Work Text:
(made by sophie// mint_syrup_)
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
May 12, 2019
Buck,
I'm not entirely certain why I'm addressing this letter to you. My first thought was Shannon, but it's not like I can put a grave as a delivery address. So, you it is. You’ve become important to me in the year we’ve known each other. If I could speak about this to you out loud, I would. But for now, I’m not there. Maybe I’ll never be.
If you were to read this, you’d probably be wondering why the hell I’m writing a letter in the first place. And I’d tell you, I have no idea. I’m not one to follow anyone’s advice — I’m pretty stubborn, if you haven’t noticed yet. But the grief counselor at the hospital told me that writing out my thoughts might help through the stages of grief, so here I am. In the stage where I’m angry. So damn angry, that I had to come home from witnessing the passing of my wife to tell my son that he’ll never see his mother again. How can I not be angry? Furious, even.
You told me I was probably making a mistake hiding her from Christopher. And I realize now that I was. I kept Chris from his mother, on purpose, and I stole the time they could’ve had together. This guilt is swallowing me up inside.
Chris is in his room now as I write this, thinking and mourning. He asked me for some time alone and I reluctantly agreed. The truth is, I don’t want to spend even a moment apart from him. I want us to lean on each other through this, even if it’s a quiet kind of comfort. We don’t really talk about important things, but I’m trying. I don’t want to be like my own father. I want to find a way to teach Christopher the opposite of what my dad taught me — I want him to grow up in tune with his emotions, and welcome them, instead of suppressing them. But how do I teach him that when I don't know it myself?
I think you’ve taken a great liking to Chris, actually, and the same can be said about how he feels about you. The few times you’ve been over at our house, he hasn’t been able to shut up about you afterwards. It’s Buck this and Buck that… And I trust you with him. In a way, I trust you with him the way I wasn’t able to trust Shannon with him before Christmas. It probably makes me a terrible person.
I prepared an envelope with your address on it, and everything. Even though I have no plans to send it, it makes me feel like you’re listening in. It probably makes no sense. Nothing does right now. Loss does that to you.
From Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
May 19, 2019
Buck,
You’re in the hospital now, sleeping your injuries away. I haven’t visited you yet — partly because your sister is staking her claim on the one person limit in the ICU, and partly because I’m not ready to step into a hospital so soon after Shannon. But trust that I want to be there for you, and I will be eventually in your recovery. It’s just that the bombing happened at the worst possible time, when I’m still raw, still angry.
I held your hand as we tried to get you out from under the fire engine. I don’t know if you remember it in the haze of your agony, but I made an attempt to comfort you. I know we’re just two guys who don’t generally touch all that much, but it felt nice to hold your hand, despite the situation. It fit sort of perfectly into mine.
Like I said, I want to be there for you. But I’m not sure how much comfort I can actually provide in my grieving. I thought for a moment there, as I watched you pinned under that truck, that I would lose you, too. And you’ve been this one thing about my move to LA that has come with an ease. You make everything easier. For the past week, you’re the only person who hasn’t treated me like I’m something fragile, someone that needs pitying, but instead done what I crave — provided distractions. Stupid jokes and messing around. You’re the only person who has earned a smile out of me, and I’m grateful to you.
I’ll help you through this. I hope Ali will, too.
From Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
September 22, 2019
Buck,
I haven’t done this whole letter thing in a good while. Honestly, I stuffed the previous two letters into the back of my sock drawer, and forgot about them. But I’m here now because there is so much I want to tell you that feels too heavy to say to your face.
You said you lost Christopher. Implied that you wronged him, wronged me. It’s you who’s wrong about the entire thing. Because as soon as I took him home after Bobby let me go, Christopher was talking about you, how you saved him, saved all those people that you managed to get to the top of some fire truck. And he probably had the second worst day of his life, but his eyes were shining because he said, Buck played games with me. Buck kept me laughing. And I wasn’t worried, because he was there. And then— I spent the whole day looking for him, screaming for him. I was scared I’d lost him forever. But it’s Buck and nothing can keep him away from us. He always makes the effort to come back to us.
And you do. You love Christopher and you fight for him, which makes sense because who wouldn’t? But you also love me, I think, for some reason. And that’s ineffable to me. I’ve never felt deserving of any sort of love, whether it’s your devoting friendship, or the love Shannon had for me as my wife. I feel like a nobody most of the time. I’m wandering through life looking after other people, whether it’s Christopher, you, or the strangers we assist on calls, and it isn’t often I get the time to look after myself. Others are always a priority to me. I just don’t feel as important, y’know?
What I’m trying to say is that you have awoken something in me. You have put effort into looking after me, me!, and as much as I don’t feel deserving of it, you’ve made me wonder if there will once be a day where I consider myself first, or at least second after Christopher. But for now, I like that you take care of me. I like that you are so willing to. Why are you?
From Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
October 27, 2019
Evan fucking Buckley,
I’m writing this in a letter format because I can’t actually talk to you. You’ve made sure of that, with your genius idea to sue the fucking city and threaten the existence of the entire fire department.
You think I was wrong to call you out in the grocery store? That you abandoned me Christopher in his time of need? He’s having nightmares about the tsunami, about Shannon dying in the tsunami, and he can’t even receive an ounce of comfort from his favorite guy because you’ve decided that this lawsuit is more important. Screw you.
I realize it was a moment of weakness, spoken from anger at myself that I can’t help Christopher through this on my own, when I called you exhausting. I don’t actually think you are, no matter how furious I am with you. And I don’t mean to blame you for all that’s going on with our family, but it sucks, it stinks that you aren’t around with your ever guiding hand.
At the end of the day, the anger stems from hurt. I need you. I need you more than I’ve ever needed anyone. You’ve crept on me like a virus, and no remedy can cure the aftershocks. And somehow, I still want more of you under my skin, poisoning me or otherwise.
Viruses pass eventually. I hope this anger passes too.
From Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
November 30, 2019
Buck,
I might be a little delirious. But it’s 3 am right now, and I haven’t been able to sleep.
We came to your loft earlier, and I ended up in the kitchen with you while Chris was picking out a game for us to play. It was supposed to be a normal night. Just the three of us, hanging out and putting our pain aside for a few hours of distractions.
But then you grabbed your belt, and you approached me with fire in your eyes, and you said something, asked something that my brain was too scrambled and lustful to decipher, and I wanted… Something. I don’t know what. But the way you looked at me — you had never looked at me that way before. You looked like you wanted to—
I should go to sleep. I’m going to sleep.
From Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
December 25, 2019
Buck,
Merry Christmas, buddy. You’re sleeping in the bunks downstairs, and I’m sipping some hot cocoa up in the loft of the firehouse. Today was a good day. Maybe the best I’ve had all year.
It’s the time for reminiscing, with the upcoming New Year’s. This year has been a lot. There are days when my first thought upon waking up isn’t Shannon, even if they are rare. I appreciate each one. Sometimes I wake up and check my phone, and I have a message, or a string of messages, from you. When you have once again spent the wee hours of the night researching something, and you choose me to be your victim for dumping your new knowledge onto. I appreciate it. I like that sometimes, my first thought of the day is you. You never hurt.
You do so much for me, it’s becoming overwhelming. You organized this entire firehouse Christmas, the first Christmas that Chris has to spend without his mother living, and you made him smile, made him laugh, made him happy. You are one hell of a guy. And you didn’t even pin this whole thing under yourself. You didn’t care for appreciation, and only wanted us to be happy. But I want to give it to you. I appreciate you. Hell, I treasure you. You are the one person who has kept me going through this trainwreck, and I adore your insistence to keep me going.
When you were playing around with the mistletoe, kissing Hen and everyone else, I kind of wished you had neared me with it. I’d like to give you a kiss. Just one in appreciation.
From Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
April 20, 2020
Dear Buck,
I almost died. I almost died, and all I could think about was Christopher, and you. That I needed to get out of that well, and make it home to the two of you. And I was willing to do anything. Absolutely anything to keep you.
You’re in my living room now, sleeping on my couch in case I need you. I’ve never dared to write a letter to you with you so close. I don’t even think you’re asleep yet, the adrenaline of the night keeping you up.
Because I almost died today. And I might be deranged, I might not be thinking straight in the slightest, but there may be a day where I don’t come home from a call, and Christopher loses another parent. And then what?
I figured out the answer to that pretty quickly. Then you. I meant it when I told you that there was nobody in this world I trusted him with more than you. You are his lifeline, in ways that I can’t be even as his biological parent. And you are so much more to him than a friend or an ally. You have helped me raise him over the past year or two, and you have become so significant that I see you in his expression, his theatrics sometimes. And he even looks like you, a little bit. Like you were born from the same rib.
And I knew at once what I needed to do. I needed to have your role in his life on paper.
So, tomorrow, when I’m supposed to be getting a day off to recover from the near drowning, I’m going to my lawyer. I’m putting you in my will. Nothing has ever made more sense to me, than doing this. Despite the fact that I know, if I’m going down on the job, you will likely go down with me.
I trust you. With my life, and Christopher’s. But I also trust you that, if I were to lose mine, you’d keep yours for him.
Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
October 13, 2020
Dear Buck,
I don’t know what to say to you in person. It’s something I struggle with often. Because you flash those blue eyes at me, shiny with guilt and hurt, and I sort of melt and struggle to form any words.
Daniel’s death wasn’t your fault. It would kind of be like saying Shannon’s death is mine because I kept her off the tube, and you would be pissed at me if I ever said that. So, let’s not do that the other way around, alright?
It pains me that your parents did this to you. That they made you feel like you aren’t a goddamn treasure of a human being. That you aren’t a miracle on an otherwise wonderless planet. Because you are. You aren’t just a human being, or someone’s attempt at a savior child, you are Buck, and all of Buck is deserving to be here. Your purpose wasn’t saving Daniel. It wasn’t saving anyone, really, not the people on our calls, not me, not Christopher, not anyone from our mismatched family.
Your purpose was to be the bright light that you are, and your purpose is to keep shining.
And you have never, not even once, felt like a failure to me, or a disarranged skeleton, made up of parts that aren’t a magical cure to an inevitable death. Magic isn’t real. And miracles usually aren’t. But it is a miracle in itself that you were born out of a favor for someone else carrying on with their existence, and ended up carving out a life for yourself that means something, everything, to the rest of us. I want it to mean something to you.
You are a wonder I believe in.
Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
May 16, 2021
Dear Buck,
I think you might be drifting away, maybe even moving on.
Because I saw you with Taylor today at your loft, as we disentangled our plot for the treasure hunt, I drank a beer as I watched you two, more bitter than usual, and I thought, I don’t belong here. Not anymore.
It’s inevitable that you and Taylor are going to be more.
And where does that leave me?
Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
May 30, 2021
Dear Buck,
Where do I even start?
It’s a great pain for me to write this letter, as one of my arms is literally in a sling, and my handwriting is probably incoherent. But I have to get this out there, for my sanity and all I owe to you.
You saved my life. I don’t mean the fact that you carried me to the ambulance and kept my heart beating until the hospital. I mean, I was lying on that street, my gaze locked onto yours, and the mere thought of never being able to tell you all I feel for you kept me alive. I reached out for you with my last strength, in an attempt to reveal everything. That, at the end of my life, I will be there, trying to get one last glimpse and touch of you.
But I survived. And I should tell you, right? I should tell you everything.
But I only managed to tell you about the will. It was a long time coming. The way you looked at me, as I told you about what I did, made me feel like there’s hope that you feel something similar for me in turn. But it’s probably wishful. I’m not and never have been deserving for the likes of you.
Taylor was at the homecoming party. She looked at you like she had a claim on you. Ana was there, too. I’ve never claimed her, not really. She’s just this someone who loves Christopher like a mother would, but I don’t want her to. Carla told me to follow my heart, and I tried to do it with her, but in the end, my heart stores love for my son above everything. And for you.
I don’t know what this means. I don’t want to look too deeply into it. But I think you might mean to me more than I dare to admit, and it terrifies me more than bullets flying through a Los Angeles street in broad daylight.
I don’t know what to do.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
September 27, 2021
Dear Buck,
You are right. You’re always right. It’s not worth it to stick it out and hope that love will surround you eventually. Especially where there is no inclination that any love has existed in the first place.
I didn’t love Ana. She was nice, sure. She was great with Christopher. But outside her relationship with him, I felt nothing worthwhile. I didn’t love her like I was supposed to after all this time of being with her, so I did what you implied I should. I broke up with her.
And it’s a weight off my shoulders. Christopher is upset, because he ended up liking her more than I ever did. But I can’t find it in myself to feel all that guilty. She was never supposed to become a mother figure to him. No one ever will be. Shannon is his mother and she will remain his mother for as long as he is alive.
I think Ana was a bit of an experiment, a longing for my parents’ approval of my relationships. They hated Shannon but surely, they couldn’t hate a respectable, Catholic, Latina woman in the business of childcare? She was the perfect choice for me in a world where I could focus on anyone other than you.
But that’s not the world I live in. I live in a world where you are everything to me, my goddamn lifeline, both my reason for breathing, and the reason for the stuttering of my breaths. You are everything all in one, Buck.
But I couldn’t describe it in speech then, and I can’t know.
So, for the time being, I’ll just keep this to myself.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
November 7, 2021
Dear Buck,
I held a heart in my hands today, and I wished it was yours instead.
Not that I want your heart to ever be failing, ever be bleeding out or hesitating in its beating. But I wish I could hold the most naked, vulnerable part of you and somehow make it belong to me. But you aren’t mine to take, or belong to.
You ran to me as I was keeping Mitchell from dying, to fulfil his wish to save his son. And you looked terrified. I don’t know if it was the bullet that ripped through the air as he killed himself, or the blood on my fingers, the same shade as the blood I painted that asphalt with.
Either way, I know you care deeply. And I wish you cared just a little bit more. But Taylor is yours, and you are hers, and I know that it simply isn’t the case.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
December 25, 2021
Dear Buck,
Merry Christmas, I’d usually say. But from that wrecked look on your face upon my news, I owe you an I’m sorry.
I could pin this on Christopher, of course. I could blame it on anyone, really, the universe I don't believe in, even. Because I got shot, and I started having panic attacks, and I broke up with the ideal woman, and my kid told me you could be dead next year. But at the end of the day, this was my reckless decision. You know a thing or two about those.
It’s not that I wanted to leave the 118, but I felt like I had no other choice.
I’ve thought I’d lose you so many times over the past years, but I never knew I would once make a conscious choice to walk away from you. So many have walked away from you, Buck, and it’s only taken me until this moment to realize how stupid they must’ve been to. Because telling you that I’m leaving you, with no proper warning and a period of adjustment, God… It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. Anyone who walks away from you doesn’t understand what they’re walking away from. But I do. Goddamnit, I do.
I once again find myself not knowing what’s next. I want you to keep me around even if we no longer spend all of our time together, but at the same time, maybe what I need is to keep a distance as I untangle my feelings. They’re loud and terrifying. And it’s too damn quiet these days to smother them.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
April 17, 2022
Dear Buck,
You’re on my couch. You’ve been on my couch for the past five nights, just in case I end up slamming more holes into my walls.
When this breakdown began last year, I never thought that you’d actually stick around. But I have joined the long list of people who have underestimated you. Because here you are, on my couch, and I’m more shocked than I have the right to be.
Therapy sucks. Frank is irritating. Healing isn’t linear, he blabs and blabs on and on. Tell me something new! Tell me how to patch up the holes inside me instead, because there is just so much metaphorical glue that I have in storage.
I scared Christopher, I scared you, and I scared myself. I’m a Halloween costume all year round. I don’t want to be. I want to be soft. I want to smooth out the rough edges. I want redemption without having to confess. But it didn’t work back when Church was my inevitable Sunday destination, and it’s not going to work now.
I think a lot about what it means to be me. Who I am without the people in my life. And I come up short, every time. I don’t think a me has ever existed. I don’t know who I am without being a caretaker. And now I’m supposed to take care of myself?
You’re on my couch, but I wish you were here in my bed instead. Even my couch feels a galactic distance away.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
September 19, 2022
Dear Buck,
For your information, I have a couch. It comes with a lot of baggage, enough that you’ll need to check it in, but it’s a couch that is yours to take, whenever you feel like that’s something you desire. It has your name on it, branded on its every inch. So, feel free to claim it at your earliest convenience.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
March 13, 2023
My dear, beloved Buck,
I have never been so physically close to you as I write you a letter, yet so far away that it hardly counts. Two feet away, you are hooked onto a machine that is the only thing keeping you alive and breathing.
You’re going to wake up and breathe on your own. I repeat this mantra in my head to keep myself from losing my sanity. There is simply no other choice. You’re going to wake up and I’m going to tell you, every day for as long as I breathe, that I breathe mostly for you.
People in coma don’t dream, but your eyelashes are fluttering like you are. I wish I could reach into your head and see what you’re seeing. Maybe it would make you feel all that more alive. Right now, I can’t help but sense that you are a ghost haunting my closet.
Christopher visited your bedside today despite the rule of no children in the ICU — a stupid one, if you ask me — and I hope you heard the pleading in his voice. I hope you heard him and that, wherever you are, you’re trying to get out of there and come back. If I’m not enough, I know he would be. So, do it. Do it for him.
I don’t own a stake for you. Hell, I probably never will, not in the way I wish I did. But if I mean anything, anything at all, if I hold a significance to you that is somewhat similar to what Orpheus felt for Eurydice, then you better come back for me too, and say it to my face.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
May 15, 2023
Dear Buck,
I get it. Natalia is shiny and beautiful whereas I am a rusty, ugly thing. And Marisol is nothing like you, but you have been seen and you have been claimed once again, so I guess she’ll have to do for the time being.
This isn’t me giving up. I could never give up on you. This is me waiting it out, because I know you rush into all these relationships and you have never once needed to chase anyone, because all these women are after you like you’re a piece of gold. Except, they all eventually fail to see that you’re not just a piece but the whole twenty-four carats.
I hope she actually sees you. You deserve it.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
April 11, 2024
Dear Buck,
I’m going to be straight up. I gave up on the letters. I convinced myself that I managed to move on from you with Marisol. But then you told me, it was a date, and everything came rushing back, louder than ever.
Turns out, all along, it wasn’t wishful hoping that you were someone like me. It’s just that I have never seemed like someone you could consider an option. And I understand. I wouldn’t want me either. But it’s agonizing that I could’ve had you, but you chose Tommy, a mere stranger.
If I came over to your loft tonight, only doomed over Marisol’s past, then our breakup is now only a matter of time. But I’ll keep watching from the sidelines for now, how this thing with Tommy works out for you.
Or is it sidelines? Because it feels like I’m on the field right with you. I have been scarily involved in your budding relationship. It could mean something, maybe. Or, y’know, I’ve just deluled myself.
Christ. I have to break up with Marisol. Soon.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
May 30, 2024
Dear Buck,
You just left. You’re not staying on my couch this time around, and I’m grateful for it. I don’t think I can accept your comfort just yet. I’m not deserving of any comfort.
I apologize for the tear-streaked paper and smushed ink. I’m in Christopher’s room, grasping at what’s no longer mine. Everything smells like that wrong shampoo that you accidentally bought for him once during my recovery from the shooting. You know, he never ended up picking his old one again. I see trinkets all around his empty room, pieces of you he’s collected over time.
He is as much yours as he is mine. I saw the look on your face as he walked out of that door. It wasn’t just one parent in my living room, losing a child. And if things were different, we’d be mourning this together, hugging his bedsheets like I am right now.
I said in a letter once, that I don’t know who I am without him. I guess now is the time to face it, and finally figure it out.
It’s time to confess and find redemption.
Love, Eddie.
Addressed to:
Evan Buckley
574 Grand St
Los Angeles, CA
November 5, 2024
Dear Buck,
This is my last letter to you. And probably the most important one.
It started off as a way of writing out my feelings into a physical manifestation, making them real and tangible. But I just sat down and read every single letter and I realized. I have hidden behind metaphors and pretty words, but I have never plainly told you how I feel.
I went to confession yesterday. Yes, an actual church. And I told this priest, this random guy who I’ll never meet again in my life, that I am in love with you. But I didn’t ask for forgiveness or redemption of my sins. Because loving you has never felt like a sin, or covet.
Loving you is the most beautiful, raw thing that has happened to me. Scratch that, actually. It didn’t happen to me. I chose to love you, I chose all you are, and I am always making a conscious decision to choose you. You’re not flawless, and I choose your flaws. You’re not perfect, but I don’t expect perfection. I want all of you, the ugly parts included. The ones Tommy couldn’t appreciate, but then again, he appreciated nothing when he had everything.
Before I seal this final letter, I just want you to know that I don’t expect reciprocation either. I am okay with keeping this love tucked in, as long as I have you in my life, no matter what form our relationship takes. I want you around. I want to hang out with you for the rest of my life. I want it to be you who goes to the airport to pick up Christopher with me this evening. I want it to be you who’s around when my cheeks paint a pretty pink after my sister takes one look at us and figures my feelings out, like everyone else has. I wouldn’t mind if you knew, as long as I can keep you.
With all my love, and cherish, and devotion,
your Eddie.
“Should be on the desk in my room. I can’t go right now, I need to stir this damn sauce.”
Adriana rolls her eyes, but obliges. She navigates through the house she’s stepped in for the first time, because, for some reason, her brother has never bothered to invite her over ‘til now, until she eventually locates Eddie’s bedroom.
It’s a faint thing, but that’s to be expected. Eddie isn’t a minimalist — take all the crap he buys for Christopher, for one, — but his room lacks personality because he never matches that effort for himself. The only somewhat striking element about it, is what she finds on his desk, next to the school re-enrollment papers Eddie asked to bring over.
A stack of letters. Several handfuls of them. All addressed to, hm, an Evan Buckley.
Pause. Wait. Buckley. As in, Buck?
Adriana realizes, with sudden glee, that she knows exactly how to put an end to that yearning look on her big brother’s face, the same one that adorns his so-called best friend’s every time he so much as dares to glance his way.
She figures she could make time for a stop at the post office before her flight back.
With the emotional turmoil of Christopher’s return, Eddie doesn’t notice that the letters are missing. His son being home is far more important than the thousands of words he poured out to Buck, about Buck. It’s simply not on his mind, is the thing that matters here.
But then he gets the knock on his door, barely having managed an hour of sleep after their twenty-four hour shift and dropping Christopher off at school.
It’s a frantic, frantic thing. Whoever’s on the other side really craves Eddie’s attention.
He’s in his pajamas when he opens the door, rubbing the exhaustion off his face. But then he takes a look at the guest, and finds that it’s the very opposite of one.
There’s Buck, still in his uniform even though their shift ended hours ago, and he’s holding his hands behind his back, hiding something from his view. Before he gets the chance to ask, Buck bestows a desperate, pleading look on him, and words fly out of his mouth, seemingly without much forethought or control.
“Were you a fucking poet in your past life?!” Buck accuses.
Eddie blinks at him.
“Seriously, man,” he carries on, reaching up to tug at his curls like a madman. He doesn’t step past the threshold, just lingers there as though he’s not welcome in. “You could have a career in writing if you weren’t a firefighter. I’d be your number one fan. I’d go to, like, conventions to see you. And you know I hate conventions, because they’re so crowded and, like, a perfect place for an emergency to happen.”
Okay, you see, now Eddie is really confused.
“I’m not following, Buck.”
He finally breaches the threshold, and Eddie has no choice but to step back and allow this nearly manic man in. It feels like opening the door during a tornado and letting the natural disaster take everything in its wake.
And maybe it is a natural disaster in the making, Eddie thinks, when Buck reveals what’s in his hands.
A stack of letters.
Oh, fuck.
How—?
Fucking Adriana. He’s going to murder her.
Through a stuttering breath and panic clawing up his throat, Eddie manages, “I can explain. Buck, I can—”
But Buck won’t have it. With his free hand, he reaches up to cover Eddie’s mouth with his finger, shushing him. His skin is hot and sweaty against his lips, yet he can’t help but lean into it, bask in it.
“No. No, you’ve said plenty.”
The rejection slams into him and nearly knocks him out. But then—
“Now’s my time to speak,” Buck carries on.
Eddie waits as he scrambles for words, and it feels like waiting on the announcement for his time of death.
Buck looks down at the stack of letters, and Eddie notices then that he has the most gentle grip on them, like he’s holding something precious, something that needs to be nurtured and cared for. A small gust of wind could stun it out of his hand.
When he looks up at Eddie again, his eyes are glistening.
“Imagine this,” he starts. “We’ve just had the shift from hell and all I want is a nap. But I don’t even make it past my door because there, on my doorstep, are twenty letters addressed to me in your ugly man handwriting. I think I’m hallucinating, honestly, because why on Earth would you send me a letter, twenty letters?”
Oh, wow. Eddie didn’t realize he’d written that many.
“There are dates on the envelopes, dating back to twenty-fucking-nineteen. So, I arrange them in order, oldest to newest, because I gotta figure out what all this means. And I start reading them, on my doorstep, because I’m too curious to even walk into my loft. I start reading and— Holy hell, Eddie.”
He realizes that it isn’t only him gasping for oxygen. So is Buck.
“I read about Shannon, and the tsunami, and a funny one in hindsight about the lawsuit, about the will, and Taylor, and Natalia, and Tommy, and— I’m standing there, on my doorstep, and thinking, why the fuck am I still on my doorstep?”
Buck takes a step closer to Eddie, and he doesn’t retreat.
“You told me, back at that hospital room, that I’m not expendable,” he breathes out. “And here I am, discovering that all this time, you thought you were. That your feelings are. That they don’t matter enough to be voiced. That you don’t matter. It fucking broke me.”
Buck has lost control of the wetness pooling in his eyes, and it’s all streaming down now.
He grasps Eddie’s hand, tenderly, sweetly.
“But on the drive over — way over the speed limit, by the way, I’m definitely getting fined —, I ended up thinking that maybe you were onto something by keeping this to yourself until now. Because I wouldn’t have been ready for you at any of these timestamps. The funny thing is, I wouldn’t have been ready for it even last week. Until Maddie — and Josh, somehow — knocked sense into me.”
Eddie gives him a look, asking for clarification, and Buck grins.
“Oh, they just happened to listen to me rant about my breakup with Tommy, until Josh blurted out that he’s been calling it since, like, day one, that I would end up breaking up with him and finally, finally realizing who I’ve been chasing this whole time.
“You,” says Buck, with clarity, with conviction. Like he’s never been so sure about anything else in his life. “I’ve been chasing you, and wanting you, and loving you, and convincing myself that I wasn’t, because never in a million years did I think I could deserve the reciprocation from you.”
And Eddie has to say something now. Argue with him.
“It’s me who doesn’t deserve—”
“Oh, shut it,” Buck is quick to dismiss him. “I won’t have you talk shit about the great, big love of my life this way. And we certainly deserve each other for how stupid, dumb, moronic we’ve been,” he adds, with glee, squeezing Eddie’s fingers.
“It’s you,” he confesses, gasping with it. “I love you, Eddie, and I always have. Always will.”
And it’s the final straw — ever since Buck turned up on his doorstep, attempts to remain a distance have been made, fruitless ones. The touch of their hands isn’t enough. The way Eddie’s tasting Buck’s breaths so close to his face isn’t enough.
Eddie doesn’t say anything except his name in warning before he leans in and takes.
Kissing has always been a chore.
He didn’t know it could be a revelation.
Eddie thinks stupidly, poetically, that kissing Buck gives him the answers to the questions of the universe. That he gets it now. Who he is. What he’s here for. Apparently, he’s been put on this planet to kiss this man stupid.
And it’s the last coherent thought he has for a long time after.
Maybe he doesn’t need to murder his sister after all.