Chapter Text
This is the worst hangover of my life, Buck thinks as he is scrolling on his phone, head pounding and hands shaking, his tongue as dry as the Nevada desert, trying to google cancel Vegas marriage without much success.
“You think you could help out here?” he says – or rather, croaks – to Eddie, but Eddie only groans and pulls the duvet further over his head. Buck can sympathize.
“Let me die in peace.”
“You’re no help,” Buck says, throwing the covers on his side off and gets up on shaky legs. The plan was to get some water, but he only makes it a few steps before he collapses down on the settee by the window, legs too shaky to carry him any further. The phone slips from his slack fingers.
“I give up,” he says. “We’ll just gonna have to stay married forever. I haven’t felt this shit since Chimney’s bachelor party.” At that, the melted mess of his brain manages to produce a lightbulb moment. He snaps his fingers, then immediately regrets it as the noise punches through his skull. “Chimney! He knows wedding stuff! I’m calling Chimney!”
Heroically, he manages to snatch the phone back up from the floor.
Calling Chimney was a mistake. He drags Hen along with him and then it’s suddenly a whole thing. They seem less interested in helping Buck and Eddie get out of this stupid drunken marriage, than how they ended up in it in the first place.
“It was just this dumb thing,” Buck tries to explain. “There were some people going to a chapel, and we came along, and I d-dunno, it all gets very fuzzy around there somewhere. And then we woke up here, with the marriage certificate.”
“Why were you in Eddie’s bed?” Hen asks. “Your and Tommy’s room is right across the hall!”
“I didn’t want to wake Tommy,” Evan says, because duh. “The 217 is down a pilot and he’s been pulling an insane amount of double shifts. He needs his beauty sleep.”
“So do I,” Eddie complains. “You snored half the night and stole the duvet.”
“Well, help me get a divorce then or I’ll keep doing that for the rest of our lives!”
Hen and Chimney don’t seem very convinced by Buck and Eddie’s version of the events of last night, and keeps insisting that Buck needs to talk to Tommy. “Fine,” he says eventually, because his entire body is aching and everything is miserable and Tommy will make it all so much better. “Should have gotten him over here in the first place, he is much more helpful than any of you.”
Tommy not only solves the whole cancelling – annulling – the marriage thing, he also brings Buck water, helps him to sit up to drink it, and then proposes.
Excepting the fact that his hangover last all into the next day too and he sleeps away all possibility of sex before they leave the swanky hotel room, Buck counts it as an altogether very successful trip.
“Okay,” he says when they finally get home the next afternoon, when he’s starting to feel human again, “is this happening or are you still sex striking?”
They’re going through the fridge to see what they have for dinner, and Tommy looks over at him, brows raised. “Sex striking… Evan, you were passed out.”
Buck slides his arms around his waist, hooks his chin over his shoulder, nips at the side of his neck. “Yeah, whatever.” Teasingly: “Does it freak you out, doing it with a married man?”
Tommy laughs, pushes back a little at Evan as Evan’s hand disappears up beneath his henley, fingers spreading out warmly across his abs. “You wouldn’t be the first married man I’ve slept with,” he says, matching Buck’s tone of voice. Then he cocks his head, looks reflective. “First one married to a man, though.”
“Really?” Buck’s hardly unfamiliar with Tommy’s dating history, and he knows that there was a long string of more or less nameless sexual encounters before Tommy fully came to terms with himself that he doesn’t really talk about that much. “In the army?”
Tommy hums, closes the fridge door. “For instance.” He always gets a little quiet when it comes up, and Buck withdraws his questing hand, closes both arms around Tommy’s middle instead.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. He pulls back a bit, to give Tommy some space. “Hey, you wanna order in?”
“No.” Tommy leans back, draws Buck with him by the hands to get him to box Tommy in against the kitchen island. One large hand closes around Buck’s neck and they’re kissing, deep and filthily, pressed together chest to chest, hips to hips.
“Yeah?” Buck breathes through the kiss, triumphantly, as he can clearly feel Tommy’s mounting interest. He groans as Tommy’s mouth twists away to bite kisses along his jaw and down his neck.
“Yeah,” Tommy says, lowly, and that tone of voice sends a shiver of anticipation down Buck’s spine even as he is already arching against Tommy from the feel of his mouth.
He huffs a laugh as Buck’s hands soon find themselves at the front of his pants, undoing his belt buckle and opening his fly with fingers sloppy from eagerness.
He swallows Tommy’s moan through their kiss as his hand move inside to cup him. “You want me on my knees?” he murmurs against Tommy’s mouth, pleased at the way it causes Tommy’s hips to jerk against him.
“No,” Tommy mumbles. Instead he grabs Buck’s free hand to pull it around him and place it against his ass, draws in a breath. “You should fuck me.”
It doesn’t happen a lot, and when it does it always means Please, take care of me. “Yeah, okay,” Buck says softly and kisses him more firmly.
Buck doesn’t know why, but everyone seems intent to rain on his amazing engagement parade. He’s getting married to the hottest person in the world and LAFD’s sexiest firefighter, and no one seems inclined to celebrate with him, at least not without reservations. Maddie is only cautiously optimistic, Eddie distracted, and Chim and Hen are still on him about delving into the ‘reasons’ he and Eddie got Vegas married (he already knows the reasons: a) too much tequila and b) too little brain), and they’ve drafted Bobby and Karen to the cause. Only Athena seems unperturbed, but Buck has a feeling that has more to do with the fact that this is exactly the sort of shenanigans she expects from him than anything else.
He tries to gush about it with Josh when he’s bringing Maddie dinner at the dispatch center one evening, but that only works until he finds out how Tommy proposed, which he dismisses as wholly underwhelming and unromantic and then quickly loses interest.
“He’s a pilot,” Josh says, “a dramatic sky-writing proposal would be the floor on this one.”
Buck’s pissed when he finds out that Hen, Chim and Bobby cornered Tommy about it all, and he confronts Bobby about it. It’s not planned: Bobby pulls him into his office to tell Buck off about unnecessary heroics in the field and in the heat of the moment, Buck fires back, complains about them using Tommy to get him in line.
Bobby sighs. “It wasn’t like that. We wanted to check in with him, see if he’s okay with all this.”
“He is,” Buck says, still on the edge. “If he wasn’t, he would tell me, for Christ’s sake!”
“Good,” Bobby says, smiling a little. “Then I suggest you just ignore us old mother hens and focus on your own happiness.”
“But I don’t want to ignore you!” Buck says, and that’s really the crux of the matter, isn’t it? “I’m ridiculously happy about this, and I want you to be too!”
And Bobby goes silent for a second, before he nods thoughtfully and says, “Yes, of course. I can see that. I’m sorry, Buck.” His smile widens. “Would you like to show me the ring again?”
Buck really does.
The thing is, Buck knows it was a really stupid, fucked up thing to do, drunk or no. He knows that this is not the kind of stuff that happens to just anyone. If this had been one of those romcoms Tommy loves, Buck drunk marrying Eddie would mean that Eddie was his one true love and that he would end up with him by the end of the movie. But this isn’t a movie and Buck doesn’t want to go back to being married to Eddie – he wants to marry Tommy. And while he would die for Eddie without question and loves him desperately, it’s in a wholly other register than the way he loves Tommy. He may have been oblivious about his interest in men for a long time, but he knows it now and doesn’t see any reason why he would have any further suppressed feeling to excavate.
“Why would you?” Tommy says, all but purring at the way Buck’s nails scratches up his scalp and Buck adores that particular look on him. “Eddie doesn’t know how to fly a helicopter and I bench more.”
Buck grins, shakes his head at his ridiculous man, but can’t deny it that he loves those two particular things about his boyfriend, among many others. “Mhm,” he says. “That’s very true.” Then he grows serious. “What about you? You’re really fine with it?”
Tommy hums. “Well, I’m glad you divorced him,” he says in that deadpan way of his. Buck laughs. “But I dunno, I know what you and Eddie are and I know what you and I are, and why would I care about some dumb drunken thing when I know what we have every day? Besides, if I had been less of an old man and stayed up, you’d probably ended up with me anyway.”
“So this is all on you, is what you’re saying?” Buck says, still smiling.
“Oh no,” Tommy says. “This is all you. In fact, I have a hard time imagining this happening to literally anyone else.”
“Eddie does have a history of jumping the gun when it comes to weddings,” Buck agrees, like the shit he is.
Tommy snorts again. “Yeah, I’m sure you were a totally innocent bystander in all of this.”
Buck presses in closer, kisses Tommy’s throat. “I suppose it’s a good thing I’m pretty at least.”
“And so humble, too.” Tommy tips his head up to allow Buck better access. “It is a good thing your insane co-dependency became apparent right of the bat. Can’t say I didn’t have plenty of warning.”
“Hey,” Buck says, suddenly a little sharply, because it’s been two years but for some reason those weeks before he figured out his interest in Tommy still makes him feel embarrassed. For maiming Eddie, for acting like a complete idiot, for his obliviousness… It turned out to be a total win, but he does wish he had handled the situation with some modicum of dignity. He still remembers the feeling of watching Tommy and Eddie take off in the helicopter for the fight and how sick it had made him, seeing their excitement, their budding bromance, with him being left behind on the tarmac…
He sits up suddenly, pulling his body heat and the duvet away both and Tommy lets out a small noise of protest. “What is it?”
And Buck knows his being ridiculous – again – and that this comes directly on the heels of their conversation about how amazingly cool and secure Tommy is about everything and it’s so humiliating and stupid that he is not and yet… “Back then, were you really into Eddie?”
Tommy stares up at him. “What?”
Buck looks away, pokes at a loosening thread in the duvet. “You know, those first two weeks. You took him to Vegas, you fixed up his car, invited him to trivia night… Were you, like, into him? Until you realized he was straight and I wasn’t?” Was I your second choice? he is too shamefaced to ask, but Tommy probably gets it anyway.
“Seriously?” Tommy says and Buck grimaces, because he knows. Tommy looks him up and down and looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or not. “You married him and now you’re worried about me being too into him?”
“Well, would you rather be engaged to Eddie,” Buck mumbles and he knows it’s so stupid, but he just cannot stop himself.
“Right now, maybe,” Tommy says, because he’s a dick and Buck deserves it. “But no, I wasn’t into him like that. I was a little too busy being distracted by his really hot friend and trying to figure out whether he was actually flirting with me or not.”
Buck cannot help the pleased smile that spreads across his face. “Yeah?”
“Evan, honey,” Tommy says, much more patiently than Buck probably deserves. “We’re getting married. I proposed to you. Remember?”
“Yeah,” Buck sighs.
And the terrifying and wonderful thing about a real, adult relationship and the way Tommy knows him and all his insecurities inside out and is still here, is that he only shakes his head a little in return, and immediately asks, “Do you need me to hold you and tell you that you’re really hot and that I love you an insane amount?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Buck admits.
Tommy pulls him back down, into his chest, enfolds Buck in his massive arms. “I love you insanely much and you’re really hot and I never had eyes for anyone else.” He’s laying it on thick, but Buck doesn’t care, loves it, and laps it up.
“Because I’m way hotter than Eddie?”
“Yeah.” Tommy laughs, eyes crinkling, and Buck loves him so much it hurts. “And because, honestly, he’s so painfully straight.”
He doesn’t even know he’s chewing over Tommy’s words until the next night, when it suddenly hits him. It’s already been a couple of weeks since Vegas and he should really have thought about it earlier, but he hasn’t, not at all. He can’t really fault himself – he’s been busy with the whole annulment thing and then he decided to call his parents about his engagement and that threw him off for several days, and Tommy’s still on an elevated schedule, meaning that Buck’s has planned his time off around Tommy’s to be able to see him as much as possible and temporarily taken on a larger load of the housework and it’s just been one thing after another for a while.
He’s puttering around folding laundry and lazily thinking about the week’s menu when he gets a text from Eddie – nothing important, just a stupid meme. As he swipes it open, however, he suddenly realizes that in all the hullabaloo about Buck and Tommy’s engagement in relation to the whole Vegas thing, no one, including himself, has thought to check in with Eddie about the marriage debacle and how he feels about it.
can i come over? he sends off immediately.
sure, Eddie replies. but isn’t tommy just coming off shift?
He is – he comes through the door just as Buck is throwing keys, phone and wallet into his pockets on his way out.
“Hey,” Tommy says. “You leaving?”
“Need to talk to Eddie,” Buck says, sticking his feet into what he thinks are his boots, realizes they’re Tommy’s 10s, steps back out of them.
“Something happen?”
“Yes and no.” Buck finds his shoes, bends down to tie them. “You know how me and Eddie got married in Vegas?”
Tommy snorts. “I have a vague memory of it, yes.”
“You know how everyone has been all concerned about me and you and what this means for us?” Buck straightens back up, folds himself into Tommy’s arms and kisses him. “Hello, babe.”
“Hi, yourself,” Tommy says fondly, sneaking his hand into the back pocket of Buck’s jeans. “You were saying?”
“I just realized that Eddie is a painfully straight dude who just got Vegas married to another dude and no one has checked in with him about it.” Buck kisses him again. “So sorry about cancelling our night together, but I think I need to go have a serious talk with Eddie.”
Tommy nods. “Good thinking,” he says. “You got it covered? Want me to come with?”
“Yes,” Buck says, kisses him again and again. “But no. I think it’s better if it’s just the two of us.”
Tommy smiles. “My baby bi all grown up and ready to talk someone else through a possible queer awakening. I feel so proud.”
“Shut up,” Buck says, pushing him away.
Tommy snags him for another kiss, then nudges him towards the door. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve been dying to get my hands on your Jeep anyway. I won’t expect you for dinner.”
“Nah.” Buck points a finger at him. “I expect my car to still be in one piece when I get back. It has some serious emotional value.”
“Yeah, well, so does you,” Tommy says. “Meaning I’d hate to lose you because of that piece of shit. Take the truck.”
Buck rolls his eyes, but unhooks the key to Tommy’s truck from the wall. “It’s so heartwarming that you want me to survive a potential crash by mowing down everyone else in my way.”
“I don’t care about anyone else,” Tommy says just as Buck closes the door, making him blush, and ugh, he is going to make him pay him for that absolute monstrosity of a line later.
“So what’s up?” Eddie says once the pizza’s arrived and they’re sat on the couch with plates and beers. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Buck says, grabbing a big slice of meat lover’s onto his plate, divests another one on Eddie’s. “I’m here to check in with you, actually.”
Eddie hesitates with his beer bottle halfway to his mouth. “With me? About what?”
Buck pauses, picks at the crust of his slice. “Well, the Vegas thing, I suppose.”
Eddie’s brows rise.
“I’m so sorry to do this to you,” Buck says. “Everyone else has been on me about it for weeks and I know it’s fucking annoying, but…” He starts out slow, but soon he’s gathering steam. “I’m not saying you have, like, romantic feelings for me because I don’t personally think it seems like you do, but you kinda got gay married and you’re straight, so have you thought anything about how that makes you feel?”
Eddie chokes on a bite of pizza. Buck pounds him on the back.
“Jesus,” Eddie wheezes once his airway’s clear. “Warn a guy, would you.” He leans back against the back of the couch, takes another sip of beer. “After insisting for weeks that this meant nothing, you’re suddenly wondering if it did, in fact, mean anything for me?”
“I said I know it’s annoying!” Buck says defensively. “I’m not asking if marrying me meant anything, I’m only checking in in regard to how you’re feeling about, you know, marrying a man.”
“Buck,” Eddie says. “It wasn’t a real marriage.”
“I know,” Buck says, very carefully. “But at the same time, it’s also kinda your most serious relationship s-since Shannon.”
Eddie rubs a hand across his face. “I’m not in love with you, Buck. Christ, you’re like my brother.”
“I know,” Buck says. And when Eddie says nothing, he prods: “But?”
Eddie sighs. “I don’t know.” His voice is small. “I’m just really shit at being with women, you know? It just never works. Hell, Chris always ends up liking my girlfriends more than me.”
Buck says nothing, only waits it out.
“But honestly?” Eddie sighs, staring down at his hands. “The idea of a dude? I’m not so sure that’s for me.”
“You don’t have to be sure,” Buck says. “Hell, I wasn’t. I was completely in the dark until Tommy.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, but he makes a face.
“What?” Buck asks.
“Well, you’d had some gay moments, hadn’t you? Tommy wasn’t the first guy who thought you were flirting with him, after all.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Buck says. “My point is, you don’t know until you know. And maybe this is nothing, it doesn’t have to be. I’m not here to convince you in any direction. I just wanted to let you know that I’m here, if you want to talk about it, whenever you want to talk about it. And if not, we can just drink beer and eat pizza while I kick your ass at Mortal Kombat.”
“When hell freezes over.” Eddie takes another swallow of beer, seems happy to take the out Buck is offering him. “But I’ll happily let you try, if you really want to get your ass kicked that badly.”
“How did it go?” Tommy asks when Buck comes back home. It’s just before midnight and Tommy’s already in bed, reading glasses on and a thick WWII biography open in his lap.
Buck leans against the doorway, content to just take him in for a moment. “You’re looking at the undefeated Mortal Kombat master,” he says, with no small amount of pride.
“Sounds like your night was very productive,” Tommy says. “He wasn’t interested in talking?”
“Not really, no.”
“Well, you can lead a horse to water and all that,” Tommy says.
“Yeah, I guess.” Buck steps into the room, starts unbuttoning his shirt. “Perhaps if we introduced him to a really hot guy?”
Tommy gives him a look across the rim of his glasses, and Buck would lie if it didn’t make him a little bit hot. “Evan.”
“Well, it worked on me!”
“Yeah, I don’t see Eddie flirting with guys left and right or putting a rainbow flag on his Instagram every Pride month,” Tommy says, turning a page.
“Hey.” Buck disappears into the en suite, grabs his toothbrush. “That was me being an ally!”
“You must have confused so many poor guys,” Tommy says. “You didn’t happen to get a lot of messages from horny dudes every June asking to lick your abs, did you?”
Buck peers out from the bathroom, says around his toothbrush, “…so what if I did. Are you saying I should put a rainbow on Eddie’s insta? And that you want to lick my abs?”
Tommy ignores the last part. “Perhaps we should just let him process this in his own time.”
Buck steps back into the bedroom, pulls off his pants, socks and underwear. He crawls under the duvet, cuddles up against Tommy annoyingly close, limbs askew, almost making him drop his heavy book and forcing him to move his face out of the way to avoid Buck’s flailing. “Well, it’s just so much easier to come to terms with it when you have a really hot guy all over you, wanting to get into your pants.”
“Hey,” Tommy protests. “I was a total gentleman.”
“That’s true,” Buck says, still moving around, lifting up and straddling Tommy’s lap, forcing him to move the book out of the way. He wiggles his ass against his dick; he’s shameless when it comes to ensuring he has Tommy’s full attention. “I’m glad you decided to give that act up.”
--
“Well,” Buck says as he inspects last night’s ill-conceived tattoo in the mirror. “The good thing is that I definitely need to stay with you for life now.”
“Glad that this settled it, if the whole ‘till death do us part thing’ did not do the trick,” Tommy says drily.
“Be honest,” Buck says, biting his lip as he turns in from of the mirror to look at the words from all angles. “Is this a total turn-off? Christ. At least it’s not misspelled.”
Several seconds passes before he realizes that Tommy is being suspiciously silent.
Buck meets his eyes in the mirror. “Tommy, be honest. Does this make you never want to touch my butt again? Never touch me again?”
Tommy sighs, pushes off the chest of drawers he’s leaning against. He steps right up against Buck, looks at the blocky letters in the mirror. “Honestly?” he says, scrunching up his nose in that way he does. “I probably like it a little too much.”
Buck perks up at that. “Yeah? You like seeing me branded, your name all over my ass?”
Tommy squeezed his eyes closed. “Jesus Christ, Evan.”
Buck cackles, kisses him like crazy, pulls him down with him onto their bed. Afterward, he grabs a black marker Tommy uses for crossword puzzles off the nightstand and, with Tommy half-asleep from the afterglow, writes BUCK’S across Tommy’s ass.
He has to admit that it does look really nice.
“Oh my god,” Buck says and then, because it doesn’t fully cover what he is feeling right now, he says it again: “Oh my god. And you were sober when you did this?”
Tommy, leaning back against the armrest of the couch, shirt unbutton and opened across his bare chest, laughs at Buck, who is straddling him with big, disbelieving eyes fastened on his left pec. There are the angry red-studded black lines of a newly made tattoo: a silhouette of a buck prancing across the curve of the muscle.
Buck fingers ghost across Tommy’s chest, fingertips stopping just outside the plastic-covered area. “You’re just as bad as me,” he says, sounding absolutely delighted about it.
“At least mine’s classier,” Tommy says. “A little bit subtle.”
“Yeah, you’re a fucking poet, all right,” Buck says. “Have fun in the changing room at work – they’ll never let you live it down.”
“I see,” Tommy says, pulling him down to kiss him even as Buck tries to resist in order to keep staring at the – his – tattoo. “Good to hear that your ass tattoo was a completely strategic and rational choice.”