welcome to gav's house of found family whump and fluff how may i help you today, we've got a good old fashioned medically inaccurate amnesia trope fest first up! this was supposed to be a oneshot but it got A LITTLE LONG so i've split it up.

this is set earlier in season one, after chim's accident and after hen and buck go to bobby's apartment, but before things get super serious with abby.

title from mother mother's 'alright', which serves as the theme song for this fic, effectively.

When he wakes, it's slowly and in drifts, senses taking their time in returning to him. His body feels like someone has laid weighted blankets over each of his limbs, and tremors run through him every couple of moments, uncontrollable shivers unrelated to any kind of cold. His chest rises and falls with quick, shallow breaths, and there's a sound coming into clarity, a strange robotic beeping. As he listens harder, trying to make out what it is, it speeds up just a little, and this is the same moment his sense of smell returns. Some kind of chemical scent, sharp and metallic, fills his throat, and he almost coughs.

It's the light that does it. When he manages to coax heavy, uncooperative eyelids into raising just slightly, the cold, bright white light over his head tells him exactly where he is, and a low groan rises in his throat. Waking up in the hospital is never a good feeling. The list of good reasons to be waking up in the hospital is very short, and the list of bad reasons is very long, and he would hazard a guess that probably none of the good reasons involve not remembering how you got there.

Because he can't. Remember how he got there. Though, the absolutely brutal headache he's experiencing probably has something to do with it.

As his eyes adjust to the inhumanely bright lighting shouting down at him from the ceiling, he's able to take in more of his surroundings. There's a heart monitor beeping away next to him, the source of the shrill sound he'd heard earlier, and a pulse oximeter clipped to his finger. His entire body aches in a kind of dull background noise. Carefully rolling his heavy, pounding head to the side, he notices that he isn't alone. There's someone else in the room with him.

There's another man in a chair next to his bed, watching him with a calm, neutral expression. The man doesn't say anything, presumably waiting for him to speak first, but he doesn't quite have his wits about him enough for that yet. It should be scary, to be so knocked off kilter, completely unable to defend himself should the need arise. But something tells him, innate and without explanation, that he has absolutely nothing to fear with this man in the room. He gets the distinct feeling, deep in his chest, that there isn't a safer person, nobody more capable of making sure that absolutely nothing is going to happen to him.

"Hey," the man eventually says, and his voice strikes that same familiar, safe feeling that his face did, though he's still unable to put a name to either.

Instead of trying, or of badgering his dry throat into speech, he looks around again, this time focusing on his own body, trying to locate the precise reason he's in a hospital, because it can't just be a headache. His head gives a particularly sharp throb, and as it fades, he notices another feeling, accompanying the pain.

Something on the back of his head itches. It's wildly irritating, and his face crumples into an annoyed frown. It takes several moments of concentrating very hard to persuade his uncooperative hand to reach up and feel around for it, trying to get whatever shirt tag is poking him in the scalp away. His fingertips have just barely brushed what feels like gauze, taped to the back of his skull, when the man in the chair makes a disapproving sound, catching his wrist and pulling his hand down with an ease that he, honestly, resents a little bit.

"Hey, no, Buck, don't touch that." The words are just this side of rebuking, a soft chide that lands in the same area of a parent warning a toddler not to touch a hot stove.

"Rude," he mutters, because the itching feeling is very much still there and very much still driving him absolutely nuts. The man in the chair chuckles quietly, and reaches over him to grab a small cup from a stand at the side of the bed.

Buck supposes he's going to forgive him, given he seems about to solve Buck's throat issue. The man sits back down, the cup in one hand, a bendy straw poking over the rim. He uses his other hand to curve carefully over the side of Buck's neck, under his head away from the itchy-tag feeling, helping him sit up enough to not choke on the water in the cup. The grip the man has on him is cautious and gentle, and Buck is grateful for it, though it serves as a grim reminder of exactly how wobbly his entire existence is at the present moment.

When he's drained the small cup of water, the man guides Buck's head back down to the crinkly, starched hospital pillow. Once Buck is resettled, his companion shifts in his seat, and it seems for a moment like he's about to get up, maybe leave the room. Something about the thought sends a spike of panic through Buck's chest, and his hand shoots out to try and halt the departure.

He must be pretty badly concussed, because he misses by about a mile, hand swiping through the empty air as nausea lurches in his stomach and his head spins.

"Hey." His voice is just as calm and reassuring as it was the first time he spoke, and now one of those hands that had helped Buck with the water is on his forearm, warm against his chilled skin. Grounding. "I'm not going anywhere, I'm just hitting the call button. Nurse said to call when you woke up. I'm not leaving."

Buck lets his eyes squeeze closed, the lights like spokes driving into his aching head. He twists his arm until he can return the grip the man sitting with him has on his wrist, fingers twisted in the fabric of the flannel shirt he thinks he remembers being blue. A moment later he risks cracking one eye open, just to be sure.

It is blue, predominantly. Blue and grey. Buck is more comforted by having remembered this while his eyes were closed than he probably should be. It was only a few seconds.

When the nurse walks in, she dims the lights somewhat, a fact for which Buck is so grateful he basically owes her a life-debt. He's able to actually open his eyes now, without squinting, and thus is able to see the two people that follow the nurse into the room. The pair is a woman and a man, dressed in street clothes, and thus unlikely to be medical staff.

As Buck is in the middle of piecing together a question to try and figure out what these seemingly random people are doing in his hospital room, the nurse interrupts. She stands beside the bed, opposite where the man sits in his chair, and looks at him with an unreadably polite expression.

"Sir, you've had a head injury. You're in the hospital." She presses a few buttons and the bed shifts, whirring softly beneath him as it lifts him into a semi-sitting position. Buck doesn't lose his grip on the flannel shirt, and the man's hand doesn't leave his arm, and he's glad.

Beyond the nurse, the new arrivals hover near the foot of the bed, looking at Buck like they're expecting him to say or do something important. As the nurse checks something on one of the monitors, they exchange a glance, and Buck looks away, back to the woman speaking to him. She's just asked him a question, and he blinks at her, embarrassed to have missed it entirely.

"Can you tell me what day it is?" the nurse repeats patiently. Her nametag, shifting into view, says Diana.

"Yeah, it's…" Buck stops, frowning. He looks from Diana, to the man at his right, and back to her. "It's, uh." Well that's not good. He doesn't have the faintest idea what day it is. "I don't know, actually. Sorry."

"It's alright," Diana says, giving him a small, reassuring smile. "That's pretty normal, you landed pretty hard when you fell. It's expected you'd be a little disoriented. Can you tell me your name?"

Okay, this one he definitely does know.

"Buck," he says confidently. "It's Buck."

Another glance exchanged between the strange people at the end of the bed, and the grip on his forearm tightens noticeably. Buck feels the anxiety that's been buzzing in his chest behind everything leap into the foreground. He looks at the man next to him, whose expression has gone grim in a new way entirely, and Buck really wants him to stop making that face. For lack of being able to figure out how to make that happen, Buck returns his attention to the nurse. She's frowning too, though her frown makes him feel markedly less guilty than the man's.

"Can you tell me your first name?" Diana asks, carefully specific in a way that makes him go cold.

"Is-" He stops, swallows hard. Wishes he had more water. Hopes he's not bruising the arm underneath the flannel sleeve he's holding onto harder every moment. "Is Buck not my first name?"

"Okay," Diana mutters under her breath. It doesn't answer Buck's question, but before he can repeat himself, she looks past him, to the man on his right. "Okay, Buck, can you tell me who he is?" She's pointing now, right across, and Buck looks over at the only other person who's been here the entire time.

In all the time he's been awake in this room, that's something Buck hasn't actually given a great deal of thought to. He may be a little rattled, brain-wise, may not be able to remember what day it is, might be slightly hazy on his name, but he's a decently smart person, and he can put facts together with context clues and figure a few things out.

The man is older than him, was sitting with him waiting for him to wake up in the hospital. Held his head up while he drank the water, sat here and basically held Buck's hand while he tries to get his wits about him enough to remember his own name. It adds up, these facts, and the way Buck felt when he looked over and saw him there, realized that this was somebody he was completely safe with. Protected by.

"Yeah. That's my dad, right?"

The woman at the end of the bed, the one in street clothes, makes a choking sound, throwing a hand over her mouth to stifle… laughter? The man who'd come in with her is abruptly smiling, eyes glinting with mirth, and he says, "Well, I mean, you're not totally wrong, Bobby's-"

"Guys." The man - Bobby? Not Buck's dad, then? - has raised his voice, and it's a little shocking to hear it above that gentle, reassuring murmur, a warning rebuke.

"Buck." Diana the nurse has his attention again, and Buck's starting to feel dizzy, focus pinging around. "I need you to stay with me for a moment. What's the last thing you remember?"

Okay. Okay, he can do this. He can focus, as soon as the pounding in his head dies down, he'll be able to focus, and then he can remember what happened, and who these people are, and who he is, and they can all go home and it'll be fine. Except… Except the harder he thinks, the more nothing he runs up against, empty space where memory and information should be.

Buck can't remember. It's not just how he got here, not just the name of the man who'd been there since he woke up, not just whoever the hell these people at the end of his bed are. He can't remember anything. Not even, apparently, his own first name.

It's only when the back of the hospital bed starts going down again, Diana's voice accompanying the whir of the motor, that Buck realizes he's having some kind of panic attack. He tries to stop it, to will his heart to slow down as the monitor screeches warnings in his ears, force his chest to stop heaving with frantic breaths, but it's to no avail. The enormity of it, the chasm left behind by everything that should be there, feels like it's going to swallow him alive.

"Buck."

The voice cuts through, joining Diana's. It's that same voice that had first given him his name back to begin with, steady and calm and loud enough to make it through the panic and the wild beeping of the heart monitor. Bobby says his name again, and this time it's accompanied by a squeeze of his forearm. Buck squeezes back, fingers digging hard enough now that he's sure he's going to leave a mark. He'd feel guilty if he could feel anything but terrified.

"Buck, you need to breathe." Bobby's other hand covers Buck's clutching one, warming his shaking fingers. "Come on, kid, we need you to calm down and breathe. In and out. That's all you have to do. In," he says it slowly, and Buck clings to the word with all his might, forcing his lungs to draw in a deep breath, exhaling as Bobby guides, "Out."

They repeat the process several times, until the monitor slows to a normal pace, and Buck feels way less like he's about to pass out. His head throbs, and he still can't remember a single thing beyond the last fifteen minutes, but he's something approaching calm, and it's a start.

Over the next couple of hours, Buck lives through a blur of tests and doctors and his room's three strangers explaining who the hell they all are. He finds out that his name is Evan Buckley, which would definitely explain the nickname Buck had called him. He's twenty-six years old, and he's a firefighter. Bobby is Bobby Nash, his station captain, and the man and woman who'd come in with the nurse are Chimney and Hen, who work with him at the 118.

A small earthquake, not bad enough to cause property damage but bad enough to knock a person off a roof if it happened at exactly the wrong moment, is what's landed him here. According to Bobby, nobody else was hurt. A teenager got stuck on a roof going for a frisbee, and had already been brought to safety when the quake threw Buck twelve feet to the ground and the rock that gifted him four stitches and a case of retrograde amnesia.

The tests come back mostly clean, meaning there's no massive brain bleed about to kill him at any moment, though this is minimally reassuring to Buck, who wouldn't honestly preferred that, because that could be fixed. What they're left with instead is some vague medical-ese about swelling and how this is, really, an extremely rare outcome.

The doctor sounds kind of fascinated, which serves to irritate Buck further. He says it should likely clear up on its own as his brain heals itself - the brain, Dr. Rochester says, is a miraculous thing nobody truly understands. The other option, though, the one that sticks in Buck's mind, pinging around all that empty space, is the version where he doesn't get his memory back at all. It's possible, Dr. Rochester said after a bit of prodding.

"No need to worry yet, it's way too soon for that," he's quick to add, when Buck's expression gets grimmer and grimmer. "Give it some time. There's no need for you to stay here, you're a very lucky young man, aside from the obvious, just the concussion and some bruising. Try and spend some time in familiar places, doing familiar things. If your headache gets suddenly a lot worse, or you notice you're bleeding from your ears or nose or anything like that, come back right away."

"Bleeding," Buck repeats faintly. He feels sicker than he had since he'd just woke up, and he wishes he'd asked Bobby to stay when the doctor came to give him the final verdict. "From my ears or nose."

"Unlikely, but be aware just in case," the doctor says, in the same neutral voice he's been speaking in for most of this conversation - except for the part where he was talking about all of the ways in which Buck is a mystery of medical science.

"Right. Be aware. Sure."

"Is there someone you can stay with? You probably shouldn't be alone tonight, with the memory loss, it would be disorienting."

Though some of the first hour or so after he woke up has gone hazy now, something Dr. Rochester assures him is completely normal, Buck does remember the part where Bobby told him that he lives with roommates.

"Yeah," he says numbly.

Hen is the one who ends up driving him home. She talks as she drives, stuff about the other calls they went out on earlier that week, maybe trying to jog his memory, maybe just trying to fill the silence Buck can feel pressing in around them, pressing out inside his own mind, echoing around all that empty space. His head feels like an abandoned mansion, rooms and halls gutted of furniture and photographs, any trace of life cored out.

They pull up outside a decently sized house with a tennis racket and a soccer ball in the front yard, and what looks to be a single, abandoned red converse sneaker. Buck takes it all in, eyes flicking from the sidewalk, to the shoe, to the front door, and out around, studying everything he can see.

"Anything look familiar at all? Anything you recognize?" Hen asks from where she sits in the driver's seat. The car idles under them as Buck tries to focus, to see if he knows who that shoe belongs to, if it might be his, if he knows the feeling of those front steps as he leaves for work or comes home from a night out.

"No," he says, honestly. The word comes out uncertain and quiet, and Buck feels very small. Los Angeles looms out around them in all directions, this woman he feels like he should know so well a stranger beside him, his house in front of him striking not a single spark of recognition. "I don't recognize anything."