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rcmclachlan · 3 months

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7x09 deleted scene coda

For the anon who requested it! Hope this is as fun to read as it was to write.

When Buck sighs, it sounds despondent, even to his own ears, which is insane considering he’s finally got a medal and isn’t being court martialed for his involvement in the theft of municipal property. There’s no reason to feel this put out.

"Are you sure you don't want anything?" Maddie asks, her patented kindness warring with incredulity bordering on annoyance. She used to sound like that whenever he’d get caught skipping school to go hang out at Swatara Creek.

He sighs again. "No."

"Because you’ve been staring at the dessert table for, like, four whole minutes," she says.

"It's a free country, Mads," he reminds her without looking away from the golden idol he’s just now decided to start worshiping. It totally goes against the Ten Commandments, but according to Eddie, breaking one of those means you can just repent twice as hard. Or something like that. It’s becoming very apparent that Eddie’s whole thing with religion is kind of screwy. "I can stare at a platter of cannolis if I want. Because of freedom."

"You know you can't absorb sugar molecules through osmosis, right? You're basically just torturing yourself."

With one last longing look at the chocolate chips dotting the ricotta cream, he turns to her and sticks his tongue between his teeth to be a brat. "Yeah, but my Adonis belt lines can cut glass, so who’s really losing here?"

The look she gives him is flat as a board. "Still you."

"I… don’t have a comeback for that right now, but I’m working on it," he promises, ignoring her eye roll in favor of searching for something else to focus his attention on. It usually helps to take his mind off the ketonic headache he’s been rocking for the last week.

His gaze locks on his target with an almost audible click, and he watches Captain Vincent Gerrard stop to take a photo with some dark-haired woman and then make a face behind her back as soon as she walks away.

That "heard you got your wings" comment has been bouncing off the walls of his mind like a DVD player screensaver for the last half hour, and hot on its heels is the memory of the muscle jumping in Tommy’s jaw in the pause that followed. Normally, Tommy would’ve stuffed that silence with at least two comments so dry and hilarious it would take a minute for anyone to realize they were the shiny wrappers around devastating insults. But he didn’t. It was like his jaw was wired shut, and it physically pained Buck to see it. Thank god Chim was there with a killer response at the ready.

Tommy’s told him a little about his time under Gerrard and while he hasn’t exactly painted a picture he’s definitely drawn the outline of a paint-by-numbers image that Buck can easily color in.

There are very few people Buck can say he truly hates, especially when he doesn’t actually know them himself. But he hates Gerrard. He hates him for the way he made and still makes Tommy feel like he has to be someone else, someone so incredibly different than the man Buck has come to know and utterly adore. He hates him for stealing the grin off Chimney’s face today. He hates Gerrard for getting into Buck’s own head and pulling his focus in the first place, for casting a shadow on what should’ve been a perfect day.

Buck may not be eating sugar these days, but there are about sixty Domino packets in his pockets that will be getting up close and personal with Gerrard’s gas tank before the day’s through.

"Huh. Wonder what that’s about."

Blinking away the red haze from his vision, Buck gives Gerrard’s back a little sneer before he turns his head to see what Maddie’s talking about. He follows her gaze across the room to where Hen and Karen are standing in front of Tommy, shoulder to shoulder like they’re presenting a united front. It’s amazing how they make someone of Tommy’s height and build look small. Whatever it is they’re discussing, it looks grave. Maybe the pall of Gerrard’s presence is affecting more than just Tommy. Maybe it’s opened up old wounds from the days when Tommy was—by Tommy’s own admission—an asshole.

He starts getting to his feet to go over and assess the situation, but suddenly Tommy breaks away from Hen and Karen, and the second he’s beyond their line of sight, the corners of his mouth curve up. By the time Tommy makes it back to their table, plate of cake in hand, he’s beaming.

"Everything… okay?"

"Everything’s great." Tommy pulls out the seat next to him and wiggles a little as he sits. Buck’s never really understood the phrase "pleased as punch," but he’s starting to get an inkling.

Buck looks at Maddie, who widens her eyes and shrugs. "Uh, what were you talking about? It looked pretty serious."

Taking a practically pornographic bite of the cake—which is just plain mean—Tommy holds up a finger, smiling while he chews, before he swallows. He presses his knee to Buck's and says cheerfully, "I just got the shovel talk."

"The what?"

Across the table, Maddie rolls her eyes fondly and says, "You know what a shovel talk is, Evan. It's the verbal equivalent of a dad cleaning his shotgun on the porch when his daughter's prom date shows up."

Tommy nods in agreement. "You know: 'if you break his heart, I'll break your knees.'"

It feels like Buck's eyebrows are trying to make a daring escape from his face via his hairline. "Hen threatened to break your knees?"

"Not in so many words, but it was heavily implied." Tommy sounds positively thrilled about it. "They wanted to know if my intentions toward you were honorable. Although I think Karen was just fishing for details, to be honest."

Maddie's eyes are bright when she leans forward, like this is the juiciest bit of gossip she's ever heard. Buck crumbles up his napkin and throws it at her. She peaceably lets it bounce off her head. "And? What'd you say?"

"That we're taking it slow."

His jaw drops, which only serves to remind him that it's still aching from this morning. "So you lied?"

"I did not," Tommy says primly, knocking his knee against Buck's. "But I also did some heavy implying of my own."

The wink he tosses Buck's way is downright filthy, and when he takes another bite of his cake he rumbles so deeply with pleasure that the table practically vibrates.

Squirming a little in his chair, with the familiar heat that blossoms any time he's within ten feet of Tommy making its way down his chest and into his belly, Buck scans the room to see if there's an empty coat closet somewhere nearby. The reception's loud enough that no one would hear a thing. Probably. Buck's starting to gain a reputation for being a bit of a screamer.

A fork taps his knuckles lightly, bringing his attention back, and Tommy gives him one of those knowing looks that always leave Buck feeling breathless and exposed on an atomic level.

"No." The corner of Tommy's mouth curls up, and he nods at Evan's plate of chicken wings. "Eat your protein."

It's truly terrible, incredible timing that Chimney comes back to the table from wherever he went just in time to hear Buck say, voice full of sleaze, "Between our shower this morning and the buffet, I've hit my protein quota for the day."

Without a word, Chimney turns around and walks in the opposite direction.

Maddie collapses into her folded arms, cackling, and Buck can't help but join in. Tommy drops his head into his hands, shoulders shaking.

"Timing is everything," Maddie practically cries.

"Well, I'm definitely getting kicked out of the group chat," Tommy says through his laughter. "Worth it."

Snickering, Buck nudges him with an elbow. It should feel like hitting the side of a mountain, but Tommy obligingly lets himself be moved, and Buck's rib cage feels like it's both expanding and shrinking at an exponential rate. His bones are going to vibrate to dust and his heart is going to be on display for everyone to see.

Swallowing around the sudden lump in his throat, he says, "Hey, most people aren't usually this happy to be threatened with grievous bodily harm, you know. Is this a rom-com thing?"

Still chuckling a little, Tommy takes a thoughtful bite of his cake and shrugs. "I'm allowed to be happy about it."

"Are you?"

"Absolutely," Tommy says, with his signature decisiveness. He slides his fork down through layers of cake and delicately cuts himself a corner with a frosting flower. "This is the first time anyone's ever cared enough to threaten me about someone I'm with. It means this is real to them."

He punctuates that by gesturing with his fork, the flower drawing a sugary line in the space between them, and then brings it to his mouth with a pleased hum.

Buck has seen at least twenty documentaries about nuclear bombs, with enough footage that Buck could describe in great, gory detail what blast, fire, and radiation can do to someone, to a city.

J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous quote, used in at least half of those documentaries—if the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky—suddenly comes to mind, damn near taking Buck out at the knees, and he stares dumbly as Tommy chews his cake like he didn't just devastate the entire landscape.

Maddie lifts her head from her arms and catches Buck's eye. There's something gentle and sweet lurking in her gaze, and he ducks his head a little with a smile, feeling caught out, even though he's not the one courting mayhem this time.

The knee pressed to his knocks against it again, and Buck blinks, startled out of his daze, to find a tiny dollop of white frosting held out to him on Tommy's fork. He looks just beyond it to where Tommy's smiling at him, like he knows exactly what he was doing when he said that, and is even happier about it than he was about his kneecaps being on the line.

"It's yours if you want it," Tommy says easily. It sounds like he's offering something else.

Heart pounding, Buck leans forward and wraps his lips around the edges of the tines, taking that small offering onto his tongue where it hits with the intensity of a thermonuclear explosion.

Buck doesn't know what his face is doing, but it makes Tommy's gaze go dark with want.

A throat clears, and Buck reluctantly looks away to where Maddie is sitting. She's staring at Tommy with an odd smile on her face, one he doesn't think he's ever seen before. It's beautiful, of course, because all her smiles are, but there's an odd promise in it that makes Buck sit up a little straighter.

"Maddie?"

She doesn't even spare him a glance. "You break his heart? There's no helicopter in the world that will help you escape from me."

Tommy's eyes go wide, and Buck opens his mouth to tell him that she's kidding, that she would never, but he closes it because it feels like it would be a lie to say it.

But a grin breaks over Tommy's face like a sunrise, and the tilled-field lines at the corners of his eyes threaten to become trenches. "Good to know."

It sounds like he's never been so happy in his entire life.

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#bucktommy #911 #the 118: you hurt him and we'll break you in half like a kit-kat bar #tommy: this is the best day of my life

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