Since it's taking me a million years to finish the coma part 2 fic, have an excerpt
Buck rolls his eyes. “It’s your house. Chris is only just getting settled again. I’ll… I’ll find a new place. Won’t be that hard. Just need a studio or something, a year lease while I find something more permanent.”
Eddie pauses. “Don’t feel like you need to rush out of here, Buck.”
Stay curled up with me in a bed we share that smells like the both of us while the kid you’ve raised for eight years or two months depending on who you ask sleeps down the hall in the bed you helped me build for him. Make me breakfast in the morning and bring me water when I’m too tired to get up and kiss my aches and share my clothes and rub my back when it’s sore from a shit 48 and listen to me moan from the relief of it like you sometimes do in the bunk rooms out of sight from everyone who knows us. Lie with me, baby.
He’s not an idiot. He knows what Eddie’s saying. Knows what he’s being offered on a silver platter: an extension on the life he’s gotten to take this summer, a temporary leave of absence from reality where the two of them share a bed and wake up curled inside each other’s arms like they did in quarantine, when Buck had deluded himself for weeks and weeks that this was what they could have, if they wanted, they just had to say it aloud, until Eddie declared he was moving out to his own home, his own life again, because of course he was. It wasn’t even a competition. Buck had never really expected it to be, not between him and Chris, because if he’s being honest with himself, between Eddie and Chris, it’s no competition for him either if some awful, vile thing decided he could only have one. But between the loneliness of a half-empty house and a life with Buck, he thought it would be harder for Eddie to leave than it was. He keeps getting everything he wants for slivers of time before he gets to go back to the way of the world, stealing moments from other people’s families he likes to think are almost his.
“I wouldn’t want to make things weird for you and Chris. Especially since…”
“Right,” Eddie says, mouth tight.
“But I’ll be here to help you settle again, alright? And don’t pull any of your macho, I-don’t-need-any-help bullshit. I’ve got the magic word: coma. Pretty hard to argue with.”
Eddie rolls his eyes. Did Eddie pick that up from him? Did Chris pick it up from Eddie? Is there some string of behaviors, of aggravating mannerisms, that Buck gets to claim has some basis in him?
“But seriously,” Eddie tells him. “You’re not sleeping on the couch. It’s shitty, you said so yourself.”
“I’ll get an air mattress or something. Haul it in here so you don’t have to sleep alone.”
Eddie studies him for a moment, and it makes Buck want to pull the blanket over his head. “You know it’s not… I’m not gonna be weird about it now that you’re, um… out of the closet, you know? I hope you know I wouldn’t—”
“No, no, Eddie, of course not, I know that. You’ve been… you’ve always been great about my sexuality. I didn’t think there was any, like… weirdness. I mean, I guess, if there is or something, I—”
“There isn’t,” Eddie says firmly, and it echoes in Buck’s brain like it doesn’t change anything. The thing is—he’d kinda thought it would.