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“Okay,” Buck says, his voice pale like his hand is pale where it rests in Eddie’s. “You gotta tell me.”
Eddie looks up at him, trying not to react to the full view of limp curls and eye bags and the frightening sheen of sweat, the oxygen mask. “Tell you what?”
“Tell me-” Buck coughs, and Eddie tenses. After a moment Buck breathes again. The air crackles into his lungs, crackles back out of them. He frowns like he was annoyed at the interruption, focuses back on Eddie. “What’s got your goat?”
Eddie can’t help the laugh that stutters out of him. “What’s got my goat?”
Buck shrugs, smiling under the plastic. “You seem pretty goatless, is all.” His thumb rubs at the back of Eddie’s hand. “What’s bothering you?”
Eddie shrugs as if to say everything, everything about all of this, but Buck stares him down until he sighs and blinks away towards the wall. “I’m sorry.”
“What do you possibly have to be sorry for?” Eddie laughs again, more of a scoff this time. “Buck, I- this is my-”
Buck’s grip is so weak. “S’not your fault.”
“Buck. If- if I’d just been faster-”
“Eddie.” Buck somehow manages to sound both kind and exasperated. Eddie looks at him again. It’s always so bright in hospital rooms, his blue eyes shine. “I’d have drowned in that fucking-”
“I-”
“Eddie.” They both breathe. Crackle, crackle. Eddie wipes his eyes. Buck squeezes his hand again. “I’d be dead without you.”
Eddie’s lungs hurt for a moment, sympathetic. “It doesn’t feel like enough.”
“Baby-”
The door opens, a nurse comes in. Eddie wipes his eyes again and makes himself let go and step back so she can check everything she needs to check. Buck lets himself be maneuvered around, poked and prodded. Eddie tries to remember when the last check in was and if the interval between them is growing or shrinking, and then giving up because time has stopped making any sense in the few days after the bridge rescue and he doesn’t know which option would mean good news anyway. When the nurse is finished she nods at them both and doesn’t linger. Eddie tries not to read anything into that, either. Hospitals are busy. She just has other patients to see.
Buck looks exhausted in the aftermath, just that small a point of movement wiping out what little reserves he had. He’s slumped back into his pillow, face miserable and ill. He tries to smile as Eddie sits back down and takes his hand again, but the trying is dreadful and obvious.
“Buck,” Eddie near-whispers, feeling helpless. “What can I do?”
Buck — crackle in, crackle out — tries to scoot himself over on the bed. “C-can you- can you just-” his arm shakes so badly where it’s braced on the bed and he looks from it to Eddie, unhappy. “I’m cold. I’m uncomfortable. I-I-I just want you to hold me.”
Eddie glances back towards the door. “They won’t like this,” he says, but of course climbs into the bed anyway. The shivering, the new boniness, the struggle for oxygen- it’s all even more obvious, pressed together like this, but Buck relaxes into his arms immediately and Eddie is so glad to hold him there. The doctors have thrown out so many possibilities about the future, tossing around frightening words like “recurrent” and “progressive” and “managing symptoms” and, of course, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see. If he closes his eyes and ignores the beep of machines and ignores the sudden noise of something going wrong for somebody else down the hall, he can pretend they’re at home. He bends to kiss the top of Buck’s head. “Better?”
Buck nods, movements slow. The mask digs into Eddie’s chest, but that’s okay. “I love you,” he says, “Please stop beating yourself up.”
Eddie kisses his curls again. “I love you. I’ll try.” Buck curls in even closer, his breathing never quite evening out even as he drops into sleep. Eddie keeps holding on, as long as he possibly can.