Work Text:
Something is wrong.
It follows Eddie home that night, when Buck’s door has shut behind him and sealed him back up inside the house. Chris asks him, halfway between Buck’s street and their own, if he noticed that Buck seemed off.
He doesn’t know what to say. Buck has been off for weeks. There will be moments when he seems completely himself— lit up, joyful, smiling. And then they’ll be chased by shadows, a darkness Eddie has never seen in him before. Sometimes, there will be a flash of something on his features: a creased expression; pain; there and then gone again like nothing ever happened, except that Eddie had seen it and he knows that it was there.
He doesn’t lie to his kid, especially not anymore. But when Eddie tells Chris that he thinks Buck is okay, it’s not really Christopher that he’s lying to. This time, Eddie is lying to himself.
They go home. Eddie waits for Christopher’s bedroom door to be shut and then he settles on the couch in the dim warm lamplight of his familiar living room. His skin crawls. He gets up and sits back down again, unable to settle, and eventually he draws his feet up onto the couch in a position more vulnerable than he might usually allow himself. He looks over across the couch cushions, at the soft worn velvet blue, and remembers.
Buck, showing up here over and over. Buck, sprawled out on this couch in this room. Buck, his limbs long, his smile easy. Buck, so tired that he’d been here three minutes before he was out cold. Buck, stretching in the morning, wincing at the stiffness of a night spent on a couch but then beaming so brightly and easily that it was plain to see he’d already forgotten about it in the space of a second.
Buck, who used to wear his heart on his sleeve. Buck, who hasn’t been over to Eddie’s house in weeks. Who had come back from New Mexico, from the desert, different.
At first, Eddie had hoped that it would just take some time. That once the ribs and the bruises were healed, once Buck got back to work and things settled back to normal, he’d be okay. Then, he’d hoped that some therapy would do it. Then, he’d started to wonder if this wasn’t worse and deeper than he’d thought.
Now, he just feels lost.
He looks at the empty seat on the couch and pictures Buck across the kitchen from him. He pictures the set of his shoulders; the tension there. He pictures Buck’s carefully crafted, warm little kitchen and the little plant on the ledge of the sink with its leaves shriveled and its earth wet.
Something is wrong, because Eddie’s the one with a black thumb and Buck loves that little plant and it had a name at some point, and Eddie wishes he’d been paying more attention when Buck told it to him. He wishes he’d paid more attention to a lot of things, actually.
He sighs, his breath audible and soft in the empty living room. His phone is facedown on the coffee table, so he reaches for it and picks it up. It unlocks and he swipes through it, opening his text thread with Buck. The last thing on the screen, staring back at him in pale bluelight, is from earlier today.
Still have room for me and Chris for dinner tonight? Six thirty?
Eddie had sent this text with anxious, bated breath. A hallmark of how much their relationship has changed recently, how much Buck has changed. Eddie never used to worry whether Buck would answer him or not.
But he had. Almost immediately, the timestamps on the messages showing the very same minute.
yes! i’ll be here and i’m making dessert!! :)
Enthusiastic, warm, complete with exclamation marks. Eddie couldn’t help feeling taken by it, but how Buck it had been. And he’d been okay at dinner too, mostly. Off and on laughing with Chris, seeming like himself for stalled and broken measures of moments before his posture would shift or he would wince or look distant, then fix a smile back on his face and wear it until it looked real again.
By the time he and Chris had left, Eddie was on edge about the whole thing. He knows Buck inside and out, and he knows— deep down— that this isn’t right. If he hadn’t been sure, the incident the other night when he’d ignored them at his door would have been the final nail in the coffin.
Eddie had been reluctant to try bringing Chris. In hindsight, he thinks it’s because he’d been afraid that it would go exactly the way it had: Buck at the window, hidden, and Eddie faced with the knowledge that whatever this is, it’s worse than it’s been before. Now that he knows, now that it’s laid out in front of him, he has to face it.
He considers typing a text, then puts his phone down and stares at the empty seat on the other side of the couch. It translates to an emptiness deep down in his chest. The truth is, Eddie had left New Mexico changed, too.
He’d knelt on the dry desert ground, the scent of sunburnt grass around them, and he’d cradled Buck’s face in his hand and felt the thrum of his pulse, steady and bright against Eddie’s fingertips. He isn’t sure that anyone could have come away from that unchanged. He knows that he hadn’t.
The truth is, he’s in love with Buck. He’s starting to think he should have said something, then and there. He’s starting to think that if he had, they wouldn’t be here now. At the time, he’d thought it wouldn’t do anybody any good. That he should wait until Buck was better.
He just hadn’t thought that maybe Buck would get worse.
He picks up his phone again, reopening the text thread, and this time he types a message before he can hold himself back from it.
All good? You seemed off tonight.
He puts his thumb up to his mouth, tearing absently at his cuticle with his teeth. A bad habit he’s been trying to kick forever, brought to life by gnawing worry somewhere in his gut, somewhere deep and instinctual.
The answer never comes.
Eddie keeps watching, but the screen remains the way it is: the message delivered, but unread. What a metaphor.
Eventually, he falls asleep on the couch, his head in Buck’s spot.
In the morning, Eddie has little to show for it save sore limbs and muscles. He checks his phone the second his eyes are open, but it’s still just as it was the night before. With that, a new sense of determination washes over him.
With Christopher off to school, Eddie sits in the parking lot and checks his phone again. It’s still just as unchanged, like he’d thought it would be. From there, he goes a little out of his way to swing by the coffee shop he knows Buck favors, even though Eddie usually complains because their prices are outrageous. It had not gone unnoticed by him the night before that Buck was mostly picking at his food, so at the moment he’s desperate enough not to mind. He hands over his card in the drive-thru lane without thinking twice about it, and a moment later carefully loads up his center console with coffee and breakfast.
He savors the quiet, trying to settle himself as the sun flickers into the cab, in and out around passing buildings and the reflecting light off of other cars. Soon, he’s pulling up alongside the curb outside Buck’s house and putting his truck into park neatly behind Buck’s. A moment after that, he’s in front of the door again— this time, by himself.
Without Christopher to consider, Eddie is more willing to go to great lengths. He raps on the sunwarmed door and waits, but he doesn’t really expect it to open and isn’t surprised when it doesn’t.
“Buck,” he calls, his eyes on the window and its unmoving shade. “It’s Eddie.”
He waits, quiet, the scent of bagels and coffee lingering around him from the bag he’s carrying. The sun shines down on him, but the house remains still and quiet.
He knocks again. Nothing.
“Buck,” he says again, raising his voice. He’s aware of how loud he’s being in what is a peaceful, quiet neighborhood right around eight in the morning, but finds that he doesn’t care very much. “If you don’t answer the door, I’m coming in.”
He’d refrained the first time. The second time, he’d been prepared to use his spare key if he had to but then Buck had come to the door. Now, he’s alone. All bets are off. Eddie had spent a long time being the kind of person who never pushed. Last year, it had been Buck who told him to Dad up, to be the person that Christopher needed. Now, Eddie is prepared to take that same advice and apply it to Buck, too.
Regardless of the many-hearted beast that lives in Eddie’s chest, that has been struggling against his bones since that day in the desert— Buck is his family. Their family, his and Christopher’s and the 118’s. That part will never change, and it had been not so long ago that they’d had this conversation about Hen.
Keep showing up. Eddie had meant it then, and he means it maybe even more now, when it comes to Buck, who is his best friend in the world before he’s anything else.
So he’s here. So he slips his key into the door and turns it with a scrape. So he steps inside out of the sun and lets his eyes adjust to the darkened, quiet house.
This is the first sign that something is wrong. Buck loves light. It had been his favorite thing about the loft, and he’d gone on and on about it when he was staying with Eddie last summer— how when he did find a place, it would have to be one with good light, like Eddie’s house gets. He’d loved that about this house, raved about it to Eddie more than once, insisted on showing him how the angle of the property allowed for light at various hours of the day.
Having all the shades drawn is so unlike him that it makes Eddie anxious, a panicky gnawing feeling.
“Buck?” he calls, toeing out of his shoes and wandering deeper into the house. The living room, kitchen and dining room are all empty, so Eddie drops his bag of breakfast on the dining table and steps through the hallway toward Buck’s bedroom. “Hey, Buck?” he calls again, his voice softer now that he’s drawing closer.
There’s a muffled sound, like a groan, from Buck’s dark bedroom. Eddie’s heart leaps unpleasantly into his throat as he eases the door open and blinks against the lack of light, his eyes finding Buck curled up in the center of his bed beneath the blankets.
The first thing Eddie notices is how improbably small he looks. The second is that his hands, pressed over his eyes, are shaking.
Something like fear sparks up in Eddie as he moves closer, an instinct, coming to the side of Buck’s bed like a ghost, his footsteps muffled.
“Buck,” he says softly.
“Don’t,” Buck rasps. “Eddie. Please just—”
Eddie crouches down, bringing him level with Buck’s half-obscured face. He’s pale— obvious even in the thin, faint light coming through around the drawn shades— and the shaking in his fingers is, upon closer inspection, really a shaking all over.
Eddie can recognize the signs of agony on Buck as well as anything else. All these years of knowing each other, of intimately seeing one another at all hours, for days on end. He’s a fount of knowledge about Evan Buckley, and right now he sort of wishes that he weren’t.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, glancing around, searching for any signs.
“Don’t,” Buck groans. “I’m fine. Please just go.”
There’s a flicker of anger, licking like flames against Eddie’s chest wall. It dies, muffled by better things: affection, worry, elusive love. “Not a chance,” he says, gentle but flat. No room for argument, not that it ever stops Buck from trying.
On the nightstand, Eddie catches sight of a small orange bottle. Painkillers, old ones. Ones that Buck had always refused to take. His stomach twists as he realizes that the bottle is almost empty. Before he can think, he’s snatching it off of the surface, the remaining pills rattling against the plastic with a telltale sound.
Buck opens his eyes. Bright blue, red from tears, but focused. Eddie catalogues this like a medical chart, searching for signs before he even consciously processes what he’s looking for. In this way, he sees the fear on Buck’s face when it flashes over his features.
“What is this?” Eddie asks, his voice steady by his own active will. It wants to shake, but he doesn’t let it.
Buck shakes his head; visibly, this causes him pain, and he closes his eyes again.
“You can see what it is,” he says, sounding miserable. “I just—”
Eddie’s thoughts swarm, a deep and intense buzzing like a crowd of locusts, like bees on a bridge, like something big and out of control.
“Buck,” he says. “Tell me how many of these you took.”
Buck, with some effort, opens his eyes again. There’s a look— something like betrayal, a sad look— on his face, and it hurts Eddie to know that he’s the one who put it there.
“It’s not like that,” Buck says, his voice small.
“What is it like, then?” Eddie presses. He’s pressing too much now, maybe, but fear will do that to a person. It’s raw, like stripped spring wood, tender and bending and threatening to break always.
Buck lets out a pained little noise, then covers his eyes again with his trembling fingers.
“I don’t want to tell you,” he admits, his voice breaking.
Eddie comes back into himself.
“Buck,” he says, pleading. “Evan.”
This moves him. His eyes open again, wider this time and teary, swimming. Eddie’s whole chest locks up at the sight, but the worry is a stronger thing like teams of horses, a stampede over his lungs and his nerves holding him in place.
“I only take the regular dose,” Buck whispers. “I swear. I promise, Eddie. I’m not getting high. It just hurts.”
Eddie has learned— in Afghanistan and here on the streets of Los Angeles— how to differentiate real pain from that which is imaginary from that which is real but not physical. When these words stumble out of Buck’s mouth, he means them literally. Eddie is sure of that.
“What hurts?” he asks, pressing and pressing. He’s a paramedic. He can fix this. Whatever it is, he can fix it. He can help. His eyes roam over Buck in the dark and he reaches for the lamp but Buck lets out a protesting sound that draws his eyes back.
“Don’t,” Buck says. “My head. Please don’t.”
He’s so fragile like this, birdlike in a way that scares Eddie, turns him pliant and forgiving in spite of himself.
“Okay,” he relents. “Your head? That’s what’s hurting? Did you—”
“Since I got back,” Buck interrupts, like he can’t stand to say it but can’t stand to hear Eddie’s frantic questions even more. “All the time, but it’s—”
He chokes on his words. Eddie feels faintly sick.
“It’s worse today. I overdid it with you guys last night. The pills aren’t working. I don’t—”
His words start to pick up and Eddie’s pulse races after them, as if they’re tethered, as if at whatever speed Buck moves Eddie’s heart does also. Eddie could not say how long it’s been that way, but maybe forever. Maybe since Eddie entered a world already inhabited by Buck for three hundred and sixty-five days. He’s never believed in this kind of thing, but maybe he could a little bit, for Buck.
“Okay,” Eddie says, forcing calm, thinking back over the course of the last few weeks. “You’ve been having headaches. What else?”
Buck swallows. He hesitates, but ultimately gives in. He must see now that he’s cornered, or maybe he’s just in enough pain that it overcomes his self-control, his desire to hide himself away.
“Nauseous,” he whispers. “When it gets bad. I can’t eat much. Uh— vision changes. I see these bright dots before the pain gets worse. I get dizzy. The light hurts. Nothing really helps. The meds put me to sleep.”
He sniffles, a soft sound that tugs at Eddie.
Then he looks up, his eyes bright with tears. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, like now that he’s started talking he can’t stop. “I know I should go and see someone but please don’t make me, Eds, I can’t— I can’t lose my job, too. They’ll find something and they’ll tell me I can’t work and I can’t—”
Eddie shakes his head.
Before he can think, before he can stop himself, he’s reaching out and putting his hand on Buck’s cheek.
“Shh,” he soothes. “Buck, shh. You’re okay.”
Now that the floodgates have opened, it seems that Buck can’t hold back. He shakes his head, a movement that visibly hurts, and then screws his eyes shut as a pained sound tumbles over his teeth out of his mouth.
“Eddie,” he sobs.
“Okay, okay,” Eddie whispers. “It’s okay, Buck.”
“I’m sorry,” Buck whimpers, forcing his wet eyes open again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
But Eddie does.
His first migraine had been when he was fifteen. A blinding pain so awful and terrifying that his mother had been willing to take him to the emergency room, where he threw up all of his dinner in the waiting room bathroom, and then received what they called a migraine cocktail alongside his diagnosis. The bag of fluids that ran through his body from an IV in his hand had brought Eddie from a state of bonedeep fear and certainty that he was dying, right back to normal in the space of twenty minutes. Like a miracle.
But the migraines had persisted. Chronic. Something he still manages today, though infrequently enough and easy to catch early. Over nearly twenty years, Eddie has landed on an emergency medication that works and learned to take them at the first sign. He hasn’t had a full-blown migraine attack in a long time now.
But he remembers. How no amount of conceptualizing it could prepare you for what it actually feels like if you’ve never had one; how terrifying that kind of pain is when it sweeps over you for the first time; how sure you are that this is something real and bad. The panic that comes with it.
It suddenly all makes sense— migraines triggered by the shock to Buck’s neck, the marks of which Eddie had seen that night in the desert; the way Buck has barely been eating; his visible pain and the darkness everywhere he went. All of this, combined with the pills he’s been secretly taking and the persistent panic he must have been feeling at the thought of something really being wrong.
Eddie is at once torn to shreds and deeply relieved. Later, when Buck is feeling better, he’ll insist that they make him a doctor’s appointment just in case. But he has enough experience to be pretty sure about what this is.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Buck repeats, his voice tiny and scared. “Someting is— something is wrong.”
“No,” Eddie soothes, gently brushing a tear off of his cheek. “You’re alright. This is a migraine, Buck.”
“What?” Buck asks, opening his eyes again and looking in disbelief at Eddie. “No. That’s not— that can’t— it feels—”
“I know,” Eddie soothes. “Here. Stay right here for me okay?”
Buck makes an unintelligible sound, and Eddie makes quick work of stepping into the bathroom, running one of Buck’s washcloths beneath the cold stream of the faucet, and wringing it out. Returning to Buck, he settles carefully in the empty space next to him on the bed and folds the cloth into thirds.
“Head back,” he says softly, and then lays the cooled fabric over his forehead, gently pushing his curls back to do so.
Buck exhales, the breath shaky.
“This can’t be—” he starts again, his voice thick. “It has to be something else.”
“I know it feels like that, bud,” Eddie whispers. “I know. But you trust me, right?”
Buck turns his head enough to get Eddie in the grasp of his eyeline. There’s pain in his blue eyes now, not only physical but something else, something even worse. “I do,” he says, and it comes out like a plea.
“I’ve had them since I was a kid,” Eddie offers. “I know what I’m talking about, and I know it feels like you’re dying but you’re not, Buck. You’re okay.”
At this, there’s a pause. And then Buck bursts into tears— broad, heaving sobs that shake him, a sound that carves out a painful space in Eddie’s chest.
“Oh, bud,” Eddie coos, reaching for him without thinking, without holding back. A moment later, Buck’s head is buried against his shoulder, the washcloth soaking a shock of cold into Eddie’s shirt as it gets tangled between them. Eddie picks it up, gently moving it to the back of Buck’s neck, and gives in to the urge to hold him close that has been following Eddie like a shadow since New Mexico.
“I’m sorry,” Buck sobs.
“Shh,” Eddie soothes. “What for, honey?”
“I thought—” Buck chokes out. “I hid it from you. I didn’t— Christopher—”
“Oh,” Eddie whispers. Unable to help himself, he turns his head and kisses Buck’s soft curls. “It’s okay. You were scared.”
“No,” Buck gasps, his breath shuddering with pain and panic. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Okay, alright,” Eddie whispers. “Breathe. It’s okay. You’re gonna make your head hurt crying like that, just breathe for me.”
Buck sniffles, but quiets; a pained sound escapes through his clenched teeth and Eddie rubs fingers tenderly over the hinge of Buck’s tight jaw until it loosens.
The lines between them, once mostly clear, have turned to watercolor. Eddie can’t say he minds; the weight of Buck’s body against him feels like a balm after weeks of worry and distance. He’ll take it, even if the words that go alongside it will have to wait now.
“There you go,” Eddie whispers.
“I’m sorry,” Buck whispers, his voice breaking. “I thought—”
“I know, baby,” Eddie soothes. “It’s okay. Nobody is mad at you, Buck. It’s okay.”
“But Chris,” Buck sniffles. “I should have come to the door.”
Eddie’s chest breaks open. “Buck,” he breathes. “He knows you love him. Okay? I promise. I’ll bring him over after school if you want.”
He doesn’t mention, though maybe it goes unsaid, that he would at this point do whatever Buck wanted.
They’re both quiet for a long moment.
“I keep—” Buck starts, then bites back a sound. “I keep messing everything up.”
Eddie doesn’t know how to tell him how untrue this is. How opposite it is of the way that Eddie sees him.
“You made the macarons,” he says instead.
Buck hesitates. “So?”
Eddie closes his eyes, and is met with the image of Buck just days ago, hoisting himself up onto the rig. Suffering. Being brave about it, which is alternately stupid and so Buck that it tears Eddie to pieces from the inside out.
“I’m not stupid, Buck,” he says gently. “I know they’re like, the hardest thing to make. But you did it for us anyway. Different colors and everything.”
Buck shifts slightly. “I like baking for you.”
“I know you do,” Eddie breathes, his breath in Buck’s curls, warm and gentle. He turns his head, rests his cheek lightly on Buck’s head, and closes his eyes. “That’s what I mean. You don’t mess things up. You— you make new things.”
He’s not sure he’s making any sense, but beneath his touch Buck relaxes a fraction, growing heavy against him.
“I’m sorry,” Buck says again. “I should have just told you. I feel—”
“No,” Eddie whispers. “It’s okay. You’ve been through a lot.”
Buck hesitates. “Are you really sure?” he asks. “About my head? What if—”
“We’ll make you an appointment,” Eddie tells him. It feels good, at least, to have this: to be able to settle next to Buck; to drape a wet cloth over his neck; to hold him; to tell him what the next move is. To be able to do something, anything, after these intermittent uncertain weeks. “I’m really sure, but that way you’ll be able to confirm and get meds that actually work.”
Buck turns his face against Eddie’s neck, and then in the same instant freezes. They know each other so well, so inside-out, that Eddie knows what he’s thinking immediately.
“You’re okay,” he soothes. “You can stay where you are. Whatever’s comfortable.”
Buck hesitates, his body a livewire.
“What does this mean?” he whispers eventually.
Eddie takes a breath, tilts his head back, thinking it over. What comes to mind is an empty seat on his blue couch, a living room too quiet.
“Means you’re stuck with me until you make that therapy appointment,” he says, and Buck huffs something that resembles a laugh.
“Okay,” he whispers. “And then what?”
It lives and breathes between them, a long soft moment. Eddie turns his head again and kisses Buck in the space between his birthmark and his curls.
“Then we’ll go from there. You and me,” he says.
A promise of a promise. A hope, a sliver, the silver lining.
“It hurts,” Buck whispers. An open door; Eddie can see that for what it is. He’s a little surprised to find that he has it in him to walk through it, knowing that he wouldn’t have a year or two ago. Growth, though slow, brings him to his best friend’s bed on a weekday in the spring, Buck’s weight spread across him; Eddie bearing it easily.
“I know, baby,” he whispers, knowing that there’s a promise in that, too. “I’ve got you.”
Eventually, Buck settles. Eddie thinks he’s asleep, and then he turns his head and brushes a kiss— brave, and sweet, and enough to twist Eddie’s heart into knots— against the sharp line of his jaw.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
The ghost of a smile flickers over Eddie’s face. “Anytime, bud,” he breathes.
With this, Buck closes his eyes. He snuffles against Eddie, shifting subconsciously closer until they are pressed beneath the blankets, warm skin and softness. I love you is silent, at least for today, but there nonetheless in the spaces between Eddie’s ribs and Buck’s, in the folds of the blankets, in the damp of the warming cloth.
And within Eddie’s chest— this many-hearted beast curls up and goes to sleep.