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baby, say you'll always keep me | buck/eddie | 8 200 words

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and the darkness behind his eyelids takes on a white edge. “Be good. Nice to be married,” he yanks on Buck’s t-shirt, “best friend.”

Finally, Buck takes a breath that sounds off somehow, but he laughs too, and that sounds normal, Eddie thinks. A normal laugh.

“Sure, Eds,” he says, and there’s his hand in Eddie’s hair again, a puff of breath on the crown of Eddie’s head like Buck leaned in to press a kiss there and then stopped, but why would he stop—“I’ll marry you if you remind me tomorrow.”

or the one in which joking about being married to your best friend is all fun and games, right up until you realize that you're not laughing.

Eddie is firmly of the opinion that if both parties find something funny, it’s a joke.

“Okay, no,” Hen says, with that judgy little scrunch to her eyebrows, “that’s not a joke.”

“I don’t know, Hen,” Chim says around a giant bite of apple, leaning back in his chair, “I see what Eddie’s saying. I can’t think of anything funnier than proposing to you for shits and giggles.”

Hen gives him a look that makes Eddie shrink a little.

“Listen,” he says, casting a look around the firehouse kitchen to make sure he doesn’t accidentally bring more people into his completely innocent, one-hundred-percent fun business, “this is between me and Buck, alright? He gets a kick out of it, I get a kick out of it, we’re not hurting anybody. Stop being all—“ he cuts himself off, because Chimney’s doing The Face at Hen, and she’s doing The Face back at him except slightly more frantically, and Eddie has a fucking headache, actually.

“You stop being all,” Chim says, waving an arm, scattering droplets of apple juice on the table. “Wait until I tell Maddie about this. She’s going to have things to say.”

“Or you could just not tell Maddie about it,” Eddie says, with absolutely no conviction, because he knows that’s a battle he’s already lost.

It’s just that—they don’t get it, clearly. He and Buck are best friends. They’ve been best friends for what feels like decades, but has really only been a few years in which they’ve each gone through fifteen different iterations of personal hell. They’re allowed to act however they want. They’re allowed have in-jokes; Hen and Chim are the ones making it weird.

Which means it’s perfectly normal for Eddie to stumble up into the loft still half-asleep, and see Buck with his hand outstretched holding Eddie’s coffee made exactly how he likes it, and say, “oh my God, you’re a lifesaver.”

And it’s perfectly normal for Buck to reply: “If you married me already, I could have made you coffee at home.”

It’s normal. Eddie is a normal man with a normal best friendship with his normal best friend.

“Okay, but,” Hen lowers her voice, leaning forward with her elbows on the table, “how did it like—start? The whole—two bros joking about marriage thing?”

Somewhere in Eddie’s periphery, Chim chokes on his apple.

Eddie presses his fingertips into his temples. He’s already finished his coffee, and now all he has is an empty cup and an existential crisis he’s been carefully stapling down at the corners, except he’s running out of goddamn staples.

“I don’t know,” he says, which is not exactly the truth.

The way it starts is a combination of things.

Eddie’s painkillers, for one, because Buck doesn’t let him skip a single dose, and taking the pill always results in absolute nonsense spilling all stream-of-consciousness out of Eddie’s mouth in the five minutes it takes him to fall asleep. Buck has a video of Eddie lying back on his very specifically shaped mound of pillows and tearily singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at the ceiling. Eddie has no memory of doing it.

So it’s Eddie’s painkillers, mostly. It has very little to do with the fact that he’s been feeling all slug-like and disgusting and not a little pathetic, because he can’t even take his own shirt off without cutting himself out of it. He can’t really shower, can’t sit down or stand up by himself without pain, and he struggles to get toothpaste on his toothbrush without tipping it over and getting the toothpaste all over the sink. The things he can do take five times longer than usual, between the shoulder and the incision over his ribs that’s only just started knitting itself back together.

And Buck’s just—there. He shows up and shows up and shows up, relentless in the face of Eddie’s grumbling and frustration and genuine anger. He makes soup and reorganizes the bookshelves and slings Christopher’s backpack over his shoulder morning after morning with an ease that would make Eddie jealous if it were anyone else.

At no point does he comment on the way Eddie’s cracked all over like an eggshell, waiting for one solid hit to shatter him for good.

The point is, really, that Eddie finds himself sitting on the edge of his bed on a random Thursday night in just his boxers, with fresh opioids in his bloodstream and Buck’s fingers warm and careful at the nape of his neck, taking off the sling he wears during the day to swap it for the sleeping one.

“There we go,” he says, with that little frown line between his eyebrows that he gets when he’s focusing really hard. “You wanna help me get your legs up on the bed?”

“No,” Eddie sighs, and relishes the tiny smile that tilts the corner of Buck’s mouth. He takes a deep breath and braces himself, because this is the part that always hurts, but Buck’s touch is familiar on the paper-thin skin of Eddie’s ankle, in the small of his back.

“I’m sorry,” Buck says, like he always does, with something tortured behind it that Eddie keeps meaning to ask about, except his brain’s already going hazy. “This feel okay?”

Even if it didn’t, Eddie wouldn’t tell him, because he’s not stupid. He knows that when Buck pretends to shower for half an hour, he spends at least half of that time in here, opening the window for some fresh air, changing the sheets every couple of days because the meds make Eddie sweat and half the bedding ends up on the floor by morning, rearranging everything to fit around the giant wedge pillow that just appeared in Eddie’s house the day he came home.

“It’s fine,” Eddie says, fighting how heavy his tongue is becoming. It’ll be another couple of minutes before he’s out, and today was—not a good day, maybe, but it was better. He doesn’t want it to end. “Sorry.”

Buck snorts. “You always say that,” he says, carefully pulling the comforter over Eddie’s legs. “And I always say what?”

“To st—ugh,” Eddie gags, because the entire inside of his mouth feels like it doesn’t belong to him, somehow. “To stop apologizing.”

“Yeah,” Buck says, soft. Eddie wants to look at him, but his eyes seem to have closed. “So stop apologizing.”

Eddie makes some kind of sound that has Buck laughing quietly under his breath. Then, there’s a hand in his hair, a careful touch that dislodges all the dry shampoo accumulated up there. Buck’s fingers on the nape of Eddie’s neck, Buck’s thumb on the edge of Eddie’s cheekbone.

“Hey, before you knock out,” he says, and the floor creaks like he’s stepping from foot to foot, “I’m going to work tomorrow, I don’t know if you remember.”

“Mh,” Eddie says back, which really means something along the lines of how could I fucking forget.It’s only twelve hours; most of Buck’s shifts have been half-shifts, lately, and Eddie’s going to get to the bottom of that too, when he has a little more brain at his disposal.

Buck sighs, which lets Eddie know he’s not going to like whatever comes next.

“I want you to sleep in if you can,” he says. Eddie goes to protest, but it’s so hard to move. “I’ll take Chris to school, and Carla’s gonna be here during the day. If you try to get out of bed by yourself, she’ll tell me.”

“Not g’na,” Eddie says, turning his head toward where Buck’s probably standing, “make Carla help.”

“Good thing you don’t have to make her, then,” Buck says, and Eddie wants to see him, but the best he can manage is a thin sliver of the world that’s all dark and shivering between his eyelids, like Buck is both there and not. “Listen, just—you can close your eyes and rest, okay? It’s okay if you do. I’ll take care of everything, and I’ll make you some breakfast you can have when you wake up.”

And it’s then: that crucial, blank, hazy minute before Eddie’s dead to the world. It’s then that he reaches his good hand out and manages to grab the edge of Buck’s shirt with clumsy fingers.

“You’re s—so good to me,” he says, the words all strange and tangy on his tongue, like he shouldn’t be saying them but he can’t remember why when it’s obviously the truth. “We should. You should—husband.”

Buck chuckles, quiet, quiet. “Huh?”

“Marry me,” Eddie slurs, and hopes Buck can hear, because it feels important that he does. “Y’know? It’d be—good.”

Silence.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, and the darkness behind his eyelids takes on a white edge. “Be good. Nice to be married,” he yanks on Buck’s t-shirt, “best friend.”

Finally, Buck takes a breath that sounds off somehow, but he laughs too, and that sounds normal, Eddie thinks. A normal laugh.

Eddie thinks about it, sometimes, and wonders how it’s possible that he remembers it at all.

He looks at Buck’s profile, cut in sharp lines in the light that spills in through the windshield, and wonders how it felt for him, Eddie high out of his mind asking for his hand in marriage; wonders what it was that made him crack a smile when he came home from work the next day and say “hey, future husband” like that was their new normal.

Eddie looks: at the slight purse to Buck’s lips when he overtakes and the frown when they come up on a stretch of traffic and the steady way his hands turn the wheel, thick fingers and the sharp peaks of his knuckles rising from underneath the skin, and he wonders if it is normal to notice those things, to catalogue them for when a moment finds him alone and he can close his eyes and imagine things that can only ever happen in his head.

He’s always looking at Buck, these days. Always wondering.

“Okay,” Buck says at the next red light, and the way he squints in the face of the sun doesn’t change when he turns to Eddie, “what’s going on with you? Do I need to kick Chim’s ass?”

Eddie reaches blindly into the cup holder and grabs a forgotten gas station receipt just for something to shred.

“It’s cute that you think you could,” he says, looking out of the window to watch couples and friends and families enjoying their morning outside the café on the corner. He bets they all have in-jokes.

Buck sighs. “I could sic Maddie on him,” he says, and Eddie feels Buck’s eyes in the side of his face, but looking at him is suddenly impossible. “If he said something.”

“Nah,” he says, because for all of Chimney’s snark, there was something quiet and sympathetic in his eyes as he stared Eddie down and tried to get him to admit the truth. It’s not his fault that Eddie’s a coward. “Now, Hen, on the other hand—“

“Oh, no, sorry,” Buck interrupts, light enough that Eddie dares to peek, and finds him smiling ever so slightly out at the crosswalk, “you’re alone in that one. You know if Hen said something to you, she was probably right.”

That’s not a joke, Eddie thinks, and swallows something very, very heavy.

“I’m fine,” he says, because Buck’s worse than a dog with a bone when it comes to Eddie’s general wellbeing, after everything they’ve been through. “Vitals are normal, pupillary response—“

“Pain in the ass,” Buck says, and then, just to be a dick, he reaches over the center console and puts a couple of those capable, capable fingers on the underside of Eddie’s wrist. He makes a big show of counting the beats of Eddie’s heart out loud, just loud enough to drown out the radio, and Eddie is—

Eddie is not breathing, and is also so, so fucked.

“See,” Buck says, and has the audacity to sound smug. “Seventy-seven. Heart rate elevated, so cut the bullshit, Eddie.”

Eddie exhales through his mouth with as much force as he dares put behind it, hoping Buck won’t notice. He’s held on for a full minute, has counted the pathetic flutters of Eddie’s heart where it’s trying to impale itself on his ribs, and he’s still not letting go.

“I’m good,” he says, steadily watching the outside, bikers and joggers and dogs on walks. Everyone so fucking put together in the morning sunshine while Eddie trembles in his own truck, and it has nothing to do with temperature, because Buck put on the heat for him like he always does. “Just tired. I couldn’t really sleep.”

That’s not even a lie. He did find himself awake at three in the morning, watching whatever he could make out of the shape of Buck one bed over.

“Oh,” Buck says, and he squeezes Eddie’s wrist once before he finally lets go. “I didn’t realize. You can sleep when we get—to yours,” he says, with a little pause, like there was another word that had offered itself.

If Eddie were just a little braver, he’d ask it: home?

“As long as you need,” Buck says, and they’re moving, so his eyes must be on the road, which means Eddie’s safe to look back at his profile again, at the way his eyelashes look burnished by the sunlight, at the hint of stubble over his upper lip. “Christopher and I are meant to be working on his science project anyway.”

“The one I’m not allowed to see until it’s finished?” Eddie asks, and the smile that settles on his face surprises him when he finds it there.

“That’s the one,” Buck grins. “So I’ll pick him up, we’ll do some homework, you can sleep. And then we’ll order something, because this shift sucked and I don’t want to cook and I’m not gonna make you do it.”

“I could,” Eddie says, but it comes out exhausted at the thought alone.

“Sure, big guy,” Buck says, reaching out to pat Eddie on the thigh. Eddie curls his fingers around the grab handle to keep himself from doing something he’ll regret. “But a good husband doesn’t make his exhausted husband cook dinner.”

He keeps grinning, laughs under his breath as he takes his hand off Eddie and makes the turn into Eddie’s street.

And Eddie—lurches. All of him, like Buck’s touch on his thigh was the last tether, and now there’s nothing to stop him crumbling and crumbling and crumbling until nothing’s left.

Buck raises his chin, looking ahead to make sure he parks far enough from the house that they can walk between it and the truck. An easy, familiar habit, built over the course of a hundred drives just like this one.

Eddie’s not sure if his denial was flimsy enough that a few sentences from his friends could rip it to pieces, or if something else has changed; he doesn’t know if it’s the strange set of Buck’s shoulders lately, or these waters they’ve been navigating where Buck no longer has a girlfriend but has an apartment that reminds him of her and stays empty more often than not.

He doesn’t know what it is, but he watches Buck put the car in park, and lingers on the movement of his bones under his skin, and thinks—what would it be like?

If Buck was his husband. If Buck was his.

Eddie has to imagine it’d go something like this anyway. That he’d keep happening upon spaces in his life that used to be empty and find them filled to the brim with Buck’s fingerprints all over. It would look like opening the fridge in the morning to find it full of leftovers he never made, like putting Christopher to bed and coming back into the living room to an open beer and easy company and a shoulder to rest his head on without feeling weak for it. It would look like Buck, by his side, for the rest of their lives.

And Eddie has never permitted that thought. He hasn’t allowed it until this, a Saturday morning in November, watching Buck round the car in the side mirror and get both of their bags out of the back seat, and then, suddenly, it’s all he wants.

One of his hands is still wrapped around the grab handle, but the other one, lying on his thigh over where Buck’s touch still feels like it lingers, starts trembling. He’s not going to panic about it, because he’s been down that particular road before and he doesn’t care to repeat it, but it’s so fucking hard to get air into his lungs.

It’s always been an abstract thing: the future. Something he never thought about until he had to because he had a wife, and a son on the way, and then it belonged to Christopher only, and now that Eddie’s let himself think of it as something that can also be his own a little bit, it’s always been—lonely. Fighting fires with his family, watching Christopher grow up and move out and build a life he can be proud of. Watching Buck do the same, because spending his evenings sprawled on the couch in his best friend’s house could never be enough to keep him happy.

Eddie couldn’t give him anything more, except then Buck’s opening Eddie’s door and leaning down and smiling with a dimple deep in his cheek as he says, “coming, old man?”, and Eddie wonders if maybe, just maybe, he could.

If he could love Buck the way he wants. If he could give him the kind of home and family he deserves. If he could propose and meant it, and if maybe—if maybe he’s been meaning it this whole time.

He could hold Buck, as his husband. He could wrap his arms around him without second-guessing where they end up, could lie back when they’re watching a movie and pull Buck on top of him until their breath syncs up, pressed together chest to thigh. Eddie could kiss him, and hold his fucking hand, and judging by the way the trembling stills, by the certainty that fills him liquid and burning hot all the way to the brim until it’s hard to make room in his chest for air, this isn’t news to him so much as it is a waking up.

He’s a little high on it, for all of two seconds, as he watches Buck unlock the front door and leave it open behind him. He’s a little high, and then he crashes right back to the ground.

Because it’s—God, it’s a joke.

Somehow, Eddie has let it become a joke.

He wakes up to the unmistakable scent of fresh pizza wafting all the way into his bedroom.

It’s not quite past sunset, Eddie thinks, but the sky’s a shade of orange that hurts his eyes when he blinks them open and squints at the outside world. There’s a twinge, painful and immediate right in the middle of his chest, at having slept most of the day away, but it only last as long as it takes for sound to filter in.

He gets up, pulls on a t-shirt, cracks the door open. Then he leans shoulder to doorjamb and just stands there, for a minute, listening to the familiar cacophony: the clinking of glasses and plates, Christopher laughing, running water, Buck saying something that makes them laugh in unison.

He’s had this for so long. He’s had it for so long, and somehow, it feels like he’s just found it only to have to lose it again.

“Ah,” Buck says when Eddie stops in the kitchen doorway, before either of them have turned to look at him, “look who’s awake, Christopher.”

“Dad!” Christopher exclaims, his voice ringing off the tile, and makes a show of squirming away when Eddie hugs him from behind and presses a kiss to his cheek. “Are you feeling better? Buck said you were really tired.”

Heart rate elevated, Eddie thinks, and kind of wants to cry about it.

“I’m all better,” he says, squeezing Christopher one last time, trying to ignore this new ache that has wrapped around his bones, that’s crawling all over the kitchen to burrow into the walls and the baseboards, and Eddie already knows that the next time Buck leaves, the house is going to feel inexplicably emptier than before. “AndI smell pizza.”

“Got you a whole one,” Buck says, holding out a plate with a few slices on it where he’s standing by the sink putting the salad together. Eddie leans back against the counter at his side and takes it, digging his fingers into the ceramic so he doesn’t reach out and touch. Then, quieter, Buck says: “I saw you didn’t eat much this morning.”

Eddie blinks. “How did you even—“

“It was Bobby’s French toast,” Buck rolls his eyes, not looking up. The window is painting a weird orange rectangle across his face, and the sight of him still makes Eddie’s heart stutter. “You’re usually wheedling seconds out of him.”

God, of course this has been it the entire time. Of course Buck has been it.

And Eddie is—still half-asleep, probably, and remembering this morning, and starting to get a little heartsick already, or maybe it’s just habit; because he brings the plate up to his face and more or less inhales half a slice of pizza and says, before he’s even done chewing: “God, marry me.”

Immediately, he drops the slice back on the plate and barely resists the urge to put his hand over his mouth, because he has to be the stupidest man alive.

But Buck just ducks his head, and smiles like it’s nothing out of the ordinary, because it isn’t.

“I’m a little wounded, Eddie,” he says, with that dimple in his cheek that Eddie would very much like to kiss, actually, slicing tomatoes with a knife he bought. “That’s not even homemade pizza. I don’t know that I’d want to marry someone whose standards are this low.”

And Eddie—laughs, because this is a hell of his own making, and there’s nothing else to do. He laughs, and bumps his hip against Buck’s, and something painfully tight in his chest loosens when Buck winks at him.

Then he sits down to wait before they all eat, and Christopher leans close with a twinkle in his eye that spells trouble.

“Dad,” he whispers into the space between them, so quiet there’s actually a chance Buck won’t hear them over his whistling. “When are you actually getting married?”

Eddie’s entire life, actually, is some kind of grand cosmic joke.

“Um,” he says, wiping his palms on his sweatpants, even though they’re dry. “We’re, uh. We’re not, buddy.”

Buck pauses his whistling. Eddie’s heart pulses on his tongue, in his temples, on the underside of his jaw, thundering against his skin.

“Why?” Christopher whispers again, and the refrigerator is humming, and somebody kids are playing and yelling in the street right outside, but none of that is enough to conceal what they’re talking about. Eddie desperately wishes that Buck would turn around.

“We, um,” Eddie scratches the back of his neck, and his tongue feels all clumsy and foreign like he’s on painkillers again, except this time he has nothing to blame but himself. “It’s just something we joke about.”

He knows what Christopher’s going to ask next. He knows, and he scrapes his chair over the floor like maybe the sound can disguise it.

“Why?”

Eddie can’t blame him, really. It’s—the kind of thing people joke about, sometimes, but not when those people are him and Buck. Not when they share responsibilities and meals and a house and a son.

He touches the back of his hand to his cheek, suddenly sure he woke up with a fever. What the fuck does he say? How can he explain this to an eleven-year-old who’s only ever seen people ask that kind of thing on TV, where it’s always serious, and at the mall that one time, when Eddie made him turn around and walk away before the guy could get rejected?

“Because we’re best friends,” Buck says. Eddie hasn’t noticed him moving, but he’s suddenly there, pulling out a chair and setting the salad bowl into the middle of the table, offering the tongs to Christopher, who shakes his head. “You probably have jokes with your friends that’d fly right over our heads, right?”

As he says it, he grabs Christopher’s plate, and digs around in the bowl for tomatoes and cucumbers only, because Christopher has something against lettuce. He arranges the vegetables carefully before he passes the plate back, and all Eddie can think, on a deranged loop in his head, is our our our our our.

“Not these kinds of jokes,” Christopher says, unimpressed. He raises an eyebrow in a way that reminds Eddie of Buck, like a sharp jab between his ribs. “If I ask someone to marry me, it’s because I want to be married to them. “

Carefully, Eddie looks at Buck out of the corner of his eye. There’s some kind of foreign tightness in his shoulders, but the rest of him is relaxed, and he’s smiling when he leans back.

“Well,” he says, “you can ask someone for fun, if they know it’s for fun.”

Christopher raises his second eyebrow, too, looking at Buck like he doesn’t believe him, when it’s Eddie who’s absolutely full of shit.

He contemplates it, for a crazy, crazy second: sliding off his chair, getting on one knee in front of God and Christopher and a couple of nibbled-on slices of meat lovers pizza, saying I’m so sorry and I’m so stupid and look at us; none of this is for fun.

But then Buck turns to him all bright, looking for backup, and Eddie remembers that he’s the one who wants Buck.

Buck doesn’t want him in return.

A week later, Buck gets run over by a fucking horse.

“Bobby,” Eddie sighs into the phone, even as he tries to shrug into his jacket one-armed, “if this is a joke—“

“It’s obviously not a joke,” Bobby says, like it should be self-evident, but there’s definitely something quietly amused about it. “Lieutenant Williamson said he tried to catch it so it wouldn’t run into traffic and it just—ran him over.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Eddie says, giving up on the jacket and grabbing his car keys from the bowl by the door. It’s way too cold outside for a t-shirt, but his heart is kind of racing anyway. It’ll keep him warm enough.

“He already heard it from me,” Bobby says on a sigh, “I promise. It’s just a ton of bruises and a cracked rib, and the nurse said they’ll probably let him go home soon. He’s a little high on the painkillers, so he needs someone with him, but I can take him to ours if—“

“What?” Eddie frowns, his phone propped between his ear and his shoulder as he starts the truck. “No, I’m on my way. I’ll see you soon.”

And he is, still in sweatpants and struggling to drive in his slides because putting on other shoes was too much of a time commitment.

“Okay,” says Bobby on the other end of the phone, and this time, he’s definitely trying not to laugh. “See you, Eddie, and drive safe. I have a feeling he won’t be going anywhere.”

Which, okay. Rationally, Eddie knows that. It’s just that Buck is miles away in a hospital bed, alone.

He gets there in just under half an hour, and finds Bobby right where he said he would be, sitting in the waiting room chair with one leg crossed over the other and a Sudoku book propped open on his knee.

“Hey,” Eddie says, definitely out of breath, which seems a little embarrassing when Bobby’s this cool about the whole thing. “Is Maddie—“

“Maddie said to tell you to tell him that she’ll kick his ass when he’s a little less out of it,” Bobby says dutifully, “and she also says good luck dealing with him on pain meds.”

Eddie exhales. He has to put his hands on his knees and bend over for a second, just to breathe, because it’s okay. If Maddie’s happy to check in on him later and let Eddie handle this, then—then it has to be okay.

“Head nurse is over there,” Bobby says, with an arch to his eyebrow that spells trouble even in times when Eddie’s not in the middle of a full-blown crisis. “If you want to try and talk your way into the back.”

“Because I’m such a talker,” Eddie replies, and Bobby tips his head back with a laugh.

But he goes anyway, and he doesn’t even flinch when the nurse levels him with a look that could wither plants.

“Hi,” he tries, with a smile that feels and probably looks wrong, “I was hoping to see Evan Buckley? I’m his,” healthcare proxy, he means to say, because she strikes him as the kind of person who takes well to facts, except what actually comes out is, “husband.”

Behind him, Bobby chokes on nothing. Eddie knows the tips of his ears must be burning, and he definitely knows he’ll be getting a Talk about this later, but for now he cares only about seeing Buck in all his horse-bulldozed glory.

The nurse raises her eyebrows. Eddie can’t possibly get away with this; he’s sure that if him and Buck were actually married, people could, like—see it on his face, or something, except she looks him up and down, and there must be something about the state of him, the stained clothes and the socks with a hole in the heel that he only wears around the house, that convinces her.

Carefully, she nods, and swaps her clipboard from one hand to the other. “Let me go see if he’s awake.”

Miraculously, he is.

And when Eddie walks into the room, he’s prepared to feel relief, the kind that’s sweet and bitter all at once. He’s even prepared for the way his knees go a little weak with it.

What he doesn’t expect is for Buck to lazily turn his head on the pillow and light right up.

“Eddie,” he grins, uninhibited and so wide it makes Eddie realize that he hasn’t seen Buck smile for real in a while, “you’re here.”

“Of course I’m here, dumbass,” Eddie says, and it takes a breath and all of two steps before he’s sitting down on the edge of Buck’s bed and taking his face in his hands and pressing their foreheads together. “This is what you get for picking up extra shifts, huh?”

“Horse was upset,” Buck says, and his forehead creases into a frown under Eddie’s. “Couldn’t—leave it.”

I love you, Eddie thinks.

“It cracked you rib,” is what he says.

“That’s okay,” Buck replies, in a small voice. “I tried.”

Eddie wants to kiss him. He’s never wanted to kiss him more, even though it’s a thought that’s made a permanent home in his head over the past week, popping up every time Buck slurps the milk left over after his cereal or tilts his head over the back of the couch when he hears Eddie coming back into the room.

Eddie wants to kiss him, because knowing he’s alright and seeing it are two different things, and it’s a runaway horse this time, a cracked rib that will have Buck chomping at the bit to go back to work in three days maximum, but next time it might be something else.

Instead, he does the next best thing, and breathes as he holds Buck’s face against his own.

“I’m gonna take you home in a minute,” he says, and lets himself get away with it because Buck will probably forget this anyway. “Okay?”

He pulls away, just to look Buck in the eye, but he doesn’t let go. He brushes his thumb over the pouch of skin under Buck’s bottom eyelid, over his birthmark, that soft patch of skin where his jaw and his ear meet.

“Yeah,” Buck says. “That’s nice. If the nurse lets me leave, because she was mean.”

He doesn’t quite pout, but it’s close. Eddie gives him the gentlest flick on the cheek to dislodge the expression, and Buck looks up at him so open, so entirely disarmed, that Eddie feels a little guilty just for looking back.

And then he grins, and Eddie grins back, and Buck half-hides his face in the pillow when he bursts into laughter. He manages, somehow, to wrap an arm around Eddie’s neck and pull him down, all insistent about it until Eddie gives in and lies down on the very edge of the bed, careful around Buck’s ribs. Buck curls into him, probably not feeling a whole lot besides happy, so Eddie’s the one who has to stop him from completely rolling over with a firm hand on his shoulder.

Buck giggles. “You know, she said,” he laughs, a happy puff of breath against the side of Eddie’s face, and Eddie thinks he could cry just as he finds himself actually tearing up, “she said my husband was here to see me.”

“Um,” Eddie says, and his throat closes so thoroughly he has to swallow to get it to open again, “sorry. I had to—I told her I was your husband so she’d let me in.”

Buck giggles again, like he doesn’t care that Eddie’s frozen next to him, or – more likely – hasn’t noticed.

“That’s not what I mean,” he says. Eddie pulls back a little to look him in the eye, and forgets to breathe with how close they are. With just how easy it would be to erase the few inches between them and hate himself for it for the rest of his life.

“I just,” Buck says, and the laughter is gone as suddenly as it came, replaced with something that looks a little like awe, except it’s sad, and Buck’s hand when it comes up to touch Eddie’s cheek is clumsy with pain meds.

He brushes a shaking thumb under Eddie’s eye, right where the freckle is, and then seems to lose his strength, landing with his palm wide in the middle of Eddie’s chest. He looks down at it, drumming the tips of his fingers over Eddie’s collarbones, a gentle thump-thump-thump. Eddie’s heart stumbles and resets to match the rhythm.

“I wish you would,” Buck says, quietly. “Marry me, I mean. I wish you would. I wish—“

“Buck,” Eddie says, so suddenly and absolutely terrified, because Buck isn’t laughing.

“I know,” is what Buck says, and his eyes are gentle when he looks back up at Eddie, like an apology. “I know, sorry.”

And before Eddie can open his mouth and ask him to back up, ask what on earth he’s sorry for, the nurse from earlier is bustling in with Buck’s discharge paperwork.

Eddie’s not entirely sure, what with the panic that threatens to choke him, but he thinks her eyes might soften a little when she looks at the two of them wrapped up in each other.

Buck stays with them for a couple of weeks.

He only puts up a little bit of a fight, once the high has worn off and he realizes that he’s in pain. He tries to argue that Eddie won’t want him around all cranky, as if they haven’t seen each other through far worse than a janky rib, and when Christopher comes home and realizes that Buck is in need of some TLC, the entire argument is shelved in three seconds flat.

Buck stays with them, and Eddie goes to sleep on the couch every night with Buck’s voice in his head, the careful, cracked-open way he said I wish.

And Buck keeps giving him this look, this soft, shimmering thing. Eddie’s never seen anything quite like it before, and he finds himself freezing in place when Buck levels him with it over something as trivial as being handed a hot drink, or Eddie helping him get his shirt over his head because raising his arms hurts.

Buck keeps looking, and Eddie can’t help it after a few days, the hope that takes root and grows no matter how hard he tries to starve and suffocate it.

I wish you would marry me, Buck had said, without batting an eye, like the thought wasn’t a surprise to him. Like the only thing holding it back in the first place had been the inhibitions that painkillers removed.

Eddie’s been thinking about the first time, too. About putting the words out there just because they felt right; because in that perfect, bare-bones-simple moment, all that mattered was that Buck stay with him forever, even if it took him more than a year to realize the truth of it.

He’s been thinking about the fact that those two things, just maybe, could be of a kind. That Buck could want him forever, too.

And it’s maybe – probably – delusional. But it might not be.

Still, he doesn’t do anything about it until the two weeks they’ve fought about and agreed on are almost up, until the night before Buck’s supposed to go back to his apartment and pretend he lives there for a few nights before he ends up right back here.

The thing that does it in the end is nothing remotely special. It’s the kind of ordinary that makes Eddie’s chest feel like it’s yawning wide open for the entire world to see inside.

It’s a Sunday night; Eddie checks on Christopher one last time to make sure he’s not reading under the covers, and walks into the living room, and finds Buck there wrapped up to his neck in a fluffy blanket, watching a documentary. He’s hold a steaming mug that, going by scent, can only be tea, and there’s—

There’s a second mug by the empty side of the couch, on a coffee table Buck helped him load and bring home months ago, on a crochet coaster from a set that Buck bought on a whim when passing a stall at the farmer’s market and then brought not to his apartment, but here. The mug says World’s #1 Dad on it, and was a gift from Buck years ago, so well-loved that the handle has a little divot in it where Eddie always rests his thumb.

The devastating thing, somehow, is that Eddie’s not really a tea person. It’s Buck’s thing, some kind of specific blend he found online that’s supposed to support healing, but the first time he tilted the can with the tea leaves in it toward Eddie and asked if he wanted to try it, Eddie didn’t even consider saying no.

So this is what they’ve been doing, for a couple of weeks that have somehow been the most torturous and the most settled thing Eddie has ever experienced. Spending their evenings on the couch, drinking tea, Buck with that look on his face.

Eddie comes out to the living room, that Sunday night, and thinks: I don’t want to give this up.

“Buck,” he says, standing in front of the couch, and Buck’s eyes slide away from the screen like he wasn’t just completely engrossed in it.

“Eddie,” he says, with an eyebrow raised, but nothing else. Eddie’s practically vibrating out of his skin, and he must see it.

“Buck,” he says again, and Buck leans forward – without a wince of pain, finally – to put his tea on the table. “I—hi.”

Buck blinks, soft and slow, and the corner of his mouth curls into a smile. “Hi, Eddie,” he says.

“I have a question,” Eddie says, his hands practically bunched up in his armpits. He swears he can feel the heat emanating off the TV in the small of his back, but that doesn’t really explain why all of him feels flushed, alive like a wire from head to toe. “To ask you.”

“That’s usually what you do with questions,” Buck replies, but it’s so soft, so kind, because Buck won’t let things go, but he’ll wait for Eddie to come out and meet him for as long as it takes.

“Okay,” Eddie says, and uncrosses his arms. “Buck, I—Jesus Christ, this shouldn’t be so hard.”

Buck tilts his head. “It’s just me,” he says, and shrugs a shoulder that’s still hidden under the blanket.

It is you, Eddie thinks, and there’s no ‘just’ about it.

It is him. It’s Buck. Buck, here, and he could stay if Eddie would just have the guts to reach for him.

He takes a step closer.

“If I asked you to marry me,” he says, and the breath he’d been holding leaves him so fast it makes him dizzy, “right now. If I asked you to marry me. What would you say?”

Buck’s smile is a little confused, a little wilted. Very, very sad, and Eddie can’t tell if the sadness is new.

“You ask me to marry you all the time,” he says, and the warmth in his eyes dissolves, all that golden fondness turning into something that looks out of place in Buck’s face, and Eddie—Eddie can read in it, finally. Can see the answer as good as written in the turned-down corner of Buck’s mouth.

“Not like this,” he says, but Buck doesn’t understand, and that’s Eddie’s fucking fault, so he leans over and pulls the coffee table back, careful not to spill the tea, just to make enough room.

Then he steps around it and gets on one knee right where the ends of Buck’s blanket are pooling on the floor.

“Not like this, okay?” he says, and hopes that the expression Buck is wearing is the dawn of something. Buck raises a hand to his face, and Eddie catches it halfway, curls all then of his fingers around the bones of Buck’s knuckles that look so strong but feel so breakable in his hands. “I know—I know this is my fault, I started this. And I’ve been so fucking stupid, Buck, and I’m so sorry, but—I just realized a few weeks ago that I meant it. That I’ve been meaning it. Even when I was high as a kite,” he bites his lip. “Especially then.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, and when he leans forward, his free hand curls around the side of Eddie’s face. “Don’t, it’s—it was just because—because I was taking care of you—“

“And I’m taking care of you right now,” Eddie says, even if the tea on the table says it’s not quite so clear-cut. “And I want nothing more than for you to be my husband for real.”

Buck shakes his head. He’s trembling, but his eyes are so, so clear, so blue even in the muted yellows of Eddie’s half-dead ceiling light.

“You remember, don’t you?” he asks, because he thinks he might know the answer. “You remember what you said to me at the hospital.”

Buck nods so, so carefully. Eddie wishes he could reach out and take the point of Buck’s chin between his fingers, wishes he could angle his face down for a kiss. But the warmth flickering to life in his veins is a half-certainty at best, and he needs to be sure.

“I said I wish you’d marry me,” Buck says, almost a whisper, and dodges Eddie’s eyes like he’s embarrassed. “And I meant it.”

Eddie’s heart trips over itself, and his mouth, out of nowhere, floods with words.

“But,” Buck says, and he tries to pull his hand out of Eddie’s grip, but only for a second. “It doesn’t need to be a thing, okay? I’m sorry. We’ve been—it’s been a joke, I’m okay with it not being real, I swear, Eddie, I swear—“

“Baby, no,” Eddie says, and it’s not what he means to say at all, except then Buck blinks at him all beautiful and startled, so he doesn’t take it back. “I’m sorry I put you through that. I’m sorry it took me forever to realize. But I’m here now, and I want it to be real.”

His knee’s starting to hurt, and an elephant is honking in the documentary that’s still playing behind his back, and he thinks Buck might have tears in his eyes. None of it is how Eddie thought he’d propose when he got a do-over, but then again, he didn’t use to think about the future all that much.

Not until Buck.

“I love you,” he says, and slips off his tongue so, so easily, like it was just waiting there for him to catch up. “I love you, and I haven’t—God, I haven’t even kissed you yet, and we might turn out to be, like, completely incompatible, but you make me want to have my life together so I can be good enough for you, and you—you show up for me and you let me show up for you and the way you trust me takes my breath away sometimes and I kind of can’t stop thinking about your hands on me, so would you please—“

“Eddie,” Buck says, and he pulls Eddie closer until their foreheads touch, until Eddie can feel the way Buck’s shaking, the way they’re both shaking. “Take a breath. Ask me again.”

Eddie does as he’s told, and the air he takes in smells like familiar detergent and sweet herbal tea and Buck.

“Marry me,” he says, and he can’t even see Buck’s face, but he still feels him smile somehow. “Please? Let’s make it official, so Hen and Chim can’t stage interventions anymore.”

And Buck laughs, then, thick with tears and something Eddie would like to hope is joy.

“Eddie,” he says, like Eddie’s something to wonder at. “Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you, you know I will, you knew before you started this conversation—“

Eddie gets off his knee, finally, and presses Buck back into the couch so he can cut him off with a kiss.

And it should feel strange, maybe – this, one of the few thingsthey haven’t done together. But Eddie holds Buck’s face in his hands the way he always has, like there’s something sacred about it, and Buck wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist safe and familiar. He kisses a little like he’s afraid, and a little like he couldn’t possibly get enough, and when Eddie bites his lip he lets out a sound so pretty it makes Eddie regret not doing this two weeks ago.

“I’m sorry I asked you to marry me when I was high,” Eddie says, and Buck laughs when he kisses the corner of his mouth, when he puts his lips on Eddie’s neck and Eddie has some kind of minor blackout for a second.

“I’m sorry I asked you to marry me when I was high,” he replies, and Eddie loses himself a little in the fact that he can touch now, that he take Buck’s hand in his and bring it up to his lips and kiss his knuckles, the hands that take care of him and hold him together when it seems impossible that he could ever be whole again.

He doesn’t let go when Buck kisses him again, or when he shuffles until he’s tipping backwards and lying on the couch with his feet hanging off the armrest, bringing Eddie down on top of him. He’s still holding Buck’s hand when the credits roll on the documentary, when the skin above his top lip stings a little from Buck’s medical leave stubble, and he only flushes a little when he realizes that he keeps coming back to touching Buck’s bare ring finger.

“You know,” Buck says, with one hand in Eddie’s hair, the other tracing mindless shapes on Eddie’s back, “I just realized we’ve never been fiancés before.”

“Technically,” Eddie says, with his face smushed into Buck’s chest and so quietly, persistently happyit’s choking him a little, “we’ve also never been husbands. All of this should be brand new.”

Buck snorts. “Okay,” he says, and when Eddie looks up at him, his eyes are gentle and dark and achingly familiar. “I’ll remind you.”

(Predictably, Eddie slips up twenty minutes into the next shift they work together.

It happens because of fruit salad, of all things, because Bobby puts pineapple in it and Eddie hates pineapple, but he never says anything because he doesn’t want to ruin it for everyone else. Except he could really go for some fruit, and then—

Then, as he’s willing himself awake with his forehead resting on the kitchen table, Buck sets a bowl in front of him, and when Eddie looks up, there’s no pineapple in sight.

“Marry me,” Eddie he says, automatic.

This time, Buck leans down, presses a kiss to the top of his head, and Eddie can feel him grin.

“I already am,” he says.)

____________________________

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