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A storm rolls into Los Angeles without warning, rainfall coming down viciously, and with the thunder and the lighting and the downpour it brings along a melancholy Eddie’s been running away from his whole life.
He’s standing by the kitchen sink, one hip against the counter and a mug of tea in his hands, when the feeling starts to creep in. Eddie isn’t sure how long he’s been frozen there, watching the rain come down in harsh bursts and, even more so, watching the drops against the window gradually join together before darting down below his sight. The tea in his hands has gotten too cold—he had made it not long after getting a picture from Karen of Christopher and Denny setting up for their sleepover, and that was hours ago. His laptop sits on the table, screen still open but dark from not being used. Eddie knows that if he turned it back on right now it’d be open on the photo album full of Christopher and Buck that he looks at more often than he cares to admit.
Eddie aches constantly these days. And it’s not just in his muscles—not the result of any of the injuries he has sustained—but instead in his bones. Instead in his marrow. He wakes up and the ache is there, as constant as the sun rising and the sound of Christopher’s crutches outside his door every morning without fail, and he spends his whole day trying to send it away only to lie down at the end of the night and realize all he’s done is make it worse.
He has a lifetime of experience in working things out on his own, and yet for the first time he’s learning what it means to be lonely.
Outside, the sky lights up with the next lightning strike, and for a moment the entire night is illuminated by it. It’s not as though their small backyard is anything particularly special to look at—there’s the planter along the fence that Hen helped him set up a few weeks after his shoulder brace came off so he could have some activity to do, and there’s the large swing-a-ring that Buck set up for Christopher shortly after they met for the first time, and there’s Christopher’s skateboard, neatly broken down until he wants to use it again and stored carefully in boxes that Buck and Christopher painted not long after the tsunami. It’s just a flash of lightning, and a roll of thunder, and both last under a second but it’s enough for that bittersweet feeling to slip under Eddie’s defenses and settle on his shoulders.
Because the thing is, when he looks at his backyard or his kitchen or his living room, it’s all—Buck. All he sees is Buck. Sees him in a lawn chair with Jee-Yun on his lap blowing bubbles into the sky. Sees him in his ridiculous pink dish gloves scrubbing Eddie’s crockpot because Eddie hates doing it. Sees him on the couch with Christopher playing video games, or by the fireplace helping Eddie put up Christmas decorations, or at the front door wearing a huge grin and a hoodie that Eddie’s pretty sure says Diaz on the tag.
Hell, everything down to the mug in Eddie’s hands proves his point. There’s a chip out of the ceramic at the lip of the mug, and Eddie wasn’t there when it happened—couldn’t have been, because it happened in Hershey, PA, just a few weeks after Buck’s thirteenth birthday. Because the mug was a gift from Maddie, painted by her soft hand in a slightly messy design but still one of Buck’s most treasured possessions. Because it’s Buck’s mug, in every sense, except it’s in Eddie’s kitchen and has been for—hell, years now, probably, and yeah, the mug belongs to Buck but it’s Eddie’s favorite. The one he uses more often than any other.
And that’s what Eddie means. There’s just truly so much of him here—Buck, in Eddie’s kitchen. And in everything. Taking up space and filling it with warmth even when he isn’t physically there, even if Eddie can’t reach out and touch him.
It’s been three weeks. Twenty-one days since the last time Buck was here, when he’d been leaning against the counter in the very spot where Eddie stands now and rolling his eyes at some stupid joke Eddie had made. But if Eddie’s being honest with himself, they’ve been apart for longer than that. Feels like it’s been months and months of waiting for Buck to come home. It’s just… he knows they’d been holding each other at a distance, have been ever since the shooting then Taylor and Ana then Maddie then Chimney then the prison then leaving the 118. Slowly splitting seam by seam until, three weeks ago, the last stitch gave way and Buck left without promising he’d be back.
Taylor’s talking about getting married, Buck had said. And Eddie had snorted because he didn’t think Buck was serious. Because just a few days before that conversation, on the same day that he and Buck had tentatively repaired the bridge Eddie burned when he impulsively quit firefighting, Buck told Eddie about the Christmas present fiasco and Bobby’s suggestion of a proposal and they had both laughed like it was the most unbelievable thing they could think of.
So, what, now you’re actually considering it, too? Eddie had snapped, and Buck had bristled and shot back, does it matter if I am?
It did, Eddie thinks mournfully to himself. It does. Because this is— this is Buck’s home, the place he should come back to every day and night without fail. The place he should store all his mugs whether they have sentimental value or they were bought on sale at Target. The place where he should hang his pictures on the wall alongside Eddie’s, where they should make spaces for the pictures they’ll take in the future, the place where the blanket that’s been deemed his doesn’t stay on the couch every night but instead finds it’s spot in their bed, the place where Eddie’s Netflix suggestions stay fucked with forever because of all the documentaries Buck watches. Buck’s house isn’t the loft, it isn’t the small drawer of his things in Taylor’s apartment, it isn’t her clothing alongside all of his in his closet, it’s not her shoes in his entryway—it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be Taylor, but.
Eddie can’t very well go around saying it should be him.
But that’s the crux of the problem. This isn’t Eddie’s house. It’s. It’s their home, but it’s been three weeks since the last time Buck crossed the threshold and even longer since the last time Buck really looked him in the eye. And it feels—it feels…
It feels the same way it did four days ago, when Abuela showed up at his door with armfuls of food and her old rosary wrapped delicately between her fingers. She had traced the beads with her wrinkled hands that never once wavered in faith and she had crossed Eddie once before placing the rosary in his palms and curling his fingers around it. She had kissed his forehead and absentmindedly asked him to pray and his heart sank because he didn't know how to tell her that he felt like he lost the right to pray years ago and still hasn’t earned it back.
Losing Buck’s trust feels a lot like that. The guilt. The knowledge that there’s no simple way to gain it again.
Eddie wasn’t—he didn’t consider himself particularly religious. Not even growing up. He may have spent Sundays growing up sitting in pews, stuck right between Adriana and Sophia to separate them since they couldn’t sit next to each other for too long before they’d start giggling and disrupting the priest, but that was back when church was just some place that Abuelita got him dressed up for every week. Back before he went and grew up and the whole thing got more complicated than that. The pews were just seats, the priest just a man, the confessional just a box, and a rosary just beads. He remembers getting older and watching his sisters, first as Adriana quit coming abruptly, then again as Sophia gradually gave up; he remembers resenting the fact that they were older than him, that it gave them the power to have a say when he didn’t. Church was unbearable at eleven, without his sisters there to entertain him, and when Abuela nudged his arm so he’d bow his head in prayer along with everyone else, he would ask God only half-jokingly if He could make time move just a little faster. Even if it was only for Eddie.
Somehow it worked because he swears all he did was blink and an entire lifetime passed him by. Eddie had the birthday he’d been waiting for, then another, then five or ten or, god, even fifteen, and now he spends his nights unable to sleep and counting cars by their headlights briefly flickering through his curtains as they drive by. Or, on nights like tonight, watching a storm roll overhead from his kitchen window.
It’s just like… he’s been speeding through it all, pumping brakes that didn’t work and waiting for the inevitable bone crush when something pulled him up short. He hurried through milestones, half out of the fear that it would be his only chance to pass through them at all and half out of certainty that he’d fuck it up if he was given more than a minute to breathe and experience it. As it was—Eddie was married by 18, a father by 21, and a veteran by 27, and just a few weeks after his 30th birthday he became a widower and watched as the life that had been speeding by him began to spin out of control.
Shannon’s death had just been the catalyst, the first in a chain of events that would slowly but surely chip away any sense of control Eddie thought he had. It was losing her, first, then nearly losing Buck not even a month later, and nearly losing Buck and Christopher just a few short months after that. It was being buried alive under a collapsed well, and it was a global pandemic, and getting shot in broad daylight when he’d least expected it. These alone, Eddie thinks, he could have lived with. He was living with it. Until his son looked at him with tears in his eyes, stuck somewhere between angry and terrified, and admitted that all he’d been thinking about was how close he was to losing his dad, too.
That had been it—the bone crush, the emergency brake that had him skidding to a stop, the crash of his reality at the bottom of his feet. The world was no longer spinning so fast he was afraid of missing it; no, Eddie realized, it had stopped spinning all together.
In truth, Eddie mostly wonders if it was ever in his cards to find the happy medium; the place somewhere between the haste in which his younger self couldn’t wait to grow up and the frozen suspension he’s living in now. He’s not sure he could have lived a life like that. One that just… happened. Not to him, and not by him, but… with him. If any such thing could make sense.
Eddie is, on his best days, still a decent man; the fundamental truth about him is that he just wants to do good. He’s not—he won’t bank on being good, because as much as he may try Eddie knows where he falls short. His standard for what classifies as a good person is placed solely into Evan Buckley, and Eddie won’t fool himself into thinking he’s even half the man that Buck is. But he can… Eddie can do good. He can put good into the world. He can raise his son to be a better man than him and he can hold the door open for strangers and he can carry groceries out to cars for anyone who needs it. He can find a job that keeps him safe and keeps his son fed and happy and, if he’s lucky, will still let him help people. And that can… that can be enough, he thinks. He can make it feel like it’s enough.
Outside, another strike of lightning strikes, and it’s followed close behind, not by the thunder that Eddie expects, but by a soft knock at his front door. He doesn’t have to check to know who’s waiting on the other side.
Eddie carefully puts his mug of still-unfinished tea at the bottom of the sink, tracing a finger along the chipped part for half a second before shaking himself and carrying his heart to the door. It’s no surprise to him to find Buck on the other side.
It’s been three weeks. But Buck looks up at him with red-rimmed eyes and it feels like no time has passed at all.
“It’s raining,” Eddie says, instead of what are you doing here, because he already knows the answer. “Come inside before you get pneumonia.”
“Did you know George Michael fell into a coma once because of pneumonia?” Buck murmurs, distracted, as he brushes past Eddie and shuffles inside. “He was right in the middle of a tour and everything.”
Eddie watches quietly as Buck kicks off his tennis shoes and lines them up alongside Eddie’s and Christopher’s on the shoe rack. “I didn’t know that,” Eddie admits.
“Yeah, it’s crazy, right?” Buck continues. He doesn’t quite look up and meet Eddie’s eye, just keeps puttering around like he’s trying to figure out if it’s still alright for him to make himself at home here. “He was in the ICU for like, three weeks. Oh, and I guess after he woke up and was recovering, he sent a bunch of the hospital staff in Vienna free tickets to his show to thank them for saving his life—”
“Buck,” Eddie says softly. Kindly. And Buck crumples in on himself like a house of cards. “Do you want to talk about it?”
It isn’t worth the wasted time to ask if something’s up—Eddie knows something is up. Knows from the way Buck showed up at his door tonight even though he’s been icing Eddie out for weeks. Knows from the way Buck’s eyes are red from crying and from the way Buck came inside already trying to distract Eddie from that fact. And even if those didn’t give it away, he would know just because he knows Buck, inside and out, in every variation.
“Yeah,” Buck concedes, so Eddie leads them both to the kitchen table.
He turns on the light over the sink, illuminating the kitchen just well enough for them to see one another. Buck’s face is more visible any time there’s another crack of lightning than it is with just the kitchen light. More out of habit than anything else, Eddie takes the magnet fidget toy he’d bought just for nights like these off the fridge and hands it to Buck. He takes it with a surprised, grateful smile.
“Did I wake you up?”
“No,” Eddie promises quietly. “I was up. Couldn’t sleep.”
Buck hums. “Thinking about anything important?”
You, Eddie thinks, and his eyes squeeze shut involuntarily at the admission. He wonders if the look on his face at all gives him away. “Always am,” he says out loud, instead. “Buck.”
“Sorry for showing up unannounced,” Buck blurts out. He winces when his finger gets caught between two of the magnets he’d been fidgeting with. “I meant to call when I first got in the car but then I just. Started driving.”
“It’s okay,” Eddie says, helpless. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s told Buck that they don’t need a head’s up, that he’s welcome any time, but he knows well enough that it wouldn’t help to remind Buck of that now.
Buck nods, mostly distracted by something outside Eddie’s kitchen window. And Eddie’s skin feels tight, suddenly, just standing there and staring at Buck—feels a little too much like his heart is on his sleeve or in his mouth—so he picks his tea back up from the sink and puts in the microwave just so his hands have something to do besides reach uselessly for Buck to try and soothe his ache. Buck turns and watches him quietly from his spot at the table.
“I can’t believe you’re microwaving tea,” Buck says, voice soft, and there’s a smile on his face that feels almost miraculous when Eddie catches sight of it.
It’s easy, then, to rise to the bait. Instinct, habit, something in between—this is their familiar ground, toeing the line between teasing and sincerity. So Eddie’s responding before he’s even truly conscious of it, defensively insisting, “I’m just reheating it, that’s different!”
“It is so not different,” Buck laughs, and Eddie throws a pen off the kitchen counter at his head. “Such a drama queen.”
“Next time it’ll be an apple,” Eddie warns, grinning, even though they both know he doesn’t mean it. He watches almost in slow motion as Buck’s smile begins to dim, once again caught looking for something far outside of this house. “Hey. You want something to drink, too?”
The microwave chimes, startling them both. The mug is warm, almost too warm to keep his hand on even just for the time it takes to pull it out of the microwave, and for some incomprehensible reason Eddie feels like it’s symbolic of something. He just doesn’t know of what.
“Taylor brought up marriage,” Buck says out of nowhere.
Eddie tries valiantly not to flinch. “I remember.”
“I know, just,” Buck starts before his own frustration cuts him off and he shakes his head to begin again. “Just. Listen, please?”
There’s no simple way to say that Eddie will spend the rest of his life tripping over his own feet to hear every word Evan Buckley ever has to say. No way to say it that disguises the enormity of how he feels. So all he does is nod and gesture for Buck to continue.
Buck’s shoulders slump a bit in relief. “Okay,” he mumbles. “So. I guess one of her friends said something, and it got her thinking. She brought it up. Just like, ‘Buck, do you think about us getting married?’. It was just… out of the blue, you know? I didn’t know what to say, all I could say was something along the lines of I didn’t think it was something she thought about. And she was like, ‘it’s not, not really, but I do see my future with you’ and it just opened this. Huge discussion that I don’t think I was really even ready to have.”
“Buck,” Eddie says. Because it’s all he can say; not to interrupt him, or to speak his mind or anything, but just to reassure Buck that he’s still listening.
“But that’s what you do, you know?” Buck continues, and when he glances up at Eddie there’s a fire in his eyes that could keep this whole house warm. “That’s what you do when you’ve been in a relationship with someone you love for nine months. So we’ve been talking about it and I’ve—Eddie, I mean, I’ve been pretending it’s not making me feel like I’m drowning but it is, it’s been suffocating me and I couldn’t figure out why. And then, today, right? She brought it up again, something about whether or not I’d relocate if she got a job in Chicago or New York or wherever—” and Eddie’s heart, stupid and traitorous, seizes up for a moment in his chest, “—and I just… I told her no.”
Eddie lets go of the breath he’d been holding.
And Buck just—shakes his head again, laughing in almost a suspended disbelief. “Well. Actually, what I said was, ‘no, what if we had kids, I wouldn’t want to move them away from their cousins’. And then she said, ‘Buck, I don’t want kids’. So.”
It’s not a surprise to Eddie. And based off of the look on his face, it’s not a surprise to Buck, either.
“Having a family is really important to you,” Eddie says carefully. Buck laughs, half disbelieving and half hysteric. “You love kids.”
“Yeah,” Buck agrees. Eddie wishes he could tell which way the story would end, but Buck’s impossible to read right now. “I know that. And, uh. I think she does too. Because she told me, you know, she’s not sure that it’s something she’ll ever change her mind on, but…”
“But?” Eddie prompts.
Buck shrugs. He’s back, Eddie notices, to not looking Eddie directly in the eye. “She, uh, she asked me if. Being Christopher’s other dad could be enough. She said she knows how important Christopher is to me and that she thinks she’d be better as a stepmom than as anyone’s mother.”
A lot of things happen to Eddie at once—his mouth fills with ash when he thinks about Taylor staying long-term in his son’s life; anger wells up hot and thick in his throat in defense of Buck, knowing full well that he deserves better; his heart skips a beat or two at hearing Buck call himself Christopher’s dad, even if they weren’t originally words out of his own mouth, and then Eddie’s heart settles and goes back to aching; and, most pressingly, something ice cold spreads down his spine as he considers the idea of Buck actually making that compromise.
“I know I’m not—” Buck starts to say, and this time Eddie can’t stop himself from reaching for Buck now, he stumbles over his feet in his haste to close the short distance between them and drops his hand, heavy and sure, onto Buck’s shoulder.
“You are,” Eddie says quickly. Firmly. “This will be the only thing I interrupt you for tonight, I swear, but you are. Christopher’s other dad, I mean. Legally, yeah, in the worst case scenario, but even still. Even now.”
Buck’s jaw tightens, and his eyes are shiny with tears barely visible in the lowlight of the kitchen, and Eddie resists the urge to move his hands to Buck’s jawline to cradle his face and reassure him over and over and over again. Outside, as though the storm can sense the quiet that’s fallen between them inside the house, a roll of thunder rumbles more faintly this time. Slowly but surely the storm over their heads is finally passing them by.
“Eddie,” Buck sighs.
“I meant it when I told you no one else will ever fight for Christopher like you do,” Eddie whispers, half desperate with it. He needs Buck to understand this, above all else. If this is all he can have, if this is what he gets, then he wants Buck to at least understand this. “Because you fight for him the way I do. Like a father. Buck.”
“You know, I, um,” Buck starts, “I never told her about the will. I don’t even really know why. But I didn’t tell her, so I was sitting there after she said that and I kept thinking to myself over and over again, if she doesn’t know about the will then why would she call me Christopher’s dad?”
Eddie opens his mouth but no sound comes out.
“And then, you know, it dawned on me,” Buck adds on, half giddy and half disbelieving. “I have all of Christopher’s favorite cereals and snacks in my pantry for whenever he comes over. He keeps some books here, a couple movies, a few Lego sets. I have a spare set of bedsheets that came from your house that I just keep at the loft now, all the time, for any time he spends the night because he prefers having the flannel ones over the sheets I bring out for guests. We have a shared Google calendar, Eddie, and I check his schedule every single day to see if something changed or if he needs me to pick him up from something. There’s a spare account on my Netflix that’s set up just for him, even with the parent controls, because I won’t let him watch rated R movies yet since it’s something you and I haven’t talked about. And the other day, the older couple down the hall told me I’m doing a great job raising Chris because he offered to hold the door open for them so they wouldn’t have to wait for the elevator.
“I’m not Christopher’s dad, I know I’m not the reason he was brought into this world, and I know he loves you and Shannon so much he’s afraid to talk about it sometimes, but. He is my kid, Eddie. I’m not—I’m not trying to take away from anything you do for him, I swear, but at the very least I can say on my part that I feel like he’s my kid. So it’s not really a stretch for Taylor to think the same thing, too.” Buck shrugs again, even with Eddie’s hand still on his shoulder, and he finally looks Eddie in the eye.
Eddie, on his part, feels like his slowed-to-a-standstill world has picked up spinning just as fast as it was before, and he doesn’t have his legs underneath him well enough to keep himself upright. He wonders if Buck knows that nine months ago Eddie put his heart in Buck’s hands and that today he’s still holding it and talking about it like it’s something precious.
It dawns on him then, two or three seconds too late, that they’re still talking about Taylor. Still talking about her wanting a place in Buck’s future and whether or not Buck wants her there, too. So Eddie swallows around the lump in his throat and ignores the way his voice breaks a bit as he asks, “Would it be enough?”
For a second, Buck looks like he’s been startled back into the present, too. “What?”
“Being Christopher’s dad,” Eddie croaks out. He has to close his eyes to forget about the way he wants to pull Buck’s face closer to his. “Taylor asked if that would be enough. Would it?”
Buck’s moment of pause weighs heavy between them. “It would,” Buck admits.
Eddie’s knees begin to buckle underneath him.
“But I don’t want it with her.”
“What?”
Buck’s hands go to either side of Eddie’s hips, steadying him before he can actually fall. Like this, Eddie can step closer until he’s practically standing between Buck’s legs—like this, it makes sense for him to move his hands to Buck’s jaw and tilt his face up gently. Buck’s eyes are still red-rimmed but they are shining.
“I broke up with Taylor,” Buck admits, and Eddie could cry. “If being Christopher’s dad is all I ever get to be, then yes, it’s more than enough. But I don’t want to let that be my only chance.”
“It’s not,” Eddie blurts out, stupid with it. Buck just grins at him, and Eddie feels half-drunk on the realization of what Buck actually came over here to do. “You’re a great dad, Evan, you deserve more kids, you should be with someone who wants to give you a hundred kids, she’s not your only chance. She doesn’t have to be.”
Buck laughs, and the warmth of it hits Eddie’s wrist. “Well, if you’re so sure—”
“I love you,” Eddie interjects. “I’m sorry, I lied when I said I wouldn’t interrupt you again, no one is surprised, but baby, baby. I would give you another kid. I’d give you a whole fucking baseball team if that’s what you want, I’ll give you a bigger house so we have room for them and I’ll give you a kitchen with that oven you’ve been dreaming of and I’ll build you a garden in the backyard, I’ll drink the coffee from your stupid Hildy machine and I’ll go to farmer’s markets with you, I’ll give you a hundred chances, I swear, I love you.”
“Where are we gonna find the money to take care of a hundred kids?” Buck asks him, voice teasing and beautiful, and Eddie can’t take it anymore.
The first time he kisses Buck it tastes like forgiveness. It feels like forever.
“I’m in love with you,” Eddie adds, when Buck pulls away just far enough to laugh again. His hands are on Eddie’s elbows now, holding them both steady, and he goes willingly when Eddie pulls him in for another kiss.
“Such a drama queen,” Buck sighs, trying to sound put out, but Eddie’s wiping the tears from under his eyes that tell a different story. “You gonna give me a second to breathe so I can tell you I’m in love with you, too?”
Eddie rolls his eyes, like hearing the words out of Buck’s mouth aren’t the second greatest sound he’s ever heard, and just because he can’t resist he says, “You’d fucking better, I just offered you a house and a hundred kids.”
“We can start with the one we already have,” Buck concedes, and Eddie’s about to ask him if he means the house or the kid before it hits him that Buck means both. Because while he’d been sitting here watching the storm and trying to convince himself that what he had of Buck was enough, Buck had been twenty minutes down the road realizing that what he had didn’t have to be enough. That somehow, despite the fact it’s been three weeks since they saw each other and even longer since they had a real conversation, Buck had still figured out that his home is here and that, if he wanted it, Eddie would give him every part of himself.
“Move in,” Eddie insists, impulsive but still certain. Buck’s hands move to his chest, fisting in Eddie’s t-shirt. “It’s yours anyway, Jesus, Buck, there’s so much of you here already. Move in. Belong to us.”
Buck’s still smiling at him, ear to ear and beautiful with it. “Idiot. I already do.”
The storm outside is gone; Buck is no longer illuminated by flashes of lightning but Eddie holds him close enough that it doesn’t matter. The world is turning again, and there’s still so many uncertainties that Eddie needs to figure out before his feet are back on solid ground. But Buck’s arms are around him and keeping him upright, and when Buck kisses him it brings him home.
And it’s more than enough.