Archive of Our Own

It takes Buck a long time to really comprehend what Eddie has placed so casually in his arms. 

The linen is warm and clean against his forearms, a decent weight that feels heavier and heavier with every passing second. The fabric on top of the pile is familiar and unwelcome; it's his brown flannel shirt, washed and pressed and folded with military precision. It smells faintly like lavender. 

Oh, he thinks dumbly, blinking down at the clothes he holds. Oh. 

Eddie is kicking him out. 

It’s not even the break up that hurts, not really. It’s the concept that Eddie would do it like this, so casually cruel, like it means nothing. Like what they had was nothing. Like Buck is nothing. A quick fuck and a bit of fun, but now Eddie has to grow up and move on. 

Oh, he thinks again, because there’s nothing else. There’s just… 

There’s nothing else. 

The pain is syrup-slow and sleepy under his skin, and it’s still so distant that he doesn’t even really feel it. He knows it’s there, lingering and deathly-sweet, but it’s not real like it should be. He’s in shock, maybe. 

“I didn’t realise how much stuff had migrated over,” Eddie is saying when Buck drags his attention back up. There’s a smile on his face and a peace about him that is hard-won and dearly treasured. He doesn’t seem upset about any of this at all. 

Buck thinks that the sound of his heart splitting straight down the middle is loud enough for them both to hear. 

“Yeah,” he says weakly, mouth dry and throat raw. He attempts a grin, but it falls flat. “My bad, sorry.”

Eddie glances at him, wry and playful, and stops fussing about with the rest of the clothes in the laundry basket so he can slink closer, fingers going to the belt loops around Buck’s hips. 

“If I didn’t know better,” he purrs, leaning so close that the spice of his cologne drowns out the sickening scent of that fucking lavender detergent. “I’d think you were staking a claim on me. Making sure anyone that went snooping knew this place was yours.”

Buck swallows thickly. “It’s your house,” he points out because it’s all he thinks to say. There’s cotton on his tongue, and his head is spinning, and everything feels so far away right now. 

Eddie huffs like Buck has said something funny, and then he’s tipping forward to press a firm, familiar kiss against Buck’s mouth. The angle of it means that the armful of clothes Buck is cradling gets squished up between them, but maybe that doesn’t matter. Maybe none of this matters. Maybe it never did, and Buck just got carried away.

He kisses back, though. He’s never been good at resisting the things he wants, no matter how badly they’ll hurt him. 

“You can stake your claim in other ways, you know,” Eddie murmurs against his lips, playful and inviting. 

Buck wants. 

“Is that an offer?” He murmurs back, even though it feels wrong to still be here, to be holding his clothes like this, to be kissing the man who’s just crushed his heart. 

Eddie’s smirk is a slow, wicked thing, and Buck’s chest goes funny at the sight of it. Eddie’s always so good at taking the lead like this, so good at winding Buck up and up and up until he finally lets go and Buck spins wildly out of control. It’s good that Buck has a guiding hand. It’s good that he has someone to make an honest man out of him. It’s good that he has someone who can take everything that Buck has to give.

Except, he doesn’t, does he. He doesn’t have. Not anymore. Maybe not ever. Maybe Buck has let his greed cloud his vision, and maybe Eddie was never as deep in this as Buck has been since the beginning.

Eddie’s fingertips have stretched up to trace over the skin of Buck’s neck, slipping up around his shoulders to curl the short hair at his nape. He shivers under the touch, and Eddie drinks it in with a self-satisfied grin, and Buck is helpless against this. 

He wants. Whatever Eddie will give him, Buck wants it. He’ll take it. No matter how much it hurts, no matter that he’s standing there holding the remains of his place in Eddie’s life. No matter that he’s in love, but Eddie isn’t.

Buck has never been good at refusing the things he desires. Has never been good at refusing the adrenaline high, even though he knows how bad the come-down will be later.

So he lets Eddie touch him, lets their mouths slot together again, lets himself surrender to the familiar push-and-pull of their bodies. He drops the laundry carelessly on the couch, ignores Eddie’s mildly disapproving huff as the clothes fall out of their carefully folded pile, and focuses on savouring every taste and smell and sensation.

If he can’t have this again, if Eddie is finally tired of him, then Buck wants to be able to remember. He wants at least that much.

He lets Eddie walk him backwards, lets Eddie guide him through doorways and hallways until they collapse on top of the bed that Buck once selfishly thought of as theirs. He’s pinned to the mattress by Eddie’s weight, his biceps flexing against the steady hold that Eddie has on his arms, and he feels trapped.

It might’ve been comforting, if he didn’t know the truth now. Ignorance would’ve let him think that maybe Eddie held him down because he wanted Buck to stay, because he knew that Buck learned how to run away from Maddie and he didn’t want to be the next person on the long list of people Buck has ruined.

Buck knows better, now. He lets Eddie nip and suck and kiss and take, and he pretends the tears on his cheeks are from Eddie taking him to pieces and not from the guilt of buying into the lie he’d so carefully built for himself.

It’s mind-blowing like it always is, because Eddie is an incredibly generous lover and Buck’s body sings underneath his hands, but once it’s over and they fall together side by side in bed, all Buck can do is stare at the ceiling.

He begs the glow to stick around, tries to hold onto it with both hands, but there’s a sucking abyss growing in his chest and it swallows up the endorphins without hesitation.

He just feels empty.

“Hey Eddie,” he says and then stops.

Eddie hums questioningly, his arm thrown over his eyes as he steadies his breathing out. Sweat glistens on his tanned skin, and Buck wants to lick it up, but he’s not allowed to touch anymore so he keeps his hands and his tongue to himself. 

He wants to ask about it. Wants to know why and how and what. Wants to know whether he could’ve changed the outcome somehow.

Or maybe he doesn’t want to know. It’ll only hurt him more in the long run.

He swallows thickly, chokes down the questions and the begging and the apologies, and manages a feeble smile.

“Thank you,” is what he manages.

Eddie snorts, laughing in that ridiculously adorable way he does when it’s just the two of them. “You don’t have to thank me for sex, Buck, jeez. If anything, I should be thanking you. You’re always so perfect for me.”

Buck used to think he was perfect for Eddie. He knows better now.

“What time is Chris coming home?” 

How much longer do I get to lay here with you before it’s over?

Eddie rolls head so he can check the clock on the wall, and the absence of his attention leaves Buck cold all over. “Hm, we still got half an hour before I gotta leave to pick him up. Why?”

Half an hour. That’s all that Buck has left of the best thing in his life. Thirty minutes to commit Eddie’s touch to memory, to keep the taste of him in his mouth, to lay here in this bed on top of the quilt they bought together. It’s not enough time. He wants longer. He wants this to not be happening.

Buck wants.

He swallows thickly. “Just wondering,” he says around his clumsy tongue, and strangles the sob that catches in his throat when Eddie flops back over and presses up against him. The smell of him is tantalising - cedarwood bodywash and frangipani shampoo - and he’s firm in all the right places, soft in all the others. He is everything that Buck has ever loved, and he’s-

He’s not Buck’s, anymore. Can’t be. They’ve broken up.

And Buck isn’t brave or strong or heroic, but he is a glutton for punishment, so he digs deep and musters up the daring to ask, “Why now?”

Eddie presses a closed-mouth kiss to his jaw. “What?”

“The clothes,” Buck manages, shivering and wanton and weak. “Why’d you give them back to me now?” What did I do to make you break up with me?

Eddie keeps pressing his lips to Buck’s skin, gentle and tender and too-much, and Buck tries not to make a sound when that mouth moves further down his neck. They don’t have the time for round two, but he doesn’t want this to end. He’ll do whatever Eddie wants him to do if it means they can stay here just a little bit longer.

“I don’t know,” Eddie says after a while, voice light and utterly unbothered. “I was just doing the laundry and realised you probably have more stuff here than I do. I don’t know what you even keep in the wardrobe at your loft. I didn’t want you to run out of outfits or something. It’d be just like you to spend all your money on new clothes when you have perfectly good ones mixed up in mine.”

He says it like he thinks it’s funny. Like ripping Buck out of their lives as if he’s some kind of weed is nothing but a joke.

“I thought you-”

He cuts himself off. There’s no point in finishing that thought out loud. He’s already chased Eddie off, there’s no point in scoring pity points by being extra pathetic. It won’t change his mind. Eddie hates it when Buck is too needy. That’s probably where this whole thing went wrong.

Eddie makes a questioning noise, and then laughs. “What? You thought I needed more clothes or something? Buck, I don’t need your extras. I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself.”

It’s not said unkindly, because Eddie doesn’t like to be mean when it’s just the two of them, but Buck feels it like a blow anyway. It hits his sternum with impact, strips his breath away, leaves him aching and bruised and winded. The pain is quicker to come now, heating up underneath his skin and digging into all the soft spots he’d stopped protecting.

When Eddie pulls away and clambers out of bed, casting about for his jeans and shirt, Buck takes an extra moment to lie there and wonder if this is going to hurt enough to kill him.

When Eddie leaves with a jaunty wave and cheerful farewell, leaving Buck standing by the Jeep, hollow and trembling and terribly empty, he hopes that it is. Hopes that it’ll snuff him out like a light, and he won’t ever have to deal with a broken heart again.

.

Eddie texts him good night, and texts him good morning, and calls him when he’s bored and has nothing to do. Buck answers every time because he’s pathetic and needy and lonely, and he tries not to let his confusion show when Eddie invites him over in that familiar tone of voice.

“Chris is at a sleepover,” Eddie tells him, low and delicious and warm. “My bed’s been feeling pretty lonely these past few days.”

Oh, Buck thinks with a sudden clarity, even as he finishes the conversation with Eddie and grabs his car keys. Oh. He gets it. Eddie still wants to have sex, he just doesn’t want the commitment. 

That’s okay. Buck’s been a whore for most of his life, so he can give himself to Eddie if that’s what Eddie wants. They can be fuck buddies or friends with benefits or whatever the correct term is these days, and Buck can be greedy with his touches and his desires, and Eddie never has to know that Buck still loves him.

He can do that. It’s better than not having Eddie at all.

*

He doesn’t expect for things to still be so easy when they’re at the firehouse with the 118. He’d thought that maybe Eddie would tell people, or act differently, or suddenly want his distance, but that’s not what happens at all. Eddie still sits next to him at mealtimes and Eddie still presses his leg against Buck’s when they’re in the truck and Eddie still gives him that brilliant grin when he says something he thinks is funny.

Chim and Hen and Ravi don’t look at them strangely and there’s no pity in their eyes when they look at Buck. Maybe Eddie hasn’t told them, then. Maybe Eddie doesn’t want them to know. 

Maybe Eddie doesn’t want them to know because he doesn’t want them to deal with Buck moping around the place.

And that’s fair. Buck knows that he tends to make things all about himself, and he grieves so publicly and so loudly and for so long, and he knows the team doesn’t like it. They didn’t like it when Bobby died, and they didn’t like it when Tommy broke up with him, and they won’t like it now that it’s Eddie’s turn to leave him.

Especially because it’s Eddie.

They’ve always liked Eddie more than Buck.

And Buck has always wanted to make their lives easier as much as he can, so he follows Eddie’s lead and keeps quiet. He smiles when Eddie cracks jokes at meals and he dutifully counts out Eddie’s reps in the gym and he makes sure to have Eddie’s back during calls and he doesn’t shut himself down the way he usually does.

The pain, ever-present and growing larger by the day, feels like lava in his veins, but he bites his tongue and swallows it down and keeps moving. 

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t. He’s gotten good at performing, at being normal, at containing that poisonous pain and anger and grief deep inside his ribcage where it can’t lash out and hurt anyone. Bobby taught him, all those years ago when Buck first came to the 118 and bled emotions all over their freshly cleaned floors. Bobby taught him how to be easier to swallow, how to be nicer, how to be better at not being too much.

So Buck knows now that if he smiles brightly enough and talks quickly enough, the questions stop coming. He can be cheerful when he’s exhausted and charming when he’s miserable and perfectly functional while his entire world is collapsing around him. 

He can do it so that Eddie doesn’t have to. He does it so that Eddie still invites him over when Chris isn’t home, still tugs him into the service closet and drops to his knees, still touches him, still wants him. 

Even if it’s not the way Buck wants him back. Even if it's not the way Buck needs to be wanted.

He can do this. For Eddie, he can do it.

Eddie asks if he wants coffee, and Buck says yes, and he says thank you when Eddie dutifully hands him a cup, and he burns his tongue with his first sip but doesn’t say anything. Eddie steals the last piece of bacon off his plate before their next shift, and Buck rolls his eyes and calls him an asshole, and Eddie laughs and laughs but offers him a kiss as an apology, and Buck takes it even though he knows he shouldn’t. 

And sometimes, Eddie just looks at him across the table with that soft, stupid little smile, and Buck’s throat gets tight because he thought that meant something. His traitorous heart thinks it still does, even after everything. But it doesn’t. It can’t. Maybe it never did. Maybe Buck just takes and takes and takes what he wants and never realises he’s taking too much until it’s too late.

They sleep together, still, and it’s fun and it’s good and it’s familiar, and Buck always leaves before breakfast if he can. It’s easier that way. It hurts a little less. Even if it makes him feel cheap and dirty, like a secret that Eddie’s trying to keep.

But he can’t lie beside Eddie as the sun peaks through the window, warming that bronze skin that Buck has felt every inch of. He can’t listen to Eddie complain about the school schedule or the grocery shopping or the fact that there are clothes everywhere again despite the fact he did the laundry two days ago. He can’t pretend that he’s fine not having all the little things he used to have. 

He can’t pretend that he doesn’t still want. Because he does. He’s greedy, and he’s selfish, and he’s still in love with Eddie, and he wants.

Sex is easy. Buck knows sex. He thrives on sex. That’s what his body is for. He’s good at it. Sex is easier to walk away from than love.

Except Eddie keeps asking him to stay.

He doesn’t use his words, because Eddie isn’t good at that and Buck doesn’t expect him too, but there’s… 

God, it’s just all these little things.

A hand closing around his wrist when he starts looking for his clothes. A sleepy, “You don’t have to rush,” when he’s already halfway into his shirt. Eddie leaving the television on because he knows Buck sleeps better when there’s background noise. Eddie buying the fibre cereal Buck likes even though Buck is the only one that eats it. A kiss on the cheek or the forehead or the lips when they walk out the door at the same time, before they have to separate for the day and go their separate ways.

It’s Eddie’s way of asking him to stay, of trying to keep him close, of balancing the scales. Of saying thank you for the sex. Quid pro quo. It’s not the same as before, because Buck hasn’t left his clothes here since the break up and he no longer thinks of it as their house and his side of the bed feels strange now, but-

Buck is greedy, and he always wants what he can’t have, and he is going to die of this. He’s going to die. Loving Eddie is going to kill him.

But he can’t stop.

*

They’re in bed together one night, cleaned up after a rather athletic hour and a half, when Eddie reaches for him. He curls a strong arm around Buck’s waist, dragging him back against Eddie’s chest. He tucks his face into the space beneath Buck’s ear and breathes out slowly.

Buck lies perfectly still.

“You’ve been quiet,” Eddie murmurs carefully, and the vibrations from his voice ripple out across Buck’s skin. 

Buck shivers and pretends it’s from the cool night air. “I’m tired.”

“Don’t use that on me. It’s been weeks, Buck. I’m trying to give you space to work through whatever’s going on in that head of yours, but I’m starting to get worried.”

The words are so gentle they burn. 

It hurts, having Eddie like this but knowing that Buck can’t keep him. It’s a broken bone that won’t heal, a blister that won’t stop weeping, a splinter he can’t dig out from under his nail. It’s inconvenient and it’s painful and Buck so desperately can’t stop doing this to himself.

He stares at the dark wall across the room and tries desperately to hold back the tears bubbling in his eyes. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Eddie makes a small noise and presses his lips to Buck’s shoulder for a moment, sorting through his thoughts. He does that more, now. Pauses before reacting. It’s Frank’s handiwork. His arm tightens around Buck’s waist.

“You can talk to me, you know.”

Buck’s laugh gets stuck on his jagged ribcage, speared to death before it ever makes it out of his mouth. Good. He doesn’t think it would be a very happy sound anyway. 

Because he can’t. He can’t talk to Eddie. Not about this.

He doesn’t know what to say about it, anyway. Doesn’t know how to get close to this ever-changing thing in his chest, this tightness in his throat, this weight on his shoulders that crawled out from under his childhood bed and followed him right out of Hershey all those years ago. 

Some days he thinks it's guilt, bone-deep and not entirely his, because surely there has to be something wrong with him if being loved like this makes him want to run away. Even though he learned it from Maddie, even though it’s what he’s always done, even though he hasn’t actually started running yet.

Other days, though, it’s fear, although he can never quite decide what it is he’s actually afraid of. Eddie leaving, maybe, or Eddie staying. Eddie looking at him one day and finally seeing the truth of who Buck is right down at his core. Seeing the same thing his parents saw, the same thing that makes him-

Exhausting.

There are things Buck knows about himself now that he wishes he didn’t. 

He knows how easily he can disappear inside somebody else, how good he is at becoming whatever people need him to be, even when it costs him pieces of himself. He knows, now, that people don’t like that, don’t want that, can’t stand that about him. No matter what shape he contorts himself into, doesn’t matter what part of himself he carves off and leaves in the dust, it isn’t enough. They leave. Maddie, Abby, Taylor, Bobby.

Buck had tried so hard to be what they wanted, and they still found him wanting. 

And he’d thought, so stupidly and so naively, that he’d finally gotten it right for Eddie. Had thought that maybe he didn’t have to try so hard, that maybe it was okay to let some of those wounds heal. He knows that Eddie loves him - loved him, at least once - and that should be enough. It should be everything. It should be the answer to every stupid answer Buck has been asking himself since he was old enough to understand that some people are made to be chosen and some people just aren’t.

Except Eddie keeps choosing him, somehow. 

And Buck keeps waiting for him to stop.

“I know,” he manages eventually, and he can’t get his voice above a whisper no matter how much he tries. “I know I can talk to you, Eddie. I just… I just don’t know what you want me to say.”

Eddie’s fingers twitch against his stomach. “The truth,” he says, and it’s tender and it’s sad and it hurts. “I want you to tell me the truth.”

Something inside him folds in on himself and goes very quiet.

The truth is that he knows that he is a sure thing. He clings, and he’s greedy, and he wants, and he’ll do whatever he has to to make sure that he isn’t torn away from the things he considers his. Things like the firehouse, like Eddie, like family. It makes him do stupid things like file a lawsuit or climb up the side of a crane while there’s an active sniper or bare his teeth at friends and enemies alike.

But he is a sure thing. He will be what people need him to be if it means they’ll let him stay. If it means they’ll love him. If it means he gets to keep these precious rarities tucked safe and close against him.

Buck knows that he didn’t used to be this way.

He thinks it's something genetic that he got from his parents, some ugly little instinct buried in the same place as the colour of his eyes and the shape of his nose. Or maybe it’s just what happens when you’re raised in a house that keeps you quiet, that suffocates you slowly, that traps you in invisibility for so many years that you stop being able to see yourself, too. He forgets himself in that house. Evan Buckley bleeds to death on his bedroom floor at the age of six, and it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.

Maddie leaves Hershey, and he spends years pretending he doesn’t understand why she did, only to grow up and do exactly the same thing every time his own life starts feeling too tight around his ribs. Maybe he learned it from her. Maybe she learned it from him. Maybe it doesn’t even matter anymore.

The point is that Buck leaves, and he doesn’t look back, and he doesn’t care.

He leaves Hershey and then he leaves the Navy and then he leaves bartending and then he leaves women sleeping beside him in unfamiliar beds, and there are whole stretches of his life where he can’t remember exactly where one place ended and another began. He doesn’t burn and he doesn’t ache and he doesn’t want, and he shifts and changes with the ebb and flow of the tide, and he doesn’t care. 

He goes to the beach. He goes overseas. He goes back to the beach. He goes wherever there is something new to look at and nobody who knows him well enough to ask what the hell is wrong with him. 

He’s good at it.

He’s so very good at leaving.

But Eddie asks him to stay. Over and over again, he asks Buck to stay. Because Buck is a sure thing, and Eddie knows Buck is a sure thing, and that’s how they’ve ended up here. 

The truth is that Buck will not go until Eddie asks him to, but they both know that Eddie never will. Even though it hurts. Even though he’s losing track of himself in the mirror. Even though he is messy and desperate and wanting, Buck will stay and he will give and Eddie will take. 

Maybe he learned it from Maddie. Maybe she learned it from him. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

He picks at a loose thread on the covers, winding it around his fingertip until it starts to hurt. “I’m fine,” he tells the wall that he’s staring at, and he knows that Eddie doesn’t believe it. “I’m sorry for worrying you.”

Eddie’s hand moves slowly over Buck’s stomach, thumb brushing back and forth against the skin there. It’s an absent-minded touch, familiar enough that Buck knows Eddie isn’t even thinking about it, and it’s so sweet it brings tears to his eyes. 

You’re being cruel, Buck wants to say but can’t. You’re being so terribly cruel, Eddie. 

He wants to beg, wants to scream, wants to-

Well. That’s enough of that.

“I know you’re not okay,” Eddie finally says, heavy and unsatisfied. “And I wish you trusted me enough to tell me why. But I’m not going to push if you don’t want me to. That’s not fair, and it’d be pretty damn hypocritical. So I’m going to drop it for now, and I’m going to wait, and when you’re ready you can tell me. Deal?”

Buck turns to face him, twisting around until they’re chest-to-chest for the first time in days. Eddie’s face is soft in the low light, his hair sticking up in a dozen different directions from where Buck’s fingers had been buried in it earlier. There’s still a faint flush high on his cheekbones, and Buck’s chest aches with the familiar, awful want of him.

He wants to reach out. 

He doesn’t.

“I love you,” he whispers instead, shameful and wishful and pained.

And Eddie smiles at him, and it’s affectionate and beautiful and open, and then he says, “Go to sleep, Buck.”

Buck closes his eyes so that Eddie can’t see the tears trapped under his lashes, but he doesn’t sleep a fucking wink.

*

Buck lies still until the darkness at the edges of the room begins to soften, the first gray light of morning bleeding through the curtains and settling in thin stripes across Eddie’s bedroom wall. His eyes are gritty and he has a headache and he needs to pee, but none of that matters right now. None of it can touch him when all he sees is Eddie’s careful expression and all he hears is Eddie’s voice telling him to go to sleep.

Nothing matters, after that. Nothing at all. 

Eventually, the alarm on Eddie’s phone vibrates against the bedside table, and Buck is already dressed.

He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, lacing his boots as quietly as he can when Eddie stirs behind him, making a low, confused noise before pushing himself up onto one elbow. His hair is a mess, his face is still crinkled with sleep, and for one terrible second, Buck is hit with such an overwhelming rush of fondness that it knocks the breath out of him.

“You’re leaving?” Eddie mumbles, and there’s something so genuinely lost in his voice that Buck has to look away.

“Yeah,” he says, forcing a smile as he reaches for the second boot. “Early start today.”

“You could’ve woken me.” Eddie rubs at his eyes, blinking at Buck through the haze of the morning. His mouth is slanted unhappily. “I could’ve made breakfast.”

Buck knows. He knows that he could’ve woken Eddie, that he could’ve stayed for breakfast, that he could’ve waited for Christopher to come home, that he could’ve lost himself in this perfect daydream. He could’ve pretended he still had everything he’s ever wanted, could still lie to himself and say he would never have to leave.

But he won’t. He’s a glutton for self-punishment, and he doesn’t care if what he does to himself hurts, but he just… He just can’t, this time. Not like this.

So he just takes a moment to look at Eddie, memorising him again: the rumpled sheets gathered around his waist, the crease from the pillow pressed into his cheek, the caramel skin still warm from where they were pressed together during the night. Buck wants to reach out and touch him. Wants to crawl back beneath the covers and let Eddie pull him close.

But he can’t. 

“I know,” he says quietly, and stands. “Didn’t want to disturb you.”

Something flickers across Eddie’s face, there and gone before Buck has a chance to figure out what it is, before that familiar softness settles across those strong features. “Alright,” Eddie allows, fond and soft and lovely, and Buck has to turn away before the pain splits open his chest right then and there.

He straightens out his clothes, brushes himself down like he can brush the proof of Eddie right off himself, and he reaches for the door, but then-

“Buck?”

He turns.

Eddie is watching him, still, more awake than he was a moment ago. There’s something uncertain to him, something difficult to read in the thin morning light. Buck can’t quite put his finger on it, but he waits patiently, and for a long moment they just stare at each other silently. 

Then Eddie’s mouth pulls into a small, tired smile. “You know you can stay, right?”

Buck has never known Eddie to be cruel, and yet. 

“I know,” Buck says, and he manages to return the smile even though the breath has been punched out of him, even though his ribs are collapsing, even though his ears are ringing and his eyes are stinging and his skin feels like it’s too tight over his bones.

He opens the door and leaves before Eddie can see him cry.

*

Buck has never had any illusions about who he is. What he is. 

He talks too much when he’s nervous and not enough when he’s scared, and he has never met an emotion he couldn’t turn into a problem for somebody else if he let it get big enough. He gets angry too quickly, and he forgives too quickly, and he trusts people too easily and then, when they inevitably prove that he shouldn’t have, he acts surprised about it.

He wants too much, he feels too much. He needs reassurance and then hates himself for needing it, which means he usually ends up pretending he doesn’t need anything at all until he reaches the point where pretending becomes impossible and something inevitably explodes.

He can be brave enough to make people proud and reckless enough to make them laugh and broken enough to make them feel needed, but eventually the shine wears off and there’s just Evan underneath it all, and Evan is-

Well. Evan is a boy with a red bike, with a sister that loves him and is trapped by him, with parents who can’t bear to touch him, with blood that wasn’t meant to be his and a heart that wasn’t meant to beat and a face that belonged to his brother first.

Evan is dead, now. Buck had smothered him, buried him as deep as he could, pretended he never existed.

He doesn’t know who it is looking back at him in the mirror, these days. 

*

Maddie’s house smells like garlic and laundry detergent, and there’s the gentle hum of music playing even though it’s too quiet to be heard over the sound of Buck’s sister clattering around the kitchen. There’s a plastic cup abandoned beside the sink, a tiny sock caught underneath one of the chairs, a collection of photographs stuck to the refrigerator with brightly coloured magnets, and Buck has the strange, disorienting thought that he’s been here a hundred times without ever really looking at it. 

And… He knows this house. He knows the shape of the kitchen and the sound the back door makes when it closes and which cupboard Maddie keeps the coffee in. He knows where Jee’s toys are supposed to go, although nobody has apparently told Jee this because there’s one laying right in the middle of the hallway.

Buck knows this house, but for the life of him, he has no idea where he belongs in it.

She hadn’t asked him much when he’d come inside, just tilted her head and looked him up and down before ushering him into one of the stools at the bench and putting together a warm cup of tea. She presses it into his hands now, gathers her own mug close, and tells him casually that Jee has recently developed an obsession with trying to eat crayons.

Buck smiles weakly into the steam curling just under his nose, hiding behind a sip of his drink. “She gets that from you,” he teases, lighter than usual but no less cheeky.

Maddie snorts. “I’ve never eaten a crayon in my life.”

“You absolutely did.”

“I did not!”

“You told me you did!” Buck sets the mug down with a small clunk so he can gesture pointedly at his sister, who is watching him with eyes that are entirely too knowing. “When we were kids, you said-”

“I told you that because you were six and you wouldn’t stop asking what crayons tasted like,” Maddie says, exasperated but fond, and maybe a little proud that she managed to fool him so well for so long. “Your teachers were getting frustrated.”

Story of his life really. Teachers, neighbours, friends, his parents, even Maddie herself. Buck wasn’t an easy kid. He didn’t used to be easy to swallow. He’s a sure thing now, and he’ll change himself into whatever shape fits, but he didn’t used to do that. He didn’t used to care that much.

Or maybe he did care, and that’s why it hurt so bad.

Maddie lets him sit in his thoughts for a while, leaning her hip against the counter as she pinches one of the biscuits on the plate that Buck has been carefully ignoring. She takes small bites in between sips of her coffee, like she’s waiting for something, but when all Buck does is fiddle with the handle of his mug and stare down at his hands, she sighs and sets the biscuit back down. 

“You can stay here tonight, if you want.”

Buck’s lips twitch at the poorly concealed concern in her voice. “I know,” he says softly.

Maddie hums at him. “Chim’s on overnights, so he won’t be home until tomorrow afternoon, and Jee would be thrilled to see you when she wakes up.”

“I know,” Buck says again, and he loves her so much that it chokes him a little bit when all she does in response to his unusual moodiness is shift her weight and cross her arms. 

“You look like shit.”

It startles a genuine laugh out of him, small and pathetic as it is, and it stings in a good way. Like pouring alcohol over a cut. Like digging fingers into a fresh bruise. Like putting his hands on Eddie’s body even though he doesn’t hold Eddie’s heart in his palms anymore. Like riding his old motorcycle and pushing it faster and faster and faster until he can’t see through the tears in his eyes as he races Death down the street.

He watches the tea ripple when he nudges the mug with his thumb, and for a long while, he’s lost for words. They’re buried inside of him somewhere that he can’t reach, pinned down by a weight that he can’t name, and they’re bleeding and wounded but he can’t fix them.

God, he’s just so messed up.

“Buck,” Maddie says eventually, a little more serious now. “Talk to me.”

“Talk to me,” Eddie had pleaded, nails brushing over Buck’s skin, breath hot on Buck’s neck, knife buried in between Buck’s ribs. Even though he once called Buck exhausting, even though he’d shouted at him in the kitchen after Bobby died for being selfish and needy and-

Talk to me, people say, and Buck has tried, and all it has ever done is hurt.

And yet.

“I used to think you left because of me,” he blurts out.

Maddie goes still.

And it’s- The words weren’t supposed to come out like that, all jumbled up and accusing and so passively aggressive. They’re too simple, somehow, for the size of this thing they’ve been carrying around between them for most of their adult lives, and Buck didn’t mean to let them out. He didn’t mean to go there, didn’t mean to open the box inside his heart that’s been festering since he was sixteen years old and angry.

He’s been choking on it for years, swallowing it down over and over again because it’s not fair of him to do this to Maddie, he doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t want to be like this, and yet-

“Buck-”

“I know,” he says, rushed and hurried and desperate, shaking his head before she can start. “I know why you left, it’s okay. I know about Doug, now, and I know you were scared. I know you didn’t have anywhere else to go and you couldn’t stay there anymore. I know all of that. It’s okay.”

His eyes burn, his throat is tight, he’s burning up from the inside. It’s rising in him like a tidal wave, like a tsunami on dry land, and he’s vomiting it up, and he can’t stop. He can’t. It’s too much. There’s too much inside him, now, and he has nowhere left to put it. He’s full up, and he’s in pain, and Eddie doesn’t want him anymore, and he loves his sister so much that he’s being poisoned by the blame he wants so badly to lay at her feet.

His voice breaks. “But I was awful.”

Maddie’s expression crumples.

“I was,” Buck insists doggedly, even though she didn’t argue, even though she knows he’s right, even though they’ve never dared to speak about this for the years that she’s been back. “I was angry all the time, and I was reckless, and I knew exactly how to push your buttons because you were the only person in that house who could see me. I knew you would come back, and I knew you would pick me every time. I knew you’d forgive me, so I took you for granted, and I’m so sorry, Maddie.”

And his sister has never looked at him the way that she looks at him now, tears blurring her eyes and cheeks going red with emotion, her hands shaking as she fiddles with her rings and rubs at her wrists. She wants to reach out to him, but she hesitates, and Buck hates himself for doing this to her. He hates her for not hating him.

“You were a kid,” she tells him as gently as she can, voice thick.

She can’t keep forgiving him for his sins. She can’t keep enabling his behaviour. Buck should have been so much better for her. He should have been so much more than what he is. 

“I was your kid,” he counters, and she shudders where she stands before looking away. Maybe it’s cruel and maybe he should stop, but he can’t. He’s broken the seal now. He can’t put it back. “You raised me,” he says, quieter now. “You shouldn’t have had to do that. You were a kid too.”

Maddie reaches for his hand, but Buck pulls away before she can take it, rubbing his fingers together anxiously instead. His skin feels too tight, suddenly, like it’s stretched thin over his bones and he worries at the little crescent his fingernail has left on the soft flesh. There are still things he hasn’t said, because there are always things that he doesn’t say; there are whole rooms inside him that he keeps locked because he knows what happens when he opens the door.

But he’s been holding onto this for so long, and the door is rotted, and he feels lost at sea and utterly alone.

“And Daniel,” he whispers, the name sitting crookedly in his mouth and falling into the air like a physical weight.

They haven’t spoken about him much, not since Buck found out about him, because neither of them know how to touch the topic without bleeding. Maddie showed him pictures, told him stories, had that wistful gleam in her eyes that made Buck’s breath catch and chased him from the room. He’s been scared, too scared, to ask questions. To ask if Maddie had ever…had ever blamed him for the way things happened. 

He had never found the courage to ask if Maddie wished that Buck had actually done what he’d been born to do. If sometimes, she might’ve agreed with their parents.

“You were grieving him and I didn’t even know,” he says, and his voice sounds very far away even to his own ears. “You had to watch him die, and then you had to come home and take care of me. You couldn’t even…” His throat closes around the rest of it, and he grits his teeth so hard that white-hot pain shoots up beneath his jaw. “You couldn’t even be his sister, because you had to be my mother.”

Maddie is crying now, silent tears slipping down her face as she lets him talk, as he cracks them both open and starts scooping out everything trapped inside. She looks beautiful, even like this, and he’s so, so thankful that she never let Doug break her.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” she says before he can continue, surprising him. “That’s not fair to you, Buck.”

He wants to argue with her on instinct, opens his mouth to cut her off, but she reaches across the space between them again, slower this time, and he’s too unsteady to stop her from curling her fingers around his wrist and holding tight. Her palm is warm, familiar, and it doesn’t hurt the way he thinks it should. She should hurt him for this. He deserves it.

But Maddie is too good for that, and she doesn’t want to hurt him, so she just gives him a horribly sad little smile. “You keep doing this,” she says, and there is no anger in it, which is worse. “You take everything that happened to us and find a way to make it your fault, even when it’s not.”

Buck drops his gaze, because he can’t bear to look at her. “I made things so much harder for you.”

“Yes, you did.”

The answer punches the breath right out of his chest.

He hadn’t expected her to confirm it, as selfish and awful as that sounds. He hadn’t expected her to come right out and say it, to slam that final jagged piece of glass into his still-beating heart and twist it like that. He’d taken her kindness for granted, had taken her reluctance to hurt him as gospel, had let himself get carried away thinking that she’d forgiven him so easily, that she didn’t resent him for what her life must have been like all those long, lonely years in Hershey.

How invisible had she felt, watching her parents collapse into grief over a brother she wasn’t allowed to speak about? How much did it hurt looking at Buck and seeing Daniel, but never being able to say that? 

God, he must have pushed her right into Doug’s arms. Must have chased her right out of town and into the great wide world, and then he’d lost her out there. Or maybe she’d lost him, and maybe it had been on purpose, and maybe-

Maddie squeezes his wrist, tight and unyielding, and some of his skin pinches under nails as she leans forward so he has to meet her teary eyes. 

“You did,” she says again, and her voice is trembling, but she’s still fierce underneath it. “You were difficult and you were angry and you scared me sometimes. You made me feel like I couldn’t leave because I was the only person who could keep you safe, could keep you alive, and I hated that feeling. I hated feeling responsible for you when I was barely old enough to take care of myself. I resented Mom and Dad for years because of that.”

Buck’s stomach twists and he looks away again, trying to pull away from her touch, trying to curl up into a ball and disappear right there at the kitchen counter. He doesn't want her to keep going anymore, can’t bear to keep listening to the conversation he’s been too afraid to have with her since she found him here in LA. He’s weak, and he’s pathetic, and he can’t bear to lose his sister right after losing the love of his life.

It will break him. This is breaking him.

“But,” Maddie continues, and Buck winces, “I never resented you. I loved you, Buck. I loved you so much that sometimes I though it was going to kill me.”

It’s not better. It’s not better at all. It’s worse, he thinks, but he doesn’t know how only that it is, and his breathing is going too quick and his sternum aches fiercely, and-

This is going to kill him. 

Maddie is shaking apart in front of him, he can hear the hitch in her breath and the quiet sobs she’s trying to speak past, but she doesn’t let go of him. “I left because I was terrified,” she tells him, half-desperate. “I left because Doug was dangerous, and I didn’t know how I could save myself and you at the same time, and I thought I was going to die if I stayed. But that doesn’t mean what I did was right. Those things can both be true at the same time; you can have made things harder for me, and I can still have been wrong to leave you there alone.”

He’s ten years old and his parents won’t say his name and he aches for reasons that he can’t name, and he pedals faster and faster, and he forgets that Maddie is watching him until he takes a corner too fast and hears her scream his name before he hits the ground-

He’s twenty years old and Maddie is gone and he’s being swallowed alive and he hates her so much it burns him up, and he’s angry, and he’ll never forgive her, and deep down underneath it all he’s just so tired-

He’s old, and he’s worn down, and he’s reckless, and she shows up like she never left, and she’s quieter and she’s scared and she flinches from him like she’s waiting for a blow, and-

“I forgave you,” he says in a rush, twisting so he can grab her hand properly, interlacing their fingers so tightly it’s uncomfortable. Maddie lets him. “Mads, I forgave you a long time ago. For all of it. I mean, I was so angry for years, but I forgave you.”

He doesn’t know what he expects to happen after that, doesn’t know what kind of reaction he wants from her, but his heart sinks and his mouth goes dry when all Maddie does is look at him. There’s something unbearably sad in her eyes, something grieved and agonised in the twist of her mouth as she tips her head forward and squeezes her eyes closed for a long moment. The tears haven’t stopped falling, and she’s sniffling now, and Buck doesn’t know why he keeps breaking everything he tries to fix.

He’s poison, he must be. He’s heavy-handed and clumsy and he can’t be trusted with delicate things. He couldn’t save Daniel, and he made Maddie’s life in Hershey difficult, and he left too much of himself in Eddie’s space, and-

“Buck,” Maddie whispers, like she’s begging, and she’s squeezing his hand so hard her nails are cutting into his skin and his fingertips are tingling. “I need you to stop doing this. You need to stop taking the blame away from me.”

“Maddie-”

“No!” Her voice is splintering, and he shrinks back, and Maddie just holds on and holds on and holds on. “You were my baby brother,” she says, and the words come out jagged and broken around the edges. “You were supposed to need me. You were supposed to be angry with me. You were supposed to slam doors and yell and make life difficult, just like you were supposed to come crying into my room because you scraped your knee or Mom was mean or because you thought the world was ending. You were a kid. You didn’t ruin my life by needing your sister.”

Buck doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t-

None of this is making sense, and his head is spinning, and he’s gasping for air. It feels like he’s back in the tsunami and he’s lost the ground beneath his feet and he’s trying to hold on to that hand that’s slipping away. He knows, somehow, that if he lets go, he’ll get swept away and nobody will ever be able to find him.

He knows, deep down, that if he lets go, he loses Eddie forever.

“I made you leave,” he croaks, because he can’t lay all of his pain down at her feet. He’s not that cruel. He’s grown. He’s changed. He doesn’t want to hurt her anymore.

But Maddie shakes her head. “You didn’t.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.” It’s full of that same fierce, stubborn love she’s been pouring into him his whole life, the same love he used to guzzle by the gallon, the same love that chafed and stung when she came barreling back into his life in LA. “I made a choice to save myself, and I will regret what that choice did to you for the rest of my life. You’re allowed to be angry with me. You were allowed to be angry at me then, and you’re allowed to be angry with me now, but you can’t take the blame for yourself. You just can’t, Buck.”

He can’t breathe properly, and he doesn’t understand, because he built his life around the fundamental truth that he’s too much. He’s always been too much. It ruined his life. It ruined Maddie’s life. It ruined his parents’ life. It ruined his relationship with Eddie. But now Maddie is saying that it’s not his fault, that it’s okay, that she forgives him and she loves him and she wants him to be angry at her, and he just… 

He just doesn’t understand.

“I was awful,” he says, again, because he can’t move past it, he can’t do what she wants him to, he can’t put that old pain back in her hands and tell her it was her fault. 

“You were hurting.”

“I hurt you.”

“Yes,” Maddie says, and Buck feels like the world is ending. “You did. But you hurt me because you were hurting too. That’s not your fault. You were a kid. So was I. We were just doing our best to survive.”

He shakes his head, blinks rapidly, tries to pull away from what he doesn’t deserve. Doesn’t she know what he’s done? Doesn’t she know who he is? Can’t she see all of the shadows and secrets and sickness hiding behind his ribs? 

He’s reckless and he’s short-sighted and he gets too involved. He’s rash and impatient and he snoops, and he talks a lot and he fights a lot and he used to steal the firetruck for kicks. He’s pissed away every opportunity he’s ever had except the 118, and even that is slipping through his fingers like sand. 

Maddie must see something in his expression, must know him right down to his atoms, because her expression crumples. “Oh, Evan,” she breathes, and reaches across the last inch between them to cup his cheek. “Please.”

Buck leans into her hand before he can stop himself, cheek settling into her palm and closes his eyes, and Maddie’s thumb brushes away his tears. For one strange moment, he isn’t thirty-three and he isn’t a firefighter and he isn’t somebody’s best friend or somebody’s ex-boyfriend, and he isn’t somebody who’s spent the last few weeks wading through the pain of losing the person he loves the most.

For just a single moment, he’s just Evan.

He’s elbows and scraped knees and too-big emotions, curled up beside his sister because she’s warm and he’s still scared of the dark.

“Please what?” He asks, because he needs to know.

Maddie lets out a breath. “Forgive yourself.”

It’s the final crack.

Buck splits apart.

The first sob that tears out of him is ugly and wet and humiliating, and he curls in on himself like he can stop himself from fracturing, but Maddie is already moving. She comes around the island and wraps both arms around him, pulling him against her, and Buck goes willingly, folding into her embrace like he used to do all those years ago in that god-forsaken house. 

She’s smaller than him now.

He notices it somewhere through the terrible, choking noise of his own breathing, and even though he’d known he’d outgrown her, it’s a gaping wound of a realisation now, because he spent so long remembering her as the person who was larger than the bad things. The house, their parents, his anger, his own body when it felt too large for the narrow confines of his bedroom. He used to curl himself around her when he was little, all ankles and elbows and scraped palms, and somehow she’d always been able to make herself big enough to hold him.

Now his chin digs awkwardly into the top of her shoulder and his knees knock against the kitchen bench, and he is thirty-three years old and six feet tall and he’s strong, and yet somehow Maddie still manages to wrap herself around him like he’s the little boy she left behind.

And there’s no dignity left in it after that.

The sobs come harder, wrenching themselves out of the deepest part of his chest until his ribs hurt and his throat feels scraped raw, and he buries his face against her shoulder because he can’t bear the thought of her watching him do this. Her shirt is soft beneath his cheek and it smells like laundry detergent and the faint vanilla lotion she likes and Jee’s baby-scent and Chim’s cologne, and he almost goes to his knees, because he remembers.

He remembers being sick and miserable and curled beneath blankets while Maddie pressed a cool hand to his forehead and tutted over his temperature. He remembers waking from nightmares and stumbling down the hallway in the dark because there was no point going to his parents, and Maddie always let him crawl into her bed without asking what he’d dreamed about.

He remembers her telling him that monsters weren’t real.

He remembers believing her.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, because apparently even now, even here, he can’t stop himself. Even here, even now, he’s making it about himself again. “I’m sorry, Maddie. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, Buck.”

His hands fist in the back of her shirt, even as he pulls back just enough to breathe. His face is wet and hot, his nose running, his eyes burning, and Maddie’s hands come up to hold his cheeks like he’s something precious and fragile. He hates that. He loves it. He doesn’t know how both things can exist at once.

“I was so angry at you,” he repeats, miserable. 

“You were allowed to be.”

“I thought….” He has to break off, has to wipe at his nose and take a deep breath in, and he can’t actually look at her directly when he says this because it’s so pathetic and he knows it will hurt her. “I though you left because I wasn’t worth staying for, and I’m sorry.”

Maddie makes a distressed sound, her palms fluttering against his face. “No,” she says. “No, Evan.”

“I know better now,” he offers, but she doesn’t smile.

“No, you don’t.” She presses a kiss to his forehead, like she’s grounding herself, like she needs to convince herself that he won’t run away, that he’s really here. She doesn't let him go, keeps him tucked close against her, keeps his head between her careful hands and doesn’t dare pull away. “This is what I‘m trying to get you to understand. You keep putting yourself at the center of everything that happened because it’s easier than admitting that there were things happening around you that you couldn’t control.”

He tries to dislodge her grip, tries to back away, tries to regather himself. He doesn’t want to hear this. “No.”

“Yes.”

“No,” he says again, louder now, half-frantic. “No, because if it wasn’t me, then-”

Then he can’t fix it. 

If it’s not him, if it wasn’t his fault, then it’s something he can’t repair, something he can’t undo, something he can’t make better. If Buck was never the problem then that means that it was someone else’s fault, and they didn’t care enough to even try. They left it up to him, always up to him, and they didn’t care that he was young, that he was trying, that he was scared. 

He’s spent his whole life trying to make things better, trying to be better, trying to be more useful and caring and understanding. Listen harder, need less, stop making things difficult. There was always something he could do, something he could change, some part of himself that could be worked on until he finally got it right. 

Exhausting, Eddie had called him so long ago. The trials and tribulations of Evan Buckley. 

That’s how it’s supposed to work.

If something went wrong, then Buck had done something wrong. Maybe he hadn’t known what it was yet, maybe it had taken him years to figure out, but there had always been something. There had to be, because otherwise all that trying meant nothing. All those years of looking back and wondering what he could have done differently, what he could have said, who he could’ve been if only he’d understood sooner-

What is he supposed to do with the idea that none of it had been his fault?

He can’t just take all those years and reduce them down, turn them into something that happened to him. He doesn’t know how to do that. He doesn’t know how to look at everything that’s transpired and just decide that he was a kid, that he didn’t know better, that somebody else should have been there to stop it.

“If it wasn’t my fault,” he says, forcing the confession out of his mouth even though it cuts like a million shards of glass. “If it wasn’t me, then I don’t know who I am. I look at myself in the mirror and I have no idea who I’m supposed to see looking back.”

Maddie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t challenge him or comfort him or apologise. It’s better that way, he thinks. It’s better that there’s quiet. He can’t handle any more of her words right now. It’s too much.

It’s just… He’s spent so long measuring himself by the damage he leaves behind that he isn’t sure what remains when he takes the damage away. He knows how to be useful, and brave, and charming, and fun. He knows how to make people laugh and how to throw himself in front of danger and how to love people with a frightening, desperate intensity. 

But without the guilt? Without the constant need to make himself smaller, better, safer, easier?

He doesn’t know.

“I don’t know how to do this,” he admits.

Maddie strokes his hair. “Do what?”

“Forgive myself.”

She’s quiet for a long time, and Buck uses it to start piecing himself back together as much as he can. His body feels emptied out, heavy and loose and aching. His face is sticky, and his fingers have gone numb from where he’s been gripping her shirt too tightly, and when he pulls back just enough to scrub at his cheeks, he notices there’s a damp patch where she’d cradled him.

He tries not to be embarrassed, but his ears flush and he has to look away.

“You don’t have to do it all at once,” Maddie says finally, once she’s given him the time and space to find the ground beneath his feet again. “I know that’s not how you usually do things, but I think that’s how it has to be for now.”

Buck gives a watery little laugh that doesn’t sound much like him. “I guess. I usually just…” He gestures vaguely, helplessly, because the rest of the sentence is obvious. He runs. He throws himself into things. He finds somebody else to save. He pushes harder and faster and further until he can’t go anymore, and then he breaks into a million pieces and can’t put himself back together again.

Maddie smiles at him. “I know,” she says again, tender and fond and loving.

Buck closes his eyes, puts his head back on her shoulder, and holds on.

*

Eddie makes him promise, right back at the very start, that Buck won’t let him go too far. 

“You have to stop me,” he says, lips brushing against Buck’s, hands hot against his waist as they press together in the bed. “I’ll go too far if you let me. I need you to remind me where the line is, keep me on the correct side of it. I don’t want to hurt you, and I need you to promise that you won’t let me.”

Buck wants his fingers on more of Eddie’s skin, wants to drown in the kisses he’s been craving for years, wants to lose himself in Eddie’s touch, wants to climb inside Eddie’s skin and live there and never leave.

“Okay,” he pants, pushing and writhing and twisting, because he’s wanted this for so long, and he’ll let Eddie do whatever he wants if it means Buck gets to have this. Gets to have him.

But Eddie holds firm, pulls away just enough that his eyes gleam solemn and serious in the low light. “Buck,” he says, strong and unrelenting. “Promise me. Don’t let me hurt you. Please.”

Buck stares up at him, takes in the sharp jaw and the moist lips and the medallion around Eddie’s neck, and he says, “I promise.”

He means it in the moment. 

Even at the end of it all, he doesn’t consider it a promise broken.

*

Hours and hours later, after the worst of it has passed and they’ve managed to eat something and put the mugs in the sink and order food that neither of them really want, Buck finds himself curled into the corner of Maddie’s couch with his feet tucked underneath him and a glass of wine balanced carefully in his hands. The television is on, but neither of them are watching it; some old sitcom plays quietly in the background, laughter rising and falling at all the appropriate places, and every now and then Maddie’s phone buzzes with another text from Chimney checking in.

Maddie sits quietly beside him, nursing her own glass, and Buck knows her well enough to know that she’s offering him the chance to steer the next few moments wherever he needs them to go. She’s waiting for him to pick the topic, for him to decide if he’s had enough talking, for him to redraw the line in the sand.

And he loves her so fiercely in that moment that he takes a deep breath and wrenches open that last, blistering, festering wound.

“Eddie broke up with me.”

He says it fast, punctuates it with a gulp of wine, and he focuses on the way his fingers wrap around the stem of the glass rather than risk a look at his sister. He feels very young and silly all of a sudden, wrapped up in misery over a heartbreak that he should’ve seen coming. It was never going to last. His fault or not, Buck isn’t the type of thing that people stay for.

Maddie hums and leans forward to set her glass on the coffee table, taking careful measure of him. “I’m so sorry, Buck,” she says, and means it. “Did he say why?”

Buck’s lips twist bitterly, because she doesn’t even sound surprised. “No. But I think I can read between the lines.”

“Buck.”

“I think he just got tired of me, you know?” He huffs a tired laugh, because he’s so tired of it all now. He’s too tired. He’s cried out his heart and now there’s just nothing in his chest where it used to be. “I mean, I don’t blame him. I’m a lot, we both know that, and I think maybe, for a while, Eddie was willing to put up with it because he loved me, but…” He shrugs. “I don’t know. I think he just finally realised he didn’t have to.”

“Buck,” Maddie says again, pained. “Don’t talk like that.”

But Buck can’t do this again with her, can’t survive another conversation where somebody tries to prise open the things he’s spent years keeping carefully shut. There’s only so much of himself he can give to Maddie tonight before he starts to feel like there won’t be anything left to put back together when he goes home.

He’s just…he’s just tired. He’s spent. He’s done. He has nothing left to give. He’s stripped himself down to nothing, and Maddie has reached inside and scooped out all of those ugly tangles, and now he’s empty. He’s nothing. He has nothing, anymore.

“I can’t keep doing it,” he says quietly, more to himself than to his sister as he stares into the inky red pool of wine he holds in his hands. “I can’t keep going back to him. It’s killing me, Mads. It’s killing me.”

She shifts her position so that she’s sitting closer to him, her body heat leeching into his freezing skin and the scent of her shampoo sweetening the air. “Then don’t,” she tells him, like it should be obvious. “Stop torturing yourself. I know you love him, and I know you always want to put his happiness first, but sometimes you have to prioritise yourself.”

“I don’t want to be selfish-”

“It’s not selfish.” It’s fierce, the way she says it, like she knows first-hand what it does to the soul to sacrifice yourself for someone you love. Maybe she does. Maybe Doug had taught her, and she’d sworn never to forget. “You deserve to be happy.”

And there it is again, that impossible space between wanting and deserving.

Because Buck wants Eddie. He wants the house and the bed and Chris yelling from the other room and Eddie’s hand finding his in the dark. He wants the stupid domestic things, like Eddie’s questionable cooking and arguing over whose turn it is to vacuum and washing each other’s hair after a long shift. He wants the soft touches, and he wants the hard ones too, and he wants the two of them tangled together under the sheets.

But wanting something doesn’t mean you get it, and maybe deserving it doesn’t mean much either.

“I think you need to let him go,” Maddie says, and Buck thinks, maybe she’s right, and, well.

That’s that, then, isn’t it.

He finishes his wine eventually, and Maddie tips against him, and they sit there until they fall asleep. Buck stays for breakfast in the morning, because there’s no reason to rush home to an empty loft, and he plays with Jee when she wakes up, letting her sticky little fingers wrap around his while Maddie moves around the kitchen. For a little while, it’s almost normal.

Eventually, though, he has to leave, so he presses a final kiss to the side of Maddie’s head, squeezes her shoulder, and promises he’ll call her later even though they both know he probably won’t. 

He’s gone before Chimney gets off-shift, slipping away as quietly as he knows how and pretending that his sister isn’t watching him go.

He doesn’t feel better, really.

He doesn’t feel much of anything.

*

Buck is careful with Eddie after that.

He doesn’t really mean to be. It’s not some conscious decision he makes when he wakes up in the morning, and he certainly doesn’t sit down and write a list of all the things he needs to stop doing. He doesn’t even really realise he’s doing it at first, because he’s still so worn out that he’s keeping his distance from everybody, at least at the start. 

He waves of Hen’s careful mothering, ignores Chimney’s probing questions, smiles weakly at Ravi’s attempt to lure him away from the lounge, looks away when Eddie draws near. 

He stops leaning against Eddie when they’re sitting in the apparatus bay, stops stealing bites of whatever Eddie brings for lunch, stops wandering into the kitchen when Eddie is making coffee so he can steal a cup. When Eddie nudges his knees against Buck’s in the back of the truck, Buck doesn’t nudge back and keeps his eyes fixed firmly out the window. 

It hurts. Everything hurts. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Buck is so tired.

And he can’t keep pretending this thing he has with Eddie is something that it isn’t. 

“You okay?” Eddie asks eventually, cornering him in the locker room, brown eyes scanning his face so carefully. His hands hover uselessly in front of him, like he wants to touch but doesn’t know if he’s allowed, and Buck misses him so much it feels like he’s bleeding, and yet.

He quirks his lips, but he only manages a tiny grimace that he quickly shakes away. “I’m fine,” he says flatly, and when Eddie only stares at him expectantly, he sighs and says, “I’m just tired, Eddie.”

“Come to mine after work,” Eddie offers immediately. “You’ve been distant, and Chris misses you. I’ll order dinner and we can just chill. You’ve always said you sleep better in my bed than yours.”

Buck wants, but he’s tired and Maddie says to let go, and he can’t keep letting Eddie use him like this. He can’t be what Eddie needs from him anymore, can’t separate his body from his heart, can’t keep giving without taking.

He needs to let Eddie go. He needs Eddie to let him go.

He shakes his head. “Maybe another time,” he says, like this isn’t killing him, like this isn’t breaking his heart, like he doesn’t wish that things could be different and Eddie could still be his. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, sounding distant and far away and hurt, but he doesn’t try to stop Buck from walking away, so Buck thinks that says enough.

Eddie doesn’t talk to him for the rest of the shift. 

*

Or the day after.

*

Or the day after that, either.

*

It takes Eddie three days.

*

The knock comes a little after seven, hard enough that Buck hears it from the kitchen over the rattle of the knife against the chopping block. He pauses with the blade hovering over the onion, listening as the sound echoes through the loft and fizzles out, swallowed up by the oppressive quiet. He hesitates, but then there’s another knock, harder and more insistent, and he wipes his hands on the tea towel hanging from the over handle and goes to answer it.

It’s Eddie. Of course it’s Eddie. Buck should have been expecting this.

For one brief, stupid second, his heart trips over itself, kicks hard against his ribs, squeals in joy and longing and relief. For just that brief heartbeat, Eddie is here to have dinner, to press close to Buck’s side and tangle their fingers together and share the same air. Eddie is here to push him to his knees, to draw him up to his mouth, to send him skittering off that cliff because they’ve always been so good at talking with their bodies.

But then Buck sees Eddie’s face, and he knows that Eddie is not here for any of those things.

There’s nothing soft about him tonight. His hair is still damp at the temples, as though he’d come straight from the shower, and his jaw is clenched so tightly that Buck can see the muscles working beneath that caramel skin. His shoulders are rigid beneath his shirt, his hands are shoved into his pockets, and there’s a flush high across his cheekbones that Buck recognises immediately because he’s seen it before. Usually just before Eddie says something he regrets.

“Hey,” Buck says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

Eddie stares at him for a beat too long, and then he says, “What the fuck is going on with you?”

Buck’s fingers tighten around the edge of the door.

Eddie looks frustrated with his lack of answer, stepping forward and shouldering his way into the loft before Buck can really make a decision at all. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks now, but these past few days have left me completely in the dark. I mean, you won’t answer me, you barely speak to me at work, and every time I try to get near you, you disappear!”

Buck falls back automatically, letting him in and swinging the door shut behind him, and it hurts, because Eddie has done this hundreds of times before and it's never felt like this. He’s walked through this doorway with his hands full of groceries of takeout or Chris’s schoolbag, kicked off his shoes and made himself comfortable in the space that Buck always thought of as his own but never truly managed to keep separate from Eddie.

Tonight, though, there is no sharing space with Eddie. There is just trying to survive him, trying to ignore him, trying to swallow down that fizzling pain that Buck’s been drowning in every single day since the break up. 

“I don’t understand what you want me to do,” Buck says quietly when Eddie turns to face him, expression thunderous.

“What I want you to do?” Eddie repeats, and there’s something incredulous in the way he says it, something that makes Buck shrink back with his shoulders creeping up towards his ears. “I want you to fucking talk to me!”

“What do you want me to say?”

Eddie makes a sharp, disbelieving sound and drags both hands through his hair, cheeks puffing out as he rolls his rage around in his mouth. Buck watches him carefully, eyes snagging on the way Eddie’s fingers catch briefly in the dark strands of air before falling away, and the sight is so painfully ordinary that his chest aches.

He wants to go to him, wants to reach out and smooth the tension from between Eddie’s eyebrows the way he has done a thousand times before, wants to press his face into Eddie’s shoulder and let the familiar smell of him make everything feel less impossible.

But Buck is so tired, and he has nothing left to give, and Maddie told him to let go.

So he stays where he is, and he doesn’t reach out.

Eddie stares at him for a long moment, and when he speaks again, his voice has dropped, the anger still there but threaded with something that Buck doesn’t really recognise anymore. “All I’ve ever wanted from you is the truth. What the hell is going on, Buck?”

It’s such an absurd notion that Buck almost laughs, except there’s nothing funny about any of this and he’s breaking apart. Eddie wants the truth, wants Buck to be the one to finally sever that thinning thread, wants Buck to take the blame and be the one to walk away, even though Eddie’s the one who handed his clothes back and broke his heart without a damn word of apology.

And Buck’s been trying. He’s been giving and giving and giving, handing over his body and his time and his love, taking whatever is left of them and holding it carefully enough that it wouldn’t make a bigger mess when it’s finally all over.

He’s been trying, and now he has nothing left, and he has to stop. 

“I don’t know what you want from me anymore,” he says again, and hates how small his voice sounds in the enormity of the moment. “Eddie, I can’t keep doing this anymore.”

Eddie recoils, stung, and laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound, is sharp and grating and so, so angry, and he says, “You’re breaking up with me?”

“I’m trying to give you what you want!”

“How is this what I want?” Eddie shoots back scathingly, and advances a step. 

Buck scrubs at his face, tries to hold the fraying edges of his sanity together. “You said you didn’t want-” He stops, because saying it aloud feels humiliating, childish, like he’s being petty and vindictive, even though he’s not. “You don’t want the relationship anymore.”

And it’s like Buck has thrown water over him, because Eddie’s temper sputters and banks, bewilderment saturating his features and wrestling with the anger as he stops dead in his tracks. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Buck looks away, looks over where the half-chopped onion is still sitting on the cutting board, the knife laying carelessly beside it, blade gleaming in the light. He can’t even remember what he’d been making before Eddie arrived, can’t remember if the recipe had been Bobby’s or his mom’s or something he’d made up himself. Does it matter? Does any of this matter?

He’s so tired, and he wants-

“I know it’s not what you wanted,” he says, softer now, and meets Eddie’s eyes with a bitter smile. “But I get it.”

“Get what?”

“That you’re done.”

Eddie winces like Buck’s landed a physical blow, and that confusion is stronger now, curling around him like a physical shroud, and he’s staring at Buck like he thinks Buck is crazy. “I’m not done with you,” he says, blank and unsteady. “What are you saying? Where is this coming from? Buck, what the fuck is going on?”

And that anger is still there, still burning just underneath Eddie’s surface, but there’s something else there now too, something frightened and wounded and so achingly familiar that Buck can’t look at it head on, can’t acknowledge it, can’t bear the burden of it anymore. 

It’s too much. All of this is too much.

“You broke up with me,” he says, blunt and honest.

And Eddie goes very still, goes very pale. His eyes are blown wide, his mouth open, and he looks so genuinely taken off guard that Buck almost surrenders, almost lurches forward for a kiss, almost drops to his knees to grovel for forgiveness. 

He wants. He wants, he wants, he wants, and Eddie is right there.

“I did not,” Eddie finally says, after a long moment.

Buck doesn’t know what game this is, doesn’t know why Eddie’s playing it, doesn’t know what the rules are or what part he’s supposed to be filling in. “You gave me my clothes back.”

And it sounds so feeble when he says it like that, sounds so harmless and normal and small, but Buck knows better. He knows. He still remembers the smell of them, the feel of them in his arms, the heartbreak they carried buried in the cotton. It had followed him home, saturated every corner of his life, flayed his insides and left him rotten and bleeding.

“The clothes,” Eddie repeats, and there’s something almost hysterical caught in his throat. “The clothes I gave you after doing the laundry. The clothes that belong to you. The clothes I gave back to you because you were saying your wardrobe was dwindling and you didn’t know why. Those clothes.”

Buck’s throat goes dry, because it’s can’t be- Eddie can’t do this to him-

“No,” he says numbly.

“Yes,” Eddie says.

“No, you-” He falters, because Eddie is looking at him like he really doesn’t understand, and suddenly Buck doesn’t know how to hold onto the certainty that has kept him upright for the past month, doesn’t know how to hold onto that familiar pain that’s pillowed him. “You gave them to me, and they were all folded up, and you said that you didn’t need my stuff there anymore. You wanted me out of the house. You-”

“I never said that. I never said I wanted you gone. Fucking hell, did you really think I’d do that to you? Is that what you think of me?”

Bucks mouth opens, but nothing comes out.

There are too many answers, all of them terrible, and he can’t say any of them, not to Eddie and not like this. Part of him wants to say yes, he really did think that Eddie wanted him gone, that he’s spent the last month and a bit watching every little piece of their relationship slip through his fingers even as Eddie drove him into the mattress. 

He wants to say that standing there with that armful of laundry had felt like being handed the remains of a life he’s never been allowed to want, that he’d gone home carrying the smell of Eddie’s detergent on his skin and cried until there was nothing left in him to cry.

He could say all of that, if he was cruel, if he was mean, if he didn’t want this so badly.

Instead, he just twists his fingers together and keeps beating the dead horse. “You gave me my things.” 

Eddie makes a frustrated noise, like he wants to interrupt, but Buck just keeps going, because he doesn’t know how to explain something that should be so painfully obvious. “You’ve never done that before, not like that. You were giving me everything back. All at once.”

“Because the clothes were yours,” Eddie argues back, and he sounds almost exasperated, like they’re arguing over something simple instead of something life-ending, and he can’t understand how Buck has managed to blow it so out of proportion. 

“I know-”

“Then what are we doing? Why are we fighting about this?”

There’s helplessness now, crowding Eddie’s face and his voice and his body, and Buck doesn’t know what to do about it. He wants to fix it, wants to step closer and put his hands on Eddie’s cheeks and tell him that it's okay, that he doesn’t have to be upset, that Buck understands.

But Buck doesn’t understand, not anymore. He stopped understanding a long time ago, and he’s just been floating along, untethered, for so long now that he forgets what it’s like to feel solid ground under his feet.

“It felt different,” he says, almost defensively, because he doesn’t like feeling like an idiot, doesn’t like that Eddie’s trying to convince him that nothing ever happened at all. 

But it did happen. It did. Buck remembers. Buck knows.

“How?” Eddie asks.

Buck can still remember the horrible, sinking certainty settling into him, can still remember the queasy feeling, the sudden clarity, the crack of his heart splitting down the middle. He didn’t imagine that. It had been real, even if Eddie was trying to pretend it wasn’t.

“It felt like you were cleaning me out, like you were making sure I didn’t have a reason to come back.”

“Buck, I-”

“But then you kissed me.” His voice cracks, and he stops talking.

Because suddenly he’s back there again, standing in Eddie’s bedroom with Eddie’s hands on his hips and that familiar little smirk playing at the corner of Eddie’s mouth. He can remember exactly how it felt to want him, even while his heart was fracturing, how he’d convinced himself that this was all he had left to offer Eddie and that Buck should be grateful for it, because something was better than nothing and Buck had never been very good at turning down something he wanted.

“I didn’t understand that,” he admits in something just above a whisper, and he can’t meet Eddie’s eyes anymore. “I thought maybe you still wanted me, you just… You just didn’t want me as your boyfriend.”

And he hates it, hates having to explain it, hates hearing the words in how own voice because they sound so much uglier outside his head than they ever did when he was alone with them.

For a long, long time, Eddie says nothing at all.

Buck watches Eddie’s hands flex at his side, tendons stark against his tanned skin, because Eddie carries his emotions in his body and not his chest and the signs are obvious if you know where to look. Like those hands, that are capable of such violence but never against his son, or his legs, that have spent so long carrying the weight of Eddie’s guilt that they’re strong enough to carry the people that he saves.

Finally, when Eddie manages to find his voice again, he sounds raw and blistered, sounds like he’s back on that war front, sounds like Buck has gutted him.

“You let me fuck you,” he says, and it’s coarse and it’s horrible and Buck hates it, but they’re both too far gone to stop now. “Even after what you thought happened, you let me-” He chokes on the rest of it, can’t bring himself to continue, and Buck-

Buck can’t help himself. 

He can’t let Eddie suffer, can’t let him take all the responsibility for himself, can’t let him drown in the same pain Buck has been swimming through.

“I thought that was what you wanted,” Buck tells him, and he means it like a blessing, like forgiveness, like salvation.

But Eddie just shakes his head, takes a step backwards, rubs at his face. “What?”

“The sex.”

“Buck.”

“You didn’t want me anymore, but you still wanted…” He can’t finish it, can’t cheapen it, can’t accuse Eddie of something so crude and awful. He knows better. It still hurts. “And I tried, Eddie. I tried. But I can’t keep doing it anymore.”

It feels important, somehow, that Eddie knows how hard Buck had really tried. It feels important that Eddie understands that Buck isn’t giving up easily, that he fought for this, that he’s not stopping because he wants to. Eddie needs to know that Buck will never not want this, that Buck will always come when he calls, but-

He has so little left to give. And Maddie said that Buck has to let go.

But Buck had tried. He’d come when Eddie had called, had climbed into that bed and wrapped himself around the man he loved and pretended that it didn’t matter there were no promises waiting for him on the other side of it. He’d kissed Eddie like he wasn’t breaking his own heart every time, had let Eddie touch him and hold him and pull him apart because that’s what Eddie had wanted, and Buck had decided somewhere between the first night and the fifth and the tenth that maybe he could survive on scraps if the alternative was having nothing at all.

He’d tried.

“I thought I could do it,” he says when Eddie stays eerily silent, and he sounds strange to his own ears, worn thin from too many nights spent talking himself into things he didn’t want to believe. “I thought if I could just keep it separate then it wouldn’t matter. I thought it was better than nothing. And I know it wasn’t ideal, but I could live with it, but I just… I just can’t anymore, and I’m so sorry.”

Eddie stares at him, and that anger has gone so, so cold and so very far away, and suddenly he just looks so strange standing there in Buck’s loft. He looks out of place and devastated and so much older than he is, like Buck has aged him beyond his years.

Finally, he says, “You thought I was using you.”

Buck wants to deny it on instinct, wants to swallow the lure and take the weight of it on his own shoulders because that’s what he was made for, but he hears Maddie’s voice in his ear, hears the tears in her voice that day, and he finds that he can’t do it. He can’t spare Eddie from this. Not anymore.

It doesn’t matter anyway, because Eddie’s waking back up now, and he doesn’t wait for Buck to say anything before words are tumbling out of him, haphazard and distressed and sick.

“You really thought I didn’t want you anymore,” Eddie says, like it hurts, like he’s wounded, like he’s struggling to breathe. “When you came over-” He inhales sharply. “When I called and you came over, you thought I was-”

He can’t finish.

Buck’s stomach twists. “You wanted me,” he says, because it’s that simple. “That’s why I kept coming back.”

“Jesus,” Eddie whispers, closing his eyes and backing away, keeping his hands raised slightly like he’s getting ready to push Buck away, like the space between them isn’t enough and he needs some kind of barrier. 

He’s gone ashen and sallow, lips thin and bloodless, his earlier anger completely eviscerated and replaced with horror. It’s not a grief that suits him, not a grief that is familiar, not a grief that Buck knows what to do with. It’s not a grief that Eddie has ever had for Shannon, for the war, for his son, for Bobby. This is new, and ugly, and awful, and Buck is useless against it as it threatens to devour Eddie whole right there in front of him.

“Eddie,” he says, but Eddie shakes his head again, holds his hands up higher, and Buck knows that means to stay away, to give him space, but he’s so worried that Eddie is going somewhere that Buck can’t reach. “Eddie.”

“Why would you let me do that to you?” Eddie asks, like he’s carved it out of himself, like it’s physically painful to ask. “Buck, why would you let me do that to you? Why would you-”

“Because I love you.” 

Because I can’t do this without you. Because I’m greedy and selfish and I wanted to keep you, even if it meant never having you the way I wanted ever again.

Eddie makes a low, pained noise; it catches somewhere deep in chest, almost animalistic in its misery, and Buck flinches away from it because he didn’t mean for this to happen. He didn’t mean for it to go like this, didn’t mean to pull Eddie apart like this.

“Eddie,” he says when there’s nothing else between them for a long moment. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“I was doing laundry.”

The simplicity of it nearly undoes him.

Eddie presses his palms into his eyes, grinds down like he’s trying to push the swell of emotions back down into the depths of his chest, and he lets out a breath thats thick and scraped raw. “I wasn’t trying to get rid of you, and I wasn’t sending you some fucking message. I wasn’t…” He stops, jaw clenching, but he’s not angry anymore, not really. “Jesus Christ.”

Buck doesn’t understand, and this doesn’t feel real, and he just-

“But I thought-”

“I know what you thought,” Eddie says, dropping his arms. There’s still hurt on his face and in his eyes, still something devastated and almost impossible in the set of his mouth, but beneath it is something that brushes up against Buck’s hurts like a soothing balm. 

Love.

There’s still love here. 

Buck starts to think, maybe, he might’ve gotten it wrong this time.

“I never broke up with you,” Eddie says firmly and risks moving forward again, closing the gap between them but not touching, not yet. He’s scared, maybe. “I don’t know how you heard that in a pile of clean laundry, Buck, but I promise you I never said it. I never meant it. I never even thought it. I want you. I love you. I can’t do this without you.”

Buck’s eyes drop to the floor between them, and shame prickles at the back of his neck.

“So we’re still together?”

It’s such a small question and it’s so unbearably embarrassing after everything else they’ve said to each other, but it’s the only thing that really matters anymore. All the rest of it - the clothes, the weeks of confusion, the awful misunderstanding that somehow grew large enough to swallow everything between them, the conversation with Maddie, the fact that Buck has given away so much of himself that he barely has enough left for himself - it can wait. 

He can deal with it all later, when he has the energy to look at it without feeling like he’s coming apart at the seams.

Right now, he just needs to know if he gets to keep Eddie.

“I know what you want me to say,” Eddie says gingerly, nervous but so sweet it hurts. “And I want to say it. God, Buck, I want you to come home with me right now and pretend none of this ever happened.”

“I want that too,” Buck says, because he does. He wants. He wants so badly, and Eddie is offering it to him, and Buck is too weak to resist.

Eddie’s jaw clenches. “But I don’t think we can do that.”

And Buck-

Well, he should have known. 

He swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat, gives a small nod, tries to put on a brave face because of course. Of course there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. He built his whole life around the fact that he never gets what he wants, that there’s always a price, that good things don’t last and he should stop hoping.

“Okay,” he says and nods again.

“No, I don’t-” Eddie exhales sharply, letting out a wordless noise of frustration as he regathers himself and picks his words a bit more carefully. “Just listen to me, okay?”

He takes a breath, and there is something painfully deliberate about the way he gathers himself before speaking again, like every word has to be weighed carefully before he lets it loose. The anger is gone now, but the hurt hasn't disappeared with it; it's settled somewhere deeper, worn into the lines around Eddie's eyes and the exhausted set of his shoulders, and Buck suddenly understands that Eddie isn't asking for distance because he doesn't want him.

He's asking because he does.

“I love you. That's not the part I'm confused about. I want to be with you. I want everything we had, and I want more of it. But I can't watch you do this to yourself again.”

Buck frowns. “I won't.”

The answer comes too quickly, too automatically, and they both know it.

“I know you mean that.”

There is no accusation in Eddie's voice, which somehow makes it harder to hear. Buck knows he means it. He knows that if Eddie asked him tomorrow whether he would ever do this again, Buck would swear up and down that he wouldn't, that he knows better now, that he understands what went wrong. 

But underneath that certainty is the uncomfortable knowledge that he had believed he was doing the right thing before, too. He had thought he was being loving, was being selfless. He had thought that if he could just make himself small enough, easy enough, useful enough, then Eddie would keep him around.

He doesn't know how to promise that part of him won't come back when he's frightened.

Eddie steps closer, but not enough to touch him.

“But you thought you were protecting me,” he continues. “You thought you were doing the right thing by swallowing everything you wanted and giving me whatever you thought I needed instead. And if we just go back to normal tomorrow, how do I know you won't do the same thing the next time you're scared?”

I can’t trust you anymore, is what he doesn’t say, but Buck hears it anyway, and it’s like a knife being plunged into his gut.

Because Eddie isn’t wrong. He’s not saying it to be mean, not saying it to cause any more pain, not saying it because he’s had enough of this. 

And even though Buck wants to be different, wants to have an answer that will make Eddie feel safe, something solid and reassuring that he can put into Eddie’s hands and say, Here. This is proof. You can trust me with this.

But all he has is the truth.

“I don’t know,” he admits reluctantly, and it feels a little bit like giving up. 

“Neither do I.”

Buck aches and he wants and he just…he has nothing, anymore. “So what do we do?”

For a moment Eddie doesn't answer. He looks at Buck with an expression Buck can't quite read, and Buck has the strange sense that they're both standing on opposite sides of some great divide, weighing each other up and deciding if it’s worth rebuilding the bridge they burned.

Then Eddie seems to make a decision and reaches for him, brushing those familiar fingers against Buck’s face and finally taking those final steps closer. “We start again,” he says firmly, and Buck doesn’t dare kiss him but he lets Eddie hold him close and take his weight, and he thinks that maybe he can do this after all.

Maybe he can start again.

*

“I’m terrified,” he admits to Maddie days and weeks later, sitting at her counter once again because Frank says that he and Eddie need a minimum of two hours completely away from each other after a session. It makes Buck’s skin itch, but he’s learning to live with that. 

Maddie hums as she bushes through Jee’s hair, trying her best to tame the wild nest. “Of course you are,” she says breezily, wrangling the hair tie around her wrist. “You grew up in a heavily dysfunctional family, have terrible coping skills, and now have to put genuine work into probably one of the first healthy relationships you’ve ever had. That’s scary stuff.”

Buck lets that slide because it’s not like she’s wrong.

“I just…” He sighs. “I know how to throw myself forward, you know? I-I love too much and I give too much and I run headfirst into everything, but I have absolutely no idea how to do this. How to take something apart and rebuild it, piece by piece. I don’t even think Eddie’s had to do this before.”

Maddie gives him a dry look. “I wouldn’t exactly say that Eddie’s the paragon of good relationships.”

“Hey,” Buck says on Eddie’s behalf.

Maddie finishes up with Jee’s hair, pressing a kiss to her daughter’s head before letting her scurry off to catch the last of the cartoon playing in the living room. “Look, is working on a relationship hard? Yes. But is it worth it? Definitely. I mean, Chimney and I have had our fair share of issues, but I wouldn’t trade what we have for anything.”

Buck screws up his face. “Gross.”

Maddie flicks her fingers at him, but she’s smiling. “Anyway. What I’m trying to say is that he’s good for you and you’re good for him and you love each other. Everything else just takes a little bit of effort and some good communication.”

“I am the poster boy of bad communication.”

“Which is why you’re seeing Frank for couples therapy. You’re supposed to be learning something.”

“I’ve learned that he prefers Eddie over me.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“You haven’t been part of those sessions!”

Maddie huffs at him like he’s being ridiculous, but she’s happy and Buck doesn’t have the heart to let his insecurities and anxiety ruin this moment.

He’s tired of being his own worst enemy. He’s tired of handing control over to the monsters that live under his bed.

He wants to try. He wants to be better.

He wants.