we might end up real close

listen its always going to be buck and eddie. always.

chimney once watched his own brother die doing a job that he followed him into. now he has to grapple with the fact that one of his closest friends is dead from the same virus that he was cured from. buck once told bobby that he couldn’t handle seeing the people he loved hurt and he hated to be the guy standing there doing nothing about it. and he had to watch from the other end of a sealed glass door as bobby said goodbye, knowing in his heart that this time there was nothing he could do. hen became a paramedic to help people, to save people. but this time, she didn’t even know that bobby needed saving. eddie wasn’t even there. he joined the fire department because he missed the camaraderie of the army. that team became his family. but in the end, he wasn’t even there. no one’s beating them in the survivor’s guilt department. the only man who probably could is dead so…

The rest of B-Shift hearing about Ravi committing domestic terrorism for the sake of Chimney even after Bobby offered to take the fall and just thinking, “Oh God, they finally got him. They roped Ravi into their sick little co-dependent work family. We’re never getting him back.”

buck not letting eddie give in to his insecurity about the job. buck not letting eddie talk himself out of his decision to move. buck holding eddie accountable for lying to chris and taking into account how chris must be feeling but also reminding him that all he needs is his dad. and that's exactly why he's eddie's partner in life and always will be, because he will never fail to consider what's best for both eddie AND christopher and to help them get there.

imagine you have a surprise baby at nineteen years old and you enlist because you don't know what else to do and you come home with ptsd and three bullet holes and a medal you hate looking at and your wife leaves you and your parents try to take the baby you did everything for but against all odds you get out and you make it work. and then your wife comes back and then your wife dies in front of you but you're still making it work. and then five years later you have a completely unexpected understandable relapse in your grief and then your parents really do take the baby you did everything for and so you leave behind the life you made and the man you're in love with and move back to the city that suffocated you because you don't know what else to do. and you're trying really really hard to make it work. but it’s just not working anymore.

The thing about 911 is that the shipping drama and discourse surrounding it completely belies how insane this show truly is. A man is attacked by a shark on the freeway. Ghosts are probably real, and so are curses. The most recent season opens with a bee-nado that segues into a plotline about an autistic half-orphan child landing a broken plan. The most dramatic moment between the fandom's favorite ship is one of the characters getting shot by a sniper in broad daylight in the suburban streets of Los Angeles. Buck's introductory scene of the entire show is him stealing a firetruck to have sex with a Tinder hookup. The fire captain's backstory is an addiction that led to the death of 148 people. He's best friends with his wife's ex-husband and once proposed to said ex-husband's boyfriend on his behalf while that boyfriend was performing brain surgery on a man in the middle of a burning building. There's a guy who sneezes every time he lies and then lies so hard he almost dies. One of the main characters gets rebar impaled through his skull and is back to work the next month with no lasting side-effects. They basically never fight fires.

genuinely I can't stop laughing at the fact that it's a canon buddie dynamic that eddie just goes around doing vaguely evil and illegal shit and buck follows him going surely this is all perfectly legally sound because eddie - my eddie, the paragon of goodness with a silver star - would never do anything illegal. but then again what else could I have expected from buck 'follows eddie diaz into what he suspects is a mob establishment with zero questions' buckley

i need that as a fic NOW!

one thing that i think is really interesting about buck and eddie's conflict and particularly their little not-fight at the end of the ep is that for literal years they've been using chris as a shield to talk about how they feel about each other. every declaration of trust or affection or whatever is spoken through christopher (there's no one in the world i trust with my son more than you. the will. etc etc) . but the thing about this time is that chris (by virtue of him being in texas) is the barrier. he's the thing effectively causing the conflict so they can't use him to hide behind. which means that almost for the first time ever we get them both actively vocalising what they mean to each other, irrespective of chris. i don't know what i'm gonna do without you. he knows how to stay, unlike some people. i'm having more trouble dealing with the idea of you not being around than i'd like to admit. i don't like it anymore than you do. like!!!!! they're admitting they don't want to be without each other!!!! they're admitting they don't want to be apart!!!!! and that is.....genuinely monumental when you consider how rarely they say it out loud (even if they show it in other ways). like the entire episode is basically just them both being irritable and upset bc they don't want to leave each other 😭😭😭