Chapter Text
Buck’s been through a lot of shit in his life.
Crushed by a ladder truck, a very public tracheotomy, a pulmonary embolism, his parents, a fucking tsunami. Hell, he’s been struck by lightning and medically dead for over three minutes.
And yet, of all the ways his life could possibly go to shit, this wasn’t one he’d ever considered.
“It’s called retrograde amnesia,” his doctor says, as if she isn’t standing in a room full of first responders who already know exactly what that means. “In your case, Mr. Buckley, it appears to be post-traumatic retrograde amnesia. Your CT’s showed some slight swelling of the hippocampus immediately post-injury, but we’ve been monitoring that and it’s significantly decreased, but we’d like to get you back in for some more tests just in case.”
“Just in case of what?” Maddie pipes up from his bedside, the very same place she hasn’t left for hours now.
She’s got her hand wrapped tight around his own like she’s afraid if she gives him any leeway he might slip out of her grasp and drift away. If Buck’s honest with himself, he hadn’t even felt it there at first. But then again he hasn't felt much of anything since he first heard the words retrograde amnesia. He just feels kind of… numb.
Numb and a little bit sick, honestly.
“Mostly for monitoring purposes,” she says back, offering them a tight lipped smile that’s probably supposed to be reassuring considering that it’s coming from a doctor. It isn’t. “And for ruling things out now that there’s this new… development.”
Buck makes a noise in the back of his throat, a low, choked off rattle that sounds like something caught between a scoff and a disbelieving little laugh.
Development, right— she’d said it so fucking casually too, as if the word amnesia isn’t haunting him, as if it isn’t sitting on his chest and crushing him like a ten ton slab of concrete.
Buck doesn’t need to look around to see the half a dozen pairs of eyes on him, he can feel the weight of their gazes boring into him. “And then what?” he asks before the silence can start to feel too much like pity. “How do we fix–” he gestures vaguely at his head with a hand “–this.”
His doctor gives him a small, tightlipped smile that does nothing to calm the tropical storm brewing in his stomach. “There is no instant fix for retrograde amnesia; this isn’t a wound we can stitch up or a bone we can mend, it’s more complicated. Oftentimes it’s temporary and resolved within a few days once the brain has come to terms with the shock. Other times it can take longer.”
“How long?”
Buck thinks that might be Chimney, or maybe Bobby, he can’t quite tell, but the voice is deep and doesn’t waiver, it’s smooth despite the ringing that’s pitching up in his ears.
“It’s hard to say. Sometimes it can take days or weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years, sometimes–” she cuts herself off before she can voice it, but Buck doesn’t need her to finish. It’s clear enough.
Sometimes they never come back.
For the first time in his life he kind of feels like he wants to throw a tantrum about it. He wants to tell everybody to get out and pull the blanket up over his head so he can hide himself away and pretend that this isn’t happening, that he hasn’t lost god only knows how many years of his memories; the very things he’d always held so precious to him, the things that made him him.
It’s— it’s wildly unfair and— and it’s cruel.
Hell, even after Chimney’d had a rebar rod through his skull he’d walked away with his memories intact. Even after the bridge collapse and the fucking sniper, even after the relentless tidal wave of shit that never seems to stop coming at them, even after the blood loss and the broken bones and the shared concussions, they’d all walked away fine and now… now he gets this.
It feels like some kind of sick, cosmic joke from the universe and after everything he’s been through, after dying for fuck sake, a little bump on the head feels like it might be the thing that breaks him.
“Evan,” another deep voice that Buck can’t quite make out says. It cuts through the ringing and the beeping in his head that just seems to be getting louder and faster and more incessant and—
Oh.
That’s not in his head.
That’s his ECG machine; that’s his heart.
“I want to make it clear, Mr. Buckley,” his doctor says, a fickle attempt at distracting him from the rapid thumpthumpthump of his heart jackrabbiting. “We don’t know. Your memories— they might return tomorrow. You might wake up and they’ll be back, this could all just be a temporary consequence of your head injury, things like that aren’t uncommon. We shouldn’t panic yet, not if we can help it, that definitely won’t help your situation. All your initial scans showed no significant damage aside from a concussion, this is purely for monitoring purposes.”
It’s, well, not exactly reassuring, but it’s something that he can cling to, at least. It’s hope.
“So what do we do for now?” he asks, desperate.
“I think the most important initial thing to do is figure out how much you can remember. For all we know you might’ve just lost a few days or, perhaps, a few weeks at best.”
“And how do we do that?”
She gestures around the room with the hand that isn’t gripping onto her clipboard. “You’ve got all your best sources of information with you. Maybe they can help you figure out where to start.”
The hand that’s still holding his tightens and Buck looks up at his sister. The smile she gives him is reticent and terse and, even if he might have felt inclined to believe it, it’s marred by the tears in her eyes. Chimney’s at her side, hand on her waist, and Buck lets himself have a second to be relieved, to be beholden to him for being there for her, for making sure she doesn’t have to go through yet another of his life-altering medical emergencies by herself. At least she’s not alone in this.
Bobby’s at the foot of his bed, eyes strong and encouraging in the way they always are, in the way that only Bobby’s could be. It makes him think, for a second, that things might not turn out so bad. Hen hovers next to him, her face expressive. She’s never been good at hiding her feelings in situations like these and her furrowed brows and pinched lips do a good job at betraying how she really feels.
And then Buck’s eyes fall on him.
The man closest to the door has his arms folded across his chest, one hand clutching at his bicep like he’s trying to physically hold himself together, to stop himself from shaking apart at the seams. Buck can see the indents in his skin from where his fingers are digging in and he has to fight the urge to tell him to cut it out, to beckon him over and get him to drop his hands so that he’s not hurting himself.
Blue eyes meet his and soften, his shoulders dropping a little like Buck’s eyes on him alone is enough to melt the tension out of him, like candle wax melting near a flame. He’s— Buck isn’t blind, okay— he’s attractive. He’s all muscle and hard edges, jawline sharp and accentuated by the cleft in his chin that Buck has the urge to put his thumb on and see just how well it fits in the little dip there. He gets a small, vigilant, smile and, fuck, now there’s a dimple in his cheek too.
Hen breaks the silence and Buck makes himself look away. “Do you remember how you ended up here? Like, what caused it?” she asks.
Buck purses his lips and tries to remember.
He can’t.
“Do you remember the lightning strike?” Maddie asks.
Chimney doesn’t wait before he chimes in with an untoward “oh, do you remember the bees?”
Hen perks up. “Right, and Gerrard?”
It’s like a whirlwind of information rushing at him all at once, overwhelming and tangible enough to make his head spin. It feels like he can recall some of it, if he really tries, but then he’s trying to recall something else and that memory slips from his grasp before he can grab it and latch on and it’s— it’s fucking frustrating, is what it is.
“Oh! How about—”
“Guys,” the same gruff voice that’d called his name earlier interrupts. The man near the doorway takes a minute step forward and, though Buck gets the feeling that he might want to, doesn’t shrink under the weight of six pairs of eyes descending on him. “You’re freaking him out. I think only one of us should ask.”
It throws him for a loop somewhat, that this man can read him well enough to know that the questioning had set him on a knife’s edge that was already threatening to topple over.
“Go ahead,” Bobby urges with a wave of his hand.
The man shakes his head, lips turning down into something that resembles a frown, and Buck makes a small, dejected noise in the back of his throat that only he (and maybe Maddie) hears.
“No,” he says, voice smaller than it had been. “No it should be someone who’s been with him through everything. One of you guys.” He pauses for a second, assessing eyes landing on Maddie, Chimney, Hen, and then Bobby, before he seems to decide. “Bobby, you do it. He’ll stay calmest if it comes from you.”
“ He's still in the room,” Buck protests, a petulant frown on his lips.
The thing is, he’s not wrong, Buck knows himself well enough to know that. Bobby’s the best choice at keeping him calm; Bobby’s always been the one who could keep him calm best, he’s been the niggling little voice in the back of Buck’s head that reprimands him whenever he’s about to do something stupid and gives him pause, the surrogate father that, in another universe, he might deserve. Apparently this man knows him well enough to understand that and Buck can’t quite figure out how the fuck he knows and it’s driving him a little crazy.
“Alright,” Bobby says, cutting his thoughts off before they can start to really spiral. He thinks for a second before he asks: “Buck, do you remember the lightning strike?”
That one’s easy, a no brainer. “I think it’d be a little hard for even me to forget the time I died, Cap.”
A small chuckle crescendos through the room.
“Alright, that’s good. What about what Chim mentioned? Can you remember the incident with the bees? And Gerrard being captain?”
“Gerrard was captain?” Buck asks, eyebrows furrowing in confusion. Adrenaline shoots through him, spikes the ECG up again and makes him sit up a little straighter. “Did something happen to you, Bobby? Why was Gerrard captain?”
“I’m fine, I’m good, kid,” he says. It doesn’t sound like a lie, but it doesn’t exactly read as the full truth either. There’s a story there, one he feels desperate to know, like an itch under his skin that he can’t quite get deep enough to scratch, but Bobby’s carrying on before he can push it any further. “Can you remember Chim and Maddie’s wedding?”
That one’s harder.
It feels like something he should remember. His big sister's wedding should be a huge deal, but, try as he might, he can’t recall it. Sure enough, when he looks down at Maddie’s hand in his, there’s a new ring on her finger.
“I remember the engagement,” he tries, a compromise. “I remember you got the ring stuck and you wouldn’t let me cut it off—”
“—it was my engagement ring, Buck—”
“—but no. I don’t think… I can’t remember the wedding.” He takes a second to look up at Maddie, offering her a small smile. “Was it good?”
She laughs, a bright, chipper sound; it’s the kind of sound that makes him feel like everything’s going to turn out okay. “It was eventful, that’s for sure.”
“Alright, we’ll go back a little more,” Bobby hums. “What about the cruise ship? Do you remember anything about that?”
There’s something vague and familiar about a cruise ship rattling around his head but it doesn’t feel like anything significant, it doesn’t feel like something that’s worth bringing up on its own. “You mean the one you and Athena went on?”
Bobby nods, hopeful.
“Yeah, I remember you leaving.”
“And the ship?” Bobby presses, voice tight. “Do you remember the ship?”
He shakes his head, no.
“Evan,” the voice from earlier calls.
Buck’s attention goes to him willingly, eagerly, like it’s natural, like it’s instinct, and the rest of the room follows suit.
“Evan, do you know who I am?” he asks. The muscles in his cheek jump and twitch like he’s grinding his teeth and clenching his jaw, bracing himself for an inevitable impact.
Buck blinks at him, eyes searching. “Should I?”
The room falls deathly silent.
The clock on the wall stops ticking, the chatter outside the room drifts away, hell, he thinks maybe people stop so much as breathing in the damn room for a few seconds. Maddie’s hand grips his tight enough to bruise and a small hitch of breath by his side is the first thing he hears.
The man looks at him for a beat, shoulders tensing back up to match the set of his jaw. He looks like he wants to say something, like he’s dying to, but then he just turns on his heel and darts out of the room like he can’t quite bear to be in it any longer.
“Tommy!” Chimney calls from beside Maddie. His hand drops from her waist and he darts around the bed, only swearing the once when he stumbles over his own feet, before following him out of the room.
Buck tries to watch them from between the half-drawn blinds. He thinks he can see Chimney’s hand on the man’s— on what must be Tommy’s, his brain supplies rather unhelpfully— shoulder, and then he’s pulling him in for a hug. The man— Tommy— goes willingly, like all the fight’s been drained out of him, and he clings to him like Chimney’s now the only thing holding him up on his feet.
Chimney’s eyes meet his through the blinds and then he’s ushering the two of them down the hall and out of sight and Buck feels strangely disappointed by their loss. His thumb strokes across Maddie’s knuckles and, yeah, that must be it. He doesn’t like the thought of her going through this alone without her now apparent husband beside her.
The room stays silent for a long few seconds even after they’re gone and Buck kind of feels like he’s got one foot hanging off of the ledge of a building. It's like he’s missing out on something huge and incredibly important that everybody except him seems to be clued in on.
“What?” he asks, shifting uncomfortably on the bed.
“Hey,” Maddie says, calling his attention. “Do you really not know who that is?”
Panic swells in his chest, deep and consuming and he thinks he might throw up about it. It’s someone he should know then— fuck.
“No,” he says despite the taste of bile rising up in his throat. “Should I? Who is he? He’s important to me?”
“Buck that’s—” a pause, a breath, Buck feels like he’s balancing on a knife's edge that’s one wrong move away from toppling, “—that’s Tommy. He’s your boyfriend.”
-
So.
He has a boyfriend.
Which is fine! It’s cool. He’s not like— homophobic or anything. He’s an ally! He’s always been an ally! Pride month emoji in his bios and all!
Except now, apparently, he’s more than that.
And according to Maddie and the others he’s been more than that for quite some time now. They’re all reluctant to put a definitive timeframe on his relationship with Tommy, either insisting that it’s complicated, or not their place, or that they don’t even exactly know, which, quite honestly, Buck thinks is bullshit.
He has a boyfriend— he has a hot boyfriend— there’s no way that not a single one of them doesn’t know how long he’s had him for. There’s no way Buck wouldn’t be screaming about it from the rooftops if he landed someone who looked like he’d been carved out of marble and could fly helicopters into freaking hurricanes. It’s just not possible.
Unless…
Oh god, what if he’s a bad boyfriend?
What if he’d kept them a secret and forced Tommy in the closet with him or something? What if he’d freaked out and hidden them and that’s why nobody knows how long they’ve been together? That’s not— Buck doesn’t think he’d treat a boyfriend like that, but yesterday he didn’t think he’d have a boyfriend at all, so maybe he doesn’t know himself half as well as he thinks he does. Maybe he is an asshole. Maybe Tommy’s only with him out of obligation because he’s a good guy and Buck’s an asshole but he’s too nice to say anything. Oh god, what if—
The door swings open and Buck’s spiralling is halted in its tracks.
“Hey,” the guy— Tommy— says from where he’s frozen in the entryway, hand curled tight around the doorknob.
He looks… he looks good, though he’s carrying around an air of exhaustion with him like a reaper hanging around for an end of life patient. It doesn’t suit him, he should be smiling. Buck wants to make him smile. There’s a dimple hiding on that face somewhere that he wants to coax out.
“Hey,” he says back.
“I thought you’d be resting.”
Buck hums and waves a dismissive hand. “Doctor Flannigan told me to stay awake, I think she’s worried I might start bleeding internally or slip into a coma or something if I close my eyes.”
It's a morbid joke, but it’s how they cope. After Chimney had been impaled by a rebar rod, he’d made Final Destination jokes for weeks. When he first came back to work whenever there was a problem he would sigh dramatically and announce ‘boy, I need this like a hole in the head’ and wait with baited breath for the groans and laughter that it got him.
He’d researched it once— the prevalence of gallows humour in first responders. It's easier to laugh at the presence of the gallows than live in fear of it, especially for those who haunt the place constantly.
Still, Buck half expects to be chastised for it.
After the lightning strike whenever he’d cracked a joke about it his parents would sigh in condemnation and give him a pointed look coupled with an even more disappointed “Evan!” Even now Maddie still swats at him when he makes a comment about it that’s a little too morbid for her taste.
“Anything to get out of your night shift,” Tommy quips back at him, just as playful.
Buck sits up a little straighter at the retort, shuffling himself up on the bed until he’s mostly upright and propped up by pillows. It’s not that he’s shocked by the reply, more so that it was just unexpected, is all. Maddie had filled him in somewhat and thrown him a few scraps of information about Tommy when he’d probed at her for details. She’d kept it simple and brief, though, worried about disrupting or influencing any of his memories, but from what she had told him, it makes sense. Firefighter, pilot, veteran— it doesn’t surprise him that Tommy’s just as content as he is to hang around the gallows.
“For the love of god, please don’t sell me out to Bobby,” he adds, serving up his own swing in this morbid game of tennis that they’re playing.
“Your secret’s safe with me.”
Buck smiles at him, all teeth and lips stretched thin, and he gets one back— and there’s that dimple again.
It’s the first time he’s seen Tommy properly smile; he’d been understandably somber and quiet earlier, his face drawn into a frown and the sharp edges of his jawline flexing from where he’d been grinding his teeth together. But now, like this, Buck finds himself a little bit obsessed with it; with the way Tommy’s nose crinkles up, the slight squint around his eyes, the way he looks so much younger and softer as the tension bleeds out of his face, that damn dimple.
He loves making people happy, he lives for it, in fact, and Tommy, it seems, is no exception to that.
“Where is everyone?” Tommy asks before he can think of a comeback, walking in and glancing around the room like he expects someone to jump out and scream surprise! at him.
“Bobby’s sorting out temporary cover for my shifts,” he starts, gut twisting with guilt— he hates the idea that anybody else will have to go out of their way because he can’t pull his weight. “Hen had to go check on the kids so Karen could get to work, I don’t exactly know where Chim disappeared to, I’m sure he’s around somewhere, and Maddie said she had to go to the bathroom. I think that’s just her alibi, though. I saw her trailing after a nurse a little while ago, I’m sure she’s hounding them for my scan results.” Buck meets Tommy’s eyes and holds them. “And you’re here.”
Tommy’s lips turn down for a second, brief enough that it would have been easy to miss if nobody was paying any attention to him. But Buck was— he is.
“I can go if you want,” Tommy offers sheepishly. “Leave you to get some rest.”
Logic would tell him that that’s the rational thing to do. He doesn’t know this man, it’s as good as having a stranger by his bedside.
Except it’s not.
That’s not how it feels.
Tommy doesn’t feel like a stranger; his presence is warm, comforting, and Buck feels less like a pitied lab rat alone with him in this room than he has since he woke up.
“No,” he says, the beeping on the ECG machine he’s hooked up to quickening ever so slightly. Tommy’s eyes flicker to it and Buck feels crimson start to taint his cheeks. “I don’t want you to go.”
Unconvinced baby blue eyes meet his. “Are you sure?”
Buck nods. “I’m sure.”
“If you change your mind—“
“—I’ll tell you to get lost. Now can you please, I don’t know, sit or something? Your hovering is spiking my blood pressure.”
Tommy rolls his eyes and huffs out a breath of air between his lips but he gives in and manoeuvres the bedside chair around until he can drop down in it, facing Buck. It should make him feel jittery, being under the perception of a man he knows the name and a few tidbits of information about; he’s always been a social person but strangers by his bedside is never something he’s been comfortable with. Hell, he’d barely even been comfortable with his parents fretting by his side, this should feel weird, it should feel wrong. But instead it’s just…
It’s shockingly unshocking how comfortable he seems to be with Tommy’s presence.
It seems to hit them both at once that they’ve been sitting in silence for much longer than should be comfortable and, when Buck opens his mouth to speak, Tommy matches him, the two of them echoing that first syllable throughout the room.
“I—”
“So—”
They both pause and look at each other for a few beats of silence, and then they’re breaking out into matching smiles and a single, soft breathy exhale of laughter slips from them both. It’s incredibly domestic and familiar for someone who is as good as a stranger to him.
“You go,” Buck insists.
Tommy seems to take pity on him because he doesn’t protest when he says, “I was just going to ask if anything’s come back to you yet.”
Buck’s stomach swoops in something he can’t quite put a name to— disappointment, maybe? Or guilt? Or maybe it’s just the fact he hasn’t eaten in god only knows how many hours and he was promised something, anything that he still hasn’t been given and he’s starving.
“No,” he admits, shoulder slumping.
Disappointment flashes across Tommy’s face and Buck might not know him, but he’s familiar enough with that emotion to know what it looks like, what it feels like, only this must be on another level entirely.
“I’m sorry,” he says, hunching in on himself like if he makes himself small enough, this bed might just swallow him whole.
Tommy schools his face into something neutral and leans back in the chair. “Why are you apologising?”
“Well, because I can’t remember, I mean I—”
“—that’s not your fault, you don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
Buck wants to protest, he really really does, he’s so used to apologising and trying to fix things and making everything better and it’s killing him that there’s nothing he can do to fix this.
“It’s not like you lost your memories on purpose,” Tommy acquiesces. “And I know if you had the chance you’d want them back. I don’t blame you, Evan.”
God, and there he goes using that stupid name of his again. Buck should hate it, he’s hated it for so fucking long, but when Tommy says it it doesn’t feel like he’s talking about a different person entirely, he says it and it drips from his lips all sickly sweet like honey. He says it like he doesn’t look at him and see the war between Buck and Evan that he’s been battling for years; he says it like he’s telling Buck that it’s safe to put down his sword, that he doesn’t have to fight between them anymore. That he can be both, that he is both. He says it like he’s a safe place for Buck to retreat to.
He should ask him about it.
He doesn’t.
“Still—” Buck starts, fiddling with the scratchy hospital blanket between his fingers, “—I know this can’t be easy on you. I don’t know what I’d be doing if…”
“If you were me?” Tommy finishes for him, one eyebrow raised.
Buck cringes a little at the abruptness of it but nods nonetheless. “Yeah, if I were you.”
“I’m—“ he pauses, jaw clenching in the same way it had earlier and Buck is torn between wanting to reprimand him for grinding his teeth, and wanting to watch the way the muscles in his face jump and twitch and pull taut, “—hanging in there.”
It’s a lie.
It’s such a lie and Buck has no idea how he knows it is, but he knows it is.
There’s dark circles under his eyes and a small, red mark on the plumpest part of his lip that’s too neatly shaped to be anything other than the imprint of teeth worrying into flesh. When Buck’s eyes drift, he catches sight of the way Tommy’s scratching at the skin around his thumb almost absentmindedly— it’s probably only the years of pilot training and military precision that’s keeping his leg from bouncing a hole into the floor. He’s not hanging in there at all; he looks like he’s about three minutes and one more piece of bad news away from going thermonuclear and taking the entire hospital down with him Godzilla style.
“I think I saw that motivational poster at my orthodontist's office one time,” he hums, a pitiful attempt at cutting through the fog of tension that’s starting to roll into the room.
Tommy’s fingers still and the air shifts to something lighter, easier. “Yeah, it’s the one with the cat hanging onto a tree branch they plaster on the ceiling and force you to stare at.” His eyebrows draw together and his voice shifts into something deeper and bitchier, and Buck is enthralled by him. “Because that’s what I want to look at when I’m an hour deep into a root canal.”
“I think it’s supposed to be inspirational or something.”
“Yeah, well. Whoever made it has clearly never had to rescue a pissed off, bloodthirsty maine coon from an even more pissed off and bloodthirsty neighbor's tree in the middle of a property dispute. That should count as some kind of warfare.”
Buck hums, amused and fond. There’s a story here he probably already knows but he wants to hear it again. “Bloodthirsty?”
“Bloodthirsty,” Tommy confirms, dead serious.
It makes him smile— really smile— and if he wasn’t still hooked up to a, quite frankly, ridiculous amount of medical equipment, he could almost forget about the whole amnesia thing.
“You were lucky to escape with your life,” he says, teasing.
“It was almost thirty pounds of fur and fury, Evan,” Tommy counters. “I’ve seen tigers with less primal rage than that thing.”
The laugh that slips past his lips is entirely involuntary, but it’s warm and it’s comforting so he lets himself fall into it— into Tommy’s deadpan humour that’s laced with bitchiness and sarcasm— and it doesn’t scare him when he starts to sink.
It’s absurd timing with everything he’s got going on, but the conversation’s sent his brain running and now all he can think about is whether or not a damn maine coon has ever killed a person and his phone is god knows where and he can’t scratch the itch that’s festering under his skin. He needs to know or this is the only thing he’s going to be thinking about whilst he’s stuck in this stupid bed, in this stupid hospital, with his stupid broken brain, and no stupid memories that he can make himself remember and—
“It hasn’t,” Tommy pipes up from the chair. He’s slumped back in it a little now, his hands tucked into the pocket of his LAFD zip up hoodie.
“What hasn’t?”
“A maine coon has never killed anyone before, at least, not since the last time you checked.”
Buck blinks at him, a little confused and a lot dumbfounded because how the hell did he know—
“Sorry, you were making that face.”
“I was making a face?”
Tommy hums in affirmation. “It’s the one you get when you’re thinking too hard about something and you need to know right now or you’ll get restless.”
He’s never been known like that before, never been perceived in the kind of way that Tommy seems to perceive him and it’s— it’s unnerving, to say the least. He’s not used to it; he has no idea what to do with it.
The silence stretches on long enough that Tommy seems to think he’s fucked up, that he’s put his foot in it, and he sits up a little straighter, the line of his shoulders tense and so fucking broad, god. “You told me about it the last time we had this conversation. I know more about owner-pet mortality rates than I ever thought I’d be comfortable knowing. Maybe that’s why I never got a dog.”
He’s deflecting; Buck might be an amnesiac, but he’s not stupid, he’s done enough of it himself to recognise a deflection when he sees one. He gets the sense that it’s something Tommy’s very familiar with too.
There’s an obvious elephant in the room that Tommy doesn’t seem willing to broach first. He can see it in the easy way they fall into conversation, in the way Tommy’s eyes keep falling on him and softening, in the way he keeps moving to say something and then instantly second guessing himself. It’s like he’s walking a tightrope without a wire or a safety net and he’s scared to even put one foot in front of the other in case he trips and falls and takes them both down with him.
Tommy gives him a small, terse smile and shifts to the edge of the chair like he’s about to leave. “Anyway—“
Buck cuts him off abruptly, desperately, the hollow pit in his stomach widening at the thought of Tommy leaving, of being alone in this room again. “Maddie told me about us.”
Well.
There goes that elephant.
Tommy goes still on the edge of his seat, his spine rigid, and Buck has to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from smiling when his eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. “Maddie told you what, exactly?”
“That we’re,” Buck pauses, gesturing between the two of them with his index finger, “you know. A thing.”
Tommy huffs out a bemused little sound that might be a laugh and Buck can’t help but think againagainagain. “A thing?”
Okay, not exactly his smoothest moment, but still.
“Yeah, a thing,” Buck echoes, putting even more emphasis on the word. “Together. A couple. Boyfriends.”
“Right,” Tommy nods, lacing his fingers together and resting his clasped hands palm-to-palm in his lap. “And how do you feel about that?”
And that’s… not the question he’d been anticipating, honestly, it’s not even a question he’d considered that much until now. Maybe he should be shocked, he’d been straight yesterday and now he's, what? Gay? Bisexual? Queer? Does he even have a label? God, is that even how it works? He knows sexuality isn’t something that can just be changed, that it’s innate, that you’re born with it, and sure, he’s appreciated a hot guy’s ass before, and he’s undoubtedly attracted to Tommy— Tommy with his chiseled jaw and broad shoulders and baby blue eyes and that damn cleft in his chin and, god, that dimple in his cheek.
Yeah, maybe he should be shocked, and maybe somewhere in his head he is, but it doesn’t feel bad. It feels like a revelation, and maybe a little bit freeing. It feels silly and cliche to say, but he kind of feels like he’s living a truth he hadn’t realised was his before, like a weight he didn’t know he’d been shouldering is finally gone.
“I’m good,” Buck finally settles on because yeah. Yeah he is. “I’m really good.”
Tommy gives him a little smile, caught somewhere between dumbfounded and pleasant surprise like he hadn’t been expecting an answer that positive. “Then I guess that’s good.”
Still, Buck can see the tension he’s holding and he’s never been one to bite his tongue. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course. Anything.”
“Maddie and the others… why don’t they know how long we’ve been together?”
Tommy shifts in his chair uncomfortably, fingers clasping and unclasping at each other and— oh god, Buck had been right, hadn’t he?
“Am I a bad boyfriend? Did I like— did I keep you in the closet or something?” he asks, guilt settling in his bones.
“Oh god, no, Evan,” Tommy insists, shuffling to the very edge of the seat and resting his palm on Buck’s arm.
It’s the first time he’s touched him and that point of contact alone makes him feel like he’s been struck by lightning all over again. Buck’s arm prickles into goosebumps, the skin under Tommy’s palm warm where it’s blanketed by the heavy weight of it— god, how had he never questioned men before?
“It’s nothing like that. You’re a good boyfriend. You're funny, and sweet, incredibly charming and gorgeous even if you do move a little fast.” There’s a story there for sure, but Buck doesn’t think now’s the time to push on that particular wound. “You’re good to me. You’re good for me.”
“So why don’t they know?” he asks because this… this is a wound he feels comfortable pushing on.
“It’s—”
“—God help me, Tommy, if you say complicated!”
Tommy shuts his mouth abruptly, teeth clacking together with the force of it and, yeah, that’s exactly the answer he was about to get and Buck has no idea how it can be complicated.
“I don’t know what else to say because it is,” Tommy insists. “Or it was, at least. I just,” he cuts himself off with a sigh. “I don’t want to force anything back for you, and I don’t think it’d be good for you to hear secondhand memories from somebody else, least of all me. I think you should let them come back on their own.”
“And if they don’t?” Buck asks, voice quivering. It’s the one thing he’s wanted to ask since he heard 'retrograde amnesia' all those hours ago.
The idea of them not coming back— of him losing a part of himself that he’ll never even be able to remember losing, that he’ll never get the chance to know what it is he’s lost— is suffocating. He feels like he’s got cinder blocks tied to his feet and he’s been thrown overboard, left to flounder and gasp in a desperate battle for air that he has no hope of winning.
“Oh, Evan.” Tommy says his name so softly, like the weight of it in his mouth is something he treasures. “They will.”
“You can’t know that, Tommy, you can’t—”
Tommy pushes himself up from his chair and moves to stand flush by his bedside, eyes dark and desperate and intense. The hand on his arm tightens, a reassuring squeeze, and the other comes up to cup his cheek.
“I can,” he says, thumb brushing over his cheekbone and Buck has to smother the urge to whine at the tenderness of it all. “Evan, there is nobody I know in this world that’s more stubborn than you, and I mean that as a compliment. I know you’ll get them back because there isn’t a world where you’ll accept losing them forever, where you’ll be content with having this—” Tommy pauses for two beeps of his heart from the monitor, grappling with the words he wants to say, before he marches onwards, “—this gap of nothing for the rest of your life. I won’t be surprised if you start remembering things out of sheer force of will and spite alone.”
Tommy gives him a smile, a soft, private one that makes Buck want to believe in what he’s saying; that makes him think that maybe, impossibly, things might actually be alright.
“You’ll be okay because that’s what you do. You always bounce back, and it might take a little more effort this time around, but you will. I’ve seen you come back from so much worse than this and I’m…” Tommy sucks in a shaky little breath of air, “I’m not going anywhere.”
They’re close— they’re so close— it wouldn’t take much at all for Buck to bring his hand up to Tommy’s face, to cup his jaw and get his thumb in that damn cleft and bring him in for a kiss. It’d just be another kiss for Tommy, something that they probably do on a daily basis considering that they’re dating, but it’d be their first for him, at least for now.
“Tommy,” Buck exhales, voice existing somewhere between a plea and a whimper and then—
And then the door to his room swings open and there are shoes squeaking against the linoleum, announcing the arrival of another person, and Tommy’s ripping himself away from him like he’s been burned, like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. It would be amusing, the little deer-in-headlights, kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar, kind of look on his face if Buck didn’t already miss the warmth of his hands and the reassuring weight of his presence by his side.
“Sorry,” Maddie says from where she’s frozen in the doorway, her hand curled around the doorframe where she’d pushed it open, a mirror image of the way Tommy had looked earlier. Her eyes dart between the two of them, calculating. “Am I interrupting?”
Yes, Buck thinks.
“No,” Tommy voices for the both of them. He clears his throat a little awkwardly and steps away from Buck’s bedside, gesturing for Maddie to take the chair because of-fucking-course he’s a gentlemen. He probably pulls Buck’s chair out for him when they have dinner and insists on holding the door open for him, probably lays his fucking jacket on the ground so Buck never has to step in a puddle or something insane and cliche and romantic like that.
It’s stupidly attractive.
God, how had he ever thought he was straight?
“Any change?” Maddie asks, slipping into the chair and giving Buck her full attention.
“No, nothing yet,” Buck answers, watching as Tommy puts some distance between him and his sister, maneuvering his way through the room to stand by the other side of his bed. There’s something there he feels like he should question, should push on, but Tommy settles in and gives him a small, reassuring smile, so he drops it for now, content to leave that bruise alone.
“Did you manage to accost my nurse into giving you any answers?” he hums, playful even as his sister shoots a glare his way.
“I was not accosting her,” Maddie insists, stubborn. “But no. I lost her somewhere around the third floor.”
Buck rolls his eyes fondly and extends his hand for her to hold. It’s a trivial action, one they do all the time, but it still carries the weight of over three decades of love and warmth and comfort and they both ease up a little at the contact— it’s just as reassuring for Maddie as it is for him. The silence they lapse into isn't exactly awkward, but it’s a few streets away from the comfortable silence he’d fallen into with Tommy when they were alone.
“Hey guys,” Bobby says, stepping over the threshold and into the room a minute or so later, breaking the silence they’d lapsed into, thank god. “Look who I found.”
Dr. Flannigan strolls in behind him like this is just a casual day at work for her, like she’s not the single person in this hospital with answers, with the missing piece of the puzzle that his brain is screaming for. Maddie huffs by his side, a little disgruntled that her efforts chasing around nurses had clearly been for nought. He loves her so much.
“Mr. Buckley,” she says, and her smile doesn’t feel as forced as it had this morning. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ll let you know when I remember,” Buck jokes. Hey, if he has to live at the gallows, there’s no reason why everybody can’t visit him here too.
Maddie swats at his arm lightly but by his other side Buck notices the way Tommy’s hand comes up to cover his mouth like he’s trying to hide his smile behind it. It makes him preen, makes him want to stretch out and bathe in the feeling like a cat lounging in a sunbeam.
“Well the good news is,” Dr. Flannigan begins, flipping through his chart with the precision only a doctor can. “Your scans are all clear. There’s no sign of damage, no indication of subdural hematoma, and all your swelling’s gone down to normal levels, you appear to just have a concussion. I’d say you’ve been very lucky, given the circumstances.”
Lucky, right.
With a boyfriend he doesn’t remember getting, a sister who’s wedding he can’t remember going to, and a room full of people who keep side-eyeing him like he’s one more piece of bad news away from tipping over the edge.
But sure, he’s lucky.
“Has—“
Buck cuts her off with a sigh. “No, there hasn’t been any change, no, I can’t remember anything, yes I would like to go home now.”
“Is that safe?” Bobby asks, standing up a little straighter. “Can he be left alone like this?”
Dr. Flannigan’s eyes shift to face him. “Well, that brings me to my next point.”
It makes Buck bristle, the way they’re talking between each other like he’s not even in the room, like he’s some kind of afterthought; a ghost haunting his own gallows.
He catches sight of Tommy shifting somewhat in his periphery and when he looks up at him, he finds blue eyes already looking back at him like he knows exactly what he’s thinking. The smile he gets is small, a barely there quirk of his lips, but it’s enough to dissuade the churning in his stomach at least for now.
“Obviously, given the concussion, it’s not advisable for Mr. Buckley to be alone for the next few days–” she pauses, glancing around the room briefly, “–I assume with the amount of family you had here in the last day that that's not going to be a problem.”
“It won’t be,” Maddie assures, squeezing his hand tight.
“And my memories?” Buck asks because he needs to know. “What about them?”
“I wish it were as simple as an easy fix, but the truth is we don’t know enough about amnesia and its effects on the brain to have a homogenous cure.” There’s a pause for a second whilst his doctor lets that hang in the air, whilst she lets him absorb and process it. “What I can recommend, though, is keeping your routine as close to how it was before. I know, obviously, you won’t remember much of it, but I’m sure your family will be able to help you with that. Keeping up with a routine, following the same kinds of patterns, sticking to your version of normalcy, those kinds of things should, hopefully, ease your brain back into remembering.”
“Normal,” he echoes, lulled somewhat by the feeling of Maddie rubbing circles into the back of his hand with her thumb. “So you mean like, work and—”
“Yeah, nice try, Buck,” Bobby says by the foot of his bed, one eyebrow cocked in fond judgement. “You already have the next few weeks booked off whilst you recover. We’ll reassess as we go.”
Buck sighs and throws his head back against the pillows, glaring up petulantly at the ceiling. One of the tiles is coming loose in the corner and he stares at the gap it makes.
“Great,” he huffs, already feeling the telltale signs of restlessness and boredom clawing at his skin. It won’t be long until it reaches his veins and permeates his blood and then he really will be screwed. “So who’s drawn the short straw then?”
Maddie and Bobby exchange a look with each other— when the hell had the two of them learned to talk in looks?— and lapse into silence. Bobby raises an eyebrow, Maddie cocks her head and purses her lips and Buck, well, Buck kind of wants to scream.
“It’s fine, you know?” he snaps at them, irritability simmering over like a pot on the boil. “I don’t need a babysitter, it’s just a concussion, I can take care of myself.”
Dr. Flannigan arches an eyebrow and looks between the four of them. He's seen enough doctors to know that look. It’s the kind of look that means he does need a babysitter and he will be getting one if he wants any chance at going home in the next few hours.
“It’s not that,” Maddie says. “Like your doctor said, we’re supposed to be keeping things normal and avoiding things that could be overwhelming and, well, it’s just,” she stops, takes a breath like she’s composing herself, and then turns back to look at him, face stern and serious. “You haven’t exactly been spending your time at home recently.”
Buck’s eyebrows draw together in confusion. If he’s not at his home, then where the hell is he?
Maddie’s eyes dart over his shoulder to the last figure in the room and Buck follows them until his gaze drops on— oh.
Of course it’s Tommy, that makes sense.
Tommy gives him a tight lipped smile and a semi-awkward wave of his hand. He’s so fucking endearing and charming and attractive and the thought of living in close quarters with him is both thrilling and nerve wracking. There’s something about Tommy that just makes him feel so… just so. That’s the only way he really knows how to describe it.
Tommy stirs up a litany of feelings in him that he can’t quite name. He makes him feel nervous, like he’s a kid with a crush again, and Buck wants to sink his teeth into that feeling and shake it around like a dog with a stuffed toy. He makes him feel a lot and he makes him feel all of it at once and it’s just so much.
The room is quiet and he knows he’s being given an out, that all he’d have to do is shift uncomfortably, or make a comment, or breathe in the wrong kind of way and all of them, Tommy especially, would be clambering over each other to find somewhere else for him. They’d all be fighting to rearrange their lives and find a place for him to slot in, but the longer the silence goes on, the more that thought is entirely unappealing to him.
He doesn’t want another place.
He wants his memories and he wants this unfamiliar aura of comfort and calm that Tommy brings him whenever they’re alone together.
Buck looks up at him, searches his eyes for a few seconds before he gives him a lopsided smile.
“How do you feel about having a roommate?”