Eddie who's never had a problem with commitment unless it has been about women. Eddie who was put in an incredibly specific situation with his first girlfriend and has since then needed to recreate it in order to feel like his relationship with a woman is Right. Eddie who has never had a successful relationship with a woman in his life but his most committed and long term relationship outside of his son is with his best friend. His best friend who has been raising his son with him in a way not even his wife got the chance to do. Eddie who was so desperate to recreate what he and Shannon had that he was willing to pursue a relationship with a woman that looked just like her. Because surely that's the answer to his problem, right? The reason he can't make any relationship work is because none of them are Shannon, right? Sure, their relationship wasn't working for 90% of its course and sure, she'd asked for a divorce right before passing because she also didn't feel they were working as a couple at the time but surely they'd grow out of that! Right? Surely he's not just convincing himself of this so that he doesn't have to explore any other possible reason as to why he's not able to or interested in forming any meaningful relationships with women the way he did with Buck
eddie watching theo while buck runs errands, chris is eating candy and theo asks if he can have some so chris says "i don't know, go ask my dad" so theo starts running looking for eddie and yelling "MY DAD, CAN I HAVE CANDY? MY DAAAAAAD" because that's what chris calls him!
i really love the idea that eddie is going to spoil theo rotten because yes!! absolutely!!
#thinking about how back in season 8 he was pouting over chris not being into halloween anymore and just outgrowing a lot of these things they used to have so much fun doing, that he now gets to do them again with theo because we know he'll be just as involved as buck in the raising of this kid. plus, i like thinking it could be a way for chris to regain interest in those things too, so they can do them as a family
It's pride month and buck is now putting bisexual hearts in his bio and ever since he came out to eddie, he puts a rainbow in his every june :) #ally #oblivious
It's pride month and buck is now putting bisexual hearts in his bio and ever since he came out to eddie, he puts a rainbow in his every june :) #ally #oblivious
based on ostark's answer about how he'd make buddie canon. so basically, a very scared eddie having feelings of realization and a very confused buck :)
Eddie was starting to run out of ideas. It had been exactly 6 days and 9 hours since he had accidentally opened the Pandora's box that were his feelings for his best friend, feelings he didn’t know existed or maybe feelings he has just never wanted to admit were there. How long had he been feeling this way? Was Buck the first man he ever felt this way about? Was he too old to even try to unpack all of this? Well, the answer to those last two questions was “NO” and he knew that.
When Eddie was around 10 years old, he remembers watching the movie My Own Private Idaho, which he was most likely too young to be watching and he had this lingering feeling that the two male leads were supposed to kiss at some point but never did and it saddened him in ways he never really wanted to think about, perhaps back then he carried a heavy weight of learned shame for even wanting to watch something like that, let alone think about why he could yearn for such a thing.
Eddie also has a vivid memory of then struggling to hang out with his best friend at the time, Omar, since he kept wondering what it would be like to kiss him. Not that the thought never crossed his mind before then, but he was now a little too aware of it and it worried him. He didn’t want it to be obvious to his friend, so they started hanging out less and less and Eddie thought about it less and less. Was he just repressing real feelings then? Is he being stupid for thinking it could be anything other than that?
He also remembers feeling strange about everyone else’s perspective of his relationship with Shannon in the coming years. They always got along and he loved having her around, he felt comfortable around her and she always pushed him to be better. He used to think she was such a beautiful girl even when they were only 14, he’d almost felt jealous of the attention she got for being so pretty. But that was a feeling he certainly was not gonna delve into.
Since they met so young, he had always believed they were meant to be, at least that’s what everybody else told him. The sex was alright, but he never got what the big deal was about it, he found it quite boring and usually just a way to pass the time or avoid having hard conversations, wrongly so. He’d been thinking about that a lot in the past 6 days, 9 hours and now 25 minutes.
He was running out of ideas and out of time. He didn’t know how else to avoid Buck at this point, he’d been hitting the gym every chance he got and declining Buck’s offers to go with him, as well as taking probably suspiciously long to get back to his texts about having dinner at his house. That one was killing Eddie the most. He missed Buck’s cooking and he missed hanging out with the little booger too, but he didn’t know how to even talk to his friend without wanting to blurt these things out.
Blurting things out is unlikely Eddie, of course, but Buck is the person he feels most comfortable with, the only one he would want to talk to about these conflicting thoughts he’s having. But he can’t do that when the thoughts are about him.
“Hey Eddie, do you think there’s still improvements to be made to my turkey recipe?” Buck was coming over to him, looking down at his little notebook, definitely not realizing Eddie was trying to hide from him in the medic truck.
‘Maybe if I ignore his question he’ll forget he saw me?’ Eddie thought. But he wasn’t that lucky.
“I don’t know, I feel like it’s not perfect yet and it needs to be perfect.” Buck scratched the back of his head, still looking at his written down recipe. “Maybe I should let Maddie host this year, maybe I’m not ready for it.”
Eddie couldn’t help but smile at that, his approval-seeking best friend was nothing short of endearing in moments like these.
“Buck, come on, you’ve been planning this Thanksgiving dinner for months now. Besides, maybe you shouldn’t make Maddie do the hosting with less than a week of notice.”
“I guess you’re right… I don’t even understand how she’s been able to pull this off before.”
He’s now standing at the doors of the medic truck, making Eddie a little nervous that he might come in. He has to think fast.
“Yeah, totally. Hey I gotta really focus on these things to sort th—”
“Oh yeah, you got it. I’m just gonna be sitting here anyway so you won’t hear a peep. Get back to your duties, don’t mind me.”
So that didn’t work. Great.
His mind was still spinning, he was now recounting the events that even led to him having this mind-fucking epiphany.
He’d been having breakfast with Buck after a shift, their conversation was currently about what he was gonna get Theo for Christmas and if he’d even try to keep the magic of Santa alive or if it was pointless with a kid as nosy and stubborn as this one, who’d probably figure it out anyway.
“What if he finds the gifts somewhere in the house and starts asking questions? Do I just lie to him?” Buck took a sip of his mocha, visibly amused by the idea of this happening.
“I definitely had to lie to Chris about it a couple of times. But I think it’s nice, if you can keep them believing in that kind of magic for a while, I think it’s good.”
“Yeah, I guess we’ll find the right way to break it to him when the time comes. If he doesn’t figure out how to Google it first.” This made both of them laugh, but Eddie’s mind lingered on the use of “we” in the sentence.
It’s no secret that he and Buck were always a team, and fostering Theo was something Eddie immediately knew he would be a part of. He knows it takes a village and he also knows he has permanent residency in that village. But suddenly thinking about a future in which they were actually parenting this kid together, making collaborative decisions on how to tell him Santa’s not real, or what grounding will be adequate for when he inevitably breaks something he was told not to touch about five hundred times. Eddie’s mind wandered into these hypotheticals and something tugged at his heart. Panic attack? No. He wasn’t panicking. He was excited. The idea of raising a kid with his best friend excited him.
“Do you think he’ll get behind the idea of the Tooth Fairy? Should we just give him money?” Eddie was leaning into it now, a smile still plastered across his face as he said this.
Buck smiled back and slightly frowned, the way he does when a thought passes his brain really fast. “He might find the Tooth Fairy kind of creepy. I know I did. Isn’t there a Mexican version of that?”
Another tug at the heart. “Yeah! Yeah, a mouse, actually. El ratón de los dientes.” He took a breath before continuing, “You wanna go with that?”
“Yeah, it sounds kind of tamer than a fairy, right? Besides, it’ll be nice to start getting him to learn more about, you know, your culture… and stuff.”
He says it so casually, he doesn’t even look at Eddie but he swears his tone was almost inviting. Maybe he just hoped it was. Why?
Why?
Oh. Maybe he does know why.
And that’s how we ended up here.
Six days and ten hours later. About twenty million mini panic attacks later, after realizing all the signs he had missed. He didn’t know if this was even reciprocated, he’d been too busy freaking out over realizing how much of his life has been fueled by repression, and now that he thinks about it, maybe his aunts had been trying to pray away the gay all those times they begged him to join the altar boys and with the way they took their rosaries out of the water when they found out Shannon was pregnant. That was kinda fucked up, actually.
He managed to escape after avoiding any and all eye contact with Buck for about 40 minutes, and giving as short of answers as he could, guilt making his chest feel heavy. He decided to go home as quickly as possible again, he didn’t even let Chim get a word in when he passed him in the locker room like a tornado trying to pick up his things before Buck could catch up to him again and God forbid ask for another breakfast together. What could that lead to? An impromptu love confession? He just couldn’t risk it, he doesn’t trust himself around Buck right now.
But at home all he has are even more of his own thoughts. Chris is at school and he’s hanging out at a friend’s house afterwards, that’s entirely too many hours of this. So he resorts to seeking company, or help.
The Wilsons will know what to do.
“We can’t tell you what to do,”
What the hell? What am I doing here then?
“You’re not even telling us anything, you can’t just say you think ‘you’re wrong about everything in your life’ and expect us to know what that means.” Karen was especially not having any of Eddie’s bullshit today.
“Okay,” He sighed and let his eyes roll to the back of his head before asking something he felt sounded out of a heartfelt coming of age movie, “How did you know you were gay?”
Hen’s eyes could’ve popped out of her skull, and Karen held onto her shoulder as if to ground herself. Eddie didn’t want to say out loud what led to this revelation, but he had to give them something to go off of.
“Hypothetically,” he started, already making Hen give him the side-eye he was becoming really familiar with very quickly, “if I discovered I’m having very intense, newfound feelings about building a future with, hypothetically, a man… would that make me gay?”
“It sure doesn’t make you not gay,” Karen said offhandedly, which made Hen give her a nudge, “I’m just saying! That’s like step five in the first ten steps of gay realization!”
“Don’t… listen to her. I mean, she’s right but you only gotta focus on you right now. Did a specific hypothetical man trigger these feelings?” Oh, don’t even get me started.
“Maybe.”
There was the side-eye again.
“Does maybe actually mean yes? And does yes mean the human embodiment of an energy drink on steroids?” That was a new one.
“Maybe,” he looked away. “Yes. Maybe, yes.”
He expected a big reaction from admitting that, but instead the wives shared a look and let out a simultaneous sigh that seemed to be one of relief, almost.
So he realized; they always knew. And sure, they might just be very wise lesbians, but there’s a big chance no matter who he went to about his current dilemma, they would not be much more surprised at the confession he’d just made. Hen could see the panic starting to set in, washing over Eddie’s face.
“Look,” she placed both of her hands on Eddie's shoulders, he thought she might’ve been about to shake him like a ragdoll but her grip was steady and her gaze was nothing but warm. “I don’t have all the answers. I’m not your gay Yoda, but I can tell you that if it’d been him who walked through our door this morning and told us this same thing, we’d probably tell him to stop wasting our damn time on something he, we actually, definitely already knew—”
Something like a woodpecker started throwing a party inside of Eddie's chest when she said that.
“—I can’t be sure of this, but I do feel pretty confident in the fact that you two love each other, be that what it may be. And you’re killing him right now.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Eddie, you’ve been avoiding him for a week, he’s worried you’re falling into some kind of depression. It’s killing him.”
God, his Buck. He should’ve known, this is why instead of actually avoiding him, he was just making him worry and push even more to know what’s going on. Buck would never just accept Eddie drifting away, nor would he find it ordinary for Eddie to stop wanting to spend time with him on a random week in November. Something had to be wrong. And of course he was right. This is the only person besides Bobby who’s been able to see through him, and in ways nobody else could even begin to comprehend.
Eddie knew he needed to stop running.
He barely made it through the door before he heard the voice coming from the living room.
“Look who finally decides to show up,” Buck sat in the middle of their couch, one leg crossed over the other and his arms stretched out, nearly the length of the whole couch. Had that always been so attractive to Eddie?
“I was at Hen’s,” he was walking slowly, but his heart was pounding like he was running a marathon.
“Oh, I know. I have your location, Eddie.” Only he did. “What is going on with you?”
“It's complicated, Buck…” he trailed off, he didn't even know where to begin or if there were even words in the English language to explain what he was feeling.
Buck's face went dark, he got himself up from the sofa and stood right in front of Eddie, inches away but not meeting his eyes.
“Did I do something?” Eddie could’ve melted into nothing right then and there, “Can you just… talk to me?”
Their eyes made contact for the first time in what felt like an eternity for Eddie, but in his defense he stopped trying to look him in the eye after the third day of this whole mess. His body nearly gave out when he saw the sadness emitting from Buck’s eyes.
“I-I just wanna know if I did something but, Eddie, you gotta tell me what it is so I can fix it. You can’t avoid me forever, you’re making it imp–”
Eddie couldn't tell if the world had physically gone quiet the moment his lips had met Buck’s, but it certainly felt that way. He’d grabbed him by his face and just kissed him. Nothing in his entire life had ever felt so right, any worry or fear he’d felt before that moment, now felt so insignificant.
He was so entranced in how perfectly at ease he felt kissing him, that it took him a while to realize he was kissing him back. Buck’s hand on Eddie’s waist while his other hand gripped at his bicep, maybe instinctively, which made Eddie smile before he pulled away. Buck was about to open his mouth to speak again but—
“God, Evan… do you ever shut the hell up?” The blue eyes staring back at him no longer held sadness, instead a goofy smile was all he was met with.
“Maybe try that again, I think you’ve found the solution.”
the thought of eddie waking up in the middle of the night to a call from maddie of all people... immediate dread.
she checks up on him regularly, but he knows this is bad news. oh, god. is it buck? another accident? he almost doesn't want to pick up.
"which one?"
nothing could've prepared him for the way the floor would collapse beneath him when he heard the news come out of her mouth.
bobby. the pilar of their family, gone. and he was nearly a thousand miles away from them. feeling utterly and completely helpless and useless. his entire body going numb after he spent two hours crying on and off until his eyes had no more to give, the sun rising and the realization setting in that he was going to have to break the news to christopher.
he was at the least grateful it was maddie who told him, her tone is always calm and sweet, even when she's hurting. it makes you feel like you're okay even when it seems like the world around you is falling apart.
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