Archive of Our Own ^beta

If Eddie believed in omens, he would call the rain one. Something about the steady evening drizzle sets a pit in his stomach, makes him itchy under his skin. The wipers of the engine swipe steady over the windshield, but Eddie can’t hear them, not under the sirens and the rain and the headset.

He can see the edge of Bobby’s frown in the passenger seat as he listens to dispatch—something about a hill, low visibility, a car that took a turn too fast. Eddie hadn’t bothered eavesdropping. Bobby will fill them in, and Eddie is too busy scratching at his wrist, at the unease curling through him.

A solid knee knocks into his. “I told you that was poison ivy.”

Eddie drops both hands back to his lap to meet Buck’s gaze. He’s grinning. It’s not fair—Buck grins and just like that the roiling feeling in Eddie’s gut lessens.

“I didn’t touch the poison ivy,” Eddie says. Buck’s grin doesn’t waver.

“Sure you didn’t. Listen, if you ask Hen for ointment, you’re going to win me twenty bucks. I’ll split it with you.”

Eddie snorts as the engine slows around a curve of road. “You bet that I touched poison ivy? Really, Buck?”

“No.” Buck has the nerve to look offended. “I bet that you would wait to ask for help about the poison ivy until we were almost off shift. You’re too stubborn for your own good.”

The engine is dragging to a stop. Eddie’s fingers twitch with the aborted urge to scratch his wrist. “What am I even gonna do with ten dollars? You couldn’t bet more?”

“I didn’t have a lot of cash on me,” Buck mutters, and it’s too rainy for Eddie to laugh but he does smile.

The engine stops fully, and Buck and Eddie are thrust out into the rain and the action. The familiarity makes the itching fade to the back of Eddie’s mind: he falls into the rhythm of Bobby yelling out orders, Hen and Chim disembarking from the ambulance with bags slung over their shoulders. Rain thunks against their turnouts as he and Buck grab gear from the truck and make their way to the edge of the road.

It was two cars, not one, that tumbled off the road. The hill they slid down onto is steep enough they’ll need ropes to get down to the people trapped inside, but not so steep the cars are sliding, at least not now. When Eddie stops at the edge of the gnarled guardrail to peer over, he can make out the back of the first car, its brake lights on and casting the rain in an odd red glow.

A solid shoulder bumps into his. “We’re both gonna have to go down.”

Buck’s face is damp, even under his helmet, and he swipes at his face with a gloved hand and grins at Eddie. Behind him, the ladder is creaking into position. Unease sits heavy in Eddie’s gut.

It’s just Wednesday, he tries to tell himself. They do this all the time.

So he claps Buck on the shoulder and makes himself grin back. “Race you.

---

Buck snaps his carabiner into place and yanks on it, the motions so familiar he’s almost spaced out as he works. He’s not—he’s so fully here, under the rain with his team in their turnouts, Eddie beside him working diligently at his own harness. Chim got a flashlight to inspect the back of the top car, and dispatch reported that there was only a driver inside. So Chim and Ravi are going to go down with the backboard to the first car, and Eddie and Buck are bypassing the first car to get to the second.

He loves his job. He loves the energy thrumming under his fingertips, adrenaline spinning through his veins. It’s a good day, a good shift, and here’s a big solid rescue to finish it out. Buck doesn’t care about anything else right now—if there is anything else, any best friend’s sons in different states or Lakers tickets that Buck can’t bring himself to look at, it doesn’t exist here. Buck is here for the rescue, for—

A hand grabs the front of his rope and tugs. Buck takes a step, not quite a stumble, but he wasn’t expecting the pull. He blinks at Eddie.

“I can check my own gear,” he says, his tone light because Eddie’s mouth is screwed up and terse. He doesn’t answer, and somehow that’s worse. Buck reaches for Eddie’s harness, and yanks. “You good, man?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He clears his throat. “Just—reminds me of our greatest hits, you know?” He gestures vaguely. Buck feels his brow go up.

“You mean the bridge?” he asks, and Eddie’s face knots again.

“I meant—never mind.”

He moves away before Buck can answer, and it takes Buck up to the moment they both are braced at the edge of the hill, ready to go down, to realize what Eddie meant—it takes Buck looking up at the ladder hanging in the sky over them, slick with rain. And by then Eddie’s on the other side of Chim and Ravi, too far for Buck to call over.

What would he say, anyway? Hey, Eddie, don’t worry, no lightning this time! Or maybe hey Eddie, if it hits it’ll hit the ladder again, because it’s the highest. Or, do you know the chances of getting struck by lightning twice?

Buck keeps his mouth shut, even when they lower down and leave Chim and Ravi at the first car, because he knows how he’d feel if Eddie ever said to him do you know what the chances of getting sniped in broad daylight twice are?

So, he works. The side of the hill is muddy under his boots, and by the time they reach the second car he can feel the strain in his biceps from controlling his descent.

It’s a van, not a car. The driver’s side is facing up, and it’s dented—the other car must have hit it and sent them both off the road. Buck sets a careful boot on the front bumper, and the whole thing rocks. He removes his boot.

“See anything?” Eddie calls. He’s down by the trunk, feet braced on the hill so he can lean over with a flashlight to peer into the back windows. Buck mimics him. It’s too dark out to make anything out for sure, but he can see an unmoving shape in the driver’s seat. “I think there’s kids back here.”

“I see a driver,” Buck confirms, and reaches for his radio. “Bobby, we’ve got multiple victims down here. The ground’s unsteady, we need to secure the van before it falls.” The hill keeps rolling below them—he doesn’t want to know what will happen if something jostles the van loose.

Eddie reaches the back door and tugs at the handle. It doesn’t budge. He inches over to the driver’s door, and when he pulls on that handle it somehow, miraculously, opens.

“The first car’s in the way, Buck,” Bobby answers over the radio. “We’ll have to wait for Chim and Ravi to get back up here.”

“That’s gonna be a while,” Chimney announces. “First driver’s in bad shape—we’re trying to untangle her from the steering wheel.”

“We don’t have time down here,” Eddie says. “Driver is unconscious with internal bleeding. There’s kids in the back.”

The radio falls silent for a moment. Buck shifts up and over the door so he can see what Eddie’s looking at. It’s a young woman, slumped over into the passenger seat. Eddie’s got one hand on her throat and the other on her stomach, his fingers light but insistent as he checks for damage. Buck’s not a medic, but he’s seen enough people with the same shallow breathing to know she doesn’t have a lot of time.

He turns to look up. He can’t see Chim and Ravi from his perspective, or the rest of the 118 up top, just the lights from the engines cascading over the hill.

“Bobby,” he says into the radio. “Can you move the truck so we can hook the van to it?”

Eddie doesn’t look up from his patient, but his shoulders tense. When Bobby answers, his voice is calm. “Buck, you’re hooked to the truck.”

Buck knows this. He’s attached to the engine, while Eddie is anchored to the ladder truck. Chim and Ravi are connected to the ladder itself.

“We’ll have to move it,” Bobby says when Buck doesn’t answer. “If you start coming back up—”

“There’s no time,” Buck says, and Eddie says, “Buck,” quietly, just like that. Buck ignores him, with effort. “It’s stable enough down here I don’t really need the harness. We have to get these kids out, Bobby.”

“How’s it look, Eddie?”

Eddie grips his rope in one hand as he looks up at Buck, who tries to make his lean against the hill look casual and effortless. Buck doesn’t know if Eddie buys it, or if he just knows the stakes, but he nods—a useless motion for someone communicating over a radio. But the nod isn’t for Bobby, it’s for Buck.

“It’s a good plan,” Eddie says. “We’ll be fine down here.”

We, Eddie says, even though their ropes are connected to different trucks and Eddie’s not the one getting unhooked. He says stuff like that a lot, on the job and off. It’s the same way Bobby says BuckandEddie, and how Hen says, “Are you coming?” at the end of shifts when the team is going to breakfast and Buck knows she means them both.

“Copy that,” Bobby says. “Buck, unhook your harness, but be careful. Dig in if you start to lose your balance.”

“You got it, Cap,” Buck says, ignoring Eddie’s dirty look. Buck had unhooked his harness at the second syllable out of Bobby’s mouth. He takes a moment to make sure he’s balanced, just to prove to Eddie that he’s being careful. “You’re clear to move up there.”

His rope slides back up the hill. Buck turns to Eddie, whose attention has shifted to the backseat.

“Are they unconscious?” he asks. Eddie shakes his head.

“They’re little,” he says. He still has one hand wrapped around his rope, and he uses it to lean farther into the car. “Hey, can you hear me?” His voice goes soft in a way Buck hasn’t heard in months, but he’s on the job so it doesn’t make his heart ache. “My name is Eddie. Can you move your fingers and toes?”

Buck shifts his weight. “I can go around,” he says, and Eddie hauls himself up so fast Buck worries he’ll strain something.

“Go around where?” he demands. He is no longer soft Eddie. “To the underside of the unsecured car? Without a rope?”

“You can just say no,” Buck mutters, and Eddie huffs.

“Cap just told you to be careful.”

“It was just an idea.”

Eddie’s mouth works. Buck wonders if the poison ivy from earlier is still bothering him. “I get it,” he says, which is not what Buck was expecting. “It’s kids. But they’re okay, Buck—they’re alert and they’re moving their fingers and toes. You don’t need to get down there.”

Buck nods, and reaches for Eddie’s rope so he can shift closer to the van. It’s too precarious for him to lean closer, but this way he can take Eddie’s med pack and hand him the tools from inside. It’s slow, because he keeps one hand on the rope, but he imagines Eddie appreciates that more than the tools Buck hands him. Or maybe he doesn’t. Buck would appreciate it, because he’s seen what happens to Eddie when he’s not connected to a rope, and sometimes he pretends that Eddie has the same worry for Buck as Buck has for him.

Sometimes Eddie makes it easy for Buck to pretend—like now, when he looks up at Buck with an IV bag in one hand and rain on his eyelashes. He’s frowning—he frowns a lot. On Saturday when Buck couldn’t fall asleep in the bunks he’d spent a lot of time staring towards the ceiling and wondering about how much Eddie frowned, and if Buck was only noticing it more now because he finally shaved the mustache.

Buck doesn’t think about the mustache, or lack thereof, while he’s on the clock. Well, that’s a lie—he doesn’t think about it when he’s out on call. Asking him not to think about the mustache or lack thereof for twelve hours straight would be like asking him not to text Eddie in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep and he dreams of the taste of iron on his tongue and he’s desperate for the reminder that Eddie isn’t still lying in that street in the puddle of his own blood. Which is to say, it’s impossible, and anyway doing both things makes him feel indescribably better

Buck has a long list of things he doesn’t think about while he’s on calls. It’s part of the reason he loves his job so much. It’s easy to hide from the uncomfortable thoughts.

“Can you tell them to send a backboard down, too?” Eddie asks. Buck nods and goes to let go of the rope for his radio, and Eddie’s eyes shift to his hand and his frown deepens. Instead, Buck leans towards the rope to wrap his elbow around it so he can hold on and key his radio with the same arm.

He relays Eddie’s request while Eddie leans forward to talk to the kids again, one hand still on the rope below where Buck is gripping it, too. When this call is over Buck imagines he’ll think about that image again, over and over.

“Buck, they’re sending the chains down for the van,” Bobby says. “Backboard is on its way with your harness.”

“Got it, Cap,” Buck says. He passes Eddie’s bag back to him and leans against the hill, and now he does let go of the rope so he can head back towards the front of the car. Eddie doesn’t watch him, which is fine. Buck already knew he wasn’t that worried about Buck.

The chain is inching down the hill along the same path Buck took earlier. The rain hasn’t lessened, and it drips in Buck’s eyes as he watches the metal slither down. It passes the first car, which wobbles.

“Chim, you’re shaking,” Buck reports into his radio. The chains pass the car. “Chim?”

The car trembles again. Its nose is deep in mud, which looks sturdy enough to hold it up, but Buck doesn’t drop his hand from the radio.

“Bobby, the first car doesn’t look stable.”

“I see it,” Bobby answers. “I can barely hear them—I think they’re losing their patient. Try and—”

Buck has no idea what he’s supposed to try, because the car above them shifts. It breaks through the mud to slide down, and every thought in Buck’s mind empties out. He moves without thinking—lunges up, for the chain that’s still moving towards him, and twists his head to where Eddie hangs, one hand on his rope and one on the van, right in the path of the first car.

Buck was wrong, about the image from earlier gripping him. It’s this one he’ll never get out of his mind: Eddie’s head snapping up to look at the car and then at Buck. Their eyes lock for an instant, an hour. Eddie’s lips purse on the first letter of Buck’s name, and the car slams into the van and Buck loses him.

---

It’s Buck’s first thought—I lost Eddie. He thinks it before he realizes, before he’s aware enough to know that he’s having a first thought, which meant he wasn’t awake and is now.

He lost Eddie. One moment Eddie was there, and the next there was a car where Eddie had been, and Buck doesn’t know what happened then. He just thinks, I lost Eddie I lost Eddie I lost Eddie, over and over, and as it whirls through his mind he realizes a few other things—like the fact that he was also right by where the car hit Eddie, which means Buck also was probably hit by the car. And like the fact that his side hurts, and his leg, and there’s something wet on his face.

It's mud. He can smell it—actually, he thinks it’s up his nose. He’s lying on his stomach, hurting somewhere under his turncoats, with his face in the mud, and he lost Eddie.

Buck groans into the mud and lifts his face. It doesn’t hurt to do that—not spinal, he thinks, and then, Eddie. He can’t have lost Eddie. He hasn’t lost Eddie. He won’t consider it.

He gets an elbow under his body to try and push himself over, and that does hurt—his side and his leg, even though he doesn’t even succeed in rolling over. Buck groans again as he paws at his radio. His fingers find a mound of squished plastic, which is fine. When he blinks mud out of his eyes to figure out why he can’t roll over, he sees his leg, pinned under a rock the size of Eddie.

Eddie, Buck thinks again. He’s panicking; he knows that. First Eddie, and now his leg—his bad leg, the one the ladder truck got six years ago—and Eddie, Eddie, he lost Eddie, and it’s making him panic, and that’s okay. He can panic for a second and then he’ll get up and find Eddie.

Buck shifts again. He can move his other leg easily, and he sets his boot against the rock and shoves. It wobbles and it hurts his ankle. The pain is sharper than the panic so Buck can tell that it’s not as bad as the ladder truck, not nearly. Which is good. Buck doesn’t know what he’d do if he lost his leg and Eddie in the same day.

He squints up at the rain, lets it clear some of the mud off his face. He’s at the bottom of the hill—that much he can tell now. He can’t see the cars, but he can see the lights from the engines, far, far above him. He must have fallen pretty far when the car hit.

Buck shifts again, gritting his teeth against the pain so he can brace himself against the ground and push. The boulder tips back, and Buck keeps pushing, and when the boulder rolls off him he’s yelling and panting, sitting up so fast he gets dizzy but he has to check, he has to feel it—he wraps a hand around his ankle and squeezes his bone through the rubber, and it hurts but it’s not blinding. It’s not broken. It’s not broken.

Okay. Buck can work with this. No radio, no Eddie—I lost Eddie, his brain insists, like he could have forgotten. But his flashlight still works, and his team is at the top of the hill and they’ll be looking, too—for him and for Eddie.

Well, Buck is already down here, so he might as well start looking, too. He pushes himself to his feet and he wobbles for a moment, his vision black, but he’s on his feet. He’s covered in mud. Buck hates mud. Buck hates the rain, too. He hates that last image of Eddie, frozen inside his eyelids. The ghost of Eddie’s blood is on his tongue. What had Eddie said? Their greatest hits?

Yeah. Buck misses who he was twenty minutes ago. Mostly he misses Eddie. He’s on his feet but he’s still panicking, and he decides to let himself think about one thing he’s not allowed to think about on calls just to make himself feel better.

There’s a lot to choose from. Eddie’s face with a mustache, and Eddie’s face without a mustache. Eddie answering the door in his underwear. Eddie’s shoulder’s hunched when Christopher left. The handful of times Eddie has smiled, really, actually smiled, in the months since then. Eddie’s blood on Buck’s tongue. Eddie’s hair—specifically, Eddie’s hair when a lock of it flops forward over his forehead. The Lakers tickets in a drawer in Buck’s kitchen, where he’d shoved them after being unable to look at them for another minute. The jacket Tommy had left on Buck’s couch, which Buck wadded up and shoved in the back of his closet in retaliation to Tommy breaking off a six month relationship over—over—

Buck decides he’s not going to think about that one. Or the other ones. The problem is that thinking about Eddie is making his chest clench uncomfortably, but almost all of the thoughts he’s not allowed to think are about Eddie, in some aspect. He tries thinking about Maddie and Jee-yun, but the panic still has a death grip on Buck. He needs something bigger, something really good, to shake this off.

So he thinks about the lightning strike. Not his own fractured memories of it, but the parts he’s crafted in between calls and alone in his loft—Eddie’s hands on his chest, pumping life back into him. Eddie on the ladder.

He tried to pull you up, Chim said once, his tone light like he was making fun of Eddie, but his eyes were heavy and when Buck glanced over Eddie didn’t meet his eyes.

Buck thinks of Eddie on the top of the hill, checking Buck’s harness without a word. Eddie in the engine, grinning. Eddie with poison ivy.

It doesn’t get rid of the panic, but something inside of Buck steadies, and he flicks his flashlight on and starts to walk, sweeping the tiny beam this way and that. He wants to find—what? Eddie, but not Eddie. It’s like when he lost Christopher in the tsunami—all he could think was I have to find him I have to find him but as the streets and hours dragged on he got more and more afraid of what would be left if he did find him.

It's the same now, but it hasn’t been hours. Buck limps over the muddy ground and lets the job take over, lets it melt all other thoughts away. He has one purpose, and that’s to find Eddie, and until he does that he won’t think anything else.

---

Eddie wakes up to hard pressure on his sternum and a flashlight in his eyes. Someone is shouting. His head pounds.

“Buck?” he manages, and the flashlight blinks off to reveal Hen’s grim smile.

“He’s awake,” she says, and the paramedic who’d been rubbing his chest stands up.

Eddie groans. “What—”

“The first car fell on the van,” Hen says. “Chim and Ravi managed to pull the driver out in time, but you barely got out of the way. We had to call for backup to get you up.”

The road is a lot brighter and louder than it was when they arrived, but Eddie is too focused on Hen’s frown to really care about what’s happening around them. He doesn’t need her to tell him he has a concussion; he can tell that much himself.

“Where’s Buck?”

Hen hesitates.

Eddie shoves himself up. His vision wavers but he grabs her arm. His head aches so badly he can feel his heartbeat behind his eyes. “Where’s Buck?”

“We’re not sure,” Hen says in the soft voice she uses for Denny and Mara. “He hadn’t clipped back into his harness when the car hit, so—”

Eddie remembers—the way Buck had looked at him, his eyes round and terrified, and Eddie had barely fought the urge to lunge towards Buck in order to fling himself back instead.

“We’re looking?” he demands, and Hen nods. When Eddie tries to stand she has to grab him and says, “Woah, Eddie. Take a minute—”

“He got hit by a car, Hen,” Eddie says, a little frantically. Hen doesn’t let go of his arm. “He—I let him unclip his harness.”

“You didn’t let him do anything,” she says, and if she keeps using that tone Eddie’s concussion is going to make him cry, out here on the job, in the middle of a call where Buck is now missing. “He decided—”

“Yeah,” he says, because his eyes are actually stinging and Eddie cannot deal with that right now. “I know.”

His second attempt at standing goes a lot better, although Hen hovers nearby to make sure he doesn’t fall over.

It takes him a minute to find Bobby—Eddie’s head is spinning and all the new people at the scene is disorienting. But he spots him near the edge of the road and starts to make his way over. Bobby spots him while he’s still talking to the captain of the 136, and he doesn’t sigh but his eyes do something that makes Eddie think he wants to.

Eddie waits, at least, until the other captain moves away. “Cap—”

“You should be enroute to the hospital,” Bobby says without preamble, and Eddie tries not to bristle. “Hen?”

“He woke up to the sternal rub,” she says with a shrug. “It’s gonna take a minute for the next ambulance to get here, anyway.”

“I have to find Buck,” Eddie says. It’s not quite what he’d planned to say—he knows he has a concussion, Bobby and Hen know he has a concussion, and if Eddie wants to stay in this state he has to be really convincing.

“We’ve got teams of people looking, Eddie,” Bobby says, and he’s doing his soothing voice, too. Eddie wants to hit something for a wild moment. “Helicopters are incoming to light up the area. We’ll find him.”

Eddie can’t help the twist of his mouth at the mention of helicopters, and he blames that on the concussion. “I can help,” he says. “Let me help, Cap.”

Bobby and Hen exchange a look. They’re treating Eddie like a patient, and even though he knows they have every right to do so, he’s hurt and concussed, it still makes him want to take them both by the shoulders and shake.

“We have more than enough manpower,” Bobby says. “If you go stumbling out in the dark you’ll only get yourself more hurt. Let us—”

“It’s Buck,” Eddie says without really meaning to, but—well, it is, isn’t it? Isn’t it always, always Buck?

“I know, kid,” Bobby says. “Believe me, I know—”

“No,” Eddie insists. If Bobby knew he wouldn’t be treating Eddie with kid gloves, insisting that he sit this one out. “Bobby, you don’t—what if it was Athena?”

Confusion breaks through Bobby’s practiced calm. Eddie presses.

“What if you saw her go down out there, and we told you to sit it out? I can’t just go to the hospital right now.”

“Eddie—”

“You wouldn’t leave,” Eddie says. He can hear the desperate tinge to his voice and he knows it’s not helping his case, but he’s got a damn concussion which means he’ll be useless at sneaking away if they try and get him in an ambulance. Bobby has to let him. Bobby has to let him. “You wouldn’t—if it were Karen you wouldn’t think twice about letting Hen stay, you know you wouldn’t.”

Bobby’s confusion is gone. Eddie tries not to think about why. “Alright,” he says. Eddie feels like he’s holding his breath. “Alright, Eddie, you can stay. But you’re not going down there.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. He can do that. He can stay up here and search. “Thanks, Cap.”

“Take a breath, Eddie,” Hen murmurs. She looks at Bobby again, and she’s frowning. “Cap—”

“He said it,” Bobby says with a shrug. “If it were Karen you wouldn’t leave, Hen.”

Eddie is going to have a crisis over this when his concussion is gone. But right now he has bigger things to worry about, so he follows Hen away from where another firefighter is coming to Bobby for information.

There are more engines lined up down the road, and Eddie can see their ropes stretching over the guardrails to disappear into the darkness of the hill. Hen stops them by their own engine, close enough to the edge of the road they can look down the hill and track the search teams by the light of their flashlights.

“They’re getting the people out of the van,” she tells him after a moment. “The mom and the kids.”

Eddie is a terrible firefighter. Eddie is a terrible person, for not once thinking—all he can think about is Buck. All he’s thought about is Buck.

“Stop it,” Hen says, even though he’s not doing anything. “You’re concussed, and you watched Buck go down. That’s what the team is for, Eddie. We take over when you need a hand.” Eddie doesn’t answer, doesn’t even nod. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Eddie laughs. “Sorry,” he says. She doesn’t look alarmed at the sharp, brittle sound he made. “No. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” Hen says slowly. “But…you know you can, right? Not just today, Eddie. After we find him, if you ever want to talk about it—”

Part of him wants to say talk about what? but Eddie is tired of lying and tired of being afraid. “I think if I wanted to talk about it I would have already, Hen. No offense.”

“None taken,” she says. “We just…we didn’t think you knew.”

Eddie wants to laugh again but doesn’t, more for Hen’s sake than his. He doesn’t know who we is, but that Hen or anyone would think that Eddie doesn’t—that Eddie is unaware—

Well, Eddie can’t exactly blame them. He can’t even put it into words in his own mind.

“I know,” he says shortly.

“Okay,” Hen says again. “So why haven’t you…”

He’s glad she doesn’t put words to it; he thinks he might pass out again if she does. “It’s complicated.”

“It’s Buck,” she says, and that sums it up so succinctly Eddie feels at once like the ground has dropped out from under his feet and like he’s never been more balanced in his life. It’s Buck. Isn’t it always?

Eddie doesn’t say anything, but his face must do something, because Hen squeezes his shoulder and then lets her hand drop to her side.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” she tells him. “I don’t want to push. But the door is always open, Eddie.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Thanks.”

Eddie appreciates Hen so, so much; he appreciates her even more when she walks away without another word, leaving Eddie to grip the guardrail in both hands as he fights to take a full breath.

The metal is cool under his palms. He doesn’t know when the rain stopped, but it did, and now everything is just damp. Eddie wonders how hard it would be to steal a harness from 136 and descend down the hill himself. He doesn’t move from the guardrail. He knows that Bobby and Hen are right, that he’s no help to anyone right now, but he can’t shake this feeling. Like if he got down there, he could be the one to find Buck.

But that can’t be true, can it? It’s the other way around. It was Buck who dragged Eddie under the engine when Eddie got shot. Buck who came to him when he broke his ribs in the back of a camper van. Buck who came when Eddie was taking a knife to his own life and shredding it.

We didn’t think you knew, Hen had said. Eddie squeezes the guardrail so hard the metal bites into his palms, stinging. Of course he knows. It’s Buck. And Eddie is—well, Eddie is Eddie. Eddie is ruinous. Everything he touches goes to pieces.

Eddie swipes a hand through his hair and tries to breathe. He’s supposed to be jello; he’s supposed to allow himself to feel joy, because he’s not supposed to punish himself. It’s easier said than done. Eddie has been punishing himself for so long it’s become habit, second thought. Punishing himself has become easier than not, and he slips back into it when he loses focus or when he loses Buck.

He forces himself to let go of the guardrail. Red lines are dented into his palms, and he rubs at them with his thumbs, urging them to fade. His head still aches, but it’s secondary to losing Buck. Eddie starts to walk along the road, his leg brushing the guardrail as he stares over the hill to search the darkness for any sign of Buck. He’s not really helping, and it eats at him, but it’s better than sitting still.

He walks to the last fire engine in the row, and keeps going, and then he turns and lets his other leg touch the guardrail as he walks back the other way. His radio bursts with chatter as he moves—they’re getting the family up, they’re calling a helicopter for the mother, they’re trying to identify her. Nothing about Firefighter Buckley. Eddie keeps walking.

He passes the 118 engines again, and sees Chim’s head shoot up. The darkness down the hill doesn’t offer up Buck. Eddie keeps walking. He reaches the end of the engines, keeps going, turns back, repeats.

He paces the road again, and again—he paces until Hen intercepts him with a hand to his chest and a bottle of water.

“Sit,” she says, gesturing at the back of the ambulance. Eddie sits. Chim stands a few feet away on his phone, his chin angled towards his chest. He’s doing the same voice that Bobby and Hen had been using. Eddie is distantly grateful that it’s not aimed at him this time.

“How’s your head?” Hen asks after watching to make sure Eddie actually takes a sip of the water. He shrugs. “Use your words, Eddie, or we’ll take you to the hospital.”

“It’s fine,” he says.

“Can you tell me your full name?” she asks, and he gives her a look. “The date? What did you have for breakfast?”

Chim wanders back over with his phone nowhere in sight. “How’s concussion boy?”

Eddie takes another gulp of water in the hopes they’ll let him get back to his pacing sooner. “It’s Wednesday. I had cereal.”

Hen has her flashlight in one hand, like she wants to check his eyes again. “Eddie, it looks like we might be here a while. Have you thought about—”

Eddie shakes his head too violently and has to stop at the pain. He doesn’t know what she’s about to ask—has he thought about leaving? Has he thought about what will happen if they don’t find him? Have you thought that they won’t find him? Have you considered that you haven’t stopped punishing yourself?

“Okay,” Hen says, instead of any of that. “Okay, Eddie.”

He takes another drink. He makes himself ask, “How long has it been?” Not because he wants to know the answer, but because he has to know.

Hen and Chim exchange one of their patented Hen-and-Chim looks. “Nearly two hours,” Hen says. “They’ve covered a lot of ground so far.”

“But there’s more,” Chim says. “Working theory is that either he’s moving, or he got thrown real far.”

Eddie takes a breath, then another. Hen says, “Chim,” and Chim says, “What? He’s not a kid, Hen. He’s already thought it.”

Eddie hasn’t, in fact, thought it. Eddie has been thinking about how many steps it takes to get from one edge of their cordon to the other. He’s been counting the search parties. For a moment it feels like he’s been thrown off the top of the ladder truck, like he’s hit the ground to stare up at Buck’s body, hanging, but at least then there’d been a body. At least then he could put his hands to Buck’s chest and feel how real he was, the proof right there under Eddie’s palms. At least then Eddie could pump life back into his heart, instead of pacing back and forth, useless.

“I shouldn’t have let him unclip,” he says. The water bottle crinkles in his grip. He thinks maybe his hands are shaking. “I knew it was a bad idea, I knew—the rain—”

“Eddie,” Hen says, again in that way of hers, and she grabs his shoulder through his turnouts. “He’s Buck. We’re going to find him—” She shoots a glance at Chim. “—and he’ll be in one piece when we do.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He finishes the water off in one giant swallow and stands again. They exchange their Hen-and-Chim look again when he starts to move off, and they mutter an argument for a quiet moment before two sets of footsteps fall in behind him. Eddie sighs. “I’m fine.”

“We know,” Chim calls. “We’re just walking. It’s not your road.”

Hen doesn’t say anything, but Eddie knows what they mean, and it’s not Buck but it does make it easier to take the next step, and the one after that.

He paces to the end, then back to the 136. Hen and Chim follow. Eddie will walk this road until his feet bleed or his concussion is healed, and he doesn’t know if that counts as punishing himself or not. Does it count, if he’s doing it for Buck’s sake?

He starts back towards the 118’s end of the road. He’s not doing it for Buck’s sake, not really. He’s doing it because if Eddie stands still, he’ll have a panic attack. Or he’ll throw up. Or both. If he stands still he’ll think about that moment on the hill, about Buck’s eyes on his.

Eddie doesn’t even remember what the last thing he said to Buck was. Was it about the backboard? Did he tell him to be careful? Sometimes they barely need to talk. Their entire conversation on the hill could have been in his head, and the last thing he said to Buck was something dumb about poison ivy. The only thing he can remember saying to Buck that day is that morning, when Buck had shut his locker and asked Eddie if he wanted to watch a movie after work, and Eddie said, “Only if you pick,” and Buck laughed like it was the best joke in the world.

He's not even looking over the guardrail that often anymore, just every dozen steps or so. If he wanted to he could think about how that means he’s punishing himself instead of trying to save Buck. He doesn’t want to. He keeps walking towards the end of the road, Hen and Chim trailing him with a whispered conversation. The farther he gets from where the crash happens the darker it gets, so if he looks down he can barely make out the shape of his own toes in the darkness. He follows the guardrail past the last truck and farther, and from there it’s only another fifteen steps until he turns around again for his trip back, and—

Eddie stops.

He’s four steps beyond the engine, a foot from the guardrail, and the road in front of him is in shadows but Eddie can make out a familiar figure limping towards him.

He feels his mouth shape his name but no noise comes out, as if it’ll spook him. He can’t even make out his face—he thinks it’s the limp, maybe, throwing him back to the first time he’d watched Buck nearly die.

The figure stops. Eddie’s chest is heaving; his skin itches.

“Eddie?” Buck calls, and Eddie runs.

He’s not even aware he’s doing it until Chim curses behind him, shouting something that echoes in Eddie’s radio. Buck is—he’s not running, not really, but he’s moving quicker than he probably should with a limp that pronounced and in moments Eddie’s close enough to see his face.

Eddie doesn’t slow enough and he slams into Buck, whose weight is solid and familiar even when he wobbles. Eddie grabs the front of his turnouts to steady him.

Buck is covered in mud. His eyes are wild on Eddie’s face.

“I thought—”

“Are you—”

They both stop. Eddie still can’t suck a full breath down, still can’t steady the frantic way his heart is beating almost out of his chest. He squeezes Buck’s coat, accidentally tugs, and Buck trips forward but catches himself with a hand on Eddie’s side.

Buck, Eddie thinks. He says, “I told you to be careful.”

Buck’s eyes are still wild, but he says, “Did you?”

Eddie can finally breathe. He gives Buck another shake, gentle enough to not unbalance him. “It was implied. It’s always implied.”

Buck looks like he’s barely listening. He lifts his free hand to Eddie’s face and it hovers in the air there, like he’s afraid to actually touch Eddie. “You’re hurt.”

“Concussion,” Eddie says impatiently. He lets go of Buck’s coat with one hand to put his hand on Buck’s shoulder, and Buck’s lashes flutter as he finally meets and holds Eddie’s gaze. “Are you hurt?”

Buck shakes his head. He’s still panting, still holding Eddie’s side, still holding his other hand in the air. And he’s a liar. Eddie presses his thumb into the spot above Buck’s collarbone. “My ankle,” Buck admits. “It got pinned. It’s not bad.”

“Jesus, Buck,” Eddie says, and he finally lets go of him so he can step to Buck’s side. He takes Buck’s wrist, the one that had been hanging in the air, and pulls it over his shoulders. “Come on.”

Hen and Chim are still there, which Eddie only remembers now. Hen takes Buck’s other side, even though he grumbles about it not being bad, and they shuffle back towards the 118’s ambulance. Bobby is waiting, his eyes bright as they sit Buck down in the back of the ambulance. Eddie crouches immediately, his hands going to Buck’s calf to work his boot down. Hen squats at his side.

“You’re still concussed,” she tells him quietly, and he shoots her a look but there’s no heat behind it.

“Good to see you, kid,” Bobby says over Eddie’s head. Eddie rocks back on his ankles to let Hen take over but doesn’t go far. “What happened?”

Buck grunts when Hen rolls his pant leg up. His ankle is bruised and scraped, little smears of blood drying in his leg hair. His six-year-old surgery scars are pale, and Hen’s fingers are deft as she prods at his bones. “The car threw me to the bottom of the hill. Radio broke. I woke up pinned but managed to get free.”

“You were out?” Eddie asks, lifting his gaze. Buck is already looking at him, and for maybe the third time in Eddie’s life he can’t decipher the look in Buck’s eyes. “How long?”

“Dunno.” Buck winces and Eddie’s attention snaps back to Hen, but she’s just wrapping Buck’s ankle. “Not long.”

“It’s been over two hours,” Bobby says. “We were worried about you.”

“Sorry,” Buck says. “I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

Eddie hears Bobby sigh, then step forward to clap Buck on the shoulder. Hen finishes wrapping Buck’s ankle and stands.

“It’s not broken, but you should still get it looked at at the hospital,” she says. “Eddie, now will you leave?”

Buck is looking at him again when Eddie raises his head. He wonders, briefly, if Buck has stopped looking at him since he spotted him on the road.

“It’s just a concussion,” Eddie says out of habit, and before Hen can even sigh or Bobby can say something kind and fatherly Buck reaches out and grabs the front of Eddie’s coat, the way Eddie did to him earlier, and hauls Eddie bodily up and onto the ambulance beside him.

It surprises Eddie so much he doesn’t even fight it, doesn’t even exclaim at Buck, hurt and maybe concussed, lifting him that easily. Eddie’s not sure what he’d say if he did open his mouth, so he doesn’t. He lets Hen and Chim bundle them both up into the ambulance. Buck is quiet, but he settles down on the gurney beside Eddie, close enough they touch from shoulder to hip to thigh.

Eddie’s fingers twitch, but now it’s with the urge to touch Buck. He catches Hen’s eyes on him and bites his lip.

It’s complicated, he told her earlier. And she said, It’s Buck.

Eddie wishes he were someone else. He wishes he could go back in time and fix whatever it was that made him into someone who ruins every good thing he gets his hands on, if only so he could get his hands on Buck. Because Buck—Buck is the epitome of the good things within Eddie’s reach, and Eddie doesn’t let himself think about it but when he can’t help it he finds himself breathless with the fear that he’ll ruin this, too.

So. Buck pressed to his side will have to be enough, because it’s always been enough. He entertained the thought of Buck being dead for maybe forty-five seconds in the past two hours, but he’s fine, he’s quiet at Eddie’s side, and that will be enough.

It has to be enough.

---

The hospital is—weird.

Not bad weird, just weird, because Eddie gets his concussion confirmed by a doctor and Buck gets his ankle bandaged and they both get discharged. There’s no anxious waiting in the waiting room, no coma, no need to call Chris to break any kind of news.

Eddie gets discharged before Buck does, and Bobby is waiting in the lobby, still in his uniform.

“I can give you a ride home,” he offers, and Eddie glances over his shoulder as if he can see down the hall to where Buck is. “He’s gonna be fine, Eddie. Chim’s on his way back so he can give him a lift.”

Eddie—Eddie itches to see him. To get his hands on his pulse, his shoulder, anywhere.

But he was barely hurt, and Eddie had already seen that he was okay, so he doesn’t need any more proof.

“Okay,” he tells Bobby, and then he gets in Bobby’s truck. They don’t talk on the drive to Eddie’s house, although Eddie knows his captain well enough to know by now he’ll get a talk sometime within the next couple weeks about what he said on the road. Bobby waits in the truck to make sure Eddie gets inside okay, and then he reverses out of the driveway and Eddie is alone in his house.

He should be exhausted, but he isn’t. He heads straight to the bathroom to rinse the sweat and fear and itchiness off his skin, and when he gets out of the shower he still isn’t tired. His heart thrums as he stands in the middle of his living room.

He can’t get that image of Buck out of his head—eyes wide and afraid. Eddie knows him so well, enough to know Buck wasn’t afraid for himself in that moment—he was afraid for Eddie. He was afraid for Eddie, and then he wandered for two hours before Eddie found him. And Eddie—it’s supposed to be good enough, but Eddie said it out loud to Bobby and Hen, said it’s Buck, and it’s not a confession, not really, but it feels like it. Eddie can’t forget it and he can’t breathe.

He checks his phone. It’s almost 2 AM. He orders an Uber and opens his messages app to Buck—not to message him, just to stare at his name.

His Uber driver is even quieter than Bobby, and drops him off in front of Buck’s building without a word. Eddie feels like he’s pacing the road again as he takes the elevator up to Buck’s door and knocks—shaky and untethered, except he can’t blame it on the concussion this time.

The apartment is quiet behind the door. He knocks again. His shower had been fast, so he figured Buck would still be up. After his third knock goes unanswered he fishes out his key ring and unlocks the door himself. He’s gotten into the habit of knocking, especially since Tommy, but Buck will understand.

Except the apartment is dead quiet and pitch black when Eddie steps through. He freezes in the doorway, and suddenly his heart is in his throat.

“Buck?” he calls. The word echoes. “Buck?”

For a moment the apartment disappears and Eddie is watching the fire engine explode, he’s listening to Buck scream over the radio, he’s staring down at Buck’s limp body, he’s watching a car hurl towards them both—

His phone rings.

Eddie lifts it out of instinct and the sight of Buck’s name flashing on the screen manages to hold back the panic. He slaps it to his ear. “Buck?” he says, for the third time.

“Where are you?” Buck says, and just the sound of his voice is enough for Eddie to take a full breath.

“Where am—where are you?” he demands.

“Your house,” Buck says, like it’s obvious. “You’re not here.”

Eddie laughs. It’s a strained sound, but he can’t help it. “I’m at the loft.”

“Oh,” Buck replies. His voice is lighter—had he panicked, too, when he couldn’t find Eddie? “That’s—oh. I guess I should have texted.”

“Me too.”

“I can come back—”

“No.” Eddie drops the phone, switches to speaker so he can order an Uber as he leaves. “Absolutely not—you should be in bed with your ankle elevated, Buck. What the hell were you thinking?”

Buck is quiet for a moment as Eddie locks his door behind him and heads for the stairs. “I dunno,” he says softly. “Just—wanted to see you.”

Eddie almost stops in his tracks as he hurries down the stairs. Buck’s words feel tugged out of Eddie’s own chest, like Buck is putting a voice to what drove Eddie here in the middle of the night, instead of calling. The urge to see him grows impossibly stronger.

“I’ll be there soon,” he manages.

“I’ll be here,” Buck says, and a moment later the call ends. Which—right. Eddie is going to see him in minutes. They don’t need to stay on the phone. Except—well. Except Eddie put a voice to it, his desire to see Buck, and then he went to do it. He wanted, and he gave in, and it feels—it’s scary, and it’s new, but it feels better than denying himself. It feels right, not denying himself Buck.

He lets himself think it: I want to see Buck.

His second Uber pulls up to the curb and Eddie climbs inside. He thinks, I want to hear his voice.

They pull away from Buck’s building. The route is displayed on the dashboard. He wants to get there faster; he wants to touch Buck and make sure he’s okay himself. He wants to put his hands on Buck and not ruin what they have.

He wants Buck.

Eddie expects the Uber to flip when he thinks it; he expects panic to rise in his chest; he expects the itchy unease to return full force.

The Uber does not flip. The driver flicks his turn signal on and stops at a red light, and the world does not end, and Eddie wants Buck.

The light turns green. The world goes on.

---

Buck goes back out to Eddie’s front porch to wait for him. It feels odd to be in the house alone, without Eddie or Christopher, and maybe it’s weird to be sitting alone on Eddie’s porch at two in the morning but it makes him feel better.

He doesn’t want to think about what it means that Eddie went to go to his loft. Buck knows what it means that Buck is here—this is where Buck goes when he needs Eddie, which is often, so he’s here a lot. This is where he went after the lightning strike, after Tommy, and Eddie is always here waiting for him. Eddie always knows to be here when Buck needs him, except he went to Buck’s loft.

Is it the ankle? Buck is supposed to be sleeping on his own couch tonight and not bothering with the loft stairs, which means he’s definitely not supposed to be bothering with his apartment’s elevator or an Uber, but Buck has never really been good at listening and he wanted to see Eddie.

Or is it—Buck doesn’t know what else it could be. He thinks about Eddie’s face on the road, intent on Buck’s face like he couldn’t see enough of him. He thinks about Eddie checking his harness before they went down the hill. Buck’s chest aches with something that feels a lot like hope.

Because he’s not stupid. Buck is a lot of things—dumb sometimes, sure, but he’s not stupid, and he’s not on call anymore so he can think it: he trailed Eddie around everywhere he went for five years, and then Tommy kissed him and Buck thought oh, that’s what that meant, and then Tommy broke up with him because Eddie takes up so much space in Buck’s life there’s not really room for anything else. Never mind that Buck was willing to make space—he would have loved Tommy with everything he had, if Tommy had let him, but he didn’t. So now Buck has nothing to distract himself from the fact that Eddie is the center of his universe and always has been, and everything that’s happened in the past six years has just been steps in getting him here, to this point, to his life that revolves around Eddie’s.

He has to figure out how to sell those stupid Lakers tickets.

Buck runs a tired hand over his face. He was worried about coming over tonight; every other time he’s seen Eddie almost die it was before Buck knew why it felt the world was ending, and now he knows. He worries that Eddie will look him in the eyes and Buck won’t be able to hide it anymore. But he couldn’t—he took two steps into his loft and he knew he couldn’t stay. He saw Eddie for less than an hour on the way to the hospital, and it wasn’t enough to cement his okay-ness in Buck’s mind. He stayed with Eddie for weeks after he got shot, and whenever he was worried he could check on him. He needs that certainty now, if only for a few minutes. Just a few minutes of seeing for himself that Eddie is okay, and then he can go back to his silent, empty loft.

A car rolls to a stop at the curb, and when Buck lifts his head Eddie is already jumping out. He crosses the yard and stops a few feet away, surprise etched into his features. It’s so much easier to read him without the mustache.

“Buck?” he says, and this—this is exactly what he needed. Eddie on his feet, keys in hand, like nothing out of the ordinary happened today. “Why are you sitting out here?”

Buck shrugs. Eddie moves closer, a mirror to when Buck had seen him on the road earlier and Eddie ran to him. He’ll never forget that moment—when he’d spotted Eddie and realized it was him. Buck doesn’t have words for that kind of relief.

“Come on,” Eddie says, and then he puts his hand under Buck’s bicep and tugs him to his feet. It’s probably because of Buck’s ankle. Buck tries not to sway into him as Eddie climbs the steps to unlock the front door. “Did you forget your key?”

“Nah,” Buck replies. He pushes the door shut and locks it out of habit. “I just—it’s so quiet in here, man. It felt weird.”

Eddie cocks his head, and Buck worries that he’s slipped up, that Eddie knows—but Eddie just reaches out again and pulls Buck to the couch. Buck goes easily and sits in his usual spot as Eddie settles beside him, and this is good, this is right. Buck will soak this up for a few minutes and then he can go home.

Eddie hadn’t turned the lights on before he sat down, so his face is half in shadow as he shifts to face Buck. And then he—he reaches out, puts his hand on Buck’s shoulder. It’s firm pressure, identical to how he’d held Buck earlier—identical to how he always does, whenever he wants Buck’s full attention. Except right now he’s just touching him, his eyes almost undiscernible in the dark, but Buck knows he’s looking at him.

“I thought you were dead,” Eddie says quietly, and Buck almost jolts.

No, he wants to say. No, it’s the other way around. I thought you were dead.

He doesn’t. Eddie never talks about the lightning strike unless they’re talking about the aftermath, so if he wants to talk about this Buck is too selfish to stop him.

Eddie’s thumb moves in tiny circles. “I woke up and they said they didn’t know where you were. And they wouldn’t let me look. And I—I about lost my mind, Buck.” He lets out an aborted little laugh and shakes his head. His thumb hasn’t stopped. “I kept thinking about our last conversation. I don’t even remember what the last thing I said to you was.”

“You asked me to ask for the backboard,” Buck supplies, and Eddie’s brow crinkles. “You did not tell me to be careful.”

“It was implied,” Eddie says for the second time that night, except last time it was chastising and this time it’s almost—pleading.

“Sorry,” Buck says, and Eddie opens his mouth to probably reassure Buck, but that’s not what Buck is talking about. “I didn’t—uh. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”

“It’s not your fault, Buck—”

“It kind of is,” Buck admits, and Eddie pauses. “I—I woke up and I started—I was looking for you. I was down there a long time, and didn’t go to the search parties or try and go back up because I was trying to find you.”

“Buck,” Eddie sighs. Buck’s cheeks feel warm, and he’s glad that it’s dark, but he still admitted to it. Eddie will know—Eddie will figure it out, why Buck spent so much time limping around in the dark looking for him.

“I only went up in case they’d found you first,” he adds, because if he’s going to say it he might as well put it all out there. “I really didn’t expect to see you just—walking around.”

Eddie sighs again, and his hand leaves Buck’s shoulder. This is it, Buck thinks—he’s been too honest and now Eddie is going to pull away. It’s what Tommy did when Buck asked him to move in, but he wasn’t the first one—Buck could go back through his life, trace through the people that pulled away when he clung too hard.

Instead of getting up, Eddie’s hand drops to Buck’s lap, where Buck has his fingers clasped. Slowly, like he’s afraid Buck will spook, he peels Buck’s hands apart so he can slip his hand into Buck’s.

Buck doesn’t move. He doesn’t—they don’t do this. They’re BuckandEddie, sure, they clap shoulders and sit beside each other and hug every now and then, but they don’t hold hands.

“Your heart is pounding,” Eddie tells him, and Buck tries to smile but he’s sure he looks as shell-shocked as he feels.

“You’re freaking me out a little bit,” he says. Eddie smiles, and it’s—it’s a real Eddie smile, not one of the fake ones he’s been using for the past few months. It effectively steals Buck’s breath.

“I told Bobby it was the same as if he’d lost Athena,” Eddie says, serious now.

“What?” Buck says, because the combination of Eddie holding his hand and Eddie smiling made every thought in his head grind to a stop, and he has to fight to keep up.

“He was trying to get me to go to the hospital,” Eddie says quietly. “He was saying all this stuff about how I couldn’t really help, and you’d be fine, and I told him if it had been Athena he wouldn’t ever think about leaving.” Eddie swallows. His thumb brushes over one of Buck’s knuckles, and under normal circumstances Buck knows he would be thinking about that simple sensation for—for years, probably, except whatever they are doing right now is nowhere near normal circumstances. “And then I said the same thing about Hen and Karen. And neither of them said, hey Eddie, that’s a little different than what’s going on here—Hen just asked me if I wanted to talk about it.”

“Talk about it,” Buck repeats, and Eddie gives him a look but he also takes a deep breath and something makes Buck raise his free hand to Eddie’s wrist.

His pulse is hammering, and it’s—it’s a revelation, honestly. Because Buck’s heart is racing, too, and he thought Eddie died, too, and it terrified him because Eddie means everything to him. And if they’re the same on the first two counts, then—

“I’ve been keeping you at a distance,” Eddie says, skin warm under Buck’s fingertips. “Because I—I mean, look around.” He uses his free hand to gesture but Buck’s eyes don’t stray from Eddie’s face. “I ruined Shannon’s life, I messed up with Ana and Marisol, I sent my own kid running. It’s like I’m incapable of keeping anything good. And you’re—you’re Buck. I couldn’t bear it if I did anything—if I ever lost, or—or hurt you—”

He sighs again. Buck remembers how present he felt earlier during the call, and it feels like nothing compared to right now. Every single part of him is awake and attentive, keyed in to Eddie’s hand in his, Eddie’s face, Eddie’s mouth, Eddie’s words.

“So you keep me at a distance,” Buck says, and he can hear the wonder in his own voice. “Because you don’t want to lose me.”

“Pretty much,” Eddie says, and Buck needs a second to digest that—that Eddie really is as afraid of losing Buck as Buck is of losing him, that they are the same, that Eddie feels— “But I almost lost you today anyway, Buck. And I’m sick of—I’m sick of not being able to put my hands on you when I want to.”

Buck raises an eyebrow. Eddie flushes.

“Not like that,” he corrects, and turns redder. “I—I mean, not not like that, but it’s—I mean that I’ve seen you get hurt so often and sometimes I just need to feel for myself that you’re okay, and I’m tired of you being somewhere else or with someone else so I have to pretend that I’m not…sick out of my mind with worry, or something.”

“I get it,” Buck says, because they’re the same in this, too.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He takes a breath, then shifts the hand that’s in Eddie’s to lift their entwined fingers. “So put your hands on me.”

Eddie’s eyes go from Buck’s hands to his face and back, and Buck knows that look—knows what Eddie’s going to say before Eddie even opens his mouth.

“You’re not going to ruin me,” Buck tells him.

Eddie’s eyes snap to his. “You don’t know that. Look at my track record.”

“You haven’t ruined anyone,” Buck replies. “You made mistakes, and people got hurt. I’ve done the same thing, Eddie. I’ve hurt you before, and you’re still here.”

Eddie’s fingers twitch in his, and Buck lets his hand slip free so Eddie can reach forward slowly—so achingly slowly, and he presses his palm flat against Buck’s sternum.

“I just—” He chews his lip for a moment. “I don’t think I could bear it if I lost you.”

“You’re not going to lose me,” Buck says. Eddie’s forehead wrinkles again, and Buck amends, “You’re not going to lose me by having me, Eddie. It’s—we’re us. We talk about stuff. I can’t do anything about the job, but this—this isn’t going to break us.”

Eddie’s hand slides up, slowly, until his fingertips brush the bare skin of Buck’s throat. Buck swallows. “You want this,” he says, a question and a statement at once, like he’s not sure, like he’s wondering at it the same way Buck had earlier. “You really—”

“I wandered around for two hours because I couldn’t face the thought of idea you,” Buck says quietly. “You’re—Eddie, you’re my best friend. You and Chris are my people. This is my home. Of course I want you.”

“You never said,” Eddie whispers.

“I practically live here,” Buck teases, but his heart is still pounding so his tone isn’t as light as he expected. “You think this couch is comfortable? Come on, Eddie.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I thought that was just—how you love. You’re so generous, Buck.”

“And you were keeping me at a distance,” Buck says. Eddie’s eyes stay locked on his but he slides his hand up to the side of Buck’s neck, his thumb on Buck’s pulse. “If you’d said—I would have come anytime, if you’d said—”

“Anytime?” Eddie repeats. He cups Buck’s jaw and Buck can’t breathe.

“Why do you think Tommy broke up with me?”

Eddie’s eyes flicker, but he says, “Don’t say his name.”

“Okay,” Buck says, and Eddie pulls—just barely, the lightest pressure to Buck’s face, but it’s Eddie, so of course Buck goes. He leans forward as Eddie tilts his chin up.

Kissing Eddie is a revelation. It feels like being at the top of the ladder truck, adrenaline pumping through him. It feels like sleeping on this couch, like waking up to the sound of Chris getting ready for school, like hearing Maddie’s ringtone on his phone—like being home. It feels right. Eddie’s mouth is soft and it’s late so his jaw is stubbly, and he has Buck’s face cradled in both hands like Buck is precious. Buck can’t help himself and reaches out, gets his hands on Eddie’s sides, tugs him closer.

Eddie breaks the kiss to breathe but he doesn’t move back. “I want you,” he murmurs. “Buck, I’ve wanted you for so long.”

“You have me,” Buck says, and kisses him again. “You’ve always had me, Eddie—anything you want—”

Eddie sits back. His mouth is red and his cheeks are flushed, and Buck has never seen anything more perfect in his life. “Anything?”

“Yeah,” Buck says. “Obviously.”

“Get rid of the loft,” Eddie says immediately, and Buck feels his eyebrows go up.

“What?”

“You heard me.” Eddie kisses him again, one hand on the back of his neck. “I hate it when you’re not here. I hate when you have to go up those stairs when you’re hurt. I hate your stupid couch.”

“It’s not—”

“It’s stupid,” Eddie says, and kisses him, and by the time he pulls back Buck has lost higher brain function again.

“Okay, it’s stupid,” he says, and Eddie smiles—another real, perfect, Eddie smile. Buck is a little worried that he’s dead and has gone to heaven. “Are you—you’re asking me to move in.”

“Yeah.”

Buck flexes his hands on Eddie’s sides, because that’s a thing he can do now. “Are you sure?”

“Evan,” Eddie says. Buck’s heart does a flip in his chest. “I want you here all the time. I want to put my hands on you all the time. You already said this is your home. You said you’d do anything I wanted.”

Well, yeah, he did say that, and he meant it. And Buck’s mind is dragging up Tommy, because that was recent, but also everything else—Abby, Ali, Taylor; his parents not stopping Buck from leaving; Maddie leaving him and then not leaving with him.

But this is Eddie. This is Eddie, and this is Buck’s home, and if Eddie can trust him enough to believe that he’s not going to ruin Buck—Buck can trust him on this. Because they’re the same, in this. They have each other’s backs.

“Okay,” he says, and presses a kiss to Eddie’s cheek, his jaw. “Okay, I’ll move in. But I’m never leaving, Eddie. I hope you know that.”

He feels Eddie’s smile under his mouth. “Good,” Eddie murmurs. “I never want you to go, Buck.”

---

Eddie has no idea why Buck has this many pairs of socks. He digs through what used to be his sock drawer and is now their sock drawer, and flings a pair over his shoulder.

“What did my socks ever do to you?” Buck asks behind him, and Eddie doesn’t bother turning but frowns at the mess of the drawer.

“I can’t find any of my socks, Buck.”

“You can wear mine.”

“Yours are too big,” Eddie mutters, and finally finds a pair stuck in the back corner of the drawer. When he turns, Buck is leaning in the doorway, his hands in his pockets and his brow drawn with concern. Eddie pauses, sighs, and retrieves the socks he flung. “Sorry.”

Buck shakes his head. “They’re just socks. It’s gonna be fine, Eddie.”

“I know.”

“He asked us to come get him,” Buck says gently, because somehow he can always read what Eddie is thinking. “He’s excited to be back.”

“I know,” Eddie says again, and runs a hand through his hair. “I just—I’m just nervous, I guess.”

“Yeah.” Buck fidgets, and Eddie watches him for a moment before Buck reaches into his pocket and pulls out what looks like a pair of tickets. “I was wondering if he’d like—if he’d want—”

“What?” Eddie asks when Buck cuts himself off. He moves closer, and Buck tilts the tickets at him. “Of course he’d want to go to the zoo, Buck. He loves the zoo.”

“Well,” Buck says. “He’s a teenager now.”

“You’re thirty-two and you love the zoo.”

Buck rolls his eyes and tucks his tickets away to reach for Eddie, tug him closer. “So you think the way that I’m obsessively stressing out about Chris coming home is irrational?”

Eddie huffs. Buck smiles. Eddie feels better immediately, because Buck’s smile has that power. “Fine. But when we get back we need to talk about how many pairs of socks you own.”

“Sure,” Buck agrees, and he tilts his head to press a kiss to Eddie’s mouth. Every time it happens a thrill runs through Eddie’s body, like he’s still shocked he can have this. Like he can’t believe it’s this simple. “I’m going to put the bags in the Jeep while you lock up?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Thanks. Love you.”

“Love you too,” Buck says over his shoulder as he heads for the front door. Eddie is in the kitchen when he realizes what he said—what Buck said back. And he waits—waits for the panic, for the world to spin out, but it doesn’t. Loving Buck is the easiest thing Eddie has ever done—easier than wanting him. Easier even than punishing himself. And it feels better than both.

Eddie takes a deep breath and makes sure the back door is locked. The house is quiet, but Buck is waiting outside, and soon Chris will be home, and together they will chase away the silence and fill every empty corner here. It took Eddie a long time to let himself be happy like this, but he has, and he’s never going to let go.