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trippedandfell · 2 years

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#100 "it's always been you" kisses because damn if that aint buddiecore.... (please!)

today, yesterday, everyday, and tomorrow night

buddie | 3.6k | ao3 | enjoy some odd, vaguely explained magical realism/parallel universe... stuff.

Eddie wakes up in a cold sweat.

There’s a journal on his bedside table, a glass of water carefully perched on top. He picks up both, downs half the glass in one go.

Then, as the sun begins to creep up above the horizon, he begins to write.

This is what Eddie knows -

There are over 420,000 parallel universes that exist alongside Earth, bumping together like beads on a hand-strung necklace. For most people, they exist only in passing - a sentence at the end of a museum plaque, a throwaway line by a reporter on a slow news day. It’s the kind of information that gets taught near the sticky-hot end of the school year, kids fidgeting out of their chairs, the teacher plodding through a chapter that’s been forced to be included in the curriculum.

This is what Eddie knows -

He’s not like most people.

Hasn’t been, really, since he sat down at the kitchen table opposite his Abuela in the middle of June, twelve years old and still shaking from adrenaline as he recounted a dream that had been real, too real, right down to the hot warmth of the sun on his neck and the salty tang of the ocean. It had been almost a relief when she had taken his hand and explained it slowly, those who walked between worlds as they slept in hopes of discovering hidden truths. A gift, she called it, smile soft and understanding. A way to teach us what’s important.

Eddie learns about the night his Abeula awoke under a sky of different stars and met an old man who told her the exact nature of the injury that had been plaguing her hip, the time his Dad met a man in the middle of a brilliant purple ocean who showed him the path to his chosen career. When he gets older, he has his own stories to share - the young girl he met that showed him how to throw a fastball, the winding village road he followed back to his Abuelo’s childhood home. He and his sisters swap stories at the dinner table, tales of the not-quite right worlds they visit when they close their eyes, comparing notes on the different ways the ground felt beneath their feet, the unique tint of the sky.

The dreams don’t come every night, or even every week - they’re random, striking like a summer thunderstorm, a collection of short bursts that leave just as quickly as they came. Only when it’s truly important, his Abuela tells him, and Eddie realizes just how true that is when he spends three weeks trying to decipher why he keeps hearing a child laugh ecstatically while he sleeps, only to wake up one day to Shannon shaking his shoulder, a pregnancy test clutched tight in one hand.

He doesn’t dream when he’s overseas, although whether that’s from sheer exhaustion or something else, he can’t quite tell. It’s not until the helicopter goes down in a sea of flames that they start anew, more intense than ever - a woman on the street shouting at him to make a change, the faint sound of a siren following him as he treks around a world with two moons.

Eddie follows the dreams to LA, where they shudder again to a stop.

That is, he supposes, until now.

Buck’s already got coffee waiting when Eddie staggers into the kitchen, taking a grateful gulp before collapsing into the nearest chair.

“Somewhere tropical this time,” he says, in lieu of a greeting, fingers drumming idly on the tabletop. “South America, I think. Lots of beaches.”

He slides the leather-bound notebook across the table, already bookmarked to the latest entry, the messy memories he managed to scrawl down the night before. Buck’s silent as he reads, throat bobbing as he finishes his own coffee, topped with so much milk that it’s nearly the colour of snow.

“This is the third one that’s had blue sand,” he says finally, flipping to the back of the book, the series of hastily-drawn charts and diagrams littered across the pages. “Do you think that has something to do with it?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie moans, slumping down to press his forehead against the cool wood. “It’s never been this hard before.”

He can’t see Buck’s face from this angle, but he can picture it - eyebrows drawn together, bottom lip caught between his teeth. It’s the face he’s been wearing ever since Eddie sat him down last month and poured his secrets out in a rush - the dreams, the travelling, the way that he hasn’t been able to sleep through the night since Hen and Karen’s vow renewal, his consciousness on a hunt for something that he can’t quite find. They’d called his Abuela together later that day, who had been concerned but not ultimately helpful, reminding him that sometimes these things take time, that he just needs to find the underlying message and they’ll stop.

“Mijo,” she had said finally, after Buck left to go pick up Chris, squeezing Eddie’s shoulder as he went, “are you sure it’s not-”

“No,” Eddie said flatly, and that had been the end of that.

Because it’s not Buck causing the dreams, he’s sure of it. Buck appears in the dreams, more often than not, but he’s never - he’s not there to send a message, or to reveal some hidden truth. The vast majority of the worlds Eddie travels to are remarkably similar to his own, so it’s no surprise that nine times out of ten Buck is there, normally with some other members of the 118, or even Eddie’s family. He’s just there as part of the fabric of Eddie’s life - a familiarity. A welcome committee, wherever he goes.

Whatever his mind is trying to tell him, it isn’t about Buck. Which leaves him here, sitting at the kitchen table long before Chris makes it out of bed, dissecting every moment of last night in hopes that he’ll finally stumble across the right answer and finally be able to get some goddamn rest.

“Okay,” Buck says now, tapping a pencil against the lined page, one, two, three. “Maybe it has to do with the water. You didn’t speak to anyone?”

Eddie wrinkles his nose, trying his best to remember. “I lived with you and Chimney,” he says, thinking of the strange room he woke up in, mattress hard against the floor. “We were - surfers, I think. Hen ran the coffee shop downstairs?”

“But no strangers?” Buck presses. “No one on the beach? Did you have a phone?”

“I did,” Eddie allows. It’s always easier in the worlds with phones - he can see who he’s in contact with, search the internet to discover where, exactly, he is. On the days when he wakes up without Chris, he’s always tempted to search his name, see what he finds, but can never quite find the strength to. If he’s honest, he’s scared he might stumble across something he never wants to see - that Chris is gone, or, even worse, that he never existed at all. “I texted - um. I wrote it down. My mom, and -”

“Adriana,” Buck says, squinting at the page. “I think. Your handwriting is awful, dude.”

Eddie kicks him under the table, laughing as Buck squirms away. “You try writing in the dark and see how well it turns out.”

That sets Buck off on some rant about different handwriting styles, and the cultural variations of each - Eddie’s too tired to fully comprehend it, if he’s honest, but he’s more than content to listen, let Buck’s words wash over him as he rambles. It’s far better than dissecting every single moment of Eddie’s night, as much as he knows Buck wants to.

Because Buck - Buck is worried. Eddie knows it, even if Buck won’t tell him outright - can see it in the clench of his jaw, the way the coffee mugs he slides to Eddie across the table keep growing in size. Eddie wants to hold him and tell him to stop, tell him that he’s alright, but at this point, he’s not quite sure if he believes it himself.

He’s at the edge of the precipice. And to be quite honest, he doesn’t think he has much longer until he falls.

It’s not until he starts travelling when he naps that it truly becomes a problem.

He’s been using naps as a bridge to survival the past six (or is it seven? He’s lost track) weeks, curling up against Buck’s side at the station and dozing off whenever he can. It’s been working pretty well for him, up until the day that he falls asleep in the bunkroom and wakes up in an unfamiliar house, stretched out in a king-sized bed.

“Motherfucker,” he curses, pulling himself upright before going through his checklist - phone, window, photos. Thankfully, the device on the bedside table looks remarkably similar to his iPhone at home, so he opens it up, swipes through it - Buck’s at the top of his contact list, same with Ravi and Hen. There’s no Chimney or Bobby this time, but there is a picture of Chris as his wallpaper, so - that’ll do. He can work with that.

The window is next, peeking out into a residential street, houses boring and beige and otherwise unremarkable. There’s a full moon high in the sky above, and Eddie’s about to check the formation of the stars when something darts across the street, disappearing into the shadows as quickly as it emerged.

It takes Eddie a minute to place it, but when he does, he has to bite back another curse. He turns to the pictures on the nightside table, and - yep. There’s a group of them sitting in a field, arms slung around each other’s shoulders and faces decidedly wolfy.

Buck’s probably going to get a kick out of this one. He loves the supernatural dreams.

Now that Eddie’s fully awake, he can feel his senses kick into full gear - the sound of Chris’s heartbeat down the hall, the faint honk of a horn from five streets over. There’s a scuffling downstairs, and he almost jumps before his brain catches up - Buck.

The house is old, floorboards warped with age, so Eddie doesn’t even bother to be quiet as he makes it down the steps, following the sound of Buck singing in the kitchen. He smiles when he sees Eddie, canines long and poking over his bottom teeth.

“Morning,” he says, sliding a plate of waffles across the table. “You’re up early.”

“Mm.” Eddie busies himself with eating so he doesn’t have to respond. This is always the hardest part of these dreams - figuring out what this world’s Eddie is like, slipping into another person’s shoes for a day. His Abuela has told him time and time again that he won’t actually affect this Eddie, that the day will reset once he’s gone and no one will have any memory of it except himself, but it still feels - weird. “You sleep okay?”

Buck snorts. “I never sleep on a full moon.” His eyebrows narrow, just the slightest. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m -” Eddie’s about to say fine when there’s a tug low in his gut, something he hasn’t felt before. “Uh,” he tries again, before he doubles over in pain, Buck racing over to his side before he can react, hands braced against Eddie’s chest.

“What’s going on?” He demands, voice tense - scared. “Talk to me.”

Eddie tries to, he really does, but then the world around him blurs and he comes to on the floor of the bunkroom, back drenched with sweat and Buck - his Buck - standing over him worriedly.

“You weren’t answering,” he says, and his voice is rough, as if he’s been yelling. “Was that-”

There’s still a sharp ache in Eddie’s gut, but it’s fading rapidly. “Yeah,” he says, because there’s no point in lying, not when it’s Buck. He takes a deep breath, digs his fingernails into the palms of his hands. “I, uh. Think it might be time to talk to someone.”

Dr. Richardson is kind, competent, and very, very experienced, according to her impressive website. None of that explains why her eyebrows furrow when Eddie describes his situation, Buck a stony soldier to his right, clutching the notebook they’ve brought along.

“The dreams aren’t supposed to hurt,” she says finally, leaning back in her seat. Outside the window, Eddie can hear the loud sound of a car alarm - he supposes, with people like him being so rare, that being in this industry isn’t exactly lucrative. Not unless you’re shilling fake dreams for people, like some of the weirdos Buck found online in his research. “They’re supposed to just - nudge. Help. Definitely not last this long.”

“So is there a way to stop it?” Buck asks, and his face is a little tense, gaunt. Neither of them have been sleeping well ever since the incident at the station, scared of what will happen if they do. “Like, do you have medicine or something that can help?”

“We can try a few things,” Dr. Richardson allows, although she doesn’t sound particularly hopeful. Eddie’s heart sinks somewhere deep in his stomach. “But dreams - especially travelling through dreams - are fickle. Unpredictable. It’s like the universe, wherever it is, has something it desperately wants you to know. Something you’re avoiding, or refusing to admit.”

“But I don’t have anything like that,” Eddie says frustratedly, refusing the urge to tug on his hair. “I mean - my biggest thing to work through was coming out, and I took care of that before this all started. Everyone in my life knows.”

“Coming out is a good example, but - not quite.” Dr. Richardson taps her pen on the corner of her page. “Some studies - fringe theories, really - say that what we learn in our dreams is the opposite of what happens when you’re awake. Not the lesson we learn, but - the feeling. If you discover something in a terrifying dream, it might end up being a really funny moment in real life. Same with sad dreams - happy moments, when you’re awake.”

“So what does that mean for Eddie?” Buck is too big for the chair, limbs squished and contorted. Any other time, Eddie would laugh, but right now he’s just - tired.

Dr. Richardson smiles at that, the faintest thing. “That maybe whatever the universe is trying to tell you, it’s really, really good.”

Eddie goes home.

Eddie dreams.

Eddie dreams about skydiving, about floating in a bubble above the Earth. Dreams about being a firefighter in Boston, or teaching overseas. Dreams about living in a mansion on a lake, camping in a tent during a pink-hued fall.

In all his dreams, Buck is there. In all his dreams, he’s awoken too early by a stabbing pain - sometimes in his stomach, sometimes elsewhere.

“This is just - bullshit,” Buck finally says one morning, when Eddie comes limping out of his bedroom with a fading ache in his leg. “This shouldn’t - this is supposed to be a good thing.”

He looks so indignant, so furious, that Eddie just wants to give him a hug. He settles for linking their ankles under the table instead.

“It normally is,” he says, soothing. “We just need to figure this out. We’re close.”

And they are close, he thinks. They’re circling in on a few themes, scrawled in the back of Eddie’s notebook: Family. Togetherness. Relaxing. Vague ideas that might lead to something, anything.

He’s taken to speaking ideas out loud, when he wakes up in unfamiliar places. I want more children. There is a promotion in my future. I’m taking a vacation soon. They all feel vaguely wrong, like ash on his lips the second he says them. But he just - can’t. Can’t figure out what else it might be.

The dream journal’s getting beat up by how much use he’s getting out of it, edges warped and pages bent. It’s instinct, at this point, for Eddie to reach for it when he wakes up yet again in a cold sweat, the clock on the wall informing him cheerily that it’s just past three in the morning.

Normally, after the dreams, he’s able to go back to sleep, catch a few hours of normal rest, but tonight he just feels - wired. Jittery. After nearly an hour of tossing and turning, he gives up altogether and flips through the notebook, turning on the nightside lamp as he goes. There’s just - there’s got to be something.

Reading the book front-to-back doesn’t unlock any new secrets, so he settles instead for tallying words on the back of an old receipt, counting the total number of times they appear. Blue appears forty-eight. Father appears fifty. Family appears sixty-five. And Buck - Eddie scrubs at his eyes, just to make sure he’s not reading it wrong - Buck appears seventy-two times.

The last time Eddie got a dreamless sleep was seventy-three nights ago.

He forces himself to check his math, to try again, but the result is the same, Buck’s name leaping off of every page. More words appear, too - Cooking. Kitchen. Firefighting. Chris. Peace. He tallies them all, then stares down at the back of the page, hands shaking.

Because he’s just - on the back of a CVS receipt, of all places - he’s just holding a list of precious phrases that make up Buck. They’ve been searching all this time for one word, or one thing, but it’s been everything - every aspect of his dreams, from the beach in South America to Buck making him breakfast - is about him. He had been so sure, so certain that Buck wasn’t there in every dream, that it couldn’t possibly be the lesson he was trying to be taught, but now, looking at the pages - even if Buck wasn’t physically there, Eddie always texted him, or called. There was always at least one picture on the nightside table, a number in his phone.

God. Eddie’s mind has been a shrine to Buck for nearly three months now, and he hadn’t even noticed.

“I’m in love with Buck,” he says, aloud to his empty room. Nothing shakes, nothing moves, but he somehow feels more - at peace, regardless. “I’m in love with Buck,” he repeats, and then, before he can help himself, he’s on his feet, making his way over to the couch where Buck’s dozing restlessly.

“Eddie?” He murmurs, and then he’s jolting awake, reaching out to grab his sides. “Are you okay? Did something happen?”

“I’m fine,” Eddie promises, and he knows he’s smiling like a fool, but he can’t quite bring himself to care. “I just - I figured it out. I know what the dreams are trying to tell me.”

Buck’s alert now, his body a tense line next to Eddie’s own. “Really?” He murmurs, and then, without warning, pulls Eddie into his chest. “God, I was so fucking worried,” he gasps, hands fisting the back of Eddie’s shirt. “I just - what is it? Are you allowed to tell me?”

Eddie takes a deep breath. He should be nervous, should be terrified - this is, if the intensity of his dreams were any indication, probably the biggest realization he’s ever uncovered. But it’s also - it’s just Buck. Who showed up with a pile of research before Eddie even had a chance to think, who lets him steal sips of his too-sweet coffee at work. Buck, who takes Chris to the zoo nearly every weekend and has his own collection of mugs in the cupboard under the sink.

“I’m in love with you.”

Buck reels back as if he’s been hit. “You - what?”

“I’m in love with you,” Eddie repeats, tugging Buck’s hand into his lap, twisting their fingers together. “And,” he adds, when he can see a protest forming on the tip of Buck’s tongue, “this isn’t another guess, or something I’m unsure about. I know it. This is what the dreams have been trying to tell me.”

“Your dream curse almost killed you to get you to confess your feelings,” Buck says, somewhat in disbelief. He stares at their entwined hands as if he can’t quite believe it himself. “I just - wow. Holy shit.”

“I know it’s a lot,” Eddie says apologetically, looking out the window, where the sun is barely peeking above the horizon. “And you don’t have to say it back today, or ever, really. I just - needed to tell you.”

Buck scoots closer, just enough so that their knees brush. It sends a tingle of something up Eddie’s spine, an undeniable sense of rightness flowing through his entire body.

“It is a lot,” he confesses, voice low. “But it’s not - God. I love you. I’ve wanted you for ages. You had to have noticed.”

Eddie gestures to his general everything, biting his lip to hide his smile. “I’m pretty oblivious, apparently.”

It feels silly now, in hindsight, that it could have been anything but Buck. He probably owes his Abuela an apology.

“I want to kiss you,” he blurts out, inelegant and simple. If pressed, he’ll blame it on the lack of sleep. “I mean,” he pauses, clears his throat. “Can I kiss you?”

Buck doesn’t answer with words.

Instead, he cradles Eddie’s face in both hands, like he’s something precious, something breakable, and leans in. It’s hardly a kiss, hardly anything at all, but Eddie swears his chest cracks right open in that moment, his heart barren for all to see as he kisses Buck again, and again, and again.

(And again.)

Eddie goes to bed with Buck in his arms that night.

It’s the best sleep he’s ever had.