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Buck steps into the hallway on his socks, soft steps.
The house is quiet now, the tension bleeding out of it with the slow rise of the sun across the morning. The hallway glows with it, a buttercup kind of light that settles. There’s no tension anymore, but the silence is unsettling.
He hadn’t meant for it to be like that. He’s confident that Eddie hadn’t either. Things get out of hand like that. It’s not the first time they’ve ever fought and it probably won’t be the last, but sitting by himself in the bedroom had only made Buck want Eddie more.
For a moment, he had been sure that Eddie was going to walk out of the house entirely. He’d sat on the edge of the bed, feeling untethered and hysterical, and braced himself for the inevitable sound of the door latch. Dread ached through his chest, tension in his shoulders as he waited for the sound. But it never came, and one breath at a time Buck relaxed.
Clarity came to him slowly as he sat there, and he started to replay their fight in his memory. It came in flashes of hurtful words, all of it over nothing really. They’re just tired. Their shift had been long, and scary, and they’d both lashed out. He can see that now.
He can see Eddie’s face, too, as he stood on the opposite side of the bedroom with the bed an ocean between them. Now that the roaring in his own ears has stopped, Buck can see it all a little more clearly— the white of Eddie’s knuckles over the pillow he was holding; the darkness in his eyes so unlike the usual warmth there; the unsettling fear and devastation on his features, all of it feeling off now that Buck is looking back at it.
Eddie isn’t usually the one to overreact. Not like this. He can be dramatic, maybe, but when it comes to an argument Buck is the one who goes off the rails and Eddie gets— exasperated, sure, but not scared.
And that’s what he’d seen on his face. Fear. The cold, sharp kind that couldn’t be anything else. If Buck could go back to it, he would do it differently. Pay more attention in the moment as it happened, and stop the fight in its tracks to make sure Eddie was okay.
Second best option, barring time travel.
He hovers in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen in the silent house and casts his eyes over the room until they settle with Eddie. He’s sitting at the table in the center of the kitchen, the room the way it’s always been, just as cozy and warm. But Eddie is a bowstring— tense all over; jaw clenched so tight Buck can see the lock of it from here; hands folded in front of him and curled into fists. He knows if he were to pry Eddie’s fingers open there would be half moon remains of his fingernails in the skin on his palms, and the knowledge threatens to break Buck open.
There are so many things he’s been learning about Eddie since they became more than the best friends they’ve always been. How Eddie likes to sleep curled up on his side when he’s in his own bed, even though at the firehouse he always sleeps on his back; the way he tastes; how he looks at Buck and only Buck; how flirtatious he can be.
There are more things about Eddie that surprise him than Buck would have expected; if you’d asked him before, he'd have said he knew Eddie better than anyone in the world. But there had been things then that even Eddie didn’t know about himself, and as Buck tilts his head and looks at the side of his face, at the tension all over his features and the tears in his eyes, he thinks that’s still true now.
He steps into the light of the kitchen and moves closer, noticing the way Eddie braces himself at the sound. But he doesn't want to fight. He didn’t in the first place, but now that he’s looking at Eddie on the verge of tears and holding himself like he might break, it’s the last thing Buck wants to make it worse. He wants to be better for Eddie. To keep being better, even when it’s hard.
Normally, Buck is scrambling. He’s used to that part— to begging someone not to leave him or doing anything he can to make sure they don’t. But this can be different, he thinks. Eddie needs him. He can do that now, and not be scared, because Eddie is still right here in the kitchen and he’s always come back for Buck even when he has left.
He stops behind Eddie’s chair and gently puts both hands on his shoulders, feeling the tension there and the way Eddie goes still. Saying nothing, he gently presses his thumb in, a little deeper, rubbing against the taut muscle beneath Eddie’s tshirt.
The only warning he gets is the catch in Eddie’s breath, before he bursts into tears, dropping his head to the table with an audible sound as sobs wrack his body.
“I’m sorry,” he sobs into his folded arms as Buck blinks in surprise.
“Hey, hey,” Buck soothes, reaching for him in the split second it takes for him to catch up to what’s happening in front of him. “Oh— hey, sweetheart, okay,” he whispers, rubbing Eddie’s shoulders gently.
Eddie lets him, even as he fights to catch his breath.
Everything feels sluggish and slow and he can’t breathe. He couldn’t say how many minutes it’s been since he left Buck in the bedroom and came into the kitchen to sit in the quiet morning, but he does know that he’s spent every single one of them trying not to do exactly this. The truth is that Eddie knows how this ends, and the sick dread of it fills every space in his chest.
No matter how he plays it back, it never goes well. He’s been here before. Thinking he could have more than he deserves and messing it up, losing his best friend one fight at a time. Everything is different now, and as his chest heaves and his world slowly chips apart he can only think that he was stupid to think that he could get it right this time. The thought is distant, but there. This is his fault.
“Eddie,” Buck is murmuring in that soft, sweet, understanding tone. Eddie knows it. He’s heard it a thousand times. And all he wants is to give into it.
“It’s okay,” Buck says. His hands are on Eddie’s back, warm and grounding. “We’re okay. It’s just a fight. We’re okay.”
But there it is. Just a fight. Eddie doesn’t know how to kick to the surface of the panic that washes over him, and he knows even less how he would explain the way he’s feeling to Buck. It’s never just a fight; it’s a building block, it has to be. It always has been before. Eddie is not good at relationships, no matter how much he wants to be or how hard he tries.
And he is trying. God, he’s trying. He isn’t sure he’s ever wanted anything to work quite in the way he wants this, this thing with Buck, to work.
He’d come to the kitchen to try to get a handle on himself so that he didn’t cry, so that he didn’t make this more of a problem than it already was. And now here he is, coming spectacularly undone and wanting to crawl into a hole somewhere and knowing that Buck would never let him.
“Eddie,” he’s saying, even more gently, and Eddie turns his face away.
Through a haze of fear, Eddie is aware that there’s only one ending to this. The fight will get tucked away in the back of their minds, and Buck will say it’s okay just like Shannon did, but one fight will add up to two and then three and over time bits and pieces of their friendship will peel away like faded wallpaper until the whole thing is unrecognizable.
Eddie has been here before.
But Buck.
“Come here,” he whispers, and then he’s hauling Eddie up to his feet. He’s always a little caught off guard by Buck’s strength, the totality of it. Today he’s powerless against it, and he lets himself be moved into Buck’s arms. This part is different, at least. Eddie has never been small like this, held like this.
His breath shudders against Buck’s shoulder and he wraps his fingers into the fabric of the shirt he’s wearing, a raw instinct. Buck wraps him up tighter in response, pulling him in close and warm. One of his hands moves up to the back of Eddie’s head and cradles his crown in its broad palm; the other settles at Eddie’s ribs, one strong arm wrapped securely over Eddie’s back until he’s curled into Buck’s chest entirely.
Against his temple, Buck’s breath is warm and when he turns his head just enough to press a kiss to Eddie’s hairline it feels as if it could break him into pieces.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I didn’t— I—”
“Shh, hey,” Buck soothes, pulling him impossibly closer. “I know, it’s okay. I’m sorry, too.”
Eddie feels frantic, out of his own reach.
“Buck,” he gasps, his breath scraping into his throat. “I didn’t mean to— I— fuck.”
“Okay,” Buck placates, though he’s starting to sound worried now, which is the opposite of what Eddie wants, what he needs if he’s going to make this right again. “Okay,” Buck repeats. “Deep breath, Eds. We’re alright, honey.”
He knows, Eddie realizes. That Eddie isn’t handling this well. He wouldn’t be talking like that if he didn’t. His heart struggles against the walls of his chest, beating wildly. Eddie is actively ruining this, and his heart just keeps trying to get to Buck as his head swims.
He pulls back.
The truth is that he tries to pull back, but Buck holds him firmly in place. “I’ve got you,” he whispers against Eddie’s hair. “I got you. You’re okay.”
They’ve been together for almost six months. Fighting was probably inevitable, but Eddie had been trying so hard to keep it at bay. Everything has been so good. Too good, probably. He just wanted it so badly—
“You have it,” Buck whispers.
Eddie had not known he was speaking. Even now he’s not sure which of his fractured words had made their way through his panic, stumbled out of his mouth, into the soft morning light in his kitchen.
It’s not like it’s the first time they’ve fought in this room. Eddie can turn his head just a little bit and he’ll be looking at the spot where Buck had stood right after Bobby died, where he’d leaned against the counter, where Eddie got in his face and Buck let him do it, like he’s doing now.
He guesses he’d done that because it was safe. Because Buck was his best friend, then.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay,” Buck answers. His voice is low and sweet, sugar in a weeping wound. He just keeps pulling Eddie closer and closer, as if it’s something he deserves.
“Why?” Eddie hears himself ask, muffled into Buck’s neck.
Buck, somewhere above him, laughs. It’s soft and sure and not degrading even a little bit; instead, it rings with something that can only be wonder and the faint trail of understanding beneath that, a thing that can only be Buck’s, like Eddie is.
“I love you,” he murmurs into the strands of Eddie’s hair, close to his scalp where Eddie can feel it like he wants to press the words right into Eddie’s brain. And then, again, steady: “I love you, Eddie.”
Eddie breathes. His lungs expand all the way for the first time since he’d stood across the room from Buck and hurled hurtful words at him and immediately regretted it.
“I love you,” he whispers through tears.
Buck holds him tighter and holds him and holds him until he stops crying and his head aches beneath his temples, a punishment he still thinks he deserves as shame works its way into the scraped out hollows left there by the panic that has receded.
He’s exhausted and drained and embarrassed. And Buck is still just holding him, his breath rising and falling beneath Eddie’s hand on his back. He hasn’t moved at all. And when Eddie does, pulling back a little bit, Buck follows.
Isn’t that the way it’s always been, too? Hasn’t Buck always swayed into Eddie’s orbit? And isn’t that the second-best thing Eddie has ever known, only just behind the miracle that is his son’s existence?
Maybe that explains the overreaction. Losing Buck is, as it follows, the second-worst thing he can imagine. Risking something that big, that important, is only ever going to make someone irrational.
Buck’s fingers find Eddie’s cheek, and they’re tender and gentle like nobody had ever been mad at all. He looks up and Buck is captured in the light, backlit, glowing. His eyes are ocean-oasis-salvation blue, lashes soft, cheeks petalsoft pink; and he’s looking at Eddie like he’s in love.
Eddie’s heart thrashes again in his chest, traitorously belonging to Buck.
“What do you need?” Buck asks.
Eddie feels his face crumple into a complicated frown. “I— I didn’t mean to—”
Buck shakes his head. “Eddie,” he says patiently, his thumb brushing lightly over Eddie’s cheekbone. “What do you need?”
Eddie thinks.
He needs this to be okay. He needs Buck. He needs to be better at this than he’s ever been before— more capable and stronger and not a risk. He needs to be someone he’s not, he thinks sometimes, someone who can do this and save it from the inevitable wreck at the end.
He looks up at Buck again, though, and the look on his face is not one that Eddie knows. It’s not the way Shannon used to look at him, and it’s not the way he would look at himself in the mirror and it occurs to him only right now, for the first time, that maybe this isn’t like that at all.
“Um. Water, maybe,” he says softly.
Buck lights up. Leans in and kisses Eddie’s forehead, a brush of a thing that goes right to the center of his chest. “Sit down, okay?” he murmurs.
A few moments later, there’s a cup of tea in front of Eddie. It steams invitingly next to a glass of water, and the vision of it blurs as Eddie blinks hard. Because that’s Buck— a step above, always doing more than he’s asked, always trying a shade harder.
“Thank you,” Eddie manages, holding his hand out palm-up as Buck sits next to him. Buck takes it, his palm warm and familiar.
They’re quiet for a few minutes, and Eddie drinks some of the water and follows it with a deep breath.
“Hey,” Buck says, catching his attention. When Eddie looks up, his face is apologetic and he squeezes Eddie’s fingers gently. “I’m sorry,” he offers. “I wasn’t really mad at you. I’m just tired.”
Eddie looks at him. “You would have been right to be mad at me.”
Buck shrugs his shoulders. “You would have been right to be mad at me,” he says, and then smiles a little bit. “But— Eddie, we’re fine. I promise.”
Eddie looks down, ashamed. “I know.”
There’s a beat.
“Do you?” Buck asks, too gently.
Eddie looks back up at him then, and pulls his lip between his teeth as he tries to figure out what to say. “I don’t want to fight with you,” he admits. “It— it scares me to fight with you, Buck.”
“You don’t have to be scared,” Buck says, emphatic, leaning in. “We’ve fought before and- and we always get through it. You’re my best friend, Eddie.”
He makes it sound so simple.
“But we’re more than that now,” Eddie says. “We’re not just best friends anymore. There’s more—”
He gestures vaguely, trailing off.
Buck frowns. They’re still holding hands, but with his free one he reaches over and nudges Eddie’s tea a little bit closer to him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he admits a moment later. “Why is it any different now?”
Trying not to be frustrated, Eddie lets out a breath. “It just— it is,” he appeals. “Right? I mean, it— it has to be, doesn’t it?”
He’s not so sure anymore, with Buck looking steadily back at him, the squeeze of his hand that feels understanding.
“I don’t think so,” Buck says gently. “Not if we don’t want it to be.”
Eddie breathes deep. “This is—”
“Hard,” Buck agrees. “I get it.”
And he does. Maybe that’s the magical part. Eddie is suddenly aware that he’s not nineteen years old anymore, or twenty-two or fresh from the desert with barely closed bullet wounds. Funnily enough, he’s been there with Buck before, too. Sometimes it feels as if they’ve done it all together. And other times, Eddie cries in the kitchen and feels unbearably, horribly young again.
“I think I just got…” He hesitates. “Scared.”
“Me, too,” Buck tells him gently.
Eddie looks up, soft affection rolling over him at the vulnerable look on Buck’s face. “Yeah?”
Buck shrugs. “I don’t know how it’s ever not scary to fight with the person you love the most in the world,” he says. “I was sitting in there waiting to hear the door.”
Eddie’s chest aches.
“Buck—”
“You wouldn’t,” Buck interrupts. “I know. That’s my point, I guess.”
Outside, the sun steadily rises over Los Angeles, predictably warm and bright. In here, Eddie loves Buck more than anything and Buck is brave and Eddie is soft and all of these things are becoming day by day as normal as daybreak over the horizon.
Eddie squeezes his hand this time, and Buck looks up with love in his eyes, unmistakable.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Buck leans in. “Like, it’s okay to be scared. Because we know each other, right? We can still be best friends.”
Eddie nods, and then looks down at his free hand, picking lightly at the cuticle on his thumb. “It’s just—” He breathes out harshly and looks back up, finding that it actually helps to be looking at Buck. “I don’t know if I know how to do both,” he admits. “With Shannon, it— I ruined that. And I know it’s because I never could have loved her the way she deserved and we never could have been what we were trying to be, but…” Shaking his head, he gathers himself. “I just don’t know if I know how.”
Buck’s face goes soft, his chair scraping against the floor in his earnest bid to inch himself closer to Eddie. “So,” he says. “We learn together.”
Eddie floods with warmth, affection coursing through him. The day spreads out in front of them and their fight and all its feelings fade one little bit at a time.
“Okay,” he whispers. “We learn together.”
Eddie watches as the morning slots into place. Buck makes a crack about learning to eat breakfast together which is senseless and normal and Buck, and then he stands in the kitchen like a thousand times before and makes Eddie chocolate chip pancakes, and Eddie tries to remind himself that he doesn’t have to earn them.
They eat with their ankles tangled beneath the table. Eddie’s headache subsides and Buck sinks into his chair a little at a time, the weight of the rough shift and the fight afterward slipping off of him. Afterward, he holds a hand out to Eddie without a word and a few minutes later they’re tangled up in the dim light of the bedroom, folded in between the sheets as Eddie settles close enough to kiss Buck’s shoulder through worn cotton. He sighs, his breath ghosting over Buck’s skin, and Buck turns his head, so that he can see his face.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he whispers, unbearably fond.
Eddie smiles a little. “Hi.”
“You okay?”
“Mhm,” Eddie hums. Sleep tugs at him and he fights against it. Maybe that’s the difference too, the way he always just wants more and more of Buck. He squeezes, his hand on Buck’s waist. “Are you okay?”
Buck nods, grinning suddenly, dazzling.
“With you?” he asks, then dips his head to kiss Eddie’s cheek, messy and warm. “Duh.”
Eddie smiles.
“Yeah,” he sighs, closing his eyes. Then he opens them again, and looks at Buck for a moment. “Hey,” he adds, featherlight. “Thank you.”
Buck opens his eyes, too, and looks at Eddie with a genuinely puzzled expression on his face.
“For what?”
Eddie huffs out a soft laugh, overwhelmed and overflowing, and then leans in to kiss Buck lightly on the mouth. “For being my best friend,” he answers. “Go to sleep, bud.”
Buck smiles, his eyes closed again. “My favorite thing to be,” he mumbles.
Eddie lays his hand over the center of Buck’s chest, and finds that he believes things he hadn’t before.
“Me, too,” he whispers.
It matters very little that Buck is already asleep.