Chapter Text
Tommy’s sure he must be floating.
He feels outside of himself; like he’s just a few feet in the air, levitating above his life, soul outside his body. It’s freeing, in a way, but also a little blinding – because he’s so off-balance. He’s so out of step, and he isn’t sure what to do with himself.
When he first realized what happened – the high-rise fire, blasts of glass and billowing smoke knocking him down in a flash – Tommy had to admit he panicked a little.
Because he’s dead. Or– almost dead? In purgatory? Nothing is quite right, here.
He’s in a hospital room, so it can’t be heaven.
Light filters softly through thin blinds, the room golden with dusk and darkening fairly fast. Tommy’s in the bed, although not in a gown – he’s in a pair of grey sweats that look like Evan’s, a little too long, and one of his FD hoodies. It’s still a little chilly, though – but then again, that’s just hospitals. Tommy isn’t sure he’s ever been in one and not been cold.
There’s two seats at the bedside, and the first is empty; the side-table next to it is completely clear bar a little packet of butterscotch, Evan’s favorite. They’re untouched.
Tommy sort of hates that.
The second seat, though, isn’t empty. The man sitting there is a mirror image of Tommy, and for a second he thinks it’s himself – or another version, or something. That’s one of those things people see before they die, right? The few who make it back from the brink, that’s something they see.
And it feels more likely than the alternative.
“Donovan?” Tommy murmurs; his brother doesn’t move, still staring at the floor. He’s picking at the corner of his lip, an old habit, one that Tommy’s seen a thousand times – and he’s wearing a baggy Captain America t-shirt, grey and faded. The plastic picture is practically falling off.
Tommy recognizes it. Their father had said it was childish and ridiculous; and when Donovan spent the night at a friends’ house, he started up the little fireplace, in the rundown house on the outskirts, and set the thing aflame.
And when Tommy tried to stop it all, his father had hit him.
Donovan never found out. Tommy refused to tell him; so as far as he knew the shirt had merely been lost, and the bruise on his brother’s face was from a fall off his bike.
They were nine, maybe ten at the. Tommy isn’t really sure.
“Don!”
He glances up at that, but he still doesn’t look at Tommy; Rocker’s looking past Tommy, stare set at the head of the hospital bed behind him.
It feels like his brother is looking through him. Like Tommy’s just sitting in the air, completely invisible and starting to dissipate, all because his brother can’t see him.
It’s only then that Tommy realises all the equipment set up around the bed, wires criss-crossing and monitor screens blank; the usual arrangement is there – a vitals monitor, an IV drip, but more extreme things, too. A ventilator, and something Tommy recognises as a pulse oximeter thanks to Lucy’s hospital stay last year.
Beside it all on the bedside table is an unlabelled manila folder, and Tommy picks it up, flicking it open.
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT is printed in bold black letters across the top of the first page, of THOMAS KINARD Jr. following in smaller letters underneath.
His will. It’s been months since he’s seen the document; the last edits had been, ultimately, very final. Or at the least, he’d assumed as much. He didn’t have many people worth leaving things too, and he had few things worth leaving to those people regardless. Most of his will, for most of his life, has been charitable.
But after things fell apart and then fell back together with Evan, Tommy updated it; spread his things between Evan, Lucy and Sal with a few extras set aside for his captain – and one of his closest friends – Aria Murphy.
In the middle of it all, when he’d finally sat down with an attorney and edited it, he’d taken out Donovan’s name entirely. It wasn’t supposed to be a malicious thing, or even much of a big deal; they hadn’t spoken since they were fifteen, and when their father died Tommy was the only one at the funeral. So it didn’t feel like it mattered.
They just weren’t a part of each other’s lives anymore – even with the same blood in their veins, same genes stringing together their physicalities, same faces looking back like mirrors… they were strangers, and that was fine.
It’s still fine. It’s meant to all be fine.
But Tommy’s brother is here, in this room; or, really, in this dream– or whatever this is . It stings, and Tommy feels a little bruised by his presence; because is this how he last sees his brother? His twin? In a hospital room inside of his head, depressed and empty and broken, all grown up and yet still looking like the fearful kid he always was.
The fearful kids they both were, waiting and waiting and waiting for a way out that only one of them really got– because Tommy’s still back there, still a child with his father watching his brother wave out the back window of the Chevy. Ducking his head in and rolling it up when their father threw his beer can.
Tommy can’t let him go like that. Not again.
“Donovan,” He mutters again, a little more insistent. “Don, Don. Donovan!”
Rocker finally looks at him, staring; then there’s a loud, beeping intonation, a bright light, and a feeling like he’s being thrown backwards before the hospital room around him disappears.
⋆⋅☆⋅⋆
It takes a while for Tommy to really wake up, and Evan cries the whole time. Silent, weeping tears that roll down his face, reddening his cheeks and dripping onto his t-shirt, dampening the dark blue to a midnight navy. He wipes them back roughly, watching his fiancé in the bed, gripping still onto one hand until a nurse forces him back toward the doorway.
Tommy wrestles with the tube of the ventilator for a while, panicked and agitated, a hand flying outward to knock a short, stocky nurse – he’s one of the first to leave the room, a hand resting tenderly over the spot on his abdomen where Tommy’s fist had made contact. The tube is removed, the sheets are loosened, and – eventually, after so long closed – his eyes blink fully open.
The harsh, sterilized lights of the hospital are obviously too much for him, so a nurse finds the switch for the room and turns them off. Someone says to page the doctor, someone else goes to fetch water for Tommy and has him sip on the cup, even through his confusion and panic.
So much is happening.
Evan just cries.
It’s a few more minutes before Tommy is really present, back in his head, with some level of realisation coming in. When he starts to understand what happened, where he is, all the excess movement stops its frantic insistence. Evan leans forward to lace their fingers together again, and the tension knit into Tommy’s expression visibly weakens.
Rocker watches it all, his wide eyes – the same deep, deep blue as Tommy’s – looking happy but his mouth turned down in a lonely kind of grimace. Buck isn’t sure Tommy’s even realised where he really is, what happened to him; or, more morbidly, the people at his bedside. His fiancé… and his uninvited, estranged brother.
The man that he loves more than anything, and the man he’s barely seen since they were teenagers.
“Evan,” Tommy’s voice is dry and hoarse, and a shaky hand takes another sip of water before he gestures for Evan to set it down on the bedside table. He reaches a hand up, letting his thumb run across his fiancé’s cheekbone, cradling him softly despite coarse hands.
Blue. Blue eyes, ocean deep and sparkling with life, the depth in them barely visible from their surface. They’re round, wide, staring ; a little fearful, but mostly loving, fixed tight on Evan’s. Open. Hopeful, really..
“ Tommy ,” Evan practically gasps, swallowing a sob and leaning forward against the hospital bed. He takes Tommy’s face between his hands tenderly, bracing himself over his fiancè carefully but urgently. Insistent, but worried, too, for his many injuries. “Thank God you’re okay, oh my God.”
“Don,” Tommy says hoarsely. When Evan pulls back, Tommy is staring at his brother, eyes wide and a little damp. “Donovan.”
Rocker, the moment Tommy woke, shied away to a corner; he looks smaller than his frame, head ducked like he doesn’t quite feel as though he belongs in this room. Like he’s intruding on the moment, somehow, stepping on their toes. It’s the same look he’d had when he first knocked on the door, and Tommy doesn’t like it.
It feels like shame. Tommy’s had enough of shame, his and Donovan’s.
“Don, you’re–” Tommy clears his throat, shaking his head. “How did you– how did you know I was here?”
“Someone from PD- um, her name was Sergeant Grant. Got all weird the second she saw me, said I was a dead ringer, mentioned your name.” Rocker murmurs. “I– I left shift as soon as I heard, my captain said I’ll make it up. I wanted to be here.”
Tommy laughs; the sound is dry and brittle, hacking when it comes out. It sounds like it hurts, and Evan winces in sympathy, his grip tightening on Tommy’s hand as he clears his throat yet again. “I don’t know why. I haven’t heard from you since you left.”
“Tom,” Evan says softly, tone not quite warning.
“Sorry,” Tommy squeezes Evan’s hand, nodding to the glass of water on the nightstand which he passes over.
Taking a long sip, Tommy tugs Evan closer. The latter laughs softly, still wiping away spare tears, climbing into the cot. It’s definitely not made for two men of their size, but with the way Tommy settles into his fiancé’s side, it doesn’t really matter.
“For what it’s worth,” Tommy adds, voice low and sincere. “I really am happy to see you. Even if it had to be like this.”
“I’m sorry it was like this.” Rocker replies simply; there’s something in his tone that’s almost bittersweet. He takes a deep breath, voice weak but words steady. “I’m sorry I never called you after I left.”
“I don’t know that I would’ve picked up.” Tommy admits; it’s a concession, yes, and not the first he’s made for Donovan’s sake. But they’ve had twenty years apart, more than, and he doesn’t care anymore for who owes who. For what he had to put up with to protect his brother from it.
The important part is that Don got out. He left, and he lived, and he escaped the terrible trap of their childhood – broken glass and yelling and the whole house stinking of alcohol and vomit. Nights tiptoeing around Dad’s bad moods, and mornings sneaking out to school so as not to wake him up. Things that only worsened after Tommy’s mother and brother took off.
But, in a way, Tommy escaped too, didn’t he? To be here now, with his brother and his fiancé. Evan’s hand in his hair and Rocker smiling weakly from the end of his bed, his heartbeat steady as a promise from the machine linked across his chest. The fact that he’s alive – so long after his father, so free of his childhood. That’s the escape.
He’s not just surviving– he’s alive.
Tommy and Rocker survived.
They escaped.
And now– now, they get to live.