Work Text:
“Eddy Chen.”
He blinks. Turns his neck with a crack so loud, he’s almost afraid he’s actually taken his own head off. Brett is blissfully ignorant of any and all dangers to Eddy’s physical wellbeing, practicing his scales like he hasn’t said anything momentous.
Not that Eddy Chen is momentous in any way, obviously. It’s just his name, blah, whatever. But it’s also his name in Brett’s mouth, taking flight like a bird that knows it can come back to roost, always. His name, instinctively first in line, casually foremost on the list. Before Brett’s own, even. He hadn’t been expecting it.
And he’s being completely normal about it now, okay, look away.
Brett looks at him. The arch of his eyebrow manages to convey both confusion and amusement. He doesn’t even want to know what his own face looks like right now. “What?”
“You said my name, like. A violinist.”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“No, I mean — this is for a bit,” he wags his phone mere inches from Brett’s nose, “for TikTok.”
“Yeah, I figured. So?”
“I thought you were gonna mention someone else.”
“Oh, was I supposed to?” Brett shakes his head, a wisp of a smile tugging at his lip. “My bad. You want me to say Janine or something, do it again?”
No. “Yeah, why not.”
The problem with the lie is this: Brett knows him like he knows his violin. He clocks the falsehood somehow, frowning as the truth reveals itself in the wrinkles of Eddy’s forehead, or the downward slope of Eddy’s mouth, or whatever else that gives him away. It takes everything in him not to tremble where he stands. So much for that random TikTok joke he wanted to make, now derailed by feelings and shit.
“You sure?” Brett asks.
“Yeah. Yeah, obviously, because I know that, y’know,” and it shouldn’t take a monumental effort to say what he wants to say, but it does. Eddy flips the phone in his hand, pretends to study the dust on the casing before he continues. “It’s nice to know I come to mind first. For you.”
“Well, you always do.” Brett pokes at him with his bow. “This shouldn’t be a fucking surprise, hey, like I thought you knew.”
And. Maybe he does.
It’s a tender, fragile thing that burns if he so much as thinks about it, but he’s been carrying that truth everyday, really. He’d carried it for years, through frantic fundraisers and crowded concert halls and hazy hotel rooms and the constancy of a man who will always, if you look at the bigger picture, think of him, first and foremost.
He does know.
“See? You were just being an idiot,” Brett rolls his eyes at him, lets his grin soothe the insult down into something fond. “Let’s try that again.”
Eddy’s been carrying the truth he knows for so long. He carries it now into his second attempt at the TikTok video, grinning as Mélodie sweeps away every last hint of envy: a subtle reminder that, while Brett plucks Hilary out of the constellations of names he respects and adores, hers is not the name that comes to him first, not the name that will always come first.
And if, sometime later, he breathes his own favorite name into the mouth of the one who bears it, tired wings finally at peace in a place of rest — well. That’s just because they’re completely normal about each other, okay?
(Now look away.)