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The last thing that Eddie says to Christopher that morning— a Saturday— is:
“Your Buck will be here to get you in a couple of hours!”
He says this from the street in the early morning, when the air is still damp and the faint chill of autumn has begun to hang in the golden light. He says it waving to Chris, who’s leaning on his crutches on Pepa’s front porch. He says it with certainty and lightness and all the things that come with being as comfortable as he is in this life.
“Okay! Bye, Dad!” Christopher calls back, easy and smiling.
He’s a happy kid— happier now than ever, in large part thanks to Buck. It’s true of them both, every day. The best thing that Eddie ever did for himself and for Christopher was to move them out of Texas and into Los Angeles. The second-best thing, or maybe tied for first, was to be brave enough to kiss Buck that night in his kitchen and to never once look back.
Two years later, that kitchen is Buck’s just as much as his own, and every new morning feels very much like that first one did.
Eddie waves at Chris again and then gets into the truck to make the usual drive to the hospital. It’s unusual for him to be working a Saturday, especially one that overlaps with Buck’s shift; usually, their schedules work out surprisingly well, considering that both of their jobs are so demanding. But there are exceptions.
Just yesterday morning Buck had stood in the kitchen with Eddie while Christopher brushed his teeth down the hall and smiled: already in his uniform and looking exceptionally handsome, which made it feel all the more like a crime to Eddie that he had to let him leave the house at all.
“Are you sure about picking Chris up tomorrow?” Eddie had asked him, leaning his hip against the counter.
“Of course,” Buck had answered. “It’s fine, Eddie, I promise.”
“After a twenty-four hour shift, though—” Eddie had started, but Buck had grinned and reached for him, drawing him in by his waist and planting a kiss to his cheek, soundly interrupting his train of thought before it could wander too far.
“Stop worrying,” Buck had said. “I’ve got him.”
These days, they share everything: the house and the bed and the shower more mornings than not; the dishes and the bills and the worries of daily life; dreams and wishes and blankets and quiet snacks in the halfdark kitchen after Christopher is in bed.
And Chris himself. Over steady months and sick days and homework sheets; over bad moods and bad dreams and hard days and doctor’s appointments; over trips to the zoo and silly games and movie nights— Buck has become just as much of a parent to Christopher as Eddie is, in ways that neither of them had imagined would be possible.
Definitely not Eddie, who had resigned himself to single parenthood alongside being gay all at once, and who never even considered that it would be another way. That anyone like Buck would come along and sweep them both up in the big hug that is his whole existence.
So when Buck says that he has Chris— even after a twenty-four hour shift— Eddie is more than inclined to believe him.
As a result, he doesn’t even think twice about it that morning as he runs through his usual routine upon arriving at work: stowing his things in his locker, checking in with his coworkers, reviewing the situation in the ER. It’s a slow day so far, and he hears in passing from Ashley that the night shift hadn’t been too bad, either, with the exception of one particularly colorful patient who had managed to get herself stuck inside a parrot costume.
Eddie is admittedly regretful he missed that one.
“Also,” she tells him, “before I go, your favorite hypochondriac is in three.”
Eddie’s favorite hypochondriac is a patient by the name of Ida Keller, who is seventy-five and totally harmless except that she always thinks she’s dying when she isn’t. Generally, she asks for Eddie.
And Eddie is a softie who indulges her more than he probably should, but he can’t help himself. She’s a sweet lady who’s mostly just lonely, and she likes him. He’d want the same for his Abuela or anyone else’s, so he humors her whenever he has the time.
This morning, he draws back her curtain and peeks into the room, watching as she lights up at the sight of him.
“Good morning, Mrs. Keller,” he says.
“Oh, Eddie,” she answers, sounding outright delighted for someone who’s supposedly ailing in one way or another. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Eddie smiles, tapping lightly on the bedframe. “What seems to be the problem today?” he asks her.
She clears her throat, tapping her chest with gold-adorned fingers. “I’m just feeling a bit under the weather, I think,” she replies.
“Yeah?” Eddie asks, pulling his stethoscope over his head. “Let’s take a listen, okay?” She nods eagerly and breathes deep as he listens to her clear and healthy lungs and heartbeat. “You sound pretty good to me, Mrs. Keller,” he says as he takes a seat on the stool.
“You can call me Ida,” she reminds him for what must be the dozenth time at least.
Eddie just smiles and taps her knee. “Is there anything else that’s bringing you in today?” he asks.
“Oh, just— you know, I woke up not feeling my best,” she answers vaguely.
“You did, huh?” Eddie asks. “Your daughter was supposed to come to town to visit, wasn’t she?”
Ida lights up. “Oh, you remembered!” she says, delighted. “She did, with my grandson. He’s thinking of attending UCLA next year.”
“College already?” Eddie answers.
“Oh, it goes by quickly,” she laughs. “What about your little boy? How old is he now?”
“Just turned nine,” Eddie tells her. “A long way from college, thankfully.”
“Not as long as you think,” she says wistfully, and Eddie wishes she wouldn’t: he does enough thinking about Christopher growing up too fast all on his own.
“Were they in town for a tour?” Eddie asks, turning the conversation back to the topic at hand.
“Yes,” she says, nodding. “He even stayed on campus.”
“Well, there you have it,” Eddie replies. “I’ll bet you picked something up from him.”
“You think that’s all it is?” she asks him, furrowing her drawn-on eyebrows. Eddie bites a smile into the inside of his cheek as he nods his head.
“I’m willing to bet on it, ma’am,” he answers. “So if it gets any worse, you can follow up with your primary doctor or come back in, but for the time being I think your best bet is rest and fluids and I think you’re going to be good as new.”
“Well, alright,” Ida says, sounding doubtful. Eddie smiles at her again, getting so far as to open his mouth to respond before there’s a scuffle beyond the curtain and a voice that interrupts him.
“Incoming trauma!”
He knows by the sound and the pitch of the voice that it’s Carol— and if she’s taking the time to call out, she’s going to need his hands.
Later, he won’t be able to remember what he said to Mrs. Keller as he stepped out into the hallway with his eyes searching. He won’t remember anything except for the moment that he looked up, down the hall past the nurse’s station to the doors of the ambulance bay, and caught a glimpse of black and yellow turnouts.
Everything slows down for a second, and Eddie glances unwittingly at the clock. By now, Buck should be ending his shift. He should be leaving the firehouse any minute to take his Jeep to go and pick up Chris from Pepa’s. Buck should be taking a picture with Chris leaned forward in the back seat, both of them grinning, and sending it to Eddie who wouldn’t see it until his lunch break. Buck should be with Christopher. Buck should be safe.
But when Eddie glances back at the doors, at the gurney, at the turnouts—
Buck is here.
Buck is here. Eddie’s brain struggles to catch up, but his feet are miles ahead of him. He takes off before he even realizes what he’s doing, his heart dropping out of his chest to the beat of his footsteps against the floor.
Someone calls his name, but he doesn’t know who and he doesn’t care, doesn’t pause to look.
Buck is here when he shouldn’t be, when he should be safe and off the clock, and he’s laid out on a stretcher in half of his turnouts, and when Eddie gets close he can see that he’s covered in blood.
The heat drains out of him at the sight of it; if he were more in his body right now, he might be able to feel the blood draining from his own face, too— but it would be no match for Buck’s, which is dark and slick and everywhere. It’s smeared on his face and dripping off of the rail of the stretcher and soaked into his torn shirt, darkening its navy to sick black, and on his hands— hands that had held Eddie barely twenty-four hours ago, hands that have touched his face and picked up Christopher and wrapped around Eddie’s wrists; hands that are now tainted tacky red.
“Buck!” Eddie gasps, or yells, or something in between: he doesn’t know, couldn’t remember his own name right now if pressed.
All he knows is panic, sheer and icesharp, the kind of fear that drives into your chest and doesn’t let up. It takes the shape of Buck’s voice and of the way he laughs with his whole body and of a million other things that are slipping through his fingers as he reaches out and they get coated in Buck’s blood.
It’s this sensation that pulls him sharply into the moment. Voices roar around him— Hen and Chim relaying numbers to other nurses; Stephanie calling his name; questions like how did this happen and how long ago being swapped for answers over the gurney as Eddie moves instinctively with it.
But he barely hears any of it, because Buck—
“Buck,” he repeats.
“Eddie,” Buck groans, turning his head in his direction as his pale lashes flutter open. “Eddie—”
“Hey, hey, baby,” Eddie soothes. Only now— only with Buck opening his eyes and time moving slowly otherwise— does Eddie get a glimpse at what’s really happening. Where all the blood is coming from.
There’s a puncture wound in Buck’s side, gaping and slick and dark. Eddie can’t see anything, can’t tell all the things he’s supposed to be able to tell because he’s a nurse and he’s supposed to be able to understand what he’s looking at.
All he sees is flesh torn open, skin he’s kissed, the spot on Buck’s stomach where Chris has buried his face in fits of laughter that shook his whole little body.
Eddie spins out as the clock ticks. How does this happen? Buck was supposed to be safe by now.
It’s not like he didn’t know. It’s not like he doesn’t sometimes look at Buck— asleep on the couch after a long shift or dressed in his uniform in the mornings— and feel the tightening in his chest at the thought of all the things that could happen to him out there. The unknowing of it, the uncertainty. It could be anything, at any time.
He’s even imagined this very scenario: a time in which he might look up and find Buck being wheeled into the emergency room. He’s shown up here before: sometimes with little scrapes that he’ll tease Eddie into kissing for him; sometimes with a dark shadow in his eyes but no physical harm at all.
This is different from that. This is the stuff that Eddie had been really afraid of: the metallic taste of blood in the air and Buck’s chest heaving and his face creased in real pain, the kind that kisses can’t touch.
“Eddie,” Buck gasps again. His blue eyes are scared and searching, and Eddie ducks his head to meet them as they move into a trauma room. Eddie is barely registering the walls and the doctor and Hen and Chim being held back in the hallway.
“I’m here,” he says, hearing the way his own voice is shaking. “What happened? What happened to him?” he repeats, looking up wildly and then finding that he can’t bear to look away from Buck’s face.
“Eddie, you’re going to have to move out of the way or get out of here!” A doctor— Hayes, a trauma surgeon who’s normally very friendly to Eddie— barks at him.
“I can— I can help,” Eddie hears himself protest. “Let me—”
“Eddie,” Carol says, tugging on his arm.
“Diaz, do not make me kick you out of here,” Hayes answers steadily.
“Eddie.” Buck’s voice draws him back, and when Eddie looks at him, he looks scared.
“Shh,” Eddie soothes. His hands are shaking and he has blood all over them and they hover over Buck’s hair: he doesn’t want to get blood in his hair, he thinks senselessly, like it even matters when he’s covered in the stuff otherwise. “I’m right here.”
“Don’t—”
“I’m not going anywhere, Buck, I’ve got you,” Eddie whispers. His throat is tight and thick. Buck reaches for him and then cries out in pain, and Eddie gives up and puts his hands on him: one spreading blood to his curls, and the other on his shoulder, out of the way and hopefully grounding.
Helplessness. He’s stricken with it, suddenly. For all his training, for all that he should be doing something— all he can do is sit here and touch Buck on his head like a benediction that he has no right to hand out at all, and hope that it’s enough.
“Eddie,” Buck whimpers.
“I know, I know it hurts, baby, we’ve got you,” Eddie hushes him. It’s mindless and it might be a lie— he doesn’t know what this feels like or whether anybody really has a handle on helping him.
Christopher loves a loophole. He’s always asking follow-up questions to any statement Eddie lays out for him. If the words are: it’s not okay to lie, the question becomes: what about if it helps someone? Eddie sometimes thinks the kid would make a good lawyer someday. What about if it helps someone? What about if it helps Buck? Is it okay for Eddie to tell Buck that they’re going to help him when he doesn’t really know anything at all; when the numbers that he’s supposed to understand are like static in his ears?
“No,” Buck says, shaking his head and turning to keep Eddie in his sights. Eddie has just enough presence of mind to register that this is a good thing— that he’s alert, that he’s moving and speaking.
“No?” he repeats.
“Not me,” Buck insists, eyes wide and wild. “Chris. I was supposed to pick up—”
Eddie’s whole chest swoops, like he’s full of birds. “Oh, Buck,” he breathes, smoothing his hand over his curls. “It’s okay. I’ll get him.”
“No,” Buck says. “He’s going to think I— I—”
“I’ll tell him,” Eddie assures him. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry, okay? You’re okay, just—”
Buck lets out a wet sound, half torn from his throat, and knocks his head back against the gurney. “I’m sorry. Ow.”
Eddie swallows hard. “You have nothing to be sorry for, okay? It’s okay.”
“I got hurt and I—I—”
I got hurt. The words bounce around the inside of Eddie’s head in spite of himself. He wants to focus, to know what to do, to do anything at all, but all he can do is spiral about Buck and the blood and the words in his head.
“You’re gonna be okay,” Eddie whispers frantically. “You’re—” He looks up, finds Carol’s eyes across the gurney. “He’s gonna be okay, right?”
“He needs an IV,” she says. “Yes. He’s going to be okay.”
All at once, she’s pressing supplies into Eddie’s hands. He moves with them without thinking, and it’s as if a switch is flipping in his brain, lighting up his synapses and bringing him to life. He could lay an IV in his sleep, and in this moment having something to do grounds him like nothing else could.
“Buck, baby,” he murmurs. “I’m gonna need your hand, okay?”
“Okay.” Buck lifts his fingers weakly and Eddie grasps them, catches them up in his own and can’t resist bringing them to his mouth. Buck’s skin tastes like copper, but he kisses his knuckles anyway before he lays his hand flat and swipes it with antiseptic that smears blood off onto the cotton.
“Just a pinch,” Eddie soothes mindlessly.
“Nothing like getting impaled,” Buck huffs.
Something in Eddie goes cold, but he swallows all his questions. Later, he thinks, followed by: if there is a later, followed by a stone wall that he promptly erects to block that train of thought at all. Buck is awake, talking, and in the emergency room surrounded by people who can help him. People Eddie knows, people he trusts. There will be a later.
He finishes the IV with a few quick motions and by then the activity in the room is picking up all over again.
“Mr. Buckley, you’re going to need minor surgery,” Dr. Hayes says, hovering over them both as Eddie’s pulse leaps into this throat.
This is stuff they do every single day: words he hears all the time. They’ve just never been about Buck before.
“Okay,” Buck agrees.
“What— what does he need? Why does he need surgery?” Eddie asks.
“Because he was impaled with a sharp piece of metal,” Dr. Hayes tells him, not unkindly, as he snaps the rail of Buck’s gurney back up into place. Something like panic climbs into Eddie’s throat at the sight of it: he knows what that means, what it signals. Ready for transport. They’re about to take Buck from him and wheel him somewhere that he won’t be allowed to follow. “Carol is going to take you and explain everything to you,” the doctor adds, and just like that in the space of an instant Eddie is no longer a nurse but just a concerned family member, like the ones they talk to every other day. “Mr. Buckley—”
“Buck,” Buck rasps, and Hayes allows a small smile.
“Buck,” he repeats. “I’ll see you in surgery in a few minutes.”
Eddie turns back to look at Buck, feeling the time slip through his fingers.
“You’re okay,” Eddie soothes. “It’s gonna be okay.”
“I know,” Buck answers, nodding and wincing at the movement. “I’m okay.”
Eddie’s heart splinters. He’d always thought that in a moment like this he would know what to do, what to say, how to make it better. Like when Buck had brought Chris into the ER after he fell at the park. He’d thought that he could be a nurse before he was Buck’s partner. He should have known better, in hindsight.
Buck takes up far too much space in his heart, in his life, for him to be rational about spilled blood and crying-out kind of pain. He should have known that in here, when it came down to the heart beneath the flesh, he was going to have to just be Eddie again.
“They’re gonna take care of you, okay?” Eddie says, his voice splintering.
“Tell Chris,” Buck pleads, turning his head to keep Eddie in his sight.
“I will, I promise,” Eddie assures him. “We’ll see you after.” There are so many other things he wants to say, but none of them make it past his teeth. The moment slips away too quickly, and then there are seconds, and then Buck is turning to him, eyes wide and open.
“I love you,” Eddie says, choking on it like there are vines in his throat. “I love you. You hear me?”
“Hear you,” Buck rasps. “I know. I love you.”
And then, just like that, he’s gone.
Eddie stands there, blinking, barely breathing, until Carol takes him by his elbow and walks him down the hallway.
Later, Eddie won’t remember much about it. It passes in a blur as she tells him in her most calming voice— the one she uses on patients and families, the one Eddie learned from her in the first place— about Buck’s surgery. He retains only bits and pieces of it— a tear, minor, repairing— just enough to know that what she’s telling him is that Buck is going to be fine.
All he can think about is Christopher, who’s probably sitting at Pepa’s in front of the window with his chin in his hands, watching the driveway for Buck’s Jeep. Expecting him to come, because Buck always does. It tugs at something in Eddie’s chest and he comes, incrementally, back into his body.
“Christopher,” he says, looking up at Carol. “He’s at my aunt’s waiting for Buck to pick him up. I need to—”
“It’s okay,” Carol assures him. “I’ll call her. Her number is still in your file. You go change out of these scrubs and sit with the firefighters who are camping out in the waiting room.”
He’s overrun with a sense of gratitude for her, for the way he has people here who know him and care about him, and the way that that extends to his son and these days even to Buck.
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Not a big deal,” she says gently. “I’ll call her and let her know what happened and she can bring Christopher to you.”
“Thank you,” Eddie manages, and she squeezes his knee and lowers her dark eyes to meet his.
“He’s okay, Eddie,” she says steadily. “He’s going to be just fine.”
Eddie draws in a shaky breath and meets her gaze. “He is, right?” he asks. Fear coats his letters; he hears it between each word, hovering like heat over pavement. “It— my head was all over the place, I didn’t even really look—”
“It’s straightforward,” Carol says patiently. “And you trust Hayes. He’s going to take care of him and you’ll have him back with you in a few hours.”
Hours— that’s the word that does it.
“My shift, my patients—” Eddie starts.
“No,” Carol cuts in. “Don’t you even start with that, now. You’re going to do what I said and go change and wait for your baby to get here. Got it?”
Eddie nods.
The next thing that comes into focus for him is Hen— someone who had been only Buck’s coworker once, who Eddie remembers meeting for the very first time in passing right here in the emergency department waiting room the day of the accident at Chris’s summer camp that brought he and Buck together. Now, they’re friends: she’s family to Buck, and Buck is all Eddie’s, and the lines get beautifully watercolored.
The minute he walks out into the waiting room, she’s on her feet and meeting him halfway with an anxious look on her face. Behind her, the room is full of Buck’s family: Chim and Bobby and Ravi, all watching with fear in their eyes.
“Hey, guys,” he says. “Um— Buck’s in surgery, but he’s gonna be fine.”
The words don’t seem true to Eddie even as he says them, but he says them. It’s like reading from a script, barely in his body as he takes a seat with them to wait.
He couldn’t say how long it is, but Carol appears to tell him that she got in touch with Pepa, who’s going to bring Christopher. And he couldn’t say how long it is after that before the doors open again and Dr. Hayes steps out.
“Buck is out of surgery and doing just fine,” he says, and Eddie stops hearing anything at all after that.
He sees blood, and Buck’s blue eyes, and blood.
Until—
“Dad!”
Christopher’s frantic voice and the clack of his crutches on the floor cut through the noise. Eddie moves out of his chair before he can think twice, turning in a circle beneath the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights. He gets a glimpse of Christopher just before Chris throws himself at Eddie, ending up whacking him in the ankle with one of his crutches.
Eddie couldn’t care less— he sinks to one knee and pulls Christopher into a hug, feeling the way he buries his face against his neck.
“Hey, honey,” Eddie soothes. It feels like something slotting into place, having Christopher close and Pepa trailing after him.
“Where’s Buck?” Chris asks, his voice thick and muffled against Eddie’s shoulder.
Eddie rubs his back, up and down over the familiar terrain of his spine. “He’s upstairs now, bud,” Eddie says. “He’s okay, I—”
“No!” Chris cries, unexpectedly vehement. Eddie has to pull back sharply to avoid getting knocked in the jaw by Chris’s head as he pulls back abruptly to look at Eddie. When he does, his eyes are shining behind his glasses and his gaze is accusatory.
“Chris—” Eddie starts.
“He’s not okay!” Chris says. “If he was okay, he—he would come and get me! He promised!”
Eddie splinters all over again; this day just keeps coming, and it’s not even noon. At least, he thinks it’s not.
“Okay, hey,” Eddie murmurs, grasping him gently by the shoulders to hold him in place, and then ducking his head so that he can meet Chris’s gaze. “Look at me, okay?”
Chris does. He’s such a good kid, and Eddie is no longer sure how much of that he can take credit for: not because he’s self-deprecating about his influence on Christopher, but because these days it feels like half him and half Buck.
“Buck is going to be okay,” Eddie says, keeping his voice even. It feels a little bit like breaking through the clouds: something about saying it to Christopher makes it feel more true to him, too. “He was hurt, and he had to have a little surgery, but he is going to be okay.”
“But— he said—”
“I know,” Eddie interrupts gently. “I know, but I saw Buck before he had to go to have his surgery and he told me to tell you—”
Christopher perks up. “You saw him?” he asks.
“I did, bud,” Eddie nods. “And he wanted me to make sure you knew he was sorry he couldn’t pick you up.”
Chris hesitates. “It’s not his fault he got hurt,” he says.
Eddie has to blink hard against the way it feels, and nods his head. “You’re right, baby. You can tell him yourself in a little while, okay?”
“We’re going to see him?” Chris asks, his eyes drifting past Eddie, down the hallway to the Emergency Room doors.
“We will,” Eddie promises, reaching up to brush some of Chris’s wild curls off of his forehead. “Right now, he’s waking up a little bit first. Remember when you had surgery, when you first woke up? How it took you a while to be awake again?”
Christopher nods.
“So that’s what we’re waiting for now,” Eddie explains. “And then—”
“And then we’ll see him?” Chris asks.
“Yes, honey,” Eddie says softly. “I promise we’re gonna see him soon.”
Soon to Eddie and soon to Christopher, apparently, mean different things. Christopher does laps around the waiting room and talks to everyone, the social butterfly that he is unhindered by the circumstances. In between conversations, he pauses to ask Eddie if it’s time to go and see Buck yet; Eddie repeatedly and patiently reminds him that he will know when it’s time.
And then, eventually, it is.
They part ways with the 118 as they all promise to check in on Buck later; as well as Pepa, who has to get to work but tells Eddie that she will call him this evening. Then, Eddie and Christopher leave the emergency department entirely and go up to the recovery wing of the surgical floor, where a nurse that Eddie doesn’t know but has seen around leads them into Buck’s room.
Eddie’s breath catches in his chest, and everything narrows down to two points: his fingers on Christopher’s back, and the meeting of Buck’s eyes across the space between them.
He’s sitting propped up in a hospital bed, looking more alert than Eddie thinks he should, and when he looks up at the sound of them his face cycles through a series of expressions: softening for Eddie, and then absolutely lighting up at the sight of Christopher.
“Hey, my boys,” Buck says, his voice soft and warm.
Eddie fights back tears as everything comes rushing to the surface. He has to stop in his tracks at the sound of Buck’s voice, alive and a little raspy but otherwise perfectly as it should be.
“Buck!” Christopher cries.
Eddie gets back his bearings just in time to grasp the back of Christopher’s shirt before he can throw himself at Buck, crutches and all. He’s not normally very fast, but today he seems to be doing his best to be.
“Easy, easy,” Eddie warns, holding him back gently. “Buck is still hurt, bud. He had surgery on his stomach, so you’re gonna have to hug him really gently.”
Buck huffs, sounding exasperated. “He’s fine,” he says.
“He’s not,” Eddie answers sharply. “He’s going to be gentle. Right, Chris?”
“Yes, Dad,” Chris says, looking up with big eyes as he shrugs his arms out of his crutches.
“C’mere,” Eddie says, and lifts him up. He’s bigger and bigger these days, and it’s not as easy as perching him on his hip anymore— but he manages it enough to lift Chris to a height where he can comfortably lean down and hug Buck, his arms around his neck.
Eddie watches as Buck melts into it, patting Chris’s back lightly and using his other hand to gently cradle the back of his head.
“Hi, buddy,” Buck murmurs. “I’m so sorry I didn’t make it to pick you up.”
“That’s okay,” Chris says, allowing Eddie to pull him back. “You got hurt.”
“Yeah,” Buck agrees, too softly, with too knowing of a glance at Eddie over Chris’s head. “But still. You know I hate missing quality time with my favorite guy.”
“Me?” Chris asks, delighted.
Buck laughs lightly, not enough to shake him, but it’s like breathing light into the air around them all. “Yeah,” he says. “You, bud.”
“Dad,” Chris says, turning to look at him. “Can I sit with Buck? Please? I’ll be careful.”
Eddie knows he has no chance against both sets of blue eyes, so he carefully helps Chris up to sit against Buck’s side. Seeing them together like this, it could be any other day— just for a second, a split second, it could be a regular Saturday and they could be at home and it could all be normal, and Eddie’s hands could be untainted by the feeling of Buck’s blood on them.
“What happened to you, Buck?” Chris asks, unknowing how it makes Eddie tense up from his stiff jaw all the way down his back.
“Uh, well,” Buck says. He’s speaking slowly but coherently, and there’s color in his face. “I was at work—”
“Fighting a fire?” Chris asks.
Buck chuckles lightly and Eddie wonders who washed the blood off of Buck’s face.
“Yes,” Buck replies. “And there was something sharp that came loose while I was working and it…well—”
“It got you,” Chris says, nodding wisely.
Buck grins, a little dopey and so soft that it makes Eddie want to cry.
He gets up then, abruptly pulling himself to his feet and moving to the monitor next to Buck’s bed, where he stands studying the numbers.
“Eds?” Buck asks gently. “What are you doing, sweetheart?”
Buck’s voice, as ever, draws him back. The words shred at the tender flesh of Eddie’s chest, down to the bone.
“Just looking,” Eddie says.
Buck softens, then holds a hand out to him. “Hey,” he says. “I’m okay. Come sit down and let someone else be the nurse for a little bit.”
Eddie opens his mouth to retort to that, but he’s interrupted when another nurse does tap lightly on the door and let herself in.
“Just making note of some vitals,” she says. Eddie doesn’t know her, but he reluctantly steps back and watches with his arms crossed as she cheerfully jots down notes.
She glances over at Christopher. “You guys look cozy,” she remarks.
“I’m not hurting him,” Chris answers. “My dad told me to be gentle.”
“You’re doing great,” the other nurse laughs, glancing back at Eddie. “Are you guys related?”
Eddie opens his mouth to step in, but Christopher gets there before either he or Buck can.
“No,” Chris says. “But Buck is my dad, too.”
Briefly, it’s like all the air goes out of the room. The nurse seems to notice, because she smiles and excuses herself as Buck looks up at Eddie with soft but uncertain eyes.
Eddie’s world rearranges itself into pieces like they’d always been meant to be there, and he moves forward with new and intense purpose, sitting down on the opposite edge of Buck’s bed from where Christopher is sitting.
“What?” Chris asks, looking between them.
“Chris,” Buck sighs. “Is that— have you been thinking about that?”
“Not really,” Christopher shrugs.
Eddie reaches out and rests his hand on Buck’s knee, squeezing gently and thinking of joints and bone marrow— all the pieces of Buck that he loves, and the blood that’s coursing steadily and easily through his miraculous body now, warming it beneath Eddie’s hand.
“Buck,” Eddie says softly.
Buck looks up, and their eyes meet. “Eddie, I—”
“Of course you’re his dad,” Eddie says. He thinks about Chris in the hallway downstairs, terrified at the thought of being without Buck, and about the mother he doesn’t see, and— somewhat less usually— about himself.
Now that he’s heard it, it’s hard to imagine that it was ever or could ever have been any other way at all.
“We wouldn’t be here without you,” he says, clearing his throat as he deliberately meets Buck’s eyes. “Either of us. Right, Chris?”
“Right!”
Buck lets out a wet breath and tugs Chris closer to him.
“Easy,” Eddie chastises, reaching up and brushing Buck’s hair off of his forehead. “Take it easy.”
Buck shakes his head. “I’m okay, I just—” He takes a breath, looking between them, and then turns his head into Eddie’s palm and plants a kiss there. It still sends swarms of butterflies fluttering up into Eddie’s chest, even here, even like this. “I just love you both so much.”
Eddie knows the feeling.
He leans in, and without ceremony he cradles Buck’s jaw in his hand and presses their lips together. Buck’s mouth is chapped and tastes like a hospital, and it’s still somehow everything— the kind of soft and life affirming kiss that brings air back into Eddie’s lungs for the first time all day.
“Never,” he says, pulling back just enough to watch Buck’s lashes flutter open, “do that to me again.”
Buck grins, lazy and bright in equal measure. “No promises.”
“Yeah, Dad!” Chris says, miraculously restored to his usual cheerful self by a mere few minutes with Buck. “He’s a firefighter!”
Eddie nods, then leans in and kisses Buck on his cheek. “Yeah,” he whispers. “He is.”