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It was storming the night Evan died. It was the storm that killed him, in fact. Sure he had been brought back shortly after, but that alone would have been enough of a reason for storms to bother him.
For a while, they actually did. They don’t anymore.
If anything, now they just make him sad. They remind him of the things he had gained — and the things he had lost — in his “other life”. Mostly… they make him think about Daniel.
He wonders if it was storming the day Daniel died. It would seem cruel for the universe to have let the sun shine on the day a family’s life had fallen into ruins. But he never asks, and he never will.
Tonight the storm is bothering him. Between each flash of lightning and clap of thunder it seems the winds are picking up more and more. The roads are quickly flooding and they are littered with fallen branches and downed power lines; and the (finally) sleeping child in his arms has a fever that just won’t break.
“What do you want to do?” Tommy asks. He comes up behind Buck and wraps his arms around them both. Buck doesn’t know what to do; he presses his lips to sweat soaked curls, the skin far too hot against them.
“I don’t know,” he says softly.
They don’t warn you about this part of parenting; when your child is sick and there’s nothing you can do except make a decision and hope it’s the right one. He thinks of Daniel and for the first time he has a glimpse — albeit inadequate in severity, and for that he is grateful — of how his parents felt trying to decide what was best for him.
They decide to wait out this storm a little longer. They’ll try one more round of cool rags, Tylenol and pedialyte before calling an ambulance to get them to the ER safely if it fails at lowering the fever. They take turns rocking and singing, trying to calm the weak distressed whimpering, and Buck tries to push away the unimaginable; what can happen when a fever gets too high.
He holds his child as tight as he can, and realizes he would do just about anything to make this all better. Tommy returns with a cooled rag, another dose of medicine and a sippy cup with pedialyte; soon the gasping breathing begins to even out.
Outside the storm doesn’t let up, but inside the fever finally does. Buck thinks of Daniel; he thinks of his parents and has pity… because they have gone through the unimaginable; something he and Tommy can now go back to not even wanting to imagine, and for that he is grateful.