Work Text:
The Wilsons are the last to leave, well past one in the morning. Buck helps carry a sleeping Mara off the couch and to the car. Chris and Denny managed to keep each other entertained enough so they didn’t go down like the younger kids, but now Denny’s finally flagging against the window. He mumbles, “Good dreams, Buh,” with his eyes closed.
“Night,” Buck says with a laugh. Once Mara’s securely buckled in, she slumps all the way over against Denny.
Buck glances over at Karen, who waves a hand in a wide arc dramatized by the whole bottle of wine she had. “W’ll be fine. Hen’ll get us there alright.” Her temple nudges his shoulder when she sways and he gets a steadying hand on her elbow. She leans on it, still watching her kids with wet eyes. “They’re so adorable. He’s such a good big brother. ‘M so proud of him.”
It’s not a surprise to Buck when she bursts into tears, and he accepts the hug readily. “I l-love my buh-babies so much,” she hiccups into his shirt and tugs so he’ll look down when she lifts her face. “You know? You know?”
“Yeah,” Buck says on reflex, because he does, and also he’s tipsy and trying really hard not to laugh. “Want help getting in?”
“I’ve got her,” Hen swoops in. Karen immediately falls into her arms, still crying. Buck’s warm past the alcohol watching them, Hen soothingly petting Karen’s hair down while she maneuvers her around the passenger side. “They’re so adorable, baby, we can eat them for breakfast tomorrow.”
After a pause, Karen wails, “I couldn’t eat them!”
“Sure you could, they’d be delicious,” Hen says, and the door closes firmly. She ambles back to give Buck a tight hug. He’s happy enough to not resist rubbing his cheek against her head.
“Great party,” she muffles into his shirt and pulls back to add: “Same time next week?”
“Ha! If you want to do it at yours, sure,” Buck snorts, and is grateful she pulls away so she can’t feel him tense when what he just said really settles. Because this house probably won’t be his for much longer. It isn’t his, to begin with.
Hen turns and opens the driver’s side, speaking over her shoulder, “We’ll get the Hans to host. I’ll work on it.”
Buck recovers and blows her kisses as she peels away. He has to linger outside a few extra seconds, arms wrapped around himself, before going inside.
It’s astonishingly quiet after having so many people talking and laughing a few minutes ago. He’s almost afraid to speak too loudly. The only proof of anything is the tiny blanket folded up on the couch arm, spotted too late after Chimney and Maddie left. He locks the door and waits until he’s able to see Eddie where he’s finishing cleaning up the kitchen.
Eddie’s eyes flick up when he hears him approach. The calm expression on his face shifts to a quiet, if not also alcohol-softened smile. He doesn’t look at Buck directly with it for long, focusing back on where he’s cutting the remaining cake up into Tupperware, but it makes Buck feel bright all the same. “All good?”
Buck nods, leaning in the doorway. “Yup. Hen’ll have fun wrangling Karen when they’re home. Chris?”
“He’s probably already down,” Eddie mutters and then looks up again, gesturing with the cake knife. “Could you check on him, actually? I’m gonna finish up here. He could take some to school if he wants.”
Buck gives a short salute, already turning to go. “Will do.”
Chris’s door is slightly cracked, a sliver of the light inside painting the hallway. Buck brushes a knock against the wood while he pushes in. It doesn’t matter either way, because Eddie was right. It looks like Chris literally just collapsed into his bed and fell asleep, shoes still on and everything.
Buck huffs to himself. He moves silently to tug them off Chris’s feet, heart squeezing at the memory of when they couldn’t reach the end of the bed, much less hang off of it. He adjusts them to at least be partially on the mattress and looks around at the unopened moving boxes stacked around. The Pokemon throw blanket he finds gets tucked around as best he can.
He gets his glasses off more carefully than anything else. Chris scrunches his nose but ultimately doesn’t wake up, so Buck folds them on his nightstand. He cups the back of Chris’s head, just for a second, just to brush aside the hair that fell into his eyes. That reveals the freckle above his eyebrow, and Buck lingers there too. He’s gotten so much bigger. Buck missed him so, so much.
“Sweet dreams, buddy,” he whispers, then straightens up. He turns out the light on his way out.
Eddie’s washing dishes when Buck comes in. “Out cold, like you said. You can ask him in the morning."
He assumes his position at the rack and starts drying to make space for more. Eddie bumps his elbow. Buck struggles not to smile, so he speaks.
“How’s it feel being back?”
Eddie gives an unconvincingly exasperated sigh to the plate he's scrubbing. “For all of six hours?” He can’t hold the stoicism long, Buck knows, not when he’s been having wine. Sure enough, his response is quiet, sincere. “Good. It feels good.”
Buck accepts the new plate. He takes more time than he should drying it, just to steel himself and start once he sets it down.
“So when should I—“
“Oh, I forgot to ask—“
Their voices overlap. Buck winces, because, yeah, Eddie was going to ask him anyway. Of course he was. He hastily picks up one of the wine glasses. “You can—“
Eddie nudges him again, harder than before. “No, you go. I don’t care.”
Buck keeps the wine glass to busy his hands with something other than wringing the towel, fixating on a water spot. After a careful moment, he forces it out. “I’ll, um, probably be answering your question. I can start looking for another place tomorrow.”
Eddie stills. Buck immediately feels that same jolt he does when the emergency alarm goes off, like he has to brace himself. He resolutely doesn’t look up from the wine glass, but Eddie’s carefully putting down the next plate he’d been cleaning in his peripheral. “I wasn’t going to ask that,” he says slowly, turning to lean his hip against the sink. When Buck doesn’t look up, he also shuts off the water.
“Do you want to move?”
Okay. Maybe Buck miscalculated. This wine glass is going to shine from space with the amount of time he’s taking on it.
“I mean,” he says weakly, eyes darting up. It’s his second miscalculation, because once he meets the bizarre look on Eddie’s face, he can’t duck back down. He finally releases the glass. The towel unfortunately doesn’t escape its fate strangled in his fists. “Don’t you… want me to?”
Eddie narrows his eyes and Buck wishes he’d just let him speak first, his bad, this is actually past miscalculation and right into mistake. He points into Buck’s chest. “That’s not an answer to my question.”
Buck fumbles. “That’s not an answer to mine.”
“No, Buck,” Eddie says without missing a beat, firmer than Buck expects him to be, probably because of how bad a deflection that was, “I don’t want you to move. I wasn’t going to ask you to.”
“Oh,” Buck squeaks, the intensity catching him off guard. He throws his hands up, nearly flicking Eddie in the face with the towel, so then he just tucks them close to his chest instead. “I just thought, since you have Chris back, you’d want it to be just you two again.”
Eddie doesn’t fire back right away, this time. He keeps watching Buck until his shoulders drop and the disbelief melts away into something Buck can’t place. When he speaks and his tone is soft, Buck could almost call it tender. “You haven’t answered me.”
Clearly, he’s stalling. He wasn’t expecting Eddie to fully kick him out as soon as possible, but he also definitely wasn’t expecting this. He struggles on what to call it, searching Eddie’s expression for any signs of discomfort or, what, anger?
There’s nothing like that, though. Just the tenderness, and a little bit of real exasperation, this time. Patience is what Buck manages to settle on, and he has to take a breath to let it sink in that it’s real.
“No,” he says, “I don’t want to leave.” I just got you back. How could I?
The side of Eddie’s mouth curves, a flash of a satisfied smile. Buck’s back to being dumbfounded when Eddie turns back to the sink, as if that’s the conversation over. “Then don’t,” he shrugs, resuming the water and the scrubbing. “We’ll figure it out. I’ve been fine on the couch so far.”
Buck frowns. “You can’t sleep on the couch indefinitely.”
“Nah, we would get a bunk bed.” Buck takes advantage and hits Eddie with the towel on purpose this time, to an instant kick to the shin in retaliation. “Or take turns! Buck, seriously, if you’re fine with it, so am I. We’ll figure it out.”
He holds the next plate up. When Buck doesn’t take it, he looks at him again, eyebrows furrowing together, as if Buck shouldn’t have about a million follow up questions right now. “What?”
Buck shifts, pressing his lips together before bursting out, “It’s— Just. Really? You can be honest. I’d still be renting, it wouldn’t be hard.”
“I’m being honest!” Eddie stresses. He shakes the plate so Buck pulls it out of the air and turns the water back off, crossing his arms to face him this time. “Why would I lie? You’re the one that freaks out and asks people to move in with you, not me.”
Buck takes that with minimal grumbling, mostly because he can’t argue and the contexts there were very notably different. He’s not about to reflect on any emotional overlap. So he cops out to the very last line of defense, the one he always thinks of first and brings up last.
“What about Chris?”
Eddie laughs, a short exhale that startles out of him. He shakes his head, but the ghost of the smile stays. “Chris,” Eddie emphasizes, bending in like Buck has to hear him better, “already thought you were staying and is very excited that he won’t have to put up with my cooking anymore because he wants to keep learning from you.”
He leans more heavily against the counter, amused and steady and completely serious all in one. Buck’s pulse hammers once. He didn’t think Eddie was actually lying at any point, but he needed to know that Eddie had considered this past the knee jerk, like Buck had. Acceptance of the fact descends on Buck gradually, like the drizzle before a rainstorm. He lowers his head absently to match Eddie. They’re close enough for him to feel the hitch in Eddie’s exhale.
The space between them changes, charges. An instinctual part of Buck’s brain has the same reaction it might have if he suddenly put his hand on a stove he hadn’t known was hot, like he has to rip away. The only reason he doesn’t do it is because he sees Eddie’s eyes widen, the same benign fear flashing through them, and he stays still anyway. They breathe together, just once, and it’s loud despite the blood currently roaring in Buck’s ears.
He isn’t close to drunk enough to not be aware of what this is, or at least what it feels like, but it can’t— They, very specifically, can’t—
Eddie breaks through the panic before it can snowball. “You know, since we’re being honest, you’re right that we’re glad to be back and away from my parents’… everything, but that’s also not the whole truth. It hasn’t really been just me and Chris for a while now.” He tilts his head, considering. A divot forms between his eyebrows the way it does when he’s mulling something over and over in his head. Buck wants to beg to know what it is, if it’s anything like what he’s thinking.
All of that, every single genre of thought in his head flies out the window when Eddie licks his lips, mouth staying parted in his hesitation. Buck has to rip his gaze up, away from the movement, and Eddie doesn’t call him on it despite watching him do it. Instead, he lowly, haltingly admits, “We were a little lonely without you, in El Paso. I… think I like having both of you under one roof.”
Buck can barely find his voice. It went wherever he tossed out his thoughts, lost and never to be found again so all the leftover space inside him is enough to contain whatever the hell’s about to happen. He scrounges around, manages an embarrassingly hopeful, “You do?”
“Yeah,” Eddie responds hoarsely, and—Buck is completely convinced he’s about to have a heart attack—Eddie’s eyes flick down, looking, staring at, “I—”
BANG, BANG, BANG.
They nearly smash foreheads jumping apart. Buck smacks a hand up against his like they did, the sting and the scare enough to snap him back into himself. Eddie whirls toward the front door, back to his full height.
“Jesus Christ. Who the hell could that be?”
“Uh,” Buck starts nonsensically. He does, in fact, need more than a second of recalibration. Whatever was happening is no longer happening, or maybe didn’t even actually happen because Buck was having a spontaneous, tequila-activated hallucination. The outside world exists. They’re in the kitchen, and they just had a party. Somebody is at the door.
He lowers his hand and clears his throat, hastily checking his phone. No missed calls, except for a random number that was probably a telemarketer. Still, he lands on the first logical conclusion. “Maybe Chim and Maddie for Jee’s blanket? She’ll cry for hours without it.”
“Yeah,” Eddie agrees readily.
He glances back at Buck, and it’s very hard to keep going with the hallucination theory considering how red Eddie is. Buck would say he’s probably about the same, if he could feel his face.
There’s another single knock, not as loud as the others.
Eddie jerks his head. “We should—”
“Right,” Buck says, too blunt. Eddie nods, turns, and Buck has to force himself to look away from the back of his head. The sliver of skin between Eddie’s hair and his collar is stupidly distracting. What is wrong with him?
Buck goes ahead with an extra stride while Eddie’s muttering, “We’re coming, we’re coming.” He almost forgets the blanket, but Eddie grabs it for him, refolding it gingerly. Buck does not watch how his hands move while he does it, hurrying to open the door. He only thinks about looking through the viewer when it’s already done, too caught up.
It isn’t Chimney. It isn’t Maddie, either.
All of Buck’s sense fragments.
It can’t be—But it is—Because he’s—But it is—Buck carried his casket —But it is—Messed up, a little dirty, missing a shoe, his head is bowed, shaved—
It is. It is, he’s not wrong, he can’t be wrong. Eddie coming up behind him and stumbling back with a horrified gasp confirms it. He wraps a hand around to yank Buck away. Buck doesn’t move. He can’t.
The name hurts to say after weeks of having to avoid it. He has to try three times. It’s little more than a rasp.
“Bobby?”
“I,” Bobby says roughly, alive, breathing swaying, “am really fucking glad to see you two.”
He passes out still actively saying the last word. They’re both there to catch him this time.