Work Text:
There’s been a lot of blood on Eddie’s hands recently. It’s becoming a sort of plagued pattern.
He wakes up every morning, kicks off his duvet, and looks down at his palms, half-expecting to see the red already there, stained and permanent on his flesh. On the edge of sleep, Eddie can feel ribs cracking beneath his fingers, wounds gushing hot crimson under his nails. Even when it isn’t there – when it was never there to begin with – it clings to him like a bad smell.
The guilt of not being fast enough. The guilt of always ending up better off than someone else. The guilt of scraping through whilst others fall through the cracks. Why him? becomes Why not him? Why is he always the one making it out in one piece, untouched and unharmed?
Sometimes, it feels like some twisted punishment from God. The faith inside of Eddie has long since travelled from praying hands to the pulse of his heart, manifesting in something adjacent to religion, yet so different. Maybe that’s why. Maybe God knows hurting Eddie's never really enough. Maybe He’s punishing Eddie by making him watch. Continuously brushing him with the hand of death, but never quite gripping ahold.
It started with Bobby. Or, maybe if he’s being honest, it started a lot earlier than that. With Shannon. With his abuelo, his namesake. The deaths total up to something inscrutable, blood layering thick onto Eddie’s hands. The guilt bubbling up and up until it burns the back of his throat, slowly choking him dry.
Now, it’s all one big, cancerous mass inside him. The origin is impossible to find. He can’t pin-point the first spill over his fingers under the crust of all the others.
But, this time, at least it’s different. The blood on his hands is his own and, twistedly, Eddie finds that a little less painful.
He fumbles for the button of the elevator doors, smearing blood over the shiny metal. The poor janitor who’s going to have to clean that up later, Eddie thinks distantly, sorrowfully. That, and the blood he’s left dripping in pools down the hallway.
The elevator isn’t opening. He slams his hand against the buttons again, trying desperately to keep his eyes open. The gritty sheet vinyl flooring isn’t a particularly inspiring sight, but Eddie forces himself to stare at it, resisting the screaming urge to meet it on the ground, to buckle to his knees and collapse in a heap.
He clutches his side, the gunshot wound weeping between his tight fingers. It throbs with the beat of his heart, rapid and frantic like Christopher’s put it through that stupid app that speeds everything to a squeaky chipmunk pitch.
The first shots came out of nowhere. One moment Eddie was standing next to Harry in the fifth floor waiting room, consoling him as best as he could without his own voice trembling. The next, he was shoving them both to the floor behind the empty gurney.
Harry’s shoulder clipped the metal stand as they went down, jolting out of its socket. Somewhere behind them, a nurse was yelling, shouting at people to hide, to find cover. It all blurred away into one hazy smudge. There was a kid standing a few feet away, lost and frozen in place. He had curly hair and a red sweater, and Eddie blinked and saw Chris. Blinked again, and saw Theo.
The thought process was barely there. Synapsis, neurons; none of Eddie’s usual rationale clicked into place. There was a fuse in the circuit board. He stumbled forward with a clumsy, one-track mind, and scooped the boy into his arms just as the next round of shots rang out.
Pain bloomed in his abdomen. He remembers, vaguely, telling the kid to get under the bed, to stay there as quietly as he could. He remembers noticing he was hit a minute after his body did, brain lazy and sluggish. The realization of, Okay. That hurts.
Harry caught up with him, dragging Eddie into the hallway. They stumbled in zig-zagging lines, bumping into walls and protruding door handles. Harry spat panicked words into his radio, but Eddie was too focused on dragging one foot in front of the other to listen properly.
By the elevators, they stopped. Harry jammed the button, and they waited. Shouting and screaming echoed from down the hallway, bouncing off the sterile walls.
“Go,” Eddie said when the shots started again.
Harry’s gaze snapped to him. “What?”
“The stairs,” he said. “Go.”
“I’m not leaving you, Eddie,” Harry said, pressing the button again. “No way.”
He grabbed Harry’s un-dislocated shoulder, jostling him like it might shake some sense into him.
“I can’t walk the stairs, and you can’t carry me,” Eddie stated, and it really was as simple as that. “Not with your arm. Go. Get– Get Chimney. I’ll be fine.”
Harry shook his head. “You’re shot.”
“Nothing that hasn’t happened before,” he joked with a thin smile.
“Eddie.”
Moving his hand from Harry’s shoulder to the back of his head, Eddie gave him a firm, steady look. “It’s going to be okay. I promise. Go.”
Now, the damn elevator doors aren’t opening, and Eddie’s starting to think he made a huge mistake. Not telling Harry to leave, not for running in front of that kid, but for even being the slightest bit confident that it wouldn’t all end up exactly like this. Bleeding out from a hole in his chest. Dying in one lifeless husk. Prometheus’ eagles pecking out every last one of his organs.
The blood on his hands is too familiar for the last coat not to be his own.
“Fucking. Work,” Eddie says through gritted teeth, jamming his thumb so hard into the elevator button the joint bends backwards.
The elevator doesn’t. Fucking work, that is.
The box in his back pocket jabs into the base of his spine, pointed corners poking upwards. He stares down the hallway at the glowing green exit sign dangling above the stairwell. The sight is blurry, vision swimming with tears from not blinking, from frustrating agony. Stairs it is, he supposes.
Eddie hasn’t been shot in a while. He wonders, if the sniper happened more recently, whether it would be hurting this bad right now. Probably, he suspects after four stumbling steps forward. It probably just hurts regardless.
The ultimate punishment ends this way. God made sure the first three bullets didn’t take him out, so it’s only retribution that this one does.
Optimistic, Eddie, he chides himself. Well done.
He tries to tell his patients that – to be optimistic. Turns out it’s much harder to practice what you preach when you’re leaking copious amounts of blood. Optimism isn’t something that clings to him when there’s the lingering itch right in the back of his skull that the bullet never exited Eddie, that it’s shifting right now, buried in the cushion-y blanket of his flesh.
He’s halfway down the hallway when the stairwell doors burst open. For a split-second, Eddie freezes. This is abnormal, in the grand scheme of things. Eddie is a Fight guy, occasionally a Flight guy. He’s not a Freeze guy.
But in this brief, terrifying nanosecond, he freezes. Sure that there’s a gun in front of him, that a barrel is staring him down, smoking from already firing, Eddie jolts to a stop. He braces one blood-slick hand on the wall beside him, and waits for the loud pop to reverberate through his skull like someone hitting the middle of a gong, or the tones on a usually quiet Wednesday morning.
But before he can slip his eyes shut – before the last thought of Christopher brings a sliver of peace to his mind – Eddie’s brain catches on. It’s faster than his body this time.
“Buck,” he says, the breath pulling from him in a gasp.
Buck’s eyes snap to him, blown wide and wild. Just like Eddie, he freezes in his step for one lingering moment, one click of a clock’s hand to say: Oh, it’s you. There you are, before he’s moving again.
“Eddie,” Buck says. There’s a red med-bag swinging from his shoulder, the strap slipping further down his arm as he rushes forward. “Jesus– Eddie.”
“That’s me,” Eddie replies weakly, and promptly collapses into Buck’s chest.
Buck catches him with two quick, strong arms, bracing Eddie’s weight against his body like it’s the most natural maneuver in the world. He shifts his hip outward as he slings an arm around Eddie’s body to support him, fingers fumbling around until they reach where Eddie’s own are still pressed tight at his side.
He feels Buck stiffen against him, assessing the wound, the blood that’s blurting at a faster rate every time Eddie sucks in a breath. Clamping his hand over Eddie’s, Buck tugs him closer, tighter.
“Okay,” Buck says. “Okay, c’mon. Stairs. I’ll check you out there.”
“Hmphm,” Eddie says back, extremely coherently.
They start back the way Buck came from, the neon green finish line starting to make him feel nauseous the longer he looks at it. Buck holds him upright, dragging them both along the hallway like some limping, four-legged creature.
Eddie left him last in the ER on the ground floor, talking to Hen about the Playmobil set he got off EBay for Theo. Away from the gunshots; so close to safety. And now he’s here, practically carrying Eddie through a yelling, shuddering hospital hallway. Point A to Point C. Where’s the middle? What happened in Point B?
“Why’re you here?” Eddie asks, squeezing his eyes shut for three seconds before prying them open again.
“You asked Harry to get help,” Buck says. The words are said through gritted teeth, strained with the energy of holding Eddie up. “I’m help.”
He swallows down thick, tangy bile. “No, I– I asked Harry to get Chimney.”
“Would you prefer him?” Buck asks.
It’s a joke, but not really because the hospital siren is going off, and Eddie’s been shot for the fourth time, and Buck is here for it again. Maybe it’s cruel of him, unfair and selfish, but he kind of wishes it was anyone else with him right now. Not for not wanting Buck. Eddie’s pretty sure he could never not want him, and maybe that’s half of the problem. They’ve both always wanted a little too much of each other.
Buck struggled after the sniper. He hurt so bad, and it was all Eddie’s fault. Now Buck’s here, palm the only barrier stopping Eddie from bleeding out, and it’s his fault again. He doesn’t want to give Buck any more nightmares. He doesn't want to be that connoting thing, the person Buck associates with pain. The Pavlovian Effect is a hell of a thing.
“Yes,” he says.
Buck doesn’t even flinch. It's probably a little self-centered of Eddie to assume he would.
“Tough luck,” Buck says, arm squeezing his waist. They’re so close to the stairwell – five, long strides. “I’m not leaving you.”
It’s odd, what happens next. There’s the unmistakable crack of a gun firing in the stairwell, bouncing through the doors that are still swinging from Buck’s entrance. It sounds just a hairbreadth away, really, and yet it’s the elevator dinging behind them that Eddie notices first, the high-pitched piiiiingggggg like a million tiny light bulbs have exploded around it.
Buck, fully conscious and not delirious with blood loss, of course hears the gun first. He stops, boots skidding obnoxiously at the abrupt cease of movement. His nostrils flare, eyes flicking from the stairs, to Eddie, to the stairs again, like he can’t quite decipher what to do. An animal caught in a trap.
“The elevator,” Eddie says, clumsily scratching the back of Buck’s neck to pull at his attention. “The elevator.”
Buck’s head snaps around, gaze narrowing in on the opening elevator doors, the tiny, grey box of safety. The bear trap lifts, jaws prying apart.
“The elevator,” Buck repeats, and meets Eddie’s eyes again. They narrow, hardening with set determination. “I’m sorry.”
And before he can ask what he’s apologizing for, or really formulate any sort of thought, Buck’s bending down and picking him up. It’s an impossibly gentle maneuver, one large hand cupping the back of Eddie’s legs, fingers splayed wide over his thighs as the other holds onto his wrist, but Eddie’s torso twists with the movement anyway, and the apology suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.
He thinks, if he could muster it up, he’d cry out with the pain that cuts through him like rain sluicing a foggy window. Instead, Eddie does nothing but whimper pitifully, the soft noise catching in his dry throat. Buck rubs his thumb soothingly over the back of his knee even as he jogs towards the elevator, each thundering step jostling Eddie up and down.
“I know,” Buck rasps. “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”
There’s blood staining Buck’s shirt now, trickling through the thin material and down his spine like some fucked up tattoo. Eddie's head swims, spinning in wide arching waves. Mouth open, he pants against the swell of Buck’s bicep, mouthing at the damp hem of his sleeve.
He doesn’t even notice they’re in the elevator until Buck’s slamming his fist against the glowing G on the button panel, and carefully putting him down. As soon as Eddie’s feet touch the ground, his knees give out beneath him, rendered useless by his wobbly joints. Buck follows him down, catching Eddie again before he crumples completely on the dirty elevator floor. He kneels, guiding Eddie’s head to rest on his thighs.
“Almost there,” Buck says, ripping open his med-bag and grabbing a pack of gauze. He lifts Eddie’s shirt and presses it firmly over the wound. “We’ll get you some help. You’re going to be fine.”
Eddie hums in response, trying to do something that isn’t the only two things his brain can think of: throw up, or press his cheek further into Buck’s thigh. There’s hair in his face, sweaty strands falling in front of his eyes. He pushes them back with trembling fingers, smearing blood across the damp pallor of his forehead. Buck wipes him clean with the back of his wrist. He’s Eddie’s biggest sin, and the only thing in the world that makes him feel this holy.
The number on the elevator screen flicks past two when the walls shudder. The lights flicker once, then twice before there’s a grinding screech of metal on metal. Beneath him, Eddie feels the floor jerk like it’s about to jump up at him. It comes to a creaking, stuttering halt. Buck’s eyebrows scrunch.
“No,” he says, Eddie’s head lolling as he gets up, moving around to the doors. “No, no, no.”
With a widening stance, Buck pries his fingers between the metal doors and yanks. His back flexes as he pulls, shirt pulled tight. The doors barely shift an inch. Buck lets out a frustrated, broken noise, stumbling backwards until he’s collapsing beside Eddie again.
“Buck,” Eddie says, coughing as Buck lifts his head again and deposits it back in his lap.
Buck ignores him, free hand coming up to fumble with his radio. He rattles off details into the speaker, Chimney’s voice following but a second later, tight and professional. Eddie’s not really sure what he says. His mind is on a perpetually loop of: fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Buck,” he says again, and this time Buck listens, crowding over him.
“Hey,” Buck says, dropping the radio to cup Eddie’s cheek and turn his face towards him. “Hey, how’re you doing?”
It’s a silly question. Eddie is endeared right down to his faltering core.
“We’re stuck in the elevator,” he croaks.
Buck nods, head bouncing like a flapping bobble-figure. “Yep. Yes, yeah, we are. But they’re coming. They’re getting us out of here.”
“Are you panicking?”
“No,” Buck says, which kind of feels like a blatant lie. “Are you?”
He can’t really feel his throbbing torso anymore, everything below his clavicle kind of dream-like. It feels claustrophobic, invasive, knowing there’s something inside of him, festering in his flesh. Fragments of poisoning metal.
“I don’t panic,” Eddie says. He blinks, moisture running down the corner of his eye. “Buck?”
Buck readjusts the gauze, cradling the back of Eddie’s head as he does so, as if the tender motion might erase some of the pain.
“Yeah?” he says, wrinkles appearing over the bridge of his nose as he sniffs.
“The bullet,” Eddie grinds out. He can feel it shifting around, that one stubborn kernel at the bottom of the bag that refuses to pop. “It’s– It’s still inside.”
Buck stares at him. “What?”
His hand fumbles, snaking around Eddie to pat around his back, checking for an exit wound. Inevitably, he comes up empty, and when his hands come back to press on the gauze, they’re shaking. Eddie loops his fingers around Buck’s wrist.
“You need to get it out,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady. It’s a little hard when he feels like he’s fastened to the mast of a tumultuously rocking ship.
Buck’s grown pale, all the blood draining from his face. Even his birthmark looks lighter, peony pink by his furrowed brow. He chews his lip, teeth gnawing the flesh white.
“Eddie, I– I can’t do that,” he says.
“You have to. Buck, please,” Eddie implores. “Please, I can– I can feel it.”
He doesn’t know if he actually can, or whether it’s just some placebo effect from knowing it’s there. But knowing is enough, and Eddie wants it out of him. The desperation must be clear on his face, because Buck’s expression levels out, a mask of fierceness sliding over the fear.
“Tell me what to do,” he says, already reaching for the med-bag.
Eddie instructs him through the morphine drip and antiseptic. Points to the right tool, and watches in a half-lidded daze as Buck snaps on gloves, wiggling his fingers as the plastic gets caught on sweaty skin. By the time Buck is getting into position, the shitty elevator lights creating a halo-like glow around his head, Eddie is starting to feel floaty, suspended half out of his body.
“Okay,” Buck says, the blue of his eyes practically swallowed up by his pupils. “Stay awake, alright?”
“I’ll try,” Eddie promises, turning his head to the side. “Do it."
Slowly, Buck peels back the gauze, the material wet and sticking to Eddie’s skin. The cold flush of air makes him wince so hard he almost misses Buck’s expression tightening, thin lines pulling at his lips. Eddie hates when he looks worried like this.
“How’sit look, Doc?” he asks, in a slurred attempt to make Buck smile.
He doesn't, just swipes his tongue over his front teeth. “You’re going to be fine.”
It sounds a little like Buck’s trying to convince himself.
At first, Eddie can’t even feel it. Buck murmurs that he’s starting, hand steadying himself on Eddie's stomach just above the swell of his naval, and Eddie thinks that maybe he’s gotten away with it. And then the forceps brush the raw edge of the wound, and pain explodes like a thousand flaming fireworks.
He cries out, a wet, agonizing noise even to his own ears, and Buck flinches. His expression crumples, hand frozen still. Beneath the fiery itch of his whole body screaming, Eddie thinks groggily that Buck might stop. That he’ll pull away, claiming he can’t do it.
And then Buck moves again, and every thought after that falls away.
He notices, at some point, that he’s crying, fat ugly tears that roll down his burning cheeks. It spills out of him without intention, getting lost with Buck’s shattered, murmuring words, jumbling together until the elevator is just one box of wails. Pain like this is something Eddie knows his body will forget later. It’ll be blocked from his mind with a black REDACTED line of marker. It's not much comfort to him now.
“'m sorry,” Buck says, voice wobbling like it’s going to spill over and break into tiny tremors any moment. “I’m sorry, Eds, it's almost done. Almost done– just hang on.”
Eddie sobs, turning his face into the crook of his elbow. With a final, searing tug, Buck pulls out the bullet. He drops the forceps to the ground with a clatter, the bullet skidding off to the corner of the elevator. Flattening another pack of gauze over the blood now spurting from the wound, Buck takes his hand, squeezing tight.
“It’s out,” he says, swiping his thumb over Eddie’s knuckles. “The bullet’s out, you’re okay. You’re okay.”
Another sob catches in Eddie’s throat, choking him as Buck lifts his head back into his lap. There are fingers in his hair, rubbing small circles into his skull to combat the barbed sword in his side. He leans into it, blinking watery eyes up at the elevator ceiling because he knows that’s what Buck wants; he’ll get scared if Eddie closes his eyes. And, for now, he can fight the begging urge to fall asleep if it’ll stop Buck from being scared.
Buck continues to murmur words to him, his palm firm and unrelenting where he’s applying pressure. He’s always like this, despite what other people say. So steady, so there. Present, in every moment. It’s one of the first things Eddie ever loved about Buck. Sat in the back of that ambulance, pulling a grenade out of a man’s leg, Buck’s calm, focused voice beside him. The face-splitting grin he gave Eddie under the glow of the sirens.
Eddie wishes he’d smile now. He honestly thinks it might help slow the blood flow, pause his circulation for a few seconds. It feels like it does, every time Buck turns one of those grins at him. Every molecule of Eddie’s being screeches to a halt. Turns heavy and sticky, clumping together in black-tarmac molasses.
Buck’s been smiling a lot more recently. There was a moment there, a terrifying, hell defining moment, where it felt impossible. Buck’s happiness always felt a grasp out of reach, dangling in front of him like a carrot on a stick. But it came back, because Buck is perpetually indestructible, because he finds the way, finds the energy to bounce back every single time. He’s a marvel, a beautiful travesty every sunrise.
Eddie wants to see him smile.
He turns his face slightly, nose brushing up the inside of Buck’s wrist. Buck looks down at him – Eddie hadn’t even realized he was speaking into his radio again. Worry still etches the lines of his face, eyebrows curved upwards together in the signature puppy-eyed Buckley move.
“Hey,” Buck whispers.
“Hey,” Eddie echoes. “I have a present for you.”
Buck brushes a thumb underneath Eddie’s left eye, collecting a stray, lingering tear. “Oh, you do?”
“Mhm. ‘s in my back pocket.”
He watches as it dawns on Buck that he’s not joking. Eddie stares up at him, at those fluttering pale eyelashes, and tries to project the plea of let me have this into every inch of his expression. Buck’s jaw twitches, head cocking slightly.
“This isn’t a trick to get me to feel you up, is it?” he asks, the joke soft and carefully cutting through the strain of their surroundings.
Eddie snorts, throat convulsing sharply. “Is that a– a complaint, Buckley?”
Buck doesn’t answer that, just smiles very slightly. It’s not enough. It’s not what Eddie wants.
Shifting, Buck drops his hand from Eddie’s face, and sneaks it behind him. His fingers skim over the arch of Eddie’s back, brushing the wonky notches of his spine where his shirt is still rucked up. Down, down, down, until Buck reaches his belt. Eyes fixed firmly on Eddie’s, Buck slowly reaches into his pants back pocket, hand closing around the small box hidden there.
“Hm. I guess you do deliver,” Buck says as he draws out the box.
Eddie lifts a shaky hand, tapping two fingers on the top of the box’s lid. “Open it.”
A look of sharp wariness flashes over Buck’s face. He chews his lip, eyes turning down at the corners as they dart quickly to the blood-soaked gauze and back. Eddie can decipher roughly what he’s thinking.
“Eddie, I–”
“Stop,” Eddie says. “This isn’t– I’m not. I want you to have this. Regardless of– of anything. Please.”
And, because they’ve had a shaky eight years of knowing each other, Buck takes the admission and nods. One-handed, he flips open the box. Eddie watches as he stalls, lips parting and fingers hovering over the satin cushion.
“Is this…?” Buck says, words getting lost somewhere neither of them can follow.
Sniffing wetly, Eddie reaches further up, biting back a whimper at the pain that shoots up his chest at the movement. He picks the medallion up in his thumb and forefinger, slowly flipping it so Buck can see the other face of the metal.
“Saint Theodore,” he says quietly, “and S-Saint Christopher. I thought you…you might want them on both sides.”
“I do,” Buck says, still staring owlishly. “Yeah, I– I do.”
In truth, Eddie’s had the idea for months. He knows how much Buck loves his son, how much he cares for Chris like he’s his own. Eddie’s watched it happen since Chris was seven years old, how much the love bloomed right from the beginning. He was always going to get Buck the same medallion he wears himself.
Then Theo came barreling in, careening headfirst into Buck’s open and wanting arms, and that was the final kick for Eddie. He customized the necklace three days ago. It’s been sitting in his pocket since, waiting for the right moment.
“Let me put it on you?” he asks, watching with awe as Buck’s face lifts up into one of those pure, wide smiles.
It’s shaky, and tinged with a kind of sadness Eddie knows will haunt them both later, but it’s there.
Letting Eddie take the medallion box from him, Buck bows his head so that he can reach behind his neck. His forehead drops against Eddie’s, their noses bumping and sliding together. The proximity is almost too much, almost has Eddie dropping the necklace to the ground.
He fiddles with the clasp, drawing back from Buck just enough to see what he’s doing as he loops it around Buck's neck. He clips it into place, rests it gently just above Buck’s shirt collar. The medallion swings between them, dangling over the hollow of Eddie’s neck, colliding with his chin when Buck shifts, dipping closer.
A deranged part of him wants to lift up onto his elbows, to tug the medallion between his teeth and drag Buck down with it. But Eddie barely has the energy to blink anymore, and besides, it’s kind of nice staying this close to Buck. So he stays, their foreheads pressed together, lips the width of a fist apart.
“Thank you,” Buck says after a moment. He draws back, taking Eddie’s hand again. It’s on both of them now, the blood. “Stay with me, yeah? They’re almost here.”
“‘M staying,” Eddie says. “Don’t have anywhere else I wanna go.”
A small laugh escapes Buck. “Nowhere in the whole world?”
The elevator doors are creaking again, a slice of light worming through the thin gap of space. Eddie sighs, and squeezes Buck’s hand back with everything he has. It’s becoming a theme with them. He doesn’t mind. He wants Buck to have everything.
“Maybe home,” he says, and it’s meant to be a joke but the confession comes out a little too soft on the truth.
Buck’s eyes glitter. “I can do that. I can get you home.”
It's cheesy and relief-driven, and it's all Eddie can cling to as the elevator opens and noise floods around them.