SHARKBOY305

Giggles madly... I do what I want. For @thecarrottt, who wanted Hoodie vibes and @chimneyschewinggum, who asked about the lightning strike...

 Sal’s working a multi-car pile-up a few blocks over when the call crackles through, ‘lightning strike, firefighter down.’ Sal’s gut drops before dispatch even says the name. He’s barking orders, but his lieutenant shoves the keys to the SUV into his hand and orders, “Go. We’ve got this.” Sal doesn’t argue. He pulls up to the scene just as they’re loading Buck into the ambulance, blond hair matted with rain and blood, body limp in the rain-slick turnout gear. Sal doesn’t ask permission; he just climbs in, knees hitting the floor beside the gurney. Eddie’s already doing compressions, face tight with grief. Sal grips Buck’s cold hand the whole ride. “Don’t you dare tap out on us, mook. Not after you finally let us keep you.” He doesn’t realize he’s shaking until a paramedic tries to check his vitals. Meanwhile, Bobby’s on the phone with Tommy because Sal literally can’t form words when they finally reach the hospital, but he hears Bobby’s voice shatters as he tells Tommy. “Evan’s down.”

Tommy’s mid-sortie when the call comes through, but he lands the chopper hard enough to make his head mechanic yell after him as Tommy sprints for his truck and breaks every speed limit getting to Cedars. By the time he burst into the waiting room, Sal’s pacing with Buck’s LAFD shirt they cut off him clutched in white knuckles. Tommy doesn’t say much; he just pulls Sal into a crushing hug right there in front of the whole 118, then sinks into the chair beside him. When Sal won’t stop shaking, muttering about three minutes and seventeen seconds, brain damage. Tommy goes out to his truck and comes back with one of Buck’s hoodies and tosses it at his husband. The waiting is brutal. Every beep of a machine, every update from the doctors, chips away at the stability they’ve built these last few years. Sal mutters at one point about how Buck was finally sleeping through the night without nightmares about the truck bombing.

Buck wakes up in their bedroom, the one with the wide bed they picked out to fit all three of them, the big windows looking out on the backyard where Gremlin likes to hunt leaves. Except Sal and Tommy aren’t there. The house is too quiet. He looks over lesson plans and smooths a hand over a soft green teacher’s sweater; there are no bombing scars on his leg, no calluses from years on the job. His parents actually see him. Maddie is safe and happy. Daniel is alive, thriving, and the whole Buckley family feels healed. They have weekly Friday dinners. It should be perfect. It should be everything he once wanted. But the house keeps glitching. There are three toothbrushes in the bathroom. A half-finished grocery list in Sal’s handwriting on the kitchen counter (“oat milk for the giant child, rocky road for Tommy, do not buy store pasta.”). Tommy’s favorite ice cream is in the freezer. And the hoodies, God, the hoodies. One draped over the couch that smells exactly like Sal’s aftershave. Another folded on the bed that’s way too big for him. He doesn’t remember these men, not fully. This life where they never met. Yet every time he tries to settle into this “life,” he starts catching fragments in dreams within the dream: Sal’s gruff laugh echoing in the kitchen, Tommy’s hands correcting his position while weightlifting, the three of them tangled together with Gremlin purring at their feet. The bathroom remodel plans.

The longer Buck stays under, the more his brain tries to convince him this safe life is better. There’s no risk of losing the 118, no lightning, no fear of being too much for his husbands. But the glitches get louder. He sees flashes of what he’d lose: Sal and Tommy grieving at his bedside (real-world echoes bleeding through). Daniel walks in and shakes his head sadly. “Evan,” he says gently, “you’re doing it again. Ever since that bomb scare at your school three years ago gave you that concussion… you’ve been mourning this life you’ve never actually had. Fire station, the two husbands, the cat who thinks he owns the place. I thought we were past this. You’ve never been a firefighter.” Daniel gestures around the Deluca-Kinard house like it’s a delusion Buck keeps retreating into. The dream-Buck (the teacher version) looks at him in the mirror with sad eyes Buck knows too well and says, “They’re better off without your chaos.” That’s the breaking point. Buck realizes the hoodie he’s clutching in the dream isn’t just fabric... it’s proof. Proof that even when his brain tried to build a world without them, it couldn’t. He chooses the messy, terrifying, real life where he’s loved so fiercely it hurts and scares him stupid. He fights his way back because Sal and Tommy are waiting, and for once, the fear of not being enough loses to the certainty that he already is. He knows they will grieve him just as fiercely as he has grieved them in this reality for years.

When Buck finally opens his eyes, the first thing he registers is the feeling of both their hands gripping his. Sal’s callused grip on the left is tight and trembling in a way Buck has never felt before. He cracks an eye open, hoarse and raspy from the tube, and manages a weak grin. “Bathroom remodel might need to wait a few more months.” Sal lets out a sound that’s half-laugh, half-sob and drops his forehead to Buck’s arm, his shoulders shaking with the kind of relief that only comes after watching your partner flatline for three minutes and seventeen seconds in the back of an ambulance. Tommy kisses his temple before he quickly steps out to the waiting room to tell everyone Buck’s awake and talking.