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rcmclachlan · 8 days

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Wrote this today while I should've been working (don't tattle).

Submitting it for the approval of the Fuck It Friday Society. Thanks to @epiphainie for tagging me!

"So? Tell me about the hot pilot."

It takes only a second to scroll through the rows of photos until he finds the one he wants to show her, but instead of handing his phone over, he takes a moment to admire it. The post has nine photos in it and this is the fourth one in—it's by far his favorite out of all the others on the account. Considering how many contenders there are, that's really saying something.

Maddie pointedly clears her throat and Buck ducks his head with a sheepish laugh, because he knows he's being mean by keeping her waiting. If the tables were turned and she was holding out on him, he'd be ready to tackle her to get to the phone. Plus, he's already looked at the picture at least three hundred times over the last two days; it's not like he's going to miss anything. He's pretty sure he could draw it from memory.

Nervously licking his suddenly-dry bottom lip, he slides the phone across the counter to her, and she snatches it up like a winning lottery ticket, or Golden Grahams, which she used to hide from him when they were younger because he could house an entire box in a single sitting.

She draws in a surprised breath when she looks at the screen, and he takes it as his cue to round the island and crowd in behind her so he can peer at it from over her shoulder.

Whoever took the shot should get a Pulitzer. It was taken through the open door of a helicopter, perfectly framing the three people in the cockpit. There are two kids—a girl no more than ten years old wearing a headset and looking at the instrument panel, while the other kid has their back to the camera, showing the familiar logo of two hands holding each other on the back of their shirt—and then there's Tommy, who's half inside the opposite door and haloed by the light of the Harbor hangar, his gaze focused on whatever he's pointing at on the panel. His head is slightly turned, exposing the textbook-perfect right angle of his jawline, and his mouth is half open. But, unlike every picture where Buck looks like a dumbass with his mouth open wide enough to drive a truck through, Tommy looks handsome and competent, caught mid-explanation about manifold pressure or rotor RPMs or any of the other gauges that Buck looked up before he'd called for the Harbor tour.

"Buck," Maddie says, stunned. She opens her mouth like she's going to say something else, but then she closes it with an audible click.

"I know."

She spins around and smacks his arm, her grin threatening to consume her entire face. "Buck!"

"I know." He does know. He really does.

"Oh my god." Maddie turns back to the phone and swipes to see the other photos, but the only other one in the post with Tommy in it is a group shot. He stands in the back of a gaggle of kids with four of his teammates, taller than everyone else, and it's either the vivid blue of his flight suit or the magnetic force field that seems to hover around him all the time, but Buck's attention is drawn immediately to him. The first time he saw the photo, it took him a second to realize there were like twenty other people in it.

"Oh my god," Maddie says again.

Each of Tommy's hands are on the shoulders of two kids, and he's smiling so widely that his eyes are almost closed. He looks so good. He looks like he did when he glanced up from the menu as Buck approached the table—like anyone in the world could've shown up but he was thrilled it was Buck specifically. No one had ever looked at him like that before. Like he was the correct answer.

And that's a wrap on our annual flight rescue simulation! As always, huge thanks to the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club (@labgc) for introducing us to the next generation of heroes. Can't wait to get up there with them again someday! #labgc #lafdharbor1

He blows out a breath. "I'm such an idiot."

"You're not an idiot. There's no way you could've anticipated Eddie showing up." Maddie swipes over to Tommy's full Instagram profile and starts tapping open photos at random. When she gets to another of Buck's favorites—the one of Tommy mid-laugh, sandwiched between a man and a woman in a bar booth with trivia sheets spread out on the table in front of them—she mutters, "Good lord."

Buck looks at the man and how he's shoved up against Tommy's side, and he swallows around a familiar sour crackle in his jaw. He'd told Tommy point blank that he can get jealous, but he's a little surprised by how much he wants to reach right into the screen and rip the poor guy out of the photo with his bare hands. He shouldn't be shocked, though; he did maim his best friend for the crime of having Tommy's attention, after all.

But that guy in the picture could've been Buck. If he hadn't been an asshole, he could've been the one sitting next to Tommy, pressed up against him and laughing, flushed with victory and good company and beer, filling out answers on the sheet and preening when Tommy turned an impressed smile on Buck for helping take their team to the final round because he knew things like what the fear of is flowers called and the world record for the longest hiccupping spree.

"I shouted to the entire restaurant that we were going to pick up hot chicks after dinner, Maddie," Buck says, and looks away from the photo where he isn't. "I might as well have paid someone to skywrite 'NO HOMO' above the Coliseum. So, yeah, I am an idiot for that."

She winces. "How'd he, uh, take that? Was he really mad?"

"Worse," he says miserably. "He was really nice."

Where his hand rests on the countertop next to her, Buck's fingers curl in to press against his palm, and the rest of his body wants to follow suit out of shame. He can't stop thinking about how quiet Tommy was after Eddie and Marisol left, how the confidence and charisma and razor-sharp wit had all grown dull and quiet from the time it took them to get up from their table and make their way to the street.

When Tommy cut the night short, he could have been awful about it. He could have yelled. He could've called Buck a homophobe, or chewed him out for wasting Tommy's time, or sneer that Buck would be better off watching the movie from the comfort of the closet. It would've been well within his right to do any of it, and Buck had been prepared for it.

He hadn't been prepared for Tommy to be kind.

"But it's not just that. I'm an idiot because… how did I not know? How do you miss something like this about yourself? Nine year olds are out there figuring it out with no problem, and meanwhile, I'm thirty-two and I had—I had no idea. I'm so stupid."

He bends over and drops his head onto the counter with a painful, yet somehow satisfying thunk.

Maddie places a hand between his shoulder blades. It's not too heavy, like she's holding him down, and it's not too light, like she doesn't know if her touch is welcome. It's just right. It always is. Even when she was a kid, she always knew how to hit the goldilocks zone when it came to comfort. His parents never came close.

"What if it were me?"

He tilts his head on the counter to look at the contemplative slash of her mouth. "What?"

"What if I were the one discovering this about myself?"

The question is soft and sweet, like how their backyard in Hershey used to fill up with hundreds of dandelions in the spring and they'd spend hours picking them and blowing the clocks everywhere, but the smile on her face is the sound of their mother shouting at them to stop because she thought the dandelions were an eyesore and they were basically planting more of them to come up in the fall.

"Would you call me stupid for not figuring it out sooner? Would you say, 'Maddie, you're pushing forty, how did you miss this?'"

Offended, Buck comes off the countertop so fast he nearly gives himself whiplash. "What?! O-Of course not—"

"Then why is it okay when it's you?" She demands, voice trembling like she's physically pulling on the reins of her anger and it's fighting her, just like it did when he hitchhiked to Marysville with a group of boys and perforated both his ear drums jumping off the Rockville Bridge. "You don't get to call one of my favorite people stupid, okay? You're not. There's no time limit to these things, Buck. You just… you figure it out when you figure it out and not a second before, and I'd be saying the same thing if you were one of those nine year olds or if you were ninety."

Buck doesn't know what his face is doing, but Maddie takes one look at him, clucks her tongue in sympathy, and then wraps her arms around him. He presses into her embrace with a grateful exhale.

Clinging to Maddie, to the quiet, endless strength of her, is nothing new, and neither is the wave of sheer wonder and disbelief that nearly knocks him on his ass because somehow she's his sister. Out of everyone in the world he could've been saddled with, he got the best of the best. He has no idea what he did in a past life to have earned a place in her current one, but it must have been amazing.

"Thanks, Mads," he says quietly into her hair. When she first started dating Doug, she switched from the peppermint conditioner she loved to the floral stuff he preferred. Buck inhales a little and swallows tears upon getting a whiff of something sweet and minty.

She pulls back a little and pats his chest, smiling. "So, what's the plan?"

He blinks. "The plan for what?"

"For trying again," Maddie clarifies, pointedly, like she wants to call him dumb but can't because she just spent the last five minutes telling him he wasn't. "So you screwed up. Big deal. We all screw up. What are you going to do to fix it?"

"Uh, I-I don't think he's going to go for that, to be honest," Buck mutters, looking down at his phone.

Last night, standing in Miceli's foyer and practically leaving craters in the floor where he was bouncing excitedly on his heels, he'd texted Tommy to see if he was already seated. The last message Tommy sent him reads: Head toward the back. I'm in one of the side booths on the left. You can't miss me :-)

There hasn't been anything since.

After Tommy cheerfully knocked Buck's entire world off its axis and walked out the door with a grin and the promise of a date, Buck had paced his apartment like a caged tiger, feeling both too big and too small for his skin, jittery and restless. The fourth time he'd stopped in the middle of a room and started laughing for no reason, he conceded he might be losing his mind. He'd felt like the only thing keeping him from exploding or floating into the stratosphere was the fact he had a shift in the morning. He'd kept away from the windows just to be on the safe side.

You like men, he'd thought giddily to himself, over and over. You are attracted to men. A man asked you out on a date and you said yes because you want to go. A man kissed you tonight and you loved it. You didn't want to stop. You want him to do it again.

It was like he'd finally found the last missing piece to the Buck puzzle he'd been searching for as long as he could remember, and slotting it into place felt like skipping the 5.0 upgrade and going straight to a different operating system. Increased storage capacity. Longer battery life. A brand new product.

He'd swore to himself that he would be cool about it. He wouldn't be a clingy, needy mess and drive Tommy off before he was able to explore whatever this was. That lasted all of twenty minutes before he was texting Tommy with trembling thumbs to thank him for coming over and clearing the air, and then threw his phone across the room. He spent the next ten minutes fighting the urge to claw his own face off until he heard the ping of a new text message.

It said, Sorry for the delay I'm still driving. Thank YOU for your hospitality ;-)

Buck had to go stick his head in the fridge to cool down about the implications of that, but once he calmed down and unscrewed the manic grin from his face, they were off to the races.

The only times they weren't messaging each other were between the hours of 1am and 5:30am, or if they were on shift. Although Buck didn't exactly hold to that. He found ways to sneak off a text or twenty during calls when he could, and he had the sneaking suspicion Tommy was doing the same. The photo he got of the sun setting over LA, taken through a helicopter's windshield, was kind of a giveaway.

It's been 24 hours since he last heard the text tone he'd assigned to Tommy's contact file—a sort of whuff sound that reminds him a little of rotor blades spinning—and he feels like if he doesn't hear it soon, he's going to go insane.

This is absolutely not the first time he's fucked up a date and was ghosted afterwards, but it is the first time the subsequent radio silence has made him feel like his colon is tying itself into a square knot. And he hates it.

"So, you're just—giving up," Maddie says, incredulity turning the question into a statement of disbelief.

He looks away from the phone and shrugs. "I'm… being respectful. It's pretty obvious he doesn't want to hear from me. I wouldn't want to hear from me."

"You don't know what he wants," Maddie points out. "He said he didn't think you were ready for this, right? Maybe he's trying to be respectful too."

He doesn't want to get his hopes up, but it sounds so plausible when she says it. Especially because Tommy hasn't been anything but even-keeled and kind and compassionate, and Buck truly doesn't think any of it is a front. If Buck reached out, he knows Tommy would respond. If Buck started texting him again and never once brought up the kiss or their disaster of a date, if he boxed up the overwhelming need to be the center of Tommy's attention and shifted things back to the safety zone of friendship, Tommy would let him. They'd be okay.

The thought of it makes Buck want to punch something.

Maddie peers up at him with a sly tilt to her mouth, but instead of calling him on whatever she sees on his face, she simply says, "But I do think keeping this from Eddie is twisting you up a bit. Maybe you need to jump that hurdle before you can move forward."

He clicks his tongue and gives a reluctant nod, because she's right. As usual. "H-How do I tell him that I'm… you know."

"Okay," she says with a falsely bright smile and wide eyes, her tone needling. "If you can't even say it out loud, then maybe you shouldn't—"

"That I like men, Maddie, god," he whines, face hot. "You're so mean to me. Jesus, do you treat Chim like this?"

"Only when he asks really nicely," she says horrifyingly.

He sticks his fingers in his ears and starts shouting, "LA LA LA!"

Maddie cracks up, then gives his chest a conciliatory pat. Annoyed, he shrugs her off, which makes her laugh harder. "I'm your sister, doofus. I'm contractually obligated to piss you off until you do what I want sometimes. Didn't you read the handbook?"

Which makes him duck his head and laugh a little. "The handbook" was a running joke they had when they were kids about what siblings were and weren't allowed to do. He hasn't thought of the handbook since the whole thing with Doug, when he realized Maddie had been taken and a tiny voice in the back of the mind whispered, "According to the handbook, you're allowed to hunt him down like a dog and kill him."

Sighing, he leans into her and nods. "I know. I know I need to talk to Eddie. I-I just wish I had some kind of guarantee he's not going to—that nothing's gonna change when he finds out."

Leaning into him right back, Maddie promises, "If it does, I'll beat him up."

"Yeah?" He smiles, a little pleased by the thought. He wants to tell Tommy about it. But he can't. Not yet. "That in the handbook?"

"Page 53," she says, and hugs him.

#i need more buckley sibs interaction almost as much as i need more bucktommy #bucktommy #buckley siblings #maddie han #evan buckley

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