How I think the Buck&Athena Roommates era would have gone:
"Yeah I'm not doing that," Tommy says, when Buck walks him through the twelve step plan he has in place to sneak him out.
"Tommy."
And that's quite the whine. The pout is cute, and Tommy wants to bite his lower lip, make sure he feels it later, but he's not backing down from this.
Tommy can't remember why the hell they'd decided to come back here, instead of going back to his place.
Falling back into bad habits, maybe.
Except he's been fucking trying not to let that happen.
"As thrilling as it would be to finally play out those rebellious teenage years I missed out on, I am not scaling a trellis, Evan."
"It's sturdy!"
"You've tested it?"
Evan ducks his head, and Tommy shakes his own, sifting his fingers through the short hairs above Evan's ear.
"You wanna get B-Shift called in to Athena's house? Because that's how you get B-Shift called to Athena's house."
The knock on the door startles them both. Athena's voice on the other end has Evan ducking beneath the covers like a scolded child, and it's so fucking adorable Tommy wants to do something insane like whisk him away to Vegas for a quickie wedding.
"Is Tommy joining us for breakfast, Buck?"
Buck glances up at him and Tommy has to marvel at the fact that he isn't freaking out about the idea of being hidden away, kept a secret. It's not about hiding Tommy, really, just a little mortification at the idea of Athena knowing Evan has a guest she wasn't aware of ahead of time. Ridiculous, considering what he was like as a probie. But he's grown. Changed.
"Tommy makes a mean pancake," Tommy calls out, and grins at the faux betrayal on Evan's face.
"Athena will start the coffee," she murmurs back, wry tone in place, and raps her knuckles against the door as her footsteps fade down the hallway.
Bucktommy secret relationship but it’s because no one thought to ask about his love life. Let’s lean into the grief isolating them from each other and have them not know Buck has been back with Tommy for months because they apparently “don’t know how to talk to him” even better if Maddie does know but Chim’s been busy with Captain Stuff so it hasn’t come up.
"Hey, so, if you could tell your roommate to stop sending me incomprehensible Millennial memes every time I ask him a question, I'd appreciate it," Ravi says, and Buck stares at the prongs of his fork to prevent himself from jamming them into Ravi's hand just long enough for Ravi to notice the way the table has gone silent. There's no way they didn't notice the emphasis, right?
"I'll, uh... make a note," Buck says, and dives back in to his spaghetti. It's been a long day. He's reheated his lunch-dinner three times already. And now he sort of desperately wants the klaxons to go because...
Because it's weird that he never told them where he was living now.
Weird that they never asked.
"You have a roommate?"
Buck is 34 years old. Buck broke his own lease to help a friend only to be ceremoniously kicked out just months later, no notice, more interaction with Chris than Eddie as he furiously repacked boxes and stuffed them in his Jeep like a madman. Buck has terrible credit and a desire to set down roots that no one seems to give a shit about, except -
Roommates lasted for a month and a half at best. If he doesn't count the lingering glances, or the lingering touches, or the lingering feelings that blew up in their faces the harder they tried to tamp them down.
Ravi just thinks it's funny to keep calling them roommates.
("Like the Vine, you know?"
"Doesn't know a single 3OH3 song but he knows Vine," Tommy had said, three and a half beers deep and kicking at Ravi's leg from his lounger on the patio of their backyard.
"Oh, my cousin sends me TikTok compilations of them."
"I don't understand half the words you two are saying," Buck had chimed in, and gotten Tommy's lazy half-smile, a hand curled around his ear, and Ravi's "If you guys are gonna do more of that I'm calling an Uber.")
"Not exactly," Buck says, and tries to send Ravi a death glare. Ravi's too busy staring at the ceiling with his chair tipped back like he's daring Buck to kick his foot out enough to catch on a leg.
They're all surprised by the news, like they've done a damn thing to find out anything about his life in the months since they shut down any attempt he'd made to reach out.
He's glad he's found a way to let himself be mad at them for that.
He's glad his entire life no longer hinges on making sure they know every intimate detail of that life.
Still. The longer they stare at him, waiting for more, the more he realizes this was...maybe an oversight.
Probably should have told them before he and Tommy stuck a For Sale sign on his bedframe at the curb and been rewarded for their manipulation when someone stole the thing within like, three hours. They'd been too lazy to take it to the dump. Too lazy to sell it on Marketplace. Too caught up in the bubble of 'stay as long as you need' turning into 'do you want to be on the mortgage I need to know by Friday'.
Ravi's slept in the guest room more than Buck ever stayed at Tommy's, before.
He's made friends with Goose, too, which Buck thinks is a little unfair because Tommy's half blind cat still sticks her tail in the air to walk away any time Buck enters a room.
"Whoops," Ravi says like this was anything but intentional.
("Are you hiding the fact that you're in a happy relationship with a dude who loves you like, a weird amount for any particular reason?"
"It's not weird. It's a normal amount!"
"If I called him right now with a Buck related emergency how long until he had a bird in the air for you?"
"...he's at work right now so like, seven minutes tops.")
When the silence just keeps stretching, he barely manages to dodge the garlic bread Buck tosses at his face before the table erupts into chaos.
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
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