#featuring extensive run on sentences as I grapple with trying to capture their voices

[cartcop]

oops, thought too hard about "I don't believe in magic, I believe in chemistry" "oh, it's science, I see" and "works like magic" and Buck's experience working in construction and I accidentally wrote a 6x17 coda

On the difference between magic and chemistry, and their relationship to thermoset adhesives

6x17 coda, ~860 words

“I have never been so excited to get a call from you,” Buck says, barging into the house with a plastic bag bearing the name of a local craft store on his arm.

“Glad my deficiencies are so thrilling,” Eddie breathes out. He’s trying to focus on the pieces of the model in front of him–Chris’ drafts are irritatingly well-labeled, which makes how much he’s struggling to piece them together that much more embarrassing. 

“Ah,” Buck grins, quirking an eyebrow as he settles down next to Eddie, drawing the model pieces away from Eddie to sit in front of him instead, “but it takes real wisdom to know when to call in the experts.”

He plucks the wall Eddie’s attempting to position from his fingertips, flipping it around and slotting it in place, right where it belongs. Eddie has the passing thought that maybe he should feel a little bit like he’s failing, needing Buck to come help him assemble his own kid’s design; he doesn’t, though. There was a twinge of it–when he was sitting here alone, staring at the pieces laid out on the coffee table, trying to make sense of it all–but calling Buck never feels like admitting defeat. It hasn't for a long, long time. 

“Sorry to drag you over here. I’m sure you have better things to do on your 48 off,” Eddie says, not really meaning a word of it until–“Shit, you didn’t have plans with Natalia, did you?”

Buck looks away from the model pieces for the first time since he sat down, his gaze dropping into his lap. On his next inhale, his face cracks into a rueful smile Eddie’s seen too many times before. Maybe it's a little presumptuous to think he can read Buck’s insecurities in the tilt of his mouth, but Eddie’s pretty sure Buck can read him the same way.

“No, I, uh–” he stutters out, and Eddie wants to scream at the world for putting him through this, whatever it turns out to be this time, on top of everything else. “I think that’s probably over. Kameron showed up at my place while we were having dinner, and I had just had to tell her about Taylor, and we had run into Lucy the other night, and–I don’t know. Seemed like maybe it was too much for her.”

Seems like I was too much for her, Buck doesn’t say, but Eddie reads it in the wobble of his not-quite-right smile and the sadness behind his eyes.

“Anyways,” Buck says with a grin, a real one this time, “that’s why I was so glad you called.” 

Eddie’s heart doesn’t skip in his chest, because what the hell would that say about him? Buck barrels on, “Kameron showed up at the loft looking for a place to stay–don’t ask, she was freaking out so much she wasn’t speaking in full sentences; except, conveniently, to tell me she really needed pickles; but I don’t know what’s happening with her and Connor–and then passes out in my bed, so I was stuck on the couch, and it sucks, Eddie, it’s so uncomfortable.”

“Well,” Eddie replies smoothly, somehow–despite the fact that he’d barely registered the majority of Buck’s run-on sentence, still stuck on the way his own breath hitched when he thought Buck had meant he was glad Eddie asked him to come over because–not important. There’s a bigger task at hand. “Glad I can offer you mine, at least,” Eddie says, gesturing at the couch, “for the small price of helping me put my kid’s genius plans together.”

“Like I wouldn’t do that anyway,” and Buck’s smiling so wide as he props the last wall up, it makes Eddie’s chest ache. Why is his chest aching? 

“Task at hand,” Buck says, nodding down at the level’s four walls he’s holding in place, “where’s the glue?”

“Epoxy,” Eddie says, grabbing it off the table and uncapping it, bringing it down to the point where the balsa walls meet the plastic base they’re building on, “I ran into Marisol, that woman whose house we helped fix up last fall, at the hardware store. She said this one ‘works like magic.’” 

As Eddie draws the little tube around the base of the four walls, hands slipping under and around Buck’s while they hold them steady, Buck goes suspiciously silent. Eddie glances up at Buck hovering over him, where he's now leaning awkwardly over the table to reach the model where Buck had pulled it in front of himself. There’s a funny look on Buck’s face where it looks down at Eddie, and this time he can't quite interpret the emotion behind it.

“It’s not magic,” Buck says, a little more pointedly than Eddie would expect for his usually whimsical nature, “It’s chemistry. I read about it a few weeks ago, when Chris was building that model water molecule for his science class out of styrofoam–we didn’t know why super glue wasn’t working and I went down a rabbit hole–anyways, its,” and he inhales, for the first time since he started talking, “it thermosets, that’s why it’s so strong. It’s chemistry.”

Forged in fire, Eddie thinks, and he doesn’t know what to do with that.