love you most <3 for you, i made this fluff — otherwise i totally had angst on speed dial.
94. untying your lover’s tie, using it to pull your lover into a kiss
[devotion (defined by you) - AO3 Link]
Word Count: 3075 words
Buck’s making a cup of tea when the sound of the lock reverberates into the apartment.
In the silence, the sound echoes with the footsteps of the man behind the door, and without turning to face him, Buck smiles.
“How was it?”
A light string of laughter, pulled from him with the electricity that sparks between them, and then the shuffle of Eddie’s socked feet against the floor. Buck’s own feet are bare, pressing against cold tile that feels like it warms as Eddie gets closer.
“Boring,” he says, leaning back against the counter next to where Buck’s pouring hot water into his mug.
Without being prompted, he reaches for another mug, drops Eddie’s favorite tea bag into it and covers it with hot water. “Yeah?”
In his suit, Eddie cuts a vision against Buck’s countertop, elbows perched behind him and legs crossed at the ankle as he reclines back. The panels of his suit jacket flutter uselessly at his sides, and the deep maroon shirt stretches across his chest until Buck thinks the buttons will pop clean off.
“Never going to one of those things again,” Eddie says, bringing one hand up to loosen his tie. “At least, not without you to keep me company.”
Buck’s eyes linger on the movement before he forces himself to look away from his partner’s strong, tan fingers grasping the knot of the black tie, tugging it loose to hang on his chest while he undoes the top two buttons.
There’s something intimate to that moment, to watch Eddie shed the layers of who he’d just been outside to who he is in a mimic of his home, with his son snoring lightly in the background. The yearning that roots in Buck’s chest only delves deeper at the notion, a stray drop rippling across the waves of an ocean.
Eddie folds his suit jacket carefully to place over the far end of the breakfast bar, and this time, Buck doesn’t look away when he starts rolling the cuffs of his shirt up. He can feel Eddie’s eyes on him as he watches the menial task be done in Eddie’s deft way, but Buck simply lets himself look back, knowing that he’s felt the burn of Eddie’s gaze on the small sliver of skin exposed by his T-shirt from the moment he entered.
He isn’t the only one looking, and that in itself lights the flame in his chest.
“You insisted on it,” he smiles instead, pressing the warm mug into Eddie’s hand. “Why would I go with you when I can hang out with my little buddy at home?”
He’s not as dressed up — truth be told, Buck had tossed on an old pair of pajamas right before Eddie dropped Christopher off, and he’s still clad in them. An old tattered T-shirt Eddie left here last year and a pair of sweatpants held up precariously by a hasty knot in the drawstring are all he has to show for himself.
Eddie arches a brow as he straightens. “No, your little buddy insisted I attend because it was a fundraiser for an animal charity. Where is he, by the way?”
“Knocked out,” Buck replies, pressing his knee into the cabinet right next to Eddie’s. He knows what Eddie’s next words are going to be.
“Miracle worker,” Eddie says — fondly, predictably. An epithet that has followed Buck for years.
Buck resists the urge to engrave the two words into the wall next to his house, the ones Eddie gives him without fail at the end of each time Buck babysits, as if he’s the one working miracles to raise this awesome kid.
He doesn’t say any of it, electing to let the calm of the evening stretch over them in answer instead as he watches Eddie turn back around from checking on his son from afar.
There’s room in the vast space. Buck knows there is. Eddie knows there is. There’s room on the counter itself for them to shift even inches apart so they’re not pressed together hip to toe.
Despite it, they stay pressed together like this with their cups of tea, quietly sharing the moment as the city settles down around them.
Buck studies his best friend over the rim of his mug, studies the ghost of a smile that seems to live on Eddie’s face whenever he’s here. He studies the little triangle of skin that spans from the hollow of his throat to the third button of his shirt, studies the way he’s now perched on one elbow facing Buck while the other holds the mug, studies the ease of his shoulders as he relaxes against the granite.
He studies him like a well-loved book, with his fingertips mapped all over pages, annotations in the margins, folds in the pages with scenes he’s clutched too hard to read over and over. He studies him like the lines of a well-loved poem, reading between them to find the essence of what he’s made of, to find all the things that remain unsaid between them.
And above all, he feels his definition of devotion shift to match the man in front of him, especially when that same man turns to smile at him with the power of a thousand suns.
“You know,” Eddie starts delicately, amusement lightening his features as his head tips to look Buck in the eye. It’s a lazy movement, and reminds Buck of the slow confidence of a man who knows what he wants, of a man who knows he’ll get it. “I got asked where my husband is today.”
Buck can’t help but throw his head back and laugh, only remembering last minute to stifle the sound so Christopher doesn’t wake up. “Yeah? Something you want to tell me, Eddie?”
Eddie huffs out a laugh as he straightens, turning to lean against his counter with both hands on the mug this time, head turned towards Buck as he mock-exaggerates his retelling. “Don’t tell anyone, but I heard from Deborah that my husband is, and I quote, ‘the strapping young hunky blond with guns for days that makes the most divine red velvet cupcakes, the one he refuses to share the recipe for.’”
Parent gossip is the best gossip, in Eddie’s eyes. Buck knows this because his best friend pounces on every little bit he can get his hands on.
But gossip about himself amuses Eddie to no end, and Buck can always see the mirth sparkling in his eyes as he recalls the various things the parents and teachers have said about them. Hearing all the wild rumors about what Buck and Eddie must get up to in their spare time is Eddie’s favorite pastime.
It had taken Buck many, many tries to perfect that red velvet cupcake recipe. He refuses to share it.
“Nothing like a middle-aged mom to boost your ego,” Buck says, clinking his cup with Eddie’s in a mimic of toasting cheers. “That was a lot of adjectives, though. She could’ve streamlined it. Made it a little simpler.”
“Really?” Eddie feigns, eyes lit up with the same playful mischief Buck sees in Christopher all the time — the same one that makes Chris look so much like his father it takes Buck’s breath away. “I thought she could’ve used a lot more. My husband is worth at least three more. At least.”
“You’re a menace,” Buck laughs, sounding far too affectionate to his own ears for the words to hold any weight. “Did you at least raise money for the cause you went there for? Or did you just get more dirt on us?”
Eddie nods. “The dirt is the best, and only fun part of these things. But yeah, definitely. The crowd was pretty rich, with deeper pockets than I thought. Perks of a private school, I guess,” he says. “Are there any red velvet cupcakes, by the way? I want some now.”
“Should be one in the fridge.”
Eddie shifts away to set his mug down, leaving Buck feeling colder with the loss of warmth on his side than with the chill of the fridge. It feels like a pipe dream of sorts, to see Eddie Diaz standing in the middle of his kitchen in a suit rummaging through his fridge, like he comes home like this all the time.
Buck thinks that maybe he does.
It had been easier in the beginning, for both of them to play into the rumors and just let the school — and the gaggle of parents waiting to catch sight of the hot single dad outside pickup — believe that Christopher Diaz has two dads, both of them firefighters to boot.
It had been a good system, but Buck hadn’t expected the rush of jealousy that had flooded him the first time he went with Eddie to drop Chris off.
One of the single parents who couldn’t seem to take no for an answer had made her way over, flipping her hair and touching Eddie’s arm like she had the right to touch him.
The roar in Buck’s ears at the sight had him climbing out of the truck before he’d known what he was doing. Like the Neanderthal he felt like, he had casually wrapped an arm around Eddie’s waist to tug him away as if that was a thing they did every day instead of something born out of the green monster stomping on Buck’s chest.
It had been a little awkward for a minute for the mom who was relentlessly trying to pursue him, but Buck had stood his ground and Eddie had leaned into it. She’d scurried away without a second glance after that.
No one else dares approach Eddie anymore.
In Buck’s eyes, that’s a win.
They play into it, because it gets people off their backs, but at times, they have fun with it, too. Eddie will fling an arm around his shoulders and proudly call him his husband during one of the parent-teacher meetings, and Christopher will happily tug him over to all his friends to introduce him as “his Buck” and Buck’s left watching as his definition of home morphs into the outlines of two people.
It may have started as an inside joke shared between them, relegated to the bounds of Christopher’s school, but it’s rapidly turning into something that’s real, something that’s theirs to claim.
Eddie breaks apart half of the cupcake, passing the shared dessert over to him as he takes his spot again, this time perched on top of the counter. Like this, he looks ruffled, vulnerable — like the universe has never touched him, like Buck’s never tasted his blood, like the streets of this city aren’t soaked in it.
For a long moment, it’s easy to pretend that they’re any other people. Just Buck and Eddie at their core, made up of — yet not defined by — all the other roles that surround them outside this moment. Buck isn’t someone’s brother, uncle, friend, firefighter. Eddie isn’t someone’s father, brother, uncle, friend, firefighter.
Here, Buck is Eddie’s and Eddie is Buck’s.
It’s as good of a moment as any, when Buck decides to cross the near invisible line in the sand.
Buck can’t bring himself to care about the crumbs falling to the ground as he watches Eddie lick the frosting off his fingers. He swallows his bite of cake, washes it down with his tea and steps forward between Eddie’s knees, placing his hands on either side of him against the cool granite.
“Hi,” Eddie smiles, eyes crinkling merrily at the corners as he sets his own mug down. It’s that same confidence again — the gleam in his eye that tells Buck that Eddie’s got him right where he wants him.
Jokes on him, because Buck has been standing right here for months, years.
“Hi,” Buck says, smiling when Eddie’s knees part to make room for him. His thighs bracket Buck’s waist and drag him in closer, and with bone-rattling certainty, Buck knows that they’re finally going to cement what’s been in stone for years.
Eddie’s face doesn’t so much as twitch at their proximity, the lines of his eyes and mouth growing unbearably softer as if to say there you are.
Slowly, he lifts a hand to the loosened tie, feeling the smooth fabric catch and slip on the rough calluses of his fingers as it pulls free. Eddie doesn’t balk at his action, only leans forward as the movement tugs him forward. It’s not until the two ends of the tie are hanging loosely around his neck, still pinned by collar, that Eddie settles his hands on top of Buck’s where they rest on his thighs.
He’s working up the nerve to say something, Buck observes, staying quiet as Eddie’s thumbs work absent circles into the back of his hands. There’s something between the lines of that action too, where Eddie seeks the quiet comfort of Buck’s presence as he works through the buzz in his head.
“We’re doing this, right?” he settles on finally, the first wrinkle of fear creasing his brow.
Buck understands that fear— the same fear pounds through his veins even though he was the first to move. There’s a lot to lose by putting his bleeding heart on the line, but Eddie’s done it since there’s nobody in this world I trust with my son more than you and this is Buck, my partner and a million times in between and after.
The least Buck can do, is show Eddie that he’s been standing right there with him, for all this time and beyond it.
“Haven’t we been doing it?” Buck asks quietly.
His gaze moves past Eddie’s shoulder towards where Christopher’s bundled into thick blankets, sleeping peacefully on the air mattress along the far wall.
Eddie’s hands drift up his arms to link behind his neck instead, the shadows disappearing from his gaze as he grins. “Yeah, I guess we have.”
Buck moves to grip the center of Eddie’s tie, using the hold to drag his best friend closer.
There’s a freckle, right under Eddie’s left eye. Buck’s gaze drifts back to it time and time again as he studies the open affection on Eddie’s face, the uplifted curve of his full lips as he smiles. There’s not a stitch of concern on his face for what they’re about to do, his confidence a tangible presence between them that finally gives Buck the courage to move.
He presses a soft kiss to the mark that somehow only accentuates the planes of his face, and feels Eddie’s eyelashes brush his skin as his eyes shutter closed.
A startled sigh leaves him, like he hadn’t expected Buck to do something so intimate, like he hadn’t expected to be treated like someone to be cherished, but Buck can feel Eddie’s cheeks bunch as the smile grows, and feels his own heart flip in response.
They stay together like that for a long moment, drawn out with the history that stretches between them — the map that finally led them here, to each other.
“Buck,” Eddie whispers.
The tie is still clenched tight in his hands, and Buck uses the leverage to finally drag his best friend into the last first kiss of their lives.
There are sparks skittering across his skin and butterflies making a home in his stomach but above all, Buck feels his universe right itself to revolve around this moment right there.
Eddie kisses like he does everything else — with an unparalleled precision. His hands land on Buck’s waist, and it’s easy as anything to keep moving with each other.
Buck licks the taste of chocolate and affection from Eddie’s mouth and Eddie chases the taste of sugar and love from his. He lets the tie go, his fingers finding purchase on the collar before drifting into the short cropped hair on the sides of Eddie’s head.
It takes nothing for him to card his fingers through the soft strands at the back of Eddie’s head, trying to get as close as possible, short of everything but crawling under his partner’s skin. Eddie presses just as close, his palms sliding up the old T-shirt to cup Buck’s neck and deepen the kiss.
It feels like forever and always rolled into a single kiss, and Buck can’t stop his lips from curling up until he’s smiling too hard for them to properly kiss. Eddie matches him for it, placing a single, soft kiss against Buck’s birthmark before tilting their foreheads together.
“Hi,” Eddie says again, laughter evident in his voice.
Buck feels the joyful sound wrap around him, feels the mirth in Eddie’s voice like an old sweater, cozy and comforting and home .
“Hi, Eddie,” Buck returns, pulling back so he can look him in the eye. Eddie leans in to kiss him one more time before his hands drop down to where Buck’s shirt has ridden up, a thumbnail scraping across the sensitive skin of his waist.
There’s never been any escaping what Eddie means to him, but feeling what he means to Eddie is a whole other ball game. There’s a reverence in every way Eddie touches him, a worship to the way his hands splay across his skin without expectation for any more than what Buck’s giving.
It’s never felt like that before — like all Eddie wants to do is stay in the circle of Buck’s arms without moving. Buck’s never felt this settled before.
He should want to hesitate. He should want to wait to put those three words out there for Eddie, knowing that what he’s putting on the line isn’t something he can ever afford to lose.
But then, Buck ghosts his lips across Eddie’s cheek, and Eddie hums a happy sound from his throat — content under Buck’s ministrations — and suddenly, there’s no choice left to be made.
The words leave his mouth in a breathless whisper, only a fraction of the ardent devotion Eddie shows him because the rest is tattooed over Buck’s soul in varying shades of every color of the sky.
“I love you.”
He doesn’t know what to expect when he puts the words out there, but Eddie pulls him closer, lips landing somewhere near his temple as they embrace. Buck relaxes into his hold, loosely wraps his arms around Eddie’s waist and tucks his face into his partner’s neck.
When the answer comes, it’s with no hesitation at all.
ominous titles are so fun. i was supposed to post a fluff fic today but here we are. spoilers for 5b promo.
[AO3 Link]
Word Count: 3213 words
It’s on the tail end of a nightmare that Eddie decides enough is enough.
He can taste ash, sand, gravel, blood — so much blood — in his mouth, lingering on his tongue, in the crevices of his mouth, pooling in his stomach right alongside the dread.
None of this is new.
What’s new is his son standing outside the bathroom Eddie’s currently retching in, wide-eyed as he watches his father shatter to pieces without being able to stop .
Eddie doesn’t use this bathroom for that very reason.
“Dad?” Chris says tentatively, when the bile streaking up Eddie’s sternum finally lets up, leaving him to lean his sweaty forehead against the wall as he presses his palms into his eyes hard enough to see stars.
He startles at the sound, whirling around too quick for the nausea in his gut to recuperate, and immediately finds himself face-down in the sink again before he throws up all over his bathroom floor.
This time, nothing comes out but pure agony.
“Chris,” Eddie manages to get out as he rinses his mouth out — valiantly trying to get the metallic, acrid taste out, all to no avail. He stares at his own reflection, looking like death warmed over with dark smudges holding his eyes up, towards where his usually-lively child stands, clutching the door frame with one small hand.
“Are you okay?”
He doesn’t like lying, but through the mirror, he sees something akin to fear in Christopher’s eyes, and so Eddie sucks it up and plasters a smile on his face. “Yeah, I’m good, buddy. Just a little sick.”
Chris doesn’t believe him, because of course he doesn’t. Five nimble steps and he’s standing in front of Eddie, studying him.
“You aren’t sleeping,” he announces, something rueful in his voice. “You’re not okay.”
And Eddie feels like the shittiest father in the world for letting his kid notice that, but he makes a decision right there and then, that he’s going back to therapy.
----
Frank is comfortable.
Eddie knows Frank. Frank knows him. He isn’t in the position where he has to repeat every sordid detail of his life again, because Frank has notes and a file specifically made out to one Edmundo Diaz in the basket behind him.
But as the session stretches on, he finds himself sinking further into the chair, as if he could disappear with that movement alone, as if the man in front of him doesn’t already know most of his secret shames.
“So your son is why you’re here today,” Frank starts, no trace of judgment in his tone. “As I recall, last time, your motivation was more or less the same.”
“Most things in my life are,” he admits, cracking his knuckles absently. “I just…Christopher saw me after a nightmare the other day, and he realized that I haven’t been sleeping well — if at all. And he looked scared for me, because he’s never seen me so…so much like that. Throwing up in the sink from a memory.”
“You didn’t want him to,” Frank guesses, right on the money.
Eddie nods. “The things I see sometimes in those dreams…I have no way of knowing how I’ll react to anything. I don’t want him to be afraid.” He hesitates, and then carefully says, “ I don’t want to be afraid.”
It feels…weird, to put something he wants out there without attaching it to Christopher, but a part of him feels lighter for it, too. Like he's finally taking something for himself that he deserved a long time ago.
Unwittingly, his mother’s words float back to the center of his mind, like they always do when he does something for himself.
Don’t drag him down with you, Eddie.
He steadies himself and looks at Frank. “I came here because I knew I had to make a change. Part of it was because Christopher saw me in a position I never wanted him to see me in. But I think…a part of me knows that I need to be here. That I’ve needed to be here for a long time.”
“What makes you say that?”
He picks and chooses his words carefully. Frank waits patiently as Eddie struggles to pull together the sentences. “When I got back from my last tour, Shannon and Chris were the only things that could get me out of bed in the morning. The thought of leaving them to fend for themselves even when I was in the same house never sat well with me, so instead of taking the time to do what my CO said and go to the VA to talk to someone, I sent in job applications and tried to rush my healing so I could be the husband and father they needed.
“It took me years to realize that I failed at being those things, because I was lost in not being able to adjust to the new changes of my life, and whatever little control I did have…”
“You keep saying that you didn't have a choice, but you're the one who keeps making these choices for the rest of us.”
Shannon’s words ring in his ears as he says, “Whatever control I did have, I doubled down on.”
Frank folds his hands in his lap, studying him intently. Eddie already feels stripped down to his bones, and his skin itches with the need to get out of here, but he forces himself to stay put as he stares at his hands.
“Let me ask you something. Think about a time where you felt the most afraid.”
And…Eddie looks up at him, his life flashing in front of his eyes in quick succession.
Four years old, standing on the edge of the community pool while Adriana looked on.
Seven years old, constantly falling to the ground off his bike.
Ten years old, not understanding the whispers in his parents’ hushed tones as they fought.
Thirteen years old, staring at the new boy across the street and wanting to be something more than friends.
Seventeen years old, graduating high school with no set plan to go to college.
Twenty-two years old, staring blankly at a pregnancy test.
Twenty-three years old, holding Christopher in his arms for the first time.
Twenty-seven years old, bleeding out in a desert on another continent with a picture of his family clutched tight in bloodied hands.
Thirty years old, standing in front of his bleeding and torn best friend, being told his son was lost in a tsunami.
Thirty-four years old, seeing that same best friend splattered with blood he couldn’t recall as his own, and later seeing him struck with the butt of a gun for defending Christopher’s name.
He’s been afraid many, many times in his life, but Eddie knows which time sticks out to him the most — and it was when he was fourteen, and he heard his parents talk in that infuriatingly passive-aggressive, polite way of theirs about a family from church whose son recently came out. Even if no one outright talked against them, no one ever invited that family to any potluck again, least of all his parents.
And he remembers the fear that had crawled up his spine at being discovered for liking the boy across the street, the same way he liked the girl who sat two desks down from him in history class.
Eddie had known all his life that things were different for him than they were for his sisters. But fourteen years old was the age that he’d realized that his parents’ very specific standards for their only son extended to every aspect of his life, and Eddie was expected to meet every single one of them.
He didn’t obviously — first with choosing not to go to college, then with getting a girl pregnant out of wedlock and then by enlisting to “get himself killed,” as his mother had put it.
The only time he recalls seeing any sort of pride on his parents’ face is when he’d come home with the medal he hates with every fiber of his being.
No one had been worried about him nearly getting himself killed then.
He doesn’t say any of that to Frank, though, trying his best to deflect. “Pretty open-ended question, don’t you think?”
“You’re paying me to be your therapist, Eddie, not the other way around,” Frank laughs. “The questions I ask are about how you take them, what you interpret them to be.”
Another open-ended sentence. Wisely, Eddie keeps his mouth shut.
Even though the other man seems to realize that he has an answer in his grasp, he moves forward for the time being — even though Eddie knows he’ll circle back to it sooner, rather than later.
“When we were last here, we talked about Christopher, and we talked about how being a father changed your life. We talked about grief, and how we learn to grow around it, rather than on top of it,” Frank recalls impressively, not even once opening Eddie’s file. “Now, the man walking into my office looks simultaneously lighter and heavier, all at once.”
Eddie can’t help but laugh, despite himself. “It feels that way, too.”
Frank smiles and gestures for him to elaborate.
“Lighter because…this time, when moments are good, I feel them. I can feel how proud I am when Chris has the best space model in his class. I can feel how happy I am when we rescue people. I can feel content when my best friend and I hang out. I couldn’t do any of that the last time I was here.”
Frank nods. “That’s great news, Eddie. That’s important progress.”
“Even if I stopped therapy in between?” Eddie says, only half-joking.
The other man laughs. “Especially then. Progress is progress. It’s important to celebrate the wins.”
It’s important to celebrate the wins.
The words stick to Eddie’s brain like glue, sending him straight back to a locker room from another time.
“A fire that big, and no fatalities. We have to celebrate.”
One loss could outweigh a hundred wins. Eddie knew that. But without those hundred wins, there might not even be a reason to keep running back into the thick of a fire.
It feels symbolic in a way he doesn’t know how to parse.
“I don’t know if you saw this on the news or heard from anyone else, but…eight months ago, there was a sniper attack on the LAFD.” His shoulder twinges, and absently, Eddie brings a hand to rub over it. “My partner and I had rushed to a scene to respond to this kid whose mother was poisoning him with eye drops, because he called me personally. We saved him, and I was about to follow him to the hospital—”
“Hey, Diaz, you want to ride with the kid to the hospital?”
Yeah, that’d be— ”
“Eddie,” Frank’s voice cuts through the memory. His face is creased in concern, and with building horror, Eddie realizes there are tears pushing at the back of his eyes. He blinks them away as he stares at his hands.
“I got shot.” The words taste like acid, bitter in that very order, sour to its very end. “Something I thought I left behind me with the Army, and then I got shot for the fourth time right in the middle of Los Angeles, with my blood splattering into my partner’s mouth and pooling onto the street.”
“They were there with you?”
“He was standing in front of me,” Eddie recalls. “Buck. I think I’ve talked about him.”
Recognition lights the therapist’s face, but he doesn’t push for any more details than Eddie offers.
“I used to think about it, the first few months. But then…I stopped. Just pushed it down like I did with all the others, so I could focus on the job, focus on being a good father.”
“What changed?” Frank asks.
Eddie huffs out a chuckle. “I left the job. I work with dispatch as one of their ex-firefighters now.”
“Ah,” Frank nods. “Being a combat medic and being a firefighter previously meant that you had to compartmentalize to the n th degree, presumably. Something that dispatch doesn’t require at the same level, and if I had to garner a guess, that could’ve been what broke your rigid control over keeping any triggers and traumas locked up tight.”
Eddie nods, knowing Frank’s assessment to be true. The recurring nightmares started a couple weeks after he started working at dispatch, as if a lockbox had opened with each day that Eddie relaxed his guard around himself.
“The sniper attack changed everything — my son, my relationship with my best friend, my confidence as a firefighter. Nothing’s stayed untouched, no matter how much I want to pretend that it did.”
He thinks about the gnawing chasm between him and Buck lately, growing further the more days Eddie stays away from the 118. For the first time in his life, Eddie actually feels like a divorced parent, unable to meet Buck’s eye for longer than two minutes when they shuffle Christopher back and forth between them.
There had been one fight after the Christmas party, and it had landed scathing on each other’s skin — ripping open old wounds on both of their torsos and leaving them bleeding out. That time, Eddie had watched Buck walk away from him, and he’d hated every second of it.
They hadn’t talked about it, or anything else, again.
Instead, Buck takes Chris out on their Saturday excursions with minimal words to Eddie, and Eddie interacts with Firefighter Buckley through the radio — only when he has to.
It’s the worst kind of torture, but he knows that if he doesn’t pick himself up enough to gather the courage to talk to Buck about the things they’ve been through in the past year, he’ll lose him.
And Eddie refuses to let that happen to them.
He’s beginning to realize that he has a lot of reasons to come to therapy.
Frank seems to pick up on his trail of thought, because he says, “Sharing trauma with someone tends to change the nature of a relationship, because suddenly, there’s a bond that ties you two together through a common event. In your case, it’s with all the other things you’ve been through with your partner over the years. There's bound to be some conflict as you turn over what it means for you.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, feeling awkward as he turns over your partner in his head, despite having used the denomination himself. Suddenly, he doesn't want to talk about the ways his and Buck's relationship has changed, because the feeling in his stomach feels a little too close to the feeling he'd gotten when Rayaan had first moved into the house across the street.
Frank, bless him, senses Eddie's reluctance to talk about it, and changes the subject.
“Now that we’ve gotten some of those things on the table, I want to start with your goals, so we can map out how each session is going to look,” Frank tells him, smiling kindly. “Areas that you want to concentrate on, rather than me picking and choosing off the bat. As we go, we can direct our attention towards those things.”
It’s different from last time, but Eddie recognizes it for what it is. Frank’s trying to offer him a way to pave his way through something that was uncomfortably vulnerable in a way Eddie isn’t used to being with anyone — not even Buck.
“I want to be okay,” he whispers. “Because right now, I’m not.”
“What does that look like to you?”
Eddie…doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he’s ever really been okay in the past fifteen years.
He doesn’t want to be here, has been dragging his feet for years about the idea of therapy, but now that he’s here, a part of him does. He’s exhausted to his bones with one session, but the validation Frank provides is something Eddie’s never really had much of.
He hears his father’s men suck it up and move on and hears his mother’s don’t drag him down with you and he realizes that maybe, the root of all these issues he has with himself start right there — at home.
“I want to stop hearing my parents’ words echoing in my ears,” he blurts out, without thinking.
It’s too raw, and doesn’t make sense in the middle of everything else they’ve talked about today, but Frank looks back at him with understanding and Eddie realizes that he’s connecting the dots from the last time Eddie was here to everything he's said today.
“I want to be able to step into this office without hearing that I’m…without hearing that I’m a failure. Without hearing that I’m supposed to shove it down and move on. Because I’m trying to teach my son that it’s okay to feel anything he needs to feel, but I want to be able to set an example for him, too. An example that’s not like the one my parents wanted made out of me.”
“So we’ll start there from next week,” Frank says, nodding in a way that makes Eddie feel strangely proud of himself. He drums a finger on his wheelchair as he thinks. “We’re almost out of time, but I do want to focus on this one aspect of your presence in this office as a parting note — Christopher.”
“What about him?”
Frank leans forward, looking intently. “There is nothing wrong with coming here because you care about your son, and you want to be a good mental place for his sake. But one of the goals I want to add onto the list is you wanting this for you . Wanting to be mentally healthy for your sake, too.”
“It’s hard,” Eddie admits. “The past ten years…nothing I’ve done has been free of what Chris needs from me.”
“It’s hard, after becoming parents, to retain a sense of individuality,” Frank acknowledges, smiling as he nods towards a strategically-placed photo frame, out of view of patients. “Everything in our lives becomes about them, about what they need, and while we have a very important responsibility towards our children, we also have a responsibility towards ourselves. So today, I want you to go home and think about this for our next session: who is Eddie Diaz?”
Eddie’s head is still buzzing with those four words when he walks out of Frank’s office ten minutes later.
His name has always been prefaced with other titles, other names that weren’t his own.
Ramon and Helena’s son. Adriana and Sophia’s brother. Shannon’s husband. Christopher’s father. Staff Sergeant Diaz. Firefighter Diaz. Dispatcher Diaz.
Somewhere, he lost track of where Eddie Diaz had gone, and now, Frank wants him to find that man again.
Unbidden, Buck’s face floats from the recesses of his brain to front and center, right alongside the image of Rayaan waving at him from across the street.
He thinks that if there’s any chance of finding who he really is, it’s there.
With a plan in mind, Eddie steels himself for a week of self-reflection before he comes back next Thursday.
For my lovely @madamewriterofwrongs on the belated occasion of her birth <3 I love you like this one, my love. Also I know y’all have seen too much of me, but good for you ig :))
Pairing: Evan “Buck” Buckley/Eddie Diaz
Rating: M
Chapter: 1/1
Word Count: 26,007 words
Snippet:
Eddie’s not really sure he wants to hear Buck justify Christopher’s words right now — not when he can feel the rush in his veins from just the possibility of walking out of the chapel with Buck’s hand in his, Christopher leading them out.
“Would you?” he interrupts, holding his breath as Buck stops a short two steps away from him — two steps that have never felt so far before.
“Would I…what?”
He gestures to the newest couple to exit the chapel. “With me?”
Buck’s brow furrows and he looks at Eddie like he’s gone insane, but there’s an inkling of hope in his eyes that tells Eddie that maybe this wouldn’t be as insane as it seems. “Is this you proposing?”
