#the use of tattoos for eddie/buck/buddie purposes always has me like 👀👀

[trashendence]

Yeah. Yep. Mmmhmm. Something about how Buck is increasingly desperate to find the secret to happiness.

How Hen "always has the answers" but she told him he needed to figure it out on his own. How Buck is — likely subconsciously — clinging to the fact that she didn't try to stop him, so he must be on the right track. (Not her responsibility, btw. She's trying to be a supportive friend.)

How that "infinitely beautiful and reachable thing" he's so desperate to find is inside of Buck. Buck himself is infinitely beautiful and worthy of love and happiness. He has been all along.

But he misunderstood the assignment.

It's so deeply ingrained in Buck that he does not exist for his own sake. His body was created — literally conceived — to save someone else. And he failed. (How deeply fucked up is it that his mother's one and only attempt at care and compassion for her son just doubles down on his trauma? That she and his father caused him? "You were born to save someone." Fuck.)

And the more he tries to find happiness, Buck "The Fixer" just keeps trying to save other people. The one and only thing he knows he's good at.

And he keeps saving people. He failed Daniel, but now he does save people. So many people. Strangers, his beloveds (especially Eddie and Chris), over and over again. But why does he still feel so empty and despairing?

He may not write them down, but Buck's got his own ledger of people saved, just like Bobby. If he saves enough people, maybe he can finally be at peace with himself. Except Buck doesn't even have a goal he's trying to reach. It — and he — by definition will never be enough.

Anyway. Evan Buckley misunderstood the assignment and is still stuck in this moment:

He will not find happiness until he 1) reckons with this right here and talks to his parents about himself, 2) realizes he deserves happiness, for his own sake, not as a reward for saving people enough / saving enough people, and 3) that the happiness he seeks is already right there, inside and all around him.

(This was a lot but I caught feelings from your tags.)

this ask is great and more coherent than most of my thoughts, my friend. thank you.

every time i think about hen and buck’s relationship, about him seeking her input, i always go back to the post-lawsuit days, when the rest of the team was still kind of giving buck the (rightful) cold shoulder and hen was the first to properly welcome him back. that “thank you, hen. for not feeling like you need to follow bobby’s lead” and hen’s “i march to the beat of my own drum, buck. always have. you should too.” because that’s exactly what she kept repeating him all those other times, and buck keeps coming back to her to hear it once more, twice more - to have someone tell him that his life is his to live, no matter how it started. no matter how it’ll end.

eddie announces he’s leaving the 118 and buck looks at hen, who’s losing eddie too; buck kisses lucy and tells hen, who gives him advice based on her past mistakes; “hen, you always have the answers” and she’s just failed a test by giving the wrong answers. buck not only thinks someone else can show him the way out of the woods, but he chooses someone who’s just as lost. he was told once that “you make it, son” and “there’s never enough time” and he convinced himself there are universal answers to universal questions, somehow. so he asks the smartest person he knows - who’s lost, still - and listens as she tells him he has the power here, he has agency, they both do. but hen’s way out is not buck’s, and it’s so significant in the frame of his storyline that she’s finally picked her happiness and how to get it without sacrificing herself more precisely when buck’s path is turning on itself over and over again.

the point is that he was conceived in pain and in pain he was every time he managed to be seen. there reside both his question and his answer. sacrifice is his act of rebellion - ‘buck begins’ and how he just doesn’t. listen. and “just breathe”//“how will you breathe?”//“i’m gonna hold it. for as long as i can.” - but it’s also his act of submission to those who have left him alone - “i’m really sorry about your dead son, but can we talk about me for a minute?” -. he can’t ask of his parents to put aside some of their pain for him, that’d be asking them to sacrifice something and they’ve suffered enough. everyone has suffered enough. maybe he hasn’t? maybe the next time he gets crushed or almost drowns, yeah, maybe that will be enough and he’ll be free.

the healthiest mindset he’s shown up until now is his desperate “love me anyway” because unconditional love is what he inherently deserves, just like everyone does, but at the same time there’s nothing worse than that ‘anyway’. anyway? despite what? what should his parents’ love forgive him for? there’s no fault - no original sin - to get over here, and he doesn’t know. he doesn’t know he can get to the core of his being and find the beauty and the happiness he spies in others, he doesn’t know he’s whole and not the sum of parts, he doesn’t know he can stop clinging to whatever he meets on his path if he’s stable and solid as marble himself.

“i hide my true feelings from others myself.”

(copy-pasting this fever-induced set i made for morgan once upon a time because i feel like it sums everything up quite well).