Last night episode inspired me so I wrote a thing.
Written in one go with a half-ass edit, so apologies for any mistakes I might have made. I just needed to get the bucktommy brain worms out.
Anyway, here’s 3000+ words to enjoy!
🩶
**********
Buck sits in his Jeep staring blankly ahead, flipping the sobriety coin between his fingers. Of course he was stupid for thinking Bobby had come back to him; stupid to believe Bobby could see him struggling from.. wherever he was and made himself known to comfort him.
Eddie was right, despite the yelling, that Bobby wasn’t in his house. He knew deep down the chances of it actually being the ghost of his father figure were slim, yet he let himself believe. Let himself believe that someone, somewhere could actually see how lonely he was now.
He feels like he did when he was a kid and his father unceremoniously told him that Santa wasn’t real. To see a regular human being, in all his corporeal form, in his attic and not the apparition of the one person he wanted to believe was there.
His heart was broken.
A knuckle knocking on his window suddenly pulls him out of his rumination. He quickly wipes the tear that had travelled down his cheek and lowers the window.
“It’s almost 3am—what’s going on? Is everything okay?” The voice isn’t angry or judging; concern and confusion decorated it more than anything.
Buck is desperate to say that he’s fine. Desperate to push everything back down into some deep, dark pit in his chest where he’d spent the last year shoving every shitty thing that he’s been through into. The words are right there in his throat just waiting for the push they need to escape. But they stay there for a moment before Buck swallows them away.
He can’t lie. Not to him.
He looks at those oh so familiar blue eyes, that despite everything, never once looked at him with judgement.
“No.” The words are shaky and barely above a whisper.
The blue eyes soften and a hand opens the car door. Buck all but falls out and into those familiar and comforting arms, not even trying to stop himself from breaking down into sobs.
****
Tommy places a steaming mug of tea on the coffee table in front of Evan then takes a seat next to him on the sofa. Not too close— he lost that privilege a year ago.
He’d woken up from a dream where somebody had broken into his house and it frustratingly put the idea into his head that he hadn’t locked the front door when he’d gone to bed a few hours prior. He checked the lock—perfectly sat in its locked position—then felt an urge to peer outside from behind his living room curtains.
The last thing he had expected to see what his ex boyfriend parked outside.
Evan hadn’t told him what was wrong, just sobbed in his arms. Tommy held him, not saying anything, just letting him cry into his chest. He somehow managed to keep himself together but it hadn’t been easy. The most Tommy had ever seen Evan emote was when he came down with boils and he spent a week with that adorable pout about it.
Seeing the pain in his face, hearing the wrecked, broken sobs and feeling his fingers gripping his shirt tightly almost broke him. Eventually, Tommy was able to usher him inside and sit him in the living room while he made them both some tea. Evan hasn’t asked for it and Tommy didn’t offer it—Just somehow thinks it’s the right thing to do.
Evan doesn’t say anything for a while. He feels a mixture of comfort and embarrassment. Tommys house always felt like more of a home than anywhere Evan had lived back when they were dating and still now it felt like a safe place to be even after almost a year of not stepping over the threshold.
But what kind of person turns up at their exes house at 3 in the morning when they’re sad and lonely?
Something reflective in Evan’s hand grabs Tommy’s attention.
“What’s that?” He asks quietly. Somehow feels as though if he speaks too loud he’ll spook Buck.
“Sobriety coin.” He mutters.
“Oh.” He says back having nothing else to offer. He thinks back to when they were dating and can’t seem to remember Evan ever drinking excessively. He enjoyed a glass of wine with dinner on occasion—they both did—or a beer sometimes but nothing out of the ordinary. Being raised by 2 alcoholic parents, Tommy knows the signs of addiction, and can’t say he ever saw anything addictive in anything Evan did.
“How long have you..” his words trail off and Evan looks up at him.
“It-it’s not mine.”
“Oh.” Tommy says again, this time with relief. “Sorry, I just assumed.”
“Found it in my attic.” Evan tells him and now Tommy is confused. He remembers a conversation they had once, the night they’d hooked up. Cuddling in bed afterwards, Tommy had made a comment about Evan not unpacking his belongings yet and Evan had complained about lack of storage space in Eddie’s old house and how he wished he had an attic.
“Did you move again?”
“Had to.” Evan replies not taking his eyes off the coin in his fingers. Tommy remembers how Evan always needed to do something with his hands when he was feeling something hard. “Eddie wanted the house back.”
“He came back from El Paso?”
Evan nods, wipes his nose with his sleeve. “Couple of weeks after Bobby’s-“ He stops himself. Tommy hears the breath sticking in his throat.
But he doesn’t push. Knows Evan doesn’t need to be pushed to talk. Knows that letting Evan open up at his own pace is the better thing to do. But he can’t help but wish that telepathy was a real thing so he could send over the thousand and one burning questions he has directly into Evan’s brain so he can get the answers. And top of the list was: what was hurting him so badly that he’d show up here of all places?!
Tommys patience pays off and after a few more minutes of the silence in the room only being broken by Tommy’s slurping of his tea (had he always drank this loud?) Evan finally spoke.
“I thought.. Bobby’s ghost was.. I thought he came back.” His voice is meek and Tommy swears he can hear his own heart crack in half. But he manages to hold himself together. Just.
“What happened?
Evan sucks in a large breath and sits back into the couch, bringing his feet up and wrapping his arms around his legs; still playing with the coin with his fingers.
“I-I kept hearing noises in the attic. Thought it was squirrels. Until Maddie made a joke about it being a ghost and-and I know that it was joke, but.. but that night a-a noise woke me up and I go into my kitchen and find a broken bottle of-of cream of tartar on the floor.”
He seems to say it as though it were supposed to mean something to Tommy but he’s yet to grasp the context.
Evan continues.
“I-I’ve been trying to recreate Bobbys snickerdoodles but I-I can’t find the recipe. Some-something was missing from the ingredients. It was cream of tartar.”
Now Tommy is picking up what Evan is putting down. It wasn’t a bother—when together he’d gotten used to Evan regularly blasting right past the point he was making, headfirst into the next subject, missing sometimes vital parts of a story for context in the process and all the while expecting Tommy to understand what was talking about regardless.
“And you think Bobby was.. telling you that?” He’s trying to ask the question gracefully and without judgment but isn’t sure how he’s coming across.
“I-I thought.. I thought we could do an ouija board, me Eddie and Chris, may-maybe see if we could contact him. But..” his face morphs into one of shame. “Eddie yelled me. Again, an-“
“What do you mean again?” The question flies out of Tommy’s mouth before he has a chance to stop it.
“We had a-a fight after Bo-… after the funeral. He said.. he said that if he’d have been there then Bobby might still be alive. He said some other stuff that doesn’t matter right now.” Evan doesn’t want to admit that he’d been questioning his friendship with Eddie. Doesn’t want to admit, even to himself, that maybe his loyalty to his best friend wasn’t reciprocal.
“Anyway,” he continues, not allowing any space for Tommy to interject. “Ravi came over in the end to do the ouija board.”
Tommy really wants to have words with Eddie Diaz. As if they all didn’t do everything they could have possibly done to save Howie’s life and Bobby was dead the moment his oxygen line got cut. Did he think Evan didn’t do enough? Or Tommy himself? Did he think Tommy just fucked around on his off weekends stealing helos and playing cat and mouse with United States fucking army just for fun?
He doesn’t say any of this. Knows it would just upset Evan more.
“What happened?” He asks instead.
“We-we heard a noise coming from the attic and-and I go up to see what it is and it’s the previous tenant. He never left. He-he’s been hiding up there for a week, apparently.”
“That’s.. creepy.” Tommy says, with the understatement of the century.
“Ravi says it’s called Phrogging?”
“It’s also called illegal.” Tommy says not being able to hide the bitchiness.
“I just.. I know it’s stupid but.. I let myself believe that-that it was Bobby. That he knew how lonely I was and- But it was just a guy.”
Lonely. Evan was lonely. How could that possibly be? He has an entire group of people around him who love him. No, that doesn’t make sense.
“But you have the 118, your sister.. I don’t understand.”
Evan drops his head, doesn’t say anything. Tommy slides closer to him, still keeping a few inches between them. “Evan, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but I’d like to understand.”
Once again Evan fights the urge to say he’s fine and make a bolt for the door. To run home, to his barely unpacked house, and shove every selfish thought and feeling back into the pit in his chest and seal it up tighter.
But then Tommy goes and tugs on his chin gently, always gently, and turns his face, forcing him to look back at the eyes he still dreams about. And he’s powerless suddenly.
He opens his mouth and talks. And he talks and he talks and he talks.
He tells Tommy about how the last year has been. Tells him about trying to support everyone through Bobbys death and constantly being dismissed, pushed away and even laughed at sometimes. He tells him about Eddie demanding his house back and how he’d changed since he’d left and returned, but that maybe he hadn’t changed at all and Buck was just starting to see Eddie more clearly. He tells him about Maddie having the baby (and the name they chose that he still wasn’t sure they he liked) and how he’d been trying to give her space to adjust to 2 kids but he missed her and feels like she doesn’t miss him. He tells him that Ravi has been the only person to give him the time of day these days. He tells him that everybody else has their family to lean on this past year and he has nobody.
Tommy wants to pack Evan’s bags and take him somewhere far, far away. He wants to knock on the doors of each and every person who claims to love Evan and yell at them for daring to make Evan feel like he isn’t important. Because god damn he was the most important person in the world and Tommy was a fucking idiot for losing him, but everybody else sure as didn’t get to push Evan away without consequences.
Evan’s phone pings in his pocket. He’s exhausted and it’s almost painful to move to reach inside and grab it. His eyes are puffy and strained from crying and he squints at the screen, opening the new message.
“Oh no.” He says solemnly.
“What?” Tommy asks
“It’s Eddie, he.. his abuela died. He-he needs me to look after Chris.” He drops his head again and runs his hand through his hair. He’s just so tired!
Tommy isn’t a monster, he knows what grief feels like and doesn’t wish it upon anyone. But Eddie doesn’t seem to need Evan for comfort—he needs him to babysit. Again. He liked Christopher, thought he was a great kid and he was- is important to Evan.
But Tommy hadn’t failed to notice when they were dating just how much Eddie relied on Buck to look after his son. And Evan always dropped everything to help. It was part of the reason Tommy had made that stupid comment about Eddie being competition. It was never about thinking Evan had a thing for Eddie, it was because Tommy always seemed to grab the short straw when it came to Evan’s time. No matter the plans they had or things they were in the middle of doing, if Eddie needed it, Evan gave it. But it was never reciprocated. Tommy can’t remember a single time Evan asked Eddie for help with something and that he actually gave it.
Usually, Evan would be up and leaving as soon as the Eddie bar signal went up but this time he’s slow to react and Tommy can almost hear the thoughts rolling around inside of Evan’s head.
“You don’t have to go.” He gives Evan the permission he thinks he needs.
“He-he needs me..” Evan says back quietly.
Tommy takes his face again and turns it towards him. “Evan. Do you want to go?”
Evan looks back at Tommy, can see the out that Tommy is giving him. He doesn’t want to hurt Christopher but he’s tired of always being the one to be called upon. And maybe it’s his own fault for always coming running every time but if this last year has taught him anything it’s that everyone only wants him around when he’s useful.
“No.” He feels Tommy’s thumb gently draw along the curved hinge of his jaw then takes the phone from his hands and puts on the coffee table face down.
“Then stay.”
Evan’s body sags with relief and Tommy allows him to list forward into his arms once again, pressing a long and lingering kiss to his forehead and breathes in that familiar scent that he missed so terribly.
He presses another kiss to Evan’s temple, one to his cheek bone and another to his cheek, then jaw. He pulls back to look at Evan, not knowing if he has permission to keep going. He wants to kiss every inch of him. Every groove and crease, every round of muscle, every scar and mole and blemish.
Evan feels the loss of Tommy’s lips on his face when he releases him. The same loss he’s felt since Tommy walked out of his apartment a year ago and again after their night together at his old place. Loss after loss he’s had to deal with this year and he can’t do it anymore.
“Don’t stop.” He commands, snaking a hand across Tommy’s neck, gripping the back of it.
Tommy doesn’t need anything more than that and presses his lips into Evan’s. Warmth floods his veins and fills his heart feeling those wonderful full lips again. He kisses him long and firm and indescribably slow. Savouring every second of the taste of that perfect mouth. His tongue curls underneath Evans and he swallows the deep groan it elicits.
Evan needs Tommy. Needs him down to the bone. He’d climb inside Tommy’s chest and live there forever if he could. He needs him on him, around, inside him. A type of comfort he’d only ever known Tommy to provide. The way he touched him, tasted him and spoke to him like every word was a sacred prayer between them. Never having to ask for support or care—just freely given it by someone who made it seem so easy; someone who never once made him feel like a burden or a nuisance that was exhausting to interact with.
Tommy knows where this is going and he should take a step back and talk. He wants this more than he’s ever wanted anything in his 40 years on earth and knows, or at least thinks he knows, that Evan wants the same thing. They should stop and talk and work things out before going further, but..
But Evan was just breaking his heart in front of him and now he’s kissing him and holding on to him for dear life, like he’s terrified if he lets go Tommy will somehow disappear. Tommy is never going to let that happen so he indulges Evan (and himself) instead. Decides to give Evan everything he wants tonight. There’s always tomorrow to talk.
He pulls back and wipes a drop of saliva from Buck’s kiss-swollen bottom lip with his thumb. Evan’s eyes are full and deep and heavy-lidded.
“What do you need, sweetheart?”
Evan also comes undone at the pet name. “You. It’s always you.”
“I’m here.” Tommy whispers against his lips. “I’m always here. I love you.”
He’s wanted to say those three words for a long time, before they even broke up, but his terror at being rejected overshadowed everything and in the end forced him to break both of their hearts. But now saying them out loud to the one man who deserved to hear them there was no terror. There were no nerves, no fear, nor frantically leaping for the nearest exit. Instead he felt clarity. Certainty.
Evan takes Tommy face in his hands and looks him, a mixture of apprehension and expectation in his eyes. “You promise?” His voice begins to shake again. “Cause I.. I-I can’t lose you again, Tommy.” He shakes his head. “I won’t make it.”
His eyes fill with wet and Tommy’s eyes do the same. How could they not when Evan was looking at him like that? He runs a hand through Evan’s hair then slides it down, resting it against his face.
“How does forever sound?”
Evan stops breathing. They weren’t the words usually spoken, but they damn sure sound like they mean the same thing.
“Was that.. did you just..” he stares at Tommy, wide-eyed and half terrified that he’s misinterpreted Tommys words.
Tommy, meanwhile, is realising what he’s just asked. It truly wasn’t what he was going for when he asked the question but as the words left his lips, and he realised how Evan might take what he said, clarity hit him in the face with the force of cement block.
Evan was right—he’s his last. His forever person. It’s ridiculous and fast and maybe even reckless to be doing this right now but fuck it! He’s waited long enough to find someone like Evan, and spent the best part of the last year wallowing in his own stupid decision to push away the love of his life.
No more waiting.
“Propose? Yeah. I think I did.”
A small, wet laugh came from his throat, matching the wetness around his eyes and Evan can’t stop the smile from forming in his own face, wiping Tommy’s tears this time.
Tommy loves him. Tommy wants to marry him. It’s crazy and reckless, he thinks, but then remembers how everybody said the same thing when Bobby asked Athena to marry him and they’d only been together for less than a year, but ended up having one of the most beautiful marriages Evan had ever seen.
He knows how everyone else will react. Knows they’ll tell him he’s being typical Buck—rushing into things without thinking. They’ll tell him he doesn’t know what he wants and that he doesn’t understand how serious marriage is.
But he also knows that Bobby approved of Tommy. Bobby told him he was good people and that it was clear how happier Evan had been when they were together. If Bobby were here he’d ask Buck if he was sure, and when he tells him he is, he’d congratulate him and wish him a life of happiness.
And that all the approval he needs.
“Forever sounds pretty perfect to me.” Is his response.
“So, that’s a yes, right?” Evan laughs freely and loudly and god Tommy has missed it.
“I love you, Tommy. Of course it’s a yes!”
Tommy lets out a sob of pure unbridled happiness and kisses his fiancé hard, wrapping his arms tightly around the man, having no intention of ever letting him go. He’ll die first.
Part 2