Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The air in ER is almost buzzing that night—or maybe it’s the static of the overhead lights, flickering on and off every so often—since they got the call from dispatch. A grenade in some guy’s leg? Even the most veteran of doctors haven’t quite seen anything like it. So it’s not really a surprise when the trauma bay is more crowded than usual as the ambulance approaches. Only, it stops before they can unload it, coming to a dead stop in the parking lot.

The police cordon off the hospital with yellow tape. Soon after, the bomb squad arrives. Someone starts a rumour that there’s a live grenade in that ambulance. The bay clears pretty quickly after that, leaving only the adrenaline junkies, waiting with bated breath to see what happens next.

If they squint enough, they can make out two (very handsome) firefighters being fitted with kevlar vests. That can not be a good sign. They don’t seem too chummy, either, which is not reassuring. The taller one watches the shorter one carefully and seems to subconsciously mirror his movements. He puffs out his chest when the other man is looking at him. It’s almost like he’s competing with him for something unspoken, but it’s one-sided. The shorter man seems wholly uninterested in the rivalry.

Either way, they disappear into the ambulance and come out alive, as does the guy with the grenade in his leg.

The taller guy has a grin on his face now as the shorter one tells him something. He laughs, and they shake hands, as though they’ve finally come to an understanding, but it’s more than that—it’s trust. The shorter man, who had barely looked at his coworker before, seemed to finally see him, eyes twinkling with mirth. The taller one seems pleased at the shift in their dynamic, ears flushing red at the tips, dimples digging into his cheeks.

The tall guy turns back to say something to his captain, and in that moment, a loud blast reverberates through the hospital.

The fucking ambulance explodes. Good thing the no-longer-unfriendly-but-still-very-sexy firefighters were able to remove the grenade in time.

Paramedics wheel the gurney inside, updating the doctors on the man’s condition. He’s stable, it seems, although he’s bleeding quite viciously from his femoral artery. Everyone snaps into action, then, forgetting the scene from outside.

The man survives, surprisingly enough. The next day, his nurse catches him shopping for baseball cards online.

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It turns out that the taller man’s last name is “Buckley.” They figure this out as they cut him out of his LAFD sweatshirt, which is branded with his name on the back. It’s definitely the firefighter from the grenade incident—he’s got the same birthmark on his eyebrow. It’s strange seeing the highly energetic man in this state, clothing stained with blood, nasty gash on his head, neck constrained in a cervical collar.

The shorter man is “Diaz,” according to his sweatshirt. It’s not hard to commit the name to memory, since they’ve had a clear view of the print—he’s been hunched over, hands clasping Buckley’s, since they wheeled him into the ER on a gurney.

(They later watch the footage and realize that he’s been holding that man’s hand a lot longer.)

His leg is mangled. It’s almost hard to look at. Every time he’s jostled on the stretcher, he lets out a groan that sounds like it’s from the depths of hell. Diaz’s eyes squeeze shut after each groan, like he’s the one in pain. But his hands never move. It’s safe to assume that they no longer hate one another, if they ever did.

Buckley’s a fighter. He stays awake the whole time, despite the unimaginable pain he must be in, having had a whole ladder truck fall on top of him. It’s not until the doctor mutters something offhand about not being sure if the boy will ever be able to work again that Buckley seems to give up the fight, fading into unconsciousness.

The absolutely scathing expression that Diaz throws at that doctor makes everyone’s blood turn icy cold.

Diaz doesn’t leave Buckley’s hospital room. He sits in the chair by his bedside, hands folded in his lap, staring at his casted leg with a blank expression. The only indication that he’s feeling anything at all is the glassiness of his eyes, but he doesn’t shed a tear.

It’s a real debate among the nurses, whether or not they’re a couple. Some claim he’s just a good friend since he’s not crying or anything, whereas others vehemently defend that Diaz is clearly in love with this man.

The debate is subsequently crushed.

When Buckley starts to show signs of life, groaning and shifting as he wakes, Diaz makes a speedy exit just as a dark-skinned woman enters the room. She catches his arm and whispers something to him—sources say it was, “Stay, Eddie, he’s waking up,” and that Eddie responded that he just can’t, Carla. When Buckley’s eyes open, the only person he sees standing in his hospital room is Carla, with her warm yet sad smile. But the nurses can see Eddie with his back to the wall outside the room, looking as if he can finally breathe again.

That’s not what crushes the debate, though.

A pretty girl with short brown hair rushes into the room shortly after Eddie’s dramatic exit, accompanied by another woman carrying two cups of coffee. The girl plants a solid kiss on Buckley’s lips. One nurse casually strolls into the room to ‘update the calendar,’ and comes back with zero intel. Apparently, they’re just chatting about how long he was in surgery. No dramatic declarations of love. The debate is tentatively reinstated. Maybe the girl is just… European?

Buckley—or “Buck,” he corrects—stays in the hospital for a few days due to the severity of his injury. He’s everyone’s favourite patient, never snappy, always polite, maybe a tad flirtatious. They sneak him extra cups of butterscotch pudding, and he teases them about ruining his body fat percentage. He’s always smiling, but everyone can tell it’s eating him up inside to be stuck in this room. They’ve never quite seen someone with such expressive eyes.

The girl visits a few times throughout his time in the hospital, but she only stays for a few minutes to give him a kiss and tell him she misses him. They never find out her name. The woman with the coffee cups, who turns out to be his sister Maddie, visits every day and sits with him for hours. She’s not their favourite, if only because she’s also a nurse and asks about his condition in excruciating detail every time. The staff grows to love her when she finally gets Buck to crack a genuine smile with a random fact about the mating rituals of penguins she looked up on her phone outside his room.

Then there’s Eddie Diaz. He only comes to the hospital once. With him is an eight-year-old boy with bright red crutches whose smile erupts, ear-to-ear, the second he lays his eyes on the man in the hospital bed. He calls out to Buck, runs over to his side, and jumps into the bed beside him. Watching them with excruciating fondness, Eddie warns the boy, Chris, to be careful not to “hurt your Buck.” Buck tells him not to worry, and that he’ll be out of there soon, with crutches that match Christopher’s. The kid almost buzzes out of his skin with excitement.

The debate is so back on.

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The next time they bring Buck into the hospital, there’s dark red blood staining a line from his lips to his chest. Hematemesis—he’s vomited blood. He’s also passed out, and the paramedics are holding an oxygen mask securely over his mouth. Once he’s handed off, the waiting room fills with people at an unprecedented rate. Usually people trickle in over the course of a few hours, having received calls that a loved one was injured, but this time, over a dozen people rush in within a few minutes.

It doesn’t take long to single out Eddie. He’s got blood on his shirt, too, especially around the sleeves of his army green button-up, like he’d been the one to treat Buck at the scene. His arms are wrapped around the kid from before—Christopher. The kid looks terrified, and Eddie whispers comforting phrases to him, petting the top of his head. Eddie’s arms tremble.

An older man whispers something to him, and Eddie takes off the blood-stained shirt, leaving him in only a white long sleeve. He looks at the older man appreciatively, who simply crouches and pats the kid on the shoulder reassuringly.

When Buck’s doctor asks for the Buckley Family, everyone stands up at once. When he clarifies immediate family, they all reluctantly sit, apart from his sister—and Eddie. He stares back at the doctor expectantly, until Maddie whispers something to him. The fog clears from his eyes, replaced with dejection, and he sits down, pulling the kid into his lap.

They lead Maddie into the wing of the hospital where her brother is taking up a bed. An Asian man follows, and Maddie clarifies he’s her partner, so it’s okay. The nurses give each other a knowing look, but no one says anything.

Buck’s upright and talking, and his eyes are scanning the room for something—someone?—when his sister and the other man, who introduced himself as Chimney (interesting name) arrive. Buck greets them happily, doing one of those manly half-hugs with Chimney like he didn’t just almost die from a blood clot in his lung. Maddie lectures him about being stupid, and for once, the nurses agree with her.

When Maddie and Chimney leave his room and a nurse comes in to check his vitals, he looks up at her shyly through his eyelashes and asks if there’s anyone else waiting for him in the waiting room. She laughs, telling him she’s not sure who isn’t, and that he’s clearly very well-loved. He blushes at that and rubs the back of his neck.

She asks if he’s looking for the handsome brunet with a buzzcut, and his blush turns an adorable shade of tomato red. “How did you know?” he asks her. She replies that she just had a feeling.

A few minutes later, Eddie’s sent through the door with his kid in tow. They watch through the window as the men hug, not a half-hug like before, but a short yet sweet embrace. As they pull apart, Eddie takes a step back, and his hands ball into fists at his sides. Buck doesn’t notice, too distracted by the kid who’s now poking his face, trying to make sure he’s okay. The laugh Buck lets out is loud enough that they can hear it from the nurse's station.

The next day, when Buck is discharged, he hands his nurse a card. It’s got a big heart on the front, and inside is a message:

Thank you for taking care of my Buck!

Love,

Christopher Diaz

They send him home with a lot of chocolate pudding.

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This time, it’s Eddie who needs medical attention. There’s no gurney—he walks through the front doors, albeit shakily. Buck’s the only one with him, a panicked expression on his face as he flags down attention. Apparently the man’s gone and almost drowned. They should really start writing down all of the ways these two almost die—it would make a pretty interesting TV show.

There’s nothing too serious about his condition—mild hypothermia, some dehydration, and a few cuts and bruises. He’s only in with the doctor for a short while, during which time Buck is firmly planted in the waiting room, despite protests that he should go home and get some sleep. The blue-eyed firefighter leans back in the rock solid chair, looking like he’s lived a thousand lives. He glances up at the television in the waiting room which is playing the local news.

The nurses have all but learned to tune out the sounds of the ER—the screaming, the yelling, the groaning, the background noise. How would they ever get anything done if they stopped to listen to those sounds? Somehow, this time, something urges them to glance at the screen, maybe something raw in that man’s eyes, something jarring.

It’s a playback of the events of the past hour. Drone footage shows a child being rescued from a hole in the ground by a firefighter in heavy gear as rain batters down on them. The child’s mother holds onto him like a lifeline, thanking the men profusely. Suddenly, there’s a lightning strike and a plume of fire and the crane is toppling, taking the earth with it, sealing the hole like the gates of hell.

A moment passes before Buck—the one in the video—absolutely loses his mind. He launches himself at the ground and digs through the mud with his bare hands, screaming Eddie’s name over and over, until a man with a captain’s hat pulls him back onto his lap, allowing him to sob. The expression on his face is worse than haunting—it’s agonizing, it’s cataclysmic, it’s fatal.

When they look at the real Buck, the current Buck, he doesn’t look much better.

Someone changes the channel, which finally breaks his reverie. He looks around, trying to figure out who it could have been, but settles with staring at the screen thankfully. A cooking show is playing now, and he watches it carefully, studying, or maybe just distracting himself from the traumatic memory, but his leg never stops shaking.

It’s impossible to watch that footage and deny the love that is written painfully on Buck’s face, obvious as though the words I love Eddie Diaz were tattooed across his forehead.

When Eddie comes back, he doesn’t notice Buck’s state. He simply smiles at the other man and gives him two thumbs up, jovially sharing that he’s good to go home to his son. Buck claps him on the back—Glad to hear it, man—without letting on that he’s feeling anything, much less the raw suffering that was just on his face moments ago. He starts spewing fun facts, pinks at the cheeks when Eddie laughs at him, and never takes his eyes off the other man’s smiling face until they’re disappearing through the doors.

Those two firefighters are definitely head over heels in love.