Chapter Text

Contrary to popular belief, Evan Buckley wasn’t (always) an oblivious idiot.

As Buck drove into work for his first shift after he and Eddie Diaz had pulled a live grenade out of a guy’s leg, he could admit — in the privacy of his Jeep — that he hadn’t exactly made the greatest first impression on his new coworker.

It was just…Bobby had brought Eddie over to introduce him properly to the team, and Eddie’s annoyingly pretty brown eyes had flickered across Buck’s whole body in this cool, assessing, judgmental little once-over, and Buck had felt something in his core flash hot with anger.

It felt like they were being tested — Buck, the team, the whole 118 — and Buck historically did not do well with tests. He’d just wanted Eddie to understand that the 118 was the best station in L.A., and they had the greatest team in the world, and also that Buck himself was — well, it didn’t matter what Buck was.

Because then Eddie had grinned at him like Buck had passed his test without even trying (or, as his fourth-grade teacher Mr. Harris had written on his report card, “actively sabotaging his own success”), and Buck was starting to realize that maybe he and Eddie could become best friends after all.

Bobby also hadn’t liked Buck at first, and Buck had still managed to win him over eventually through an unstoppable combination of grit, determination, and not having sex at work.

All Buck had to do was repeat that same winning formula again with Eddie. And luckily, it would be even easier not to have sex at work now, since his girlfriend was in Europe and Eddie was a man and Buck was straight, so like…obviously they couldn’t have sex.

With each other. Because Eddie was probably having a lot of sex in general, given his face. And his abs. And the way he strode through the firehouse like he always knew exactly where he was going, even though he was still new enough to the 118 that he kept forgetting where they stored the extra hoses. And…well. He was probably having a lot of sex, was the point. Just alone. Well, not alone alone. Other people were probably involved. But on his own, meaning without the inclusion of his coworkers.

Just like Buck! So they definitely had that in common!

Although Buck was on his own and also alone, so maybe they weren’t really the same at all.

But that was fine. Best friends should be similar, but not *too *similar, right?

That was what Buck had started inadvertently calling Eddie in his head: Eddie Newbestfriend Diaz. He hadn’t meant to. Whenever Buck thought about Eddie, the association just popped into his mind automatically, the words “new best friend” tumbling after the word “Eddie” like puppies after their mother.

In short, Buck had some deficits to make up if he wanted Eddie to think of Buck as his newbestfriend, and hang out with him all the time, and tell him secrets, and answer his texts, and maybe even text *Buck *first sometimes, just because Eddie had been thinking about Buck even when he wasn’t around.

Maybe Eddie would be walking down the street and see an ugly lamp shaped like a dog in the window of an antique store and send it to Buck with a caption like “look it’s you,” and then Buck could send back a photo of a cat and dog salt and pepper shaker set captioned “IT’S US,” and Eddie would react with a laughing emoji or possibly even a heart.

Buck had never had a best friend — new or otherwise — so he was still working out the details of what it would be like, but he was pretty sure emoji tapbacks were an important part of the bonding process.

Buck strode into the station with an eager bounce in his step and caught sight of Eddie immediately. Just like the first time Buck had seen him, Eddie was in the locker room, doing up his uniform shirt.

“Eddie!” Buck’s bounces increased in both height and velocity until he reached the locker room. Eddie’s fingers stuttered on the buttons of his shirt like he wasn’t sure if he’d need them to brace for impact, but Buck skidded to a stop right in front of him, and Eddie relaxed once he realized he wasn’t actually about to get jumped.

“I haven’t had the chance to give you my tour yet! Of the 118! Come on, we have twenty minutes before Cap starts the morning briefing.”

“I did get a tour,” Eddie said slowly, squinting suspiciously at Buck like he thought Buck was angling to get him up to the roof and push him off.

Which was a rude presumption. It would never even occur to Buck to do something like that to Eddie.

…Today.

“Cap asked Chimney to give me a tour on my first day,” Eddie continued, in the same tone of voice that someone might tell a kidnapper ‘lots of people know where I am, and they’ll be expecting me home any minute.’

Buck scoffed. “You can’t trust Chimney’s tour. Chimney’s tours are crap.”

“Hey!”

Wow, Buck hadn’t even seen Chimney there, which was a little weird, since he was standing right next to Eddie. Maybe Eddie had blocked Buck’s view of him or something. He was taller than Chimney, although Buck knew better than to say that out loud.

Instead, Buck scoffed. “Oh please, you know it’s true. On my first day, you just showed me boring stuff like the inside of an ambulance and where we keep the extra turnouts. And when you showed me the kitchen, you said those fancy Himalayan salt chips in the back of the cabinet were Cap’s and that nobody should touch them!”

“They’re not?” Eddie interjected, and then looked like he immediately regretted it when Buck and Chimney both whirled to face him.

“No!” Buck pronounced triumphantly, just as Chimney said, “Technically yes!”

“Technically?” Eddie asked with a little smirk that he almost immediately suppressed, but Buck caught it anyway.

“As Captain of the 118, everything in this station is Bobby’s,” Chimney was explaining virtuously. “And you *shouldn’t *touch the fancy Himalayan salt chips. Because I want to touch the fancy Himalayan salt chips. Ergo, ‘technically yes.’”

“The snacks are for everyone,” Buck hissed at Chimney as he grabbed Eddie by the wrist and started tugging him out of the locker room. “Come on Eddie, I’ll even show you where Chimney hides the peanut butter pretzels.”

Eddie still hadn’t finished doing up his uniform shirt, but he let himself be dragged away, while Chimney’s wail of “not my pretzels!” echoed off the locker room walls behind them.

***

The tour was going great. Buck had showed Eddie his secret trick to jiggling the tap of the second-to-last shower when it stuck on ‘cold,’ and helped Eddie claim the third-best bed in the bunkroom after Hen’s and Buck’s own, even though Cap had told Eddie the bunks were first-come-first-serve (to which Buck had just laughed condescendingly), and he’d even showed Eddie all the secret settings on their espresso maker that Buck only knew about because one night on a boring shift he’d gotten really into reading kitchen appliance manuals.

He also knew how to use the air fryer setting on the toaster oven, but he hadn’t had a chance to try it yet because some people were cowards. Or, as Bobby put it: “it’s a leading cause of kitchen fires and we are a fire station, Buck, are you crazy?” Buck was pretty sure all those French fry arsonists just hadn’t read their toaster oven manuals carefully enough, and it would be totally fine for him, but Bobby had banned him from the kitchen for three days until he’d promised to confine himself to “toast” and “oven.”

The toaster was* not* a part of the tour.

“…And this walk-in supply closet is great if you need to have a private conversation. Just be careful because—”

Buck heard the telltale snick of a door closing behind them and winced.

“…the door locks automatically,” he finished.

He turned to see Eddie, frozen with his hand on the doorknob like a caricature of a spotlit criminal. He looked so horrified that Buck immediately rushed to reassure him.

“It’s fine, we’ll just call someone to get us out. Chim will laugh at us for the rest of our lives, and Hen will save the teasing to deploy just when it will be most psychologically devastating, which actually might be worse, but — okay, so it’s fine, we’ll just call Bobby to get us out.”

Eddie’s eyes, if possible, went even wider. He looked a little bit like what would happen if an anime character got food poisoning.

“Um,” he said. “So, funny story. When you came to get me for my tour, I hadn’t actually finished changing yet, so I’d put my phone down in my locker, and…well. It’s still there. Presumably.”

Eddie cringed like he thought maybe Buck would yell at him again, which Buck felt really bad about, since that *definitely *was not his style at all.

…Today.

Instead, he overcompensated by yelling, too-loud for a tiny closet, “THAT’S FINE, EDDIE! YOU DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG! EVER IN YOUR LIFE, PROBABLY.”

Which probably should have made Eddie more terrified, but instead, his face softened into one of those wide, delighted smiles that Buck had first glimpsed outside the grenade guy’s ambulance. And, even more miraculously, Eddie actually started laughing.

“Not sure many people would agree with you on that, but thanks, Buck. Should we use your phone?”

“Oh!” Buck blinked his eyes away from Eddie’s grinning face, startled. “Uh, yeah, of course.” He felt through his pockets for his phone, but was suddenly struck with a memory of being so excited to get to work this morning that he’d…

“Okay. So. Don’t panic. But I do have to tell you that I left my phone in my car.”

And, even more miraculously, that only seemed to make Eddie laugh harder.

“You’re right,” he managed to get out through his giggles, “your tour is way better than Chimney’s.”

***

An hour later (which, wow, they’d fully missed Cap’s morning briefing and nobody had gotten concerned enough to search the station for them? Hurtful), Buck and Eddie had managed to arrange themselves in the small walk-in closet so they could both sit down at the same time. Eddie was leaning against the door, Buck was leaning against a stack of toilet paper, and their knees kept knocking against each other in the middle, but this whole thing could definitely be worse.

Buck had gotten the chance to learn Eddie’s favorite ice cream flavor (anything with peanut butter), and whether the vending machine at the Academy still broke any time someone tried to buy a Diet Pepsi (it did, but apparently Eddie had figured out exactly where to whack the machine to free the bottle, and for the rest of his tenure at the Academy, he was forced to constantly retrieve sodas for other people, since nobody else could get it to work).

Buck didn’t think he’d ever run out of things he wanted to know about Eddie, but even he could admit that his capacity for question invention was starting to run out.

Except…

“Okay, but seriously, what is Eddie short for? You already know what my nickname is short for, so it’s only fair.”

Eddie gave Buck a narrow-eyed look, like he thought Buck had some ulterior motive for asking.

Buck gave Eddie his most guileless smile, trying to his best to look like someone who didn’t even know what “ulterior” meant, which, as it happened, was a role that Buck was born to play.

(It had to be related to “interior” and “exterior,” right? But what else was there, aside from inside and outside? Maybe under the ground? Ult and under did sound similar…)

“You can tell me, even if it’s a secret,” Buck urged. “I’m really good at burying things. It’ll be ulterior.”

“Uh,” said Eddie. “Well, it’s not really a secret, it’s just…” His face crumpled a little bit, like a Doritos bag in the microwave, and he finally sighed: “It was my grandfather’s name.”

“And you didn’t get along?” Buck guessed.

“No…no, I did. That’s why...”

Eddie flashed him a small, self-deprecating smile, and shifted around on the floor like maybe he was hoping Buck would change the subject. But some inexplicable instinct stopped Buck from speaking. Maybe it was the way Eddie was staring down at his hands, or the fact that he wasn’t actually changing the subject himself, but something about Eddie’s energy in this moment made some part of Buck perk up and whisper: wait. Be patient.

So he did.

And after a few seconds of soft silence, where Buck looked at the side of Eddie’s face and Eddie twisted his fingers in his lap, Eddie finally opened his mouth and said:

“I’m uh, the oldest. In my family. Oldest brother. First boy. So I got my abuelo’s name. And when I was a kid, he was always this larger-than-life figure. Friends with everyone. Generous to a fault. And really brave — he and my abuela left Mexico and moved to El Paso when they were basically teenagers. It was a lot of responsibility for him to carry on his shoulders so early in his life, but he never let it show. He was always just…perfect.”

Eddie’s eyes had gone distant, a soft smile on his face, and Buck found himself smiling too. But Eddie wasn’t done.

“My parents still call me ‘Edmundo,’ and sometimes it’s like *they *think it’s some kind of magic spell. Like if they call me ‘Edmundo’ enough times, eventually it’ll rub off, and I’ll be more like him. Whatever I’m supposed to be. But I’m just…not. I never have been. So. Eddie it is.”

The distance in Eddie’s eyes was still there now, but harsher. It made Buck want to do something insane like hug him.

Instead, he repeated “Eddie,” slowly, trying out the syllables again, now that he knew the kind of weight that was attached to them, rolling them around in his mouth like he was at a wine tasting.

Notes of friendliness, generosity, bravery. Sadness. Self-deprecation. And also, for some reason, nutmeg.

Buck hesitated over what he wanted to say next. It felt like it might be a little presumptuous: too much, too soon. In the grand scheme of things, he’d only known Eddie for less than a week, even if he felt like it had been longer than that.

Buck had the uncanny feeling that this supply closet was a kind of Narnia wardrobe; like Buck and Eddie were spending a lifetime together in this other world, but would return to their own universe to find that no time had passed.

Maybe Eddie felt the same way. Buck hoped he did.

“Uh. F-for what it’s worth…” Buck knew he was stuttering, but he pushed doggedly forward anyway. “O-obviously I didn’t know your grandfather. But, um. I think you’re more similar than you realize.”

“Oh.” Eddie blinked at him, shocked, and Buck watched in fascination as his face flooded with pink.

“I still like Eddie better though,” Buck rushed to clarify, nervous that Eddie wasn’t responding. “Edmundo is too long for a firefighter. There’s no time for three syllables when you’re running through a burning building. By the time we got to the ‘do,’ the ceiling would be collapsed on top of you or something.”

“Like I’m really gonna take nickname advice from Buck Buckley,” Eddie scoffed, nudging at Buck’s knee with his own. And with that, the tension was broken.

And, in a feat of perfect timing by the universe, it was then that the supply closet door got shoved open and sent Eddie tumbling forward into Buck with an “oof!” Buck just barely managed to catch him before he went headfirst into the toilet paper.

In the doorway where Eddie had been sitting stood Chimney, backlit by the sudden light streaming into their closet, crunching gleefully on a handful of peanut butter pretzels.

“We were just…uh…” Buck started to stammer.

“Inventory,” Eddie cut in smoothly. He held up a roll of toilet paper. “There are fourteen of these. Cap should probably order more.”

“Riiight,” Chimney replied. “Thank God you both were on it.”

“What can I say,” Eddie shot Buck a small smile, his eyes sparkling like the two of them were sharing an inside joke. “We make a pretty good team. Right, Evan?”

“Absolutely, Edmundo.”

“Oh hell, I’m really gonna regret leaving you in here for two hours, aren’t I,” Chimney groaned.

“Karma’s a bitch, Howard.”