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2023
Eddie is coping.
Buck is fine— not only safe and alive, but completely fine. Maybe a little rattled, like anybody would be. But in great health and every bit the person he was before Eddie watched his lifeless body hang over Los Angeles against the backlit, lightning lilac sky of a night he would like to be able to forget.
So he’s coping, because there’s nothing to be torn up about. Buck is fine. And during the day, most days, looking over and catching the rise and fall of his chest from the seat next to him on the engine or the firehouse couch or the front seat of either his truck or Buck’s Jeep is more than enough to settle him.
But those are the days. And the nights are a different story.
Eddie wakes, gasping.
The breath tears fiercely out of his lungs and for a split second he thinks he’s dying— not long enough for the thought to really form, it’s more of a feeling that sinks its claws into him as he thrashes against sweatdamp sheets and heaves in breath that burns in his throat.
When he dreams, it’s often muddy. Sometimes in the literal sense, and other times in the sense that he’s left without any details as soon as he rises to consciousness. He can’t remember what the image was; he only knows how it makes him feel.
Tonight, it’s different. He sees it very clearly, though it’s really more memory than dream. Because that had actually happened, hadn’t it? Buck, slipping out of this world and leaving it dark and empty. It’s so real and raw that Eddie can’t stop to think about it. He’s afraid— of finding that it’s real, maybe, or of what might happen if he pauses long enough to consider the possibility. Or both.
Still reeling and breathless, Eddie reaches blindly for the nightstand and fumbles for his phone. The screen lights up and he squints against the brightness enough to navigate to the favorited contacts page and tap Buck’s name.
At the top of the screen, it reads 11:49. It’s not exactly the middle of the night— Eddie had crashed early after a twelve-hour shift— but even if it were, he knows Buck wouldn’t mind. He never does.
Except that the phone rings and rings, and the knot in Eddie’s chest grows impossibly tighter, and eventually the line clicks and sends him to Buck’s voicemail. The familiar greeting sounds tin and impersonal, and Eddie hangs up the call before it beeps.
There’s a moment, tangled in his own sheets, in which Eddie feels trapped in his own bed, his own body. He wonders— half formed and fleeting— if Buck had felt that way, with a tube down his throat and breathing for him, keeping him alive when Eddie’s hands against his fragile ribs weren’t enough to do it anymore.
His breath catches, remembering the concave of Buck’s sternum and the way the bone had given out beneath his incessant pressure.
He stumbles out of bed before he can think twice about it, his thoughts still wrapped in cotton as he abandons the sheets and reaches for the first shirt he can find without looking at it. He’s aware enough to be grateful that Christopher happens to be at a weekend space camp, tonight of all nights. It’s stupid, what he’s doing.
Buck is fine.
Eddie doesn’t need to see him. He’s fine.
Buck is fine. Right?
Eddie dials again on his way out the door, but gets the same result.
“Shit,” he hisses.
His breath is sharp and fast, but his hands are steady on the door, on the key, on the steering wheel. Some things do come out of war. For Eddie, he left the desert with steady fingers and fear that stayed firmly lodged in the thin space between his lungs.
The truck is silent as he guides it along the familiar route to Buck’s apartment. He’s done it countless times, could do it in his sleep if asked. He takes a yellow light, with nothing coming in the opposite direction, and bites the inside of his cheek for somewhere to put the anxiety that crawls up his spine.
He parks next to Buck’s Jeep, still and silent in the dark, and goes upstairs.
There’s a part of him that wants to bang on the door, as hard as he can, make a lot of noise just because he wants to prove that Buck can still hear it. He’d felt that way in the hospital, too, chest tight and eyes hot with tears as he listened to his kid talk to Buck like he could personally will him to come back to them.
Maybe he did, Eddie thinks wildly as he forgoes the elevator for the stairs, his footfalls echoing in the dizzying staircase until he’s breathless on Buck’s floor. He uses the key. Eddie is good at smothering the things he really wants to do, good at trading his impulses for the things that keep him quiet.
Inside, the loft is dark and silent. There are no lights on anywhere, just the faint dim glow of the city beyond the big windows and the lingering scent that Eddie associates with Buck. It does little for him tonight, though.
He just—
He knows how insane he must look— will look, if he wakes Buck up. But he needs to see.
So he carefully toes out of his shoes with what little presence of mind he has left and takes the stairs very quietly, the sound of his heartbeat pumping blood behind his eardrums deafening.
At the top of the stairs, he pauses.
He’s not sure what he was expecting, really. Buck always answers when he calls, if he can, so there was a fearful part of Eddie that was picturing— the worst, in any of its forms, he guesses. But there at the top of the stairs, sprawled across his bed, Buck is wrapped up warm and soft and sleeping. Safe. Alive.
Eddie can see the slow rise and fall of his chest even from here, now that his eyes have adjusted to the dim light.
And it does help— he does feel a rush of relief at the sight of it. But it’s not entirely enough to ease him out of the panic that still lingers, to make him feel settled and sure that Buck is really okay.
Because Buck had been breathing in the hospital too. His chest had risen and fallen. Eddie knows because it’s what he’d looked at, so that he didn’t have to see Buck’s still, ashen face, too closely mimicking—
Eddie knows what it looks like when Buck is dead. He knows what it feels like to put his hands on Buck’s wrist, his neck, his chest— and feel nothing but the hollow emptiness of a heart gone terrifyingly still.
Eddie steps closer. That’s when he catches a glimpse of Buck’s phone, on the floor next to him an inch from the charger. Dead, probably. Why he didn’t answer. It should be relief that Eddie feels, but it’s shameful hot prickling anger, the kind of thing that Eddie hates. He’s not angry with Buck, not really.
Maybe he’s angry with himself. He doesn’t know anymore. He’s exhausted and his eyes are wet and he can’t remember if they’ve been like that the whole time. If the lights were blurred on the drive here.
When he moves forward, it’s more of an instinct than a choice. He drops to one knee next to Buck’s bed, his breath caught in his chest as he watches the shifting glow from outside of a city alive make its way over Buck’s face— across the plane of his cheek, his open mouth, the splash of pink on his eyebrow.
Eddie feels tangled again, like waking up in the sheets, but it’s all inside his chest. A knot of feelings that he has no words for, sent out into the world like a man and ending up feeling like a boy because he doesn’t know how to feel like anything.
But he feels this. Whatever it is, this need. Wherever it comes from.
Buck’s hands are trapped beneath his blanket, but his head is turned sideways on the pillow. Eddie reaches out before he can think twice about what he’s doing, and puts featherlight fingertips on his exposed neck instead.
Buck is so warm. Eddie lets out a noise that he doesn’t mean to, something torn from his lungs in time with the steady, thumping pulse beneath his touch.
And Buck—
Buck wakes from a deep sleep with someone’s hand on his throat.
Most people would panic, but in the same instant that he registers the touch of skin to his own, Buck knows who’s touching him. It’s not by scent or by the feel of his fingertips, but by some other thing, some combination of things that makes up the presence of Eddie in his room.
Buck just— knows, without opening his eyes.
He looks anyway, though. He’s always looking for Eddie, even in rooms where he can feel him.
As he flutters his lashes open, he tilts his head back and exposes his neck. It’s not a choice he makes, but an urge that he has, to open himself up to Eddie’s fingers on the thrum of his pulse. Buck is like that, anyway— accommodating. But for Eddie, he’s more so. He wants to help, even before he knows what he’s helping with.
As he opens his eyes, Eddie comes into view and Buck feels himself wake up significantly at the sight of him.
Kneeling at the side of his bed, Eddie looks— wrecked. Red-eyed, with tear tracks on his face. His shirt, Buck notices absently, is inside-out.
For a long moment, there’s nothing but the lingering, stretching quiet of the room around them and the soft breath, too gentle to hear. But the sound out of Eddie’s mouth leaves a bad taste in Buck’s, and quiet isn’t what he’s best at.
Eventually— what must really only be a few seconds, but feels longer in the dark— he can’t take it anymore.
“Are you okay?” he murmurs, his eyes on Eddie’s face.
And so he can’t miss it, when Eddie’s breath catches and his features crumble and twist. The tightness in his jaw and the scrunch of his nose reach down and carve out a painful scrape in Buck’s chest, and he’s moving before he can think. He turns on his side, closer to Eddie, and props himself up on his elbow, free hand reaching out until it settles at the bend of Eddie’s arm.
“Hey,” he soothes, butterfly soft. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. We’re okay.”
Eddie takes a shuddering, audible breath.
Against Buck’s neck, his fingers begin to tremble.
“Buck,” he says— the only thing that he’s been thinking, since wakefulness came for him and dragged him back into this admittedly better reality, away from the slice of lightning through the sky.
“I’m right here,” Buck says immediately. His eyes are blue, even in the darkness, and focused on Eddie’s face like he might be trying to memorize it or read something printed very small between Eddie’s tense jaw and aching temple or in the space between his stinging eyes. “It’s okay. Here.”
Buck moves, then. Gets out of his warm, comfortable bed in the middle of the night and lowers himself onto the floor right next to Eddie, so close that the line of Eddie’s body is haphazardly pressed against Buck’s, hip to hip and knee to knee.
Eddie takes a breath and drops his head.
Buck doesn’t say anything else, not for a long time. Instead, he holds out his own wrist. Eddie looks at it for a moment, but ultimately he doesn’t have to ask to know what Buck is doing. He’s doing what he always does.
Offering.
Eddie reaches out and wraps his fingers around Buck’s wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he rasps, some three hundred heartbeats later. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
Buck shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he answers. “You don’t need to be sorry. I’m always here, Eddie.”
And that’s true, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why it’s so scary, to know that for three minutes and seventeen seconds—
“You weren’t, though,” Eddie whispers.
He hates himself a little bit. But Buck is soft as ever, nudging his knee so gently into Eddie’s.
“I’m okay,” he says. Eddie should be scared of how knowing he sounds. Were it anyone else, he would be recoiling from it, backing away from being known. But—
For whatever reason, Buck is different. Eddie is always a little bit too exhausted to try to understand why that is.
“I know,” he says, his voice raw and scraped.
Buck reaches up onto his nightstand, takes down a reusable water bottle. He holds it out to Eddie without question and Eddie drinks from the straw that tastes very faintly of toothpaste. The water helps, though, soothing his throat. He hands it back in silence and then Buck turns to look at him in the dark. When he speaks, it’s with unbearable softness.
“You want to sleep here?” he asks.
Eddie imagines the alternative. Going back to his own house, alone, where the sheets will be a reminder of a trap and the ceiling is not painted with the faint light of life outside.
“I can take your couch,” he offers, and Buck rolls his eyes. Eddie realizes, a beat late, that he hadn’t been looking at Buck’s face and doesn’t know how he’s sure that happened, but he is.
“Come here,” Buck says patiently.
And so Eddie follows him into his bed. They’ve done it before, but not quite like this.
“Buck,” Eddie starts, reluctantly, as Buck settles behind him and reaches for him like it’s nothing, like it’s— what they do.
“Eddie,” he answers.
This isn’t what they do. But Buck is so strong and healthy that Eddie thinks he’d give him anything in a moment like this one. He lets himself be hauled in, a surprised breath out of his throat, and then Buck is wrapping him up tightly against his chest.
Eddie settles. His fingers stop shaking. Something unlocks in his spine, in spite of everything he knows about himself, as Buck holds him.
“You’re okay,” Buck breathes. “Okay?”
Eddie nods, wordless. He’s not sure he knows what there is to say in a moment like this. Buck is warm. His heart is beating. He’s holding Eddie as his lungs fill and release, a steady in and out that Eddie can feel against his back.
He lets out a breath, and Buck holds him a fraction closer.
He reaches up, then, cautiously— until his fingers find Buck’s wrist again, and Buck turns his hand enough to let him touch. His other hand is splayed across Eddie’s ribs, and he rubs his thumb softly over the intercostal space beneath it. Eddie knows the science of it, could tell you the name of every inch of his own body. But in this moment, it all melts to nothing but touched and held.
And beneath the touch of fingertips on his wrist, as they both slip into sleep, Buck’s heart beats steadily in the dark.
2026
It’s been a long time since Eddie has felt like this.
That night, back then. They hadn’t ever talked about it. He’d woken up and Buck was already in the kitchen, coffee filtering, the scent rich and bright. Eddie hadn’t said much and Buck had let him get away with it and in that way it became a distance between them.
Not much of one— they went about their lives the same way they’d been doing before, for the most part. They talked to each other about anything else but that, and they hung out with Chris and traded off tools at work with a seamless synergy, and they were best friends just like they’d always been.
Buck got better. Eddie stopped having nightmares. Eventually, it was a footnote in the pages of their friendship and if occasionally Eddie thought about the tender way that Buck reached for him or how it had felt to be held by someone as big as him, that was the kind of thing he was already good at burying.
And then, the desert.
New Mexico, the heat of the sun, the frantic pull deep down in Eddie’s chest the moment he woke up in a hospital and Buck was gone.
He’d wondered, of course. If Buck was already dead. It was impossible not to, when everything was so bleak and hours were ticking by and nobody seemed interested in helping him who wasn’t across state lines. But really, when it came down to it, Eddie knew he wasn’t dead yet.
He knew because he remembered what it felt like, the emptiness of a world without Evan Buckley in it. He remembered those three minutes and seventeen seconds of darkness, when his hands had been on Buck’s chest and the rain had beaten the earth into submission while the sky flashed and Eddie had been witness to a cold and empty future without Buck.
This time wasn’t like that. He spent the whole day walking on injuries and ignoring flashes of pain because he knew that he couldn’t face it. Not again, and especially not now. If he couldn’t cope with losing Buck back then, he certainly wouldn’t be able to now. Every intervening year had brought them closer, in ways that Eddie couldn’t have imagined. Ways that sometimes even now Eddie isn’t sure how to understand, how to put into words the way he feels when he looks at Buck.
It was never a question that he would fight like hell to get Buck home. The question was, what would happen afterward?
It’s different this time.
Buck is okay. Banged up, still recovering, but he’s okay. Eddie reminds himself often. He’s recovering too, both of them having returned to California with matching injuries to show for their little adventure.
But it’s different. After the lightning strike, Eddie had been able to let Buck come to him. He was good at that, back then, at taking a step back and letting things happen around him and at knowing what Buck needed from him and at giving it to him. That night had been a moment of weakness in the pattern, sure, but for the most part that version of Eddie was capable of holding back.
He finds, after New Mexico, that this is surprisingly untrue of present-day Eddie.
He can’t sit still. He can’t leave Buck alone. He worries, constantly. He lies awake at night and thinks about it, remembers the sun on his back and the dappling light over Buck’s bloody face and the sweet scent of dry grass beneath them, cut through with the metallic taste of blood and electricity, a faint acrid reminder of where they were.
Eddie thinks about his fingers against Buck’s neck.
Beneath the extended ladder in the rain; in Buck’s warm bed one night not long after; and on the ground in New Mexico, with Buck dazed and in pain but smiling up at him. Buck, whose heart was beating a steady thrum beneath the touch of Eddie’s fingers; Buck who was there and safe and harmed, yes, but alive.
Buck, who in his usual fashion had rallied fast and tried to convince Eddie to let him drive half the way home. As if. He’d gone so far, at one point, as to argue that Eddie was worse off than he was.
“You are not a serious person,” Eddie had told him as he settled himself back into the driver’s seat.
Buck had frowned. “I don’t think you should try to adopt phrases from Chris anymore,” he had replied, but nonetheless he took up his place again in the passenger seat so Eddie had taken it as a win.
It’s been two weeks since then.
Eddie knows he’s hovering more than Buck would like him to, but he can’t help it. If he’s not at Buck’s house physically watching his chest rise and fall, he’s at his own house thinking about it, worrying over it. It’s unlike him, makes him feel unhinged, but he can’t stop.
Sometimes, he texts Buck.
Tonight, a Friday, with the house empty and Christopher at a friend’s house again, Eddie’s fingers are itching for it, wishing he’d just asked Buck to hang out as a guise to keep watching him.
10:23. He opens their text thread— the last thing on it being from this morning, a picture of some bread that Buck had made and Eddie choosing to heart-react to it instead of typing a reply about how Buck should be resting— and types: Got a fact for me?
This is his favorite way to open a conversation with Buck, because Buck always has a fact and this is especially true lately, because he’s still on leave because of his broken ribs and he’s been filling the time with a slew of documentaries.
Except that tonight, Buck doesn’t respond.
Eddie sits on his couch and stares at the blue bubbles on his screen. He’s reminded, sort of forcefully, of the hospital. Of sitting there with his phone in his hand sending messages to Buck that never reached him. Of the one he sent first and then deleted, the one that was too raw and too vulnerable and too apologetic.
He waits, tapping his fingers anxiously against his knee, and then types another message when he can’t stand it anymore.
You good?
He knows it’s stupid. Buck is fine. Buck has been fine. But—
This one goes unanswered, too. He thinks back to that other night, where he doesn’t let his mind take him often, how the phone was just there on the floor and Buck was asleep. He doesn’t think about it much because it makes him warm all over when he remembers being pressed against Buck, their bodies lined up beneath the blankets.
It’s probably the same now.
Except that now, Eddie knows what it was like to wake up in a hospital bed, to look over and find Buck gone. To know that he was out there, hurting, and nobody but Eddie was really looking for him. He knows what it was like to see Buck breathing for the first time and feel like he was the one who was learning to breathe again, too.
He knows what it was like to watch Buck get up again. To watch him breathe through the pain and to know, more acutely than ever, that he couldn’t have survived losing Buck. Not this time. He knows what it was like to watch Buck come home, to watch him hug Chris as if it didn’t hurt when Eddie knew that it did.
Buck is okay, mostly. It’s Eddie who isn’t.
It’s Eddie— again, just more loudly this time, who can’t sit still without knowing Buck is breathing.
The drive— ten minutes on a good day between his house and Buck’s— passes in a blur of soft streetlights and late evening dark. He spends it trying to convince himself that Buck is safe and breathing, but it doesn’t do much for the tightness in his chest. Like before, like always, he needs to see. Buck’s windows are lit from within when Eddie pulls his truck into the driveway, the beams of his headlights sweeping over the front of the house.
He lets himself in. He thinks about knocking and even wonders if he should but it feels wrong, somehow. It’s late, a velvet hush over Buck’s quiet little neighborhood, the whole thing a far cry from what the loft had been. This is more Buck, though. Eddie likes the house, as much as he privately misses waking up to Buck between his own walls instead the way it had been all last summer.
Inside, it’s quiet. The hair on Eddie’s arms stands up as he creeps softly through the house. The last thing he wants is to scare or startle Buck, but he moves without thinking, matching the environment. He sweeps his eyes over all of Buck’s familiar things, the pillows and framed pictures and the here and there stuff that used to be Eddie’s. He checks the bedroom with a glance, but it’s empty, and then he steps through to the dining room and into a pool of soft light.
The doors to the backyard are wide open.
He steps through them, cautious, his heart beating hard in his chest.
Buck, he discovers, is lying on the grass.
At first, Eddie’s heart leaps into his throat at the sight, at everything that it represents, at the memory of Buck’s body collapsing to dry desert earth. Terror seizes him for a moment, lashing through his chest at the reminder. But that was New Mexico, and this is Los Angeles— home, where the grass on Buck’s back lawn is lush and cool with the night and the palms cut a familiar shadowed silhouette against the starless sky, and Buck’s chest rises and falls steadily. In and out, visible even from where Eddie stands in the doorway.
He must make a sound, out of his control, because Buck startles slightly and turns his head, half-rising from where he’s lying on the ground. Spotting Eddie standing there, his shoulders relax.
“Eddie?” he says. “What are you doing here? You scared me.”
Eddie’s heart settles back into his chest as he steps forward, out onto the patio and closer to where Buck is. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, clearing his throat. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just— you weren’t—”
In the halflight, Buck frowns. His face creases with it and he looks Eddie over, like maybe somehow Eddie is the one to be worried about.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“You didn’t answer my text,” Eddie admits.
He feels stupid now, a little, but Buck looks at him in a way that makes it feel like it’s okay. He’s good about that, at least most of the time. Gentle and dramatic in equal measure, he’s the best of everything. Even when he’s driving Eddie crazy, it’s the good kind.
“Sorry,” Buck offers, gesturing around him. “I was out here, I didn’t bring my phone with me.”
Eddie says nothing, but wanders closer until he can see the way the light plays on Buck’s face.
“You want to sit?” Buck asks.
Eddie nods, lowering himself to the grass next to Buck. It’s impossible not to compare how it had felt that day, leaning over him, on his knees, Buck’s head cradled in his hand. Even now, Eddie’s palm itches.
Buck watches him carefully, and then it’s quiet for a moment.
They haven’t talked about it, barely at all since they debriefed in the hospital afterward, but Eddie is starting to get the feeling that this is about to change.
Eventually, it’s Buck— like always— who can’t stand the silence. What surprises Eddie is how he breaks it.
“You can,” he says, two simple words that convey the truth of their bond, a thing they normally roam around and through but not on top of.
“What?” Eddie asks.
Buck levels him with a look, blue eyes keen and sharp in a way that Eddie rarely sees them.
“Cut the shit, Eddie,” Buck says, his voice gentling the words. He leans back against the grass, then, and turns his head, baring his neck.
You can. Eddie’s breath catches. “How did you know?”
Buck smiles, a soft wild thing. “I know you,” he says, and then closes his eyes, tilts his chin up just a little bit further, and waits.
Eddie reaches out, pressing two fingers against Buck’s neck, and lets the steady thump of his pulse wash over him.
“You know,” he says, his voice tight with a fierce feeling in his throat. “That night that I came to your house, you— you just let me do this. You woke up with someone’s hand on your throat and you just—”
“I do know,” Buck says. The words vibrate beneath Eddie’s touch, a pleasant hum that shoots up into his wrist. “I knew it was you. Didn’t have to look.”
Intimacy crawls all over them, vinelike, pervasive.
“Buck,” Eddie breathes, his eyes stinging suddenly. Buck’s pulse thunders. “I don’t know how to do this.”
Buck opens his eyes, his pale lashes fluttering. He regards Eddie carefully for a moment.
“I’m okay, Eds,” he says.
“No,” Eddie chokes, surprising even himself. “You’re not. We’re— I don’t know, maybe you are, but I’m not.”
“Hey,” Buck whispers.
It happens so quickly that Eddie doesn’t have time to stop himself. Two weeks of careful waiting on tiptoes, and it takes only that one word in Buck’s sweetsoftest voice for Eddie to burst into tears.
“Oh. Eddie,” Buck breathes, pushing himself up. He does best, always, with someone to care for and later they’re going to have no choice but to reverse roles— Eddie will make sure they do, would rather die than leave Buck unattended in all this— but for a weak, splintering moment, it’s all that Eddie can do to lean into it.
“Hey,” Buck whispers, reaching out and rubbing Eddie’s shoulder, the muscle of his bicep as they sit awkwardly facing each other on the bare ground of Buck’s backyard. “Hey, c’mere. It’s okay.”
Buck touches him, and Eddie lets it happen, and for a blissful moment with Buck rubbing his back and the scent of his clean laundry and curl cream around him, they’re not in the New Mexico desert and Buck’s pulse is not something Eddie is questioning and everything is clear.
It’s in this moment of clarity, with Buck’s soft breath brushing Eddie’s hair, that he realizes he is deeply and irreversibly in love.
“Buck,” he whispers, his voice tremulous.
Buck shakes his head, but like so many other times it’s as if he can read Eddie’s mind.
“I know,” he whispers.
Like Eddie had said, when Buck was breathing hard on the ground beneath him. Maybe the truth is he’d realized it then, and only has the courage to accept it now that they're here, home and safe.
Buck kisses the top of his head, and Eddie feels it like a promise.
Everything else can wait, maybe.
“Here,” Buck says gently.
He pulls back just enough to lift Eddie’s hand between them, and then he turns it and presses it to his own chest. They look at each other in the dark, warm brown eyes on bright, clear blue even in the dim halflight.
Eddie wants to say it, but then he looks at Buck and thinks that he already knows, the way that Eddie himself had known that somewhere out there, Buck was alive. The way that Buck had known he needed to sleep next to him. The way that Buck had twice bared his throat to Eddie’s hand without a shred of caution.
Buck’s heart thunders against Eddie’s waiting palm, through skin and fabric. Everything else can wait, at least until the light of morning.