black ink (perfect vows)

Like most things, this is for @bieddiediaz​ <3 also @bedhadakdiaz because we talked about this and I combined both headcanons into this monstrosity dajsklj. The AO3 version has an embedded image so I recommend reading it there!

[AO3 Link]

Word Count: 3632 words

Their wedding was perfect.

Eddie knows how that sounds. Everyone thinks their wedding to the love of their life is…well, perfect. Just for getting tobewith the man he loves most in the world, celebrating it with his son and the other people he holds close, Eddie thinks it ranks pretty far up there on the scale of perfect moments.

But what he knows for sure, is that everything outside of Buck and Christopher’s presence didn’t just getto be perfect on its own.

They had issues with just about everything, from the venue to the flowers to the centerpieces to the seating arrangements and an appearance from Clipboard Buck didn’t exactlyfixmatters.

(And Eddie won’t ever admit this out loud, but Clipboard Buck is one of his favorite versions of his husband. There’s something about how bossy Buck gets the minute he gets a clipboard that’s always gotten under Eddie’s skin.) 

Maybe it was their fault for getting married within six months of dating, and booking all the venues last minute, but there had been a checklist of things to do, and none of them had come to fruition. At the end of the day, they chose to have a quick ceremony in the fire station parking lot before a small reception in Tía Pepa’s backyard. There were no fancy centerpieces that cost more than the furniture in their home, no flowers that would make Buck and Christopher sneeze, and no frills to make their pockets hurt.

Eddie doesn’t think it could’ve gotten better than that.

But it does, because one night, a week after the wedding, Eddie stumbles across a crumpled sheet of paper shoved into the kitchen writing desk. 

Or rather,multiplesheets of paper.

He furrows his brow as he presses the papers flat against the table, trying to smooth out the wrinkles as best as he can before looking over the words.

And then he freezes.

Because some of these words might be familiar, but the handwriting is more familiar to Eddie than his own —  scrawled across the calendar haphazardly hung outside, printed across erratic Post-Its on the fridge, scribbled in the corners of random notepads. Some of Eddie’s books have this same handwriting annotating it, absent thoughts written in the margins.

One of his most prized possessions is his favorite book annotated just for him in this same handwriting.

It’s Buck’s, clear as day. He’d obviously hidden the crumpled pieces of paper in the drawer so Eddie didn’t see them when he took the trash out, but must’ve forgotten to toss them out later. 

They’re his vows.

They’re not the final ones — not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe two or three sentences, Eddie knows none of these words were in the vows that he and Buck had exchanged privately, after their first kiss as husbands and not where everyone could see them.

Bobby had let them take a moment in the bunk room, where Eddie had wasted no time pressing all of his words and vows and promises into Buck’s face in between deep kisses, made better with the press of their wedding rings on each other’s skin. 

Buck’s vows had left Eddie a mess, of tears and snot and love and affection that couldn’t be contained in the little band that now decorated Buck’s finger. So instead, he’d elected to play one of the songs that reminded him of Buck without fail, and they’d slow-danced to other people’s words in lieu of their own, under the gross light of the bunk room.

Buck had never looked more beautiful to Eddie than he had during that moment. Standing tall in his crisp suit, a wide smile on his face, the dimple that Eddie had spent countless hours tracing, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes — Eddie doesn’t remember a time where Buck had looked happier, doesn’t remember a time where he’d felt happier.

But here, where he can see crosses and scribbles where Buck’s tried to draft out his vows, Eddie can almost see it in his head — Buck sneaking out of bed, shutting the door to the kitchen to scribble these down where no one could see him, then shoving them in the drawer away from everyone’s view.

Eddie wonders when Buck decided that drafted vows just weren’t going to cut it.

As he traces the crazy loops and the sharp edges of the letters in his husband’s handwriting, an idea begins to form his mind, and Eddie smiles to himself.

—

Buck usually never knows whathis husband’s up to, but he always knows whenhe’s up to something.

Eddie’s been skittish over a few days, but not in a way that would make him pull away from Buck. If anything, he’s never been closer, with an arm slung around Buck at all times, with his palm pressing into its spot over Buck’s heart, his legs tangled with Buck’s own until they’re little more than a pile of limbs.

But there’s something shifty about the way he’s a little quieter, his fingers absently crossing over his side to brush over his own ribs while he’s lost in thought.

Given that Buck’s usually stuck to him like glue at work, and that he sees Eddie shirtless on the regular, he knows it’s not an injury.

But there’s something that Eddie’s contemplating, quiet as he mulls over something that he’s not sharing and it makes Buck just that little bit more nervous.

“What is it?” he tries asking one day, covering Eddie’s side with his own palm. “What are you thinking so hard about?”

Eddie jolts like he’s been caught doing something he’s not allowed to, like touch his own damn skin, and Buck’s about to tug his own hand away when Eddie presses it back against him.

“Perfect,” he murmurs, seemingly to himself. Buck stares at where his hand rests with Eddie’s on top, then back to his husband’s face. 

It’s nonsensical to Buck, and doesn’t answer either question he asked, but for the kiss Eddie pulls him into right then, he can’t bring himself to push the matter further.

(If he swings a leg over Eddie’s hips to pin him to the sofa so he can stop brooding, that’s Buck’s business.)

Like everything, the truth eventually does come out.

Buck’s not expecting it when it does, but to be fair, neither is Eddie because he nearly jumps ten feet into the air when he walks into the house to see Buck sprawled out on the couch Saturday afternoon, munching on popcorn while watching Big Hero 6 for the umpteenth time.

Sue him, Buck loves this movie.

“What the fu–” Eddie cuts himself off before the curse can fully form, one of those habits formed from years of living with a kid. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here, Edmundo,” Buck teases, furrowing his brows. “Did you hit your head or something? Did you forget our marriage already?”

Eddie rolls his eyes but shakes his head, leaning down to kiss Buck’s forehead on his way to the kitchen. “No, and I could never. But you said this morning that you were going to Maddie’s for the afternoon, right?”

“Yeah but Jee-Yun caught something at daycare so Maddie and Chim are up to their eyeballs in puke today,” Buck explains, grimacing a little at the thought. He hates the idea of his niece hurting. “I offered to help them out, but Maddie said I’d either bring the bug back home, or Chris would bring it home in a few weeks anyway.”

“God forbid,” Eddie mutters, a little uselessly. There’s an inevitability to kids catching the flu at school, and both of them know that. Buck laughs at the resigned look on Eddie’s face.

It’s then that he takes in what Eddie’s wearing.

It’s not the same tank top he was wearing all those years ago, the one with the open arm-holes and deep neck that dries Buck’s mouth out. Whenever he remembers it, he remembers the sweat-slick form of Eddie underneath, with ruffles of curls falling onto his forehead as he listened to Buck’s territorial dumbassery. He remembers his eyes tracking the light stubble on Eddie’s face, and the grooves of his muscles, and remembers hating that he couldn’t stop looking at the new guy, in what he now knows what him being irreversibly attracted to him.

If anyone had told him then that the man underneath the unfairly attractive racerback tank would become his husband, Buck would’ve laughed in their face.

This tank top is pretty damn close to that one, though.

The sides of the tank top are almost completely open on the sides, and it’s looser, falling and framing Eddie’s narrow waist, and as sexy as he looks, it’s not Eddie’s usual style. 

“What are you wearing?”

Eddie winces, but before he can open his mouth to offer an explanation, Buck catches sight of a familiar glossy bandage dully reflecting the overhead light.

Saniderm.

“Did you get a new tattoo?” Buck will deny that he screeches the words to his dying day, because he’s been caught completely off-guard, so he deserves a minute or two. 

Eddie’s face grows amused, even in the face of his own floundering panic, and Buck forgets to be embarrassed.

He jumps off the couch, joining Eddie over where he’s downing a bottle of water, his eyes tracking Buck warily over the rim as he drinks.

“Let me see?” he asks, keeping his eyes on Eddie’s face even though he sobadlywants to see it right away — he just doesn’t want to see it without Eddie’s permission.

“Don’t get mad,” Eddie cautions, hesitation clear in his voice as a hand comes up to cover the tattoo. 

Buck’s forehead creases in confusion as he shoots Eddie a weird look. “You’re regretting the tattoo approximately twenty minutes after getting it? Why would I be mad?”

“Oh,I’mdefinitely not regretting the tattoo. I think it’s my favorite one, just…”

Eddie’s nervousness, in turn, makes Bucknervous. What could Eddie have possibly gotten inked on his own body that would make Buckmad?

“Okay, here goes nothing,” Eddie mutters to himself, letting his hand fall away. He lifts his arm to brace on top of his head so Buck can see the scrawl over the lines of his ribs through the shirt.

For a minute, Buck doesn’t know what he’s looking at, before it hits him and he sucks in a breath.

“My-my vows,” he breathes out, hovering a hand over the words in his own handwriting, redness outlining the fresh ink.

Buck is more than familiar with Mikael, Eddie’s tattoo artist, and he’s done an eerily fantastic job of copying Buck’s handwriting to make it look like Buck himself has written over his husband’s skin in permanent ink. 

He reads over the first line, and frowns. “Wait, these aren’t–”

Eddie digs a piece of paper out of his pocket, silently handing it to Buck. He unfolds it to see one of the drafts that Buck thought he’d thrown away, complete with scribbled out words and crossed out phrases that Mikael has replicated exactly onto Eddie’s skin.

They’re not the vows Buck had given him — they’re the ones he’d tossed.

“Where did you get this?”

“The kitchen drawer.” 

Buck’s quiet for a minute, running his finger along the rough edge of the crinkled paper. The tattoo rests on Eddie’s right side, scrawled over his skin with black ink. The lines coast down the side of his torso, a total of eighteen that go from a couple inches below his armpit, down to the level of his bellybutton. Mikael has copied every last letter, every space, every punctuation mark, every scratched out word, every slant, even the uneven spaces between the lines — it’s all there, embedded on Eddie’s torso forever.

“Why these?”

His voice is smaller than it’s been in years, and part of him feelssmall — like he doesn’t deserve to be a part of Eddie’s body even though Buck’s hands and fingers and lips and body have mapped over every inch of him a million times over.

Eddie lets his arm fall, curling his fingers around Buck’s wrist. “Buck,thesewords are you. The raw ones, the ones you threw away because you thought I wouldn’t want to hear them, but baby, I want everypart of you. You’re…” He sucks in a breath, tracing the vein that follows Buck’s pulse before looking back at him. “You and Chris arethe best parts of me.” 

Tear prick at the corners of Buck’s eyes, because Eddie had said something similar in his vows, but even if he hadn’t, Buck knows for fact that Eddie has always expected, always wanted100% of Buck — even the parts of him that other people think are too much.

He’s never made any secret of that, and less so in the six months they’ve been together.

For the first time since seeing the tattoo, Buck lays his hand down over it, spreading his fingers over the glossy bandage so the words peek out in between. 

It’s then that he sees the purposeful space, and he realizes how Eddie decided where to ink it. This is where Buck’s left hand lands without fail whenever he holds Eddie like this — spanning over his right side as if he can gather all of him under one palm. 

On Eddie’s back, coming up the same side, is a tattoo Eddie had gotten last year — an imprint of Christopher’s baby footprints. Mikael had made that tattoo look like footprints walking, a total of eight, growing smaller until they faded.

Buck can’t help but notice that the fade of Christopher’s footprints ends right at the edge of where Buck’s words start.

His ring lays nestled onto his hand, fingers spread wide over the raw promises, and Buck thinks to himself that there’s symbolism for something beautiful there. “Eddie, I–”

“Are you mad?” His husband’s worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, and with his other hand, Buck gently tugs it free, dragging Eddie into a searing kiss that leaves Buck’s bones vibrating with just how much he loves this man.

“Mad in love with you, maybe,” Buck cheeses, too far gone to care about how sappy he sounds. “You could’ve put the ones I actually said to you.”

“Yeah, I could’ve,” Eddie acknowledges, a soft smile lighting his features and turning him even more golden in the afternoon sun. Buck feels a little dizzy just looking at him. “But these areyou. This is my husband, the one I get to see and love.” He taps his side to accentuate his point.

“You’re such a fucking sap.” A lump curls into Buck’s throat as Eddie wraps him into a hug. He keeps one hand on his husband’s new tattoo, tracing the lettering over the plastic. He’s conscious of the dull ache that probably lives under Eddie’s skin but he can’t stop touching him.

He can almost see himself scratching out words and phrases, can almost feel the phantom frustration of not being able to pick the right words for how much he loves Eddie. He’d cracked more than one pen, globs of ink bursting out of the nib with the force of him pressing down as if the words could follow the pressure. 

After that, he’d switched to pencil. Easier to sharpen, weren’t rendered useless if Buck pressed too hard.

It needed to be perfect to him at the time, but standing in front of his best friend, who not only married Buck, but also got his goddamned handwriting tattooedon his skin forever, Buck doesn’t think there couldn’t have been any more perfect words. 

“Then why did you look like you’d just swallowed a bunch of needles when you came in?” he manages to ask around a thick tongue, tilting his head down to press his emotions into a soft kiss over Eddie’s exposed shoulder, next to where the wide strap stretches over the divot above his collarbone.

Eddie laughs, a gentle, rich sound that ruffles the hair on the side of Buck’s head where they’re still pressed together. “Because I wasn’t sure how you’d react, since I wasn’t meant to see these.”

“You weren’t,” Buck agrees, lifting his head to press his forehead to his husband’s. “But you did, and I’m glad you saw them. I was a mess trying to get them to be absolutely perfect, but….I didn’t need to. I didn’t use the card I wrote the night before, and I didn’t use any of the improvised sticky notes I stole from Bobby’s desk.”

“You stole Post-Its at our wedding?” Eddie’s eyebrows shoot way up, disappearing into his hairline. “From the Captain’s office?”

“I put them back!” Buck defends himself, shrugging. “I also learned that Bobby doesn’t have secure passwords for anything.”

Eddie laughs, and Buck feels like he can breathe a little easier. He tangles their fingers together and pulls Eddie over to the couch, maneuvering him onto his side so the tattoo faces upwards, open for Buck’s eyes.

He pushes the coffee table back and sinks down to his knees in front of the couch, taking his first close look at the new tattoo. Eddie stays quiet, his eyes tracking Buck even as he lifts his arm away from his side.

“God, I love you,” Buck murmurs absently, bending to kiss the edge of the tape. The lines of the tattoo are crisp in a way his pen wasn’t during the night he scribbled these.

“Tell me about them?” Eddie whispers.

Buck’s quiet for a second as he looks at the picture his husband makes against the couch cushions, the flame in his chest belonging to Eddie blazing into an inferno until he thinks his blood is made of nothing but Eddie’s love. “I tried for three weeks to write the perfect words. Every night, I’d come out here after you fell asleep. The first few days, I completely blanked. Not a single word came to mind.

“Then we had that taco night, and you had queso on your koala apron while you and Chris made the bowls with all the toppings, and I’d never been more in love with you, and suddenly, the words came. I had to write them all down on my phone so I wouldn’t forget.”

“Queso on the koala apron. After everything we’ve been through,” Eddie mutters, shaking his head fondly. The soft, warm smile on his face gives him away instantly, and Buck grins at him. “I love you too, you know.”  

Buck gestures to the tattoo, lifting an eyebrow. “Oh, I know.”

He jokes about it, but truth be told, his heart hasn’t stopped skipping against his sternum every time he looks at his words on Eddie’s skin. He’s never doubted that Eddie doeslove him, but the strength of just how much bowls Buck over every single time.

“Any words you give me are the perfect ones,” Eddie says matter-of-factually, like he hasn’t just obliterated Buck’s whole world with one action and nine perfect words. He scoots backwards until his back rests against the sofa, leaving a space for Buck as he holds his hand out for him. Buck climbs into the space Eddie made, letting his husband tuck him close so he doesn’t fall off. 

The couch was not made for two men over six-feet to lay side by side, but they make it work with Buck half on Eddie, his husband going boneless into the cushions as Buck’s weight presses him into it. Eddie hums as his arm goes around Buck’s shoulder.

“Stupidly romantic asshole,” Buck murmurs into Eddie’s chest as they lay together, tears sparking behind his eyes.

Buck’s hand, like a beacon, finds the tattoo again, tracing nonsensical patterns along the short letters. He moves the fabric away so he can look at where they curve over the natural bumps and curve of his ribs, the soft skin of his waist. He splays his hand across the scroll of writing again.

Eddie’s chuckle is low and rich, burning a smooth path down to Buck’s stomach. “Only for you, Buck. Only for you.” He’s quiet for a second before pressing a kiss to the top of Buck’s head, murmuring the last line of the discarded vows — one of the lines that Buck had kept in his actual ones. “I can’t wait to spend forever with you, either.”

Buck turns his face into where Eddie’s heart beats steady, traces the letters again, and smiles.

—

I’m writing these while you drool on your my pillow, face down and still. You didn’t move when I climbed out of bed, and while other people wouldn’t that might not mean anything to anyone else, to me, it tells me that you feel secure safe around me. It surprises me every day.

I’m not sure whatI don’t know what words to use to promise you that I’ve loved you before I even knew long before I knew my home was made of you and Christopher, and it might have taken us a long time to get here, but now that we are we’re here, I never want to leave never want you to leave. I want to live with you, cry with you, laugh with you, die with you and when our time comes, I want to go with you. I promise to (never) go anywhere you can’t follow. All those years ago I promised to have your back, and today, I’m promising to uphold that vow for the rest of my life our lives. I love you, Eddie, and I can’t wait to spend my life forever with you.