9-1-1 Countdown To Season 6 87/100[Image ID: 3 Large Gifs From Season 5 Episode 1 Of Hen And Karen In

9-1-1 ⤖ Countdown to Season 6 ⤖ 87/100 [Image ID: 3 large gifs from season 5 episode 1 of Hen and Karen in Athena and Bobby’s dining room. Gif 1: Hen looks at Karen and says “My wife, the apocalyptic doomsayer. Gif 2: A close-up of Hen smiling and shaking her head as she says “Always a big hit at the parties babe.” Gif 3: Karen laughs and says “Oh, you love it.” /end ID]

DO HIM NEXT

All My Deepest Fantasies

[Buck/Eddie | 4763 words | rated M]

Eddie likes to think he’s a pretty chill guy. He’s never been a particularly sexual being – sure, he recognizes when people are attractive and he’s had good sex before and has felt attraction at a low level pretty regularly, but.

But recently, Eddie came to the realization that he feels that attraction for men, too. Specifically Buck, and on a regular basis. There’s the whole being in love with him thing, sure, but also, he has eyes. Buck shares a lot of personal space with him in a lot of places in a lot of variants of dress (nothing sexual, unfortunately, but they do share a shower room at the station), and Eddie can see that he wears shirts a size too small and shorts that leave little to the imagination when he sleeps over on the couch, and he thought that low level attraction was just going to be a part of his life, now that he knows it’s there. There are even dips in the feeling, when he feels more of a warmth and would probably accept a hug over a handjob, but in this moment he’s starting to believe he might’ve been on a bit of a plateau with his wants, because he’s so used to seeing Buck in every shape and form available to him, and, well. Here’s the thing.

The thing is, Eddie has seen Buck in a t-shirt with jeans a little too tight and bright white sneakers and a huge grin and his souvenir refillable zoo cup in his hand and a backwards ballcap on his head. This is not a new image to Eddie. But it is a new image to Queer Eddie, and when he walks into the kitchen at 8:30 in the morning to the sight of Zoo Buck like they’d planned the week before (Eddie needs a day to clean and Chris hasn’t been to the zoo in a while, and Eddie and Buck have a full 48 hours off) he doesn’t expect to… Well. He becomes aware remarkably quickly that his brain is just so used to everyday Buck that it’s been able to dial its horniness down to a functioning level, and this New (to Queer Eddie) Buck has arrived and fucked all of that up.

He literally stumbles mid-stride as his brain processes the sight in front of him, and he has to wait the solid ten seconds it takes for his brain to reload before any coherent thought is available to him, and he’s just lucky that he’s usually a bit of a grump in the mornings and this doesn’t throw Buck or Christopher off.

“Good morning, Dad!” Chris says from the table, eating from a bowl of cereal. He’s already dressed all by himself and Eddie wants to bemoan the loss of childhood, but the genuine joy in his eyes at the prospect of a day at the zoo tells him there is still childhood yet to come. “Buck brought his cup! Do we have ours?”

“Of course we do,” he says, voice a little lower and gruffer than normal, and he clears his throat. He goes to the cabinet with all the mugs and Special Cups (Eddie’s a sucker for the free refill reusable souvenir cups that pretty much any type of park will sell you) and finds the one with the monkeys on it. It’s got one of those long and bendy straws and Eddie makes sure that it and the cup are both clean before handing it over to Chris, who beams at him.

He has not looked at Buck since he walked in, but the image of him is seared across his mind anyway.

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when eddie’s in the room what then

"is your father a thief? because i'll report him" omar najam funniest person alive

bittersweet and cruel (i still love you)

Rated M | 10k | read on ao3

Summary:

“Why did you leave?” That question, at least, is easy to answer. Buck rubs his palms on his jeans, which have gone from comfortable to confining in the hour and a half it’s been since he left his sister’s place, and shrugs. “Our marriage would have ended last week if I hadn't." “That's—" not true, Eddie almost says, because underneath that shell of childhood trauma he has worked so tirelessly to rid himself of, he is still, above all else, the most compassionately hopeful person Buck has ever met. The fact that he pauses says a lot. or; a bitter scene from a sweet marriage

There are some things Buck never understood growing up, some things he never even bothered to piece together. He's on the wrong side of thirty these days, closer to his forties than he is to his twenties so he’d like to think that he has, for the most part, grown out of that burning adolescent inclination to blame his parents for everything. But some things are very clearly his parents’ fault; the way his throat tightens whenever he thinks someone he loves is going to leave, the way he reacts with an internalized violence whenever his heart bleeds inside his chest—that’s all them. He has grown a lot over the years, courtesy of therapy and family and even a little bit of religion, but those are the big things, the bitter things he still sits with during the small hours of the night when Eddie is asleep and his thoughts drift to places they shouldn't go. But the one thing Buck can safely blame his parents for, now until forever, is the idea of home as a safe space was completely lost to him until he was well into his adulthood.

Maddie tried for him. She built a home out of a ruined legacy, carved a sanctuary from the ivory bones of a dead brother gone too soon, and did her best to create a place for him in which he could belong. God knows Buck would never fault her for that; his sister was still very much a child when she was thrust into motherhood, forced to raise a little boy before she even had the chance to be young and stupid herself. Buck could learn every word in every language and he still wouldn't be enough to convey to her how much she means to him, how grateful he is to get for sharpening him up, raising him so he didn't end up jaded and damaged like all the rest of the world. But despite her best efforts, it was Maddie herself who was his home, which means that when she left, she took his home right with her and left him with the empty shell of a house full of picture frames turned toward the walls and parents who could never look him in the eye.

Buck didn’t learn the idea of a safe space until Peru. Until an old woman named Magda saw him wandering the streets, fresh-faced and naïve, and took him in. She didn’t speak a lick of English and spoke to him in that kind of rapid-fire Spanish that only comes with having grown up soaking up a language since childhood. But she had a stern, matronly presence that had him straightening up his spine whenever she walked into the room, ready to give her the whole world if she asked. It was Magda who took care of him when he got sick with fever and forced all kinds of home remedies down his throat and slathered salves on his skin. It was Magda who dragged him to market with her and taught him how to pick the best, ripest fruits and then made him carry them back while she hobbled along looking at brightly woven rugs and clothing.

She died only six months after he met her, her old body just up and gone out on her like a flame in a windstorm sometime overnight, and Buck remembers standing in the corner of her home, watching her children grieve for her thinking that he surely would never know what it feels like to have this sort of safety again.

He was wrong, as it turns out.

Not long after Magda’s death came Los Angeles, and with Los Angeles came the 118 and the station house that he knows as well as he knows his own fingerprints. He met Hen, and Chimney, and Bobby, and it was as if all the pieces that were missing in the wake of Magda’s death were suddenly plugged up and filled again.

Then came Eddie, and wasn’t that a surprise? This man who Buck hated for all of a week on principle until suddenly he became the most important thing in his life. Second most important thing, technically; only Christopher holds the spot of being number one, not like either he or Eddie would have it any other way.

When he thinks about it, Buck doesn’t know how or when it happened. He doesn’t know when the station house got bumped down from being his primary safe space to being secondary, but one day Buck looked up and suddenly Eddie’s house was the only place in the world where he felt like he could just truly be.

No pressure. No expectations. No one looking to him to have it to have it all together.

He could just be himself.

He guesses it’s true what people say—that you never really know what you have until its gone. Funny he realizes how safe this home makes him feel when it doesn’t even feel like a safe space right now.

Buck looks up at the front door through the windshield of his jeep, moonlight cloaking the porch in shadow. He’s been sitting outside for almost thirty minutes now, trying and failing will his feet to walk him inside. He thinks about what would happen if he went indoors. He doesn’t know what the protocol is here, but as far as he can tell, there are only two real options: one in which he falls into bed next to Eddie and they wake up tomorrow and pretend the last six days didn’t happen, and another in which Eddie tells him to take the rest of his shit and get out before Christopher wakes up. He supposes still that there is a third option: one in which he takes the couch with no clue as to whether that will make things better or worse, and he spends the couple hours until daylight tossing and turning  until Eddie wakes up and they stare at each other across the room, trying to figure out what to do next.

Neither option appeals to him, if he’s honest. But he can’t sit outside forever. California isn’t Pennsylvania, but there’s a nip in the air that speaks to changing season and he doesn’t feel like wasting his gas in his husband’s driveway.

It’s still going on two in the morning when Buck finally gets out of his Jeep and makes his way inside. The house is so quiet that he almost feels like a ghost haunting the halls of a church. His feet down walk so much as they shuffle, as if every half-step he takes, his brain is fighting him to take two steps back. But he made it indoors, there has to be some victory to that.

Everything is dark inside, dimly lit by the nightlight Eddie keeps at the hallway entrance and the moonlight streaming through the windows.

He’s exhausted, but that’s not surprising. Everything is so exhausting all the time. There should be some sort of fetal application process before birth, Buck thinks nonsensically as he kicks off his shoes. There should be something that allows a fetus a choice as to whether or not it wants to be born, because honestly? Buck didn't ask for this. He's not about to eat a bullet, sure, and nine times out of ten, he loves his life enough to never want to leave it, but that tenth time? When everything feels irreparably agonized and broken?

Those are the days he wishes he’d had a say in the matter. Existence is a burden he never asked to carry; sometimes it is a feather in the palm of his hand, and other times, he is Atlas struggling underneath the weight of it all. But life is burdensome, all the same, even when it is a burden he would gladly carry. He supposes the problem now is that he got used to not carrying things alone, and he’s not sure if he remembers how to recalibrate his hardwiring so that he can bear that weight all on his shoulders, but he guesses he’ll have to try.

It's either that or curl up in a ball and die. Even that doesn’t seem too bad right now.

Buck looks toward the sofa, comfortable for visits, not comfortable to sleep on—before bypassing it altogether and heading for the kitchen. He’ll get some water first and then decide what to do next. If it comes down to it, he’ll even sleep on the floor if he needs to. But he barely makes it three steps into the kitchen, duffel bag still slung across on his shoulder, when he realizes he's not alone.

Eddie sits at the kitchen table, arms crossed over his chest, eyes lost somewhere in the middle distance. The sight of him punches the breath straight out of Buck’s chest; six days, and somehow he’d already almost forgotten the raw, ethereal beauty of him. Even now, when he looks exactly how Buck feels—haunted and grim, with shadows under his eyes, his skin waxy, and his face unshaven—he is still the most beautiful thing Buck has ever seen.

Buck stares for a long moment.

That's one thing he never learned how to not do. Not even four years of marriage could numb him to the sight of his husband. No matter where he is, no matter where they are, Buck’s eyes always find the long, solid lines of Eddie's form like a flower seeking heat. Most days, he doesn't mind.

Today, he just aches.

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