what you always do

It’s like I was viewing things as a third party, as if it was on tv. There’s this voiceover (VO) of a woman talking and she’s talking to Eddie. Shes saying something like ‘and what were the first signs?’ And I’m seeing Eddie interact with Buck and then interacting with Chris, and Eddie in a voice over is going “it was mostly forgetting words and getting stuck in the middle of sentences. I thought it was just stress.” And then there’s these scenes of Eddie with some woman, and he’s laughing and they look happy. The VO woman goes “you were getting married” and VO Eddie hums and is like “we were planning for the fall”. Literally in my head i’m thinking ‘he’s marrying a woman??? Tf???’

Then it goes to Eddie in a hospital bed. He looks, like, absolutely devastated and Buck is by his bedside while a doctor talks to them. It goes to Eddie and Buck with Christopher and Christopher looks really scared. VO Eddie goes “the doctor said I was the youngest person he’d ever seen with it”.

It’s never mentioned directly but i just ~knew~ in that dream logic way that he has fucking early onset dementia. All the while I’m still thinking ‘okay so this woman???’ And then it cuts back to the hospital room from earlier and the scene kind of continues from where it cut off and it’s Buck leaning forward and enveloping Eddie’s hands in his and looking at him with glassy eyes and going “I’m with you every step, Eddie”.

Then boom, it jumps and it’s an obvious time skip and and Eddie is lying in a hospital bed again but he looks older and thinner, with gray peppering his temples and his stubble and he’s obviously not well, and Buck looks older and Christopher is there and he’s a whole ass adult. It seems to have been 5-7 years or so. The woman VO goes “it progressed quickly” and VO Eddie goes “doc said I had a random genetic mutation. Nothing anyone could have done”

Christopher sits at one side and holds Eddie’s hand and says something like “I love you dad, it’s okay, I know it hurts, you can go” and Buck is on the other side of him, tears streaming, one hand cupping the side/back of Eddie’s neck and the other holding his hand. This is when you see they both have wedding rings on. VO woman goes “it was always going to be him?” And VO Eddie goes “always”.

As much as we love to say Buck is Christopher’s second dad, that is just not displayed in canon, not explicitly. It’s just not. Buck is most definitely the closest adult in Christopher’s life besides Eddie, by a wide margin, but they’ve only ever put Buck in a particularly parental role a couple times. Buck himself will never put himself in that role unless Eddie or Chris explicitly says it. It’s not ‘watering down’ anything to acknowledge that this is entirely different, both from a relational standpoint and from a responsibility and life stage standpoint.

I’ve also seen people say it’s ridiculous that ‘oh just because Buck is the sperm donor Theo goes to him and not family’. You guys, I don’t think you understand just how often it happens that children have -no- other family to take them in these cases. They may have an elderly grandparent that can’t care for them, or a distant uncle who doesn’t care, or family that simply -can’t- due to financial issues, disability, etc. It’s not like Buck was an anonymous sperm donor, he was known to Theo’s parents, very well known, long before Theo was even thought of. It makes total and complete sense that Theo could go to Buck if there were no other family members that could take him. This is true whether Buck was the sperm donor or not, but you cannot argue that it’s not a positive thing that Theo is with someone he is biologically similar to and could potentially understand him better than someone else.