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Everything was happening at lightning speed, for lack of a better word– so fast that Eddie doesn’t even know how he ended up with his back flat on the ground, rain pelting down on him, as his eyes stung from the blinding flash of light that had cracked through the sky. There’s a charred smell in the air that burns through Eddie’s nostrils as he sits up, his tailbone aching from where he had slammed into the cement after being thrown through the air.
With the disorienting wash of light slowly faded from the edges of his vision, Eddie grapples his limbs into motion as he drags himself up off of the ground, swivelling his head in an attempt to get his bearings. He leans forward, wrapping a hand around the metal rod at the base of the ladder truck, partly to steady himself as his body still aches from the fall, and partly to continue at the task at hand– the fire isn’t going to put itself out, after all.
He flexes his arm, preparing to haul himself up onto the rig again, but his eyes land at the top of the ladder before he can step up. His eyes zero in, through the haze of smoke and heavy rain, on the figure dangling from the line. Eddie freezes for one excruciating moment, and he thinks that maybe he yells something, but he can’t be sure what it is. Then he’s moving again. He’s going up the ladder in a way that would have gotten him chewed out in the academy, three steps at a time, pulling himself up with his arms as fast as he can, and in one quick blur he’s at the top.
He looks down over the end of the ladder, seeing the line pulled taut with the weight of Buck’s body, and the only thing he can think to do is pull. He curls each finger around the line, tensing and locking them into place, and he pulls. The muscles in his shoulders and his arms are burning, and he should have known that logically he wouldn’t be able to lift Buck with just his upper body’s strength. Buck, who is always so full of life, such a large presence in any room— Eddie can obviously not lift him like this.
He grinds his heels into the metal platform beneath him, tightening his grip as he tries to pitch his hips forwards. His back strains against the motion, and even using the torque of his entire bodyweight— lifting with his back like he’s been warned time and time again to never do— he can’t get the rope to budge.
He heaves a breath out from deep in his chest, barking out some strained instruction down to whoever is running things below him, something that he hopes is the right call, and Buck’s body starts to descend slowly to the ground. Eddie moves his hands, one after the other, feeding the line down carefully as the end drops closer and closer to where he can see Bobby waiting with open arms. His assistance isn’t doing much, he knows that, but he can’t just stand there and watch the greatest thing he’s ever known drop to the ground.
The line finally goes loose, Eddie watching as Bobby grabs onto Buck’s motionless body and unclips his harness, and only then does he turn away. He turns and he practically launches himself down the slant of the ladder. He’s honestly surprised that his LAFD-issued boots don’t slip against the wet metal even once on the way down.
When he reaches the bottom, Bobby has already dropped Buck onto the gurney as Hen and Chimney yell their plan of action back and forth, and Eddie can’t even tell if he’s breathing. He takes a few steps, his feet dragging against the puddles on the concrete, and he catches his first clear glimpse of Buck’s face. Buck looks too peaceful, not a single uptick of the eyebrow or worry line creasing the softness of his face. It’s an expressionless, blank look that Eddie has never seen Buck have, not even in sleep.
They say that one of the warning signs before you die is a crushing sense of dread. Eddie has heard of the phenomenon before, and of course there’s no set science behind it, but he has also witnessed it first hand. Heart attack victims in the back of an ambulance, fatally injured soldiers on the battlefield— Eddie has watched as some mysterious, crippling, dark dread curled around them before their final moments.
Now, standing in heavy, freezing rain, just a few feet away from the love of his life, Eddie can’t help but wonder if that feeling can translate to your other half. He hopes to God, to the universe, to whatever force is out there and listening, that that’s not the case. Because Eddie is watching as Hen and Chimney maneuver Buck’s lifeless limbs around the gurney, and all he feels is dread. From the top of his skull to the balls of his feet, there are cold spikes of dread panging through him, and he refuses to believe that it means what he fears it might.
Hen yells for Chimney to hand her the stickers for the EKG machine, ripping the velcro on Buck’s turnouts apart, and she stops in her tracks. Buck’s chest is bare now, and there are vicious lines of red carving across his pale skin, all the way from the top of his neck to the bottom of his ribs. And sitting on top of the rain-wet, splotchy red skin are army-issue dog tags.
Eddie feels that same sense of dread that’s been piercing through him, and he realizes now that he’s been feeling it since the flash of blinding white and the image that’s burned into his brain of Buck hanging from the ladder. His eyes catch on the silver metal, the engravings that he remembers running his thumb over countless times. Last name, first initial, blood type, all of the standard military information. His one true identifier while he was in the army– the final tie to his life, his loved ones, in the likely event that he would never make it home.
But he had made it home, and now his dog tags are hung around Buck’s neck like an omen, like some kind of curse. And the fear that he had felt in the desert all those years ago, crumpled against a rock as he bled out and faded from consciousness to the sound of gunfire, was nothing compared to the fear he feels now. Because now, looking at Buck’s chest that has no rise and no fall, Eddie can’t help but feel like he transferred his own inevitable, violently twisted fate to the best person he has ever found for himself.
Hen and Chimney look up from Buck’s motionless body, their hands frozen and hovered over where they should be working– God, why aren’t they working? Eddie takes another step forward, resolute to go do something seeing as neither Hen or Chimney are. He looks up from Buck’s chest for the first time since it was laid bare, and he finds the two paramedics with wide eyes, looking back and forth between himself and the silver chain on Buck’s neck.
It takes a split second for every single question in their eyes to echo through Eddie’s head, and then Eddie is finally closing the distance between himself and Buck. He’s nodding, though he’s not sure why– maybe it’s in response to the unspoken questions, maybe it’s just giving him something to do as he walks the few final feet to the gurney.
Before he even knows it, Eddie is speaking. “Yes. Yes, okay? Yes, we’re…”
His voice is coming out tight and loud, like something is squeezing in his chest and trying to make its way out of his closing throat. He’s reaching out, trying to grab at whatever is in reach, trying to find some point of contact so that the last time he could remember touching Buck wouldn’t be the last time. Bobby’s hands are on his shoulders, wrapping around him in a way that’s meant less for comfort and more to hold him back from collapsing forwards onto the gurney.
“Why aren’t you doing anything?” he shouts through the rain, his gaze barreling into Hen and Chimney as his body works instinctively to worm out of Bobby’s hold. “Let me do something, why aren’t you doing anything?”
That does, at least, seem to startle Hen and Chimney out of their daze of realization, and they both spring back into motion at full speed. Eddie can hear them talking at each other in snapping and shaking voices, operating together at an intensity that eases Eddie’s anger but increases the pangs of dread. They’re the best paramedics that Eddie knows, and they’re panicked. He attempts again to pull out of Bobby’s hold, and is instead pulled further back– further away from Buck and any ability to save him. “Bobby, wha–”
“No,” Bobby cut him off, spinning the two of them around and away with his vice grip. “You’re not working on him, I’m sorry, but Chim and Hen have it.”
“Bobby, let me do something,” Eddie says, his tone pleading as he cranes his head to look at Buck over Bobby’s shoulder.
“If you want to do something, you can drive,” Bobby says firmly, a warning look on his face. Eddie shakes his head, is about to fight his captain on his orders with all that he has, but then Hen hollers something over at them.
“We have to go, Cap! Now, he needs a hospital now,” she yells over the rain that’s still pounding, an urgency in her voice that Eddie recognizes from every time they’ve ever been losing a patient on a call. Just from her voice, he knows that Buck is dying. Buck is dying, and he hasn’t been breathing for almost two minutes already. Some part of Eddie had started counting the moment he took that first step up the ladder.
“Okay, get him in the ambulance, I’ll radio the hospital on the way and tell them to have all hands on deck,” Bobby yells over his shoulder at her, before looking back at Eddie with his most stern face. “Eddie, you’re driving.”
Eddie thinks about arguing, but Buck’s gurney is already being lifted up into the back of the ambulance, and there really is nothing else to do but drive. He can drive, so he turns and sprints to the driver’s side door of the ambulance, lurches it open so harshly that the metal hinge squeaks, and then they’re en route.
The drive to the hospital is one minute long, and Eddie wishes that he could say that it passed in a thoughtless blur. But truly, Eddie can’t remember his thoughts ever moving so quickly through his head. He thinks of Buck, of course. He thinks of the look on Buck's face the night that Eddie had told him he loved him, which had been right before he had kissed him for the first time.
He thinks of how light he had felt the days after, like some weight had been lifted off of his chest just by loving Buck and telling him so. He thinks of their conversation a few days later, their decision to keep their relationship private, at least for a little while until they had found their footing. It was a stupid decision, Eddie thinks now– a waste of time that they could have spent loving each other out loud.
He thinks of that first shift back after they had gotten together, how frustrated and sad Buck had seemed not being able to touch him, to kiss him, to tell him that he loved him. And he thinks of his own hands, later that night when they got home, clasping the silver chain of his dog tags and looping them around Buck’s neck. He thinks of tapping their chests, the matching silver resting over their hearts, and saying ‘so that we both know that I’m there with you, and that you’re here with me, even when we can’t show it all the way.’
He thinks of the way Buck had kissed him afterwards, about how Buck has kissed him every single day since. He thinks about how he should have relished in it, how he should have groveled at Buck’s feet for permission to scream it from the rooftops– how perpetually in love and in awe he was of him.
He thinks about how now he might never get the chance to love him out loud, Evan Buckley, the best man he had ever known. And all the while, that same part of Eddie kept counting. He thinks that he’ll keep counting for the rest of his life.
He’s barely pulled to a full stop in front of the hospital’s ER before he hears the back doors of the ambulance opening. There’s clattering coming from behind him, the rickety sounds of the gurney being lifted and pulled out onto the street. Eddie throws his door open, jumping out of the driver's seat in one swift motion, not even waiting for both feet to hit the ground before he’s turning to run up to the hospital doors behind Hen and Chimney.
As he sprints to catch up to them, he’s able to see exactly what state Buck’s life is in. Buck is dying. Hen is sat atop the gurney, doing chest compressions, her eyes not leaving Buck’s face as Chim pushes them along. Eddie feels a sharp tug of nausea in his gut, but he swallows resolutely and keeps pace, not willing to leave Buck’s side until he absolutely has to, until the ER doctors tell him so.
The group of them burst through the ER doors, doctors and nurses all flocking to them immediately, barely taking half a second to take in the sight of them before they’re pushing Hen off the gurney and taking over completely. Somewhere behind him, Eddie is vaguely aware of Bobby’s voice, meaning he must have been driving the engine directly behind the ambulance the whole way here.
Eddie remembers Buck telling him one time that Bobby used to have a rule: don’t go beyond the glass doors. Bobby must have retired it before Eddie got there, because it had never been told to him by anyone else, and thank God for that. At this moment, Eddie doesn’t know how anyone could expect him to stay put, to stop at the glass doors and hand over the person that he’s vowed to himself he’ll hold close forever. He’s holding his hand against Buck’s wrist, against the sliver of skin that’s exposed under his turnout coat, and Eddie’s stomach churns violently again when he realizes that Buck’s hands are ice cold.
The slew of doctors surround the gurney, moving limbs and checking pulse points, and someone is speaking directly in Eddie’s ear. Eddie can’t hear whatever it is that they’re saying, but someone physically moves his hand away from Buck, and then the gurney is being pushed through double doors into one of the trauma rooms. A woman in scrubs lingers, turns towards them and says, “We’ll do everything we can.”
As the woman turns and walks briskly towards the double doors, Eddie hears his own voice crackle out of his throat, sounding broken and desperate. “Do more.”
Eddie isn’t sure who grabs him by the shoulders, who moves him and sits him down somewhere. He’s squeezing his eyes shut, pleading that somehow he’ll open them and this will have just been some fucked up nightmare. But when he opens his eyes, he sees the bare, beige walls and generically ugly chairs of a hospital waiting room, and it’s still real. He’s still in his heavy, waterlogged turnouts, his head is still swimming where it rests against the wall behind him, and Bobby, Hen, and Chimney are all looking at him from the opposite row of chairs.
They all look worried, though Eddie isn’t sure if it’s just because of Buck or if it’s partially because they think he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It’s probably both.
“Eddie, are you with us?” Hen asks, craning her head slightly to the side as she tries to catch his eye. Eddie just nods, holds her gaze for as long as he can– which turns out to be no more than two seconds– before dropping his eyes to the floor. He lets out a shaky breath, waiting for one of them to ask. He knows they want to ask. When none of them say anything, Eddie answers them anyways.
“It’s been a month and a half,” he says, keeping his eyes trained on the floor as he presses his fingertips harshly into his thighs. “We’ve been… We’re together, it’s been a month and a half.”
“So that’s why he was wearing…” Chim starts, but he trails off before finishing his sentence. He doesn’t need to finish it, they all know what he’s talking about.
Eddie nods. “I gave them to him after our first shift back, after we– it’s– he wears them.”
“Okay,” Bobby says with a nod, rocking back in his chair and digging his heels into the floor. “Congratulations, or… I don’t know exactly what to say right now, considering...”
Bobby looks around the waiting room, and Eddie can guess what he was going to say. Considering where they are, considering the fact that Buck is dying, considering the fact that Eddie might never get to see his smile or hear his voice again. Eddie’s eyes land on his lap, and his hands are shaking. He lets go of his thighs and clenches his hands into fists, grinds them into the flesh above his knees.
“Did you get his heart to start again?” Eddie asks, and it surprises him just as much as it seems to surprise his three friends in front of him. “In the ambulance?”
Chim and Hen look between each other, silently communicating something that Eddie can’t read, and then Hen speaks. “It was back and forth. It started and stopped a few times on the way here. When we got here his heart was beating, but he still wasn’t breathing.”
“Okay,” Eddie nods. He takes a shaky breath in, feeling tears start to well in his eyes. He pinches his eyebrows together, pressing his lips into a line and shaking his head slightly. He’s gone this whole time without crying, he doesn’t want to start now. Buck isn’t dead yet– he isn’t dead, period– so Eddie won’t cry.
Unfortunately, that thought process does nothing to stop the tears from falling. One moment he’s taking deep breaths and shaking his head, and the next his face is slick and salty. A sob racks through his chest and he drops his head into his hands, pressing the heel of his palms against his eyes and dragging them down his cheeks. He feels a hand at either shoulder, an arm wrapping across his back, and he’s crying so hard that it feels like he’s choking.
He’s not dead, he’s not dead, he’s not dead. He reminds himself over and over– it’s either out loud or in his head, he can’t be sure which. I can’t lose him, I won’t lose him.
He isn’t sure how long they sit there, him sobbing and them doing whatever small things they can to be there for him, but his breakdown is eventually interrupted by someone calling out into the waiting room. “Here for Evan Buckley?”
Eddie’s head shoots up, and his heaving breaths stop as his eyes land on the woman standing at the waiting room door. It’s the same woman that promised to do everything they could.
“That’s us, we’re here for Evan Buckley,” Bobby says, and his voice sounds tight. They all stand, Eddie feeling his knees almost buckle beneath him, but he sways and keeps his eyes locked on the woman.
“I’m Doctor Emily Singer, I’m the lead doctor on Mr. Buckley’s team,” she says as she steps further into the room towards them.
“Is he alive?” Eddie asks so quietly that it would have been inaudible had they not been in a silent waiting room.
“Yes, he is alive,” Dr. Singer says, and Eddie almost collapses then and there. He’s alive.
“We have him set up in a room, but I’m afraid he hasn’t woken up yet. It’s just a waiting game now, seeing how his body recovers.” She looks at them, and her face tells Eddie that this isn’t as good of news as he originally thought.
“You mean,” Eddie says, cutting himself off and forcing himself to swallow, hoping that it’ll help him speak at a normal volume again. “You mean, wait and see if he wakes up. Not when, if.”
There’s a pause, a few beats of silence passing between all of them in the room, and then Dr. Singer nods. “Yes, if.”
Eddie feels the tears pricking at his eyes again, but he blinks them back. He does an odd combination of nodding and shaking his head, his brain not quite landing on one specific emotion or reaction. He pushes out the last of his air, letting his lungs burn for a few moments before sucking air back in roughly.
He thinks that Hen is talking to the doctor, engaging with some more specific updates, but he can’t hear what they’re saying. Chimney says something before pulling his phone out and walking out of the room. Bobby is standing at his side, keeping a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and nodding along to whatever Hen and Dr. Singer are saying. Eddie is breathing in, holding, breathing out, holding. And then they’re all looking at him.
“What?” he mutters, blinking as he tries to get his ears to start working again.
“Do you want to see him?” Dr. Singer repeats, looking at him gently.
Before Eddie can even think about his response, he hears himself say, “Yes.”
He follows Dr. Singer out of the waiting room, down two hallways and around a corner, and then the two of them are standing outside of a closed door. There’s a plastic sign on the wall next to the door that reads ‘Patient Room 118.’ Eddie blinks, huffing out a breath that would almost be a laugh if not for the fact that his adams apple feels three sizes too big. Buck would get excited about being in room 118 if he were awake. Buck would say that it’s a good omen.
Eddie’s eyes slide from the sign to the small rectangular window in the center of the door. Through the lined glass, he catches sight of Buck. He’s laid back against some pillows, a plethora of tubes and IVs sticking out of him, and he looks pale. He looks pale and weak, a type of helpless that would drive him up a wall in frustration if he could see himself. Eddie has to reach out and lean a hand against the door to keep himself upright, and he squeezes his eyes shut again as he tries to build up the courage to actually walk into the room.
“Take your time,” Dr. Singer says softly, placing a light hand at the back of his shoulder for a moment. “It might be hard to see him in his condition.”
He nods, his head still hung as he takes a deep breath in, holds it, and then he raises his head and pushes the door open. He exhales as he walks in, and the first thing he hears is the even beeping of the monitors that surround Buck’s bed. He shuffles forward, landing at the side of the bed before he even means to, that unexplained force in him that always pulls him right to Buck. His eyes scan over Buck from head to toe, and as he watches the rise and fall of Buck’s chest, that thing in the back of Eddie’s brain pauses its count.
Eddie reaches out a hand, meaning to brush back the hair that had fallen onto Buck’s face, the curls looking just as unruly as ever from the helmet and the rain, but he freezes with his arm outstretched. He turns his head, looking at Dr. Singer, who is still standing in the doorway at a respectful distance. “Can I touch him?”
She nods, and Eddie turns back to look at Buck again. He brushes the curls off of his forehead, his thumb swiping over his skin a few times before landing on the birthmark above his eyebrow. He rests his right hand on Buck’s jaw and leans forward, keeping his back straight as he hinges at the hips, and he presses his forehead to Buck’s.
“Hey, Buck,” he says quietly, slowly pressing his lips to Buck’s cheekbone. Eddie is aware that it’s a relative unknown, whether or not people out of consciousness can hear what’s happening around them, but it feels wrong not to talk. He never thought he would get the chance to talk to the love of his life again, so it feels wrong not to take every opportunity that he can now.
“I’m, um… I’m here. I’ve got you, Buck,” Eddie says, cradling Buck’s face in his hands, which is currently unmarred by expression. It’s the same blank look that feels so unsettling to see on Buck’s face. Eddie runs his thumbs over the hollows of Buck’s cheeks, trying to keep the shake out of his voice as he continues.
“You’re going to be okay, okay? Chim is calling Maddie, I think, he left while we were talking to the doctor. They said we just have to wait and see if you wake up, but I’m not worried, okay? You’re the most stubborn person I’ve ever met, and I know you promised to take Chris to the planetarium next week. And I’ve never seen you break a promise, Buck, especially a promise to him, so I’m not worried. And I’m gonna be here with you, I promise, okay?”
Eddie moves his hands down from Buck’s face, sliding his palms across his neck and chest, and the movement causes the hospital gown to tug down slightly. The spindly, scarlet marks are still cutting through Buck’s skin, dropping down to below the collar of the hospital gown. Eddie reaches out his fingers, tracing one of the figures with the tip of his index, and his brain flashes him an image of Buck’s bare chest, red tree root patterns covering him, with the gleaming silver dog tags resting on his sternum.
Eddie looks around the room for a split second, finding the clear plastic bag of Buck’s belongings placed on top of the dresser. He straightens, walking around to the other side of the bed, and he opens the seal on it. He fishes around with one hand until he feels the cool metal against his skin, and the chain jingles as he pulls it out of the bag. “Can I put these back on him? Or can he not wear them right now?”
Dr. Singer looks up at him startled, surprised to be asked a question after seemingly trying so hard to be invisible since entering the room. She looks at what Eddie’s holding in his hand, and she shakes her head. “He can’t wear any metal, just in case we have to bring him in for any emergency scans. I’m sorry.”
Eddie nods, sniffing air in through his nose, and he sits down in the chair next to the bed. He pulls one of Buck’s hands into his own, and he lets out a breath of relief when he feels that it’s no longer ice cold like it had been before. It’s not particularly warm, but Buck’s hands never are, and the familiar temperature allows some of that dread and panic in Eddie’s chest to dissipate. Eddie grasps onto Buck’s hand, pressing the cold metal of his dog tags between their palms, and he drops his other hand onto Buck’s chest.
“I would tell you that I love you, but I don’t want…” Eddie trails off, suddenly scared to say the rest of his sentence out loud. He doesn’t want the last time he tells Buck he loves him to be when one of them is unconscious, when one of them is possibly unaware. If there’s going to be a last ‘I love you,’ he wants to keep it as when they had caught each other in the bunk room before that last call– when they had kept the lights off for a moment, had pressed their lips together, had whispered that they loved each other before walking back out into the light of the firehouse. Eddie wants that to be the last time, if there has to be one. “I’ll tell you when you wake up, okay?”
Maybe minutes or hours later, with the silver chain still tucked between their joined hands, Eddie’s eyes start to droop. His back slumps forward and his head drops onto the side of the bed. He lets his head stay there, keeps his eyes trained on Buck’s slowly moving chest, on the subtle thump of Buck’s pulse at the base of his throat. At some point, Eddie’s eyes close against the faded light of the bedside lamp, and he lets them stay closed. He can still feel the muted warmth of Buck’s hand in his, still hear the rhythm of his heart on the monitors and the quiet whooshing sound of his breathing, and it’s enough to settle his brain long enough for him to drift into a monotone sleep.
There are no vivid dreams, and Eddie would be grateful for that if he had the presence of mind. He had expected to dream about rain and lightning and the bodies of everyone he’s ever loved dangling from wires. It would have been on par with the painful and anxiety-ridden dreams that his mind loves to saddle him with every other night. But tonight, his mind is black and empty. It’s like he’s in a void, like not even his subconscious knows where to put him without knowing if Buck will be there when he wakes.
Eddie stands in the dark room where, even in the depths of sleep, his mind knows that without Buck there is no chance of light. There’s a ticking noise that echoes through the cavernous space, and Eddie can’t tell where it’s coming from, but it’s perfectly in time with the passing seconds. He knows logically that he’s asleep, but he is also very awake in this pitch black room, and he remembers everything that has ever happened to him. He remembers his parents arguing with him as a kid, his sisters dancing around the living room afterwards as they hauled him up from the couch and made him join until he felt better. He remembers loving Shannon, and he knows now that it was not in the way that he loves Buck, but he remembers loving her nonetheless.
He remembers holding the positive pregnancy test in his hands as he sat beside Shannon on her parent’s bathroom floor, and he remembers holding her as they cried and asked each other and the universe what they were going to do. He remembers meeting Christopher for the very first time, holding in his arms the most beautiful, fragile, inconceivably small thing in the entire world. He remembers feeling like his heart was simultaneously in his chest and across the room and held in his hands.
He remembers losing Shannon, first to himself, to his selfishness and immaturity, and then to death. He remembers telling Christopher that his mother would never come home again, and he remembers feeling angry at her and at himself and at the entire world for putting his son through that loss. He remembers, years later, sitting Christopher down and holding onto Buck’s hand as they told him they were together. He remembers Christopher smiling at them, staring with a dumbfounded expression on his face before jumping up and hugging them so tight it felt like he was trying to crush them.
And, though it hasn’t happened yet, somehow Eddie remembers having to tell Christopher about this. About Buck, gone, taken by some act of God and never coming back just like his mother. He remembers how much harder it is this time, how Chris is old enough to understand it now. He remembers spending the rest of his life loving Buck, even in death, never forgetting the man that made him soft and vulnerable and not scared of either of those things for the first time in his life.
He remembers never moving on, not because he thinks Buck wouldn’t want him to, but because he cannot fathom loving anyone ever again in the way that he loves Buck. It hasn’t happened yet, but standing in the tenebrous, echoing room, he remembers all of it. He is asleep, and he is awake, and all he hears is ticking, and he can see the rest of his entire life without Buck.
When Eddie wakes up, it is to what can only be described as commotion. There are nurses and doctors moving about in his peripheral vision, his eyes still hazy and unfocused from being woken up so suddenly. There are a myriad of voices, medical terms and commands being thrown around the room. There’s sunlight shining into the room from the window, which means it must be at least morning. He must have slept through the night, which is surprisingly considering the odd angle and insane amount of adrenaline that had been coursing through him for hours the night before.
Eddie lifts his head, and he brings a free hand up to rub at his eyes, willing some type of brain function to start up so that he can articulately ask what the hell is going on. Before his eyes can find any doctor or nurse or healthcare professional, he feels a squeeze against his hand. He looks down, seeing Buck’s hand held tightly in his grasp, the silver chain still draped over their joined hands. He must have held on all night.
It takes him a few moments to realize that he’s not the one squeezing, though. His eyes snap up from his hand, straight towards Buck’s face, and a sob of relief breaks out of Eddie’s throat when blue eyes are looking back at him.
There’s an overwhelmed look on Buck’s face, his eyes wide and his eyebrows pitched so high that his forehead creases, and Eddie shoots up from his seat. His hand still clings onto Buck’s for dear life, and he leans over Buck’s bed. He presses their lips together in one quick motion, his other hand coming up to run over Buck’s forehead and hair.
“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” Eddie says over and over, his lips brushing against Buck’s forehead as he speaks. Buck huffs out a breath beneath him, strong enough that Eddie can hear it, can feel it blowing against his chin.
“Eddie,” Buck croaks out, his voice dry and cracked, and it’s the most beautiful sound he has ever heard. Eddie almost laughs.
He pulls back, grabbing Buck’s jaw gently with his free hand, eyes scanning over Buck’s face. “Y- you got struck by lightning. I almost lost you, I thought I lost you.”
Buck looks back at him, eyes filling with tears, and one drops from his lashes as he shakes his head. Buck doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. Eddie knows what he means, just with one shake of his head. I’m here, you didn’t lose me.
“I love you,” Eddie says, running his thumb along Buck’s cheek to wipe at the tears. “I told you I would tell you again when you woke up. I love you.”
Buck doesn’t say it back, but Eddie sees it in the way he blinks up at him, sees it in the way that he sucks in a shaky breath and pulls his eyebrows together ever so slightly. Someone ushers Eddie away from the bed, and Dr. Singer starts bustling her way around Buck, asking questions and testing reflexes. Buck keeps his eyes on Eddie, and Eddie keeps his eyes on Buck, and Eddie feels like he can breathe again.
The thing in the back of his brain stops counting, and the dog tags press against his palm as he grips down on them, and he lets out a breath. He thinks about the life that he saw in that cavernous room, the years of emptiness and dim lights, and it doesn’t weigh him down as he thought it would. Because Buck, his Buck, is alive and breathing and looking at him. And Eddie gets to spend the rest of his life being soft and vulnerable and loudly in love.