Archive of Our Own

The only thing Eddie brings home from El Paso, other than his son and all the stuff he had just moved there with not even half a year earlier, is the dawning revelation that he’s never truly been happy, and a latent Southern politeness he’s never quite able to shake. 

It springs up in Eddie in moments so arbitrary they take even him by surprise. Such as now: 

“Thank you,” says Eddie, his own voice soft and sugary in his ears, in response to the woman who has just spoken. “He is.”

The woman smiles and moves away, oblivious to how Eddie’s body locks up the instant the words exit his mouth and then hang there in the air, naked and raw for him to relive. 

“Your husband is so sweet, ” she’d said, passing by Eddie on her way to the refreshments. And they’d both just stood for a moment, watching where she’d gestured: Buck, the late afternoon sun limning him bronze, Mara standing on his toes and her little hands gripping his thick waist. The two of them clumsy with laughter, Buck waltzing her around and around the low wooden pallet floor the Wilsons have set up in their backyard for this very purpose, Mara’s head tipped back so she can beam up at him, Buck’s hands so careful and secure on her shoulders, his sense of rhythm non-existent, the tawny triangle of hair at the nape of his neck gone dewey with sweat. 

Eddie had been watching them for a long time when the woman wandered over. So long the ice in his drink had started to melt, the whole thing sweating down his wrist. 

Thank you. He is. 

As if Buck is Eddie’s. Eddie’s to receive compliments about. Eddie’s to be fond of. As if Buck is Eddie’s husband. 

“Uh,” says Chimney.

“Please shut up,” says Eddie without turning around, so mortified he can hear that childlike whine in the back of his throat threatening to come through. His mouth is very dry. He takes a sip out of the cup he’s been holding aimlessly as he watches Buck and Mara, finds his lemonade watered down and weak. He presses the wet plastic of the cup to his hot cheek instead, the one on the side where Chimney is standing, so he doesn’t have to see his huge delighted eyes and stupid grinning mouth. 

“Hey, hey,” says Chimney, holding his hands up in surrender. Eddie can still see him in the sliver of space between the wall of the cup and the curve of his eye socket. Chimney’s eyebrows go up, his grin goes innocent. Like butter wouldn’t melt. “I didn’t say anything.”

The song ends. In the brief pause before the next one, Eddie watches Buck help Mara execute her dismount with much more grace than any of the dancing that had come before it. He does an extravagant little bow her way that makes her giggle, and she wobbles through a curtsey, and Buck’s smile is that exuberant adoring one he always wears around kids, the corners of his eyes crinkled up from how big the expression stretches his cheeks. 

That sugar from Eddie’s voice has infiltrated his bloodstream. Slow and thick and sweet and hot. 

Eddie used to love dancing. 

“Neither did I,” says Eddie, an obvious lie. He’s not sure why he’s arguing. He should just walk away. He should have just found something to do that wasn’t staring at his best friend across a crowded party in the broad late afternoon daylight. “I mean, it’s just—it’s awkward to correct people. So.”

Previously, Eddie has always done it anyway. The cashier at the grocery store that time Eddie was sick but insisted on doing the shopping on Sunday because Sunday was Shopping Day and Lord knows the Diaz house could use some structure, so Buck had rolled his eyes and bundled Eddie into the passenger side of his own damn truck and then, when they got to the store, had made Eddie lean against the cart as they drifted their way slowly down the aisles, Eddie calling off items as he saw them in what he can now acknowledge was a congested and imperious manner, Buck darting to grab them off the shelves before Eddie could even lift a finger. The cashier had said something that didn’t stick in Eddie’s mind through the fever-haze, something about Eddie’s husband taking such good care of him. And Eddie had said, “We’re not married,” maybe a little too loudly. He still remembers how sharply Buck’s eyes had snapped to him. He still remembers the way his belly had gone all warm and fluttery at her words. 

Countless people have seen the two of them with Chris and just assumed. One of his friend’s moms had apparently thought Buck and Eddie were married for two years before she’d said something offhand about it, and Eddie had to correct her, feeling like his brain was a record player, just stick, stick, sticking on her words, replaying them until he had to shake his head and jostle them loose. 

The barista at the coffee shop by their house, when Buck had flirted with him last month in that casual, friendly way he has, and he’d been so offended on Eddie’s behalf it almost caused a scene until a hot-cheeked Eddie clarified. Half of the 133. Tommy. 

Chimney’s eyebrows do something both more incredulous and more amused. “Are people often assuming things about you and our good friend Buck that you have to correct them on?”

“What’s that about correcting me?”

“Nothing,” says Eddie, at the same time that Chim says, “Not what I said.”

Normally this would poke at Buck, scratch at him, annoy him until he wore everybody down and got the answer he felt was being hidden from him. But it’s like the sunlight, the dancing, the laughter, has slowed him down all easy and languid. Softened him. Liquified him. He’s one long tower of shimmering gold where he sidles up close to Eddie, smelling of sunhot skin and melting cologne and sticky fruit punch. 

He tilts his head as he looks down at Eddie. Smiling, smiling. The curls clinging to his forehead, the downy line of his gilded eyelashes. The hollow beneath his Adam’s apple glimmering with sweat. 

Your husband is so sweet. 

“Mara was really keeping me on my toes out there,” Buck says. 

In an easy, thoughtless motion, he takes the cup out of Eddie’s loose hand. It’s presumptuous, assuming that Eddie is open to sharing, should be annoying. The unpracticed instinctual way Buck inserts himself into everything of Eddie’s. 

Eddie lets him. Of course. Watches the pulse of his esophagus through his skin as he takes a long drink. Swallows down a long dry throat, a helpless echo of Buck’s gesture. 

“She was dancing circles around you, man,” Eddie says. 

It’s automatic to tease him, friendly and light, instead of saying the honest thing, which is that Eddie would have stood here in the full sunlit heat and watched Buck fumble with all that gawky free-spirited abandon around the dance floor until the the Rapture commenced or Buck stopped, whichever came first. 

Buck grins and hands Eddie his cup back, half-full. His thumb grazes the innermost curve of Eddie’s palm, where Eddie’s skin has gone tacky with condensation. “Well, it’s her party,” Buck says, amiable. “I figured I’d let her have the spotlight.”

He is. He is. He is. 

The Wilsons are throwing a party to celebrate Mara’s adoption being finalized, and it’s in full swing. It’s probably the most untainted joy Eddie has felt from his friends and family since Bobby died a few months ago, except for maybe at the birth of Baby Bobby; true, unbridled celebration for this little girl and her family. It is effervescent and contagious. 

It is also, for someone like Eddie, bordering on overwhelming. Not in a bad way. But in a way that feels like other people’s heads are breaching the surface, and Eddie’s still stuck down beneath the undertow. Chained down by his ankles. In a way that has him drifting a little closer to Buck, despite the bald, bloody, achingly honest slip of the tongue Chimney just witnessed Eddie committing. 

He tries not to take advantage of it—Buck’s bedrock presence. The grounding physicality of it. Buck is a bulwark, a balustrade. It is calming to be near him, despite his loud nature, the overspilling of every emotion that passes through him so vivid even Eddie can feel them like ink bleeding onto his skin. Or maybe because of it. Like he creates a little bit of a forcefield just by sheer virtue of his personality, a shield that isn’t for Eddie but that he can huddle behind anyway when he’s feeling especially cowardly, taking advantage when he’s too tired to reinforce his own walls. 

Or something. 

“—thought you were Eddie’s husband.”

Eddie tunes back into the conversation in time to catch the tail end of Chimney’s sentence, and whatever steel had started to go molten in the middle of his spine at Buck’s proximity immediately tempers again. He feels his shoulders snap back like someone’s told him to stand at attention. 

“Oh,” says Buck. There’s something in his voice. Sounds like pressing a thumb too hard into a bruise just to feel the ache. Eddie’s too busy trying to channel the desperate panic he’s feeling into a Chimney-directed glare to look at Buck, but he hears his soft breath of a laugh. Feels it, stirring the hair at his temple. “Yeah that happens. Uh. Kind of a lot.”

“That’s what Eddie said,” says Chimney, who is pointedly not looking at Eddie. Eddie loves him, but right now he would do anything to get him to shut the hell up. “Very interesting. Food for thought.”

Eddie’s heart shouldn’t be beating this fast. He’s been shot before, for God’s sake. “It was fine,” he says tightly. He can feel Buck’s eyes on him. “It’s always—it’s fine.”

Something in Chimney’s posture abates, losing that dog-on-the-scent eagerness he gets sometimes when he sees the thread of a good joke and has to chase it, at whatever’s on Eddie’s face. Paralyzed fear, if Eddie had to guess. No matter how hard he’s trying to mask it. 

“Alright, alright,” Chimney says. Placating. A white flag, although Eddie would have to be stupid to assume it one of surrender. 

The conversation shifts—they’re talking about the baby, Chimney showing pictures on his phone like Buck and Eddie haven’t seen him practically every other day since he was born, like he isn’t across the yard swaddled to Maddie’s chest where she sits in the shade with Karen—but Eddie can’t relax back into it. 

Something has been uncovered within him. Scar tissue split open that he thought was fully healed, the wound raw and gaping. Blood flowing that he believed would stay inside forever. 

He can’t name it. But he feels it. 

Buck has his arm propped on the table behind Eddie. It opens up the line of his body, the sturdy breadth of his torso, the pale skin at the secret curve of his bicep where the sun doesn’t reach. Eddie is held in the casual cradle of his body despite the foot and half of warm air between them, secure and surrounded. 

Eddie could just lean back. 

Maybe the woman from earlier would look over again. See Eddie’s body fitted into Buck’s, all their curves and angles aligned. Eddie’s head on Buck’s shoulder, Buck’s arm heavy and proprietary around Eddie’s waist. Like any of the other married couples here. 

Eddie is usually the one to initiate physical contact between himself and Buck. His most selfish indulgence. Buck, who overflows with affection, gregarious sunshine packaged into six feet and two inches of hefty muscle and summer’s day eyes—Buck holds back with Eddie. Eddie knows he does. A cautious gentleness. Something about the militaristic rigidity Eddie can’t shake, even when they’re half drunk on the couch side by side or exhausted after a brutal shift or curled up under the comforter together and Buck could do anything to him and. And Eddie would let him. Something about the way Eddie was born, ensconced from that first breath in a glass case that fits him like a second skin. An invisible layer, but a layer. A permanent separation between himself and the world. Something about Eddie that very clearly makes Buck think he can’t reach out. 

So Eddie does. Measured, careful. Meting out his allotted touches like a starving man on dwindling rations.

“You ok?” murmurs Buck. 

Eddie blinks. Chimney has wandered away while Eddie got lost in his own head; Eddie sees him weaving through the crowd to scoop Jee up and twirl her out onto the dance floor. 

Eddie sways in, lets his shoulder brush Buck’s when he turns to glance up at him. 

Buck’s eyes are too blue. Like God cut out pieces of the sky and sewed them in around his pupils. 

Eddie’s own eyes fall to the little bit of softness that gathers beneath Buck’s chin when he tilts it down, the flushed skin of his neck, the open gap of his collar where the faintest tease of chest hair peeps through, visible only if you know to look for it. Eddie, who has spent the last few months changing for bed in the same room as Buck with only the charged air between them, the last few years before that seeing him undress into his uniform every morning, laughing and talking and totally unaware of the weight of Eddie’s gaze—Eddie knows to look for it. 

“Yeah,” he says, his voice a cloudy undertone of air between them. There’s a couple dozen people crammed into this yard, but the line of Buck’s attention is so direct that it’s easy to forget they’re not alone. “It’s nice to see everyone happy.”

Buck smiles. Eddie doesn’t miss the sadness behind it, because Buck’s not trying to hide it. They’re both thinking the same thing. They don’t have to say it. Bobby should be here. 

“Are you?” Buck asks. “Happy?”

Jesus. Leave it to Buck to hand him a question like a loaded gun in the middle of a little girl’s party. 

Although—no, that’s not fair. It shouldn’t be loaded at all. Should be very simple, in fact. Eddie’s son is back home and no longer hates him, even if Eddie walks around in tip-toe terror that he’ll do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing and send them backsliding; Eddie has his job back with the 118, his family, even if the patriarch of that family is gone and the wound his absence left behind will never fully close; Hen and Karen and Chimney and Maddie are all, despite this loss, expanding their families, their happiness, their love, and Eddie is happy for them, truly he is; Buck still lives with him, a fact that Christopher still thrills over often in rare displays of demonstrable delight and Eddie thrills over in private, even if Buck still won’t stop touring new apartments and making noise about moving out and giving the Diazes their space back. It’s all fine. Good. Really. 

Yes , Eddie tries to make himself say. The lie tastes bitter even before he tells it. 

“I’m ok,” Eddie settles on, and it’s so not an answer to what Buck asked, and he took way too long to say it, and Buck’s easy smile fades. 

He should only ever be smiling, Eddie thinks a little desperately. He should be with someone who makes him smile. 

Somewhere across the yard, Chris and Denny are bent over the little handheld video game machine Buck bought Chris that Eddie never really learned the name of. It was a purchase that Buck refused to listen to Eddie’s protestations about, tight lipped with determination up until the moment he handed it to Chris, and then his whole bearing softened with that expression of parental fondness and knowingness that Eddie’s not even sure Buck’s aware his face can make, and he said, “A welcome home gift. Because you’re back where you belong.”

He knows Buck loves his son. Buck loves Chris more than anyone else in the world does, besides Eddie. So Eddie doesn’t understand why Buck doesn’t know this is where he belongs, as well. The Diaz house. With the two people who love him most in the world, too. 

Eddie went with him to tour another apartment a few days ago. A perfectly suitable two bedroom about forty minutes from their house. It was sterile, clinical, the way all of them are, the walls painted an unobtrusive matte color somewhere between white and cream, the counters cleaned to gleaming, the whole space echoing with the absence of furniture. The realtor asked something about kids while Buck was in the kitchen and Eddie was in the bedroom, something about school districts, about expanding their family. No, Eddie had to say. No, he’s not mine. I’m just with him. 

The sun is sinking toward the horizon. Buck is a little burned even though Eddie made him put on sunscreen before they left the house, pink across the bridge of his nose. His eyelids stutter on a blink. 

“Eddie,” he says. 

It pulls Eddie from his reverie. He keeps doing that recently. Drifting. Lost in the coiled tunnels of his own mind like the minotaur trying to find its way out of the maze. 

“Sorry,” he says, and his mouth’s still dry. He takes a drink from the cup Buck handed back to him. All water now, the weakest echo of fruit hitting the back of his palette. He wonders if his mouth is touching the place Buck’s mouth touched. “What?”

“Nothing,” says Buck, watching him, his hand curled loose and empty a breath from Eddie’s hip. “Nothing.”

*

Chris falls asleep on the drive home. 

Eddie’s chest pangs, watching him in the rearview. His glasses crooked on his face, half his curls smashed against the window he’s leaned against, his mouth hanging open around these slow, even breaths, full-chested with pure exhaustion. He tired himself out like he’s a little kid again. 

It hurts, all the love Eddie’s got for him. Eddie thought his skin would split with it those months when Chris was gone and Eddie had nowhere to put it. He thought one of those lonely nights he might just bleed out on the bedroom floor. 

Buck glances up, catches sight of Chris. Cuts his dusk-soft eyes over to Eddie. 

It’s devastating, the gentle, adoring tilt of his smile. Eddie has to press a palm to his chest to rub out the ache. 

“Somebody had a good time,” Buck murmurs, low. His voice is heavy with fondness, laden with it, like a ripe fruit on a branch. 

They didn’t leave until the sun had fully set, and the whole world is indigo and plumb and hazy shadowblue outside the windows of Buck’s Jeep, slowmoving watercolor behind the gathering mist of an unexpected rain. The temperature has dropped fast with the absence of sun, the first true sign that autumn is here, and Buck has the windows cracked, the heater on. 

Eddie realizes it all at once. That he feels safer than he has ever felt. In this car, with this man, and this boy. 

It’s stunning that he can speak past the thing that wells up in his throat, even if it’s just to whisper, “He was so excited to see everybody.”

Buck has to look away again as he turns onto their street, back to the road. The streetlights they pass flicker over his profile, fast like a camera shutter. Eddie wants to keep him forever. 

“God,” says Buck, kind of laughing at himself, shaking his head and smiling and letting out a little huff of air and his eyes catching the light where they’ve suddenly gone shiny, “I’m so glad you two are home.”

Your husband is so sweet. 

He is. 

Eddie echoes Buck words from months ago. He says, “Back where we belong.”

Buck pulls up in front of their house. 

He turns his whole body when he looks at Eddie this time. He is so good at that, at giving away his entire attention to someone. To Eddie. Eddie wants to bask in it and hide from it all the same, two disparate simultaneous reactions that he’s never learned to live with any better over the last seven years. 

“Yes,” says Buck simply. His big luminous eyes. His wide shoulders, wedged sideways against the seat, just so he can be sure to encompass all of Eddie in his gaze. ”It didn’t—Eddie, it wasn’t a home when you were gone. It was just an empty house.”

That’s what it’ll be like if you leave, Eddie thinks, but cannot make himself say. The words slam up against that awful inborn glass layer, smack to the ground like birds with the flight stunned out of them. You belong with me, Eddie thinks, purely selfish now. You belong with me. 

“Thank you for saving it for us,” Eddie murmurs. 

“Of course—of course, Eddie,” Buck says, but it’s choked, as if he was trying to say something else. His hand lifts from the steering wheel, reaches, before he aborts the gesture and lets it fall again. “Anything. You know I would’ve done anything. Still would.”

The neighborhood is still, serene midnight blue. Buck hasn’t shut the engine off yet, and the car hums its familiar mechanical hum around them, the radio playing a warm blanket of indistinguishable music under their heavy breaths. 

“I know,” Eddie whispers. He has to look away, but no part of Buck is safe. He’s just so—he’s too—God, it’s all of him. His earnest mouth, his long legs, the unmasked kindness in the mirrored shine of his eyes, the squishy muscle of his stomach, the curve of his neck that Eddie knows fits the shape of Eddie’s head perfectly. Eddie stares blindly out the windshield instead, eyes burning at the bright white glare of the headlights against the front door. “I—”

“Are we home?”

Eddie doesn’t jump, because if there is one thing thirty years on this earth has taught him it's how to gather his body in tight and hold it still when he’s shocked. But all his breath spills out of him, marbles dumped on a wooden floor. 

Buck’s never been wound tight like Eddie, doesn’t hold himself constantly like a soldier bracing for a bomb to drop. He jolts at the sound of Chris’s sleepy voice splitting their hush, twisting over his shoulder to look at him. 

“Woah, you startled me,” says Buck, a warm blurry shape in Eddie’s peripheral. “You were really conked out back there.”

“No,” says Chris, sleep making him just a bit petulant. Eddie knows he’s not little, sees the evidence of it every day since Chris came back, how independent he is now, how smart and funny and mature—but he sounds little now. He used to pretend he was asleep when they got home so Eddie would carry inside. Eddie misses carrying him. Eddie misses watching Buck carry him. “Just resting my eyes.”

“Sure, bud,” Buck says, laughing. 

They all shuffle inside. Buck holds the door for them as they cross the threshold, and the smile he sends Eddie over Chris’s head squeezes a fist around Eddie’s heart. 

*

It happens so fast. 

They’re almost out. The apartment complex is six floors, and they’ve managed to evacuate everyone listed as a tenant. Buck and Eddie are doing a final sweep before the fire—a kitchen fire which started on the third floor and spread vertically in both directions so fast the building was a column of wobbling flame by the time the 118 showed up—takes the whole structure down. One more flight of stairs, and then one more floor, and then they’re out. 

“Buck, Eddie, status?” Chimney asks, voice crackling in double over their radios. 

“Second floor clear, Captain,” Eddie says. His own voice flickers into his ears from Buck’s radio behind him. “One more to go.”

“Roger that,” says Chim. “Careful, she’s going up fast.”

“You take one side of the hallway, I’ll take the other,” Eddie says to Buck only, calling back over his shoulder. Even through the insulation of his turnouts this place feels like Hell, heat pressing tacky and cloying against all the surface of his skin. It reminds him of El Paso. Hot wet liquid air. “I think we’re good, but just to be safe—”

He hears the crack only after he’s fallen. 

The whole world pauses for a moment, Eddie suspended over the huge glaring void of space where the floor used to be. He twisted his body, somehow, when he set his foot down into nothingness, his whole torso wrenched around, thrown back desperately toward the jagged edge of hallway Buck stands on like a precipice. Buck—he’s orange and gold and red in the firelight, both hands thrown forward as if he has any chance of catching Eddie’s rapidly hurdling body, his face anguished, his mouth open around a scream Eddie can’t hear. 

And then the sound kicks on. And then the world rushes back in.

And Eddie falls. 

It comes in flashes after that, little half-second clips: hitting something hot and hard and jagged when he lands, a sharp thing wedged against his back, the breath sucked out of him; staring up at the hole in the ceiling above him as plaster and flame rains down into his eyes, the hole a supernova with all the world collapsing inside, and Buck’s bonewhite face the center of it; Chimney’s voice, a barrage of questions that Eddie cannot understand; the way Eddie can’t get his lungs to work no matter how hard he tries; the roar of the building coming down around him like a crowd chanting words Eddie can’t parse. 

Buck is screaming Eddie’s name. It’s so loud the static spikes through the radio and turns the word into an unintelligible shriek, so loud that Eddie can hear his actual voice doubled up over the one being transmitted to him, a raw aching bellow of sound that pours down through the hole in the ceiling and into Eddie’s gasping mouth. 

Flash. Buck’s ruined voice. Flash. The arch of the doorway to Eddie’s right buckling in on itself. Flash. Something in Eddie’s chest popping, air and blood rushing in to fill the gap it left behind. Flash. Smoke in his eyes. Flash. Buck’s voice. Flash. Buck’s voice. 

“Eddie, ” Buck is screaming, and Eddie hates the sound of it, shattered, cutting his throat bloody even on the vowels, “Eddie!” 

Hen told Eddie once that Buck screamed Eddie’s name until his voice gave out when the well swallowed him down. She said it was one of the worst things she ever heard. 

Eddie thinks, I’m sorry. 

Eddie should say something. Eddie should move. But he is bent over backward on a jagged slab of broken floor, and all he can see is the smoke closing over Buck’s face, and then he can see nothing at all. 

*

Here is one of the secrets Eddie keeps clutched close to his chest in a bloody-knuckled fist: Eddie misses being married. 

It is a secret, because it is shameful. It is shameful, because the thing Eddie misses most about being married is not that Shannon was his wife. 

And he does miss her. Of course he does. She was his best friend. She was his best, dearest friend, for the longest time the only ally he had that wasn’t forged by necessity in an arid desert shooting at people he never should've been shooting at and being shot at in return. She was nice, and funny, and he liked her before they knew she was pregnant, he really liked her—liked laying side by side with her on their backs in his bedroom, their legs stretched up the wall, staring at the posters she helped pin to Eddie’s ceiling when she told him his room was too sad and talking about their futures, their dreams, things Eddie’d never said to anybody else. Even after she got pregnant, after he enlisted, after Christopher was born, after things became so difficult so fast Eddie sometimes couldn’t even remember how to feel like a real person, she was still his best friend. He was determined to be good to her. For her. He was determined to set her and Christopher up for a good life, even if it wasn’t gonna look like the lives they talked about in fits of childlike fancy those summer afternoons that already felt like they happened to other people.

He loved her. He did. 

He just couldn’t love her the right way. He just couldn’t love her good enough. Couldn’t love her the way a husband should love his wife. 

Sometimes it was close. Especially in the beginning, when Chris was so tiny he felt like a fairytale creature plucked from a dream, just this beautiful, improbable, squirmy pink hungry little thing, this baby Eddie had helped make, this baby that came from Shannon. She grew him. Their little baby, more perfect than any other baby in the history of the world, she grew him. And Eddie loved her for it so powerfully that sometimes when he thinks about it even now his eyes go wet. 

Eddie loved Shannon—still loves her, despite her wrong and his wrong and the wrong they created together—and he misses her. Will always miss her. But he doesn’t miss being married to her. Even if she was still alive, Eddie knows that isn’t what they would be to each other anymore. 

That’s his fault. He was a bad husband. He was bad at being a husband. He knows it now, he knew it then, nineteen years old and saddled with a responsibility he had only ever considered in vague, far-off, nebulous dreams, a house full of kids, someone who loved him… He was a coward. It is a flaw that has only festerd in the past fourteen years. 

Eddie misses belonging to someone. Eddie misses something he knows he never really had with Shannon. Eddie misses something that feels so close some days he’s sick with it. 

He wants to try again. If someone gave Eddie another chance, a different chance, if he—if he—if someone loved Eddie, if someone wanted him, Eddie thinks he could be good this time. Eddie would try to be good. Eddie would love him the right way. Eddie loves him. Eddie—

Eddie wakes up.

The room is still and white and clean. He’s alone. 

For a long time Eddie can do nothing but lay still and breathe, an action that strikes him as something he’s grateful to be able to perform, though he doesn’t know why. His head is thick, swimming, too heavy on his shoulders; turning it feels like pushing through deep water, or honey, his mind stuffed full of clouds, his eyes not quite focusing. 

It smells sterile in here, sharp and antiseptic. Something bitter and acrid on the back of his tongue. 

Eddie’s heart rate picks up. He can feel it in the tender spots on his torso, which ache like someone has pressed their fingers through the bruised spots on a peach and dug right in to the hard pit in the center, throbbing with each flex of his ventricles. He doesn’t want to be alone. 

There is an empty chair by his bedside, the vinyl seat covered in something dark and gritty. Dirt—no, soot. That sharp chemical smell in the air. 

It hurts to shake his head. Eddie does it anyway. He can hear something, fists pounding the back of his mind, a memory rising up from the murky water. 

Buck. The apartment, the fire, the floor giving way. 

Buck’s scream. 

Eddie’s next breath wobbles. He’s not too hurt, he doesn’t think—he can move his head and all his limbs, he’s breathing, that’s good enough for him—but whatever weighted fog that’s filling his head spreads down through the rest of him, his chest, his arms, his pelvis, his legs, makes him dense and dumb and slow. 

He needs to get up. He needs to find Buck. He needs to make sure Buck knows he’s ok. 

The door opens, and a woman wearing scrubs walks in. She smiles as soon as she sees him. 

“Hello, Mr. Diaz,” she says. “How’re you feeling?”

“Buck,” says Eddie. He’s being rude, but the part of his brain that’s usually working overtime to remember social cues and how to follow them is trapped under all that leaden fog, and he really only cares about one thing right now. “Where’s Buck?”

Her face is blank for a moment, and the disappointment Eddie felt upon waking without Buck beside him for the first time months swells into a sharp driving hurt at the thought that he hasn’t been here at all. And then she says, “Oh! You mean your husband? He stepped out maybe five minutes ago, hon, ran down the hall to make a phone call. Didn’t wanna wake you. He’ll be back.”

It should ease the anxious tightness in his chest, but it doesn’t. Eddie needs to see him.

“Can you get him?” he rasps, throat dry. “Please?”

The nurse’s face melts into a smile. “Ok, baby,” she says, “hold on.”

Eddie doesn’t know how much time passes. He has been snipped loose of the threads that sew him to reality: he’s still in free fall, he’s still in that undertow, he’s sinking, sinking, and the thing he’s sinking in is bottomless, and he can’t even see the surface anymore. He’s floating out to sea, his limbs too waterlogged to swim with. 

His eyes are closed when the door opens again, caught in the middle of a blink, too exhausted to lift back up. He struggles to part them, lids bruised. 

Buck fills the doorway for a moment. Golden and totemic. Some hard knot in the base of Eddie’s throat unwinds. 

“Eddie,” says Buck, his voice hoarse from screaming. It’s the only thing he’s said for hours, over and over again to the rhythm of Eddie’s heartbeat. He comes close, the door clicking shut behind him, bypassing the chair to hover warm and big and attentive over Eddie’s prone form. He’s in a too-small shirt and sweatpants—they’re Eddie’s, he realizes. Somebody must’ve swung by their house and opened their dresser and pulled out the first outfit they saw, heedless of the fact that Buck and Eddie’s clothes have been mixed up together for months in the same drawers. His face is streaked with soot. “Eddie, fuck, you scared the shit outta me.”

He still looks scared. Open, unadulterated fear, telegraphed without shame across every line of his face. Tired, too, his eyes puffy, the bags beneath them dark and shiny as a raven’s wing. He is looking at Eddie the way he did when he picked him up from the airport the morning of Bobby’s funeral, the first time they’d seen each other in person in months: bare, bruised desperation. 

His mouth is open a little bit, parted around the shape of Eddie’s name. The inside of his bottom lip is wet and warm and pink, his tongue soft and slick behind the cradle of his even white teeth. Eddie wants to crawl inside his mouth and stay there. 

Eddie says, “Sorry.”

“No,” Buck breathes, voice shaking, and for some reason the hurt on his face contracts, a horrible twisted knot of it. He touches the cold plane of Eddie’s cheek, his hand big and unsteady, his fingers calloused and gentle, and Eddie’s dizzy head dips into the cradle of his touch with a little shiver of relief. “God, Eddie—don’t apologize.”

Eddie feels a hundred steps behind. Below. But something about Buck’s skin on his mollifies, soothes. He lets himself drift into the muzzy mist behind his eyes. 

“I scared you,” Eddie says, mouth slow and swollen. He’s plucking pieces from the air and sewing them back into place again. There is something else, something that seems just as important. He says, “She thought you were my husband. The nurse.”

Buck’s eyes flicker over Eddie’s face like shadows shifting over a riverbed. He is still standing, almost guarding him from the rest of the room, bent around Eddie as if protecting him from gunfire. “Oh,” he says. 

When Eddie was fifteen his mother broke her arm. She was cleaning out the gutters while Eddie’s father was away because it was rainy season in El Paso, and they kept overflowing and drowning the garden. The ladder was tall, unsteady, one leg sunk a little further in the soggy ground than the other three. She’d toppled off and tried to catch herself with her left arm, the weaker one, and just ended up with it bent at a sickening angle beneath her body, her ulna ripping through her flesh in a flash of jagged white bone. Eddie had had to drive her to the hospital, really do it this time, his two little sisters crying in the back seat because they weren’t old enough yet to stay home without him, his mother crying in the passenger seat and flinching at every turn he took too fast. She got surgery, Eddie remembers, and the drugs made her loose-lipped and oddly young in a way that terrified him, and she kept asking to talk to Ramon. Her husband. Eddie’s father. No matter how many times Eddie called he didn’t pick up the phone. Eddie cleaned the gutters from then on. 

Buck is still holding his face. 

“How long have I…” Eddie trails off. The thoughts are slipping through his mind like minnows, quicksilver. When he speaks, the edge of his bottom lip grazes Buck’s palm. “Is Chris ok? Where is he?” 

“He’s ok,” Buck says, answering the part he knows Eddie cares about most first. “You’ve been here about twelve hours, and everybody had to go home, so Hen and Karen took him. He’s worried about you, wanted to stay, but I didn’t want him sleeping in a hospital. I was, uh, just talking to him on the phone. He loves you a lot.”

They must have Eddie on painkillers, because all his emotions feel so much closer to the surface than they usually do, so much harder to mask. Like when he fell he shattered the glass. He feels his eyes water, and can’t do anything to hide it, Buck hovering as low and as close as he is. 

“I don’t want you sleeping in a hospital, either,” Eddie says, and he should stop there, usually he would, but the water is so deep. And Eddie is so small. “But I don’t want you to leave.”

“Oh, Eddie.” Buck’s face breaks open. A smile, yet still that knifepoint hurt. A sunrise, a crack in the foundation. Eddie doesn’t understand. Eddie wants to pull Buck’s whole weight down on top of him, bruised-peach tenderness be damned. “I’m not leaving you.”

*

The nurses are utterly charmed by Buck, who is on his absolute best behavior. He brings them all back coffee when Eddie finally convinces him to go to the cafeteria and get himself a bite to eat, and he regales them with a story about Eddie saving a kid from an upside down car that Eddie barely remembers and has a suspicion is probably highly embellished, based on the rapturous way Buck is telling it, and by the time night has fallen they’re all in love with him, so much so that they’ve scrounged a cot and an extra large pair of men’s pajamas up from somewhere so Buck doesn’t have to sleep in the chair by Eddie’s bed. 

Eddie calls Chris while Buck’s in the bathroom. He’s a little more lucid than he was earlier, having forgone the morphine offered him so he can talk to Chris with a brain that actually works. The tradeoff is that he actually feels all the hurt now, every place his stupid fallible human body took the brunt of a fifteen foot fall. But it’s a small price to pay. 

Chris doesn’t even let the call ring one full time. He answers like he’s been staring at his phone just waiting. 

“Dad!” His face fills up the frame. He looks openly concerned, no affected teenage ambivalence to be found. Eddie hates how often his baby has had to worry about him in fourteen years of life. Eddie hates that it’s happening again. “Are you ok? Can I come see you? Where’s Buck?”

“I’m ok, mijo, I’m ok,” Eddie murmurs. FaceTime was a bad idea, probably. This is the first time Eddie’s seen himself since he fell, and it’s a little shocking: where his face isn’t streaked with soot it’s marred with thick purplegreen bruising, his lip busted, the capillaries in his eyes burst so his sclera is scarlet. But he and Chris like to be face to face when they talk to each other, always have. Even when he hated Eddie, off in El Paso and barely answering Eddie’s calls once a month, they video called. “Don’t worry about me. They’re just keeping me for a night, protocol, you know. Buck’s staying with me, but you can see us tomorrow when we come home.”

Chris is frowning. He looks tired, those same dark smudges under his eyes that Buck had. It’s unbearable that Eddie had any hand in putting them there. God, Eddie wants to pull him through the screen and into his arms and never let go of him again. 

“Can you tell me what’s wrong with you?” Chris asks. “Buck just said you were hurt but ok, but I know it’s because he just didn’t want me to worry.”

It’s another way Chris is like Buck. They like to know absolutely everything about a situation, every minute detail, so they can look at it from each angle and sift through the data and assess it over and over again in those big smart brains of theirs. But Buck knows the flipside of that more intimately than Chris, so of course he held off giving him all the information—it’s easy to drive yourself crazy obsessing over something you can’t fix. 

Eddie shifts against the mattress. Buck propped him up very gently on a couple of pillows as Eddie ate his gross hospital food dinner earlier, but Eddie’s starting to get tired again. Starting to hurt, a radiating kind of pain that spills from his core in undulating waves. 

“It could be a lot worse,” Eddie says. It could. He fell through the floor of a burning building. He could be dead. “Couple broken ribs, dislocated shoulder, concussion, inhaled too much smoke when my mask cracked. All very survivable.”

Chris huffs. “I know you’re gonna survive , Dad, Buck would be freaking out way more if you might die. I just.” And he stops. Looks away from the phone, head tipped down like he’s trying to be casual about what comes out next, even though he’s squirming in his chair. “I just don’t want you to hurt.”

Eddie doesn’t know what he did to deserve the best kid in the world, but he knows he’s never gonna stop being grateful to the point of pain. 

“I’m ok, buddy,” Eddie says again, softer. 

Chris looks up at him from over the rim of his glasses. Eddie almost laughs. “You say that all the time,” Chris says, flat. “And you look bad. LIke it really, really hurts.”

Something in the middle of Eddie’s chest shivers. He remembers what it was like, fifteen years old, his mother weeping through a tightly clenched mouth as pain rippled through her. Her blood running through her fingers, her bone drawing Eddie’s eye like a flashbang grenade. The way she begged for someone who wasn’t Eddie to help her. The way that Eddie knew the whole time he was just a poor, inefficient stand-in for who she really wanted, and the way he knew that who she really wanted was never gonna come. 

The nurse who was there when Eddie woke up wanders in through the open door, smiles, starts checking something on Eddie’s chart. 

“It hurts,” Eddie confesses gently, “but it’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. And like I said, Buck’s staying. You know how he is, he’s—“

“Yeah,” Chris interrupts, visibly brightening. Visibly relaxing. Comforted by the thought of Buck at Eddie’s side. “He’d never let you feel bad.”

It’s such a simple statement, but it hits Eddie hard in that shivery place in the core of him. 

It’s true. Buck said it the other night, didn’t he? Anything. Anything. 

The nurse presses a hand to her chest, mouths aww over the foot of Eddie’s bed. 

Eddie’s cheeks are so hot. He sees them in the little picture frame of himself in the top right corner of the screen, flooded dusty pink. 

“That’s right,” he says softly. 

They don’t talk for much longer. It’s late, and even though Eddie’s only been awake for two of the last fourteen hours he’s so exhausted his bones feel like they’ll snap if he moves too fast. He tells Chris he loves him, blows a ridiculous and slightly loopy kiss to him through the screen that Chris rolls his eyes at with a begrudging grin. Chris says, “Tell Buck I love him, too,” and Eddie’s heart squeezes and squeezes, and the call drops. 

“What an adorable kid,” the nurse says, moving over to the wheeled table by Eddie’s bedside and beginning to measure out of his medication. “How old is he?”

Eddie smiles like he always does when someone compliments Chris, adoring beyond measure. This is one form of love that has always come easy to Eddie, no matter how overwhelming or difficult the circumstances around it. Eddie was born to love Chris. He knows that. 

“Almost fifteen.”

“You two must be so proud, raising a boy like that,” she says. 

Something moves in the corner of Eddie’s eye and he glances up to see Buck leaning in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest, his face washed clean. He’s watching Eddie, eyes half-lidded and unblinking, oddly predatory backlit as he is by the hallway fluorescents. Like he’s about to leverage all the strength in his legs back and leap the twelve feet to Eddie’s bed, about to cover him completely. Eddie’s breath hitches, his bruised chest throbbing. 

“We are,” Eddie murmurs, not looking away. 

She says something else, something Eddie doesn’t catch. Buck is moving into the room on a prowl. He leans against the foot of Eddie’s bed and drapes his arms over his chest, stepping in to receive the instructions the nurse is trying to give Eddie about his painkillers with such authority that she turns and starts addressing Buck instead, not missing a beat. 

Buck’s nodding, taking it all very seriously. Eddie lets his head fall back to his pillow. 

He should be trying to listen, making sure he can take care of himself, so he won’t be a bother through the night. 

He watches Buck instead. The studious line of his jaw, nodding at what she says. Eddie knows he’s really internalizing it, gathering information in that way of his, and that probably before he turns around he’ll have it all sorted out into an incomprehensible plan that Eddie won’t have to worry about understanding because Buck’s gonna take charge anyway. 

“Alright,” Buck says once the nurse leaves. Eddie smiles at the tone of his voice even though smiling hurts—Buck, diving in headfirst. Taking initiative. He moves to the bedside table and fills a plastic cup from the bottle of water he bought from a vending machine earlier in the evening, his hands steady and measured and capable. “Here we go.”

“I missed all that,” Eddie confesses. Gestures weakly out the door she just exited, wrist heavy and sagging with exhaustion. 

The smile Buck slips him is all sticky-sweet indulgence. “I know,” he says, tapping out two little pills into a smaller plastic cup. His fingers are long and thick. There’s still soot wedged in black half-moons beneath his fingernails. “It’s ok, I gotcha. Take these.”

He sits sideways on the lip of the bed, crooking one leg up onto the mattress so that his thigh presses right up against Eddie’s, his other leg stretched out for miles on the shiny tile floor. Even through the blankets Eddie can feel the heat of him. He’s the only warm thing in the whole room. 

It takes Eddie too long to register that Buck’s holding out the pills and the water his way. He drags his eyes from the offering, up Buck’s arm, to his face. Blinks, and then clenches his jaw at the flare of pain, even his eyelids feeling bruised now. 

“What’s that?”

“Painkillers,” says Buck. Doesn’t lower his hand. 

The nurse turned the light off when she left the room, and the door is closed, so the only light spilling in comes from the breathing cityscape outside. All lit up like it always is, rooftop bars and billboards, a handful of lonely offices still glowing at the tops of highrises, the thready, streaked, winking smear of headlights that winds through the whole city like a blazing river. 

It lights Buck up in a carousel of muted color. Makes him seem bigger than he is. Closer. 

“I’m fine,” says Eddie. 

Buck’s brow furrows. “Eddie,” he says. 

Eddie’s never gonna forget the sound of it. Of Buck’s scream. Or the feeling it had birthed out of the tender wet mess of Eddie’s guts, that awful guilt, that need to alleviate Buck’s fear so powerful he almost could have pulled himself back through the hole he fell through with his bare hands. 

“I’m ok,” Eddie says, the same thing he kept repeating to Chris, the same tone slipping out on accident—all low and round and soothing. But he must be doing something wrong, because Buck’s frown only deepens. “Just wanna get to sleep so we can wake up tomorrow and go home.” 

“You’re not gonna be able to sleep at all feeling four broken ribs the whole night,” Buck says. His outstretched, unwavering hands. He’s gotta be just as tired as Eddie is. More, probably. There’s no way he slept while Eddie was unconscious. “Come on, man.”

“I,” says Eddie, and then nothing. 

He knows he can’t explain it to Buck. He can barely explain it to himself, more fervid dogma that lives behind his breastbone than an articulable belief. That if Eddie takes something to sweep the pain away it is in and of itself an admission of the pain in the first place, just something else for Buck to worry about, but if Eddie can just keep quiet, just grind his teeth closed and hold himself still and silent, then Buck will drift to sleep oblivious to Eddie’s agony, and Eddie will carry that agony alone until he finds somewhere to put it down in secret. 

“Eddie,” says Buck again, and sometimes in Eddie’s most selfish moments he wonders if his name is one of Buck’s favorite words for how often he says it, if the curl of his voice around the vowels means anything at all, “you heard Chris. I’m not gonna let you lay there and hurt.” 

Eddie presses the fingertips of one hand to his eyes. They had him hooked up to oxygen while he was unconscious, pumping his lungs full of clear sanitary air. His nose is still sore from the cannula. 

Buck’s voice drops low as the ocean. Sweetdark hush. “Take the painkillers, Eddie.” 

Eddie shivers from the nape of his neck to the cradle of his hips. Eddie takes the painkillers. 

*

Eddie gets a month of injury leave—”At least a month, Diaz,” Chimney intones, stern as he ever gets, “don’t even try to lie to me about feeling better sooner, I’m married to the sister of your live-in bestie, I have eyes everywhere, I’ll know .”—which sucks, but there’s really no way around it. He’s not gonna be any use to anybody when he can’t even haul himself to his own two feet without tearing up. 

The last time he was unemployed, he was in town for what he thought was only a visit, Chris-less, and attending the funeral of one of the greatest men he will ever know. Even with the broken ribs, this is an improvement, but Eddie can feel it slipping out of his hands. Grasped by the current, swept out to sea. 

Chris and Buck are concerned about him, Eddie can tell, even though given what happened to him Eddie’s gotten off relatively easy. Chris keeps sending these faux-casual, affectedly-indifferent glances of concern Eddie’s way any time he thinks Eddie’s not looking, like he’s checking that there isn’t some life threatening injury Eddie’s sporting and hasn’t told him about. It’s breaking Eddie’s goddamn heart, and he keeps trying to inject extra happiness into his smile, keeps trying to sprawl on the couch instead of sitting tight and tender and aching and still so he doesn’t jostle anything, keeps trying to walk around without Buck’s assistance even though he’s hobbling like he’s ninety, so maybe Chris will see that he really is ok. That it’s still just his dad, infallible, and not someone Chris has to waste any time worrying over. 

It isn’t working. It’s like how Eddie’s repeated mantra in the hospital, I’m ok, I’m ok, I’m ok, had put this look on Buck’s face like Eddie was gonna walk off a building. Chris’s concern goes from furtive to full-blown, no longer bothering to hide it. 

Eddie can’t stop thinking about how quiet the house was when Chris was gone. So quiet that the silence rang, a sharp, driving, anguished sound that Eddie couldn’t get out of his ears no matter how hard he shook his head. 

Buck would never let you feel bad, Chris had said. Which means that Chris trusts Buck when it comes to Eddie. Which means that Buck can fix this before Eddie runs his own son off again. 

“Tell him I’m fine,” says Eddie. He’s been home two days, and he’s already tired of it. Of every movement down to each individual breath hurting like he’s more bruise than flesh, of his son looking at him with big, scared eyes, of the constant attention he’s getting, as if it matters at all that Eddie did something stupid on the job and got hurt for it, of the painkillers making him slow and sluggish and a little sick. “Please.”

He’s in their bed, propped up by what feels like every pillow Eddie owns plus all the ones Buck moved in with. He switched to ibuprofen today, and while his head is much clearer, it’s not really doing anything to dull the hurt. His back teeth throb, every heartbeat painful. 

Buck is on his half of the bed in a big, loose t-shirt, looking soft and rumpled and sleepy. He’s doing something on Eddie’s ipad, but he stops when Eddie speaks. Looks at him over the screen, the bluewhite glow cutting little glowing triangles in beneath his cheekbones. 

“What?” he says. “Who?”

Eddie’s neck hurts with keeping his head turned like this. He lets it loll against the nearest pillow and watches Buck from beneath the feathered spread of his eyelashes, nervy and unsteady with the hope that this works. “Chris,” he says. “He’s worried about me, and nothing I say or do is gonna get through to him. ‘S gotta be you.”

Buck furrows his brow. The collar of his t-shirt is all stretched out from where he grabs it at the back of the neckline and yanks it over his head in one smooth motion every time he changes, and it sits crooked over his broad clavicles. He puts the ipad facedown in his lap. Gives Eddie his full attention.  

“You want me to lie to him?” he asks, and Eddie can tell he’s genuinely confused. 

“No—what? No.” Eddie bats Buck’s question out of the air with a sweep of his wrist, dismissive. “Just tell him I’m ok. He’s looking at me like I’m gonna fall apart.”

“Eddie. You fell through a burning building.”

“I know, Buck, I was there,” Eddie snaps, not so much angry as he is defensive. He rankles at the way Buck’s looking at him, the blatant concern, the soft, tender care. It’s too much. Like a feast after weeks of starving. “But I’m fine now—”

“You’re not fine, ” Buck says, incredulous. He is sitting forward now, his shirt wrinkling up beneath the meat of his chest and the slight curve of his soft tummy. Somewhere in the distance a siren wails. “Just because you’re not actively dying doesn’t mean you’re ok, Eddie. Of course Chris is worried about you. You’re his dad. He loves you.”

“Exactly,” Eddie spits, and he’s sitting up now, too, his stiff neck shot through with a sharp pain, “I’m his dad. He’s not supposed to be worried about me, ever, and instead it’s all the time. I’m having a mental breakdown or I’m getting shot or I’m—I’m losing my mind and having an affair with someone who looks like his dead mom and running him out of the house because he doesn’t feel safe with me anymore. I’m supposed to be the one he relies on, I’m supposed to be ok so I can take care of him. He just got back, Buck, I just got him back, I don’t want him to, to, to have to waste his time on me, to have to worry about me, I want him to stay, I want—”

“Eddie,” Buck is saying, soft, “Eddie. It’s ok.” He pulls Eddie sideways into his chest, wraps his arms around Eddie’s heaving shoulders all sweet and careful, not putting pressure on any of the places Eddie’s weakest. “Shh, Eds, I know. I know.”

Eddie lets himself be held, selfish and starving. It’s all he’s wanted since he fell, since he had to stare at Buck’s devastated face and empty reaching hands. 

“He’s not gonna leave,” Buck says against the crown of Eddie’s head. Eddie’s face is pressed into his shoulder, open-mouthed and shuddering, and he isn’t crying but he might as well be. He can hear the sharp, pathetic little gasps that spill out of his mouth, can taste the saltsting of saline surging up his throat. “Especially not because you’re hurt. Sure, he’s worried, but that’s because he loves you and doesn’t want you to be hurting. We care about you, Eddie. It’s ok to let yourself be cared for.”

Eddie can’t speak. He’s clinging to the front of Buck’s shirt with too-tight hands. There’s a sob mounting in the back of his throat. He swallows it down with a vicious clench. 

Eddie thinks of driving Helena home from the hospital. How gray she’d been from the pain, how raw and open the anguish on her face. How terrified he’d been. How he’d just wanted to run, to go to his room and pull the covers over his head and hide, to not hear her asking for her husband again, or yelling at Eddie because he lost track of the time at the hospital and didn’t get Sophia to ballet on time, or crying when she bumped her wrist on the kitchen counter. How scared he’d been that if he looked away she’d disappear, and then it would be just him and his little sisters in their empty house with only Eddie to take care of them. 

He’d do anything for Christopher to never have to feel that. The weight of responsibility, the burden of filling an absence. The entire breadth of a parent’s pain, confusing and overwhelming and cruel and consuming. 

“And you have me,” Buck says. “He knows you have me. No matter what.”

Until you leave, Eddie thinks. He doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t make it a habit, ripping his heart out of his chest and showing it to Buck, raw and bloody. And also, it isn’t fair. Buck’s always been there for Eddie no matter where he lives. Even in El Paso, eight hundred miles between them, Eddie felt closer to Buck than any other person in his life. 

No matter what Eddie’s given, he just wants more. 

The shame is viscous in his chest, a thick tacky lump.

“I know,” Eddie says, rote. Keeping his voice quiet, keeping his voice small. If he isn’t too loud Buck won’t hear how ragged it is on the edges. “Sorry.”

Buck makes an awful, tragic little noise. “Please stop doing that,” he begs, wide palm curling around the curved back of Eddie’s skull and pulling his head impossibly closer. Eddie’s forehead ends up notched against the wing of one of those clavicles, Buck’s skin soft and warm against Eddie’s already flushed face. They’re just a bundle of heat, all tied together. Eddie should pull away. He squeezes his eyes closed, sucks down a trembling inhale. “You haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have to apologize.”

The thought of that being true is almost funny. Eddie is so used to apologizing that he prefaces everything he does with remorse. 

But he says, “Ok,” anyway, small and resigned, because Buck asked him to. So he will try. 

He feels the shake of Buck’s head as he presses his cheek to the top of Eddie’s. “I know you don’t believe me,” he says. “It’s ok. You just have to listen to me.”

Listen to Buck. That instinct is woven almost as deeply into Eddie’s DNA as contrition. 

“Just. Just, will you talk to him?” Eddie asks. He knows how pathetic he sounds, how needy, but he’s so tired and the dim warmth of the little hollow of Buck’s throat is so quiet. “Tell him I’m not hiding something worse from him, and I really will be ok.”

It is quiet for a long time. All Eddie can hear is the wet living squelch of Buck’s heartbeat, comforting in his ear. 

“Yeah, Eddie,” Buck says eventually, fingers sliding through Eddie’s hair. “I’ll tell him.”

*

The morning of Buck’s first shift back after Eddie’s accident he hovers around Eddie so long that he is officially past the point of being late for work by the time Eddie manages to shove him out the door. 

“You’re being insane,” Eddie says. 

Buck hits him with a truly potent case of hangdog eyes, all mournful and beseeching. “I just wanna be sure you have everything you might need.”

Buck declared yesterday Baking Day, and and woke up earlier than he did this morning for his actual job to spend a good ten hours baking a batch of anything Eddie has ever even vaguely hinted he likes to eat. Eddie’s only plans for the next forty-eight hours include lounging on their couch in his pajamas, catching up on the particularly salacious telenovellas even Chris doesn’t watch with him, and gorging himself on protein snickerdoodles. 

He doesn’t say this. He says, “You already told Maddie to have her phone on her in case I need anything today, remember? And Karen tomorrow. Which is unnecessary, because I’m going to be fine. Trust me.” 

Buck deflates a little bit, standing there on the sidewalk with his travel mug full of coffee Eddie made him—Eddie’s been going crazy watching Buck do all the work the past few days, and coffee is about the only thing his battered body is up for making right now—blinking balefully up at Eddie with that familiar furrow of concern between his eyebrows. 

“I do trust you,” he says. “I just…”

Buck had leapt down through the hole in the floor after Eddie fell, Ravi said yesterday when he’d called to see how Eddie was doing. Ignored Chim’s orders, ignored the flame engulfing Eddie’s body, ignored the jagged pieces of concrete and wooden rafters and metal. Crouched there by Eddie’s unresponsive form, unable to move him in case his spine was damaged, screaming Eddie’s name so loud the whole team could hear him outside. 

He’s lucky he didn’t get in trouble. He’s lucky he didn’t get hurt. 

It was stupid, but Eddie can’t say he doesn’t get it. He thinks of a thunderstorm on a night that feels like ages ago and like yesterday all at once, Buck dangling limp as a broken-spined fish on the end of a hook, the whole world shocked white as a radiation blast. Eddie pounding and pounding and pounding his chest, so scared he couldn’t feel his own hands, and Buck’s heart leaping to life in the cup of Eddie’s palm like a bird throwing itself against the bars of its cage. 

“You’re gonna be so late for work you get fired, and then nobody will be bringing any money into this household to support your extravagant flour spending habits,” Eddie says, trying for levity. It’s not even true, he’s getting paid leave. He just wants to see Buck smile. “Go be a breadwinner.”

“Alright, alright,” Buck says. He’s pink and blue and gold in the clear diffuse morning air. He walks backward toward his Jeep, eyes on Eddie the whole time. “Bye-bye. Call me if you need me, baby.”

Eddie rolls his eyes, and waves, and watches him drive away, and it isn’t until he’s back inside on the other side of a closed door that he realizes what Buck just said. 

Eddie goes very still. The house holds its breath around him. 

His first instinct is to pick up the phone and call Buck and demand he say it again. 

Eddie doesn’t follow his first instinct. He very rarely does. He hobbles to the couch instead, lowers himself down slowly, clutching the worst side of his ribs with one hand as he sinks. He ignores the way his mouth has gone dry, his tongue thick, his eyes inexplicably warm, his cheeks warmer. 

Muscle memory, probably, regardless of the fact that Buck hasn’t been in a relationship in months. Leftover instinct from the last time Buck lived with somebody. 

Call me if you need me, baby. Well, Buck had asked Eddie to listen to him. And Eddie isn’t going to call, isn’t going to need him even if he already misses him, in that achy codependent way he’s spent years fighting through, but—but he knows Buck would answer. 

*

Eddie:

[Image of a bouquet of flowers] 

Buck: 

Pretty!!

Eddie: 

Maddie and Jee brought me flowers. 

Buck: 

😍

My favorite girls

Eddie: 

And him.

[Image of Eddie’s arms and torso, a baby tucked up beneath his chin asleep on his chest] 

Buck:

GOD

EDDIE 

😭😭😭😭😭🥺🥺🥺🤩❤️❤️❤️💕💕😭😭🥺🥺😭❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Eddie: 

❤️

*

Buck: 

Doing ok?

Eddie: 

Doing ok. 

You?

Buck: 

Honest to god cat up a tree call today

Cute but like how stereotypical can it get

[Image of a gray cat in Buck’s arms, Buck laughing, the cat blurry from how much it’s squirming]

Eddie: 

I’ve always liked cats.

Buck: 

You ARE a cat

Eddie: 

?

Buck: 

1. Fluffy 
2. Particular about your grooming habits
3. Likes to nap in the sun

Eddie: 

You caught me doing that one time. 

Buck: 

And I will never forget it<3<3<3<3

* 

Eddie feels the air change when Buck walks through the door.

It’s pitiful, maybe, that Eddie’s spent the morning just waiting for him. But he has. He woke up in the predawn with anticipatory butterflies flapping through his belly and looked at the clock and immediately started counting the hours until Buck would be home. 

Eddie’s in the living room on the couch. He hears Buck’s tread in the hallway, heavy with the weight of him. The shush of fabric as he pulls his jacket off. The thunk of his sneakers as he uses the baseboard to toe them off without untying him, that bad habit Eddie’s never managed to convince him to shake. 

He comes around the corner, meeting Eddie’s eyes before he’s fully in the room. 

You called me baby, Eddie thinks. It’s the only thing in his brain, his own mind shouting it at him, loud and getting louder. You called me baby. 

“Hey,” Buck says, going to toss himself down on the opposite end of the couch but changing his velocity at the last second, slow and ginger so he doesn’t jostle Eddie. He narrows his eyes when he looks at Eddie fully. Lifts one hand to gesture with intention at Eddie’s wet hair. “You aren’t supposed to wash your own hair yet, Eddie, you can’t even lift your arms over your head!”

Buck’s legs are sprawled out on the floor before him, halfway under the coffee table with how long they are. He turns, hooks an arm over the back of the couch so he can face Eddie. The soft bit of flesh on his hips spills in a perfect little handful over the waistband of his jeans. Eddie’s throat is dry as a desert. 

“Uh, I used the shower chair,” Eddie says belatedly. “And took it real easy. It was driving me crazy, Buck, you know how much I hate when my hair is dirty.”

Buck’s mouth twitches into a grin despite the admonishment. “That’s what I meant yesterday. Kitty.”

“Um,” says Eddie.

“Well, I was sorta expecting to have come home to you trying to remodel our house or something, so I’m glad to see you mostly stayed out of trouble,” Buck says, switching topics with his usual rapidity. “Good job.”

Eddie blinks. Eddie says, “Thank you.”

Buck’s grin softens down into a smile, and then into something Eddie doesn’t have a word for. Too close to be contemplation, too gentle to be examination. Like he is wiping away the rain that has gathered on Eddie’s glass layer to gaze down at the man inside. 

He must catch something on Eddie’s face. He tilts his head. The air gains another degree of warmth. “You ok, man?”

How often has Buck asked him that in the last week? Month? Year? The entire breadth of their relationship? 

Eddie says, “You called me baby. Before you left.”

Buck’s breath hitches in his chest. “I, uh. Thought you didn’t hear me.”

Eddie’s hands are tingling from the palm outwards. He grips the bottom of his shirt just for something to hold onto. “I heard you.”

Buck’s lips are parted, eyes darting wildly over the surface of Eddie’s face. His tongue does something horrible and distracting in the corner of his mouth, wet and pink. He says, “You keep letting people think I’m your husband.”

Eddie has no rebuttal to that. Nothing that wouldn’t be a lie so black it would rot in his mouth. 

Eddie just wants him. 

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “I do.”

“Eddie,” Buck gets out, husky. His eyelids droop as he lifts his chin and looks down the planes of his face at Eddie, swaying in so close Eddie can feel his breath. His hand slips down the back of the couch. Stops just before it reaches Eddie’s shoulder. “Eddie, you gotta—you gotta—you gotta tell me if I’m reading this wrong.”

There’s a place inside Eddie that’s the shape of Buck, and it’s cold and it’s starving. 

“Tell me what you’re reading,” he says. 

Buck makes a low noise that Eddie wants to clutch in the palm of his hand. He swallows like his mouth is too full. 

“I think you want me,” Buck rasps. “I think you wanna be mine. Married to me.”

It goes through Eddie like another fucking bullet. He buckles around it as it hits him, reaching for Buck’s big open hand dangling by his shoulder. “Buck,” he whispers, voice shaking, “Buck—”

“Yeah,” Buck says, so low Eddie feels it more than he hears it, a vibration that runs out Buck’s chest and down his arm and into Eddie’s gut. Buck twists his hand in Eddie’s, grabs his wrist. Presses Eddie’s whole hand back against the cushion and then his thumb to Eddie’s pulse point, hard and driving, and smiles a slow, knowing smile when Eddie’s heartbeat leaps to meet his touch. “That’s what I thought.”

Jesus, there’s no hiding from him. Not anymore. Eddie feels naked despite the hoodie and sweatpants he’s wearing, completely bared to the molten run of Buck’s gaze that drags liquid and lingering from Eddie’s feet to his face. Eddie might as well be wearing nothing. Eddie might as well pry his ribs open and let Buck have a look around in the chambers of his heart. Open and shattered. Break glass in case of emergency. 

“Buck,” Eddie says again, already dumb with it and he hasn’t even been kissed yet. He can feel how big his eyes are, he can feel how his mouth’s hanging open, but he can’t fucking do anything about it. He twitches the fingers of his trapped hand just to feel the tendons flex beneath Buck’s iron grip. “Please.”

“Please what?” Buck asks. It’s like Eddie’s open want has done something to Buck, flipped a switch in him, handed him permission he’s just been hanging around in stasis waiting to receive. His smile is almost smug, wide and fuschia, so utterly sure of himself. Of Eddie. As if he knows Eddie’s desire better than he himself does, and now Buck just wants to hear him say it. 

“Buck.” Eddie’s voice breaks around the word. He wants to crawl into Buck’s lap, wants to sew himself in beneath Buck’s skin, right up against his bones, like a second skeleton. A part of him that’d have to be surgically removed. “You know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Buck murmurs, “but I wanna hear you ask me for it, baby. Gotta make sure I’m doing the right thing to take care of you, treating you right while you’re still all banged up.”

It’s ridiculous. There’s no one on this earth Eddie would trust more with his body than the man sitting in front of him. 

But Buck wants him to ask for it. 

“Kiss me,” Eddie begs, so ashamed of the request and so dizzy with the certainty that it’ll be granted that his vision sways. “Please, please kiss me, please—”

“Fuck,” Buck groans, and then his other hand is on Eddie’s jaw, tipping his head back, thumbing Eddie’s lax mouth open and drawing Eddie toward him and fitting their mouths together on an inhale. 

Buck’s a good kisser. Eddie knew he would be. Driving and intent and thorough and focused and consuming, his hot damp mouth, his wet velvet tongue, and the way his body bears down on top of Eddie’s, the way he presses him back into the cushions, the way he never, not once, lets go of Eddie’s wrist. 

Grounding him. Keeping him pinned in place. 

As if Eddie would ever leave. 

Eddie can’t decide what part of Buck to touch first, overwhelmed with choice, with the limitless options when he used to think he’d die with nothing. His free hand flutters, birdlike and restless: gripping at Buck’s shoulder, his waist, the bulge of his bicep, the curve of his cheek. 

He’s whimpering, he realizes, high and thin and breaking again and again like waves on the shore, all because of a kiss. If you let go of me I’ll die, Eddie thinks, and he means it. 

“Gonna take you to bed,” Buck says into his mouth. His hand slides from Eddie’s jaw to curve around his broken ribs, gentle, tender. Bracing them with the spread of his fingers. “Gonna lay you down all easy and slow so it doesn’t hurt, ok? Gonna take care of you.”

Eddie shivers into his hold. Somewhere distant he registers that he does in fact hurt, twisted in a way he shouldn’t be, already sore from washing his hair this morning, his arms like jelly from the strain it had taken. But Buck’s touch is an anesthetic. All Eddie can feel is him. 

Buck pulls Back, and Eddie clamps a hand around his forearm to keep him close. 

Buck laughs against the corner of Eddie’s mouth. Bites at his bottom lip, soothes it with another smaller kiss. Eddie’s face is burning.  

“I got you, Eddie, I got you,” he says, syrupy and reassuring. He kisses Eddie’s jaw, drags his mouth down the line of Eddie’s neck to bite at his clavicle. Back up. A wet, sloppy lick to the fragile dip behind the notch of Eddie’s jaw, marking Eddie’s skin with his spit. “I’m not going anywhere. But we gotta get you to a bed.”

Eddie’s gone postverbal, everything he could possibly say too huge to fit behind his teeth. He nods, loose and lightheaded, lets Buck ease him to his feet. Falls immediately into Buck’s chest once they’re standing, his arms around Buck’s neck, his mouth finding Buck’s like heat-seeking missile.

Somehow, Buck gets him to the bedroom. He’s piloting Eddie’s body for him, all guiding hands and directive touches, buffeting Eddie ceaselessly down the hallway and over the threshold into the bedroom, not stopping until the backs of Eddie’s thighs bump up against the foot of the bed. 

Buck cups Eddie’s face in both of his palms. Blinks down at him. His pupils have almost eclipsed his cornflower irises, wet black pools that Eddie can see his own flushed face reflected in. 

The overhead light is off in here, the curtains closed. It’s late morning, but you wouldn’t know it—the room has taken on a sense of placelessness, as if it and its occupants have stepped outside of time. As if Buck and Eddie are the only people alive in this pocket dimension they’ve tumbled into. 

Eddie left the lamp on when he got up this morning. The warm spill of it laves Buck’s skin. 

“You’re so pretty, Eddie,” Buck murmurs.

Something at the base of Eddie’s tailbone sparks, sends electricity rolling up his spine. He arches, his torso pressing to Buck’s involuntarily. Buck sweeps his thumbs feather-light across Eddie’s drooping eyelids, beneath his eyes. His gaze keeps flickering to Eddie’s empty wanting mouth. Buck says, fervent and filthy, “My pretty wife.”

It knocks Eddie’s knees out from under him. 

Buck catches him around the waist before he can really fall, eases him back flat against the rumpled comforter, slinging a leg over Eddie’s lap and pressing nasty desperate kisses to his open mouth and saying, eager, hungry, “Yeah? That’s what you are, aren’t you, baby? My wife, my pretty girl.”

Sometimes Eddie thinks about it. When he’s drunk or when he’s so tired it hurts to keep his eyes open or when it’s just him and Buck on the couch late at night, the whole world curtained behind the impenetrable darkness, and he just has to trust Buck can’t read his mind. 

Sometimes Eddie thinks about it. About how his mother and her friends used to sip iced tea on the front porch in the sticky Texas heat, gossiping about their men, shaking their heads, their words bubbly and slow. Eddie thinks about sitting on some hazy front porch with a little cluster of faceless women talking about their husbands, thinks about saying, “My husband, my Buck, he’s such a brute. Just picks me up and carries me away when he wants me, he’s insatiable,” and shaking his head when he says it, but his cheeks candy-pink, and a smile tucked up in the corner of his mouth, a proud one, a smug one, because he knows what he’s got that they don’t. Because he likes it. He likes the way Buck wants him. 

Buck’s so big looming above him. His meaty chest and his wide, built shoulders, and the curve of his belly and his thick arms denting the mattress on either side of Eddie’s head. Eddie feels small beneath him in a way that almost makes him nauseous from wanting it so bad. 

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees. His voice is shocking, high and breathy. He can’t get a deep enough inhale to put the bass back into it. He doesn’t want to. He paws at Buck’s chest, his jaw, brings him down into another kiss that’s really more trading spit back and forth, hot liquid traveled from Buck’s tongue to Eddie’s. “I am. I am.”

Buck braces his hips against the bed, hooks his hands into Eddie’s armpits. Gentle and effortless, as if he’s lifting Jee, he scoots Eddie up the bed so his head lands on a pillow. 

“Say it,” Buck says, rough. 

Eddie turns his scalding face to the side, eyes squeezed closed, and presses his fevered forehead against the inside of Buck’s wrist. “Buck,” he whines, squirming below him, the basin of his pelvis all boiling liquid, his cock so hard he can feel the place on the front of his sweats where they’ve gone heavy and sodden and wet. “I can’t.”

“Yeah you can, baby,” Buck coos. “I know you can. My pretty little wife.”

He rolls his hips down as he says it, grinds his hard cock against Eddie’s, and oh, God, he’s big. Eddie can feel it before he even sees it. Big and hard and hot and desperate for Eddie. All for Eddie. 

“I’m,” Eddie starts, teeth almost chattering with how bad he wants it. He tries to open his eyes, but his head’s spinning so fast his tummy flips into his throat. He closes them again. Clings to either side of Buck’s waist, hands seeking all that warm skin beneath his t-shirt. “I’m your—I’m your wife, I’m your pretty wife—oh, God, Buck.”

Buck’s moan rolls like thunder through him. 

“I wanna get inside you,” Buck pants, “please let me get inside you, baby.”

Eddie nods against his arm. Again, again, again. He’d let Buck turn him inside out. He’d let Buck do anything to him.

Buck sits up, all his weight rocking back against Eddie’s lap. He moves too fast for Eddie to miss his touch: grips the neck of Eddie’s hoodie in one hand and the tab of the zipper in the other and yanks down in one hard pull, all the cool air of the bedroom spilling in to cradle Eddie’s torso. 

“Fuck, Eddie,” he says when he sees him. His eyes are dark and ravenous, and it’s—it’s genuinely bewildering. Eddie knows what he looks like, the whole expanse of his chest and ribs every muddied shade of bluepurplegreenyellowbrown that exists, not a square inch of flesh unbruised. Just a constant lurid reminder of the accident. Eddie feels on a good day satisfactorily neutral about his own physical appearance, considers himself plain but passably handsome, and so he’s aware of the reality of what he looks like right now. It’s ugly. It’s all wound. 

But Buck doesn’t seem to think so. Buck licks his lips as he surveys Eddie, as he dissects him, and then he bends close and the fan of his hot breath on Eddie’s raw skin sends ripples of shivers down his legs and he finds a spot of unblemished skin right over the little swell of Eddie’s left pectoral and he bares his teeth and he bites him. Hard. 

It knocks the wind out of Eddie. His stomach contracts, his segmented spine bows. The intercostal muscles between his ribs scream at him, and the entire map of his fascia is lit up like LA at night, pain with a bloodysweet edge. 

“Easy, easy,” Buck hums, like he’s gentling a startled horse. He slides his hands beneath Eddie’s spine and lifts him just a little, just enough to drag the hoodie first off of one arm, then the other. Eddie is still elevated a handful of inches off the bed, bared like an offering across the plank of Buck’s arms, so Buck doesn’t have to bend his head very far at all to kiss the shape his teeth left in Eddie’s skin. Right over Eddie’s rollicking heart. “You just lay here and take it, Eddie, ok? Don’t want you hurting yourself.”

Buck waits for Eddie’s pliant, “Ok,” before he lowers him down again. 

He yanks Eddie’s sweatpants down and off. Tosses them somewhere in the corner of the room. Kneels at Eddie’s side and hooks a hand around the back of Eddie’s knee and pulls his leg up a little, so its splayed bent over the mattress, his cock hard and dripping and as quivering with banked arousal as the rest of him. 

“Anybody ever fingered you before, baby?” Buck asks. And oh, this asshole—Eddie can see by the look on his stupid handsome arrogant face that he knows nobody has, and that he likes it. His eyelids are so heavy the only thing Eddie can see is half-moon slivers of feverblue. He runs his hand up the inside of Eddie’s thigh, stops just short of his ass. “Desperate girl like you, it’s hard to believe nobody’s ever touched you like that before.”

The center of Eddie’s chest is expanding, expanding, expanding. “No,” he says, the vowel all drawn out, voice shaking with how hard he’s trembling. He feels exposed and displayed and humiliated, bared in supplication, naked before Buck, who is still fully dressed. Because that’s the way Buck wants him. “No, nobody.”

Somehow Eddie’s still shocked by it when it happens, even though Buck’s hand is palpating his ass. Two fingers pressed to the surface of his hole, and a deep, slow, circular rub. 

Eddie keens out a wordless whine. 

He is clutching the back of Buck’s neck where his skin is the warmest, the downy trail of feathery baby hairs spilling down the nape of his neck, this coveted, sacred spot Eddie has stared at with his chest tied up in knots of longing so many times over the years. Something about it is just as intimate as the tip of Buck’s middle finger dipping in dry to the tight, puckered ring of muscle between Eddie’s legs. A body is a body is a body, and here in this hearstop moment, the two of theirs are indistinguishable. 

Buck bends at the waist to kiss him again. A deep, quenching drink of a kiss. 

“You waited,” Buck pants against his mouth. “You waited, just for me, didn’t you? You waited so you could be mine.”

“Yeah,” Eddie whispers, because it doesn’t matter if he consciously knew that or not, doesn’t matter if the thing that’s kept him buried alive for thirty years was fear or self-hatred or indoctrination or cruelty or the hand of God. What matters is that it has put him here in this bed beneath this man. What matters is that he has broken through the surface and his lungs are raking in gaspfulls of clean, clear air. 

“Jesus Christ, Eddie, you’re so—” Buck cuts himself off to rear back on his knees again, his chest heaving. He shoves the hand not currently threatening to breach Eddie dry down into his jeans, button thumbed open and zipper scraping down with a sound that cuts with deafening volume through the water-thick air. He pulls his cock out, groaning as he squeezes it in a clumsy, careless fist, no finesse and all desperation, and God—the ring of his fingers and thumb barely meets around it. Eddie feels fucking crazed. 

Buck looks like every shameful desire Eddie’s ever had made manifest. Shirt shoved halfway up his waist and jeans halfway down his hips, the thick padded muscle of his stomach flexing with every hard, rough stroke of his hand, his cockhead wet and just as flushed as his mouth, the thick, curly hair dusting his thighs and his groin and trailing up beneath his shirt. Eddie knows it blankets his chest, too, has seen it enough times to recall it in perfect detail. He wants to rub his soft cheek against it, feel the scrape, the burn. He wants to feel it between his legs. 

Eddie’s never wanted anybody he’s fucked this bad before. 

Eddie’s never wanted anybody he’s fucked. 

Buck pulls off of his own cock with effort. Pins Eddie’s mouth open with his thumb and his ring finger dug so hard in the hinge of his jaw that it releases, reflexive, and then shoves two fingers of his opposite hand in behind Eddie’s teeth. 

They press Eddie’s loose tongue into the bottom of his mouth. Slide backwards slowly, edging up on the part of Eddie’s throat that’s all soft spongy tissue, the part that makes his gag reflex trigger just enough that his eyes begin to run. 

Buck’s skin tastes salty and bitter and animal. Coated with his own sweat, his precome. And now, with Eddie. 

Eddie suckles at them, pulls them in deeper, automatic. He wants every inch of Buck he can get. He wants to take Buck so far inside himself that they disappear into each other, become one new creature. He wants—he wants—

“Buck,” he says, or tries to, the word slurred and misshapen and silly-sounding around Buck’s fingers. Eddie’s rocking his own hips up into nothing, mindless, one hand gripping Buck’s forearm and the other sifting through his messy curls. He chews a little on Buck’s knuckles, light, flesh and bone and tendon squishy under his molars. “ Hnnnf. ”

Buck laughs at him. It’s low and mean and mocking, but his eyes are limpid, his fingers stroking Eddie’s tongue firmly with adoration. Buck wants him. Eddie can see it in every line of his body, feel it in the humid heat of his breath crowded up underneath Eddie’s jaw. Buck wants him. 

“It’s ok, pretty girl, I know it’s hard to think right now,” Buck says. “Just get me nice and wet, that’s right, just like that.”

Eddie doesn’t know if his flesh and muscle and bone and fragile flailing heart are built to withstand this. He’s used to heat of the external kind, has walked through more fire than he can recall with distinction, his whole adult life a shimmering sheet of flame in his memory. But this heat has no impetus spark, no source, no flame Eddie can quench. It’s built into his goddamn veins, and it’s gonna swallow him whole. 

That’s alright, he decides, as Buck raps the back of two fingers over Eddie’s limp jaw to get him to open up. Let him burn. 

Buck pulls out of Eddie’s mouth. For a moment his wet hand hovers there before Eddie’s face, a long, glimmering strand of hot saliva bridging the gap from his fingers to Eddie’s mouth. And then it snaps. Splashes down onto Eddie’s cheek.

“Buck, oh my God,” Eddie breathes. 

“Feelin’ good, baby?” Buck asks him, and Eddie nods, and nods, and nods, and Buck says, “Well you’re about to feel even better.”

It’s still too dry when Buck slides his middle finger into Eddie’s hole, a sharp friction burn, but Eddie doesn’t care. He bears down on it without conscious thought, muscles contracting, and the fist in Buck’s hair tightens, twists, tugs him even closer. 

Buck makes a sound like Eddie has hit him when he does it. Punched-out. Rough as a gravel road. 

He works his finger in and out, so slow it’s like he thinks Eddie will break if he speeds up, so slow it’s agonizing, sinking a little further each time his wrist crooks. 

When he slips a second finger in, Eddie feels like he’s being broken in half, cleaved in twain. The two soft longing halves of his body parting like waves around Buck’s intrusion. 

“You’re so fucking tight,” Buck says, close to awed. “So tight and hot and wet for me.”

“Want you,” Eddie mumbles, lips buzzing, sticking to each other with drool, “want you t’fuck me.”

He doesn't know how he’ll even take it when two of Buck’s fingers already feel like this and Buck’s cock is frankly ridiculous. But he wants it. In this moment, he thinks he wants it more than anything. 

Buck’s breath is harsh as a buzzsaw in his throat. He hitches Eddie’s thigh up higher, kneading at the fleshy muscle in rhythm with the slow, dragging pace of his penetrating fingers. “‘M gonna,” he says. It sounds like a vow. “But I gotta open you up first, baby. Get you all nice and loose so I don’t hurt you.”

Buck’s fingers withdraw again, except they don’t stop and plunge back in this time. A split second before Buck’s fingertips slip out past Eddie’s rim Eddie flinches with a sudden bolt of raw panic, slaps his hand down around Buck’s wrist. Holds him in place. 

“No,” Eddie says, “no, don’t, don’t stop.”

“Eddie, ” Buck says, half huff of laughter and half groan. He’s shaking, too, Eddie realizes. Everywhere but for his steady, capable hands. Banked, surging desire. “It’s ok, I’m not leaving. Just gotta grab the lube.”

Eddie pouts up at him, but acquiesces. Watches Buck through huge, watery eyes as he stretches out over Eddie to grab the lube from his nightstand, his shirt sliding up and his bicep flexing, the arc of his body long and lovely. 

He pulls his jeans and socks and underwear off while they’re separated, sends them and his shirt flying off to the same corner Eddie’s clothes disappeared to. And Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the shape of him—his wide sculpted shoulders and his stupid jacked arms and thick waist, his thighs like tree trunks, his cock bobbing heavy and wet and flushed between them. He’s so gorgeous it feels unfathomable. 

It only takes a handful of stuttered heartbeats, but Eddie’s already aching for him by the time he settles between Eddie’s thighs again. He feels so empty he could cry.

It’s like Buck knows. It’s like his body can feel what’s happening to Eddie’s body, his blood Eddie’s blood, his breath Eddie’s breath. He spans Eddie’s waist with his hand, careful around his mauled skin and cracked ribs, and without missing a beat slides two newly-slick fingers back inside Eddie’s starving entrance. 

“Look at you,” he breathes. “God, I’m so lucky you’re mine.”

He’s all Eddie can see. The place at his temples where his curls have gone dark, flattened with sweat. The tattoos stark on his flushed arms. The mound of his pecs and the little valley between them. His tongue licking his lips, again and again, like he’s chasing the taste of Eddie on his mouth. 

“Yours,” Eddie echoes.

Buck has worked a third finger into him by now, pace picking up into something faster, even and rhythmic and brutal, just this side of punishing. He crooks his hand, strokes hard and deliberate over Eddie’s prostate. 

Eddie’s blood is singing on a high, wrung-out whine. His arms have fallen heavy to the bed, too weak to hold them up any longer. He still hasn’t touched his cock, and neither has Buck, but suddenly it hits Eddie all at once, the sensation, the emotion, the endorphin rush so heady he feels like he’s on some kinda party drug, and he’s—

“Buck,” Eddie says, “Buck, I’m—I’m gonna—”

“That’s ok, baby, go ahead,” Buck says, “my sweet girl, letting me take care of you, getting all worked up with my fingers in your cunt. You can come, Eddie.”

Eddie does, harder than he can remember ever coming before in his life. It crashes into him, so sudden and so total that it takes his breath from him, and his spine arches off the bed again, and his legs shake, and it hurts because everything hurts right now, but it’s that sweetedged kinda pain that feels good, like a slap to the face or a sprained ankle on a basketball court under a vivid sun. He’s—he’s almost wailing, a horrible, wounded sound of ecstacy ripped from his throat, and he’d be embarrassed if he could feel anything other than purified. Cleaned out. Made anew. 

“Eddie,” Buck is saying, over and over like he doesn’t even know he’s saying it, hand withdrawing as he crawls up the bed to hold himself over Eddie once more. “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie—”

He says it into his mouth as he kisses him, wet fingers slipping on Eddie’s jaw, down his neck, to his waist again. His cock digs into Eddie’s heaving belly. Leaves a sticky wet pool behind. 

“Condom,” Buck mutters, making as if to pull away before diving back in again, kissing the broken trail of Eddie’s cracked moan out of his mouth. “Hold on—need to—”

“No,” Eddie says. With effort, he lifts his arms high enough to cling to Buck’s strong, firm shoulders. “No, no condom, please. Please. Wanna feel you.”

Buck pulls back just far enough to stare at Eddie. He looks like someone hit him over the back of the head. Stunned, a little slack-jawed. 

“Eddie,” he says again, hoarse. “You sure?”

Eddie’s never been more sure of anything. 

“I’m your wife,” Eddie says, thick and dreamy. It’s like all this heat has boiled his brain, has melted it away. All that’s left is bubbling hot honey, coating all of him, a sweet protective layer. “‘Course I’m sure.”

“You’re gonna fucking kill me,” Buck rasps. 

Despite the punishing pace Buck built to, despite the arrogant cant to his jaw, he is still gentle with Eddie. Slow as he eases Eddie’s thighs up, as he hooks Eddie’s knees around his shoulders, not folding him nearly as far as Eddie wants him to, not yanking him into his lap and bending him in half and disregarding his injuries entirely. He takes care of Eddie, like he said he would. Like Eddie always knows he will. 

Even when he slides home it’s gentle. So slow as to almost be cruel. 

“Next time,” Buck says, and he’s making Eddie into something new, remolding him around his cock, filling that empty space and filling it and filling it, so full Eddie’s atoms are expanding, “when you’re healed and feeling good, I’m gonna flip you over and hold you down and fuck you ‘til you can’t walk. Gonna put you through the fucking mattress.”

Eddie makes a broken mew of a sound, and Buck bottoms out. 

Eddie’s shaky and sensitive, whole body shocky as a livewire with overstimulation, the sensation of every touch magnified to a thousand. It’s like electrocution each time Buck nails his prostate, and the waves of it radiate through Eddie’s torso and down his arms and legs, these long, rolling currents of pleasurepain, so heightened he can barely breathe let alone speak. 

He can’t believe Buck is touching him. Can’t believe Buck fits inside him. Can’t believe he’s getting hard again.

“ Unh ,” says Eddie, the only response he can manage. 

Buck laughs at him again, his mouth a mean, adoring curl. And then he’s pulling almost all the way out and slamming back in again, and Eddie can’t do anything but hold on. 

“Eyes open, Eddie,” Buck says. “Look at me, wanna see you.”

Eddie hadn’t even realized they were shut. It takes genuine, concentrated effort to peel them open again, to raise his eyelids which have gone heavy and woozy and tacky with unshed tears. He stares at Buck’s face above him: his eyebrows titled up in the middle, brow wrinkled with pleasure, his lips that have now kissed Eddie hanging open, his teeth that have now been sunk into Eddie’s skin glinting in the dark cavern of his mouth, the highest parts of the curve of his cheeks stained scarlet. 

Eddie loves him. God, Eddie loves him.

“Good girl,” Buck whispers, the words passed gentle down to Eddie through the scant heatdark space between them. He drags his hand through the come pooled in the concave of Eddie’s stomach, gets it good and wet, and then wraps his hand around Eddie’s cock. Eddie jumps at the touch, and Buck hushes him, soft and wordless and breathy up against Eddie’s cheek, as he starts to stroke him in time with his thrusts. “Think you can come again?”

“I—I—”

“I think you can. For me?”

Jesus. Well when he puts it like that.

It builds and builds and builds inside Eddie, this pressure, this heat. And then he's coming again with a strangled little cry, clenching around Buck, curving toward him and twisting away at once, lit up like a circuit board, and Buck is spilling hot and wet and endless inside him on the next breath they share. 

For a long time Eddie can do nothing but cling to him. Buck’s forehead nestled in against Eddie’s throat, his strong arms trembling a bit from holding himself up so as not to crush Eddie into the mattress. His hands, wandering restless over every inch of Eddie’s buzzing skin.

“I love you,” Buck whispers, voice small and splintered, and Eddie’s heart throbs. “I love you, Eddie, I love you, I love you so much.”

“Sweetheart,” Eddie murmurs. He can feel Buck’s face wet against him. “Come here.”

Buck pulls out, and Eddie holds back his whimper at the loss, at the hot gush of Buck’s come spilling down the inside of his thigh. Buck moves to the side of him, crawling up the bed so they can face each other when Eddie turns his head on the pillow. 

He’s the most beautiful thing Eddie’s ever seen. Pink tear-streaked face, his hair a wreck from Eddie’s greedy hands. 

He’s Eddie’s. Eddie’s never gonna be apart from him again. 

Eddie’s still weak as a kitten, so he tips his chin up imploringly, and Buck understands what he’s asking for. Of course he does. He slides his arm around Eddie, tilts Eddie’s face toward him with a hand that’s still soaked with spit and lube and come, and kisses him. 

“I love you,” Eddie says, and he means it so much that the words feel inadequate, too small and commonplace to carry the depth of his feeling from his mouth to Buck’s ears. He grabs Buck’s hand and places it over his still-pounding heart, right over the spot where Buck sank his teeth in. Maybe Buck can just feel it. Maybe he’ll feel it and know. “Buck, I don’t—I’ve never—I don’t even know how to tell you. How to show you.”

“It’s ok, Eddie,” Buck murmurs. He’s holding Eddie’s heartbeat in his palm the way Eddie held his on that awful storming night. He is Eddie’s, and Eddie is his. “You already have.”

They stay there for a long time. It’s a true indication of how satisfied Eddie is that the various liquids drying down flakey on his skin don’t even bother him. He’s almost asleep, hovering in that warm filmy layer right before slumber, but there is something still pricking at the back of his mind. 

“Buck,” he slurs. He’s exhausted, but it’s the good kind of exhaustion, not the hollow depletion he’s been walking around with for months. Years. He curls his hand around Buck’s wrist.

“Mm?”

“Don’t move out.”

Buck’s mouth is in Eddie’s hair. He pulls back just a little to look at him, his smile so wide Eddie’s heart flutters. 

“Yeah?” he asks. It’s ridiculous that he looks almost shy, after what he just did to Eddie, after how he spoke to him, all those things he said. “Want me to stay?”

Eddie could laugh, could make a joke. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have to, anymore. 

“Forever,” he murmurs. “Want you forever.”

Buck’s breath catches, his eyes bright and wet and tender. He kisses the corner of Eddie’s mouth. His forehead. Each of his soft, flushed eyelids. 

“You know, I meant it,” he says, low, fervent. “All of it. You’re mine. We’re basically married to each other already.”

It’s true. That thing Eddie’s been missing, that his heart’s been craving—the longing has only gotten so acute because it’s been right in front of him the whole time in the shape of his best friend, hovering close as a breath, this kind wonderful ridiculous man, this person who touches Eddie and replaces all the parts inside he didn’t even know he was missing. Eddie loves him and is loved in return. They belong to each other. 

“Good,” says Eddie. He weaves his fingers through Buck’s, presses their joined hands together over the beat of his heart. “Then I’ll stop correcting people.”