Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If Eddie gets much more packed up, he’s not going to actually be able to live properly in his house while he works on finding a place in Texas.

Buck sidesteps the boxes as he makes his way towards the lounge. They have another zoom call scheduled, well, Eddie does, but Buck has invited himself along again because Eddie is in desperate need of a moderating influence to convince him not to break his budget looking for a place nice enough to tempt Christopher back into living with him based on amenities alone, nor to consign himself to a miserable little box of an apartment simply because it’s available and would get him back in Christopher’s life sooner.

When he finds Eddie, though, the laptop isn’t set up though and Eddie isn’t wearing the expression Buck has grown used to in the days since Eddie had announced his intention. Instead, he’s holding his phone and looking stunned.

“Eddie, hey,” Buck greets, warily. “Are you ready for our meeting with the realtor?”

Eddie shakes his head. “I just got off the phone with Adriana. She’s been offered a big promotion.”

“Oh. Uh… good for her?” He’s only met Eddie’s sisters in passing, doesn’t really know much about them, other than the vague impression that they’re closer to their parents than Eddie.

“The new role is based in Atlanta. They want her to start as soon as possible, but she just renewed her lease last month.”

Buck nods slowly. So, they’d been commiserating over moving woes.

“Her place is a nice two bedroom, because she wanted a home office. It’s a short drive from my parents, and Chris has visited her there a few times, so it’s definitely accessible,” Eddie continues. “We just talked it over, and rather than pay the fees to break her lease, she’s going to sublet to me. It means I can be in El Paso in time to spend the holidays with Chris.”

Oh. Wow.

Eddie’s got a place in El Paso. Just like that. All the effort Buck has put into helping him make a real plan, all his determination to make sure Eddie has something in El Paso that would be his own and free from the influence of his family, it’s been worthless.

He’s…

…happy for Eddie. So happy for Eddie that his jaw aches as he smiles.

“Congratulations!” he says, and then, turning sharply towards the refrigerator, “This calls for a drink—a toast.”

Buck grabs two beers, it’s really a shame that Eddie doesn’t keep anything stronger in the house, popping the caps off both and handing one to Eddie.

“To your new life,” he offers, holding his bottle up between them.

Eddie blinks at him, still dazed looking, then gives a shaky smile. He must be overwhelmed at things going so much easier than he must have feared.

“Right. To… family. And to… to making a home.”

Their bottles clink. Buck raises his to his lips and swallows long and deep. Because he’s so passionate about the toast, of course.

Securing Adriana’s apartment doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. Eddie will still need to sort his job out, Bobby has been very accommodating about the prospect of him leaving with so little notice, but Eddie is applying to firehouses around El Paso and other temporary jobs to ensure he still has an income until he can get situated with El Paso Fire Department. He’ll need to finish boxing up his things, work out what he’s bringing with him, what he’s getting rid of, and what he might want to put in storage since Adriana’s place will come with some furnishings but Eddie might want his own versions of that stuff for when he gets his own place. There’s figuring out what to do with this house — Eddie had planned on selling in order to get the cash he’d need for the move, but that was going to be complicated and time consuming, especially if he’s doing it from out of state, and apparently when Buck had been busy elsewhere Eddie had ended up talking with Ravi of all people about the LA rental market and the possible value of keeping his house here and using it as a source of rental income to cover his costs in Texas with cash to spare.

Maybe Eddie doesn’t need Buck for his home in El Paso, but Buck can still help with the process of the move and so he makes lists and one beer leads to another and another and he’s far from drunk when he looks up from the list he’s writing out for Eddie, only to find Eddie watching him with an expression that makes Buck feel like the world is spinning off its axis.

“I wish we didn’t have to do this,” Eddie admits. “I wish I hadn’t fucked this all up.”

“What? No, no. Eddie…” It kills Buck, the way he’s taken all the blame on himself. Like there wasn’t so much tragedy that had brought Eddie to this point: from the fact he’d been rushed into marriage instead of choosing it as part of the natural progression of love, and the pain of losing Shannon and being left with nothing but a list of things unsaid and questions unanswered; to the mistake he’d made with Kim, yes, but the fact that she hadn’t accepted him breaking things off and instead pushed her way into his home and tried to play a part she had no right to or understanding of; to Eddie’s parents and the way they seemed to believe that supporting their grandson meant withdrawing all support for their son and undermining every bridge he tried to build. “Eddie, if there was anything I could do, anything I could give you—”

And then Eddie’s lips are on his, silencing him a tender press that knocks all the breath out of him.

It’s everything Buck has longed for since the moment he realised he could never have it, because there’s some part of him that is broken, only capable of giving this sort of love where he’ll never get it back, but for a few moments he has confirmation of all that it could have been, Eddie’s warm lips, his hand landing gently on Buck’s shoulder, the scent of his cologne wrapping around them both…

“I’m sorry,” Eddie murmurs, when they finally pull apart. “God, that was selfish. I just… I didn’t realise until it was already too late. And I thought for a while that maybe we could still get our chance eventually, but…”

But this is it. It’s over for them. Buck had thought they had at least until the new year, that he’d have more time to mentally prepare himself before Eddie was gone for good, but Adriana’s offer had snatched what little time he had left with Eddie away. He ought to be grateful, he knows it was going to be hell for Eddie not spending the holidays with Chris, had already been mentally making plans to keep him from wallowing too much, and Eddie getting to be with Chris is the best thing, he’d just thought they’d have a little more time.

Perhaps pre-emptive grief has destroyed all sense of reason; there are still things left to lose, they could still be friends, of a sort, with Eddie in Texas. But it will never be what they had, and they’ll never have what they might otherwise have built, and so he says, “You’re not gone yet.”

Eddie’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t pull away.

This time Buck is the one to lean in, and the kiss isn’t delicate but desperate. All the greed, the grasping, that he’s held back, he pours into Eddie’s mouth, pressing their bodies close, until Eddie’s hands rise to grasp at him, like Buck isn’t the only one who feels like they can never be close enough.

He’s spent so many nights here, making a home for himself on Eddie’s couch. He can have one night in Eddie’s bed, before he loses it all for good.

Chapter Text

It’s almost a relief, to be hunched over the toilet bowl at 5am on Christmas morning.

Buck has been feeling queasy on and off since not long after Eddie announced his plan to move, but he’d chalked it up to the stress of helping Eddie speed-run his move so that he could be in El Paso with Chris for the holidays. He can’t be sick to his stomach just at the thought of losing Eddie. That’s not a fair weight to put on his friend, to need Eddie here for the sake of Buck’s health, when Christopher needs him in El Paso. At least the resurgence of last night’s dinner suggests that whatever is wrong with him is probably viral or bacterial, rather that psychosomatic symptoms of the fact that Buck is too selfish to handle letting his best friend go to his son.

Maddie is not going to be happy when she sees his text bailing on joining the Buckley-Han family lunch, not after all her insistence on his attendance despite his lack of holiday spirit. She’s not wrong that a part of him doesn’t want to be surrounded by holiday cheer, but it wasn’t just for the sake of wallowing that he’d attempted to demur the offer. They’d make him welcome and mean it, they’re family and they love him as much as he loves them, but there’re different sorts of family and the thought of watching his sister and Chim be partners, be parents, feels too much like pressing on the bruise of things Buck can’t have.

Tommy might have said he didn’t think he was going to be Buck’s last, but it seems more like Buck isn’t cut out to be anyone else’s last, to be permanent in the way it feels like he’s always chasing.

When his stomach has been emptied of even the thinnest of bile, he crawls back into bed. The sheets have grown cold in the time he’s spent in the bathroom, and he tangles the blankets around him, trying to capture some warmth. For most of the year, the open airy space of the loft helps ease the oppressiveness of LA’s heat, but at this time of year the chill turns the space cavernous and draughty.

He drifts off without realising it, wakes to his phone buzzing with an incoming call from Maddie.

“Merry Christmas,” he says as he answers it, and Maddie laughs softly in response.

“Not so merry for you, by the sounds of your text,” she says. “Are you okay? Do you have any other symptoms?”

“I don’t need you to dispatch me an ambulance. Or your off-duty paramedic. It’s probably just a stomach bug,” he assures her. “This time of year, spending time around sick people, you know how it goes.”

Maddie gives a sceptical hum. “Chim mentioned you were looking a little peaky on shift the other day.”

Which day had that been? The one where Buck had retched behind the ambulance after a call to rescue a guy that had been trapped in his smokehouse had turned his stomach unexpectedly? Or the week before when he’d barely been able to keep down Bobby’s scrambled eggs at breakfast?

“I’m fine,” Buck insists. It’s true, the nausea has subsided for now, though he has no confidence it won’t be back. Either way, he won’t be joining Maddie for Christmas. With her not yet through her first trimester, there’s no way Buck is going to risk exposing her to whatever is wrong with him. “I’ve got orange juice and crackers. I know how to take care of myself.”

“I just feel bad about you being alone and sick on Christmas. Are you sure you don’t want Chim to drop by? He could bring over the tea Linda recommended me. I’ve been using it for morning sickness, but she says it works wonders for any type of nausea.”

“I’m fine Maddie, I promise. If I still feel crappy in a few days maybe I’ll give the tea a try, but there’s no point spreading the sickness around if it’s something I can just sleep off.”

“If you say so,” Maddie concedes. “Do you want me to let you go, so you can rest, or we could swap to facetime and you can watch Jee-Yun open some presents?”

“She wasn’t tearing them open at six am?”

“Not this year,” Maddie says. “Mainly because the first one she got into was chocolate so she distracted herself, but I’m taking the win.”

“I can handle presents,” Buck says, sitting up and pulling on the festively green sweater he’d planned on wearing for his visit. There’s nothing to be done about the dark circles under his eyes as he catches sight of himself in the mirror, but he runs his fingers through his hair and figures that’s presentable enough for family.

*

December drags into January, and Buck doesn’t feel any better though he knows his friends’ patience must be wearing thin.

They were all friends with Eddie, they all miss him. What happened between them, that night when Eddie’s plans finally came together, is no excuse for Buck to fall apart.

They are still friends, after all. Eddie texts him regularly, finds time to call at least once a week. It’s not the same as being there to keep Buck company when he’s sleepless late at night during a slow shift, there are jokes Buck wants to share which would lose their humour if he has to explain the context, he misses the feeling of Eddie’s shoulder bumping against his own for no reason at all. But El Paso was the right choice for Eddie and Buck is happy for him, really truly.

In person, it seems that Eddie is finally managing to connect with Christopher candidly rather than the terse dialogues they’d shared over zoom. He practically glows with joy to talk about what Christopher is reading in class and his opinion of the lunches at his new school, all the ‘boring’ details his son hadn’t deigned to share over calls. It’s not perfect, even over the camera, Buck can see the lines of tension on Eddie’s face when he talks about his parents, about having to make arrangements around them and how Christopher only spends the night at his some weekends because “he has a routine with them, I shouldn’t do anything that might affect him at school”.

It means so much, to finally have hope that they’re going to be okay. Buck isn’t going to bring that mood down with petty complaints about how this winter feels colder than recent years or that he’s been plagued by leg cramps as a result.

The tea Maddie recommended has at least proven as effective as she predicted against his bouts of nausea. As her morning sickness starts to abate and she enters the glowing phase of pregnancy, she gives Buck her whole leftover stock, and since the taste is okay he starts to make a habit of two cups a day, cutting back on his coffee drinking since the caffeine will only exacerbate how jittery he feels when he finds himself at a loose end during all those hours he would have once spent with Eddie.

When he’d broken up with Tommy, his energy had been redirected into baking, but the gap Eddie has left in his life feels impossible to fill, so Buck doesn’t even try. It’s easier to focus on doting on Maddie, until she starts shooting him warning glares like he’s smothering her or like she thinks he’s doing it out of mistrust rather than simply because he’s cherishing the family that’s still around. He takes extra shifts. The team he usually works with on A shift is medic heavy and Buck knows that’s never going to be his area of expertise, his interest in air rescue never really extended beyond idle curiosity and the spark Tommy had lit, but he takes the chance to talk to people on B and C shift about their specialist certifications and starts to wonder about asking Bobby to put him forward for advanced qualifications so he can fill his newfound spare time with studying and training.

*

In February, life goes on.

Chim cracks jokes about getting back out there, how Buck could easily find somebody who doesn’t want to be single for Valentines day and offer them his company, and Buck jokes back that Chim is timing his efforts badly and he should save any attempts to trigger another lovelorn baking spree until a time when the shops won’t be filled with discounted post-holiday candy.

Maddie’s magic tea does its job and as whatever stomach upset Buck had contracted finally abates. His appetite comes back with a vengeance and he finds himself reworking his meal plans to up the protein in order to keep the sudden snacking impulses at bay. It works out quite well, results in Maddie inviting herself round for regular dinners that he’d tried a new recipe for peanut butter chicken and triggered her cravings for a dish would be impractical to cook for herself since Jee-Yun was going through a fussy phase and Chim wasn’t a fan of nuts.

Eddie’s texting grows a little more sporadic, but it’s not unexpected. He warns Buck he’s finally been assigned to a regular spot at an El Paso firehouse but his new captain is a hard-ass about phones being out on shift, even when they weren’t on calls. On the flip side, Chris emails Buck a copy of an essay he’s written about the Liberty Bell with the comment ‘youre from pennsylvania so i bet you can be more help than dad or my abuelos’ and Buck reads it and then spends the evening doing enough research to send meaningful comments back. He’s not going to admit that if he’d been taught about it as a kid it had been at a point where he wasn’t very attentive to history, not when Christopher is finally reaching out after months of silence even though he has no reason to care about the life he’d left behind in LA now his dad has joined him.

Perhaps it’s just that as they creep towards March the weather is starting to improve, perhaps Buck is simply adjusting. There’s a bitter comfort in the fact if all things must end, then the ache in his heart surely won’t last forever.

Chapter Text

It trips Buck up when he goes to pull on a pair of work pants and realises he has to strain a little to do up the button. It’s not a problem, bulking and cutting phases when he’s building muscle mean that he’s got a looser pair, but it catches him by surprise because he’s not in a bulking phase, and if he was going to pack on the pounds unintentionally, he’d have expected it to be back in late fall when he’d been attempting to burying his feelings about the breakup with Tommy in baked goods.

Weeks of his appetite being dulled by nausea, followed by it returning with a ravenous craving for iron rich proteins and leafy greens, shouldn’t be causing a tummy. It’s no beer gut either, not when between Eddie’s absence and Maddie’s pregnancy most of the social occasions where he’d drink have either stopped or temporarily become alcohol free.

He needs to adjust his workouts anyway, over the last few weeks he’s found his pecs inexplicably achy even when he hasn’t been doing anything to work those muscles particularly hard, he’s just not sure if it’s a sign he should be upping those workouts to make sure the strength is there or if he’s been overworking those muscles and needs to take a break.

Nothing Buck experiences feels like a big deal on its own, but the unsettling feeling that there’s something odd going on with his body doesn’t go away. It comes to a head when he starts feeling a reoccurring weird fluttering feeling in his stomach. It doesn’t feel like he’s going to be sick but it’s definitely not normal, and unlikely the explainable stomach upsets that cropped up around meals or when he was first waking up—easily explained as reactions to the food or some sort of reflux—the only pattern to the feeling is, nonsensically, that it is happening mainly in response to loud noises.

Buck had assumed the weird stomach upset he’d been dealing with after Eddie left had just been a stress thing that had diminished as he’d learned to live with the loss, but this new feeling has his mind springing to parasitic cycles and how as a first responder he had a far above average possibility of being exposed to individuals with unusual infections. And he’d been cooking for Maddie an awful lot lately; what if he’d picked up an infection at work then exposed her to it and hurt the baby?

The longer he thinks about it, the more he knows he won’t be able to ignore it until he has an answer, some expert reassurance.

He could ask someone on the team, but he doesn’t want to make Chim worry about Maddie when he’s working so hard to embrace the pregnancy as a joyful experience rather than a worrying one, and if Buck is just gassy or spiralling his way into anxiety symptoms worrying about nothing, he doesn’t want to deal with the team knowing about it.

So he books an appointment with a general practitioner for the next forty-eight off they can fit him in, goes through the whole rigmarole of explaining his symptoms to the receptionist, who has him piss into a container for testing, and then again to the doctor, who asks Buck to remove his shirt and examines his chest and slightly protruding belly with a brisk efficiency that makes him wonder if he’d missed some news about an LA outbreak because she seems to already know what she’s looking for.

Just as he’s putting his shirt back on, the doctor’s computer pings with his incoming test result, and she barely glances at whatever has come up on the screen before nodding as if it only confirms her assessment.

“Well, Mr Buckley, I can see why you described it as feeling like there’s something alive in you,” she says slowly. “You’re carrying high and tight, so with your build it’s not all that shocking you’ve missed it if you didn’t know you had the carrier gene.”

“The carrier gene?” he echoes dumbly. “I don’t…”

The doctor gives him a sympathetic look. “You certainly do, Mr Buckley. You’re between three and four months pregnant. Are you able to identify the date you might have conceived, or would you like to schedule an ultrasound so we can assess the foetus’ development?”

*

Buck arrives back at the loft with a fistful of pamphlets echoing the guidance he’s already up to date on from wanting to know as much as could to support Maddie these past few months, an ultrasound appointment scheduled in a few days, and his mind whirling.

As a teenager, alongside the mediocre school sex ed, his parents had handed him some educational booklets (while not looking him in the eye) but they’d said nothing about him having the carrier gene, even though most families had children tested at birth. Hell, he’d been an IVF baby, genetically selected for, surely the presence of the uncommon gene that allowed some men to carry children was the sort of thing that needed to be checked for when designing your baby to be someone else’s perfect match?

He could call them and ask, but that risked making them wonder why the topic had suddenly come up, and this isn’t something he wants to share with them right now and risk them blabbing, or worse turning up unexpectedly, before he’s had any time to process the news. He’s not sure this is something he wants to share with them at all. Maddie might have wanted to repair things with them so they could be grandparents for Jee-Yun and Buck has supported her choice there, but the few times he’d seen his mother hold Jee-Yun he’d had to fight the irrational urge to snatch her back. He’s not sure he could exercise the same restraint with his own child.

Getting an explanation from his parents won’t change anything. Whatever reason they had for misleading him or neglecting to test him, it doesn’t alter the fact that the doctor had been certain that there is a baby growing inside of him.

A baby that has been growing inside of him for he’s not even sure how long. His face must have done something when said that he needed the ultrasound to confirm the timeline, because the doctor had gently informed him that he still had time to think about his options if he didn’t want to continue the pregnancy, though he wouldn’t be able to linger over the decision.

Buck hadn’t been able to bring himself to admit that he hadn’t even thought that far ahead. He’d been stuck on the fact that the ultrasound would reveal when this pregnancy had begun.

With who it had begun.

There had only been a few weeks between his breakup with Tommy and that reckless night with Eddie. The odds are surely greater for Tommy, with whom he had unknowingly taken the risk multiple times, but the timing of the symptoms stating more closely align with his night with Eddie. It’s impossible to guess though, when for some people symptoms took a few weeks to grow noticeable, and there’s still the risk that some of the things he’s now re-examining as possible pregnancy symptoms really were caused by sickness or stress as he’d first suspected.

Eddie or Tommy, neither of them are here, and Buck certainly can’t mention this to either of them until he knows who is the baby’s other father. He briefly considers calling Maddie, but he can’t ask her to keep secrets from Chim — they’ve all learned the hard way that putting sibling and spousal loyalties in conflict only led to unhappiness for everyone. Plus, anything Chim knows will spread to the team — he’s not sure if any of the others have stayed in touch with Tommy, but even in El Paso Eddie would definitely end up in the loop if news like that started spreading around the 118. Whatever answers the ultrasound gives, it would be a blow to their friendship if Eddie learned about Buck’s pregnancy second hand.

Buck is going to have to figure this out on his own.

Chapter Text

It had taken a week for Buck to fit in the ultrasound appointment. A week of mounting dread in which he couldn’t help bouncing back and forth between who was the worse option. Tommy, who had walked out of his life as easily as he’d walked into it and Buck had no idea if he’d do the same for a baby, if Tommy would step up as a father or be so absent that Buck may as well being having a miracle baby all on his own? Or Eddie, who is one of the most important people in his life, an excellent father, who was working so hard to do everything he could for the child he already had that he’d moved out of state and deserved so much better than to have his life made harder by the unexpected result of a night that neither of them had talked about since it happened.

He has no idea which is the dominant emotion out of relief or dread when the doctor looks up from the scanner and says, “The foetal development is consistent with a conception in late November.”

“And h—how sure is that date?”

The doctor raises her eyebrows. “It’s impossible to be precise, but the estimates are accurate to within a few days. Do you have reason to believe that date is not possible?”

“Oh, no,” Buck shakes his head, embarrassed. “No, that’s… possible. It’s just that I got dumped, a few weeks before that. But late November…”

It has to be Eddie’s.

Now that he knows, it’s impossible not to be relieved that he won’t have to reach out to the man who had dumped him out of the blue and cut their connection as if their six-month relationship had always been something disposable. Though in some ways things might have been easier with Tommy, it would ruin their clean break but, once Tommy knew, either Buck would be doing it alone or they could make a strictly practical arrangement like countless other sets of LA parents who were no longer wanted to be in each other’s lives.

Instead, Buck is going to have to figure out how to co-parent with his best friend, without upending Eddie’s life in El Paso and disrupting his efforts to rebuild his relationship with Chris, and find a way to respect the share of responsibility Eddie was bound to insist on taking without making him feel trapped by a pregnancy that had only occurred because Buck had carelessly trusted his parents when he should have known better and so hadn’t warned Eddie they’d need protection.

“Would you like to know the sex? You’re far enough along that I should be able to make a reasonable assessment, but some people prefer to wait, for the surprise, or until they’ve… made a decision.”

“A decision?”

“You still have a few weeks left for a termination, if that’s the route you chose, but be aware that California decides the cut off based on assessment of viability. That’s typically between twenty-four and twenty-six weeks, but the closer you get to that limit, the greater the possibility of a physician assessing the pregnancy as viable and declining to carry out the procedure.”

Oh.

Abortion.

It’s the obvious choice.

Buck hasn’t even entertained the thought.

This baby, his baby, is going to turn his life upside-down, and Eddie will be dragged into the mess. The most responsible, logical thing for Buck to do would be to just… make the problem go away. Make his baby go away.

“—ley. Mr Buckley!”

Buck startles, attention snapping back to the doctor. “Yes? Sorry… I—I just zoned out a moment.”

“I understand. These are big decisions. As I said, you still have a few weeks, to think it over, or talk to anybody who might impact your decision. I can also give you the details of a counselling service. They’re a reputable organisation who specialise in giving unbiased advice to individuals experiencing unplanned pregnancies.”

But what advice can they give, when there are really only two choices, and the one that is most rational is the exact opposite of his instincts?

“I… I think I just need time to process,” he says, though he hasn’t got much time, thanks to being unaware this was even a risk he faced.

The doctor nods, but Buck sees her slip a flyer for the counselling service in the paperwork she hands to him anyway.

He already knows he won’t call. There are only two people whose opinions on this really matter, and they are both in El Paso.

*

Buck doesn’t call Eddie.

He doesn’t call Eddie the night after the appointment, sitting on the floor of the loft reading over all the paperwork he’s been given, repeatedly snatching his hand away from where he keeps subconsciously pressing it to his belly with every thought of the tiny life growing there.

He doesn’t call Eddie the day after either, not when he can’t trust himself to share the news without spilling out all manner of his own messy feelings.

The day after that, Eddie has a museum trip with Christopher (he’d been researching for weeks, making a list of interesting activities in the El Paso area that Christopher’s grandparents hadn’t already taken him to as part of their summer of distracting him from ever having a moment to think about his circumstances) and Buck will not derail that long awaited plan with news which can wait a few more days.

Four days into the spiral, Eddie calls him.

“How would you feel about coming out to El Paso for Chris’s spring break?”

At least it’s not FaceTime, so Buck is able to take a deep breath and steady his voice before he answers, whereas he’s certain his face would have given him away.

“I… won’t you guys be busy? I mean, you two will be having bonding time, rebuilding, right?”

Eddie sighs. “I don’t want to overwhelm him. We’re doing better; he’s agreed to stay with me for the whole two weeks since my parents can’t argue it’s disrupting his school routine, but I don’t want to smother him. He’s got plans with his friends too, but… I was thinking having you there might make things seem more normal and relaxed, not like he’s being forced into pretending things are okay with me.”

Fuck. Had this call come a month ago, Buck would have accepted without hesitation. He wants to be by Eddie’s side again, to see for himself that Christopher is doing okay rather than relying on sporadic texts. There isn’t much he wouldn’t give to make them happy and help fix the rift between them, to make up for his utter failure at making anything better during the summer.

But he can’t.

There’s no way to visit and keep his pregnancy a secret. Maddie and the team suspect nothing, with the way Buck’s body composition has fluctuated over the years with variations in his diet and workout routines, even if anybody spotted the slight thickening of his waistline, they would probably blame it on comfort eating or cutting back on his ab workouts. Maddie isn’t drinking because of her pregnancy and hasn’t questioned that Buck would match her sobriety level during their hangouts for simple politeness reasons, and drinking on the job would be out of the question. But hanging out with Eddie and suddenly declining to share a beer? That will provoke Eddie to suspicion for sure, and however uncertain Buck feels right now, how few good options it seems like he has, he definitely won’t be able to lie to his best friend’s face.

Buck also can’t show up in El Paso and drop this bomb on Eddie and Christopher just as they’re reaching a truce. The hope in Eddie at the prospect of Christopher splitting his vacation time between his friends and his father, grandparents a distant third, is palpable, but the fact he’s asking Buck along as a potential distraction or mediator is proof of the fragility of the improvements between them.

He knows Eddie has been as hopeful as he was nervous when he’d thought Shannon was pregnant again, but he’d never got the impression with Ana or Marisol that Eddie actively wanted more kids. Eddies loves Chris, and he’s always good with kids on calls; but Buck still remembers the way Eddie had commented back when they barely knew each other that he loved this kid, Christopher being the most important thing in his life, compared to Buck’s more general enthusiasm for kids. Eddie has always been committed to being a good father to Christopher, if Buck keeps this baby he doesn’t doubt that Eddie will step up and want to be a decent father, but that isn’t the same as actually wishing to parent another child.

Not to mention that Chris is a teenager now, only a few years from his independence, so a baby wouldn’t just be adding to the family, it would be starting the ‘kids’ stage from the beginning, trapping Eddie once again in parenting a young child, just as Eddie ought to be reaching a new stage in his parenting journey and getting to explore the freedoms he’d missed out on becoming a parent so young.

Chris, who would and should have no obligation to his new sibling (Buck would not force him into Maddie’s role of being responsible for making up for any parental shortcomings), but didn’t mean Buck could protect him entirely from the effects of it. Chris has never hinted at any dissatisfaction with being an only child, even when Denny had been so excited about foster siblings and the prospect of the permanent addition of Mara. It would hardly be surprising if Christopher were to deem a baby disrupting his life and eating into his father’s time nothing more than an annoyance, or worse, a conflict of priorities that would damage his relationship with Eddie and drive him back into the focused care of his grandparents.

The responsible thing is to break the news to Eddie sooner rather than later, make sure Eddie has time to think things over and give his own input on what Buck should do about his looming deadline. There’s just no way that Buck can tell him without causing problems. There never will be, but he can at least put it off to allow Eddie and Chris to have had their spring break bonding experience undisturbed.

“El Paso is a long drive, and I know a lot of people with kids have already put in for vacation days around spring break time.” Buck normally did too, but with Chris in El Paso he hadn’t seen the point this year. “I… we could do the summer break, if you want?”

The baby was due mid-August. Either the truth will be out and Buck will already be with them, or there will be no impediment to him going.

He just has to figure out which it will be.

Chapter Text

Buck is at another ultrasound, the deadline to make his decision about terminating the pregnancy perilously close, when the technician repeats the question of the doctor from his first ultrasound, does he what to know his baby’s sex?

The smart choice is to decline, to do everything he can to hold himself back from emotional attachment, but in that moment he realises it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t told Eddie yet, if Eddie would encourage his choice or try to remind him to see reason.

Buck can only choose one way.

It’s going to make a total mess of his life. Eddie will have every right to resent Buck for making this choice for both of them. Chris might be furious at the disruption a baby will bring to their lives. To not allow them a say in this decision makes Buck’s stomach churn with guilt, but he can’t breathe every time he thinks of doing anything else.

He has been pro-choice for as long as he’s known enough about where babies come from to have an opinion, but when Buck thinks of the foetus inside of him all rational arguments vanish from his mind and he can’t help the swell of emotions inside him as the prospect of his and Eddie’s baby. There’s terror, certainly, but also so much love.

He’s brought one child into this world, made partly from him, and given that child up because that was what he’d agreed, what Connor and Kameron needed; but he’s made no promises to anyone about the baby growing inside him now and, selfish as it is, Buck can’t give it up.

He nods and knows he’s sealed his fate even before he gets his answer.

The tech angles the ultrasound wand, reminding him again that sex interpreted from the ultrasound is a generally reliable estimate, not a guarantee, before pronouncing, “But from the looks of things, you’re carrying a baby girl.”

A daughter. His and Eddie’s daughter.

Will she look like Chris? Buck sees so much of Eddie in him, but he knows Eddie sees resemblances to Shannon that Buck never knew her well enough to recognise.

There’s so much he’s going to have to figure out. Not just the immediate crisis of finding a way to tell Eddie and Chris without it blowing up in their faces, nor how to cope with the fact that Buck has built his life here, but Eddie and Chris want theirs in El Paso. He’s going to have to learn how to be a good father, to be this little girl’s number one person, to be somebody she can rely on no matter what, even if things get messy with Eddie and Christopher — it’s too easy to recall the way Christopher had refused to look Buck in the eye in the aftermath of the Kim situation and know that Buck had missed any warning signs that things weren’t right with Eddie until Kim had shown up at the firehouse, and even then his words to Eddie hadn’t got through. He hadn’t been enough for them and Chris (who had once run to Buck when things got bad) had called his grandparents and cut Buck and Eddie both off.

There’s all the small things too. He’s learned how to style Jee-Yun’s hair, Buck had got well into his twenties before figuring out that he didn’t need to gel his hair smooth to make it look good, Chris inherited Shannon’s curls over Eddie’s voluminous but smooth locks, if the same genetic dominance pattern repeats and this little girl inherits Buck’s curls he’ll have to learn a whole new set of tricks to style curls worn longer. He can probably find a tutorial for that though.

There isn’t going to be such an answer regarding how to make it work with the mess of a family he’s going to be bringing this baby into, all he knows is that he loves her already and he’s going to do the very best he can.

*

With the one life-upending decision made, it’s easier to start figuring out a plan for all the rest.

Buck still has no idea how to confess to Eddie, but he buys a notebook and pulls up all the baby research he’d already done for Maddie and hashes out the practicalities.

LAFD policy doesn’t require disclosure of pregnancy, only any associated health or fitness issues which might interfere with his ability to do his job, so it is theoretically up to him when he wants to swap to light duty until he gets to the point pregnancy symptoms will get in the way of his work. The safest choice is sooner rather than later: Buck can’t go into the field and give a potential rescue less than his best if he’s too worried about protecting his baby to make a jump or stick it out in a collapsing structure.

He won’t be able to swap to light duty without people asking questions. Bobby is theoretically bound by privacy laws as his captain to not pass on the reason if Buck put in the request, but that wouldn’t keep the team from noticing and speculating. Gossip would get back to Eddie, which means Buck can’t make his transfer until after he’s figured out a way to break this news.

Buck also scrutinises the LAFD’s pregnancy and parental leave policies. He’ll have an entitlement to some paid leave as part of his contract, he needs to stay employed by the LAFD to use that, but he also needs to figure out his living situation.

The loft is no home for a baby even if he they stay in LA, and when Buck envisions the home he wants his daughter to grow up in the only place he can picture is Eddie’s house in LA, but Eddie is gone and the place that once felt more like home to Buck than his own apartment has new occupants now.

Eddie has followed Chris to El Paso because he’s a good parent doing what’s best for his son. Buck won’t ruin that for either of them. So if Buck wants his daughter to have both her parents and any chance of a good relationship with her brother, he’s going to have to follow them.

He’d been half tempted to offer that anyway, when Eddie had announced his departure, but Buck’s ties to LA had restrained him. Not just his job, but family too. He’s trying to believe that things will be better this time for Maddie and her pregnancy, she knows her previous risk factors and the warning signs of complications, is in a better place mentally, and Chim will be free to support her without the complications of the pandemic; but Buck had also been counting on being able to support her better himself. He trusts her, trusts their whole family to look out for her, but he can’t stop the crawling guilt at the prospect that he’s going to be too wrapped up in problems of his own creation to be there for her.

Even if he had no reason to worry for Maddie, there’s a part of him that is twice as petrified at the prospect of having this baby without his sister at hand. Eddie is an excellent father, but he’s also got Chris to think of. Buck is going to do his best, but he’s not naïve enough to think a new baby won’t be hard. When he imagines the start he wants for his little girl, it’s with the doting of the 118 extended family, he wants to figure out how parent with Maddie’s reassurance and Bobby’s advice, Hen’s gentle teasing and Chim’s solidarity in having not so long ago experienced being a first-time father. He knows they’ll still care, still call, if he’s in El Paso, but it won’t be the same; just as his friendship with Eddie feels different now they’re hundreds of miles apart.

They can’t have both though, and their daughter having Eddie as a present parent matters more than Buck getting to cling to his own supports. Which means he’s going to have to figure out moving to El Paso: how to break his lease and transfer his insurance and what he’ll need to do to earn a place at a new firehouse while still in the postpartum recovery (Eddie is too responsible not to provide financially for his daughter but Buck doesn’t want to be a drain on him and he’s going to do his utmost to make sure Christopher won’t feel the baby is taking anything away from him). He’ll also have to make sure he’s fully capable of caring for a baby on his own when Eddie’s time is occupied with work and Chris and anybody else Buck might lean on for help learning and adapting to that situation will be too far away to offer more than words.

Seeing it all written out on paper only hammers home how much he’s about to turn his life upside-down and how difficult some of those changes are going to be, yet somehow despite all the sweeping changes written out, the step that is still leaving him feeling paralysed is picking up the phone and calling Eddie.

Chapter Text

It’s a simple call, a low-speed two car collision with minor injuries, but unfortunately it’s happened between a couple both trying to use their narrow driveway at the same time and they’ve somehow wedged the cars together so that none of the doors are accessible which means it’s a scramble to extract them.

Buck’s lucky, he’s on the wife’s car and she’s mostly concerned with getting out. Over at the other car, the husband seems more interested in throwing a tantrum over the damage to his car and the fact it’s being worsened be the rescue — the sort of caller that it’s all too tempting to offer to leave where they are until they get their priorities in order. He’s Hen and Bobby’s problem though, so Buck tunes out the yelling and the threats of a lawsuit as he breaks through the windshield and helps the exasperated woman free of her seat. They didn’t see the accident, but Buck would lay money on who the careless driver at fault is.

He clears the broken glass, creating a safe route to guide the woman over the hood and out of the car, and hands her off to Chim, then follows her down, only for his heel to catch on a spot of leaked oil and skid out from under him.

In the blink of an eye, he’s flat on his ass, shoulder slamming against the hood of the car with a sharp reverberating pain.

“Aaand Buckley hits the deck again!” Chim teases. “Do you need a remedial lesson in watching where you put your feet?”

Buck should laugh, it is foolish that for the second time in less than a year he’s slipped on an innocuous spill and landed on the same shoulder, instead he grimaces and rubs his hand over his abdomen, hoping it looks like he’s just sore, but trying to coax out a response. She hasn’t progressed to distinctive kicks yet, but he’s felt smaller churns of movement and one of those flutters would be very reassuring right about now.

Chim’s brow furrows when Buck doesn’t join in on the joking. “You’re okay, right? You didn’t whack your head there, did you?”

“N-no, my head’s fine,” Buck reassures. It’s a simple fall, he reminds himself. The overall drop was barely more forceful than flopping into his bed after a long shift. Worrying about the baby is pure paranoia, when most of his pain in concentrated in his shoulder. “I think I’m going to need this shoulder checking out though, I landed hard on my shoulder. Same one as last time.”

“Want me to check you over?”

Buck shakes his head. Under a loose shirt, it’s still easy to overlook, but if he takes his shirt off, there’s nobody on the team who isn’t smart enough to take note of the fact the protuberance of his belly is too well defined to simply result from an excess of baked goods. “I slipped over, I don’t need a fuss,” he says, hoping it comes across bashful rather than secretive. “It’s probably a pulled muscle, but I think I’d better get it scanned to check there’s no underlying problem, y’know. I’m not twenty-six and bouncing back from this stuff anymore.”

That works well enough to elicit eyerolls from not only Chim, but also Hen who is passing by as she grabs some more gear.

“You’re still the baby here,” she teases. “If you start complaining about being an old man, what about the rest of us?”

They make quick work of the scene after that. Both victims need first aid and advice about warning symptoms to watch out for, but neither of them have serious injuries, so Hen and Bobby take the truck back, and Chim drives Buck to the emergency room in the ambulance but concedes that a wrenched shoulder is minor enough for him to sit up front instead of loaded in the back like a patient.

“Want me to come in with you?” Chim offers when they arrive. “Shift ends in an hour anyway, Bobby won’t mind my hanging around as long as I’m on call if I’m needed.”

Eddie had waited with Buck last time he’d been injured like this, but then there hadn’t been any reason for Buck to need medical privacy.

“Don’t bother, it’s a shoulder wrench, which means it’s going to be ages in a waiting room to get it checked out and probably be told all it needs is rest, elevation, ice.”

Chim raises his eyebrows. “You could do that yourself, but you asked to come to the ER.”

For that baby, but he can’t tell Chim that. “Yeah, well, with the dislocation a few months ago, I want to get checked out that it healed up right. I wouldn’t have expected a simple fall like that to hurt so bad.”

“Sensible,” Chim says with a slow nod. “Alright, I’ll head out. But call if you need to, yeah. Me and Maddie can sort out getting your jeep back if you aren’t able to drive for a few days.”

Normally, Eddie handles the jeep if Buck is ever unable to drive. Eddie hates driving, but he also doesn’t need to adjust the seat and mirrors a whole bunch and leave them for Buck to adjust back.

But Eddie is in El Paso.

So Buck thanks Chim for the offer, then heads inside and fills out his intake form and ticks the boxes for ‘carrier’ and ‘pregnancy’ before handing it over, and not unsurprisingly with those boxes selected, he’s moved through the queue much faster.

“Mr Buckley, you’re here today because of a fall?” the doctor confirms when he’s ushered through the assessment room.

“Yeah, slipped and landed on my ass, but I also hit my shoulder which is where most of the pain is. I dislocated it last fall, so I want to check I haven’t done any serious damage,” Buck explains. “But… uh… mainly I wanted to get checked over because I’m pregnant… six months.”

The doctor nods understandingly. “I see. A small fall shouldn’t be too much to worry about, but we’ll do the baby checks first, just to give you peace of mind.”

The exam is quick and efficient, which isn’t a surprise given that Buck knows his worry is largely irrational, but it’s still a relief to hear the doctor noting no trauma to the abdomen and only light bruising to his back (his shoulder and tailbone had taken the brunt of the impact) and a steady foetal heartbeat.

“A minor accident like that isn’t typically risky during pregnancy, but I would recommend being extra alert to any changes in symptoms over the next few days. If you have any abdominal pains or bleeding, head to an ER to get it checked out. Now, let’s get a proper look at this shoulder.”

That is distinctly more unpleasant, the pain a steady ache and, when the doctor finishes examining and scanning, they say, “It looks like a partial muscular tear. You could rest it and see how it heals naturally, but given that it was caused by a low-impact fall and likely aggravated by your history of injury to this shoulder, you might also wish to consider reconstructive surgery, which would have a longer initial recovery time but would reduce the risk of similar re-injury in the future.”

“How long would those options take?”

“If you wish to let it heal naturally, you could be back to full use of the shoulder within a few weeks, but it would be vulnerable to more severe tears if it is subject to further impacts. The reconstructive surgery would have a longer recovery time, at least three months, but some patients take up to six depending on the complexity of the process, but your shoulder would be stronger against possible future injuries. But it would be minimally invasive and can be done under local anaesthetic, so you could get it done right away without any concern about your pregnancy.”

The doctor pauses for a moment and then adds, “Of course, you know your own personal circumstances best, but getting the surgery promptly would mean you’d likely be recovered to the point of light lifting by your due date, you may wish to consider the challenge future strain issues might present while caring for an infant.”

Well, that was an unsubtle hint alongside the more neutral medical recommendation.

“Thanks, can I get the full info on the surgery to take away to think about,” Buck says. Under other circumstances, he wouldn’t hesitate before picking the option which got him back to the 118 fastest, but he’ll need to take light duty for the pregnancy anyway, and the prospect of his shoulder problems getting in the way of giving his daughter the care she needs is one he wants to avoid.

*

The next time he knows Eddie is off and Chris must be at school, Buck calls.

Eddie picks up within a few rings. “Buck? What’s wrong?”

They exchange at least a few texts a day, even if their conflicting shifts mean a lag between replies, but calls are harder to fit in. But he hadn’t thought they’d got the point where their communication was so fragmented that Eddie would only expect an unplanned call from Buck in the event of a problem though.

“Nothing. Why would something be wrong?”

“You’re on shift right now. You wouldn’t call just to chat while you’re working. So what is it?”

Huh. Eddie must have a good memory, to still recall where in 118’s rotating scheduled they are after all these months.

“No, I wasn’t watching my footing on a call the other day, fell and hit the same shoulder I messed up at Halloween, so I’m completely off duty all week, and I need to talk to Bobby about getting a temporary transfer to a lighter duty role for a while. But hanging out on my couch alone while everyone I know is at work gets old fast, so I thought if you were off shift maybe we could—”

“A transfer?” Eddie interrupts. “You were okay after a few days, last time. What happened that you’re hurt so badly you need light duty? Nobody mentioned anything to me.”

“It was a stupid slip, nothing to talk about. But last time it was a strain on the muscle from the dislocation, this time it’s a partial tear, so it’s going to need a few weeks, minimum.”

Not to mention his other reason for needing light duty. Every conversation he has with Eddie, Buck feels the weight of what he’s withholding, but if he tells Eddie about the baby now, it’s going to seem needy. A guilt trip that he’s pregnant and injured and Eddie should let himself be dragged back to LA to take care of him. And no matter how much Buck misses him, he can’t do that.

“Minimum?”

“The doctor also suggested a possible surgery. It would be a longer recovery time but lessen the risk of me getting more strain injuries to that shoulder. It seems more convenient to get it done down, rather than risking more minor shoulder injuries until it gets so bad I don’t have a choice.”

It’s a half truth. Under usual circumstances, he would have been tempted by the option that would let him get back on the job faster, and he’d worry about any future injuries only if they actually happened. But it is convenient that a three-to-six-month recovery from shoulder surgery will give him the perfect excuse to ask for the light duty he was going to need to take anyway without having to mention the pregnancy or arouse any suspicions.

Eddie hums thoughtfully. “I guess I see the sense in that. What’s the recovery like for the surgery?”

“Arm in a sling for a few weeks, then avoiding heavy lifting for a few more and building usage back up with physio.” The information he’d received said three to six months for the recovery, but that was based on an average person — Buck isn’t going to push his recovery, he can’t risk injuring himself further and not being able to care for his baby, but he knows his body well enough that he’ll do all his physio properly and heal efficiently.

“Have you got a plan for support with your recovery? Will Maddie be helping you out?”

“I should be fine, it’s not than invasive of a surgery. I can prep enough freezer food to get me through the first few days where I’ll be pretty sore, and after that I can look after myself.”

“Buck, come on. I know how tough being without the use of a shoulder is.”

“It’s not the same.”

It’s not a bullet wound; and Buck would have stood sentry outside Eddie’s door if he’d not been allowed in to assist, he’d wanted to help Eddie for selfish reasons as much as he had because Eddie and Chris would benefit from it. Buck can’t inconvenience anyone else over a pulled muscle.

Eddie sighs and, fuck, Buck is doing it without even meaning to, using his injury to solicit worry and attention because he can’t handle being left behind again.

“Anyway,” he says firmly, “Resting my shoulder is super boring. Tell me what’s going down in El Paso.”

There’s a long pause before Eddie says, “Well, now the weather is warm again, my parents are back to talking about building a pool.”

“If they wanted to do that, wouldn’t it make sense to have made the plans and got work started before it started getting to be swimming weather?”

“Yeah, well, my mom is super keen on the idea, but I’m not sure my dad is such a big fan of having the yard torn up by construction, especially when Chris isn’t that interested in swimming by himself. They’re both happy to give Chris more reasons to spend his time there, but regularly inviting his friends over? It’s mom’s idea of a great opportunity to show off to the other moms, dad is less keen on an invasion of noisy teenagers.”

Buck wrinkles his nose. “He’s fourteen; surely the moms aren’t coming over with their kids?”

“No, but the kids talk and some of their parents go to the same church as them, so she’s got plenty to say about how much Chris’s friends love going over to theirs and how nice he gets to have that with them without having to worry about space and fitting around my work hours.”

“I see.” It probably was nice for Chris to get to visit his extended family like that and having more spaces he felt at home and welcome his friends to. He had Pepa in LA for family, but LA real estate meant it wasn’t practical for her or Eddie to host large gatherings often. When Buck moves to El Paso, he’ll be getting his own place near Eddie at first so as not to overcrowd Eddie and Chris’s current living situation, but when their lease was up, maybe they’d move in together. Their combined incomes would net them more space, and if they could offer Chris the advantage of being able to host his friends at home too, that might outweigh the inconveniences of asking him to cohabit with a baby.

He listens to Eddie talk more, doing his best to be encouraging every time Eddie says something that second guesses his own parenting. After spring break, Chris had chosen to mainly stay with his dad, though he still went to his grandparents at least once a week for dinner and stayed over every other weekend. Some families were just close like that, Buck knew, but Eddie had confessed to Buck he still felt like he was in a split custody arrangement and that the balance could tip back to Chris living with his grandparents at the slightest misstep.

Eddie had asked, a few times, what impression Buck got of Chris’s feelings of the situation (‘I’m not asking you to break his confidence, if he’s told you something private, but… does he seem happy?’) but Buck hadn’t been able to give him an answer other than to trust his gut and that he was the one who could see how Chris was going.

The truth was most of what Buck heard from Chris was emoji reactions to messages Buck sent, Chris’s contact was mainly memes or photos of stuff he found funny. It was probably more typical teenager behaviour than any conscious choice on Chris’s part to leave Buck on the outside of his life, but it was hard not to wonder if Chris had moved on from the life Buck had once been part of on an almost familial level; if maybe their closeness had only ever been a side-effect of proximity, fun but not the sort of relationship Chris wanted to make the effort to maintain now Buck wasn’t part of his life by default.

Despite that, it’s not like Buck thinks Chris would be mad specifically about Buck coming back into his life when he moves to El Paso, but doing so not as a family friend but as the parent of his new half-sister is surely going to be harder for him to welcome. If Eddie is right and things are going better, Buck is going to be the one bringing problems back into it. The more Eddie shares his hopes and cautious steps towards a more normal relationship with Chris, the more certain Buck is that he needs to do his best not to ruin the last months they’ll have being father and son, Chris as Eddie’s unquestioned number one, before he breaks the news.

He’ll have to admit his situation at some point, it’s going to get harder and harder to keep concealing it — fortunately he’s not Maddie, already struggling with carrying the extra weight of her baby, on Buck’s much larger frame the weight gain seems slight by proportion — but getting the shoulder surgery will buy him time. And it will buy Eddie time to work on his relationship with Chris without distraction or the added conflict of how Chris might react to the addition of a baby to his family.

The baby growing inside of him is getting everything she needs from Buck’s body right now. The little weight of her is his to carry. He’s heard that babies can recognise voices they heard in utero, but tucked away safely inside Buck she isn’t really going to feel the absence of her other dad or brother. Buck carrying the responsibility of her now protects her from being introduced as a burden on them while they’re struggling, and hopefully by the time she’s born they’ll have repaired things enough that Buck introducing her as a new addition to their family they could learn to love, not a weight to their troubles.

Chapter Text

Bobby manages to find him a temporary transfer to the LAFD’s administrative department, only raising his eyebrows a little when Buck can’t quite suppress his amusement at learning the placement is to cover somebody taking parental leave as the duration coincidentally lines up with the time Buck has estimated he’ll need to be off. But when Bobby follows up by reassuring Buck his place at the 118 will be waiting for him when he’s recovered, the attempted comfort curdles in Buck’s stomach.

It’s not fair of him to not give Bobby the heads up that he’ll need to start recruiting for Buck’s permanent replacement, rather than just a fill-in, especially when he’d had such a hard time finding somebody for Eddie’s spot, ending up putting two part-timers from B shift in that spot.

But the lines of team and family are so blurred. Bobby his boss might be obliged to keep Buck’s situation confidential if Buck told him in this capacity; Bobby his friend would probably tell him he should be honest, even though Buck keeping his baby to himself until Eddie and Chris are doing better benefits everyone. Even officially prevented from breaking the news, Bobby would be more than capable of stoking the team’s curiosity and nudging them in the right direction until it was impossible for Buck to keep his secret.

No, inconveniencing Bobby will just have to be something Buck apologises for later. Instead he does his best to show his appreciation for Bobby finding him a transfer. Sure it isn’t the sort of work that appeals to Buck, but it will keep his little girl safe and, as he assures Bobby, is a good pick on the grounds of being based out of LAFD HQ not the dispatch building like Eddie’s desk job had been. Buck loves Maddie, but working directly under the watchful eye of his sister would definitely have been weird, not to mention disastrous for his secret.

In a stroke of luck, his doctor gets his surgery scheduled in during the gap of a few weeks before his new role is due to start, meaning he should be over the worst of the recovery and ready to start as soon as the job’s regular occupant starts their leave.

In the meantime, he’s stuck off work and in the loft, with his arm in a sling and aching steadily because even though the surgery went off without a hitch the pain goes deep enough that he’d need to take stronger painkillers than his pregnancy allows if he wanted to numb it entirely.

Eddie was right, having only one good arm is limiting. Buck was right too, he can manage just fine. He’d lived on crutches for months after his leg injury, which had meant limited use of his arms while standing, and he’s good at making do.

Buck passes the time by self-indulgently fussing over his baby, bump prominent enough now that it’s a good thing he injured himself when he did because he wouldn’t be able to hide it in his uniforms. He’s wearing baggy sweatshirts whenever he sees anyone now, thankful not wanting to restrict his shoulder and his longstanding reputation for running cold means nobody calls him out over the unseasonable wardrobe choices.

His baby is growing steadily, and she’s strong too. Buck isn’t going to pin any potential destiny on her until she’s ready to choose for herself, but if she does want to be a soccer player she’s certainly got the kicking instincts for it. If he puts on music, he can really get her moving, and he passes hours playing around with radio stations experimenting to see if she’s responding just to the sounds in general or if there is a pattern to what she responds to.

When baby girl is resting, he works on his plan, confirming the fee to break the lease on the loft when the time comes and finding a realtor based in El Paso (not the one Eddie used, there’s no reason to think they’d be in touch after Eddie stopped being a client and moved into his sister’s apartment, but it would be just Buck’s luck for them to run into each other in the grocery store and get into polite small talk). The fact he’ll be quitting his job with no new one lined up makes finding a landlord willing to rent to someone in his financial position tricky, but it’s not like Buck is looking for a forever home, just somewhere to stay for a few months where he and the baby can be close to Eddie without overcrowding his current apartment. They can work out their long-term plan together from there. The realtor sounds apologetic when she says only studios will really be in the ‘playing it safe’ budget he’s drawn up but that’s fine by Buck, he’s pretty sure being able to keep his baby girl within sight at all times will be exactly what he wants.

She can’t be ‘baby girl’ forever though, and Buck has never named anything before; his parents weren’t exactly pet people and he’s never had a lifestyle that would have let him take care of one himself. He starts out trawling baby name websites, but after he finds himself with a mass of tabs open delving into the life stories of people who have had the names that catch his eye, he switches to ordering a physical baby names book that will let him work on it without distractions.

It’s easy enough to rule names out—nothing like ‘Hope’ that will weigh her down with expectations or names picked based on their meaning; no names that he associates with anyone else, she deserves something all her own, he flips through the pages crossing out exes, acquaintances, and relatives with ease—but finding anything that actually feels right is a whole other question.

How had Christopher got his name? Buck wishes he could call Eddie up and ask him, but he can’t think of an excuse to give if Eddie questions why Buck is thinking about this. Buck can’t make this decision alone, he isn’t going to pick something without giving Eddie a say, but it feels negligent not to at least be working on a shortlist

He’s sure some parents-to-be would envy him this period of inactivity, but the boredom and isolation chafe, remind him too much of the last time he was unfit to do his job and unable to talk about it with his team knowing that he’d get no sympathy for his frustration with the consequences of his own choices, but aching for somebody to tell him everything is going to be okay.

He’s aching and frustrated in other ways too.

Increased libido during the later stages of pregnancy was a tidbit he’d tried to ignore when researching for Maddie and hadn’t really thought applied to him, assuming it was mainly a psychological thing for happy couples enjoying being over the nausea stage of the process.

But, as he passes the seven month mark, Buck finds his body surging with arousal over seemingly nothing at all. He’s waking up hard more often than he has since puberty, but it just leaves him feeling pent up and unsatisfied.

He doesn’t want to hook up, he’s not that guy anymore and even if he were and he found someone to hook up with that didn’t care that he’s pregnant, the thought of letting somebody touch him like that while he has his and Eddie’s baby inside of him makes Buck’s skin crawl.

Trying to see to himself is barely better. Buck’s mind recoils from fantasies of other people, but memories of his one night with Eddie aren’t enough. It ought to have burned indelibly into his mind, his soul, but when he tries to recall the exact crook of Eddie’s fingers or the timbre of his voice as he’d asked ‘like this?’ the recollections are hazy and hollowed by the knowledge that night was all of Eddie he’d ever get to have. It isn’t fair that the night changed his life forever but, though he tried to savour it in the moment, he can’t find pleasure in the memories. They never talked about it in the aftermath, Buck had known if he tried that all his desperation would come spilling out, a mess Eddie didn’t need adding to his struggles, and, once Buck had known he was pregnant, there was no way to bring it up that wouldn’t end in him explaining everything.

They’ll have to acknowledge it once the baby is out, but it fills Buck with bitterness to think that Eddie might look back on that night with regret, and that poisons his own memory, the expression on Eddie’s face in his fantasies twisting with recriminations and betrayal until Buck can’t stand to think of it anymore.

Nobody but Eddie will do for him, but there’s no separating the Eddie in his memories and imagination from his fears, and so Buck is left alone with nothing but needs which are impossible to meet, an all too familiar feeling.

Chapter Text

His shoulder recovery provides the perfect cover for his need for light duties, and the nine-to-five hours of his temporary administrative role provide an excuse to only meet up with the team during evenings since it’s becoming increasingly hard to get away with hiding under layers while in the California sun. He mainly talks to Eddie by phone or by text, and Eddie doesn’t question that Buck is always sitting down facing the camera rather than with whatever device he’s calling from propped up with a wide view of the room while Buck is multi-tasking — why would he? Half the reason is sincerely wanting to give what little time he gets with Eddie his undivided attention, concealing the changes to his body is just a convenient side effect.

He has no solution to the problem of Maddie.

She definitely suspects that something is going on with him, pointedly asking if there’s anything he wants to talk about, though Buck is fairly sure her suspicions were only a general sense that things were different rather than her picking up the signs of what he was hiding. Since the surgery though, Buck can tell she’s started shifting from idly curious to actively worried, and she’d let slip Chimney, instead of sensibly reassuring his pregnant wife, has told her that Buck was acting increasingly oddly at work before the injury.

Every time they meet up, she’s watching him, no longer content to wait for him to share but trying to figure him out. A few intentional misdirects might keep her from figuring out the truth, but constantly hiding is exhausting and worrying about Buck will stress Maddie out which won’t be good for her baby. He doesn’t want to drag her into his secrets and lies, but he can’t push her away either.

In the end it comes down to the simple fact that Buck can’t—won’t—spend the next two months coming up with excuses not to hug his sister just because his baby bump is now prominent enough that no amount of obscuring the silhouette is going to keep Maddie from noticing it bumping up against her own when they hug.

He invites her over to the loft, makes two mugs of herbal tea that he isn’t really interested in drinking; he just wants something to do while he builds up to what he needs to say. Sets them down at the island, like avoiding facing her head on is going to make this conversation any easy.

“I know you’ve been suspicious of me agreeing to get the shoulder surgery,” he starts, trailing off as Maddie sighs. An auspicious start.

“I’m glad you got the surgery, it was a sensible choice, but it was surprising you didn’t take longer to decide, especially when it means you’re not able to work with the 118,” she explains. “You’ve been down ever since the breakup with Tommy, and then Eddie left, and you got sick at Christmas, and then just when it seemed like you were starting to perk up, this injury and it seems like your new job is keeping you so busy we’ve hardly seen you lately. I worry.”

Laid out like that, it’s hard to argue with. Buck hadn’t meant to cause her stress, but of course his sister would pick up on the odd behaviours his secret had led to.

“The truth is, I’ve… had something going on these past few months. Still do. But I… I’m not ready for everyone to know Maddie, not yet, and especially not the team.” He takes a sip of his tea, scalding his tongue slightly, before he looks Maddie in the eyes. “I could tell you, but if I tell you I need you not to tell Chim and I don’t want to put you in an awkward spot. Or you can just know that I have some personal stuff going on, and leave it at that when there are things I can’t explain.”

Maddie frowns. “I know we’ve had our difficulties figuring out a balance as a family, but if something is private between us, I understand that and Chim will respect it, just as long as it isn’t going to end with someone in hospital.”

Buck winces. Of all the phrasing she could have chosen, she picks the thing that isn’t really grounds to worry at all but means he’s either got to lie to her or let the whole situation sound more dangerous than a routine procedure.

“Buck—” Maddie can read him too well, her expression darkening at his reaction to the mention of the hospital. “Are you sick? Did they find something when working on you shoulder?”

“It’s not like that. It’s not… it’s not a bad thing.” Complicated and scary, he can’t deny, but Buck can’t bring himself to think of bringing his baby girl into the world as something bad.

Maddie looks unconvinced though.

Even if she can’t make the promise Buck wants, he’s made her worry worse with this pre-confession and he can’t leave things like this. He’s going to have to take the risk. At the very least, if Maddie decides she can’t keep his secret, he trusts her to be upfront about it and give him a little warning to break the news before anyone else does.

Buck sighs and pulls off his sweater. The t-shirt he has on underneath clings to the undeniable swell of his stomach in a way that seems pretty self-explanatory, but for good measure he says, “Turns out I have the carrier gene. Surprise.”

He kind of wishes he had a camera to hand, to snap a picture of the way Maddie’s jaw drops. “W-what? But you—”

It’s a relief that somebody who grew up in the same household is just as shocked and it isn’t Buck misremembering that his parents had led him to such misguided certainty that he wasn’t a carrier.

“Yeah, finding out I’m pregnant was a hell of a way to uncover that missing detail in my medical records,” he jokes weakly.

“Oh Evan…” Maddie says softly, “When are you due?”

“August.”

“That’s just a few weeks after me.” He can see her doing the mental arithmetic that he did when he realised, only she’s missing a key figure from the equation and comes up with, “You haven’t told Tommy?”

Buck shakes his head. Best to cut this misunderstanding off before Maddie gets swept away by it. “It’s not his.”

Maddie is skilled at concealing her thoughts and emotions when she wants to, frighteningly so; she so often seems to see straight through him but that sibling power only goes one way. Even someone who didn’t know here would be able to read the way her gentle concern shifts to shock at this clarification, then circles back to concern but this time tinged with alarm.

“Is that why you’ve been keeping it a secret? Evan, if you tried for a rebound with a stranger… It worries me you weren’t safe, even not knowing about the carrier gene, but I wouldn’t judge you. For doing it or for keeping the baby. Nobody would, you know that right?”

They might not judge him for being careless enough to get pregnant, and he knows they’ll be outwardly supportive no matter what, but he can’t shake the worry that privately they’ll think he’s being selfish and impulsive again, to keep the baby despite the challenges.

“It wasn’t like that. Forget about Tommy, it wasn’t some rebound hookup. It was when Eddie left. We… we were almost out of time, but he hadn’t left yet and I… we…” he shrugs, gesturing to his belly. The end results explain it well enough. “I thought I could at least have the memory to keep, but I ended up with a little more than that.”

“You and Eddie?” Maddie blinks, slow and impossible to read. “You’re pregnant with Eddie’s baby?”

Buck nods, breath hitching. It’s strange to hear someone he knows say it aloud. It’s not just his pregnancy, secret and tucked safely away under sweatshirts; she’s going to be Eddie’s baby, out in the world, with everything that comes with that.

Finally, Maddie’s shocked expression settles into a frown. “And the two of you have been keeping this from everyone since last year?”

“I didn’t know I was a carrier,” he reminds her. “When I started showing signs, I thought the bloating and nausea were some sort of stomach upset I’d picked up on the job, not morning sickness. I didn’t even realise what was going on until spring.”

“That was still months ago,” she points out. “You’ve just been keeping this a secret. And Eddie has stayed in Texas and left you to handle it all on your own?”

“You’re the first person I’ve told,” Buck corrects. “That’s why the team can’t know. I don’t want him to hear about it from them.”

“You’re due in two months,” Maddie says, eyebrows shooting up, “and Eddie doesn’t know?”

If Eddie were here, Buck would never have been able to keep the secret this long. But if Eddie were here, Buck wouldn’t need to hide it. “He’s in Texas. He’s busy.”

“Too busy to pick up the phone? Or are you keeping this from him on purpose?”

“We’ve talked, of course we still talk, but—”

“Evan, you have to tell him,” Maddie interjects. “He needs to know about his child. It’s Eddie, he’ll want to be involved.”

She’s right, Eddie will want to care for his daughter, but it’s more complicated than that. Eddie already has a child to think about, one who is hurt and Eddie had come frighteningly close to losing. Their baby girl won’t be affected if Eddie was absent for this part of her life, and giving Eddie his best shot at repairing things with Christopher is also giving her the best shot at having a family that isn’t broken from the start.

“I’m not going to keep them apart. I’m planning on telling him, just… not yet.”

“When then? You’re due in August.” Maddie shakes her head. “Do you feel ready? One hundred percent prepared to be a parent?”

“I—I—Maddie, that’s not fair.” He’s trying. He knows he’s not the ideal parent, but he’s doing the research, making plans. “I’m nervous, but I’m… I have to do this; I want to do this. It might be hard, but I’m going to be good enough for her—”

Face crumpling, Maddie slides from her stool. “Oh, Evan, no, I know. Of course you’re scared, that’s natural. I worry about my baby, I worried about Jee-Yun. It’s okay to be nervous.” Closing the distance between them, she wraps her arms around him. “I hate that you’ve been dealing with all this alone, that you haven’t come to anyone for help. I’m not saying you have to be perfectly ready—I don’t think anyone really is—but you’ve been preparing yourself, practically and emotionally. Do you really think it’s fair to Eddie to have a baby—You said her?” Buck nods. “—to have a daughter sprung on him, without him having a chance to get ready, to think about what it means to be a father to a little girl, another baby.”

“It’s not that simple, he went to Texas for a reason, because he has to prioritise Christopher,” Buck explains. “I don’t want to hurt either of them, but my baby… I love her so much already Maddie, I had to keep her. And I know Eddie will love her, he’s too good not to, but what if I ruin their family?”

“Oh, Evan…” she murmurs. “No…”

But as much as Buck would love to sink into her comfort, he can’t lie to himself about the possibility. “Chris already left once,” he reminds her. “Dealing with a baby is a lot to ask of him.”

Shaking her head, Maddie pulls back enough to look him in the face. “I don’t know their situation that well, I haven’t been privy to all things you have, but from my understanding their situation would be complicated regardless of you or your baby. If things are difficult, I’m not going to lie to you, a baby might complicate things further, but you aren’t to blame for their problems.”

Except that Buck had failed to notice his best friend was suffering some sort of grief relapse, making reckless, self-destructive decisions; not until those decisions were at the firehouse and then on Eddie’s doorstep and it was far too late. Except that Eddie had asked him to fix things with Chris and Buck had only managed to make Chris glare at him with betrayal too.

“Eddie uprooted his whole life to give Chris the stability he wanted in El Paso,” Buck reminds her. “As soon as I tell Eddie, that will all be thrown out of balance. The only thing I can give them is this time.”

“If you’re really scared Chris won’t take the news well, surely the best thing for that is if you and Eddie have a chance to talk it over with him. Let him plan for the changes and bring any concerns to you and Eddie to be reassured.”

“And what if the plan he makes is to live with his grandparents for good?” What if Buck’s daughter becomes the reason Eddie loses his son? He couldn’t choose anything else but to keep her, but he can’t delude himself about that danger. If Christopher cuts Eddie off for this, Eddie would be well within in rights to never forgive Buck the betrayal that put them in that situation.

“You can’t control Christopher’s reaction. Him wanting to live full time with his grandparents again is a risk,” Maddie agrees. “But it’s a risk you’ve already taken. If he’s going to be mad when he finds out, it’s just a matter of when that happens, you aren’t helping by putting it off.”

“If I wait, Eddie gets more time with his son, just the two of them with no complications. And maybe he can use that time to make things good enough between them that Christopher will want to stay anyway.” Eddie is a good father and Christopher loves him, the rift between them is mending and the situation isn’t hopeless, just fragile still.

“Every day you wait is one less day to work through this with Christopher before the baby comes. It’s a day Eddie gets to be with his son, yes, but is it kind of you to let him build up a sense of security while you’re hiding something you know is going to shake their foundations?”

Is that what he’s doing? Telling himself he’s giving Eddie and Chris this time to heal, but actually just letting Eddie wander into false hope before Buck pulls the rug out from under them?

“Not to mention, you need to figure out together what you’re going to do about custody and visitation if Chris refuses to come back to LA. I’m sure Eddie will want to be involved, but El Paso to LA is too far for regular visits, and that’s before working around your schedules.”

Oh. Oh, no. “No. Maddie. I’m not going to do that to them, make them uproot their lives because I decided to keep the baby.” He’s already made one choice which will affect them all; the least he can do is mitigate the consequences. “I’ve already started looking for apartments in El Paso.”

Maddie’s grip on him tightens for a moment before she takes a step back. “You want to move to El Paso?”

Buck laughs. Sometimes he hates El Paso for existing, but, “I don’t want my baby to grow up with a father she only sees on video calls or to keep Eddie from his daughter. And I can’t… I always understood why Eddie followed Chris out there. A custody arrangement where she goes to live with them and I’m here…” he shakes his head, pressing his hands to his bump. He can’t do that. Losing Chris had hurt, no matter how much he’d tried to inoculate himself against it with reminders that Chris was never his to keep; Eddie leaving had felt like having a limb cut off, leaving him struggling along only able to continue because he wouldn’t burden anybody else with him falling apart; but to give up his little girl… he’d survive it, for her sake, but the third strike truly would take him out, he’s already twice been left in LA waiting for visits or calls from El Paso that ease his heartache but never heal it, his baby girl doing the same might break him. “I have to move to El Paso.”

“No.” Maddie’s worried face breaks his heart a little. Leaving Maddie and her new baby is going to torture a part of him, but she’ll still have Chim and the extended 118 family to take care of her, and much as he’ll miss her support, he has to think of his baby first. But Maddie is insistent. “Evan… I… you’re worried about your baby and about the impact you’re having everyone around you and you’re trying to do the right thing. I understand that all too well. But parenting a newborn is hard, it’s hard for even for stable couples with good family support. The thought of you alone in El Paso with no practical support except for Eddie, who’ll be gone for twenty-four hour shifts, or even longer, leaving you without anyone…” Maddie shakes her head. “Honestly Evan, that scares me.”

And it’s awful that he’s adding to Maddie’s stress when she’s already got enough on her plate with her own pregnancy, but there’s no denying the facts of what she’s saying.

The Texas branches of Eddie’s family would be around, but the only one of them Buck really knows is Isabel. She’s healthy for her age, but she was struggling to keep up with Chris back when Buck first met the Diazes, it would be unreasonable to lean on her for help with a newborn. As for Eddie’s parents, ultimately decisions about them will be Eddie’s; but after their lack of support for Eddie over the years and the way they’ve seemed more interested in taking over than helping Eddie and Chris navigate their recent difficulties, Buck can’t imagine going to them with any struggles he has as a new parent. As much as Christopher clearly cares for his grandparents, if Buck’s baby girl wants family to lean on he hopes she chooses Maddie and Chim and that he’ll still visit LA often enough for her to be part of the extended family of the 118th even if neither of her parents work there anymore.

“I can’t take Christopher’s father away from him, I won’t. And I won’t give up my daughter. I… I know it’s not ideal,” Buck concedes. “But this is the only way I can think of to make it work.”

It’s going to be hard, and the picture Maddie’s painted of his life in El Paso only drives home the uncomfortable reality of how alone he’ll be, but Buck has done hard before, been alone, for far less worthy causes than his family.

Maddie bites her lip. “I understand that, but your little girl is going to need her fathers too. Both of them, healthy and supported. Promise me that whatever decisions you make, you’ll keep that in mind.”

“Of course.” He’s not trying to be reckless, only trying to find a solution that will make this work, and this is the best one he has when this isn’t Christopher’s responsibility to manage and Eddie is already committed to his son, which means it’s Buck who’ll need to cover the distance of compromise.

“And that you’ll call me. For anything. Any time.”

She’s looking at him severely, taking on an air that blurs the line between big sister and mom, but, “You’ll have a new baby too, Maddie, I’m not going to wake you in the middle of the night—”

“—so I don’t have to worry? Yes, you will. My kids are going to grow up with a cousin and an Uncle Buck who they know well and who are happy and—”

“Maddie…”

“You can promise me or I can start looking at houses in El Paso too.”

Her expression is fierce, this isn’t a fight he can win, and he certainly isn’t going to disrupt Maddie, Chim, and Jee-Yun lives too, drag them away from their home and the rest of their family,

“I’ll call you. And I’ll be coming back to visit. I’m not running Maddie,” he knows what she fears, but that’s never been his foible. Instead, he’s clung to his baby girl even knowing it’s the selfish choice.

She hugs him again, pressing her head against his shoulder. “And I’m holding onto you. If El Paso is where you think you need to be, I’ll support you. But you need to talk to Eddie. And wherever you need to go, remember you’ll still have a home here and people who love you.”

“I know.”

Chapter Text

Buck is running out of time.

There's a baby-carrier strapped into the backseat of his car (for Maddie's baby, if anyone asks, to save having to go through the whole process of moving a baby seat over any time he babysits or drives Maddie anywhere) and a drawer in his dresser secretly filling up with onesies, in various sizes courtesy of Maddie's advice "you don't know what she'll need, with you and Eddie as parents she might go straight into bigger sizes".

They all look almost impossibly tiny to Buck.

But in barely more than a month, his baby girl is going to be wearing them, and Maddie is right, Eddie needs time to prepare.

If Eddie turned up on Buck’s doorstep with a baby and told him it was theirs, Buck would throw himself into being a parent wholeheartedly, but it would still be overwhelming news. And Buck is free to dedicate himself to his baby girl, Eddie has other priorities that he needs to consider, to plan for. Buck has given Eddie and Chris months to rebuild without this disturbance, but, if he leaves it much longer, his shielding is going to turn into blindsiding them with an actual baby instead of just the news of one impending.

Buck’s done as much as he can on his own to plan for the move to El Paso, but there are preparations Eddie will need to make too. Adriana’s two-bedroom apartment might be perfect for Eddie and Chris, but they’ll have to make changes to accommodate a baby, even if her primary residence will be Buck’s apartment. Buck’s sure Eddie would understand Buck not wanting his baby away from him at first, but at some point he'll have to leave her to go back to work and the most obvious solution is for them to take different shifts so there is always somebody to watch her, but Eddie might have his own opinions about the most suitable arrangements. Maddie’s words about custody and visitation echo in Buck’s ears. They'll have to figure out how their family will function, if Eddie wants to try making a home together or if they’ll need to divide their daughter’s time between them.

It’s not fair if they reach the point of such a discussion without giving Eddie a chance to prepare, to figure out what he wants and what is practical and get his thoughts in order before the whirlwind of dealing with a new baby is dropped on him.

It’s been nearly two weeks since Buck spoke to Maddie, it’s just over a month until his due date, and he owes Eddie at least that much time to prepare.

It’s impossible to plan the conversation, no matter how hard he tries he can’t figure out the words. He’d shown Maddie, but just zooming out on a Facetime call with Eddie and letting him do the maths would be a pretty terrible way to break the news.

Not that there's any good way to upend Eddie's carefully regrown happiness, to admit Buck has known for months this storm was coming but kept it from Eddie, sheltering him as he settled into his new life but always knowing he’d at some point be ripping that shelter away. It had seemed so obvious when he'd first decided to let Eddie and Chris have as much undisturbed time as possible, but perhaps Maddie was right and he's just been cruel not to warn them he's made their current peace temporary. Regardless, if Eddie hasn’t got his relationship with Chris back to a place where this won’t break it by now, giving them any more time is unlikely to tip the balance. None of which makes it any easier to figure out how to tell Eddie, how to apologise for the situation Buck has placed him in without apologising for their daughter, who’s without choice or fault in this.

He can't keep avoiding this, so when they're texting while Buck is on his lunch break and Eddie calls him to better tell the story of the wild call from his previous shift, Buck waits for Eddie to be done and forces himself to speak.

“Can we... Is there… do you have any free time soon when Christopher won't be around? I need to talk to you about something.”

He’s going to need to be able to talk frankly, and Eddie should have some privacy to process whatever emotional reaction he has to the news. Not to mention Chris has had enough unpleasant familial surprises for a lifetime without Buck risking him learning the news of his impending half-sister via accidentally overhearing.

"He's out now," Eddie offers.

"Not now, I'm at work, so I'll need to go soon." It would only take a moment to say 'I'm pregnant' but he owes Eddie a proper explanation, answers to his questions, and he doesn't want to put a countdown on that. Perhaps he shouldn’t have brought it up when he wasn’t in a position to get to the point, but it’s a commitment to having the conversation — now Eddie knows there is a conversation to be had, he won’t let Buck keep chickening out of it. "Is there a good time at the weekend, or during an evening?" Working a fixed weekly schedule actually kind of sucks, Buck had never properly appreciated having his days off move around until suddenly there were periods of time which were just never available to him.

“I have a shift tomorrow... I could call you on my break, but I’d only have the length of the official rest period. My Captain is more of a hardass than Bobby about not using phones on duty even if we aren’t busy.”

“It's... uh... it's not really a conversation to have at work.” Especially not when Eddie has hardly talked about his team in Texas and Buck doesn’t know if they’d be supportive or make things worse if Eddie had such news dropped on him mid-shift.

“Buck… what’s this about?”

“I’ve got… there’s something we need to discuss, when you have the time and the privacy for a serious conversation.” As with Maddie, it’s hard to find the line between conveying the important and time-sensitive nature without making it seem like a catastrophe or emergency that Eddie should immediately worry about. “Nobody’s hurt, or anything like that, but… it’s important.”

“What about Sunday?” Eddie offers. “Chris was probably going to stay in and game, but I can encourage him to go actually meet up with his friends.”

“No, no, don't kick him out!” The last thing Buck wants is to start a precedent of him asking Eddie to inconvenience Chris for the sake of their daughter. “It can wait a little while, just, when else are you free within the next few days?”

He can hear Eddie draw in a slow breath, pictures the thoughtful look on his face as he decides whether or not to push, but eventually he says, “It’s not a great week for me, if I’m being honest. You’re at work during the day. Monday Chris and I have tickets to a baseball game in the evening, Tuesday I’m on shift again, Wednesday is the night my parents have family dinner and they’ve been clear they don’t mind if Chris attends without me but…”

But after all the effort he’s made, it’s no surprise Eddie isn’t exactly comfortable with his parents playing happy families with his son while he’s left on the outside.

It’s tempting to offer to skip work, call out sick so that he can talk to Eddie during the day. It wouldn’t even be faking really, pregnancy related illness and poor mental health were both covered by the LAFD’s absence policy, and the stress of having to break this news to Eddie is certainly weighing on him. But if he offers, Eddie will be suspicious of what conversation could be serious enough for Buck to take a day off work, and Buck needs to be back at his desk in five minutes, this really isn’t the time to be getting into all that.

“What about Thursday evening?” It’s not great for him, he’s got a call with his El Paso realtor he’ll have to cancel, but it’s more important that doesn’t let another week slip by without him breaking the news.

Eddie hums, and after a few moments says, "Chris is going to see a movie with his friends, I can make Thursday work."

It's hardly a confident response, make it work suggests Eddie might need to move some plans around, but Buck can't bring himself to argue. Whatever inconvenience it might be for Eddie to free up his Thursday evening, it's also no good for him to wait even longer for the news.

"Great, I need to get back to work now, but we'll talk Thursday."

Eddie promises to keep his evening clear and says goodbye.

The weight on Buck's chest isn't lifted, but he can breathe easier at the knowledge it won't be long now. Just a few more days, and he'll tell Eddie everything and take the consequences as they come.

*

Eddie, turns out I have the carrier gene.

No, it had worked with Maddie but he can’t risk the conversation going off the rails again before he gets to the why Eddie specifically needs to know.

Eddie, remember that night we spent together before you left…

Except there were too many things Eddie could say to that and if he responded by saying he regretted it, wanted to pretend it never happened, that would make it so much harder for Buck to say what he had to.

Eddie, I’m sorry.

Eddie is certainly deserving of an apology for the fact Buck made a choice that’s going to have a huge impact on Eddie’s life without giving him any input on the decision making, the fact Buck wouldn’t have been able to bring himself to make any other decision doesn’t absolve him of the harm caused. But he can’t let it slip into apologising for the fact their daughter exists; even if she’ll never know, Buck won’t be that parent.

The jeep’s AC is on the fritz again, pumping out warm air, so he winds the windows down instead as he drives to work, letting the breeze rush in and the rumble of the traffic drown out his spiralling thoughts.

There’s no right way to do this. No angle he can present which will make this easier. He’s just going to have to say it. It’s probably better to be plain, Eddie won’t appreciate if Buck tries to mollycoddle him or gives false assurances that this won’t cause problems.

A horn blares. Buck checks his right mirror, looking for the reason, only to hear a screech of tyres from his left.

A red SUV spins across his lane.

Buck slams his brakes.

The car behind him is slower.

A crunch.

A jolt.

He blinks dazedly at his shattered windscreen.

He’s looking down at an upturned sedan.

There’s a loud ringing—for a second he thinks it’s the firehouse bell, but that makes no sense. He tries to turn his head, get a better sense of his surroundings, but the motion makes him heave and that movement sends a spike of pain through his side that has him freezing in panic.

A glance down reveals the driver’s side door has partially caved in, the crumpled metal digging into the side of his abdomen, terrifyingly close to where his baby girl rests. Feeling around, the area is dry of blood or signs of penetrating injury, but that doesn’t preclude internal damage from the harsh impact, or the risk of more damage if he tries to move around.

He’s pinned. There’s a truck blocking him in from the left, and as he looks around further he realises the off balance feeling isn’t just from a blow to the head, the jeep is tilted at a steep angle, as if it had started to roll before being trapped in place by the vehicles around it.

A pileup. And he’s likely right in the middle of it, which means first responders will have to clear the surrounding area before they can even begin to extract him. With this many cars around him, other people must be calling 9-1-1, but he should still make his own call so the responding firefighters would know to look for him, factor his pregnancy into their triage of the scene.

It’s not just triage though, not just the immediate response. He doesn’t think he’s badly hurt, but if anything is wrong, his baby needs to be cared for. Right now, Maddie is the only one who is even aware there would be a need. She’ll be an amazing Aunt, Maddie would make sure her niece is well looked after, but she’s not the person who needs to know.

Buck really is out of time now.

He stretches over, managing to grab his phone, and bypasses the emergency call button in favour of his recent contacts.

He counts the rings, heart pounding, and just as he’s starting to fear it won’t be answered he hears the shift from the dial tone to a connected call.

“Buck? What’s up?” Eddie sounds distracted, with an echo that suggests the phone isn’t being held to his head. “I thought we were calling this evening, I’m with Chris right now—”

Fuck. Exactly the circumstances he didn’t want to break the news in, but it’s too late to be choosy.

“I’m sorry. I swear I was going to explain everything tonight,” he promises. “But there’s been a pileup on the 101.”

“I didn’t know you were off light duty already?” Buck can see the furrow in Eddie’s brow so perfectly in his mind’s eye compared to his blurred vision. “If you’re going to run over at work and not be able to call later, that’s fine, I know how it goes.”

But it’s not fine and Eddie is only saying that because he doesn’t know the importance of why Buck needed that call with him. “I’m in a pile-up on the 101,” he corrects. “I—”

“Have you called 9-1-1? What are your injuries?”

If he were somebody else, the way Eddie so smoothly switches to speaking as a first responder might be comforting. But Buck doesn’t need EMT advice, he needs the father of his child.

“I’m pregnant.”

There’s dead silence on the line. All he can do is push on through.

“I… I don’t know if the baby is hurt. I don’t have any major abdominal injury as far as I can tell, but whiplash, the impact… I don’t know.”

They both know all too well the sort of subtle complications people can come away with after seemingly small accidents. Everything might be fine, but there’s blood dripping down his face and the jeep is rocking slightly as one of the vehicles pressed against it revs their engine like they could just drive away from this mess and Buck is a solid EMT but he can’t take any chances with his little girl and the responsibility he has to see her safely into this world.

“I know you’re in El Paso, but I need you to be here for her. Please. For—” our baby, the full confession is finally on his lips when his car is jolted from behind, something creaking loudly as it tips further.

The phone slips from his fingers, tumbling across the car and through the open window.

His one chance is gone.

Buck can only hope that Eddie is coming.

Chapter Text

He comes to slowly, to a bleary room, but Buck has woken up in enough hospital beds to identify his circumstances by the feel of cheap sheets and the smell of harsh cleaning products.

Car crash. The moment of impact escapes him, but he’s sure that’s how he ended up here. He’d been driving to work, and from there he can piece together blurry memories of firefighters (nobody he’d met before) cutting him from the jeep, then arriving at Presbyterian and he knows he talked to a doctor but the conversation is a gap in his recollections.

There’ll probably be a chart within the vicinity of his bed. He starts to sit up, only to be struck by an immediate wave of wrongness as, where there should be the weight of his baby, he feels only the horribly familiar pull of an injury that ought to hurt but is currently being masked by pain meds.

He presses his hands to his too-flat stomach and the pain is nothing compared to the terror as he forces himself upright, pulling loose one of the monitoring devices he’s hooked up to as he sweeps the empty room, praying for the sight of a bassinet.

An alarm sounds from the dislodged monitor, and the door opens to admit a woman in a white coat.

“Mr Buckley, you’re awa—”

“My baby!” His words come out a breathless panicked whisper. “I… I was pregnant… I… did…?”

“Your daughter was safely delivered via emergency caesarean approximately one hour ago,” the doctor says, firmly interrupting the question Buck couldn’t bring himself to ask. “She’s currently being cared for on our neonatal ward, but I can have somebody bring her down just as soon as you’ve been assessed.”

“Assessed?” Did they think he was an unfit parent for getting into an accident?

“You hit your head in the crash and there was only time for a triage assessment before you went into surgery as a priority. You didn’t seem to be suffering from any brain injury and some post-surgical disorientation is normal, but we need to be sure there are no complications.”

Part of Buck is tempted to argue, to demand to see his daughter, but he knows hospitals, knows procedures — playing along will likely get him what he wants faster than storming down the corridors and trying to force his way into the neonatal unit.

He’s pretty sure he performs worse than he should, but how can they expect him to focus on memory and cognitive tests when his baby girl is out there somewhere and he can’t get to her, can’t be sure she’s safe?

But after fifteen hellish minutes, the door swings open and a nurse enters, pushing a wheeled hospital bassinet. He pushes himself up in the bed, feeling that still unsettling pull across his lower abdomen where his bump had been. Buck needs his daughter, but the angle of the bed and the high sides of the bassinet are blocking his view. He needs to go to her, but his limbs still feel sluggish with anaesthesia and the motion of sitting up has made his head spin.

“Lay back,” the doctor instructs.

“No. No, I need to see her,” he half pleads. “Let me hold her… I need—”

“We’re going to recline you, then rest her on your chest so you can have proper contact,” the doctor assures him. “Given your condition, you shouldn’t try to hold her unaided just yet. We’ll assess you again later this evening, and further if necessary, so you can be confident of when you’re safe to support her.”

Buck slumps back against the pillows, forcing himself to breathe through the slightly dizzying experience of being lowered by the bed’s motors. Then, as promised, his baby is lifted from the crib and placed against his chest.

Her head rests just over his heart and he hopes the familiarity of its beat brings her comfort as she blinks up at him, face scrunched as if indignant at being moved from where she’d been sleeping, before she settles against him, so small he can barely feel her weight.

“She wasn’t due until August, and she’s so tiny.” If he thinks about is seriously, she can’t be that much different in size from Jee-Yun at birth, but Buck and Eddie both tower over Maddie and Chim, Buck had been expecting his daughter to fulfil Maddie’s premonitions of being an unusually large newborn, but now she’s missed out on vital growth, on all the strength Buck could have given her in the final weeks of carrying her.

“She is a few weeks preterm, but she’s far enough along in her development that it’s mostly just growing she’d be doing for the next few weeks. The biggest concern is respiratory weakness, but so far her lungs have seemed strong and she’s been doing fine without extra support. That said, we’re going to keep you and her under regular observation for at least forty-eight hours just in case she needs to transfer to the NICU, and she’ll be scheduled for additional checkups for the first twelve weeks.”

His daughter is strong. She shouldn’t have to be, but at least the doctor doesn’t seem to think there’s any immediate problem.

It’s going to make going to El Paso a lot more complicated though. He’ll have to figure out transferring her care. Hell, before that, there’s the question of getting her there. If her health is fragile, he can’t risk the uncertainty of the medical options en route if she needs help during the road trip down there. Fuck, Buck is in no state to drive her anywhere; and going by his blurred memories of the state of the jeep, he might not even have a recoverable car.

His carefully constructed plan is as much a wreck as his jeep; everything he’s tried to do for his daughter is falling apart. Even though she sits in the middle of his chest with plenty of room on either side, he can’t help but wish he could reach up to grip her more securely. The crash was a freak accident, the doctor’s restriction comes of rightly looking out for her safety given that he’s recovering from both a head injury and surgical sedation, but something in Buck wants to scream at the knowledge he can’t be trusted to hold her and keep her safe.

He’d not held Chris securely either, back when the tsunami had hit. His precious young life had been in Buck’s hands, and Buck had let him be ripped away, lost him, because he wasn’t enough. It was the kindness of strangers which had brought Chris back to Eddie, and now Buck is dependent on the medical team to care for their baby while he lies helpless.

He needs to do better for her — he’s promised himself he’ll do better — but how can he like this?

Eddie’s words from after the tsunami echo in his head, that what’s important isn’t never failing, but never stopping trying, but has he even managed that? Choosing to keep his daughter was a knowing betrayal of Eddie and Christopher. He’d loved them, but he’d done it anyway because the alternative was losing his daughter. From the moment he’s known about her, his love has been overwhelming, but Buck has loved people before; it’s never been enough. There was something special about the thought of this baby who is his, something he’s wanted so badly, but perhaps that is a selfish thought. After all, she’s not his because she’s chosen him but because of the circumstance of her birth, because she’s a helpless infant with no choice but to depend on him.

Once, Christopher had run to Buck. Talked to him about hopes and dreams, come to him with concerns. But now he’s older, capable of making choices, and when things had got hard and he’d needed support, when Buck had been not just offering but all but begging to give it, Christopher had still chosen his grandparents instead, chosen to leave Buck. What if his daughter grows up to feel the same?

“You have visitors waiting,” the doctor informs him. “But since you weren’t in a condition to say who could receive information about your daughter and we had no prior authorisations on file for her, all they’ve been told is that you made it through the surgery.”

“Oh…” What a stupid oversight. Buck should have named Eddie on her paperwork at least, and Maddie as a backup. He needs to know, people need to know. If the doctors haven’t told them anything, it’s all on Buck to do so, but the thought of reality intruding on this little bubble of him and his daughter makes his dizziness turn to nausea.

“Now that you’re awake and can make decisions for your daughter, we can let them through, but you’ll be restricted to two visitors at a time and any visitors will be warned that they’ll have to leave if a member of our medical team deems it necessary. You and your daughter need to be resting.”

Right. For the duration of his pregnancy, his baby has been Buck’s, but she’s got another father, two sets of biological grandparents, plus a whole extended family. This moment, her tiny body resting on his, will be the last time she’s entirely his.

And Buck can’t even hold her.

So the least he can do is not deny her that potential support network. And if he wants her to have that, it’s well past time he explains himself to them, hard though it’s going to be.

“Mr Buckley…? If you don’t want visitors, hospital security can ask them to leave instead.”

“No. No, I… you can let the visitors in,” Buck says. “But can you help me move her back to the bassinet first?” Just like Chris and Eddie, he doesn’t want to let his daughter go, but he has to think about what is best for her. He doesn’t want her feeling the way his heart races with nerves about the conversations he’s going to need to have, not when the doctor says she needs to be resting.

He and his baby aren’t connected bodily anymore, and Buck can see that the doctor’s hands are gentle and careful as she lifts his baby away and gets her settled in the crib, still so close he’d be able to reach over and scoop her up were he fit to do so safely. Something in him aches all the same at the absence of her soft weight as he braces to finally face the consequences of his choices.

Chapter Text

He’s expecting Maddie to be the first person shown in, probably with Jee-Yun as the second visitor simply because there would be nobody to watch her at short notice.

Instead, as footsteps approach, Buck hears the familiar clack of crutches. For a second his heart leaps, before he reminds himself that it’s a hospital: there are bound to be people on crutches, more likely it’s just some stranger passing by his room on their way to somewhere else.

Then the door eases open, two familiar figures in the entryway. Chris approaches, Eddie close on his heels.

Chris is so much taller. Eddie is tan, stubble grown out just enough that he looks rugged and relaxed, not the oscillations of strict self-discipline and letting himself go that he’d struggled between when in LA without Chris. They both look better than the last time he’d seen them in person. El Paso has clearly been good for them.

And now Buck is going to upset the peace and happiness they’ve found by throwing a baby that neither of them wanted into the mix and begging them to love her.

Chris gives Buck an assessing once over which makes him look so much like Eddie. Right now, it’s hard to see either of their features in their daughter — she has the flushed scrunched up look of all newborns — but will she take after Eddie and grow up to have the same penetrating Diaz stare? Buck’s not sure he’s equipped to handle a toddler that can see straight through him like that.

“Are you ok?” Chris demands. “The doctor said you weren’t badly hurt in the accident, but you look…”

He trails off, as if realising whatever he was about to say isn’t polite, but it’s enough for Buck to laugh, briefly, before the pull of stitches in his abdomen forces him to stop.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” he promises. He remembers calling Eddie, isn’t sure if Chris heard him in the accident or was just told about it, but he’s not going to make a fuss over getting a little banged up, not talking to a kid who lost a parent to a car accident. “It’s mostly scrapes and bruises. I’m still a little dizzy, but the doctor said that should improve as the anaesthetic wears off.”

“Because of the surgery,” Chris says. “The c-section.”

“Yeah.” Buck gestures to the bassinet at his side and Chris takes a few steps closer, peering into it.

“Holy shit…”

The Eddie Buck knew eight months ago would have scolded Chris for his language. Evidently, he doesn’t know them as well anymore.

“I can’t believe you actually have a baby,” Chris continues. “Can I take a picture?”

“I… sure,” Buck allows. At least Chris seems enthused by her now. Buck can only hope some of that feeling remains once he knows she isn’t just Buck’s baby. “Just don’t use the flash or anything, so you don’t bother her eyes.”

Chris nods and leans over the bassinet, pulling out his phone, and Buck finally looks over to where Eddie is watching them.

Instead of the expected questions about the baby or why Buck dragged him and his son all the way out here over a minor car accident, the first thing Eddie says is, “Maddie would be here, but hearing the news about you triggered her labour.”

“What?!” That wasn’t how it should happen. This second pregnancy was supposed to be Maddie’s chance to experience it joyfully. Another car crash birth feels like a terrible omen, and this time Buck has caused it.

“She’s fine,” Eddie quickly adds. “Chim is with her, and Hen’s watching Jee for them and texting updates. They’re at Cedars, though, so Maddie won’t be able to visit you until she’s discharged.”

Okay. Okay, Buck can’t be there for his sister, but other people are. That’s good. That’s something he’ll need to learn to rely on once he moves to El Paso. Buck thought he’d get at least a little time with her and the new baby, but the important thing is, “She’s really fine?”

“Yeah, Hen says everything is basically going textbook. Maddie was due around now anyway, right?”

Buck nods. Sure, Maddie’s labour being triggered by his accident isn’t ideal, but her labour starting now doesn’t mean that something is wrong or that there’s any risk to her or the baby.

“Hen will probably swing by later. She’ll be able to give you a better update,” Eddie adds. “Bobby is in the waiting room. He’s been here since he heard, but they said you could only have two visitors at a time, so he let me and Chris go first.”

Bobby has been at the hospital this whole time? It’s a relief Buck hadn’t expected to feel. With Maddie indisposed, if Eddie hadn’t come, there would still be somebody here that Buck trusts with his daughter. He owes an explanation to Bobby too — not least for not being upfront about the fact his departure from the 118 isn’t as temporary as he presented it — but Bobby had come anyway, even though he must realise how Buck had misled him.

Finally, finally, Eddie steps towards the bassinet, but instead of looking at the baby — his baby — he picks up the chart clipped to the end of the bassinet.

“Six pounds and one ounce… That’s pretty small, especially given your height. Is she pre-term?”

“She was due mid-August,” Buck confirms, and he can practically see Eddie counting the months backward in his head. “The doctor said she seems healthy, but they’re going to keep a close eye on her for the next few days, in case of underlying complications.”

“That’s good,” Eddie remarks, blandly polite. “Have they talked about her longer-term needs yet? If she wasn’t due till August, she’s probably hasn't got as much immune development as she should. Chris and I washed our hands before coming in, of course, but maybe—”

Chris cuts off Eddie’s observations with a sigh — loud, pointed, and so teenage it makes Buck ache. He’d had moments of adolescent attitude before he’d left, but this has a practised familiarity that shows just how much he’s grown up, how much Buck has missed.

“Chris…” Eddie says, a warning tone.

“Dad…” Chris replies, equally terse. “Are you going to ask?”

Eddie doesn’t answer, but something in his expression is enough to have Chris rolling his eyes.

Once, Buck thinks he’d have read them both with the same ease they’re communicating with each other, back when he’d been so close he’d let himself feel like a part of their family. Now he’s tied to them by blood via his daughter, but utterly on the outside of this wordless exchange.

“Fine, if you won’t…” Chris huffs, turning to look Buck head on. “Buck. Do I have a sister now?”

Shit.

How had Chris guessed? Buck can’t imagine Eddie bringing up the night they’d spent together to his son, but obviously something had triggered Chris’s suspicion.

This was not how he wanted to break this news, but he’s not going to lie here and lie to Chris’s face.

“Y—yeah.”

Chris purses his lips, glances past Buck to his father, but Buck can’t bring himself to turn and take in Eddie’s reaction. Fuck. If only he’d done this over the phone while he had the chance.

From where Eddie’s stood, there’s the sound of fabric moving, then Eddie, voice eerily calm, says, “Chris. You haven’t eaten since before we left this morning. Go find yourself a snack.”

Chris glances from his father, to Buck, to the baby, before grabbing the wallet that Buck can see out of the corner of his eye and shoving it in his pocket. “Right… I’ll be back though.”

The room is silent as he crosses it, as the door swings shut behind with a swish and a snick which seems to echo through the tense air.

It’s smart of Eddie not to do this in front of Christopher.

It’s almost enough to make Buck wish he could send the baby away too. She shouldn’t have one of her first experiences of the world being hearing her parents fight. But, even if he could convince one of the nurses to take her away on some pretext, Buck doesn’t actually want her out of his sight.

“Can I hold her?” Eddie says, voice dropping to barely above a whisper as he finally steps across the room, taking Chris’s spot by the bassinet.

“Of course.” She’s Eddie’s daughter after all.

For the first time since his confession, Buck looks up, watching as Eddie lifts their baby from her bassinet: his broad hand supporting her head, his other arm curled beneath to keep her extra steady even though Eddie could easily balance her with one. The look on his face is one Buck knows. He’d seen it for the first time when Eddie had reunited with Christopher in the aftermath of Eddie’s first earthquake; a fierce, focused adoration for his child that makes Buck’s pounding heart stop in its tracks.

Their baby girl has been Buck’s responsibility since he learned about her in March. Every step he’s taken, Buck has been carrying her, knowing she’d suffer for every mistake he made, that every decision he took needed to be for her first. Now she’s in Eddie’s arms and whatever else happens, even if Eddie and Chris are furious, even if Buck screws this up, Eddie will take care of her.

“She’s really mine?”

Eddie sounds more stunned than sceptical, but Buck can’t help but feel a little panicked as he says, “Definitely. All the scans put her conception date as weeks after I broke up with Tommy, and there hasn’t been anyone else.” If Eddie wants a paternity test, Buck knows it’s going to back up what he’s saying, but if Eddie could believe Buck would lie to him about that, then more has changed between them than Buck can fathom.

Eddie just nods, staring down at their daughter for a few long moments before resettling her in the bassinet and stepping back.

Buck’s heart sinks.

Jaw clenched, Eddie closes his eyes. Buck watches as he clearly organises his thoughts before saying, “You’ve been keeping her from me all this time?”

“I’m sorry. I never meant to spring her on you like this,” Buck promises. She was always going to turn Eddie’s and Chris’s lives upside-down, but not this abruptly.

“Then why did you?” Eddie’s accusatory tone is entirely fair. “You had months to tell me, and yet the first I even knew that you were pregnant was this morning.”

“I know. But you needed to focus on Chris.” Eddie has to understand that Buck did this to help. “With how things were, you needed time without distractions or complications. Things were hard enough for the two of you without having to deal with the prospect of a baby.”

“And, what, you didn’t think I could handle it? You didn’t think I’d make the right decisions for our family?”

Eddie stares at Buck like he’s been betrayed and Buck shakes his head, desperate to disabuse him of that notion.

“I didn’t want you to have to make those decisions,” he corrects, ignoring the wave of dizziness the head shaking has brought on. “I know how much you’ve worked to be a good father to Chris; I wanted to make things easier for you.”

“By not letting me know our daughter?!”

“No!” Eddie can’t think Buck would do that. “No, it was just… There was nothing you could do for her while I was carrying her; she’d never know if you were around or not. But I would never have kept her from you.”

“You were going to tell me?” Eddie presses.

“Of course, that was what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. With her due in August, I wanted to make sure you had enough warning to think things over, so that when she was born we could figure something out.”

“Figure something out…” Eddie echoes. “Like, what, visitation?”

“I—I don’t know… yes, if that’s how you want to do this.”

Buck had assumed — hoped, perhaps — that Eddie would want more than that, that they could find a way for both of them to raise her cooperatively if not together, avoiding anything so rigid as set weekends and splitting holidays. But Eddie has just had this sprung on him, it makes sense that his first thought would be of the most traditional approach.

Eddie runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. If you weren’t planning on hiding her, why not just tell me right away? Why wait so long?”

“There was no sense in disturbing your time with Chris for the pregnancy, not when the two of you needed time to fix things. News like this, back when things were so fragile between you…” Buck shakes his head. “You two have been in a better place lately, things might be hard, but you two will get through it.”

“But you weren’t sure we would before?” Eddie asks.

“A baby is a big change—”

“And that seemed like a reason not to tell us?”

He just isn’t getting it.

“What if Chris had found out and decided the easiest way to avoid having to deal with a baby was to go live with his grandparents again?” Eddie flinches, the hypothetical hitting hard just like Buck knew it would. “I didn’t want to do that to you. Things were so strained between you two, you told me yourself, back when he started staying over with you again it felt like one wrong move might send him back to them. Telling you about her would have unbalanced everything. But everything you were telling me suggested things were getting better, you just needed more time.”

“So you kept our daughter from me for my sake?” Eddie says, disbelief loud and clear.

“For her too,” Buck admits. “It wouldn’t have helped anyone for her to upset things with Chris. I never wanted you to lose him, but after I realised I was pregnant, I also didn’t want to risk her having to grow up knowing she should have had a brother but instead she was part of the reason he was gone, even if she had no choice in it.”

“…what?” Eddie looks pained, like he finally might understand.

“I know how badly Chris leaving hit you, Eddie. I understood then, and I saw how much you needed to follow him to El Paso. He’s your son. Can you imagine spending every holiday, every milestone, knowing that you should have been celebrating them with your son, but instead he’d left because of our daughter?”

“I… I wouldn’t do that. Do you seriously think I’d… what?” Eddie spits. “Neglect her? Blame her?”

There’s comfort in his outrage, but Buck knows it’s only because Eddie hasn’t thought the idea through. Chris going to El Paso in the immediate aftermath of what had happened with that woman had been enough to have Eddie halfway to falling apart, but there had been so many unknowns then and at least a faint hope that Chris would change his mind and come home of his own accord — or at least, Buck had held onto that hope and tried to reassure Eddie as best he could without making false promises.

If Eddie had lost his son for good, it would change him, and who could judge him for that? Eddie might still want to be a good parent to their daughter, do everything that remained in his power, but such severe losses left people with little left to give. Expecting the impossible would only lead to disappointment.

“Buck,” Eddie demands, eyes wide. “You can’t think I’d do that.”

“I know you wouldn’t want to, but if—”

“I’ll love her anyway.”

He exudes defiance as he says it and Buck knows Eddie means it to the best of his abilities, but, “You don’t know what I was about to say.”

“It doesn’t matter. Fuck, even if she wasn’t mine, I’d love her because she’s your daughter.”

God, Buck wishes it were that easy. “I don’t doubt that you care, but Chris needed you—”

“Do you love Chris less, now that you have her?” Eddie snaps.

“What?”

Eddie glares at him. “You loved Christopher like he was your own, anybody could see that. It was one of the reasons I never doubted you’d accept when I put you in my will. Has that changed?”

So many things have changed. Christopher has been in El Paso for a year. At first he’d cut contact entirely, weeks of Buck’s messages being ignored, the only news of him third hand as Eddie relayed his parents’ vague reassurances that Chris was settling in fine but he needed his space. When Chris’s anger towards Eddie had finally started to dull, he’d gradually opened back up to Buck too, but there was no avoiding the change to their relationship. No more cooking him dinner, no more movie nights or hours spent gaming while Chris joked about how Buck was terrible (“I’m not as bad as your dad!”, “Could you aim any lower?”); Chris would sometimes message Buck to ask for help with homework, give updates on his life when prompted, but the pseudo-family dynamic they’d built had been torn apart when Chris left. Buck could see all too well why Eddie had to go to El Paso to rebuild his own relationship with Chris, because it was impossible for things to be the same with that sort of distance between them.

His role in Christopher’s life has crumbled to next to nothing and their relationship might not ever be the same, but has Buck stopped loving him? “Of course not!”

“Then why would you doubt that I can love both of my kids?”

Eddie’s raised voice echoes in the hospital room, and he freezes, glancing towards the bassinet. For a moment, there’s nothing but the sound of their breathing, but when the baby doesn’t stir, Eddie continues, tone dropping into something more tentative, “Buck…”

“I never doubted that.” Eddie’s love for Chris is boundless and Eddie is too good a person not to open his heart to their daughter, but feelings weren’t the same as actions, and in the latter Eddie would be bound by practicality. “But… Chris needs you in a way that she doesn’t. I could take care of her, but he’s got to be your priority; you’re the only father he has.”

Eddie shakes his head, wilful in his denial. “Caring for Chris doesn’t mean I couldn’t also be there for her,” he protests.

“Then tell me if I’d called and told you months ago, you’d have left Chris living with your parents and come back here for us.”

It’s a harsh thing to throw in his face, but Eddie’s wince reveals the truth of it even before his answer. “I can’t, but—”

“You couldn’t leave El Paso and I had to stay with the LAFD for my insurance and my paid paternity leave entitlement.” All emotion aside, those facts are unavoidable. “You knowing wouldn’t have changed any of that, it would just mean you’d worry about it, on top of everything you were already dealing with, and for what?”

Buck should have guessed that Eddie would be angry at being kept out of the loop, unable to influence his own life; but, from the moment Buck had decided to keep the baby, there had been nothing Eddie could have done. The only thing Eddie would have gained from being told was the opportunity to stress over a situation he couldn’t change.

“I’m sorry you found out like this, instead of getting some warning.” Buck isn’t trying to make excuses for the mess this has turned into. “But you were eight hundred miles away. Telling you earlier wouldn’t have changed anything about that.”

“I could have talked with Chris,” Eddie insists, he sounds almost pleading and Buck aches with guilt. Eddie has always taken on so much responsibility, he isn’t immune to mistakes, but Buck has seen time and time again the high standards he holds himself to in parenting Chris. Buck has been selfish to put Eddie in this no-win scenario. “You’re right, I wouldn’t have just left him, but I could’ve asked him to consider coming back to LA. We could have found a compromise if you’d given me the chance.”

“And you think that’s what I want for either of them? For Chris’s first impression of his sister to be that his life is being uprooted because of her? For her to get the blame for my selfishness?” Because if he was stuck between keeping his promise to prioritise his son and being there for his daughter, maybe Eddie would make that terrible choice, but it was Buck who’d chosen to go ahead with the pregnancy and forced them into this position.

“Nobody is blaming her, she didn’t create this situation,” Eddie says, and Buck hears what he doesn’t say — Buck doesn’t have the same exemption. Even that small reassurance isn’t really Eddie’s to give; of course it isn’t their daughter’s fault, but that doesn’t mean everyone around them will react rationally. Chris is still just a teenager and it would be too easy for his ire to focus on his new sister as the reason Eddie can’t just walk away from this mess, rather than on Buck for making the mess. “That doesn’t change the fact I can’t be the parent either of my kids deserve if I’m trying to split myself between El Paso and LA. Something will have to give.”

They’re on the same page about that at least.

“And now it can,” Buck reassures him. “I needed the LAFD for my paternity entitlements. Now she’s born, they’re activated, I have them no matter what I do next, so she can have you in her life and Chris doesn’t need to be uprooted.”

It’s a good solution, but Eddie shakes his head. “I… what are you talking about?”

“I told you, if I’d quit to come to El Paso while I was pregnant I’d have lost those entitlements, but now I’m on paternity leave, so I’m free to go.”

“Go…” Eddie’s jaw slackens and then tenses so abruptly it looks painful. “…come to El Paso?”

“I told you, I want you to be in her life. You and Chris chose El Paso, so that’s where we need to be. I know there are details to figure out, but I can make this work.” Maybe all Eddie needs to understand is that Buck has been preparing for this, isn’t just planning on crashing into his life there with a baby and expecting Eddie to make room. “This… look, I know the timing has gone all wrong and you haven’t been included in the planning, but I’ve shortlisted some apartments and between the paid part of the paternity leave and then my savings I can afford the move and to take a few months to find a new job out there. I know it’s going to be a lot of change, but I have it handled. The only part I haven’t been able to straighten out is her insurance while I’m between jobs; I think the only way for that to work is if she goes on yours once my LAFD insurance expires.”

“Jesus…”

Buck had known he was springing a lot on Eddie, but he’s not expecting the expression of pure revulsion that washes over Eddie’s face. It’s a difficult situation, but he’d been certain Eddie would want their daughter close while they figured it out. If Eddie doesn’t, all Buck’s plans are up in smoke and he doesn’t know where they go from here. But if Eddie isn’t happy, the least Buck can do is hear him out. “If that’s too much…”

“Of course I’ll put our daughter on my insurance Buck!” Eddie snaps. “What—”

A soft cry stops Eddie cold.

He steps towards the bassinet as if the motion is automatic, but then pauses, looking to Buck as if uncertain.

“If you don’t want to check her, I can call for a nurse?” Buck offers. It’s enough to know that Eddie has the instincts of a caring father; he doesn’t have to be ready to start right away when he’s known about his daughter less than an hour.

Eddie’s face creases. “You’re not going to check her yourself?”

“I can’t.” All the ways Buck has tried to explain that he’s done his best for their daughter, that he’s tried to minimise the impact his choice is going to have on Chris and Eddie, has it under control, but now he has to admit this. “I won’t be able to lift her until the incision has started to heal up and the doctor said until the anaesthesia has fully worn off and I pass the concussion tests, I shouldn’t try to hold her either.”

“Oh.” Eddie stares for a moment, then shakes his head, leaning over the crib to pick her up. “I’ve got her…”

Buck has seen Eddie check newborns over before, with relaxed professional efficiency. Eddie is good with babies, Buck had noticed it many times at scenes. But their daughter he checks over almost tentatively, before pronouncing, “I think she just needs a diaper change. Do you have any?”

“On the trolley under the bassinet.” Before he’d been left alone with her, the doctor had mentioned the starter set of supplies, only to remind Buck again that he shouldn’t try to use any of them.

He watches as Eddie goes through the diaper change. Their daughter’s cries die down the instant Eddie removes the soiled one, but he fumbles a little when replacing it and Buck fleetingly wonders if it’s because he was in Afghanistan for so much of Christopher’s infancy or if it’s just that he’s out of practice. Then he feels guilty for judging. Eddie is doing more for her than he can right now.

Unease is clear on Eddie’s face as he settles their daughter back into her bassinet and it’s not wholly surprising when he turns back to Buck and says, “I should go check up on Chris, and Bobby will still be in the waiting room, I should let him take his turn seeing you.”

With Chris out of the room, there’s no reason Eddie couldn’t stay while Bobby is here, but Buck won’t argue with the excuse if Eddie wants to use it. Anyway, Buck understands why Eddie wanted to get the facts straight first, but, after the news Chris has received, Eddie should go give him whatever reassurance he needs. Buck owes Chris an explanation too, but no doubt Eddie’s words will matter more.

“Of course, you should help Chris deal with this,” Buck agrees.

Eddie’s shoulders sag. “I’ll send Bobby in. I’ll be back later, but you should get some rest if you can.”

Buck nods. That won’t be hard with the bone deep tiredness he feels. Hopefully Bobby won’t want a detailed explanation of all the bad decisions that mean Buck is about to spring a resignation on him from a hospital room.

It’s foolish, the way Buck feels watching Eddie walk away again. This isn’t like before; he isn’t leaving the state, leaving Buck’s life. He might not even be leaving the hospital.

Eddie came back to LA. He’ll come back.

Buck just isn’t sure how things will go when he does.

Chapter Text

Eddie must have explained some of the situation to Bobby before he sent him in because Bobby doesn’t ask any questions about the baby’s parentage or Buck’s plans, only if he and his baby are doing okay. When Buck had tried to bring up what this meant for work, Bobby had shaken his head and said, “You’ve just started the biggest job of your life, kid. Don’t worry about anything else right now. I’ll make sure all your paternity leave paperwork is filed correctly.”

Maybe it’s irresponsible, but Bobby offers too much temptation to resist. The idea of somebody taking care of some part of this situation for him after all the months of having to figure it out himself is a weight off his tired shoulders. They talk briefly, but it’s the kind of deliberately untaxing chatter Buck is familiar with from other hospital stays, and he dozes off to the sight of Bobby holding his baby and humming some song Buck doesn’t know.

Bobby is still there when he wakes. He’s moved the hospital chair closer to the bed at some point, but Buck’s baby is sleeping soundly in his arms. “I’ve had a message from Hen,” Bobby says, when he notices Buck is no longer napping. “Maddie has delivered her baby, it’s another little girl. Both Maddie and she are doing fine.”

Another niece. A little girl the same age as his. Buck isn’t actually sure if his parents are only children or if the absence of other relatives was part of them covering up their family history after Daniel, but he and Maddie don’t have any cousins that he knows about. He’s excited for his daughter to experience that, feels distantly pleased to be the one to give Jee and the new baby that (though he supposed Albert could have kids eventually).

Bobby stays until the end of visiting hours, but, though there’s no restriction on visiting for parents of new babies, Eddie doesn’t come back that day.

It makes sense really. Buck had yanked him and Chris to LA with no warning. He’s probably got to find a hotel, rearrange upcoming plans in El Paso; he might still be talking things over with Christopher depending on how badly that conversation has gone.

That night Buck sleeps fitfully, waking three times to feed his baby, each time with a nurse supervising for as long as he is holding her. But when he wakes the next day, he doesn’t get the wave of dizziness as he carefully raises himself up and at his morning checkup he passes the concussion tests and is given permission to hold his baby girl properly, though they tell him he’ll still need to wait for assistance to lift her or put her down.

The oatmeal he’s served for breakfast cools in its plastic bowl as he finally cradles her. She’s quiet, calm, and Buck wants to explain to her it’s okay to fuss, he won’t get mad or leave her to cry it out, he’ll be there and he’ll make things okay for her. It’s probably a terrible jinx to lay on himself, but when she blinks sleepily up at him Buck gives into the temptation to whisper aloud some of the promises he’s been making in his head since he decided to keep her.

Her eyes are blue and it’s too soon to know if she’s got them from him or if they’re something she’ll outgrow, but Buck is going do everything he can to make sure the half of her she gets from him is made of the best parts he can give.

Hen stops by at the start of visiting hours, bringing with her a smoothie that is far more appetising than the hospital breakfast. She can’t stay long before her shift, but she spends a few minutes cooing over the baby and provides Buck a more detailed update on Maddie — recovering well enough that she’ll probably be discharged and able to visit by tomorrow, and Maddie and Chim’s daughter is also doing well and has been given the fitting name of ‘Joy’.

“And…” Hen continues. “Does baby Buckley have a first name yet?”

“Uh…”

Buck had never planned on naming her without giving Eddie a say, and honestly Buck isn’t sure anything on the list of ideas he’d drawn up really suit her now she’s here; but more than that, she’s a Diaz. He wants that connection for her so badly, but it wouldn’t be fair to correct Hen until he’s checked that Eddie and Chris would be okay with that choice.

Hen just laughs at his hesitation. “Well, you have ten days to register her, I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

He will, or maybe Eddie will. Hopefully they’ll be able to figure something out together, even though Eddie has been given far less thinking time than Buck.

Hen leaves for work, and in the end, Buck hears Eddie before he sees him, his voice echoing down the hospital corridors and through the propped open door.

“—No. What both my kids need is a loving family, which they have. The other details—” Eddie cuts himself off, but it’s only a moment before he’s talking again, sharply. “No, I already made that mistake once, I’m not going to repeat it. Now I need to go, we can talk later.”

There’s a pause, in both the voices and footsteps, and then Buck hears Chris’s softer tones say, “Dad? Are you—”

“Let’s go see Buck,” Eddie interrupts, voice gentle but firm. “I know you wanted to come back and talk to him more yesterday, and from what Hen said he might be in a better condition for visitors this morning.”

“He managed to talk with you for long enough before you came to find me,” Chris huffs, but the footsteps resume, and a moment later they’re walking through the door, Chris with an air of teenaged sullenness and Eddie with a slightly strained looking smile.

“Hey, Buck,” Chris says. “You look better.”

The laugh springs to Buck so easily that for a moment it’s like the last messy year never happened.

“You’re holding her,” Eddie interjects. “What about your concussion?”

“I got the all clear this morning.” Buck’s been reckless in the past, but he wouldn’t hold his daughter if there was a risk he might hurt her, no matter how much he’d wanted to yesterday.

“What concussion?” Chris demands, sharply. “Buck, you said you just had scrapes and bruises.”

“When they initially assessed me, I had a few possible symptoms like the dizziness I mentioned to you and slow reaction times, that could have been signs of a concussion or just because of the anaesthetic from the c-section, so the doctors wanted to wait and check again once that wore off,” Buck explains. “And to be on the safe side, the doctors said not to hold the baby until those symptoms cleared up. That’s all.”

“But you’re holding her now, so your symptoms are all gone?”

“I’ll still need some help getting her in or out of the bassinet,” Buck admits, mainly to spare Chris finding out later and thinking he’s been lied to. “But no bending or twisting for a few days is normal after a c-section, it’s not because of the car accident.”

Chris levels him with a baleful look.

“Eddie,” Buck continues. “Since you’re here, would you mind helping me set her down?” Buck isn’t sure how this visit is going to go. He’s hoping Chris’s presence will keep Eddie from arguing with him again, but there’s still every possibility of Chris getting angry, and Buck doesn’t want his daughter physically trapped in the middle if Chris does decide to vent his upset at Buck.

“I can hold her, if you want your hands free,” Eddie offers instead.

“If you want.”

He’d seen Eddie holding her yesterday, but there’s something different about having Eddie lean in — hands brushing over Buck’s arms, close enough that Buck can breathe in the scent of him, not the one Buck is used to but is that because he’s changed his habits in El Paso or just because he’s using borrowed products due to the impromptu trip to LA — and lift her from Buck’s grip.

Despite what Buck had overheard, Chris hangs back, settling in the visitor’s chair and pulling out his phone as Eddie asks after Bobby’s visit and then Buck relays what he’d heard from Hen about Maddie, Chim and baby Joy. It occurs to him as he’s saying it, Eddie might already have been updated by one of their friends, but if Buck is passing on old news, Eddie doesn’t interrupt him.

Buck wonders if when he replaces his phone he’ll find they’ve been talking about him too in the 118 group chat or if they’ll have made a separate chat so he can’t see them gossiping.

When he mentions Maddie being discharged, Eddie interjects, “What about you? Is your place ready for when you can bring the baby home, or did you have more to do?”

Buck frowns. Had Eddie not been listening to him yesterday? “No… I bought a few things like baby clothes, but only stuff that would be easy to move. There’d be no point setting up the loft, I told you, I was just waiting on being a little closer to my due date to start my paternity leave, then I was going to relocate.”

“While nine months pregnant…” Eddie mutters, then shakes his head. “Okay, well, that’s not happening.”

“Things might not be happening according to plan,” Buck acknowledges, “But I’ll probably be out of here in a few days—”

“So we have a few days to get the loft set up for a baby,” Eddie interrupts. “We’ll make a list of everything you need and I can start setting them up, Chim already sent me info on the crib brand he and Maddie bought, I assume you’re fine with trusting their recommendation?”

Maddie had helped him pick out the car seat, giving her ‘ease of use’ recommendations alongside Buck’s careful research of safety standards, and he probably would have asked her advice before setting up his place in El Paso, but, “Eddie, you don’t have to—”

“If you don’t want me to do it, I can talk to Bobby and Hen, ask them to make a start when they’re off shift tomorrow, but it needs doing and you’re recovering from major abdominal surgery. You’re in no condition to be moving furniture around Buck, come on.”

Eddie’s right.

Even once they’re discharged from the hospital, Buck hasn’t actually signed a contract on a place in El Paso yet, and the logistics of making that trip with a premature baby are a lot more complicated than making it while pregnant. He’s going to need to stay in LA at least a little while, and that means making a home for his baby, even if he’ll need a bigger u-haul to get it all to El Paso with him.

“All my stuff is over there,” Buck says, nodding to the shelf that holds the personal effects he was brought in with. “You can grab my keys.”

Eddie’s brow furrows. “No need. I can use mine.”

Buck hadn’t asked for Eddie’s copy of the loft key back when he’d handed back his key to Eddie’s house, but there was no reason for such a relic of LA to clutter up Eddie’s keychain in El Paso, except maybe that he’d just never got round to removing it.

He’s conscious, as Eddie lists off a few more baby essentials he can set up at the loft, of Chris sitting off to the side and occupied with his phone. On one hand Buck’s glad Eddie hadn’t left him with his grandparents, but it has to be pretty frustrating for Chris to be dragged away from his summer break and whatever plans he had with all his new friends in El Paso only to be stuck in a hospital room while Buck and Eddie talk about baby furniture.

“What’s your plan here?” Buck asks, bypassing Eddie’s question of if Buck thinks a pushchair is worthwhile in a city as car centric as LA. “I didn’t ask yesterday, but you weren’t expecting to be dragged out to LA. You must have a shift coming up, things to get back to.”

“I have two weeks paternity leave,” Eddie corrects, gaze dipping to linger on the baby in his arms. “My captain was a bit shocked by the short notice, but that doesn’t change my entitlement. Pepa is happy to have Chris visiting, me staying on her couch probably isn’t sustainable for more than a few days, but Bobby has already offered his spare room if I need it.”

Buck can understand why Eddie wouldn’t want to let Chris stay in El Paso with his grandparents while Eddie is in LA, especially when his move back to Eddie is so recent, and at least visiting Pepa at least gives Chris something to do in LA other than be inconvenienced. Chris and Eddie’s home might no longer be here, but at least they still have enough of a support network that they aren’t wasting money on hotels either.

Before either of them can say anything further, Eddie’s phone starts to ring.

Eddie sets the baby down before pulling his phone out, but when he looks at the screen he frowns before saying, “Sorry, I should take this. Chris, stay here with Buck, I won’t be long.”

He heads out and without thinking Buck asks, “Who’s call could be so important he’d take it from a hospital?” then winces at his own ego, as if visiting him takes precedence over everything else Eddie has going on. Especially when despite Eddie’s glib explanation of paternity leave, Buck has no doubt caused all sorts of disruption to his life.

“Maybe Bisabuela,” Chris answers, with a shrug. “He spent like an hour on the phone last night reminding her that you’re not catholic as if that might keep her from going totally overboard planning a christening, and I’m pretty sure they only stopped because it was getting late in Texas not because Dad was winning.”

Religion. They’ve talked about it casually, how Eddie isn’t committed to the idea of being a non-believer but he and Chris don’t go to church; beyond that Buck has never considered what Eddie’s stance on the religious upbringing of his children is, if he’ll want their daughter baptised either to please his family or out of lingering cautious belief.

As involved as Buck sometimes was with their family life, Christopher has always been Eddie’s son. Buck might give an opinion on the age appropriateness of a movie or the best thing to bring to a school bake sale, but the big decisions had always been strictly Eddie’s domain. When it comes to their daughter, he’s going to be navigating new territory in deciding together how she should be raised.

“Was that her on the phone earlier?” Eddie had been using a terser tone than Buck has ever heard him take with his grandmother, and while she often operated with a level of presumption which stemmed from comfortable familiarity with Eddie Buck doubts she’d call him back so soon after being firmly rebuffed.

Chris pulls a face. “No way. I… uh… I didn’t actually see, but I think it might have been my grandma.”

Ah. Eddie’s mother Buck can absolutely imagine him taking that tone with. Has wished he would sometimes, when Eddie talked about how things were going in El Paso, but that hadn’t been Buck’s place to say; and he’d always hoped if Eddie argued with his family it would be to stand up for himself, not because of a situation Buck had caused.

“I texted her about the news last night,” Chris continues. “She texted back that she was sorry dad would do that to me and of course I can move back in with her and Abuelo again. I didn’t tell Dad she said that, but if she said anything about it when she called… um… Well, I can see why they would be arguing.”

Oh.

No. No, no, no. That can’t happen. Buck’s plan was supposed to prevent that happening. Things have gone awry, but it shouldn’t drive Chris away from Eddie. Yes, he’s dragged them from El Paso and Buck is going to have to recover before he can make the long drive down there, but that shouldn’t come between Chris and Eddie.

“She’s wrong,” Buck blurts out, then grimaces. Chris made clear last summer the esteem he holds his grandparents in when he’d chosen to go with them instead of accepting any support from Buck. Much as Buck isn’t a fan of Eddie’s parents, voicing his opinions of them will only drive Christopher towards them. “I mean, she doesn’t have all the facts. I know your dad has been working hard to prove that you’re his priority, me having this baby doesn’t change that. Your dad didn’t think I had the carrier gene. He didn’t knowingly make a careless decision, he trusted that I’ve have warned him if we needed to take precautions. And I didn’t.”

“What?” Christopher screws up his face. “Are you saying you, like… You baby trapped him?”

The question is more puzzled than accusing, but it lands like a gut-punch nonetheless. That is what everyone is going to think of him: poor desperate Evan Buckley, couldn’t get anyone to stay for him so he brought an innocent child into his mess so that somebody would stay for her and get stuck with him in the process.

“…Buck?”

He shakes his head. He’s supposed to be persuading Chris not to blame Eddie, he can’t fail for a second time, especially not because he’s too absorbed in selfish fears.

“I didn’t do this to manipulate your dad. When I found out I was pregnant, I—I—I—” He’d been selfish, and now he has to look Christopher in the eye and admit that even though Buck loves him he’d still made a choice he knew wasn’t in Christopher’s best interests. Doing that to Chris, how could he possibly think he could be a good parent? Will he have to do the same to his baby girl someday? “I didn’t plan on getting pregnant. But once I realised I was… I couldn’t… I had to…”

“You wanted to keep your baby,” Chris surmises.

“Yes. And you have every right to be angry with me for how that will affect you, but your dad isn’t at fault here.”

“Oh yeah? So he didn’t know you could get pregnant, whatever. You and Dad were supposed to be best friends,” Chris huffs. “Even with everything else I thought he couldn’t mess that up, but you didn’t tell us about the baby so obviously he did.”

“Your Dad and I are friends.” Given how Christopher’s world had been rocked last year Buck can’t let him come to the conclusion that Eddie’s intimacy was yet again to blame for the upheaval in his life. “That hasn’t changed.” Not unless Eddie is even angrier than he seemed.

“Something changed.” Chris gestures sharply towards the bassinet. “I’m fourteen Buck, I know you didn’t end up with a baby by being friends.”

Chris is probably old enough now that Buck could deflect by talking about friends with benefits or what happened being insignificant to Buck and Eddie’s friendship, but it feels wrong to placate him with a misleading interpretation. Buck knows his own feelings, but he has no idea why Eddie chose to kiss him right before he walked out of Buck’s life with every intention of it being for good, nor what it means for their friendship now they can no longer ignore it.

“Me not telling your dad had nothing to do with anything that happened between us,” Buck clarifies instead. “Big news, like a pregnancy, has to be handled carefully, respectfully. I didn’t tell your dad — tell either of you — because I know how tough of a year you’ve had. With everything last year, and then your dad needing to get settled in El Paso, I wanted to give you both some time without having to deal with another big change.”

“So it’s—” Christopher looks taken aback, indignant as he says “—it’s my fault?”

What?

“Chris, no. I don’t blame you for anything,” Buck says firmly. Chris might have been part of the reason Buck made the decisions he did, but that didn’t make those choices Christopher’s responsibility. “I let you and your dad to have that time for yourselves because it was important to me. Because I want you both to be happy, I always wanted that, and having this baby, I wanted her to grow up in a happy family too.”

Narrowing his eyes, Chris says, “Well, you should have let us decide if we wanted that.”

He’s done his best to give Chris and Eddie time, and he’ll keep doing what he can to make it possible for his daughter to fit into their lives, but while he’s made the choice to bring her into their family, Buck can’t force their feelings. If Chris doesn’t want that, Buck has to respect it, and he can only hope that Eddie’s relationship with his son won’t be harmed by being caught in the middle.

“I understand. And look, Chris, I know you had to come here at short notice and it’s been a big disruption for you, but I never intended for that. If it weren’t for the car accident…” Buck shakes his head. Chris doesn’t need to hear his excuses, he just has be better about arranging for contingencies, even if they’re hard to plan for now when he doesn’t know how his life in El Paso will take shape. “I can’t promise you there won’t be any more problems, and this baby and your dad being her other parent will mean changes, but that doesn’t mean you don’t get a say. I’ll listen and I’m sure your dad will too. If you want space or to keep stuff just family sometimes, I’m not… this baby is going to complicate things, but I— we—”

“I mean, it’ll be weird getting used to having a sister,” Chris interrupts, and Buck sags against his pillows in relief that Chris is at least open to the idea of getting used to her, not threatening to run back to his grandparents and cut not just Buck and the baby but also Eddie from his life. “And there are things a baby can’t do, so unless you were planning on being one of those annoying people with a crying baby in a movie theatre and stuff, obviously sometimes things will just be me and dad, but it’s whatever.”

“Of course. I’ll make sure you and your dad get time which is just for you; and that you and your dad and your sister get time as a family without me, too.”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“You and I haven’t really talked much since you moved to El Paso,” he reminds Chris, carefully keep his tone neutral. Chris is a child, even more than Eddie, he shouldn’t carry the weight of Buck’s emotional neediness. “And I understand. You’re growing up and moving forward in your life, doing what is right for your happiness. I’m proud of you for that. I want you to have the freedom to choose a life that makes you happy. Even if things might have to change a little because of the baby, I don’t want you to think the decisions you’ve made for yourself are being ignored.”

Chris straightens in his chair as he says, “We’ve talked!”

But not like they used to, not the way that had Buck feeling like Chris was family long before there was anything official connecting them.

“You stopped answering my messages when you left for El Paso,” Buck points out. And he’d understood, truly. That’s why it’s important now that Chris understands he can still maintain that boundary, even if there wouldn’t be the same distance between them. “And I—”

“When first went to El Paso I was ignoring everyone,” Chris interrupts. “Even Tia Pepa and my friends who didn’t even know what happened. And yeah, I especially didn’t want to think about home or dad and talking to you was too close to that, but that was ages ago. I’ve been talking to dad again for months, and you and I talked for like two hours the other week when you were helping me figure out where to get that data on firefly populations.”

His earnest expression makes him look so much more like the sweet kid Buck remembers than the angry teenager who’d left for Texas, the crease in the brow closer to worried than angry; a guilt trip was never what Buck had intended though.

“You’re important to me and I’ll always have your back if you need me to,” Buck assures him. Acknowledging his reduced role in Chris’s life doesn’t change the place Chris has in his. “If you want me to help with homework, or give you advice, I’m always going to pick up the call if I can, but you don’t owe me anything back.”

“You—You’re making it sound like you only talked to me because I asked for it.” Chris’s voice wavers, before he shakes his head sharply and says, “I know you wouldn’t have started hanging out with me if it weren’t for dad and it’s different from having friends the same age, but it’s not like you only hung out with me to help take care of me, right? We’re friends, aren’t we?“

Are they? It would be an easy label to accept, a casual connection, but though Chris had only come into his life because of Eddie, it hadn’t taken long at all for Buck to start to care about him far more than in the distant way he’d care about any co-worker’s child. When Buck looks at Christopher the feelings that fills him is closer to the one he gets looking at his daughter than of a friend. He’s got to be supportive of Chris’s best interests, though, no matter how much it hurts, just like he’d supported Eddie leaving. Buck can’t place his feelings on anybody else like an anchor, it would be doubly wrong to lay that responsibility on a child.

“You’ve never been just an obligation,” Buck says. He doesn’t want Chris to think Buck is reducing their relationship to him doing babysitting favours for Eddie, so clearly at odds with their reality, but he’s not sure what Christopher needs from him right now. “I’ve always enjoyed spending time with you; I’m lucky to have met you. But you wanted a fresh start, I wasn’t going to—I’m not going pressure you into anything more than you want.”

With a sudden jerk, Chris slaps his hand against the arm of his chair. “That’s… you’re doing the dad thing!” he snaps. “I… I only just got him to stop and now you’re doing it.”

“What?”

“You think you’re protecting me from being affected by problems, but ignoring that I might have an opinion on the best way to deal with a problem that involves me. I’m not a baby, Buck! You can’t decide for me.”

“I’m not!” That was the opposite of what Buck was doing. If he could decide for Chris, Buck would choose happiness and family every time, but it would be hollow if it isn’t what Chris wants. “You wanted distance, space, so I respected that. I’m telling you I’ll keep respecting that—”

“Did I ask you to?! I wanted everything to go away last summer, not forever. It’s not helping me to let me make decisions but not tell me they might have more consequences than I expect or hurt other people without me meaning to. You could have texted me and said ‘hey I’m bored, want to game?’ or something, instead of letting us stop being friends because I didn’t notice that you were only talking when I asked.”

How many times had Buck wanted to do that? But Eddie had been breaking his own heart trying to respect his son’s sharp new boundaries and respect his wishes, the least Buck could do was take that cue and not outwardly cling to Chris when he’d been so clear about wanting to be left alone.

“We haven’t stopped being friends,” Buck tries. Friends might be oversimplifying their relationship, but if that’s what Christopher wants from him then Buck will make it fit. “Not if you want to be, I just… You left, and you dad went after you and claimed a place in your life again because he’s your dad, but my place in your life is whatever you choose Chris, and you wanted space.”

“I could have found the firefly data without you,” Chris retorts. “I talked to you because I wanted to talk to you. I thought you were going to come and see us this summer since you couldn’t make spring break, but you lied! I—”

“No, I didn’t.” Buck hasn’t been fully honestly with anyone, these past few months, but he wouldn’t tell a lie like that. “I was going to come to El Paso. Didn’t you dad say…? You were here when we talked about it earlier, me moving.”

“I… you and dad talked about how your loft isn’t set up for a baby,” Chris recounts. “It makes sense that you’d move somewhere with bedrooms.”

“I’m moving to El Paso, Chris,” Buck corrects. If Chris had misunderstood that, thought Buck and the baby were going to stay in LA and only visit occasionally, no wonder he’d not understood why Buck had needed to explain that he’d still respect Christopher’s space.

Chris opened his mouth, then closed it again harshly, shaking his head. “No. No, Dad said he wasn’t going to make any more big decisions without telling me. He promised.”

Fuck. It's seems there's no avoiding Buck screwing Eddie and Chris over with his selfish choices. “Your dad didn’t decide that. But I need to, Chris. It’s like I said, if you need breaks or space sometimes, I want you to have that; but — look, I know the two of you have had a rough patch, but Eddie is a good dad — I want the baby to have him around, and that means being in El Paso with you.”

“And dad just agreed to that?” Chris says, incredulously.

They’re right back where they started: Buck uncertain how to convince Chris that the baby won’t pull Eddie’s priorities away from him, but also clinging to the fact Eddie had seemed to want to be involved with their daughter. Buck doesn’t know how Eddie with balance the two if Chris doesn’t accept the baby being involved in Eddie’s life.

“Chris, your dad loves you,” Buck starts, but Chris just shakes his head, standing abruptly.

“You aren’t listening to me,” he snaps. “Fine, if you won’t tell me, I’ll go ask him myself. I—I’ll see you later, Buck.”

And with a few quick steps, Buck and his baby are alone again.

He can only hope that Eddie will do a better job of talking Chris around than the mess Buck has just made of that conversation.

Chapter Text

Eddie stops by briefly after Chris leaves to find him, but only stays long enough to reiterate that he’s going to get the loft set up and promise to talk to Chris. “He seemed… moody when he came to find me,” Eddie acknowledges, “But whatever it is, we’ll resolve it. It’s been an intense few days for everyone, that’s all.”

An intense few days of Buck’s making, but when it comes to Chris the only thing he can do is trust Eddie. He’s still mulling over where he went wrong with Chris, if there was some compromise Buck could have offered that would leave Chris less angry with the idea of Buck joining him and Eddie in El Paso without offering to deprive his daughter of one of her parents, when Maddie arrives.

She’s wearing a slouchy dress, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, but she’s got a new parent glow about her that Buck, with his sutures and bruises, is certain he lacks.

“Maddie!” he welcomes, as she comes over and presses a greeting kiss to his forehead, before turning to the bassinet.

“Is this my niece? Oh, Buck, she’s adorable,” Maddie coos. “Does she have a name yet?”

“No, I need to discuss it with Eddie.” And sooner rather than later, California might allow ten days to register a name, but Buck’s pretty sure their friends and family are going to get impatient well before that. “And what about my nieces? Joy?” he prods.

Eddie wasn’t wrong to point out it’s going to be at least a few weeks before Buck can actually make the move to El Paso, which means a little more time with his family, a chance to bond with the baby before he has to say goodbye, but that time is still so short and he’d hoped Maddie would bring his nieces by.

“Chim has them,” Maddie explains. “You can see them both soon, but I wanted to talk to you without having to split my attention.”

Buck can’t imagine being a room away from his daughter, let alone taking a trip across the city. He’ll have to work up to that while he’s waiting to be recovered enough to go back to work, maybe sooner, if solo time would help Eddie and Chris bond with her, but he puts that thought out of his mind for now.

“Maddie, I’m so sorry,” he starts, “Eddie said me crashing was what triggered your labour—”

But Maddie cuts him off with a quick shake of her head. “From the description of it, you couldn’t have avoided the crash,” she points out. “And I was worried about you getting hurt, I’m glad to see you looking okay, but I can’t say I mind Joy not being quite as stubborn as Jee about facing the world rather than making me waddle round the size of a whale with a baby that refuses to come out.”

It’s easy to embrace her good humour, even if he can feel his wound tugging a little at the full body laugh that spills through him in response. Eddie might be tense and Chris is painfully furious, but Maddie has found a silver lining even though Buck had caused her stress.

“Now,” Maddie says, settling into the visitor’s chair. “Chim knows Eddie is our new niece’s other parent, and he didn’t hear it from me, so I assume you finally told Eddie?”

“I was going to tell him on Thursday anyway. I’d asked him to make some time with privacy.” This protest might make no practical difference, but he had listened to Maddie’s advice. “But yes, he and Chris know.” There was no need to get into the fact Chris had challenged him on the baby’s parentage before Buck had worked up the strength to confess.

“How did they take it?”

Isn’t that the question.

“Eddie was angry, not about her, but that he didn’t know. I tried to explain, but maybe with the anaesthesia or being still out of it from the crash I wasn’t clear enough. He wants to be a good father to her though, like I knew he would,” Buck explains. He’s pretty sure good parents don’t fight all the time, which has to mean Eddie will forgive him for the secret keeping even if he doesn’t understand, but they haven’t really had a chance to talk about anything other than their baby. “Chris… he seemed to handle the news pretty well at first, but then this morning… he’s talking to his grandparents and they’ve offered to let him move back in. He’s not happy about the idea of me and the baby joining them in El Paso, even after I tried to assure him that I’d still respect him wanting space and make sure he and Eddie had time to themselves without the baby and…”

He trails off. Maddie’s expression has been darkening with every word and the last thing Buck wants to do is take away the blissful happiness she’d arrive with just because he’s made a mess of his own life.

“Oh, Buck, I’m sorry.”

“You warned me giving him time with Eddie might not be enough to fix it,” Buck reminds her. “I… this is on me. I knew the risks, and I decided I wanted to keep my baby anyway. Now I’m just dealing with the consequences of making a selfish decision.”

“I know you were worried, but I thought… well, it would be understandable that he might need some time to adjust to the change or worry about the new baby altering family dynamics, not that he’d outright object to you or his sister in his life,” Maddie sighs. “Chris might feel inconvenienced, but that’s part of life. It’s lovely that you care so much about him, but you’re allowed to do things for yourself too. He’s going to have to learn to adapt.”

“No, he doesn’t have to do anything,” Buck protests. “He doesn’t owe me anything. I made my choices, the results are mine to deal with.”

But Maddie shakes her head.

“I’m not saying this to diminish the importance of Chris’s happiness. Being a parent, your children’s needs come first, but you shouldn’t throw away all your wants so they can always get their way. It’s okay, it’s important, to compromise sometimes. You wanted to keep your daughter, and you have every right to. Having a happy parent is good for a child.” Her expression goes distant for a moment, before she adds, with forceful light-heartedness, “Sometimes Jee wants to watch the same episode of Paw Patrol for the fifth time in a week and I make her choose something else. She doesn’t like that, but it would drive me up the wall to hear the episode again, and me making a choice that prioritises me helps me be a better parent overall.”

“Making her watch a different show is hardly the same as ruining Chris’s life.”

“You aren’t ruining his life,” Maddie says firmly. “Buck, look at me.” She pauses, waits until he’s looking her in the eye, before she says, “A younger sibling isn’t a terrible thing to have. You know that, right?”

“Things are good now, but you can’t say I didn’t make life harder for you as a kid,” he reminds her, words falling from his mouth without thought, then winces because the last thing he wants to do is remind Maddie of her childhood misery or pressure her into reassuring him about his place in her life, which is better and more balanced now. “And, I mean, Chim and Albert didn’t really have any relationship until a few years ago; Eddie loves his sisters, but he barely had contact with them before moving back to Texas. A younger sibling—”

“Having you, back then, gave me something good to hold on to, a reason not to lose myself in grief like our parents did,” Maddie says, reaching over to squeeze his hand. “The challenges that came from them being so wrapped up in their pain that they neglected their responsibilities to both of us were never your fault. The difficulties between Chim and Albert were because of their father, and I don’t know anything about Eddie’s relationship with his sisters but the things you’ve said about his parents, well, I doubt the sisters were the reason he wanted barely anything to do with Texas for so long. And I know you and Eddie will be better parents, won’t make those mistakes.”

“Maybe we can do better,” Buck concedes. “But he wouldn’t need us to do better if I hadn’t created a situation which is going to make Chris’s life harder.”

Maddie sighs, gaze going unfocused for a few moments before she asks, “Do you think I’m a bad parent for having Joy?”

“What? Maddie, no, of course not.” Is this the first warning sign of her PPD flaring up again, or just worry that she’d made a choice which meant facing that risk again? “You’re an amazing mom. Jee-Yun and Joy are both so lucky to have you.”

“Jee-Yun might not get along with the baby, and she was too young to give an informed vote on if she wants a younger sister,” Maddie points out. “Now she’ll have to cope with Chim and I splitting our attention, and there might be things she wants we can’t afford now we’re budgeting for two kids; even in the best-case scenario, the baby crying will probably disturb her—”

“Jee will love her,” Buck interrupts. “Maddie, come on, what are you talking about? Maybe she’ll have to get better at taking turns or being patient, but you and Chim will help her through any adjustment. So what if they each have a smaller college fund or whatever because you’re splitting your savings two ways? There are no guarantees with things like that, and the important thing is that they’ll grow up loved.”

Maddie leans back in her chair. “So, if Jee-Yun can deal with the changes that come with having a little sister, and it doesn’t make me a bad person, why are you acting like it’s so unreasonable to expect Chris to do the same?”

It’s not the same. But Buck isn’t sure how to explain to Maddie that the gulf between their circumstances makes a world of difference when she seems so resolute in drawing a comparison.

After a few moments, Maddie sighs. “Speaking of parents…” she segues with a grimace. “I spoke with ours briefly this morning, to give them an update about Joy. I didn’t say anything about you, and they didn’t ask. You haven’t told them about your pregnancy, have you?”

“Fuck no,” he blurts out. They were some of the few people Buck could have told without worrying about it getting back to Eddie, but the thought of talking to them about this… “I—I know I shouldn’t hold it against them that I didn’t know I was a carrier. It’s old news and they’re trying to be better now, but ending up accidentally pregnant because they didn’t have me tested and just told me I wasn’t a carrier… I feel like I can’t trust them all over again.”

And with that distrust resurges the phantom ache of a thousand old wounds he’d tried to set aside when Maddie had decided Jee-Yun ought to have grandparents.

He knows it’s not fair, to fault them for being willing to go to extremes to save their elder son, but the thought of introducing his baby girl to the people who’d looked at his infant self as a source of parts to harvest, them wanting to hold her, wanting to call her theirs even in their rightful capacity as grandparents, when she’s grown from parts of him, parts that they’d spent so much of his life mourning as defective… Buck can’t do it. He can’t change the choice Maddie has made for Jee and presumably wants to make for Joy, but right now having his daughter’s grandparents around feels like a source of far more stress than support. Either set, he suspects, though Eddie’s family will be Eddie’s decision.

“The longer you keep this from them, the worse it will be when they find out,” Maddie reminds him pragmatically. “Unless you’re planning on cutting them off…?”

And that would be grossly unfair to Maddie, to leave her trapped in between him and their parents. In the end it’s Buck who should’ve known better, and nobody is going to be helped by him dredging up ancient history to ask why that test had never been done when he must have undergone a barrage of testing to be used as a donor, why they’d never told him so many things that they should’ve.

“I know I’ll have to tell them, but…” even if he wasn’t struggling with old wounds, he’s not sure what would be worse, his parents swooping down to LA to dote on his daughter in a way they’d never bothered with him, or them treating her with dismissal and indifference as another one of Buck’s mistakes, surprised it took this long with his history of irresponsible behaviour. “I need to get things stable with Chris and Eddie first, without being distracted by our parents.”

“Well, they were planning on visiting in a few weeks but I can tell them it wouldn’t be a good time, that it’s better for Jee to avoid the extra upheaval of them visiting alongside getting used to a new baby in the house,” Maddie offers, but Buck shakes his head.

“I’d appreciate if you stall them until then, but you won’t need to keep them away long on my account,” he reminds her. One of the few things truly advantageous about moving to El Paso is that with Maddie and her kids still in LA, if their parents get it into their heads to bestow grandparent visits Buck will be hundreds of miles away, and the fact Maddie’s given them two grandkids should keep them focused on her instead of tracking down Buck for the sake of one.

Maybe after he gets through the move and integrating his little girl into Eddie and Christopher’s lives without Chris fleeing to his grandparents again, things will be steady enough that Buck can figure out how to deal with introducing his daughter to his parents.

“You’re still set on El Paso, then?” Maddie asks. “And Eddie and Chris are okay with that?”

“I don’t have a choice,” Buck reminds her. “I told you, Chris doesn’t want us there, but Eddie wants to be an involved parent, so I’m just going to have to find a way to make it work.”

“I see.” Maddie nods slowly. “Well, don’t forget you have family here too, and you can always come to me. You don’t have to make it work all on your own.”

Chapter Text

Buck isn’t expecting anybody else after visiting hours draw to a close, but shortly after he’s finished picking at his dinner (why do hospitals think serving bad food to people whose appetites are already low is a good idea) there’s a soft knock at the door to his room.

Eddie, finally making use of the unlimited visiting time he gets from being their daughter’s father.

“Sorry it took me so long to get back here.” He starts towards the bassinet and then says, “Oh, she’s sleeping. I won’t disturb her.”

She’d probably sleep fine in Eddie’s arms, but Buck won’t push the suggestion on Eddie. He’d be holding her himself, if he hadn’t just been eating and didn’t wanted to call a nurse back in to help transfer her to him.

“And how are you feeling?” Eddie asks. “I don’t want to disturb you either, I know you need your rest.”

“I’m fine.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow.

“I napped before dinner. The bruising from the crash is still kinda sore and my incision hurts if I try any movement that uses core muscles, but overall I’m as well as can be expected,” Buck corrects. “Maddie visited this afternoon, she didn’t bring either of my nieces—” whoops, he probably sounds a little petulant there. It’s not that he doesn’t understand that a hospital visit would be a hassle with a newborn and Jee-Yun. He wants to make the most of the time he has with them, is all. “—but she seems to be doing okay. She’s spoken to our parents, convinced them to give her and Chim some time to get settled in with Joy, so I don’t have to worry about them turning up for a surprise visit and expecting me to explain why they actually have two new grandchildren.”

At the mention of Buck’s parents, Eddie’s expression twists. “So, they don’t know about her yet?”

“If I thought I could get away with hiding her from them forever, I think I would,” Buck admits. “I know that’s stupid. They’re… they’re fine. Maddie is happy with their relationship with Jee-Yun. I just… I can’t deal with them right now.”

“You don’t have to,” Eddie says. “Ever, I mean. You tried to improve things with them, but if you’re not comfortable with the way they act, being grandparents doesn’t give them entitlement to your child.”

Buck shakes his head. “I don’t want to put Maddie in the middle of all that. I shouldn’t push them out of my life. Even if they gave up on me for a while, they’ve been doing better since Jee. It’s just… I tried so hard to understand that the way they treated me wasn’t their fault, that it was just because of their grief, but now I look at our daughter and it feels impossible all over again to understand how they could do what they did.”

Not the having him for parts; uncomfortable though it is, he can reconcile the idea of them convincing themselves that consenting on his behalf was fine, that he was too young to offer but would have wanted to help save Daniel if he’d been able to make the choice. But everything that came after? Buck looks at his daughter and can’t imagine any loss, any pain, that would cause him to be so indifferent to her happiness, to stop caring for her like they did for him.

“I know it was the two of you against them for a long while, but Maddie’s got Chim in her corner now, she’ll still have support even if you decide you don’t want to deal with your parents anymore,” Eddie says. “You chose to give them a second chance they hadn’t earned, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep letting them in. Being adequate grandparents to Jee-Yun doesn’t excuse the way they treated you or Maddie.”

“Maybe.” It was all so simple in theory, but to have begged them to try only to throw their efforts back in their face? Buck isn’t sure he can do that any more easily than he can accept them. “Anyway, you didn’t come here to listen to me ramble about my parents.”

“No, I’m glad you told me all that. I want to listen to you,” Eddie says. “And they’re our daughter’s grandparents. How involved they should be is definitely something we should talk about. Though I appreciate Maddie keeping them away so we don’t need to commit to anything immediately.”

“Still, it’s not what you came all the way back here after visiting hours for.”

“I would have come anyway,” Eddie insists. “To talk to you and to see our daughter. But Chris and I had a long talk this afternoon, about our family and the future, but also about some of the things you said to him this morning, and I would like to talk with you about that.”

“I’m sorry.” Buck had been trusted with such a simple thing as sitting and talking with Chris while Eddie took a call, and drove him away so fast. “I… it came out all wrong, I wasn’t trying to guilt trip or pressure him, I wanted to reassure him that even though things are changing he has a say, that I’d still respect his boundaries as much as I can.”

Eddie nods. “I figured as much from how Chris retold it. Apparently you’ve been feeling like he only talks to you when he needs something from you?”

“And that’s fine. If that’s what he needs, I’m happy to do it. I was trying to explain I’d noticed the change and I’d respect his wishes.”

“I get it. For a while it felt like homework and wanting favours or permission were the only reasons he talked to me,” is Eddie’s unexpected reply. “I thought it was down to him still being mad at me, at first, but even after things settled down, well, he has friendly days and moody ones. I think some of that is just his age, y’know?”

Maybe Eddie is right. Maybe it isn’t personal, Buck is just expecting too much.

“The thing it really made me wonder—” Eddie continues, “—is, did I do that?”

“What?” Buck pushes himself upright, perplexed. “Eddie, what are you talking about?”

“I had so much going on with Chris, the new job, with my family…” Eddie sighs. “Did I make you feel I was only calling you for selfish reasons? That our relationship was all about my needs?”

“Of course not. I wanted to hear about what’s going on with you both. Half the time it was me calling you to check in on how you were both doing,” Buck reminds him. If anything, he’d been the selfish one, desperate to know what was happening in their lives so he could still feel a part of them.

“Well, I’m glad I wasn’t boring you,” Eddie says. “But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t being self-absorbed. Just a moment ago you were talking about your worries about your parents, then cut yourself off. You’ve listened to me talk about my parents so much since Chris went to them, but you thought I wouldn’t listen to you do the same?”

It’s like his conversation with Maddie all over again. Why can’t anyone see his situation is not the same as theirs?

When Buck doesn’t answer, Eddie continues, “You hid your pregnancy, but maybe you wouldn’t have concealed it so easily and for so long if I hadn’t been too wrapped up in my own problems to pay attention to what was going on with you.”

“Eddie, that’s absurd. You didn’t know because I kept it a secret.”

“I should have been paying more attention. You must have had symptoms — morning sickness and fatigue at the very least — but I never noticed anything.”

“Nobody noticed. You had the least chance to, since you weren’t seeing me in person. Hell, I had Maddie giving me the anti-nausea tea she used for her morning sickness and when my symptoms finally got to the point I couldn’t keep ignoring them I still wasn’t expecting the doctor to say I was pregnant,” Buck protests. “If I couldn’t figure it out, it’s ridiculous for you to expect to have.”

“But you knew there was something,” Eddie insists. “You were sick long enough for Maddie to be recommending nausea treatment, and I didn’t even realise anything was wrong.”

“Nothing was wrong, it was just pregnancy symptoms,” Buck starts to insist, when from their daughter’s bassinet there is a quiet whine.

She doesn’t cry, just makes the low grumbles that Buck has already grown to associate with disgruntled waking. Buck turns towards her on instinct at the same time Eddie steps forward, then grimaces at the tug at the base of his abdomen, not quite able to bite back his groan of frustration at the way it’s sharper now the doctors are weaning him off the stronger painkillers he’d had immediately post-surgery.

Eddie freezes, his gaze shuttering. “Do you… do you have a problem with me holding her?”

Buck slumps against his pillows, pushing down his aching discontent lest Eddie get even more of a wrong impression. “No… no, of course you can hold her.” It had been the biggest relief Buck had felt in months, to see her safely in Eddie’s arms and know she’d have such a capable father. “I just… I hate that I can’t. That she wants to be held, that she’s crying, but it strains my incision if I reach for her, so I keep needing to wait for a nurse instead of being able to give her what she needs.”

“Shit.” The crumpling of Eddie’s expression is agony to watch.

“The nurses respond quickly,” Buck hastens to add. “She’s not being left to cry long. They’re taking good care of her, it’s just… me.”

Buck, who can only sit, useless to his daughter, as Eddie steps forward and scoops her up.

“Buck, I… I’m sorry,” Eddie says, voice thick as he turns, and… oh! Leans down to offer their daughter to Buck, who has to scramble to get his hands in place to receive her.

“It’s fine,” he says, as Eddie steps back. “I want you to hold her. You don’t have to give her to me just because I want her.”

“No, I shouldn’t have left you both for so long.” Expression pained, Eddie looks down at both of them. “I was trying to get things organised and not disturb you, but I should have thought about the support you’d need right now—”

“The nurses are doing a good job,” Buck assures him. “I mean it. I don’t like being so useless, but you don’t need to worry about her. You had to focus on Christopher.”

“Buck…” Eddie’s jaw clenches so tight Buck can practically hear his teeth grinding. “You can’t keep doing that.”

His face is a thundercloud, despite Buck’s efforts. All he’s doing is holding his daughter and trying to explain to Eddie that it’s okay, that Buck’s moment of frustration was about his selfish wants, not a reason for Eddie to look so tense.

“Eddie?”

“That’s the same justification you gave for keeping her a secret from us. I understand what you were trying to do, you thought you were protecting her from things going wrong with me and Chris in ways that could hurt her, and fixing things with Chris was important but…” Eddie takes a step back, dropping into the visitor’s chair with a dismal shake of his head. “Chris is a priority for me, but so is she. Minimising her needs to make things easier with him isn’t how I want to raise her, and I don’t think you do either.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.” Buck curls his daughter close, as if he can protect her from the very thought. “She’s getting everything she needs. She has to wait a few minutes for the nurses, but I wouldn’t let them not take care of her.”

“I’m not saying you’d let her be neglected, I’m sure she’s getting good enough care,” Eddie says, but there’s a twist in the way he says ‘good enough’ that makes it sound like that is far from good enough for him. “But I want her to have better than that.”

Of course she should. It’s good Eddie wants that for her, but it’s not like Buck doesn’t want that too. “I’ll be healed enough for a normal range of motion within a few days—”

“It’s not the c-section, Buck.” Eddie sighs. “You take as long as you need to recover. But if I’d known about her, things could be better right now. Whether that meant having a nursery set up in El Paso or somewhere long term for me and Chris to stay in LA. We could have had a plan for all this, I could have my truck instead of needing Pepa or our friends to drive me everywhere, which isn’t going to be sustainable once she’s ready to leave hospital and needs a car-seat—”

“It’s not like I intended for my car to get crashed into.” He’s explained this already. Yes, he’s put Eddie in a terrible position, but it grates to be blamed for the one part of this which isn’t his fault. “I had a car-seat, I had things under control. And I was going to tell you. That was why I wanted to talk the day the accident happened, you would have had time to plan for that sort of stuff.”

“But I didn’t. And if you’d told me sooner, I’d already have had time and been ready, we could have had backup plans in place,” Eddie argues.

“You were busy making things right with Christopher,” Buck reminds him. “What would be gained from distracting you from that? I just want to make things as easy as—”

“She doesn’t have to be easy!” Eddie snaps. “Do you think things with Chris were easy? No…” He drags a hand through his hair, narrows his eyes. “No, you know they weren’t. I was always honest with you about that, how I used being a provider as an excuse not to be present; and you know about my mistakes with Shannon, how even when I was trying to be a better father, Chris lost out on time with his mother because of me. Fuck, you were right there when he decided he’d rather run to El Paso than be raised by—”

“What the hell, Eddie?” Buck has never judged Eddie for how hard he’s had to work as a parent, even the fiasco with Kim had been understandable, tragic only because Eddie’s grief-stricken choices had been met with callousness at every turn instead of support. “You’re an amazing father. Maybe things haven’t always been perfect with Chris, but you’ve put in the work and done what is best for him, even in a difficult situation. I just don’t want to put you in a difficult situation again.”

“So instead you treat me like I’m going to be some sort of deadbeat?” Eddie rubs at his eyes, shakes his head as if pained. “If it wasn’t any of that, what was it?”

“What was what, Eddie, I don’t understand—”

“What made you stop trusting me?”

The words hang in the air between them, heavy as they are unfathomable.

“If I hadn’t known she’d have you, I don’t know if I could have kept her.” Wanted her, certainly, but as selfish as Buck’s choice had been, he wouldn’t have brought his precious baby girl into this world with just him to rely on. It might be the worst part of what he’s done, how much comfort he’s drawn from the certainty Eddie will take care of their daughter, even knowing what it might cost Eddie and that he never chose any of this. “Eddie, of course I trust you.”

“Trust me?” Eddie shakes his head. “You didn’t tell me about your pregnancy, you haven’t involved me in any of your plans for our daughter, because you don’t believe I can handle it, that I can meet her needs and Christopher’s while being fair to both of them. You aren’t letting me support you—”

“Because you shouldn’t have to! I’m the one whose negligence meant we didn’t use protection when we should have. I’m the one who decided to go ahead with the pregnancy; I have to take responsibility for that.”

Buck can feel the blood rushing in his ears. This confrontation with Eddie was inevitable, he’s known every step of the way that keeping his daughter was breaking Eddie’s trust, he thought he’d prepared himself for Eddie’s unhappiness but he hadn’t braced for these depths of it, for Eddie to be so angry that even Buck’s protection would be taken as a betrayal.

“And you think cutting me out is the responsible choice?” Eddie accuses. “That it’s better for her if you do this without me?”

Of course it isn’t. Eddie’s already called him out: Buck can provide what their daughter needs, but not as much as she deserves. He’s tried to plan, but he doesn’t actually have a job lined up in El Paso yet, and as soon as he goes back to work he’s going to need to find childcare in an unfamiliar city where the only people he knows will be Eddie’s family. Isabel is too old to help with a baby and, after the way they’d encroached with Chris, Buck dreads every possibility of how Eddie’s parents might react to their newest grandchild. His efforts to avoid putting pressure on Eddie and coming between him and Chris are failing his daughter, his hopes to give her a better life dependant on burdening Eddie and Chris.

His hands are shaking.

Holding his daughter is the very least he should be able to do for her, but he’d carried her in his body right into a car crash, isn’t able to lift her without help, and now he can’t even keep her steady in his arms.

“You—You should take her.” 

“What?” Eddie still looks distrustful, but Buck can’t rationalise to him right now. Making sure their daughter is safe and comfortable matters more.

“I—I can’t—” his breath catches in his chest, turning into a full body shudder “—Eddie, please.”

Eddie is out of the chair in an instant, but instead of sweeping their daughter from Buck’s unsteady grip, he perches on the edge of the bed, twisting to slide an arm underneath where Buck is holding the baby, supporting both of them with a firm grip. His free arm wraps around Buck’s shoulders. It’s a delicate touch, but Buck can’t help but sag against him with a hitching inhale and Eddie takes the weight just as easily, just as comfortably, as he does their daughter’s.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, and it feels like a promise. “I’ve got you both.”

“I’m sorry,” Buck gasps out. “God, Eddie, of course I don’t want to do this without you. But every way I look at it, either I screw things up for you and for Chris, or I’m screwing her up before she’s even had a chance…”

“You aren’t.” Eddie’s tone is firm, and with his solid presence pressed against Buck’s side, his certainty reverberates. “You’re doing fine, Buck. Look at her.”

He follows Eddie’s instruction, dropping his gaze to the tiny bundle held by them both. Their daughter stares back up at him, with eyes so like his own. She’s not crying, despite Buck’s faltering, her face pink but relaxed from the indignant scrunch she’d first faced the world with.

Buck tries to match that calm, syncing his breathing to Eddie’s even rhythm.

“I just want her to be happy,” he says. “But all I’ve done is make a mess of things.”

“You haven’t. I’m sorry you didn’t get to tell me like you planned, that we didn’t have time to get ready for this together, but whatever idiot driver caused that pile up was the one made a mess of things,” Eddie says. It’s not quite true, many of their problems could also have been avoided if Buck hadn’t left it so late to say anything, but arguing with Eddie’s kindness is exhausting. “But I’m here now, so let me have your back.”

There’s a reason Bobby had always tried to discourage him from going solo during structure work, even when they were under constraints and splitting up would let them cover ground faster. Alone it was easier to get cut off, turned around. When Eddie was with him, he offered a second perspective, opened up options for manoeuvres that couldn’t be carried out alone.

“Hell,” Eddie continues. “Even if I couldn’t be here, if I’d missed your call or a freak asteroid strike wiped out all the travel routes and trapped me in Texas, you have a whole team, a whole family, of people here who want to help you out. Nobody wants to overwhelm you with visitors when you need rest, but any help you want, there are people waiting to give it.”

Bobby, who’d waited at the hospital the whole time Buck was in surgery. Hen, who’d stopped by at the first chance she’d had. Maddie had come despite having delivered a baby of her own only yesterday, and he’s sure Chim would have been by had he not been watching Buck’s nieces so Maddie could come. If he had a working phone, Buck’s inbox would most likely be inundated with well wishes from their extended family, the wider team at the 118. After being alone with this for so many months because he’d been trying to keep his pregnancy a secret from Eddie, Buck had got used to the absence of support. But he’d been the one keeping them at bay to protect his secret, and at the first opportunity they’ve been here.

“You’re right. They’re our team, I know they’d help, and I’d be stupid not to take advantage of that while I have it,” Buck admits. “I just… I had a plan for how all this was going to go, and I’d be in El Paso for this part, and I didn’t—”

“It’s not your fault. You’re in hospital. I should have talked to you, asked about visitors and what you wanted. But everybody is going to support you, they’d have still supported you if you had come to El Paso, but you’re in LA, and that means they can be here with you,” Eddie soothes. “That’s… I wasn’t going to bring it up until I’d explained to Chris, but that’s part of why I think it’s best if Chris and I are the ones to move, to come back.”

“No.”

Against his side, Eddie stiffens. But how many times will Buck have to say he won’t force any further complications on Eddie and Chris before someone will listen?

“Buck…” Eddie forces most of the tension out with a slow breath, but his grip on Buck’s shoulder is still a little tighter than it was before. “It makes sense—”

“Does it? You and he are settled in El Paso, happy. You would still be there if I hadn’t decided to keep the pregnancy.”

“I never wanted to be,” Eddie says, even as he doesn’t deny the truth of Buck’s statement. “I came to LA the first time because being in El Paso and so close to my parents wasn’t good for me and I didn’t think it would be good for Chris either. Chris went back because I made our home somewhere he no longer wanted to be, so I had to work with that, but what we built in LA is the life I want.”

“But Chris chose El Paso and you can’t risk him—”

“It’s not going to come to that,” Eddie says, with more confidence than Buck has heard him talking about Chris with than since before everything happened with the woman who looked like Shannon. “I… god, with everything that’s happened, I can’t blame you for worrying, but these last few months, things have got better between me and Chris. After the mistakes I’d made, Chris needed to see that I would put his wants before my own, but you and our daughter’s needs matter too. He’s old enough to understand that, and I think seeing the way things have changed here has him realising what he’s given up by moving to El Paso, what he’s missed out on. I’m not saying this was the best way of it happening, but if I say it’s time to come back to LA, I don’t think he’d run to his grandparents again.”

Buck doesn’t want to fight him on this. Eddie and Chris, back where Buck has always felt they belonged, would be like a dream come true. “You… if you think Chris wouldn’t mind, you could talk to him about it. But I already told to him about staying in El Paso, promised him he wouldn’t be forced into anything.” Buck can’t stop Eddie making decisions for his son, but after he’s tried so hard to make it clear he’ll respect Chris’s boundaries even if it means giving up a place in his life, surely Eddie won’t break Buck’s word for him.

“Okay, then we can talk about it together,” Eddie concedes. “These are decisions to make as a family.”

Buck nods. As a family. That sounds nice.

Chapter Text

Athena is the first to visit the next morning, dropping off an old phone of her own for Buck to use until he’s able to replace his own, plus the recovered SIM card from his original phone (too damaged in the crash to salvage) so that he at least has all his contacts without re-inputting them.

Once the phone is set up, there’s only one thing to do. With a helping hand from Athena, he gets his baby girl positioned in his arms and switches his phone to the camera.

He’ll have to ask Chris if he can send Buck copies of the photos he’d taken when he’d first seen her, her first ever photos and Buck hadn’t been paying attention, but maybe that’s an okay trade for the fact Chris volunteered to share that moment with her.

He takes a few photos right away, and after Athena has said her goodbyes turns his full attention to taking more. Buck knows it’ll be a few weeks for his daughter to really focus her vision but her blue eyes look so intently up at him. He’s sure all the pictures he takes will look very alike, but he can’t help wanting to capture every flutter of her lashes, the smack of her lips, the wrinkle in her nose that is so astonishingly like Eddie’s even on her tiny baby face.

He picks half a dozen of the clearest shots of different expressions and sends them to the ‘118 + families’ group-chat and it barely takes a moment for the heart reacts and messages of ‘awww’ to roll in.

Scrolling through the rest of his contacts is most a reminder of how lucky he is that all his most important people are also important to each other. He hesitates on his parents’ contacts — if he tells them now, within a few days of giving birth, he could probably smooth over the fact he’d hidden the pregnancy with a few apologies; but he doesn’t want to apologise for anything to do with her, not to them.

They aren’t the only family in his contacts that it might be appropriate to send a picture to, though. For the most part, Buck probably shouldn’t interfere with how Eddie approaches this with his own relatives, though if their daughter is used as tool to undermine Eddie the way Chris has been used by his grandparents Buck isn’t sure he can sit idly by. But that worry doesn’t extend to Isabel, who’d invited him to call her Abuela years ago. He’d often sent her pictures of Eddie and Chris until they’d left, so she’ll surely want plenty of pictures of her newest great-grandchild too.

Not two minutes after the message sends, his phone starts to ring.

It shouldn’t surprise him how naturally Isabel talks about her new great-granddaughter like a much-wanted addition to the family instead of an accidental blindside. She delivers a gentle scolding that she hasn’t had time to make a baby blanket, but before Buck can even apologise she’s moved onto talking about how Adriana was early too, that early babies grow up to be late sleepers, and that brings her back around to the baby blanket and what colour to make it.

“You aren’t the ‘pink for a girl’ type, I think. Christopher, he had a lot of blue when he was small, but Eddie never got much say in that; once he did, he encouraged Christopher to make his own choices. Have you talked about nursery colours?”

“Not yet.” They haven’t even settled on what state they’re going to live in; decorating decisions for a hypothetical nursery are a far off prospect. He’s not going to bring up the El Paso or LA issue with Isabel though, not when he knows he’ll say yes to LA in a heartbeat if Eddie is right about Chris being open to it, but Isabel is in El Paso and will see her great-granddaughter far less if they choose LA. “I’m not ready to imagine letting her out of my sight.”

“Ah, you never really are. Josephina and Ramon are still my babies, no matter how many grandbabies of their own they have now,” she says. “But you’ll learn to let them find their own path.”

Looking at the tiny bundle in the crook of his arm, it’s hard to imagine; but Buck remembers when Chris was half the size he is now, how proud Buck’s been of every step of his growth even as he reels from the speed of it sometimes, and with that in mind it’s easy to trust Isabel’s wisdom.

She’s spilling anecdotes about what Eddie was like as a baby (adorable and charming in every way — having seen both of the kids Eddie’s genes have made, Buck can believe it) when the door opens to admit Eddie and Chris.

Then it’s a flurry of greetings as he puts the phone on speaker so they can all talk. Eddie winds up hissing, “Abuela, please—” when she mentions baptism but otherwise the remainder of the call feels like the kind of conversation they used to have when Isabel was still in LA, before everything got so messy.

Eventually, Isabel has to go, citing prior plans with a friend and thanking Buck for supplying her with pictures to show off, and within a few minutes of the phone call ending, Christopher settles his gaze on Buck with palpable intent. “So, Dad said he talked to you about how your plan to move.”

“Chris!”

Christopher gives a theatrical sigh at his dad’s scolding. “What? You said we had to talk about it.”

“I also told you Buck is still recovering,” Eddie reminds him. “We don’t need to rush into it.”

It’s kindly meant, but, “Chris is right.”

Buck’s conversation with Eddie yesterday had been difficult, but it had left him with a clearer sense of what Eddie wanted. Being up front with Chris will make it easier to plan, even if Chris is still angry with him.

“There are too many practical considerations for this to be put off. We’ll be out of hospital within a few days, and whatever plan we make needs to start with picking a state. You were dragged out here by the accident and that wasn’t my intention; you’re both settled in El Paso, I wasn’t going to disrupt that choice any more than I had to.” Even now, with Eddie implying he’s glad to have a justification to bring Chris back, Buck won’t risk Chris feeling like his sister’s birth is to blame for his choice being taken away. Chris is happy with his new life, and Eddie is happy that Chris is happy even if the rest of his feelings about moving back to his hometown are more strained. “Chris, I know your dad has raised some practical points about the fact it will be complicated for me to move with a baby, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it. I don’t want to force you away from your home and your friends if you want to stay in El Paso.”

Chris shrugs. “I mean, if nothing had changed… I don’t know what I’d have wanted. I like El Paso, but it’s not like the reason I left had anything to do with not liking LA. I’d made friends there and some stuff was pretty nice, like all my classes being easier—”

Buck fights the urge to pull a face. Chris is such a bright kid and a lot of effort had gone into getting him into a school in LA which would support him to make the most of that, but when Buck was fourteen his priorities hadn’t been any better.

“—and then dad was there too, so even though I missed the beach and my LA friends, and it was annoying how awkward things kept being with dad and my grandparents… well, it’d be kind of shitty to make dad move all the way to El Paso for me and then decide I wanted to go back to LA for no good reason.”

“Chris…” Buck can see the twist of Eddie’s face, knows without it even needing to be said that Eddie has never needed a reason to put his son’s happiness first and how much it must kill him that Chris would doubt that.

“But that’s not the point,” Chris presses on firmly. “Because now we have a good reason. I have a sister and she deserves to grow up with all the good stuff I had in LA. Like… uh… Korean BBQ. People in El Paso seem to think because they’re in Texas they should have Texas BBQ always. And learning about the stars at the observatory; and our zoo trips—”

“El Paso has a zoo,” Buck points out. It’s not like he wants to convince Chris not to come back, but he can’t risk him feeling like he’s been brought back under false pretences.

Chris rolls his eyes. “It’s not our zoo. And there’s no beach or mountains, there’s nothing wrong with the desert but it gets boring. And school, like, she’s little now, but she’ll have to go eventually and it was fine that my classes were easy, but that was because I was ahead of everyone else because I went to a good school here.”

“I… really haven’t thought about her schooling yet,” Buck says. Future school districts are something they should factor into their move, but he hadn’t expected Christopher to be the one to think of it.

“Well, it’s important. But the most important thing is family. Me and Dad have family in El Paso and LA, but all your people are here in LA.” Not strictly true, but Chris is perceptive enough to have picked up on the fact that while the Diazes get together for holidays and family occasions, Buck only does the same with his parents when it’s Maddie doing the organising. The people that matter are all in LA, or at least they were until Christopher’s departure. “My Texas cousins already have each other. You shouldn’t take Jee-Yun’s only cousin away from her.”

The jut of his chin as he concludes tells Buck Chris knows just what a trump card he’s played with that last line. It’s one thing to give up his own attachments to let Chris keep the stability of El Paso; it’s another to think of his nieces not getting to have the fullest possible relationship with his daughter. Jee-Yun and Joy wouldn’t miss out on the experience of having cousins, not really, Denny and Mara already offer that in all but the official sense, but they could have more; plus Buck wants his daughter to experience a large close knit family too, and he doesn’t know Eddie’s extended family well enough to want to rely on them for that.

“If you’re both happy to come back…” Buck says, and is interrupted by stereo yeses. Christopher’s voice has gotten so deep and he and Eddie sound startlingly alike in their stubborn tones.

“We’re staying,” Eddie says. “Pepa won’t mind having Chris around for as long as necessary, and I can stay on her couch a few more days.”

“You still have a key to my place,” Buck reminds him. Anyone else, he might think twice about offering up his bed when things are still so undefined between them, but with Eddie it can just mean wanting his friend comfortable, no matter what else is tangled between them. “I’ll probably be discharged later this week, but if you want to get out of Pepa’s hair for now, you going there makes more sense than it sitting empty while you sleep on a couch.”

Eddie bites his lip. “About that… Now we’re moving back, I could start looking for a nearby place for just Chris and I, but… you talked about finding your own place in El Paso, which you don’t need to do now, but your loft isn’t ideal for a baby… if you’re going to move anyway, there could be advantages to us moving together.”

Buck’s stomach flips at the suggestion. His plan for El Paso had been living near Eddie and figuring out some way to parent collaboratively while maintaining their separate lives. Does Eddie mean planning together to ensure that both their new places are in the same neighbourhood, or is he talking about moving in together? Living together would make co-parenting much more convenient; but living like a family with Eddie while not being in a relationship, having never even talked about the night which had resulted in their daughter and what it meant for them, would feel like moving into a house of cards.

“I’m not putting you on the spot,” Eddie adds hastily. “Don’t try to decide anything now. I just wanted you to know that’s an option for you to think about.”

Speaking of big decisions, “Moving is going to take some time to sort out. But there’s something pretty time sensitive I need to ask you both.”

He can see Chris and Eddie exchange wary looks, but pushes on. This is too important and there’s a deadline on making the decision.

“California requires a baby’s name to be registered within ten days of birth,” he adds, and as they both start to relax, delivers the important part. “She’s currently baby Buckley on her hospital records because they only knew my name when we were admitted, but, well… how would you both feel about her using Diaz?”

Eddie looks nonplussed. “What?”

“I’d like her to share the same family name as you.” Even Maddie isn’t using Buckley anymore, and Eddie and Chris are the family the baby deserves to carry in day-to-day life regardless of what future decisions Buck might make regarding his parents. His call with Isabel has only strengthened that feeling. 

“So you want to hyphenate?”

Buck bites his lip. “That’s an option. But if she’s Buckley-Diaz, and you’re both Diazes, she’s going to be the odd one out.” It’s their family name, Buck can’t be the one to make this decision, but he doesn’t want his daughter to spend her whole life marked out as other, as not quite belonging. “I’d rather keep it simple for her, if you’re willing.”

It’s not going to be simple though, not going by the strained look on Eddie’s face. “What about you? If we do that, you’ll be the one who stands out, she won’t have that link to you.”

Buck shrugs. “There’s no perfect option. But this is what I want, if you’re okay with it.” She’s his baby girl, he’s carried her for the last eight months and he’ll be her dad no matter what, she doesn’t need his name, not like he wants her to have the security of being unquestionably family to Eddie and Christopher.

Chris glances searchingly towards his father , but seems to find no cue in Eddie’s expression. “I’m fine with her being a Diaz,” he says after a moment, shrugging and turning back to Buck. “I’m sure the two of you can figure something out about making sure your name is connected too.”

Eddie sighs, but then says, “If you’re set on using just ‘Diaz’ for her surname, we’re including Buckley as a middle name.”

It’s a sensible offer, the solution Maddie used with Jee-Yun. It’ll get something in there officially, without the ‘Buckley’ shadow hanging over her as she goes about her life. “Great, she’s got a last name and a middle name, so now all she needs is something for us to actually call her.”

“If you haven’t picked her given name yet, can I make suggestions?” Christopher asks.

“Go for it,” Buck says. Her getting their family name was the part that mattered most to him. “God knows I’ve had four months to come up with something and got nowhere.”

“Huh?” Chris’s face scrunches. “But a pregnancy takes nine months, I know she’s early, but she can’t be that early or she’d need to be in an incubator and stuff. And dad had already been in Texas since last year.”

“No, she’s only a few weeks early, but it took a while for me to realise I was pregnant.”

Chris looks incredulously from Buck to Eddie. “A while? If you’ve only had four months to think of a name, that’s half your pregnancy!”

“Well, I didn’t even know I could get pregnant,” Buck explains.

“You didn’t know?” 

Chris is in a tough enough spot with Eddie no longer able to fully shield him from the conflict between his father and his grandparents, the last thing he needs is the messy history of the Buckley family dumping on him as an excuse for Buck’s ignorance, so he just shakes his head.

“And you didn’t move to LA until you were an adult either, right?”

Buck’s not sure what that has to do with anything but, “No, I grew up in Pennsylvania, I didn’t move here until my mid twenties.”

“Right, well, I’m glad we’ve decided to move back here,” Chris says, and there’s clearly something Buck is missing because Eddie groans and rubs a hand over his face.

“Chris…” Eddie is cut off by the sound of his phone ringing, looking down at it with a frown. “Damn, it’s my Captain. Not Bobby, my El Paso captain. I should…”

Eddie glances between the phone and them. It’s clear he thinks he ought to do the professional thing and answer his Captain, especially if he is going to announce he’s resigned from El Paso following his paternity leave, but Buck also understands his hesitance after the mess Buck had made of his last one on one conversation with Chris. “I’m all out of potentially life changing news to break,” he promises.

Chris glances between them and then seems to catch on. “Yeah, dad, we’re fine. I got kind of frustrated last time we talked, but we’re on the same page now. You don’t need to hover.”

“I won’t be long,” Eddie says. “If it’s something complicated, I’ll call him back at a better time.”

“If you don’t hurry up, you’re going to miss his call,” Buck points out, gratified when Chris snickers.

Eddie sends them one last wary look, but then steps out into the hallway, leaving Buck alone with both of Eddie’s children.

The last two times they’d been alone together, Buck had first failed to convince Chris not to run from Eddie to his grandparents and then in his attempt to be supportive of Christopher’s new life driven him storming out of the hospital room in anger and misplaced suspicion that Eddie was to blame for Buck’s secrets.

He isn’t going to mess this up again.

Chris is choosing LA. And if his change of heart seems sudden, well, so was the initial decision to move to Texas. Buck had tried to talk it through him him then, but ultimately conceded to Eddie’s view that Chris was old enough that his choice should be respected; he’s done what he can to give Chris the opportunity to air his opinions now,  if Chris and Eddie are in agreement on returning, he’s done trying to offer them outs.

Still, it’s one thing to promise not to anger Chris with any more major changes that will impact his life, it’s another to know where to start, when it feels like Buck has developed a chronic case of saying the wrong thing when it comes to Chris.

He’s spared having to make a decision at all when Chris asks, “Can I hold her? I know Dad said when we came here the first time about her immune system, and I was on a plane the other day, so it’s fine if not, but…”

Eddie had mentioned the possibility but no doctors had expressed any concerns in that area. “You washed your hands before coming in right?” Buck checks.

“Of course,” Chris huffs. “I know how to behave in a hospital.”

“Then I think that would be nice. I still can’t really turn, but if you don’t mind sitting on the bed, I can hand her to you that way.”

If Chris feels more any more lingering anger with Buck, it doesn’t slow him down in hopping up onto the mattress, carefully shifting his crutches to settle out of the way at his side.

It’s a squeeze. Buck takes up a lot of a single mattress and Chris is really far too close to grown to easily fit himself into the gaps which remain, but with some carefully manoeuvring he manages to get himself seated well enough that Buck doesn’t have to worry about him slipping while holding the baby, and more than close enough for Buck to hand her over without any stretching.

Chris is tentative with his grip, startling a little when his sister starts to fuss at being moved, but he lets Buck guide him into the easiest posture to support her properly, and it doesn’t take long to get her settled in his arms, the pair of them staring at each other which what Buck would like to believe is similar levels of enthralment.

“So you have ideas for her name…” he prompts, but Chris shakes his head.

“Not yet. If you couldn’t think of something in all these months, I can’t pick something good in five minutes,” he protests, as if Buck had been asking him to make an immediate proclamation. “I need to think. I bet I can pick something by tomorrow.”

“I mean, your dad is going to be involved in that decision too,” Buck reminds him. “But I’m sure he’ll appreciate a shortlist.”

“I can do a shortlist. That’ll make sure she gets something cool. But not the sort of cool that will be cringe by the time she’s in middle school because it’s trying too hard to be trendy.”

“I’m sure she’ll appreciate it,” Buck says. He’s not sure how to express how much Christopher’s acceptance of his sister matters without making the teen uncomfortable, but he can’t leave Chris feeling unacknowledged either. “I know things have been tough for you two lately, but Eddie is a good dad, and you’re already being an excellent brother. I’m glad you’re both doing better, that she’ll have you both.”

“You are too.”

Buck is certainly doing better for having Eddie and Chris back in his life, but he’s not sure Chris’s response fully tracks with what Buck had said. “What?”

Chris shrugs, not looking up from his sister. “I mean, I know you’ve never officially been one, but you’re a dad she’s lucky to have.”

Oh.

Eddie is the father Buck has relied upon for their daughter, this whole time. Buck will do what he can for her, everything within his power, but Eddie’s the one with the proven track record, the one who has already raised one child to be brave and clever and kind. For Christopher to hold Buck in even a fraction of that esteem (and it does feel like esteem, not an oblique slight on Eddie’s parenting, to suggest the rocky patch Eddie and Christopher have shared is what puts Eddie and Buck in a region which could be comparable) is more of a vote of confidence than he could have dared to dream of.

There’s nothing he can say to that, nothing to do but soak in the moment, unsure of how much time has passed before he looks up to see Eddie braced in the doorway, eyes honeyed as he smiles at them. Buck hadn’t even noticed his return, but when their eyes meet, Eddie’s smile broadens even as his cheeks glow a rosy pink. Buck can’t blame Eddie for excitement he’s exuding, not when his own chest feels like it’s full of spun sugar bubbles of hope at the sight of Chris holding his baby sister with such confidence and ease. There are still details to figure out, but, for the first time, Buck can look between the three Diazes and see a family.

Chapter Text

A few days later, Buck carries his daughter into his apartment for the first time.

Bobby had been the one to drive them home from the hospital, but Eddie had been waiting in the building’s parking lot to intercept them and hovered within arm’s reach through the elevator ride up to the apartment. It’s comforting, despite the overkill. The doctors had checked Buck could carry his daughter a reasonable distance before deeming him fit to leave the hospital, and he’d passed that test three days after his c-section, he’s only stayed in hospital this long because the paediatric doctors had wanted to do a few more days of monitoring and hospital policy was to keep the birthing parent in with the baby where possible. Clearly somebody in hospital management recognised that if they’d discharged Buck from his bed, they’d have had to deal with him camping out on the neonatal ward rather than leaving Kaitlyn behind.

Kaitlyn Buckley Diaz. Chris had supplied his top ten name recommendations, which Eddie had whittled down to six he approved of, before offering Buck another round of choice before they resorted to tearing Christopher’s list into strips and pulling a name out of a hospital cup.

Six was an array Buck could actually think about without getting overwhelmed the way he had been when presented with every possible choice he could make for his daughter’s future. He didn’t want to put limits on her, and, of Chris’s list, Buck had been drawn to the opportunities offered by a name that could be used whole but came with the options of so many common variants so that she would be free to be Kaitlyn, Kait, Kaity, Kay, or, if she grew up to feel like none of those fit, she’d pick out her own in the comfort of having always been free to choose. 

It’s strange to enter his apartment and find it not as he’d left it. Looking up to the loft area, he can see a sturdy-looking crib assembled by the bed, and a travel bassinet also waiting in the lounge.

“I threw out some of your groceries that looked like they were going bad,” Eddie informs him. “But you’ve also received more prepped meals than one person could reasonably eat, so your freezer is pretty rammed.”

Buck nods appreciatively. They’ve all faced down enough personal emergencies to get good at stacking up freezer meals tetris style and the subsequent jenga game of getting stuff back out. A supply of meals will come in handy, he’s managed well enough in the hospital when all he’s had to do is focus on his daughter, but now he’s going to have to be responsible for himself as well as her, and much as he loves cooking it is probably going to be too energy sapping while recovering from surgery and caring for a newborn.

It’s handy, too, that Eddie and Chris had picked LA, otherwise all that food, all that love and support from his family and friends, would have needed to be thrown out because he couldn’t take it to El Paso.

He lays Kaitlyn in her bassinet, watching her blink up at the ceiling before her eyes drift shut with a minuscule sigh. So far, she’s proven to be a light sleeper but an easy one. Any attempt to move her or unexpected noise has her squinting out at the world as if to see what is going on, but she’s just as quick to relax back into napping once she’s processed the disturbance. Buck can’t help but think her alertness and the efficiency with which she rests are an inheritance of firefighters’ instincts.

She settles so fast that he can’t pretend the stroke of his fingertips over her head is for her and not a self-soothing gesture, but he indulges for only a moment before heading back over to join Eddie in the kitchen area.

There are topics Buck was unwilling to broach in the hospital, where they might be interrupted by a visitor or member of medical staff at any time. This is the first time they’ve been truly alone together since Eddie left.

There’s a bag by the stairs of Eddie’s things, having taken Buck up on his offer to stay here rather than on Pepa’s couch. It looks partly full, but Buck’s not sure if it’s because Eddie has repacked his things with the plan of retreating to Pepa’s now Buck is home or if he just never unpacked in the first place.

For their daughter’s first night at home, Buck wants Eddie with them, if Eddie is willing to stay. He can do this alone; his plans for El Paso had involved living near Eddie but not having him around all the time, but with Eddie so close it would feel wrong to watch him walk away again.

For that to happen, they need to figure out where Eddie is going to stay. Pepa’s, or Buck’s couch, or Buck’s bed. And any discussion of tonight can’t be fully disentangled from discussing their future.

“So… you want me to move in with you.” It’s a blunt opening, but Buck has spent months not being direct with Eddie and he’s tired of it.

“I said living together is an option we should consider,” Eddie corrects. “But we don’t have to rush into anything. You should take all the time you need to think.”

“Taking time to think isn’t any good without information to think on, so, I… uh…” he hates to fall back on such an ominous cliche, but so much of the direction of their future hinges on what Eddie thinks about the night they’ve never talked about. “Eddie, before we can decide anything, we need to talk about us.”

Eddie draws in a strained breath. “Buck…”

“Listen, I want you to be as involved a parent as you want to be, for Kaitlyn to grow up with both her fathers and her brother around; but our situation is complicated. Moving in together would make caring for her easier, be convenient for shared custody, but there are other factors to consider. You’re in this position because I didn’t know I had the carrier gene, Eddie. My parents treated me like I didn’t and I figured they knew what they were doing and never bothered to get myself tested, like an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot for assuming they gave you correct health information,” Eddie says, but he’s wrong.

“It’s not like I didn’t know my parents were unreliable about my childhood medical history. I should have thought to get retested as an adult.” Hell, maybe he should ask to do all the early childhood medical checks at the same time Kaitlyn does, just in case there’s anything else they neglected to have tested or tell him about.

“I knew that too,” Eddie points out. “But I didn’t think about it either. And I’m fourteen years past being able to use Texas sex-ed as an excuse for relying on assumptions rather than protection.”

“Maybe, but I’m also the one that decided to keep her without telling you.” What would Eddie have wanted, if Buck had given him the chance to influence the decision? He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to, not when Eddie’s desire to be a present parent could too easily be an argument for not being a parent at all when being present hadn’t been an option. “I… we need to be good parents. I don’t want to make a mess of our friendship any more than we already have. Living together seems like an easy answer now, but what happens if a year or two from now you meet somebody and they aren’t happy with you living with someone you… got pregnant? I don’t want to keep you from your happiness, but I want Kaitlyn to have a stable home—”

“Buck.” Oh. Eddie’s voice is sharp, his jaw tight. “Do you really think there’s a situation where I pick some hypothetical future stranger over our family?”

Buck knows this look. It’s pain, not anger, drawing every muscle in Eddie’s body tense. And Buck has caused that. He’s letting his mouth run away from him, dragging them both into worst-case scenarios that hurt Eddie to even imagine.

“No. No… you’d choose our daughter, I know that. But I don’t want to force that choice on you. You shouldn’t have to give up a chance at future happiness. When Chris left after first hearing the news, I talked to Maddie about the fact my choices hurt him—”

“He was shocked, Buck, that’s all.”

“—I didn’t prioritise what was best for him or for you when I decided to keep the pregnancy. It was a selfish choice and you both have to deal with the consequences. But if I had chosen an abortion, there’d still be consequences because of how I’d have felt about that. This is the same. I know you’d put Kaitlyn ahead of your happiness, just like you’ve done with Chris so many times, but she—they both—deserve to have you happy. So even if it would be more practical for now, maybe it’s better if we don’t start something that wouldn’t be compatible with your future happiness.”

Eddie shakes his head, pressing fingers to his temple. “I wouldn’t have offered if I weren’t willing.”

That’s not enough. Eddie would be willing to suffer eternal torment for the sake of his kids, but that isn’t what Buck wants for any of them. “Willing isn’t—”

“The night we conceived Kaitlyn, I kissed you because I didn’t want to leave this life without having kissed you at least once,” Eddie interjects. “It was selfish of me, knowing I couldn’t stay. And then I needed to fix things with Chris, to put him above my wants, so I didn’t let myself dwell on what I couldn’t have, and I thought you’d be okay here with Maddie and the team having your back, that you wouldn’t… It makes sense if that kiss, that night didn’t mean the same things to you as it did to me. I’m not telling you this to put expectations on you. But there’s no other hypothetical future partner for me to factor into our plans, into any plan for my happiness.  The most important people in my life are Chris, Kait, and you. Maybe things are too complicated for me to have everything I want, but I’m not going to let anything else come between me and the three of you.”

The memories Buck has of their night together are frustratingly hazed by distance and time, his own mental replays overlain with the regret in which he’d been sure Eddie would hold the consequences. Eddie having wanted him, truly, selfishly, as more than a spur of the moment thing or distraction from his impending departure feels like a surreal fantasy still.

More than that, “You want… are you saying that you want a relationship with me?” Even after Buck has betrayed his trust, been the cause of this mess between them?

“I want to be your partner, in every sense. But we can be good parents as friends,” Eddie says firmly. “Me moving to El Paso, you keeping such big secrets…Things have changed between us, Buck. Not how I feel about you, but you’re right that things are complicated. So if our relationship changes, I’d only want if we chose it for us, not because you got pregnant and us being together like that would simplify things.”

They wouldn’t be the only couple to commit to a relationship because of a baby, hell, it wouldn’t even be Eddie’s first time doing so. It could almost be easy, when Buck wants Eddie just as much as he did when he’d initiated that desperate second kiss and maybe Eddie wants him too; but it’s one thing to believe Eddie when he says he’s not unhappy to be back in LA, it’s another to forget that he was choosing El Paso until their daughter changed the stakes. The vision in Buck’s mind, of them as a perfect little family of four, will be destined to crumble if neither of them can trust in the choice.

“I…” a thousand futures stretch out in front of him, each so fragile that he can destroy them with whatever words he picks next. “Will you stay here tonight?” he manages. “I know it isn’t ideal. Chris will probably have to stay at Pepa’s still unless he wants to deal with waking up every time Kaitlyn cries, but I’d feel better having you on hand while we settle in.”

“Sure. I can make up the couch.” Buck’s not sure what his face does if he wonders if he should take that as part of an answer as to what their future holds, that Eddie might want him but still choose to hold back, but Eddie clearly sees something because he continues, “I’d be staying on your couch or Pepa’s for the time being no matter how this conversation went. You’re still recovering, I’m not risking needing to go to the ER because I rolled over in my sleep and accidentally elbowed you.” 

“The doctors wouldn’t have discharged me if I couldn’t handle a small bump,” Buck protests. Also, they’re both EMTs. Even if Eddie did accidentally agitate Buck’s injuries, it was hardly beyond what they could manage.

“If we share a bed I’m going to lie awake all night out of caution,” Eddie threatens, with a firmness that suggests he’s thought this over already. “But of course I’ll stay. Chris will understand and he’ll be fine at Pepa’s — he wants to be close, but not at the expense of his sleep.”

Buck nods. “When we look for apartments, we can make sure there’s decent soundproofing, or a layout that means his bedroom is away from where she’ll sleep,” he says.

Eddie’s expression softens from guarded to a wariness that is suffused with hope. “You want that?” he checks. “To move in together?”

Buck nods. “Yeah. Yeah… and I… making things more complicated now, tangling what is between us up with figuring things out with Kaitlyn, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Their partnership, comfortable and steady as it has been for so many years, matters more than anything else, and this isn’t the moment to gamble with changing it. “But Eddie, you kissed me. Everything else was because I wanted it, because I didn’t want to let you go. The future I want is one with you.”

Right now it’s overwhelming to look beyond Kaitlyn’s next feed, but if Eddie is staying, if Eddie has the same future in mind, they will figure it out together.

Chapter Text

August

Buck’s not sure what careers involve the skill of coming up with shortlists, but if there are any, they’re strong options for Christopher’s future. He takes to house hunting with enthusiasm and only occasionally has to be reminded to stay on budget.

They go to their first viewing two weeks after Kaitlyn leaves the hospital, and it only takes six viewings before they find a place.

The house is a one story a little further from the fire station than Eddie’s old one, but slightly nearer to Maddie and Chim’s place than Buck’s apartment. It’s on the official school bus route for the school Chris will start when summer break ends, with three bedrooms, and a small fully enclosed back yard.

As move-ins go, it’s simplified by the fact it’s mainly Buck’s stuff they’re filling it with — most of Eddie’s bulky furniture was sold or donated when he moved. Adriana had agreed to box up what Eddie and Chris had left behind in El Paso and ship it to them, calling it fair trade for the fact Eddie had covered the apartment’s rent for long enough that she could now break the lease without incurring fees.

Chris claims the mid-sized of the bedrooms, tucked down the hall between the laundry room and the bathroom, where he’s least likely to be woken by a crying baby or wake her in return.

He and Eddie flip a coin to decide who gets which of the other bedrooms; it’s the only way to break up a deadlock of better light vs size vs storage. In the Buck is still pretty sure Eddie somehow rigged it to make sure Buck got the more generous room, but Eddie’s small room is carefully arranged to make space for a second crib, because he is insistent that Buck gets turns at having nights of undisturbed sleep, even though he’s still on paternity leave while Eddie is back at work.

Buck is expecting to sleep poorly, his first night away from Kaitlyn. But he wakes to the sun warm and mid-morning bright as it beams through the crack in the curtains and follows the sound of low voices through to the kitchen. Eddie is sitting at the kitchen table with Kait in his arms, bottle in hand to feed her as Chris spreads peanut butter on toast for both of them, and Buck realises that of course he’d been able to rest deeply, his subconscious entirely at ease in the knowledge Eddie was watching over their family.

September

Routine comes in fast and Christopher’s return to school brings structure to the surreal and baby centred bubble Buck’s life had become in the weeks after Kait’s birth.

Staying home with his daughter feels different from the times he’d been stuck at home injured, the confines still get to him and there are days he itches to be out there with his team, but there’s no fear that his job and the team aren’t waiting for him (thank you California’s very clear laws about parental job protections) and he’s never more than a day away from Chris or Eddie being home.

Like this afternoon, when Chris clatters in, a second boy unexpectedly beside him.

“I didn’t think you were bringing a friend over,” Buck says, eyebrow raised. Chris knows to make sure Buck and Eddie are informed if he’s making plans with friends, if only so that Buck knows when to expect him and how much to cook for meals.

“Sorry Buck. Jake forgot his house-key, and his mom won’t be back from work until like six, so I said he should hang out here instead of waiting around on his porch for hours. All our friends on this bus route were already off by the time he realised, and we were only a few minutes away from our stop or I’d have texted you a heads up.”

“That’s fine,” Buck says. He’s pretty sure from the boys’ matching slightly embarrassed expressions that this is a genuine mix up, not some scheme to get away with an unapproved hangout. “Will your mom be able to pick you up when she’s done at work, or will you need a ride home?” Eddie’s on an overnight shift and (unlike every anecdote Buck’s been told about babies being soothed by driving around) Kaitlyn won’t sleep at all in her car seat and gets overtired if she’s kept up for more than an hour or so. It’s put severe limits on their ability to make longer journeys or quick turnarounds. Last week Buck had been caught in traffic with her on the way to Bobby’s and resorted to pulling over and just holding her for half an hour so she could nap in his arms before finishing the final few miles of the journey, because it would have been impossible to drive with her wailing in the backseat.

“Uh…”

“If she can’t, he can Uber,” Chris suggests. He’s already had one too many experiences of being the one in the back seat with Kait when she starts to get irritable.

“Right! Yeah, my mom doesn’t mind me using it for emergencies,” Jake says. “She’d be pissed if I made somebody with a new baby give me a ride, and everybody knows about your baby because Chris won’t shut up about her.”

For a second, Buck wonders if Chris has been complaining to his friends about the disruption, but Chris just rolls his eyes and says, “You’re just jealous because I’ve got a sister and your mom won’t even let you have a gerbil.”

October

Being back at the 118 without Eddie feels strange all over again, even though it’s been nearly a full year since they’ve shared a shift.

To finally feel settled in him being back, only to have him not be where he’s expected keeps tripping Buck up, even as he savours being back with his team now his paternity leave is over. Eddie is part of the 118 again, but they’d arranged things so that Buck’s return to work lined up with the start of an academy paramedic training unit. Attending meant Eddie was only working day shifts as they eased into the change of Buck no longer being home with Kait full time and avoid the financial hit of overnight childcare for a while longer.

The paramedic certification means even once Eddie is done with the training, he won’t go back to being Buck’s usual partner at work, but the only other practical solution would have been them taking different shifts and would still mean losing him at work plus giving up time with him at home.

Odd as it is to get back into the routine of doing twenty-fours without Eddie by his side, it’s worth it to come home to him. Every time he walks into the house to find Eddie singing Kaitlyn a quiet lullaby or Chris sitting by her crib to talking through his homework as he completes it because ‘it’s never too soon to start learning what the universe is made of, Buck’, he wonders how he made it so many years going home to an empty apartment. Then remembers that even before Kait, before he’d figured out his sexuality, before it had even occurred to him to look for a future here, he’d already been going to the Diazes nearly as often as not, intertwining his life with Eddie’s in a way he simply hadn’t had the context to think about.

November

The first time Buck had gone out just for fun after Kaitlyn’s birth, it had been hard not to feel like he was doing something wrong, leaving his daughter just for a trivia night. Maddie had insisted; been firm that letting her babysit her niece for the evening would be good for all of them, and, when she’d asked Buck to trust her, he’d known she didn’t mean just with Kait but also with himself.

It’s grown less stressful with practice and with the reminder that his life is full of people who are not only willing but appreciative of the chance to watch his daughter.

So Chris is going to a friend’s after school; Kaitlyn is with Bobby for the afternoon; and Buck is touring the ‘Emergency Service Vehicles Through Time’ temporary exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum, Eddie at his side and uncomplaining when Buck lingers in front of exhibits to note down on his phone things that he wants to read more about later.

Most of the information he’s already familiar with — who doesn’t know that dalmatians were associated with firefighters because they helped calm the horses? And some of the technical stuff like the display of incremental improvements in pump design is excessively dry; vehicle work is one of the better firehouse chores, but Buck’s never been interested in pursuing an engineering specialism. But the stories behind how the vehicles Buck works with every day were developed, details of specific calls that led to firefighters changing their set ups to handle them better in the future, are fascinating.

The advantage of working shifts means they’re there on a weekday, so the exhibit isn’t crowded, but there have been parts where the walkways between displays have been narrow enough that if he were with somebody else Buck might have gone single file. With Eddie, though, he hadn’t hesitated to press on, their shoulders bumping in a pattern that’s familiar from years side by side.

There have been moments at home — lingering looks, shared space, touches more tender than the boyish jostling they’d so often shared — that feel poised on the brink of something, but the brink is where they’ve stay and Buck is quietly certain that Eddie is as nervous as he is that it might just be the tides of domesticity bringing them so close.

Here the closeness feels like a natural extension of the way they’ve always been.

It’s a good afternoon, and though the exhibit is temporary, there’s a small section of the gift shop dedicated to it and Buck’s attention is caught by a shelf of emergency service themed mugs.

“Do you think it would look half-assed if I bought one of each of these and then gave them all out as Christmas presents?” Under normal circumstances giving everyone the same gift would definitely be too impersonal, but he knows Hen would enjoy the ‘Medic - because miracle worker isn’t a job title mug’ and Ravi will roll his eyes but secretly appreciate the one with all the cartoon tools on it because he is the next best after Buck with the chainsaw even if Buck can admit now his teaching methods left something to be desired. “And, oh, hey — we have to get this one for you! Not for Christmas, obviously, but, look at it.”

It’s a simple design, just ‘my truck is cooler than yours’ with a cartoon ladder truck beneath it. Eddie had ended up getting his sister to sell his truck rather than flying back to El Paso to retrieve it and, while the car he’s replaced it with is a much more practical family vehicle, Buck knows there’s a small part of Eddie that misses the flashiness of his truck.

Sure enough, a wry smile curls across Eddie’s face as he reads the slogan, sealing Buck’s decision. It’s been good, having this time to get used to all the changes in his life, have Eddie back as his best friend, but Buck had never stopped wanting more, and the way Eddie is looking at him now, Buck’s certain that whatever had prompted Eddie to kiss him a year ago is still there.

Eddie’s already confessed that he wants to be Buck’s partner, shows his love in a dozen comfortably domestic ways every day, but Eddie had also been burned once before by a relationship too entangled in the obligation to make a family. He’d laid his cards on the table with only one request: that the life they build together be one they both choose.

Watching Eddie glow with contentment over a cheesy mug, Buck knows he wants that life. More importantly, after the last few months, he’s certain he can choose it without ruining their friendship or making things harder for their family.

Leaning forward, he brushes a kiss to the corner of Eddie’s mouth. It’s a quick, chaste thing — he’s not twenty-six anymore and he’s not going to put on a show in a museum gift shop — but when he steps back, Eddie’s cheeks are flushed and he can feel the matching heat in his own. It might be foolish to be flustered by a simple kiss with all that’s already passed between them, but the way Eddie catches his hand entwining their fingers with a grip that feels like taking hold of the rest of their lives, and that more than merits the way Buck’s heart is racing.

December

Buck hasn’t got much in the way of Christmas traditions. As a kid, he’d celebrated with Maddie, but after he’d left home, the holiday had become nothing more than a yearly lull in his travels, a time when so many of the fellow adventurers he’d met on his travels dropped their free-spirited independence to vanish off home for the holiday season while Buck gave vague excuses about Pennsylvania weather for why he’d stay hanging around.

In LA, he’d had people to spend the holiday with, but Buck’s holiday rituals have always been at the whims of the 118 shift pattern. After that first disastrous effort to offer Maddie the joy of their childhood again, he’d dropped the idea of family celebrations and focused on the celebrations he shared with the team, whether that was working the festive shift together or dropping by different people’s Christmas celebrations in shared moments that slotted between family traditions.

It’s different for Eddie and Chris. They have a whole month of festive family traditions — Buck’s been included in most of them over the years, from visiting Santa to making gingerbread houses to working their way through Chris’s ever evolving ranking of Christmas movies — plus the weight of the fact that Christmas was once the time that Christopher got his mother back, one of his most joyful holiday memories tragically entangled with the fact it was also his last Christmas with his mother.

Buck’s been prepared to approach things carefully, he wants Kaitlyn to have family Christmas traditions but without stepping on Christopher’s memories of Shannon and the little things he does to commemorate her, but Chris himself has no such hesitation, throwing himself into planning activities like he’s been waiting his whole life for the chance to be the one creating Christmas magic for something else.

“She’s too little to get it,” Eddie protests, when Christ produces a list of local malls that have Santa visiting experiences (ordered by a combination of their online reviews and if the malls had stores Chris liked) and Buck is inclined to agree. When she’s old enough to actually understand the concept of Santa, he’ll play along to let her have the experience, but he’s not going to hand his baby off to a stranger in a fake beard just for the sake of a picture.

He is, however, inclined to side with Chris about doing elf on the shelf once Kaitlyn is old enough to get it, less for the sake of forcing a tradition but because the way Eddie’s entire face scrunches up at the prospect of ‘pretending an ugly doll surveilling us in our own home, seriously?’ is too funny to resist.

But by Christmas morning there’s a new family picture of them all in Christmas sweaters on the mantle, and a little salt dough handprint ornament hanging from the tree on the back of which Chris has painted a painstakingly neat ‘Kaitlyn’s First Christmas’. Buck’s certain the stack of presents under the tree is bigger than it had been last night, which means Eddie probably snuck more in before coming to bed, and for all Chris’s fits of ‘too cool for this’ teenage attitude he hasn’t outgrown appreciation for the snowmen shaped festive pancakes even if he does make fun of Buck’s rather lopsided effort at a reindeer.

When Buck had first plotted with Athena to arrange the firehouse Christmas so Chris and Eddie could share the day together, he’d never imagined they’d one day be here. But as he watches Kaitlyn toss aside one of the carefully researched sensory development toys Buck had bought her in favour of scrunching up the wrapping paper with a delighted laugh, it all feels worth the wait.

January

The new year brings with it new milestones for Kaitlyn. Most dramatically, weaning and Buck’s growing suspicion that their daughter is going to a picky eater. She’ll try anything, but that’s a small mercy when after the first mouthful or two everything what they’ve tried feeding her ends up not eaten but dribbled down her front or smeared between her hands and then over everything she manages to touch before Buck can wash them for her.

Kait’s paediatrician had been relaxed when Buck had brought her to him, saying there was nothing developmentally keeping her from solid foods and they should just keep trying. Easy to say when he wasn’t the one cleaning every fruit and vegetable Buck can figure out how to puree out of downy baby hair daily and, the few times Kaitlyn had a more spirited reaction, off various kitchen surfaces.

“Honestly, I think she just gets overexcited,” Eddie says, as Buck attempts to coax Kaitlyn’s squirming limbs into a sleep onesie, having been the one to bathe her while Eddie has cleaned up what could be mistaken for the aftermath of a mashed potato tornado. “She reminds me of you, reacting to food.”

“Excuse me? When exactly did I try to shove potato into my ears?”

He can’t see Eddie as he settles Kait into her crib but Buck can hear his eyeroll as he says, “Well, obviously not that part. But you did get spaghetti sauce on your nose the other day.”

“That’s a natural risk of spaghetti.”

“Not if you didn’t slurp it. Anyway, my point was, she reminded me a little of when Bobby makes a new recipe and after a few bites you start trying to reverse engineer the recipe by taste and smell and get so caught up in that you’re distracted from actually eating.”

“Eddie, it was unseasoned mashed potato,” Buck points out. They’ve experimented with lots of things but flavourful or bland doesn’t seem to have any influence on Kaitlyn’s interest in actually eating her food.

“Sure, but it’s all new to her, not just the taste and the process of eating solids, but the colours, the textures, the whole idea of food. Maybe the way she keeps playing with her food instead of eating it isn’t to do with a problem with the eating part. It’s just her way of understanding it first.”

It’s a sensible line of reasoning, delivered with such tenderness in Eddie’s tone, as if their daughter’s efforts to unravel the mystery of mashed potato is something he’s truly proud of, and what can Buck do in response to that but lean in to steal as kiss as he joins Eddie on the bed.

“You know, there’s another six-month milestone we haven’t talked about,” Buck says, as Eddie’s fingers tuck under the hem of his t-shirt. “We’re getting to the stage where Kait will be old enough to start sleeping in her own room.”

Eddie’s nose scrunches as he pulls back from where he’d been about to kiss Buck again.

“Already?” he asks dubiously, and Buck knows how he feels. Kait is so little and helpless still. The thought of her being away from them both while they sleep is unsettling, and the things they’ve both seen on the job provide a worrying list of all the things that could go wrong.

“Six months is when it’s safe to start. It’s probably not practical yet, she’s still feeding at night a few times a week, but when as actually starts eating solids instead of just playing with them she’ll probably start sleeping through the night, so there wouldn’t be so much need to have her in the room with us.”

Eddie shakes his head. “I know she technically could, but… I don’t know that I’m ready to have her away from both of us all night yet. But if you need more nights of undisturbed sleep, she can stay in with me.”

Buck cuts Eddie off with a shake of his head and another kiss.

“I don’t want that,” he says firmly. “I’m just wondering if it’s time to start getting a bedroom ready to be hers.” Their turn taking arrangement of who Kaitlyn stayed with at night has largely fallen by the wayside as they’ve shared each other’s beds more nights than not. “We still have two cribs, we can keep one with us, but it might be nice to have the option.”

They get time to themselves, there are plenty of people willing to babysit for them, but sharing a bedroom with a baby does stymie opportunities for spontaneity.

“Oh.” The ease with which Eddie blushed would never not be an addiction to Buck. “Oh, yeah, we could give her a bedroom, if you’re ready for that. But which room?”

Buck had never known he could feel exasperation so fondly as he does at the furrow in Eddie’s brow as he considers this.

“The smaller one,” Buck says firmly. “Eddie, we’re two grown men, she’s not quite as tall as a baguette.” Buck wants her to have everything she needs, and he plans to do what he can to facilitate her wants, and it fills him with tenderness to see Eddie so visibly thinking the same, but she is a baby. “If Kaitlyn needs more space when she’s older, we can look at swapping rooms or a new lease, but she managed eight months in my womb, we are not giving a baby the master bedroom.”

February

Kaitlyn waves as Buck passes the entryway to the living room, babbling in enthusiastic acknowledgement. He waves back, but is planning on proceeding to the kitchen and leaving her to whatever game Chris is playing with her, except that her voice is followed by Christopher’s sudden, “Oh shit.”

Buck is in the room with them in an instant, looking around for what has caused Chris’s reaction, but there’s nothing obviously wrong. The room looks just as he’d last seen it; Kait is in her walker, bouncing herself enthusiastically on the spot; and Chris sits sprawled in front of her on a cushion, seemingly fine except for his look of alarm.

“What happened?” he asks, and Chris’s expression shifts to one of confusion.

“Didn’t you hear that?”

“I… no?” All Buck had heard was Kaitlyn’s babble, but perhaps in Christopher’s position he’d been nearer to some sound Buck hadn’t picked up on. “What did you hear?”

“Kait,” Chris says, and then, “Listen!”

Buck walks over to them both, dropping to a kneeling position to listen closely, but Kait’s breathing sounds fine, there’s no noises from her walker that might suggest it’s broken, she doesn’t seem gassy or sniffling or in any other physical distress that might make a sound.

“I don’t hear anything,” he says, scooping Kait up anyway out of an abundance of caution.

“That!” Chris says, voice cracking with the force of his exasperation. “Listen to her. She sees you and she starts saying ‘Buh!’,” Chris exclaims. “Like Buck!”

Buck blinks, turning to his daughter who giggles and babbles, and, Chris isn’t entirely wrong, there’s a string of ‘buhbuhbuh’ in there, but tempting though it is to read into that, she’s still far too little for it to be actual words.

She’s also managing ‘dada’ pretty frequently, but they are just combinations of sounds among many, directed equally at her fathers and anything else that catches her interest, including her recent favourite object, the microwave. From the baby development books Buck has read, she might be starting to realise that some sounds generated more of a reaction than others and repeating those more, but it would be another few months before she starts to reliably associate them with meanings.

“It’s nice of you to point it out,” he says. He doesn’t want to miss any more milestones than he has to, even if he knows there’s a risk that some of them will happen while he’s at work and her ‘first’ time rolling over had been suspiciously well executed. “But her real first words probably aren’t gonna be for a couple of months yet. She’s just experimenting with sounds right now.”

Chris’s expression is almost a carbon copy of Eddie’s when somebody brings up the topic of the supernatural or other unexplainable forces at work in the universe. “No, I heard what she said, and she didn’t start saying it until she saw you.”

Buck shifts Kaitlyn in his arms and away from her efforts to blow a raspberry against his neck. “That’s just luck.”

“She said Buck,” Chris insists. “You’re her dad, she shouldn’t call you that. But what if she’s hearing me call dad dad, and she gets confused and thinks it only means him and not you?”

There is a potential for confusion there that they probably need to plan for, Kaitlyn calling Eddie and Buck ‘dad’ could lead to some ambiguities. Since Chris has rightly pointed out that Eddie already holds that title for Chris and it would be confusing for Kait to use something different for him than Chris, Buck will need to come up with some other term of address for himself. But though it’s a puzzle, it hardly merits Chris’s forceful reaction.

“If you’re worried about her language development, watching your cussing would be the most useful habit to work on,” he suggests. She’s a few stages away from being able to replicate the sounds needed to be repeating Chris’s ‘oh shit’, but that didn’t mean her brain wasn’t working on it.

“Buck…” Chris groans, then grimaces in Kaitlyn’s direction, as if he might be corrupting her currently non-existent vocabulary just by using Buck’s name.

“Chris, it’s fine. There are kids who grow up bilingual,” Buck reminds him. “She’ll learn once she’s old enough that I can be ‘Buck’ to other people and ‘dad’ or something else to her, just like all kids do.”

“But she might end up calling you Buck in the meantime,” Chris argues. “And what if the habit sticks?”

“Then it sticks.” Maybe he’s reading too much into the tense set of Chris’s shoulders, and this really is just about Kaitlyn, but, “The label doesn’t matter. I’m not about to start calling Bobby dad—” though Buck had called Bobby ‘pops’ a few times as a probie, mainly as a joke, but maybe that was an option for Kait to use “—but that doesn’t make him any less important to me. If Kait decides she’s more comfortable calling me Buck for the rest of her life, I won’t be mad or love her any less. Calling me by my name doesn’t change anything about our relationship.”

“Are you sure?” Chris asks.

“We’re family,” Buck replies. “That is what matters. Everything else is ours to decide.”

March

Disaster after disaster, Buck knows the people around him have tried to hammer in the notion that he’s not expendable, and he’s known that to be true for a long time. Just the same as he’s always known that no matter what they might feel obligated to say, if there had to be someone on the team to not make it out of a disaster it was better him than anyone with kids at home.

The building they’ve been called to, half swallowed by a sinkhole, has been constructed well enough not to just collapse, but the entire east side is slowly subsiding, and Buck swears he can feel the gradient of the floor getting steeper with each office they clear. The IC isn’t gambling with anyone’s lives, but Buck’s been a firefighter long enough to know how easily a situation like this can deteriorate. Kaitlyn isn’t even a year old, but it would only take one wrong move for her to lose a parent tonight.

As practical as the decision had been to have Eddie qualify as a paramedic, Buck had dreaded the prospect of going into a mess like this and not being able to watch his back because they’re working separately. Now he’s in here, though, there’s an odd reassurance to it — if the building does come down, being separated increases the odds of at least one of them making it home to their kids.

There’s a safety in that, not to take unnecessary risks that would keep him from going home to his family, but to keep the fear from paralysing him. As the rescue drags on (they’re well into overtime now) he might not have Eddie at his side, but he’s intermittently a reassuring voice over the radio reminding Buck of everything he has to come home to.

By the time the all-clear sounds, Buck is dusty and exhausted, filled with the hollow ache that came with a shift he’s unquestionably helped save so many people but the losses are high too. It’s a quiet ride back to the 118, to pile turnouts in the laundry and rinse off the grime of the shift in a hasty shower.

Eddie attempts to swipe the jeep keys from his hand as they make their way across the parking lot. “Let me drive,” he says. “You’ve had a long shift.”

“We both have.” And Eddie hates driving. Not to mention, an incident like that in their call radius means traffic in the vicinity of the 118 will be worsened by diversions.

“You were the one digging people out of that mess,” Eddie protests. “I spent half of the shift on triaging patients who were able to evacuate themselves.”

“You’re not convincing me that’s easy.” Even when Buck was a probie he knew better than to underestimate what went into all the parts of the job that were necessary in support of the big saves. “I’m safe to drive, I promise.”

“Safe, sure, but you’re tired. Buck, I don’t get to have your back on shift anymore, so let me be your partner now.” Eddie wraps both his hands around Buck’s left, where he’s holding the keys. “Please.”

Buck can do it. He’s driven himself home after hard shifts plenty of times before, has always accepted it as just part of the job, but when Eddie strokes a thumb over his hand he releases the grip on the keys and lets Eddie take them.

He can do this on his own if he has to, but he isn’t alone anymore.