Ok this might seem a little out of the ordinary but I was wondering if you could do a fic where reader has a nightmare, accidentally chokes Eddie and then runs out of the house. I seen a similar fic with Buddie on AO3
Not the Thing I'm Scared Of
Eddie Diaz x Reader — One-Shot
The dream always starts the same way: a hallway that isn't real, a door that won't open, hands that aren't hers closing around her throat. Tonight it's worse — tonight the hands are behind her, and when she twists to fight them off, muscle memory takes over before her mind catches up.
She surfaces from sleep already moving, forearm braced across a throat, fingers locked into the collar of a shirt, and for one suspended second the dream and the room are the same place.
Then Eddie makes a sound she's never heard him make — half-word, half-gasp — and everything snaps into focus at once: his hands on her wrist, not fighting her off but trying to get her attention, his face inches from hers in the dark, his throat working under her forearm.
She lets go like she's been burned.
He's coughing, one hand at his own throat, and he's already saying her name, already saying "hey, hey, I'm okay," but she's not listening, she's scrambling backward off the bed so fast she takes the comforter with her, and the only thought in her head is I did that, my hands did that, I hurt him in his own bed —
"Y/N." His voice is rough but steady. "Look at me. I'm fine."
She's already at the bedroom door.
She doesn't wait. She's down the hallway, past Christopher's closed door — quiet, thank God, still quiet — and out the front door into the yard before her brain fully registers that she's barefoot, that it's past two in the morning, that she has nowhere to go and isn't planning to go anywhere in particular. She just needs to not be in that house right now. She needs distance between her hands and the person she almost hurt with them.
The grass is cold and wet under her feet. Somewhere down the block a dog is barking at nothing. She gets as far as the sidewalk before her legs just — stop working, and she sits down hard on the curb with her arms wrapped around her knees, shaking.
She hears the front door again. Footsteps, unhurried, deliberately unhurried, like he's giving her every chance to hear him coming and not be startled by it.
"Don't," she says, before he's even close. "Don't come near me right now."
Eddie stops a few feet back anyway, hands loose at his sides where she can see them, and lowers himself down onto the curb — not next to her, just close enough to talk. In the light from the streetlamp she can see the faint mark already forming at his collarbone, and something in her chest folds in on itself.
"I'm not near you," he says quietly. "I'm just here."
"I choked you. In your sleep. In your own bed, I had my arm across your throat and I didn't even know it was you—"
"That's not something you just know, Eddie, that's not—" Her voice cracks. "What if I'd had something in my hand. What if Christopher had come in. What if—"
He's quiet for a second, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped into something steadier, something she recognizes from calls, from the version of him that talks people down off far worse ledges than this one. "You want to know what I know? I know you were asleep. I know whatever was in that dream, it wasn't me you were fighting. And I know the second you were awake enough to understand what happened, you were more scared of yourself than I was of you — which, for the record, was not scared at all."
"I'm not going to pretend getting choked awake was fun," he says, dry enough that it almost startles a broken laugh out of her. "But I've had worse wake-up calls than my girlfriend's PTSD. I've had worse wake-up calls than a structure fire. This isn't the thing that scares me."
She finally looks at him. "Then what does?"
"You out here at two a.m. thinking you have to sit on a curb by yourself because your body did something your mind didn't choose." He says it plainly, no heat in it. "That's the part I don't like."
"I didn't want to hurt you again."
"You didn't hurt me the first time. Not really. You reacted to something that tried to kill you once, and your body still remembers how to survive it even when you're asleep. That's not a flaw, Y/N. That's you being alive."
Her eyes are stinging now, and she hates it, hates that she's the one crying when he's the one with a mark on his throat. "I don't know how to make it stop."
"You don't have to make it stop tonight. You just have to come back inside." He holds out a hand — not grabbing, not reaching for her, just open, an offer she can decline. "I'll take the couch if it'd make you feel safer. I'll sleep in the recliner. I don't care where I sleep. I care that you're not out here alone convincing yourself you're something you're not."
She looks at his hand for a long moment. Then at the mark on his throat, faint but there, proof of exactly what she's afraid of being.
Christopher's door is still shut when they come back in, and Eddie steers her toward the couch instead of the bedroom without her having to ask. He gets her a glass of water she doesn't drink and a blanket she pulls up to her chin anyway, and when he sits down on the far cushion — close, but not crowding — she notices he's rubbing absently at his collarbone.
"Barely." He catches her looking and drops his hand. "I've had worse from Buck during a wrestling match over the last slice of pizza."
She doesn't answer, just watches the mark like it might get worse if she looks away from it, and Eddie seems to understand that no joke is going to talk her out of that particular fear tonight.
"Hey." He waits until she meets his eyes. "I'm not scared of you. I'm not gonna flinch every time you roll over in your sleep. I'm not gonna start sleeping with one eye open. This doesn't change anything about how I feel, except maybe that I want to help you figure out what's underneath it, if you'll let me."
"It's not something you can fix."
"I'm not trying to fix you. I've been on the other side of a bad night more times than I can count — you think I don't understand what it's like to wake up already fighting something that isn't there?" He says it without pity, just fact, just two people who've both spent nights fighting things that weren't in the room. "I'm not asking you to explain the dream tonight. I'm asking you to stay on this couch instead of sitting on a curb by yourself."
The tightness in her chest doesn't disappear, but it loosens, just slightly, enough that she can breathe around it.
He doesn't push further than that — doesn't ask what the hallway was, or whose hands she remembers, or how long this has been happening. He just shifts closer, slow enough that she has time to tell him not to, and when she doesn't, he lets her fold into his side, careful, deliberate, like he's the one who has something to prove instead of her.
"For what it's worth," he murmurs into her hair, sometime later, when her breathing has finally started to even out, "you didn't run because you're dangerous. You ran because you'd rather hurt yourself than risk hurting someone you love. That's not the same thing at all."
She doesn't answer. She's already halfway back to sleep, one hand fisted loosely in his shirt like she's checking, even unconscious, that he's still there.
Eddie stays exactly where he is until morning.
