Obitez

Doug had to keep a level head in all of this, he kept telling himself. 

Maddie had left. 

That much was pretty clear, by the way she hadn’t come home from her night shift that morning. And he tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, Maddie was scheduled to work in the ER that night, he knew those shifts could run over from time to time. So he got up that morning and went to the hospital, stopping at her favorite coffee shop along the way. He was going to give her a little treat as he offered to drive her home after her extended shift. 

Only when he walked into the ER and made eye contact with the charge nurse, he knew that Maddie wasn’t there. 

“Where’s Maddie?” he asked her, walking up to the nurses’ station and setting the coffee on the counter. 

The nurse shrugged her shoulders, turning away from him. “She clocked out about half an hour ago, must have just missed her.” 

“Then why does her phone show her still being here?” Doug asked, leaning over the counter slightly. 

She turned to him, leveling him with a glare. “How am I supposed to know?” she asked. “Maybe if you actually liked each other, she would text you.” 

Doug chuckled as he leant away from the counter, taking a step back and turning around, walking out of the building. He went back home, Maddoe’s car not on the driveway or in the garage and waited. 

This wouldn’t be the first time she thought about running away. This wouldn’t be the first time she actually tried to do it. But she always came back in less than twenty four hours. 

Though the next morning, Maddie still hadn’t come home. 

So… she had finally left him. And well, he couldn’t allow that. 

It wasn’t hard to figure out where Maddie had gone. 

Doug knew that she had left. Left more than just him and their house, but left the city and state altogether. 

She wouldn’t have gone to one of her coworkers’ houses, it would be all too easy for him to find her that way. She also wouldn’t have gone to her parents’ house. Despite her parents’ dislike for him, they did get along marginally well with his parents. 

So unless she had gone to some friend from college who moved out of state, and Doug highly doubted she did that, that left one person. 

Her brother, Evan Buckley. 

Unsurprisingly, Evan didn’t do much to hide his online presence. 

All Doug had to do was type a couple variations of his name into the instagram search, sort through the fifteen other Evan Buckley’s instagram brought up, to find the account named Evan ‘Buck’ Buckley. 

It wasn’t even made private. 

Once he found the account, it didn’t take Doug long to figure out where Buck was living now. A few of the most recent posts were him at his job as a firefighter. Scrolling down, there were a handful of pictures of him with a red headed woman, probably a girlfriend of some sort even though she looked a decade or two older than him. And then, scrolling down a little more, he found a post from what had to be Buck’s first day as a firefighter, him standing big and proud in front of a fire truck with the number 118 and letters LAFD on it. 

So a firefighter in Los Angeles, huh? 

A bit far away, Doug had to admit, but he had heard that the kid left home and went on one of the ‘self-discovery’ journeys over five years ago now, so it’s not that surprising he wound up on the other side of the country. 

And Doug had to admit that it was the perfect place for Maddie to go to. She probably thought he wouldn’t follow her all the way out there. If Doug was anyone else, he probably wouldn’t.

Arriving at the hospital, Buck was taken straight back into the ER. 

The staff took his vitals, and set up a bag of saline to go into his PICC line and start trying to hydrate him. 

Thankfully, the ride over to the ER hadn’t done anything to increase Buck’s temperature anymore, though it was still higher than Tommy would’ve liked it. 

And then to help with the pain in Buck’s leg, they gave Buck a small dose of morphine, which had a near immediate effect, making the lines of pain that had been on Buck’s face since Friday disappear in a couple of seconds. 

“A doctor will be by soon,” one of the nurses told Maddie and Tommy who were standing next to Buck’s bed.

Tommy sighed as he took a step closer to Buck’s bed, reaching out a hand and running it over Buck’s head. Buck was mostly asleep at this point due to the morphine, but he stirred just enough to turn into Tommy’s touch. Maddie sat down in one of the chairs in the ER cubicle, leaving one remaining chair for Tommy when he was ready.  

“We got him here now, he’ll be okay,” Maddie said. Tommy knew that she was saying that for mostly his benefit and relief. He just nodded, hoping that the doctors would be able to find something to help Buck, and quickly. 

One of the ER doctors had come in less than five minutes later. After retaking Buck’s vitals for himself, he called for a blood sample to test for a possible virus or infection that Buck could have picked up, just in case. 

“It’s only a precaution right now,” The doctor explained to Tommy and Maddie. “But we need to check in his case. For now until someone from oncology comes down, we’ll leave him on the morphine drip for the pain and saline to rehydrate him.” Tommy and Maddie nodded in understanding.

As they waited for the lab results to come back, Buck started to stir slightly. Tommy picked his head up to look at Buck in the bed, and he scooted his chair over. Once he was as close to Buck’s bed as he could be, he reached a hand up to grab hold of Buck’s.

It took about another hour for the lab results to come back and the doctor to return. The entire time, Buck was mostly asleep, stirring a handful of times but not enough to open his eyes. 

“From the lab results, there’s no signs of any infection or virus right now,” the doctor said, making both Maddie and Tommy let out sighs of relief.