Chapter Text
mid-S7
Eddie likes Tommy well enough. He's been a good friend, in the short time they've known each other. They have a lot of shared interests (martial arts, Buck, flying, Buck). It's always been a good time when they've hung out. Tommy's a standup guy. Hell, he saved Bobby and Athena's lives. He is a good man.
Unfortunately, in that moment, watching Tommy and Buck share a kiss in Chimney's hospital room right before the wedding, Eddie finds that he really can't lie to himself any more.
He is intensely, insanely jealous of Tommy.
Eddie wishes that Tommy was a criminal, a terrorist, an enemy agent. Someone that Eddie could have extraordinarily-rendered straight away to a black site, never to be seen again. Never to touch Buck that way again. Something dark and possessive churns in the pit of his stomach. His fist clenches involuntarily. He feels dangerous.
"This doesn't change anything between us," Eddie had said when Buck had come out to him.
Of all the many, many times that Eddie had lied to Buck, that might have been the biggest lie of all.
It changed everything.
late S4
The hotel ballroom is dimly lit. Forty round tables are scattered across the large room, each seating eight to twelve. There's a podium on a raised platform on the wall opposite the doors, with two long tables to either side. Dinner will be served soon, but in the meantime, a man in a cheap suit is speaking. Eddie recognizes him from television; he's the evening weatherman for channel 8 news. He's reading the list of nominees for some award - do they give Emmys for weather reporting? Eddie's never paid much attention to awards season in LA, much less to the daytime Emmys, but he vaguely remembers there are a whole slew of awards that don't get televised in the main ceremony.
The crowd of attendees applauds at whatever the weatherman has just said, and a woman at a table near the podium gasps and stands up, quickly taking the steps onto the stage. She briskly walks behind the row of dignitaries to the center, shakes the hand of the announcer, and accepts a trophy. She leans into the microphone and begins to give an acceptance speech.
Eddie recognizes her. It's Taylor Kelly.
He instinctively tries to take a step backward, but he's already pressed against the side wall of the room, alongside the rest of the waitstaff, waiting for a break in the ceremonies.
"Control, people here may recognize me," he quietly murmurs, knowing that his comms will pick it up even over the background noise in the room. "Should I abort?"
There's no immediate response, and he scans the far side of the room, focusing on the table where Taylor had been sitting. His heart sinks. There, in a rented tuxedo just a bit too narrow in the shoulders, is Evan Buckley, face beaming with a wide grin of pride as his girlfriend accepts her award.
After a minute his earwig chirps out, "Negative, Fireman. Hold position."
Eddie sighs, and tugs on the bottom of his white jacket. "Firefighter," he mutters to himself.
It'll probably be fine, anyway. Buck and Taylor are sitting on the far side of the room. His target is on the nearer end of the stage. Neither of them will be expecting to see him, not dressed like this anyway. The whole point of going in as staff is to be faceless and unremarkable. He can do the job, then slip out through the kitchen, exactly as the mission plan had called for.
The audience applauds again. It's time.
Eddie grabs a pitcher of water and approaches the left end of the stage as the other waitstaff fan out throughout the room. He picks up the water glass of the woman on the end and refills it, then moves to the man to her right. His glass is already full, so he skips it and moves to the third person in. This glass is half-empty. He picks it up, tops it off from the pitcher, and smoothly drops in a fast-dissolving tablet that he'd held between his middle and index fingers of the hand holding the glass. It's a simple sleight-of-hand trick that he'd practiced for hours during training, and has employed in the field more than a few times since then. Eddie isn't even sure what the pill is, this time - narcotic, paralytic, or poison. He isn't primary on this mission, so his briefing had been minimal. The next stage of the op was someone else's problem. His part was just to get the right material into the right glass, and then walk away.
He finishes filling the other glasses on that side of the long table, and retreats to the kitchens. "Package delivered," he murmurs. His earwig clicks once in acknowledgement. He drops off the water pitcher at the kitchen's beverage station and returns to the ballroom.
He can't leave quite yet. Sometimes they don't drink the water. He might need to "season" the filet too.
He stands against the wall, keeping an eye on the main table and trying to look as bored as the rest of the staff. His eyes keep returning to Taylor and Buck, though. Buck is leaning in, whispering something in Taylor's ear that's making her blush. No doubt congratulating her, or telling her how he plans to celebrate with her, later, at the loft. Or maybe they took a room here, and will go upstairs with a bottle of champagne. The A shift is about to start a 48, but not until 5pm the next day; plenty of time to celebrate. Buck brushes a strand of hair away from Taylor's ear and leans in further, pressing a soft kiss to her cheek.
At the main table, the target picks up his water glass and takes a deep swallow.
Eddie exhales, and moves toward the kitchen. "Package opened," he says, and proceeds to his exfil route. His earwig chirps again. Eddie moves through the staff corridors quickly, taking a freight elevator down to the loading dock, where he steps into the back of an unmarked white van.
Control is sitting in front of a bank of monitors, speaking softly into her headset. Eddie quickly strips out of the catering uniform, hanging it carefully back on its hanger; Wardrobe is kind of fussy about wrinkles when it's a short-term assignment like this. He changes back into his civvies, trying not to distract Control, who is directing another team. He takes out his earwig and returns it to its charger, glancing at the monitors as he goes. It looks like whatever was in the pill wasn't fast-acting, anyway, which was probably a good thing with Buck in the room. If their target had gone down right away, Buck would have probably jumped in to resuscitate. Always trying to be the hero.
Eddie slips out of the van, goes down a level in the parking garage to his truck, and drives home, where Carla is with Christopher. He'd been out for less than three hours, on his "date" with a woman who doesn't exist. Chris is already asleep. "Maybe next weekend," he tells Carla with a smile when she asks if he'll be seeing tonight's date again. "We didn't make firm plans. I'll let you know."
During their next shift, Buck looks a little squirrelly for the first couple of hours. Finally, he pulls Eddie aside after a call.
"Hey, man, what were you doing at the Westin last night? Waiting tables?" he asks in a hushed voice.
Eddie checks to make sure no one is near, and flashes an easy smile. "Everyone needs a side hustle, right?"
"I was going to come over to say hi, but, like, you totally disappeared."
"Yeah, they had me loading up the trays in the back. Hey, could you... could you not tell Cap? LAFD doesn't like us picking up other gigs on our downtime." Eddie puts on a bashful smile, a well-practiced aw-shucks grin, like a schoolboy who'd been caught in a harmless prank.
Buck frowns. "If you need help, like, financially..."
Eddie shakes his head hastily. He needs Buck to drop this. "Nah, man, I'm good. Just, you know, Christmas is coming, and Christopher is really growing like a weed these days." He changes the subject. "Hey, I saw Taylor won an award. Give her my congratulations."
Buck grins, easily diverted into talking about how excited Taylor had been and what a boost it was going to be for her career. Eddie smiles at his friend and slightly wants to die, not only because of the detailed incident disclosure report he's going to have to file with the agency after all of this.
This is why he hates running jobs in LA. 12.5 million people, and yet.
Buck doesn't bring it up again, but the following weekend he takes Chris to the mall and returns with a new pair of sneakers and an oversized jacket for the boy. Eddie argues with him, but Buck won't let him pay him back.