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Buck doesn’t like being wet.
He wasn’t always this way. Growing up, he was the type of kid that would play out in the rain until Maddie told him he was going to catch pneumonia, riding his bike around town in torrential downpour and trailing water into CVS and the Turkey Hill. He’d keep his wet clothes on until they started to itch, and would wear them again the next day while they were still damp. He never dried his hair, or changed his socks. It’s a wonder he never actually ended up catching anything.
Firefighting isn’t a dry job, Buck knew that before he ever signed up for the Academy. If he’s not jumping into pools to save drowning victims, he’s swimming out into the Pacific to pull people from a plane wreck. If he’s not getting caught in the spray of the hoses, he’s getting caught under an air tanker dumping a thousand gallons of retardant. He’s spitting sprinkler water from his mouth and blinking it from his eyes. He’s saving a kid and his mom from an elevator rapidly filling with water; he’s saving Bobby and Athena from a sinking cruise ship. He’s getting swept away in a tsunami, he’s climbing a ladder in the rain, he’s watching Chimney saw a woman’s leg off in a subway car under a broken supply line—
“Buck?”
Denny looks up at him with big, concerned eyes. His hair is tied down in a makeshift scrub cap and a pair of nitrile gloves are slipping off his hands. There’s a tiny smudge of blood near his collar, near his skin.
“Are you okay?”
Buck blinks at him. He feels like his lungs are filling with water.
His voice doesn’t sound like his own when he says, “Yeah, why?”
Denny doesn’t look convinced. He glances back to where Eddie is suturing a woman’s arm shut like he’s going to go fetch him.
“You look like you’re gonna pass out. Do you need me to get—”
“No!”
Denny watches him for a second, assessing him in a way that is all Hen, then grabs a tiny bottle of water from his pocket and hands it to Buck. Then he’s gone.
Buck drops the bottle to the floor like its meager weight is too much for his shaking fingers, the sound of it hitting the cement swallowed by the clamor of the firehouse, and pulls himself up the nearest staircase on a leg that feels like it’s about to give out. Every ascending step feels like a hacksaw hitting bone.
Buck never used to mind being wet, but now, six years since the tsunami that took out the Santa Monica Pier under his feet and two years since the thunderstorm that killed him, he can’t stand it. He hates it, and he needs to get out of these clothes.
But he can’t move. He reaches the bunk room at the other end of the loft and finds himself frozen in the open doorway like some invisible force is preventing him from going in. He should be down in the bay, helping people, treating people, doing his job, but it’s been hours since they clawed their way out of that mangled subway car and his clothes are still damp and he hates it.
A hand presses between his shoulder blades, guiding him over the threshold and into the bunk room. Buck takes two shaky steps and turns to find Eddie there, always there. Eddie, who probably didn’t even need Denny to find him to know that Buck needed him. Eddie, who shows up anyway.
Eddie, who’s saved Buck from drowning time and time again.
A noise that Buck doesn’t recognize breaks free from his throat.
“My leg hurts,” he whimpers, and then he goes down.
And Eddie catches him.
“Okay, okay, Buck, I gotcha. Let’s get you to bed, huh?”
Eddie drags him to the nearest bunk and sits him on the edge. Buck’s head, too heavy for his neck, rests in the crook of Eddie’s neck. He smells like sweat and antiseptic and something so undeniably Eddie that it quenches Buck’s thirst more than a bottle of water ever could.
He starts with Buck’s boots, unlacing them with quick, deft fingers and pulling them off. He peels his sticky socks off next, and stuffs them in the boots, out of sight. The tops of Buck’s feet are pale and indented with the pattern of his socks, and Eddie gives them a quick rub before moving on, up to his belt.
“You’ve been checked out since we got back,” Eddie murmurs as he tugs Buck’s pants over his unwilling hips.
He doesn’t ask Buck how he is, doesn’t ask him what’s wrong. He tells him, because he knows, and it makes a pressure grow behind Buck’s eyes. He grabs the front of Eddie’s shirt and doesn’t let go.
Buck’s pants go over his swollen knee, and Eddie keeps talking to distract him.
“You know, I didn’t have you go back to the hospital ‘cause I figured the whole being-stuck-in-a-room-with-a-scalpel-wielding-robot thing was still a little fresh, but now I see that would’ve been better than having to watch—”
“It’s fine.”
Eddie huffs and slides Buck’s pants past his feet. His belt clanks against the floor.
“It’s not fine, Buck.”
He turns his face against Buck’s on his shoulder and whispers it into his ear, like it’ll reach his brain faster that way. Eddie’s hands, so big and warm, wrap around his left calf and squeeze-push, his thumbs digging painfully into stiff muscle and sensitive scar tissue. Buck keens into his neck.
“I know, bud. I know. Geez, you’re cold.”
“Freezing.”
Another huff, this one sounding more like a laugh. Eddie gets up from the floor slowly, taking Buck’s head with him and letting his face drag gently over his soft chest until it rests against his stomach. He puts a hand on the back of Buck’s head, holding him there, holding his cheek to the steady rise-and-fall of his breathing. His fingers tug at the curls at the crown of Buck’s head, having dried odd and stiff. Buck shivers.
“That’s what you get for keeping these wet clothes on. C’mon, before you catch pneumonia.”
Eddie reaches around Buck and grabs the hem of his shirt, tugging it up and over his head, then down his arms. It joins the rest of his uniform on the floor.
Buck is left alone in his boxers, thankfully dry, for half a second, too short a time to notice he’s been left alone at all. Eddie returns from the adjoining bathroom with a stack of blankets, which he dumps unceremoniously at the foot of the bed.
Hands on his hips, he watches Buck, and Buck looks up at him through sticky lashes to find him frowning, frowning, his eyebrows creating a fissure in his lined forehead. Buck is too out of his own mind to parse what’s going through Eddie’s.
Just when his spine is starting to complain from the slumped angle, Eddie grabs him behind the knees and swings his legs onto the bed, like Buck’s seen him do to Christopher a million times over the years.
Christopher, who’s gotten too old to be tucked in, but not Buck. Maddie only got to tuck him in for the first six years of his life before she was off with Doug, and it was never enough. He feels like he’s been chasing that feeling, that comfort, ever since.
Flat on his back now, head sinking into the crinkly LAFD-issued pillow, Buck covers his warm face with his cold hands. The sobs that break free from the back of his throat come like a damn bursting, loud and unwavering, and Eddie sinks his hands into the rushing water and grabs hold of him.
He takes one of the blankets and rubs it hard and fast over Buck’s near-naked body like he’s a shivering newborn that doesn’t yet know how to regulate its body temperature, then drapes it over him, followed by another blanket, and another. It’s too much.
Buck has a weighted blanket at home—two, actually, one that’s fifteen pounds and one that’s twenty, and usually they help, the weight helps, but right now, under just a few shitty polyester blankets from the linen closet, it’s too much. It feels too much like a slab of concrete, too much like an overturned ladder truck. Just like his damp clothes, he needs them off.
He kicks his legs, pushes up on his elbows, fear like a vice around his lungs, and with the kind of speed that saw him graduating top of his class all those years ago, Eddie grabs the blankets and throws them off, onto the floor, and replaces them with his hands.
“Hey, hey, Buck, look at me.”
Buck looks at him through the dark of the room and his wavering eyesight. There’s sweat catching in the hair on his chest, pinpricking from his lower back, threatening to drench him all over again, but Eddie is looking at him so steadily and Buck can’t look away.
“What do you want?”
Something deep down and selfish finds its way onto Buck’s tongue, and it’s falling from his mouth before he can stop it.
“Just you.”
Eddie’s brown eyes widen a fraction, and skate across Buck’s face like a biometric scanner, then soften into something sweet and familiar. Eddie hasn’t looked at him like this in so long.
He gets up and rounds the bed, kicking off his own boots as he does. “Alright,” he says, “Scoot over, you damn Tonka truck, these beds are half the size of the one at your old loft.”
Buck lets out an errant sob, louder than the rest, because him and Eddie have been living under the same roof for six months now and this is the first time they’re sharing a bed since COVID. It makes him feel young and desperate, like he could hold his arms in Eddie’s direction and make grabby-hands.
Eddie gets in gently on Buck’s left, being mindful of his leg that’s a mess of twitching muscle and radiating pain, worsened from his fit with the blankets, and lays down close enough that Buck can feel his hair tickle his ear.
“Eddie—”
He tugs until Buck’s half on top of him, guiding his face back into the crook of his neck like it belongs there. Buck should feel weird, with Eddie fully clothed while Buck is in nothing but a pair of flimsy boxer-briefs, but all he can feel is thankful. And safe.
“I know,” Eddie says. “Just rest, huh? Relax, Buck, it’s been a weird couple of days.”
Weird couple of months, Buck doesn’t say.
“But, Eddie…”
Buck doesn’t know what to say, and he lets his words taper off. There’s so much he needs to say, about a lot, but Eddie just wraps his arms around Buck and holds him like nothing matters up here in the bunk room.
“But nothing. Don’t make me call Chris.”
That gets a smile out of him.
“Listen,” Eddie says, his voice vibrating against Buck’s forehead where it’s pressed into the side of his neck, “I know, okay? I do. I’m sorry, you’re sorry. Everything’s felt kind of FUBAR lately. Let’s just— Let’s nap a little, while we got enough hands downstairs.”
“Okay,” Buck croaks, and Eddie, miraculous Eddie, buries his lips in his mop of hair until he hits scalp. The brief kiss trickles warmth throughout Buck’s body like he’s been hooked up to a bag of warm saline. “But I—I want to visit Lori. The, uh, the woman who—”
“Sure,” Eddie says easily. “But let’s wait until Hen and Athena make it back Earth-side, okay?”
“Okay,” Buck says again.
“Good. Now close your eyes.”
Eddie’s fingers brush over the knobs of Buck’s spine, up and down, up and down, like a metronome on the slowest setting. C6, C7, T1, T2. Buck feels him counting the vertebrae.
It lulls him into a sleep he wasn’t expecting to get any time soon.