leashy

I'm An Old, blog will have 18+ content.

post! breakup! paintballing!

(pretend this is something written in the immediate aftermath of the breakup airing so we don't yet know how the firefam are going to react.)

harbor vs. 118 paintballing has been in the diary for a couple months and buck's like "no, absolutely not, i am NOT going" but eddie cajoles him into it because "c'mon, man, it was your idea, i bet he doesn't even show up anyway."

except, of course, he does. cue buck speedrunning his very own six stages of breakup madness (sadness, wistfulness, longing, anxiety, hope, misery) before landing squarely in so! mad! he cannot! see! straight!!!! he pulls the 118 into a huddle to lay out a brutal plan of war that has them all doing this face 😬

meanwhile, tommy to lucy: "i told you this was a bad idea he's trying to set me on fire with his brain." lucy: "better than you trying to drown yourself in your own misery. maybe you should, idk, try saying words to him?" except every time tommy glances over buck's staring daggers at him.

so! on the occasions i don't head canon tommy as a socal native, i like to toy with the idea that when he got out of the army, he drove until he reached the ocean, with no real plan in mind.

so i think this would be a tommy character study in the guise of a road trip fic. maybe he meets some guy at a gas station who makes him feel weird in a way he won't be ready to think about for a long, long time. maybe he meets a trucker in a rest stop shower and they trade quick, impersonal hand jobs and that night tommy springs for a motel room so he can get blackout drunk and tuck the memory away.

oh! i actually started and promptly abandoned a fic that would be perfect for this.

it's a wild west setting, buck and tommy had a brief fling years ago back east, but tommy was a lawman on his way out west and thought buck had a chance at something like a normal life so he left him with a letter.

now, out west, tommy's scrounging up a living as a lonely, cynical bounty hunter, hoping for one last big score so he can go back east and hang up his spurs, so he's on the trail of notorious outlaw william "billy boils" mccurdy except, oh no! billy has an accomplice. a very familiar accomplice who tommy never thought he'd see again.

🤣🤪

Oh oh okay, walk with me.

Rival. Food market. Stalls.

Buck takes the settlement, Tommy gets injured somehow (maybe the gas explosion goes worse, maybe it happens later), neither of them can stay in the LAFD.

Tommy's had his little food truck for years, selling fairly traditional but very high quality sandwiches. It's not what he thought he'd wind up doing but he does love it. He especially loves the bustle of food markets, when he ropes his buddy Sal into helping out. Except then one weekend he starts seeing people walking past his stall with gyros, and grilled cheeses with insane fillings, and hollowed out baguettes filled with chilli, and pillowy brioche rolls with sweet fillings.

Cue an ongoing rivalry where Sandwich Assistants Sal and Eddie get roped into unwilling espionage missions (they become buds and have a betting pool before long), Buck and Tommy both are losing sleep trying to come up with new recipes to outdo each other etc etc.

(Lyrics from eyes don’t lie by Kingfishr)

- @ambernotember xo

take my hand for some angst 🫴

Tommy's (terrible shithead asshole) father is dying. Something halfway between lingering filial duty and a morbid desire to check it actually happens has him travelling back to his hometown for the first time in more than a decade to Be There. Evan offers to go with him but a) they've only been back together for a month at this point and b) Evan has Theo to think about now and c) Tommy doesn't want Evan within a hundred miles of his father, even if the old bigot is on the way out. He's been halfway to passed out and still managed to say things that have eviscerated Tommy and left wounds that bled sluggishly for years after. There's just no way. But Tommy promises to call him.

The first night, Tommy sits out in the back yard and has Evan tell him about his day. It's a lifeline. Thirty minutes later, he feels like he can walk back into the house without losing his mind.

The second night, Tommy tells Evan about running into a woman he went to high school with when he went into town for groceries. Fucking weird, is his overall conclusion.

The third night, Tommy sits silently, listening to Evan breathe. It doesn't occur to him that Evan can do the same until he says, "Tommy, are you smoking?" It's insane. His dad is inside dying slowly of metastatic lung cancer, and Tommy's smoking a cigarette in the back yard. "Yeah," he says, stubbing out his Camel. "Sorry. I fucking hate it here. I've always hated it here."