Crash that helicopter, SalBuckTommy edition:
Seeing Buck break down after the lab incident has Tommy rethink everything. After the funeral he tentatively reaches out to Buck, they talk, they decide they want to start dating again, take it slow, take their time to really get to know each other this time around.
Roughly around the same time Sal and Gina separate. Sal needs somewhere to stay while he figures out what to do, and Tommy offers his spare room. Queue some tension with Buck. (“You didn’t want us to move in together, but he is ok?” “Evan, he’s my best friend.” “Like Eddie is mine and you were weird about me living at his place while he wasn’t even there.” “This isn’t the same.” “No, it isn’t. You ever had a crush on him?” “Evan.” “Don’t Evan me, answer the question.”)
Sal is trying to make himself rare whenever Buck is over, not accidentally third wheeling, but it’s tense, it’s weird.
And then the helicopter crashes.
Buck is on shift at the time, they’re in the midst of evacuating a multi storey building that’s rapidly going up in flames, so it takes a couple of hours for the information to come through as they’re finally finishing up at the scene. They drop him off at the hospital on the way back to the station and Buck is running high in adrenaline and exhaustion and unprocessed trauma as he’s pleading with an unimpressed nurse who is telling him she can’t give him any information, he isn’t next of kin, sorry. Alerted by the commotion, Sal appears (who is Tommy’s ICE and medical proxy because fuck Tommy’s dad, he doesn’t get to make decisions for Tommy) who has been at the hospital for hours, waiting for Tommy to get out of surgery. They wait together until Tommy is out of surgery and then go sit with him for as long as the nurses allow them, silent and tense while they watch the machines he’s hooked up to, scared the doctor who told them the surgery went well, that he’s stable enough while his body needs to heal might be wrong.
When the nurses finally force them to leave, Sal takes Buck home back to Tommy’s, thinking it best not to leave him alone for now and so they can both head back to the hospital as soon as they get new information or when visiting hours start the next day. Sal is woken up in the middle of the night by loud noises from the kitchen and finds Buck trying to bake cookies at 2:30am, despite his hands shaking so hard he’s got more ingredients all over the counter tops than in the mixing bowl. Buck tells him they’re for the nurses and the doctors, a thank you, and that he can’t sleep anyway. Sal tells him they probably won’t appreciate the tears mixed into them, and that’s when Buck fully breaks down for the first time since the lab incident, sobbing on the floor of Tommy’s kitchen, and it’s Sal who’s there, who sits with him and holds him through it and inwardly promises himself he’ll make sure Buck won’t have to attend another funeral, even if that means a deal with the devil himself.
And Sal is just there over the next weeks: when Tommy wakes up in the hospital, when the doctors tell him about his long way to recovery, about the surgeries in his near future to fix everything and get him back to full health; he’s there for Tommy and, to Buck’s surprise, he’s there for Buck too. He’s got Buck’s back, doesn’t tell him he’s making Tommy’s crash about himself when Buck struggles with his own emotions in regards to the whole situation. He’s offers companionship and silent support and distraction for both of them.
And then one night when Tommy is back in hospital in between having been at home to recover, to have surgery to remove some scar tissue that hindered the healing process, Buck and Sal fall asleep on the couch together. Having leaned against each other turns into half way cuddling with each other, and when Buck wakes up, in those moments where he’s not fully awake yet, he leans more heavily into the body he’s curled up with, smelling the familiar shower gel Tommy always uses, a strong arm around him, and he leans up for a kiss. It takes them about ten seconds to realise but the damage is done. They both feel horribly guilty about it, but it also felt so right, and Sal accepts that yeah, maybe he’d had a crush on Tommy too, back then, but he’d already been happily committed to Gina by the time Tommy came out to him.
Well, fast forward a couple hours of awkwardness until Buck admits he’s horrible at keeping secrets and more over, he doesn’t want to keep secrets from Tommy, not when a stupid secret kiss had cost him Taylor’s trust back then. So they talk it out, all three of them, and some heartfelt time later *wavey hands* they end up being a throuple.
