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Buck gets home and Eddie’s eyes are full moon circular and he’s sweating a lot which isn’t, like, a great sign with the AC on full blast. Buck had been playing a podcast on his phone the whole ride home — hooked to the vent and screen turned up bright so he can quickly tap through ads, safely, Eddie, I’m not going to crash the car — so even if the ringer had somehow been turned off he would have noticed a missed call notification. No forewarning means it can’t be that dire. No one’s dying, or probably even hurt. Chris had texted right before Buck left the station, complaining about a homework assignment, and Buck can’t imagine he could have gotten into very much trouble in the computer lab in the amount of time it takes to drive home. Well. Who knows. Buck still doesn’t understand how CADD works, however many, uh, blue prints? Mock ups? Chris has tried to explain to him over the years. Maybe he… built a building too tall? And the computer burst into flames? And now they’re in even more debt to Cal Poly?
“Buck,” Eddie says, voice terribly soft. Right. Buck blinks away from theoretical budgetary nightmares to look at his husband. Still wide eyed, almost ringing his hands. In need of a forehead kiss at earliest convenience.
“Baby,” he says, stepping forward and planting one on him, rubbing his hands up and down Eddie’s arms. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“I’m so sorry,” Eddie says, and the genuine heartbreak in his face makes real worry twist in Buck’s gut. “I- I tried to fix it- God, I’m so sorry, it was an accident.”
“It’s okay,” Buck says first, because that seems important. “What happened, Eddie?”
Eddie takes his hand and pulls him to the kitchen. On the table- oh.
“I was cleaning out the closet and the fucking- the vacuum hose caught it and I didn’t notice right away, and- Buck, I’m so sorry.”
It’s a flannel shirt, blue with tan plaid. Color still pretty good even if it’s older than Buck is. He knows that three of the buttons on the chest don’t match, and the elbows have worn so thin he worries every time he wears it one wrong move will have him poking right through. Some moth holes here and there. And now: the whole front left side, starting under the pocket where the seam has made the fabric weak, a huge tear. It’s been sewn back together, in neat stitches that Buck immediately recognizes as Eddie’s hand, but the fabric warps and pulls along the line of them.
“Oh,” Buck says, out loud this time. “Bobby’s shirt.”
It feels like a dumb statement coming out of his mouth, vacant and surprised. Because that’s what it is, out from its careful storage space folded on their closet shelf to be taken out on cold days or bad days or sometimes on happy ones, just to give it, like, a well rounded emotional experience. Just so he’s not only thinking about Bobby when he’s sad.
“I’m so sorry, Buck,” Eddie says again. Buck looks up at him, his crossed arms and furrowed brows.
“It’s okay,” he says, which is true, however he’s feeling about it right now. “It’s… it’s an old shirt. It’s not- I mean, it was already pretty beat up when I got it. Not gonna last forever.” It was one of the few articles of clothing that had survived the house fire back in 2024, hidden in one of those miraculous unburned pockets of brick or drywall they find sometimes. Bobby had tossed it in the washers at work, because even if the flames hadn’t touched it directly it still sat there in the smoke of every nasty thing you don’t think about combusting as a home burns down. He’d ran it through twice, because it had come with him from Minnesota and he didn’t want to have to throw it away. It had come through the industrial cleaning pretty fragile, and Buck hadn’t seen him wear it again. Hadn’t seen it at all, until about a year later when Athena handed him a box with a cast iron, a couple of books. The shirt. “I mean- t-thank you. For…” Buck gestures at the emergency rescue measures, his hand drifting down to feel along the bumpy thread.
“I panicked,” Eddie says unhappily, watching Buck’s hand trace the rip. “I tried to- but fabric is different than- uh, skin.”
That makes Buck snort a little, and Eddie’s mouth twitches into a little smile. Buck sighs and puts his arms around him, dropping his head to kiss his shoulder. “Really. It’s okay. Thank you for taking good care of it.”
“I don’t know about good care,” Eddie murmurs, slumping into him. “After I did that Frankenstein job I ran to that sewing store by the Brazilian place, they talked me through darning but by the time I got back here you were almost home and I was worried I’d got the wrong thread colors or that I’d just make it worse- I just kind of froze and then you were here.”
“Darning?” Buck pulls upright again, kissing stray bits of Eddie’s skin as he goes.
“Yeah,” Eddie nods, looking over to a plastic bag Buck hadn’t noticed, embroidery thread poking out the top. “If- well, they explained it but then mostly just told me to go to youtube.”
Buck laughs at Eddie’s displeased little nose wrinkle, and grabs the bag, looks through the contents. A small folded square of gray-blue fabric, blue and tan thread in those loops Buck remembers Maddie getting hopelessly tangled when she had a friendship bracelet making phase in high school, some needles. “Show me how?”
Eddie puts a tentative hand over the supplies held in Buck’s. “Are you sure? I- Peppa hates sewing, but she has friends-”
“I know we haven’t worked together in a little while but are you so quick to stop believing in the power of our teamwork, Diaz?” Buck grins down at him, squinty and head tilted in a way that makes Eddie roll his eyes even as he smiles along.
“Okay, okay. I just- I know how special this is to you and I-”
”Bobby believed in our teamwork, too,” Buck says, and Eddie swallows around a lump Buck also feels. “Let’s do this for him.”
It takes a while. They don’t know what they’re doing, as earnestly as Eddie explains what he remembers from the ladies at the store. YouTube gets pulled up, Buck’s phone propped against a sturdy mug. They sit at the table, and Eddie makes fun of Buck’s less than neat stitches, and their ankles cross by their chair legs, and Eddie swears when he pricks his finger with the needle which Buck thinks happens endearingly often for a seasoned paramedic. They talk as they work, about their stations and Chris and the heatwave. They’re quiet as they work. Buck thinks about Bobby’s shoulders, how straight they stood under this cloth. He thinks about time, how old the shirt is, how pretty soon Bobby will have been gone longer than Buck knew him. When he has to stop, Eddie holds his hand until he can start again.
At some point Eddie stands up to turn on the lights. Buck hadn’t realized it was getting so late. He runs a palm across the pieces they’d darned so far, both starting at one end and working to meet each other. Not quite there yet. “Pretty close.”
Eddie hums, leaning over his back to see. “Not so bad.” He reaches out to poke at a wobbly section of his work. “And now we know how to do this, can keep fixing this thing up as- oh- Buck-”
“Sorry,” Buck says, trying to laugh around the sudden wetness. “Sorry. Yeah. It’s just- it’s going to keep unraveling forever. There’s nothing- it’s never going to be anything new, we just have to keep- keep holding onto- there’s just not enough. I wish- I wish-”
Eddie pulls his chair around the corner of the table to sit right up close. “I know. I’m sorry. I wish-” he sighs. “Everything you’re wishing. I wish I hadn’t- sped up the decay.”
Buck shakes his head, scrubbing his eyes. “It’s not- it is just a shirt, Eddie. I don’t actually need it to remember him.”
“Still,” Eddie says.
“Still,” Buck nods. He picks the shirt up carefully from the table and slides his arms into the sleeves, even if it’s still too hot out for the idea of a warm layer to be appealing. The fabric is a soft breeze of a hug, like it always is. “How’s it look?”
They got the colors pretty close, and their work got better as it went. He’s getting hungry, they’ll have to finish tomorrow. As Eddie puts his palm against Buck’s chest, flattening out the wrinkles, Buck thinks Bobby would smile at the clumsy love of the repairs.
Eddie’s hand keeps going up, slides around Buck’s neck, fingers scraping at the short hair at the base of his skull. “You don’t, really, but- sometimes I think you look like him.”
Buck closes his eyes, takes a shaky inhale, letting his heart ache very badly for a moment. He opens them again. “I’m gonna put this away, start dinner?”
Eddie nods, and stands up to gather their sewing supplies. They kiss before Buck leaves the room, and after Buck’s folded the flannel back into its safe closet home, he comes back into the kitchen and they kiss again.