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The nightmares don’t start right away.
Last time, they did. After Afghanistan, after the helicopter – Eddie was waking up from nightmares as soon as he was lucid enough to dream at all.
A couple more nightmares to add to the pile – yeah. That was an understatement.
Pretty much everyone had them, though, in the field hospital. It wasn’t uncommon to hear someone wake up screaming. It feels dystopian as hell, but Eddie does what he always does: he heals. He picks himself up, he dusts himself off, and he moves on.
The nightmares, unfortunately, do not. By the time he finally makes it home, he’s still waking up gasping pretty much every night. He usually manages to keep the screams from escaping by then. Trapping them behind his teeth. Where they can’t escape. He’s got a kid in the house after all, the one he’s watched grow up through video screens. He’s already an absent father, he doesn’t need to be traumatizing the kid, too. He’s supposed to be healed. He’s supposed to have this under control.
Shannon is a heavy sleeper. She doesn’t ever wake up when he does – just lies at his side, breathing into the pillow as he bolts upright, heart pounding, wrist aching, sweat soaking his thin sleep T-shirts. He can’t blame her. After all, he never shakes her awake, no matter how insane he feels, hyperventilating in the darkness of his own home. He’s safe here, he reminds himself, splashing water on his face in their tiny bathroom, in the dark. He’s supposed to be safe here.
He’s supposed to be healed.
His first nightmare-free night comes on the night that Shannon up and leaves him, like some kind of cruel irony. Or maybe his body registers the weight of Christopher’s tiny little body in the bed next to him, and gives him a fucking break.
For a while after that, he’s too exhausted to dream much at all. Life deals him a reprieve, even as the rest of his life is falling the fuck apart. It’s good – Christopher sneaks into his bed several nights a week, the poor kid clingier than usual, abandoned first by one parent and then the other. Every time Eddie wakes up to Christopher cuddling up to his chest, nightmare free, he thanks a God he’s not sure he even believes in. He works himself to the bone, works himself to exhaustion, and when he shuts his eyes at night it’s to a blissful silence. And that’s when Eddie discovers his favourite strategy for dealing with hard shit: keep fucking busy. The nightmares do keep cropping up every now and again, as time goes on: New Years Eve, usually, or after really hard calls. But Eddie’s pretty sure that’s normal. He doesn’t know a single soldier that never has nightmares. Could be worse.
And then he gets gunned down in the middle of an LA intersection.
But the nightmares don’t come back right away.
***
Eddie has recovered from bullet wounds before. That’s what he reminds everyone every time he gets asked how he’s doing: Last time, I had three. Shoulder is a piece of cake in comparison. He doesn’t want anyone fussing over him. I’ve got it handled, he tells Ana when she asks if he needs her to stay over; I’ve got it handled, he tells Abuela when she drops off heaping tupperware containers of every food under the sun; I’ve got it handled, he tells Carla when she asks if he needs her to stay late.
I’ve got it handled, he tells Buck, again and again and again. Buck is a terrible listener, though, stubborn enough to muscle his way into Eddie and Chris’s space, making way too many of their meals and crashing on the couch more often than not. Chris is thrilled, of course. Eddie likes Buck in his home, of course he does, it’s just that sometimes he catches sight of Buck in his peripheral vision and he sees him covered in blood. It disappears when Eddie looks at him straight on, but he can’t escape the image.
(He hasn’t seen Buck wear white once since Eddie’s eyes were dragging themselves closed in that firetruck.)
“Do you want to talk about it?” Buck had asked exactly once, when Eddie had been restless and uncomfortable and unable to sleep. They’d been sitting at Eddie’s kitchen table, mugs of rapidly cooling tea between them, and Eddie hadn’t been in the mood to talk. He hadn’t been in the mood for anything – he’d been in the mood to sleep, but his stupid body wouldn’t comply. It felt like his body was fighting him on everything, these days: sleep was just the latest warzone.
“No,” he’d said shortly.
There was nothing to talk about. A bullet ripped through Eddie’s skin, but he’d survived it. Again. He barely remembered the event itself, didn’t even think about it anymore. He was picking up and moving on – if only his body would do the same.
(Eddie forcibly ignores the look on Buck’s face when he asks the question, broken open and vulnerable. Ignores the way that Buck clearly wants Eddie’s answer to be yes. But it’s not easy.)
He heals. Of course he heals – his body always does. (Even the wrist that was torn up by a bullet barely bothers him any more. Only aches in the cold weather. Lucky he lives in California.) This wound is painless, in comparison. Eddie doesn’t wake up screaming on his first day back at the 118 – he gets up like normal, eats a piece of welcome-back cake, falls into his place in the firehouse like nothing ever happened.
Life moves on. What’s that saying? Time heals all wounds. He’s healed – everything is fine.
Except that the more time that passes, the more Eddie’s grip on himself breaks.
It starts small. He’s back at work, shoulder to shoulder with Buck like nothing ever happened. Ignoring the way that Buck flinches when he walks out into an open space. It’s fine.
And then his hands start shaking.
It’s barely noticeable: a tiny tremor when he’s rinsing lettuce for their dinner, fingers trembling against the leaves. “Everything okay?” Ana asks, when she notices him staring down at his hands, frozen at the sink.
“Yeah,” he tells her. Clears his throat roughly. “Yeah, I’m fine.” There was a crazy call at work today, he reasons to himself. It’s just some leftover adrenaline.
Except that it happens again.
He’s not even doing anything the second time, just watching Chris make his way into school in the morning. And his fucking hands start shaking. It’s a disconcerting feeling, he thinks, as he sits in the driver’s seat of his truck, watching his hands tremble against the steering wheel. It’s disconcerting, watching his body rebel against his control. It passes, though. Apparently it always does. Eddie gets home without crashing into anything, and he forces his hands still by the time he makes it in through the front door. And if he feels a little shaky for the rest of the day, well, that’s easy enough to ignore.
Eddie’s not sure what the hell is wrong with him, but he’s sure it’s just a temporary thing. Maybe some leftover nerve damage from the shooting? It seems unlikely. Maybe he’ll ask Hen.
(He doesn’t. He puts it away and moves on with his life.)
And then Ana reaches for his hand, one morning, as they walk to her favourite breakfast place, and his hands start shaking right in front of his eyes. (“Just cold,” he assures her, under the heat of her questioning gaze. They both ignore the blazing sunshine above their heads.)
He rationalizes that one only in retrospect. After he has a panic attack in a suit shop. After he tells Buck that he’s going to stick it out and his best friend looks at him like he doesn’t know who he is. After he breaks up with his girlfriend in his kitchen.
It must have been Ana. The tremors, the panic attack, the tightness in his chest that never seems to leave: it must have been Ana. He feels better, once she’s gone – like he can breathe again. He doesn’t have to grit his teeth against a shudder when she goes to touch him. (He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. Ana is a perfectly lovely woman. He’d liked her, he really had. But he’d had to force himself to touch her.)
But he puts that away, too. She’s gone, now. It wasn’t a good fit. Next time, with the next woman, he’ll try harder. If there even is a next time.
He’s fine. The panic attacks have stopped, right? He got rid of the root cause, and now his body is back under his control. Chimney is gone, because Maddie is gone, and the last time he and Buck hung out one-on-one, Buck had a shiner blooming under one of those pretty blue eyes. But everything is fine. Eddie picks up the medic slack at the station, and Chimney is going to come back. Maddie is not his sister, and she’s also going to come back. Buck has Taylor, now – it’s only natural that he isn’t banging on Eddie’s door to watch Inside Out with Chris for the 30th time.
Everything is fine.
Chris is doing well at school, and he was barely torn up about the breakup at all. Eddie’s mom has stopped harassing him about coming to Texas for Christmas. His shoulder barely even aches anymore. These are all wins. He should be happy.
There’s nothing wrong.
And then Eddie has to watch a gun being pointed at Buck’s face, and the nightmares come back with a fucking vengeance.
They’re all the same. Well – that’s not entirely true. But they’re all variations on the same theme, just in different settings: Buck’s terrified face, covered in blood. Only this time, the blood isn’t Eddie’s.
Sometimes the shot rings out over the air and Eddie is staring at Buck’s face, a few feet away, watching red bloom across that pristine white shirt. And then Buck falls.
Sometimes, Eddie is shot by a sniper on a random LA street corner, but he has to watch from the pavement as Buck is gunned down, just out of reach, blood pooling out beneath his white shirt, stretching towards where Eddie is lying, frozen, unable to get to him.
Sometimes, he’s back in Afghanistan, in the sand and the dust, helicopter down, shots ringing out over his head. It’s the old nightmare, from his first time around, but now Buck is there. Bleeding. Gasping for air. Eddie gets his hands on him, trying to drag him to safety. Eddie has to feel his heartbeat slow under his hands.
Eddie wakes up every night with screams trapped behind his teeth, stumbling to the bathroom in a haze to start scrubbing away invisible traces of Buck’s blood from his pristine, clean hands.
***
He quits his job.
The nightmares don’t stop.
Sometimes he wonders if they ever will. Whatever it is that’s wrong with him, he’s not sure it’s fixable. His body heals, like it always does, but something in his brain has gone wrong. Maybe it’s always been wrong. And he’s not sure there’s a way to get it back.
But at least Christopher isn’t worried about him dying anymore. That’s a win. He should be happy.
There shouldn’t be anything wrong.