Archive of Our Own ^beta

Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Buck doesn’t have the key to Eddie’s house anymore. 

He handed them over—along with his newly carved-out heart and a warm, freshly baked batch of chocolate cookies—two months, five days, six hours, and thirty…no, thirty-one seconds ago. It made sense to do it. Eddie was moving. The house would be vacant. Why would Buck need a key? There would be no more late night I’m coming over texts , no more stumbling in upset or bored or lonely, no more kicking his feet up on the couch, Eddie’s thigh next to his, and thumbing through the TV guide with a cold beer in hand. 

Buck’s spent so much of the past seven years inventing excuses to make the drive over to Eddie’s place, but there were no more left. His days of slowly diminishing creativity were over. Plus, Eddie was selling the house, and no new owner was going to sign paperwork that read some guy named Evan Buckley will keep his key and can enter your home at any time, sorry in the footnotes. 

So, it made sense. Buck handed them over, and he even smiled like it didn’t feel like he just got hit by a bus on the inside. He’s been doing that a lot recently. 

And now, when he looks down at his key fob, it hits him again. Like the bus has called all of its other bus friends and gotten them to run him over too, all from different directions, at different speeds, at the same time, until he’s nothing more than roadkill—a pile of broken flesh and blood sticking to their tires like a spit-out piece of gum. The fob isn’t empty, exactly. There’s his key for the loft and the zebra key chain he made in his crochet phase that Christopher said looked more like a naked mole rat wearing a Beetlejuice costume, but—there’s something missing. Something wrong. 

You can’t take the key to Eddie’s house off the fob. Then it’s just like—the whole entire key ring is mourning too. Missing something, trying to get used to all the empty space. What’s the point of keys anyway? They’re practically useless if they can’t even get him into the place he loves the most. Buck should just throw the whole thing away. He’d rather just not go anywhere ever again. Cut off his feet, too, while he’s at it. He doesn’t need those either. 

Except—he kind of needs both for what he’s doing right now. 

Look. Buck might not be able to get into Eddie’s house, at least not without breaking a couple windows and laws in the process, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a road that leads to it. And a street that goes past it. And streets—they aren’t illegal. They’re open to the public. And driving down streets is normal. People do that all the time, and nobody thinks it’s weird.  

Buck is just driving down a street. Like anybody else. He’s just—going someplace. Yes, there’s a place. It’s somewhere, and Eddie’s house is on the way to that somewhere, as houses often are. Purely out of coincidence, he’s driving past Eddie’s specifically. And he’s surely not slowing down as he passes, or rolling down the windows, or even stopping to park in front of the driveway. There’s no reason to do that, of course, because Buck’s normal. 

And if he was, by chance, putting his car into park at this very moment, it would be totally okay. Because you see, there’s a pothole right in front of Eddie’s mailbox. And Buck—he has an interest in potholes. He has an interest, specifically, in checking if potholes have magically been filled overnight. Which is why, of course, he needs to stop here every morning, to see if this one has been a victim of the potholes-getting-magically-filled-epidemic that he saw about on the news. It’s essential. It’s journalism. And he needs to stay there, parked in front of the pothole (it’s an invisible pothole, if he didn’t mention that, because those are the ones especially prone to the epidemic) for let’s say, thirty minutes to an hour every day, just in case he can catch it being filled. See, nobody’s caught it yet. And Buck wants to be the first. He’s always dreamed of being in the Guinness Book of World Records. 

Like, Evan Buckley, First to See Invisible Potholes Magically Filled, and It Coincidentally Happened Right In Front of His Best Friend’s Old House Who Moved Away Two Months Ago, has a nice ring to it, right? 

Right?

They can even put him next to that couple who kissed for fifty-eight hours straight. Or the guy with the fingernails. It would be an honor, really, to be by the guy with the fingernails. 

Anyway. Normal. That’s what Buck is doing. And besides, magic potholes aside, it’s Eddie’s house, even if it’s not really his anymore. There’s a couple things in LA that used to belong to Eddie and now don’t anymore—his locker at the 118, his seat on the rig, Buck—but his home is the biggest entity on the list, the most tangible. Probably because it’s quite literally twelve feet tall. And if Eddie isn’t here to hold onto things himself, then Buck needs to find a way to do it for him. It’s called being a good friend, and he’s dedicated to the job no matter how many miles are between them. 

Buck’s never been good at unlearning how to call something home. 

So he ends up here, like a dog that just returns to the grave of its owner over and over because it has nowhere else to go. He sits in the driver's seat, windows rolled down so the tinted glass can’t impair his vision, and looks. A never-ending open-casket funeral. Buck catalogues everything, as if he’s scared it’ll be gone the next time he comes, or changed into something that no longer screams Eddie’s name with every panel and brick and blade of grass. 

Like if he’s not careful, he’ll lose the memory of him too. 

The grass has grown one-fifth of an inch since last time he was here. (Well, he doesn’t really know, because he doesn’t bring a fucking ruler, but that’s how much grass grows in a day, so. He’s generalizing.) That’s very nice. Somebody will have to mow it soon. Buck wonders who will take care of that now that Eddie’s not here. The city? The neighborhood council? That one sixty-year-old neighbor of Eddie’s with the potbelly who mows so much Buck is surprised he still even has grass? 

Everything is in the perfect place. Buck verifies it thoroughly, close enough he would catch any stain on the wall, any chipping of paint. The terracotta tiles still sit on the roof, the stone pathway up to the door is as smooth and shiny as it’s always been. And the for sale sign—

Wait. 

The for sale sign is gone. 

Buck’s breath gets sucked out of his throat. Suddenly, looking out at Eddie’s house with clearer eyes, Buck realizes what he had somehow missed, the big elephant in the driveway. 

There’s a fucking moving truck here. 

It’s parked in the driveway, taking up the entire width of it, and its glossy white walls shine like a bad omen. The orange lettering stands out, a bruise on pale skin, and Buck feels fucking sick, all the way down to the depths of his stomach. 

The air inside of the Jeep feels too tight. The world loses a bit of its solidity, like Buck could just fall through, be left scrambling at nothing for an eternity. Everything is spinning and still at once, frozen. It’s too tight. Too suffocating. Too large, too dizzying. There’s a ringing in Buck’s ears; it grows as he sits there, stares out the window, and refuses to believe it. 

There’s a moving truck in Eddie’s driveway. There’s a moving truck in Eddie’s driveway. There’s a fucking moving truck. In Eddie’s driveway.

No. No. This can’t be happening. This—no. This isn’t right. Somebody can’t be moving into Eddie’s house. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t. How can you move into a house that still belongs to someone else? How can you move into a house that still has Christopher’s fingerprints on the doorknobs and Eddie’s laugh littered over the walls and Buck’s heart buried under the floorboards? 

And the thing is—Buck knew Eddie was selling the house. Of course he did. He’s been staring at that for sale sign every day for two months now, watching it sway in the wind and stay staked into the dirt, like a parasite crawling into his bloodstream. He’s been listening to Eddie talk about mortgages and contracts and agents over the phone as he sorts out permanent living arrangements in El Paso. He—he knew that this was the plan, long before he was standing in the hollow shell of the hallway and watching Eddie say goodbye to the house that had held him and his son for seven years. Long before he had to say the word himself. He knew, and he’s known, terribly, horribly, wholly; he’s walked around with the idea like living with a knife embedded in his throat—and yet. 

It never felt real. Buck just thought, maybe, that nobody would buy it, that nobody would dare stain such a perfect image, mess with a mausoleum of the past. Despite everything—his bad luck, his slippery fingers, the fact that the world has seemed determined to teach him otherwise—he thought he could hold onto this. That this could remain constant, a fixture, as sturdy and unbreakable as the house’s foundations themselves. 

Eddie doesn’t live in the house anymore, hasn’t for a while. It isn’t his, not technically, not anymore. But it is an echo of happiness, a museum, a temple, a resting ground. A grave. It’s important to Buck, in the way scraps often are to a starving dog. He doesn’t understand how someone wouldn’t see that, even just scrolling through the pictures on Zillow; how someone else didn’t just sniff the air here and know that there was too much history to interrupt, too many stories in every scratch in the wood. He doesn’t know how anyone else could think they deserved to live in the aftermath of Eddie’s departure, in the space he left behind. 

He didn’t know that even the smallest of scraps he bites into can get ripped out of his teeth. Somehow, like an idiot, Buck thought that he wouldn’t have to lose this too. 

Buck tastes bile, the familiar acidic flavor of grief. He can’t—this can’t be happening. Not right now. Not when—not when he’s barely been surviving as it is. 

He needs to open the door. He needs to get out of here. He needs to get a better look. 

Just as he moves his face closer to the window, the dark oak door to the house swings open, and out walks a man. 

Buck notes a thousand things at once: his dark brown hair, short and cropped against the top of his scalp, his honey-brown skin and slender build. The dark eyes, the thick brow, the sweatpants and loose-fitted t-shirt he’s wearing. He’s around thirty—maybe late twenties—if Buck had to guess. He looks kind, unassuming, a normal fucking guy. 

And he’s moving into Eddie’s house. 

A thousand emotions bubble up inside Buck, turning him into a hot, roasting melting pot. He can’t trace the edge of them, can’t put a name to a single feeling. It’s overwhelming in the worst way. He doesn’t know what he wants to do—die, cry, scream, fall onto the ground and let his bones decompose into the dirt of this place. It all just feels like—like he’s swallowing glass, and it’s cutting his throat as it slides down, turning his insides bloody and swollen. He’s trapped in his worst nightmare, and it never ends; it just keeps going, devolving and devolving further and further into chaos and agony every day that Buck lives here without his best friend. He feels like he’s been beaten so far into the ground that he’s become an echo of himself. A smudged ink stain on a burning piece of parchment. 

And this man—he looks fucking unbothered. Like he has no idea. No idea about the house, no idea about Eddie, no idea that Buck hasn’t taken a real breath in two whole months, no idea what he’s trampling all over right now as he walks down the front porch steps. 

Stepping onto the driveway, the man finally looks up and catches sight of Buck’s Jeep, eyes narrowing as he tries to block out the sun to get a better look. Buck’s first thought is wow, his eyes look a lot like Eddie’s when the sun hits them like that. 

His second thought is, oh, fuck, I’m about to get caught. 

It’s one thing to park outside an empty house to do your civic duty to check the potholes. It’s another thing entirely to park outside an occupied house and stare like a fucking stalker at its new owner for ten minutes. 

Buck scrambles to roll up the window and put the car into drive. Heart in his throat, chest beating erratically, he drives away. He makes it nearly all the way out of Eddie’s neighborhood before his hands start shaking. 

If Buck thinks about it, really, he deserves a reward for how good he’s being.

When Eddie came into his life, it was like stumbling into an endless gold mine, like being granted a quiet, simple miracle he could hold all for himself. It was a shift in the tectonic plates under Buck’s feet that couldn’t be reversed. So much of Buck’s life was flickering, fleeting, no more than the flash of a camera, but Eddie was permanent. A fixture. There was a surety to him, one so strong that Buck learned to stop doubting it. A year ago, Buck wouldn’t have been able to imagine a world where Eddie wasn’t by his side, where Eddie wasn’t breathing in the space next to him every day, close enough to touch, their knees knocking together in the back of the engine. Three months ago, when Eddie first broke the news he was leaving, Buck thought he would probably be dead by this point, or driven to the point of complete madness. That seemed like the most logical conclusion to this slow, numbing nightmare. 

But the thing is—he hasn’t. He’s still alive. And he’s been so fucking good. Because his best friend is gone, and it’s the worst thing ever, maybe the worst thing he’s ever lived through, and yet, Buck hasn’t said a single thing. For once, he hasn’t made it about him. Held his tongue, bit it so hard that it still hasn’t stopped bleeding. Tied his hands behind his back to stop himself from reaching, from grabbing, from hoarding what could no longer be his. 

He did the right thing. He did the impossible. 

He let Eddie go. 

And he hasn’t complained. Somehow, he hasn’t even cried. He hasn’t fallen on his knees to beg or driven eleven hours in a blind obsession and ended up at Eddie’s door, no matter how desperately the urge overtakes him. And sure, maybe he ends up at Eddie’s house nearly every day and wears the sweatshirt Eddie accidentally left at his house a few months ago to bed and keeps asking the empty air behind him on calls for the halligan, but. He’s been a good boy. He’s sat and he’s stayed, even when his whole body was telling him to do the exact opposite. 

So it’s okay, really, that this has tipped him over, pushed him off some invisible ledge he’s been standing on the last month. It’s okay that on his way home from Eddie’s house, he has to pull the car over on the side of the road because his hands are shaking so hard, and that as soon as he puts the car into park, it crashes into him for real—a full-blown panic attack, the first he’s had since the fucking shooting. It’s okay that he sits there, forehead pressed against the wheel, for an entire thirty minutes before he’s able to take a normal breath, okay that he drives the rest of the way to the loft in a blur, okay that he nearly throws up when he opens the door and immediately spots one of Eddie’s blankets laying over the couch cushion. 

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

Buck’s been so good. He can have one single blip. And it’s not like he could stop it even if he tried. 

Insanity comes for him, and it comes for him hard. 

“Hey.” Eddie’s voice is quiet, concerned—so gentle it makes Buck’s heart ache. “Is everything alright?” 

Buck, brought out of his daze, turns onto his side in his bed to face where Eddie’s voice is trickling out of his phone speaker. It takes a moment for him to process the question, a moment longer for him to put together an answer. 

“Yeah.” It’s a lie, just like his answer to that question has been for the last two months. Buck hates that it’s become normal for him to lie to Eddie, but he has to when the truth is so selfish. 

On the other end of the line, Eddie hesitates. “You sure?” 

“Of course I am.” Another lie, twice in thirty seconds. Buck is going to hell. “Why do you ask?” he says, as if he doesn’t already know. As if it isn’t obvious how completely he’s been coming apart at the seams for the last twenty-four hours. 

He’s not surprised Eddie’s picked up on it. Of course he did—he knows Buck so well, it’s like he could navigate the mine-field of Buck’s brain with his eyes closed. Buck’s never been able to hide from him, even eight hundred miles away and behind a phone screen. It’s part of the reason he debated bailing on this call tonight. He didn’t want to be around Eddie and his X-ray vision, didn’t want to burden Eddie with his pathetic misery and gaping wounds on an innocent Tuesday night. 

He’s a fucking adult. He can handle his messes himself. Licking his wounds in private—he should get used to it. It’s not like it’s sustainable to depend on Eddie for that, not anymore. 

But ultimately, he couldn’t resist. Couldn’t ignore it when Eddie’s name flashed on his screen at their scheduled call time. It’s a lapse in judgement—a failure in his agreement to be as selfless as possible—but he can’t help it. He’s too hungry for every piece of Eddie to let any of them pass by. 

“You just—” Eddie says, “you’ve been a bit quiet today.” 

A truth. Unlike him, Eddie’s still capable of offering those. 

Usually, these calls are more of a conversation. Eddie tells him about El Paso, about whether he’s been making headway with Chris, about the enraging comments his mother makes at the dinner table. In turn, Buck tells him about the calls they have, about Jee-Yun’s antics during his last night of babysitting, about the recipes he finds on Pinterest. 

There’s not much of that tonight. Buck’s barely said a word since they got on thirty minutes ago. He doesn’t even have much attention for listening, for soaking up Eddie’s words like he usually would. 

Instead it’s just been this: silence, Eddie’s steady voice, Buck’s screaming mind, a grating symphony. 

He wants to ask, how long have you known? How long have you been keeping this from me? How long has the deed been signed? Have you met him? Talked to him? Are you okay with it—this imposter walking through your house, tracking his bare feet across your floors? 

Did you know? Did you know that this was going to kill me? 

He swallows it all down, tucks it aside. His third lie of the night: “I’m fine. Just tired.” 

There’s a long silence. Buck can almost see it—Eddie’s face, lips pressing together in hesitation, as if considering whether to accept it or to push further. 

Then, finally, he cracks. “Stayed up too late on Wikipedia again, huh?” His voice has a fond lilt  to it, as if he’s smiling, and Buck lets out a quick breath of relief, relaxing a little bit into the pillows.

He hadn’t been on Wikipedia last night—he was too occupied with spiraling—but he takes the out anyway. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Did you know that grass grows a fifth of an inch per night?” 

“Oh?” Eddie says, as if this is somehow an interesting tidbit. 

Buck nods, starts telling Eddie about the mechanics of front yard ecosystems, and thinks, distantly—

How cruel it is that the only person in the world who cares enough to listen to him talk like this is eight hundred miles away from him. 

Buck tries not to. He tries to resist, to be good, to keep these emotions that rush out of him like an oil spill in check. But recently, the walls that hold him together have been shaved down with sandpaper, made razor-thin, and Buck is only so strong. 

He ends up back at Eddie’s house. 

Look, it makes sense for him to be here. It’s not like he’s being crazy or anything, being stalkerish. Buck is a man of habit, like a dog conditioned to drool at the sound of the bell. He’s ended most of his days driving along this street, parking in this driveway, stumbling through the door to the couch. It’s as routine as brushing his teeth, the kind of task he could complete with his eyes closed. 

Buck isn’t choosing to come here after his shift ends. It just—happens. Out of his control. It’s his brain’s neural pathways doing what they’ve been taught to do. 

And it turns out this path is just as instinctual to follow, even when Eddie isn’t waiting at its end. 

This time, Buck thinks smarter and parks a little bit away from the house—close enough to still be able to see, but far enough that it’s not particularly suspicious. He doesn’t want to look like he’s…stalking or anything. Because he’s not. That would be ridiculous. 

He’s just looking on. A respectful, non-creepy onlooker. Maybe he’s just a guy interested in Spanish revival architecture. Maybe the random house he’s parked in front of belongs to a friend. Another friend that he has, not Eddie—because he has those—who lives here, in this neighborhood. And he’s just…waiting for them. In his car, because he doesn’t have the key to this friend's house. It’s all very, very normal business. 

He stares at the white stucco, the brown terracotta, the wrought iron accents. It’s all the same, just the way it was three days ago, just the way it was every time he walked up those steps, through those doors, and into the beating, thrumming heart of the house for the past seven years. But shouldn’t it be different? 

How is it fair that everything still screams Eddie, when there’s no Eddie to be found? Shouldn’t the world have stopped spinning days, weeks, months ago? 

Buck squints at the closed curtains as if he could see through them, see inside this warped version of the house he knows. It’s an obsession—thinking about this guy. Buck doesn’t know how to be normal about it. He’s spent the last forty-eight hours overcome with the urge to know everything about him, whether he likes his coffee cold or hot, whether he sleeps with socks on, whether he eats the same Special K cereal as Eddie in the morning with the little freeze-dried strawberries, whether he breathes out his nose or his mouth, whether he has any idea that his new home is a gravesite, and Buck is the widow sitting on the bench nearby. 

Buck wants to shatter the windows and sneak inside. He wants to press his ear against the door and listen in, like putting a stethoscope to a heart he already knows is no longer beating. He wants more than he knows what to do with.

He’s desperate, itching all over. So far out of his mind he can’t even describe it, can’t put it to words. It’s like—he needs to know. He needs to see, to find out whether this man is a deserving successor. Whether he’s worthy of treading over the hardwood floors that Eddie and Christopher’s bare feet have touched. 

Just as he has the thought, a UPS truck rolls down the street and stops in front of the house. For a single second—watching the door shutter open and the driver step out with a package in hand—Buck is annoyed. The truck is blocking his view of the house, and he needs to see the house. It’s important. It’s crucial. It’s, like, life or death. 

And then, all at once, Buck gets an idea. 

A terrible, horrible, insane idea. 

There’s no thinking involved. As soon as the thought comes to him, he’s already stumbling out of the Jeep and jogging over towards the driveway.

The UPS driver, returning to his truck, gives him a strange look as he passes by, but doesn’t say anything. Buck feels high on adrenaline as he rushes up the steps to the porch, grabs the package left by the driver just in time for the door to swing open. 

Buck’s heart stumbles to a stop. 

It’s the same man from before. Dark chestnut eyes, amber skin, cropped hair that’s buzzed down around the ears, just like Buck all too vividly remembers. But there’s something about seeing him up close that’s more startling. Buck notes that he’s slimmer than Eddie, his face longer, his brows thicker, and for some reason, each realization feels like a gut punch of its own. 

He doesn’t have time to worry about why that is, because—

Because behind the man’s head, where he’s cracked the doorway open, he can see it—a sliver of the inside of Eddie’s house. He can even make out the lamp in the corner, a little bit of the couch. Achingly, a lump of emotion clogging his throat, Buck tears his eyes away from the sight. When he finally meets his eyes again, the man is looking at him, eyebrows raised, confused and unsure. 

Suddenly, Buck realizes that he’s standing at the door of a random man's house, holding his package, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, and that this all probably looks very strange. 

“Um. Hello,” Buck fumbles, wincing as he holds out the cardboard box. “You, uh. You got a package.”

The man blinks at him. “I can see that,” he says, very slowly, peering at Buck like he might be about to jump out at him like a Jack-in-the-box. “Are you…the UPS driver?” 

His eyes flicker over Buck’s head. Buck follows his gaze to where, of course, the UPS truck is now slowly driving away, rolling down the street with no care in the world. The fucking traitor. 

Buck swallows. Says: “I, uh. No. I just—” He looks down at the box in his hands, searching for words, and then back up at the man. “Wanted to make sure you got the package safely,” he finishes with an awkward smile, internally cursing himself. 

God, what is he fucking doing? This is ridiculous. Pure insanity—he doesn’t even know what he thought would come out of this. He needs to fall into an invisible pothole and die. Why can’t he ever just think things through? 

The one silver lining is at least the man doesn’t seem to recognize him from the car incident a couple days ago. This would be so much worse if he already thought Buck was stalking him. 

Still, his spine itches with the way the man is looking at him. “...Okay? I mean, I think it was pretty safe, considering the UPS driver rang the doorbell to let me know it was here.” 

A good point, unfortunately. 

“Well,” Buck says, “one point seven million packages get stolen every single day, so.” He shrugs, lifting the package as if in emphasis. “It’s good to be careful, y’know.” 

The man stares at him for a long moment. “Sorry,” he says, after a second, putting a hand against the door frame to brace himself. “Who are you?” 

And Buck—he can’t exactly say oh, I’m the best friend of the guy who sold this house to you so now I’m here trying to learn everything about you for some reason I can’t even explain, can he? 

“Oh,” he says instead, “My name is Buck. I, uh—” he waves a hand behind him, convincing, “my friend lives in the neighborhood, and I was just, um…on a walk. I just saw the UPS truck, y’know, as I was walking, and you never know when a package is going to get stolen, and I—” he smiles weakly. “I’m a good citizen.” 

“Right.” The man nods slowly, as if tasting the word. “And you didn’t stop to think about whether your good citizenship would, you know, get the cops called on you?” 

Buck stares at him, blinks repeatedly. Then: “Are you going to call the cops on me?” 

The man doesn’t say anything—just watches him, and Buck feels his stomach turn. Not because he’s scared that the police are actually going to be called here. He doesn’t know this guy, but he’s pretty sure he’s not going to do that. It just feels like his time is running out. He acted like an idiot long enough to get the door open, to see the inside of Eddie’s house again for nearly an entire minute. It feels like he’s gained something he didn't know he would ever get to have back. And now—he doesn’t want that door to close. 

He can’t let it. He needs to find a way back in there. And he’s terrified that if he doesn’t find some way—some loophole—he’s going to be shut out again. 

So, he changes tactics. Looks down at the box, back up at the man, and sighs. “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t about the package,” he admits. 

A long beat of careful, considering silence. “Then what?” 

Buck assesses the man for a moment, then comes to a decision: he’ll take a risk. He’s done this before, many times, and it’s worked. He has no idea if it’ll work now, but it’s worth a shot. 

He tilts his head, tucks his chin in, looks up at the man through his eyelashes. Flashes a smile—not the wild, free, so-big-it-hurts-his-cheeks one he gets around Eddie, but the perfectly perfected one that used to live on his face when he spent his nights bathed in neon with three condoms in his pocket and a mental map to the nearest alleyway fresh in his mind. It’s the kind of smile he used to stand in front of the mirror to practice when he was twenty and far too arrogant for his own good, the kind of smile that used to make him feel simultaneously alive and nauseous down to the very pit of his stomach, like putting on a mask that protects and suffocates all at once. It’s the kind of smile that has brought many people to their knees. Literally. 

Now, he doesn’t feel alive at all—just nauseous, as he lets his lips curve flirtatiously. “Maybe I just thought you were really cute.” 

It occurs to him, distantly, as soon as the words leave his mouth, that this might make him look even more creepy. 

Wait. Is he… blushing?

Oh my god, he is. Like, actually. It’s all at once, as if the man hadn’t even been expecting it himself. For a second, all Buck can do is watch as he drops his head down to hide the way pink is rising to his cheeks. 

Buck is bewildered. Maybe he underestimated his flirting skills. 

“Really?” the man says, flustered, a bit coy. He looks up as he says it, and Buck finally gets a good glimpse of his flushed cheeks, and—

Suddenly, all he can see is Eddie. Across from him in the engine, feet pressed against each other, turning pink over Buck’s gentle teasing. Golden in the sunlight at one of Bobby’s barbecues, laughing in a lawn chair, nose-bridge burning from the sun’s never-waning kiss. On the couch in his house, side by side, red all over from laughing and laughing and laughing so hard their chests hurt. 

For a single second, it feels like Buck is burning. His heart pangs on the underside of his ribs, and everything is Eddie. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie. 

Then he blinks, and it’s gone. 

The man is in front of him, and he’s not Eddie, and Buck’s painfully aware of this. It hurts —to see him standing in the doorway instead of the man he knows, barefoot in a ratty LAFD sweatshirt, smiling that sweet, familiar smile that says oh, you’re here. I’m glad that you’re here. 

With a tight grip on his emotions, Buck manages to hold himself together as the reminder of everything he’s missing hits him like a sharp blow. Somehow, his smile doesn’t falter. 

The house, the house, he thinks. You can’t lose the house. 

“Yeah, really,” he confirms. “I just—I saw you the other day, you were moving in, and I was, uh, over at my friend’s, and…I just thought, you know, you were handsome, and—” he looks down at the package in his hands and then back to the man with a sharp, self-deprecating smile, “I don’t think straight around pretty people, I guess.” 

It’s not even completely a lie. This guy—he’s attractive. He has a nice nose, and pretty eyes, and soft-looking lips that would probably be good for kissing. If he had his sexuality crisis eight years earlier, this is exactly the kind of guy Buck 1.0 would’ve tried to get into the pants of. So what if first Buck’s thought upon seeing him had been more oh my god, who are you and why are you fucking stealing my best friend’s house than wow, cute? It’s like the same thing. Practically. 

And the rest of the story? Well. He’s allowed to take some creative liberties. 

“Hm.” The guy’s cheeks are still lightly dusted with pink, and it’s a good look against his chestnut skin. He’s still slightly flustered, but now he’s giving Buck flirty eyes too, tilting his head into a small, pleased smile. “Well, you sure have a strange way of flirting.” 

Buck laughs. It’s a dry sound—a little off to his own ears—but convincing enough to pass as normal to anyone who doesn’t know him. For a split second, Buck’s almost waiting to be called out on it, then he remembers. Right. The man isn’t Eddie. 

“Oh, trust me,” he says. “I know.” The whole fiasco before he and Tommy had their first kiss is enough evidence of that. 

The guy smiles at him, a genuine one. He leans his cheek against the door frame, and it makes him look a little bashful as he looks up at Buck. “So,” he says, after a moment, “I’m not going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere if I invite you inside, am I?” 

Again, Buck laughs. Then the words hit him. 

If I invite you inside. If I invite you inside. 

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. Holy fucking shittity shit. 

He means inside Eddie’s house, and that’s a place, that’s a really good place, and holy shit, he’s saying that Buck—he might to get to go in there, into Eddie’s house, and he hasn’t been in there in so fucking long, and— 

Holy shit, really. 

Um, okay. This is so okay. Like, maximum levels of okay. Buck—he just needs to, like, say something to that. Anything. 

“As long as you’re not allergic to good company,” he goes with, still blacking out a little bit, “you should be safe.” 

Okay, maybe not that. That sounded kind of stupid. God. Whatever. 

The man smiles at him. There’s an edge of calculation to his gaze under the bright-eyed delight, and Buck feels like he’s being studied under a microscope, assessed and checked out all at once. “You seem harmless,” he comments, as if to himself. 

No, Buck wants to say. You know nothing. He wants to say, I’m not harmless, because I’m a mess, because it’s been two months since my best friend left and every day waking up still feels like fighting against the current, because I can’t even breathe sleep eat or live without him, and that’s not normal. He wants to say, I’m not harmless because I hold onto people so hard I leave bruises on their skin, and I drag people down with me, and I take and I take and I take until they have nothing more to give, until we’re both clawing at rock bottom.  

I’m not harmless, he wants to say, because once you let me in, I will never, ever leave. I will become the ghost you can’t get rid of. The stray dog that keeps coming back to your door. 

I do not know how to let go. 

Instead, he grins. Holds up his free hand, flips it around. Scout’s honor. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” 

“Well,” the man says. “I guess I owe you. For, you know, protecting me from porch pirates.” A sweet smile, and then: “Let me get you a drink.” 

Dumbly, Buck nods. 

The man’s smile grows. With one last tap on the door frame, he turns around and starts walking towards the living room. It’s clear he expects Buck to follow him. 

Buck blacks out for a second. Seriously this time. His brain has fully left the premises. Which is bad because—well, he wants it to be here, especially when he’s on these very specific premises. These premises are important. Very much so. Because they belong to Eddie. Or did. Past tense. Whatever. 

So, Buck collects all the pieces of his rational mind, haphazardly glues them back together, and takes a very deep breath. Then, finally, he takes a step inside the house. 

It should probably feel more monumental than it does. 

How long has it been since he’s walked the hardwood floors, since he’s traced this path? Too long, too long, too long. There’s too much to look at. Too many things to locate. Buck wants to touch all of it, wants to walk around this place like it’s a museum, a shrine to Eddie and Christopher he needs to pray at. 

But he can’t. It’s pure luck that he ended up inside of here again. He can’t ruin it by slobbering everywhere, can’t dare to show his belly and end up shedding all over the freshly vacuumed carpet. He has to be good. So good. So as he walks by the coat rack by the door and the couch and the TV and the mantel that’s now missing all the pictures, he keeps his hands to himself. Curls them into fists at his sides, fingernails digging into his palms, and pretends like this is all good and fine and normal, like he’s not literally seconds away from combusting on the inside. 

The man leads him to the kitchen. Buck follows behind obediently, even though he knows this house better than the man ever could. He can’t show that, though, because this should be the first time Buck’s ever been here, and he shouldn’t know where everything is, and he doesn’t need the man to think he’s creepy or weird or insane or crazy about his best friend or any of the other things he most definitely is. 

He doesn’t need to know what really led Buck here. He doesn’t need to know exactly what sort of burial grounds they’re standing on. It’s all—irrelevant. Truly. 

Still, he lets himself glance around the kitchen, taking it in. It’s the same ceramic off-white countertops, terracotta tile floor, blue ovens, and dark wood table. But it feels different, stripped. Everything that made it beautiful—made it Eddie and Christopher—has been packed into a box and taken to El Paso, and now all that’s left is an echo. There’s no calendar hanging on the fridge, scribbled over with Eddie and Buck’s handwriting, no frog soap dish sitting by the sink, no lasagna-stained dishes in the sink waiting to be washed. 

It all just feels so… impersonal. Buck hates it with a passion. 

“So, Buck,” the man says as he slides up to the fridge, swinging it open. The inside is predictably bare, considering that he just moved in two days ago, but it’s such a far cry from the spilling, overflowing labyrinth it was as Eddie’s fridge that Buck has to blink a couple times to make sense of what he's seeing. “What do you do for work?” He swipes two beers out of the back and turns to face Buck again with a grin. “Unless you’re really just a full-time good Samaritan,” he says, nodding down to the package that’s still firmly clutched in Buck’s hands. 

“Oh, uh. Sort of,” Buck says, sliding the package onto a nearby countertop so he can take the outstretched beer. When the man raises his eyebrows, Buck elaborates: “I’m with the LAFD.” 

His eyebrows shoot even further into his hairline. “Oh? You’re a firefighter? That’s sick as hell, man.” 

Buck cracks a smile. “It really is.” Usually, this is the part where Buck would start to gush, going on and on about yesterday, this call, and my partner and I, and Eddie, Eddie, his name is Eddie—but he feels held still today, like there’s a thick band around his chest stopping him from speaking. So instead, he leaves it at that, and asks, “What about you?” 

“I’m an actor,” the man answers. “Or, well.” He scratches at the back of his neck. “An aspiring one.” 

Interesting. “Any luck?” 

“No, but”—the man shrugs—“I’ve only been in LA for three days, so. I’m not too worried yet. Gotta pay the bills somehow, though, so I’m long-term subbing at this elementary school nearby—Durand—until, you know, I actually book a role or two.” 

Buck perks up at the name of the school, because, well, that’s the one Christopher used to go to. But he can’t say that. That name is too sacred. 

He takes a sip of his beer to avoid running his tongue. 

It’s a Miller High Life. Eddie used to always hate Millers; he thought they were too carbonated, too crisp, too grainy. Buck likes the taste just fine, but something about it feels rotten now. Like it’s a betrayal to Eddie to stand in his house and throw this back instead of the Modelos they always drank together—like he’s defiling something sacred; committing some grand, unthinkable crime. 

But no matter how much he yearns for it, the smooth slide of cold Modelo won’t bring back Eddie, so Buck swallows this down instead and tries not to feel mournful about it. It’s fine. It’s all fine. 

“Where’d you move up here from?” Buck asks when he pulls the bottle away from his lips. 

The man sighs. “Texas,” he says, and Buck nearly jolts. “My family thinks I’m an idiot for leaving, but—I couldn’t take it anymore, you know? I mean, I’m a gay man in my thirties. I don’t want to spend my whole life in a place where fifty percent of people still see that as something shameful.” 

He looks at Buck meaningfully, and Buck thinks this is probably meant to be a covert yes, I’m gay kind of thing, but Buck doesn’t even care. He can’t help it—he’s thinking of Eddie. 

Eddie, gritting his teeth as his parents told him you’re making a mistake, over and over and over again. Eddie, a beat-up car and two bags of belongings, driving all the way from El Paso to LA with a sleeping kid in the backseat. Eddie, defying every boundary and pushing every limit to end up here, to build a new life just for him and Christopher. 

And now, Eddie, back where he started, in the same state that broke him down in the first place. The same state he worked so hard to get away from. 

He’s struck, for a second, by the simple unfairness of it all. There’s not a single person who deserves what he’s been dealt less than Eddie. Buck wishes, not for the first time, that things were different, that he could make them different.

He can’t, though. He knows this. And that’s why he’s here, drinking fucking a High Life with a stranger, instead of burning the whole world down to rebuild a better one for Eddie and Christopher to live in. 

“Welcome to LA,” he says. “Trading casual homophobia for the world’s worst traffic.” 

The man laughs. It’s a good sound—a little bit higher pitched than Eddie’s, but still warm and round and full. Buck always feels proud when he gets Eddie to laugh, and he feels the slightest echo of that feeling now. 

“Cheers to that,” the man says, smiling lopsidedly. 

Buck laughs too, and they both take a long swig of their beers. 

The conversation goes easily from there. The man tells him about his younger brother back in Texas, and his first acting gig in a toilet paper commercial when he was fifteen, and how once he broke his leg trying to teach himself karate because he thought it would give him a leg up in an audition. In turn, Buck tells him about bartending in Peru, and the time they saved Felisa Valdez from a falling chandelier, and how he learned how to burp the entire alphabet at age twelve and somehow has retained that skill for over twenty years. 

Buck doesn’t know how long they talk, but their beers are almost empty by the time Buck even remembers he’s missing an important piece of information. “Hey,” he says, when things finally go silent for longer than a couple of seconds. “You never did tell me your name, you know.” 

Part of him doesn’t want to know. Part of him just wants him to be the man forever, never cemented into anything permanent. Maybe then Buck could pretend like he’s gonna move away as fast as he came, and Eddie will be back here tomorrow, where he belongs, handing Buck a Modelo and saying I wish I never had to leave you, and Buck would feel his heart finally, finally, finally stitch back together and he would say, it’s okay, it’s okay, just. Just stay this time. Just stay. 

But it also feels wrong to not know. Because this is reality, and as much as Buck wishes it wasn’t, he can’t delude himself into not knowing that. This man lives in this house now, and Buck should know his name, just like he should know the address of Eddie’s new house, and the name of the captain at Station 6 that’s giving him orders, and the exact coffee shop he goes to every morning before work now that Buck isn’t the one going there with him. 

“Oh,” the man says, as if he hadn’t realized. “It’s Mateo.” 

Buck smiles. “Mateo,” he repeats, tasting the name. It fits. It’s nice. 

Mateo smiles back at him. He considers Buck for a second, and it’s a bit uncomfortable, the way he’s looking at him—like he’s seeing something special. “You know, Buck,” he says, setting his empty longneck on the counter with a click. “I’m really glad I met you tonight.” 

Buck freezes for a second, unsure. Unsticking his throat, he tries: “I’m really glad I met you too.” 

And it’s not a lie. Truly. It’s nice, talking to him. Mateo is charming, and interesting, and not bad to look at either. And there’s a tug at the center of Buck’s chest, under all the hurt and ache and uncertainty, and it’s weak in comparison to anything he’s felt for Eddie, but it’s there . 

Here, it says. This is something easy. This is something close. This is something you could chase. 

Buck doesn’t know. All he knows is that—Mateo is here, inside Eddie’s house, and Eddie isn’t. Eddie is in El Paso, miles upon miles away, and Buck can’t have him, can’t touch him, can’t talk to him besides through a grainy phone speaker. But this guy—he’s here, standing in the same place that Eddie once stood, and Buck could touch him if he wanted to. He doesn’t know if he wants to. But he knows that talking to Mateo means staying inside the house, and staying inside the house means feeling closer to Eddie, and feeling closer to Eddie means…something.

It means something. 

And when Buck leaves twenty minutes later, with Mateo’s contact in his phone and a promise to meet up sometime soon—he convinces himself that Mateo could mean something, too. 

Living without Eddie is like walking around without a heart inside his chest. 

He’s a body without a pulse. It’s hard to exist with it—all the empty space where Eddie used to be. He feels like some parasite has crawled into him and been sucking him dry from the inside for all these months. The truth is, he doesn’t know who he is without Eddie. He’s not himself anymore—just a ghost, a shadow stitched under skin, skulking down the graveyard of memories in his mind because they’re all he has left. 

A body without a heart to sustain it. Buck’s been on the slow road to death for months now. 

But maybe that’s not the end. 

Buck remembers reading about it once, on some random Wikipedia deep dive in the earliest hours of the morning—artificial hearts. First implemented into a dog by a Russian scientist during World War Two, science has come a long way with them; there’s now two available for temporary use, meant to bridge the gap as patients wait for heart transplants. 

Buck feels like that dog, or maybe one of the humans, chest pried open and waiting for momentary salvation. He doesn’t have a heart anymore. Eddie took that with him when he left. But there’s artificial hearts on the market. He could get one. And it wouldn’t be enough, it wouldn’t even be close to the real thing, but with it, he would be better than he is now—half-dead, barely breathing, lost to total heart failure. He would live miserably, achingly, terribly. But he would live. 

Mateo is like that artificial heart. A synthetic organ in the shape of the real thing, the perfect size to fill the gaping hole in Buck’s chest. A bandaid for a bullet hole, but at least it would stop some of the bleeding. 

And Buck—Buck is so fucking tired. Tired of the ache, of the emptiness, of the wind howling through his hollowed-out insides. Tired of feeling like a body decomposing in real-time, like a house gutted by fire, standing only because no one has come to knock it down yet. 

It’s a crude, desperate attempt to replace the irreplaceable—to assuage what cannot be assuaged—but Buck will do it anyway. He’s desperate. He’s broken. He’s starving. He’s what any man would be without a heart. 

So he grabs his scalpel and his forceps, and he gets ready to perform a transplantation. 

Five days later, Buck gets a text from Mateo. 

It’s great timing, because right when the message comes in, Buck is in the middle of grade A, 7.2 on the Richter scale spiral. 

It starts, of course, because Eddie didn’t respond to his text last night about the maned wolf and its weed-scented piss. On its own, Buck could justify it—because he had sent the text at 2 AM, and that meant it was three in El Paso, and Eddie is usually conked out by eleven o'clock. But Buck had never gotten a response to his text from the day prior asking Eddie if he had ever tried Oaxacan pizza, nor to his text this morning questioning whether they were still on for their FaceTime call. And then, a couple hours later—totally not panicking—Buck had sent Eddie, Hey, just making sure everything’s alright. Please call me if you get the chance, and he had even added a heart at the end. No response. Not even the little receipt telling him that Eddie had read the message. 

Now, it’s officially been twenty-four hours since he heard from Eddie, and Buck is spiraling. 

Eddie always responds to him, usually in under an hour’s time, except when he’s on shift, and Buck knows he’s not on shift because he created a Google calendar with Eddie’s entire schedule on it after he moved. Completely, totally normal behavior. So if Eddie’s not responding to him and he’s not on shift, then something must’ve happened, right? 

Maybe he realized Buck is too much and finally decided it wasn’t worth the work to keep up with him over the distance. Maybe he somehow has contact with Mateo and learned about how Buck has been insanely and pathetically stalking his house like a rabid guard dog, and now he’s pissed at Buck for being abnormal and disgusting and having absolutely no boundaries. Maybe he met someone at a Texan bar, and she was beautiful and perfect for Eddie and they danced to country line dances that Buck would have no way of knowing, and now Eddie is still at her house after a night of life-changing, amazing, out-of-this-world sex, and they’re planning for their elopement and all the beautiful perfect Texan children they’re going to have together. Or maybe yesterday, on Eddie’s shift, they had been called out to a five-alarm, and Eddie’s new partner (whose name is Joey, and Buck hates his guts with an irrational passion) wasn’t watching his back as well as Buck would have, and Eddie fell through the floor and now he’s in a hospital somewhere on a ventilator with a thousand lines hooked up to his arms and nobody thought to call Buck because nobody knows about him in El Paso and why would they—he’s just Eddie’s old best friend from LA that doesn’t matter anymore—and he is Eddie’s emergency contact but maybe Eddie changed it because he realized it made absolutely no sense to have his emergency contact be eight hundred miles away, and—

Anyway. The point is—it’s good that Mateo texts him when he does. 

Hey, the text reads. Random, but…do you wanna come over? 

Buck stares at it for a long moment. They’ve been texting on and off for the past few days, random conversations about anything and everything, but they haven’t seen each other in person since the first time. In a show of great strength, Buck miraculously hasn’t even been back over there, not even to check for magical potholes. Something about having contact with Mateo makes him feel less like an insane animal who needs to have eyes on the house at all times. He knew this Mateo thing was a good idea; he’s already becoming less deranged. 

For a second, Buck wants to decline the invitation. Eddie might not be answering him, but they still had planned to call. Even if there’s only the slightest chance that it might actually happen, Buck doesn’t want to waste it. But it feels a little ridiculous to say no, I can’t come, I’m too busy waiting at the door for someone who’s not coming home tonight. Plus, if he stays, he knows the spiraling won’t stop. 

Maybe it’s best to get out of the house for a while. To see if forgetting about it for a couple of hours is possible. 

Buck types a quick text in agreement and grabs his keys. 

Twenty minutes later, he’s parking his Jeep in Eddie’s driveway. The chilly nighttime air nips at his skin as he walks the familiar path to the front door. He knocks and only has to wait a few seconds before the door opens, Mateo’s face on the other side. 

“Hi,” he says with a smile. 

Buck smiles back and tries to make it normal. “Hi.” 

They just stare at each other for a second, Mateo looking up at him with moon-eyes. Buck, on the other hand, feels distinctly uncomfortable. He tries to ignore it. 

Finally, Mateo seems to realize maybe he’s been standing there for too long, and takes a step back. “Come in, come in,” he says, waving Buck inside with pink rising to his cheeks. Buck’s seen it before, so he’s prepared this time—he only lets it remind him of Eddie for a single second. 

Buck takes a step in and feels the warmth of the Diaz house descend upon him all at once. Suddenly it’s all okay, his heartbeat finally returning to its normal tempo after the high alert he’s been on all day. Just like magic. 

“Your house, again, huh?” Buck says as he wipes his feet on the welcome mat, reaching down to untie his shoes. “Fancy for a first date.” 

In front of him, Mateo nearly trips over his own feet at the word date. Really, Buck isn’t sure where this sudden nervousness is coming from. It’s cute, he supposes. Or it should be, at least. 

“Uh, yeah,” he says. Buck can tell, even from the back, that his cheeks are turning red. “I just thought, y’know, since you had already been here…” He turns around, and his words trail off as he sees Buck knelt over. Frowning: “You don’t have to do that, you know.” 

“What?” Buck says with a frown of his own. He’s distracted, still trying to unlace his shoes. 

“Take them off,” he answers. He gestures down to his own feet, where he’s wearing a pair of red Adidas sambas. “I don’t care.” 

“Oh.” Buck blinks. Tries to process this. In a robot voice, his brain helpfully tells him, this does not compute. 

Thanks, brain. 

It’s just—Eddie always had people take their shoes off before coming in. Maybe it was just something his family had done, something drilled into him since birth. But either way, he was a big believer in clean floors. He would want his floors to be clean, even now. And surely, surely, this isn’t okay. Surely, this won’t be allowed. Surely, some God is going to appear and smite Mateo off the Earth unless he agrees to take those Adidas off right at this very moment. 

Buck has the insane thought that he needs to go to Mateo’s closet and just…burn all his shoes. He can’t be trusted with them, clearly. Maybe that’s insane. But hey, these floors are sacred. So are the windows and the shutters and the blinds and the ball of dust in the corner, because they all have been touched by Eddie, loved by Eddie, maintained by Eddie. Buck’s the only one left here to protect that, to protect this house. He’s the only one who knows how things are supposed to be, because Eddie’s gone, and so is Christopher. 

This—this is wrong. It’s so wrong that Buck has to grit his teeth for a second to swallow back the surge of irrational anger that threatens to spill out. But there’s nothing he can do. He can’t tell Mateo to stop wearing shoes in his own home. He can’t kidnap Eddie and bring him here to enforce the rules himself. 

So instead, he smiles and hopes it doesn’t come off as passive-aggressive as he feels as he says, “No, it’s fine. I’m just more comfortable without them.” 

Mateo shrugs, indifferent. “Fine by me.” 

Inside his head, Buck mockingly repeats the words, in a high-pitched, whiny voice. Then he thinks, well, that was mean. He shouldn’t be like this—angry, bitter, annoyed. Mateo hasn’t done anything wrong. He’s sweet. He’s just wearing shoes, for fuck’s sake. 

Buck resolves to be normal again as he finishes sliding off his own. Tucking them in the empty corner where the Diazes always leave them, he stands up and moves to follow Mateo in the living room. 

“I thought we could watch a movie,” Mateo is saying as he rounds the couch. He swipes something off the coffee table and holds it up for Buck to see. A red DVD case— Mission Impossible. “You said you had never seen it, so…” 

Buck had said that, over text a couple nights ago. He doesn’t remember how the conversation had come up; just that Mateo was talking about some of his favorite movies, and predictably, Buck hadn’t seen any of them. The message was typed out and sent before he could think it through—my friend thinks I’m literally the scum of the Earth for never having seen a Tom Cruise movie.  

(Truthfully, it felt like a crime to reduce Eddie to that. Friend, not even with best to precede it. Like the world’s worst understatement, the least encompassing term for what Eddie was to him that he could possibly come up with. But it was as close as he could get without getting too close, and Buck was still dedicated to making sure Mateo never knew about Eddie. He doesn’t want those wires to cross.)

You WHAT? Mateo had responded, oblivious to Buck’s turmoil, and now here they are. 

Buck had imagined he would watch this movie for the first time with Eddie. That was the plan, anyway. They had been sitting on the couch, Eddie in a pair of underwear and a pink collared shirt, Buck wearing his own misery, when Eddie asserted vehemently that he wouldn’t let Buck get away with this terrible atrocity and lack of culture any longer. We’ll binge every Tom Cruise movie, he said. Risky Business first. Buck had agreed, because what else was he meant to do? When Eddie wanted something, Buck gave it to him. 

Then, Eddie had told him over a scone that he was moving to El Paso, and the last thing either of them were thinking about was Tom Cruise. 

“Sounds good,” Buck says, instead of saying all of this. He’ll watch the movie with Mateo, even though it stings to think that it means he’ll never be able to watch it for the first time with Eddie. Even though it feels like a betrayal. 

Mateo smiles at him, pleased. “I’ll grab us beers.” 

“No, that’s alright,” Buck says, a little too quickly. He doesn’t want to drink another fucking High Life. This holy ground has already been desecrated enough today. “I’m good.” 

Mateo shrugs, walking towards the kitchen. “Just one for me, then,” he says. 

In the distance, Buck hears the sound of shoes moving across tiles and the fridge opening, and it occurs to him he’s alone inside Eddie’s living room for the first time in, well…seemingly forever. 

He’s not sure what he should do. Dissolve into dust and sink into the cracks in the floorboards so he’ll never have to leave, maybe. 

He spins in a slow circle, taking in the room. It’s funny—Eddie took a lot of his furniture and decorations with him to El Paso. The couch chair Christopher loves, the ottoman, the coffee table, even the rug. But he left the couch. Buck has no idea why, because out of everything here, isn’t this what means the most? Isn’t it the heart-tissue of the Diaz house? The thing that’s held the weight of Eddie, Buck, and Christopher the most, the thing that’s sat under them through movie nights and science project buildings and post-therapy naps and hugs and tears and everything in between?

Or maybe that’s why Eddie didn’t bring it—to leave something here to remember him by. As if Buck wasn’t already enough to handle the job on his own. 

It almost seems like a gift, left here for him. Or maybe a curse. Buck’s not sure. 

Either way, it feels as if he’s doing something both terribly wrong and terribly right as he slowly lowers himself onto its cushions. Feels, for the first time in months, the scratchy navy fabric under his palm. He doesn’t know what to do with it—whether he should sink into the feeling, succumb to the familiarity, or jerk right back up as if burnt. 

Mateo walks back in with a beer in his hand. His gaze doesn’t change when he glances at Buck sitting ramrod straight on his couch, but Buck—he suddenly can’t breathe over the acidic taste of guilt. With his heart pounding in his ears, he feels, strangely, like a kid sticking his hand in the cookie drawer, getting caught doing something he shouldn’t. 

“Sure you don’t want, like, a water or anything?” Mateo asks as he sets his beer on the coffee table, no coaster. Does he not even worry about getting water rings on the wood? 

Eddie would never. He had a pair of ceramic coasters that Christopher made in art class years and years ago. Both of them were painted with different pictures of the two of them together—Christopher and Eddie at the zoo, pointing at a lion that looked more like an artistically shaped orange blob, and Christopher and Eddie at the beach with a surfboard and an umbrella. 

There were never any water rings on Eddie’s table because of them. And this isn’t Eddie’s table, so Buck doesn’t really care, but it’s just…different, is all. 

“I’m good,” Buck says, smiling weakly. 

Mateo shrugs, grabbing the DVD case off of the table again. He pops it open, and as he walks over to the DVD player, Buck is thinking about it—this house, a standing testament to Eddie, and yet not, because it’s not the same. 

He thinks about how Eddie might’ve been a stickler for shoes-off and the use of coasters, but really, neatness—perfection—had never been the concern here. It’s what made it so much different from the loft. Eddie let the world have its way with the house, let time nip at it until it was something cozy and homey, a bit messy, and all the more Eddie and Christopher for it. He let it be loved, and that’s part of the reason Buck loved it so much. The mismatched plates in the cupboards and the crayon-stained wallpaper were such a startling contrast from anything he had ever known before. 

He hadn’t known, prior to meeting Eddie and Christopher, that it was possible to love a house like you loved a person. 

Now, he’s overcome with the insane urge to shout at Mateo’s back: have you seen it, the crayon stain on the wall? Eddie shouted at Christopher for ten minutes over that, until Christopher was crying and he felt too bad to shout anymore. Have you seen the Sharpie marks on the door frame outside the laundry room? The tallest one is exactly sixty-six and a half inches above the ground because that’s exactly how tall Christopher was when he left for El Paso. Have you seen the patched walls in the bedroom? I did those. Eddie and I did them together. I breathed into this house. 

You could never understand. 

The thought feels him with something dark and unkind. Buck swallows it down forcibly and makes sure the smile is back on his face by the time Mateo turns around. 

It’s okay. He’s okay. This is all—it’s good. Truly. 

The opening chords start trickling out of the TV speakers. Mateo takes his spot next to Buck on the couch, looking over to give him a soft, private smile close as he settles into the cushions. They’re close enough that their thighs are touching. 

Buck can feel the firm material of Mateo’s jeans through the fabric of his sweatpants, the warmth of his body heat seeping in from under that. Mateo doesn’t know it, but he’s sitting on the same side of him Eddie sits on. Mateo doesn’t know it, but Buck couldn’t be further away at all. 

He’s drifting somewhere else—back at his graveyard of memories. Digging them out one by one, because they had never been firmly buried in the first place. 

It’s almost like he’s there again, on a different night, in a past version of this house, back when the air hung a little bit warmer around him and it was still easy to breathe. Eddie’s beside him, thighs and arms brushing, and there’s something different on the TV—another action movie Eddie’s into that Buck has never heard of. There’s Modelos on the coffee table, sitting on top of the ceramic coasters. They got home from their shift a couple hours ago now, and Eddie smells like the fresh pine-scented body wash he uses, and that…that’s real nice. Buck is tired and Eddie is solid, and his head might be slowly, slowly falling on his shoulder. 

Falling asleep there, bud? Eddie says with a chuckle, his breath tickling Buck’s ear. Nodding, Buck murmurs something intelligible and buries further into Eddie, and—

Mateo nudges Buck’s shoulder to point out something on the screen, and the illusion breaks. 

He’s back in real life, in this present, lesser version of the house, and Buck’s heart aches. It’s such a tender, painful hurt he wants to claw the entire organ out. Next to him, Mateo laughs at something in the movie, and Buck wonders how someone could know so little and have no idea how little they know all at once. 

Buck closes his eyes. Sinks into the feeling of the warm body next to him and tries to calm his thrashing heart. He wishes that he was falling asleep, because at least in his dreams, it would be easier to pretend. 

Towards the end of the movie, after Tom Cruise explodes a helicopter with a piece of bubblegum, Buck gets up to use the bathroom. If Mateo notices that he finds it immediately, without fumbling around or asking for directions, he doesn’t say anything. 

Buck pulls out his phone as he sits on the toilet—a bad habit Eddie always flames him for. Immediately, he’s overwhelmed. 

Four missed calls from Eddie. A message that his UPS package arrived that he promptly ignores. Three messages from Eddie. 

Heart in his throat, Buck opens up his and Eddie’s text thread. 

Hey, I’m sorry I missed our usual time. I forgot to tell you a guy on C-shift asked if I could cover for him today. I can call now if you’re still free? 

That one was sent at 9:35. The next one is at 10:23. Really tired, gonna go to bed now. I hope you’re okay. I’m really sorry we missed each other, was looking forward to talking to you tonight. 

Then, a few minutes later, as if Eddie had to chew on it, had hovered his thumb over the blue arrow in hesitation: I miss you. 

Attached to it is a red heart emoji. 

Buck nearly throws up from the guilt. 

Despite it all, Buck keeps seeing Mateo. 

It feels less like a choice, and more like addiction—try all he wants, but Buck will inevitably end back up at the door. He has to. Truth is, Buck is starving, starving for something he’ll never truly have, and the closer he gets , the more the gap in his chest opens up, yawning and hungry for more. And then it’s this—a positive feedback loop, a cycle of unfulfillment he can’t find an end to. Maybe this is just who he’s meant to be now. A voyager climbing up the tallest mountain over and over again, until his legs are beaten and bloody, because it’s the closest he can ever get to reaching the moon. 

Besides, he swears there’s something there, a relief to the pain of it all. There’s something in the foundations of that house that steadies him, something in the feeling of Mateo’s shoulder against him has him believing that maybe he could survive this. He learns all the places where the house—and Mateo—are different, and that makes it easier to ignore them, easier to pretend. 

He leaves every night feeling something akin to better , like temporary spackle has patched over the holes in his chest. It’s artificial at best—nothing like the bone-deep rightness he used to feel after a night with Eddie and Christopher—but it’s something. 

In some backwards way, Buck feels like this is the closest he’s been to Eddie since he left. Which is strange, because the further Buck finds himself caught up in Mateo, the less time he has for Eddie, and the conversations they do have are riddled with lies and half-truths. Everything feels less authentic, less them. Buck hates it, and yet, he can’t stop it. 

He doesn’t know how. 

“Christopher’s teaching me to play chess now,” Eddie is telling him on the phone. Under his voice, there’s the faint sound of bustling, brief streams of other voices filtering in—Eddie is at the grocery store. 

Buck can imagine him pushing his cart through the dairy aisle, his phone tucked between his ear and his shoulder as he looks for Christopher’s favorite brand of yogurt. His heart aches a little just thinking about it. Eddie’s schedule is busy these days, between shifts, spending time with Christopher and his parents, and looking for a house down there. Most days, their shifts overlap inconveniently, so this is what Eddie does to still make time for Buck—calls him at the grocery store, or in the car as he waits to pick up Christopher from school, or even sometimes during his morning walk around the neighborhood. 

“Oh?” Buck says, loud enough to be heard over the chopping of onions. His phone is set on the counter beside him, on speaker as he preps for dinner; he’s making steak tacos tonight. “And let me guess—you’re terrible.” 

“What? No.” A more accurate translation: how did you know? 

“Eddie,” Buck says with a laugh, “c’mon. You don’t even know the difference between a rook and a bishop.” 

He remembers pulling out the chess board one time at the station and how Eddie looked at it like it was a foreign—potentially evil—entity. Buck had tried to explain the different pieces and their abilities, but Eddie had been a lost cause. 

“Well,” Eddie huffs, “I do now.” His cheeks must be flushed, and for one second, Buck feels ridiculously fond. Eddie continues, “You know, he told me you guys were playing online together. Through some app, or something?” 

“Yeah.” Buck nods, sliding his pile of diced unions into a bowl. “Game Pigeon.” 

Ever since Eddie moved down there, the floodgates of communication between Buck and Chris have opened. It felt unfair, before, to text Christopher when he knew Eddie wasn’t getting any responses on his end. So he refrained as much as possible, even though it killed him a bit inside. 

Now, though, it’s different. Eddie has much more of Christopher than Buck does—and that’s how it’s meant to be. It’s perfectly fair and fine, and Buck isn’t jealous of Eddie at all, he just—he misses him. He’s glad that he and Christopher have been texting. At least he has that. 

“He’s getting good,” he adds. “Couple more months of practice, and he could start winning against me.” 

“Please don’t let him,” Eddie responds. “His ego’s already big enough after beating me a million times.” 

“You say that like it’s an accomplishment.” 

Eddie laughs, a quick breath of air. “ Oh, shut up.” 

Buck laughs too, and for a second, he almost feels…something close to happy. 

Then, Eddie says, “Hey, maybe next time we call I can get him on the phone, too. Friday, right? I might be over at my parents’ at our usual time, anyway.” 

The happy feeling recedes all at once, leaving Buck feeling itchy in its wake. The taste of guilt coats his tongue. 

Somehow, Eddie notices the shift. “What?” 

Buck bites his lip. “Nothing. It’s just—” he hesitates. “I, uh, told Maddie I was going to babysit Jee that day.” 

It’s a lie. He’s going to be at a restaurant with Mateo. Their true first date. It was the only day they could do it, with Buck’s shift schedule and Mateo stopping around for some open casting calls over the week. It’s funny, that it felt so simple when Buck agreed to it, and now—it’s like he’s committed a crime. And he’s lying to the authorities about his involvement. 

“Oh,” Eddie says. “That’s fine. It’ll be nice to say hi to her.” 

And that just makes Buck feel worse. 

He clenches his eyes shut as he stumbles through another lie. “Well, after that—Maddie’s coming back, and we were gonna have dinner together, and I—I just don’t think there’s gonna be time.” 

He’s never felt so sick in his life. God, this sucks. This fucking sucks. He’s not built for this—lying to Eddie. Prioritizing someone else over him. It’s just—not in his blood. And yet…

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line. Buck’s stomach is sinking so far inside his chest he thinks it might permanently lock out of place. “I-I’m sorry,” he tries, weakly. 

Then, finally, Eddie speaks. “Hey,” he says, voice soft and reassuring. “Don’t worry about it, man. Another time, yeah?” 

“Yeah.” Buck starts nodding eagerly, as if Eddie can see it, as if trying to convince himself that it’s alright, this is all fine, he’s not as terrible of a friend as he feels like he is. 

It’s quiet after that, so quiet that Buck can hear it when Eddie starts placing his groceries on the conveyor belt in front of the cashier, soft little clinks. 

The thought occurs to him, and he can’t let it go. He manages to push past the lump of guilt in his throat to say, “Don’t forget to use that coupon.” 

Eddie laughs, a soft sound. “Almost did,” he says, and it sounds like something more. “Thanks, Buck.” 

Buck takes a breath and tries to let that assuage some of the guilt. At least—at least, he can still help Eddie, in small ways like this. At least Eddie is still thankful for him. 

Sometimes, selfishly, Buck wonders how Eddie is surviving in El Paso without him. Who’s there to find the TV remote for him when he loses it between the couch cushions? Who helps him pick out the best corn at the grocery store? Who gets the stepstool out to retrieve the stuffed animal Christopher thought would be funny to throw on the ceiling fan? Who makes sure he remembers to pack a change of socks in his duffel and doesn’t forget his shirt in his locker? Who does he lean on after a long shift, who gives him open arms to fall apart in? Who keeps him safe and warm and protected? 

Who takes care of him, when he refuses to take care of himself? 

Then Buck remembers that Eddie existed long before Buck came into his life, and he would exist afterwards even if they never spoke again. Buck was a fixture in his life, but perhaps not the foundation—if you pulled him out, that didn’t mean everything else would crumble. His place was fleeting, never helpful enough to become a necessity. 

Buck pushes the thought away, quickly catalogues it as nonsense. Besides, he’s always known it’s true—Eddie’s much better at surviving without him than he’s ever been at surviving without Eddie. It’s a truth he’s had to learn over the years, that nobody else seems to love like he does. He’s always been the one who needs, more than anybody has ever needed him. 

In the end, Buck will tell himself it’s not the thought that makes his eyes start to water. That’s just the onions. 

Buck parks in front of Eddie’s house at seven PM on the dot, dressed in a pair of slacks and a brown button-up. The inside of the Jeep smells like Buck’s cologne. 

Only a handful of seconds after Buck sends a text to Mateo letting him know he’s here, the passenger seat door swings open. Mateo stands in the dark, a nearby streetlamp casting him in pale yellow, revealing the tight black long-sleeve he paired with dark jeans and his slicked-back hair. 

“Hey,” he says, smiling. “You look—” He pauses, his eyes raking over Buck. Even in the dim light, Buck can make out the blush that crawls up his cheeks. It takes a second, an unsubtle clearing of the throat, before the rest of the sentence comes out. “Really good.” 

Buck’s heard those words many times, from girls on barstools and in bar bathrooms, from actual girlfriends, in clubs and on the streets and on calls and in his Tinder messages. Usually, they light a slow fire in his stomach, like putting a match to gasoline, turning him into something fluid and hungry. The truth is, Buck just likes compliments. A lot. Once, Eddie had patted his chest with Looking good there, Buckley, and Buck had nearly popped a boner right in the middle of Hen and Karen’s vow renewal ceremony. Such reactions are not out of the ordinary for him. 

But now, nothing happens. He doesn’t want to melt into his seat. He doesn’t feel suddenly taken over by a flirty, confident mood. It’s just…the same dull feeling inside his chest, like something missing. 

Buck smiles around it and hopes it doesn’t come off flat. “Thanks,” he says. “You do too.” 

Mateo ducks his head as his blush grows, like he’s really taking it to heart, and that of all things makes Buck feel guilty. He pushes it down. It’s fine. He’s just—he’s not in the mood to be flirty. It’s not that he doesn’t like Mateo or anything. Because, he does. Truly. He likes him. 

Mateo climbs into the car, and Buck shifts it into drive. 

Music gently trickles from the speakers. Buck recognizes the strum of the guitar, the gravelly hum of the leader singer's voice, but it takes a second for him to place it. Then, the song drifts into the chorus, and the singer questions whether he’ll ever get to see his lover again, and Buck remembers exactly why this song is on his playlist. 

Mateo’s nose crinkles. “Is this… Wilco? ” 

It is. Buck only knows this song because Eddie liked it—because Eddie loved Wilco, and Shinedown, and Pearl Jam, and Tom Petty, and the genre as a whole. Buck remembers cooking over at Eddie’s with this very album playing through his phone speaker, chopping up bell peppers as Eddie gently hummed along from the barstool. Ever since then, his cooking playlist had become an amalgamation of Eddie’s favorites. He must have been listening to it while making lunch earlier today and forgotten to switch the playlist before getting into the car. 

He wonders if he’ll always feel like this—haunted by Eddie. 

Buck looks at Mateo, faking a grin at his reaction. “What, not a shooter for dad rock?” 

Mateo shrugs. “Eh, it’s fine. Just—not my favorite.” 

Buck feels something slither in him at the blatant distaste in Mateo’s voice, like don’t you know that Eddie loved this song? How could you say that about something Eddie loved? 

It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid—Mateo hasn’t done anything wrong. He doesn’t even know about Eddie, let alone what music he likes. But Buck can’t help it. 

He just thinks—if you’re gonna replace Eddie, if you’re gonna take his spot and his house and his bedroom, then you should respect him. You shouldn’t do anything he wouldn’t do. 

Instead of expressing that, Buck just grits his teeth through another smile and pretends like he doesn’t have fire crawling through his veins. “What kind of music are you into, then?” 

Mateo gives him an answer about indie rock and folk country that Buck only half listens to. Quietly seething, Buck switches the channel to accommodate him but not before Jeff Tweedy sings over the final notes of the song: 

I’m evicted from your heart. 

I deserve it. 

Buck takes Mateo to Eddie’s favorite restaurant. 

It’s a Thai place, a couple miles down on Sunset, that Eddie swears has the best pad thai he’s ever tasted. Buck is inclined to agree, although he thinks the pull of this place is less about the food and more about the memories. There’s something inherently nostalgic about it—the potted plants, the wooden chairs, the simple red tablecloths. Buck can’t help but recall every time he’s been here, after shifts and before Christopher’s school musical performance, and a thousand times in between to pick up their takeout.

They had come here, in the weeks after the lawsuit. It was the first time they had hung out since Eddie had forgiven him, and Buck remembers sitting in the chairs, Eddie laughing across from him, and thinking I’ll never let myself lose this again. 

He should’ve known better, even then, than to make those kinds of promises. 

They chose a spot by the window. Buck orders pad thai. Mateo says he doesn’t like pad thai and orders khao soi instead. The waitress comes to pour their wine and tells them that they make a cute couple. Mateo smiles; Buck smiles too, ten times less genuine, and tries to convince himself that the way everything in him protests the idea doesn’t mean anything. 

There’s a connection between him and Mateo. He knows this because when they’re at Eddie’s house together, he can feel it, a tug in the center of his chest telling him this is a place you want to be in. And he likes Mateo—like his smile, the way he blushes, how he’s practically an open book, pouring over himself to tell Buck anything he wants to know. 

Here, though—outside the fortress of Eddie’s house—Buck is overly aware of the fact that, suddenly, he feels absolutely nothing for him. 

But it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fluke. An off-night. 

Buck resolves to ignore it. Everything is normal. He’ll do everything he’s supposed to do—smile when Mateo smiles at him, listen while Mateo tells him about the audition he had that morning, ask him questions like Buck has a genuine interest in his life. Buck will smile and nod and look like he’s having the best time. 

Tonight, Mateo will not be the only actor at the table. 

Buck doesn’t know who he would be without Eddie. 

He thinks about who he was ten years ago, traipsing across the country with nothing to his name besides the Jeep and a couple thousand bucks, stumbling in and out of careers and bars and girls' bedrooms. He thinks about who he is now, today—older and wiser and considerably less of a punk. Finally, he thinks, he’s somebody worth being. And there’s a lot of reasons he got here—the 118, firefighting in general, Abby, Bobby, Maddie coming back—but at the center of it all is Eddie. 

Eddie, his foundation. Eddie, his centerpiece. Eddie, the breath in his lungs. 

Without Eddie, Buck would still be a stagnant creature, moving but not changing. Moving, but not towards anything better. He would be lost, like a stray dog without a home to return to. And maybe he is that now anyway, now that Eddie’s left. Now that he’s back at the pound. But he never would have even known there was anything different had he not met Eddie, had Eddie not offered him a home he could curl up into the corner of and finally be safe. 

That’s the thing about Buck—he’s a piece of clay molded by Eddie’s warm hands, a shadow cast only in his life. There’s no knowing Buck without knowing Eddie. 

Buck hasn’t told Mateo about Eddie. Of course he hasn’t. How would he explain that? Buck knows how it looks. He knows that if Mateo found out, he would no longer have anything to do with Buck. He would leave, and it would be like losing Eddie twice over. So Buck won’t tell him. He can’t. 

Mateo doesn’t know Eddie, so he doesn’t know Buck. Can’t know Buck. That’s like…holding a distorted painting of himself in front of his face and asking someone to fall in love with that instead of the man behind it. It’s impossible. 

But it doesn’t matter though. Buck isn’t asking Mateo to fall in love with him. Honestly, he couldn’t care less if he does. 

“Who are you texting?” 

Maddie’s voice jolts Buck out of his daze so suddenly he nearly falls out of his seat. 

When he glances up, both Maddie and Chim are looking at him, eyebrows raised over their plates of fettuccine Alfredo and nearly empty glasses of white wine—or raspberry flavored sparkling water on Maddie’s part. 

Buck swallows, caught. This is what it feels like to be cornered by a slightly wine-drunk detective and his very perceptive partner who have a terrifying ability to communicate telepathically with each other. 

Okay, yes, he had been texting under the table. Bad manners, he knows. Disrespectful, probably, when he’s a guest in their house. But also—they had been talking about their anniversary plans, or something else Buck can’t recall now, and he wasn’t even part of the conversation. When his phone lit up with a message from Mateo, what was he meant to do—ignore him? And when his single response turned into a full-fledged text conversation at the expense of paying attention to dinner, it was just—it was fine. Besides, it’s not like this sort of behavior is completely uncommon for Buck. 

Slowly, he shuts his phone off before Chimney can reach over the table and snatch it out of his hands. He can tell by the glint in his eye that he’s thinking about it, and after eight years of friendship, Buck has learned to take precautions. 

“Well?” Maddie says after Buck is silent for too long, gesturing for him to answer her question. 

Buck, of course, opts for a lie. “Just Eddie.”

It’s a believable one, is the thing. Not that he and Eddie are always texting or anything—it’s just that sometimes Buck will send him a funny meme and Eddie will respond What? I don’t get it and Buck will have to sit there for twenty minutes and try to explain something that undoubtedly just sounds like gibberish to Eddie’s ears. Then somehow that will devolve into an hours-long conversation about maned wolves and chess strategies and Buck’s new secret ingredient in his snickerdoodle recipe, and…

It’s hard to look away from the phone when Eddie’s name is the one on it, is all. 

Buck is a terrible liar, but this is a good one. He’s expecting Maddie to take his word for it, admonish him for his bad manners, and then move on. He’s expecting, really, to get away with it. 

But instead, Maddie’s eyes narrow. “You’re lying,” she states, after a moment of careful assessment. 

Buck’s mouth gapes open a bit. “What? N-no, I’m not—” 

Rolling her eyes, Maddie says, “Evan, I know when you’re lying. I knew it when you broke my Juicy Couture perfume in the seventh grade, and I know it now.” 

“Wha—?” Buck blinks. Then, his gaze focuses. “Wait, you knew about that?” 

Another roll of the eyes. “Yes. You were so obvious; you smelt like that stuff for a week afterwards.” 

Oh. Buck processes this, and it feels like dismantling on lifelong belief. He really thought he got away with that. For twenty years. His life is a lie. 

“W-well,” he stammers. “How do you know now?” 

“Yeah,” Chimney chimes in, looking at his wife like she’s developed alien super powers. “How do you know?” It seems, for all their usual telepathy, he’s just as lost as Buck is now. 

Maddie looks at Buck—really looks at him—for a long moment, and it feels like she’s seeing down to his soul. “You always smile when you’re texting Eddie,” she says simply. “You’re not smiling now.” 

Buck stares at her, heart pounding in his chest. He feels, strangely, like he’s been caught. Which is stupid, because this is far from the first time she’s expressed that sentiment. Eddie seems like he’s good for you, she said, a couple months after she had moved to LA. You’re happier with Eddie, she told him when she found out about his plans with the lawsuit, a silent are you sure you want to do this? 

I need to buy Eddie flowers, she said, the first time Maddie had ever come to one of Bobby’s barbecues. They had been standing in the kitchen, helping Athena clean up while the rest of their friends lingered outside. I’ve never seen you laugh like that before. 

Maybe it’s just a truth everybody in his life has come to accept: Eddie is his person. The one who can make him smile the biggest, laugh the loudest, feel the fullest. The one who could hurt him the most, too, if he ever wanted to. 

Buck’s come to accept it too; except now, he feels a bitter taste fill his mouth at the reminder. It’s a reminder he doesn’t need, a reminder of how big the spaces are between the things he wants and the things he actually has. As if he isn’t already terribly, horribly aware. 

He sits with that for a second, staring at Maddie. Then, it shatters: “That’s stupid,” he whines, just on the side of petulant. “What if we had been texting about something serious?” 

Maddie raises an eyebrow. “Were you?” 

“No! I mean—yes, um…” he trails off. “Or, no. We were just…texting.” He gives a shrug even he knows is unconvincing. 

“About what?” 

Buck bristles. “It’s private.” 

“Mhm.” Maddie looks at Chimney; he looks back. They both seem to come to the same, silent conclusion: Buck is a terrible liar. 

It’s Chimney who speaks. “C’mon, Buck, just give it up. You know you can’t win against Professor X over here.” He nudges his wife with his elbow and looks at Buck with commiseration in his eyes: we both know what it’s like. 

Buck doesn’t know who Professor X is. 

“I’m not—” lying, he wants to say, but he is, and he looks at Maddie and Chim’s unimpressed faces and knows that they both know it too. All at once, he feels his resolve crumble. “Fine,” he says, pressing his lips together so hard they lose circulation, angry that he’s relenting. “I wasn’t texting Eddie.” 

A slow, triumphant grin grows over his sister’s face. “Okay,” she says. “Who were you texting?”

Buck hesitates. He knows it’s a bad idea to tell them about Mateo; he can feel it in his bones. Chimney, for one, always gets way too giddy when Buck is seeing someone new, teasing him and asking him a million questions and trying to get their number so he can send them his startlingly large collection of embarrassing Buck photos. Buck doesn’t want that because he doesn’t want to talk about Mateo, and he doesn’t want the whole wide world to know about him, either—which is the inevitable side effect of telling Chimney anything. 

Maddie, on the other hand, is a whole other story. Buck doesn’t know if he can handle the way she always sees right through him, not right now. 

“Nobody,” he says, after too long of a pause. 

Maddie and Chimney sigh in unison. 

“You’re the worst,” Maddie gripes, slinging a tiny piece of sauce-covered chicken at his forehead. 

“Hey!” 

“We’ve already created such a nice environment of honesty here, Buck,” Chimney says, gesturing to the table. “You can tell us.” 

Buck sighs. He should’ve drank more wine. 

“It’s nobody,” he says again. “It’s just—” he takes a deep breath, “I’vebeenseeingsomebody.” 

Chimney’s brow wrinkles. Maddie purses her lips. At the same time: “What?” 

Another deep breath. God, he’s going to regret this, isn’t he? “I may, uh, possibly”—he winces—“be seeing somebody new? And that’s who I was texting?” 

Their faces both crease with shock. 

“Casually,” he rushes to add, his skin itching all over from the admission. “Very casually. I mean, we’ve only been on one date, and we haven’t even, like, kissed or anything. It’s barely even a thing, really.” 

There’s a long moment of silence. “You’ve been seeing someone?” Maddie repeats, like she’s just processed this. “For how long?” 

“Uh.” Buck scratches the back of his head. “Like, a couple of weeks?” 

“Guy or girl?” Chimney jumps in to ask. 

“Guy. His name is, uh—” Buck almost doesn’t want to say it, but he feels like he has to. They’re gonna ask anyway. “Mateo.” 

“How’d you guys meet?” Maddie asks the question so carefully that it makes Buck feel nervous. He has no idea what she’s thinking. 

Again, Buck hesitates, chewing on his lip. He doesn’t know what to say; it’s not like the truth is an acceptable answer. He can’t think of anything worse than Maddie finding out about the whole house situation. So, instead, weakly, he says, “Just—around, you know.” 

Maddie and Chimney look at each other again. Buck hates when they do that. 

“I think that’s code for Grindr,” Chimney says in a stage whisper. 

And you know. Buck will let them believe it. Somehow, that’s better than the actual truth. 

Maddie gives him a look, and Chimney grins in response. 

She looks back at Buck. “So, this guy, Mateo…do you like him?” 

Buck shifts in his seat, feeling suddenly the most uncomfortable he has throughout this entire conversation. “Um, yeah, of course,” he says. “He’s…he’s nice.” 

It feels flat coming off his tongue, and he can see it on Maddie’s face, the way she purses her lips in dissatisfaction—she heard it too. Great. 

Chimney, on the other hand, looks delighted. Naturally. Buck wouldn’t be surprised if he’s gonna run off to giddily call Hen and Karen as soon as the dinner’s over. But when he speaks again, his voice is surprisingly sincere. “You know, Buck,” he says, sticking his fork into a piece of chicken. “I’m really proud of you for moving on.” 

For a second, Buck thinks Chimney means moving on from Eddie, and he’s confused. It just seems like an odd thing to say. 

Then, he remembers: Tommy.  

He almost wants to laugh. How funny is it that Tommy’s name has probably crossed his mind only twice since Eddie broke the news? Bigger heartbreaks detract from the smaller ones, he’s learned. 

Still, Buck smiles, grateful for the sentiment, and the dinner goes on. More questions are thrown at him about Mateo, and Buck does his best to answer them without digging himself deeper into the grave. At some point, Chimney decides to have mercy on Buck and switch the topic to Jee-yun’s birthday party next month. 

Throughout it all, Maddie watches him, studies him. Buck feels like a bug under her microscope. And Maddie has a very powerful microscope. Like, Titan Krios levels. It’s frightening. 

It’s not until all their plates are clean, and Chimney is hauling a stack of them to the kitchen by himself, that Buck turns to Maddie. “Okay,” he says, tired of whatever ten-step assessment Maddie’s been scaling him on for the last half-hour. “Spit it out.” 

Maddie sure takes the opportunity, like he knew she would. 

“You’re making a mistake,” she says, simple as that, no sugarcoating. Maddie’s always been good at giving it to him honestly. 

Buck doesn’t really know how to respond to that. Doesn’t know how to defend himself. The worst part is if she already thinks that—when all she knows is Mateo’s name—imagine what she would think if she knew who exactly Mateo was and how exactly Buck met him. 

“Why do you think that?” he asks, very carefully.

“Evan,” Maddie says, sighing. She reaches out across the table to take his hand, and Buck lets her, feeling her soft fingers over his calloused skin. “You’ve been going through a lot these past few months. And the last time you jumped into a relationship during a big emotional change, you ended up with Taylor.” 

He knows what she’s talking about: the shooting. When he almost lost Eddie, in a different way than he’s losing him now. He doesn’t want to think that this situation is in any way similar to that, but he can’t lie to himself—he sort of sees what Maddie is getting at. 

“Maddie, it wasn’t like—” he shakes his head. “Taylor—she was fine.”  

It wasn’t like there was nothing there, between them. Sure, their relationship was a mess by most standards, dysfunctional, even toxic. But Buck did love her, in some way, and in some way, Taylor loved him too. The entire relationship wasn’t built upon the aftermath of the shooting, even if that’s where it started. 

Buck thinks he would’ve ended up with her at some point, whether Eddie had almost died or not. 

Probably. 

“Exactly,” Maddie says. “Just fine. Look, Buck, I think you have a habit of using your relationships as a way to hide from yourself.” She tilts her head at him, smiling sadly. “And I just—I don’t want you to fall into that trap again.” 

Buck looks at her and thinks maybe it’s true. Maybe that’s what Taylor was—a whole lot of hiding and settling. But the thing is, he never thought about it like that at the time. He genuinely did think that he loved her, uncomplicatedly, with no ulterior motives. If he was using her as a shield, a way to avoid facing the uncomfortable parts of himself, he had no idea in the moment. 

“Thanks for the concern, Mads, but…that’s not what this is, okay?” he says, trying to swallow back the way it tastes like dishonesty. “Mateo is—he’s a nice guy. Really.” 

Maddie leans back and sighs. “There it is, again. It’s just—” she waves a hand. “The way you talk about him. You’re a gusher, Buck—you gush. But you barely have anything to say about this guy. You…” She looks at him for a long moment. “You still just seem so sad .”

Buck lets go of Maddie’s hand. Sits back in his seat. Frowns. 

He can’t deny it. He’s still miserable. There’s a shiny layer of gold plating over it, hiding it now, making it feel better—until he looks too long. And then he’s just back where he started, hollow on the inside, aching with all the emptiness. 

“But—but that’s not because of Mateo,” he tries to defend himself. “That’s just because Eddie is gone.” 

Maddie just looks at him for a long moment, like she’s seeing down to the deepest waters of him. “Right,” she says, meaningfully. And then she’s grabbing her glass, standing up, and following Chimney into the kitchen.

Buck watches her go, swallowing back the league of emotions rising up in his throat. He can hear his own words echoing in his head: 

Eddie is gone. Eddie is gone. Eddie is gone. 

And thinks, maybe, that’s the because of everything. 

Buck is at the pool table, playing a round of eightball with Hen and Chimney, when Ravi’s voice rings up from downstairs. 

“Buck!” he shouts. “You have a guest.” 

Hen’s eyebrows shoot up, pausing where she was lining up a shot at the cue ball. “A guest?” 

Buck shrugs as he sets his cue against the table. 

They’re a couple hours into a twenty-four, and Buck is already flagging. It’s been like this since Eddie left—this perpetual tiredness, this bone-deep weariness he can’t outrun. It doesn’t matter how many hours of sleep he gets; he always wakes up dreary, like his body is trying to pull itself down into its grave. Buck’s good at compartmentalizing though. He’s sure everyone has noticed he doesn’t have as much to give lately, but he hasn’t let it affect his performance on calls. He’ll hold together, just so he doesn’t have to hear one more person ask if he’s okay. 

He approaches the railing not really knowing what to expect. Not really caring. But as soon as he sees who’s standing on the bottom floor next to Ravi, his throat goes dry. 

“...Mateo?” 

Mateo grins up at him. “Hey, Buck.” 

He’s wearing a pink button-up shirt over a tank top and a pair of slightly baggy blue jeans. His hair is styled forwards instead of slicked back, leaving a thick piece of hair swooping over his forehead. It’s a good look. He looks nice. Buck wants to die. 

“W-what are you doing here?” 

It’s wrong. He shouldn’t be here. Not in this place, the place where Eddie used to stand next to him and share his locker and wash the engine and check the inventory. Mateo—he’s not supposed to exist beyond Eddie’s house and the few dates they go on outside of it. He’s not supposed to exist here , in this sanctuary. 

He’s already taken one of Buck’s homes. He can’t fucking take this one too. It’s fucking wrong . 

Buck feels sick to his stomach as Mateo holds out the little sack in his hands for him to see. “I brought you something,” he says, practically shouting to be heard with the distance. 

Not knowing what else to do, he gestures for Mateo to come up. 

“Is that…?” he hears Hen whisper from behind him. 

“Yeah,” Chimney whispers back. 

Thirty seconds later, Mateo’s head appears at the top of the stairs. He walks over to Buck, his grin shifting into a soft, more fond smile as he takes in Buck in his uniform. Mateo’s never seen him like this, never seen this version of Buck—at peace, at the job he loves, surrounded by his people. 

He knows this version of him is better than any version Mateo’s gotten. But also—Buck is selfish. He doesn’t want to give these pieces of himself to Mateo. They’re already reserved for the others. 

“Hey,” he says, soft, as he slides into Buck’s space. His arm comes around Buck’s back, pulling him into a side hug, and—

Buck might literally be dying inside. He should pinch himself, probably, just to make sure that this isn’t a nightmare. 

As it is, he does his best not to stiffen up under the touch, even as the smell of Mateo’s cologne and the feel of his hair brushing against Buck’s cheeks floods his senses. 

It’s overwhelming and new. At this point, they’ve been…seeing each other for a month now, but they’ve never touched. Not like this. Buck wishes he could go back to not knowing what Mateo’s skin felt like against his. 

“You look nice,” Mateo says, his cheek against Buck’s chest. 

His eyes flicker towards Hen and Chimney, and then back before he has time to torture himself by dissecting their expressions. “Thank you,” Buck manages to get out. It sounds at least fifty percent normal. 

Finally, Mateo pulls back. He keeps one arm on Buck’s back. It’s a tether Buck wants to rip free off. 

“So,” he says, gesturing to the paper sack Mateo’s still holding. “What’s—what’s this?” 

“Oh,” Mateo says. His cheeks go a little pink as he pulls away slightly from Buck, fumbling with the package. “You, uh, you mentioned the other night you liked pan dulce, and that it had been a while since you had it, so…I thought I would bring you some. You know, in case you needed a pick-me-up.” 

He looks up at Buck, and his smile is sheepish, but also proud, like he thinks he’s done something romantic or remarkably sweet. 

And in theory, it is. It is romantic and it is sweet, and Buck should be thankful. But he’s not. Instead his palms are sweating, and his heart is dropping, leaving a sinkhole behind in his chest. Because all he can think about is the Diazes. 

There’s a little Mexican bakery by Christopher’s school they would stop at sometimes. Eddie would always let Christopher pick out three different pastries, and he would always go for the most colorful ones, the pink and orange and blue conchas. When they would get back in the car, he would rip off a piece for Buck, and by the time they got to Durand, both their mouths would be stained orange. 

Buck can smell their sugary scent even through the bag, and he wants to cry, just a little bit. But he can still feel Mateo’s eyes on his face, watching for his reaction, so just narrowly he manages to keep it together. 

“Wow,” he says as he takes the bag from Mateo’s outstretched hands. “This is—this is very sweet.” 

Mateo smiles, a little weaker than before, eyes searching over Buck’s face. Buck feels bad—he wasn’t convincing enough. 

Before he can open his mouth to try for something more enthusiastic, Hen clears her throat from across the room. 

“So, Buck,” she says, arms crossing over her chest. “Are you gonna introduce us to your friend?” 

Buck glares at her. She already knows who his friend is. They all do, because a week ago, after his dinner at Maddie’s, Chimney had bounced into the firehouse ready to tell everybody about the new, high-gossip tidbit he had gleaned. And tell them he did. For hours. There wasn’t even that much to talk about, but somehow, Chimney managed. 

Since then, Buck hasn’t heard the end of your man and Mateo and your new boyfriend and a thousand increasingly evasive questions about him and their relationship and their (non-existent, Buck has stressed) sex life, among other things. 

Every time they bring it up, this horrible, nauseating feeling overtakes Buck, like something’s clawing at the inside of his stomach. It’s this strange sense that he’s doing something wrong, breaking some unspoken rule, like he has some cause for guilt. The feeling is already bad enough when he’s with Mateo alone, at Mateo’s house or in a restaurant, but having the others aware of his crime has made it ten times worse. 

For a reason he can’t quite explain, he keeps waiting for somebody to look at him and ask: What about Eddie? How could you do this to Eddie? As if seeing Mateo is somehow a betrayal to him. 

Chimney has asked, several times, when they would get to meet Mateo. Buck was really hoping the answer would be never, because he knew the feeling would only get worse with all of them in the same room. 

But, well. 

This is typical, considering Buck’s luck. 

Buck gestures. “This is, uh—this is Mateo.” 

He doesn’t really know what to say besides that. This is Mateo, the guy I’m dating. Or, this is Mateo, the guy who moved in Eddie’s house and I accidentally met him and I accidentally purposely started going on dates with him and now he’s here and he has no idea about the whole Eddie thing. Oops. 

None of it is right. None of it looks good. So he just leaves it as that. 

Next to him, Mateo smiles, his charming one. It increases his handsomeness by at least twenty-five percent, and also—it makes him look a little bit more like Eddie. Which Buck feels totally normal about. “Hi. I’ve heard so much about you guys.” 

Correction: he’s heard a very little bit about them. Barely anything, although Buck is sure Mateo is unaware of truly how much he hasn’t been told. Buck’s only skimmed the surface when it comes to talking about the 118 with him. He’s been holding his tongue for the most part, because he’s found that it’s nearly impossible to talk about his coworkers or the firehouse or even firefighting in general without mentioning Eddie. Eddie’s at the center of nearly every story Buck has to tell, so it’s easier, really, to just not say much at all. 

Hen raises her eyebrows. “Oh?” she says. “I wish we could say the same, but Buck’s been a bit of a closed book about you.” 

She says it kindly, like this is some kind of good reflector on their relationship. And maybe other people truly do love like that—quietly, measuredly, behind closed doors. Holding their loved ones close to their heart, keeping their relationship just for themselves. But that’s never been Buck. Maddie said it herself—he’s a gusher. When he loves somebody, they spill out of him in every word and action and thought like an uncontrollable force. 

Mateo doesn’t know that, though. Buck is suddenly aware of the fact that Mateo doesn’t know that. 

Because he takes the comment in stride, like he really does think it’s a compliment. Looking up at Buck, he smiles, tucking himself closer to his side. “Yeah, well,” he says, “he’s a tough nut to crack, isn’t he?” 

Hen’s eyebrows fly all the way up into her hairline, which is especially impressive considering she has a buzz cut. Said nobody about Buck ever, she’s thinking, and…yeah. Buck’s thinking that too. 

This is exactly why he never wanted Mateo to meet them. Five minutes into the interaction, and he can already feel himself doubting everything. And the second he starts picking at the already flimsy thing he’s built, it’ll all fall down. 

Buck doesn’t want that. He just wants something to be easy for once. 

“The toughest,” Chimney chimes in, grinning. “Never met somebody so closed off. You know—sometimes Buck will just sit there in silence for hours on end. Won’t even say a word.” 

Buck shoots Chimney a glare. He just grins bigger in response. 

Mateo blinks, looking up at Buck. Buck shakes his head, as if to say don’t worry about him. 

Hen is watching them assessingly. There’s a sharpness to her gaze as she leans against the pool table, crossing her legs across each other. It makes her look a bit intimidating, but Mateo seems undeterred. “How did you two meet, Mateo?” 

Oh no. 

“Uh.” Mateo looks up at Buck with a small, private smile. “It’s actually a funny story.” 

Oh no, oh no, oh no. 

This is like watching a car crash in slow motion. A lighter being dropped onto gasoline right before the whole house explodes. 

Buck should stop this before everything comes crumbling down. But if he interrupts Mateo with a lie, then Mateo will be suspicious. But if he lets him go on…

Maybe it’ll be fine. The story isn’t immediately incriminating. 

“I actually just moved to LA about a month ago,” he says. “Buck has a friend that lives in my neighborhood, and he was visiting while I was moving in. I guess he must’ve seen me while I was moving my stuff inside, and…when a UPS truck came to drop off a package for me, he grabbed it and pretended to be the delivery man so he could talk to me.” He shrugs, smiling. “And here we are.” 

Again, Hen’s eyebrows raise. They’ve been doing a lot of that. She looks to Buck. “What friend?” 

Buck instantly goes red all over. He can feel his skin burning. 

“Um.” He racks his brain for a lie and comes away with nothing. It comes out like a question: “Eddie?” 

“Eddie?” Hen repeats slowly. Her face narrows in suspicion, gaze sliding towards Mateo, and that look—it’s dangerous. “Mateo,” she demands, “what’s your address?” 

Mateo, understandably, rears back. “Excuse me?” 

Hen looks at Buck meaningfully. Sharply. There’s a realization in that gaze, and Buck knows it immediately: 

Hen has figured him out. Of course she has. 

“It’s his house, isn’t it?” she asks. “It’s Eddie’s.” 

Buck presses his lips together and says nothing. There’s nothing he can say. 

Hen says it on an exhale, full of both understanding and pity and a sad disbelief: “Buck.” 

Next to him, Mateo frowns, looking between the two of him in confusion. “Buck? What is she talking about?” 

Buck bites his lip, hard enough to taste blood. “I…” he begins, searching for words, searching for some explanation that’s not going to immediately scare him off. 

The alarm goes off. 

Buck swallows. Mateo’s face is bathed in red. Around them, the moment shatters, Hen and Chim sharing one last look before rushing away from the pool table. 

“I have to go,” Buck tells Mateo. 

Mateo nods, his brow creased. He looks at Buck like, for the first time, he’s trying to figure him out. 

“I—I’ll call you later?” Buck tries, his tongue heavy in his mouth. 

“Yeah,” Mateo says. “Yeah. That’ll be good.” 

Buck floods with relief. “Okay. Um.” Holding up the paper sack: “Thank you for these. Really.” 

A hesitant smile tugs at the corners of Mateo’s lips. “No problem.” 

“Buck, hurry!” he hears Chimney call from downstairs. 

Before he can take a step back, Mateo reaches for him, briefly brushing his thumb over his eyebrow. “Be safe, okay?” he whispers. 

And Buck thinks of Eddie, of all the looks they shared while they grabbed their helmets, of pats on the backs before running into five alarms, of the thousand different ways they said please survive this. Please survive this for me. Reaching hands across burning boards, following each other into the flames, pulling each other out of debris, desperate hugs behind the engine after close calls. 

Buck nods and steps away from Mateo, leaving him standing there by the pool table. 

As they’re grabbing their helmets, Hen looks at him. “So…”

He shakes his head, says, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and pulls himself inside the ambulance. 

Buck does call Mateo the next morning, when their shift is over. Mateo doesn’t mention the interaction with Hen, so neither does Buck. 

It’s for the best, Buck thinks. It’s better if they don’t look too closely at what they’ve built, don’t look too closely at the fact that the thing they’re both chasing is little more than a figment. An illusion. This way, neither of them have to lose it. And Buck’s content to pretend for as long as he can that this whole thing isn’t doomed to fall apart. That there’s even something there to fall apart in the first place. 

Buck’s been having a lot of strange dreams lately. 

There’s this one he’s been having since Eddie left, where he’s fighting Texas, the state in the form of a faceless man. He doesn’t know how he knows it’s Texas, but he does, and he’s trying desperately to knock him down, but Texas is too strong. He keeps coming back and reaching inside Buck’s chest, taking more from him until he’s nothing more than a mess of blood and guts and emptiness. 

He has lots where he’s reaching for Eddie, but his hands just pass right through him. He can’t hold on, can’t touch him, no matter how hard he tries. Sometimes that dream warps into this—Buck standing at the top of a cliff, Eddie standing below, ankle deep in water, Buck falling but never caught. Buck falls right through Eddie’s transparent body and hits the ground. Another, where he’s at Eddie’s house, except the corridors are endless and the lights are flicked off. He’s trying to find Eddie inside of the maze, but every door he opens, all that’s there on the other side is Mateo. Over and over again. 

And then there’s the other type of dream. The slower, warm ones, where it feels like his body is being pushed into a vat of honey, hands brushing over him everywhere—his chest and arms and thighs and places that haven’t been touched by anyone but himself in months. He wakes up on fire and aching, a pit of desire in his stomach, but he’s never able to remember who the hands from the dream belonged to—Mateo, or Eddie. 

This is none of those. This is a classic nightmare, born from the tangled-up threads of a horrible memory. 

Hot concrete, city streets, blood splattering. The taste of it on Buck’s tongue, the scream of Eddie’s name, the sound of a gunshot. Eddie falling, down, down, down, the hard ground catching him like the jaws of a predator. Buck is getting shoved down too, a man’s voice shouting in his ears, but he can’t look away, he can’t blink, he can’t breathe, Eddie, Eddie, Eddie—

Buck wakes up gasping, sweat dripping down his forehead, the sheets tangled around his ankles like a chain. His throat feels sore. He can hear his heart beating, pounding like a death march in his ears. 

On instinct, he rolls around on his stomach, reaching for his phone on his nightstand. He just—he needs Eddie. He needs to hear his voice, hear the steady rise and fall of his breath. He needs to make sure he’s okay. 

Eddie’s contact is on the top of the screen; of course it is. Buck takes a breath, and—

Feels frozen down to his core. 

For some reason, his fingers aren’t working, won’t reach for the button. 

Buck looks at the time. It’s two AM. Eddie’s probably not even awake. But Buck knows who is. 

He clicks off of Eddie’s name, clicks on Mateo’s. Types, You awake? 

The response comes in less than a minute: Yeah actually. Everything good? 

Fine. Just can’t sleep. 

Want company? Mateo responds. I’m just practicing some lines. We could call? 

Buck hits the button without another second of hesitation. 

The easier option. Maybe that’s what Buck needs right now. But as he lays there, Mateo’s voice in his ear, he doesn’t feel comforted. He doesn’t feel calm. The shakiness from the dream never recedes. 

Buck falls back asleep with his fingernails digging crescents into the skin of his palm. 

It’s become a bit of a routine at the station to FaceTime Eddie on Thursdays. It works out well—the 118 is always on shift, and Eddie usually isn’t. They all miss Eddie, like a loose cog in a well-oiled machine—it’s not enough to send the whole thing crumbling apart, but it is enough that the rest of it aches in its absence. So it makes sense, in between calls, for them to all pile onto one of the station sofas and fill some of the gaps in their chests together. 

Today, Buck’s phone is the one they’re using to call him, but Chimney’s the one holding it. The call has already been going on for an hour—the relative silence from the alarms today giving them ample time—so most of the others already wandered off, Bobby to prep for dinner, Hen mentioning something about catching some sleep. Even Buck has sort of drifted away, settling on the couch opposite from Chimney. 

There’s been a strange, terrible distance between him and Eddie for the past couple of weeks, and it’s only grown larger as more time has passed. Buck hates it as much as he knows that it’s his fault. He’s the one who’s been pulling back, cancelling their calls to go see Mateo, leaving their text thread from the last couple of weeks to run dry. And when they do talk, it’s not the same, because even just hearing Eddie’s voice is enough to have the guilt-shaped monster living inside Buck rear its head. He feels terrible. He feels like he doesn’t deserve to talk to Eddie. He’s tired of having to lie to him. 

He misses him so much he thinks he could die from it. 

Chimney is the only one still truly engaging with Eddie. Buck contents himself with sitting close enough to still hear his voice, but far away enough he won’t have to talk to him. He’s kind of scared that any day now Eddie is going to ask him— what’s going on with you? Where’d you go? 

He doesn’t have an answer that Eddie would like, so right now, his strategy has been to avoid the question.

Chimney and Eddie are in the middle of a conversation about how Jee is having a dinosaur phase, and Eddie is saying something about how he wished he kept all of Christopher’s old dinosaur toys to give to them, and Buck has sort of zoned out. That’s the only reason he doesn’t immediately jump up and put a stop in the conversation as soon as there’s a lull, and Eddie breaks it by saying, “By the way, how have your dinners been with Buck?” 

Buck looks up in time from his picking at his fingernails to catch Chimney’s frown. “What?” 

“Your dinners with Buck,” Eddie repeats. Buck can’t see Eddie’s face on the phone screen from where he’s sitting but he can still imagine it—the slight crease to his face he’s probably getting about now. “He was over there last night, wasn’t he?” 

Chimney’s brow wrinkles. “Uh, no. Buck hasn’t been over in like a week.” 

He can hear the frown in Eddie’s voice. “That’s weird. He said he was eating with you and Maddie…” 

Chimney looks towards Buck. “Hey, didn’t you say you were going to hang out with Mateo yesterday?”

Oh, motherfucker. 

Buck tries to motion at Chimney, shaking his head vigorously to indicate shut up, shut up, please shut up! But it’s too late. The words have already been uttered. 

“Mateo?” Eddie parrots, confused. “Who’s Mateo?” 

Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

“The…the guy Buck’s seeing?” Chimney says, like he’s confused at Eddie’s confusion. Like he just assumes Eddie already knows about Mateo, because why wouldn’t he—Buck tells him everything. Or at least, that’s how it’s always gone, until now. 

Really, it’s not Chimney’s fault that Buck has suddenly become something he’s never been when it comes to Eddie: a liar. 

“What?” Eddie’s voice is incredulous. “Buck’s—Buck’s dating someone?”

Buck feels breathless, numb all the way to his fingertips. He thought Mateo showing up at the firehouse was his worst nightmare, but no—this easily takes the cake. He can’t even see past the lack of oxygen going to his brain right now. 

Chimney looks between the phone and where Buck is quickly clambering off the couch. “Oh my god.” He slaps his hand over his face in sudden horror. “You didn’t know, did you? Buck didn’t tell you.” 

“No, I d— who the hell is Mateo?” 

Pulling the phone out of reach when Buck tries to grab at it, Chimney looks at him with wide eyes. “You didn’t tell him about the…?” 

Buck grits his teeth. Why the hell would he tell Eddie about that?  

“No,” he hisses, still reaching for the phone. 

Eddie’s desperately trying to get their attention. “What’s going on? Hey, hey, what the fuck are you guys talking about?” He sounds distressed. 

Chimney gets this look on his face. Really, it’s a terrible look—his skin turning red, his cheeks inflating as if he’s blowing a bubble like an elementary school student. Buck’s seen this look before, and he knows it’s bad news. When Chimney’s body starts physically thrumming from the strain it takes on him to keep a secret, it means he is dangerously close to spilling everything. 

“Chimney…” Buck’s voice is low in warning. He can hear his heart beating in his chest. “Don’t.” 

They share a long look. Chimney’s body shakes like a rumbling volcano. 

Buck takes a deep breath and silently casts a desperate prayer to every god he can even think of, please, please, please—

All at once, Chimney explodes. “Buck is dating the guy who moved into your house,” he says in a rush. 

And there it is. 

The words hang in the air. Buck’s stomach is plummeting. Chimney looks both relieved and guilty. 

There’s ten seconds of complete silence, enough time for Buck to die and come back to life and then die again in the uncertainty of all of it. He just stands there numb, having no idea what to think or feel, only distantly aware of the way his hands are starting to shake at his side. And then—

“He what?” 

Everything shatters. Buck’s body unfreezes, and he can suddenly pinpoint a thousand different sensations: a sliver of cold dread trickling down his spine, the dryness of the roof of his mouth, the way the pit of his stomach seems to go on and on, a never-ending tunnel of nausea. 

Chimney gasps, as if realizing what he’s just done. With a limp wrist, he drops Buck’s phone onto the couch, jerking away from it like it's a poisonous spider. “Um, gotta go,” he says, jumping off the couch. “Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.” 

“Chimney—” Eddie shouts through the phone. 

But Chimney is already halfway across the loft. 

Buck approaches the phone like he would a bomb, his entire body vibrating with fear and apprehension and that constant thread of guilt he’s become familiar with. 

When he picks it up, Eddie’s face takes over the screen. He looks…disturbed, agitated. His cheeks are flushed with an angry red and his eyes are wild, nearly horrified. 

Is he mad at Buck? He must be. 

Buck feels sick to his stomach. He wants to cower in the corner like a disobedient dog that’s been reprimanded. Wants to roll over and beg for forgiveness. 

“Buck,” Eddie says, demands, when he sees him, “Buck. What the hell? Are you really…?” 

Buck’s hand shakes. 

“Eddie…” he begins, but he doesn’t know how to finish it. Doesn’t know what to say to justify himself, justify this terrifying, horrible thing he’s become. How do you say, I did it, I did it all, can you forgive me? 

So, unsteadily, he reaches for the red button and watches Eddie’s face disappear from the screen. 

The phone falls from Buck’s hand onto the floor. Everything tastes ripe with ruination. 

Animals do strange things to survive. 

Possums play dead, their bodies expelling a corpse-like smell to ward off predators. The wood frog freezes itself alive in the winter. Sea cucumbers eject their guts to use as a weapon when attacked and then grow the removed internal organs back once safe. Birds migrate to find warmth. Dogs burrow. Goats climb trees. 

Buck finds homes. 

Places that can keep him warm, people that have a nice corner in their heart empty enough for him to curl up inside. Where he can let his guard down, loosen the tightly wound strings that hold him together, and just be . Safe from the world, his heart held steady by wooden foundations. 

Months ago, Buck got evicted from the most permanent, warmest home he had ever found. Not on purpose, not maliciously—but it couldn’t be his anymore. So Buck back was in the place he hadn’t been since his twenties, the same place he lived at fifteen when Maddie was no longer there to patch the wounds he got from riding his skateboard into the side of his dad’s Honda Accord. 

Out in the freezing cold. 

So, in the aftermath, Buck built a house for himself. Fabricated it out of nothing: a replica of the one he had lost. It was flimsy and it was falling apart and had no insulation, nothing to keep him truly warm, but Buck had always been good at settling for scraps. He slapped Mateo’s name to the top of the building and moved himself in. 

He did it to survive. Or maybe he did it to self-sabotage. Either way—

The house is on fucking fire now. 

Buck doesn’t know how he survives his shift. 

Sitting in his car afterwards, it all feels like a fever dream—dragging his feet through the calls, everyone looking at him with concerned eyes, sitting by the toilet because, at several points, he really was convinced he was about to be sick. He hung on by the skin of his teeth, never letting that shaky feeling under his skin fully take over. 

But as he’s driving home, it hits him. The slow crawl of panic up his spine. It makes his hands shake around the steering wheel, his breaths coming out short. He keeps thinking about Eddie’s face through the phone screen, looking rubbed raw. Had he been angry? Furious? Disgusted? 

The not knowing is what’s killing Buck. It feels like he dropped a plate and now is watching it spin around and around on the kitchen tile, waiting to see if it will decide to break. 

Eddie must know now. He must know that Buck is insane about him in a way that shouldn’t be allowed, shouldn’t be encouraged; he must know that Buck is dirty and crazy and a stain he couldn’t even get rid of by moving eight hundred miles away. He must know that Buck has been reaching out and pulling away at once, and that the reason everything slips out of his hands is because his palms are coated with liquid poison—a double-edged blade, sending everything he touches careening towards death. 

He must know that he should run for good, finally cut Buck off like he should’ve months and maybe even years ago, because he’s not stable and he’s not a good friend and he’s not a good person, and he just hasn’t been good , like he promised he would be. 

He failed, and he’s going to lose Eddie because of it. 

Or maybe—maybe, Eddie will think it’s just a coincidence. He’ll think that yes, Buck is dating the guy who lives in Eddie’s house, but he’s not dating him because he’s living in Eddie’s house. 

Because it is just a coincidence, right? He wasn’t stalking Eddie’s house, because he had just happened to drive past and stopped momentarily to check out the pothole, and he hadn’t purposefully tried to meet Mateo—he was just being kind by delivering his package more directly. And the whole dating him thing…well, that just happened. It was normal! 

This is the thought process Buck has been living inside of for months, but now, it seems flimsy. The excuses he’s relied upon so heavily have been worn down to the bone, rubbed so thin that the paint is chipping off their surfaces and he can nearly see right through them. He can see right down to the truth he’s been hiding from, and that’s terrifying. 

The truth is terrifying. 

Buck stops at a red-light. He’ll take a right here, and then he’ll be at the loft. Easy as that.

His hands are still shaking around the wheel as he waits, tapping out a restless rhythm against the leather. He feels like he’s standing at a precipice—of loss, of understanding, of a realization he’s not ready for. He feels like he’s losing Eddie, or he’s already lost him and now the wound has gotten infected, or maybe it’s been infected, and now he’s just dying from it, withering away into bone. 

Maybe what Buck needs is a distraction. A band-aid for a bullet wound. 

He remembers what Maddie said, about him hiding in relationships, using them as defenses in times of emotional distress, protection from himself. I don't want you to fall into that trap again, she had said. 

But Buck—he needs to hide some more. It’s like a sinkhole he can’t climb out of, an addictive cycle he’s stuck inside. He needs to reach for Eddie, but Eddie is too far to reach for. Like his dream, he keeps falling through Eddie’s phantom arms and landing in somebody else’s. 

He takes a left and ends up at Eddie’s house. 

Mateo is at the door before Buck has time to blink. “Buck?” he says, backlit by the lamp turned on in the living room. 

Buck remembers, with a frantic desperation, that he never used to have to knock, never used to have to wait for Eddie to unlock the door. It was always open to him, and so were the wide hallways of Eddie’s heart—he would walk in and Eddie would never ask him to leave. For so long, it was as simple as that. 

When Buck says nothing, Mateo frowns and asks, “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah,” Buck rasps out. “Yeah. Just—long shift.” 

Mateo’s gaze turns sympathetic. “Bad calls?” 

Of course, Mateo is assuming they must’ve lost some people, some patients, got caught up at some five alarm and didn’t get everybody out. But Buck thinks of his FaceTime call with Eddie and nods. 

The door opens wider for him to step in. “Want a beer?” Mateo asks. 

Again, Buck nods, and when Mateo takes a step backwards, he follows. 

Walking through the living room feels different this time. Usually, he feels comforted by all the small pieces of Eddie—the lamp, the ottoman, the scuffs on the wood from the time Eddie pushed all the furniture against the walls to teach Buck how to dance. But now, it’s almost like he’s being haunted, like every inanimate object is now reaching out for him with their twisting fingers, taunting him. Saying why are you here? You don’t deserve to be here? None of this belongs to you—or him—anymore. You’ve overstayed your welcome. 

Buck swallows and follows Mateo into the kitchen, watches as he opens up the fridge and grabs two High Lifes out from the top shelf. 

Stepping towards him, Mateo offers the bottle. Buck takes it, uncaps it, and throws it back. It’s a long sip—concerningly long, maybe—and Buck feels Mateo’s eyes on him for the entire duration of it, carefully studying his face as he takes a sip of his own drink. 

When he finally removes the bottle from his lips, Mateo asks, “Do you wanna talk about it?” He steps closer to Buck as he says it, their shoulders pressing against each other, and Buck thinks it's meant to be a comforting point of contact, except it's not. It’s never been, with Mateo. 

Buck sets his beer down on the counter. Usually his emotions are like a waterfall he can’t control, pouring out violently, but somehow, he’s kept a lock on it around Mateo over the past weeks. He’s been careful not to spill too much, not to be too vulnerable, not to let Mateo see through the mask. 

Now, though, he’s tired and he’s exhausted, and even if he tried to keep it together, he knows everything he’s feeling would slip through the barriers anyway. So, he looks at Mateo and says, “Do you ever feel like your house is on fire?” 

Mateo’s brow knits. “What?” 

Buck sighs, digs a knuckle into his eye. “Like—your house is on fire, and it’s the only thing that’s burning. The rest of the world is fine, so if you just left your house, you would be fine too, but…you just don’t want to leave.” He hardly even knows what he’s saying anymore, the words just pouring out of him uncontrollably. “Because the house is yours, even if it’s just ash, and you’d just…rather die with it than live without it.” 

Because that’s how Buck feels. Liked he’d rather die here, drowning in pieces of Eddie, than move on. It would be easier to just forget about it, if he just resolved to leave this all behind. But he can’t. He couldn’t. He hasn’t. 

Mateo blinks at him. “Well,” he says with a click of his tongue, looking like he’s struggling to process how they got here. “Um. No, I can’t say I’ve felt…that specifically.” He looks at Buck. “Is that…how firefighting feels?” 

Buck shakes his head. “It’s how everything feels,” he says, and it’s not completely true, but also it is—because Eddie is everything, isn’t he? 

Nothing feels right without him. Even the parts of his life unconnected to Eddie still feel like they’ve dulled in the last couple months, never as enjoyable as they used to be. It’s like the world has lost fifty percent of its beauty since Eddie left, like he took all of the color and wonder with him to El Paso and left Buck with nothing but grey. 

Tilting his head, Mateo says: “Everything?” 

Staring at him, Buck tries to catch his meaning. Then, he gets distracted, because Mateo has a mole under his eye, just like Eddie does. Except Mateo’s is under his left eye instead of the right, and it’s bigger, more noticeable. 

He pictures Eddie, and his mole, imagines brushing a finger over the beauty mark. He can almost feel it—the way his calloused fingertips would slide over the soft, smooth skin, Eddie’s eyelashes fluttering under the touch, how it would be so easy to…to…

That’s when Buck realizes that Mateo is looking at his lips. 

Oh, he thinks. His eyes are focused, tinted with desire, the brown nearly swallowed up by his enlarged pupils. 

And Buck knows how this part goes. His stomach fills, bubbling up with an emotion he doesn’t have time to place. He just—he’s frozen. When Mateo starts leaning in, Buck doesn’t move away. 

Mateo kisses him, and it tastes like ash, like guilt, and like Miller High Life. 

For a second, Buck kisses him back. Because—because it’s what he’s meant to do, and he’s sort of gotten used to doing that with Mateo, checking off boxes on a list. And because he knows how to do it, this part. Knows how to let his body take and pull and shove when his mind is too weak to do it. Back in the day, this used to be the one thing he could depend on, the one thing that could silence the swirl of emotions that were ripping apart from the inside. This song and dance was a drug, and even though Buck’s no longer addicted, he still knows the moves. 

But even as Mateo pushes further into his mouth, his hand coming up to cup the back of Buck’s neck, the emotions don’t quiet. If anything, they get louder: this sensation pounding through his heart like a drum beat, the aftershocks of a warning siren. A bitter taste on his tongue, a pit the size of a boulder in his stomach, ripping his insides apart. It swallows him up like a sinkhole, and once he falls to the bottom, he realizes why the feeling tastes so familiar. 

Because he’s felt the same one before, lifetimes ago, standing in dimmed bar lighting with the buzz of alcohol in his system coloring everything fuzzy and distorted. He felt it, then, standing in front of a pool table, Lucy’s lips on his. 

Then, he felt like he was cheating on Taylor. 

Now, he feels like—

Oh my fucking god. 

The realization slams down on him like a fucking anvil dropping from the sky, and he wrenches away from Mateo all at once. 

He feels like he’s cheating on Eddie. This whole time—that’s what the feeling that’s been haunting him has been. Guilt, because in his mind, unconsciously, dating Mateo has been a betrayal to Eddie, because—

Because he loves Eddie. He’s in love with Eddie. Has been for a long time, probably, holy fucking shit. 

Mateo blinks, disoriented. “Wha—?” 

“We can’t,” Buck gasps out, like the truth is finally crawling its way out of his throat, a creature that hasn’t seen the sun in so long. “I can’t,” he says, frantic. “This isn’t— This is wrong.” 

He pulls himself away from Mateo’s grasp, breaking contact completely. It’s not enough—he can still feel the guilt from what he’s just done crawling all over his skin. Like Mateo’s touch has left residue on him and he needs to scrub it off, scrub it away completely, until he’s raw and red and bleeding. He needs to—

Throw up, probably. 

Mateo is looking at him like he’s still adrift, still lost in the kiss. “What—what are you…?” 

“Mateo, I’m sorry,” Buck says. “But this isn’t—” 

All at once, Mateo’s gaze shutters, like a camera lens closing. “You don’t want me, do you?” he says, and he phrases it as if it’s only barely a question. As if he already knows the answer. 

“I…” Buck doesn’t know what to say. He can’t deny it, not really. “I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I…I didn’t know.” 

He doesn’t even know if that’s true. He remembers being aware of, in moments, how little he truly felt towards Mateo, and he remembers pushing it down. He knew it; he didn’t want to know it. But he knew it, nonetheless. 

“So what?” Mateo’s voice is stony. “You’re emotionally unavailable? Bad breakup?” 

“Uh…” Buck blinks. “Yeah,” he admits, and he’s not thinking of Tommy. He’s thinking of Eddie. 

How could he ever think of anything else? 

Jesus Christ, Buck is such a fucking idiot. There’s no one else on this entire plane that would spend years walking around with this feeling and not know what it meant. It had been so painfully obvious the entire time. Buck wants to grab himself by the ears and scream. 

Mateo sighs, buries his head in his hands. “Fucking christ,” he says. The words sound dull. “I should’ve known,” he says, as he drops his hands to his side. “Every time you looked at me, it felt like…you were seeing someone else. Or wished you were seeing someone else. But I don’t know, I guess I…” he shrugs, with a small, achingly sad smile, “just wanted to be hopeful for once.”

Buck feels his stomach fill with a different kind of guilt. 

God, god . How could he let himself do this? Set himself on fire and burn an innocent up in the process. It’s terrible. He should’ve known better. He should never have done any of this. 

“I’m sorry, Mateo,” Buck chokes out, for the third time. “I—I never wanted anybody’s heart to get broken.” 

And it’s true. He was trying futilely to fix his own; it was never his intention to get Mateo caught in the crossfire. But it happened anyway, and he knows that he’s responsible. 

Mateo scoffs. “You didn’t break my heart, Buck,” he says. “I knew you for, like, a month. I probably didn’t even know you at all.” He shakes his head. “Don’t give yourself too much credit.” 

He says it unkindly, but Buck sort of floods with relief. He probably doesn’t deserve any sort of absolution for his behavior, but…

“Well,” he says, awkward. “That’s—that’s good.” 

Mateo stares at him. Sighs. “You were a fun time, Buck, if that’s what you’re waiting to hear.” He takes a sip of his beer. “Now, do us both a favor and get out of here before I decide I have meaner things to say about you.” 

“Oh.” Buck blinks several times. “Oh, okay. Yeah. Good idea.” He starts to stumble his way out of the kitchen on unsteady feet. Halfway towards the door, he turns. Hesitates. Awkwardly waves. “Uh, goodbye, Mateo. I—yeah. Goodbye.” 

He forces his feet to move, to carry him across the living room. Remembers: this is probably the last time I’ll ever be in this house. 

Hand on the doorframe, he lets himself look. He thinks about how all of this—all that he’s done—started with this place, started with not wanting to lose another piece of Eddie by losing it. But maybe there’s no version of this story where this house stays in his life. He’s never going to move on from Eddie, but maybe this place is one part of him he’s meant to leave behind. 

He’s never been good at goodbyes, so he doesn’t say one. He doesn’t want to make another promise he can’t keep. 

So, feeling his chest gape open with the weight of it all, he walks out the door. 

It makes sense—the whole loving Eddie thing—doesn’t it? 

For Buck, love and the inability to let go have always been closely intertwined, cycles feeding into each other. The more he loves somebody, the tighter he holds on. He loves and he loves and he loves, and he’ll never stop—not even if they move eight hundred miles away, not even if the sun collapses, not even if the sky falls and he’s not even alive anymore. Even then, he’ll still find a way to do it, because that’s just the kind of love it is. His body will decay and the carbon that once made him will join the dirt, and he’ll love them from there. 

Loving is an eternal thing for Buck; he doesn’t know how to stop it. He’s often thought that this is who he is—not a person, not a man, but a mere collection of bone fragments and scraps of flesh glued around far too big a heart. It’s as much of a curse as it is a blessing. 

And he’s never held onto anything tighter—with such desperation, with such total insanity—than he has with Eddie. Because he loves him, and it’s a desperate thing, an eternal thing, an inescapable thing. It’s who he is, at the core of himself. It’s who he’ll be in a hundred years, when all that’s left of him is dust. 

Eddie is the center of his universe, the sun he orbits around. It makes sense that this is what happens when the gravitational center disappears—the whole system goes into failure. Planets start colliding, falling from midair. Buck floats through space, looking for another star to remind him of Eddie’s warmth, but none of them could ever compare.

Nothing could ever compare. 

Buck knew that. For all the hiding from himself he’s done in the past few months, he never could deny the simple fact that Eddie meant everything to him. Or that he missed Eddie desperately, and it was the most painful thing he ever felt. He knew that he was a bit insane without him, knew that nobody would ever make him feel as safe and as held as Eddie did. And yet, he didn’t know . 

And now that he does, everything starts to click into place. He realizes that what he’s done with Mateo isn’t just a one-off diversion into lunacy—it’s a pattern. 

Eddie has done this before—the whole leaving-for-the-sake-of-Christopher thing. Last time, it was the 118, not the whole state, but still. And what had Buck done in response? Kissed the girl who was Eddie’s replacement at the station. 

What Maddie said the other day at dinner was undoubtedly true, and Buck realizes that now more than ever. But it’s not just that he gets into relationships to hide from himself—he gets into them to hide from his feelings for Eddie, specifically. 

Taylor, who kissed him the day he almost lost Eddie, who he held even tighter in the wake of Eddie’s announcement that was leaving the 118. Tommy, who he started dating after having his bisexual awakening, because realizing that his overwhelming, bordering on insane jealousy during those weeks was because of Eddie was far too scary. 

He realizes now that most of the things he did like about Tommy are things that Eddie is too. 

And now there’s Mateo. Another mirror for Eddie he reflected all of his feelings onto.  

Buck is half hysterical from the knowledge of all of it as he drives to the loft. He could laugh until he cried, except it’s not funny, not really. When he finally makes it home, his whole body feels weighed down, exhausted. Brain reeling, he stumbles into the bathroom. 

He looks in the mirror and for the first time, sees himself. 

Buck wakes up the next morning to the sound of his doorbell ringing. 

He had been up concerningly late last night. His mind was still racing, refusing to quiet. It seemed to think it needed to remind him every ten seconds about what he had learned, as if there was a chance he was ever going to forget it. 

Buck doesn’t quite know how to feel in the wake of his realization. On one hand, it’s been illuminating. There’s something calming about putting a name, a word, to a feeling he’s long lived with, long been defined by. He feels like he understands himself more than ever, and that’s comforting. A feeling he isn’t really used to. But, at the same time, the weight of all he knows now is crushing. 

It’s one thing to have the best friend you’re weirdly codependent on three states out of your reach. It’s another thing when it’s the love of your life. 

Now Buck can’t stop torturing himself with the fact he was never much bothered by before: Eddie is straight. Has said so many times. He and Buck will never be together, because Eddie doesn’t like men and so he can’t want Buck. And even if he wasn’t straight, he still wouldn’t want Buck, because he knows Buck more than anybody else. And sure, that sounds like a good thing, and it is , but it also means that Eddie has seen every one of Buck’s messes and mistakes and car crashes and insane spirals. Eddie knows Buck more than anybody else, so out of everybody, he’s the least likely to want him. This, Buck thinks, is good logic. 

And now Eddie knows about his latest mess, perhaps one of the biggest ones he’s ever gotten himself into, because Chimney can’t keep his goddamn mouth shut. Buck has no idea how anyone would want him after hearing about that, even if they still managed after all of the other stuff. 

He needs to talk to Eddie at some point, he thinks as he slides out of bed, groaning at the stiffness in his body. He had checked religiously last night; there were no text messages, no calls, no voicemails left from Eddie. Every time he thinks about it, it sends his heart plummeting. He doesn’t know what Eddie’s thinking. How mad or disgusted or annoyed he is. And it terrifies him, so much that he contemplates picking up his phone to call and explain it all right now. But what would he say? How could he justify his actions without the insightful little love tidbit? And how could he tell Eddie he loves him without expecting their entire relationship to fracture apart? 

Buck doesn’t know what to do. But he has to do something , at some point. He can’t lose Eddie. Not when he’s already lost so much of him. 

Tiredly, Buck pads down the stairs, bare feet on hardwood floors. Digging a knuckle into the corner of his eye, he yawns and reaches for the door. 

And the entire world tilts upside down. 

Eddie is standing on his doorstep. 

Buck pulls his hand away from his eye. Blinks to make sure there’s not just an eye booger blocking his vision. And when he looks again, Eddie’s still there, tapping his foot impatiently, a little red rimmed around the eye like he didn’t get enough sleep last night. 

When he sees Buck, his mouth parts. 

“Eddie?” 

“Buck,” Eddie breathes out in response. He barely even gives Buck a single second longer to process his presence before he’s looking him straight in the eye, and saying—no, demanding, “You can’t date the guy who moved into my house.” 

Buck blinks. He can’t breathe. His brain—it’s just—there’s nothing going on in there. He thinks it must be broken. 

“W-what?” he stutters out. 

He hasn’t seen Eddie in person in three months. And now he’s here—right in front of him in one of his green Dad henleys and a pair of tight blue jeans that are doing very nice things for his thighs—and Buck feels like he might literally fall to the ground from how weak his knees are feeling. 

“The guy who moved into my house,” Eddie repeats, slower this time. His jaw is made of stone. “You can’t date him.” 

“Oh,” Buck says. He blinks several times again. Puts his hand up against the door frame to steady himself. “Why?” 

“Because—” Eddie huffs out. He’s looking at Buck like he should just understand, like he’s mad that he’s even having to explain it. “It’s not— he’s not—you shouldn’t—” With a frustrated huff, he breaks off, and—seemingly giving up on words—surges forward, grabbing Buck’s face with his hands. 

Buck has never been less prepared for a kiss in his life. 

It’s all at once, sudden, Eddie’s teeth knocking into his from the force of it. His hands keep Buck’s face in place, and he’s kissing him, desperately, angrily, with every ounce of himself. As if he thinks his life depends on it. 

Buck lets out a gasp of shock, stumbling a couple steps back. Eddie follows him, pressing deeper, tonguing at the seam of his lips, and Buck—he can’t even think. His brain is on a loop of Eddie, kiss, lips, hands, Eddie, and it’s overwhelming, his heartbeat a deafening rhythm. Finally getting with the program, Buck sucks at Eddie’s bottom lip, starving for the flavor. His hands start flying everywhere, moving without his direction—running through Eddie’s hair, over his face, bunching up the back of his shirt. He wants closer, more. 

It’s a harsh kiss, frantic and urgent, and it’s everything. It’s electrifying, restoring long dead parts of Buck with new life with every press of Eddie’s lips. For the first time in months, Buck feels like he has a heart inside his chest again. 

This is everything that his kiss with Mateo wasn’t. This is everything Buck is yearning for. Because it’s Eddie. It’s all Eddie. 

Buck barely even has time to process what’s happening—oh my god he’s kissing Eddie Diaz, holy fuck—before Eddie’s pulling back, removing his lips from Buck’s with a pop. 

Blinking his eyes open, Buck looks at Eddie, standing across from him with enlarged pupils, angrily flushed cheeks, and spit-slick lips. Buck can feel Eddie’s spit on his own lips, and holy shit, he doesn’t know what alternate reality he woke up in this morning, but please, can he stay here? 

“Wow,” he says, dazed, bringing up a hand up to his lips just to make sure that really happened. “That was…that was a good reason.” 

Eddie stares at him for a long second, breathing heavily. Then, all at once, his gaze hardens again, and he pushes past Buck, into the loft. Buck whirls around to follow him, once again thrown off-kilter. 

What the fuck is happening?  

“I just—” Eddie begins. He’s pacing around the kitchen, his breath sharp and audible, his body tense. Buck’s never seen him like this. “I know it’s unfair of me to just—to just show up here and make demands of you, especially since I’ve been gone. But it’s just been—it’s been driving me crazy, the past couple of weeks, seeing that something was going on with you, but I had no way of knowing what because you just kept cancelling on me. And I missed you like crazy and I knew something was up, but I didn’t think—when I moved away, I didn’t think that meant you were going to start seeing someone else.” 

He clenches his hands at his side. Open, close, open, close. “When Chimney said—that you were—with this guy, I just lost my mind a bit, and I guess I still haven’t gotten it back, because—” Finally, he stops moving. Turns to face Buck, looks him in the eye, and says, “Whenever I think about you, with him, I just—it makes me feel fucking insane. Like I can’t even breathe. And I just keep thinking he’s meant to be with me. And maybe I’m just crazy for thinking that, or maybe I’m too late, but I couldn’t stay in El Paso knowing that there was a chance I was losing you to some asshole —” 

“Eddie,” Buck says, cutting him off. 

Eddie’s mouth stamps shut. 

Buck feels his hands shaking at his side. He can hardly process what Eddie’s even saying, mostly because his lips still warm from the best kiss of his fucking life, but he’s trying—and it sounds like—

It sounds like Eddie wants him. Loves him, maybe. 

“Eddie,” he repeats, taking a step closer. “You haven’t lost me.” 

Eddie stares at him. “But the guy—”

“The guy is gone,” Buck says. He takes another step closer, feeling hope thrum in his fingers. “I called everything off with him last night, because he kissed me—”

Eddie looks very distressed. “He kissed you?” 

Buck can’t help but smile. He feels fucking giddy. “Yes, Eddie, he kissed me. And I pushed him away, like, ten seconds in, because I realized that I only was with him in the first place because I wanted you.” Another step forward, and now, he’s close enough to Eddie to touch. “I only want you.” 

He reaches out and cups Eddie’s face with his palm, sliding his hand down to his chin. Using the grip to tilt his face upwards, Eddie’s eyes are suddenly trained on him, and they’re so big and brown and beautiful that Buck could nearly cry. “Because I love you, Eddie.” 

Eddie makes a noise in the back of his throat, as if wounded. He engulfs Buck in another kiss, and they’re all movement again, waves crashing into each other, interloping melodies finally joining in harmony. 

This kiss loses most of the harsh edge of the last one, but Eddie is still fiery, still a bundle of energy as he licks into Buck’s mouth, hands wandering everywhere. Buck feels every one of his touches like it's a brand, opening a pool of molten lava in the pit of his stomach. He’s burning, burning everywhere, as Eddie maneuvers him backwards. Together they slowly inch across the loft, all the way to the couch. 

Eddie breaks the kiss to push Buck down on top of it. Buck waddles further backwards, so that he’s laying across it horizontally, so that when he pulls Eddie down with him, his thighs can slot on either side of Buck’s hips. 

“Are you…” Buck says, gasping in between kisses, “ever gonna…say it back?” He swallows back a moan. “Or are you just gonna…make me wait forever?” 

Eddie detracts himself from Buck’s lips to scowl at him. Then, nibbling at Buck’s bottom lip: “I love you.” Biting down his jaw: “I love you.” Sucking an angry bruise into his neck: “I love you.” 

“Oh,” Buck says, leaning his head back to let Eddie lick over the teeth marks he definitely just left in Buck’s skin. He grins. “That’s great.” 

“Tell me you didn’t forget me,” Eddie demands, kissing back up his jaw. 

Buck almost wants to scoff. There’s not a single second of this entire month where he could plausibly say he wasn’t thinking about Eddie. Forgetting him is a fucking joke. 

“I didn’t,” he assures him anyway. “I couldn’t.” 

Eddie kisses him. “Tell me you’re mine.” 

“I’m yours,” Buck says, without a second's pause. He’s nodding his head so vigorously it makes it hard for Eddie to keep kissing him. “I’m yours, Eddie.” 

Eddie pulls back, and he’s looking at him like he’s still unsure, like he’s scared it might not be true. Which is absolutely insane—because there’s nobody else in this entire world who Buck would rather belong to—so Buck just has to tell him: “I’m so insane about you, I nearly dated a guy for an entire month just because it got me a way inside your house again. And because he kind of blushed like you.” He reaches up to rub a thumb over Eddie’s cheek, where that same strawberry flush is sitting now, and thinks: it’s so much better when it’s you.  

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he promises, swiping the thumb over Eddie’s cheek. He softens his voice. “Actually, it’s kind of scary how crazy about you I am.” 

“Well.” Eddie shifts upwards, leaning back so that he’s sitting rather than hovering over Buck, and Buck moves his legs to let him. “I just dropped three hundred on a plane ticket because I thought you were dating another man.” He grins, and there’s those sharp canines Buck loves so much. “Clearly, I can’t say anything.” 

Buck shakes his head, and suddenly, he’s sober, the thrill of it all momentarily parting to make way for a bit of needed seriousness. Because somehow, for some reason, Eddie has lost his sense of self-preservation and decided that the only part of hey I went crazy over you and stalked your house and ended up dating the guy who moved there he cared about was the dating someone else bit. And Buck is really, really glad that Eddie doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that the man he’s kissing is essentially a psycho stalker. That’s great, really, for Buck—it’s not like he wants Eddie to find any reason to stop kissing him. 

But at the same time, he needs Eddie to know exactly what he’s getting himself into. He can’t—he can’t have Eddie discovering the true extent of Buck’s madness a couple months in and deciding he doesn’t want him anymore. 

“I’m serious, Eddie,” Buck says, and now he’s sitting up, looking Eddie in the eyes. “Like—you should be concerned, okay? When you left, I lost my mind a bit, and it wasn’t—you shouldn’t just be okay with that. The way I acted was—it was bad.” He bites his lips, looks away. “If we’re gonna do this, I need you to know… I just don’t know how to be normal about you. I don’t think I ever will.” 

Eddie frowns. “And you think I’m normal about you?” Buck slides his gaze to him and lifts one shoulder in a little shrug, and for some reason, that makes Eddie laugh. “Buck,” he says. “I’ve been losing my mind in El Paso being apart from you. It’s, like, made me into free target practice for Christopher; he won’t stop making fun of me for moping.” He puts air quotations around the words. “Sometimes,” he says, voice going softer, “I missed you so much I would start listening to all the voicemails I had from you on my phone over and over. Just to hear your voice.”

Suddenly, Buck feels like he’s going to cry. “Eddie,” he says.

He thought he loved Eddie more than anyone could possibly love him back, but he was wrong. All this time Eddie had been doing it, loving him back just as intensely, from eight hundred miles away. And isn’t that insane to know? Doesn’t that change everything? 

Eddie smiles at him, small. “If you want to make this a competition about who missed the other more, we can,” he says. “But just know, every second you were with Mateo, I was in El Paso wishing desperately that you were going to call.” 

“Well,” Buck says, wiping at his eyes with a laugh, “that just makes me feel bad.” 

Eddie grins and knocks their shoulders together. “Good. You were making out with my pinch-hitter for a month. I hope you feel bad.” 

He’s kidding. Buck knows he’s kidding. And on another day, Buck really will feel bad—for Eddie, for Mateo, for anybody else he may have inadvertently hurt. But right now, Eddie is here, in front of him for the first time in months. Eddie is here, and he loves Buck, so the guilt can wait for another day. 

“First of all,” Buck says, smiling so wide it hurts. “We kissed once. Second of all, I don’t know what that means.” He really does not know anything about baseball. He thinks that’s from baseball, anyway. 

Eddie knocks him on the back of the head. “Of course you don’t.” Then his face softens. “I mean it, Buck. I love you, and I love that you’re crazy about me. I wouldn’t want it any other way.” 

Buck shakes his head, but he can’t help the smile that grows even further across his face. “You’re insane.” 

“It’s your fault,” Eddie says, and somehow, he makes it sound romantic. “You make me that way.” 

And what else is Buck meant to do besides kiss him, hand sliding to the back of his neck, soft and slow and sweet? Eddie smiles into the kiss, and that just makes it all the more perfect, even when he has to stop because they keep knocking teeth. 

He leans his forehead against Eddie’s. It hits him, not like a bus, but like a slow trickle of understanding: “You have to go back, don’t you?” 

Eddie squeezes Buck closer, and sounds genuinely regretful as he says, “Yeah.” 

Buck nods. He’s done with lying to himself, so he’s going to be honest: it fucking sucks. He doesn’t know how he’s going to survive being apart again, especially after this, but he’ll make it. He’ll make it, because he knows Eddie loves him. 

“How long do we have?” he asks. 

“My flight back is in three days,” Eddie answers. “But…I don’t think Christopher and I are going to be in El Paso for much longer.” 

Buck jerks back, wide-eyed. “What?” 

A shy smile, bordering on hopeful: “I, uh, we talked, and…sorted some things out. And it turns out, um, Los Angeles is still both of our homes.” He knocks on Buck’s chest in emphasis, as if that’s home for him too. “I don’t know when, but…yeah. We’re coming back.” 

Buck instantly is overcome with giddiness, the feeling spreading all the way down to the tips of his fingers. That’s—that’s the best thing he’s ever heard. He could do a fucking cartwheel. 

“Oh my god, Eddie.” He grins, bright, so big he can feel it stretching his cheeks. Then he pauses. “But your house…” 

He knows that the house isn’t everything, that LA being home isn’t confined to that little two bedroom on South Bedford. But…the house is a lot. And the idea that Eddie might not get it back is heartbreaking. 

Eddie nods, rolling his tongue over his top teeth. “Well, assuming you didn’t scare Mateo all the way off, he still has a couple months left on his lease, but. After that, I guess it could be mine again.” 

“Wait—” Buck freezes. “His lease? I—” 

“Yeah, we settled on a short lease because he was planning on moving after a couple of months anyway—”

“Eddie,” Buck cuts him off. “What are you talking about? I thought you put the house up for sale?” 

“Um. I did,” Eddie says with a shrug. “But then, I took it off the market. Put it up for rent instead.” 

Buck blinks several times, trying to process this. 

Then, Eddie adds, in a quiet voice, “I guess it felt wrong to act like I was never going to come back to you.” 

All at once, Buck melts, softening into putty. He leans into Eddie’s chest, tucking his head under his chin. Eddie’s arms instantly settle around him, like they were made to do it. It’s nice, after months of trying to surround himself with Eddie in the most backwards ways possible, to be surrounded by him like this. “You never told me,” Buck whispers. 

Eddie swallows, and Buck can feel the words rumble in his chest. “I think there’s a lot we haven’t told each other.” 

Sighing, Buck nods. “Yeah.” 

“We’ll have to fix that,” Eddie says, placing a kiss into Buck’s hair, and it sounds like a promise. We’ll talk about it. I won’t let you hide from me again. We won’t let anything break us. 

Buck sinks further into Eddie’s hold. Suddenly, he doesn’t know why he spent so long running from this, from his feelings, hiding them in Taylor, Tommy, Mateo. It’s ridiculous, to have been scared of something so true, something so inevitable, something so right. For so long, he could’ve had this. And that’s both a strange and life-changing revelation—that all this time he was moping about Eddie not being his home anymore, Eddie was in El Paso with the doors of his heart wide open for him. Buck never left, and Eddie never wanted him to. 

Finally, Buck was more than just a stray biding time on somebody’s porch. He belongs. 

“Hey,” Eddie says suddenly, after a long moment of peaceful silence. “You know what I want?” 

“What?” Buck asks. 

“A beer.” 

Buck, caught off guard, laughs. For a second, he wants to say no. Because he wants to keep laying here, head over Eddie’s beating heart. He wants to catalogue every minute detail of his existence, run his hands over the parts of him he hasn’t seen in so long, and he wants to hold him close, protect this feeling of warmth and safety dancing around in his chest. But then he remembers they have three days, and there’s a lot you can do in three days. Including spare some time for a good beer. 

“Yeah, actually,” he says, finally. “Me too.” 

So they both detangle themselves and step off the couch, and Eddie intertwines his hand with Buck’s to pull him all the way to the fridge. 

And thirty minutes later, when Eddie kisses him again, soft and sweet—

It tastes like happiness, like new beginnings, and like an ice cold Modelo.