That Home // Buck S9

BUDDIE ★ PEACE & VIOLENCE (DEVASTATING VERSION)

flashing throughout as per the show

Eddie is trained for following procedure as much as adapting to circumstances. he will reel in his panic till he decides it's not efficient to reel it in anymore. everything is a tool for him, including himself. he rushes in when it's an intervention (something he isn't actually trained for) like it was for Abigail but 9x13 was a mission. it was a rescue and evacuation. and this is persistent work. unrelenting work that requires you to keep going step by step no matter how much you have to go. of all the people who were looking for Buck, Bonnie and Earl were stuck with the worst choice because Eddie has always been about remembering. he's thorough in a way that comes from practice, of years of valuing details (sometimes even at the cost of the big picture). and he does not waylaid from what he knows to be true. he's a skeptic at his core and that means reliance on real things he observes. he knows what he saw, he knows what he was looking for, he finds what he was looking for. there's no distracting him from what he KNOWS. he doesn't waste time trying to know anything more than what he needs. he sees the truck, he hears Bonnie behind him, he takes the gun from her. it's point A to point B with zero space for detours. he doesn't want to know why someone did what they did, he doesn't want to know anything other than what he went there for - where is Buck? is he alive?

disclaimer before i start yappin': i have an english literature degree. i took the one statistics class in college over a decade ago. anything i say could actually be deadass wrong (i don't think it is), but i say it with truth in my heart.

i'm SO sorry these graphs are ASS quality bc no matter how much i tried to make them smaller and still legible it just. didn't work! but if you click/tap to expand they do look like 10% better???? i think the graphs might look better on mobile and everything under the break might look better on desktop?? fuck it we ball.

so to get the data i wanted to look at, i went to the 9-1-1 (tv) fandom tag on ao3 and then filtered by each month. the numbers charted below reflect the available* fics when i checked on 7/1/26, and they span from the month the show premiered, jan of 2018, to last month, june of 2026.

*available meaning live on ao3. i do lament this couldn't reflect every fic ever written for the show but hey, people have every right to yank their shit from the internet if they really want to.

in my opinion, and once again i don't do math like that, there are three distinct booms that lead to upward trends: a mini boom when eddie and maddie join the cast of characters, a bigger boom from people joining to watch the tsunami arc, and the biggest boom when buck got canonized as bisexual.

another interesting trend that i noticed is that more often than not (read: most of the time but not always, to be clear), there are spikes the month after each premiere (season premiere, winter/spring premiere) and during the month of each finale (season finale, fall finale). usually the exceptions to this trend were times where the fall finale ended the last week of november or the times where the winter/spring premiere was at the beginning of march instead of the end. (dates pulled from wikipedia)

season 9 is a little bit of a tricky thing with having the premiere beginning of october and two mini hiatuses after the winter premiere, so while it does look like the fandom is losing some numbers, i do think we're just returning to a more-normal average with less fics of a certain other ship being written, and i do imagine we'll have a spike in the fall once again for the whole fandom.

fics with the buddie (buck/eddie) tag made up the strong majority of fics during the fox era (65% being the lowest may 2019, highest being 96% in feb 2019) which you can see as the lines are much closer together during that time, and post bi buck boom they still have the highest number of fics of any ship in any month and make up more than half of all 9-1-1 fics published every month except for may 2024 (47%) and june 2024 (45%), with the highest percentage post-abc being 72% in march of 2026.

the average percentage of buddie fics in the fox era was 77% and the average percentage of buddie fics in the abc era is currently 62% but i do think it's likely on an upwards trajectory. 15% seems like a scary dip, but the highest number of buddie fics in the fox era (856, october 2021) is only 35 fics more than the lowest number of buddie fics in the abc era (821, june 2024).

so the tl;dr version for everything above: no, i don't think 9-1-1 is in a fic drought, i think we're just trending back to a buddie higher majority which would affect the numbers any which way with losing numbers from other ships, and i think we'll be just fine.

under the read more i put all the numbers i pulled from ao3 to make the charts above, as well as the rest of the ships that showed up on the list for the relationship filter.

anyway, thanks for reading!!

disclaimer before i start yappin': i have an english literature degree. i took the one statistics class in college over a decade ago. anything i say could actually be deadass wrong (i don't think it is), but i say it with truth in my heart.

i'm SO sorry these graphs are ASS quality bc no matter how much i tried to make them smaller and still legible it just. didn't work! but if you click/tap to expand they do look like 10% better???? i think the graphs might look better on mobile and everything under the break might look better on desktop?? fuck it we ball.

so to get the data i wanted to look at, i went to the 9-1-1 (tv) fandom tag on ao3 and then filtered by each month. the numbers charted below reflect the available* fics when i checked on 7/1/26, and they span from the month the show premiered, jan of 2018, to last month, june of 2026.

*available meaning live on ao3. i do lament this couldn't reflect every fic ever written for the show but hey, people have every right to yank their shit from the internet if they really want to.

in my opinion, and once again i don't do math like that, there are three distinct booms that lead to upward trends: a mini boom when eddie and maddie join the cast of characters, a bigger boom from people joining to watch the tsunami arc, and the biggest boom when buck got canonized as bisexual.

another interesting trend that i noticed is that more often than not (read: most of the time but not always, to be clear), there are spikes the month after each premiere (season premiere, winter/spring premiere) and during the month of each finale (season finale, fall finale). usually the exceptions to this trend were times where the fall finale ended the last week of november or the times where the winter/spring premiere was at the beginning of march instead of the end. (dates pulled from wikipedia)

season 9 is a little bit of a tricky thing with having the premiere beginning of october and two mini hiatuses after the winter premiere, so while it does look like the fandom is losing some numbers, i do think we're just returning to a more-normal average with less fics of a certain other ship being written, and i do imagine we'll have a spike in the fall once again for the whole fandom.

fics with the buddie (buck/eddie) tag made up the strong majority of fics during the fox era (65% being the lowest may 2019, highest being 96% in feb 2019) which you can see as the lines are much closer together during that time, and post bi buck boom they still have the highest number of fics of any ship in any month and make up more than half of all 9-1-1 fics published every month except for may 2024 (47%) and june 2024 (45%), with the highest percentage post-abc being 72% in march of 2026.

the average percentage of buddie fics in the fox era was 77% and the average percentage of buddie fics in the abc era is currently 62% but i do think it's likely on an upwards trajectory. 15% seems like a scary dip, but the highest number of buddie fics in the fox era (856, october 2021) is only 35 fics more than the lowest number of buddie fics in the abc era (821, june 2024).

so the tl;dr version for everything above: no, i don't think 9-1-1 is in a fic drought, i think we're just trending back to a buddie higher majority which would affect the numbers any which way with losing numbers from other ships, and i think we'll be just fine.

under the read more i put all the numbers i pulled from ao3 to make the charts above, as well as the rest of the ships that showed up on the list for the relationship filter.

anyway, thanks for reading!!

i clung to your hands so that something human might exist in the chaos ✴