#when chris comes home and buck makes a perfect lasagna on the first try then what

[littleblackraincloudofcourse]

Color theory won

Couch theory won

even the Doors theory won

After months of people calling buddie shippers crazy we get an episode full of wins and we're not even half way through the season

[evanfixes]

Buck learned real, important, unconditional parental love from Bobby, whose primary love language is cooking. He came into his own amidst the smell of bay leaves and oregano, unattainable lasagna.

Eddie is Latino, and I can verify that culturally, food is definitely love—besides which, he lived so much of his young/adult life on shitty military meals. Far from all that culturally unique home cooking (love).

Buck is almost constantly cooking for Eddie & Christopher on screen; at this point, the wildly escalating fandom joke about Eddie's inability to make food is canon. Which is funny because he's also been unable to make love work too, first chasing after a half-remembered ideal and then the ghost of a woman he is unable to remember objectively. And it's funny too that Buck is the one always feeding Eddie (and Chris). At the end of the day, nuns and ghosts aside, Buck will be there to give Eddie the love and support he needs.

Buck messes up his lasagna a lot. He kind of fumbles around, trying to perfect it, and he feels like he can do that with Eddie and Christopher. He feels safe to mess up (why wouldn't he, after the tsunami, the lawsuit...) so he does. He laughs when the lasagna burns because Eddie already planned on pizza, and that's okay because it doesn't matter anyway. Buck attempts to demonstrate the love he's come to respect, that he admires in Bobby, that he desperately missed himself as a child, and Eddie is happy to let him—even when it burns a little.

What I'm saying is that regardless of where this show goes, Buck and Eddie feed a hunger in each other that's too vulnerable, too private for anyone else to even be allowed to know about. So even if we aren't given romance, what is more true of a love than feeding a heart that's hungry in some way only you can see and fulfill?