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likeshipsonthesea · 2 years

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want

coda fic for 6x07 Cursed a.k.a. the episode where we all heard way too much about buck’s baby batter (blame @somaybeamystery for that one). i had a lot of feelings about that episode and the way they handled it--mostly it being for comic relief--so here’s a more serious, introspective look at buck’s donation arc, and what i hope happened after 6x07

warnings for infertility references and references to the buckleys/daniel

“What’s with the sand?” Buck sweeps a hand toward the light dusting of sand Eddie’s created by taking off his shoes on Buck’s welcome mat.

“Ah, shit, sorry.”

Buck rolls his eyes. “I own a vacuum cleaner, don’t worry.”

Eddie elects to ignore their usual argument over Buck’s stupid-smart vacuum cleaner and answer the question anyway. “I just dropped Chris at Andrew’s house for a sleepover and didn’t have time to change after his surfing lesson.”

“Is Andrew the one with the ridiculous video game set-up?”

Eddie smiles but shakes his head. “No, that’s Ricky. Andrew’s the one with the gerbils.”

“Ricky gerbils, got it.” Buck nods slowly and goes silent, continuing to nod at nothing slower and slower until Eddie’s nearly forgotten why he’s nodding at all. He puts the six pack he brought down on the counter and the sound makes Buck snap his head back up, eyes refocusing on Eddie rather than somewhere in the distance.

Eddie lifts his eyebrows. “You good?”

“Yeah,” Buck says, belated. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

Eddie can tell by the way Buck’s jaw twitches that he’s worrying the inside of his lip. He’s been doing it so often lately that he even refused Eddie’s tomatoes over lunch during their last shift—he didn’t say it, but Eddie knows it’s because he’s broken the skin and the acidity of the tomatoes would sting.

“What do I do about it?” Eddie asked Frank, during their last session.

“What do you want to do about it?” Frank replied, infuriating as always.

“Ask him what’s wrong.” Eddie shook his head. “But if he wanted to talk about it, he would.”

“Then you have to choose,” Frank said sensibly. “Either don’t ask and stop worrying about it until he brings it up, or ask and deal with the consequences.”

Eddie hates when Frank doesn’t give him an easy answer. Not that Frank’s ever given him an easy answer. Honestly, Eddie hates almost everything about therapy, except the getting better part.

Eddie takes a deep breath. “You tell me to shut up, I’ll shut up and we’ll drink and watch the game and I won’t say another word about it,” Eddie says, and almost doesn’t continue when Buck looks at him with his big dumb eyes, so lost Eddie wants to do something stupid like invite him home or kiss his freaking forehead. “But I know there’s something wrong, and if you want to talk about it, I want to listen.”

Buck stares at him for several long seconds. Yeah, Eddie’s surprised with himself, too.

“I, uh.” Buck ducks his chin, looking down at his kitchen counter. He has both hands curled around the edge of it, his fingers spread wide, the skin going stark white with the pressure he puts on them. “I had my donation appointment today.”

Eddie’s face does something drastic at that, but he has an extra second before Buck looks up to school his expression into something neutral and open.

“Oh?” Eddie says, because he’s not sure what else to fucking say and it works well enough for Frank when he’s trying to get Eddie to keep talking.

But Eddie must not have done it right because Buck looks back down at the counter and nods again, just saying, “Yeah. Yeah.”

“So.” Eddie tries to think of the appropriate thing to say when your best friend (and the guy that several therapy sessions would indicate you’re stupidly in love with) tells you he’s donated his sperm to a couple you’ve never met. “So, uh. It’s all done, then?”

Buck’s shoulders tense as he presses even more weight into his hands. Fuck. Eddie probably should’ve just gone with “congrats.”

“It’s not,” Buck says without looking up. Eddie winces. He didn’t know about this whole thing until yesterday, but if he did, he might’ve seen this coming. It would be hard for anyone to father a child and then just not be involved in the kid’s life, let alone Buck, who clings to everything in his life like it’s going to be taken away if he loosens his grip. Eddie’s pretty sure that’s why he eats the way he does—like someone will take away the plate if he doesn’t finish fast enough. Knowing there’s a kid out there with a part of him in them but not being allowed to see them, raise them, love them—Eddie could’ve guessed that would kill Buck.

But it’s not Buck’s kid.

“It is over,” Eddie says as gently as he can manage. “You did your part, and now it’s over.”

“No, I didn’t—” Buck’s jaw clenches and releases. “I rescheduled.”

“Second thoughts?” Eddie asks, trying not to sound hopeful. If he knew the couple, he might feel a pang of sympathy for their situation, but he only cares about Buck, so he can’t manage anything but relief.

Buck shakes his head abruptly and Eddie’s relief fizzles in his chest. “No, no—not—not like that.”

“The moon wasn’t in the right position, then?” Eddie tries for a smile and grins when he gets one, accompanied by a soft huff of laughter and the slight loosening of Buck’s shoulders.

“No.” Buck glances up, smile still playing at his lips. “Not anything like that.”

“Then why reschedule?”

Buck sighs deeply, his shoulders falling further. “When Connor and Camryn asked me, I did all this research.” He gestures aimlessly with one hand as he speaks. “What to eat, how much to exercise, how involved people tend to be, how donor-born people feel about the whole thing. I wanted to do it right, you know?”

Eddie nods, smiling faintly. He’d expect nothing less from Buck.

“Well, uh.” Buck rubs at the back of his neck with his gesturing hand. “One thing they recommended was to abstain from, uh. Giving your own sample. Before the appointment.”

Eddie nods in a totally casual and not incredibly controlled way because he’s a normal friend that’s not going to be weird about his best friend’s ejaculations. Mhmm.

“Well. I was supposed to have my appointment a month ago. But stuff kept getting in the way. The tech fainted, the power went out.” Buck gestures dismissively. “All this stuff.”

“So it’s been a month since…?”

Buck smiles tightly. “Yup.”

“So you’re…”

“Pretty pent-up, yeah.”

“Ah.” Eddie imagines a small box with a lid and puts the thoughts and feelings he has about this information into that box, then puts that box into another box, and repeats that process until he can take a deep breath without wheezing. It’s a neat little trick he learned when he was a kid. He calls it the box method. Frank calls it repression. “So, how does rescheduling help with that?”

Buck doesn’t answer for long enough that Eddie considers just offering to turn on the game, but the little wrinkle between Buck’s eyebrows keeps Eddie from speaking. Finally, he says quietly, “My Jeep broke down on the way to the appointment. Between the pressure of doing it for Connor and Camryn and the whole thing at the station yesterday, and the frustration of saving up for so long, I just. Wanted to get it over with. So I ran. I ran through the streets, almost knocking people over, got there with four minutes to spare, and the nurse gave me a cup and a magazine and left me alone in the room and I just.”

Buck screws his mouth to the side.

“I was sitting there. Sweaty, breathing hard, looking at this cup. And it just—didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel—I wasn’t—I forgot. With all the secrecy and special diets and whatever, I forgot why I was doing it in the first place.”

“Why are you doing it?” If Eddie were Frank, he wouldn’t have asked. But Eddie’s not an impartial party, he’s half in love with his best friend and he has no fucking clue why he’s agreed to this whole thing, and he just really wants to know.

The tension in Buck’s face releases slowly until he’s got a faint smile sitting on his lips, eyes firmly on his kitchen counter. “It’s awkward, unbelievably awkward, to ask someone for their sperm. The whole thing—wine and dining me, explaining to someone you haven’t seen in years this seriously intimate thing, talking about sperm count and donation appointments. Most people, you get pregnant, it’s easy. No awkward conversations, no third parties. This whole thing is awkward and stressful and takes five times as much work.” Buck looks up, meeting Eddie’s eyes. “Even if I wasn’t sure they’d be awesome parents, and even though I don’t know if I’m going to deal with the whole “having a kid without being a parent” thing well, I’d still do it. Because I know without a doubt that they want this kid more than anything in the world, and this kid is going to grow up knowing that.”

Just like that, Eddie gets it. This is probably the furthest thing you can get from having a kid for spare parts. That comprehension must be evident in his face because Buck looks away again. Clears his throat.

“I know it’s dumb,” he says, self-deprecating and minimizing, and Eddie could just shake him and yell you matter, you asshole, but he doesn’t. He thinks Frank would be proud, though, both for having the thought and restraining himself. “But I was sitting there in that room and I knew that if I donated in that moment, it wouldn’t be because I wanted this kid for Connor and Camryn, it would be because I was frustrated and stressed. So I rescheduled.” Buck worries at the inside of his lip for a long moment before adding, “Every part of this kid’s existence should be because they’re wanted.”

Eddie loves him. It surges in him at random moments, overwhelming and sweet. It’s happened more and more often since he’s been working with Frank. He’s never said it aloud, but he thinks dealing with all his other shit has left more room in him for love. Different flavors of it—pride and joy when Christopher talks about his newest science project, contentment and warmth when he’s squished between Hen and Chim on the firehouse couch, delight and surprise when he listens to his dad’s misadventures in retirement. Buck’s somehow all of those flavors in one bite, bursting across Eddie’s tongue like a well-executed recipe.

“I didn’t think I could feel like that anymore,” Eddie told Frank once, stilted and embarrassed and probably too honest, but pleased anyway.

Sometimes it hurts. Hurts with how big it feels, hurts with how much it is, hurts because this person he loves so much it’s stupid doesn’t see how much he’s loved—or how he should be loved. All the shit Buck’s been through with his parents and his near-deaths and his unlucky love life and he’s still so fucking kind. Reckless and impulsive and self-destructive to the point that he blows up everything within the blast radius, sure. But still so unrelentingly kind.

“It’s not dumb,” Eddie finally manages to say through all the cresting emotions in his chest. Buck looks at him, surprised, wide-eyed. “I don’t think it’s dumb at all.”

Buck cracks a smile, the one Christopher pilfered from him, the one Eddie gets when he relents to “five more minutes” of video games. A smile of victory and surprise. A smile of gratitude.

“Thanks, Eddie.”

Too honest, Eddie says, “Anytime.”

Eddie only lets Christopher have another five minutes half of the time he asks for it, but Buck? Eddie would choose that smile on Buck’s face over almost anything else.