Sunday morning ramblings about Eddie and his feelings...
We've known for a while that Eddie needs to choose and Buck needs to be chosen (what a love story, goddamn).
I'm guessing that Eddie has "chosen." He's grounded and clear and calm in his feelings for Buck. Eddie knows he loves Buck, is in love with him, and isn't fighting it anymore. He knows how he feels and he's convinced himself he'll tell Buck, when and only if Buck is ready. And he's made peace with Buck never being ready. Eddie just wants Buck to be happy and with him and Chris, in whatever way they can have him. Eddie will never date again, and he will be happy enough, just like this, for the rest of his life.
So, Eddie is in this convenient little stalemate with himself. Because while he's not scared of own feelings anymore, telling Buck? Is still terrifying. But it doesn't matter, because Buck isn't ready. So he ignores that fear and he waits.
But Buck needs to be chosen. Buck needs to hear the words, and hear them again. And again. While Eddie has used so many of his words with Buck, they're always wrapped around Christopher. Never about Eddie's feelings for Buck. What Buck means to him. You think you're expendable but you're wrong comes the closest. But Buck needs expressions of love to be spelled out explicitly, again and again and again. That's the only way to penetrate through Buck's trauma. You see it in the way Maddie talks to him, how she's able to get him to hear and accept her love for him.
Of course people need to be "ready" to be in a relationship. Especially one as serious as Buck and Eddie's will be. (There's no "dating" for these two. They're basically already married, just without the romance + sex part. And acknowledging the "married" part, with their words. This will be the last relationship either of them will ever have. So, yeah, really fucking serious. And both of them need to be ready.)
So yes, Buck has a long way to go before he'll be ready for this relationship. But no one has to be "ready" in order to be loved. And as loud as Eddie's love for Buck is, even without the words? Buck cannot see it or feel it for what it is. Eddie is going to have to take that final, terrifying leap and tell him.
This aspect of their relationships to their own traumas — the choosing and being chosen — is and will continue to be a place of beautiful, mutual healing. And it will also be a place of struggle and conflict. Sometimes their wounds will offer each other healing, and sometimes their wounds will bang up against each other. Gorgeous and romantic and brutal and messy and never complete. 911 is not a rom com. This is a grown up love story about mutual healing — a lifelong practice, they will have to figure out together. What does it look like in partnership and parenting? Through work and therapy? What does it look like in their sex life? This physical aspect of their relationship that will be entirely new to both of their bodies, as individuals and together? All has to be navigated and figured out, and they get to do it together.
So, I bet this thing that's coming with Buck — that he's actually going to say yes to being a sperm donor and will convince himself he's happy about it — is going to be the biggest test of Eddie's healing. The thing with Chris will rattle him and be really hard. But it's a normal parenting rite of passage that at least some part of Eddie would have been prepared for. But this thing with Buck? Is going to be a shock. And a fucking tinder box. That box Eddie loves to lock things away in? Where he has to lock them away to survive? The box where he keeps all those feelings from when he got shot and saw Buck covered in his blood, that moment when he thought they were both going to die? That box that will hold Eddie's love for Buck and anger at seeing Buck break his own heart in this way; Eddie's desire for Buck, to have Buck for himself; Eddie's hurt, because Buck already has a child, a child Eddie gave him; Eddie's terror at saying the words, because he's still punishing himself and following the longings of his heart is just not something he gets to do. Buck saying yes to being a sperm donor is dropping a lit match in that tinder box.
Yeah, Buck and Eddie are on a collision course to their feelings and it's going to be...I have no idea. Catalysmic. Earth-shattering. And Brenna Malloy is directing the mid-season finale.
Fuck me I love this show.
