Archive of Our Own

I’ve been here before , runs through the back of Eddie’s mind as he drives. In an ambulance with his dead partner. He’s been here before. It was brutal then and it’s brutal now, a familiar type of brutal. He keeps his composure through it. Three minutes to hospital. It won’t be like with Shannon. There was no fixing the damage the car had done to her; her body was broken and she’d bled out. They’d all seen less severe instances still end in death and they’d all known the only thing that would save her was a miracle. No miracle had come. But Buck has a chance. Complete cardiac arrest is different - Chim can keep Buck’s blood circulating with chest compressions. They can do rescue breaths. They can protect his brain from damage, they can get him to the hospital and the medical team there can save him. Three minutes. Two, now. One.

The hospital is in view.

At the bay, Eddie throws the ambulance into park, throws himself out the door. He’s there at the back to help carry Buck down. He’s the first one there. He re-starts compressions as soon as the gurney is on the ground. Buck is still dead. But they can keep his body safe for him to come back to it. Eddie can do that. Buck can come back; he will. They’ll get him back.

Eddie rides the gurney through the glass doors and Buck’s medical team takes over, shouldering him out of the way while Cap and Hen shout vital stats. Eddie watches them take Buck away, the doctors and nurses, leaving him by the doors staring after them. Familiar fear floods through him. He covers his mouth with a shaking hand. He’s been here before.

After all of that is the waiting. Bobby sits in the waiting lobby. Maddie’s in with her brother’s doctors - Chimney by her side. Their parents are in the lobby too. Buck’s father stands, his mother sits. Then stands, paces briefly back and forth, and sits again. Hospitals are hard for them, Bobby remembers. They had to watch their first son die and now they wait to hear news on their second.

I know how much it hurts , he could tell them. They’re on the other side of the room. Buck’s father revolves around his mother as if she were his sun. Bobby remembers Buck describing them that way, once, years ago. Their own universe of two.

It kind of felt like we were an actual family , Buck described their most recent family dinner. Bobby had been facing the other way, but he’d heard Buck’s tone, the almost surprised tenderness of it. Like Buck had been given a precious gift.

Two days ago he’d crouched next to Bobby and said, Come on, it’s me , and Bobby had given him the secret chili ingredient his own father had given him. Buck had sounded - he’d sounded almost demanding, in a shy pleased spoiled way. He’d sounded like he had only the slightest doubt Bobby wouldn’t share, that he was mostly belief. Belief in Bobby. Belief in his right to Bobby’s secrets. His right to Bobby’s life, to be part of it.

Now he’s dead in another room and Bobby doesn’t know if he’ll come back.

I know how much it hurts , he could say to Buck’s parents.

It hurts so much to breathe, to doubt, to worry. It hurts more than a broken back. It hurts more than falling off the wagon. It hurts like being split down the center, like the pain inside of you is too big to be held by your body, like the grief has teeth and is chewing you from the chest outward. It hurts like the world is ending because the world is ending, the world is gone. Your child is your world and when you lose him. When you lose him.

Oh , Bobby thinks. I’ve been here before.

They let her look at him. They let her go into his room, and they let her hold his hand. He has such big hands now. She still remembers how small they’d been when he was just three days old. Just three days old, that’s when she met him. His skin had still been wrinkled and his face had still been red, so red that at first they hadn’t really noticed the birthmark. His hand had curled around just her thumb and she’d giggled at it, at how miniature it was. His tiny fingernails. He’d smelled like something new when she leaned over him and inhaled. It had thrown her when she’d inhaled newborn Jee-Yun and the sense memory came flooding back of him, so new and so small.

He’s big now, but he still fits inside her heart. She can still fold him right in.

She holds Daniel there too. Both of her brothers, she carries them with her all the time. The pain of Daniel dying, she holds it too.

She’d held Daniel’s hand in his hospital room as he died. He’d been in a coma then too. Just like their little brother before her. Maddie had been too little to understand what she was doing but she’d done it then as she does it now. She sits vigil.

You’re too little , she thinks to Buck. No matter his size, he’ll always be too small for what has happened to him. You need to get bigger. So big that nothing can hurt you.

I don’t want to be here , she thinks. I never wanted to be here again .

She holds his hand now as she held his hand then, as she held Daniel. Outside this room there are people who love Buck waiting to be the one where she is, but no one can take her place just yet.

Tears rain down her face but she doesn’t wipe them away. She lets them fall. There’s no point in clearing them, she knows. More will just come. She’s been here before.