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mattzerella-sticks · 4 months

Text

if it cannot hatch from its shell, the chick will die without ever truly being born. (ao3 link)

Rated: T

Word count: 2,324

Pairing: Buck/Eddie (pre-relationship)

It's missing-Christopher-Diaz-hours at the Diaz House, party of one. Until Buck crashes his pity party with a little gift to help turn Eddie's night around for the better. Now stoned, Eddie convinces Buck to watch a television show with him that Eddie hasn't seen in years. The show dredges up old feelings for Eddie. He and Buck talk them out.

Eddie’s pushing dinner around when he receives Buck’s text asking to hang out. He answers immediately. No. Without further explanation or any uncertainty. That doesn’t stop Buck from following up, telling Eddie he’s already outside.

“Dammit, Buck…”

He throws his fork against the plate. Its clatter overpowers the scrape his chair makes as he stands and stomps towards the front door. Buck waits for him there. Phone in one hand, brown paper bag in the other.

Buck squints down at Eddie, a sheepish grin creeping across his face. “Hey, Eddie…”

“I’m not in the mood, Buck.”

“I know but… give me a minute. And – and if you still aren’t, I’ll leave.”

Eddie should turn Buck away. Return to his unappetizing, freezer-burned microwaveable meal puddling on his table and wallow, alone, like he had planned for the rest of his evening. But then Buck bat his eyelashes at Eddie. He bats them twice. Three times, and Eddie surrenders.

“Fine.” Eddie steps aside so Buck can squeeze past. “You have one minute. Starting… now.”

Buck guides Eddie into the living room wasting his allotted time to set him onto the couch before speaking. He reaches inside the brown paper bag and produces a large, shrink-wrapped, chocolate-chip cookie. Eddie spots the dessert’s label. He recognizes the tiny seven-tipped leaf printed on it.

“Is that –“?

“Figured you’d prefer this over a brownie,” he says. “Since the last time I brought brownies over was… not our most pleasant conversation.”

Eddie’s gaze drifts from the cookie to Buck. He looks all too eager for Eddie to lunge at the opportunity like a fish with bait, though his appearance is also suffused with poorly masked worry that he, perhaps, miscalculated. That Eddie would still deny him, send him away.

The idea is tempting. So is the cookie. He weighs both options in his mind as the minute he gave Buck runs out into overtime.

Buck squirms underneath his scrutiny. “So? Are you in?”

His answer was inevitable in the end. He sighs. Reaches out to Buck and, crooking his fingers, Eddie says, “Hand it over.”

They split the cookie between them. Each cookie half is about five milligrams. Eddie nibbles on his treat to wade into his high. The warm, tingling numbness starts at his ankles, climbs his shins, his knees, rising higher and higher until it reaches his head and then he’s fully submerged, floating in a gooey, imagined embrace. That happens around the thirty-minute mark.

Buck, the lightweight, was giddy after his first bite. His only bite.

“What the hell did we just watch, Eds?” He’s laughing. His fingers lazily ghost the hairs at Eddie’s nape as he speaks. “Seriously? I know we’re stoned but that felt like an acid trip.”

Eddie rolls his eyes at him. “No it didn’t.”

“Did too.”

“Shut up.”

The credits end and the video skips onto the next in the playlist; the second episode begins despite Buck’s giggled, stilted review of the first drowning it out.

Eddie pauses the video. “Are you gonna watch the show, or do you want to keep talking over it?”

Buck’s lips twitch and tremble against his smile while he schools his features into a heavy caricature of seriousness to apologize. Laughter hiccups from him regardless and, though he tries clearing his throat to hide it, Eddie notices. “Sorry, sorry,” he repeats. “I just… I’m still trying to wrap my head around what we saw.”

“What are you hung up on?”

“…Everything?”

“Buck…”

“Okay, okay – I guess the whole… dueling thing threw me. Where did the arena come from? The upside-down castle?”

“They’re just there.”

“And everyone’s cool with fighting there? With swords?”

“They have to. It’s part of the Contest for the Rose Bride.”

“That’s another thing! How is everyone so cool with a contest where the winner practically ‘owns’ this poor girl? I mean, even those other kids saw how badly that green-haired douche was treating her, and they let it happen because ‘he won’. What was that?”

Eddie sighs. “It sucks, but those are the rules. Whoever’s engaged to the Rose Bride can do what they want, and in return – at the right time – the Rose Bride will grant her betrothed the power to revolutionize the world.” Buck almost protests but Eddie cuts him off. “This was only the first episode. If we keep watching, they get into it – deconstruct it a bit, by way of the main character.”

“Is the sword the power they’re all fighting for?”

“No, the sword’s just a sword.”

“That happens to live inside a girl?”

“Yes.”

“Then what are they all fighting for?”

“Buck!”

Buck pouts at Eddie. It curbs the frustration bubbling beneath his surface, that threatened to kill his buzz. Eddie breathes deep and releases his jittery tension in a long exhale. Finished, he sags deeper into the couch as he casts a dull, half-lidded stare across where Buck had fully sprawled atop its cushions and the nearby coffee table.

“Do you want me to put something else on?” he asks. “Because if you’re not interested, I can.”

“No, no. I’m interested. I wouldn’t be asking this many questions if I wasn’t interested.”

“Promise?”

He nods. “Yeah, you can start it up again. I’ll stay quiet.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

Eddie presses play, the screen unfreezes, and the episode continues.

Eddie has been watching Buck rather than the show for the past few minutes, more interested in how the television’s fuzzy glow softens the edges of Buck’s rapt attraction to the story. He looks younger in its light. Stubble hidden; eyes wider. Eddie could tell him to close his mouth, to keep bugs from flying inside it, but he can’t navigate his thoughts around the roadblock that is Buck’s adorableness to form a coherent sentence let alone gather the strength and shatter the enchanting silence by speaking.

True to his word, Buck hadn’t made a peep during the entire episode. Why must Eddie?

Why must Eddie look at Buck and, without meaning to, ask, “You really like it?”

Buck holds a finger to shush him, his eyes trained on the screen. Eddie fumbles for the remote and stops it midway through the obligatory dueling scene.

“Eddie!”

“You like it?”

Buck meets his gaze and blinks. “Uh,” he runs his tongue over his top lip, his bottom lip, his top lip again. “Yeah. I thought I told you that I was…”

“Interested? I know,” Eddie shrugs. “You could’ve been saying it to say it, though.”

“Why would I do that?”

“You wouldn’t be the first.”

Eddie realizes it’s the worst thing to have said because now Buck has forgotten the show and misplaced all his attention onto Eddie. Half his face is lost in shadow. The half Eddie can see he doesn’t like. The softness is tinged with sorrow, his parted lips turned down, and Buck’s eye had sharpened to better pierce him. Like it might probe all Eddie’s memories, every moment he shared an interest, let someone in, every attempt which ended in failure as they thought it, thought him, too weird to make an effort, until he stopped sharing those parts of himself, with one, mighty jab.

Not that it was remotely possible Buck could know all that from a single look...

…Right?

“Eddie,” Buck says. “I’d never lie to you about liking something. If I did, you’d still be a lousy cook.”

“Oh. Right.”

He’s not sure how to proceed, so Eddie decides his most prudent course of action is to pretend this hadn’t happened and resume watching the show. Except the remote had somehow ended up in Buck’s hands. Dammit.

“Does this show really mean a lot to you?”

“A lot?” Eddie doesn’t remember communicating ever being this hard. Was it the weed, or the conversation topic? His tongue sits awkwardly inside his mouth as he talks. “I like it, yeah. Have ever since I was a kid.”

“You watched this as a kid?”

“It was one of my favorite shows,” he says. “I… watched a lot of anime growing up.”

“You like anime? How do I not know this about you?”

“You like anime?” Eddie parrots Buck’s question back at him instead of answering.

“I… didn’t watch much television as a kid,” Buck admits. “My folks thought most cartoons airing back then would only make me dumber, so they limited what I watched. But I remember seeing a few episodes of Dragon Ball Z, when I’d hang out at a friend’s house sometimes.”

“I watched that. I wasn’t as obsessed with it like all the other kids at school were.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know… it just felt long. And there was a lot of fighting.”

“There’s fighting in this.”

“Yeah, there is.”

“What about this show’s different?”

Eddie looks at the screen, at where Utena is locked in battle with Saionji during their rematch. Utena winces while Saionji bears down on her. As he studies the screen Eddie reflects on why he’s so fond of this anime over so many that he’s seen. When he reaches a conclusion, he glances back at Buck, finds him waiting, and chooses to share.

“I guess I liked the main girl’s whole deal.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s this girl. And everyone has expectations about how she’s supposed to act, like they’re trying to box her in. Yet she doesn’t stand for any of that crap. She looks the world in the eye and says, ‘this is who I am. I won’t stop being who I am because it makes you uncomfortable’. It’s… it was inspiring, back then.” For a boy who always felt like the shoes he wore were bigger than they were supposed to be. Who was boxed in by the world from the very beginning, but who couldn’t stand as tall as her. Who can’t.

“I’d say it’s pretty inspiring now, too,” Buck whispers.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.”

Buck taps the remote against his thigh arrhythmically. “So you saw a lot of yourself in Utena?”

A prickling warmth creeps up Eddie’s face. “I guess.”

“Cool.”

He holds the remote out for Eddie to take.

Eddie grabs it, but he doesn’t press play yet. He’s on the right side of being stoned that this next admission wouldn’t hurt like it should. Eddie can talk about it like he would the weather or how the Lakers played in their last game. He doesn’t waste the opportunity. “I wanted to watch this with Christopher.”

“You – you did?”

Buck recognizes the gravity imbued within his speech, even in his inebriated state, and pulls closer to Eddie’s orbit to listen.

“Yeah.” And Eddie’s glad Buck is here, that he brought the weed-infused cookie. “I wanted to share it with him, show him a part of my childhood.”

“What were you waiting for?”

“For him to get older,” Eddie chuckles. “But I guess I waited a little too long, huh?”

“There’ll still be time, Eds.”

The most wonderful thing is that Eddie can watch the twinkle in Buck’s eye as he says that, and knows he means it from the very core of his being. Makes Eddie briefly believe it himself.

“Yeah. Yeah, there will be.”

They resumed the episode. At the end, as the credits began to roll, and a vocalist sang the closing theme in a language neither understood as the dub declined including subtitles for the music, Buck asks Eddie who he thinks Buck is like in this fantastical world, if Eddie is Utena. “Am I the friend? Waka – something?”

Wakaba? Eddie does not think so. She always reminded him of Shannon.

But Buck… “You’re more like Anthy.”

“Anthy?” Buck blinks at him. “You mean the girl everyone’s fighting over?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Eddie cannot parse through the vast number of reasons swirlimg around his fogged mind, so he shrugs and cops out by telling Buck, “If you watched the show, it’d be obvious.”

“I am! It’s not my fault we’re only on episode two!”

“Then we need to watch more.”

Buck groans, but he’s also flashing Eddie that special, private smile he has whenever they’re alone together that leaves him breathless. He blames it, and the resultant oxygen deprivation, on what he does next.

Eddie lays his hand flat over Buck’s heart. It thump-thump-thumps beneath Eddie’s palm at a slow, deliberate pace.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to pull a sword from your chest.”

Except that’s not quite true. As his one hand rests there, both men wholly consumed by the comfort in their contact, Eddie’s other hand slithers towards Buck’s neck and scrapes its blunt nails across a patch of skin forcing Buck to yelp, jump, and draw his shoulders high as he could to shield himself from another strike.

“Did you just tickle me?”

Eddie’s laughing. He gloats, “Yeah. I did.”

“Oh. Oh, it’s on.”

They miss the entirety of the third episode because of their tickle war. Eddie’s body aches worse than after suffering through Gerard’s tortuous drills he forces on them ever since returning to lord over the 118, and while he might have been tossed onto the floor by Buck’s long, flailing legs sweeping him off the couch, Eddie does not care. He feels too much like a kid to care about those sorts of things.

Not the kid he was. The kid he never got to be.

Eddie stares up at Buck, his back groaning in protest, chest heaving with every breath, face flushed and sweaty, and thanks him. “For tonight.”

Buck nods. “Thank you. For this.”

He must mean the show, for letting Buck view a part of himself Eddie hadn’t revealed in years, trusting him with this knowledge… because any other reason Eddie might suspect has to be imagined, brought on by the drugs roiling inside.

Buck helps Eddie back onto the couch and once they have made themselves comfortable, pressed against each other, not an inch of space between them, the two boys restart the episode.

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