Chapter Text
You would think being struck by lightning would slow a body down – or, at least, quiet the mind.
-
It’s semi-dark in Buck’s apartment and a guy is kissing him.
Tommy’s lips are pressed against Buck’s. His fingers rest gently on Buck’s chin, tipping him up so their lips slot perfectly into place before dropping away. White hot heat runs through Buck – a jolting shock that comes from being kissed after going so long without, followed by another jolt of knowing just who is kissing him. It happens in a flash, but in the moment it feels like minutes – hours – go by before Tommy parts from him. In those minutes, Buck’s mind does not go blank. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s like every thought in the universe converges on him, like a sky has opened up – "the opposite of blindness". As they kiss, Buck reaches out for something – tries to grasp at it – but he falters, grabbing air instead. It’s too big to hold. The sky opens up, but the world narrows down to just him and Tommy. Just two bodies closing in on one another.
Tommy is kissing him, Buck thinks. Tommy is kissing him and his lips are soft. There’s the rub of stubble, the feeling of a stronger, firmer body pressed against him, and suddenly Buck is back in his kitchen. As he realizes that, Tommy steps back, and just as one thought opens, another closes. Something to explore, maybe, but later.
“So that was okay?” Tommy asks him, like he didn’t just blow up Buck’s entire world, re-arranging some parts within him that he didn’t know was there. Buck’s heart pounds and there’s a shift in him, small and seismic. Something slams into place within him like a door fitting neatly into its frame.
“That was better than fake mouth-static,” he says, breathlessly.
-
Buck went to school in an era where wearing the wrong colour shirt got you called a slur. Once said, it became an open invitation to speculate on your sexuality. Not really speculate since implying something was gay was to imply an impossibility – that someone could be not straight was absurd. But you were being called out for lacking something.
Not that Buck ever heard those things directed at him. He did hear it in the halls though, yelled out in locker-rooms, tossed casually around by friends. It was a joke – just a joke. Not that Buck ever really got what was so funny about it.
Not that it mattered. He was normal (at least at school). He wasn’t one of the popular kids, but he was well-liked by both his classmates and his teachers. The Buckley charm was famous in his high school for the way teachers always let him have extensions, always let him get away with a little too much. He disrupted class, never handed in assignments on time, had to be silenced during lessons for talking too much, and he could give them a smile and everything would be… not forgiven per say, but there was an understanding. Buckley was a good kid, they would say, just like his sister, but he’s just a little too impulsive.
So Buck was normal. A little reckless, but normal. When a girl in his eleventh grade English class implied there was maybe something more going on with Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby and a guy on his football team scoffed and asked, “What, like they’re fags?” Buck laughed along with the rest of his class, not totally getting why, but knowing it was something apart from him. Nothing really to do with him.
-
Buck doesn’t think about it. After Tommy kisses him, Buck doesn’t think about it. He agrees to go to dinner with Tommy – on a date – that Saturday. He shows up in a shirt that’s tight enough across his chest to broadcast that he looks good and he knows he looks good.
At dinner, he talks easily with Tommy, sharing stories about weird calls they’ve been on, areas where they might have crossed paths before hijacking a helicopter together, complaining about the higher ups in the LAFD and how they have no idea what actually happens on the ground – or in the air in Tommy’s case. He finds out that Tommy has like five bets going with Donato relating to the 118 and their calls.
“She wins it all if it ever involves aliens.”
“Oh, so you asked me on a date to secure a bet?” Buck grins, as he takes a sip of beer.
“Among other things,” Tommy says, looking at Buck. Buck feels himself flush as he takes another sip to hide it.
It’s almost like dinner with a pal, but Buck keeps looking at Tommy’s lips, his eyes drifting down as he tries to concentrate on what Tommy is saying. Tommy catches him too, lips twitching with amusement, and his gaze scans Buck in return. Buck quickly looks away and looks around the room. He wonders if it is obvious to others what they’re doing here – that they’re on a date. That they’ve kissed in Buck’s kitchen and Buck has spent most of this evening – most of his evenings since then – wondering when they’ll kiss again. The restaurant is nearly full, creating a steady buzz of noise and when Buck looks around he can clock at least five couples who are definitely on a date.
“Nobody’s looking at us, Evan.” This brings Buck’s attention back to the table. Tommy looks at him reassuringly. “We’re just two guys having dinner. Nobody cares.”
And when Tommy says it, Evan believes him. It’s a normal thing they’re doing, but it’s also not something Buck does. Not with men at least.
Later when the night goes bust, when he confesses that this is his first date “with a dude” (and why did he have to say it like that), when Eddie and Marisol walk in and he repeatedly puts his foot in his mouth, when Tommy leaves him standing on the sidewalk alone and confused, the ghost of his touch on Buck’s back just before he watched Tommy get into an Uber, he realizes that Tommy lied about nobody caring.
-
In the last years of high school Buck played football. He didn’t really like football, but that was what you played when you lived in a Pennsylvanian suburb and you had nothing better to do. Buck had spent most of high school avoiding it. He started high school baby-faced and with a lack of direction that didn’t appeal to coaches, plus he skipped most of his P.E. classes. Between 10th and 11th grade, Buck shot up and bulked out, becoming immediately desirable to not only girls, but to his high school gym teachers. Within the first week of class, he was recruited into the football team.
Football, to him, was a game you played because you were expected to, and also because all your friends played it. That was kind of the point of it – a way to hang out more with your friends and an excuse to skip out on class. Football became a game to Buck that you played to stay after school when you didn’t want to go home to an empty house – or worse, a house that’s not quite empty. A house haunted by your parents. A house that reminded him that his only ally was long gone, that Maddie had left their house and Buck along with it.
With football Buck was needed and wanted. Mostly needed because he’s not that great at it. He’s more useful as another body on the team, someone there to pad the bench and run drills when needed. He could probably count the number of times he was actually on the field during a game on one hand. He only remembers the feeling of the ball reaching him, and his mind going blank, and how he ran on instinct. When he had stopped running, he was swarmed by teammates, who yelled and cheered into his ears, heavily patting his back.
“Good job, Buckley,” the team captain had said, and sparks ran though Buck that would make him want to run and run again.
-
Tommy leaves Buck on the sidewalk and that should be the end of it. He tried and failed at the whole dating a guy thing. But his mind keeps coming back to Tommy, wandering back to their failed date. Not to the embarrassing parts, though those moments pop up blindingly in his mind first, but the way Tommy looked at him, the way Tommy looked, the way that even though Buck had been a total ass, Tommy still had ended the date in the gentlest way possible. Through a fog of mortification, Buck’s mind latches on to Tommy’s cleft, his lips, the broadness of his chest, the shape of his nose. Outside of Tommy’s physicality, just the very being of Tommy, his coolness, the smooth way he asked for the cheque.
Buck wonders what might have happened if their date hadn’t ended there. Would they have made it to the movie theatre at all? Would Tommy have kissed him in the back of the Uber or made him wait through two and half hours of a shitty remake of a movie Buck’s never heard of before he touched him again? Would Buck have been able to convince Tommy to change directions and head back to his place? Letting them relive the other night, this time with Buck making the first move, letting the kiss linger, letting him clutch at Tommy, pressing deeper and deeper.
Buck keeps wondering until he confesses to Maddie. It’s a coming out (of sorts), though he tries to skip over the entire being on a date with a guy thing. Maddie catches him on the pronoun though, and it all comes tumbling out, not just about Tommy, but how he’s attracted to guys and he’s relieved when she doesn’t make a big deal out of it, that she doesn’t tease him or grill him for more details.
“Tell me more about the hot pilot,” she says, smiling brightly, and he is happy to. Happy that her focus is on Tommy as a person, and not just what Buck confesses to.
-
When Buck first arrived in L.A., just before he joined the LAFD, where he was kicking around doing odd jobs as a waiter/trainer/whatever, he hooked up with a hot chick named Jessica. Maybe Jennifer. Definitely a name that started with J. He had met her at a shitty restaurant they both worked at, him bartending and her waitressing, in the brief moment they both worked there before the place was sold and turned into a tanning salon. She had blonde hair bleached mostly from the sun, cool piercings, and smelt of coconut and sex wax. She could do things with her tongue that made Buck shut up, and she wasn’t interested in long term relationships or talking about feelings. They got on great.
After he had pulled out of her and tied off the condom, they started lazily making out, not quite totally exhausted but also not ready to commit to a second round. Kissing had turned to talking, which turned to questioning. Just the basic getting-to-know-you ones: what do you on your days off? What do you actually want to do instead of working for shit wages at a place that’s just one big health code violation? Are you an L.A. Native? How long have you been in L.A.? What brought you here in the first place?
Buck told her about travelling the country, moving slowly down the east coast before a broken heart sent him out west. How he worked on a dude ranch for a couple of months before heading to Peru. (Why Peru? He couldn’t really say.) How Peru was so completely different from anything he experienced in Hershey, and, by extension, how completely outside of himself he was. He talked about bartending (“Oh so that’s why you’re so good at making those fancy drinks and so shit at making a vodka cran,” she teases.) He talks about the locals, who were always kind to him, and the tourists who were less so. How the majority of them tipped shitty and tried to start fights with other guests. How there were the rare few customers who were polite to him and lonely, and willing to chat for hours because of that. How that’s where he met his roommate Conner, who was neither lonely or an asshole, but always made Buck smile when he approached the bar, always made small talk with him that made him feel like a person and not just a means to an end. How when Conner suggested Buck follow him and his friends back to L.A., he took him up on it, and that’s why he was here.
“Huh,” she said lightly, her mind more on finding her clothes on the floor than to what Buck was saying. “That sounds kind of gay.”
“What? No, come on,” he laughed, but she raised her eyebrow as she wiggled into her jeans. “Come on, it wasn’t like that. We’re buddies. It was time to move on and, and they had a place I could crash at. I mean, I had to take it.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to hit a sore spot. I’m just saying most people don’t drop everything to follow a person half-way across the world. It’s cool though,” she assured him. “I like your sense of adventure.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling as she leaned down to kiss him, and he tugged at her shirt, hoping she would take the hint.
Later, she kissed him as she left and had typed her number in his phone, telling him to take the hint and call her (“And not to cover your shift,” she said firmly). Later, much later, when he’s searching through his contact to find another number, he stumbles upon her name and wonders why he never called her.
-
Buck doesn’t think about it, and he tells himself that’s because it’s easy. What him and Tommy have between them is easy. Being with Tommy is easy. They go on a couple of casual dates after their coffee reconciliation, just a few movies, dinner at their respective places, but it seems so easy.
Their second date ends with them on Tommy’s couch, Buck straddling Tommy as they make out sloppily, Tommy’s hand firmly digging into Buck’s ass, as Buck presses himself against Tommy. Tommy pulls back, slightly breathless, and asks Buck if he’s sure about this. Buck doesn’t say anything, doesn’t want a moment of doubt between them, so he nods his head quickly before he unbuckles Tommy’s belt and tugs off his pants.
“Jesus,” Tommy gasps as Buck pulls off his shirts, “easy there, tiger.” But he doesn’t tease Buck, doesn’t doubt that Buck wants this, when he eases into him later, kissing the nape of neck as Buck adjusts to feeling of Tommy on top of him, within him. He lets Buck take the lead, and after they both come, Tommy turns to Buck, looking a little surprised and awed, and asks if that was okay.
“Way better than fake mouth static,” Buck says, grinning as Tommy barks out a laugh.
Tommy shows up for Chimney’s karaoke bachelor party and he talks with Hen and Karen like he’s been friends with them forever – which is technically true in the case of Hen. He sides with Eddie on the clipboard Buck-teasing, but rubs Buck’s back gently when no one is looking, letting Buck know that he’s on his side. If there’s a look shared between Hen and Karen about how Buck and Tommy are interacting, Buck doesn’t notice, too wrapped up in the absence of Chimney and the worry that this nice thing he planned for his future brother-in-law has gone to shit.
Tommy shows up later at the hospital too, in his sooty turnouts, smelling of smoke and sweat. Tommy looks exhausted, but he’s here and it’s so easy to kiss him right there at the reception, to drag him up to Chimney’s room and announce his presence. To announce that Tommy is here with him. And then it becomes easier because everyone knows, and he doesn’t have to talk about it. It’s just him and Tommy and it’s easy.
It's easy until it isn’t.
-
Nowhere in the training manuals does it say that becoming a firefighters means you get propositioned a lot. Perhaps it should be a given, with all the calendars and porn and stuff, but getting hit on does happen a lot. Especially if you’re young, fit, and good looking, which Buck checks off all three of those categories. He gets asked out a lot, and Buck would be lying if he said it wasn’t a huge perk of the job. Working as a first responder means working weird hours, taking long and exhausting shifts, and having a terrible work-life balance. It seems only fair that he gets to hook up while at work. Obviously, Bobby is not happy with this, but there’s a sort of a thrill in sneaking off, escaping the boredom that is downtime at the fire house, and plus it’s sometimes the only way Buck gets to date people as a probie.
So, Buck expected the flirting, the hot dates, the fun hook-ups, he just wasn’t prepared for the rest of it. The old ladies who grab his ass as he walks by, the ones who say he reminds of them of their long dead husbands – Herald, Ernie, or whatever. The middle-aged housewives who paw at him, their breath smelling faintly of pinot grigio and their mascara running slightly as their eyes sweep over him. The old women who think he’s their dead spouses, exclaiming with surprise, “Oh my Johnny, my Johnny, you’re here, you’re here…”
Guys flirt with him too. Not that he really notices. There are some obvious attempts – a hand on his bicep that lingers just a little too long, a wink from an older gentleman waiting to be lifted onto a gurney, double-entendres said in jest, but that make Buck flush from head to toe. Mostly harmless, but not too common and only made notable by who was doing it, rather than the act itself.
Then there were the calls that, in hindsight, Buck could say was something more. The guy with the tapeworm and his husband – though Buck really did just want to know about the guy’s body fat percentage. The man at a boardwalk event he treated for dehydration, and they had talked for so long that Hen had to ask if there was anything seriously wrong with him when Buck finally returned to the truck, and she didn’t believe him when he said that the guy was fine. Or that dude at the gym who had managed to twist his ankle so severely that he couldn’t even hobble off the machine, and every time Buck had tried to talk to him, the words just came out wrong. It was so bad that Chimney had to take over after Buck stumbled over the first basic question for a fifth time in a row. Chim looked at Hen as he bent down and Hen had returned it with a raised eyebrow and an expression on her face that said ‘we’ll talk about this later’, but Buck never really figured what that was all about.
By the time Eddie arrives at the 118, Buck is used to the flirting, the random touching, the lack of personal boundaries. When Eddie joins, it’s nice to share the load, so to speak.
What he isn’t used to is the random speculation of his sex life with his co-worker by strangers. The Christmas elf comment has been innocuous – most guys don’t follow their best friend to watch his kid get a photo taken with Santa. He almost says something, but it was more because he felt like he was being given credit for something he wasn’t a part of. Christopher is a great kid, but has nothing to do with Buck, and it felt weird to claim an identity that didn’t belong to him, to take a place in Chris’s life that he had yet to earn.
He didn’t see the comments on the beauty influencer’s livestream when it happened, but he heard about it from Hen and Chim, who couldn’t stop teasing him about it – and just him for some reason.
He lets Eddie in on it later, but Eddie doesn’t seem to care.
“People online seem to think we’re a couple,” Buck says to him as they change to go home. “You know the girl with the larva on her face. She was, uh, liveblogging the entire time we were there and apparently people were commenting that we would look good together.”
“Hmm, did they now?” Eddie says distantly, his attention on his phone. “That’s nice.”
“Does that bother you? That-that people think we’re,” he waves hand between them, “together? Like as a couple.”
“No.” Eddie frowns. “People can think what they want. They usually do.”
“But you’re not mad – you don’t mind if people think you’re – that we’re – gay.”
Eddie slams his locker shut and shoots Buck a look. “No, why would it matter? We both know we’re straight. We know what we mean to each other. Who cares if some randos think otherwise?”
“Right.” Buck nods. He fiddles with bag, not quite looking Eddie in the eyes.
“Buck, does it bother you?”
“Me? No! No, not at all. It’s just weird, I guess. Just hasn’t really happened to me before.”
-
They go to Miceli’s for their sixth month anniversary. It’s Buck’s idea.
“Gotta make up for our terrible first date,” he tells Tommy.
“Oh you have more than made up for that date,” Tommy assures him, his eyes raking over Buck’s body.
They don’t get their original table (“Probably a good thing,” Tommy deadpans as they sit down), nor do they order the same meal as last time. They’re seated higher up, overlooking the rest of the restaurant and it’s familiar and different enough that Buck feels relaxed and happy. Tommy looks so good in front of him, with a new plaid shirt that Buck had bought him to make up for the whole sleeping on the couch/Billy Boil incident and a fresh haircut that makes his boyfriend look so hot, he almost wants to skip dinner.
It's been six months and Buck is having dinner with his boyfriend. His stomach isn’t churning unpleasantly, and his chest doesn’t tighten at the thought that other people might see him – see them – and wonder what they’re doing together, what they are to each other.
At some point in the evening something shifts, something small, then large, and Buck’s not sure when exactly it happens. Maybe when that random blonde woman and her friends interrupt him and Tommy to ask Buck to take a group photo for them. Maybe it’s when he picks up his phone like he’s never taken a photo for a stranger before. Maybe it’s the way he stumbles on his words, and he feels his chest constrict as he feels like he should say something. Maybe it’s the fact that he doesn’t mention he’s on a date and she’s interrupting him. Maybe it’s the way she outright flirts with him, like he isn’t there on a date with Tommy. Maybe it’s the moment he comes back to the table, stumbling out how weird it all was, and then makes it even more weird by asking his gay boyfriend why he doesn’t check out women. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the fact that Tommy then drops a major bombshell about his ex-fiancé, and leaves Buck in a crater where his relationship used to be, struggling for his life, for his self, for whatever he is to Tommy.
Tommy breaks up with him. In the aftermath, Buck isn’t sure how it happened or when exactly their relationship fractured so much that Tommy could see only one conclusion to it, but he’s left watching his boyfriend retreat from his apartment and from his life, and his mind keeps running over the last words Tommy says to him as he tries to figure out just where exactly it all went wrong.
He wonders if Tommy decided to break up with him exactly at the moment when Buck asked him to move in with him, of if the decision has been slowly building in Tommy’s mind, a brick added on their first, second, twentieth, or last date. Buck wonders what in his behaviour made Tommy think he wasn’t serious, or that he was too eager, or that he was just rushing into something, again, without thinking. That Buck was just someone you couldn’t take seriously as a long-term partner.
“Look, Evan,” Tommy tells him. “You’re an incredible guy.” And Buck is back again with Taylor, with Ali, with Abby. He’s standing before a partner knowing that the end is coming, that he could be all these great things and still not be good enough.
“I know how this ends,” Tommy says, and later, much later, Buck can admit that he did too.