love was blooming through the cracks

Without tearing his gaze away from that look on Tommy's face, the one he's still pulling in a slightly different font, Eddie reaches out and picks up his coffee from the counter with practiced, blind ease. He frowns as he takes a long sip. He isn't sure what to say to that and so he doesn't say anything at all.

He doesn't need to, really, when Tommy goes on all on his own.

"There are some situations where you don't show up for each other though, right?"

"Not sure I catch your drift," Eddie chuckles, head tilting with the momentum of his confusion.

Tommy studies him, like trying to suss him out, and then sighs.

"Nevermind."

"Okay," Eddie lets it go.

He tries to let it go, only, Tommy is trying to win some foot-in-mouth contest, apparently because--

"I'm just trying not to feel like I always have to compete for my boyfriend's attention, I guess is what I'm saying," he blurts out with a large, half-aborted gesture that startles Eddie aback with his mug halfway lifted to his lips.

He lowers it carefully.

He pulls a face of his own.

"Compete with who?"

Tommy stalls for a beat before he barks out a laugh. He looks at Eddie like he thinks he's stupid or something, which isn't the most pleasant experience. Eddie has gotten along just fine with Tommy for months, now, but all of a sudden it feels like Tommy isn't getting along with him and Eddie can't parse why.

"Come on, Diaz," he scoffs, "you're not that dense."

He's looking him up and down like he's reading him and Eddie doesn't care for it at all, actually. He feels transparent and he feels brittle and he opens his mouth to say something, although he has no hope of planning ahead for what, only--

"Eddie! C'mere for a sec!" Buck calls, loud and demanding from the bathroom upstairs. "Bring your bag!"

Tommy's once-over breaks, but only because he shakes his head with this frigid sort of unsurprised frustration, and only then does Eddie pick up what he's been putting down.

His jaw hinges open, just ever so slightly, and he understands the meaning of gobsmacked for perhaps the first time in his life and--

"Eddie?!"

"You gonna keep him waiting?" Tommy asks with an edge of mockery and Eddie purses his lips as he sets down his coffee and trades it out for his med bag.

He strides forward, but as he passes by, drops hand to shoulder.

"I'm not competing with you, Tommy," he says flatly with barely a pause in his step to do so.

He's a third of the way up the staircase when he catches the sigh at his back and hears the mostly-muttered, "no, you're really not, are you," that chases him up.

In all technicality, they're on the same page, but they don't really talk much after that.

Anyway, it's only a couple weeks later when Tommy breaks up with Buck, when Buck shows up on Eddie's doorstep, when Eddie is the first one to get him to smile and laugh again in a post-breakup world to the tune of loud, loud music and where are your goddamn pants, man?

It's the beer, probably, and the dancing endorphins, that makes a ghost of a thought drift across Eddie's brain: