Archive of Our Own

Buck mentions the appointments at their next shift, offhandedly, tossed over his shoulder while he's restocking the ambulance, same as he mentions most things related to Eddie's life that he's taken upon himself to manage, which is admittedly a lot of things, possibly too many things, but Eddie's never complained, always just does this little exhale through his nose that Buck has learned to interpret as fond resignation, basically Eddie-speak for thanks, I would've forgotten, you're the best, what would I do without you Evan Buckley, light of my life, scheduler of my appointments, most reliable man in Los Angeles County, my rock, my anchor, my emergency contact both literal and spiritual.

Okay maybe not all of that but Buck can extrapolate.

Except this time Eddie goes stiff.

Anyone else would miss it, but Buck has made a quiet study of Eddie Diaz over the years, a hobby, really, possibly an Olympic sport if they gave out medals for noticing when your best friend's shoulders climb a quarter inch toward his ears. So he notices the micro-flinch, Eddie’s jaw tightening almost imperceptibly before he says, "You scheduled them together?"

"Yeah," Buck says slowly. Eddie is being weird, trying very hard to seem like a guy who doesn't care about something when he actually cares enormously about something. "I figured we could grab lunch after? There's that place a couple blocks from the clinic you’ve been wanting to try."

"Cool," Eddie says, turning back to his locker, abruptly ending the conversation. Okay, that's not suspicious at all, that's completely normal behavior for a person with no secrets and nothing to hide.

Buck spends the rest of the shift going through a mental catalog of everything he could've done wrong in the last forty-eight hours because clearly he's done something and Eddie won't tell him what. Buck hates it, frankly, because how is Buck supposed to fix a problem he doesn't know exists? He'd eaten the last of Eddie's pretzels from the snack cabinet but he'd replaced them, even got the fancy organic ones Eddie pretends he doesn't prefer, so that couldn't be it. He'd made a joke about how Eddie came back from Texas with a Prius, like a man who describes wine as "oaky" and has a favorite tote bag, but Eddie had laughed at that one, or at least done the nose-exhale thing. He'd helped Christopher with his history presentation over FaceTime on Sunday, maybe overstepped there, gotten a little too invested in the diorama of ancient Rome, started using phrases like "historically accurate aqueduct placement" and "optimal gladiator sightlines," had gotten really passionate about the Colosseum's crowd flow. Christopher seemed into it, though it could've been secretly annoying. But Eddie had wandered into frame with a beer and smiled at both of them, calling Buck a nerd in this soft voice that made Buck feel like he'd swallowed a small sun.

So what the hell?

"Are you mad at me?" Buck asks in the truck on the way to the clinic. He's driving since Eddie sold his soul to environmental consciousness and Buck refuses to be seen pulling up to a medical facility in a car that looks like a suppository on wheels. Eddie's in the passenger seat doing his princess routine, which Buck is absolutely not going to say out loud because Eddie would kill him, but it's true, Eddie has become a full-blown passenger princess since the Prius acquisition, perfectly content to let Buck chauffeur him around the greater Los Angeles area while he controls the music and provides unsolicited commentary on Buck’s following distance.

Except right now Eddie's not critiquing anything, just sitting there with his knee bouncing a rhythm Buck doesn't recognize from Eddie's usual repertoire of anxious tells, and Buck knows all of Eddie's anxious tells, has them memorized like state capitals or the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. This one time Eddie had been nervous about a parent-teacher conference and Buck had seen it from across the station just by the way Eddie was holding his coffee cup, when he went over and asked what was wrong, Eddie had accused him of being a witch, and Buck had replied that he’d have to be a warlock or a wizard, since witches are usually women. 

Eddie's head snaps toward him. "What? No."

"You seem mad."

"I'm not mad."

"You seem something."

“I’m fine.”

"You're not fine, you're doing the clench-y jaw thing where you're trying not to say what you're actually thinking, and normally I'd let you marinate in your broody silence because I respect your process, I'm a respecter of processes, but you've been weird ever since I mentioned the appointments so I'm trying to figure out what I did. Like maybe I shouldn't have scheduled them without asking, I could see how that might be overstepping, or is it the lunch place, do you not want to go there? We can do literally anything else, I just thought you mentioned wanting to try it but maybe I invented that memory, or wait is it a Christopher thing, did I say something to Christopher? Because I know I get too intense sometimes—"

Eddie's quiet for a second and Buck watches him in his peripheral vision because he can't help it, Eddie's face is endlessly interesting to him, all these micro-expressions that most people never get to see, this whole secret language Buck has spent years becoming fluent in. Eddie's got a little crease between his eyebrows that means he's chewing on something he doesn't want to say, and his hands are doing the thing where they keep almost reaching for his own face before aborting the action. Buck follows all of it, files it away in the ever-expanding mental folder labeled EDDIE that has basically become his mind’s largest document.

"I'm fine," Eddie finally says, which is a lie, obviously, but Buck decides to let it go for now because they're pulling into the parking lot and he figures the truth will shake loose eventually, it always does, Eddie's historically very bad at keeping things from Buck. It’s as if his secrets have a homing instinct.

The clinic waiting room is sterile and uninviting, only amplifying Eddie’s current restlessness. Buck signs them both in while Eddie hovers behind him pouting. The receptionist has a little bowl of those strawberry candies that he’s only ever found in his grandmothers' purse, the ones in the shiny wrappers that taste vaguely like artificial fruit and the passage of time. Buck takes one because free candy is free candy and also he wants to see if Eddie will judge him for it.

Eddie doesn't even notice. Eddie is too busy vibrating like a chihuahua at the vet.

Buck finds two seats in the corner underneath a poster about hand-washing that features a cartoon germ with googly eyes and a sinister expression. Buck gets into a heated staring contest with the germ as Eddie drops into a seat like his strings have been cut, immediately crossing his arms over his chest in standard pouting posture. Buck finds it cute, actually. The way Eddie turns into a grumpy five year old when upset. 

"Okay seriously," Buck says, unwrapping his contraband strawberry candy, "what's going on with you?"

"Nothing."

"You're being weird."

"I'm not being weird, I'm being normal, this is just my face."

"Your normal face is usually a lot less constipated.”

Eddie shoots him a glare that's probably supposed to be withering but lands somewhere closer to please stop looking directly at me with your perceiving eyes. Too late, Buck has been perceiving Eddie since 2018 and he's not about to stop now. It's become his primary hobby and maybe his entire personality.

A nurse calls someone's name, not theirs, some guy named Harold who looks about seventy and completely unbothered by the whole clinic experience, like a normal adult, and Eddie flinches so hard his elbow hits the armrest. Buck watches this happen with growing fascination, the way Eddie immediately tries to play it off, recrossing his arms, setting his jaw, doing his whole I am a statue and statues don't have feelings routine that hasn't fooled Buck in ages. 

"Eddie."

"What?"

"You just jumped like three inches off your chair."

"I didn't."

"You absolutely did, I watched it happen, I have eyes."

"Your eyes are broken."

"My eyes are twenty-twenty, I scored extremely well on my last eye exam."

The nurse calls another name, still not theirs, this time a woman with a toddler who's eating goldfish crackers off the waiting room floor. Buck finds it both disgusting and relatable. Eddie twitches again, this barely-there jolt that he's clearly trying very hard to suppress. His knee starts bouncing, the same arrhythmic anxious pattern from the car, and one of his hands has migrated up to grip his own bicep, holding himself together through sheer force of will.

Buck is running through possibilities now, because something is clearly very wrong and Eddie won't just tell him which is typical Eddie behavior but still frustrating, and Buck's brain is generating hypotheses at an alarming rate. Eddie's not sick, Buck would know if Eddie was sick, Buck monitors Eddie's health the way day traders monitor the stock market, with obsessive attention and mild panic at any fluctuation. Eddie's not in trouble, probably, unless he's in secret trouble he hasn't mentioned, which would be offensive because Buck has made it extremely clear that he wants to be involved in all of Eddie's problems, he’s basically submitted a formal application to be Eddie's designated crisis manager.

"Okay," Buck says slowly, "you're going to tell me what's happening right now or I'm going to start guessing, and I'll warn you my guesses are going to get increasingly unhinged. I'll start with 'maybe you're mildly stressed' and end up at 'maybe you're a sleeper agent who just got activated by the creepy hand-washing poster.'"

"I don't want to go in there," Eddie says, very fast, barely a whisper.

Buck blinks. "To the... examination room?"

"Yes."

"Where they do the screening. The health screening. That is the whole reason we’re here."

"Yes."

"The fifteen-minute thing where they check your blood pressure and steal a little of your blood for lab purposes.”

"It's the stealing blood part, Buck." Eddie's looking at the floor now, at the weird speckled linoleum that probably hasn't been truly clean since 1987, clenching his jaw so tight it makes Buck wonder if he grinds his teeth in his sleep. "The needles. I don't. I can't."

Buck's brain does a brief intermission, because surely Eddie isn’t saying what Buck thinks he’s saying.

"You're scared of needles," he says.

"I didn't say scared."

"Eddie," Buck says, turning in his chair to face him because this moment deserves his complete attention, his undivided focus, this is historic, unprecedented, Buck is witnessing something rare like a solar eclipse or a Beyoncé sighting. “You’ve been shot. In a war. You got shot multiple times in an actual armed conflict with actual enemy combatants, you have scars, Eddie, you have actual bullet hole scars on your body, I've seen them—" he's seen them a lot, actually, maybe looked a little too closely at times, knows which one is from Kandahar and which one is from the sniper, knows their shapes and textures from locker room glances he definitely didn't linger on, "and you're telling me you're scared of a little needle wielded by a nice phlebotomist named, like, Brenda or something."

"Getting shot is different," Eddie hisses, glancing around like someone might overhear, as if his reputation as the unflappable one is going to crumble if word gets out. Buck is having the time of his entire life right now, this is the best day he's experienced in years, possibly ever.

"How is getting shot different? Explain it to me. Use your words."

"You don't see it coming!" Eddie whisper-yells. "You're not just sitting there watching someone approach you with a tiny horrible spear, you don't have to anticipate it, bullets at least have the decency to surprise you."

"Bullets have the decency—"

"Bullets don't make you fill out paperwork first, Buck! Plus you don’t have to sit in a chair that crinkles and smell that smell, ugh, you know the smell."

"The alcohol swab smell?"

“It haunts me, Buck.”

"Oh my god." Buck is experiencing so many feelings right now, an overwhelming cascade. He’s going to treasure this conversation forever, is going to write it down somewhere so he never forgets a single word, might get it tattooed on his body in very small font.

Eddie, his best friend, who rappels off cliffs and overpasses and once performed a field tracheotomy with a pocket knife while making small talk, this man is genuinely panicked about a blood draw. Eddie's hands are trembling slightly where they're gripping his own biceps, his face has gone a little pale under the fluorescent lighting, and Buck's heart is a mix of oh my god this is hilarious and oh my god I want to protect you from everything forever.

"Bullets just happen," Eddie continues, now committed to this unhinged thesis defense he's conducting in front of the entire waiting room, hands gesturing wildly. Eddie doesn't panic, Eddie is a man of stillness and repression, and yet here he is flapping around like an anxious chicken. "Bullets don't make an appointment, bullets don't ask you to roll up your sleeve, bullets don't tap on your arm looking for a vein while making small talk about the weather."

"So your position is that bullets are more considerate than phlebotomists."

"Bullets respect you," Eddie says, completely serious, clearly having thought about this, probably at length, possibly lying awake at 3am constructing this entire philosophical framework about the relative courtesy of various things that puncture human flesh, and Buck is so delighted he might actually explode, might just burst into confetti right here for everyone to see.

"Eddie," Buck says, very carefully. He's trying not to laugh, he's trying so hard, his whole body is vibrating with the effort of not laughing, this is clearly a real fear that Eddie has and Buck's not a monster, but also he’s not entirely in control of his face right now. "Eddie, buddy, light of my life—"

“Don’t.”

“Star of my firmament.”

“I will leave, I will walk home, I’ll call an Uber—”

“My most cherished passenger princess.”

“I’m going to kill you and make it look like an accident.”

"You'd miss me too much," Buck says, smiling now, unable to help it. Eddie's glaring at him but he’s fighting a losing battle against the smile that wants to break through. Buck feels lit up from the inside, incandescent, like someone replaced his blood with champagne.

"What if I pass out," Eddie says suddenly, and the almost-smile dies on his face, replaced by something closer to genuine horror, pupils blowing wide. "Buck, what if I pass out, what if I faint in front of a stranger, I can't faint in front of a stranger, I have a reputation—"

“A reputation for what, being conscious?” 

“For being competent, for being the guy who doesn’t panic. I jumped out of a helicopter last month!”

“God, Eddie, if you bring up the helicopter one more time—”

“It’s relevant to the situation! I jumped out of a helicopter, Buck, I didn’t even hesitate, I just went, and now you're telling me I have to sit still while someone stabs me with a tiny metal straw and I'm supposed to just let that happen.”

"It's not a straw, it's a needle, there's a—"

"It's a straw, it's a little stabby straw that they use to slurp your blood. That's vampirism, Buck, that's what vampires do, I'm being asked to submit to voluntary vampirism in a room that smells like hand sanitizer and broken dreams.”

Buck has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from cackling, stabby straw, voluntary vampirism. Eddie is gesturing emphatically now, delivering a TED talk on the horrors of modern medicine and it's the most adorable thing Buck has ever witnessed in his entire thirty-three years on this planet. He wants to put this moment in a jar and keep it on his nightstand. He wants to write poetry about it, bad poetry, the kind with forced rhymes and excessive adjectives.

"Eddie."

"What if I cry?"

Buck blinks. "What?"

"What if I cry, Buck, what if the needle goes in and I just start crying, what if I weep openly in front of another human being, what if there are tears, I haven't cried in front of a stranger since I was eleven years old and Tommy Morrison pushed me off the monkey bars."

"I feel like we should unpack the Tommy Morrison thing at some point." Buck says, but internally he's just spinning, absolutely giddy, because Eddie is worried about crying, Eddie who has the emotional availability of a concrete wall most days is sitting here catastrophizing about tears, and Buck is so endeared it's frankly becoming a problem.

"I can't have that on my record, Buck, I can't be the guy who cried at a blood draw, they probably have a note system, they probably flag you, they'll put a little sticker on my file that says 'crier' and every medical professional in Los Angeles will know."

"That's absolutely not how medical records work." Buck manages, his voice now strained with the effort of not dissolving into hysterical laughter. Eddie is spiraling, and it's magnificent. Buck is watching Eddie Diaz completely unravel over the concept of a notation system for emotional patients and he's never been happier.

"You don't know that, you don't know what they write in there, it could say anything, it could say 'Eddie Diaz, cries at needles, do not respect him.’"

"I'm pretty sure that would violate several HIPAA regulations."

"HIPAA doesn't protect you from judgment, Buck! We judge people all the time!"

And that's it, that's the line that breaks him, Buck has to slap a hand over his mouth to muffle the sound that comes out. Eddie has delivered this argument with such conviction, such certainty, like he's thought deeply about the limitations of healthcare privacy laws as they pertain to emotional humiliation.

"Okay," Buck says, trying to wrestle his face into something resembling supportive and not delirious with joy, "okay, let's just, let's take a breath."

"I can't breathe, breathing is for people who aren't about to be stabbed."

"You're not being stabbed, you're receiving a routine medical procedure."

"What if my vein rolls, Buck." Eddie's eyes have gone wide again, slightly manic. "Veins do that sometimes, they roll, they're evasive, what if my vein tries to escape and they have to stab me multiple times, what if I become a pincushion, what if they can't find it and they just keep jabbing—"

Buck is going to die. Buck is going to die right here in this waiting room from the sheer joy at the idea that Eddie's circulatory system is plotting against him.

"Your veins are fine, you have great veins, I've seen your veins."

"When have you seen my veins?!"

Buck falters, because the honest answer is constantly, all the time. I have a whole mental scrapbook of your forearms and the way the veins stand out when you're gripping something. I've thought about your vasculature more than a friend should. It just seems like too much information for this particular moment. "You have visible veins! You're a fit person! Your veins are very... present!"

Eddie stares at him. "Present."

"Accessible. Vein-forward. You're not going to have a vein problem is my point."

"You don't know that, you're not a phlebotomist."

"Neither are you!"

"Exactly, I don't know what I'm dealing with, they have training, Buck, they know things about blood that we don't know, they have secrets."

"Phlebotomists don't have secrets, they have a certification."

"That's what they want you to think!"

Buck is in love with this man. That's the thought that surfaces, unbidden and undeniable, as Eddie sits there wide-eyed and paranoid accusing phlebotomists of running some kind of secret blood cabal. Buck is so in love with him it's stupid, it's embarrassing, it's been true for years and he's been carefully not looking at it but right now, in this moment, watching Eddie be the most ridiculous version of himself, Buck can't look away from it.

A nurse appears in the doorway, clipboard in hand, "Diaz?"

Eddie makes a sound like a small mammal being stepped on, a high-pitched involuntary wheeze that Buck has never heard come out of a human adult before, and his hand shoots out and grabs Buck's wrist with the intensity of a man being swept out to sea. Buck's whole heart clenches, a painful wonderful squeeze, because Eddie reached for him, Eddie's scared and his first instinct was to grab onto Buck.

"Don't let them take me," Eddie whispers.

"Eddie, you have to go, this is a mandatory work screening."

"Tell Chimney I died."

"You're not dying," Buck says, smiling so hard his face hurts, besotted, completely gone for this disaster of a man.

"Tell him I died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, not crying in a doctor’s office waiting room."

"You haven't cried yet!"

"Yet, Buck, you said yet."

"I'm coming with you, oh my god, I'm coming with you, let go of my wrist before you cut off circulation."

"Promise me," Eddie says, deadly serious, eyes boring into Buck's, "promise me that if I faint you'll catch me before I hit the floor. I can't hit the floor, Buck, the floor is linoleum, the floor has seen things, there's a mysterious stain under chair four."

"I noticed that stain too, actually," Buck says, a little breathless, because Eddie's asking Buck to catch him, Eddie trusts Buck to catch him and it doesn't matter that the context is absurd, it doesn't matter that they're talking about fainting during a blood draw, it still means something and makes Buck want to disregard the whole appointment and kiss Eddie breathless instead. 

"Promise me."

"I promise, Jesus, I promise I'll catch you, I'll always catch you, now can we please go before the nurse thinks we're both insane."

The nurse, whose name tag says Veronica, is watching this entire exchange patiently. Buck mouths sorry at her as he hauls Eddie out of his chair and toward the doorway, Eddie's hand still clamped around his wrist as if Buck is the only thing tethering him to sanity.

"He's nervous about needles," Buck tells Veronica, because someone should probably provide context for whatever is about to happen.

"I gathered," Veronica says dryly. Buck likes her immediately.

The examination room is small and cold and sterile, featuring yet another cartoon germ poster, this one apparently part of a series, the germ now wearing a tiny stethoscope and looking weirdly smug about it, like it knows classified information about Buck's future that it's choosing not to share, which raises several questions about the internal logic of this public health campaign that Buck doesn't have time to think about because Eddie keeps trying to escape. 

“I’ll go first,” Buck says, because Eddie looks like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin and also because Buck would do literally anything to make that pinched expression disappear from Eddie’s face. “You can watch. See how not scary it is.”

“I think that’ll just freak me out more.”

“Then don’t watch, I don’t know, look at my face instead.”

Eddie’s eyes snap to Buck’s face and stay there, locked on, and Buck’s ears go warm under the sudden onslaught of attention. Veronica gestures to the chair and Buck sits down, rolling up his sleeve bravely, trying to create a calm and reassuring environment. 

“You have good veins,” Veronica observes, tapping the inside of his elbow.

“I know,” Buck says, then, because he can’t help himself, “I grew them myself.”

Eddie, standing in the corner with his arms crossed, as far from the blood draw chair as possible while still technically being present, pressed against the wall like he's trying to phase through it into the next room, snorts. It's a small victory but Buck will take it. Buck will take any small noise Eddie makes and hoard it in the little treasure chest inside his heart.

The needle goes in. Buck doesn't flinch, mostly because he's watching Eddie watch him, tracking the way Eddie's gaze keeps darting between Buck's face and the needle and back again, probably developing a five-point contingency plan in case Buck suddenly explodes from needle-related complications. Buck is not going to explode. Buck is fine. Buck has experienced significantly worse things than a tiny needle, including but not limited to: a pulmonary embolism, a firetruck collapsing on his leg, getting struck by literal lightning from the actual sky, and that time Chimney made him try ghost pepper salsa on a dare and Buck couldn't taste anything for three days and became briefly convinced he'd permanently destroyed his tongue and would never enjoy food again.

"See?" Buck says. "Nothing to it."

"You're being weird about it," Eddie says.

"I'm not being weird, I'm calm."

"Your calm is weird. It's unsettling. You're never this calm."

"I'm frequently calm! I'm a calm person!"

"You once got so excited about a new sandwich place that you rear-ended someone."

"That was one time and the sandwich was life-changing, Eddie, it had truffle aioli.”

Veronica finishes up, pressing a cotton ball to Buck's arm and taping it down. Buck stands, making a show of flexing his arm as Eddie rolls his eyes.

"Your turn," Veronica says. Eddie goes very, very pale.

Not just regular pale. Eddie goes the color of skim milk or printer paper, or Buck's face that time he accidentally opened a text from Maddie that was definitely meant for Chimney and contained details about Chimney that Buck has been trying to scrub from his memory ever since, with limited success. Eddie's whole body locks up and Buck watches him take one step toward the chair and stop, frozen mid-stride.

"Eddie."

"I'm going. I'm going, I just. I need a second."

"You can have a second."

"Maybe two seconds."

"Take all the seconds you need, buddy."

Eddie takes a breath, walking to the chair and sitting down with grim determination, back straight, chin up, hands trembling only slightly. Veronica is patient, probably used to this, probably has a whole internal taxonomy of needle-phobic patients organized by severity and coping mechanism, Eddie’s HIPPA nightmare.

Eddie rolls up his sleeve. His jaw is clenched so tight Buck can see the muscle jumping, a tiny rhythmic pulse under his skin, and his free hand is gripping the armrest hard enough to leave permanent indentations, gouging finger-shaped trenches into the vinyl that Veronica is going to discover later and wonder about. Veronica swabs his arm with alcohol and Eddie makes a small, strangled noise like a cat being lowered slowly into a bathtub against its will.

"You okay?" Buck asks.

"Fine," Eddie says, which is a lie. Eddie is not fine. 

Veronica readies the needle and Eddie's eyes go wide, fixed on it, unblinking, the thousand-yard stare, a man who has been to war but has decided that this, this is the thing that will finally break him. Buck has never seen Eddie look at anything with this much horror, not even that time they responded to a call involving a snake loose in a preschool and discovered it was a python, a very large python, a python that had recently consumed someone's classroom hamster, Mr. Whiskers, rest in peace, gone but not forgotten, digested but immortalized in the memories of twenty-three traumatized four-year-olds.

"Hey," Buck says softly, stepping closer. "Hey, look at me."

Eddie's eyes don't move. Eddie is frozen, hypnotized, a deer in headlights if the headlights were very small and medical-grade and wielded by a certified phlebotomist named Veronica.

"Eddie. Eyes on me."

Eddie drags his eyes away from the needle and finds Buck's face instead, and oh, there it is, the real fear underneath all the bluster, the vulnerability Eddie's been trying to smother with jokes. Eddie is scared, really scared, and he's letting Buck see it, which is maybe the most disarming part of all, because Eddie doesn't let anyone see the soft unprotected places, Eddie guards those with his life, and yet here he is, handing them to Buck

"Do you want me to hold your hand?"

Eddie blinks. His mouth opens and closes, working soundlessly, processing the offer. Buck watches the contemplation across Eddie's face—surprise, confusion, his eyes going a little wet at the corners, his throat bobbing as he swallows.

"Yeah," Eddie whispers. "Okay."

Buck reaches out and takes Eddie's hand.

Eddie's hand is warm. It’s weird because Eddie’s the cold one out of the two of them, Buck knows this, has known this for years, has accumulated approximately ten thousand data points about Eddie's body temperature from accidental touches and couch proximity and that one time Eddie fell asleep on Buck's shoulder during a movie and Buck sat frozen for three hours because he didn't want to disturb him, would have let his entire arm necrose and fall off and require surgical reattachment if it meant Eddie could keep sleeping peacefully against him with his hair tickling Buck's jaw. Eddie's hand is warm and slightly calloused and his fingers are trembling just a little and Buck suddenly can't remember how to breathe. 

Veronica moves in with the needle and Eddie's grip tightens, crushing, bones grinding together. Buck doesn't mind. Buck doesn't mind at all. Buck would let Eddie pulverize every metacarpal in his hand into calcium powder, reduce his entire skeletal structure to fine calcium dust, if it helped even a little.

"You're doing great," Buck says.

"I haven't done anything yet, she hasn't even started."

"You sat in the chair. That's huge."

"That's literally the bare minimum."

"The bare minimum is still an accomplishment when you're scared."

Eddie looks at him and Buck feels the privilege of having Eddie's full attention settle over him like a blanket, like sunlight, or a warm bath on a cold day. Eddie has these eyes, brown but not just brown, not the flat boring brown of cardboard boxes or wet sand or the sludge at the bottom of a coffee pot that's been sitting too long. No. Eddie's eyes are the brown of coffee in the morning before you add anything to it, of whiskey in firelight, of expensive leather seats in vintage cars and aged wood in old libraries and cinnamon bark and all the warmest best things Buck has ever encountered, seventeen different shades layered on top of each other creating depth and dimension and complexity that Buck could spend years trying to map. Buck could write a dissertation on Eddie's eyes. Buck could pursue a doctorate, could dedicate his entire academic career to memorizing the gold flecks near the pupils that only show up when the light hits just right, could spend decades developing a meticulous archive of every shade and variation and still not be finished.

He's thought about Eddie's eyes an embarrassing amount. Gotten lost in them mid-conversation and had to ask Eddie to repeat himself because Buck was too busy drowning to listen to what he was saying. It’s not weird, though. Friends notice each other’s eyes all the time. Friends spend hours contemplating the specific gradient of brown in their best friend's irises. Friends do that. Probably. Maybe. Buck doesn't actually know what normal friends do because he's never managed to have normal feelings about Eddie Diaz for a single second of their entire friendship.

"Small pinch," Veronica announces.

Eddie squeaks, squeezing Buck's hand hard enough to make Buck see stars, tiny pinpricks of light dancing across his vision.

"Tell me about octopuses," Eddie gasps out. "The escaped one. Inky."

"You remember Inky?"

"You've told me about Inky like fifteen times, Buck, of course I remember Inky, just—talk. Please."

"Okay, okay, so Inky." Buck's brain, which has been unhelpfully blank, suddenly floods with cephalopod facts. "So Inky was a common New Zealand octopus, about the size of a rugby ball, and he lived in the National Aquarium in Napier, and one night in 2016 someone left the lid of his tank slightly ajar. And Inky—this is the incredible part—Inky figured it out. He figured out the lid was open and he just... went for it. Squeezed his entire boneless body through the gap, dropped to the floor, and made his way across the aquarium floor in the middle of the night, leaving a little wet trail behind him. He found a drainpipe that led to the ocean, a six-inch drainpipe, and squeezed his whole body through that too. By the time the staff came in the next morning, Inky was gone. Free. Swimming in the Pacific Ocean somewhere, probably starting a family, probably telling his octopus children about the time he escaped from prison."

"Octopuses don't talk to their children." Eddie's voice is strained but he's not looking at the needle anymore, he's looking at Buck.

"You don't know that. You don't speak octopus. Maybe they have a whole complex language system based on color changes and tentacle movements. Maybe Inky is out there right now communicating his escape narrative through bioluminescent pulses. Maybe he's become a legend among his people, the Steve McQueen of marine invertebrates, the octopus who refused to accept his fate."

"I love when you do this," Eddie says, his grip loosens slightly and his breathing evens out.

Buck's heart stutters. "Do what?"

"Go off on tangents. Get excited about weird stuff. It's—" Eddie stops, swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing. "It's really—"

"Really what?"

"Nothing. Keep talking about Inky."

Buck files that moment away for later, adds it to the ever-growing archive, continuing to talk about Inky and octopus intelligence, about how they can unscrew jars from the inside and recognize individual human faces and possibly dream, there's research suggesting they might dream, imagine what an octopus dreams about, probably fish and freedom and the deep dark parts of the ocean humans have never seen.

Eddie's hand is still in his, neither of them thinking to let go. Buck isn't sure he could let go at this point even if he wanted to; his fingers have declared their permanent allegiance to Eddie's hand, established their own sovereign nation with a population of two and a chief export of overwhelming, embarrassing emotion.

Eddie's hand fits in his perfectly. That's just a fact, their hands slot together like two halves of a whole that Buck didn't know he was missing. Buck is suddenly thinking about all the times their hands could have been doing this and weren't, all the missed opportunities, years of potential handholding squandered because Buck didn't know Eddie needed it, didn't know this was an option available to him. Eddie has a small scar on his knuckle, a thin white line, origin unknown, and Buck wants to ask about it, wants the full story, to trace it with his fingertip and memorize the texture, the slightly raised ridge of healed tissue. He wants to press his mouth to it. He wants to kiss every scar on Eddie's body and learn the history of each one and—

Well, that is not a friend thought.

Buck memorizes the scar anyway, files it away, too, trying to move on.

Eddie's fingernails are short and neat, carefully maintained. Eddie is meticulous about grooming, always so put together even when everything else is falling apart. Buck suddenly can't stop thinking about Eddie cutting his own fingernails, such a mundane task, a boring human maintenance activity, yet Buck would watch it with rapt attention. Would offer commentary. Would probably research optimal nail care routines and present his findings in a slideshow format because Buck went through a phase in his twenties where he watched way too many videos about hand modeling (don't ask, he doesn't remember the original reason) and learned a lot about cuticle health and has never been able to fully forget it.

Eddie's hands are not hand-model hands. They're working hands, practical hands, hands that have held dying people and pulled children from wreckage and fixed Christopher’s toys and probably built furniture and definitely thrown punches. There's a callus on Eddie's palm from the firehose, and another one on his index finger from something Buck doesn’t know about, maybe guitar, does Eddie play guitar? Buck should ask. Buck should know this. Buck should know everything about Eddie’s hands. Every callus and scar and the exact PSI of Eddie’s grip strength and the specific temperature of his palm and the way his pulse feels through the thin skin of his wrist, rabbiting fast right now, evidence of fear and adrenaline and maybe other things Buck shouldn't speculate about.

Buck wants to bring Eddie's hand to his mouth and kiss the knuckles. Buck has to physically lock his muscles in place to prevent the motion from occurring. You can't kiss your friend's knuckles in a clinic room while Veronica the phlebotomist watches and silently judges you. That's not on the friendship menu. That's not covered under the standard terms and conditions of platonic male bonding.

Eddie's wrist is elegant. That's a weird thing to notice, probably, a weird thing to think about your best friend, but Buck is noticing it anyway, the delicate architecture of bone and tendon, the way Eddie's veins trace blue-green paths under his skin, visible proof that Eddie is alive and here and letting Buck hold his hand. Eddie's wrist is elegant and Buck wants to press his lips to the pulse point, wants to feel Eddie's heartbeat against his mouth and trace the path of that vein with his tongue, and that's definitely not a friend thought, that's so far from friend territory that it's in a different hemisphere, a different planet, a different galaxy entirely.

"Almost done," Veronica says.

"You're doing so good," Buck tells Eddie, nearly reverent, the kind of voice you'd use in church if Buck ever went to church, which he doesn't, but if he did this is how he'd sound, worshipful and awed.

Eddie's eyes flick to his face and stay there, searching for what, Buck doesn't know, but Buck lets him look, lets Eddie see whatever he needs to see. Buck has never been able to hide anything from Eddie anyway. Eddie sees through him like Buck is made of glass, always has, from the very beginning.

"Done," Veronica announces, and Eddie slumps back in the chair, all the tension draining out of him at once.

His hand is still in Buck's.

"I did it," Eddie says, wonder in his voice.

"You did it."

"I didn't pass out."

"You didn't pass out."

"I didn't cry."

"Not a single tear. Very stoic. Very manly."

"Shut up." But Eddie's smiling now, a bright relieved smile spreading across his face, then he giggles. Eddie Diaz, human embodiment of stoic masculinity and emotional repression, giggles. It's high-pitched and giddy and slightly unhinged and Buck can’t think, sparks flying everywhere, all higher functions shutting down.

"You're so cute," Buck says.

The words just fall out. No thought or filter, paying no mind to the consequences of this encounter. Just you're so cute, delivered with full sincerity while holding Eddie's hand.

Eddie chokes, inducing a full-body spasm, his fingers seizing in Buck's grip.

Buck comes back online and immediately begins damage control.

"I mean," Buck blurts, "in a bro way. A friend way. Cute the way friends are cute. The way I'd say Chimney is cute. Or Bobby. Bobby's a little cute, right? In a dad way. A cute dad. You're cute the way Bobby is a cute dad except you're not my dad, obviously, that would be weird, you're my friend, my extremely normal friend who I have extremely normal friend feelings about."

"Buck."

"Sometimes friends call friends cute, that's a documented phenomenon, I've definitely heard of it happening, it's not weird, it's just an observation, my eyes observed your face doing a cute thing and my mouth reported the findings."

"Buck."

"Which is a completely normal heterosexual observation because I have functioning eyeballs and eyeballs perceive visual information and my eyeballs happened to perceive that you were being objectively cute about the needle thing in a way that any person with standard human vision would notice, it's just science, Eddie, it's biology, it's the fundamental nature of optical perception."

"Please stop talking," Eddie says, his cheeks going pink. Eddie is blushing. There's color spreading across his face and Buck has never seen Eddie blush before, didn't know Eddie's face could even do that, is now adding this information to the archive, creating a whole new subcategory labeled EDDIE BLUSHING, cross-referenced with CAUSES OF BUCK'S INEVITABLE CARDIAC ARREST.

"Right. Yes. Stopping. Shutting up. Silent Buck, that's me now."

Veronica hands Eddie a cotton ball and tape, her face conveying a profound weariness, weariness that comes from witnessing whatever just happened. Whatever it was will most likely be processed during her lunch break and possibly in therapy later. Buck doesn't blame her. Buck will also be processing this for the rest of his life, specifically the part where he called Eddie cute out loud with his actual mouth and then rambled about optical perception for thirty seconds while Eddie turned pink.

Eddie stands up, wobbling slightly, and Buck reaches out automatically to steady him, hand landing on his elbow. Eddie looks down at the contact, then up at Buck's face, wide-eyed.

"We should get lunch," Buck says, desperate for a topic that isn't his own catastrophic lack of verbal filter. "That place you wanted. The one with the—"

"The good bread, yeah." Eddie's voice sounds strange, slightly rough. “It’s, uh, getting kind of late, though. So maybe let’s just go home?”

They thank Veronica, who looks genuinely relieved to see them go, and walk out into the waiting room. Buck's brain is running a continuous loop of you're so cute you're so cute you're so cute and he's hyper-aware of Eddie beside him, the space between their bodies, the way their arms almost brush with every step.

Sunshine pours down as they step outside. Buck squints against the assault, grateful for an external sensation to focus on. They walk toward the truck, side by side, footsteps synchronizing automatically the way they always do, and Buck is mentally drafting an apology, trying to figure out how to address the cute thing without making it exponentially worse, when Eddie stumbles.

It's not a big stumble. Just a misstep, a slight wobble, probably post-needle lightheadedness combined with uneven pavement and the emotional whiplash of the last fifteen minutes. Eddie's hand shoots out and grabs Buck's arm for balance, fingers curling around Buck's bicep. He laughs at himself, a soft self-deprecating huff, nose wrinkling, eyes crinkling, his whole face scrunched up in embarrassment.

"Sorry," Eddie says. "Dizzy."

"You should've had more water this morning, I told you to hydrate."

"You always tell me to hydrate, you're obsessed with hydration."

"Because hydration is important! The human body is sixty percent water! Dehydration affects cognitive function and physical coordination and also your skin, Eddie, do you want bad skin?"

"My skin is fine."

"Your skin is incredible, actually, which is annoying, you probably don't even have a skincare routine."

"I wash my face."

"With what? Bar soap? Please tell me you don't use bar soap on your face, Eddie, I will buy you a proper cleanser. I will make a whole regimen for you, I will personally ensure the continued health of your epidermis."

Eddie laughs, his head tipping back and his shoulders shaking. Buck's breath catches in his throat because Eddie laughing is Buck's favorite thing in the entire world. Buck would do absolutely anything to make Eddie laugh, would make a complete fool of himself on a daily basis forever if it meant getting to hear that sound.

Eddie's hand is still on Buck's arm. His grip has loosened but he hasn't let go, his fingers warm through Buck's sleeve, the sun is in his hair, picking out golden highlights Buck has never noticed before. Buck could explode with how much he loves this man, how much he's always loved this man, how much he will continue loving this man until he dies and probably also after.

Because Buck does love him. He loves Eddie, is in love with Eddie. He wants to spend the rest of his life making Eddie laugh and holding his hand and learning every single thing about him there is to learn.

Eddie's earlobe is slightly crooked. The left one, barely noticeable unless you're looking closely, which Buck always is, Buck is always looking closely at Eddie, can't seem to stop, doesn't want to stop. Eddie's earlobe is crooked and Buck loves it, would write sonnets about it if he knew how to write sonnets, would compose entire symphonies dedicated to the slight asymmetry of Eddie's ear anatomy. Ode to Eddie's Left Earlobe, he'd call it. A Meditation on Auricular Imperfection. It would win awards. Critics would weep.

Eddie has a freckle below his left eye that Buck noticed two years ago at a barbecue and has been thinking about ever since, a small brown dot that Buck wants to press his lips to, wants to taste, map with his tongue. Eddie has a scar on his jawline, faint and silver, probably from his army days, from a story Buck has never heard, and Buck wants all of Eddie's stories, wants the full complete history of every mark on Eddie's body.

Eddie's collarbone is visible at the open neck of his shirt, the architecture of it pressing against his skin. Buck has thought about it a weird amount, has imagined running his tongue along the ridge of it, biting down gently, leaving marks that Eddie would have to explain later or hide under his uniform.

Eddie's shoulders are perfect. His neck is perfect. The small mole on the side of his throat is perfect. The way his hair curls slightly behind his ears when it gets too long is perfect. Everything about Eddie is perfect, actually, even the imperfect things, especially the imperfect things, and Buck is so gone for him it's pathetic, it's been nearly a decade and Buck is still here staring at Eddie like a man possessed.

Eddie's lips are slightly chapped. He never remembers to use chapstick, no matter how many times Buck reminds him or how many lip balms Buck has bought and pressed into Eddie's hands with increasingly desperate pleas to please just moisturize, Eddie, your lips are going to crack and bleed and it's going to hurt. Eddie's lips are chapped and Buck wants to kiss them anyway, wants to lick and bite the lower one and feel Eddie gasp against his mouth.

"Buck?" Eddie's voice cuts through the spiral. "You okay? You kind of zoned out."

"Fine," Buck breathes. "I'm fine. I'm great. I'm fantastic. I'm just standing here in a parking lot having extremely normal thoughts about—parking lots. Asphalt. The way the light reflects off car windshields."

Eddie's eyebrows furrow, two perfect lines of confusion, and Buck wants to smooth them out with his thumb, to touch Eddie's face. Buck is thinking about Eddie's eyes and Eddie's stupid chapped lips and the freckle on his cheek and the way he always does the nose-exhale thing when Buck makes him laugh and the way he smiles when he looks at Christopher and the way he looked at Buck the first day they met like Buck was an inconvenience and then the way he looked at Buck after the tsunami like Buck was a miracle and the way he's looking at Buck right now like Buck is the only solid thing in a spinning world—

"God," Buck says, the words punched out of him. "I love you."

Oh no.

Oh no.

Oh no no no no no.

Buck stops. Eddie stops. Time freezes, crystallizes, suspends itself in this single horrible eternal moment where those words hang in between them, irrevocable, a confession Buck didn't mean to make landing between them like a bomb going off in slow motion.

Buck’s dignity runs for the hills, abandoning Buck in a parking lot with his mouth hanging open and his best friend staring at him with wide shocked eyes.

Eddie's hand is still on his arm. Neither of them is breathing.

"I," Buck starts, but nothing follows. His vocabulary has fled along with his dignity, leaving him with nothing but white noise and the thundering awareness of what he's just done.

Eddie’s eyes go even wider, color draining from his cheeks and then flooding back. The silence stretches, ten seconds, twenty, an eternity compressed into a single moment and Buck can feel his heart pounding in his ears, his whole body going cold and then hot and then cold again.

"We should go," Eddie finally says, hoarse.

"Yeah," Buck manages. "Sure."

They walk to the truck in silence, their footsteps suddenly out of sync where they've always been perfectly matched before. Buck's legs move on autopilot, carrying him forward even though every instinct is screaming at him to flee, to somehow rewind time and swallow those words before they could escape.

He told Eddie he loves him. Not in a friend way, not as a joke, in the real way that involves wanting to build a life together, the forever kind, and Eddie's response was we should go, which is not I love you, too, which is not anything close to what Buck wanted to hear, which is basically a rejection wrapped in three words and Buck is in hell.

Buck unlocks the truck with numb fingers. They climb in, doors closing in unison, and Buck starts the engine because that's what you do, that's the next step, you start the car and you drive even when your whole world is ending. The radio blares to life, some upbeat pop song that heightens the ringing in Buck’s ears. He jabs the power button hard enough to hurt his finger.

They pull out of the parking lot and Buck drives on autopilot, his hands and feet doing the right things while his brain spirals into increasingly dark territory. Eddie is staring out the window, his whole body angled away, his shoulders a rigid line. Buck wants to say he's sorry. To take it back. Explain that he didn't mean it, except he did mean it, he meant it more than he's ever meant anything, and that's the problem.

The streets pass in a blur. Stop signs, traffic lights, other cars with other people living their normal lives with people that love them back. Buck envies them. He would give anything to be any one of them instead of himself right now.

They turn onto Eddie's street. Buck has driven this route a thousand times, could do it blindfolded, and he's always felt a lift of anticipation when Eddie's house comes into view. Now the familiar shape fills him with dread, his stomach drops as he pulls into the driveway and puts the truck in park.

The engine goes quiet. The world goes quiet. Everything is silent except Buck's pulse, loud enough to be audible from space.

They sit there, the silence filling the cab, pressing against Buck's chest until he can barely breathe. Buck stares at the garage door and thinks about all the times he's been here, all the dinners and movie nights and lazy Sunday mornings, all the moments he's filed away in his mental archive. He thinks about Christopher and how this might change things, how Buck might lose not just Eddie but Chris too, the family he's built without ever officially being part of it. He thinks about work, about seeing Eddie every shift and pretending everything is fine when nothing will ever be fine again.

He thinks about Eddie's hand in his in that room, trembling, and wonders if that's the last time Eddie will ever reach for him.

Buck takes a breath and forces the words out even though they taste like ash.

"Eddie, I'm really sorry—"

"I love you, too," Eddie says.

Wait.

"What?"

Eddie turns to look at him, finally, and his face is flushed, eyes bright and fierce and terrified. "I said, I love you, too."

"You." Buck's gapes. "What?"

"I love you." Eddie's voice is stronger now, steadier, gaining momentum. "Too. Also. In addition. Reciprocally. In response to you loving me, I also love you. In the same way. The non-friend way. The way where I want to kiss you and wake up next to you and grow old with you and all of that, all of the things, every single one."

Buck stares at him. That’s—Eddie loves—wow. Huh.

"You," Buck tries again. "You love me."

"Yes."

"Love me love me."

"I swear to God, Buckley, if you make me say it again—"

"No, I just—" Buck is on the verge of tears. Happy tears. The best he’s ever felt tears. "You love me. You actually love me."

"Yes." Eddie's face softens. "I actually love you. I've loved you for years. I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew. Hen definitely knows, she gives me the side-eye whenever you and I talk, which is like, always.”

"I didn't know."

"You're kind of an idiot."

"Yeah," Buck agrees, feeling tears prick at his eyes, laughter building in his throat, everything he's been holding back finally breaking free. "Yeah, I really am."

Eddie reaches over and takes Buck's hand, the same hand from the clinic, threading their fingers together. His palm is warm against Buck's, squeezing in little beats. Buck can feel Eddie's pulse through the point of contact, can feel their hearts beating together.

"Thanks for holding my hand," Eddie says softly, his thumb tracing a slow circle against Buck's skin.

"I—wha—yes." Buck's voice is doing several embarrassing things at once, cracking and wobbling and going really high. "Yeah. Always. Of course. Anytime. Forever. I would hold your hand through literally anything, through a zombie apocalypse, through a robot uprising, through the heat death of the universe—"

"Buck."

"Yeah?"

"Do you want pizza for dinner?"

Buck blinks, thrown, his brain still struggling to process the fact that Eddie loves him, Eddie loves him, Eddie said it out loud and now Eddie is holding his hand. "Pizza?"

Eddie's already pushing his door open, stepping out onto the driveway as Buck watches him through the windshield. He walks toward the house with easy confident strides like he didn't just turn Buck's entire world upside down and inside out.

Eddie pauses at the front door and looks back over his shoulder. He's smiling, a small private smile that Buck has never seen before, one that looks like it belongs only to Buck, invented specifically for this moment.

"You coming?" Eddie asks.

Buck scrambles out of the truck so fast he nearly face-plants on the concrete, his foot catching on the running board, arms windmilling briefly before he catches himself. Eddie watches all of this with obvious amusement, his smile growing, and Buck doesn't even care that he looks ridiculous because Eddie loves him. Eddie loves him. Eddie is standing at his front door smiling at Buck with soft eyes and Eddie loves him.

Buck crosses the driveway on unsteady legs, climbing the porch steps and stopping in front of Eddie, close enough to touch. Eddie's eyes are sparkling, seventeen shades of brown all glowing in the late afternoon light, and Buck wants to kiss him. So badly he could die.

"Hi," Buck says softly. 

"Hi." Eddie's smile widens. "You okay?"

"I don't know. I think I might be having a stroke. You should check my vitals."

"You're such a drama queen."

"You love me."

"Yeah." Eddie stares at him, determined. "I really do."

Eddie reaches for Buck's hand again, tangles their fingers together, and uses the grip to tug Buck forward, over the threshold and into the house. Buck follows, stumbling slightly, as if he needed the pull, he'd follow Eddie anywhere, has been following Eddie for years without fully understanding why, and now he knows, now he finally knows.

The door swings shut behind them, and the late afternoon light filtering through the windows goes dim and golden, casting everything in soft warm tones. Buck is still holding Eddie's hand, is never going to stop holding Eddie's hand, has made a decision about this that feels very permanent, Eddie’s hand will stay in his forever, even if he has to superglue them together. Eddie is leading him into the living room, pulling him deeper into the house, into his space, into his life.

Eddie stops in the middle of the room and turns to face him. They're standing close, closer than they've ever stood before, close enough that Buck can see the individual lashes framing Eddie's eyes, can count the freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and see the way Eddie's pulse is jumping in his throat.

"I've wanted this for so long," Buck admits. "You have no idea. I've wanted this for years."

"I know," Eddie says, his free hand coming up to rest on Buck's hip. "I've been watching you not say it. You're really bad at hiding things."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"Why didn't you?"

"I asked first."

"I was scared." Eddie's thumb strokes a small arc on Buck's hip, making Buck shiver. "I'm still scared. But I figured out a while ago that I'm more scared of not having this than of having it and potentially losing it."

"You're not going to lose me,” Buck says fiercely, full of conviction. "You can't. I'm not going anywhere. You're stuck with me now, Diaz. You're never getting rid of me. I'm going to be here forever, holding your hand and making you drink water and telling you about octopuses—"

"Octopi."

"Actually, both are correct, but octopuses is more commonly accepted in modern usage."

Eddie kisses him. 

Whether it’s because he wants to or to make Buck stop talking, he isn’t sure. But Eddie kisses him, and nothing has ever felt so right. 

Eddie's hand slides from Buck's hip to the small of his back, pulling him in, untangling their joined hands so he can cup Buck's jaw, his palm warm against Buck's cheek, fingers curling behind Buck's ear. Eddie's lips are slightly chapped, just like Buck noticed earlier, but they're soft against his mouth, gentle at first, as if Eddie's asking a question.

Buck answers by surging forward, by grabbing handfuls of Eddie's shirt and pulling him closer, kissing him back with every ounce of desperate longing he's been suppressing. Eddie groans against his mouth, deepening the kiss and Buck is drowning, Buck is dying, Buck is being completely remade by the feeling of Eddie's mouth on his.

They break apart gasping, breathing each other's air.

"Wow," Buck says.

"Yeah," Eddie agrees.

"We should have been doing that the whole time."

"We really should have."

"Think of all the time we wasted."

"We have plenty of time to make up for it."

Buck grins, giddy, and Eddie grins back at him. They're just standing there in Eddie's living room smiling at each other like idiots, two people who just discovered a secret the universe has been keeping from them.

"So," Eddie says. "Pizza?"

"Yeah," Buck says. "Pizza. And then more of that. A lot more of that.”

"I think that can be arranged."

Eddie kisses him again, softer this time, sweeter. Buck melts into it, letting himself have this thing he's wanted for so long. They stay like that for a while, the pizza long forgotten as they learn each other in a new way. Buck thinks about Inky the octopus, escaping through drainpipes and finding your way to freedom.

He thinks maybe he understands now. Maybe this is what it feels like to finally squeeze through the gap, to find the ocean, to be free.