Chapter Text
Buck knows something’s wrong the minute he wakes up.
His leg feels like it’s on fire, he can’t stop shaking, and when he tries to sit up, the whole room spins in a nauseating blur that has him lying back down just as quickly. He makes himself stay there for a second, breathing through the taste of bile resting at the back of his throat before trying again.
He moves far more slowly when he eventually cautiously tries again, and it helps a bit. The room only spins a little this time as he straightens, pushing himself backwards until he can brace himself against the pillows.
Bending forward makes his stomach threaten to revolt again, but he keeps his breathing steady, swallows hard, and eventually it fades. Or at least it fades enough that he feels relatively safe in continuing to bend forward, peeling back his sheets as he goes. His nose wrinkles when he realizes how soaked through they are with sweat, suddenly aware of the way his shirt and shorts are clinging to him.
Sheets out of the way, he’s surprised to see that his leg looks… fine.
Despite the pain that he can still feel radiating upwards from his calf—a deep, throbbing pain that’s making his hip ache—there’s nothing about his leg that looks off. His skin is still less tan than it usually is, the result of a summer spent mostly in and out of hospitals, doctor’s offices, and physio appointments, but there’s no worrying flush or paleness. His surgery scars—long, jagged pink lines that stand out brightly beneath the fine dusting of leg hair that has finally all grown back in—don’t look discoloured either, and aren’t any more raised than they always are.
Okay. So. That’s.
He’s not sure what to make of that.
Pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, he immediately rolls his eyes at himself. It’s not like he’s going to be able to feel if he’s got a fever, though the chills still rolling through him and the sweat-soaked sheets now puddling around his ankles make a fair argument for it on their own. There’s a thermostat in the first aid kit he keeps in his bathroom, but he’s honestly not feeling super confident about his ability to make it across the room without passing out at the moment.
Fuck.
Okay. Okay.
He’s an adult. He’s survived a bomb, and a tsunami. He’s a firefighter—well, kind of.
He can handle walking a handful of feet to his own bathroom.
Taking a bracing breath, Buck swings his legs over the edge of the bed, and immediately has to stop.
He stays there, frozen, every muscle in his body locking up as he fights to keep his breathing deep and even. Hyperventilating over how much that hurt will not be helpful, even if it’s what his body and brain are screaming at him to do. The room’s already getting a little dim at the edges—if he faints because he couldn’t keep his breathing under control, no one will ever let him live it down.
Buck does eventually make it to the bathroom.
It sucks, and it takes about five times as long as it should, and he gives up on standing the second his feet hit tile, sitting down and scooting the rest of the way on his ass, but he makes it.
His first aid kit is easy to drag out from under the sink at least, and it only takes a few more seconds before he’s got the thermometer stuck under his armpit. He sets a timer for ten minutes on his phone, and gives himself permission to lean back against the wall, savouring how cool it feels against his skin as he lets his eyes slide blissfully shut.
The timer goes off sooner than he expects, startling him out of the half-doze he’d managed to fall into. Sitting up, he pulls the thermometer out of his armpit. It takes a second before the numbers swim into focus, dark grey on pale grey not quite a strong enough contrast with the way his head is still kinda swimming from the walk over to the bathroom.
102.3º.
Well.
That’s not great.
Sighing, Buck takes a photo of the number, before tossing the thermometer in the vague direction of his still spread-open first aid kit as he switches over to his texts.
heyyyyyyyy
so. I kinda need to ask u for a favour?
only if ur free
Making sure his volume is on, Buck lets himself slide all the way to the floor this time as he waits. Shuts his eyes as he presses his face against the tile. God, that feels good. He could lay here forever.
Annoyingly, it only takes a few minutes before his phone chimes.
Of course! What’s up?
okay don’t freak out but
i think i need to go to the hospital?
and i rly don’t want to have to call an ambulance lol
WHAT??? WHY????
EVAN.
CALL AN AMBULANCE.
Buck snorts, whispers a quiet ow to himself when it makes his head throb. Quickly replies before Maddie can work herself up into an actual panic.
its not that serious, just a fever lol
i just don’t think i should try and drive
terrible job not freaking out btw
It clearly is serious if you think you need to go to the hospital!!
I’m on my way, but if you start to feel worse before I get there, call 911!!!
i mean, in a way, i already have 😉
I’m going to kill you. See you soon.
The triage nurse doesn’t seem overly concerned as he writes down Buck’s symptoms, even with Buck leaning heavily on the intake desk to try and stop the room from spinning. The nurse tells them that it’ll probably be a while, gestures them off towards the waiting area. Following the gesture, Buck and Maddie sigh in near perfect tandem; the uncomfortable plastic seating a far-too familiar sight, somehow exactly the same regardless of which hospital they’ve landed at.
Buck doesn’t enjoy how much he has to rely on Maddie to get over to the waiting area, but he makes it without falling over, so. He’s counting it as a win.
Maddie, predictably, goes right back to fussing over him as soon as they’re seated, the same way she had the whole drive over—showering him with a deluge of questions that he’d done his best to answer while shivering in the passenger seat, freezing despite the oversized hoodie and sweatpants he’d managed to drag on before she got to his place. At least she seems to have run out of questions, focusing instead on whether he’s too hot or too cold, if she should see if they can get something to put his foot up, if he needs water, or a snack.
Buck tries to wave her off, and when that doesn’t work, points out that the actual medical professional that had taken down his information hadn’t seemed worried. Unfortunately, that also fails to calm Maddie down, just makes her mumble something long and angry under her breath about incompetent nurses and the state of healthcare in this country. But she at least doesn’t say anything when, a few minutes later, he pulls his hood up, closing his eyes and slumping down in his seat, trying to ignore both the general physical discomfort of the hard seats and the pain still radiating from his leg.
From the faint tapping sounds coming from her general direction, he’s pretty sure she’s just found a different outlet for her worry. Probably googling his symptoms. Or texting them to everyone they know.
Or both.
Not that he can really blame her, not after… well, take your pick really. It wasn’t like he could pretend that he would have been as willing or as quick to go to the hospital before the embolism.
Christ, he hopes this isn’t anything to do with that. Not after he’d finally gotten the all-clear from his surgeon and physical therapist. Not when he’s so fucking close to getting to go back to work that he can practically taste it.
The only thing that’s still standing in his way is clearing up whatever weird issue the brass have with him, and he’s already got plans for how to tackle that, starting with going over to Bobby and Athena’s for dinner on Friday. Whatever their issue is, he’s confident that Bobby is going to have great advice for him. Will have his back, against whoever it is that doesn’t want him back.
Bobby always does.
Buck manages to doze off for a bit with that thought settling across him like a warm blanket and is woken an indeterminate time later to Maddie’s hand clasped around his forearm, shaking him awake. It takes him a second to remember where he is and why, disoriented and in pain, but eventually he finds the eyes of the nurse waiting for them, clipboard in hand. Shooting the nurse an apologetic smile, Buck staggers back upright, Maddie’s grip turning to iron when he gets his feet under him and immediately threatens to pitch forward.
He saw her in action as a nurse so rarely, its only in moments like this that he’s reminded that she’s had plenty of practice in moving around people far larger than herself. His big sister, stronger in so many ways than him, stronger in ways that she’s so rarely credited for.
Buck can’t find the energy to fight her when she asks the nurse for a wheelchair, just lets himself get guided into it, closing his eyes against the bright light of the fluorescents as he’s wheeled deeper into the hospital. He knows Maddie’s the one pushing him by the scent of the perfume coming from right behind his head, and is abruptly reminded of something Bobby once told him, years ago.
Our job ends at the glass doors.
But Buck’s never been work to Maddie.
The nurse helps Maddie get him up onto the examination table when they finally land in a room, before leaving them to their own devices. Buck’s mostly focusing on trying not to fall back asleep, idly scanning the informative poster on prostate cancer that’s staring back at him from the back of the door. Maddie is sitting on the chair next to the door, back to looking at her phone now that she’s apparently feeling at least somewhat confident that Buck’s not about to just pitch over.
“Eddie wants to know if you’ve ever had appendicitis,” she suddenly says, laughter strung around her words even though she’s clearly trying to hide it. It’s enough to startle Buck out of the zoned-out fog he’d settled into, sitting up a bit straighter as he looks down at his sister, still focused on her phone.
“What?” Buck asks. “Why are you texting Eddie?” Maddie looks up from her phone to give him a deeply unimpressed look, as if he was somehow to blame for this.
“I wasn’t, but Chim was crowd-sourcing opinions on your symptoms, and now Eddie Diaz is sending me a new text approximately every six seconds.”
Buck stares at her. Maddie stares back.
Her phone buzzes again, and she looks down at the screen. “And now he wants to know if you’ve ever had mono.”
“Yes on appendicitis, no on mono,” Buck says, and Maddie’s head snaps back up, eyes wide.
“When did you have appendicitis?”
Buck wrinkles his nose, trying to think back. “Um, 2010, 2011? I think? I was in… uh, Colorado? Yeah, uh, working at the ranch. Had to get emergency surgery and everything. My boss was so annoyed about the whole thing, it ended up being half the reason I left.”
Maddie blinks at him, something sad and pained sitting heavy on her features. Buck offers her a faint smile, knowing they’re both thinking about the same thing. Lost years, lost time; things that they’re still finding out about each other, things that they’ll probably never know.
But they’re together now. Buck would much rather focus on that.
Maddie’s phone buzzes.
“Oh for the love of—”
Buck laughs as Maddie scowls down at her phone, but whatever new question Eddie had, Buck doesn’t get to hear it, both him and Maddie turning as one when the door swings open.
The doctor is short, shorter even than Maddie, but she blows into the room with the presence and force of someone twice her height. Her hair is shaved on the sides, slightly longer on top, and she’s already looking Buck up and down over the top of her glasses before the door even finishes closing behind her.
“Evan Buckley?”
“Buck, please,” he says, offering her a weak smile. She smiles back, small but genuine in a way that immediately eases some of the tension in Buck’s shoulders.
“Nice to meet you, Buck. I’m Dr. Parks, I’ll be taking a look over you today.” She smiles at him again, before turning to Maddie. “And you are…?”
“Maddie. I’m Buck’s sister.”
“Nice to meet you as well,” Dr. Parks says, before turning back to Buck. “Now, why don’t we start with what’s brought you in today. The admittance form says you woke up with a fever?” Buck nods. “Alright, why don’t you tell me about your symptoms.”
Like the nurse before her, Dr. Parks doesn’t show any signs of being overly concerned as Buck lists off everything he’s been feeling since he woke up. Buck is just shooting Maddie an I told you so look—to which she rolls her eyes in response—when he gets to the pain in his leg, and watches with a sinking feeling in his stomach as Dr. Parks pauses, and frowns. The frown only deepens when she has him roll up his pants, and they learn that applying pressure to the area makes the pain astronomically worse.
Honestly, if no one else is going to do it, Buck’s gonna give himself a gold star for not puking today, not even once.
“And your surgery, that was done last year?” she asks, no longer applying quite so much pressure but still feeling out the area around his scars.
“The first one was in April,” Maddie supplies. “He had two more, one in May and one in June.”
“Any additional trauma to the site since?”
Buck shakes his head but catches out of the corner of his eye the way Maddie’s head jerks, as if stopping herself in the middle of making the same motion. He looks at her, finds her frowning back at him.
“There was… there was the tsunami,” she says.
“My leg didn’t get hurt in that though,” Buck says, confused. Looks down at Dr. Parks, waiting for him with a single eyebrow raised. “I got some scratches and cuts, mostly on my arms and face. And I guess my legs were really sore the day afterwards, from all the swimming and then walking around for most of the day afterwards, but nothing like. Actually happened to my leg.”
“You were caught in the Santa Monica tsunami?” Dr. Parks clarifies. Buck nods. “And those wounds that you received, were you in the water when they occurred?”
Buck looks at Maddie, who looks back at him with wide, worried eyes.
“Uh, I’m not— I’m not totally sure about like, the when and how?” he says. “It was a bit, uh, chaotic but I definitely… I definitely got some of them in the initial wave, because I remember them itching like crazy with all the salt and stuff, when I was out in the sun afterwards.”
“So after that initial wave, you managed to get out of the water?” Dr. Parks asks.
Buck just nods, and Maddie shoots him a look.
Clearing his throat, Buck adds: “Right after, I got onto this… there was a fire truck? I went back into the water a… a couple of times, helping other people out. But then I stayed up there, until—”
Buck’s voice cuts off with an abruptness that feels involuntary, like all the muscles in your throat seizing at once, like the numbness of too much time in the ocean, like the endless burn of saltwater in your eyes, your nose, your lungs.
“Until the wave began to recede,” Maddie finishes for him. “He went back in the water then, and then spent something like eight hours walking around after that.”
Dr. Parks looks at her, and whatever question is in her gaze is answered by Maddie:
“He was looking for— for the kid he’d been at the pier with.”
Buck avoids Dr. Parks’ eyes when she turns back around.
He’s seen the look he’s sure she’s wearing before. He doesn’t need to see it again.
“Did you end up walking through still water at any point?” Dr. Parks asks, voice careful, practiced. Neutral.
“I— I think so?” Buck says, trying to ignore the screaming, clawing animal in his chest, the one begging him to not to try and remember that day.
He swallows down the taste of acid, and manages to call up the memory of water-soaked denim. Blinks back tears at the smell of cotton candy and gasoline that comes along with it, sunscreen and death.
“I dove back in, when it was receding,” he says, tongue feeling swollen and misshapen as it forms the words. “And then… then, yeah, while I was wal— was walking around, there were points where it was… where I needed to wade through water. And there were… there were a few people who were— who were still trapped so I, uh. I think I went— no, I, I did go fully underwater a few more times.”
Buck stops. Swallows. Clears his throat.
“So, uh, yeah. Still water. Yeah.”
A moment of silence. Then Maddie’s voice, tentative, gentle.
“That was when you got the big cut, wasn’t it?” Maddie asks. “The one on your arm.”
“Oh! Yeah, uh, I’m not really sure how but… yeah. Someone bandaged it for me though.”
“And then you kept searching,” Maddie says with the kind of admonition that would hurt from anyone else mixed with the exact type of worry that stops it from hurting—a familiar combination in her voice.
Buck shrugs, looks back at Dr. Parks. Feels his stomach plummet when he takes in the way her lips have become tightly pressed together, the way she’s now looking at the scar on his arm, finer and paler than the ones on his leg, even though its more recent. After a second, she looks up at him, smile back in place.
It looks the same as it did when she first walked in.
“Okay, I think there’s a few tests I’d like to run, just to rule some things out.”
Dr. Parks is still smiling, her words light, and it should be comforting, should make Buck’s stomach stop feeling like it’s in free-fall, but.
The thing is.
The thing is, is that Buck is a first responder.
He’s watched, on a hundred different occasions, as Hen or Murph have neatly sidestepped a question to avoid speculative diagnosis. He’s seen Bambi spin even the most vague statements into words that somehow manage to comfort worried families and scared casualties alike, all while avoiding ever actually saying anything or giving a diagnosis. He knows what it looks like, when Chim is all but certain that everything is going to be fine, but just can’t say as much to the patient.
He also knows what it looks like, when the paramedics think it might be really, really bad. When they think the casualty won’t ever leave the hospital. When they think they won’t even make it that far.
He really wishes he didn’t know how to tell the difference between the two.
They’re at the hospital for nine hours.
“They said they might have the results as early as Thursday,” Maddie says as they pull out of the parking lot, her tone saying that she’s aiming for comforting.
“Yeah or up to two weeks,” Buck replies, too exhausted and sore to care that he sounds more like a petulant pre-teen than an adult man. He resists the urge to reach down and rub at the spot where they’d done the bone biopsy, fiddling with the lid of the bottle of painkillers he’d been given at the hospital pharmacy instead.
“Your blood work was good,” Maddie continues, undeterred. “Normal white blood cell count, which rules out a lot of things.”
“But also doesn’t explain what’s wrong.”
“The radiologist didn’t see anything on the x-rays either,” Maddie says, voice getting a bit louder as she talks over him. “And the orthopaedic surgeon said the surgery site looked like he’d expect.”
“Yeah, without comparing the bone scan to my previous ones—”
“Which your surgeon will be doing as soon as they send the scans you got today to her,” Maddie says, cutting him off again.
They’re stopped at a red light, so Buck turns his head to give her an unimpressed look.
Maddie gives him a matching one right back, before sighing.
“Look, there’s no point in borrowing trouble, Evan,” easing the car into the intersection as the light turns green above them. “Like Dr. Parks said, so far it’s looking like it’s just an infection. Once they get confirmation, you’ll be able to go on antibiotics, clear it right up.”
“Yeah, unless the hardware’s infected” Buck says, unable to keep the bite from his voice as he feels the frustration and anger he’d spent most of the day suppressing begins to rise up. “And then it’s another fucking surgery.”
Buck slams his head back on the headrest to punctuate the statement, immediately regretting it as pain throbs through his head, black spots dancing at the edges of his vision.
“Buck!” Maddie says.
“Sorry,” Buck mumbles, going back to playing with the lid of the pill bottle. Manages to sit for two whole minutes in total silence before the urge to speak becomes too powerful to resist. “I just… I was so close to getting back for real.”
“You are so close,” Maddie says. “I know how much this has sucked, and I know I wasn’t as… understanding, of your position, as you needed me to be at first. But everyone can see how hard you’ve been working, and how seriously you’ve been taking your health. Especially since the embolism.”
“I guess,” Buck says.
He watches the lights flicker by outside the window for a moment before suddenly remembering something he’d meant to ask Maddie about earlier.
“Hey,” he says. “Before, when Dr. Parks asked about trauma to the surgical site, why’d you bring up the tsunami? You know I didn’t hurt my leg then.”
Maddie doesn’t reply right away, eyes fixed out the front of the car. Buck watches her hands tighten on the steering wheel, and swallows down another wash of bile.
“The tsunami wasn’t just ocean water Buck,” she finally says, still not looking at him. “Especially after the initial wave. With the second wave and the still water that got left behind, there was… there were a lot of other things mixed in. Grey water, and—”
“—sewage,” Buck says, voice flat. Maddie grimaces, shoots him a look that he doesn’t want to interpret, going back to looking out the window instead.
“We just have to wait for the bone biopsy results,” Maddie says after another long, heavy silence. Her voice is firm, determination matching the rigidity of her spine when Buck risks a glance at her. “Once they’ve identified what it is, they’ll get you on the right antibiotics and you’ll be back to 100% before you even know it. This is just a temporary setback, okay?”
Buck doesn’t reply, and Maddie’s arm swings out, aim wild as she refuses to take her eyes off the road. Somehow, she still manages to hit him perfectly in the centre of his chest.
“Okay?”
“Okay, okay. Christ!” Buck says, rubbing at the spot where her hand had collided with his sternum.
Maddie rolls her eyes at him when she catches the gesture, so he sticks his tongue out at her. Can’t help but laugh when she takes another swat at him, successfully ducking away this time. Only settling back into his seat once he’s judged the danger has fully passed.
“Just a temporary setback,” he eventually says.
“Just a temporary setback,” Maddie echos, voice firm, and holds up her hand without looking, pinkie finger up.
Buck hooks his own around it, and smiles. Feels, for the first time since Dr. Parks had stopped smiling at him, that maybe everything really was going to be okay.
They call him on Wednesday.
“Okay, as requested, your Switch and phone charger. There were six books on your bedside table, and I wasn’t sure which one was ‘the one about robots’, so I just brought them all,” Maddie says as she settles into the chair next to Buck’s hospital bed, already digging through her tote.
Buck makes grabby hands at the Switch when she pulls it out, and she thankfully hands it directly to him, before piling the books on the bedside table. She holds up the phone charger, a question clear on her face, and he fishes his phone out from between his blankets—which had been sitting at a tight 20% battery when Maddie had left—and was now completely dead, killed in his boredom by one too many rounds of Words With Friends with Eddie’s Abuela.
He hands it over to Maddie, more than happy to leave it to her to try and figure out where it can be plugged in without making a nurse yell at them both.
Turning on his Switch, Buck watches out of the corner of his eye as Maddie finds an outlet, plugging in his phone. She keeps her eyes on the screen as it sits dark for a heartbeat before coming back to life, and its only a lifetime of knowing her that lets Buck get his eyes fully back on the screen in front of him before her gaze lands on him. He can practically feel the guilt coming off of her, so he holds his focus on the screen until he’s sure she’s not looking at him anymore.
He looks back at her just in time to witness a crime.
“Maddie!”
His unlocked phone is only just barely saved from meeting a tragic fate on the floor of a hospital room when Maddie practically jumps at the sound of her name—both of them temporarily locked onto the drama of the scramble of her fingers over plastic and glass. Only when she’s finally managed to get both her hands wrapped securely around his phone does Maddie’s head whip towards him, her eyes wide, the guilt he’d sensed earlier on full display.
“How do you even know my passcode?” he says, refusing to be distracted from his entirely justified indignation.
Maddie looks at him.
“What? Did Chim tell you? How does Chim know?”
Maddie begins to slowly shake her head.
“What? Why are you disappointed in me? I’m not the one being all, all— all sneaky! And, and, nosy! And rude!”
“Evan.”
“What?”
“Evan.”
“What?”
“Your passcode hasn’t changed once since you got your first phone.”
Buck opens his mouth. Shuts it without saying anything.
“And sixty-nine, sixty-nine, really isn’t as funny as you think it is,” Maddie says with a raised eyebrow, though Buck strongly feels like the way that she can’t fully stop herself from smiling really undermines her whole claim.
Even if he should maybe reevaluate his personal online security.
“Whatever,” he eventually settles on, ignoring Maddie’s responding laugh. “Why are you violating my privacy?”
“Buck, I know so many things about you I wish to god I could un-know—”
“O-kay, unneces—”
“And I don’t think you’ve ever in your life had even the vaguest semblance of a sense of privacy—”
“Just because you’re always in my business does not mean I don’t want—”
“And I just wanted to— to check,” Maddie finishes, tripping over her words slightly at the end, as if she had stumbled her way into an honesty she wasn’t planning on as well.
“Check what?” Buck asks, frowning.
Maddie’s lips turn pale as she presses them tightly together, glancing at his phone before meeting his eyes. Guilt, again, shining bright in their dark depths.
Buck feels his frown deepen as he turns her words back over again in his mind. Thinking back over the whole conversation, and then further, before she’d left to head over to the loft, when she’d—
“You wanted to check if I broke my promise,” he says, voice flat enough to make Maddie wince.
“Buck…” she says; a plea, directionless, pointless.
Buck shakes his head, tries not to notice the way he can feel his cheeks heating, the sting at the corner of his eyes.
“I didn’t,” he says. “You can check if you don’t believe me. But I just… I was just playing Words With Friends with Abuela. Who is a scrabble shark, just a heads up. Y’know, if you ever play against her. She’s fucking ruthless. Cleaned me right out.”
“Buck…”
“No, seriously Maddie, I get it.”
He does. Really. It just. Hurts a bit, anyways.
Even if he gets it.
Deliberately, carefully, Maddie locks his phone screen, sets it on the bedside table without looking away from him.
“How’re you feeling?” she asks.
A branch, long, thin green leaves and yellow flowers, falling away to be replaced by stone fruit the colour of bruises—
Buck slumps back against the pillows. Shrugs.
“Anxious, I guess?” he says.
—offered and accepted, given and received.
Maddie’s eyes cut to his lower leg for just a second. Not lingering, but not so quick that he doesn’t catch it, even with the medication turning his head cloudy and floating.
When she meets his eyes again her expression is set. Determined. Unshakable.
“Temporary setback,” she says, holding out her pinkie.
“Temporary setback,” he agrees, hooking his pinkie around hers.
Buck had kept his promise. He didn’t google outcomes of surgical debridement while Maddie was at his loft.
He did, however, convince Elly, the sixth nurse he’s met since he emerged far enough from the post-surgery fog to begin forming memories, to take down the screen hiding his own leg from his line of sight.
“I’m a firefighter,” he’d argued. “I see worse on a literal daily basis.”
“It’s my leg,” he’d said. “I should be allowed to see my own leg.”
Elly—5-foot-nothing with short, spiky black hair and a literal bounce to her step as she’d circled him checking his vitals—could either teleport or had super speed because otherwise Buck has no idea how she managed to go from standing by to the pole holding the screen up to holding a plastic bin she’d summoned from somewhere up under his chin, just in time to save him from vomiting straight onto his own lap.
She’d been utterly unfazed about the whole thing, and had only nodded, still smiling, in response to his slurred request that she not tell Maddie.
The cut went from just above his ankle to four inches below his knee. The bandages packed into it didn’t make it any less obvious that there was less there than there’d been before. Infected tissue, necrotic bone, foreign matter. Carved out with surgical precision; nothing but gauze to replace them.
The bone biopsy had, in the end, revealed what the blood tests failed to.
Contiguous-focus osteomyelitis.
Bone infection.
Begging and guilt-tripping and a very reluctant promise from Maddie—that he does, admittedly, feel a bit bad about—buys him until Saturday morning. Two full days in the hospital, two-and-a-half if you count Wednesday, with only his sister for company.
Buck can only sigh when Athena appears in the doorway of his room.
She points her finger at him, a warning, even though he hasn’t said anything, and crosses the room, grabbing the seat next to his bed. Her eyes don’t so much as flicker over to the open wound on his leg, and Buck kinda feels like he might vomit again, this time out of gratitude.
“Maddie broke?” Buck asks before he can do something horrible like cry.
“She did,” Athena acknowledges with a tilt of her head. “And you should really be thanking her for her timing, because the rest of the 118 is currently less than five hours into their 24, and are legally and morally unable to bust down your door the way you know they all want to.”
“The door isn’t shut,” Buck says. “It’s a safety issue.”
Athena gives him an unimpressed look, slightly undermined by the fact that he now knows her well enough to know that the way that she’s pursing her mouth is to stop herself from laughing, not because she’s judging him and every decision he’s ever made and finding him beyond wanting.
The look fades after a moment, replaced by the sort of searching, piercing gaze that always makes Buck feel pinned down, transparent. Like Athena is reaching into his brain and picking apart every thought jumbled together in there. Buck doesn’t think mind reading is real but if there was anyone out there that he could buy being able to do it, it would be Athena.
“So what have you been getting up to?” she asks. Nods towards his Switch, abandoned on his lap. “Not just playing video games, I hope.”
Its such a mom thing to say that Buck is right back to blinking back tears. Never mind the fact that she didn’t ask the question he’s been dreading, the question that is a not insignificant part of the reason he didn’t want his friends to know about this.
How are you, hitting him like acid.
“No, no, not just video games,” Buck says. Grabs the Switch and tucks it against his hip on the mattress, as if that will somehow undo Athena having already seen it. “Maddie’s been picking up my library holds for me.”
Athena’s eyes land on the haphazard pile of books on the table next to his hospital bed, and she reaches out, grabs the one on top. Buck makes no move to stop her.
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” she reads aloud, glances at Buck. There’s something weighty in her eyes, and Buck tries his best not to squirm under its heaviness. Shrugs.
“I like learning about things,” he says, “it’s… I dunno. There’s just so much out there, y’know? So many stories that never get told, stuff you never hear about unless you go looking for it.”
Athena smiles at him. “Your teachers must have loved you,” she says.
Buck snorts. “I think all of my teachers wanted to kill me. Uh, ‘disruptive presence in class’ was the primary complaint I believe.”
Athena nods. “I think that’s pretty common with kids with ADHD,” she offers, sympathetic and gentle.
Buck fights back the urge to roll his eyes like a child; an instinctive reaction, to a diagnosis he’d only ever heard from Maddie.
“I don’t have ADHD,” he says.
Athena blinks at him, surprise obvious on her face before it goes carefully blank, lips pursed but not in the good way as she looks back at the stack of books, avoiding his eyes. She sets the one in her hands aside, tugs the one at the bottom free instead. Far larger than the others in size but not in length, IMPACT! splayed out in bold, bright red letters across the front. Looking back at Buck, Athena raises a single eyebrow.
Buck can feel his face turning red.
“Christopher is doing a unit on space right now,” he mumbles. “We’ve been learning about asteroids together.”
Athena looks back down at the book, sparing Buck at least extended exposure to the knowing look in her eye. Flips it open, scans over a handful of pages, before shutting it again. Setting it aside, she leans back in her chair, and then gestures at him with one hand—a sweeping gesture with all the regal elegance of a queen.
“Well?” she says. “Tell me about asteroids.”
So Buck does.
Bone infection can occur due to a contiguous spread from surrounding tissue and joints, or direct inoculation of the bone from trauma or surgery.
It can also occur through bacteraemic seeding of bone from a distant source of infection.
Buck hadn’t even thought about it. It would never have even occurred to him, that what he was doing could be dangerous. Wandering around for hours with open wounds. Water washing over them, again and again.
Contaminated water, saltwater freely mixing with what it had forcefully pulled from the drains it had flowed over, sewage seeping in from broken pipes and septic tanks, still water laying puddled in ditches and stagnant ponds jumbled together until they were impossible to separate. The leftovers of that destructive, killing tide, holding onto all it had gathered, adding in the bodies of those it had drowned in its arrival, left soaking in its remnants, bloated and leaching.
But.
He still sometimes wakes up choking on a scream shaped like Christopher, hands locked into desperate, grasping claws. His panicked breathing echoing around the empty loft, an uneven accompaniment to the rapid pounding of his heart, blood rushing in his ears.
So he can’t regret it.
He can’t.
Chim and Hen fight over his chart, bumping hips and scrabbling in a way that Buck can’t help but laugh at—even knowing that they’re almost definitely playing it up for exactly that purpose.
Hen emerges triumphant, ignoring the offended noise Eddie makes when she unceremoniously knocks him out of the way on her path to the chair next to his bed. It’s more people than should be allowed in the room, but first responders always tended to receive that sort of leniency from the nurses—never mind the fact that Buck’s been in the hospital enough times in the past year that some of them know him by name. Know him well enough to ask after his son and partner, a question Buck still hasn’t figured out how to respond to.
Eddie hovers anxiously behind Hen as she settles into the chair, Chim’s head now hidden by the screen as he leans down to, Buck assumes, inspect the surgical site. Bobby is conspicuously absent, but the sting of it had been swiftly wiped away with the explanation that he’d gotten held up by paperwork after shift.
“They think the bacteria was introduced in the tsunami?” Hen asks after scanning his chart for a minute, Eddie now leaning down to read over her shoulder.
Buck nods.
“But you got put on antibiotics afterwards,” Eddie says with a frown. Buck nods again. Him and Christopher both had, along with probably like, half of LA.
“Yeah,” he says, “but I guess osteomyelitis typically is polymicrobial? So its pretty much impossible to address with just general antibiotics.”
“They’re working on culture-directed antimicrobial therapy now though?” Hen asks, still focused on his chart.
“Yup,” Buck says, popping the ‘p’, “plus the—” he gestures to the hanging screen, “—debridement.”
Chim’s head finally materializes over the screen. “You didn’t want to do maggot therapy?” he asks, eyebrows jumping.
Buck wrinkles his nose, and Chim laughs.
“Wow,” Chim says, “What happened to the guy who pulled a nine-foot tapeworm out of some guy’s ass in the back of the ambulance?”
“Sorry, you what?” Eddie asks.
“That’s different,” Buck argues. Chim just snaps his gum at him, raising both eyebrows.
Buck turns to Hen and Eddie for support, and finds them both giving him incredulous looks.
“What?” he says.
“Honestly, if anyone I know was going to go for it, I would put my money on you,” Hen says. “You literally said ooooh, maggot! when you found the one that fell out of that influencer’s face.”
“You and Christopher spent an hour and a half in the insect house the last time you dragged me to the zoo,” Eddie adds, because he might be Buck’s best friend but he’s also a back-stabbing snake. “I timed it. I was a minute away from faking a medical emergency just to get out of there.”
Chim jumps back in, adding,“you told me once that you think parasites are ‘neat’.”
“They’re interesting!” Buck argues. “And again, that’s different.”
His attempt to defend himself is, predictably, to no avail—Chim just launches into an argument on why Buck should try it, which Buck is pretty sure is more motivated by Chim wanting the chance to see the treatment in action and not out of a true and genuine belief in the ‘bonus healing properties’ of the maggots.
It’s not quite enough of a distraction for Buck to miss Hen pointing to something on his chart before looking up at Eddie, the two of them exchanging a worried look.
Buck pretends not to see it anyways, because he knows.
He knows.
Staphylococcus aureus. The most commonly isolated pathogen in bone infections, pathogenic strains of s. aureus can promote infections by producing virulence factors, leading to antimicrobial resistance.
Acinetobacter baumannii. A gram-negative bacillus and opportunistic pathogen, a. baumannii can be recovered from nearly all soil and surface water samples and will target areas of skin exposed through injury.
Enterococcus faecalis. Found in fecal matter and frequently in surfaces in hospitals, e. faecalis is one of the most antibiotic-resistant bacteria, with no existing reliable treatments for severe, deep-seated infections.
Stenotrophomonas maltophilia. Frequently isolated from bodies of water and sewage, the risk of infection from s. maltophilia increases with the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics.
Bacteroides fragilis. Despite only accounting for 0.5% of the colonic flora, b. fragilis is the most commonly isolated anaerobic pathogen, due, in part, to its potent virulence factors.
In Buck’s defence, Maddie broke her promise first.
“Why didn’t you tell us, kid?” Bobby asks after a long silence.
Buck fiddles with the sheet covering his lap, avoiding the other man’s eyes. Bobby is leaned forward in the chair next to him, forearms braced on his thighs, hands clasped where they rest between his knees. Looking at Buck, no doubt, with the same soft concern that he has been since he showed up in Buck’s hospital room.
He’d come by the day before too, eventually, showing up while Chim, Hen, and Eddie were still hanging out in his room. He hadn’t had much to say then though—probably because pretty much everything he wanted to say to Buck, he didn’t want an audience for. Hence, the post-lunch ambush.
Buck hadn’t even had the chance to finish his jello.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” he eventually says. Hears Bobby suck in a breath, probably to say something about how he always worries about Buck—something that Buck thinks might have been true from the moment he showed up at the 118 for his first day as a probie, but which has been cast into far sharper, more brutal relief over the past year.
Buck rushes to cut him off. He can’t hear it. Not again. Not now.
Not after the last conversation they’d had in a hospital; Buck practically shaking with fury, words falling from him like acid, burning them both.
“And I didn’t want to put you in a tough spot.”
That brings Bobby up short, and Buck glances at him just long enough to see the confusion on his face fade as he regroups, refocuses.
“What do you mean?” Bobby asks.
Buck shrugs, back to picking at his blankets and avoiding Bobby’s eyes. “Y’know, with The Brass. I didn’t want this getting back to them, in case it just convinces them even more that I shouldn’t come back, but I didn’t want to ask you to like, lie for me. Or make you feel like you were, I dunno, betraying me or something if they did ask and you were honest.”
A moment of silence, long enough for Buck to become aware of how hard his heart is pounding at having said all that out loud. He’s suddenly very grateful for the ambush, because there’s no way he would have been able to say any of that in front of the rest of the team.
“Oh kid…” Bobby finally says and there’s… something in his voice.
Something that Buck can’t identify.
It’s enough to have him braving another glance over at his Captain, but whatever it was, there’s no sign of it on his face by the time Buck looks at him. He’s wearing his locked-down, professional, gentle-with-civilians face though, so Buck is certain that there was something there. Something that he missed. Something that the persistent twist in his gut as he searches Bobby’s face says was important.
“I guess, the good news is that I don’t have to be on blood thinners anymore,” Buck offers after a moment, a leap towards familiar ground, even if its one still littered with hurt, still too raw to offer a comfortable landing.
“Oh?” Bobby says, glances towards Buck’s hidden leg. “I guess they couldn’t keep you on them, with the…”
Giant open wound on your leg, he doesn’t say.
“Well, yeah,” Buck says. “But also my surgeon says that the clots were probably being caused by the hardware? And they had to take them out for the— the debridement.”
“Oh,” Bobby says again, looking oddly thrown.
Which is fair. It’s not like debridement is a field procedure. Bobby wouldn’t have any reason to know as much about it as Buck does—and all of that learned only after he broke his promise to Maddie.
“Yeah,” he says. “I guess they pretty much always take hardware out, if there’s an infection in the area surrounding it? Because bacteria will collect around it, so it’s basically impossible to completely clear it out if they leave it in. So they took it all out, when they did the surgery.”
Buck doesn’t tell Bobby about what else they took out.
That the infection had started weeks ago, without him ever noticing, the pain from it so mild he hadn’t realized it was anything new, anything different than the persistent, nearly constant pain he’d been experiencing ever since the bombing—the pain he’d already accepted as being his new normal.
That at some point, the pus that had been gathering in his bone from the infection had ruptured through the cortex to the periosteum.
That the resulting disruption in blood flow had led to parts of his tibia that hadn’t even been infected becoming necrotic—pieces of his bone slowly dying without him ever once noticing something was wrong.
“You’ll get through this,” Bobby says before he leaves, reaching out and gripping Buck’s shoulder tight. The gesture familiar, grounding. More fatherly than anything Buck had ever experienced before meeting Bobby.
Buck smiles up at him, the expression easy, familiar. Cocksure and confident.
“I know,” he lies.
The doctor’s face is grim when he stops by Monday evening.
“It is unfortunately something that not even the best protocols can wholly protect against,” he says, “but we’ve sent your most recent cultures over to our infectious disease specialist, and will be adjusting your antibiotic therapy according to her recommendations.”
Buck thinks about crying. Thinks about screaming. Thinks about dragging himself off this stupid fucking bed and right out of this stupid fucking hospital.
Instead he just bites down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood. Nods.
Waits until the doctor leaves to shove his face in his pillow, not sure if its screams or sobs he’s trying to muffle. At least his door is shut now.
Yay for containment protocols.
Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. MRSA.
Turns out, the boogeyman is real and lives in your local hospital.
Maddie jerks to a stop the second she steps inside his room.
She’s wearing a mask, plastic gloves, a gown. Hair tied up and tucked away under a surgical cap. Those weird medical booties over her shoes. But even with all of that, Buck knows it’s her. There’s no one else whose eyes he’d be so clearly able to read horror in.
Her eyes are locked on his leg, and Buck wonders what exactly she’s seeing.
Buck hasn’t asked to see it again since the first time, the phantom taste of bile and stomach acid rising up in the back of his throat every time he’s thought about it. Besides, he doesn’t need to see it to know how bad it is anymore.
He can smell it.
“Evan,” Maddie eventually says, voice small, choked. Hurt, the way only a parent’s can be, seeing their child injured, in pain. Not that Buck is in much pain. He’s not feeling much below his knee on his left leg anymore.
Probably not a good sign, but he’s trying not to think about it.
The smell is harder to ignore but. He’s doing his best with that too.
“Hey Mads,” he says, and watches as she wrenches her head up to meet his eyes, practically having to force herself to look away from his leg. He offers her the best smile he can muster, can tell from the creases around her eyes that she’s doing the same behind her mask.
Crossing the room, she reclaims the seat next to his bed, settling in as if nothing at all has changed since she was here less than twenty-four hours earlier. As if he hadn’t been informed that he wouldn’t be allowed to take his books with him once he left the hospital. As if he still wasn’t entirely clear on whether or not they’re planning on incinerating his phone and Switch as well.
She does hesitate before reaching out and taking his hand, but she still does it.
Buck starts to cry.
“Oh Evan,” she say, and then she’s sitting on the bed next to his hip, which she’s almost certainly not supposed to be doing, but she’s also running her hand through his hair, fingers warm and familiar even through the gloves, so he’s not going to be the one to point it out. She pulls him into a hug a second later, and Buck lets himself collapse into the feeling of her arms wrapping around him. He’s been far too big for her to fully wrap herself around him for a long, long time, but somehow she always manages to make him feel like she is anyways.
Maddie’s arms were the only safety he knew for such a long time, and for a minute, he lets himself pretend that this is something that she can fix the way she fixed so much when they were kids. That this is something she can protect him from.
She doesn’t return to the chair when he finally lets himself slip from her grasp, falling back onto the pillows. Stays, perched on the edge of the bed, their hands still tangled together on her lap.
“Have you talked to a doctor yet today?” Maddie says.
Buck nods, feels another sob catch in his throat. Forcefully swallows it down.
“What did they say?” she prompts when it becomes clear that he’s not going to speak.
“Well,” he says, “turns out this might not be uh— quite as temporary a setback as we thought.”
“Evan…” she says, chiding and coaxing, exasperated and warm.
Safe.
Buck closes his eyes. Can’t bear to see her face when he says it.
“They’re recommending amputation,” he says.
An inhale, sharp as a scalpel. An exhale, soft and careful. A pause, deliberate and measured.
“How far up?” Maddie asks, voice turning calm, clinical. Still warm, but… distant. Professional. Assessing. He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know that she’s put on her Nurse Face—well, Dispatch Face, now, but they’re similar enough that he doesn’t think it really matters what he calls it.
“Few inches below the knee,” he says. Listens as she breathes out, heavy and relieved. Tries not to feel like she just reached out and stabbed him without so much as raising a hand, without speaking a single word.
“Did they say when they want to do it?” she asks.
Buck gives himself a second of cowardice—a single moment, to linger in the darkness and safety of his closed eyes—before he forces them open, forces himself to meet Maddie’s eyes, wide and wet and all he can really see of her face.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
Maddie opens her mouth to reply, but Buck keeps going—has to, has to face this head on. He won’t convince anyone that he’s making the right decision if he keeps acting like a scared child the whole time.
“I told them not to book it,” he says. Waits, keeping his eyes steady on Maddie’s.
Watches confusion bloom and then fade, wilting before growing into anger.
“Why not?” she asks, her grip on Buck’s hands suddenly tightening, squeezing, nearly hard enough to bruise.
Buck swallows. “They said there’s still a chance that the antibiotics will beat back the infection. And if they do, then I’m just looking at bone grafts, maybe some hardware.”
“And what exactly are the odds of that ‘chance’?” Maddie says, not needing to make the gesture for him to hear the air quotes around chance.
“There’s no way to—”
“Evan,” Maddie snaps, sounding so much like Margaret for a second that Buck has to lock every muscle in his body to stop himself from instinctively flinching back. “This is your fucking life we’re talking about.”
“I know that, Mads, I just—”
“You just what?” Maddie says, finally dropping his hands so that she can stand, too angry to keep sitting. “You really think your quality of life will be that much better if you manage to end up with bone grafts instead of a prosthetic? Do you have any idea what the chances are of ending up with chronic pain if you do that? And that’s if the grafts take, and if the hardware holds!”
“Maddie—”
“And what about if the antibiotics don’t work?” Maddie interrupts him as she continues, now pacing, each word given extra emphasis by the sharp gestures drawn by her hands in the empty air. “And the infection spreads up to your femur? If you lose your knee too? What’s your quality of life then, huh? Do you know how much of a difference it makes to mobility to keep your knee?”
“The doctor—”
“If the doctor told you that keeping on with the antibiotics is better than doing an amputation, I’m getting you a different doctor. Fuck, I’ll get you transferred to a different hospital.”
“I don’t think they’ll let you,” Buck says. “Y’know, with the—” he waves his hand at her, encapsulating all the protective clothing she’s wearing, makes the same gesture towards his leg.
Maddie stares at him.
“MRSA,” he clarifies. Wiggles his fingers, like he’s talking about a movie monster. Tries his best to summon up a smile to accompany it. Feels himself miss the mark in both regards.
“What did the doctor say,” she says, the words flat. Not a question.
“I mean, do you even care?” Buck says, defensiveness rising up in the aftermath of failing to deflect; the ghost of the child he was, the dark, ugly, adult version of all the things he learned in Margaret and Philip’s house, all the things he’s never quite managed to shake. “Kinda seems like you’ve already made up your mind about what I need. Doesn’t matter what the doctors say, or what I want—”
“And what exactly is it that you want, Buck? You want to risk your life, risk losing your whole leg, and for what?”
Buck opens his mouth, but before he can say anything, Maddie is coming to an abrupt stop, what little he can see of her face giving away that she’s as angry as he’s ever seen her. Her finger pointed towards him, already accusing.
“And don’t you fucking dare say its so you can be a firefighter,” she almost hisses.
A nurse ends up coming in and asking Maddie to leave.
Going by the sympathetic look he shoots Maddie as he ushers her out, it’s not because he’s on Buck’s side.
They’d told him, after the surgery, that they’d found separated pieces of necrotic bone.
Turns out they hadn’t found them all, or maybe there’d just been more forming. Pieces of his bone falling off as more and more of it died, dislodged by the ongoing debridement and escaping easy detection as they were washed deeper into his leg, hidden under his skin.
Pieces of necrotic bone, settling into their new home alongside everything else they’d carried with them from the original infection site, and everything they’d passed by along the way.
Discharge forming new sites of infection, from which tunnelling wounds slowly extended, working their way towards his skin. Tracts that had instead found first the thin tissue holding together his muscles, and had sent the infection racing along them instead. A surface with little blood flow to risk bringing the infection to the skin, a surface along which it rapidly spread, eating into soft tissue and muscle alike.
Another boogeyman, brought you in exciting full colour surround sound in the hospital room of one Evan Issac Buckley.
Necrotizing fasciitis.
Fuck.
Visiting hours start at 6 a.m.
Eddie shows up at 4.
Buck isn’t asleep enough to be startled awake when the door opens—between the leg and the hospital noises and the clockwork checkins from the nurses, he’s not sure he’s been fully asleep the entire six days he’s been in the hospital—but it still takes him a minute to fully process that there’s someone else in the room, and that that person isn’t a nurse or doctor.
Like Maddie, he doesn’t need to see his face to recognize him.
“Eddie?” he says, squinting into the dimness of the room. “What are you doing here?”
Eddie doesn’t respond immediately, standing at the foot of Buck’s bed like a ghost wrapped in a pale blue shroud, silent and still. Between the distance and the darkness, Buck can’t see his eyes, but he can tell by the tilt of his head that Eddie is looking down at his leg.
Buck has no idea how much he can actually see with the lack of real lighting, but.
He got a glimpse of his leg the last time they were transferring him to a wheelchair to use the bathroom; a slip of the screen, the wound not quite finished being covered.
Well, wounds, now.
The original one, still open, its edges sharp and clean. Packed even deeper with gauze than it had been before—for all he hasn’t tried to look since the first time, he had still caught glimpses of what was pulling away with the gauze when they switched them out.
White stained yellow and red, swollen with fluids. Things he didn’t want to try and identify clinging to the fibres, viscid and thick. Things he couldn’t help but identify when a piece shook itself free of the rest, tumbling to the floor with a nauseating clatter. Just as quickly snatched up with a muttered curse, too quickly for Buck to look away, to miss the sight of a small, white shard.
The new ones, some open, some not, their edges raw and consumptive. Purple and red blooming across his skin like bruises, revealed to be anything but in the holes where the covering skin has been eaten way, the tissue beneath a pure black interrupted only by curving pools of yellow. Red, brilliant and bright amongst the rest; the places where no epidermis remains, no dermis, no tissue. Only fibres of muscle, unmistakable in their texture, drawn taught and hideously exposed.
A glimpse. Just a second. Barely enough time to take it all in.
Unless you’ve been trained to.
No amount of training will let you see in the dark though, so, eventually, Eddie moves on.
He throws himself into the chair next to Buck’s bed with a familiar sort of heaviness; the looseness of limbs that comes from too little sleep and too much adrenaline. What little of his face that Buck can see impassive; the intensity with which his shadowed eyes remain fixed on Buck the whole time the only thing giving away that he’s anything other than a dispassionate observer to Buck’s decay.
“What are you doing here?” Buck asks again, picking up his phone to check the time—and immediately locking it again when he’s nearly blinded by the sudden glare. Closing one eye and squinting, he tries again, leaving it lit just long enough to confirm that yes, it is an absolutely insane time for Eddie to be here.
“Wanted to catch you before my shift,” Eddie says, kicking his legs up to rest his heels on the edge of Buck’s mattress, as if Buck’s entire bed wasn’t a literal breeding ground for infection and rot.
Hell, give him another three days, there’ll probably be something brand new popping up in the festering pits tunnelling through his legs. Never before seen! A groundbreaking discovery! Infectious disease experts will be throwing elbows, just for the chance to get a first look!
Maybe they’ll even name it after him—s. buckleus has a certain ring to it.
“Why?” Buck asks, instead of voicing any of that aloud. “What’s—has something happened? Is Chris okay?”
“Wh— Yes, Christopher is fine, Christ.”
“Then—”
“You, Buck. You’re what’s happened.”
Buck truly has no idea what to say to that, which is fine because Eddie just keeps right on going.
“Maddie said you’re probably gonna have surgery today?”
“You talked to Maddie?”
“There’s a brand new group chat solely dedicated to talking about your medical issues. Get over it. You’re having surgery today?”
Buck sputters out a half-formed protest—because what the fuck, why is everyone he knows so goddamn nosey—before he manages to pull his words together enough to formulate a real response.
“Yeah, they need to—the doctor says that they’re going to need to do wide debridement.” A pause, a correction, “Wider debridement.”
Eddie’s face—as much of it as Buck can see above the mask—remains impassive.
“Damn,” he says. “How much of your leg is gonna be left at that point, do you think? Can’t say skin and bones because, well. That’s really most of what you’re losing between the two infections, isn’t it?”
Buck feels his mouth drop open like he’s a cartoon character. Eyes wide, staring at the man sitting next to him. Stunned into silence.
Eddie just stares back at him.
Every once in a while, Buck thinks he maybe knows Eddie better than he knows anyone else on the planet—better than himself, even, some days. He knows that Eddie can come across as buttoned-up and hard to read. Serious and grumpy and skittish about how he’s actually feeling. He also knows that it’s more or less entirely a smokescreen—tilt your head to the left and squint a little, and on a good day you can see straight through into the centre of Eddie’s heart.
He has no idea what Eddie’s thinking now.
“Do you know what the most common cause of death is, for American soldiers in Afghanistan?” Eddie asks. His voice is perfectly neutral; all the inflection and emotion of someone asking what you think of the weather.
A pause. “What?” Buck asks, because whatever he was expecting, that wasn’t it.
“Almost half are killed by IEDs,” Eddie says. Gives it a beat, continues, “Do you know what the chances are of losing a limb in an IED explosion?”
“Okay,” Buck says, leaning back into his pillows, rubbing tiredly at his eyes. “Whatever man, I get it.”
“Seventy percent,” Eddie says, as if Buck hadn’t spoken. “But you know what’s true, of everyone I know, who lost a limb or two or, what the hell, three, over there?”
Buck has to actively fight not to grind his teeth as he attempts to stare Eddie down.
Unsurprisingly, it has little effect—it never did, not even when they barely knew each other, not even when he was still constantly hissing and swiping at the other man like a pissed-off, territorial cat. When Eddie didn’t know him well enough to see straight through him, to know that it was all bluster. Performative and paranoid.
Finally, after a long, deliberate pause, Eddie pulls his feet off Buck’s mattress. Plants them on the ground. Leans in, slow and methodical.
“They were alive,” he says.
“I’m not—” Buck starts, heated, before remembering what time it is. “I’m not dying,” he practically hisses, whisper-soft and furious.
Eddie raises an eyebrow. “No? Could have fooled me. Kinda seems like you’ve decided to just roll over and let it happen.”
“What the fuck Eddie?” Buck says. “I’m not just… I’m fighting it, I’m having surgery tomor—today, technically.”
“Right. Just not the surgery with the highest likelihood of saving your life. Not the surgery that has the highest chance of making sure that you can run again. Not the surgery that won’t result in a dozen more surgeries as they attempt to sculpt your own peeled-off skin and pieces of bone from a corpse into something that somewhat resembles a leg.”
“They want to take my leg, Eddie. I won’t… I can’t… I wouldn’t be…”
“Buck,” Eddie says, leaning forward again, forearms braced on his thighs in an unknowing mirror of the position Bobby had taken only a few days earlier. Unlike Bobby, every muscle in Eddie’s body was drawn tight, shoulders tense and high, jawline stark. Buck feels himself tense in response without meaning to—
An instinctive readying, up on his toes with his nails biting into his palms, bouncing in place, unable to hold in all the nervous energy crackling through him as he waits for whatever judgement would be brought upon him this time. For yet another injury, yet another example of him being staggeringly irresponsible. For being so fucking stupid, so reckless…
—before his eyes land on a stack of papers held in Eddie’s hands he hadn’t noticed previously, their edges bending slightly under the force of Eddie’s grip on them.
“What’s that?” Buck says, a desperate, wild swing. “They’re not gonna let you leave with paper you brought in here man. They’re definitely gonna burn those.”
Again, instinct: deflect, deflect, deflect.
Eddie looks down at his own hands. Not like he’s surprised—like what Buck’s said is new information and he’s finding himself forced to suddenly mourn their inevitable destruction. Not like he had forgotten he’d brought them in the first place either. No, it’s almost like… like a victory.
Like Buck’s attempt at deflection had instead led him right into a trap; Eddie the patient, watchful hunter, waiting just out of sight for the tell-tale sound of the trap going off, for the wounded animal cry that would surely follow, proclaiming his success.
“They’re for you,” Eddie says, and yup, Buck can practically hear the metaphorical bear trap snapping shut around him. “I kinda figured you’d look it all up yourself, but the way Maddie tells it, you’ve decided that keeping your leg is the only thing you care about.”
“It’s not about ‘keeping’ my leg,” Buck snaps.
There’s a choked sound trapped in the back of his throat—something raw, something hurt. Something like the cry of a wounded animal, mindless with fear and pain. Stripped down and laid bare; frantic and snarling.
He forces it down.
“It’s about my— my whole fucking life, Eddie,” he continues, voice furious but quiet. Shaking in a way he can’t quite get a grip on. “And you and Maddie and everyone else keep on parading through here, telling me to just give it all up, as if it’s that easy? As if I have anything else?”
“Buck—”
“No! You all keep telling me that I should just fucking give up now, to just fucking… fucking stop trying to get through this—to get better. You’ve all fucking given up on me, and then you come in here and accuse me of giving up, while I’m still fighting! Because I’ll never stop fighting, Eddie! I’ll never—”
Buck cuts himself off, the choked sound he’d forced down earlier—something he now recognizes as a terrible, bloody deliverance; a sob and a scream both—filling his mouth. Weighing down his tongue, pressed tight against the back of his teeth. Too close to spilling out for him to risk continuing to talk.
Eddie watches him in silence for a moment before he drops his gaze back down to the papers. He bends them until they’re nearly wrapped around themselves, curving up and over. Releases them, watches them slowly uncurl. The muscle in his jaw ticks once, twice, before he finally looks back up at Buck.
“I know you’ll never stop fighting Buck,” he finally says, softer than Buck was expecting. Soft enough that the sound behind Buck’s teeth—already multiplying, filling his lungs and throat—begins to pound at the cage of his ribs. A wretched, violent attempt to escape. “Just make sure that you’re not fighting for the wrong thing.”
Eddie stands up. Stares down at Buck for one heartbeat, then another. Nearly visibly shakes off the tension that had been radiating off of him, settling back into something more familiar, shoulders going loose and easy. Buck can’t say how, but he’d almost positive Eddie is now smirking at him behind his mask.
“And maybe stop being a fucking idiot while you’re at it,” he says, before dropping the papers onto Buck’s lap, carelessly enough that a few escape, fluttering and spiralling down to the floor.
Buck reaches out on instinct, slapping his hand over the ones that are threatening to slide off the sheets, chasing after their fallen compatriots. Its enough of a distraction that Eddie manages to make it halfway to the doorway before Buck can look back up, chase him down with his eyes.
Eddie catches his gaze, one hand already reaching out to open the door. Even in the darkness Buck can see the way the corner of his eyes crinkle as he smiles behind his mask. He tosses off a lazy, sloppy salute. Opens the door.
“I’ll see you after the surgery,” he says, and then he’s gone.
Arlene Cohen.
Developed a bone infection in her ankle three years after fracturing her tibia in a snowboarding accident. Went through numerous operations attempting to treat the infection, before finally having her leg amputated below the knee.
Enjoys cooking and baking. Fluent in Spanish. Can frequently be found biking, hiking, and paddle boarding.
Paralympian. Paramedic.
Firefighter.
At 6:12 a.m., eight days after he was admitted to the hospital, Buck texts his sister.
just told the dr
i’m cancelling the debridement
amputation at 2 tmrw
sorry for not listening to u sooner, u were right
Ten minutes later, almost like an afterthought.
temporary setback 🤙