Archive of Our Own ^beta

Cover image by Kaitlin (Iinryer)

Eddie never knew anyone with the knack, growing up. Stacy Winters in the front office had it, according to playground rumor; she and her husband, who was a ranch hand or a cop or a power line worker. Eddie's mom shushed him when he asked about it and told him not to listen to gossip, and anyway he saw them dancing after school once and they seemed just like anybody. He twirled her around and around and she laughed loud enough for Eddie to hear her way down the hall where he was sitting in the nurse's office with an ice pack over a bee sting, watching through the open door. His abuelo and abuela danced like that, and sometimes his mom and dad, too.

It’s a rare phenomenon, a teacher droned on in sophomore biology on a day too nice outside to pay much attention to anything. Congeneric minds — or any of the dozens of colloquial names for them — are uncommon enough on their own, and the odds get even longer for them to find someone who both also has the knack and that they actually click with. Abuela called them missing pieces, like when Sophia had bumped into the dining room table and sent the jigsaw puzzle flying, sending parts under the fridge never to be found again, leaving their matching edges forever lonely. Together, congeneric minds are capable of great feats, the teacher went on. They share instincts, feelings, sometimes even movements, one mind sending a signal and another body responding. 

Little was known about the science of it, though not for lack of trying. There’d been a bunch of papers about experiments to force the pairing to happen in people, and then decades later a bunch more papers about how that doesn’t really work, and was entirely unethical anyway. Adrenaline seemed to figure into things, some evolutionary quirk to give people in dangerous situations the best chance at surviving. Eddie got a C on the paper he wrote about it because he met Shannon that semester, and the regular shaky-hands speeding-heart feeling of being sixteen and in love seemed to him the most intense a relationship could possibly be. Eddie looked at her and most times had no idea what she was thinking. In the beginning this was a thrill, the mystery of her half her appeal. Later — arguing through a screen over a spotty internet connection, shame swirling in his gut but still unable to choke up the right words to fix any of this — he figured he just hadn’t bothered to actually know her very well. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people with congeneric potential tended to flock to high stakes environments. Eddie finally met a few pairs in the army, folks so in tune that one of them would be in the air before the other said jump. He’d found it a little uncanny. Johnson and Tucker, eating in the canteen, movements so synchronized it looked like they shared one body that by some bureaucratic error had been spread across two people. He remained unconvinced that it would have made a difference between him and Shannon. They always seemed to need space or closeness at inverse moments to the other. Sharing nerve endings would have been one more too-small room neither of them could leave. 

He saw Tucker die, a few months into that first tour. Watched Johnson scream and choke and claw at his chest like the bullets had torn through him. Thought, guiltily, that he was glad no one — not Shannon, not anyone — knew him quite that well, shared his life quite that entirely. The pain, he thought as he wiped the sedated Johnson’s mouth clean after he’d screamed himself bloody, just didn’t really seem worth it. Shannon was leaving him. He was 25 and halfway across the world from any home he’d ever had, 7,000 miles from his son and the wife he didn’t know very well but was still pretty sure was leaving him. He threw the dirty scrap of gauze in the trash, looking down at Johnson’s restless twitching eyelids. At least it wouldn’t hurt this bad. 

And then, in Los Angeles, 2018, Eddie had met Buck. Then, huddled over a man with a bomb in his leg, Eddie had needed gauze and Buck’s hand had moved. Then, in the parking lot bathed in the light of an ambulance on fire, Buck had inhaled and Eddie's lungs expanded. And, well, that was that.

—

Chimney's always thought it was fun to watch Buck and Eddie play catch. He’s pretty sure that’s a recommended thing, by some science type somewhere. Supposed to strengthen your neural link or whatever. Weirdly competitive sudoku was always more his and Hen’s thing. Anyway. Chimney’s perched on a bar stool with his afternoon can of Diet Coke, and Buck and Eddie had started at three feet apart but are now somewhere around fifteen and still effortlessly plucking the ball out of thin air on every toss. 

It’s good to see the two of them together after everything last year. Chimney hadn’t even been there for half of it, but shit was already rocky when he’d left to follow Maddie, and Hen had kept him up to date on how badly Buck was doing even when Chim hadn’t really wanted to hear it. Bygones, hopefully, are bygones, and Chimney is only sometimes good at holding a grudge, so he’s genuinely happy to hear Buck’s shout of laughter as Eddie turns to lob one over the shoulder, throwing blind. Buck still catches it, of course. They’re as in sync as they’ve ever been, and their game has evolved now — Buck tenses like he’s going to throw right, twisting left at the very last second. It’s hard to trick someone who can feel your muscles contract, though, and Eddie still manages to course correct.

“Nah,” he calls, chuckling. “You’re gonna have to try harder than that.” 

They’re really off, now, underhand, overhand, behind the back, moving as much as possible or standing absolutely still to fuck with each other’s instincts enough to make them miss. Chimney actually cheers at a particularly wild throw from Eddie — the slight grimace on his face making Chim pretty sure he actually just lost grip on the ball, but whatever works — that Buck just barely manages to grab, diving perilously close to the coffee table. That part makes his face pull in an extremely Hen-like wince, and he grabs her ginger ale and only-a-little-melty cup of ice off the counter to pass over as she settles beside him. He grins at her, all big, and her answering smile crinkles her eyes so hard her glasses shift around. Buck and Eddie weren’t the only ones apart last year. Chimney left his lungs on the other side of the country, and it's so nice to breathe easy again.

Hen pours her ginger ale, swirling an impatient finger in the bubbles to deflate them so she can fill the glass as much as possible. She nods towards the game. “How are they doing?” 

It’s a bigger question than who’s winning at catch. Chimney shrugs as he looks over again. They seem happy enough, settled enough. They look like they’re having fun. That doesn’t necessarily preclude turmoil, in Chim’s experience. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

In the end, it’s the sudden blaring of the alarm that finally makes Eddie miss the ball.

—

Buck looks exhausted as he hovers over Eddie’s stove, and some part of Eddie is strangely happy about it. The thing is, he didn’t look exhausted at the station. He’d been all bright smiles and endless energy, bounding from one task to another like the overgrown puppy many people have accused him of being. Eddie doesn’t even think that was entirely a front, necessarily. He knows it can be… easier, to hold yourself together at work. He likes his job, he knows Buck does too, and barring something going disastrously wrong it can feel good to be someplace where you feel equipped to handle any crisis that may arrive, where everyone likes you and trusts that you know what you’re doing. It's out here, in the world, away from protocol and schedules and training, where things tend to fall apart. The thing Eddie is happy — selfish — about is that Buck’s choosing to do that falling apart here. He could have gone to the loft to lick whatever wounds he’s nursing, but he’s at Eddie’s stove stirring rice to go with the enchiladas already in the oven. 

“This’ll be done soon, if you wanna get Chris.” Even Buck’s voice is tired, quiet and scratchy as he turns down the heat and sets the wooden spoon aside. 

“Okay,” Eddie taps his shoulder as he passes him. “There’s beers in the fridge if you want one.”

It makes Buck smile, eyebrows pulling down as he squints. “I know. I’m the one who bought them, last week.”

“Oh, right.” He shrugs, grinning when Buck shakes his head with a soft laugh. It’s his rice, too, then, and his cheese and chiles and chicken in the enchiladas. Half Eddie’s groceries arrive by jeep in Evan Buckley’s reusable shopping bags. “Well, by all means, help yourself to one of your own beers. You’re welcome for the fridge space.” 

Buck does move for the refrigerator as Eddie leaves the room, and this makes him selfish-happy, too. If he drinks, he’ll stay the night — even one beer an acceptable, if flimsy, excuse — and Eddie won’t have to bother with asking him. He knocks on Chris’ door. “Mijo, dinner soon. You finish your homework?”

The door swings open quickly, and Eddie holds in a laugh. With a 24 hour shift and Buck busy the night before that, they haven’t gotten to eat his cooking in awhile. “I only have the reading left, I can do that before bed.” 

“Alright-” Eddie cuts himself off when his arms suddenly tense hard enough he whacks his knuckles against the door frame he’s still standing close to. “Uh- okay, I’ll meet you out there,” he recovers, trying to keep his voice casual. “Wash your hands.” 

He follows dread that isn’t his own back to the kitchen, where he finds Buck looking down at the tray of enchiladas with a fairly tragic expression on his face. 

“You okay?” Eddie looks him over. “Did you burn yourself?” 

“No, just- the fucking food,” Buck sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I never actually turned the timer on.”

Eddie looks at the tray. A little over done, but he’d hardly call it burnt. “I like when the tortillas get kind of weird and dry.” 

Buck frowns at him. “Chris doesn’t.” 

Chris, who apparently followed right behind him, points at a spot sort of in the middle. “That part looks okay. It will still taste good, Buck.” 

For a moment Buck looks like he’s going to argue — with Christopher, Jesus, Eddie’s not sure he’s ever seen this man actually disagree with his kid about anything — but then he deflates. “Sorry. Gotta pay attention in the kitchen.” He knocks his knuckles against the side of his head, clicking his tongue to make a sound like he’s hollow, made of wood. It makes Chris laugh and move on from the moment, washing his hands at the kitchen sink and grabbing plates for everyone. Eddie tries to catch Buck’s eye but is skillfully avoided. On the rare occasions one of them can win their reflex testing games, it’s Buck. 

He relaxes some during dinner, even with Eddie not helping matters by watching him like a hawk. Buck laughs at all Christopher’s jokes, laughs again when Eddie tells them both to eat with their mouths closed for the love of god. Eddie still gets the occasional swoop in his gut from Buck’s unease, but mostly it’s been replaced by the kind of feedback loop that always happens at family meals: he loves his son, Buck loves his son, those feelings bounce against and feed each other till no room is left for the day’s troubles. 

They wrap up before eight so Chris can go finish his homework, and Buck won’t let Eddie do the dishes alone even if they always have the argument that whoever cooked shouldn’t have to clean. They share another beer at the kitchen table as Eddie prepares Chris’ lunch and Buck picks up one of the stray copies of the nature magazine he’d subscribed to and had addressed to Eddie’s house because he’s here all the time anyway and thought Chris might find it interesting, too. 

9:30 is probably too early to go to bed, but Eddie is still getting used to being back at work and Buck is starting to look wilted around the edges again, so he kicks him gently under the table and nods towards his bedroom.

“Yeah,” Buck agrees, carefully marking his page. “Lemme check on Chris, be there in a minute.”

Eddie puts on sweats and a worn-thin t-shirt and flops onto the bed, intending to close his eyes for just a moment and blinking awake when Buck slides in next to him, already changed for bed. 

“Have to drop him off a little early tomorrow,” Buck reminds him, voice barely above a whisper.

“Right,” Eddie blinks, reaching out for his phone to change his alarm. “Science lab set up.” 

“He’s excited about it,” Buck says, soft, a little smile pulling at his mouth. “Wish I could come with you guys.” 

“Right,” Eddie says again, trying not to frown, unsure of how successful he is at it. “Your date with Taylor.”

“Mhm.” Buck — gracefully ignoring whatever level of frowning Eddie was doing — wiggles further under the covers, closing his eyes and sinking into his pillow. “Night, Eddie.”

Eddie reaches under the covers to grab Buck’s arm for just a moment, like that might keep him there for good. “Goodnight, Buck.”

—

2019

Some part of Eddie, in the engine on the way out here, had been certain this was somehow a prank. Sure, he knows Los Angeles is a city built on a mess of fault lines, and he knows that disasters tend to hang out in twos and threes, but, god. The entirety of Santa Monica is a bizarre wasteland. It feels like there should be movie crews, camera cranes, actors with perfect mascara as they drip with water sprayed safely from a hose.

It takes roughly fifteen seconds from stepping out of the truck to seeing the first body. Nobody yells cut.

It’s gruesome work, though the wins are big when they come. A guilty, jittery sort of adrenaline makes a home in Eddie’s veins. Saving a man stabbed through a boat with an improvised scuba oxygen mask and underwater chest compressions feels amazing. Looking up at a tilting Ferris wheel means he’s not looking down at dead and bloated limbs. Save the next person, and the next. Train your eyes to slide over unnatural stillness. Movement is what you’re looking for.

And, all day, steadily growing: the feeling that he’s missing something. He rummages in his medic bag like he’s going to find that half his supplies have vanished, but everything’s right where it should be. He nervously keeps his eyes on his team like they’re all Chris at the mall, but no one ever strays so far he doesn’t know where they are. Is it the feeling of the dead, then? The people floating past that he can’t save? The worry that any of them might not be all the way gone and he’s missing the opportunity to bring them home?

He doesn’t know. There’s too much to do, he can’t dwell on it. He pushes the feeling down and keeps moving forward.

—

Eddie blinks awake. It’s the cool kind of dark in the room, no telltale warmth of the blackout curtains trying to keep the day back and failing. He looks at the clock on his bedside table. 3:26. He looks over at Buck, his broad shoulders. He’s breathing steadily, still asleep. Eddie puts a hand, palm flat and fingers spread, against his back.

—

Chimney always thought that if he ever had kids he wouldn’t be one of those “my child is the cutest kid to ever walk the earth” people. Mostly this is because of how much time he spent around tiny baby Denny, and man, that kid was cute. Cherubic little cheeks, happiest smile you’ve ever seen, the whole shebang. Holding Jee-Yun as she eats a strawberry with such enthusiasm she snorts the whipped cream topping up her nose and has to immediately sneeze it back out, though, he thinks that he was a filthy liar. His kid is the absolutely cutest kid to ever walk the earth, foamy snot all over his work shirt be damned.

“You’re adorable, you know that, kid?” Chim asks as he looks around vaguely for a paper towel or something. Jee says something like “stahbebby” and makes grabby hands, so he abandons his side quest and hands her another piece of fruit instead. 

“Oh- aw- you want me to take her so you can change?” 

Maddie also has the my kid is the cutest expression on her face as she walks into the kitchen, keys clattering and big bag thudding onto the counter. Chimney, a little guiltily, uses the Child Distraction to look her over for a moment. Every time he’s seen her after the roadtrip-breakup fiasco, she’s looked a little better, less pale, her smiles more genuine. And the smile on her face right now is really for real genuine, all glowy and soft as she looks at their daughter.

“Howie?”

“Hm?” He looks down at his shirt. “Oh, uh- nah, I’ll just wipe this off. I’m sure it’ll see worse than this at work. If you could-”

He passes Jee over — giggling as she goes, cute — and locates a dish towel, wetting it in the sink and doing a rough scrub. Good enough. “I got fried chicken from that place on 7th for dinner last night, there’s some left in the fridge if you want it for lunch. I got the honey mustard sauce for you just in case.”

When he looks up again the smile on Maddie’s face is smaller but no less soft or real. “Thank you. Dreadfully, I mostly survived last night on ramen and granola bars.” She grins now, nose wrinkling up. “Long shift. I feel like we should get a kitchen at the call center, you can rent Bobby out to us.”

Chim cackles. “The fire department might take you up on that with the rate we go through equipment. Bobby had this look on his face like we might have to start resorting to bake sales when Buck accidentally kicked a halligan over a cliff the other day.”

Maddie snorts, which sets Jee off giggling, not one to be left out. Chimney smiles a big, cheek ache-y smile down at the breakfast dishes he’s rinsing in the sink.

“Oh, I can get those,” Maddie says, bouncing Jee on her hip. “You have to get going.”

“I made the mess, I don’t want to leave more work for you.” He regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth, even before her face tightens up. He’s been trying, so hard, not to worry about leaving her alone, and beyond that trying so hard not to let her see that worry when step one inevitably fails. “I mean- I know you can handle it-”

“It’s fine, Chim.” She hitches Jee up a little higher, pitches her voice into baby talk. “We can take care of it, huh? Can’t we?”

“Alright,” Chimney nods, wiping his hands. “Okay! Bye baby Jee! Have fun with your mom! I’ll see you later!” He smacks a big kiss on her still whipped-creamy cheek, and barely stops himself before he does the same to Maddie. “Uh- okay. Call if you- if you need anything?”

The look Maddie gives him is a little tired, a little amused. “I will,” she says, and then makes a little shooing motion. “Have a good day at work.”

Chimney does a lazy salute, waves bye to Jee and heads out the door.

When he gets to the station, Eddie is flopped on the couch, staring up at the ceiling and looking comically morose. 

“Fuck is up with you?” Chim asks, kicking his foot as he scoots past him to take the far cushion.

Eddie makes a face at him, and then sigh-groans and scrubs his face with both hands. “Worried about Buck.” 

Chim snorts. “Mm, funny. I’m worried about Maddie.” He holds a hand out to shake, and Eddie raises his eyebrow but takes it with a little laugh. “Buckleys, huh?”

“Yeah.” The fleeting amusement leaves Eddie’s face, leaving him melancholy again. He picks at a cuticle. “It’s… not easy to talk when we’re like this.” When they’re already living in each other’s brains anyway? When they’re fighting? Some combination of the two? Eddie continues before Chim can ask for clarification. “I think I’ve always encouraged us not to talk. So… it feels unfair for me to be the one to make us do it now, but I think it needs to happen. He feels so guilty about- he had no control over any of it.” Eddie sighs again, rolls his head along the back of the couch to look at Chimney again. “I dreamed about the tsunami again. That usually only happens when he… it’s been a long time.”

Some combination of the two, something else entirely. “It seems like you’ve already got the solution, man. Talk to your boy.”

Eddie’s eyes get wide in the split second before he looks away again. “He’s not- he’s not my boy.”

Chimney doesn’t snort this time, but it's a close thing. “Probably something else you should talk about.”

“…Yeah,” Eddie says, a little sheepish. Then, so obviously changing the subject it’s almost laughable: “How’s Maddie? How’s Jee?”

Chimney lets the derailment happen. “I think, fully truly honestly, that Maddie is probably actually perfectly fine. I just don’t know how to get my body and brain to believe that.” 

“It’s hard to watch someone struggle.”

“Yeah. And, like- she’s not really struggling anymore, like I said! But I guess- I missed it last time. I don’t want that to happen again. If she needs help I want to be there for her, but I’m afraid I’m being crazy and overbearing about it. Ugh.”

Eddie makes a sympathetic face. “I’m sure she knows it’s because you care about her.”

“Yeah, good intentions don't stop something from being annoying.” He sighs, probably as melancholy and morose as Eddie. His dramatics are catching. “Anyway. You wanna see pictures of Jee absolutely demolishing some strawberries?”

Eddie laughs, just as gracefully accepting Chimney’s change of topic. “Yeah, man, always.”

—

Eddie doesn’t get around to talking to Buck till a week later. They’re in Eddie’s house again, but Buck has started to look exhausted everywhere, all the time, nothing special anymore about the way his eyelids droop when he walks in through this specific door. It’s worse than usual today. They had a hell of a long call — a rockslide down on the PCH, outside of their usual range but it was bad enough that the responding station had called for any back up they could possibly get — and Eddie’s wrist and shoulders and whole damn body aches from the hours of grueling work. Buck has to be feeling it, too. Eddie heads right to the bathroom, grabbing the tube of arnica gel that keeps this household running some days. 

He doesn’t know how to bring anything up. We need to talk feels as ridiculous as it does dire. That’s a movie script confrontation, as contrived and meaningless as it’s not you, it’s me, or I’m sorry for your loss. Buck is his best friend, and also their fucking hearts beat in rhythm. He can do better. 

“My leg hurts sometimes,” is what ends up coming out of his mouth when he gets back to the living room. Your ache is mine. A little poetic, but whatever. It gets the point across. Share it with me, please. We already do, so why are you hiding it?

Buck is sprawled on the floor next to the couch, Eddie isn’t sure why. He looks up at him silently for a few moments, and then rubs at his shoulder. Answer enough. Eddie barely has to look as he tosses him the gel, sure Buck will catch it as Eddie sits on the couch with a sigh. He watches Buck, still on his back, hike up his pant leg and start massaging arnica into his calf muscles.

“Are you… doing okay?” It feels stupid to say.

Buck looks at him like it’s stupid to hear, too. His fingers drum a few times over one of the jagged lines still drawn up his shin. “‘M fine, Eds. Just a long day.”

Eddie purses his lips, shaking his head back and forth in a slow roll against the back of the couch. “You know that’s not what I meant.” His hand lifts up to catch the tossed arnica without thinking about it. He looks down at Buck, sprawled out, looking back up at him. “I want to… know that you’re okay. And, Buck, I’m here if you’re not.”

Buck sits up with a sigh that’s more petulant and annoyed than Eddie wishes it was. He rests his chin on his bent knee. “I know. But I’m- I’ll be fine. Stop worrying.” 

Eddie snorts at that. “Oh, yeah, that’s something I’m great at.” 

Buck’s smile grows so tenderly across his face. “I know.” He twitches his right pointer finger three times and Eddie’s moves involuntarily with the tug. “Come on,” he says, standing up with a groan. “Let’s make the pizza.”

They’d bought the ingredients together — sort of together, Buck on the phone at the grocery store and Eddie and Chris shouting requests down the line — earlier that week, and Chris will be home soon from a friend’s house and likely starving from the hard work of being a twelve year old all day long. He’s old enough that the novelty of making the pizza himself is less appealing than being able to immediately eat it, even if Buck had made big sad faces as he’d relayed his instructions to make it in his absence. And this is all a distraction, Eddie knows it is, but Buck is smiling down at him and his finger goes tug, tug, tug, and he lets him get away with it.

—

It’s nice to not be the only one who’s been gone awhile. Being an LAFD paramedic is like riding an admittedly very complicated bicycle. It’s not like Chimney’s forgotten how to do any of this — it hasn’t been that long, and he even had some practice while in Boston — but it’s all just a little… uneasy. Unfamiliar. They changed brands of ice packs while he was away. They carry more adrenaline than they used to, and the pockets of the med bag got rearranged. He finds himself hesitating in the field more than he ever has, and riding Hen’s instincts more often than sharing his own.

Eddie seems to be the same way; letting Buck take the lead, pausing more, tiring faster. Any amount of hours spent in the gym don’t necessarily translate to the realities of the job, and by the haggard look on Eddie’s face after more physically demanding calls that probably mirrors his own, Chimney is sure Eddie’s also sorely feeling that unfortunate truth.

And then there’s the nerves of it all. He sees Eddie glance up at surrounding windows when they’re on an open street. Chimney gets a little nervous when someone comes up behind him, imagines the faint pinch of a drugged needle. The added tension of not-entirely-irrational irrational fear haunting their every movement has them exhausted by the time they pile back into the station. Chimney showers as slowly as is reasonable in a firehouse he might have to run right back out of at any moment, and then trudges his way upstairs. Have these boots always been so uncomfortable? Did he use to get blisters like this? Awful.

When he gets to the loft — that definitely felt like more stairs than usual — he finds Eddie already sprawled out on the couch Chimney himself was about to collapse on. “Budge up, Diaz,” he demands, kicking him half heartedly. 

Eddie groans as he smacks Chim’s leg away and drags himself upright. “My legs are butter,” he complains, melting into the cushions like the rest of him is, too. Chimney doesn’t doubt it. He sort of had it easier on the call they just came in from, on medical duty as he was - Eddie spent the last hour running up and down a slope carrying heavy equipment. 

“Oh, you’re young,” Chimney says, because sympathy doesn’t preclude him from talking shit. “You’ll resolidify in no time. I, however, am resigned to the cruel fate of being purée for the foreseeable future.”

“Oh, yeah, at your ripe old age of-”

“Mm, and I think we should just stop talking now-”

The general soft clamor of Buck and Bobby making lunch in the kitchen suddenly becomes a louder and more specific clamor. Eddie and Chimney both turn at Bobby’s shout of laughter. 

“That’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard,” he says to Buck, still laughing, getting the kid in a gentle headlock.

“Eddie,” Buck calls, grinning and flailing and noticing their audience. “Eds- ah- help!”

“No,” Eddie squints at him even as he drags his tired legs off the couch to go investigate. “What did you do?”

Chimney grins as he watches the three of them goof around in the kitchen, Bobby laughing as he shoos them away from the hot stove. Some things might feel a little worse right now, a little itchy, a little uncomfortable, but some things never change.

Chimney picks Jee up from the Lees after work and twirls her around and around on their front lawn until he gets worried she can’t breathe for laughing too hard. The afternoon is so pleasantly warm that it seems a shame to go straight home, so he wanders them over to a park littered with food trucks on any given weekday. One of their favorites is there, a Jamaican place with a plantain porridge Jee loves to get sort of in her mouth and mostly all over her outfit. They get in line and then Chimney double takes because a few people ahead of them it looks like-

“Mama!”

Maddie twirls around at Jee’s delighted shout, and lights right up when she sees them, abandoning her spot to come towards Jee’s grabby hands. 

“Hi my baby,” she coos, kissing her tiny fingers. “What are you doing here?”

“Seemed like a nice afternoon for eating outside,” Chim says, shrug matching the swoop in his stomach. “You’re on break? Would you… care to join us?”

Maddie smiles, raising an eyebrow. “Well, it would be kind of weird if I got my lunch and sat 15 feet away from you.” She nods at the picnic tables, not spaced particularly far apart. 

He laughs, ducking his head. His cheeks feel hot, god, is he blushing? “Oh, you’re not into the clandestine? You don’t want to communicate solely through a series of winks and napkin waves?”

Maddie winks twice and scrunches up her nose, and he thinks — for certainly not the last time as they get their food and eat in the sun and linger by their cars like they’re both reluctant to say goodbye — I miss you so much.

—

It’s gotten harder over the years to tell whose dream is whose when the stuff of their nightmares has such overlap. Eddie thinks this must be his own subconscious, at first. Sun shining down on Hope street and the distant sound of waves and the intense feeling that he’s missing something, someone, limbs all cold and slow moving like he’s caught in the mud. And Buck had felt so solid at work today, steady ground to stand on when Eddie himself had felt so unsteady. He’d fallen asleep expecting a nightmare to come, had almost sent a pre-sleep apology text for whatever subconscious spillover Buck was going to be subjected to.

But then he turns towards the firetruck — burning and flipped, and upright and whole all at once — and sees himself standing there. “We have to leave,” his own mouth begs. Buck’s voice, Buck’s dream after all. “Please- Eddie, please- we have to leave, you have to move, you can’t be here, you have to-” 

Dream Eddie just stands there, smiling beatifically, not listening or not caring. His hair is perfectly mussed and the light almost makes him glow, which Eddie might laugh about if he wasn’t sure of what was coming next.

He winces as he sees himself get shot. It’s not the first time. Buck’s had this nightmare before, but they don’t share every dream and there were all those months after the shooting where they weren’t connected at all. Eddie wonders how many times Buck has watched this happen. 

The Eddie who’s bleeding out on the ground is still smiling that serene smile up at him. “My leg hurts sometimes,” he says, and his shin splits magically open, blood and titanium screws falling out. “Do you want to come home?” He asks, coughing, more blood in coagulated chunks spewing from his mouth. Still smiling, covered in gore that only one third belongs to him. “It will hurt, but I don’t mind.”

Eddie with Buck’s mouth says “Oh, Buck,” and he feels Buck’s surprised jolt, and they immediately wake up.

He blinks up at the ceiling, and then over at the pillow beside him. Buck is at the loft tonight. Eddie exhales slowly and reaches a hand to lay across the cold other half of his bed. 

“Just talk to me.”

And of course what they have is not telepathy, not really, so he gets no response. 

—

Chimney wakes up after a solid seven hours of sleep feeling like he didn’t get a wink and with a killer headache hammering around his skull. Wonderful. He staggers through getting Jee all dressed up and fed, trying not to wince at her extremely cute and terribly loud early morning toddler babbling. Maddie is frowning in concern the second she opens the door.

“Are you alright?” She hovers over the hastily packed diaper bag he left on the counter. “You look awful.”

“Gee, thanks,” he says, sarcastic until Jee babbles something like you're welcome and he turns into a little dad-shaped pile of goo. When he and Maddie have finished making matching awww faces at each other, he sighs and says “Uh, no, I’m fine. I don’t think this is my headache.”

He and Hen don’t really feel each other’s emotions minute to minute — only sometimes, in really high stakes situations — but if one of them is feeling something intensely enough for a long period of time, it tends to leak over. This is a Henrietta Wilson stress headache, Chimney is sure of it. He goes out of his way driving to work so he can pick up an extra large cup of Hen’s all time favorite coffee from the cafe that’s just far enough from the station to rarely justify going there, and a blueberry crumble to boot. 

“Hello, Mrs. Wilson,” he says, passing the goods to the grabby hands she makes as soon as she sees what he’s carrying. “Care to tell me why I downed three Advil with my cup o’ joe this morning?”

Hen takes a big gulp of coffee, and then sighs long and loudly. “My mother wants to get married.”

Last Chimney knew they were all happy for Toni’s second chance at romance with Clive, but the look on Hen’s face says otherwise. “I take it congratulations are not in order?” 

She sighs again, even more groan-like this time, and he follows her to the couches. “I mean, I’m happy for them. She’s my mom, I’m happy for her, but… she wants to do it in our backyard. Which- I don’t know, I think I’d be fine with it! They’re retirees, where were they gonna get the cash for a venue? We host or we’d have ended up paying for wherever else it would be. Which-” Hen wipes a hand over her face and Chimney’s temple gives a pointed little throb. “Which would have been fine, we would have done it, it would have been fine. But Karen got all in her feelings about it because- because of all the shit with our wedding.”

“Right,” Chimney nods, remembering how beautiful Hen and Karen had been in their suit and dress, how happy a day it had been, and how many times Hen had hung up the phone and sobbed into his shoulder in the days leading up to it. “And how about your feelings about it?”

Hen flops her head back, boneless. “I’m trying not to have any. Trying not to- get sucked back into it, you know? Fuck, man, it’s been ages. She didn’t want me to get married because she had such a terrible experience with being married.” Chimney nods, but thinks about some of the things Hen had wept to him all those years ago. Comments from Toni about Hen specifically being unfit for marriage, about how she was supportive but just didn’t see how things could ever work out between two women long term, and why not wait to see if the right man could come along to tame her impulsive behavior? “She’s allowed to change her mind. She’s allowed to grow. We’re fine now. We’re fine! So it shouldn’t hurt like this anymore!”

Eddie — walking past the couch on his way to the kitchen with his own mug in hand — snorts, and then looks at them guiltily when they both turn to stare.

“Uh, sorry,” he says. “Just- like, this station is full of poster children for ‘something your parents said 20 years ago fucking you up for life,’ you know?”

Hen smirks, though her eyes are tired. “So, what’s your vote, Diaz? Forgive or hold a grudge?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Eddie winces. He walks around the couch and flops down onto the other end from Hen, whistling a breath through his teeth. “Fuck if I know. Both always feel like the wrong answer. Forgive them and it’s like you’re saying all the shit they did is okay, hold a grudge and, like, you’re just as bad as them, or you’re being the unreasonable child they think of you as. So I guess you have to suck it up and be the better person, but God, can’t they be the better person for once? I- I’d never make Chris work this hard for my love or approval. Why should I have to do all the work here?”

Shit. Chimney recognizes the look on all of their faces, it’s the one he makes when changing a particularly stinky diaper. He raises his cup and the other two cheer, everyone drinking their coffee in contemplative silence. Eddie looks towards the stairs moments before Buck walks up them, and Chimney lets out a low whistle.

“Oh man, Buckaroo, looks like I should have brought you a cup of coffee, too. Also got parental trouble?” 

“What?” Buck frowns at him with a level of confused frustration that makes Chim pretty sure he was already confused and frustrated by something else. “No.”

Bobby, a little more earnest from where he stands scrambling eggs in the kitchen, calls over. “You alright, kid?”

“Yeah, I’m- it’s fine,” Buck says, and though he doesn’t actually roll his eyes Chimney doesn’t need to be his counterpart to know he wants to. But then he sighs, ducking his head, relenting. “Me and Taylor broke up.”

Chimney can’t really see Eddie’s expression with the way he’s twisted around to look at Buck, but the man’s whole body tenses in surprise. Uh oh. The dynamic duo is still troubled. They’d still been hanging on when he’d left to find Maddie but Chimney remembers the lawsuit days, how miserable and loud and angry Eddie had been. He tries to catch his eye now — I thought you were going to talk to him — but, of course, the bell rings and they have to be on their way.

—

Eddie thinks that, with practice, he’s got chopping vegetables into perfect bite size pieces down pat. He’s okay at then turning those pieces into an edibly baked meal, too, these days, but Buck still has him relegated to knife work only. Tonight Eddie’s not going to argue with that. He’d barely convinced Buck to come over in the first place, everything about him when he cornered him in the parking lot was like a prey animal getting ready to bolt. His shoulders are still tense as he stirs the simmering sauce pan on the stove, staring down at his work with way more concentration than Eddie thinks it really needs. A jumble of words and half finished thoughts press at his lips, but in the end it doesn’t matter that Eddie couldn’t decide what to say because Buck speaks first.

“Man, I don’t want to talk about it,” he huffs, like Eddie had said something, had needled, had been bugging him about it instead of mostly staying politely quiet aside from asking him if he was okay once, like a week ago. 

“I just want to know you’re okay, Buck,” Eddie repeats the dialogue, words coming out with more of a snap than he wants them to. He grits his teeth and forces in a calming breath, setting down the knife and trying to relax his posture. 

“I’m fine,” Buck says, remaining entirely unrelaxed. “I’ll be fine.”

Eddie stares at the back of his head, because Buck hasn’t bothered to look at him. He doesn’t know what he’s thinking. That’s usually not true. He’s tried so hard to make that not true, tried to learn from his mistakes with Shannon. “Those are two very different answers.” 

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Buck tries to get back on script. “I- I’m dealing with it.”

“Are you?” Fuck, Eddie’s trying not to be angry. That’s not how he wanted this conversation to go. Worry just twists itself into new, uglier shapes without his input, sometimes. “Doesn’t really feel like it.”

“God.” Buck turns off the stove — ever safe with his heat sources — and spins around. “Can you just drop this right now? Why are you so- none of you even fucking liked Taylor! You’re all torn up about it now? Why do we have to drag shit out all of a sudden?”

Eddie throws his hands in the air. “I don’t know. I don’t want to- just because I’ve been to therapy doesn’t mean I always have to be the one to- why do I have to be the one dragging shit out? Why can’t you just talk to me?”

Buck looks taken aback. He actually scoffs. “Are you fucking kidding me? Eds, I practically begged you to talk to me, over and over-” Buck straightens up, steps back, covers his eyes with his hand for a moment. Looks at Eddie again. “No. No, I’m not doing this. I don’t want to- to resent you for healing how you needed to heal.”

Eddie sticks his tongue between his teeth, bites down. Well, doesn’t he feel like shit. Even here when things are falling apart, Buck is trying to be kind and patient with him. “Sorry.”

“You don’t…” Buck sighs — exhaustion back in full force, visibly weighing him down — and looks back at the saucepan. “You don’t have anything to apologize for.” Breathe in, breathe out. “I… I’m gonna head back to the loft, Eddie.”

“No, Buck, you don’t have to-”

“I just- I just need a minute.” Another sigh, and he rubs at his face like he has a headache brewing. “I’ll stay for dinner,” he promises down to the caramelizing onions, a white flag, a compromise. 

And Eddie’s so tempted to take it: they don’t work the same shift tomorrow, Eddie had to call off to take Pepa to get a root canal, and he hates the idea of not seeing Buck for a few days after ending things like this. But. “No, it’s-” a try for a laugh that comes out kind of wrong. “You’ve taught me well enough I can finish from here. Go if you need to go.”

Buck looks up at him, a furrowed line between his eyebrows that Eddie wants to do something stupid like kiss away. “I’ll be back.”

That gets Eddie to smile, even if it hurts a little. “I know you will.”

Buck sets down his spoon, steps away from the stove, takes Eddie’s hand. Eddie wonders for a moment if he’ll say something else, but in the end he just squeezes tight for a moment and walks out the door.

—

Chimney likes these mornings together, when shifts line up so he and Maddie happen to be at the apartment at the same time for longer than a quick hello goodbye here’s our child have a nice day. Jee is going to absolute town on a plate of cut up bananas, and she even seems to be maybe eating some of them. Maddie looks relaxed, laughing over her avocado toast piled high with whatever random ingredients they find in the fridge. Today: marinated eggs, capers, shredded carrot, and, in Maddie’s brave case, a base layer of peanut butter.

“I swear it’s actually good,” she giggles as he watches her take a bite with a wrinkled up nose.

Another thing specific to today: he keeps catching a look in her eye, something fond, sort of longing. Maybe it’s not specific to today, actually. He’s been seeing it for a while, in her and whenever he makes eye contact with himself in his rear view mirror when he drives away from her. It’s relevant today because it’s making him feel absolutely hypocritical not talking to her about it as he takes a big sip of coffee and brings up everyone’s favorite poorly communicating couple.

“Hey, uh, have you talked to your brother recently?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Yes, but now I’m concerned there’s something to talk about. Is he okay? Has something happened?”

Chimney sigh-groan-shrugs. “You know how he is, it’s always hard to tell until he’s suing the city or screaming at your parents. But he’s just been, like… off at work for a while. Just kind of tired, I guess? And- shit, did he tell you about Taylor?”

She nods, though she’s fully frowning now. “He said it was more or less mutual. He almost seemed… relieved, if I’m being honest.”

“Hm.” Well, Chimney’s sure he wasn’t exactly the only one to feel that way about it, but that’s neither here nor there. “Yeah, he seems mostly okay about that, I guess, but the thing is, he didn’t tell Eddie about it.”

Maddie’s eyes flash wide for a moment. “Hm.”

“Exactly.”

Maddie sighs, chewing at her lip in a way her brother does sometimes when deep in thought. “I’ll try to get him to talk to me.”

“Yeah, good luck.” His tone is half sarcastic, half sincere, and she scrunches her nose at him for it. “Anyway. You two have a good day, I’ll tell your brother to call you.”

“Okay, stay safe.” She smiles at him, and when she leans in, he leans in, and they’re a hair’s breadth from kissing when they both pull back, blinking, all awkward chuckles and pink cheeks. 

“Right,” Chimney says, scratching the back of his neck. “Well. I have to go. Have a- yeah. Okay, bye.” He turns to leave. And then immediately turns back around again, fuck it, he’ll try to be brave. “Um, but, maybe- I mean, maybe this is too soon, but maybe we should talk sometime?”

Maddie, braver than anyone, gives him a little smile. “Yeah, okay.”

At work, Bobby is waiting upstairs with a big box from Porto’s, absently sipping coffee and chewing on a guava strudel.

“Is someone dying?”

Bobby startles. “What? No, Chimney, no one is dying.”

“Is someone getting transferred? Have we all been fired? Have you said the q word?”

“No, what- nothing bad is happening. Why do you think something bad is happening?”

“Porto’s, Cap! You went to the good bakery.”

“I can’t just do something nice?” Bobby laughs. “I wanted strudel.”

“Mmmm.” Chimney squints at Bobby, and then down at the box again. Ooh, chicken empanada! “Fine. I accept your act of non-suspicious goodwill.”

“I’m glad,” Bobby says, shaking his head with a bemused smile as Hen walks up the stairs and makes a beeline for them as soon as she sees the pastry box. As she digs in without comment Bobby raises his eyebrows like see, perfectly normal and Chimney makes a face at him before turning to Hen.

“Henrietta, my love, how are you this fine day?”

Hen snorts over her cheese roll at him. “I take it you had a good morning.”

Chimney shrugs, trying to will his face not to turn pink again. “I had a good breakfast.”

“So I can eat your emp-”

“Hands off my empanada, Wilson.” 

The morning segues, somehow, into wedding planning. Hen informs them of Toni’s seemingly endless list of demands; an overly specific color palette, acceptable and unacceptable rental chairs and tables, displeasure at any and all suggested catering so far. After everyone has made the appropriate exasperated noises, Hen’s displeased expression softens. 

“I know I’m complaining a lot, but I am glad she’s getting to have this. She’s my mom, I love her, she went through a lot of shit with my dad. She deserves a happy ending.”

Chimney smiles and leans against her, elbow to elbow, ankle to ankle. 

Buck, half an hour late, runs up the stairs like there are wolves after him, “Sorry, Cap,” flying out of him as soon as his boot hits the top step.

Bobby doesn’t even ask if there was traffic. “Porto’s,” he offers, and Chimney suddenly understands the mysterious appearance of baked goods. 

Buck keeps moving, straight to the coffee machine. “Not really hungry.”

Bobby’s fingers drum against the box, where Chimney is certain Buck’s favored spinach and feta empanada is waiting. “I’ll save this for when you are, then.” 

Buck only nods, grabbing his coffee and heading back downstairs with the speed at which he’d come up them. The rest of the day he hovers around the edge of the station, a sort of dark cloud of doom with the occasional obvious show of put-togetherness as he attends every meal and robotically gives the run down of whatever Wikipedia rabbit hole he fell into last night. Chimney wonders if he went over to Eddie’s after dropping the Taylor news. He can’t tell if that would have made this mood better or caused it in the first place. Bobby, the sap, is giving him all the easy jobs around the station, and keeps sharing increasingly worried glances with them all that Buck isn’t even complaining about it. Chimney’s almost relieved when the alarm goes off after a painfully slow morning, a little of the tension easing out of Buck’s shoulders even if they’re heading out to a three alarm fire. Whatever’s eating him up can be put aside in the field. Chimney understands the impulse. Can’t be said firefighting is a profession full of people with particularly healthy coping mechanisms. 

In the engine Hen snorts at a text. “I have never in my life heard her name a favorite flower and now she wants orchids?”

Chimney whistles. “Expensive taste. Is she- hey!” The protest is aimed at Buck, who’s smacking his arm. “What-“

“Shut up.” Buck looks suddenly ghost-pale so Chimney shuts up instead of complaining further. He’s staring intensely into the front seat where dispatch is informing Bobby about the scene. “What- what was that address?” 

Bobby glances into the backseat and then turns around more fully at Buck’s stricken expression. “Uh- a school on Plymouth, near Queen Anne Park.”

Beyond ghost pale, Buck’s a sheet of printer paper right out of the plastic wrap. Then he speaks, and the blood drains right out of everybody else, too. “It’s Chris’ school- Bobby- that’s Christopher’s school.” 

A flurry of activity. Bobby demands details over the radio (three alarm fire, evacuation in progress, RA units requested but no injuries reported yet) as Buck dials Eddie. Gets sent to voicemail, dials again. Again. Calls Pepa, gets voicemail.

“Fuck- Fuck!” Buck’s shaking hard enough in his seat Chimney is rattling around with him. He puts a hand on his arm, a slightly pathetic feeling gesture of physical and/or emotional support. Buck doesn’t shrug him off at least. Chimney thinks about saying something like I’m sure he’s okay, but really he has no fucking idea if that’s true, and he thinks Buck wouldn’t appreciate false platitudes in the slightest. 

“Text him,” he suggests. “Pepa’s probably either under or just getting out of surgery, he must be busy with her. Leave him a message, let him know what’s happening.”

“Okay,” Buck takes a deep breath, and another, straightening up in his seat. “Alright.” As he types, the rest of his body goes still, like having even one actionable task has jumpstarted whatever process inside of him necessary to putting on a professional firefighter persona. By the time they reach the school, he’s tight-jawed and blank-faced, hopping out of the engine almost before they’ve pulled to a complete stop. 

There’s already a loosely organized crowd of kids in the field next to where they parked, mostly looking curious and excited rather than frightened, and there’s no one immediately waving them over for medical attention. More are still evacuating, being ushered by desperately-calm teachers into lining up by classroom. Buck gets three long strides towards the crowd before Bobby catches his arm.

“Buck,” he says, stern but with a big heaping of understanding and regret beneath his words. “We have a job to do. You have to stay focused. That’s what will help Chris and all these other kids right now.”

For a few breathless beats of time it looks like Buck isn’t going to go down without a fight, but then he nods and they all get to work. It’s a three alarm and it’s at a school, so they’re not the only crew here. Bobby joins the IC assessing the scene while Ravi and Buck gear up to head inside and Hen and Chimney move into the field. He looks for Christopher, of course he does, though he doesn’t know which class he’s in or what his teacher looks like or anything particularly helpful towards picking him out of this crowd. Red glasses, curls, crutches. He catches glimpses of all of these as he checks for smoke inhalation and minor bumps, bruises, and burns, but never in the right combination or for long enough to make a positive identification. Buck and Ravi come back out with more stragglers, go back in. Come out, go back in. Chim is a dozen yards away but even from this distance he can see the awful fear on Buck’s features, his eyes wild. Chimney is freaking out at this point, Buck must be losing it entirely as it creeps towards a full hour of them being here with the fire still spreading and the now undeniable lack of one Christopher Diaz out here safe with his friends. If it was Jee in there, he doesn’t know what he’d do. 

Oh, he thinks, something sliding into place as Buck breaks away from the rest of the firefighters, gets a teacher’s attention, begs for information. Chimney walks towards the little huddle of them and thinks he’s not worried like his best friend’s kid is in danger. He’s worried like his kid is in danger. 

“I- I think there might be people in the science lab,” the teacher is saying, nervous, glancing repeatedly back at the school. “The 7th grade has a class project in there, sometimes a few of them will go check on it at lunch w-which is when the fire broke out. But I- I’m not sure- I’m not sure-”

“Where’s the science lab?” Bobby asks, joining in their little group. Hen’s a few steps behind Chimney, Ravi is hovering close by. Chimney wonders sometimes if this thing, this trick he and Hen and Buck and Eddie can do isn’t contagious somehow. The whole group of them, tangled up in some long, intangible string.

“It’s in the back west corner,” Buck says before the teacher can even open her mouth. He takes a sharp breath and straps on his helmet. “Fuck this.” Barely a glance at Bobby as he takes off towards the doors. “Fire me if you have to.”

“Buck!” Bobby calls after him, but doesn’t actually move to stop him, instead taking up a tense grip on his radio. “Firefighter Buckley, report on your progress.”

A second. Two, five, ten. “Main hall clear.”

First grade clear, second grade clear. Third grade had a scared little girl half unconscious hiding in a closet, but another team of firefighters had already found her, their questions about why Buck is in here alone half-audible over the radio. Fourth grade clear. Fifth grade-

“Let me through- let me the fuck-“ An Eddie shaped commotion by the guys set up at the perimeter to keep worried parents at bay. Fucking finally. “I’m a firefighter, my team is right there-”

“Let him through,” Bobby calls, waving Eddie over. “He’s one of ours.”

Eddie may as well have teleported across the parking lot with how fast he makes it to them, one hand immediately grabbing a handful of Bobby’s turnouts. It strikes Chimney as a strangely childlike gesture coming from Eddie. “Chris- Christopher-”

“I’m sorry, Eddie, we haven’t found him yet.” Bobby’s soothing captain voice does nothing to drown out the pained sound Eddie makes before the sentence is even over. 

“How- why is this happening-” he stops, blinks, looks around. “Where’s Buck?” 

“I…” oh, it’s never a good sign when Bobby is lost for words. Chimney winces from his careful hover a few feet away. Bobby glances towards the school, and it’s a damning enough answer. 

“You let him go in alone?”

Chimney’s seen Eddie pissed off before. There was the grocery store incident and the weeks surrounding it, Eddie’s fuse as short as his haircut, a walking bomb forged by grief and helplessness. And who among them have never snapped at their dearly beloved coworkers when the days get long and stressful? But Chimney’s not sure he’s seen Eddie this beside himself before, roaring with equal parts fury and fear. For his son, of course, but also — of course — for Buck. Chimney thinks about crying in front of a pediatrician. Something else slides into place. He’d thought- he’s not sure. Buckandeddie, some sort of crush, some unspoken mutual affection he and Maddie sometimes gossiped about, laughed about. Eddie stands next to him, a pillar of fire maybe hotter than the burning school, and Chimney thinks of course it runs deeper.

“Buck, come in,” Bobby speaks into the radio under Eddie’s blazing stare. “Buck, please report.”

Static.

“Goddamnit.” Eddie shoves past Bobby, headed for the truck, presumably to gear up and run headlong into the fire. 

“You’re not on shift, Eddie, and you’re too close to this, stand down.” Bobby still manages to sound calm and in control of this absolute shit show, a trait Chimney has always admired in him. “Ravi, Chim-”

“Like hell I’m staying out here,” Eddie snaps. “Are you kidding me? That’s-” he starts to gesture towards the school and then… stops. Stops talking, stops moving. All except for one finger, which twitch, twitch, twitches. “Buck,” he breathes, a fraction of a second before the man himself walks through the doors. 

Their group is moving before Chimney’s really even processed what he’s seeing. It’s Hen’s relief flooding through him that resolves adrenaline-blurred shapes into Christopher clinging to Buck’s neck with wide eyes, a teacher carrying another child following them out of the inferno. Chimney later feels a little guilty about how thoroughly they ignored the second duo as they ushered Chris and Buck to their ambulance, but there were other RA units around, he’s sure they were taken care of. 

Eddie repeats a frantic litany of his son’s name as he takes him from Buck’s arms and sits on the back of the ambulance. Hen gets an oxygen mask on him, checks his breathing, checks his eyes for irritation. Her back is to Chimney but he feels the way her eyes follow Buck as he darts around the side of the vehicle, feels her confidence that she can handle Chris, feels that she’s passing her worry for Buck along to Chimney. He pats her on the back as he follows around the corner, trusting their divide-and-conquer unspoken triage system now as he always has. 

Buck’s got his hands braced on his knees, bent nearly double, vomiting onto the tarmac. Chimney scoots past him to open the passenger side door and root around in the glove compartment for one of the water bottles Hen usually keeps in there. He puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “Buck-”

Buck straightens up and holds one hand out for the water, shaking his head even as he gasps down big, ugly breaths. He rinses his mouth, spits, drains the rest of the bottle. Holds out his hand again. Chimney fishes his pack of gum out of his radio pocket and hands a stick over. Buck chews fast and then spits it on the ground — a little rude, but whatever, it’s been a shitty day — and wipes his face. He takes exactly three more deep breaths, more even this time, pulling himself back together with such bloodless determination it makes Chimney’s chest ache a little.

Buck goes back to- his family. That’s what their little three man unit is, isn’t it? Chimney wonders when the line shifted, or if they came out of the box that way, right from the moment Buck turned around that very first day and across the station Eddie’s head moved with him. 

“Buck,” Christopher says, slightly muffled through the oxygen mask. Chimney raises an eyebrow at Hen who shakes her head; just a precaution, the kid’s okay. Christopher opens his arms wide and Buck stumbles forward into them, wrapping his own arms around the son and the father both. Chimney tries not to overhear any of the quiet words whispered between the three of them, but the image of Eddie’s hand coming up to tangle in Buck’s curls — cradling his head, keeping him close and safe — sticks with him. 

—

Chris is barely bothered by any of this. When they get home — Buck drives them in Eddie’s truck, Bobby lets them leave right from the school, and Eddie thinks maybe they should have got an Uber with how bad Buck’s hands shook on the wheel — he patiently lets them fuss over him all evening, sandwiched happily between them as they eat his favorite takeout. 

“I knew you’d come get me, Buck,” he says, smiling up at him with his mouth covered in barbecue sauce. 

“Every time,” Buck promises, voice soft, though when he meets Eddie’s eyes over Chris’ head there’s tight worry there. 

Eddie holds in a sigh and thinks they probably need to have a conversation about human fallibility, but how do you tell your kid he needs to be a little more cautious in dangerous situations because his fathers are not miracle workers and they’ve all been astoundingly, sickeningly lucky so far?

They watch a movie together- or, sort of do. Chris falls asleep only maybe half an hour in, and then Buck and Eddie mostly just watch Christpher until the credits roll. He wakes up again a little when Eddie scoops him up into his arms. He can see out of the corner of his eye the way Chris blinks, looks around, settles when he sees something over Eddie’s shoulder. Sees Buck over Eddie’s shoulder. They had him shower as soon as they got home — Chris had delighted in getting to use Eddie’s decon shampoo to get rid of the smoke smell tangled in his curls — and he’d already put on his pajamas, so Eddie can tuck him straight into bed. Buck reads a little from Chris’ current book, having long been designated the better at doing voices, and Eddie almost drifts off next to his son to the soothing tones of it. He feels a nudge at his calf. Buck’s toe, his head tilted towards Chris to alert Eddie to the fact he’s out like a light. It’s hard to leave. Sitting right here, ass going numb on the hardwood and shoulder digging painfully into the bedframe, he’s close enough to Christopher to feel the displaced air every time he breathes out. If he leaves the room, who knows. He packed Chris into the car this morning and dropped him off at school, and let Buck go to work without even seeing him, without even saying goodbye, and wouldn’t have known anything was wrong until it was too late to do anything about it. He’d felt distant stabs of worry, but he always feels distant stabs of worry these days. That endless feeling of searching during the tsunami and he didn’t learn a fucking thing. But he can’t live on the floor forever, can’t keep everyone he loves in a bubble safe from harm, so. He stands up. Kisses his son’s head, and Buck does the same. They leave, quiet as they can. 

As they walk back down the hall, Eddie feels like he’s buzzing out of his skin, sensation strong in the way it only is when Buck’s feeling it too. He shakes his hands to try to dissipate the feeling, knowing as he does it that it won’t work. He needs something more, he needs to work out the energy, he needs-

He needs.

“Buck-”

They’re in the kitchen. All the lights are still on because, Eddie doesn’t know, maybe it feels safer that way, but he has a strange out of body thought that he wishes they had better mood lighting as Buck steps forward, puts his hands on Eddie’s face, and kisses him. 

Look. There’s limits to this thing, this mind meld shit. Despite feeling each other’s feelings and the occasional pull and tug of distant muscle, they are two people, two bodies. Eddie sometimes thinks what they have is barely above regular instinct. Would he know Buck any less if he didn’t walk in his dreams? But, god, here in the kitchen at not even 10 o’clock Buck wants so deeply that it thrums in Eddie’s veins. Buck’s knees buckle a little, Eddie thinks, because his want met Eddie’s own there. 

Buck pulls back, wrecked and gasping already when they’ve barely done a goddamn thing. “Eds-”

It looks like he wants to apologize, or ask for more, so before he can, Eddie says, “You can have this. You can have me. Anything you want. ”

They stumble to bed. Buck’s fingers trip all over him, lighter than Eddie is expecting. Lighter, certainly, than the death grip he has on Buck’s shirt as he pulls him down on top of him. They kiss, mouth to mouth, mouth to cheek and jaw and neck and collarbone. Buck pulls Eddie’s shirt aside, still so gentle, and kisses his latest bullet wound. He still smells like smoke, his post-disaster shower a frantic two minute affair as he’d hurried to meet Eddie and Chris on the couch. Buck’s hand comes up to wipe Eddie’s tears away before he’s even registered the way his eyes have started to sting. 

And then this gets a little frantic, too. Hands in hair and sneaking under clothes to touch warm skin. Neither of them is willing to pull far enough away from each other to take anything off, so they’re a clothed and writhing mass of gasping limbs. And it’s good, it’s so good, even if this had happened differently, even if what had pushed them to this wasn’t another worst day of their lives in a long list of worst days of their lives, Eddie’s not sure he’d want anything more than Evan Buckley fucking down on him through both their sweatpants. He’s everywhere, and warm and rough and the little gasping sounds he’s making are something Eddie’s never heard from him before. The rest of my life, he wants to say. Would say, if he had the air in his lungs for it. The rest of my life I want to learn new sounds you make. He comes. It’s quick, but he feels too good to care about that, and anyway Buck follows him here as he does in all else. 

The lights are still on as they lay beside each other, breathing ragged, so Eddie can see perfectly the exact shade of blue of Buck’s eyes as he turns to him. “Taylor said I couldn’t love her right because we’re…” missing pieces. Fished out from under the fridge, their edges perfectly aligned, but the puzzle they fit into long since put away. “Because you take up too much of my head,” Buck sighs, the hand that was trapped under Eddie’s arm when they collapsed turning to circle his wrist. “But that’s not…” he blinks, frowns, rolls his body impossibly closer. “When I couldn’t feel you at all I still loved you.”

—

When Eddie woke up from the shooting, he was inconsolable. There was a void in his chest, an emptiness, a terrible pit where something had been ripped out of him. He’d opened his eyes and Ana had been there, startled at his sudden waking and immediate outpouring of emotion. She’d called in the doctor, asking- Is this because of the medicine? Is he hurting? Is this an effect of the coma?

Eddie hadn’t been able to speak through the sobs, but how could she not understand? What else would make him feel this way? He thought Buck was dead.

Once Ana figured out what was happening, she assured him Buck was alive and well. Bobby said the same, when he came in minutes later from a call or a coffee run or wherever he’d been. Buck is alive, he’s okay, he’s with Chris. Eddie hadn’t known why they’d lie to him, but he couldn’t quite believe it with the way he felt like half a person, and with the numbness spreading in his limbs. And then Buck had come through the door and he’d still barely believed it, because the numbness hadn’t gone away.

It happens, sometimes. They’d just… split. Connection lost. It’s not unheard of: one partner gravely injured and the other closing themself off in an involuntary act of self preservation. Eddie remembered Johnson’s bloody lips, technically alive but as much of a corpse as Tucker where he lay shrouded a few tents away. Remembered the way he hadn’t felt Shannon die — too late now to ever know her better, what a fucking joke that he’d thought distance would make it hurt less — but had felt Buck see her in the street, remembered the way his entire soul had recoiled (and recoiled again as it had been Buck laying in the street, Eddie’s leg and heart and brain on fire. And again, when Buck’s blood had dripped thick and awful over the Grants’ back patio, and again, when he’d looked up at the field hospital and discovered, finally, what he’d been missing.) LA General’s only resident expert in congeneric minds had looked at them very gently as she told them that trauma changes people, and they might open that pathway again, or it might stay closed. Wait and see, and in the meantime, a list of recommended therapists, a handful of teamwork exercises. A little ball to toss around. 

Buck had felt so guilty about it. Slinking around Eddie’s house like a misbehaving dog, letting Ana do most of the physical caretaking, barely touching Eddie if he could help it. Eddie, who had been kind of angry and so lonely and fucking scared, and underneath everything else glad, because he hadn’t wanted anyone to see or share the growing turmoil inside of him. 

That’s another reason why people split, and a reason why some people can never connect like this in the first place. Athena Grant has never had an ounce of congeneric sensitivity. She doesn’t want anyone else in her mind, that's her own business. Eddie withdrew, shut down, kept Buck out. So, he felt guilty too, and Buck would later tell him that he had been kind of angry and fucking lonely and so terrified, and maybe under it all kind of relieved, because it let him self destruct in Taylor’s arms, and Lucy’s, without Eddie there to stop him.

This had happened to them once before. Not entirely, really. Throughout the aftermath of the lawsuit — the aftermath of the aftermath of shannonladdertruckembolismtsunami — Eddie could still just barely feel Buck out of the very corner of his mind’s eye. He’d go to bed every night so fucking homesick he almost called his parents’ house in El Paso, but the one time he’d picked up the phone his fingers had put in his own number. Not the right house, not his own homesickness. His knuckles were bloody as they’d clutched his phone, and his side ached with a bruise, and he’d missed his best friend so badly. But they were young and stupid and self involved and didn’t know how to reach out, so it took an idiotic fight in a grocery store and an apology over Halloween candy to find each other again.

This time, after the shooting, Buck never left. Chris was never late for school or birthday parties or doctor's appointments while Eddie was recovering because Buck was always there to get him where he needed to be. Buck had his back when he came back to work, and was a voice of reason when things were falling apart with Ana. He was hurt — even without feeling it firsthand Eddie knows he was hurt — when Eddie left the 118, but even then he was back at the house after not too long, trying so hard not to let Eddie shut everyone out entirely. He came running when Eddie destroyed his room, and he stayed, and stayed. 

And when a fire broke out at dispatch and Eddie suited up and followed him into the flames, they moved in perfect step and Eddie could breathe even in all the acrid smoke and the dust of crumbling walls because he finally had two sets of lungs again.

—

Buck looks okay this morning, Chimney thinks. His shoulders rest in a far more relaxed slope than they’ve been in lately as he sits on the couch while the station works its way awake on this early start shift. He’s smiling down at his phone. It’s around 7:30 now, get ready for school time, and the slant of Buck’s grin is soft and parental, so.

“How’s Chris?” Chimney asks as he settles into an armchair, blowing on his coffee so it cools faster. 

Buck kind of laughs, turns his phone to show Chimney a blurry picture of a maybe-dog taken out of the Diaz front windows. “Man, he was way less freaked out than we were. I feel like we’ve given him a kinda skewed vision of, like, what a person can reasonably survive.”

Chim snorts. “Yeah, you two seem pretty unkillable, huh.”

Buck raises an eyebrow, gestures at Chimney’s rebar scar, down to where- well, either Doug cut up his guts or Jonah stopped his heart. “I think you might have me beat. Tied, at least.

Chimney grins, raises his mug. “House full of cockroaches.”

In the kitchen Eddie makes a disgusted sound loud enough to be heard over in the sitting area. Buck and Chimney turn to watch as he makes his way over, a grimace on his face as he hands his mug to Buck.

“Make your own fucking coffee,” he says, eyeing the drink with annoyance as Buck gets up on his knees to look over the back of the couch at him, taking the mug and gulping down a surprised sip.

“Oh, shit, uh- sorry, I was thinking about how I wanted to get up and make- uh, do you want me to make yours?”

Chimney’s never seen someone look so exasperated and so fond at the same time. Eddie shakes his head, sighing even as his mouth smiles seemingly against his own will. “No, that’s fine,” he says, leaning down to kiss Buck lightly, right on the mouth, casual and unthinking and clearly a familiar gesture to the two of them. The cozy, soft aura surrounding them lasts about two seconds before they both freeze and turn to look at Chim, matching alarm in their wide eyes.

Chimney just holds his hands up with a grin so wide it makes his cheeks immediately ache. “I won’t say anything!”

Eddie straightens up, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, while Buck hides his bright red cheeks behind the coffee mug. There’s stomping on the stairs and Eddie quickly moves back to the kitchen as Hen appears, Bobby a few steps behind. He’s carrying a pastry box full of muffins — yes!! — so Chimney tries to make his grin less obvious and more morning-baked-goods appropriate as he skips over to meet them at the counter to grab the blueberriest blueberry muffin he can find. He’s just taken a huge bite when he looks up and meets Hen’s eyes. She looks amused by his muffin-fever, but absolutely unamused by every other thing on the entire planet. 

“Wuh oh,” he says, spitting crumbs and ignoring Bobby’s displeased look. “What’s the face for?”

“Well-” she huffs, like she’s got big drama she’s going to share, but then her face does something complicated and Chimney feels the vague unease of processing too many emotions at once. “Well- god, I don’t even know where to start.” 

“Muffin?” Buck offers, eyes wide and concerned, face now mostly not pink anymore. 

She huffs an amused but grateful almost-laugh at him, and does grab a muffin, taking a much more respectably sized bite than Chimney had. Once she’s chewed and swallowed — a pointed look at Chimney from Bobby’s direction — she takes a deep breath. “Mom doesn’t want to get married after all. Or- well she does, she’s just going to do it someplace else. Now, she wants me and Karen to have a vow renewal. 

“That sounds nice,” Chimney says, because he can feel how not nice it is rolling off of her.

“Yeah,” she scoff-laughs. “But… I don’t know. I love Karen! I love my wife!” Everyone in the vicinity nods. Of course, an absolute truth. “But it feels kind of out of nowhere! And a vow renewal is a weird thing for a third party to suggest! And she made a little comment about all we’ve been through over last few years, which felt like a dig at me, and…” she sighs and makes a face, the kind with the colon and the backslash, and then sighs again and looks more resigned. “But I feel like I can’t be anything less than 100% enthusiastic because Karen loved the idea, so…” she looks at Bobby. “Anybody up for coming to a wedding whenever Bobby can swing us all getting off work?”

Bobby smiles, sympathetic and excited all at once. “Two Saturdays from now should line up. Is that too soon?” 

Hen shrugs. “No, I mean- we’ve already got half a wedding planned, kind of just needed to confirm the guest list.” She makes a face again. “God, I’ve got all those stupid orchids ordered already.”

Chimney pats her back as Buck looks like he’s .02 seconds away from wiggling like a puppy. He raises his eyebrows at him and Buck flushes again. 

“The only wedding I’ve been to was Maddie and Doug, which, ew.” Everyone makes an appropriate ew face. “And- well- a-and then like when I was traveling, sometimes somebody would bring me as a plus one, but that was, uh,” he almost glances at Bobby and then looks resolutely straight ahead and continues quietly, “Mostly to hook up in the nice venue bathrooms.” 

Chimney snorts. “What's the nicest bathroom you've been in?”

Buck tilts his head contemplatively. “To use the regular way or to have sex in?” 

“Congratulations, again,” Bobby says, loudly, clapping Hen on the back and fleeing to his office past an Eddie who's rapidly turning an interesting shade of scarlet as Buck starts listing various restrooms and what he has or hasn't done in them. 

Chimney taps Hen’s foot with his own as Buck describes a toilet surrounded by mirrors on all sides, floor and ceiling included. “Wanna come over after work? I have White Claw and various fancy cheeses I got stumbling lost through a Whole Foods yesterday. Does that count as a bachelorette party? Do impromptu, sort of unwanted vow renewals come with bachelorette parties?” 

Hen laughs, and it sounds a little more like her real one. “I don’t know. Can’t say no to fancy cheeses, though.” 

So, several hours and other people’s catastrophes later, Hen shows up at 5 pm on the dot. Chimney’s best friend is a punctual woman, so he’s got the charcuterie tray ready to go, lime White Claw in one hand and baby on his hip. 

“Is this allowed?” He asks as she walks through the door, cooing at Jee. “I feel like holding a baby and an alcohol at the same time is, like, not allowed.” 

“I… don’t think there are rules about that. And it’s, like, 5% alcohol, I think you’re okay, responsibility-wise. Have you been standing there worrying about it?” She asks as she takes hers — watermelon, in a glass with ice ready and waiting — from the counter. 

“You know me so well, Henrietta.” He plucks a goldfish off the tray and hands it to Jee to gum up, and takes a slightly guilty sip of his drink. “Shall we retire to the living room?”

The first sort-of bachelorette party activity is, mostly, just watching Jee crawl around the floor. 

“She’s so small but so big,” Hen sighs, smiling down at her, chin in hand.

“Isn’t it crazy how big she’s gotten?” Chimney can’t quite believe it. Every time he looks at his daughter, she seems to have grown a little, learned something new. “It’s going so fast.”

Hen nods, her smile turned bittersweet. “I remember with Denny I felt like I was missing it while it was happening.”

Chimney nods, blinking suddenly damp eyes. “Any advice?”

She shrugs. “People always told me to try and live in the moment, but I don’t know that emotions work that way. You’re gonna feel what you’re gonna feel. Take the good with the bad.” 

“Is that how you’re taking the wedding?”

Hen groans, flopping back onto the couch. “Don’t ask me to follow my own awesome advice.” 

Chimney laughs. “It can’t be all terrible. Like- if your mom hadn’t suggested it, would you want to do this?”

Hen’s expression gets ooey-gooey at the speed of light. “Yeah. Yeah, I would. I love my wife, and only you got to be there the first time.” She elbows him. “You’re my best friend but… our family’s gotten bigger, you know? It’d be nice to have everybody there.”

Chimney sometimes wishes he could go back in time and tell himself what the 118 would become to him, what he would become because of them. “Yeah, it would be. So- maybe you should just go for it! Lean in!”

“Mhmm,” Hen nods, but her face gets sad again. “It… Chim, it hurt when Mom wasn’t there last time. It hurt and now I’m thinking about that hurt, when for the longest time I’d just locked it away.”

Chimney grabs her hand. “She reached out,” he says. Lots of parents don’t, he knows from experience. Toni Wilson has her flaws, but in his eyes she’s got a hell of a head start on the elder Han, or the Buckleys. “She wants to be there for you now. It- I can’t imagine. I don’t know what it’s like to be rejected in that way. But at least she’s trying to make up for it now.”

Hen sighs. “I know. But how do I reconcile the real pain with the current love?”

“Ah, man.” He squeezes her hand, rolls his head along the back of the couch to look up at the ceiling. “Fuck if I know. But- hey, you have a functional relationship right now. Buck’s right, it would be nice to celebrate somebody’s love.”

She hums, eyes getting a little sharper, a little more prying. “So, things with you and Maddie…”

Chimney heaves a big ol’ sigh up from way down in his gut. “Man. We decided to take a break but I… I kind of want to undecide that. Every time she’s here in the morning it’s like- I just want to say stay. Stay here, stay with me. We can figure it out, right? We could make it good again.”

Hen looks- well, way less enthusiastic than one might expect from a best friend hearing about romantic woes. “Are you sure that’s a good idea right now?” Her voice is gentle, hesitant, almost work-like. Carefully delivering a negative prognosis.

”Okay, hey. What’s the real question you want to ask? What’s with the-” he gestures at the slant of her mouth, the furrow of her brows. 

Her mouth just gets slantier, her brows more furrowed. “She took off, Chim.”

Chimney feels his face screwing up like it did in trig after spring break in 11th grade, figures he should have known suddenly entirely incomprehensible. He knows Hen. He knows Hen, how did he not know she felt this way? “Uh, yeah, because she was literally having a hormone driven mental breakdown.” 

“And then after you spent all that time chasing her, she decided to dump you?”

“It was mutual, Hen.” They’re facing each other on the couch now, Hen has her arms crossed. Chimney can’t remember the last time they’d argued outside of the occasional 23rd-hour-of-a-shift snappishness. “It was all a lot, yeah, so we decided we needed a break.”

“Why do you have to fight so hard?” Hen near-snaps. “You deserve someone who will fight just as hard for you.”

“Okay, well, next time when I have postpartum depression after giving birth to our child I hope she does the same for me?”

“She wasn’t at the hospital.” Real snap, loud, brittle. 

“What?” Maddie has been at the hospital almost every time Chim has been. Except- Chimney’s eyes widen a second before Hen speaks, because except-

“After Jonah.” Hen’s eyes shine. “Karen came running. And Maddie didn’t.”

“Ah, Hen.” He reaches across the small but heavy distance between them and pokes her crossed arms until she gives him a hand to hold. “Karen’s your wife. And at that point you were my emergency contact, I’m not even sure they would have let her in.” She came to pick him up, though, driving slowly and carefully all the way back to his apartment, apologizing for every speed bump and pothole. They sat together on the couch for hours, her fingers on his wrist feeling his pulse, both of them unspeakingly terrified it would skip a beat or stop all together. “She was worried. We all worry in different ways.” Chim squeezes Hen’s hand. “You, my love, worry by being a little over protective.”

Hen wipes away a tear with her free hand, and Chim’s eyes sting with it. “I just want the world for you. You deserve so much happiness and so much care.” 

He smiles, brings her hand up to kiss the back of it. “And I’m lucky enough to have it, from a lot of places.”

“Yeah,” she says, still watery but smiling along with him now. “Yeah. Sorry. If you love her you should get to love her.” She laughs, wipes her eyes again. “And when your parent suggests a wedding you’re not quite ready for and you freak out about it in some weird way, I’ll be there to hold your hand and tell you you’re being ridiculous.” 

Chimney laughs, and slumps over to lean against her in relief. “Alright. It’s a deal. So, are you sticking with all those fucking orchids?”

They hang out all afternoon, ostensibly wedding planning but mostly snacking and cooing over the gummy way Jee chows down on goldfish crackers. Hen helps put her to bed once she passes out face down on the carpet, and hugs Chimney tight tight tight before she leaves. 

After she’s driven away, Chimney texts Maddie. Or, well. Actually Maddie texted first, about half an hour ago, about a weird bird she saw outside of dispatch on her dinner break. Bright orange, zoo orange, fancy rich person pet orange, with a bunch of feathers sticking up from it’s head like a crown or like when they slick Jee’s hair up in a little spike when giving her a bubble bath. 

Chimney 8:23 PM did he have a little suit jacket or perhaps an embroidered ascot 

Maddie 8:23 PM A tragic lack of accessories 

Maddie 8:24 PM  Down on his luck perhaps, fortune squandered on more seeds than a sensible bird would know what to do with

Maddie 8:24 PM Or maybe a zoo escapee? Am I harboring a fugitive here?

Chimney 8:25 PM 😱

Chimney 8:25 PM well your bail money better be set pretty low or i won’t be able to afford gettin you out of the hoosegow

Maddie 8:26 PM 😭😂

Chimney is fully aware he’s grinning like an idiot as he wanders around putting away charcuterie. He wonders if he can- he gasps mid thought. 

Chimney 8:28 PM  JAILBIRD 

Maddie 8:28 PM LOL

No one’s here so he’s free to giggle at his phone without judgment. He wonders if he can convince Maddie to dress Jee up as a rich bird gone to jail for tax evasion for Halloween. It’s kind of high concept but they could pull it off. 

Maddie 8:32 PM Did Buck seem okay at work? I never got the chance to talk to him after the fire at Chris’ school. Is Chris doing okay?? That must have been terrifying

Chimney 8:32 PM Chris apparently thought it was cool lol buck seems fine. well like. considering 

Maddie 8:34 PM Thats good

Maddie 8:35 PM Okay unethical speculation time 😶 do him and Eddie seem different I was getting a different vibe there 

Emojis, Chim decides, don’t count as telling secrets.

Chimney 8:36 PM 🤐…😉

Maddie 8:36 PM omg

Maddie 8:37 PM  I mean. 🤐

Chimney laughs, and tries to think of how to segue into talking about a different relationship, and then laughs again when Maddie once more beats him to the punch. 

Maddie 8:40 PM Maybe we could get them to babysit for us on Friday 

Maddie 8:40 PM I mean if youre free and you want to do something? Just us? No pressure. Sorry you can ignore this if you want?

Maddie 8:40 PM It might be too soon of me to ask and I of course understand if you say no, but I’ve missed you so much and I dont want to regret inaction anymore. 

Fuck off Jane Austen, Chimney thinks as he honest to god clutches his phone to his chest. You’ve got nothing on her. 

Chimney 8:41 PM i was just thinking the same thing

Chimney 8:41 PM maybe a bufffriday? drop jee off with buckandeddie so we can snoop a little and then come back here?

Chim takes a deep breath. Go big or go home, Han.

Chimney 8:42 PM also you want to be my date to Hen and Karen’s vow renewal?

He doesn’t even have to wait 30 seconds for a response.

Maddie 8:42 PM I’d love to :)

—

“Chim looks downright gleeful today,” Eddie says, watching as the guy smiles down at his egg burrito like it proposed marriage. “I think he honest to god skipped up the stairs.”

Buck snorts — Eddie can feel the slight jerk of it in the places their arms are pressed against each other as they lean side by side at the counter by the fridge — and grins at him, waggling his eyebrows. “Yeah, I bet. Maddie asked if we could babysit Friday.”

Okay, now Eddie feels a little giddy. We. He smiles down at the floor. Ridiculous. “Well. I got no plans.” 

“Cool.” When he glances over, he sees that Buck is smiling, too. 

Buck was smiling when he woke up this morning, which Eddie knows because he slept in Eddie’s bed. He’d strolled through the front doors yesterday at four like the place was his — it is, Eddie thinks — and craned his neck around to see if Chris could see before kissing him hello, and he’d made them dinner and helped with homework and convinced Chris to go to bed on time even though his school has moved back online for a bit until they deal with the fire damage. And then he’d followed Eddie to their bedroom, and they’d fallen asleep after hushed handjobs under the covers, and they’d woken up in each other’s arms. Eddie got ready for work with Buck pressing sleepy kisses to the back of his neck. Carla had been happily side eyeing them as they’d gone out the door and all Eddie could do was blush and grin.

Now at work their thighs press together at the counter or on the couch or in the truck. Which, well, they always did, but it’s a little more thrilling now with their fingers tangling together just out of sight of everyone. Eddie wants to do this forever with him. They haven’t even been on a date yet so Eddie can’t ask Buck to marry him, and he wouldn’t want to steal Hen’s thunder anyway. As soon as seems reasonable. He can wait.

And then at lunch between calls Buck sits there happily giving Hen his opinion on wedding stuff, scrolling through Pinterest boards on his phone. 

“Why do you have all these saved?” She laughs, flicking between floral arrangements.

Buck shrugs. “I just like weddings.” He slides down in his chair so he can kick Chimney, seated across from him at the table. “And maybe if Maddie ever got married again I’d have these ready to go.” Chimney makes a face that effectively conveys well, Jesus, give me a minute, so Buck covers with a “Well, or, you know. Anybody else.” 

And it’s just an excuse, but he’s so careful not to look at Eddie when he says it, and Eddie no longer feels particularly reasonable, or like waiting.

In the afternoon they’re called out to an office building fire in Boyle Heights, a new build, cheap, a maze of cubicles and paper thin walls made of shit just waiting to combust. It’s a tricky situation — a lot of people to evacuate in the middle of the workday and the fire spreading rapidly, greedy for loose paperwork — but he and Buck are on it right now. Eddie feels weird about thinking he’s having fun in a burning building, but it’s so good to just know where Buck is at all times, and have all his needs anticipated and know exactly what Buck needs from him in turn. Every time they catch each other’s eyes as they rush people out while the structure deteriorates, they share a grin through the smoke. 

They’re not the only station present, and it’s not Bobby’s familiar voice over the radio calling to evacuate, fight the fire from outside. Eddie follows Buck towards the exit, and matches his footsteps without even trying. Once they’re outside, they get on the lines to help spray the building down, but Buck keeps looking around, counting heads. Unease creeps into Eddie, the always unwelcome but over familiar guest. 

“Hey,” Buck calls to a passing Hen. “Where’s Bobby?”

She frowns at him. “He’s the one who told IC we should evacuate. He wasn’t with y’all?”

Buck drops the hose. “No, he was on the other side of the building.”

The three of them look nervously towards the structure. It’s sort of less on fire, but still pretty fucking on fire. Eddie thumbs on his radio. “Captain Nash, report in.”

Nothing. Eddie’s stomach sinks as Buck takes a step back towards the building. “Bobby. Where are you?”

There’s a response this time, but it’s too crackled to make out.

“Repeat,” Buck demands, taking another step forward.

Nothing. Part of the ceiling close to them collapses, and Eddie isn’t sure if the flinch that runs through both of them originated in him or Buck. 

“Goddamnit,” Buck snarls, throwing himself back towards the truck to get another oxygen tank. He’s going back in. And Eddie will go back in after him, of course he’ll go back in after him. “Why does this keep happening?”

They’re halfway geared up to make the charge, Hen and Chimney readying the ambulance for whatever they might find inside, when a side door opens and Bobby spills out with a few stray office workers in tow. Buck drops his tanks with a clatter and runs to them, helping everyone towards the paramedics. 

“The hell have you been?” Eddie asks, giving Bobby a relieved grin.

“Sorry for the worry,” Bobby says, his own grin a little sheepish. “I heard some folks calling out, figured the chance of getting them out safely was greater than the risks of staying in longer.”

Chimney smacks Buck on the shoulder. “You’re rubbing off on your old man.” 

And everyone laughs, and everyone’s okay, and that should be the end of it. Gamble paid off, another win in the books. But when Eddie glances up at him, Buck is frozen looking at Bobby with an expression Eddie somehow can’t read, and Eddie’s hands are suddenly going numb like they do when a panic attack is coming on, except he doesn’t think it’s his panic.

“Buck-” he manages, his tongue lead, before Buck unfreezes.

“Why did you do that.” 

Bobby looks up at Buck’s- it wasn’t even a question, really, more like the kind of statement made by someone admonishing their dog for tracking mud in the house. “What?”

“Why did you do that?” His voice cracks halfway through the sentence and Eddie feels it like a physical thing. “Why did you do that, why did you stay in there?”

Bobby puts a hand halfway up, a placating gesture, and speaks in careful captain voice. “I assessed the risks and decided-”

Buck shoves him. A little shove, a playground shove. Eddie tries to reach out but he can’t get his arms to move right. Someone shouts, mostly in confusion. He catches a trace of Hen’s perfume. 

“You could have died,” Buck shouts, moving past grabbing hands towards Bobby who looks torn between stepping back or standing his ground. “You can’t do that! You’re supposed to- you’re supposed to be smarter! You can’t do that!”

He’s melting down. Eddie can feel the molten blend of emotions flowing through him. Not like a river, like- he remembers sitting at the kitchen table, Buck with his magazine, saying pyroclastic flows can get up to 430 miles an hour, and 1800 fahrenheit. Lethal, invariably. 

“Buck-”

Buck’s still yelling, but Eddie’s ears are halfway static. He’s yelling at their captain, and the fire crews and office workers are all standing there watching it happen. Bobby looks lost. Both his hands are up now, wavering helplessly like he wants to grab onto Buck but doesn’t want to scare him or set him off further. 

“Hey- h-hey- Kid-”

Buck shakes his head, the noise ripping out of his throat containing no words Eddie can discern, and then he’s choking on sobs, big, like the way Christopher cries after nightmares. Eddie painstakingly unsticks his feet from the concrete, stumbles forward, gets his hands on Buck’s face. 

“It’s okay- it’s- h-honey, it’s okay, it’s-” Eddie is crying too. That buzzing under his skin is back, but he’s holding onto Buck and it’s not going away. There’s a hand on his shoulder, hands, Chimney is gently pulling him away while Hen bundles Buck off to the shade of the firetruck.

“But-” Eddie gasps, trying to follow. 

“I know,” Chimney hums. “I know, but you’re just feeding into each other’s noise right now. You can check on him in a bit.” 

Eddie sits down, right there in the middle of the parking lot in front of a building that still burns in front of them. There’s water on the pavement, he distantly registers the way it soaks his turnouts. 

“Is… is he okay?” It’s a stupid question, but his thoughts fray out at the edges. 

“Yeah, Eddie, he’s going to be okay.” Chimney’s crouched next to him, a soothing hand rubbing his back. “You’re alright. Keep breathing.”

Ah. It is his panic now. He tries his best to even out his breathing, is not particularly successful at it. He just needs- he twists where he’s sitting, even with numb limbs and stuttering breath it’s easy to find Buck. He’s sitting on the edge of the firetruck, Hen at his side, Bobby kneeling in front of him. Buck’s chest rises and Eddie’s lungs exhale. Eddie’s hand curls, fingers scraping against gravel, through pooled hose water. As he watches, Bobby swipes his thumb under Buck’s eye, wiping his tears away like a father with his child.

—

Eddie wasn’t really here for this one. He got the story in bits and pieces from other people later. 

Bobby had already been on edge that day, Buck was never specifically sure why. “I was being an idiot,” he’d said, head tilted over and a sheepish smile lit up soft by night time kitchen lights. “Poking into stuff I shouldn’t’ve.” Hen says Bobby shoved him but Buck never really confirmed it, that night or any other. He always talked around it, shrugging and looking away when Eddie got up the nerve or curiosity to directly ask. “He was pissed,” Buck would say. “He got pissed.” 

And then a plane had gone down just offshore. Eddie remembers seeing it on the news and feeling grateful, despite how pissed he was at her, that Shannon had driven to California rather than flown. It was a real mess out there, but they were getting people out. It could have been worse, Buck, Hen, and Bobby had all at some point told him. There were still people left to save.

“There was a woman,” Bobby had said in a hushed tone down to his hands, sometime in Eddie’s early recovery after the shooting when he was alone in his mind and feeling alone in the whole world, a world that had become bigger and scarier without him realizing, when giving up in one way or another had felt too easy to do. “She was trapped in her seat. I should have left her.” He admits it in that same small tone, speaking directly to an old scar across his knuckle. “But I wasn’t- back then I thought it’d be alright to just- at least I’d be helping someone.” 

And the thing is, it’s impossible. What happened was impossible. You either have the knack or you don’t and Bobby doesn’t. He shouldn’t have been able to make the connection, shouldn’t have been able to reach out and shake that metaphorical hand. But out on that sinking aircraft, Buck and Bobby did. They shared strength, Bobby suddenly working with the muscles of a man more than 20 years younger, and they got the woman out of her seat, got her back to shore and to her waiting child. 

They both got whipped off for tests after, impossible bouncing around in the mouths of all the doctors and nurses and hospital staff. And all those tests backed that statement up: the parts of Bobby’s brain generally thought to be what makes a person congeneric were as dark as ever. They got, more or less, a big official shrug. Strange shit happens sometimes. They got sent home with a couple ibuprofen for their mild headaches, even those more likely caused by the hours spent awake and working than by any medical mystery-or-miracle.

“Bobby kind of… pulled away after that, for a while,” Buck had told Eddie, his shrug not enough to dispel the sadness from his shoulder. 

“I couldn’t handle it,” Bobby had admitted. “Feeling all that- that care, from him. I didn’t think I deserved it. Couldn’t handle being thought of as a father when my kids had just- I wasn’t ready for it.” This part of the years-long conversation had taken place just after Buck’s parents had visited. Eddie wondered when he did start feeling ready for it. Eddie remembers, sharply, how things were between the three of them through the blood clots and tsunami and lawyers. He wonders how things could have been different if either he. Or Bobby had got over themselves, helped Buck when he was hurting instead of lighting fire to bridges in desperate acts of self-preservation. 

“We’re fine now, though,” Buck shrugs a third time with limbs far more relaxed, that night in the kitchen sometime in Eddie’s second year at the station. After the well, before the train. Months after the lawsuit. “Me and Bobby- we’re good.” 

And Eddie thinks that’s true, sees how they behave around each other, the worry and care and love behind Bobby’s actions, and Buck’s. 

But they never really talked about it.

—

Maddie’s face immediately pinches in concern when Chimney opens the door. Shoot. He was trying so hard to look absolutely fine and not worried at all. “It’s okay. I promise it’s okay.” She nods, still looking wobbly, and his heart goes thunk thud thunk and he wants so badly to hug her. He wants so badly to be hugged. 

He opens his arms. She immediately wraps him right up. Her hugs are always so tight and Chimney wonders sometimes if that’s because she had Buck to practice on, all ten feet and all the muscle of him, all the desperate fear and love in him that might explode out all over the place if someone wasn’t there to hold him together. She smells so good. She’s so warm- oh god he loves her so much. 

“Okay,” he says into her hair. “Now, don’t freak out.”

“Nooo,” she says, pulling back a little to look at him with her eyebrows making a V. “That’s the worst sentence! That immediately makes people freak out, Howie!” 

“Yeah, I know, sorry, bad lead in!” Chim shakes his head like a dog getting rid of fleas. “I just mean- everyone is physically okay.” 

“I don’t like how you’ve stressed physically.”

Chimney winces. “Well. I mean. He’s probably okay mentally, or, like, better than he was earlier-”

“Buck?” Maddie asks, eyebrow V getting pointier. “What happened? Where is he? Is he alright?”

“He’s at Bobby’s, I think, which is also what he freaked out about? He kind of sort of had a meltdown in the middle of a call? But I guess- I mean- a lot’s happened. I guess it’s- I mean the Bobby stuff doesn’t not make sense, I just didn’t think that would be the thing that did it, you know?”

“What exactly did it? What happened?” Her fingers dig into his back a little, he thinks unintentionally.

“Oh, uh- Bobby stopped responding for a bit in a fire. He was fine, he was just helping people get out, but Buck… uh, yeah. It wasn’t great. And- well, Bobby was kind of freaked out about it too, I think, so he invited Buck over for dinner, so- he’s safe. He’s safe.” It feels like he’s lying somehow, though he knows he’s not. Buck is with Bobby, Buck is safe with Bobby. And later, hopefully, will be with Eddie and safe with Eddie, because Chimney can’t quite get rid of the image of Eddie sitting in the middle of the street, lost like a little kid. He remembers, unbidden, the night Kevin died. The first person he’d shared a brain with. Chimney had known it happened quickly, because he’d felt a little bit of heat, a little bit of pain, and then nothing, nothing, nothing ever again.

“Baby,” Maddie says, and her hands on his arms and her eyes looking at his face are warm, and gentle. 

“Sorry,” he says, crackly. “Sorry. It’s okay. I swear-”

“I know,” she says. She speaks quietly, because she’s very close. “It’s okay. I’m right here.”

Her lips are just as soft as he remembered them to be.

—

It’s almost 9 when Buck knocks on the door. Eddie knows it's him before he even gets up from the couch because he exhales properly for the first time in hours. He nearly trips over a spare sneaker in his rush to fling open the door. Buck stands there in borrowed clothes; sweatpants too tight in some places and too loose in others, and a Lakers shirt from back when they were playing out of Minneapolis, the light blue and yellow almost faded to illegibility. He’s holding Tupperware. He’s in one piece. 

“Why’d you knock?” Eddie can’t remember the last time Buck didn’t just walk right in.

Buck shrugs, eyes a little unsure. “I thought… I just thought I should knock.” 

Eddie turns inside and heads to the kitchen, listening to the so-familiar sounds of Buck toeing off his shoes and following him on quiet feet. He gets two glasses, fills them with water, and faces Buck again. He’s standing in the entryway, the containers in his hands now held up in front of his chest.

“Leftovers, from Bobby,” he says, staring down at them like they hold some kind of miracle he’s not sure he believes in. “We made corn chowder. Brownies, too. Uh-” he exhales. “Comfort food.”

“Right.”

Eddie puts the waters down on the table, the muted tap of glass on wood seeming inordinately loud in the quiet room, and then they just stare at each other for a few moments. Between one breath and the next the air in Eddie’s chest catches, rattles around, comes out as a laugh.

”What?” Buck sounds almost exasperated, but there’s a smile tugging at his lips.

“Nothing, I-” Eddie laughs again, dragging his hand across his face and then looking again into Buck’s eyes, bright and blue. “I thought we needed to talk about the shooting. Guess you had all kinds of stuff going on.”

Buck’s smile turns wry. “Not everything’s about you, Eddie.” And then he sighs, sets his Tupperware down, leans against the table. “But it is also about you. It’s- I- I’ve been trying so hard to hold onto everyone but I- I don’t know what’s going to happen.” His head dips down to his chest. “I can’t… stop any of it.”

Eddie comes closer, standing close enough he feels the warmth of Buck’s knees. His chest aches, in the kind of distant way where he can’t tell if it’s Buck’s pain or plain old heartbreak. “You always want to fix everything. You can’t- you can’t fix the whole world, Buck.”

Buck laughs, wet, throwing his hands up in a wide shrug. “Don’t I at least have to try?”

Eddie steps between his legs, puts his hands on either side of his face. “I can’t promise you any more control, and I- hell, I can’t even promise I’m any better about it.” Because that’s what it was every time he ran, wasn’t it? A desperate bid for choice and his own safety wrapped in the desire to make everything better for everyone. If he went to the army alone, if he went to California alone, if he cut Buck off and tried to keep existing without half his limbs, at least he’d controlled those outcomes. He’d never lay with lips bloody from screaming out loss. The mystery was prettier left unsolved. The heart was less prone to aching when not tied to another. Buck is warm between his palms, warm against his front, and he’s not a mystery at all, and Eddie hasn’t been alone in years, and he vows to himself, to Shannon, to Buck, to anyone who’ll listen that he won’t forget that again. “But I promise you I’ll try right along with you. We do this together. It’s not- baby, you don’t have to fight all by yourself.”

“Eddie-”

“And if you fail, or I fail, or- or the world decides to fuck us like it so often seems to do, I promise I’ll still be right there with you. I know I haven’t been great about that. I’m sorry.”

“Eddie-”

“We do this together.” Eddie kisses the side of Buck’s mouth, and that’s not enough so he kisses his cheek and forehead, too. “We talk to each other, okay? We work things out together.”

“Okay.” Buck sniffs, wipes at his eyes. “Yeah, Eddie, okay. I-I promise, too.”

“Okay.” It’s the truth. He knows Buck, so he’s sure of that. Eddie kisses his lips. “I’m with you- I’m with you till I die, Buck. I’m right here and I promise I’ll love you the whole rest of my life.”

Buck curls down into Eddie’s collar bone and heaves a single sob, hands fisting and relaxing in the back of Eddie’s shirt. “I-in sickness and in health, huh?”

Eddie buries his face in Buck’s hair and smiles there, marveling at the home they’ve built on a shared page. “We probably shouldn’t steal Hen and Karen’s thunder, so… can you wait a few weeks for me to ask you a question?” 

Eddie’s shirt is getting wet, and Buck shakes in his arms. “Yeah. Yeah, I- I can wait.”

“Alright.” He wonders how many jewelry stores he can drag Chris to before he gets bored.

“If-” there’s a soft pressure against Eddie’s chest, maybe a kiss. “But if you get the ring sooner can I- could I wear it? Just around the house?”

Eddie laughs, and pulls Buck up to kiss him again. “Yeah.” He wipes the tears from underneath his beautiful red rimmed eyes. The next day’s a Tuesday, but one skipped day of school is probably fine. “Fuck- yeah. I’ll- I’ll go get one tomorrow.”

Eddie’s left ring finger curls, because behind his back Buck’s is doing the same, pulling Eddie’s along with it. “Okay- okay.” He surges forward to kiss Eddie once, and then again, and then again. “The rest of my life, too, okay? I’ll love you- I’ll love you for all of it. Every second.”

Eddie’s cheeks ache with how big he smiles and his heart aches for himself at 25, so afraid of the fear and pain that would come for him regardless that he thought he’d rather not understand what it was to really know someone, to be really known. With Buck in his arms, the future spools out before him. Every second of his life, loved and shared. He can’t wait.

—

Epilogue 

It’s late afternoon, the California sun starting to go pink and lovely, and the reception is in full swing. Buck had cried all through the ceremony because he always does, even at all those weddings he was only brought along to screw around with. And this time meant all so much more, because it was Hen up there, smile solar-flare bright and heart singing with love so loud his own hummed along to the tune. Eddie had held his hand the whole time, and squinted at him teasingly like all the tears in his eyes were spillover from Buck’s, as if he isn’t just as much of a sap. Hen is still wrapped up in Karen, slow stepping around the dance floor. Occasionally Buck feels his heart flutter, his stomach swoop along to their two person rhythm, and he smiles down at the ground every time. 

Chimney and Maddie are on the dance floor, too, Jee sandwiched between them. They occasionally spin together, or bounce her up in the air, and Jee laughs and Chimney laughs and it bubbles up in Buck, spilling out as he giggles over his champagne or along with Christopher or in Eddie’s arms. Bobby is twirling Athena in an elegant waltz, his heart beating strong and lungs taking big deep breaths, and Buck breathes easy and wonders if Bobby would teach him to dance like that, if he asked. He catches his eye over Athena’s shoulder, and Bobby smiles at him, and Buck thinks he would. 

He closes his eyes. Eddie went into the house to wash his hands of frosting after he’d gathered up all their cake plates. The wood floor creaks under his feet, and the water is pleasantly cool on his hands. He’s sweating a little, Buck can feel it run down his back under his suit. He’s smiling, and Buck lets it pull his own face into happiness. 

When Buck was young, he was very lonely. He had Maddie, sometimes, and she would help him with homework and hold his hand when they walked to the library and tell him jokes to make him laugh when it seemed like there was nothing funny at all about the house they grew up in. He wonders, sometimes, if that’s what did it. When she went off for college, Buck thinks maybe his heart reached out so hard for her that it bumped into other people along the way. He’s certainly the youngest he knows to have paired up with somebody — Brian Anderson, on the football field when they were sixteen, who froze dead still in a forward rush and later shoved him to the floor in the locker room and told him to get the fuck out of his head, with several pointed and unkind words besides — though nobody ever used to stick around long. He’d never felt anything like what he sensed in Hen and Chimney; strong, lasting, unbreakable. He’d wanted it so badly, but Abby had said I’m not myself when I’m with you, and Ali had implied much the same, that he was no one, nothing outside the job, a perpetual guest in his home, in his life. Maybe that was the problem. Not an outstretched hand but a black hole, someone for people to fall into and never get out. 

“Hey.” 

Buck opens his eyes. Eddie’s standing before him. Two days ago he moved the last of the boxes from his loft into Eddie’s garage. He’s never been a guest in this man’s home, even at the very beginning. “Hi, Eddie.”

Eddie grins, and Buck feels the roses in his cheeks. “You wanna dance with me?”

Eddie breathes in front of him and Buck can feel it like it’s his own lungs breathing, and he can feel Bobby — whose heart once reached back — dip Athena across the floor, and Hen and Chimney share a laugh and their bond is their own but he picks up the radio frequency sometimes, and even everyone here who doesn’t have the knack are still vague presences in the shape of their absence. He’s not alone, not lonely anymore. He has a lot of people to share his life with, and a lot of life of his own to share. 

And Eddie promised. There’s a band of metal cradled against his chest, made warm by his skin, hanging from a delicate chain around his neck. Pretty soon he’ll get asked a question. For the rest of his life, he’ll be one half of together. 

Buck slides his hand into Eddie’s outstretched one. “You didn’t get enough of me stepping on your toes earlier?”

Eddie’s eyes wrinkle up at the corners, beautiful. He shakes his head. “Never.” 

And Buck knows, he knows that he means it.