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Buck is late.
Eddie had woken with Lucas before the sun rose above the horizon; had fed him and rocked him and sat in the nursery watching the morning creep over the buttery walls with shafts of weak light turning gold. He’d taken him into the kitchen and balanced taking care of the baby and checking in with Christopher as he gets ready for school and making a cup of coffee, with the familiar pang that he feels every morning that he does this alone: every morning that there’s one mug instead of two because Buck is at work and Eddie is not.
For the first three months of their baby’s life, they’d been fortunate to be holed up together spending an equally luxurious and challenging summer learning what their family is like now. It exists to Eddie, even now just two months later, like a blur of gold on film: a hazy and beautiful stretch of his life that he wants to remember forever.
Then their parental leave had ended, and they’d decided that until Lucas is a little older they would take different shifts and it had seemed like the right choice at the time. And now it’s almost November and the version of autumn that befalls Los Angeles has set in with softness, and today Buck is at work while Eddie is home with Lucas.
And Buck is late.
Chris has gotten off to school, leaving for the bus with a kiss on his little brother’s head and disappearing into the morning. Since then, Eddie has laid Lucas on the floor for tummy time; changed his diaper; and spent a solid few minutes on the couch with Lucas’s little body resting on his thighs, repeatedly leaning in and brushing their noses together before pulling back quickly because this game fascinates Lucas lately and makes his tiny face light up.
Now, Eddie is making an attempt to coax him into a morning nap to mixed results, which is probably because Buck is late and Eddie’s phone is silent— no call, no just got back and heading home text, no picture from the engine— and Eddie can feel the sharp pull of tension in his upper back as it spreads across his shoulders.
And probably Lucas can feel it too, which is why Eddie is pacing the floor between the kitchen and the living room with the baby curled up against his chest, fussing uncharacteristically while Eddie takes pointless glances at the clock, watching it tick past eight-thirty and closer to nine like a particularly bitter taunt to him specifically.
He tilts his head, pressing his cheek to the soft light curls on Lucas’s head, to the warmth of his baby skin underneath. Lucas breathes against him, and Eddie tries to remember if he was this big last week, if he’s already growing.
“Where is your Daddy?” he asks softly, cradling the back of Lucas’s head in one hand and holding him against his shoulder with the other. “Hm?”
Lucas makes an indistinguishable noise and somewhere, some place deep in Eddie’s chest, something twists in a way that hurts.
It never used to be this way. He never used to worry about Buck like this, because he didn’t have to, because they were always together. Because Eddie was his partner and they didn’t clamber into the engine unless it was both of them, unless they were fighting a fire or doing a rescue or performing an extraction or whatever else was asked of them— in perfect tandem, shoulder to shoulder the way they’ve always been.
It’s harder than Eddie had ever imagined it would be: being out there with someone who isn’t Buck, wondering if he and Lucas and Chris are okay at home; being home instead and losing sleep in an empty bed worrying about who’s out there with Buck instead of him and if they have his back the way Eddie would.
The answer, he thinks often and is thinking now, is no. Nobody has Buck’s back like Eddie would— because nobody knows Buck like Eddie does.
It keeps Eddie up at night and it’s what has him pacing now, with tension filtering through his fingertips into their baby’s soft skin as the clock continues to count upwards and the door doesn’t open, until it does.
Just after nine-fifteen, over an hour late with no call or text, Buck’s key slides into the lock on the front door and Eddie feels his body go into overdrive with it: there’s a dizzying rush of relief and the faint brush of something that’s almost humiliating, that feeling he gets when the anxiety leaves him to feel like he’s been ridiculous.
Then he looks up.
Buck is freshly showered, curls still dampened, and he’s in shorts and a long-sleeve quarter-zip with a soft cotton collar and he’s toeing out of his sneakers like it’s any other day. But across the expanse of his cheek above twenty-four hours of fine blonde stubble, there’s a fiercely bright red scrape that catches Eddie’s eye: still open and raw.
Eddie’s breath catches.
“Hey,” Buck is saying, but it sort of feels like he’s far away, like he’s somebody else, like Eddie is somewhere he isn’t. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Your face,” Eddie says, a little outside of himself but staring, his gaze locked on Buck’s cheek, on the blood, on the scraped-off skin. Yesterday, before Buck had left home for his shift, Eddie had stood where Buck is standing now and he’d leaned in and he’d kissed his husband on the cheek. He remembers it clearly, the warmth of Buck’s skin beneath his mouth, the soft-roughness of it.
That skin is gone now, mostly. Scraped off, without Eddie there to see it happen. Without Eddie there to stop it from happening.
At Eddie’s words, Buck grins, dropping his bag by the door in its usual spot and nudging his shoes out of the way beneath the rack so that Chris won’t catch his crutches on them when he comes in from school later.
“Yeah,” Buck says casually, like there’s not blood on his face, like there’s no blood elsewhere that Eddie can’t see yet. “That’s why I’m late.”
Eddie’s throat closes up. He forgets the word for how he’s feeling, what it means.
“What happened?” he asks, the words sounding mangled to his own ear.
Buck shrugs one shoulder. There’s a bright light in his eyes and he looks alive, but Eddie can’t stop looking at the blood on his cheek and thinking wildly, illogically, about it all spilling out of his body at once.
“Rope rescue,” he says. “It was crazy, there was this guy stuck on the cliffs— those ones out there near where we went with Chim and Maddie, remember? Last summer? Anyway—”
He’s roguish, an echo of a young man Eddie had met once, one who would run into danger without thinking. And it was okay then, because Eddie was there to grasp him by the back of his shirt and haul him back, check his harness and double check it again, be sure he was running in with someone to follow him.
Sometimes, that still wasn’t enough, and Eddie carries all of those occasions with him like scars that no one else can see.
“This guy managed to get himself stuck out there,” Buck continues, “and Bobby thought we should wait but you know how that stuff crumbles so I convinced him to let me get out there and we hooked the harness to the truck.” Eddie’s throat goes tighter as Buck grins at him, pushing back his sleeve to reveal another scrape along his forearm. “Got banged up pretty good and made us late, but—”
“Buck,” Eddie says, taking a step closer to him in the doorway and feeling like time is slowing, slowing, like seconds are moments. “What?”
“It was crazy, the guy was falling so they let out my line and I just—” Buck makes a sort of aborted motion, and Eddie watches his fist close up around thin air and feels faintly nauseous. “Grabbed him,” Buck says, grinning again. “You should have been there, Eds, it was so—”
What exactly it was, Eddie doesn’t get the chance to find out. The words you should have been there ring in his ears like the shriek of a fire alarm, and a feeling of sick wrongness creeps over his spine and he feels immediately, strangely, trapped.
You should have been there.
He should have— or Buck should have been here, with Eddie, with their baby. What had Eddie been doing while Buck was hanging from a cliff, while his body had been let down too quick and had fallen who knows how far and scraped against fragile cliffsides? Had he been kissing their baby or watching Chris shut the front door behind him or standing in their kitchen, unknowing?
If something had gone wrong— if it had been worse— what would Eddie have been doing while his husband was hurt or worse?
Suddenly, Eddie is angry.
The kind of angry that is really something else, something softer, the kind of angry that has thorns made of care. The worst kind, because it scrapes him deeper than the shallow weeping cuts on Buck’s face and his arm and who knows where else. The kind that will bruise even more viciously than wherever Buck is black and blue from the cliffside.
Because Buck is grinning in front of him like it’s all okay. Like Eddie’s chest isn’t tight; like he didn’t spend the night half-awake because it’s hard to sleep without Buck’s weight next to him; like he doesn’t even know that if he’d been even a little bit unlucky, Lucas would be without a parent, and Eddie would be—
“What were you thinking?” Eddie interrupts, his voice sharpening. He’s being so unfair that he can see it right away, but not so unfair that he can stop himself.
Buck’s smile slips slowly from his features, and he tilts his head a little with a concerned frown appearing between his eyebrows, and Eddie wants to wrap him up in his arms and hug him tight and kiss his cheeks and his curls; he wants to shove him hard and he wants to tilt his head to the light to get a good look at the scrapes and their shiny film of raw skin and he wants to make him understand the drowning feeling that he has in his lungs. All of this, all at once.
Loving someone like this— in a way that breaks you open— is something that Eddie has learned is equally beautiful and awful. Loving someone like this and holding pieces of them in your arms and watching them get hurt and worrying that they’re never coming home and adjusting to being here while he’s there—
Suddenly, it all feels like too much.
“Eddie,” Buck says, with the air of someone who’s ready to talk down an intervention.
Eddie’s chest sears.
“Don’t do that,” he snaps. In his arms, Lucas fusses intermittently, and Eddie watches Buck’s eyes flicker to their son and all he can think about is what kind of life they’d be left with, in a world without Buck.
“I’m fine,” Buck says, looking at Eddie again. “It was no—”
“Don’t even think about saying no big deal,” Eddie says, irrationally. He knows he’s being unfair but can’t stop, feeling like he’s something run off of its tracks and set loose to wobble precariously.
Buck frowns. “What do you mean?” he asks. “It was. I was harnessed in.”
“You were reckless!” Eddie says.
That’s unfair, too.
“No, I wasn’t!” Buck argues, looking indignant and surprised, as if this hasn’t even occurred to him.
Eddie shakes his head. “You were,” he says. “Like always.”
It’s a low blow and he knows it even before Buck’s features darken.
“Since when?” Buck demands. His posture is different now: broader, stronger. Eddie wavers, but there’s a thin shimmering thread of panic that could break any second and let him fall and then it would be him, tumbling off the cliffs.
“You have a family, Buck,” Eddie says. “A baby.”
Buck’s eyes flash. “What are you saying, Eddie?” he asks. “What, that I—I’m not thinking about Lucas and Chris? About you? You think I’m not trying to get back home to you?” He shakes his head. “You have a monopoly on that or what?”
“No,” Eddie answers, scrambling. “That’s not— but— I’m not the one coming home an hour late all scraped up.”
Buck rolls his eyes, and something flashes through Eddie’s chest, threatening to climb into his throat.
“Like this couldn’t happen to you just as easily as me,” Buck says.
Eddie rocks Lucas in his arms and swallows hard, wanting to look away from his husband’s face but unable to find it in him to do it. The sun has started to creep into the room with the turning of the day, and it finds the ends of Buck’s hair and turns him silver and gold, and Eddie loves him so much that the thought of living without him for even a moment feels so impossibly painful that he can’t entertain it without feeling like it’s going to tear him into pieces.
“I wouldn’t be bragging about it,” Eddie snaps, and regrets it the minute he does.
Buck scoffs. “Sorry I wanted to tell you about what happened to me.”
“That’s not fair—”
“Oh, but you’re being fair,” Buck says evenly.
He’s not. He knows he’s not. But there’s something cold and afraid that is aching in the back of his mouth, hurting his teeth, making him feel like he’s trapped, like if he bites he’s going to break.
In his arms, Lucas has finally had enough and starts to cry in earnest. Eddie holds his little body closer, cradling him, thinking against his will and better judgement about what he’d be doing with Lucas if Buck hadn’t made it home today.
“Oh, honey,” Eddie murmurs against his cheek, bouncing him lightly. “Shh. I know, I’m sorry.”
Buck’s face shifts, the frustration melting off of him as he takes a step closer, his fingers outstretched toward Lucas.
Eddie gets a glimpse of his knuckles, then. Sees the way they’re bloodied; the raw scrape above the gold band of his wedding ring as it glints in the light. It’s this sight that reaches down into him and pulls the strings, and he turns Lucas away, an unthinking reflex born of a fierce ache of protectiveness: the urge to keep their baby safe from the scrape of blood and the touch of pain that has followed them both long before Lucas was born.
He wants to protect this baby from everything— all the things he couldn’t protect Christopher from; all the things he couldn’t protect himself from; all the things that still scrape his husband’s skin raw and turn him bloody when all Eddie ever wants is for him to be whole and safe next to them.
He realizes what he’s done in a matter of half-seconds: horror washing over him as Buck’s gaze shutters and he blinks and hurt appears on all of his features at once.
Immediately, Eddie’s eyes fill with tears.
It’s an apex, maybe, an inevitability after weeks of strain on their lives, weeks of sleeplessness and nights spent apart and things that they thought they’d be able to handle only to find out that it’s harder apart than they remembered it being and harder than they’d thought it would be now.
It was always coming, probably, this break. If they’d caught it sooner maybe it wouldn’t have needed to be like this but now it’s in front of them, broken at their feet. Fear and regret and anxiety tangle like vines in Eddie’s throat, choking him as Buck’s hurt face blurs in front of him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, the words scraping the roof of his mouth. “Buck, I’m— I—”
In front of him, Buck’s face shifts again: from hurt to concern as Eddie blinks and tears cling to his lashes and Buck moves in and out of focus like watercolor. Lucas is wailing in his arms now— obviously feeling Eddie’s tension on top of being overtired. Eddie feels wound too tight and like he’s failing at every turn: exhausting himself; stretching everything too thin; falling short for Lucas and for Christopher; and now hurting Buck, too.
“Hey,” Buck says, and his voice has turned unbearably gentle. Eddie has gotten better about this stuff, usually, but at this moment he can’t help but feel like he doesn’t deserve it when Buck reaches up and tenderly brushes tears off of his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie says again, miserably close to hysterics.
“No, hey,” Buck soothes. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Can I take the baby?”
Eddie nods, trying to swallow as his nose scrunches in a futile attempt to hold back tears. He kisses Lucas’s head and hands him over to Buck, who takes him easily.
“Hi, my sweet boy,” Buck coos at him, his voice all honey and settled calm as he curls Lucas into his shoulder and turns his head, catching Lucas’s little hand with his mouth and kissing it soundly. Lucas turns his head against Buck’s neck, looking tinier in Buck’s arms than he’d felt in Eddie’s, and Eddie steps back, watching them.
Buck— not the reckless or overeager young man he’d been when Eddie met him, but broader, softer, and the kind of father that Eddie had been sure he would be and was— focuses entirely on Lucas. He watches as Lucas settles in his arms like magic; as Buck drops several sweet kisses over his curls and breathes in and settles, too.
His chest is still tight: with shame and with wishing that he hadn’t lashed out when Buck didn’t deserve it, but also with the lingering grasp of real fear. It’s not fair— not to Buck especially— but all he can think about is having to tell Chris that his mom was never coming home; about having to do it again, now that Christopher is older and has had Buck in his life even longer than Shannon was; about having to explain death to Lucas or having to tell him about his dad in the past tense; about a world in which Lucas doesn’t remember any of this and has no recollection of the way that Buck loves him.
When Lucas settles, Buck looks up and meets Eddie’s eyes.
His face— the features that are all more familiar to Eddie now than even his own in the mirror— is soft. There’s no trace of their pseudo-fight left in Buck’s expression, no space for it amongst the fierce love that he has for Eddie, which shows so clearly that there could be no doubt about it.
Even now, Eddie sometimes wonders how long Buck was looking at him like that before either of them realized what it meant. How long he was looking back.
“Buck,” he says, his voice cracking. “I don’t think I can keep doing this.”
Buck’s face softens impossibly, and he steps closer to Eddie again; with the arm that’s not holding their baby, he reaches for him and then Eddie is enveloped in Buck’s familiar touch as he wraps his arm snugly around him. Eddie turns his head and comes face to face with a sleepy Lucas, blinking drowsily with soft blue eyes that he got from Buck.
“You’re okay,” Buck whispers above him, the words drifting through strands of Eddie’s hair. “I’m gonna put Lucas down to nap and then we can talk, okay?”
Eddie swallows hard, feeling his face twist. He nods his head because there’s nothing else he can do, but what he really wants is to insist that he can’t let go of Buck, not even for a moment. It feels insurmountable.
He does it anyway, and it rings with the echo of years of self-depravation. A skill that he’s lost in the meantime, the muscle of it going soft with disuse. But he does it, and he lets Buck with his bloodied arm and scraped face carry their baby safely down the hallway until they’ve both disappeared from view.
Eddie’s chest gets tight. He fights off this feeling by wandering into the kitchen and resting his hands on the edge of the countertop, where he presses his palms into the blunt edge of it until it feels like something.
He’s still there when Buck gets back; Eddie feels more than sees or hears him. After all these years, it’s easy to recognize the feeling of having Buck in the room with him. Mostly, because it makes him feel safer than anything in the world. And maybe that’s what all of this comes down to: how unsafe Eddie has felt, being separated from him like this.
Buck walks up behind him where he stands facing the sink and the window, and wraps him up in an enveloping hug. The warmth of him presses against Eddie’s back and it’s more than the sun splashed over his face and chest through the glass. The heat of Los Angeles has nothing on Buck.
Eddie breathes in and leans back, and Buck takes his weight as he holds him tighter, closer. Eddie shuts his eyes, but when he does all he sees is Buck: the weight of his body slamming harshly into the rocks; the scrape of it; the danger.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Buck shakes his head and Eddie feels it against him, along his neck, against his shoulder.
“Don’t be sorry,” he murmurs, rubbing a soothing thumb along Eddie’s ribs where his hands cradle Eddie’s bones through his tshirt. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
But Buck shouldn’t have to be sorry for going to work and doing his job, just because Eddie can’t handle being away from him. Shame creeps on tiptoe up along his spine. Since when, he wonders, has he been so incapable?
Suddenly, he feels exposed. He turns from the window and into Buck, who easily shifts to accommodate him and then holds him even closer, even tighter.
“I got you,” he murmurs, and Eddie could start crying all over again if he’s not careful.
“I know,” he sniffs instead, tucking his nose against the collar of Buck’s shirt. He’s broad and solid under him and Eddie is so exhausted that he feels like he could fall asleep like this, right here on his feet.
Buck rubs his hand up and down his back, a soothing lull as the quiet of the morning wraps around them.
Eddie’s words from before still linger. I don’t think I can keep doing this. He means that, but what is the solution? As far as he can see it through his sleepless, exhausted mind: there isn’t one. Not while Lucas is so little, not when these days are so precious. They can’t leave him with someone they don’t even know. They can’t both stay home with him. There’s nowhere to turn that feels like the right way.
Are they failing at this? Failing the baby who’s sleeping so warm and peaceful down the hall; failing Christopher who is growing up but still needs them just as much; failing each other? And if so, is it Eddie’s fault as much as he feels like it is?
“I’m just tired,” he says. He wants this to be the case; for it to be that simple.
Buck nods above him and Eddie feels it when he swallows, pressed against Buck’s neck. “I know, sweetheart,” he murmurs. He reaches up then, drawing Eddie’s head back with gentle guiding touches until they’re face to face. Buck’s features swim blurrily, too close to really make out, but Eddie doesn’t need to. He knows every bit of Buck’s face, far better than he knows his own.
Buck reaches up, stroking a rambling path over Eddie’s nose and cheek: up to his temple, through his hair where it’s lengthening on top. He’s so tender, so gentle, that Eddie feels torn apart by it.
“You should go and get some sleep,” Buck says softly.
Eddie shakes his head hesitantly. “We should try to— I don’t want to leave it like this,” he says.
Buck shakes his head, too. “We’re not leaving it like anything,” he says calmly. “We can figure it out later. But you look exhausted.” He leans in, pressing a kiss to Eddie’s cheek that spreads warmth across his mouth from the outside in like a sunbeam.
“I am exhausted,” he relents.
“Okay,” Buck soothes, reaching for Eddie’s wrist and taking it gently in his palm, feeling Eddie’s pulse beneath his fingertips and the tendons in his arm. “Come on. You can sleep and I’ll stay up with Lucas.”
He can see the moment that Eddie surrenders: when he nods his head, when his wrist softens. He allows Buck to lead him through the doorway into the hall and down past both Christopher’s room and Lucas’s, into their shared bedroom. At night, they share it with Lucas as well: his bassinet is pressed against the wall beneath the windows, but they try to put him in his nursery for naptime, getting him used to sleeping in what will be his bedroom when he gets a little bit older.
Sometimes, Buck feels like all they do is wait for him to get a little older. Wait for him to eat one ounce more; wait for him to see better; wait for him to learn new things; wait for him to sleep in longer stretches or reach the next developmental milestone. He loves watching this happen, watching Lucas grow, and at the same time he feels like it should all slow way down.
He sits on the edge of the mattress at Eddie’s hip, on Eddie’s side of their bed. This, too, should slow way down. Everything should: the boys; the ins and outs of their lives; the way Eddie’s hair occasionally glints with the barest singular strand of silver.
Buck has always been the kind of person to want more, faster. Lately, he finds himself wanting the opposite. He’s not sure if it’s the natural course of maturity or just the way his life in particular has unfolded: if it’s Eddie, and all the time they missed and all the ways Buck doesn’t really think they missed anything, and how that makes him want to savor these years even more.
He tucks one leg under him as Eddie folds his body beneath the covers, and he thinks about Eddie here by himself all night while he was by himself across town in the bunkroom, and something pulls at him like a loose threat from the inside.
He reaches out, brushing his husband’s hair off of his forehead as Eddie tilts his head back into the pillows and scoffs lightly, affectionately.
“You don’t have to baby me,” he says, looking up through his lashes.
The ghost of a smile tugs at Buck’s face in a way that he feels. “I want to baby you,” he says.
Eddie smiles a little, but Buck knows better than to take it at face value. He looks exhausted and sad and his eyes are red and there’s something fragile about his countenance, like one wrong move will send the whole thing crumbling.
In so many ways, this is the happiest they’ve ever been. Suddenly, the thought of standing in between their family and that feeling is unbearable to Buck. He’s seized by it, this remnant of a version of himself that he has and hasn’t been in equal measure.
“You okay?” he asks, thumbing Eddie’s cheekbone lightly.
“Mhm,” Eddie says, already sounding sleepy as he blinks up at Buck. “Lay with me?”
Buck couldn’t refuse if he wanted to. He settles in around Eddie, pressing their bodies together as the ceiling fan drifts lazy circles of air down over them with a soft persistent hum. Buck stays on top of the blankets while Eddie burrows under them, and he settles his hand on his husband’s hip and leans in to press a kiss to the back of his neck.
Eddie twists, suddenly seeming a little more awake, and gets his brown eyes on Buck.
“What?” Buck asks softly.
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Eddie asks.
That feeling in Buck’s chest turns again, even fiercer.
“No,” he hushes. “I’m okay. Don’t worry.”
Eddie settles down, shifting closer to Buck and taking in a slow breath that Buck can feel against him: it doesn’t go quite down to the base of Eddie’s lungs. Close, but not there.
“I’m sorry I made you scared,” Buck whispers.
Eddie hums. “Thought we were talking about it later.”
“We are,” Buck murmurs, nodding his head. “We will. I just— I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t thinking about you, Eds. I was. I promise.”
Eddie exhales. His nod brushes against Buck’s jaw, a soft collision of bone on bone.
“I’m sorry I said you weren’t,” Eddie breathes. “I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s okay,” Buck says, then kisses Eddie wherever he can reach: it ends up planted in the hair behind his ear, the soft shell nudged with Buck’s nose. “I love you so much.”
Eddie melts. Buck can feel it, the moment he relaxes.
“I love you,” he says, and turns his head and dips his gaze and presses a kiss in return to the inside of Buck’s bicep, where his arms are wrapped around him.
A moment after that, Eddie falls asleep.
Buck lays there as seconds tick into minutes; as Lucas sleeps and the faintest murmur of empty static creeps over the baby monitor next to him; as Eddie breathes in and out with the steady rhythm of sleep.
He keeps hearing Eddie’s voice in his head. Over and over again. I don’t think I can keep doing this.
The truth is, Buck doesn’t think he can, either. It’s not fair to any of them. Something has to give, somewhere.
To Buck, as he watches Eddie slowly surrender to deeper sleep with his cheek smushed against the pillow, it seems like there’s only one option.
He slips out of bed as carefully and quietly as he can, and breathes out only when he’s clear of the mattress and Eddie is still sound asleep. He adjusts the blankets and then pulls himself away with one more backwards glance. He goes to the kitchen and writes out a note to Eddie which he leaves on the table out in the open, and then pauses to put on his shoes before he creeps into Lucas’s butter-yellow nursery. In the crib, he’s also fast asleep, and he fusses only a little bit as Buck picks him up and settles him in his car-seat. Luckily, Lucas is as good of a sleeper as a baby his age can be, and he fusses lightly but doesn’t fully wake as Buck slips into the driver’s seat of his Jeep and pulls them both backwards out of the driveway.
He checks the rearview mirror, and in it he can see the smaller mirror attached to the backseat headrest that allows him to see Lucas in his rear-facing carseat. He’s cuddled up, sleeping, and looks impossibly small like this with his lashes brushing his cheeks and wisps of blonde curls on his soft head.
The sight of him only makes Buck more sure about what he’s doing.
Bobby and Buck had left the firehouse at the same time following the end of their shift. It’s safe to say by the expression on his face that he’s not expecting Buck to turn up at his door less than two hours later, baby in tow and much more serious-faced than he’d been when they left each other.
Still, like always, he moves aside for him.
“Not that I’m not happy to see you,” he says as he leads Buck deeper into the otherwise-quiet house and then peers over the dining table into the car-seat to get a look at a now-rousing Lucas, “but what brings you here all of a sudden? Thought you and this guy would be at home with Eddie after that shift.”
Buck sighs, reaching into Lucas’s carseat to unbuckle him from it as he turns his head back and forth, a sure sign that he’s about to start getting fussy. He’s an easy baby, but hates being restrained.
“Yeah,” Buck says, lifting his small body into his arms. “Uh, this is about Eddie. Kind of.”
Bobby holds his hands out expectantly and Buck smiles slightly as he passes Lucas over to him. He watches, leaning against Bobby’s dining table, as he coos at Lucas and cradles him close, giving him a moment of his full attention and very successfully pulling Lucas back from the brink of getting fussy.
Bobby looks up at him then, and now he’s giving Buck his full attention. He’s good like that, for both of them.
“Kind of?” he prompts, picking up the thread of their conversation again.
Buck swallows and nods. “Yeah. Um—”
Suddenly, he isn’t sure where to start. He just keeps hearing Eddie in his head, the break in his voice. He sits in one of the chairs and looks up at Bobby, with Lucas in his arms.
“I think I need to, uh,” he starts, clearing his throat. “To quit. F-for a while. Not quit. More like a-a sabbatical.”
Bobby looks at him, impassive, for a long stretching moment. Then he sits, too, and balances letting Lucas examine his fingertips with giving Buck a familiarly steady look.
“Why?” he asks eventually.
Buck exhales, gathering his scattered thoughts. “Me and Eddie,” he says. “Lucas. Chris. I— I came home today and Eddie was…”
He trails off, seeing his husband’s face in his mind, and gives his head a little shake as he looks back at Bobby again.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he explains. “Either of us. We both thought being on opposite shifts was going to be enough, you know? Until Lucas was a little older, but— but it’s not. He’s so anxious, Cap. I can’t keep doing that to him.”
Bobby’s expression softens. “Buck,” he says. “Have you spoken to Eddie about this?”
Buck’s throat tightens.
“No,” he admits. “But— before you say anything. It’s not because I’m keeping it from him or anything. It’s—”
What it is, is difficult to explain. But Buck tries anyway.
“I want to do this for him,” he says earnestly, leaning in as Bobby readjusts the baby in his arms. “For all of them. I want to— I want to fix this for him, for once. I don’t want him to have to worry like that anymore. And it won’t be forever, it’s just a fix for now so it’s not like it’s a big life change.”
Bobby looks at him for a long moment, his face unreadable.
Then he says: “What if you had another option?”
Buck frowns.
“W-we don’t,” he says slowly. “I mean— not while Lucas is so little. We don’t want to leave him with someone we don’t know or-or put him in daycare yet so that’s why we went to different shifts but it’s really wearing on us, especially Eddie, and—”
Bobby tilts his head. “But,” he interrupts, “what if you did have another option? Would you still want to do this?”
Buck’s frown deepens. “Is this a trick question?”
“No,” Bobby huffs, halfway to laughing. “It’s not.”
“Well, yeah,” Buck relents. “It’s not my first pick, obviously. But it’s where we are, so—”
“Maybe not,” Bobby says lightly.
“M-maybe not?” Buck repeats.
Bobby is quiet for a moment, and then he brushes his fingers over Lucas’s hair and looks back at Buck.
“What if you had someone you know who could take him while you and Eddie are at work?” he asks. “Someone you trust?”
If Buck weren’t wired from a long shift and wrapped up in the tunnel vision of thinking about Eddie, he might have noticed the slightly cautious note in Bobby’s voice betraying a layer of hopeful trepidation.
“Well,” he says slowly. “Yeah. I guess that would be different.”
“What about me?” Bobby asks, his eyes steady on Buck’s.
Buck blinks.
“You?” he asks. “Cap, y-you also work the same shifts as us.”
“Sure,” Bobby allows. “But what if I didn’t?”
Buck’s world had once hinged on Bobby and the 118. Today, in new and surprising ways, he is surprised to wake up and find that it doesn’t anymore. In the same way that he had been willing to take a step back to protect Eddie and their family, he also finds that this doesn’t feel like getting the breath knocked out of him, the way it used to when he tried to imagine a world with anybody else as his Captain.
In a split second, Buck imagines Bobby as something else. As the place he comes to drop his kid off before work. As a kind of pseudo-grandparent. As a baker and a gardener and whatever else he might discover he wants to be; as someone who’s here at home, safe and alive and still present.
Life has shifted and changed in so many ways that sometimes it’s dizzying to Buck. This is just the latest in this year’s line-up.
Bobby is still looking at him, still steady, still holding a content Lucas.
“You’re retiring?” he asks.
“Thinking about it,” Bobby nods. “I’ve been talking about it with Athena. And with Hen,” he adds carefully, as if he thinks this news might upset Buck.
And it might— in a slightly different world or just a year ago, it might have. Today, it reaches him like a newly opened door: a way out.
“Hen,” he repeats.
“Is that—” Bobby starts, and Buck nods.
“No, that’s— that’s good,” he assures him. “That’s great, even.”
If there is anything that would still worry Buck about Bobby leaving the 118, it’s the prospect of a new Captain: the idea of someone from the outside coming in and potentially changing everything around is— even now— too much for him. But if that person is going to be Hen, who knows and loves their family and who would carry on Bobby’s legacy in a way that will be unquestionably dedicated and loyal— if he’s honest, Buck can’t think of a better alternative.
Still.
“But—” he starts. “Are you sure?”
Bobby smiles a little bit. “About retiring or about Lucas?”
Buck shrugs. “Uh, both?”
“Yeah,” Bobby answers. He turns his head to look at Lucas, and Buck watches as his face gets soft. “I’m sure about both.” He looks over at Buck then, and Buck is slightly caught off-guard to realize that his face is still just as soft as when he’d been looking at the baby.
“I don’t want you quitting anything, Buck,” he says gently. “You or Eddie. These last few weeks, it’s been obvious you two work best together.”
Buck ducks his head, nodding. “Yeah. We do.”
Bobby smiles; Buck looks up just in time to catch it going bittersweet. “And,” he adds. “There’s a lot that I didn’t think I would ever get to do in this life. Having a family like this to retire to? That’s up there.”
A family, Buck thinks, a little bit breathless with it.
“You know,” he says softly. “Me, either.”
Bobby grins, turning to look at Lucas, who’s wide-eyed and alert in his arms. “What do you think, kiddo?” he asks. “You want to start hanging out with me?”
Lucas coos in response and Bobby’s smile takes up his whole face.
“What will Athena think?” Buck asks cautiously, even as the sight warms him all over.
Bobby turns Lucas in Buck’s direction, still grinning as he holds the baby up so that they’re cheek to cheek. Somehow, both of them facing him, they look strangely alike.
“Do you really think she could resist this face?” he asks.
Admittedly, though he might be biased, Buck doesn’t think anybody could.
Eddie wakes slowly.
The first thing he notices is absence. The lack of weight next to him— the lack of Buck— brings a sense of dread rolling over him before he even gets his eyes open.
He’d fallen asleep with Buck covering him, warm and pressed into him and safe. Now, Buck’s side of their bed is cold and even as the memory of the morning comes back to him and he knows that Buck is perfectly safe off-shift and not far away, there’s still a bad taste in Eddie’s mouth.
He presses up in bed and sits with a cursory glance around, taking in the placement of the sun through the windows and the clock on the bedside table. He’s only been asleep for an hour and a half, but he does feel better. There’s a fact about that, he remembers— Buck’s voice coming back to him in pieces. He thinks he said something about ninety minutes and optimal naptime. Eddie has never quite gotten the hang of that: and honestly, he sort of thinks that putting limits on naptime takes away the joy of it.
Today, though, it was mostly a necessity anyway. And now that he’s feeling better and the morning is wearing close to midday, he slips out of bed for the second time today and pads down the hall in search of Buck and Lucas.
The house is strangely quiet, but he thinks absently that they might be in the backyard until he turns the corner into the kitchen and spots the piece of paper with his name on it, sitting on the wood.
Eddie, and a lopsidedly-drawn heart.
He reaches for it and flips it open to read the inside, which says, Went to run a quick errand. Back soon!!!
Beneath that it says, Love Buck and Lucas
Eddie’s chest warms in spite of himself. There’s a flicker of disappointment, but he can take the quiet moment to re-center himself before he and Buck talk about what their next steps are going to be.
He mulls that over as he absent-mindedly makes a fresh pot of coffee. A day like this requires a little indulgence, which is a skill that Eddie has only learned for himself fairly recently. Before Buck it had been impossible; and in the years after Buck, but before Eddie learned who he is, it was still hard.
Now, it’s usually easy enough. On rare days— today included— he has to remind himself that it’s okay. He does this mostly by thinking of his sons: he imagines what he’d say to them and tries to say it to himself. That it’s okay to want things. That it’s good to care for yourself.
He waits for the coffee to brew and watches as it slowly drips into the pot, the sound of it percolating a reassuring steady hum. He had hoped that when he woke up from his nap, the answer would have come to him: some perfect solution that would make this all make sense. But there’s nothing that seems any more clear to him now than it did earlier.
He’s more clear-headed and not as emotional, but the facts remain what they had been. No matter which way he turns it, they’re backed into a corner. Something has to give, but Eddie has no idea what it’s going to be— what it can be, what has room to give without sending the whole thing crumbling.
The coffee sputters and finishes dripping just as, for the second time that day, Buck’s key scrapes in the lock of the front door. Eddie reaches— habitually— for two mugs from the cabinet. One which is his, with an old and slightly scratched-up design on it that says Best Dad Ever. And one that’s Buck’s, which has a little shark at the bottom that gets covered in coffee as he tips the pot into it.
“Hi, hi, hi,” Buck says, faintly breathless as he comes into the kitchen and breathes life into the room. His hands are full— a Tupperware container in one and Lucas’s carseat in the other— but he leans in anyway and kisses Eddie sweetly on the cheek, then again on the mouth when Eddie turns his head.
“Hi,” Eddie says, his eyes roaming over the container and the carseat curiously. “Where have you two been?”
Buck smiles.
Eddie has always loved the way he smiles: the brightness of it; the way it feels incandescent; the dimples in his cheeks and the way he tilts his head and how being in the light of it makes you feel like you’re sitting in the sun.
He studies his husband. Something has changed in the last hour and a half, somehow: Eddie had fallen asleep and expected that when he woke up they were going to have to hash this out. Instead, he woke up to a much softer, lighter version of Buck.
“We,” he says, setting the carseat on the table and the Tupperware next to it so that he can free his hands to scoop the baby out, “were at Bobby’s. Weren’t we?” he adds, cooing at Lucas.
“At Bobby’s?” Eddie repeats. He reaches for the container and finds it full of cinnamon rolls.
“Yep,” Buck says, still smiling. “And those are for you.”
“I want this first,” Eddie answers, reaching for Lucas. “”Does he need a—”
“Nope,” Buck replies, handing him over easily. “Changed him right before we left Bobby’s. He’s all good.”
Eddie takes their baby into his arms and curls his hand around the back of his head, kissing his little cheek. “Hola, mi sol,” he says softly. “Hi. Sorry about crying on you earlier.”
Lucas reaches out and gets his fingers around the chain of Eddie’s St. Christopher medal, which is tucked under his shirt.
“I don’t think he minded,” Buck says.
Still, he’s smiling.
“Okay,” Eddie sighs, leaning against the counter with the baby in his arms so that he can look at Buck properly. “Give it up, Buckley.”
Buck’s smile doesn’t move, but it does get soft.
“Okay,” he agrees. “But you have to promise to let me finish.”
“Am I supposed to not be concerned by that statement?” Eddie asks dryly.
Buck smiles again, more indulgently, and moves closer. He puts one hand on Eddie’s waist, and uses the other to brush through Lucas’s soft baby curls.
“Promise?” he asks, ducking his head.
“No,” Eddie replies. “Tell me anyway, you’re making me nervous.”
“Don’t be nervous,” Buck says, gentle and amused at once. “I went to Bobby’s to take a leave of absence.”
Eddie’s heart drops.
“You what?” he asks. “Buck, you said we were going to talk about this!”
“Hey— hey,” Buck says, tapping his chest lightly. “Hold on. I know. But let me finish.”
Eddie sighs, but Buck’s blue eyes are so imploring.
“Fine.”
“I know I said we were going to talk about it,” Buck says. “A-and I promise you, if you aren’t happy with this solution after you hear me out we can always go back on it. Nothing set in stone. Okay?”
Eddie says nothing.
“But,” Buck says, pressing on, his expression breaking open into that lethally earnest look that always undoes Eddie in spite of himself. “Eddie, I know how anxious you’ve been about this. And— and I wanted to fix something for you, for once. You deserve that. You deserve to not have to work for it every time. O-okay, I just watched you sleeping and you had been crying and you looked so tired and I just wanted to have a solution to-to hand you. If you wanted it.”
Eddie softens. “Buck.”
Buck nods, pulling his lip between his teeth. “So I went to Bobby, and I thought— this isn’t the perfect solution, but it would just be temporary anyway. Just until Lucas is big enough that we could leave him with someone we don’t know. Right? Like— like we said when we went on separate shifts in the first place.”
Eddie’s head spins. He bites at the inside of his cheek, shaking his head. “But, Buck, I don’t want you to give this up.”
Buck shakes his head, his expression suddenly fierce, and draws Eddie’s gaze to him with a light touch to his jaw as their eyes meet: deep brown on bright blue.
“I would,” Buck whispers. “For you and the boys. I— I realized today that I would, and I wouldn’t even bat an eye.”
The backs of Eddie’s eyes sting. Buck is looking at him now— not for the first time and not for the last, but still breathtakingly— just like he used to look at a blazing inferno. Like he wanted it. Like it was a part of him.
“I know you would,” Eddie whispers. “I just don’t want to ask you to.”
“You’re not,” Buck says. And then he smiles. “And,” he adds, “it turns out that I actually don’t have to.”
Eddie frowns, confused. “What?” he asks.
Buck lays it out for him as he puts Bobby’s cinnamon rolls on plates, shifting around the kitchen with renewed spring and purpose. He answers all of Eddie’s questions, which are more or less the same ones that he’d had himself, and within a matter of minutes it feels as if everything has worked out in their favor.
For once, the answer is laid out in front of them like an offering.
Eddie has to take a deep breath so as not to cry.
“And—” he starts as Buck finishes what he’s doing and comes back to stand in front of him. “You’re okay with this? The stuff with Bobby?”
Buck’s blue eyes turn serious and earnest.
“Things change,” he says, and then he glances at Lucas and Eddie watches him soften all over and realizes that they do. That they have. That neither of them are the people they’d been once, and all of it for the better.
But some things stay the same.
And after a tumultuous month as they balance continuing to split shifts with Bobby’s transition out of the 118, there comes a morning when everything feels— just for a moment— as it once was.
When the tones sound in the firehouse loft and Buck and Eddie grin at each other and race for the stairs; when they sling themselves up into the engine and press their knees together and Buck taps the roof thrice, and then they’re careening out of the engine bay.
And then Buck looks across at Eddie, and Eddie looks back while Hen sits in the front seat with the Captain’s shield on her helmet— and both are true in perfect, impossible synchronicity: everything is new, and some things have not changed at all.