#but yes I am very much looking forward to seeing the direction that 8b takes us on

[mischiefbuckley]

Eddie’s reaction that he makes in this scene also is such a sentiment to the friendship that they both hold because to Eddie who’s never had anyone in his corner, even during his marriage, has Buck who’s always had his back since day one so even while Buck is going through his own problems of dealing with the aftermath of a breakup he still offers to help Eddie out and stay with him and it’s Eddie little “oh” moment as well in the way of of course Buck would offer to help me out he’s my best friend and that’s the type of person he has always been to me

Compared to Buck who again Eddie’s been his longest standing best friend that we have seen on screen and how integral that friendship has been to Buck as well as to Eddie because Buck found himself feeling apart of the Diaz family with both Eddie and Christopher. And how at any given moment Buck always goes to Eddie for anything and everything and now the realization hits him as soon as he sits on the couch that he won’t have his best friend in his life forever and that’s his “oh” moment of he can’t imagine his life without having Eddie there with him all the time

[ecotone99]

[MF] Nosedive

Emma was up in the air about her position up in the air.

Being a flight attendant just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was no longer the glory days of the classy Pan-Am stewardess, adorned in her robin blue dress and cap, long legs and aura of elegance. There was no more mingling with wealthy jetsetters in those luxury liners in the sky, those flying spectacles of glitz and glamour, jetting off to the globe’s most exotic locales. Now it was all about waiting on the impatient masses. The ever-impatient masses.

“Just a second!” Emma hissed. The fat man in 36C was trying to monopolize her attention again. He leaned back on his neck pillow, folds of sweaty red flesh billowing out the sides. Earbuds in, he snapped his fingers above his head as if the plane would nosedive straight into the ocean if she didn’t come serve him. Right. That. Moment.

She clamoured past Margaret, her near-octogenarian co-worker. Fifty years and a hundred pounds ago, Margaret could’ve been one of those glamorous Pan-Am girls that a young Emma had pictured in her dreams. Margaret pushed a clunky metal service cart, loaded with reanimated frozen food (“chicken or pasta?”, the modern attendant’s catchphrase). Her oversized rear-end nearly sent Emma tumbling into a row of French businessmen, pattering away on laptops.

“Sorry love” Margaret purred. Her rosy cheeks and sweet old lady demeanour masked her gross incompetence. Emma liked her slightly better than the other attendants though, a bunch of middle-aged chain-smokers with skin like leather. And Craig.

Cursing her life choices, she finally reached the fat man, who resembled a raging toddler. He was watching some lame action movie, Tom Cruise sprinting across the miniscule screen as a hoard of thugs and dead pixels closed in.

“Yes sir?” Emma asked in her customer service voice. Despite her extreme disdain, her paycheque mandated that she attempt to remain pleasant.

The man swished something around in his cheeks, and proceeded to spit a chunk of half-chewed food into the plastic platter on his tray-table. It was flanked by a small cup of water, a roll from the Middle Ages, and something the airline deemed a ‘brownie’.

“I ordered the pasta.”

“And what is that?

“It’s chicken!”

Dammit Margaret. Emma wearily glanced around. Margaret was headed into first-class, backside squeezing down the cabin, begging for a hard kick. There were rows of seat-backs and human scalps as far as the eye could see. She didn’t like breathing the same recycled air as these people. Only one thing to do.

“Craig!” she called out. Craig, the only other attendant her age, spun around, spilling a stream of orange juice across the lap of the woman with the sleep-mask he was serving. Craig had always had a massive crush on Emma, mainly because there as no one else to really have a crush on. He was kind of cute, as one would describe a puppy or a small squirrel as cute, with a soft baby-face and patches of adult acne.

“You got any more pastas?”

Craig fumbled through his cart, unsheathing a tray of regurgitated dogfood with steam-soaked plastic wrap over the top. He tossed in some packaged utensils.

“My lady” he cooed, passing it over the passengers’ heads between them.

“Thanks” Emma muttered, cringing.

“Don’t mention it!” Craig said excitedly. “I’ve got so many pastas. And chickens. And pastas. And chickens. And vegetarian pastas. And…”

Emma smiled at him, and he visibly swooned. That did the trick. She placed the new meal atop the fat man’s tray-table.

“There you go, one pasta.” She resisted the urge to add your majesty.

The man poked at a congealed glob of tomato sauce with his fork. “How long til Paris?” he sneered.

Emma glanced at her watch. “Just a couple hours.” The man could’ve easily looked at the virtual map on his TV. One of the few conveniences of modern air travel.

He grunted.

“Are you traveling with your wife?” Emma asked, mistakenly advancing the conversation. An equally-obese woman pooled in the seat beside him, dead asleep, slobber leaking from an open jaw. She wore a football jersey and Cheetos dust.

“Yeah” he sighed. “It’s our anniversary trip. She always wanted to go to Paris.”

“And what are you most excited to see? The Eiffel Tower? Notre Dame?”

“Euro Disney” he answered. “I’m gonna try to give her the slip in Frontierland.”

Emma nodded with the most plastic smile she could muster. Thankfully, she was pulled away by the monotone ding of a ‘call attendant’ button a few rows down. In fact, there were multiple ‘call attendant’ dings, an entire ear-piercing symphony. Emma shuffled down the fuselage to find an exasperated mother in a middle seat, yelling with a strained voice, two shrieking gremlins darting around her. They slipped through her arms whenever she attempted to snatch one. Deep crayon strokes were embedded in the seat-back. The old man in front of them, nose in the latest Dan Brown atrocity, was growing more agitated with each kick and jab.

“Uh, hi” Emma muttered, with a quick wave.

“Sorry, sorry, look, I didn’t press it, they’re just…” the mother started. A gremlin resumed spamming the ‘call attendant’ button, the ding blaring, the little light flickering. “JASON! STOP PRESSING THAT! YOU’RE WASTING THE NICE LADY’S TIME!”

“Shhh!” hissed the old man from ahead.

“Emma! Emma!”

What now? Emma spun around from one train-wreck to the next. Margaret stood at the border with business class, leaning out the iron curtain, trying to get her attention. Emma swallowed her wits and hurried forward, vaulting over a pair of bare legs stretched across the aisle.

“What Margaret?”

“We’ve got a teeny bit of a problem up here, love” Margaret explained. “8B brought a chihuahua in her handbag. Very adorable of course. But he seems to have gotten loose and had a little tinkle on the floor- the chihuahua that is, not the passenger.” She glanced back behind her. “A wee more than a tinkle I’m afraid.”

“…And?”

“And it’s my break time. I was hoping you could be a dear and swab it up?” Margaret tossed a roll of paper towel, which Emma caught before she could react. “Thanks love!”

Looking at the paper towel, Emma felt something that certainly wasn’t job satisfaction bubble up inside her, pushing towards the surface. She swallowed it with a few deep breaths before slipping into the nearby lavatory, flicking it locked, and taking a seat on the closed high-suction toilet. She turned and looked at herself in the mirror, stained with God-knows-what. Heavy bags hung beneath her eyes. Leaning closer, she could even make out a few faint wrinkles, commencing their journey across her cheeks. Her lips throbbed from fake-smiling. Was this really what she wanted to do with her life? A glorified babysitter stuck on a Transatlantic tube, at the beck and call of every ridiculous tourist and their nonsensical demands? She briefly wondered if any Pan-Am girls had ever stooped to scrubbing up chihuahua piss. Probably not. Too classy. Emma fantasized about storming into her manager’s office once she finally made it home, slamming a big fat resignation letter on her desk. Maybe this would be her final flight after all.

As she soaked in her fantasy, she was interrupted by a sudden jolt. More than a jolt really. All at once the plane lurched abruptly sideways, sending Emma crashing into the sink, knocking the wind out of her. Just as she started to get up, smoothing the front of her stewardess uniform, there was a sudden thrash the other way, knocking her over the toilet, her knee bashing on the side. The lights flickered with a questionable buzz.

Pushing out the lavatory, Emma came upon utter chaos.

“Uh, this is your captain speaking, you may’ve noticed that we’ve hit a wave of turbulence” came Captain Ronaldo’s voice over the static-y intercom. “Should hopefully clear in a few minutes, but the seatbelt sign has been turned on and oxygen masks have been deployed for your safety. Please direct any questions to a member of our cabin crew.”

Nope!

Ignoring the prehistoric-sounding mess in the cabin as passengers scrambled for their masks- biting, clawing, kicking small children- Emma ducked into the galley where Margaret and Craig were already seated. She tugged on her dangling mask from overhead, her steady breaths soon inflating the small bag at the end.

Craig, his bag widening at a much faster rate, gripped her arm. She carefully pried him off like an unwanted Band-Aid.

“We’re going down…we’re going down…” he gasped between breaths.

“Oh, don’t worry love, we have Captain Ronaldo at the helm!” Margaret cheerily exclaimed. “This will be over in a few minutes! Everything is going to be fine, tip-top, we…OH SHITTTTTT!”

The plane plunged suddenly downward. Turbines screamed as it collapsed into a dizzying spiral, dropping hundreds of feet per second, the icy black waters of the mid-Atlantic rising to meet it.

Emma lurched forward, body straining against the seatbelt, clinging with white knuckles to the edge of her chair. She glanced around. Time seemed to have stopped. A coffee pot, knocked from the adjacent counter, hung in mid-air, a ribbon of black decaf floating out the lid, like something out of the space station.

This was how it ended, she supposed. Trapped in a plane with all these stupid people, Margaret and Craig her seatmates for eternity, no legacy but a name on a forgotten memorial plaque on a blustery seaside somewhere. She should’ve quit while she had the chance. Lived a little. Experienced life outside the tube. She never got to fall in love, never got to find herself, never got to have an adventure. Never got to see Paris beyond the overpriced airport hotels huddled around the tarmac. It was, indeed, her final flight. A weird sort of irony.

Emma braced for impact.

Suddenly, yet another jolt shook the craft, and it somehow leveled out. The dimmed lights reignited in full force. Emma watched the floating coffee pot shatter across the floor. Margaret was muttering “oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear” under her breath. Craig looked catatonic. Then came the bland tone of the seatbelt sign switching off, and Emma knew it was going to be okay. She brushed her windswept hair back into place, gingerly pulling off her oxygen mask and unclipping her seatbelt, filled with utter awe.

She’d been given another chance to live. And maybe the flight attendant life wasn’t so bad after all. Serving a few unruly passengers was sufficiently better than plunging to a freezing death in the middle of the ocean. Most of them were quite nice anyway. A few bad apples, rotten from travel stress and general indecency, ruined the bunch. That was it. None of it was personal. None of it was defining. Emma strode towards the cabin with a restored passion. Perhaps the very same passion that those retro Pan-Am girls had felt.

Upon arrival, every ‘call attendant’ button was screaming, the flashing lights like a sea of strobes. Feeling something bubble up inside her again, Emma wearily headed for the fat man in 36C, frantically snapping his fingers above his head.

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