Chapter Text
Buck can’t move.
All he can do is stand right where Tommy left him, leaning slightly against the kitchen island, one hand desperately clutching the countertop behind him.
Buck can’t move his body, but his mind is racing, synapses firing at a rate he’s pretty sure has to be unhealthy.
What the shit just happened?
He feels fourteen again, blushing behind the bleachers as he cups April Owens’ face with shaking hands. His stomach is swirling like it did back then, in that way he knows is probably excitement but leaves him feeling sick anyway. But there’s something else that wasn’t there on that fall day nearly twenty years ago. Something deep, deep in his chest that’s just now emanating outwards.
His back against the island, Buck sinks to the floor, hands coming up to press at his sternum. He breathes out, breath shaky as all hell. Buck knows, in that moment, that he is irrevocably changed. Because that feeling in his chest is one of warmth, of settling.
This is that thing in his heart that’s never felt quite right. That feeling of longing that Buck has never been able to pinpoint, no matter how many places he traveled, people he helped, or women he kissed.
The warmth is not entirely unfamiliar. Buck has felt it before; he feels it when his and Maddie’s pinkies lock, when Christopher laughs, when he watches Bobby and Athena together. It came on especially strongly one time when Hen had shown the crew her photos from Pride. Buck had looked at Hen surrounded by people just like her, her smile blinding even through the screen. There’d been warmth in his chest, but with something else - a stirring he hadn’t had a chance to give a second thought before the bell rang. Buck is pretty sure he’d felt jealous then too, and wasn’t that ironic - that it was misconstrued jealousy that brought him to this moment now.
But in all those instances he’s never felt the settling. The warmth had always cooled with the knowledge that as right as all those things are, they aren’t his. They’re parts of his life, important parts, but not parts of Buck.
But this? Despite the pounding of his heart and the racing thoughts in his head, Buck knows that this is a piece of him. An extremely important one.
And that’s what unlocks his frozen body and allows his hands to unclench: the knowledge that this, whatever “this” ends up being, is a part of his very soul.
It’s not about Tommy, or any man that could have stood in his place. It’s about Buck.
What was it he had said to Tommy? ”I am free.”
As he felt the settle within his chest and the lightness it created in the rest of his being, Buck felt fucking free.