “I’m so happy—Eddie, I’m so happy that you fought your way to being able to love again. I’m so happy you love him,” she inclines her head toward where Buck is currently trying to dangle Denny upside down. “I’ve never met two people who deserve each other more.”

“Hen,” he says, his own eyes stinging. “I—“

“I just wanted to tell you that,” she reaches out, and takes his face in her hands. “Because I love you so much,” she says.

“Oh,” Eddie laughs, leaning into the warmth of her touch. “You tried Maddie’s wine, huh.”

“It’s very good wine,” she nods heavily. “But I always love you. Seriously. Don’t tell anyone I said any of this, but I love you and I’m so proud of you and I hope I don’t remember this tomorrow.”

Eddie bites his lip. “I hope you do,” he says, and leans up to press a long kiss to her cheek that makes her laugh.

“Henrietta,” Buck bounds up to them with a scandalized gasp, “that’s my man you’re kissing.”

“He’s kissing me,” Hen grins, and gently pushes at Eddie’s back to get him to stand up, where Buck barely lets Eddie take a breath before he’s pulling him into his arms. “You’ve gotta keep a better eye on him.”

“Oh, I’ve got my eye on him,” Buck says quietly, looking down at Eddie like he’s something wonderful.

Eddie will feel bad about it later, but he kind of forgets Hen’s there the second Buck’s arms close around his waist.

“Your man, huh?” he grins, resting his forehead against Buck’s.

“It’s been six months, Eddie,” Buck says, but the smile is audible in his voice. “Keep up.”

Eddie’s trying to. He understands it to be his reality now, most days, this dream of a life he’s somehow stumbled into. Most days he wakes with Buck and goes to sleep with him, holds his hand at the park and at the aquarium and in the grocery store and absentmindedly raises it to kiss Buck’s knuckles every once in a while. He kisses Buck in the street, leaning against a bench in the park like he’s in high school, and forgets that anyone else could be looking, could ever understand this.

It’s easy, easy, easy. Even on the hard days, it isn’t the love that hurts; it’s everything they’ve brought with them, years of suffering that stack up between them and need to be disassembled with careful hands. But the way Buck loves him – ever-present, all-consuming – and the way Eddie looks up from whatever he’s doing to find that he’s gravitated toward Buck, has turned to him, is reaching for him, those are things that have never so much as needed second thought.

Happiness, Eddie thinks, is a gentle thing. It sneaks up on you, like the hands of a man who loves you wrapping around your waist from behind, swaying with you in a pitch-dark living room with no music on. It sneaks up like the kind of pleasure you never knew was possible until you’re with someone you trust enough to let them inside your body and know they’ll leave you more whole than you were before. It sneaks up like this: this feeling that settles right behind his breastbone as he hears Buck calling him his.

He belongs with Buck; lets himself belong to him. And that, in a life filled with bullets and blood and so many things with a singular determination to bury him, is somehow still the bravest thing Eddie has ever done.

“Come dance,” Buck says into his neck, and Eddie realizes they’re already halfway to the back of the yard, where Buck’s decided to pretend the dance floor is. “I want to sway like it’s junior prom, but if I grab someone else your weird possessive spidey sense is going to tingle and you’re going to put people off coming to our house.”

Eddie snorts. “Fuck you,” he says, with so much love in his voice it even makes him blush. They shuffle past Bobby and Athena, and then Buck spins him around, his hands around Eddie’s waist, Buck’s chest against his back. It’s the kind of thing Eddie would balk at if someone described it to him, being all exposed like this with Buck wrapped around him from behind, but then he’s living it, and it’s exactly right.

He leans his head back on Buck’s shoulder. “I’m not possessive,” he says, which is so blatant a lie that it makes Buck laugh, a warm huff of air against Eddie’s cheek.

“Okay,” he says, stretching the o until Eddie blindly pokes him. “Tell that to Marianne.”

“Okay, Marianne needs to keep her hands to herself,” Eddie says, threading his fingers through Buck’s on his own stomach, pulling him closer. “I know she’s sixty, I know she’s a lesbian, but that doesn’t disqualify her, because I see her in her little kitchen window when we’re going to work, looking—“

Buck kisses the spot where Eddie’s jaw meets his neck, cutting him off.

“Ridiculous,” he says, swaying them in place, his chest shaking with suppressed laughter at Eddie’s back. “Eddie, I swear. I literally walked into a streetlight when you put on those tight jeans the other day, I don’t know what else you want.”

“It’s not about you,” Eddie says before Buck’s even done speaking, reaching up to run a hand through his hair in reassurance. “It’s about them. There’s a way to appreciate that you’re the hottest person in any room you walk into, but like—appropriately.”

“Mm,” Buck hums into his shoulder, swaying over to the other side, turning them around. “Please tell me more about how you’ll appreciate me appropriately when all these people leave.”

“You’re the one who wanted the party,” Eddie points out, shuddering when Buck kisses his neck, quick and dry but enough. “I can kick them out right now.”

Buck chuckles. “Then you’re also going to put people off coming to our house,” he says. “And besides, Christopher’s having way too much fun right now.”

He’s over by the patio table, sitting at the head of it, lording over a tray of plastic cups filled with a mystery smoothie with undisclosed ingredients. Denny, Harry, Karen, and David have all somehow agreed to play the game, the rules of which weren’t entirely clear to Eddie when Christopher had explained them.

Eddie turns to look at him at just the right time to see him sniff his own creation and grimace at it.

“Look at that face he’s making,” Buck says into his shoulder with so much love in his voice it makes Eddie shudder. “He looks exactly like you when you accidentally grab the kombucha instead of the juice.”

“That’s terrifyingly specific,” Eddie replies, but it’s a little breathless, because—Buck’s not wrong. Christopher’s growing up, and of course he is. He’s becoming his own, more independent, a person in his own right, and—that person sometimes looks like Eddie. Sometimes acts like him.

Eddie’s starting to think that it might be okay to be proud of that.

“Okay, new plan,” he says, and Buck’s hands around his waist tighten. “We make people leave on their own.”

“Oh,” Buck laughs. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

He is.

Buck keeps a hold of one of Eddie’s hands and spins him out, just far enough that he can pull him back in face to face.

“Hi,” he grins, a flush to his cheeks that might be wine or might be their proximity or might just be happiness. “Christopher’s going to hate us for this, you know.”

“He’ll get over it,” Eddie says, his hands tight around Buck’s biceps. “Maybe. I hope we’re not scarring him for life.”

“If we are, at least we’re doing it together,” Buck grins. “I love you, you jealous weirdo.”

“Love you, life of the party,” Eddie grins back, and then he’s leaning in, kissing Buck in this way they’ve perfected – not filthy, not enough to get them yelled at, just a touch uncomfortable to watch.

Predictably, a loud groan of “ugh, dads,” carries over from the table, and Buck giggles into the kiss, his breath breaking in a puff against Eddie’s cheek.

“Oh, everyone turn around,” Hen’s voice rings across the yard. Definitely a little drunk; she’s louder than she’d normally be. “They’re doing it again.”

There’s laughter, and not a few groans, but Eddie knows even without looking that everyone’s backs are turned. Their family, letting them have a minute, staying with them even when they’re being obnoxious on purpose.

Buck’s hands tighten around his waist, and Eddie movies his arms to wrap them around Buck’s shoulders, to mess up his hair in the back in a way that’ll stick up for the rest of the night as a reminder.

Somehow, improbably, he kisses the love of his life in their backyard, with lights strung overhead that dapple color on the back of his eyelids. He kisses Buck like he won’t ever get to do it again because he knows better than most what it’s like to lose things, and runs a thumb over the tip of his ear, and thinks about the ring in his bedside drawer.

They probably won’t kiss long enough to make people leave. Eddie wants his family to have a good time, wants to make sure he checks in with people he hasn’t seen in a while; he’ll feel bad if he doesn’t get to do it, and Buck will, too, because the least all of them deserve for being there is the hosts’ attention.

But Eddie has learned how to be selfish with one thing. This – the feeling that rises in him mellow and sweet and certain when Buck looks at him across the room or smiles extra wide or says Eddie’s name – isn’t one he just allows to pass through him.

No: he lets it linger, lets it fill him all the way up, sweet and a little unfamiliar even for the hundredth time. He feels it, and holds it tight against all his empty spaces until it takes root, until it finds another place inside him it can heal.

He feels it, and he asks it to stay.