Archive of Our Own

The call is a partial structure collapse on a commercial remodel, second floor pancaked onto the first, and it's going fine — as fine as these things ever go — right up until it isn't.

Eddie's halfway through threading a backboard to a contractor with a busted ankle when the rest of the floor decides it's done pulling its weight. He hears it before he sees it, the dull groan of timber giving up, and then the sound gets very loud and very specific, and somewhere in the dust and the noise is Buck, who was twenty feet to Eddie's right shoring a doorway, and then Buck is not where Buck was.

"Buck!" 

Eddie's already moving on autopilot, every nerve screaming at him to get to Buck, climbing over a joist that wasn't there a second ago. The dust is everywhere and he can't see and his own voice comes out wrong, too high. "Buck, talk to me, where are y—"

There’s a small cough. To his left, weaker than it should be. Buck's half-buried, a section of upper floor across his legs, and his face is gray with drywall dust except for where it isn't, except for the dark wet line tracking down from his hairline, crimson and utterly terrifying. Eddie gets his hands under the debris and his hearing is gone — well, mostly — his ears narrowing everything down to just the spot where Buck is.

"Hey," Buck says, or tries to. "Hey, I'm—"

"Don't." Eddie has the debris up, Chimney materializing on the other side to bear some of the brunt of it. Buck's legs are there, both of them, attached, moving when Eddie says move them, which is the only thing Eddie needs in the entire world right now. "Don't talk, don't move, just—stay with me, okay? Stay with me, baby, I've got you, I've got you—"

It tumbles out of him, the adrenaline of the situation apparently deciding his mouth has full authority to say whatever the hell it wants. He doesn't really hear himself say it, either. He's got both hands on Buck's face, checking his pupils, thumb wiping dust from under his eye, and the word is just gone, out, said, hanging there in the dust with everything else.

Buck blinks up at him, glassy, concussed, and doesn't seem to catch it.

Small mercies. Eddie will take it. Eddie will take the one (1) mercy the universe is apparently willing to extend to him today.

But across the rubble, Chimney's hands go still on the backboard. And Hen, crouched at Buck's other side with the C-collar, lifts her head and looks at Eddie with both eyebrows climbing toward her hairline and her mouth pressing into a flat line that is working very hard not to become a smile.

Two mercies was too much to ask for. 

Eddie does not look back at her. Eddie looks at Buck, exclusively, because Buck is his patient and a good medic maintains focus on his patient and there is absolutely nothing else happening here.

"Pupils equal," he says, to no one, a little shakier than he’d hoped it would sound. "Let's get him on the board."

The ride to the hospital is the longest fifteen minutes of Eddie’s life, which is saying something, because Eddie has had a lot of long fifteen minutes, several of them in a literal warzone. 

Buck spends the whole thing fading in and out and narrating his symptoms like he’s reading from a menu — “the lights are doing a fun thing,” “I think there’s two of you, which is a lot of Eddie, not that I’m complaining,” “there’s too many lights and they keep moving” — and Eddie spends the whole thing holding pressure on the gash above his hairline and saying “yeah, bud, you told me about the lights already” in a way that is calm and professional and not at all squeaky and weird because his hands are shaking for reasons unrelated to road vibration.

It’s a head laceration and a concussion. That’s it. Personally, Eddie has sustained worse. He knows, clinically, factually, with the entire knowledge of his training, that Buck is going to be fine. 

Eddie, however, doesn’t feel fine about it. Eddie feels like his chest has been hollowed out with a melon baller, and the gap is being held together with C-collar straps and the sheer force of him not thinking about how Buck went out of his sight and then there was floor where Buck used to be. 

He doesn’t let go of Buck’s hand the entire ride. For stability. The patient’s stability, which is Buck. Obviously. 

At the hospital they take Buck for a CT and make Eddie sit in the waiting room like some kind of civilian. Like he isn’t credentialed to be in there. With Buck. Like he hasn’t intubated people in worse shape than Buck on the floor of a moving goddamn vehicle. 

Plus, mind you, Eddie is Buck’s emergency contact. 

Eddie filled out the stupid form himself, in his own handwriting, in the little box that said person to notify, and if Eddie is the person to notify then by every law of logic Eddie should be permitted to do the notifying from inside the room. 

Not out here, where some kid is methodically dismantling a waiting-room chair and a TV that’s bolted to the wall plays a cooking show with the sound off. 

Who the hell do these people think they are? 

Eddie has held Buck’s actual life in his hands. Multiple times, if you count the whole ladder truck on the leg situation, which Eddie does. 

He should be allowed back there. He's Buck's — well. Not husband. Obviously. Not boyfriend, or romantic partner in any legally or socially recognized sense, or any sense, any sense at all. But his best friend, which has to count for something, which used to count for something before hospitals got so damn precious about who gets to stand next to a bed. 

Eddie spends forty minutes pretending to read a poster about flu shots and not thinking about anything at all. 

He learns a great deal about flu shots. He could give a damn TED talk on flu shots now, that’s how thoroughly he is not thinking about Buck. 

He could not, if asked, tell you a single thing the poster actually said, because the entire time his attention is pointed down the hallway Buck disappeared into, like a dog watching a door. 

When they let him back, Buck is propped up in a bed with three staples in his head and a smile he is far too pleased with for a guy who got concussed a couple hours ago. 

“There he is,” Buck says, grinning. “My medic.”

My medic. Two words, and Buck says them so easily, like Eddie belongs to him. Like Buck filed the paperwork and Eddie came back stamped property of Evan Buckley. 

Eddie — Eddie should hate that. Right?

Eddie does not hate that. 

Eddie feels a warmth behind his ribcage that flutters outward, encasing his entire body, traitorous, and he has a number of feelings about being claimed in a post-op room by a man with three staples in his head, and every single one of them is going to be shoved down indefinitely. 

“Your medic was Hen,” Eddie says, sitting down hard in the plastic chair. “I just held your hand and listened to you talk about the ceiling.”

“You held my hand,” Buck sing-songs, his grin loose and dopey, the painkillers clearly doing some heavy lifting. “Romantic.”

Eddie flinches a little as butterflies erupt in his stomach. “Yeah, well,” he mutters. “Don’t get used to it.”

It should be fine now. It should be over. Eddie has survived the call, the ride here, close to thirty-five goddamn minutes of flu-shot literature, and he’s home free. One clean exit away from never thinking about any of this again. Except Buck tilts his head against the pillow, squinting, like he’s chasing something down a long hallway in his own mind. 

No. Whatever it is, no. Eddie would like Buck to stop chasing whatever that thing is. Would like to grab the thought out of Buck’s concussed head and throw it out a window. 

Buck’s face drops into something serious, eyes wide. “You called me baby.”

There it is. Out the window it did not go.

Everything in Eddie’s body does some type of weird freeze-frame, in the manner of someone who has just stepped on something that might be a landmine and also might be a Lego, and who has decided that, statistically, the outcomes are similar enough not to risk it. 

“No, I didn’t,” Eddie says. 

Very smooth. Convincing. Exactly how somebody with nothing to hide would say it, and Eddie has nothing to hide, because there’s nothing to hide, because he didn’t say it, even though he definitely said it, and recalling the exact timbre of his own voice while saying it is neither here nor there. 

Here's the actual explanation, the boring one, the one that doesn't require anyone to make a face about it: Eddie meant to say bud. Obviously. Bud. He says it a million times a shift. 

It lives in his mouth, basically a reflex, and under that much adrenaline the wires crossed and bud came out one letter long. Buh — baby. It's practically the same word. It's a typo. A verbal typo, said out loud, to a man's face, while holding said face. Happens constantly. To everyone. 

“You did.” Buck points at him, floppy and triumphant. “At the— the thing. With the— you said it. You called me baby.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Eddie.” Buck is delighted. This is probably the most fun Buck has had all day, possibly all month, and he has a head injury, so the bar is somewhere down on the floor next to the building that fell on him. “I heard you. I was concussed, not deaf.”

This is the part where a smarter person would laugh it off. Yeah, Buck, sure, whatever you say, easy, breezy, beautiful, covergirl. The whole thing dies right here in the hospital room where it belongs. Eddie knows this. Eddie can see the smart road from where he’s standing. He has a map, a compass, and clear weather, and Eddie looks at all of it and drives directly into the lake. 

“I didn’t call you baby,” Eddie scoffs. “I called you a baby. Because you got a bump on the head and were crying about it.”

There’s a pause. 

Buck’s whole face looks confused, and then amused, and then hurt, and then betrayed. Which is the one he stays on. Which Eddie, for the record, does not like. 

“That’s not—” Buck starts. 

“You were being a baby,” Eddie continues, standing now, because a moving target is harder to hit and because he needs to get the hell out of this room before his face tells Buck something he’s trying very hard to hide. “I’m gonna go tell the others you’re awake.”

“Eddie.”

“Rest your head, bud.”

“Eddie.”

Eddie is already through the door. 

Buck is cleared for light duty in a week and back in the field in two, which is two weeks Eddie spends pretending the whole baby thing never happened. 

It works about as well as everything else Eddie does. Which is to say it does not work, because Buck has decided that baby is the funniest thing to occur in the history of Station 118, and Buck has the long-term memory of an elephant when it comes to material he can use against Eddie and the long-term memory of a goldfish when it comes to where he left his keys. 

It starts small. Buck reaches across him for coffee and says “thanks, baby” with a grin pointed in Eddie’s direction to see if it works. Eddie doesn’t give him the satisfaction. He pours his coffee like someone who has never heard the word baby in his life, like Buck could say it a million more times and Eddie’s blood pressure would stay at a reasonable level.

Buck does. He says it a million more times. 

“Pass the salt, baby.”

“Nice catch, baby.”

“You want the last one, baby?”

Each one tossed out casually, a little experiment, Buck watching Eddie’s face over the rim of his cup for any crack in his composure. 

Eddie gives him nothing. Eddie is a brick wall. Eddie is Fort Knox. 

Eddie is a man whose resolve is, in fact, cracking straight down the middle every single time, but he’ll be damned before he lets it show on the outside. 

The team, of course, is no help. 

“Morning, baby,” Hen says to Eddie, deadpan, sliding into the seat across from him. 

Eddie glares at her. “Don’t.”

“What? Buck gets to.”

“Buck has brain damage.”

“Buck had a concussion weeks ago and has made a full recovery,” Chimney says, appearing with a plate and zero invitation to this conversation. “Per the doctor. So really, the only person still saying baby with no medical excuse is you, the day it happened, when you—”

“I will punch you.”

“—called him baby,” Chimney finishes, sitting down, delighted and unbothered, fully prepared to die on this hill. 

Then there’s the part that Eddie doesn’t see coming, because Eddie is an idiot. 

It’s a slow shift, the kind where the worst thing that’s happened by noon is Buck losing an arm-wrestling match to Hen. Eddie’s in the gym half-watching Buck rack plates onto a barbell he absolutely does not need that much weight on. Eddie’s spotting from the bench, more or less. Mostly he’s watching Buck’s arms, which is a hobby Eddie has, completely platonically, the way you’d admire a nice truck. 

Buck sets up for a deadlift. Locks in and lifts. Then, at the top of the rep, Buck makes the single least convincing sound Eddie has ever heard a human make — a strangled “augh!” — and lets the bar drop. He clutches his lower back, folds toward the floor with the grace and believability of a soap opera actor whose contract is not being renewed. 

“Ow,” Buck announces, dramatically. “Ow, my back. Ow.”

Eddie doesn’t move. He watches Buck arrange himself on the gym floor, one hand pressed to a spine that’s fine, face screwed up in what Buck clearly believes is agony and what actually looks like mild constipation.

“Eddie,” Buck gasps, theatrically, peeking one eye open to check whether the performance is working. “Eddie, I think I really hurt it. You should probably— you should come check on me. As a medic.”

And Eddie knows — Eddie knows exactly what this is. Buck has set an elaborate trap to extract the word from Eddie, and the trap is so bad, so flagrantly transparent, that any self-respecting person would laugh and walk away. 

Instead, as a non-self-respecting person, Eddie crouches down next to him. 

It’s kind of just muscle memory. No thought required for his knees to just bend. Some hindbrain part of Eddie that has not gotten the memo that will apparently fall for this every single time Buck so much as mimes a hangnail. Eddie’s already got a hand on Buck’s back, the other reaching for his pulse, the entire automatic machinery of Buck is hurt spinning up before the thinking part of Eddie can grab the wheel. 

“Where does it—” Eddie starts, then stops, because Buck is grinning at him like the cat that got the cream. 

Caught. Eddie has been caught being a person who cares whether Buck is hurt. 

The shame is immense. Totally.

“You came to check on me,” Buck says, delighted. 

“I came to confirm you’re faking.” Eddie removes his hand from Buck’s back, with dignity. “Which you are. Get up.”

“You were worried.”

“I was professionally curious.”

“Say it, though.” Buck’s still on the floor, propped on his elbows now, all pretense of injury abandoned. “If you were really worried, you’d have called me— you know.”

“I’m not calling you anything.” Because the first time was a misfire. You don't reload a misfire on purpose. That's just called firing. Eddie stands. “Except an idiot. Get off the floor before someone thinks you actually got hurt.”

Buck takes the loss in the gym as a setback, not a defeat, because Buck is nothing if not committed to a bad idea. 

The next attempt comes two days later and involves, of all things, a kettlebell. 

Eddie’s restocking the rig when he hears it from across the bay — a clang of metal on concrete, followed immediately by a howl that belongs in a community theater production of something tragic. Eddie turns and Buck is hopping on one foot, clutching the other, kettlebell on the floor a clear eight inches from where any part of Buck’s body could possibly be. 

“My foot,” Buck wails. “It landed on my foot. E-Eddie, it got my foot.”

Funny enough, Eddie can see from across the bay, the full unbroken stretch of floor between the kettlebell and Buck’s allegedly crushed foot. Buck has dropped a kettlebell near his foot and is now trying to sell a workplace injury to Eddie, who treats injuries for a living. 

This should go great. 

“It missed you by a foot,” Eddie says. “Ironically.”

“It grazed me. There was— there— it grazed me.” Buck hops closer, foot still cradled, laying it on thicker by the second. “I could have a fracture. You can’t see it, but. You’d need to— you should check. You’re a medic. Check on me.” 

Eddie rolls his eyes. “Walk it off.”

“I can’t walk, Eddie, that’s the whole—” Buck puts the foot down, forgets to keep limping, takes a couple of completely normal steps, and remembers half a second too late to wince. “—ow.”

Eddie stares at him.

Buck stares back, the wince frozen on his face, fully aware he’s been caught and committed to the bit anyway, because giving up would mean admitting what he’s fishing for, and Buck would apparently rather fake a foot fracture than say I want you to call me baby again out loud like a person. 

Here’s the thing Eddie’s not going to think about: Eddie knows what Buck wants. He has known, since the gym, or maybe before, actually. The word is right there, sitting in Eddie’s mouth, and all Eddie has to do to make Buck light up like a Christmas tree is to say it. The only reason Eddie doesn’t is that if he says it once on purpose, as a joke, then Buck will know it was never a joke, and Eddie will have handed over the one piece of evidence he’s been guarding since a building fell on the man he might — since the call. The thing. With Buck. His best friend. 

“No fracture,” Eddie says, not checking. “You’ll live. Pick up the kettlebell before someone trips on it and actually gets hurt.”

Buck deflates, foot mysteriously healed, pouting. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m a delight.” Eddie goes back to stocking the rig. His hands are shaking. But maybe he’s just had too much caffeine today. 

Eddie's vigilance is built entirely for Buck's fake injuries, and Buck's fake injuries are not the problem. The problem, as ever, is the real one.

It's a multi-car pileup on the 110, three weeks into Buck's campaign, and it's chaos — Eddie's got a driver with a femur that's pointing the wrong direction and Buck's two cars up working a rollover, and everything's fine, everyone's accounted for, right up until the SUV nobody fully secured shifts on the incline with a groan of metal that Eddie feels in his bones.

"Buck's under that," Hen says, and Eddie is already gone.

He doesn't remember crossing the distance. One second he's kneeling over a patient and the next he's got his hands on the frame of a vehicle that is six inches from where Buck is crouched, and Buck looks up at him, and Buck is fine, Buck is completely fine, the chocks held, the SUV settled, nothing happened — but Eddie's heart is somewhere up around his throat and the words are out before he can stop them, shaking and entirely sincere:

"You okay? Talk to me, baby."

And there it is.

Eddie would like a building to fall on him now, please. Specifically, him, this time, a nice big one, structural, fatal, immediate. He has spent three weeks fortifying himself against kettlebells and bad deadlift acting, three weeks of brick-wall, Fort-Knox, nothing-gets-through, and the breach has come not from any of Buck's idiot traps but from Eddie's own stupid mouth, in front of God and Hen and a man with a misaligned femur.

What follows is complete and utter silence.

Well. Not silence. There's a freeway's worth of noise. But between the two of them, in the foot of space where Eddie's hands are still gripping the frame and Buck is staring up at him with his mouth slightly open, there is a perfect, ringing, catastrophic silence.

Eddie hears it this time. Eddie hears every letter of it and would give one of his organs, a good one, to have it back.

He does not get it back. That's not how words work. Eddie knows this. Eddie has been alive for three decades and has watched, repeatedly, words fail to climb back into the mouths that released them, and even so, some optimistic idiot at the wheel of Eddie keeps hoping, every time, that this'll be the one that reverses. 

Buck's face starts to crack into the most insufferable grin Eddie has ever had the misfortune to be standing in front of, and Eddie watches it happen knowing there's not a single thing he can do to stop it, no floor to walk through, no rig to restock, no kettlebell to confiscate.

"You—" Buck breathes.

"We're working." Eddie croaks. "We are at work. There is a femur that needs my attention."

"You said it again."

"I said nothing,” Eddie rasps. “Get out from under the car."

Buck is already crawling out, lit up brighter than the wreck behind him, and Eddie knows, with cold certainty, that he is never going to hear the end of this for as long as they both shall live.

The problem with getting caught is that Buck is a man who knows how to hold a grudge in the most affectionate way possible. 

Buck, now armed with proof — actual, witnessed, freeway-grade proof — becomes insufferable in a whole new way. The fake injuries stop, because the fake injuries were only ever a means to an end, and the end has been achieved, and now Buck gets to do the thing he really wanted, which is to bring it up constantly, gleefully, with no regard for Eddie’s blood pressure or will to live. 

“Hey, Eddie.” Buck slides into the seat next to him at breakfast. “You know what I was thinking about?”

“No.”

“That time you called me baby.”

“Pass the syrup.”

“Twice.” Buck holds up two fingers, in case Eddie has forgotten how counting works. “You called me baby twice, Eddie.”

Eddie turns to him, eyes narrowed, lips pressed together in a slight frown. “I’m going to start eating somewhere else.”

It goes on like this for days. Buck brings it up in the rig. Buck brings it up during inventory. Buck brings it up, once, sotto voce, while they're carrying a patient down three flights of stairs — "you know, if I tripped right now, I bet I know what you'd call me" — and Eddie nearly drops his end of the gurney out of pure spite if it weren’t for the actual injured person on it.

The worst part is that Buck has gotten creative. He no longer simply says the word. He’s now developed a whole comedic repertoire around the word, an entire bit with recurring segments and callbacks, like a late-night talk show host who has found his one reliable laugh and intends to ride it into syndication. 

There are themed variations. There are impressions of Eddie, hand to chest, gazing into the middle distance, breathing baby like a man in some type of commercial for like — allergy medication, or something. 

Eddie has watched Buck do this impression for Hen, who laughed, like a traitor. Who is supposed to be Eddie’s friend, but is now his arch-nemesis, next to Buck.

And that’s what’s killing Eddie, slowly, like a very stupid poison.

Buck thinks it’s all a bit. 

Buck thinks the whole thing is a hilarious, ongoing joke. A slip of the tongue on Eddie’s part. A natural development of their nearly decade long friendship. The kind of material you mine for years. Remember when Eddie called me baby? A funny story for the grandkids who will somehow exist without Buck ever once connecting the dots. 

Buck thinks Eddie’s deflecting because he’s embarrassed. And Eddie is embarrassed, that’s the thing, that’s a perfectly good and complete explanation for why Eddie wants to leave the country when Buck says it. 

A guy says something stupid under stress to one of the most important people in his life, it becomes a whole bit, the guy gets embarrassed. 

Normal. Universal. Happens to everyone — probably. 

And really, when you get down to it, it was a slip of the tongue in the most literal sense. 

Eddie meant bud. He's gone over this. His mouth was aiming for bud, the building came down, and the landing got sloppy. One letter. People mishear bud as baby all the time, probably, in high-stress multi-syllabic environments. 

The fact that it then happened a second time, that’s — that's just the brain forming a bad habit. Muscle memory. Eddie will simply un-form it. Any day now. 

Eddie doesn’t need to go looking for some deeper reason behind the wanting-to-leave-the-country, because the surface reason is right there and it’s fine and it covers everything, all of it. 

Anyway, maybe wanting to leave the country isn’t even about Buck. Maybe Eddie just wants to leave the country. People do that. People take vacations all the time. 

He’s heard Portugal is beautiful this time of year, all those tiled buildings, the coastline, very restful. 

Or Japan. Eddie could go to Japan. He could be the kind of guy who goes to Japan, eats really good food, looks at a temple, comes back a changed man with zero unresolved feelings about anyone. 

Costa Rica. New Zealand. Somewhere with no Buck in it and no tables they can gaze across and no babies. Well — there will be babies, but the cute kind. Not the Buck kind. 

This isn’t about Buck, okay? This is about Eddie being overdue for some personal time, and the timing, the fact that the urge arrives exclusively when Buck says one specific word, is a coincidence, and Eddie does not investigate coincidences. He’s not a detective. He’s just a guy who needs a passport renewal, probably, and a beach. 

Even the part where he feels like he’s going to throw up every time Buck smiles at him, that’s — that is a stress response, obviously, a normal stress response to being relentlessly bullied at his place of employment. 

Buck does not know — has not, in all his needling, paused to consider — that every time he says it, he's poking at the single most honest thing Eddie has never said out loud, and Eddie has to sit there and take it, and laugh it off, and pass the fucking syrup, while a coil wrapped around his ribs pulls tighter and tighter and tighter. 

Indigestion, probably. He should eat slower. 

Eddie could end it. In theory. Hypothetically, if there were anything to end, which there isn’t, beyond the bit itself. All he’d have to say is — well, he doesn’t know what he’d have to say, because there’s nothing to say, because saying I meant it would imply there was a thing he meant, and there wasn’t, it was adrenaline and a head injury and a car about to fall on his best friend’s head, two separate emergencies, none of which mean anything.

But if he were to end it, say something just so Buck would give the damn thing a rest, the joke would stop being a joke so fast Buck would get whiplash. They’d both just stand there looking at whatever got uncovered, and Eddie has elected, firmly, not to find out what that is. 

Eddie reaches for his coffee instead, and says, with great commitment, absolutely nothing. 

Eddie figures out he’s in love with Buck on an otherwise unremarkable evening, elbow-deep in the sink, scrubbing dried pasta sauce off the plates from dinner. 

There’s no thunderclap. No swell of strings or montage or warning shot. Chris is down the hall in his room, the muffled sound of some game leaking through the door. Buck’s on Eddie’s couch yelling answers at Jeopardy! One sock on, the other sock God knows where, and he twists around to demand Eddie confirm he was right — already laughing before he’s finished his own sentence — and Eddie looks at him, at the indignant face and the one stupid sock, and the thought strolls to the front of his head, like it’s been loitering in the back for years. 

Oh. I’m in love with him.

Eddie sets the plate down in the rack, very slowly. 

Okay. Fine. This is fine. This is a manageable piece of information, and Eddie is a manageable kind of guy. Lots of people love their best friends. That’s the whole job description of a best friend. Somebody you’d take a bullet for, build your kid’s life around, think about when they’re not in the room, picture across a hypothetical dinner table for the next forty years — okay. 

The thoughts are coming in from a few directions at once now, and Eddie would appreciate it if they formed a neat and orderly line. 

“Eddie.” Buck’s still watching him from the couch. “It’s Mount Kilimanjaro, right? Tell me I got it. The guy said it wrong.”

“You got it,” Eddie says, on autopilot, from many miles away. 

Eddie did not hear the question. Eddie would not, at the moment, be able to confirm the existence of Africa. 

“Thank you.” Buck turns back, vindicated, and Eddie stands very still with the dishwater cooling around his hands while his entire existence topples to the ground. 

He’s in love with Buck. That’s fact one. 

Eddie can hold one fact. He’s a grown man, a father, a professional — he can hold a single fact without dropping it in the sink. 

Then fact two wanders in, in no hurry whatsoever, and taps him on the shoulder. 

Buck is a man. 

Eddie stares at the suds. 

Biologically, Buck is a man. Eddie’s in love with him. These two pieces of information have apparently spent this whole time in separate rooms of Eddie’s mind, never once introduced, and they’re meeting right now, over dirty dishes, shaking hands, doing a little dance together that Eddie is now being forced to watch. 

Another thing that may or may not be important is that Eddie figured out the love thing minutes before it occurred to him that there might be a broader implication involved in loving Buck. 

He led with Buck, which is what he always does. It didn’t go I’m into men, and Buck’s a man, therefore. It went I’m in love with Buck, full stop, then a long, eerie silence, then, faint and a little stunned: huh. 

Which Eddie is pretty sure is not the standard order of operations. 

He’s seen the movies. There’s supposed to be a whole arc — a questioning phase, some soul-searching, a significant moment in a locker room. Eddie skipped every step. Eddie went straight to the man of it all. 

Turns out he’s been standing in this particular room for years with his damn eyes shut, narrating the dark, while Buck waved at him from a few feet away. 

What finally has Eddie gripping the counter for balance is the timeline. The inciting incident, Buck faking injuries, weeks of baby being lobbed at him like a punchline. He’d been so busy treating the word as a slip, the single most embarrassing thing he’s ever done, that he never once asked the obvious follow-up question. The one any detective would’ve led with: why does Eddie’s whole chest cave in over a word he supposedly didn’t mean?

Because he meant it. Obviously he fucking meant it. 

“You’re being weird,” Buck calls. “Why are you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird.”

“You’re being so weird right now, it’s not even funny. What happened?”

What happened is that fifteen minutes ago Eddie was a normal man washing normal dishes and now he knows two things he didn’t before. 

One of them is that he’s in love with Buck. 

The other is that he’s in love with Buck and probably gay. 

Those things are here now, and they’re holding hands, and staring at Eddie, who would love to go back in time before he knew any of this. 

“Nothing,” Eddie says, to the sink, voice trembling slightly like a guy for whom a tremendous amount has just happened. “You’re right. It was Kilimanjaro.”

“I knew it was Kilimanjaro! Take that Mr. Host.” Buck shoots him a grin, easy and unbothered, like the floor of Eddie’s entire life didn’t just shift four inches to the left. “See, this is why I love you. Backup confirmation. My own personal fact-checker.”

It's nothing. People say love you to their friends. Buck especially, who hands the word out like he's got a surplus, who's said it to Eddie at least a thousand times over a thousand dumb little moments and never once made Eddie feel anything but vaguely pleased about it. 

Buck says it the way other people say bye or drive safe. He said it once mid-sneeze. The words have been worn smooth from overuse, polished down to a sound that registers about as much as a car door shutting.

Or it did, twenty minutes ago, back when Eddie was a normal person and not whatever he is now, because the words go in differently and settle somewhere south of where they used to, and Eddie has already gone and committed the cardinal sin, which is to wonder what I love you would sound like if Buck meant it the other way. 

In the morning, maybe. Gravel-voiced, half-asleep, I love you whispered into the curve of Eddie’s neck. Or after midnight, the lights off, Buck saying is soft and slow the way voices get in moments like that — I love you.

Or, God help him, the version where Eddie’s name rides in front of it, with Buck’s mouth trailing down the side of Eddie’s throat and not stopping there, both of them tangled up in a bed with a lot fewer clothes than they have on right now, and—

A high-pitched squeak echoes throughout the room, and it takes Eddie a second to realize it came from him. 

It is, frankly, a humiliating little chirp, like the noise a sneaker makes on a gym floor, and it leaves Eddie’s body and bounces around the kitchen and into the living room. 

Act natural, says the part of Eddie’s brain that has never once in his life acted natural. 

Buck turns to face him fully. “Did you just—”

"No."

"You squeaked."

"I swallowed wrong." Eddie spins back to the sink fast enough to slosh water down his shirt. "Went down the wrong way."

"You're not drinking anything, man."

"There's water everywhere. I'm doing dishes. It's a wet situation." Eddie scrubs at a plate that's been clean for a full minute, maybe two. "Watch your show."

After a minute of silence, Eddie lets out a long exhale. 

So this is how it happens for Eddie. 

Not in any of the loud places he expected the big things to find him — but here, hands gone soft in the cooling water, with the two most important people in his life under the same roof. 

He loves Buck. He’s known it for ten minutes and somehow years. And the knowing has settled in to stay, patient and enormous, like it was only ever waiting for him to stop talking long enough to hear it. 

The elevator dies between the fifth and sixth floors with Eddie and Buck inside it, because why not, Eddie's life is just a series of small rooms God keeps locking him into with this man.

They'd been clearing the upper levels of a parking garage after a fender-bender turned into a minor electrical fire and Cap had sent the two of them down for the last of the gear. The lights stuttered, the car dropped a few inches, and now they hang there between floors while Buck explains the situation over the radio to the team who sound about as thrilled as Eddie feels.

"Twenty minutes, maybe thirty," Buck says, clipping the radio back. "Maintenance is on it."

"Great." Eddie slides down to sit against the back wall. "Love that for us."

It's fine. It's a box. Eddie's survived worse boxes. 

Hey, he survived thirty-four years in the closet and found his way out eventually, he can handle an elevator for half an hour.

The single problem with this box is that it's the size of a phone booth and Buck is in it — Buck, who Eddie has spent a solid month being stupidly, ruinously in love with, who hasn't got a clue, and who is right now folding himself down to sit close enough that their shoulders press together. 

Which is fine. Eddie's fine with it. Eddie has total command of his face and his pulse and the eight inches of shared air between them, and if he keeps insisting on that, it might eventually become true.

So that's the situation. Eddie's handling it.

They last about ten minutes before the bickering starts, which was always going to happen, and it kicks off over something so dumb Eddie couldn't repeat it back an hour from now — the bay thermostat, and whether seventy-three degrees counts as "boiling" or as "completely normal, Buck, put on a shirt." 

Doesn't matter. What matters is Buck is wrong, refuses to admit he's wrong, and Eddie has no other entertainment available in this steel coffin except winning.

"You set it to sixty-two," Eddie says. "I watched you do it. With my own eyes."

"I set it to a reasonable, livable temperature for a building full of people doing manual labor."

"You set it to a meat locker, and then you stole my hoodie because you got cold, which is the part that really—"

"Oh my God." Buck thunks his head back against the wall. "You're so annoying when you're right. Anybody ever tell you that?"

"A few people.” Eddie shrugs. “None of them were wrong either."

Buck chuckles. "Whatever you say, baby."

And there it is.

He hasn't pulled it out in weeks. The bit had cooled off, baby retired long enough that Eddie almost stopped bracing for the next one. But Buck plays it now like a card he's been hoarding, smug, throwing it across the space between them because he knows precisely what it does to Eddie, that it wins the argument by knocking him clean off the road.

It works. The muscle in Eddie's jaw jumps on cue, and behind it his heart breaks into a sprint, because what Buck doesn't get is that the joke died at the kitchen sink, and every time Buck says that word now it lands on a guy who'd hand over an organ to earn it for real. 

Buck's running a play Eddie already lost.

"You're ridiculous," Eddie says. "Do you ever give it a rest? Genuinely. Is there an off switch on you somewhere, or—"

"It's not a big deal." Buck grins at the doors, not even bothering to look at him, milking this for everything it's worth. 

Eddie’s hands are fists at his sides to avoid doing what he wants to do, which is kiss Buck to shut him up. After so long without hearing that word from Buck’s mouth, Eddie is dizzy with it.

"I'm just messing with you, Eds. It's not like you said it on pur—"

"I said it because I'm in love with you!"

The words launch out of Eddie at full volume and ricochet off all four walls of the elevator. There's nowhere for it to go and nowhere for either of them to go with it. 

The instant they're loose, Eddie's stomach plunges through the floor of the car and keeps falling, because — that's out now, that happened, in a parking garage, of all places, he said that to his best friend, with no door and no air and no future where Eddie gets to insist he didn't. 

Abort, howls every cell he owns, a clean four seconds past the last moment aborting would've done him any good.

"Happy?" Eddie adds, because apparently he's all in, apparently this dam won't do half-measures. "Is that what you were fishing for this whole time? You've spent a month poking at this like it's the funniest joke ever written — baby this, baby that, the impressions, the entire circus — and meanwhile I've been losing it over here because I meant it, Buck. I meant it when a building fell on you and I meant it watching you almost get crushed by a sedan and I mean it right now, in an elevator, which is, for the record, the single dumbest venue I could've picked, and I'm aware of that, I'd have taken anywhere else on the planet—"

Eddie shuts up. Mainly because he's out of breath. 

Buck freezes beside him, the grin Eddie loves and hates no longer there. His mouth hangs open a fraction and his eyes are wide and he’s looking at Eddie like he just said that entire thing in Spanish. 

Which — Eddie is pretty sure he didn’t. Like, ninety-eight percent sure it was in English.

The silence sits there between them, filled in by the hum of the car and the whine of a drill a few floors up that cuts out almost as soon as it starts. 

So Eddie waits. He's never once in his life been this aware of waiting, of his own pulse going at a dead sprint, of the exact press of Buck's shoulder still flush against his like the planet hasn't tipped off its axis, while every grim version of what could happen next plays on a loop in his head. 

"Say something," Eddie tries, pitched lower, the adrenaline bleeding out and dropping him into the cold knowledge that he just did that, with no take-backs and a generous twenty minutes left on the clock. "Buck. Please. Anything. I'm begging you here—"

Buck doesn't say anything right away, which is somehow worse than any of the things he could say. Eddie has run a number of nightmare scenarios about this exact moment — the let-him-down-easy, the I-value-our-friendship, the visible recalculation of every moment they've ever shared — and not one of those nightmares featured Buck just sitting there with his mouth open, looking like Eddie reached over and unplugged him.

"You—" Buck croaks, clears his throat, and tries again. "You love me."

"That's what I said, yeah."

"You're in love with me."

"Also said that, yes. We're really circling the runway here, Buck. I gave a whole speech." He pauses. “I did say it in English, right? You understood me?”

"Like—" Buck's hand floats up, waves between the two of them, then surrenders and drops back to his knee. "Like a friend thing. Right? Like a best-friend, I'd-throw-myself-in-front-of-a-car-for-you thing—"

Eddie shrugs, accepting his fate. "More of a boyfriend thing, actually."

Buck stops moving entirely.

And here's where Eddie would give a great deal to be anywhere else, because watching the word boyfriend travel across Buck's face is its own specific flavor of torture. There’s confusion, then slow dawning, then the exact second Buck's brain catches up to his ears, and Eddie has to sit here and witness all of it with nowhere to look and no convenient building to drop on him.

"Boyfriend," Buck says, like he's never heard the word, as if Eddie made it up on the spot.

"You want it in writing? Got twenty minutes and a stunning lack of other plans—"

"Eddie."

"That's me.” He lifts his hand and waggles it in a little wave. “Hi."

"You're being serious." Buck searches his face for the seam, the catch, the half-second where Eddie cracks and says gotcha. It doesn't come. "You're actually— you're not screwing with me right now."

"Took me a building, a car, and a full breakdown at my kitchen sink to get here, but here I am."

Buck keeps staring. Eddie stares back, which is harder than anything he's done all day, because there's nothing left to do with his hands and nowhere to point his eyes except at Buck, who's looking back at him like the rug was ripped out from under both of them and only one of them got a warning.

Breaking the stare, Buck buries his face in his hands.

This, Eddie can tell, is going to be Buck's whole processing arc, and they're trapped in a metal box together for the duration of it, and somewhere in the spiraling there's supposed to be an answer to the actual question Eddie asked, which Buck has skated right past in favor of relitigating his entire life.

"Buck." Eddie reaches over and tugs one hand off Buck's face, because he'd like access to at least half the expression. "I told you a thing. You wanna maybe tell me a thing back? Anything? The suspense is doing wonders for me."

"Okay." Buck scrubs both hands down his face and lets out a breath. "Okay. Give me a second here. You can't just say that and expect me to know words after.”

"Take your time. I've got nowhere to be. Trapped in a box. With my dignity, which is also in here somewhere—" 

"You're in love with me." Buck drops his hands and turns, and whatever Eddie braced for, it isn't the look on Buck's face now, something dangerously close to hope doing its best not to be hope. "Since when?"

"Since the—" Eddie's mouth stalls out on him. He hadn't planned to say this part. He hadn't planned to say any part, actually, the whole confession being the result of Buck being Buck and Eddie loving him for it, despite any annoyance he may have been feeling. Now Buck's looking at him and waiting and there's nowhere to set the truth down except in the open. "The kitchen sink. I was doing dishes. You were yelling at Jeopardy!, you had one sock on, and I just— I looked over and I knew. That's it. A sink and a sock." 

“And Jeopardy!,” Buck whispers.

“Yes, Buck. And Jeopardy!.”

“And you didn’t say anything.”

“Well,” Eddie rubs his hand over the back of his neck. “My track record on saying things isn’t exactly—”

“Eddie.” Buck’s knee is pressed against his now, and Eddie doesn’t remember either of them moving. “I have wanted you to mean it this entire time.”

Eddie’s first thought is that he misheard, which would make sense, given his pulse is currently loud enough to drown out a fire alarm. 

His second thought is that he hasn't misheard, and now he has to do something with the sentence, which is the bigger problem of the two. 

Buck wanted him to mean it, which means the grin was maybe never about getting one over on Eddie, which means Buck saying it was Buck doing a version of the same cowardly thing Eddie was doing, which means — and Eddie wants to be careful here, wants to be very sure he's reading the room and not just hearing what so much wanting has primed him to hear — that Buck wants him back. Right? That's the thing being communicated. Buck wants Eddie to mean it because Buck means it. That's — Eddie's fairly confident that's how the sentence works. He took English. It’s a shit language, sure, but he’s fluent. He's parsed harder sentences than this, and he's never once frozen up when connecting nouns to verbs.

There's a real chance Eddie's having a stroke. The good kind, if there is one.

"This whole time," Buck says again, quieter, like Eddie needs it slowed down to absorb it. Which, fair, because Eddie's brain has stalled somewhere around the word mean and is currently producing nothing but a dial-up tone and the distant sound of Eddie screaming what the fuck is happening?

"I—" Eddie starts, and finds he's got no end for the sentence. 

He’s been panic-narrating his feelings in full paragraphs in the privacy of his own head this whole time and now that there’s an audience he’s got the vocabulary of a concussed Buck.

It doesn’t matter in the end, because Buck is done waiting on him — has, by the look of it, been done waiting for a while — and there's a scramble of limbs that's deeply undignified for two grown men in a confined space, Buck getting a hand fisted in the front of Eddie's jacket and hauling him up. 

They get their feet under them in a graceless lurch. Buck walks him backward two steps until Eddie's shoulders hit the elevator doors with a hollow boom that neither of them acknowledges, and Buck's mouth is on his.

Okay. Alright. So Buck is kissing him. Buck. A man. Is kissing him with great enthusiasm. 

This is a thing that's happening to Eddie, currently, and Eddie has the dim sense that he should be participating rather than standing here in shock, but a not-small part of him is busy screaming: BUCK IS KISSING YOU. 

He'd had a gentle version of this cued up in his head since the kitchen sink — the half-asleep one, a courtesy preview his brain put together for a day Eddie figured would never come — and this is nothing like the preview. This is Buck kissing him like he's making up for years of saying the wrong thing, one hand still twisted in Eddie's jacket and the other coming up to his jaw, as Eddie whimpers beneath him.

Right. Participate. Eddie can do that. 

Eddie has, historically, been good at things, and there's no reason kissing Buck should be the one to break the streak, except that his hands have stopped working, and despite Eddie’s urges, it takes an embarrassing second for his hands to come back online, then—

Eddie gets his hands on him finally. Both of them. One at Buck's waist hauling him in and the other sliding up the back of his neck into his hair. He kisses him back with a month of regret behind it, sloppy and uncoordinated and the best thing that's happened to Eddie in recent memory. 

Buck groans against him and presses in closer, the whole line of him flush against Eddie now, and whatever color commentary Eddie's been thinking cuts out entirely, replaced with yes and finally and more. 

His hand fists in Buck's hair and Buck's teeth catch his bottom lip and Eddie's knee comes up a little and Buck's hand drops to his hip, gripping, thumb pushing under the hem of Eddie's shirt to the skin there, and—

The elevator doors open.

Except the doors are what Eddie's leaning against, so the doors opening means Eddie's leaning against nothing, which is a fun discovery to make with another man's tongue in your mouth. 

Eddie's center of gravity relocates into the hallway with all the grace of a dropped ladder, taking Buck with it, the two of them coming apart in a frantic scramble.

Buck's hand flies off Eddie's hip. Eddie catches himself on the doorframe and pulls his face into an expression that portrays that he was just having a perfectly normal conversation about elevator safety, an expression he can feel failing, because his lips are wet and his hair is a mess, and elevator safety is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

Hen and Chimney are standing directly in front of the open doors.

They've been there a while. Eddie can tell they've been there a while because neither of them looks remotely surprised.

Which means maintenance fixed the elevator at some point before the doors put on a show, and Eddie isn’t sure how much everyone outside could hear before suddenly they had an audience, and Eddie would like to know exactly how many seconds of whatever the fuck just happened these two are now carrying around in their heads, except that he would not like to know, he would like to never know, he would actually like to walk into the ocean.

Hen doesn't say a word, honestly she just looks amused. She keeps her eyes locked on the pair of them — sliding once, slowly, from Eddie's mouth to Buck's mouth and back, a tennis match she's clearly enjoying — and then, without looking away, without so much as a blink, she lifts her open hand and holds it out to the side, palm up, fingers giving a small, patient beckon in Chimney's direction.

"Alright," Hen says. "You owe me fifty dollars."

"Aw, come on." Chimney's already digging for his wallet, aggrieved, like the betrayal here is his and not Eddie's. "I had end of the month. I was so close."

"You had them figuring it out on their own." Hen wiggles her fingers. Pay up. "Which would require either of them to be a functional adult. Rookie mistake."

"I believed in them."

"That was your first mistake."

Eddie opens his mouth, but there’s not really any defense, no joke to use to laugh it off, or version of the next sentence that explains anything away. He's spared having to find out what falls out of him anyway, because the radio crackles.

"Engine 118, structure fire on Hill, multiple units requested." Dispatch rattles off the cross streets, and just like that the four of them are firefighters again, the moment dropped where it stands the second the call comes through, which is the first lucky break Eddie's caught all day.

"This isn't over," Hen tells them, pocketing her fifty, already moving for the stairs.

It is, blessedly, over for now. Eddie has never in his life been this grateful for somebody else's structure fire, and he makes a mental note to feel bad about that later, for the homeowner's sake.

They pile into the rig, and the second Eddie's strapped in next to Buck with their shoulders touching and nothing to do but sit there for the length of the drive, the full weight of what just happened catches up to him all at once and he has to physically work to keep his face neutral, because the alternative is grinning like an idiot in front of everyone.

He kissed Buck. 

Buck kissed him, technically, Buck got there first, Buck has been there first this entire time apparently while Eddie was busy pricing out one-way tickets to anywhere, but the point stands: that happened. 

Eddie's mouth knows what Buck's mouth feels like now. 

That's information Eddie has, permanently, that he gets to keep, and there's nothing on earth that can take it back.

The part that Eddie keeps circling, giddy and stupid about it, the part that's still sinking in somewhere around his heart: he gets to do this now. 

All the looking he's been doing, he doesn't have to pretend anymore. He could reach over right now and put his hand on Buck's thigh and that would just be a thing he's permitted to do. 

The knowledge is borderline obscene. Eddie sits with his hands folded in his lap like a man at church, white-knuckling the urge to find out what other parts of Buck make that sexy noise the kiss earned him, and fails to not think about it, repeatedly, the whole way to the call.

Which loops him back around, as the rig takes a corner, to the genuinely insane realization that he's gay, apparently. 

That's a thing about Eddie now, a thing that's been true the whole time, just sitting there waiting for a building to fall on Buck so it could introduce itself. 

Thirty-four years and the news arrives via Evan Buckley, which feels about right, feels exactly like how Eddie's life tends to go. He keeps waiting for the panic to show up about it and it just doesn't. There's no panic. There's a guy he loves two feet away pretending to look out a window, and Eddie's the most settled he's been in — possibly years, and if that's what gay feels like then Eddie's not sure what he spent three decades so worried about. 

Hindsight. Twenty-twenty, allegedly, except in Eddie's case it took a concussion that wasn't even his.

Buck's looking out the window, wearing a smile he's not bothering to hide. Eddie stares at the back of Chimney's head and replays the last ten minutes on a loop he plans to keep strictly to himself until the day he dies, possibly longer, depending on the afterlife's privacy settings.

On scene, Chimney's barking assignments before the rig's fully stopped and there's a half-second where Buck twists in his seat and his shirt pulls tight across his shoulders, and Eddie, newly licensed to notice such things, notices such things, and has to look at the ceiling of the rig and ask God for the strength to put out a fire like a professional and not jump his maybe-boyfriend in the middle of an emergency.

Buck's already pulling his helmet on, turning to jog toward his side of the building.

"Hey, Buck."

Buck turns mid-stride. "Yeah?"

Eddie's carried this word like a hot coal cupped in both hands, certain it would scar him, certain the only move was to put an ocean between himself and the heat of it. Now Buck stands in the wash of the engine lights, waiting, and Eddie opens his hands to find it never burned at all, only ever glowed there, a small, steady heat he could have held this whole time.

He opens his mouth, and finds it costs him nothing at all.

"I love you, baby."

Buck's whole face lights up, that gorgeous smile stretching wide, the one Eddie's signed up to spend a long time earning on purpose now.

"I love you too," Buck calls, already jogging backward, refusing to give up the sight of Eddie for the half-second it'd take to turn around. "Try not to let a building fall on you."

"No promises," Eddie says, and goes to work, and for the first time in a while the coil that's been wound tight around his ribs isn't there at all.