Work Text:
It was definitely a q-word shift, but the 118 were currently pretending not to notice. It was 11 am, the rigs were washed, and Chimney was on his second crossword. It was one of those mornings where everyone's chores needed a second person just so they'd have someone to talk to, because frankly, the chores were already done, but the energy had to go somewhere. Eddie maintained that he did not believe in curses or jinxes, but he wasn't going to say it, either. He was just going to think it, very quietly, from the bench where he was re-rolling a hose that did not need re-rolling.
Buck was halfway down the stairs with a crate of medical supplies when the woman came through the open bay doors at a dead run.
Eddie was moving before he'd decided to. Years of instinct said runner equals emergency. He made it two steps before it registered that she was laughing.
"Evan!"
Buck looked up at the name nobody used, and Eddie watched his face do something he'd never seen it do before. It wasn't surprise. Buck's face did surprise all the time, even when it was fake, especially around the kids. This was the opposite of his usual animation. For half a second, everything in the man went flat and still, the box frozen against his hip, and Eddie thought, absurdly, of the way guys used to look at mail call when the envelope had the wrong handwriting.
Then it was gone, and Buck was grinning, dropping the crate on one of the steps, sliding down the last half of the stairs using his hands on the handrail, and the woman was airborne by the time he hit the floor.
She was tall, tan, with long dark hair, and she was wrapped around Buck like she had a lifetime of practice at it. Buck spun her once. Her feet knocked over a mop that was leaning against the wall. Neither of them noticed.
"You're here. Grace, how are you here?" Buck asked into her hair.
"Surprise," was all he got in return.
Across the bay, Hen and Ravi had stopped inventorying the med bag. Chimney had lowered his crossword from his perch in the loft.
They all four traded glances.
"Who is that?" Chimney said to no one in particular.
Nobody answered. Buck set her down and didn't let go of her shoulders, holding her out at arm's length like he was confirming she was real, and she was beaming up at him, and Eddie had seen enough romantic comedies against his will to know exactly what this looked like.
"Okay," Grace said, reading the bay in one sweep, and Eddie revised his previous opinion of her, because that was a cop's sweep, or a cop's kid. "They're all staring. Why are they all staring?"
"Because you tackled me at work."
"I've tackled you in worse places."
"GRACIE! Jesus," Buck barked a laugh.
Hen's eyebrows had achieved escape velocity, and Ravi was currently hiding his laugh behind a clipboard, but Eddie could still see his whole body shaking. The woman did the math quicker than Buck could explain, and made a face like she'd bitten a lemon.
"Oh! Oh, gross. no." She stepped out from under Buck's hands and put a full foot of space between them, gesturing at him. "He's basically my brother. Ew."
"Ew," Buck agreed, delighted, pulling her back into a light headlock.
"Can I just say," came a new voice from the bay doors, "the fact that any of you looked at her and looked at him and thought, sure, that tracks, is frankly an insult to her taste, and I want that noted."
The man coming through was shorter than Buck, blond, already mid-gesture, wearing the put-upon expression of somebody who had been holding in a rant since the parking lot. Behind him, a second man, and Eddie's spine did the thing before his brain caught up.
It was the walk. Weight even, hands loose, eyes doing a slow pass of the bay, exits, loft, and personnel in that order, all of it under a perfectly friendly face. Eddie had spent years around men who moved like that and years learning to stop moving like that himself. Military, he thought, and then, watching the man clock Eddie clocking him, he watched amusement pass across his face.
"Danno," Grace had groaned.
"Noted, that's all I'm saying."
"You realize that insult lands on me," Buck said, not in a way that insinuated he actually cared.
"As it should be, look at her."
Buck shrugged in agreement as he made his way to the two men. The second man had covered more ground while everyone watched Danno, which Eddie suspected was a maneuver they'd run a thousand times.
"Sir—" Buck had started before he was pulled into a hug. It was brief, but solid, one hand hard on the back of Buck's neck at the end of it, and Buck's eyes closed for exactly one second. Eddie put that observation in the same pocket as the mail-call face and did not look away fast enough to pretend he hadn't seen it.
"Hey, kid," the man said.
"Hey," Buck said, rough, and then, recovering, gesturing at all three of them: "Guys, um, this is Steve, Danno, and Grace. They're— we go way back. Steve McGarrett, Daniel Williams, and his daughter, Grace, the 118. Hen, Ravi, Chim, Eddie." A beat. "Don't believe anything Danno tells you."
That earned an offended look from the blond, while the other two laughed at his expense.
"Everything I say is well documented," Danno defended himself.
"How are you even here?" Buck asked. "How did you know I was on shift?"
Grace smiled. It was a lovely smile, and it contained absolutely no information.
"Grace," Buck said.
She smiled wider.
"I like her," Chimney announced from where the 118 had gathered nearby.
"There was a backup plan if you were on the call," Steve offered. "Your highlight reels of L.A. over the years have given us plenty of material to work with, and you know Daniel likes to be prepared."
"These two still do not value my flexibility and contingency plans. Can you believe that?" Buck had one hand on Danno's shoulder, comfortingly, but he was still laughing. Eddie watched Buck carefully, realization settling in him that Buck was lit up brighter than he had seen him in months, since before New Mexico, before the lab, before Texas, maybe even longer.
Hen leaned towards Eddie, voice low. "You know about any of this?"
"Not a clue." He tried to keep his voice even, pretending like he didn't notice the way Hen and Ravi were both looking at him.
It was Buck's day to cook lunch, and Eddie watched him try to get out of it exactly once.
"We could order in," Buck said, already losing. "There's that new Thai place."
"We're not ordering in," Grace said, planting herself on a stool at the island like she'd been assigned the seat at birth. "I've been hearing about these firehouse family meals for years. I want the full experience."
"The full experience is him yelling at the pan," Chimney said.
"Perfect." She grinned, narrowing her eyes at Buck teasingly.
So Buck cooked, and Eddie understood within about ninety seconds why his best friend seemed so stressed about arguably his favorite firehouse task. Grace was still sitting at the island, and the other men took their spots on either side of her, while the rest of the 118 filled in the gaps along the railing of the loft. Buck, however, was on the wrong side of all of it with a knife in his hand and onions to get through, unable to steer a single thing. Every time the conversation tilted somewhere he didn't like, Eddie watched him open his mouth, and then the pan would need him, and the moment would be gone. It would have been funny if Buck's shoulders hadn't been slowly climbing towards his ears.
Steve watched Buck work for a while, quiet in a way that had its own gravity, and then said, "Bobby taught you well."
Buck's hands stuttered for half a second, then he was moving again as if nothing had happened.
"Yeah, he did."
Eddie locked eyes with Hen from where he stood against the cabinets. Neither of them said anything, but the question moved between them anyway: these people knew Bobby's name. Knew it well enough to use it gently.
"Big improvement," Steve went on, "because the first time this man cooked for me, it involved a canteen cup, a heat tab, and something the packaging called 'menu twelve' and I still think about it when I get chest pains."
"That was one time."
"It was beef, allegedly."
Grace stole a piece of bell pepper off the cutting board, and Buck swatted at her hand without looking, and she took another one anyway. The whole exchange had the automatic quality that reminded him of the weekend breakfasts in his own kitchen. Eddie filed the canteen cup away next to the walk and the mail-call face. The pile was getting heavy.
Danno had drifted over to the coffee machine, and on his way past Buck, he said, low, but not low enough, "You look good, kid. Better than I figured, honestly, after the stunt your parents pulled." A hand landed briefly on Buck's back, and then Danno was pouring coffee, and the sentence just sat there in the middle of the room. Eddie didn't look at Hen this time. He looked at Buck, whose ears had gone slightly pink and whose knife had gotten faster. Buck glanced at Eddie, saw the concern plain on his face, gave a small shake of his head, and Eddie sighed, choosing to add it to the pile to be picked up later.
Realistically, they could have been talking about any number of stunts the Buckley parents had pulled, but the concerning part was that it sounded like a recent stunt, and Eddie hadn't realized Buck had been in contact with them since before they left for Nashville.
The food came together, some kind of chicken dish that reminded them of Bobby, and they ate around the island because nobody wanted to relocate. Chim finally asked how the three of them knew Buck, and Eddie felt Buck go carefully still on his left, and Danno, mouth full, waved a fork and said, "Work thing, way back," and Buck relaxed, and that was that, until it wasn't.
Because Danno was a talker, and Grace had made the mistake of telling him something about Kauai, and Kauai had reminded him of some story he was clearly contractually obligated to tell.
"So it was supposed to be a simple pickup," Danno said. "Simple. One guy, one warehouse, and I distinctly remember saying in the car, that nothing involving this guy," a fork pointed at Steve, "has ever once been simple. So naturally, there's gunfire before I've got my door open. And I have a daughter, okay. I have a mortgage, I'm aging in dog years out there, and these two are having fun. No one warned that there were two of them. And I'm behind my probably hundred and fiftieth government-issued vehicle at this point, doing the math about my life expectancy, and I look up, and Boomerang here just strolls out of the smoke carrying the guy we came for over his shoulder like it's a bag of mulch, and this one," the fork swings from where it had been directed to Buck on the word 'boomerang' back to Steve, "says, and I quote, told you."
Danno speared a piece of chicken, pleased with himself.
Nobody else on the island moved.
"Boomerang," Chimney said, into the silence, very carefully, in a way that reminded Eddie of the way they handled a grenade in the back of an ambulance so long ago. "Why Boomerang?"
"We learned pretty quickly that no matter what you throw this kid into, he always comes back." Danno said, "Every time. It drove the senior guys crazy for four years. There was a pool going about—" He stopped short.
It took him about three more seconds. Eddie watched it happen, watched him read Hen's face, then Ravi's, then Chim's, then Eddie's, then Buck's, and arrive.
"They don't know," he started back up again, setting his fork down. "Steven. They don't know."
Steve wasn't looking at his partner. Steve was looking at Buck, and Steve didn't look surprised, which was somehow the loudest thing in the room from where Eddie was sitting.
"Buck, you said you washed out," Hen said slowly.
"I—" Buck started, just as the tones above them rang out.
Later, Eddie would think there had never in the history of the 118 been a tone at a worse time or a better one. Buck moved like the alarm had personally saved his life, plates abandoned, everyone up, and the visitors flowed out of the way with a lack of confusion that said they all knew how this worked.
At the trucks, Grace caught Buck's arm. She had to reach up to hug him with his turnouts half on, and she did it anyway, quick and hard.
"Always come back," she said.
It wasn't a request. It came out of her soft and automatic, the way people said drive safe, except nobody at the 118 said anything like that ever because they didn't make promises they couldn't keep.
"Always come back," Buck said, matching her soft and automatic tone, already climbing up, and Eddie sat down in his spot next to him, their knees touching the way they always did, as if nothing had changed at all.
The call was a kitchen fire with a homeowner who'd tried to be a hero with a garden hose. It was small, only ugly for about six minutes, and it was the kind of thing they could do in their sleep. Buck and Eddie took the interior. Buck went through the door first, and at the threshold said something under his breath that the SCBA ate, but Eddie didn't need to hear it. He'd heard it a hundred times over eight years and had always filed it as self-talk, a man psyching himself up at the door. Now wasn't the time to overanalyze it.
On the way out, salvage done, homeowner sheepish under a blanket, Buck pulled his mask down and looked at Eddie, and whatever he was expecting to find wasn't there.
"You're not surprised," Buck said.
"No."
"How long?"
"I wasn't completely sure until Steve walked into the bay this morning, clearing it like he owned the place."
Buck stared at him. There was soot down one side of his face he was sure he hadn't noticed yet.
"Why didn't you ever say anything?"
"You'd tell me eventually," Eddie said easily, and climbed into the rig again.
The questions came all night from the rest, and Eddie noticed that Buck let them, which was its own information. They came in waves, in the gaps a 24 leaves you.
At dinner, it was Hen, one question, quiet, no audience except the four of them: "How long were you in?"
"Four years." Buck pushed rice around his plate. "Then Peru. Then here. The stuff I told you guys wasn't," He stopped, tried again. "The stories, the postcards I sent Maddie, it was all real. It happened. I just… spread it out. Left out a chapter."
"A chapter," Hen repeated, unamused.
"A deployment or three," Buck said, very quietly, and Hen didn't push.
At eleven, Chim stood in the kitchen with his phone for a long time, typing, deleting, typing again. Eddie, who had spent the better part of the day hovering around Buck just in case he needed backup or support, watched him from the couch.
"Maddie?"
"She's going to hear it from somebody," Chim said. "Better me than the group chat." He sent it, and then looked slightly ill.
At almost three in the morning, they end up back around the table because nobody could sleep and nobody would admit it, and Chim, who had been circling something for hours, finally landed on it.
"Okay, I have to ask. At the trucks. What Grace said to you. Always come back. What's that about?"
"It's just a thing we say," Buck said to his coffee. "Habit. Old team thing."
And that would have been that, the table was tired enough to take it, except Eddie's brain had spent the majority of the day quietly reindexing eight years, and the results were sitting in his chest like a weight. Under his breath, at door breaches, for years. Filed as noise. In the doorway to his home, months ago, a hand on Chris's shoulder, and a packed U-Haul in the driveway. I always come back. Eddie had thought it was a joke about how Saturday mornings were reserved for Buck's pancakes. He hadn't really thought about it at all. Buck had a talent for hiding things in plain sight and letting you assume it was noise.
"That's not it," Eddie said, causing Buck to look over at him in surprise.
Eddie held his eyes and didn't make it a shot across the bow, kept his voice as level as the table. "You say it to Christopher. You say it to yourself, going through doors at scenes. That's not a team thing, Buck. That's something else."
Buck looked at his coffee for a long time, then at Eddie, and Eddie watched him do the math on the exits and find none, and then Buck leaned back in his chair and shrugged. He handpicked the least important voice he owned.
"I mean, yeah, I guess it's kind of our version of I love you." He said it in the same way he'd tell the team casual facts about his documentaries during downtime. "I don't really say that one. Haven't since," Buck had the decency to pretend like he had to think about it, "I don't know, Maddie gave me the Jeep, probably. The Buckleys were never really big on it, either. You run the numbers enough times, you find a workaround. It's more efficient." He reached across the table and took a cookie off the tray like the conversation was over.
Nobody said anything.
"It's not a big deal," Buck said, to the silence, which was its own kind of big deal.
"Maddie says it," Chim said. His voice came out strange, like he already knew where this was going but had to say it out loud anyway. "She says it all the time. On the phone. At dinner. She said it to you on Tuesday."
"Sure."
"You say you too."
"Same thing."
It was not the same thing, and every person at that table knew it was not the same thing, and Eddie watched Chim set his cup down without drinking from it and lean back out of the light, rerunning, Eddie was certain, years of conversations he had overheard that had ended in you too, back at you, night, or some variation. All of it filed under Buck being Buck, half out the door of every conversation, never sticking the ending. Nobody at this table had ever once clocked that one specific sentence had been trailing off on purpose for nearly a decade, because he'd hidden it exactly where he hid everything, in plain sight, under volume.
"So the phrase," Hen said, seemingly aware this was going to be a very heavy question for where they were at in the shift, but doing it anyway. "Where's it from?"
"Grace. The team gave me Boomerang. Grace was a little older than Chris was when I met him. I could never get anything past that kid. She figured out I didn't do the same goodbye stuff that everyone else did. Everyone else who's ever picked up on it wanted to know why, wanted to fix it, or force it. But Grace just…shrugs, zero judgement, and tells me that if I'm a boomerang, I always come back, and that's kind of the same thing." Buck was smiling now, one of the genuine ones they all recognized as the one for the kids. "Five seconds. Solved like it was nothing." The smile stayed for another beat before he clapped his hands on his knees and stood. "Anyway. Some of us have a bunk with our name on it."
Buck's phone buzzed on the table as he reached for it. Eddie could see Maddie's name on the screen, but none of them could read the preview from their angles. Buck didn't even look. He slid it into his pocket before taking his empty mug to the sink like a man being helpful and not a man leaving.
Hen got up a minute later with her own mug, unhurried, and Eddie did not watch her go to the sink in the deliberate way that meant he was tracking every second of it. The water was running. Buck was washing a plate that was already clean.
"That thing you're doing," Hen said low, "Your fun-fact voice. It may work on a lot of people."
"Hen."
"I'm not making it a thing." She set her mug down next to his hand before covering his hand lightly with her own. "I just wanted you to know it doesn't work on us."
She went to the bunks. Buck stood at the sink with the water running a while longer and washed her mug, too.
Eddie stayed at the table until four, alone, working his way through the pile of evidence he had gathered so far.
He took it out and went piece by piece, the way they inventoried the med bags after a bad call, and every single item landed in a different spot than where he'd filed it. The mail-call face wasn't shock, it was a sign of a breach. The canteen cup, not a joke or overexaggeration, a very real life he once lived. Whatever his parents did wasn't old news; it was something new, something current. The muttering on calls that he'd filed away as self-talk, some private psych-up, one more piece of the Buck-noise in a loud job: it was never for himself. Buck went through first, nearly every single call, always half a step ahead of them at all times, and he said it into the fire over the people following him in, the way other men crossed themselves over sacred thresholds. A ten-year-old's workaround, recited verbatim over the 118, every single shift.
He'd been telling them the whole time.
He'd just never once said it directly.
Realistically, he knew what would be waiting for him when he got home before he even left the fire station. It was only confirmed when he pulled into the driveway next to a car he didn't recognize that was obviously a rental. So he wasn't exactly surprised when he unlocked his front door only to be immediately greeted by the smell of coffee, even though he knew Theo was at school already, and no matter how smart that kid was, they hadn't breached kitchen appliances yet. For safety reasons.
He stood in his own doorway at 8 am, twenty-five hours deep, the smell of a grease fire still lingering in his hair, and looked at the three people sitting around his living room like a panel. There was a fourth mug of coffee waiting for him.
"Did you steal a key yesterday?"
"He doesn't need a key. You know that." Grace smirked, nodding in Steve's direction.
This was true.
Buck thought about turning around. He thought about the shower, and his bed, and how he'd spent years keeping these two worlds apart, and it had all come undone in one shift, and then he sat down on his own couch like a guest and wrapped his hands around the mug.
"So," Danno said, and Buck braced for the volume, but it never came. Danno's voice came out level and tired and worried, which was so much worse. "I did some math last night. You wanna hear my math?"
"I don't much care for math." A lie they all recognized.
"Eleven trips," Danno said. "Since you got out. Eleven times you got on a plane to us. You came for Grace's graduation, you came several times that Steve nearly got himself killed, you came for two weddings, and one funeral, and Thanksgiving that one year with the turkey we don't discuss. You know how many times we've stood in this house?"
"This is still pretty new." Buck tried halfheartedly to defend it. Danno ignored him.
"Zero. I used to think it was sweet, you always making the effort to come to us. It wasn't sweet, Evan. It was perimeter control."
Buck stared into his coffee.
"Every visit we ever floated, you were always busy. Every time we said we'd come to you, you'd come up with a better idea. You've been doing this for years, making sure the wires never crossed, but yesterday they crossed, and I saw it on your face. We just can't figure out why." Grace explained gently.
"We're not mad." Steve offered, seeing the discomfort settle into Buck's bones. "No one's mad, kid. We're confused and more than a little worried, but not mad. Those people yesterday, that's your family, anybody with eyes can see that, but they had no idea who we were. What we're trying to figure out is why…what were you protecting? From where I was sitting, everyone in that firehouse loves you unconditionally. So what was the threat?"
This was not the first time in 24 hours that Buck had felt like all of the compartmentalizing he had worked so hard at over the years was actually a hand grenade.
"If they're separate, then I can't lose both." He would not be able to explain later why he skirted the questions from the 118 and let the mask slip here. Maybe it was exhaustion. Maybe it was that these people were used to a more vulnerable Buck. He sighed, knowing he needed to explain it better. "If the wires don't cross, then when it all goes wrong, it only takes out one net. That's it. You keep the systems isolated so one failure can't cascade." He heard himself. "It's worked for this long."
"It hasn't worked," Steve said. Buck looked up, caught off guard by how sure he sounded. "You called me a week after Bobby died, a week, Buck. I found out my kid lost his father 7 days late because you were, what? Metering the damage? Making sure it didn't wreck us, too? You're going to tell me we're different from them, and we are, but we're not exempt. You're building up walls without doors here. That's not a safety net. It's solitary."
Buck's eyes were burning, and he told himself it was the smoke from their last call and the 26 hours of no sleep.
"I—," he started, and it cracked. Steve stood up.
"Okay," he cut him off with a hand on the back of Buck's neck, and it took everything left in Buck not to just fold right then and there. "Get some sleep."
"That's it?"
"You're exhausted. Nothing you say right now counts, and nothing we say is going to land. Sleep. We'll talk later."
It wasn't a suggestion, it was a promise, but it was a promise Buck could live with.
They let themselves out for a day of L.A. sightseeing, and Buck sat in his living room with a full mug of cold coffee and thought, distantly, before exhaustion took the thought away, that being handled by Steve McGarrett felt exactly like being handled by Bobby, and that he was too tired to survive knowing that right now.
"…and I'm not saying it was completely stupid," Steve was saying, 9 hours later, over the remains of coffee Buck had made properly this time and some stress fresh-baked cookies, "I'm saying you were the single point of failure in your own design, and the fact that you can't see that is exactly—"
The knock came in a specific rhythm, two low thumps at knee-height and then a proper knock above it, and Buck was up and out of his chair so fast it scraped.
"Hold that thought. Actually, don't. Lose that thought entirely."
The door was swinging open as Buck reached the entryway, and Theo, who had clearly done the knee-height knocking personally and was still vibrating with the accomplishment, dinosaur shirt, arms already up ready to be picked up, with Christopher behind him on his crutches, and Eddie, behind both of them with a grocery bag and an expression that said he knew exactly what he was interrupting and had timed it on purpose. Bless this man.
"BUCK!" Theo cheered.
"THEO!" Buck called back, swinging the little boy up into his arms. The following transfer had the practiced quality of a thousand repetitions, kid to hip, bag to hand to hook by the door. He reached out instinctively to give Chris a one-armed hug as he walked in.
"Dad said to knock for a heads up," Chris murmured, making Buck chuckle.
"Good man. Thank you."
Then Buck turned around to face their guests, who had followed him into the living room, where they were now staring at him like they'd witnessed a magic trick. This was fair, considering it kind of looked like he had somehow cloned himself not once, but twice.
Grace's hands were over her mouth.
"Oh my god, he's a mini Boomerang."
"He's a mini Boomerang who didn't nap," Eddie said as he came up behind him, "so temper your expectations."
"He has the exact same face, Steve. Look at this. It's the same face."
"I see it, Danno." Steve's smirking, but Buck instantly heard the shift from their previous conversation to his overwhelmingly fond voice.
Christopher moved through the crowd easily and claimed his regular spot on the couch, positioning himself right next to Steve. "Hi. I'm Christopher. Are you Buck's SEAL friend? Dad wouldn't tell me anything."
"Christopher," Eddie started.
"Am I wrong?"
"I like him," Danno said.
"Grace." Grace joined him on the couch as she introduced herself. "I've been waiting like 8 years for this, I finally get to meet my brothers."
"Nephews," Danno said. "Wait."
"Brothers." Grace shot back firmly. "I was the original, okay. OG Buckling at your service. They have a right to know the truth."
Buck heard Eddie snort behind him.
"Buckling?" Buck mouthed at her, brows furrowed in confusion. She just grinned.
"Honestly, at this point, Buck's basically just another one of you two." She turned to Chris. "There's bio dad," she pointed at Danno, "the walking security clearance," then at Steve, "and you know this chaos gremlin already," she looked at Buck, "He's the one who taught me how to drive a boat when I was twelve and did a background check on my prom date."
"That was Steve."
"You provided the plate number."
"Allegedly."
Another dad. Buck stood there with forty pounds of Theo on his hip and both hands full, and the words went through him sideways. She'd been ten. He'd been twenty, closer to her than to Danno in years, and somewhere in there the lines had crossed anyway, brother into something with no name that was mostly father, and he knew exactly how that sort of thing happened, because it had happened to him first, from the other side, in a house in Hershey with a sister nine years up who came to every game their parents missed. He was somebody's Maddie. He'd never once put it in those words, and Maddie's text was still sitting unopened in his pocket. Theo booped him on the nose, bringing him out of his daze.
"Oh, okay." He surfaced. "Who's hungry?"
Yes. Avoidance and food were the most obvious answers here.
Dinner was loud in the best way. Theo held court from his booster seat and threw exactly one piece of broccoli, which Steve caught out of the air without looking, which made Chris lose his mind, which meant Steve had to do it again, and by the third broccoli, Eddie confiscated the ammunition. Buck quietly pointed out that it was likely Theo's goal all along to get out of actually eating the tiny trees. Danno and Chris discovered a shared position on the fundamental insanity of the rest of the men at the table and formed an instant and terrible alliance. Grace told the story of the boat lesson. Buck told the true version. Nobody believed either of them.
Buck caught Steve watching him, once, over the noise of Theo teaching Grace the intricacies of chocolate milk bubble racing. Buck had Theo's fork in one hand, and he was mid-argument with Chris about the boat, and Steve was leaning back at the end of the table with his arms crossed, watching all of it with the fondest expression. When Steve noticed Buck watching him, he shot him a look that said told you.
Cleanup split along the lines that nobody negotiated. Grace washed, Buck dried, and Danno cornered Eddie on the patio where he was still wiping down the table.
Buck couldn't hear it. The one time Danno managed his volume properly, but he could see it happening through the glass. Danno spoke with his hands low, and Eddie listened with the towel gone still. Danno said something that made Eddie look up, straight at the window, straight at where Buck was pretending very hard to be interested in a dry plate, and Eddie not looking away and not answering Danno at all, and Danno nodding slowly like the non-answer had actually been notarized.
At the sink, Grace bumped Buck's shoulder with hers and kept her eyes on the dishes.
"You know Eddie's in love with you, right?"
Buck rolled his eyes, "Not you, too?"
Her eyebrows boosted towards the stratosphere. "At least you're aware."
Buck continued drying the plates, ignoring the blush he felt crawling up his neck.
Later, with Theo asleep on the couch in a fortress of cushions Chris and Grace had engineered, Buck stepped out onto the back porch where Steve was already sitting. He pulled the slider shut behind him because he had decided to be honest, but he needed the door shut to do it.
"I couldn't even call Eddie after the lab," he started softly. "Maddie had to. It didn't take a week because I was hiding something, I just…I genuinely couldn't do it."
Steve didn't face him, allowing him this moment unguarded and underwitnessed.
"I was right there in front of him, and he dropped the glass door—," Buck's voice cracked. "He locked me out, and he took off the mask. I didn't know what he was doing at first. I didn't understand, and I panicked. And then I realized, and I didn't even get a second to fully grasp it, he was telling me I was going to be okay, that they were going to need me. He told me he loved me. He said it the way you do, I love you, kid. And I had it, it was right there, and I thought—" He laughed, one broken note. "I thought maybe if I don't say it, it's not goodbye. How can he go if I don't sign off? He has to come back. He can't leave like that, right? Every single person I've ever said it to has walked away, so I ran it backwards. Like the words were the mechanism. Like I could hold the door open by keeping my mouth shut." His hands were balled into fists. "He does anyway. And the only thing my whole system bought, the only thing, was that Bobby never got to hear it."
"I know," Steve said. "I didn't say it to my dad either. The words were never the mechanism, kid."
Buck's breath left him as Steve's hand landed on the back of his neck, and this time, Buck folded into him, and Steve held him and said nothing at all, and the slider stayed shut for as long as they needed.
They broke up the night the way good nights break up, slowly and with three false endings. Danno had opinions on their hotel's parking situation that required a full airing. Grace and Chris exchanged numbers with the solemnity of a treaty. Theo surfaced from the cushion fortress just long enough to relocate to Eddie's shoulder and go under again.
At the door, Grace hugged Buck the way she'd hugged him in the bay, and Buck held on one extra second, making the decision he'd been considering all evening.
"I love you," he said.
He felt her go still against him. It was small; she recovered in under a second. She knew what she had been handed, and she didn't make it weigh anything. She just squeezed harder.
"Obviously. Love you, too, Boom." Her voice sounded thick and muffled from where she was buried into his shoulder.
Steve and Danno made it to the door together because that's how they worked. One unit, two opinions. Danno got the first hug and talked straight through it: tomorrow, a hiking trail Buck told them about, it was a good plan, no excuses. Steve came after. His hug was longer than it had been at the station, but just as fierce. When he pulled back, his hand remained on Buck's neck for a beat, and Buck had to keep a fist in Danno's jacket so he couldn't drift out of range before he said it.
"I love you guys. Both of you."
Fifteen years, and then three people inside of a minute, at a goodnight, at nothing, at a parting that could not have mattered less, which was the entire point, because Bobby had left them in the middle of a routine shift. There were no partings that didn't matter. There was just the superstition, and Buck was done paying for it.
Danno opened his mouth, and whatever was supposed to come out didn't survive the trip, and what arrived instead, wrecked, was, "See, was that so hard?" and he patted Buck's cheek twice before rushing out the door before anyone could get a good look at his face.
Steve's grip tightened once.
"Yeah, kid," he said, roughly. "You too."
Buck watched them all pile into the rental car and pull out of the driveway before slowly allowing the door to close, and when he turned, Eddie was leaned against the wall opposite him, a sleeping Theo still on his shoulder.
"You wanna go on a hike tomorrow while the kids are in school?" Buck said, because it was that or the other thing, and the other thing wasn't ready. "Danno will make it weird if you don't come."
"I have a feeling he's gonna make it weird either way." Eddie countered quietly, before planting a soft kiss against Theo's curls and passing him off to Buck. "I'll be there."
"You're not wrong."
Chris offered a whispered goodnight to Buck as he passed through to the front door, eyes on Theo as they all three waited for the hinges to squeak. For once, they were silent. Buck stepped out onto the front porch with his son still asleep in his arms, and Eddie looked at him, and Buck looked back, and the moment stretched exactly one second past deniable.
"Always come back," Eddie said, making Buck's breath catch in his throat.
"I always do."
"See you tomorrow, Buck."
"Goodnight."
Buck closed the door.
Well, that was certainly new.
Once he had tucked Theo into bed, he took out his phone. One unread message from 18 hours earlier. He opened it.
Maddie: I love you. You know that, right?
Buck leaned against Theo's bedroom door in the hallway and read it until the screen dimmed, then woke it, and read it again. For fifteen years, his response would be simple. You too. He could be brave one more time tonight, right? Then he typed back.
Buck: I know. I've always known. I love you.
He hit send before the superstition could vote.