Uhhh love your AUs!!! What about 5 facts AU on Tommy and Buck on rival trivia teams?
thank you so much! and whoops, let's pretend you didn't send this almost a month ago, lovely anon. going under a cut a little way in because this ended up like 1.1k long.
1) Buck isn't sure what to expect from his first trivia night with the 118. It's not a formal LAFD thing, Hen assures him. Not every team is from a firehouse, but a lot of them are. He thinks it'll be a fun way to bond with his new teammates. He gets to the bar early, before Hen and Chim and the others. He checks in for the team and gets their table number, but he gets distracted from staking out a good table when a guy appears at the bar next to him. Buck's pretty sure he must be here for the quiz, and he must be on one of the firehouse teams. He's Buck's height, but his shoulders are so broad, and his biceps are like…whoa. Plus, Buck can't help noticing, he has a hell of an ass. Buck is blessed/cursed with a sad little pancake butt no matter what he tries, and he wonders if there's a non-weird way to ask. Before he gets the chance, the guy cuts him a glance, then double takes, then smiles.
2) He's been talking with Tommy for ten minutes, and he couldn't even tell you what they'd been discussing. He's not…it's a little weird, right? Buck's got that feeling, that rushing in his ears, that tingling in his fingertips, that he gets when he's talking with a really hot girl. Except instead of doing his very best not to let his eyes dip too disrespectfully to her chest, he's doing his best not to stare at the cleft in Tommy's chin, or the way his big hands move when he's emphasizing a point. Like he said, weird. Buck opens his mouth to say something — he has no idea what, but he doesn't want the conversation to stop — when someone barrels into him and slings an arm around his shoulders.
"Buckaroo! Are you sleeping with the enemy?"
"Chim?"
"Howie?"
"Don't speak to me, traitor," Chim says, holding up a hand to block Tommy from looking at him.
"Wait, what's — " Buck tries to ask, but for a short guy, Chim still has all the strength of a firefighter, and he drags Buck along with him as he walks away from the bar.
Buck manages a glance back and a helpless shrug at the amused look on Tommy's face.
3) It turns out Buck took Tommy's place at the 118 and on the trivia team. Hen and Chim seem more mad that they lost their MVP ("I hate to admit it," Hen says, "But that man knows sports and movies and 20th century history to a really impressive degree." "Henrietta!" Chim snaps. "Do not speak fondly of the betrayer.") than that they lost their colleague and…maybe friend? Buck's not sure how much of the shit-talking is just for show. He's not going to be a lot of help to them for sports or movies or history, and when Hen asks what his specialty is and Buck says, "I dunno…trivia?" Chim lets his head drop to the table with a groan.
"Okay, listen to me," Chim says firmly, pointing two fingers at his own eyes and then at Buck's. "He wasn't here for the last one and we weren't here for the one before that. This is our first opportunity to show him we don't need his freakish knowledge of basketball stats. Do not fuck this up for us, Buckley."
Buck's starting to think that maybe this isn't going to be quite the chilled bonding experience he was expecting.
4) There's a round on aquatic creatures that Buck absolutely knocks out of the park. Then there's a round on 90s rom-coms, followed by one on sports that has Chim howling with rage and glaring daggers over at Tommy's table where he's squished between two other burly firefighters and scribbling industriously. There's a break after that, and Buck offers to go to the bar when he sees that Tommy's heading up there too. He can feel Chim glaring at him the whole time, so he doesn't do more than offer Tommy a smile. Tommy has no such qualms, beelining over to him once he has his drinks — Buck tries not to look at the way he's holding three bottles of beer in one hand, the necks slotted in between his thick fingers.
"Hey," he says, sounding bright and breathless. "How's it going?"
"You know Chim's going to give me hell for talking to you, right?"
Tommy winks. "Why'd you think I'm here?"
"Oh," Buck says, and tries not to let himself droop, because Tommy's really cool, and Buck doesn't want him to only be talking to Buck to get a rise out of someone else.
"Well," Tommy says, and his free hand rubs at the back of his neck. "I mean. Not just that."
"Buckley!" Chim yells. "Stop fraternizing!"
Tommy laughs. "When he gets really mad, he gets his little vein, right here," he says, tapping his own temple. "See how it goes."
"Yeah," Buck says, feeling giddy.
5) The 118 don't win. Harbor — because Tommy is a pilot, Buck realizes with an inexplicable swooping in his stomach. So. Cool — don't win either. In fact, they come joint third, tied exactly. He thinks Chim's madder about that than if the Harbor team had won outright. So he's a little confused when, once the winners have taken their prize and the quizmaster has wrapped up, Chim and Hen head directly for Tommy's table for an exchange of back slaps and greetings.
"I thought we weren't allowed to fraternize," he says, because he's trailed after them.
"During quiz time," Chim says.
"Quiz time is sacred," Tommy admits.
"You can talk to each other as much as you want outside of quiz time," Hen tells them.
Buck's not sure why, but he looks at Tommy right as she says that, and feels like he's been frozen solid by the color of Tommy's eyes, the laughter lines around them as he smiles.
"Is that a promise?" he asks, his voice low, and Buck feels like they're the only two people left in the bar.
"Yeah," he says, pretending he can't feel himself blushing, can't feel the weight of the stares Hen and Chim are switching back and forth between him and Tommy like spectators at a Tennis match. "Yeah, I'd like that."
They swap phones to trade numbers and Buck feels a zap of electricity when their fingers graze as they pass them back. Tommy's put his details in as 'Tommy (quiz night)'. Buck doesn't think too much as he changes it to 'Tommy (hot pilot)'.
+1) Hen, Chim, and the Harbor team remain deeply suspicious of them at quiz nights. In fairness, they do spend most of the evening making eyes at each other across the room, so they maybe have a point.
Send me a 🔄 and I will use a random number generator for a random AU.
These are supernatural and horror based AUs, with some fun ones I don't see often on AU lists.
Rumor says Ink sank to the bottom, and it still there like a skeleton in Minecraft. (Also just want to clarify not a ship. I see these two idiots as frenemies but less of the friends part.)
