Archive of Our Own

Eddie wasn’t too fond of the hardware store.

It was just one of those places that made the hair on the back of his arms stand up. 

And really, he had no logical reason to feel that way. He’d been to hardware stores plenty of times in his life — trailing after his dad as a kid, stopping in throughout the years whenever something around the house needed fixing, practically living in one back when he was in El Paso and the house was falling apart at the seams. He’d gone for Chris’s school projects, and for whatever new curiosity Chris had latched onto that week. Hell, he’d even met one of his ex‑girlfriends in a hardware store. But with the way that relationship ended, he couldn’t exactly be blamed for his lingering distaste.

So really, hanging out in a hardware store was the last thing he wanted to be doing. 

Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how he looked at it — he was extremely fond of Buck and Theo. And hanging out with them was the first and only thing he wanted to be doing. Which was how he found himself roaming the aisles, staring at different types of timber while his son, his best friend, and the absolute ball of chaos that was Theo darted between displays. 

“Are you sure that piece is long enough?” Buck asked sceptically, squinting at the timber.

“Yes, Buck. I measured the tree three times, and even got Chim to do it too, just to make sure.”

Eddie didn’t add that Chim had used the wrong end of the tape measure for the first two attempts. Buck didn’t need that information. No one needed that information.

But they did need timber. Because today, the dreadful hardware-store journey was due to the treehouse Buck planned to build for Theo in his backyard. 

Buck had mentioned once that he'd had one growing up, which Theo had naturally overheard and then begged Buck relentlessly until it became an inevitability that Theo would have one too. Which then meant that Buck had begged him to help. Not that he'd really had to beg much. In fact, Buck hadn't even really asked — he'd more or less just mentioned it, and Eddie was already on board before the sentence was finished. But the fact that he would do just about anything for Buck wasn't really the point.

The point was that the piece of timber Eddie was looking at was absolutely long enough, and he was determined to get Buck to agree with him.

Buck was still frowning at the board like it was lying to him. “I don’t know, man. It just looks short.” 

“I measured it, Buck. Trust me.”

“It's not that I don't trust you,” Buck tried to explain, “it's just that I don't trust that this piece is as long as it's saying it is. I mean, look at it.”

If the piece weren't so long, Eddie would have whacked Buck over the head with it. Because it was definitely long enough.

“I promise you it is fine.”

“Okay,” Buck relented. “But if it's wrong, you're the one coming back here to get the right size.”

It was that threat of excessive trips to the hardware store led Eddie to double-check his measurements. And just as he thought — he was right. Who would have thought?

“Told you.”

“You wouldn’t have had to check again if you were so sure,” Buck pointed out, using a particular brand of infuriating logic that Eddie had long since accepted as one of Buck’s least endearing qualities.

“I checked again to prove a point.”

“The point being that you weren't totally sure.”

“The point being that I was.” Eddie set the timber down and fixed Buck with a look. “Completely. Entirely. One hundred percent sure.”

Buck opened his mouth.

“Don't.”

Buck closed it again. There was a beat of silence, broken only by the distant crash of something metallic hitting the floor two aisles over, followed immediately by the sound of Theo's voice offering a very cheerful and wholly unconvincing it wasn't me.

Buck sighed. Eddie didn't bother hiding his smile.

A smile that may have slightly faltered when they found the boys in an aisle with nails scattered all over the ground.

“What happened here?” Buck asked the boys who were practising a look of complete innocence. 

“The nails fell,” Theo said.

“Did they now?”

“Yep.” He nodded seriously. “It was loud.”

Eddie was holding back laughter while Buck tried to play bad cop. It was funny. Buck had been the good cop to Chris for so long that it was genuinely entertaining to watch him attempt the reverse. And Eddie was rapidly warming to his newfound position on the other side of that equation.

“Chris,” Eddie said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “What happened?”

Chris looked up. His expression looked like he was weighing exactly how much detail would serve him best and get him in the least amount of trouble. An expression Eddie knew very well. 

“Theo wanted to see how they were packaged,” Chris said finally. “And the box was a little, well, it wasn't sealed properly.”

“It was already open,” Theo confirmed helpfully. “A little bit.”

“A little bit,” Buck repeated.

“Barely open,” Theo said. “And then it was more open.”

“And then the nails were on the floor,” Chris finished. “It was a complete accident.”

Eddie pressed his lips together very firmly.

“It's not funny,” Buck said, pointing at him without looking at him.

“I know,” Eddie said. It absolutely was.

“Alright, boys,” Buck said, corralling both Chris and Theo with a look that suggested he was two seconds from herding them like cattle, “how about we clean this up and then go find some paint.” 

“Or,” Chris said, “you and Dad can clean this up while Theo and I go and find some paint.”

Eddie was trying not to laugh again. His kid had a good hustle. 

“That's not — we're not splitting up the clean-up crew,” Buck said, returning his attention to Chris with what Eddie recognised as his best attempt at a stern face. It was a decent effort. “Everyone who made the mess cleans it up.”

“Theo made the mess,” Chris said reasonably. “I was just a witness.”

“Nuh uh, you helped me get it off the shelf first,” Theo offered, completely unhelpfully.

Chris closed his eyes briefly. “Thanks, Theo.”

“You're welcome.”

Eddie gave up trying not to laugh. He poorly disguised it as a cough and received a look from Buck that he felt in his spine.

Thankfully, between the four of them, the nails were gathered up and returned to their box in a few minutes. Though not without Theo getting distracted about fifty times during the process. 

“Okay,” Buck said, finally satisfied with the clean-up efforts. “Paint.”

“Can we go find it?” Theo asked immediately, already bouncing on his heels. “Me and Chris?”

Eddie’s heart melted at the request. He knew that Theo loved Chris, and he knew that Chris loved Theo in return. But the open joy at wanting to spend time together was truly special. Every day they were acting more and more like brothers, and Eddie tried not to let that thought paralyse him.

Because deep down, he knows that there is nothing he wants more than for that to be true. For Chris and Theo to grow up together. For him and Buck to raise them together for the rest of their lives. For him and Buck to be something more. To hold him, and kiss him, and call him mine openly. Because while Eddie loved the life they were currently living, he couldn’t help but hope that one day they could cross the invisible line they had both drawn that keeps them passing everything off as platonic.

It wasn’t platonic. It couldn’t be. Eddie knew that what he felt for Buck was definitely not that. The love was too big, too all‑consuming to be anything less than utter devotion. It may have taken him a while to burn down the walls of Catholic guilt he had inside himself, but eventually he decided that the only person he wanted to worship and devote his life to was not a God, but rather Buck himself. Because at least Buck had constantly shown him that he was there.

And Buck was also incredibly gorgeous. Like, he has to consciously stop his jaw from dropping in his presence sometimes. There was just something so ethereal about the man. Something otherworldly, and Eddie wanted to kiss and touch him all over — if only so he had proof that he was a real, tangible being and not something he made up in his head. Not something he tailored to perfection just for him.

Though even without that, he knew Buck was real. For many reasons. But most immediately because Buck was currently tapping him on the shoulder.

Eddie really needed to better control his Buck-related daydreams.

“Eds, is that okay?”

“Huh?”

“Is it okay if Chris takes Theo to look at the paint?” Buck asked, with a look of confusion creeping across his face.

“Oh — yeah, of course.”

“Okay.” Buck was still looking at him a little strangely. “Are you good?”

Eddie gave him a look that he hoped communicated yes, obviously, I'm completely fine and was absolutely not just thinking about your gorgeous face before turning to Chris and clapping him on the shoulder.

“Go ahead,” he said. “You're in charge.”

“Really?” Theo breathed, like this was the greatest news he'd ever received.

“Really,” Eddie said. “Chris is in charge. That means what he says goes, you stay where he can see you, and you touch nothing without asking him first.” He fixed Theo with a look. “Nothing.”

Theo nodded vigorously.

Eddie looked at Chris. “The paint section is probably at the back. Text me if you need anything.”

“We'll be fine,” Chris said, with the easy confidence of someone who had been navigating the world responsibly since he was far too young to have to. Then he tilted his head towards the end of the aisle. “Come on, Theo.”

Theo was already moving. Chris followed, and Eddie watched them disappear around the corner — his son, and the boy who was starting to feel more and more like his son's brother every single day.

He really needed to get it together.

“Okay,” Buck said from beside him, still watching him with that same uncertain expression. “What was that about?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said. “Come on. We still need to find you the right screws.”

Buck let it go. But Eddie could feel him looking.

They found the screws without incident, which Eddie considered a minor miracle given the day's track record.

Buck was reading the back of a box of wood screws, his expression full of pure concentration. Eddie was leaning against the shelf beside him, watching him in the way he had gotten very good at disguising as nothing in particular. 

“Do you think three-inch or three and a half?” Buck asked, not looking up.

“Three and a half,” Eddie said. “More support.”

“See, this is why I bring you,” Buck said it easily, offhandedly. He finally looked up, and the corner of his mouth pulled into something soft. “I don't know what I'd do without you, honestly.”  

Eddie looked at him. “Probably build a very structurally unsound treehouse.”

Buck laughed and turned back to the shelf. “Probably.”

They moved slowly down the aisle, with no real urgency. That was one of Eddie's favourite things about being with Buck — his absence of urgency. The way time seemed to operate differently around him, looser, more forgiving. Like, there was always enough of it.

“Hey,” Buck said after a moment. “Do you think the boys would want to help actually build it? Like, with the tools and everything. Obviously supervised.”

“Chris would love that,” Eddie said. “And I’m almost positive Theo would too.”

“Yeah,” Buck said quietly. “Yeah, I think so too. Though we will have to watch him carefully.” 

And that was the thing that got Eddie every time. 

It wasn't the big moments with Buck, though those were plenty. It was this. The quiet assumption of we. The way Buck talked about the future and Eddie was simply already in it, without discussion or caveat, as naturally as breathing. Chris and Theo. The boys. Their boys, in the easy shorthand of a life that had grown so intertwined, Eddie couldn't always remember where one ended, and the other began. 

He thought about what it might look like. Five years from now, ten. Theo and Chris older, louder, probably more chaotic than either Eddie or Buck could handle. A house — their house, a real one, not two separate addresses they shuttled between constantly. 

He imagined Buck in the mornings. The smell of coffee and pancakes. Buck being unreasonably alert and cheerful. Eddie needing at least twenty minutes of silence before he was fit for human interaction. The comfortable negotiation of a shared life. 

He wanted it so badly it was almost embarrassing.

“Do you ever think about it?” Buck asked.

Eddie's heart stuttered. “Think about what?”

Because Eddie was thinking about a lot of things. 

Buck was quiet for a second, turning a box of screws over in his hands without really looking at it. 

“The future,” Buck said. “Like — I don't know. Where everything will end up.”

“Sometimes,” Eddie said, which was the most spectacular understatement of his life.

“I think about it a lot lately,” Buck said. He set the screws down and picked up another box, still not quite meeting Eddie's eyes. “About what I want it to look like. I used to not really do that — plan ahead, I mean. You know how I was.” He glanced over then, brief and a little self-deprecating. “Jumping into things. Hoping for the best.”

“I remember,” Eddie said.

“I'm better at it now. Thinking things through.” A pause. “Knowing what I actually want.”

The aisle was very quiet. Somewhere distantly, Eddie could hear the ambient noise of the store, a forklift somewhere in the back, a pop song bleeding through the overhead speakers. But here it felt strangely still.

“And what do you want?” Eddie asked. He still wasn’t sure if he wanted the answer. 

Buck looked at him then, fully, and something in his expression shifted into something unguarded and open and so painfully sincere that Eddie felt it like a hand around his heart.

“I think you probably already know,” Buck said quietly.

And maybe he did. Maybe he had known for a long time, the same way he knew everything about Buck. He thought about all the walls he had spent years carefully constructing, all the guilt and the fear and the voices that told him this wasn't allowed, wasn't something he got to have. He thought about how none of it had mattered in the end. How Buck had simply rendered all of it irrelevant just by existing in his life with such relentless, unwavering consistency.

Eddie took a breath.

“Buck,” he said. “I need to tell you something. I should have said it a long time ago, and I've been — I've been an idiot, frankly, and I think you deserve to hear—”

The crash was enormous. 

Eddie flinched hard.

Despite being out of a warzone for years, loud sounds still sometimes got him. He knew that PTSD was something he was going to carry forever — his therapist had been very clear and very kind about that — but he had been hoping that years of work would at least mean he didn't feel like his heart was trying to exit his chest every time something unexpected happened in public.

He gripped the shelf beside him. Focused on the cold metal under his fingers.

Buck's hand landed on his shoulder immediately.

“It's okay,” Buck murmured, low enough that it was just for him. “You're safe. You're in a hardware store. I'm right here.”

Eddie took a breath. Then another. Let Buck's hand anchor him back into his own body, back into the fluorescent lighting and the smell of sawdust and machine oil, back into the present.

“I know,” Eddie said. “I'm good. I'm—”

The explosion came without warning.

A burst of flame erupted from somewhere near the back of the store, followed immediately by a bloom of thick dark smoke that rolled up towards the ceiling. The sound hit a half second later — a concussive, pressurised crack that rattled the shelving units and sent something clattering to the floor three aisles over.

For one terrible, suspended second, neither of them moved.

Then they both moved at exactly the same time.

“Chris.” Eddie was already running.

“Theo.” Buck was right beside him.

They tore around the corner, past a display of power tools, past a stunned-looking employee frozen in the middle of an aisle, past everything. The only thought in either of their heads was the same singular, driving urgency. Eddie's heart was hammering for an entirely different reason now, something primal and animal clawing up through his chest.

“CHRIS!” he shouted, not caring how it sounded. “THEO!”

“THEO!” Buck's voice was right behind him, loud and cracked at the edges in a way Eddie had almost never heard from him. “THEO, CHRIS, ANSWER ME!”

The smoke was thickening near the back of the store, curling lazily under the fluorescent lights, and Eddie's eyes were scanning every aisle opening they passed, every gap, every face that wasn't the right face —

“Dad!”

Eddie stopped so fast he nearly fell.

Chris was at the end of the aisle to his left, upright, unhurt, one hand gripping Theo's jacket sleeve like he had grabbed him and hadn't let go. Theo's eyes were wide, and his hair was slightly dishevelled, but he was standing, and he was fine. They were okay. They were all okay. 

Buck hit his knees in front of Theo before Eddie had fully processed that they'd found them, hands on Theo's face, checking him over with the rapid efficiency of a first responder and the barely contained panic of a father.

“Are you hurt? Theo, look at me. Are you hurt?”

“I'm okay,” Theo said, sounding genuinely startled by the intensity of it. 

“Chris, you okay?” Buck then focused his attention on him.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.” But he sounded shaken. Eddie was, too, if he was being honest.

But the joy over finding the boys okay was quickly drowned out by the sounds of the fire alarms blaring. 

The fire from the explosion had moved fast. Faster than it should have, which meant it had found something it liked. Shelving units near the back were fully alight now, orange and violent, and the smoke was no longer curling lazily towards the ceiling. It was filling it, a thick dark blanket pressing downward, eating the space between the lights and the floor with quiet, methodical efficiency.

“Back exit,” Buck said immediately.

“There's smoke coming from that direction,” Eddie said.

Whatever had exploded had done so near the rear of the building, and the corridor that led to the emergency exit was already obscured, grey and impenetrable.

“Front then,” Buck said, turning.

Eddie had already checked. “No. Look.”

The fire had jumped — shelving unit to shelving unit, following the accelerant of whatever had ignited, and it had done so in a wide, sweeping arc that had effectively cut across the front of the store. The main entrance was visible through the smoke, but the path to it was not clean. Display units were burning. Something aerosol-based was popping in short, sharp bursts like distant gunfire every few seconds, sending small jets of flame sideways off the shelves. 

Eddie used every ounce of self-control he had not to react.

But this wasn't good.

The fire suppression system wasn't working. No sprinklers. No overhead intervention of any kind. Just the alarm screaming into the smoke-filled air while the fire did exactly what fire does when left completely unchecked — it grew, and it spread, and it found every new thing it could consume. 

He ran a rapid inventory in his head the way he had been trained to. A hardware store. Timber. Solvents. Adhesives. Aerosols. Electrical wiring running through the walls. Gas-powered equipment lined up in neat rows near the garden section. It was arguably one of the worst possible places in the world to be caught in a fire, a building designed and stocked as though it had set out specifically to make a firefighter's job as difficult as it could.

And they had no gear. No masks. No tanks. No protection beyond their clothing and the increasingly thin margin of breathable air near the floor.

His hands wanted to move. His body wanted to act. Every instinct he had built over years of training was screaming at him to do something, to find the source and attack it, to get between the fire and anyone it might reach. He was a first responder. This was what he did. This was who he was.

But he had his family.

That was the thing that overrode everything else, cleanly and completely and without negotiation. He had Chris, and Buck had Theo, and without gear, they were not firefighters right now. They were just two men in a burning building with their kids. Two men who would do anything to keep those kids alive. 

The firefighters would be coming. Someone would have called it in. The alarm alone would have triggered an automatic response. They just needed to hold on until then. Stay low, stay away from the accelerants, keep the boys calm, and wait. 

“We're cut off,” Buck said. It wasn't a question. He sounded calm, not because he wasn't afraid but because being afraid wasn't useful right now. 

“We're cut off,” Eddie confirmed.

Theo had pressed himself against Buck's side and was very quiet, which was somehow more alarming than noise would have been. Chris was standing close to Eddie, his hand finding Eddie's arm.

“Dad,” Chris said quietly.

“I've got you,” Eddie said, and he meant it with everything he had.

Buck crouched in front of Theo again, hands on his shoulders, voice low and even. “Hey. Look at me. We're going to be okay, alright? I need you to be really brave for me right now. Can you do that?”

Theo nodded.

“Good.” Buck stood. He looked at Eddie over the boys' heads, and in the look was everything neither of them said out loud. The fear. The ferocious, almost violent commitment to getting these kids out. The absolute unspoken agreement that whatever it took, they were doing it together. Having each other’s backs. 

“We need to move away from the flammables,” Eddie said, already scanning the aisle they were standing in. Paint supplies to the left. Solvents and adhesives ahead. Both of them stacked floor to ceiling, both of them catastrophically combustible. “If that fire reaches this aisle—”

“It'll go up like a matchbox,” Buck finished. “I know.”

“Lumber section,” Eddie said. “Middle of the store. It'll burn but it'll burn slower. Gives us more time.”

Buck nodded. “And we get low. Smoke rises. Boys, I need you to listen very carefully.” He looked between Chris and Theo, making sure he had both of their attention. “We're going to move quickly and we're going to stay low. Cover your mouth and nose with your shirt like this—” he demonstrated, pulling the collar of his flannel up over the lower half of his face, “—and you breathe as little as you have to. Small breaths. Through the fabric. Okay?”

“Okay,” Chris said, already doing it.

Theo copied him without a word.

“Stay between us,” Eddie said. “Chris, you're with me. Theo, you stay right next to Buck. You don't stop, you don't let go, and you don't look at the fire. Eyes forward. Understood?”

Both boys nodded.

Another pop from the aerosol aisle — closer this time — sent a tongue of flame licking up towards the ceiling and a wave of heat rolling towards them that Eddie felt on the side of his face like an open oven door. Somewhere deeper in the store, there was a low, structural groan that he did not like at all.

They were running out of time to have options.

“Okay,” Buck said, looking at Eddie. “On you.”

Eddie took one breath. Looked at his son. Looked at Theo. Looked at Buck.

“Move,” he said.

They moved fast and low through the lumber aisle, the smoke thinner there but thickening by the minute. Eddie kept one hand on Chris's back and his eyes up, reading the fire the way he had been trained to, tracking its movement through the gaps in the shelving. It was still spreading laterally, chasing the path of least resistance along the eastern wall. They had a little time. Not much.

“Here,” Buck said, pulling them into a gap between two large stacks of timber. It was as good a position as they were going to find — away from the accelerants, partial cover on three sides, and low enough that the worst of the smoke was still above their heads. For now.

“Down,” Eddie said. “Everybody down.”

They crouched together in a tight cluster, the boys between them automatically, Buck and Eddie bracketing them on either side without discussion. Eddie's back was to the timber. He could feel the heat of the fire as a distant, persistent pressure, like a hand pushing against the far side of the building.

His eyes went to Chris. Chris's shirt was doing something, but not enough. The smoke was getting denser and he could already hear the slight rasp in Theo's breathing that he didn't like.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out his water bottle. Half full. Maybe a little more.

Buck saw it immediately. Saw what he was thinking.

“Do the boys first,” Buck said quietly.

Eddie was already unscrewing the cap. “Chris, take your shirt off for a second.”

Chris didn't question it. He pulled it off over his head and Eddie upended the bottle over it, soaking it through as evenly as he could, wringing it slightly so it wasn't dripping, then handing it back.

“Back on. Keep it over your nose and mouth. Breathe through the fabric.”

Chris nodded and pulled it back on, pressing the wet fabric to his face.

Eddie looked at Theo. Theo was already obligingly pulling at the hem of his shirt. Eddie soaked it with the remainder of the bottle, making sure the front was saturated, then handed it back to Buck, who helped Theo get it back on and positioned correctly.

The bottle was empty.

Eddie turned it over in his hands once, then set it down.

“What about you two?” Chris asked, eyes moving between Eddie and Buck over the top of his wet shirt, sharp and aware in the way that always caught Eddie slightly off guard. The boy didn't miss much.

“We're fine,” Eddie said.

“Dad.”

“We're fine, Chris.” He kept his voice even and certain because that was what Chris needed to hear, and because there was no version of this in which Eddie spent a single second worrying about himself while his kids were in a burning building. “The water wouldn't have stretched far enough anyway. Buck and I are more used to the smoke. We’ll be okay.”

He glanced at Buck. Buck's expression confirmed that he had done the same math and arrived at the same place, without drama and without hesitation. Of course he had.

Buck pulled his flannel shirt off, leaving just his undershirt, and tore the flannel roughly in half with his hands. He passed one half to Eddie without a word.

Eddie took it. Held it over his nose and mouth. It wasn't wet. It wasn't much. But it was something.

“Thank you,” he said, muffled through the fabric.

“Don't mention it,” Buck said, holding his own half to his face. His eyes were watering slightly from the smoke. Or at least that was what Eddie was choosing to assume.

Overhead, the alarm kept screaming. 

After a few minutes of no one speaking, only their raspy breathing and the distant roar of the fire to keep them company, Eddie spoke. 

“Buck,” he said quietly, low enough that the boys wouldn't catch it.

Buck leaned in slightly. His eyes were already on Eddie.

“There were other people in the store,” Eddie said.

Buck's jaw tightened. “I know.”

“We can't—” Eddie stopped. Started again. “Without gear we can't—”

“I know,” Buck said again, and the weight in it told Eddie that he was fighting exactly the same battle. The same instinct. The same war between who they were at work and who they needed to be right now, in this specific moment, for these two specific people.

Buck glanced down at Theo, who was pressed against his side with a white-knuckled grip on his shirt, and something in his expression settled into something resolute.

“We stay with the boys,” Buck said. It cost him something to say it. Eddie could see that clearly. “The crew will be here soon. They'll have the gear, they'll have the lines. Our job right now is to make sure Chris and Theo walk out of here.”

Eddie nodded. His chest felt tight, and it wasn't just the smoke.

“Our job right now is to make sure Chris and Theo walk out of here,” he repeated back, quietly, like saying it out loud made it easier to hold onto.

“Hey.” Buck's hand found his arm, squeezing it firmly. “We're going to get them out.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I know.”

That was a vow Eddie would fight tooth and nail to keep. 

— — —

The fire had gotten closer. 

Eddie heard it before he felt it. The temperature in the lumber aisle climbed several degrees in what felt like the space of a single breath, and the smoke pressing down from the ceiling dropped another foot closer to the floor.

He felt Buck shift beside him.

“We need to get lower,” Eddie said.

They flattened. All four of them, down onto their stomachs on the cold concrete floor, where the air was marginally cleaner, marginally cooler. He just hoped the concentration of chemicals in the air wasn’t too strong. 

He looked at Chris.

Chris's eyes were half open. Heavy. The wet shirt was still pressed to his face but his grip on it had gone slack, his fingers barely holding the fabric in place. His breathing was slow and laboured in a way that made Eddie's chest seize.

“Chris.” He kept his voice measured. “Hey. Eyes open, bud. Look at me.”

Chris's eyes found him. Glassy, but present. “I'm awake,”he said, barely audible.

“I know you are. Stay that way.”

He looked past Chris to Theo. Theo was tucked against Buck's chest, Buck curled around him with one large hand cradling the back of his head, and Theo's eyes were closed. Buck had two fingers pressed gently to his neck, checking his pulse the way Eddie had done to him a hundred times before. 

The expression on Buck's face was the most frightening thing Eddie had seen all day. 

“He's okay,” Buck said, without Eddie having to ask. “Pulse is strong. He's just—” He stopped. Swallowed. “He's fighting it.”

“Theo.” Buck dipped his head close. “Theo, hey. Come on, buddy, stay with me.”

Theo stirred slightly. Not much. Enough.

“There he is,” Buck murmured. “That's my boy. Stay with me.”

Eddie pressed his forehead briefly to the cool concrete and allowed himself exactly one second of something that was very close to falling apart. One second of feeling the full weight of it — the heat, the smoke, the sound of his son's ragged breathing, the image of Theo's closed eyes — and then he locked it back down and lifted his head.

They were still breathing. All four of them. That was the only fact that mattered right now.

Smoke inhalation was serious but they had been low, they had the fabric, they had the wet shirts. The boys were fighting consciousness but they were fighting it, which meant they were still in it. Still here.

It could be worse. He needed to cling to that. 

Another section of shelving collapsed somewhere beyond the end of their aisle, and a fresh wave of heat rolled over them like a breaking wave. Eddie threw an arm over Chris automatically, pressing him closer to the floor. Buck curled tighter around Theo.

The roar of the fire was enormous now. It filled everything, it sounded like a living thing, like something with intention and appetite, and Eddie could feel it on his skin and in his throat and behind his eyes. His own breathing was getting harder, each inhale a conscious effort, the flannel doing less than it had been doing twenty minutes ago.

He reached out his free hand.

Buck took it without hesitation.

The irony wasn't lost on him.

It almost would have been funny, in a different context. For the one thing they signed up to run toward every day to be the very thing that finally chased them down for good. 

Poetic wasn't even the right word for it. It was almost insulting.

Eddie laughed, a short, rough sound that turned immediately into a cough that tasted like smoke and ash. Buck turned his head to look at him, his expression suggesting he was seriously questioning Eddie's mental state, which was fair.

“What?” Buck said, hoarse.

“Nothing,” Eddie managed. “Just — of all the ways.”

Buck stared at him for a moment. Then something crossed his face that was exhausted and pained and almost amused all at once.

“Yeah,” Buck rasped. “Of all the ways.”

They looked at each other in the orange haze, and the heat and the noise, and Eddie thought about all the things that were currently sitting between them, unfinished. That conversation in the screws aisle, already a lifetime ago. I think you probably already know. The invisible line. The thing neither of them had said.

He thought about the very real possibility that they might not get another chance to say it.

Eddie wasn't afraid of dying. He had made a kind of peace with his own mortality a long time ago, earlier than most people had to. But he was terrified, he discovered, of dying with this left unsaid. Of Buck not knowing. Of all the time they had spent carefully, politely, not acknowledging what was sitting in the middle of every room they had ever been in together, and then running out of time to do anything about it.

That thought was more suffocating than the smoke.

He tightened his hand around Buck's.

“Buck.”

“Eddie, don’t speak, you have to—”

“I love you,” Eddie said.

It came out quieter than he intended. Rougher, scraped raw by smoke and heat. But it came out clean and whole and completely, and once it was out he felt something in him release that he hadn't realised he'd been holding for years.

Buck had gone very still.

“I'm not saying it because of this,” Eddie said, gesturing vaguely at the burning building around them, because he needed Buck to understand that. “I'm saying it because I should have said it a long time ago. I kept waiting for the right moment, and I've figured out that I've been an idiot, because there's never going to be a more right moment than whatever moment I'm in with you.” He stopped. Coughed once. Pressed on. “You are my best friend and the greatest person I have ever known, and I have been in love with you for so long that I genuinely can't remember what it felt like before. And I needed you to know that. In case—”

“Don't,” Buck said. His voice was wrecked, and it wasn't entirely the smoke. “Don't say in case.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. “Then just — now you know.”

“I love you too,” Buck said, and his voice broke on it, cracked clean down the middle. “I love you so much, Eddie. I have for so long.”

And Eddie felt warmth bloom through him — a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire at all. In fact, the heat in his chest wasn’t from anything except the love that quietly burned for Buck. A fire he fed every day without thinking. A fire that would keep burning even if he didn’t survive this.

That thought didn't frighten him the way it might have. There was something almost peaceful about it. Buck would know. Whatever happened, Buck would know. He had made sure of it.

He looked over at Chris.

Chris was still. Too still.

“Chris.” Eddie moved onto his side, hand going to his son's face. “Chris, hey.”

Chris didn't respond.

“Buck—”

“I see it.” Buck was already shifting, reaching across, two fingers to Chris's neck. His face did something complicated. “Pulse is good. He's breathing. He's just—”

“He's out.”

“He's out,” Buck confirmed.

Eddie pressed his hand flat against Chris's chest and felt it rise. Fall. Rise again. Slow and shallow, but there. He kept his hand there, needing the physical confirmation of it, needing to feel it.

“Theo's the same,” Buck said quietly. There was a rawness in his voice that had nothing to do with the smoke.

Eddie looked at him. Buck had Theo pulled against his chest, one hand spread wide across his small ribcage, the same thing Eddie was doing, both of them reduced to the most fundamental measure of relief available to them. Rise and fall. Rise and fall.

Still breathing.

The fire made a sound like a long exhale, and then the shelving unit at the far end of their aisle groaned, metal warping under heat, and began to list sideways. It didn't fall. Not yet. But it was going to.

“We need to move them,” Eddie said.

“Where?” Buck asked, not argumentatively. Genuinely. 

Because the answer wasn't obvious anymore. The aisle behind them was compromised. The aisle ahead was worse. The smoke on the floor was thicker now — it had dropped, silently and steadily, until the clean air they had been hugging the ground for was less clean and less plentiful with every passing minute.

Eddie looked up. The ceiling was invisible. Just a solid dark mass of rolling smoke pressing down like a lid being closed.

His eyes were streaming. His throat felt like he had swallowed gravel. Each breath was an event, a conscious decision, work in a way that breathing should never have to be.

He looked at Buck, and he could see it on him too. The pallor under the soot. The slight slowing of his movements. The way he was breathing through his nose with the deliberate control of someone managing a resource they were running low on.

They were running low on time. On air. On options.

“They're in here,” Eddie said, mostly to himself. 

The entry team. He had heard them. He had heard the doors come in, the shouts, the movement. They were in the building. They just had to get to them, or the team had to get to them, and the margin between those two things was narrowing.

He reached out and grabbed Buck's arm.

“Stay awake,” Eddie said. It came out more desperate than he intended.

Buck looked at him. His eyes were glassy at the edges but still sharp at the centre, still present, still entirely and completely Buck.

“I'm awake,” Buck said.

“Good,” Eddie said, and his voice scraped raw on every word. “Because I have a lifetime left of love to give you. Don’t go leaving me now.” 

He forced himself to think. To be useful. To be more than just a man lying on the floor of a burning building waiting to be found. He had been trained for this — not this exactly, not this specific nightmare, but the principle of it. Stay calm. Use what you have. Make yourself findable.

He looked around the aisle with eyes that were streaming and his vision that was starting to blur at the edges. Timber. Concrete floor. The collapsed shapes of things that used to be shelves further down. Screws and bolts were scattered across the ground from some earlier casualty. A flat cart someone had abandoned, its orange handle sticking up in his peripheral vision.

Orange.

He let go of Buck's hand.

“I'll be right back,” he said.

“Eddie—”

“Two seconds.”

He army-crawled to the cart, staying as low as physically possible, cheek nearly dragging the floor. The smoke down here was still marginally thinner, but marginally was the key word in that sentence. He grabbed the cart by its orange handle and dragged it back towards them, then maneuvered it upright against the end of the timber stack — tall enough to be visible above the lower shelving, orange enough to stand out against the grey of the smoke. 

It wasn't much. But it was a landmark. Something deliberate in the chaos. Something those trying to help can use to find them. 

He grabbed a length of thin timber from the nearest stack, maybe four feet long, and propped it against the cart at an angle, knocking it against the metal shelving rhythmically. Three short. Three long. Three short.

Not enough noise to carry far. But something. A pattern in the chaos. Something that said this is intentional, someone is here, someone is waiting.

He crawled back to Buck, Chris and Theo.

He put his hand back on Chris's chest first. Still rising. Still falling.

“Hey,” he said softly, close to Chris's ear. “I know you can't hear me. But I love you. I love you more than I know how to say. I have loved you since the moment I saw you and every day since then, you have made me so proud I don't know what to do with it.” He pressed his lips to the top of Chris's head, soot and sweat and all. “You are the best thing I have ever done. The very best thing.”

He lifted his head. Looked across at Theo.

He reached out and rested his hand gently against Theo's cheek. Theo's skin was warm — too warm — but his chest was still moving against Buck's.

“And you,” Eddie said quietly. “You absolute hurricane of a kid. You came into our lives and just — refused to leave any space unfilled, did you know that? Every corner.” His voice caught. He steadied it. “I love you too. More than you know. More than you're old enough to understand yet.”

He leaned over Buck and pressed a kiss to Theo's head.

Then he settled back and looked at Buck. 

Buck was watching him. His eyes were heavy, the lids dropping and lifting with an effort that Eddie recognised and did not like. His breathing had changed — slower, more deliberate, each inhale a challenge.

“Buck.”

“I heard all of that,” Buck said. Barely a whisper. “That was — Eddie, that was—”

“Don't you dare get sentimental on me right now, Buckley.”

The corner of Buck's mouth moved. “A bit late for that.”

“Stay awake.”

“I'm trying.” And Eddie could see that he was. Could see the effort of it in the set of his jaw, the way he was blinking slowly, fighting the pull of it. “It's just — it's very — the smoke is—”

“I know.” Eddie moved closer. Got an arm around Buck's shoulders, tucking himself against him the way Buck had been tucking Theo, so that Buck's weight was partly against him. “Lean on me. Come on.”

Buck did, heavy and warm, his head dropping slightly towards Eddie's shoulder.

“There you go,” Eddie said. “I've got you.”

“You've got Theo too,” Buck murmured. “Make sure you've got Theo.”

“I've got Theo. I've got Chris. I've got you. I've got all three of you.”

Buck made a sound that was low and exhausted and deeply, painfully trusting.

“Okay,” Buck said. “Okay.”

His eyes closed.

“Buck.” Eddie's arm tightened around him. “Eyes open.”

Buck's eyes opened. Slowly. Halfway.

“I love you,” Eddie said. Because he had a lifetime of it to give, and he didn't know how much time he had to give it, so he was going to keep saying it. He was going to say it as many times as he possibly could until Death came and made him stop. And even then, he still thinks he’d find a way. “I love you. Stay awake.”

“Love you too,” Buck breathed. “So much.”

“I know.” Eddie pressed his lips to Buck's temple, the same way he had with the boys, and felt Buck exhale slowly against his shoulder. “I know you do. And I need you to hold onto that right now, okay? Hold onto it and stay with me.”

And as a final act of love — of desperation — Eddie pressed his lips to Buck’s. He tried to breathe something pure into the man who made him a sinner, hoping with everything he had that there was enough goodness in him to give just a little more life to the man who owned his heart.

He’d damn his soul to Hell a million times over for Evan Buckley without an ounce of regret. Even if the flames licking around them, closing in by the minute, were foreshadowing his eternity, he still couldn’t find it in himself to take that love back.

Buck stirred beneath the kiss. Just barely. His lips moved, almost imperceptibly, the faintest pressure back, the last of some conscious thread pulling him towards Eddie even through the dark pulling him under. His hand moved too—slow, uncoordinated—found Eddie's arm and held on. 

Eddie broke away. Pressed his forehead to Buck's temple.

“Stay,” he said. The word had almost no voice behind it. Just breath and shape and everything he meant. “Please. Stay.”

Buck's hand loosened on his arm. 

The grip that had been so certain just moments ago went slack. Fingers sliding from Eddie's arm until Buck's hand came to rest on the ground between them, open and still. 

“Buck.” Eddie grabbed it. Held it in both of his. “Buck, hey. Come on.”

Nothing.

His chest was still moving. Eddie checked, immediately and desperately, eyes fixed on the rise and fall of it, counting the seconds between. Still there. Slow and too shallow and not enough but there. Still there.

“Okay,” Eddie said, to himself, to the air, to whatever was listening. “Okay. That's okay. You're okay.”

He wasn't sure who he was trying to convince.

He arranged Buck as carefully as he could, keeping his airway clear the way training dictated, tilting him slightly onto his side. His hands were shaking. He noticed it distantly. 

He looked at Chris. Still. Pale beneath the soot.

He looked at Theo. Curled on his side now, where Buck could no longer hold him, small and too quiet. So unlike him. 

The three of them were all unconscious, but they were still breathing.

And Eddie was trying to hold it all together with nothing left.

He could feel it now — the pull of it. He had been fighting it for a while without fully acknowledging that he was fighting it, the way the darkness had been gathering at the edges of his vision. 

He was fighting because he had a family to protect. 

He had a date to go on because Buck had said he loved him back.

He had to watch Chris walk across a stage someday. He had to embarrass him on prom night, teach him to drive and survive the experience. Then tell the story badly at his wedding.

He had to build a treehouse. A structurally sound one. With wood, they were going to have to find somewhere other than this particular hardware store.

He had to hear Buck laugh in the morning. Every day until he was old and grey. 

“I've got you,” he said. It came out in a whisper. Less than a whisper. “I've still got you. All of you.”

And so, he gathered up his whole world, still breathing but unconscious, and he took his own body — the scarred vessel that has carried him around for thirty‑four years — and he used it for one last good thing. A shield between the danger and the people he loves. 

And as the flames began to lick at his skin, he prayed the universe would offer him one final mercy: that he’d lose access to oxygen before he had to feel himself burn. 

— — —

When Buck came to, he noticed two things.

One, that he was moving.

Two, that the air was cleaner.

He was on a gurney, he realised. Being wheeled. The sky above him was open and grey and the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life, and he pulled the air into his lungs with a desperation that he felt in every part of his body.

Clean air. He hadn't realised how much he had missed it until it was back.

“Hey, hey — there he is. Don't try to sit up.”

He tried to sit up.

A firm hand on his shoulder pressed him back down. He blinked up at Hen, her face coming into focus above him, a mask around her neck. She looked relieved and concerned simultaneously. 

“Buck. Stay down. You're okay. You're out.”

“The kids,” he said, and his voice came out wrecked, scraped hollow, barely recognisable as his own. “Hen, the kids—”

“Are out,” she said, firmly and immediately, because she knew him well enough to know that nothing else she said would register until he had that. “They're out, Buck. Both of them.”

He exhaled. It hurt. He didn't care.

“Where—”

“Chris and Theo are over there.” She tilted her head briefly to the left.

He turned his own head despite everything screaming at him, craning to see past the organised chaos of the scene. He found them. Two small figures, side by side on matching gurneys, oxygen masks covering their faces, a paramedic working between them. He could see the rise and fall of their chests from here and tried to let it soothe him. 

“They're okay?” His eyes stayed on them.

“Smoke inhalation,” Hen said. “Both of them. They're going to need observation and a good long stretch of oxygen, but they're going to be fine, Buck. They're already starting to come around. Theo was asking for you about two minutes ago.”

Relief hit him like a truck. 

They were okay. His babies were okay.

“Athena's with them,” Hen continued, her hands moving over him as she talked. “She's going to ride with them to the hospital. They won't be alone for a second. I promise, they will meet us there.”

He nodded. Tried to breathe evenly. Felt the oxygen mask on his own face properly for the first time and focused on what it was giving him.

“You're a little worse for wear,” Hen said, and her voice shifted into something that was gently warning him. “Your oxygen levels were low when we got to you. Lower than the others. We're going to need to monitor you. We have to get your temperature back down too.”

“I'm fine,” he said automatically.

“You're not fine,” she said, just as automatically. “Buck you were caught in a fire with no oxygen, that is arguably not fine.”

He chose to ignore that because something was nagging at him. Something that the relief over the boys had momentarily displaced, something that was now pushing its way back to the surface with increasing urgency.

He turned his head back to Hen.

“Eddie,” he said.

Hen's hands stilled.

She didn't meet his eyes.

“Hen.” His voice came out low and stripped of everything. “Hen, look at me.”

She looked at him. Her expression was composed in the way that people who loved you composed themselves when they were trying to buy time.

“Where's Eddie?” Buck said. “Is he okay?”

The gurney kept moving. The chaos of the scene continued around them, voices and radios and the hiss of water on fire. Above them the sky stayed grey and open.

Hen said nothing.

And in the silence, Buck felt the clean air turn cold in his lungs.

“Hen.” His hand found her wrist. “Where is he?”

Hen held his gaze for a long moment. Then she looked at the paramedic across from her, something passing between them that Buck didn't like at all, and the ambulance doors closed as they moved. 

“Hen,” Buck said. A warning. A plea. Both.

She sat down across from him. Pulled her gloves off. And when she looked at him this time, she didn't compose herself first.

“It's bad, Buck.”

Buck felt his heart skip a beat. 

“How bad?” he asked. He was already bracing for the worst-case scenario. 

Hen folded her hands in front of her. He had seen her deliver news before. Had stood beside her while she did it, had watched her find the words for the unsurvivable and unsayable. He had never been on this side of it.

“When the team found you,” she said, carefully and steadily, “Eddie was draped over the three of you.”

Buck went still.

“He had his back to the fire,” Hen continued. “He had positioned himself between it and you and the boys. He was—” She stopped briefly. Restarted. “He was using himself as a shield.”

Buck thought about losing consciousness. About the last thing he remembered, which was Eddie's hand in his, Eddie's voice saying stay, Eddie's forehead against his temple. He thought about what Eddie must have done after that. After Buck had stopped being able to help. After Buck had left him alone with all of it.

“The boys,” Hen said, “were as protected as they could have been, given the circumstances. Their oxygen levels were better than expected. The team thinks the wet shirts helped significantly. That was smart thinking, Buck.”

“That was Eddie,” Buck said. His voice didn't sound like his voice. “It was his idea.”

“He inhaled a lot of smoke,” Hen said. “A significant amount. More than any of you, because he had been breathing that air the longest and with the least protection by the end.” Another pause, smaller, tighter. “And he sustained burns. To his back. His arms.”

Buck closed his eyes.

“Hen.”

“They're significant, Buck. I'm not going to tell you otherwise.”

He opened his eyes. “How significant.”

“We won't know the full extent until—”

“Hen.” His voice cracked down the middle. “Tell me.”

She held his gaze. “Significant enough that they're going to need time to assess. Significant enough that it's going to be a long road.” She leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees. “But he's alive. I need you to hold onto that.”

Buck's jaw tightened. He could feel his breathing change, the monitor beside him registering the uptick, the numbers shifting in ways the clinical part of his brain could read and interpret even now. 

“We lost his pulse,” Hen said. Quietly. Like she could soften it by lowering her voice.

The monitor spiked.

“We lost it at the scene,” she continued, “for approximately—”

“Don't,” Buck said. “Don't tell me how long.”

Hen closed her mouth.

“He's back,” Buck said, more to himself than to her. “You said he's back.”

“He's back,” Hen confirmed. “Chim is with him right now. In the other rig. You know how good Chim is, Buck. You know that Eddie is in the best possible hands.”

“I should be there.” Buck was already moving, already pushing himself upright, the oxygen monitor pulling at his finger, the IV line in his arm going taut. “I need to be with him, Hen, I need—”

“Buck.” Both her hands on his shoulders, firm and grounding, pushing him back down with more force than her size suggested. “Buck, stop.”

“He was alone, Hen, he was alone at the end, and I left him, I went under. I left him there by himself with all of them, and he—” His voice broke. He let it break. There was no point in holding it now. “He put himself over all of us. He—”

“I know,” Hen said.

“He didn't — he should have—” Buck pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. Breathed. He tried to at least. “He always does this. He always — it's always him. It's always Eddie who—”

“I know,” Hen said again, softer.

“I need to see him.”

“You will. I promise you, you will. But right now, I need you to lie down and let me do my job, because you are not as okay as you think you are. Eddie would never forgive me if I let something happen to you on the way to the hospital.” She held his gaze, steady and serious, full of something very close to her own grief. “You hear me?”

Buck looked at her.

His chest was heaving. The monitor was loud. Somewhere in another ambulance, Chim had his hands on Eddie, and Eddie's heart was beating; it was beating, Hen had said so. She had said he was back. That he was alive. 

The ambulance moved through traffic, and Buck stared at the ceiling and tried to hold himself together with both hands.

He couldn't stop seeing it.

He hadn't even been conscious for it, hadn't seen it happen, had no memory of anything after Eddie's hand in his and the darkness pulling him under. But his mind was filling in the blanks with a clarity that was almost worse than having witnessed it. Eddie, alone. Eddie, the last one standing in every sense that mattered, with Buck unconscious and the boys unconscious and the fire closing in from every direction. Eddie, who had looked at the three of them and made a calculation that Buck couldn't think about directly without feeling like something was coming apart in his chest.

He had chosen to cover them.

He hadn't run. Hadn't moved towards the exit, hadn't done the thing that every survival instinct a person possessed would have been screaming at him to do. He had gathered them up — Buck, and Chris, and Theo — and he had wrapped himself around them and put his back to the fire.

Like it wasn't even a choice. Like there was never any other option. Like the question of what Eddie Diaz would do when the people he loved were in danger had such an obvious and inevitable answer that the universe hadn't even bothered to make it a question.

Buck thought about Eddie's back. About the burns Hen had described with careful, measured words that hadn't disguised what they were. About the fire that had been close enough to touch him, that had touched him, that had left its mark on the skin of a man who had already been marked by too many things and had survived all of them through sheer stubbornness.

He thought about Eddie's lungs. About what it meant to be the last one breathing in a room with no air left. About Eddie, with no water left, no wet shirt, nothing but a torn piece of flannel between him and the smoke, staying conscious through pure will because someone had to, because the boys needed someone, and Buck had failed to stay with him. He had failed to have his back. 

“Hey.” Hen's voice, close and quiet. “Buck. Whatever you're thinking right now, stop.”

“I can't,” he said.

His voice was wet. He realised distantly that his face was wet too, that somewhere in the last few minutes the tears had started without his permission and were now conducting themselves without any input from him whatsoever.

He didn't try to stop them. He wasn't sure he could.

“He was alone,” Buck said. The words felt like something being pulled out of him. “At the end he was alone, Hen. He was the only one still — and he just— ” He stopped. His jaw worked. “He put himself over us like we were something worth protecting more than himself. Like his life was the one that mattered least.”

“That's Eddie,” Hen said softly. Not dismissively. More like an acknowledgment of something they both understood about the man, something that was both his greatest quality and the thing that made the people who loved him want to shake him by the shoulders.

“It shouldn't be,” Buck said. “He shouldn't — he does this, Hen, he always does this, he runs towards the thing instead of away from it and one day.” His voice gave out on him completely. He pressed his fist against his mouth, hard, and breathed through his nose and waited for the wave of it to crest and break.

It took a moment.

Hen sat beside him. She didn't try to fill the silence with anything and he was grateful for that, for the particular gift she had always had of knowing when presence was more useful than words.

“He died,” Buck said, when he could. “You said you lost his pulse.”

“He came back,” Hen said.

“He died, Hen.” Buck turned his head to look at her, and he could feel what his face looked like, and he didn't care. "He was gone. He was—" He stopped again. Pressed his lips together. “For how long?”

Hen held his gaze for a long moment. 

“Long enough,” she said quietly.

“How long, Hen.”

She exhaled through her nose. “Two minutes. A little over.”

Buck closed his eyes.

Two minutes. He turned the number over in his head and felt it settle into him like something cold. Two minutes was not nothing. Two minutes was not a blip or a close call or something you brushed off and moved past. Two minutes was long enough to matter. Long enough to mean something. Long enough that the people working on him would have been feeling the shift in the room, that particular shift that Buck knew from the inside of too many scenes, where urgency starts to curdle into something else, something heavier. 

“He came back strong,” Hen said, because she knew him well enough to know where his mind was going. “Once he came back, he came back. Chim said his rhythm stabilised quickly. That's a good sign.”

“A good sign,” Buck repeated.

“Buck—”

“He died for two minutes, Hen.” His voice was very quiet. Very flat. “He died. On the floor of a hardware store. Because he put himself over us.”

Buck looked at her. 

“This is all my fault.”

“Don't do that,” Hen said firmly. “Don't you dare do that.” 

Buck just scoffed. 

“I mean it,” she said. “I will only say this once so I need you to hear me properly.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, eyes level with his. “Eddie Diaz made a choice. He made it consciously and completely and it was his to make. You don't get to take that from him by turning it into something to feel guilty about. That's not what it was, and you know it.”

Buck's jaw worked.

“What was it then?” he said, and his voice finally cracked, finally gave up the last of its composure. “Tell me what it was, because from where I'm sitting it looks like the man I love nearly died and it looks like it was to protect me and I don't know what to do with that, Hen. I don't know where to put that.”

Hen was quiet for a moment.

“It was love,” she said simply. “That's all it was. That's all it ever is with Eddie. A love for you. And a love for those two boys.”

He stared at the ceiling and felt the tears track sideways across his temples and into his hair, and he didn't move to stop them.

“He told me,” Buck said, muffled behind his hand, which he had tried to use to stop his sobs. “In the fire. Before I went under. He told me he loved me.”

Hen went very still.

“He said— ”Buck's voice broke in the middle of it and he pushed through anyway, because Eddie had pushed through so much more with so much less, and the least Buck could do was finish a sentence. “He said he had a lifetime of love to give me. And that he should have said it a long time ago.” He lowered his hand. “And I told him back. We finally — after all of it, after all this time, we finally said it.”

The silence in the ambulance was very full.

Hen's hand found his. Not his arm this time. His hand. And she held on tight. 

He stopped.

He laughed, sudden and broken, surprising even himself.

“He told me he loved me and then he died,” Buck said. “For two minutes. He told me he loved me, and then he literally died.”

Hen made a sound that was caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

“That is,” she said carefully, “very on brand for Eddie Diaz.”

“It's insane,” Buck said. “It's completely insane. He's insane.”

Hen squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, hard, and looked back up at the ceiling and let himself feel all of it — the relief and the terror and the love and the grief and the residual smoke in his lungs. The fear that had its hands around his throat even now.

“He has to be okay,” Buck said. For what felt like the hundredth time, because saying it felt like doing something. “Chim has him?”

“Chim has him,” Hen confirmed.

“Chim's the best.”

“Chim's the best,” she agreed.

“He's going to be okay.”

Hen didn't say anything to that. She just held his hand and let him say it, let him build whatever he needed to build out of whatever materials he had available, because that was what you did for the people you loved when there was nothing else to offer.

“He has to be okay,” Buck said one more time, quieter, more to himself than to her.

Outside, the hospital came into view.

— — —

The hospital room was too bright and too quiet and too far away from wherever Eddie was.

Buck had been told, politely but firmly, by two separate doctors and one very tired nurse, that he was doing well. That his oxygen levels had come up nicely. That his lungs sounded better than expected given the circumstances. That he was very lucky. That they just wanted to keep him overnight for observation, standard protocol, nothing to worry about.

He had nodded through all of it and understood none of it, because the part of his brain responsible for processing information was entirely occupied with the question of where Eddie was and why nobody was telling him anything.

Theo was asleep in the chair beside his bed, curled into himself, his knees pulled up and his cheek resting on his arm. He was still in his hospital gown with a thin blanket tucked around him by a nurse who had taken one look at him and gone to find one without being asked. 

His oxygen levels were good. He had woken up confused and then immediately asked for Buck. He had only just settled back down. 

Chris was on the bed beside Buck. That had not been a medical recommendation. It had been a combined effort of Buck refusing to let him be wheeled to a separate room and Chris's refusal to leave Buck’s side. He was awake, which he had been for a while now, sitting up against the headboard with his legs stretched out beside Buck's and his eyes focused on nothing in the distance. 

He hadn't asked about his dad yet.

Buck thought that probably meant he was afraid of the answer. He understood that completely.

Buck himself was doing a very poor job of not staring at the door. Every time footsteps passed in the corridor outside, he tracked them with his eyes, waiting for them to slow, to stop, to mean something. They never did. They kept going, every time, and he kept watching the door, and the door kept giving him nothing.

His mind was conducting a very unwelcome inventory of everything that could go wrong with a person who had inhaled that much smoke and sustained burns of that significance. He knew too much. That was the problem with being a first responder. He knew exactly enough to construct a comprehensive list of things to be terrified about.

Lungs. The lining of them, the damage that smoke could do that didn't always show up immediately, could worsen over the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

He knew what bad outcomes looked like, and he kept his mind carefully away from that. It wasn’t the type of thinking he needed to be doing.

Burns. Infection. Sepsis. The way burns compromised everything, the way the body's response to them could become its own crisis, the way—

He pressed the heel of his palm against his eye.

Stop, he told himself. He came back. He's here. Stop.

“Buck.”

He looked down. Chris was watching him.

“Hey,” Buck said. “You should try to sleep.”

“You should try to sleep,” Chris said mildly, in a tone that was so purely Eddie that Buck felt it like a hand around his heart.

“I will if you do,” Buck said. But he knew he was lying. He wouldn’t be sleeping until he knew Eddie was okay. 

“You won't,” Chris said, seeing straight through him. 

Buck looked at him. Chris looked back. They sat in the particular silence of two people who were both thinking about the same person and both carefully not saying so. Buck put his arm around Chris's shoulders, and Chris leaned into it without a word, and they watched the door together. Waiting for the news which would tell them whether or not the man who held them together was okay. 

— — —

The knock, when it finally came, was not a doctor. 

Maddie came through the door. She looked like she had been holding herself together very tightly for a few hours. She looked at Buck. A visual sweep of a sister checking that her brother was physically present and accounted for—and something in her face collapsed with relief. 

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Buck replied. 

She crossed the room and hugged him, carefully, mindful of the various things attached to him, and Buck let himself be hugged. He felt seven years old again. Which he thought was probably allowed, given the day he had. 

“I'm so glad you're okay,” she said, fierce and quiet into his shoulder. “I'm so glad. When I heard — Buck, when I heard what building it was and that you were inside, I—” She stopped. Pulled back. Held his face in both her hands the way she had when they were children, when the world felt bigger, and she was the one who stood between him and all the things that wanted to hurt him. “You’re okay.”

“I'm okay,” he said. He still wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince more. 

She looked at Theo, asleep in the chair, his blanket tucked around him. Then at Chris, who gave her a small, tired attempt at a smile.

“Chris,” she said softly. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Chris said. “The oxygen helped.”

“Good.” She sat on the edge of the bed. Looked back at Buck. He could tell that she was trying to look past whatever surface he was presenting to what was actually underneath. 

Her expression shifted.

“Buck,” she said quietly. “What is it?”

And that was all it took. Just his name, in her voice, with that particular frequency of knowing behind it that had been finding him since childhood. 

He felt his face do something he couldn't stop, felt the thing he had been holding at arm's length for the entire ambulance ride and the entire intake process and the entire too-bright, too-quiet stretch of hospital room hours come rushing in all at once. 

“Eddie,” he said. And that was as far as he got.

Maddie pulled him in without another word.

He went. He pressed his face against his sister's shoulder and he cried in a way he hadn't let himself cry yet. Because he hadn't been able to, he had been holding back because there were the kids and there was Hen and there was the need to hold things together that never quite switched off. 

But Maddie had been holding things together for him longer than anyone, and she didn't need him to hold back, and so he didn't. 

He cried for Eddie on the floor of the hardware store. For Eddie's back to the fire. For two minutes of silence where a pulse should have been. For all the years they had wasted circling something they should have run towards. For the kiss Eddie had pressed to his lips that tasted like smoke and desperation and everything he should have said a thousand times before. 

He cried because he loved him. Because he had always loved him. And because love, he had learned today, was not a guarantee of anything.

“I've got you,” Maddie said, low and steady against the top of his head. “I've got you, Buck. I'm right here.”

A small sound from across the room interrupted them.

Buck stilled.

Theo was awake.

He was sitting up in the chair with his blanket pooled around him, eyes wide and glassy, the particular disorientation of a four year old waking up somewhere unfamiliar written plainly across his face. He looked at the room. At the hospital lights. At Maddie and Buck on the bed, at Buck's face, at the evidence of tears that Buck hadn't had time to hide.

Theo's face crumpled.

“Is Eddie dead?” he said.

The word hit the room like a stone hitting water.

“Theo.” Buck started.

“You're crying,” Theo said, with the devastating simple logic of a four year old who had not yet learned that crying had many causes. His own eyes were filling now, rapidly. “You're crying and Eddie's not here and is he dead, is Eddie dead—”

“Theo, no—”

But Theo had already started crying. Sobs escaping his tiny body in bursts. He slid off the chair onto his bare feet and stood in the middle of the room and cried for Eddie with everything he had. Buck’s heart broke for it. 

Buck's eyes went to Chris, who had gone completely rigid beside him.

He noticed the moment Chris took in the word dead and the name Eddie arriving in the same breath. 

“Is my dad dead?” Chris said.

His voice was completely level. That was almost the worst part.

“Chris—” Buck reached for him.

“Buck.” Chris's voice cracked on his name, just the one fracture, and then he pressed his lips together and held it. “Is my dad dead? Just tell me. I need you to just tell me.”

“No,” Buck said, and he said it with everything he had, every cell, every scrap of certainty he could locate in himself. “No, Chris. He is not dead. He is alive. He is in this hospital right now and he is alive.”

Chris stared at him.

“I promise you,” Buck said. “I would not tell you that if it wasn't true. You know I wouldn't.”

Something in Chris's face broke open, just briefly, the control slipping for one single unguarded second before he pulled it back. He nodded. One small nod. His eyes were bright and he was blinking and he was so much his father's son that Buck could barely look at him directly.

Maddie had already crossed the room to Theo. She crouched in front of him and gathered him up, all of him, lifting him against her chest. 

Theo buried his face in her neck and cried in the complete and uninhibited way only small children could, his whole body shaking with it.

“Hey,” Maddie said, low and warm against his hair. “Hey, sweetheart. Eddie is not dead. Do you hear me? He's not gone. He's here, he's in this building, he's being looked after.”

“There was a loud noise,” Theo sobbed, muffled against her shoulder. “And there was a big fire and we were all sleeping and—” He dissolved again, the sentence gone.

“I know,” Maddie said. “I know, baby. That was so scary. That was so, so scary.”

“I want Eddie,” Theo said. Small and absolute.

“I know you do.”

“I want Eddie right now.”

“I know.” Maddie held him tighter. “I know.”

Buck reached out his arm.

Chris didn't hesitate. He leaned into Buck's side the way he had when he was small, the way he probably thought he was too old for now but wasn't, would never be, and Buck put his arm around him and held on.

“He's alive,” Buck said again, quietly, into Chris's hair. For Chris and for Theo and for Maddie and for himself. “He's alive and the doctors are with him and your dad is the most stubborn, most impossible—” His voice caught. He steadied it. “He is not going anywhere. That's not who he is.”

Chris exhaled, slow and shaky, against Buck's shoulder.

Maddie had lowered herself into the chair with Theo still in her arms, rocking him slightly, his crying beginning to quiet into the hiccupping aftermath of tears. 

“Is Eddie going to be okay?” Theo said, sniffling into his hands. 

Buck opened his mouth, but Maddie got there first.

“We're waiting to hear,” she said, honestly and carefully. “There's a doctor who has been looking after him. He's going to come and talk to us very soon and he's going to tell us everything. Okay?”

Theo scrambled out of Maddie's hold and crossed the small distance to the bed. He climbed up with some effort, the hospital gown twisted around him, and pressed himself into Buck's side opposite Chris, burrowing in with his face against Buck's ribs and his fist curled in Buck's hospital gown.

Buck wrapped his arms around both of them. 

His boys. For all intents and purposes, his sons. 

He pressed his lips to the top of Chris's head. Then to the top of Theo's.

He held them and felt them breathe, and he thought about Eddie. 

Come back, he thought, with everything in him, directing it outward, through the walls, through the corridors, through however many floors and doors stood between them. Come back to us. Come back to me. Come back to your sons.

We are all right here and we need you to come back.

“He's gonna be okay,” Buck said.

Because he had to be. 

— — —

It felt like an eternity had passed before Buck got any news about Eddie. 

But eventually, there was another knock at the door. 

Buck's arms tightened involuntarily around the boys.

The doctor was young, younger than Buck had expected. She had a tablet under her arm and a lanyard around her neck. She looked at the room — at Buck in the bed, at the two boys tucked against him, at Maddie in the chair — and took a breath.

“Mr Buckley?” She said.

“Yeah,” Buck replied. “That's me.”

The doctor nodded. Looked briefly at the boys. “I'm Dr Reyes. I've been overseeing Mr Diaz's care.”

“How is he?”

“He's alive,” Dr Reyes said.

Buck exhaled. Beside him, he felt Chris do the same, one long shuddering breath that he had clearly been holding since the word died had entered the room an hour ago. Theo made a small sound against Buck's ribs.

“He's alive,” Buck repeated, because he needed to say it himself. “Okay. Okay. What—” He stopped. Restarted. “Tell me everything.”

“Mr Diaz sustained significant smoke inhalation,” She said, measured and clear. “His airway is compromised and we have him intubated to support his breathing while his lungs begin to recover. We're monitoring him very closely.” A pause. “He also sustained burns to his back and upper arms. They're serious. We have a burns specialist involved in his care and we'll have a clearer picture in the next twenty-four hours about what treatment will look like going forward.”

Buck processed this in layers. Intubated. Burns specialist. Twenty four hours.

Alive. Alive. Alive

“His heart?” Buck asked before he relaxed too much. 

Dr Reyes met his eyes. “Stable. His rhythm has been consistent since resuscitation. We're monitoring for any complications but so far he is holding steady.”

“When can I see him?” Buck said.

The doctor's expression shifted, just slightly, into something that Buck recognised as the precursor to something he wasn't going to like.

“Mr Diaz is in the ICU,” Dr Reyes said carefully. “Our policy for the ICU is family members only. And visitors must be sixteen or older to visit.”

The silence that followed was heavy. 

Buck looked at Chris. Chris, who was fourteen. Chris, who was Eddie's son, who had been on that floor with him, who had been carried out by a first responder while his father's heart was stopped.

He looked at Theo. Four years old. Pressed against his side with a fist in his hospital gown. Desperate to see his Eddie. 

He looked at the doctor.

“I can't leave this bed,” Buck whispered. “Can I?”

“No,” Dr Reyes agreed. “We'd prefer you didn't, not until morning at the earliest.”

“And the boys are too young.”

“I'm sorry. It's policy. We—”

“I understand the policy,” Buck said. He was very calm. He’d like that noted. “I understand it and I'm not going to argue with it, but it really sucks.”

He looked at Maddie, who was already watching him already knowing where this was going.

“I need someone in that room with him.”

Maddie held his gaze.

“I can't stand the idea of him being alone in there,” Buck said, and his voice dipped on the last words, losing some of its steadiness. “He was alone at the end, in the fire, and I—” He stopped. “I can't have him wake up alone. I can't. I need someone who—” He looked at Maddie. Just at Maddie. “Please.”

Maddie stood up.

“Tell me where to go,” she said.

Buck looked at the doctor.

Dr Reyes hesitated. “I'm sorry, and I understand this is a difficult situation, but ICU visits are restricted to immediate family. I'll need to confirm your relationship to the patient.”

Buck didn't even blink.

“She's his sister in law,” he said. “Eddie and I are married.”

Maddie's expression didn't change. Not even slightly. Like she wasn’t at all surprised by Buck’s announcement.

“Evan and Eddie Diaz,” she said, with a serenity that Buck would be grateful for until the end of his life. “I'm Maddie Han. Buck sister, Eddie's sister in law.”

Dr Reyes looked between them. Whatever she saw in their faces, whatever calculation she ran, she arrived at her answer quickly.

“I'll let the ICU team know you're coming,” she said before leaving. 

Maddie squeezed Buck's hand. 

“Don't leave him,” Buck said. “Not even for a minute.”

“I won't,” she said. “I promise.”

“And Maddie.” His jaw tightened. “Talk to him. Even if he can't — just talk to him. So he knows someone's there.”

She just nodded and then she was gone, following Dr Reyes down the corridor, and Buck watched the door close behind her and then looked up at the ceiling and breathed.

Chris had not said a word through any of it. He was still looking at the closed door.

“She'll stay with him,” Buck said.

“I know,” Chris said quietly.

Theo had fallen into a thin, exhausted sleep again, still tucked against Buck's side, his breathing slow and even. Buck kept one hand on his back and watched the door and waited.

His phone buzzed.

Maddie.

He answered before the second buzz had finished.

The video connected. Maddie's face for half a second, and then she turned the phone.

The ICU room was dim and quiet, full of the soft sound of monitors and the measured rhythm of a ventilator doing the work that Eddie's lungs were resting from. There were lines and leads and the organised complexity of a room where someone was being held very carefully in place while their body remembered how to do what bodies were supposed to do.

And there was Eddie.

Buck saw his face.

Still. Pale beneath the bruising and the soot that hadn't quite been entirely cleaned away yet. Eyes closed. A tube taped at the corner of his mouth. His chest rising in the slow, mechanical cadence of the ventilator, steady and deliberate and there.

Rising.

Falling.

Rising.

Buck felt something leave his body that he hadn't known he was still holding. Something that had been coiled and clenched and braced since Hen had said long enough in the ambulance, since the floor of the lumber aisle, since he had lost sight of him. 

It left him all at once, quietly, like a breath he had been holding for hours.

His eyes filled.

He let them.

“Hey,” he said, barely audible. To the phone, to the dim room, to the still face of the man who he loved more than anything. 

“Hey, Eddie. I'm here. I'm—” His voice gave out briefly. He brought it back. “I'm right here. Okay? I'm not going anywhere.”

The ventilator breathed for Eddie in its steady, unhurried way.

“Maddie's going to sit with you,” Buck said. “Until I can get there myself. Which is going to be as soon as they let me out of this bed, so—” He laughed, just barely, just a breath of it. “Don't get too comfortable without me.”

He watched Eddie's chest rise and fall.

Rise and fall.

“I love you,” Buck whispered. Quietly. For Eddie, who couldn't hear him, or maybe could, because nobody really knew for certain. Buck was choosing to believe that he could. “I love you. Please come back to me, baby.”

The monitor beeped its steady rhythm.

Buck kept the phone in his hand long after Maddie had propped it up on the table beside the bed, angled so he could still see. He kept it there while Theo slept against his side and Chris sat quiet and watchful beside him. He kept it there and he watched Eddie breathe. 

Because Eddie was alive. 

— — —

The first thing Eddie noticed when he woke was the ceiling. 

He knew it just by the smell of the place, antiseptic and recycled air. That, and the particular quality of the light above him. It was too even, there were no shadows, it was the kind of light that didn't come from anywhere natural.

Hospital.

He was in the hospital.

The second thing he noticed was that existing was very effortful.

Every breath hurts. He could feel his lungs working in the way that you weren't normally supposed to feel them, conscious of every expansion and contraction. 

There was something in his throat. Something that had been there and was perhaps only just gone, a rawness that told the story of its recent removal without requiring him to remember the details. His back was — he didn't have a word for his back. He found that he didn't want to explore that particular information too thoroughly. Not yet.

He was very tired.

The third thing he noticed was Buck.

He was asleep in the chair beside the bed. He was folded into it in the way tall people folded into chairs that weren't designed for them, one arm along the armrest, his chin dropped towards his chest, his hair doing several things at once. He had a blanket over him that had the look of something a nurse had placed there after the fact, tucked around him while he was already asleep.

He was pale. He had shadows under his eyes that suggested he hadn’t slept properly in a long time. 

He was the best thing Eddie had ever seen in his life.

Eddie tried to say his name. What came out was nothing. Less than nothing. A dry, raw approximation of intention with no sound behind it. His throat felt like sandpaper and gravel and something worse. The effort of the attempt sent him into a coughing fit that was both agonising and, as it turned out, extremely effective.

Buck was awake before the second cough.

“Eddie.” His voice cracked clean down the middle. “Hey. Hey, I'm here. Don't — try not to — here.”

There was a cup with a straw materialising at his lips. Eddie drank. The water was the most extraordinary thing he had ever tasted. He took three careful sips and then laid back against the pillow and breathed, breathing hurt, but he didn't care.

He looked at Buck.

Buck was looking at him with an expression that Eddie felt in every part of himself, including the parts that were currently registering significant complaints. His eyes were red-rimmed. His hand had found Eddie's on top of the blanket and was holding it with a grip that communicated several months' worth of things without saying any of them.

Eddie opened his mouth. The sound that came out was not a real language.

“Don't try to talk yet,” Buck said immediately. “It's okay. You don't need to. I'm here. I'm right here.”

Eddie shook his head. Which hurt. He ignored that.

He needed to talk. He needed to say something specific and urgent and the inability to produce sound with his ruined throat was one of the most frustrating things that had ever happened to him. 

He tried again. Managed something that was almost a word. Almost.

“What do you need?” Buck said, leaning closer, reading him the way he always did, the way that had taken Eddie an embarrassingly long time to recognise as love. “What is it? Are you in pain? I can get the nurse, I can—”

Eddie squeezed his hand.

Buck stopped.

Eddie held his gaze. He tried to make his face say what his voice couldn't. He had always been better at that anyway, at communicating the things that mattered in the spaces between words. He and Buck had been doing it for years, an entire private language built in the margins of everything they hadn't said out loud.

He tried to make his face say the kids.

Buck looked at him. Processing. And then understanding moved across his face, the way it usually did. 

“Chris and Theo,” Buck said.

Eddie's hand tightened.

“They're okay,” Buck said, with certainty. “Eddie, they're okay. They're both okay. They got out.”

Eddie stared at him.

“Chris is here,” Buck continued. “He's in this hospital right now, he's been driving the nurses absolutely crazy trying to get them to let him come up and see you, which—”

His voice wobbled and he steadied it. 

“Which is very much like you, by the way. His oxygen levels are perfect. He's been cleared. He's completely fine.”

Eddie closed his eyes.

“Theo too,” Buck said. “He's fine. He's been asking about you approximately every four minutes since he woke up. He wanted me to tell you—”

Buck stopped.

“He wanted me to tell you that he saved all the screws. From the floor of the hardware store. He put them in his pocket before we left and he's been keeping them safe for you.”

Eddie opened his eyes.

Buck was smiling, and it was the most broken and beautiful version of his smile that Eddie had ever seen.

“They're safe,” Buck said. “They're both safe. You got them out, Eddie. You got all of us out, baby. You did it.”

Eddie felt the tears before he could do anything about them, which was embarrassing but also, given the circumstances, something he decided he was going to allow. They tracked sideways across his temples and Buck reached up without a word and brushed one away with his thumb, his hand staying against Eddie's face.

Eddie turned his face into it.

“I've got you,” Buck said quietly. “I've got you now. You can stop holding everything together. I've got you, sweetheart.”

Eddie breathed. It hurt, but he breathed anyway.

He breathed for Buck. For Chris. For Theo. For his family. 

— — —

The discharge paperwork took forty five minutes longer than it needed to.

Eddie knew this because he had been watching the clock on the wall of his hospital room with the intensity of a man who had been in that room for one too many days. He was prepared to count every remaining second of it if that was what was required of him.

“You could sit down,” Buck said from the chair beside the bed.

“I'm fine standing,” Eddie said.

“Your back—”

“Is fine.”

Buck gave him a look that communicated, very efficiently, that they both knew that was not entirely true. Eddie gave him one back that communicated that he was leaving this hospital today even if he had to discharge himself against medical advice. A look that said nobody was going to stop him, and that Buck of all people had very little ground to stand on when it came to reckless discharge decisions.

Buck closed his mouth. Wise.

The burns on Eddie's back were healing. That was what the doctors had said. They had also said that healing was a long road. 

There would be follow up appointments and wound care and physical therapy and a list of things he needed to monitor and report. All of which had been printed out and handed to Buck, presumably because someone had assessed the situation and determined that Buck was the more reliable recipient. 

They were probably right. 

His lungs were better. Significantly better than the first few days, which he had only partial memory of. He just had to take it slow. Something he was arguably very bad at. 

The door opened.

Not a nurse with paperwork.

Theo came through it at speed, Chris immediately behind him wearing the expression of someone who had told him to walk and been ignored. Theo was in his regular clothes, a red hoodie and jeans, his shoes on the wrong feet in a way that suggested he had put them on himself in a hurry and nobody had gotten around to correcting it.

He stopped when he saw Eddie standing up.

Theo stared at him.

“Hi, kiddo,” Eddie said.

Theo crossed the room in three seconds and wrapped himself around Eddie's legs.

Eddie's hand went to the back of his head immediately.

“Hey,” Eddie said softly. “Hey, I've got you.”

Theo said nothing. Just held on tighter. 

Eddie looked up at Chris, who was standing a few feet back, hands in the pocket of his hoodie. He looked older than fourteen at that moment. He looked like someone who had spent eleven days being steadier than a fourteen year old should have to be and was only now, in the presence of his father standing upright in regular clothes, beginning to let that go.

“Come here,” Eddie said.

Chris crossed the room and let Eddie pull him in, and Eddie held both of them, Theo still attached to his legs and Chris tucked against his side, and felt something settle in him that had been unsettled since the floor of the hardware store.

His family. His whole family, right here.

He looked at Buck over Chris's head.

Buck was standing by the chair, not pretending to look at anything else, not making any effort to disguise what was on his face. He looked like a man watching something he had been afraid he might not get to see. He looked like a man in love. 

“Hi,” Eddie said. All other words were lost to him.

“Hi.”

“Alright,” the nurse said briskly, appearing in the doorway with a clipboard. “Mr Diaz. Let's get you out of here.”

“Finally,” Theo said, with great feeling.

The nurse looked at him. Then, despite herself, she smiled.

“Finally,” she agreed.

— — —

Once all the paperwork had been filled out, and Eddie begrudgingly got wheeled out of his room on a wheelchair, he once again, gathered his family in his arms. Theo attached to his legs, Chris on one side, Buck on the other and he stood in the entrance of the hospital and held them.

The afternoon sun was doing something generous with the light, laying it out warm and unhurried across the car park, across the ordinary world that had kept moving while they were inside the burning building and inside the hospital. 

It had all just kept going, the way it always did. Indifferent and ordinary and beautiful, in the way that ordinary things became beautiful when you had spent enough time being afraid you might not get back to them.

He breathed it in.

His lungs, still tender, still finding their way back to themselves, expanded with the effort of it, and it hurt, and he didn't care even slightly.

“Are we going or what?” Theo said, into his leg. 

Chris made a sound that was almost a laugh.

Buck pressed his lips together and looked sideways at Eddie with an expression that was going to undo him completely if he wasn't careful. 

He was going to marry that man. 

He looked down at Theo.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “We're going.”

Theo released his legs. Took his hand instead. 

Chris fell into step on his left. Buck on his right.

And Eddie Diaz—who had spent thirty four years in a body that had been shot and broken and burned, who had carried Catholic guilt like a stone, who had walked into a hardware store on a perfectly ordinary Saturday with no expectation of anything other than timber and an argument about measurements—walked out into the light.

Whole.

Home.

Burning with love for his family.