Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Eddie has had some pretty piss-poor starts to his day throughout his life. 

When he was shot out of the sky and barely survived a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, he didn’t wake up feeling grateful to be alive—he had woken up with gut-wrenching regret already eating away at his tired bones for not bringing everyone back to the base alive.

The day Shannon left, it had felt like any other morning—until he read Shannon’s note and his entire world had been flipped upside down. 

The first day he woke up in LA after their move, it had felt like every molecule of air in his sparse room had dried up in his lungs and he choked on the realization he left every safety net he ever knew back in El Paso. 

So, yeah. Eddie’s had his fair share of shitty mornings—and yet this one was already on its way to the top of the list and he hadn’t even opened his eyes yet. 

It wouldn’t be so bad if he woke up slowly, he thinks. It would be fine if he had time to adjust to the sharp-numb-aching pain in his shoulder and the cold drip of an IV in his hand.

Instead, he goes from nothing to everything, all at once. 

“Christopher,” Eddie gasps with sudden clarity. His eyes shut as quickly as they open; the light is loudly fluorescent and immediately burns. But then his brain starts tripping over itself trying to remember why urgency is important anyway. There was an earthquake—7.1, the first one since he moved to LA a few weeks back—and he hadn’t heard from Chris all day. They had been in a crumbling sky-rise and despite Buckley’s insistence of the building’s structural integrity, Eddie must have been right to be skeptical if it landed him in this hospital bed. 

“Shh, Edmundo, it’s okay. Christopher is okay. Lie back down, your shoulder shouldn’t be strained right now.“ There’s gentle hands trying to push him back against the scratchy hospital pillows, and when Eddie blinks his eyes open again they’re met with a face so concerned it’s disconcerting—he definitely doesn’t know this woman well enough for her to be distressed. And wait— 

“What did you call me?” Eddie shakes his head against the name he left in El Paso, before he asks, quicker this time, “And who are you? How do you know Chris?” He thinks maybe she could be one of his teachers—he hasn’t gotten the chance to meet them all yet, mostly on purpose since he’s still been looking for a school better equip to handle Chris’ needs—but that still doesn’t answer why she’s here. 

The woman is speechless for a moment. There’s a flash of hurt in her eyes Eddie would normally probably feel bad about, but anxiety is rising in his chest as he realizes something just isn’t right and there’s a growing suspicion burning up the air in his lungs that it’s him. 

“I—“ The woman clears her throat before her face goes carefully blank. “I’m going to go get your doctor.” 

Eddie doesn’t know if being left alone makes him feel better or worse, but he doesn’t get long to figure it out before the woman returns with a taller woman who must be his doctor. They both wear looks of concern, but the doctor’s is more clinical and somehow that is worse. 

“My name is Dr. Tamara Pierce. I need to ask you a few questions and if at any time you need a break, we can stop, okay?” 

There’s a heartbeat too long before Eddie realizes he’s supposed to answer, but that same heartbeat is a choking weight in his throat so all he gets out is a nod. 

“What is your name?” 

“Eddie Diaz.”

“Do you know where you are?” 

“A hospital. Hopefully one in LA.” The doctor quirks her lips up at him but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. 

“Do you know why you’re here?” 

Shit. “I—“ Eddie swallows hard, and the movement is enough to send a twinge through his shoulder. “Was hurt. My shoulder?” 

Dr. Pierce levels him with a look that’s somehow kind but also expresses just what she thinks about guessing. “How were you hurt, Mr. Diaz?” 

Eddie closes his eyes, breathes out deeply. “I…don’t know. I think—it must have been at work?” When he opens his eyes, it’s met with a hopeful expression on the woman who he woke up to. He averts his gaze and stares right at the doctor when he says, “It has to be related to the earthquake—that 7.1—right? I had to be injured when we were trying to reach someone stuck at the top of a high-rise, but I—“ Out of his periphery, that hope has died off her face. “I don’t remember what happened after I entered the building.” 

Dr. Pierce nods and writes something down quickly. “And what year is it, Mr. Diaz?” 

Eddie may not have been at the 118 long, but he’s assessed enough head wounds while on active duty to know why everything seems just a little off to him. 

His fingers grip the starched hospital sheets when he answers, “2018.” 

Dr. Pierce breathes out through her nose, not quite a sigh, but it holds the same weight. “Alright. Thank you, Mr. Diaz. We’re going to have to run some more tests, but you appear to have some form of acute amnesia.” 

The look she gives him isn’t pity so much as an acknowledgement of the work he has ahead of him, and he’s grateful for it. He doesn’t think he could take the weight of someone’s pity right now; he feels fractured, like the small sliver of control over his life he’d finally gathered up is slipping through a thousand fissures in his skin. He can barely listen to the rest of the conversation. His vision tunnels in on his hands, shaking against the sheets in his grip. 

“So—so what does that mean? Is he going to be okay?” The woman steps quickly around Eddie’s bed, like the closer she is to the doctor the better the truth will be. 

Dr. Pierce flips through Eddie’s chart and the sound itches against his ears, too loud and sharp. “I’m sorry Ms. Flores, but I won’t have more information until we run more tests. I need to contact his power of attorney due to the nature of this injury, but there’s a few blood tests we can run in the meantime—“ 

That finally gets Eddie’s attention. He’d switched his medical POA over to his abuela when he moved, and the thought of having a familiar face around makes his chest ache but another priority presses against his ribs harder. “My abuela, she probably has my son and I don’t want—I can’t let him see—“ 

Dr. Pierce looks through his chart once more, her eyes scanning the page. “You have an Evan Buckley listed here.” 

Eddie’s stomach drops at the same time the woman takes a sharp inhale. “That can’t be right, I just updated it, I—“ This doesn’t make sense, he barely even likes his partner at work, why would he—why— 

Eddie’s chest is cold and hollow when he finally asks, “What year is it?” 

Dr. Pierce’s mouth is a firm, unwavering line even as her eyes soften with empathy. 

“It’s 2021, Mr. Diaz.” 

The woman, he finds out, is his girlfriend—Ana Flores. 

It’s almost surprising how numb he feels about dating again—how he must have moved on from Shannon, yet he can’t muster up any disappointment. All those nights he’s spent since she left staring at the wedding band gathering dust on his nightstand, and he can’t even remember when he stopped feeling guilty about chasing her away. 

There’s something infuriatingly poetic about that. Eddie has always hated poetry, though, and at least that hasn’t changed. 

He tries to ask about it all once and the look on Ana’s face afterward twists something inside his stomach. She skirts the question, so he asks more general questions that she only answers vaguely. She doesn’t have many answers to Dr. Pierce’s questions over Eddie’s history either, so Eddie tells himself it’s because their relationship must be pretty new. She hasn’t run from the hospital yet though, despite how awkward this must be for her. 

Eddie wonders if that’s one of the things he liked about her—before the shame at not even knowing why he asked the woman out in the first place settles into the growing, gnawing pit of anxiety in his stomach and pushes the thought away. 

When Buck finally arrives at the hospital, it’s with Abuela in tow. He doesn’t have enough time to be surprised at that before Abuela commands his attention. 

“Oh, nieto—Eddie, I was so worried.” Abuela reaches his side as soon as she’s through the door, smothering his face in kisses. 

The pit feels a little more shallow as he huffs out a laugh. The tension that had been tangling in his shoulders—coiled tight like he could break any moment—releases the moment he smells her jasmine and rose perfume. She’s worn the same one since he was a kid, and the familiarity stings as much as it comforts him. 

“I’m okay, Abuela, I’m fine—“ 

“You’re not,” Abuela insists, her hands fluttering about his forehead before decidedly smoothing back his hair. Her eyes soften. “But you will be, that I know.” 

Eddie raises his hand to hold the one she pats against his face one more time before he realizes. “Wait, if you’re here—is Chris with Pepa?”

At this, Buck steps forward. He had somehow blended in with the doorframe—his shoulders are bulkier than Eddie remembers but they’re bunched like if he tries hard enough, they’ll all forget he’s there. 

“He uh—he wanted to come, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea.” There’s a flare of irritation in Eddie’s chest at the thought of someone he barely knows making decisions for his son, even if he agrees with it. “He’s with Carla—uh, she’s his home aid.” 

“She’s very good with Christopher,” Abuela assures Eddie, like that’s the only reason uneasiness would be reflecting off his face. “He adores her.” 

“I don’t like not knowing who my son is with,” Eddie says before he can think much of it. 

A silence blankets them all at the reminder of his condition. 

He knows it isn’t fair; he’s sure that if he hired this Carla, he would have fully vetted her. And he would never have kept someone around that Chris didn’t like. Still—the unknowing twists between his ribs and makes it hard to breathe. 

He tries to clutch at something he can control. “Can he stay with you overnight, Abuela?” 

His grandmother exchanges a look with Buck that Eddie doesn’t know how to decipher, and the thought itches beneath his skin. 

“It may be better for him to have the familiarity of his own home, nieto,” Abuela tells him gently. 

“Could you stay with him at home, then?” 

Another look between them. Eddie is about to ask what the hell that’s all about, but then finally Abuela turns to Eddie with a placating smile. “We’ll get Christopher taken care of, my love. Don’t worry.” 

Eddie’s about to ask what that’s even supposed to mean before Ana clears her throat. 

“Well—hopefully they’ll be able to release you soon, Edmundo. Now that Buck is here—“ Ana’s encouragement trips over Buck’s name, her eyes resolutely staying on Eddie’s while she takes his hand. Eddie had forgotten she was in the room still. “The doctor will be able to move forward, right?” 

Her eyes flit to Buck, who is back to standing as close to the door as he can manage. He looks guilty when he looks back at Ana. Curiously, he won’t look at Eddie. 

“Uh, right. Right. I’m going to go find her, see what I need to—yeah. I’ll be back.” Buck looks ready to bolt, but he turns to Abuela first. “Abuela, do you need anything? I can bring something back from the cafeteria or get you a coffee—I know you were up all night, so—“ 

“Go, Evan,” Abuela reaches one hand up to pat at Buck’s cheek the same way she did to Eddie moments ago. “I have my nieto and a chair—these old bones can rest now.” 

Buck’s laugh is a tired thing, but he nods before finally leaving. 

The door behind him shuts and Abuela settles into the chair at the side of Eddie’s bed with a deep sigh. There’s so much Eddie wants to ask her—she’s the only familiarity he’s trying desperately not to grasp onto too tight. The exposure of asking any of those questions is too much for him, though; asking means accepting he doesn’t know the answers, and that acknowledgement presses against all his edges in all the wrong places. 

Plus, it feels too personal when they’re not alone. 

“I still don’t quite understand why Buck needs to give permission for anything.” Ana’s voice cuts through the silence. “I mean, it’s not like Edmundo is incapacitated—he’s awake, he should be able to make his own decisions.” 

Admittedly, Eddie has had the same thought a few times; he doesn’t like the idea of a virtual stranger making any of his medical decisions when he’s perfectly capable of making his own right now. The doctor had assured Eddie all major decisions would be given to him for final say but that in his condition, his medical POA had to be kept informed since informed consent is a difficult thing to give when you’re missing a lot of crucial information about yourself. 

“Evan will make the right decision, whatever is needed,” Abuela replies with a confidence that surprises Eddie. 

Ana looks just as surprised as she stands at the foot of his bed, staring at Abuela. She folds her arms across her chest; on someone else it might look defiant, but she just looks uncomfortable. 

“Still, it just…Doesn’t seem right.” 

The tension that creeps over them begins suffocating Eddie. Before Abuela can defend Buck any more, he clears his throat. 

“Uh—Ana,” Eddie starts, tripping over having to actually address his own (apparent) girlfriend, “would you mind finding my nurse and seeing if I can get something to eat? My head is starting to hurt.” He’s not hungry, but he’s not lying about the headache forming behind his brows. Ana opens up with the opportunity to do something and easily agrees. 

Once she leaves, the rest of the tension in Eddie’s shoulders finally releases. 

With a sigh, he falls back against the thin hospital mattress. He presses the heel of his palm against his eyes and prays to a God he barely believes in that this has all just been a long, exhausting dream. 

“Oh, Eddito,” Abuela sighs, and he hears her chair scoot closer before her fingers wrap around his bicep. “I know this must be hard.” 

“I’m just so confused,” Eddie breathes out, dropping his hand. Abuela’s fingers take his limp ones between her own. Admitting it out loud helps release some of the pressure that had been building in his head, but it leaves room for the fear of the truth to start bubbling up. He’s lost three years of his life, and everything he’s apparently built for himself is so unfamiliar it burns like tears in his eyes. 

 “I know, cariño, I know. But you will get through this. You have more support than you know now. You are not alone in this.”

Eddie knows it’s supposed to comfort him. He knows the idea of having people who want to help him, be there for him, was unfamiliar long before he lost his memory—and knows how hard it must have been for him to allow people in enough to give him that support. 

Still, when he tries to picture all these faceless people who supposedly love him, he just feels alone. 

Thankfully, Buck and Ana are both scarce after that. Ana has to go back to work between a MRI Eddie has to have and a CT scan, and Buck leaves soon after he comes back from talking with Dr. Pierce. He was mostly needed to confirm Eddie’s medical history is up to date and to give them a framework for the years he’s missing. He comes back only to update them and tell Abuela that Pepa would be picking her up at the end of visiting hours before he slips back out with barely a glance in Eddie’s direction. 

It’s a little easier to breathe when it’s just Eddie and Abuela left, but then even she has to leave. He grows more and more restless as he fights off the morphine-induced drowsiness throughout the night while trying to pull memories out of the void with a growing desperation. 

It’s almost a relief when he’s given an official diagnosis of post-traumatic dissociative amnesia the next day. His doctor delivers the news with some trauma specialist at her side, about how sometimes the brain tries to protect itself from a traumatic event by forgetting certain things or people—or sometimes entire chunks of time, like in Eddie’s case. 

Then they carefully explain to him the reason he’s at the hospital in the first place. The fact he was shot is less shocking than he feels it probably should be; the ache in his shoulder is a familiar one, and he half wonders if his body remembered how to deal with the pain even if he doesn’t remember getting shot this time. 

It’s decidedly all less of a relief when he’s told the only things they can prescribe are time and therapy. 

He almost wishes there was something physically wrong with his brain if it meant some surgery or medicine could fix it, but instead he’s just told to take it easy and surround himself with people who can “cultivate a supportive and caring environment” which is the most bullshit prescription Eddie has ever received, he thinks. 

 He gets released later that afternoon with the caveat he reports tomorrow for his first official therapy appointment, but that feels far enough away he refuses to deal with it until he has to. It’s the same way he feels about actually getting to see Christopher—as much as he wants to see his son, he’s terrified of getting to a home he’d only just started getting used to and somehow explaining to Chris he can’t remember. He’s stopped himself from wondering too much how many things he doesn’t remember his son doing; it feels too much like the nights in the desert he would wonder what milestones he was missing. 

The closer he gets to going home, the harder it gets to picture how he’s going to deal with it all. 

Ana picks him up from the hospital. Eddie honestly doesn’t know how she knows to be there, but she brushes it away with an explanation involving coordinating with Buck, and Eddie stops listening with little guilt. Buck is another thing he doesn’t know how to deal with yet and that list is growing too fast for his comfort so he shoves it to the back of the mind.

The universe, however, has a of a sense of humor Eddie doesn’t appreciate when they arrive to his house and a Jeep that’s barely familiar to him is sitting beside his aunt’s beat up old Subaru. 

It’s enough to distract Eddie from worrying about what he’s going to say Chris, so when Ana leads him inside he’s nearly bowled over with spindly legs and a pair of crutches. 

“Dad! You’re home!” 

Eddie envelops Chris in a one-armed hug that nearly fills up the hole that’s been in his heart since he woke up two days ago. 

“God I missed you, kid,” Eddie breathes out against his son’s curls. Chris hugs his neck tighter. 

“I missed you too, Dad,” Chris tells him like it’s a secret. “But I knew you were going to be okay. And now you are!” 

Eddie falters before slowly pulling back. He’s very conscious of the other people in the room—of Ana and Buck watching them with too much familiarity, and of Abuela and Pepa flittering at the edges of his vision. Still, Eddie can’t avoid telling Chris forever. 

“Ah, Chris I’m—I am okay, but you need to know I’m still…Hurt.”

Chris’ hand flutters around his shoulder. “I know that, Dad,” he says with so much exasperation it makes a laugh bubble up past the anxiety in Eddie’s chest. 

“No, mijo, not just that. I—my head, it—“ 

“Is this because you can’t remember?” 

Eddie blinks. 

“Because Buck told me the doctor said you have anne—anniemn—“

“Amnesia,” Eddie corrects absently, his eyes drifting to Buck where he’s resolutely staring at his own socked feet.

“Amnesia,” Chris repeats back with a decisive nod, “and that you forgot some stuff since we moved to LA—like all the cool stuff at work, and Carla, and even us being best friends with Buck!” Chris says the last part like it’s the most unbelievable thing out of it all. 

That anxiety feels dangerously close to hysteria at this point. 

“He said that, did he?” 

“Yup,” Chris nods, popping the p. 

“And you’re not…Upset?” Eddie drags his eyes back to his son, who rolls his eyes in a way Eddie definitely doesn’t remember teaching him. Suddenly he realizes Chris is taller than he remembers too—his face is less round, and there’s a distinctly teenage quality to the look in his eyes at being treated so carefully. 

Eddie swallows down the the realization his kid is now only a couple years away from being a teen, and his eight year old his no longer waiting for him at his elementary school during that earthquake. 

“Well, I was,” Chris admits, quieter this time. “But Buck also said you remember me and that even though sometimes the brain forgets some things, that doesn’t mean they’re not important.” Chris raises one hand and carefully pats one of Eddie’s temples. “And that you could get them back if we give you time and love which is easy.” He says it like it’s the easiest thing in the world, actually, and Eddie is left speechless. 

He doesn’t know if he wants to scream at Buck or kiss him. 

There’s an uncomfortable knot in his chest at the thought of someone else explaining something so delicate to his son, but looking at Chris—handling this so much better than Eddie had imagined in any of the scenarios he went through in the hospital, all he can do is be grateful Chris doesn’t feel abandoned by his father yet again. 

The rest of his welcome home goes by a lot smoother, thankfully. 

Abuela and Pepa get back to the residency they’ve claimed over Eddie’s kitchen—cooking enough freezer meals to last them through the next Armageddon—only allowing entry to Buck, who gets called in as back up every so often. Eddie hadn’t pictured the guy as a cook—he was cocky from the moment they met and despite the “good heart” the rest of the team had assured Eddie existed somewhere beneath all that bravado showing up eventually, he still gave off frat boy vibes. 

Well—at least, he used to. Eddie has trouble recognizing the young Buck he knows with this older, softer Buck that can’t seem to stop doing things around Eddie’s house long enough to actually talk to him. 

If he’s not in the kitchen, he’s doing something to entertain Chris or straighten up something Eddie doesn’t even realize is out of place. To be fair, most of the things in the house look out of place to him though—most of it is new to him, even if it still all looks like something he’d have wanted to get for it eventually. It’s a lot cozier than how he remembers it; most of his funds were stretched thin right after they moved trying to get Chris set up with school supplies and then getting all new out-fittings for the bathroom and Chris’ room, since his parents refused to give up the ones they had. 

It’s nice, though. There’s a lot more heart in their home than Eddie could have ever imagined existing, and he finds himself mostly wandering throughout the house and cataloguing all the changes. 

Ana stays by his side, quietly telling him some general things that had happened in the last three years, which he’s trying to not feel suffocated by. As much as he appreciates her dedication, there’s still a distinct discomfort at having someone he just…Doesn’t know constantly watching him. At least he knows Buck, even if doesn’t know this Buck—but Ana is a complete stranger to him. He doesn’t know how to handle her without hurting her feelings, but also doesn’t want to ruin a relationship he doesn’t even remember starting. 

“—and then there was the pandemic, but don’t worry—things have been pretty under control for the last year, and you and Chris are both vaccinated. I don’t want you to be completely lost if a variant or something comes up, though, so don’t be surprised—“ 

Eddie blows out a breath, thinking maybe he’s more traumatized than he realized if the word pandemic doesn’t even phase him at the moment. He puts the picture frame he was studying back down on the bookcase.

“I’m sorry, is this all too much?” Ana asks, quirking an embarrassed smile at him. She nervously straightens the frame he put back, and Eddie tries to not be annoyed at that. 

He forces a smile back and tries to reply as honestly as he can. “Just a little. There’s just…A lot, that I missed in just…My life. It’s hard to think about anything else.” 

Ana swallows, immediately looking regretful. “You’re right, I just—I guess I don’t know how else to help.” 

“I appreciate what you’ve done already. I know this isn’t…Easy.”

A small, timid smile breaks across her lips. Eddie tries to not flinch when she reaches out and squeezes his arm. 

“I’m happy to be here. I want to…To be here for you, to do whatever you need to remember. I care about you, Edmundo, and that won’t change even if you can’t remember me.” 

Eddie doesn’t know what to say that feels as heartfelt as that, so he just gives her a strained smile in return. 

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that…I thought I could maybe—stay. Tonight. To help you out with Christopher, and so we could maybe talk and see if anything jogs your memory.” 

At that, Eddie does flinch. 

“I…Appreciate that. But I think it’s best that I just have some…Time. For me and Chris, I’m just—I’m tired, and I just need—“ It’s not a lie; his shoulder started aching an hour ago, and his head is beginning to pound out a rhythm that pulses against the light of the living room. “Plus, my Tía said she would stay tonight, so—“ Which is a lie, but he doesn’t feel bad about it. 

“Of course,” Ana cuts in. “No need to explain. I could stop by tomorrow?” 

“Maybe…Next week? I just need…Time.” 

“Yeah, of course…Of course.” There’s disappointment in her eyes but the sad smile she gives him says she wasn’t expecting any different. 

Ana doesn’t stay long after that. 

Buck doesn’t either, but strangely enough he lingers even more than she did. 

“Alright, so, Carla will be here in the morning to get Chris for school—she’ll get here at 6:30. You uh, enrolled him in a new private school a few months after that earthquake,” Buck tells Eddie in between putting on his shoes. “I threw his uniform in the wash for you earlier.” 

Eddie is left blinking at Buck. He briefly wonders about how in the world he affords a private school on top of an in home caregiver because unless he also got a massive raise in the years he’s forgotten, he’s going to have to sit down with his bank statements sooner than he thought. Even with the impending doom finances always leaves him with, though, he can’t help but stare at Buck with a little wonder at how ingrained he seems to be in their lives. He’s had some good friends throughout his life, but none that ever came close to knowing the laundering schedule of his kid’s school clothes. 

It’s all on the verge of too much; he’s grateful he has someone to tell him these little things he definitely needs to know, but it also just reminds him how much he’s forgotten.

“Does she usually pick him up?” 

Buck pauses before lacing his boot quickly. “Honestly, she was technically off tomorrow and has another client but she knows how hard this is going to be for you and wanted to uh…Meet you. Again.” He stands up and barely meets Eddie’s eyes. “But I was already scheduled off for tomorrow since we didn’t know…” 

Eddie realizes it’s because they didn’t know if he was going to wake up. The strangeness of not knowing just how enmeshed Buck is in their lives starts itching under his skin again. 

Buck clears his throat. “So I had planned on picking him up, but…” 

Eddie knows the hesitation, logically, doesn’t make sense. Eddie can’t drive yet, and technically, he at least knows Buck. He might not remember why he trusts the man so much, but he is a familiar face not only to himself but obviously to Chris, and he should probably trust him to pick up his son over this mysterious Carla. 

His headache pulses a little harder against his skull.

“Could you—“ Eddie sighs, resisting the urge to rub at his shoulder; it won’t help, and it’ll just show how uncomfortable he is asking this. “Can I come with you? It’s probably stupid, but—” He hates having to ask to do something regarding his own son, and he doesn’t know how to say that without insulting him. 

“Hey, it’s not stupid.” Buck’s reassurance comes quick. Eddie blinks at him in surprise; there’s more confidence in his eyes than there’s been since Eddie woke up, and he doesn’t know what to make about that. It dulls to something more tame. “Actually, I didn’t want to overstep, but…” Buck sighs and shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “I know you have an appointment with Frank tomorrow, and I’d like—I mean, if you want—I can drive you.” 

The fact that he even knows Eddie not only has an appointment with a therapist but knows the man’s name twists something up in Eddie’s chest. 

“Okay…okay. Uh, yeah—thank you,” Eddie says, feeling a little lost. He clears his throat, the words rough on their way out. “Really. Thank you, Buck.” 

For the first time since Eddie’s seen him again, Buck smiles. It’s soft but steady, and more reassuring than anything Eddie’s been told in the last couple of days. 

“Hey, what are friends for, right?” 

Eddie doesn’t have much experience with friends—good friends—but he thinks everything Buck has been doing for him in the background might exceed most expectations. What does he know though—maybe this really is just how their friendship is. 

Eddie thinks, briefly, he’d really like to remember that. 

The next morning, Eddie is quickly convinced Carla is a woman forged by the heavens above and sent as a gift he’s certain he’ll never be able to karmically repay. 

Eddie doesn’t usually warm up to others very fast; it’s not that he doesn’t like people, per se, but he just doesn’t trust people until they’ve proven they’re worth the effort of trusting. Carla, however, has a soothing command of the world around her that makes Eddie instantly understand why his grandmother was so insistent about her before. Not only is Chris completely at ease with her as soon as she shows up, but she also calms Eddie’s nerves about the finances he has strewn across the dining room table he’d been staring at since he woke up a little after 4 unable to go back to sleep. 

“Oh and this one you definitely don’t need to worry about, honey,“ Carla tsks and taps the largest bill Eddie had dug out of the mail left stuffed into a box by the front door before disappearing into the kitchen. It was overflowing and Eddie thought it would be an easy task to organize it in the wee hours of the morning, but instead he’s just given himself a migraine before 7am. He rubs thoroughly at his eyes, one then the other, before weighing the dignity he’d lose if he just collapsed on the dining room table right then. 

“That’s just the monthly invoice from my employer, more of a formality for your records. The state covers my services through a program—I can tell you more about it if you’d like, but you look like you’re about to keel over any minute.” Carla re-emerges with a cup of coffee in one hand and an encouraging smile on her lips. 

“Have I told you before that you’re a blessing?” 

Carla barks out a laugh before setting the mug in front of him and deliberately gathers all the papers on the table together. She shuffles them into something resembling a stack and sets it as far away from Eddie on the table as possible. 

“Trust me, baby, I’m just as blessed to have the Diaz boys in my life. Especially when I have them home in one piece,” Carla tells him with a smile that makes Eddie wonder just how in the world he ever found her in the endless void that is LA’s disability services. Before he was shot, he remembers how much the stress of finding a solution for Chris’ care while he was at work had been slowly winding around his subconscious every waking moment. He constantly felt on the edge of drowning, and yet he woke up to not only a lifejacket but a whole ass rescue boat in front of him. 

It almost feels like cheating at a game he didn’t know he was playing; which is absurd, since it’s not like he used cheat codes to pass by the hard parts of his life. He did actually go through them, he just…Can’t remember them. 

Eddie can hear Chris’ crutches clacking in the hallway between the bathroom and his bedroom, so he estimates they only have a few more minutes until his son is ready to leave. 

“Before you leave,” Eddie says, blowing on the dark coffee still steaming in his mug. It’s black and sugarless, but he hides the grimace when he takes a sip. “I just have to ask—how did I ever end up finding you? I feel like I went through hundreds of carer profiles when I first arrived and I gave up a week in, too overwhelmed at figuring out how to navigate all the different companies and what grants they used.” 

Carla’s face melts into something softer than he knows how to process on a virtual stranger. “That was all thanks to our boy Buck.”

Eddie blinks at her. “You knew Buck?” 

“Oh yes, I knew Buck way before you. Or ‘Buck 1.0’, I think that’s what he’s calling it nowadays.” Carla laughs, but it’s fond and amused. “Abby, his girlfriend, hired me for her mother. After Abby left, well, we didn’t keep in touch too much but Buck does grow on you in a way that’s hard to ever completely shake.” 

“And he what—referred you?” Eddie tries to picture himself asking Buck of all people for a recommendation for Chris’ care; he struggles to come up with a plausible image even with this more mature Buck he now apparently knows. 

“More like he set us up,” Carla laughs again. “Long story short, our little Buckaroo knew you were struggling with childcare, and he reached out to me to help with finding some grants. I think he knew we’d click from the beginning, even if he swears that was just a happy coincidence.” 

“Oh,” is all Eddie replies. He feels a little raw but doesn’t know which part of it all rubbed him that way. “That’s…A lot. You know, to do for someone he barely knows.” 

That soft look is back, and this time it’s enough to start burning across Eddie’s skin. He has to look away from it. “To be honest,” Carla sighs, “I have my doubts there’s anything in the world that boy wouldn’t do for the two of you.” 

And Eddie…Well, he doesn’t know what to make of that.  Thankfully, he doesn’t have to figure out because Chris is careening into the dining room a moment later. “I’m not late!” He informs them with a giggle. 

Carla checks her watch before laughing herself. “I don’t think declaring it makes it true this time, sweetheart. C’mon now, let’s let your dad get a head start on resting up, right?” She gives him an admonishing look and Eddie holds his good hand up in surrender. 

“Not going anywhere, promise,” Eddie tells her solemnly. 

“We all know that doesn’t mean you’ll rest.” 

“Yeah, Dad, we all know.” 

Eddie laughs, and for the first time he doesn’t feel like an outsider to his own life. “Okay, okay. I get it—butt down, feet up and all that.” 

“Atta boy,” Carla coos, patting him on the cheek as she follows Chris to the door. “And you’ll call me if you need anything.” She doesn’t leave it as a question. 

“Sure,” Eddie concedes. 

It’s not a lie if he doesn’t plan on needing anyone, anyway. 

To be fair, Eddie does try to rest after they leave. 

For about half an hour. 

(Seventeen minutes to be exact, but Eddie doesn’t think semantics are important if he’s the only one counting.) 

He tries to sit down with a book that had been left on the console table behind the couch, resolutely ignoring the rest of the mail on the dining room table. He had been wanting to read more for a while now, but it’s a luxury of time he never seemed to be able to justify especially with the stress of moving. But Chris loves to read—at least, Eddie is pretty sure he still loves to read—and he wanted to set a good example for him. When he saw all the books pressed tightly against each other on the bookcase in the living room yesterday, he was grateful he must have at least figured out a way to do one thing right by his son. 

He’s fairly certain the book isn’t one of Chris’—although his son has always been more mature for his age, Eddie still doesn’t think his eleven year old was reading a non-fiction cold case about a library fire. The book is dog-eared several times, like it’s one Eddie must have been trying to fit in between a busy schedule. He rationalizes he must have been pretty determined to read it but when he tries to start it, he has to reread the second page about five times before giving up. 

Maybe his taste in books has drastically changed in three years, or maybe Chris has some really…Interesting tastes for a preteen. 

Either way, he thinks he gives “resting” a fair shot before he tosses the book onto the coffee table and decides to snoop through his own stuff again. It’s probably not technically snooping since it is still his stuff, but he can’t help but feel like he’s intruding on a stranger’s life as he explores the house. That’s probably something the hospital appointed therapist is going to have a field day unpacking, and the thought alone makes Eddie grimace. 

He starts in the kitchen, because it feels like the safest option emotionally. 

There’s few differences he can note at first; despite the verifiable cooking storm that happened in here yesterday, the counters are completely cleared and the only thing out of place is where the coffee pot sits by the sink where Carla must have left it. He meticulously begins looking through the cabinets, though, and is surprised to find multiple appliances and high-end cookware Eddie thinks would take a miracle for him to know how to use. He briefly wonders if Chris’ complaints about Eddie’s lack of culinary prowess bullied him into taking a cooking class or fifty. 

The fridge is another mystery. It’s fully stocked with leftovers, sure—and when Eddie checks the freezer, he isn’t surprised to see more gallon-bags with careful instructions written on them filling it up—but beyond that, it’s just so…Organized. The type of organized that used to make Eddie feel overwhelmed when he would search for parenting tips during the late nights he was convinced he was going to ruin Chris forever with his ineptitude and the top results were Pinterest boards by stay at home moms with “simple” homemaking hacks that cost more time and money than Eddie ever had to spare. 

Staring at the clearly labeled snack and produce bins in between drink dispensers for carbonated water, though, it looks like the fridge has never seen a messy day—and seriously, when did Eddie become the type of person to have carbonated water over a single can of soda in his fridge?

He looks at the calendar nearly hidden beneath everything else and makes mental note to figure out some of the circled dates with cryptic shorthand beneath them before he starts sifting through the papers stuck to the fridge doors with mismatched sets of magnets. Most of it is predictable; some coupons, a Father’s Day card, a half-written grocery list, but mainly pictures signed by Chris in various Crayola shades. There’s artwork of different animals—and Eddie makes a mental note Chris must really be into those now and to check if he’s still into space at all—and a couple of depictions of the 118 in the middle of a heroic save which make Eddie smile. 

That smile drops quickly when he finds the first “family” portrait. 

It depicts a sunny day with a clearly labeled “Dad” watching over Chris on a skateboard—but on the other side, there’s a smiling figure labelled “Buck.” Eddie stares at it for longer than he’d like to admit before flipping through the rest of the drawings only to find every one that includes Eddie has Buck right there with him. 

Eddie moves onto the living room, and tells himself he’s not running away from a refrigerator. 

He takes a closer look at everything he passed over yesterday. His eyes had barely scanned over the room with Ana following him so closely; he felt watched, even if her attention was mostly on figuring out different current events to catch him up on. Still, his skin had felt frayed with her next to him while he tried to imagine the thought behind each knick knack or photo. He didn’t realize how much he hadn’t actually taken in until he gets close to the mantle and examines each framed picture. 

There’s one of him, Chris, and Shannon at the beach—Chris looks closer to what he remembers, so it must have been shortly after they moved to LA—that makes Eddie’s heart ache with the amount of questions it raises. He traces the smiles on all three of their faces with his good hand. How did he get to a point where they could look so happy together, and yet she wasn’t here with them? Were they actually able to overcome everything they put each other through to co-parent peacefully? Did she even live nearby or does she only visit occasionally—is that why they look so happy to see each other? Did they finally learn their love was best at a distance? 

He’s tempted to call her. 

His phone has been left plugged in on his nightstand since he got home yesterday—he hadn’t even thought about it in the hospital, but learned it had been given to Buck by the hospital, along with the rest of his possessions on the day of the shooting. He had briefly considered going through it last night, but he made it a couple of days’ worth of communications through a group text with the rest of the 118 before giving up. The amount of inside jokes he just didn’t get became overwhelming, so he decided to leave it until he either (hopefully) remembers his life, or at least gets to know his coworkers enough again that it doesn’t feel intrusive to read their conversations. 

Still, seeing the photo of all three of them makes a part of him wonder if they have the relationship now that Shannon would want to know if her (ex?) husband is apparently suffering from traumatic memory loss. A stronger, more raw part of him remembers the desperation he felt when he decided to move to LA and start over with their son, and thinks it’s probably for the best if he doesn’t revisit his past too much while trying to remember his future. 

The other photos are even harder to conceive. 

All of them—not that there’s many, but Eddie has clearly forgone any decor in favor of making room for as many photos as possible on the mantle—include Buck. Most are selfies of Eddie, Chris, and Buck on various outings. One is from what looks like Abuela’s birthday party, and she’s giving Chris a kiss on the head while Buck and Eddie sandwich her with cheek kisses. There’s one where they’re at the station and Eddie is in his dress uniform, so he assumes it’s when he made it off probation. Chris is wearing Eddie’s helmet, and Buck is—curiously—on crutches. Chimney and a pretty brunette woman are beside Eddie, and they’re all laughing at something it looks like Chris said to them right before the camera went off. 

Eddie holds his breath at as he imagines living through each photo, until it all comes out in a rush at the last one at the edge of the mantle. Nestled beside an innocent one of Buck and Chris reading inside what is probably a blanket fort, is a small 4x6 frame featuring just Eddie and Buck. 

The photo was taken outside; it looks like a typically bright day in LA, and the sun throws a glare from behind them. Neither of them are looking at the camera, both of their gazes focused somewhere out of frame. There’s nothing too special about the picture itself; honestly, what’s more telling than the photo itself is the fact Eddie had apparently thought it belonged on display. He picks it up, and he thinks he understands why—he looks…Happy. He isn’t wearing one of the big smiles that hurt his cheeks just looking at, but instead there’s a simple air of contentment about the photo that makes his chest feel hollow. The way they’re pressed so casually close, Eddie smiling something softer than he’s felt in years and Buck laughing with joy reflected in his squinted eyes and one arm thrown around Eddie’s shoulders—it’s the type of friendship Eddie never understood. 

He looks like he’s at home. He doesn’t know how to look at himself.

There isn’t a single photo of Eddie’s parents out on display. There’s not even a picture of Eddie’s girlfriend—but there’s at least five featuring none other than Evan Buckley. Eddie puts the frame back on the mantle. He takes a deep breath that rattles on the way in, and forces it to steady on the way out. 

Eddie is exhausted. 

He stares at the fireplace without really seeing it anymore. There’s a dull ache in his shoulder that he knows he should take a pain pill for, but his feet feel like concrete blocks against the rug. It takes all the effort he can manage to slump down and plop on the coffee table, which doesn’t seem to appreciate his weight. Trying to make sense of his life has left his brain feeling like stretched out taffy; every thought is distorted and too thin. 

He doesn’t know how long he sits there. Long enough for the dull ache to pulse into something a lot angrier, that’s for sure. He’s certain he should get up soon and start getting ready to exist in public—not that he can shower yet himself, but he doesn’t have even a quarter of the mental energy to get that dilemma figured out so he’s shoved it to the lowest priority until he can start smelling himself. But he can probably at least manage to do a quick rinse with a washcloth at the sink, if he can maneuver his shirt off the right way. 

Even thinking about it makes his limbs feel heavier. 

But he doesn’t have the luxury to exist in his exhaustion. It doesn’t matter what he’s going through—his kid, his house, his life can’t stop functioning just because Eddie hasn’t figured out how to function himself yet. If he stops moving for too long he’s fairly certain the entire weight of the world would crush him in its gravity, so he’d really rather not chance it and pushes himself to his feet. 

As he musters the motivation to actually make it to the bathroom, though, he freezes at the sound of the door unlocking. It registers that he has no idea who could be walking through the door at the same time that the bulk of Buck’s shoulders fills the doorway. His head is down as he toes off his boots while trying to balance a brown bag and two to-go coffees. 

“You have a key?” Eddie blurts out instead of a greeting, because it seems like a nicer thing to ask than why the hell Buck is letting himself into his house. 

Buck’s head whips up, eyes wide. He trips over his own boot and nearly spills the coffee. Eddie takes an automatic step forward, but Buck steadies himself and his goods. 

“Uh, hi,” Buck says sheepishly. “Sorry.” He clears his throat, shifting from foot to foot. “I do—have a key, that is. I guess it’s just…Habit. I didn’t think about it, but I shouldn’t have—“ 

Eddie doesn’t know how to process any of that information, so instead he interrupts Buck’s increasingly frantic explanation with, “Is that coffee for me?” 

Buck blinks at him. “Yeah. It’s from McCallie’s, it’s—well, it was your favorite.” 

Eddie sort of remembers seeing the place when he had searched the area when they first moved in. He had been wanting to try out the coffee shop for a while since it’d be convenient on his way to work, but he just hadn’t found the time yet. 

“Thanks,” he says quietly, instead of unpacking any of that. He watches Buck watch him back for a moment before clearing his throat. He nods toward the kitchen. “You want to sit?”

Buck jumps into step, following Eddie’s lead to sit across from each other. He unpacks the bag and sets a comically large muffin down beside the coffee in front of Eddie. The house somehow feels emptier with Buck in it now too; it’s filled with a yawning quiet and too bright morning light, and it feels like Eddie is missing more than just the memories of how this is probably normal for them now. 

“Sorry, again,” Buck repeats. He’s taken the lid off his own coffee and blows on it a couple of times, not looking Eddie in the eye. “I was on autopilot, I guess, but I should have stopped to think how weird this would be for you.” 

Eddie doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry. Probably both. “Weird is an understatement,” he says on a rush. He almost instantly regrets how honest that is and tries to swallow the discomfort with some of the coffee; he nearly spits it out when it tastes perfect. Slightly creamy with a hint of sugar, and Eddie thinks crying might win out. 

Buck finally looks up at that. He doesn’t look hurt like Eddie would expect; he quirks a smile at him and he wraps his fingers around the disposable coffee cup on top of the table. “I gotta admit, I’m a loss here too if it makes you feel any better.” 

“What do you mean?” 

Buck sighs, squinting his eyes past Eddie and watches the light filter in through the sheer curtains across the room. “Dr. Pierce said you woke up thinking it was after that earthquake way back when, right?” 

Eddie doesn’t know where he’s going with this. Still, he nods. “I remember us going into that high-rise, but—“ His throat feels tight around the admission, but Buck doesn’t seem to need more confirmation. 

“Right.” Buck focuses back on him with a sad sort of humor in his eyes. “I can’t even remember what we were like back then, if I’m honest. Things have…Changed, so much since then, and I never really had to stop and think about it. I don’t even know how to act to make things less weird for you, because I don’t remember what you must think of me where you’re at right now.” 

“You don’t have to—“ Eddie shakes his head, tries to find words for feelings that he’s not used to expressing to others. “I don’t want you to act any different than you usually would.” He’s not sure if that’s entirely true actually, but the thought of getting used to Buck again but having it be some sort of mirage of whatever Buck thinks he needs to be is more confusing than figuring out whatever the hell kind of friendship the two of them have seemed to cultivate over the years. “I don’t want to get to know whoever you aren’t.”

Buck’s head tilts, considering him through the entire tangle of emotion Eddie tries to unravel. “You want to get to know me?” 

Warmth tickles at the back of Eddie’s neck. “Well, yeah. You’re like…You’re my best friend, right?” 

Buck’s smile is soft around the corners, but it’s nothing compared to his eyes. Eddie focuses on his coffee and tries to ignore how much he likes it was made perfect for him. “Yeah,” Buck rasps, his fingers tearing tiny lines into the cardboard sleeve around his cup. “You’re mine too, you know.” 

Eddie laughs, and it feels a little like it was punched out of him. “I’m beginning to understand that, yeah.” 

“Good.” Buck clears his throat, and Eddie chances a look at him. That softness has tempered the rest of his edges too. “Now, who’s ready for some therapy?” 

Eddie groans, and the tension is gone. “That better be a rhetorical question.” 

“Oh it definitely is.” Buck grins at him. “But Frank remembers how much you loved seeing him last time, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” 

“I’ve seen him before?”

Buck pauses from where he’s stood up and started clearing trash off the table. “Your doctor didn’t tell you?” Eddie shakes his head and picks at his muffin. “Ah, yeah. A couple years ago now.”

“Doesn’t seem like something I’d do,” Eddie muses around a bite. It’s weird to consider himself doing something so out of character, but no weirder than the rest of this whole experience. 

“Well, I wouldn’t say it was voluntary.” Buck laughs awkwardly, like there’s a story behind it. Eddie makes a mental note to ask about it. “But you mentioned to me before that you told him a lot more than you thought you would, so when the doctor asked if there was anyone you’d prefer seeing, I figured he’d be a good fit.” Buck crumples the bag in both hands, holding the ball in front of his chest. “I hope that was okay.” 

“No, yeah,” Eddie agrees quickly. “Makes sense. Uh, thank you.” 

Buck laughs and starts moving again. “You don’t have to keep thanking me, you know.” He disappears into the kitchen and Eddie works on disappearing the rest of his muffin. 

When Buck appears again, Eddie chugs the last few sips of his coffee. “I need a few minutes before we leave, I still gotta—“ He gestures down to his sweatpants. 

“Yeah, of course. Do you, uh…Need any help?” He winces like the question came out more painful than he meant it. 

Truthfully, Eddie probably does need help. Still, that’s one line he doesn’t think he’s ready to cross with his coworker. “I think I got it,” Eddie assures. Buck nods quickly and grabs Eddie’s trash. 

“Well, just—give me a shout if you need me, I guess. I’ll be out here.” He throws a thumb toward the living room. 

Getting rinsed off goes about as well as Eddie’s worst prediction for it. He can’t unfasten his sling one handed and it gets stuck over his head when he tries to pull it off, which sets off a new ache in his shoulder. He gets water all over the bathmat even though he tries to wring out the washcloth each time he wets it, and he’s pretty sure he still has soap in some places by the time he gives up. Jeans are decidedly an enemy, so he just pulls on a clean pair of joggers. When he looks at his t-shirt, he has instant flashbacks to wrangling his sleep shirt up and over his head and sighs. 

His shirt and sling fisted in his good hand, Eddie pads back into the living after an embarrassingly long amount of time. Buck is sitting on the couch with the tv off and when Eddie crosses over to him, he sees the book he gave up on earlier in his hands. He has it open to a little over halfway through. 

“Oh! Hey, sorry, wasn’t paying attention,” Buck says, startled a little. He folds the corner of his page down and sets the book on the coffee table. Eddie doesn’t know what to make of that. 

“You’re fine,” he says, clenching his clothes a little tighter. Buck seems to register his lack of shirt belatedly. 

“Do you need…?” Buck tilts his head to Eddie’s fist; he doesn’t know how to ask, but he doesn’t need to before Buck is standing up and gesturing for them to switch spots. 

Eddie sits down stiffly. Buck kneels between his knees like the proximity doesn’t bother him at all. Eddie resolutely focuses over Buck’s head as he starts to manipulate his shoulder carefully to get the shirt on; Buck’s gentle touch makes him curious, though, and when he chances a peek down at his face, Eddie has to hold his breath at the concentration pinching Buck’s expression together so seriously. 

Eddie lets that breath out on a hiss when his arm is pulled a little too far, and Buck immediately apologizes. Pain is clear in his own eyes as his hands move slower, his fingers barely a brush over Eddie’s skin; there’s a reverence in the way he touches him, and Eddie can’t breathe properly until his shirt is on and the sling has been fastened and Buck has pulled out of his orbit. 

“There we go,” Buck says with a half smile. He sits back on his haunches until he’s pressed against the coffee table, and even then there’s so little room between them that it’s all Eddie can think about and yet it doesn’t seem to phase Buck whatsoever. 

“Thank you,” Eddie murmurs, a little dazed. 

“What did I say about that?” Buck’s lips quirk up a little higher, his eyes bright. 

Eddie smiles back a little then. “What’s wrong with a little appreciation?”

“Nothing wrong with it,” Buck says, using the coffee table to push himself up. “But it’s not necessary. Not with me.” 

“Why?”

The question seems to throw him off as much as it throws Eddie; he’s not sure exactly why he asks it, or even what exactly he’s asking. There’s a lot of questions that keep bumping around his chest regarding Evan Buckley, but the one that keeps tripping over his ribs is just—why? Why Eddie? Why is he everywhere Eddie looks? Why does he give so much to him and Chris? 

Why does he look at Eddie like that? 

Looking down, a complicated sort of sorrow stretches deep into Buck’s eyes. “I…” One of his hands twitch toward Eddie before he folds his arms across his chest. Resolution settles into his expression. “I’d do anything for you, Eds. You and Chris—all you have to do is ask, and it’s yours.” 

It’s so close to what Carla said, yet it hits harder coming from Buck himself. It’s like a truck straight to his solar plexus the way all the air is sucked from his body at once. 

It doesn’t even answer his question—not really, not when why why why keeps tripping through his veins with the same thrashing beat of his heart. 

“Anyway, we should get going—” Buck swallows, stepping to the side with averted eyes. “Don’t wanna be late.” 

Therapy. 

Right. 

Yes. 

Buck’s taking him to therapy, where he knows Eddie’s therapist’s name and Eddie’s entire history with him; Buck, who let himself into Eddie’s house with food from Eddie’s favorite coffee shop with coffee crafted perfectly for Eddie’s tastes; Buck, who apparently has a book on Eddie’s coffee table with so many dog-eared pages it’s like any interruption at Eddie’s house is worth putting it down. 

Buck, who touches him with a devotion as palpable as all the little pieces of himself scattered throughout Eddie's home. 

Eddie thinks he might have solved his own question, but he’s afraid to look at the answer too closely—because he’s fairly certain his best friend is in love with him, and Eddie can’t remember a single thing about him. 

Chapter Text

Once he gives the thought life, it’s the only thing that can survive the whirlwind tearing through Eddie’s insides. 

He’s learned, through years of dealing with crisis after crisis, that juggling so many at once is a surefire way to book yourself a ticket straight into a mental breakdown. Even when it seems impossible to wade through the mess, it’s important to deal with one emergency at a time; unfortunately for Eddie, his biggest emergency isn’t one he can actually do anything about since he can’t force himself to remember, and so this new one has decided to take up direct residence in the forefront of his brain. 

Eddie woke up missing three years of his life, and somehow during that time his best friend fell in love with him.

It’s the only thing that makes sense, right? The way Buck is so ingrained in the life Eddie’s made for himself, the way people talk about him—the way Abuela talks to him—it’s like he’s an unquestionable facet of not only Eddie’s life but also Christopher’s. He’s somehow more of a fixture in their lives than Eddie’s own damn wife ever was, and he has no fucking clue what to do with that. 

It’s not something he thinks he can just ask about. How do you ask a person, “Hey so this is probably awkward but have we ever addressed the fact I’m pretty sure you’re in love with me? No, oh okay cool”? Or worse—had they already talked about it? And somehow left their friendship intact afterwards? The more he thinks about it, Eddie thinks that must be it. He’s dating someone else for godssake! 

He’s riding in the passenger seat of Buck’s Jeep and he, very certainly, wants to take his chances jumping ship right there on on the Santa Monica Freeway. 

If Buck notices the way Eddie has stopped being able to act normal all of a sudden, he doesn’t show it. The radio is playing a song Eddie doesn’t recognize but Buck is all but humming along like it’s a popular hit—his thumbs beat out a slightly-off-rhythm echo and even though his mouth is a tight line, his head still bobs distractedly to the tune while he glances over his shoulder to merge. 

Eddie watches him with a new kind of apprehension. The man has made it clear how much he just wants to help him, and Eddie can’t deny how much easier it is to accept it from an at least somewhat familiar face than the strangers that surround his new life; but if Eddie’s right about this—and he’s pretty certain he is, all things considering—isn’t he just taking advantage of Buck’s feelings? 

Would he be letting Buck do so much for him if he could remember what the hell is going on between them? 

Eddie doesn’t like to think of himself as someone who would exploit the feelings of someone else, especially if they obviously care about him. He’s done a lot of stupid and selfish things in his past, but if there’s one thing he’s learned from his kid it’s the importance of how you treat people.   

At least his slow descent into an internal hysteria distracts Eddie enough that he doesn’t think about the reality of having to face a therapist that knows more about him that he knows about himself. 

“Alright, I have a couple of errands to run,” Buck says while throwing the Jeep in park at the front of an inconspicuous enough building. He turns to Eddie, a smile on his lips that would probably be reassuring if Eddie didn’t feel so guilty in the wake of it. “But I’ll be back here before you get done, so just come on out whenever you’re finished. Frank was able to get you booked for an hour and a half today, since this is an emergency session.” 

Eddie grimaces. “A longer session sounds like the actual emergency here.” 

“Yeah, well, just try to communicate with more than just displeased grunts, okay?” 

Eddie lets out a startled laugh that’s more of an exhale of air through his nose, but it’s enough to turn Buck’s smile into a grin. “I know how to communicate.” 

“Oh, I know you’re capable of it—but you’re also capable of being a stubborn ass, so just remember he’s there to help, yeah?” 

Eddie rolls his eyes but still smiles something small and amused while he takes off his seatbelt and tries to get the door open one-handed. Buck waits patiently until Eddie is standing by passenger door, his good hand clutching against the frame, and he silently appreciates Buck seeming to know when to let Eddie do something for himself. The thought ties in with the lingering feeling of being a little too seen by Buck’s jokes though, and suddenly he feels exposed just standing there staring at Buck. 

“Alright, well…See you soon,” Eddie says belatedly, catching himself from thanking him again for the ride. 

“You got it,” Buck replies, like showing up for Eddie is the most constant thing on his schedule. So far, Eddie is fairly certain it is. 

The waiting area for Frank’s office is clinical; it’s sparse in its decor and even the magazines seem more perfunctory than welcoming, but there’s a few cozy accents determined to poke through. When Eddie checks in with the receptionist—a quiet but friendly woman who stops misting a bright green plant on her desk when he walks up—he thinks he knows where the homeliness comes from. He’s proven correct when he’s ushered into Frank’s office; it’s not big but has plenty of cleared space for the man’s wheelchair to move around, and besides a bookshelf with practical sounding titles lined across it and a single throw pillow on the couch, there isn’t much for Eddie to focus on. 

Eddie thinks he prefers this over some contrived depiction of peace that he’s sure he wouldn’t be able to feel comfortable in, but he sure as hell would like something to distract him from having to look his therapist in the eye. 

“Hello, Eddie. I’m Frank,” the man says cordially. He’s sat a couple of feet in front of his desk, a clipboard propped on one knee. 

“Hello Frank,” Eddie mimics. “I don’t want to be here.” 

Frank laughs, once and hard, before he masks it behind pursed lips. “My apologies—that’s what you said last time we met as well.” 

Despite himself, Eddie smiles a little. “I guess not everything changes.” 

“No, not everything does,” Frank concedes, more composed. “Some things do, though. And some things you can change if you decide to change them. How are you feeling about all the changes you’ve woken up to, Eddie?” 

The smile drops. “Is that how we’re going to do this? Just jump right into the feelings talk?” 

“You responded best to…An efficient approach to talking about difficult things when we previously worked together.” Frank folds his hands over his lap, one steadying the clipboard. He tilts his head in consideration when he says, “Is there a way you would prefer me to talk to you instead?”

The thing is, Eddie knows he’s right; the thought of having someone treat him too gently—treat him like he’s something that could break even with how fragile his sanity feels—is enough to have Eddie ready to bolt back out the door. 

Frank seems to be able to translate Eddie’s silence and the decidedly-not-a-pout on his face, but he waits an infuriating amount of time for Eddie to verbalize it. 

“No, okay, fine.” Eddie huffs out a breath and wishes he could cross his arms fully, but god only knows what that would translate to in therapist language. He can only imagine the notes Frank will make about him. 

“Alright then,” Frank agrees, a little too calmly for the smile in his eyes. “So. Changes.” 

Eddie shifts in his seat. Grabs the single throw pillow and roughly shoves it onto his lap, notes be damned. “I have no fucking clue how I’m supposed to feel.” 

“Why do you think you’re supposed to feel any sort of way?” 

“I don’t—“ Eddie groans and stares aggressively at the fringe on the pillow. It’s balding in some spots, like it’s used to being picked at by the occupants of this couch. “I just don’t know what people expect of me. I’m not—I’m not who they want me to be, not right now.” 

“Why do you think they want you to be any certain way?”

“Of course they want me to be—“ Eddie cuts himself off, getting too worked up. He takes a deep breath, looks up at Frank, who is just watching him with expectant eyes. “They all have memories of me that I don’t have with them. I’m—I’m important to these people who I don’t even remember. Of course I’m not who they wish I was.” 

Frank makes a considering noise while he flips a page on his clipboard. “You know,” he says, too casually, “from what you told me in our previous sessions—and from speaking briefly with Mr. Buckley about your current situation—I think it’s safe to say these people you’re important to are just happy you’re alive. It’s natural for them to perhaps feel confused, and maybe a little lost, at how to help you currently—” Frank continues, this time watching Eddie right back. “But those kinds of feelings come from the love they have for you.” 

Eddie isn’t so sure about that. How can someone love him if he doesn’t even know them? If his memories don’t come back—something he’s resolutely tried to ignore as a possibility—will they still want a future with him when their past doesn’t exist with him anymore? And if they do—is it out of obligation from the person he had become, and not the one he will become?       

Exhaustion gnaws at his bones again. 

“I’m just so fucking tired,” Eddie exhales. He doesn’t elaborate, because there’s too much to fit into a single explanation. He’s tired of being alone, of doing this whole surviving-day-to-day thing on his own; tired of questioning his every choice; tired of feeling like he’s failing his kid; and now, tired of feeling like he might have somehow found a way to rest in this life he’s made himself, but he’s gone and fucked that up too. 

“You’re going through an unimaginable experience right now,” Frank says, and for the first time there’s an edge of sympathy in his eyes. “Do you think it’s normal to feel tired from the emotional toll it takes on you?” 

Eddie knows what he’s supposed to say. He knows why he’s supposed to say it, too. But instead he just smiles grimly. “It’s not normal for me. I don’t—I don’t get to be tired, okay? I get to move on, to shrug it off—I just haven’t figured out how to yet.” 

Frank watches him, contemplative, for a disconcerting moment. Then, he sighs and pushes himself to the small console table by his desk that’s home to a K-cup coffee maker. 

“Coffee? Tea?” Frank asks, throwing Eddie a glance over his shoulder while he readies himself a cup.

“Uh, no. Thanks.” 

Frank hums in acknowledgement. The machine is old and gurgles to life loudly while filling his travel mug up. Eddie watches it all, confused at what the hell kind of therapy tactic this is supposed to be. 

“Is this supposed to what—make me feel like you’re just like me or something? Needing coffee is supposed to humanize our relationship?” 

Frank snorts a little as he secures the lid to his mug and turns himself to roll back toward Eddie. 

“Do you want to unpack the amount of suspicion you have toward mental health professionals right now?” 

Eddie’s mouth drops open on a retort, then clicks shut. “No. Not particularly.” 

“Another day, then.” Frank eyes him from over the rim of his glasses after he’s settled back in front of Eddie, this time a little closer than before. “I got coffee because I’m about to have a hard conversation with you, and I cope with difficult situations with copious amounts of caffeine. Unhealthy, I know, but we all have our vices.” 

“What,” Eddie starts, his throat dry, “what conversation are you talking about?” 

Frank levels him with a an unreadable look. “Do you want to know why you first came to see me?” 

Eddie’s heart trips over every one of his ribs as it falls into his stomach. Yes is immediately on his tongue to reply, but there’s something about the sadness around the edges of Frank’s otherwise neutral mouth that has him hesitating. 

Does he want to know? If it’s bad enough to have his therapist hesitate to tell him, does he want to put himself through it again if he already (assumedly) got himself past it once? 

Would it be worth whatever painful price he’ll have paid twice if—when—he remembers?  

Swallowing through the thorny indecision, Eddie meets Frank’s stare. “Yes. I do.” 

Frank watches him for a moment longer. He sighs, then takes a sip of his coffee. “About a year after you started at the 118, you were caught fighting in an illegal fighting ring and your captain mandated therapy for anger management.” 

That…Is not what Eddie had been expecting. Granted, he really didn’t have any expectations—but that definitely wouldn’t have been on the list of guesses, anyway. 

“I—“ Eddie shakes his head, trying to make sense of what he just heard. “I what?” 

“A coworker from a different house reported you to your captain before her captain could do so, when their team was called out to a fight after you delivered a nearly fatal blow to your opponent.” Frank delivers each word with a factuality that has Eddie’s head reeling. 

He knows—he has anger issues, sure. He’s lost his temper in high-stress personal situations, but he’s never—he doesn’t go too far, ever. He’s always still in control of himself. What the hell did he get himself into? And why?

Everything about his life that he’s learned so far has been nothing short of a fantasy that he never thought he could achieve for himself and Christopher before moving to LA. He’s seemingly built this perfect, loving support system out of the people he’s surrounded himself with. It’s all been nearly too much to accept and yet—

Yet, when he thinks about it a little harder, this is the piece of himself he can relate to the most. 

He might not know what drove him to doing such an idiotic thing—what drove him to jeopardize his job so badly—but he knows the anger it would take simmers in his veins, always. It’s there, ready to be called on any time frustration threatens to rear its nasty head. It’s why he does ensure he’s always in control of himself, of his emotions—of whatever shit he has to deal with, because he can’t afford to let that anger flow out of him freely the way it begs to. 

So yeah. He can only imagine what it took, but he knows the potential of that bad decision sits snugly right under his skin even now. It’s why he has to make sure he picks himself up even from this newest nightmare and make sure he keeps moving on from it before he’s swallowed up by it all. 

“Do you want to know what you said to me during our first session?” Frank asks, a little softer this time. 

Eddie laughs, short and devoid of humor. “That I didn’t want to be there?” 

Frank smiles, small and at the corner of his mouth. “After that.”

“Fine. What did I say?” 

“That you didn’t want to see me, but that you knew you had to.” Frank fixes him with a look Eddie doesn’t want to read. “Because you didn’t want Christopher to grow up the way you did. You didn’t want him to think having emotions was some type of failure—that he was wrong for being affected by life, by all its ups and downs.” 

There’s a lump in Eddie’s throat and it’s decidedly not anger. It’s something wetter, something heaving in its insistence and it balls up behind his eyes, too. “I said that?” 

“You did,” Frank assures him. “You meant it, too. You didn’t see me very long—against my own recommendation, mind you—“ Eddie huffs out a watery laugh. Frank smiles a little wider. “But when you left, you had worked hard to undo your internal prejudice against your own feelings, Eddie. You were proud of yourself, and you had every right to be.” 

Eddie nods, because he doesn’t know what else to do. It feels like praise for a project he cheated on; it feels empty, even if he wants so badly to bask in it. “Why did you decide to tell me all of this?” 

“This is going to be exponentially harder than just unpacking generational trauma, Eddie,” Frank tells him, matter-of-factly. “But you need to know that you’re capable of facing this in a way that doesn’t leave you more exhausted than you began. You need to know you deserve to come out on the other side of this feeling good.”

Eddie wipes at his eyes roughly with one hand, one then the other. He doesn’t meet Frank’s eyes as he nods, this time with an acknowledgement in his chest; it’s one that wrestles against the instinct in his gut to fight back, but he forces it down. 

He’s tired. 

He can do this. 

And maybe, just maybe—he’ll figure out how the hell he did it all the first time around, too. 

Buck is, unsurprisingly, parked right out front of the building when Eddie exits. The windows to the Jeep are rolled down and he has one arm out of the driver’s side, hand curled around the frame. Eddie can just make out a low beat coming from the radio and see Buck’s head nodding along. He’s wearing some ridiculously big Aviators, and when he spots Eddie walk up there’s an even more ridiculous smile on his face. 

Eddie can’t help but smile back, just a little bit. Even though he feels a little shattered, stretched and pushed back into shape, it’s hard not to respond to the joy Buck throws his way. 

“How’d it go?” Buck casually throws the question over his shoulder as he starts to pull away. 

“Good,” Eddie tells him and is surprised it doesn’t taste like a lie. It wasn’t comfortable, nor was it easy—but it does feel like the start of something worthwhile. 

Buck’s grin is blinding. “I’m glad to hear it, dude. Frank isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, you know—an acquired taste, Maddie told me once—but he’s damn good.” 

The name itches at the back of Eddie’s mind. “Maddie?” He remembers something about Buck dating someone who Chimney and Hen were convinced was ghosting him, but between the time passed since then and Eddie’s own…Revelations, he’s pretty sure that can’t be the same woman. 

“My sister.” Buck laughs a little awkwardly. “She uh—she’s a 9-1-1 dispatcher and saw Frank a while back as well. She actually started seeing him again recently too.” 

“Oh,” is all Eddie knows how to say. He’s certain this is something he would have known otherwise, and he can’t help but feel a little guilty at that; whatever their relationship is, he’s certain Buck was—is—his best friend, and it’s almost easy to forget how strange this must be for him, too. 

“She’s dating Chimney—just so you know,” Buck adds belatedly. “And speaking of—I thought we could get some lunch before picking up Christopher but if you’re feeling up for it, we could maybe swing by the station to eat and see everyone?” 

Eddie inhales, a little surprised at the suggestion. It’s not that he—he wants to see his team, he knows that. But also the thought of being surrounded by more people who know him better than he knows himself right now is…A lot. 

Buck seems to read his hesitation and adds, “I’ve been updating them on you but—well, I can only fight them off visiting for so long.” He lets out a fond chuckle. “They’d respect your space if you need it of course, but they’ve all been worried. I thought maybe seeing them at the station with a guaranteed time limit since we have to pick up Chris might make it easier on you.” 

Eddie doesn’t know why he’s so surprised by the amount of consideration Buck’s given this, but he’s still left a little hollow at having his comfort being made such an obvious priority laid out right in front of him. 

“You’re right, yeah. I’d—yeah, I’d like to see them.” 

Buck shoots him a quick smile. “Yeah? Awesome. Chim will be happy, too—Bobby’s been out too, so they’ve all been fending for themselves the last few days when I’m not there.” 

“Bobby’s out?” 

Buck hesitates. Eddie looks over after a suspended moment and sees him swallow. “Yeah, he uh—he was shot, too. It was while you were still in the hospital and was—it was the same shooter. He’s fine,” Buck adds hurriedly, but there’s a tension in his shoulders that wasn’t there before. “But he’s going to be out a few weeks on recovery.” 

It’s the first time the shooting has really been mentioned by—well, by anyone. But whether or not Buck has purposefully avoided the subject Eddie can’t be sure, but having it offered to him even hesitantly is enough to give him the courage to be curious.    

“So, uh, Frank did have a suggestion,” Eddie starts, clears his throat, and stops. He doesn’t know how to ask the next part, so instead of dwelling on it he makes the words come out anyway. “He said it might help if I talked about what happened.” And okay—that’s not exactly the homework Frank did actually give him but it has been one of the more pressing things Eddie wants to know, sue him.

“You mean…?” Eddie hears the leather steering wheel groan as Buck’s fingers tighten over it. His sunglasses never leave the road, but Eddie can see tight wrinkles form at the edges of his eyes behind the rim. 

“When I was shot, yeah.” Eddie guesses he shouldn’t feel so disconnected from it; that it shouldn’t feel like something he can say so factually, without impact except the faint pain in his shoulder. It’s hard to feel anything over something he can’t remember though, especially while being faced with a reality that can’t wait for him to catch up before he has to deal with it all. 

“What—“ Buck swallows. The steering wheel groans more. “What do you want to know?” 

Eddie blows out a long breath. Isn’t that just the loaded question, huh?  

“I don’t even—honestly, I don’t even know what to ask. I thought you might know something, anything about it that might—“ He’s cut off by the Jeep being jerked to an abrupt stop. Eddie hadn’t noticed them pull into a McDonalds, but now they’re taking up at least two spaces where Buck’s parked haphazardly. “Uh—Buck?” 

“Just a—“ Buck breathes in a deep, sucking breath while Eddie watches him, unsure what to do. His head falls forward, resting between his fists on the steering wheel, and he draws in more of those breaths until they even out. His sunglasses slide down his nose until he yanks at them suddenly and holds them in a shaking fist. 

Eddie knows that Buck—that he loves him, one way or another, but didn’t think about how much just talking about the shooting would…Affect him. 

As Buck’s labored breathing doesn’t ease—actually, Eddie is pretty sure it’s only getting worse, filling the Jeep with harsher gasps the longer Buck tries to push them away with tightly closed eyes—guilt gnaws at Eddie’s constricted ribs. Carefully, he reaches over and takes Buck’s sunglasses out of his hand and puts them in the cupholder. Buck’s hand goes limp in his lap with nothing to hold and he opens his eyes only to stare down at his own palms, sucking in another breath. Eddie watches him for a brutal heartbeat before he reaches back out and places his hand between Buck’s shoulder blades. 

Something choked hiccups out of Buck’s throat, something caught between a laugh and a cry, before he inhales deep and shuddering. Eddie can feel the way his heart batters out a ruthless beat through his shirt; eyes wide, he watches guiltily as Buck struggles to gain composure under his touch. 

When he starts to rub hesitant circles between Buck’s shoulders, the tension begins to unwind until Buck leans heavily into the steering wheel on a wet sigh. 

“Sorry,” he rasps out eventually, sitting back up slowly. Eddie’s hand hovers over him for a second too long before he takes it back to his lap. “Sorry, I just—“ 

“No, I shouldn’t have—“ Eddie shakes his head, still watching Buck for any signs of cracks. “I shouldn’t have brought it up so casually, I didn’t think—“ Didn’t think it hurt you so bad, didn’t think of you the way you keep thinking of me, didn’t—    

 Buck shoots him a wavering smile. It doesn’t meet his eyes. “You didn’t know.” He says it like it’s that simple; that Eddie could carve out his heart, and he’d forgive him without a second’s thought, and again Eddie just thinks why?

“Still,” he says instead. He can’t take his eyes off Buck, even as he seems to strengthen back into something unbreakable as each minute passes. 

Buck runs one hand through his hair before blowing out a final breath. “I was—“ He starts, his mouth clicking shut. He puts his sunglasses on before watching the lunch rush line up at the drive-thru. “I was there. I—saw you, I watched—“   

He can’t seem to finish the sentence, but he doesn’t need to. 

Eddie isn’t easily horrified, but—but that’s distinctly what he feels gathering in the pit of his stomach as he realizes exactly what Buck is saying. 

“Jesus, Buck.” There’s a stinging in Eddie’s throat, behind his eyes, everywhere, all across his skin. He doesn’t—he doesn’t remember Buck, doesn’t remember their friendship, but he aches at how haunted the man looks sitting beside him; he thinks he doesn’t have to remember to feel sore at the misery rolling off Buck. Then it hits him. “Have you talked to anyone, do you have—“ Eddie swallows the question as soon as he realizes he’s probably the someone Buck would have gone to. 

The brittle smile he gets in return confirms his suspicion. 

“I’m good, Eds. Really. I just—“ Buck exhales, then smiles something a little stronger. “I’ll tell you about it—soon, I will, but I just can’t. Not right now.” 

“Of course,” Eddie agrees quickly. His good hand clenches against the soft fabric of his joggers. “I can always ask someone else, too, so don’t feel pressured—“

“No,” Buck cuts in, a little too quickly. He shakes his head, then determinedly starts the engine back up. “I want to. No one—“ He watches the road before pulling back out, seemingly back on course for the station. “No one else could really get it, man. And it’d…Probably help me too, you know? Just…Not right now.” 

Eddie nods even though Buck isn’t watching him, but they drop the conversation anyway. Still, Eddie can’t help but watch Buck out of the corner of his eye for the rest of the ride; all he can see are the broken pieces of Buck shattered against the steering wheel, all jumbled back together and not-quite-right. 

Eddie enters the station without any expectations and only a small amount of healthy apprehension. 

Buck is lighter by the time they arrive, but there’s still a set to his shoulders that Eddie doesn’t think belongs there. It keeps Buck securely in his periphery even through all the warm greetings from team members he only half recognizes. When they make it up to the loft, Eddie is at least relieved to find Hen and Chimney sat at the kitchen island. 

“Look at what the Buck dragged in!” Chimney crows when they’re spotted. The grin that splits his lips is only interrupted by the gum he snaps into a quick bubble before pushing himself back to pull Eddie into a hug. 

“Isn’t this a nice surprise,” Hen says, soft and genuine. Eddie didn’t realize how much he had missed the both of them until he breathes in against Hen’s collar and it causes tears to spring to his eyes. 

Familiarity has been hard for him to accept, but he’s surprised by how welcome it is from the two of them. 

“Buck said you guys had been worried,” Eddie tells them as an explanation when he pulls back. Buck, who had immediately gone to check out the refrigerator, pops his head over the door to throw them all a quick smile. “So—here I am. Alive, mostly unscathed.” 

The joke falls flatter than he’d meant it to, only able to offer them a one-shouldered shrug and a half smile with the delivery. 

“Eh, that pretty little head of yours is going to bounce back in no time,” Chimney assures him with a pat on the back before ushering him to sit. Eddie grins at the confidence, the normalcy. It’s easier then for them to fall into catching up like Eddie had only been gone on a vacation and not missing a critical chunk of their lives together; he’s sure most of it is stuff he should have already known, but he’s caught up on more recent changes in their lives anyway while Buck gets to work diligently at the stove. Eddie watches him every so often—steadfastly holding his attention to whatever lunch he’s cooking up—and thinks it’s partly a distraction so he can have privacy with his other friends. 

He’s struck—again—by how much consideration Buck gives him, gives his needs and comfort. 

He’s not used to it, not really. And now, knowing that Buck has to be struggling to cope with his own trauma from watching Eddie—from seeing him—from the shooting too, Eddie wonders briefly how he would have handled this stitched together Buck if he woke up normal. He wonders how they manage to get through things with their friendship so securely in tact, because he imagines they have to have learned how to navigate each other at least a little bit to have the other so ingrained in their lives. 

He doesn’t realize he’s been staring a little too long until Buck scolding Chimney—who apparently wandered over to help in a way that solely looks like taste testing—breaks him out of his thoughts. When Eddie looks back over at Hen, she’s watching him with something soft and sympathetic behind her glasses. 

“How are you holding up, Eddie?” She asks without preamble. 

It doesn’t itch the way Frank’s questions did; he wonders if it’s because of some subconscious comfort from his friend even if he doesn’t remember, or if Hen’s just like that naturally.  

He lets out a long breath either way and lets honesty blow out with it. “It’s all been really fucking weird, honestly.” 

Hen snorts. “I can imagine,” she agrees easily, settling back against her chair. “I know it might be hard to believe with where your head is stuck right now, but…You’ve gone through a lot since you moved here. We all have, and I hope you believe me when I say we’re family, Eddie. All of us here, we’re behind you every step of the way.”  

Eddie watches the way his fingers expand across the tabletop, his palm pressing down into the cold surface. His fingertips feel a little numb against it, and he focuses on that instead of the lump forming in his throat. Too many tears have threatened to fall today, and he’s determined to keep them in. 

“I’m—yeah, I’m getting that. It’s all a little surreal,” he laughs, disbelief tinging it. “I still can’t figure out what I did to earn so many people in my life, you know?”

“Oh, Eddie,” Hen sighs like her whole heart gets breathed out with it. Eddie finally looks up and nearly can’t stand to see the gentleness in her expression. “You didn’t have to earn our love—you and Christopher are so easy to love, we couldn’t help ourselves.” There’s something light in her eyes like she knows the heaviness of that admission would be too hefty for Eddie, and he clings to it. 

“People keep saying that, but it’s still hard to understand,” he says around that lump. His eyes drift to Buck again before his attention snaps back to Hen, who didn’t miss a moment. 

“Now that is something I can’t help you with.” Hen laughs a little at Eddie’s expression—he’s not sure what his face is doing because the feelings fueling it are too complicated for him to even begin to parse out, so honestly, he can’t blame her for not wanting to try either. 

 “He’s—“ Eddie starts but stops immediately. He’s tempted to ask Hen if she knows what the hell had been going on between them; it mostly sounds like a better idea than having to eventually face Buck with the question, at least, but he still feels a little too raw at admitting he’s picked up on something…Off about the relationship between them. 

It feels too personal, and besides—there’s still a slim chance he’s been reading the whole situation wrong anyway. 

So he switches tactics instead, and asks something he’s been equally concerned about since the car ride over. “Has he—you know, talked to anyone? About the shooting.” 

Hen looks rattled by the question, but she schools her features back into something gentle quickly. “We’ve been keeping an eye on our boy, Eddie, don’t worry. Buck…” She sighs, her own gaze drifting over to watch him and Chimney fight over something boiling in a pot. “He’s a strong one. He’s been through way more than he ever should have, that’s for certain. And we know—“ She stops, clucks her tongue, then turns to Eddie with a sympathetic look. “We know he’d normally lean on you through something like this. But you need to focus on you, okay? We’ll take care of our boy.”   

Eddie nods his acknowledgement, not fully convinced. 

He wonders if they see the fractures the way he does—wonders if they can see the way Buck’s smile looks like a fissure itself. 

By the time they pick up Chris, every movement takes monumental effort through the heavy weight of exhaustion sinking into Eddie’s bones. 

He hates how much just a couple of errands, essentially, takes out of him. It makes him feel like normalcy is so beyond his reach he can’t even imagine what it’d look like; he, logically, knows the emotional and mental stress he’s under is going to make his physical recovery stagger at best, but it’s hard to accept the reality of it when he’s more than ready to get something of a normal life back. 

He tries to pay attention to which line Buck gets into for pick up—tries to even look around the campus a little to familiarize himself with the school itself—but it’s hard to focus through the brain fog and achy haze in his shoulder. 

“Why don’t you stay in the car?” Buck suggests when they finally pull up to the curb. Eddie wants to protest through the exhaustion, his hackles beginning to rise at the idea that he can’t even pick up his son right, but then Buck is smiling at him conspiratorially. “I bet Chris will be so surprised, it’ll be great.” 

And damn him, Buck does know him. It’s like he already knew he’d need to diffuse Eddie and knew how to do it without even trying.  

 With a reluctant nod, Eddie leans back against the headrest. Through the window, he watches as Buck waits patiently with the rest of the adults picking up their kids. He looks like he’s making small talk with a couple of the parents, all of them laughing and looking comfortable with one another. 

It’s…Odd, right? That he’s let his best friend get so involved in his kid’s life? 

Maybe it’s weariness settling into his consciousness, but Eddie lets himself think about how he could have let someone get so tangled up in their lives without it being…Not just romantic, but permanent. After Shannon left, Eddie was too focused on getting their lives back on track as a single parent to ever consider dating again. Not to mention he—well, not hoped, but thought that maybe they’d work things out some day. He didn’t like to admit it to himself often, but part of the reason he moved to LA was in hopes of a reconciliation. 

Maybe he really should reach out to her, or at least ask…Someone about what happened between them. The hurt is still raw inside him, but maybe she would have some answers about how he learned to trust someone so deeply around his kid again without being afraid they’d leave if they weren’t tied to them in any significant way. 

The kids start piling out of the school then, and Eddie watches with a held breath when Buck spots Christopher. 

His face breaks out in the most genuine smile Eddie’s seen him wear so far; it lights up not just his face, but lifts the burden that had been weighing down his shoulders ever since their talk in the Jeep earlier. Still, it’s nothing compared to the joy in Chris’ expression. You’d think he hadn’t seen Buck in years instead of just last night with the way he pushes his crutches at full-speed toward the man. When they meet it’s in a twirling embrace that twists the air up in Eddie’s lungs until he knows he should look away, but can’t tear his eyes from the scene. 

The two walk back to the Jeep with everyone else around them forgotten; Buck is nodding as animatedly as Chris is talking, his backpack slung over Buck’s shoulder. They look so comfortable together—so happy, and Eddie thinks he gets it, just a bit. 

He gets why he’d have trouble setting any kind of boundary that kept a smile like that off his kid’s face. 

“And guess who came to surprise you!” Buck says with a flourish when he swings the backseat door open. 

“Dad!” Chris’ giggles are enough to energize Eddie; he’ll never get over the way his kid can find so much joy in the smallest things. 

“Hey, Superman.” Eddie grins when he turns to watch Chris get buckled in. “How was school today?” 

“There was a fire drill and we got to go outside but then the doors got locked so we got extra recess and then—“ Chris excitedly starts recounting the tale Eddie is certain Buck was getting regaled with just moments ago. Eddie can’t help the smile that gets plastered on his face as he relaxes into Chris’ enthusiastic cadence and the back of his seat. He chances a couple looks toward Buck as well only to find him just as engaged as he looked the first time around, and Eddie ignores the warmth that spreads across his chest at the sight. 

Whatever Eddie did to build this community he has surrounding himself and his kid, he’s grateful he has someone that obviously loves Chris this much. He had to have done something right in the last three years at least to have built this kind of support system; he’s not sure he can imagine forging these kinds of bonds, but he apparently is capable of it—so even if he doesn’t ever remember, he hopes he’s able to learn how to keep them up, at least for Chris’ sake. 

The rest of the ride home is surprisingly…Normal. 

That’s the only way Eddie can describe it. He’s too tired to think too hard about the whole Buck Situation, and quite honestly he’s had enough emotional labor through Frank for a lifetime—though he’s resolutely ignoring the new appointment scheduled for a few days from now—and it’s…Easy, a little too easy, to let Buck lead them into a rhythm of domesticity with Chris as a buffer between them. 

And Eddie isn’t too prideful to admit—at least to himself—that it’s really fucking nice to not have to think about how to function enough to give Chris the normalcy he deserves right now. It’s nice to get home and have Buck already making a game out of what leftovers they choose for dinner, to have him help Chris get his homework spread out at the dining room table—prioritized by what subjects Chris is apparently struggling in recently—without being fully excluded from the home routine. Buck has him help get the leftovers heated up while he gets the plates and glasses down from a cabinet too high for Eddie to reach for in his sling, and Eddie doesn’t feel like an outsider for even a second. 

Buck comes over to help Eddie where he was stationed at the kitchen table to remove the husks on his abuela's tamales before they go in the oven, right after he leans a head into the dining room to make sure Chris is still on track. He sits in the chair across from Eddie before sliding an open pill bottle over with a glass of water, an invitation for Eddie to take the pain pill he had been avoiding all day. They make him sleepy, and he hates how it feels like he’s out of control of his own awareness—the medicine helps, sure, but it’s not a side effect he has the luxury to endure when he has a kid to look after. 

“I can stay until Chris is asleep,” Buck offers quietly after Eddie hesitates a moment too long. When he looks up, Buck is busy at work expertly dehusking. “I know you won’t take one before bed, but his bedtime isn’t for another five hours, so the sleepiness should wear off by then.” 

Eddie stares at him, at a loss for words. “How the hell do you know that?” It comes out less accusatory and more wondrous, but Buck still flinches at the question. 

“We’ve both had our fair share of prescriptions, man,” he says, like it explains anything. “I don’t have to stay—and you don’t have to take it—but I don’t want you sitting over there in pain just because you think you have to be.” 

Eddie considers him for a minute, his tamales completely forgotten. Buck doesn’t seem to mind—never seems to mind picking up any of Eddie’s slack, actually, in the most disconcerting way—and takes over his as well. He’s getting them put into the oven before Eddie finally reaches over and takes a sip of water before popping a pill into his mouth.   

Eddie is swallowing when Buck turns around. He gives Eddie a small, satisfied smile before leaving to check on Chris again. 

Honestly, Eddie should feel—overwhelmed, probably.  Annoyed, more than likely. But when he starts to pull at the complicated snarl of emotions tangling around his ribs, the first thing he feels is just…Grateful. 

He doesn’t know what he did to make Evan Buckley fall in love with him, but it’s the kind of love that someone could definitely get used to receiving. He understands it a bit, he thinks—he gets why it must have been hard to push Buck and his feelings away fully. He wonders what, actually, could have kept him from returning the feelings—he’s already lost in how nice it is to have someone have his back so thoroughly, and he doesn’t know how he ever coped with a friendship so all-encompassing before. 

Did they decide things would just stay better as friends? Were neither of them able to reconcile the changes they’d need to make at work? Did they just get too close for any actual attraction to bloom between them? 

Eddie stops his train of thought right there on those tracks; he doesn’t think it’d be productive to consider any potential attraction to Buck in any sort of capacity right now. For whatever reason—and he’s sure it’s a good one, if they managed to keep their friendship so alive in the wake of it—they aren’t together, and Eddie doesn’t need to go and fuck that up too with his memory loss.    

Still, between his line of thought and the sleepy haze of the medicine kicking in, the evening passes by before Eddie even realizes the sun set. 

He’s nodding off on the couch, a documentary on in the background that apparently Buck and Chris had started the week before and were now determined to finish together, when Buck disappears with a thoroughly zonked out Chris in his arms. He says something to Eddie that’s too quiet for his sleepy ears to catch. Minutes or hours could pass between him putting Chris to bed and when he finally comes back to settle beside Eddie—either way, Eddie doesn’t stir until there’s a soft palm on his good arm. 

“Hey, Eds, why don’t you go to bed too?” 

“Wha—what time is it?” Eddie’s voice is as blurred as his eyes when he tries to blink them open. Buck’s back comes into view but it takes a second for Eddie to realize he’s bent over to put on his shoes. 

“A little after nine—I’ll get out of your hair, but do you need help getting ready for bed?” Buck sits up to nod toward the sling rumpled at Eddie’s shoulder. 

“You should—you should stay,” Eddie tells him, stumbling over his own conviction in the statement. He’s not sure why he says it; it could be how much easier it was to rest with another adult Chris trusts in the house, or maybe it’s because of that haunted look in Buck eyes from earlier that hasn’t fully left the back of Eddie’s mind. 

Buck blinks at him, eyes wide, as Eddie yawns. Sleep is dissipating quickly now that the realization of what he’s asked starts to sink in, and it’s only a moment before he’s watching Buck back with just as alert eyes. 

“You—“ Buck swallows, his hands clenching and unclenching at his thighs. “Is that something…You’re comfortable with?” 

Eddie surprises himself with how true it is when he says, “Yes. I mean, it’s probably not the first time you’ve stayed over, right?” He shares a small smile with Buck that he thinks masks the unknown sort of nerves growing in his chest at the invitation. It feels a little like giving back to all that Buck’s let him take in the last couple of days, and that feels right even if he’s not sure if he can fully rationalize it. 

Buck lets out a shaky laugh. “I may or may not have a drawer in your dresser,” he confirms.

Eddie’s heart does a funny thing he doesn’t try to interpret. Instead, he just rolls his eyes. “Of course you do.” 

“Hey, I can’t help the fact you hate driving after long shifts—it just got easier to take one car sometimes.” There’s something less uncertain and more playful in Buck’s eyes now, and it settles Eddie’s own nerves. 

“I’m sure,” he agrees in a way that definitely says he’s not convinced in the slightest, but it has Buck laughing lighter now. “Well, you probably know where the spare sheets are better than I do,” Eddie jokes and that feels light too, which isn’t something he expects. It’s less awkward than he expects too, leaving Buck to get settled in for bed on his couch. 

The thought of having a practical stranger in his house at night would usually be enough to have Eddie on edge and unable to ever fully relax to sleep; he tells himself that, logically, by now any one of the people in his life would have told him if he shouldn’t trust Buck, and plus…He really can’t deny how much easier it was today to get through the things he didn’t even have the energy to think about earlier this morning. 

By the time he’s gotten the sling off and he’s settled back against his pillows—which mysteriously have different pillowcases than last night, to match the new set of sheets on his bed as well, and he doesn’t even remember when Buck had the time to sneak away to get them changed after dinner—he’s tired but not in the sleepy way he was earlier. He finds his pill bottle and another glass of water set out on his nightstand and doesn’t resist the urge to roll his eyes; still, he feels comfortable enough with Buck’s presence in the living room to take one to help with the dull threat of an ache that began once he wrestled off his sling. 

Eddie leans into his stacked pillows, ready to let the medicine kick in before he falls asleep, and decides to finally pick his phone up again. He has to admit, it’s almost been nice not feeling attached to his phone for the last couple of days;  almost, but not quite, because he still feels like he’s just avoiding facing whatever truths it holds about himself at this point. 

He goes through his pictures first. 

He doesn’t stray too far back—really, he’s just curious about what’s been going on recently in his life. Unsurprisingly, there’s more photos like the ones he found on his mantle this morning. Most are of Christopher—scattered in with Christopher and Buck together, and a few of all three of them during various outings. There are some that are completely and confusingly contextless and appear to be while he was on shift—things like a pair of turnout boots zoomed in on, several pencils stacked in X’s on a sleeping Chimney’s forehead, the back of Hen and Buck’s heads as they press their cheeks together, seemingly in an intense battle of Mario Kart. 

It’s a little surprising, however, the complete…Lack of Ana. He thought maybe they just hadn’t reached the stage where he’d want physical reminders of her throughout the house and that’s why there weren’t framed photos up yet, but going through the last few months of his camera roll tells Eddie it actually might be because there’s just…Nothing to get printed. He’s struck with how—strange that is, right? Even when things weren’t great between him and Shannon, they still took pictures to capture their snatched moments together. They still had fun and wanted to hold onto their memories together while they could. 

Curious, he finally tries to go through his messages again. He’s never been one to delete message chains—he figures even messages from years prior could come in handy some day, and the amount of memory they take up on his phone is nothing, really—and that hasn’t seemed to change either. He has to scroll down several threads, though, before he finds the one with Ana. 

Reading through the scattered texts they’ve shared reveals absolutely nothing else. There’s some flirting, sure—though Eddie cringes a bit at his own words, because he likes to think he has a little more game than making homework puns to his girlfriend, okay—but otherwise it all seems very…Tame. Detached, almost. Not for the first time, Eddie wonders just how long they’ve been together to lack any sort of tangible foundation for him to find. 

There’s a squirming interest between his ribs when he exits out of their thread and scrolls back to the top. His thumb hovers over the thread labelled “Buck (I.C.E)”; the screen is bright in the dark of his room, like it’s illuminating what a dangerous curiosity he’s trying to not entertain. It’s hard not to, though—with everything that he’s seen in the last day and a half, he can’t help but wonder. 

It’s mostly mundane, mostly nonsensical exchanges. Whether it’s some dumb joke or just a one-to-two word request for a something from the store, it’s all very…Domestic. There’s a casualness to the way he and Buck communicate that’s too easy to get wrapped up in. He’s scrolled back so long the words have all but blurred together at this point—sure, there’s a bit of a difference in the way they’ve texted over time, but it’s always with a sort of easiness that has Eddie desperate to know how it started; how did they get here, how did they create whatever this is?

Maybe it’s the pain pill kicking in and making him deliriously tired, but he doesn’t even realize he’s scrolled back a couple of years. It isn’t until something completely snags his attention away from the mystery of it all that he even realizes how far he’s gone. 

Shannon.

His eyes catch on the name and he quickly tries to scroll back down to find it, his heart jumping in his chest as he sits up straighter in bed.

There’s three messages—all followed by silence on Eddie’s end for a few days. 

The funeral was beautiful, Eds. 

 I didn’t know Shannon, but I know how much you cared about her. I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, but we’re here for you man. I’m here for you, whatever you need. Whatever Chris needs. 

Please just…Don’t shut us out, Eddie. We love you.

Eddie can’t breathe. 

He reads the messages again, then again and again until the words beat against his chest as hard as his heart. 

He can’t think—he can’t breathe and he can’t think and he can’t believe—

With shaking fingers, he desperately pulls up her contact information. It’s still there, and for a moment there’s hope in his chest. His fingers hesitate over her name as tears start to bubble and spill over, fat droplets landing on his phone screen. His thumb slips once, twice—then he’s pressing call and waiting, waiting, waiting—   

Only for the call to never connect. There’s an unaffected operator’s recording about the number you’ve reached is not in service and Eddie suddenly feels like he’s the one disconnected from service. His hands shake and the tears fall harder, blurring his screen until he can’t manage to hold it in his numb fingers and it falls into his lap. The screen is too bright, reflecting harshly until he has to shut his eyes against it and the burning wetness gathering in his throat. 

Shannon is dead. 

His wife—is dead.

Chapter Text

Eddie doesn’t sleep after that. 

Actually, if he was someone who would admit to it—which he’s not—he’s pretty sure the entire night is spent in one long, agonizing panic attack. 

Eddie has never come close to drowning—or at least, he doesn’t think he has, for what it’s worth—but he imagines he now knows what it must feel like. He’s never had had air so thick in his lungs that he could choke on it—only to have it thinned out the next second like there’s a fire in his chest burning up all the oxygen, but all night is spent in that torrential cyclone.    

By the time quiet light starts trying to push through his blinds, Eddie’s fingers have gone numb along with his toes—and his arms and his legs and every tissue in his body, actually, because he can’t feel a single fucking thing except the chilled marrow in his bones. He stopped shaking an hour or an eternity ago, at least; or maybe the rest of the world started vibrating too, matching the wild frequency of his thoughts that hasn’t slowed down to give him even a second of rest. 

He doesn’t know what to feel—he doesn’t know how to fucking feel, how to feel anything at all, now that he’s finally confronted with something so permanent from the past that he’s lost. 

Is this why the lines between him and Buck got so blurred?

Is this why Eddie let them get that way?

Did Shannon leave such a cavernous wound in his chest, seeping with the need for someone to step in and help him apply enough pressure to stall his grief into something manageable? He can see it, which is the sad thing; he can see all the ways he’d break after that, can feel the cracks in his body already spreading like wildfire until the only thing that will be left of him are the ashes of all the truths he thought he knew. 

He sees how he’d break, and he sees how desperately he’d want the kind of partner he could never be for Shannon to somehow settle in all his fractures and show him how to be stable for once. He can see how he’d let his partner at work so eagerly fill in the gaps until the line between helping out and stepping in became indistinct and untouchable. 

It’s a line he’s already slipped into crossing again without even trying, which is a thought that cracks his ribs open and leaves all his fibrous feelings exposed. 

He’s going to shake apart if he doesn’t somehow stop thinking about all the ways his life seems to happen to him—like he doesn’t even get a choice in how any of it goes, how any of it went, not even how it’s going to turn out, because he has no idea what his life looked like two days ago let alone how it’ll look tomorrow. 

What he does know is that the pipes are rattling to life in the wall behind his headboard, and the sounds of the vanity drawers opening and closing are too quick and confident to be Chris, and if he isn’t careful then Buck is going to come find him soon—and Eddie is a lot of things, but vulnerable is not one of them. As much as he can’t imagine how he’s supposed to stand up straight and face a world that feels even more foreign to him today than it did yesterday, he can’t bear the idea of Buck finding him curled up in his sheets and afraid to endure whatever else his life has to haunt him with.   

So, he manages to get out of bed and get his sling on in a way that isn’t quite right, but the painful dig of the buckle into his shoulder is a small reminder he is still capable of feeling, so he just leaves it. He grabs his phone and makes his way to the kitchen before he hears the shower shut off. 

There’s a pot of coffee almost done brewing, gurgling its last few drops into the carafe.

Eddie stares at it longer than he means to before he notices two mugs already set out beside it. One of them already has some sugar and creamer sitting in the bottom of it and Eddie wants to smash the entire thing on the ground.

Taking a deep breath in, he grabs the steaming carafe and pours coffee in the mug instead. He takes a second of hesitation—hearing Buck move around in the bathroom now—before he decides to go ahead and pour Buck out a mug, too, as he briefly remembers Buck waiting a while for his coffee to cool off before drinking it yesterday. 

It feels small in comparison to everything else he’s taken from the man recently, but drinkable coffee seems like a good offering for what Eddie wants to ask him this morning. 

Eddie is staring at the morning light pooling out of the back door window and onto the tile when Buck walks in. There’s a hesitancy in his entrance that must be when he spots Eddie, but he wouldn’t know because he refuses to stop looking at the light stretching toward him with slanted fingers. Instead, he takes a sip of coffee that’s just the right amount of sweet and scalding to remind him he’s alive. 

“Morning, Eds,” Buck greets only after a short, suspended moment. His step is more confident when he walks toward the coffee before there’s another hesitant beat.

“Thanks,” he says belatedly, setting his mug down across from Eddie’s at the table. 

Eddie knows he should look up—knows he should at least say something, anything that would show Buck he’s a normal, functioning person and not the violent mess his insides feel like. 

“Are you okay?” Buck asks then, and Eddie flinches. Buck’s hand reaches across the couple of feet between them, his fingers twitching against the tabletop, but Eddie pulls his own hand back into his lap with a sharp inhale. 

Finally, he glances up. He’s not sure what he looks like, but it has to be the bad side of rough if it has Buck eyeing him with such a ragged sort of concern. 

“Eddie, what’s—“ 

“I know about Shannon.”

The words spill out of him like acid, melting through the table and any modicum of easiness grown between them. Buck’s hand recoils back like he’s burned. 

“You—what? How—“ Eddie watches as Buck’s eyes flit to his phone sitting like a hot stripe of neon on the table. 

“You know,” Eddie starts, feeling oddly more detached from the whole conversation than he thought he would. “Frank told me about the—the fighting.” Buck lets out a sharp exhale while Eddie swallows around the truth that had been hard for him to digest yesterday. “I didn’t—I mean I understood but I didn’t think—“ Eddie clears his throat past the lump forming there, too dangerously close to feeling exposed. 

“Eddie,” Buck pleads—raw and open—but Eddie doesn’t have the grace left in his body to meet his eyes and find out what it is that piety is asking of him. 

“He said I should ask someone I trust to—to basically give me some bullshit, sanitized spark notes version of my life so that we could ‘identify possible traumas’ and work through them in the coming appointments.” Eddie can’t help but sneer at the idea now; he hadn’t been too keen on it before and immediately asked Buck about a definite trauma afterward, but now all he can think about is the fact that bastard sat across from him in that stupid, steril office of his and knew this is what was waiting for Eddie eventually. 

Buck doesn’t try to diffuse Eddie’s anger, and he thinks that actually makes him angrier. He hates how well Buck seems to know him—how well of a grasp he has over Eddie’s entire being that he knows to let this fuse burn itself out, yet Eddie can’t recall Buck’s favorite fucking color. 

“What else don’t I know, Buck? What else do I not fucking know about my own fucking life?” The words are like shards of glass, ripping through Eddie’s throat and leaving blood in his mouth, and he wants them to cut whatever bullshit tether Buck has been so infuriatingly steadfast holding onto. 

He wants his fire to spread into Buck until the combustion can’t be smothered out, because he’d rather have the embers in his veins devour anything that isn’t him. 

Except—except Buck doesn’t so much as flinch at the vitriol. 

Those hands aren’t outstretched anymore, instead they’re wrapped around the coffee mug Eddie knows is too hot to directly touch still. But Buck is clasping it tight, his thumbs rubbing at the rim where steam has left condensation, and he’s nodding down at it like he’s just—just accepting whatever anger Eddie can spit at him and bearing it like Atlas upon his own shoulders. 

Goddamn him, but it’s enough to have all the heat in Eddie’s blood simmer back down to something he can keep tempered. 

“I’m—“ Eddie swallows against the apology stuck in his throat. He sighs roughly, but before he can try to force it out, Buck looks up. 

“Don’t worry about it.” There’s something small and sad in his eyes, but the half smile he gives is strong before he lets out a long, tired exhale. “What do you need, Eddie? What’s going to help you?”

All that heat immediately balls up behind Eddie’s eyes and he quickly looks down at his forgotten mug, trying to hide the tears that he doesn’t understand. He hates this. He hates what a mess he feels like, he hates that he doesn’t even know what he needs right now. It should be the easiest thing to answer, and yet all he feels like doing is crying which is the most horrifying part of it all. 

Because what he needs, he can’t just get; Buck can’t give it to him, no one can give him his life back to what it should be. 

Buck reaches a tentative hand across the table again, and this time Eddie doesn’t flinch when it lands on top of his. He gives Eddie’s shaking fingers a long, gentle squeeze. 

“We’ll figure it out, Eds. Together, okay? You’re not alone in this, no matter how it may feel.” The assurance only makes that heat grow until Eddie has to close his eyes against the tears searing down his cheeks. His head hangs lower, unwilling to let Buck see what his tenderness has broken in him. 

Eddie nods, but the movement is a little too frantic. He takes a deep, sucking breath before slipping his hand from under Buck’s so he can wipe roughly at his face. When the tears feel more dried than incriminating, he finally looks up. “Okay,” he rasps, bobbing his head with more control. “Yeah, okay.” 

Buck searches his face for something—for what, Eddie has no idea. He doesn’t even know what Buck could possibly read from the scrubbed-down mess he’s made of himself, but whatever it is has him looking almost as worn as Eddie. 

The air hangs with the uncomfortable weight of unfamiliarity; Eddie is sure that if he wasn’t so screwed up right now, whatever comfort Buck offered would be gently stacked against the foundation they clearly had laid between them and it’d create some sort of solid strategy to get them both better. But Eddie is screwed up, and that foundation has a giant crack at Eddie’s feet, and he’s starting to feel like there’s never going to be a better for him because he’s never been allowed to have that kind of mercy. 

The pressure is finally released with the sharp sound of Christopher’s crutches against hardwood in the hallway. 

Buck blows out a breath, blinking his eyes rapidly for a moment, before he takes a long drag of his coffee. “If you’re okay with it,” he says after setting the now-empty mug down, “I’ll take Christopher to school today. And when I get back, we can—we’ll talk, we’ll figure something out, okay?” 

Eddie has always had an issue accepting help; it feels too much like charity, like he’s the failure he’s so convinced he is, if he accepts anything even if it’s offered to him. So maybe it says something about how deeply exhausted he is that he just nods, his shoulders deflating from the release of tension between them. “Yeah. That’s fine.” 

Buck gives him a look like he knows how much that took out of Eddie, and Eddie is too tired to feel bad about the imbalance between them again. 

He lets the morning move past him instead of even trying to keep up with it. He takes the pain pill and water that’s offered to him before Buck disappears to tidy up the living room; he greets Chris with the most enthusiastic hug he can muster; he doesn’t feel anything when Buck is the one who has to reach for the cereal bowl for Chris’ breakfast. He tries to rest in the normalcy but all it does is itch across his skin, but at least he determinedly doesn’t pick at the feeling and make it scab with the anger still whispering around his ribs every time his thoughts wander past the present. 

Once Buck and Chris have left for school—Eddie holding onto Chris maybe just a little too long during their goodbye hug while Buck studiously looks the other way—there’s too much silence in the house. 

It’s the same kind of silence that would drive Eddie crazy the last time he was shot, too; it’s the permeating kind, the one that slips into every crevice of a house and a body and expands until it feels like it’s the only thing you’ll ever hear again. Being left alone with his thoughts and his slowly healing wounds only makes him feel like there’s an eternity between him and recovery, which is made unsurprisingly worse after the night he had. 

Fueled by a creeping need to find control in literally anything he can grab at, Eddie decides to hunt for his vacuum and determinedly pushes it through the entire house one-handed. He’s pretty sure Carla would scold him until actual guilt pushed his ass into an armchair if she knew, but it’s the quickest thing he can think of to scratch away at the feeling of floating through his own life. It’s small but it makes him feel less helpless to his own condition, so if he vacuums the rug in the living room a little too aggressively despite his body protesting, it’s no one’s business but his own. 

Even though the activity has his body burning with exertion—which is infuriating all on its own—he still feels too close to the edge of something dangerously similar to panic. 

He shoves the vacuum back into the utility closet before going to his own room to survey it for anything he can get his hands—hand—on. His eyes zero in on his dresser, clutter spread out all over the top of it, and before he can even consider what he’ll do with it all he’s moving it all to the bed—one by one, colognes and loose change and watches and every trinket he never thought he’d be the type to keep, because it always seemed like things that would just be a nuisance whenever he moved again. 

Once he’s left staring at a pile of junk that he only recognizes half of, the chaos bubbling in his chest just threatens to spill over more. 

He thinks about putting it all in a drawer, so then he’s opening them all up but none of them are empty; they are all too stuffed with wrinkled clothes he mostly doesn’t recognize, so before he thinks about it he’s taking all those out too and tossing them on the floor to sort. 

It’s only when his good shoulder is starting to ache—strain burning from his neck all the way down into his forearm—and he’s kneeling in a mess of clothes that he’s starting to realize very quickly he can’t fold one-handed, that all the nervous energy in his body deflates into something too fragile to touch. 

“God, what am I doing?” He blows out the question with the last of his nerves. 

He looks around at his room and a slow sort of embarrassment rolls across his skin; it’s a whirlwind of a mess, and he’s just left gripping a t-shirt that looks a little too big for him in his good hand with no idea how to get it all back in order. 

It had felt like relief, almost, but now it’s just another thing he doesn’t know how to clean up. 

A low chime breaks him out of his shame. There’s a light coming from his bed where his phone is valiantly trying to alert him of a text from beneath the small mountain of shit off his dresser and several pairs of balled-up socks. 

With a heavy sigh and knees that crack in new ways Eddie doesn’t remember earning, he pushes himself off the floor and shuffles through the mess he’s made. His phone lets out another sound to remind him of the notification before he finds it. When he does, he’s surprised to see a text from Ana. 

Truthfully, he hadn’t thought about her much in the last couple of days. He guesses he should feel guilty about that—if not for the affection he apparently had for her previously, then at least for the amount of effort she had shown while he was in the hospital. But all he feels when he swipes open her text is a weary sort of interest. 

It’s short, simple, just a message checking in on him; but it just feels like another expectant weight on his shoulders when he reads it. 

Maybe it’s the knowledge of Shannon still lingering in the back of his mind—where he’s shoved it with a shaking sort of resolve so he can keep moving, the gravity of reality too sharp on his heels for him to stop any longer for the grief dripping through his veins—or maybe it’s the disconnection threatening to take over if he doesn’t do something for himself. Whatever it is, Eddie doesn’t think about what he’d want once he gets his memories back and instead just thinks about what would make his life easier now. 

Which is what has him typing out the most cowardly break-up he thinks he’s ever done. 

He only had a handful of girlfriends throughout high school and then he and Shannon met during the gap year Eddie took before deciding on a college, so it’s not like he has much practice but he’s certain that breaking up through text has never been classy. It doesn’t stop him from crafting the message, though. 

I don’t know how to do this. I know you deserve better than this even if I don’t remember you, but I hope you understand how difficult this is. I can’t handle a relationship right now. I’m sorry, Ana. 

It feels cold—detached—but if he’s honest, those are the only things he feels when he thinks of his apparent girlfriend too. He knows he’d feel different if he could remember her, he’s certain—but he can’t, and it’s one thing he can control to make the weight of reality feel a little lighter. He’s sure if—when—he gets his memories back he’ll probably be angry at himself, but he thinks back to the lack of her presence throughout the life he’s snooped through and is determined to not feel bad about it. 

Buck had asked what he needed to feel better and while this doesn’t make even a dent in what’s wrong with him, he does still breathe a little easier after he hits send. 

Immediately his phone vibrates with an incoming call. He almost wants to laugh at the fact he doesn’t have a picture set for Ana’s contact but the generic call screen is more of a mockery than anything. He declines the call. A moment passes before another is coming through. 

Without much thought, Eddie turns his phone off. 

The quiet that follows deafens the entire room. 

Eddie lets his phone fall back onto the mountain of mess strewn across his duvet. Rubbing one hand roughly through his hair, he sits on the edge of his mattress—a few pointy things protest under his thighs, but he’s beyond caring about what crap he’s probably breaking—and lets his head hang between his shoulders. His good hand goes limp across one of his knees, and he watches his fingers tremble against the warm air in his room. 

That’s how Buck finds him. 

It’s like all the energy left his body as soon as he found something to center himself on, something to grab and shift himself back into a lane he at least knows how to steer, and he can’t seem to move from the mess he’s thrown all over his bedroom floor. He doesn’t even hear Buck enter the house before there’s a tentative knock on his open door. 

“Uh, Eddie? Is there…What happened?” Buck asks him tentatively. Eddie huffs out a humorless laugh at the tone; he had been pretty sure at this point that there was no uncertainty in the way Buck navigated through Eddie’s life. 

“I broke up with Ana,” Eddie tells him in lieu of an explanation. He stretches from his perched position on the bed while Buck lets out a surprised noise. Glancing up, there’s confused apprehension written across Buck’s furrowed brow. 

“Before or after the cyclone hit your bedroom?” 

Eddie snorts. “After. Or—during, I guess. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.” 

“Are you—you know, are you sure you want to break up your girlfriend right now?” The implication of you’ll regret it when you remember her is louder than his actual question. 

Eddie chews on his lip, unable to look at Buck when he says, “I don’t care what I’ll feel when I remember. I care about what I feel now.” 

Buck, damn him, just waits him out. It takes several weighted moments of Eddie looking at the piles of clothes at his feet before he meets his eyes—but when he does, there’s a sympathetic sort of understanding softening Buck’s entire stature. 

“If that’s what you need,” Buck tells him, like it’s as simple as that. Like whatever Eddie needs in life is worth the price others have to pay; like Buck could never begrudge him the cost. 

“I don’t know what I need, Buck—not really.” It’s a desperate moment of honesty that rips the words from Eddie’s chest; they trip over each of his ribs and lay on the cluttered floor between them, but Buck picks them up like they don’t belong in the rest of the mess of Eddie’s life. 

“That’s okay,” he says. Eddie closes his eyes and wishes he could believe him, just for a moment. “I—“ The hesitancy in Buck’s voice has him giving up that wish and looking up. He looks uncharacteristically uncomfortable, but it’s gone as quick as it came. “I talked to my therapist on the way home.” 

Eddie isn’t sure if he’s more surprised buy the reference to Buck’s own therapist or him referring to Eddie’s house as home. Either—or both—has him thrown off enough to blink over at Buck, the turmoil in his own body quelling for a blissful moment. “What about?” 

“Can we—sorry, Eds, but can we like, move away from whatever modern art piece you’ve made of your floor? I just can’t concentrate with our underwear everywhere, man.” 

That startles a laugh out of Eddie; it feels rough and wet against his throat, but it’s good to let it out. Looking around at all the mismatched clothes, he briefly remembers Buck mentioning his own drawer and feels a sudden surge of embarrassment.

“C’mon, I’ll make us some breakfast while we talk, yeah?” 

“You cook?” Eddie asks instead of agreeing, but he follows Buck out to the kitchen nonetheless. 

“Bobby taught me,” Buck grins over his shoulder. “He tried teaching you some too, but, well—“ 

Eddie huffs. “Yeah, that’s a lost cause.” 

“Most definitely is.” Buck laughs, bright and untethered. It clenches something deep in Eddie’s stomach as Buck moves around his kitchen with a comfortable confidence. 

Leaning against the counter by the fridge—as far from the stove he can get—Eddie watches while Buck lays out everything for what looks like cinnamon roll French toast, Eddie’s guiltiest pleasure. The tangle of emotion surrounding the mystery of Buck constricts Eddie’s lungs a little tighter; it’s not a recipe Eddie ever cooks for himself because it’s just self indulgent enough he can never justify giving it to himself, but it always reminds him of the very few sick days he took from school when it was just him and his mom at home and she’d make it with a secret smile on her lips, telling him not to tell his sisters. 

“So,” Eddie says, a little strangled, “your therapist?” 

Buck doesn’t look up from mixing the icing when he replies. “Dr. Copeland. I’ve been seeing her—a while, I guess. I’ve talked to her a couple of times since—“ his breath hitches. The bulk of his shoulders raise up toward his ears, and something shutters across his expression. Eddie doesn’t have to guess hard that it’s since the shooting. “Anyway. I talked to her about what I should—could—do to help you. She’s not…Entirely on board. But knowing Frank’s tendency toward…Uh, confrontation of trauma, I figure this would happen sooner or later.” 

Eddie barely follows the train of thought. “What would happen?” 

Buck takes a moment—rinses his whisk, cracks a couple of eggs, then works on mixing those next—and gets the first couple of pieces of bread in the pan. Eddie tries to be patient; he can see the tension building across Buck’s entire body, and he knows whatever it is isn’t easy for him to say. 

Still, Eddie’s never been the most patient man. 

“Buck?” 

He sighs, those shoulders all the way up to his ears, while he pokes at the bread with a spatula. “I wanted to know if I should just—tell you. Everything.” 

Eddie blinks at him. The breath in his lungs feels like lead all of a sudden, even as his heart trips over itself in anticipation. 

“Why?” The question surprises Eddie, because he wants to know and knows he probably shouldn’t question being given the answers so easily, but his voice just bounces off the tense line of Buck’s shoulders and Eddie doesn’t like the way it lands between them. 

“I know—“ Buck stops, flips the toast a little too roughly. A splatter of egg and butter lands on the stovetop. “This has got to be hard for you. I know that—I know you, Eddie. And as much as it might go against professional advice, I think knowing what you’re missing will make you feel…Not better. But in control. And that can’t be a bad thing, right?” 

He finally looks over to Eddie, sounding so small in his question, and his eyes beg to know if it’s the right thing to do. Eddie’s breath catches in his throat; the smallest part of him thinks maybe they should listen to the two therapists between them to approach his past slowly, but it’s easy to ignore when Buck’s offering him the chance to choose. 

Even if Buck wasn’t right about Eddie needing a sense of control—which he is, Eddie thinks just a little hysterically, he always is it seems—being given the opportunity to choose how his future looks like, what information he gets to shape it, is too much to give up. 

“Yes,” Eddie rasps. He takes a step forward before he realizes it, and then another until he’s close enough to feel the heat of the burner radiating from the stove. Buck doesn’t move, just looks down at Eddie with a much newer spatula than Eddie remembers ever buying hanging limp in one hand. “Please, Buck—yes, I need to know.” 

Buck watches him for a moment, his own expression open and yet still hard for Eddie to read, before he’s nodding. 

“Okay,” he breathes out, and the tension gets blown out with it. His shoulders drop, and he’s nodding absently. “Alright, well. Good thing we have some comfort food, then.” The half hearted smile he gives Eddie when he turns back to the stove doesn’t have much humor to fuel the flat joke. 

Eddie would be worried at how much he’s apparently gone through to warrant his favorite breakfast food, but his stomach is churning enough at the idea of getting answers that he doesn’t think anything would be strong enough to comfort him, anyway. 

Buck declares he’s going to break Eddie’s rule of no eating in the living room—which Eddie, truthfully, didn’t even know he had—and gets them set up with the coffee table pulled up close. He doesn’t offer to cut Eddie’s French toast, but he does hand him the plate with his fork already sliced through a piece to get him started. It’s awkward and he definitely butchers the bread with his non-dominant hand, but it tastes amazing despite the anticipation bubbling in his stomach. 

Eddie manages to down a solid three bites before he turns expectantly to Buck. 

“Jesus, not even gonna let me finish?” Buck asks through a big bite, laughing nervously after swallowing it down. Eddie just raises an eyebrow. 

“You can eat in between filling me on my life if it’s not too much of an imposition, you know.” It’s the first attempt at levity Eddie’s really made in a couple of days, and despite it feeling weird and fuzzy on his tongue, it makes Buck smile a little. 

“Okay, jeez.” Buck rolls his eyes before shoving one last bite in. “Where to even begin? Well, I guess after the earthquake…” 

Eddie settles in against the couch cushions. His nerves finally feel less like electricity in his veins as he listens to every word—even as Buck seems to go on some truly odd tangents about different hijinks they apparently got into together. Even though he knows not everything he’s going to hear will be good, he can’t help but smile a little at the things Buck thinks are important enough to tell him about their friendship—like a trip they took to the museum with Chris, or a skateboard they built together for him. 

It’s honestly easy to get lost in hearing all the ways Eddie apparently grew this little family of his in LA, especially when he gets to do so while eating a stupidly sweet breakfast made specifically to give him a little bit of happiness during such a weird-as-fuck time. 

Eddie gets comfortable while listening to everything—almost like it’s not his life he’s hearing about, like it’s just the best story Buck’s ever had the pleasure of telling based off his hand gestures alone—so it’s a harsh reality check when Buck starts talking about Shannon. 

Eddie has to cultivate a numbness in his chest when she’s brought up—when he’s told about how she asked him for a divorce, how he held her hand while she died. 

“Did Chris—how did he—“ Eddie asks in the middle of it, not even sure what he wants to know. The last bite of toast he took feels like cement in his stomach now; the powdered sugar coats his throat like sandpaper and makes it hard to push enough air through. 

“You, uh, had him see a counselor a few months later for…Something else. But it helped him with processing the grief, too, I think.” 

For his part, Buck looks like he’s doing a good job shouldering through the awkwardness of telling his best friend about the sorest parts of his past; still, it’s hard for Eddie to consider his comfort when he all he wants to do is press at these bruises and see how deep they go. 

“What could have been a more urgent need of therapy than his mother dying?” 

Buck sucks in a breath, and Eddie watches with a morbid fascination as the tenderness flares deep across his expression. 

“There was—“ Buck swallows, takes a big inhale. The exhale is shaky enough even Eddie can see it from across the couch. “A tsunami hit out of nowhere one day. I was—there was an accident at work, a few months before that, and I had been off duty for a while. You—ah, you dropped Chris off with me that day before you went into work.” 

A sinking feeling starts to heave low in Eddie’s stomach. Buck shifts, making himself small with his elbows on his knees and his hands twisting in the open air between them. He doesn’t look at Eddie when he continues. 

“I took him to the pier for a day out. The pier—it was hit first.” 

His voice is as hollowed out as the dread Eddie feels listening to him; even with the knowledge Chris is safe—that he left for school this morning with a smile and a joke about Eddie’s clinginess—anxiety builds, low and slow, in his stomach up toward his chest until it fills up his lungs. 

“But—he’s okay, and you—“ Eddie doesn’t know what he’s asking, if he’s even asking anything at all. He’s grasping for a reassurance of the reality he saw with his own two eyes this morning, but Chris is at school and there’s nothing to tether Eddie to his rationality. 

“Yeah, we were okay,” Buck rasps, nodding quickly like he’s reminding himself of reality too. His head is heavy between his shoulders when he finally looks over to Eddie. “I—I did everything I could for him, Eds. I swear to you I did.” 

There’s a raw, imploring sort of vow in the openness of Buck’s face; it’s the kind that feels like a benediction after a reformation, the kind that feels true even when truth is buried in crumbling ground. 

Eddie’s body aches with how long he’s held it taut with the pressure of anxiety against his bones. He breathes out before forcing each of his muscles to relax, one by one. His shoulders shake when he releases them, but it feels better than the rigidity that had held him upright. 

“You’re still in my life, right?” Eddie asks after a long, suspended moment. Buck blinks at him, surprised enough that he sits up, his shoulders and chest opening like he trusts nothing Eddie could ever say would strike those vulnerable spots. 

“I—I mean, yes, but it’s okay to feel—“

Eddie shakes his head, and his own body finally stops shaking with it. “You’re still in Chris’ life?” 

Buck nods. 

“Then I must have believed you—believed in you, right? I might not know who—who I became, but I know one thing for certain: I would never keep someone I don’t trust around my kid. And you’re more than around, Buck.” 

Buck’s expression is exposed, undefended, and looks more dazed than if Eddie actually had struck out at him. 

He doesn’t really know where the words come from, not really; but he knows they’re true. He knows that despite everything, Buck hasn’t given him a reason to believe whatever trust built between them is unwarranted. Whatever they’ve gone through—whatever feelings they have or haven’t talked about, they’ve made it out on the other side with something sturdy enough between them not even Eddie’s lack of memories has seemed to shake it. 

If there’s anything Eddie needs right now, it’s something to hold onto; something that won’t break under the petrified grasp he’s trying to have over his life. 

Buck’s mouth had fallen open, and the breath he lets out trembles against his lower lip. Eddie tells himself his eyes don’t linger while watching, but it’s only because he’s quickly distracted by the tears in Buck’s eyes. 

“Shit, what did I—“ Eddie shifts toward Buck on the couch, one knee pulled up and pressed uncomfortably into the back cushions, but he doesn’t know if he should get any closer. He doesn’t know what type of comfort is normal between them, but he’s certain he wouldn’t have normally left Buck to cry by himself. 

Buck shoves his hands against his eyes quickly, though, as if to push the tears back in while he lets out a puffy laugh. 

“Sorry, no it’s not—you didn’t do anything, it’s just—“ He digs the heel of his palms against his cheeks, roughly rubbing away any lingering moisture, before he gives Eddie the sort of smile that brightens his entire face; it’s not huge or blinding, but it’s like a break in a storm as it splits Buck’s lips. “You said something really similar back then. I didn’t think you could—it doesn’t matter. You just surprised me, that’s all.” 

Eddie nods without really knowing what part he’s agreeing with, but the movement helps him feel more tethered. He’s still watching Buck as he tries to settle back down, but there’s a residual tremor in the way Buck holds himself. And Eddie—okay, Eddie knows that, objectively, he’s probably the one that should take some comfort after all of this. That’s not to say he doesn’t feel a little off kilter, a little like his axis has been kicked out from under him after hearing so much he’s having trouble processing it all. But Buck looks a little wrecked across from him, and it aches in the well of his chest.   

But maybe that’s why he feels capable of keeping his feet firmly planted right now—maybe seeing everything that he’s been told, everything that has happened, hasn’t happened only to him is a lifeline he didn’t realize he needed. 

There’s a sad, untouchable throbbing deep in his chest that wonders if this is what Shannon wanted from him, all those years ago; if through every patchy video call she was begging him to step back into their life, not to ease her burdens but to carry them with her. A lump balls up in his throat as he watches Buck across the couch from him, stepping into Eddie’s mess without pretending it isn’t there—but instead carrying it like it’s his own. 

A flash of a thought—brief and unformed, like the memory of dream—filters through with an echoed Are you hurt? Eddie doesn’t know where it comes from, but looking at Buck so far away from him with glassy eyes and a wet smile, he’s pretty sure they’re both a little hurt right then and just wants to make it stop. 

“Can I—will you—“ The words are sticky in Eddie’s mouth, but he knows it’s from the unfamiliar weight of them on his tongue and not lack of desire. He doesn’t know how to ask for it, so instead he lays it out in front of Buck and trusts he’ll know what to do with it. “I want a hug.” 

Buck stares at him for one long, frozen moment that has shame starting to roll under Eddie’s skin. He’s about to recoil—to hide, to find an excuse to snatch the words back into his mouth—when Buck moves like his brain finally caught up to the rest of him. He’s scrambling to the other side of the couch, all limbs and clumsy gentleness, before he drops himself to the floor between Eddie’s knees. It’s so close to the way they were yesterday, yet Eddie feels miles away from the discomfort at having him so close this time. 

When Buck leans forward, Eddie meets him halfway until he can wrap his good arm around Buck’s shoulders and pull him in close. Buck’s arms are loose around his waist—so careful around his sling—but there’s a solidity to the way he breathes in against Eddie’s neck. 

It’s a kind of comfort Eddie doesn’t think he’s ever allowed himself to have and yet Buck gives it to him like this isn’t a dangerous sort of currency between them. 

He indulges in the way Buck doesn’t seem hurried to let go, like he’ll let Eddie hold on as long as he needs to stitch himself back together, and lets himself take the pieces that had been so jumbled together before and get them sorted into something that resembles order. When he does pull away, it’s with a surprising amount of reluctance and a hesitant smile. 

Buck holds him at arms length for a beat before returning it with his own grin, the tears nothing more than forgotten tracks on his cheeks. 

“If it’s cool with you,” Buck laughs, the sound a little rusty as he slowly pulls himself to his feet, “I think maybe we can save the rest of this history lesson for another time, yeah?” 

He looks almost regretful to ask, playing it off as some kind of joke that only has the edge of humor, but Eddie is pretty sure he’d agree to anything Buck needs after that. Cold sinks into his lungs with tight fingers at the memory of Buck in the Jeep yesterday at even the mention of the shooting, and Eddie doesn’t think he has it in him to prod Buck into anymore truths today anyway. 

“So long as you promise there won’t be a pop quiz.” 

Buck’s laugh punches out of him this time, short and baffled, and he gives Eddie a wide smile that leaves him a little breathless looking up into it. 

“Promise. Now, what do you say we tackle the explosion that hit your room? ‘Cause it really was a mess, man, like damn.” Buck tosses the offer over his shoulder after he’s already moving—already accepted they would be in that mess together, no matter why Eddie pulled it all out anyway. He has to take a moment to rearrange the complicated feelings in his chest before he can follow, but there’s a sneaking suspicion hiding somewhere behind his heart and lungs and the rest of the things that keep him alive that knows following Buck is an inevitability. 

It takes them a few hours to clean up. 

It starts with all the junk tossed onto Eddie’s bed but instead of just putting it back into the chaotic pile it’d been on his dresser, Buck actually helps him go through things with an easy sort of organization. He holds up every item and asks Eddie if he’d like to keep it, tells him if it’s something that really shouldn’t be thrown away and explains why, and laughs through telling him mundane stories attached to some of the things. 

Something settles under Eddie’s skin each time he’s given a choice like it matters, like he still gets to have an opinion over his life even if he doesn’t remember it. It makes him feel a little more like it’d be okay, if life had to be like this; if he couldn’t remember his past, that it wouldn’t mean he didn’t have a future just as promising.

Buck has just finished helping him sort through all the clothes and get the ones that definitely should have been hung up long before now onto hangers when he offers for Eddie to come with him to get Chris from school. 

He thinks about it, but looking at the neatly piled shirts stretched onto hangers gives him such a sense of productivity that he decides maybe, just maybe it’s okay to let go of one thing and let Buck pick up Chris by himself; that maybe it isn’t a sign of Eddie failing, but a sign he’s growing. 

Frank would probably be really smug at that thought, so Eddie squashes it down. 

Still, it doesn’t feel like giving in when Buck leaves him to finish up their organizing. 

The last bit of chaos that had kept him up throughout the night finally settles as Eddie gets the clothes hung up one by one in his woefully underutilized closet; honestly, the fact that he never got around to actually filling it up the way it should be makes him feel a little better, like he’s not somehow losing at life compared to the person he became over the last few years. 

Frank would probably want to unpack that feeling, so Eddie revels in it without having to think too much about it. 

He’s hanging up the last shirt when he spots it; it’s an unassuming box, solid black with a space for a label that never got filled out. He doesn’t know why it catches his eye; it almost looks like a shoe box, and definitely looks like it belongs where it’s perched up high on the wire shelves running along the length of the closet. 

Something tugs against his ribs until he picks it up—he has to get on his tip toes and balance it on the palm of his good hand before curling it close to his chest, but he gets it safely down without spilling its contents all over the floor. Taking it over to the bed, he sits with it in his lap and wiggles the snug lid off without any preamble. 

It looks like a bunch of important documents—briefly, Eddie gets excited about the idea of finding something with his banking info on it, because he knows that’s important but he hadn’t found a local one to switch to before the earthquake. He shuffles through everything, scanning the pages with a casual sort of interest, when his eyes catch on something that steals his breath. 

He reads the document from top to bottom, and then he does it again for good measure. 

The third time is because he’s pretty sure he hasn’t breathed since the first time, and the words are all starting to blur together. 

He sucks in a breath, his fingers wrinkling the copy of his last will and testament in their trembling hold. Eddie thought he had gotten a good understanding of the life he woke up to, but when he stares at the first line item under the very first article, he thinks that maybe he got it all wrong in the first place. 

Because when he reads Evan Buckley right next to legal guardian of Christopher Diaz, Eddie doesn’t know how those words could exist in a world where he wasn’t in love with the man. 

Chapter Text

Of all the things that have changed in his life over the last three years, Eddie never thought his sexuality would be one of them. 

To be completely fair, he doesn’t actually think it’s changed; for that to be true, it would mean Eddie ever actually gave his orientation more than just a passing acceptance of what he thought was true. He had at least a teenager’s attraction to his high school girlfriends, which is a fact; he was definitely attracted to Shannon, so—fact; and when he looks at Buck, through the hazy confusion of emotions surrounding the man, there’s a fluttering of something very warm and familiar in his chest—so, he guesses, that’s a fact too. 

(And if he lets himself look at Buck a little longer and notices his mouth gets dry whenever his arms flex in that obscene way of his, well. It’s all in the name of research.) 

So what if Eddie lets this newfound revelation take over the rest of the crisises going on in his life; some people might call it deflecting, but he thinks it’s perfectly fair to obsess just a little over the person he’s 99% certain he was in love with before he lost his memories. It had been…Not easier, really, when he thought Buck was the one in love with him. But it was less…Personal. But knowing this is the person Eddie trusted his son—his entire world—to if he died? 

Yeah. He thinks he’s allowed to be a little curious about Buck after that. 

He’s also a little more-than-curious if this…Attraction is something he’s already had to come to terms with; if this is something his brain has already chewed through and managed to swallow whole, and somehow in the end digested it into that inconspicuous piece of paper gathering dust in his closet. 

(Eddie has never wished he was the type of person to journal meticulously, but he does think, briefly, that it sure as hell would make a situation like this a lot easier to understand.) 

It takes him a while to move on from the initial shock of his discovery, but once he does—well, things start making more sense, that’s for sure. 

He thinks back on how assumed it was that Buck would do right by Eddie—with the way Abuela spoke of him in the hospital, how no one seemed to bat an eye at going to Buck for updates on Eddie since his release. When he thinks about it, he hasn’t had to field any concerned texts or calls from anyone since he got home, actually. He hadn’t really questioned it before since the only ones he’d expect something like that from are his grandmother and aunt—and maybe his sisters, if they found out somehow. 

But the family he’s seemed to cultivate over these last few years are definitely the hands-on types from what he can tell; so if he hasn’t had to deal with the headache of answering people he barely remembers, he’s guessing it’s not because there haven’t been questions—it’s because he’s just not the one any of them have been asking. 

Eddie thinks of the way Buck has seemed to just know what he needs—and when he hasn’t known, he’s asked and given Eddie the chance to choose for himself. 

It’s all certainly enough to have Eddie feeling somehow both off-kilter yet firmly rooted in his own understanding by the time Buck eventually gets back home with Christopher in tow that afternoon.

He tries his best to not let either of them notice something is different—that something has profoundly shifted in Eddie’s world, and now he has to adjust his entire perception to see it all clearly. He watches the way Buck moves through their lives a little closer—really sees the way he’s so comfortable stepping into Eddie’s mess while Eddie himself feels out of his depth, yet Buck navigates it like there’s nothing else he’d rather be knee-deep in. 

When he watches the way Buck sits down with Chris over homework—explaining, quite terribly, fifth grade math to Eddie in a way that has Chris laughing and Eddie too fond to be concerned about his kid’s report card—he lets himself take it all in with the idea that this is the man he loved. When Chris starts to—exasperatedly—go over the lesson from class that day so Buck understands how to do the problem and Buck just grins over his head at Eddie like it was his plan all along to get Chris to work through it on his own, Eddie doesn’t let the warmth in his chest make him look away. He embraces it, lets it sit under his skin and heat him up from the inside out. 

There’s a contentment that seems to settle over Buck, too, Eddie notices; it’s not that he seemed uncomfortable around them before or anything—but when Eddie stops questioning Buck’s place in their lives and just sits back and observes, there’s an easiness to the way he exists with them. It’s a subtle change, but there’s less weight on Buck’s shoulders when he moves throughout the house—their home, Eddie thinks a little wondrously. There’s a glimpse of the contentment Eddie saw in that picture of them on the mantle and he realizes if there’s anything he wants to remember, it’s the way this love grew between them. 

Because once he lets himself see it, he can’t unsee it. 

It’s not that he’s magically more comfortable around Buck after that, either—but the knowledge does settle between his ribs and lets him breathe a little easier at having the man so entwined in his life. It all makes more sense, like piecing together all the edge pieces in this puzzle made of his life; with the frame finally put in place, he feels more confident he’ll be able to decipher the rest of the jumbled middle. 

It’s not as surprising when they sit down together later, after dinner, and Buck suggests they go over some of the smaller—but still crucial—things Eddie will need to relearn. He can’t help but think it’s Buck’s subtle apology for cutting their trip down Eddie’s memory lane short that morning, but either way it still gives him a firmer hold on his life that he’s unspeakably grateful for. 

So that’s how they end up at the dining room table, hunched over the calendar off the fridge, with Buck explaining the shorthand and circled dates. It’s how they end up going through all the mail that had overwhelmed Eddie before and have it sorted into piles based on priority within an hour. It’s how his—still old, still slow—laptop ends up opened between them while Buck resets his bookmark folder with all the websites that Eddie uses to pay online bills marked at the top. It’s how he gets a lesson on using the LAFD employee portal where Buck shows him where to view all the paperwork regarding his medical leave—all of which is already filled out, curtesy of both Buck and Chimney, who is apparently the acting captain during Bobby’s absence. 

It’s a lot to take in—and even more to try to retain—but by the time Eddie falls asleep that night, he feels secure in his life for the first time since he woke up to it. 

Eddie wakes up late the next morning and has one sleepy, frenzied moment where he thinks Chris is going to be late for school before he hears voices coming from the kitchen. Something settles his panic when he recognizes Buck’s booming laugh tangling with Chris’ giggles, and when he checks his phone he realizes it’s Saturday. It’s Saturday and Buck is still here, because Eddie didn’t even have to ask him to stay the night before. 

When he enters the kitchen, he’s stuck watching from the doorway; Eddie has seen Buck interact with Chris for a few days now, but watching them cook together—the affection between them even softer in the late morning light—has him swallowing around something warm and wet in his throat. 

It’s the way Chris looks so at ease and independent perched on a step stool pushed up against the stove, even as Buck keeps him steady while standing right behind him. He’s always wanted his son to feel capable and sure, even when the world kept doubting him and his ability to move through it—and here he is, giggling and flipping a pancake while Buck gives him just the right amount of assistance and encouragement. 

Seeing them work together so seamlessly makes Eddie think it’s no wonder Buck has been able to help him through recovery while still giving him the agency he needs to feel in control of his own life; here he is, doing the same thing for Chris, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to him. 

“It looks like sleeping beauty finally decided to join us, Chris,” Buck teases when he catches sight of Eddie propped up against the doorframe. There’s a warm mischief tugging the corner of his lips up, welcoming Eddie into their joke. “Guess we can’t eat his pancakes after all.”

“Aw man.” Chris tries to let out a put-upon sigh but it only dissolves into conspiratorial laughter when he tilts his head back to look at Buck, who tangles a hand in the curls pressed against his chest and smacks a loud kiss to the laugh lines creasing Chris’ forehead. 

“I see how it is,” Eddie says, pushing through the breathless ache in his chest at the sight. “My own kid, selling me out for extra breakfast.” He moves to tickle Chris for revenge, not realizing how close it put him to Buck until he looks up and freezes; the curve of Buck’s smile is too intimate at this distance, too inviting to not be pulled in further by its gravity. 

“But Dad,” Chris whines, giggling as he’s able to push away Eddie’s limp hand while he’s stuck staring at Buck a little too long. “They’re Buck’s pancakes. They’re the best.” 

“Are they now?” Eddie asks absently before finally breaking the moment and looking back down at Chris, who’s giving him the most pre-teen duh face he’s ever witnessed. “Okay, okay. I get it—Dad definitely ranks lower than pancakes on your priority list, kid.” 

“Only during breakfast time,” Chris assures him with a pat to Eddie’s chest before dutifully turning back to the pancakes in question. 

Buck’s laugh rumbles through the small space between the three of them, shaking Eddie and his attention all the way down to his bones. 

“Tough break, Eds,” Buck tells him, an unbearably fond expression softening his face as he smirks down at Eddie. 

“You’ve turned my kid against me, Buckley,” Eddie accuses, but any heat to the comment is too consumed by the warmth in his voice. He would be embarrassed if the knowledge of his will wasn’t churning in the back of his mind, bubbling up questions Eddie doesn’t know how to ask yet desperately wants to know. 

“Only during breakfast time,” Buck mimics and Chris tosses him a proud grin, his curls bouncing against Buck’s chest as he throws his head back to look up at him again. 

And—and there’s no way Buck doesn’t know, right? That’s why he’s able to navigate this mess between them so confidently? He knows Eddie trusts him not only with his life at work, but apparently with his heart through his kid. He has to know that’s why he’s Eddie’s power of attorney, why he’s Christopher’s guardian when Eddie can’t be. 

It has to be why Buck has been able to stay rooted through Eddie’s confusion and distrust at the beginning, because he knows that even if he can’t remember, Eddie has trusted him to do what’s best for their family. 

Their family, Eddie thinks breathlessly, as he watches the two of them get plates made and the table set. That’s the only thing they could be described as—a family, a unit, with so much trust and love flowing between them Eddie could see it living all around the house even when he couldn’t recognize it. 

 It settles against the ache in his bones that had been there since the morning Shannon left—and honestly, since before then, too; it’s an ache that’s been gnawing at his conscience since he signed up for his second tour, since he thought his problems would become clearer when he didn’t have to answer to his wife’s increasingly worried and exhausted face. He’s never felt like he would be able to catch up to his short-comings since he left them behind—but when he looks at his kitchen table filled with pancakes and syrup and love and laughter, he thinks he may be able to start untangling his inadequacy from the rest of his buried marrow. 

There’s such an impenetrable bubble around them—the morning buoyant and everlasting—that Eddie is startled when Buck’s phone starts rumbling against the table with an incessant buzz. 

Buck looks down at it in surprise, like he can’t understand why his phone would be going off, for only a second before he’s grabbing it and halfway out of his chair. 

“I’ll be just a sec, guys,” he says apologetically, but his eyes are glued to his screen. He glances up before he makes it to the door and sends a warning finger to Chris. “I better still have just as many pancakes on my plate when I get back, bud.” 

“Make no promises.” Chris laughs, a wide and devious smile on his face. 

“Tell no lies, yeah yeah.” Buck’s pinched expression softens with a smile for a moment and then he’s out the door. Eddie tries to not listen in, but he can hear a faint hey, Taylor before he hears the front door open and close. He firmly tells himself he’s not jealous, because Buck obviously is allowed to have a life outside of the two of them—but curiosity is still a safe emotion. 

“What’s that all about?” Eddie asks, mostly to himself, but Chris offers him a shrug when he turns back to him. 

“Secret spy stuff, probably,” Chris tells him with the easy conviction of an eleven year old that has a bewildered grin splitting Eddie’s face. 

“Spy stuff, huh?” 

“Gotta be.” Chris nods solemnly, like it’s the only thing that makes sense. “He knows too much stuff.” 

“That’s got to be it,” Eddie agrees, just as convinced. “God, I’m glad you’re still you, kid.” 

Chris rolls his eyes so hard his head rolls back and forth with it, an exasperated sigh spilling out of him. “You’re still weird, Dad.” 

They’re still discussing the intricacies of Buck’s supposed spy career when he comes back inside. There’s a troubled sort of weariness on Buck’s face—his phone clenched in one hand—that disappears as soon as he realizes Eddie is watching him. He slips his phone into the pocket of his jeans before he takes his seat like he was never interrupted. 

“Oh man, are you talking about your spy theory again?” Buck comments after a belated moment of picking at his food. 

“Nooo,” Chris drawls, laughing into his juice. 

“I told you, bud, if I was a spy—you’d be my confidant, the only person to know my secret identity,” Buck says it with a genuine sincerity, a hand over his heart, despite the laugh growing on the side of his lips. 

“That’s what a spy would say,” Chris informs him matter of factly. Buck makes a wounded sound and that hand starts clenching his chest instead. 

“You got me there, bud.” 

The concession is met with more giggles as Chris takes a victory bite of pancake. 

Eddie watches fondly, but he can’t help but see the way Buck’s energy starts to flag after the teasing stops. He gets a little quieter, and his eyebrows draw together the same way his shoulders do. When he catches Buck’s eye, he’s met with only a quick smile before he averts his gaze back to his well-forgotten breakfast. 

“Hey, Buck,” Chris says when he’s finished his food, “do you think Dad can play video games with one hand?”

“Well, kid,” Buck muses, pretending to think. “I think your dad can’t play video games even with two hands, so it might be a long shot.” 

“Hey now,” Eddie tries to defend himself, but truthfully he’s pretty sure there’s not much to defend. He hasn’t played a video game in years. “I guess we can find out later if you get your room cleaned up, right, Chris?”

Chris heaves out the most put upon sigh Eddie’s ever heard come out of his mouth. “Why couldn’t you forget about that,” he grumbles, but diligently starts heading for his room. Eddie’s left staring after his kid—his preteen—dumbfounded at the amount of sarcasm coming from him. 

“Did you hear that?” Eddie turns to Buck, his indignation tempered only by the absurdity of it. 

Buck’s soft chuckle follows Chris out the room along with his gaze. “Yeah, but he totally gets that from you, you know.” 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Eddie expects his grin to be met with a matching one, but the weight is back in Buck’s gaze. There’s another buzz and his hand automatically goes to fish his phone out of his pocket, and he’s busy typing away for a moment while Eddie watches him. 

“Uh, sorry,” Buck tells him with a glance up. He puts his phone back on the table, face down. “What were you saying?” 

Instead of repeating, Eddie tilts his head toward Buck’s phone. “Is everything okay?” 

Buck lets out a sigh, rubbing at his face a couple times before just resting his palms over his eyes. He leans back in his chair until the back legs creak against the tile. When his hands drop, his gaze lingers on the ceiling for a moment before looking back at Eddie. There’s a fixed, warm smile on his face but it doesn’t touch his eyes. 

“Yeah, it’s nothing to worry about, man.” 

“Doesn’t seem like nothing.” Eddie doesn’t know why he pushes—he thinks he normally wouldn’t, but he also thinks the him who knows Buck would, so he lets himself. 

“It’s—“ Buck picks his phone back up when it buzzes again, reads the banner across the lock screen, and sighs. He taps the phone a few times against his palm absently. “It was my girlfr—uh, Taylor.” 

Eddie’s brows scrunch together, still catching the way Buck tripped over the words. “You have a girlfriend?” He doesn’t mean to make it sound like an accusation, but he winces a little when it does. 

“Uh, had,” Buck says on a sigh, tossing the phone back on the table. “I think I had a girlfriend.” 

Eddie doesn’t know how to process Buck having and breaking up with a girlfriend all before he even knew of her existence. He wracks his brain for any memory of Buck mentioning her over the last few days but—no, he can’t think of a single time. 

“I’m—sorry? Was it—“ Eddie winces, realizing the lack of mention might actually be his fault. “Was it because of me?” 

“What? No, no, no,” Buck hurries to say, leaning across the table like it’ll press the words closer to Eddie and make him believe them. “She just—it was barely even starting, anyway. And well, I already told her you—and Chris, of course—would be my priority right now, but I guess she just didn’t…Understand that until now.” 

“So…It is because of me.” Eddie tries to muster some guilt over the fact, but it’s hard to do when this whole revelation makes his realization from last night more complicated; except…Except then he remembers he had a girlfriend too, until he broke up with her yesterday. Which he probably wouldn’t have done if he could remember her. 

But if they both have—had?—girlfriends…Then what the hell is Eddie supposed to think about the will sitting in a box in his damn closet right now? 

“I mean—on technicality?” Buck winces, then sighs. “I don’t blame you. Really, Eds don’t even think about it. It’s not a big deal.” 

Eddie mulls over that, swishing a piece of pancake through the last dredges of syrup on his plate until it’s a mushy, unrecognizable mess. He eats it anyway. 

“Do you…Want to talk about it?” He offers slowly. He’d think significant others would be something they’d talk about, right? That’s what friends—not to mention best friends—would have input on? 

Buck laughs but it sounds more like a strangled breath. Eddie raises an eyebrow towards him. 

“Sorry, sorry—I think that’s the first time you’ve ever offered to talk about Taylor with me.” The way he says it makes it sound like the most hilarious irony in the world, but the joke doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“Do I—or I guess, did I—not like her?” 

“She’s just not…Well, she’s an acquired taste.” 

“I’ve been told the same thing about myself, you know.” 

“Yeah,” Buck barks out a real laugh this time, “I know. Unfortunately, I guess neither of your uh…Flavors ever blended well together.” 

“This metaphor is getting a little weird,” Eddie comments easily, if only to hear that laugh again. It’s all…Easy. When he lets himself just be, it’s almost…Normal between them. Eddie doesn’t know what exactly to think about that but—well, it doesn’t stop him from liking it. 

The phone buzzes again, and the effortless air between them suddenly feels labored. 

“Is she uh—still texting you? Pretty mad, then, I guess.” 

Buck shakes his head absently, shooting off a quick message. “No, it’s Chimney actually. He’s asking if I can bump my first shift back to tomorrow.” He’s distracted, worrying the edge of his thumbnail between his teeth, when he mutters, “I could see if Carla could—no, she’s coming on Monday and Wednesday, she needed this weekend off. Maybe—“ 

It takes an embarrassingly long moment for Eddie to realize why he’d need to reach out to Carla. 

“We’ll be fine here, Buck, you don’t have to—“ 

“Dude, no offense, but I know you haven’t even showered yet, do you really want to go a whole day without a little help?” 

 Eddie is left staring at him, eyebrows raised. It’s not—well, it’s not that it isn’t true. Despite the stubborn streak flaring through his chest, Eddie knows the doctors said he shouldn’t try caring for himself let alone his kid by himself for at least a couple of weeks. It hadn’t seemed like such a problem this past week with Buck here and he’s realizing now, a little self conscious, that he hadn’t actually considered when Buck would…Leave. 

Logically, he knows he has to work—hell, it’s not like he forgot they’re coworkers, at least. But Buck had been there so relentlessly since he’d been released from the hospital that Eddie sort of…Forgot that this wouldn’t be how things would be forever. 

He had finally settled into a sense of comfort with Buck here, and he was close to just accepting it as his new normal, really. 

After a few too-long seconds of Eddie’s speechlessness, Buck looks up from biting at his thumb and his mouth falls open the same time as his eyes widen. “Oh shit, sorry Eddie I—I didn’t mean it like that, I know you’re capable I just—“ 

“No, you’re right.” Eddie shakes off the apology with a wave of his hand. “I just—forgot about you having to go back to work,” he admits sheepishly. He can’t seem to meet Buck’s eyes when he says it; when he finally looks back up, there’s a softness across Buck’s face that he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle directed at him this early in the morning. 

“I was supposed to be off through the weekend,” Buck admits. “There were a few people who volunteered for my shifts this week as soon as they heard about your…Condition.” He clears his throat, and he doesn’t look like he knows what to do with that information in the same way Eddie fumbles with it. Even from the short time he remembers of the station, he caught on quick that the teams definitely like to take care of their own when something happens to family but—well. 

It’s a little harder to ignore the image of the family they’ve created between them when he knows it’s not just him who sees it. 

“But with Bobby out and everything going on with Maddie, Chim has been worn a little thin, you know?” Buck goes on. Eddie’s brain is still stuck stalling over what, exactly, the firehouse thinks is going on between them. “And then Johnson called out for tomorrow because her kid is sick and he didn’t know who else to ask—“ 

Eddie finally catches up to Buck’s train of thought and reaches across the table to pat his hand absently. Buck’s mouth immediately clicks shut. 

“Don’t worry about it, Buck. If something happens, I can always call Abuela.” 

“Abuela has bridge on Sundays,” Buck tells him immediately. Eddie blinks at him then laughs. 

“Pepa then. You have a life outside of your best friend and his kid—dont’ feel guilty for living it.”

Even if, admittedly, there is a warmth pooling in Eddie’s chest at the way Buck is so insistently present for them; Eddie’s always been the one to provide—for his family, for the few friends he managed to keep before moving, for his team when he was deployed. He’s so used to being the one with a stiff back that any burden could be laid upon that he never learned how to ask someone else to share the weight. 

Buck doesn’t make him ask, though; that’s the difference. He doesn’t have to ask so it feels less like charity and more like a partnership. 

It makes it easier to understand why he’d trust him so much, especially if one day—well, Eddie doesn’t have to think about that. He survived—again—and has enough troubles in the wake of it to go borrowing any others. 

“I got it!” Buck exclaims, making Eddie jump a little. “Hen’s off tomorrow—they have a home visit scheduled for their foster daughter, Nia. Maybe she and Denny could swing by here after? Check in on you guys? I bet Chris wouldn’t mind getting to hang out with Denny,” Buck adds casually, like Eddie can’t read the worry across his face. 

“Would that make you feel better?” Eddie asks, almost amused, if it weren’t for the fact he’s essentially being set up for a playdate, too. 

“A little,” Buck grins, small but sincere. Eddie briefly wonders if he’s always been weak to that look. 

“Fine,” he sighs, “but only if Hen doesn’t mind.”

“Oh, she won’t.” Buck waves him off, already on his phone and texting with more vigor than he had before. “Especially since she knows how stressed Chim’s been, too.”

He says it all absently, but Eddie watches the subtle shift in the tension across his back; with a little bit of his own guilt, Eddie suddenly remembers Buck talking about his sister seeing Frank again recently too. He doesn’t remember if the two of them are close, but he can’t imagine Buck not being a big family guy—especially with the way he’s talking about Chimney, Eddie pieces together a picture Buck has seemingly kept well hid from him this past week. 

Eddie thinks of all the pieces of himself Buck has torn off and given to him this past week, plus god only knows how many he can’t remember, and suddenly—desperately—wants some way to give a few of them back.  

“How is your sister?” Eddie asks cautiously. Buck blinks up at him owlishly. 

“She’s uh—it’s been a little rough. Newborns always are, and now with Chimney having to pick up extra shifts for a while until Bobby gets back it’s…Yeah, it’s just been rough.” 

Eddie nods, vaguely remembering the photos Chimney broke out of their daughter when they visited the station for lunch. “Jee-Yun, right?” Buck smiles brightly at the mention of his niece, and it warms Eddie in a way he distinctly wants to ignore. 

“Yeah, she’s so cute, Eds,” Buck coos, so much lighter even just talking about the girl. He swipes open some pictures that Eddie politely looks through—most of which are, in fact, the same ones Chimney showed him—before there’s a subtle shift in his expression. “Maddie’s trying so hard with her,” he murmurs, staring at a particular photo of Chimney, Jee-Yun, and a very tired looking Maddie. “I wish I could do something to make it easier on her.” 

Eddie awkwardly shifts his weight in his seat; the pain on Buck’s face looks too personal for him to comment on, but the urge to extend even the smallest reassurance burns his tongue. 

“Post-partum is hard. Shannon—“ Eddie swallows down the dull ache at the memory and stares at his hand on the table as he says, “She had to see someone for it, after I went on tour the first time. It’s a lot of work, but if she’s anything like you, Maddie is going to be able to get through this.”

There’s a moment of silence that stretches for a few pounding heartbeats too long. Overstepping seemed impossible at this point with Buck, but Eddie worries he somehow found that line when he looks up and sees Buck’s stunned face. 

“Sorry,” Eddie blurts out, gruff, “I shouldn’t—“ 

“No, Eds, I just—“ Buck shakes his head, leaning across the table so quickly Eddie has to stop himself from flinching back. “I never mentioned Maddie having postpartum.” 

Eddie stares at him, wide eyed. He immediately opens his mouth to backtrack the assumption but then—was it an assumption? No, there was definitely something so sure in his mind when he said it, he could have sworn—but now he tries to think of when Buck told him and he can’t pull anything specific out. 

“Sorry I—I just guessed, between what you and Chimney have said—and her seeing Frank, but I don’t—“ Remember hangs out of his mouth like a sin he has to confess, and he hates the weight of it. 

“It’s—no, it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” Buck assures after a suspended moment. There’s a dullness to his smile that Eddie also hates putting there. 

Silence stretches between them again and Eddie wants to crumple it up and throw it away along with the stupid moment he let himself hope he could actually have remembered something from before. 

It’s later that evening, after enough video games that Chris definitely got his answer—no, Eddie is not any better playing one handed than two—and dinner has been cleaned up, that the last dredges of disappointment finally wash away from the back of Eddie’s mind. 

Hen has agreed to stop by the next day for a little while and help out with anything Eddie might need so Buck isn’t as jittery about his upcoming 24 hour shift, and things have slowly settled back into something resembling calm by the time the sun sets and Chris is busy in his room—determined to finish a game he promised Denny he’d play the last time they hung out, apparently. 

Somehow, in the quiet of their evening, Eddie manages to ask for Buck’s help showering. 

(He’d been self conscious ever since Buck’s comment that morning, alright? So he asked if Buck could really tell he hadn’t showered yet, and after a moment of stunned silence, Buck’s unbridled laughter at the face Eddie pulled had the knot in his chest untangling enough that when he offered to help, Eddie didn’t think too hard about saying yes.) 

Honestly—Eddie knows that unless he wants to find out just how sarcastic his pre-teen has gotten over the last few years, he needs to do more than a quick wash down at the sink. 

He also knows, from unfortunate experience, that doing so while keeping his shoulder dry is nearly impossible without help. 

Short of eating all of his pride like some three course meal and asking his grandmother to help bathe him, there’s really no one else he can think of that wouldn’t be even more awkward to ask. And at least Buck seems to appreciate how difficult it is for Eddie; he cracks a joke about preserving Eddie’s modesty as he leaves a folded towel on the back of the toilet after adjusting Chris’ shower chair to fit Eddie’s height and leaves him to get situated. 

It’s still uncomfortable as hell, though, and he tries to ignore the way the cold bathroom air itches across his bare skin as he attempts to hide his equally bare ass from view with a fluffy towel. 

Buck knocks before coming back in, which might be endearing if Eddie’s nerves didn’t already feel like electricity in his veins. 

“You’re good,” Eddie calls gruffly. 

He can’t meet Buck’s eyes when the door opens, but relief does dislodge some of the nerves under his skin when he takes in the basketball shorts and tank top Buck has changed into. It’s not that Eddie really expected Buck to be in anything less, but—well, he’s going to get soaked helping him, and he wouldn’t blame him if he stripped down to his underwear. 

Still, it’s complicated enough for Eddie to reconcile asking for such intimate help from someone he may or may not have been in love with a week ago, so he’s grateful for this small blessing at least. 

“Let’s make this quick,” Eddie grimaces, resolutely staring at the yellowing grout between the shower tiles. 

“Hen will be grateful for your sacrifice tomorrow, I’m sure,” Buck jokes, and he knows it’s meant to make him feel better about the whole situation, but Eddie can’t find it in him to crack a smile. He watches silently as Buck gets waterproof medical tape and Saran Wrap set up on the back of the toilet seat before he turns around. 

“Alright, let’s get you wrapped up.” Buck clears his throat and finally steps into the shower with him, and Eddie tries very hard to not think about the lack of space between them as he starts applying plastic wrap over Eddie’s bandaged shoulder. 

Buck touches him in that gentle way of his, and it’s nearly too loud in the shower stall’s cramped acoustics; whether it speaks to Buck’s feelings or his own, Eddie hasn’t figured out yet.  

Buck is surprisingly quiet as he gets the shower head turned on and tests the water on his hand—the runoff pools by Eddie’s feet and his toes twitch at the shock of cold, but he almost prefers it as the water warms to something more tolerable and he has to face that this is actual reality right now; it was easier to be touched when he thought that it was only Buck harboring some kind of feelings for him. 

Now, though, it’s—not entirely awkward, but it’s definitely hard for Eddie to think of anything but the warmth radiating behind him and if it’s coming from the water or Buck’s body. 

He’s tense until the spray finally hits his back, and he can’t help the way his body twitches as soon as a damp washcloth is dragged across his good shoulder. He closes his eyes and tries hard to not picture Buck behind him, focused with that same unbreakable reverence from when he helped Eddie into his shirt the other day. 

He’s not used to being treated as something fragile—not in the breakable way, but in a distinctly precious sort of way that he thinks would normally leave him insulted and ready to run; with Buck, though…It’s hard for Eddie to understand why the simple devotion brings him to his knees.

He hears Buck shift behind him. When he opens his eyes it’s toward the ground, and he watches as Buck’s toes come into his line of sight right in front of him.

“You want to ah, get everything else?” 

Eddie raises his head enough to take in the washcloth being offered to him, and then the way Buck watches the shower head spray against the wall instead of meeting his eyes. 

Eddie tries to work as quickly as possible after Buck turns his back for his privacy. He takes the shower head when it’s offered to him and rinses as well as he can before handing it back. 

“So—hair. This will be tricky.” Tackling the problem at hand seems to give Buck something to focus and there’s less awkward tension in his shoulders when he looks back at Eddie. 

“Leaning forward works best.” 

He looks like he’s about to ask if Eddie’s sure, but then his eyes flicker to the small scar on his left shoulder—barely puckered after so much time now, but it still aches with Buck’s weighted gaze. 

“Right. Forward it is, then.” 

Eddie folds himself in half as much as he can and watches as Buck steps closer, until their toes almost touch. He focuses on the swirling, sudsy runoff around their feet instead of the gentle circles Buck’s fingers massage into his scalp and distinctly ignores the heat trying to well up behind his eyes. 

When they’re done, Buck leaves him a pair of underwear and sweatpants—folded up the same way his towel was—before the door clicks behind him as he goes to get changed himself. It takes Eddie a frustrating amount of time to get dressed, and when he does he’s left already fatigued and staring at the fogged up bathroom mirror. 

He hasn’t really…Looked at himself, he realizes with a sudden and sick kind of clarity. He’s seen his reflection in passing, but he’s distinctly aware of the way his eyes would immediately avert when he’d come too close to actually seeing anything. 

Honestly, he can’t tell if it’s because he’s afraid of seeing another set of stitches on another shoulder or if he doesn’t want to see what time has done to the rest of him, either. 

Maybe it’s because he knows Buck is on the other side of the door right now—probably starting to wonder if he slipped and fell down the drain with the rest of Eddie’s illusion of self-reliance—but after only a stalled moment, he wipes the condensation off the mirror in three rough swipes. 

If seeing the changes in Chris had been weird, seeing himself is…Disconcerting.

It’s not even that he looks drastically different or anything. His hair is only a little shorter than he remembers, and the scruff across his jaw is definitely just from not shaving for the past week—he can’t imagine he ever became a beard guy. 

What gets him, though, is the…Softness of his face. He hasn’t really gained much weight from what he can tell—there’s still a definition through his chest and arms—but the edges of his jaw and cheeks are more rounded. It makes him look more…Content. 

It’s a look he hasn’t seen on himself before. It's enough to make his reflection nearly unrecognizable from whatever has shaped him into this softer version of himself; he's always known, at least, the shape of who he's supposed to be. Staring at himself now, though—he's a stranger, and when he lets that thought finally slip through and breathes life into it, all the air from is lungs is sucked out with it. 

The door opens a crack beside him and he watches in the mirror as Buck’s head pops through, a hand covering his eyes. 

“I knocked,” he says like it’s a question and an explanation. 

“It’s fine,” Eddie tells him roughly when Buck stays awkwardly rooted behind the door. 

Buck looks at him then—eyes flicking to the mirror and the way Eddie’s hand is gripping the vanity, arm shaking just a little—and silently shuts the door behind him before leaning against it.  

Eddie wants to know what Buck sees when he looks at him; he wants to know all the memories between them that shape his view of the man Eddie’s become; he wants to know what he used to see when he looked at Buck just a week ago. 

The prospect of never being able to witness Buck the same way again sits with a grim weight against his lungs. It’s a breathless thought, and it scalds all the combustive hope hiding in his chest.  

When Buck takes a tentative step toward him, something deep and brittle inside him flinches hard enough that Eddie can feel it snap; he feels the frayed cords of control get cleaved out of his grasp and he chases them with a strangled sob. His grip on the counter is the only thing keeping him upright as his back bows with the force of it—but before he can knock himself over on the next heaved breath, Buck is there. 

He’s there in Eddie’s space, hands and voice surrounding him, and he knows it should comfort him—knows it from the echo from the fathomless part of his mind, from the instinctual way his body wants to lean into Buck’s touch—yet all it does is scrape over Eddie’s skin. 

His body is one big, battered abrasion that he desperately wishes Buck could be the balm for—but even that desire leaves him bruised with the weight of his absent memories, from the only thing keeping him from being soothed by the salve of Buck’s presence. 

“You should go,” Eddie bites out once he can work his jaw again. His teeth are grit so hard to keep another sob from escaping that it feels like they’re going to crack right through his skull; Eddie kind of wishes he would, if only to taste blood instead of the bitter disappointment staining his inside of his mouth. 

Buck doesn’t step away, and Eddie wants to laugh from either relief or frustration and the fact he can’t tell which it is only has more hysteria building in his chest. 

“Why would I do that, Eds?” Buck asks, soft and honest. He waits for an answer like it isn’t rhetorical even as he lets Eddie hide his face from the question. 

“Because this isn’t—“ your mess, Eddie wants to say. Your problem. But it doesn’t feel honest, doesn’t feel real, which only confuses him more. “I’m a mess,” he says instead, because that is real—and then, because it’s even more so, “I don’t know how to do this.” 

“Do what?” 

Eddie shakes his head against the question, because no matter how gentle it is, he can’t allow it to touch the tender truth of it all: he doesn’t know how to let Buck see him like this, doesn’t know how to be held and let it calm the storm between his ribs. 

He doesn’t know how to let this untamed and fluorescent vulnerability tear him apart—how to have a partner that doesn’t pick from all his sown pieces like their weight isn’t the greatest burden in this barren world.

“You don’t have to know,” Buck tells him, hushed. His hands find Eddie’s shoulders—shaky with their gentle touch—and Eddie has to close his eyes against the reverent insistence that splays Buck’s face wide open, so sure in his sincerity. 

Buck doesn’t let him hide this time though. 

His palms travel the length of Eddie’s neck until they’re pressed to the cut of his jaw, and he wants to shake off the hold—wants to bury himself in it—wants to dig down into whatever subconscious is left in him and take out whatever memory would let him know how much a touch like this means between them.          

“Eddie, look at me—please,” Buck whispers, a prayer begging to be heard, like he somehow holds salvation between his fingers but still can’t reach it.

Eddie never knew a merciful God through all his childhood Masses—he could never understand how an almighty power could ignore so many invocations; standing at the edge of Buck’s plea and knowing if he answers, he’ll start a descent he can’t come back from, he finally gets it. He understands how crippling it is to give someone everything they want, when it takes everything you have in return. 

Eddie can’t deny the hellfire in his veins begging for his own absolution, though—so he rewrites the creed carved into his bones that tells him reliance is not strength, and leans into Buck’s hands like they’re the last altar his knees will ever buckle for. 

“I’m here,” Buck tells him, and his eyes crease with the weight of the promise. Red-rimmed and overflowing with a hallowed vow, he holds Eddie’s stare with the same tenderness in his palms. “As long as you want me, I’m here for you, Eddie. You don’t have to know anything—because I have no idea what I’m doing either, but we’ll figure it out, okay? Together.” 

“Okay,” Eddie agrees, reckless and ruined. “Together.”

There had always been a tension cord running down Eddie’s spine—keeping him upright through every emotional blow, never letting him bow to any aftershocks—and he thought if it were to ever snap, each of his vertebra would ricochet and shatter every piece of him until he’d never be able to stand under the weight of the world again.    

So when it was severed—when Eddie broke and fell apart at Buck’s feet that night on the bathroom tile—he didn’t think it was possible to recover from it.

But by some miracle of their own making, things get…Not easier, but manageable. Buck helps him step through all the shards of himself that still feel too sharp to touch, and Eddie is able to handle them a little more carefully. He stops trying to make sense of what came before and makes the decision to just focus on the after he’s left with so he can start forming a normal that feels like it actually belongs to him, here and now.   

So Eddie sees Buck off at the door for his first shift back to work and doesn’t let himself question if he should feel so relieved when he says he’ll be home before lunch tomorrow, and instead Eddie just offers the easy smile that comes in reply without a fuss. 

And even though being home without Buck is stranger than Eddie would like to admit, he lets that truth exist in his thoughts without fighting it. 

There’s still a jagged piece of him that has difficulty accepting help, but he actively avoids cutting himself on it when Hen shows up with her compassion and her son in tow. It’s good to see Chris look so unbothered by everything that’s been surrounding him recently while he excitedly catches up with Denny, and Eddie tells himself if his son can do it then he can too. 

So he listens to Hen talk about the station and doesn’t focus on the fact it’s probably stuff he’s been told before when she explains the situation around her foster daughter, Nia, and instead Eddie just remembers to ask how the home visit went and feels warmed by the smile he gets in return. 

When Hen offers to help him through some gentle PT stretches she’s learned about in one of her classes, he takes the olive branch and lets it be planted into a new tree between them. They’re shallow roots but he wants to water them into something that could take hold, so when she asks how he’s doing—if having Buck around has been helping—he tries to dig out some honesty to give her. 

  “It was pretty weird at first,” Eddie admits. He winces as Hen manipulates his shoulder into small, gentle circles. The look she tosses down to him is empathetic, but he doesn’t know if it’s for the pain or his answer. 

“I was worried it might be,” she tells him, “since there’s such a difference between where your head’s at and where the two of you have ended up.” Eddie nods, his eyes drifting toward the mantle and all its memories, from where he’s perched on the coffee table. 

“It’s been easier to accept him than I thought it’d be, though.” 

Hen stops moving his arm and raises an eyebrow at him. 

“It’s just, he’s so—“ Eddie thinks of backtracking, but it feels disingenuous in the amiable air growing between them. He sighs, rubbing his good hand through his hair roughly while Hen takes a step back and sits herself on the arm of the couch. 

“I get it,” she tells him, her expression softening as Eddie looks up. “Buck has that effect on people—once he’s let in, it’s hard to get him out.” 

Eddie mulls over her words, chews on them and the inside of his cheek, before he looks at his hands. His right arm is fatigued from the gentle movements, his fingers trembling slightly under the strain. Still, it feels good to have it mirroring his good hand as he stares at both his palms upturned in his lap.  

“I don’t want to get him out,” he tells her, devout in the tender admission. When he looks at her again, faint surprise crinkles the edges of her eyes but it quickly warms into understanding. 

“That’s gotta be confusing,” Hen say. She leans forward and reaches one hand out to tangle the fingers of his good hand with hers. “But if it helps, I think you would have arrived here some way or another in the end, memories or not.” 

Something tightens in his chest that feels too close to hope for Eddie to touch. 

“What do you mean?” He needs to hear her say it—he wants to hear someone else acknowledge everything he’s witnessed between them, so he doesn’t feel so crazy for wanting it this badly. 

Hen squeezes his fingers once before leaning back on a sigh. She looks up like an answer will be hiding in the popcorn ceiling. “Look, I don’t want to tell you how to feel. But—“ She levels him with a weighty stare. “You should know…Buck would give you and Chris the world if he could—but you already gave him his world though, Eddie.” 

Eddie makes a wounded sound, because he thinks he understands and it’s sharp in its honesty but he wants it to cut deeper, wants to feel it settle in all his soft parts and until he bleeds nothing but the truth. 

“I have never seen him happier than when he’s with the two of you—and you gave him that. He’s changed since he met you—and over the last couple of years, you have too, Eddie.” He doesn’t realize his eyes have started watering until Hen pushes herself forward and cups his cheek, her thumb wiping at the single tear brave enough to fall. “And that's all I wish for you. However you end up there, I hope you can find that happiness again. You’ve earned it, Eddie. I promise you have.” 

Eddie holds her stare until he feels it seep through his skin and wrap around his bones, and he thinks—maybe he does. 

If it’s big enough that he’s not the only one who can see it—big enough to give him the kind of contentment that’s rounded out his body and soul—maybe he has earned it. 

And maybe that means he doesn’t have to suffer through earning it again to have it. 

Hen doesn’t stay much longer—just long enough to help him with changing over the laundry after he promises to let Buck help him get it out of the dryer tomorrow. When she leaves, Eddie feels full from her honesty, but it isn’t as heavy as he thought it'd be; he has a clarity beginning to build in his chest even if he doesn’t necessarily know what to do with it.

He’s not sure if he wants to confront it yet, even if he’s brimming and close to bursting if he doesn’t.    

So when Carla arrives bright and early Monday morning to pick up Christopher—this time with Eddie in tow as well for his appointment with Frank—he’s feeling distinctly less confident about the whole “bearing his soul” thing therapy likes to drag out of people; he’s not sure if he can take any of his therapist’s poking and prodding at this budding truth yet. Still, Eddie’s knows if he wants any chance at recovering—either his past or for his future—then he has to give over the parts of himself he’s most protective of.   

As it turns out, Frank does, in fact, have plenty to say about his whole tempest act the other day and he promptly regrets being “open” and “honest” with the man. 

He still tells the truth, though, even if he’s unwilling to give himself any points for that fact.

Eddie is already emotionally worn out only halfway through his session, so his guard is down when Frank throws him a curveball and focuses on his actual reason for being there.

“So,” Frank starts casually, “have you thought about what you could have been so afraid of that your mind forced itself to forget?”

That tension cord feels like it’s snaking back up Eddie’s spine as he sits up straighter, and asks, “How could I know that if I can’t remember?” 

“You said Buck talked to you about your life,” Frank reads over his notes, which Eddie knows isn’t to refresh anything since they just talked about this. “When you said that you think you might have remembered flashes of memories, what kind of moments did it happen in?” 

Eddie works his jaw. “I was with Buck.” His tongue presses against the roof of his mouth, sticky with the rest of his admission. “They both happened when—when we were talking about before.” 

“And how were you feeling when it happened?” 

Eddie exhales through his nose; it feels too intimate to tell a stranger, but he reminds himself that Frank is paid to not judge the soft parts of himself. That they’re not going to be trampled unless he keeps them closed too tightly in his fist. 

“I felt—safe. Buck—he…Makes me feel safe.” 

Frank hums, an affirming sound, before he leans forward in his wheelchair with one arm crossed over his knees. “He’s your best friend, and he’s been earnest to help you through this. I’m glad you’ve been able to trust him, Eddie. I know that isn’t easy, especially in your situation.” 

Eddie doesn’t know how to accept praise from his therapist, so he just nods his acknowledgement. Frank, at least, seems to understand that’s as far as he’ll get with him today.

“I’ll be honest with you, Eddie,” Frank sighs, sitting back up and writing a note on his clipboard before tucking the pen safely into the metal clasp. “I think the trauma of the shooting triggered this memory loss because you were scared of something in your life, and it was safer for your mind to forget than to lose it. If talking to Buck makes you feel safe enough that some of your memories are trying to come back, then I think talking more about what you’ve gone through might help you figure out this fear.” 

“Easier said than done,” Eddie tells him, eyes rolling at the simple way Frank says it. 

“Not easy at all,” Frank agrees, ignoring Eddie’s attitude. “Facing your trauma is one of the hardest things a person can do—facing it without knowing it? This will be hard, Eddie, there’s no doubting that. But from what you’ve told me today, you’ve already come a long way in embracing your feelings and I think you have the tools you need to do this if you let yourself.” 

Eddie swallows any smart retort that wants to disparage the acknowledgement of the work he’s put in over the last few days. Because the truth is—he thinks he’s ready to do this too, but he knows what it’s going to take. 

And with the memory of Buck’s shaking hands on the steering wheel burned into his conscience, he’s not sure if Buck is ready to face it with him. 

By the time Carla drops him back off at home, Buck’s Jeep is parked in the driveway and instead of ignoring it, Eddie takes the fluttering sense of comfort out of his chest and examines it. There’s a hope tangled up with it, one that has grown stronger since he left Frank’s office, and despite his apprehension of bringing up the shooting again, he wants to give these feelings a chance to thrive. He tiptoes with that hope in his hands as he takes in Buck on the couch—arms bunched up uncomfortably toward his shoulders and his head drooped to one side, like he didn’t want to fall asleep but once he sat down gravity and exhaustion took over. 

Eddie watches him for a few heartbeats before he tucks that comfort right between his ribs and moves to carefully sit on the cushion next to Buck, making sure his good shoulder is the one that brushes up against him. 

Buck barely stirs, only shuffles closer to his weight dipping the cushion. Eddie relaxes back into the couch and lets his head fall dangerously close to Buck’s shoulder and thinks this is it. This is the simple kind of home he’s always wanted to find. He lets the thought wind through his lungs until he breathes it out on a deep exhale that settles around them with the rest of the midday light. 

Eddie doesn’t know how long he falls asleep for, but it’s long enough that he wakes up with his face jammed into Buck’s neck and he's curled toward the body next to him, knees pulled up and cramped between the cushion and Buck’s ribs. 

“Mornin’,” Buck groans, the sound rumbling against Eddie’s cheek. When he pulls away, his skin sticks to Buck’s and he thinks, absently, they definitely slept through lunch time. 

“Afternoon,” Eddie corrects lightly, pulling away only enough to lean into the cushion instead of Buck’s side. His head is rolled against the back of the couch so he can keep watching Buck as he wakes up, rubbing the sleep away from his eyes with rough hands. 

“Didn’t mean to fall asleep,” he says like an apology. He curls himself into the couch, mirroring Eddie, before giving him a small smile. “How was your appointment with Frank?”

And Eddie—well, normally he’d feel bad about ambushing someone with their trauma right after they wake up. But the question is enough of an opportunity that he knows if he doesn’t take it, he’s going to close that door for so long he might forget how to open it again. 

“Good,” Eddie says. He swallows, then lets the words tumble from his throat, “He thinks we should talk about my traumas—about the shooting.” 

Buck tenses so quickly Eddie thinks he can feel it snap through the air. 

“Eddie, I—“ 

“I know,” Eddie shakes his head, sitting up and leaning in. “I know this isn’t—it isn’t going to be easy, and I don’t want to hurt you with this. But—I need to know, Buck. I need to know what happened, and you’re the only one I trust to tell me.”

It feels like a low blow, and if the wound that opens across Buck’s face is any indicator, it strikes harder than Eddie wanted. 

Buck’s chest rises and falls quickly with his breath, and Eddie shifts so he can reach his good hand out until it’s splayed right over his sternum, a steady weight. Buck watches him with wide eyes before closing them, dragging in deeper breaths until they even out. 

When he looks at Eddie again, it’s with a quiet sort of desperation. 

“I haven’t even been able to think about that day,” Buck admits, whisper silent, like the enormity of it will fill up the room if he’s too loud. “I can’t think about it, it’s just too much. It was too close.” 

“That’s—Buck, that’s—that’s normal, it was traumatic for you.” 

“I wasn’t the one who was shot, Eddie,” Buck spits, broken, and before his face softens with regret. “Sorry, I—I didn’t mean it like that, shit—“ 

“It’s okay,” Eddie tries to tell him, but Buck just shakes his head until it falls forward into his hands. He’s propped up against his knees, staring at the floor, and his fingers grip his hair so tight Eddie wants to take them in his own before he tears any out. “I get it. Just because you weren’t—that doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt, Buck.”     

When Buck doesn’t move—when his fingers just tangle tighter in his hair—Eddie shuffles closer and gently tugs one hand free and then the other, his palm pressed against the rapid beat of Buck’s heart under the thin skin of his wrist. 

He tugs on that hand more until Buck finally has to look up, but when he does there’s a grim confession pooling in his eyes.  

 “I can’t help but think that—that it would have been better, you know, for Chris. If I was the one who was shot.” Buck’s voice is quiet but full of enough conviction that the words don’t just pierce Eddie’s soul but tear through it; he feels unmade in their wake, all his pieces shredded and left sore. “I mean, I couldn’t even be there for him right! When I had to tell him you—you weren’t coming home, I lost it, Eddie.” 

Buck’s eyes beg him to understand—not to alleviate his guilt, but to see it and agree with it. He’s asking Eddie to condemn him, like he isn’t admitting to doing the one thing Eddie could have hoped for. 

Eddie refuses to take the knife handed to him; he refuses to cut Buck deeper with it. 

“You were there for him, Buck. That’s what matters.”

 Buck shakes his head and pulls away, but Eddie follows; he snaps his good hand out, fingers splaying over the soft and worn sweats covering Buck’s knee, and bends his head until he can catch Buck’s eyes again. 

“You don’t get it, Eds,” he sighs, defeated, but he at least holds Eddie’s gaze while he does it. 

Eddie squeezes his knee, fighting the urge to pull him closer. “You don’t get it, Buck,” he challenges, “not if you think it’d be better for Chris that you were gone. How can you think that? How can you see how much he loves you and think he wouldn’t be just as devastated if you left him?” 

Buck stares at him, everything in him torn out and dripping in his expression, before tears gather around his eyelashes and then he’s rapidly blinking them away. 

“I’m not—Eddie, c’mon man.” His voice shakes with his head, like he’s trying to knock loose the sincerity of Eddie’s words. “I’m not as important as you—as his dad—I can’t—“ 

“I wouldn’t leave my kid to you if I didn’t think you’re what’s best for him, with or without me.” The words slip out before Eddie can catch them. He knows it’s probably a low blow—knows how much Christopher means to Buck, has seen it more clearly than anything else about his life since he woke up. But he doesn’t regret saying it; if it’s what it takes to get Buck to understand his—obvious, rightful—place in their lives, he’d say it a thousand times. 

Still, the stricken look stretching Buck’s face into something confused and unrecognizable has him at least remorseful for the impact. 

“What—“ Buck swallows before his expression is carefully rearranged back into place. He watches Eddie with a new kind of caution. “What do you mean by that?” 

Eddie’s conviction falters. “I mean—my will, Buck. You know about—“ A gnawing realization starts to grow in his lungs, stealing all his oxygen as Buck’s face increasingly looks more confused. “I must have told you about my will…Right?” 

“Eddie,” Buck starts, staring at him with wide eyes, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must be confused, I don’t know—“ 

Eddie can’t think—doesn’t know what to think—but he knows there’s no way to mistake what he saw. He doesn’t know why he wouldn’t tell Buck—what the hell had he been thinking—but he knows he has the chance to prove it to him. 

Without another thought, Eddie’s on his feet and headed to his bedroom. He doesn’t stop to see if Buck follows him; he doesn’t need to, because his confused voice is at Eddie’s back by the time he makes it to the closet. 

“Eddie, what are you—“

“Look,” Eddie tells him, stretching on his toes to pull down the stupid shoebox holding the biggest secret of his life, apparently. He’s not careful with it this time; he lets the lid fall to the floor once he shimmies it off, and then lets the rest of the box follow once he has the will in his hand. “Look at this. Read it.” 

Buck is staring at him like he’s crazy, but after Eddie shoves the paper in his hands insistently, he warily takes it. His eyes scan the page quickly—and then he freezes. Eddie watches the way every tendon in Buck’s body seems to calcify at the same time, all except for his eyes, which keep flying over the words. 

“This…Is this…” When Buck finally lifts his gaze, it’s raw and bleeding for answers Eddie wishes he could give him. 

“It’s true,” is all he can say, all he can offer. He takes a step closer before lifting a finger to gently tap at the notarized date. “I did it over a year ago, apparently. It’s why I thought…”

Buck sucks in a breath when he follows Eddie’s finger. “This was—“ His hands start to shake, just a little, the paper shuddering under Eddie’s touch; he moves his hand to steady one of Buck’s before he crumples the will in his grasp. 

“What? Is there something special about the date?” 

Buck looks lost when he stares at him; there’s a distant sort of wonder spreading across his face as he searches for a reason that Eddie can’t give him. 

“Last year, there was—we were on a call. There was this underground well and a kid was trapped—you went down and the kid was brought up, but before you—it was storming, and lightning hit and you—“ Buck’s breathing becomes shallower as he speaks, his hands shaking harder. Eddie gently takes the will from his hands, letting it float down to the hardwood floor at their feet, before stepping so close he can feel the tremors rolling off Buck’s entire body. 

“It’s okay,” Eddie tells him, quietly, unsure of what he’s even reassuring him about. He has no idea where Buck’s mind has drifted, but he’s here and so is Eddie and one way or another, they’re both going to be okay. “I’m here.” 

Buck breathes out, deep but unsteady, and it blows across Eddie’s hair as he looks at him like he’s seeing right through him. He grips Buck’s hand a little tighter, like it’ll tether him until he’s back next to Eddie. 

“You were buried. Forty feet of mud and I couldn’t get to you—“ Buck stares down at his hands like they’re responsible, like he tried to claw Eddie out himself but failed and blames himself for it—he hates it but everything he’s learned about Buck so far, he’s pretty sure that’s exactly what happened. 

“But I got out,” Eddie whispers, because he had to—he’s standing here, alive and on the rough side of well, but he’s here. 

“You did,” Buck says it like he’s reassuring himself. He finally seems to remember where they are, looking down at Eddie and the nonexistent space between them. His hand twitches in Eddie’s grip but he doesn’t move to pull away. “The date on your will—it’s a week and a day after you were buried alive, Eds.” 

He says it like he’s burdened by the weight of the plea in his voice; like Eddie will know what he was thinking eight days after almost dying a year ago, and why he thought Buck didn’t deserve to know everything that decision would reveal back then. 

Eddie can’t be certain why exactly he didn’t talk to Buck first—but he can guess. He can guess why he wouldn’t want to display his heart so open and plainly written onto paper, and ask Buck to take care with how he holds it. 

He doesn’t have to remember to know how deep his love must have ran for Buck back then, because he can feel how hard it beats in his veins for him even now. 

He thinks about Frank’s words—how he should embrace the fear that must have been born from the trauma of being shot—and he almost wants to laugh; he’s not been afraid of dying since he signed up for his second tour and came home broken and bruised. But when he thinks of the love he’s built in this house, their home, and ever being taken away from it? 

Eddie is terrified. 

He can’t even remember forging any of it, but he’s already so scared of losing it; he can’t imagine how many pieces he’d be shattered into if he could remember. 

So maybe Frank is right, and maybe his brain is trying to protect him by forgetting all the things he loved and all the things that tried to take them away, but Eddie has to protect this. He’s got Buck’s fluttering heart between his hands right now, and he’s got one opportunity to make sure he knows Eddie would dig himself out of that mud a thousand times over if it meant keeping that heart safe. 

“Why would I leave Christopher to you without having to ask you first, Buck?” 

“Eddie, I don’t—“

Eddie sighs, chasing Buck’s gaze as he tries to hide it. “Why would I leave Christopher’s guardianship up to chance?” 

Finally, Buck meets his stare and holds it. “Because it wouldn’t be.” When Eddie nods his encouragement, Buck adds with more confidence, “It wouldn’t be chance. You—you knew there’s no way I would say no.” 

“No,” Eddie says slowly, and before the brief flicker of panic in Buck’s eyes can grow, he finishes, “I know that, Buck. Not knew. Even after just a week—Buck, I know how much you love Christopher.” He swallows down the claim how much you love us before he can do something stupid, like say it out loud. 

“But—you don’t know, Eds—you—“

“Evan,” Eddie sighs, “you haven’t doubted me since I woke up. Why are you starting now?” 

“Because you—I’m not—“

“Not what? Capable? You’ve taken care of both me and Chris this entire week, I don’t believe that for—“ 

“I’m not worth it, Eddie!” Buck heaves the words out of him and they land with a terrible weight between them. “You and—and Chris, you’re both worth the world, okay? And I—“ Eddie is left staring, speechless, as Buck drags in air with gulping breaths. His eyes are wild with tears that refuse to fall, but only reflect the insistence in his stare. “I should have been able to save you, Eddie, you never should have been shot in the first place! I was supposed to have your back but I—I—“

“You did save me, Buck—“ Eddie doesn’t know where the words come from and he doesn’t have enough time to unearth them before Buck cuts him off, like he didn’t hear anything. 

“I just stood there, I didn’t even see it coming—you were across from me and then you weren’t and you—“ 

 “And I reached for you, because I knew you’d reach back.” Eddie says it with such certainty in his chest, blooming right under lungs and filling them with conviction, that it takes a full heartbeat for him to realize why Buck is suddenly very, very quiet and staring at him widely. 

Eddie remembers reaching for Buck. 

He remembers the sharp shock of the bullet tearing through his shoulder, and then he remembers his eyes finding his partner and not leaving him again until he couldn’t keep them open any longer. 

He remembers the anguish on Buck’s face—the way he watched Eddie right back, rooted in place for a moment that lasted longer than the breath that had gotten stuck in Eddie’s chest. 

“You—I never told you that, Eddie,” Buck says slowly, like if he’s careful with the words then the truth of them won’t be scared away. He looks like he’s shaking, but when he lays a steady hand on the curve of Eddie’s neck, Eddie realizes it’s actually him. 

He feels the tremors then, vibrating through is body with such force that a gasp is knocked loose from his throat and then he’s crumbling; his knees try to lock against his fall but it only pitches him forward, but—but Buck is there, right in front of him, and he lowers them more carefully to the ground. The hardwood against Eddie’s knees feels like concrete but he can barely feel anything it at all, actually—he tries to focus on it, but all the feeling in his body is being knocked around with the rest of the reverberations in his bones. 

“Breathe, Eddie, I got you,” Buck murmurs, slow and steady, just like his heartbeat under Eddie’s palm. His vision focuses enough for him to see where Buck has brought his hand up to cover his chest, right over Buck’s heart, and he’s holding it there with a firm grasp even as his thumb sweeps gently over the underside of Eddie’s wrist. 

“You—“ Eddie looks up, eyes wide and searching, as he asks, “you said that, didn’t you? In the—firetruck?” At Buck’s hesitant nod, Eddie continues, a little quicker. “You said ‘I got you,’ and all I could do was watch you, I just wanted to see you, but—“ Eddie shakes his head, the memory blurring together. 

He can’t picture the before—or the after—but he sees Buck so very clearly; Buck, hunched over him and splattered in his blood; Buck, wide eyed and begging; Buck, pressing against his shoulder and then pressing closer still, telling him to hang on. 

“You remember?” Buck asks him with such a quiet hope that Eddie hates he has to break it. 

“I—“ He tries to focus, but most of his brain feels like it’s been shoved full of static; he tries to pull something—anything—else out of the haze but he’s only left with a handful of frustration. “No, not everything, I can just picture when—but nothing else. I can’t remember anything else.“ 

Their eyes meet when Eddie refocuses. And it’s not—there isn’t a rush, or a flood, or anything else that Eddie expected when he thought about remembering. But when he looks at Buck—sees the lines of worry creasing between his eyebrows, sees the red rims of his eyes, sees the small tremor in his bottom lip—Eddie knows him. 

He doesn’t remember the time between them that’s still lost somewhere in the miasma of his mind, but he knows Buck. 

He slips his hand from Buck’s chest up to his shoulder to his neck before his fingers make a shaky path across his jaw—his cheek—his birthmark. Buck’s breath is fast but his eyes are steady as they hold Eddie’s gaze, hope and confusion mixing in a dangerous way. 

“I feel you,” Eddie whispers, too afraid to admit it any louder. “I can’t—I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel you, Buck. I can’t remember but I—I know you.” 

He knows he sounds crazy—but it’s like there’s an imprint of Buck on his soul; there’s a deep well of affection rooted within his bones, tangled up with each sinew and tissue, that echos the devotion built from all those years and it’s like if nothing else was left of Eddie, he’d still have Buck burrowed right there next to his heart and fighting to be felt. 

He closes his eyes and leans in until his forehead presses right up against Buck’s, his fingers curling in the hair at the back of Buck’s neck to keep him close. He tries to concentrate, tries to push close enough that maybe it’ll wring out something else, anything else. 

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Eddie whispers, quiet as a confession, and he feels Buck suck in a breath right across from his lips. “I—I knew you’d fight for Christopher, and you’re all I want for him if I—but I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“Why?” Buck asks, quick and desperate, like if he asks fast enough Eddie will be able to pull the answer out before it disappears. 

And Eddie—he can’t be sure. It’s all—mixed up, cloudy, and he isn’t sure what’s a real memory and what’s just a feeling buried in his chest that echos like one. But if there’s one thing he knows—one thing he can feel, so certainly, that he knows it’s enough to scare him to his core to think he could lose it. 

So he may not remember, but Eddie knows it’s true when he says, “Because I love you, Evan.” It’s quiet, reverent, and when Eddie opens his eyes it has Buck trembling. “I love you, and I didn’t know how to tell you about the will without telling you that, too.” 

“Eddie,” Buck says his name like it’s a plea. Tears gather at the edge of his eyes and Eddie pulls back so he can wipe at them. “How can you—are you sure? How can you know if you—“ He sucks in a breath and the one he exhales is jagged with doubt. 

“I might not remember everything,” Eddie agrees carefully, watching as his thumb wipes away the moisture gathering at the corner of his eye again. “But I’ve—God, Buck, I didn’t have to. I’ve been falling in love with you all over again this week, before I even remembered a single damn thing.” 

“You were?” Buck whispers in broken awe. 

The smile that pulls against the brittle corners of Eddie’s lips is small but sure. “You’re part of our family, Evan. Part of Chris. Part of me—I didn’t understand why I wanted to trust you so badly, at first. But now I get it—because the only way I’ve been able to trust myself is by believing you, Buck. By trusting you.” 

Buck searches his face and Eddie opens it to him, lets him see everything he has to offer. It’s not much, not yet, but it’s more than he could have been sure of even an hour ago and everything he has, he knows he’d give to Buck in a heartbeat. 

“You love me?” 

It’s small—trembling with hope—just like the fingers Buck raise to cup Eddie’s jaw. He leans into the touch, and breathes in the certainty that it belongs right there, right against his skin. 

“So goddamn much, Evan.” 

Buck laughs then, quiet at first and then bubbling through his tears and smile. 

“God, Eddie, I love you too. I love you so much I don’t know what to do with it, I want—“ His eyes flicker to Eddie’s mouth and his grip tightens just a fraction on Eddie’s jaw and it’s just enough to have him pressing forward, right until their breath tangles right between their lips. 

For what he’s pretty sure is the first time, Eddie lets himself see Buck; see the way he watches Eddie with an unguarded wanting, and for once, Eddie lets himself want right back. 

“Kiss me,” Eddie breathes out and before it can even reach Buck’s mouth, he’s surging forward and pressing a kiss to Eddie’s lips. It’s bruising in its tenderness and Eddie gasps into it, his hand falling to Buck’s ribcage and gripping him closer. Buck pulls him in by the jaw, and Eddie deliriously wishes he could be pulled right into Buck’s chest and live there next to the rasped breaths he feels expand against his palm. 

“God, Eddie,” Buck’s voice is ragged, raw, and Eddie feels ruined by it. 

“I know, I know,” he agrees, because he gets it—it’s all so much, almost too much, but then he’s leaning in and Buck is all sensual reverence in the way he moves his lips against his and for a moment, that’s all that matters. 

When they finally manage to part—not far, though, their foreheads pressed firmly together—Eddie’s fingers refuse to untangle from Buck’s shirt, right over his ribs, and Buck’s hands have anchored to the sides of his neck while his thumbs stroke comforting lines across the cut of his jaw. 

“Where do we go from here?” Buck whispers, quiet and curious, but there’s a surety in the way he asks that Eddie smiles at. 

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly, but the unknown doesn’t feel so overwhelming with the admission. “But what did you say before? That we’d figure it out?” 

“Together,” Buck finishes for him, and Eddie can feel the smile that splits Buck’s lips like an imprint on his bones. If he can keep nothing else, he wants to keep that happiness burning bright in his veins for the rest of his life. 

With that vow thrumming under his tongue, Eddie smiles right back, wild and brilliant. 

“Together.”