Chapter Text
part one.
love never wanted me
but i took it anyway
put your ear to the speaker
and choose love or sympathy
but never both, no
howie han barb
@folklorevan
please tell me the evan buckley abby clark break up rumours are real i spent $5 on a manifestation spell on etsy for this
❤ 13 6:06 PM
2 people are talking about this
One day, Buck will tell an interviewer that he would be happy to make movies with Eddie Diaz until the day he dies.
But first, years before that, he sees Eddie for the first time on the set of Chimney’s fifth movie.
Chimney’s only capable of describing What’s Inside You? in sprawling rants scattered with conflicting references. To an interviewer, he says, “It’s like, you ever see that One Direction documentary? Or Disaster Movie? So, like a mockumentary but in an apocalyptic Spaghetti Western. Like, it’s ridiculous and a parody but also totally serious and intentionally genre mixing — like, have you seen that Iranian film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night? That, but not.”
The journalist, when they type the interview up for publication, writes: “If you didn’t get any of that, don’t worry; you’re not alone.”
Buck, honestly, doesn’t get it, but he trusts Chimney’s filmmaking implicitly and he’s not in the movie, anyway, so he doesn’t need to. But Maddie? Maddie loves it from the second she hears Chimney stumble over a muddled description, only the second conversation she and Chimney have, absolutely missing every reference Chimney makes. And while Chimney’s willing to take Buck’s noncommittal nods and mhmms, Maddie’s insistent on making Buck get it.
It takes Maddie exactly five seconds to convince Chimney to let Maddie and Buck visit set on the first day of filming.
“Pay attention,” Maddie says while a harried PA herds them out of the way, depositing them at the edge of all of the action. Buck wastes no time in picking at the nearly-empty craft services table next to them. “Because I will be quizzing you.”
He pauses with his disappointing find — a scone — halfway to his mouth. “Quizzing me? You’ve been on a film set, Maddie. We’re gonna watch the same three-minute scene a dozen times.”
“And that should be all you need, Evan.”
Buck rolls his eyes, laughing around a bite of scone.
Around them the crew is scrambling about, setting up an indoor scene. Three walls of a bedroom have been propped up: a Queen bed with rumpled dark sheets in the center of the back wall; bare wooden nightstands on either side; a mirror with a similarly bare dresser beneath it. Whoever’s meant to act in it — and Buck struggles to think if he’s heard Chimney or the press talk about the cast — isn’t there yet, just the set designers and production assistants adjusting minute angles and swapping out one set of dresser handles for another.
Until, suddenly, Maddie says, “Oh.”
Buck follows her eye line and —
And the thing is, Buck’s an actor; he’s seen a lot of hot men, men even hotter than this guy, and yet.
The guy’s built, not like he’s spent months being moulded by Marvel-paid personal trainers, but like he’s spent his entire life working with his hands. His dark brows, the line of his mouth, seem permanently bent toward imagery of a grumpy old man. They’ve got him in a sweat-stained white tank top at least two sizes too small and a pair of ratty grey sweatpants.
He’s listening intently to a PA as they gesture at a script in their hands. One of his socked feet absently traces the blue taped X that marks his blocking in the centre of the bedroom set.
There’s nothing that makes him special.
Still, Buck can’t help but ask, “Who is that?”
Maddie scoffs. “You really don’t listen to Chim, do you? Remember, Eddie Diaz? Total new guy. Chimney practically had to beg him to take the role.”
“What?” The steel slips into Buck’s voice before he can think to stop it. Maddie’s eyebrows climb toward her hairline. He takes a moment to force casualness when he continues, “Why’d he have to beg?”
Maddie’s eyes are narrowed, assessing, as she says, “I don’t know. I think he wanted a smaller role, less hours?”
Buck’s jaw clenches until something creaks. He remembers every single time he auditioned for Chimney, for every single director he’s ever met, before he finally got a part. He worked for months before he got a role with actual lines. Even now, with an IMDb page he’s proud of, with everything Abby did for him, he still works for every role he gets. He’s never been arrogant enough to have someone beg him to take a better role, not even in the aftermath of Jump/Fall.
“Wow,” Maddie says, an amused tilt to her mouth. “You’re not seriously jealous are you?”
“Jealous?” Buck scoffs. Eddie Diaz is not the first new, hot actor to come on the scene since Buck’s started acting. “Not a chance.”
Maddie hums, mouth pursed and eyebrows raised, the picture of big-sister skepticism. Buck’s next bite of scone is rough, the tension in his shoulders and neck making him quickly irritable.
Eddie Diaz raises a hand towards his head and pauses with it a breath from his undoubtedly recently styled hair for a moment before he curls his fingers into a fist, drops it back down to his side. Buck thinks, uncharitably, fucking amateur.
Huddled behind a huge monitor, Chimney gives a five-second warning. PAs scramble away from the set, the tech crew snapping to attention behind their equipment. Buck’s heart starts to race, a pavlovian sensation; even on this side of things, the adrenaline gets to him, the moment of gasping breath before everything starts. Eddie Diaz looks perfectly at ease. Buck hates him for it, just a little.
“Action.”
Buck keeps a critical eye on Eddie. He doesn’t kid himself into thinking that Eddie isn’t good at what he does — Chimney would never hire him, never mind freakin’ beg, if he wasn’t — but he waits for the moment he slips into the role, leaving Eddie behind in favour of plastic edges. It was the thing Abby spent months training Buck out of, sitting on her kitchen island and pelting marshmallows at him every time she lost sight of Buck — of something human and real — under whatever character he was trying on. It was the thing that made Chimney turn him down again and again, in the beginning.
Eddie Diaz doesn’t do that.
He’s visibly uncomfortable, but rather than gruff and stiff he’s almost mocking, movements open and fluid. His eyebrows are still bowed towards the center of his forehead, but they lean more towards action hero Ken Doll than grumpy old man. He hasn’t slipped into the role; he’s met it in the middle. He’s hitting every mark on Chimney’s ridiculous list — part earnest parody, part comical love letter — but Eddie is still there, enough that Buck, a total stranger, can see him. It’s hard to look away.
Buck clenches his jaw hard enough it hurts.
When Chimney cuts — followed immediately by an affectionate, “Diaz, you bastard!” — Maddie hmms loudly, leaning surreptitiously into Buck’s side. “What were you saying earlier?”
Buck turns on his heel and walks away.
After that first day, Buck doesn’t see Chimney’s set for a while.
He’s busy with reshoots for A Touch of Someone Else, a rom-com that Buck filmed mostly shirtless.
Abby had helped him prepare for the audition, had celebrated with him when he got it, had rehearsed scenes with him again and again when he was too nervous to sleep. Abby’s fingerprints are all over the film, even if she’s not in it. Returning to the set, repeating lines he can still hear in her voice as she dissected them for meaning and affectation, puts him in a weird mood for the days they last and beyond.
Besides, it’s not like he makes a habit of visiting sets he’s not working on unless he’s bored or Maddie invites him along. So, he’s not purposely avoiding Eddie Diaz; he’s just busy.
He sure fucking hears about the guy, though.
“Eddie is a godsend,” Chimney says, grabbing a beer from Buck’s fridge. Maddie’s sitting on the kitchen counter, so Chimney only makes it as far as leaning against it next to her, elbow resting on her knee.
It’s the fourth time he’s listened to Chimney sing Eddie’s praises. Maddie does it almost as often. Even fucking Bobby — who has irrevocably betrayed Buck by taking Eddie on as a client — acts like the sun shines out of the guy’s ass.
“I’ve been fighting producers and the studio about this movie since I sent in the first script. Nobody gets it. Like, yeah, it’s ridiculous, but that’s the point. And it still has a theme, but no one in Hollywood can manage a critical reading to save their lives —“
“But Eddie gets it?” Maddie cuts in, smiling indulgently. She meets Buck’s eyes and widens her own. This is not Chimney’s first time delivering this same rant, cursing studio execs and Disney as an entity for sanitizing the film industry.
“Yes! Or he’s at least willing to trust me. You make four fantastic movies —”
“Really?” Buck interrupts. “Never Gonna Give You Up?”
“— Shut up, I stand by that one. God, I miss Hen.”
“She hasn’t even left yet.”
“I’m preemptively missing her.”
Maddie throws her head back in a laugh, plucking the beer out of Chimney’s hand to take a drink. She makes a face as she hands it back. Chimney’s too busy staring at Maddie with a dopey grin to notice his drink has left or been returned. Buck rolls his eyes, resisting the urge to bang his head against the kitchen island.
“The point is,” Chimney says, once he’s pulled his gaze away from Maddie.
And Buck finds himself quite suddenly at the end of his rope. “That Eddie Diaz is God, Eddie Diaz is the reason the sun rises and falls, all hail Eddie freaking Diaz!” He pushes away from the island and stalks away.
In an undertone, Chimney says, “What’s his problem?”
Buck doesn’t have a problem. And if he does, it’s definitely not Eddie Diaz.
“Evan! Hey, Evan, over here! When’s the last time you heard from Abby Clark? Do you know where she is? When’s she coming back?”
He ducks his head against the blinding flashes, a security guard’s hand pressing against the centre of his back to guide him forward. He doesn’t let himself react to any of the shouted questions, doesn’t let any of the responses he has edge out past his clenched teeth.
The party’s off to a bad start.
He wasn’t going to show at all, prepared to spend the evening sulking in Abby’s apartment, pretending to read through the scripts Bobby sent over and waiting for Abby to call. Like every other non-working evening he’s had in the last four months. It was only Maddie, texting him creative threats and heartfelt pleas back-to-back, that made him swap out sweats for an emerald green silk button-up he’s contractually obligated to wear in public at least once.
He doesn’t feel up to being Evan Buckley, Abby Clark’s reformed fuck boy turned devoted beau turned abandoned pet. He does it anyway.
The inside of the party — and Buck doesn’t even know what it’s for, or who’s throwing it, or how he got an invite — is dark and loud. A popular club cleared out for a somewhat exclusive guest list, an open bar along the back, lush booths lining the perimeter, sweaty swarms of people grinding in the centre of everything.
Just over a year ago, fresh off his first huge success, getting callback after callback for the first time in his career, he’d be right there in the thick of it. He’d find a model or some kind of influencer, someone who cared more about the follower count on his Instagram than the prestige of the roles on his IMDb, dance only long enough to convey intention, and then fuck in the bathroom. He had it down to a science. The tabloids loved it, verified Twitter accounts quote tweeting pap shots of Buck with yet another model to say “vs angels are just passing evan buckley around like a blunt” and “evan buckley must lay absolutely crazy pipe.”
After Abby, he stopped going to parties. Abby hated them and was unwilling to spend too much unnecessary time away from her mother on top of that. For the first time, spending an evening at home was better, Abby's company better than a hundred models.
Now, he keeps his eyes on the ground as he edges around the crowds toward the bar. He orders a drink and watches the condensation drip down the side, cold when they reach his fingers.
The face of his phone, where he’s texted Maddie a slew of messages to the tune of where are you and how dare you drag me to this party and not be easily found, is black.
An hour. He’ll give this party an hour, and then he’s going back to his girlfriend’s empty apartment, Maddie or no Maddie.
“Hey.”
A dark drink slides into view next to Buck. It’s attached to a rough, calloused hand, a black watch wrapped around the wrist. Buck follows that wrist up, up, up to Eddie Diaz, smiling in a black shirt buttoned nearly all the way to his neck. Buck’s contracted shirt is unbuttoned to his navel.
Eddie’s free hand breaches the space between them, held out for a shake. Like they’re at a fucking conference. “I’m Eddie Diaz. Buck, right? Chimney talks about you a lot.”
Buck bristles. He has the uncanny sensation that someone’s peeled back the layers of his skin to reveal his muscle and bone as he sits in his sadness — his bone-deep loneliness — in front of Eddie Diaz, who has the nerve to call him Buck.
“Evan, actually,” he says, slipping his hand into Eddie’s. Eddie’s eyebrows raise when Buck squeezes it, this side of too hard.
The friendly politeness in Eddie’s smile leaches out in front of Buck’s eyes. It turns tight, sliding further up one side, eyes narrowing. A sick, damaged thing inside of Buck revels in it; he wants to push Eddie until he breaks.
“Right. Evan.” His voice is flat, but there’s something amused in his eyes. “You planning on visiting set again?” It sounds like a dare or a threat. Buck’s skin is on fire, heat rising up the back of his neck.
“Don’t think so,” he says, clipped. He’s being petty, he knows. Childish. Like the kid who used to frequent TMZ headlines before Abby made him into someone better.
He does nothing to stop it. He’s torn ragged and raw, questions about Abby he doesn’t have the answers to still echoing around his head, his phone full of outgoing calls with no responses, everything uncertain and fickle beneath his feet.
And Eddie? New, shining Eddie, who’s managed to slide into all of these places in his life like it’s nothing, like Buck didn’t work himself to the bone to get there himself? The hurt in Buck hates him so much he can taste the blood of it in his mouth.
“Real busy. Reshoots, press, new projects. You know how it is.” He slaps the heel of his hand against his forehead, an exaggerated gesture. “Oh, look who I’m talking to! Nevermind.” His shoulders hunch in a shrug as he brings his drink to his mouth.
Eddie laughs. It’s a lit match held to the bottom of Buck’s spine, sending flames licking up the length of him. “Sure,” he says, tone dangerously amused. Buck almost leans forward in anticipation. “I’m sure it’s real time-consuming.”
Buck’s jaw clenches, sudden and tight. He wants Eddie to snap so he doesn’t have to. He wants Eddie to — to throw a punch or to slam Buck against the bar or —
Face up between them, Buck’s phone lights up with a picture of Maddie, swallowed up by a unicorn onesie. He pushes his drink away, slides off of the bar stool.
“Well, this has been awesome,” he gushes with fake cheer, taking advantage of the vindicating one or two inches of height he has on Eddie to look down his nose. He gestures with his phone, where Maddie’s call has timed out and been replaced by a string of text notifications. “But duty calls. Let’s do this again, yeah?”
He kisses the pads of three fingers, pulls them away, and blows the kiss across the distance with a wink. Eddie rolls his eyes. The furious flames are still wrapped around his spine as he steps away, checking his phone for Maddie’s directions.
“Hey.” Buck jerks to a stop, held in place by a hand around his wrist. He swallows, spine snapping straight, and meets Eddie’s eyes. They’re dark, hard. “I don’t know what you’re going through,” he says, voice gruff and pitched low. “I’m sure it sucks. But I’m not your problem, so save your big dog bark for someone else, yeah?”
Something hot and sweet slides through Buck’s veins. It tilts his mouth into a sharp smirk before he can do anything about it. “You sure you don’t wanna see my bite?” It’s meant to be a threat, another way to push until Eddie snaps, but it comes out wrong.
Eddie’s dark, dark, dark eyes stay on his for an endless beat before he tears them away, shaking his head at the ground and laughing. The laugh’s as dark and tense as this entire fucking night. “You’re trouble,” he accuses, grinning. It’s sharp; a shark’s grin.
Eddie walks away before Buck can do anything truly stupid.
Buck and Eddie’s feud is in the press before Buck wakes up the next day.
Maddie texts him an article from Buzzfeed with the headline, Trouble in Han-idise? Evan Buckley and Eddie Diaz Are Not the Besties We Were Hoping For. Chimney sends a stream of Tweets, all featuring pixelated pictures of Buck and Eddie in each other’s faces at the bar accompanied by jokes about alpha male behaviour and Howie Han collecting pretty boys with attitudes.
Buck sends his reply in a group chat between the three of them: han-idise is the worst pun i’ve ever heard.
Chimney’s instant response is, i love it.
He leaves his phone at home when he goes for his run.
In the early days, when he was lucky to have his name in the news once every few months, he checked for it religiously. Against the advice of everyone in the industry he had ever met, he set up a Google Alert for his name, had a nightly routine of searching for indirects on Twitter, for tags on Instagram, any scrap of proof that people out there knew who he was.
It wasn’t about the attention — well, it wasn’t only about the attention. It was mostly about finding proof that he was getting somewhere, that he was making some kind of impact on people. He kept up the nightly routine even after Jump/Fall when every other headline and indirect was about his conquests.
He got rid of them when Abby left. He didn’t need the reminder.
His feet hit the pavement too hard, his breaths jagged on their way out. When’s the last time you heard from Abby Clark? When’s she coming back?
Buck stumbles to a stop, leaning over to bow his head and rest his palms on his knees. It’s bad form; he doesn’t care.
He once told a therapist — Chimney insisted, so the therapy scenes in a film he cast Buck in would have authentic experience behind them — that he spent his life feeling like a ghost, haunting his parents’ and Maddie’s lives. Now, he’s not sure who the ghost is, him or Abby.
He walks the rest of the way to his — Abby’s — apartment. Abby had been worried they were moving too quickly when Buck moved his meagre belongings in, but Buck had been so sure.
He pulls the Britta out of the fridge, eyes the dwindling supply of food. Fills a glass with water. Takes a long drink. Breathes.
His phone rings.
He nearly trips over his feet on his way to the coffee table, bracing himself on the arm of the couch as he answers without looking, saying breathlessly into the phone, “Hello?” The hope in his chest is a physical weight, pinning his heart to his breastbone.
“Buck.” It’s Chimney. The hope dissolves into acid, dripping down into his gut. “Listen, if you do me this favour I will give you my first born.”
Buck swallows around a sudden lump in his throat to say, “Sure you don’t wanna check that promise with my sister first?”
“Wha—No. What? I don’t…” The confused panic in Chimney’s voice is almost enough to make Buck smile. “That’s not. Okay, moving on. Tommy dropped out of the movie. He broke his stupid leg trying to film a freaking parkour TikTok and then he was an asshole to one of the PAs, so obviously I’m not keeping him on, but he hasn’t filmed anything yet so I have six scenes with no actor to film them and filming is meant to start tomorrow, so—”
“You want me to fill in?” Buck cuts in. The sweet feeling of being needed, useful to someone edges into the spaces Abby’s gouged out.
“Yes. Please? It’s only five or six days of filming, maybe a week if something else goes to shit.”
“Okay, yeah, that should be fine. I can get Bobby to move back some stuff.” There’s a huge whiteboard calendar propped against the wall by the bathroom — Buck never got around to hanging it up properly when he moved in, and then Abby left and it stopped feeling like he could — where Bobby makes him write down obligations and events so they’re never far out of reach. “Hey, what’s the role anyway?”
“I’m emailing you the pages literally right now. It’s Holden’s old bandmate, Fitz. Best friends turned bitter rivals kinda thing. Fitz left the band to go solo, and during the whole world-ending thing they run into each other. It’s this whole thing about how relationships form in these specific, life-altering situations — huge stardom, the collapse of society, climate change — and…well, anyway, Holden and Fitz decide to work together again and then Fitz gets washed away in a tsunami.”
Buck chokes on a laugh. “Dude. You just love killing off best friends in movies.”
Chimney makes a muffled noise from the other side of the phone that Buck can’t quite get a read on. “Yeah, well.”
“You know I’m obviously willing to do this for you,” Buck says, pivoting away from that weird un-Chimney-like tone. “But. Eddie and I…”
“Are actors,” Chimney finishes. “I’m not worried about that. Might even be good tension for the film. Are you worried?”
Buck scoffs. “No, I’m a professional.”
“Yeah, I’m not touching that. Okay, thank you for this, I seriously owe you. I’ll send Bobby the legal shit.”
“Okay. Hey, what are you paying Eddie for this?”
Chimney’s laughter is a sudden burst of sound in Buck’s ear. “Yeah right. Goodbye, Buckley.”
Buck pulls his phone away from his ear and pulls up Bobby’s contact.
Chimney told Buck, once, about his early career as a PA, working on sets where the crew held their breath the whole time, trying desperately not to be seen or heard by directors and actors too concerned with their own importance to think of anyone else.
Chimney’s sets are nothing like that, always full of laughter from cast and crew and beyond. If a camera isn’t rolling, someone’s laughing.
When Buck walks onto set on his first day as an official cast member, Eddie Diaz is laughing. He’s got his head thrown back, the long line of his throat exposed, as May attacks the sleeve of his flannel with a seam ripper. Her head’s ducked, abashed.
That damaged, wounded thing inside of Buck wants to set it all on fire.
There’s no use pretending it isn’t that damage that makes him ignore Eddie, turning his back on him to hug May.
May pulls back from the hug with a bright greeting, only half paying attention to him as she glances down at an iPad, a complicated, colour-coded spreadsheet filling the screen. “I have to deal with some stuff for the extras, but you come find me soon, okay?”
Buck salutes her with his index finger at his brow bone. “Yes, ma’am.” She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling as she leaves.
And Buck stays exactly where he is, less than a foot in front of Eddie, facing away and regarding the set with a level of attention he rarely offers anything. He starts to count.
At 7, there’s a snort. Buck caves and looks.
Eddie’s standing with his arms folded over his chest, a blue flannel over another sweat-stained white tank top. Someone’s painted a bruise over one eye, a cut above the eyebrow, his hair matted with fake blood. They’ve let his stubble grow; he was clean-shaven at the party the other night.
The easy laughter he shared with May is gone, replaced by that hard, bitter amusement Buck remembers so fondly.
“Yeah?” Buck questions, his own mouth forming the knife’s edge of a smirk. He keeps his feet planted firmly where they are, fighting off the ridiculous urge to step closer into Eddie’s space.
“Nothing,” Eddie says, giving a shake of his head as his mouth bunches into a tight smile like he’s fighting off a laugh. “You’re just reminding me of someone. The sulky silent treatment thing.”
“Sulky?” The question’s out before he can think, indignation colouring his tone. “I’m not sulking.”
“Sure.” Eddie’s sure’s make Buck want to hit something, the way they weigh heavy in the air. “But I thought you weren’t planning on visiting the set. You know,” he removes one hand from where he’s tucked it under his armpit, bending the arm at the elbow to gesture towards Buck with a flat palm, “because you’re just so busy.”
And maybe there’s some sick vindication accompanying the knowledge that Eddie doesn’t know he’s here to work, that Chimney didn’t say anything to his so-called godsend.
He shrugs, an exaggerated movement of his shoulders. “Well, anything for a fan.” He presses a hand to his chest, falsely heartfelt.
Buck has the inexplicable thought that Eddie’s laugh is nothing like Abby’s. It’s rough like it’s being dragged straight from his chest and past his teeth against his will. Like it costs him something.
“What do you think we’re measuring here?” Eddie asks, eyes briefly narrowing into a squint. “So I know what to work on.” The sardonic weight of his words burrows under Buck’s skin.
Buck remembers his own voice saying you sure you don’t wanna see my bite? and clamps his teeth down around something worse. There’s a dare in Eddie’s eyes, definitely, but somewhere in the shadows, there’s something like exhaustion, too. Buck looks away; it’s too familiar.
“Buck.” Chimney appears at his side, a pair of sunglasses perched on the top of his head. “What are you doing here — thank you by the way — you gotta get changed. I’ll get a PA to take you to a dressing room. I’d apologize for the lack of a trailer, but I’m actually not sorry at all.”
Buck sees the moment Eddie figures it out: his eyebrows pinch towards the centre of his forehead, wrinkling the skin there, for only a moment before they climb upwards. Eddie’s gaze goes from Chimney to Buck, meeting his eyes — and, undoubtedly, his self-satisfied smirk. Canary, meet cat.
“Oh,” Chimney says, catching the exchange and turning to Eddie. “Fuck, I forgot to tell you. I asked Buck to fill in for Tommy, is that all right?”
Buck bristles, irrationally annoyed that whether or not Eddie’s okay with this matters.
His annoyance spikes when Eddie only smiles and shakes his head. “Totally fine with me.” He meets Buck’s eyes again. The smile grows, that shark’s smile back. “Go on, Trouble. Let’s get this over with.”
Tragically, Buck loves acting with Eddie.
Part of it is the roles they’re in, two guys who can hardly stand to be in the same room without ripping each other apart limb from limb, a decade of history, good and bad, strangling them. That jagged part of Buck that wants to push Eddie until he snaps thrives in it. The tension creates itself.
But that tension only lasts so long, until Holden and Fitz have rekindled their abandoned trust in each other, fanning the flames of it in the middle of the end of the world. And that's easy, too.
Acting with Eddie feels a bit like a game, or a drug. Like they’re challenging each other to do better, to act better, until the feeling of acting falls away and Buck nearly forgets he’s saying someone else’s words. Like he’s disappointed when someone calls cut.
And Buck, who has never put on a character that hasn’t sunk into his bones, feels the sad desperation of Fitz in his final scene like it’s his own. When he fights against the rush of water — inside a tank, surrounded by a stunt crew — as it drags him away from where his best friend holds onto a tree branch, he forgets that the splinter that crackles down his spine doesn’t belong to him.
When Chimney calls wrap on Buck’s role, Eddie smiles, soft, as he claps with the rest of the cast and crew. They’re both soaking wet, dirty clothes plastered to their bodies like a second skin. Eddie slaps a hand against Buck’s shoulder, a show of comradery Buck isn’t expecting, and the sound’s amplified.
But they’re not friends. They just work well together.
“I just think he’s hiding something,” Buck says, a few days after What’s Inside You? has wrapped up shooting.
Maddie, who has her hand tucked into Buck’s elbow as they duck into the wrap party, snorts. “Uh, okay? It’s Hollywood; who isn’t hiding something?”
“That’s not—It’s different.”
“How?”
Buck bites out a frustrated noise. “He did this interview, right, and he was asked about how his family feels about his new career and he literally said, ‘I’d prefer to keep my work and personal lives separate.’” He sets a wide-eyed look of disbelief on Maddie — can you believe that? — who hides a laugh behind the palm of her hand. “Who says that! A serial killer, that’s who.”
Maddie shakes her head. “Or someone who — wait for it — wants to keep their work and personal lives separate.”
Buck scoffs. “He’s an actor.”
Their conversation pauses long enough for Maddie to order them a pair of drinks at the bar Chimney's set up in Bobby and Athena’s backyard, a venue Chim only managed to secure through a tight guest list and the promise that no one entered the actual house.
“How did you even end up reading one of Eddie’s interviews?” Maddie asks once there’s a drink in both of their hands, matching pink umbrellas poking out of the top.
Buck looks down, watches his fingers spin the umbrella around to avoid his sister’s searching gaze. “I may have…looked him up.” He shrugs as he glances up; no big deal. It’s not like he found much, outside of the news of his casting and the one interview where he avoided half the questions. He doesn't even have a Wiki yet.
Maddie’s eyebrows nearly kiss her hairline. “You don’t look people up. Chimney told me all about that time you somehow ended up at a Marvel wrap party and didn’t recognize a single person there.”
Buck waves a dismissive hand. “That’s different.”
Maddie laughs, shaking her head. “You keep saying that, and you know, I think you’re right.”
Maddie doesn’t give him the chance to question whatever that means, quickly whisked away by Chimney to poke around May’s old karaoke setup. And then Buck’s on his own.
The thing is, he’s good at throwing on a charming smile and slipping into friendly conversation with other industry people. He remembers names, where they met, the name of the dog they mentioned rescuing or the brand they were having trouble negotiating contracts with. He laughs in all the right places and nails the punchlines of his jokes, straddles the line between friendly and flirty like he was born on it.
It’s just not as easy anymore. He feels like they can see something wrong in his eyes, the loneliness and the hurt. Like they’re waiting for the moment he stumbles so they can push him right over the edge. He holds his breath waiting for someone to bring up Abby, to ask him where she is.
“Must be nice, having your sister in town,” Chloe Something-or-Other says, a studio exec that Chimney is constantly bemoaning the fact he has to play nice with. She has the studio look about her like she’s assessing Buck for his value to a project. “Although, her situation with Kendall is quite the mess, isn’t it?”
Ice slides swiftly through his veins. He wishes, with a sharp clarity that makes him light-headed, that she had just asked about Abby.
He blinks, channelling his early career history of playing Stupid But Hot Guy #1 to feign wide-eyed confusion. “What? I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Chloe’s expression falls into a brief echo of Buck’s confusion. Before she can explain, Buck plows on, “Oh, sorry, I told Bobby I’d help with the… porta potties.”
He turns away from the journey her face goes on, fleeing to the edges of the party. Bobby, he knows, is holed up in his office, probably with Athena. If he didn’t think Chimney would skin him for breaking the “no going inside” rule, he might try to hide out with them.
Instead, he ducks around the half-wall that’s been set up behind the catering tables. The edge of the yard, overlooking rolling hills, is only a few feet away from the rest of the party, but it’s already quieter. Buck’s shoulders slump, relieved.
He’s only 28; he shouldn’t be this bone-deep exhausted, shouldn’t be running away from a party that’s at least marginally in his honour. He’s at the height of his career.
He pulls his phone from his pocket; his lock screen is a picture of Abby, on a beach in Italy when they were filming Lights Up, Abby’s brother’s indie short film. In the photo, her back’s to the camera, hair and white dress blowing in the wind. Buck remembers pocketing his phone after taking the picture, running unevenly across the sand to throw her over his shoulder, their joint laughter competing with the crashing waves.
One of her mother’s nurses called almost immediately after; the trip to Italy, Abby unable to leave her mother in LA for the three weeks filming lasted, had brought up strange, disjointed memories of the height of her own acting career that sent her into spiralling meltdowns. They rushed back to the hotel, and Abby spent the rest of the trip only half there, the other half of her lost in her guilt.
When he pulls up his call log, it’s a long list of outgoing calls to Abby 💖💖, never answered. He scrolls until he finds the last time Abby called him: three weeks ago, 4 AM L.A. time. Buck had missed it, and she left a short voicemail about how exciting Ireland was and that he should call her back.
He takes a breath, holds it, and presses his thumb down on her name.
The phone rings against his ear for a long, long time.
“This is Abby, leave a message.”
Buck blows a breath out through his nose. “Hey, Abby. It’s me, uh. Buck.” He laughs, humourless. He’s so fucking stupid, but he can’t stop himself. “I, uh, told you in the last voicemail that I’m doing this movie for Chimney, a real last minute thing. I don’t think I mentioned what it’s called? I mean, you can probably look it up, but. Well, it’s called What’s Inside You? It’s kinda weird, even for Chim. I didn’t get it at first. But Maddie — uh, my sister, I’ve mentioned her… well anyway, she loves it, and I guess I understand it a bit better now.”
He almost says, unbidden, Eddie helped, but he swallows it down like a lump in his throat. For some reason, he doesn’t want Eddie and Abby anywhere near the other. He clears his throat, struggling to find solid ground beneath his feet.
“Anyway. We wrapped. I’m actually at the wrap party right now. It’s…uh, fine. It'd be better if you were here. Um. Are you still in Ireland?”
He hears a snap of a branch behind him. When he looks over his shoulder he has the inexplicable sense that it’s going to be Eddie, looking for him.
It’s not; it’s a woman, her red hair held back in a complicated updo. She’s watching her hands as she juggles a small purse, a drink, her phone, and a silk scarf. Buck doesn’t recognize her.
Into his phone, he says, quickly, “Uh, I have to go. But uh, wish you were here. Bye.” He pauses, ducks his head, and says, quietly, “Love you.”
His phone is safely tucked in his pocket by the time the woman makes it to his side.
“Can you hold this?” She pushes her purse, phone, and scarf into his hands, but holds onto her drink.
Buck watches, her items held against his chest, as she uses her now free hand to pull a seemingly endless supply of glittering pins out of her hair. She gestures at Buck with a handful of them until he dutifully shifts his grip on her belongings to hold out an empty palm for her to drop them into. She pulls a final pin out of her hair, the last curl hanging onto the hairstyle slipping free and falling down her back. She shakes it out, ruffling a hand through the hair at her crown.
“Thank you,” she says once she’s done, finally aiming her attention at Buck with a wide smile. She plucks her clutch out of his arms and holds it open under Buck’s hand so he can carefully drop the pile of hair pins into the bag. She loops the scarf around her neck, tucks the bag under her arm, and taps away at her phone screen for a long moment where Buck does nothing but wait, useless and confused.
Finally, she tucks the phone under her drink in one hand, a protective napkin between the screen and the glass, and offers her free hand to Buck. “I’m Taylor.”
Buck laughs, placing his hand in hers. “Evan,” he says.
She brushes her hair out of her face when she takes her hand back, her smile twisting into something familiar. “I know. Nice of you to fill in on this one. From what I understand, it’s not really a Buckley movie is it?”
Buck shifts, a shoulder jerking up into a shrug. “I’m not really picky. A Buckley movie is whatever movie wants me.” If there’s anything he’s learned it’s that there’s an audience for every movie, and this job has never really been about him.
Taylor’s eyebrows spike upwards, her smile lifting higher up one side. “So, you’re saying you’re easy?”
“That’s what they tell me,” he says, impulsive, tripping over the line between friendly and flirty. Guilt pools in his stomach like acid.
Taylor takes a step closer, the toes of her strappy wedges a breath away from his sneakers. The arch of her eyebrow is challenging. “Yeah? How easy?”
Buck laughs, surprised, as a blush rises up his neck. He’s out of practice, being on the other side of such direct interest, and if he was Buck from a year ago he might be stupid enough to risk the combined wrath of Bobby, Athena, and Chimney to rise to her challenge right here.
The Buck of right now has acidic guilt bubbling in his gut, prodding his organs into tight knots. He takes a step back, rubs the back of his neck with a restless hand, and says, “Sorry, but I have a girlfriend.”
Taylor’s eyes widen briefly, and something minute changes in her expression. Buck can’t identify it. It’s not disappointment; almost the opposite. “Really?” Buck frowns. “It’s just — I thought you and Abby had broken up?”
Buck blinks, the question hollowing out his stomach. “What?”
“That’s what everyone’s been saying. Are you not?” Taylor’s eyes are narrowed, assessing.
Buck swallows. He wants to ask since when and who and what exactly are they saying but he can’t force any sound past his teeth. He wants to say we are obviously still together but it sounds stupid and embarrassing even to himself, like he’s a groupie who can’t let go.
“Hey, I figured it out.”
Suddenly, Eddie’s at their side. Buck didn’t even hear him approach. He’s staring at Taylor with hard eyes, and it’s different from the looks he gives Buck when they’re snapping and posturing; there’s no amusement or challenge, just disdain. Buck blinks in the face of it, shocked.
Taylor’s expression similarly hardens as she takes a step away and sets an unimpressed set of flat eyebrows on Eddie. Her tone is slow and bored, all playful flirtation leached out, when she asks, “Figured out what?”
“Well,” he says, sharp and pointed, “when we were talking earlier, I thought I recognized you.”
Taylor's smile is like a knife. “Guess I just have one of those faces.”
Eddie tilts his head, mirrors Taylor's smile back to her. It’s like watching a tennis match. “Sure. But a friend of mine loves Starz News, so eventually, it clicked. Taylor Kelly, right?” Taylor’s eyes narrow, caught. Buck frowns, lost. “Which is weird, because I just can’t imagine Chimney inviting the press.”
Buck feels very suddenly sick. “Press?”
He tries to rewind their conversation, tries to remember if he said anything he doesn’t want the world to know. How much of his voicemail to Abby did she hear?
She has the courtesy to look at least somewhat abashed when she meets his eyes, biting her lip and lifting a shoulder into a shrug. “It’s a job,” she says.
Eddie scoffs, drawing Buck and Taylor’s attention just in time to see his eyes roll. “That’s nice,” he says, clipped. “Anyway, you’ve got like,” his nose and mouth screw up, exaggerated, as he makes a show of checking his bare wrist, “five minutes to leave before I let security know.”
Taylor’s glare is fierce, but she doesn’t argue as she downs the rest of her drink in one go. She hands the empty glass to Buck, who grabs it on autopilot. “It was nice meeting you. We should do this again.”
Buck snorts. “God, I hope not.”
Taylor laughs, pats the side of his arm, and spares one more glare at Eddie before making her way across the grass back toward the party and, hopefully, the exit.
Buck slumps once she’s out of sight, resting his forearms on the clear fence that lines the back of the yard so he can fold over.
He presses his forehead into the knobs of his wrists and takes a breath.
Buck doesn’t hide much from the press. Some — most — have told him he’s too honest, too willing to give pieces of himself away to anyone with a microphone, but he likes sharing. He likes letting people get to know him.
It’s only — I thought you and Abby had broken up. This — Abby is different from the one night stands he had splattered across tabloids. It’s not a funny story to tell a late night talk show host. It’s a girlfriend that won’t call him back, it’s saying love you into a voicemail that might never get opened. It’s his hurt, a fresh, fleshy thing in the palm of his hands that he wants to lock away in a drawer that no one can ever touch.
“Here.” Buck looks up to find Eddie at his side, leaning against the fence and holding out a water bottle.
Buck straightens and wordlessly accepts it, suddenly embarrassed. He’s not having a normal reaction to unknowingly talking to a reporter, he knows, but he doesn’t have the words to defend himself. Eddie takes Taylor’s empty glass from Buck’s slack hand.
When Buck’s downed half the water bottle, he twists the cap back on and bashfully meets Eddie’s eyes. “Uh, thank you.”
Eddie shrugs it off, turning to mimic Buck’s stance, looking out over the hills. It should be awkward, Buck thinks, to silently stand next to a guy he’s done nothing but provoke, who just saw him nearly breakdown at a party over one reporter. But it’s not.
Buck thinks about the interview he read, Eddie brushing off any question that got more personal than his opinion on Chimney as a director. He thinks about the disdain in Eddie’s eyes when he looked at Taylor.
He breaks the silence: “Why act? If you hate the press and attention so much?” Buck’s forgotten to inject bite into his tone; it comes out soft, curious, instead.
Eddie blinks, jerking his head towards Buck. He searches Buck’s face for a second like he’s trying to figure out what their game is now. He seems to come to a decision because he tilts his head, his mouth bending into an only slightly sarcastic smile. “I spent a long time hiding, so I guess acting just comes easy.”
Buck laughs, but it’s the kindest one he’s given Eddie so far. “Well, yeah, me too. But I can answer an interviewer’s questions without basically telling them to fuck off.”
Eddie’s laugh is mostly a bark, a sudden burst of sound. His smile crinkles the corner of his eyes. “How would you know that’s how I answer interviewers?”
“Nuh-huh,” Buck chides, bumping Eddie’s shoulder with his own. “I asked first.”
Eddie shakes his head, looking back out over the hills. “I...Acting’s good money, and the hours are crap but only for a few weeks or months at a time. When I was planning to move to L.A. to be closer to some family, a friend said she could get me an audition, said that she thought I’d be good at it, so I decided I’d do one audition. If I didn’t get it, I’d figure something else out. It’d be hard — I’m not really qualified for much — but I’d make it work. And if I got it, then great.”
The familiar bitterness — one audition — rises in Buck’s chest, but it’s missing some of the burning heat. He watches Eddie’s hands roll Taylor’s empty glass between his palms.
“But if I got it, it was my problem. The scrutiny, the attention, the criticism — I can handle that, no problem. Nothing new. But my…my family didn’t sign up for that and, frankly, I don’t think I’d react too well to hearing any of it directed at them.” The smile Eddie aims at his hands is humourless. “So, that’s the deal. They can have me, but they can’t have them.”
“Wow,” Buck says, shaking his head. “I guess I’ve never had someone I loved enough to protect like that. Or someone that loved me enough to protect me.” Even Maddie, who he would walk through fire for and who would do the same and more for him, has only been back in his life for a couple of months. He has years and years of experience on his own, even when he was surrounded by people.
The look Eddie gives him is complicated; sad isn’t the right word, but Buck can’t think of a better match. “Maybe you gotta find better people.”
Buck’s mouth slides into a grin. “What, are you offering?”
Eddie laughs, shoving Buck away with a hand on his bicep. “Shut up and drink your water.”
Buck does as he’s told. The party is better.
And like that, they’re friends.
When Buck drops Eddie’s name for the third time — Eddie and I went on a run; Eddie would not shut up about how much he hates the new Marvel movie, he’s worse than Chimney; Eddie put honey mustard on his hotdog, how weird is that? — twenty minutes into a phone call with Maddie, she drowns out the rest of Buck’s sentence with a booming laugh.
He frowns into his fridge where he’s looking for something he can throw together for lunch.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Maddie says, in a high-pitched tone that very clearly indicates it is not nothing. “It’s just hard to believe you were calling this guy a serial killer, what, a month ago? And now look at you! My baby brother, all grown up and making friends.”
So, they’re friends. They text back and forth: Buck sending pictures of bulldogs he meets in the park with their deep frowns (this u?); Eddie sending impassioned rants about whatever movie he’s watching or L.A. traffic; hour-long, rapid-fire conversations debating the best and worst selections from craft services. Buck doesn’t really text people — Maddie calls, or shows up; Bobby calls, or tells him to stop by; Chimney will send a wall of texts and then not respond for three days; Hen, oddly, prefers emails; Abby…well — but his lock screen almost always has a notification with Eddie’s name on it.
Eddie still keeps his family close to his chest. He makes vague references to things someone’s said, or movies someone likes, but never any details. And Buck gets it — he hasn’t said a word about Abby, even when Eddie looks like he might want to ask after Buck’s checked his call log for the third time in an hour — but that urge to push sneaks in. It’s softer, now; less about making Eddie break and more about cracking Eddie open like an egg to see the soft bits inside. He shies away from it.
“Come on,” Eddie says, panting as he jogs in place next to Buck, who’s paused in the middle of the trail to suck in ragged breaths, hands on his thighs. Eddie’s grinning, even as sweat drips down his nose. “You would not have survived boot camp.”
Buck glares, breathing too hard to get any words out.
That Eddie’s shared: his two terms in Afghanistan as a combat medic. But just that, the most basic facts. Buck doesn’t push, even when he wants to.
Eddie’s feet still. He slides a hand up over his face, through his hair, wiping away sweat as he laughs at Buck’s pain. “Alright, you baby.” He clamps a hand around Buck’s shoulder and gives it a gentle shake. “Let’s walk the rest.”
Buck straightens and falls into step with Eddie, silent as he works his heart back down to a manageable rate.
The running’s another thing they do. At least a couple of times a week, Eddie shows up at Buck’s apartment in running gear so they can make loops around Buck’s neighbourhood.
Buck’s used to his solo daily runs, keeping an even, casual pace, and running with Eddie is different. They start that way — even, casual — until one of them catches the other’s eye, sends a look dripping with challenge, and speeds up. They challenge each other in equal measure, but it’s usually Buck that has to stumble to a stop and catch his breath, missing his personal trainer in between movies and without Eddie’s army training. Eddie’s good-natured ribbing never lasts long.
Sometimes Buck remembers blowing Eddie a bitter kiss in a bar, remembers you sure you don’t wanna see my bite? and understands Maddie’s laughter.
“You get the press schedule, yet?” Buck asks once he’s caught his breath enough to speak without wheezing. What’s Inside You? press doesn’t start for months and months still, the movie a year out from release, but Buck has an email in his inbox from Bobby with a short list of interviews and trendy YouTube bits, tentative dates highlighted. Most of them include the note with Eddie.
“Yeah, at least a proposed one.” He slides a beaming smile in Buck’s direction. “Got any tips?”
Buck snorts. “For mister I’d like to keep my work and personal lives separate? No.”
Eddie’s smile turns teasing, challenging; it’s not altogether different from their original back and forth. They still push and pull, but the hard edges and bitterness have been filed away, leaving behind soft amusement. “What did you say back when we were filming, something about me being a fan?”
Buck laughs, shoving Eddie’s shoulder with his own as Eddie’s laughter joins in. “Shut up. Just try to make it interesting for yourself. You’re gonna hear the same questions a thousand times a day.”
Eddie nods, serious, like he’s actually paying attention to what Buck’s saying. The attention makes something itch under Buck’s skin. He’s not used to people looking to him for guidance, advice. “Well, at least you’ll be there for some of it.”
Buck ducks his head, hiding a sudden blush. “Uh, yeah. Just a couple of L.A. ones. Uh, sorry. I know it’s kind of weird that I’m so involved in the press since I’m barely in the movie and you’re the lead. I don’t want you to think I’m, like, trying to steal your thunder.”
Eddie squints at him briefly, a confused bend to his mouth. “Buck.”
That’s new, too, since the wrap party, when they said their goodbyes and Eddie said, “Have a good night, Evan,” and Buck blushed, having forgotten the way he had said actually, it’s Evan when they met. He corrected him — “Buck.” “Oh, I’ve been promoted?” “Eh, probationary period.” — and in the time since Eddie’s found a dozen ways to say Buck that really mean shut up or you’re an idiot or come on.
“I don’t think you’re trying to steal my thunder.” He’s laughing as he quotes Buck back to him, shaking his head. “Believe me, I’d have you do all the press, with me or without, if I thought Chimney or Bobby would let us get away with it.”
Buck laughs, tension leaking out of his shoulders. He’s never really been friends with someone he’s acted with before; friendly, sure. He’s played up camaraderie in interviews, talked about how the cast “felt just like family” for the soundbite, even talked to them for a few minutes at a party months later. But actual, honest-to-God friends, people he sees outside of set or press tours? Never. By the time he acted with Abby, they were already dating, and Abby bought a ticket to Ireland as soon as press ended.
“Where’d you go?” Eddie gently knocks Buck’s shoulder with his own. They’re walking close enough that he barely has to do any work to cross the distance. “You’ve got a —” he makes a circular gesture at his own face, which he’s fashioned into an exaggerated frown “— thing going on.”
Buck rolls his eyes, smiling despite himself. “Shut up. I — uh, was just thinking I should give Abby a call.”
Eddie’s expression is suddenly serious: eyebrows coming together to crease his forehead, jaw tightening along the edge of a frown. Buck doesn’t talk about Abby, and Eddie doesn’t ask, but it’s impossible for Buck to hide all of his hurt, and for Eddie to hide all of his contempt.
“Okay,” he says, finally. Buck can nearly hear everything Eddie’s forcing himself not to say. “If that’s what you want to do.”
Buck makes a sound, noncommittal. He doesn’t know what he wants, or he does but it’s not something he can ask for. He wants Abby to call him back, to come home, to send a postcard. It’s been almost three months of radio silence. And the worst part is that he understands.
“Buck.” This Buck sounds different from the last, weighing heavier in the air between them. “I know you miss her, and God knows I shouldn’t be giving anyone relationship advice —” he laughs like Buck knows a single thing about his relationship status “— but…you have to know you deserve better than this.”
Somehow, they’ve slowed to a stop, and Buck turns to face Eddie, blinking. He thinks, stupidly, that he might cry.
Maddie’s been saying the same thing in a thousand different ways for weeks, leaving her laptop around Buck’s — Abby’s — apartment open to real estate listings in the area. But Maddie’s his sister; she's spent their entire childhoods protecting Buck. Eddie’s known him for a couple of months, and they spent most of that time at each other’s throats.
Before Buck can figure out what to say, Eddie’s phone rings. His frown deepens when he sees the screen, and Buck waves at him to answer it.
“Hello? Is everything okay?” Eddie’s free hand goes to his neck, pressing fingers into the hollow of his collarbone as he listens to whoever’s on the other end. “Okay. No, that’s fine. Don’t worry about it, I’ll be right there. Okay, thank you. Love you too, bye.”
Exhaustion settles into the lines of Eddie’s face as he hangs up the call, drops his phone back into the pocket of his shorts, and sighs. “Fuck.”
“Woah, what’s going on? Was that — uh, like, a girlfriend? Is everything okay?”
Eddie blinks, meeting Buck’s eyes like he forgot he was there. “What? No, no girlfriend, it was my aunt. She has to—”
Buck raises his eyebrows, waits.
Eddie’s eyes search Buck’s face for a long, long moment like he’s wrestling with something. Finally, he breaks. “She’s watching my kid, but she has to go pick my abuela up from an appointment — we got the times confused — so I have to…um, I have to go.”
Buck’s face splits into a grin. “Holy shit, you have a kid? How old are they? I love kids.” He holds his hand out, palm up, and folds his fingers into a gimme gesture.
Eddie’s eyes squint, a confused smile tugging at his mouth. “He’s seven, Christopher. What are you doing?”
Buck fixes his face into his very best duh expression. “You’ve got pictures of him on your phone don’t you? Don’t hold out on me.” Eddie laughs, and in the space within it Buck’s face falls, remembering the context of Eddie’s phone call. “Oh, shit, nevermind. You said you have to go.”
“Yeah.” The assessing, contemplative look crosses Eddie’s face again. Buck has the sudden thought that it must be exhausting to be Eddie, constantly weighing his every action. “Listen, do you wanna come with? You don’t have to, but we were gonna watch some movies, order a pizza.”
“Yes. Obviously.” Buck bounces on his toes, grinning, and sets off toward his building at a jog. “Come on, slow poke, put that army training to use.”
When Eddie pulls his truck up to his aunt’s house, Christopher’s already waiting, leaning on crutches by the front door. A woman Buck assumes is Eddie’s aunt stands next to him, resting an affectionate hand on the top of his light curls.
The car’s barely in park before Eddie’s climbing out, taking off toward his son. Buck follows only a step behind.
“Hey, kid,” Eddie says, his smile wider than Buck’s ever seen it. He swoops Christopher up into a hug that lifts him right off his feet, tucking his head against his shoulder with a hand on the back of his head.
It’s a scene Buck’s only ever seen in films. Something behind Buck’s breastbone clenches.
Christopher laughs, delighted, as Eddie places him gently back on the ground and gestures to Buck. “Hey, Chris, this is my friend Buck. Buck, this is Christopher.”
Eddie watches Buck carefully, a hard, guarded look in his eyes. They’ve come a long way in a short time, but Buck doesn’t doubt for a second that Eddie will pluck every trace of Buck out of his life if this introduction doesn’t go well. Buck's chest warms, unspeakably grateful this kid has someone in his corner who is willing to protect him against anything.
Buck drops into a crouch in front of Christopher, elbows resting on bent knees. “Hey, buddy. Your dad says you’re planning on watching some movies today.”
Christopher nods, smiling wide. “Yeah! We’re watching all the Toy Story movies. It’s a…” His eyebrows pinch together, thinking hard. Buck’s heart leaks borrowed sunlight throughout his body.
Eddie grins, places a hand on Christopher’s shoulder. “A marathon.”
“Yeah, a Toy Story marathon.”
Buck exaggerates an excited intake of breath. “No way, I love Toy Story. But I’ve only seen the first one.”
“What?” Eddie asks, pulling his attention away from his son to send an indignant expression on Buck.
Buck shrugs. “I told you I haven’t watched a lot of movies.”
Before Eddie can interrogate Buck’s cinema knowledge anymore, which he clearly wants to, Christopher laughs. “But the second one is the best!”
“Yeah? Do you mind if I watch it with you guys?”
Christopher shifts, excited, to look up at his dad. Buck’s heart grows eight sizes, at least, pushing against the confines of his chest. “Can he?”
Eddie laughs. “Of course he can. Why don’t you go grab your stuff and we can stop for pizza on the way.”
Christopher’s already on his way through the door Eddie’s aunt is holding open, shouting okay over his shoulder. Buck laughs as he straightens out of his crouch, aiming a smile at Eddie. His cheeks are starting to ache; this is infinitely better than going home to his haunted apartment. “You’ve got a crazy cute kid, dude.”
Buck turns to Eddie’s aunt before Eddie can say anything in response, holding out a hand. “Hey, I’m Buck. It’s nice to meet you, finally.”
Eddie’s aunt slides her hand into Buck's, her grip firm as they shake. She smiles at him with a sharp, amused look in her eyes. “I know who you are. I loved Jump/Fall. I’m Pepa.”
“Pepa,” Eddie breathes out, even as Buck laughs.
“Please, Eddie. Don’t bring cute actors to my house if I’m not allowed to compliment them.”
Eddie says something like oh, my God under his breath, but it’s drowned out by Buck’s laughter. “Yeah, Eddie, let your aunt compliment me.” To Pepa he says, “Thank you, I love that one, too.”
Chris reappears in the doorway, a red and blue backpack slung over his shoulder, and immediately wraps himself around Pepa’s legs in a hug goodbye. Pepa returns it in earnest, kissing the top of his head.
When they separate Christopher grabs Eddie’s hand in his much smaller one and tugs. “Come on, we gotta show Buck Jessie.”
At Eddie’s house, a cozy bungalow so far removed from the fancy industrialism Buck’s surrounded himself with in the last few years that it takes Buck a second to adjust, Eddie sends Christopher off to wash his hands and get changed while Buck helps set the coffee table up with a box of meat lover’s. On the TV, the title screen for Toy Story loops, playing on an honest-to-God BluRay.
Buck surreptitiously glances down the hall to make sure Chris is still tucked behind a closed door. “So, his mom?”
Eddie’s jaw tenses, his shoulder rising into something almost like a shrug. “It’s…She left when I got back from the second tour, moved to California to take care of her mom. It was…probably for the best. Not her leaving Chris, but us breaking up. We talk — we didn’t for a while, but we do now. She knows I’m in L.A. but…she’s not ready to be in Christopher’s life and I’m not ready to trust her, so that’s all for now.”
“Wow.” Buck sets down a Superman branded plastic cup filled with water next to Christopher’s plate. He’s swapped out the glass Eddie tried to give him with a Moana branded plastic cup to match. Eddie had blinked, thrown, and then replaced his own glass with a Spider-Man cup. “You’re a really good dad.”
Eddie peels his attention away from where he’s carefully pouring a puddle of creamy garlic sauce onto Christopher’s plate next to the slice he’s already put out. The smile he aims at Buck is self-deprecating. “You’ve known that I’m a dad for less than two hours.”
Buck laughs, dropping onto the couch in front of his plate. “Yeah, and trust me? I know bad dads. You are not one of those.” The look in Eddie’s eyes isn’t dissimilar to the one he gets whenever Abby’s brought up. “I mean, you’re doing everything you can to protect him from your career. I told you, no one’s ever protected me like that. Maddie did everything she could, but she was just a kid, too. I’m just saying, it’s nice. He’s a lucky kid.”
Eddie ducks his head, busying himself with filling his plate and effectively avoiding Buck’s gaze. “Yeah, well. Thanks.”
Buck bumps their shoulders together. They’re sitting closer on the couch than they strictly need to, crowded near the edge of their seats to reach the coffee table easier. Christopher has a thick cushion on the floor for when he returns.
“What are you going to do with Christopher when you have press? Or when you film another movie?”
Eddie lets out a long sigh, placing his forehead into his palms. “Your guess is as good as mine. I know Pepa and my abuela can’t watch him for that long, and I can’t take him with me every time but I don’t even know where to start. He needs specific care, but my job and hours are so weird. And I don’t know how I’m meant to trust a stranger to keep this secret from the press.”
Buck bites his lip, the hamster wheel in his mind spinning. “Does Bobby know? About Chris, I mean.”
“Uh, no.”
“Eddie,” Buck laughs. “It’s Bobby. You think he doesn’t get it?”
Eddie hunches his shoulder, his smile at least having the decency to look abashed. “I know he gets it. I just. It’s hard to trust Christopher with people, even with myself.”
Warmth pools in Buck’s chest, spreads out to his extremities, at the implication that Eddie trusts him, even after their rocky start, and so soon. “You can trust Bobby. He’s another one of those rare good dads.”
Eddie’s eyes narrow. “I hope I never meet a lot of people.”
Buck’s face scrunches, mouth forming a confused line. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Don’t worry about it. Eat your food.”
A few weeks after meeting Christopher, Buck runs into a mail carrier in the hallway outside of his apartment.
The carrier checks a clipboard, smacking his gum lazily. “Evan Buckley?”
“Uh, yeah.”
A manila envelope is thrust into his hands. The carrier is gone almost before Buck can shout a thank you at his retreating back.
The envelope is, in fact, addressed to Evan Buckley. There’s no return address, but a green post-it on the front reads, Carter Anthony. See you 7/20, 2 PM. Athena.
Inside the folder is a script for something called Damned Spot, writer and director Athena Grant.
Buck’s inside his apartment and on the phone before he’s finished reading the title page.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me Athena was getting into directing,” he says into the receiver the second Bobby answers.
“Hi, Buck. I’m doing well, thank you. How are you?” Bobby’s voice is light, amused. Buck grins into the phone even as he rolls his eyes, unseen.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m great. Back to Athena directing. And writing!”
He doesn’t know Athena the way he knows Bobby or Chimney, not really, but she’s woven into the fabric of his career just as much as they are.
She had been the star in the first movie Chimney cast Buck in, a buddy cop film with a surprisingly strong critique against the police system underlying the whole thing. Buck was in a supporting role, a naive rookie that shared nearly all of his scenes with Athena, a disillusioned cop near the end of her career.
She was the most secure person Buck had ever met, and just being near her was enough to make him steady on his own feet. She looked through every bit of false bravado Buck had layered on, set him straight more times than he could count. It was Athena that got him to switch from his old agent, who was professional but didn’t seem to like Buck all that much, to Bobby.
“You know Athena. Once she got it in her head that she wanted to make a movie, she made a movie. She turned my office upside down, plotting it all out with post-its on the walls.” It’s impossible to call Bobby’s voice anything but painfully fond; Buck’s chest aches, unrelated.
“And she wants me in it?”
Buck knows Athena likes him, he does. He even knows that she respects his acting, but even as Buck’s career has gotten more serious, it’s still light-hearted. He’s still only ever an earnest romance hero or the comedic relief in a slasher. Even What’s Inside You? was a mostly exaggerated parody until he drowned.
He just can’t imagine Athena writing anything that isn’t 100% hard-hitting. Can’t imagine her writing anything that he would be good enough to act in.
Bobby makes a noise on the other side of the phone, partly frustrated, partly amused. Like he saw this coming, but he’s still going to be mad about it. “Yes, Buck. But I’d love to see you question her.”
Buck snorts. “Yeah, I’m okay.” The nerves — the sense that he doesn’t deserve the script still in his hands — don’t disappear, but he pushes them to the side for now. “What’s July 20th?”
“Your audition. She’s obviously not just giving you the role; it’s Athena. But between me and you, it’ll be hard for someone to out you.”
Buck laughs, flipping idly through the script. It’s clearly not the full thing, just the pages with the Carter Anthony character Athena assigned him. The bits he catches are exactly as hard-hitting as he expected: missing children, desperate parents, tensions breaking.
“So,” Bobby says, a lift in his tone that draws Buck’s attention, “Eddie called me.”
Buck lets the script fall closed on the kitchen island. “He did?”
He’s seen Christopher a handful of times since the first meeting, stopping by for dinners where Eddie and Christopher make it their responsibility to fill in the gaps in Buck’s cinematic childhood.
Eddie’s nervous and maybe a little paranoid about the two of them taking Christopher in public, even with Eddie’s movie still in the hands of editors and Buck’s own fame not quite at the level of being stalked by paparazzi at the zoo. But he lets them dawn silly disguises of baseball hats and sunglasses to take Christopher to the aquarium, where Buck and Christopher pour over educational pamphlets about hammerhead sharks and jellyfish while Eddie juggles the assortment of aquatic themed plushies Buck and Christopher pick out in the gift shop.
When Maddie visits his apartment after — her apartment feeling too tight, or too big, or too dark, depending on the day — and sees a stingray plushie on his couch, a print of Eddie and Buck against a sea backdrop pinned to his fridge with a penguin magnet (the picture with Chris hidden away in the drawer of his nightstand), she’s briefly misty-eyed, but says nothing. In return, Buck doesn’t say anything when her phone screen, face up on the coffee table as they pick through a selection of Chinese takeout, lights up every few minutes with a new text from Chimney.
“Yeah. He said you told him to trust me.”
Buck’s shoulders hunch, unseen in the privacy of his apartment. “Well, he needs people to trust.”
“And so did you.”
Buck remembers meeting Bobby, Athena literally pushing him through the door of Bobby’s office at the time, a bright room in a tall building downtown. Bobby had been stern, guarded, gruff; Buck had been brazen, reckless, lost. Buck can’t help but think Bobby needed someone to trust, too.
Bobby continues, “I’m glad you both found some. He said he needs more secure childcare, that he won’t take any more auditions until he figures something out. I figured you probably have some ideas.”
Buck laughs, startled — and then immediately unsurprised — that Bobby caught onto him so quickly. “Yeah, I’m working on it.”
Some odd days later, Buck opens his door to reveal Eddie, frowning at his phone in running gear. Buck hasn’t figured out if Eddie only owns three outfits or if he has a closet full of duplicates.
He looks up when Buck opens the door, pockets his phone and smiles.
“Hey, wanna head for the dog park today? That Greyhound you like might be there.”
Buck lets go of the knee-jerk response — you know her name is Halloweentown 2 — to step back, holding the door open for Eddie, who frowns. “No running today. Get in; this is an ambush.”
“An ambush?” Despite his confusion, Eddie steps into Buck’s apartment, letting Buck close the door behind him and lead him towards the living room.
Carla places her coffee on the table in front of her and rises from the couch. Eddie sends Buck one final look of abject confusion before his hardwired manners take over, stepping up to Carla with a hand held out and a polite smile in place.
“Hi, ma’am. I’m Eddie Diaz.”
Carla laughs, raising her eyebrows in Buck’s direction before shaking Eddie’s hand. “Please, call me Carla. Buck’s told me so much about you.”
“Really?” Eddie and Carla turn twin looks on Buck, who has to fight off the blush at the scrutiny.
“Carla was one of Abby’s mom’s nurses. Uh, Abby never let it get to the press, but her mom had pretty severe Alzheimer’s.”
He tries, generally, to keep Abby and Eddie as separate as he can, in his mind and his life. It’s partly the fact that, outside of Maddie, Eddie is the one thing in his life that’s never been touched by Abby’s presence; partly the fact that he’s embarrassed to reveal too much of the sticky, fleshy devotion he holds for her in the centre of his chest; partly the way Eddie’s jaw clenches when she’s brought up, the way Buck can see him swallowing the responses Maddie never does.
Still, he can’t help but draw connections between these two people so dedicated to and enveloped in their duties to their family.
He swallows against the sudden tightness in his chest, and continues, “If anyone can help you with your situation — and all I’ve said is that you could use some help — it’s Carla. She’s dealt with people in the industry for years, and she won’t say a thing. You can trust her.”
There’s something complicated in Eddie’s expression when he looks at Buck. It’s assessing, like always, but there’s something else under it, something like an exposed wire. His jaw’s a tight line.
Carla settles onto the couch again, and gestures for Eddie to do the same. Her smile is as friendly, warm and open, as ever. Buck can see Eddie bending under it. “Any questions you have, I’ve got answers.”
Eddie hesitates for only a second before he lowers himself onto the edge of Buck’s armchair, resting his elbows on his knees as he tangles his fingers together. Every line of his body is tense, but he’s sitting, and he’s looking at Carla closely as she pulls a binder out of her bag. He’s not running for the door. Buck recognizes it as the win it is.
Buck grins, swiping his keys from the table. “Okay, I’m gonna go for a run and leave you two to it.” Eddie shoots him a starkly grateful look; Buck knows him, at this point, well enough to know he’d like his audience to be as small as possible when he’s forced to admit he needs help.
Buck slips out of the door, jogs to the dog park — he’s forgotten how quiet it is, running alone — and spends twenty minutes playing with Halloweentown 2 while her college-aged owner indulges them.
Eddie’s gone by the time Buck gets back, on his way to his aunt’s to talk to her and Chris about what Carla’s shared, and Carla wraps him into the second hug of the day. “You’re doing really good by him, Buck.”
Buck presses the edge of his chin against the top of Carla’s head for a second before they pull away. He has a sticky, inexplicable fear that Eddie can leave at any second, disappear with Chris in tow to never be seen or heard from again, unless Buck does something. He pushes the thought away.
“Have you, uh.” He clears his throat, looks away from Carla’s knowing gaze. “Have you heard from Abby lately?”
Carla’s silent for a moment, and when Buck drags his eyes back to her, her expression is soft, and a little sad. She presses a gentle hand against Buck’s cheek; Buck has the sudden urge to cry.
“Go easy on her. She’s doing what’s best for her after everything she’s been through.”
Buck’s jaw is clenched tight when he gives a short nod, Carla’s hand on his cheek staying in place. He has never, not even for a second, stopped understanding Abby’s decision, her need to escape this city and the memory of her mother, the way they both took pieces from her until there was nothing left. It only doubles the ache in his chest.
Carla tilts her head. “But you have to do what’s best for you, too.”
Buck swallows hard and says nothing. He has no idea what’s best for him.
Carla pulls him into one last hug, makes him promise to call more, and tells him to buy more groceries before she lets herself out.
Buck stands exactly where she left him for a long moment before he makes himself move. He heads to the kitchen, pulling his phone out to start on a grocery order.
On the fridge, next to the picture from the aquarium, is a yellow post-it note: Thank you. Eddie.
“I don’t know what it is,” Maddie says, referring to her current apartment as the real estate agent she’s hired leaves them to walk around a possible replacement. “It’s just. Not right.” She rubs a restless hand up and down the length of her bicep.
She’s spent more and more time crashing on Buck’s bed, alternating lunches and dinners between Buck and Chimney, anything to get out of her apartment. It was, Buck knows, a rushed decision to get the apartment in the first place. She hadn’t wanted to take up space in Buck’s apartment, not when Buck was insistent Abby would be back soon, and she was searching for the independence she was never allowed.
“I think,” she says, when Buck says nothing, letting her work through whatever’s going on in her head. It’s a trick he’s learned from Eddie, who will sometimes just stare at Buck in silence when Buck’s battling something until he cracks and spills what he really wants to say. “I think that it’s too much like the London apartment. Too nice and impersonal. Mom and Dad would have called it new money,” she laughs as she says it, voice tilting in a poor imitation of their mother’s highbrow inflection. “I need something different, something warm and lived in.”
Buck, reflexively, thinks of Eddie’s house: the plushy couch, the toys pushed into the corners of the room, the framed pictures along the walls. “I don’t know if you can rent something already lived in,” Buck comments, tone deliberately light and teasing. “You might have to do that yourself.”
Maddie rolls her eyes, circling the open concept, living room/dining room/kitchen space until she makes it to the marble kitchen island. She runs her hands along the top. “Maybe something less modern? And it doesn’t have to be so big, does it? It’s just me. And maybe a cat.”
“A cat?” Buck laughs, surprised, as he stops on the other side of the island, leaning the palms of his hands on it.
“Yeah, a cat. Why not? I’ve never had a pet before. Obviously Mom and Dad didn’t like them, and neither did —”
Buck’s stomach clenches, suddenly, with a fierce stab of anger. He remembers opening the door of Abby's apartment to find Maddie waiting on the other side after three years locked away in London without any contact, only ever seeing her in London newspapers he scoured the internet for, collecting reviews for her newest West End play like the origami hearts she used to make for him.
He remembers the first time she broke down, sitting on his closed toilet seat while he shaved, laughing about something until suddenly she was sobbing, spilling out only the broadest strokes of her marriage, of the abuse, made worse by working so close together: her acting out his plays on stage six nights a week, every forgotten or misspoken line taken as a slight against him.
The news of the divorce had been in the tabloids for a few days at that point, her now-ex-husband piling the news outlets with hollow soundbites about always having love for her that made something sour pool in Buck’s gut.
A week later, Maddie went public about what he had done to her, complete with a restraining order. Doug continued to insist on his innocence, dismissing Maddie’s accusations as hysterical and misinformed, but he stayed in London.
Buck hates the man with an intensity that makes his teeth ache.
“Anyway," Maddie says, tone overly bright and cheery. "I always thought I’d get a cat one day.”
Buck forces a smile around his anger and makes a note to look into cat rescues in the area. “Well, I think it’s a great idea. What does Chimney think?”
Maddie blinks, looking up from the marble to frown. “What makes you think I’ve talked to Chimney about getting a cat?” Buck says nothing, levelling expectant eyebrows at her. She sighs. “Fine. He said it’s a good idea, too.”
Buck’s laugh echoes around the empty apartment.
Maddie rolls her eyes, but she’s laughing, too. When her gaze makes its way back to Buck, it’s got the distinct tint of big-sister-meddling. Buck’s shoulders are already hunching when she says, “You know, this apartment isn’t for me, but it might be good for you.”
“Maddie.” His instincts are saying flight, pushing him to put as much distance between him and his conversation as possible, but he keeps his feet planted where they are and says, as steady as he can manage, “She’s coming back.”
She raises her hands in surrender, taking a small step away from the island. “Maybe she is,” she says, but Buck doesn’t think she believes it, “but if she doesn’t…I just think you’d be happier, in a place that was fully yours. Maybe you’d finally hang up that whiteboard.”
Buck’s shoulders twitch, tensing. “And if — when she comes back and I’m gone?”
Maddie’s mouth is twisted in a frown, eyes sad, like when she used to clean his scraped knees and elbows as a kid, lecturing him on being more careful. “Maybe you deserve to have someone chase after you for a change.”
A lump rises quite suddenly in his throat, his jaw clenching around it. Before he can say anything, the real estate agent makes her return, immediately jumping into the details for the next apartment.
The day continues.
During Carla’s first official day taking care of Christopher, Eddie and Buck take advantage of the freedom to go on a longer run.
Their runs, plus Buck’s return to training in preparation for A Touch of Someone Else press, have strengthened Buck’s stamina. When he’s finally forced to slow to a walk, a mile out from Buck’s apartment, Eddie falls into step next to him without any ribbing.
The silence is easy. With Eddie more than anyone else in his life, Buck doesn't feel the need to fill every silence. But Buck can see the tense lines of Eddie’s body, the worry over Christopher pouring off of him in waves. Hardly a full minute goes by without Eddie pulling his phone from his pocket, checking the screen compulsively.
It’s Buck’s desire to wipe the worry away that makes him say, “I think I’m gonna move. Out of Abby’s apartment, I mean.”
Predictably, it drags Eddie’s attention away from his — blank — phone screen to raise a set of surprised eyebrows at Buck. “Oh. Did something happen?”
Buck’s shoulders twitch in an approximation of a shrug. “Nothing major. But, it’s been almost four months since I heard from her. I still...love her and I don’t...I don’t even resent her for any of this, which I know you think is crazy, but you didn’t know her. Her entire life was about her mom — her mom’s fame, her legacy, and then her illness — and when she passed...I get why she left. I can’t fault her for any of it. But people keep telling me I deserve more, and I’m working on believing them.”
Eddie nods, keeping his eyes on Buck for a long, long moment, even as they continue down the street toward Buck’s building. Finally, he says, “I don’t think it’s crazy. That you still love her, or that you’re still trying. It’s...you do deserve more but, you’ve got this crazy big heart. I don’t think any of us want that to change.” He reaches over, through the short distance between them, to clasp a hand around Buck’s shoulder, fingers pressing briefly but firmly into the space beneath his collarbone.
“Besides,” he adds, taking his hand back, “I get what it’s like to be left. You don’t stop loving someone just because they leave.”
Buck blinks, sending a startled look at the side of Eddie’s head as he looks resolutely forward. While Buck’s mentioned Abby more — or at least mentioned his past with Abby more, the things she taught him and the places they visited — Eddie’s kept a tight lid on his mysterious ex. “Do you still love her? Christopher’s mom?”
Eddie doesn’t look at him when he says, after a long pause, “I don’t know. I try not to think about it.”
It’s such an Eddie answer that Buck almost laughs. He swallows the noise down. “Well, how do you feel about not thinking about women and helping me look for a new place to live?”
Eddie’s laugh is a now-familiar boom, sounding, like always, as if he’s been caught off guard. “Yeah, alright, Trouble. Sounds good.”
In the days that follow, Maddie makes him a colour-coded spreadsheet of listings in the area, ranked by price, distance to Bobby and Athena, distance to the apartment Maddie herself has recently put in an application for, and distance to Eddie’s house.
Her criticisms of Abby get carefully packed away. Instead, she stops by often, always with comfort foods and a list of romantic comedies they watched as kids so they can point out how awkward some scenes must have been to film, and then pretend they’re not both crying during the third act conflict.
Bobby teaches him how to make pierogies from scratch. Athena pretends he’s not about to audition for her movie. Chimney bullies him for listening to Eddie’s movie recommendations and not his. Hen mails him a box of Swedish chocolate. Eddie invites Buck over — or brings Christopher to his apartment — nearly every day, always framing it like it’s Buck doing a favour for him.
He sends a letter to Abby’s agent and clears his call log. The sting lessens.
And he auditions for Athena’s movie.
It’s a tough audition — possibly the toughest he’s ever done. The material is dense, visceral, and irrevocably about pain in a way that none of his movies have been to this point. He meets the role in the middle, delivers lines about his child being his heart walking around outside of his body, and thinks about Eddie’s devotion to Christopher, about his own adoration for the kid that grows with every passing day.
He feels wrung out, exhausted, when the audition finishes. Athena thanks him for his time, and he tries not to convince himself her professional distance means rejection.
But days later he still hasn’t heard from her, and it’s getting harder to hold out hope.
Press has started for A Touch of Someone Else, the Hulu release only a couple of weeks away. There’s not a lot scheduled — it’s a pretty small film, all things considered — but it’s the first he’s done since Abby left, since the news broke of their official break up, Buck’s publicist sending through a generic quote about Buck’s respect for Abby and Abby's publicist declining to comment.
He flips his phone over in his hands as he sits on the set of an interview. People are milling about around him; the crew preparing cameras and lights and audio, his co-star — Becca, who is kind but strictly professional — still having her hair and makeup retouched, their interviewer missing for now. It’s the third interview of the day, Buck’s cheeks starting to ache from the perma-smile he’s been wearing.
His phone’s ringer is silenced because they’re on set and he’s a professional, so the only reason he knows when it rings is that he’s already staring at it. Athena’s photo fills the screen, taken during that buddy-cop movie they did, Athena frowning in her police uniform.
He gestures with his phone in the direction of his publicist, standing off to the side, who frowns but waves him off. He swipes at his screen to answer as he picks his way through the commotion of the set, searching for a door that leads to a quiet hallway.
“Hi, Athena,” he says, free hand turning a knob. He closes the door behind him; silence falls.
“Hi, Buckaroo. I know you’ve got a bunch of press today, so I won’t keep you long.” Buck holds his breath. “Sorry, but you’re not good enough for my movie,” doesn’t take that long, does it? “Welcome to the team, kid.”
The breath leaves Buck in a rush. “Holy shit, seriously?”
Athena laughs, followed by Bobby's deeper echo. “Yes, seriously. Does this seem like something I’d joke about?”
“No, obviously not, I just — wow, thank you, Athena.”
“Don’t thank me, Buck. Just don’t fuck up my movie.” In the background, Bobby says, “Athena!” and Athena’s laugh fills the line again. “I wouldn’t hire you if I didn’t believe in you. Go do your press before someone complains to Bobby.”
Buck spills more gratitude into the call between their goodbyes until Athena hangs up.
He’s quick to send a text (I GOT IT!!!!) to Eddie, who knows only that Buck had an audition he was nervous about, the details protected under threat of death by Athena’s lawyers.
Less than a minute later, Eddie responds with a picture of Christopher mid-cheer that Buck immediately saves to his camera roll. The text that accompanies it says Never doubted you.
And Buck takes a minute, outside in the empty hall, to breathe.
He hadn’t been lying to that reporter at the What’s Inside You? wrap party; he’s never been picky about the movies he does. Not only because he couldn’t afford to be, but because he’s never cared much about critical reception or prestige.
He got into acting because he had a roommate that did work as an extra on the side and gave Buck the number of a casting agency that liked his look. He stayed with acting — fell in love with acting — because when he was a kid sometimes the only good part of his week was when he and Maddie would sneak away to watch movies, escaping into something else for an hour and a half. They weren’t watching Oscar nominees; they were watching rom-coms and teen comedies. If Buck’s escapism is doubled on the other side of the camera, and if it provides some lost kid the same thing movies gave him as a kid, then he doesn’t care if they’re high art.
Still. Athena’s script is good — it’s high art — and hard and dark and like nothing Buck has ever done, and he wants it so bad he aches, whether he deserves it or not.
Never doubted you.
He pockets his phone; heads back into the interview.
Becca and the interviewer are in their seats, trading introductions when Buck slides back onto set, shedding a quick apology.
“No worries,” the interviewer says, turning to Buck with a professional smile. Her red hair is in loose waves around her shoulders.
It takes Buck a second to place her, and when he does — I thought you and Abby had broken up — his stomach twists briefly. He remembers Eddie’s rare show of anger.
Before Taylor can say anything, Buck thrusts a hand in the space between them. “Hey, I’m Evan Buckley.”
Taylor’s eyebrows twitch, but she accepts the hand easily. “Nice to meet you. I’m Taylor Kelly.”
The interview, at first, is almost exactly like the other two interviews they’ve done that day. Buck smiles and delivers his answers like he's reading off a script: I loved working with Becca; Romances are my favourite things to film; I’d do a superhero movie if someone asked, but it’s not really a goal.
And then Taylor shuffles the Starz New branded flashcards in her lap, smiles like she wants to laugh, and says to Buck, “A few months ago, the word on the street was you and Eddie Diaz were at each other’s throats. Is that still the case? Should we be looking for tension when we watch What’s Inside You? less than a year from now?”
Buck almost laughs. Starting a fight with Eddie in a club feels like another lifetime. He wants to pull out his phone and show the camera the never-ending scroll of texts they’ve accumulated, and he might, if not for the way Christopher is so present, ingrained in their conversations and their friendship.
He has a sudden flare of protectiveness wash over him, the inexplicable urge to protect even his thoughts of Christopher from this room of producers and cameras and Taylor Kelly. He thinks he finally understands Eddie’s cold anger the night of the wrap party.
He grins, charismatic. “Not at all. We worked all of that out.” He waves a dismissive hand through the air. “In fact, and he’s probably fine with me sharing this, but he’s told me he’s my biggest fan.”
(Days later, when the interview gets posted online and the question about Eddie gets pulled and shared all over Twitter, Eddie will text him, Seriously? I’m your biggest fan? and Buck will respond, ugh i just love getting to know my fans <3 along with a picture of a Freshii’s napkin he’s signed.)
Taylor’s smile twitches against a laugh, but she only says, “That’s so nice to hear,” and moves on to a question for Becca about moving on from her TV teen drama to the big screen.
The rest of the interview passes with little fanfare, Buck going through the motions even as he counts down the minutes. After this, an hour lunch break before they get carted off to film a couple of quirky YouTube interview segments. Buck’s already pulling up his phone to search for food in the area by the time he makes it to the same hallway from before, significantly less quiet now as his and Becca’s people pour out.
He waves his publicist to go on without him, eyes snagging on a series of mail notifications with Damned Spot’s code name, On Mortal Thoughts, in the subject. The hallway empties around him as he scrolls through them, skimming details about his contract and filming schedules and more NDAs. The aching want slides back into his veins. Alongside it: a thick sludge of sticky doubt.
“Evan.”
Buck glances up from his phone — the screen now black — and slides it into his pocket as he spots Taylor, her arms folded across her chest.
She smiles once she earns his attention; there’s a distinct difference between this one and the one she wore as the interviewer, less professional kindness and more silky interest. “No hard feelings, right?”
Buck laughs, eyebrows pinching as he aims a mostly confused smile in her direction. “Did you forget the part were you snuck into my wrap party, tried to hit on me, and then immediately tried to ply me for information about my relationship?”
Taylor scoffs, eyes rolling to the right. “Surely you know what a job is.”
“Did they start including spy work in the job description for celebrity news reporters?”
“I would hardly call sneaking into a party ‘spy work.’ Besides, you didn’t end up giving me any information so, no harm no foul.”
“No harm no foul?” he says, smiling. Even with the pang of Abby in the back of his head, he’s missed flirting. This, he has no doubt he can do. This might be the thing he does best.
Taylor takes a step closer, wrapping long fingers tipped with forest green nails around his bare forearm. A single eyebrow raises. “Would you like there to be a foul?”
Buck tilts his head, grin widening. It’s nice, like Maddie said, for someone to chase him. “You do this with every cute actor that walks through your studio?”
“Does it matter?”
It turns out that it doesn’t.
She pats his bicep when she’s finished pulling her dress back down, says, “Thank you, that was fun,” and exits the storage closet she brought them to.
Buck says, “Bye,” to an empty room and doesn’t feel anything at all.
None of the furniture in Abby’s apartment is his. It’s not really Abby’s either; she rented the place fully furnished when her mom got sick.
It amounts to an incredibly easy packing experience: just clothes, documents, his whiteboard, his pile of keepsakes. Really, it’s only slightly more stuff than he had when he was in a different city doing a different job every couple of months. He's not sure how to feel about that, so he deliberately doesn’t think about it at all.
Still, between Maddie and Eddie’s badgering, he has the important pieces ordered online, timed to arrive at his new apartment the day he moves in. When Buck’s mouse hovers over options for assembly, Eddie, sitting next to him on the couch debating the qualities of walnut versus oak, scoffs at the prices.
“Nearly two hundred dollars?” He says, shaking his head. “The bed frame’s already fifteen hundred. We can build a bed frame for free.”
So, it's Eddie's fault that they find themselves sitting on the floor of his lofted bedroom, surrounded by the pieces of his (walnut) bed frame. Eddie’s sorted them into neat piles, but that’s as far as they’ve gotten.
Maddie sits with her back against the railing that overlooks the rest of the apartment, the instructions for the bed in her lap and a frown creasing her eyebrows. “The pieces are lettered and numbered for some reason. The screws are just named after colours?” She shakes her head, flipping through the instructions like it’ll start to make sense the further she gets. “Why didn’t you just pay someone to do this?”
“I don’t know.” Buck turns to Eddie accusingly, his eyebrows high on his forehead. “Why didn’t I?”
Eddie glares, a piece of wood in either hand that look identical except for the fact one has two pre-drilled holes and the other has three. “It was two hundred dollars.”
“I’m rich!”
“Why would you say that to me?”
Maddie laughs, nearly drowning out the sound of the doorbell ringing. Buck, trapped in the centre of what might hopefully become his bed frame, gives Maddie an imploring look, who rolls her eyes but dutifully climbs to her feet and down the stairs.
Eddie frowns at the wood in his hands, sighs, and places them down in front of him among half a dozen nearly identical pieces.
Buck blurts out, “I slept with Taylor.” He doesn’t know what compels him to say it, only that he’s been trying to for a week with little success.
Buck's not sure he and Eddie have gone a full day without talking since they became friends for real, but they almost never talk about women, and even when they do it’s exclusively about their exes — Abby, the email from her agent in his inbox letting him know she passed the letter along; Shannon, her monthly mono-syllabic texts in response to the Christopher updates Eddie sends along that Eddie pretends don’t frustrate him. He doesn’t have to tell Eddie about Taylor.
But he got an email that morning with the final draft of the interview for approval. At the 2-minute mark: that question about Eddie and Buck’s feud, Buck’s biggest fan quip. Eddie’s going to see it, he knows, and something about not telling him about what happened after feels too much like lying.
Eddie’s attention snaps up, eyebrows pinched towards the centre of his face. “Who?”
“Taylor Kelly. The, uh, the reporter from the wrap party.” Eddie’s eyebrows jump up, the line of his jaw tensing. Buck’s quick to continue, “She interviewed me and Becca during the press we did last week. And then after — well.” He shrugs, remembering the cramped closet, Taylor hiking her dress up, producing a condom from somewhere before turning her back to him and resting her hands on a shelf full of audio equipment.
A blush rises up his neck. A year and a half ago everyone would have known the dirty details before the day was over. Now, he mostly wants to forget about it.
“Huh.” Eddie’s expression is considering, eyes pinging around Buck’s face. “So you’re...ready to move on from Abby?”
Buck’s breath leaves him in a rush. He can hear Maddie downstairs, rifling through the mess of bags on his kitchen counter to find paper plates. He thinks about the way she smiles whenever someone mentions Chimney.
Taylor had been fun, and easy, and uncomplicated. Buck had still walked away hollow, skin too tight.
“I don’t think so. Or, maybe I am but...You didn’t know me before I started dating Abby — I know Chimney’s made jokes about it — but I liked to sleep around. Like, a lot. And then I did Jump/Fall and it was my first real success and I really slept around. I was just talking to Abby then, we were friends, but then we weren’t and I...I was so in love with her. I loved having someone to come home to and someone who really knew me. So, I don’t know…I guess I just don’t want to go back to sleeping around.”
Eddie nods, mouth a flat line as he listens. His attention is heavy, but not uncomfortable. “And you think Taylor just wanted to sleep with you? That she wouldn’t want to do the relationship thing?”
Buck snorts. “Oh, she definitely doesn’t want a relationship.” He narrows his eyes at Eddie and tosses the bag of screws in his direction. “Shouldn’t you be discouraging me from her? You hated her when you met her.”
Eddie laughs, a short exhale of breath. “Well, yeah. She sucks. But I can pretend to like her if you do. My parents never let me or Shannon forget how much they hated her and it was exhausting, so.” He shrugs. “If you want her in your life, I’m not gonna make it hard for you. Besides, if we have to Maddie and I will just bitch about her to each other.”
Buck grins, warmed by the thought of Maddie and Eddie bonding over their shared protectiveness.
“Well, I don’t think we have to worry about Taylor being in my life, so don’t strain yourself.”
Eddie’s snort is drowned out by Maddie’s scream.
Buck's heart drops to the floor of his stomach with a speed that leaves him instantly nauseous. Buck and Eddie share identical panicked looks as they jump to their feet, leaping over scattered furniture pieces to sprint down the stairs two, three at a time. They stumble to a stop at the edge of Buck’s kitchen, slamming into the kitchen island. On the other side, Maddie’s frozen, staring wide-eyed at the phone in her hands.
“What?” Buck’s heart is thumping, denting the inside of his ribs. “What happened? Is everything okay? Is it —”
Maddie glances up, and she’s grinning, the curve of her mouth changing her entire face. Eddie slumps next to Buck, the tension leaving him like air out of a balloon; Buck relaxes only the set of his shoulders, unsure.
“I didn’t tell anyone because — well, I didn’t think anything would come of it, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed when it didn’t but — but I auditioned for this movie — I don’t think I’m allowed to say — and I got it! I got it! A role that has nothing to do with him.” There are tears in the corner of Maddie’s bright eyes, even as she claps her hands together, phone caught in the middle, literally bouncing on her feet.
“Holy shit,” Buck says, rounding the island to sweep her into a hug.
She laughs into his shoulder, her feet lifting off of the floor for a second before he sets her down. She spares a second to wipe the palm of her hand against her cheek before Eddie’s stepping in for a hug of his own, pouring congratulations into her hair. Buck feels fit to burst, filled to the brim with happiness for his sister, happiness for himself for having his sister and his best friend happy and safe and within reach.
“Oh, gosh,” Maddie says when she steps out of Eddie’s hug, her hands floating, restless, mid-air. “I have to call Howie and let him know.” She’s already tapping away at her phone screen as she walks away, Buck and Eddie forgotten.
Eddie turns to Buck with raised eyebrows and mouths, Howie? Buck’s laughter echoes through the apartment.
“I just think she’s been gone long enough,” Chimney says as he empties the last bag of takeout and sets their food on Maddie’s coffee table.
Her new apartment is small, well-lit, filled with soft furniture and warm area rugs. It’s older, with floorboards that creak and a water tank that needs three minutes and some coaxing before the shower runs hot, but her love for it etches itself in every corner.
She’s sitting with her feet tucked under her on the couch next to Chim, a fuzzy burgundy blanket wrapped around her shoulders and pooling in her lap. She passes Chimney her plate and he wordlessly fills with a bit of everything. With some effort, Buck keeps his comments to himself.
“She’s only been gone for like three months,” Buck says, filling his own plate. By himself.
“And I think that’s long enough!”
Maddie laughs, a sound like a bell, as Buck rolls his eyes.
Hen’s been abroad with Karen and Denny, mostly in Sweden but occasionally branching out to the bordering countries according to weekly emails she addresses to Buck, Chimney, Athena, Bobby, and — surprisingly, since Buck’s only aware of one interaction between the two of them — Eddie. The trip was Karen’s doing, the result of research for a top-secret film she’s working on, the details hidden even from Hen, who laments at length in her emails about the secrecy. Chimney replies all — much to Athena’s annoyance — with overly dramatic laments of his own, dramatizing Hen’s absence like a Victorian love letter.
“We were gone for four months to shoot Playing Dead,” Buck reminds him. The buddy-cop black comedy with Athena had been cursed, Chimney swears to this day. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, turning the three-month shooting schedule into a haggard four.
Chimney makes a dismissive sound, handing Maddie her plate. “That’s different; we were in New York. The time difference from here to Sweden is eight hours.”
Maddie laughs, shifting until she can balance her plate on her knees. “I think it’s cute how codependent you two are.”
Chimney glances at her for only a second before he’s ducking his head to hide his blushing grin. Buck thinks about banging his head on the table, just to see if they’d notice.
“Besides,” Maddie says, bringing her glass of wine briefly to her mouth, “we’ll get to make fun of Buck when Eddie has to leave to film something.”
Chimney laughs. Buck lowers his plate to send Maddie the full force of his betrayed look. “Eddie’s not—What’s that supposed to mean?”
Maddie sets her best I’m your big sister and I know every embarrassing thought you’ve had before you’ve even had it look on him. “When was the last time you saw Eddie?”
Buck narrows his eyes, knowing he’s walking into a trap even as he says, “This morning.”
“And the last time before that?”
Buck’s silent for a moment. “The…night before. I crashed on his couch.”
Maddie raises her eyebrows: checkmate. Chimney laughs again, a booming sound that fills Maddie’s apartment.
He almost says Christopher wanted pancakes! but he bites it back at the last second. He won’t betray Eddie’s trust, won’t reveal Christopher to anyone, not even to Maddie. Instead, he laughs with them, rolling his eyes.
On the coffee table, surrounded by take-out containers, his phone lights up and a candid picture of Eddie frowning at a Batman Lego set fills the screen as if summoned by their conversation. It sets Maddie and Chimney off into another round of uproarious laughter.
Buck swipes at the screen to answer, tapping the speaker on. “Hey, Eddie. You’re on speaker so you can defend me against Maddie and Chim’s bullying.”
“Drama queen,” Chimney accuses as Maddie calls a cheerful, “Hi, Eddie!”
Eddie laughs, muffled through the phone. “Hey Maddie, Chim. I’m guessing none of you have seen the news.”
Buck, Maddie, and Chim share a confused look. “Uh, no?” Buck answers.
Eddie clears his throat and recites, “Maddie Buckley leaves the stage behind to join her brother Evan Buckley in Athena Grant’s directorial debut, Damned Spot.”
“What?” Buck and Maddie say as one, trading wide-eyed looks of surprise.
“That’s the part you got?” Buck asks over Chimney and Eddie’s laughter.
“Athena didn’t say anything,” Maddie says, voice breathy with her shock.
To Eddie, Buck asks, “When did that get posted? I can’t believe Athena didn’t mention anything to us.”
“She probably thought you two would tell each other,” Chimney points out. Maddie waves a frantic hand at him dismissively.
“An hour ago,” Eddie answers. “That’s just one of a dozen headlines. Most are about Athena directing, obviously.”
Buck smirks. “An hour ago? Aw,” he coos, “my biggest fan.”
Chimney groans; Maddie looks pleadingly upwards. Buck is entirely unsympathetic.
“Yeah, laugh it up,” Eddie says, and Buck can picture his eye roll perfectly. “Now’s probably a good time to tell you that Athena cast me, too.” Before Buck can react Eddie continues, “I’m Maddie’s husband.”
Chimney laughs until he cries.
News of Eddie’s casting breaks a week later, and the tabloids immediately question whether or not Maddie, newly single, and Eddie, presumed single, will fall victim to a showmance and, if so, whether or not Buck and Eddie’s feud will make a return. Buck reads the most outrageous headlines out loud to Eddie, tone mocking, interrupting his own readings to call the reporters idiots. Eddie only laughs, brushing them all off.
“How have we switched places?” Buck demands. “You’re supposed to welcome me to the dark, press-hating side, not abandon me here.”
“Buck,” Eddie says. This one means stop thinking so much. “Do you really think there’s any chance of me and Maddie happening? And if there was — which there isn’t — that, what, you’d just be overcome by your need to defend Maddie’s honour?”
Buck glares, bottom lip a millimetre away from a full-blown pout. “No, obviously not; that’s what’s so annoying. Where are they getting any of this from? They don’t even know you’re single, they’re just assuming. And just because Maddie’s single she has to hook up with the first co-star she has? And I’m such an asshole that I think I have some right to decide who Maddie does or doesn’t see?”
Or that our friendship is so fragile, superficial, that you kissing my sister would be enough to break it? The last bit feels too much like showing his hand, although he’s not sure what that hand is; he swallows it down.
Eddie’s smile is soft, indulgent. He sets a beer in front of Buck, who’s sitting at Eddie’s kitchen table fuming at the article on his phone. Maddie Buckley and Eddie Diaz Caught Getting Cozy Ahead of Damned Spot Filming. Its point of reference is a picture of Eddie and Maddie leaving the production studio, heads ducked together, Maddie laughing and Eddie smiling. The picture is out of focus, taken from afar and posted on Twitter before the tabloids found it.
Eddie drops into the seat across from him with his own beer. Christopher’s tucked in, asleep after a long day of assisting Buck and Eddie as they fixed a wobbly step on Abuela’s back porch.
“People in the press have been making crazy leaps of logic about you for years. What about this one is getting to you so bad?”
Part of it is that even approaching the thought of Maddie and Eddie, even seeing it in his peripheral as his brain dodges it, makes something in Buck’s stomach twist into sticky knots. He wants to DM every reporter that’s written about it to tell them how impossible it is so they’ll stop writing about it where he can see it, so he can stop being confronted by the sticky-wrong-itchy nameless feelings that crawl under his skin.
The other part is: “I guess until now it’s always just been about me. I don’t care what people say about me, but Maddie — and you — I just can’t stand the way they talk about you.”
Eddie tilts his head, eyes soft, mouth a gentle curve. Buck remembers telling him I guess I’ve never had someone I’ve loved enough to protect like that.
He clears his throat. “And. And it’s annoying that they’re all focusing so much on some fake romance between you and Maddie, and not the movie itself, or how big this is for Athena.”
Eddie tilts his beer at Buck in agreement. “Well, maybe they’ll change gears when filming starts.”
They don’t.
The set’s more protected than any set Buck’s ever been on, but people still catch photos of Maddie and Eddie talking by their trailers and arriving to set together. The headlines never mention it, but nearly every photo includes Buck: when someone grabs a picture of Maddie and Eddie mid-laugh outside of Eddie’s trailer, Eddie has his hand on Buck’s shoulder; when someone else takes a picture of Maddie and Eddie arriving on set, they’re climbing out of Buck’s Jeep, Eddie handing Buck his bag.
Maddie and Eddie find it hilarious and make exaggerated, jokey kissy faces at each other whenever someone comes across another tweet speculating about their relationship. Eddie’s Twitter — an account that only got made when his publicist emailed Buck begging him to talk to Eddie about it — is perpetually untouched, but they huddle together in between takes as Maddie likes tweets speculating against and for their relationship in equal measure just to confuse people.
Buck sends every headline to Chimney, his only ally, with lines of angry emojis. Chimney responds with laughing-crying emojis.
And as much as the Maddie-Eddie press drives him up the wall, it's at least a distraction.
Filming is tough. Tougher, even, than Buck anticipated. The scenes are hard — emotional, draining, Buck and Eddie screaming themselves hoarse at each other, or by themselves in empty rooms, Maddie in tears more often than not, the tensions thick enough to choke — and Athena is a characteristically stringent director, having them repeat scenes again and again until they’re perfect.
Buck worries himself sick before scenes, runs himself ragged to pull the best performance he can out of the very core of himself. He’s exhausted by the time Athena calls cut on his last scene of the day, wrung out and physically aching.
Technically, he can collapse in his trailer, nap until Eddie and Maddie are done for the night so he can drive them home and spend the rest of the night staring at his ceiling until exhaustion wins out over his buzzing brain. Instead, he slumps in the director’s chair with his name on the front, a white styrofoam cup filled with coffee warm between his palms, and watches Eddie and Maddie drag themselves through the day’s final scene.
They’re screaming at each other from either side of a bed, Eddie in only a loose-fitting pair of sweats, Maddie only in an oversized UCLA t-shirt that falls to her knees. Eddie has a fine smattering of dark facial hair, a purple blotch of makeup bruising over his left eye. Maddie’s hair and makeup are deliberately messy, rushed, like she’s holding onto normalcy and failing. She has a pillow clutched tightly to her chest.
Their child has been missing for two weeks. In the scene before this, Eddie and Buck look through the surrounding forest, their formerly solid friendship rapidly falling to pieces as they blame each other for their children’s disappearance. It ends with Buck throwing a punch, Eddie tackling him to the forest floor, wrestling until the town’s fumbling Sheriff pulls them apart.
They haven’t filmed it yet; the thought of it makes Buck's skin itch.
A camera on a rig circles Eddie and Maddie as their fight escalates, coming to an abrupt stop over Maddie’s shoulder as Eddie half-turns and slams the flat of his palm against the bedroom wall. The sound is sudden, loud in the otherwise silence of the set, but Buck can already envision the way it’ll be amplified, cutting through the score, in post-production. Buck can see on the monitor the way the camera catches Maddie’s flinch, out of focus. Buck doesn’t think it’s in the script.
“Dammit, Nora,” Eddie shouts, shoulders tense, voice rough. Buck’s stomach clenches; Eddie’s still there, like he always is, in the frustrated line of his shoulders and the hard, flat look in his eyes, but there’s enough missing, swallowed up in this broken character, that Buck inexplicably misses him. “What do you want from me?”
There’s a brief pause while the rigged camera sets up behind Eddie’s shoulder to capture Maddie's reaction. Eddie and Maddie don’t move, hardly breathe. The cameraman gestures; Athena calls filming back to action.
Maddie glares and throws the pillow in her arms onto the bed in a sharp movement. “More than this,” she snaps, the sharpest Buck's ever heard her, and then walks out of frame.
“Cut.”
Neither Maddie nor Eddie move, brittle tension still in every line of their bodies. Buck’s fingers twitch against the urge to reach for them.
“Um, again?” Maddie says, turning to Athena.
Athena looks away from the monitor to send a smile in Maddie’s direction. “No, that’s the one.”
Maddie’s shoulders slump like a marionette with the strings cut. Eddie lets out a long breath, takes a step to the left and drags Maddie into a quick, hard hug. Buck’s on his feet and approaching them before he's made the conscious decision to.
Eddie’s saying something into Maddie’s hair when Buck makes it to them, but he lets go when he sees Buck. Maddie turns, accepting the hug Buck forces onto her before she steps away. Her hands don’t shake when she pushes her hair out of her face, but Buck knows it’s a close call.
“I’m going to call Chimney,” she says, placing a soft hand on Buck’s forearm as she passes. “You two can go ahead; Chim will pick me up.”
Buck nods and watches her go. It’s been a rough day, so he doesn’t make any comments about whatever’s going on with her and Chimney.
With Maddie out of sight, the line of Eddie’s back relaxes, a hand reaching up to rub his knuckles in the corner of his eye like he was holding back his exhaustion for Maddie’s sake. The crew is checking the set, putting things away, and getting ready to leave for the night. It’s nearly 4 AM. Buck’s too tired to think.
He nudges Eddie’s bare ankle with the toe of his sneaker. Eddie’s head lifts and meets Buck’s eye with a tired look of his own. Buck wills his mouth into a soft, tired smile. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They make quick work of saying their goodbyes to the crew, to Athena, stopping by Eddie’s trailer only long enough for Eddie to change. The drive to Eddie’s house is completely silent, the roads not empty — never empty in L.A. — but quieter than usual in a way that makes Buck hesitant to speak, even to whisper.
In Eddie’s driveway, they sit, silent, for a minute longer. Eddie’s looking down at his hands, where his fingers are fidgeting slowly with his keys. Buck watches, dropping his hands from the steering wheel to mirror Eddie’s position. He’s caught between his own exhaustion, his desire to climb under his blankets and sleep until he has to be on set again in ten — no, nine — hours, and a twitchy, burrowing need to wipe away the tired, hurt look in Eddie’s eyes.
Buck knows, without having to ask or be told, that Eddie’s thinking about Shannon — about the rough period before, during, and after his deployments that he’s only ever referred to briefly, off-handedly, like he’s trained himself not to get too close to the memories — and about Christopher.
Buck can’t look too closely at Eddie’s love for Christopher, at his guilt about his absence, at the measures he’s willing to go to so he can give Christopher the best life possible, for fear that his feelings about all of it will tear at his seams, break through, pour out between them.
Buck’s fingers twitch, flex; he resists the temptation to cover Eddie’s hands with his own.
A lifetime later, Eddie raises his head and sets clear, determined eyes on Buck. “Stay,” he says, asks, commands. “Don’t go to your apartment, just. Spend the night, yeah?”
“Okay,” Buck says, reflexively, instantly. He doesn’t have to think about it.
Eddie nods, two hard bobs of his head, already looking away and putting a hand on his door as Buck parks and cuts the engine. Silence falls again as they walk to Eddie’s front door, as Eddie unlocks the door and slowly pushes it open.
They keep their footsteps light as they pass Carla, asleep on the couch. Buck pauses, briefly, when he sees her, panicked, but Eddie gestures limply for Buck to follow him. And Buck doesn’t stand a chance; he follows him.
In Eddie’s room, they peel out of their hoodies in the dark and make quick work of brushing their teeth in Eddie’s bathroom, Buck’s plastic purple toothbrush waiting for him in the holder. Wordlessly, they burrow under Eddie’s covers.
Buck sometimes feels like he sleeps in Eddie’s house more than he does in his own bed, but always on the couch. For a brief moment, he’s tense and uncertain, holding his limbs tightly to his side of the bed. He’s never shared a bed with someone he wasn’t sleeping with. There’s a sticky, twisting feeling in his gut, not dissimilar to his emotional reflex to Maddie-Eddie-Romance headlines, but in a different shape. Nothing makes sense.
Eddie sprawls out on his stomach, head facing Buck, cheek smashed into his pillow, eyes closed. Buck's heart thumps once inside his rib cage.
“Goodnight, Buck.” His voice is already sleep-rough. Nothing makes sense.
Buck relaxes anyway, lets his eyes slip closed and his body give in to the comfort of the bed, the warmth of another body in bed seeping into his bones. “‘Night, Eddie.”
They wake up closer, but not touching. The twisty-sticky-itchy feeling remains. Nothing makes sense.
Filming takes a small, necessary break after Buck and Eddie’s fight scene.
The scene itself is gruelling. Buck spends the hours leading up to it wound tight enough to burst, wearing holes in the floor of his trailer. His nerves are frayed wires, sparking against thin air.
He nearly puts his head through the roof when there’s a knock on his trailer door. He can’t even force a friendly grin when he pulls open the door with a clenched jaw, preparing himself not to snap at an underpaid PA.
It’s not a PA; it’s Eddie, already dressed for the scene in a dark green flannel and light wash jeans, his facial hair trimmed to the exact length as yesterday for continuity. He gestures with a nod of his head for Buck to let him in and then pushes past him anyway when he’s still for too long, muscles too tight to move on command.
They have twenty minutes before they’re due on set. It’s not even the most important scene of the film, not by a long shot, and not the one Buck’s been dreading the most — Buck endeavours to not think about that scene at all, as long as he can help it — but it’s here now. And — and he has no reason to be so nervous, so anxious, about it, but he is anyway.
Eddie places a careful hand on top of Buck’s where it’s still gripping the handle of his trailer door, pries it gently away. He pushes the door softly shut and trails his hand feather-light up the length of Buck’s arm until he reaches his shoulder. His thumb presses, hard, in the hollow of Buck’s collarbone until something releases in the line of Buck’s body.
“Tell me the worst thing that can possibly happen today,” Eddie says, ducking his head until he catches Buck’s eye.
Buck swallows. “The San Andreas Fault breaks.”
Eddie rolls his eyes, but a grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Okay, now tell me the worst thing that can happen specifically today, not any other day.”
Buck looks away, the weight of Eddie’s searching — always searching — eyes suddenly too much.
A beat of tense silence passes before Eddie sighs. “Okay, why don’t I tell you what I think? I think that after the year you’ve had and the way we started, you’re worried about what this scene will do to us.”
Buck’s gaze snaps back, surprise giving himself away. Eddie uses the hand still on Buck’s shoulder to squeeze, shaking him gently.
“It’s not gonna happen, okay? This, it’s not that fragile. I let you meet my son, man, and he fucking loves you, so it’s gonna take a lot more than a scene in a movie to do serious damage.”
At the mention of Christopher, who Buck loves with an intensity he can’t think too much about, Buck's heart thumps painfully. Some of the too-tight tension leaks out of his shoulders despite himself. The wet-hot worry sits, pooling in the space behind his ribs, but it’s easier to breathe around with Eddie’s reassurances sliding through muscle and bone.
“Yeah, okay,” he croaks out. “Uh, thank you.”
Eddie’s hand gives one more squeeze of Buck’s shoulder before falling away. Buck feels the heat-brand of his touch for a long time afterwards.
Even with Eddie’s pep talk, the scene is rough, Athena having them repeat it again and again.
They were both insistent on doing their own fight choreography, spending hours rehearsing it on pads in the studio’s gym, but now they’re both too hesitant. Buck pauses with a fist in the air, unwilling to throw even a fake punch. Eddie’s too gentle when he barrels into Buck. When they fumble on the forest floor it’s too slow, playful instead of tense and violent.
On the fourth run-through, they hit the forest floor with a crash, and Buck’s meant to roll them over, straddle Eddie’s midsection and throw another punch that Eddie will block with his forearms. Instead, he pauses, thighs digging into Eddie’s waist — the flannel and undershirt have bunched up in the scuffle, exposing a sliver of bare skin — heart racing — and forgets what his next move is supposed to be. They stare blankly at each other, Eddie’s liquid brown eyes dark, for a long beat of silence, before Eddie starts laughing.
Eddie brings his hands up to his face, covering it as his laughter grows. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, breathless. Buck succumbs to it, sliding off of Eddie to collapse in the dirt next to him, his laughter joining Eddie’s. Some of the crew join in, even as they roll their eyes and start to reset.
“Boys,” Athena says, stopping by their feet with her hands on her waist.
“Sorry,” Eddie pants out again, his hands dragging down his face to rest on his stomach. That sliver of skin is still on display. Buck’s laughter catches in his throat.
“It’s very cute,” Athena continues, “that you two are having such a hard time brawling, but we’re burning daylight here.”
“Sorry,” Buck echoes. “We’ll get it this time, promise.”
Athena narrows her eyes at them, a clear admonishment in the set of her eyebrows, before she nods. “You better,” she says, stepping away.
Beside Buck, Eddie sucks in a deep breath, lets it out slow, before climbing to his feet and offering Buck his hand. Buck grasps it with his own and lets Eddie pull him to his feet. Instead of dropping Buck’s hand, Eddie uses the grip to pull him into his chest, wrapping a strong arm around Buck’s shoulders.
A surprised bark of laughter buries itself against Eddie's collar as Buck returns the hug, his fingers twisting in his flannel. Into the side of Eddie’s head, Buck asks, “What’s this about?”
Eddie’s answering laugh is a puff of air against Buck’s neck. Buck most certainly does not shiver, except for the fact that he does. He’s grinning when he pulls back, and they’re still standing close enough that Buck can see the ring of darker brown on the inside of Eddie’s irises.
“That’s me giving you permission to beat the shit out of me, yeah?” There’s an amused glint in Eddie’s eyes, in the bend of his smile, that grows when Buck barks out another startled laugh. “We’re good, solid. You’re my best friend.”
A sudden ache in Buck’s chest, a solid warmth that grows and spreads. He knows they are, knows that they spend almost every second of their free time together, but it’s something else entirely to hear it out loud. It pokes at the tender parts of his psyche, the parts that are constantly waiting for someone to grow tired of him and walk away.
Eddie pats Buck’s shoulder once, rough. “So be my best friend and punch me in the face on camera.”
The grin that tugs at Buck’s face forces his eyes into a squint as they follow the crew a few feet down the path where the blocking for their scene starts.
“Besides,” Eddie continues, catching Buck’s eye, “it’s just a movie. In real life I’d obviously take you.”
Buck’s eyebrows raise, a thrill rising up his spine. He remembers, months ago, the desperate, hot urge to push anytime he was around Eddie, hoping he might snap and push back. He loves being Eddie’s friend with a fierceness that surprises him and he wouldn’t trade it for all of the fame or money in the world, but sometimes he misses that tension, that back and forth, that fire that raced up his spine the closer they got. You sure you don’t wanna see my bite?
And the thing is, that tension is still there, sometimes: when they race each other on their runs; when they get too into the video games they play with Christopher; when their teasing trips over an imaginary line into something more.
Or when Buck crowds briefly into Eddie’s space on the trail, finally at their marker, ducks his head to make eye contact (and, maybe, to remind Eddie of the height difference), and says, “You wanna go for the title?”
Eddie’s eyes are dark, a hard, amused challenge in them, but he laughs and pushes Buck a half-step back.
So, the tension’s still there, but only for brief moments before one or both of them steps away, and maybe Buck wants to see it break, explode.
Athena says, “Action.”
This time, when Buck snaps out biting lines, he leans into that hot anger, that nameless sticky desire. Eddie’s eyes are dark when he stops at his next marker, turns to Buck and growls out a response. The gravel in his voice fans the flames, sends them sliding between skin and muscle.
This time, Buck doesn’t hesitate when he throws his fist. It never makes contact, Eddie’s head snapping back just in time, but the heat that explodes through Buck’s chest doesn’t seem to care.
Eddie’s shoulder hits him just under his ribs without any real force, Buck letting him fall to the forest floor. They grapple briefly — and Buck is on fire, adrenaline thrumming sweetly through his veins — before Buck flips them, trapping Eddie’s waist between his thighs. This time, he immediately goes for the second punch, Eddie’s forearms coming up to block them. Eddie’s hips snap up, dislodging Buck from his position, reaching for a fistful of Buck’s shirt at the same time. With the hand twisted in Buck’s shirt, he pulls Buck forward into the impending rush of Eddie’s forehead, crushing into Buck’s nose in slow motion.
They cut only long enough for a makeup artist to swoop in and paint a thick line of fake blood down from a nostril. Buck barely breathes until filming resumes, Buck falling back onto the floor from the impact of Eddie’s hit. He brings a hand to his face, panting, and smears the fake blood across his face.
Buck and Eddie pause, staring each other down with dark, hard eyes as they pant, catching their breaths, for only a second before flying back at each other with swinging fists, hands twisted in clothing, the blood on Buck’s hand smearing across Eddie’s skin when he reaches for his neck. They’re closecloseclose, touching at nearly every point of their bodies, and it’s aggressive and violent, but the heat that seems to have filled every square inch of Buck rejoices: finally.
The Sheriff arrives, pulling Buck up and away by the back of his shirt, leaving Eddie sprawled, legs bent and spread wide open, chest heaving, like — Buck’s mind skitters away from the thought. The Sheriff delivers his line — Buck isn’t listening at all, his heart pounding a deafening beat in his ears — and Athena calls cut.
Buck’s immediately laughing, half hysterical, holding his hand out for Eddie in a reversal of their roles only — what, ten minutes ago? fifteen? Time’s gone slippery. He pulls Eddie to his feet, straight into a hug, Eddie’s laughter an echo in his ears, muffled in his shoulder. Buck’s blood is hot liquid gold through his veins, making the points of contact between him and Eddie glow, glow, glow. And if he keeps their hips angled apart to maintain his dignity, then well, that’s between him and God.
Eventually, they peel apart, and they look ridiculous, grinning like lunatics with fake blood smeared over Eddie’s neck, what feels like Buck’s entire face.
Athena appears at their side, a slick smirk splitting her face like she knows something they don’t. “That was great, boys. Let’s pack up.”
And filming breaks for a week.
It’s welcome, Buck and Eddie both grateful for the extra time with Christopher and to sleep without weird, long call times. Maddie, for her part, disappears to Chim’s apartment and isn’t seen for days. Buck, being a good brother, only sends her six texts commenting on the fact.
On the third day of break — and Buck can’t help but think this was intentional on Athena’s part — Hen and Karen land in L.A.. Hen sends her last email update from the airplane just before takeoff, a beaming selfie of her and a sleeping Karen attached. Chimney’s reply is almost instant: Counting down the 5,504 miles until my heart returns <3.
Two days after that, Bobby and Athena’s backyard is transformed for a party.
It’s nothing like the What’s Inside You? wrap party. There’s no catering, no bar, no porta potties or security, just Bobby manning a grill and Athena lining a folding table with beers and soda. The guestlist, similarly, is small: Hen and Karen, Chimney, Eddie, Buck, an open invitation to partners and family. Maddie comes along, though Buck isn’t quite sure if she’s his guest or Chimney’s.
She arrives with Chimney, ten minutes after Buck and Eddie pull up in Buck’s Jeep, so he thinks she might not be his.
“What have I missed?” Hen asks an hour and a half in. She drops into Eddie’s recently vacated seat next to Buck, Maddie having pulled him away to play against Karen and Chimney in a hastily set up game of beer pong.
Buck smiles around the mouth of his beer. “Not much. You were only gone a few months.”
Hen snorts. “Yeah, sure. When I left you were cursing Eddie Diaz’s name every chance you got — Chimney was starting to worry that he’d never be able to get you two in a movie together — and now you two are attached at the hip?”
“You already knew that.” Buck narrows his eyes. “Don’t pretend you and Chim weren’t gossiping about it while you were away.”
Hen lifts her nose primly, even as the bend of her mouth gives her away. “Chim and I don’t gossip. We just — educate each other.” Buck rolls his eyes, laughing. “And — hypothetically — if Chim shared any news on the Buck-Eddie front, he didn’t share the how.”
Buck smiles, smug. “Probably because Chim doesn’t know.”
He met Hen at the wrap party of that first movie with Chimney, Hen technically not a part of the cast or crew but with a perma-best-friend-invite. Buck knew of Hen, a director famous for her artsy, melancholy queer romances with an Oscar already under her belt, but Buck had never let himself believe he could be in one of her films.
Intimidating career aside, Hen was kind and welcoming, interested in Buck and his thoughts about the movie, about Chim, about Athena, about the industry at large. Chim, Athena, Bobby; they were all kind to Buck more than he thought he probably deserved, but Hen was the first person to include Buck like he was an equal.
Even so, it’s impossible to ignore the gap in experience between Buck and the others, Hen almost most of all. It’s easy for Buck to fall into the younger sibling role, Hen and the others dispensing their worldly knowledge and advice onto him. It’s part of what makes spending time with Eddie so nice, someone who gets as much from Buck as Buck gets from him.
So, if Buck’s a little smug to know something that Hen doesn’t, that’s his right.
Hen widens her eyes meaningfully.
Buck shrugs. Truthfully, he doesn’t know how to explain it. It feels too small, too insignificant, to say Eddie saved him from spilling his guts to a reporter because, even if that’s what happened, it’s not really what made them Eddie-and-Buck.
It’s a thousand little things, a thousand big things: the way they’ve both been broken and taped back together in similar ways; the way they’ve both been lonely for longer than they even realized it themselves; the way Eddie trusts Buck with Christopher, and Buck trusts Eddie with his fleshy, raw hurt.
The way they hardly need to speak to understand what’s holding the other back, Eddie in the quiet of Buck’s trailer saying why don’t I tell you what I think...I think you’re worried about what this will do to us. Buck’s never been an us before, not even with Abby.
The beer pong game dissolves into uproarious noise, Eddie and Maddie cheering and Chimney cursing. Maddie throws her arms around Eddie in a brief, celebratory hug that lifts her off her feet. Chimney chugs his fallen beer, Karen consoling him with a gentle hand on his shoulder, and tosses the ping pong ball back at Eddie.
Eddie wipes it on the hem of his shirt, turns to where Buck and Hen are sitting, and winks directly at Buck when he kisses the ball, puts his free hand over his eyes, and sends the ball flying.
It spins around the rim of a cup, Chimney chanting no no no no; it sinks.
Something hot and familiar pools in Buck’s gut.
Maddie loses it, jumping on Eddie’s back, Eddie’s laughter filling the yard as he turns to Buck with a wide grin, smug eyes. Buck cheers, cupping his hands around his mouth, as Hen shouts condolences to her wife.
Buck’s no stranger to the playful side of Eddie, at this point, but he knows it’s been more or less reserved for Christopher the last several years, if it was allowed out at all. This, he thinks, Eddie showing it off in front of Buck’s closest friends, his family, is just another one of those how’s.
“Sometimes things just...click, you know,” Buck finally says, turning back to Hen. Her smile has turned knowing, interested, eyes narrowed just slightly behind her glasses.
“I do know,” she confirms, but she sounds like she’s talking about something else entirely.
Filming resumes.
It’s just as hard as before. They’re getting into the thick of it now, all of the set up well behind them. Every scene feels like the most important scene in the film, the tension constantly stifling, Athena making them repeat them again and again until she’s satisfied.
This far into the story, there’s no denying that Maddie is the star of the film. Buck knew from the second he finished the script that the story was all about Nora, the grieving mother being ignored and brushed aside by her husband and his friend and even the narrative itself until she takes matters into her own hands. Eddie and Buck’s characters — lost in their own conflict, their own feelings, their own back and forth — think it’s their story, but it’s not and it never really was.
Most of the scenes on the remaining call sheets are Maddie’s, even if Buck or Eddie or both are in them, and Maddie spends a lot of time between takes on the phone with Chimney.
And then Eddie has to get shot.
Buck’s known about the scene, of course, and he’s done his best not to think about it, but they’re standing in a field at 2 AM surrounded by cameras and audio and light equipment, and there’s no more ignoring it. It’s just Buck and Eddie filming, the shooter hidden out of sight narratively. Their marks are far apart, a couple of feet of heat-dried grass between the white chalk Xs.
Eddie catches his eyes as a production assistant goes over the blocking of the scene one more time — Buck spends most of it on his knees, clutching a child-sized shirt that’s meant to belong to his missing daughter; Eddie stands even as he’s shot until he collapses; a long, lingering pause until Buck crawls to his side, tries to stop the bleeding with his hands — and waggles his eyebrows when she says Buck will be on his knees.
Buck bites his tongue against a laugh. Eddie ducks his head with a grin. His stomach’s a mess of knots.
Thanks to an issue with production, they only have one pyrotechnic kit for the shot, attached to a plastic bag of fake blood hidden in Eddie’s shirt, so they only have one chance to get the scene done. Buck thinks he may throw up.
“Okay, boys,” the key production assistant — Malorie — says, tucking her tablet against her chest, “we’ve got five minutes before shooting is meant to start. Go ahead and hug or whatever it is you two do.”
Buck and Eddie let out a joint bark of laughter. Malorie offers them an amused grin before walking away, already shouting after the prop manager about the timing for the pyrotechnic trigger.
In her absence Buck turns to Eddie, holding his arms open with waggling eyebrows and a sarcastic grin. Eddie rolls his eyes, and Buck’s expecting him to push his shoulder or otherwise turn away, but instead, he takes a step forward into Buck’s open arms.
The knots in Buck’s stomach loosen, warm liquid gold spreading through his body as he immediately tightens his arms around Eddie’s broad shoulders. Eddie’s arms are lines of crisp heat around his waist, a sharp contrast to the cold press of his nose against the side of Buck’s neck. Eddie’s hair tickles the side of Buck’s face, the smell of Christopher’s no tears strawberry shampoo filling his nostrils, and Buck instantly knows the kind of morning he had, can picture Eddie half asleep in the shower, running late and reaching blindly for the closest bottle, can almost hear Chris’ sarcastic quip about Eddie being a thief.
They pull apart and Buck has an insane, inexplicable rush of disappointment. Nothing makes sense.
“Boys,” Athena shouts, looking up from the monitor someone's set up behind the line of cameras. “No pressure, but we’ve got one shot at this.”
Buck shakes his head, mouth pursed. “Definitely not feeling pressure.”
Eddie laughs, squeezing Buck’s shoulder once before backing away towards his marker.
Athena calls for action and Buck disappears into the lines, the blocking, tears that come too easily, burning his throat. His fingers cramp around the pink-purple-blue fabric in his hands, clutched to his chest. The dewy grass beneath his knees dampens his denim.
He thinks, unbidden, while spitting out choked lines about what he’s willing to do — anything, everything — for his missing daughter, about Christopher, the wide smile he wears when he’s teasing Eddie, the excited gleam in his eyes when he’s sharing what he learned in class, the way he wraps Buck in a tight hug every time he sees him. The thought knocks the wind out of him, like a physical punch. He gasps out an unplanned sob between one line and the next.
A few feet away, Eddie’s jaw clenches, eyebrows tensing in tightly controlled worry. His hand twitches at his side. Buck can barely see it through the blur of his tears, but it presses directly on a bruise.
“Carter,” Eddie says, a deep drag of sound past his lips. “She’s not —”
The pyrotechnic trigger doesn’t sound like a gunshot — they’ll add it in post — but it’s loud enough in the silence of set to make Buck’s flinch real, his eyes slamming monetarily shut before they’re snapping open again, watching, stunned as Eddie’s eyes widen, a lost confused look sliding over his face. The fake blood is cold where it’s splattered on Buck’s face, syrupy and thick on his tongue. Slowly — and then quickly — blood seeps through the blue of Eddie’s shirt, a spot on his right shoulder that drips down his chest.
Eddie glances down at it, and the look of blind, confused panic on his face is stark, reaching into Buck’s chest and pulling at the threads that hold him together. Buck is frozen. His heart crawls into his throat, choking.
Eddie collapses; Buck imagines it in slow motion. He has to physically hold himself back for a 1...2...3-count for the moment to linger, cinematically, before he’s crawling, desperately, on his hands and knees toward Eddie.
“Hey, hey,” he says, the words tumbling out in a slurred jumble. He sets the fabric still clenched in his hand to the side before pressing shaking hands to Eddie’s chest. He can feel the bulge of the blood bag beneath his hands, but the thick red liquid seeping through his fingers, making his grip slippery, feels real. He swallows, hard, against sudden nausea.
Eddie’s eyes flutter shut, and Buck knows it’s in the script, but panic surges through him anyway, even as he pats a bloodied hand against his cheek, leaving bright red smears across his skin. “No, no — you asshole, you absolute dick — you gotta hang on — stay with me, let me, I just —” He fumbles at his pocket for the prop phone, black where his own is red, until the blood on his hands stains it, dialling frantically before pressing it to his cheek. He rattles off desperate, stumbling information to an imaginary dispatcher, pleading with them to hurry, choking around thick tears.
Athena yells, “Cut!”
Buck collapses, strings cut, pressing his forehead against Eddie’s chest. He drops the phone onto the grass and curls his hands into fists to stop their shaking. Eddie’s hand lifts, lands on the curve of Buck’s back, and it’s enough for him to raise his head and meet Eddie’s eyes, open now and completely blank, even as his fingers dig reassuringly into Buck’s muscle.
Malorie approaches and Buck gets it together enough to help Eddie into a sitting position. They climb unsteadily to their feet, Eddie surreptitiously avoiding eye contact as Malorie asks after the pyrotechnic hit.
“All good,” Eddie promises, lifting his shirt so he can peel away the tape holding the movie magic to his skin. Malorie holds out a cloth bag for Eddie to drop the remains into.
“That was great,” Athena says, approaching just as Malorie scurries away. Buck, typically, would preen under the praise. Instead, he swallows back more tears, still pressing insistently at his boundaries. “It’s been a hard night. You two should head home. You’re not on the call sheet for tomorrow, so sleep in. That’s an order.”
She gives them a meaningful look, and Buck forces a smile in reply, and then she’s gone, replaced by a different production assistant that relieves Buck of his mic pack, making a note on a tablet as she does. When Buck looks up, free, Eddie’s gone.
Not gone, just a shadow in the distance: head down, shoulders up, heading to his trailer with a single-minded determination. Buck thinks of the carefully blank look in his eyes — the visceral panic when the shot was triggered — and follows after him.
He catches the door just before it closes and slides into the trailer behind him.
Eddie’s standing at the sink in his mini-kitchen, head bowed, shoulders a tight line. Buck’s hands, at his side, curl into fists against the urge to reach out, touch him, for fear that he might shatter under Buck’s touch.
A foot away, Buck stands and stares. Useless.
“I was going to be a firefighter,” Eddie says, suddenly, his back still to Buck.
It’s a one-two punch: one, so far from what he was expecting it takes a second to sink in; and two, when it does sink in, the knowledge that Buck was going to be one, too.
“After Shannon left. I got into the academy and everything, but…I told Shannon I needed time because I wasn’t…okay.” His voice is tight, sharp, on the last word, like he’s angry at himself for admitting it, for feeling it. “But she needed me to be and I couldn’t make it work. I dropped out of the academy a week in; I kept fucking panicking when the alarm went off. How stupid is that?”
“It’s not,” Buck says, the words heavy as they fall out of his mouth.
Eddie gives a sarcastic laugh. Buck takes a step closer, coming up beside Eddie, still not touching. Eddie doesn’t look at him.
“I was shot. Three times. Our helicopter — it was shot right out of the sky. I tried to get everyone out but one of our guys…he didn’t make it, and I got a Silver Star —” he spits the words, bitter “— and an honourable discharge.” He presses a hand to his shoulder — the opposite one from tonight’s scene, mostly clean. “I’m over it, really. It’s been…years at this point. You can hardly see the scars. It’s just…”
“Eddie,” Buck says. It scraps against his insides of the way out, desperate, enough to make Eddie look up and away from the empty sink and meet Buck’s eyes. Eddie’s are shining, wet and hurting, even as he visibly tries to hide it, his bottom lip tense.
Buck can’t help it: he puts a hand on Eddie’s shoulder, above Eddie's, gripping tight and — It’s usually Eddie that initiates touch, usually Eddie grabbing Buck’s bicep and slinging an arm around his shoulders and sitting close enough for their thighs to touch, and Buck doesn’t know why — he’s normally a touchy guy — but it makes this touch now feel significant, too big for the small trailer.
“Eddie, you don’t have to be over it. You don’t have to be okay.”
Eddie’s eyes narrow, instantly. “Chris—”
“Christopher,” Buck interrupts, hand squeezing on his shoulder, “has people in his corner. He has your aunt and your abuela, Carla, Bobby, me. You have us. And your kid? He’s the best person I know: crazy smart, funny, fucking kind. There’s no way that incredible kid you raised would want you to needlessly suffer for him.” Eddie blinks, brown eyes swimming. “I know...I know you think it’s up to you to take on the whole world all on your own, but it’s not. Let me — let someone carry it with you.”
The look Eddie’s giving him feels too big for words — dark, heavy, arresting — Buck’s breath catches. And then, almost quicker than Buck can track, Eddie’s got a fist in Buck’s shirt, right over his solar plexus, pulling him close — rough — and they’re kissing.
Buck moves instinctively, reflexively, instantly, the hand on Eddie’s shoulder sliding until his fingers can brush the short hairs at the back of Eddie’s neck. Eddie makes a sound against his mouth; Buck feels like he may die.
And the truth is? The truth is Buck has never thought about kissing Eddie. He’s only kissed one other man in his life, a teammate on his football team that he fooled around with after practice for a couple of weeks before he found a girlfriend, so Buck did too. Kissing Eddie, it’s never even crossed his mind. But now, with Eddie’s mouth hot and insistent on his, it’s hard to believe he’ll think of anything else ever again.
They’re both panting when they finally drag their mouths apart, and Buck has to pull his gaze away from the red of Eddie’s mouth to see his eyes, dark, liquid, hot enough to burn. Buck licks his lips; Eddie’s eyes track the movement.
His voice is rough — a shiver slides down Buck’s spine — when he says, “We can’t…This is —”
“Trouble?” Buck suggests, breathless, a smirk twisting his mouth. Eddie’s hand — still fisted in the fabric of Buck’s falsely blood-stained white shirt — flexes, tugging Buck a millimetre forward.
“So much,” Eddie says, and it’s a growl, and their mouths are crashing back together, desperate.
Buck backs Eddie up until his back hits the wall of the trailer, Buck’s hand on the back of his head cushioning the blow, his thigh sliding between Eddie’s legs. Eddie’s hand in Buck’s shirt slides to his ribs, large hand spawning the width of him, and suddenly Buck knows what that heat he felt at the bar that first night they met — you sure you don’t wanna see my bite — when they filmed their fight — you wanna go for the title? The flames are back, threatening to consume him whole.
He makes a pathetic, punched-out sound against Eddie’s mouth, dragging his lips down the column of Eddie’s throat, his thigh pressing closer, Eddie’s answering groan echoing through the trailer. He’s hard against Buck’s leg. Buck’s hard, too, against Eddie’s hip, enough to make him dizzy and from only a few minutes of making out.
Buck scrapes his teeth against the side of Eddie’s neck, the acidic-sweet-tangy taste of the fake blood coating his tongue. Eddie’s breath escapes like a hiss.
“Buck — Evan.”
Buck’s hand, migrating from Eddie’s hair to his waist, squeezes; he remembers sitting at the bar, saying it’s Evan, actually, the heat in Eddie’s eyes, the lick of flame at the base of his spine. He hopes his fingers leave prints on his skin.
“This is — such a bad idea,” Eddie pants out, one hand sliding through Buck’s curls, fingers flexing, tugging at the roots. Buck might die if they keep going, but he might die if they stop, too.
Buck pulls away only enough to flash a smirk, the hand not digging bruises into Eddie’s waist moulding around Eddie’s jaw, using only enough pressure to tilt Eddie’s head back. Eddie’s eyes are nearly black. Buck wants to swallow him whole.
“Don’t you think you’re owed a couple of bad ideas?”
Something flashes across Eddie’s face, and then he’s the one surging forward, catching Buck’s mouth with his own and walking them backwards blindly until the back of Buck’s knees hit the arm of the couch. Eddie lowers them, gently, across the cushions, crawling into Buck’s lap, a reversal of their fight on the forest floor. Buck had chalked the semi he got that day to human nature — two bodies, friction, over six months without consistent sex.
He laughs, remembering the way he hugged Eddie with his hips carefully angled away, and Eddie gives him an exaggerated look of mock-offended confusion
“Really? What’s so funny?”
Eddie’s sitting on Buck’s lap, Buck’s head resting on a couch arm, and he can’t help himself: he puts a hand on Eddie’s knee, slides it over his thigh, under his shirt, fingers tracing muscle. They flex under his touch.
“Absolutely nothing,” Buck says, creeping his other hand under his shirt, bunching it up until Eddie raises his arms, letting Buck push it off and toss it to the side.
It’s not the first time he’s seen Eddie shirtless — he’s not even sure he could remember every time he has — but his mouth goes dry anyway, eyes raking over the planes of his heaving chest, his stomach, the thin line of dark hair from his belly button past his waistband, the harsh V of his hips.
This time, he can make out a faint, small scar on his left shoulder.
Eddie doesn’t let him take too long looking, impatiently tugging at Buck’s shirt until he shifts enough for Eddie to rid him of it.
“Full disclosure,” Eddie says, hands going to the button of Buck’s jeans — Buck’s going to die, he’s sure of it. Eddie’s expression is hungry. “I’ve hooked up with one guy, once, over ten years ago and we never made it past hand stuff.”
Buck thinks about the last time Eddie probably had sex, definitely with Shannon, probably before he was discharged. Buck wants to lay him out, take him apart, put him back together, but he knows, without having to talk to Eddie about it at all, that this bad idea doesn’t go that far. This, he knows, will be quick and messy, and it’s not gonna happen again. His chest aches, dully, at the thought. He pushes it away, lifts his hips so Eddie can shove his jeans down, reaches out to deal with Eddie’s jeans next.
“Also one guy,” Buck shares, kicking away their discarded jeans. His mouth waters at the sight of Eddie’s dick, hard and straining against his boxers. “Also ten years ago. More than once. We never got a home run, but pretty much everything else.” He looks up at Eddie, smirks. “Want a demo?”
Eddie laughs, sliding a hand into Buck’s hair. Buck leans into the touch, seconds away from purring like a cat. He has the thought that this should be harder, that there should be more of a learning curve to fooling around with your best friend. It might be the easiest thing he’s done all year, his whole life.
“It’s really nice of you to think I would last even a fucking second if you put your mouth on my dick right now.”
Buck’s answering laugh booms around the trailer. “Then hand stuff it is,” he says, wasting no time in reaching into Eddie’s boxers.
The sound Eddie makes when Buck’s hand wraps around him unravels something deep inside Buck’s chest. He wants it to be his ringtone. He only gets a couple of strokes in before Eddie returns the favour, his grip on the edge of too tight, Buck gasping into the space between them. Eddie leans forward until he can catch Buck’s mouth in a gasping kiss, barely anything more than panting into each other’s mouths.
It’s over embarrassingly fast, both of them too keyed up and having gone too long without. Eddie cleans them up with a kleenex from the box of tissues on the coffee table, gentle and thorough. The burning heat has left Buck in a rush, replaced by a bittersweet warm glow.
When he’s done, Eddie collapses onto Buck’s chest, forehead against his shoulder. Buck’s arms, instinctively, go around his shoulders. They stay like that, silent except for the sounds of their haggard breaths, for several long moments.
Finally, into Buck’s neck, Eddie says, “For hand stuff, that was fucking incredible.” A pause and then: “It can’t happen again.”
Buck’s hand sweeps over the length of Eddie’s spine. “I know.”