Work Text:
"The hands that cradled your face and tilted it upwards to kiss your forehead are soaked in unfathomable quantities of blood."
"...but they cradled me, yes?"
---
The medicine is red and tastes like death.
When Margaret shows up at his door, Buck lets out a quick, trembling breath, his stomach preemptively clenching in pain. He knows instantly why she’s here, alone, without Maddie calling him a few days before to warn him that their parents are coming to town.
Buck lets her in anyway.
He doesn’t fight it, doesn’t bother asking what she’s doing in Los Angeles, how she knows where he lives, why she’s showing up now. He just looks down at the small, brown, inconspicuous bag hanging off her shoulder.
Her medical bag. Ice packs, bandaids, a mix of over and under-the-counter pills, some whole and others crushed into a powder to be put into food or made into a liquid.
Maybe it’s because the loss of Bobby is still aching and fresh, hurting his heart hard enough to bruise, even nearly a year later. Maybe it’s because things have been good, not great, but good, okay, and Buck is giving in to his knee-jerk reaction to make it all go to shit.
Maybe it’s because Buck has felt weird, off-balance, for months and he doesn’t know why or how to fix it, but he knows how to do this. Knows how to be sick.
They stand awkwardly, silent, in the entranceway. Then Margaret raises her hand, and Buck flinches involuntarily as her palm settles against his forehead and moves down to his cheeks like a human thermometer.
She tuts lightly, announces he has a fever. Buck blinks, accepts this as a fact, because Margaret said it which makes it so, and finds himself being led to his room in a daze, the hallway getting blurry. She tucks him into bed like he’s a child and disappears to the kitchen with her bag.
Buck hears her puttering around, probably biting back snide comments about how he organizes the cabinets. He trembles under the covers, like a dog hiding from a thunderstorm. He was going to meal prep for the week today, do his bi-monthly cleaning he hasn’t done in three months, workout, and maybe cook too much dinner so he has to bring the leftovers to Eddie’s.
But now he’s sick. For the first time since he was eighteen, Buck is sick. Or, at least he will be.
Margaret comes back soon enough, balancing a serving dish as a tray in her arms. His medicine sits in the center, the dark red visible through the small, cloudy bottle. It’s homemade–a strong combination of several pills, medicines, herbs, supplements–with love and care, specially made just for his wellbeing.
Buck feels a burning itch under his skin when he sees it, his instinctual urge to scream, fight, run. Any response, really, other than sitting and taking it.
But Margaret is pouring the medicine out onto a spoon she must’ve brought from home–real silver, thin, pretty pattern across the handle, he recognizes it from his parents' wedding china–and Buck feels his mouth dry as his limbs turn to lead.
He tilts his head back, Margaret’s lotion-soft hand against his forehead, fingers taping out a pattern he can’t follow, and monitoring a fever that isn’t there.
He breathes through his nose and forces himself to swallow. Somehow, it tastes as it always has, and Buck wonders if a day ever passed where he hadn’t felt it lingering on the back of his tongue.
There have been nights over the years, lonely, scary nights, where Buck has woken up in a sweat, his heart racing, eyes wide, and he could’ve sworn he could taste the medicine at its full potency. He could feel the thick syrupiness of it as it slipped down the back of his throat, settling heavy in his stomach like a rock meant to sink him.
“Good boy,” Margaret says, voice comforting, in a violent sort of way, just as it always has.
She smiles at him, teeth sharp like a shark, but she hasn’t bitten at him, not yet, and Buck’s eyes fill with tears. He likes being good. It gives him something to do, something that keeps the loneliness and vast, empty pit working its way through him at bay.
Buck’s loved when he’s good, only when he’s good. When he’s good and useful, doing his best to anticipate everyone’s needs and moods, ignoring his own. When he can’t be good or useful, he tries to be quiet, obedient. Malleable like a loose paper clip you find on the floor, bending to whatever shape you want.
He used to be even worse as a kid, jittering with energy but sitting on his hands and biting the inside of his cheek and tongue, hard enough he would often get cold sores, so he wouldn’t bother anyone.
Buck got better as an adult, has let himself ramble when he has enough to ramble about, and he indulges in whatever hyperfixation of the week he has.
He has changed so much over the years, and Buck had started to think he successfully detached himself from that needy little kid he used to be.
Because Evan was whiny and begged for attention like a dirty, stray dog you had to kick to leave you alone. Evan ran away from his problems and had to ask for change at gas stations to get by. Evan was scared and lonely, twitchy and paranoid, always looking behind his back like someone was coming after him.
And Buck’s a grown man with friends, a family, a job he’s stuck with for more than just a handful of months. Buck has a stable income, a house entirely of his own. Buck has a savings account and a checking account, even if he’s still not entirely sure what the difference is. Buck has an okay credit store.
It started to feel like Evan wasn't just a name he doesn’t go by anymore, it was something close to an entirely different entity.
Now, tucked into bed by his mother and medicine taken, Buck knows he’ll never escape being Evan.
Inside of him, under all the weight and height he’s gained since he was eighteen, under all the false confidence and pride, Buck’s still that weak, pathetic little boy.
Even now, he still lets Margaret in, knowing what she’s going to do, still listens when she says he has a cough he doesn’t have, still feels a sweat from his up-and-coming fever.
Buck still swallows the poison.
It feels familiar, settles a soul-deep aching in his chest he didn’t realize he still had. There’s a comfort in familiarity. Sometimes, Buck used to think being sick was all he was born for. And maybe it is, because falling back into it is easy, comes to him like blinking or breathing.
The relief he feels when the sickness starts to close in terrifies him. It reminds Buck that there’s always going to be something wrong, something evil and dark within him.
The sickness comes in stages, like clockwork. First, just a dull ache settling in his muscles and bones, making him achy and tired. Second, congestion works its way across his chest, making him hack wet globs of phlegm up. Next the nausea comes, replacing the impending doom feeling in his stomach with actual pain.
The fever won’t come for a couple more hours, a couple more doses of medicine.
Buck whines softly, a warning, as his stomach clenches and his throat bobs.
Margaret has a bowl ready–teal porcelain, Buck’s, not the familiar, white ceramic one–had it stacked on the tray, next to the tissues and rags and cups of ice. She tucks it under his chin before he can make a mess of himself and the sheets.
She's always ready.
---
Denny brings home a cold from school one day. No big deal, it’s cold and flu season anyway, and elementary schools are already breeding grounds for germs.
It spreads through the station like wildfire.
Hen brings it in, and she gives it to Chimney, who gives it to Maddie and Eddie, who gives it to Bobby and Chris. Bobby brings it home to Athena, May, and Harry.
Buck’s the only one to make it out unscathed. He hasn’t been around the station for a couple weeks now, still on the mend from the bombing, then the embolism, then the tsunami.
He knows he hasn’t gotten sick because he isn’t around anybody sick long enough for them to infect him too, but there’s this aching, nagging thought Buck keeps having.
He hasn’t gotten sick since he was eighteen. Hasn’t gotten the flu, a summer cold, winter bug, just the occasional nausea that comes from hangovers or food poisoning. He’s always been good at looking past expiration dates and oddly colored meats. Sketchy restaurants and dirty hot dog stands, flies buzzing nearby.
After all the time he spent sick as a kid, Buck assumed his immune system would be weak and useless, almost like a leg after it’s been crushed.
But now he wonders if all that sickness has maxed his body out, and he’ll never succumb to another disease or virus again. It makes him a bit nauseous, ironically, and leaves him struggling to think clearly.
So Buck tries to avoid going over to Eddies for as long as he can, until both him and Chris aren’t sick anymore.
Sick children have always made him uncomfortable. He worries how he’ll react around them, if some primal urge to take care of them will consume him–if he’ll want, need, to make them sicker.
But he gives in eventually. Eddie had just recovered when Chris got sick, and apparently he keeps asking for his Buck. Eddie knows just how to get to him. Buck still feels guilty for the tsunami, still wakes up with a hand lunging across the bed to grab Chris before he falls into the water.
He goes over, but not before giving himself a pep talk in the mirror, fingers gripping the edge of the sink hard enough his knuckles turn white. He arms himself with candy for when Chris feels better, and another video game while he doesn’t.
“Buck,” Chris cheers, a little nasally and overall sickly subdued, from his bed when Buck appears in his doorway.
“Hey, superman,” he says softly, ignoring Eddie's warnings of getting sick, and settles on the edge of the bed. “I heard you were sick.”
“Yeah.” Chris nods sagely. “Are those sour patch kids?”
Buck barks out a laugh, smile bright and genuine. Eddie takes that as an opportunity to pluck the candy from his hands. “Not until after dinner.”
“Dad,” Chris whines, lower lip jutting out and trembling just like Buck taught him.
Eddie gives him one, one, sour patch kid. Buck gets one, too, but only because Eddie deemed his same manipulation attempt pathetic enough.
Buck spends the better half of his afternoon sitting in bed with Chris, playing video games with him, then reading stories when Eddie makes his third ‘subtle’ comment about screens rotting their brains.
True to his word, Eddie lets them have more candy after dinner, even if it was so vegetable heavy that they deserve double, but he doesn’t bring that up.
Buck goes to the bathroom, and when he gets back, Eddie’s tucking Chris in for bed, checking his temperature for what’s probably the twentieth time today.
And Buck trusts him, literally with his life, and he knows Eddie’s not some psycho who poisons his child. But Buck’s standing in the doorway and Eddie’s had tissues for Chris’ runny nose all day, a bowl nearby just in case, and everything else he could possibly need.
He's ready, like maybe he already knows what symptoms are coming.
Buck shakes his head violently, hard enough it’ll probably hurt later, trying to dislodge those thoughts. Eddie wouldn’t do that. Eddie knows how Chris is going to feel because he was just sick himself.
Eddie wouldn’t do that.
But he rushes down the hallway anyway, bursting into the kitchen and swallowing one, two gulps of the nyquil Eddie left on the counter.
"You feeling sick too?"
“No,” Buck practically squeaks, jolting like he’s trying to jump out of his skin. He fumbles the nyquil but is able to catch it before it can slam down on his foot. “I mean, yeah.”
He fakes a meek cough that has Eddie raising a skeptical eyebrow. Hopefully the shame spreading across Buck’s cheeks looks more like a sickened blush.
The nyquil tasted like nyquil, nothing replaced or added to it. No poison.
"Okay..." Eddie leans against the counter with his arms crossed, watching him.
Buck tries not to squirm. “I was sick all the time as a kid,” he hears himself saying.
It might be the closest he’ll get to telling the truth. Buck has this feeling deep in his bones, his body’s insistent need to run, to flee before Eddie can figure out too much.
"So you're not sick?"
"No. I, uh,” Buck stammers, “I just miss the taste of nyquil, I think. It makes me feel nostalgic."
"Okay," Eddie says slowly. He eyes him suspiciously. "What's up with you?"
"Nothing," Buck says too quickly.
"Uh-huh."
"I should probably go." Buck puts the nyquil down hard, winces at the way it slams against the counter. "It's getting late."
"Buck–"
"Besides, I might get sick too, then you'll be stuck taking care of me and Chris. Wouldn't want to put you out!"
Buck practically sprints from the house, nearly shoulder checking Eddie on his way out the kitchen.
He files the lawsuit a couple days later, after a dinner with Bobby leaves him reeling and nearly crazed.
By the time they make up, it's weeks, almost months later, and they’ve had enough going on that Eddie’s forgotten all about Buck’s freakout in his kitchen. Buck doesn’t remind him.
It's better that way.
---
When Maddie calls to tell him their parents are in town, expecting a dinner together, no less, Buck has a panic attack in his bathroom.
He falls to his knees against the cold, hard tile, muting himself when the gasping breaths become too loud. He grabs at his chest, fingers raking at the skin, when the silence drifts on for too long and he has to remind himself to talk.
Buck tries to rush Maddie off the phone as fast as he can without raising concerns. Once his phone has gone blank, he lets it clatter to the floor too. His vision gets blurry and spotty, and he makes the mistake of trying to stand and almost cracks his head open on the corner of the counter.
Buck hasn’t seen his parents since he was eighteen and leaving Hershey. Running away, he reminds himself, hightailing it out like someone was after him.
Neither his parents nor Buck have made any effort to communicate since. They haven’t made a phone call, sent a text or left a voicemail. No emails, or letters. No missing persons reports.
Buck considers drugging himself with xanax or whatever anti-anxiety he could get his hands on at the last moment. But he decided he needed to stay sharp, aware, even if it meant possibly having a goddamn heart attack at Maddie’s kitchen table.
Dinner is awkward and stilted.
When Buck walks in and sees his parents–his mother–his chest clenches, and the possibility of a heart attack goes from an exaggeration to a threatening probability.
Buck reluctantly hugs his parents, tries to act like this isn’t the first time they’re seeing each other in over a decade, like they left things on good terms, and like their touch doesn’t make his skin burn and crawl.
His parents give a good performance, too. Phillip pats him on the back, asks him how things are, because he has no idea what is going on in his life to ask for specifics. Margaret goes to kiss him on the cheek, and Buck flinches away like she was about to smack him.
Maddie gives him a weird, concerned look, and Buck smiles back, bordering on manic. It was meant to be comforting, I’m okay, don’t worry, and it seems to only do the opposite.
Buck picks his way through most of the food, convincing himself that Margaret has snuck away into the kitchen and poisoned his food, a punishment for running away and thinking he can get away with it. He can’t look at her without feeling a phantom tickle in his throat, a sweat breaking out across his forehead.
Buck prepared several different breathing techniques last night and all of today, and he rushes through them all within twenty minutes. When he’s lightheaded from the quick, shallow breathing he’s trying to hide, he picks at his nails, hidden under the table, until the skin bleeds and drops down, staining the knee of his jeans.
They make it to the end of dinner, Buck’s held it together, for the most part, and he’s ready to sprint from the building, when Margaret and Phillip plop a little wooden box on the table for Maddie. A baby box, filled with old, cherished memorabilia from her childhood.
"What about my baby box?" Buck asks stupidly. Stupid, stupid.
He doesn’t even want to remember most of his childhood, except for the few, untainted good times with Maddie. What would be in his box, anyway? Dozens of medicine bottles, used tissues, sweat rags, printed x-rays, dried up stitches, old casts and slings?
Things sort of fall apart after that.
Buck freaks out on them, like he always does, ruins the dinner that has made it nearly impossible to sleep in the days leading up to it. He manages to stop himself just short of saying anything too incriminating, then takes off and drives home, his lungs practically collapsing in on themselves.
He goes back over the next day to apologize to Maddie for being an annoying embarrassment as usual, for causing such a hissy-fit scene. He picks up a photo at random from her box, trying to make it about her again.
There's something that cracks open in Buck's chest when he learns about Daniel.
A fiery rage creeps out of him, courses through his body and seeps out across his bed when he screams into his pillow in the middle of the night.
Buck tries to find public records, calls nearly a dozen children’s hospitals across eastern Pennsylvania, but none of them give him anything. Not that they have much to go off of, just a name and vague year for birth and death, because he’s too much of a coward to ask Maddie for details.
Eventually, he’s able to get in contact with the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, but the only investigation they find against his parents was for him, when he was ten and coming into the hospital so often the nurses thought he was being abused.
That year, Buck broke his arm falling out of a tree, cracked his head open running at the pool, and dislocated his shoulder playing too rough with the neighbors.
It’s not until he’s throwing up in his kitchen sink that Buck realizes what he was really looking for–any sort of evidence that even remotely suggests that Margaret made Daniel sick.
After giving the sink a good scrubbing, head dizzy and pounding from his overuse of bleach, Buck reminds himself that leukemia isn’t exactly something you can just give to a person.
His next realization has him throwing his cleaning supplies across the loft, too angry to care about the containers breaking and chemicals leaking out across the floor.
It was never about him.
Buck was just a stand-in, a proxy, a puppet, because the real thing was long gone. Margaret couldn’t have Daniel anymore, but she had Buck, and he could be healed, taken care of, even if his sickness was manufactured.
Love isn't care. Love isn't medicine. Love isn't comfort. Love isn't fingers brushing a stray hair back. Love isn't spoon feeding. Love isn't getting tucked into bed. Love isn't being doted on day after day.
Love is poison. Love is pain. Love is sweat and shaking in the summer heat. Love is headaches and stomach pains. Love is nausea. Love is eyes rolling back and fingers twitching and limbs seizing. Love is blood.
Love is punishment.
---
Time, Buck has learned, has a funny way of moving.
For him, twenty minutes can be an hour, and an hour can be five minutes. It doesn’t make sense, probably has something to do with the undiagnosed ADHD he definitely doesn’t have, but he understands it, at least.
Time is different when he’s sick.
It gets worse, a few hours after the sickness begins, when his fever finally kicks in. He gets all sweaty and disoriented, unsure of where he is and how long he’s been there.
Time stretches and snaps, changes without rhyme or reason. An hour is five minutes is twenty is ten is a day is a week is a second.
Buck can blink and it’s tomorrow. He sleeps for eight, fitful hours, fifteen minutes have passed.
The point is, time has a way of bleeding. The blood gushes through his fingers, pours through at a cycle of various speeds, switching up right as Buck thinks he gets a good grip on it.
It was…morning, when Margaret came. He’s sure of it, can remember, even if the memory is somehow already distant and hazy, that he had just woken up an hour or two before she showed up, still had flakes of egg and toast from breakfast stuck in his teeth.
It’s evening now, Buck thinks, guesses as much, based on the way the light is weak and barely breaking through his curtains at the low angle it's at.
The sickness had come fast and hard, would’ve knocked him flat on his ass had he been standing. The sudden onset of it–a low-grade fever, coughs and shivers that rack his frame, nausea that hits practically on the hour, and worst of it all, the fever that will no doubt leave him writhing in pain tonight–made it difficult to keep track of how long its been since he laid down.
Since he got his medicine.
Already, his bones and muscles feel like they’re fusing together, making him heavy and sink down into the bed. He’ll melt into the mattress itself if he lies here for too long. Buck’s out of practice, can’t fight it off as well as he used to.
Margaret had confiscated his phone hours ago. Buck wouldn’t have called anyone for help, even if he wanted to. It’s too complicated of a situation to explain, and he’d be too shamed to be caught like this.
He manages to convince her to give it back, just for a few minutes, monitored under her watchful eye. Everyone will freak out if he suddenly goes AWOL. Multiple kidnappings within one group of people and just a few years tends to do that. Can make people feel a bit paranoid.
Buck responds to a few texts, types out a message to Chim to let him know he won’t be able to work for a couple days–an impromptu visit to a nearby national park with some old buddies from his ranch hand days.
Margaret looks over the message, scanning for hidden pleas for help. They’ve had them set up for a while now, of course.
Buck doesn’t leave any. He could have left something simple, inconspicuous, but he didn’t. He paused, considered it, hands trembling as he decided not to. Buck would rather sit and take the medicine, take the sickness and aching pain, because he wants it, needs it.
He’s sick already, he tries to reason with himself, no need to get everyone worried. Buck will only be sick for a couple days, like always, and he’ll get better when he’s been good enough and Margaret decides he’s getting better.
No point in fighting it.
Buck sends a similar message to Eddie, seizing with guilt when the message gets hearted within a minute, and he gets a response telling him to have fun (but not too much fun).
Chim answers not long after, cursing him out for giving him such short notice but approving his time off anyway. Maddie texts him too, telling him to be safe and to let her know when he gets there.
It was so easy. Because there's nothing to worry about, should be nothing to worry about. He can’t blame anyone but himself. No one would be able to guess a camping trip actually means he’s sick. No one knows what sick even means, and how it has any difference from regular old cold-and-flu sick
Time starts to drip faster.
Margaret takes his phone back and evening becomes morning becomes afternoon becomes night becomes morning.
They fall back into old routines. Buck gets his medicine with every meal, which has been steadily becoming more and more liquid like–smoothies, oatmeals, soups, broths. Limited entertainments come in the form of watching Margaret read, counting the cracks across his ceiling, wheezing through a mid-afternoon nap.
He’s allowed his phone for ten minutes in the morning and ten at night. Eddie asks for pictures of wherever Buck says he’s gone, asks what he’s up to each day. Buck makes up stories of lakes and hikes, an owl and some foxes, a boring rant about some beetle, and raccoons terrorizing the trash cans at night; he promises to show him pictures once he gets back.
The lies come out easy, like second nature. He’s good at letting them slip out as a breath. Buck’s better at being sick–at letting it consume him, at letting Margaret dote on him–good at choking things down and taking the brunt force of whatever's left.
Buck tries not to dwell on the passage of time, mostly keeps track through his texts, but it usually does nothing more than confuse him. Distantly, in the deep, dark, fuzzy part of his brain, he tries to remember to not let it go on for too long. Like last time.
He won’t be sick for as long, won’t get as sick. He won’t let weeks pass, just a week, max. He’ll be better, stand up for himself when it becomes clear he has to.
Buck’s in control this time. Even if Margaret chooses what he eats, how much he eats, when and how often he’s allowed to go to the bathroom, how long he’s allowed to sleep, who he texts, what he texts, how far the window opens, how fast the fan spins, when and how heavy his dosages of medicine come.
Buck’s in control.
---
There is blood splattered across Buck’s face.
There are eighty-eight recognized constellations in the sky. Cheetahs have the largest lungs of any big cat, relative to body size. The Eiffel Tower was originally built for Barcelona
And there is blood splattered across Buck's face.
He knows the coppery, tangy taste of blood well. Bitten lips, cheeks, tongues; licked away scratches; pouring from his nose after breaking up a bar fight.
It’s warm and sticky, dark red. It’ll stain his white shirt, and possibly his skin if he lets it sit for too long.
“He’s not sick, not really,” Eddie says. “She’s making him sick. Probably for years.”
Buck’s stomach drops in fear when he processes what he’s said. For one, stupid, fleeting second, he’s convinced that Eddie’s talking about him. That he has found out, somehow, about Buck’s deep dark childhood secret he’s never told anyone about. That he’s bringing it up casually, because he wants to throw it in Buck’s face and watch him squirm.
He isn’t, of course, because not everything is about Buck. He’s always been so selfish, so needy and desperate to make everyone look at him.
The kid, Charlie, from a call a couple days ago. Eddie thinks he’s been drugged by his mother for years.
“Munchausen by proxy,” Chim says.
Buck recognizes the term, remembers looking it up once, on a computer in a public library somewhere in South Carolina. He remembers practically running out, and how he had fled to Florida, desperate to get as far from Pennsylvania as he could manage with his limited funds.
Eddie and Chim make it sound serious. Something more than just a mother doting and caring for her son. Something that isn’t right, something rarely heard of, even more rarely experienced.
Buck had been on that call. He hadn’t sensed anything wrong, hadn’t felt some gut feeling at the sight of this sick boy and his worried mother. Charlie did look a little sick, sure, but his mother said he has an autoimmune disorder, and Buck believed her without question.
Even after his search in South Carolina, Buck stupidly assumed that his sickness as a child was something that has only happened to him, that he’s the only person on earth with a mother whose love is painful and punishing.
Charlie’s situation seems worse.
Buck was never sick for years at a time, just a week, or two at most. Sometimes three, but that was only when he was really bad. He never had to move across the country time and time again, meeting with a never ending series of doctors and changing last names so no one becomes suspicious.
Margaret never poisoned him. His medicines were a strong, probably illegal and dangerous mix of various drugs, but they were medicine at the end of the day, meant for human consumption. She never hid it from him, never hid eye drops in his food. Buck always knew what was happening, what she was doing.
It was Buck’s fault, his choice to swallow the medicine. Charlie never had that choice. He seems like a good enough kid, certainly doesn’t irritate and cause trouble like Buck used to.
Buck feels better, even if a child is being drugged, poisoned. Because this is munchausen by proxy. What happened to Buck wasn’t. It was something else, something foreign and unique only to him.
He tags along with Eddie when the kid calls him, even if he spends the entire ride hiding his trembling hands, and trying to breathe evenly so he doesn’t get too lightheaded.
He feels guilty, responsible, for not seeing what was going on. He should have known something was up.
They get there around the same time as the paramedics, and Eddie turns out to be right. Charlie’s mother has been poisoning him with eye drops. And he did it right back, even though he knew the possibility of what could happen.
Buck can’t blame him. He used to be able to pretend that Margaret’s medicine actually made him feel better. It was sometime in between middle school and high school when Buck tested his theory, took one of the pills from her bag. He got sick a few hours later, and he knew. Buck knew, and he would still let it happen.
But Buck never tried to retaliate, could have never dreamed of doing such a thing. Clearly that means that Charlie has had it much worse off, to be pushed to do this. Buck has always been so dramatic. Margaret could have been so much worse to him–he’s a little surprised that she wasn’t–and he should feel lucky for that.
Buck helps the paramedics get the woman onto a gurney and down the stairs, load her up in the ambulance. He bites his tongue, hard, so he doesn’t get weird and freak out on her, or cry, or ask her to take care of him, too.
He’s never missed the sickness, not really. But there have been moments, a handful across the years, where Buck has gotten lonely and felt empty, and he sort of wanted it again. Deranged, disgusting, that Buck wants this, and a kid like Charlie has had his whole life ruled by it.
Eddie’s gotten Charlie in an ambulance too, a separate one, and Buck can hear himself congratulating him on making a good call. One of the paramedics is offering Eddie to come along, and Buck thinks about coming too. To let Charlie have one person with him who sort of gets it, even if Buck will never actually say it.
Eddie’s answering, about to take a step, when his body jolts forward. He’s falling, thudding hard to the ground, and blood is seeping out across the pavement, and Buck’s being tackled, and Eddie is bleeding, and Eddie is out in the open, vulnerable, and Buck has his blood splattered across his face.
Buck snaps out of it, crawls under the fire truck–he is pinned to the ground, he is pinned to the ground, he is pinned to the ground–and pulls Eddie to safety. He hauls him up, gets him in the cab, presses down on the wound.
There is still blood splattered across Buck's face.
---
Buck has always had a good pain tolerance.
Even as a kid, the broken arms, sprained ankles, pulled muscles, scrapes and bruises never had much of an effect on him. He’s gotten even better as an adult, can swallow down the pain until it’s tearing its way through him, and even then he chokes down a painkiller and keeps going.
He likes to measure his pain in terms of it could be worse. Break his hand in a construction incident, at least it wasn’t his right hand. Kicked in the back by a horse, at least it wasn’t the face or chest. Pinned down by a fire engine and his leg crushed beneath it, at least he doesn’t lose the leg. Caught in a tsunami, at least he doesn’t drown. Struck by lightning, at least he doesn’t–
Dying isn’t what Buck thought it would be.
Honestly, when he was younger, around middle and high school age, Buck assumed he would be dead before he was eighteen.
At the hands of Margaret and his sickness, or more likely one of the thousands of reckless things he would do for attention would get to him. He would drown facedown in someone else’s pool, get hit by a car while popping a wheelie on his bike, go down in a neck-snapping tackle while playing football.
But Buck got away from Hershey, somehow lived to see eighteen, and he still, subconsciously, assumed he would die young. He would starve in the back of the jeep in some parking lot, freeze sleeping on a park bench, get stabbed by a dirty blade in a dark alleyway.
Then he became a firefighter, and Buck took that as confirmation for a young death. Not as young as he used to think, but surely he wouldn’t make it past his twenties, maybe even his thirties if he wasn’t too careless. He would go fast, dangerous, probably in a blaze of glory.
It felt better than the alternative. He used to worry that all the sickness would eventually catch up to him, and he would die, slow and painful, in some hospital bed with the doctors wondering what the hell went wrong.
“Go get ‘em, cowboy!”
Buck climbs up the ladder. There's a loud, crashing noise and Buck barely has time to look up as the sky cracks apart, before it all goes–not dark, not black, just nothing.
Dying, as it turns out, is quick, instantaneous. Sort of like Buck had always hoped. A blink and you'd miss it, sort of thing. He doesn’t see heaven or hell in the three minutes (and seventeen seconds) that he’s dead. He’s just…gone. Into complete, empty nothingness.
But he wakes up anyway, despite the odds, with an apparent head injury.
Things feel off, and Buck’s not sure how he got here, and he keeps hearing a crashing, thunderous noise, a jolt through his bones.
And Daniel is alive.
Daniel, the prodigy son, the saint, the burning reminder that has haunted Buck’s entire life, without him knowing it, is alive. Buck blinks once, twice when he sees him, unsure why he’s even surprised by it.
Stupidly, he lets Maddie take him home to his loft, ignoring the gut feeling of this is wrong.
But their parents are there. Waiting for him, worried about him, happy to see him. His presence in the room seems to relieve them, and Buck has never seen that look on their faces before, directed at him.
He’s used to the indifference, the discontent when he’s being too much, the disgust barely hidden in their eyes, the apathy towards his overall existence.
Margaret hugs him, and it doesn’t hurt, and Buck doesn’t feel the need to flinch away. Phillip looks at him, and it doesn’t feel like his eyes are sliding right past him. It makes his chest ache in some weird way, his eyes sting.
He should have known for sure, right then and there, that there wasn’t something right with the world he woke up into. He should have ran straight from his loft as soon as he saw them, hell, he should have run from the hospital when he saw Daniel.
But Buck stays, despite everything in his gut telling him not to. He sits on the couch with Phillip and Daniel, watches the game with them and drinks a beer. Maddie and Margaret are in the other room, and Buck isn’t worried about having to hurt himself so someone will look at him, because they already are.
He doesn’t worry about a sudden sickness, doesn’t worry about being ignored and shunned like some dirty being unworthy of love and attention.
Things are good here. Buck starts to forget what it’s like to be sick, embraces this life where he never has been, where he has never felt the soul-consuming need to be. He could stay here, if he wanted to.
But of course, everything is too good to be true, slips through his fingers like grains of sand. Everything else is shitty in this–alternate universe, slip in time, coma dream–life. Buck never became a firefighter, Maddie’s still married to Doug, Jee isn’t Jee, Bobby’s dead, and Eddie’s left because his parents took Chris away.
Buck can’t let himself stay.
Even after Margaret stops him in the hallway of the hospital, and she is holding him and it doesn’t make his skin crawl, and she is telling him everything he has always wanted to hear–that he can be loved without the pain, that he doesn’t have to suffer for it–and it doesn’t hurt.
Buck sprints down the hallway anyway, smashes through the window, fights to wake up.
Suddenly, he’s breathing, eyes fluttering, and the world makes sense again.
Daniel’s dead–Maddie and Chim are married, Jee is Jee, Bobby’s alive and well, and Eddie still has Chris and they’re still in Los Angeles–and Margaret loves him, in some distant and passive and painful way, and it is tearing him in half.
Buck tells himself that he fought to get back because it was the right thing to do, that he knew he couldn’t live out the rest of his life with everyone else suffering because of it.
But he knows that some part of him, soul-deep, will always be begging to be hurt, to be dizzy and aching in the chest and kneeling over from the pain.
---
"Buck!"
Buck jolts awake, head fuzzy and heavy.
His fever still hasn’t broken yet, has gone on for long enough that it’s leaving him delirious. Delirious that he hears Eddie’s voice and thinks he’s in the room. The thought is conflicting, leaves him with a mix of hope and dread–hope that he’s been found, and dread that he’s been found like this.
“Huh?” he mumbles, throat dry and raspy. He weakly props himself up on shaky elbows, peering around the room and squinting against the bright sunlight coming in through the drawn back curtains.
Buck spots Margaret across the room, perched on a chair she dragged in from the kitchen days ago, his phone tight in her grasp.
“Mom? What’s– What’re you doing?”
“Listening to messages, Evan,” she says dismissively, leaving no room for argument or complaint. Buck doesn’t have the strength to make it out of bed, and even if did, he’s not sure he would have the willpower to go against her orders and try and wrestle his phone from her. “From your friend, Eddie, is it?”
Buck frowns. He doesn’t like the accusatory way she said that, how it left him feeling guilty. She knows, somehow, about his secret. She’s always been able to figure him out just from one scathing look.
“Buck! BuckBuckBuck, Buck, Buck,” Eddie slurs from the phone. Buck’s gut twists. He misses Eddie. “I miss you! Where have you beeeen? You should–” Eddie hiccups. “–be here.”
Buck feels guilty. He should be there. He should be able to stand up against his mother. But he isn’t, he’s weak and needy and sick in the head.
There’s a clattering noise and someone else’s voice. It sounds like Karen. “What?” Eddie says too loudly, basically a shout. “No, I’m talking to Buck. I loooooove Buck, like I’m crazy in love with him. He’s sooo so tall and biggg. Karen, his hair is, like–”
Buck’s heart jolts violently, beating hard enough to break through his ribs and straight out his chest. Eddie’s– Eddie's in love with him. He pushes himself to sit up fully, wondering if he would be able to launch himself across the room and grab his phone.
There’s a muffled gasp into the phone, shuffling and some more clattering, then the voicemail cuts off abruptly, leaving behind a deafening silence.
Margaret breaks it, scoffing out a noise that sounds so foreign coming from her that it takes Buck a moment to realize what it is. A laugh.
She’s laughing at him.
Buck’s stomach drops, twisting painfully and making the nausea return almost full force. Dread and shame floods through his bloodstream, reaching from the very bottom of his toes to the top of his scalp. Of course it had to happen while he’s sick, when he can’t do a thing about it because he’s too weak and frail.
Margaret turns to him, eyes glinting when she gets a look at his face. She’s always found some gratification in his pain. She hurts to heal, after all.
“You don’t think he meant it, do you?” she asks lightly. It stings, burns, aches bad enough it feels like an open wound that will leave a huge scar somewhere across his chest.
“Mom,” Buck tries, voice cracking. He wants to crawl out of his skin, slither beneath his bed and never be seen by the outside world again. He wants to cry until he’s sunken in and a weak gust of wind is able to blow him away.
Margaret’s face twists into something close to gleeful, and she lets out a quiet, pitiful noise, bordering on mocking. “Oh, Evan. You poor thing. Of course you are.”
She’s always had a unique ability of being able to see straight through him, to find exactly what will hurt him the most, and taking it and stabbing him in the gut with it.
“Don’t–”
“In love with him,” Margaret finishes. She tuts and places his phone face down on his dresser. She clasps her hands together in her lap, and she is small and unassuming, and she is terrifying. “Do you really believe that’s a good idea?”
“Stop.”
“Just hopeless.”
“Stop it,” he begs, eyes prickling hot with tears he refuses to shed.
“Pathetic.”
“Stop it!” Buck shouts, trying to sound authoritative, but it just comes out weak, pathetic. The tears come loose before he can stop them, breaking free and pouring down his cheeks, hot and heavy.
“Oh,” Margaret coos, suddenly sympathetic; done with her attack. She flutters across the room and lands on the edge of the bed. Buck scoots away from her, but he’s so tired and shaky he barely makes it to the center of the bed.
She’s good at the sudden switch from attack to comfort. Attack, comfort, attack, comfort, attack, comfortattackcomfortattackcomfortattackcomfortattackcomfortattackcomfort, and Buck’s never been good at figuring out which one is which.
“Get off,” Buck sobs, trembling when her palms settle either side of his face. “No.”
“Shh.” Margaret wraps her arms around him and pulls him close, starts rocking them from side to side. Buck tries to thrash, but she has a strong hold on him. Just a few weeks ago, Buck was able to carry two full grown adults out of a burning building. Now he can’t even fight off his over sixty-year-old mother, who he has a good hundred pounds and nearly a foot over. “Don’t cry.”
Buck feels the fight slowly drain out of him. He needs the comfort like he needs air to breathe, and he finds himself curling up into her hold.
Pathetic, pathetic.
---
Buck can still remember the day after Maddie left, how the silence turned empty and violent, made the house feel like a tomb.
He remembers how he cried himself to sleep the night before, sobbing so hard he had started to gag. He remembers how Margaret had pressed her cold hands to his forehead that morning and told him he had a fever. He remembers how angry and hurt he was, how he pushed her away and stormed out of the house, not returning until dusk.
For two weeks after that, Margaret ignored him. She walked past in the hallways like they were strangers, threw out any clothes he had left lying around the house, shoes sitting in the entrance way, turned away when he said goodbye in the mornings. Dinner was a silent affair, nothing but chewing and the scrapping of utensils, Phillip sitting silent, too, because he knew his place, and this had nothing to do with him.
Until one day when Buck snapped, feeling crazed and lonely and invisible, and he begged her to just look at him. To acknowledge his presence so he could at least know that he was real.
He begged and begged and begged, until eventually his voice cracked and broke, and he began to sob at the kitchen table. She still didn’t look up, stared down and ate her dry casserole like nothing was going on.
Buck had felt something give in his chest–a crackling like sensation, the earth collapsing in on itself–and he grabbed at his stomach and told her he felt sick.
Margaret’s head had snapped up, eyes triumphant and tracking him like he was something to be hunted and killed, mounted on the wall. He spent a week and a half sick after that.
Buck understood then that leaving is a Great sin, and even those who don’t commit it shall be punished. When he ran away years later, he was terrified of the day she would get her revenge.
Buck resented Maddie for a while after she left. He hated her for leaving, hated her for not taking him with her. He hated Margaret for chasing her off, hated her for making him hate Maddie. He hated himself for hating Maddie, hated himself for hating Margaret, hated himself for giving in.
He wants to hate Eddie for leaving.
It’s Buck’s fault, even if it really isn’t. Eddie was probably looking for an out anyway. And Buck can’t blame him, he’s just another in the long list of people who can’t put up with him.
What Buck really hates is that Eddie didn't even ask for him to come with him.
Because he would have gone. In a heartbeat he would have agreed, would have gone and broken his lease that night. He would have quit his job and transferred, left behind his sister and his niece and his whole mess of friends that have become family. He would have left behind the station and team that saved his life, without hesitation, just because Eddie asked him to.
But Eddie doesn’t ask.
“Everything that matters is in Texas.”
Buck tries not to hate him, hate himself for hating him. He does, a little bit, and feels immensely guilty because of it. He tries to channel all that hate into the job, into baking, cooking, moving into Eddie’s house and trying to make it into something he can live with.
He picks up extra shifts, covers for a few hours when someone needs him to. He lingers in the locker room and goes out on calls with b-shift and sometimes c-shift, because he’s conveniently still in his uniform, and he has nothing better to do, so he might as well tag along.
He bakes cookies, cakes, pies, muffins, enough to feed a small army. He brings them to the station and lets them pick them apart like vultures. He gives them to Eddie’s neighbors to get on their good graces, and hands them out to the homeless when he can’t sleep and goes on runs.
He sleeps with Tommy. Stupid, sad, pathetic, he knows. But it gets quiet at night in Eddie’s house. Mind-numbingly quiet, and Buck can’t stand it. The quiet has always made his skin crawl.
It feels good, in the moment, to be wanted, used. He’s had worse, sluttier phases before anyway.
Buck regrets sleeping with Tommy the moment he wakes up on his sheetless-mattress. He especially regrets it when he walks into the kitchen and sees him making breakfast. Tommy, in Eddie’s house, in Eddie’s kitchen, cooking on Eddie’s stove. He hates it.
He’s willing to forget it, to let Tommy down gently and have him go on good enough terms. But then he insinuated that he’s in love with Eddie, and Buck feels his demeanor shift from general annoyance to something more, his hackles rising. Confusion, anger, defensiveness. He kicks Tommy out and ignores the fact that he might be right.
Stupidly, he brings it up to Maddie, hoping she will roll her eyes and scoff at the idea like he did, at what an outlandish thing to think and say. Instead, she gives him a soft, almost pitying look, and seems to agree.
Buck feels even worse about it. Because a small, hidden-deep-down, part of himself was hoping she would do exactly that. That Maddie would smile and tell him it’s okay if he is. He can’t take it.
Buck will not be in love with Eddie. He refuses to be some pathetic cliche. A sad, lonely man in love with his best friend who is hundreds of miles away. Ridiculous.
But Buck misses Eddie like a lost limb. He goes to hand him the saws or jaws on calls, almost shouts his name when it's lunch time, tries to text him if he wants to go out to a new restaurant he heard about, makes too much for dinner and has to eat leftover lasagna for a week.
He's in love with Eddie.
Buck buries that feeling as deep as it can go.
---
Bobby's... Bobby's bleeding.
Buck can’t make sense of it.
It had just been a call. It started out as just a call. Sure, things took a turn, and then it had become a bad call, then it became a bad call. Dangerous. Hen and Chim were down, and things weren’t looking good.
A virus, a deadly virus. The military got involved, they were quarantined, and there wasn’t a thing they could do about it.
But Buck and Athena, uncaring of the threats of the U.S. government, break several laws, probably committed some felonies too, but it was for the team.
They get the vaccine to the team, and Chim gets it before things turn fatal. It was worth it, even if Buck had to call fucking Tommy, of all people, for help.
He goes back in to help everyone out, to make sure they do. Buck’s turning, about to walk out, when he sees Bobby, out of the corner of his eye and through the cloudy mask, backing away.
He follows him, instinctively, like a duckling imprinted on the first thing it saw when it woke up. He asks what he’s doing, and suddenly Bobby is hitting the button to close the door, with him still in the lab.
The glass is separating them, and Buck is shouting and banging on it like he’s somehow strong enough to break through with just his bare hands. Bobby’s taking his helmet off, and he shouldn’t, it’s dangerous, deadly, and he’s…he’s bleeding.
He looks sick. Eyes dark and sunken in, face pale, nose bleeding.
Sick, sick, sick.
Margaret must’ve gotten to him, Buck thinks manically. He must have been bad again, made her angry, and now she’s punishing him. He thought he could leave Hershey without consequence. She’s always been so righteous and petty, like an angry god.
When Buck was in the third grade, she threw out all his stuffed animals, claiming they had moths, or fleas, or some other small bug he wouldn’t have been able to notice, and was probably the one that brought them in to begin with. She’s made him walk home from dentist appointments if he caused too much trouble during his cleaning. She’s refused to make him lunch for school and wouldn’t let him grab anything from the cabinets.
And now she’s gotten Bobby. It’s his fault. He did this. If he had just been good, had stayed, had let Margaret make him sick for the rest of his life, let her hurt him, let her kill him if it came to it. Buck would have been glad to do it, had he known.
“You’re gonna be okay, Buck, remember that. They’re gonna need you. I love you, kid.”
Bobby was supposed to be okay. Buck was supposed to get him out.
It hurts, like someone has flayed him open, like a knife had been stabbed through his chest. Head to toe it aches, threatens to break him. Love has always, and will always, leave behind a pain bad enough to kill. Buck’s not going to be okay, he’ll never be okay.
Bobby’s suddenly walking off, and Buck is yelling at him to stay, and he doesn’t. He’s never been able to get anyone to stay, to never leave him. Everyone grows tired of him, hightails it away as soon as they can, and if they haven’t already it’s coming, fast and hard and devastating.
Buck runs off to get Athena. Because Athena is worth staying for, worth fighting for, and Buck isn’t. He’s needy and pathetic and begging to deaf ears.
Buck wishes it was him. Bitterly, he wonders if he would be able to take it. He was born for it. He was meant to be the one dying, the one aching and breaking and sick. He’s so good at taking the hurt and the suffering, it would be like a heart beating. Something instinctual, written into his DNA.
Bobby tells him to leave so he can be with Athena. And Buck does, movements stiff and hesitant, but he does it anyway, because he listens when he knows he has to. He can be good. He can follow orders.
Buck staggers down the hallway, rips his helmet off and his legs go loose and weak until he’s sliding down the wall. His eyes go hazy, and his breath shallow and quickening, and he uses the last of the air in his lungs to wail.
No matter how far and fast Buck runs, the sickness will always find a way to come back.
He can only hope it's him next.
---
Buck’s gotten worse since they listened to Eddie’s voicemail.
He’s not good anymore, doesn’t let Margaret dote on him as easily, refuses to eat the sludge she gives him, fights her when it’s time for more medicine, won’t let her towel away his sweat.
She does manage to get some medicine in him, because he is weak and can’t stand up for himself for too long, not when she starts to completely ignore him. It’s stronger, a darker red with a fouler taste than usual.
His fever broke a few hours ago, and she views that as disobedience on his part, something to be punished for. Not listening needs to be punished too.
Eventually, Buck gets too hungry to care about the tasteless liquid that changes depending on what meal he’s having. Smoothies for breakfast, oatmeal for lunch, soups and broths for dinner. It leaves him tired and desperate for some actual, solid food.
That’s when Margaret stops feeding him. Punishment. He doesn’t get dinner that night, or breakfast the next morning, lunch is late and comes in the form of a watery oatmeal that looks like it’s been sitting out on the counter for a day and a half.
Buck eats it anyway, even lets Margaret spoonfeed it to him.
She doesn’t give him his phone anymore, has it hidden somewhere outside the arms length he can reach off the bed. He hasn’t seen it on his hobbled trips to the bathroom. She waits outside the door while he pees and gives himself the occasional spongebath, too frail to climb into the shower.
She’s taken away his tissues, his vaseline for his dry, cracked lips and nostrils, won’t give him more than one cup of water a day, and his bathroom trips have been cut down to once in the morning when he wakes up and once at night before he goes to sleep.
A pressure starts in the base of Buck’s neck some time in the afternoon, slowly spiderwebbing its way up his skull. It creeps down into his jaw and makes it ache, then it goes up from there, settling like an ice pick through his head, makes it hurt to blink, to look too far up and down and to the side.
Buck’s starved, stomach clenching around the few spoonfuls of oatmeal he was able to swallow, head pounding, muscles twitching from disuse, when Margaret gives him two, small, unidentifiable pills for his pain.
He’s too deep into his sickness, too addicted to the need to be comforted–is still trembling from her recent neglect–that he takes them without a second thought.
Within the hour, the pressure in his head worsens, pressing behind his eyes bad enough that it feels like they’re going to pop right out of his skull.
He knew, as soon as the pills had started to melt on his tongue–his mouth was too dry to swallow properly, and he had already finished his water for the day–that it was going to get worse.
Buck always gets worse before he gets better. He’s always driven to the brink of dehydration, sweating and hacking out all his fluids for days. He’s always sobbing because he’s so hungry but the nausea won’t let him eat. He’s always rubbing at his throat once it starts to burn from vomiting up nothing but stomach acid.
But he can’t stop. He can’t help but reach out for Margaret anyway, begging for her to hold him and rock him and tell him everything will be alright.
Even when her touch is coming as a comfort, it hurts.
Buck remembers every picture day growing up, when Margaret would help him get ready, the one day out of the year. She had an image for him, and it had to be done right. Hair cut short enough that it wouldn’t curl, straightened or brushed back if it was. Unseemly birthmark covered. A smile with teeth only allowed as long as he didn’t have a gap in the front. Iron-pressed slacks and baby blue button downs, dress shoes and socks that matched.
He hated the concealer smeared across his face and the gel that made his hair feel thick and heavy, but he craved the attention. It was one of the few times Margaret would touch him when he wasn't sick. A silk-smooth thumb across his forehead, boney fingers against his scalp.
She settles a cold, damp rag across his forehead. His headache hasn’t lightened up in the slightest.
“Mom,” Buck whimpers, “hurts.”
Margaret draws the curtains closed, gets another rag and places it at the base of his neck. She settles into the bed next to him and begins brushing his hair back, gently detangling the knots with her fingers.
It’s nice, peaceful. It doesn’t last long.
"I don't know if I ever loved you," Margaret whispers.
Comfort, attack, comfort, attack, comfort. Attack.
Buck flinches. His chest aches, like someone's reached a hand inside to squeeze at his heart to see how much force it could take before breaking.
"Momma," Buck whines–begs, he's always been so damn good at begging.
"You were such a hard thing to love," she carries on, unhearing, uncaring, her hand patting his hair harshly. "Even as a baby. Always crying. Never fed. So difficult. Why were you so difficult?"
Buck tries to curl up, hoping if he gets small enough, pathetic enough, she’ll take pity on him and stop. Hoping she’ll go back to comfort. "I was a child, Mom, a baby."
"You were a punishment. Daniel was a godsend."
Margaret doesn't say it, even that would be too far for her. But they both hear it; It should've been you.
"Sorry," Buck sobs into a pillow, "I'm sorry."
"Shh," Margaret tuts, a noise halfway between comfort and disgust.
Buck's fingernails dig into his palm, and he wonders how hard he'd have to squeeze for the skin to break and blood to seep from little, crescent moon indents.
The pain in his head reaches its peak, and he passes out against his tear-soaked pillow.
---
Someone’s pounding on his door.
Margaret jumps up and rushes from the room. There’s shouting somewhere outside, a sort of splintering sound, then more shouting.
Buck rips the covers back with shaky hands. He tries to get up but overthinks just how much strength he has and flops heavily to the floor. His hands smack down, barely holding up his weight.
He pulls at the nightstand and side of the bed, his legs too weak and wobbly, useless and shaking like jelly. They’ll never work again, he’s sure of it.
Margaret’s overdone it again. Got the dosage wrong, gave him too much. And Buck took it, leaned his head back and swallowed like a good boy. Let the days bleed together and let her feed him next to nothing and let her towel away his sweat and blood and tears.
“Buck!”
Thundering footsteps come down the hallway, bust into the room.
Eddie, pausing at first in the doorway, then eyes bursting wide in shock. He jumps to Buck’s side, hand warm and heavy across his back.
A guttural sound comes from deep in Buck’s chest–not a scream or a groan, something instinctual and animalistic, a rabbit as the wolf's teeth dig into its neck.
"Buck? Holy shit. Buck, Buck, what did she give you? What did you give him?" Eddie shouts.
"Mom?" Buck whimpers.
"No, no," Eddie says soothingly. Because Buck shouldn't want the poison. He shouldn't want the one pushing it down his throat. "It's me."
"Evan!" Margaret shrieks.
Buck’s stomach twists suddenly as his mouth fills with saliva. A sweat breaks out across his forehead, and he tries to get himself up onto his elbows, but still none of his limbs will work.
He flops facedown and dry heaves against the floor.
"Hey, hey, hey," Eddie says in a rush as he scrambles for the puke bowl on the nightstand, next to his tissues, and the rags, and the water cup, the medicine.
He’ll know, he’ll see.
Buck dry heaves again, staring down into that fucking teal porcelain, as Eddie hauls him up on his hands and knees.
"It's okay," Margaret whispers. Nails of a respectable length, painted a respectable shade of red, scratch at his scalp. "Let it go."
"No," Evan whines, a high, keening noise from the back of his throat. A wet cough and gag follows. "Get off."
The ceiling fan spins listlessly, squeaks with each full rotation. Fireworks explode outside the window, lighting the room in blues and reds, making his brain pound against his skull.
Evan's finger twitches. This is it. She's finally done it this time. He will die; she will kill him.
The teal bowl lies beneath him, a string of drool tethering them together.
"Teal?" The bowl has never been teal. It's white, always been white. He remembers staring down into the white as a kid and wondering how hard Margaret had scrubbed it to have no pink left behind. "It's teal."
"Yeah, teal," Eddie says from above. "That's the only bowl you'll eat ramen out of."
Pink bile tarnishes the teal.
---
When Buck blinks awake, Maddie is sobbing by his side, Eddie next to her, not looking much better, awkwardly patting her back.
He's sick of waking up in hospital beds.
He hates hospitals. He hates the stench of death, and all the wires and tubes and beeping. He hates the newborns screeching in tandem with the woman who just lost her husband. He hates the sawdust textured food and the weird tasting water. He hates the ice chips and the hard-to-swallow pills.
Buck's throat hurts something fierce and his stomach clenches around emptiness, which means they pumped his stomach. Excavated the poison and took all the love with it.
"He–" Buck tries, but his voice is rough and rocky, cracking at the end like a sparkler about to go out. "Hey."
"Oh, Evan– Buck," Maddie sighs as she jumps up from her seat.
He should want her here, hugging him, comforting him, talking enough for the both of them–he used to go to her when he was a child, dripping blood from a scrapped shin onto her carpet, carrying a loose baby tooth in the heart of his palm–but now having her see him like this makes him feel naked, exposed. Nauseous.
"Where's Mom?" Buck asks. Maddie freezes and the room fills with a thick tension.
"She..." Maddie trails off, pulling at her fingers and looking anywhere but him.
"She's in custody," Eddie finishes when it becomes clear she can't say it.
Buck blinks. "What?"
"They arrested her."
Buck knew that it was bad, bad enough that he would never tell anyone, never let anyone know, never let them see, but it wasn’t that bad. Bad enough that Margaret would be arrested over it. "Why?"
"’Why?’" Maddie echos, a crease forming between her eyebrows. "’Why,’ Buck? She, she was– Buck."
He hates the worry and grief he has caused Maddie all his life. Has caused for everyone he’s ever known. He is pathetic and tainted.
"Buck," Eddie says with a forced evenness. "She was poisoning you."
Buck almost takes the out, almost lets him think that it was a one and done thing, an isolated incident, that he didn’t even realize, that he didn’t want it and Margaret simply got the drop on them.
Instead, his mind goes blank, and what comes out is, "She loves me."
I don't know if I ever loved you.
Maddie makes a choked off gasping noise, hand raising to hide her mouth. Eddie’s fingers flex white around the magazine twisted in his lap.
“None of that was love, Buck,” Eddie says, “it’s abuse.”
Buck shakes his head violently, a bad idea considering the headache is still taking its time going away. “No, no–”
“I’m sorry.”
“No!” he exclaims in a panic. “She– She loves me.”
I don't know if I ever loved you
"Buck..." Eddie sighs, rising out of his seat.
"I'm loved," Buck says forcefully, teeth digging into his tongue. If he says it with enough conviction it's true, right?
I don't know if I ever loved you
There is blood in his mouth and Buck is dying and no one has ever loved him. He will die, slow and painful in a hospital, just like he always feared. The heart monitor nearly doubles in its tempo.
Maddie and Eddie rush forward, flanking themselves on either side of the bed and try their best to calm him down, but a fleet of nurses comes pouring into the room. Someone starts to hold down his flailing legs, and Buck freaks out even worse.
"Can I get a dose of lorazepam?" a doctor shouts over the chaos.
"You're not sedating him!"
"No!" Buck screeches. "No, no, no!"
He is a dog stuck in a trap, bleeding and snapping at anyone who gets too close, ready to gnaw his own leg off to escape.
They get the needle hooked into his IV and pumping the sedative into his bloodstream before he can pull the wires from his body and flee the state.
His vision begins to blur not long after.
---
Buck comes to in the same hospital bed, same room, sunlight coming in through the window just a little bit less.
His head is still fuzzy, feels like it's been stuffed with cotton, but it doesn’t hurt as much anymore, has settled into nothing more than a dull ache.
He thinks he’s alone at first, and almost goes to pull out his IV when he makes eye contact with Eddie. He tries to close his eyes in an effort to pretend to be sleeping.
"Afternoon," Eddie says dryly.
Buck peels his eyes back open in defeat, tries not to completely fall apart, again. Shame floods through him, coils tightly in his stomach and overwhelms his senses.
"Where's Maddie?" he croaks, throat sore from all his yelling. He winces.
"She went home. Didn't want to upset you."
"I–" Buck's throat clicks. "She wasn't upsetting me."
Eddie gives him a look. "The police need to take your statement. Athena got them to back off until tomorrow."
Buck picks at his nails, chest hurting. “Why?”
"Buck. She was–"
"I know!" Buck balls his hands in his lap and doesn't dare tear his eyes away. "I– I don't want to talk about it right now, please. Please," he begs.
He wants to pretend this never happens, wants to move on with his life and maybe give Eddie, and Maddie, and everyone else who saw or heard, amnesia so they never remember any of it.
"Okay," Eddie says quietly. "They're coming around with lunch soon."
"I'm not hungry," Buck sighs.
"I wasn't asking. You need to eat."
"I'm not hungry," Buck repeats stubbornly.
He can't remember the last time he ate, really ate something solid and filling. He can’t remember much of anything from the last few days.
"Mmhmm,” Eddie hums, probably already planning on forcing something down his throat anyway.
"She had me on an all liquid diet for a while, so I don't know how much I'll be able to eat."
Eddie nods to himself, jaw clenching and unclenching. "Just the pudding then."
Buck wants to be difficult, to get his way even when it’s not really his choice. "I want jello."
Eddie scoffs and rolls his eyes. "Then the jello."
"Is jello a liquid?"
"I don't know." Eddie smiles lightly, the tension filling the room at least slightly easing up. "That's something I would ask you."
Buck should let it go, should bury it and never bring it up, pretend he never heard it. "Eddie?"
"Yeah?"
"I, uh, I listened to your voicemail."
If he can’t be sick, can’t hurt, he can have this. Hopeless, pathetic. Pathetic, pathetic.
Eddie’s eyes widen in surprise. "Oh. About that, actually–"
"It was a cruel thing to joke about,” Buck cuts him off, “even if you were drunk."
Eddie’s face drops, and he blinks a few times. "What?"
"I know me being in love with you must be hilarious, but that was a mean thing to do."
"You are?" Eddie asks, a fake hopefulness in his voice.
It’s bad enough that Eddie somehow found out Buck’s in love with him, and sent him a voicemail to torment him, but to pretend he actually meant it is worse. A thousand times worse, and Buck wants the pain, but this hurts too much for him to take.
Buck scoffs and angrily wipes at his eyes. "Stop it. That's– Don't do that."
Eddie sits up and pulls his chair closer to the bed, hands hovering nearby like he can’t figure out where to put them. “I wasn’t joking, Buck, but I think we should talk about this another time.”
He sounds like he’s being serious, and Buck wants to believe him. In fact, he believes him so much that the heart monitor shows his increased heart rate. Eddie turns to it with a soft snort and smile.
Buck glares at his heart monitor and resists the urge to knock it over or rip the socket from the wall.
“You’re not lying?” Buck asks, heart in his throat. He trusts Eddie. Eddie wouldn’t hurt him. Wouldn’t drug him and act like his comfort was enough to make up for it.
“No, Buck. I wouldn’t do that to you. Never in a million years.”
“And– And you’re sure? About me? I– I’m a fucking mess, Eddie.” Buck gestures to himself, the wires across his body, the entire room. “I mean, c’mon.”
Eddie frowns. "That's why I wanted to wait. You're hurt right now."
"I'm not broken," Buck says, voice breaking.
"I know, bud. You're hurt, and things are complicated. I just think we should wait for a while until everything settles."
Buck’s tired of waiting. He’s waited all his life for happiness, for comfort and safety without stipulation. "How long?"
Eddie tilts his head, looks pointedly at the hospital bed and the monitors and the wires. “A couple weeks?”
“Weeks?”
“Buck. There's a lot going on right now. Trying to start a relationship right now is not a good idea. For either of us.”
Eddie’s hand finds his over the blanket, laces their fingers together. The touch doesn’t hurt, doesn’t burn.
Buck nods. “Okay.”
A nurse comes in a few minutes later with lunch.
Eddie leaves him the jello and a packet of crackers that he’ll no doubt force him to eat. He takes what appears to be meatloaf for himself.
Buck peels off the lid of the jello, frowning at his hospital bracelet and wires and needles taped to his arm.
The green jello stares up at him tauntingly, like it knows how deep the emptiness inside him goes, how loud the howling can get.
"I had a seizure when I was eighteen."
Eddie's gaze snaps up, easy look slipping away. Buck's not sure why he's saying this.
Maybe it's his instinct to ruin anything good as soon as he gets it. Eddie didn't sign up for any of this bullshit, just accidentally left a drunken voicemail before he knew how pathetic Buck could get.
"She– I– I was sick for a month, two months. I dunno. I left after that, never found out why I had the seizure in the first place. They gave me jello when I woke up. Green jello."
Buck squeezes the container and watches the jello warp to match the shape. He feels wrung dry, and everything left hidden is pouring out before he can get a grip.
"I can get another flavor," Eddie offers, already hovering halfway off his chair.
"No, it's alright. I like green. I did throw it up in a field last time, but that was right after I realized she could've killed me so..."
Buck chuckles once weakly, throat bobbing. The break–thirty years of fear and desperation crashing down on him–comes so suddenly it startles him. The noise that tears out of him is a cross between a choke and gasp, cracking the previous silence of the room.
The green jello trembles as his hands shake.
"Buck," Eddie says, but it's distant and floating away.
A wail-like sob works its way out of his chest. He covers his face in an effort to get himself under control, unsure he can take being sedated again.
"Hey, hey."
Hands pull at his forearms, cradle his cheeks, drag him into a warm shoulder, and tangle fingers in his hair. Buck knows it's Eddie, he knows where he is, how old he is, he knows. But his terror has always been stronger than his reasoning.
Margaret will kill him, she will accomplish what she has twice failed to do.
"Don't let them sedate me again," Buck sobs, his hands dragging uselessly across Eddie's back because he can't get his fingers to work and grab at the fabric. "Don't let her–" He chokes.
"I won't," Eddie promises. "You're okay, it's okay. She– She can't hurt you."
Buck smears snot and tears against the collar of Eddie's shirt, but he can't get himself to stop and pull away.
---
Eddie takes him home in the morning.
He showed up bright and early at the start of visiting hours, conveniently just in time to watch Buck get his statement taken,
Athena was there too, insisted upon it, in fact. She wasn’t allowed on the case–Buck hadn’t realized it was bad enough dropping the charges wasn’t an option–but her and Eddie are allowed in the room, hovering nearby in case he freaks out.
The detectives give him a rundown of all the drugs in his system. It’s a long list, and Buck doesn’t hear a single one of them, just listens to Eddie and Athena’s barely contained shock as it goes on.
Buck lets his mind go blank and hazy as he talks, as he explains the past couple of days, the times from his childhood.
His head keeps tilting towards the door every few minutes, half expecting Margaret to come whirling in for her usual one woman show of Concerned and Distressed Mother.
They ask Eddie and Athena how they knew something was wrong, and it’s the first time Buck even wonders how they found him, too busy being consumed by the shame of it all.
Eddie says that Buck hadn’t responded to his texts in a day or two, not completely concerning, but he hadn’t responded to anyone else either. When he checked his FindMy Friends, it showed him at home, not out camping like he said he was.
The detectives shake his hands, let him know they’ll keep him updated, whatever that means, and they leave. Over like that. It’s done, thirty years of Buck’s life over. Until there's a trial. If there’s a trial.
Athena stays while they get him ready to be discharged, and she helps wheel him out while Eddie pulls the car around. They don’t talk much, which he is grateful for, but she holds his hand and kisses him on the forehead.
Buck hates the drive from the hospital. He hates the empty silence that stretches across the dashboard like an endless void, he hates the aching wounds that get agitated with every bump in the road, he hates the adrenaline that's long gone, and he hates the next dose of pain meds waiting at home.
He hates the guilt and the shame flowing alongside his blood like it belongs inside him. He hates knowing whatever happened, whatever reckless decision he made is what put him in the hospital. He hates that he makes it someone else's problem to deal with.
Buck stares out the window and can't bring himself to talk, even as Eddie fiddles with the radio at every stop.
He watches a pack of pre-teens ride past on their bikes. They go careening into the road without a care. He used to be like that, worse most days–stupid, careless, uncaring of how it affected others. Now, he just imagines the cars they cut off hitting them, their helmet-less skulls cracking against the pavement.
"You alright?" Eddie asks after he's already gone through all the radio stations twice and turned the volume from five to ten to five.
Buck's mouth opens and closes, a fish out of water. Eventually, "I don't know."
"Okay," Eddie says easily, like he'll rebuild Buck piece by piece without complaint. "Maddie texted me. She wants to know when's a good time to see you."
For years he wondered if she knew. If Margaret had done the same thing to her. If love and pain had been synonyms. If a seizure had been the final tipping point for leaving with Doug.
She didn't know.
Buck squeezes his eyes shut.
She didn't know.
He's still trying to figure out if that's better or worse.
"Tomorrow," Buck decides.
He watches a seagull fly across the horizon. It's going east, away from the water, towards the hills. Maybe the heat rising unforgivingly above the pavement mimics the shimmering waves of the sea.
Buck frowns when they pull into Eddie's driveway. Obviously, he assumed that's where they were going, and he's always felt safer at Eddie's. But he liked his new house, a place finally his own, and now it's tainted.
He could barely stomach living on the east coast after he left Hershey. He won't flee Los Angeles, but he'll have to move, won’t be able to sleep in that same bed, that same room. The realization makes him angry, makes him want to smash his face against the dashboard.
Because Buck only knows how to express his emotions through pain.
Eddie leads him into the house. They stand quietly in the entranceway, and it reminds Buck of when Margaret showed up. He almost turns to slam the door in her face.
"Where's Chris?"
"Staying with Hen and Karen tonight.”
Buck tries not to take that personally. But this is fucked, Buck is fucked, so maybe Eddie’s right to not have his son around him anymore.
"You tired?"
Buck wants to throw a fit, to stomp his feet on the floor and kick and scream–like when he was a toddler and Maddie was trying to teach him how to tie his shoes and he couldn't get his fingers to form the two bunny ears no matter how hard he tried.
"I'm tired of being tired,” he sighs.
He's been sleeping on and off for the past day and a half, bed bound since... Since.
"How– How long was I..." Buck trails off awkwardly, wringing his hands together helplessly, hoping Eddie knows what he means.
Eddie's face pinches together. "A week."
"Oh. Right," Buck says distantly. "I knew that."
It feels like someone's cut him from throat to navel, left him open and vulnerable, blood and guts dirtying the floor. But at least Eddie's the only witness, the only one he would trust to see it all, to scoop his insides off the floor and shove them back inside.
"I don't think I know how to be a person. Not without the hurt."
Buck used to imagine that there was a limit to pain, that one day he would have suffered enough and it would end. That he would wake up and be good enough and there would be no poison, only love.
That day never came, the suffering and pain and fear never ended. The black hole in the deepest part of his chest did nothing but grow.
"Oh, Buck," Eddie gasps, sounding like Buck just punched him in the gut. A tear breaks free.
Buck’s reaching out to wipe it away when he realizes his own face is wet too. He wipes at it harshly with the sleeve of his shirt. "Oh. Sorry."
"Stop apologizing for everything, Buck. I know your perception of love is–"
"Fucked up?"
"–skewed," Eddie finishes. "But we'll show you. I'll show you. It doesn't have to hurt, baby."
Buck sniffs and throws himself across the room and into Eddie’s arm. He stuffs his face in his shoulder and breathes in his scent like it’s the air he needs to live.
Eddie’s hand comes up to cradle the back of his head. Buck’s face is puffy, eyes dry, and chest aching. He’s tired.
He yarns into the crook of Eddie’s neck, who then snorts softly. “So you are tired. Wanna take a nap?"
"It's barely ten."
Buck changes out of the clothes Eddie brought him in the hospital. They feel weird, too restrictive, smell off, clinical like. He wants to put on one of Eddie’s shirts, but none of them fit, so he has to settle for some of his own spare clothes he keeps in the dresser.
Eddie tucks him into bed, and it doesn’t feel the same as when Margaret would do it, doesn’t hurt as much. Eddie wouldn’t make him stay in bed for days at a time, would probably force him out of it after hour twelve.
Eddie’s pulling away, flicking off the lamp and moving to leave. Buck’s hand shoots out suddenly, nearly subconsciously, and his fingers wrap around Eddie’s wrist.
"Eddie, I– I know that you said it should wait, but, stay? Please. I don't wanna... Just– Stay?"
Eddie gives him a comforting look, eyes softening. "Yeah, Buck,” he breathes, “ I'll stay."
He changes into shorts and climbs into bed next to him. Buck wants to curl around him, to press their skin together from head to toe. He doesn’t, and settles for their shoulders bruising together and their pinkies linked on top of the covers.
Buck wakes up on his stomach an hour or two later, Eddie next to him, his back bare and broad, stretching across his half of the bed.
Heat rolls in through the open window, because Eddie and the thermostat have a tenuous relationship and he hasn't deemed it hot enough outside to turn the air on.
The ceiling fan is working overtime to push the heat back out the window, and Buck watches it for a while, trying to ignore the imaginary squeak he hears it make at every full rotation.
Eddie shifts suddenly, eyes still closed, arms wrapping around his waist and pulling him impossibly closer, like he could sense how stuck in his own head Buck was getting.
"I got you," he mumbles into his shoulder.
Buck releases a stuttering breath and lets the distant LA traffic and Eddie's soft snoring lull him to sleep.