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Downtime, Eddie thinks, is the most dangerous part of their job. Well, other than the running into burning buildings part, and the climbing twenty feet up shaky ladders that could use a lot more maintenance part, and the part where they sometimes get guns drawn on them because people in distress can be motherfucking jerks—other than all of those parts, downtime is the most dangerous.
It’s insidious, is what it is. The temptation to kick his feet up on the couch while snacking non-stop on whatever leftover Bobby stashed away in the fridge is a very, very concrete threat to Eddie’s physical form.
They try to mix it up, come up with a collection of activities to keep themselves sane in the idleness between one crazy call and the next. He and Buck work out competitively at least once a week, which is nice. Hen brings books and makes them read and discuss them, which is less nice but always effective. Eddie bought a bag of random wooden mind puzzles at a yard sale and emptied it on the dinner table, and sometimes they agonize over those.
Chim has taken up stand-up comedy because he’s scared his kid will think he’s lame and they’re his test audience, because he thinks they won’t be able to tell he’s stealing jokes from old Dave Chappelle sketches left and right.
They entertain themselves in ever-changing, fun ways, but sometimes—sometimes they just need to relax and do nothing for a while, you know? Unplug the brain and scroll through social media for a bit and spread a few mindless likes around.
Inactivity. That’s where danger lies.
Eddie should’ve foreseen this.
Chim is napping in the armchair, his neck bent at an angle he’s going to regret the minute he wakes up. Hen is texting furiously with the kind of private smirk that means Karen’s on the other side of that conversation. Bobby disappeared downstairs a while ago, his brow pinched in the way only the prospect of massive amounts of paperwork can achieve.
Eddie is on the couch, manspreading without shame because he has the space, nobody else claimed a spot, and he’s thumbing away at his Instagram feed without really seeing any of it, because he keeps getting distracted.
Buck is sitting on his favorite ottoman, miles of legs spread out in front of him, and he’s leaning back into the couch, his shoulder a warm weight against Eddie’s leg, and he’s watching a video on his phone and he’s giggling.
Under normal circumstances, Eddie would be since long teasing the shit out of Buck’s schoolgirl-ish tiny little hiccups of laughter. Shit, under normal circumstances Eddie would have woken Chim up to have a decent partner in ribbing Buck for his pink cheeks and dopey expression—Eddie needs to make fun of it, otherwise he’ll end up noticing how pretty and radiant Buck looks when he’s having fun, and how much Eddie wants to gently push the palm of his hand to the place where Buck’s throat is vibrating with laughter.
But the circumstances right now? The furthest thing away from normal.
Eddie knows exactly what Buck’s watching. It’s videos of a YouTube doctor doing all sorts of inane things—telling stories about his practice, answering anonymous questions, reacting to other videos, cuddling with his frankly ridiculously giant dog called Bear.
Eddie knows, because Buck is not the only person in his life who’s a fan of the channel; he and Christopher have been pouring over this guy’s content for weeks, the both of them having the exact reaction Buck is sporting right now—fits of giggles, lots of blushing, the occasional awed gasp.
Thinking about it makes Eddie’s body feel two sizes too small.
Hen locks her phone and looks over, arching an interested eyebrow, and Eddie is quick to school his fuming expression into something casual and not as clearly green-eyed.
“Whatcha watchin’, Buckaroo?” she asks, swaggering to the couch and taking a seat on Buck’s other side.
Buck is all too eager to pull the Airpods out of his ears and grin up at her, tilting the phone so she can see.
“It’s Doctor Mike,” Buck says, still sounding way too giddy for Eddie’s taste.
Hen’s eyes go wide and round and impressed and she whistles a little under her breath.
“Damn, that’s a pretty face. I’ll even forgive him the appropriation of the title,” she says, and Eddie is fuming a little bit. Because, yeah, see—Hen is not wrong. Doctor Mike is young and magazine-spread levels of attractive with his big blue eyes and the dazzling smile and the perfect fluffy coif and the broad chest.
Buck tilts his head into the couch a little and laughs.
“No, see, he’s an actual Doctor too,” he says, and all too excitedly pulls up his browser to show Hen the guy’s credentials. Jesus, what is he, his manager? “Family medicine in New Jersey.”
“You’re kidding. That’s… not what a family doctor is supposed to look like,” Hen says, doing a double, no, triple take. Buck just laughs and shrugs, as if to say, it’s the twenty-first century, what can you do.
“Didn’t he go to a Covid party last winter?” Eddie hears himself say before he can stop himself. The judicious course of action would’ve been to steer very, very clear of this conversation, but it’s too late for that now. “I thought he was cancelled.”
Buck turns to look at him, wide-eyed and tilting his head in surprise. He gasps, clutching at his heart dramatically.
“Eddie. Knowledge of irrelevant celebrity trivia and flawless use of the lingo? I’m impressed,” he teases, bumping his shoulder against Eddie’s knee.
“They grow up so fast,” Hen dead-pans, wiping fake tears from the corner of her eye and leaning over to pat Eddie’s shoulder.
Eddie feels his cheeks redden, but he soldiers through it and rolls his eyes.
“Anyway, yeah, he messed up and went to a party that wasn’t the safest thing in the world,” Buck says, and he has the decency to blush a little in his attempt to defend a perfect stranger’s reputation. “But he gave a really good apology. Like, he owned the mistake, and he’s been super vocal about safety ever since.”
“I bet,” Eddie says, dry as the desert.
Buck bumps into his leg again. “C’mon, you like him too.”
Eddie, most definitely, does not. He’s about to say so, but then he realizes that Hen is looking at him with this smug spark in her eyes, like she’s about to call him out on his bullshit, so he bites his tongue and gets up with the weak excuse that he needs a coffee.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Buck’s disgruntled pout. But Hen is leaning over Buck’s shoulder again, asking to see more of the hot doctor, and Eddie busies himself with the coffee maker, huffing at his own idiocy.
He’s fucking jealous of a YouTuber now. This is great.
*
See, the thing is—Eddie brought this tragedy on himself.
Knee-deep in the quicksand of the first lockdown, back when they were all shacked up at the station to try and minimize exposure risks for their families, Eddie had struggled to find the right words to explain the situation to Christopher.
There was so much Eddie himself didn’t understand—wasn’t ready to process—about their freshly upended lives, and it had been a terrible, tough time for everyone involved. A lot of tears were spilt; not all were Christopher’s.
Buck had helped. Of course. Wonderful, perfect, perceptive Buck was there, tireless, at every turn, to distract Christopher—and Eddie, and himself—with chatter and games and jokes and bedtime stories, without fail. The rest of the 118, too.
But Eddie knew, deep down, that these were all temporary fixes. What Christopher needed was the clear, down-to-earth perspective of some authority figure who wasn’t his dad or his dad’s friend or his dad’s boss.
In a desperate quest for a solution, Eddie had turned to the Internet. And the Internet had given him Doctor Mike: a friendly face with a medical degree and a soothing voice, someone who projected safety and calm and reassurance and was doing an entire series of easy, palatable videos about the pandemic.
Christopher ate it up hook, line and sinker.
So. Eddie is the creator of his own misery. What an unpredictable turn of events.
He introduced his kid to Doctor Mike, and then Christopher inevitably shared him with Buck, and now Eddie gets a front row seat to his son and his best friend fanboying over the guy.
Doctor Mike is so good, he knows so many things, he’s a doctor, have you seen his dog. Eddie is slowly losing his mind.
“Buck, you know how to do that, you have done that before,” Eddie says, helplessly watching as Buck and Chris forget all about movie night and instead choose to gasp and oooh and aaaw over Doctor Mike explaining how to spot a pneumothorax and how to fix it, in family-friendly terms.
“But Eddie,” Buck says, his eyes wide and full of glee, “it’s Doctor Mike.”
And then, before Eddie can think of an answer or even just flip him off behind Christopher’s head, the two of them yell, in perfect sync with Doctor Mike on the video, “CHEST COMPRESSIONS! CHEST COMPRESSIONS! CHEST COMPRESSIONS!”
They laugh, half hysterical. They high five. Eddie groans and he knows he has nobody to blame but himself.
*
(The worst part about this whole thing is, Eddie isn’t at all oblivious to the reasons why he instinctively trusted Doctor Mike.
That first time, lonely and sleepless and missing his son like a limb at 2AM on the station’s couch, he’d clicked on the guy’s videos because he’d caught something familiar in the face smiling up at him from the thumbnail.
Doctor Mike has a thousand watt smile, a collection of weird facts and goofy catchphrases always tumbling out of his pretty mouth, a flailing sort of energy that means he cannot sit still to save his life, an infectious laughter, and clear blue eyes.
Eddie is so fucking embarrassed that he was actually the first one with a crush on the man, because he reminded him of Buck.)
*
Luckily, YouTube is a literal bottomless cesspool of content, so Christopher’s infatuation with Doctor Mike gets to sit on the back burner after a while, quickly replaced by a whole thing of fighting robots that Eddie isn’t going to touch with a ten-foot pole. He trusts Buck to keep his son’s online activities in check.
Eddie himself has pretty much put the entire thing out of his mind—and gladly, because while he knows that his complicated feelings for Buck are there to stay, he’s pretty okay to wave goodbye forever to the petty bite of jealousy over a fucking YouTube doctor—and things have gone back to normal.
Well, the usual weird normal where his gorgeous, single best friend would rather hang out on Eddie’s couch with Eddie’s kid on a Friday night than go out and make anyone—everyone—go stupidly in love with him.
Eddie isn’t going to complain.
Like, ever.
Until, of course, the universe remembers it’s supposed to make Eddie’s life a fucking nightmare, and have him die of a heart attack before he’s even thirty-five.
They roll into a swanky business district across town—lots of banks and corporate headquarters and fancy hotels catering to the kind of people who don’t drive their own cars.
The call isn’t too complicated, but it’s a weird one: somehow, a filing cabinet was dropped from the twenty-fifth floor of one of the buildings, embedding itself halfway through the windshield of a car in incoming traffic. For some miracle, the driver is unharmed, but the car pretty much crumpled on itself so it takes them a while to get her out of it.
While Chim and Hen busy themselves treating a few scraps and whiplashes from the minor pileup that followed the impact, Eddie and Buck work on the trapped driver in perfect sync, barely needing any guidance from Bobby.
Once the poor, terrified woman is finally set free, Chim comes over to check up on her. Hen follows close, but first she makes a beeline for Buck with a strange smile and she elbows him in the ribs.
“You need to go back there, Buckaroo, two cars down,” she says, and she actually winks before slipping on her most professional expression and focusing on the driver.
Buck turns to Eddie, who’s just as confused as he is, and after a quick shrug, they both head in the direction Hen pointed towards. Buck is still holding the jaws of life and hoists them carelessly over his shoulder, his t-shirt begging for mercy where it stretches over his thick biceps, and yeah, Eddie is definitely gonna get that heart attack he wanted if he doesn’t stop staring.
Two cars down there’s an expensive piece of automobile royalty, a sleek white Audi riding so low it’s sinful, sitting a little askew where the driver swerved to avoid rear-ending the car in front of it. The ride catches Buck’s attention immediately, with him actually whistling under his breath and stopping to really, really look at her—so that Eddie, who’s more partial to the aggressive beauty of big imposing trucks, is the first to see the tall, muscular man standing next to the car, carefully rotating his right shoulder.
It’s Doctor Mike. Of course it is.
Eddie sighs, and hopes against all hope that Buck doesn’t notice.
“Holy shit,” Buck says immediately, snapping the fingers of his free hand. “Chest compressions!”
Doctor Mike looks up sharply, his head tilting to the side—it’s not adorable, Christ, he’s a grown-ass man, and yeah, Eddie is aware he’s an hypocrite because he never complains when Buck does the exact same thing, only his head tilt goes the other way around—but then he smiles, brilliant and blinding.
“Buck?” he says, and Eddie chokes on his own breath and half-stumbles because, what? They know each other?
Buck looks surprised for a whole three seconds, then he throws his head back and laughs, which puts the perfect column of his neck on display, glistening with sweat and with a smudge of grease right under his Adam’s apple. Not that Eddie’s looking.
“Hen told ya?” Buck asks with a smile, and Doctor Mike closes the last few feet between them to shake Buck’s hand with a firm, gentle grip.
“Yeah, she said you’d be happy.” He turns to Eddie, shakes his hand too, his smile picture-perfect but still warm and friendly. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Eddie grumbles, because goddamn, the man has no right to be this charming when all Eddie wants is to hate his guts.
Buck ducks his head and giggles, then he nods to Doctor Mike’s shoulder. “You alright?”
“Yeah, just a bit sore. You know, safety belts,” he says, then he looks at the minor wreckage only a few feet away—there’s still folders and loose scraps of paper raining down from the hole in the twenty-fifth floor’s window—and grimaces a little. “I got lucky.”
Buck—the jaws still nestled comfortably over his shoulder, because he’s a show-off programmed to turn Eddie literally insane—slaps the back of his hand into Eddie’s chest.
“Dude, we need to get a picture for Christopher, he’s gonna flip out,” he says, his eyes wide. Then he looks at Doctor Mike and his cheeks turn a little pink, sheepish, “I mean, if that’s okay. Chris is the best kid in the world and he loves your videos, we’ve watched everything, like, six times. But, we don’t wanna trouble you.”
“Please! What? I’ve always wanted a picture with firefighters, you guys are heroes,” Doctor Mike says with a cheeky grin, and he sounds genuinely excited, God, Eddie wants to die.
Then, Doctor Mike asks, “Is Christopher your son?”
And he’s looking from Buck to Eddie, seamlessly, like he can see that they’re a team, a unit, a something, and it unlocks a warm and possessive feeling deep in Eddie’s chest. Buck opens his mouth to say something, probably correct the assumption, but Eddie bumps their shoulders together. He decides to go for it, because fuck it.
“Yeah,” he says, with a small, pleased grin when he hears Buck make a strangled sound. Eddie doesn’t look at him when he pulls out his phone, a very stupid idea blossoming in his head. “Buck, do you want to get chest compressions?”
*
Buck doesn’t take his eyes off Eddie’s face for the entire ride back. His neck is pink, and he banters with Hen over the headset about their celebrity run-in, explains to Bobby and Chim who exactly that was, but he doesn’t stop staring.
Eddie smirks, sits back, and basks in the attention.
Back at the station, he goes to sit at the dinner table and pulls out his phone, opening up the gallery and scrolling through the pictures—Doctor Mike insisted they take a bunch of silly selfies and he really wanted one with his head in the jaws, bless his soul.
Eddie doesn’t look up when he hears Buck climb the stairs and shuffle behind him.
Buck takes a seat directly in front of him, and Eddie still doesn’t look, instead smirking to himself as he looks at a thumbnail of the first video he took—Doctor Mike straddling Buck’s hips where he’s sprawled starfish-like on the pavement, leaning in to give him Chris compressions! Chris compressions! Chris compressions! with a brilliant, laughing grin. Doctor Mike’s knee is digging into Buck’s side a little, and his hands are pressing snugly on Buck’s chest—obviously—but somehow, the intimate pose doesn’t bother Eddie that much.
Buck clears his throat, and he still sounds so fucking strangled; Eddie is not a cruel person, so he decides to put him out of his misery and locks his phone, putting it down, folding his hands together.
Buck’s face is red, he’s squirming in his seat a little, but when Eddie finally meets his eye, he calms down and leans in, propping his chin in his palm.
“You know,” he says, his voice low, and the entire station is eerily quiet, so Eddie knows for sure Chim and Hen are lurking on the stairs, ears bent. “If people think we have a son together, and you don’t correct them… they might assume other things, too.”
Eddie’s heart is in his throat, but from the outside, he knows he is the portrait of calm and poise.
“Yeah?” he says, all casual-like, even if he feels everything but. “Is that bad?”
Buck laughs, a little breathless. He drops his hand, ducks his head. Slow, but sure, he reaches out, only his index finger extended, until he touches the back of Eddie’s hand on the table. It’s one, tiny point of contact, and it shouldn’t be enough of anything, but still, Eddie’s storming heart settles. He’s thinking, vaguely, of the space diagrams in Christopher’s science book, how before the Big Bang the universe was wrapped up and compressed in a single tiny little point, exactly like the pad of Buck’s finger on his skin, and then it exploded and there it was, everything, and, yeah, Eddie gets it.
“It’s not bad,” Buck says, his eyes bright under his lashes, and Eddie leans back in his chair, warm and content.
*
(Christopher melts into a puddle of joy when he sees the video and they DM Doctor Mike all the pictures they took and he responds with a frankly excessive amount of multi-colored, shiny hearts. This time, Eddie gets to be pretty proud of the mess he made.)