#this beach is strange | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

yersina · 1 year ago

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concept: buddie supernatural au (the mythos. not the show.)

buck is like the werewolf coded character ever, so ofc that's what he is. he's a werewolf who grew up in a family of werewolves who never made him feel like part of a pack, so he’s trying so desperately to seek connection wherever he can get it. (no, that’s not right—maddie was always pack to him, but then she left with that vampire doug. she always smells a bit like blood now in a way that rubs him wrong, but she’s still staunchly, if tiredly, loyal whenever he nudges her about it, and it hurts to have the reminder that at the end of the day, he’s not her first choice. she’s still pack, she’ll always be pack, but there’s something broken and frayed there now that buck can’t poke at without wanting to break down, so he doesn’t.)

“you go, i go,” connor says, and buck hears pack, so he tags along.

“no man left behind,” the recruiter tells him, and buck hears pack, so he signs himself up for training.

“welcome to the 118,” bobby tells him, and buck still hears pack, but he’s long past trusting his ears.

but things get better. they get worse, first—he’s reminded that humans always find it easier to break bonds than werewolves—but then he’s hired again and saving lives and part of the team. and he has abby, who smells a bit like sickness and a lot like worry the first time he actually meets her, but she has a smile like the moon and always, always picks up the phone when he calls her.

(and then abby goes to europe, and she stops picking up the phone as often. buck doesn’t think of it as leaving him. he doesn’t. he doesn’t.)

the day that eddie shows up and buck catches a whiff of his scent, he’s... confused. the guy absolutely reeks of the sea, in a way that makes no sense if he's telling the truth about being in the army for several years before this. he should smell like sand and gunpowder, but instead buck is reminded of walks along the beach, and with a faint hint of fur and fish, too.

and then he sees the leather jacket that eddie hangs up in his locker.

“damn, this looks like high quality if i’ve ever seen it,” hen says, eyebrows raised, and they practically leap off her face when she catches both of them stiffening when she reaches for it. “oookay. i’ll just. go over there?”

“you brought it with you?” buck hisses at eddie when she’s out of earshot.

“you know what it is?” eddie narrows his eyes. “werewolf? vampire? fairy?” he sniffs the air and then snorts. “werewolf. got it.”

“don’t you have like a—like a box or something to keep it in for safekeeping? a safe?” literally anywhere other than the fire house.

“why don’t you leave my personal belongings to me?” eddie slams his locker door shut. “and the lockbox thing is a stereotype.”

great.

but then they pull a grenade from a man’s leg and they work in a kind of harmony that buck’s never felt before with anyone else on the team, the kind that makes his blood sing and howl in his veins, and eddie says “you can have my back any day” and buck, despite everything, still hears pack.

eddie keeps his seal skin with him because he’s had it stolen once. or—stolen is a strong word, it would never hold up in any human court, but instinct doesn't care about semantics, and he’d ended up married anyway. so he always keeps it with him, he always knows where it is, and if he can’t fit it on under or over whatever uniform he's wearing at the time, it’s going in his locker and right back on his person at the end of his shift.

buck still gives him weird looks for it from time to time, like he can’t quite believe that eddie’s willing to take his coat with him outside of his house at all, but he quickly accepts it as the status quo and at least stops questioning him about it. besides, it’s not as if buck’s completely innocent on the supernatural front either. eddie’s never seen any other werewolf take a work shift on a full moon, and even though buck practically vibrates through his shift, he makes it through the night without so much as a five o’clock shadow.

“skipped your pack run?” he asks when they’re all changing back into their civvies. he instantly regrets the question when buck’s shoulders hitch up around his ears in the very picture of uncomfortable.

“i, uh. i have you guys,” buck says with a painful looking smile. shit. “i’ll see you on wednesday, man.”

“buck—” and he’s gone.

he doesn’t even get the chance to work up the courage to ask what that was all about because shannon. shannon.

there’s a lot of anger and betrayal and misunderstanding tangled up in their relationship, but there’s love there still, too. and christopher. always christopher. but then he lets it slip that she’s back in his life now, and buck—

“you're fucking with me, right?” buck’s voice is so flat that it doesn’t even sound like a question.

eddie sighs. “buck—”

“she’s the one who took your coat, right? that’s why you married her? why you had to marry her?”

“buck, it’s not that simple—”

“and now you let her back in, easy as that? you're not even a little bit mad?”

“of course i’m mad!” eddie yells. buck flinches. “but i left her too. it’s complicated, buck.”

despite all the jokes that the rest of the 118 make about buck and his golden retriever, frat boy energy, he’s always been good at thinking on his feet and memorizing facts and putting the pieces of a mystery together. “she gave you back your coat,” he says slowly, like he’s turning the idea over in his mind while he says it. “that’s why you enlisted. you were running. you were free.” eddie doesn’t deny it fast enough. “eddie.”

“like i said. it’s complicated.”

buck shakes his head slowly, eyes wide and wary like eddie’s a stranger that he’s never seen before. “doesn't sound complicated to me.”

the bell rings. eddie’s never been so grateful for a three-alarm fire in his life.

see, the thing is, everything buck is saying is true. shannon is the one who ended up with his coat. eddie did enlist after she gave his coat back. but that ignores everything before and after and in-between. shannon didn’t purposefully take his coat or hide it from him either, and she’d given it back when eddie had been forced to explain when chris would be born with his own coat. and despite everything, despite the fact that he knew he loved her, knew he loved chris—he still chose to leave. he thought he’d been sending a message when he’d chosen something with a built-in return date, a quiet ‘i’ll be back eventually, i promise’ but apparently not.

like he said—it’s complicated.

the universe decides to take that as a challenge, as it always does. shannon, the tsunami, the lawsuit—it’s all so much, all the time, and eddie doesn’t really tune back in to the world until he’s trapped forty feet below the ground, surrounded by water and missing his goddamn coat.

“really?” he asks the muddy tomb around him. “now?”

but the water is an old friend, as always, and he’s much less likely to die of hypothermia or shock from the cold than the average human, so he grits his teeth and dives below the surface. when he crawls his way back to his team, it’s buck that greets him first, pulling him into a hug that’d be painfully tight to a human and smelling of wet fur and tears. “i wasn’t sure you—i knew you’d survive the water, but all the mud on top of you—”

“i’m here,” eddie says, because what else can he say? “i made it.”

he gets bundled up in a blanket and carted off to a paramedic to get checked out, but he doesn’t forget the way buck’s shoulders shook against his own.

eddie gets shot and buck falls to fucking pieces because that’s his p—that’s his fucking best friend and now buck knows what his blood feels like on his hands and in his mouth. and he follows eddie all the way to the hospital, all the way to the double doors that he’s never been allowed past, before he remembers—

christopher.

so he stays with eddie’s kid, takes care of him like he’s his own—like eddie would take care of him—and tries not to break down with every lungful of eddieandchris scented air that he takes in their house.

when buck gets that call from ana, he throws himself into action, tugging on a jacket with one hand and juggling his phone with the other so he can make sure that christopher will be safe at home with carla while he rushes to the hospital. to eddie.

ana’s presence hardly registers when he bursts into that hospital room and sees eddie on the bed. his scent is weak and laced with the smell of disinfectant and chemicals but his smile is still warm and alive and oh, buck missed him.

“h-hey,” buck stammers, pulling up short next to the bed. he’s not sure if he should or even can pick up eddie’s hand. can he touch? will eddie break? “i—i made sure that no one touched your stuff at the firehouse, your coat’s still safe, i promise, and—and chris is at home, i’ve been staying with him, making sure that he’s okay—did you know he’s been doing a good job in science class?—and i told carla to wait for a video call maybe, if you’re up to it, so—”

“buck.” and then all of the words spilling from his mouth come to a trembling halt when eddie puts a hand on his arm. “hey. breathe.” buck sucks in a reedy breath. “everything you did was perfect. thank you.”

buck’s exhale shakes. “yeah?”

the smile that eddie gives him could rival the sun in its warmth. “yeah.”

and then later, after eddie’s been discharged—

“you’re not expendable,” eddie says. “if i die, i want you to take care of christopher,” eddie says. buck’s blood is roaring in his ears.

oh.

OH.

all he hears is he’s yours too.

“eddie,” he chokes out. he dives for eddie, burrowing into his surprised embrace and wishing he could wrap his furry body around eddie and smother him with licks and kisses because human comfort just doesn’t compare sometimes. instead, he settles for tucking eddie’s face into the curve of his neck, right where buck’s the most vulnerable.

it’s not the same, he chants to himself, it doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to you, but that doesn’t matter over the triumphant roar of PACK in his veins. packs share pups. that’s the whole point of packs—so the children can grow up safely, surrounded by family. and eddie just gave him his.

he would’ve taken care of chris without the confirmation—already has been, really—but it feels entirely different to have the words out in the open, to know that eddie feels the same way. mine, he thinks with vicious satisfaction and something that feels a little too similar to relief, twisting his fingers tighter into eddie’s shirt. mine mine mine mine mine.

“thank you,” he whispers into eddie’s collarbone. “this means. uh. a lot. thank you.”

“hey.” buck can feel eddie’s confusion in the way his body doesn’t quite know whether to lean in or not, but it doesn’t make his voice any less warm. “i’m just making it official, yknow? i want someone who’d fight for him as hard as i would. and i know that’s you. it’s been you.”

“mhm.” buck’s hardly listening anymore. he just curls up and lets himself breathe out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. i’ve found them, he thinks. the missing pieces to my puzzle.

#sina rambles #sina writes #911 #911 show #buddie #supernatural au #was originally worried that it’d be weird for Eddie to be a selkie but yknow what he gets it from his mom’s side #not pictured here: buck chasing seal!eddie up and down the beach on the full moons #strange things that I researched for this include how good seals are at smelling and actual wolf pack dynamics #not that either of those really made a huge impact lmao

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