Ok, I was really struggling to understand why this ship got me hooked so much, because I don’t like, ship them as a couple, but I really would like to see them act together for longer, and this is the mind rambling that got me to finally cry that episode 6 scene out.
Owen and Legs have the same kind of trauma: they’ve lived through, did and witnessed horrific things that scarred them in an irreversible way.
Owen deals with it as the young man he’ll always be. He’s proud of what he’s done, doesn’t think deeply about it, stays trapped in his own pain, retraumatizing himself because he built his whole identity around it. Legs, on the other hand, is a middle-aged man who’s managed to process a bit of what he went through and what he did. It still hurts a lot—he feels shame and remorse—but he chose to be productive about it, working as a traveling doctor to pay back the world in some way.
If either of them could let go a little of those identities, they’d be the perfect company for each other and would understand one another on a spiritual level. But they both have fixed morals and won’t do that, even though other asks, seduces, and offers the way.
Like, they have this chemistry in the way they talk and understand pain—pain only they’ve experienced. But they’re already on such different paths that they can’t even be friends anymore.
They have to be enemies, and even in that they’re mismatched, because Legs will never fight the way Owen wants him to. If they could just stab each other, it would help release the tension. But every act of violence Owen wants will always be one-sided.
And even if like, Legs gave in a little and became a vampire, it would end so badly for them. Owen is so self-destructive and dangerous that he’d eventually force Legs to choose between being the moral person he wants to be or be his companion, and we know Legs wouldn’t choose anyone over saving lives.
So they are both, for each other, a mirror, a foil, a rival, a friend, a thread of hope -- all in imperfect ways.
