eddie wakes up in the middle of the night to his phone ringing and his stomach is already sinking before he sees the name on the screen because it's not buck's ringtone. because the only person who could make a phone call in the middle of the night not terribly wrong is buck. buck forgetting that eddie isn't on the same 24-hour shifts with him anymore and calling him in the locker room to tell him about how crazy their last call was. buck remembering last minute about some wikipedia fact that he wants to make sure eddie told chris about, even though he already texted the article to chris. buck calling just because, just for, just a voice on the other end of the line who eddie uses to remember how to breathe, sometimes.
but it's not buck calling him, it's maddie, and there are no baseball bats in his room in el paso but he can feel the holes crumbling open in his walls anyways. he doesn't want to pick up the phone. he picks up the phone.
"eddie," maddie says, her voice strange and uncanny through hundreds of miles. he doesn't hear maddie's voice over the phone, unless he's facetiming with buck and she's in the background and buck tells her to say hi and she does, with a roll of her eyes and a smile caught in her voice shared between the two of them, the one that says hi, hello, what a ridiculous person it is that we love, what a wonderful thing it is to be loved by him.
her voice doesn't sound like that now. it's trembling, a little, shaky at the edges. the first responder worn down into something like a fissure in a shard of glass, and eddie is already prepared for the sharp edge to bleed him dry.
"maddie?" he says, because that's what you're supposed to say when you don't know already that the world is breaking in some way. because eddie is good at pressing the blindfold over his eyes and pretending he hasn't already tripped off a ledge into a long, long fall.
maddie inhales shakily over the line. "i-- i didn't want you to find out from the news," she says, then falls silent for a moment. "there was a call, and--"
and maddie is calling eddie now. in the middle of the night. maddie's face appeared on his phone screen, instead of the picture of buck smiling in his apron and glowing in the kitchen light. eddie knows. eddie doesn't want to know. he doesn't want to know.
"no," he says, and maddie's words falter, stop. the silence hangs between them, a blade hovering above his throat, the executioner's axe for every one of his sins. "no, maddie, don't--"
don't do this to me. not now, not here, not while my body is alive and breathing and his isn't. don't do this when my son is sleeping down the hall and has to wake up in a world where half of the world beneath his feet will suddenly be gone. don't do this when i can't crawl beneath his corpse. don't. don't. don't.
"eddie," maddie says again, and eddie wants to throw his phone at the wall like a child, make a world where the words won't come true if he never hears them.
"i can't," he gasps, and every breath is hitched, because the person who reminded him of how to breathe is not on the other end of the line.
"i'm sorry," maddie says, and there are real tears in her voice now, a sort of helplessness. she doesn't know how to help him through this. the person who does is not here. eddie has to do it himself, the way he's almost forgotten how to.
eddie closes his eyes, presses his hand over his mouth. maddie lets him shake for a moment, two.
her voice is gentle. "i'm sorry, eddie. bobby's gone."
and for a long, terrible second, all eddie can feel is the air rushing back into his lungs.
