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“Why do you let him call you Evan?”
Buck and Eddie are currently sprawled out on their cots in the bunk room; Buck’s been mindlessly scrolling through Instagram for the last half hour and he’d thought Eddie was asleep, but apparently not.
Buck sets his phone aside and sits up. “What?”
Eddie rolls onto his side to face Buck. “Hey, man, I’m sorry if this is a touchy subject, but I noticed Tommy always calls you Evan,” he says, pillowing his cheek against his shoulder. “You’ve never corrected him, not even once. I mean… if you’re uncomfortable correcting him, I can do it for you. No big deal. But I guess I was just curious.”
Buck nods slowly and settles back against his pillow, lacing his fingers over his chest. “Well, Evan is my name, Edmundo.”
Eddie scoffs and flops onto his back. “Don’t be difficult.”
Buck laughs and reaches up to scrub at his cheek. “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s… I introduced myself as Evan. I couldn’t exactly give him the ‘everyone who knows me calls me Buck’ spiel in the midst of a helicopter heist. But then he just kept calling me Evan and I—I like how he says my name. Like Evan is worth knowing.”
“He is, you know,” Eddie says.
“Hmm?” Buck picks his phone back up and swipes out of Instagram to his text messages, where a new one from Tommy is waiting for him.
“Evan is worth knowing,” Eddie says.
Hey Evan just wanted to check in and say hi!
Buck shoots off a reply—miss you can’t wait to see you—before glancing back over at Eddie. “Yeah. I’m starting to understand that more and more, now,” he says, lips twitching up in the hint of a smile.
Eddie smiles back, his eyes warm and fond. He reaches across the small space between their cots to squeeze Buck’s shoulder. “I’m happy you found somebody who can see that.”
Buck doesn’t miss the unspoken words augmenting the rest of that sentence. He’s been with a lot of people who couldn’t see past the Buck of it all. People who were dazzled by the larger-than-life persona he wore as a mask, or drawn in by his damage and their desire to piece him back together. Tommy’s seen Buck and he’s seen Evan, and he likes them both. He likes all of Evan Buckley.
Buck heart swells in his chest at that—or maybe it’s just his lungs expanding and contracting with every breath—and he decides he likes the feeling. His heart feels so full it could burst.
“Me too,” he says, quietly. Finally. “Me too.”