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Every hospital has a room like this one.
Every department has a corner, tucked away behind an undusted potted plant. A mid-range carpet, stained wet with things no-one names. Curtains never less than half closed. A table with a Bible. Well worn and pointless.
Bobby sits in the chair beside it, rosary creaking between calloused fingers. Athena beside him, weapon still tucked to her side, expression like she might shoot any god that doesn't answer on sight.
Somewhere down the corridor Maddie has her face pressed to the glass of ICU, her breath creating little rain clouds against it. Chim's probably there too, still dripping his personal storm onto the tiles, waiting for a break in the clouds.
Quite poetic of him, really.
You writing soliloquies now?
And he almost answers, that's the crazy thing. Almost says, No. No, just –
Just the room is full of static, still, like a radio left running, and he thinks – he thinks he hears the laughter in it.
Don't make my eulogy boring, man.
He covers his ears, squeezes his eyes shut. Wills the ringing to stop, stop because he said talk to me but not, never –
Eddie?
He grits his teeth, but the words bubble up anyway, spill out like blood from between split lips and splatter, dark and grim, against the carpet.
"Shut the fuck up. Shut the –"
"Eddie?" Hen sounds – worse, somehow. "Eddie, are you okay?"
"The –" He breathes. It hurts. Opens his eyes and it hurts more. "Can't you hear it?"
Hen's eyes, all round and red, look up at him. She's kneeling on the carpet and he almost tells her he's sorry, for the mess. For taking the chair when she might need it. Is he in the chair? Or is he the stain on the carpet?
Jesus, Eddie. Really?
He just might be mad. He tells her as much.
"I can hear –" Static. Breathing. The edge of his name petering out as Hen's eyebrows rise. "Something."
"Tinnitus," Hen says, "from the strike. Are you sure we can't get you looked at?"
"Not tinnitus." He shakes his head. Bells ring, distant and alarming. His blood howls. "Nothing, it's –"
---
Buck. It's Buck.
And Eddie's had a nervous breakdown or three in his time, is intimately acquainted with the feeling of his mind running away from him, the adrenaline that makes his hands shake when he tries to catch up, the sick, roiling unsteadiness of his feet.
They don't compare. Nothing compares to this.
(Nothing but a yellow dress and a sunny day and the way the air tastes in resus when everyone has left but the one who never will, sour and sharp like ozone and bile, bloodstains bright as lipstick on slack lips.)
Bobby's sitting with Buck, has been ever since they peeled Maddie away, sometimes with Athena but mostly alone.
One at a time, the nurses said. But Athena has always been a law unto herself.
She told Eddie to go home, earlier. Get some rest. Told him, you're no good to him like this as though that wasn't the problem, as though Eddie's abject failure to do anything isn't the thing burning him up inside until he feels like stomach acid might have melted his spine.
It would explain why he can't quite stand up. Why he's pressed his fingers into the prints Maddie left behind and is just – waiting.
For Buck to wake up. For the world to end. For Bobby to put down that fucking rosary.
It doesn't explain the face he sees beside his in the glass. The upturned mouth. The impossible brightness of those eyes.
He blinks, and it's gone, and he's going mad. Completely, utterly mad. But, God. God he wants it back.
---
The chapel smells of hyacinths.
Not real ones, or, Eddie wouldn't know, couldn't identify a real one with a gun to his head, but he knows the smell. Heavy florals with a chemical aftertaste. The sort of disinfectant you use to cover something up, a blanket of fakery that only takes what it's hiding and somehow makes it worse.
Eddie remembers the first time he'd done this, last time, only time. His Abuelo lying six feet away in a white casket, eyes glued shut, jaw wired. His hands had been shaking so hard and he'd been – furious. Furious with himself. God. Shannon, who watched him with big, sad eyes, but never took a step toward him.
There's no taper to light a candle here, only a bic lighter, yellow and short on gas. The shadow at the edge of his vision flickers and sways. He wants to believe it's a step toward him. He wants never to find out.
I don't know if I believe in God. Do you think I should? To be on the safe side? O-or is that not, I mean do you think he knows? That you're pretending?
Eddie's hands shake, and shake, and shake.
---
The second time Buck dies, Eddie's not there to see it.
Not even in that godforsaken room. Not even in the corridor.
No. He's asleep. Not even dreaming. Just – nowhere.
Wakes up to three missed calls. Chim, Hen, Bobby, and a text – Athena.
Things took a turn. The nurses say you can bring Christopher.
---
He can't quite remember now what he told Christopher about the day his mother died. Not the moment he'd broken his son's heart, he's sure of that, has the sound he made carved into his heart, etched into every one of his ribs, but the rest – it's fuzzy. Memories skewed by time and grief and anger. An accident, he thinks he'd said. She loved you, so much.
I'm leaving again.
Chris approaches the bed like he's approaching a wild animal; silent, his crutches left in The Room while they were waiting for the nurses to be ready for them.
I'm so sorry.
Eddie doesn't think he'd told him that part. The part where she was always going to leave, regardless. How everyone, eventually, does.
You're starting to sound like me.
Yeah, well. That's madness for you, he thinks. The lines get blurry.
There are fewer wires now, but he's not naïve enough to think that's a good sign. They don't let children into the ICU to visit the soon to be cured, only to say –
A broken, tiny sound. Too small, too childlike to come from his son and yet, and yet.
"You promised, you promised."
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so –
The third time Buck dies, Eddie thinks maybe he does too.
---
There's a DNR order hanging at the end of the bed, signed by a doctor Eddie's never seen, and Buck's hand is purple-pale in his.
Hen says it's from the lightning. That they're burns, under the skin, from where Buck held the whole sky in his hands for just a moment.
Eddie thinks they're just already dead, and waiting for the rest of Buck to catch up.
He's held plenty of dead hands, as it happens. Part of the territory. Cold and stiff, or still bloodwarm. Lax, like Buck's are now, the blood pooling with gravity into bruises that will never heal.
He holds one up to his face, the left one, because it's the one free of wires and not because – not because. But he counts those pale fingers over and over. Bends them towards his palm, holds them, for a second, against his face. Wills some of his own warmth into them and hates himself for the way his mouth aches to kiss them.
You could, you know. Eddie, you could.
And that's the thing about going mad. You start to believe things you shouldn't. Start listening to the whispers in your ears and the screaming desperation of your heart. Lift that hand again, one more time. Splay the fingers between your thumbs and press a kiss – dry, quick, your whole soul behind it – to a fading lifeline.
Look up, like the stories are true. Like he'll be looking back and they aren't they aren't true and you knew it you knew it you –
---
Eddie sleeps in his truck, too afraid to go home, too watched to stay, and it's been raining when the knock comes. Chim's face at the window, dripping wet, but the storm is long past.
And through the window, the fog of exhaustion, the complete, constant, neverending terror –
"He's awake! Eddie! Eddie he's –"
And Eddie lays his head on the steering wheel, swallows the shreds of his sanity, and cries, and cries, and cries.