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Clearing the table kind of felt like another one of those one-man jobs Buck and Eddie somehow made a two-man job and got made fun of for at the station. Eddie had clocked it pretty early on, when he realized Danny was mostly fidgeting with the salt and pepper shakers. Nothing was left to be carried inside. There was only a small handful of trash that had already been collected in a napkin. But it seemed like Danny was working up to something, so Eddie stayed where he was.
"So, you're the medic."
"I'm the medic."
"Army."
"Yeah."
"Mm." Danny nodded slowly, like this confirmed something he'd suspected. "See, here's my situation, Diaz. I had a whole thing prepared. For tonight. I've been working on it since Gracie booked the flights, real good stuff. There was a part about how I've buried bodies in three states and none of 'em ever turned up, which is a lie. It's a bit, but it lands. You'd have been a little scared. It would have been good for both of us." He set down the pepper shaker. "And I'm standing here realizing I don't get to do it, and I want you to know I'm a little annoyed about it. It was a good speech."
Eddie's mouth twitched despite himself. "And why don't you get to do it?"
"Because that speech is for the guy you don't trust. It's for when some stranger's got their hands near somebody you love and you gotta put a fence up so they know it's there." Danny finally stopped pretending to do anything useful and sat back in his chair, arms crossed. "I don't need a fence with you. Which is the annoying part. I've known exactly who you were for years."
Eddie's brows furrowed. "We met yesterday."
"You, I met yesterday." Danny pointed at him. "Eddie, I've known for years." He said the name differently than the you, gave it a weight, and Eddie didn't understand it yet, not fully. "You gotta understand how that kid operates with us. He calls. Not dutifully, not on birthdays. He calls when something's rattling around in him, and he can't set it down. It's me or Steve or Grace, half the time at some ungodly hour when he knows we'll be up because of work. I think his favorite time was Grace's midterms in college, because time didn't really exist with her study schedule, and that's convenient for a man on a 24. Point is, he talks. A lot. You know that. And over the years, a name starts coming up. A lot. More than he knows it does, I'd put money on it. He'll call to tell you about his week, and it's Eddie this, and Eddie said, and Eddie and Chris, and you learn a person that way. Sideways. Through how somebody else can't stop mentioning them."
Eddie didn't have anything to say to that. For a second, he couldn't quite find air for it.
"So no speech. The vetting happened a long time ago, buddy, over a whole lot of conversations you didn't know were interviews. You passed. I'm just here to shake the hand in person and confirm you're real, because honestly? He talks about you like you're a little bit made up. And yet," He gestured at Eddie. "Here you are. Bit shorter than advertised."
"He's got two inches on me."
"He makes you sound tall, Eddie. That's the point I'm making. He makes you sound like a lot of things."
And there it was again, the weight of the name. Danny kept circling something but never landing, and Eddie was starting to understand a little bit more.
Eddie sat down across from him. "Can I ask you something?"
"You can ask."
"Does he actually talk to you guys? About the job stuff, the bad calls?" Eddie kept his eyes on the yard, because it was easier than watching Danny hear the question under the question. "Because we're there. The 118. We're on every one of them right beside him. I've watched him almost die more times than I want to count, and I've been the one dragging him out of it. But after? He doesn't, he won't. He makes a joke and changes the subject, and he's fine. He's always fine. He's getting there, I think, with some of the more recent stuff. But I don't know if I've ever gotten him to actually put any of it down with me." He made himself say the rest of it. "So I guess I'm asking the guy that gets those calls: is there somewhere he actually talks about it? Or does he just not? Anywhere."
Danny was quiet for a moment, and when he answered, the humor had left his voice completely.
"He talks to us. Some. He wants to protect us from the brunt of it, I think. But yeah, sometimes he does. A little. More than nothing." He looked at Eddie, and there was something careful in it, like he knew he was handing over a thing that would land in two directions at once. "I'm not gonna give you the list, because it's not mine to give and because some of it'd keep you up. But I'll tell you the one that told me everything I needed to know about you two. A couple of years back, he called Steve in the middle of the night, and I've known both of them a long time, and they're both very good at faking it. So seeing them shaken is a rare sight. Anyway, Steve shows up, and he's wrecked because Buck sounded rattled; therefore, Steve was rattled. The whole time Buck was coming apart on the phone, he kept saying it wasn't about him; he's fine. No need to panic. Just needed to hear a friendly voice. Took Steve and me a while, talking about it after, to even work out what the call had even been about." Danny held his eyes. "It was about you. You'd been shot. He'd kept you alive, and he called Steve hours later, after he got your kid to bed, to tell him he was fine."
Behind the glass, Grace said something, and Buck tipped his head back and laughed, soap to his elbows, lit up, completely oblivious to the conversation happening about him just steps away.
"He never talks about that day," Eddie said quietly.
"Course not. He wouldn't." Danny shook his head. "That's just how he is, Eddie. He'll crawl under an engine for you, and bleed for you, and lie awake for you, and he will make absolutely sure you never see the size of it. Somewhere somebody taught him he'd be better off keeping everything close to the vest. He's there for everybody's worst days. But he's never gonna let you be there for his. And it's not because he doesn't trust you. He just doesn't think he deserves it." Danny shrugged, and it wasn't a light shrug at all. "So no shovel talk. Consider it a briefing. On the terrain."
Eddie turned it over. The look on Buck's face the moment Grace had shown up. He talks to us. Some. The small ugly relief of learning there was somewhere Buck put it down, and the ache riding in right behind it, that the somewhere wasn't home. Wasn't Eddie.
"He's worth it," Eddie said. He didn't fully know what he was responding to with that, only that it was true, and that Danny already knew it.
"Yeah, he is. He doesn't think so, which is its own thing you're gonna run into, but he is." He stood, gathered up some of the things like he was actually prepared to go inside this time. "And for whatever it's worth from a guy you met yesterday, he's not good at letting people all the way in. Takes him forever. So if you're already inside, if he's already got you here and with the way you are with Theo, and this whole—" Danny tipped his head at the house, the domesticity of it, "—then you're further than most people ever get with him. Don't waste it. That's the real speech. It's not as good as the buried bodies one. I liked mine better."
"We're not— I mean, we're partners. Best friends, since day one, actually. Chris adores him. Practically lives here. You know when he bought this house, he would only look at one-stories? Pretty sure he bought stuff for Chris's room here before half his own furniture. Wanted to make sure Chris always had somewhere else to go. And Theo—" Eddie's whole face had changed, went warm and helpless the way it only did about the boys, "—Theo looks at Chris like he hung the actual moon, follows him around the house, wants to do everything Chris does, and Chris pretends he's way too cool for it 'cause he's fifteen, but I catch him eating it up, he loves being a big brother, being looked up to like that. You should see the two of them when Buck gets them going at the zoo, it's—"
Danny had gone quiet. He had stopped wiping at a spot on the table and was looking at Eddie with an expression that had gone, very gently, from amused to something almost tender, and Eddie ran the last few seconds back to find what he'd said, and found it.
He loves being a big brother.
Chris. Theo's big brother.
Except they weren't brothers. Not technically. And there wasn't a version of the world where those two were brothers, regardless of how much they looked alike, unless the two men raising them were doing it together. Unless it was one family. Eddie had just described, warm and proud and without noticing it at all, a household that on paper did not exist. Two separately fathered kids he'd folded into siblings so easily, so automatically, that the folding had happened without Eddie ever really deciding it.
"Huh," Danny said, soft.
"I just meant—" Eddie started, and didn't have anywhere to take it, because the honest finish didn't walk it back. The honest finish was that they are brothers. They've been brothers since the day they met.
Danny let him not finish, a knowing smile on his face. He looked through the window at Buck, still at the sink, still laughing, and then back at Eddie, and his face did a complicated thing, fond and a little sad, a man watching something he'd been rooting for from thousands of miles away.
"You know he's gonna be the last one to figure this out. Whatever this is you two are running. Best-friends-with-a-couple-of-brothers." He fought the smile and lost. "He's gonna be dead last across that line because he doesn't believe he gets to have it, and you're gonna have to be patient about that in a way that's gonna drive you nuts. But you already knew that."
Through the glass, the water shut off. Grace was hanging up the towel, and she turned and gave Buck a look Eddie couldn't read from here, pointed, sisterly, the kind that reminded him of his own sisters, and Buck's ears went slightly pink and he said something back that made her roll her eyes.
Eddie went back inside, into the warm and the light and the sound of Buck's voice with the word brother sitting in his chest where he'd accidentally set it down, and the strange terrifying relief of having said the true thing out loud once, even if it was to the wrong person first.
Buck looked up when the door opened, found Eddie automatically, the way he always did. Eddie noticed he was still blushing a little.
"Danno didn't scare you off?"
"Nah," Eddie said. "We just talked."
Across the kitchen, Danny caught Grace's eye, and something passed between them Eddie could guess at. Grace's mouth twitched. Danny winked at her.
"Good," Buck said. "He tells people he buries bodies; it's a whole bit."
"It's a good bit," Eddie said, and took the towel out of Grace's hand, and stepped up to the sink next to Buck, close, the way they always ended up, and didn't think about the word sitting in his chest.