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Eddie sets the glass of water on the bedside table without looking at it and takes a deep breath as his gaze rakes over Buck’s body. He’s finally stopped trembling. Seems a bit sturdier today than the last few days. It doesn’t stop the water in Eddie’s hand from splashing over the side of the glass from his trembling. But it does ease some of the tension in his chest and shoulders.
Buck glances up at him from beneath his lashes, much of the colors slowly returned to his face. A soft blush on either cheek bone where they’d been so pale yesterday and the day before. Where he looked ghostly before, a slow simmer of life is slowly making its way back in.
“Thank you.”
Eddie shakes his head, letting go of the glass and reaching out to tuck the edges of the blanket in around Buck’s hips. Something for him to do. If his hands are busy he doesn’t have to think about how he failed him. He’s here. They both are. That’s what matters.
“You don’t need to thank me,” he says, quietly. “Not for this. Never for this.”
“Eddie—“
He pauses and looks up at him, shaking his head again, slower. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” he says, carefully. “Than at your side when you need me.”
“Maybe watching Die Hard with Chris?”
Eddie huffs, clicking his tongue and turning back to the blanket, carefully pushing it under Buck’s hips. “He said it was boring.”
Buck gasps mockingly and the sound is so lovely and alive that Eddie’s heart roars in his ears. “And you didn’t disown him?”
“You joke,” Eddie murmurs, looking up at him with raised eyebrows, voice low, “But it was on the table.”
A smile ghosts along the edges of Buck’s mouth as his gaze ducks down and away.
Eddie leans in towards him, hand pressed into the bed between the blanket and Buck’s hips. “But, no,” he says, softer. “Not even watching Die Hard with Chris. Okay?” He waits for Buck to meet his gaze, doesn’t move or think or so much as breathe as he waits. When he finally does, his movements are slow and unsure, and Eddie wants to reach out and shake him. “When you need me,” he says, hoping the message is clear in his eyes. “I’ll be right here.”
“I know, I just—“
“You don’t even have to need me, you know?” Eddie interrupts. “You know I’ll come when you call.”
Bucks brows pinch together.
“Believe it or not, Buckley,” he murmurs, looking down at where his hand is, and pulls it free to pat the blanket flat over Buck’s hip. “You’re one of my favorite people.”
“One of?”
Eddie shrugs, flashing him a small smile. “The other one’s my kid.” The smile slips, and he swallows. “You’re one of his favorite people, too.”
“Let me guess,” Buck murmurs. “The other ones you?”
Eddie huffs a laugh, leaning back in his chair and letting his hand slip away from Buck. “No,” he says. “That would be Melanie. She’s a junior, and he’s going to ask her to prom.”
Bucks expression falls, his gaze going distant and the tentative smile disappearing entirely. “He’s grown up so fast,” he says, frowning. “It feels like he was seven last week and I was holding him up so he could see the tigers at the back of the exhibit.”
Eddie watches that slow burning light fade, quick as if he’d never found it. The echo of who Buck was before this year ruined their lives and cracked the foundations he built himself out of disappearing back into the shell left behind.
“Hey,” he murmurs, leaning in and ducking his head to catch his gaze. “Where’d you go?”
Buck shakes his head, “No—” His voice cracks and Eddie’s heart follows it, hairline fractures splintering down each atrium of his heart, “Nowhere. Just thinking.”
“Wanna tell me about it?”
He shakes his head, wringing his hands in his lap. “It’s nothing.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He doesn’t say anything else — just waits. Lets the silence sit between them and become something tangible that Buck can grab onto and hold. Eventually, he does. Slowly, he takes it as the safety line it is, and his gaze comes back up to meet Eddie’s, tentative and unsure, but brimming with the kind of hope Eddie’s been aching to see in his eyes for months.
“Time just ke—keeps moving,” He finally says, mindlessly picking at his cuticles. Eddie swallows and reaches out, gently settling one hand overtop his, stilling the anxious movements. “And—I. I feel like it’s leaving me behind. No,” a noise at the back of his throat cuts off the sentence and he tears his gaze away to look down at where their hands are stacked in his lap. “No matter how fa—fast I run or—or hard I work, I just c—can’t keep up.”
His breath comes out on a heavy exhale, like the words have been sitting in his chest for so long that digging them up has opened his lungs in a way they haven’t in a long, long time. Like it’s his first real, deep breath in so long that his body doesn’t even know how to do it without it being an entire body endeavor.
Like breathing stopped being a mechanical action for so long that he has to learn how to let it happen again.
“That’s why you have a partner,” Eddie says, his own voice cracking on the term partner. It doesn’t necessarily mean what it used to mean. He’s not even sure the depths of what it means now. What all it encompasses. Only that he is Buck’s, and he’s not going to let him take another step convinced he has to go it alone.
Buck glances back up at him, lashes fluttering to blink away the tears forming on his lashlines.
“Would you expect me to leave you in a structure fire?” Eddie asks, dipping his head and reaching up with his free hand to carefully wipe at a rogue tears clinging to the corner of Buck’s eye beneath his birthmark. “You’d want me to, but would you expect me to leave you there to find your way out on your own?”
Buck’s Adam’s apple bobs as Eddie’s hand smooths out over the shape of his cheek and eases to mold to the shape of it, his fingertips dipping into Buck’s hairline, as his palm encompasses Buck’s clammy skin.
“You, uh,” He swallows again, eyes fluttering and then closing, as if he can’t help himself as he leans into the warmth of Eddie’s hand. “You wouldn’t.”
“No,” Eddie agrees, squeezing Buck’s hands between them, and sweeping another errant tear away with his thumb as it sneaks past Buck’s closed eyes. “I wouldn’t. This isn’t any different than that.” He scoots closer, until his knees bump the edge of the bed and he can’t feasibly get any closer without letting go. “I wouldn’t leave you to find your way out of a fire, and I’m not leaving you to find your way out of this.”
Buck sniffles, his eyebrows furrowing as he nuzzles into the hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry,” Buck whispers, voice hoarse and thick like he’s speaking past a mountain of tears waiting for release.
Eddie shakes his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
He opens his eyes, and Eddie finds himself lost for breath as those bright eyes find him with ease. They’re glassy with unshed tears, but the light’s there, like it’s fighting to be seen through a dense fog. Present but far away, but coming closer yet.
“Time’s never going to stop running,” Eddie murmurs, leaning in towards him, cradling Buck’s cheek like he’s something porcelain and precious. “But when you get tired, or you feel you’re not fast enough, I’ll be right here. I’ll bear your weight and carry you when you feel like you can’t keep going, okay?” Buck’s breath hitches and more tears flee, but Eddie catches them before they can go far. “And not just me, either. Everyone out there,” He motions to the hall with his chin, where their friends and family are all asleep on the living room floor. “They’d do the same thing.”
Buck nods, eyes closing again, squeezing tight, like he’s fighting off a wave of emotion.
“Do you know why?” Eddie asks.
A small shake of his head; a barely there movement that could give way to plausible deniability if he wanted, but Eddie takes it for the thread it is. For the question that Buck’s too scared to ask, because he feels like he’s asked too much of everyone here already.
For the answer he doesn’t believe he’ll get.
Eddie lets go of his hands, reaches out and gently pushes a stray, damp curl out of Buck’s face. “It’s because,” He says, softly, carefully, like the winds of change aren’t brushing up against them in this moment, waiting for the chance to sink into the very air they breathe. “We love you.”
Buck’s breath catches.
“You hear me?” Eddie asks, smoothing his hand over the side of his face and holding him carefully between both hands. The world in the palm of his hand. A piece of his heart, tangible, out in the world, completely unaware.
Buck nods, his face pinching, mouth downturning around a hiccup of noise.
“Say it,” Eddie whispers.
He starts to shake his head, moving like he’s going to pull away, but Eddie moves with him, like two people lost at sea moving with the waves so they don’t get dragged under.
Buck blinks up at him. “Eddie—”
“We love you,” Eddie repeats, meeting his gaze head on, and nodding. “Say it, Buck.”
Buck’s eyes dance back and forth between Eddie’s, like he’s trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle he hasn’t seen the end result of.
“You—you love me,” Buck whispers mournfully.
Eddie nods. “Yeah,” He breathes.
Buck closes his eyes like it’s the hardest thing he’s had to hear or admit since this whole thing started, and Eddie holds him as he shakes. His hands come up and clasp around Eddie’s wrists, like he can’t decide if he wants to hold him there or push him away. Eddie shifts, pushing out of the chair and shoving it behind him with his leg so he can sit on the edge of the bed and lean in close, pressing his forehead to Buck’s and closing his eyes.
His forehead’s just as clammy as his cheeks, and his hair’s damp with sweat where it presses to Eddie’s hairline, but he still inhales sharply and holds the breath, like the oxygen burning away in his lungs is the only proof that he and Buck are still here together. Buck’s hands tighten around Eddie’s wrists, and he leans into Eddie’s touch, pushing into him like he wants to absorb him.
Eddie would let him.
Would welcome it.
Being a part of Evan Buckley? At least there he can always be there to protect him.
“I love you,” Eddie admits quietly, his voice catching, as if he hasn’t spent the past eight years screaming it into the silence between every other word uttered between them.
It’s not the same as everyone else.
It’s not something he knows how to properly address. And it’s certainly not the time to try and make sense of it. But it’s true. It’s fact.
It’s as much a part of things that simply are as the sky is blue and grass is green and the universe keeps going regardless of ones readiness to march onward.
“You should get some sleep,” He murmurs, moving to pull away.
One of the hands wrapped around his wrist slides up, finds the divit at the back of Eddie’s neck and nestles in like it was made to fit there. “Don’t go,” Buck breathes.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Eddie answers, thumbs sweeping over Buck’s cheekbones. “I’ll be right here.”
Buck takes a shuddering breath and nods before releasing him and letting Eddie slowly pull himself away. Before Eddie can move back to the chair, though, Buck’s hand wraps around his hand, stilling him.
“Buck?”
“Can—will. I—would you l—lay with me?”
He doesn’t meet Eddie’s gaze as he asks, like he’s almost ashamed to reach for the comfort Eddie’s been begging him to claim, so Eddie waits. Waits for those eyes to seek his out. Waits until he knows Buck is paying attention. And then he nods, once, and motions for Buck to scoot over.
Buck’s eyes widen, but then his gaze softens, like molten lava cooling beneath the night sky, and he scoots over, eyes never leaving Eddie. Watching. Waiting. Like he half expects Eddie to get up and go.
Instead, Eddie lifts the blanket and climbs into the bed next to him. Pays no mind to the damp spot where Buck sweat through the covers before the fever broke, but holds out his arms, an invite that brokers no room for hesitation or argument, and Buck falls into his side like the last string of resistance has finally been cut.
Eddie winds his arms around him and pulls him in tight against him as Buck sinks into his chest with the first signs of comfort slipping into his exhaustion heavy bones since they started the detox.
They slip into sleep together.
And for the first time since Eddie got a call in the middle of the night in El Paso, he doesn’t have nightmares of what he’ll lose when he wakes. Because his son is safe in the guest room, and the other half of his heart, the part of his heart that’s always felt a bit too exposed, is finally where it belongs.
Whatever comes next, they have this.
Each other.