#em.fic

[archerincombat]

heard they were talking about my guy

[louisdotmp3]

move the kitchen table out to the lawn

It feels like Eddie hasn’t seen Buck in weeks.

or,

local woman listens to slow dancing by aly & aj and concocts a little story to quench the 6a boys drought

-

It feels like Eddie hasn’t seen Buck in weeks.

Which was absolutely not true, he had just had a twenty-four with him earlier this week.  But still, he’d been weirdly distant for a while now.  Eddie couldn’t quite pinpoint what the turning point might have been or what exactly set off yet another frustrating distance between them.  Even as he puzzled over it he knew, he knew , that Buck was not the only one that manufactured stupid distance in their relationship periodically.  It’s just that this was the first time that it’s happened that Eddie has recognized that it was a sort of cyclical thing for the two of them, and he was sick of it, he’d decided.  There had to be a better way.

He was currently wandering through the planetarium with Chris and there was something about the simulation of two stars orbiting each other that made him want to compare his and Buck’s relationship to something cosmic like that.  The initial slingshotting as their combined gravity pulled them from their lonely orbits, the long elliptical orbits as the two stars started traveling through space together, and the closer, slower, more circular orbits around each other the two settle into that inexplicably made Eddie’s chest ache a little.

Read on AO3

[louisdotmp3]

uhmm, here is the first bit of ad astra per aspera 2003 bc i want u to have it. after a year. one day maybe soon i will publish the whole thing but until then,

-

Dean stays with Bobby into the new year.  He does some tune ups on the car and helps Bobby out with his projects.  He cooks them breakfast most mornings and it takes him back to one of the long stays he and Sam had spent here before it all went to shit between Bobby and his dad.  He’d been fourteen and said he wanted to learn how to cook and Bobby had laughed and said he only knew how to make breakfast and heat up some soup.  Dean didn’t say it but Bobby made the fluffiest pancakes and the best scrambled eggs he’d ever had, and he’d eaten in diners all over the country at that point.  And besides, when he thought of a home-cooked meal, he thought of this kitchen and Bobby’s hands making food.  

One afternoon Bobby puts on Rumours as they work on an old rusted out Firebird.  A few songs in, Dean asks who this is and Bobby gives him the most scandalized look he’s ever seen in his life.

“Did your Daddy teach you nothin’?'' he asks, half-jokingly.  Dean ducks back under the hood and laughs.  “You’re missing out on the classics, boy.”

Dean tells him about the albums he’s been listening to, from the recommendations of strangers.  Tells him about Ben Folds but not Indigo Girls.  He mentions Tracy Chapman and he knows the tone of his voice is reverent.

“I got a live album of hers around here somewhere.  Remind me tonight and I’ll dig it out for you,” Bobby says.

Dean pops his head over the hood to peer at Bobby, “Really?”

“Sure.”  The next song starts and Bobby puts a hand out and tilts his head up, as if to listen to the music better, “Alright, quiet, pay attention.”

They’re quiet for a few songs, just the sound of their tools and Fleetwood Mac, and then.

Time cast a spell on you but you won't forget me

I know I could've loved you but you would not let me

Dean is abruptly thankful to be able to hide behind the hood of this car.  Then he smiles.  Bobby's picked this album on purpose, of course, and that’s what puts a lump in his throat.  They hadn’t talked about it since the first day, but he spends the first blue days of 2003 in the care of a man who can speak in the languages that don’t get lodged in Dean’s throat.

-

It gets too cold one week to work on the car, even in the little shed serving as a faux-mechanic shop.  Bobby had rigged up a heating setup there but it just wasn’t insulated, so with highs in the single digits they stayed inside for most of the week.  They played cards and Dean slowly made his way through more of Bobby’s sci-fi collection.  Bobby unearthed a pile of his favorite records and Dean played them while he drank coffee and made breakfast in the morning.  

Bobby made an enormous batch of stew and at night they watched Food Network.  One night, Ina Garten said she was making a roast chicken dinner and a tiramisu to welcome her husband home.  Dean thought the roast chicken seemed far, far out of his skill level but the tiramisu…he could see himself making that.  For someone he loved.  Dean took a drink of his beer and pretended his heart didn’t ache.

Dean went out once a day to start the Impala and Bobby’s truck and let them run for a few minutes, and each time came bursting back inside in a gust of cold air rubbing his frozen hands together and grabbing for a fresh cup of coffee.

Bobby eventually frowned at him and said, “Need to get you some real winter gear, you’ll freeze your balls off.”

Dean shrugged, “It’s fine, not that cold.”  Bobby looked at him like he’d spoken gibberish, and okay.  Maybe he deserved that look while he was standing in the kitchen with his shoulders up to his ears cradling a cup of coffee in both hands like it was the only thing keeping him upright.  

Bobby digs around that day and finds him a bright orange ribbed ski hat and an ugly pair of camo hunting gloves.  He wears them the next day when Bobby drives the two of them into town to a Goodwill, and warrants no objections from Dean.  The two of them flip through coats together until they come upon a good, sturdy Carhartt.

“You need anything else?” Bobby asks.  And the thing is, Dean hates thrift stores.  Tries to avoid them whenever he has the cash for a Walmart instead.  He hates thinking about Sam getting made fun of in middle school for the clothes Dean had bought him, hates remembering the two of them swimming in their clothes they’d bought two sizes too big just so they’d last longer.  But this had been unexpectedly nice, just flipping through coats with Bobby and showing him the ones with crazy colors and patterns that made him laugh.

“Yeah, actually,” Dean says.  They end up flipping through shirts and Dean finds a Led Zeppelin t-shirt that he can’t pass up.  While Dean goes to look through the jeans Bobby says he’ll be over in homewares, which Dean thinks is kind of a funny image but just nods and tells him he’ll meet him there.

When Dean makes his way over with the cart Bobby is already walking toward him, two mugs in hand.

“Whatcha got?”

Bobby raises the mugs triumphantly.  They’re two white mugs with blue geese marching around the rim.  It was the mug Dean had seen Bobby drink from as long as he’d known him in duplicate.  “You ever see these you grab ‘em for me, will ya?”

“What, one isn’t enough?”

“It’s just in case.”

“Just in case, what?”

“Just in case I break ‘em,” Bobby says, and puts them in the cart.

“Bobby, how many goose mugs have you broken?” Dean asks.  Bobby just looks at him and then turns to walk toward the register, and Dean laughs.  “Bobby!”

Dean is still laughing as the cashier rings them up and Bobby pays for everything, and it’s not helped that Bobby has pulled on such a gruff look to counteract the revelation that he stockpiles the one mug he’ll drink out of because he can’t help but break them, apparently. 

“Thanks, Bobby,” Dean says as they walk out, seeing as the only things Bobby’d gotten were those two mugs and a paperback, while Dean had taken the opportunity to grab a few pairs of jeans, a few t-shirts, a new belt, the Carhartt, and a University of South Dakota sweatshirt that had looked so comfortable he couldn’t pass it up.  

“You’re welcome, can’t have you traipsing around the country with no real coat, idjit.”  They pile their haul into the back seat of Bobby’s truck and Dean walks the cart back.  “You hungry?” Bobby asks.

“Starving,” Dean says.

“How do you feel about Chinese?”

“There’s Chinese in Sioux Falls?” Dean asks, incredulously.

“This ain’t the middle of nowhere,” Bobby shoots back.

Later Dean wrinkles his nose as the massive plate of egg foo young Bobby ordered is placed on the table.  Bobby rolls his eyes and tells him to stop making that face and try a little.  Dean wrinkles his nose but does.

As always, Bobby is right.

At the end of the meal they crack open their fortune cookies and Dean reads his aloud.

“Miles are covered one step at a time.”

-

Not long after, Dean gets a call.

“Got a case up in Boise I can’t quite figure.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He can hear the tinny roar of a diesel engine starting up through the phone’s tiny speaker, “What’ve you been up to?”

“Oh, this and that.  Need me to do some research?  I can get into it,” Dean offers, but has a feeling he knows where this is going.  Even though he has the best library of supernatural books west of the Mississippi at his disposal in this house, it’s not like he’d tell his dad that.  And anyway, he’s never been the research guy.

“Nah, just need some backup.  Already called someone about hitting the books,” his dad says.  Nothing new under the sun.  “How far out are you?”

“Uh, about a day,” Dean says without thinking.

“Alright, see you then.”  His dad hangs up.

Right.

He momentarily wishes he’d thought faster and given himself more time, and then pushes that thought away.  People were presumably dying and he could help.  The only thing he was doing here was nursing a broken heart and it was probably past time to get back to the real world.  He’d spent nearly a month here without even pretending to check for cases, and he finally lets the guilt tug at him.

It’s time to get back to work.

He finds Bobby in his study.  Bobby’s been working on a translation lately so his desk is more disorganized than usual and there are stacks of books towering precariously, dotted around the room.  It makes Dean’s eye twitch and he desperately wants to get Bobby some more shelves and organize it properly but Bobby said he likes it like this, that there’s a system and he knows where everything is.  He clears his throat.

“Dad called,” he announces.

Bobby looks up, pen in his hand.  He scratches his chin, “Did he.”  It’s not a question, it’s a venomous acknowledgement.  Dean sighs.

“Just needs a little help with a case up in Boise, said I’d be there soon as I could.”

Bobby considers him a moment longer, then sighs and puts down what he was working on.  “You leaving tonight?” Bobby asks.

Dean nods, “Soon as I’m packed, yeah.”

Bobby gets up and starts shuffling through one of his drawers before he pulls out an old hardback book and a brand new Stanley thermos.  He hands them to Dean unceremoniously.

“Happy birthday, sorry they ain’t wrapped.”

Dean turns the book over, The Haunting of Hill House.  The cover shows green and blue leaves on a black background, and the spine is worn and cracked.  Dean wonders how old it is.

“Thanks, Bobby,” he says, genuinely touched.  It’s two weeks before his birthday, and Bobby had had these just sitting in his drawer waiting for it.

Bobby nods and gestures for the thermos, “I’ll put on a pot of coffee for you, y’oughta stop drinking that gas station shit.”  He hands it to him and Bobby moves past him toward the kitchen.

Dean makes his way up to his room - the room he’d been staying in that he’d started thinking of as his, at least.  His few books were stacked neatly on the nightstand, largest to smallest.  His clothes were tucked away in the small dresser, atop which his sketchbook and pencils sat.  His new coat and hat hung on the back of the door.  Dean fished his duffel bag out from underneath the bed and he settled back into the familiar feeling of being swept away by the current of his life as he packed it into this one small, faded space for the thousandth time.

Bobby sends him off with a thermos full of hot coffee, a few new tapes he’d pulled out, and a hug.

“Call if you get into trouble,” Bobby says, looking him in the eye, “And call if you don’t.”

Dean smiles, “Promise.”

The sun is setting as he pulls out of the salvage yard, the dust of the gravel road kicked up behind him obscuring the house in the rearview.  Dean pops in the Fleetwood Mac album he’d been given and the sky melts into gold.

[archerincombat]

You get what you get (and you don't get to pick 'em)

just a short lil drabble for the start of Ravi week—not one of the two official fics i’m working on but what can i say? the power of ravi compelled me and i wrote this in the last hour. title from family is family by kacey musgraves

day one: family | 1k

Ravi isn’t expecting his sister to show up in Los Angeles without warning, seeing as it’s a several hour flight from Austin. But really, it’s the conversation Ananya is having with Buck that makes him think, Well, it’s been a good run. Shame I have to quit three days before my shield ceremony.

B-shift has just gotten back from their last call of the day, so Ravi’s exhausted and maybe, possibly hallucinating, but the B-shift Captain claps him on the back and tells him he’ll put in a good word with the Fire Chief, which unnerves him more than anything else and maybe Ravi’s really running on fumes and he’s hallucinating because the only other option seems to be Ananya. In the station kitchen. Speaking to Buck Buckley.

She looks put together in a way that Ravi isn’t, and if her standards weren’t, “I don’t date white people,” then Ravi admits, as an older brother, he would be kind of nervous. Because Ravi does date white people and he thinks Buck, the walking benefactor of therapists everywhere, is kind of hot, sometimes.

Less so when he’s speaking to his sister, though.

“Hello,” he interrupts, only half-way up the staircase but unable to bear them not paying attention to him for a second longer. (What? He’s a Leo moon.) “Please tell me I’m having a heat stroke. Or any kind of stroke, really. I’m not picky. In fact, just bring back the cancer, I think—”

“Ravi,” Ananya greets, bumping his shoulder with a teasing smile on her face. “Buck was just telling me—”

And here’s the problem, because Ravi has no issue with Ananya spilling embarrassing childhood stories about him, it can’t be any worse than spending your college tuition on a motorcycle only to crash it, or Baby In Wall, which took place when Buck was a whole ass 25 year old. It’s not Ananya sharing stories that Ravi has an issue with. “—about the q-word situation. Super cool of you, dude. Way to make a first impression.”

Ravi blinks at her, trying to convey whatever he’s trying to convey through years of growing up together in the same house. He hopes she reads, Go away now and not Huh, my older brother doesn’t want my at his job, guess I’ll stay.

“This is not—” he waves his hand, acutely aware that he’s ignoring Buck entirely. “Are our parents here? Are they hiding somewhere? Did Dad get to Bobby?”

“Hey, man,” Buck says cheerfully. “It can’t be any worse than finding out you have a brother who died of cancer and your family hid it from you their entire lives because it was technically your fault.”

Now it’s Ananya’s turn to blink. “Wow,” she replies, slowly. A lot of people are very scared. “Um, okay, so our family isn’t actually, like, traumatizing, or whatever, but yeah, they’re all in town. I just swang by to see if your friends wanted to join us for dinner tomorrow?”

Ravi thinks, Please, God no, but that’s not enough, clearly, because Buck brightens like he’s just been struck by direct sunlight and grins at Ravi, like he’s the one that orchestrated this and also like he didn’t just suggest that he and Albert have a joint graduation ceremony two months ago before Albert quit, a suggestion that Ravi’s never quite gotten over because it implies Ravi and Albert being in the same room as each other for an extended period of time and not snapping at each other.

“That would be amazing!” Buck says, grinning. “I’ll text the group. I’m sure they’re free. Are you guys vegetarian because I’ve been meaning to go vegan and—”

Ravi takes that as his cue to go take a shower, and informs his mother that if she cancels this dinner, he’ll make an appearance at the temple next to his house at least once a month.

She texts back, Why can’t you do both? and yeah, Ravi really should’ve seen that coming.

Dinner goes…well, it goes.

His dad and Hen get along well—“See, Ravi, it’s never too late to go to Med School.” And his mom and Bobby are trading recipes as she lists everything out to him with 50% less chili powder than Ravi knows she normally adds. And Eddie and Buck seem very entertained by Ananya, who’s clearly subtly trying to figure out if they’re a thing and if so, by how much, and—

It’s not terrible, all together. He sighs and Chim, who’s sitting directly to his left, shoots him a glance. “You okay, Ravi?”

They’re closer, now, after Chimney left and came back and Ravi felt like he could breathe for the first time in ages. It feels like Ravi, Chimney, and Hen, these days, if only because Bobby’s their Captain and Buck and Eddie are in their own world.

“Fine,” he says finally, feeling something like it. “Yeah, fine. I just—I don’t know, it’s all very overwhelming.”

“This is overwhelming!” Chimney exclaims. “This is—remember when you were trying to explain the plot of Riverdale to me?”

“That’s performance art. I think they just made Archie gay.”

“Right before it got canceled?”

“Oh, you know the radicals can’t win everything,” Ravi replies, swirling his fettuccine. He hears Ananya laugh at something Eddie says and smiles, just to himself. “Has anyone told you that the 118 is a little co-dependant. And weird?”

Chimney points his fork at him. “Has anyone ever told you that that’s not a bad thing?” Buck says something about tapeworms and everyone groans and Hen tells him to, “please let them have one meal in peace, Jesus Christ,” and Chimney just smirks into his pasta, sharing a glance with Ravi. “Welcome to the family, probie.”

[louisdotmp3]

gathering all my 911 fics into a little bouquet:

quarantine fwb fic (24k, E)

eddie grief fic (3k, G)

buck makes them soup and then fucks that man (3k, E)

buck realizes what this feeling is (1.5k, G)

5x14 eddie nightmare coda (500, T)

[louisdotmp3]

transcription under the cut

Eddie dreams about the boy he had a crush on in high school, he dreams of being in his high school that’s not his high school and sneaking around with the boy - which never happened in his real life - and along the way running into people from all the points in his life.  They always want to know what he’s doing there.  He doesn’t know.

He leans against the counter and it’s raining outside and the tea is hot in his hands and something shifts in his chest.  And it’s this moment with tea in his hands alone in his house for the first time in a long time and it’s raining in LA and he sits up on the counter and grips his mug with both hands.  He felt like a bruise all mottled and tender and so painfully sweet that it set your teeth on edge to touch.  It’s achingly sweet, so much so that it hurts.

Eddie didn’t believe in the universe but it felt so cosmically right for it to be raining.  He thought of Hill House and the woman who accidentally caused it to hail when she was sad.  Eddie wondered if he was haunted.  He wondered if he was sad enough to change the physical makeup of the universe.  He wondered how you were supposed to get rid of a ghost that’s always been inside of you.

[louisdotmp3]

AD ASTRA PER ASPERA

Kansas was the Sunflower State.  The state bird had a yellow chest, like a sunflower.  Kansas looked like South Dakota to Dean, down to the sunflower fields.  He’s sitting in one now, in South Dakota.  Not far from the Badlands, pulled off on the side of the highway.  He’d climbed down the bank of the road and walked right in and sat down.  It was going to storm.  There were black clouds on the horizon, far off cracks of thunder rumbling along.

For the first time in his life, he was alone.

or, the stanford era dean fic, 2002

[louisdotmp3]

upon reflection (buddie, 15k, E)

Buck doesn’t think, just says, “Hey Eds, you wanna?” Half to wipe that caught out look off his friend’s face and half because, well. Buck doesn’t not want to. It would be fun, something to do to pass some time in the most stressful month of everyone’s lives.

Eddie sits back so he’s between Buck’s thighs instead of on top of him and is slow to answer. Buck waits, and finally he answers, “Should we?”

or, Buck and Eddie get into a friends with benefits situation that quickly spirals out of control.

[louisdotmp3]

bless my homeland

Read on AO3

Eddie wishes this grief hurt him more, that he could feel it ripping into his chest. It doesn’t feel like enough, it’s never good enough. He’d watched his wife die under his own hands, before his eyes, and he’d thought of her lying in a hospital bed eight years before. Her sweat-soaked hair plastered to her forehead and her rosy cheeks. He looks at her now and she is pristine, and she’s gone. Eddie lays a hand on her arm but it’s not her, and he feels sick. He’s not sure there can be something worse than this.

He’s failing her again, he thinks. He’s always been too numb, not expressive enough. He thinks that maybe there just isn’t enough space inside him to feel as much as people deserve and he’s never known how to fix that. And now Shannon is gone and it’s still no bigger. He’s consumed but finite, and he wonders how to make himself an infinity. He wonders if he could do it, if he collapsed in on himself. He thinks about Christopher and their trips to the observatory and wonders what it would be like, to explode in such a spectacular fashion. To have a final showing that he was here and he did everything he could. To transform into something that was only space.

-

Chris is playing in Abuela’s backyard. It’s sunny out, it’s always sunny out. The back door is open and the sounds of the neighborhood drift in: windchimes, dogs barking, distant chatter. None of it feels real. Even the warm breeze that wafts in feels manufactured. He was standing at Abuela’s kitchen sink, just watching his son. He thinks that this is what time travel is. Eddie is about to snatch him away from this moment forever, and they’ll never be able to get back to this life. Wildly he thinks of Chris graduating one day and a sob bursts out of him because he won’t have his mother there.

“Eddito,” Abuela says, and he can’t stand how sad she sounds. It makes him want to clench his fists hard enough to bleed.

“I just,” he gasps, “I can’t do it.”

She rubs his back as he takes gasping breaths and tries to calm down. He feels like he might never breathe normally again. He almost hopes for it. He stares at the water droplets clinging to the sides of the sink and wonders how to stay here in the moment forever because every moment after this seems too big.

“I’m going to - I’m going to go out there and ruin his life,” Eddie says with shuddering breaths.

“Breathe, Eddie, please,” she says and pulls him around to face her. She sets her hands on his shoulders and looks at him with sad eyes and he’s ten years old again, at his Abuelo’s funeral.

“How do you do it?” he asks. He means, he means all of it but he also means - how did she tell people? What did she say to his father, how long did it take her to screw up the courage? He can feel himself shaking, imagining what his father felt in that moment.

“You love him, and this is part of loving him,” she says. Eddie shakes his head because that can’t be true. He’s eight years old.

Later, he goes and sits in the sunshine with his son. Chris asks him what’s wrong.

“Christopher,” Eddie starts, and he can see it in his eyes, that he knows. Can see the free-falling limbo of knowing without knowing just because Eddie can’t keep it together even a little bit, even for his son.

“Dad,” and it’s the smallest voice and he sounds scared. Eddie still doesn’t know how the words he needs to say are going to make it out of his mouth but he has to say them, he can’t leave Christopher hanging mid-air like this.

“Chris, Mom was in an accident.” All Eddie can hear is his blood pounding in his head.

His son looks up at him with watery eyes and asks, “Is she okay?”

And Eddie has to do this. He has to just say it. And when he says it, it’ll be real. His stomach swoops.

“No, mijo, she died.” His voice breaks.

This is worse, he thinks. The way Christopher folds in on himself, it’s the worst moment of his life.

-

Pepa takes charge of calling their parents and sisters, and Abuela is a constant presence. She puts together Christopher’s meals and sits with Eddie. Later, he’s not sure what he was doing. He must have been doing something, but it’s all just a black hole. Buck comes over the next night and tells Abuela to go and get some rest, that he’s got it tonight. Eddie numbly watches as he hugs her and tells her how sorry he is, tells her that he’ll call her in the morning. He watches as Christopher appears and Buck gets on his knees to hug him, he watches them both cry. Buck stands and scoops Christopher up, carries him to the couch, and sits next to Eddie, tucking Christopher between them.

“Hey,” Buck says.

“Hi,” Eddie says, rather pathetically.

“Have you guys eaten dinner yet?” he asks.

Eddie shakes his head. He can’t remember the last time he ate. He can’t remember the last time he was hungry. Buck reaches across the couch and rubs a hand up and down his arm like he’s trying to warm him up.

“What do you think you can eat, Eds?”

Eddie shrugs.

“How about I make pancakes and we’ll go from there,” Buck suggests.

“Okay,” Eddie says. He feels like a ghost. Usually, anything Buck says pops so brightly into his world he can feel the force of it, and now the words go right through him.

Buck turns the TV on, puts a silly cooking competition show they’d been watching lately on, and goes to cook, telling them it’ll be twenty minutes. Eddie wraps his arm around Chris and he sniffles and it feels like his heart might burst. Shannon would never get to have this again. He bites the inside of his cheek to stop the gasping sobs from coming back and thinks that it’s stupid, it’s so stupid - that someone can leave their body like that. That someone’s life can end in the middle of a breath like that. That he can’t go back, that time is ferrying him so far from her already.

He thinks that this is the closest he’ll ever be to her again. That every moment more is the new closest. He tries to breathe, he tries to focus on the colors flickering across the screen, he tries to stop the pounding in his head, but he feels trapped in his body, held prisoner in this moment.

“Chris, do you want whipped cream on your pancakes?” Buck’s head pops in the room suddenly. Christopher sniffles again and nods. “Why don’t you go ahead and do it? I don’t think I’ll put enough.”

Not needing to be asked twice, Christopher switches places with Buck. Buck sits down so gingerly next to Eddie, and he hates it. He hates being treated like glass. He would rather shatter than do whatever this was, anyway. Buck places his hand on his arm and Eddie hardly feels it.

“Eddie,” he says, soft and low. “You have to breathe. C’mon, look at me.” Eddie does. Buck takes his hand and presses it to his chest with one hand, and wraps his other around the back of his neck. He feels Buck’s thumb stroke back and forth, and he feels Buck take slow, deliberate breaths. He breathes, because Buck wants him to.

He hears Christopher coming back into the room, and can’t help but make an embarrassing strangled noise when he hugs Eddie. Buck slowly rubs his back and sits with them for a few minutes until they all calm down a little.

“Alright, Diaz’s,” Buck says, “It’s time to eat, come on.” He herds them both into the kitchen and sits them down at the island. Buck pushes Christopher’s plate of chocolate chip pancakes with whipped cream toward him and assembles Eddie’s, giving him two plain pancakes with butter and syrup. He places it in front of him and hands him a fork.

Eddie just looks at it.

“Just a few bites, man,” Buck says quietly. Eddie takes a bite. The way Buck has been looking at him he wasn’t sure if he was about to reach across the table and start cutting his food up into pieces.

“Mom loved chocolate chip pancakes,” Christopher says, and Eddie doesn’t know how he’s supposed to swallow past the lump in his throat, but he finally manages it. Buck is frozen, looking at him.

“Yeah, she did,” is all Eddie can say. He had burned more than one pancake for her. And now she would never have them again. He cut another piece of his food while Buck watched.

-

The morning of the funeral he asks Buck to get him a pack of cigarettes. Brand? is all he texts back. Eddie says he doesn’t care and to please meet him at the church early. Of course, is what he gets in response.

The thing about it is, Eddie’s not sure if he can handle seeing Shannon’s family. He hasn’t seen them in years, and her funeral that he’s planned seems like maybe the worst place in the world to see them again. Every single decision he’d made for her, for the funeral, had tugged at his gut. She’d wanted a divorce, would she even want him to be the one doing this?

But then he thinks about his vows and thinks that maybe this is the one time he can get it right. That if this is how they part, he can finally do his best for her.

When Buck arrives Eddie slips out with him, to sit on the grass behind the church. Buck hands him the cigarettes and a lighter. Eddie tilts the pack toward him and Buck takes one, too. Eddie lights them both and takes a long drag. When he coughs Buck pulls out a bottled water and hands it to him silently.

“Think of everything, don’t you?” He takes a drink and clears his throat. He takes another drag and feels the buzz start, closing his eyes. The breeze rustling the leaves of the trees feels real today, in that aching sad and sweet way. It’s a beautiful day.

“Have a couple packs of tissues, too,” Buck says, and grabs the water from him to take a drink.

“Thanks, Buck.”

It’s only ten in the morning but this whole day has felt like he’s been running in slow motion, too fast and too slow all at once. He tries to think about how much he was dreading everyone coming over to his place after the ceremony instead of the fact that his wife’s corpse was lying in a box fifty feet away.

They smoke in silence until Buck hums and says, “We’re gonna reek.”

“Yeah,” Eddie agrees. He finishes his off and tucks the pack and lighter in his pocket.

“How’s Chris been today?” Buck asks.

Eddie shakes his head, “Okay. I know he isn’t, but…it’s hard to tell with him, sometimes.”

Buck puts his cigarette out and smiles a little, “Yeah, well, he gets that from you.” They linger there, for a minute. Eddie pulls at the grass and Buck sits with him.

Eddie sighs. “Okay.”

Buck follows him inside.

-

There’s too much food.

It’s everywhere, the fridge is bursting with it and Eddie can’t stomach anything. At the very least he feels a tug of pride that his parents get to see how he has a life here, that he has people that care. He needs the food gone, and he needs his parents gone, too. Rehashing the same old fights is familiar, at least, but it’s all he has the energy for. When they leave for their hotel in the evenings Eddie sinks onto the couch and doesn’t move for hours.

Chris lays with him, mostly, the two of them tucking themselves together under a blanket. They watch Disney movies and Food Network. Eddie scrolls through messages of his friends and family and acquaintances asking if he needs anything. He never knows what to say to those. Is he supposed to thank people or can he say that there’s not a single thing in the world that he needs right now that anyone could give him? He thinks probably not, so he doesn’t reply. He feels guilty about it.

Buck has been texting him photos. Of the sunrise one morning when he’d just gotten off work, of some purple flowers he’d seen on his run, of his feet as he waited for his coffee, of himself with a dramatic pouty face and a nasty scratch above his eyebrow. He reacts with hearts to all of them but the last, which he reacts to with an exclamation point. Later, he receives a two-minute voice note of how it happened and how he really wasn’t a cat person. Eddie smiled as he listened.

A week later, he gets a text from Bobby telling him to let him know if he needs any help with the paperwork, that he’s happy to do it if Eddie wants to give him the information. Eddie calls him and asks him if he'd really do that for him.

“Eddie, of course. I can come over next week and we can start sorting through it,” Bobby says.

He tries not to cry and fails because he’s so relieved to not have to figure everything out alone. The prospect had been just another thing pressing in on his chest, making it hard to breathe.

“Thank you, Bobby, really,” Eddie says.

“You’re very welcome. We’re all thinking of you, Eddie.”

“I know,” Eddie replies. If there was one thing that had been made clear in the past week, it was that Eddie had more family here than he’d realized.

-

The day his parents leave, he asks Buck to come over. Christopher is already in bed when he gets there after his shift, and Eddie offers to lend him some sweats and a t-shirt mostly so that he doesn’t have to ask him out loud to stay. Buck accepts.

Eddie leads him to his room and pulls some out for him, and turns his back so Buck can change.

“Your scratch looks better,” Eddie says with his back turned.

“Hm? Yeah, it wasn’t that big a deal,” Buck says.

“Of course, which is why you sent me a monologue about your daring rescue of a mean, ungrateful cat,” Eddie says, laughing.

Buck steps around in front of him and his eyes are so soft on Eddie. “Yeah, thought it would make you smile.”

“You were right.”

“Good.”

It’s quiet, and Eddie knows it’s his turn to say something. Buck just stands there, in the middle of Eddie’s room, waiting for him. He’s steady in a way that’s comforting.

“I think I might burn the couch,” Eddie says. Buck’s eyebrows shoot up.

“Burn the couch?”

“I’ve spent so much time there the past two weeks I think it might be permanently me-shaped,” he says. He’s joking, but he’s not. He’s been thinking about it for days.

“Burning something could be cathartic,” Buck says. And then, “So should I sleep here, instead?” He’s too good at reading between the lines that Eddie wants him to, it’s probably bad to rely on Buck reading his mind to get out of using his words. And maybe he would deal with that at some point, but not tonight. Tonight they turn out the lights and slide under Eddie’s covers together and Buck curls toward him in the dark. Eddie stares at the ceiling.

“It’s just lonely,” he admits. “I miss her.”

Buck grabs his hand and squeezes it. He leaves their hands clasped together, and eventually they fall asleep like that.

-

“What happens now?” he asks Abuela one day, a couple of weeks later. He’d gone back to work today, and he felt a little adrift in the normalcy of it, of sitting here in Abuela’s kitchen watching her prepare dinner. He says it apropos of nothing, and the way she considers him makes him so grateful that she knows him so well, that she knows exactly what he’s asking her without him having to stumble to get more words out.

“Now things get better,” she says simply, “You keep living your life.”

“That’s it? It just…over?”

“Eddito,” she crosses the kitchen to grasp his shoulders again. He always feels like a kid when she does it, and it’s no different this time. “Things are never over. People aren’t like stories, they don’t just end. They’re a part of you. I tell jokes Abuelo told me. You sound like her when you talk about music. You live and be happy that you were told a joke so stupid you remember it twenty years later,” she laughs and Eddie does, too.

“Things get better,” Eddie says. “Huh.”

Christopher pokes his head in the doorway to ask when dinner is going to be done. Eddie’s throat squeezes a little - those were her eyes, the way his eyebrow is tilted was hers. And Abuela is right, she’s here. The evidence is all over them both, she’s tied up in who they are in ways they’ll never untangle. So Eddie believes her. She’s right about that, so things really must get better.

[louisdotmp3]

when the man comes around (T, 574)

Eddie is always dying.

Read on AO3

-

You’re always dying.

When he was dying, he mostly thought of Christopher.  He figured that was pretty common, to think of your kids in your last moments.  It’s what he’d thought of when he’d lain bleeding in a valley a few thousand miles away, it’s what he’d thought when he felt like his lungs were going to burst any second, and it’s what he’d thought as he’d lain bleeding out in the spotlight sun of LA.  Hell, when he’d been gasping for breath on the floor of a suit shop it’s what he’d thought of.

Shannon was always there, too - his brain always took some time in its possible last moments to feel a swell of guilt that he was leaving her again, that he’d maybe never stopped being angry at her for dying and leaving them, that neither of them had been good enough to stay for Christopher.

And then there was Buck.  Buck, who had featured so prominently in those thoughts of Christopher that he’d changed his will just as soon as he’d rid the taste of earth from his mouth.  Now, when he’s dying, on the streets of LA or in front of his son, he thinks of Buck.  He sees flashes of Buck living in the house Eddie’s leaving him, of Buck’s Jeep parked permanently in front of the little yellow house.  After the shooting, before he wakes, he dreams of Buck taking his room and finally putting a few things on the walls, putting up some blue curtains that match his eyes.  He dreams that he and Christopher plant red roses in the front yard and they grow to be taller than Buck.  He dreams that he’s a ghost haunting his own home and watches Buck feed a green, shimmering betta fish on the windowsill, watches Christopher grow older, watches as they forget him altogether.  It’s nice.  He hopes for that.

Eddie thinks of those dreams often.  Sometimes Buck moves around his kitchen in the exact way he did in his head and he wants to tell him about the roses and the fish and the curtains.  He doesn’t, because he thinks maybe those words would let Buck peer inside him and see the truth that even Eddie still couldn’t bring himself to look at.  That, and he doesn’t think Buck would find it as comforting as Eddie does, to think of Buck here without Eddie.

When he has the nightmares, there are no comforting thoughts of leaving his life in order.  There are no thoughts of Christopher, or Buck, or Shannon.  There’s just the heart-stopping fear and it just hurts, and hurts, and hurts.  It’s just the things he tried not to feel in those moments, it’s just the terror of his own existence being snuffed out against his will.  It’s just the admittance that he doesn’t want to leave and the fact that it could happen at any time.  It wasn’t just the tendrils of his past tightening around his throat, it was that every single day he would walk across a space that was a little too open and clench his jaw and his fists until it hurt.  In the nightmares, his body makes him feel it, makes him feel the terror that threatens to wipe his brain blank, makes him gasp and sob back to reality.  He always clutches at his chest afterward.  Wasn’t he full of holes?  Shouldn’t he be dying?  Wasn’t he always?

[louisdotmp3]

holy broken heart

he's grieved before. hell, he's spent his whole life grieving. but there had always been somewhere to go, something to do, some evil to stop or some god to outwit. this time is different. this time, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit in it, the fullness of his grief and the enormity of his regret. he spent weeks cataloging every single moment that cemented for cas that he should slice his heart open at an altar instead of keeping it beating in his chest where it belonged. he can't go into gas 'n sips, or eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or listen to his favorite zeppelin songs. he spends a lot of time sitting on park benches and just staring at the blue of the sky. he develops a habit of tapping his chest just to remind himself that he's alive and his own heart still apparently sits in his chest.

it doesn't feel like it.

two months slip through him and dean figures he probably thought about cas at least once every waking minute, and a lot of the sleeping minutes, too. once, he dreams he's on the roof of a huge gothic mansion, cas' corpse is in the attic, and all he knows is that he has to get them out of there. he tries to climb down on a bedsheet rope with cas over his shoulder, but he wakes up before he succeeds. he feels sick. he remembers how cas' body had felt to carry, last time when he'd carried him over the threshold of that little lake house. he stares at the ceiling and fights down the nausea and wonders what it means that he'd been trying to escape with his body in the dream.

he thinks about cas when he drinks coffee. sometimes he thinks about cas and drinks tea instead just because cas had liked it. sometimes when he squeezes the honey bear it makes him choke up, and then it makes him smile. it makes him laugh because isn't it ridiculous? the things people leave behind? the pieces of them you can feel stamped all over your soul? he thinks of that joni mitchell lyric. you said love is touching souls, well surely you've touched mine 'cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time. that's what this grief is like, cas is pouring out of dean all the time. it's sweet, in a way. the kind of sweet that growing pains feel like. cas aches so sweetly in dean's bones. he doesn't ever want it to stop aching.

[louisdotmp3]

stanford era dean lives on the bits and pieces of social interaction he can get from strangers instead of relying on the long-term relationships in his life. he used to call sam up until sam told him - well, he doesn't like to think about it. and he hunts with his dad every couple of weeks, and then as time goes on every couple of months, but that is never very - it never ends up being what he wants. he's craving stability and familiar affection, but he takes what he can get from the people that flit through his life - or rather, from the people whose lives he passes through, barely an impression left. he lives on the smile from a waitress, or the passionate recommendations from the guy that worked in the music shop he stopped by on his way out of town, or the thank you from the old lady that tells him he's a nice young man when he helps her put her groceries in her car. he has trouble sleeping alone in a motel room so he often just keeps driving and grabs a few hours in the front seat of baby pulled off the road somewhere. he uses his dad's jacket as a blanket and swears to himself that this is what he wants.

[louisdotmp3]

Kansas was the Sunflower State. The state bird had a yellow chest, like a sunflower. Kansas looked like South Dakota to Dean, down to the sunflower fields. He’s sitting in one now, not far from the Badlands, pulled off on the side of the highway. He’d climbed down the bank of the road and walked right in and sat down. It was going to storm. There were black clouds on the horizon, far off cracks of thunder rumbling along.

For the first time in his life, he was alone.

There was a crackling electricity in the air, a static anticipation of the skies opening themselves up. When he was a kid and it stormed he always imagined giants in the sky, stomping around and having a tantrum. Sometimes, standing in a tiny motel bathroom staring in the mirror at his own glassy eyes, he pictured crying so hard and so loud it burst into the world in a crack of electricity. His dad was kind of like that. Sammy was kind of like that. Dean just didn’t know how to make himself that big. He'd been surrounded by giants, and now they were gone.

He thought about the western meadowlark, sometimes. He’d learned about it, once, in middle school. They’d been in Olathe a few weeks and hit it at the right time to catch the first day of school, one of the few he’d ever attended. The very first social studies class had been about the state of Kansas. They’d learned about the flag and the sunflowers and the state seal and the state bird, the western meadowlark. He remembers because he’d spent that fall looking for one everywhere they went. That entire fall, instead of counting flags or trying to complete the alphabet first from words on signs on car rides, he and Sam had kept their eyes peeled for meadowlarks. They’d spotted a lot of cardinals, some blue jays, even a few robins, but never the meadowlark. Now, he lies back so the sunflowers tower above him under the ominous sky, and thinks about painting his chest yellow like the meadowlark. He thinks about flying away.

a stanford era dean fic coming to an ao3 near you on oct 8

[louisdotmp3]

morning glories

castiel likes sunlight in the morning.

he's always liked it, ever since the first morning. he likes the way living things respond to the new light, the way bacteria swim toward it, the way critters emerge from their nightly hiding places, the way creatures stretch and yawn in the glowing dawn. he never gets tired of the way a new day emerges, the way the flowers open themselves up to it and bask in their continued existence. it reminds him of the rapturous excitement of creation. and also, it means that it's socially acceptable to consume coffee.

these days he's usually the first one up, though it wasn't always that way. for a while it seemed that he was catching up on not sleeping at all in his many millennia of existence, and dean was continuing to subsist on his four hours. he would often gasp awake at four or five in the morning and try to get up without cas noticing. he always noticed, but he'd roll over and go back to sleep anyway. and when the sunlight came hotter and brighter than the stuff dean was served at dawn, dean would be there with a hot coffee in hand, his own refilled in his other hand. sometimes he came into the room singing a made-up morning song, loudly and purposely out of tune, if cas wasn't up yet. cas knows this is his real life because he never could have imagined it as good as this.

then, they moved to a real house with real windows. their curtains are orange and gauzy in their bedroom, and the morning light spills over their bed like gold. and suddenly, it was dean that was catching up on a few decades of sleep. mostly he stays up late and sleeps late - for him, at least - because he still has trouble falling asleep. cas can tell when he's had a nightmare because he gets woken up by a joyful and boomingly loud morning song, like he's trying to drown out whatever's in his head.

(on those mornings cas usually pulls the coffees out of dean's hand to put on the nightstand and flops comically on top of him.

good morning, he'll say when he knocks the breath out of dean.

jeez, warn a guy, dean will reply, smile evident in his voice.)

but often now, cas is the one with coffees in hand. he never tries to wake dean, just sits beside him and looks. it was something he used to do all the time when cas had still been castiel, when dean was simply a human he'd gotten a confusing taste for. he remembers sitting on the side of motel beds and mapping the curves of dean's face with his eyes, the crook of his nose, the bow of his lips, the curve of his lashes. something rising in him when he thought pridefully that he'd done that. he'd recreated this man with painstaking precision and he thought he might finally know why humans felt so strongly about art. acts of creation. it was intoxicating to create something so beautiful, and it had made castiel ache to see that beauty out of his control. it was addictive to watch dean push at the boundaries of his given form, to push at the boundaries of creation. castiel had wanted him to succeed. his form reached through time and space in ways incomprehensible to humans, but he'd never felt more expansive than watching dean's soul glint in his eyes when he made up his mind.

now, he watches dean sleepily rub his eyes with the backs of his hands as he wakes in golden light. in their house, in their bed, in their sheets. he smiles because sometimes, when dean is watching him, cas asks him, what? why are you looking at me like that? and dean told him once that he felt like the grinch, and laughed at his own comment. finally, still laughing, he'd explained: his heart grew too big for his chest sometimes, when he looked at cas. sometimes his body felt too small to contain such an enormous feeling. he'd wondered aloud if the universe was big enough to contain something like that. cas had told him it wasn't, from his experience. he'd kissed him.

this morning dean yawns and stretches and reaches for cas and it's just like the flowers that bloom in the morning, cas thinks. morning glories. his life is full of morning glories.

[louisdotmp3]

dean watched cas sleep once, back when he was first falling.  they were at bobby’s, it was still dark out and dean was up, had managed to bite back the scream from the dream that had woken him.  he simply got up from where he’d been on the couch and gone to the kitchen to start the coffee.  bobby wouldn’t be up for an hour or two, and sam would be up even later than that.  he leaned against the counter and looked out the window as he listened to bobby’s old coffee maker stutter and spit.  the salvage yard was starting to get blue with dawn, it felt like a different kind of dream.  he felt his spine tingle.  

“hey, cas.”

“hello, dean.”

“want a cup?” 

cas said that angels don’t drink coffee, and then yawned.  dean didn’t pour him a cup, but put milk and sugar in his, and sat down at the kitchen table.  cas sat across from him.  he was blinking slow, and leaned forward on crossed arms.  dean didn’t have much to say, it was too early and he’d gone from one dream to another, so he just drank from his coffee and set his mug down in the middle of the table.  found himself just looking at cas right back, in a way he didn’t always let himself.  he looked exhausted, in a way an angel never should.  cas looked at him while he grabbed the mug and took a sip.  

“so angels drink coffee now.”

“no.”

“mhm.”

by the time they finish it the light coming in the windows is getting blue, and the light spilling in the living room window is haloing cas and dean thinks this is divinity.  knocking knees with a fallen angel over a cup of folgers on some dreamy morning.  it makes his skin feel too tight, his chest feel too small to hold whatever this is.  he gets up and pulls cas up, too.  

“c’mon, you look like you’re about to drop.”  cas just allows dean to pull him along, to sit him on the couch, to pull off the trenchcoat and throw it over the back of the couch, to cover him with the blankets dean had been using.  “get some sleep, pal.”  he doesn’t even protest with an angels don’t sleep, just closes his eyes.

dean goes to pour himself another cup, black this time, and toes back into the living room to sit in the armchair.  the light goes from blue to red to gold, and cas sleeps on bobby’s couch.  it feels like a miracle.  

[louisdotmp3]

upon reflection (buddie, 15k, E)

Buck doesn’t think, just says, “Hey Eds, you wanna?” Half to wipe that caught-out look off his friend’s face and half because, well. Buck doesn’t not want to. It would be fun, something to do to pass some time in the most stressful month of everyone’s lives.

Eddie sits back so he’s between Buck’s thighs instead of on top of him and is slow to answer. Buck waits, and finally he answers, “Should we?”

or, Buck and Eddie get into a friends with benefits situation that quickly spirals out of control.

↳ Chapter 5 out now