Work Text:
They’ve spent a few days in Brisbane together, filming for YouTube and talking about everything and nothing and going out to eat together, taking the long way home after. It’s felt right , the way it never does when Brett’s alone in Sydney, unable to reach out and grab onto his best friend, when even FaceTime can’t bring him any closer because they’re hundreds of miles apart. As much as he loves Sydney, it never feels like home.
It’s time to go, or he’ll miss his plane. They’ve been hugging goodbye for too long as it is. His planner is scribbled with countdowns to their next meeting, tightly packed plans for the brief time they’ll spend together. Brett steps outside, where his parents are already waiting to take him to the airport, and squints at the sun, woefully thinking back to the sad remains of his sunglasses, laying scattered on the street after their discussion had gotten too animated. Eddy is still clearly fighting the same emotion currently wringing Brett’s airways as he looks at him, all gentle and almost unbearably sad. With a single, soft-spoken “wait”, he disappears inside for a moment, only to reemerge with the black cap he’s been wearing all weekend, his favourite. Without ceremony, he plops it on Brett’s head.
“Bring it back to me next time, yeah?” he says, then pulls him into one last hug.
“Yeah,” Brett responds, his throat tight, realigns the hat when Eddy pulls away, and gives his hand a little squeeze before he leaves. It feels nice to have a piece of Eddy to take away. Less lonely.
***
It’s some kind of codependency, Brett thinks.
For years, they always brought something with them whenever they left each other. From the hat onwards, Brett always left Brisbane with a shirt, a pen, a pair of headphones – something of Eddy’s that Eddy gave him without asking. When Eddy was about to leave Sydney for the first time after that, he needed to look at Brett expectantly for a few seconds in the bleak hall of the airport before Brett realised what he was expecting, shrugged his black-and-white varsity jacket off and draped it over Eddy’s shoulders. Something settled in Eddy’s posture after that, and Brett never forgot again.
He blames it on the fact that they’ve barely spent a week apart for almost as long as they’ve known each other. They’ve been everywhere together, done everything together, and there has always been an arm to reach out to, a duet partner or honest critic or a shoulder to weep on or the source of 3 a.m. laughter.
His time in Sydney might have made the whole thing worse. They’d been close before, sure, but if Brett had to put a pin on the moment from which being next to Eddy was the only way his life made sense, that pin would sit somewhere in his Sydney days. They learned to be clingy, then, and never bothered to unlearn it, even when they shared a home.
Even now, years into living together, they get weird about being apart. A dinner with friends or a night spent somewhere else is fine, but everything after that makes both of them restless. The longer they’re separated, the longer the calls get, the more frequent the texts become – even when Brett begins to feel a little suffocated by their constant proximity, the way everything in their lives is intertwined, it takes him no more than two days to ache for the status quo again. Eddy is normalcy, he’s Brett’s default state.
They no longer give each other trinkets to bring along, mostly because the days they spend away from each other are so few and far between nowadays, but sometimes, Brett misses the tradition.
***
They do need time apart occasionally, of course they do. With the looming world tour ahead of them, a wild ride for which they’ll be firmly strapped in right next to each other, like that cable car they rode in or, more likely, a thrilling and exhausting roller coaster. It’s okay, then, that they take a break from each other before the safety bar gets locked down over them. It’s normal.
When Eddy goes on his Japan trip, the stream of artsy photos is almost constant. Shots of high-rises and cherry blossoms and delicious meals and lit streets in the dark. Brett gets updated every half an hour, on average, and yet, he aches for touch, wishes for something a little more palpable than Eddy's face on the screen of his phone, brief flashes of the earrings Brett had gifted him before he left – not quite the trinket custom of old, but something akin to it. This is the most extensive leave they’ve had from each other in literal years and he’s not too fond of the memories of separation it brings up.
In the midst of packing his last things before it’s his turn to go travelling, Brett appears in the doorway of the living room, a little sheepish.
“Hey, Eddy,” he starts, and Eddy immediately looks up from his laptop, slides his headphones down to rest around his neck.
“Can I bring something of yours with me?” Brett asks before he chickens out.
Eddy blinks at him twice.
“Yeah, like what?” he asks, and Brett is grateful for the question, happy that it’s not a what do you mean (I need a piece of you to cling to when you’re not next to me) or a why (because I feel hollow when I’m alone, and it feels less overwhelming when I can focus on you). This is why they’ve worked so well together for more than half their lives – Eddy decodes him without a cipher, understands Brett as much as he does himself or even more.
“Something really, really you,” Brett replies with an awkward little shrug, looks at Eddy think and realise and move. Eddy digs around in his box of shiny things – the third one in the past year, because he keeps needing bigger ones – and emerges victoriously with a bracelet.
Brett looks at the gorgeous white gold of the piece of jewellery, the four-leaf clovers of it, with a bit of disbelief.
“Really?” he asks, a little more reverent than he expected to sound.
“Yeah,” Eddy exclaims with a little bit of pride and carefully clasps it around Brett’s right wrist. “This is really, really me, right?”
“It sure is,” Brett has to agree. He lifts his arm, watches the glimmering bracelet slide across his skin until it catches. “You sure you wanna send me off to Japan alone with your favourite piece of jewellery ever?” he asks, then.
Eddy deliberates for a second. He blushes when he says, “Well, you’re my favourite person ever, so.” He plays it off as a joke, but it’s the truth, too, and Brett can’t help but throw himself at Eddy for a tight hug. Where his arms wrap around Eddy’s shoulders, he can run the fingers of his left hand over his other arm, feel the delicate chain of the bracelet against his skin.
“I can stay home, too, you know,” he offers when he pulls away.
“No, get out of here. As soon as we’re on tour, you’ll be begging for a week without me,” Eddy laughs at him, and Brett chuckles, too.
He knows he will, but he also knows he’d want to go back to normalcy, to his default state, on day two.