Archive of Our Own

More than anything else in the world, Eddie hates the oppressive silence that he will inevitably have to soldier through during a therapy session with Frank. 

Because the thing about Frank is that they’ve known each other for years, and while Frank will still approach issues with the same care and concern as he did in the beginning, when Eddie was fresh off a breakdown and wading through a proverbial river of repressed issues, he has since learned to push. Every single Tuesday, 7pm sharp, Eddie will sit down in the armchair that may as well have a permanent imprint of his ass in the cushion with how often he’s been sat in it over the years, and Frank will look at him for a long, long time in complete silence. And then he’ll ask a question that will make Eddie want to pull a patented Chris tantrum, head thrown back with a groan and eyes rolling into the back of the head so hard they may very well get stuck there one of these days. Eddie decides to blame Buck for that one. Christopher certainly didn’t learn it from him, because Eddie does not throw tantrums, thanks. No, instead, faced with a straight-faced Frank, with his eyes wide open in curious neutrality, Eddie will huff, and huff some more, and crack his knuckles a couple of times for good measure, and then he’ll talk.

God, but he hates talking. 

“And how did that make you feel?” Frank asks now, nothing in his voice to suggest that he feels any type of way about what Eddie just told him. “When the lawyer suggested that you’re a violent, angry person,” he specifies. 

Eddie chews on the inside of his cheek and listens to the clock tick idly by, for ten, fifteen seconds, and then he clears his throat. Frank’s notebook lies open on the armrest of his own chair, words indecipherable from where Eddie is sitting, though he’d long ago given up on trying to take a peek. And Frank just keeps looking at him, quiet and patient, blinking every so often. The smug bastard. God. 

“I was - it made me feel… upset,” Eddie mutters, but it ends up sounding more like a question than a statement. Because Frank encourages him to identify his emotions. And apparently using ‘I feel’ statements is more conducive to parsing through complicated situations than ‘I am’, because ‘our emotional reactions to outside stimuli do not define us as human beings’. Or something.  

Frank hums, his eyes flicking down as he starts scribbling away in that stupid notebook. He looks back up at Eddie with that same, neutral gaze. “What about his question was particularly upsetting at that moment?” 

“He doesn’t know me,” Eddie all but spits out, but Frank gives no reaction to the venom in his voice, other than another slow blink. “He was asking all these questions about me like he knows me, but he doesn’t.” 

“Who does?” Frank asks, leaning back in his seat slightly. He closes the notebook. 

Eddie blinks. What kind of question is that, right? Plenty of people know Eddie. Dozens, even. The 118, and his extended family, and Chris, and… Frank! Frank knows him, too. He probably knows too much about him, because Eddie has consistently been forced to tell him the deepest and darkest of thoughts floating around in his mind for years. 

“You, I guess,” Eddie hedges, and he knows it’s the wrong answer because Frank flips open the notebook again and scribbles something down before leveling him with another look. 

“I know a lot about you, Eddie,” he says. “Your trauma, the specific issues you face day to day, and how that trauma informs the ways in which you react to those issues.”

“Right, so you know me.” 

Another scribble. God damn. 

Frank’s mouth tips down ever so slightly, like it does when he’s about to say something that’ll either have Eddie reaching for the tissues or clenching his jaw so hard that his teeth will grind together and ache for days. It’s always a toss-up between the two. 

“You are a person, Eddie,” he says, in that simple way he says all things, like they’re a simple fact. And he is a person. So why does Eddie feel the tell-tale tickling behind his eyes? “We are more than our trauma and the issues we experience. So, let me rephrase - who knows Eddie the person, the friend, as opposed to Eddie the patient, the firefighter?” 

Eddie blinks, and swallows convulsively a couple of times, like there’s something stuck in his throat. 

“My parents,” he says at last, with a mouth tasting of ash as it shapes itself around the words. They made him, after all. They’re the only people who have known Eddie his entire life, from the very beginning. And so they must know him, too. Right?  

Frank hums, scribbling furiously for a few excruciating moments. Eddie wants to argue with him about it, but he doesn’t know what to say. Is it possible to get a failing grade in therapy?

“What is it about your relationship with your parents that shows you that they know you?” 

Ah, there it is. Eddie sniffs, blinking and blinking and blinking, and then he reaches for the stupid tissues. Frank hands them to him without batting an eye. 

“They love Chris,” he says through the stuffy feeling in his nose, wiping at his dry cheeks just for something to do with his hands. 

“That’s good,” Frank nods. “Chris is important to you.” 

“He’s the most important. He’s everything.” 

Frank nods again, jotting something down quickly. “Do you know Chris?” 

Eddie blinks up at Frank. “Of course I know him. I know my kid. I know everything about him.” 

“Can you give me an example?” 

Can he give him an example, he asks. Pft. Sometimes it feels like his mind is stuffed full to the brim with information about that kid, and still he adds more, every single day, happy to make more room if it means getting to watch Christopher be a person with him. 

Eddie sits up straighter, feeling the familiar warmth that always comes when talking about his son. This, he can do. Easy.

“He’s a good kid. Kind, I mean, to everyone, but also just good. Like, he’s a good person all-around, doesn’t take shit from anyone, not even me. And he’s so smart it scares me sometimes. And - I mean, there’s the little stuff too, obviously. He prefers clementines over oranges…” they have a basket of clementines in the kitchen, always full, even though Eddie thinks they taste the same as oranges, but prefers the texture of the latter. “He’s curious, like Buck. They’re always teaching me something new, every day. I think they’re literally watching a documentary right now, so I’ll probably learn about deep-sea creatures or cave paintings or something once I’m back home.” 

Frank smiles, “You love him.” 

“Of course I love him.” 

“You love him, so you know him.” 

Eddie nods, “I loved him before I knew him, before he was born.” 

He remembers Shannon getting pregnant, and the immeasurable fear that had gripped him, just nineteen years old and scared out of his fucking mind with the idea of not being good enough to raise a happy kid. So he’d left, fled, really, to a desert where getting shot at on a daily basis was somehow less scary than failing his own kid. And he remembers the bitter taste of bile in his throat every time he’d think of Christopher with his parents, Shannon bearing the brunt of their disappointment in him. He remembers coming home and trying, really trying, and the anger that grew like a parasite at the very core of him every time his parents would talk about Chris as if he was theirs. Because he wasn’t theirs. He was Eddie’s. And Eddie would never, ever be disappointed in him. 

“How do your parents show you their love, aside from loving your son?” 

Eddie grimaces, “I - uh. I don’t - Next question, okay? I don’t wanna - I can’t.” 

He knows, okay? His parents are shitty and his childhood was shitty, for the most part, and he only ever sees them during the holidays, when Buck splits his time between Eddie’s house and Maddie’s for Christmas eve and Christmas day. They sit in awkward silence that is only interrupted by questions aimed towards Christopher, and his kid is so perfect that he doesn’t even mention the awkwardness, instead answering everything with the same kind of enthusiasm and uninhibited joy that follows him everywhere, even after everything he’s been through, despite all of the ways in which Eddie has failed him. 

“Is Christopher an angry person?” 

Eddie rears back as if he’s been slapped. “No! He - I mean, he gets upset sometimes, when he’s having a hard time with something. It’s okay that he feels angry sometimes, there’s a lot to be angry about. But - but he’s not an angry person. That’s not who he is. He’s just a kid.” 

“He is. He’s just a kid.” 

Eddie blinks, and blinks. He looks at Frank’s notebook, today’s page nearly full of neat scribbles. The clock on the wall ticks on and on rhythmically. 

Unbidden, a memory appears in his mind like a piece of seaweed washed up on a rocky beach at dawn. He is ten years old, and his father walks into Sophia’s room after work, just before nightfall. She and Eddie are sitting cross-legged on the floor, her small hands clumsy as they work on painting Eddie’s nails a pretty purple color that shines kind of pink in the fading sunlight. They jump at the sound of the front door closing, and Sophia scrambles to close the nail polish bottle and shove it back into her dresser while Eddie sits frozen on the floor, staring at the open doorway and back at their father. The smell of the nail polish is sharp and inescapable, and he knows. Eddie feels fear like a physical ache in his stomach. He is dragged to the bathroom and made to scrub at his nails until the cuticles bleed, raw and painful, not a speck of polish left, as his father watches over him with a hand gripping hard at Eddie’s bony shoulder. His bottom lip is bleeding from how hard he’s biting into it, because he can’t cry, and he can’t say anything, either. Anger flares in his chest like a shock of electricity, but he swallows that down, too. He goes to bed that night, and in the morning he is told that it’s time to become the man of the house. Sophia never asks to paint his nails again, and at some point his fingers stop feeling painful to the touch. 

Chris has a shelf lined with nail polish in his room, courtesy of Buck a few years ago, and sometimes the two of them will paint their nails together while Eddie chokes down tasteless bites of pizza during movie night. When asked, he’ll say that he’s allergic to polish, but he’ll make sure to tell them how nice it looks on them, and he’ll save the photos in his camera roll to look at when sleep evades him later in the night. 

The thing is, Eddie tries very hard not to think about his childhood too often. It’s been sort of a rule that he’s had for a long time, put in place somewhere between his seventh birthday and the drive to LA with a squirmy, giggly seven year old strapped into a car seat, grinning at him in the rearview mirror. Sometimes he looks at Chris and aches all over, somewhere deep within himself, and the weight of his mistakes feels like too much to carry all at once. And yet he can’t help but feel just the smallest flush of pride at his easy smiles, the way he trusts so openly, how he isn’t afraid to ask questions or complain or roll his eyes or argue. Chris will throw a fit as readily as he’ll tell Eddie he loves him before bed, and Eddie feels the sharp pain of loving him so fiercely with every breath he’s taken since he was nineteen years old. He’ll never scramble to hide when he hears Eddie’s key in the lock of their front door, and he’ll never cry himself to sleep out of fear or shame. 

He knows the sound of Eddie’s footsteps outside his bedroom door like a warm embrace, not the harsh sting of a palm across his face. 

“I was just a kid, too,” Eddie whispers. Frank hands him another tissue, and he realizes that his face is wet, snot leaking in a steady, thick stream out of his nose and onto his top lip. He wipes harshly at it and leans back in the armchair, staring up at the ceiling. 

They don’t say anything else for a long time. Eddie sniffs, and blows his nose, and eventually Frank flips his notebook closed and lets him know that their session is over for the day. As Eddie’s making his way through the door, Frank clears his throat pointedly.

“You are not an angry or violent man, Eddie. I want you to spend the next week thinking about anger as a symptom, and not as a personality trait.” 

Eddie huffs, “I’m getting homework again?” 

Frank waves him off with a small smile. “Tuesday, 7pm. And good luck tomorrow.” 

He lays awake in bed that night, staring up at the blank expanse of his bedroom ceiling as though it’s the star-speckled sky above the corn field half an hour’s drive away from his childhood home in El Paso. He might not have been a particularly good driver at sixteen, but sometimes it was just him and his old, rusty hand-me-down truck against the world back then, and the long, winding dirt road that led him to the one place in the world where he could be alone and unburdened by the expectations of everyone else. He’d lay on a well-worn blanket that smelled vaguely of smoke and damp from a rainstorm he’d gotten caught in, air dried in the Texas heat but still soft, and he’d look up at the stars for hours in the liminal space between midnight and dawn, scared by how big everything else felt, and how small he himself seemed in the face of it all. And as he laid there under the indifferent abyss of it all, so young and so, so lonely, he wondered if he’d always feel that way. If it would ever get better. 

His phone buzzes on the nightstand, and he swipes up to a message from Buck, lips quirking up in a smile at the mere sight of the stupid nickname he’d set up for himself in Eddie’s phone months ago. 

buckito ❤️ 

U awake? 

02:48

Eddie turns to face the closed door of his bedroom and he sees the faint glow of the living room lamp snaking its way past his threshold, warm and golden in the otherwise sterile darkness. He considers getting up and joining Buck in the living room, but the bed is very warm, and he’s so, so tired. 

‘Yup’, he types, and follows it up with a simple ‘come here’. 

There are several long moments of silence during which Eddie wonders if Buck ended up succumbing to sleep in the short time it took him to respond, but then the light outside his room disappears, and he strains his ears against the quiet to hear the soft patter of bare feet making their way over to his door. Another moment, and Buck is standing in his doorway, looking rumpled in a way that makes it clear that he’d been tossing and turning on the couch for a long while. His curly hair sticks up on one side and is flat on the other, and Eddie aches to reach out and smooth it out with his fingers, just so he’d have something to do with his restless hands. 

Instead, he beckons Buck over by lifting the covers on the empty side of the bed, and watches, pleased, as Buck makes his way over without question after clicking the door closed. 

They look at each other across the small space left over between where their heads rest on Eddie’s pillows, and he wishes that it wasn’t so dark in the room so he could see the expression on Buck’s face. His eyes are blue even in the darkness, glimmering like little stars, and they crinkle at the corners as Eddie continues to stare without saying anything. 

“What?” he whispers, turning further into his pillow but not looking away. 

Buck burrows deeper into the covers and gives a pleased little hum, cheek rubbing against his own pillowcase. “Can’t sleep,” he murmurs, and all the while his gaze darts across Eddie’s face in quick flicks, from one eye to the other. 

“Same,” Eddie’s hand spasms on the bed, the other trapped beneath his pillow. “Wanna talk about it?” 

Buck’s lips twist to the side in displeasure, and Eddie snorts. He looks so much like Chris sometimes, especially this late at night when he’s sleepy and disarmingly young-looking, rumpled and quiet. Same blonde curls, same amused glimmer in his eyes. Happy because he made Eddie laugh. 

Eddie’s fingers pick idly at a loose thread in their shared comforter. 

“You nervous about tomorrow?” Buck asks instead of answering, because of course he does. They could go for gold at the avoidance Olympics and both come out on top. 

Eddie shrugs, as much as the confines of his blanket cocoon allow. “Their lawyer is a dick,” he murmurs, mostly just so he could see the grin take over Buck’s face as he huffs a laugh. His warm, minty breath fans across Eddie’s cheek like the caress of a hand. 

“I was this close to yelling ‘objection!’ this morning,” Buck admits, his index finger and thumb nearly touching at the gesture, and it’s Eddie’s turn to laugh. 

“Okay, Ally McBeal. I don’t think you can object from the audience.” 

“Hey, I’ve seen Legally Blonde!” Buck hisses, amused,  “I could totally win a court case.” 

Eddie huffs, “Sure you could, bud.” 

He looks at Buck, then, a smile still lingering on his own lips and mirrored on Buck’s face as he stares back with half-lidded eyes. Eddie shifts closer to him, just a little bit, and his hand slides across the comforter on its own accord. Buck has been mirroring his position, and their pinkies almost touch at the small movement. He thinks back to the session with Frank and feels an uncomfortable dip somewhere in his stomach, like dropping on a rollercoaster, or the moment right before your plane takes off, wheels in the air.  

The smile must have slipped from his face at some point, because Buck makes a hurt little noise and links their pinkies together. His skin is warm even in the late November chill that settles over their house at night. 

“Do you think I’m an angry person?” he whispers, because it’s dark and it’s just him and Buck in the silence, and Buck doesn’t have a notebook to scribble in when Eddie says something that needs to be examined further. And Buck’s eyes are blue and kind, and his fingers tangle with Eddie’s own in the empty space between them, bridging the divide like it’s second nature. 

“I think you get angry when you’re upset because you won’t let yourself feel anything else,” Buck tells him, soft, always soft, even when his words make Eddie feel like breaking something, or crying.

Eddie nods, swallowing past the lump in his throat. “I don’t - I try not to get angry anymore, it’s just-” 

“Hey,” Buck squeezes his fingers, “You don’t have to explain. I know you, Eds.” 

And isn’t that just the worst and best thing he could have said? In the quiet that settles over them like a blanket after Buck’s words, Eddie continues to look at him, and look at him. He does that a lot, so much so that it’s been a subject of mockery for Chim, Hen and Ravi for an embarrassingly long time. Even Bobby will sometimes look at him with an amused quirk to his mouth in the station loft between calls, when Eddie realizes he’s been staring, unblinking, at Buck settled next to him on the couch, or across from him at the dining table, or in the truck, knees slotted together like the pieces of a puzzle as Buck rambles and laughs and sifts his happiness over Eddie like powdered sugar.

The thing is, there is a heavy, fireproof box in the dark confines of Eddie’s mind labeled ‘DO NOT OPEN’. It is in this box that he stores the untouchable memories of Buck that would make him unable to sleep at night or get up in the morning or work with a shred of composure. It’s “Wanna go for the title?” and the gnawing emptiness of the lawsuit days, it’s the day he held Buck’s hand under the ladder truck instead of helping lift it off of him, because holding Buck’s hand was the most important thing in the world at that moment, and he had to be the one to do it. It’s swimming through murky water after being buried under 30 feet of mud, Buck clawing his way to him with his bare fucking hands even as Bobby pried him away, kicking and screaming, and the impossible relief on Buck’s face as Eddie had emerged through the crowd in that field, wet and cold but alive. Laying in a warm pool of his own blood, reaching for Buck, because he’s all Eddie wanted in the moment between living and dying, only Buck. And then the excruciating pain as he was hauled under the truck and heaved inside, Buck’s beautiful, blood covered face hovering above him with wide, terrified eyes and chest heaving in panic. The ice-cold fear that had seized him when he thought that Buck had been hurt, too. It’s seeing Buck dangling from his line on top of their ladder, lifeless and gone, already gone, and Eddie running up to him against protocol, because you can’t pull deadweight up that way, but he had tried anyway. And then the 3 minutes and 17 seconds it took for Buck’s heart to start, and the fact that it started for Eddie, even though Chim had been the one doing compressions for most of that time. 

It’s looking in the rearview mirror on a rainy morning and seeing Buck’s smile drop off his face as soon as he thought Eddie wasn’t looking, and the way Eddie could see him standing there, in the middle of the street, the entire way until he had to make a turn. The pit that had opened up in his stomach as soon as he’d started the car, which hadn't closed back up until he’d come back to LA with Chris in tow for good. And again, that same pit splitting him down the middle in a neon lit club weeks ago, watching Buck dance with strangers and go home with them while Eddie nursed a beer and tried to pretend he couldn’t see the look on Ravi’s face as he watched silently, knowing but unwilling to pry. 

He opens up the box just a crack, and allows the memory of “I know you, Eds” to slide in there, too, before slamming the lid shut again. Buck breathes softly next to him, his eyes closed and eyelashes fluttering softly against the pale apples of his cheeks. His hand is warm in Eddie’s own, and Eddie watches their intertwined fingers for a long, long time, before sleep claims him as well. 

“What is your relationship with religion, Mr. Diaz?” 

Eddie has to try very, very hard to suppress the reaction his body has to that question. Which is to say, he swallows the bile rising up in his throat, and cracks his knuckles where his hands have been wringing together in his lap, hidden from sight in the stuffy courtroom. 

He clears his throat, and looks at a point somewhere just above the lawyer’s shoulder. “I grew up Catholic. My parents have always been involved in the church.” 

“And what about you?” 

Silence settles over the courtroom like a cloud of smoke, thick and oppressive. 

His mind supplies a memory, not too distant, of Abuela. Her hand a warm and comforting weight over his heart, telling him that it was okay to look for God’s presence within himself, the people he loves. 

And he thinks about being six years old and having to sit through mass and Bible study, interpreting the word of God in the pages of a book, and the way his parents would use that word to rationalize their own beliefs. How his mother’s mouth would twist in displeasure whenever Eddie would mention his best friend at school, and how the only time she told him she was proud of him was when he’d told her he’d asked Shannon to marry him. How his father would talk to him about Hell and the people who go there, and then ask about the girls in his class, and if he liked any of them. The sharp sting of his hand on Eddie’s face after Eddie admitted that he preferred to eat lunch with his best friend, a boy. How he stopped having lunch at school after that, and picked Shannon to like instead. How his father told him, after Shannon got pregnant, that that kind of sin was okay if it meant that Eddie could finally become a real man. 

And he thinks about how dancing was perfectly okay as long as he got trophies and medals for it, because a man is supposed to be the best at what he does. But it wasn’t okay to dance with Adriana and Sophia in their room, with Adriana balanced precariously on top of his own feet because she was clumsy, his arm wrapped around her middle to keep her steady, and his other hand held up to twirl Sophia around them. They had been laughing so hard that day, Adriana with that little snort giggle that Christopher sometimes still does when Buck gets whipped cream on his top lip and pretends to not notice it, even though he’s a teenager and too cool to find adults amusing. And then Ramon had cleared his throat in the doorway and motioned for Eddie to follow him outside, and that was that. They never danced together again, but he’d sometimes hear his sisters laughing behind their closed bedroom door, the sound of their bare feet barely heard over the music they’d play on Eddie’s old iPod. Eddie quit dancing shortly after that, and he hasn’t danced since.

“I’m not a practicing Catholic,” he settles on saying. “What happened that day had nothing to do with my beliefs. I was there as a paramedic, and she needed medical assistance.” 

They go over the details of Abigail’s case, in the medical sense - the tetanus as a result of her living conditions, which her parents inflicted on her. The lockjaw as a symptom of the tetanus, and how it wasn’t her fault. How she could have died if it had been left untreated, and how her parents seemed disinterested in the prospect of that happening. Hen is called to the stand to give her testimony, and she reiterates everything he’d said in that confident, no-nonsense way of hers that makes Eddie feel better about his own recollection of events. 

Abigail finds them, after. She tells them about the girl her parents had seen her with during a church youth group event, months ago. 

“We were just laughing together, and she touched my hand,” Abigail says, and her eyes are full of unshed tears. Hen hands her a tissue, her own eyes wide and glossy. “She was my best friend.” 

Eddie feels that familiar pit in his stomach. She’s just a kid, too, barely older than Chris. She’s just a year younger than Eddie was when he became a father. He thinks about her chained in a church closet with parents who think she deserved it, who barely looked at her during the two-day trial. And he imagines Chris earlier in the morning, wolfing down a stack of pancakes and trying not to talk with his mouth full even as he and Buck told Eddie about the documentary they’d watched on Victorian households and how they had led wallpaper and asbestos and borax in their bread, their blonde curls reflecting the early morning sunlight. 

“I know it seems impossible, but you’ll get through this, kid,” he tells her. 

Abigail looks away, at the open window to their right, where a bird perches on a low tree branch and chirps idly over the sound of traffic. “Like you did?” 

He smiles, a small thing that feels more like a grimace, “I’m getting there.” 

She leaves with Alex’s number saved in her phone courtesy of Hen, and an open invitation to join them for dinner at the station as soon as she gets settled in somewhere safe. Eddie watches the door after it closes behind her hunched over frame for a long time. 

“She’ll be okay,” Hen mutters as they wait for Buck to pick them up from the courthouse, squeezed together on a small bench just outside the building with the mid-morning sun helping to keep the chill in the air at bay. 

Eddie hums, and stares down at his phone, where the lock screen photo stares back at him - Chris, Buck and himself, a couple of years ago, cheeks all squished together in order to fit into the frame, matching grins on their faces. He and Buck are both looking at Christopher in this one, but Eddie knows that there is another photo in his camera roll, unused but looked at often, where he and Buck are looking at each other over Chris’s head as he sticks his tongue out at the camera. Their smiles are smaller, but Eddie has to swallow a lump in his throat every time he sees himself in that photo, the look in his eyes as he looks at Buck. He wonders if it’s always there and he just doesn’t know it, if it’s clear to anyone who looks at him and Buck together, if Buck knows. 

His phone chimes, and the photo gives way to a new message. Hen huffs a laugh as she looks down at it. 

buckito ❤️

Your carriage awaits, my liege :*

10:47

Eddie looks up at her, and the way she tilts her head makes him question what his face has been doing since the message came through, or since he looked down at that photo.

A car honks just as she opens her mouth to say something, and they are waved over by an enthusiastic Buck who has half a dozen questions for them within the first ten minutes of the car ride to the station. Eddie sits in the passenger seat of his car, his eyes fluttering over Buck’s profile in the stolen moments during red lights and stop signs, and he listens to Hen answer every single one on her own. He looks at Buck’s hand on the gear shift, and thinks about how easy it would be to reach out and slot their fingers together like they did last night in bed.

He turns to look out the window, and ignores the big, hungry thing screaming at him inside his chest. 

Eddie throws himself into the armchair in Frank’s office on Tuesday at 7pm sharp, and this time he doesn’t wait for their usual 5 minute silence to pass before speaking. 

“Buck said that he knows me,” he says, without preamble. 

Frank blinks, and slowly opens his notebook. He doesn’t write anything down. 

“Does he?” Frank asks at last, after the clock on his wall has ticked away for a minute or two. He taps his pen against the blank page of the notebook, and looks at Eddie in that steady way of his, like he already knows the answer. 

“I think he knows me better than anyone.” 

“It’s good to have a best friend like that, Eddie.” 

“I know him, too,” Eddie says. 

Frank nods, and jots something down. “Would you like to tell me about him?” 

“His parents fucking suck,” Eddie starts, wincing a bit at the tone, but Frank just nods in response so he figures it’s okay. “He grew up alone, when Maddie - that’s his sister, when she left home. He was all alone for a while, and I think he was just looking for someone who wouldn’t leave him.” 

Another nod, more writing.

“I left,” Eddie bites out, and he chews on the inside of his cheek for a long moment. “When I went to El Paso for Chris, I left him, too. And I had to, and he knows that. But I still left. And before that, I left Shannon, when I went to the army.” 

Frank’s mouth twists. “Do you often think about Shannon and Buck in the same context?” 

And, okay, what the hell kind of question is that? Eddie frowns, mouth already open as he tries to formulate an argument, when Frank puts a hand up. 

“Allow me to rephrase,” he says, hand already poised over his notebook, ready to keep writing as soon as Eddie starts speaking, no doubt. Dick. “What is Buck to you?” 

Eddie leans back in the armchair, his shoulders still stiff. “He’s my best friend. And - uh, my partner.” 

“At work?” 

“Well, yeah, but - he’s also just my partner. Like, with Chris. He’s been in that kid’s life for longer than he hasn’t.”

And as he says the words, unplanned but true, Eddie feels the box in his head inch its way open just a smidge. A memory of Buck bursting through the locked door of Eddie’s bedroom, kneeling on the floor with him as Eddie clutched at a baseball bat, surrounded by the fruits of his own destruction. Chris, younger then, before Eddie blew his life up, calling Buck for help. Buck staying with them for a long time after that, patching up the holes in Eddie’s bedroom wall and joking with him about it. Buck taking Chris to school and cooking for them and making sure that the fridge always had leftovers in it when he went to work, because Eddie could barely force himself out of bed and into the shower in the mornings, weighed down by bone-deep exhaustion and an inescapable hopelessness that felt like it would never go away. 

But it did. Because Buck said he’d have his back, nearly a decade ago in that parking lot, and he’s kept that promise every day since. He’s been the one constant in their lives ever since he came stumbling into them. That’s why his name is written on a piece of paper in the fireproof box stuffed at the back of Eddie’s closet, right under Chris’s birth certificate and their passports. 

Frank writes for a few long moments, and then looks up at Eddie with his mouth doing that thing again. Eddie can not catch a break. 

“You’re allowed to want things, Eddie,” he says. “Good things. Good people.” 

Eddie huffs, and stares at a loose thread in his jeans for a long time. 

“I’ll ruin it.” 

A beat of silence. “Would you like to elaborate?” 

He does groan, this time, but manages to not roll his eyes or toss his head back in agony. Small wins. Frank raises an unimpressed eyebrow, but does not otherwise react. 

“Look - I’m sure you’ve noticed, but I’m kind of a mess. Like, blowing up my entire life on a regular basis every few years, capital M, mess,” he bites out. “He deserves better.” 

Frank hums, and scribbles something down again. Eddie’s eye twitches. “Do you treat Buck poorly?” 

“Wha- No! No, of course not, but…” 

“But?” 

Eddie clenches his jaw. The box rattles in his head. 

Frank sighs, and it sounds loud in the sudden stillness of the room. “Eddie. There is a person who knows you, and takes care of your son with you. Takes care of you. You are partners, at work and outside of it. So, why don’t you tell me what this is really about?”

The clock keeps ticking, and Frank doesn’t reach for the notebook again. Eddie feels his phone buzz in his pocket.

“I’m - I feel scared. Of losing him. I guess.” 

A nod, and the notebook is flipped closed. 

“You have faced tremendous loss in your life, and so has Christopher,” Frank says, his voice gentle in the same way it was during their first sessions together, when Eddie had barely been holding it together. “But from what you’ve told me, Buck does not seem like the type of person who would leave you.” 

Eddie nods, but doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t know what to say, and he doesn’t want to cry. Those are his only options. 

They sit in silence for a long, long time, and Frank doesn’t attempt to ask follow-up questions or fill that silence with idle conversation, either. His phone buzzes again at one point. When their time is up, he walks Eddie to the door of his office, and Eddie can feel his eyes on the back of his head long after he’s walked out of the building. 

On the drive back home, Eddie turns up the radio and grips the steering wheel so hard he’s pretty sure he’ll get blisters on his palms, and he tries very hard to not think about anything at all. But all too soon the familiar glow of their porchlight greets him, and he allows himself just a moment of silence, during which he resolutely does not panic. He looks down at his phone instead, stalling. Two unread messages hover over the lock screen photo. 

buckito ❤️

Chris asked to go to Denny’s for a sleepover, online school tomorrow + new ps5 game secured

19:09

Dropped him off and got us pizza :* 

19:45

Eddie swallows, heart fluttering with the realization that Chris knows, though he is a teenager and is therefore far too cool and nonchalant to admit it, that Buck is his parent, too. In all the ways that matter, he has been for a long time. Maybe from the very beginning.  

He breathes for a long moment, and then makes his way to the door. 

Buck is sitting on the couch, head tossed over the backrest and neck craned at an uncomfortable angle that allows him to look at Eddie upside down where he stands in the open doorway. And he’s holding a half-full bottle of beer, another sitting unopened on a coaster on the coffee table. His long fingers are wrapped around the neck of it, and his fingernails are painted purple. 

“I’m in love with you,” Eddie tells him. 

Buck’s mouth drops open as soon as the words reach his ears. The bottle slips from his fingers, and he gets beer all over the front of his shirt as he struggles to get a grip on it and gives up halfway through, still staring at Eddie. His eyes are very wide, and very blue, and his cheeks look rosy from the beer, birthmark just a shade darker than it usually is in the dim light of the living room lamp. There is a hole in the collar of his t-shirt, and his socks are mismatched, and Eddie loves him, and loves him, and loves him. 

“Uh,” Buck says, eloquently. 

The beer bottle rolls across their carpet, empty, its spilled contents making Buck’s shirt stick to the soft area of his stomach right underneath his bellybutton. Eddie’s heart hammers away in his chest, even as he takes a moment to close the door with a soft click and toe his shoes off right next to Buck’s own in their entryway. They stare at each other the entire time, and he watches the way Buck’s Adam's apple bobs when he swallows. 

“You’re - okay, yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, not - not no - okay,” Buck stammers, still staring, his mouth opening and closing like the goldfish Chris used to have on his bedside table. He cringes at himself, looks like he’d like to beg Eddie to take him out back and put an end to the stuttering, like he does when he’s particularly flustered. His birthmark is a deep pink now, almost red. 

Eddie smiles, and walks slowly towards the couch until their socked toes press together. When he looks down, he notices that the mismatched pair of socks on Buck’s feet matches the ones on his own. And just like that, it doesn’t feel so scary anymore. 

He cups Buck’s cheek, gentle, always gentle with him. And if his hand shakes as he does it, Buck is kind enough to not mention it. 

“I’m in love with you,” he repeats, louder this time, unafraid. “I think I’ve always loved you, ever since we met. Maybe even before that.” 

“Eddie,” Bucks whispers, and it barely sounds like a word with how it’s carried out on an exhale, like all of the air has been expelled from his lungs, all at once. 

“You don’t have to say it back, I just wanted you to know.” 

Buck’s jaw drops again, “Don’t have to say it ba-? Eddie. Are you fucking kidding me?” he grips the hand Eddie still has on his cheek, their fingers pressed together, and lifts the other to clutch at the fabric of Eddie’s shirt. “Of course I- I’ve loved you for years, Eds, oh my god.” 

Eddie frowns down at him, “Why didn’t you-” 

“What, say anything?” Buck snorts, “Eddie, you’re - well, you’re obviously not, but I thought you were, and I’m so proud of you, by the way, but I thought you were straight! Like, painfully straight. Tommy and I had a whole argument about it!” 

“Ew, do not talk about Tommy fucking Kinard while we’re professing our love for each other for the first time,” he shudders, “God.”

“Sorry!” Buck laughs, and his fingers clutch harder at Eddie’s shirt, making him sway forward and take a step closer to Buck, between his spread thighs. He steps into a damp patch of carpet where the beer is soaking through, and he can feel it getting onto his sock as well. 

Buck raises his other hand and grabs at Eddie’s waist to steady him, his eyes alight with happiness as he looks up at him. Eddie cups his face with both hands, rubs little circles over the rosiness of his full cheeks. 

“I’m gonna love you forever,” Buck tells him. 

“I know.” 

Buck glares up at him, but he’s still smiling. “Okay, Han Solo. Now say it back.” 

He emphasizes the words by shaking Eddie back and forth with the grip he still has on his waist, and Eddie retaliates by squeezing his cheeks together until his lips pout out absurdly. He leans down and presses his mouth to them, grimacing at the way his lips come away wet with Buck’s saliva from how he’s still pouting, and in a moment of insanity he will forever deny, his tongue swipes out to lick it off. 

Buck wheezes. “You’re gonna kill me.” 

“I love you.” 

“Oh my fucking god. Get down here.” 

He’s pulled onto Buck’s lap in the span of a blink, and Eddie has just a brief moment to feel elated at the easy way in which Buck maneuvers them around into a more comfortable position, before his brain bluescreens completely. Because Buck’s hands are sliding under his shirt, gripping at the bare skin of his waist now, and his mouth is on Eddie’s between one breath and the next. 

And, look - Eddie’s been kissed before, right? He might have spent his life deeply repressed and forced into a mold that never quite fit, but he’s definitely kissed people before, and that had been good. Great, sometimes, even though it never felt quite right. 

Now, though? With Buck licking at the seam of his lips and his big hands sliding over his goosebumped skin, Eddie understands what it means to want in the way his friends at school used to gush about in the locker room. Their lips slot together and part with little smacking noises, and Buck licks into his mouth like he’s determined to taste the very essence of him, and Eddie would let him if only he knew where in the body it was. 

And he knows, with startling clarity, that there is no closing that box in his head now. Not after this. 

“Love you,” Buck murmurs into his open mouth where they’re pressed together. He nips at Eddie’s bottom lip before licking right back in, and he’s muttering between kisses like he can’t help it, Eddie’s name pressed into his lips, and just the first syllable of it, and a litany of i love you on a near constant loop. 

Eddie feels like he might just float away if Buck lets go of him, he feels so light. 

He presses closer still, sliding further against Buck until they’re pressed chest to chest. His hands dig into Buck’s hair on their own accord, and he can’t believe he gets to do this, have this. Buck panting into his open mouth and refusing to move away to take a proper breath, his pink tongue sticking out and licking across Eddie’s kiss-swollen lips, the corners of them where his saliva has gathered in tiny pools. 

Eddie thinks about the version of him in El Paso, during those bleak months between Chris leaving and coming back home, who would lay awake at night and stare at Buck’s photos in his camera roll after just having spoken to him over facetime for hours, like an insane person, full of a longing that had nowhere to go. The deep pit of loneliness that came with leaving his best friend behind, and why hadn’t he asked Buck to come with him? He would have, is the thing. Eddie knows he would have. Buck even temporarily adopted a dog to teach Eddie a lesson about loyalty, for fuck’s sake. And the way he couldn’t even look Eddie in the eye as he lied about not needing him, either. The fake smile he’d plastered on as they said goodbye that day. God. They’ve been so, so stupid. Hen and Chimney were right, they’re always right. 

“I fucking love you,” he says against Buck’s chin, licking at it before he moves back up to his mouth for another kiss. “Never gonna leave you.”

Buck releases a hurt little noise and kisses him back furiously, his hands fisted in the fabric of Eddie’s shirt that’s pulled upwards with the movement so that it ends up wrinkled uncomfortably under his armpits. He rocks Eddie back and forth in his lap, his entire body swaying with each kiss like he can’t help it. 

Eddie huffs and leans back, shushing Buck as he immediately whines in protest at the sudden distance between them, and spares a moment to whip off his shirt and toss it somewhere over Buck’s shoulder. It knocks something off the shelf on its way to the floor, but Eddie does not have the mental capacity to worry about that at the moment. 

“That was so fucking hot, oh my god,” Buck whispers, like he’s talking to himself, as he leans forward to mouth at the newly exposed skin of Eddie’s torso. He trails his lips across the bare expanse of Eddie’s chest, pressing barely there nips to whatever patch of skin he can reach and thumbing over his abs with a quiet whine. 

Eddie grins into the curls tickling at his chin from where Buck is leaning into him, head bowed down to press open-mouthed kisses to Eddie’s pecs, making him shudder. His heart is fluttering hummingbird-fast in his chest, and he grips at Buck’s hair again with trembling hands. He’s so full of this bright, joyous warmth that it feels almost impossible. But it’s happening, it really is. Buck, trembling underneath him, muttering half-formed praises against Eddie’s flushed skin and his big, safe hands touching Eddie all over like he can’t believe it either. 

He thinks back to the day Buck came out to him in the loft kitchen, his voice small and uncertain in a way so foreign to Eddie as he’d told him about the date. With Tommy fucking Kinard. And how Eddie had felt a stab of pain somewhere deep in his gut, like getting suckerpunched in the ring, even as he’d assured Buck that it didn’t change a thing between them. The look on Buck’s face right after he said it, relieved but also… really not at all? Almost disappointed, though Eddie had been unable to think about it at the time, and what it could mean, choosing instead to shove it deep, deep into the box of forbidden ideas. He knows now, though. Buck had wanted it to change everything between them, and it had. 

Eddie looks down at him, looks at the way the blue of Buck’s irises is nearly swallowed up by his wide pupils, his lips spit-slick and puffy, the red of his birthmark stark against his flushed skin. He looks up at Eddie as though having felt his gaze on him, and the way he smiles makes him look so soft, and so young. Happy. 

And Eddie knows him.

He knows him, and so he loves him. He loves him, and so he wants to know him. 

And he’s the most beautiful thing Eddie’s ever seen.