Chapter Text
Loving Eddie is—
Loving Eddie is new, but not really. It’s a surprise that’s been waiting to happen, a revelation that feels like it’s always been there, just waiting for the right moment to surface. Loving Eddie is like finding that last piece of the puzzle, the one that makes everything click into place. It’s looking back over the last six years and realizing you’ve been holding the answer all along—just in a language you didn’t know how to read until now.
Because loving Eddie is just right. It’s how it always was going to be. Loving Eddie is friendship and so much more. It’s a place he belongs when he’s never felt like that before. It’s a house where he is not really a guest; a couch that’s comfortable to sleep on. It’s a kid that he loves more than anything else in the world—a piece of paper that makes his part in his life official, but not really necessary. Loving Eddie is six years of shared glances, endless banter, hard conversations, and even harder silences. It’s heartbreak and healing, laughter and life.
Loving Eddie is giving him his heart and knowing it’ll be safe there—knowing it won’t be taken for granted or, worse, shattered like before.
Loving Eddie is the destination he didn’t even know he’d been walking towards all his life.
“Buck,” Eddie had said that night, nervous and afraid like Buck had never seen him before. “I’m in love with you.”
But loving Eddie is also scary. It’s a life-altering question with a terrifying response. Because Buck has danced this dance before, and his many partners have always ended up leaving him there, making him realize that he’s the reason none of them stuck around.
So Buck lies. He takes Eddie’s hand in his and rejects him—tells him he doesn’t feel the same in the softest, kindest way he can think of. He tells him that he’d love to stay friends because Eddie matters so much to him—and that’s the truth—and forces himself not to hold him in his arms when he notices the glimpse of hurt that appears for a second in his best friend’s eyes.
Because Buck can’t fuck this up. He just can’t. He cannot live without Eddie. Because Eddie is not Abby or Ali or Taylor or even fucking Tommy. Eddie is the best thing that’s ever happened to him—Eddie is the person in his corner. Eddie is his soft place to land.
And he’s being really fucking selfish and is hurting both of them in the process, but—
But if that’s the price he has to pay to keep Eddie in his life forever, then he’ll pay it. He’ll close his heart to all the feelings—to the way it’s booming in his chest, screaming at him angrily—and force himself to ignore the way his best friend—the man he loves—hurts like he’s doing at that moment.
“You don’t know that, Evan,” Maddie says the day after in her kitchen, when Buck simply couldn’t stop his heart from thundering in his chest and calling him every kind of name for letting the thing he finally realized he’s wanted more than anything else in his life run by him. She is holding him, like she has always done when he’s little more than broken pieces on the floor, brushing a thumb under his red-rimmed, teary eyes whenever a tear falls. “You can’t make a decision like that out of fear.”
And Buck knows… he knows, alright? He’s just—he’s just been left at the curb so many times that he can’t take this chance, not with Eddie.
He’s never enough, and he’s not letting Eddie realize that, too.
So Buck pines but forces himself not to. He watches Eddie from afar with a different glint in his eyes that he always tries to catch. He tries to keep things normal, as they always were. He doesn’t let his feelings ruin their Buck and Eddie thing.
But he fails sometimes. He jumps a little when Eddie puts a hand on him; he keeps trying to avoid the other man’s gaze when his feelings become too much; he doesn’t always sit next to him like he usually does.
And it’s unfair, and he knows it, and his heart always jumps in his throat when he notices the hurt in the other man’s eyes flickering for a moment all over again. But loving Eddie when you’re not supposed to is hard. Because now that this piece of the puzzle is finally in its place, Buck just can’t help but see him in this different light. Buck can’t help imagining a life next to him as more than just best friends—he can’t help imagining him in his arms, holding him close and kissing him—
“Okay, enough,” Chimney says at the station one day when they’re alone. He’s rolling his eyes at him, and Buck realizes he hasn’t been masking his feelings as well as he thought he was. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but I do know that you’re both idiots. Whatever happened, just talk about it, alright?”
And Chim is right, but Buck doesn’t tell him. He just nods at him in silence and goes back to his thoughts. He brushes a hand on his face and tries to ground himself—tries not to let his fear of abandonment overpower him forever.
Because loving Eddie is scary, but it’s also something he can’t control—it’s something he can’t stop.
Loving Eddie is new—but not really. It’s something that Buck has always known. It’s something that’s been with him—with them, for the past six years. Eddie has seen him all this time and taken him, accepted him, loved him so much to give him his heart multiple times and trust Buck with it, like no one else in his life had ever done.
So Buck takes a leap of faith. He pushes away all his fears. He curses himself for being an idiot, for rejecting Eddie’s heart the one time that mattered the most. He hopes with all himself that loving him is easy enough for Eddie to still feel the same.
He finds himself in front of Eddie’s door, rain-soaked and unable to knock on it. He’s scared—so scared—but he wants this more than he’s ever wanted anything else in the world. He wants to be enough for the person he’s been in love with for the past six years without knowing. But he takes too long, because Eddie is opening the door and grabbing him and telling him to get out of the rain, but Buck doesn’t budge, and he sees the worry in his best friend—in the eyes of the man he loves.
“Eddie,” he says, and he wonders for a second if his tears look any different from the streaks of rain already on his face.
“I’m in love with you, too.”