When My Time Comes Around - 8x15 coda
There had been so many moments — too many moments — when a stray thought popped through that said, this could be the day you don’t come home. Sometimes, Bobby’s not afraid to admit, he hoped for it. Wanted and yearned to finally leave his mortal coil.
Not when it was really the end of the line.
He was supposed to have more time. He wanted it. He knew almost with perfect clarity when he had just hours left. He also knew he couldn’t tell anyone.
Not just because he knew they would all try to save him when there was a single dose of the antiviral and no real hope that he and Chimney would make it out, but because they were under microscopic scrutiny.
Bobby couldn’t tell them. He couldn’t even let on that anything was wrong with him. He knew there’d be no surviving for one of them and Bobby had to take that fall.
The symptoms came on slower than they had for Chim, but there nonetheless. He felt them more and more as time moved.
He wasn’t even tempted to save himself. It had to be Chim. And he had to get them out of the lab before he said anything to anyone. His chest was tight and everything in him was screaming for survival.
But Bobby was the Captain.
His choices had brought them into the lab — granted that was the job and they had all gone in there willingly.
Chim had a baby on the way and another child waiting for him at home. Hen had Karen and their two kids. Ravi, well it was possible that Bobby didn’t know much about Ravi’s family life. Buck at least hadn’t been caught up in it and how much worse would it have been to have him inside the lab. Not just because then Buck wouldn’t have been out there to help Athena, but because Buck meant so much more to him and it had been hard enough to close the doors between them…much less to have spent hours lying to him to his face.
Bobby saw the devastation as understanding hit Buck and in the end, when Buck walked away, Bobby felt his proudest of him. Of his son. He really was his kid, the one that Bobby never expected. The one that he tried to push away. The one that barreled through Bobby’s defences and the reason that Bobby got to live instead of just surviving.
Bobby believed it when he told him he’d be okay. He knew it. Buck had come such a long way and he was stronger and more capable than he was given credit for at times and he wasn’t going to be alone.
Bobby had Athena there for the end even though they couldn’t touch and even though the last kiss they shared was a hurried one when they were both heading out the door. Neither of them could have even thought that this would be the day one of them wouldn’t return home and yet…Bobby supposed it was bound to happen sometime. You could only go so far avoiding death and for him, any time he had after the fire that took his kids had been borrowed.
It hurt. The physical was almost dull in comparison to the pain he felt at leaving Athena, at having no other choice.
Bobby accepted it and in his last moments he held onto his faith.
He didn’t pray for himself. He prayed for them, one last time.
