Work Text:
The email came in on a Wednesday.
Now Bobby didn’t have anything against Wednesdays. Wednesday was usually a perfectly normal day during the week. On Wednesdays he wore his socks with little pictures of sushi on them and he brought Athena lunch if they had enough downtime at the station. Usually, he didn’t have a slew of paperwork to finish on Wednesdays, because he would pour over it all day Tuesday, so Wednesday was the beginning of a new stack of things he would accidentally-on-purpose put off for later. Things didn’t tend to go wrong on Wednesdays and he wouldn’t say that the email was necessarily anything going wrong except, well, there was never really a good reason for him to receive an email from the station’s Union Representative Amy Castro with the subject line Urgent: Status Change, Captain Nash Eyes Only . The last time Bobby had received an Urgent email from the Union it was to inform him of his rights after being suspended.
Bobby wouldn’t say he panicked but he didn’t… not panic. The Union never reached out unless there was something serious that needed his attention. His people didn’t go to the Union unless there was something that they didn’t quite feel they could tell him. That wasn’t an environment he liked to foster. The 118 was a family, his team was his number two priority, number one when they needed him to step up. The last time a member of his team couldn’t trust him to be objective it ended in a lawsuit that they all, more or less, pretended never happened at this point.
“Sorry,” he apologized quickly to both Michael and Athena, stepping carefully out of frame of the Skype video and clicking on the notification with fingers he would go to the grave insisting weren’t shaking. “One moment.”
Athena’s hand reached out, trailing gentle fingers over his forearm and wrist. “Everything okay?” She scrunched up her face as she asked it and narrowed her gaze like she was ready to go to war.
It was sweet, it was everything Bobby had ever wanted from a partner, before and after Minnesota. “Just a message from the Union.”
Athena’s eyebrows shot up and, significantly, she looked down at his phone. “From the Union?”
He winced but watched the message, and the subsequent attachment, quickly load on his screen. “Why would the Union send you an email?” Michael asked curiously.
“They usually don’t .” Bobby didn’t know who it was meant to be reassuring but he was pretty sure it didn’t quite hit the mark. His stress was obviously palpable, if only for the way Athena squeezed his wrist again and Michael blinked with big brown eyes from his side of the camera.
The email started as most did from the Union - formal and to the point.
Captain Robert Nash .
He gave it his rapt attention, Athena with one eye carefully on his face and the other on Michael as he gesticulated with his hands. They were both curious, though, and maybe a bit worried. Bobby’s heart seized, for a moment, at the familiar names but the worry it conjured was quickly soothed over with confusion and realization. “Huh.” Slowly, he lowered himself back down onto the chair beside Athena, skimmed the email once more and locked the screen, turning his phone upside down on the kitchen table.
“ Huh? ” Athena asked pointedly, glancing down at his phone and then back at him.
Michael had stopped too, it seemed, mid-story with that eager attention he gave Bobby whenever he thought he had something juicy to share. And Bobby wanted to tell them, oh how he wanted to. But this was… this was… these were his boys. This was a matter between two of his firefighters - two of his best firefighters - and their captain, not his boys and whatever Bobby Nash was to them. They had gone through the Union for a reason (probably, Bobby’s logical mind reminded him, for legality reasons). “It’s nothing bad.” He reassured both of them.
“Nothing bad ?” Athena parroted, the expression on her face the one that told him how much she wanted to know more. She knew the password to his phone, just like he knew the password to hers, but she couldn’t (and didn’t, no matter how much it bothered both of them at times) know the password to his work email. He received information from so many different people, dealt with so much sensitive information regarding the people he worked with and for, it would seriously put his career in jeopardy if he were to let her read it.
And Bobby supposed it was entertaining to have something to hold over her. Something that he knew that no one else did for once. “No,” Bobby said after a moment, a smile teasing over his lips and arms crossing over his chest. “I think this might actually… be something really good for once.”
“For once ?” Athena echoed.
“I can’t tell you.” He told the both of them, even though there was nothing more that he wanted to do. Bobby would give anything to screenshot the email and shoot it to the 118’s group chat that he had carefully put on mute back in Buck’s probationary year.
If anything, the admission made them even more curious. Athena and Michael shared a look - communicated with a gaze in the way that reminded Bobby that they had been together longer than Bobby had been in either of their lives - and turned back to him in unison. “Who killed someone?” Michael asked eagerly.
“What?” Bobby laughed. “No one killed anyone.”
“Who’s having a baby ?” Athena asked instead. “I know it’s not Hen. She would have told me. And it can’t be Chimney because Hen would have told me that too.”
“I do have other people on my team aside from Hen and Chim.”
“Oh god,” Athena balked. “Don’t tell me Buck’s having a baby.”
And what would be so wrong with that? Bobby was almost offended on his behalf before he noticed the twist of her lips. She was teasing him - no one knew the way Bobby looked at that boy better than Athena did. He’s not mine , Bobby had said once.
He’s as good as , Athena had argued.
Be that as it may, other than the whole… sperm donation thing of the past year, Bobby was pretty sure there wasn’t any miniature Buck’s running around aside from the parts of Jee-Yun that Chimney was stubbornly refusing to admit she had inherited from her uncle. “Buck’s not having a baby.” Bobby held up a hand to interrupt the next logical choice for her. “Neither is Eddie. No one is having a baby.”
Yet, Bobby’s mind supplied. They were both young, it wasn’t that far off to assume that they would, one day, if they lasted (and they both must be convinced that they would , if they were bothering to inform the Union rather than… just letting it be a thing) decide to have another child together. But he couldn’t say any of that, no matter how much his mind was spiraling for him to tell his wife about this potentially momentous event. “If I guess…” Athena started, always one to sniff out a mystery a mile away.
“You’re not going to guess.” Bobby was pretty sure no one was going to guess. He knew more about the two of them and he hadn’t guessed. Out of the entire crew, Bobby was pretty sure he had the closest idea of what exactly the nature of their relationship was and even he hadn’t seen this change coming. Maybe Maddie would, but that would only be because Buck was almost incapable of keeping a secret from her. But Athena? No. He loved his wife, he loved and knew how observant she was, but she wasn’t going to guess.
Athena took it as the challenge he hadn’t fully meant for it to be. “I like my odds.”
Bobby chuckled, shook his head and grabbed back Michael’s attention. “How’s Harry doing?” It did the job of distracting his wife, even if Bobby knew she was aware of what he was doing.
It was fine, he decided, she wasn’t going to be getting anything out of him. He wasn’t exactly sure how he would explain it anyway. It wasn’t like he could have imagined this was a potential situation he would have to be aware of. Or maybe he was fooling himself. Bobby sat back further into his chair and pondered, half of his mind on Michael and half of his mind still on that one line on the email - romantic relationship status disclosure. Maybe it had been more obvious than he was thinking. Maybe he just… hadn’t been looking.
--
The first real clue that anything had changed, Bobby would realize later, had come months and months before he received the email. He would realize later that they hadn’t even been trying to hide it, only being, oddly, professional about the entire thing. “I’m just saying,” Chimney punctuated his sentence with a sharp kick in the same general direction of the broken television. “She knows she can get away with everything.”
Hen’s hand trailed over Bobby’s elbow as she crossed behind him at the stove, situating herself across from Chimney as she leaned over the breakfast bar, watching her best friend with amused curiosity. “Who does?” She asked when Buck didn’t bother do anything more than roll his eyes at Chimney’s dramatics and turn another page in whatever book he was reading (Bobby thought it might have had something to do with emotionally unavailable parents, but he hadn’t been able to take a glance at the title before Buck had folded the pages in just a way that it broke the spine and hid the cover from view).
“Jee.” Chimney provided, bouncing closer to Hen now that he had a willing audience.
Bobby laughed quietly to himself, shaking his head fondly. Chimney had been in for the last few weeks with increasingly dramatic complaints about Jee-Yun’s new stage of the terrible-twos . Apparently, if she wasn’t playing with toilet water she was throwing a tantrum or finding Maddie’s lipstick and drawing on the walls. The last time he had seen her, Jee-Yun had seemed perfectly well behaved. That’s just because it’s you , Chimney had insisted. Bobby wasn’t entirely sure he was over exaggerating. “What has she done this time?” Bobby asked with as much good nature as he could, twisting his wrist and stir frying the vegetables he was cooking.
“She put all of the lotion in our shoes .” Chim bemoaned. “I don’t even know how she got it.”
“Probably because you keep it on the bottom shelf.” Buck mumbled with a coy furrow of his brow. It was a familiar one, although Bobby wasn’t entirely sure if Chimney knew it was the face Buck wore when he was purposely saying something to set him off. It was something Bobby had seen with Harry and May, with Robert Jr. and Brooke and, most recently, with Buck and Chim and Hen (and, on the rare occasion he saw Buck and Maddie together, with them). The instinct of the youngest sibling. “Well, within toddler height.”
Hen, at least, had caught on to what he was doing. She traded an amused look with him over Chim’s shoulder, rolling her eyes when Buck did nothing more than blink innocently in her direction. That boy hadn’t been innocent a day in his life. At least not where antagonizing his coworkers was concerned. “Remind me who’s apartment she trashed.” Chimney countered like it was a sticking point, a premature triumphant look on his face as he said it.
“Didn’t she draw on your walls a few days ago?” Eddie sat himself on the arm of the couch, closer than was necessary, perhaps, to Buck’s shoulder, but Bobby couldn’t exactly blame him for being protective after everything (they were all protective, Bobby more than the rest, and Buck soaked up the attention like a sponge).
“I told you that in confidence !” Chimney protested.
Eddie’s face twitched into a fond little smile. “Didn’t you say your daughter is the next Banksy?”
“Did you know that Banksy got nominated for an Oscar in 2010?” Buck absently turned a page.
“What does that have to do with your niece drawing on walls?”
“What does my niece drawing on walls have to do with you putting lotion in her way and then complaining about when she uses it?”
Chimney frowned, Hen snickered, and Bobby… later, he’d reflect on the way Eddie ducked his head and scratched at the corner of his nose. He’d remember the way Eddie had shuffled his thigh closer, so that the blue starch of his uniform brushed against Buck’s forearm. He’d think about the way Buck wrapped his arm around the inside of Eddie’s knee, the way he leaned back against the thumb Eddie very gently brushed over the nape of his neck, the look they traded that spoke volumes. But at the time, Bobby only noticed the way Chimney’s ears reddened and the betrayed look he shot in both Eddie and Hen’s direction for not even trying to mask their amusement. “Maybe you should just move your entire apartment to the top shelves.” Eddie quipped lightly and leaned more comfortably back.
“Nothing on the counters,” Hen added with a laugh. “Step ladders everywhere.”
“None of you are very supportive.”
“Who beat out Banksy?” Bobby asked with an amused huff in their direction.
“Who cares ?” Chimney bemoaned. “My shoes permanently have lotion in them.”
“You didn’t clean them out?”
“ How would I clean them out?”
“Water.” Eddie provided blandly.
“Inside Job.” Buck said over Eddie’s shoulder, holding eye contact with Bobby for a moment before sending him a quick smile, blue eyes dropping back down to the page in his book.
Bobby would have been distracted if he was trying to read while everyone else conversed around him. He had enough trouble doing paperwork at the communal dinner table when everyone else was allowing him his space. But Buck focused best when there was noise, even if it was finicky. Bobby knew him well enough to know that he enjoyed being around people, that the only time Buck truly isolated himself was when something was wrong. He would suggest somewhere quieter, but as the conversation grew between Hen, Chim and Eddie, Bobby piping in himself every now and then, Buck simply sunk further into the couch (and, consequently, into Eddie’s side). He wasn’t paying them any attention, eyes moving down the page at a speed Bobby wouldn’t have expected of him when they first met. He read, the conversation carried on around him, and Bobby would ask himself months later how he hadn’t noticed the way he wasn’t the only one watching Buck. “Eddie.” Hen said insistently, curiously, pointedly, as they set the table, leaving Chimney to continue whining at Buck as he valiantly ignored him to finish reading.
Eddie glanced at her through his eyelashes, thanking Bobby wordlessly for the bundle of silverware he handed over as he put the finishing touches on the dinner he had thrown together. “Hen.”
She swept her eyes over him, cataloging something that Bobby wasn’t sure she’d bring up. “Karen has this friend.” Ah , Bobby thought with a small little smile. Hen was trying to set him up . She wasn’t the most pushy of the team, if Eddie said he wasn’t interested she would happily relay the information and move on, but Hen had a pretty good track record when it came to romantic partnerships. Her and Karen had singlehandedly set up a good number of their friends with a success rate that was a bit astonishing. Bobby wasn’t sure if it was something that Hen necessarily enjoyed doing, but she supported Karen enough to be willing to go along with it all the same.
Bobby wasn’t sure if Eddie was ready to start dating again, though. He had tried with that school teacher, but that had fizzled out the last Bobby had heard. The last they had talked about things (which was very very briefly and then never brought up again when neither of them could sleep) Eddie seemed more concerned with getting to know himself than he had been finding a partner. Bobby couldn’t criticize him for such things, he was rather amazed, actually, by Eddie’s strength as a single parent. His happiness and steadiness in being a parent first, everything else second. He was even more impressed in the comeback. Bobby didn’t know everything that happened after the shooting - Buck had called him to say Eddie needed support and not much else - but he knew the man watching Hen through his eyelashes wasn’t the same man that he had hired. There was a new respect, a new regard for his own self-worth that had been lacking before. “I’m glad Karen has friends.” Eddie responded with a small shake of his head.
“That’s cute.” Hen rolled her eyes and set down the final plate. “She’s very smart, very pretty, and very single.”
“I think Nate at the dance studio is single.” It was pointed, in the way a lot of what Eddie did was pointed, the way he was distancing himself from the commitment.
But if Bobby noticed it, then Hen did too. She shared a glance with him behind Eddie’s back and, helplessly, Bobby shrugged. He didn’t meddle with his firefighter’s love lives, and Bobby, of all people, wasn’t going to begrudge Eddie for wanting to be more settled in himself before he started dating again. “Nate at the dance studio.” Hen scoffed. “I’m not asking about Nate at the dance studio .”
“What do you have against Nate?”
“Maybe you should date Nate.” Hen rolled her eyes.
Eddie blinked, a light blush on his cheeks. “Nate’s not my type.”
“I still can’t believe you’re doing that, by the way.” Chimney said with a slap of his hand against Eddie’s back.
“Do you need help bringing anything in?” Buck asked, sliding up beside Bobby with eagerly waiting hands. He waited until Bobby handed him the potholders to grab anything, thankfully, grabbing the casserole dish and nudging Hen gently out of the way to place it on the center of the table.
“Doing what?” Eddie asked wryly, waiting the way Bobby had noticed he always did for Hen to pull out her chair and sit down before doing so himself. It was probably ingrained in him, the way it wasn’t ingrained in Buck, the gentlemanly nature of it seemed like something that Eddie’s father would have taught him.
“You don’t seem like a dancer.”
“He did competition until he was, like, sixteen.” Bobby wasn’t shocked, not really, by how much information Buck soaked up about Eddie. He did it with all of them with surprising enthusiasm. He loved people and, most people, loved him too. But Bobby was pretty sure he wouldn’t even know Eddie had a kid if Buck hadn’t pried it out of him, he certainly wouldn’t have known the names of Eddie’s sister’s or the way he liked his coffee or that he used to play baseball all through his high school, and early college, career. There were moments where Buck would let slip something about Eddie that he considered small, inconsequential, a sum of the whole, and the rest of them would be left puzzling out where it fit in the picture. Eddie presented a different version of himself to all of them, Bobby had known him for years and, still, he was convinced that the only people on the planet that knew Eddie (really knew him) were Christopher and Buck.
Absently, Buck’s hand landed on Eddie’s thigh, settled over his knee for a moment, before he reached for the salad Bobby had thrown together. Chimney balked at the admission. “Please tell me there are pictures.”
“There -.”
“Oh my god, ” Buck’s eyes sparkled. “He’s in this super adorable green leotard -.”
“Dejar de hablar.”
Buck’s cheeks flushed, but his smile stayed wide. Teasing. He leaned over the table and everyone, aside from Eddie, leaned closer to hear whatever secret he was about to spill. “He did show choir until he graduated.” Buck’s eyes glittered, Eddie threw his head back in a loud groan and Bobby had just laughed, back then, with everyone else. He didn’t notice the way Eddie smacked the back of his knuckles against Buck’s, or the way Buck caught his hand quick enough to give them a glancing brush of his lips before dropping them back onto the table. He didn’t notice until he went back and thought about it all over again. And then he couldn’t help but notice.
--
The second clue that anything had changed had honestly been more obvious. Bobby was actually embarrassed he hadn’t recognized it for what it was until he had gotten the email. Eddie technically lived the closest to the Grant-Nash household - they frequently ran into each other at the same park, once quite literally, either with or without children in tow. Bobby liked Eddie, even. He was a great member of their team, had a biting wit that he usually kept quiet, and an absolute heart of gold. He was incredibly loyal, cared a lot about his family, and was smarter than he liked to play things. It wasn’t that Bobby typically stopped by Eddie’s house unannounced, but Harry had been staying with them over the vacation and had asked to use the video game Bobby had brought to the station that Eddie had asked if he could bring home for Christopher. Why, out of all the video games they had , Harry had needed that one was beyond him but he had pitched a fit until Bobby had promised to get it for him and Athena had rolled her eyes but waved him off with a kiss on the cheek and a thank you .
That was how he found himself on Eddie’s well-manicured front lawn, pleasantly surprised to see Buck’s Jeep parked along the curb and loud laughter from the small backyard. Bobby tried not to be obvious, really he did, and he would swear up and down that he didn’t have a favorite on his crew but… Buck was different. It had gotten them into trouble before - it had nearly ruined them before. Bobby saw more of himself in Buck than he ever expected to, but he mostly saw the potential within him. He had the potential to be the best of them and everyone but him knew it. Bobby looked at him and saw everything that he was, everything that he could be, and he wanted nothing more than to see him get everything he had ever wanted.
He peaked around the corner of the house, bypassing the front door to glance over the wooden fence that Christopher had designed and Eddie had built to look in the back. Christopher was the one laughing, although it seemed as though the other two were laughing as well, although just not as loud.
It warmed something in Bobby’s heart.
The three of them deserved every bit of happiness they could get.
Bobby didn’t know what it was they had been playing, but he did know that it looked like Eddie had abandoned the game to dig his fingers into Buck’s ribs from behind. It felt odd that it was so rare to see the two of them so unabashedly… happy . He knew both of their pasts up to a point - Buck didn’t really tell anyone anything about his life before Los Angeles, Bobby would have more luck getting Maddie’s story than getting his and Eddie… Eddie was as much an open book as he was a closed one. They had both been happy before, he had seen them even at peace before, but he had never… he had never seen them like this before. Laughing hard enough it was without sound.
Later, he would notice the way the entire thing felt both different and yet familiar. Later he’d notice the way they were pressed tightly together, the way Buck wasn’t quite pulling away but pushing Eddie’s hands to a different part of his body. He’d notice the centimeters between their faces, the very subtle way Eddie was keeping the both of them upright while being careful of Buck’s bad leg, and the fact that, once he did stop digging in his fingers, it was only to hold Buck’s hands in his own.
Currently, though, Bobby only noticed the joy in their laughter and painted on their faces. The baseball at their feet, and the leather glove Christopher was tossing between his hands while he laughed. He knocked on the fence, loud enough that it had the three of them turning to face him. “Sorry to interrupt.” Bobby was sorry to interrupt, although he wasn’t sorry he was seeing it at all in the first place.
Eddie was carefully restrained at the station and Buck was a different version of himself altogether whenever he was actually on shift. Where Eddie had started to open up more as he grew closer to the team, Buck played a delicate game of giving too much information and not enough at the same time. Bobby knew way more about his sex life than he had ever wanted to know, but he didn’t actually know how Buck preferred to spend his free time. He knew he stopped therapy after Eddie got shot, but he didn’t know how he dealt with his problems instead. Especially his actually dying problems. Bobby had been worried about him, he always would be worried about him more than he was worried about anyone else. Somehow, looking at his smile as Eddie tickled his sides, reminded him that he didn’t have to carry that worry alone anymore.
Eddie’s smile dimmed a bit, Buck’s only grew confused, and Christopher was the first to greet him cheerfully. “Hey, Bobby!” He waved too.
His coordination had gotten much better in the years Bobby had watched him grow.
“Hey, Chris!” Bobby greeted just as happily.
Eddie shuffled closer to him, grabbed the lock at the fence and opened the small wooden opening that Bobby knew was mostly used for bringing out trash instead of letting in visitors. “Hey, Cap.”
“Eddie,” Bobby followed him through the gate and over to the picnic table. “Sorry for just stopping by.”
“It’s fine.” A part of him didn’t want it to be fine. A part of him wanted Eddie to tell him to go back home, to pitch a fit, to… to do something so catastrophically uncharacteristic that… that Bobby would what? Have a reason to stay instead of go home? How pathetic of him to be so used to seeing his team in distress that seeing them so completely at peace had him wavering. “Want a water? Soda or something?”
“No, no,” Bobby waved away. “I just have to grab something from you and then I’ll leave you boys to it.” Buck was still catching his breath by the backdoor. Bobby watched him bend down to grab the metal reusable water bottle he carried with him everywhere (covered in stickers from Jee-Yun’s favorite cartoon) and take a deep swing that had his adam’s apple bobbing. “Hey, Buck!” He waved as he said it and Buck glanced his way, smiled behind the mouth of the bottle, and waved back.
“Dad, stop .” Christopher chastised with a whine. Bobby didn’t know what Eddie had been doing, but being called out about it by his son was enough to, apparently, have him blushing. Blushing! Bobby had never seen him blush before.
Eddie pushed at the side of his face until he was leaning away, laughing that same, loud laugh he had been doing before Bobby interrupted them. “ You stop.” Eddie muttered.
“Keep your eyes to your… yourself.” Christopher teased.
Bobby glanced between them in amusement. “That video game you borrowed from the station,” he began. “Harry’s home this week and he is driving us up a wall asking for it back.”
Eddie nodded in understanding. “Easier to just get it than argue about it for another hour?”
Bobby snapped in no particular direction. “Got it in one.”
“Okay,” Eddie grabbed the leather mit before Christopher could toss it again. “Go on, bud, you know where it is.”
“Aw,” Christopher sighed. “We… we were going to play it tonight.”
“You can borrow it again when Harry goes back home.” Bobby promised. “Or maybe he’d like to play it with you while he’s here?”
Christopher perked up. Harry was still a few years older than him, and he was definitely closer to Denny than he was either of the Grant children, but he still seemed to like Harry and Harry didn’t mind hanging out with Chris. He hopped off the bench, stood on surprisingly steady feet and stumbled forward. He stopped with a curious little frown on his face. “If you get married, would that make Harry my uncle?”
Eddie balked and Buck, from the porch, choked on the water he was swallowing. “What?” Eddie drew back in comedic horror.
Bobby was simply confused. “ How , Chris?” Buck asked once he got himself under control.
Christopher shrugged and started forward again. “If… if Bobby’s your dad -.”
“Bobby’s not his dad.” Eddie corrected and Buck… Buck’s cheeks were bright red. He glanced in Bobby’s direction and away again.
“You said his dad’s an ass.”
“I…” Eddie pursed his lips. “Just get the game, Chris.”
Christopher laughed but went to do as he was told, grabbing onto Buck’s forearm as he walked up the stairs and disappearing into the house with the backdoor left open behind him. “His dad is an ass, though.” Eddie muttered without looking Bobby’s direction.
It was truthfully the first bad thing Bobby had ever heard Eddie say about the Buckley parents. Both times they had visited he had been carefully silent about them, and ridiculously supportive of Buck’s decision to try and make good with them. Bobby had the distinct impression that Eddie knew more about the entire Buckley family situation than any of them. He wanted to ask, he wanted to know more, but when was it a good time to ask for more information than Buck apparently wanted him to know? Bobby wanted Buck to share it willingly, to sit in Bobby’s office or across from him at the kitchen table or even on his new couch and tell him everything without Bobby needing to prompt for more information. He knew how he felt about the Buckley parents, he knew how Chim felt about them even more, but he had been under the impression that Eddie was as neutral about them as everyone who hadn’t met them.
Apparently, that wasn’t the case.
“What changed there?” Bobby asked just to be certain that whatever it was wouldn’t follow them into work.
Eddie looked over at him wryly. “Nothing.”
He raised his brows in question but said nothing at all. “Are, uhm,” Buck finally stepped closer to them, and pushed the water bottle into Eddie’s hands. “Drink that.”
Eddie rolled his eyes in an expression fairly similar to the one Christopher had sent him but listened. “How are things going now that Harry’s back?” Buck asked, leaning his body on the table behind Eddie and pressing his shoulder into his back.
Bobby shrugged, stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried to think of the best answer. “It’s great to have him home.” Bobby said pragmatically. “But I think we got a little too used to not having kids at home.”
“That sounds so peaceful.” Eddie bemoaned.
Buck snorted. “You couldn’t even handle a weekend without Chris.”
“ You couldn’t handle a weekend without him.” Eddie corrected. “ I welcomed it.”
“So long as he comes home.”
“Yeah.” Eddie shrugged. “So long as he comes home.”
“Well,” Bobby laughed at the small exchange of smiles between the two of them. “He’s getting on Athena’s nerves. Harry is definitely her child.”
“I mean there are worse mom’s to have.” Buck offered with a shrug. “She can drop him off with Maddie. She’ll have him washing dishes and singing Disney tunes in no time.”
“Just because she can still do that with you -.” Eddie began.
Bobby clapped his hands to stave off the inevitable argument. They got into them every now and then, pointless little things that were entertaining to watch but exhausting to follow. No one ever really won, although both of them would say that they have . “What are you boys up to today?”
They traded a look and shrugged in unison. “Just hanging out.” Buck answered for the two of them.
It’s a little weird , Athena had said with a scrunch of her nose during one of the “family” barbeques. They spend so much time together. She had snorted after she said it. If I didn’t know any better I’d say they’re dating.
Bobby hadn’t put two and two together at the time, but he had asked, in a rather joking tone, “What? No dates, boys?”
Buck flushed and Eddie snorted with a shake of his head. “No,” he scoffed. “Just Buck.”
It had sounded sarcastic at the time and Bobby had laughed it off with them. But he failed to notice the way Buck’s cheeks darkened at Eddie’s answer and he had failed to notice the small smile traded between them. He hadn’t paid enough attention to notice how Christopher rolled his eyes while handing over the video game. He said his goodbyes, wished them a goodnight, climbed into his car and drove away.
He should have realized it then, but he hadn’t.
He should have realized it when they started coming into work together. The time that they disappeared into the showers and came back notably disheveled and Buck stumbled his way through an excuse that he was obviously making up on the spot - he definitely should have noticed it then.
But he hadn’t.
And he was only putting the pieces together now that he had the full picture laid out in front of him.
Several months.
Several .
Bobby didn’t know if he was more insulted they hadn’t told him or upset that he was finding out about it because of an email from the union rep and not his people themselves. It kept him up all Wednesday night into Friday and it followed him through the bay doors at the station and up to his office to click his pen and stare at his wall in contemplation. He was going to have to talk to them about it. Their files had already been updated with the correct paperwork, so he didn’t have that as an excuse. But surely they had to have known that the rep was telling him.
Why hadn’t either of them talked to him themselves?
He had thought they had figured their problems with communication out. Eddie trusted him enough, now, to call him when he needed advice about Christopher or life in general. Buck had sat across from him and said so confidently I died and texted him every single morning to make sure he was okay. He had almost ruined his relationship with both of them by the things they all decided to keep to themselves so why had they decided to keep this to themselves instead of just talking to him about it?
He frowned. Maybe it wasn’t that simple. Maybe… maybe it was that simple. Maybe this was the first time in a long time that both of them were unashamedly happy and they had been so scared to jinx it that they had decided to simply keep it to themselves for the time being.
Maybe Bobby was living a bit too harshly in his own mind and failing to think about theirs .
So he said nothing about it at all.
Buck and Eddie came to work together as they had been for months. Bobby caught the way Buck leaned across his gear shift in the Jeep to press a lingering kiss to Eddie’s mouth and he only noticed how content they looked when they pulled apart. He started breakfast, and pulled the two of them in a shared hug at the top of the stairs in greeting. “Congratulations.” He said like it was the simplest thing in the world.
Eddie pulled away first, patted his back with a blushing smile on his face and disappeared into the kitchen.
Buck lingered, held onto Bobby just as tightly as he was holding onto him, and ducked his smile into his neck.
Congratulations.
That felt like just the right thing to say to him.