Warbigbang - to a place inside where there is joy - part 1
Title: to a place inside where there is joy
Author: eudaimon
Fandom: Generation Kill, Band of Brothers, American Idiot, The Pacific.
Character/Pairing(s): Brad Colbert/Nate Fick, Joe Liebgott/David Webster, Tunny/Will, Leckie/Hoosier, John/Lena, Doc Bryan/OFC, Ray Person/OFC
Rating: NC17
Word Count: 20, 406
Summary: Brad has had a date written on a scrap of paper in his wallet for over a year and it's a date that he intends to keep. A journey myth of sorts - Brad sets out across America, pausing at various points across the way. What he can never really know is this: that he is not the first man who came home from the war to make this kind of journey. His path criss-crosses with those of three other men; Joe Liebgott who doesn't know where he's going, Tunny Clarke who doesn't really know who he is and Robert Leckie, who's struggling with what he needs to leave behind. It's a much a story about America as anything - a story about distance and how you live with it...a story about what it's like to come home and find a country that big waiting to be crossed. And nothing ever really changes.
Link to Craft 1: art by skyearth85
Link to Craft 2: mix by uniformly
Link to Craft 3: mix by newredshoes
A/N: God, this fic was a trial. I all but dragged this out of myself during a five week long trip to America this summer. There's a lot of that trip in this. Thanks go to my crafters, to cjmarlowe for being a meticulous beta and for loving this despite the fact that she only knows half the fandoms and to all of the people who put up with me whining about this fic for months. This is for you.
“Find a place inside where there is joy, and the joy will burn out the pain” - Joe Campbell
He lies in his grave and listens to the chatter of the radio between Ray’s shoulder and his cheek. Somewhere not too distant he can hear Doc Bryan and Poke talking. He shifts and the sandy soil shifts with him and he listens to the way the world moves around him as its centre. He can’t make out what they’re talking about. The stars are brighter here than in San Diego. He knows that there are stars that can be seen only from the Southern Hemisphere. And he wonders what else is out there that is beyond understanding and cannot be seen from the point at which he’s standing....
Sometimes, he finds himself wanting to do more than just be.
His little ones down for the night, Ray quiet for once and watchful enough for all of them in the dark, Brad finds himself restless and pushes out of his Marine-shaped hole in the ground. He walks between the Humvees, his weapon at his shoulder. In the shadow of a vehicle, he finds Nate in his grave. He crouches down, out of sight, and reaches out, touching, lightly, Nate’s jaw. A Recon Marine is a waiting creature, detail orientated, and Brad has made a project out of memorising Nate Fick, for all of the good it can do him when they’ve had time to lie down in a bed precisely once, and everything else has been stolen moments and wasted opportunities.
Nate’s eyelashes flutter. In the dark, his eyes are dark like the ocean can be.
“I thought I was dreaming,” he says. The corner of Brad’s mouth catches on a smile and he bends down and Nate pushes up just high enough that their mouths meet. Brad remembers wanting to kiss Nate the first time that he set eyes on him and that’s never really changed. The kiss lingers for a moment and, the whole time, Brad’s listening for the sound of boots on dust, the tell tale metallic sound of a shifted weapon. He feels Nate smile rather than sees it. Nate’s hand comes to rest against his thigh.
“Living dangerously tonight, Brad?”
“If I was living dangerously, I’d be in that hole with you.”
The second kiss is harder, pushier, and it’s proof of how much either of them can want. Brad ends up breathless and backed up, both hands up in something like surrender. And Nate’s the only one that Brad’s ever surrendering to; no affront to his Warrior spirit, just the way that things turned out, hoo rah.
Semper fi. Be the trouble that you want to see in the world.
*
He wakes up alone, and thinks about brushing his teeth.
*
1. San Diego, CA
For a long while after waking from another familiar dream about Iraq and things he never did there (would never have done there), he lies quietly in the middle of an unmade bed. He’s always loved this apartment, with its courtyard full of bike parts and the balcony at the back but, most of all, he loves his bed and not just because of the memory of the scant times he’s had Nate here and woken up in the middle of the night in time to watch Nate pad across the bedroom naked and slip back into bed.
It’s more than that. It has to do with a little space of your own and quiet space that doesn’t smell of anybody else’s sweat. Rare, in a Marine’s life. Worth it.
On the pillow next to his head, his phone trills. Brad’s always had a weakness for gadgets and his phone is sleek and silver but at least it sounds like a fucking phone. He curls one hand up over his head and glances at the number before he answers with his thumb against the touch screen.
“It’s late, Nate,” he says.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” Nate sounds amused and Brad imagines him lying in bed in Boston, one arm up over his head, 1st Recon t shirt. Sometimes, it seems miraculous to Brad that Nate can apparently take easily to any life he chooses but Brad’s always known what he was meant to be. He’s got ‘warrior’ written on his bones.
“I am awake,” he concedes, amused himself, phone cradled between ear and shoulder as he shifts. There’s no clock in the room because he hates the ticking and he’s never needed one; war fucks with circadian rhythms but it still feels late. “I was just thinking about you.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. A muffled sound which Brad imagines is Nate dragging his shirt over his head. Even if he didn’t, Brad imagines him bare chested, hair ruffled and just lying back down again.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Same old dream. I was in Iraq again.”
“One day everything will stop being about Iraq.”
Brad knows that they both doubt that.
“Far be it for to make this any more homoerotic than it undoubtedly is, Nate,” says Brad, taking his time, “But I would sleep easier if you were here.”
Nate laughs, just a little. Brad feels himself smile in echo.
Sometimes, it feels like everything in the world’s an echo of something that’s already happened.
“Me too, Brad.”
The first time that either of them said anything about love, he was making coffee, aware of Nate moving around behind him and then there were arms around his waist and that sentiment breathed in his ear. He trusted Nate with his life and the lives of brothers; intimacy was easy. Being in love came as no surprise at all.
“When are you going to leave?”
“Soon as I wake up. I’ll be there by Thursday evening.”
A rustle of pages on the other end of the line; Brad knows as certainly as his heartbeat that Nate’s just reached for his date book.
“Thursday’s kind of shitty, Brad, but if I’m not here, you’ve got your key.”
“I do.”
“You can come in and make yourself at home.”
He wouldn’t want it any other way. He shifts his weight comfortably, sheets sliding against bare skin. For a moment, he just lies there and listens to Nate breathing. In two years, they haven’t spent nearly enough time in the same bed. He lies there with Nate on the other end of the line and he imagines lying side by side. He imagines rolling onto his side and skimming the flat of one hand down the planes of Nate’s chest and belly. He’d shift his weight just so. They'd end up lying close together in the middle of the bed and it would be Nate who kissed him, leaned in and kissed him with one hand pressing down past the elastic of his shorts.
“Penny for your thoughts, Brad?”
Even in Iraq, it had felt like Nate could read his mind.
“You know what I'm thinking,” he says, deciding to rein himself in, for now. He hears the catch in Nate's breathing and he knows that nothing's changed here; somewhere, the width of a country away, Nate Fick is still working miracles and reading minds.
Sometime in the next few minutes, Brad falls asleep with his phone still in his hand and Nate's voice still in his ear, telling him some story about Harvard which will be long forgotten by the morning.
*
2. East L.A, CA
The road between San Diego and L.A is fine, usually, but today it's a little congested. His bike hums under him, against him, reminding him that it is a thing born and bought at great expense for speed, and it pains him to idle for construction work. The leathers are new and may never fit him as snug as the old ones in his closet in San Diego, made to fit him, second skin. An image of Nate in a battered leather too big through the shoulders, tugged close across his chest, dark wool scarf tucked tight under his chin.
Get on the bike, Nate, he said, but Nate just shook his head.
Maybe tomorrow.
He shrugs his shoulders and guns the engine. There's a BBQ in East L.A that he's promised he'll show his face at, promised Poke a month ago that he'll show up and drink a beer, and Nate's not expecting him until Thursday, so an hour will make no difference here.
The party's in full swing by the time Brad walks into the yard, jacket already shrugged, beer picked up enroute in hand. There's a swell of relatives unfamiliar to Brad Colbert and his neat, barely extended family, but he feels welcome, always, here. Maria Espera looks up at him and smiles, her arms full of a baby who isn't hers. He picks Poke out of the crowd easily enough.
It never ceases to amaze him how different Poke looks here. He ought to be used to it, used to seeing guys for beers when not deployed, but with Poke, it's like a whole body change. He comes home to his wife and children and slips so easily into being somebody else. Sometimes, Brad wishes that it was a knack that he knew.
“Glad you came, Iceman,” says Poke, offering a hand that, in turn, pulls Brad into a quick embrace. Brad knows, has always known, that their friendship amuses Poke but he's never made friends easily and, the ones he makes, he tends to keep. He likes it here, different from his white-on-white apartment in San Diego and, even if it's not something that he'd ever want, it's a pleasant place to visit from time to time.
“Well, I said I would, didn't I?”
“I know you did, dog, but you know as well as I do, how shit can and does come up.”
Brad shakes his head and hands over the beers, trading six for one cold one that he unscrews because one beer won't hurt and he's halfway through it before he feels a little hand slip into his. Babies have always terrified Brad, no matter how many times he's been told that they're not as fragile as they appear (and they appear so fragile, held in hands more used to handling artillery and ammunition and engine parts) but kids...he likes kids. He spends a lot of time around his sister's kids and there were the kids in the desert, the ones who brightened when you looked at them, waved, held out chocolate in tentative fingers. Jessie Espera has known Brad since she was a tiny child and now she's big enough for dance lessons, old enough to be pirouetting between relatives and squinting as she looks up at him.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” He smiles at her, a bright, broad smile, one that he reserves for certain people in his life, and always for her. He carefully set his beer on one side and then bends down and picks her up. She wraps her arms easily around his neck. “How's it going, Jessie? Have you been having fun?”
She nods, solemnly. She's got a lot of her Mom in her but, sometimes, she reminds Brad so strongly of Poke that it's painful. Right now, she's giving him the same look that Poke gives him when he's about to launch into something particularly colourful, even more comic on the face of a four year old girl.
“Are you going to show Brad your dance moves, baby?” asks Poke, smoothing one hand over her dark curls before grinning at Brad. “She's got pirouettes and everything, dog.”
“Can't wait,” says Brad, and mostly means it. Sometimes, it feels like he's two people (it's a feeling which he knows that Poke would understand. There was the Brad who was out in the desert, combat effective, warrior, shrunk to his most useful size. And then there was the other Brad, who was the same, but less. Sometimes, he can feel where one meets the other.
He might be standing there holding Poke's little girl in his arms the way that he'll probably never hold a child of his own, but the truth is this: his heart? Already dreaming east. In his head, there's a map of all the miles to cover, and he could tell Poke why it's so important that he make good time, but he won't because he might go way back with Tony Espera, might number him among the very few human beings that he can bring himself to love, but that doesn't mean that Poke has the capacity to understand this thing that has come to pass between Brad and Nate and that doesn't mean that Brad would ever do him the disservice of asking him to try.
Two things: Nate Fick and the United States Marine Corps.
Brad never had a problem with not telling.
He sets Jessie down on her feet and watches as she spins away and he retrieves his beer and takes a long, cool swallow. The bottle sweats against the palm of his hand.
“Where to next, Dog?” asks Poke, and Brad shrugs like he's got no real plan, shrugs even though there's a map in his head, a straight line between one ocean and another, that scrap of paper in his wallet and that date he means to keep. While Jessie pirouettes, Brad checks his phone and finds a message from Nate, three words, not much but enough to call to mind windows thrown open to a sudden summer storm, water pooling on the floor and Nate's body, the press of Nate inside him, lips against his chin, his jaw, his ear, I love you breathed and taken into memory.
Three words.
RAINING HERE TODAY.
Jessie's still dancing and he's yet to finish his beer, but the truth is this: he's already gone.
*
Interlude: Liebgott (Between Boulder, CO and Salt Lake City, UT)
War and, for a long time after that, the road. Cold, too - for a long time, he feels like he's going to be cold in his bones for ever. Not the cold of Bastogne, the honest, wet cold of close-packed snow and the sudden warmth of a guy next to you, pressed together from shoulder to hip. Not cold the way Bastogne was cold but cold the way he felt sitting in the back of that truck with his head cradled in his hands and his mother tongue, his mother's tongue on his lips. The bitter taste of familiar words and the sound of gates closing and the smell of cigarettes and shit and loss.
It's a cold that never leaves him.
A thought: what if it ruined him for warmer times?
Through summer, he lingers in humid places, picks up a few hours' construction work, a few taxi driving shifts. He cuts some hair. His own hair, he pushes back from his forehead, lets it get dirty and greasy. There is a part of him that knows that it will always be difficult to give a shit now that he's back in pants with torn cuffs and t-shirts worn soft. His hands have a tremour that he's unused to and he's sure that he used to be smoother than this; he used to make pretty girls smile.
It's been a long time since he was last in Oakwood.
It's been a long time since he last saw the lights on the bridge through the fog.
It's less humid up here, drier but still hot, and he finds himself starting to think of home. It's been two years since he said goodbye to Easy in New York City, turned his back and walked away, allowing himself one last glance over his shoulder to watch one man pause on the corner, straighten his hair across his forehead, raise his hand to hail a cab.
For two years now, Joe's been dreaming of what might have happened if he'd slid into that cab alongside Webster, before it had time to pull away.
Here was the thing: Joe had never really forgiven Webster for missing the long cold in Bastogne and that had always coloured how he talked to him and how he touched him too. Oldest of six kids, Joe Liebgott never really learned how to be quiet and he never really learned how to be still and there was this stillness in Webster, sometimes, that threatened to unravel him. He never knew how to respond to it, so he just grew cold instead. The last time he touched Webster, he reached out on the quayside and straightened the knot in Webster's tie.
And he'd walked away, but he could have stayed, shit, he really could have, slid onto cracked leather seats and sat close enough that they would have touched along arm and thigh, shoulder to knee, and he could have stayed, and stayed close. Web wasn't heading straight home from the city, so there would have been a hotel room, more expensive than anything Joe could have ever afforded on his own. Web would have moved first, leaning in until his forehead touched Joe's, tugging his tie undone, thumbing the buttons on his dress Green shirts. In Austria, maybe, they took their time once or twice but the rest of it was all rush and noise, all push and shove. Sometimes, when they fucked, Joe felt rough and crazy, left bruises and sucked up kiss marks. Once, he'd left constellations of kisses across Web's belly and thighs but, in that hotel room, he'd have gone slower, softer, down on his knees, with his shirt hanging open and his lips moving over hot skin. They'd both have needed a shower but he'd still have taken his time. Just a blowjob, but it would have been something to remember Web by, in the days that followed.
The days that followed that were long and dry, and, occasionally, he found himself naked in the dark with somebody, his hands grazing skin, felt himself get rough and crazy once again, but it was never the same, because the feeling wasn't there. He'd find himself going through the motions, a kiss here, a touch there; now you step in, now you push your fingers into his hair and now you tug. Always boys. Never girls. He'd forgotten how to be with girls. He'd forgotten how they wanted to be touched and, for a long time, he'd forgotten how he wanted to be touched, too; he'd shoved himself too hard against rough edges and tight corners, all in the misguided hope that, one day, something would feel right.
Never did though, and it didn't matter how many beds he pulled himself out of, how many times he rinsed his mouth out and how many foreheads he forgot to kiss on his way out the door.
A thought: if he never really forgave Webster for missing Bastogne, what it boils down to is this: that Webster not being there means that he had to go through that long cold alone and it's been two years wandering and he's never really been warm again, after that. Once, cuddled close in a narrow bed, Web whispered to him about about some asshole called Odysseus and how long he wandered and how difficult it was for him to go home after his war.
And somehow, it's been two years, and he still hasn't worked out a way to go back to Oakwood and be plain old Joey Liebgott once again.
And he keeps thinking about how, once, Webster (or somebody who looked very like him) told Joe that a shark has to keep swimming otherwise it drowns. A thing built to breathe water and it'll still drown if it stays still for too long.
Sometimes, drowning in the blood of a man he no longer knows how to be, Joe knows how those fucking fish must feel.
*
3. Kansas City, MO
It always comes as a surprise to him, how still Ray is in his own environment - how like himself, only with the volume turned down low. He offers Brad a hand that pulls him into an embrace and then all but shoves Brad in the direction of the bathroom. Which Brad can appreciate. It's hot and he's been wearing leather for twelve hours today.
He strips and showers in Ray's narrow bathroom and, afterwards, he wipes at the mirror with the palm of his hand so that he can shave, too. He pulls a clean t-shirt on over damp skin and pads through the apartment on bare feet. These jeans are ragged at the hems from being worn ever so slightly too long.
The door to the balcony is standing open and Ray's already got two beers standing on the rail. Brad's been here a handful of times, eaten dinner and met Ray's fiancée. Spend enough time in the same Humvee as a man, believe in his driving and trust in him as the best of his kind, and you forget that there was ever a time before you knew him. Brad slides into the seat beside Ray, Ray passes Brad a beer and, for a long moment, nobody talks.
In Iraq, he never would have thought it was possible.
“She's working until late,” explains Ray, his own beer paused halfway to his lips. Brad nods but he doesn't speak again until he's drunk off half of the beer in a series of long swallows that feel good in the heavy humidity that's so unlike Southern California. Sweat prickles against his hairline and he wonders why he bothered showering in the first place.
“Just us, then,” he says, neck of the bottle resting against his bottom lip for a moment before a smile catches in the corner of his mouth. “Jesus.”
Few people make him laugh as easily and often as Ray Person. Another one on that list that he has brought himself to love. These are the people you never have to thank, and are never thanked by, but it means nothing, in the end.
Because something means more.
He was never given to sentimentality but he's loyal,a nd, when he loves, it's never given freely but at least it's deep.
They end up talking about mutual acquaintances; the ones still in the Corps, the ones who, like Ray, had the sense to get out. In his bones, Brad knows that he'll never have that kind of sense. He's got 'MARINE' written on his bones, never knew any different. Adopted, he never doubted his parents' love for him, never wondered where he belonged, but from the first time he'd walked into that office in Oceanside, he'd known that he was there to stay.
No point in arguing with a forgone conclusion.
“I think I'm going for this job in this Blueprint store,” Ray's telling him, a world away from verbal diarrhoea and dick jokes but still there in the twitch in the corner of his mouth, the cigarette twitching between his fingers, sparking when Ray talks with his hands. A different guy entirely but somehow also fundamentally the same. Genius RTO, sure, but something out in the world, too.
Brad doesn't see enough of him.
“Sounds good,” says Brad, and raises his beer to that.
Ray's fiancée's name is Beth, and she comes home smelling faintly of antiseptic, wearing scrubs and a faded 'Dawn of the Dead' t shirt. She pulls off her hat and drops it on the table next to her keys and then she comes out onto the balcony and wraps her arms around Ray's skinny as fuck shoulders, dropping a kiss into his short hair.
“Hey, Brad,” she says, reaching out to snag Ray's beer and, when there isn't any in it for her to steal, Brad offers her his instead.
“He's my favourite,” she says, moving around to slide into Ray's lap, both beer bottles cradled between her knees. Ray rubs one hand up and down her back and, for a moment, Brad misses Nate like a part of him. He feels like a straight up pussy admitting it to himself, which doesn't mean that it isn't also true.
“Only because you don't know him, baby,” says Ray, giving Brad his best shit-eating grin before he lands a kiss against the side of her neck, and Brad remembers all the talking that Ray had to do after Rolling Stone's book dropped and they all read it and some of them had more explaining to do than others. Jenni had called; Brad had spent five minutes with the silent receiver cradled between ear and shoulder before he put it back in the cradle.
“So where to after this, Homes?” asks Ray, Beth drinking the rest of Brad's beer and settling comfortably back against Ray's shoulder, her eyes drifting closed. Brad's eyes linger on her profile, for a second, but there's nothing there and not just because she's Ray's girlfriend.
Observe everything....
“Philadelphia,” he says, shifting comfortably in his chair. Beth offers the bottle back and he takes the last swallow of beer, liquid warm from the bottle being cradled between her knees. “Should get there around lunchtime the day after tomorrow.”
“Doc Bryan's in Philadelphia,” explains Ray, combing his fingers through Beth's hair, probably the most tender thing that Brad's ever seen him do, and he struggles to fit it into what he knows about Ray Person, and, in the end, he just shrugs and lets it go. Ray tells Beth about how much of an ornery fucker Tim Bryan really is. In his pocket, Brad's cellphone hums and shivers.
Still listening to Ray and Beth talking, he shifts to get it out of his pocket, scuffing his thumb against the touch screen. One new email received.
FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com
TO: iceman74@gmail.com
SUBJECT: Checking In
Just checking in and making sure that you're on schedule and arrived safely at Ray's. Just finished dinner, about to get some school work done. Say Hi to Beth and Ray for me.
I miss you.
N
”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise” Horace
A smile tugs at the corner of Brad's mouth - this is the effect that Nate has on him. Beth and Ray are talking about her day and she works in the ER, so there's plenty to tell, and Brad feels absolutely no guilt when he opens a new email.
FROM: iceman74@gmail.com
TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
SUBJECT: Clarification Needed
How much do you miss me me?
(I miss you too).
Brad
“We...are going to bed,” says Beth, straightening up, sliding out of Ray's lap and holding out both hands. Ray takes them, sliding to his feet. He leans in and grazes his mouth against Beth's and then straightens, his shoulders pulling back slightly before he holds out his hand for Brad's empty beer bottle.
“We'll try not to make enough noise to keep you up, Homes,” says Ray.
For a moment, with Ray grinning like that, Brad's back in the desert again.
Beth swats at Ray with her free hand and then leans up, draping one slender arm around Brad's shoulder and drawing him into a quick hug and a quicker kiss to the cheek.
“There's more beer in the fridge,” she says.
He's back on the balcony, a fresh beer sweating in his hand and condensation running down over his knuckles when his phone buzzes on the table beside him. He lifts the bottle to his lips and takes a long swallow. A Recon Marine is a creature skilled in waiting. Anticipation is healthy for the soul.
FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com
TO: iceman74@gmail.com
SUBJECT: Clarification Enclosed
So much that all I've been able to think about all night is you being here. I'm sitting in a bar in Davis Sq. and all I can think about is coming home on Thursday and actually getting to put my hands on you. Remember last time you were in town and I bent you over my kitchen table? We're definitely doing that again.
N
”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise” Horace
FROM: iceman74@gmail.com
TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: Clarification Enclosed.
Oh, really? And here's me sending perfectly innocent emails and hoping that you'll tell me you love me. Shame on you, Nate Fick.
Brad
FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com
TO: iceman74@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: RE: Clarification Enclosed
On the verge of having drunk too many beers, which DOES NOT negate the things I intend to do to you when you're finally here.
Definitely love you though.
N
”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise” Horace
He ends up lying in Ray's spare room, on top of the sheets and still in his boxers, phone held up in front of him as he writes one last email. His alarm is set for an early hour: the road still calling.
FROM: iceman74@gmail.com
TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: Clarification Enclosed.
When I'm there, you can do anything you want to me. You can fuck me anyway you want to, get fucked any way you want to. I've got a week there, and I intend to fucking use it. As soon as I send this, I'm going to jerk off while I think about going down on my knees as soon as you come home on Thursday and sucking you off. It's been a year since the last time you came in my mouth, Nate. I want you to think about that when you get home tonight.
I fucking love you and, one day, we're not going to need emails for this.
Brad
His phone stays silent on the pillow next to his head and Brad ends up with one hand pressed down inside his underwear, fingers curled around his dick and jerking slowly. There are photos on his photo, taken idly, Nate bending to tie shoelaces; Nate with his fingers pushed into his hair, studying; Nate half awake and smiling in rumpled white sheets; Nate in a bar in Boston, more than a little drunk and grinning, beer in hand. Those pictures are there, each one representing a time when they were together and it was okay for them to be together; Brad has to resist taking snapshots of Nate doing things as mundane as grocery shopping or wiping down kitchen counters because he feels this sudden, almost painful impulse to save these moments because God knows when he'll see their like again.
He doesn't know when the fuck he got this sentimental.
The point is: there are pictures on his phone that he could look at, none explicitly designed to be jerk off material, but Nate's face is really all the inspiration he needs. His phone stays on the pillow. He has no need for still images. Tonight, he's got an elaborate fantasy of Nate in his apartment in Boston, stripping out of winter gear, boots and scarf and peacoat, before he leans, chill lips, cheeks and the tip of his nose reddened as he steals a kiss and Brad pushes one hand under Nate's open collar, feels how much warmer he is where his cloth's been layered. Nate is chilled but Brad's warm from a day tucked away inside and the heat is cranked up, way up, and Nate fumbles to get out of his sweater, and Brad stills him, wraps his fingers over Nate's but still tugging up, all but peeling Nate out of the thing and dropping it, already forgotten by the time it hits the floor. Brad's got plans but he's also got a powerful need to see Nate and, as Nate leans in, dragging him into another kiss, longer and wetter, Brad's fingers are busy tugging open the buttons on Nate's shirt.
“Brad,” says Nate, shrugging out of that, too, letting it slip to the floor, but Brad's already down on his knees. He pulls open Nate's jeans, denim damp and chill to the knee from walking from the T in the snow, white cotton underwear. Brad's never been a fan of the predictable but there are some things that are undeniably comforting.
Nate's fingers press into his hair and Brad finds himself grinning. He gave his first blowjob at seventeen, Military Academy cliché, and he always enjoyed giving head but never really loved it until he slid his lips down over Nate Fick's dick for the first time. He strokes Nate slowly, a fluid roll of his wrist and all the while his eyes fixed on Nate's face, watching the way that his eyes widen ever so slightly, throat contracting, teeth touching his bottom lip, and Brad can't stand it a moment longer, he really can't. Waiting creature? Yes. Recon in his bones? Absolutely, but, fuck it, he knows this terrain absolutely, knows it in his bones, and there's no call for caution here and emphatically no call to be afraid.
He slides his lips down over the first few inches of Nate's undeniably beautiful dick. He groans softly and hears Nate groan just as softly in reply. He knows that he could suck Nate off quicker and harder but he tells himself that he's been waiting for this all day and that he means to enjoy every second of it. Nate's fingers in his hair, the press of Nate's dick past his lips. Brad sucks Nate slowly, revelling in the heavy weight of Nate on his tongue, the scent of Nate's body when he swallows him deep enough that the tip of his nose almost brushes skin. Above him, Nate moans something about how good it is and Brad smiles; even when sucking dick, he prides himself on being elite. One of his hands is curled around Nate's dick, thumb brushing against the tightening skin of Nate's balls, and the other reaches around, grasping his ass, pulling him in closer. All the warning he gets is a tightening of Nate's fingers, a short broken sort of moan and then Brad's swallowing smoothly and moaning every chance he gets.
It's a fantasy built meticulously on reality, though he can't now remember what came aftwards, after that blowjob, after Nate was warm again.
Brad comes hot over his fingers and belly while he's trying to recall. He knows that he ought to feel guilty about jerking off in Ray's guest room, but he doesn't, not really. A few minutes later, he becomes aware of voices filtering through the wall. For a brief, horrible moment, he thinks that maybe he can hear Ray and Beth fucking in the next room but then it occurs to him that they're just talking in low voices, which reminds him of how him and Nate lie talking, sometimes, so close on the pillow that their noses touch, talk bullshit really, tell stories about the sort of days they've had, just shooting the shit and being close, talking to hear each other talk.
It's little and stupid things that he misses most.
In the end, though, he falls asleep listening to Beth and Ray talking, a room away.
*
Before leaving, he pauses for coffee in Ray's kitchen, leather and bare feet, the cotton of his t-shirt worn so thin that there's almost a hole over one shoulder. He watches Ray pad around the kitchen smoothly and methodically and remembers days of dry swallowing Ripped Fuel and singing to stay awake. Beth is still sleeping but Ray's up and ready to go to work, dressed neatly, speaking quietly, and there's a joke here, somewhere, about the Grooming Standard, but Brad just drinks his coffee and doesn't make it.
“I don't know how you do it, Homes,” says Ray, finally sitting and drinking his coffee, dishes from last night drying on the rack. “The moving. Fuck, I got home from Iraq and I never fucking wanted to move again. Kansas City's fucking stuck with me.”
“We can't all be as lucky as Kansas fucking City, Ray.”
And Brad just smiles and wishes that he could say something about staying and reasons to stay, but Ray doesn't know about Nate and never will, because Brad loves being a Marine and Nate knows that, knows that better than anyone and, somehow, they find ways to go on.
Ray has to leave for work. Brad rinses both cups and leaves them standing in the sink, and he doesn't wake Beth up when it's time to go.
*
Interlude: Tunny (Between New York, NY and Jingletown, NY)
They take the bus from New York and he sits awake and watches the lights moving in the dark. The foot that he's missing is a dead weight, itching in a boot that feels like it's laced too tight. He knows that there's a medical explanation for all of this; she's tried to explain but, sitting there on the bus like that, all that it feels like is not being able to get comfortable, the only one awake on a bus full of sleeping souls. It feels like having one more foot than he ought to, at the same time as also having one less.
Unbalanced.
She shifts against him, turns her face and presses her nose into his sleeve. He touches her hair and thinks about how he doesn't know what he's going to say to Johnny when he sees him again.
They were always born out of war and peace (his own words, sounding heavy and pretentious, now) and, Jesus Christ, he's got no idea what he's doing with himself any more.
When he does sleep, he dreams of bullets. Dimly, he remembers begging somebody for Novocaine. Sometimes, he wonders if it was her, but she'll never tell him one way or another.
She's good like that.
Kind. She's kind in a way that Tunny and his friends never really figured out, no matter how much they loved each other. They were always too abrasive, too disappointed and fucked up and mean. They always wanted too much but couldn't figure out a way to get more than they had.
He dreams about standing on the overpass and looking down at the lights. It's peaceful in a way that it never was before. Her name still feels like a joke. It's either a joke or a promise; he finds it hard to decide.
The name 'Grace' is only one thing among many that makes her extraordinary.
*
Everyone wants a piece of his time but, for one night, he holds them at arm's length. It's the first chance he's had to spend any time alone with her. He's still getting used to wearing the prosthetic and he limps between the bathroom and the bed, lies down on the crisp sheets in pyjama pants and a t shirt stencilled with his name across the chest. He idly traces 'CLARKE' with his fingers and he watches her undress.
He tries to remember the last time that he was naked with someone else who was naked, with somebody who wanted to see him naked because they wanted to fuck him; he's been naked around her, but only for sponge baths and he always turned his face away.
It's difficult to tell whether they've been putting this off or saving it.
Eventually, she slides across him, wearing black cotton panties and a plain bra. Standing up he feels off balance but lying on his back with her face above him, her weight across him, he can pretend that that bullet never happened. He can pretend that he's young and whole and willing.
Her body is a doorway and, through it, there's a place where the war never happened.
Two out of three ain't bad.
She leans forward, kisses the corner of his mouth and his jaw, pushes both hands up underneath his shirt. He remembers lying in a hospital bed and wishing that she'd touch him like this, anything to distract him from the shit circling round and around in his head. And now she touches him and he leans up, presses up onto one elbow with the other hand reaching for her, pushes his fingers into the fall of her long dark hair and pulls her down for another kiss.
My leg, he mumbles. Shit, Grace.
I don't give a shit about your leg, she tells him, grinning. Just tell me that nothing's happened to your dick, Tunny.
That makes him laugh like he laughed the first time he heard her real name. You cannot be fuckin' serious?
He'll never figure out a way to tell her how grateful he is for any of it.
She peels his shirt up over his head and he reaches up while still kissing her and unsnaps her bra one handed. It's a trick that he taught himself one summer and he's absurdly pleased to still remember how. He cradles one tit against the palm of his hand and kisses blindly across the other. She moves on top of him in such a way that reminds him that all he's wanted to be since the first time he saw her is inside her and his heels press into the bed and, for a moment, he forgets that there's any difference there at all.
For a moment, it looks like she's just going to fumble their clothes out of the way, but that's not what he wants here. He shoves his pants down around his thighs, elastic scraping against his hard on, and he's so grateful when she takes the cue and starts to strip him naked, barely pausing at all over his prosthetic. He's so grateful that he almost bursts into tears.
He's come home as such a fucking pussy.
When both of them are naked (and she doesn't even glance at his leg, prosthetic discarded on the floor beside them), she presses him backwards with both hands on his chest, leans over him and he watches her hair spill forward over her shoulders and the way she bites her lip before she's reaching between them, curling her fingers around his dick to slide down onto him and his head falls back against the pillow and it feels like a long time before he can force his eyes open to watch the way that she moves above him.
He's inside her before he remembers the last time he was naked with someone like this.
*
It was always so easy to feel disappointed. Jingletown wasn't much, life wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and they'd been twenty, man, twenty and still waiting for their lives to start. Heather and Will were always fighting; Johnny was always dreaming of somewhere else, stoned off his face on Mary Jane and Ritalin and who could blame him? Tunny never knew what he wanted; he just knew that he wanted more than they had.
He used to look for answers, stood there, dropping glass bottles off the overpass. Sometimes, he didn't even hear them break.
And, sometimes, there was Will, smashed off his face and turning up at Tunny's door, ringing his cellphone so as not to wake Tunny's mom and standing there, swaying in the front yard, waiting for Tunny to open the door and let him inside. He'd all but topple, his head coming to rest against Tunny's shoulder and Tunny's hand would come up and cradle the back of his head and hold him close for a minute. Will was his best friend; what else was he supposed to do?
Usually, how it ended up was the two of them sprawled together on his too narrow bed, some seriously shitty movie playing on the T.V. too quietly to be heard, passing a joint between them or drinking warm beer caged from the refrigerator while his Mom was at her boyfriend's.
It never occurred to him that they'd all have done better sober.
It only ever happened when Heather had been a particularly raging bitch and it was never his idea (it never felt like his idea) but, somehow, Will lifted his head and Tunny turned his to answer him and....
The first time Will had kissed him, Tunny had felt himself startle like a Prom Queen who's date just tried to touch her under her bra without permission. He'd felt his eyes go wide. He'd found himself staring at Will, eyes wide, breathing a little harder than before.
It's okay, man, Will had mumbled, his mouth close enough that Tunny had felt his lips move against his. It's just me.
Which was always the problem because Will was always easier to like than Tunny or Johnny; Will never quite got the hang of being as hateful as either of them could be when they put their minds to it. It was always Will who draped an arm around Tunny's shoulders and pulled him in close. It was always Will who kissed his shoulder and looked at him like he understood. Johnny was wrapped up in his own pain, his dreams of being a rockstar or a revolutionary, something fucking lame like that, but Will...Will was just quietly disappointed and, when he fought with Heather, he got so fucking angry but he was always the one who went crawling back.
After the first time Will kissed him, the one thing that Tunny tried really hard not to think about was Heather.
Two things. There were two things that he tried really hard not to think about: Heather, and how much he wanted Will to do it again.
He always tried to feel guilty about it, after it happened, but he could never quite manage it. He knew that he ought to feel bad but it was like his give-a-fuck was broken and he wanted. Jesus, he couldn't ever remember wanting as much.
What the fuck did that even make him into?
What it made him feel like was a complete and utter fag, especially on the night that it went further than just making out and he found himself kissing his way downward, shoving at Will's shirt with one hand. Yeah, he was pretty sure that it was faggy to suddenly and completely want nothing more than to suck his best friend's dick, but Will's fingers had grazed against his hair and Tunny had done his level best to ignore how hard his own dick was as he was tugging open the buttons on Will's jeans, shoving them down around his hips. He remembers that it occurred to him that he had no idea how to go about it, how he was supposed to suck another guy off, but he knew how it felt when it was done to him (always by girls who giggled, afterwards, and covered their mouths while they spat into discarded coffee cups).
Johnny always said that if that was what happened then he was trying to fuck the wrong sort of girls.
And maybe Johnny always had a point, but Tunny never told Johnny about the night he bent his head, curled his fingers around the surprising weight of Will's dick and wrapped his mouth around the first few inches. Above him, Will had groaned, eyes closed, head tilted back and Tunny had shoved his hand down his own pyjama pants, started to jerk himself off as his head started to bob and Will's fingers pushed into his hair and pulled and he's pretty sure that it shouldn't have felt as good as it did. For a long moment, he didn't struggle against anything; he just sucked Will's dick until he came too soon over his own fingers and then, when Will came moments later, he didn't giggle and he didn't cover his mouth with his hand - he just swallowed as neatly as he could, choked a little but kept it down. Will passed out right after and Tunny just lay there beside him, boneless beside him, the taste of come still in his mouth, sticky on his belly and between his fingers. He lay there waiting for Will's phone to ring, for it to be Heather, for Will to struggle out of bed and pull on his clothes and leave without really looking at him and then they'd be sober the next time they saw each other and neither of them would mention it, especially not in front of Johnny.
Which didn't mean that it never happened again.
*
It was always a struggle to get out of bed the day after one of Will's midnight visits; Tunny would end up lying there all day, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him, not because he wanted to do that to Will (not just because of that), but because he always felt like shit afterwards. He could never, not ever, put his finger on what felt so wrong about it.
On top of him, back in the moment, she moves, her hips fluid, her hair swaying forward to curtain both of them as she leans down and kisses him, changing the angle that he's pressed inside her at. He'd forgotten that it could feel like this; he's not sure that it ever felt like this before Grace. He remembers her learning over his hospital bed and kissing him; at the time, he'd thought that it was a dream but it tastes exactly the same. In the bed beside him, there'd been a guy who went on to lose both hands. Remembering that, Tunny reaches up and cups Grace's face with both hands and holds her to the kiss, rolling his hips, fucking her for a few strokes while he's got her. He does it just because he can and, right that, that feels like cause for a fucking celebration.
Don't stop, she whimpers, her mouth still pressed against his, her knees pressing into the bed on either side of him as he fucks her. Jesus, Tunny, that feels so fucking good. Don't you dare stop, Tunny. Don't you dare.
He still has trouble with his leg, sometimes, so she's the one who takes it on and off when he can't, checks the scars. Sometimes, she sits with him half in her lap and rubs lotion over sore skin and wounded nerve endings.
It's the closest he's ever felt to being in love with someone he didn't grow up with. It's probably the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for him. She's easier to love than most of the people he knows. He thinks that's probably because he doesn't know her half as well. Not yet.
He squirms his hand between them, presses his thumb against her clit and looks straight up into her face because he wants to see the look on her face, wants to watch her eyes flutter closed and her head tip back the way Will's used to, only it doesn't. He looks up and she's biting her lip and she's looking straight at him. Something about his face must change because she sighs, so sweetly, and then reaches out to touch his face with one hand, still rolling her hips between his dick and his hand, and she smiles so softly, so open and so bright that he doesn't quite know how to process it. I love you, Joe, she tells him, spine tightening and hands shaking as she starts to come on top of him and that's when it finally clicks into place - the realisation that he might have come home one foot short, but that doesn't mean that, somehow, with her or through her (if her body is a door), he can't figure out how to be more whole than he was before.
Afterwards, both of them still sticky, still trembling (and he's smiling like an idiot), they lie close together and she falls asleep and Tunny thinks about how, in the morning, they'll spend time with his mom before they go and see Will and meet his kid and there'll be less rage, more love, and he'll have gone beyond the place where Jingletown can hurt him at all.
If he's lucky.
If she's with him.
It isn't done but it does all start to fall into place.
He closes his eyes, drifts, sleeps deeply and dreams of something other than bullets and flying.
( Part 2 | Kansas City to Philadelphia. )
Author: eudaimon
Fandom: Generation Kill, Band of Brothers, American Idiot, The Pacific.
Character/Pairing(s): Brad Colbert/Nate Fick, Joe Liebgott/David Webster, Tunny/Will, Leckie/Hoosier, John/Lena, Doc Bryan/OFC, Ray Person/OFC
Rating: NC17
Word Count: 20, 406
Summary: Brad has had a date written on a scrap of paper in his wallet for over a year and it's a date that he intends to keep. A journey myth of sorts - Brad sets out across America, pausing at various points across the way. What he can never really know is this: that he is not the first man who came home from the war to make this kind of journey. His path criss-crosses with those of three other men; Joe Liebgott who doesn't know where he's going, Tunny Clarke who doesn't really know who he is and Robert Leckie, who's struggling with what he needs to leave behind. It's a much a story about America as anything - a story about distance and how you live with it...a story about what it's like to come home and find a country that big waiting to be crossed. And nothing ever really changes.
Link to Craft 1: art by skyearth85
Link to Craft 2: mix by uniformly
Link to Craft 3: mix by newredshoes
A/N: God, this fic was a trial. I all but dragged this out of myself during a five week long trip to America this summer. There's a lot of that trip in this. Thanks go to my crafters, to cjmarlowe for being a meticulous beta and for loving this despite the fact that she only knows half the fandoms and to all of the people who put up with me whining about this fic for months. This is for you.
“Find a place inside where there is joy, and the joy will burn out the pain” - Joe Campbell
He lies in his grave and listens to the chatter of the radio between Ray’s shoulder and his cheek. Somewhere not too distant he can hear Doc Bryan and Poke talking. He shifts and the sandy soil shifts with him and he listens to the way the world moves around him as its centre. He can’t make out what they’re talking about. The stars are brighter here than in San Diego. He knows that there are stars that can be seen only from the Southern Hemisphere. And he wonders what else is out there that is beyond understanding and cannot be seen from the point at which he’s standing....
Sometimes, he finds himself wanting to do more than just be.
His little ones down for the night, Ray quiet for once and watchful enough for all of them in the dark, Brad finds himself restless and pushes out of his Marine-shaped hole in the ground. He walks between the Humvees, his weapon at his shoulder. In the shadow of a vehicle, he finds Nate in his grave. He crouches down, out of sight, and reaches out, touching, lightly, Nate’s jaw. A Recon Marine is a waiting creature, detail orientated, and Brad has made a project out of memorising Nate Fick, for all of the good it can do him when they’ve had time to lie down in a bed precisely once, and everything else has been stolen moments and wasted opportunities.
Nate’s eyelashes flutter. In the dark, his eyes are dark like the ocean can be.
“I thought I was dreaming,” he says. The corner of Brad’s mouth catches on a smile and he bends down and Nate pushes up just high enough that their mouths meet. Brad remembers wanting to kiss Nate the first time that he set eyes on him and that’s never really changed. The kiss lingers for a moment and, the whole time, Brad’s listening for the sound of boots on dust, the tell tale metallic sound of a shifted weapon. He feels Nate smile rather than sees it. Nate’s hand comes to rest against his thigh.
“Living dangerously tonight, Brad?”
“If I was living dangerously, I’d be in that hole with you.”
The second kiss is harder, pushier, and it’s proof of how much either of them can want. Brad ends up breathless and backed up, both hands up in something like surrender. And Nate’s the only one that Brad’s ever surrendering to; no affront to his Warrior spirit, just the way that things turned out, hoo rah.
Semper fi. Be the trouble that you want to see in the world.
*
He wakes up alone, and thinks about brushing his teeth.
*
1. San Diego, CA
For a long while after waking from another familiar dream about Iraq and things he never did there (would never have done there), he lies quietly in the middle of an unmade bed. He’s always loved this apartment, with its courtyard full of bike parts and the balcony at the back but, most of all, he loves his bed and not just because of the memory of the scant times he’s had Nate here and woken up in the middle of the night in time to watch Nate pad across the bedroom naked and slip back into bed.
It’s more than that. It has to do with a little space of your own and quiet space that doesn’t smell of anybody else’s sweat. Rare, in a Marine’s life. Worth it.
On the pillow next to his head, his phone trills. Brad’s always had a weakness for gadgets and his phone is sleek and silver but at least it sounds like a fucking phone. He curls one hand up over his head and glances at the number before he answers with his thumb against the touch screen.
“It’s late, Nate,” he says.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?” Nate sounds amused and Brad imagines him lying in bed in Boston, one arm up over his head, 1st Recon t shirt. Sometimes, it seems miraculous to Brad that Nate can apparently take easily to any life he chooses but Brad’s always known what he was meant to be. He’s got ‘warrior’ written on his bones.
“I am awake,” he concedes, amused himself, phone cradled between ear and shoulder as he shifts. There’s no clock in the room because he hates the ticking and he’s never needed one; war fucks with circadian rhythms but it still feels late. “I was just thinking about you.”
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. A muffled sound which Brad imagines is Nate dragging his shirt over his head. Even if he didn’t, Brad imagines him bare chested, hair ruffled and just lying back down again.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Same old dream. I was in Iraq again.”
“One day everything will stop being about Iraq.”
Brad knows that they both doubt that.
“Far be it for to make this any more homoerotic than it undoubtedly is, Nate,” says Brad, taking his time, “But I would sleep easier if you were here.”
Nate laughs, just a little. Brad feels himself smile in echo.
Sometimes, it feels like everything in the world’s an echo of something that’s already happened.
“Me too, Brad.”
The first time that either of them said anything about love, he was making coffee, aware of Nate moving around behind him and then there were arms around his waist and that sentiment breathed in his ear. He trusted Nate with his life and the lives of brothers; intimacy was easy. Being in love came as no surprise at all.
“When are you going to leave?”
“Soon as I wake up. I’ll be there by Thursday evening.”
A rustle of pages on the other end of the line; Brad knows as certainly as his heartbeat that Nate’s just reached for his date book.
“Thursday’s kind of shitty, Brad, but if I’m not here, you’ve got your key.”
“I do.”
“You can come in and make yourself at home.”
He wouldn’t want it any other way. He shifts his weight comfortably, sheets sliding against bare skin. For a moment, he just lies there and listens to Nate breathing. In two years, they haven’t spent nearly enough time in the same bed. He lies there with Nate on the other end of the line and he imagines lying side by side. He imagines rolling onto his side and skimming the flat of one hand down the planes of Nate’s chest and belly. He’d shift his weight just so. They'd end up lying close together in the middle of the bed and it would be Nate who kissed him, leaned in and kissed him with one hand pressing down past the elastic of his shorts.
“Penny for your thoughts, Brad?”
Even in Iraq, it had felt like Nate could read his mind.
“You know what I'm thinking,” he says, deciding to rein himself in, for now. He hears the catch in Nate's breathing and he knows that nothing's changed here; somewhere, the width of a country away, Nate Fick is still working miracles and reading minds.
Sometime in the next few minutes, Brad falls asleep with his phone still in his hand and Nate's voice still in his ear, telling him some story about Harvard which will be long forgotten by the morning.
*
2. East L.A, CA
The road between San Diego and L.A is fine, usually, but today it's a little congested. His bike hums under him, against him, reminding him that it is a thing born and bought at great expense for speed, and it pains him to idle for construction work. The leathers are new and may never fit him as snug as the old ones in his closet in San Diego, made to fit him, second skin. An image of Nate in a battered leather too big through the shoulders, tugged close across his chest, dark wool scarf tucked tight under his chin.
Get on the bike, Nate, he said, but Nate just shook his head.
Maybe tomorrow.
He shrugs his shoulders and guns the engine. There's a BBQ in East L.A that he's promised he'll show his face at, promised Poke a month ago that he'll show up and drink a beer, and Nate's not expecting him until Thursday, so an hour will make no difference here.
The party's in full swing by the time Brad walks into the yard, jacket already shrugged, beer picked up enroute in hand. There's a swell of relatives unfamiliar to Brad Colbert and his neat, barely extended family, but he feels welcome, always, here. Maria Espera looks up at him and smiles, her arms full of a baby who isn't hers. He picks Poke out of the crowd easily enough.
It never ceases to amaze him how different Poke looks here. He ought to be used to it, used to seeing guys for beers when not deployed, but with Poke, it's like a whole body change. He comes home to his wife and children and slips so easily into being somebody else. Sometimes, Brad wishes that it was a knack that he knew.
“Glad you came, Iceman,” says Poke, offering a hand that, in turn, pulls Brad into a quick embrace. Brad knows, has always known, that their friendship amuses Poke but he's never made friends easily and, the ones he makes, he tends to keep. He likes it here, different from his white-on-white apartment in San Diego and, even if it's not something that he'd ever want, it's a pleasant place to visit from time to time.
“Well, I said I would, didn't I?”
“I know you did, dog, but you know as well as I do, how shit can and does come up.”
Brad shakes his head and hands over the beers, trading six for one cold one that he unscrews because one beer won't hurt and he's halfway through it before he feels a little hand slip into his. Babies have always terrified Brad, no matter how many times he's been told that they're not as fragile as they appear (and they appear so fragile, held in hands more used to handling artillery and ammunition and engine parts) but kids...he likes kids. He spends a lot of time around his sister's kids and there were the kids in the desert, the ones who brightened when you looked at them, waved, held out chocolate in tentative fingers. Jessie Espera has known Brad since she was a tiny child and now she's big enough for dance lessons, old enough to be pirouetting between relatives and squinting as she looks up at him.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” He smiles at her, a bright, broad smile, one that he reserves for certain people in his life, and always for her. He carefully set his beer on one side and then bends down and picks her up. She wraps her arms easily around his neck. “How's it going, Jessie? Have you been having fun?”
She nods, solemnly. She's got a lot of her Mom in her but, sometimes, she reminds Brad so strongly of Poke that it's painful. Right now, she's giving him the same look that Poke gives him when he's about to launch into something particularly colourful, even more comic on the face of a four year old girl.
“Are you going to show Brad your dance moves, baby?” asks Poke, smoothing one hand over her dark curls before grinning at Brad. “She's got pirouettes and everything, dog.”
“Can't wait,” says Brad, and mostly means it. Sometimes, it feels like he's two people (it's a feeling which he knows that Poke would understand. There was the Brad who was out in the desert, combat effective, warrior, shrunk to his most useful size. And then there was the other Brad, who was the same, but less. Sometimes, he can feel where one meets the other.
He might be standing there holding Poke's little girl in his arms the way that he'll probably never hold a child of his own, but the truth is this: his heart? Already dreaming east. In his head, there's a map of all the miles to cover, and he could tell Poke why it's so important that he make good time, but he won't because he might go way back with Tony Espera, might number him among the very few human beings that he can bring himself to love, but that doesn't mean that Poke has the capacity to understand this thing that has come to pass between Brad and Nate and that doesn't mean that Brad would ever do him the disservice of asking him to try.
Two things: Nate Fick and the United States Marine Corps.
Brad never had a problem with not telling.
He sets Jessie down on her feet and watches as she spins away and he retrieves his beer and takes a long, cool swallow. The bottle sweats against the palm of his hand.
“Where to next, Dog?” asks Poke, and Brad shrugs like he's got no real plan, shrugs even though there's a map in his head, a straight line between one ocean and another, that scrap of paper in his wallet and that date he means to keep. While Jessie pirouettes, Brad checks his phone and finds a message from Nate, three words, not much but enough to call to mind windows thrown open to a sudden summer storm, water pooling on the floor and Nate's body, the press of Nate inside him, lips against his chin, his jaw, his ear, I love you breathed and taken into memory.
Three words.
RAINING HERE TODAY.
Jessie's still dancing and he's yet to finish his beer, but the truth is this: he's already gone.
*
Interlude: Liebgott (Between Boulder, CO and Salt Lake City, UT)
War and, for a long time after that, the road. Cold, too - for a long time, he feels like he's going to be cold in his bones for ever. Not the cold of Bastogne, the honest, wet cold of close-packed snow and the sudden warmth of a guy next to you, pressed together from shoulder to hip. Not cold the way Bastogne was cold but cold the way he felt sitting in the back of that truck with his head cradled in his hands and his mother tongue, his mother's tongue on his lips. The bitter taste of familiar words and the sound of gates closing and the smell of cigarettes and shit and loss.
It's a cold that never leaves him.
A thought: what if it ruined him for warmer times?
Through summer, he lingers in humid places, picks up a few hours' construction work, a few taxi driving shifts. He cuts some hair. His own hair, he pushes back from his forehead, lets it get dirty and greasy. There is a part of him that knows that it will always be difficult to give a shit now that he's back in pants with torn cuffs and t-shirts worn soft. His hands have a tremour that he's unused to and he's sure that he used to be smoother than this; he used to make pretty girls smile.
It's been a long time since he was last in Oakwood.
It's been a long time since he last saw the lights on the bridge through the fog.
It's less humid up here, drier but still hot, and he finds himself starting to think of home. It's been two years since he said goodbye to Easy in New York City, turned his back and walked away, allowing himself one last glance over his shoulder to watch one man pause on the corner, straighten his hair across his forehead, raise his hand to hail a cab.
For two years now, Joe's been dreaming of what might have happened if he'd slid into that cab alongside Webster, before it had time to pull away.
Here was the thing: Joe had never really forgiven Webster for missing the long cold in Bastogne and that had always coloured how he talked to him and how he touched him too. Oldest of six kids, Joe Liebgott never really learned how to be quiet and he never really learned how to be still and there was this stillness in Webster, sometimes, that threatened to unravel him. He never knew how to respond to it, so he just grew cold instead. The last time he touched Webster, he reached out on the quayside and straightened the knot in Webster's tie.
And he'd walked away, but he could have stayed, shit, he really could have, slid onto cracked leather seats and sat close enough that they would have touched along arm and thigh, shoulder to knee, and he could have stayed, and stayed close. Web wasn't heading straight home from the city, so there would have been a hotel room, more expensive than anything Joe could have ever afforded on his own. Web would have moved first, leaning in until his forehead touched Joe's, tugging his tie undone, thumbing the buttons on his dress Green shirts. In Austria, maybe, they took their time once or twice but the rest of it was all rush and noise, all push and shove. Sometimes, when they fucked, Joe felt rough and crazy, left bruises and sucked up kiss marks. Once, he'd left constellations of kisses across Web's belly and thighs but, in that hotel room, he'd have gone slower, softer, down on his knees, with his shirt hanging open and his lips moving over hot skin. They'd both have needed a shower but he'd still have taken his time. Just a blowjob, but it would have been something to remember Web by, in the days that followed.
The days that followed that were long and dry, and, occasionally, he found himself naked in the dark with somebody, his hands grazing skin, felt himself get rough and crazy once again, but it was never the same, because the feeling wasn't there. He'd find himself going through the motions, a kiss here, a touch there; now you step in, now you push your fingers into his hair and now you tug. Always boys. Never girls. He'd forgotten how to be with girls. He'd forgotten how they wanted to be touched and, for a long time, he'd forgotten how he wanted to be touched, too; he'd shoved himself too hard against rough edges and tight corners, all in the misguided hope that, one day, something would feel right.
Never did though, and it didn't matter how many beds he pulled himself out of, how many times he rinsed his mouth out and how many foreheads he forgot to kiss on his way out the door.
A thought: if he never really forgave Webster for missing Bastogne, what it boils down to is this: that Webster not being there means that he had to go through that long cold alone and it's been two years wandering and he's never really been warm again, after that. Once, cuddled close in a narrow bed, Web whispered to him about about some asshole called Odysseus and how long he wandered and how difficult it was for him to go home after his war.
And somehow, it's been two years, and he still hasn't worked out a way to go back to Oakwood and be plain old Joey Liebgott once again.
And he keeps thinking about how, once, Webster (or somebody who looked very like him) told Joe that a shark has to keep swimming otherwise it drowns. A thing built to breathe water and it'll still drown if it stays still for too long.
Sometimes, drowning in the blood of a man he no longer knows how to be, Joe knows how those fucking fish must feel.
*
3. Kansas City, MO
It always comes as a surprise to him, how still Ray is in his own environment - how like himself, only with the volume turned down low. He offers Brad a hand that pulls him into an embrace and then all but shoves Brad in the direction of the bathroom. Which Brad can appreciate. It's hot and he's been wearing leather for twelve hours today.
He strips and showers in Ray's narrow bathroom and, afterwards, he wipes at the mirror with the palm of his hand so that he can shave, too. He pulls a clean t-shirt on over damp skin and pads through the apartment on bare feet. These jeans are ragged at the hems from being worn ever so slightly too long.
The door to the balcony is standing open and Ray's already got two beers standing on the rail. Brad's been here a handful of times, eaten dinner and met Ray's fiancée. Spend enough time in the same Humvee as a man, believe in his driving and trust in him as the best of his kind, and you forget that there was ever a time before you knew him. Brad slides into the seat beside Ray, Ray passes Brad a beer and, for a long moment, nobody talks.
In Iraq, he never would have thought it was possible.
“She's working until late,” explains Ray, his own beer paused halfway to his lips. Brad nods but he doesn't speak again until he's drunk off half of the beer in a series of long swallows that feel good in the heavy humidity that's so unlike Southern California. Sweat prickles against his hairline and he wonders why he bothered showering in the first place.
“Just us, then,” he says, neck of the bottle resting against his bottom lip for a moment before a smile catches in the corner of his mouth. “Jesus.”
Few people make him laugh as easily and often as Ray Person. Another one on that list that he has brought himself to love. These are the people you never have to thank, and are never thanked by, but it means nothing, in the end.
Because something means more.
He was never given to sentimentality but he's loyal,a nd, when he loves, it's never given freely but at least it's deep.
They end up talking about mutual acquaintances; the ones still in the Corps, the ones who, like Ray, had the sense to get out. In his bones, Brad knows that he'll never have that kind of sense. He's got 'MARINE' written on his bones, never knew any different. Adopted, he never doubted his parents' love for him, never wondered where he belonged, but from the first time he'd walked into that office in Oceanside, he'd known that he was there to stay.
No point in arguing with a forgone conclusion.
“I think I'm going for this job in this Blueprint store,” Ray's telling him, a world away from verbal diarrhoea and dick jokes but still there in the twitch in the corner of his mouth, the cigarette twitching between his fingers, sparking when Ray talks with his hands. A different guy entirely but somehow also fundamentally the same. Genius RTO, sure, but something out in the world, too.
Brad doesn't see enough of him.
“Sounds good,” says Brad, and raises his beer to that.
Ray's fiancée's name is Beth, and she comes home smelling faintly of antiseptic, wearing scrubs and a faded 'Dawn of the Dead' t shirt. She pulls off her hat and drops it on the table next to her keys and then she comes out onto the balcony and wraps her arms around Ray's skinny as fuck shoulders, dropping a kiss into his short hair.
“Hey, Brad,” she says, reaching out to snag Ray's beer and, when there isn't any in it for her to steal, Brad offers her his instead.
“He's my favourite,” she says, moving around to slide into Ray's lap, both beer bottles cradled between her knees. Ray rubs one hand up and down her back and, for a moment, Brad misses Nate like a part of him. He feels like a straight up pussy admitting it to himself, which doesn't mean that it isn't also true.
“Only because you don't know him, baby,” says Ray, giving Brad his best shit-eating grin before he lands a kiss against the side of her neck, and Brad remembers all the talking that Ray had to do after Rolling Stone's book dropped and they all read it and some of them had more explaining to do than others. Jenni had called; Brad had spent five minutes with the silent receiver cradled between ear and shoulder before he put it back in the cradle.
“So where to after this, Homes?” asks Ray, Beth drinking the rest of Brad's beer and settling comfortably back against Ray's shoulder, her eyes drifting closed. Brad's eyes linger on her profile, for a second, but there's nothing there and not just because she's Ray's girlfriend.
Observe everything....
“Philadelphia,” he says, shifting comfortably in his chair. Beth offers the bottle back and he takes the last swallow of beer, liquid warm from the bottle being cradled between her knees. “Should get there around lunchtime the day after tomorrow.”
“Doc Bryan's in Philadelphia,” explains Ray, combing his fingers through Beth's hair, probably the most tender thing that Brad's ever seen him do, and he struggles to fit it into what he knows about Ray Person, and, in the end, he just shrugs and lets it go. Ray tells Beth about how much of an ornery fucker Tim Bryan really is. In his pocket, Brad's cellphone hums and shivers.
Still listening to Ray and Beth talking, he shifts to get it out of his pocket, scuffing his thumb against the touch screen. One new email received.
FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com
TO: iceman74@gmail.com
SUBJECT: Checking In
Just checking in and making sure that you're on schedule and arrived safely at Ray's. Just finished dinner, about to get some school work done. Say Hi to Beth and Ray for me.
I miss you.
N
”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise” Horace
A smile tugs at the corner of Brad's mouth - this is the effect that Nate has on him. Beth and Ray are talking about her day and she works in the ER, so there's plenty to tell, and Brad feels absolutely no guilt when he opens a new email.
FROM: iceman74@gmail.com
TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
SUBJECT: Clarification Needed
How much do you miss me me?
(I miss you too).
Brad
“We...are going to bed,” says Beth, straightening up, sliding out of Ray's lap and holding out both hands. Ray takes them, sliding to his feet. He leans in and grazes his mouth against Beth's and then straightens, his shoulders pulling back slightly before he holds out his hand for Brad's empty beer bottle.
“We'll try not to make enough noise to keep you up, Homes,” says Ray.
For a moment, with Ray grinning like that, Brad's back in the desert again.
Beth swats at Ray with her free hand and then leans up, draping one slender arm around Brad's shoulder and drawing him into a quick hug and a quicker kiss to the cheek.
“There's more beer in the fridge,” she says.
He's back on the balcony, a fresh beer sweating in his hand and condensation running down over his knuckles when his phone buzzes on the table beside him. He lifts the bottle to his lips and takes a long swallow. A Recon Marine is a creature skilled in waiting. Anticipation is healthy for the soul.
FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com
TO: iceman74@gmail.com
SUBJECT: Clarification Enclosed
So much that all I've been able to think about all night is you being here. I'm sitting in a bar in Davis Sq. and all I can think about is coming home on Thursday and actually getting to put my hands on you. Remember last time you were in town and I bent you over my kitchen table? We're definitely doing that again.
N
”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise” Horace
FROM: iceman74@gmail.com
TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: Clarification Enclosed.
Oh, really? And here's me sending perfectly innocent emails and hoping that you'll tell me you love me. Shame on you, Nate Fick.
Brad
FROM: nate.fick@gmail.com
TO: iceman74@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: RE: Clarification Enclosed
On the verge of having drunk too many beers, which DOES NOT negate the things I intend to do to you when you're finally here.
Definitely love you though.
N
”Begin, be bold and venture to be wise” Horace
He ends up lying in Ray's spare room, on top of the sheets and still in his boxers, phone held up in front of him as he writes one last email. His alarm is set for an early hour: the road still calling.
FROM: iceman74@gmail.com
TO: nate.fick@gmail.com
SUBJECT: RE: Clarification Enclosed.
When I'm there, you can do anything you want to me. You can fuck me anyway you want to, get fucked any way you want to. I've got a week there, and I intend to fucking use it. As soon as I send this, I'm going to jerk off while I think about going down on my knees as soon as you come home on Thursday and sucking you off. It's been a year since the last time you came in my mouth, Nate. I want you to think about that when you get home tonight.
I fucking love you and, one day, we're not going to need emails for this.
Brad
His phone stays silent on the pillow next to his head and Brad ends up with one hand pressed down inside his underwear, fingers curled around his dick and jerking slowly. There are photos on his photo, taken idly, Nate bending to tie shoelaces; Nate with his fingers pushed into his hair, studying; Nate half awake and smiling in rumpled white sheets; Nate in a bar in Boston, more than a little drunk and grinning, beer in hand. Those pictures are there, each one representing a time when they were together and it was okay for them to be together; Brad has to resist taking snapshots of Nate doing things as mundane as grocery shopping or wiping down kitchen counters because he feels this sudden, almost painful impulse to save these moments because God knows when he'll see their like again.
He doesn't know when the fuck he got this sentimental.
The point is: there are pictures on his phone that he could look at, none explicitly designed to be jerk off material, but Nate's face is really all the inspiration he needs. His phone stays on the pillow. He has no need for still images. Tonight, he's got an elaborate fantasy of Nate in his apartment in Boston, stripping out of winter gear, boots and scarf and peacoat, before he leans, chill lips, cheeks and the tip of his nose reddened as he steals a kiss and Brad pushes one hand under Nate's open collar, feels how much warmer he is where his cloth's been layered. Nate is chilled but Brad's warm from a day tucked away inside and the heat is cranked up, way up, and Nate fumbles to get out of his sweater, and Brad stills him, wraps his fingers over Nate's but still tugging up, all but peeling Nate out of the thing and dropping it, already forgotten by the time it hits the floor. Brad's got plans but he's also got a powerful need to see Nate and, as Nate leans in, dragging him into another kiss, longer and wetter, Brad's fingers are busy tugging open the buttons on Nate's shirt.
“Brad,” says Nate, shrugging out of that, too, letting it slip to the floor, but Brad's already down on his knees. He pulls open Nate's jeans, denim damp and chill to the knee from walking from the T in the snow, white cotton underwear. Brad's never been a fan of the predictable but there are some things that are undeniably comforting.
Nate's fingers press into his hair and Brad finds himself grinning. He gave his first blowjob at seventeen, Military Academy cliché, and he always enjoyed giving head but never really loved it until he slid his lips down over Nate Fick's dick for the first time. He strokes Nate slowly, a fluid roll of his wrist and all the while his eyes fixed on Nate's face, watching the way that his eyes widen ever so slightly, throat contracting, teeth touching his bottom lip, and Brad can't stand it a moment longer, he really can't. Waiting creature? Yes. Recon in his bones? Absolutely, but, fuck it, he knows this terrain absolutely, knows it in his bones, and there's no call for caution here and emphatically no call to be afraid.
He slides his lips down over the first few inches of Nate's undeniably beautiful dick. He groans softly and hears Nate groan just as softly in reply. He knows that he could suck Nate off quicker and harder but he tells himself that he's been waiting for this all day and that he means to enjoy every second of it. Nate's fingers in his hair, the press of Nate's dick past his lips. Brad sucks Nate slowly, revelling in the heavy weight of Nate on his tongue, the scent of Nate's body when he swallows him deep enough that the tip of his nose almost brushes skin. Above him, Nate moans something about how good it is and Brad smiles; even when sucking dick, he prides himself on being elite. One of his hands is curled around Nate's dick, thumb brushing against the tightening skin of Nate's balls, and the other reaches around, grasping his ass, pulling him in closer. All the warning he gets is a tightening of Nate's fingers, a short broken sort of moan and then Brad's swallowing smoothly and moaning every chance he gets.
It's a fantasy built meticulously on reality, though he can't now remember what came aftwards, after that blowjob, after Nate was warm again.
Brad comes hot over his fingers and belly while he's trying to recall. He knows that he ought to feel guilty about jerking off in Ray's guest room, but he doesn't, not really. A few minutes later, he becomes aware of voices filtering through the wall. For a brief, horrible moment, he thinks that maybe he can hear Ray and Beth fucking in the next room but then it occurs to him that they're just talking in low voices, which reminds him of how him and Nate lie talking, sometimes, so close on the pillow that their noses touch, talk bullshit really, tell stories about the sort of days they've had, just shooting the shit and being close, talking to hear each other talk.
It's little and stupid things that he misses most.
In the end, though, he falls asleep listening to Beth and Ray talking, a room away.
*
Before leaving, he pauses for coffee in Ray's kitchen, leather and bare feet, the cotton of his t-shirt worn so thin that there's almost a hole over one shoulder. He watches Ray pad around the kitchen smoothly and methodically and remembers days of dry swallowing Ripped Fuel and singing to stay awake. Beth is still sleeping but Ray's up and ready to go to work, dressed neatly, speaking quietly, and there's a joke here, somewhere, about the Grooming Standard, but Brad just drinks his coffee and doesn't make it.
“I don't know how you do it, Homes,” says Ray, finally sitting and drinking his coffee, dishes from last night drying on the rack. “The moving. Fuck, I got home from Iraq and I never fucking wanted to move again. Kansas City's fucking stuck with me.”
“We can't all be as lucky as Kansas fucking City, Ray.”
And Brad just smiles and wishes that he could say something about staying and reasons to stay, but Ray doesn't know about Nate and never will, because Brad loves being a Marine and Nate knows that, knows that better than anyone and, somehow, they find ways to go on.
Ray has to leave for work. Brad rinses both cups and leaves them standing in the sink, and he doesn't wake Beth up when it's time to go.
*
Interlude: Tunny (Between New York, NY and Jingletown, NY)
They take the bus from New York and he sits awake and watches the lights moving in the dark. The foot that he's missing is a dead weight, itching in a boot that feels like it's laced too tight. He knows that there's a medical explanation for all of this; she's tried to explain but, sitting there on the bus like that, all that it feels like is not being able to get comfortable, the only one awake on a bus full of sleeping souls. It feels like having one more foot than he ought to, at the same time as also having one less.
Unbalanced.
She shifts against him, turns her face and presses her nose into his sleeve. He touches her hair and thinks about how he doesn't know what he's going to say to Johnny when he sees him again.
They were always born out of war and peace (his own words, sounding heavy and pretentious, now) and, Jesus Christ, he's got no idea what he's doing with himself any more.
When he does sleep, he dreams of bullets. Dimly, he remembers begging somebody for Novocaine. Sometimes, he wonders if it was her, but she'll never tell him one way or another.
She's good like that.
Kind. She's kind in a way that Tunny and his friends never really figured out, no matter how much they loved each other. They were always too abrasive, too disappointed and fucked up and mean. They always wanted too much but couldn't figure out a way to get more than they had.
He dreams about standing on the overpass and looking down at the lights. It's peaceful in a way that it never was before. Her name still feels like a joke. It's either a joke or a promise; he finds it hard to decide.
The name 'Grace' is only one thing among many that makes her extraordinary.
*
Everyone wants a piece of his time but, for one night, he holds them at arm's length. It's the first chance he's had to spend any time alone with her. He's still getting used to wearing the prosthetic and he limps between the bathroom and the bed, lies down on the crisp sheets in pyjama pants and a t shirt stencilled with his name across the chest. He idly traces 'CLARKE' with his fingers and he watches her undress.
He tries to remember the last time that he was naked with someone else who was naked, with somebody who wanted to see him naked because they wanted to fuck him; he's been naked around her, but only for sponge baths and he always turned his face away.
It's difficult to tell whether they've been putting this off or saving it.
Eventually, she slides across him, wearing black cotton panties and a plain bra. Standing up he feels off balance but lying on his back with her face above him, her weight across him, he can pretend that that bullet never happened. He can pretend that he's young and whole and willing.
Her body is a doorway and, through it, there's a place where the war never happened.
Two out of three ain't bad.
She leans forward, kisses the corner of his mouth and his jaw, pushes both hands up underneath his shirt. He remembers lying in a hospital bed and wishing that she'd touch him like this, anything to distract him from the shit circling round and around in his head. And now she touches him and he leans up, presses up onto one elbow with the other hand reaching for her, pushes his fingers into the fall of her long dark hair and pulls her down for another kiss.
My leg, he mumbles. Shit, Grace.
I don't give a shit about your leg, she tells him, grinning. Just tell me that nothing's happened to your dick, Tunny.
That makes him laugh like he laughed the first time he heard her real name. You cannot be fuckin' serious?
He'll never figure out a way to tell her how grateful he is for any of it.
She peels his shirt up over his head and he reaches up while still kissing her and unsnaps her bra one handed. It's a trick that he taught himself one summer and he's absurdly pleased to still remember how. He cradles one tit against the palm of his hand and kisses blindly across the other. She moves on top of him in such a way that reminds him that all he's wanted to be since the first time he saw her is inside her and his heels press into the bed and, for a moment, he forgets that there's any difference there at all.
For a moment, it looks like she's just going to fumble their clothes out of the way, but that's not what he wants here. He shoves his pants down around his thighs, elastic scraping against his hard on, and he's so grateful when she takes the cue and starts to strip him naked, barely pausing at all over his prosthetic. He's so grateful that he almost bursts into tears.
He's come home as such a fucking pussy.
When both of them are naked (and she doesn't even glance at his leg, prosthetic discarded on the floor beside them), she presses him backwards with both hands on his chest, leans over him and he watches her hair spill forward over her shoulders and the way she bites her lip before she's reaching between them, curling her fingers around his dick to slide down onto him and his head falls back against the pillow and it feels like a long time before he can force his eyes open to watch the way that she moves above him.
He's inside her before he remembers the last time he was naked with someone like this.
*
It was always so easy to feel disappointed. Jingletown wasn't much, life wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and they'd been twenty, man, twenty and still waiting for their lives to start. Heather and Will were always fighting; Johnny was always dreaming of somewhere else, stoned off his face on Mary Jane and Ritalin and who could blame him? Tunny never knew what he wanted; he just knew that he wanted more than they had.
He used to look for answers, stood there, dropping glass bottles off the overpass. Sometimes, he didn't even hear them break.
And, sometimes, there was Will, smashed off his face and turning up at Tunny's door, ringing his cellphone so as not to wake Tunny's mom and standing there, swaying in the front yard, waiting for Tunny to open the door and let him inside. He'd all but topple, his head coming to rest against Tunny's shoulder and Tunny's hand would come up and cradle the back of his head and hold him close for a minute. Will was his best friend; what else was he supposed to do?
Usually, how it ended up was the two of them sprawled together on his too narrow bed, some seriously shitty movie playing on the T.V. too quietly to be heard, passing a joint between them or drinking warm beer caged from the refrigerator while his Mom was at her boyfriend's.
It never occurred to him that they'd all have done better sober.
It only ever happened when Heather had been a particularly raging bitch and it was never his idea (it never felt like his idea) but, somehow, Will lifted his head and Tunny turned his to answer him and....
The first time Will had kissed him, Tunny had felt himself startle like a Prom Queen who's date just tried to touch her under her bra without permission. He'd felt his eyes go wide. He'd found himself staring at Will, eyes wide, breathing a little harder than before.
It's okay, man, Will had mumbled, his mouth close enough that Tunny had felt his lips move against his. It's just me.
Which was always the problem because Will was always easier to like than Tunny or Johnny; Will never quite got the hang of being as hateful as either of them could be when they put their minds to it. It was always Will who draped an arm around Tunny's shoulders and pulled him in close. It was always Will who kissed his shoulder and looked at him like he understood. Johnny was wrapped up in his own pain, his dreams of being a rockstar or a revolutionary, something fucking lame like that, but Will...Will was just quietly disappointed and, when he fought with Heather, he got so fucking angry but he was always the one who went crawling back.
After the first time Will kissed him, the one thing that Tunny tried really hard not to think about was Heather.
Two things. There were two things that he tried really hard not to think about: Heather, and how much he wanted Will to do it again.
He always tried to feel guilty about it, after it happened, but he could never quite manage it. He knew that he ought to feel bad but it was like his give-a-fuck was broken and he wanted. Jesus, he couldn't ever remember wanting as much.
What the fuck did that even make him into?
What it made him feel like was a complete and utter fag, especially on the night that it went further than just making out and he found himself kissing his way downward, shoving at Will's shirt with one hand. Yeah, he was pretty sure that it was faggy to suddenly and completely want nothing more than to suck his best friend's dick, but Will's fingers had grazed against his hair and Tunny had done his level best to ignore how hard his own dick was as he was tugging open the buttons on Will's jeans, shoving them down around his hips. He remembers that it occurred to him that he had no idea how to go about it, how he was supposed to suck another guy off, but he knew how it felt when it was done to him (always by girls who giggled, afterwards, and covered their mouths while they spat into discarded coffee cups).
Johnny always said that if that was what happened then he was trying to fuck the wrong sort of girls.
And maybe Johnny always had a point, but Tunny never told Johnny about the night he bent his head, curled his fingers around the surprising weight of Will's dick and wrapped his mouth around the first few inches. Above him, Will had groaned, eyes closed, head tilted back and Tunny had shoved his hand down his own pyjama pants, started to jerk himself off as his head started to bob and Will's fingers pushed into his hair and pulled and he's pretty sure that it shouldn't have felt as good as it did. For a long moment, he didn't struggle against anything; he just sucked Will's dick until he came too soon over his own fingers and then, when Will came moments later, he didn't giggle and he didn't cover his mouth with his hand - he just swallowed as neatly as he could, choked a little but kept it down. Will passed out right after and Tunny just lay there beside him, boneless beside him, the taste of come still in his mouth, sticky on his belly and between his fingers. He lay there waiting for Will's phone to ring, for it to be Heather, for Will to struggle out of bed and pull on his clothes and leave without really looking at him and then they'd be sober the next time they saw each other and neither of them would mention it, especially not in front of Johnny.
Which didn't mean that it never happened again.
*
It was always a struggle to get out of bed the day after one of Will's midnight visits; Tunny would end up lying there all day, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him, not because he wanted to do that to Will (not just because of that), but because he always felt like shit afterwards. He could never, not ever, put his finger on what felt so wrong about it.
On top of him, back in the moment, she moves, her hips fluid, her hair swaying forward to curtain both of them as she leans down and kisses him, changing the angle that he's pressed inside her at. He'd forgotten that it could feel like this; he's not sure that it ever felt like this before Grace. He remembers her learning over his hospital bed and kissing him; at the time, he'd thought that it was a dream but it tastes exactly the same. In the bed beside him, there'd been a guy who went on to lose both hands. Remembering that, Tunny reaches up and cups Grace's face with both hands and holds her to the kiss, rolling his hips, fucking her for a few strokes while he's got her. He does it just because he can and, right that, that feels like cause for a fucking celebration.
Don't stop, she whimpers, her mouth still pressed against his, her knees pressing into the bed on either side of him as he fucks her. Jesus, Tunny, that feels so fucking good. Don't you dare stop, Tunny. Don't you dare.
He still has trouble with his leg, sometimes, so she's the one who takes it on and off when he can't, checks the scars. Sometimes, she sits with him half in her lap and rubs lotion over sore skin and wounded nerve endings.
It's the closest he's ever felt to being in love with someone he didn't grow up with. It's probably the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for him. She's easier to love than most of the people he knows. He thinks that's probably because he doesn't know her half as well. Not yet.
He squirms his hand between them, presses his thumb against her clit and looks straight up into her face because he wants to see the look on her face, wants to watch her eyes flutter closed and her head tip back the way Will's used to, only it doesn't. He looks up and she's biting her lip and she's looking straight at him. Something about his face must change because she sighs, so sweetly, and then reaches out to touch his face with one hand, still rolling her hips between his dick and his hand, and she smiles so softly, so open and so bright that he doesn't quite know how to process it. I love you, Joe, she tells him, spine tightening and hands shaking as she starts to come on top of him and that's when it finally clicks into place - the realisation that he might have come home one foot short, but that doesn't mean that, somehow, with her or through her (if her body is a door), he can't figure out how to be more whole than he was before.
Afterwards, both of them still sticky, still trembling (and he's smiling like an idiot), they lie close together and she falls asleep and Tunny thinks about how, in the morning, they'll spend time with his mom before they go and see Will and meet his kid and there'll be less rage, more love, and he'll have gone beyond the place where Jingletown can hurt him at all.
If he's lucky.
If she's with him.
It isn't done but it does all start to fall into place.
He closes his eyes, drifts, sleeps deeply and dreams of something other than bullets and flying.
( Part 2 | Kansas City to Philadelphia. )