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Buck has been moving around the kitchen like he’s afraid of waking something. He stands at the sink rinsing a mug he never drank from. The gesture is wrong in a dozen tiny ways—too careful, too measured. Buck isn’t a precise person unless he’s bracing for impact. Eddie’s jaw clicks. He hates that he knows this side of Buck now—soft-footed, careful, already half-gone.
Buck talks about beating traffic before shift. A nothing line, worn smooth. Eddie hears the lack of texture in it, the gap where Buck’s usual ease should be. Chris hears it too, eyes tracking Buck with that sharp, observant focus he used to reserve for Eddie when Eddie was pretending panic was fatigue. A protective vigilance he learned too young.
Then Chris asks, too casual to be casual, “You coming to brunch with the Wilsons on Saturday?”
Eddie’s hand spasms against the counter. Chris doesn’t ask things like that. He assumes Buck is there, the same way he assumes there will be leftovers in the fridge or that Buck will automatically lean over to check his math homework if he sighs too loudly at the table.
Asking means he’s unsure.
Buck hesitates. The silence goes stiff around them. “If you want,” he says. Chris sits back hard, then says, too quietly, “You don’t have to come if you’re busy.” It slams into Eddie harder than it hits Buck. Because Chris means: I know you’ve been avoiding us. I’m trying not to take it personally. Buck gives that small, automatic nod, the kind you make when you’ve spent a lifetime taking the smallest exit offered, just to avoid disappointing anyone. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it. “Never too busy.” Eddie’s throat goes tight. Buck doesn’t realize he’s agreeing to guilt.
Chris asks if Buck is staying for dinner.
Buck almost says, “Where else would I go?” He hears the truth in it a second too soon. He switches it to a joke—“Only if your dad doesn’t cook”—and he thinks it lands safely, Chris smiling. Eddie almost says, Then act like you want to be here, but bites it back a hair too late; some of the bitterness still leaks into the space between them. It was supposed to land like reassurance. It doesn’t.
Chris swallows, nods too quickly, then glances at Eddie. It’s a tiny look, barely a flick. But Eddie feels it lodge under his ribs. Not a question. Not a plea. Something worse: expectation. Not that Eddie will fix anything—Chris is too old, too smart for that. No, it’s the expectation that Eddie will at least acknowledge what’s happening. Name the wrongness so Chris doesn’t have to carry it alone.
There is another universe where Eddie steps forward, cups Buck’s jaw, and says something grounding—You’re family, you idiot, of course you’re coming to brunch—but that version lives in the space between Eddie’s heartbeat and his fear. Eddie can’t. Naming it feels like touching a bruise he’s been pretending wasn’t there, and he has always been better at enduring pain than admitting he feels it. He steps over that thought the way he does laundry piles: later, later, later.
“I’ll text,” Buck says. Gentle. Neutral. Final.
Chris lingers for a second longer, fingers tapping the side of his crutch the same way he used to tap Eddie’s knee when he was younger and didn’t have the words to say he was worried. Eddie opens his mouth, but Chris is already walking down the hall.
Eddie drags a hand over his face. Whatever he meant to say to Buck—something simple, something that would’ve pulled him back into orbit—didn’t make it past his throat. He looks back at the mug. It sits there, pristine, harmless, meaningless. For a second, Eddie imagines reaching out and touching it just to see if it’s still warm. Just to prove Buck had been here long enough to leave heat behind.
He reaches out without thinking, touches the rim with two fingers. It’s cold. He lets his hand fall.
Buck treats the next twenty hours like a shift he can muscle through if he just keeps moving. Routine as anesthesia. Clean turnouts, polished boots. He knows Eddie notices from across the loft. He knows Chris noticed first. He tells himself he’ll apologize later. Or explain. Or at least look Eddie in the eye long enough to prove he hasn’t disappeared. The call tone erupts before he decides which lie to use.
The building they arrive at isn't fully collapsed, not yet, but it has the kind of framing Buck recognizes immediately—the wrong kind of lean, the kind that announces a structure has been surviving on borrowed time and one more bad day. Eddie was supposed to remain outside—triage, logistics, anywhere except inside this half-gutted duplex—but they’d been short a set of hands for the structural assessment, and no one hesitated when Eddie stepped in. He’s still in his paramedic gear, turnout pulled over it in a hurry, helmet slightly askew the way it always is when he doesn’t prioritize himself.
Buck walks inside first, boot flattening against floorboards that sag with a reluctant give. It hits him where recognition always does: this is a place that remembers what it was before someone stopped showing up.
“Hell of a vibe,” Eddie says. Buck lets out a breath that thinks about being a laugh and changes its mind halfway. Eddie files the sound Buck makes under Not Fine.
Buck is two steps ahead, lamp swinging, particles drifting in the beam like slow rain. Eddie’s eyes follow the movement without permission, the worn line of Buck’s jaw, the way he braces a hand on the wall like he’s listening to the house whisper. Eddie feels the ache of it, sharp and unwelcome. He’d spent months trying to drown this exact feeling in routine and distance, convinced he could out-stubborn it.
But all it takes is the sound of Buck’s boots on old wood for the truth to spike up his spine: he’s been in love with this man so long it rewired all his instincts. He tried to smother it for everyone’s sake—Chris’s stability, his own sanity, Buck’s peace—but wanting Buck sits in him like pulse and bone. Buck shifts, testing the next step, and Eddie has a split-second flash of reaching for him—steadying, claiming, something too dangerous to name. He forces his hand still. If he touches him now, even by accident, he won’t be able to pretend anymore.
“Kind of feels like the whole thing’s been holding a breath for like a decade,” Buck mutters. He doesn’t specify whether he means the building.
When the floor gives way, there isn’t a dramatic sound. That’s the first thing Buck registers. No crash, no sharp crack, no clean warning. Just a low, internal complaint somewhere behind the wall, as though the building has been carrying someone else’s weight for far too long and has quietly decided it can’t anymore.
Eddie’s hand braces on the railing of the stairs they fell into, instinctive, his spine going rigid in a way Buck feels before he hears the subtle flex.
His lamp clicks on. The beam pushes through drifting grit, painting uneven gold across a space that used to be a stairway but now tilts like a sketch that someone crumpled and half-smoothed out again. The railing bows a fraction. A tired inch.
“Buck,” Eddie says. Just his name, but held tight. A hand on the shoulder Eddie didn’t actually touch. Buck reaches for the comm even as he knows it won't work. The static’s already under his skin.
“Mesh in the walls,” he says.
“Old lath under plaster,” Eddie finishes. Eyes pinned to the shifting stairs. “Yeah. I felt it.”
The center mass of the stairs seems to settle again all at once, a lazy, downward shrug. Buck feels it in the bones of his legs before the beam above them sheds a thin strip of plaster that twirls through the air like a ribbon. He steps back automatically—muscle memory, their old rhythm of retreat—but the riser under his heel disintegrates with a wet crack.
The drop yanks his stomach up. His shoulder hits the wall hard enough to jar his skull, and then his head follows. Not a catastrophic hit. But Eddie reacts like it is. He’s there instantly, hand clamping around Buck’s arm with a force that should hurt, except Buck only feels relief. Eddie says his name again and the word doesn’t break, but something in Eddie does.
“What did you hit?” Eddie asks, and it comes out too thin, too fast. That’s the tell. Eddie hates this, hates when Buck sways, hates when Buck goes quiet, hates the way fear outruns logic. Buck hasn’t seen him this scared in years.
Buck blinks, slow, his fingers go to his temple, find the hot, sore swell already building there.
“Wall kissed me back,” he says, aiming for lightness and landing closer to honest.
“You need to sit,” Eddie says. No room for argument. No room for anything. “Landing. Now.” Buck could argue. Doesn’t. He lets Eddie guide him to the nearest patch of intact flooring. They move together, the building humming a low, complaining note around them. Buck lowers himself until his back finds the cool plaster of the wall. Eddie stays close enough that Buck can still feel the heat of him through the gear. He shifts once, a shallow adjustment to ease the pull in his neck.
Eddie feels the heat of Buck’s shoulder under his hand and, for one blurred second, he almost says the thing he has spent a year swallowing. It rises with the same instinct that makes him check Buck’s pulse before checking his own injuries. Wanting him is so familiar it feels like muscle memory at this point. He forces the instinct down hard, the way he has learned to press gauze into a wound before it has the chance to bleed out.
Later, he tells himself. Not here. Not now.
“Well,” Buck murmurs, letting his gaze wander down the blocked corridor and back, “looks like it’s you and me.”
Buck’s joke is shaped like something casual, but Eddie can hear what’s underneath: the recognition that they’ve been orbiting each other across kitchens and firehouse bunks and doorways for months without actually ending up in the same place. It’s the kind of rupture Buck only ever hides behind humor when he’s hurting.
Eddie sits one step down from the landing, the height difference just enough that Buck has to tip his chin the slightest bit to hold his eyes. “We stay put,” Eddie says. His voice doesn’t rise, but the authority in it is unmistakable. “They’ll get to us. We don’t move until we know you’re steady.”
Buck’s mouth twitches, almost a smile, but the effort strips it of warmth. “I’m steady,” he says, softer than the dust settling around them. He sketches a vague circle in the air. “Exfoliating treatment. Ambient lighting. Kind of feels like a spa day.”
The bit lands thin. Eddie sees the cost instantly—the tightness between Buck’s exhales, the way his gaze skids sideways like his eyes can’t hold a single point too long without losing focus. Then Buck looks up, and the softness there hits Eddie harder than the fall did. The lamplight shifts with the motion. The flashlight dangling from the bent bracket overhead swings, the beam’s arc slicing across Buck’s face.
He vanishes.
Not in reality—just in the shadow—but Eddie’s body misinterprets the absence with terrifying efficiency. Panic snaps up his spine so fast there’s no time to rationalize it. His hand snaps the light back with more force than makes sense in a crumbling stairwell. Breath punches high and sharp into his chest. The beam lands on Buck’s face again.
Real. Solid. Dust-smeared and terrifyingly human.
Another low complaint moves through the structure as the stairwell judders, then drops even further, even while they brace. Eddie’s body reacts first. His shoulder jerks, and when Eddie comes back to himself, it’s not to pain. Pain is patient; it waits its turn. What hits first is pressure—a throbbing exacerbating the traumas held in his right shoulder that makes the rest of him fold protectively around it. The expression that flashes across his face is fast and sharp and not as hidden as he thinks. The air tastes wrong. Dust and gypsum first; then the faint metallic tang of something ruptured above them.
He tests his hands; fine motor control answers back. A blessing his grandmother would’ve told him to thank a saint for. He doesn’t remember which one covers collapses, only that Abuela would’ve known without thinking. Escúchate atentamente, mijo. The body tells the truth even when you don’t want it to. He stills, catalogues, steadies.
“Eddie,” Buck says before he can stop himself.
“I’m fine,” Eddie snaps, but there’s no real sharpness to it; all the edge is fear.
Buck is concussed and bone-deep exhausted, and the sight of Eddie hurting while pretending he’s not does something ugly and familiar under Buck’s ribs. Buck lets the flinch that answer causes roll through him unchecked. He’s too tired to disguise his reactions as jokes.
“You won’t even look at me when you say it,” he says quietly. There’s no accusation. Just the soft, bewildered tone of someone who’s been losing Eddie one inch at a time.
Eddie’s head whips toward him, eyes flashing in the narrow cone of light. The look is too revealing. “This isn’t—” He cuts himself off, jaw clenching hard enough to tremble. Whatever he was going to say slams into the back of his teeth, trapped there by instinct and fear. “Buck, we’re not talking about this in here.”
“That’s all we do lately,” Buck says, and it comes out cracked-soft, more confused than bitter. “Not talk about it.”
The sentence hits Eddie like debris—he inhales like it stings, because it does. “We don’t have time.”
Eddie had learned the hard way that he and Buck didn’t get two chances at the same fight. One argument cost them months. Another might cost something Eddie didn’t know how to live without.
“We had time,” Buck murmurs. “We just didn’t use it.” It feels like it’s been sitting in his chest for months waiting for a crack to slip through. The concussion has finally given it one.
There is a beat where they might stop. Where they might reset. Where either one of them might offer a softer truth. But Eddie is scared, and Buck is tired, and the moment slips past the point where gentleness can hold anything together.
“You pull away,” Buck says, calm in a way that makes it worse, “and I let you.”
The stairwell groans again—deep, tired, a structure begging for relief. Eddie flinches before he can hide it. The sound hits the same nerve that used to fire when Buck took a hit on a call: instinct first, breath second, rational thought nowhere in sight. His pulse snaps hard under his sternum, too close to the place that has always gone hollow when Buck is in danger. He hates that it happens automatically. He hates that Buck sees it.
Buck sees it, of course he does, and something in his expression shifts, something quieter than hurt but more profound than surprise. A clarity he should never have had to earn through this much pain.
“Eddie,” Buck says softly, “you don’t have to pretend with me.”
The words land in Eddie’s chest like impact—low, direct, unbearably intimate. Pretend? Jesus. “Buck,” he says, and he can feel the strain in the word, the way it drags against the constriction in his chest, “for the love of god, do not start turning this into something it is not.”
He isn’t trying to shut Buck down. He’s trying to shove the panic back behind his ribs where it belongs. He can’t look at Buck before the fallout hits because he already knows what Buck will think:
Eddie is rejecting him.
Eddie is irritated.
Eddie is tired of him.
Not that Eddie is terrified.
Not that Eddie is at his breaking point after months of upheaval.
Not that Eddie is seconds away from giving himself away entirely if Buck keeps looking at him like that.
“Okay,” Buck says, finally. The word is measured, careful, too even. “If that’s what you think I’m doing, then…sure.”
Buck’s nod is devastating. It’s not acquiescence. Eddie feels the distance spread out between them like the sea parting.
“I just don’t know how to stop you from assuming the worst of me every time I try to understand what’s happening.”
Eddie shakes his head immediately, a reflex, a plea, a denial that doesn’t get sound before Buck keeps going.
“I’m not overreacting,” Buck says. “I’m reacting to you being hurt, trying to hide it, and acting like it’s no big deal.” His voice thins dangerously. “God, Eddie, that’s what scares me. The way you shrug off your own pain like it’s an inconvenience. The way you decide I can’t try to look after you.”
It’s the gentleness that makes Eddie snap. Not out of anger, but because the gentleness hits every place he’s been holding together with sheer will.
“Don’t twist this into something about you.”
The line comes out low and precise. Too precise. The kind of precision Eddie only uses when he’s trying to perform control he no longer has.
The blow is so precise it doesn’t even feel like impact—more like Buck’s ribs simply forget how to hold his lungs. He blinks once, slowly, as if dust caught on the lashes changed the focus of his entire world.
“Oh,” he says. The pain of a man who’s been misreading the map his whole life and just found out he’s been walking in the wrong direction again.
Eddie’s face shifts, regret shadowing the edges of his features, but the mask is still there, still taut. Buck breathes once, shallow, uneven, and lets the dust settle on his skin like a verdict.
“You think that’s what this is,” he whispers. “You really think I’m trying to make this about me.”
“Buck, that’s not—”
The thing about getting hit in the head is that the truth arrives like pain: delayed, disorienting, a beat off from when you most need it. Buck feels it roll through him the way a bad concussion always does—impact first, meaning after, everything a half-second too slow to catch. It’s not clarity; it’s a hallway light sputtering on just long enough to show the mess he’s been tripping over. “I get it now,” he says, and it comes out like he’s finally found a mass on an ultrasound. Not relief, exactly, just the grim comfort of recognizing the shape of what’s been draining him.
Eddie’s stomach chills. He’s heard that tone before. Right before Buck walked into a burning warehouse with a bottle of kerosene grief.
“Buck,” Eddie says again, warning, plea, apology. It could be any of them. Buck lets his head tip back against the wall, dust gritting against his scalp. The stairwell swims a little at the edges, but Eddie is still in focus. Eddie is always in focus.
“I’m not twisting it,” Buck says, and this time the steadiness in his voice is the kind that comes from being done swallowing things. “Eddie, do you honestly think I walk around trying to make things about me? I don’t even say what I actually feel until the floor literally drops out from under us.”
He lets out a sigh, frustrated with himself for explaining this in the first place. “You think I learned that yesterday? I grew up knowing that the second I needed something, people either shut down or walked away. So yeah, maybe I learned to keep things contained. Maybe I learned to handle it myself. But don’t stand there and act like I’m hijacking some conversation to turn this into me airing out my issues when the whole reason we’re having this conversation is because I never did.”
“You know what, Buck? You think you’re the only one scared? The only one hurting? You pull away, vanish behind a smile, and then get pissed when I don’t magically know how to reach you.”
A beat—raw, cracked.
“You act like I’m choosing to misunderstand you. I’m not. You’re impossible to read when you decide I don’t deserve the truth.” Eddie says finally. “We’re not doing this. Not like this.”
“Yeah,” Buck says, and the word is too quick, too self-protective, too exhausted. “Except if we don’t, tomorrow you’ll pretend you’re fine and I’ll pretend I believe you and we’ll just—” He sketches a weak circle with his fingers. “—slide right back into whatever this is. Again.”
The sentence slams into Eddie’s spine. The air in the stairwell is already thin, too full of dust and tension, but it collapses further around that line. Eddie’s pulse spikes. His shoulder throbs. Something primitive in him recognizes a cliff edge.
“Buck.” Eddie’s voice comes out too soft to be an order and too strained to be a boundary. It sounds like a man trying to stop a landslide with his hands.
But Buck only shakes his head once, not defiant, not dramatic. Just tired. The kind of resignation that comes from realizing he’s been waiting for Eddie to meet him in the middle for months, and the middle has never stopped moving farther away.
“You keep telling me it’s the wrong time,” Buck says. His voice is still maddeningly controlled, but Eddie can hear the fracture beneath it, the fault line straining. “But you never say when the right time is supposed to be. I tried to meet you where you were,” Buck says, quieter. “God, I tried everything I could think of...showing up more, giving you space, waiting for you to blink first. None of it changed anything.”
The words hit Eddie’s stomach like a drop through an elevator shaft. Because that—that—is the truth he never wanted Buck to see. Eddie has been chasing himself in circles for months. “What do you want me to say?” Eddie asks, and it’s not a challenge, it’s a plea. He’s asking for the script he should have learned by now, the one that would stop Buck from hurting.
Buck hears the question the way he always does when he’s on uneven ground, like there’s a right answer he should already know. Like the moment Eddie has to ask, Buck’s failed some test he didn’t know he was taking. Eddie means it as a request; Buck hears same old expectation underneath it: he should understand, should anticipate, and should smooth the edges before they cut anyone.
Buck exhales, this sharp little laugh that’s nothing but hurt. “You know what gets me? You get to be human. You get to be overwhelmed or grieving or tired, and I have to understand.” His voice thins. “But the second I slip? The second I misread anything?” He snaps his fingers, a tiny, cruel sound. “It turns into a verdict. Into you deciding I was never worth the grace and trust you pretended to give me.”
“Trust you?” Eddie repeats. The words come out stunned, then edged, then aching. “Buck, you didn’t tell me you were hurting. You moved into my house and smiled and joked and stopped talking to me about anything real.”
“That’s not—” Buck tries.
“True?” Eddie cuts in, voice low but sharp—too sharp. “It felt true. You stopped letting me in. Every time something’s wrong, you downplay it.” Eddie’s voice lifts, cracked with anguish. “Every single time.”
Buck’s jaw tightens—pain, not anger. “You ask me how I’m doing like you need me to say I’m fine. I don’t need you to—”
“You don’t need anyone,” Eddie fires back, the words erupting like pressure bursting a seal. “I get it. But you also don’t ask for anything. Not help, not space, not even the right to be pissed off when people upset you.” Eddie’s voice drops, and the drop is worse than shouting. “You were fading,” Eddie says. “I felt every inch of it. A little more every week.”
The word hangs there like a diagnosis Eddie didn’t want to deliver. “By the time I left for El Paso, I couldn’t tell what you were thinking anymore.” Buck’s inhale stumbles—an audible break in rhythm.
“When you walked away,” Buck says, voice level only because he’s holding it there with both hands, “I told myself it wasn’t about me. I told myself families shift. I told myself you needed time. I told myself Chris was growing up.” A measured exhale. “I kept rewriting the story until it didn’t hurt,” Buck murmurs. “Or until I could pretend it didn’t. It’s not like it was my first time living in a house that didn’t belong to me. Same waiting, different furniture.”
He looks at Eddie—really looks—and Eddie feels ice enter his bloodstream.
“But when I was in that house alone, trying to figure out what version of myself I should be now that you weren’t there?” Buck’s voice softens, not fragile, just precise. “I realized every version of me was built around you. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I finally did the math.” His jaw tightens. “And the math said you’d been pulling away for a long time.”
Then he says the last thing Eddie expects.
“We need to talk about your will.”
Eddie goes completely still. His fingers curl. For one disorienting second he is nineteen again—Shannon at the airport, him turning away to the gate, he is 27 again, Shannon turned toward him with truth on her tongue, one he wasn’t ready for, one that changed everything too late.
“What?”
Buck opens his mouth, waits for the dizziness to crest, then speaks. “You went silent every time it came up,” he says. He’s not accusing—he’s presenting evidence like it’s the only way to keep from drowning. “You wouldn’t look at me when Hen mentioned updating hers. You flinched when someone said my name.” His shoulders lift barely, a sketch of a shrug that belongs to someone who learned resignation too young. “You let Chris stay there for months. It wasn’t hard to figure it out.”
Eddie’s breath snaps out of him. “No. Buck—no, that’s not—”
“You trusted me once,” Buck says. The steadiness in his voice is a sharpened blade. “Then things changed for you. You fixed the mistake. It tracks.”
Buck sees the way it hits Eddie and hates that he said it—but he doesn’t take it back. He can’t. Not after months of swallowing things down until they turned toxic.
“That’s not—Buck, stop—” Eddie reaches for him instinctively, and just as instinctively, he snatches his hand back, terrified of the distance closing, terrified of the distance staying. The movement barely registers. Buck is already falling deeper into the story he’s been telling himself alone in the dark.
“You once accused me of not thinking about what my decisions would do to us,” Buck says — not throwing it at him, just tracing the pattern out loud. “But somewhere along the line we switched places. You’ve become a hypocrite.” His voice doesn’t rise—it narrows. “You don’t talk to me anymore, not really. You hold yourself back just as much as I do. We kept pretenses up the best we could, but when it came down to it, you cut me out of your life in the ways that used to matter.”
Eddie doesn’t argue. He doesn’t even blink. Because Buck isn’t wrong about the behavior—only the meaning. The stairwell vibrates with the weight of it—or maybe that’s Eddie’s pulse. The moment stretches, elastic and dangerous, and Eddie can see the pattern with brutal clarity: Buck even forced this conversation open. He didn’t. He probably wouldn’t have.
The words land with awful symmetry. Eddie looks wrecked, like Buck’s just named the thing Eddie buried under routines and distance and silence. Buck’s shoulders sag, the anger cooling into something quieter, heavier. “So why wouldn’t I assume you cut me out of the paperwork too?”
His gaze slides, refocuses, finds Eddie again. Buck drags a hand over his face like he’s trying to clear grit from his vision, but his eyes stay wrong. Tired.
“You told me you understood why I left,” Eddie says hoarsely. “You said you were okay.”
Buck doesn’t blink. “I lied.”
The word hits the air like a slap. Eddie’s whole body jerks.
“I lied because I knew honesty wouldn't change anything. Because I could’ve said, ‘I’m not okay,’ or ‘I miss you,’ or ‘I don’t know who I am without you two,’ and you still would’ve taken the out you always take.”
Buck pushes on, “You’re scared to make choices,” His voice rises—not loud, but cracking through its own restraint.
“You wait until they’re made for you. And I knew that if I told you how bad it was for me, it wouldn’t make you stay. It wouldn’t make you choose me. It would just make me pathetic.”
It’s said so softly Eddie almost wishes Buck had yelled it. At least yelling you can brace for. This—this quiet, accidental confession of displacement—cuts deeper because Buck doesn’t flinch as he says it. Eddie’s mouth opens, then closes. The dust hangs between them like static.
Buck’s expression shifts slowly, not with a flinch or a wince, but with the inward drop of someone bracing himself to lift a wound he has carried for years. It is older than this conversation. It is older than his concussion. It feels like he’s yanking something out of his own gut.
“I know you’re scared,” Buck says, cutting him off gently. “I saw it. That’s the crazy part. I see it for half a second before you shove it away. Before you shove me away.” Eddie flinches. He can’t help it. Buck’s tone is frayed, falsely bright. “I used to be the person you didn’t do that with,” he says. “Remember?”
“I’ve been a ghost my whole life, Eddie.” The truth leaves him before he can find a safer shape to it. It comes out clean and flat, like a fact instead of the admission it really is. Eddie’s eyes sharpen in a way that makes Buck’s stomach drop, but he cannot stop now. He has finally cracked the seal, and the rupture has its own momentum.
He works moisture back into his lips. He keeps his breath steady on the second try. “Not invisible,” he says. “I mean… I learned how to take up just enough space to keep people from tripping over me. Not enough to make them notice when I’m gone.”
Eddie’s jaw flexes, a tell Buck knows too well. Guilt is already gathering there, or anger, or fear. Buck can’t tell which one Eddie will let surface first. Buck continues before he can think better of it—because once the door is open, poison flows out in a flood. A part of him begs to shut up, but the part doing the talking has been starved too long.
“You know when you walk into a room and you instantly know who you’re allowed to be?” Buck says. “I never had that. I just learned to read whatever version of me people needed. I became…modular. Present, but never essential.”
“Buck—”
“Don’t. Please. If I stop I won’t start again.” Buck steadies himself.
The look on Eddie’s face is terrible, fear and apology and something Buck can’t look at too long without folding in on himself. He forces himself to continue anyway. His voice rises only because he is fighting the dizziness tugging at the edges of his vision.
“For Bobby, I was…I don’t know, something to fix. A…memorial.” he says, voice dropping to something thinner, “A walking, talking second chance. Some broken kid he could turn into proof that he did something right after he lost his family. I didn’t realize it until he left—until the house was silent—but that’s all I was. A rewrite. A lesson. A way for him to pretend he could control what he couldn’t save.”
Eddie’s jaw clenches—sharp, protective, immediate—but Buck doesn’t let him interrupt again. He’s not done. He’s not close.
“For Maddie,” Buck pushes on, each word fraying at the edges, “I’m a reminder the universe kept the wrong brother. She never says it, she never would. But I see it. Every time she looks at me she’s still apologizing—for leaving, for not being enough of a shield. I’m not her brother—I’m her guilt. I love her, but I can’t breathe under that weight sometimes, and I can’t tell her that without breaking her. With Chimney? I’m Kevin with the serial numbers filed off. Familiar enough to wound, different enough to resent, close enough to stand in the space where someone else should be.”
“I love them. I’m not blaming them,” he adds, shaking his head once. “I’m just saying what it felt like.”
Eddie stares at him, nearly frozen. He scrubs a hand over his face—not wiping tears, just trying to stay here, in his body, while years of swallowed truths claw their way out of Buck.
“When I was a kid,” Buck murmurs, “my parents walked through the house like I was furniture. Background noise. If I made myself useful, I was tolerated. If I needed anything, I was a problem. And after Daniel—” His voice cracks. “After him, I became the shadow they kept in the corner. A reminder. Their mistake.”
Eddie’s hand twitches toward him.
“I’ll lose the thought if you touch me.” Buck says, steadying himself on each word, voice rising again.
“I realized.” he continues, “The safest way to be loved is to be convenient. Helpful. Fixed. Replaceable. Not chosen—just available. For the people who matter most to me. I’m the stand-in. The reminder. The…shadow. Easy to lean on. Easier to let go of. I thought—I thought you figured that out too.”
Buck lifts his eyes to Eddie’s, holds them there. Because this—this right here—is the part he has never said out loud. The part he has barricaded behind jokes and helping hands and fixing things because being useful felt safer than being seen. He swallows against the nausea, and then he says the thing that has been rotting inside his chest. “I figured out the pattern. And I hated myself for it.” He runs out of breath mid-sentence, jaw trembling. Then, quieter—
“I finally understood the place you kept me in. You want the truth? For you, I’m the guy you kill the loneliness with.” Buck says—quiet, almost like he hates that the thought ever occurred to him.
Eddie’s fingers curl inward before he even knows he’s moved, the instinct to reach for Buck flaring too fast to control. Dust drifts from the ceiling. Buck tracks it midair, dazed, then drags back to the point he’d been making.
“And I don’t think you meant to make me feel replaceable. I wasn’t…I mean, not just that,” he says, trying to stay steady. “But that’s what it turned into. When things were too heavy. When you couldn’t breathe. The partner when you’re lonely. The extra parent when life gets too heavy. The warmth you plug into your hollow spots so they don’t echo. The one Chris monitors like a flight-risk because you taught him to expect people to vanish. I’m the one he leans on when you’re drowning and he doesn’t want to say it.”
“It felt like I was woven into your life in all the emergency rooms and late nights and family dinners, but never in the parts that actually counted.” He meets Eddie’s eyes—no anger, just the raw clarity of someone done pretending. His breathing is shallow now, like each word costs him something he doesn’t have to spare. “You reached for me,” he says. “Every time it got dark. And the second you got your footing back, I’d feel you step away. Not on purpose. Not cruel. Just… like daylight. Automatic.”
“Do you know what it does to a person,” he finishes, “to love a life they’re not actually part of? To be woven into the center of something they were never invited to claim? To be allowed everywhere but chosen nowhere?”
“And the worst part?” Buck whispers, eyes flicking away like he can’t stand to see the truth land. “I know you’re going to tell me I’m wrong. You’ll say all the right things, because you’re good, Eddie. You’re good. But we both know—” he swallows hard, “—we both know I’m not wrong. Not about this. Not about what I am in your life.”
Eddie makes a strangled noise—half gasp, half protest. “That’s not true,” he gets out, voice breaking. “That’s not fair.”
Buck’s mouth twitches, like Eddie just proved his point. Something in Buck recoils at the word. “Fair?” Buck repeats, not loud, not sharp—just tired. “Then let’s talk about Chris.”
Eddie straightens—defensive, appalled. “No. Absolutely not. Don’t pull Chris any further into your hurt.”
“I’m not pulling him. I’m acknowledging reality. His mom died. I showed up a lot after. You tell me what that looks like from the outside.”
“It looks like you were there,” Eddie says. “It looks like you stepped up when I couldn’t breathe. It looks like—”
“It looks like someone had to stand where she used to stand,” Buck says. “And I happened to be closest.”
“That’s bullshit,” Eddie snaps. “You think I would’ve let just anyone into his life like that? You think he would? He isn’t reaching for a ghost. He’s reaching for you.”
“He did six months in El Paso without calling me once,” he says. “So you’ll forgive me if sometimes it feels like he figured out how to do without.”
Eddie flinches. “He’s a teenager,” he says. “He was mad at me. Mad at you. Mad at the world. He shut everyone out.”
“He still talked to you,” Buck says. “Eventually. He went to your parents. He went to your new house. I was the one on the other end of the line getting ‘sorry, man, he’s busy’ and ‘we’ll try next week’ until it felt stupid to ask.
“I used to know what I was to you,” he says. “Maybe not in words, but in the way you looked at me when I walked in the door. In how you never hesitated when it came to Chris. That used to be the clearest part of us—how naturally we moved around him. But then you stopped bringing him up. And the more you stepped back from letting me into Chris’s days, the more I felt myself slipping out of yours.”
Eddie’s breath stutters, panic and anger colliding in the air between them.
“You could have pushed,” Eddie says. “Once he came home. You could’ve shown up.”
“Shown up to what?” Buck asks, sharper now because the memory stings. “A house I wasn’t sure I belonged in anymore? A family that had learned to function without me? You know what it feels like to stand on a porch rehearsing how not to be too much? Because I do. Chris watched us fall apart,” Buck says, voice cracking. “Do you even realize that?”
Eddie goes still. Completely. Buck has always hated how recognizably he reacts to feeling abandoned—Eddie remembers Buck in a different doorway, years ago, where he stood with his life boxed up in an apartment with mint walls, someone else’s decor, and a hope he’d never admit.
“You can’t use him as proof you didn’t cut me out of things,” Buck says, and the heat isn’t wild or reckless; it’s the kind of anger that comes from standing alone in a doorway too many times. “You can’t say ‘we missed you’ and then act like I imagined every unanswered text.”
“You think I didn’t feel you gone?” he fires back. “You think I didn’t walk into my own house and feel—” His breath stutters. “Feel the space where you should’ve been?”
The scene flickers. The edges blur. Buck exhales slowly, trying to keep the dizziness at bay. “I’m not saying you did it to hurt me. I’m saying it hurt.”
Eddie makes a broken sound, frustration and fear bleeding together. “I didn’t want to drag you into my mess.”
“You dragged me anyway,” Buck says. “You always do. You act like protecting yourself is something you have to do alone, and then you make decisions that tear through everyone who cares about you without letting any of us in. You treat looking out for yourself like a crime, Eddie, and then you martyr yourself when nobody wants you to.”
It hits. Eddie looks away, like eye contact might crack something open he can’t patch. The wall is safer. Structures don’t flinch. “I was trying to keep people safe,” and it’s not defensive. It’s worn. “That’s all I’ve ever done.”
“Maddie told me I needed to learn how to be alone again,” Buck says, softer, almost stunned by the memory. “Because I wasn’t part of a family anymore.”
“But hearing that,” Buck continues, voice rough, “after you left, after Chris stopped calling, after your house didn’t feel like mine anymore, with your mail, your memories, your kid’s artwork still on the fridge because I couldn’t make myself take it down? I stood in your doorway listening to the quiet where your lives used to be—Eddie, do you have any idea what it did to me?”
“You had a whole house,” Buck continues. There’s no accusation in it—just the kind of restraint that makes the truth land harder. “A house I helped you keep together for years. A life I helped you build. And then you moved it eight hundred miles away, and it never even crossed your mind to ask if I wanted to come with.”
Eddie becomes aware of the texture of the rail under his palm—chipped paint, a ridge of rust, a faint tackiness that shouldn’t matter and yet won’t leave his skin. It feels like the pew-grip at his abuela’s funeral—something to anchor himself with when the ground felt wrong beneath his feet. He can’t name why the detail lodges itself in his senses, but it does. Sometimes when he’s overwhelmed, his brain latches onto the wrong thing and holds tight. It’s happening now. He tries to shake it off; it clings anyway.
Buck doesn’t have the energy to soften it. “I’ve been right next to you for years, Eddie. Holding up every corner of your life you let collapse on me. The one you pull into your home and then shut out of your life. You didn’t even tell me when you stopped needing me—you just stopped showing up for me. And every time things get too heavy or too close, I’m supposed to step back. Smile. Tell myself it’s not personal. Pretend I didn’t mistake proximity for belonging. Pretend I knew my place all along.”
Eddie feels the world tilt in a slow, nauseating slide, the kind that gives just enough warning to make the dread worse. Buck’s words settle like debris after a blast, and Eddie can’t seem to get air around them. Somewhere in the last year—between the funeral, the distance, the half-conversations—Buck built an entire story about where he stands in Eddie’s life. And Eddie didn’t see it happening. Didn’t stop it. Didn’t even know to reach for him before the ground shifted.
“Kill the loneliness,” Eddie repeats, but the disbelief in his voice scares him. “You think that’s what I was doing with you?”
Buck, getting dizzier, loses the thread for half a second—not the meaning, just the sequence—and has to close his eyes to find the next sentence. He doesn’t actually respond. The silence is worse than anything he could have said.
Eddie feels something cold push up his throat, not guilt—terror. Terror that Buck has been carrying this alone, writing himself out of their life in real time while Eddie told himself they were just… adjusting. Grieving. Finding their footing again. He feels the terror flicker into something hotter. Not rage. But anger with a pulse—steady, certain, and rising. He doesn’t like being misunderstood, and he especially doesn’t like being misunderstood by the one person he thought never got him wrong.
He can live with fear. He can live with confusion. What he cannot live with is Buck believing that Eddie wanted him because Eddie was lonely. That he was filler. A placeholder. Something to quiet a room rather than someone Eddie wanted in it. “Convenient,” he says, the word coming out tight. “That’s what you think all that was.”
He sighs once, that humorless, wounded sound he only makes when something breaks where it shouldn’t. “It was convenient for you,” Eddie says, each word dropping like stones, “to sit in my kitchen every night acting like you were okay with it. Acting like none of it meant anything deeper to anyone but you.”
His heart is beating too fast; its pulse tries to puncture skin. He barely hears himself over it. But the pressure inside him finally finds a hole to escape through.
“You think I let anyone else tuck Chris in, or pick him up from school, or sit with him after nightmares?” Eddie asks, voice rising. “You weren’t a fucking placeholder. You were part of raising him. I did it because you were in our lives in a way I couldn’t undo even if I wanted to.”
Buck looks like he is trying to steady himself against the words, but Eddie pushes through before doubt can take shape.
“And you think I did that because I was lonely?” Eddie asks, stunned and furious all at once. “Buck, I don’t put people in my family out of loneliness. I don’t put people in my family at all unless they’ve already worked their way into it. You can tell yourself whatever story you want,” Eddie says tightly, “but don’t tell me I picked you because I needed a warm body in the house. I gave you my kid.”
His chest feels like something is tearing loose inside it. And beneath the terror, something steadier, sharper: the unbearable clarity that if he doesn’t say what he's been holding in now, Buck will keep bleeding himself dry. The look in Buck’s eyes isn’t anger; it’s resignation, the kind that comes from thinking you’ve already heard every possible way someone doesn’t choose you. It makes Eddie feel like the floor has dropped beneath both of them again.
Eddie realizes that the only way forward is to show Buck the part he’s never said aloud. It feels like peeling back armor he welded to his own fucking ribs.
“And don’t rewrite that as me using you to keep the quiet away. You keep acting like I left you guessing. Like I didn’t show you in every possible way that you were—” he stops, jaw locking as the word tries to break through, “—that you mattered. You think I didn’t—” Eddie stops. “You think I never wanted to…you think I didn’t feel any of this? Call me a coward. Call me confused. Hell, call me blind. But don’t you dare say I felt less than you did. You can’t tell me I didn’t pick you in whatever way you wanted when you never put yourself on the table to begin with.” Eddie finishes, voice shaking with truth and fear and grief.
“Eddie,” he says, not gently, “I’ve been on the table for years. Jesus Christ—I built the damn table. I sanded it, stained it, set a fucking place for you at it and waited for you to sit down. I have been the table.”
“You make it sound like I didn’t try.” Eddie’s voice cracks on the single syllable, barely audible but unmistakable. He squeezes his eyes shut for half a second, long enough to lose the thread of his anger. When he opens them, they lift again with something stripped bare behind them.
“Eddie, stop,” Buck says, voice thin and tired in a way that hits Eddie in the gut, the same way a sudden dip in the floor does when you’re already unsteady. “You don’t have to make this deeper than it is. I’m not keeping score. I don’t even—” Buck breathes out, shaky. “I don’t expect anything from you.”
Eddie feels the snap happen in him before the sound leaves his mouth, a hot crack through the center of his chest. The feeling is immediate and tidal, the way a burn feels before your brain catches up—anger, fear, and that other thing he kept refusing to name, all rising at once and tangling together until they’re indistinguishable.
“Buck, shut up. Do you hear yourself?” Eddie asks, leaning forward as if pulled by a wire. “Do you actually hear what you’re saying? You don’t expect anything from me? What the hell does that even mean?”
Buck’s mouth opens. Eddie recognizes the shape of the next sentence, the self-blame gathering there like static.
“I’m just trying not to add—”
“Jesus Christ, Buck.” Eddie doesn’t shout so much as flare, the heat curling up through him faster than he could modulate. “You have to stop talking like you’re some kind of burden I’m putting up with.”
Buck flinches, subtle but deep. The kind of flinch Eddie has seen on calls, on patients who were bracing for a second blow, the quiet bracing of someone who had learned to fold inward rather than take up any room. Eddie watches Buck’s face work in that way that means he’s swallowing something down—panic, apology, the self-erasure Eddie has been watching creep into him for months. It makes Eddie’s throat burn.
“I’m not your charity case,” Eddie says, voice cracking. “And you’re not disposable. So stop talking like that’s all you’ll ever be.” Eddie can feel the heat of him—too close, too unsteady, too important.
“You always do this,” Eddie says quietly, fiercely. “You start apologizing for taking up space I already gave you. You tie yourself into knots trying not to upset me and somehow—somehow—you decide I can’t handle you when I’m the one who—” He stops, because the next word feels like it might shatter him. “When I’ve been trying so hard not to lose you.”
“You think I didn’t see you?” Eddie says. “You think I didn’t feel all of it? I’ve been trying to hold myself together long enough to figure out what the hell to do with wanting you.”
Eddie takes a tight breath, the kind he only takes when he’s about two seconds away from saying something he’s been holding back for far too long. Eddie’s eyes snap up to his—because this next part, he needs Buck to see.
“You remember that day you came home from that date with Natalia?” Eddie asks—and his voice isn’t just unsteady. It’s disbelieving, like he can’t fucking believe that this is the moment, here in the wreckage of everything, where he finally has to say this out loud. “You were standing next to me in a graveyard telling me how she saw you. Like it was some kind of revelation. Like no one had ever done that before.”
Buck’s breathing falters.
“And I just—stood there,” he says, the words dragging out of him like they’ve been rusted in place. “Listening to you talk about being seen. And all I could think was—Jesus, Buck, I’ve been seeing you. Every damn day. For years. I’ve been seeing you so clearly it felt like if I looked a second longer you’d see it on my face.”
He draws in a breath like he’s pulling it through broken glass. “I didn’t know what to do with that. I tried to shove it down. I tried to be grateful that you were still there, even if I couldn’t name why being near you made my chest feel too tight.” He gives the smallest shake of his head, refusing reflexively to look away. “But it didn’t get easier. It got worse. Every day I didn’t say it made it harder to breathe around you. Harder to stand next to you without giving myself away. Harder to pretend I could hold that line forever without going insane.”
Eddie doesn’t know how to choose himself without feeling like he’s stealing oxygen from everyone else. The truth grinds up through him with the force of a backdraft, sudden, scorching, and undeniable. Every time Buck offered him something gentle, something easy, something good, Eddie’s first instinct wasn’t to reach for it. It was to brace for the moment it would be taken away. When Buck became the center of so many things Eddie wanted—things that weren’t guaranteed, things that could break him—Eddie did what he always does. He tried to amputate the wanting before it could consume him.
Eddie can see now, with painful clarity, how the last few months must have looked through Buck’s eyes—the silences, the hesitations, the way Eddie kept trying to hold the line without realizing Buck thought the line was a wall. Buck makes a soft, stunned sound that lands in Eddie’s chest like a punch. The last year rewrites itself with brutal clarity: every quiet moment Eddie took to steady himself, he thought he was drawing a boundary he could hold until he understood himself.
Buck didn’t see restraint. He saw retreat.
There’s no anger left in Buck’s expression, no defenses—just the worn, honest exhaustion of someone who finally said the thing he didn’t think he was allowed to want. The recognition presses into his ribs, not sharp but deep: Buck wasn’t wrong about the loneliness. He just never understood he wasn’t the only one feeling it.
He sighs.
“You want the real answer, Buck? I was already in love with you. Long before I understood it. Long before I could even look the word in the eye.” He stares up at the ceiling. “You were in my family before I even realized what that meant, and when you talked about her like she was the first person who ever really saw you, I didn’t know how to stand there without tearing something open.”
“So I stayed silent,” Eddie says, raw. “And you took it as emptiness.”
Eddie holds Buck’s gaze because this moment cannot be soft or evasive; it has to be plain. He’s been keeping Buck close in all the ways that mattered and none of the ways that named it, so of course the weight feels foreign on his tongue. But it’s real. God, it’s real. And admitting it feels like admitting he’s been living beside his heart rather than inside it.
“I felt everything you felt,” he says. “And I hid it. That’s the truth.”
Buck hears Eddie say the words, and something in him stills so abruptly it feels like his body forgets how to cycle the next breath. Not shock. Something closer to the instinct that hits on scenes when a ceiling groans in a burning room or a beam shifts overhead—the kind of stillness that pulls every sense inward at once. A slow tremor starts in his hands, almost imperceptible, the kind he’s fought through on difficult calls without anyone noticing. Eddie would notice. Eddie always does.
Eddie doesn’t retract the line. He stands in it, even as some part of him flinches—not visibly, but in the way his breath hitches at the wrong time. He’s still angry. Buck feels it in the air between them, that unsettled heat that hasn’t found its final shape yet. And Buck, stupidly, instinctively, tries to do the thing he always does: read Eddie’s face before he reads his own body.
It’s a mistake. His vision tilts a little when he shifts weight, a wrong-angle slide his brain takes half a second too long to correct for. Eddie’s eyes flick to the movement, sharp enough to cut through the fog, and something in him sours—like he thinks Buck’s hesitation is another retreat instead of Buck’s body starting to betray him.
Buck wants to say he’s not retreating. He wants to say anything. But the breath he pulls in feels oddly light. The concussion hums quietly behind his thoughts, not loud enough to blame for anything, but enough to make the truth Eddie just laid down feel even more disorienting. His mind keeps replaying the words because they don’t match the path he thought this night was taking. They don’t match anything he thought he understood.
He tries to answer. His voice doesn’t quite cooperate.
“Eddie,” he manages.
Buck tries to regulate his breathing, but the inhale doesn’t land the way it should. He holds the exhale a beat too long without meaning to. His eyes stay on Eddie because looking away feels impossible—and maybe dangerous.
There’s no flinch, no retreat, but there’s a visible effort on Buck’s face to interpret what he just heard. Eddie watches the muscles at Buck’s jaw work once, a genuine attempt at an answer that doesn’t make it past the first stage. There’s a beat where Eddie’s breath stutters—barely noticeable, except Buck notices everything Eddie tries to hide—and Buck recognizes the shape of it. It isn’t forgiveness. It’s fear, clipped down to the smallest setting Eddie can manage without giving himself away. But when Buck wavers—really wavers—something in Eddie recalibrates with terrifying speed. The anger doesn’t disappear. It just slides sideways, making room for something sharper.
“Buck,” Eddie says. The word is calm.
For a second Buck thinks the floor has steadied under them, but then the light in the stairwell flickers and he feels a delayed sway work its way through his legs. Eddie sees it before Buck does. Buck tries to ground himself, pressing his palm to the nearest wall, but the wall tilts under his perception in a way walls aren’t supposed to. He blinks, slow. The room pulls slightly left.
There’s a split second where Eddie sees both emergencies at once. For one suspended second, every emotion he’s been holding back tries to surge up at once—fear, regret, relief, all crowding the same breath. He forces it down, not to avoid it, but because Buck is swaying, because the floor is unsteady, because his heart can break later. Eddie wants to grab him, steady him, shake him, apologize, confirm, everything all at once—but Buck’s pupils are wrong, and the way he blinks is even worse. The man in front of him is going down, and Eddie can’t lose him twice in one night—first to misunderstanding, then to a fucking concussion.
“Buck,” Eddie says again, and this time he is already moving.
Buck wants to say he’s alright. The word is there, somewhere, but it never reaches his mouth. His knees soften without warning, not a collapse yet, but a signal—something slipping in the handoff between intention and execution. Eddie catches him before the tilt becomes a fall.
Eddie’s training overtakes his fear. It always does.
“We need to get out of here,” Eddie says, voice low but decisive, the kind of tone that clears rooms and cuts through panic. “Now.”
Buck nods, but the motion wavers. His balance tilts forward and he catches himself on the wall, fingers spreading against cracked plaster. He can feel the heat at the base of his skull pulsing in time with his heartbeat. He forces the next word out carefully.
“Okay.”
The syllable is clear but too thin. Eddie closes the distance in the same breath, one hand gripping Buck’s elbow, firm and decisive, stabilizing him with the same pressure Eddie uses on scene victims when he’s trying to hide how badly he wants them conscious.
Buck’s gaze dips toward the floor, reorients itself, then returns to Eddie—still trying to work his way through the confession even as his body demands a different priority.
“I’ve got you,” Eddie says. Buck lets himself lean into the contact, just enough that Eddie can feel the truth of how unsteady he is. Buck’s face settles into that rigid, disciplined mask he uses when he’s trying not to show strain—the one Eddie has always hated for what it hides. The foundation shifts again. A section of debris slumps away from the doorway. Eddie’s hand tightens reflexively, fingers pressing a fraction harder into Buck’s arm. “Take it slow.”
They reach the doorway as the last crew member steps aside to let them through. Ravi spots them first. His expression tightens, quick and focused. “You good?” Ravi asks Buck, answering the question himself as he takes in the way Buck’s leaning into Eddie’s hold.
Buck manages a nod. The movement is too disoriented to be reassuring. “Let’s get him outside,” Eddie says. He doesn’t need volume; authority carries fine without it. Ravi moves instantly to Buck’s other side. The standby medic is already pulling gloves on.
“What happened?” the medic asks.
“Head impact earlier in the structure,” Eddie says. “Symptoms worsening.” The medic lifts a penlight. Eddie steps closer without thinking, becoming a silent point of balance. Buck’s pupils contract under the light, a fraction too slow. Eddie notices immediately.
“He’s not going home alone,” the medic says.
“He’s not,” Eddie answers, before Buck even thinks to object.
The truth of that settles into Buck’s shoulders—not resignation, not defeat. Something softer, quieter, threaded with relief so faint it barely registers as anything at all. The medic runs through instructions, but Buck’s focus keeps slipping, the edges of the world blurring whenever he stops moving. When he attempts to stand fully upright again, his weight lists to the left, and Eddie’s hand snaps out, bracing him by the ribs.
“Let me,” Eddie murmurs.
They start moving toward the engine. Eddie stays half a step behind and half a step beside him, a position Buck recognizes from every call where Eddie’s instinct to protect someone overrides everything else. The rest of the crew moves around them, resetting the scene, but Eddie only tracks one thing—every uneven breath Buck takes, every misstep, every moment Buck tries to hide how close he is to tipping over.
The confession is still there between them, loud, impossible, and untouched. But for the first time tonight, Eddie isn’t afraid of what comes next.
The house looks exactly as they left it, but stepping inside feels different. Buck pauses just past the threshold, steadying himself out of habit, checking the ground the way he did back in the stairwell. He isn’t looking for structural damage this time. He’s looking for orientation, for whatever version of himself he is supposed to be now.
Buck lowers himself onto the couch with more care than he wants to admit, palms pressed to the cushion until he finds the center of balance. Buck leans back slowly. His ribs feel tight. His head pulses in a slow, dull rhythm. Eddie hovers at the edge of the couch like he's waiting for the floor to move again. He catalogs details the same way he does on their worst calls—the tension in Buck’s jaw, the way he holds the pillow, the pinch between his brows he gets when he’s fighting off something heavier than pain.
“You need to stay awake for a while,” Eddie says. The words are practical, but the tone lands warmer than that. “Just… for a bit.”
“I know.” Buck folds his hands together to keep them still. The tremor hasn’t fully left yet.
He expects Eddie to step back now, to give him space the way Eddie usually does when things get too emotional too fast. But Eddie doesn’t move away. If anything, he shifts closer without meaning to, one hand braced near Buck’s knee like he’s ready to catch him again if a shadow so much as flickers wrong across his face.
It’s subtle, but it’s there—Eddie’s presence pressed into the edges of every movement. Buck feels it before he understands it. He has the faint, disorienting sense that Eddie’s hand has been on him—guiding him, steadying him, balancing him—for so long now that his body has stopped registering the individual moments.
Buck shifts his hands on his knees, a restless, unconscious motion that reminds Eddie of all the nights Buck sat in this exact spot talking about everything except what was hurting him. Eddie leans forward. “About earlier.”
Buck huffs, the closest he can get to a laugh. “You could just say you’re worried.”
Eddie’s mouth goes flat. “You could just say you’re still pissed.”
Buck looks at him, slow. “I thought that was obvious.”
“It is,” Eddie says. “I just wanted to hear you admit it.”
Buck shifts—careful, deliberate—but the room tilts anyway. One of Eddie’s hands shoots out automatically, it’s instinct, not apology. Maybe that’s why it stings less. Buck breathes through the sway. “Yeah. I’m mad,” he says finally. “I’m mad you dropped all that on me when I could barely keep my feet under me. I’m mad you assumed I’d ever walk away from you for good.”
Eddie shuts his eyes once, like the hit lands hard but not unfair. When he opens them, there’s that same ache from the stairwell—anger, yes, but threaded with something older, steadier, heavier.
“You scared the shit out of me,” Eddie says. “And I was already mad, and the second you went quiet I thought—” He cuts himself off. His jaw flexes. “It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”
“You should’ve said it,” Buck counters, surprising them both. “Just… maybe not like you were trying to win a fight.”
“We’ll talk. We should talk. Just…not while you’re this wiped.” Eddie’s voice steady but nothing close to neutral. “I’m not making you fight me and a concussion.”
Buck’s gaze drops to Eddie’s hands, then returns with that heady concentration Eddie knows better than most people know their own faces.
Eddie’s hand is resting on Buck’s knee now—calm, grounded, sure. It takes Buck a moment to realize Eddie didn’t put it there just now. Eddie never moved it away after stabilizing him at the doorway. Somewhere between the building and the couch, every shift, every change in footing, every moment Buck drifted off-center—Eddie’s hand had been there.
And Eddie doesn’t seem aware of it at all. The realization hits with a slow, spreading warmth Buck doesn’t trust yet. He forces his focus back to Eddie’s face.
Eddie stands and moves down the hallway, returning with a blanket. He doesn’t let him refuse. He drapes the blanket across the back of the couch—not over him, not around him, just there—close enough that Buck can reach for it if he wants it, far enough that he doesn’t have to.
“You scared me,” Eddie says eventually.
Buck’s eyes soften in a way that hits deeper than any apology. “You scared me too.”
Eddie holds Buck’s eyes for a moment longer than he means to, as if checking whether Buck is really here or about to slip away again. The anger isn’t sharp now; it sits lower, worn down by the night. Buck feels it in the way Eddie stays too close without quite touching him, in the way his breath changes whenever Buck shifts. It’s not about the last argument anymore. It’s the accumulation of weeks—months—of both of them moving around something they never named, each assuming the other had stopped paying attention. The concussion loosened everything Buck had been holding tight, and Eddie’s confession tore through what was left. What remains between them now isn’t heat but pressure, steady and unavoidable.
The house is quiet, but not the brittle silence they’ve been carrying for months, not the shell-shocked hush of the stairwell. Just the soft ordinary sounds of a place that has held them both long enough to know their worst nights. Buck’s eyelids grow heavier. The concussion is pulling at him, coaxing him downward. He fights it, keeps his gaze lifted.
Eddie hasn’t moved his hand.
The thought hits Buck again—closer, clearer. Not just in the stairwell. Not just on the walk out. Not just during the medic check. Eddie has been touching him—somewhere, somehow—since the moment Buck started to fall.
A steadying palm at his elbow. A grip at his ribs. A brace at his back. Fingers firm around his arm. A hand lingering now, warm on his knee, as if Eddie forgot how to let go. Before Buck fully settles, he lifts his gaze once more.
“You’re staying?”
“Yeah,” Eddie says quietly. “Right here.”
Buck wakes for his concussion check with the dull clarity of someone who wrung himself out emotionally and then slept crooked on a couch. His body registers it before his mind does, the stiff shoulders, that come from trying to hold too much for too long. But the room settles around him with a softness he recognizes: he didn’t wake up in a stranger’s room or an empty apartment. He woke up here, in a home that has held him through good days and impossible ones.
He sits up slowly. The blanket Eddie must have draped over him slips to his waist. His head throbs in a contained, predictable rhythm—not dangerous, just insistent. His mind, unfortunately, is sharper than he wants it to be. The night comes back in whole pieces, not softened by sleep and not blurred by injury. The parts where Buck threw every ugly thing he carries about himself straight at Eddie like a match. Every place Eddie caught fire in return. Eddie’s confession. His own collapse. The sound of Eddie’s voice stretched thin with fear.
As he showers, he thinks back to the fight. There are no merciful gaps. Nothing softened by sleep. The memories sit heavy, and some of them still sting—enough that his chest tightens once before his pulse evens out. He expects shame to flare, or fear, or the instinct to retreat, but none of it rises. Instead, he feels the strange calm of having said something irreversible and still finding Eddie sitting beside him.
Chris’s cereal bowl sits in the sink, rinsed but not well. A mug with a half-ring of coffee. A plate with crumbs. Proof that life kept moving while Buck was unconscious. The sight knocks something loose in him—small, unexpected, not entirely pleasant. He swallows around it, unsure whether the feeling is homesickness or something closer to missing his own life. Only after the sting comes something steadier, quieter, the reminder that this is a life he wasn’t pushed out of. It is a life he stepped out of, assuming the door had closed behind him.
Footsteps approach. Eddie comes in with two mugs—coffee in one hand, tea in the other. He sets both on the table and hands Buck the coffee. Buck reaches, but his fingers miss the rim by a fraction. Eddie doesn’t comment; he simply nudges the mug an inch closer, casual in a way that feels deliberate. Buck lifts his eyes at the shift in weight and holds Eddie’s gaze longer than usual, like he is waiting for something to break the silence first.
Eddie had watched Buck come back to consciousness like he was afraid to trust it, like some part of him still expected Buck to wake up and pull away again. “You looked like you needed a minute,” Eddie says. “Not from me. From everything.”
Buck exhales through his nose. Something in the comment lands too precisely. “Sorry,” he says. “About what I said.”
Eddie’s head snaps up. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” Buck’s jaw goes tight—reflex, not anger, the echo of last night’s rawness still close to the surface.
“The spiral. We both said things and we both meant them. I’m not going to change the impact by pretending it was a mistake.” Heat has returned to the space between them, though the tension hasn’t bled out; their words are still in the walls.
“That’s comforting,” Buck mutters.
“You’re welcome.”
Buck’s mouth almost lifts. He hates that Eddie can pull that out of him without trying. Eddie’s tone is not light, exactly, but it has give. Enough for Buck to feel something inside him loosen. It feels like a bridge lowered between them, steady enough that Buck can step onto it without worrying it will collapse.
“You’re not mad?” Buck asks.
“Not at you,” Eddie says, but he doesn’t look away, and something unresolved flickers across his face. “If I were, you’d be mowing the lawn right now.”
Buck huffs a real laugh. Eddie’s mouth almost lifts in response. The ease feels unfamiliar only because it has been absent for months, replaced by distance neither of them recognized while it was happening. Eddie’s eyes shift in a way Buck feels in his ribs. That shift—soft, almost shy—is one Buck hasn’t seen in months. Buck recognizes the look on Eddie’s face—care hidden in practicality, worry masquerading as routine. It’s the version of Eddie he’s always trusted the most.
“I didn’t want to run,” Buck says.
“I noticed,” Eddie replies. He gestures toward the tea. “Hence the good stuff.”
Eddie stands, moves to the stove with a quiet competence that Buck has missed more than he lets himself admit. He cracks eggs one-handed, reaches for the pan without looking. Buck’s gaze is lit up with a concentration that feels familiar. Eddie has seen it during rescues, during hard conversations, during every moment where Buck tried to understand something before deciding how to hold it.
Eddie plates the eggs, sets the dish in front of Buck, then sits beside him—not across, not angled away. The proximity is intentional. It makes Buck’s pulse stutter once, just enough to feel it.
“Buck,” he says, leaning in, voice low enough the air seems to thicken between them, “stop waiting for me to walk away. We’re not done talking,” Eddie says. “It wasn’t pretty. I’m not pretending it was. It was messy as hell, yeah—but overdue.”
Buck sets his fork down. “Doesn’t mean it didn’t suck.”
“It did,” Eddie says. “But sometimes the only way through something is the hard way. I don’t want you walking around acting like we broke something we can’t fix,” Eddie adds. Eddie isn’t offering an escape hatch. He’s giving him a place, one he didn’t lose even when everything in Buck’s head insisted otherwise. Something solid to hold onto without pretending they’re not standing in the aftermath of something important.
“I was trying to hurt you,” Buck says quietly.
“So was I,” Eddie replies. “You just had a concussion. That’s the difference.”
“I wish I could blame it on that.”
“I don’t want you to,” Eddie says. “You were honest. That matters.”
“You were right there,” Eddie continues, eyes flicking up, then away. “Right in front of me and still…gone. And I realized—” A swallow. Hard. “If I kept pretending nothing was happening between us, I was going to lose you anyway. You really thought I cut you out.”
“Yeah,” Buck replies. “I did.” The words scrape coming out, drastically smaller than the anger that held them last night but no less true.
“Because I left.”
“Because you left without me,” Buck echoes. “And because when you came back… it felt like everything in you had shifted except the parts that didn’t include me.”
Eddie absorbs it. They go quiet again, but the quiet is working. For years, silence between them has been a tool—sometimes safety, sometimes avoidance. This one feels different. It is shifting the air between them, not calcifying it. Buck sits in that shift, feeling something open rather than close.
Eddie places his hand on the table between them, palm up. Not reaching. Not retreating. Just making himself visible. Buck feels heat sting at the back of his eyes. Not tears. Just pressure. This isn’t an olive branch or a plea. It’s a place set for him—plain, steady, unadorned. Buck realizes, with a quiet certainty, that this is the first time Eddie has ever made something this clear without words.
Buck looks at it for a long moment. Then he sets his hand down, palm to palm, the contact warm and grounding.
Eddie’s fingers curl lightly around his. Not possessive. Not desperate. Just certain. The muscle in Eddie’s jaw softens. Buck inhales, long and slow. He feels the slow swipe of Eddie’s thumb against his knuckles, slow and certain, a gesture so small it should barely register, but Buck feels it all the way down his spine.
Buck takes another bite mostly because Eddie is analyzing him with that careful focus he only uses when he doesn’t want to crowd someone but can’t quite look away. It isn’t hovering. It isn’t pity. Eddie watches him the way he’s watched him for years, with the ease of someone who knows every one of Buck’s tells and still checks for new ones.
Buck feels the attention in his chest, warm and embarrassingly grounding. The eggs don’t taste like much, but the act of eating under Eddie’s quiet supervision hits a part of him he tries hard to keep unexposed. He didn’t realize how long it had been since someone made him breakfast.
Buck’s knee accidentally nudges Eddie’s. Eddie doesn’t move. He lets the contact sit there, sure and unbothered. After a moment, he shifts forward half an inch—enough that their legs settle together in a quiet press through their pajamas. It gives Buck just enough room to take a breath he has been holding for months—maybe years.
Buck looks at their joined hands before he lifts his eyes again. “When you said you were in love with me… my first reaction wasn’t shock. It was disbelief that I hadn’t imagined everything.”
Eddie’s breath hitches, subtle but unmistakable. Buck feels the sound rather than hears it, like an old instinct waking back up.
“Because you’ve been…with me. For years. In ways that don’t make sense unless they’re love. But you never said it. And I never thought I was allowed to assume something that big.” He looks down at his hands, flexes them once. “I figured that was just how you take care of people. How you take care of me.”
He lifts his eyes again. Eddie is listening the way he always does when it matters—with no interruptions, no attempts to redirect, just fully there.
“So I loved you quietly. In the places you left open. In the ways that didn’t cross the line I thought you were drawing. I built my life around you because I didn’t think I was ever getting any closer than that.” A beat. “So I told myself you were just…better at loving people than I was. That what felt like a family to me was friendship to you.”
The next words come quieter, but not hesitant. “But I loved you anyway. Very much. And not saying it didn’t make it less true.”
The room settles around the admission like something finally arranged where it always belonged. When Eddie speaks, it’s without hesitation. The steadiness in his voice isn’t distance. It’s intent.
“You said last night that I don’t choose things,” he says. “That I just let life happen around me until it’s too late to change any of it. That used to be true. But not with you.”
“You’re right that I didn’t say it before,” he says. “And it wasn’t because it wasn’t there. It was because it was there, and I didn’t know how to say it without changing everything we’d built.”
Buck feels the honesty settle into his ribs—not sharp, just solid.
“I thought choosing you was something I was already doing. Every day. In the way I showed up. In the ways I kept you close. In the ways I built my life around you without even questioning it.”
He holds Buck’s gaze, warm and direct. “But I want to say it now because I want you to know this isn’t an accident or momentum. I love you. You aren’t something that happened to me. You’re the person I reach for first. I’m not taking that back.”
There’s a hitch in Buck’s breath, muscle-memory from the times Eddie stepped back instead of toward him. Eddie reaches out—not for Buck’s hand this time, but higher. Eddie lifts a hand toward Buck’s face, hesitates for just a second, and then commits—fingers sliding into his hair, gentle but possessive in a way he has never allowed himself before. Buck freezes, every nerve in him jolting. Eddie lets his hand brush slowly down the line of Buck’s jaw before he sets it on the table, as if he’s giving himself one last second of restraint. “Tell me if this is too much,” Eddie says softly.
“You said you loved me quietly,” Eddie says. “You weren’t the only one.”
Buck freezes for a moment. The words settle low, heavy, exactly where the fear had been sitting for months. Eddie watches the reaction travel through him—the catch of breath, the tension in his jaw—and something in Eddie’s expression sharpens, like this was the confirmation he needed.
“You want to know the worst part?” Eddie asks. “I was furious at you for not seeing it.” He doesn’t say it like an accusation. He says it like it has been burning a hole in his chest—something he couldn’t say last night without setting the whole room on fire. Something he can finally lay down now that Buck hasn’t disappeared, now that the morning is real and the night didn’t undo them. “But when we got home, right before you fell asleep, I realized something.”
“Yeah?”
“We weren’t fighting because we didn’t love each other. We were fighting because we did.”
The words hit a scar that isn’t done healing. Buck lets out a laugh that isn’t really a laugh—more a breath that comes apart in his chest, like the truth is unwinding him gently instead of gutting him the way it used to. He’s suddenly grateful he’s sitting down; his knees wouldn’t survive this upright. Hearing it aloud again rearranges something in him that’s been crooked for too long.
Eddie exhales slowly, the kind of sigh that sounds like a decision settling. “Listen. I’m not asking for everything tonight. I just want us to stop pretending we’re circling something we’ve both been in the middle of for years.”
Buck meets his eyes, and this time there is no hesitation in him either. “Tell me where you want us to go. I’ll meet you there.”
The kettle clicks. Neither of them moves. They stay like that for one suspended second—wanting, wrecked, vibrating with everything that they just said.
Eddie makes them more tea they don’t drink. Buck washes the dishes; Eddie dries them, even though neither of them should trust themselves with this much proximity. Buck yawns first. They don’t talk about where Buck is sleeping now that he doesn’t have to keep awake for his concussion checks. They don't discuss sharing the bed. It just…happens, pulled along by the slow, exhausted gravity of everything that broke and then didn’t. Eddie turns off the light; Buck is still standing there like he’s waiting for permission he shouldn’t need. Eddie lifts the blanket. That’s all it takes.
They end up curled together without meaning to—Buck’s breath warm against Eddie’s shoulder, Eddie’s hand finding the small curve of Buck’s spine like instinct, like muscle memory he’s finally allowed to trust. Neither of them sleeps well most nights, but this is different. This is the first time in months their bodies aren’t bracing for impact.
Dawn finds them tangled together. Buck wakes in slow pieces—the warmth at his back, the solid weight along his spine, the cheek pressed into his shoulder. Eddie’s arm is locked around his waist, not loose or tentative, but firm, the way someone sleeps when they’ve been gripping something in their dreams.
Eddie inhales, slow and heavy, and his hand moves from under his shirt—sliding up Buck’s torso with sleepy certainty. His fingers brush along Buck’s ribs, then the back of his knuckles skim the edge of his chest. Buck moves without thinking, and Eddie’s hold tightens immediately, pulling him back until Buck’s spine settles flush against Eddie’s chest. There’s no hesitation in the grip, no apology. Just instinct.
“Buck,” Eddie murmurs, voice thick with sleep, the consonants softened by warmth.
Buck turns slightly, enough that when he opens his eyes they’re a few centimeters apart. Eddie’s fingers trace the line of his hipbone in slow, absent strokes—unselfconscious, proprietary in a way Eddie would deny if he were awake enough to notice himself doing it. The touch sends a clean line of heat through Buck’s stomach, but the sharper feeling underneath is something steadier, quieter: don’t let daylight take this away.
He swallows and leans in, the movement small but unmistakable. “Eddie,” he murmurs, voice rough from disuse and everything the last day shook loose, “just tell me if we’re ready for this. If we’re stopping.” The question hits Eddie harder than anything Buck could have confessed. His eyes open fully—dark, alert in a heartbeat. His hand leaves Buck’s waist only long enough to cup the back of Buck’s neck, thumb stroking the soft place under his ear.
“We’re not stopping,” Eddie says. There’s no wobble in it, no thought he’s trying to talk himself into. Just certainty.
Buck lets out something that’s half a breath, half a laugh, and entirely relief. He turns the rest of the way. “Eddie,” he manages, “if you don’t kiss me, I’m going to—”
Eddie doesn’t let him finish.
Eddie leans in, brushing his mouth against Buck’s in a slow, claiming press that deepens the second Buck responds—like Eddie was holding himself an inch back until he knew Buck wasn’t going to flinch. Then Buck responds—honest, unguarded—and the softness burns away into something deeper. Eddie’s hand tightens at the back of his neck, not rough, not rushed, just decisive in a way that tells Buck the thought wasn’t new, only waiting for permission. Buck feels the warmth of it melt down his spine, startling in how safe it feels, how inevitable. When Eddie shifts closer, sliding a leg between Buck’s, Buck gasps into the kiss—quiet, shaky, devastating.
Eddie hears it. His grip tightens, drawing Buck fully onto his back without breaking contact. Buck feels the moment Eddie settles his weight fully, body aligned with his, warm and solid and grounding. It sends a bolt of tenderness through him so strong it almost knocks the air out of him. Eddie seems to feel it too; he runs his hand up Buck’s arm in a slow, soothing line before kissing him again—deep, lingering, the kind of kiss that promises they’re not going back to the versions of themselves who held everything at arm’s length.
Buck fists his hands in Eddie’s shirt—not to pull him down, but to anchor something in himself that’s been trembling for months. Eddie’s answering breath is warm against his cheek, half-kiss, half-sigh, like he’s been waiting for Buck to reach for him first. Buck’s heartbeat stumbles. He feels Eddie track it with his thumb, a soft sound escaping him before he kisses Buck again—deeper, firmer, as if confirming every jump of Buck’s pulse is meant for him.
Buck presses closer, kisses deepening with a reverence disguised as hunger. Everything they said—I left, you left, I love you, I thought I lost you—sits under every movement, every sound they drag from each other.
“Eddie,” Buck breathes against his mouth, not a question, not a plea—just his name, full of awe and the sharp, sweet ache of wanting. Eddie pulls back only far enough to see him. Dawn is soft around them, but Eddie’s expression is anything but soft; Eddie, always deliberate, finally giving all that held-back intensity somewhere to go.
“You good?” Eddie asks, voice low, like he’s trying not to break whatever spell morning has allowed.
Buck nods once, too quickly, then steadier. “Yeah. I’m—God, I’m here.”
Every movement is slow but consuming—Eddie’s mouth finding the corner of Buck’s, then his jaw, then the place below his ear where Eddie’s breath sends Buck’s stomach tightening in a sharp, overwhelming rush. Buck turns into him instinctively, a low sound leaving him before he can catch it. Eddie answers with a quiet, reverent “yeah” against his throat, like Buck just confirmed something Eddie has suspected for years.
Eddie tightens his arm around him, and the shift is so sure, so lived-in, that something deep in Buck finally settles.
The room, the dawn light, the warmth of Eddie’s body — it all lands with the weight of something real. Buck isn’t a flicker in a corridor anymore. He isn’t an echo. He’s here, held, solid, and for the first time in a long time, the only thing following him is Eddie’s breath against his skin.