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“Where's- Where’s Eddie?”
The question tears its way through the group. Eyes start searching, glancing around, wondering, thinking, that's right, there should be someone else. They are no longer hugging, celebrating, laughing, or crying- they are just standing in a vivid, horrible, incomplete circle. This wasn’t the end; there could be no happy ending yet. There is still a missing piece; this wasn’t the whole picture. Not even close.
Buck’s eyes are jumping, person to person. He’d instinctively sought out Eddie— something about your eyes always finding the person you're closest to in a room. But there were no honeyed brown eyes, no head of soft brown hair. It didn’t make sense. Buck and Harry had left him with Chin and Hen. Left him with Ravi and May. Left him in that waiting room, fluorescent lights too bright and blinding as if they alone could chase away the helplessness of stale cups of coffee and stiff plastic chairs. He’d left Eddie with their family because Harry had needed something, anything, as a distraction. Buck had immediately gone into help mode, his natural state, really. He’d been so focused on Harry, he hadn’t thought to check. He always checked. Why hadn’t he checked?
He distantly hears the ping of an elevator, sharply cutting through the fog. His brain has stopped working. It was nothing but white, static noise because Eddie wasn’t here. There had just been a shooter, and Eddie wasn’t there. A shooter and a gun and a bullet, and Buck suddenly felt the phantom splash of hot blood speckling his face, the taste of him in his mouth. Where was Eddie?
“Eddie!” Chim yells, part disbelief, part fear. Buck feels Chim’s hand, which was just around Buck’s back, rip away.
Buck feels himself turn, following Chim and now Hen, who start running.
Running toward Eddie.
Eddie.
Oh, he thinks to himself, they found him.
Then his brain catches up.
He's the only one left in the hallway, feet still rooted to the floor. His feet are frozen, and his legs won't work because that is Eddie. Eddie, lying on the floor of an open elevator, nudged up against the wall, legs splayed out, head crooked ever so slightly wrong, lulled against his shoulder. Eddie is lying, looking somewhat lifeless in a pool of… blood.
Buck’s brain short-circuits. That's not right. Eddie and blood. They don’t go together. They don’t go together when he's alone without a patient in front of him. Or unless Buck is there to feel the splash of it. They don’t go together unless Buck is able to press his hands to it and use nothing but the force of his own will to keep it inside of him.
Maybe it's the memory of crawling under a fire truck to get to him, maybe it's the way his brain restarts that reminds him he should be at Eddie’s side, where he belongs. Maybe he doesn’t actually understand what's happening, just that his legs are finally working, finally moving, striding, running towards him.
Buck can’t look away. It's a sick joke, how unnatural, how horrible the sight is, but he can’t bring himself to look away. He thinks he pushes Harry out of the way, needing a better view. Shoves Ravi aside to stand in the front row. A barricade spot for death.
Because that is what he is looking at now. No longer peaking through the gaps of the 118 to catch one tiny glimpse. He’s made it now, and all he sees is death, death with capable hands trying to find a pulse, capable hands pulling a soaked, ripped shirt away from the wound.
Buck almost laughs at the sight. He feels it bubbling up his throat, threatening to explode out of him. He wants to laugh in some weird, delirious relief because that can’t be Eddie. Not his Eddie. This is… whoever this is, is not Eddie. Eddie is full of life. Eddie is warmth and sunlight and tanned skin. Eddie is flushed cheeks, a small blush working its way across his face at any compliment. Eddie is sparkling, shining eyes, crinkling around the corners, watching Buck inevitably make a fool of himself.
That is Eddie.
This is… this is a pale, still, lifeless husk of a person.
“He’s not breathing,” Chim says.
Buck’s throat closes, a lump forming.
“He’s lost too much blood,” Hen states, voice shaking.
Buck’s vision clouds over, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. His body reacts before his brain.
“Dammit! I can’t find a pulse! Lay him flat, now!” Chim shouts.
Buck’s heart skips a beat, maybe two, as if the idea of Eddie not breathing, not living, not fighting anymore was enough to make his own life stop.
“Starting compressions!” Chim says, maneuvering himself. It blocks Buck’s view of Eddie’s face.
Buck feels the loss of it deep in the marrow of his bones.
“One, two—”
Crack
The tell-tale sound of ribs breaking from the force of Chim pumping his heart echoes through the otherwise silent elevator. Buck always found it upsetting how violent trying to keep someone alive is. How someone had to inflict such pain to keep a heart beating.
How someone’s— Eddie's— body could already be bleeding, and still need further breaking.
It’s that thought, the realization that Eddie was breaking right in front of his eyes, that unleashed him. Buck feels the first hot tear streak down his face. He feels himself lunge forward, needing to do something, anything. Half-crazed in his desperation, because somehow that was Eddie. It was Eddie, and he was dead. He feels hands holding him back, grabbing and scrambling at his chest. He feels a second set join them.
He knows he's shouting now. Sobbing, yelling, and screaming, kicking his feet as he's pulled away instead of toward. His voice was going hoarse from the effort of saying his name. Eddie. As if the sound of it, the volume of it alone, would be enough to get through to him. To make him wake up.
“EDDIE! No, no- Eddie, please! Let go of me- I need to- Eddie!” he’s crying, but it's muffled to his ears, blocked by the sound of a high-pitched ringing, growing louder and louder.
A gurney is brought in, there are hands all over him—not the right ones, he thinks, then pushes aside— nurses holding him back, working against him but for him as well. For him, because there are light blue scrubs and shouting voices everywhere, surrounding Eddie as he's moved. There is so much noise and ringing, and they are taking him away, away to somewhere Buck can’t follow.
“I’ve got a pul-” someone yells before the doors slam shut, blocking Buck out from the world.
“Buck,” Ravi grunts, “man, you need to stop, please.”
“Buck!” Chim is suddenly in his face, eyes hard. Buck can still see the fear, and he doesn’t think Chim is trying that hard to hide it anyway. His tone, though, is commanding, and it cuts through him.
Buck goes completely and utterly slack. Like a puppet cut from its strings. Chim reaches out to grab him, and Buck feels the three of them, Ravi, Harry, and Chim, work to get him up out of the room, into a chair. The plastic is hard against his back, the cushion doing nothing to soften the blow of what just happened.
He feels another hot tear roll down his cheek. He reaches a shaking hand up to swipe it away.
Someone sits down next to him. They try to get him to look up, but Buck is staring at the floor. He's staring, and he's hoping it will somehow give him the answers he needs, or maybe just hoping it will open up and swallow him whole.
“Buckaroo,” Hen whispers, “you need to breathe.”
He tries. He really does. Sucks in gasp after gasp until his lungs start burning. Hen lays her hand on his forearm; it's soothing, grounding. He feels the breaths start to get easier, coming softer now, natural. It’s so unfair, how easily he continues to live.
“Good,” Hen says, stroking her thumb up the inside of his arm.
“I didn’t-” Buck’s voice croaks around the words. He has to clear his throat and start again, “I didn’t know, Hen. I should have known.”
“Hey now,” Hen murmurs, “don’t do that. Nobody knew Buck. This isn’t on you.”
Buck doesn’t respond. She won’t understand. Nobody really will. Eddie was a part of this family as much as the rest of them, but to him, Eddie was more. He didn’t love anyone else any less, but Eddie was different. Somehow, someway, he was different, and Buck didn’t question it. He took it in stride. He decided he would have Eddie’s back all those years ago, and he's never looked back. Until now. He failed Eddie, just like he’s failed at everything else-
Hen starts rubbing his arm more intensely. The scrubbing sensation of it finally gets him to look away from the floor. There are streaks of blood on Buck's arm. Eddie’s blood. Hen had tried to pack the wound, replacing Eddie’s slack hands on his ripped off shirt, already soaked through, no use really. She must not have realized it was still all over her when she touched Buck.
“I’m sorry,” Hen says, scrubbing harder. She's really only making it worse, the blood still wet. Smearing it across his skin.
Buck gently grabs her wrist and pulls her away, “It's okay. Just leave it.”
Hen gives him a look, exploring his face for the first time now that he's actually looking at her. He tries to give her a small smile to emphasize that it really is okay. That Eddie’s blood on his skin actually made him feel better. Makes him feel like he did something. Hen finally nods, standing up. Buck knows she's going to wash her hands now. Imagines her watching it flake down the drain, running pink as it mixes with the water.
Buck doesn’t know how long he continues to sit there. Only knows it's long enough that the smeared blood dries on his arm, long enough where a cup of bitter coffee is placed on the table next to him, long enough where Chim has finally stopped pacing and instead has sat down defeated, despite feeling like he has to keep going just because his badge says captain.
Buck stares at Eddie’s blood on his arm, studies the way it burrows into the lines of his skin until it could almost be considered a part of him now, with how intertwined it is.
Buck stands up.
He feels every head in the room swivel towards him and hopes they don’t try to follow.
Buck walks out of the waiting room and pulls to a stop in front of a closed set of elevator doors. Blindly, he reaches out and hits the call button.
It pings, same as before, and the doors slide open. It’s still bloody, everyone too busy to get around to start cleaning it up. Too frantic, too occupied with other things in the aftermath of a shooter to realize something so fundamentally out of place. He walks in, careful not to disrupt the pool of blood, and lets the doors close.
Eddie is not there, not actually. His body is in a surgical room, currently being operated on. But, Buck thinks, technically, Eddie is still in that elevator with him. He’s there in the way the blood sits pooled on the floor, too thick and too much accumulated in one spot to have dried despite the time that has passed. Eddie is still there in the way he smeared his blood across an elevator's body and ingrained it into its very being. Still there in the way he pushed his blood into the nuts and bolts, and laid the handprints of his devotion on its walls while praying it would get him home.
Buck reaches out and lays his hand over one of his prints. Eddie had large hands, this was a fact that Buck knew and tried not to think about too much, but seeing his own hands against the outline of them made him realize just how big. Buck waits, hand pressed against the wall. Nothing happens. No phantom touch pushes back, no heat of skin settles against him. The wall stays cold. The handprint stays stuck.
It was a bit ironic how Eddie’s handprints painted in blood could look so much like the first pictures painted by humans. Painted in caves and worshipped as signs of life. The same image repeated tens of thousands of years later, not as a celebration but as a last stance.
Buck slowly pulls his hand away, careful not to disrupt the flakes of it.
He turns, looks at the button panel also covered in blood. This was not a smooth, perfect preservation. This time it was laid out in a pattern screaming nothing but desperation, a silent plea, and a prayer for help. Buck reaches out again, touches it gently. His finger doesn’t smudge it. It's fully dried, just like the handprint, a testament to how long ago it was since Eddie had any strength to try to help himself. Buck follows the stains, presses every button marred by Eddie's blood, watches the panel light up one by one, each a faithless, hopeless cry.
Buck stops at every floor. Waits and waits until— this one. The door opens, and there’s blood on the floor, this time outside of the elevator. He steps out, leaving the signs of that which came with giving up and instead following the signs of fighting for life. The dichotomy of it hits him like whiplash.
Sure, the elevator may have started with a fight, but it ended as a pile on the floor and a heart no longer beating. But the hallway, the hallway holds the meat of it. The hallway was without a doubt, Eddie. There was no mistaking it here.
The life of it, despite being laid out in blood, was everywhere. Buck followed it. Followed the smears on the walls, the drops on the floor, followed it like a blind man going on with nothing but the idea of finding sight at last.
Buck pauses outside the chapel doors. One of them was still hanging open, beckoning through its darkness, stark against the artificiality of hospital lights.
Buck pauses because he can imagine the scene despite not being there. He can imagine the way Eddie probably thought to himself as the knife slid in, Seriously? It had to happen in a chapel, of all places? Buck smiles at the thought. Eddie has always had such dark humor.
Buck slips inside silently. His eyes fall to the center nave immediately, the breadcrumb trail finally ending in the stark spread of red against the white of the carpet. Eddie must have also spent a while on this floor, maybe unable to comprehend what the pain in his side meant before finally getting himself up.
The human body held around twelve pints of blood in it. That is a lot of blood. There was a lot of blood in the elevator, a The Shining reenactment, if you will — that was good. He needs to remember to tell that to Eddie when he… There was also a lot of blood left between the chapel pews.
When he combined the image of the elevator and the image of the chapel, Buck couldn’t bring himself to think about how it all could have belonged to Eddie.
It had to have been at least thirty minutes they spent in lockdown, so Eddie must have been bleeding out for... a long time if the shooter had come here first. Buck knows you can bleed out from an abdominal wound like that in mere minutes if it’s bad enough. Eddie made it out of the chapel. He made it to the elevator only to be trapped once again.
Buck wonders how long Eddie must have been unconscious in that elevator then. How long he must have been in cardiac arrest, how long he could have been legally considered dead for. Buck wonders if it was never going to turn out a different way. Wonders if they were always going to find him too late-
No. No, no, no. Buck can’t. He just can’t think like that. Not if he wanted to walk back out of this chapel, which cruelly, painfully, distantly he knew he needed to, instead of curling up in a ball on top of the stains in the carpet and following Eddie into the light.
Buck forcibly tears his eyes away from the blood and looks around.
Buck skips walking down the center aisle. Instead, he walks around the back of the pews. There was spilled water and a missing vase. He finds Eddie's phone thrown haphazardly in a corner, hidden from sight. Eddie wouldn’t have been able to find it, probably didn’t even know it was still in the room, or too in pain to notice its absence in the first place.
Whoever stabbed him also made sure he didn’t have a lifeline to cling to. Left him completely and utterly alone. Buck stamps down the rising rage, shakes it away like a dog fresh out of water. Buck picks the phone up and glances at the screen. It’s cracked. Eddie never cracks his phone. It must have cracked from his fall or when the guy threw it in the corner. Buck makes a mental note to replace the screen protector before Eddie wakes up— if he ever wakes up.
Buck takes a shaky breath and taps the screen. He sees a bunch of missed calls, all from himself. His contact name has a smiley face next to it. Buck doesn’t remember when that happened, only that it makes his heart crack. Every notification is from at least thirty minutes ago. An hour, a year, a lifetime ago, when Buck was still living in a blissful reality where Eddie was alive and unharmed.
He knows he shouldn’t. Knows it’s an invasion of privacy, but Eddie told him his password years ago. Shared it in passing like it wasn’t that big of a deal. Like he simply trusted Buck enough to know. Buck took that offer of trust and wrapped it around his heart so tight. So now, Buck opens it. A text message pops up in a group chat Athena is okay. The last thing he looked at. He probably thought God had answered his prayers for once. Then he paid the price for it.
Buck pockets Eddie’s phone. Returns to where he started.
He steps a little further between the pews this time. When he turns and finds a baseball cap lying on a chair in the back row. Buck stares at it. Then walks over and takes the seat next to it.
Buck looks out at the pulpit, eyes passing over the rows. Imagines it filled with bodies all gathered for something they couldn’t even see and shakes his head. He shifts his vision, opting instead to imagine the shooter sitting there waiting for Eddie to finish his prayer. Watching, interrupting something Buck knows feels deeply vulnerable to Eddie. Imagines Eddie turning around and seeing him.
Buck can picture the expression on Eddie’s face so vividly. He watches it shift from open, gut-wrenched, tragic, perhaps a tear or two in his eye, to guarded, closed off. Weary probably— definitely annoyed at the company. Buck sees him bristle. Sees Eddie clear his throat, pretend to be fine, easily slipping a mask over the pain. Buck sees it so clearly because he's seen it time and time again.
Buck wonders if the guy spoke to Eddie. He wonders if Eddie knew what was coming before it arrived.
If it were Buck, he probably would have said something. Would have asked Eddie why he was there. Would have offered condolences. Would have voiced his own grief, tried to share it with him, he’s learned that’s the only way sometimes to continue living.
Oh, you’re here for your friend Athena? She got shot? I’m here because my best friend got stabbed. Now help me so it helps you.
Buck doesn’t have the real Eddie, but he has the made-up version of him, the one he can envision so clearly. Buck asks him, “Why were you praying?”
Eddie turns in his seat, looking back at him, “I prayed because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You never were good at knowing when to stop. At realizing you had done all you could… God answered you. I think you know that. That Athena’s okay.”
“I know.”
Buck pauses, looking down, picking at the blood still on his arm, “If He helped Athena… will He help you?”
Buck can feel Eddie’s gaze rove over him despite being unable to look him in the eye, “I don’t know.”
“That’s helpful.”
“I’m not sure how helpful I can be,” Eddie says slowly, “considering I'm not real.”
Buck peaks at him from under his lashes. “Then how are you here?”
Eddie turns back toward the pulpit, crossing his arms as he leans back in his seat.
“You find what you need to in a place like this.”
Buck frowns, “You found a knife.”
Eddie laughs, “Yeah. I guess I did. Maybe it was needed,” Eddie looks back at him again, eyebrow cocked and a smirk dancing across his mouth, “divine intervention.”
“Oh my god,” Buck says back, “your dark humor is rubbing off on me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You just said you weren’t real… that means everything you’re saying is coming from my head.”
His Eddie hums in thought, “Then that means you already knew what you needed by coming here. You didn’t need to imagine me.”
“Your face makes me think better,” Buck mumbles. “Less loud inside.”
“My face?”
“Yeah, your face. Your energy, vibe, whatever it is.” Buck shrugs, “You.”
“Okay. Well, I’m here now... what’s making it so loud in there, Buckley?”
“My best friend died,” Buck whispers to an empty room.
Eddie glances at him, “I’m sorry.”
“He died because I left him alone.”
“He didn’t feel alone.”
Buck looks at him through blurry eyes, his chin wobbles, but he forces the words out, “How do you know that?”
“Maybe he was alone physically. But he believed he would make it back to you, to them. Loneliness can’t survive in the face of that,” Eddie responds. He lets the silence stretch for a beat before adding, “I’m not a religious person, Buck. I just have… I have faith, and I have to live with the hope that that is enough. Sometimes it’s not.”
Buck swipes at his face, furiously swiping at the tears, but they keep coming no matter how hard he tries to stop them
“I wish he would stop doing this,” Buck forces out. Eddie tilts his head at him in question. Buck adds around another cascade of tears, “dealing with it alone. I- I wish he could ask for help once in a while instead of ignoring it until it blows up in his face. Or stabs him.”
“Maybe he doesn’t think he deserves it.”
“He deserves to have joy,” Buck snaps.
Eddie considers him from across the room, then he smiles ever so softly. The tipping up of his lips, layered with a sadness so potent, Buck doesn’t understand how Eddie doesn’t choke on it.
“I think you might need to tell him that he does. Really spell it out for him.”
“I don’t know how to,” Buck admits.
Eddie turns away, goes back to staring at the pulpit. He doesn’t say anything as the minutes stretch. Buck thinks maybe he finally reached the point in this weird grief hallucination ordeal where his mind has run out of answers to give him.
Then Eddie stands up and silently walks toward him. Buck gets up as well and meets him halfway. They are so close, Eddie’s eyes start flicking back and forth between his own, unable to focus on both at the same time but searching.
“You know,” Eddie breathes out at last. His hand ghosts over Buck's chest, right over his heart, but doesn’t land.
Does Buck know? He’s spent the last eight years trying to convince Eddie that he was worth it with every act. Every unannounced visit, using keys they exchanged within a month of knowing each other to exist in the same space together for a little while longer— because apparently working 24- 48 hour shifts together wasn’t enough. Every phone call, from twenty minutes to eight hundred miles away. Every week, Eddie and Chris gathered around Buck’s dining table, filling the space with a love Buck didn’t know was possible until them. Every dead end, every close call, every rock bottom — hospital beds, baseball bats, plane tickets, desert skies, and pills.
They kept showing up. Kept having the other's back.
How does Buck take all of that? How can he fit all of that, everything they’ve been through together, and wrap it with a neat little bow and present it to him on a silver platter he could understand?
Oh.
Oh.
“I have to tell him I love him,” Buck gasps.
His Eddie smiles again, nodding his head.
“I love him,” Buck repeats. “I'm in love with him.”
The weight of it— or maybe the release of it crashes over him in one fell swoop. Followed swiftly and steadily by fear. Bone numbing, all-consuming fear.
“What if he freaks out? He’s going to freak out.”
Eddie lifts his brow, “I’m not freaking out.”
“I’m controlling everything you do and say,” Buck counters.
“If you knew he was going to freak out. Why aren’t I?”
Buck frowns.
“You know him, Buck,” Eddie offers. “You know him more than he knows himself sometimes, and that’s scary. It's frankly terrifying, but it means you know what he needs even if he can’t see it himself. Help him understand.”
“I can’t,” Buck’s voice crumbles. He feels his heart shatter into a million tiny pieces at the realization. A million pieces trapped in his chest, taped together, bound by life.
His heart was a kaleidoscope of love that found its light too late.
This is the end. This is officially where Buck has run out of answers. He didn’t know what happened next. All he knew was that he was standing in a pool of Eddie’s blood between chapel pews while Eddie’s body was somewhere in the hospital around him.
“Hey now, have a little faith in him,” Eddie teases.
Faith.
Buck can do faith.
Buck sniffles, his voice is soft and impossibly small as he asks, “Can… Can I pray for him?”
Eddie pauses, thinking. “I think he would like that.”
“Really?”
“I don't think he would admit it, but yeah,” Eddie confirms, “I think he would.”
His Eddie steps away, glances down at the baseball hat forgotten in the pews.
“I have to go now,” he says, already walking away.
Another tear escapes as Buck nods in understanding.
His version of Eddie makes it to the doors, one hand clutching at his side, the other on the handle, “Buck?”
“Yeah?”
“Don't forget to tell him— your best friend— what you told me. When he wakes up. He needs it.”
“I will,” Buck vows.
Buck thinks, maybe then is when the real Eddie got the text. Maybe he paused in the center of the Chapel and breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe he turned to cross himself. Maybe he went to kiss the cross, but instead, what came out was a wheeze of pain. A slice of heat and a twist of a knife.
Buck wouldn't know. He wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there, and he couldn’t do anything now. Except…
Buck isn’t religious. He technically grew up Episcopalian, but he never really understood it. Only followed when his parents told him to go to Church because it was the only offered slice of love he ever received from them. It was a routine of trying to please his mother and annoying his father when he couldn’t sit still. He should have known it was just a ploy by them pretending to be an actual family in front of their neighbors. They stopped inviting him when he was old enough to stay home alone for an hour or so.
So Buck stopped paying attention to religion a while ago. He doesn’t know how to pray. He had to wiki-how step-by-step instructions for confession, for fucks sake. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. But his body is guiding him forward. A whisper in the back of his mind that this is exactly what Eddie had done for Athena, but never for himself.
Buck stops, glances down, and sees a row of cushions. One is still slightly indented with a pair of knees and Buck knows. Buck could tell Eddie apart from a crowd of people through the way the indent of his knees on a cushion looked alone.
Because he loved him. He loved him enough to notice and be loved him enough to try.
Buck kneels on the cushion, takes Eddie’s place. Buck kneels, and he prays for Eddie since he never could do it himself.