given the opportunity (4924 words) by roadtripexpert
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Beru Whitesun
Characters: Padmé Amidala, Beru Whitesun, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Owen Lars, Cliegg Lars
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Tusken Species (Star Wars), the complications of violence, Grief, Lesbian sex as a coping mechanism
Summary:
The desert eats its young.
Anyone that knows me knows I don’t write speculation fics but s5 is bringing it all out in us so here we are: this is trash and unedited but 🤷♀️
[AO3 Link]
Word Count: 2480 words
The first thing he notices is the walls are closing in.
Eddie’s pretty sure they’re not supposed to do that. Walls are meant to be sturdy, to be protective, to stay...far away and keep them safe.
Walls might’ve saved him from all this, if he’d been standing in the building and not in the middle of the fucking street. He thinks he might trust them to keep him safe in more ways than if they weren’t there, knows that he throws — counts on — metaphysical walls around him to keep his heart safe.
Instead, they’re closing in on him.
He sucks in a breath and tries to focus, tries not to shift at the scratchy blazer on top of his shirt. The urge to unbutton his shirt and rip it off his skin swells until Eddie thinks he can taste it, and there’s nothing but the black haze dimming his vision and the ringing in his ears.
He’s not sure how he got here.
One minute, he’s shopping for a suit, because he’s got to attend court and the old blazer he has ripped at a seam that can’t be fixed without it being glaringly obvious that it was fixed, and the next, he’s staring blankly at the guy who’s helping him try all this shit on.
He makes it five more minutes before the glint in the opposite window catches his attention again and suddenly, he’s not even in the store anymore.
Searing pain bursts out through his shoulder and streaks down his arm and chest until it’s radiating throughout his body. Blood begins to seep through his clothes, sticking them to his skin in the worst texture imaginable. Eddie’s head spins, and there’s a blurry figure in front of him that’s probably Buck. Chaos whirls around him, the noise overwhelming every other sense Eddie has.
The pain, the loss of breath, the ringing — they take Eddie out at the knees and suddenly he’s falling. He falls into a pool of blood, and gravel crunches underneath his fingers as he rests on his side. The buttons of his shirt dig uncomfortably into him and his chest gets uncomfortably tight, and it’s too hot—
“Can’t...breathe,” he manages to choke out, though he doesn’t know if anyone can hear him. He scrambles at his shirt, tugs at the flat buttons underneath his fingers, right where his heart is pounding faster than it ever has. The constriction around his throat loosens just a little bit but it’s not enough, he needs—
He doesn’t know what he needs.
Where’s Buck? Is Charlie okay? 133 Captain...Mehta, Eddie thinks...where is he?
“Sir? Sir?!” A faint voice pierces through the panic whirling through his system, and the formal word surprises him enough for him to realize that it’s not gravel under him, it’s smooth linoleum, or something fancy Buck would know the name of.
And Buck isn’t here, and this isn’t Charlie’s building, and the 133 isn’t here, either.
“Sir? Can you hear me?”
Eddie closed his eyes at some point, and he opens them now, still not being able to suck in a full breath. He stares back blankly into a face he can’t really work the features out of, but the man’s saying something and Eddie’s just not following.
He starts following a little when he sees a familiar uniform surround him, one that he throws on every day and goes out there to try to save someone from either the worst moment of their life or the most embarrassing ones.
Something tight wraps around his arm, and Eddie hears a whooshing sound that he realizes is his own lungs, trying to suck thin air into them. His heart pounds faster at the realization.
“He’s...attack...hospital.” Only a few words filter through, but enough for Eddie to put together that he’s having a heart attack.
He’s only 34. How is he having a heart attack ?
He’s got a kid at home, no history of hypertension, nothing that justifies having a fucking heart attack in the middle of this store.
The threat of that only serves to overwhelm him even more, and before Eddie can fight it, the darkness lurking at the edges of his vision closes over him, and everything fades away.
----
He’s getting real sick of waking up to beeping noises.
There’s a steady rhythm to it, at the very least, so when Eddie opens groggy eyes, he knows he’s not in the middle of a heart attack.
His gaze lands on a nurse in the corner of the room, rifling through drawers for something.
“Hi,” he croaks out to get her attention.
She turns around and breaks into a grin. “Hey there, you were out for a bit. How are you feeling now?”
He assesses himself. Aside from the emotionally off-kilter day, he feels...fine. There’s a numbness to his mind right now that he knows wasn’t there this morning, which probably plays a big part in that. Hell, he’s not even in a hospital gown — there’s only a pulse oximeter on his finger.
He feels small though, back in this hospital bed. There’s still a weight on his chest of all the what-if and why and he’s exhausted, as if he’s been working back to back 24-hour shifts. His bones feel heavy, and his skin doesn’t quite fit right around him.
He absently cracks his knuckles as his last few memories come flooding back in. The store, the suit shopping...the salesman Eddie probably scared half to death.
“Uh, why am I here?”
“I can answer that one,” a doctor steps in, smiling kindly at the nurse, who takes her cue and leaves. “You had a panic attack.”
Eddie stares at her as he remembers the few words he’d picked up from the paramedics. They'd mentioned something about an attack.
“It wasn’t a heart attack?” If he wasn’t lying in a hospital bed, he would’ve collapsed with sheer relief.
Dr. Eve shakes her head. “Not at all. Your heart is perfectly fine. Panic attacks often seem like heart attacks, because they have similar symptoms, but you’re not showing any symptoms of cardiovascular disease and from what I have on file, no history of it, either.”
“No, no history,” he murmurs quietly as he thinks. “But I passed out?”
Her expression shifts as she sits on a rolling chair, opening a folder that’s presumably his. “I am concerned that you passed out, because that means you were stressed about something to a very large extent. Also, you panicked when you were brought into the ER. We had to sedate you before you could hurt someone with your thrashing.”
All of this is news to Eddie, because he doesn’t remember—
The flare in the window.
He closes his eyes and curses under his breath.
It’s not a trigger he thought he’d have. In the six months since the shooting, he’s figured out a few things that ramp his anxiety off — large, open spaces, the scent of the gum Chimney was chewing that day, blistering heat, and sometimes, the scratch of his uniform.
Flashing lights have never been a problem. He wouldn’t have been able to go back to work otherwise, he wouldn’t have wanted to go to work knowing that he was one wrong light away from freezing. In this line of work, one second means the difference between life and death.
“It seems you already know what happened,” Dr. Eve observes, not unkindly. “Would you like me to recommend a therapist or a counselor?”
“No, no that’s alright.” He clears his throat. “I’m uh...I’m already seeing one.”
She simply nods once, not pushing for any answers but before she can get out of her chair, the door bursts open, revealing a frantic Buck.
Too many expressions roll over his face, too fast for Eddie to catch all of them with his slightly foggy mind. The few that he does catch are panic, relief, and something that looks a little too fragile for Eddie to try and dissect. He attempts a small smile in his direction that probably looks more like a grimace. “What are you doing here?”
“Emergency contact,” is all he offers in response, apparently too busy making sure everything is to his satisfaction to notice the woman standing behind him with no-nonsense brows raised to her hairline.
He knows what Buck’s doing, because they’ve had enough scares over the past few months to be paranoid of everything, so he doesn't protest, just lets him look his fill and realize that Eddie's fine.
Eddie smiles faintly when she looks at him, shrugging.
Buck’s hawk-like gaze catches the movement and he looks back at the doctor, smiling sheepishly before moving to Eddie’s side. “Sorry, Doc. How’s he doing?”
“All good to go home, now that you’re here.” She sounds more amused than anything, but Eddie takes the minute that they're distracted to slump a little, exhaling silently before her words catch up to him.
“Wait, you wouldn’t have let me out of here without him? I thought I was okay.”
“Hospital procedure, Mr. Diaz, even for panic attacks. I’ll get the nurse to pull up your discharge papers and instructions, and you can go home. Just take it easy for the evening, okay?”
Eddie nods, and turns his attention back to Buck, who’s busy picking at his fingernails as he stares intently at Eddie. He doesn’t know what to say, so he offers a greeting. “Hi, Buck.”
“A panic attack,” he says softly, ignoring Eddie. “I didn’t know you were having those.”
That’s because Eddie didn’t tell him. Granted, they’d never been this bad before, but he’s woken up on more than one occasion in the middle of that LA street, or sometimes in the middle of an Afghanistan desert, wishing that death wouldn’t touch him. Sometimes, he still feels cold, slimy fingers on his skin long after the panic fades.
“I...It wasn’t that bad,” he says feebly, knowing he can’t lie about this. Not after all this, and not to Buck.
Buck’s expression darkens, his jaw tightening and suddenly, Eddie feels weaker than before. Whatever fragile look was in his eyes only grows until Eddie thinks Buck might splinter apart.
The nurse comes back before any of them can say anything, and Eddie signs them feeling every inch of his years. Hell, he feels double his age right now, tired and exhausted of never getting a reprieve. He just doesn’t know how to deal with anything, and now he’s pissed his best friend off, too.
“Buck,” he reaches out, touches his partner’s sleeve. “I didn’t tell you because we’ve been through enough the past few weeks. I was handling it, I just...probably not as well as I thought.”
“We’re supposed to have each other’s backs,” Buck says quietly. “I want you to trust me to have yours.”
“I do,” he says immediately. “And you have. You’ve been doing everything for me since I...since then. I just didn’t want to worry you.”
Buck nods once, curling a balancing hand around Eddie’s elbow as they walk out of the room. “Let’s just get you home, okay? It just...scared me to have you back here. That's all.”
They drive in complete silence. None of Buck’s usual commentary, not even the fucking radio. It’s a little unnerving and Eddie fiddles anxiously with the papers in his lap, eyes darting everywhere.
“Hey,” Buck’s hand hovers over his thigh for a minute before Eddie nods. He places his palm and spreads his fingers, taking most of Eddie's attention and pushing the anxiety back a little. “You okay?”
He’s about to give his standard, automatic answer, but thinks better of it. “No,” he admits. “I thought I was doing better, but I went to that suit shop Bobby told me about today and there was a glint of something in the window and I...I don’t know what happened.”
He thinks about what could’ve caused him to pass out, though. He knows that it’s rare to lose consciousness during panic attacks, but he thinks back to the turmoil of the last few days and realizes that he’s been anxious virtually every day this week.
There was the chaos of the blackout, and the helicopter rescue that nearly ended with Eddie’s body falling straight down to the pavement. He’d fallen out of the helicopter, yanking the arm he’d been shot in the last time he was dangling precariously out of one.
He’d been on edge since that rescue, every little thing serving to irk him a little more. Sleep was far and few in between before Eddie would wake up in a pool of his own sweat, breathing harshly in the too-still bedroom.
Maybe that’s it.
He’s so fucking sick of trying to make sense of everything — so sick of trying to straighten his world back to the organized routine it was before the shooting.
Eddie sighs and tips his head back against the seat. “I just want to be better again. I don’t...I hate looking over my shoulder like this all the time.”
Buck’s grip gets tighter and Eddie, on a whim, drops a hand on top, fitting his fingers into the spaces between Buck’s. “Are you still seeing Frank?”
“Yeah,” he admits. “He was really helping, and he doesn’t push me too far.”
Buck flips his palm so they’re actually holding hands and squeezes once. “That’s good. You know we’re here if you need anything, right? You don't have to be okay all the time. It's okay to not be okay, if you need to.”
Grasping the hand that worked tirelessly to save him many, many times during and after the shooting serves as lifeline enough.
He thinks of all the ways everyone’s gone out of their way to support Eddie after the shooting — and yet, no one treats him like anything fragile. There was one moment where Bobby asked him if he was ready to be back, but that was it. No more questions, no ‘you should have stayed home,’ no walking around eggshells — simple trust in Eddie’s judgment.
Eddie idly taps his thumb against the back of his hand and nods. He's still anxious, still feels tears pushing the back of his eyes, and somehow feels unbelievably tired, but this was a speed-bump, but he’s not going to let it set back all the progress he has made. “Yeah. Yeah I do know.”
“Good,” Buck says decisively. “Then you also know I’m coming home with you tonight. Just in case. Doctor's orders.”
Eddie laughs softly, focusing on the familiar roads as they enter his neighborhood. No doctor asked for him to be supervised, but he's not going to be the one to protest. “Wouldn’t expect any less.”
Buck grins at him, soft and fond, and that’s that.
