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Half an hour in, Buck adjusts in his seat and can’t hold in the pained grunt he’d been clearly trying to swallow since they got in the car.
“You alright?” Eddie feels slightly stupid asking it. Of course he isn’t, but what else is he supposed to say.
“Fine,” Buck exhales, sinking back into the uncomfortable car seat. There’s a spring digging into Eddie’s spine and he wishes he’d- what? Patted down the passenger seat for pokey bits? Buck smiles over at him, genuinely enough. “I promise to wait at least another 40 minutes before I start asking if we’re there yet.”
Eddie’s not sure he could get his mouth to make a smile if he tried. “Can’t give you anything else for another two hours, but tell me to pull over whenever you need to.”
Buck rolls his eyes, showy, for Eddie’s sake, lips still pulled up. “I know, yeah.”
“Okay.” Eddie drags his eyes back to the road. Should keep them on the road. Has nightmare visions of swerving into traffic, going over another incline, rolling again. “You should try to get some sleep.”
Buck actually laughs. “Man.” Out of the corner of his eye Eddie sees him rub a hand over his face. “I don’t- I’m never really gonna sleep right again after that.”
“What… what exactly happened?” Eddie glances at him fully, so he sees the way Buck’s grin stiffens, the tiny little shake of his head. Not now. Please don’t. Okay, then. Eddie looks ahead again. “We’ll stop in Tucson.”
“Okay.”
“But let me know if-”
“Yeah,” with a little laugh back in it. “I’ll let you know.”
-
Buck does fall asleep before they get there, but only lightly. He’s blinking awake again before Eddie’s even fully parked the car. “Arizona?”
“Yeah.”
Buck grunts and closes his eyes again. Eddie lets him have the few moments it takes to get up and walk around to the passenger side. “C’mon, bud. Gotta stretch those legs.”
Buck grunts again but gets himself upright. They’re at an ugly little rest stop outside of town, just a run down bathroom and a couple of parking spots, but there’s a family in an RV with little kids making happy noises and enough cars driving past to reduce the pinprick feeling of isolation. The dad gives them a weird look which makes Eddie’s stomach flip before he remembers how beat to absolute shit they are. He waves and smiles as reassuringly as possible and then busies himself with helping Buck limp a few yards back and forth.
“You hurt your leg again?” Eddie tries to remember any of the conversations he’d had with Buck’s doctors through a long night of uncomfortable naps in the chair by his bed. The discovery of internal bleeding kind of wiped out any other injury in his mind, even if it had apparently been more of a slow seep into his guts rather than any more catastrophic tear.
“Nah,” Buck says, leaning on him. It’s hot out here, Eddie’s sweating into his borrowed clothes. “Just acting up.”
Eddie looks out towards the city. “You wanna just get a hotel room? There’s no rush any more, we could get some real rest-”
“I just want to go home,” Buck says, but then backtracks immediately. “I mean- you’re hurt, too, if you’re not feeling up to-”
“No. No, Buck, I’m alright.” His head hurts, his back hurts, his arm hurts- everything hurts. But Buck wants to go home, and Eddie wants to get him there. He wants to sleep in his own bed, see his kid. “We’re good.”
-
Toltec, Stanfield, Bighorn. Shuffling around parking lots. Buck gets down some of the warm applesauce cups the nurse gave them. He can’t take the pills on an empty stomach, and he’s been warned off solid food for the next few days. His nose wrinkles every time, but he doesn't complain.
-
Buck falls asleep for real some time around hitting the California border, sun finally set enough to not be driving directly into the glare of it. Eddie knows it's real sleep because he starts snoring. It almost makes him laugh out loud, but he doesn’t want to wake him right back up again. Seat not too uncomfortable, then. He sleeps peacefully for exactly 23 minutes — Eddie happened to glance at the clock when the snoring started, and checking the time at the start of a crisis is natural instinct for a medic — and then, with no preamble, he starts screaming. Eddie does swerve the car, heart jumping into his throat as he steers them back in line, honking blaring in his ears.
“Buck!” The screaming is still going, Eddie can’t tell if it’s fear, pain. “Buck-”
Off-ramp, Eddie takes it. A quiet city’s quiet street. He pulls to the curb haphazardly, is out and running around to Buck’s side while the engine is still hot and pinging.
“Buck, Buck, come on.” He hates to touch him while he’s still out, especially if his gut has busted back open again, but- oh God, he has to wake him, make sure that isn’t the case, make sure he’s not bleeding out right in front of him. A hard shake. “Buck!”
Blue eyes fly open. “I’m not-” he says, and then his arm flails out into Eddie’s chest.
“You’re alright,” Eddie says, not knowing if it’s true. He grabs the thrown hand. “You’re alright, okay, are you hurting? Can you tell me if it hurts?”
Buck looks around, frantic, lungs heaving, other hand flinging out to brace against the dashboard. His fingers squeeze around Eddie’s. “What-” the dashboard creaks, Buck’s full weight tunneled through his stiff arm. “E-Eddie.”
“Yeah. Right here.” Eddie touches the back of his neck, palm flat, checking for fever. He feels sleep-warm, but not dangerously so. “Buck-”
He almost falls back when Buck suddenly moves, scrambling to get out of the car. It’s a motion kind of like falling, but sideways rather to the ground so the thing he hits is Eddie, the two of them stumbling up the curb onto the empty sidewalk. Eddie’s arms come up around him to catch but by then they’ve stopped moving so it becomes some kind of hold, a hug. “Oh God,” Buck is saying, “Oh- oh fuck, oh-”
“Alright,” Eddie says. “Alright.” He can feel Buck breathing against him, big horrible gasps, but- there it is, he’s breathing. Eddie can feel it. His whole big body is hunched down in his arms. He smells mostly like borrowed hospital clothes but, God, that’s kind of a familiar scent at this point in his life. “Alright, Buck.” He’s shaking. Maybe Eddie is shaking. Eddie holds tighter, palm on the back of his skull. His hair is greasy, Buck hates that. Eddie’s eyes sting. He’s alive and his hair is greasy. It is Eddie shaking, he’s pretty sure, because Buck is alive, and the relief of that is hitting him harder now than seeing him across that yard, than climbing clumsily up into the ambulance next to him, than half sleeping all night in that awful chair, waking up every half hour because a nurse came in, or just to look over and check. I thought I was looking for a body, he only now realizes, almost says out loud. Buck heaves against him, and Eddie plants his feet and takes the weight. “Okay.” He doesn’t know where the fuck they are, how close the lights coming on in the buildings around them are to home. The evening air is cool. “Alright, Buck, come on, we’re almost there.”
-
It’s still about three and a half hours till they’re pulling up outside of Buck’s house. Buck slept again through a lot of it, uninterrupted this time. Eddie is so tired he feels like he’s splintering, body coming apart into tiny little shards. Maddie could hear it over the phone as he’d stopped to get gas at the edge of the county, letting Buck sleep through this final stop.
“One of us could come meet you,” she’d offered, but the idea of sitting there and waiting was worse than pushing through the final stretch himself. He’d assured her he was as alright as he could be, that Buck was alright as he could be, that they’d all see each other in the morning after a solid stretch of time in real beds.
Buck started to wake up as they got further into the city, and he’s upright and staring through the window now. The engine is still idling. There’s no street parking left at this time of night.
“Buck-”
“Eddie,” he says, and it’s a little wild, and when he turns his eyes are too big, and his hand is flinging out again, almost clawing at Eddie’s arm.
So, okay. Eddie lets go of the wheel and lets their fingers thread together. “Chris will want to see you,” he says, offers so Buck doesn’t have to actually ask. “Come over.”
It’s only a ten minute drive between their houses at this time of night. Eddie remembers the pleased little feeling that lived somewhere around his collarbones when he’d learned how close Buck’s new place was. He’d called Chris at the last stop, too, let him know he’d be home soon, let Pepa go home. Chris is old enough to not necessarily need a baby sitter, but waiting and worrying isn’t something anyone should have to do alone. His son opens the door while Eddie is squeezing the shitbox in next to the Prius, which he will never think a bad thought about again. Buck lets out a sigh of relief that may as well have come from Eddie’s chest at the silhouette of him on the porch. Buck stands up out of the car like he’s going to rush over to him, but then leans against it on shaky legs. Eddie — not, in all honesty, doing much better — comes around to help him, and they limp to the house together. Chris stares at them both, cataloguing. Buck pulls him into a hug, face tucked into his curls. As always, Eddie’s heart does a funny squeeze at how much shorter the distance is that Buck needs to lean down to do so these days.
“You’re alright?” Chris asks, one eye visible from where he’s tucked up against Buck’s chest.
“Yeah, mijo, we’re alright.” Eddie runs a hand up whatever parts of his spine are available around Buck’s looped arms. “Come on.”
They all shuffle into the house, Eddie again helping Buck stay upright and moving forward. They get to the kitchen, Buck sinking gingerly into a chair as Eddie grabs them both protein shakes from the fridge. The applesauce ran out ages ago, and Eddie had been making do on a snickers bar from a gas station six hours back. He opens Buck’s pull tab for him, a bit of a struggle with his arm but easier than Buck having to do it himself, and passes it to him with a reassuring back rub. Chris watches the movement and Eddie’s stomach flips. He wonders what he sees. He wonders if it’s what the people in the diner saw, what the cops sneered at. Wonders how many other people look at them and make assumptions. Wonders if they look at Eddie even removed from the context of Buck and make the assumptions anyway. He sits in a chair and drinks his protein shake. Chris says you look like shit and Eddie says hey, language and Buck laughs. He yawns mid sip and dribbles shake down his shirt and Chris cackles as Buck chokes a little and Eddie gets up to get him a towel. Standing up now that he’s home in a chair proves nearly impossible, but he manages anyway.
“Alright,” he says, digging Buck’s prescriptions out of his sweats and doling out the appropriate pills. “Chris, don’t stay up too late.” Eddie has no idea what time it is, actually. Maybe ten? The car didn’t have a functional dashboard clock. “C’mon, Buck.”
“Love you, Dad, love you Buck,” Chris says, standing with them to give them a goodnight embrace. Buck’s eyes are a little wet when he pulls away, but none of them mention it.
They get down the hall together, not speaking. Buck goes into the bathroom while Eddie finds some of his clothes for them to wear. Changing is a an excersize in mild torture, bending his aching limbs out of and into various legs and sleeves. Maybe just a new shirt for Buck, so he at least doesn’t have to sleep in protein shake. He offers the garment up as he swaps places in the bathroom, brushing his teeth as fast as possible and only standing to piss because he’s pretty sure he’d fall asleep if he sat down. Buck is already under the covers when Eddie comes back into the bedroom, and he’s not sure what he’s feeling about the lack of argument or even any discussion at all about sharing the bed. But he thinks about Buck screaming, and he thinks about the prospect of sleeping alone, and he climbs in without bringing it up.
Buck’s half lidded, sunk into the pillow, watching him. “Eddie.”
“Yeah?” He feels pretty half lidded himself, almost dreaming.
Buck almost frowns. Trying to string together a solid line of words, Eddie thinks. “Thank you,” is what he ends up with, and it makes Eddie’s own brows furrow.
“I- I barely did anything.” Buck crawled himself out, Eddie had the dumb luck of good timing.
But Buck rolls his eyes at him. “Thank you,” he says again, and Eddie feels- adrift, overwhelmed, in a sudden panic he’s too tired to even really feel. He reaches under the covers and finds Buck’s hand again. “I’m glad you… you always find me.”
“Always,” Eddie promises, voice a croak. “Always, okay?”
Buck nods, eyes closing. Eddie wants to brush away every scrape on his familiar face. “You too,” he sighs, a little nonsensically, but Eddie knows it. Buck would never stop looking, if Eddie needed finding. And- and maybe he does. The adrift feeling, the lost thing in his chest. He falls asleep a little calmer, knowing that whatever it is, Buck will pull it out carefully and take good care of it.