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Eddie has never been a morning person. He loathed having to wake up early for school when he was younger. He didn’t mind that much when it was for his baseball practices.
When he joined the army he was forced to become a morning person. And he hated every single second of the process of waking up early, almost on autopilot, when he finally came back to El Paso.
But he became a dad, and it’s that thing he heard once in passing about how you never sleep the same way ever again after having children. And he wouldn’t change that for the world.
If Chris wanted to be at the park at the asscrack of dawn then Eddie would take him there in 0.2 seconds flat, regardless if he had gotten enough sleep or not.
Eddie could handle sleeping only three hours and still get up at 6:30 am to start the day.
Sleeping in is a concept Eddie hasn’t been a participant of since… ever, actually. He doesn’t remember the last time he did it. He probably never has.
In contrast…
Buck loves mornings. He enjoyed going out for a run before the rest of the world was awake. Loved getting breakfast ready before either Eddie or Chris were up. He would read, clean the house, listen to a podcast- he would make the most out of every single second of his mornings.
Eddie could not wrap his head around how Buck had immense amounts of energy straight out of bed without a single drop of caffeine in his system.
Buck will bolt up the stairs to the loft at the station and give out enthusiastic ‘good mornings’ whilst everyone else is dead on their feet, holding a cup of coffee in their hands.
Which is why this right now is something of a miracle. At least for Eddie.
They slept in. They’re actually able to say ‘it’s 12 so we’d technically be having brunch right now’. They are still in bed, sheets tangled around them (Buck hogs all the blankets, and Eddie is a koala in his sleep, so they are still, somehow, covered in the morning) and it’s all just so…
Buck is snoring. Not the loud boisterous snores he produces when he’s absolutely exhausted and passed out on the bed. No, he’s doing little puffs of air that remind him of Pegasus in Hercules. Which is just- it’s so incredibly Buck that Eddie feels like his heart might burst just from listening to it.
Eddie, despite his best attempts to fall back asleep, has been awake for the past ten minutes.
He’s just soaking this all in. The fact that this moment right now- he gets to have this. He’s so happy, and it feels like a solar explosion might happen inside himself from it.
He just wants to freeze this moment and store it in a bottle. Like one of those miniature ships people build inside glass bottles. And he wants to safely store it away to one of the shelves in his heart labeled ‘Buck’.
And then- the snoring stops, there is a slight shift on the bed, and Eddie is still taken aback when Buck opens his eyes. Even if they’ve been waking up beside each other for a while now, it never gets old. Because those sapphire eyes are looking at him with such awe and love and-
Eddie always has to bite his cheek a bit because he might just cry at the sight if he doesn’t.
But the true thing that’s always able to disarm him is that smile. And Buck has many smiles; the one he uses to convince Bobby to make his mushroom risotto, the one he has when Chris asks him for help on one of his projects, the one he uses to make Jee laugh. But this one- this one is his ‘Eddie smile’.
He smiles at him like he also can’t believe Eddie is here with him. He smiles at him like Eddie is worth more than all the riches in the world combined. He smiles at him with such open adoration that Eddie sometimes feels like he needs to look away. But he can’t.
Because that smile has been there for him, through thick and thin, and he’s afraid that if he doesn’t look at it now, he might miss out on a second of Buck’s unbridled joy.
“Hey.”
And Eddie feels that all encompassing feeling that he’s learned to show. The one he spent so long pushing back, that went unacknowledged for years, but that he no longer wants to hide.
“Hi, baby.”
Buck yawns, and Eddie is slightly afraid that his jaw might pop if he opens it any wider, which also reminds him-
He tries to push that thought back because they simply do not have time to use Buck’s skill to open his mouth so wide that he’s able to fit-
“What time is it?”
Eddie swallows back the sudden urge to jump on Buck’s lap and tries to sound the opposite of turned on before he replies.
“12:15, I think.”
Buck lets out a brief hum of acknowledgement before he comes closer to Eddie and plasters himself next to him. Half on top and with his face hurried in Eddie’s neck.
“Can we stay here a little longer?”
And Eddie would give Buck anything if it meant that they could spend the rest of their lives like this.
“Yeah, but we do need to get up at some point. We still need to go pick up Chris later.”
Buck just lifts his head up, eyes half closed, and blindly lands a kiss on Eddie’s nose.
“Ok, love you.”
Eddie just- not to sound sappy, but he just melts at that and can’t help the goofiest, most lovesick smile from appearing on his face before he says:
“I love you too.”
And then he tries to fall back asleep, which doesn’t take him very long this time round. Because the pressure he feels on his chest, both of the overwhelming love he feels for his best friend, his partner in every sense of the word, and of the person that the weight comes from, that keeps him grounded, that reminds him that this is real- it helps him sleep peacefully.
Because this is no longer just a dream for Eddie. It doesn’t only happen when he closes his eyes. It’s actually something he gets to touch and feel and breathe while he’s wide awake.
And his last thought before he completely falls back into the best sleep he’s ever gotten in his life, is that he wants to become a morning person if it means he gets to have this every morning for the rest of his life.