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Eddie’s been sitting in the parking lot for going on ten minutes when his phone rings and he jumps half out of his skin.
“Why are you sitting in the parking lot?” comes Hen’s voice, jarringly loud through his truck’s Bluetooth.
Eddie clears his throat, one hand still pressed to his chest in belated shock. “I’m—how do you know I’m in the parking lot?”
There’s a huff of laughter over the line. “I recognized your truck, and you parked in the first row. You’re not slick, Diaz.”
Eddie snorts. “Shit.” He squints at the building across the way, the sleek modern lines of it, wondering if he can see Hen through the window.
“You didn’t answer my question, though,” she says. It’s soft, and Eddie can picture the draw of her brows, the way she would have turned away from where the rest of the team sits. The mental image makes the ever-present ache in his chest flare, insistently. He ignores it.
“What was the question?” he asks, like he’s ever been able to successfully avoid anything in his life.
Hen sighs, heavy and worn-thin. “You’re in the parking lot. You’re not in here, with the rest of the team.”
Eddie looks at his lap, tapping fingers against his knee. He takes a moment to curse the advent of hands-free technology, because now that they’re free he doesn’t know what to do with them. “I’m not part of the team, anymore,” he says, and he knows he’s being deliberately obtuse, but—he’s not. Not anymore, not right now.
“Eddie,” Hen replies, and it’s tired, again. They must have been up all night.
Eddie had gotten the call from Bobby in the middle of his lunch break; he’d begged off the rest of his slate of trainings to administer in order to rush to the hospital. And based on the few details of the call he’d managed to glean from the stilted, pained phone call, they must have been working extraction for at least most of the night.
Eddie clears his throat. “How is he?”
Hen laughs, and there’s something sharp and awful hiding under the sound. “Which one?”
Eddie’s chest seizes in a moment of icy panic. “Chim—”
“—is fine,” Hen cuts in. “Or, mostly. He will be,” she amends. “Fractured wrist, concussion, bruised as hell. Maddie’s harassing the nurses about discharging him, last I heard.”
Eddie stares, unseeing, at the blue slacks of his uniform. “But he’s…”
“He’s okay. A little rattled, yeah, but—” she clears her throat, and the rest of the sentence comes out choked: “—not as bad as it could have been.”
The icy panic is back with a vengeance now, two iron fists around his lungs. “Hen,” he exhales in a ragged whisper. “Hen, how—how bad is it?”
The silence that comes fills up his car with something that feels like the crushing pull of a black hole, a singularity, a voice: did you know that the closest black hole is probably 20,000 lightyears away—
A sniff cuts through his spiral, and Eddie hates the way Hen’s voice wavers: “It’s not good.”
Comatose.
That’s what Hen told him, voice gentle but thick with the exhaustion that comes from hours of tightly wound emotion: the blood loss and severe head trauma, compounded by the fact that he was already unconscious when they found him all resulted in a coma that had every doctor and nurse saying we’ll just have to wait and see. It was all Eddie could do to not have a panic attack right then and there.
Then, a bustle over the line that might have been Chimney coming out, and Hen had hung up with “get out of the parking lot, Diaz,” thrown as a parting shot. So, he did.
The problem was—Eddie put the truck in drive and pulled away.
The guilt that immediately started churning in his gut was almost enough to make him pull a U-turn in the middle of the road but—but. He can’t be there right now.
A text from Bobby lights up the messaging display on his center console: Hen told us you couldn’t get off work but she gave you the rundown. I’ll call with more updates when we get them. And another right after—Sorry you couldn’t be here.
Eddie’s glad for the fact that he has the excuse of actively driving to avoid answering those messages, because he isn’t even sure how he’d start.
At home, he pours a glass of water and then doesn’t drink it, instead watching the spots of condensation on the side of glass grow fatter and fatter until it’s almost ugly, the way the droplets refuse to burst.
There's no text from Hen about why she lied for him, no text from Bobby with an update from the hospital, no response from Chimney, the blue bubble of Eddie’s glad you’re ok. call if you need anything left adrift.
Eddie draws a finger down the side of the glass, tracing a line into the patchwork dampness on the side just to make the drops begin to blur.
“Dad?” comes a call from the front door that Eddie didn’t even hear opening, and it makes him jump so violently that the glass of water teeters onto its edge for a split second until he’s able to catch it in a quick scramble.
Eddie should get up—Chris is here, Carla is dropping him off, it must be past three already—but it suddenly feels like his body weighs ten tons, and he can’t stand up from the kitchen chair. So he waits, silent, until Chris stands framed in the doorway to the dining room, Carla just over his shoulder.
“We saw your truck in the garage,” Chris says with a smile, but it drops immediately when Eddie does a dismal job returning it.
His therapist—his PTSD-specializing therapist that he got two weeks after quitting the 118—says that Eddie needs to stop dictating what he should feel, and that he should instead try to experience his emotions as they naturally occur—i.e., he shouldn’t force smiles for his son. He agreed to as much with Christopher, affirming a pact to tell each other the truth about what they’re feeling. But right now—Eddie’s a little scared of what might start leaking out if he stops faking smiles.
“Why are you home? What happened?” Christopher asks, a frown settling in at the corners of his mouth.
Carla looks a little wide-eyed as she drops a hand onto his shoulder. “Chris, do you want to put your stuff away in your room?”
“No.” Chris roughly shrugs his shoulders to dislodge her hand.
“Christopher—” Eddie starts.
“No,” Chris says again. “No, Dad—what—what happened? Why are you home?”
Eddie drops one hand underneath the table and clenches it into a fist on his knee. He inhales and tries to breathe with his whole chest, tries desperately to ground himself before he has to have this conversation. “Chris, buddy, maybe you should come sit.”
Chris doesn’t sit. Instead, he says—
“Did something happen to Buck?”
—and all of Eddie’s tenuous centering goes out the window. “What?”
Carla replaces her hand on Chris’ shoulder. “Honey—"
“Did something happen to Buck?” Chris says, putting all the force behind the words that a ten-year-old can muster.
Eddie swallows and tries to ignore the way his fingertips are tingling. “Why… what makes you think something happened to Buck?”
“You’re home.” Chris swallows and pushes himself up straighter on his crutches. “You’re home early, and you look upset and you haven’t said anything and—and the last time you were like this was when Mom—when Mom was dead.”
It’s like all the air got sucked out of the room. Eddie swallows, and his throat is like sandpaper.
“Is Buck dead?” Chris whispers.
“No,” Eddie replies, hoarse, looking at the still-full water glass on the table. “No, but—he’s in the hospital.”
There’s a small inhale, and Eddie looks up just in time to catch his son’s eyes—glassy with shock and rapidly-appearing tears—before Chris is turning around and urgently pushing past Carla.
A few seconds later, a door slams in the hallway and Eddie scrubs a hand across his face. Well, he means to, but he ends up just covering his eyes and reveling in the darkness.
How did he screw that up so much? How did he let Chris get so well-versed in disaster to the point that he knows when to expect it? Eddie doesn’t have answers, and he doesn’t know how to get them.
There’s the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, the shift and settle of Carla joining him at the table. Eddie blinks behind the safety of his hand one last time before he lets it drop down.
“What happened?” Carla asks.
Eddie doesn’t even have the energy to sigh right now, so he relays what he knows, monotone: “They got a call at a parking garage—Bobby said someone crashed into one of the center pillars. Then there was a partial collapse, or something, I don’t know, but the ceiling fell through the floor and Buck and Chimney went with it.” Carla sucks in a harsh breath through her nose. “I’m pretty sure they were stuck down there for hours,” Eddie tacks on, a detached observation.
Carla clears her throat. “And they’re…”
“Chim’s mostly fine,” Eddie supplies. “Broken wrist, concussion. Maddie took him home.” He stops. He lets the silence stretch on, hoping that maybe it would snap in two like a piece of overworked gum and that this whole nightmare would snap with it. But it just stretches, pulls further and further until it’s so thin Eddie can’t do much but wave it aside. “Buck was… I don’t know. Hen didn’t give me too many details. But his concussion was worse, and I think something cut through his turnout, so he was bleeding pretty bad. He was already unconscious when they got to him.” Another pause, another futile delay before Eddie has to grit his teeth and face the truth. His voice is choked when he does: “…and now he won’t wake up.”
Eddie takes a breath in and hates himself for the way it shakes, almost imperceptible.
The warmth of a hand covering his own. The tick of his clock on the wall. A car outside, the hum of the air conditioner—drops of condensation on his water glass. Eddie measures his breathing and comes up with something a few surprising inches away from the panic that he’d come to expect.
He wants—he wants so desperately to tell Buck that. To sit down and tell him how stupidly annoyed and righteously frustrated he is at the fact that all the therapy is actually helping, that he was wrong to quit the 118, that he’s slowly unpacking the old, dusty boxes of his mind and that maybe he doesn’t feel lighter—not yet—but that it feels like a possibility for the first time in years. For the first time since Shannon showed up with three positive pregnancy tests, maybe, or since he graduated high school and started working at his father’s garage the next weekend, or maybe for the first time he can remember. But—but. He can’t.
“Eddie,” Carla says softly. “You could have called. We would’ve met you at the hospital.”
He shakes his head. “No. I didn’t—uh. I didn’t go to the hospital.”
He feels the way Carla’s hand goes still. “Eddie.” It’s not nearly as soft-spoken this time. “You didn’t go see him? Chim? Your team?”
“They’re not my team,” Eddie says, almost without thinking. He winces as soon as the words are out.
Carla tsks and pulls her hand back as she leans forward on her elbows. “You know that’s not true. That’ll never be true.”
Eddie just shrugs, vaguely helpless.
“You’re telling me you didn’t go at all?”
“I talked to Hen on the phone? Bobby said he’d text me with updates,” Eddie offers.
Carla just stares at him.
“I texted Chim, but he hasn’t responded yet.”
Carla looks unimpressed. “You texted him. The man’s got one functioning hand, and you texted him.”
Eddie winces. “I guess I didn’t think of that.”
“You guess,” Carla responds, incredulous.
Eddie swallows. “Look, Chris will probably want to go during visiting hours tomorrow. I’m not making him go to school. Would you… do you mind taking him?”
It’s silent for a moment—a few ticks of the clock. “What’s this about?” Carla asks.
Eddie just shakes his head.
“You think Buck wouldn’t want you there?”
It’s hard to swallow around the knot in his throat. “I know he wouldn’t.”
“Eddie—” Carla starts, but he cuts her off.
“No, I know that. He told me to leave him alone.”
“He said that?”
“Not… not in so many words, but—essentially.” He can hear it, echoing: just—don’t. Don’t, Eddie.
Carla sighs, weary. “I knew you two were arguing but—I thought you were meeting up to talk it out?”
Eddie sniffs, a sharp, pained smile pulling at one side of his mouth. “Yeah. Yeah, we tried.”
Carla doesn’t respond. She just quirks a brow and waits for him to continue.
Eddie blows out a rough exhale. “We just—fought, immediately. I said some stuff I didn’t mean.” He laughs, sardonic and dangerous. “He didn’t even drink the fucking coffee he bought, Carla.”
Eddie grabs the glass of water from the center of the table in one motion and gulps a mouthful down. It doesn’t make him feel better—it just makes his palm uncomfortably wet.
Carla watches him with something dangerously close to pity in her eyes. “Eddie, I know for a fact that boy could never not want you around.”
Eddie sets his glass back down on the table with quiet thump. He closes his eyes—tries to think of something to say, but he just ends up shaking his head back and forth. No. No, you’re wrong.
Carla leans back in her chair. “Okay,” she says, soft. “Okay. I’m assuming you’re making yourself go to work tomorrow?”
Eddie doesn’t respond.
“Yeah, okay. Thought so.” The scrape of a chair pushing back, the sound of Carla standing. “I’ll be here in the morning to pick him up before visiting hours. I’ll stay here with him until you get off.”
“Thanks, Carla,” Eddie replies, rubbing at his temples. His voice is hoarse.
He feels a hand drop onto his shoulder, lightly squeezing. “Talk to Chris, Eddie. And take care of yourself.”
Eddie nods, eyes still closed because he thinks they might be bloodshot and more than a little teary if he were to open them. He keeps them closed as he hears Carla’s footsteps grow faint, after the front door opens and closes, and even after the muffled hum of her car’s engine disappears down the road.
He keeps his eyes closed and presses his fists into them like a child—if I can’t see it, it’s not real. He only eases up when psychedelic spots start to dance in his vision.
Buck got hurt, and you weren’t there, he thinks to himself, just to see where it hurts. Buck’s in a coma, he thinks. Buck might never wake up.
He presses his fists into his closed eyes and hopelessly tries to ignore the taste of salt on his lips.
“Chris?” Eddie knocks on the door. “I made dinner.” There’s no answer. “It turned out fine, I promise.”
Eddie waits, leans in close to the door to see if he can hear Chris moving around, but there’s nothing.
“Chris, buddy? Can I come in?”
“No,” comes the muffled answer.
Eddie sighs and lets his head fall forward until his forehead thunks against the door. “Buddy, I know you’re upset. I am too. But you have to eat something.”
The rustling behind the door, but still no answer.
“Chris, I know you’re sad, but—”
“I’m not.”
Eddie pauses. He squints, and his forehead crinkles and folds where it’s still pressed against the door. “You’re not?”
“No,” comes the answer. “No. I’m mad.”
Eddie blows out a measured exhale. “Okay,” he says, mostly to himself. “Okay.” And Eddie—muscles stiff with the tension he’s held in them nearly all day—reaches for the floor and lowers himself down to sitting against the wall, joints cracking as he does. He tilts his head back, knees pulled up with elbows resting on top of them. He lets his head roll along the wall until he’s tilted towards Christopher’s door. “Alright, buddy. We promised to talk about this stuff. Tell me why you’re mad.”
There’s silence for a little longer, but Eddie doesn’t push. When Chris’ voice comes, it’s louder, closer as it crawls under the closed door. “I’m mad. Because Buck got hurt, and—and you weren’t there.”
Eddie’s breath catches in his throat. The ever-present latent guilt that sits like a rock in his gut starts to churn, boiling over and spitting because—because Eddie wasn’t there, was he? He wasn’t there. He said he would have Buck’s back, be his partner, and he didn’t do any of that. Hasn’t in a while. And now, Buck might—might—
“Dad?” A tentative call through the door, and Eddie blinks. “Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” Eddie breathes on a rough exhale. “Yeah, buddy I’m still here.” He shifts on the floor, lets one leg stretch out across the hallway, his toe nearly touching the opposite wall.
“I told you why—why I left, Chris. And we’ve talked about me going back.” There’s an affirmative noise, which Eddie takes as a good sign, so—he keeps going. “But even though I’m not there right now, the whole team still is. When Buck got hurt, Chimney was there with him. And—and I bet Chimney did everything I would do and then some. Buck’s not… he’s not alone, buddy.”
Eddie sits, barely daring to breathe fully, while he waits for Christopher’s response. He spares a thought for what might be happening in the hospital—he hasn’t gotten any updates from Bobby and is firmly assuming that no news is good news, but he wonders who might still be there, who might be sitting at Buck’s bedside, holding his hand, wonders if—if Buck is alone, now.
“We haven’t done movie night for a while,” comes the eventual reply, and it’s so quiet that Eddie feels like he might have missed it if he wasn’t waiting for it.
“What, uh, what do you mean?” Eddie asks, a breathless sound a few steps to the left of laughter caught in his chest.
“Buck watches me when you’re at work, sometimes,” Chris starts. “But we don’t—we don’t hang out all together, anymore.” Eddie’s working on formulating a response when Chris says, soft and aching, through the door: “I miss it.”
Eddie has to screw up his mouth into a frown for a second while he waits for the press of tears behind his eyes to abate. “I miss it, too.”
“Are you guys fighting?” Chris asks.
Eddie sighs. “I—kind of. Buck and I have… a lot of things we should talk about, but we haven’t been. And that’s making both of us kind of sad, I think.”
There’s a hum of consideration. “Then you guys should talk about it.”
A laugh surprises him, and then it kind of makes him want to cry. “Yeah. I’m working on it, kid.”
He sniffs hard, and an old instinct inside of him screams to suck it up in front of Christopher, but: Eddie’s trying to change. He’s trying so hard, and this is—this is part of it, right? So he lets the grief and sadness and fear come. “I’m worried about Buck,” he says. “I’m worried about him. The doctors say, uh. They say he might not wake up. And that’s really scary. So, I’m worried about him, and I know you are too, and we’re not going to stop worrying. And that’s okay. But—even though we’re sad, and worried, and—scared, even—” Eddie stops to take a deep breath in. “We still gotta eat dinner, okay?”
Telling his kid that he’s scared—that’s—that’s something Eddie’s not sure he’ll ever be comfortable with, no matter how many times people tell him that it’s okay. Because that’s what got him into this mess: pretending with all his heart that he wasn’t scared, wasn’t vibrating out of his own skin with panic every other day. So, he tells Chris he’s scared, and he hopes that won’t make it worse.
The door opens with a click and a whoosh of air, and then Christopher is standing next to him.
“Why are you on the floor?”
Christopher has long since gone to bed, but Eddie’s still awake, staring at where the crown molding meets the blank expanse of his bedroom ceiling.
There is still no text from Bobby—Eddie is still operating under the no news good news agenda—and there are no texts from Hen or Chim or Carla, either. In fact, the only new notification on his phone was a text from his supervisor at the academy that read: Heard what happened at your old station today. Take the rest of the week off. Hope everything turns out okay. Eddie stared at the message for a good five minutes in the hope that he could burn it out of existence through sheer force of will.
Because—he needs a distraction. He does. Tonight, he was able to focus on Christopher, keeping it together for his sake so that there’s some semblance of normalcy. But Carla will be with him all day tomorrow, and Eddie will be alone. And he’ll think about it.
He’ll think about how—maybe if he was there, if he’d fallen with Buck, he might have been able to do something different. Or he’ll think about Maddie at her brother’s bedside, or Hen, or Bobby or Athena or even Chim, and he’ll think about Buck’s limp hand and the pulse ox that’s undoubtably clipped to one of his fingers.
He’ll think about it—what might happen if Buck doesn’t wake up. And then the thinking will come to an abrupt halt, because when it comes to picturing a future without Buck, Eddie finds a gigantic blank spot.
That was something he’d realized somehow, somewhere in-between changing his will and quitting his job: he doesn’t think he has a future without Buck, anymore. Or, at least, he doesn’t think he wants one. He pictures the way he and Christopher would continue, forever, orbiting only each other, pictures the way he would dim and flicker and the way his heart might wither.
He and Buck have been—linked together, for lack of better words, for so long now that Eddie can’t even begin to decipher where it might have started. He also can’t begin to decipher what it means, though he thinks his therapist is starting to figure it out.
So, the thought of a future without Buck—it’s almost inconceivable.
And that makes him think about The Princess Bride, showing it to Buck on a movie night and hiding a smile at the way Buck’s eyes were glassy with emotion by the end of the film. The way Eddie asked Buck to make sure Chris brushed his teeth, and the way Buck turned and said as you wish through a grin so wide it dimpled his cheeks, the way they laughed and laughed and laughed.
He stares at the ceiling and think about it until he drifts off. And when he wakes up, his eyes are red and puffy, and his cheeks are sticky and tight.
Eddie is loath to admit that he takes a page from his how-to-survive-high-school rulebook and pretends to leave the house in the morning.
He puts on his uniform and kisses Chris goodbye when Carla gets there, tells them to say hi to Buck for him and is very proud of himself when that sentence comes out mostly steady and normal. He gets in his truck and drives around the block, picks up a coffee for himself and only comes back to the house when he’s positive they’ve left.
He’s not sure what he’ll do when it comes to the afternoon, but—he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
He changes into sweatpants, settling on the couch and turning on the TV. Channel 8 Action News is on, but no Taylor Kelly reporting. It’s a cruel sort of shock, because Eddie almost entirely forgot she existed. Great. And now he’s thinking about why she’s not reporting this morning: she must be with Buck. He imagines her smiling kindly at Chris over Buck’s still form in a hospital bed, and something awful sours in his gut.
He throws away his coffee, only half-drunk.
He turns off the TV and is starting to despair at the thought of finding something to do all day when his phone buzzes, three times, on the table before him. It doesn’t even occur to him to be ashamed of the way he scrambles for it.
It’s a series of texts—from Chim. I’m in one piece, don’t worry, the first one starts. Hen spilled the beans that you won’t go to the hospital. That’s stupid. Below it, there’s a voice memo recording titled New Recording 41 and Eddie takes a second to baffle at the fact that Chim even opens the voice memo app, let alone has forty other untitled recordings. The final text, innocuously sitting at the bottom of Eddie’s screen, reads: I’m not sending this because I think he won’t wake up. He’s going to. But I think you should hear it anyway.
And as soon as Eddie presses play on the voice memo, he knows what’s happening.
---
“Okay. It’s recording.” Chimney’s voice, thin and tired, an odd echo behind it. All the sounds have that odd echo—the reverb of the smallest sounds bouncing back and forth creating a vacuum that presses in on your ears.
“It’s going?” That’s Buck’s voice, even more thin and more tired, hoarse and strained.
“Yeah,” Chimney responds. “But Buck, you’re gonna be fine.”
A huff of laughter from Buck, then a choked off groan. Heavy breathing for a moment. “Yeah,” Buck says. “Sure. But I’m gonna do it anyway. I don’t trust you not to just forget it all out of spite.”
A surprised chuckle of thick laughter from Chimney. Then silence, heavy and cloying.
What sounds like it might have been an attempt at a deep breath cuts off in a grunt and a punchy exhale. “Fuck. Yeah. So—I’m hurt pretty bad. Dunno if I’m making it out of this one.” A stuttered chuckle. “So, I’m making Chimney record my last words. Say hi, Chim.”
“This is my phone, Buck.”
“Yeah.” A sniff. “Yeah. If I do die, I’m making Chim send this out to everybody like he’s executing my will.”
A snort. “Thanks for that.”
“Yeah. Anyway, uh—I don’t want to die. Obviously, I don’t want to die, but for a while I don’t think I would have not-wanted-to quite as much as I do now, because—uh—it sounds stupid, but I’ve got a lot a good things going right now, if that makes sense.” A shift, a choppy inhale, a measured exhale. “So, uh—Hen—yeah, I’m starting with you—um, you’re… shit, this is hard.”
Chimney laughs. “Yeah, idiot. I don’t think it’s supposed to be easy.”
“Yeah. Anyway—Hen. You’re the first person that I—that I really connected with, here in L.A., and I’m always gonna love you for that, and for everything after. You’re one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, you know that? You’re just—so fucking smart, and strong, and kind, and good, and sometimes when I’m about to make a bad decision I think, y’know, ‘what would Hen say,’ and then—I make the bad decision anyway, but still. Still.” A few moments of breathing, heavy, then a sniffle. “You’re gonna be such a good doctor. And I’m—I’m really sad I might not get to see it.” Buck’s voice is thick with tears, now, and his breathing shudders. A muffled, breathy curse, followed by a low groan.
Chimney cuts in. “Buck, man, are you sure—”
“Chim, I’m fine. Or—not—not fine, but I gotta do this, okay?” Buck’s voice tips up at the end, plaintive, and Chimney sighs. There’s silence—filled with what might be silent conversation—before Buck continues. “Right. Um. Yeah, I guess—Bobby. You, uh, you’re a really great captain, but you’re also a really great friend, and—I think you know this, but I really look up to you, y’know? And I know I’m a dumbass kid most of the time, but—you kind of love me anyway? And I don’t really get it, but I’m really grateful for it. I never really—never really knew it could be like that. And—and you can tell Athena, too, or she can listen to this, I guess, but—Athena too, I know I get on her nerves but she—sticks with me anyway, and I just—I just really love you guys. I really do.” Buck’s voice is thick with emotion now, and there’s a hiccup that cuts through his next breath.
Shuffling, then the loudest groan of pain yet from Buck. Chimney’s voice: “Buck, please, you gotta keep pressure on this—”
“—Chim, stop, Chim, you’re gonna fuck up your hand more, let me—”
A rustle that covers sound for a second before it steadies once again into two heavy sets of breathing, echoing back and forth.
A tight hum that must be Buck groaning through pursed lips before he continues. “Okay. Sorry. Yeah.” Buck inhales, seeming to steel himself. “Chim.”
“No, man—”
“Yeah,” Buck cuts him off. “Yeah. Chim. You’re—we’re not in-laws, really, I know, but you’ve been my brother for so long, y’know? You—I really, really love you dude. Most of the time I don’t know how to tell you that. And—I know we’ve talked about it but I’m sorry, again, I’m sorry for not telling you and I’m sorry for not being there for you and—”
“Buck,” Chimney cuts in, his own voice wobbling. “Buck, don’t even worry about that, okay? I love you, too, man, of course I do.”
“Okay,” Buck responds, small and weak. “Okay.”
The longest silence yet, now, punctuated only by Buck’s breathing, labored and shuddering in his chest.
“Buck, man, we can stop—” Chimney says, real fear coloring his voice, but he cuts himself off.
A few more heavy breaths, then—a sob. “Maddie,” Buck says. “Maddie, I don’t… I’m sorry for leaving, I guess. I’m sorry I’m not gonna be there, I’m sorry I’m not gonna see Jee again or you or—I’m sorry—” Another sob, another hiccup, another rustle and a punched-out breath that sounds like a grunt. “I wouldn’t be—me, at all, if it wasn’t for you, and—you always loved me and—I’m so proud of you, y’know? I hope you’re proud of you, too. You should be. And you’re gonna be okay, yeah? I’m really glad you and Chim have got each other, and—you guys are gonna be okay.” More silence, then, so quiet it’s almost inaudible: “I’m really gonna miss you.”
Silence, and breathing, and echoing, and tension in the air like a knife-edge.
“Eddie,” Buck says, and then he stops. He sighs. “I broke up with Taylor.”
A bark of loud laughter from Chimney.
“Hey, you don’t get to—to—laugh at my big confession, okay?”
“Okay, okay,” Chimney chuckles, trailing off. “Sorry, continue.”
“Yeah. Um… I broke up with Taylor. I haven’t told you that yet ‘cause I’ve been—so mad at you for no good reason and it f-feels stupid, now. I’m sorry for—sorry for the stuff I said, and ignoring you, and—I’ve really been being a bad friend and now—” a hiccup, “—I’m never gonna get to fix it. And I’m sorry.” Buck’s breathing is audibly picking up, heaving with efforts to not break down. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, man. You are. And—not being with you these past few months—not even not being your—your partner, but not being around you? That’s been, just totally… unbearable. I wanna be around you all the time.”
A choked off sob, and then silence—Buck taking moments to compose himself. He exhales, and it truly sounds like a death rattle as it goes.
Buck continues in a whisper, now: “Tell—tell Chris that—I love him. And I’m sorry.” A sniffle. “Eddie,” Buck says. “Eddie, I’m… you’re—” he cuts himself off. “Thanks for—trusting me with him. And you. You two are…” A quiet, short inhale, and the next words are nearly inaudible: “…I love you guys so much I don’t know what to do with it all.”
Silence, echoes. Breathing. Silence. It stretches on.
“Buck?” Chim asks. A scuffle—Chimney’s voice louder and closer: “Shit, shit! Buck, c’mon, wake up.”
Silence.
“Buck,” Chimney begs. Then— “Shit.”
And the recording stops.
---
The red of Eddie’s fingers like a vice around his phone has long leeched out, leaving his hand bone-white with pressure.
It takes one, two, three tries to muster enough focus to let his fingers uncurl, his joints relax. He brings the hand up to his face—wet, of course, tear tracks still running fresh down his cheeks, but he can’t bring himself to wipe them away.
Instead, Eddie lets his head drop down, rolling through his spine one vertebra at a time, until he's hunched over, head between his knees.
And he lets himself cry. He lets himself sob, loud and long, he lets himself ache with the things he cannot put words to. He lets it course through his body all the way to the tips of his fingers where they’re curled against his heart, feeling it beat even through his grief.
And then—he gets in his car and drives.
“Eddie?”
He whirls around in the waiting room and is met with the face of Maddie Buckley, hallway doors swinging shut behind her.
“Hi,” he says.
She smiles, sad. “Hi.”
Eddie, suddenly self-conscious, swings his arms at his sides until he realizes that must look stupid and he stops, clasping them behind his back. Then that feels too much like parade rest, so he drops them and stuffs them in his pocket.
“Are you—headed out, then?” he asks.
Maddie huffs a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, Chim’s home with Jee but I don’t—I feel weird leaving them both alone.”
Eddie just nods.
“Is that weird?” she continues. “It feels weird. That I was so scared to be responsible for Jee—and I still am, but now Chimney’s hurt so I have to just suck it up.”
Eddie shrugs.
Maddie laughs, awkward. “Sorry. I guess I’m thinking about a lot—right now.”
“No, no that—that makes sense,” Eddie says, fumbling.
“Were you looking for Chris?” Maddie asks. “He and Carla left a little bit ago. I think they were gonna go get ice cream.”
Eddie wasn’t looking for Chris, but he says anyway: “Yeah. Yeah, thanks.”
They stand in silence, for a moment, an impasse. Then, they both start talking at the same time:
“You know—” says Maddie.
“Actually—” says Eddie.
They both stop, and they both laugh.
“We’re a mess, huh?” Maddie jokes, and Eddie feels no heat behind it.
He chuckles and gestures to the chairs. “Want to sit?”
They end up in a pair of uncomfortable chairs, matching paper cups of shitty coffee in hand.
“I’m actually not here for Chris,” Eddie says. “I was gonna—I felt like I should visit him. Buck.”
Maddie nods. “I thought it was weird that you hadn’t been by, yet.”
“Yeah, I was—working through some stuff.”
Maddie grimaces. “Feels like there’s always something to work through.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says. “Yeah. I think that might just be how it works.”
They sip their respective coffees, for a moment.
“I’m really glad he’s got you,” Maddie says. “You guys are—you guys are good for each other, I think.”
Eddie fights a lump in his throat. “He’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me,” he whispers.
He feels Maddie looking at him and he fixes his gaze on his coffee. “Room 37-B,” she offers. “I don’t want him to wake up alone.” Maddie stands and drops her cup in the trash with a little scrunch of her nose that reminds Eddie of Buck so violently that he feels tears prick in the corner of his eyes. “I’ll see you soon, okay?” she says.
Eddie nods, and then she’s gone.
Room 37-B is small, for a hospital room, and dim—the western-facing window isn’t getting direct light yet, and the overheard fluorescents are off. Buck, tucked into the bed in the center of the room, looks, for all intents and purposes, like he’s simply asleep. Which he is, Eddie supposes.
He doesn’t look okay, necessarily—his face is pale and sunken, a big swath of white gauze is sticking out from where the blanket is tucked around his waist, adhesive ends of leads stuck onto his chest, a bandage wrapped around his temple.
There are three chairs already pulled up next to either side of the bed, so Eddie picks the one on Buck’s left, closest to his head.
Christopher, last night over the dinner table, was very interested in whether or not coma patients could hear people talking to them. Eddie dutifully googled it and received the very unsatisfying answer of maybe. Maybe. Eddie is sick and tired of maybes.
“Buck,” he says, and then he stops. “Evan,” he tries, just to see if it’ll get a reaction. Nothing.
The heart monitor beeps, slow and quiet, the steady hiss of the nasal cannula barely audible.
“I’m sure Chris told you this,” Eddie starts. “But you have to wake up. You have to. I’m not taking no for an answer.” There’s nothing, not even a twitch. Eddie lays a hand over Buck’s. “You’re going to wake up. And then we’re going to talk about everything, and we’re going to be okay. Because we have to be.”
The room is private and quiet and the door is closed, but even if none of that were true, Eddie doesn’t think he’d be able to help himself—he rests his other hand over the center of Buck’s chest, letting it rise with the steady, even inhale. His heart thumps underneath Eddie’s palm. Buck exhales. Another thump.
This, Eddie is certain of: between one breath and the next, the heart will keep beating. It has to.
Eddie lets his head dip down, and he fits Buck’s hand more firmly into the grip of his own. “You’re going to wake up. That’s all I’m gonna say.”
Eddie must have drifted off: his head is pillowed on the edge of the bed, and both his hands have migrated down to hold Buck’s own.
He wonders, for a moment, what woke him. The room is still dim, so it’s not too late in the afternoon. His phone is quiet in his back pocket and his neck doesn’t hurt too bad, so he can’t have been asleep for that long.
He’s still puzzling when he feels it—a twitch between his hands.
Eddie gasps. “Buck?” He snaps his head up and is met with two blue eyes blinking blearily above him.
“… Eds?” comes the hoarse reply.
“Buck,” Eddie breathes, and he once again can’t help himself: he surges up, reminding himself at the last minute to be gentle. One hand stays tangled in Buck’s, the other comes up to curl behind his neck. Eddie’s not sure if Buck can handle a full-on hug right now, so he leans in until their foreheads are touching, as close as they can be without aggravating Buck’s side. “Buck,” he says again, just because he can.
“You’re here?” Buck breathes, a little confused.
“Of course I’m here,” Eddie says, pulling back a little so he can look Buck in the eye. “You’re—I’m—of course I’m here, okay?” His hand slides up so that it’s framing the shell of Buck’s ear, thumb resting on the edge of his cheekbone.
Buck nods, still slow and muddled.
“Shit,” Eddie says. “Shit, I need to—call—” he starts scrabbling around for the nurse call button, but a weak little squeeze of their joined hands makes him pause.
“Not mad?” Buck whispers.
Eddie hiccups a laugh. “No, I’m—no, Buck, I’m not mad.” He props his elbows up on the bed, cradling Buck’s hand between his own. He drops his head. “Fuck, I’m so glad you’re okay.” Without thinking, he drops a kiss onto Buck’s curled fingers.
Buck blinks. “Eddie…” His mouth is open, and he looks a little awed, so Eddie does it again. “Eddie,” Buck repeats.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, and everything they’re saying means nothing, but it means a little bit of everything, too. “Yeah,” he repeats.
Buck smiles. “Missed you.”
Eddie tries his very best not to cry. “I missed you too.” Then the bandage, and the nasal cannula and the hospital of it all registers, and Eddie lets their hands fall back to the bed. “Okay, I need to—I’m gonna call the nurse and they’re gonna make sure you’re okay.”
Buck nods. Eddie stands to reach the call button at the head of the bed, and on his way back down, he presses his forehead against Buck’s one more time.
“I’m really glad you’re okay.”
Later, outside the room bustling with doctors and nurses that Eddie got kicked out of, he opens up the 118 + extended fam group chat and sends a single text: he’s awake!
He ignores most of the replies, but a message from Hen in their private thread catches his eye: glad you finally made it out of the parking lot.