Chapter Text
“Marry me.”
“What?”
“Buck,” Eddie says, catching him by the arm and ducking to meet his eye, “marry me.”
“That’s what I fucking thought you said,” replies Buck.
“Buck,” Eddie says again, “I’m serious.”
“I know you’re serious,” says Buck.
“Well, you haven’t answered the question,” says Eddie.
“You haven’t actually asked me a question,” Buck points out. “Or told me what you’re thinking. About anything.”
There’s a bite to Buck’s voice that Eddie knows he deserves; the fight they had the other day is still looming over them, mostly unresolved, and from Buck’s perspective this has come out of nowhere. Not something Eddie’s been mulling over in the back of his head for months, since before he left for Texas, crystallizing in the middle of his living room after a day where the floor feels like it dropped out from under him just as surely as it did, literally, out from under Buck.
“I need,” Eddie says, then stops, shaking his head. “I – Buck.”
“Eddie,” Buck says.
Eddie looks away. He swallows, trying to pull himself together and trying to keep the wrong words from escaping his mouth. “I’ve been thinking. A lot. Over the last few months. About how – about a lot of things, actually. And most of them boil down to this.”
“Marrying me,” Buck says. Eddie still isn’t looking at him, but he can hear the familiar skepticism in his voice, knows exactly the way he’s tilting his head, raising his eyebrows.
“Yeah,” says Eddie. “I mean, don’t you think – wouldn’t it be easier? Knowing that we’d always, always be the first call if anything happened? Knowing that – I mean, God, I spent the last few months in El Paso remembering exactly why I put you in my will as Chris’s guardian, you know? And after all that, it’d be – you know, reassuring. To be married to you, and know that if the worst – that they wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if they fought you for him, you know?”
Buck takes in a sharp breath, but Eddie doesn’t stop.
“And the longer I was away the more it – I mean, we’ve been everything short of married for a while,” Eddie says. He’s still not looking at Buck. “It wouldn’t have to be – I mean, you could still – like, date. Or whatever. I just – it would be reassuring. To know that if it all went to shit we’d have each other.”
“We already have each other,” Buck says, his voice rough.
“Buck,” Eddie says. He finally turns back toward him, and finds Buck standing exactly how he’d imagined: arms crossed, head tilted, those blue eyes boring straight through him.
He doesn’t know how to say you’re already everything to me without it coming out painfully romantic. And that’s not what this is about – it’s really not what this is about.
“We’ve already lost Bobby,” Eddie continues softly. “Can you blame me for wanting to hold onto you and Chris as tight as I can right now?”
Buck sighs. His eyes search Eddie for a long moment, and Eddie really, truly doesn’t know what he finds, but what he says is, “No, I can’t.”
“So will you marry me?” Eddie asks, and it’s gentler this time. More of a question than a demand, uncertain and tentative.
Buck shifts. He’s still watching Eddie, a soft frown pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Yes,” he says finally.
And that’s… really the last that they talk about it in so many words. Oh – they do it. They get married. But it’s quiet and without much fanfare, just the two of them and Christopher at a government building, exchanging painfully earnest vows in soft voices and sliding hastily-purchased silicone rings over each other’s fingers that they both know they won’t be wearing on the regular.
But they don’t talk about it, after.
They don’t tell anyone that they’ve done it, beyond updating some of their information with HR alongside Eddie’s return to work paperwork. It isn’t a secret, exactly, in that they aren’t going out of their way to hide it, but neither of them is going out of their way to announce it, either.
Nothing has changed between them.
They are living together, not because of the marriage but because of Eddie and Chris moving home from Texas. Because, four months ago, Buck had lifted one of the heaviest weights off of Eddie’s shoulders without even a thought, and now that the Diazes are back it leaves the three of them in a house that used to accommodate all of them comfortably, happily, but now feels almost suffocatingly small. It’s not because Christopher has grown; it’s Eddie and Buck, swallowed up by all the things they still haven’t quite resolved.
But they’re married, now.
So even as the tension between him and Buck ratchets tighter, Eddie has that to hold onto. Even after a fight that left Eddie feeling unstable and exhausted and brokenhearted, even after chasing Buck into a collapsing building, even after Eddie’s return to work is punctuated by an awkward shift from Buck’s partner to Hen’s, he can trust that he can’t lose Buck. He can’t lose Buck.
(He could, he knows, lose Buck in other ways. But if he agreed to marry Eddie days after the – still not resolved in a way that feels closed or satisfying – worst fight of their life, Eddie knows he can’t drive Buck away.)
Living with Buck is intuitive for Eddie in a lot of ways, despite the tension. They sleep on opposite sides of the bed, though they tend to roll into each other in the night. Buck runs cold but hates to sleep with anything on his arms, and Eddie runs hot especially while he’s asleep, so it’s natural that they’d gravitate toward each other.
And if, sometimes, Eddie wakes up to Buck’s shoulders silently shaking and his face buried in the curve of Eddie’s neck, that’s between him and Buck.
Work is –
Fine.
It’s fine.
They’ve shaken off Gerrard as interim captain, with Chim stepping up to the plate in his place. Hen didn’t want it, which surprised Eddie a bit but at the same time not at all. Chimney barely seems to want it.
Chim’s a decent captain. He’s grown a lot since the last time he took up the job, more certain of himself. More than that, though, Eddie can tell that he knows he needs to have it together because nobody else is holding it together. Chimney feels guilty over what happened, over Bobby dying in his place, and he’s throwing himself into the job to make up for it.
Hen ends up temporary interim captain anyway for most of June, with Chim out on paternity leave.
Buck (and Eddie’s) nephew is named Robert Nash Han. It settles weirdly in Eddie’s chest when Maddie announces it, and Chim’s got this look in his eye like he’s almost regretting it.
“And, like, I get it, I do,” Buck says, more to the pan of bacon he’s minding than to Eddie, “but also, they had to know none of us were going to be able to call him –“
Bobby. None of them can call him Bobby.
“Yeah, probably,” Eddie agrees. “I think even Robby is gonna be dicey.”
“And then what are we supposed to call him?” says Buck. There’s a thread of hysteria in his voice, reedy and thin. “Fucking Robert? Like he’s thirty-five? He’s a goddamn newborn!”
“Last I talked to Chim, they were calling him Nash,” Eddie offers. “Which is – cute, I guess?”
“I think it’s the best we’re gonna do,” Buck says.
The bacon is finished. Buck is still facing the wall, his shoulders tight.
“Hey,” Eddie says, quieter. “Are you –“
“Chris!” Buck calls before Eddie can finish the thought. “Breakfast!”
“Right,” says Eddie.
Because they haven’t talked about it. None of it. Not Bobby’s death and not how either of them felt about it, beyond that one sharp-edged argument that left them both bleeding in their goddamn kitchen.
(They know how to hurt each other better than anyone else in the world, is the problem. They know each other to the bone, and that means they know all the best places to stick the knife.)
Some of that is on Eddie, obviously. He doesn’t really know how to start that conversation again without falling back into the fight, without digging his heels in and clawing at Buck to make up for the fact that he feels like he’s failed everyone who matters to him. Bringing Chris home to remind Buck that he still has a family who loves him isn’t a trick that he can pull off twice, and he doesn’t know how else he'd make up for the things he’s afraid he would say.
But Buck’s not talking either.
That’s not unusual, actually. Buck is the kind of person who talks all the time while saying jack shit, and Eddie is usually the one prying it out of him. But it feels like a minefield between them right now, and the closest Eddie’s gotten to touching it without causing an explosion was when he asked Buck to marry him. Which they also aren’t talking about.
“Are we still going to Aunt Maddie’s today?” Chris says once he’s settled with breakfast in front of him. “To see – uh –“
“Nash,” Eddie fills in.
“Nash,” echoes Chris.
“We are,” says Buck. “Or, I mean, I definitely am. If you don’t want –“
“Buck,” Chris interrupts, rolling his eyes, “of course I want to go. Literally everybody else has already met him. And anyway, I want to see Baby Jee. Gotta make sure she knows she’s still my favorite cousin.”
“I don’t know if you can still call her Baby Jee when she’s got an actual baby brother in the house,” Eddie says.
“We have an understanding,” says Chris. Eddie decides not to ask what that means.
A few years ago, Chris told Eddie that the 118’s kids were kind of like cousins – friends, definitely, but brought together by necessity rather than choice. Their parents are family, so they’re all family. Chris has a lot of cousins-on-technicality, Pepa’s friends’ grandkids and the like, so Eddie trusts his assessment.
Except for Baby Jee, Chris had clarified, because she’s Aunt Maddie’s kid, so she’s my cousin for real.
Chris had been ten or so at the time, long, long before Eddie had blurted out a proposal to Buck, before Buck had said yes even though there’s so much unresolved between them. Buck has been parent-adjacent for Christopher for longer than anyone is willing to lay out in quite that many words. Chris’s consistent use of Aunt Maddie since he was eight or nine is the closest any of them ever got before this May.
That’s the only other discussion they’ve had about the marriage since it happened – the obvious move, the one implied in Eddie’s rambling proposal, to have Buck formally adopt Christopher. It’s a work in progress, but should be straightforward.
Anyway, all of this is to say that while Eddie and Buck’s marriage isn’t a secret in so many words, it’s also not likely to be revealed by accident today. Maddie has been Aunt Maddie longer than Buck has, in the most technical of senses, been Chris’s father.
No one has noticed that Eddie and Buck got married.
Part of that is to do with the wedding rings neither of them wear – Eddie’s is tucked against his heart alongside his St. Christopher medal, even though it’s silicone and he could wear it, if he wanted to. He just doesn’t want to invite the questions that would bring. He’s pretty sure Buck’s is on him somewhere, too, but he doesn’t know for certain. Doesn’t know where he’s keeping it.
But the other part, maybe the bigger part, is that Eddie and Buck are exactly the same as they ever have been. In fact, though it pains Eddie to think about it too long, they’re actually a little more distant than usual.
Still, nobody blinks at the Diaz-Buckleys showing up to the Hans’ as a unit. They’ve been showing up to places as a family for so long it would be weirder to point it out than to let it be.
Maddie gives Buck a look when they get there, one of those older sister kind that communicate more than you’d like them to, and he shrugs her off with a tension around his eyes that Eddie doesn’t know how to read. He doesn’t know how to handle not knowing how to read Buck. He doesn’t know how to find his way back to Buck, either.
Nash is a good distraction. He’s small and soft and fragile in the way newborns always are, but he’s awake enough to stare up at Chris with wide eyes fixed on the light catching in his glasses. Eddie takes a few dozen photos, Buck takes a few dozen more, and then Eddie takes the baby so Jee can pull Chris to the floor to play trucks while the rest of them chat.
It's great. It’s easy, with the natural conversation topic of the new baby and how Jee is faring so far with a sibling in the house.
(That means that when Maddie catches Eddie by the arm on their way out the door and says, “What is up with the two of you lately?” he’s caught completely off guard.
That means that his answering, “I think I broke something by leaving. I had to go, but we’ve been home for weeks and I still feel like I can’t get through to him,” is more honest than he means for it to be.
Maddie studies him. She’s got a furrow between her brows that Eddie knows how to read on Buck, but is a mystery on his sister. She pats his shoulder. “You love each other. You’ll get there.”
Eddie just nods, feeling wrongfooted and oddly exposed.)
And so their summer goes. Work is odd and unbalanced as they settle into new patterns around the absence of Bobby, home is odd and unbalanced with Eddie and Buck so out of sync. But they show up to functions as a family, and nobody seems to have quite noticed the ways they’re not quite themselves.
Eddie, inside of the relationship and watching Buck pull further and further away, can’t stop noticing.
And then in August:
“I think I want to find a place of my own.”
“You know that you don’t have to do that,” Eddie says immediately.
“I know,” Buck says. The tension thrumming through him suggests that maybe he doesn’t, actually, but lately it’s been harder and harder to keep bickering from biting, and Eddie really doesn’t want to start a fight. “But I think it could be good for me. For us. To have some – space. You know?”
“If that’s what you want,” says Eddie. “But you know that we want you here, right? I wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t want you here.”
Buck’s face does something complicated, and he looks away from Eddie. “I know. I know. I just – it doesn’t have to be forever, necessarily. Just – uh. I think it could be good.”
“If you’re sure,” Eddie repeats.
“I’m sure.”
Buck doesn’t let Eddie help him house hunt, either. He keeps the whole thing at arm’s length from him, repeating over and over that he wants to give Eddie space. Wants to have space for himself.
Eddie doesn’t know how to tell him that he doesn’t want space. That he married Buck because his strongest instinct is to hold onto him as tightly as possible and never let go, and he already feels like Buck is slipping away from him. And even if he knew how, he knows deep down that he probably wouldn’t say any of it – if this is what Buck wants, and he keeps insisting that this is what he wants, then Eddie will let him go.
They’re married, anyway. Even if they don’t live in the same house, Eddie knows he isn’t losing Buck forever. Just – for now. Until he remembers that he doesn’t have to be alone, isn’t a burden on the people who care about him. It feels terrifying to give Buck the space he’s begging for, but he has to trust him.
The only saving grace for Eddie right now is that work is finally starting to settle. Chimney is back from paternity leave, so Eddie and Hen have started to fall into a rhythm with each other. They’ve worked together before here and there, Eddie jumping in as a short-term cover for Chimney a few times in the past, so most of the kinks of a new partnership are behind them.
Hen has noticed the tension between Eddie and Buck, because she sees everything, but she hasn’t commented on it yet. Eddie is pretty sure she hasn’t figured out yet how deep it runs, either. He catches her glancing between them sometimes, though, especially when conversations that used to be banter have become pointed bickering. When conversations that used to be playful have become silence.
“If you stare at him any harder, he’s going to catch fire,” she says one afternoon, breaking her committed streak of not commenting.
Eddie shakes his head. “I’m not staring at anyone.”
“Right,” Hen says, looking at him through the top edge of her lenses. “Look, I promised Karen that I wouldn’t get involved in whatever mess is happening between you and Buck without her –“
“Without her?” Eddie cuts in.
“- but I’ve never known a problem between you and Buck that you couldn’t just talk out,” Hen continues as if Eddie hadn’t spoken.
“Do you think that I haven’t tried to talk to him?” says Eddie.
“I don’t know what you get up to at home,” says Hen, “but you haven’t tried here.”
“Yeah, well,” Eddie says. He can’t talk to Buck seriously at work, these days, because their marriage may not be secret but it’s also not common knowledge, and there’s no way to have any of the conversations Eddie wants to have without the word husband spilling out of his mouth. He sighs. “He’s moving out.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” says Hen, tilting her head curiously. “I mean, I’ve been to your house, Eddie, it’s got to be a little tight with the three of you.”
It’s almost perfect, actually, since Eddie and Buck and Christopher have all been moving around each other in that house for most of a decade, but the elephant in the room is making it a little bit difficult to breathe.
“Yeah,” Eddie says instead of any of that. He knows it comes out flat and unconvincing, based on the look that Hen shoots at him in response, but he’s not going to do any better. He looks over at Buck again. “It’s great.”