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"Ow!"
Hen finds herself on her feet before she fully processes the sound, the book she'd been reading (not her thing, but Karen had sounded so excited when she mentioned it) spilled loose on the arm of the armchair and her feet half-stumbling off the coffee table.
She's not the only one. Eddie is a few steps ahead of her, steps longer and with a heart that's always pointing at his very own true north echoing from the kitchen. Chimney half brains himself running out of the bunks, shoes half-on and eyes bleary. Ravi's shirtsleeve catches on the rail as he scrambles to turn around, almost being yanked back into place.
All of them spill into the kitchen area, hands bracing on counters and eyes already checking over the damage.
Buck blinks at them, all guileless blue eyes and a slight tilt of the head that makes Hen's heart clench once, tight, inside her chest. Bobby doesn't look at them at all, his hands already cupping Buck's palm like it's a small, fragile thing, brows furrowed with a sort of heartbreak that is probably incongruous to the situation.
"...guys?" Buck says, half a question. Hen is already moving forward, standing beside Bobby to peer at Buck's hand. It's a shallow cut, maybe an inch long, drawing up the fleshiest part of his palm up to the first knuckle of his thumb. Hen has seen more gruesome things in her average morning, will see more gruesome things by the end of the shift, probably, but she has to take a deep breath at the blood welling at the site of the small injury anyways.
She holds a hand out blindly, and Chimney is already handing her a wad of gauze, some antiseptic in his other hand. Hen is the most gentle she's perhaps ever been when she wipes crimson clear of pink skin.
"Hen," Buck says again, and Hen looks up, meets his eyes. He looks at her, concerned, eyes shifting to the careful way Chimney is holding himself beside her, the way Ravi is holding the medkit in his hands, watching them nervously, the way Bobby is still keeping a hand on his forearm, holding him steady.
When he tries to turn his head to look at Eddie, the other man shakes his head, puts a hand on his shoulder, stands at his back like a sentinel in a LAFD tee. "Don't move, idiot."
Buck looks at Hen again, eyes big and confused, looking the way Denny did when he was very small and trusted her to make the world make sense for him. She wants, terribly badly, to make the world make sense for Buck.
But she doesn't know how to explain this to him, the quiet fear in the station that settled over them the first step Buck took into the loft after the lightning strike. The way his pain reverberates through them like a heartbeat going still under their palms. How all of them know, now, how his blood looks when there's not enough oxygen pumping through his veins.
Because Buck had been lost to them before, skin pale and pallid and blood unmoving. Because Buck had been on a hospital bed, the rest of them with their rescues and medical kits and blackboards useless to him in this liminal space. Because they are here, now, and their hands can help him, even with this, even just a little.
"This doesn't look too bad," she says instead. "We can take care of this pretty quick." And what she means is let us take care of you, and how wonderful it is, that this is something we can take care of, and what a miracle it is, that you are still here to be taken care of.
Buck nods, slow, like he can hear her anyways, easing into their touch with something like joy, like a gift given and received in turn.