Okay but your brain is so big re: that fork thing. It literally makes it make so much more sense, because it's such a bizarre moment otherwise? The weirdness of telling someone to kill you in the middle of an argument notwithstanding, there were probably butter knives on the table? The fact that it was a fork specifically feels so pointed, and making the connection with the "stick a fork in me" and that being how you tell something is done/ready....omg. I feel like you just forced open my third eye.
literally it’s been driving me crazy for DAYS? the word choice felt so heavy handed for exactly the reasons you listed, but i did wonder if the “stick a fork in me” for “ready” meant something but i couldn’t figure out to what end. i was thinking it was foreshadowing for some call to come with someone getting a flatware injury before i realized it was an “invisible” nod
which gets even crazier bc i rewatched that scene after that post and in addition to the “fork tender” reference you’ve also got eddie being anxious about following the recipe exactly (chain of command parallels?), him planning the mavericks tickets drop for a father-son roadtrip, and this is also the episode featuring hen’s birthday
like i cannot believe i’m saying this but i genuinely think they had this episode mapped out at least a year in advance and my brain is SPINNING
hellooo erin, this one was soooo fun hehe. i had to cheat a little bit and do 6 sentences bc i could not for the life of me find a way to merge the last two into one in a way that sounded good 😅 so!! enjoyyy the lil extra 🫶
Buck is sat at the kitchen table, sorting through the bills when Eddie gets back from his run, hair flopping over his forehead and tank top sticking to his torso — completely and utterly distracting.
"Welcome back," Buck leers unabashedly, "good run?" He asks, abandoning the mail to snag the hem of Eddie's shirt as he passes, tugging him out of his path to the fridge and into the vee of his legs instead.
Shamelessly, he pushes the fabric up and out of the way, leaning forward to press his face to Eddie's bare skin, warm from exertion and sticky from sweat; he can taste the salt on his lips as he murmurs appreciatively, "You smell good."
"I smell good?" Eddie muses around a rumbling laugh, clearly not convinced.
He lifts his arm: to push the hair from his eyes, to pet over Buck's shoulder, to take a whiff for himself — whatever the reason, Buck takes advantage, winding his arms around Eddie's middle to keep him still, keep him close, and tipping his face up to bury into the hollow of Eddie's armpit, where the sweat and the musk and the undiluted Eddie is strongest. "So good, baby," he hums, nuzzling his nose into the soft skin, the wiry hair, "so good."
It was so hard to choose because they all sound good, but 🤒 please!!
some more post-confession, immediately after this snippet:
-
"Sure," Eddie says, gesturing stupidly at the half-full pot. He clears his throat again, steps to the side, leans his hip against the counter edge as Buck comes into the kitchen. The cup in his hand bleeds heat into his fingers; he sips it just for something to do as Buck leans past him to pull open the cabinet. He's not even that close, but Eddie can still smell him—that woodsy body wash he likes, faint lingering notes of pine. Buck acquires a cup, pours himself coffee.
"Any oat milk creamer left?" he asks.
"Ravi used it up, sorry," Eddie says. Buck makes a face at him, scrunched up and playfully annoyed. He didn't shave this morning, probably because his cheeks are still a little sore, and blondish stubble softens the edge of his jaw.
"Jerk," he says cheerfully. "Hey, you okay? You seem a little…"
The only other scene I have, based on what is undoubedly my misunderstanding of California marriage law, based on some 3AM Googling, as @perlaret can attest:
“Did you know that one of the grounds for annulment in California is if one party had a prior spouse that was declared dead but turned out to be alive?”
“You don’t say.”
There’s a long beat of silence as Eddie finishes up in his locker. Then he hears a low, nervous chuckle. “You think What’s Her Name would be willing to pretend to be Shannon again?”
Eddie barely stops himself from slamming the locker closed as he turns to glare at Buck. “How is it that you keep finding ways to make this all worse.”
Buck balks, mouth hanging open as he stutters out his response. “I- I didn’t mean- It’s a joke, Eddie, God.”
“Ha,” He says, and does slam his locker, turning to stalk out and start his shift.
If you had to choose between Buddie never going canon OR Buddie goes canon but in the most boring/rushed way possible, which would you pick?
this is diaBOLICAL.
ok. im going buddie goes canon but it's boring/rushed because honestly??? after all the build-up we've had over the past nine years, even if the actual culmination of it all isn't what i hoped, that doesn't erase all it took to get them to that point you know?? and it's hard to think of a scenario where they confess to full blown romantic love and im not on the floor about it, no matter how disjointed and poorly executed.
and at the VERY VERY least we still get beautiful gifsets and abby butchdiaz's real love amv out of buddie canon so. i still win.
I will ask you about it! What are your thoughts/worries about what's going on with Buck and Eddie?
ahhh yay okay!
so like. i do kinda wanna preface this by saying this isn’t me dooming or closing on buddie bc i am absolutely not, and i could very well be proven wrong, especially if we get some good Buck and Eddie worrying about Chris in the next episode. and also this isn’t even like. my entire thought about this? bc i still don’t know everything i’m feeling, and i’m still hoping we get something in the test of the season, because the start of it really seems like it was setting something up and maybe they’ll return to that at some point. (logical plot arc who? can they just put me in the writers room i have to edit writers’ arcs all the time in my day job i can help them be logical) and if my worry here is proven wrong, i will be fucking thrilled bc i want it to be proven wrong
also i feel i should mention that i have only watched each episode once so it’s entirely possible i’m misremembering things, especially bc 9a aired during a very very busy time in my life and maybe i didn’t absorb everything
and honestly this turned into such a long ramble bc i keep going back and forth on everything even as i typed this out so i am sticking it under a cut
actually lemme tl;dr this first, and if you want my rambling thoughts (sorry, they’re so disjointed) you can read on. so the tl;dr: i worry they’re just gonna focus on Buck and Eddie solely as friends, thus ignoring what made them BuckandEddie and also made them coparents and partners, and therefore sweep that under the rug or act like it never happened, bc i have yet to see much of an arc for either of them in season 9, individually or as a pair, and there isn’t much in s9 that’s making me confident they’re gonna go anywhere with the two of them in any space beyond just best friends. i hope i’m wrong—i hope we get some good Buck and Eddie worrying together next episode, bc that would nullify my fears of them retconning shit—but the fact i am not confident about it worries me.
and please note (this is not at you Erin! but anyone who might read this and wanna yell at me for apparently dooming) i’m not saying this will happen. this isn’t spec or dooming—it really isn’t. it’s just my fears that they’re not gonna follow through on anything they’ve spent time setting up.
my thought/worry is that they’re gonna try to throw Buck and Eddie out of character a little bit and try to just. undo any potential buddie setup. which obviously would be bananas—how do you throw them out of character in season 9? that’s one reason why i even hesitated to talk about my worry here. it’s an insane thought.
but there have been certain decisions that feel a little ooc (i actually have a post about Eddie in last night’s episode saved in my drafts bc i’m not sure i worded it the way i want it yet). we have also had some great setup in season 8 that went nowhere—and s8 was far from the only season to set something up only for it to go nowhere—so it wouldn’t surprise me if anything they set up in s9 goes nowhere too. and i’ve been saying for most of season 9 now that Buck and Eddie are just. confusing me, because i cannot figure out what the hell their arc is supposed to be, let alone if they even have one, individually or as a pair. we’re halfway through the season now and i still can’t pinpoint it, mainly bc i feel like they haven’t really had much of a cohesive plot yet? by this point in s8, Buck and Eddie had a lot going on together. rn out in season 9, we have Eddie with Abigail, Chris, and religion (sigh, sorry, religion is a tough subject for me and i don’t have faith they’d do anything with it in a way that i personally would like, which is ofc fine bc others will and have had different takes, as we saw when we got that variety of posts about Eddie and religion during dia de los muertos—it’s just personally not for me) and Buck telling that couple he’s trying to figure out how to be a half, not a third, and moving into his new house. but that’s pretty much all i’ve seen established for them individually so far. there was some setup for them as a pair in the beginning, but that doesn’t appear to have lasted beyond the opening arc.
and again, i could be proven wrong with the next episode! if we do get some good Buck and Eddie parenting moments like we have in the past, my fears will probably go away. but it’s the fact that i can’t be sure that’s what they’ll do that worries me and makes me fear they’re gonna just. ignore some of what made Buck and Eddie BuckandEddie. it wouldn’t be the first time, yknow? we never got Buck’s feelings about Chris leaving—i still wish we’d gotten something about Buck wanting to bring Chris back too—even if we did get the wonderful 8x17 (though even then one can argue that didn’t go anywhere since in the next episode Eddie was still leaving, Buck had decided to transfer out of the 118, and then the next thing we knew Eddie was back in his house and Buck was … somewhere). we never got any explanation about what happened between or to Buck and Eddie during the hiatus, why they were acting the way they were in the opening arc (i’ve seen some people say it was them recovering from Bobby but we never actually got that explained, nor have i really seen much onscreen to support that apart from them now just being friends again), nor what happened leading up to Buck moving out of Eddie’s house. like earlier in the season i was still hopeful we’d get an explanation for what was going on, but now that we’re halfway through i’m not really that confident anymore. and ofc this isn’t the Buck and Eddie show, but they’re still two main characters and it feels really odd to not actually focus on them in this respect.
so i suppose this is just me worrying that they’re sweeping it (“it” being BuckandEddie, and also therefore buddie) under the rug and moving on as if all that never happened, or try to retcon the idea that Buck is Chris’s second parent. (yes we have that moment ostark mentioned is coming, but we all know i don’t lend much to listening to actors in interviews, so even if we do have a Chris and Buck moment, who’s to say it’s gonna be like something we’ve had in the past? i certainly hope it will, especially now that Chris is growing up, but i’m not confident.)
and okay not just the Buck and Eddie of it all (bc again that would require a lot of character erasure that doesn’t really seem like something they could or would do) but whatever they were trying to set up in the beginning of season 9 or in season 8. and yes we had those great moments in the nightclub with Eddie donning his heart eyes at Buck, and the way Eddie looked at Ravi when Ravi asked how he can be so bad at this, and the fact Eddie was teaching Hen to dance in Buck’s backyard instead of his own, and probably more i’m spacing on rn bc i haven’t had any caffeine yet. but just bc we had those moments doesn’t mean they’re gonna add up to anything.
if it isn’t clear from this absolute ramble, i keep going back and forth about what i’m feeling, even while just writing all this out (i actually had to start it over bc of how back and forth i was going in a way that didn’t really lend itself to legibility), because we did have those moments and those moments were great. i’m really enjoying s9 so far, even if i wish things seemed to have more of a cohesive arc. and granted i binged the show in a matter of like. a month maybe? before i caught up to season 8, though i didn’t start watching s8 until we’d passed the episodes Eddie wasn’t in, so it’s entirely possible that i just don’t have the same experience others do in how to watch the show and how the show does certain things, which is why i hesitated to voice this fear for so many episodes. last night’s just kinda. idk made me feel a certain way. and the Eddie moment in my drafts is kinda what clinched me mentioning that i have a worry instead of just letting it sit.
of course on a different but related note, i still don’t really understand why people are worried that Alex is gonna be Eddie’s next love interest. i talked about this in the tags on that post you saw, Erin, how i keep wondering if others are seeing something i’m not that’s making them worry that Alex is Eddie’s new love interest bc that is entirely possible (being demi has affected how i view romances in the past so i don’t always pick up on allo cues) but idk. she just seems like a recurring character to me who would of course be helping Eddie find Chris if Eddie has figured out it was Abigail who took him, considering Eddie brought Alex in to help Abigail in the first place. but i digress bc that’s off topic. sort of.
okay upon rereading this there is no possible way to conclude this but hopefully something made sense. i’m not dooming, not closing on buddie, and if they make me suffer an actual relationship that goes nowhere again i will probably scream. but my worries are only getting stronger as we go further along in the season, and i hope i’m proven wrong. or maybe this is just me missing season 5. i loved season 5. watched it over and over.
sorry this makes no sense despite me rereading it a dozen times but i need to actually get started on my day so i’m just clicking post!
10(ish) new sentences from ghost!buddie for @semperama
Chris presses his lips together in a thin line and sniffles, and then sets the planchet down in the center of the board, two fingers of each hand resting on the guide. Buck can see him take a deep breath and then another.
“Buck,” Chris starts, a whisper, and the name catches hard in his throat.
Buck feels it in the space where his heart should be – a tug, a pulse.
Chris clears his throat. “Buck are you here?”
“Yes!” Buck shouts voicelessly. “Yes, I’m here.”
Chris doesn’t twitch. The planchet doesn’t move.
“Buck,” Chris repeats, resigned misery in his quiet voice. “Buck are you here?”
Buck gets as close as he can without walking through Chris. “Yes, I’m here. God, Chris. I’m here.” He scrubs his hands through his hair.
10 i answered here but i will say another part of fanon that i hate is that eddie's Actual Authentic personality is the exact opposite of how he has behaved up until now. because. why?
17. there should be more of this type of fic/art
yay let's be selfish. i will Always read non-sexual intimacy, and i will Always read buck and eddie taking care of each other right after the tsunami (canon compliant or not, i'm not picky). also buck and eddie taking care of each other after just a regular but difficult shift. hurt/comfort but like Mutual hurt/comfort you know?