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scarliefrancis · 1 month ago

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everything you want is on the other side

Buck slides a beer Tommy's way and fights the urge to duck his head. "So, I just thought, maybe, if you wanted to, we could -."

"I'm seeing someone," Tommy says, and blinks, and stares at the label of his bottle.

"Oh," Buck says, and shoves the hurt down deep where it won't inconvenience anyone. That's - it's been - been longer than they were ever together, hasn't it? And, yeah, after that comment in the helicopter maybe Buck had had this expectation that Tommy would wait for him, but that wasn't fair to assume, was it? It's - they're - "I... I'm happy for you."

Tommy gives him a strange look.

"We - is friends an option on the table though? Like, is your ex being around going to screw that up for you?"

Tommy snorts, derisively, and Buck thinks - okay then.

He'd avoided Buck plenty well before, so Buck doesn't really know why he'd have agreed to come out for drinks with him if that wasn't in the table. Maybe this is just - a clean break. They never really got there, until now.

There'd been a sunny afternoon, a few months in, where Tommy had taken him out to a stretch of beach and tossed a football back and forth with him for an hour, the both of them getting progressively sweatier and progressively more horny every time they caught the other checking them out, and Buck had thought to himself - I don't do this with any of my friends. Just - out and about enjoying the day and fucking around for the hell of it, and he'd been so caught up in the idea that Tommy could be a friend as well as a lover that he'd - he'd started picturing it.

A life. Shared, in all the ways that mattered. Holding hands on the beach and smiling at each other in the surf. Teasing one another about the silliest things, too many inside jokes to count, making Tommy laugh and laugh and laugh.

He'd never let it go farther than that. Hazy edges of a home filled with filmy curtains and Tommy's insane DVD collection got shoved away, like pulling back the curtain was just asking for disaster.

Being taken care of, when things weren't easy, when one of them was pissed, when everything was perfect other than a flare up in his leg.

He'd always thought they were on the same page and never bothered to ask if they were reading the same book.

Tommy's was a tragedy, in three parts.

Buck's was a fluffy short story, all purple prose and gratuitous overindulgence, with a kick-your-teeth-in surprise unhappy ending.

So. So now someone else gets the Tommy experience.

He's irrationally annoyed they won't appreciate it. He's insanely jealous by the idea of them appreciating it better than he ever did.

"He - do you want to tell me about him?"

Tommy's brows knit. "Well, he has me doing homework, which I don't love."

Buck lets the words work through him, over him. Younger, again? Like Tommy has a type, and that, for some reason, grinds Buck's gears. Or is that some sort of euphemism for -

"And part of the syllabus was talking to the people who scare me about the things that scare me."

And that sounds like -

"Shilling out all this money out of pocket so the Chief doesn't know I'm a basket case and the first thing he has me do is confront fear like that's not the damn foundation keeping me standing."

Buck picks at his coaster.

Tommy clocks the move and stills, glancing up at him, startled. "You thought I meant -."

"Yeah."

Tommy's hand shifts away from his beer, towards Buck's, before he aborts, spreading fingers against the sticky two-top they'd snagged from a couple who barely glanced at them as they threw on their coats, too starry-eyed in lust to notice the two burly men who'd been lingering by the bar waiting for a table to open up. He couldn't blame them. They'd been right there, obsessed with the way it felt to be naked together in all the ways except the ones that mattered, to get lost in the slide of skin and the feel of tongues sliding together, bodies shifting into one another.

Buck does the scariest thing he can think of. He looks up, and rolls a hand away from his own bottle. Palm up, fingers loose, crawling two inches forward.

His heart is somewhere in his throat and he doesn't look away when Tommy blinks at the extended hand. "I scare you?" Buck asks, and Tommy leans forward to knit their fingers together.

"You scare the everliving shit out of me, Evan."

They didn't really talk, the way they should have.

If Buck has to think back on that day at the beach, with the wind turning Tommy's loose curls into a vortex atop his head, with the tide licking at their ankles, with the ridges of the football grooving into Buck's palm - they'd flirted, and had a surface level conversation over the sounds of a pair of five-year-olds screaming their lungs out as they tried to fill a hole they'd dug in the sand with buckets and buckets and buckets of water that was gone each time they made it back from the surf with a new pail-ful of ocean.

The kids hadn't even cared that their hole never held any of that water in. They'd just been thrilled to pour another bucket full of water in, the sand drinking it all up.

"You never scared me," Buck admits, and hates the way something sad flickers behind Tommy's eyes, because he's spent enough time doing postmortem on their relationship to have an idea about why that would hurt Tommy. "That - it meant a lot, to me, that I always felt so solid with you. That I never had to question..."

Tommy's smile pulls at something deep in his gut. It's not a happy smile, it's the kind with broken glass hiding beneath the surface, ready to slice and bleed in an irreparable way.

"And then I ripped the rug out," Tommy says. It's his judgy tone, the one Buck always hated to hear him use on himself. The one he'd used a lot more than Buck had wanted to notice, at the time.

"I didn't exactly make a good case for myself," Buck tells him, and Tommy squeezes his hand.

"Larry says I let the fear take the cyclic nine times out of ten."

Larry's a weird fucking name for a therapist, Buck doesn't say. "That is not the way he said that," Buck actually says, and Tommy glances up from behind his lashes, the skin on one side of his mouth dimpling.

On early mornings in a bunk when he couldn't sleep after a shitty call, he'd sometimes imagined what those devastating smile lines would look like as the skin around the muscle got thinner, less buoyant. What the specks of grey in his high and tight fade would look like as they became more prominent.

"We workshopped a way to paraphrase it without tearing my own hair out."

"Why are you going to therapy, Tommy?"

The hand squeezing his tightens like a vice.

"Because you scare the everliving shit out of me," Tommy says, amusement in his tone even though his eyes are swimming with unshed tears. "And I'm tired of either of us thinking that doesn't mean something."

"You can't use me as an excuse instead of admitting you're a little messed up in the head."

Tommy's laugh sticks in his throat somewhere, Adams apple bobbing. "That's what Larry said, too."

He tries to picture Tommy in a room with soft lighting, vaguely comfortable seating, a stress ball he could flick between his enormous hands because he has to be fiddling with something at all times or he goes a little crazy - toe tapping or knee jumping while he flexes his palms against his thighs. Larry probably has a field day taking notes of all the ways Tommy stims to make himself feel like a person.

"So...what does that mean?"

He looks like he wants to bolt. It's such a stark contrast - the way he always made sure Buck was the most comfortable he could possibly be and the way he always had his muscles braced for flight.

"It means I can't shake you. Means every time I had a foot out the door the other one was digging in on the other side of the frame. Means I..." Tommy shifts, again, pushes the beer off to the side to reach out and wrap his other hand around their clasped hands. "Means I still don't know what the fuck is wrong with me but I'm hoping you have the patience to be there while I figure it out."

"As...as what, exactly?"

He's scared of the answer, he realizes. Scared that Tommy thinks he's too messed up to - to be with someone. Scared that what Tommy needs is something he's screwed up so many times he's barely spoken to his best friend without a fight in months.

He's scared.

Oh.

Oh, he's scared.

Scared of trying to fill a hole in the sand with briney water.

"I'm a terrible friend," Tommy intones, voice soft, lower lip tucked beneath his teeth. "Think I could have been a better boyfriend."

"You were the best boyfriend," Buck says, a little offended on his behalf, but he's not - he's not wrong. They were so caught up in the being together part that they never figured out what they were trying to do with it.

"I was very good at pretending I didn't want more from you than you were giving me."

It looks like it hurts him at least half as much to say as it does for Buck to hear it. He swallows around a suddenly tight throat. "Will you - can you tell me what you wanted?"

Tommy's face goes through a series of expressions. Lands somewhere between terrified and determined. "Fair warning, I still want them."

Something warm and careful curls up and purrs beneath his ribcage. He's scared. They both are.

That means something.

"Don't try to reassure me if it gets scary," Buck says, and Tommy chokes out a phlegmy laugh, takes a stuttering breath, and lets loose.

---

"Evan."

Buck blinks awake, and rolls his eyes blearily until he catches sight of Tommy, kneeling over him on the bed.

The look on his face has Buck scrambling to wakefulness, and Tommy looks guilty, for a moment, before he tamps it down. "Its okay. I'm okay."

It's -Buck darts a look at the trusty alarm clock he's had at his bedside since the first time he slept through five alarms on his phone - three in the morning and when they spoke on the phone earlier tonight Tommy made it clear he had too much going on tomorrow to make the drive to Buck's. So. Not okay.

"Fine, I'm not - I'm in one piece," Tommy admits. He looks wrung out, exhausted. Something must have happened in the six hours Buck's been sleeping, because he was having a killer shift when they left off for the night. He'd been excited about having to execute some slick maneuver during that high rise fire downtown.

Buck goes to work unbuttoning Tommy's jeans. He leaves his shoes by the door, every time he uses the key Buck gave him three months ago (his heart in his throat, nerves making the words more difficult than they should have been) so the pants come off without a struggle, and then Tommy's whisking his shirt over his head, and he's bare and antsy as he stares at Buck, shifting on his heels. "Big spoon or little spoon?" Buck asks, and something in Tommy stills, the frantic energy bleeding out of him like that question debrided the layer of skin over the blister that is his mental state at this moment in time.

Tommy climbs over him to get to his side of the bed. "Little," he murmurs, already turning to show Buck his back, and around the quiet maneuvering of the duvet Buck gathers him up, gathers him in, an arm under the pillow and his hand spread wide across Tommy's chest.

He'll talk about it when he's ready.

Or Buck will have to do the work and force it out of him, later. Larry says Buck needs to push more than he does and fuck anyone who tells him he's making it about himself.

Larry's kind of an asshole. He doesn't join Tommy very often, but when he does he gets why Tommy keeps going back. It's not the right style for Buck, one-on-one. But he sure does know how to get his point across.

Tommy's got more freckles on his shoulders from helping Buck put together a new garden bed out in the yard three days ago, a kink in his neck from taking a dive playing volleyball on the beach last week.

("We won, didn't we?"

"And now Mr. Side Sleeper won't be able to find a comfortable position for a month."

"Next time I'll let Ravi and Lucy crow about beating us for the rest of our lives.").

"I want kids," Tommy says, out of nowhere, swinging his ass back into the cradle of Buck's pelvis, like he doesn't feel quite close enough to Buck, yet. Buck tightens his hold. "I know we haven't talked about it. Figured it was pretty obvious what your opinion on the matter was."

A barbeque, three months into them trying again, Chris trying to get his attention while he had Robert spitting up on his shoulder and Jee throwing a tantrum about not being the center of attention - when Tommy had swooped in with the assist, yanking Jee up onto his knee to distract her and smiling at a grateful looking Christopher. Buck had stared at him for the entirety of Chris's breakdown of the latest exhibit at the MOMA while the want threatened to swallow him whole.

He hadn't bothered to ask how Tommy had managed to turn that tantrum around so quickly.

There's still so much they don't know about each other.

They're getting the hang of asking now. Telling. Listening. Pushing through the terror of an assumption.

"There was a couple, my last flight. Broken ankle and some scrapes and bruises up in Runyon. Pregnant woman married to an idiot of a man."

Buck hums.

"Guy decided three hundred yards up the trail to let his wife know he never wanted kids."

"Sounds like a nightmare."

"Garret had to strap him down and they still managed to argue themselves hoarse before we made it to the hospital. And I just got to thinking - if I don't tell you shit, you can't read my damn mind and ferret it out. I don't want to be a decrepit old man when our kids graduate high school."

Our kids kind of kicks him in the solar plexus, but he lets it bruise over, for the time being. "You're gonna be built like a brick shithouse when you're eighty, shut up."

Tommy chuckles. Sighs, and tips his head back. "I had a panic attack in the truck because I don't want them without you and I never asked."

Buck presses a kiss to his temple. Another to a new spray of freckles on his neck.

"I get to be the bad cop dad."

Tommy snorts, and snuggles in a little bit more. "Like that was ever a question, I'm gonna be the biggest pushover this side of the Mississippi." He's quiet, for a long, long moment. A hand settles over top of Buck's. "Not now. But I want to - talk about it. Figure out the options."

Kam's been bugging him about the viability of her womb in the most graphic way possible since she met Tommy once, six months ago. So that - that's an option. Maybe.

If they decide on something soon.

They don't even live together. Technically.

"Larry's gonna have a field day with this one," Tommy says, and Buck tucks his nose into the hair at the back of Tommy's head.

"You want me to go?"

"No. I'll tell you, after, but. No, this is a Tommy Special."

"Your dad?"

"My father. My mom. Three uncles and twenty shitty captains and - and Bobby."

The sting is the same as always. He just found a place to store the pain.

"Is this a tarp in the hole situation, or do you think you can put the bucket away?"

Tommy groans. "You know I hate it when you and Larry come up with convoluted metaphor."

His breathing is evening out. The hand over Buck's isn't shaking, anymore.

"You're gonna be a stupid good dad," Buck tells him, and doesn't mind so much when Tommy's lifts up his hand to press a kiss to his knuckles and they come back wet with tears.

#you scare the everliving shit out of me!!!#bucktommy #they’re like religion to me at this point #fanfiction

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