hurting myself and keeping myself alive by thinking about platonically married buddie rommates raising their two kids together. camped out at the dining table discussing the meal plan for the week. them trying to figure out who’s going to drive theo to soccer practice on wednesday and who’s picking chris up from his robotics workshop on thursday. very seriously wondering if they should adopt a cat or a dog in-between sips of lukewarm coffee. eddie’s hand high up on buck’s thigh and buck playing with eddie’s fingers instead of filling out their whiteboard weekly planner. just platonic stuff like that
"tell me in person" is kinda one of my favorite lines on the show. the absolute certainty bobby has in athena to do something that seems impossible even in-universe. no doubt in his mind she'll make it back to him. one of the most romantic scenes, and it's thanks to. a beenado.
me when i have concrete to lay at 6:30, a timber lorry to drive to kansas at 8:15, a british boyfriend to bend over at 9:30, and an episode of euphoria to guest star in at 10:40
can I request 1, 3, & 20 for buddie please? separate prompts or together, whichever floats your boat!
1) knuckles brushing across a cheek + 3) lips pressed against a brow-bone + 20) fingertips tracing the notches of a spine (mwah ty sarah <33 i chose to do them separately AND together, because i am always Like This. this one got kind of long so under a cut!)
(touch prompts!)
Eddie is used to being the early riser in a relationship. Eldest son time. Military time. Single father time. Any number of reasons for the way his body has become accustomed to jostling him awake at the brink of dawn, clear-headed and efficient, any traces of irritation tucked into the spaces deep inside of him reserved for feelings that he doesn't have the luxury of indulging in.
He would wake up before Shannon, in the quicksilver moments that they were together after Chris was born, rolling out of bed to rock their son to sleep and being rewarded by the softness in her eyes when she woke up after, exhaustion clinging less fervently to the edges of her eyes. He would wake up before Ana, watching her face still and silent in the dawn light, startling himself with her presence like she was a guest that he never quite came to expect. He would wake up before Marisol, untucking himself from her to do his morning chores, her jokingly complaining about her not doing her fair share of work and it never occurring to him to share any of it with her. It's just what he does. He's the one that gets up. He's the one who does it all.
With Buck, though, it's different.
Buck isn't like Eddie, with the clock embedded into him by necessity and force of habit. He's just a morning person, in the truest sense of the word. Though to call him that perhaps belies the point, which is that Buck throws himself into living as much as he can, as fully as he can. He throws himself into mornings and lingers into nights and even when he's sleep-worn or heavy with exhaustion there's a feeling of satisfaction there, like he takes pride in wringing out every moment he can from a day.
Between the two of them, even before-- all of this, which is to say the kissing and the cuddling and the bodies pressed into each other under the sheets, it was always a little bit of a guessing game on who was going to wake up first. Sometimes it would be Buck, the smell of breakfast and soft humming and the clunking noise of living that Buck can never quite contain. Sometimes it's Eddie, who quietly prepares for the day ahead of them, packing Buck's duffel alongside his own with the ease of love worn smooth at the edges.
With this, though--
(which is to say: the startling joy found in crevasses of Eddie's life that he'd thought were gathering dust. The ordinary moments suddenly refracted in color like light through a prism or waterfall or some other metaphor for the inherent transmutation properties of love. The kissing. So much kissing.)
-- with this, everything shifts, ever so slightly.
(1)
Eddie wakes up, and the world is bright.
He squints and groans at the light not so much filtering as it is invading through the curtains, casting everything in a new day. For a moment, habit runs through his muscles, pushes his elbows into the mattress so he can clamber out of bed into something productive.
Then, an arm around his waist, tugging him down. The world suddenly dims, not frightening but familiar, chestnut curls allowing just the right amount of light through them as Eddie's face is pressed to the hollow of Buck's throat, his nose tickling his adam's apple.
"Buck," he says, laughter already caught in his throat, the mere presence of this impossible man sending sparks, confetti, fireworks off in his veins.
"Nope," Buck mumbles into Eddie's hair, all squished and sleep-blurred, a smile in his voice just for Eddie. "Not getting out of bed."
"It's morning."
"It's sleeping in day, Eddie. I've decided." Long arms, longer legs, Eddie is trapped. He loves it. He absolutely cannot allow Buck to know that he loves it.
"Oh, you've decided?"
A nod against his head. "I've decided," Buck says, in his snottiest of voices. Eddie, as always, matches his energy.
"There are children out there," Eddie points out, perhaps a little dramatically. "Starving. You would let our children starve, Buck?"
"Chris lives for days when he can sneak an extra bowl of Reese's cereal for breakfast without either of us complaining about the sugar content," Buck says. "And he said he'd play with Theo this morning for a bit."
Eddie narrows his eyes. He feels Buck stiffen, only a little. "...I didn't know we had Reese's in the house."
A pause. "Well, you also didn't know that I reorganized your spice cabinet until you couldn't find the paprika, so."
"Buck. Did you bribe our kid with sugar so that we can sleep in."
Eddie pushes Buck back, just a little, so he can tilt his face up to meet his eyes. And also maybe so he can touch his pecs a little, so what, that's his boyfriend.
Buck's eyes are curved at the edges, all cheer. His grin is dimpled on one side, teeth flashing in that infuriatingly handsome way that Eddie refuses to admit always works on him. His body betrays him, though, his hand shifting around Buck's jaw, knuckles brushing over the swell of his lip, the little scar at the edge, the dimple curled in his cheek.
He presses a thumb to the dimple, drags it outward to watch the way Buck's smile gets even bigger. "Don't be ridiculous, Eddie. I bribed our firstborn with sugar so that we can cuddle in bed."
Eddie bites down a helpless smile, knows it seeps out of him anyways. He can hear the thump of careless teenage footsteps, if he concentrates. "Of course you did," he says. Then: "Did you at least tell him not to feed our secondborn straight sugar?"
Wide blue eyes, a toddler's giggly shriek, a wince. Eddie memorizes the shift of muscle under his fingers, cups Buck's jaw tenderly, and cracks up into his sheepish sternum.
(2)
It is not often that Eddie makes an elaborate breakfast.
It's not a matter of skill, mostly -- after all, there was a reason Bobby started Buck on breakfast foods: they were the hardest to fuck up. It's more simple tradition, if anything. Eddie is (or is now, at least) a competent cook. Buck is a passionate cook. He takes joy in discovering recipes and meal prepping and trying new techniques in ways that Eddie just doesn't, and Eddie is more than happy to sit on the counter and be fed bites of ricotta-stuffed crepes or egg bakes or whatever flavor of french toast Buck decides for their stale bread Saturdays.
Still, Eddie finds himself balancing strawberries on top of a pile of pancakes, rearranging the eggs twice and frowning at the results, deciding between orange juice and apple juice.
"Dad," his beloved son says. "You're being neurotic."
"Where did you learn that word?"
A blank stare. "I'm sixteen."
Beside him, Theo giggles. "Eddie's neurotic," he announces, his lisp making the roast unintentionally adorable. Eddie ruffles his hair, gets a little squirm in response.
"Don't listen to Chris, Theo," he says. "He only says boring stuff."
"Chris is cool," Theo protests, and Chris grins smugly at him.
"Yeah, dad," he says. "I'm cool. I even woke up early just to make sure you didn't chicken out on this."
"I'm not-- I wouldn't--" Eddie tries to glare at Chris. He fails. Chris just tilts his head pointedly down the hall.
"I told him to wait a bit more," he says. "But I think he's actually gonna vibrate out of his skin if he has to stay in bed for any longer."
Eddie throws his head back, groans, and grabs the orange juice before taking the tray down the hall. Behind him, he can hear his traitorous children giggling to each other.
He nudges the bedroom door open with a foot and nearly forgets what he's meant to be doing when he sees Buck sitting against the headboard, half-naked, curls messy, eyes lighting up when they see Eddie.
"Eddie!" he says, happiness in every square inch of his body. It's impossible to believe, sometimes, how happy Eddie makes Buck. It's impossible not to believe, when Buck is so obvious with it, glowing and unmistakable.
"Buck," he says, the name as familiar as his own heartbeat. He walks forward. One step, then another. Buck's eyes fall to the tray in his hands.
"Breakfast in bed?" he tilts his head, curious. "What's the occasion?"
"You being in my bed," Eddie says, putting the tray down in front of him, curling a hand into the his curls to press a kiss to his brow, peppering kisses along his hairline as Buck giggles until he reaches his birthmark. He's not nervous anymore, weirdly. It's just Buck, after all. Love of his life, his best friend, his partner in crime and in life. There's no other way for this to go.
Buck's eyes scrunches as he smiles, fond even as he's still a little confused. He looks down at the tray, grabs a strawberry, begins to eat. Eddie watches him clear his plate, making sure to tell Eddie between bites how good everything is. Eddie perches on the edge of the bed, listens to Chris and Theo watch cartoons in the living room, and waits until Buck is finished.
"Wait," he says, when Buck tries to get up, tray shifting with him. "You didn't finish."
Buck tilts his head at him. "What?"
Eddie nods at the plate. "There's something else," he says, heart in his throat.
Buck looks at him, then at the plate. His brows furrow. He takes in the plate, then picks it up. Drops it.
Eddie catches it in his hands, leaving Buck's hands free to pick up the small, gleaming key.
"You have a key already, so this is more metaphorical than anything, but-- I want to see you in my bed tomorrow, too. And the day after that. For-- a long time."
A beat, then a small, wet laugh. "A long time, huh," Buck says, looking at Eddie with red-rimmed eyes. "That's-- uh, yeah, that sounds about right."
And Eddie holds his head in his hands, presses another smacking kiss on his birthmark as Buck laughs, the key gleaming gold in his hands.
(3)
Eddie likes being held by Buck.
It's not a surprise, given the whole dating thing. But he would challenge anyone not to like being held by Buck, who holds people with the exact right amount of pressure, like he's keeping you safe but also not smothering you.
Honestly, Eddie could do with a little smothering, sometimes, but he appreciates the thought.
So Eddie likes being held by Buck, the way any same person would, and he especially likes waking up in Buck's arms, sleep-tousled and morning-warm, mouth pressed to warm skin and rumbling with low snores. The two of them always start out spooning, when they go to bed, but they always end up this way: face to face, noses squished to necks and collars and hair, curled into each other like quotation marks. It's codependent, probably. It's careless, definitely. It's the best thing in Eddie's life.
Today, it goes like this: Eddie's cheek pressed into the pillow, face, turned towards sunlight, which is to say Buck. A leg curled over the dip of his waist, thrown over his hip, keeping him in place. A palm finding its way under his tank top, calloused fingertips dancing their way up his spine, a gentle rhythm that feels more deliberate than not.
"Are you playing piano on me?" Eddie murmurs, cracking one eye open a sliver. Buck looks at him, has been looking at him, from the angle his face is at, eyes bright and awake even as the rest of him remains sleep-soft in their bed.
Buck grins, ducks his head to get a morning-breath kiss before answering. "I've never played the piano, Eddie."
Eddie raises an eyebrow. "Doesn't answer the question, Buck."
He shivers, a little, when Buck just tip-taps his fingers a little quicker up his back, quicksilver moments of touch that leave goosebumps in their wake like every inch of Eddie's body feels a little forlorn when not actively being touched by Buck. Buck grins a little at him, eyes mischievous.
"I'm not playing piano on you, Eddie," Buck answers dutifully. He pushes Eddie towards him a little, tucking the both of them impossibly closer to each other. "I'm counting."
Eddie blinks, eyes opening fully. "Counting?"
"The little notches. I'm counting."
It makes Eddie laugh, a surprised huff of air that's tucked into the crook of Buck's neck now. Buck shivers, a little, and Eddie gets his revenge by nipping at the thin skin right below his ear. Buck retaliates by tightening the leg around Eddie's hip, a thick thigh pressing into him in a way that could easily get out of hand.
Eddie, a few years ago, would've rolled out of bed, insisted on getting started with the day. Eddie, today, just curls himself in even closer.
"I would imagine I have around thirty-two to thirty-five segments," he tells Buck, teasing. "You know, like most humans."
"I need an exact count, Eddie," Buck tells him, very solemnly. "What if they need that info when you're doing a checkup? They're gonna think I'm a neglectful boyfriend."
"I'm pretty sure that's not on any intake forms, mi sol," Eddie nips at Buck again, is rewarded with a press of fingers to the small of his back. "I know what you're really doing, you're not slick."
A little giggle, boyish and infectious. "What am I really doing, then?" Buck asks, sing-song.
"Feelin' me up."
Buck cracks up at that, giggling into Eddie's hair even as his hand sweeps over the breadth of Eddie's back, pressing with casual proprietary presumptuousness to each mole dotting the span of his skin, every bone that's visible beneath the shifting of his skin. These are things that Eddie does not know about himself, that Buck has told him with his mouth pressed to Eddie's skin, in the same careful way he catalogues every other detail of Eddie's existence.
It's overwhelming. Eddie wouldn't have it any other way.
"Oh, is that a crime, now?" Buck is saying, breathless with laughter. "To feel my hot boyfriend up first thing in the morning?"
Eddie feels the strength of Buck's grin seep into him, his own smile helpless in response. He tips his head back, meets Buck's eyes, watches the way that love transforms him into something not new but more wholly him, blooming in the light of the kind of love that he's always thrived in.
And Eddie feels transformed too, under that love, not any less himself but the startling, beautiful parts of him that were tucked out of sight rendered into clarity through beloved eyes. Coming together into a whole that Eddie is learning to love, simply because he is so loved in return.
"I'll allow it," he says, running his hand through Buck's hair, pressing a kiss to his jaw, not waiting for the day to begin because every moment with the two of them is so wholly worth existing in. "It's a pretty nice way to wake up."
I think it’s funny how whenever they ask ryliver questions about the characters Oliver is like “oh the writers are in charge, I’m just following them😊” and Ryan is like “☝️let me tell you 🫵 what should’ve happened”
happy pride to the person who asked the question about bodyswap. oliver says i’d strip down and dance around in my underwear. everyone laughs and he says no genuinely, that’s the first thing i would do. okay. sure. gets flustered and stands up. immediately kicks over a water bottle. gets flustered again and sits back down. ryan looks at him, says hmmmm what would i do with your body? oliver says you’d be so lucky. like; you wish. ryan laughs. oliver laughs. repeats what would I do with your body and ryan (bright red) reaches over and sticks a hand in his armpit and gives him a secret little pinch. ryan says hmmm i guess I’d slut it up. like you used to, i’d be a slut. in your body. :) they say thank you very much for the question and move right along like that was the most normal they’ve ever been.
eddie wakes up in the middle of the night to his phone ringing and his stomach is already sinking before he sees the name on the screen because it's not buck's ringtone. because the only person who could make a phone call in the middle of the night not terribly wrong is buck. buck forgetting that eddie isn't on the same 24-hour shifts with him anymore and calling him in the locker room to tell him about how crazy their last call was. buck remembering last minute about some wikipedia fact that he wants to make sure eddie told chris about, even though he already texted the article to chris. buck calling just because, just for, just a voice on the other end of the line who eddie uses to remember how to breathe, sometimes.
but it's not buck calling him, it's maddie, and there are no baseball bats in his room in el paso but he can feel the holes crumbling open in his walls anyways. he doesn't want to pick up the phone. he picks up the phone.
"eddie," maddie says, her voice strange and uncanny through hundreds of miles. he doesn't hear maddie's voice over the phone, unless he's facetiming with buck and she's in the background and buck tells her to say hi and she does, with a roll of her eyes and a smile caught in her voice shared between the two of them, the one that says hi, hello, what a ridiculous person it is that we love, what a wonderful thing it is to be loved by him.
her voice doesn't sound like that now. it's trembling, a little, shaky at the edges. the first responder worn down into something like a fissure in a shard of glass, and eddie is already prepared for the sharp edge to bleed him dry.
"maddie?" he says, because that's what you're supposed to say when you don't know already that the world is breaking in some way. because eddie is good at pressing the blindfold over his eyes and pretending he hasn't already tripped off a ledge into a long, long fall.
maddie inhales shakily over the line. "i-- i didn't want you to find out from the news," she says, then falls silent for a moment. "there was a call, and--"
and maddie is calling eddie now. in the middle of the night. maddie's face appeared on his phone screen, instead of the picture of buck smiling in his apron and glowing in the kitchen light. eddie knows. eddie doesn't want to know. he doesn't want to know.
"no," he says, and maddie's words falter, stop. the silence hangs between them, a blade hovering above his throat, the executioner's axe for every one of his sins. "no, maddie, don't--"
don't do this to me. not now, not here, not while my body is alive and breathing and his isn't. don't do this when my son is sleeping down the hall and has to wake up in a world where half of the world beneath his feet will suddenly be gone. don't do this when i can't crawl beneath his corpse. don't. don't. don't.
"eddie," maddie says again, and eddie wants to throw his phone at the wall like a child, make a world where the words won't come true if he never hears them.
"i can't," he gasps, and every breath is hitched, because the person who reminded him of how to breathe is not on the other end of the line.
"i'm sorry," maddie says, and there are real tears in her voice now, a sort of helplessness. she doesn't know how to help him through this. the person who does is not here. eddie has to do it himself, the way he's almost forgotten how to.
eddie closes his eyes, presses his hand over his mouth. maddie lets him shake for a moment, two.
"tell me," he says.
her voice is gentle. "i'm sorry, eddie. bobby's gone."
and for a long, terrible second, all eddie can feel is the air rushing back into his lungs.
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