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Buck is feeling very nervous. It’s not unusual in and of itself, he had anxiety before he came out of the womb, but today is different. He is sitting in the driver’s seat of his truck, parked right next to the very familiar driveway. He has a small light blue gift bag in his lap. His fingers are quietly messing with the bag’s handles, and his right foot is tapping an unfamiliar beat into the floor. He has been sitting here for a very long time now. Upside: he gets to see the sunset now. Downside: his ass is sore from the lack of movement and his brain is taking every opportunity to overthink what he is doing to high hell.
He is not catastrophizing. He is being very rational and trying to think ahead. He spent a long time preparing for today, from the formation of the idea three weeks ago to shopping for materials on his day off, to sneaking around the station with the supplies to work on his gift between calls. Hen has been giving him The Look for at least the last three shifts. She had looked ready to ask him about it the last time he saw her yesterday, but he had been blessed with the call dropping on them right that second. He didn’t even mind the overtime.
Buck is feeling very nervous. So nervous, in fact, that he doesn’t notice another presence outside his car until someone is knocking on his window. Well, shit.
“Hey, kid. I absolutely do not mind you sleeping on my front lawn, but if you’d rather come in and use the perfectly comfortable guest bed that we already set up for you, I think your back would be happier.”
Bobby sounds amused. He has that glint in his eyes that tells Buck he spotted the truck at least an hour ago and has been waiting for Buck to finally come in. Buck’s fingers immediately stop messing with the handles and he rushes to open the car door.
“Hey, Pops. I was just in the neighbourhood, and thought I would stop by. You know how it goes.”
Bobby tilts his head to the side, and his eyebrows slowly gain altitude. He makes a show of looking at his watch and at the indisputably beautiful sunset down the street. Buck can feel his back sticking to the car seat with sweat.
This was a bad idea. He should have stayed at home, and pretended the thoughts and ideas did not bother him, and that he didn’t imagine a perfect scenario of how this would go at least seven million times in the last three weeks. Bobby tilts his head further, and Buck can feel the blush rising from under his shirt to the very tips of his ears.
“As I said, the guest bed is all made up and ready for you. I just started with the risotto if you’re feeling like giving me a hand.”
Bobby pointedly puts his hand on the frame of the car door, telling Buck that running is no longer an option. Buck swallows, clears his throat. Swallows again.
His hand grips the handles of the light blue gift bag in his lap. He spent at least fifteen minutes agonizing over the color of the bag while at the store. Yellow seemed like an obvious choice, it’s warm and it’s hard not to smile when looking at it. But something was off. Then he looked at the classic black and white. That felt too formal and not personal enough. Green reminded him of Christmas, pure white was bland and boring, pink felt too much like a joke, even though he knew that Bobby would never judge him for loving the perfect baby pink shade.
He looked at the bags with patterns, bags with glitter, bags that said “Happy Birthday!” and “It’s a boy!” on them. He considered giving up and bringing his gift wrapped in parchment paper as an ode to all the baking lessons Bobby has given him over the years. Then he saw the most perfect light blue shade, in a perfect size. Something about it spoke to him. The color of the summer sky in the early morning, reminding him of all those conversations he shared with Bobby during slow shifts when neither of them could sleep. The deep and the meaningless, ranting about drivers in LA that have never heard of driver’s ed or talking about being raised by parents who probably should never have had children. Buck bought the bag before he could talk himself out of it again.
He feels the top of the bag crumple under his iron grip now that he is slowly exiting the car. He knows that there is no way on Earth this will go wrong, Bobby would never do that to him, but something inside his brain still screams for him to abort the mission and pretend that he really was just in the neighborhood. Buck feels Bobby’s hand land on his shoulder as it leaves its place on the car door and it grounds him almost immediately.
This is Bobby. This is his captain, and his mentor, and his closest friend. There is no reason to worry, because it’s just Bobby, and Bobby will love him no matter what. He exhales.
“Thanks for the invitation, I think I’ll take you up on that.” He swallows, steps from one foot to the other. Forces himself to meet Bobby’s eyes. “Hey, uh. This is… This is for you.”
He feels his heart drop out of his pant leg as he extends the bag forward into Bobby’s arms. Bobby, for his part, looks completely unbothered. He makes a small curious noise and raises the bag all the way up to his face, as if trying to sniff what is inside of it. Buck can’t help but giggle, and Bobby gives him a look over the top of the bag, telling him that this was the goal all along.
“Thank you. You know I don’t need a bribe to allow you to perform free labor in my kitchen, right?” Bobby’s tone is joking, but his face is that same face he gives Buck whenever he says something a little too self-deprecating. Like he knows that Buck is too deep inside his head again and may need a rescue operation. He lowers the bag back down, and wraps his other arm around Buck’s shoulders. “You can help me pick the wine for the risotto while I check this out.”
The house is warm and smells vaguely of old books and brown butter. Buck takes a second to take it in, to take a deep breath and finally unclench his jaw. This is a safe space. It’s going to be okay.
They slowly proceed to the kitchen, and Bobby presses the pause button on his small kitchen speaker to restart the music. It’s something soothing, with a lot of piano and a soft female voice crooning about time long gone. Buck immediately goes to wash his hands before assessing the vegetables laid out before him. He just finishes peeling off the first carrot when he hears the tell-tale crinkle of the gift bag being open. He swallows again.
“‘To the best dad, with love.’” Bobby sounds confused but entertained as he opens the card.
Buck can’t stop fidgeting with the vegetable peeler. He knows exactly what is written in that card. He agonized over the words even longer than he agonized over the gift that would go along with them, spent countless hours going through every sentence he could think of to express how much Bobby means to him and how much he is appreciated, discarding one option after the other because it never felt like enough. It felt like the English language did not have enough words to say what Buck wanted to say. Just saying “Thank you, I love you” felt stupid and incomplete, but the more he tried to elaborate the more he scared himself. What if he overshares again? What if his vulnerability is not reciprocated? What if Bobby doesn’t feel even a fraction of what Buck feels every day? It would make for a very awkward dinner.
He settled on making a rough draft with everything he wanted to say, and pulling out the best parts for the actual card. It took him a few tries, but he finally felt like he got it down. He managed to fit everything into four neat paragraphs, dedicating each one to a separate thank you that he wanted to tell Bobby. Thank you for giving me a chance. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for understanding me. Thank you for loving me despite and because of everything I am. His hands shook as he signed the card with “I love you, Cap. -Your resident stray kitten, Buck.”
Now that he can see Bobby reading the card in real time, he has a lot of regrets. He should’ve mailed it instead of bringing it in person. He should’ve chosen a different card. He should’ve never written it in the first place because all of this was one huge mistake and their relationship will never recover. He pays close attention to Bobby’s face, but the man is completely unreadable at this point. He doesn’t look angry or upset, and Buck counts that as a win, but beyond that he has no idea what is going through Bobby’s head.
Bobby silently closes the card and puts it on the counter in front of him. Buck feels like he stopped breathing about ten minutes ago. He helplessly watches as Bobby pulls out the rest of the gift out of the bag.
It’s a small, light purple crocheted octopus with blue and pink tentacles. It has huge black plastic eyes and a stitched-on smile. It’s wearing a small brown bucket hat that Buck saw in the pet section of the store and could not walk past. The octopus looks very much like a hand-made project from a toddler, and Buck feels like he is ready to cry.
“Did you learn how to crochet without telling me?” Bobby’s voice is light and kind, no judgement in sight, but Buck still feels like he’s been put under a microscope.
“Uh.” Great. He lost his ability to speak too. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
He puts the vegetable peeler down and takes a step towards Bobby, still paying close attention to his frustratingly neutral, hard to read face.
“I saw a pattern online when looking into the history of fiber arts and it seemed like something you would like, but I didn’t want to buy it because everyone can do that.” He lowers his eyes and forces himself to take a deep breath. “I wanted it to be personal. You… You mean a lot to me, and I thought I could show you that by learning something new for you. I know it doesn’t look all that gre-”
His speech is interrupted by Bobby closing the distance between them and pulling him into his chest. Oh. Oh. Maybe it was okay, after all.
Bobby squeezes him like there is no tomorrow, and Buck can swear he feels a small kiss being placed on his forehead. Oh.
His arms finally catch up with his brain, and he rushes to squeeze Bobby right back. The desire to cry is back, but now it’s not out of desperation but out of sheer relief that hits his entire body like the tsunami all those years ago. Bobby understood. Bobby once again looked at Buck and saw exactly what Buck was trying to say, without Buck having to step on his own throat and spell it out. Bobby understood him, and he accepted him too. Oh.
“I love you too, kid. You don’t have to thank me for that. You’re so easy to love. Even when you drive me up the wall with all the stupid stunts you pull, it’s really hard to be mad at you for long.” Bobby squeezes him one last time, before putting a hand back on his shoulder and gently pushing him away to look him in the eyes. His expression is still neutral, but the tearful shine in his eyes gives him away. “I need you to get it, Buck. Loving you is the easiest thing in the world. I’m here for you, for as long as God has given me. Okay?”
Buck breaks the eye contact and pushes his face back into the crook of Bobby’s neck.
“Yeah.” He exhales once again. “Yeah, okay.”