Archive of Our Own

one

They break up on a Wednesday.

After it's done, when Buck is sitting on the stairs of Maddie's building in the dark and staring at his Jeep parked all crooked with a suitcase in the passenger seat, it's the only thing he can think about.

It's Wednesday. Christopher had robotics club after school, and they were meant to use the extra time to go to the organic grocery store forty-five minutes away, because it's date night and Eddie wanted to cook something special and—

It's a goddamned Wednesday. Buck's always thought these things happen on more remarkable days, when Mercury's in fucking retrograde or it's a full moon or a black cat crosses your path and gives you an indication that it's about to be the worst day of your life.

But he woke up this morning in Eddie's arms, to Eddie running a hand through his hair and saying morning, baby a little rough, like he'd saved his first words of the day for Buck. They had waffles for breakfast - no blueberries, because they somehow went moldy overnight - and Chris had almost forgotten his lunchbox, and then Eddie had kissed Buck in the doorway with one shoe on and promised to hurry back, grinning. Buck spent his time alone loading the dishwasher and going over the calendar on the fridge and texting a reply to every picture of Jee that Chimney sent him. A lifetime has passed since then.

They have a shift tomorrow, always marked on the calendar in yellow, and it feels more than a little unbelievable that there will be a world for Buck to wake up into. That it'll stop being Wednesday, and the rest of his life is going to start, miserable and pathetic and lonely, back to its default state. He should have known better than to think that something so bright could burn forever.

He's not really sure what time it is, at this point. Late, going by the dark blue of the sky, but his phone's dead. He'd need to go up to Maddie and Chimney's to plug it in, but once he knocks on their door, all of this will be just a little more real.

Maybe five more minutes of sitting on the stairs.

The bushes next to him rustle. For a hysterical second, Buck thinks he's about to get mugged, just to top off the day, but what appears on the sidewalk is even funnier, somehow.

It's a cat. A black cat, with glinty yellow eyes that flash at him in the dusk, and it sits down at the foot of the stairs and meows, looking up at Buck, swishing its tail.

“You're too late,” he tells it, and flinches at how rough his voice sounds. “You're supposed to be an omen.”

The cat meows again. Buck tilts his head at it, and it turns its back, crossing the sidewalk and elegantly stepping off the curb onto the pavement, slinking around the wheel of a parked car. He assumes that's it, and makes to finally get up if he can remember how to do it, except then the cat reappears, right in the middle of the road, and sits down. Its eyes seem even brighter from a distance.

“What?” Buck asks.

The cat swishes its tail. Buck looks up and down the street, but thankfully, it's empty.

“Get out of the road,” he says, pushing back up onto his feet. His knees pop, and he swears he hears Eddie's voice in his ear, laughing, calling him an old man, but he doesn't even turn his head before he remembers that Eddie isn't - can't be - here. Maybe it's finally sinking in. “Come on, there's cars out there. Get out of here.”

The cat meows. It tilts its head, blinking at Buck with its face sideways like an owl, and doesn't move.

“Do you have a death wish?”

A meow. The cat lies down, rolls over onto its back, and bats at the air, apparently unconcerned that a car could turn into the street any second and completely miss the dark blob lying on the pavement.

Buck feels a flash of—something, the kind of cloying, sticky darkness he hasn't felt in a while, and wonders how it would feel to just lie down next to it and close his eyes in the face of the streetlights just flickering on. He'd be here, and then maybe he wouldn't.

And then the cat meows; he blinks, snaps out of it, takes in a terrified breath. He can't, no matter how much it feels like the world has just ended. He can't go back on what he promised Christopher, and he wants to be there to watch Jee-Yun grow up, and he and Eddie—Eddie, when he can stand to be around Buck, might be his friend again someday, more than Buck deserves and only a fraction of what he wants, so—he can't. Couldn't.

That has to be growth, or something.

“Okay,” he says to the cat, which is blinking up at him the perfect picture of innocence. “I'm off the clock, you know. This isn't my job.”

He hops off the stairs, crosses the sidewalk, steps down onto the pavement between two parked cars, weaving the same path as the cat did, just much more clumsily.

“Alright,” he says, standing over it. He puts his hands on his hips, then remembers Bobby smiling over breakfast the other day and telling him he must have picked that up from Eddie, and lets them fall free. “Back to the bushes, come on.”

The cat meows. He bends down, more than a little cautious without his work gloves, but it doesn't seem to mind being picked up. It feels almost liquid when he touches it, spilling through his grip until he gets it under the armpits and lifts it up, Simba-like.

“There,” he grins.

The cat blinks, and its eyes flash unnaturally bright.

two

Buck wakes up in—a bed. His head is throbbing a little, but the rest of it feels familiar enough: a ray of sun on his face, his feet hopelessly tangled in the sheets, their radio alarm playing the horrible dad rock station, Eddie's arm thrown over his waist.

Eddie's arm thrown over his waist.

He sits up so fast he misjudges the size of the bed and rolls off the side, landing hard on his elbow, comforter tangled around his legs.

The sheets rustle above him. Eddie makes a familiar disgruntled sound, shuffles around, his arms rising into the air for a second as he stretches, and the sight of his hands bathed in the sunlight coming through the blinds puts a painful lump in Buck's throat. This has to be a dream, he thinks, even though the pain radiating through his arm feels very real, and the carpet under his shoulder is viscerally scratchy.

Another noise; then, Eddie's face appears over the edge of the bed, his cheeks a little red with sleep, messy hair falling into his forehead.

“Baby?” he asks, and his face—he's looking at Buck like he loves him, still.

This has to be a fucking dream.

So Buck lies there, still, silent, not even bothering to try and say something. It'll all dissolve any second, the small frown between Eddie's eyebrows and the soft light filling their bedroom and the sheets with the stupid cartoons of dogs wearing bowties on them that Eddie loathes, but smiles when he's putting them on. Buck will blink awake again, in Maddie and Chimney's living room this time, unless they felt so bad for him they let him have the bed for a night.

It'll be Thursday, and everything he no longer gets to have, everything his brain is trying this desperately to hold on to, will be gone again.

“Buck?” Eddie asks again when he doesn't get an answer, leaning on an elbow as he reaches down, puts a warm hand on Buck's sternum. “You okay? Did you just fall off the bed?”

His voice is a little rough, like every morning. Buck loves it when he sounds this way, loves that he gets to - got to - hear it, this Eddie who's only for him.

He wants to lean up for a kiss, except this isn't real, and he's not sure he could take it if Eddie disappeared right from under his lips.

Eddie sighs. “Alright, come on.”

Buck doesn't protest, doesn't do anything when Eddie stumbles off the bed just to help him stand and push him to sit down on the edge of the mattress. His touch is as gentle as it's ever been, and Buck's mind is an endless loop of no no no no no even as he leans into it. This is so fucking wrong, regardless of whether Eddie is a figment of his imagination, because Buck gave it up. He gave up their tiny bedroom and the sticky lock in the front door, gave up Eddie and Christopher and the pictures of the three of them that are hanging on the wall right across from where he's sitting. He gave up Eddie touching him like this, like he's worth being careful for, like he matters.

“You got any words you can give me?” Eddie asks, now kneeling on the floor in nothing but the boxers he wore to bed, the same ones as yesterday. He squeezes Buck's thigh, reaches one hand up to touch the side of Buck's face, to tilt his head like he's looking for injuries. “It's okay if not, just—are you in pain?”

Buck shakes his head. He had the bizarre urge to laugh, right in the face of this dream Eddie and his soft concern, the love in his eyes, but it looks too much like the real thing. He can't bring himself to make a sound.

“Okay,” Eddie says, and one of the deep wrinkles in his forehead softens a little. “That's good. Do you want to go back to bed? I can get Chris to school and come lie down with you.”

He gets up, then, leaning on Buck's thigh to help himself up. At no point does he drift away - if anything, he's even closer once he's standing between Buck's legs, his thumbs running in shaky arcs over Buck's cheekbones - but Buck sees him moving and panics. He reaches out, before he can think better of it, his hand curling into its favorite spot on Eddie's hip, keeping him in place.

Eddie chuckles, a soft sound that rumbles through him.

“Baby, someone has to go on the school run. You can get some more sleep in the meantime, huh? I'll be quick.”

Buck, to his horror, feels the tell-tale sting of tears in his nose. He didn't cry yesterday, because it felt like he was doing the right thing even as he was ripping his own heart out, and the numbness that settled in as he drove away was absolute, but this—

Eddie's taking care of him. Easy, familiar, the way they always take care of each other, helping shoulder the bad days. He thinks today's one of those, that Buck's too far into the fog to say anything to him, when the truth is that Buck's painfully alert, with his heart beating, panicked, in every inch of his body. This has to be a dream, but it keeps going and going and going. He's not this strong.

“Hey,” Eddie says, and his thumb at the corner of Buck's eye swipes a tear away just as it claws its way out. “I love you. It's just a bad day, it's okay.”

And Buck wants to speak, then, wants to tell Eddie that he loves him too, the one thing that will always be true.

Instead, he breaks. When he opens his eyes and catches Eddie looking down at him, he tilts his chin up, just so. Eddie smiles, a soft thing that grows into a grin. He doesn't hesitate - just leans down and kisses Buck, his hand warm and solid on the back of Buck's neck, breaking the kiss for another smile when Buck pulls him closer, Eddie's stomach to Buck's chest, the warmth of him all-consuming.

Kissing Eddie is the most familiar thing in the world, but even after months, it still gives him a thrill. Eddie touches him, kisses his bottom lip, licks into his mouth, and Buck always gets this little shiver at the very base of his spine, like he's on the verge of melting.

This dream Eddie kisses the same. He feels the same, smells the same, and Buck—

“I was thinking,” Eddie says when he pulls away, all but speaking into Buck's mouth, their lips brushing, “it's meant to be date night tonight.”

Buck finds himself hoping that he doesn't wake up for another while.

“Tonight?” he asks, the first word he's said, but Eddie doesn't look the least bit surprised to hear it. He smiles, in that quiet way that crinkles the corners of his eyes, and runs a thumb over Buck's bottom lip.

“Unless I mixed up my days,” he says, and he looks so happy, so unlike the Eddie Buck left behind yesterday, who tried so hard to put up every guard and didn't really manage, because he's gotten used to not needing them, and has never been all that good at keeping them up around Buck anyway. There are moments Buck still can't quite breathe under the weight of that, the trust Eddie has placed in him - except now, of course, Buck has thrown it back in his face.

For the best, though. Down the line, it'll be for the best.

“Wednesday's date night,” Eddie says, the bridge of his nose a little crinkled, “except for when—”

“We're on shift, and then it's moved to Thursday,” Buck fills in, the line so familiar it falls out of him on its own. “But today's—”

Eddie tilts his head. “Wednesday,” he says, reaching over to Buck's bedside table for his phone. “Yeah. You had me worried for a second.”

And he turns the phone around, showing Buck the painfully familiar lockscreen, the three of them in front of the giraffe enclosure at the zoo, Eddie's grin pressed to Buck's cheek and Christopher making a face between them. Above their heads is the time, just after seven in the morning, and under it—

It's Wednesday.

Buck's grip on Eddie's hip tightens before he can stop it. Eddie's breath hitches.

He opens his mouth - to do what, he has no idea, because there's something very like a scream building at the top of his chest, and maybe if he screams he'll wake up—

There's a slam from down the hallway.

“I'm up,” Chris calls through the door, on his way to the bathroom same as any other morning, except it's Wednesday.

The day Buck broke up with Eddie.

“He'll be starving,” Eddie says, still standing in front of him, and Buck exhales around the scream and lets his head fall forward instead, his forehead against the soft, warm skin of Eddie's stomach. Eddie's hands land in his hair immediately, carding through it, drawing soothing circles on Buck's scalp. “You want me to bring you something? Toast you some of that weird alive bread?”

“It's not alive, it's sprouted,” Buck mumbles, and Eddie's stomach shakes with a quiet laugh. “But I'm—I'm okay. You should go. Sorry I—”

“Hey,” Eddie interrupts, with a gentle tug to the hair on the back of Buck's head. “None of that. I'm gonna go get our kid to school, and we can talk when I come back? If you want.”

Buck wraps his arms around Eddie's waist, just for a second.

“Yeah,” he says, hoarse out of nowhere. “Yeah, I—it's meant to be date night, I don't want to be like this.”

Eddie tugs again. This time, Buck follows his touch, letting Eddie lift his head with a soft hand on Buck's jaw.

“Date night's flexible,” he says, the hint of a frown settled between his eyebrows. “We can put it off, but I'm not gonna put off being there for you when you're not feeling well.”

Buck blinks away the sting in his eyes. Eddie's so good at that, these days - saying what he means, asking for what he wants, being unflinchingly honest and beautifully stubborn and there, never letting Buck retreat too far into his head on his own.

Except for yesterday. Today. The actual reality that has to exist, if only Buck could figure out how to get back and stop stealing this. Maybe there's a Buck here, one who is a little less screwed up, who isn't quite so terrified of ruining the people he loves most, and Buck is taking his place, somehow.

“Okay,” he says, leaning into Eddie's touch when he brushes a thumb over Buck's temple. It's that easy to give Eddie anything he wants. It always has been, even in the hardest cases, when what Eddie wants is for Buck to be better to himself. “I love you.”

It falls off his tongue easy, second nature, and overwrites the memory of the last time he said it, the one he thought he'd get to carry with him forever. A sharp, jagged thing; a reminder. He'd said it much heavier then, a little desperate, leaning against the fridge, I love you, and Eddie's mouth had twisted as he tore an old receipt to shreds.

But, he'd said, and Buck did the rest.

Except this Eddie smiles, still a little blurry with the early hour, and leans down for a kiss that's soft and lingering.

“Love you,” he says, just as the bathroom door slams open outside. “I'll be back in a minute.”

He lets his hand trail down Buck's face, his neck, his shoulder, then down Buck's arm to squeeze his hand. When he finally lets go, he walks backwards, stepping over the shirt Buck vaguely remembers pulling off Tuesday night - last night - and disappearing through the door with a silly little wave that makes Buck's throat close.

Eddie is happy, was happy, with him. All of Buck's baggage, and he's shouldered it like it's nothing, like he doesn't see that he's Sisyphus and will always, eventually, have to start again.

It would end anyway, the next time they found themselves back at the bottom of the hill. Buck did the right thing.

So he waits, sitting up ramrod straight at the edge of the bed, right where Eddie set him, listening to the usual noise of the morning. Christopher comes in already dressed, smelling like toothpaste when he leans in to give Buck a hug and tells him to have a good day, and Buck squeezes him for just a little too long. He overwrites this, too, a memory of Chris sweet and honest and uncomplicated, because the next time they talk, back in the real world, Buck is irrevocably going to hurt him.

Eventually, though, the house is quiet, and Buck is left alone.

For a minute, he just closes his eyes, imagining Maddie and Chimney's living room, the picture of Jee-Yun in a polka dot frame that sits on one of the tables and the as-yet unidentified stain on the couch left from when it doubled as Albert's bed, hoping it'll be enough to transport him there. But the room around him stays the same, with the sun in his back and the sheets that smell faintly like Eddie's favorite lemon body wash.

He goes to Google next, scrolling through list after list of advice on how to wake up from a nightmare. He tries all of it - looking at himself in the mirror, calling out for help, blinking the dream away, jolting himself awake. As a last resort, he curls up on Eddie's side of the bed, trying to fall asleep so he can wake up back in the real world, and he's still there, eyes closed, when the bedroom door creaks open again.

Eddie doesn't say anything, barely makes any noise as he moves around the bed. He pulls off his t-shirt with a soft grunt he's probably not even aware of making, and then the mattress dips, pulling at Buck until his back is settled against Eddie's chest, and Eddie presses a soft kiss to his naked shoulder. He doesn't try to grab his phone, or read, or do anything other than lie there and hold Buck close, half-humming something toneless and soothing, his exhales little bursts of warmth in Buck's hair.

Buck has no idea how long they stay that way, only that he gives up on falling asleep after a while. He opens his eyes just a sliver, and it's still the same room, the same day.

Wednesday. The day he broke up with Eddie, except he has to start considering the possibility that he didn't.

That yesterday, the Wednesday he thought he'd lived, was the actual dream, and this is the present, and the universe, for some godforsaken reason, saw it fit to put him through this twice.

It's just that it felt real. He's never felt pain quite like it, and it's roaming around his body still, a dull ache that turns knife-sharp whenever he remembers how it went. He can't believe—but that has to be it. He dreamed it, and he and Eddie are still together, and he has to give up the love of his life all over again.

“I can hear the gears grinding in your head,” Eddie says, after a while of Buck staring at the opposite wall, counting time in the coming and going of a pigeon outside their bedroom window. “What's going on up there?”

He has no idea. He sounds sweet like always, careful but never too careful, the tip of his nose tickling Buck's neck as he asks to be let in.

And Buck wishes - painfully, desperately, for a broken fragment of second - that he could keep him out.

“I, um,” he says, and squeezes Eddie's wrist where it's resting on his stomach, “I think we should probably sit up for this.”

Eddie moves without question, the sheets rustling as he pulls himself upright, and Buck's bones feel a thousand years old when he does the same. Yesterday—today—the dream today makes his mind feel like a day-old bruise when he tries to recall exactly how it went, the words he said.

“Okay,” Eddie says, leaning back against the headboard. His shoulders are a little higher than they should be, tense even as he visibly tries to relax. “I'm listening.”

Buck settles at the foot of the bed, facing Eddie, too far to reach for his hand like he wants to. He wets his lips, and fights the feeling like his tongue is sticking to the roof of his mouth.

“I've been doing some thinking,” he says, and that part, at least, it's true.

Eddie's eyebrows draw together. “Okay,” he nods.

“And I—” Buck swallows, then swallows again. It felt impossible to do last time, and that was when Eddie was dressed and half-turned away from him, sorting through the cereal boxes to check the expiration dates. Now, Buck has a front-seat view to the rise and fall of his bare chest, the way his breath quickens just so. “I think we—I think I—Eddie.”

Slowly, without breaking eye contact, Eddie draws his knees up. Buck misses the warmth with an immediacy that takes his breath away, but it feels fair that Eddie's keeping it to himself. He can probably hear what Buck's about to say, long before he finds the words to say it.

He digs his fingers into his thighs. Finally, he remembers the way he started this last time, and the words taste ashy in his mouth:

“I don't think we should do this anymore.”

Eddie's chest stops, mid-breath. “This,” he says, a disbelieving scoff of a word. He wants to play dumb; Buck can practically see it in the way he swallows as he absorbs the blow, but that's not who Eddie is, especially not in this relationship. He's always seen straight through the words Buck spins to cushion the truth.

“This,” Buck nods, feeling like his head might fall off his neck any second. “Our—our relationship.”

It almost feels dismissive to call it that. Buck tries to swallow, but his throat won't move.

“Right,” Eddie says. His jaw works and works and works as he looks away from Buck, out of the window, squinting out at the blue sky. “So you want to break up. At least say the actual words.”

His voice is shaking. The only thing Buck can do about it now is hang his head and pretend he doesn't hear it.

“I want to break up,” he tells the sheets, staring down at a dachshund in a bright blue tophat. Eddie bought these goddamned sheets because of him, had circled back under the pretense of getting an extra pillow and snuck them through checkout just to pull them out of the bag when they were back at the truck, with a smile tucked into the corner of his mouth.

Buck had kissed him, then, right in the parking lot, because it was the first time he didn't just know it rationally, but felt it down to his marrow:

Eddie loves him.

It took him so long to believe, to stop being afraid of it, but he got there, had been there, and then—

“I realized, when I got hurt again,” he says, rubbing the elbow he dislocated falling out of a second-story window a few weeks ago, “that it's just—a little too much for me to handle.”

Which isn't quite the truth. He realized that it's too much for Eddie, but Buck's learned the hard way that Eddie won't tolerate him deciding what he should be thinking or feeling.

But Buck's too much, regardless. The clumsiness, the bumps and scrapes and sprains that Eddie nurses every time; the way Buck attracts accidents like misfortune got so used to following him around it doesn't know how to stop.

He can't say it like that, because Eddie would know, then. He'd know as soon as Buck opened his mouth that his mother, already in town to visit Jee-Yun, stepped foot in a hospital to see her child for the first time in decades, and looked at him like he was a squashed bug persistently stuck to the sole of her shoe.

Eddie can sniff out Margaret Buckley from miles away, can pinpoint her influence in every little thing Buck says and jump in to remind him that she's wrong.

But Buck's played this one close to the chest since he left the hospital. He said nothing as Eddie helped him dress and undress, as he dug out the wedge pillow he'd slept with after the shooting from the back of the closet, as he made sure that everything they cooked for a couple of weeks could be eaten one-handed. It was far from the worst injury Buck has had, was really barely an injury at all, but Eddie slipped into taking care of him like it was a second skin, because it was also far from the first time he's had to do it.

So Margaret, for all her presence at Buck's bedside made him feel two inches tall, was right, just this once. He can't keep himself out of trouble, even when he genuinely tries, and no one who cares about him can make it through that without breaking, one day.

Without Buck, inevitably, ruining them.

“What is?” Eddie asks, his voice only wavering for a split second. “What's too much?”

Buck remembers, now, what he said yesterday, and he desperately doesn't want to say it again. It was the only way to get Eddie to let go, and he only knew it because Eddie has let him all the way in, has trusted him with so many things Buck is far too clumsy to hold.

“You,” he says, barely audible.

You loving me, he'd said yesterday, and Eddie had flinched, full body, like Buck hit him.

“The—the way—” he swallows, and the rest of the words don't come.

Eddie drags his gaze away from the window. Their eyes meet for a breath, for two, and that's as long as Buck can take before he's looking at the sheets again, the little cartoon dogs bent and twisted around the weight of his body.

“The way I love you,” Eddie says, certain. He lets go of one of his knees, his leg stretching out alongside Buck's in the covers. The sight of his bare feet makes Buck want to cry. “I know you don't—Buck.”

Buck hears it for the request it is, and raises his head. His eyes land on Eddie's chin, afraid to go any higher.

“You don't mean that,” Eddie says, but his bottom lip is trembling, which Buck only catches because he's already looking. “We promised we wouldn't lie to each other.”

And they haven't. There's nothing Buck would want to conceal badly enough to risk Eddie's trust over it, except—

Eddie doesn't know this one, yet. He doesn't know how this life's inevitably going to go: Buck using up all his cat lives and a few extra on top until one day, he's going to wake up in the hospital and Eddie won't be in his usual place by his bedside. Until it's one too many times that Buck can't drive or help with dinner or carry the baby they've talked about having, until Eddie can't look at him without seeing bandages, blood, bruises, until he learns to be afraid to pick up calls from unknown numbers.

Until he sees Buck not as he is, but as he inevitably will be, relying on his care again, leeching all of that soft light Eddie's had about him for the last few months.

The worst part is that he always says the same thing, whether it's the cold they caught from each other a couple of weeks ago or a gash made in Buck's side by a falling chunk of debris that's bleeding all over Eddie's hands.

I'll take care of you.

He does, and he has, and he will. Buck knows he will; he knows, in every last vessel dragging blood into his shivering fingertips, that Eddie is his forever.

There has to be some kind of cosmic joke in it, actually. He's let himself believe, after decades, that he's allowed a love like this, and he barely got to enjoy it before he realized that it's still not enough. Nothing can be enough when he's been all wrong from the moment he entered the world.

“I'm not,” he lies. “I just can't—can't stop to think about someone else like that when—”

“Bullshit,” Eddie interrupts, fierce. The way he barks it makes Buck look him in the eye, finally, and the stiffness melts right off Eddie's face as they look at each other. “Don't lie to me,” he says, so much gentler. “We can figure out whatever it is, just let us actually talk about it—”

“I don't want to talk,” Buck interrupts, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth, biting down until the pain is sparking down his jaw. Eddie didn't really fight him yesterday, but Buck can't say it that way again, can't tell Eddie that the love he fought so hard to feel has grown too heavy.

But he needs to get out of here. He's already most of the way empty from doing this once, so it doesn't actually hurt, but Eddie is close and warm and looking at him just a little afraid, and Buck is way too close to taking it all back.

“I want to break up,” he says again. “It's for the best.”

Eddie bites his lip, and blinks rapidly up at the walls, covered in picture frames and weird art they bring home from thrift stores.

“I love you,” he tells the room, and it sounds like a plea. Buck's seen him broken open only a couple of times, and he hates that he can see the cracks slowly creeping in around the edges of Eddie's face.

It's for the best.

“I love you,” Buck says, his palm on the comforter like it thinks it's still allowed to touch.

Eddie nods. “But.”

Buck rubs a hand over his face, once then a hundred times, until the tip of his nose hurts with it. He wants to claw out of his skin, leave it behind on the floor, crawl out into the world something brand new, twisted, unrecognizable.

“I just think,” he tries to swallow, “that maybe we rushed into this, you know? We didn't really realize what it'd be like, and—”

“What it'd be like?” Eddie spits back at him, and he gets off the bed so quickly he almost falls. Buck gets halfway through reaching out to steady him, then drops his hand. “We practically lived together for months before you ever kissed me,” he says, turning his back, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I went to therapy, you went to therapy, we went to fucking couples' therapy, we went with Chris, we talked ourselves hoarse so we'd know how to do this for real. So we could get through things like this together if they happened.”

He's shaking, all over, when he reaches out to pull on his discarded t-shirt and accidentally gets Buck's, which is the same color. The lines of his back are wound so tight they're visible even under the fabric.

“You can't plan for this,” Buck says, suddenly soft, realizing he's found a different sore spot he can press on. “You can't control everything. That's not how a relationship works.”

When Eddie turns around, his face is wet, his red eyes furious, but only for the couple of breaths he takes before he speaks.

“You're lying to me,” he tells the window. He's trying to make his voice flat, and it's not quite working.

“You said you'd let me go,” Buck replies. “The day I kissed you, actually, remember? We had a couple of shots and talked about doing this for real, and you said if I fell out of love—”

“Except you didn't fall out of love,” Eddie says, turning his back again so he can pace, three steps in one direction and three back, Buck's ancient t-shirt loose around his hips.

Buck lets him, and thinks he should be feeling his heart beating on his tongue, clawing its way out, but there's nothing. He's just—empty. He left all the worthwhile parts of himself on their kitchen floor yesterday, and this is just scraping out the rest.

Eddie comes to a stop in front of him. He wipes his face with the backs of his hands, both at once.

“You didn't fall out of love,” he says, sinking to one knee where Buck is sitting, carefully curling a hand around the bump of his kneecap. The back of it is still damp, and Buck can't look at him, doesn't know where to put his own hands. “Baby.”

He's not—pleading, not really. It'd be easier if he was pleading, but he says it the same as always, soft in that way that still makes Buck shiver with disbelief sometimes.

“You're lying to me,” Eddie says, his voice as firm as he can make it. Buck has no idea how he does any of this.

Miserably, he shakes his head. “I'm not.”

Eddie squeezes his knee, a little too tight, like he's trying to keep Buck there.

“Buck,” he says, the end of the word choked off. He sounds a little like he did right before they first kissed, when Buck had paused a breath away from their lips touching, suddenly nervous. “Don't do this.”

Buck wants to take his hand. Wants to tangle their fingers together, just one more time, draw the kind of comfort only Eddie can give, but it's not his to take. He can't give Eddie that kind of hope, even for a breath.

He has to end this, and then he has to go, again.

“I'm sorry,” he says. It hurts to breathe. “I'm sorry, I can't.”

And he manages to hold Eddie's gaze, for a few beats of his heart that feel sluggish, barely there. The way Eddie's looking at him is like being cut open, like Eddie's reaching into the gaps between his ribs to get at the truth.

He's not stupid, and the worst part, actually, is that he knows Buck like no one ever has or will. He must be able to read the lie all over his face, but he'll see the plea, too, just like he did yesterday.

Let me go, Buck tries to tell him, the last thing he wants.

Eddie's hand on his knee slackens. Buck takes a painful inhale, his throat lined with shards.

And then Eddie's halfway across the room, turning his back. By all rights, there should be tears on Buck's face, but it's like he just—forgot how to cry. His entire face is stinging, but he's too empty for anything to come out.

“Okay,” Eddie says, muffled as he presses his knuckles into his eyes. He almost looks small like this, hunched and hollow-boned, his shoulders curled in. “Fine.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, helpless, and even that feels like a transgression.

“You want to break up,” Eddie says, and when he turns around, his beautiful face is all twisted. Buck loves him, in that moment, so desperately can't move with it. “So let's do it. I don't know how you want to separate your stuff from mine, but you can just—”

“That doesn't matter right now,” Buck interrupts quietly. “We can—we can discuss—”

“Discuss,” Eddie snorts, a loud, ugly sound. “Suddenly you want to fucking talk.”

Yesterday's Eddie, dream Eddie, had just turned and left the room. Buck didn't have to see his flushed face, the carnage in his eyes. He didn't have to be on the other end of this, Eddie's justified, heart-rending anger.

“I just meant—”

“I know what you meant,” Eddie says. He takes a step forward, a step back, like he needs to pace but won't allow himself. He crosses his arms, digs his fingers into his own skin. “We're not doing that today.”

“I wasn't suggesting we do,” Buck replies. He feels—thin. “And I promise I'll—Chris—”

“Yeah, of course you will,” and even quiet it sounds like a roar, like he's bleeding. “Of course you'll fucking—you can't be here right now.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, as the tell-tale, shivery feeling of a tear slides down the side of his nose. He's never seen Eddie like this, and the fact that he's to blame falls like an anvil into the bottom of his stomach.

Eddie sighs, wet. He rubs his face with the back of his hand, his empty fingers curling. “Please,” he says, and his shoulders drop, the stretched-out fabric of Buck's black shirt gaping at the collar. “Just—please go.”

Buck gets up. He can't imagine reaching for the suitcase on top of the closet and packing a change of clothes into it like last time, not when Eddie's standing by the bed like a cornered animal, breathing hard. There's nothing he really needs, at least nothing he can take with him, so all he does is reach down to grab the shirt off the floor and stand there, in a bedroom that's no longer his, with a hand halfway to outstretched like Eddie's going to let him come closer and hold him goodbye.

Then Eddie makes a noise, a sob that he only halfway swallows, and Buck trips out of the room and out of the house and out of his life with panic pounding bright white against his temples.

He doesn't pause, this time, when he gets to his destination. He doesn't sit on the stairs, just marches up to the door and dodges Maddie's frown and Chimney's wide eyes as they badger him for what happened. He turns down dinner, makes up a messy bed on the couch, and then—

three

He wakes up with Eddie's arm thrown over his waist.

There's a pit in his stomach as soon as he opens his eyes, because the alarm is on again, the same radio station, the same song. The sunlight streaming into the room is buttery-soft, brand new, early. The alarm is ringing so they can take Chris to school. And—

He reaches out for the nightstand on his side of the bed they share, clumsily unplugs his phone one-handed. The screen lights up to a familiar wallpaper, and it's right there, just above the top of Buck's head: Wednesday.

“Woah,” Eddie drawls, his grip on Buck's waist tightening as he breathes in deep, face half-smushed into Buck's shoulder. “Your heart's racing.”

Buck's not entirely sure how he still has a heart, and he can't really feel it, but it must be there, because Eddie lifts his head and presses a kiss right over where it should be beating. His eyes are still closed.

“You okay?” he asks, reaching up to run a hand through Buck's hair, tucking his face into the crook of Buck's neck, breathing warm and just a little damp and perfect.

“Yeah,” Buck says, his eyes on the ceiling, because he's not sure he can take the familiar sight of Eddie curled around him. It's Wednesday again. Yesterday didn't happen, and the yesterday before that probably also didn't, and they're still together—

“You sure?” Eddie asks. He puts a hand on Buck's face and pulls him down so he can look at him with a sleepy, determined squint. There are pillow lines printed into his cheek that Buck must have missed on the previous mornings. “Nightmare?”

Through the dull, fuzzy ache wrapped around his head like a vice, Buck tries to commit this to memory, Eddie steeped in the softness of the morning, messy-haired and squinty, only speaking a couple of words at a time.

“Nah,” he says, his entire face burning as he looks down at Eddie, the easy openness in his eyes that he's going to have to take away again. “My heart's just racing cause I saw you.”

Eddie grins with all his teeth. It makes an easy home on his face, crinkles the corners of his eyes.

“Aren't you a regular old charmer,” he says with one eyebrow raised, and Buck's completely powerless when he leans in for a kiss, languid and still smiling a little. He drinks Eddie in, the soft scrape of stubble and his bottom lip that's just a little chapped. He smells like their gentle detergent, the distant remnants of yesterday's cologne, and the cinnamon hand cream he's started using before bed because he likes the way it makes his skin feel, which he told Buck a few months ago with an expression that was equal parts confusion and delight.

He smells like Eddie, and Buck doesn't know what does and doesn't exist anymore, because all of it feels real, except he's—stuck.

The hardest day of his life, starting over again, starting with Eddie steady and beautiful and unknowing, in love with him.

And Buck has to leave him, because he doesn't know which one of these days will be the one that sticks.

It's the right fucking thing to do.

Eddie tangles his fingers in Buck's hair and rolls until he's on top, his body blanketing Buck's, pressing him into the mattress. Buck shivers, and then doesn't really stop, overwhelmed by what really might be the last time he gets to touch Eddie, this time. He wants to hold it all, yesterday's Eddie kneeling in front of him, the Eddie from the day before leaning back against the kitchen table with his hands shaking, this; but some of it is already fading, the memories blurring together.

“Hi,” Buck says, and his arms come up to wrap around Eddie and hold him in place, muscle memory.

“Hi,” Eddie replies, in-between one kiss and the next, sneaking his tongue into Buck's mouth for a shallow taste. “Any particular reason you're about to squeeze the life out of me?”

Buck's breath hitches. He forces himself to relax, only hold Eddie tight enough that his hands meet in the middle of Eddie's back, where he can still feel his ribs moving with every breath.

“Sorry,” he says, as Eddie presses a kiss to his jaw. “Just—I love you.”

Eddie's eyes are wide, a little disarmed, like it's not what he was expecting Buck to say.

“I love you,” he replies, easy, another thing for Buck to try to keep. “How about we—”

A slam from down the hall, and Christopher's unmistakable footsteps.

“I'm up,” he says through the door, probably heading for the bathroom again. Eddie makes a dissatisfied noise into Buck's mouth, but when he pulls away, he's smiling still.

“Duty calls,” he says, reaching up to push Buck's hair off his forehead. “I kind of feel like—”

“Waffles for breakfast,” Buck fills in breathlessly. He'd said the same thing, two days ago, but on that Wednesday he was standing over by the dresser, frowning at his selection of t-shirts.

“Yeah,” Eddie says, surprised like he thinks Buck might have actually read his mind. “So if I incentivize you,” he pecks Buck's bottom lip, “with, I don't know…”

Buck makes a feeble noise in the bottom of his throat when Eddie licks into his mouth, and tilts his head back to fit their lips together better. He shouldn't be doing this; he's making it worse for Eddie. It's going to hurt him more if Buck lets himself pretend like this, but Eddie's hand at the base of his neck is painfully familiar, and he feels safe in a way he never might again.

Eddie hitches his thigh higher, pressing them closer together, and one of his hands sneaks down to squeeze Buck's hip. It feels, somehow, like forever since Buck's been touched like this, and he presses into it, and then—

Then Eddie's up, stumbling to stand, his eyes shining as he looks down at Buck, who's probably flushed all the way down his neck.

“Are you incentivized?” he asks, walking backwards to the dresser. “We're going to have an empty house in an hour, who knows what could happen.”

Buck knows what will, but he swallows around the reality that sits on his tongue like a boulder, acrid and immovable. He doesn't know how to resist this, the pull of the way Eddie loves him.

“You know,” he puts an arm behind his head, watching as Eddie pauses with a t-shirt halfway to his head, eyes suddenly stuck to Buck's biceps, “you're the one who's always going on about spoiling our kid.”

“Ah,” Eddie says, pointing at Buck with the hand holding his shirt, “but it doesn't count when you're also spoiling me.”
He pulls it on - Buck's again, on purpose this time, an ancient yellow thing with a gaping collar that Buck brought over here years ago now, for the nights he stayed over. Then he crosses the room back to the bed and leans down for one last kiss.

“Hurry up, I'm hungry,” he says before he disappears through the door.

Buck is left alone, smiling at the ceiling, and he closes his eyes as he feels the smile falling with every breath he takes. He shouldn't have let Eddie leave. Shouldn't have let the morning play out the way it did the first time, waking up and breakfast together and Eddie taking Chris to school while Buck gets lost in the quagmire that is his own mind.

He hadn't actually known he was about to do it, the first time. It took him until the early afternoon to realize, to call Eddie into the kitchen and try to break his heart cleanly.

This isn't clean. It's Buck still, somehow, managing to be selfish.

“I'm hungry!” Eddie calls from the kitchen, his voice clear through the cracked door, followed by Christopher's laughter. There's the clink of cutlery, and the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of what's probably Eddie cutting fruit. The kind of morning Buck thought he'd get to have for the rest of his life, and he can't take the thought of shattering it now.

So he gets up and makes the waffle batter, shivering every time Eddie's arms sneak around his waist. He accepts a cup of coffee that Eddie passes him with a kiss, and sets out the orange juice for when Christopher inevitably decides that he wants a glass, and laughs in a way that almost makes him feel warm when he gets a smear of chocolate syrup on his chin and Chris tries to give him instructions on how to wipe it off.

Eddie leaves with a kiss on the cheek that's still a little sticky.

Two hours later, Buck's standing outside with nothing but his car keys, shivering or maybe not quite. He can't feel his body as he folds himself into the driver's seat, doesn't really know how he gets his hands on the wheel.

He does still make it to Maddie and Chimney's, and up the stairs. He doesn't remember going to sleep.

eight

It's still, always, a Wednesday. He wakes up with Eddie, he ends the day without him, and the universe doesn't seem to care that a little part of him dies each time. He comes back to the same soft sunlight, the same song on the radio, day after day.

It doesn't take him all that long to grow numb, to start pulling away from Eddie's first-thing-in-the-morning touches, because their gentleness steals his breath. The only solace is that it puts Eddie on immediate alert, helps Buck avoid prolonging it.

Each time, the conversation gets shorter. There's not enough of him left to make it as gentle as Eddie deserves, and Buck can't even find it in himself to be terrified of what he's slipping into, less of a person and more of a translucent stain on the world around him, a bruise.

But he feels, deep down, that this is the right thing to do. Even if one of these breakups sticks, and his clumsy words make Eddie hate him for good; even if they never speak again, it'll be better than the slow death march that would happen otherwise.

So he does it again, and Eddie raises his voice. Again, and Eddie breaks into tears at the kitchen table, heaving sobs that he doesn't know how to stop. Again, and Eddie's the one to leave the house first, so all Buck can do is slide down the kitchen cabinets and dry heave until his hands stop shaking long enough to call Chimney for a ride.

Again, again, again.

On day seven, or eight, or whichever day it is, he takes a left instead of a right, and drives all the way out into the hills instead of seeking refuge with his sister. He's not sure he can take other people looking at him; he already feels too exposed behind the wheel, with the wind whipping through his hair through the open windows. The hills are yellowy-green around him, dotted with the bright facades of villas and unnaturally blue swimming pools.

When he gets stuck staring at one, he doesn't realize he's drifted until he hears the horn. Even then, he doesn't really have the presence of mind to beg the fucking universe that he get another Wednesday after this, that he see his boys again.

It's just the headlights that come out of nowhere, and he closes his eyes as they sweep him off the road.

nine

The radio is silent, this time.

Buck's sitting bolt upright before he's even fully awake, his chest heaving. There's no one in bed next to him, no annoyed snuffling from Eddie at being jolted.

It's—

“Hey,” Eddie says, poking his head through the door with a smile. Not the kind of smile he'd be wearing if yesterday had been real.

Buck reaches over to wake up his phone.

Wednesday.

“You slept through the alarm,” Eddie says as he steps into the room, like he can read some kind of question that Buck doesn't know is on his face. “Chris is at school already. Figured I'd let you rest.”

Something in Buck's chest, something that feels like the last thing holding him upright, just—pops and lies there, dead.

He hasn't really seen Chris in days, not properly. He hasn't been to the firehouse, hasn't been anywhere other than here and Maddie's and inside his Jeep. He's eaten the same breakfast, if he's eaten at all, and woken up with the exact same dull pain at the base of his skull, and every word, every touch from Eddie has felt stolen and undeserved at once.

He hasn't felt alive for days and days on end, and he's so fucking tired.

“Baby?” Eddie asks, his voice softer.

And Buck doesn't realize he's sobbing until Eddie's arms are around him. His touch is so steady it only makes Buck feel the trembling of his own body more acutely, the noises clawing their way out of his throat echoing in the safe circle of Eddie's arms.

“Okay,” Eddie murmurs, even though Buck barely hears him through the noise that is his own breathing. He runs a warm, soothing hand down Buck's back, over and over, his fingers cool on the overheated skin of Buck's neck. “It's okay, you're okay.”

He's saying the words into Buck's hair, his breath even against Buck's temple. Buck tries to reply, to say something, but the emptiness inside him only offers another sob, a constant, painful echo. His throat is burning, and the way his body convulses around the sobs hurts, strains his back and his stomach until he feels cramped head to toe.

Eddie doesn't falter, moving from Buck's back to his shoulders, rubbing at the sore spots. He doesn't know how much time passes, but he starts feeling feverish and dehydrated, his mouth sticky, so it's probably a while. Eddie's shirt must be ruined, and it must hurt to be curled around Buck like this, but when Buck goes to pull away, Eddie doesn't let him. Instead, he wraps a gentle hand around the back of Buck's neck and slowly, slowly moves backward until he's propped up against the headboard.

Buck hides his face in the wet spot he's made right in the middle of Eddie's chest, and tries to swallow even though his throat feels like it's full of razors. Eddie brings his knees up, cages him in, holds and holds and holds him until Buck wants to cry not about the darkness that's settled in his head, but about Eddie being here at all. He wants to get lost in him, sink his fingers into him, be near him in a way that's unquenchable even right in Eddie's arms, because Buck has lost him, and the universe is just making him keep a tally now.

He died yesterday. He must have, because every other time, he ended the day by falling asleep. In the last memory he has of yesterday, just snatches of color from the free fall, the sky had still been light.

He died, and that could have been the end of it.

“Hey,” Eddie murmurs, and it's then that Buck realizes he's stopped crying quite so noisily, the sobs reduced to tears pooling in the corners of his eyes, stinging where they trickle down the sides of his nose where a layer of salt has already dried. “Do you need anything? Water?”

He definitely needs water, but he's afraid that Eddie will move if he says yes. He's not really ready for that, and he curls his fingers into the back of Eddie's shirt a little too desperately, probably tugging the fabric irreversibly out of shape.

All he wants, with a desperation that aches so much he can't even tell where it begins, is Eddie. Selfishly, hopelessly, Buck wants to keep him.

“No,” he remembers to say, and it hurts his throat on the way out, “no, I'm—I just—”

“Hey, okay,” Eddie says, in the voice he uses on panicking patients, which is when Buck catches himself pressed to Eddie so tight it hurts a little, the curve of Eddie's ribs digging into his own. Eddie's hands, though, are in his hair, are running down Buck's body in even, long strokes, tethering him here. “Okay. We can stay here for as long as you want.”

He doesn't ask what this is about. There's a distant edge to his voice that betrays how much he wants to, which is only natural, but there's nowhere for Buck to even begin explaining. He doesn't know what's real anymore, where this began, where it'll end.

All he knows is that Eddie is with him now.

“Actually,” he says into Eddie's chest, then clears his throat a couple of times, “have you eaten?”

Eddie makes a surprised noise. Buck can't blame him, with the way he walked in here just to see Buck fall into pieces, the giant wet patch on his t-shirt, with Buck in his arms still shaking as the grief claws its way out.

But Eddie's here, and Buck just—needs a minute. He can't do this again right now; he feels like he might not even be strong enough to hold his own head up for a while.

“No,” Eddie says, absentmindedly tracing the bump at the top of Buck's spine. “Chris had cereal, I wasn't really hungry.”

Buck recognizes that tone, too. I wasn't really hungry as a substitute for something else.

He takes in a stuffy, shaking breath. Then he lifts his head, off Eddie's chest and into the crook of his neck, where his skin is warm and soft and smells like body wash.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” he asks, and lets himself imagine he's asking Eddie to go on the run from whatever immovable, incomprehensible forces are holding him stuck here. “For breakfast, I mean.”

Eddie presses his lips to Buck's temple. “You sure?” he asks, and the warmth in his voice makes Buck shiver.

“Yeah,” Buck says, curling into Eddie, wrapping his arms around his waist. “Yeah, please.”

Eddie nods and loosens his hold a little, giving Buck time to extricate himself. He sticks close while Buck pulls on an old pair of jeans and a hoodie, leans in the bathroom doorway and watches Buck splash his face with cold water and brush his teeth, their eyes meeting over and over in the mirror.

They take the truck, and Eddie slides behind the wheel before Buck can try, one hand in Buck’s as he navigates out of their street and into traffic, unmistakably headed for the breakfast place they only go to when they’re celebrating something or if their shift’s been particularly bad.

The perpetual lump in Buck’s throat, soothed a little by all the crying, grows back as he watches Eddie’s profile, the soft wrinkle between his eyebrows. He swallows a curse when someone cuts him off, then turns it into a smile and leans across the center console to kiss Buck while they’re waiting to move.

Buck goes a little boneless with it, his eyes closed and head still tipped up even after Eddie pulls away and goes back to driving.

He wants, wants Eddie even though he’s right there, their hands still tangled together in Buck’s lap. It’s an ache, and it unfurls inside him little by little when they get out of the car and find a little table for two half-shaded by a potted ficus tree. Eddie, sunlit, knocks their ankles under the table and turns his most charming smile on the waitress.

Buck grabs his hand on the tabletop far too desperately to be casual and knows, with a certainty that winds around his bones ice cold, that he doesn’t have it in him to let Eddie go today. He can’t, not when he’s still on the wrong side of shivery, not when he wants to walk around the table and sit in Eddie’s lap and maybe crawl under his t-shirt, somehow, just to be close.

He died yesterday, and the loop still reset. So today—maybe today he can try a Wednesday on which they go to sleep side by side.

Maybe the universe wants him and Eddie to stay together on this particular date.

It’s selfish, bitterly so, but that’s not the worst thing Buck has been, these past few days. He can’t quite get enough of Eddie like this, accidentally snorting into his glass when Buck cracks a joke that’s barely funny, because he knows now what Eddie looks like broken all the way down to the bones, and knows how it feels to have done it to him.

So maybe this, sticking around, isn’t the worst thing Buck can do. Just this once, he can rewrite what happens. He can accompany Eddie to the grocery store and help with dinner and spin him into a dance in the kitchen while they do the dishes, and he can breathe.

He just needs a second to breathe.

thirteen

“That was awesome,” Christopher says, way too loud for the carpeted movie theater hallway.

Eddie’s answering laugh rumbles through Buck’s side, the two of them pressed together and leaning against the wall while they wait for most of the crowd to pass.

“Told you,” Buck says. “Your dad just doesn’t know what’s good.”

Eddie throws up the arm that’s not wrapped around Buck’s waist, making Christopher laugh.

“Excuse me for not having faith in a movie about aliens.”

“But they were humanoid aliens, Dad,” Chris says with a little eye roll that makes him look like Eddie.

“Yeah, dad,” Buck repeats bumping their shoulders together. He shivers when Eddie grins at him. “They couldn’t tell the aliens apart from the people. That was the point.”

Eddie pinches his side. “That doesn’t mean it was a good movie,” he says, but his face softens when he sees Buck and Christopher’s matching pursed lips. “The ending didn’t make any sense—”

“They left Earth because the aliens turned into—”

“But,” Eddie interrupts Christopher's impassioned reply, his face so soft when he looks down at him that Buck has to duck his gaze away, “I'm sure they'll make it clearer in the sequel, which I'll be seeing because I keep getting outvoted in my own house.”

Chris, grinning wildly, holds out a fist for Buck to bump. He does, touching his knuckles to Christopher's softer than he usually would.

When he turns to Eddie, he has a retort on the tip of his tongue, something about how they need a kid who'd side with Eddie, just to balance things out; the kind of thing that gets Eddie to stop and stare for a second, to look at Buck a little breathlessly.

Thankfully, he smothers it before it comes out.

This isn't real. They're going to go home, put Chris to bed, kiss goodnight, fall asleep next to each other - and tomorrow, none of this will have existed. He found as much out four days ago, when he woke up to that same song on the radio and resolved to go back to breaking it off and then just—didn't do it.

He's gotten addicted to this, easier than breathing. He gets to live a perfect day with Eddie and Christopher, go to sleep, then do it all again, and there's no comparing that to the drowning misery of breaking Eddie's heart.

It's still the wrong thing to do, but he's starting to think that he'll just never get out of this. That maybe he did die on that day, and his body's lying broken on the rocks, and this is heaven for whatever was left of him then.

But if he does - if he eventually wakes up somewhere that's not his bed, on a day that's maybe overcast, a Thursday or a Friday or anything, anything else - he'll do it. As soon as he's sure the ground is real under his feet, he'll let Eddie go.

It's just that, in the meantime - is it really so bad to stay in this happiness?

“Babe, you coming?” Eddie asks, and Buck blinks back to the present only to realize that Christopher's already halfway down the hallway, and Eddie is waiting with his hand outstretched.

“Sorry,” Buck replies, shakes his head, grabs Eddie's hand. “Zoned out.”

Eddie curls into his side, walking so close their connected hands are trapped between their bodies.

“You're just thinking about getting probed,” he says into Buck's ear, and Buck doesn't even try to hold back a giant bark of a laugh.

Eddie, judging by his pleased, squinted smile, doesn't realize that it sounds just a little bit wrong.

sixteen

“Okay,” Eddie calls, trying to stuff his wallet into his back pocket as he jogs out of the grocery store. “Got the capers, let's go.”

Buck isn't really sure why he didn't wait in the car - but it's a nice day, like this Wednesday always is. The store has clean-looking benches out front. And there's something about the way Eddie lights up as soon as he spots him waiting that makes Buck shiver.

“What are you making again?” Buck asks, even though he knows, and has eaten the dish almost every day for the past week. This is the third time he's standing in front of this particular grocery store, waiting for Eddie to grab the jar of capers that was nowhere to be found at the fancy organic place.

“Salmon,” Eddie says, his eyebrows raised, probably because they were debating the merits of different-sized filets together not half an hour ago. “With lemon caper butter. Which was meant to be a surprise, by the way.”

“Come on,” Buck grins, pulling on the end of Eddie's henley when he comes within reach, “you wanted to tell me. This way I know what I'm excited for.”

Eddie purses his lips. “Hold off on the excitement,” he says. “Don't know if it's going to be any good.”

“Eddie, come on,” Buck says, smiling until Eddie's face folds around a smile in response. “It's going to be amazing.”

It is. He can't tell Eddie that he knows from experience, but it's so good he's looking forward to it again, both the salmon and the way Eddie's going to look when he takes it out of the oven, with a little grin curled into the corner of his mouth that's just for him.

“Time to find out, I guess,” Eddie shrugs. “Oh. Here.”

And he holds out—Buck has to blink a couple of times. He holds out a can of the ridiculously expensive stevia-sweetened soda Buck tries to pretend he doesn't love.

“Um,” he says. This is not like any of the other times he's waited in front of the grocery store.

Eddie raises his eyebrows. “You're thirsty.”

“I am?”

“Yes,” Eddie says, still holding the drink. Buck wraps his fingers around it carefully, one by one, like it's going to disappear from under his touch. “What, you think I can't tell?”

And Buck just—grabs the can, slips it in his hoodie pocket, and pulls Eddie in for a kiss on the edge of a grocery store parking lot.

Eddie makes a noise against his mouth that is half-surprise, half-laugh, but he wraps his free arm around Buck's waist anyway to keep him there. It's early afternoon, and busy, with one cart after another rattling by them, but Buck can't bring himself to care about anyone else when Eddie smiles, when he kisses Buck back like he doesn't care where they are either.

He can't really linger on the way it makes him feel to be known so thoroughly, not if he wants to stay standing and wake up tomorrow and do it all over again, but his thoughts cloud over anyway when Eddie puts his other hand on Buck's waist and presses closer.

He gets lost in the kiss for a second, and then he thinks, wait, wasn't he just holding—

Eddie catches the caper jar just before it hits the ground.

twenty

Eddie looks like a goddamned mirage.

Buck's really not sure how he's supposed to look away from him, or do anything other than curl into his side and breathe and thank whatever lucky stars he still has left.

He's lying on the blanket with his eyes closed, head pillowed on one of his arms, his chest rising and falling steadily. They've settled in a pool of spindly shade provided by a tree, and the sun paints soft, morphing shapes on Eddie's face that Buck wants to chase with his mouth, press a kiss to everything the light has warmed.

“This is nice,” Eddie says, probably sensing Buck's look. He blinks his eyes open slowly, the way he does in the mornings. “I didn't think I was a park date person.”

Buck rolls over, right into his space, until their noses bump together.

“I like showing you new things,” he says, with the tips of his ears burning a little. He's not sure he would have said it if he wasn't almost sure that in a few hours, all of this will be erased.

Eddie, though, beams back at him. “Yeah, you're pretty good at that,” he says, touching their foreheads together, and his eyes squint shut with the proximity. Buck is about to say fuck it and roll on top of him, because the loop resetting would also erase any charges for public indecency.

Except then something barrels into him from the back, making him flinch.

“What the hell—”

“A dog,” Eddie says, his head raised to peek over Buck's shoulder. “And, uh. Like a million children running after it.”

Buck sits up, turning to look. There is, indeed, some kind of medium-sized dog rolling in the grass next to him, paws swinging wildly into the air, trailing a gummy bear-patterned leash.

And Eddie wasn't wrong about the children, either.

“Soup!” yells the little girl who reaches them first, her braids practically billowing behind her with how fast she's running. “Stop it!”

The dog - Soup, apparently - rolls over onto his stomach, ears perked up. When he sees the gaggle of people headed for him, he tries to make a run for it, but Buck is just close enough to grab the leash before he makes off with it again.

“Thank you, mister,” the little girl pants, out of breath, when she reaches them. Buck's not sure if he should be handing the leash to her, what with how tiny she is. “Bad Soup.”

Soup sits in the grass, his tongue lolling out. He looks a little like he's grinning.

“Evie, how many times do I have to tell you—Soup!” yells the next child who reaches them, a girl that looks to be a little older than Christopher. “Oh my God, thanks.”

Buck holds out the leash. “No problem,” he says. Going by the rustling, Eddie sits up behind him, and the little girl's eyes widen when they jump over Buck's shoulder. “I think, uh, Soup here just got a little excited.”

“I didn't name him,” the girl says, scowling as she brings the dog to heel, but the corner of her mouth is twitching. “Did I, Evie?”

Evie crosses her arms. “I wanted to name him Banana,” she says, pouting. Buck warms at the sight of her, and Eddie, like he knows, puts his chin on Buck's shoulder to watch Soup disregard commands and go back to rolling on the ground. “Or Potato.”

“Potato's a good name for a dog,” Eddie says, right in Buck's ear. Buck wishes he could look at his face, no doubt the softest thing he'd ever see.

“I came up with it,” Evie says proudly. “But my stupid brother—”

“Hey now,” says the older girl, practiced enough that this is probably far from her first time. “You know we don't call—”

“Erika!” comes another little kid voice, and the owner of it crashes into Erika's legs at full speed, grabbing onto her jeans to stay upright. “Soup ran away.”

Erika sigh. “Yeah, squirt,” she says, showing him the leash, “we got him.”

Only then does the boy seem to register the dog, still on the ground, now lying on his side and idly chewing the grass.

“Soup!” he yells at top volume, throwing himself down to wrap an arm around Soup's neck.

Buck's not really sure what to do, here.

“You, uh,” he says, gesturing between them as if it's not clear who he's talking to, “you guys okay? Do you need help finding someone, or—”

“No, no,” Erika says, blowing her bangs off her face. “Our parents are out here somewhere, we just took off after the dog.”

And, as if on cue, two harried-looking women run up behind them, barely managing to stop before they hit the edge of Buck and Eddie's blanket. One of them has a baby strapped to her chest, dark-haired and big-eyed, looking out at the commotion.

“I am forty-three years old,” the other woman says, bending over to put her hands on her knees. “That’s too old to be chasing you across an entire park.”

“Sorry, Mama,” Evie says, immediately coming over to wrap her tiny arms around her mother's waist.

“Soup ran away,” the boy informs her from where he's sitting on the ground with the dog's head in his lap, petting his ears. He's still yelling a little. “We had to catch him.”

“You didn't catch him,” Evie grumbles into her mom's hip. Then she lifts an arm and points straight at Buck in a way that makes him strangely self-conscious. “He did.”

Only then do the parents seem to notice Buck and Eddie, which—he supposes that's understandable, with the four kids and the dog to keep track of.

“Oh,” the one with the baby says, pushing her hair off her face. “Oh, I'm sorry, did the dog—”

“Nah,” Buck waves a hand. “I think he tripped over me, so—I guess sorry for being in the way, but he seems fine.”

“No, Soup's indestructible,” says the other mom, her hand on Evie's shoulder. “He ate three socks last month and then he just—”

“Babe,” her partner interrupts, on the verge of a grin as she reaches out a hand to squeeze her shoulder. “Maybe not the time to talk about the dog's bowel movements.”

“No, by all means,” Eddie says, grinning up at them. Buck feels—God, he feels proud to be leaning into him, proud of the fact that they're obviously here together and someone like Eddie chose him, of all people. “We've kind of been thinking about getting a dog, it's good to hear some first-hand experiences.”

Buck blinks. “We have?”

Eddie puts his chin on his shoulder, eyebrow raised. “What, Chris hasn't been putting the moves on you? Dad, please, did you know that people with dogs are happier, I read it in a book, et cetera?”

“Well, I mean,” Buck says, “he wouldn't need to butter me up. I love dogs.”

Eddie smiles so wide the corners of his eyes squint shut. “Typical,” he says, turning back to the women, who are looking between them with expressions so knowing they make Buck flush a little. “I keep getting outvoted in my own house.”

And Buck takes a breath, then, to tell him that he keeps saying that, but the words disintegrate on his tongue when he remembers that Eddie didn't.

That was another Eddie, a few Wednesdays ago.

“Well, he's a menace,” the mom with the baby shrugs, “but he's been great at bringing the kids together, you know? The condition was that they're the ones who take care of him, so they made a whole Soup chart.”

Behind them, Erika has now crouched down to rub Soup's belly, and the little boy is lying in the grass, curled around the dog's back.

“Ah, well, we've only got the one,” Eddie says. Buck looks at him, head tilted up and smiling with his elbows on his knees, and aches. “Maybe we should wait a few years.”

And Buck should, in theory, be used to this by now. They've been together for over eight months, and have been getting mistaken for a family for far longer than that. Existing as a couple isn't new. Other people seeing them together isn't new.

But there's still something about this, Eddie relaxed and squinting into the sun as he talks to strangers about their family, settled and steady and quietly proud.

Buck is, too. He wants to tell everyone he meets some days, look at how happy this man makes me, did you know that could happen?

He wants to hide his face in the crook of Eddie's neck, where it's familiar and warm, and while away the day there until it's time for it to loop again, just hold Eddie and press everything he feels into his skin.

He wishes he could have this forever.

“Not at all,” one of the moms is saying when Buck tunes back in, realizing guiltily that he's missed a chunk of the conversation. “Happy to help, although between you and me,” she leans in, the baby on her chest reaching out a curious hand in Eddie's direction, “maybe get one that's lower energy. His first walk's at half past five.”

“Oof,” Eddie laughs, reaching back so the baby can grab the tip of his finger and pull.

Buck has to turn his face away.

“Okay, Soup's done eating grass,” the other mom says, disentangling Evie's arms from around her waist, pressing a kiss to each of her cheeks. “We still have to make dinner when we get home, let's go.”

The little boy stays on the ground, groaning at the sky, until Erika stands him upright and brushes off his grass-stained jeans.

“It was nice to meet you,” says the mom with the baby, smiling at them both, though it grows a little wider when her eyes fall on Eddie. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” Eddie grins. “See you around.”

Evie waves at Buck as she passes, and Soup pauses to sniff his shoes before Erika tugs him away, but it takes no time at all for them to disappear behind a bend in the path, leaving them alone again.

Eddie watches them go until he loses sight of them. Then he turns to Buck, his chin pressed into his shoulder.

“What?” he asks, which probably means that Buck hasn't been doing a good enough job keeping his face in check.

And he has no idea where to even begin. He can't explain what he doesn't understand himself, can't tell Eddie that he wishes this was the version of today they got to keep. All of it feels like it's going to burn his tongue if he tries to speak it.

But he takes a breath anyway, and what comes out is:

“Should we get a dog?”

Eddie laughs a little, and the last remnant of the charm he puts on for strangers slides off, leaving him soft-faced, familiar, Buck's.

“I don't know,” he says, and when he looks at the ground, Buck swears there's a little bit of pink high in his cheeks. “I kind of—I liked the—” he bites his lip. Breathes out through his nose, and visibly swallows whatever he'd been about to say. “Nevermind.”

“No, come on,” Buck says, leaning into him, nuzzling into Eddie's neck until he has him laughing again. “Tell me.”

Eddie's entire body expands around a sigh. Buck presses a kiss to his shoulder, runs a thumb over the flushed side of his face and the pink shell of his ear, waits.

“I liked what she said,” he says, turning his head away, in the direction of where the family disappeared. “About the dog bringing the kids together.”

“Okay,” Buck says, and ignores the hole it punches through his stomach, carefully swallowing down the bile on the back of his tongue. “So—we should wait, like you said? Until—if—” and he's not sure if he wants to smile or burst into tears about the possibility, “we have another kid?”

Eddie nudges him away, and wraps a gentle hand around the back of his neck when he kisses him.

“Have you ever,” he says, and he only holds Buck's gaze for a second before his eyes flick away, “have you ever thought about—more?”

He's blushing in earnest now, his whole face red when he tips it down, watching his free hand that's pulling tiny blades of grass out of the ground.

“More?” Buck asks, but he thinks—he thinks he might know. They've talked about having a child in the not-so-distant future, considered it as a real possibility, but the way Eddie looked at this family—

“More kids,” Eddie says, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth. “Like—I don't know, four might be too many with what this city pays, but I—”

“But if,” Buck clears his throat, desperately hoping he can hold tears at bay, “if we won the lottery, though. You'd want four?”

Eddie shrugs a shoulder, rubs his cheek against it. He looks shy, almost, not something Buck's seen him wear before.

“Maybe,” he says quietly. “It's just—I don't know, I've been thinking about it lately. About—what it means to be a father, and all the mistakes I made with Chris, and—”

“And he turned out the most amazing kid I've ever met,” Buck interrupts, reaching out for Eddie's hand.

Eddie laughs a little. “Yeah,” he nods, squeezing Buck's fingers in-between his. “He's pretty great, and I—I love watching him grow up. Seeing all the little things he picked up from me. It makes me feel like—I don't know. Like I'm not so bad at getting things right, sometimes.”

“Eddie,” Buck says, and lifts an arm to wipe at his eyes while Eddie isn't looking. “You're an incredible dad. You'd be an incredible dad to—” he stutters, looks back at where the parents were standing a few minutes ago and feels something in his chest twist and thinks God, thinks please, “to all of our kids.”

“All of them, huh?” Eddie smiles, a private thing that hides in the very corner of his mouth.

Buck can see it, in perfect, tactile clarity: a bigger house, a bigger kitchen, something that would fit them, toeing the line between messy and chaotic every morning just before it's time to leave the house. A dog like Soup, or maybe something smaller, a parrot for their nonexistent kid who's obsessed with pirates, a bearded dragon for Chris, a turtle they gifted Eddie because of that one face he makes. Eddie with a sleepy toddler on his hip, equally sleepy as he goes about making breakfast and filling lunchboxes one-handed, and weekends where they get to spend as much time as they want teaching the kids how to flip pancakes.

He's not sure if it's always been inside him, one of those things he's only ever imagined in the abstract, or if it's brand new and already feels so right anyway.

“I'd give you a million kids if I could,” he says, and hates that it comes out a little hollow, not gentle the way he means to say it.

Eddie laughs. When he lies back down on the blanket, Buck follows, leaning up on an elbow to see into Eddie's face.

“I'm happy with the one we have,” Eddie says. “We're the kind of family I didn't think I was built for, you know? I didn't think I was a good partner, or a good dad, and now I just—we're complete, even if stays just the three of us, but if you wanted, and if Chris was okay with it—”

“I want,” Buck says, aching with how much we means it.

Eddie reaches up, runs a hand through Buck's hair. “That's good to hear,” he says, and something in his face has shifted; something that had been a little out of place, maybe, and Buck hadn't even noticed. “Because I've been convincing myself to talk to you about it for weeks.”

Buck starts to smile, starts to lean down for a kiss, and then freezes halfway.

For weeks. Eddie, who's still a little pink in the face like he has something to be embarrassed about, has been trying for weeks to talk to Buck about the future they could have together.

This Eddie, yesterday's Eddie, every version of him.

The Eddie whose heart he broke first, weeks ago, had been thinking about a big family.

And this one, though Buck can no longer bring himself to break his heart, will never get to have what he wants. This conversation will wink out of existence, will go back to being un-had when they wake up in the morning.

Buck can swear it all he wants, promise Eddie the world, but he can't break through whatever has him trapped here. It's been blissful, every single day since he decided to leave the breakup for the next Thursday he lives, and he's let himself get lost in it, but he looks at Eddie now, as he closes his eyes and turns his head toward the sun, and—

Eddie deserves to have a future. Even if this is a dream, every version of him deserves to live and heal and be happy, and Buck will have to figure out how to let him go, but before he can do that, he has to wake up on a Thursday.

He has to break the fucking loop.

twenty-three

Eddie, on his way home from the grocery store, stops to buy Buck flowers.

He walks through the door bouquet-first, with the crochet market bag Pepa gifted him over his shoulder, and grins when he spots Buck pacing the hallway.

Buck is pacing the hallway because, same as the last three days, he's trying to figure out how to make this thing end.

Breaking up with Eddie, clearly, doesn't work. Not breaking up with him doesn't work either, and he can't figure out what else the goddamned universe could possibly want. The internet hasn't been helpful, because it all boils down to the same thing: he's either supposed to learn something or get something right.

The right thing has to be letting Eddie go. That conviction has been slipping away from him, little by little, the first Wednesdays he lived growing hazier because his memory is the only place they exist, but he can—he'll find it again. He'll be reminded of why it's the right thing to do.

He hopes, because it's so, so easy to let himself get carried away when Eddie does things like this.

“Hey,” he says, throwing his keys into the dish by the door, kicking off his shoes. His hair is a little messy from the breeze Buck knows picks up outside right around this time, every time. “I got you something.”

Buck lets go of the knuckle he'd been biting, and when Eddie reaches for him to kiss him hello, he melts into it. Lets himself get swept up, because the way Eddie loves him is so very good at bulldozing all of his rational arguments.

“I can see that,” he says, smiling against Eddie's mouth. His throat is a little tight, the way it always is these days, whenever he realizes that he has Eddie and doesn't have him all at the same time. He has him now, in this moment that does and doesn't exist, and he feels real. That's far more than Buck thought he'd get to have a month after breaking up. “What's the occasion?”

“Don't know,” Eddie shrugs the shoulder without the bag. “You were a little out of it this morning, and then I saw this guy with a sign that said he's going to throw these away if he doesn't sell them by the end of the day, so.”

“Oh,” Buck grins, “so you got me flowers because they were on sale.”

But he wraps his fingers around the stems like he's touching gold, careful when the paper crinkles as Eddie passes the bouquet over. It's a shaggy mix of flowers and leaves, half a dozen different colors. Some of the petals are a little crushed, the smaller flowers half-wilted, but the fact that Eddie's the one handing it to him makes it stunningly beautiful.

“You know me,” he says, threading a finger through Buck's belt loop and pulling him into the kitchen, “I'm cheap.”

“Hm,” Buck hums, reaching up into one of the cabinets for a vase while Eddie unloads the groceries, “cheap enough to, I don't know—”

“Take my clothes off so we can save on the AC?” Eddie fills in.

Buck bites down on another grin as he runs the water, watching the hypnotic trickle of it down the inside of the vase. “That's not what I was about to say. It's September.”

“Sure,” Eddie says, closing the fridge. When Buck raises his head, he's smiling, already halfway out of his t-shirt. “But the answer is yes.”

Buck forgets all about the loop for a couple of hours.

twenty-eight

He doesn't mean to say it.

It's not something he's so much as thought about during this slew of Wednesdays, because it hurts too much to imagine.

But then they're lying in their backyard, shuffling around the bumps in the ground that poke at them through the blanket, watching the light pollution and the three exceptionally bright stars that are visible in this neighborhood.

Then, Eddie turns his head inside the hood he's wearing, squinting at Buck even though it's dark.

“That's Vega, right?” he asks, pointing up at the sky. “The highest one, and Arcturus is a little lower.”

Buck blinks. “How do you know that?”

“You told me,” Eddie laughs, turning his face back up. “Obviously.”

“I told—” Buck's voice falters. “Eddie, when have we ever looked at the stars together?”

Eddie reaches over, finding Buck's hand without looking, and interlaces their fingers. “Don't know,” he says, tilting his head like he's going to see another celestial body if he just changes the angle. “A few years ago? When Chris had his astronomy phase, and we wanted to go to the Observatory but it was closed, so we sat out here and compared the sky with that app on your phone.”

“And then Chris fell asleep,” Buck says, suddenly in a whisper, because—he remembers it, of course he does. It's one of the first memories of its kind, one he's carried with him through some of the worst moments of his life. A night so much like this one, the darkness tinted orange above them, Eddie on a lawn chair with Chris in his lap, back when Chris still allowed that kind of thing. A quiet moment; a private one, and Buck was there for it.

“Yeah,” Eddie grins at the sky. “And you said you didn't want to tell him because you weren't a hundred percent sure which one was which, but just between me and you, you're pretty certain that the highest star in the sky this time of year is Vega.”

Years ago. Years ago, when Chris had just started a new school year and Eddie was most of the way unraveled and Buck had no idea what he was doing here, just that he never wanted to be anywhere else.

“Eddie,” he says, and can't stop the words that well in his mouth.

Eddie turns to him with a hum, a questioning little noise in the back of his throat.

“Marry me,” Buck says.

The world goes silent. Buck's own breathing fades, ceding to the sudden rush of blood in his ears. Eddie blinks, taken aback, once, twice.

“What?” he asks, his voice soft.

The noise in Buck's ears gets louder. He can't—he can't breathe, because this is ridiculous, is impossible, is too soon, and even if Eddie says yes they can't get married, because Eddie won't remember.

Eddie—

Won't remember.

Buck can and will beat himself up for this tomorrow. He'll wake up and won't let himself get distracted this time and will figure out a way to pop this bubble he's stuck in, but Eddie won't remember, and Buck's been slowly falling apart in a hundred different places for weeks on end, so he reaches for yet another thing that isn't his to take, and says it again:

“Marry me.”

“I,” Eddie breathes in, his eyes shining in the diffuse orange glow of the streetlights. “I was gonna—are you sure?”

“You remembered the stars,” Buck says by way of explanation, pulling on their joined hands to press them to his chest.

“I remember everything you tell me,” Eddie replies.

Buck's eyes fill with tears, but he blinks them away. You don't, he thinks, but he can't say it. You don't remember all the ways I made you hate me. You don't remember all the times I decided to be a coward and not do it again.

Eddie reaches out, steady, his hand on Buck's cheek. “I'll remember this, too,” he says, so quietly it barely carries through the space between them. “For the rest of my life.”

Buck swallows against the soft, shivering joy in the back of his throat, breathes through the nausea that comes along with it.

You won't, he wants to say. You won't, and I want you to, I want you to, I want you to.

“So it's a yes,” Eddie says, the corners of his eyes damp, one of the tears cut into three by the crinkles that pop up there when he smiles. “If you can handle me having a long, long memory.”

twenty-nine

Buck's already kneeling by the toilet by the time he registers that he's awake.

It's too early, earlier than the alarm, because the bedroom's just beginning to grow lighter. Eddie is turned away from the door, fast asleep.

And Buck is—throwing up. It comes in waves, searing pain like the contents of his stomach are boiling, every time he remembers what he did yesterday.

Between bouts of nausea, he rests his forehead against the cold floor tile, but he sees Eddie's face every time he closes his eyes, the soft wonder in his eyes as he said yes, the way his eyelashes trembled just before he pulled Buck in for a kiss.

Buck can't keep doing this to him. Can't keep taking advantage, accumulating all these perfect days Eddie will never get to live. He'd imagined the moment they'll get engaged, in the early morning hours when it felt safe to entertain his silliest romantic ideas, and now he stole it from both of them: from himself, because he'll never get to live it for real, and from Eddie, who had no idea he was only saying yes for a couple of hours before it got erased.

He dry heaves again, but nothing else comes up. For a few minutes, he sits with his back to the wall, his face tilted up toward the ceiling light, and when he feels a little less queasy, he gets up and brushes his teeth.

Then he slides back into bed, not tired at all, hot all over and painfully uncomfortable, wanting to burst through his skin. It's definitely sunrise now, leeching the darkness until Buck can make out the details of every photo frame on the opposite wall, a dozen captures of their life together starting on the leftmost side, because Eddie had said they needed to leave room for more.

He stares at the picture from the party they threw for their six-month anniversary, Eddie in the middle holding Buck piggyback, Chris in front, the rest of their family flanking them. Chimney had brought a huge balloon shaped like a 6, but it kept floating horizontally, because the store only had a 9 and he had to try and tie it to the string upside down.

“'S early,” Eddie grumbles, turning over noisily, probably not really awake. Buck lies as still as he can, hoping Eddie will just go back to sleep and give him more time to figure out what to do, but he's not so lucky. “Buck?”

“It is early,” he says in a whisper. “Go back to bed, I'll wake you up.”

Eddie lifts his face off the pillow, creased in a dozen different places with hair falling into his face, and seems to consider it.

Whatever expression Buck's wearing must give him away, though, because Eddie turns over onto his back and blinks as he rubs the sleep out of his eyes.

“What's up?” he asks, morning-hoarse and entirely disarmed, looking painfully young as his eyes dart around Buck's face. “Nightmare?”

Buck almost scoffs. He wishes.

“I'm okay,” he says, which is of course the exact wrong thing to say.

Eddie's eyebrows draw together. “Buck.” He reaches toward where Buck is half-propped up against the headboard and clumsily pokes what's closest, which happens to be Buck's side, right where he's ticklish. “Talk.”

You always speak in one-word sentences in the morning, Buck wants to say. You keep socks that have multiple holes in them because you hate throwing stuff out. You're the only human being on planet Earth who likes orange juice with pulp, and you eat apples with the core because it makes Christopher pull that disgusted face you love. You pretend to dislike things just to get Chimney to talk about them when he's looking a little wilted. You know when I'm thirsty and you bring me flowers just because and you ruin me for anyone else with every single thing you do.

I love you, and I don't know how to do life without you, and I don't want to have to learn.

There's a tug, as soon as he thinks it, somewhere below his navel, the thought snagging and not letting go. He doesn't want to have to learn, but that doesn't mean—it can't mean—

“Can I ask you something?” spills out of his mouth before he realizes to stop it, and then Eddie's turning his head on the pillow, his hair a messy halo around his head.

“Ask away,” he says, still blinking a little too fast, like he's trying to catch up with Buck being awake.

Buck takes a breath, and it feels deeper than it has in forever. The nausea is gone.

Eddie won't remember. If this is the wrong thing to do, Eddie won't remember, and Buck can make himself forget.

“Do you ever think about us breaking up?” he asks.

Eddie's eyes widen a little, and it gets a couple more rapid blinks out of him, but he doesn't look shocked. Doesn't even really look surprised.

And slowly, impossibly, he smiles.

“All the time,” he says.

Buck has no idea what to do with that.

Eddie seems to, though, because he rolls onto his side and reaches over the small gap between them to put a hand on Buck's chest.

“I think about it all the time,” he says. “Every day. Probably multiple times a day.”

“You—” Buck has to swallow to get the bitter taste out of his mouth, and even then it's difficult to shape words. “You do?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, still smiling. With the morning sun in his back, he's devastating, even with half his face smushed into the pillow. “I worry all the time. I just have these moments where I look at you and I feel like—there's no way, you know? There's no way I get to keep this. Of course I'm going to fuck it up.”

“You're not,” Buck says on reflex, shaking his head. “You couldn't.”

“I have a lot of experience in screwing up relationships,” Eddie says, the tilt of his mouth a little rueful. “And this isn't like any relationship I've had. You're not like anyone I've loved before.”

“You're the love of my life,” Buck says, because if the past few weeks have taught him anything, it's this. He doesn't actually know how to give up the way Eddie makes him feel.

Eddie's face softens. “Yeah,” he says, his fingers tapping out a rhythm on Buck's chest, matching the beat of his heart. “I think that's what the kids are calling it these days.”

Buck tries to smile, but it wobbles pathetically, slips right off his lips, spills down his chin.

“I love you,” Eddie tells him, reaching up to run a thumb over the skin under Buck's eye that had looked dark enough to be bruised in the bathroom mirror. “And I think about losing you every day, and then I get to remind myself that I get a say.”

“Not if something—”

Eddie presses a finger over his lips, cutting off the rest of the words.

Not if something happens to me, because it will, and then it'll hurt. It'll hurt Eddie to love him.

“I get a say,” Eddie murmurs. “I never know if both of us are going to make it to tomorrow, yeah, but I decide if I let you in. I decide when to push and when to leave you alone, I decide how I show you that I love you, I decide how I want my future to look, because this is mine.”

Buck closes his eyes.

“You,” Eddie says, “are one of the first choices I've ever made just for me. So whenever I get too in my head, I just…”

He trails off, and the hand on Buck's cheek grows a little firmer as Eddie pulls him closer and presses a kiss to the side of his face. He stays there for a second, leans his forehead against Buck's temple, and breathes, soft warmth.

“But if,” Buck says, but Eddie's words are on a loop in his head, all the time, all the time, all the time. Eddie thinks about it all the time, and then makes the choice to keep Buck anyway. “If I wanted to—if I asked to break up, and I had a good reason—”

“Then I'd let you go,” Eddie says, and shivers a little. “But we both know you get in your head, so I'd have to ask you to be really, really sure first.”

Buck laughs, almost, but the sound stays stuck somewhere halfway up his chest. He's sure. He thinks. He thinks he's sure, because it's right, but the memory of his mother has washed out already, grown less intense with time, and Eddie's been right here.

He has to be sure. He has to be sure that Eddie will be better off without him, because otherwise—

“I'm here, okay?” Eddie says, and the hand he has wedged between them somehow slips into Buck's. “I'm right here. Take your time, sweetheart.”

Buck frowns. The air suddenly tastes a little strange, nothing like their sheets and Eddie's hand cream and the reed diffuser they keep on the dresser.

Still, he takes a breath to ask what Eddie means.

He takes a breath, and wakes up.

one

He's not in their bed.

He's not even horizontal, actually, but tilted up, and the pillow feels like sandpaper against his face, and—his face, there's something on his face—

“Buck,” Eddie says, and his voice isn't hoarse or soft or sleepy. He sounds alert, wide awake.

There are—noises, a scrape and a creak and a persistent beep-beep-beep that sounds ocean-like in Buck's ears, all muffled. Shuffling like footsteps, like sheafs of paper, and then—then Eddie's holding his hand, and all the noise dies.

“Buck,” he says, high in his throat, the word trembling. “Baby, can you hear me?”

“Ed,” he tries, but his throat feels like the desert. “Eddie. Didn't—I didn't—”

“Okay, okay—fuck, wait, give me a second,” Eddie says, and his hand slips away. He makes more noises, curses under his breath when he trips over something that sounds like a heap of metal when it clatters. “Here, open your mouth.”

He does, without question, and sighs at the soothing cold of an ice chip on his tongue. He's felt this before, more times than he can count, waking up in—

Hospital. Of course it's a hospital, and the darkness around him is tinged pink because his eyes are closed against the glare of the overhead lights.

It's a hospital, and Eddie is by his side, and the first coherent thought Buck has is not again.

“Here, another one,” Eddie says, his fingers freezing cold where they brush against Buck's lips. “Don't bite them, I know how you get.”

He sniffles; after he puts the ice chip on Buck's tongue, his hand lingers, the softest touch to the hinge of Buck's jaw, like he's afraid.

“Is it,” Buck says, biting through the ice, “what day's it?”

“Uh,” Eddie says thickly. “I actually—I think Monday?”

Yeah, Buck thinks as he crawls back into the crumpled corners of his body. He feels it in the weight of the air against him, hears it in the upset sniffles Eddie's muffling with something, probably his sleeve.

It's not Wednesday anymore, and Eddie is sitting by his hospital bed, crying.

Slowly, Buck opens his eyes. They feel like someone glued them together while he was asleep, his eyelashes tangled, and the light burns, but he just closes them for a minute, then tries again. His view is the usual: gray panel ceiling, square fluorescents, the very edge of an IV bag hanging in the corner of his vision.

“Hey,” Eddie says on his left. Buck is terrified of looking at him. “I should—God, I should call a nurse, what am I—”

“Eddie,” Buck interrupts, and Eddie's hand slips back into his, unmistakably shaking. Slowly, he turns his head, pausing after every inch until the throbbing at the base of his skull subsides. He can feel his hands, his arms and legs, but they feel like they're attached to him by silly string, just there.

But he needs to know. He needs to be sure.

“Yeah,” Eddie replies, his voice echoing over the mechanical beeps. “I'm here. I'm here, whatever you need.”

Just to know. He needs—needs to turn his head, but it won't lie flat on the pillow, his neck suddenly stuck halfway there.

“You,” Buck says, his eyes filling with miserable tears independent of him. “Are you—can I see you?”

Eddie squeezes his hand. “Not much to look at,” he warns, but he gets up anyway, and then he's leaning over Buck's bed.

He looks—rough. Hollow-eyed, a little gray around the edges, with his hair flat on one side of his head like he'd been sleeping on it. He's stubbled, almost enough to be considered a beard; his lips are chapped, and his eyelashes are clumped together with the tears that still glisten, hastily wiped, on the side of his face.

He's the most beautiful thing Buck has ever seen - and he's the answer, too. It is Monday, and this is the Eddie who turned his back to Buck at the kitchen table, or the one who sent him away, or the one who cried like Buck's never quite seen him cry before.

This Eddie doesn't belong to Buck anymore.

“I broke up with you,” Buck says. It's not what he means to say, because by some miracle Eddie is touching him anyway, is feeding Buck ice chips because he doesn't quite remember how to work his hands yet, and he desperately doesn't want him to go anywhere, but—they're not together anymore. It's only right.

Eddie smiles. It looks like he's a little out of practice, the edges of it awkward.

“Yeah, you did,” he nods, still leaning over the bed in a way that has to be killing his back, just so Buck can see him. “And before you ask, yeah, I'm here anyway.”

Carefully, Buck tries to move his head again. This time, he manages to turn it almost all the way to the side, and Eddie follows his gaze, settling back in the straight-backed chair waiting there.

“What happened?” is the question Buck asks instead. He's beginning to feel his heartbeat, the way his arms are connected to his chest, his hips aching a little. Something is off somewhere, but he's too sluggish to pinpoint it.

Eddie closes his eyes and exhales, slow, probably counting to four in his head.

“You got hit by a car,” he says, and a few universes away he might have hit stern, but to Buck he mostly sounds desperately relieved. “Right in front of Maddie and Chimney's building. Because you went out into the road to grab a cat.”

And—oh, Buck thinks as the memory emerges from the swirling fog of Wednesdays. The black cat: a bad omen, and it didn't even cross his path.

“At least that's what they told me here,” Eddie continues, staring past Buck at the window. “I don't know exactly—I was on my way to find you when I got the call.”

The corners of Buck's mouth are still damp from the ice chips, but his throat goes dry anyway. “To find me,” he repeats.

Eddie is—looking at Buck like he loves him.

“I wanted to talk,” he says, blinking away, at the floor, with a self-deprecating smile. “Because you—upset me—”

Buck snorts.

“Yeah, okay, you pissed me off,” Eddie says, his smile growing a little wider. “But it took about twenty minutes of you being gone for me to realize what actually happened.”

He reaches out his other hand, too, both wrapping around Buck's fingers to tug them off the bed, just high enough that Eddie can press a kiss to his knuckles.

Buck shivers with it, from the goosebumps on the back of his neck all the way down to the toes.

This is real. Eddie is here, and it's a Monday. Eddie is here, and he remembers what Buck did to keep him away from this exact thing happening, but his clothes are wrinkled like he'd slept in them and there's a cot pushed against the wall with the covers all bunched up in a ball the way Eddie leaves them when he gets up, and Buck—

Buck woke up because he couldn't be sure.

By his side, Eddie bows his head, and presses his forehead to their joined hands. The breath that leaves him is visible more than it's audible, an endless, endless drop of the tense line of his shoulders. He looks like he's praying, but he's silent, his breath even where it breaks against Buck's forearm.

Please don't leave me, Buck thinks, and the avalanche of guilt he braces for doesn't come. Please.

“I'm so glad you're okay,” Eddie whispers, probably not even meant for him.

Buck's throat closes, but he swallows the sob back down, sends his own prayer up to the universe that this isn't as selfish as it feels, and says:

“I didn't mean it.”

Eddie raises his head.

“What I said,” Buck clarifies. “Anything—everything I said. I was just—I was so fucking scared, and I—”

“I know,” Eddie says, impossibly soft. “I knew before you ended up here, but then, uh,” he glances at the door with a haunted look that seems oddly familiar. It only takes Buck a second to place it because he's probably still concussed, and when he does it stops the breath in his chest.

“My mother.”

Eddie's mouth twists. “Both of them, actually,” he replies, and looks at the door again, like just mentioning them will bring them back. “I thought maybe they grew a conscience, but,” he presses his lips together, so tight they almost disappear, and doesn't continue.

“But they came to lecture me about how loving me's a burden when I do this to myself,” Buck says, carefully looking at a water spot on the ceiling. “And I was comatose, huh?”

Eddie clears his throat. Buck knows without looking that he's moving his jaw in that way he has, when he's trying to work through something.

“I told them to get the fuck out,” he says, quiet, like he's ashamed. “That's all I said, but then Maddie asked them to join her outside, and, uh. Last I heard, they're back in Hershey.”

“Let's hope they stay there,” Buck says with a sigh. He hates the thought of Eddie, probably already frazzled because Buck landed himself in a hospital bed again, having to deal with Phillip and Margaret's particular brand of cruelty that apes concern.

He tries to raise his hand, just to rub it over his face and bring some feeling back in, and that's when he finally realizes what's wrong: his right arm is in a cast.

“It's a clean break,” Eddie says, and reaches up to do exactly what Buck wanted, quick fingers rubbing at his forehead and the bridge of his nose, making the skin there feel like it's actually part of his body. “You know the drill. Three months or so, but lucky for you, you already slept two weeks of it away.”

Two weeks.

“Eddie—”

“There's no version of this story,” Eddie interrupts, running a hand through his hair, “where I don't worry about you, Buck.”

Buck thinks back to every one of his Wednesdays: Eddie asking him what's wrong, letting him sleep, letting him cry. Buying him soda and bringing him flowers and touching him all the time, just because.

“That's what it means,” he goes on, carefully planting his elbows on the mattress, “to love someone. I love you and I worry about you, so I'm by your side - and if you break up with me, if you don't want me here, I'll just be worrying about you from miles away, but I always will be. I'll always be hoping that you're okay. I can't turn it off.”

Buck opens his mouth, but Eddie puts a feather-light hand on his thigh and squeezes, just a little.

“And that's not a burden. Loving you isn't a burden, Buck, you have to know that,” he says, his eyes wide, unflinching as he chases Buck's gaze.

Buck sniffs. He can't cry, because he only has one hand to wipe his face with, and Eddie's holding that one, and Buck's feeling a little like he might never want to let him go.

“I don't,” he shakes his head, swallows, breathes through it. “I don't know that I do.”

Eddie nods, because of course this isn't news to him.

“But I want to,” he says, trying to get enough control of his fingers to squeeze Eddie's hand. He feels too big for his skin, but not in a bad way. “And while I figure that out, if you want—”

Eddie laughs, almost. “I want,” he says as he stands up, “to be wherever you are. I got your back, you got mine, right? That was the deal.”

“I'm not sure you signed up for everything that goes on up here,” Buck says, rolling his head side to side on the pillow.

“Because I'm the poster child for mental health,” Eddie says, stopping him with a touch to the side of his face. He's close enough to kiss, and Buck wants to kiss him a little desperately, wants to find out how he tastes. It's Monday, and he'll taste like something new. “Of course I signed up for it. If I can't handle you at your 'breaking up because you'll become too much to handle'—”

And Buck laughs then, out loud, and turns his face into Eddie's touch. Eddie, who always makes things better.

“—I don't deserve you at your 'reciting the chemical elements ordered by atomic number'.”

“I learned that as a party trick,” Buck says, a little absentminded because his eyes are glued to Eddie's face, the joy that's slowly blooming there, starting in the corners of his eyes.

“And it's very impressive,” Eddie says, his teeth coming out as he smiles. “But I mean it. There's a reason they say in sickness and in health.”

Buck remembers, then, Eddie looking up at the stars, a night that never happened. He'll have to tell Eddie before he leaves the hospital, wash himself clean, but maybe—maybe Eddie might understand.

Maybe they could have another night, just like it except not at all.

“We're not married,” Buck says, his gaze falling to Eddie's lips.

“Yet,” Eddie replies quietly, and when he leans down, Buck is already stretched as far off the bed as his body will allow to meet him halfway.

He'd kissed him, for all intents and purposes, something like half an hour ago, and this Eddie kisses just as carefully, with a reverence that makes Buck choke up.

But he can feel how real this is, down to the exhaustion already gnawing on his bones. He feels heavy and awkward and messy and so painfully present, down to the novel sensation of Eddie's long stubble against his chin, the sharp pinprick of pain when he moves too quickly and nudges his cannula. Eddie tastes like peppermint gum and smells like the hospital, but Buck wants to sink into him and never come up for air.

“I'm sorry,” he breathes when they separate, the beeps of the heart monitor next to him coming in just a little quicker. “I love you, I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry I let you leave,” Eddie says, running his thumb over Buck's bottom lip. “We should've just—I don't know.”

“Talked about it?” Buck grins. That's always Eddie's line, but he's coming to see that Eddie might have a point.

“Something like that,” Eddie nods when he sits back down. “We should actually schedule an appointment.”

Buck sighs. He knows full well that they should; their couples' therapist encouraged them to come in once every few months, just to check up on how they're doing, and it would have been coming up soon anyway. He'll go, and he'll hold Eddie's hand the entire time, and he'll come out of the session better for it, but for now, he's just—a little tired, still.

“After I get out here,” he says.

“After you get out of here,” Eddie agrees, bringing Buck's hand to his lips again. “It'll probably be a while still, but at least you can tell me what to bring. I tried to make it—I don't know, homey, or something, but it's still a hospital room.”

Buck looks around. The rest of the room is mostly the usual, ready to be scrubbed clean and occupied by someone else the minute Buck leaves - but there are little signs of life, of people coming to see him while he was gone. Cards on the windowsill, at least three of which bear Christopher's big blocky handwriting, a pile of blankets Buck recognizes as their own, the reed diffuser from their bedroom, and—

A bouquet of flowers that's just this side of wilted, bright green leaves and flowers in half a dozen different colors.

“We're gonna have to find something else to talk about until then,” Eddie says.

Buck looks over at him, gorgeous even when he's bone-tired and pale under artificial lights, and thinks of cinema trips, of teasing Eddie about the size of his salmon filets, of soda and stargazing and a dog named Soup.

Of the love that guided him, day by repeated day, back to remembering why he couldn't give it up.

“You know,” he says, lacing his fingers with Eddie's, “I actually think I might have a story.”