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It’s been four weeks.
A month, technically, although they kissed on the thirtieth and there are still three days left until then, the last three spaces not marked by a red X on the kitchen calendar.
Eddie stares and stares and stares at it, uniform lines made in marker by a familiar hand, and wonders if this is where he finally loses his mind.
“You coming to work today, or?” Buck asks from the doorway. Eddie looks over his shoulder to see him standing there with a confused little smile, his own duffel bag over one shoulder, Eddie’s duffel bag over the other. “Because we—“
“Yeah, Dad, are you kerming?” Christopher says from the hallway, already laughing.
Eddie and Buck groan in unison.
“Okay, you don’t get to groan,” Eddie points at him, but he’s smiling so wide his whole stupid, lovesick face hurts with it. “You encouraged this. It’s your fault.”
At odds with his words, he turns away from the calendar and crosses the kitchen in a couple of steps, stopping just close enough to feel the heat Buck’s always emanating.
“It’s not my fault that your kid has excellent observational skills,” Buck replies.
They’re already late, but Eddie thinks he can be forgiven for taking a second to just—look at him. They’ve been awake for well over an hour, but he still looks a little sleep-crumpled, with a pillow crease in his cheek that’s just beginning to fade and his hair all over the place, enjoying freedom before he gels it down at the station. And his eyes—
“He’s your kid when it’s about Kermit nonsense,” Eddie says, specifically to watch them spark.
“Okay, grumpy,” Buck says, grinning so wide his teeth poke into his bottom lip. He holds Eddie in place with a soft hand on the side of his face, and leans in for a quick kiss that ends up being not so quick, because Eddie slept through the first alarm that he sets specifically so he can kiss Buck silly before they have to get out of bed, so he’s already in withdrawal, and—
And their eleven-year-old is in the hallway, of which he helpfully reminds them by making a retching noise impressive enough that it turns Eddie’s stomach a little.
Buck breaks into a laugh, warm breath puffing over Eddie’s top lip, their teeth meeting and effectively ending the kiss.
“Okay, kid, we’re coming,” Buck says, and hands over Eddie’s bag. “You’re free to go out and wait by the car, you know.”
Christopher sighs like the weight of the world is on his shoulders, and opens the door with a creak. Buck follows him out, and Eddie hops around by the front door for a minute, trying to put his shoes on while also not taking his eyes off his son and his boyfriend, who are laughing about something as Buck helps Christopher up into the truck. The sun’s already out, and Eddie could swear he hears birdsong in the air, and he has to stand there for a minute and let himself be absolutely fucking overcome with the fact that this is his life.
“We’re going to be late,” Buck sing-songs, opening the driver’s-side door, but going by the way he’s smiling, he probably has an idea of where Eddie’s thoughts have wandered.
Get it together, Eddie thinks as he picks up his bag, and then something occurs to him.
“Hey, did you—“
“Packed you that shirt you brought home to wash,” Buck rolls his eyes. “Got your phone charger, checked Christopher’s lunch twice, and coffee’s already in the car. Let’s go.”
So the thing is: it’s been four weeks, and Eddie’s pretty sure it’s a matter of life and death that Buck move in with them right now.
*
“Okay,” Hen says, judgily, knowing full well she’s the only one Eddie would let get away with it. “So just ask him? Doesn’t he already spend every night at your place?”
“Uh,” Eddie scratches the back of his neck. “Like—six nights a week.”
“They take Sundays off as God intended,” Chim whispers. Eddie throws a balled-up napkin at him, then goes back to losing his mind.
“Okay,” Hen says again, the corner of her mouth twitching. “And he cooks ninety percent of your meals. And knows all of Christopher’s teachers by name. And drives your car all the time, which is confusing, because I thought men buy that type of thing as some kind of statement.”
“It was a phase,” Eddie mumbles into the tabletop, where he’s—resting his head. Casually, because nothing is wrong. “But yeah. All of those are factually true.”
Hen laughs. Quietly, but they’re all here early and C shift is out and the loft is quiet, so Eddie just manages to catch it, and he goes to protest, but then Hen’s putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing and that’s—nice. Supportive.
“So literally just—ask him,” Hen says. “With words. Say ‘hey, Buck, we’ve been functionally living together for years, want to actually move in’?”
“No,” Eddie tells the tabletop.
“I’ve gotta say,” Chim says and, by the sound of it, puts away the magazine he wasn’t reading. “This seems like a crisis of your own making.”
“How?” Eddie says, into a patch of something sticky they should probably wipe up before Bobby gets here.
“You’re the one who wants to ask him to move in via meme.”
Eddie straightens up. “I thought it’d be cute,” he says, miserably. “Like an in-joke.”
“Romance really is dead,” Chim says, taking a loud sip of his coffee.
Eddie opens his mouth to tell him to knock it off, but then Buck’s there, taking the stairs up two at a time, his eyes landing on Eddie first thing.
“Hi,” he says, smiling wide, all breathless, like they didn’t spend most of last night together at Eddie’s.
Eddie is so fucking sick of not waking up with him every day, too.
“Hi,” he grins, and Chim makes a retching noise.
“Nevermind,” he says. “Romance is alive and well, and it is gross.”
“Okay,” Buck points a finger at him, moving to cross the loft, “you’ve been making goo goo eyes at my sister for years and I’ve said nothing, so you can shut up and put up with it.”
But by then he’s reached Eddie’s chair, and Eddie’s forgotten all about his crisis and being a sulky piece of shit to annoy his coworkers into helping him, because Buck cradles Eddie’s face in his hands and tips it up and gives him an obnoxious, smacking kiss on the lips.
In the wide repertoire of Buck and Christopher’s Kermit memes, Eddie’s pretty sure he’s reached ‘Kermit surrounded by hearts’ levels.
“Good morning to you too, Buckaroo,” Hen says, grinning. “Stop being adorable in front of my cereal.”
Buck steps around Eddie’s chair, keeping a steady hand on his shoulder, and leans over to peck Hen on the cheek.
“Morning, Hen,” he smiles like the sun, then turns to raise an eyebrow at Chimney. “Brother-in-law.”
“Pain in my ass,” Chim raises his mug in greeting.
“Children,” Bobby says, coming up the stairs with an inexplicable container of tomatoes under his arm. “If anyone’s interested in breakfast that didn’t come from a box, get in the kitchen.”
And Eddie—considers that, because maybe Bobby would give him some actual advice, but Buck’s already skipping over to the counter and physically dragging Chim along to help, and then all Eddie can do is put his head back on the table.
“Hey,” Hen says quietly, rubbing a soothing hand between his shoulderblades, and Eddie hates how nice that feels. “You know he’s going to say yes no matter how you do it, right?”
“Maybe,” Eddie mumbles. “But I want—“
“You’re already enough for him,” she interrupts, cutting straight to the heart of the thing as she usually does, and he doesn’t have anything he can say back to that. “Like—beyond enough. I’m pretty sure you two have been calling your house home for something like two years, so don’t stress yourself out over it. He’ll say yes before you’re even done asking.”
Eddie puts an elbow on the table, and puts his chin in his hand so he has a view of Buck. He’s laughing at something Chim said, the corners of his eyes all folded up, and then he looks over his shoulder and turns all of that light on Eddie.
It’s the kind of smile that makes Eddie want to look over his shoulder, because the thought of all of it being for him is a little difficult to comprehend.
He smiles back.
“I hope so,” he says, and Hen sighs next to him. “I really hope so.”
*
They reconvene at three in the morning, with most of the station asleep. Eddie’s almost completely sure it’s a coincidence that he walks up from where he was lying down with Buck until he fell asleep, and finds Hen and Chim whispering on the couch with their heads together.
“What’s going on?” he asks, and they both look up at him, caught.
The lights in the kitchen flicker.
“We’re, uh,” Hen says, “curating.”
And then Eddie’s phone starts practically vibrating out of his pocket.
He pulls it out to discover that he has messages in a brand new groupchat – not the firehouse one, not the one that someone named A shift hot bitches, but one that’s just him, Chim, and Hen.
And it’s full of image files.
“I sent you some suggestions,” Hen smiles, way too upbeat for this hour of the morning. Eddie walks over to sit next to them, and steels himself before he scrolls all the way to the top of the thread.
To begin with, there are a few Kermits: one lying in the middle of an empty house, which Hen has captioned “how the house feels without Buck in it”, and one despondently holding a beer bottle, which is, apparently, the result of a “Buck-free Sunday”. Theoretically, it’s an honest effort on their part, but the rest of the suggestions quickly devolve into stuff that makes Eddie feel a little like a blushing virgin.
The last one is a picture of what Eddie’s almost sure is a SpongeBob character, holding a heart with something written in it.
“What does that…” he mumbles, pinching out to zoom in. As soon as the words register, he throws his phone across the couch, smacking Hen in the thigh and not feeling the least bit bad about it.
“It said ‘break my back like a glowstick daddy’,” Chim helpfully informs him.
Bobby, of course, chooses that moment to exit his office.
Eddie just has time to take in his raised eyebrows, and the way his expression is hovering between curious and horrified, before he has to drop head into his hands and groan at the ground.
“So,” Bobby says, into the eerie silence of the loft.
“I’m trying to ask Buck to move in with me,” Eddie says immediately, because that has suddenly become the least embarrassing part of this.
“He’s just having a tough time, Cap,” Hen says, patting Eddie on the shoulder. “We’re trying to help.”
“You,” Eddie says, straightening up even as his spine is screaming at him to curl up in mortification and general misery, “are having way too much fun with this.”
“Again, you brought memes into it,” Chim says, snapping his gum.
“Exactly,” Hen points at Chim, as Bobby carefully moves around the couch and into the kitchen to pour himself a cup of coffee. “You can’t expect us to be completely serious about it.”
“Yes I can,” Eddie mumbles, even as he has to bite down on an exhausted smile. “This is serious.”
For a minute, it’s just the sounds of Bobby puttering around in the kitchen, the thunk of mugs being set down on the counter, the clink of the spoon in the sugar container. Hen and Chim are probably doing the eyebrows at each other over Eddie’s head.
He turns his phone over in his hand, and the screen automatically lights up. Eddie, as always, gets stuck staring at his lockscreen: Buck from across the kitchen table a couple of weeks ago, all cozy-looking in a blue hoodie, with the sun at his back, his face half-hidden by his favorite frog mug.
(The thing lives in Eddie’s cupboard against his will, he swears. He’d meant to put up more of a fight than a “what the hell is that, Buck”, but then his boyfriend had walked over and taken the mug out of Eddie’s hands and snuck his fingers under the hem of Eddie’s shirt and said, “it reminds me of you”, and the next thing Eddie knew, he was setting it in his stupid smart coffee maker and hitting Buck’s preset and smiling in a way that still feels a little foreign on his face.)
Over the rim of the mug, though, he’s looking at Eddie, with this little spark in his eye that thoroughly takes Eddie’s breath away.
Bobby sets coffee on the table with a quiet thunk, and sits down on the adjoining couch.
“You okay there?” he asks, and Eddie knows it’s aimed in his direction, but phone Buck is looking at him with all the light of the world in his eyes, and he can’t exactly look away.
“That’s my favorite dimple of his,” he mumbles, pressing his finger over it on the photo.
Hen sighs so heavily it feels like she’s deflating against Eddie’s side.
“He only has two,” Bobby says, and when Eddie looks up at him, the corner of his mouth is twitching violently.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Eddie says miserably, and Bobby just manages to turn his laugh into a cough and hide it in the crook of his elbow. “I’m completely inept at this, Bobby. What the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“Just—ask him normally?” Bobby says.
Eddie drops his head back into his hands.
“Tough going, buddy,” Chim squeezes his shoulder and, to his credit, doesn’t laugh out loud.
*
Eddie takes things into his own hands after that.
On the one night that Buck isn’t at theirs, which happens to fall on a Wednesday, he sees Christopher off to bed, turns out all the lights except for the one over the kitchen table, gets to Googling house-related memes, and quickly discovers that House, M.D. is his new worst enemy.
But he does scrounge some together, and instead of sending them to Buck directly, he decides to be marginally more romantic and print them.
The next day, he slides one into Buck’s locker. It’s free real estate, the text proclaims, and Eddie pretends to button up his shirt while he watches Buck’s profile for the moment he 
gets it.
What he receives instead is a blinding smile. “Eds,” Buck says, all morning-soft with his shirt unbuttoned and his chest on display and you’re at work, Eddie, calm down— “that’s so sweet. You want to share lockers?”
Eddie doesn’t really have time to reply before Chim’s coming in, looking between the two of them suspiciously, raising his eyebrows in Eddie’s direction to ask if this particular housing crisis is over.
“Morning, Chim,” Buck says, with a private little smile curled in the corner of his mouth. “I’ll go tell Bobby,” is what he says to Eddie, and leans in to kiss him on the cheek before he’s running out of the locker room and up the stairs, still tucking his shirt into his pants.
“Assuming he’s not telling Bobby that he’s moving into your house,” Chim says, looking at Eddie with something that might be sympathy or might just be pity, depending on the angle.
Eddie throws a sock at him and goes back to the drawing board.
The next thing he tries, to his never-ending embarrassment, is Bugs Bunny. He’s a little afraid to put it up where the neighbors can see, so he sticks it to the inside of the front door while Buck is out with Maddie, and forgets about it for a few hours.
Then Buck comes home, closes the door with a soft click, and starts giggling.
“Eddie,” he grins when he comes into the living room, leaning over where Eddie’s half-dozing with his head on the armrest of the couch, “you’re right, this is your house. I can’t believe you’re finally embracing meme culture.”
He leans down for a kiss, a little windswept, with the tip of his nose just a little chilly where it presses into Eddie’s cheek, and Eddie doesn’t really have it in him to explain when Christopher’s sleeping over at Hen and Karen’s and Buck’s been gone for hours and there’s a perfectly good bed just waiting for them to mess it up a little.
But it is when he figures out that communicating with Buck via meme may be less cute, and more of an actual problem.
But he’s—well, he’s committed to the idea now, and the thought of asking Buck outright is actually kind of paralyzing, so he doesn’t give up right away. He rolls a meme up in a carton of eggs he brings home from the store; he tucks one into a hardback book on migratory birds that he buys on a whim because the blue of the cover kind of reminds him of Buck’s eyes, and he and Christopher have been on a bird kick lately anyway; he leaves one under Buck’s phone when he lets him sleep and ducks out to get Christopher to school. Every time, Buck grins at him all delighted and proud, like Eddie’s a kid discovering something for the first time, and doesn’t get it.
One night, when he’s lying in bed scrolling through his phone with Buck’s head resting on his shoulder while he reads, he tries an even more direct approach, and texts Buck a video.
“Uh,” Buck says when Eddie’s custom text tone chimes in the silence of the room. “Did you forget that I’m here?”
Eddie sighs. “Just open it.”
And Buck looks up at him with a tiny little frown that Eddie can’t kiss away, because this is important, focus—he looks up, and blinks a couple of times, and then carefully marks his place with the wonky paperclip bookmark Christopher made for him at school.
He picks up his phone, clicks play on the video, and Eddie holds his breath.
This is it. Surely this has to be it. He’s making himself clear, right?
But Buck watches it loop a few times, the woman passing by on the street yelling “and they were roommates!”, and then he looks up again with soft little creases in the corners of his eyes, his eyes so fond Eddie kind of wants to cry.
This is it. This is it, this is it, this is it—
“Eddie,” Buck says, practically cooing. “That’s hilarious, but are you just finding out this exists?”
Eddie excuses himself to go in the kitchen and drink a calming glass of water.
*
“Dad,” Christopher says from the darkness. Eddie almost has a goddamned heart attack.
“Christopher,” he says. “Jesus. What are you doing awake?”
He hits the light switch, and Christopher comes into focus, sitting at the kitchen table messy-haired, in pyjamas, with his hands folded on the tabletop.
“That’s not why we’re here, Dad,” he says, and Eddie—Eddie briefly considers going back to bed, because this has to be a hallucination. It’s half past five in the morning, and he’s hit snooze, and he’s having one of those traumatizing half-awake dreams. “What are you doing?”
Eddie blinks. “What am I doing?”
“What are you doing,” Christopher repeats.
“I, uh,” says Eddie. “S—standing here?”
Christopher sighs, rolls his eyes, then drops his head onto his folded hands. Eddie has no idea where he get the dramatics from.
“With those,” he says, pointing at the fridge.
There, lovingly stuck under the bendy limbs of their colorful magnet men, are the memes Eddie’s been leaving all over the place.
“Okay,” Eddie swallows. “Okay, listen,” and he crosses the kitchen to sit down opposite his son. “You like having Buck here with us, right?”
Christopher blinks at him, completely nonplussed.
“And he’s,” Eddie scratches the back of his head. “He’s already here all the time anyway, so I thought I would, uh—I wanted to—I’ve been trying to ask him to move in with us.”
“Yeah,” Christopher tilts his head. “I know that.”
“You do,” Eddie says, tired, and wonders if Hildy would make his coffee and bring it to him if he asked nicely, since he’s graciously accepted her presence in his home. “How?”
Christopher points at the fridge again.
“Okay,” Eddie says, staring at the goth house and the pink house, fighting the urge to bang his head on the table. “So you get it, but Buck doesn’t?”
“I’m eleven,” Christopher says, which is a fair point, and then: “I can help.”
The duh is heavily implied.
“Right,” Eddie says, considering his options. “Are you sure that—“
“You should have asked me in the first place, Dad,” Christopher rolls his eyes. “I came up with Kermit, you know.”
“I do know,” Eddie replies, his face folding around a smile even still puffy with sleep as it is. He hates the Kermit thing. He definitely, one hundred percent, hates it. Nothing to like about it at all. “So you have ideas for something he might get?”
“I have the solution,” Christopher says, unfolding his hands to reveal his phone resting underneath. “Even if this isn’t in my job prescription,” Christopher says.
“Description,” Eddie corrects weakly. “And you don’t have a job.”
“I have you and Buck,” Christopher says, and pushes his phone across the table.
And on the screen—
“Oh my God,” Eddie says. He doesn’t hear angels singing in the background to accompany his moment of revelation, so the weird gurgling coming from the garbage disposal will have to do. “Oh my God, Christopher. You’re a genius.”
Christopher grins. “Can I get the new Kirby game when it comes out?”
And Eddie couldn’t say no even if he wanted to.
*
It takes him a few days, still.
It takes him a few days of watching Buck move around the house with an easy familiarity, a confidence in knowing where everything is that’s a result of years spent coming here and reorganizing Eddie’s drawers so they “make some fucking sense, Eddie, Jesus”. A few days of waking up with Buck’s breath warm on the back of his neck, of hip-checking each other while they’re crowding at the bathroom sink brushing their teeth, of seamlessly navigating chores and dinner and bedtime and kissing lazily on the couch with a movie in the background only to drop off into sleep like the old people they are.
And on a Thursday morning seven weeks into their relationship, Eddie comes back from Pepa’s to find Buck standing at the kitchen counter, and wraps his arms around his waist from behind, and feels Buck exhale in something like relief.
“You’re home,” he says, with a smile in his voice, and Eddie realizes, just like that, that he’s been an absolute fool.
“Wait here,” he says, and slides down the hallway in his socks before Buck has a chance to ask him what’s going on. He stumbles into their bedroom and opens the drawer of his bedside table to finally take out the two things he’s been holding back and keeping safe in there.
“Eddie?” Buck asks when Eddie pokes his head back into the kitchen, his forehead scrunched, but still smiling. “I didn’t even get a kiss hello, what’s going on?”
“Sorry,” Eddie says, breathless for some reason, and pulls Buck close by the shirt to kiss him just this side of dirty. “Hi, baby. I have something for you.”
Buck stares at Eddie’s lips for a couple of seconds, and then blinks out of his daze. “Did Pepa send food?” he asks, hopeful.
“Um,” Eddie scratches the back of his head. “Not exactly. But this is—maybe this is just as good?”
And before he can make up his mind, he digs in the left pocket of the jacket he still hasn’t taken off, and takes out the envelope he’d crammed inside.
Buck tilts his head. “I don’t know that I’ve ever had a good thing come in an envelope.”
Eddie looks at it, a thin white rectangle on which all his hopes are resting, trembling in the space between them because Eddie’s trembling too.
“Trust me,” he says, and he still hasn’t quite caught his breath.
Buck smiles, a little confused but sure enough, and grabs it. Eddie can’t look him in the face as he digs his nail into the corner that’s not quite stuck down and carefully tears it open.
He can’t look him in the face, so he watches Buck carefully reach in and unfold the piece of paper inside.
Silence. Eddie needs to look, he needs to look, and he can’t bring himself to do it, can’t quite swallow around the lump in his throat, but then—then Buck’s hands start shaking, too.
“Eddie,” he says, and when Eddie looks up at him, his eyes are swimming with tears. “Baby. Is this—this is why you’ve been so stressed?”
“You noticed, huh,” Eddie says, fighting the urge to run away.
“Yeah, I,” Buck says, looking between the—the fucking meme in his hands and Eddie, who is an idiot, and how is this his life, actually— “you got all tense the other day when I said I didn’t know when I’ll get home from Maddie’s, and then—“
And his eyes travel over Eddie’s shoulder, to the fridge.
“Oh,” he says, barely audible, and the paper elegantly falls out of his hands and glides to the ground. “You’ve been—oh,” Buck says, and actually puts his hand over his mouth. “You—oh my God, and I didn’t get it, I—Eddie. I’m so sorry.”
But that familiar light is back in his eyes. When he looks at Eddie, a tear trickles down the side of his nose, just as he breaks into a grin so wide it teases out Eddie’s favorite dimple.
And Eddie can breathe.
“I didn’t want to—assume,” he grimaces, a little embarrassed about it now in the face of Buck’s painfully obvious delight. “It’s—an adjustment, you know, to go from having your own place that you can escape to if things get too much—“
“Eddie,” Buck says, and erases the space between them in a single step, a hand landing on Eddie’s waist, the other one on the side of his face. “When have you ever been too much for me?”
Eddie—doesn’t have an answer to that.
“I didn’t want to assume that you’d want me here full time,” Buck says. He bites his lip, his eyes flitting around the kitchen like he’s seeing it for the first time. “I’ve wanted—God, I’ve thought of this house as home for so much longer than we’ve been together.”
Eddie’s pretty sure his face is saying things he won’t be able to verbalize until he’s writing his wedding vows, but he doesn’t try to hide any of it, doesn’t try to rub away the sting in the corners of his eyes.
Buck’s here. Buck’s going to be here.
“And it’s not too fast?” he asks, a little breathless again for an entirely different reason.
“It’s been something like three years since the first time I did your dishes,” Buck says, and then Eddie can’t hold himself back anymore. He wraps his arms around Buck’s shoulders, and kisses him with an enthusiasm that makes Buck laugh right up until it makes him whine a little in the back of his throat.
“Our dishes,” Eddie mumbles against Buck’s mouth when it’s too difficult to keep kissing him with how wide they’re both smiling. “Our house. Our kid, our bed, our weird haunted dryer—“
“It’s not haunted,” Buck laughs quietly. “It’s just misunderstood.”
“That thing is haunted,” Eddie says, punctuating it with a kiss, “and we’re getting a new one.”
“We are, huh?” Buck asks, his bottom lip caught under his teeth. “I guess I can live with that. As long as you don’t try to tell me via meme.”
Eddie buries his laughter in Buck’s chest, and feels embarrassingly warm when Buck presses a kiss into his hair.
“Words,” he says. “I promise I’ll use words next time.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Buck replies, with a smile clear in his voice, “roommate.”
Which—
“Oh,” Eddie blinks, taking a step away from Buck so he can reach into his other pocket. “I almost forgot.”
And it’s suddenly the easiest thing to grab Buck’s wrist, turn his hand palm up, and gently place the box in his hand.
Buck frowns at it.
“What’s—“ he starts, and stops when lifts the lid and pulls out the contents: a bright green key with Kermit the frog’s face printed on it.
“So you remember who you’re coming home to,” Eddie says, and smiles to hide the way his heart is excitedly dashing itself into pieces against his ribs.
“Eddie, that’s—“ Buck blinks, “I hate you, but that’s so fucking sweet, come here—“
Before Eddie can turn to run away, Buck grabs him by the waist and backs him into the fridge. There’s enough force behind it to knock a little bit of Eddie’s breath out in a very exciting way, and it’s also enough to knock a bunch of magnets to the ground with a clatter that barely registers, because Buck’s pulling him close and licking into his mouth, the key still in his hand and digging into Eddie’s hip.
Eddie supposes this really is his life now: magnet men scattered at his feet, a dozen meme printouts fluttering to the ground around him, and making out against their fridge with his boyfriend, who’s moving in.
One of these days, he’s going to come to terms with the fact that he owes it all to a Muppet.
*
