Chapter Text
El Paso, Texas, 1995.
“Mom, I still don’t feel so good,” Eddie says as he tugs on Mom’s skirt and stumbles into the kitchen. He feels tired, achy, and too hot, but he had a bad dream about the firebird and the blue dragon going away. They’d told him they’d always watch over him, but he woke up looking for them and couldn’t find them.
“Oh honey, that’s just the medicine kicking in. Do you want some more juice?”
“No!” Eddie shakes his head briskly. He doesn’t want to throw up again.
“Maybe you need more medicine? The doctor said you might need a second dose,” Mom says, bending down to look him in the eye. She has a slight frown on her face, and Eddie doesn’t like this look. This is the look Mom gets when she’s about to be mean to someone while pretending to be nice.
“I’m getting better,” Eddie insists despite feeling the room begin to sway around him.
“We’ll do a second dose,” Mom says, already straightening to get the dark bottle out of the cupboard above the sink that’s too high for Eddie to reach.
“I don’t want it,” Eddie protests, wanting to cry.
“This will make you feel better, honey. Just you see.”
The bitter taste makes him gag, but Mom doesn’t let him spit it out. Over his sniffles, there’s a fading cry of the firebird screaming in warning.
He doesn’t see his firebird or her friend, the blue serpent dragon, again until many years later.
***
Los Angeles, California, 2024.
He’s fucked up badly this time.
Possibly beyond fixing.
Eddie can’t believe he was so stupid. Maybe everything his mom always says about him is the truth—that he’ll just drag Chris down with him like he had Shannon.
Shannon hadn’t wanted to stay and Eddie selfishly thought that maybe—just maybe—he could finally fix things. Somehow, Shannon had returned, and he could try again to be enough.
He hadn’t fixed anything. He’s only broken things further and Chris ended up as collateral damage.
If you don’t do this, you’ll regret it.
His father’s words echo in his broken heart that continues to rattle in his chest, his ribs refusing to expand fully with each breath.
I fucked up.
Chris wouldn’t look at him. He wouldn’t say goodbye even while Eddie desperately told him he loved him.
I hurt my son…
It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life to let Christopher go out the door with his grandparents. They’d left a half hour ago, and Eddie can only sit here on the couch, staring at the door, with his head in his hands.
He swears he can hear the lub-dub Chris’ heartbeat fading as he gets further and further away.
Eddie feels adrift.
He’s a terrible host. He’d called Buck frantic this morning, and, of course, Buck had dropped everything to help, and he hasn’t left. Buck is in the kitchen, doing something to keep himself busy while….
Chris—Christopher—his son, is gone.
It’s all Eddie’s fault.
His fault.
Christopher won’t be back. He’ll realize that he’s better off in Texas, away from a father who finds his dead mother’s doppelgänger and goes on dates with her while torpedoing a perfectly lovely relationship with a woman who would have made a great stepmother.
At the edge of his thoughts, Eddie wonders how long it’ll be before Buck realizes how messed up he is and leaves, too.
The heartbeat is faint, hardly there.
He can’t lose it.
Eddie can’t lose this last bit of his son.
Buck comes and goes from the living room, a glass of water going ignored because Eddie has to hold on to that faint sound as it goes further and further away from him.
And then, the heartbeat fades rapidly between one beat and the next.
“No!” Eddie shouts, and he reaches for the sound. He has to find it. Where has it gone?
Nonononononononononononononononon!
He’s lost it.
It’s gone.
He can’t find it anywhere.
It’s his fault.
He has to find it—look for it.
Eddie reaches and reaches, trying to find the elusive sound. It was just there. He has to find it…
***
Buck is doing the dishes when he feels the tether he’d just fastened to Eddie starts to fade. It’s not unusual for Eddie to slip free of the spirit tethers Buck attaches to his best friend every time he sees him, but this time is different.
It’s not that the tether slides lose, and Buck has to reattach it like he always does.
The tether fades.
It feels like Eddie’s dying.
Buck has had too much experience with death in his life. From the deaths everyone experiences over time to the deployments with the Seals that he can’t talk about without telling too much and the deaths he lives through on the job, Buck knows the feel of death intimately. The way a person’s aura fades away to be drawn to the spirit realm is something every Guide knows and dreads.
He can’t—not Eddie.
Death can’t have him.
Not this time.
Not while Buck draws breath.
The dinner plate shatters when it hits the floor, but Buck doesn’t care or notice. He’s racing in bare feet to the living room, desperate to get his hands on Eddie. Skin-to-skin contact will boost his abilities and he doesn’t care who feels him trying to save Eddie and gets caught in the backwash of him throwing every bit of energy he can at holding onto Eddie.
Buck can’t lose Eddie.
Eddie is worth the risk.
Steve will kill Buck when he finds out. He’s completely ignoring the rules about staying under the radar and avoiding notice.
He doesn’t care—it’s Eddie.
Nothing matters except Eddie.
Eddie is on the couch, frozen with his hands on his face, eyes staring blankly at the closed front door. He makes no acknowledgment of Buck’s presence, pupils unfocused and dilated. When Buck touches him, Eddie’s skin is cool to the touch, and when his fingers find the carotid pulse, it’s sluggish and dangerously low. At first, Buck thinks Eddie isn’t breathing, but Eddie’s shallow breath barely causes any chest rise, and Buck would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking for it.
“Eddie? C’mon man, snap out of it!” Buck snaps, cradling Eddie’s face in his hands, and the movement is enough that Eddie’s slack body begins to tilt forward like a marionette with cut strings, his muscles entirely without tone to pitch him toward the coffee table. “Eddie?!?”
Buck wraps a new empathic tether around Eddie, but it slips off, refusing to attach.
It’s like Eddie’s body is an empty shell… like he’s not here.
Buck had only seen this once before when he tried to help a sentinel in a deep zone after the death of their guide and anchor.
There’s only one trick Buck knows to try, his lack of formal training coming back to bite him in the ass at the worst possible time. He pulls Eddie inside his shields and thrusts the strongest tether he can make directly into Eddie’s heart like he’s trying to shock a cardiac arrest patient… and the tether latches onto Eddie’s unsheltered core and sticks.
The connection is still faint, but it’s there, and Buck holds on with everything he’s got while yelling for Hildy to call 9-1-1.