Archive of Our Own ^beta

I think, sometimes, that my whole body is made of love, flesh and bone and blood, and that within me I carry more than I can bear, enough that, if I gave it to you, it would spill out of your hands.

What they explained was that he got struck by lightning. What they told him was the recovery process, what Eddie told him was 3 minutes and 17 seconds, what he remembers if he thinks hard enough is the dream where he wasn’t a failure for his original purpose and he realized he didn’t want it.

For being in a coma on the verge of death, Buck thinks he’s feeling mostly good. There’s a residual ache around his heart, sort of like the phantom pain in his leg all those years ago, but Buck isn’t a stranger to his mind playing tricks, and when he’s in that space between waking and sleep, the ache becomes hurt deep in his chest, for who he was between life and death, for what he left behind, and for what he chose instead.

“Eddie,” he mumbles drowsily, eyes closed, chest hurting again the way it does when he’s on the verge of unconsciousness. He’s still so tired, weighted. All he wants to do is sleep, but it’s lonely, going to a place only your own mind knows. He’s afraid of loneliness, sometimes, and more afraid that he won’t wake up. That he could end up there again.

“I’m here,” says Eddie’s voice, a little rough, warm, and then Eddie’s hand envelopes his, steady and grounding, and Buck’s chest rises and falls normally, without another complaint.

“Don’t leave,” Buck murmurs.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Eddie says, and then, “Sleep,” and Buck does.

-

They send Buck home on a Monday. Maddie texts him to let him know she’s coming for dinner at six sharp, which means she’ll be there by five, and Buck knows this because she was asked to leave at the end of visiting hours three times yesterday before she finally relented.

Normally, Buck would protest, but he feels like he’s missing everyone more than he ever has, more than when they were apart, and there’s something knocking around in his head, something that feels like finally, like truth and something soothing, some reminder that he’s not alone the way he was always worried he would be.

That’s not really the reason he doesn’t protest when Eddie drives him home, or when they pull up to Eddie’s house instead of the loft either. Maybe a little part of it, but Eddie hasn’t shaved in two days, and his clothes are rumpled, and he was sitting in Buck’s room the whole time, quiet and calm, and when Eddie walked to his car without even a question, Buck knew he trusted him to follow, so he did. That’s the second part of it.

“You know, you don’t have to take care of me,” Buck points out when he’s laying on Eddie’s bed, letting Eddie ghost his hands over his bare torso. “I feel fine.”

Eddie doesn’t even look at him, focused on his task, but he frowns. “You died,” he says, pausing for a moment, then sighing. “You died, Buck.”

“I know,” Buck says, watching him. He is fine, mostly, but there’s a little kernel of worry sitting there in his chest.

“There are a lot of complicated feelings that come with that,” Eddie says, eyes finally flickering to his. He’s kneeling on the bed next to him, knees bumping into Buck’s side, but Buck doesn’t mind that so much. He kind of likes it, the points of contact between them, though it’s fabric not skin. Eddie doesn’t look worried, per se, just… Buck isn’t really sure what that look means.

“It doesn’t feel complicated,” Buck says. It feels… he doesn’t know, but not complicated. Uncertain, maybe. Like the world changed its axis, a little.

“The best thing to do,” Eddie says, ignoring him, “is to allow yourself to feel it. All of it,” he adds on pointedly. He presses his palm gently on Buck’s skin, watching him carefully. “Feel different?”

Eddie’s hand is warm. His magic feels sort of the same, like he’s soothing over a wound with his hand, healing it little by little.

Right now, it doesn’t feel like anything. There’s nothing in particular to heal, so Eddie’s magic remains contained.

Eddie tried to explain it to him once. “It’s like trying to drink beer with your mouth closed,” he had said, holding up the bottle in his hand. “Nowhere to go.”

“Your magic is like beer,” Buck had repeated, mouth twitching, and Eddie laughed.

“It can be sour,” Eddie argued, grinning.

Buck had tilted his head. “Does it feel sour?”

Eddie looked into his bottle. “Sometimes,” he relented after a moment. “When I’m angry.”

“And the rest of the time?” Buck asked, because Eddie’s magic has never felt sour. Because he’s been the subject of Eddie’s anger, and he’s seen Eddie’s sorrow, Eddie at his worst, but his magic has never felt anything but safe.

Eddie had paused long enough to let the silence sink in. Then, “Don’t know. What does it feel like to you?”

Buck didn’t even have to think. “Warm.”

Right now, the only thing that’s warm is Eddie’s hand, the solid weight of his palm on Buck’s skin.

Buck knows Eddie can tell that it isn’t doing anything, but he answers anyway. “No.” And then, because he wants to be sure, “Can—can you check my heart?”

A little furrow forms between Eddie’s eyebrows, but he doesn’t say anything, so Buck rushes to fill in the gap. “It’s—my doctor said there wasn’t anything wrong but—my chest felt kind of heavy.” It doesn’t now. It didn’t when Eddie held his hand in the hospital, and it didn’t on the way home. Buck sort of thinks it could be Eddie’s magic healing him inadvertently when he’s close by, but even if it’s psychological, Buck doesn’t think keeping Eddie close to him is so bad.

Eddie looks for a moment like he doesn’t want to indulge him. But Buck knows he’ll cave, because the first thing he did after Buck got discharged was take him to the Diaz household and tell him to take his shirt off and lie in his bed so he could inspect him himself.

Eddie’s internal battle ends and he slides his palm over to Buck’s heart. For a second, there’s only the sound of them breathing, the steady rhythm of Buck’s heart, Eddie’s hand on him. Buck could stay here for a while just like this. Eddie’s house is his safe place in a lot of ways, and coming here from a hospital bed is such a relief that part of Buck wants to ask if he can stay. It’s not just the place, though. It’s Eddie’s hand on him too, the focused look in Eddie’s eyes that Buck wants to bask in.

“What’s the diagnosis?” he asks, more sincerely than he means to. He peers up at Eddie to assess his expression. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the doctors—it’s just that this is Eddie. He trusts Eddie.

“Safe,” is all Eddie says curtly, like this is baseball. He removes his hand but doesn’t move back immediately, staring at Buck. “You’ll let me know if it hurts again?”

“It didn’t hurt,” Buck corrects. “Just felt heavy.”

Eddie settles his weight back, raising his eyebrows as if to say, okay, and? “You’ll let me know if it feels heavy again?” he repeats, acting exasperated, but the line of his mouth is still firm, the corners of his lips downturned.

Any retort dies on Buck’s tongue. “Yeah,” he says, because he knows what that frown means now, because he knows how Eddie looks when he’s worried. For a split second, he’s tempted to reach up and smooth away the little lines between his eyebrows. Instead, he adds on, “I’m good,” when Eddie doesn’t move.

Eddie lingers an extra moment anyway, before finally moving off the bed. He watches Buck pull his shirt on, worrying his bottom lip, but he turns away when Buck catches his eyes, clearing his throat. “Want a beer?” he asks, already leaving for the kitchen.

Buck can’t help it. He snorts and then follows. “Aren’t you supposed to be a medic?” he asks. “And you were in the room when they ran me through the medications.”

He was. He was there almost the whole time, ducking out to pick up Chris, then back and restless, fiddling with the hem of his shirt, reading a book for a minute before putting it down again. Buck had told him he didn’t have to stay, and Eddie had given him a look like he was the crazy one for even suggesting it.

Buck gets it. If they had allowed him in the room after Eddie had been shot, he wouldn’t have left either.

Eddie grabs himself a beer anyway, even though it’s three in the afternoon, and he seems a little more settled with something in his hands. He leans against the counter, so Buck mirrors him, leaning against the island. Buck has noticed that Eddie tends to busy himself with something when he’s thinking something that hits a little too hard.

Buck can’t blame him. There’s an anxious thread running through him making him tap his fingers against the counter, so he decides to beat Eddie to it. “You worried about me?” he asks, tilting his head, fingers stilling.

Eddie grimaces, then shrugs. “You’re fine,” he says, gesturing to Buck’s body.

“I’m fine,” Buck echoes, because Eddie is saying it, but he’s not really believing it. Because he’s saying it like he’s trying to convince himself, and his knuckles are white where he’s holding on to the bottle a little too tightly, and it hits Buck then, that Eddie has watched people die before, people he cared about. “I’m fine,” Buck says again, softer. “Really.”

Eddie can’t seem to help looking at him, and once he’s looking, he can’t seem to look away. “You had scars, you know,” he says, very still. Buck’s body seems to quiet with him.

“Lichtenberg figures?” he asks.

When Buck was six, lightning had struck a huge, old tree sitting atop a hill Maddie and he used to sled down when it snowed enough. Maddie took him to see it after, and Buck remembers how large it was, even torn down the middle, wood black and splintered from the force of it.

Buck had felt small, smaller than he usually did, and Maddie, always able to read him, had taken his hand. “Look, Evan. It said sorry,” she said, pointing at the branching marks.

He learned they had a name years later. He had looked them up for no reason other than he didn’t have marks to remember Maddie by, when she left.

At his words, Eddie pauses. “What?”

“The marks you get when struck by lightning,” Buck explains. “They usually only last a day.”

Eddie nods after a second. Usually he’d tease Buck for his trivia a little more, but Buck can tell he’s trying to keep himself together. “They did,” he says, and he’s almost unreadable, but Buck knows him.

“Eddie,” is all he has to say.

“What, Buck?” Eddie says like he’s frustrated, hunching in on himself. “I thought—” He tries to breathe, shaky, and rubs a hand over his face. He looks like he’s falling apart for a second before he tries to close it up, like an old wound reopened, a buried grief unearthed again, but Buck’s throat aches with it.

He realizes with a start that he’s seen that look on Eddie’s face once before. Eddie looked the same sort of helpless after Shannon died, when he turned the blame inwards and couldn’t quite figure out how to forgive himself for it.

“You were dead,” Eddie says quietly, but he isn’t looking at Buck anymore. “And I—I didn’t know how to bring you back.”

“Don’t,” Buck says immediately. “Don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault, Eddie.”

When Eddie looks back, his eyes are so dark, and so so warm. Buck swears he can see the cracks in them, the way they’re begging him to know that Eddie tried. “My magic—” Eddie says, like he’s bleeding.

“You’re a witch,” Buck points out. “Not a necromancer. You still have to obey natural laws.”

It’s obvious bait despite the reassurance. Eddie’s mouth turns down, but he can’t help himself. “Necromancers don’t exist.”

“Ever the disbeliever,” Buck teases, and Eddie cracks a smile that warms Buck immediately. It feels like a physical thing more than it ever has, relieving the weight on Eddie’s shoulders, easing the dull weight within Buck.

“I believe in some things,” Eddie argues, looking back at the bottle in his hand.

“Not yourself?” Buck asks, pointedly, but not harsh.

Eddie opens his mouth wordlessly. He pauses there, like the words have evaporated on his tongue, and then closes his mouth, offers a half shrug. “You came back, didn’t you?” he says, like it’s an admission, like he doesn’t understand.

Buck thinks he can read between the lines. I can’t trust myself but I can trust you.

Sometimes, when it’s after nine pm and Buck can’t trust himself in the hours that stretch on endlessly, he imagines himself as a broken record, scratching over and over at the same weathered spot until he wears it down to nothing. He imagines losing the things that he’s trying to hold on to as tightly as he can, and then he picks himself up and the hours compress into the minutes between the loft and Eddie’s house, and then the minutes turn into the second between Eddie catching sight of him and the familiar flicker in his eyes, the quirk of his mouth.

That’s all it takes to banish the unease. The corner of Buck’s mouth rises despite himself. “Couldn’t get rid of me that easily?” he asks, sure that Eddie will meet him in the middle, like a handshake between them.

Eddie does, like it wasn’t even a question. “I’ve tried a few times,” he says dryly, “but you don’t seem willing to kick it.”

Buck grins. “Come on. And abandon my favorite Diaz?”

Eddie’s eyes look lighter when he looks back up. “Don’t let Christopher hear you say that,” he says, bottle forgotten, attention solely on Buck again. Buck soaks in it. “He’ll get jealous.”

“You want to be my favorite?” Buck asks, delighted.

Eddie gives him a tentative smile. “Don’t flatter yourself,” but he goes back into motion, resting an elbow on the counter, bringing the bottle to his lips, and the little knot in Buck’s chest loosens.

“You’ve got my undivided attention,” Buck teases, but he’s being sincere too, and he’s sure Eddie can tell, can read the little shiver that zips up his spine when he says it. He holds his hands out in front of him, palms up, like an offer. “I’m all yours.”

Eddie’s grin softens into something liquid. “Whatever you say, Buck,” he says, stepping forward to clap a hand on Buck’s shoulder, lingering there for just barely too long.

If Buck didn’t know what to look for, he might not even have noticed. The best way Buck can describe it is Eddie looking like he’s settling back into himself. Most of the time he’s walking around in a fuzzy Eddie-shaped haze, but when he really leans on his magic, when he lets it flow through him, he looks exactly like himself, with tired eyes and soft edges and his heart outside his chest.

Buck doesn’t say a thing about it. Instead, he lets Eddie withdraw his hand, lets him go out of focus again, and he tries to figure out if Eddie is less blurry than usual, or if he’s chasing closeness, like a broken record all over again.

“You driving?” Eddie asks like it’s nothing, and Buck knows it’s time to pick up Christopher from school just as he knows that Eddie is about to toss him the keys, and his hand is up before he even thinks about it.

The keys land in his hand like they’re meant to be there. He bumps his shoulder against Eddie’s on the way out the door, familiar and right and enough to reassure, and Eddie leans into it, briefly, then away but he’s still in focus, this time, and Buck doesn’t feel like a broken record at all.

The steering wheel is an old friend under his hands, and maybe Buck is meant to be here, too.

-

The thing about having a hyper realistic dream during your coma after your heart stopped is Buck can’t knock off the urge to check. Surfacing after sleep is always disorienting, so he does two things: check that his pulse is still steady at his wrist, and then check he’s in the right timeline.

“I’m coming over,” is the first thing Eddie says to him today when he picks up the phone. Buck mumbles sleepily, closes his eyes, and next thing he knows he’s blinking awake to the sound of something sizzling on the pan downstairs.

“Don’t burn down my kitchen,” he calls, voice rough.

“Get out of bed,” Eddie calls back, and Buck’s chest goes all warm as he smiles, inevitable.

Maddie has finally stopped with the neverending rotation of guests, so Buck has a moment to breathe and blink up at his ceiling. To remember what it feels like to be alive, moving his limbs, wiggling his fingers and his toes, the bed warm under him, sunlight slanting through his windows, and the sound of something clanging and then Eddie’s resulting curse.

“Don’t break my kitchen either,” Buck calls again. Eddie doesn’t bother replying, but Buck imagines the little vindictive flicker in Eddie’s chest, or more than just imagines because he knows Eddie so much that it’s tangible, because he highly suspects that Eddie just threw him a middle finger. Just to mess with him, Buck says, “Saw that.”

“Sure you did, man,” Eddie replies, but Buck can hear his grin in his voice, and that’s what gets Buck to roll out of bed.

They eat the omelets Eddie made together, as Eddie updates Buck on the 118 and Christopher. Of all his visitors, Buck likes it most when Eddie’s here, even if Eddie is still a little too restless. He gives Buck space, doesn’t mind if Buck doesn’t want to talk (which is rarely), and even when he sticks around for far too long, it’s not suffocating. Eddie isn’t on a schedule, after all. He’s not here because someone else asked. He’s here for Buck, and Buck can’t help but look at him and remember when they were in the opposite positions, when Buck didn’t want to let Eddie out of his sight after seeing what his blood looked like on the pavement, to reassure himself that Eddie’s blood stayed where it belongs, body intact, and that the warmth of his own magic trying to stitch him back together wasn’t leaking out the way it did when Buck dragged him under the engine, Eddie’s skin hot enough to burn, when Buck held on to him anyway.

When Buck thinks about that, when he closes his eyes, he can still see it, feel it, so he thinks he gets it, why Eddie is sticking so close. And it’s not the same for anyone else, the way Buck wanted to be there for him, the way Eddie is here for him. He doesn’t know what makes it different for just the two of them, but it is.

Buck blinks when he realizes he zoned out staring at his plate, looking up to meet Eddie’s gaze, immediate relief washing over him, and he’s reminded all over again that he died but he’s not dead, and Buck wasn’t lying to Hen, exactly, when he said he felt fine, but he still isn’t sure that next time he blinks his eyes open he’ll be in a universe where he’s loved all the way through, and it’s still wrong.

Eddie told him to feel, so Buck lets himself feel it, deep and raw and real. Being alive is the drag of his fingers against the counter, the taste of the omelet, Eddie’s eyes on his, Eddie’s chest rising and falling as he breathes, in the loft, in Buck’s life like he belongs here.

“You back with me?” Eddie asks, watching him carefully, sitting very still now.

“Yeah,” Buck says, taking a deep breath. “Sorry.”

Eddie shakes his head, a quiet scolding, but he doesn’t say anything for another minute. “Where’d you go?” he asks eventually.

Buck doesn’t know how to answer. “I can’t even remember it that well,” is what he decides on. “I don’t know why it bothers me.”

“Your dream?” Eddie clarifies.

Buck nods slowly. Eddie doesn’t say anything, and Buck knows it’s because Eddie knows how to get him to talk, and Eddie knows Buck is aware of this little trick of his, but Eddie still does it, and Buck still breaks. “I don’t want to wake up there again,” Buck confesses. “When I think about it—it’s like I can feel the wrongness of everything. But I—I don’t know. Some things weren’t bad. Hen was the same.” Eddie snorts, quietly, even though he already knows this, and it gives Buck the courage to say, “But things weren’t—it wasn’t all right. Like Maddie and Chim, like—” His tongue gets tangled on the words, but they’re important, “—you weren’t there.”

It hits him hard when he says it like that. The first time he said it, it was exact. It was the details, the facts, but it wasn’t the feelings. It wasn’t the dread in the pit of Buck’s stomach, the knowledge that he could’ve fixed it, this broken thing, the way he had almost turned next to him on instinct only to stop himself because he knew no one would be there. It wasn’t the echo of emptiness, the coolness where there should’ve been warmth, the loneliness of his knee, used to bumping into Eddie’s.

Eddie acknowledges it with a tip of his head, but he says, as steady as always, “Best person to verify you’re alive then.”

Buck can’t help but crack a grin, and it’s almost like his body can settle then, like once he smiles his mind remembers how to let go, how to remember what’s important, or maybe it’s that he can see the way the line of Eddie’s mouth softens a little when Buck’s mouth quirks up. He’s glad of the physicality of it, the feeling he gets in response. It’s solid, grounding, tangible.

It’s only around Eddie. When he’s with everyone else, Buck feels the same as before, and sometimes it’s as if nothing happened, like his heart didn’t stop. He pushes on the same as he always does, bored to tears when not at work, trying to find ways to occupy time, trying to stuff down the urge to go out and just—help. Do something, be useful. He pushes against the coddling, hates the suffocation of worry, even when he knows it’s coming from a place of love. It’s just that he remembers an age ago, when worry was the only thing standing between him and his job, and he remembers the distance it brought, the look on Eddie’s face.

Buck swore to himself, never again, because Eddie had asked him to return, had forgiven him, had trusted him, and trust isn’t a thing lightly given, not with Eddie.

Maybe that’s why Buck keeps feeling it with him. Maybe it’s because Eddie trusted him to return, because Buck knows Eddie trusts him like no one else, that a part of Buck belongs to Eddie, always will, and Buck took that seriously before, but he didn’t appreciate it for all it was. There was a world in which he lost it, but not one that he never had it in the first place. He understands the gravity of that now.

“Sure,” Buck says, rolling his eyes, delighted when Eddie’s lips curve up into a responding smile, easy, just like that. He knows Eddie knows he’s glad for him, but Buck pretends anyway. “I could call Bobby every morning too,” he points out.

Eddie doesn't even miss a beat, tilting his head. “And every afternoon?”

Buck is unable to keep down his grin now. “I do not nap every afternoon.”

“But you call me every afternoon,” Eddie corrects, eyes shining with amusement, and there’s something small tucked into Buck’s heart, something that memorizes this moment, the natural teasing, back and forth, Eddie’s mirth, the comfort Buck sits in, the rightness of this all. It feels like belonging, and Buck has to wonder if that’s what living is all about in the end, whatever feeling it is that he gets just looking at Eddie sometimes, like he can feel it back.

“Yesterday, you called me,” Buck retorts anyway, straightening up, getting heated at the false accusation.

Eddie pauses then, and Buck’s chest tightens for a split second, before Eddie says, light, “I’d gotten used to it. The radio silence was out of character.”

“You going to keep me in your sight?” Buck offers like a solution, raising an eyebrow, and then Eddie gives him a look that knocks the breath out of his chest, because Buck knows that look, contemplative and acknowledging, as if it’s a genuine offer and not a joke, and then he thinks he gets it, both for Eddie, to have him safe and close, and for himself, to be close and in the place that feels most right. He wouldn’t have to call in the morning, because in that other universe Eddie’s house didn’t exist. There, the couch wouldn’t have the creases from Buck sleeping on it so often. There, the place called home would smell like something different, nothing like Eddie’s cologne, or Christopher’s toothpaste, or the woodsy body wash the three of them share, and Buck’s entire body feels tender and achy at the thought of that, of not having it, of getting it back.

Then he thinks of waking up in Eddie’s house, and the tenderness gets impossibly softer, more fragile, and Buck wants that reassurance every time, to hear Eddie’s voice close by. How could his dream bother him there? How could anything, really?

“You’re making dinner,” Eddie tells him, point blank, as if it’s already been decided. There’s room to protest, Buck knows, but he doesn't want to, and he knows Eddie and he knows himself and he knows the two of them and how they work.

“Done,” Buck replies, which he thinks is a little funny because it was never a question. He knows Eddie never doubted it, not even for a moment, but it’s worth the little joke for Eddie’s responding smile, a different one than the ones before, one that’s private and relieved and reassured, and just the sight of it is enough for Buck to feel it pressing into his skin, like an anchor tying him here, to the things that are imperfect, real, his, and that’s the part that matters most. It’s his.

-

Being at Eddie’s house fixes a lot of things.

Being barred from work is less unbearable when Buck can hear Eddie getting ready for it in the morning, when Chris calls out to Eddie about the location of his homework, backpack, and lunchbox (Eddie always acts exasperated about it but locates it anyway), and the smell of breakfast convinces Buck to roll off the couch. Time doesn’t bother him as much at Eddie’s house, not where there’s a million things to do: laundry, fixing the chipped paint by the mantle, cleaning, reading Eddie’s books, and buying little things that fit into place like they were meant to be there.

It’s not as jarring to wake up either. The blankets Buck use smell like Eddie, because he keeps hogging them when they watch movies. The pillowcase not as much, but Eddie uses a different detergent than Buck does, and that in itself is enough that Buck’s brain always knows he’s safe before he’s awake enough to understand why.

He feels alive here. It’s not electric, or thrilling, or blood pumping in his veins, not the type of adrenaline he usually chases. It’s simpler than that, a fact. Buck is alive, Eddie’s house is home, the sun rises in the morning. Simple.

Sometimes he gets flashes of the dream, but that crawling dread that haunted him at the loft doesn’t bother him here, as if Eddie’s magic has learned to protect him too.

Eddie raises his eyebrows when Buck mentions it offhand, pausing in trying to peel off his shirt. They dropped Chris off at a friend’s house about an hour ago so they’d kicked back on the couch to play a few video games, maybe start a new show Buck’s been eyeing. Eddie appeared with two beers in hand, which turned out to be a bad decision after they’d both gotten a little competitive, resulting in Eddie spilling beer on his shirt and his pants both. Buck, after fetching clean clothes, simply stayed in the bathroom with Eddie after handing them off.

“You do know my magic can’t do anything besides—” Eddie tells him, and then he stops, frozen, which makes Buck trip up on his train of thought for a moment, a flicker of disquiet itching at him that drowns after another moment because once Buck has a hunch, he can’t let it go.

“Besides heal,” Buck says, filling in the gap, “I know. But it’s like… okay, you said when the truck fell on me, your magic reacted.”

Eddie nods slowly, going back to slowly pulling off his shirt where it’s sticking against his skin.

“So what if, when I died, and you tried to save me, it reacted again?” Buck says excitedly, because it’s a good theory and it would make sense. Eddie’s always healed people after the fact. That’s what first responders do most of the time, deal with what’s been done, but when Buck was laying there, blind with the pain of it, there had been a small part of him that knew he was going to lose his leg with every passing breath. After, Eddie told him he’d never tried to stop an injury while it was happening, but he didn’t even think when he was holding Buck’s hand then, didn’t even have to focus more than usual for his magic to flow out of him and keep Buck steady the whole time.

So it makes sense, because Eddie’s magic is a lot like him, bursting out when needed, when called, and lying in wait the rest of the time, bottled up. He briefly tries to imagine what Eddie would have looked like next to his still body, and then instantly tries to forget it, because he can see it so vividly it hurts, because he can imagine the distress and the desperation, the outpour of emotion, and it’s so—it’s too much—he can’t banish it from his mind, hurting all over for Eddie, so vivid he can feel it, so much that he can’t help but press a hand against his chest.

Eddie’s hand immediately covers his, and when Buck looks up, Eddie is standing very close to him, eyebrows furrowed in worry, eyes flickering back and forth between his. “Your chest?” Eddie asks, voice full of concern, hand regular warmth, lack of magic reassuring Buck that he isn’t hurt physically, that he’s just feeling.

“Sorry,” Buck says, voice trembling a little, suddenly. He tries to swallow it down. His emotions have been out of control since dying, and he’s not sure if that’s a usual byproduct of being dead and then coming back to life, or if it’s because it’s about Eddie, the way things often are, the way that matters more than ever. It helps that he’s here in Eddie’s bathroom, and oddly enough, that Eddie is shirtless, chest right there, skin and muscle and the wisps of hair on his stomach sticking to his skin where the beer spilled, so so alive and real and it reminds Buck all over again that he’s here, alive and real too. “Okay,” Buck relents, glad that Eddie hasn’t taken his hand away yet, “maybe your magic isn’t protecting me.”

Eddie makes a sound in his throat. “My magic always protects you,” he argues back, but he looks anxious. “Does it hurt?”

Buck shakes his head dutifully, and Eddie lets out a breath like he’s been holding it in this whole time. Buck knows Eddie will keep asking, so he says, softly, “It doesn’t hurt.”

Eddie’s frown doesn’t lessen. “Buck,” he says, and Buck can hear what he means, the accusation and the exasperation and the little bit of fear. Buck kind of wants to touch him, to just lay his palm flat against Eddie’s skin the way Eddie laid his hand on Buck. He doesn’t have any magic to give, but he could give anything and everything else. It might be enough.

“C’mon,” Buck tells him. “Your magic isn’t doing anything.” You would know, he thinks, because Eddie has magic. He would know, also, because Eddie knows Buck.

Eddie looks at him intensely for a second before his shoulders drop a fraction, and he draws his hand back suddenly, as if he forgot it was there, as if it too were hurting Buck. Buck has to swallow down a feeling he can’t name, something hollow. “Yeah,” Eddie says, voice normal, but he seems unable to keep his eyes off Buck and unwilling to step back.

“Weren’t you going to clean up?” Buck prompts, nodding at Eddie’s stomach, at the dark spill on his pants over his hip. It finally gets Eddie back in motion, and Buck watches, not sure why he’s transfixed on the peek of dark hair he gets as Eddie starts to pull off his pants and underwear both before embarrassment takes over and he turns his head to stare at the wall.

There’s a sudden buzz under his skin. He didn’t have this in his dream. Not Eddie, and not all of Eddie, the parts that he’s only glimpsed in passing either. It’s a peculiar thought, not knowing something of Eddie. Buck knows everything about him, about his kid and his life and his thoughts, about the things he doesn’t tell anyone except Buck, the things he tells anyone who will listen, and he knows Eddie’s body, the patchwork of scars and where he has moles and birthmarks, and Buck knows where to put his hand when he’s trying to reassure him. He knows Eddie’s hands very well because they’ve been on him a thousand times and he knows Eddie’s eyes which always seem to come back to his, inevitably.

But Buck doesn’t know that part of Eddie that’s under his clothes, and Buck died and he could’ve died without ever knowing everything there is to know about Eddie, and Buck hates the thought of that much more than embarrassment.

He turns back. Eddie is already wearing the sweatpants Buck got for him, about to pull on his shirt. He pauses when they make eye contact. “What?” he asks.

“When you almost died,” Buck says instead, watching as Eddie resumes with his shirt, “you must’ve had regrets.”

Eddie adjusts his shirt so he’s comfortable, slowly. “A few,” he relents, grabbing the dirty clothes and leaving. Buck follows after him as naturally as always. “Leaving Christopher,” Eddie finally says when he’s busy throwing things into the washer. “Leaving you,” he adds, then, quieter, “Ana.”

“Leaving Ana,” Buck repeats, but it immediately hits him that he’s wrong, the way Eddie grimaces just a little like a twinge in Buck’s chest. Eddie won’t look at him, adding detergent like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world, and then he turns on the washer and there’s nothing deterring him from glancing at Buck.

His face immediately crumples. “I regretted Ana,” Eddie says deliberately, careful with his word choice, expression stricken.

Buck didn’t know that. He knew Eddie’s heart wasn’t in it, and he knew what it was like to be on the receiving end, but he didn’t know that, and it’s just another thing he never would have known if he had died. It’s another thing he’ll hold close even if it hurts him too, because he can feel Eddie’s distress, the ache all over.

“Eddie—” he starts.

“I thought you got shot,” Eddie blurts out, and Buck sucks in a sharp breath.

“What?” he says faintly. There’s a ringing in his ears, and suddenly it’s not imagining Eddie over Buck’s dead body, but remembering the warmth of Eddie’s blood on his face and the horror of it and the sick feeling of save him. It’s remembering that Chris was going to be alone, that Eddie had family and belonging, and that Buck wished in that moment that it had been him, because the world would’ve stopped if Eddie had—if he hadn’t made it.

And he remembers the worst part of himself then, the selfish part, the part that screamed at being abandoned again, that couldn’t bear the weight of it, that couldn’t handle the almost loss.

Eddie’s mouth is downturned. “I thought,” he says roughly, “you were the one that got shot. Because I could see—” His voice breaks, and he gestures vaguely at Buck’s face. It’s like a sucker punch.

“Your blood,” Buck says, faint, even though they both know it. There’s a terrible silence that follows.

Then, he repeats, can’t help himself, horrified, “You saw your blood on me.”

The feelings of it are all there, under his skin, and it disorients Buck again, all this emotion that he has no idea what to do with.

He’s used to his feelings rising up, knows the ebb and flow of them, has tempered some of them over the years, and never quite figured out how to control others, but it’s a familiar game. He wants to tell Eddie that yes, he’s hurt, that something isn’t where it should be, but it doesn’t hurt, really. It’s just a lot. It’s just enough that he needs someone to steady him.

He thinks, briefly, of what Eddie must have thought before the pain tore through him, and they’re standing close but not close enough. Buck’s whole body is made of it, because that day they were also standing close but not close enough, and Buck doesn’t want to relive that. He reaches blindly, hand landing on Eddie’s shoulder, and he can feel Eddie shudder under his palm.

“I regretted Ana,” Eddie says quietly, eyes beseeching, “because I thought—I thought you were going to die in front of me, and—” He cuts himself off, drawing in a ragged breath. He reaches up helplessly, reaching, and then freezes as if he didn’t even realize he was doing it, and Buck can’t have that. He catches Eddie’s hand with his other hand, and pulls it closer, until Eddie’s palm is resting against his chest, fingers splayed like a promise.

Eddie looks at him then, and Buck breathes, in and out, chest rising and falling, Eddie’s hand safe on him, in his grip. Buck likes the thought of that, of keeping Eddie safe, of protecting him too. “I’m fine,” he says again, sure he’ll have to repeat it again. It doesn’t bother him. Not much bothers him when it comes to Eddie.

Eddie sucks in a shaky breath, but he continues, “It made me think about what was important. And I—I wanted it to work with her, but—” He squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head. “I could imagine a life without her,” he says with finality. “But I couldn’t imagine a life without you.”

It takes Buck three tries to speak. “Eddie,” is all he can muster when he finally gets hold of his voice.

“You can’t leave, Buck,” Eddie says, shaking his head. “You can’t leave me.”

“I’m not,” Buck breathes, and again, for good measure, “I’m not leaving.” He wants to tell Eddie he gets it, that he’s been left before, and he understands how that feels. He understands what it means to try, to fight, to choose to stay, even when it’s hard, even when everything within him is screaming that it’s easier to give up. He understands what it means that Eddie is asking, point blank, rather than through his actions, through the things he gives Buck.

He knows the look on Eddie’s face, and it’s a double feeling in his chest, the fear of being left behind, and the desperation it takes to ask, to beg. It’s all so much it threatens to swallow him whole, and Buck is afraid of feeling it all and then he remembers he has Eddie, and Eddie has him, and he lets it crash through him. Eddie’s magic might only heal, but it must be protecting him too because everything, all of it, feels so, so warm.

That’s what pushes Buck to say, soft, “I don’t want to live a life without you either.” It’s his version of asking to stay. Of asking if he can have this. “That would’ve been my regret if I hadn’t—if I hadn’t come back.”

“Don’t,” Eddie says immediately, and Buck understands all of a sudden, why Eddie acted the way he did when he sat Buck down, when he told him about the will, when he said that Buck wasn’t expendable.

The thing is, Buck was always an addition. He was the one giving everything only to go back to his empty bed, and at some point, Buck figured that’s all he’d ever be, that of everyone, he could sacrifice himself. He thought there wasn’t anyone relying on him, not the way everyone else had to get home, to their partner, to their kid, to their loved ones, and Buck has been trudging down the path alone for so long, he didn’t even realize when someone joined him, footsteps falling into sync so quickly he hadn’t even noticed.

Buck died for three minutes and seventeen seconds, and he had a crazy dream in which Eddie wasn’t there, and it was awful but it wasn’t real and solid, not like this, not like the world in which Eddie had lived without Buck for as long as his heart hadn’t beat, as long as he didn’t breathe on his own, as long as it took between that and the moment he mumbled Eddie’s name, and Eddie’s hand found his.

Buck said he didn’t want to live a life without Eddie, but he doesn’t want Eddie to live a life without him either. They’re partners, after all, and Buck still feels off kilter from dying but he can let himself feel all of it as long as he’s got Eddie. He can let himself live, in totality.

He looks at Eddie. He thinks, keep me, and something slots into place between his ribs, Eddie’s eyes softening when Buck squeezes his hand.

“Just come back,” Eddie says, hoarse. He clears his throat, doesn’t let go, doesn’t move back. “Don’t regret it, just come back.”

And that, well. Buck can’t promise, but he’ll fight until his very last breath to get back if it comes to it, because Eddie asked him to, because he trusted him, because sometimes it feels like Eddie is giving him a little piece of himself he hasn’t given anyone else, and Buck doesn’t take that lightly. He’ll bring it back to where it belongs, he vows to himself. He’ll bring himself back where he belongs, for Eddie, but more importantly, for himself.

-

“Buck,” he hears dimly, his hands wet with Eddie’s blood, the concrete, his shirt and face and Eddie’s eyes going hazy and Buck feels so sick, hot and cold, in flashes like he’s feverish, like he’s having chills because he can’t stop shaking, and thinking not Eddie, please, not again, not again, not again—

“Buck?” slices straight through it, and Buck jolts awake, breaths crashing out of his chest, the tang of blood in the air already fading, and he’s blinking his eyes open to see Chris standing over him, bottom lip trembling, eyes big and scared, a hand reaching out for him.

Buck’s shirt is soaked with sweat, his limbs still trembling, but he shoves it all aside, immediately sitting up, catching Chris’ hand in his own. “Hey,” he says, voice scratchy and hoarse, like he’s been screaming. Has he? Eddie would be here if he was, probably, but it’s just Chris in the dark.

Chris hitches in a shuddering breath like he’s trying not to cry. “Are you hurt?” he asks anxiously, same tone, same concern as his dad, sounding so so young, and Buck remembers so clearly when Eddie asked him that, knows Eddie and this kid like the back of his hand, better, even, and he guides Chris to sit next to him and then pulls him in for a hug. Chris makes a tiny sound, wrapping his arms around him too, and even through the sweat Buck can feel it as his silent tears soak through his shirt.

“I’m not hurt,” Buck promises, holding on tight, reassuring the both of them. He buries his nose in Chris’ hair, breathes him in to remind himself that he’s here and not there. “Just a nightmare.” A memory, and he has this insane urge to go seek out Eddie, to touch the place where the bullet hit him so he can remember that it’s healed over.

But Buck doesn’t know if it really is. The skin might be intact, but the fragile peace they’ve maintained after it, after each time they’ve gotten hurt, maybe that’s not healed, not really. Buck hasn’t had a nightmare about it for a long time, but he did, after. He wouldn’t let Eddie out of his sight after, and he knows Eddie noticed, but he never said a thing so Buck didn’t stop, not until he could blink his eyes open without his chest seizing in terror for something that didn’t even happen to him.

The truck falling on him, that happened to him, and he didn’t have nightmares about that. There’s a part of Buck that knows why, a part of Buck he doesn’t want to think about, but that’s been pushed to the front since dying, and choosing, and promising. It was the part of him that pushed him to climb up, when there could’ve been a sniper, when he could’ve been killed, there and gone the next second, and Buck didn’t care about that, not as long as no one else got hurt.

The difference now is Eddie asked him to come back, or, deeper than that, Buck wants to keep the things he has. The difference is Buck has an idea now of how much he has to lose, so he wants to keep Eddie, and he wants to sink into living, and he wants to choose.

Evan Buckley has spent a lifetime trying things, waiting for one to stick. But he’s starting to realize it’s not about waiting. It’s about holding on to the things he has and pulling them in by the belt loops, and Buck has a family, has a home, and it’s all he’s ever wanted, and he’s not going to lose it, not if he has anything to say about it.

“You can’t leave,” Chris says, muffled into Buck’s shirt, voice wet, and the weakest part of Buck’s heart cracks a little. “I don’t want you to leave.”

Buck has to swallow down the lump in his throat two times before he can speak. “I don’t plan on it,” he says, squeezing Chris tight. “I don’t want to leave either. You, or your dad.”

“Promise?” Chris says, sniffling when he leans back to look up at Buck. Then quickly adds on, like he’s afraid, “You have to mean it. Mom promised Dad, and she still left, and I—” He stops, looking lost, as if there aren’t words to describe what he feels.

Buck is struck silent at it, at another thing that hasn’t quite healed right. He can still feel the urge to fix it, the way he always does, but Chris isn’t asking for Buck to fix it. He’s asking for Buck to mean it, this time, and Buck can do that.

“I promise,” Buck says, swears, an oath so solemn he can feel it all the way down to his bones, looking Chris in the eye, “that I will do everything in my power to come back home. To you both.”

Chris’ eyes are shiny with tears as he peers at Buck, soft with emotion. “I love you, Buck,” he says, voice wobbly.

Buck has to blink back his own tears. “I love you too, Chris,” he says and gathers him back in his arms, trying to let his body relax. He thinks, unbidden, of the tsunami and cradling Chris in his arms there, and that—he had nightmares of that. Of loss, and even thinking of it now feels like a raw wound, like something that only half scabbed over.

He doesn’t know why he’s thinking of it now.

They sit there for a while in silence, until Chris’ tears have slowed. Chris doesn’t move away at any point so Buck indulges him for a while, and they chat about going to see an exhibit Chris is interested in, about some friendship drama, a new app that everyone’s using, until Chris’ words start petering out between yawns, and Buck keeps talking, even when Chris stops responding, about little nothings, just to sink into the feeling of trust, of the weight against him as Chris falls asleep right there.

Buck stops speaking at some point, and then he sits there for an indescribable amount of time, holding, and letting his heart flow over, bleeding where it’s safe, but once he starts he can’t stop bleeding and bleeding, and he wants to be somewhere safer, so he carefully scoops Chris up and carries him to his room.

Chris snuffles a little when Buck tucks him under the covers but remains soundly asleep, so Buck slips out of the room, turning to close the door softly.

“Buck?” he hears from behind him, soft and sleepy, and it’s like holding his breath for a second when he turns, when he sees Eddie and everything in him narrows down to this, to safety, and then it’s the exhale after and it crashes into him, the terror and regret and all those gritty things like loss and being left behind and broken promises and empty spaces, all of it hitting even harder than when he was in it.

“Eddie,” he croaks, voice breaking, and he makes it halfway to Eddie’s door before his knees give out, but Eddie is already there to catch him, arms strong and steady around him as he lowers them to the ground, and Buck’s eyes spill over there, when his face is tucked into Eddie’s shoulder, when he’s clutching at Eddie like he can’t bear to let go.

He lets himself think of it all now, of all the scars, and the blood, and the fear, where he can hear Eddie’s heartbeat in his ears, smell Eddie, touch him, where he’s alive and Buck is alive, and they’re living, the two of them. Together.

“Buck,” Eddie is saying, frantic, hands slipping under Buck’s shirt to touch his back, his bare skin, checking and checking. He’s got the hands of a medic, of someone who heals, of someone who’s fought and dragged himself out of things he shouldn’t have had to, sure and still gentle.

“Buck,” he repeats into his ear, quiet but firm the way it gets when he’s panicked, “Buck, what’s wrong? What happened?”

“Nightmare,” Buck mumbles, and the dull weight of it all eases as Eddie lets out a breath.

“Chris?” he asks, sounding calmer too, but his hands are still spread over Buck’s skin like he can’t bear to let go either. Buck doesn’t mind that, them holding each other, making sure they’re both alive.

“Me,” Buck replies, his tears wetting Eddie’s dry shirt, and he’s glad at least that Eddie wasn’t having a nightmare too. The tension in Eddie’s body eases, and Buck’s own muscles loosen in response, but he’s suddenly afraid, not in the crushing way as he’s been these past few weeks, but in the way that he knows, the way that fear has gripped him all his life when he doesn’t know what to do, when there’s something stirring within him that he doesn’t understand.

“Sorry,” Buck says, voice thick, then again, softer, almost a whisper, “I’m sorry.”

Eddie doesn’t placate him, doesn’t shift away. He simply holds Buck as always. “What was the nightmare about?” he asks, running his palm over Buck’s skin, almost absently, just a few inches, but it warms Buck from the inside out.

Buck sucks in a shuddering breath, glad to breathe Eddie in, the clean scent of his shirt, the smell of his skin. The dream already feels faded, and after, when Eddie was recovering, Buck hadn’t—he hadn’t talked about it. Hadn’t wanted to hurt Eddie, and even now he wants to stuff it all down. He wants to stop the outpour to stop himself from hurting Eddie with himself, but he knows what it’s like now, to wake up every morning unsure if he was alive or dead, if he was in the right place with the people who mattered most, and it’s that that pushes Buck to confess, “You getting shot.”

Eddie stills.

“We never talked about it, Eddie,” Buck says. He knows his grip is too tight, that Eddie might protest at any moment, but he can’t get himself to loosen his hold, he can’t. He doesn’t want Eddie to pull away, not when Eddie is real and warm and solid here, when he doesn’t smell like blood, when he’s not shot, when Buck is still in the timeline where they’re step in step, the two of them. “You never told me—you never said anything.”

Eddie exhales quietly. “What was there to say, Buck?” he asks, weary, but considering, like he hasn’t thought about it before. “I got shot, and then I woke up. I lived,” he offers, like it’s simple. “Life went on.”

“But you didn’t want it,” Buck says softly, and he doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows it’s the truth, a truth Eddie wouldn’t let himself hear back then, that’s still painful to the touch. “The life before.”

To Buck, it seems simple. Eddie got shot and realized Ana wasn’t what he wanted. He stuck it out because Eddie has always been stubborn like that, and maybe a little desperate too, trying to hold on to things for all the wrong reasons, trying to find something that sticks.

Buck knows what that’s like, but he’s still having a hard time figuring out how to articulate what he doesn’t want. His regrets all lie in the things he wants to have and hold on to, because Buck’s life has been a game of chasing rather than running.

What does Buck want? He wants to stay, but he wanted that before. He wants to live. He wants this, Eddie and Chris and home, he wants that life before he died, but he wants it more desperately than he ever has, and he doesn’t even understand how he can want something he has so badly.

His body aches with how much he wants it, and he doesn’t know what would soothe it.

“I wanted most of it,” Eddie allows. Not Ana, Buck knows. But being a firefighter, and Chris, and maybe Buck too.

“Me too,” Buck says, but his throat hurts with whatever this unspeakable thing is, and his chest feels suddenly like an open wound, and it’s too much to keep bottled up.

He says, desperately, “There’s something wrong with me,” but he doesn’t know how to describe it. He knows Eddie will fix it anyway, somehow, in that way that he fixes a lot of things when it comes to Buck. Once he starts, he can’t stop. “Eddie, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t stop—I just keep feeling so much, it’s—it’s like I can’t—”

“Buck,” Eddie says, grounding, right into his ear. “Buck. Let yourself feel it, okay? I got you, bud.”

“Eddie,” Buck gasps, and he realizes his eyes are wet again for no reason at all, “Eddie, Eddie, I need—” He doesn’t know what he needs, and for a split second it all rises up, far too much, and then it starts to ebb, waves receding as Eddie pulls him up, not letting go of him as they stumble into his room, emotions softening out as Eddie pushes him down onto the bed.

They stay like that for a split second in which it feels like the world stops spinning, Buck on his back, Eddie with one knee on the bed, peering down at him, worried and reassuring at the same time. Buck suddenly has this thought that this is what he wants, that unknowable unspeakable thing. All that want for something he had but, he realizes between breaths, that he didn’t have, not really.

The thing he wants—Eddie gets into bed, pulls the covers over both of them, and then, silently, Eddie’s knuckles bump into his hand, and Buck, without thinking, turns his hand over so their hands can slot together—is more than what he had before.

His throat is still a little achy, but more than that he’s warm, all the way through, and he squeezes Eddie’s hand and is granted a squeeze back.

“Go to sleep, Buck,” Eddie tells him. And then, “I’m here,” like this is nothing out of the ordinary, but Buck’s chest spills over with something it takes him a long time to place, almost asleep, listening to Eddie’s even breathing, muted and quiet, and on the brink of unconsciousness it’s not so overwhelming, to belong and be had and to want.

In Eddie’s bed, Buck isn’t afraid of himself and of not knowing. It’s okay, here, to breathe and remember and feel.

To allow himself to think of forever, as if such an infinite concept could be compressed into something as small as this moment.

As simple as his hand in Eddie’s.

-

Buck knows he’s being twitchy.

Eddie keeps giving him these long looks, ones that aren’t meant to be sneaky, that are supposed to trap Buck’s gaze and get him to crack.

Buck has studiously avoided them all day, leaving for a late lunch with Maddie, telling her the good news, fiddling with his phone at red lights, finger hovering over Bobby’s contact. He probably shouldn’t have even told Maddie, because Maddie will tell Chimney, and Chimney will tell everyone, and everyone includes Eddie.

Then Buck drove around for a while, telling himself an extra bag of flour could come in handy in case of a baking emergency, and he went through the car wash, and he figured if he was out he might as well get a new plant to decorate Eddie’s kitchen window. He doesn’t know why he’s nervous, but this slow sense of anxiety has been building since his doctor’s appointment this morning until he’s staring at a little cactus and he checks his phone and ignores the pang when there’s nothing there. Taps his foot. Examines the labels the next shelf up. Checks again, repeats, and he does this another time before he finally caves, buys the cactus, and heads home.

“Is that flour?” Eddie asks when he opens the door, Buck still fumbling with his keys.

Eddie was waiting for him, Buck realizes and instantly feels guilty. “Yeah,” he says. Looks down at the flour, the pot, because it’s easier than looking at Eddie. “And a cactus for the kitchen.”

Eddie takes it, fingers gentle when they brush his, when they linger just a little too long, and Buck’s stomach flips because he’s dreading the end of this. It was good news, and Buck wanted it so badly he could feel it in his gut, and now he’s got it and he’s—he is happy, when it comes to his job. But it feels like a loss. He can go back to one thing and has to abandon another, and Buck really just wants to keep it all but he’s not allowed to.

He looks at Eddie then, where he’s still standing in his doorway with the pot clutched between his fingers, hair rumpled like it gets when he keeps running his hands through it when he’s anxious, and he’s wearing Buck’s shirt of all things. He’s watching Buck carefully, going for neutral, but Buck knows him too well. There’s the tension at the edges of Eddie’s eyes, in his jaw.

“Doctor’s appointment went well,” Buck says tentatively, and half of his dread eases with just the admission.

Eddie blows out a breath. “You had me worried,” he says, already looking lighter as he steps back, a silent invitation. He disappears into the kitchen as Buck kicks off his shoes at the door before following him to put the flour away.

Eddie has already put the cactus exactly where Buck imagined it, and that’s all it takes. Eddie holds his hands out for the flour, and Buck, emotion clawing up his throat, admits, “They cleared me.”

Eddie doesn’t freeze, exactly. “Isn’t that good?” he asks, lowering his hands slowly, shoulders tight, arms tense, mouth firm. He gives Buck a searching look. “You’ve been going stir crazy here.”

“I want to go back to work,” Buck says reluctantly, but he doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay. He wants to stay so badly he can practically taste it. He wants to sleep in Eddie’s bed because it feels like he belongs there, because it smells like him and because he can listen to Eddie breathe beside him. He can reach out and touch him if he wants, which he doesn’t do, but—he could.

But it’s only when he’s hurt that he gets that, and Buck is sick and tired of being handled like he’s fragile, like he can only get something real when he’s injured, as if the pretending stops. Ali broke up with him when his leg was wrapped up, Eddie gave him Christopher after the tsunami, and even now, Buck only gets to keep things when he loses something else.

“But?” Eddie prompts.

“But I don’t want to go,” Buck says, swallowing hard. It feels like a confession of sorts.

“To work,” Eddie says slowly, looking confused.

Buck shakes his head, and suddenly he feels nervous for no reason at all. “To the loft.”

Eddie stares at him for a long second. “What’s wrong with the loft?” he asks, slanting it like a little private joke between them, but the sliver of his smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Eddie,” is all Buck can say, and Eddie abandons the pretense.

“Then don’t,” he says, shrugging like it’s easy, but it doesn’t feel easy, this tight feeling in Buck’s chest.

“I can’t just—” Buck stops there, thinking it, I can’t just stay. He can’t stay, but he can’t go, he can’t leave either, because he promised Eddie, and Chris, and he just—he can’t.

He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to return to the empty loft, where it doesn’t smell like home, and where he’ll have to sleep in his own bed and cook for no one other than himself and where he’ll spend every day wondering if he came back to life just for this, for more of everything he’s always done.

What will Eddie have of him if Buck leaves?

Buck only has to think about it for a split second and realizes—

Everything.

He knows this kitchen, this house better than he knows himself, better than anyone else knows it. The waffle maker he bought is hidden behind the stack of pots and pans in the cabinet, usually behind the frying pan with the dent in the handle from when he accidentally dropped it while trying to flip pancakes in the air for Chris. There are solar system and big cat themed towels tucked into the drawer by the sink, exactly where Buck put them. He got Eddie this body lotion he likes, which now sits at the bathroom sink, and he set up a bird mobile in Chris’ room when Chris had a brief stint with ornithology (he still has the book Buck bought him, even if he doesn’t touch it anymore), and it’s that and a thousand other things in every place he can think of.

Buck’s splashed himself all over the walls here, wholly, intimately, in a way a relationship could never touch.

It’s not like being left without anything. It’s not like grasping at memories because that’s all he has, it wouldn’t be, because Buck knows what it’s like to be left without anything and he wouldn’t do that, not to anyone, but especially not to Eddie.

But Eddie isn’t Buck. Buck would have taken the scars to remember someone by, wished so many times Maddie had left something even if it hurt, would have pressed on the bruises when he was missing her or anyone, really. But Buck hates the thought of Eddie being left with all of this like an open wound, because he’s had wounds and injuries and he’s been hurt too many times, and Buck is full of something too big to put into words but it’s still everything he wants to give to Eddie.

He just—he wants. To keep giving. To keep having. Because Eddie deserves it, and because Buck wants it.

Buck looks at the cactus sitting on the windowsill, and he thinks, firmly, it’s not going to be the last thing, not if he has a choice, and with that he can feel the frantic buzz beneath his skin warring with a sudden calm.

“Why can’t you stay?” Eddie asks, tempering his voice ever so carefully, needlessly, because Buck can practically taste whatever it is Eddie is hiding, and it hits him all of a sudden, crystal clear, that Eddie doesn’t want him to leave either.

“I want to,” Buck tells him, voice a little raspy with how much he wants it.

Eddie nods, clipped, and all of Buck settles. “Then stay,” Eddie says simply.

Buck takes a breath. “I want to stay forever,” he clarifies, and his heart stops, actually stops, and then kicks in again as if trying to catch up.

Eddie opens his mouth wordlessly, then, softer, a little fond, “Then stay. No one’s stopping you.” He holds out his hands. “And give me the flour.”

Buck can’t help but breathe out a laugh, ducking his head before he hands it over. “Sorry,” he says sheepishly, because now he can acknowledge it was a needless purchase.

“A little extra never hurt anyone,” Eddie says, but he isn’t moving where he’s staring into his cabinet at the lack of space. Buck laughs despite himself and goes forward to nudge into Eddie’s side, their shoulders bumping as Buck reaches for the near empty bag of sugar.

“There’s not much left in this, and I saw these jars at—” Buck starts, already problem solving, something warm spreading through him when he realizes this isn’t a beginning, or an end, but something he can hold on to for a while longer. He’s still talking when he turns and catches just a glimpse of Eddie’s smile as he watches Buck consolidate things, fitting in the flour into a perfect little space, tucking it away, and Buck imagines it as himself for a moment, tucked right where he belongs.

“How do you always manage to fit everything in there?” Eddie asks, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s an art, not a science,” Buck tells him, grinning.

“The art of inventory?” Eddie teases, an ongoing joke about Buck’s endless work punishments. Buck throws him the finger, delighted when Eddie laughs.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Buck grumbles, but he can’t keep down his smile. And now that the dread is out of the way, he asks, fishing, “Did you miss me?”

Eddie doesn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, I missed having an idiot on the job. Ravi tries but he’s not as good at it.”

“Hey,” Buck protests, pleased from the inside out anyway. Eddie casts him a grin, easy as anything, and Buck soaks it up.

With the fear gone, the knowledge that he’s staying, he feels like he can finally let the excitement in. He’s cleared. He’s going back to work, and he gets to return here, but he isn’t stuck here walking himself in tired circles when everything in him wants to be out there doing what he does best. He immediately calls Bobby to tell him he was cleared to go back, his whole body alive with it, already talking as he goes out to the living room, and Eddie does this odd little movement, as if trying to slap his shoulder on the way out and then thinking better of it, his hand hovering, blinking, but Buck knows what he really wants.

Buck reaches out and fits his hand right around Eddie’s wrist, squeezing briefly, warmth sliding through him as Eddie’s face eases, and then he lets his wrist slide out from Eddie’s loose grip and can’t keep his grin down when he thinks of where he’s headed—back to his other home, back to his family, to work, to what he loves, and back to his partner.

He lets it slip that he’s going to stay with Eddie, not even thinking about it until there’s a pregnant pause from Bobby.

“You’re staying with Eddie?” Bobby repeats.

“Yeah, I mean—” Buck says, suddenly flustered, “—I didn’t insist, honest, Bobby, I just—asked.”

Bobby hums, contemplative. “Just keep me updated,” he says lightly, in a tone Buck can’t decipher.

Buck nods, sure that he just missed something but unsure what. “Will do,” and the breath of relief he lets out is interrupted by Eddie walking into the room with a bag of tortilla chips tucked under his arm, salsa in hand. “Hey, Eddie’s here. See you Tuesday?”

“Tuesday,” Bobby confirms warmly, and Buck hangs up already making gimme hands as Eddie passes over the bag. He’s a little too enthusiastic and rips the bag open, chips spilling out onto the floor.

They stare at each other in surprised silence, Eddie says, “Dude,” and then they’re laughing, and Buck isn’t thinking of anything at all when they’re like this.

He thinks of it later, when Eddie’s arm is slung over the back of the couch, when Buck says something that makes him laugh and Eddie grants an affectionate squeeze to the back of Buck’s neck, hand lingering, shape of him outlined by his body, Eddie exactly where he should be.

He’s still touching Buck like he’s checking, but Buck doesn’t really mind that, not if it’s reassuring. After all, Eddie thought Buck died twice while he was awake, and maybe more than that while he’s been asleep, lost in nightmares.

In Buck’s mind, Eddie has died a thousand times. Every one has mattered, and every one makes every single moment precious, like sand in Buck’s hands. It’s the kind that Buck holds on to tightly, that Buck holds close.

Like time, which he can’t stop from slipping from his fingers, but which he can savor every moment of anyway.

-

“I bet he makes it twenty minutes before passing out,” Chimney says, eyeing Eddie like he’s a ticking time bomb.

The high of being back at work still hasn’t worn off. Buck knows he’s been bouncing off the walls, but he missed firefighting like an ache in his side, and he missed the affectionate touches from the others, a side armed hug from Bobby, Chimney ruffling his hair, Hen shoving him over on the couch.

He’s been getting a lot from Eddie lately, in and out of work, but even now their legs are slotted together where they sit across from each other in the engine, headed back to the station after Eddie had, in his words, accidentally healed a fractured ankle.

“How do you accidentally heal a broken bone?” Buck had asked, staring at a very bewildered looking Eddie, hand still on the woman’s ankle as if to be sure that’s what he did.

“My magic’s been—I don’t know,” Eddie had replied, and even now he’s still squinting out the window like he doesn’t understand. Buck watches him, just as confused about how it happened. Eddie hasn’t done that before. Ever, as far as Buck knows, or as far as Eddie has told him.

“I give it ten,” Hen replies to Chimney drily, not even looking. She’s also staring out the window on the other side, peering up at the sky. “Is there rain on the forecast?”

“How much are you going to bet?” Chimney asks, settling back into his seat, ready for a challenge, and Hen finally turns with an unimpressed look and a wicked tilt to her eyebrow that says she’s up for it.

“On Eddie falling asleep or the rain?”

“I’m not going to fall asleep,” Eddie interjects, dry.

“I give it five,” Buck says in response, grinning despite himself at the betrayed look Eddie gives him. Hen and Chimney jump on that, incredulous, and it turns into Buck defending himself for lowballing, but he glances at Eddie after, where he’s still looking out the window.

Truthfully, Buck is surprised Eddie is still awake.

Eddie’s strong suit is small injuries, cuts, scratches, scrapes, bruises. He can heal all of those easily, barely a droplet of his magic supply. When it comes to bigger things, he’s particularly good at dampening pain, holding things steady, where they should be, keeping blood pumping, forcing breath into lungs. On occasion, if he’s focusing, he can fix something bigger. Heal a nick to a nonessential organ, maybe. Reverse most of an allergy response.

Not fix a bone.

The last big thing Eddie tried to do was steady Buck when his leg was under that truck, and Eddie had slept for sixteen hours straight after that, and then walked around like a zombie for the next week.

Buck is glad that the cost of Eddie’s magic is only sleep. Eddie fights it, but it’s harmless, and Buck wonders sometimes, privately, if his magic has a soft spot for Eddie, like the way Eddie grumbles it has a soft spot for Buck.

What Eddie should do, when they get back, is head straight to the bunk room. He never does though, and they have a routine for this.

“Whose turn is it?” Hen asks, eyeing the gym, workout clearly in mind, so Buck knows she’ll try her best to get out of it. Bobby has already disappeared into his office, and Chimney appears to be spreading the news about Eddie’s heroic efforts around the 118.

“Mine,” Buck answers, already headed up towards the couches, because it is, but also because he wants to save Eddie from the attention and curious eyes. There’s an accompanying flutter of satisfaction deep in his stomach when he says it, and maybe it’s that he likes the responsibility again, of taking care of Eddie, of being relied on. It makes him feel good, being of use, always has, always will. It feels like he belongs here, that he’s earned it. He doesn’t need to, he knows, but it feels good anyway.

“Guys,” Eddie says, exasperated, but he follows Buck up anyway. “I’m fine,” he insists when it’s just the two of them up there, Buck sitting on the couch, Eddie standing, but he’s blinking a little slower than usual, and Buck knows him far too well.

“C’mere,” Buck says, and Eddie does, just like that, sitting next to Buck with an appreciable inch of space between them. “Put your head on my shoulder,” Buck orders as he threads his arm around Eddie’s waist to pull him closer.

“Buck,” Eddie protests, but he lets Buck manhandle him a little so they’re thigh to thigh, and he lets out this soft little sigh as he rests his cheek on Buck’s shoulder, lighting Buck up from the inside out. “I’m going to stay awake,” Eddie insists anyway, trying and failing to hide a yawn, his weight already drooping into Buck.

Five minutes, Buck thinks fondly, but says, “Okay. Want to watch a movie?”

“I know what you’re doing,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t squirm out of Buck’s hold, which makes Buck tuck him that bit closer, realizing Eddie’s more exhausted than he’s letting on. Usually, Eddie protests all the way until he’s asleep, and that normally takes around half an hour of pinning him down on the couch until his head starts to nod. Hen has perfected her glare to get Eddie to stay, Chimney bribes him, and Buck simply holds him where he wants him. Bobby is exempt, but all he has to do is tell Eddie it’s an order if things get out of hand.

“What am I doing?” Buck asks him, just to tease.

Eddie doesn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, he mumbles, a little vulnerable, “I don’t know what happened.”

Buck pauses, leaning his head on Eddie’s gingerly. They’re close enough now that Buck can murmur, private, because he knows Eddie is trusting him with this. “Have you ever…?” Buck asks quietly and trails off.

“Never,” Eddie responds, turning his face into Buck’s shoulder. His voice comes out muffled, adding on, “I don’t know—I could feel the bone, and I could feel where it was broken. I was just going to stop the pain, but I could feel that my magic wanted to fix it.”

“So you fixed it,” Buck reasons.

Eddie nods, a tiny movement against Buck. “I couldn’t help it,” he says, quiet for a moment. “It’s been trying to fix everything recently.”

Buck frowns. “And draining you in the process,” he points out. It’s not that he thinks Eddie’s magic is doing it on purpose, or that it’s trying to hurt him because Buck knows Eddie’s magic too well for that.

Eddie immediately says, “It’s not hurting me, Buck. It just wants to help.”

“Yeah, but—” Buck starts and then stops, trying to articulate it, the thing that’s bothering him. He knows what it’s like to throw himself all in, to jump headfirst no matter what it takes of him, and Buck realizes what it is.

That no matter how much he may live that life, he doesn’t want it for Eddie. He doesn’t want Eddie to give all of himself to it, to everyone else. “You’re exhausted,” he says softly, like it’s an explanation, but he thinks Eddie gets it.

“Yeah,” Eddie admits, and then, “Can we lie down?”

They kick their shoes off together, Buck with efficiency, Eddie slowly, and Buck scoots over, saying, “Grab the remote.”

Eddie rubs his eyes, yawning, but complies and hands it over before he’s curving into Buck’s chest and then Buck maneuvers them both down so that Eddie’s lying comfortably on top of him, mostly dead weight, his head tucked under Buck’s chin.

“You know, I don’t lie on top of anyone else,” Eddie says sleepily.

“They’re all smaller than you,” Buck reasons, a little thrill that goes up his spine when he says it, and there’s a split second where his thumb freezes on the power button and he thinks, oh no.

Because that—he knows what that feeling is.

The first time he and Abby slept in the same bed, not for sex, just to hold and be held, Abby had brushed her fingers against the small of his back, hand dipping under his shirt. It had felt like something right. It felt something like the beginnings of love, something like deep wanting, like desire too, and something that could’ve been everything Buck had ever wanted.

Buck doesn’t breathe for long enough that Eddie says, “Buck?” and then Buck laughs, because he doesn’t know what else to do, soft and helpless. He’s glad only that Eddie is too sleepy to decipher it, and he turns the TV on like nothing happened because if he speaks it might just all spill out.

It was just once, he reasons, flipping through the channels, trying to will his heart to slow down. It was just once.

“How long has it been?” Eddie murmurs, words bleeding together like they get when he’s on the verge of sleep.

Buck checks the time, and this, he can do. “Do you think Hen would believe me if I said it was six minutes?”

Eddie laughs. “You’re a terrible liar.”

Yeah, Buck thinks, lump in his throat. I am.

“My hair’s in my eye,” Eddie complains, and Buck makes the mistake of brushing Eddie’s hair out of his face, and this time his stomach turns, this quiet little thing, and Buck knows, he knows what that is.

He closes his eyes, and by the time he opens them, he’s sure Eddie is asleep, which means he’s left with his heart thrumming in his chest and no one to talk to, no one he can tell. Not this.

Saying it would make it real, and Buck doesn’t want it to be real. He wants to stay by Eddie’s side, at work, at home, and Buck thinks he might be an idiot.

He thinks he might be about to ruin one of the best things that’s ever happened to him.

-

Here’s the thing about good things: Buck always fucks them up.

Eddie won’t want him to stay. Eddie won’t want him anymore.

Buck looks at him when they go out for tacos the next day, and Eddie is laughing so hard he’s red in the face, and Buck doesn’t have that feeling, not anymore, but he knows it’ll come back, that it’s inevitable.

He promised Eddie he wouldn’t leave, and Buck won’t. When Eddie tells him to go, he’ll go, but he doesn’t want to. He wants to have this forever. He wants forever, and he’s wanted it for a long time, he thinks, and maybe Buck should have realized sooner what that meant.

Maybe he should’ve known, in that dream. Maybe he should’ve known when he saw what the difference was between dreaming and living.

Maybe he should’ve known in the hospital when all he wanted was Eddie, or before that, when Eddie’s blood sprayed across his face, a million different times that pointed to where this would end up.

(Buck has always held on too tight. And he’s always, always been left behind.)

-

“Ow!” Buck hisses, trying not to get blood on the carrots as he beelines to the sink to run his thumb under cold water, worry pressing itself between his ribs for no reason at all. The cut is shallow despite the instant bloom of blood.

“Buck?” Eddie says, popping his head through the door, faintly alarmed. He immediately comes over at the sight of Buck clutching his hand.

“It’s nothing,” Buck tries to tell him. Eddie ignores it, grabbing Buck’s hand. Buck can feel an odd little tug from somewhere in his chest and the warmth of Eddie’s magic as the wound closes upon itself, blood washing away to reveal unbroken skin, the throb of pain dissipating like it wasn’t there.

Eddie examines Buck’s hand for a little longer than necessary, magic lingering, and Buck’s heart trips just before Eddie lets go, clearing his throat. “You better not chop off your finger in my kitchen,” he tells Buck, and Buck, despite the sinking feeling in his stomach, can’t help but laugh a little.

“You could heal that too,” he points out, and Eddie gives him a look, but his mouth twitches and Buck takes that as a win.

Later, he bumps his shoulder against Eddie’s, and then he just doesn’t move it, and this time he’s paying attention so he catches the little tug behind his sternum.

He’s been checking. Feeling it out. He’s suddenly hyper aware of how much they touch each other already, so much that it’s not every time that it’s accompanied by—by something in his gut. It’s hard to stop himself sometimes, because they sleep in the same bed, they like to hang out on the couch pressed up against each other, and they’re partners, in sync and in motion, handing each other tools and giving each other fist bumps without even thinking, little pats, a hand landing somewhere to guide, feet nudging.

It’s a little overwhelming, this feeling buried under his sternum, a little different. Buck can’t stop poking at it, can’t stop leaning into Eddie to feel it again, like something that’s sore, that hurts in a good way. It’s odd, how quiet it is, how steady, and just how deeply it takes his breath away. Buck can’t make sense of it.

He’s never had a feeling like that, but he’s not surprised because this isn’t anyone else—it’s Eddie. Of course Buck feels different about him than anyone else. He’s Buck’s first best friend, Buck’s first constant. He’s the guy that stuck around. He’s the one who took Buck home, who kept him. He’s just—he’s everything Buck has been missing without even knowing. He’s safe, not for his magic, but for who he is, and there’s a tiny part of Buck, below the trepidation that he keeps swallowing down, that cherishes this. It feels like a responsibility, feeling this for Eddie, and not one that Buck would ever take lightly. It’s important that this be done right, that Buck is the one who gets to do it, the way Eddie deserves, for as long as he’ll let Buck give it.

But it’s still a matter of time, and sometimes Buck looks at him, and he wishes he were someone else. He wishes his emotions didn’t spill out of him on a normal day, a tidal wave since dying, and he wishes he could stop hurting in anticipation. It’s going to hurt, more than anything has ever hurt, when he loses this, and Buck might have survived dying, but he’s not sure he’ll survive this.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t stop at Eddie. It’s Christopher. It’s the 118, and family, and home. He’s going to go to work, and things won’t be seamless anymore. He’s going to lose his partner, and it’s going to drive a wedge between all of them, when he and Eddie aren’t working. It’s going to destroy everything, because Eddie is part of everything he loves.

He still can’t stop himself from clinging.

They eat dinner together, like every other night, Chris relaying his day as usual. After, Eddie goes to do the dishes, as always, because Buck cooks, Eddie cleans up, and Chris has to make a diorama for history class. Buck settles down with him and helps assemble it, gluing pieces, making sure it’s sturdy enough to survive transport. Eddie disappears at some point to throw in laundry, presumably. Buck could recite the list of chores off the top of his head, could figure out where in the house Eddie is just by his footsteps, figure out what he’s doing by the sound of him.

He’s half aware of it for a while, the rest of his attention on helping Chris. He has most of it handled by himself, and Buck feels a swell of pride, watching him. He’s a little selfish, he’ll admit to himself, wanting to hold on to this feeling, to this family that he might even dare call his.

Chris gets most of the way himself before finally getting stuck with a particularly difficult piece of double sided tape. Buck watches him for a while, trying to stop himself from smiling before the feeling grows, sudden and warm.

It pushes Buck to ask, so fond he could burst, “You need help?” The feeling is a lot like it’s been a lot, out of nowhere, Buck still off balance. He could pretend out loud, say he’s still recovering, but he isn’t and he knows it. The emotions rising up in his chest seem to be here to stay, in all their too muchness. Buck is used to that somewhat, the idea of too much, and even more used to the opposite, so when they rise up he finds he doesn’t mind so much, not when they fill him up completely.

Buck knows what it’s like to run on empty. He’ll have to again, soon, but for now he’s going to let all of it brim up and overflow.

“No,” Chris says, a little hotly, and Buck holds his hands up in surrender, leaning back.

“Okay, okay,” he says, trying to bite down a laugh as he gets up. “Glass of orange juice?” he asks.

“Uh—yes, please,” Chris says, much calmer suddenly, and Buck grins to himself as he pours out two glasses for them.

The juice goes back in the fridge, and he turns, glasses in hand, and catches sight of Eddie.

He’s leaning against the doorway, arms crossed, shirt creased, eyes on Buck, and Buck can feel it in his stomach, the little tug, the little catch of his breath in his throat when their eyes meet.

There’s a moment, where it’s just the two of them. Chris isn’t paying attention, and Eddie is looking at him, and it’s so simple, it’s so simple, but Buck can feel it down to his toes.

“Orange juice?” Eddie asks, voice tinged with something soft and rumpled, like gently worn clothing, like home. “Aren’t you a bit old for that?”

Buck looks at him for too long without saying anything. He wonders if Eddie knows. Eddie must know. Buck has always been obvious, and Eddie knows him far too well, better than anyone else, and Buck can’t stop staring and touching and holding on too tight. It hasn’t even been a week since Buck figured it out, and he’s already reaching a breaking point.

He tries for a grin anyway. He can tell he isn’t quite successful though, because Eddie’s eyebrows draw together, just a little. “If you want a glass,” Buck tells him, and his voice is bleeding everything, “all you have to do is ask.”

“Nicely,” Chris interjects, tape defeated and now focused on sticking things together.

Buck huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, Eddie,” he piles on. “Say please.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, but he swipes Buck’s glass after Buck takes a gulp to drink half of it down as Buck sputters out protests, and then Eddie hands it to Chris who makes eye contact as he drinks the rest.

Buck stares at them, betrayed. “You have your own glass!” he protests at Chris, but Chris bursts out laughing and Buck can’t really hold a grudge then.

Eddie swipes the chair next to Buck, and Buck lets him take over on directing Chris on what to add where, aware of Eddie’s knee against his. Buck doesn’t move his leg, but he can’t keep it still either, knee bouncing.

“Dad,” Christopher is saying when Eddie’s hand lands on Buck’s thigh, a little like an order that Buck hears loud and clear, and his entire body goes still with it. “Do you think I should add names here?”

“Hmm,” Eddie assesses like his hand isn’t warm on Buck’s thigh, like it doesn’t mean anything, but it means something to Buck, something too big to put into words. “Can you write that small?”

Chris makes a face of defiance, and if everything was the same as before, Buck would tease Eddie, would say something like, Was that meant to be a challenge? and Christopher would agree and stubbornly try to prove Eddie wrong, and Eddie would groan, but he wouldn’t be able to keep down his smile, and the low anxiety Buck feels isn’t anything compared to everything else he’s been feeling lately, but it’s enough.

He’s not really sure how he escapes to the bathroom, just that he has to splash water on his face before he can really breathe, hands gripping the sink, staring at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t really know what he needs. What he wants is on the other side of the door, but he can’t breathe when Eddie’s being—when Eddie is Eddie as he always is, and that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Buck is still changing, and Eddie will stay the same. That’s the difference between them. Buck will become something else, and Eddie won’t, and sure, Eddie was shaken when everything happened to Buck. But he’ll go back to normal, and Buck won’t. He can’t figure out how to.

He fumbles through an excuse about bringing more clothes to Eddie’s house when he emerges, Eddie toweling off wet dishes. He lets Buck go without pressing, but there’s a pinch of discomfort when Buck leaves that makes his hands unsteady when he goes to unlock his car before he takes another deep breath and regains control.

It’s like his body is rebelling against him, like everything is screaming go back.

Buck drives.

-

He can only lie to Eddie so much, so he does go to the loft, locating a spare duffel bag in his closet. He halfheartedly gathers a few of the remaining clothes, of which there aren’t too many, and then he figures if he’s here, he might as well clean up a little.

He shoots off a text to Eddie, something silly about dust, and something more sincere about not staying up for him. It’s already approaching nine, sky dark, and Eddie responds as normal, tells him not to come back too dirty or he won’t let him back in, and it makes Buck grin despite himself. He stays there a second too long, just looking at his phone, at their messages open, and then he places his phone face down on the counter and gets to work.

It helps a little. Buck feels better when he’s cleaned every inch of the kitchen and bathroom, done a quick swipe over the floors and surfaces. He feels useful, and that settles him more than anything.

He grabs the duffel bag when he sees it’s nearing one in the morning and heads back to Eddie’s with the windows down, the fresh air pleasant against his face. He loves this route, so familiar he could picture it beginning to end, even more so at night when there’s no traffic, when the distance between him and Eddie is reduced down to nothing except Buck’s foot on the pedal.

It’s a familiar feeling, that little bit of anticipation in his gut, like everything in him thrums with it, knows he’s going where he belongs, and then he’s pulling into the driveway, pleased when he sees Eddie left the living room light on for him, and he knows, more than he’s ever known anything, that this is right. This is where he wants to be.

That part of it is unfamiliar, feels different than it ever has. Newer, a little quieter, tender to the touch like he’s nervous, and reassuring all over despite it. Right now, he isn’t thinking about how this is going to ruin everything. He isn’t thinking about everything he has to lose. Instead, he wants to curl his hands protectively around it, the first flicker of something much much bigger than him.

Buck has always loved falling in love. He likes tripping into it, and the way he flusters, and the little thrills of little nothings. Usually, he’d be thinking about the first kiss and the first time they take their clothes off and the first time he’s allowed to touch, but this isn’t usually. This is Eddie. They’ve had a million firsts already, a million declarations of all kinds.

It’s a little thrilling, that it’s different. It’s a little thrilling that the world seems to be holding its breath when he unlocks the door, and then he stops right there, halfway to taking his shoes off, duffel bag slung over his shoulder, door still open.

Eddie’s feet are hanging over the arm of the couch. Buck can’t remember why he ever left. He smiles to himself, shuts the door quietly behind him, shucks off his shoes, abandons his bag by the door, and shuffles over to peer over the couch.

His chest floods with warmth when he makes eye contact with Eddie, who looks barely awake, dark eyes soft with sleep, boxers bunched up high on his thighs, shirt rucked up to reveal a sliver of his stomach, and Buck doesn’t even want to touch right now. He doesn’t even want more. He just wants to look, or maybe less than that. It’s enough, knowing this is an Eddie only meant for him.

Buck’s voice doesn’t come out quite right, but he chides anyway, “I told you not to stay up.”

Eddie makes a quiet sound in his chest, eyes closing again, and Buck goes to turn the lamp off, dark settling over the house as he ventures semi-blindly back to Eddie. There’s just enough light peeking through the curtains that he narrowly avoids banging his shin on the coffee table, and he can make out the outline of Eddie getting up with a grumble, can hear the soft shift of clothing, of the couch creasing under Eddie’s weight as he sits up before pushing himself on to his feet.

“Was waiting for you,” Eddie mumbles as he follows Buck to the bathroom. There’s a nightlight in there, enough that Buck can brush his teeth as Eddie leans against the doorway, eyes closed. “What’d you do?” he asks through a yawn. “Clean the entire place?”

Buck makes a nondescript sound, and Eddie seems to take it as confirmation, flicking Buck’s forehead when he’s done brushing his teeth.

“Ow,” Buck says, all mock offense.

“Next time, take me with you,” Eddie tells him, his fingers curling around Buck’s arm so he can drag him to the bedroom. “And don’t stay out so late.” He isn’t stumbling exactly, but every movement is laden with sleep, and Buck is helpless in his grasp, helpless to say anything but no, so he lets himself be pulled, lets Eddie pull his shirt off when they’re in his—their room. He expects something within him, some feeling to squeeze him tight, but right now there’s nothing except the space between them, except Eddie tugging impatiently at his pants, which Buck discards like they’re not important. He peels off his socks, and then he’s standing there in nothing but underwear, and it feels like everything is hushed now, every nerve ending anticipating Eddie touching him again.

“I’ll be cold,” Buck tells him when Eddie grabs his wrist, pulling him towards the bed, and his skin feels tender where Eddie touches it. Buck is helpless to resist the tugging, so he goes despite himself.

“I’ll keep you warm,” Eddie says, sounding a little grumpy, falling back on the bed without getting under the covers. His hand is still warm on Buck’s wrist. Buck can’t help a fond laugh when he doesn’t move. Eddie opens an eye, complaining, “I’m tired.”

“I told you not to stay up late,” Buck tells him, but he’s already at work on getting Eddie under the covers, on slipping under himself, and then Eddie rolls over, slinging an arm over Buck’s waist. He yelps when Buck’s cold toes touch his warm calf. Buck doesn’t back off, and Eddie doesn’t withdraw despite swearing under his breath.

“Well now I’m awake,” Eddie grumbles, and it’s then that Buck notices how close they are, Eddie’s arm a comfortable weight on his bare skin, the rise and fall of his chest evident under his thin t-shirt. Eddie adjusts his head on his pillow so he can peer at Buck better, so Buck can’t hide, and Buck should hate that look, that Eddie can see right through him like this, that all it would take is a tilt of his head for Buck to confess everything, but Buck doesn’t hate anything when it comes to Eddie. It’s just a lot—to be seen. To be bared, like Eddie can touch his heart in his chest like it’s easy. It was a lot before, in a good way, and it’s a lot now when there’s no distance to span. It’s not a realization Buck thinks, this thing with Eddie, but something that’s been a long time coming.

Maybe that’s part of why it’s different. Maybe he’s been falling in love with Eddie for a long time. Maybe since the beginning.

“You’ve been checking,” Buck says into the space between them, hushed, “that I’m okay.”

Eddie studies him for a moment, then sighs softly, relenting just like that, at the tiniest bit of pressure. “Yeah,” he admits.

“I’m fine,” Buck tells him again like he told him ages ago, when he was home, when he was where he wanted to be with Eddie, and he can tell Eddie is thinking of it too. It’s accompanied by a little pang of relief that he’s still here, that what he wanted then was to stay, and he was allowed to. “I’m still fine.”

Part of Buck thinks Eddie is going to remove his arm. He knows Eddie’s magic is stoppered, not flowing into Buck when he doesn’t need fixing, and that’s all Eddie needs to feel to know it’s true, so there’s no reason to leave his arm there, warm and reassuring the other way back for Buck.

“I know,” Eddie says, mouth twisting. He doesn’t move an inch, and Buck’s throat tightens inexplicably. “Your chest—nothing’s bothering you?”

Buck shakes his head a little, relieved at Eddie’s expression cracking a little, voice soft and worried. “Check,” he urges because this feels like steady ground, and Eddie’s arm comes off him so he can slide his palm over Buck’s chest, and there in the quiet, it’s like Buck can hear Eddie’s heartbeat too, tripping over his. The touch makes Buck want to shiver, something unbearably intimate about it here when they’re in bed together, and Buck has to swallow down his want at it.

“See?” he says. “Fine.”

Eddie’s eyes flicker between his. “Nothing else?” he says, assessing, and Buck can only look at him, seeing the question for what it is, for something beyond physical.

It’s easy to say he’s fine. It’s easy when he has a clean bill of health, a doctor’s note, when Eddie’s magic isn’t healing him. All he had to do was walk after the engine fell on him, wade back in the water after the tsunami, go into work after Eddie got shot to show everyone he was fine.

He’s fine. His body has withstood everything so far. It absorbed lightning and came out the other side intact, alive. His heart is still beating.

And Buck is still terrified of losing everything.

“You know,” he says, trying to breathe through it, “a lot of people change completely after nearly dying.”

“Or actually dying,” Eddie says pointedly, removing his hand to move his arm back where it was, like he’s holding Buck close, and it gives Buck the strength to go on.

“It makes them think about what they want to do,” he says, voice shaking a little. “Who they want to be.”

“Okay,” Eddie says, nodding, following along just like that. “So—you want to change things?”

Buck closes his eyes then, shakes his head. “I don’t want anything to change,” he admits, and his voice cracks. “I want everything to stay the same.”

“Buck,” Eddie says seriously, and Buck opens his eyes to see all the sincerity that he can feel welling up in him. “You’re not the person you were when we met. Hell, you’re not even the same person you were yesterday.” He shrugs. “Things change.”

“Yeah, but—” Buck says, and he doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, his eyes damp all of a sudden. “Sometimes it feels like all of it was for nothing. Like I’m still a kid, and I can’t figure out why no one—” He can’t go on.

Eddie huffs out a breath, exasperated and fond all at once. “What, you think you haven’t got me?” he asks, as if annoyed, but Buck knows all the way down to his bones that it’s perhaps the most honest thing that anyone’s ever said to him.

“When the well collapsed,” Buck has to say, the memory coming up from somewhere hidden, somewhere dark, “I thought I was going to lose you.”

Eddie sucks in a sharp breath, and it’s a sucker punch to the gut, so hard Buck can’t breathe for a moment.

He hasn’t thought about that since. Tried to lock it away in the back of his mind so he didn’t have to think about the yawning, awful emptiness of a life without Eddie.

“Buck,” Eddie says after what feels like an eternity, expression pained.

“I just—I couldn’t stop,” Buck says, voice aching all over, breaths coming fast and panicked, “I couldn’t stop thinking about not having you. I thought you were going to suffocate under there, and I—I was going to be alone again, and I’m supposed to be—I’m—I’m fine but—”

“You’re not,” Eddie says quietly, shifting closer, and there, beneath all of Buck’s terror, is love, clear as anything, and Buck’s entire life might change, but he knows, without question, this won’t, that it’s here to stay, that it might have been inevitable from the start. “You’re not fine,” Eddie tells him, voice softening with the closing distance between them, eyes dark and gentle this close. Buck might love him more than he’s ever loved anything.

It isn’t terrifying. Buck isn’t fine, and that’s okay with Eddie, and Buck wonders if maybe this is the one thing he can’t ruin. Eddie’s fingers brush against the small of his back, and Buck shudders with it, and he confesses, like it’s nothing, “If you had died, I was never going to get over you. I knew I wouldn’t.”

It feels like everything then, when it’s been said.

“Yeah?” Eddie says, a soft, wondrous thing. It’s all still intact, when Buck can breathe enough to think about it. It’s as close to a confession as he can get without outright saying it, and it didn’t destroy anything. He swallows, nods wordlessly. “I guess I can’t go dying then,” Eddie tells him, angled like a joke, but it’s not really a joke and they both know it.

“You can’t,” Buck says right back, low and urgent, and his voice bleeds with it. “What would I—” His voice fails him, the question right on the type of his tongue. What would I do without you? How would I survive without you?

“You’d go on,” Eddie says, like it’s simple. “You’d have a kid to take care of,” he points out, and the pressure of it is crushing, sudden weight on Buck’s chest making it hard to breathe, and he can see it all hit Eddie too, the trust of it, the way he’d give Chris to Buck in a heartbeat, without hesitation, and then Buck wants—he wants, so much, tangled feelings pouring out of him. He has Eddie, and he’d have Chris if—but he already has Chris. Eddie has made sure of that.

Eddie asks him when he’s making decisions for Chris. Chris asks Buck for advice, and he goes to him when he’s mad at Eddie. Eddie hates leaving Chris with other people but has never blinked twice when Buck asks to take him out for an afternoon, or a night, or a sleepover. It’s just that Eddie would prefer to be there, likes being close, likes holding on a little, just like Buck.

That’s part of why they work. They both cling on a little too tight, give each other everything, and maybe that’s really why Buck ran here in the aftermath of dying.

There are the things he wants. There’s Eddie and Chris and family and home, there’s waking up in the morning never alone, familiarity and languid time when everything used to drag or slip by. But there’s also this thing building up inside of Buck, this thing that scares him sometimes. It’s something made entirely of Buck, and that makes it hard to admit he can’t handle it. He’s too old to beg to sleep with Maddie, to ask for someone to wrap their arms around him and keep the nightmares at bay. He’s supposed to be able to handle himself now.

When you’ve been left so many times, at some point you learn you have to do everything yourself.

But Buck isn’t sure he ever learned how to deal with himself, not really. He either stuffs it deep down where he can’t see it, or it erupts out of him, and he can’t stop it. He hates it, and he hates being alone with it, but he has to face it, the way he has to face everything about himself because he wants to be better, because as much as he doesn’t want anything to change, he doesn’t want to stay the same either.

Eddie took one look at him, gave him his kid like it was nothing, without even asking, because he knew Buck would do it, because Buck never let him do it alone, and that’s why Buck is here now. Because Eddie isn’t going to let him do it alone either. Because Buck knows when he’s afraid of facing it himself, Eddie’s got his back.

“We have a kid to take care of,” Buck corrects, quiet, and even as he says it he knows that’s what he wants, and that he has it already, and he finally manages to pick out a single thing from the knot in his chest.

He finally places that he really, really wants to kiss Eddie.

“Mm,” Eddie hums with a small nod, swallowing hard, eyes fluttering shut. Buck can’t tear his eyes away, his heart beating steadily despite himself. “We do.”

Buck’s toes aren’t cold anymore. He doesn’t move. It doesn’t feel like too much here, not right now. Nothing could, he thinks. Even if it did, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

It doesn’t feel like keeping a secret when Buck thinks of it like that. He could tell Eddie what he’s feeling, and Eddie would help him through it, and the insistent press of his words in his mouth dies just like that. He looks at Eddie, and he doesn’t have to say it.

Eddie will figure it out, after all, just like he always does when it comes to Buck, just like Buck always figures him out. And if this is an exchange, Buck can love Eddie without saying it, but in every way that matters, too.

-

Buck would’ve gone in regardless. Building partially collapsed with unsteady structural support, firefighters needed to sweep the top floors, the familiar sound of his SCBA as he breathes, pushing aside rubble to rescue stragglers. He feels alive here, always has, in that he’s where he’s meant to be, doing what he’s supposed to be doing.

But he’s glad that Eddie’s behind him, close to his back, voice firm and calm when the floor groans beneath them and they both still. “Don’t move,” he tells Buck, unnecessary, but reassuring all the same. They only had to look at each other on the ground to know, just a glance from Buck as a question, a nod from Eddie as an answer, and they were ready to go together.

Buck has never been this in tune with Eddie, which is saying something. Even their first shift together, there was something seamless about moving together. They clicked, like Buck has never clicked with anyone else, even while trying to guard himself against Eddie. He shoved it back then, because firefighting was worth more than keeping his hackles raised, and Eddie slipped right through just like that, settled himself right where Buck wanted someone, in the spot that scared him most. He couldn’t figure out how to get Eddie out from under his skin then. Hadn’t wanted to. Still doesn’t.

It’s still scary sometimes, but he wants to stick it out like he always has, wants to hope that this time it doesn’t hurt. He’s an optimist, sue him, but in all the time he’s spent worrying about what he wants, he’s never once thought about not having Eddie. He thought of it after the well, after Eddie got shot, and tried to shove it so far down it would never resurface. At least in those cases, he had Eddie before then, had his best friend, and every bit of something he could only have dreamed of. It was almost worse in his coma dream. Eddie barely existed there, all the years erased, and everything about that had been wrong.

It had occurred to him only once, that as much as his life changed, he would have been different too. Eddie had been pressed up against his back then, warm and real, breathing slow and deep. He’d fallen asleep earlier and rolled over at some point. Buck hadn’t bothered moving, liking the weight of him close, and it was safe enough there to consider what being different would have meant.

If he grew up wanted, he wouldn’t have clung to the 118 as tightly as he did. There wouldn’t have been walls to break down, and Buck wouldn’t have wanted Eddie as badly as he did, and Eddie wouldn’t be everything he was to Buck. Buck’s eyes were only a little wet when he turned his face into his pillow.

Everything that happened to him was unfair. Buck knows that. He’s spent years unpacking it in therapy, but it’s part of him. It’s part of what makes him imperfect, and Buck is—he can’t imagine being the other him. Being whole already. Having to make room for someone else.

When he met Eddie, he already had an empty space waiting, and there’s something important about that.

“Careful,” he tells Eddie when they continue walking, picking their way carefully through the rubble. He doesn’t need to say it out loud, not really, when he knows Eddie is just as in tune with him right now. It’s not even that they can have a silent conversation with just a look, because they’ve always been able to do that. Right now, it’s like Buck can feel Eddie right there, can tell when he’s about to open his mouth to caution Buck about watching his step, when he’s calmly walking behind him. He doesn’t know how he knows without looking, but he does.

There’s no one on the floor they’re on, which Eddie reports to Bobby, and then they climb carefully up, the building groaning around them, the creak of metal under their feet, walls shuddering a little in a way that makes them both stop, Buck’s heart in his throat.

“It’ll hold,” Bobby tells them over Eddie’s walkie. “Bits are crumbling off on the delta side, but the building itself should hold.”

“Got it, Cap,” Eddie says, and he reaches out to press his hand against Buck’s lower back briefly, reassuring. “Get moving.”

Buck can’t help but grin. “You got it,” he says dutifully and continues up with Eddie close behind him. They check the rooms together, Eddie weaving around his arm as Buck holds a door open, Eddie stumbling and Buck catching him by the shoulder, and they make eye contact and Buck thinks he could read Eddie’s mind right now, if he needed to, a million words unspoken.

His heart skips a beat despite himself. Eddie clears his throat, says, “Thanks,” and then they’re moving again.

“Buckley, Diaz,” comes Bobby’s voice when they only have the rooms at the end of the hall left. “Get out of there. Alpha side is starting to go.”

Buck looks back. They’re in the back of the building, and the front seems fine for now. “Copy that, Cap. We’ve got two rooms left,” Buck says, glancing over at Eddie, determined, assured by Eddie’s nod back. “We’ll be right out after.”

“Make it quick,” Bobby says, and they get straight to it. There’s no one in either room, and Eddie’s on his walkie, telling them they’re getting out of there. They’re halfway back to the stairs in the midsection when a tremor runs through the entire building, a terrible groan, and then the end of the hallway in front of them simply crashes down, exposing the side of the building like it’s been ripped open, accompanied by a small lurch of the floor.

Buck’s heart drops, panic clawing up at him, and he forces himself to breathe through the worst of it. The building shudders, unsteady under their feet, but remains intact and Buck casts a panicked glance at Eddie whose own alarm is only apparent by his wide eyes and because Buck knows him, can read it in the way he’s holding himself very still.

“Buck, Eddie, you two alright?” comes Bobby’s voice, urgent.

“All good, Cap,” Buck tells him, willing his heart to slow down. “Coming down now.”

“Stairwell should be fine. Be careful,” Bobby says, and Eddie exhales at that. He jerks his head towards the stairwell, and Buck leads the way, cautious, aware of the fissures in the floor creeping towards them and besides them, the other side of the building threatening to go crumbling down too.

He knows Eddie is right behind him, their panic muted now in favor of determination to get out, and the door is only a few feet away. He can’t tell the difference between the creaks and groans of the building around them, hoping it’ll all hold just long enough for them to get there when he feels a swell of sudden panic, and at the same time Eddie saying, frantic, “Buck,” and then Buck feels the floor tilting under him, his own panic crashing into him like a tidal wave.

Eddie’s hand lands on his arm, tight enough to bruise, before he roughly tugs him back and they stumble away from where the floor crumbled right out beneath where Buck was just standing.

Buck can’t catch his breath, entire body alive with frantic energy, the double rhythm of frightened heartbeat in his chest, panic warring with confusion.

The thing is—the thing is—there was no one way for him to know.

He didn’t know that the floor was going to fall out from under him. He didn’t see it coming. He doesn’t have premonition, and Buck may believe in the universe, but not like this, not that panic that touched him a split second before he could’ve known in any way, before Eddie’s voice hit him or the floor tilted, before he might have—

“You okay?” Eddie asks, voice tight, still holding his arm, grip loosening a fraction.

Buck turns, feels a little pinch of relief when his eyes meet Eddie’s, and he thinks, with sudden clarity, Oh. That’s you.

“Nice save,” Buck says without thinking, and then there’s a flicker of amusement that Buck knows isn’t his, and he can see it on Eddie’s face, in the way his brow softens, the way he finally lets go of Buck. It’s disorienting and a little overwhelming, but everything clicks all of a sudden.

That’s why they’ve been in sync. That’s why Buck’s feelings have been so much and a little unfamiliar and tangled up.

Now that Buck’s looking for it, he can feel Eddie’s resolve underneath his own frantic heartbeat, can tell when he tilts his head and says, “Come on,” that Eddie’s got him.

They make it safely down the stairs, and Buck can—he can feel him the whole way down, and then they’re out in fresh air, and he can feel Eddie’s tension bleeding out of him, glancing over to watch his shoulders relax as Eddie talks with Bobby, and Buck is trying to figure out where Eddie begins and Buck ends, making his way around the truck, out of view, out of the way, heart in his throat, breaths shallow as he braces one hand against it, stares at the ground.

He sifts through all his emotions, tries to untangle them carefully. He doesn’t really know what he’s looking for, but—

There. There’s Eddie, calm now. Buck holds on to that for a minute, lets it calm him too. He feels a touch of discomfort after a while, wonders if Eddie banged his shoulder into something, not looking, and he has to huff out a laugh at the thought before Eddie rounds the side of the truck, frowning when he catches sight of Buck, worried. Buck can feel it, and it’s quieter than Buck usually feels but steady.

It’s—it’s a lot feeling it. Objectively, Buck knows Eddie cares about him. He knows they’re kind of each other’s person, and he knows Eddie watches out for him. But it’s one thing hearing that Eddie is worrying about him. It’s one thing for Eddie to ask Buck to stay, for him to trust him, for him to care, and it’s another entirely to feel it.

Buck is helpless to it. He straightens up. “I’m good,” he says, soft, and he knows Eddie doesn’t believe him, eyes trained on him. He offers his hand out, palm up. “Check?”

Eddie hesitates, coming forward, then gently touches his palm, fingers sure when they brush against him. He looks perfectly inside himself, all focus and seriousness, but Buck can feel the edge of Eddie’s worry soften. “Well, you’re not dying,” he says, and Buck doesn’t have to feel it to know he still doesn’t completely believe it. He still knows Eddie’s tells well enough, not needing the extra emotion to confirm it.

There’s a smile tugging at Buck’s lips, something blooming deep within him, pleased and grateful and like nothing else. It’s something reserved for Eddie, and his chest might be full to the brim, but it’s big enough to hold everything right now. “Told you,” he chides, and Eddie’s expression cracks, worry mostly dissolving into something warmer, something that brushes against Buck’s heart.

“Not sure I can trust you to take care of yourself,” Eddie says dryly, fingers still in Buck’s palm, but everything within Buck is affection.

Buck has to stifle his grin now, bashful and pleased because oh, that’s half Eddie. That’s Eddie’s affection, his fondness, quieter than Buck’s. They’re hard to tease apart for a second but distinct once Buck can place it. Buck’s fondness is a rush. It pushes him, races through him. Eddie’s is more like warmth on a summer night, slow growing but everywhere, steadfast. Buck curls his fingers around Eddie’s, holding his hand there, and he thinks he may be glowing from the inside out with all of it.

“I’m pretty good at staying alive,” Buck points out.

Eddie raises his eyebrow like he doesn’t believe him for a second. “Aren’t I usually the one cleaning up your messes?”

“Like that’s such a burden,” Buck teases, and then his knees go a little weak at the seriousness of the look Eddie gives him, at the tenderness buried under it.

“You’d do the same for me,” Eddie points out, and it’s nothing but truth. This time the thing that catches at Buck’s breath isn’t Eddie’s emotions. It’s not more than it was before. No, it’s everything he’s been feeling for years with Eddie. It’s all Buck, all the familiar rush, all the things that Eddie always makes him feel. Seen. Trusted. It’s years of knowing each other, of holding each other up, and pulling each other along. It’s years of learning and paying attention, and it’s—it’s Eddie, the way things often are with Buck.

No matter what happens, Buck knows he’ll never not trust Eddie. Everything could change, and that never would. You can trust me, Buck thinks, squeezing Eddie’s fingers gently, to keep you safe.

He doesn’t know if Eddie can hear him, but Eddie squeezes back before drawing his hand away, goes back round the truck, stops right before he disappears out of view to peer over his shoulder, quirk to his mouth. “Aren’t you coming?”

Buck huffs out a laugh, ducks his head, and then follows.

There’s nothing else he would do. Nothing else he’d ever want to.

-

They’re out and busy for another hour on simpler calls, a woman’s hair caught in her hair dryer, a pair of twisted ankles after twin slips in the shower, currently a little kid stuck in a tree. Buck is only half paying attention, present when he’s needed, but focused on Eddie when he’s not.

They’re all watching Eddie scale the tree. Bobby offered the ladder, and Eddie waved a hand and said he had it. Buck watches as he hauls himself up without too much difficulty, Chimney letting out a low whistle, Hen asking how the kid got up there in the first place, but Buck is too busy trying to find Eddie’s emotions again.

He keeps losing the thread of him below his own. It makes sense when Buck has had a lifetime with himself, and he knows he hasn’t had that with Eddie yet, but sometimes it feels like it. Sometimes when they look at each other and he knows what Eddie is thinking, knows Eddie knows him, he thinks maybe that’s all a lifetime is. Knowing someone and being known.

He squints up as Eddie reaches out a hand to the kid clinging to the trunk, and finds Eddie within him again, the surety that being with Eddie always gives him. He can imagine Eddie’s voice, quiet but firm, as he watches the kid take his hand.

There used to be a tree that didn’t look like this, and a kid nothing like the kid holding Eddie’s hand, in a place that never felt like home the way it does here, but Buck remembers how it felt to be eight, standing up there looking down at the houses, feeling on top of the world and terrified and small all at once. He remembers the scrapes on his palms and the race of his heartbeat and the way he was determined to do it anyway, chasing something that he could never name.

If Eddie had been there, maybe Buck never would have climbed a tree like that again. But maybe he never would have run away either. Maybe he wouldn’t have died and it wouldn’t have changed everything. There’s a lump in his throat, of things that never happened and things that did, and he has to—he needs to put it away for a million reasons. He’s on the job, most importantly, and putting it away is what they do, but he also can’t risk distracting Eddie.

He has no idea if Eddie can feel him back. He tries to imagine it in reverse. Tries to imagine being Eddie and that his familiar emotions are those deep, quiet ones, and then pictures the rush of Buck’s emotions crashing in, wild and sweeping over every little bit of him. He knows it can’t bother Eddie that much because he would know, and that sort of knocks him over, not only the tether of knowledge they’ve been carrying for years, but the way he would be able to confirm it just by feeling it out.

He tries to pull himself together, can’t quite manage it, and then he’s searching within himself again, rooting around until he finds Eddie’s steadiness. That, he can hold on to. It can’t guide him out of himself, not completely, but it’s comforting to know he isn’t alone, and then Buck feels a bit like his breath has been wiped clean from his lungs because—he isn’t alone.

He hasn’t been alone since dying. Eddie hasn’t let him.

“Buck,” Eddie says, in front of him out of nowhere. His smile is a touch lopsided, teasing. “You going to join us?” he asks for a second time, incling his head back at the truck where Hen is just disappearing inside.

Buck waves his hand in dismissal but dutifully follows, and Eddie’s knees knock against his when they’re sitting across from each other, and Buck is reminded again that Eddie’s got him. That really, Eddie hasn’t let him be alone, not all this time, and especially not now. He’s been there the whole time, years, bumping his elbow into Buck’s, and now he’s tucked right into Buck’s chest like it’s nothing.

Buck screws up his eyes, can’t even put words to it, just feels it all with everything he has and pushes it Eddie’s way. Eddie doesn’t blink when Buck opens his eyes, halfway through saying something to Chimney, his head turned. He glances over at Buck at some point to exchange an amused look that says, can you believe this guy? But it’s private, just for Buck, and Chimney catches them at it and loudly complains, while Buck, unable to stop himself, grins and holds it close.

It’s not fair, Buck reasons, when they’re back and Bobby tells them to start on dinner. Eddie grabs the cutting board as Buck starts a pot of water for the pasta. It’s not fair that Eddie’s doing all of this for him, that he’s there for Buck in every way that matters, when Buck can’t do the same for him.

“Spit it out,” Eddie says as he chops, out of the blue.

Buck pauses in his surveying of the fridge to see what they have left, turning his head to look at Eddie, confused. “What?”

“You’ve hardly said a word since I saved you,” Eddie says, glancing over briefly, and Buck knows he’s saying it to get a rise out of him.

He doesn’t take the bait, just shrugging. Eddie studies him. He’s not going to let it go, Buck can tell, and Buck would try to get out of this conversation except he can feel Eddie’s sincerity all the way down to his bones, can feel the fondness, Eddie’s fondness, lapping at him.

It flusters him a little, being in the direct beam of Eddie’s affection. It feels like it’s been trained on Buck this entire time, unwavering and overwhelming, and Buck can barely fathom how much Eddie likes him. He’s always trusted that Eddie does, because Eddie has always been honest with him, because they’re best friends, but it’s so—it’s constant. That’s the part that gets him, that makes him feel shivery all over.

There’s a small part of him that wonders at it because, well, he’s just Buck. He’s wriggled his way into Eddie’s life, and Eddie has let him, and Buck now knows with every fiber of his being that Eddie’s glad about it, all the way down to his toes.

He thinks about that moment of panic again from Eddie, his grip on Buck’s arm, and then he thinks of how Eddie wanted him to stay at his house. How Eddie wanted him to stay.

Buck’s heart swells, entirely his own this time. “If you hadn’t been there—” he starts, light, as he opens the spice cabinet this time.

“But I was,” Eddie says, like it’s simple. “I’m your partner. That’s my job.”

“Eddie,” Buck complains through a smile. “I’m trying to say thank you.”

“And I’m trying to say you don’t need to,” Eddie replies, giving him a look when Buck glances over. “But you’re welcome.” They grin at each other briefly before Eddie turns back, and Buck watches him for a few extra seconds, just long enough that he feels the little ache of something he doesn’t know how to name.

It’s Eddie’s emotion, he’s sure of that, but it’s hard to place what it is. It feels like a whole bit of him goes tender, like it would hurt to touch if he could touch it, and Buck suddenly thinks he understands why Eddie reaches out to touch with his magic. He thinks he’d like to put his palm over Eddie’s chest, over his heart where this little ball of feelings is trying to squeeze into something smaller, or rather, where Eddie’s trying to dampen it.

He doesn’t know how he knows that’s what’s happening, but he’s sure of it. It doesn’t feel very good. It’s kind of heavy, trying to force something that doesn’t want to budge, trying to zip something up that’s trying to spill over. The feeling resists it, Buck thinks, and Eddie is still chopping like nothing’s wrong but he’s frowning now.

Buck abandons the cabinet. He goes over to lean against the counter next to Eddie, crossing his arms.

Eddie studiously does not look at him, and then, after a minute, Buck feels him stop pushing against it as he lets out a sigh. Buck expects it to burst out, but it doesn’t. It just sits there, seeps a little around the edges until Buck’s fingers are tender with it.

“Are you still blaming yourself for me dying?” Buck guesses.

Eddie’s movements stop. He chews on his bottom lip for a few seconds, working himself up to saying something.

“I should’ve had your back,” Eddie says softly, and Buck can hear the clatter of the firehouse as it normally sounds, but it feels far away right now when the world is narrowed down to just this, to Buck and to Eddie, to the cavern of his chest holding them both.

Buck knows it’s the truth, but it’s not total. “You did,” Buck says, and Eddie looks at him, grimacing. “You had me.”

“I should’ve been—” Eddie struggles. “I should’ve been there,” he says, but Buck can feel that’s not what he really wants to say by the tightness in his throat.

“You saved me, Eddie,” Buck reasons, because that’s what everyone told him after. That Eddie tried to pull him up with everything he had, and then he was the one who gave him compressions. Hen had said they couldn’t touch Eddie, his skin had been so hot, the air around him crackling with energy, lightning redirected into magic that Eddie used to heal him.

Buck can’t imagine it, exactly. He’s never seen Eddie like that. To him, Eddie is just Eddie, already competent, power tucked beneath his arm like anything else. He doesn’t look different when he uses it, just more settled, maybe more present, real enough that Buck can touch him. He can still feel the static in his mouth before, and he wonders if it would have hurt if he had been awake when Eddie finally got to him.

He doesn’t think so. Eddie turned something that hurt him into something that could save him. And besides, Eddie has never hurt him. Would never.

Buck feels the last of Eddie’s resolve give way. “I’m not good at saving people,” Eddie tells him, and Buck thinks he gets it.

“Shannon?” he asks, finally placing what he’s feeling. It’s grief and longing and regret all mixed into one, and Buck knows it’s not only her. It’s everyone Eddie saved when he was in the army, saved and lost, it’s all the people he’s tried to hold on to and lost anyway, a million wounds that didn’t heal right.

“She told me I wasn’t there for her,” Eddie says, pulling a carrot towards him to resume cutting. Buck knows it’s easier like that, when he’s doing something, when he doesn’t have to look, but he can still feel the anxiety, insistent in the pit of Eddie’s stomach. “When I got back from the army. And she was right, I wasn’t there for her. Then when she died—” Eddie shrugs, as if nonchalant, but Buck knows him better, doesn’t even need to feel it to know it’s a mask he wears when he’s trying to hide. From Buck, mostly, but the insistent pressure of forcing it down makes Buck think Eddie’s hiding from himself too.

“Eddie,” Buck says, and he doesn’t let Eddie run now. He wraps his hand over Eddie’s wrist, stops his hand, and this time when Eddie looks at him his eyes are a little wet. “That wasn’t your fault,” Buck tells him. “You know that, right? And it wasn’t your fault with me either?”

“I know,” Eddie says begrudgingly, blinking. “But I’m not—I don’t have a great track record of saving people, Buck.”

“You have a good track record with me,” Buck points out, frowning. Eddie opens his mouth to protest, and Buck interrupts, “No, hey. I’m not anyone else.”

“I know,” Eddie says, like it hurts. “I just—” He stops. Puts down the knife carefully, and then he twists his hand around so that their fingers can thread together, tentative from Eddie, but Buck meets him like he always does, curling his fingers to hold on tight. Eddie looks at their hands then, and Buck does too. There’s something safe in the sight of it, in Buck’s hand dwarfed just a little by Eddie’s, Eddie’s long fingers and the familiar callouses of his palm.

It doesn’t matter that they’re in public, not really. Eddie squeezes his hand, gently. Buck squeezes back, and it seems to give Eddie the strength to say, “I don’t want to let you down too,” and Buck can tell that’s the heart of it, the thing that frightens Eddie most because it strikes Buck so deep he can’t even put a name to where it hurts.

“You don’t want to lose me,” Buck translates, and then he can’t seem to catch his breath at how much he feels wanted. He can’t even figure out where to start with that, how to tell Eddie how much it means, how much he can feel it tucking itself under his skin, warming him all over. Buck has to take a second to just look at him, at Eddie’s eyelashes swooping down, the firm line of his mouth. He’s attractive, sure, but the sight of him is familiar to Buck. He’s everything he wants when he’s not feeling himself, when he’s had a bad day, when he wants someone else to be there with him. “I promised,” Buck reassures quietly, not to leave, and he knows that Eddie gets it when he glances back up, eyes bleeding everything.

“I felt your heart stop,” Eddie says back, like it’s nothing, but his voice is faint and he’s looking at Buck like it’s important that he’s here. Like maybe the lightning strike changed everything for him too. Everything within Buck aches with him, with fear and tenderness and a sense of resignation, though Buck doesn’t doubt for a second that Eddie pushed that aside before going after him, up that ladder. But—

“You weren’t touching me though,” Buck says, half a question. He was on that ladder, and Eddie wasn’t, and Eddie’s always had to touch someone to heal them, to use his magic.

Eddie opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but nothing comes out. He closes his mouth, swallows hard, eyes wide and grip tight in Buck’s. It takes Buck a second to locate the guilt wrapped up in something soft that Buck can’t put a name to, sitting quietly in his ribcage. He has no idea what it means, studying Eddie carefully, but Eddie can’t seem to bring himself to say it either.

One of them has to give. “Eddie,” is all Buck has to say, still confused, and Eddie cracks.

“I can—” He falters for a second, struggles, and then Buck watches him put himself back together. “I can feel your heartbeat even if I’m not touching you,” Eddie tells him, like it’s a confession, and Buck’s heart speeds up in response, crowds up his throat.

He stands there, stock still, just to absorb it. “I didn’t know you could do that,” Buck eventually manages to say, his entire body thrumming with it, feeling alive and real and grateful beyond words. He wouldn’t have known this if he had died, either, wouldn’t know how Eddie’s hand trembles just a little in his, how he can stop it just by giving Eddie a little nod through his own emotions, wordless, or maybe, I got you, and Eddie settles, just like that.

He also makes a quiet, strangled noise reminiscent of a laugh. “Neither did I.”

Buck is still stuck, on it, on the way it feels like a secret well kept, like a little flame cupped in his palms. “That’s useful,” he says, mouth on autopilot. “You know, you could use that when we’re searching for survivors. You could find people.” He’s barely aware of what he’s saying over the rush of his heartbeat in his ears because it—it feels like it means something. That’s not something he knew, and he knows practically everything about Eddie. He knows how Eddie likes his coffee, and what Eddie’s favorite movies are, and Eddie has explained his magic to him, had explained it not long after they became friends.

He had healed a bruise that Buck got from shoving his shoulder against a door, and his touch had been barely there before Buck’s shoulder, skin down to muscle down to bone, went warm, all the way through. Buck remembered looking up at Eddie like that, the singular focus on his face, all of him shrinking down into nothing more and nothing less than where he was standing, and Buck understood, in that moment, he was going to be the one to reach Eddie, wherever he went.

“That’s gotta be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, man,” Buck had blurted out, and he’ll never forget the look Eddie gave him after, small and pleased and a little surprised.

“I don’t think about it,” Eddie told him then, shrugging. “It just happens.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Buck replied, and Eddie looked at him, really looked, before grinning.

“People without magic never do,” he said, dry, already dragging a grin to Buck’s lips too, but after that, he stuck close to Buck, closer than anyone, and Buck had let him.

“Buck,” Eddie says now, and Buck’s mouth snaps shut, his heart racing. He’s heard his name a million times in Eddie’s mouth, in a million different ways, but only one other has ever felt like this. Eddie looks him directly in the eye, the way he does when it’s something important for Buck to hear. “Just you,” is all he says, and Buck’s entire body is full of it.

“Just me?” he repeats without thinking, and then it dawns on him what that means.

Eddie hesitates now before swallowing and giving him a small nod. Softer, “Just you.”

Buck stares at him. It feels too big to put into words. “Not even Chris?” he asks tentatively, and Eddie shakes his head. “But—” He’s the one who falters now, swallowing hard. “Since the beginning?” because maybe there’s something about a manufactured heartbeat that makes it easier to hear, something about flesh and bone that don’t belong. Maybe Eddie can hear him because Buck’s living on time that he didn’t earn, and maybe it’s none of that, but Buck finds there’s a part of him that hurts, that wonders if that’s why Eddie stuck close.

He doesn’t want to be kept around for something he can give. He’s never wanted that, but especially not from Eddie.

He doesn’t get the chance to drown in that though because Eddie says, “No. Since the well.” He’s very still, now. Looking at Buck, but his eyes are far away and Buck knows he’s remembering. It’s not something Eddie does often. He tends to keep things behind him, put them away, and stay in the moment. It’s part of what makes him such a good firefighter, but sometimes Buck can see it building behind Eddie’s eyes, threatening to spill over in one way or another, a fist to the face, a bat to his room.

Buck can’t fix everything, but god he wants to. He wants to reach back, wants to reassure Eddie that he’s here, that his heart is beating, that even if he’s not fine, he’s here. He knows Eddie has him. And that’s enough.

Buck can feel the way Eddie’s chest is going tight with worry, and he tries, for the first time, to touch it, to wrap himself around it and to tell Eddie that he isn’t there in the past, but here, safe and sound with Buck.

Eddie’s expression doesn’t change, and Buck knows he can’t feel him back, but he thinks about his nightmare and he thinks about Eddie’s hands all over him and his body wants it suddenly and fiercely, to be pressed close, to be touched and to provide safety.

“I was drowning down there,” Eddie says after a pause, expression grim with memory, fear and determination and grief, “and it was dark, and I didn’t know which way was up. I couldn’t figure out where to go, so I just—I don’t know. I was just trying to reach for something, for anything, and then there you were.”

“My heart was beating really fast,” Buck tells him, mouth numb, remembering it now, his own terror, the mud under his fingernails, the endless scream building in his throat even as he was yelling. He remembers Bobby pulling him up, saying, “Come on, kid,” in his ear, and he remembers every step away feeling like giving up.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, a little breath of laughter. And then, as if he’s reading Buck’s mind, as if he knows how to get Buck’s heart to jolt, he says, “I knew you weren’t giving up on me.”

And the thing is, Eddie is his person. The thing is Buck knows he’s not reading his mind, and he knows Eddie can’t feel it back, but Eddie knows him down to the bones, in a way that no one else does, and it’s not out of obligation. It’s because Eddie chose him, and there’s something sacred about that, something about finding a place to belong and a person to belong to and letting them choose and letting himself be chosen, and really, that’s all Buck has ever wanted, and all Eddie has ever given him.

“You followed it?” he asks, feeling settled all over, warm all the way through.

“Yeah,” Eddie admits. “And then—” He half shrugs. “Once I started feeling it, I never stopped.”

And it finally hits him, really hits him, that Eddie felt him die. That Eddie chose, and almost lost, and it’s a thousand wounds never healed, terror so deep it must have carved him open, and he’s still standing here, still choosing, his hand in Buck’s, feelings all over Buck’s chest, messy and raw and honest, so honest it might scare him if he knew. Even so, Buck’s got him. That was never a question.

Eddie’s still talking, looking down at their hands now, rubbing his thumb over Buck’s skin. “I have to be close to you though. I haven’t tested how far it goes, but the loft is out of range from my house.”

“That why you wanted me at yours?” Buck has to ask, sure Eddie can tell how much it means, might even be able to feel it in the rhythm of Buck’s heartbeat.

The smile Eddie casts at him when he looks back up at Buck is soft at the edges, and nothing close to fragile. Eddie says, mouth tilting further up, “That, and you do my laundry for me,” and Buck laughs, mock offended, shaking his head and trying to school his expression into something scolding. He knows it doesn’t work because Eddie can’t seem to stop smiling either.

“Whatever, man,” Buck says through his own smile, meaning everything opposite, finally letting go of Eddie’s hand. He needs it to take over cutting vegetables, before Bobby finally comes up and busts them for getting nothing done, but it feels like a loss, something so deep that Buck knows without knowing that Eddie felt that too.

“We’re switching jobs?” Eddie asks, like he didn’t just miss Buck pulling his hand away. His expression doesn’t give a thing away either when Buck glances over, one eyebrow quirked up, posture relaxed.

Buck is still trying to puzzle that out when he says, “Yep. Check if we still have that spice mix?” and gently puts a hand against Eddie’s lower back to push him towards the spice cabinet, and then his stomach lurches, entire body lighting up at it, and well, it would have been fine if Buck had realized he was in love with Eddie when he was only feeling his own feelings. Except Buck now knows there’s two sets of feelings to parse through, and he remembers all of his own, remembers what love and giddiness and arousal feel like, what normal is to him. And he’s spent all day poking at Eddie’s emotions, figuring out how they feel different, deeper, all over, like sinking in slowly rather than plunging, and he knows now how to distinguish them, and that—

That wasn’t Buck’s stomach lurching.

That was Eddie’s.

-

Buck is allowed approximately fifteen seconds to stare at the back of Eddie’s head, and then Bobby comes up and scolds them lightly for getting nothing done, and Buck finally forces himself to breathe. Then it’s preparing for dinner, sitting down to eat, Eddie’s knee pressed against his and Buck feeling it all over, quiet and warm and enough to stop his voice in his throat, and then the alarm goes before he can forget how to talk, before he can forget how to be normal, before he can pretend that he doesn’t know.

By the time they get back, hours later, they’re all covered head to toe in dust and grime. Buck passes out as soon as he gets his head on a pillow, and then he’s blinking awake to another alarm, getting up with a groan, Eddie right beside him, keeping Buck tethered deep in his chest.

It’s maybe the busiest shift they’ve had since Buck got back. Eddie completely heals a torn ligament on their second to last call, and he looks close to falling asleep where he stands on the last one, a structure fire. They stay an hour over time to wrap that one up, and Buck practically has to peel his turnouts off when they get back, all of them too tired to talk much. Hen and Chimney leave first, mumbling agreement to postpone a playdate, and then it’s just Buck and Eddie.

Buck is too exhausted to do much besides pull his pants on. Eddie’s eyes are closed as he pulls his shirt over his head. He opens them to close his duffel bag and slings it over his shoulder, and then leans against the lockers, eyes closed again. “Want me to drive?” he mumbles.

Buck can’t help but laugh quietly. He takes a second to look at Eddie. It’s the first moment he’s had to think about it, the first moment he’s had since realizing, so he looks at Eddie and maybe he’s too tired to be nervous of anything but—

It’s Eddie. It’s Eddie, and they’re going home together, and then they’re going to sleep in the same bed, and Buck, selfishly, wants that, and he has to wonder if part of it’s that he can feel that Eddie wants that too, even if the way they want it is different.

“You look ready to drop,” Buck says, gathering his things. His entire body aches, and he thinks longingly of their bed, and there’s a little thrill at the thought of that. Their bed. That’s how he imagines it, when they’ll get home, and that’s theirs too, their home.

It’s the second moment he’s had now, to think about it, and this one isn’t about could bes and what ifs. Maybe, once again, it’s that he’s too exhausted to worry, but right now all he can think about is that Eddie wants him there just as much as Buck wants to be there, the two of them bumping hips in the kitchen, pressed together on the couch in the living room, falling into bed together at the end of the day. Buck can’t help but think about every moment since dying, every moment they’ve had together, and it all builds and builds, and he has to close his eyes just to feel it all.

“You look pretty tired yourself,” Eddie says, and Buck opens his eyes, feeling nothing but fond.

“Your eyes aren’t even open,” he points out.

Eddie smiles, cracking his eyes open to look at him, and it feels like Buck’s pinned for a split second, like that’s all it takes. “There,” Eddie tells him. He gives Buck a deliberate look up and down, head to toe, and now that Buck knows what to look for, he can see the way Eddie’s eyes linger a little too long, feel the flutter deep in his gut and the way his mouth goes a little dry. “You sure you can get us back in one piece?”

“You trust me?” Buck asks, angling for teasing but hitting something softer, and the resulting flicker of affection makes Buck think he made the right choice anyway.

Eddie dozes on the way back, traffic not too bad, Christopher already at school, and he seems a little more awake than Buck by the time they crawl into bed together.

Buck turns his nose into the pillow, can’t bring himself to move and drag the covers over himself, sleep already dragging him under.

He grasps at consciousness as he listens to Eddie moving around, the bed dipping close to him. Everything smells familiar here, like them, him and Eddie, and the bit of him that’s still able to think realizes he hasn’t been afraid of falling asleep. That he hasn’t been thinking about waking up in that other place, that he hasn’t wondered if he’s halfway to the grave, if he’s going to end up in that not quite right dream again.

That he knows where he belongs, and he wants to keep it. He wants it, desperately wants it, more than anything he’s ever wanted, and he has it, he’s not going to destroy it, and it’s a relief, knowing that.

Buck isn’t the one who wants more than he can have. He’s not going to be the one who clings, and he’s not going to have to break his promises. He has this family he wants that wants him just as badly, and it’s much better this way around.

If Buck were the one to fall in love with Eddie, he’d ruin everything. But Eddie falling in love with him? Buck may not feel the same, but that’s not important.

He’d give Eddie everything, no matter what he asked for. No matter what. He loves Eddie in every way that matters anyway.

He realizes after another moment that Eddie’s tucking the blanket around him, and then he’s laying next to him, and Buck feels a little pang from Eddie that he can’t place.

“C’mere,” is all he mumbles, not sure what it is, just sure he has to do something about it. Eddie rolls right into him, and Buck lifts his arm with the last bit of strength he has to drape it over him as Eddie tucks himself right into Buck, his leg slotting between Buck’s, and he can feel Eddie settle, body and emotion both, his soft sigh brushing against Buck’s cheek.

Buck doesn’t have enough brainpower to think on it. Instead, he feels Eddie’s fingers inch up just past the hem of his shirt, his fingertips resting on Buck’s lower back, like he’s something important enough to hold, and that’s the last thought he has before drifting off.

-

They’re still in the same position they fell asleep in, when Buck finally wakes up. He can tell Eddie is awake by the pattern of his breathing, and he looks absently for what Eddie’s feeling. He finds it more easily this time, in the shape of something comfortable. Whispers, “Hey,” and feels it balloon into affection.

Eddie makes a soft sound deep in his chest, just to acknowledge that he’s heard it. They lay there for a while as Buck sheds sleep, finally opening his eyes a sliver to see Eddie’s already looking at him, dark eyes right there, only a few inches away.

Eddie, who loves him, and Buck has to inhale shakily. Eddie’s forehead immediately creases, all quiet concern under the sea of comfort. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, but now that his brain is working, it all starts to sink in.

It’s just—Eddie loves him. And Buck can feel it.

It’s not that Buck thinks he’s unloveable, but he’s danced this dance many times and he knows how it ends. He knows that he’s loved until he’s not, that in the end, he isn’t enough to stay for.

After breaking up with Abby, with Taylor, Buck had to wonder if he could’ve seen it coming from far off. Had to wonder how many feelings hidden under I love yous, how many things would’ve told him about the end. He’s been in love before, with people he thought loved him that left him anyway, and with people he knew didn’t really love him, just wanted to stick it out, and both hurt.

Maybe someone with more of a sense of self preservation would’ve stopped, but Buck isn’t that person. He’s always tried again, always given everything, always loved easily. And maybe it’s because deep down, he’s always wanted to belong and to be chosen and to be loved. Maybe it’s because he knew down to his bones that the people that were supposed to want him from the beginning, the people who brought him into this world, didn’t. And when you start there, where can you go?

But Eddie isn’t like them. He’s not like Buck’s parents, and he’s not Abby, or Taylor. He’s not like anyone else. He was Buck’s friend first, and he liked Buck well enough before he fell in love, whenever that was, and that opens a whole other can of worms Buck can’t even touch.

And this time, it’s not just Buck trusting it. It’s not Buck seeing it, and it’s not Buck being in love and wanting to see what he wants. It’s Eddie’s feelings in his chest, where Buck can feel them too, entirely honest and not hiding a thing. Buck would’ve trusted him to be honest, because Eddie takes him seriously, treats him like it’s serious, this thing between them, and it crushes Buck’s chest, that there’s a thing between them.

But because Buck can feel it, he can tell there’s nothing that feels like an end, and everything that feels like forever. He remembers, unbidden, asking Eddie if he could stay forever, and the responding kick in his chest and that—that was Eddie.

“You want to sleep more?” Buck asks, carefully looking for signs of exhaustion. Eddie looks fairly well rested despite using his magic in such a large dose again, and when he shakes his head, Buck can tell he’s being truthful. “Torn ligament?” he prompts anyway, voice low and still sleep soft.

Eddie’s face only shutters slightly. “Yeah,” he says after an age, but he matches Buck’s volume, like the only space it needs to cross is the little distance between their faces, and Buck gets a little thrill at that, at everything narrowing down to just them in bed together. Eddie shifts, his leg between Buck’s dragging high up Buck’s upper thigh and he feels a sudden curl of heat as Eddie stills, muscles tense, perhaps aware of how intimate it is. Buck squeezes his legs around Eddie’s to reassure him, pleased when Eddie relaxes again, eyes flickering between his.

He doesn’t want Eddie to be embarrassed about this. He doesn’t want Eddie to rein himself in, not when Eddie’s spent a lifetime reining himself in, and Buck will spend longer than that coaxing him out. He’s keeping Eddie safe, and that he can do, but he can’t do anything about the magic. It doesn’t seem to be bothering Eddie physically beyond the extra exhaustion, but Eddie keeps worrying his bottom lip and Buck knows he hates being out of control.

Sometimes, Buck thinks Eddie hates his magic too. Hates that he can’t save anyone when it comes to it, and Buck gets it, he does, but he’s glad Eddie can’t do that. He imagines Eddie faced with the choice between saving someone else and saving himself, and he knows the only thing stopping Eddie is Chris, that otherwise Eddie would give it everything he had, that Eddie already gives everything, like it’s never enough, and Buck wants to gather it all up, push it back into his chest, and tell him it’s always been enough.

“Maybe there’s something about it in your journal,” Buck offers. He’d shown it to Buck once, the small, perfectly kept journal, unworn by time, crisp paper and clean edges, though Eddie showed notes going back at least three centuries, Spanish scrawled all over.

“How is that possible?” Buck had asked, examining it carefully after Eddie told him he once ripped a page and watched it repair itself. “I thought your family only had healing magic?”

Eddie just shrugged.

Buck folded the corner of a page gently, watched the crease uncrease, fingertips warm. “I can feel it,” he said, the magic reverent and careful, like someone had imbued love into this little book.

“You can?” Eddie asked, surprised, coming over to place a hand over Buck’s. He was frowning, and maybe Buck should have figured something out then as he looked up at Eddie, feeling fond for no reason at all.

“You can’t?” Buck asked. Eddie shook his head. Buck didn’t know how to describe it, not really. It was still early then, not even a year since they met, and Buck knew the feeling of Eddie’s magic but not the words to put to it, not yet. All he offered was, “It kind of feels like you,” and the firm line of Eddie’s mouth softened, like he knew what Buck meant.

Now, Eddie’s face scrunches in response. “Maybe,” he says doubtfully, but Buck is realizing another thing.

Eddie doesn’t know. He doesn’t know Buck can feel his emotions. Eddie caves at the slightest pressure from Buck, but Buck knows he tries to hide things away from Buck anyway, like he thinks the full weight of them would be too much for anyone to handle, the way it’s too much for him sometimes when Buck figures out how to support a little of his weight without Eddie realizing.

Buck knows how to poke, how to wait him out, has learned the way Eddie softens and how to chip at him just right so that Eddie can fall into his open arms when it comes to it. But that’s what Buck wants for Eddie. He wants Eddie to choose.

He wants Eddie to choose him. And maybe he doesn’t know what Eddie would choose if Eddie knew some semblance of his heart with all its big bleeding emotions was in Buck. Maybe he doesn’t know how much he means to Eddie, not really, not even now when he can feel everything because it feels too big to take in when Buck looks right at it, it feels like something unconditional and unfathomable and something that’s made up of everything within Eddie, that tangled complicated mess of memories and past hurt and fear that’s solely Eddie’s.

But he still knows what he wants for Eddie. Eddie should have a choice. For himself, and for Buck, both.

“Come on,” Buck says, untangling himself from Eddie carefully, extracting his legs, drawing back his arm, and his heart stutters at the touch of loss from Eddie when he’s standing there, looking down at him.

“Five more minutes,” Eddie says, flopping back, just to protest.

Buck offers his hand. Eddie turns his head a little to look at it, then looks back at Buck with a raised eyebrow. “I need someone to translate,” Buck says, biting down a smile, and he blooms with warmth when Eddie huffs out a laugh but takes his hand anyway and lets Buck haul him up.

“I’ve read it all already. There won’t be anything,” Eddie says, hair a mess, yawning as Buck tugs them towards the bathroom. He points his thumb back behind them when Buck glances at him. “The journal is back that way.”

Buck’s stomach growls poignantly, and he smiles sheepishly. “This first,” he says, agreeing with his stomach, “and my mouth tastes like death.”

Eddie laughs, holding up one hand in defeat, his other hand safe in Buck’s. “Fine,” he replies, “but only if you make me an omelet.”

“Don’t I already do that?” Buck asks, feigning confusion, and he doesn’t dodge quite fast enough to evade Eddie thwacking his arm, and then he accidentally spits out suds on the mirror when he laughs two minutes later, still pretending it hurts, Eddie’s eye rolling increasingly exaggerated.

He does make them omelets, and they sit in the slant of afternoon sunlight, ankles pressed together under the table as they eat, Eddie like he’s ravenous while Buck chews thoughtfully, watching him. He gets up halfway through eating his to make Eddie another, pleased all over at Eddie’s emotions, gratitude, steady affection, and then again when Eddie finishes that one too.

Eddie finally slows down on his fourth omelet. Buck figures the hunger is residual from the magic use, so he nudges an orange in Eddie’s direction, watches Eddie tear the peel into pieces so he can eat it, taking the remains of the peel, and then gives him another.

Eddie gives him a resentful look, like he can see right through him, but Buck just grins at him, getting up and grabbing their plates to wash them up and put them on the drying rack. When he turns around, Eddie is staring at his hand, and it takes Buck a moment to place the mild surprise, the confusion.

“Eddie?” he says, going over and then his gaze lands upon the second orange peel in one piece in Eddie’s hand. They stare at it together. It was just in pieces, Buck knows, because he watched Eddie tear it apart. “What—” Buck starts and stops, lost for words.

“I don’t know,” Eddie says, flustered when he turns to look up at Buck. “It just—fixed itself.”

“Your magic?” Buck asks, leaning over him to touch it. It feels, as expected, like an orange peel, unbroken, as if it were never torn apart in the first place, and it also feels like Eddie, warm and safe and loved, and for a second Buck feels a little tether between him, the peel, and Eddie, like a tiny string tied between them, the connection so fragile that a breath would snap it.

It’s barely anything, nothing compared to everything Buck is holding, everything Buck has been holding since dying, and it still feels, for a moment, like he can hear Eddie’s heartbeat in his ears, like they’re as close as they can be, closer than they’ve ever been.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and the connection snaps.

Buck’s next breath is loud in his ears, though it’s quiet in the room. “I can feel it,” he admits, hushed, withdrawing his hand, fingertips still tender with it. Eddie gives him a searching look and then looks back at the peel, examining it carefully. “Maybe,” Buck says, thinking hard now, “your magic thought it needed healing.”

Something blooms into existence deep within him, so much that he’s glad that Eddie isn’t looking at him and doesn’t catch the way he has to put his hand on the back of Eddie’s chair to stabilize himself.

Since realizing he can feel Eddie’s emotions, he understands why his emotions have been a tidal wave. On a normal day, Buck’s emotions drag him along, and now with Eddie’s in tow, Buck is helpless against them, against the way they build and tug at him and overflow. It’s mostly been easier to handle when he knows what to look for, since yesterday, but now they slam into him again, and Buck understands that Eddie has been keeping his emotions in check, even when Buck thought he had let go.

This feeling, the pain and hurt of it, is so sharp, so deep it feels bottomless even when Buck is sinking in it, casting his hands about to try and find the end of it.

And it’s still not scary. Not the way Buck imagines it scares Eddie. Buck lets himself sink into it because he wants, more than anything, to understand and to hold it. He wants everything of Eddie.

Eddie, still turned away from him, runs his thumb over the peel, swallowing hard. “I can’t fix everything, Buck.” His voice wavers.

Buck doesn’t try to stuff it down. He sits in it, and he thinks hard, you can trust me. And that’s all he needs to gather the strength to speak. “You can’t,” he agrees, taking a seat in the chair next to him so he can look at Eddie up close, talk to him right there. “Eddie,” he says when Eddie avoids his gaze.

Eddie’s face screws up, and then he lets out an exasperated breath and looks at Buck.

“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Buck says gently.

“I know,” Eddie replies, but Buck can feel the press of it in his throat. “I know,” he repeats, quieter, swallowing again. “I just—” His voice breaks, and his eyes are wet all of a sudden. “I can fix an orange peel, but I can’t save Shannon,” he says, like it takes effort and then has to gasp in a breath after, and Buck’s moving, pulling him in before he can think about it, holding him close, letting Eddie muffle his shaky breaths, tears wetting his shirt. After a few seconds, Buck feels Eddie grip the back of his shirt, and then he sags against Buck and if the feeling before was bottomless, the safety of this one is infinite.

“You were dead,” Eddie says, his breathing uneven. “And in the army—Buck, you were dead.”

“I know,” Buck says, eyes closing, and he’s afraid of it suddenly. He was afraid of the dream, of not having Eddie, of everything being wrong, not real, but right now, he just wants to live. He wants to live. And that’s stronger than fear.

“What’s the point of having magic if I can’t save everyone?” Eddie says, muffled, and Buck wants to tell him he knew. That for all it’s taken for Eddie to admit it, Buck already knew, has already been preparing to catch him.

Eddie’s crying raggedly now. “What’s the point if no matter how hard I try, I can’t save anyone?” And then, before Buck can say anything, he admits, like it hurts, “I’m afraid of losing everyone, Buck.”

Buck buries his face into Eddie’s hair then. “Do you regret trying to save me?” he asks, breathing him in, and it hurts, but feels good too, because Buck knows more than anything that he and Eddie are afraid of losing, of being left behind.

In Buck’s coma dream, he had to let go of the life he lived, the life he wanted, and he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to leave anything behind, not the way he’s been left over and over, and maybe part of it is that Eddie doesn’t want to leave Buck, not the way Shannon left him, but that stills means Eddie is choosing him. It still means Buck is choosing to live, it still means Eddie is a choice, still Buck’s choice, and they’re still choosing each other, and that’s more important than anything.

“No,” Eddie says immediately. “No, I don’t. Buck,” he says desperately with a sudden press of anxiety that has Buck confused until, “I don’t regret you.”

And you is a lot of things. You is all of Buck, not a piece ignored or unseen, and it’s not an action Eddie made, but a choice to accept it all. “You said I could stay forever,” Buck has to say, feeling fond, and Eddie’s anxiety, the soft shape of it, eases. “Did you mean that?”

“I’m a mess,” Eddie tells him, but he’s already given in and Buck knows it.

“I know,” Buck says wisely, which makes Eddie laugh wetly.

“I don’t want to be afraid,” Eddie admits, like it’s safe to be vulnerable here, still in the echo of their teasing. “I’m scared all the time.”

“Me too,” Buck says, thinking of a thousand losses, “but you still love me.” He feels a little pang when that hits Eddie. “And Maddie, and Bobby, and Hen, and Chim, and—and I feel like I belong here. I feel like I’m home, and I don’t—I wouldn’t make any other choice.”

“Me neither,” Eddie mumbles. “I’m glad you’re my best friend,” and that’s what he says, but that’s not what he means because Buck can feel all the love and warmth of it, the way it spills over, true and Eddie all over, and Buck thinks he can tell that Eddie knows that Buck knows what he means. That it means everything to Buck.

“You want to check out the journal?” Buck asks, remembering through it what they were planning on doing.

“In a minute,” Eddie says after a moment, like it’s still hard to admit. Buck can still feel the slight resistance, but he puts his hand on the back of Eddie’s head, and Buck would know, because he can hear Eddie’s soft sigh, the way Eddie melts that little more into him, but he feels the accompanying ease of pressure in his chest.

“As long as you want,” Buck says, as much for himself as for Eddie, and he thinks Eddie gets that because he lets go of Buck’s shirt to slip his hand under the hem, to let his palm rest against Buck’s skin, too.

-

They go to check out the journal after much longer than a minute, after Eddie starts to complain about his neck getting sore, and Buck lets go of him with a laugh before he washes up the frying pan.

Eddie retrieves the journal and sits on his bed, as Buck flops down to lay on his stomach, putting his chin in hand to watch Eddie read.

“Hey, when was the last time you read it?” Buck asks after a minute, impatient.

“When I first showed it to you, and you wouldn’t stop bothering me about it,” Eddie replies distractedly, and Buck throws a pillow at him that hits Eddie squarely in the face.

Eddie flips him off with a scowl that makes Buck grin, and then resumes reading. Buck busies himself with making the bed and he’s just tucking the last corner in when Eddie curses softly in Spanish.

“What?” Buck asks, going over to sit next to Eddie, their knees bumping. Buck wishes he wasn’t wearing pants all of a sudden, so he could feel Eddie’s skin on his, so he puts his hand there instead, and there’s a sudden bubble of nerves that reminds him that Eddie is in love with him all over again.

Eddie deliberately bumps his shoulder into Buck’s after a moment, as if giving him permission, so Buck leaves his hand there. “I forgot how hard it was to read last time,” Eddie says, harried. “Some of the Spanish is old, and I don’t know every word. Plus some of this—I don’t know what it’s trying to say.” He reads something under his breath, and then stares at the wall, clearly trying to figure out how to translate it for Buck before giving up with a shake of his head.

Buck leans into Eddie to look at it too. It’s small enough to fit snugly in one of Eddie’s hands, and only half full of writing. Eddie continues to flip pages, reading over more stuff, quicker towards the end where the entries are newer.

“The magic in my family,” Eddie had told him early on, “skips three or four generations. It builds and builds until it can’t help but blow up into the eldest child, like it’s just waiting to get out.”

“You,” Buck had said.

“Me,” Eddie agreed. “My bisabuela was the last person before me to have magic.”

Now, Buck watches as Eddie sighs as he flips forward and then stops. “Back to my bisabuela’s section,” he says glumly. Buck knows it’s the section Eddie has read most, partially because he still remembers her, and because it’s the most recent portion. It helps that her writing is neat and legible, and that the Spanish isn’t that old. She died when Eddie was six.

“I wish she was still alive so I could ask her. But most of her stuff,” he says, turning the page, “isn’t about magic. It’s about how she felt using it,” and Eddie goes still all of a sudden.

Buck barely catches it, more aware of the way Eddie’s stomach drops and Buck can feel it, sudden and weighted. “Eddie?” he has to ask, trying to figure out if it’s a bad feeling. He doesn't think so, but it means something he can’t figure out.

“My bisabuela told me healing comes from the heart,” Eddie says faintly, his hand reaching up absently to touch his chest.

Buck’s heart feels like it thumps in response, and he has to resist reaching up to rub over it, not wanting to worry Eddie. Buck wonders if that’s why he keeps asking, if Buck’s heart is where Eddie’s heart is leading him, beating and alive and steady.

“She told you that before she died?” Buck asks curiously.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, swallowing. “When I was five. I didn’t—I didn’t understand what it meant.”

Buck tries to read his expression, decipher what Eddie’s feelings mean. “But you do now?”

Eddie opens his mouth wordlessly, then closes his mouth. After an eternity, “I—yeah.”

“So,” Buck tries to put together, “it’s about how you feel,” and it clicks.

It’s all about Eddie. It’s about Eddie and the outpour of his feelings, and Buck is being allowed to catch it, and in that way, Buck thinks Eddie might not have chosen this consciously, but his heart did. His heart, and his magic, chose Buck, and Buck has to look at him, up close and right there, at his dark eyes searching right back. Buck remembers that his hand is still on Eddie’s knee, warm skin under his palm and he squeezes gently.

Eddie exhales softly. “I get it for—” He cuts himself off, embarrassment squirming in Buck’s chest, and then says instead, “I don’t love the orange peel.”

Buck could make fun of him for it, but he’s puzzling it out too. They sit there for a while, thinking. “You’ve never done anything before this?” Buck wonders. “Anything unusual?”

Eddie doesn’t quite freeze. But he does avoid making eye contact with Buck, and Buck has no idea what that means. “Just recent stuff,” he says vaguely, fidgeting with the journal.

“After I died,” Buck offers. Eddie nods, jerky, and Buck tells him, sincere, “Sorry for scaring you.”

Eddie gives him a look at that, one that Buck is used to, one that feels reminiscent of the one he gave Buck after the tsunami, that first time. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Buck knows that. He told Eddie he can’t control everything, and he meant it, for the both of them. Buck has blamed himself for a million things he couldn’t fix, and god, if he could fix everything he would, but he can start here, to fix this thing that looms over them, especially over Eddie. “Still,” he says, shrugging. “I scared you.”

“You always scare me,” Eddie says, like it’s nothing, like Buck is worth it anyway, and then, “but I knew what I was signing up for.”

Buck can’t help but duck his head, unable to stop smiling, pleased and grateful. “I’m not as bad as I used to be,” he argues when he gains control over his mouth again, glancing up.

“Yeah. You’re worse,” Eddie tells him, and Buck flicks his knee, which makes Eddie laugh.

“You like me more now,” Buck says before he can stop himself.

Eddie doesn’t even try to feign offense, his expression fond when he says, “You weren’t so bad back then.” The look in his eyes and the unwavering feeling steady in Buck’s chest would be enough to fluster him if Buck weren’t too busy soaking it up.

“You love me now, though,” he pushes, and it comes out a little too soft, because he’s said it once, because he knows it’s true, and because he wants it.

Eddie rolls his eyes with a sigh. “You never stop, do you?” he says, trying to keep down his smile now, but he places a hand over Buck’s on his knee and squeezes briefly, not a hint of butterflies in Eddie’s stomach, but deep, unshakeable warmth instead that fills Buck up.

“Never,” Buck promises, but he’s looking at Eddie’s hand on his knee now. He can’t remember who started it, can’t remember when the flip switched and it became natural to reach out, to seek out comfort in the form of touch. He’s a million touches too late to remember, but he knows they’ve had all the firsts that matter, and maybe that’s all that matters. Maybe the most important part is that he can see the future stretching out in front of him, the past behind him, and even the parts that hurt are worth it, worth staying around for.

Maddie was worth missing, for when he was a kid, for when she came back to him, for every postcard when she wasn’t there. It was worth it, the pain and the hurt, and Buck remembers a conversation ages ago with Chris, when he promised it was worth it for when they came back.

But after dying, Buck thinks maybe the hurt is worth it even if they don’t. He didn’t feel like that when Maddie left, when he watched Abby walk away, when he watched Eddie disappear behind hospital doors, but he’s glad that he’s able to love enough to hurt, to feel like he lived, like he tried and loved and felt everything.

And the people that mattered most came back in the end. Buck can think of a million nights he couldn’t fall asleep wondering desperately what about him wasn’t enough to come back for, but Eddie’s hand is on his knee, and Buck’s hand is on his, and he glances up to catch Eddie’s eye, his breath catching in his throat at the look Eddie is giving him, nothing more than he normally does, calm and nothing special, but still meaning everything.

Buck withdraws his hand, suddenly feeling overwhelmed for no reason at all. He clears his throat, trying and failing to ignore Eddie’s sudden confusion, his hand still warm on Buck’s knee, and it reminds Buck that now they’re not touching, skin to skin. He fidgets for a breath, and then, carefully not looking at Eddie, offers his hand, palm up. Eddie doesn’t move for a split second, and then he takes Buck’s hand, their fingers slotting together easily, and Buck feels the lurch in his—in Eddie’s stomach, the shiver down his spine, and he can’t help but glance up.

Eddie gives him a small smile that Buck’s never seen before, that makes Buck’s entire body go weightless, his mouth so dry he can’t figure out how to form words, heart beating so hard it feels like it isn’t alone in his chest.

He couldn’t put words to how it makes him feel. Loved, he thinks, if one word could be enough. Buck has to laugh, a little breathless. “You’re going to make me do the laundry, aren’t you?”

Eddie’s smile broadens into a grin. “You said you like it,” he points out, but he doesn’t let go of Buck’s hand when he stands up, and Buck shoves at his shoulder when he’s up too, already sputtering out protests, though they both know he doesn’t mean it.

Ten minutes later, Eddie throws his dirty underwear at Buck when Buck laughingly insults his fashion sense, and Buck can’t help but think that being afraid all the time is worth this.

There wasn’t laundry in the other universe. There wasn’t the preciousness of time, or the mundane, or all the things that make up everything he has with Eddie. In a way, there wasn’t choice either. There wasn’t Eddie choosing him, there wasn’t the steady thrum of his heartbeat in his wrist, and there wasn’t a Buck that existed there who knew what it was like to starve, and to want more than anything.

There wasn’t magic in Buck’s life there, whether it existed in Eddie’s body or inside Buck’s, and maybe there wasn’t fear either, the fear that comes with all the things that matter, the fear Buck can bear to house in the cavern of his feelings, if only because it’s important, because it hurts more because of everything, because of something just like Eddie throwing laundry at him after holding his hand, after giving him that look that Buck doesn’t think he’s ever seen on Eddie’s face.

It still makes Buck’s breath catch a little, that look, when he thinks about it later after Chris is home, when Eddie’s helping him with his homework. He thinks about it for a long time after Eddie falls asleep on him that night too, trying to trace the soft edges of it in his chest. He thinks and he thinks, and he still doesn’t know what it means, because Eddie’s feelings were steady as ever, and then Eddie wakes up, grumbles against his neck to stop thinking so much, and Buck lets it go in favor of wrapping his arms around him, in being where he belongs, and drifting off to sleep.

-

Buck doesn’t really think when they catch sight of the bar brawl after a slow shift that morning, just goes with his hands up, saying, “Hey, woah, woah, let’s just—” makes eyes contact with one of the guys who spits on the ground, and then he gets just enough warning to think, that’s going to hurt, before he takes an elbow to the nose, pain immediate and blinding.

“Buck!” he hears dimly where he’s laying on the floor when he blinks a second later, bottom half of his face wet, blood in his mouth, and Eddie’s anger blooming suddenly, hot and all encompassing.

“Eddie!” follows, and he manages to lift his head just in time to catch Hen bodily holding Eddie back while Bobby steps in to defuse the situation, jaw set, throwing a guy who opens his mouth to protest a look that silences him immediately.

Hen and Eddie get him up and out while Bobby handles it, Chimney looming behind him with his arms crossed, and Buck ends up sitting on the back of the truck, eyes watering when Hen gently feels at his face.

“Just let me—” Eddie starts, hands already hovering over Buck’s face, his expression half murderous, half worried.

“Relax, Diaz,” Hen says, batting his hands away. Eddie allows it, looking unhappy, eyes steady on Buck. “We don’t want you collapsing after healing another broken bone.” She gently pokes Buck’s nose a little more, which makes Buck wince, and declares, “Nothing broken.”

“Thanks, Hen,” Buck manages before Eddie’s hands cradle his face and the throb dulls, the heat of the pain easing into familiar warmth as Eddie’s magic floods through him, steady and safe, healing all the damage done.

Buck can feel where it slips from Eddie’s palms straight into his skin, skittering warmth across his face and then something deeper when it reaches his nose. It doesn’t hurt, to be healed, never has, but Buck has never felt it so vividly, as if he were the one reaching beneath his own skin and healing the bruised cartilage, soothing the angry heat and swelling around it, flow of blood dampening into a drip and then to a stop.

It takes him a minute to register that his chest is warm with magic too, quieter underneath the immediate injury of his nose, but present. It feels almost like a tug, as if there’s a ball of magic sitting there being drawn up, through his ribcage, up his throat, up into his nose, thready and light and tender, almost familiar, a memory he can’t quite grasp nudging at him. Eddie’s magic dissolves as it finishes up healing everything, and Buck realizes what it makes him think of.

It reminds him of the thread he felt when he touched the orange peel.

He doesn’t remember closing his eyes, but when he opens them, Eddie’s still staring at him, face much closer to him. “Hey,” Eddie says, and Buck can still hear the anger in his voice, but his hands are gentle on Buck’s face.

Buck reaches up to hold one of Eddie’s wrists, squeezing gently. “Hey,” he says thickly, through the blood, but there isn’t even a tinge of pain to be found anymore. He’s a little drowsy actually, a hint of sleepiness tugging at him, but, “I’m good.”

“That asshole—” Eddie grits out, eyes flickering back and forth from Buck’s eyes to the mess of blood on his nose and mouth. Buck feels a weak tug of something, a vague thought that it almost looks like Eddie wants to kiss him.

For a moment, he imagines they’re not wearing their uniforms, and they’re not at work, but at home. He imagines he’s sitting on the bed, that he cut himself shaving or something small, so little blood Eddie could brush it away with his thumb, and he imagines his face cupped just like this, looking up at Eddie as Eddie looks down at him, and there, his eyes flickering down would be to Buck’s lips because he wants—he wants something, and Buck doesn’t—he wouldn’t think about it, but he could give it, he thinks.

He would give it, if Eddie wanted him to.

But Eddie’s brows are still pulled tight, jaw tight, so Buck placates, “You know how Bobby gets when he’s angry.” He knows it’ll be enough to stop Eddie, who still looks tempted to go back in and deal with him. “I don’t envy that guy.”

Just as predicted, Eddie stares at him for a second before exhaling sharply, the jut of anger softening just a little. He finally draws away to root around inside the first aid kit. Hen is nowhere to be found when Buck glances up, presumably having gone back in, so he leans back and stifles a yawn, watching Eddie unzip one of the pockets fondly. “You gotta admit,” he says, trying to coax out a laugh, as Eddie pulls out the packet of antiseptic wipes, ripping one open, “punching a firefighter takes guts.”

Eddie huffs out a breath with enough amusement Buck takes it as a win. “So does shooting one,” he says, dry as ever, and Buck makes a soft, involuntary sound in response as Eddie cups his chin. Buck figures he’s going to tilt his head up, but Eddie stops right there, staring down at him, dark eyes searching.

They look at each other for a long moment. Buck wonders if it feels different now because Eddie knows he has nightmares about it sometimes. He wonders if Eddie knew how much it scared him before, if Eddie had any idea how much Buck cared about him, how much Buck would have given for him, would still, if it came to it. Eddie doesn’t have Buck’s feelings in his chest, but Buck figures he can read it clear as day on his face.

It’s not like Buck isn’t an open book. He knows he’s easy to read, but he knows sometimes it’s not that simple. He knows that he can read Eddie’s face better than anyone, and he still couldn’t quite wrap his head around how much Eddie cared about him, not because of Eddie, but because of himself.

He tilts his face up, gratified when Eddie’s hand moves with him, and he resumes cleaning Buck up, wiping the blood off his face, methodical, though he keeps looking at Buck, eyes lingering. “You’re good,” he says finally, and then he’s carefully not looking at Buck, fiddling needlessly with the first aid kit, a little bit of concern trickling down Buck’s spine.

“Eddie?” Buck says, confused.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” Eddie asks immediately, his hands going still. He gives up on pretending and looks back at Buck now, and that’s a little bit of fright on his face, when Buck can match it to the swirl of emotions within him. Fright and regret and apology.

Buck doesn’t understand. “You didn’t hurt me,” he says, slowly, trying to figure out where it’s coming from.

“I was angry,” Eddie says like an explanation, desperate, and he abandons the first aid kit completely to step back between Buck’s legs and reach out like he’s going to cup Buck’s face in his hands, though he stops before he can touch him.

Buck doesn’t think as he grabs Eddie’s wrists and guides them into place, Eddie’s fingers against his face rough and calloused and familiar, touch feather light. He’s being careful, Buck realizes, though he’s not sure why. Eddie’s never hurt him, not like this.

“I was angry,” Eddie repeats, “and it felt like—” He has to close his eyes, shake his head, and take a breath. “When I’m angry, it’s like my magic is—” He struggles to find a word.

“Sour,” Buck completes, recalling a conversation long ago.

Eddie chews on his lip. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “It doesn’t feel good.”

“Huh,” Buck says, studying him. He squeezes his thighs around Eddie’s leg, crowding him in close. “It’s never felt like that to me. Always feels good,” he adds on absently, running a hand down Eddie’s forearm, over the soft hair there, the curve of muscle beneath skin.

He feels alive under Buck’s hands like this. Real.

“Yeah?” Eddie says, the tension in his shoulders easing just like that, weight swaying a little towards Buck, one of his hands dragging down, over the rasp of Buck’s stubble to the soft skin of his throat and then down over his shirt so he can rest his hand over Buck’s heart. Buck wonders if that’s how Eddie reminds himself that Buck is alive and real too, if the thread of his heartbeat is enough.

He looks up at Eddie, a little through his eyelashes, trying to figure out why. He knows now that Eddie can hear his heartbeat without touching him, but then he thinks about being able to feel Eddie’s feelings in his chest and how he wants to be close to him anyway, and he thinks he gets it.

“Yeah,” Buck says, and maybe it’s about time he told Eddie how it feels, the way he didn’t all that time ago. “It feels warm mostly. Safe.” He mulls it over, trying to capture the feeling of it within him moments ago. Eddie watches him, quiet, paying attention. It’s like being wrapped up, Buck thinks, like something reassuring, something permanent and never wavering, and it feels like Eddie if he really had to name it, it feels the way Eddie’s emotions feel, it feels like home and being allowed to stay, like being wanted is easy, like choosing is barely even a question.

It feels like getting into bed with Eddie, where it’s warm and safe, like he can hear Eddie’s breathing right there, like Eddie’s heart is the one beating steady in his ears. Buck could go for that right now, sleepy, close to Eddie.

“It feels like you,” he says, and that’s really what it is, but he thinks the words are inadequate, so he tries instead, “It feels like I feel about you,” and he doesn’t miss the slight, quiet catch of Eddie’s breath.

Buck freezes immediately, staring up at Eddie with wide eyes, his mouth already open and ready to fix something because that sounded like—that sounds like—

“Oh yeah?” Eddie asks, looking nothing but fond. “How do you feel about me?”

Buck is forced to swallow. “You know,” he says weakly, and then gets stuck there, but he’s relieved when there isn’t anything anxious sitting below the surface of his own panic, Eddie taking it in stride like he always does when it comes to Buck.

Eddie laughs softly. “I know,” he says, mostly amused, but he gives Buck a look that makes him want to shiver before Eddie pats his chest twice. “Up and at ‘em, soldier. You’re cleared for duty,” and then he’s stepping away, packing away the first aid kit, and they’re rejoined by everyone else a minute after they watch the cops go in.

“Did you find the person we came for?” Eddie asks as Hen hops up into the engine. The call was originally for an oven fire in the kitchen, conveniently blocked by the brawl.

“Yep,” Chimney says, climbing in after her. “Fire went out ten minutes ago. Piece of cake. How’s the nose?”

“Good as new,” Buck reassures.

The ride back is quick, though they all keep casting furtive looks at Eddie. “I’m awake,” Eddie complains eventually when the silence drags a little too long, and he protests all the way until they’re climbing out into the firehouse.

“I can feel it, but it’s not that bad,” Eddie is saying insistently to Hen as Buck is overcome with a yawn, shaking his head a little to clear it. The tiredness lingers anyway. It’s not Eddie, Buck knows, maybe because exhaustion isn’t really an emotion, but he’s never felt tired when Eddie does. He isn’t really sure where it’s coming from. He slept well last night, felt alert up until the elbow to the face, if he had to guess.

“Buck looks like he could go for a nap,” Bobby says, not missing a thing, and then to Eddie, “Why don’t you join him?”

Eddie doesn’t put up much protest after that. “I’m not that tired,” Buck says as he takes a bunk in the back corner, but his head hitting the pillow feels good, weight slumping into the mattress despite his protests. “Just a little sleepy.” He can’t resist yawning again.

“Getting hurt really took it out of you,” Eddie comments, yawning in response. He gives Buck an offended look. “Stop that.”

Buck grins at him. “If I’m making you yawn, it’s because you love me,” he points out, unable to stop himself. He’s not sure if he wants to get a rise out of Eddie or if he just wants to say it, to hear it in his own voice and know it’s true.

Eddie only tuts, says, “Scoot over,” and Buck obeys without a question, lifting an arm up over Eddie as he gets under the covers next to him, pressing right up close to Buck so they can avoid falling off either side. It’s not a bed meant for two, though they’ve all slept in pairs before, after haunting calls and nightmares and sometimes just to be close.

“Hey,” Buck says on the brink of sleep, eyes already closed. “I forgot to give it to you.”

“Forgot to give what?” Eddie murmurs. His hand is in Buck’s hair, and Buck doesn’t really remember when that happened but it feels nice when Eddie scratches his fingers there. Buck blinks a few times to keep awake and reaches into his pocket.

He can tell it’s cracked the moment he touches it. “It broke,” he says, unable to hide his disappointment. It must have been when he hit the ground after he got hit. He pulls it out anyway and brings it up over the covers between their chests, Eddie’s forehead bumping against his when they both look down at it, soft, smooth wood cradled in Buck’s hand besides the jagged edge. “It’s supposed to be a fire truck,” Buck murmurs. “It’s laser cut into wood.”

“Where did you even—” Eddie asks, sounding bewildered, before he realizes aloud, “The art fair?”

A tree fell on a handful of booths at an art fair earlier that afternoon, and they had been called in to help. “Yeah, one of the booths I was helping with,” Buck explains. “The owner, Marina, was telling me how she makes them, and she said she had the perfect one.” He looks at it mournfully. “I thought you’d like it. Could’ve put it on your key ring.”

“It was for you,” Eddie says, though Buck can feel how he’s hesitantly pleased anyway.

“Nah,” Buck says, eyes closing again. “I’ll go buy a matching one next week,” and he likes the way Eddie likes that, pleased again, this time not at all hesitant.

“Here, let me see,” Eddie says, presumably to get a better look at it if he can in the dark of the bunk room, but his fingers touch the wood, brushing against Buck’s, and instantly Buck’s fingers are warm with magic, a split second of a tie between his chest, the wood, and Eddie, and he knows without knowing how, without even opening his eyes, that the crack just sealed up like it was never there.

Eddie withdraws his fingers the next second, but Buck’s skin is still tingling as they breathe in the quiet. “Sorry,” Eddie says, hushed, before tentatively touching it again.

Buck opens his eyes to examine it now, thumbing over the intact wood, smooth. “You didn’t mean to do that?”

Eddie doesn’t reply, but Buck knows it’s confirmation. He offers it to Eddie, watching as Eddie takes it gingerly before tucking it away in his pocket and returning his hand to Buck’s hair.

“Mm,” Buck hums without thinking when Eddie scratches through his hair again. He’s trying to think about what’s going on, what’s changed that’s caused Eddie to fix things just like that, but Eddie’s warm against him, the movement of his fingers lulling Buck to sleep. “We can figure it out,” Buck mumbles, eyes slipping shut.

The last thing he remembers is Eddie’s breath of laughter, an affectionate, “Maybe after you sleep,” before he’s out.

-

A nap fixes him and Eddie right up, and the shift passes relatively smoothly, giving Buck time to mull it over during minor calls and stretches of time in between.

“Hey, Hen,” he asks at some point, when she’s finished beating him at video games and about to take a bite of an apple.

She pauses, raising an eyebrow. “Yes?”

Buck’s got a theory. “Can you break something and give it to Eddie?”

Eddie’s head pops up from behind his book, and Buck can feel the sudden focus of his attention and the accompanying confusion. “Buck?”

Hen is looking between them, both her eyebrows raised now. “Do I even want to know?” she asks with a sigh and splits the apple in half with her bare hands.

Chimney lets out a low whistle, says, “Remind me not to get on your bad side,” but Buck watches carefully as Hen leans over and Eddie puts down his book to accept the two halves. Bobby tosses Hen another apple, and Hen says something to Chimney, though Buck doesn’t really register any of it because Eddie looks up at him, apple still in pieces, and Buck is almost sure.

The alarm goes off just as Eddie opens his mouth, and Buck can feel Eddie’s confusion lurking at the corners of his consciousness the whole call.

“I can’t just fix anything,” Eddie tells him when they’re watching the gurney disappear into the ambulance. It was a broken leg, clean fracture, and Buck had been assigned to keep Eddie away from it to keep him awake for the last two hours of their shift, but as a result, Eddie keeps shifting his weight, looking itchy, running his hands through his hair. “I didn’t fix the apple.”

Buck nods, and he can tell that Eddie’s watching him, that he’s taking his cues from Buck, getting a little less restless when he sees that Buck isn’t surprised. “You didn’t think I would,” Eddie realizes, and Buck nods again, and he watches Eddie stop fidgeting, just like that, and wonders if maybe all the energy wasn’t just from not being able to fix the fracture.

Buck can’t help but smile at that. “The only thing they’ve got in common,” he explains, because he wracked his brain for ages and it was the only thing he could think of, “is that I gave them to you.”

Eddie freezes, seemingly unable to look away, and Buck catches the thread of his heartbeat, tripping over itself. He says, a little hoarse, “Buck.”

Buck shrugs, like his heart isn’t beating hard too, like it doesn’t mean everything. “Your bisabuela said,” he recalls, tucking his hands into his pockets, looking up at the sky, “healing comes from the heart.” He casts Eddie a glance then, and he can’t breathe for a second at how much he knows Eddie, how much he can read it all on his face. He nudges Eddie’s shoulder with his and says lightly, “We’re best friends. It makes sense.”

Best friends doesn’t even cover it. Best friends is what Buck used to want and what he used to think, but he thinks they’ve been more than that for a long time, something so fundamental and important to each other that there isn’t even a term that covers it. Eddie gave him his kid, his heart and soul, and his trust, and a lot of other things Buck has always wanted to have of someone else. In return, Buck has given him everything, and sometimes it still feels like it isn’t enough, like Eddie still doesn’t know how important he is to Buck.

“Best friends,” Eddie echoes softly, looking like he’s drawing into himself, but Buck doesn’t want that. He’s reaching out almost before he can realize it, catching Eddie’s hand wordlessly. Eddie stares at him, and for the first time since knowing he’s feeling Eddie’s feelings, since he died, maybe in years, maybe since the lawsuit, really, he has no idea what Eddie’s feeling. Not even a little bit.

Eddie must be able to read some of the anxiety on Buck’s face because he forces himself to relax, squeezing Buck’s hand back. It immediately reassures Buck, and Buck marvels a little at that, pleased that Eddie knows how to do that, easily, and it always feels right. Then, as if it’s nothing, Eddie says, “You know I love you, don’t you?”

Buck is struck silent, staring at him.

“Buckley, Diaz,” Bobby says, startling them both, Eddie letting go of Buck’s hand, and Buck, without thinking, lets go too, pulling his hand back jerkily, heart beating out of his chest now. He can’t look away from Eddie, knows he has to pretend that Eddie didn’t mean it in the way he meant it, which Buck can still feel, warm and easy to give and steady. It makes Buck wonder, unbidden, if it’s really that easy to love him, if Eddie really thinks of it as the easiest thing in the world.

Was it easy to give Buck his son? His trust? It’s easy for Buck, but there were times he thought it wouldn’t be easy for anyone else, times he thought he was the only one who begged to be loved this way. He’s met a lot of people, given a lot of pieces of himself, and he’s learned that’s not enough. It’s not enough to give and give, to beg someone to stay, and it wasn’t enough to let someone go either, and Buck doesn’t really know what’s enough to keep someone around.

He doesn’t know what about him is enough for Eddie to want to stick around. He can’t reason it out, but he can feel it, and Buck—

Buck wants that. He can let himself want that.

He forces himself to turn to Bobby, sure he fails completely at schooling his expression. Bobby examines him, clearly able to tell something’s up, but mercifully he just tilts his head towards the truck. “Duty calls.”

When they arrive at the scene, they quickly discover the five car pile up looks worse than it actually is. Eddie claps a hand on his shoulder briefly before they split up to pull people out of separate cars, and the ghost of the touch stays with Buck all the way up until he’s reaching for a stuffed rabbit that flew out the window and ended up half under the tires of another car, and the sound of metal screeching and the car lurching is all the warning he gets before there’s a blinding pain in his wrist and he cries out.

He immediately knows it’s broken, using his other hand to reach under, clearing the way for him to wiggle his arm out, breathing shallow, black spots dancing over his vision. He somehow manages it, fingers just barely wrapped around the rabbit still.

“Buck!” Hen exclaims, as he exchanges the rabbit from his bad hand to his good one, blinking away the spots.

“I’m good,” he wheezes, offering the rabbit first. Chimney comes out of nowhere, plucking it out of his hand to go deliver it while Hen gets him up again.

“Twice in one day, Buckley,” she scolds into his ear, maneuvering them to the nearest ambulance as he focuses on breathing through it. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Fix me up?” Buck asks hopefully and then yelps when he sits down, wrist jerking with the movement. Hen examines it carefully before sighing.

“Broken,” she reports, and Buck immediately deflates, imagining the weeks of recovery before he can go back to work. He knows the drill, but he doesn’t want to again, not so soon after the last time, not now when everything has been kind of perfect, not when he can spend all day with Eddie, can be useful and help people and help Eddie, help him figure out what’s going on.

Eddie needs him here. Eddie, and the 118, and the little girl clutching her rabbit, tears dry now. Buck’s heart tugs at the sight.

He pulled her mother out of the car too, helped get that man’s leg free, coaxed that little kid into climbing out of the trunk where he was hiding, scared, and this is where Buck wants to be. This is where Buck feels alive, this is where the coma dream can’t scare him, not even a little bit, where it doesn’t matter who doesn’t want him. The only thing that matters here is saving someone, and then someone else. It’s the place he can fix things, not everything, but he can sure as hell try.

And despite wanting it that much, Buck knows he’s not going to let Eddie heal it. It takes too much out of him to heal big things, especially more frequently like he’s been doing recently, like he’s already done today, and Buck hates the idea that Eddie would continue to give so much of himself for something that’ll heal on its own.

He knows if he asks, Eddie would heal him without hesitation, and even if he doesn’t ask, Eddie will try to heal him anyway. Buck’s heart swells at the thought, his disappointment softening. And, he reasons, this won’t be as bad as all the previous times because he gets to stay at a place, maybe the first place, that Buck can call home and mean it.

He catches Eddie’s eye as Eddie comes around their truck, eyebrows furrowed, stopping for a second when he catches sight of Buck, his worry rearing up, sudden and sharp, before he immediately sets off for him.

Buck squares his shoulders. “Don’t let him,” he tells Hen.

“Already ahead of you,” Hen says when she turns and sees Eddie, clearly ready to stop him. Buck gives Eddie a little shake of his head, which Eddie completely ignores, resolve rising, and at just that, it feels like that little knot of warmth sitting in Buck’s chest comes alive again, as if there were a thread of Eddie’s magic sitting there, one that unravels and stretches out to touch gentle fingers on his wrist, the slice of pain softening, and his whole arm goes warm, his wrist hot to the touch when he brushes it with a tentative finger, pain dissipating like it was never there.

He turns it, curls and uncurls his fingers as the warmth disappears, ready to tell Eddie off for it, and then exhaustion hits him, deep, down to his bones, and he can only say, weakly, just as Eddie comes up, “Eddie,” which makes Hen turn too, worry on her face, and then Eddie’s catching him where he’s starting to fall forward, and his cheek settles against Eddie’s chest, head cradled by one of Eddie’s hands. He’s tired, so tired.

“What happened?” he hears Eddie say, but it feels a million miles away, Eddie’s fingers gentle against his ear.

“His wrist,” Hen says, sounding confused, and then something else, but Buck’s body is weighted, and he’s sinking, and he only remembers that he’s never afraid to sleep when Eddie’s got him, and Eddie’s got him right now, so he sleeps.

-

Eddie’s dozing, his chin is resting on his chest in a way that can’t be comfortable when Buck blinks awake this time. He’s slumped over on the sofa across from him, and Buck is laying on the couch up in the loft of the firehouse, a blanket draped over him. There isn’t much noise, which must mean the crew is out, but there’s sun coming in that must mean it’s past the end of their shift.

His wrist, he remembers suddenly. He lifts it up, examining it for damage or bruising, anything, but it looks and feels completely fine as if he never broke it in the first place.

Eddie hadn’t even touched him. He’d looked at him, walked over with resolve, but he hadn’t gotten close before Buck felt his magic, warm and familiar in his chest as if it was sitting within him, just waiting to protect him.

Buck puts a hand on his chest, presses his palm in a little, breathes. Thinks again, healing comes from the heart, and he glances over at Eddie, his heart melting all over again. He doesn’t know if it’s possible that Eddie loves him enough to heal him like that, but there’s been a lot of impossible things with Eddie, and with Buck, and with Buck and Eddie.

Eddie can fix things Buck gives him, and Eddie can fix Buck, and Buck doesn’t really know if that’s a new thing since he died because Eddie’s always tried to fix him, no matter where or how he’s hurt.

Even now, it’s almost like Buck can feel Eddie’s heartbeat under his palm, intertwined with his own, reliable and reassuring. He removes his hand then, not wanting to worry Eddie. “Eddie,” he says, voice still raspy with sleep, but Eddie stirs immediately, lifting his head up with a groan before his eyes fix on Buck.

“Buck,” he says, leaning forward, a rush of anxiety and fear and relief coming in, his emotions tangled all together, but Buck doesn’t bother picking them out right now.

He frowns. “You weren’t supposed to heal me,” he scolds.

Eddie stares at him. “What?”

Buck raises his wrist. “You’re supposed to be careful about healing,” he tells him, scanning Eddie’s face for signs of the exhaustion he expects, but Eddie doesn’t look tired. Still a little sleep soft, but not tired, not listing to one side like he does when he exerts too much magic. He doesn’t look ready to drop. No, out of the two of them, Eddie wasn’t the one to fall asleep.

Buck was.

“I know,” Eddie says, and now he’s all nervousness, wringing his hands, restless. “I don’t know what happened, Buck. I just—I saw you, and I knew you were hurt, and I—I don’t understand,” he says, looking helpless. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Eddie—” Buck says as he sits up, swinging his legs off the couch, but Eddie interrupts him.

“I can’t stop,” Eddie continues, stumbling over his words. “I keep healing everything and I—I’ve always been able to control it, but I can’t now.” And that terrifies him, Buck realizes, just as he feels the lurch of panic from Eddie. It scares him that he can’t control it, and Buck wonders if that part of Eddie has always scared him, if maybe there’s a reason he’s always kept it so tightly locked.

Eddie’s still going. “I feel like I’m spilling over, Buck,” he says, breathing out a laugh without amusement, a soft, vulnerable noise. “It wasn’t hurting anyone before, but it—it tried to hurt you.” He finally looks at Buck, really looks at him, his eyes wide and scared. “I couldn’t wake you,” he says, like it means nothing when Buck knows it means everything. “You fell asleep on me and then I—I couldn’t wake you.”

“I was sleeping it off,” Buck says, heart thudding suddenly, and he forgets himself, reaching up to touch his chest as he puts it together, “like you do.” As if he was the one wielding the magic, as if he was the one paying the price. Eddie doesn’t look tired because Buck shouldered it, the sudden exhaustion because of the tug of magic in his chest, but Buck knows it was Eddie’s magic, like he knows everything about Eddie.

Buck stares at Eddie with some awe. He can heal broken bones now, and things that Buck gives him, and he can heal Buck without touching him, and Buck can feel the worry that’s made of Eddie’s love, strong as ever, spilling all over when Buck dares to look at it.

It feels warm. Never dangerous, never sour or hurtful or anything but safe.

Eddie gets up, comes over, and puts his hand over Buck’s, right over his chest again as he sits on the couch next to him. “Hurts?” he asks, close enough now that Buck can read every line of his face, listen to his breaths, shallow and panicked.

“No,” Buck tells him, but Eddie can’t seem to stop himself, staring at their hands so Buck says, very firmly, “Eddie.”

Eddie looks at him like he’s wounded.

“You didn’t hurt me,” Buck tells him, because he didn’t, and he hasn’t, and he won’t. “Your magic has never hurt me.”

“You didn’t—I couldn’t wake you up,” Eddie says, beseeching, and Buck can imagine how much that must’ve freaked him out, how it’s still too soon since there was another time Eddie couldn’t wake Buck up. It wasn’t just that Buck died. It was that Buck died and came back to life and he was still there in the hospital, breathing because of a machine, and he probably looked like he was sleeping but he was in a place that Eddie couldn’t get to, that Buck could barely get himself out of, and that was true for days in which Eddie could only torture himself imagining how it ended.

“I could feel your magic here,” Buck says, reaching up with his other hand to sandwich Eddie’s hand between his, and that, finally, renders Eddie silent. “I could feel it heal me.” He squeezes Eddie’s hand, thinking about the sensation of it, the trust he had. There hadn’t been fear for him even if he didn’t understand, not with something that familiar and gentle and warm. “It feels like I’ve got a little piece of you protecting me,” Buck says, and he watches Eddie shudder, just a little, with a feeling like a knot untying within him. Buck shrugs. “It made me tired, that’s all. No harm done.”

Eddie’s fingers curl around his. “It happened earlier too,” he thinks out loud, shoulders loosening, chest easing. “When I healed your nose.”

“Oh,” Buck says as it dawns on him, “I felt that too. I could feel it coming from your hands, but I could also feel it inside me.”

Eddie chews on his bottom lip, eyes flickering down to Buck’s chest again. “Have you been able to feel that since—” He falters, like his lungs tighten a fraction, just enough to stop him from speaking.

Buck is already shaking his head. “Just when you heal me,” he says, and with everything he knows, it makes sense. Eddie’s been healing him from the inside out, like he’s trying to make up for Buck’s heart stopping, for not being there, like that split second between his hands touching Buck and his magic diving in could’ve changed anything.

“You’ve got to stop getting hurt,” Eddie tells him. He tries for a smile, but it’s still fragile. Buck wants to touch it with his thumb as if that could tell Eddie he doesn’t need to pretend with him. Eddie sighs then, a long-suffering sigh, and his smile softens into something genuine. “But we both know you’re not going to do that.”

Buck can’t help but smile back at that, ducking his head. “Come on,” he complains fondly.

Eddie lets out a breath of laughter, but he says, determined, so earnest Buck can feel it like a handprint within him, “I’ll work on controlling it. I don’t want it to hurt you.”

“It didn’t hurt me,” Buck reminds him, aware that they’re still holding hands over his chest.

Eddie ignores him. “I’m going to figure it out,” he promises, squeezing Buck’s fingers, soft, slow warmth settling all through Buck, and, underneath it, something Buck can’t really decipher. It’s something deep, something that feels like it’s been there for a while.

“You don’t have to do it alone, you know?” Buck says, half joking to ease it, but he thinks Eddie can tell how much he means it. “Let me help you,” he can’t resist adding on.

Eddie hesitates, and Buck knows he has him.

“I’m practically a witch too,” Buck pushes, just to get a rise out of him, and Eddie can’t seem to help grinning at that.

“Whatever you say, buddy,” he says, indulgent and completely judgemental, but when Buck finally gets up, he flips his hand to catch Eddie’s, intertwining their fingers, and Eddie lets himself be pulled along, easy as anything, like that’s all it takes.

Just his hand in Buck’s. Just the reassurance that he’s not going it alone.

-

The mug splits more cleanly than Buck expects.

The crack of broken ceramic in the sink is sharp, loud when it slips out of Buck’s wet hands, and Buck can practically feel Eddie’s heart jump and then his eyes boring holes into the back of Buck’s head.

He’s sitting behind him in the kitchen, sorting through mail as Buck took over cleaning the dishes from an early lunch, and when Buck glances back sheepishly, Eddie’s already raising an unimpressed eyebrow.

“It slipped!” Buck protests as Eddie sighs and gives up, getting up to come over.

“You know,” Eddie says when his shoulder bumps against Buck’s, the both of them staring down at the three broken pieces of one of his favorite mugs in the sink, “you could’ve just broken a toothpick,” but he doesn’t sound even the littlest bit of exasperated. He leans into Buck just a little, a tiny thrill running up his spine, and Buck still wonders at it, that Buck can still make him giddy like that.

He looks at Eddie looking down into the sink, their faces close, and then Eddie looks back at him, all dark eyes and shadow over his jaw, something soft in the press of his lips, and Buck loses his train of thought entirely for a second. “I was going to,” he says, voice quieting to fit the distance between them, when he remembers what they were talking about. “I was just going to have you fix something small.”

“The mug isn’t that big,” Eddie reasons, volume matching Buck’s, eyes flickering down just a little before he turns away, leaving Buck to swallow, and goes to pick up the pieces in the sink before Buck grabs his wrists to stop him.

“I have to give it to you,” Buck chides, and Eddie huffs but allows Buck to gingerly pick up the pieces before placing them in Eddie’s waiting hands. He pauses before he places the last piece, looking up only to see that Eddie is already looking at him, and Buck can feel the anticipation sitting in both of them.

“If it’s going to make you too tired—” Buck starts.

“Buck,” Eddie says firmly, not even a little exasperated, and Buck shuts up.

They’re both expecting it, but Buck sucks in a sharp breath the moment the last piece touches Eddie’s hand and gives a little tug against Buck’s now warm fingers to slot itself into place before the cracks seal up. There’s no glow to it, no sight of anything, but Buck can feel it down to his toes, that thread of magic that ties Eddie to the mug to Buck, and then Eddie slowly turns the mug in his hands, running his thumbs over it as Buck’s hands hover over it.

“You fix things I give you,” Buck says needlessly, and Eddie gives him a look that has everything contained within it, if that were possible.

“Can you feel it?” Eddie asks curiously, nodding at Buck’s chest, and Buck rubs over the spot gently.

“No,” he says, and then, “Yes.” Eddie quirks an eyebrow, amusement dancing around in Buck’s stomach, and Buck waves a hand. “It’s not the same, exactly,” he says, struggling to explain, grateful as he feels Eddie’s amusement soften in favor of concentration, his eyebrows turning inward, full attention on Buck now, listening. Buck touches the mug, feels the ping of magic through him and between them before it’s gone, almost before he can even focus on it. “Usually when you heal me,” he says instead, “I can feel it flow into me. Like—” and he takes the mug out of Eddie’s hands to set it down on the counter, reaching for Eddie’s hands to guide them to cup his face. “Like this,” Buck says, and then Eddie’s affection surges up and settles into him, grounding him.

“Like this,” Eddie repeats, amused, but he goes with it. “Okay. You cut yourself shaving,” he offers as a hypothetical.

Buck nods. “I cut myself shaving,” he repeats, and then Eddie thumbs at a spot on his cheek.

“Here,” Eddie says simply, and Buck can feel the tug of it, all the layers hidden under Eddie’s expression, something fond and wanting and cradled with care. He wants to bask in it, to soak in it, to stand here and stay here, Eddie’s hands on him. There’s sunlight streaming in through the window, and Buck’s hands are still a little wet from doing the dishes, and Eddie’s warm and alive and breathing, right here, close to him.

It all feels so simple here. Like home. Like something real, like something even death couldn’t threaten, not really.

“There,” Buck agrees, a little breathless with it all. “If it’s a small cut, it only takes a second. I can feel the warmth coming from your thumb to the wound. If I really concentrate, I can feel it under my skin.”

Eddie frowns. “That must feel weird.” It’s what Buck expects him to say, in a way, because Eddie still can’t quite believe that his magic might be nothing but good.

Buck shakes his head firmly. “No,” he says, and Eddie only appraises him before he seems to accept it, nodding for Buck to go on. “The whole area goes warm, but I can tell it’s coming from you.”

“But now?” Eddie prompts, looking curious.

“When you healed my wrist, I could feel it starting in my chest,” Buck recalls, “and going through me to where I was hurt.” But he’s not thinking about his wrist and Eddie’s magic flowing through him. He’s thinking of the orange peel. “When you fix something I give you,” he tries to explain, “I can feel you.”

Eddie studies him. “My magic?” he asks with some confusion, as if he knows that’s not what Buck means.

Buck struggles for a second, trying to describe it, before he gives up. “I don’t think you feel much different than your magic,” he says helplessly, watching as Eddie goes perfectly still. “It’s all part of you. It all feels the same to me.” And, his heart in his throat, he remembers saying, it feels like I feel about you. It feels important, suddenly, that part of it.

Eddie’s eyes glimmer with something Buck can’t decipher, but he thumbs at Buck’s cheek again, just a little. “Okay,” is all he says, and then his eyes flicker down for barely a second, and oh—oh, Eddie just looked at his mouth, and Buck doesn’t have to reach for it this time to find it, that Eddie wants to kiss him, and he remembers unbidden when he thought that was his own want, when he thought he wanted to kiss Eddie, and it feels like then, his heart beating fast, but it’s more, the ache of it blooming all over him, through every bit of him, fierce and unwavering and Buck is drenched in it, as if it were a tidal wave and he was simply another person helpless to it.

He’s thinking of a million things now, of the tsunami but not of the helplessness. He’s thinking about holding Chris to him and Chris clinging on, and he’s thinking about Eddie’s face when he had hold of Chris and he looked over his shoulder to Buck, and he’s thinking of Eddie’s body safely held by him when he was bleeding out before Buck got him into the truck, and of Eddie drowning underground and reaching out for Buck and finding him there, and Eddie climbing up the ladder to him when he died, and Buck can’t even breathe with it, all the things he’s thinking and feeling and it’s Eddie, but it’s Buck, it’s Buck and it’s what he feels for Eddie.

“And when you fixed the orange peel,” Buck continues, mouth numb, unable to look away, caught in Eddie’s gaze and under his hands, in their kitchen, and he’s still—he needs to explain this to Eddie, but he stumbles a little, “the—the first time, I could feel it. Like a—like a little thread connecting me to it to you. And—I only feel it when you’re fixing things,” because you love me, he thinks, and Eddie could just tilt Buck’s head down, just a little, lean a little closer, and Buck’s trembling suddenly, can’t stop. “Eddie,” he says, half a gasp, and then, “Eddie.”

It eases a fraction just like that, worry replacing some of the want and Eddie’s hands leave his face, voice anxious when he asks, “Buck?” and he doesn’t want to kiss Buck right now, not anymore, but Buck still—he can still feel how much he wants to kiss or be kissed, how much he wants it, and it’s been confusing when it’s the two of them mixed up in his chest, but Buck just—knows. Buck knows that those are his emotions, looks at Eddie, realizes only, I’m in love with you too, and it feels like he’s finally letting out a breath he’s been holding for a long, long time.

He reaches out for Eddie, not sure when he stepped away. Eddie still looks stricken, but he allows Buck to pull him close, and then closer still, and then Eddie’s concern yields as he understands, to something soft and warm and familiar as his eyes close just before Buck finally, finally kisses him.

Eddie kisses him back, insistent and unwavering and so Eddie that Buck has to remember how to breathe, his knees weak, his heart trembling in his chest, his heart and Eddie’s, his emotions crashing into him as Eddie’s hold him steady. Eddie’s hands find Buck’s waist, his jaw, keeping him close, touching him like he can’t bear to be further than that for a second while Buck’s hands hover at Eddie’s hips. He’s afraid to move them, as if he’ll touch it and it’ll all go away, Eddie and his life and everything he wants.

You’re real, he thinks because Eddie’s mouth is soft against his, the scrape of his stubble against Buck’s bottom lip making his stomach flutter, because Eddie’s kissing Buck like he loves him, pressed up right against him, holding him like he’s worth being careful with.

If Buck were sitting on death’s precipice, if he was in his coma dream again, he wouldn’t have this. No, there he wouldn’t have Eddie at all, he would have belonging of a different kind, belonging that could’ve meant everything once, that did mean everything once, but doesn’t anymore, not when he has Eddie.

Eddie withdraws just enough to say, “You’re shaking, buddy,” just like always, a little fond, a smile dancing around his mouth, more an observation than anything, but he looks well-kissed and pink in the face and Buck—Buck loves him. Buck is in love with him.

And Eddie—

It feels safe here to tremble, under Eddie’s hands and steady gaze, in their kitchen, in their house, in the place that he thinks of as home with a person that matters more than a place ever could. It’s a lot to feel all at once, but for once, Buck isn’t afraid, not even a little bit.

“How long have you—” Buck has to ask, the words getting tangled up in his mouth.

Eddie thumbs at his bottom lip as if he can coax the words out, which makes Buck shiver, and then he’s smiling helplessly in the face of Eddie’s laughter. “A long time,” Eddie admits anyway, sincere, and then his smile fades into this brittle thing, and he isn’t looking at Buck now, eyes cast down. He touches Buck’s chest gently, watching there, and then he swallows. “A long time, Buck,” he says again, quieter, like a confession.

“Since the beginning?” Buck asks, and he’s more than pleased that it coaxes a small smile out of Eddie.

“You think I was instantly into you?” Eddie asks as he looks back up at him, clearly amused, worry softening. “When you were throwing a fit?”

Buck can’t help but laugh at that. It wasn’t really anger, when he thought back on it after Eddie bumped his shoulder like they were friends. Buck can’t remember now, but maybe that was the first time he wasn’t afraid. His posturing was fear like so many things were fear back then. It was desperately holding on and knowing how easy he was to replace. It was looking at Eddie and thinking he was everything that Buck wasn’t, and it was jealousy and envy and wanting so badly to be liked but not when he still couldn’t figure out if he could use the word home yet. He knew what he wanted it to be, but Buck has always wanted things that never meant the same to anyone else.

Eddie meant it, though. Buck knew that from the beginning. He didn’t know exactly what it would turn into, years of friendship down the road, being best friends, and being trusted with Eddie’s kid, with his emotions and his heart, and he didn’t know back then that he was going to fall in love with Eddie, and that Eddie would love him. He didn’t know Eddie would invite him into his house, and he didn’t know they were going to kiss in the kitchen, and there was no way Buck all those years ago could’ve ever dreamed of this.

But if Eddie had told him that, had looked him straight in the eye and told him he was going to love him, Buck would’ve let him. He has let him, and it’s a little bit because it’s something he’s always wanted, and a lot because it’s Eddie.

“Okay,” Buck relents as he remembers he’s holding Eddie, that he’s allowed to, that Eddie wants him to. There’s no doubt here, about what Eddie wants, about what Buck can have, so he pulls him that bit closer, warm all over when Eddie goes, easily, a thrill spilling through Buck that’s only half his. “Maybe not since then. But after?” he asks hopefully.

“After,” Eddie says, and he ghosts his fingers over Buck’s birthmark, which makes Buck shiver and sends a small delight through Eddie’s chest, “I thought we could be friends.”

“We were,” Buck says, but he can’t stop himself now from touching Eddie, running his hands up over his torso, feeling the muscle and the planes of him under his shirt, the warmth of him, pleased that he can tell that Eddie likes it. “We are. What did it take then?” he wants to know, because there must’ve been a tipping point. There must’ve been something he did that Eddie never forgot, but even as he says it, Buck thinks if it’s anything like what he feels for Eddie, what he’s felt for who knows how long, then it never needed anything. It just needed to be Eddie.

“Took me almost dying,” Eddie confesses, voice a little rough, “and realizing I wanted you more than I wanted my girlfriend.” He closes his eyes then, swallowing hard, his heart hammering in Buck’s ears. “You told me to break up with her. So I did.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, and he knows that’s all he needs to say.

“I know,” Eddie groans, his expression pained. “Not my best moment.”

Buck nods a little, but he’s too busy thinking now of Eddie back then, clearly unhappy and pushing through for Chris, and probably for Buck, because Eddie always sacrifices himself for the people he loves. He always protects people in the way he knows how, the way he thinks they need it. It’s true that Buck likes when Eddie protects him, that sometimes he does need it, needs Eddie’s steady hand and firm voice and his unwavering magic. Eddie calms him down when he’s all over the place, and pushes him when Buck loses steam. He’s told Buck he loves him in a thousand ways, and as much as Buck was afraid, he trusted that Eddie loved him. That it wasn’t conditional.

But he doesn’t need Eddie to protect him now. “You could’ve told me,” Buck says, and it’s the truth. You could’ve trusted me.

Eddie shakes his head. “No,” he replies firmly, “I couldn’t,” and maybe in another lifetime Buck would’ve been upset by it, but he can hear the thread beneath it, can feel the way the words stick in Eddie’s throat, and the feeling underneath it that Buck knows. The feeling he had when Bobby fired him, when Maddie told him to go.

Buck softens. “You think you’re too much for me?”

Eddie looks stricken at that, silent, slow and quiet fear creeping over him. “I know I’m not,” he eventually manages to say, hoarse.

“Do you?” Buck asks, giving him a look. He knows Eddie too well for that. Eddie knows it, and he knows Buck isn’t going to let it go.

“I’m not—” Eddie says, quiet and pleading, “Buck, I want—you’re going to give me everything I want,” but he’s saying it like it’s a problem, heavy weight in his stomach.

Buck doesn’t understand. “Yeah,” he says slowly, but he’s flushing all over at the thought, that he could do that, that Eddie is going to let him do that, that he’s going to be allowed to have that, “I am.”

“I want it too much,” Eddie says, shaky, his face pale. “I want you too much. I can’t control myself around you, and I’m—I—” He inhales sharply, holding his breath for a moment before he lets it out, slow. “I promised,” he says quietly, “that I’d control it. So we—I can’t. Not yet.”

Buck doesn’t understand it, but he can feel the ache deep in Eddie’s chest, and the fear and the conviction, and through it all, crystal clear, affection, want. And Buck knows Eddie too well to think that Eddie would ever settle on giving him anything less than everything because that’s who Eddie is, and Buck loves him for it.

“Okay,” he says, and Eddie blinks at him in surprise, clearly expecting a fight.

“Okay?” Eddie repeats, trying to pull out of Buck’s grasp, but Buck refuses to let him go and holds him more tightly as if he can cradle the soft, flighty thing that’s afraid in Eddie’s chest, as if he can lay rest to whatever’s bothering Eddie, whatever’s been bothering him since Buck died, because that’s where it started when Buck thinks back on it, and he’s sorry for it.

He can’t promise he’ll never get hurt again. He can’t stop throwing himself into risky situations, and maybe Buck’s heart will stop again, but he thinks it might be enough to love Eddie with as much as he can give for as long as he can. “Can I kiss you one more time?” is all Buck asks, and Eddie’s breath catches, just like that.

“Buck—” he says, and then the rest of his sentence gets swallowed up when Buck kisses him again. Eddie buries his hands in Buck’s hair, kissing back fiercely, and Buck can feel how much Eddie wants it tangled with how much he wants it, and it washes over him like forever bottled up.

When they’re finally forced to resurface for air, Eddie makes a sound of protest that makes Buck laugh despite himself before he sobers up. “Eddie,” he says deliberately, still trying to catch his breath, and he waits until Eddie’s looking right at him. “I trust you.”

Eddie’s face crumples a little at that, looking a little like he’s going to crack open, and he feels a little like he might just break in Buck’s arms, where Buck can keep him safe. “Buck,” he whispers.

“We’re going to figure it out together,” Buck reasons, reaching up and touching Eddie’s hand, still warm on his face. “And you’ve already given me everything I want,” and he has the sudden urge to cry, thinking about that, about everything Eddie has given him, about everything Eddie is to him.

“That can’t be enough,” Eddie says, the corners of his mouth downturned, but he moves his hand so they can thread their fingers together, and Buck can’t help but squeeze, drinking in the sight of Eddie this close.

“I think I was looking for you a long time before we met,” Buck says, shrugging, feeling tender at the pang that goes right through him, “and I think I’ve been afraid.”

“Of?” Eddie prompts, catching Buck just like that.

“Of being alone,” Buck answers honestly, aching, because that’s always been the heart of it. Of not being wanted, of being surrounded by people and still lonely, of losing the ones he wants to keep. “Of people leaving.”

The line of Eddie’s mouth softens. “I’m not going to leave,” he says, and then, as if reading Buck’s mind, “You promised me, so let me promise you.”

He can’t make that promise, not really. They’re first responders, and some days Buck witnesses people torn apart from the people they love. He can tell Eddie knows that though when he looks at him, and there’s a quiet thread of understanding that runs between them. The promise Eddie is making isn’t a promise of the impossible kind. It’s the kind that involves choosing, that’s purposeful. Buck says, breathless, quiet, “Eddie—”

“Buck,” Eddie interrupts him before he can go on, voice unwavering as it always gets when he wants Buck to listen, and he looks sure. “You’re my partner,” he says, and Buck feels perfectly alive, perfectly himself and settled and present, and he might finally understand Eddie. He might understand why Eddie only seems to settle into himself when he’s leaning into his magic, because Buck’s been a little afraid for a long time of settling in somewhere.

He was afraid on his first day at the 118, and he was afraid of Eddie, in the beginning. He was afraid of being burned, of what felt like inevitable after everything that happened before.

“I want you with me,” Eddie tells him, and maybe Buck needed this too, Eddie’s feelings in his chest because he knows how to search around in himself now. He knows how to look past the hurried whirlpool of himself, past the gentle tide that is Eddie, down and down, until he finds that little bit of fear that’s been tucked away for so long in the darkness of himself, the part that he’s been trying to run from.

He can trust Eddie with it, he thinks. It’s easier than he thought, to give it. “I’m with you,” Buck tells him, swallowing hard, and that’s the important part, being with Eddie.

Eddie’s breath seems to get caught somewhere in his throat. “I know,” is all he says eventually, chewing on his lip. Buck has to force himself to step back instead of kissing him again, fighting against the pang of loss from Eddie when he does it, Eddie’s expression blatantly disgruntled, and Buck huffs out a laugh despite himself.

“Come on,” he says, offering a lifeline for both of them, abandoning the dishes as he walks himself backwards, figuring he’ll do them later. “You didn’t finish going through your mail.”

Eddie gives him a long look, but he follows, trepidation creeping over him when he sits down gingerly next to Buck at the table, but Buck lets his leg rest against Eddie’s, and it disappears, just like that.

If Buck’s entire body goes warm when he presses his hand briefly against Eddie’s thigh when he gets up later, the feeling so deep he knows it’s not only him, neither of them will ever tell.

-

It’s surprisingly easy in the hours after that, falling into familiar routine. They know how to live together, how to be best friends, and only on occasion will Eddie’s gaze fall to his mouth, a little spark of something lighting up under Buck’s sternum. He always catches Eddie’s eye, both of them pausing before they grin at each other, a little shy, before they pass through the moment together, easily.

Eddie’s painting over his bedroom door frame while Buck sands at some rough spots later that afternoon when he starts to feel something brew quietly inside him. He doesn’t do anything about it for a while, just feeling it out. Eddie’s frowning just a little bit, but his face softens when Buck offers to grab them popsicles for a five minute break.

“Eddie,” Buck says simply after a while, the question going unsaid, when they’ve finished their popsicles and Eddie’s painting the edge by the wall, careful because he didn’t bother with tape.

Eddie doesn’t stop painting, dipping his brush in the cup he’s holding, but Buck can feel some of his tension give way, like Buck’s voice is all it takes. “How do you always know?” Eddie asks, not quite exasperated, glancing over at Buck.

Buck frowns. “Know what?”

Eddie stops painting, examining his work, before he sighs. “You always know when something’s wrong.”

“You’re my best friend,” Buck says first, because that’s the obvious answer. You’re Eddie, he wants to say. I want to know when something’s wrong, and you’re bad at hiding it from me. But it occurs to him that there’s a second reason, and he stops sanding. “And uh—” he says, his heart suddenly speeding up, and he gets stuck there because, it dawns on him suddenly, Eddie doesn’t know.

Eddie is watching him now, raising an eyebrow. “And?” he asks, and if Buck knows Eddie, Eddie most definitely knows Buck.

Buck resumes sanding slowly. “And I’ve, uh—kind of been able to feel your emotions,” he says, almost like a question, aware when Eddie goes completely still.

There’s a very long silence. Then, Eddie says faintly, “What?”

Buck is too nervous to look at him, trying to figure out what Eddie’s emotions are beneath the crawl of panic up his throat. “It’s not—I didn’t mean to keep it a secret,” he says, and though he can feel Eddie’s alarm, he’s glad suddenly that Eddie knows. Even if Eddie’s magic chose Buck, even if Buck can hold Eddie’s emotions on his own, he wants Eddie to trust him with it.

“You—” Eddie starts and then gets stuck. Buck dares to look, and Eddie’s staring at him with wide eyes. He opens his mouth and closes it, and Buck hates that the first two flashes of emotions he gets are shame and guilt, and then it’s like Eddie gives in, swallowing as he gathers himself, but his hands are trembling.

Buck can’t stop himself from reaching out to remove the cup of paint from Eddie’s grip, then the brush, leaving them with the sandpaper on Eddie’s bedside table. When he turns back, Eddie’s still standing at the doorway, back to him.

“Eddie,” Buck says, not sure what to do, not sure if he should go closer.

“Since the lightning?” Eddie asks, voice low but steady. Not angry, and not shocked. He sounds like he’s thinking, mostly, putting things together, but it’s a little too vulnerable to be simply that, and there’s a quiet press of regret somewhere deep under it.

Buck thinks he knows what that’s for. He knows the push and pull of Eddie too much not to. “I think so,” he offers, “but I didn’t know at first.”

Eddie exhales slowly. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, finally turning around, and he looks hurt, but Buck just—he knows it’s for him. He knows what Eddie looks like when he’s sorry. This is an apology, in the way Eddie apologizes to him, and Buck can’t help but feel a surge of affection. Eddie says, wounded, “You said you couldn’t stop feeling, and I thought it was—you kept talking about your dream, and you died, Buck. You died. I thought it was just—”

“Eddie,” Buck says, and he can hear the fondness in his voice. He thinks that might’ve always been there before he knew where to look, and there’s something comforting about that, about always, that he can still say Eddie’s name the same way and it means just as much.

Eddie stops, regret written all over his face where Buck can see it, to match what he’s feeling, and Buck knows he’s going to catch him. His whole body feels alive with it, with protecting Eddie, and for a split second he doesn’t know if that’s Eddie’s magic or him. “You can still feel it?” Eddie asks, tentative.

Buck shrugs, but he thinks Eddie knows it’s confirmation. “You going to stop blaming yourself?”

Eddie swallows hard. “You knew,” he says, and he looks embarrassed now. “That I’m—then you can feel how much I—” He falters, making a gesture at his chest, but they look at each other, and Buck knows.

He finishes for him, quiet, “How much you love me?” and Eddie looks struck. Buck takes the silence to sit on the edge of Eddie’s bed, pleased when Eddie comes over to sit next to him, his knee bumping into Buck’s.

“It’s been overwhelming you,” Eddie says quietly now, examining him, and Buck can practically see his hands itching to check over him.

“I didn’t know,” Buck repeats, because it was and wasn’t, because it was too much for himself but not too much for the both of them, once he knew. “But it must be your magic, right?”

Eddie hesitates, then nods, touching Buck’s knee carefully. It’s not skin, not what Eddie wants it to be, but Buck can tell it reassures him to be close to Buck anyway. “When did you—

“A couple weeks ago,” Buck tells him, and he places his hand over Eddie’s, full of the slow bloom of warmth from it. Eddie looks relieved, just a little, and grounded mostly. Concentrated on finding where his emotions are in Buck, though he’s not sure Eddie will be able to find anything. But Eddie is only supposed to know how to heal, and Buck doesn’t know where the emotions fall into that. Except—

It’s healing of a different kind, if Buck really thinks about it. It’s Eddie’s magic taking care of him again, it’s Eddie taking care of him, the way he always has. It’s Eddie trusting him, reminding him that Buck is important to him, and it’s a confirmation in many ways of something he’s always known even if he’s always been afraid of it. Eddie gave him his kid, and Buck’s name is in his will, and Eddie gave him a bit of his magic, and his magic gave him Eddie’s emotions, the love that Buck has been chasing for a long time and the mess that Buck wants anyway. It’s trusting, to Buck, and Buck has seldom been trusted like this.

There’s something healing about having Eddie, all of him, about being allowed that. Buck doesn’t think he’s ever been allowed that before, never really could have in the way that he has Eddie right now, and his throat feels tight at just the thought of it. “When the floor nearly collapsed under me,” Buck continues despite it, Eddie still looking at him, “I could feel your panic before mine.” He promised Eddie they’d figure it out together, and Buck knows that goes the other way around too, always has.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Eddie asks, quiet, pleading.

“I liked knowing,” Buck confesses now, with Eddie’s eyes on him, and he knows what it feels like to kiss him, and he knows what Eddie feels like, all of him, all of it, and he’s so so grateful to be alive. He’s so grateful to have this. “It was a lot when I didn’t know, but it never scared me.” He looks at Eddie carefully then. “You’re not too much,” Buck offers.

Eddie absorbs that, panic trickling down, calm washing over him then, a little bit of fear, but mostly something glowing, something that feels all over like trust. “Doesn’t hurt?” he asks eventually, an echo. Buck shakes his head, and he can practically see Eddie turn inwards and then he can feel it, the warmth and steadiness of him as he looks at Buck, letting him feel it. “How long?” he asks after an eternity, voice laid bare.

Buck can’t stop looking at him. “How long what?” he says, and he still has no idea how he missed it, tempted to press his lips to Eddie’s, or against his temple, or his neck, or anywhere Eddie would let him, everywhere if Eddie would allow it.

“You kissed me,” Eddie says, and his breath hitches even though he’s the one who said it.

Buck can’t help but laugh, a bit embarrassed now. “I figured it out right before I kissed you,” he confesses. “But—”

“But you were in love with me before,” Eddie says, and he seems to settle once he’s said it while Buck tries to breathe through his own emotions at hearing it out loud, his chest tight with how much he trusts Eddie right now, how much he trusts him with himself. “Weren’t you?”

And the way Eddie says that, it’s not teasing or unsure. “You knew?” Buck asks, taken aback.

“I know you best, don’t I?” Eddie asks, the corner of his mouth tugging up into something fond, and Buck is so in love it feels like it could pour out of his ears and then Eddie could see it too, could catch it in his hands, hold it just like Buck’s been holding him.

“Yeah,” Buck says, breathless, “you do.”

Eddie bites his lip, before he finally sighs in resignation. “It’s really not hurting you, is it?”

“I told you,” Buck scolds lightly. After all, “You would know.”

“Yeah, I would,” Eddie says, almost like he’s realizing it, and Buck figures he’s finally put it to rest. After a moment of staring at each other again, Eddie reaches up and pushes against Buck’s chest, so Buck goes with it, falling back onto the bed, blinking up at Eddie, brimming over with trust and affection. “Just let me check,” Eddie asks very quietly, his hands slipping up under Buck’s shirt, taking his time to slide his palms over Buck’s stomach and up and up to over his heart, and here, Buck thinks, like all that time ago, he wouldn’t mind staying here under Eddie’s hands and his eyes and where Eddie loves him.

Eddie closes his eyes, concentrating, every bit of him for Buck, and Buck’s chest tugs with warmth for a second and it feels like Eddie’s heartbeat is in his chest before the sensation is gone, but Eddie remains, warm and solid and real.

Eddie opens his eyes, and Buck says, not thinking, “I think I’ve been in love with you since the day we met.”

Eddie stares at him, and then he breathes out a laugh. “Come on,” he complains, far too pleased to mean it, “give me a real answer.”

Buck can’t help but grin back. “That is a real answer,” and when he thinks about it, it’s true. He’s always loved Eddie, in every way that’s mattered, in every way he wanted to and Eddie wanted him to.

“You hated me,” Eddie says, grinning back now, and then he blows out a breath, a spike of want somewhere in his—in Buck’s—stomach. “God, I want to kiss you,” he says then, like it’s nothing, but Buck has to suck in a breath.

“Eddie,” he manages, winded, his own stomach alive with butterflies, “if you don’t stop thinking about it, I’m not going to be able to stop myself.”

Eddie swallows hard, his eyes a little darker, but he visibly lets it go. Buck thinks he’s going to back off, but Eddie leans down and presses a featherlight kiss against the corner of Buck’s mouth, the want so quiet and quick that Buck can’t even breathe before Eddie’s up and off him, picking up the cup of paint and brush again before he goes back to the doorway, the back of his neck pink, ears red. Buck’s heart won’t stop tripping.

“Aren’t you supposed to be sanding?” Eddie says, voice even, and he looks unimpressed when he glances over his shoulder, which makes Buck throw an arm over his eyes to laugh before he pulls himself up.

“You’re only keeping me around to do your dirty work, aren’t you?” Buck teases as he retrieves the sandpaper, and he can’t see Eddie’s face, but he can feel Eddie’s responding grin all the way down to his toes.

“Someone has to put you to use,” Eddie replies, casting Buck a fond look when he’s back next to him, and their shoulders bump just as always, and it’s a joke, but Buck feels pleased all over by the sentiment behind it, that Eddie knows what he needs and gives it, easier than anything.

“Yeah, yeah,” Buck says, but he can’t help but duck his head as he grins. “You know,” he says then, thinking for some reason of Eddie trying to figure everything out, “we match pretty well.”

“We do,” Eddie says, warm, but he seems to know that Buck’s thinking. “In a particular way?”

Buck shrugs, “I’m the guy who wants to fix everything, and you’re the guy who can fix things.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then, to his surprise, Eddie breathes out a laugh, a feeling like something slotting into place somewhere deep within Buck. “You’re making me do your dirty work, aren’t you?” Eddie says, but he looks at Buck and his expression is thoughtful more than anything.

“You’d do it anyway,” Buck tries to tease, but it comes out too sincere because Buck looks at him and he sees someone who knows how to sacrifice, who wants to give, whose hands may know how to heal but whose heart is at the center of it all.

Eddie shrugs, something sure about the set of his shoulders, something knowing in his eyes, and something transparent in his chest. Buck’s engulfed in it for one brief second as Eddie says, like there was never a doubt, “So would you.”

-

Eddie makes good on his promise of figuring it out, reining in his magic little by little over the next handful of shifts with determination, reading over the journal again, letting Buck sit with him when he’s thinking things out.

They don’t sit any closer than before, or any farther, and it’s easy. It’s easy when they go to bed together, when they’re pressed against each other and it’s dark and there’s only Eddie’s eyes on him, and Buck’s chest full to the brim, and Eddie runs his hands all over Buck, until Buck’s spine feels like it’s melting into the bed, but Eddie doesn’t do anything about the ache of want in his throat. He doesn’t need to, not in the face of a promise, of forever, of Buck catching him, just like always.

Knowing doesn't change anything, not really, and Buck likes how that means he’s had Eddie for longer than he’d thought. They’re still seamless on calls, they still crack open beers on Eddie’s couch, and Buck still feels like he belongs here.

He sticks a little closer to Eddie on calls than before, though. No one seems to notice except Eddie, who always checks that Buck is behind him when they’re picking their way through disaster, fire, rubble.

“Buck,” Eddie says from in front of him, just as expected. They’re on the second floor of a high school. The earthquake had been a bad one, jostling buildings off their foundations to topple over like dominoes. The school is tilted about 45 degrees too far, but it crashed on the building next to it and landed there, stuck in place, so there’d been little danger in going inside. It’s also the evening, meaning everything is mostly quiet to Buck’s relief. Not many people to pull out of the mess.

“Right behind you,” Buck replies. They’re supposed to rendezvous with Chimney and Hen at the hallway intersection, just ahead, and Eddie’s leading them carefully over lockers and past the whole sections of wall that have crumpled, desks and tables spilling out everywhere as they scan for anyone they missed.

Buck can feel the small wash of relief at his voice in Eddie’s chest, warming him from the inside out, and he hurries to catch up.

“Eddie, Buck!” Chimney calls out, coming into sight as he rounds the corner, Hen a little behind him.

“No one in our hallway,” Hen reports as they come up.

“Ours was clear too,” Buck says, and while Chimney radios Bobby, Buck watches Eddie turn back to survey the mess.

He nudges Eddie with his shoulder after a moment, which makes Eddie glance over at him before he turns back, a little furrow between his eyebrows, chest feeling tight. Eddie shakes his head. “A few hours earlier and—”

“Chris would’ve still been at school,” Buck completes quietly, his heart tugging at the thought of it, and he wishes he could soothe Eddie’s fear, but he knows he can’t do that about Christopher any more than he can do it about himself. “But it wasn’t a few hours earlier,” he says instead, but it means more than that. It wasn’t a few hours earlier, and Buck didn’t die, and neither did Chris, and neither did Eddie. The bullets didn’t hit Eddie’s heart, the lightning didn’t stop Buck’s heart, not permanently, and the tsunami didn’t wash Chris away. Maybe they were lucky, but Buck’s grateful for it, grateful that they’ve missed death more times than he can count. “He’s safe with Pepa,” he adds on. Thinks, and I’m safe with you.

“Mm,” Eddie hums, but he looks back at Buck with something unknowable, something tender as if he can read it all over Buck’s face.

And it’s that look, that thought of safety, that Buck’s thinking about when they start for the third floor on Bobby’s orders, when Eddie glances back at him to check he’s there, and there’s no warning, only their eyes meeting just before the ceiling caves and the floor gives way beneath them.

-

Buck is lucky, his breathing shaky, blood rushing in his ears where he’s been safely deposited next to a gaping hole in the wall. The lights of the emergency vehicles just outside flash in, illuminating the rock and metal everywhere, the dust in the air. He wasn’t hit by anything from above, and it felt like the bit of floor he was on simply slid its way down to the bottom, but there’s panic underneath his breastbone, and shock, and adrenaline, and Buck doesn’t think now, just croaks, “Eddie.”

And then it all hits him, and he’s scrambling up. He lost his helmet somewhere on the way down and he coughs, and he can hear Hen’s voice somewhere further into the building, and then Chimney, and his radio must be broken because he can hear theirs, echoing, can hear Bobby through it, but he turns and everything stops because there’s Eddie.

Buck thinks only, nonsensically, that he should’ve thought it the other way around as he clambers over, fear crawling up through him, already gasping out breaths, eyes getting blurry. He thought that Chris was safe with Pepa, and Buck was safe with Eddie, but he should’ve thought that Eddie was safe with Buck. Then he’s at Eddie’s side, careful, his arms coming around him and Eddie slumps right into him, like they’ve done this a million times, like it hasn’t just been the few months since Buck was in the hospital, like Buck’s embrace is exactly where Eddie wants to be.

“Eddie,” Buck hears, from far away, raw and desperate, “Eddie, Eddie, come on,” and he realizes that he’s the one saying it, and he realizes he’s crying, “Don’t—you’re fine, okay, you’re okay, don’t, Eddie, please.”

Buck’s been scared before. He’s had nightmares, and he’s seen Eddie hurt, Eddie gone, but none of it, nothing comes close to this. All it took was one story and a collapsed building, and Eddie’s got metal buried in his chest, slick with blood, right where his heart is, but it feels more like it’s Buck’s heart that’s taking the force of it, it feels like he’s breaking, and he’s crying in earnest now, because he loves him, he loves him, and he promised and he didn’t keep him safe. He promised, and Eddie is going to die in his arms anyway.

Buck can feel the heat of Eddie’s magic through his turnouts, and he’s desperate to see him suddenly, desperate to clutch on to the little time he can still get. He gets a hand up to get Eddie’s helmet off, barely aware of how he does it. The second his fingers brush against Eddie’s skin, it’s like a shock runs through him, like a thousand strings pulling taut, magic hot and thick and Buck can feel it deep in his chest, deeper than any ache or any feeling, so deep he can’t breathe around it. Then, like all his emotions, like the way he’s been feeling since being struck by lightning, he can hear Eddie’s heartbeat under his own, weak but steady in a way it can’t be, not where the metal is in Eddie.

“Buck,” Eddie rasps, voice wet, his hand feebly grabbing at Buck’s turnouts, and Buck thinks he might shatter. Live, he wants to beg, unfairly, impossibly. Don’t leave me.

“Hey, hey, no speaking,” he says instead, trying to pull himself together, thumbing at Eddie’s mouth, wiping the blood off his lips. Eddie’s skin is so hot, magic so hot it feels like it’s seeping out of him. Buck locates the tug of Eddie’s magic within him and focuses with everything he has, pours and pours into it with every emotion, with fear and love and hurt and desperation, his tears and his blood and his body, and he thinks of kissing Eddie, and he thinks of forever and promises and Eddie can’t break his promise. He can’t leave Buck. He can’t leave Christopher. He can’t leave.

“I got you,” Buck says, voice breaking, because that’s what he should’ve done, and he buries his face into Eddie’s hair, lets his tears fall there, whispers, “I love you, okay? I love you,” and it feels like something builds inside him then, the heat of it building and building until it finally gives and pours out of him into Eddie.

“My heart,” Eddie says, voice faint, and all Buck can do is hold him.

“I know,” Buck says, trying to soothe him, and he can hear people close by now, people coming to them. There’s nothing they can do. Nothing he can do. “I’m here,” he says, voice cracking again, struggling against the tide of grief threatening to pull him under. “I’m here.”

“Buck,” Eddie says again weakly, resolve growing, steady as Eddie’s emotions always are, but Buck can also feel how much Eddie loves him, can feel how his name is drenched in it, how Eddie’s entire body is full of it, and he can hear how Eddie needs him, and he’s crying still, but he quiets.

There’s noise around them, shouting and sirens and helicopters, but right now it’s just Buck and Eddie, just their feelings colliding in Buck’s chest, Eddie’s voice in Buck’s ear, Eddie in his arms like so many times before. It’s just the heat of him in Buck’s embrace, the magic bleeding everywhere as if he and Eddie are intertwined, like a little bubble around them keeping them together.

“I’m listening,” Buck tells him, and he is, to Eddie’s wet gasps of breath as he struggles, his magic flaring hotter when he coughs weakly, and Buck wipes his mouth again with his thumb, though the only thing it does is smear it across his lips. Buck remembers an eternity ago when Eddie’s blood was bright red against his skin, and then it seemed like it might be the end too, but not like this, not like the way Buck can’t begin to hope.

“Not here,” Eddie says, so quiet Buck has to lean close to hear him, and Buck tries to memorize it before he doesn't have it anymore, the rasp and timbre of his voice, the tone of it, the feeling it gives Buck, reassuring. Then, Eddie gathers his strength to say, more firmly, “My heart isn’t here,” and Buck watches as he touches his chest gingerly, right next to the metal. Buck catches his hand, feels the familiar shape of it, the callouses and the bones of his fingers, and sitting right in his stomach is this feeling of conviction that he knows doesn't belong to him.

“Your heart isn’t there,” Buck repeats, slow, breathing still shuddery, but Eddie’s grip slackens like he’s said what he needed to say, something softening in his chest with something like relief, and Buck knows. He knows it’s true.

For a split second he wants to argue that it’s impossible, except Eddie’s been doing a lot of impossible things, he’s been healing more than he’s ever healed, fixing things, and his emotions are raw in Buck’s chest, and Buck is afraid, yes, but he’s not afraid of this thing between them. That would’ve been an impossibility too, before Buck died, and Eddie’s always been a bit of impossible in that he’s everything Buck’s ever wanted and afraid he would never have.

Buck eases back a little so he can look at him. Eddie’s eyes are dark, warm, hazy with blood loss, but Eddie blinks at him, and it would be impossible that he’s still fighting to breathe if his heart was there. Buck can still hear Eddie’s heartbeat in his ears, in his bones, wrapped up in his chest under layers and layers of emotions. Eddie’s magic is letting him hear it, reassuring as ever, protecting them, keeping Eddie’s heart safe, keeping Buck’s from breaking too.

“Where is it?” Buck murmurs. He registers dimly that someone’s calling his name, but this is important, and there’s still blood on Eddie’s lips but it’s not a broken promise anymore, not a sure thing, and Buck clutches on to that so hard it hurts.

“Somewhere safe,” Eddie tells him, his eyes finally falling shut and then there are hands and orders around him and Eddie’s blood is still all over him, warm and wet, but he can’t let go of Eddie’s hand, he can’t.

“Go with him,” someone says in his ear, pushing him so he follows, and Buck only realizes it was Bobby when they’re in the ambulance and he’s still holding Eddie’s hand.

“His heart isn’t there,” Buck tells one of the paramedics, shaky, watching Eddie’s eyes flutter, and everything is hot, so hot it feels like it could melt him, but it doesn’t hurt, not even now. “He’s a—he’s a witch. His heart isn’t—”

“Got it. We got him,” is the response, and Buck holds Eddie’s hand until they wheel him into the hospital and they finally take him beyond where Buck can go, Eddie’s heartbeat quieting in his ears when Buck lets go, and Buck collapses into a chair, weeping, because through the mess of his own fear and sorrow and panic, he can’t find Eddie’s emotions anymore, magic finally poured out, and he had everything. He had it, all of Eddie, and he’s still sitting here with nothing except Eddie’s blood on his hands and a yawning chasm inside him where Eddie is supposed to go.

-

Buck only realizes that he could’ve gone to the loft when he’s standing in Eddie’s bathroom, stripping off his turnouts with shaking hands. The hospital had been overwhelmed with victims of the earthquake, sent him home, told him they’d inform him when Eddie was out of surgery for at least a punctured lung, if not more than that.

Maybe it would’ve been easier than here.

Chris needs to be told. Buck needs to wash the blood off. Eddie needs him to—

Buck gets under the shower, and everything is Eddie here, and he sinks to his knees under the spray and curls up there, trying to breathe around the terrible emptiness in his chest. It scares him every time he pokes at it, where he knows Eddie should be, where it’s been wrenched out, and he cries helplessly, in anger and frustration and fear, as he scrubs himself off. He’s glad that there isn’t much blood on him because he couldn’t bear to watch it go down Eddie’s drain, but after he finally manages to get himself out on shaky legs, he can’t go near the heap of bloody turnouts on the bathroom floor for a few minutes. He eventually finds the courage to stuff them into a trash bag, clean the bathroom floor, wash his hands, and it’s only then that he remembers to pull on clothes.

He ends up sitting on Eddie’s—on their bed. He can’t lay down because he thinks if he remembers what it’s like to sleep next to Eddie, the warm shape of him next to Buck, the way he snuggles up to him, something in him will crack all the way through.

He doesn’t even have Eddie’s blood on his hands anymore. He doesn’t have Eddie’s emotions. But he has this house, full of memories, and he knows what it’s like to be loved unconditionally, and he knows what it’s like to love someone more than anything, more than he ever thought he could, and Buck is a person full of love, and it was still more than he ever knew. He has Christopher, and he has hope, fragile but sitting in his chest, and Eddie—he trusts Eddie to come back to him. He trusts Eddie’s magic to bring him back.

He tries to remember the shape of it now, the warmth and the safety of it, and it comes easy, the ghost of it, and Buck whispers, “Protect him.” He wonders if this is how Eddie felt when Buck was the one laying there, silent and unresponsive, if Eddie imagined his life fracturing, if he knew the only thing he could do was let his magic try.

He breathes in, sharp, and then there’s an echo, a faint warmth in his chest, and Buck follows the thread of it within him, trailing back to where his own heart sits, and there Buck can place it as more than just Eddie’s magic, as Eddie’s heartbeat, so quiet Buck has to concentrate to hear it under the rhythm of his own. He might not have Eddie physically with him, but Eddie’s magic has never left him alone, not really, and even now it’s reassuring him. He buries his face in his hands, the darkness of it making it easier to latch on to Eddie’s heartbeat, to hold on.

He sits there for a long time, trembling and feeling it, the way it ebbs and flows, beating sluggishly before it wavers precariously and flickers out, and everything feels like it goes still, phantom warmth and deafening silence and Buck’s chest pulled too tight to even breathe because he thinks he knows—because Eddie can’t, he can’t, and Buck can’t, he can’t.

“No,” Buck says, voice raw and whittled down to nothing but the barest bones of what he wants, to the barest bones of everything he feels for Eddie.

The next second it trips back into rhythm, and this time Buck can hear it all the way in his ears, still weak but close, as if his ear was on Eddie’s chest. He gasps belatedly, sucking in air desperately, his face wet, and his chest suddenly too heavy to ignore. Buck clutches at it, trying to breathe through the weight of it, shaking with relief as Eddie’s magic goes warm again, fainter than before, but all over, his entire body alight with it.

He gets up and stumbles back to the bathroom, still trying to breathe around the heaviness of his chest, catching himself with one hand on the wall in the hallway, stopping there. Through ragged breaths, he puts together that it feels like it did when he was the one in the hospital bed, the phantom pain in his chest, and he wonders if Eddie’s magic is sharing his pain too. Buck would gladly bear it, would share it if it meant Eddie was going to come back to him, and he staggers the rest of the way until he can brace himself against the sink, splash water on his face, still shaking as he looks at himself in the mirror.

He pulls up his shirt to check. There’s nothing visibly out of the ordinary, so he lets it fall back down and slumps against the closest wall, sliding down to the floor so he can sit there and put his palm over his chest, the slightest bit of pressure feeling good against the ache. It’s insistent, but not painful, and Buck can’t help but smile thinking about how if Eddie were here, he would worry at his bottom lip, press his palm where Buck’s is, touch him and make it go away. His smile wavers then, because Buck could hold him, tuck his face into Eddie’s shoulder, press a kiss there. He could reassure himself with his thumb on Eddie’s pulse. Eddie’s magic is doing that now, Eddie’s heartbeat thrumming through him, but Buck pushes hard at his chest, and it almost feels like he can feel it there, their heartbeats intertwined, as if that’s where it’s housed.

Somewhere safe, Buck thinks, and stills.

The thing is, he knows Eddie. He knows Eddie more than he knows anyone, and he knows that Eddie hates being out of control, and that sometimes he can be reckless, yes, but he wouldn’t—not with this. Buck is the one who throws himself into danger headfirst, and Eddie is the one who has his back, but he reins Buck in and he has a kid and he’s levelheaded most of the time, calm under pressure, unshakeable, except when it comes to Buck getting hurt.

Since the lightning, Buck’s been feeling Eddie’s emotions, and Buck’s chest floods with magic when he gets hurt and Eddie tries to heal him, and Eddie’s been able to heal as if he can’t help but fix things, and he’s been fixing everything Buck gives him, and Buck is the guy who wants to fix things, and healing comes from the heart, and it’s impossible, it feels impossible that Eddie would look at him and think, he’s somewhere safe.

It would have to be somewhere close, Buck thinks. He realizes dimly he’s crying again, but this time he’s not even sure why. It would have to be somewhere Eddie could check constantly, and Eddie hasn’t stopped checking his chest, has been worrying over it, over Buck, convinced he’s hurting him because to himself, Eddie is good at breaking things. He’s good at anger and pushing people away and running, but to Buck, he’s good at healing and caring and he’s a good father and he’s a good partner and he’s not without his imperfections but he’s Buck’s. He’s Buck’s.

Buck stands again, washes his face, and just like when he realized those were Eddie’s emotions within him, now that he thinks he knows what the weight is, the ache feels tender more than anything. It feels like trust, and that’s what Buck’s still thinking as he grabs the car keys and pulls on his shoes.

He thinks he might just be able to catch Pepa and Chris before bedtime, and he knows it’s going to be a long night, but he wants Chris to know, and he wants to be there, be with the other thing Eddie trusted him with.

That feeling accompanies him all the way to Pepa’s, and he ignores the doorbell, knocking on the door just in case, though the lights inside are still on. He waits, Eddie’s heartbeat steady in his ears, safe in his chest, and when Pepa opens the door, he figures it must be giving him strength because she doesn’t look immediately concerned, just confused.

“Evancito?” Pepa asks. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?” Chris is in the eyeline of the door, turning around when he hears it’s Buck, and when Buck’s eyes land on him, this familiar kid that’s as much his as Eddie’s, he expects the tug behind his sternum, but he isn’t expecting the call.

“Hello?” he says when he picks up, Pepa ushering him into the house, mouthing, sorry for taking it, which she waves off as if she can tell it’s important, and then—he knows. He knows before they can say anything because he can already feel it deep within him, Eddie’s magic all the way to his fingertips, and there, below everything, below realization and the crash of his emotions, below the weight of his chest, is the faint stirring of something that fills the empty space like it was never gone.

“Mr. Evan Buckley?”

It all wells up then, lump in his throat, tears of relief spilling over, and he’s sorry only that Chris and Pepa look alarmed, but he chokes out, “Yes?”

“Mr. Edmundo Diaz is out of surgery. It went well,” and that’s all he remembers later because then it’s reassuring Chris and Pepa, and Eddie won’t be awake when they go, but Chris insists on going anyway. Pepa insists on staying because of the two visitor policy, and Buck is still promising to keep her updated as she pushes him out the door.

The distance thins, road, hospital, room, and he sinks into the chair next to Eddie and this time when he cries, he can take Eddie’s hand, feel the warmth of him, of his magic fixing him up, and Chris lets him hold him, and here, he’s not alone.

He’s not alone, and he’s alive, and he’s in love. And it hurts, but there’s something important about that, something that Buck wants to hold and never let go.

-

Witches aren’t very common, and the surgeons end up coming down to see Eddie a few hours later, though he’s still unconscious, looking thrilled as they tell Buck about doing the procedure with a vital organ missing.

Chris is slumped against Buck, fast asleep, and Buck adjusts his grip on him, drawn in by their enthusiasm despite himself.

“Made it much easier to fix up his lung,” one of them says, sipping her coffee. “All that empty space. The arteries just—ended. Looked like a really clean scoop, but we still got a pulse on the monitor and his blood was still pumping. He coded once. We weren’t quite sure what to do, but he recovered pretty fast.”

They ask about how hot he gets when his magic is healing him, say they’ve heard stories about him after he got shot, tell Buck that his body seemed to know what to do to help them, that he’s healing fast, and they tell him that he’s got an incredible partner, which makes Buck’s heart trip.

He thanks them three times, and they finally trail out. The doctor comes in an hour later to check on Eddie, looking pleased at the progress of his wounds, though he’s still hot to the touch. He leaves Buck alone again after reminding him to call him when Eddie wakes.

Buck is still holding Eddie’s hand. His leg went numb a while ago, but he doesn’t want to let go of Chris, and he’s not sure when he falls asleep, but he does know when he wakes because he opens his eyes and Eddie is looking at him, and Buck’s chest is drenched in relief, and he gives up on figuring out whether it’s his or Eddie’s. “Eddie,” he says, voice bleeding all over, and Eddie squeezes his hand weakly.

“Buck,” he croaks, and Buck wants to curl up into his touch, sure his emotions are spilling onto his face, but he doesn’t bother trying to mop them up, not when he can feel Eddie’s fondness through them, present as always.

He wakes Chris and calls the doctor and nurse, brushing Eddie’s hair off his forehead absently once they’re fussing over Eddie’s bandages and asking him questions. Eddie complies, but Buck can feel his patience wane quickly, the ache of his chest bothering him, exhaustion threatening to pull him under again.

His magic was working overtime to save him, and Buck can feel the traces of it, the stray bits of warmth still sitting under his skin. He touches Eddie’s ear absently and feels a bit of Eddie’s grumpiness quiet, as if Buck is all it takes to keep him grounded, as if he thinks of Buck as a lifeline, and the heartbeat in Buck’s ears is a soft double rhythm.

“We just want to keep him a few more hours,” the doctor tells Buck when Eddie’s on the verge of sleep, struggling to keep his eyes open. He’s speaking quietly to Chris, seemingly fine with Buck taking over. They seemed reassured when Buck told them it was a side effect of healing, and they’ve pulled him out into the hallway to let him know. “With how he’s doing, he could probably be discharged now, but we want to be sure.” Then, with a small smile, “It’s not every day we see a witch around here.”

Buck gets a text from their group chat when he goes back in, and he leaves Chris for a minute to go get swept up in hugs and warmth from the rest of the 118, fresh off their shift.

“Buck,” Bobby tells him knowingly when he’s done updating them, “go home.”

Buck hesitates. “But—”

“We’ll let you know when he wakes up again,” Hen reassures. “You should at least get Christopher showered and fed. And call his school.”

Buck wavers, but they’re right, and he can already tell Eddie’s half asleep anyway. He goes back in, promises they’re going to come back to get him and warns him that he’s going to have other visitors. Eddie tries to protest through his yawns, his eyes already slipping shut, and Buck squeezes his hand, left with the littlest bit of hazy affection tucked between his ribs before sleep claims Eddie before they can even walk out.

That’s exactly what they do. They return two hours later to find that Chimney and Hen have gone home already, Pepa and a clearly waning Bobby the two remaining. Buck insists that he’s got it, sending Bobby home, and Pepa promises to stop by later with food, taking her leave too.

Eddie wakes an hour later, hand already reaching for Buck’s, his first word a raspy, “Christopher.”

From there, it’s easy. He gets discharged, still a little sore, and Buck is careful with getting him into the jeep. When they get home, Chris is drooping and Buck gets him situated and back in bed, and then he returns to Eddie, whom he deposited in their bed.

Eddie blinks slowly at him, still looking sleepy, but his eyes are alert enough and the warmth there is enough for Buck to stop in the doorway, unable to step closer.

“You said,” Buck says, very quiet, “your heart was somewhere safe.”

Eddie swallows hard at that, and slow emotion creeping over him feels a little like an apology. He knows now that Buck can feel it, and Buck thinks Eddie is letting him feel it as they stare at each other, trusting him to feel that, and he’s on the verge of tears again at nothing more than the idea of that, of how much Eddie trusts him. “Buck,” Eddie says, faint worry when he sees Buck’s wet eyes, holding an arm out in invitation.

Buck doesn’t move because if he goes he’ll never be able to have this conversation. He’ll go and kiss Eddie, and he won’t be able to stop. He’ll cry all over him, except he has a feeling he’s going to do that anyway.

“Somewhere safe?” Buck asks, his voice cracking, and he sees the moment Eddie figures out that he knows, feels it like a punch to the stomach.

“Buck,” Eddie says, this time like he’s been struck.

“Are you insane?” Buck asks, trying to keep his voice under control. He can tell he’s failing because Eddie pushes himself to sit up with a small wince that makes Buck want to throttle him and insist he stay there except Buck can’t move, can’t go closer. He’s angry, he thinks, and he loves Eddie so much it hurts, and he wants to press on it like a wound, wants to drag him close and keep him there, and he thinks not of the hospital room, but of the high school, of the metal in Eddie’s chest, and if Buck had the magic to fix it, he would have, without a thought. “You didn’t tell me,” Buck says, breathing fast now, watching Eddie’s face fall except that’s not it.

“I—I know,” Eddie croaks, stricken.

“No,” Buck says. “No, you should’ve told me because I—I would’ve been careful if I had known.” Eddie’s mouth opens and closes, and Buck can feel him starting to understand but he can’t stop. “If something happened—it would’ve killed us both,” Buck says, shaking now under the onslaught of his own fear, his fear for Eddie, for what he could have done to him, except Buck isn’t that guy who didn’t care whether he lived or died, not anymore. He’s still the guy who would sacrifice himself if it came to it, but he wants so desperately to live. He wants to live. If he had known, maybe he would have been more careful, or maybe he would have been exactly himself. He might’ve helped Eddie, or he might have never realized how much he wanted him, and Buck realizes it doesn’t matter.

It’s not about another world, it’s not about the coma dream, or about the what ifs. It’s not about time wasted or regret. It’s about what he has, this life that’s his, where he can do whatever he wants, where he has Eddie and Chris and he’s not perfect and he’s still afraid and he’s been hurt, but he’s alive, and Eddie is standing there, and Buck isn’t going to ever stop being grateful for it.

“I know,” Eddie repeats, all their emotions mixing together in Buck’s chest now and he gives up on identifying any of it, focusing on Eddie’s eyes on him. “I just—you were dying,” Eddie says, shaky. “And I didn’t know what to do, it just—it just fell out of my chest and I—I didn’t think. I just put it in yours.”

“That’s why you’ve been checking,” Buck says, closing his eyes briefly before he opens them, feeling like he finally understands. “Isn’t it? And the healing—”

“You’re the guy who fixes things,” Eddie says, letting out a strangled laugh. “You said it yourself. I didn’t—I didn’t know it was affecting me. I just thought—”

“It was hurting me?” Buck completes, and they both fall silent then, Eddie’s eyes pleading with him. Buck wavers in the face of it, before saying, slowly, “You can’t really think I’m safe,” because he knows Eddie’s seen all the ways in which he takes risks.

“Buck,” Eddie says, like he can’t even believe Buck is saying that, and Buck’s chest pulls tight with such deep and unshakeable belief that Buck can’t help but drown in it. “Buck, you’re the safest place I can think of.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, and this time it’s a gasp, the fear of it all catching up to him, and he takes the few steps to Eddie as Eddie stands, and then they’re kissing desperately. “I was so scared,” Buck whispers into his mouth, shaking with it now, his whole body warm with who knows what, Eddie’s magic, his body, his hands pulling him closer. “Don’t do that again.”

“I won’t,” Eddie says, and Buck knows he can’t promise that, but Eddie says it like he can before he’s coaxing Buck’s jaw open with his thumbs, and that’s Eddie’s tongue in his mouth and then it’s salty because they’re both kind of crying but they can’t stop. Buck likes the way Eddie sucks in these little gasps when he draws back for breath before finding his mouth again, and then Eddie finally draws back and pulls Buck into as fierce a hug he can give when he’s still sore, pressing kisses into Buck’s hair, along the line of his shoulder before he rests his cheek there, breathing hard.

Buck buries his face in Eddie’s hair, breathing him in, not sure he’ll ever be able to let go. “I love you,” is all he can think to say.

“I love you too,” Eddie says, like it’s easy, and then he makes a sound half between a sob and a laugh. “Oh god, I love you,” and it feels like the last piece of everything, and Buck’s body goes warm and this time he knows it’s Eddie magic.

He turns them around, pulls back just enough to sit on the edge of the bed, and he lets go of Eddie’s hands to pull his shirt off, opening his legs with intention as he looks up at Eddie.

Eddie stares at him, his breaths still fast, and Buck wouldn’t even have to feel the affection within him to know that’s what’s written all over Eddie’s face. He takes the step forward to stand between Buck’s legs, his hands ghosting over Buck’s bare shoulders.

Buck shivers, just a little. “Take it,” he tells Eddie, trusting. “It’s yours.”

Eddie touches his skin, his palms warm on Buck. “I’m yours,” he says helplessly, swallowing, and Buck can feel it so viscerally, how much Eddie means that, that he can’t figure out how to speak for a few moments even though he’s known. He places a kiss against Eddie’s arm, where he can reach. Eddie’s breathing stutters in response, and then Buck’s entire body blooms with warmth and Eddie moves one of his hands and it’s so easy, the way his heart falls straight out of Buck’s chest into his palm.

Buck half expects it to be covered in golden light or wrapped up safely, but it’s nothing more and nothing less than a human heart, veins and arteries and muscle. He can tell what the surgeons meant now by the clean place where the arteries end. They watch the frantic rhythm it’s beating and Buck thinks of how something so small is living, breathing, and entirely Eddie’s, and he had that in him. He had Eddie in him, kept him safe and alive and it did the same in return, and maybe it’s returning to the place it belongs, but he glances up at Eddie, and he knows he’s already there.

“Does it hurt?” Eddie asks quietly, a little anxious, and Buck can’t feel that anymore but he knows Eddie better than anything and he understands the moment their eyes meet.

Buck shakes his head. He’s still full of magic, brimming with it, and there’s no weight in his chest either but it doesn’t feel empty without it. It doesn’t feel like the emptiness when Eddie’s hand left his in the hospital. It feels more like the pressure eases, like Buck did what he was supposed to do, nothing more, nothing less, and there’s a lifetime to figure out Eddie anyway.

“Put it back,” he urges, quiet too, and Eddie simply pushes it straight back into his own chest. The warmth of Eddie’s magic finally ebbs, and everything is where it belongs, and Buck puts his palm on Eddie’s chest, relieved at the feeling of it.

Eddie’s hand covers his after a moment. “Buck,” he says, wavering, “I—”

“I’m staying,” Buck tells him. Eddie studies him and then nods, swallowing, and Buck can feel it in the pace of his heartbeat, can see it in the way Eddie’s eyes won’t leave his. “You want me here, so I’m staying here.”

The corner of Eddie’s mouth tugs up then. “Just because I want you to?” but he asks like he already knows the answer, like he knows Buck better than anyone.

“That,” Buck says, his own smile rising to his face, and it feels so good, “and because I really, really want to.”

Sometimes I think of inviting you into my body, which I imagine as a cavern of a house, practiced in having, in holding, and I wouldn’t spill a drop, not because you are too little, but because I want it too much.