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Eddie can’t remember why Buck is in his bed when he first wakes up, but to be fair, his sleep-muddled brain can’t really process anything beyond Buck’s naked back and the light peeking through the curtains, bathing him in a soft early morning glow.
His hair is fluffed up, too, flopping out on the pillow where Buck had buried his head. He’s breathing softly, and the rise and fall of his body are slow and mellow.
Eddie props himself up so he can get a better look at Buck's face, and it’s slack with sleep, his skin is pale, other than the somehow brighter birthmark and the tiny sliver of skin brightened by the early morning light.
He glances around the room, and his eyes land on Buck’s black duffle bag in the corner, which seems fuller than usual, and- oh yeah, Buck’s apartment flooded. Buck had shown up at Eddie’s house at around 12:30 with heavy dark circles under his eyes and a bag thrown over his shoulder.
Eddie hadn’t really thought twice about telling Buck to just sleep in his bed because he never really thinks about it anymore.
Buck is getting older, and as the number of injuries he’s left with rises, the number of aches he deals with daily also rises, and that’s certainly not going to be helped by Eddie’s too-small couch, especially for a 6’2” man that likes to either curl up into an actual ball or stretch himself completely out. And right now, Buck looks more relaxed than Eddie has ever seen him on the couch, so really, it’s not even a question anymore.
He glances at the alarm clock he’s praying he turned off, and it blinks ‘7:10’ at him in bright red numbers. So…It’s 7:10 on a Saturday, and right now, Eddie thinks you would have to pay him to get out of bed. He has absolutely nowhere to be until he has to pick up Chris from Devon’s house at 3, so he’s just going to lay here and stare at Buck in a totally non-creepy way for as long as life lets him, which might just be until Buck decides to wake up.
He lets himself plop back into the sheets, settling closer to Buck than before. He reaches out and almost touches Buck, but maybe for the sake of Buck’s sleep schedule, he doesn’t. Instead, he chooses to trail his finger through the air, tracing the outlines of the scars that scattered Buck’s freckled and otherwise smooth skin.
There’s a jagged raised one, running diagonally from the bottom of his left shoulder blade to a little before his spine. It’s redder than most of the others, newer, and Eddie remembers it so vividly he can still feel the blood under his fingers.
He tries to focus on the rise and fall of Buck’s figure, the breathing patterns he had become so familiar with.
The scars mean that Buck is real, he’s alive, that he’s healing.
He’s got a thin, almost white line right next to his spine that he knows for a fact, is from a knife. He would know because he asked Buck himself when Buck was recovering from something else that involved his back looking like a painting consisting of various shades of blues, purples, and green bruises.
Buck gets this look on his face whenever someone mentions something about a sharp object meeting skin in a way that isn’t strictly medical. One time Eddie walked into the kitchen to find Buck holding himself over the sink, looking like he was about two seconds away from puking and staring at a kitchen knife he was supposed to be washing.
Buck shifts, turning his body so he can bury his face further into the pillow, and it gets Eddie to smile.
He wants to count the freckles across the tops of Buck’s sun-kissed shoulders, but he has to be honest. There are too many. So he settles for finally reaching out all the way, pressing his fingertips to Buck’s skin as gently as he can.
And he lays there, listening to the whooshing of the fan and focusing on the heat he can feel on Buck’s skin as he traces it. He outlines scars, and freckles, connecting one to another. He spells words too. He counts the notches in Buck’s spine, then traces the word ‘Beautiful’ just below the T-8 vertebrae.
Then Buck’s shoulders pull up for a second, his head lifts off the pillow, and Eddie almost apologizes, but Buck is already settling back into the sheets before he can. He leaves his fingers to press against Buck’s skin, waiting for a second to see if Buck is awake.
Buck starts rolling over, and Eddie doesn’t feel like moving his hand, so it stays pressed between the bed and Buck’s back.
Buck stares at the ceiling and squints when his eyes catch the sunlight, and now Eddie feels the need to apologize.
“Sorry,” he murmurs and searches in his head for an explanation that doesn’t sound stupid. “I just want to reassure myself, I guess,” is what he finally lands on, not really explaining what he was reassuring himself of.
Buck yawns, “s’okay,” he rolls over again so he can press his face into the crook of Eddie’s neck, probably so he can hide from the sunlight. He seems to understand Eddie’s cryptic words and mumbles, “M’right here.”
Eddie brings his now exposed hand and arm up to wrap around Buck’s back, continuing his mindless tracing, and at some point, he feels Buck’s finger drag along the side of his upper arm, spelling words that take Eddie a second to figure out.
‘I love you’ is branded into his skin, all the way down to his wrist.
Eddie moves his arm to hold onto Buck however he can, and Buck hums against Eddie’s neck, sending vibrations to the very core of his being. “Go back to sleep,” he whispers into Buck’s hair. He presses his lips to the crown of Buck’s head with more intention than before and breathes out, “I love you,” to a possibly -hopefully- sleeping Buck.
But he’ll tell Buck again later when they’re both awake, and then he’ll tell him the next morning, and the morning after that, and the one after that, and he’ll love Buck with every ounce of himself until the world stops spinning, and the night goes quiet, and even then, he thinks they’ll still have each other.