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It happens so fast.
Things like this always do. Eddie has watched enough people die to know that it isn’t usually slow. Not when it’s like this.
The lights flicker; the flash of red from the laser flares across Eddie’s vision; his heartbeat kicks up in his chest and he hears the steady pulse of it in his ears as adrenaline courses a familiar path through his system.
Eddie knows how this goes.
Except that today, he blinks. One second, Buck is reaching for the hammer. He isn’t sure how it happens; he thinks that he misses it entirely, when a scalpel slings across the room and the stars all align like they have so many other times before and the blade slices cleanly through the flesh of Evan Buckley’s neck.
There’s a kind of stillness in a moment like this.
Everything goes sort of static. Just for a breath, a heartbeat, an instant. Eddie hears ringing in the space between the contractions of the muscle in his chest that keeps him alive; feels burning between breaths of his lungs; and blinks again.
Then, all Eddie sees is blood.
He moves without thinking. Someone is shouting behind him— Ravi, maybe Chim, Eddie isn’t sure— and then there’s a crash that he would probably hope is the decimation of the robot if he had any room in his head to think about anything but—
“Buck!”
It’s chaos. Eddie’s knees hit the floor and he doesn’t feel it, the shock absorbed by cartilage and all that adrenaline. He’s dizzy with it, or he would be except that Buck is on the floor.
Buck is on the floor. Buck is—
“Buck, hey,” he stammers, frantic, frenzied.
Buck’s mouth is open. His eyes are so, so blue. Eddie has seen him choke on his own blood once before. He remembers that night so vividly now, everything from the easy, light, happy atmosphere to Buck’s joy and surprise and Christopher so little and excited to give Buck the card he made— and he remembers how it had washed over him: how nice it had been, how warm and good everything felt. It always does, just before.
He should have known. He’s been good. They’ve been good, haven’t they?
Buck is covered in blood. His eyes are so, so blue. He’s shaking, his fingertips grasping for the wound on his neck. The blood just keeps coming.
“Help!” Eddie screams. But he doesn’t look away.
“Eddie,” Buck chokes. “It’s— ah.”
Eddie has seen Buck covered in blood before, too. He remembers this day just as clearly as the other one. He remembers the way the sun was shining, how it reflected off of the trucks and the windshields and the windows, the world a disco ball. He remembers how the warmth of it had soaked into the dark fabric across his shoulders and beneath it warmed his skin. He remembers Buck, standing there, facing him.
And Eddie remembers how he’d felt then, too. He had been so relieved. Proud of himself. Glad that he’d done something, helped someone. It had been so warm. It had felt so good.
It always does, just before.
Eddie should have known. Should have felt it coming. Should have seen the signs. But he didn’t and now Buck is bleeding.
“I got you,” he says. “I got you, I got you.”
He puts his hand on Buck’s neck and presses, feeling the way Buck groans beneath his palm and hearing it echo in his head. “I know, I know it hurts, I’m sorry.” The words come out in a rush, all smushed and thick.
Buck shakes his head, his expression creased in a way that feels a little unbearable to look at.
“Stay with me, Buck,” Eddie says. His hand is wet. He can’t stop thinking about arteries and blood cells and statistics about neck wounds. It’s all so fuzzy; he grasps for the things that he’s sure he knows, but can’t reach them through the haze in his brain. Buck’s neck is bleeding, warm and sticky and awful against his skin.
“Ow,” Buck gasps beneath him. It feels like Eddie has been sliced open, too.
“You’re— don’t close your eyes,” Eddie says frantically. Buck is pliant, both of Eddie’s hands on his neck now. His pulse thrums with every gush of blood. It’s so warm and Eddie feels so nauseous, suddenly.
But Buck is just looking at him. Just looking. “Eddie,” he says. “It’s— I think I’m okay.”
“Stop,” Eddie instructs.
His voice shakes. Why is he shaking? He’s supposed to be better at this. This is, after all, the thing he’s trained to do now. It’s the thing he’s been doing so well at. Working side by side with Hen, learning something new, helping people. It’s the reason he’d been looking away. It’s the reason he wasn’t—
“Just be still, be quiet,” he pleads. He doesn’t sound very professional, he doesn’t think.
Buck reaches out and grasps Eddie’s arm. And then he squeezes, once and twice. Eddie cannot imagine why he would do something like that. Not for the life of him.
Eddie blinks, and there’s a nurse. Two nurses. One of them tries to pry his hand off of Buck’s neck. Eddie finds that his fingers are stiff. The thought of pulling away reaches him through a haze and panic flares flamebright and quick in his chest.
“No,” he says, hearing his own voice as if from far away, outside his own throat and teeth and mouth.
“Ah,” Buck hisses. “Eddie, just—”
Eddie lets go.
The nurses push him aside and he watches, heart in his throat, as they converge on Buck and shield him from Eddie’s view.
He wants to scream, suddenly. He could, he thinks. But he doesn’t.
“Buck, how we doing?” Chim asks. Eddie hears his voice, a little bit like a fish in a tank. He isn’t sure what they did with the robot, and he finds that he doesn’t care. “You okay?”
One of the nurses moves out of the way. Buck leans back on a gurney; Eddie doesn’t know where it came from. He doesn’t know what happened to their patient, either. He doesn’t know anything except that Buck’s face is twisted up in discomfort, his face pale.
“I’m okay,” he says, looking at Chim. “You guys go.”
Eddie wants to scream.
“We’ll come back and—”
“No,” Eddie interrupts. He looks over at Chimney, his gaze so sharp that he can feel it in himself. Like glass. Like blade. “No,” he repeats. “I’ll stay. I’m—”
Chim hesitates. Eddie thinks, Bobby wouldn’t have hesitated, and then feels awful immediately.
“Okay,” he relents. “We’re gonna go check on Harry. Let us know.”
Eddie doesn’t even know where Harry went. He can’t bring himself to think too hard about it.
“I’m okay,” Buck says from the gurney.
Eddie turns back to look at him. Everything feels like swimming upstream, seconds and minutes lost to confusion. He barely knows where he is.
But he looks at Buck and his focus sharpens. He’s leaning his head back now; the wound on his neck is exposed and the nurses are covering it with half-bloodied gauze. Has it been a whole minute, Eddie wonders? How long have they been standing here? How many beats of Buck’s heart will it take before all the blood spills out of his body and onto the tiles?
“Eddie,” Buck murmurs. His voice is soft now. Eddie blinks, and moves to the top of the gurney without thinking.
“You’re okay," he whispers. Soothes. He tries. He’s a dad; Christopher woke up in pain one morning last month and let Eddie crawl into his bed and hold him the way he’d done when he was little. It was awful and wonderful in a different way, being so close to him. Eddie had cradled him and run his fingers through his soft curls and thought— at least there’s this. At least I can touch him. Maybe Eddie was too glad for it. Maybe he is worse than he thought. Maybe it didn’t matter that he would never have wished for his baby to be in pain, but only that he had taken any amount of solace in it.
Is that how it works? he wonders now, watching Buck bleed. For every solace, there’s blood?
His hands are shaking. But he can try to be there for Buck. He has to try. Buck must be scared. There’s a voice in the back of his head, whispering. It’s the least he can do.
He raises his hand— still not entirely sure what he’s going to do with it— and sees that it’s still crimson and sticky. His breath catches in his throat and his stomach turns at the sight of it. Buck’s blood on his fingers, caught in the lines of his palm, drying on his knuckles. Buck is pale and trembling and in pain, and the blood is on Eddie’s hands.
“We’re going to take you to the emergency room,” one of the nurses says. She’s looking at Buck, but when Eddie looks down, Buck is looking at him. He’s upside down like this, head tilted back.
“Are you coming?” he asks. His voice is hoarse and it has that lilt to it that Eddie knows means pain— he’s heard it in Buck’s voice on bad leg days and after rough calls and in hospital rooms before— but he’s fluttering his lashes, keeping Eddie in his sight. It’s occurring to Eddie for the very first time that he might not actually be dying at all. Eddie had just been so sure he was.
“Yeah,” he says without thinking. “Of course.”
Eddie is coming back to himself in small increments. He takes a step and remembers that this is a hospital. He takes another and remembers that if this were a critical emergency, he would be shoved to the side. He watches Buck put his own hand on the gauze against his neck and remembers, inexplicably, that Buck had choked on bread one time and received a tracheotomy in a restaurant. This memory makes Eddie inexplicably furious.
They walk down the hallway and he looks at the blood drying on his hands and remembers that he is not Buck’s partner anymore.
This memory makes Eddie feel like crawling out of his skin.
In the emergency room, he tries to listen as the nurse explains to Buck that the bleeding is slowing, but that he will need stitches.
“Wait,” he says, all the eyes in the room finding him. “Stitches?”
Buck is watching him, Eddie realizes.
“Yes,” the nurse replies cautiously. “Someone will be in to do them shortly.”
And then she leaves. She walks out of the room like it’s nothing, like Buck isn’t bleeding, like Buck’s neck isn’t sliced open, like Buck isn’t pale and wincing in pain right now.
Eddie watches her go, something coming loose in his chest and tumbling down, somewhere dark and deep and out of reach.
“Where is she going?” he hears himself ask, sounding bitter and biting.
“Eddie,” Buck says.
“No, it’s— your neck is—” Eddie feels himself stretching, feels it as he loses sight of reason.
“I’m fine,” Buck tells him.
For some reason, this enrages Eddie. Guilt and fury tangle like choking vines in his chest, an invasive, awful mess with a vise grip on his lungs. He rounds on Buck, eyes flashing, thinking about blades and their sharp metal glint and how blood tastes like metal.
“You are not fine!” he snaps.
Buck’s blue eyes look more blue because his skin has lost its soft pink flush. He’s so pale. Eddie wants something; he just isn’t sure what it is.
“Eddie,” Buck repeats.
Eddie wants to scream again. He doesn’t want to hurt Buck. He’s never wanted to hurt Buck. It’s just that sometimes, he can’t help it. Sometimes, blood gets on his hands anyway.
“Stop saying that!” he insists before he can stop himself.
Buck blinks sluggishly up at him. Eddie’s fingers ache and he wraps them into a fist. He thinks that maybe if there were someone else in front of him, he’d feel like hitting them. As it is, he digs his blunt fingernails into his palm.
“Do you want to look for yourself?” Buck asks, sort of dryly. He goes to move his hand, then, pulling the gauze slightly away from his neck, and Eddie feels a tidal rush of panic that drips cold and fierce over his whole body.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he hisses, leaning in and pressing the gauze tighter against Buck’s neck.
“Ow,” Buck complains, flinching away. Eddie thinks— distantly— that he should be taking solace in this. He should be feeling relieved. It should be one of those things like it always has been before. They should be laughing it off right now, because Buck got a scalpel thrown at his neck and he’s fine.
But Eddie is not laughing. His heart is racing and there’s still blood on his hands and Buck is looking pale and shaky and all Eddie can bring himself to think about is how differently it might have gone this time.
“Are you out of your mind?” he says as Buck looks up at him through his lashes. “You could have died, Buck!”
Buck scowls at him. “You’re the one who’s a paramedic now,” he says. “I was just trying to let you see.”
“I don’t need to see!” Eddie argues. He’s not sure when he started pacing, only that his shoes squeak against the floor. “I saw it, Buck! Look!”
He holds his hands up, still red. Buck looks mostly unmoved by this display, if a little bit uncertain.
“I was there,” he answers. “Eddie. I’m really fine.”
Eddie lets out a sound. He means to scoff. He thinks it kind of comes out helpless and scared, because Buck looks at him differently all of a sudden. The fight drains out of the room in real time, even as Eddie scrambles to hold onto it.
It’s so much easier than the way Buck is looking at him now— calm, if a little confused. Concerned. Eddie feels like he could claw his way out of his own body right now, a jumble of haphazardly crossed nerves and anxieties.
“You’re not fine!” he says. “This is all my fault, Buck!”
Buck stares at him. “What?”
Eddie groans, scrubbing a hand over his face. “You know what I’m talking about,” he insists.
“I don’t, Eds,” Buck pleads. “Malfunctioning robots or-or geomagnetic storms or, like, bad timing. That stuff isn’t your fault.”
“You don’t understand!” Eddie snaps, frustrated.
“What do I not understand?” Buck asks.
It’s a reasonable question, but Eddie thinks if he were to try to answer it he might burst into tears. Shame builds like pressure behind his eyes and he thinks, inadvertently, about Texas.
He has been doing so much better. He’s been happy. But right now all he can think about is the oppressive desert mornings and the way that Christopher had looked at him when Eddie had to tell him that Bobby was dead.
He thinks about going home at the end of this shift. It’ll be a Saturday. If something had happened to Buck today, he’d have had to wake Chris to tell him. He’d have had to sit on the edge of his bed in his recently updated room that no longer looks like it belongs to a little boy, and look him in the eyes. And Chris is not so little anymore— that’s true whether Eddie wants it to be or not— but in a moment like that, Eddie thinks he would have looked like it.
“What if you had been really hurt?” he hurls across the room at Buck like an accusation.
Buck looks steadily back at him. “I’m not, though,” he says. It’s too, too gentle.
“You were in there by yourself!” Eddie says. What’s meant to sound firm comes out of his mouth like a plea.
After the lab, Eddie had demanded to know everything. It had been Ravi who explained it all to him, start to finish, giving answers to the questions that had been rattling around in Eddie’s head for two weeks. They’d sat in Ravi’s car outside the funeral talking about it, arriving too early.
Eddie had tried to picture Bobby alone in there.
Maybe that’s part of why he’s so scared now. He’d looked at Buck through the window, trapped and in danger. He’d been right there. And it hadn’t mattered all that much.
After Bobby died, Eddie had thought that it was right for him to try to get it together. It was what Bobby would have wanted for him, so he threw everything he had into it. He woke up every day and tried to be the kind of man that Bobby would have been proud of. He searched out things that would make him happy; turned that happiness into care for his son; showed up and was present every single chance he got.
And it’s been working. Eddie’s been doing so well.
But here they are anyway. Like it was inevitable. Like there’s nothing Eddie can ever do to stop the people he cares about from getting hurt, no matter how much blood gets on his hands.
“Eddie,” Buck says softly.
Suddenly, Eddie can’t look at him. He shakes his head once, hard, feeling the way his face twists.
“I need to—”
“Eddie,” Buck pleads, but Eddie is already out in the hallway. He squeezes his eyes shut and then walks away, rounds the corner and leans against the wall as his breath stumbles out of his throat.
The distance doesn’t work this time. Not really. He feels awful the minute Buck is out of his sight, a desperate clawing in his throat.
His chest heaves and he leans his head back against the wall, closing his eyes. When he does, he sees Buck.
Buck laid out on the pavement with his hand in Eddie’s as he screamed in agony. Buck laughing in the kitchen at the firehouse. Buck with scratches across his face, bloody and covered in dirt and still looking for Christopher. Buck sprawled out on his couch. Buck in his son’s bedroom, bearing the pain Eddie knows it causes him to sit cramped up on the floor just so that he can build Legos with Chris. Buck in the sun; in the gym; in Eddie’s backyard squinting at his phone because he’s convinced this one weed is toxic.
Recently, Eddie has been on a precipice.
He’d realized that something wasn’t right the day he left for El Paso. He thinks that it started when he looked in the rearview mirror at Buck standing in the street. Whatever it had been that he was feeling, Eddie knew that he couldn’t keep ignoring it.
But really, now that he’s thinking about it again, it goes back further than that. All the way back to when he was a kid, maybe. Before Christopher, before Shannon. It’s hard for Eddie to remember parts of himself that existed before he was a dad or a soldier, but they exist and they are in him still.
He leans his head back and looks at the ceiling, their uniform tiles. He traces their edges with his eyes and waits for his vision to stop blurring. And then, unbidden, Buck’s voice comes back to him.
One of those nights when Chris was already in bed— when he was smaller and some things were simpler— Buck had been sitting on the couch and he’d turned to Eddie and said—
“Do you think dogs know they’re dogs?”
Eddie had started laughing before he could stop himself and then he had laughed and laughed, so hard that he couldn’t breathe. Buck was laughing too, by then, and he didn’t even know what was funny. Eddie remembers that night so vividly now: the way Buck had laughed so hard just because Eddie was laughing. Like his joy was enough to make Buck overflowingly, dazzlingly happy.
Thank God for you, kid. That’s what he had said to Chris when he asked the same question. Because Christopher’s whole existence was— and is— a light on Eddie’s life.
Christopher is the sun. But Buck—
“The moon reflects the sunlight,” Chris had told him one time, pointing to the hanging solar system above them. They’d been at a museum. Eddie can’t remember which one, but he knows Chris was wearing blue and Buck was there with them.
“Is that true?” Eddie had asked, even though he knew it was.
It’s funny now. There’s a geomagnetic storm sending robots haywire and two of his friends are lost in space and Eddie still can’t stop thinking about the sun and the moon and the way they reflect light off of each other, working in tandem to hold the earth in its fragile state of stasis. There’s a lot about it that Eddie doesn’t really understand, but he gets that much. He gets that they wouldn’t be anywhere without the sun and the moon.
There had been a fleeting moment today when Eddie had thought Buck was going to die.
There had been a moment, driving away to go to El Paso, when Eddie had thought his heart was being ripped into pieces.
There had been a moment, right after Eddie learned that Bobby was dead, when all he wanted was Buck.
And there is a moment now, shaking in a hospital hallway with his best friend’s blood on his hands, when everything comes to Eddie in a glimmering rush of clarity. A moment when it all makes perfect sense to him and his vision clears for what kind of feels like the first time in his entire life. A moment when Eddie steps into the light.
There’s a sign for a bathroom at the end of the hall and Eddie strides into it and scrubs his hands clean. Blood runs red and then pink and then clear as his skin stings pink. He barely pauses long enough to dry the water off of his fingers, and then he goes back to Buck.
There are apologies on his tongue, but they die at the sight of Buck leaned back on his gurney. He’s no longer in his turnout coat— just his shirt underneath— and there’s an expression of true pain on his face now as he squeezes his eyes shut. There’s a doctor applying stitches to the still open wound in his neck.
Eddie’s stomach turns with guilt as they both look up at the sound of the curtain over the cubicle. The doctor hesitates, but Buck takes in a breath. His eyes go all soft and concerned, even though his fingers are clenched tightly around the edge of the gurney, his knuckles white.
Eddie’s heart beats a steady drum in his chest as he drops himself into the chair next to Buck.
“Eddie,” Buck says softly, searching his face with those wide-open, sweet blue eyes. How could he have ever missed it, Eddie wonders as he looks at him. “Are you okay?”
Eddie huffs fondly, reaching for Buck’s hand and gently prying his fingers open. Buck still has blood drying on his wrist, but Eddie’s hands are finally clean.
“I’m fine,” he says. “Here.”
He fits his hand around Buck’s, their palms pressed tightly together, and squeezes encouragingly, then nods across at the doctor before turning his full attention back to Buck.
“Squeeze if you need to,” he says softly.
Buck blinks slowly at him. And then squeezes tight as the next stitch goes in, his face creasing with pain as Eddie rubs his thumb over the side of his hand.
“Sorry,” Buck says between stitches.
“Don’t be,” Eddie whispers. “I got you.”
Buck looks at him like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t; the room is quiet as the minutes tick by and Buck winces through the row of stitches in his neck. And then, eventually, they’re alone again.
Eddie looks at Buck, who’s slightly less pale and looking a little more himself.
He’s also so beautiful that it hurts Eddie a little bit to look at him, now that he understands what light he reflects and why it fills him up the way it does, a shimmering and perfect thing that Eddie might have been too afraid to touch not so long ago.
But he’s doing better now.
“I’m sorry,” he says, leaning in a little bit.
Buck glances down at their hands— still clasped together— and then cautiously back up to Eddie, searching his face.
“It’s okay,” he says softly. “It wasn’t your fault, Eddie.”
“No,” Eddie says, shaking his head. He hesitates, pulling his lip between his teeth, and then reaches up. His fingers only shake a little bit as he brushes a stray curl off of Buck’s forehead. “I’m sorry I walked away from you. That wasn’t fair.”
Buck blinks, his eyes wide.
“But you, uh—” he starts carefully, studying Eddie like he’s scared he’s doing something wrong as Eddie’s heart beats the rhythm of his name over and over again against his ribs, a caged bird desperate for flight. “You came back.”
Eddie smiles then.
“Yeah,” he says. “I did.”
Buck takes a breath. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks, still looking at Eddie intently. “You seem—”
“Buck,” Eddie breathes.
Eddie surges upward and carefully holds Buck’s jaw in his hand on the opposite side from where he’s injured. He only lets go of Buck’s hand so that he can put his other one on the side of Buck’s head, holding him steady so that he can’t tilt his head too far and tug on the stitches.
Eddie doesn’t want this to hurt him.
The last thing he sees is a flash of soft ocean blue and warm light lashes, before his eyes are closed and he’s kissing Buck.
And then, it all goes gold.
It’s sweet and warm and the press of Buck’s mouth to his feels like the height of summer— one of those days when the sky is endless and the world feels so bright and perfect that it almost hurts to be alive, just because the sweetness of it is so effortless and tangible. Eddie buzzes with the rightness of it as Buck melts beneath him and every moment of Eddie’s life sparkles back at him, leading to right now.
Buck is the one who pulls back, eventually.
Eddie would have kept kissing him forever, if he could. But it’s almost as good to look at Buck’s face and find that his cheeks are pink again.
“Eddie,” he gasps.
Eddie rubs his cheek gently. “Buck.”
“What’s— wait. I—”
“I love you.” It comes out of Eddie’s mouth with conviction. “I don’t want to… I have a lot to tell you later. I don’t want to tell you everything here, and I’m still worried about you and I want to get you home. But, um—” He pulls back, just enough that he can see Buck’s hopeful and soft expression more clearly, and tilts his head, looking bravely and determinedly into Buck’s eyes. “I want you to know that I mean that.”
Buck nods, slowly, like he’s processing something.
Eddie waits, his hands still holding Buck’s face. And then he watches as Buck smiles— that big, bright, altogether beautiful kind of smile.
“Yeah,” Buck says, breathless. “Okay. Yeah. I love you too, Eddie.”
Like he can’t help it, he reaches for Eddie and Eddie lets him, goes in easily and kisses him and leaves the rest for later. He’s better now. He can breathe. He can hold Buck steady and kiss him deeply and not feel regret.
So he does.
And the light reflects back, like it always has.