My Best Friend: The Story of Mami & Papi Part II
From their Point of View
That was true. They had been each other's best friend since they could remember. And now they could both admit they had started to fall in love with each other within a year or so. Calleigh genuinely thought her heart had stopped beating when dispatch mistakenly reported over the radio that Eric was dead. She drove straight to Miami General in a daze and demanded answers from the ER nurse. At first she wouldn't tell Calleigh a thing when she asked where she and Ryan, who had just arrived saying he heard Delko was dead and wanted to know what was going on, could go to donate blood for Officer Delko, finally Calleigh demanded an answer, "professional to professional."
The nurse then told them "your friend is beyond blood and plasma. They've been working on him for the past fifteen minutes. He didn't respond in the next five, they'll call it."
Both Calleigh and Ryan stood in stunned silence. Calleigh had to force herself to breathe again. Horatio watched helplessly through the glass on the Trauma Unit door. He couldn't believe this were happening, Clavo Cruz wanted him shot, not Eric. The moron security guard had shot Eric instead. It was supposed to be him on that stretcher, not Eric. If Eric died, Horatio would never be able to live with himself. Even if Eric lived he would barely be able to stomach the guilt he felt.
The paddles weren't working to restart the Cuban's heart; an adrenaline shot straight to his heart muscle was his last chance. Eric's brain had already been without oxygen for almost twenty minutes. Even if he survived, the chances were high he'd suffer some sort of brain damage.
"Get me an epicardium needle, now!" The doctor bellowed.
The large needle stabbed directly into his heart, restarted the organ. The monitor immediately started to beep, showing a squiggly line. Eric's eyes jolted open and he made a loud gasp for air, the upper half of his body popping up before he fell back down and into an unconscious state.
But he was alive.
Everyone knew and Alexx had told them, Eric was not out of woods, yet. He could still die. And even if he did survive, there was no way of telling what extent of brain damage he could have. He may wake up and not be the same Eric they knew. The team took turns watching over their colleague in the ICU. Twenty minutes each time, per hospital regulations.
It hit Calleigh like a bomb. She loved Eric Delko. She was in love with her best friend. Yet even in the privacy of just two of them in the room and him unconscious, probably not able to hear her anyway, she didn't have the nerve to tell him how she felt. Even though she still could lose him one way or the other.
He was alive, and awake. Brain damage or not, Eric Delko was determined to get his life back. And he wasn't angry with his best friend, Horatio. So the bullet that was lodged in his head had been meant for H; he didn't blame H for that. He blamed that miserable waste of life named Clavo Cruz and the imbecile who agreed to shot a cop in exchange for $100,000 to pay off his luxury car. Brain damage that included memory loss or not, the one thing nothing in the world could make him forget just how he loved a woman named Calleigh. Still, even after teetering on the edge of death he couldn't bring himself to say how he felt.
Neither was Eric angry that Horatio had shot and killed Clavo Cruz hours after his shooting. After Horatio had removed Clavo's every avenue of escape, Clavo had showed up at the station, wanting suicide by cop, specifically by Horatio Caine, whom he saw as a worthy opponent.
Calleigh's been kidnaped. The words rang in his ears over and over. When he told disgraced former lab employee Dan Cooper that if anything happened to Calleigh because he had posted her cell phone number on the web, that he would come back and kill him, it wasn't a threat but a promise.
Eric had no doubt he would have and now be in jail; And he wouldn't care. His life was nothing without her in it.
It was going to be years before their child knew any of this, even in child-appropriate information. When she became a toddler and began to talk, Nevaeh was bound to ask daddy where he got the scar on the back of his head. The one where he was shot. He wasn't worried about explaining it. The explanation of "daddy got hurt at work a few years ago" would satisfy a young child.
Hopefully.
Walking her to the hummer following her rescue Eric couldn't hold back his feelings any longer.
That night was the start of their life together.
