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Frank called it hypervigilance, but whatever it is there’s a noise in the house and Eddie is awake.
His hand is reaching for the baseball bat before his eyes are even all the way open; muscles moving purely on instinct, feet swinging over the bed. It hasn’t been like this since the army, since two-minute turnarounds between asleep and awake and on a chopper became routine, and Frank had warned him, gently, carefully, that this might happen: that the dredging up of old memories, new hot painful pokers in wounds that had apparently never healed over, might set him on edge, but he’s not even really presently aware of it until he’s two steps into his living room with the baseball bat raised over his head.
And then:
“Jesus, Eddie, it’s just me!”
He swings, anyway, because his mind is still on hyper speed, because he’s awake and in his dark blue living room but thirty seconds ago he had been drenched in sweat and in bed and dreaming, strangely enough, of Buck, in his turnouts, blood blooming around his head like a flower as he screams beneath a firetruck, and then he hears a noise in his house and—
There’s a blur. And then something shatters.
It’s—enough, to have him blinking out of his reverie, the second between the give of the bat against something, the sound of broken glass against the floorboards, and then he’s no longer on the street, or in the helicopter, or the ambulance, and he’s just back in his living room, his dark blue living room, and—
And Buck. Buck is here.
Buck, hands raised above his head. Buck, eyes wide. Buck, the same colour as the dusky floorboards.
Buck. Is here. And Eddie nearly hit him with a baseball bat.
“Oh fuck,” Eddie breathes, and the bat slips from his grasp. “Buck, I—”
He doesn’t really know how to finish the sentence, because he nearly hit him with a fucking baseball bat, actually did shatter a vase, and he’s not sure where one goes from that. The claws of the nightmare are still in his back, still hooked around his shoulder blades. He imagines, sometimes, that they’ll embed deep enough, sprout black ugly traitorous wings that will take him away.
His temples ring. He is aware of his breathing: a rattling, terrified thing in his ribcage. There is a moment where they both just stare at each other.
“Should I,” Buck says, finally, “have knocked?”
And Eddie is just—so fucking tired, of all a sudden. He’s tired of not being able to sleep, and he’s tired of dreaming when he does, and he’s tired of being awake and of his job and being a useless father and an even worse friend. “You have a key,” he says; is all he says, because he doesn’t know to say, I gave it to you for a reason.
“I do,” Buck says. “I just didn’t know it came with the caveat of being attacked when I used it.”
He’s smiling, a small, awkward, careful thing. Eddie wonders when his smiles stopped being careless around him; when he had to start measuring them like this. Then his fingers adjust around the baseball bat and he thinks, faintly, a little hysterically, right.
“I’m,” he says, and starts to say sorry, but it locks in his jaw; tightens his lips shut, strangles somewhere in his throat, warps into something like a sob. “Um.”
Buck’s face creases. “Eddie—”
“You should, um,” Eddie says, and he lets go of the baseball bat. “You should go.”
“No,” Buck says, immediately, and he steps forward, and glass crunches, and Eddie thinks that could have been bone. That could have been Buck. “No, Eddie—”
“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, and horribly feels his eyes begin to burn. “I’m—Evan, I’m so sorry, I didn’t even see you—”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Buck says, and the baseball bat hits the ground with a hollow thud; rolls a little, before coming to stop against the leg of the couch, and Eddie watches it, can’t stop watching it, the way the fragments of glass around it glitter white-black-white in the flickering streetlamp outside. “Hey. Eddie.”
“I need to,” Eddie says, “I need to clean it—”
He’s dropping before he can think that it’s broken glass on the floor; feels it through his sweatpants, and then the thickened skin of his palms. “I just need to,” he finds himself saying, trying to scoop it up into his hands, the remnants of this ugly vase that could have been Buck’s head on the floor, and there’s dirt on the floor, too, half a mangled flower, its stem bruised black, head ripped off, “I just need to—”
“Eddie—”
“You should go—”
“Eddie.”
And then there are hands at his shoulders; pushing him back. Eddie doesn’t fight it; or maybe it’s just the black wings pulling him back too. So he lets himself be pushed, palms twinkling with glass, and comes face to face with Buck’s wide blue eyes, dark as the night, depthless as the well, brows furrowed in concern.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Buck smiles at him so, so sadly. “It’s okay. Can I clean for you?”
Eddie nods.
He sits back on the couch when Buck gently pushes him to, keeps his palms upturned on his knees as he quietly watches Buck shed his jacket, drape it over the armchair, and then disappear into the kitchen for the dustpan and brush. He’s back within seconds, kneeling down by where Eddie is sat, and carefully sweeping up all the broken glass into the pan, emptying it into a plastic bag. He hasn’t even taken off his shoes.
Eddie says, again, quieter, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Buck also says again, and Eddie doesn’t quite believe it, but he believes it more than the last time. He ties the bag off, and then stands. “I’m going to put this in the trash.”
“Glass—”
“In the red bin. I know.”
He goes. Eddie wonders if it was really the vase that he broke and not his own ribs. He feels like maybe he’s leaking out from the chest, blood and guts and viscera.
Buck returns, this time with two mugs. He hands one to Eddie, and the ceramic is warm, steaming: tea. “Maddie used to make me tea whenever I was sad,” Buck said to him once, lips quirked in that wry way they did whenever he’d divulge something that wasn’t wholly positive, like he was trying to assure Eddie he knew he was being a buzz-kill. Like there would be any world Eddie wouldn’t want to know every single piece of him. He doesn’t know what to think of it, now: just stares down at it for a moment, unseeing. The sides of his vision flicker.
He wonders if he ever woke up. Maybe this is still part of the nightmare.
“You drink it, you know,” Buck says, and Eddie glances up to see him watching him carefully. His lips quirk again. “You were just watching it like it would bite.”
“It’s hot,” Eddie says.
“I ran some cold water in.”
Eddie sips. He never drinks tea: black coffee man, through and through. But the tea is warm, pleasantly hums all the way down his oesophagus; tastes faintly of something spiced, something perfumed. The creatures around the edge of his vision retreat a little.
“Thank you,” he says. His voice feels rough.
Buck nods. “Are your hands…”
Eddie opens the one that is not cradling the mug. His palms glitter.
“Eddie,” Buck says. Is all he says.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Eddie says, quietly.
Buck looks like he wants to reach over and brush it off himself, but he stays put. Half of Eddie feels relieved; the other half twists.
He doesn’t know if he can trust himself to touch Buck. Not just yet.
“Are we gonna talk about why you’re sleeping with a bat?” Buck says.
“You didn’t tell me you were stopping by,” Eddie says, instead of answering.
Buck shrugs. He looks down into his own mug. “I,” he says, and then nothing else, for a short while. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see me, if I asked ahead.”
“So you came anyway?”
“I was just gonna say hi to Christopher.”
Eddie watches him. “It’s two in the morning.”
“I didn’t realise it was so late when I left.”
But he came regardless. Eddie looks down at his tea.
“I’m sorry,” Buck says.
“Don’t be,” Eddie says.
Rain or shine, he’d said to him once. You can reach out any time. And it’s not just anytime, anymore, because it hasn’t really been anytime since he left the 118 and joined dispatch – and if he’s being truthful with himself, it hasn’t really been anytime since he stood across from Buck at an intersection in downtown Los Angeles with a bullet hole in his shoulder – but Buck came anyway, let himself in with a key, and now Eddie’s left fleshy and exposed to him, his ugly vulnerable underbelly on display to be prodded at.
You call this healing? his voice says in Eddie’s head: a voice that isn’t really Buck’s, just wearing a cruel imitation of his face. This mess of scar tissue and skin that won’t come back together?
Because he’d—told Buck, about Frank. Not in detail, and not of his own volition, not really. Just can you pick up Christopher from school today? Buck responding, late shift? Five minutes, before Eddie bit his tongue and sent back, I have therapy.
Buck hadn’t responded for twenty minutes, and then all he sent back was, I’ll leave dinner for you.
So Buck—knows, about Frank. But Eddie’s been careful to hide the bulk of it, because therapy is hard fucking work, and he emerges from each session feeling like a skinned animal, spines and claws all plucked off, just fleshy skin and a trembling skeleton slowly filling back in after years of being hollow, and Buck—
Buck doesn’t need to know, about the bad moments of it. Because they haven’t talked properly for months, and Eddie isn’t brave enough to say here. These are the broken parts I’m trying to fix. Some of them are you. Not yet.
But then he showed up out of the blue and Eddie swung a baseball bat at his head.
“Don’t be,” Eddie says, again, because Buck showed up, and Eddie swung a bat at his head, and instead of running, or cowering, Buck swept up the glass, and made him tea, and is now sat across from him with dark, gentle eyes.
These are the broken parts I’m trying to fix. Some of them are you, and the ones that aren’t somehow still lead back to that intersection.
“Okay,” Buck says, softly.
He isn’t looking at the bat, but Eddie is, and suddenly it’s all he can look at. He leans forward and picks it up.
“Did you play?” Buck says.
“A little.”
“What position?”
“Pitcher.”
“Were you any good?”
Eddie shrugs. Truthfully, he wasn’t bad: had offers from a few schools across the country to play for them. But then Shannon got pregnant, and his parents got distant, and it was all he could do to plug a ring on her finger before he was enrolling into the army.
It’s one of those dreams he hangs onto loosely, like a balloon. Whenever he’s playing make-belief in his head, he occasionally entertains what would have happened if he played in college: if he ever would have made the professional leagues, followed it to a career, or if he would have always found a way to firefighting.
“Why are you sleeping with a baseball bat, Eddie?” Buck says, softly.
“Because I’m—” Eddie swallows, and digs the heel of his palm into his eye. Imagines that the stars on the back of his eyelid are the glass shards. “I don’t know.”
“Because you’re…?”
Eddie rotates the baseball bat in his hands. Once. Twice.
“Afraid?” Buck says.
“I thought you were an intruder,” Eddie says.
Buck watches him for a long moment. “Were you. Were you asleep?”
“Yes,” Eddie says, because technically he was, only these days he gets more rest with his eyes open, because every time he wakes up sweating through his sheets and his heart pounding so hard through his chest he has to check for rib cracks every morning.
“…Nightmares?”
And Eddie, horribly, feels his eyes begin to burn. “It’s late, Buck,” he says, roughly, but Buck won’t let him go.
“Was it Christopher?”
“It was you,” Eddie says.
Buck’s mouth closes.
“Yeah, so,” Eddie says, and turns the baseball bat again. Tells himself he won’t fucking cry. “Do with that what you will.”
“Eddie,” Buck says.
Eddie can’t look at him. He feels like he might break apart if he does.
There is the squeak of springs; the couch rocks, a little. And then Buck is walking away, and Eddie can’t look up, but he squeezes his eyes shut, rests his forehead on the very end of the baseball bat, feels the customary ache in his jaw from biting back tears, and wonders if there will ever be a day he wakes up and doesn’t grieve everything in his life. Wonders if there will ever be a day he wakes up, recites the mantra he and Frank wrote together (my name is Eddie Diaz, I am a good father, I am a good partner, I am deserving of good things) and actually believes it beyond phatic calcium words.
And then the couch squeaks again, and he looks up to see Buck sitting down, gently, across from him. His jaw aches even more now, like someone is screwing the bolts of it tighter and tighter, teeth braced against each other and cracking to keep his treacherous tongue at bay, but he doesn’t say anything: just watches, quietly, as Buck reaches for him, carefully unprises one of his hands from around the baseball bat. Unfurls it; reveals his sparkling, bloody palm.
And carefully wipes it down with a damp cloth.
Eddie can only watch in silence as Buck carefully cleans out his cuts; wipes away the blood and glass, so gently Eddie barely feels it, his fingers gentle around his wrist. They are folded, just so, that their pulse points are aligned: thumb against the green of his wrist, where his skin is thinnest, most delicate. Holding him like he is something precious. Like he—
Like he is something good. Something worthy of being held.
Tears start falling at some point halfway through the first hand. Buck works gently at it until it no longer sparkles and the blood has been scooped out of his heartline, just stings with antiseptic, and then reaches for the other. Eddie lets him; lets the first hand rest on his knee, fingers unfurled like a budding flower. Fat tears roll down his cheeks, drip from his chin, catch in his eyelashes and the corners of his lips. His mouth is full of perfume and sea salt and words he isn’t quite sure how to say.
It's only maybe a minute later that Buck finishes cleaning his other hand, but he doesn’t let it go, just cradles it between both of his own for a while – before he gently lifts it, and presses the gentlest of kisses to the centre of his palm, so gentle Eddie only feels the whisper of his lips on his skin. Then he kisses the heel of his palm, the curve of his thumb – and then right over his pulse, on his wrist.
A half-stifled sob lodges in Eddie’s throat.
Buck looks up at him, and their gazes meet. If he’s surprised by the tears, he doesn’t say anything – just turns Eddie’s hand, and then holds the ridge of his knuckles against his cheek. “You,” he says, softly, but with enough conviction to turn Eddie’s knees to water: “are so fucking important to me, Eddie Diaz.”
And Eddie cries.
He doesn’t know the last time he cried like this. Maybe Shannon: maybe never. But Buck is still cradling his hands like they are something to be held, like they are something to be treated softly, like Eddie and his vulnerable underbelly is valuable, and good, and he is here, at two in the morning, because Eddie said anytime and Buck believed him, and the baseball bat is still between Eddie’s knees, and he just cries, and cries, until the neck of his T-shirt is wet, until his chest is heaving, until the ball of tension he feels as though he’s been carrying in his chest for the past thirty-four years has finally, finally, unravelled, just a little.
He pulls his hands to cover his face, but Buck doesn’t let him go: instead comes right up to him, until their shaking foreheads are together, until Eddie’s broken brain is up against Buck’s birthmark, and their wet fingers are intertwined, and then Buck’s arms are coming around him, and Eddie—Eddie clings back, hard.
“I’m sorry,” he manages.
“It’s okay,” Buck says fiercely, and Eddie still doesn’t really believe him, but he believes him more than the last time, and for the first time he thinks maybe if he keeps asking, and if Buck keeps saying it over and over again, he might start to believe it too. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”
But this – this, Eddie can believe. Eddie does believe. Because before they were ever friends, ever family, ever important—they had each other. Indubitably and always.
Buck’s got him.