Chapter Text
He gets the news on a Tuesday. An ordinary day – tacked onto the tail end of his seventy-two off, traffic growing heavier as the workday bleeds out of the city.
Lung cancer. Or – more precisely – Stage IIIA Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC), adenocarcinoma, with mediastinal lymph node involvement but no distant metastases.
The doctor told him more than that. A lot more.
Tommy can’t remember most of it. He can barely remember the doctor’s name. He’s standing outside the automatic doors with a stack of paper nearly an inch thick in his hands, fingers shaking so badly he’s at risk of the wind catching the edges and scattering his life across the sidewalk.
It’s unclear how long he’s been there. Long enough for the cold hospital air to keep breathing down the back of his neck, every whoosh of the automatic doors like the building spitting another victim out into the world. Another casualty of pain, frustration, anger, fear. A cocktail more toxic than anything that’ll be pumped into his veins in a few short weeks.
Radiation. Chemotherapy. Immunotherapy. Maybe surgery.
It all adds up to time off work, endless needles, months under a low cloud of rumbling nausea and exhaustion.
He barely even runs into burning buildings anymore. Ember and ash home to the ground crew at the 217 while he’s safely tucked inside a helicopter.
Lung cancer.
Sitting at the wheel of his truck, he stares blankly ahead, unsure how he traveled so quickly – the world having jumped from sidewalk to windshield in the space of a blink. The sharp, shrill ring of his phone pulls him from his haze, shatters through him like a hammer through glass, the weight of reality heavy and loud.
Evan.
His face beams up at Tommy from the screen, eyes bright, curls wild, finger pointing at the stage behind him. Tommy can’t even remember the name of the band they saw that night two months ago. He smiles at the memory regardless.
Oh, God. Evan.
He can’t…they’ve barely been together four months. He can’t tell him this. Can’t. He won’t be the reason Evan “Bleeding Heart” Buckley stays. Out of guilt, out of pity, out of some noble, self-destructive sense of obligation.
And maybe it won’t be long anyway.
“He-hey, Evan. What’s up?”
Tommy can hear the din of the station in the background, soft laughter, the clank of weights, the familiar thunk of gear slotting into compartments on the truck.
Evan sounds like he’s smiling. “Tommy. Just wanted t-to check in. You said you had a doctor’s appointment today, right? For the cough?”
Of course he remembers. His adorably sweet, kind-hearted, painfully caring boyfriend. Leave it to Evan. Tommy mentioned the tests after his third bout of pneumonia in under a year, after the walk from his truck to the locker room left him dizzy and breathless enough to finally scare him into making the appointment.
Shit.
“Oh, yeah.” Tommy shifts the phone to his other ear, buys himself a second. He doesn’t want to lie, but can’t bring himself to tell the truth. At least not yet. “It’s okay. I…I can fill you in when we have dinner. You’re off this weekend, right?”
“Yeah,” Evan’s smiling again, Tommy can tell. The word lifts at the end and Tommy can picture the dimple in his cheek. “And I’m making dinner.” A bell rings on Evan’s end and he grumbles under his breath.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Tommy says. “Be safe, yeah?”
“Yeah. I will. Talk soon.”
It takes an extra forty minutes for Tommy to get home, and he’s not sure how he manages it without wrapping his truck around a pole. His body feels disconnected from the rest of him when he moves through his pre-work routine. Gathering food, clothes, and making coffee. Muscle memory does all the work. His brain stays somewhere far away, curled tight around a single, burning word.
Cancer.
The last few months line up in his head whether he wants them to or not. The weight loss. The exhaustion. The headaches. The dull, intermittent ache in his chest. The pneumonia. The way stairs started feeling like mountains.
He wants someone to blame. The universe. Bad luck. Anything.
But looking back, he realizes it’s nobody’s fault but his own. And he’s the one paying the price.
It’s not a death sentence, they said.
Aggressive treatment with curative intent, they said.
Six to twelve months, they said.
When the door shuts behind Tommy, he leaves it behind – packs it in a box in his mind and deadbolts the door, content to let it gather dust so he can focus on getting through his shift. Then he can deal with it. When there’s time to fall apart.
For now, he’ll do what he’s always done.
He’ll suffer in silence.
*
*
Two and a half weeks after he sits in Dr. Carter’s office, Tommy starts the inevitable.
Evan’s been careful around him – quick to suggest a quiet night in, an easy movie, always offering an extra hoodie, dimming the lights at the first sign of a creeping headache.
Tommy waves it off. “You know how it gets this time of year. People in this city write checks they can’t cash and end up in weirder situations every day.”
“Yeah,” Evan sighs, settling in beside him on the couch. Tommy leans in, steals warmth like it’s something he’s left in a lost-and-found lately. “Eddie said they miss you at basketball.”
“Didn’t realize I was so popular,” Tommy smirks, pressing a kiss to Evan’s temple. There’s a soft, grounding hum beneath him when they touch.
“I’ve always said you were cool,” Evan says, smug, already scrolling through movie titles faster than Tommy can track. He doesn’t mind. The way shifts take him out leave his lids drooping before the opening credits finish most times anyway.
“Really, though,” Tommy says, fingers threading through Evan’s curls. “I’m fine. Still just catching up from being sick.”
“And you’re old,” Evan adds, grinning, earning a teasing jab to the ribs. “Ow! Okay, okay. At least we know one thing that’s still working.”
Tommy arches an eyebrow. Evan laughs so enthusiastically, it fills the room, leaves a blanket heavier than the one draped over Tommy’s legs. Tommy tries to learn it, memorize the melody, scratch it into his brain and replay the record through the worst of what’s to come.
His chest aches at the thought of losing it.
Because he will. One way or another, he and Evan will end. Death or destruction, it’s just a matter of timing, and how much damage he does on the way out.
He shoves the thought back, locks it away with the heaviest his mind stirs up these days, and rushes back to the warmth of Evan, settling there for now. Safe and sound.
By the time Halloween rolls around, Tommy’s in his second week of radiation, and he feels every minute of it. He’s talked with his captain, grounded himself through early treatment, promised he’ll earn his keep until even light duty is off the table. It’s hard to endure the pity from his co-workers, sympathy everyone tries to hide. They don’t have the whole picture, but they’ve got enough pieces to see the shape of it.
Shifts grind him down, so much so he sees Evan less. And the quiet, creeping fear – that the best thing he’s ever had is already slipping away – starts to feel like prophecy.
Only Evan doesn’t treat it like one.
Where Tommy looks for cracks, gaps in the armor, weak points to target that prove this is all temporary, Evan does the opposite.
He’s open. Earnest. He absorbs bad news and somehow turns it into forward motion, knocks the cynicism right out of Tommy’s hands. Hands that grew around the shape of it from the time his mother left her family behind.
So the fear drifts further back.
Maybe he can keep this. Maybe he can be strong enough to get through the worst of it, manage his time with Evan well enough that he won’t notice. Won’t see how fragile it all is. Maybe he can keep the shine on things. The flirting, the easy charm, the honeymoon glow. Just a little longer.
Tommy craves it – needs the normalcy like he needs his own heartbeat, wants nothing more than a picture-perfect romance to fall back on during his darkest days. He just doesn’t want the dark to dim the light.
When Evan winds up in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder and a “dead mummy curse,” Tommy is two floors away, finishing an appointment with his oncologist.
His stomach turns. He nearly bowls over another patient in the stairwell. He sits in his truck for thirty minutes, staring at nothing, before forcing himself back inside to find Evan.
From there, Tommy spirals – unravels completely.
The urgent need to fix, the intense urge to protect, all while battling the growing impulse to leave. He focuses on Evan first – helps with the sling, lines up pain meds and tea, stacks pillows, and builds a watchlist to combat Evan’s inevitable boredom.
When he claims a shift in the middle of their time together, Evan is none the wiser.
Tommy loads up on radiation and fights the nausea and pounding headache white-knuckled, couples it with a low-grade fever over the next 48 hours and shows back up at Evan’s exhausted and worn thin.
They sleep a little closer that night, both too tired to do anything but melt into one another, breathing and heartbeat in sync.
It’s not just physical – the side effects – though he’d been warned that would be the case. He’s shorter-tempered. Sharper. The old, angry edges he thought he’d buried start showing through again. He snaps at his crew, at his friends. He hates himself for it even as it keeps happening.
He tries to pause before he reacts. To breathe. To count. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he keeps it bottled up as much as he can, only letting it out in the safety of the one person he’s trying so hard not to hurt.
Evan’s nothing but kind, firm in letting Tommy know he’s being a dick, but quick to forgive when he cools off. The longer it goes on, the more Tommy’s tongue wants to turn traitor. Spill the secret he’s been keeping so locked up, let Evan into the darkness just a little.
But he can’t.
Every almost-confession dies behind his teeth. His father’s voice lives there, too. Old and sharp and cruel, teaching him early what it costs to feel too much.
Instead, it all finally snaps a few days after their anniversary. A dinner that’s a little off. A name he hasn’t heard in years and a sudden, jolting reminder Evan’s new to all this. Tommy is very, very good at leaving first.
When they end up at Evan’s apartment before a movie a couple days later, Tommy already wading through exhaustion so deep he can feel it in his joints, it snaps apart.
Suddenly Evan’s asking him to move in after admitting he’s the himbo Tommy heard wandered off with his ex soon after he broke her heart and he’s turning around and doing the same to Evan before he can even stop himself. Burning the bridge while he’s smack dab in the middle of it.
When he makes it two blocks from Evan’s, he pulls into a parking lot and throws up near a dumpster. He tries to stop his hands from shaking, pushes back burning tears, and drives home on autopilot, falling into bed with his heart heavier than it’s ever been before.
*
*
Breaking up with Evan is the last stone in an already overfilled bucket Tommy’s been dragging just to stay upright.
Radiation doesn’t get kinder. Not that he expected it would. And when chemotherapy joins the rotation in week three, it turns everything into something meaner, heavier. A bully his body has finally decided to agree with – pummeling him with the worst of his thoughts.
The fatigue is different from anything he’s known before. Not just tired. Not even exhausted. It’s deep and pulling and gravity-thick, a kind of weariness sleep doesn’t come close to touching and espresso can’t fight, no matter how many shots he makes part of his morning ritual.
Most days, he’s in bed before the sun is. Workouts fall away first. Then his appetite, no matter how many times his oncologist reminds him he needs the calories, needs the fuel. Food starts to feel like another chore he doesn’t have the strength to negotiate – not when the payment is nausea that never quits.
His captain stops by sometimes, drops off food from the station or gift cards for places that deliver, asking about his prognosis, if he needs anything. Poses the question more than once of telling the crew the ugly details of what’s been going on. His days at the station slip from three days a week to two, down to one every other week if he can even manage that.
Melton gives him office work. Inventory. Paperwork that’s been collecting dust for months, stuff that’s got the chief breathing down their neck. It gives Tommy something to do with his hands, ways to spend time upright, away from a screen, without the insistent reminders of everything he’s lost in this awful process.
The glass in his kitchen cabinets reflect his waning muscle – bulk he’s spent years earning only to fade away in a few short weeks. His jumpsuit sits wrinkled in the back of his locker, replaced by his uniform on the rare days he can stay awake longer than an hour, on the days the brain fog doesn’t stop him at the front door.
The guest room on the first floor becomes his bedroom. The stairs are too tough to climb most days, leaving him winded and hollowed out by the time he reaches the top. He drags his favorite pillow and blanket downstairs, along with his toiletries, and scatters his life across the first floor so it’s all within reach when he’s at his weakest.
By week five, he can barely stand long enough to drive, catches a ride with Jenkins to the station when he heads in for a shift. One that’s trimmed down to four hours but still feels like a marathon when he thinks about just keeping his eyes open.
“You okay, man?” Jenkins asks when they pull into the lot. “You look like shit.”
Tommy huffs a weak laugh, reaches for an excuse but doesn’t have the energy to grasp it, lets it fall apart in his hands. “I think…yeah. Probably not. But I will be.”
“I’m good for more than a ride,” Jenkins says with a casual shrug. “If you need anything.”
Tommy smiles, soft and careful, held back enough to tamp the emotion swelling in his chest at the gesture. “Thanks. I’ll, uh, I’ll talk to Melton today. I’m gonna take some time off.”
Jenkins nods, reaches out and squeezes Tommy’s shoulder. Tommy’s always cold now, and the warmth from his crewmate’s hand seeps into his bones like they’ve been craving the heat.
Tommy makes it two hours before he stumbles, nearly passes out in the empty locker room. When he talks to Melton, he keeps his voice steady, swallows down the burn behind his eyes, waves off every offer of help. Promises to keep them updated. Promises he’ll be back.
At home, Tommy sits on the edge of the couch and scrolls through his contacts. He sees teammates from pick-up basketball games, the 118, the 217, his cousin that lives out in Boston. People who would show up if he asked. Who’d bring food. Help with laundry. Sit with him when things got ugly.
And then there’s Evan.
Face still beaming up at him from the screen, eyes bright, smile warm.
That’s where it finally gives.
The dam shatters apart, sudden and ruthless, and tears spill down his face while his hands shake uselessly at his cheeks.
He’s never felt more alone.