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Buck is too still.
That is the first thing Eddie knows, before the mud soaking through his knees, before the sirens that are not here yet, before the coppery smell of blood in the rain and dirt. Before the fact that his own voice is coming out of him in raw, wrecked pieces he does not recognize.
Buck is too still in his lap.
“Hey. Hey, no, no, no.” Eddie’s hands are everywhere at once, useless and frantic and shaking so hard he can barely make them work. One braced at the back of Buck’s neck, trying to keep his head supported. One spread over Buck’s ribs like he can hold him together through pressure alone. His bare fingers slip against Buck’s wet shirt, against mud, against blood, and the cold of it makes something inside him seize up so violently he nearly chokes on it.
Buck’s head lolls against Eddie’s forearm, limp in a way Buck should never be. Buck is never limp. He is all restless motion, all bright edges and loud opinions and too much energy crammed into one body. Even asleep, Buck is never this still. Even asleep, Buck breathes like he means it.
Now every breath is a terrible thing Eddie has to hunt for.
He bends over him, forehead pressing hard to Buck’s, desperate enough to use pain as a tether. The rain has turned to a mist so fine it sits on Buck’s eyelashes and gathers in the blond of his hair. There is mud smeared over Buck’s temple, over his cheek, over the cut at his hairline that will not stop bleeding. Eddie can feel the heat of it cooling under the night air. Can feel Buck’s skin too slick and too cold and not cold enough, because if Buck was cold-cold that would mean—
No.
No.
“Buck.” His voice breaks clean through the middle of the name. He swallows and tries again, like if he can just say it the right way Buck will answer. “Buck, come on. Come on, man. Stay with me.”
Nothing.
There is nothing out here but sand, rock, and night.
The desert stretches around them in every direction, vast and empty and indifferent, the wind scraping over the ground in dry whispers. Just Eddie on his knees in the dirt with Buck crumpled in his lap, bleeding and unconscious and far too still beneath the open sky.
Eddie rocks without meaning to.
The movement starts small, almost invisible, his body answering terror with instinct. Forward. Back. Forward. Back. As if Buck is something precious he can protect with closeness alone. As if motion means life. As if, so long as Eddie keeps holding him and keeps moving, Buck cannot slip any farther away. But the rhythm turns desperate fast. He drags Buck tighter against his chest and keeps rocking like a man trying to bargain with the universe, with God, with the endless dark itself.
“Help’s coming,” he says, words spilling hot and useless over Buck’s mouth, his cheek, the tiny space between them. “You hear me? Help is coming. They’re coming right now. You just—you hold on for me. You hold on.”
Buck does not move.
Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, and all he sees is every other almost-loss layered one on top of another. The fire truck ladder. The lifelessness of Buck’s face after the lightning strike. Buck pale and broken under fluorescent hospital lights. Buck on the other side of too many closed doors. Buck saying there are things he doesn’t know how to let go of. Buck at his kitchen table. Buck on his couch. Buck in his life so thoroughly, so quietly, so completely that Eddie stopped knowing where the edges were.
He cannot do this.
He cannot.
His thumb drags over Buck’s jaw. Mud catches under the pad of it. Blood, tacky and wet, stripes across his skin. Buck’s lips are parted just enough to give Eddie hope and then rip it away when the next breath takes too long.
“Come on.” Eddie’s voice drops into something hoarse and ragged, the shape of prayer without the comfort of one. “Come on, Buck. Don’t—don’t do this. Don’t you do this.”
The words come faster after that, tumbling out without order, without pride, without any of the careful locks Eddie has spent half his life putting on himself. There is no room for any of that here. Only Buck. Only this.
“You stay with me, okay? Stay with me.” Eddie presses harder, brow to brow, so close he can taste rain and iron in the air. “Chris is waiting for you. You know that? You know he’s gonna kill me if I let anything happen to you. He’s got that game he wanted to show you, and he was asking if you were coming by on Friday, and you said you would, so you have to—you have to keep your word.”
His chest hitches so hard it hurts.
“You promised him.”
Still nothing.
Buck’s lashes flutter.
Eddie jolts so violently he nearly loses his grip. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s it, baby, come on.” The endearment slips out of him blood-warm and thoughtless, wrung from someplace too deep to stop. He does not even register it beyond the feral hope that follows. “Come on, Buck. Eyes on me. Open your eyes.”
But Buck only sags heavier, head tipping farther into Eddie’s hand.
The hope curdles. Eddie makes a sound low in his throat, something stripped raw and helpless.
Somewhere to his left there is movement, boots splashing through mud, voices clipped with urgency. A flashlight beam cuts across the dark and disappears again. Somebody says the ambulance is two minutes out.
Two minutes.
Two minutes is nothing. Two minutes is an entire lifetime. Two minutes is enough time to lose a person forever.
Eddie can’t breathe around it.
He pulls back before he can stop himself, only far enough to see Buck’s face. Really see it. Mud caked along the sharp line of his cheekbone. Blood threaded through his eyebrow. Rain beading on his skin. The unfair familiarity of that face turned slack and unresponsive in his hands.
Buck looks younger like this. Not peaceful—Eddie will never think that word again as long as he lives—but young. Unarmored. Frighteningly human.
Eddie’s tears have been falling for long enough now that he can feel the tracks they make through the grime on his face, warm lines cutting down through dirt and blood spatter, dripping off his jaw onto Buck’s jacket. He barely notices them until one lands on Buck’s cheek and stays there like another drop of rain.
“Please,” Eddie whispers, and it is the most naked word he has ever said.
His fingers tighten behind Buck’s neck. He leans in and presses a kiss to Buck’s forehead—bloody, muddy, chilled by rain, the skin broken at the hairline. He kisses him anyway, careful and trembling, mouth lingering there like he can transfer something essential through contact. Life. Warmth. Himself.
The taste of salt and dirt and iron hits his lips.
Another sob tears loose before he can swallow it down. Tears slide faster, carving clean tracks through the mess on his face. He can feel them cooling in the wind, mixing with the blood smeared across his cheek, with the grit of the ground where he went down beside Buck and never got back up.
“I love you,” he says into Buck’s skin, because at this point what is left to protect? “You hear me? I love you, so you don’t get to leave. Not like this. Not without—” His voice snaps apart.
Not without knowing.
Not without hearing it.
Not again.
He drags Buck back into his chest with a desperate, clumsy strength, gathering him closer as if proximity itself could keep him here. One arm brackets across Buck’s shoulders. The other cradles the back of his head and presses it firmly beneath Eddie’s chin, the top of Buck’s head tucked hard against him. Eddie bows over him, forehead pressed to damp hair now, then lower until the crown of Buck’s head is braced against his mouth, his cheek, anything he can reach. Holding him like shelter. Like anchor. Like the center of the world.
“Stay,” he breathes, the word hot into Buck’s hair. “Stay, stay, stay.”
He rocks them both.
His thighs are numb from kneeling in the mud. His lower back is screaming. His hands ache from gripping too hard. He does not loosen them. He cannot. Every time Buck’s body shifts with the faintest breath, relief hits Eddie so sharply it borders on pain. Every time there is a pause, his own heart stutters into panic so complete he thinks he might black out.
“I can’t lose you again.” The confession comes out cracked, pressed against Buck’s hair. “Do you understand me? I can’t. I can’t do that again.”
He is not even sure which again he means. There are too many.
Again like the shooting, when the world went white around the edges and all Eddie could think was Buck. Again like the lightning, when Buck’s heart stopped and took Eddie’s with it. Again like every moment Buck has ever been on the wrong side of a closing door while Eddie stood there, helpless and furious and praying to a God he only remembers when it’s Buck on the line.
Again like all the times Eddie almost admitted to himself what Buck was and then shoved it back down because wanting doesn’t make things safe. Because naming something that precious felt like handing fate a weapon.
Too late for that now.
Buck makes a faint sound.
Eddie jerks back just enough to look at him, one hand flying to his face. “Buck? Buck, hey.”
It is barely a sound at all—more exhale than voice, maybe just air catching wrong—but Eddie would build an entire religion around less.
“That’s it,” he says instantly, fiercely. “That’s good. Good, baby, that’s good. Stay with me. I know. I know it hurts. I know.”
His hand cups Buck’s cheek. The stubble there rasps against his palm, horribly ordinary. Eddie clings to it.
“The 118 needs you,” he says, because maybe obligation will work where love won’t. Buck has always answered to need. “You hear me? Hen’s gonna yell at you for scaring her, Chim’s gonna yell at you because he acts like a jerk when he’s scared, Ravi’s gonna hover, and “And Maddie—” The name nearly wrecks him too. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut for half a second, then forces them open again. “You think your sister could survive this? You think she could stand in another hospital and hear—no. No, Buck. You don’t get to do that to her. You stay.”
“And me.” He brushes his knuckles over Buck’s temple, careful of the blood. “You don’t get to leave me. You don’t.”
Rain taps softly against the backs of his hands. Somewhere, closer now, sirens rise and split the dark open.
Eddie almost collapses from relief, but relief is too dangerous this early. He has had hope ripped away too many times to trust it. So he does not let go. Does not ease up. He keeps Buck pinned to him, head tucked under his chin, body curved around him like a barricade.
“Ambulance is here!” someone shouts.
Lights wash red-white over the mud. Doors slam. Boots pound. The world rushes back all at once, loud and cold and full of motion.
Eddie barely registers it.
His mouth stays against Buck’s hair. “Hear that?” he whispers. “That’s your ride. So this is the part where you keep breathing and let them do their job, okay? That’s all you have to do. Just breathe.”
Hands are on Eddie then—gentle, firm, trying to assess, trying to make room. Somebody says his name once, twice. He ignores them. Or maybe he can’t hear them past the roaring in his ears.
“Sir,” the paramedic says, close now, voice sharpened by tenderness. “I need you to let me in.”
He cannot. The refusal is animal, immediate. His arms tighten reflexively.
Then Buck’s breath ghosts weakly against the soaked fabric at Eddie’s throat.
Eddie breaks.
He presses one more wrecked kiss into Buck’s hair and finally lifts his head enough to let the paramedics come in around him. But he doesn’t let go completely. Even as they move Buck, even as gloved hands take over, Eddie keeps one hand on him—on his shoulder, his arm, the side of his face—anywhere he can still reach.
“I’m here,” he keeps saying, to Buck or to himself or to whatever might be listening. “I’m here. I’m here.”
Buck does not answer.
But he breathes.
Thin and ragged and terrifyingly fragile, but he breathes.
And Eddie, mud-soaked and shaking and streaked with tears that have carved clean lines through blood and dirt, stays on his knees in the wreckage of the moment and builds his whole universe around that single fact.
He breathes.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Until Eddie can almost believe there might still be a world left after this.