Fic | GK | you are the risk (i'll always take)
Generation Kill | Brad/Nate | PG13
"There's a hundred reasons why we shouldn't do this," he says.
Brad's lips quirk, masking the feel of ice running down his spine. "And only one we should?"
Nate pauses, throat working. Brad sees his fingers clench on empty air.
"I didn't say that."
Afterwards.
It's a deadly word. You don't walk under fire thinking of afterwards. You don't get out of your Humvee in the middle of an ambush if you're planning for afterwards. If you don't already consider yourself dead.
It's a paradox, mindfuck, vicious cycle. CO's who consider themselves living on borrowed time make good superiors, operating on cold fact, not emotion. Ductus exemplo. Their LT's disregard for his own safety should reassure them all, inspire them.
Nate's dumb, self-sacrificial feats make them grind their teeth together.
Scribe calls it. They've adored Fick, from the start. Maybe too much.
Sometimes, in theater, dickhead officers would be easier.
"I don't miss anything from home," he says. "Except my bike."
He looks Nate in the eye. Pointed. As clear as he can make it. For now.
Nate bites his lip. Brad's body reacts predictably. He's expended more energy trying to police his dick during the invasion than even griping about the fucking wrongness of their mission-at some point there's just no sense in it anymore. He is forced to shift, drawing Nate's attention by the movement before he looks up hastily.
"I-I wouldn't mind a good steak."
How Brad loves the little stutter.
"Better showers," Nate goes on. "Some privacy…"
"Ah," he grins. "Privacy, sir. Sure."
Nate looks caught between frustration and doubt. Brad wants to wipe away the look, replace it with a million things, certainty morphing into acceptance, anticipation, contentment. He wants to see Nate's eyes fighting to stay open while his mouth is slack with desperate inhales, sweat beading on his upper lip.
He wants hitching breaths and surprised bursts of laughter and soft, sleepy eyes.
It's been a long time since he's wanted things. Consciously, deliberately. It feels better than he thought it would.
He doesn't hide the want. From himself, or from Nate. He hopes he's right in thinking that they're past that point.
He doesn't think he has the strength to not try, to not fight for this. If it's a risk it's one he has to take.
Brad Colbert doesn't do leaps of faith. Except when he does.
Nate swallows heavily.
"I've been thinking of leaving the Corps," he says.
"I know," Brad says.
The lip-biting. Yes.
(It would be great if he could deny being easy and predictable, but at this point it's a fucking moot point anyway.)
Got to him from day one. Fuck, got to him from the introduction. Still wasn't as bad as the eyes. Green like that wasn't supposed to exist in his world, it promised too much. He got through the first meeting by fixing his eyes respectfully just past Fick's head, by telling himself their new LT had to be a bleeding-heart liberal dicksuck who would get them all killed in Iraq.
The next day he was asked for his input in planning the first training exercise for when the rest of the platoon arrived at Pendleton. Brad kept his guard up for about ten minutes. After that, he had to periodically glance at Nate's bars, just to remind himself.
When they were done, they got into a conversation about something else, something inconsequential. (He remembers, because he doesn't forget anything about Nate, but the topic under discussion isn't the point. The point is the discussion itself, which was the beginning.)
(He lies. The beginning was the goddamn beginning-seeing their improbably young-looking new Lieutenant walking towards him, led by Wynn. The subsequent less than 24 hours of refusing to acknowledge the fact was nothing but a futile, doomed struggle. The longer he talked with Nate, the harder it was to keep lying to himself. His reservations endured the one day and after that he was undeniably fucked.)
At the end of that first shared tactics session, when Nate shuffled the papers together, mind stuck on something they'd been debating, and his teeth began gnawing his lower lip, Brad silently choked on his own tongue, felt his nipples harden.
Pendleton, Kuwait, Iraq. Since then it's been downhill, gotten only worse, every day adding a layer of respect and admiration and need until it feels Brad will buckle under it all.
There are occasions in-country when the only thing he thinks of, mid-combat jack, is the sore-looking red of Nate's lips, and the care he would like to show them. His own mouth tingles in phantom sensation. When he comes, the tremors shake him from his neck to his thighs, and in a moment of post-orgasmic clarity he fears he'll never have the opportunity to touch Nate Fick at all.
"The LT sure chewed him up and spit him out."
"Are you for real, dickhead? The LT fucking handed him his ass in a platter. Did you fucking see the way Casey Kasem kept flinching every time Fick even looked his way?"
Brad hears the tail end of the exchange and smoothly changes his course to the group converging around 2-2's vehicle. "And what's got you girls tittering like someone gave you backstage passes for a fucking boyband concert?"
Poke turns to look at him with a half grin that tells Brad he's about to be sorry for asking. "It's your bee-ef-ef, dawg. The man is a stone cold motherfucker."
"Despite that cocksucking mouth," Chaffin drawls. Brad's spine stiffens.
"And this is a surprise to you pathetic whiskey tango ingrates?" He's directing his words to the group at large, but his eyes are on Staffin, cold and hard. "Keep this level of ineptitude up, and you can fucking wave your Recon badge goodbye."
"Nah, we know the LT's the shit, brah," Lilley injects, the unlikely peace-maker. "But tonight, fucking A, dude-that was something else."
Brad gets the whole story eventually. The guys are still laughing, building it up so that Brad already knows it will become one of Recon's legends. There's fierce pride coating every word, yeah, you can try to push the LT but when he decides to push back you're fucking dead, man.
They aren't thinking about how much more difficult Nate might have just made everything for himself, or rather, are choosing not to concentrate on that.
Brad should find the sir. Tell him his men've got his six, whether he likes it or not.
He's not supposed to notice a lot of the things he notices about Nate.
His voice on the comms. What he's saying, yes, but also the pitch and timber of it. (Admitting it makes him feel like he should have pussy tattooed on his forehead.) A couple of times he overhears Nate singing, usually with Mike, but once on his own, bent over a map on the hood of his Humvee. There's a double-vision suddenly, a scene with Nate leaning over a coffee table in an unfamiliar living room, books and a notepad and loose papers strewn in front of him, lips barely moving, lyrics delivered on a low, soft breath.
Brad shakes his head to dispel the picture, but he's not fast enough to miss someone coming to stand next to Nate, palm dropping to rest on the back of his neck.
He got the scar on the back of his left wrist back in military school. It's faded, white, almost unnoticeable.
"Catherine Zeta-fucking-Jones or Eva Mendes?"
"Either. No, Mendes."
"Megan Fox or Denise Richards?"
"Fox."
"Homes, I totally knew you had a thing for brunettes. Try to keep from molesting me while I'm sleeping, okay?"
"In good conscience, I cannot make any such promise, Ray."
"That's alright, I guess I could suffer through a blowjob. Hey, Brad, who would you rather blow-"
"Evening, gents."
"Heeey, LT," Ray's smirk spells trouble. "We were just talking about who Brad likes best in Bravo-Two."
Nate's eyes glitter in amusement, but he keeps his face straight. Of course he does. "I'll let the Gunny know we're having a platoon-wide tournament to compete for the favor of Sergeant Colbert," he says gravely.
"Well, when you say it like that, sir, you make Brad sound like a princess, and what's that going to do to his combat effectiveness?"
Nate strides off after a couple of minutes, never lingering, never completely immersing himself in his men's bullshitting. It's probably in the first chapter of the officers' handbook, being present but not too involved. Brad's had plenty of junior Lieutenants who've nervously toed the line, unsure of how much is too friendly, swinging wildly between back-slapping and detachment.
The thing about Nate is, he carries the command with him constantly, it's there in the lines of his body, the way he sees everything that happens around him, the way a look from him can check the platoon at its rowdiest. It doesn't keep his men from wanting to talk to him, from wanting to be in his company.
Ray watches him as he stares after Nate, a beat too long.
"You lying piece of shit," he says, without heat. "I fucking knew the thing about brunettes had to be total bullshit, homes."
They drive and get shot at and shoot back. They continue to get their asses reamed by the enduring atmosphere of failure, from the supply shortage to the unfortunate existence of algae like Encino fucking Man.
They drive some more, shoot some more. The mission makes as little sense as the previous day, the next day. They get thinner, angrier, more tired.
Running out of reason as fast as running out of days.
It's the invasion in a nutshell. Then the bitch gets named and suddenly it's a working part of the grand strategic plan, a clinical boardroom concoction of history and politics, a fever dream of liberation.
It doesn't change the facts on the streets of Baghdad, but Bravo Two isn't allowed to fix what's been fucked up. Under their mission parameters, the anarchy outside the walls of the power plant is collateral damage. Like little kids and bombs.
The way Nate looks, ashen and exhausted, worn to the bone-it makes Brad's own frustrations retreat to the back of his mind. He's a grunt. For him, wallowing is optional. He'd rather shore Nate up, if allowed.
Brad finds his peace of mind in the single shining piece of integrity in the desert. It gives him his hour of sleep each night, knowing that Nate's idealism will recover, and he'll change the world.
Afterwards.
(In Baghdad is the first time he tastes the word. Gives himself leave to think about it. His dick gets hard when he's thinking about making Nate coffee in the mornings, and eventually Brad gets off on the thought of kissing him in a kitchen. Their kitchen.
It might be the gayest moment of his life. But, then again-moot point.)
"This is wrong, too, isn't it?"
They're leaning their shoulders on a wall at a dark part of Paige, facing each other, the distance between their bodies and faces shrunk from the respectable two feet it was when Brad found Nate a while ago.
A shifting of his arm against the stone, a redistribution of weight, a rocking of his body without the backward movement that is a part of it. Nate raises his eyebrow at each transparent trick and allows it nonetheless.
Nate told him early on, without saying a word out loud, that he wouldn't touch Brad while he was still his subordinate. Brad hates it and understands it. Hates it more on nights like this, when every inch of the skin he sees before him seems infused with magnetism, making his mouth water, imagining his teeth pressing on Nate's jaw. Nights like this, he can't look at anything below Nate's neck, the idea of the body hidden beneath the dusty cammies too much like a tease, a torture, something to test his self-control to the breaking point when every little thing about Nate already makes him burn, decimating his discipline to cinders.
But he can imagine biting Nate's jaw-can't not-and licking the underside of it, licking Nate's ears, the sounds he'd make, tight, needy, asking Brad for it at last.
"Wrong isn't the word I'd use, no."
They breath the same air, talk about the end of their mission, with the undercurrent of waiting for something else entirely.
It's the DADT version of foreplay, and it hurts, in his chest, twists low in his stomach. Two weeks before they ship home he's hard pretty much constantly, seeks Nate out more than strictly smart, and walks off in a daze every time.
He asks himself, every time he's away from Nate for longer than an hour and his head clears some, what he's getting himself into-didn't he learn this lesson already?
Ivy League, a man, an officer. East Coast choirboy with a degree in Classics.
It sounds like a bad joke when broken down to basics.
Then the pull propels him in a certain direction, and when he catches sight of Nate-could be from the corner of his eye, almost outside his peripheral line of vision, doesn't matter, he recognizes Nate less with his eyes than with the lurch in his gut-and gets close enough to talk, or just to smirk at him, the standard multifunction Iceman expression, anything from a greeting to mockery-
Nate will look at him, and he will be concealing a total zero.
Brad knows he has issues, but if he didn't see the honesty and cautious pleasure in Nate's gaze, well, jesus-he's not that stupid, if he were he'd be in the fucking Army.
"It was a clusterfuck, dawg, no two ways about it. They'll be writing analyses and shit about this one for the next twenty years. It's fucking Vietnam all over again, right? The white man never learns. But we did our fucking jobs."
"Word, brah."
"You are so fucking moto when you're drunk, Poke. And your team is no better. Stop fucking embarrassing yourselves."
"Don't mind Brad," Ray pipes up, frighteningly eloquent still considering he's matched them shot for shot, and is about half their weight. Something to be said for his mutated trailer park genes. "He's fucking fronting, homes, because he can't admit this tour changed his fucking life."
"Indeed, Ray, if anything could make my trust in the Corps crumble, it would be this ridiculous fucking 40-day dog and pony show that completely undermined everything First Recon is meant for."
"Cute, homes. You know I meant your newfound faith in humanity. Speaking of, they got a date for the Captain's paddle party, yet?"
"How should I know?"
Poke snorts, and Lilley starts laughing.
At least he will know what to say when Nate, with his default setting of officer's fucking guilt-tripping, will inevitably bring up his fear of damaging Brad's career again.
"Maps, finally. And we got the warning order."
"The tone of your voice suggests you're less than pleased with the chronology, sir."
"Don't get smart with me, Sergeant. They can sense the disdain radiating off of you back in the chow hall."
"Sir, you've caught me. And no turret, either. Not the most promising of beginnings."
"Yes, because the Corps is synonymous with auspicious."
"I'm sure I would agree, sir, if I understood your higher education vocabulary."
It gets a laugh out of Nate. Brad is pleased. The invasion is off to a better start already.
"Make sure your men try to get some sleep. It may be a while before the next opportunity."
You too, Brad doesn't say. He'll pick his battles. "Semper fi, sir."
He doesn't know where to start.
When he pushes his chest to Nate's back, bringing them to clothed full-body contact, and traps Nate against the counter, for a moment he doesn't think they'll get any further, because he can't see himself moving, not to strip, not to find a bed. Months of waiting and he's overwhelmed by Nate's smell this close, by Nate's chin dipping to his chest, a flush covering the back of his neck.
He had a combat jack like this once.
The memories of theater, unexpectedly, help him ground himself. That AO has been inked in his mind, he can overlay it with the fuzzy reality of Nate's apartment, he can try every last thing he wanted, thought about, ached for.
His hands steal under Nate's shirt, trailing up his abs to his nipples. Nate surges in place when Brad flicks one. His hand flies up to grip Brad's wrist, to stay it in place.
Brad would grin, but his face feels unresponsive. He presses harder against Nate, cranes to mouth at the fade of Nate's haircut. His cock strains against his zipper.
They'll move soon. Just a minute. Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
"There's a hundred reasons why we shouldn't do this," he says.
Brad's lips quirk, masking the feel of ice running down his spine. "And only one we should?"
Nate pauses, throat working. Brad sees his fingers clench on empty air.
"I didn't say that."
Afterwards.
It's a deadly word. You don't walk under fire thinking of afterwards. You don't get out of your Humvee in the middle of an ambush if you're planning for afterwards. If you don't already consider yourself dead.
It's a paradox, mindfuck, vicious cycle. CO's who consider themselves living on borrowed time make good superiors, operating on cold fact, not emotion. Ductus exemplo. Their LT's disregard for his own safety should reassure them all, inspire them.
Nate's dumb, self-sacrificial feats make them grind their teeth together.
Scribe calls it. They've adored Fick, from the start. Maybe too much.
Sometimes, in theater, dickhead officers would be easier.
"I don't miss anything from home," he says. "Except my bike."
He looks Nate in the eye. Pointed. As clear as he can make it. For now.
Nate bites his lip. Brad's body reacts predictably. He's expended more energy trying to police his dick during the invasion than even griping about the fucking wrongness of their mission-at some point there's just no sense in it anymore. He is forced to shift, drawing Nate's attention by the movement before he looks up hastily.
"I-I wouldn't mind a good steak."
How Brad loves the little stutter.
"Better showers," Nate goes on. "Some privacy…"
"Ah," he grins. "Privacy, sir. Sure."
Nate looks caught between frustration and doubt. Brad wants to wipe away the look, replace it with a million things, certainty morphing into acceptance, anticipation, contentment. He wants to see Nate's eyes fighting to stay open while his mouth is slack with desperate inhales, sweat beading on his upper lip.
He wants hitching breaths and surprised bursts of laughter and soft, sleepy eyes.
It's been a long time since he's wanted things. Consciously, deliberately. It feels better than he thought it would.
He doesn't hide the want. From himself, or from Nate. He hopes he's right in thinking that they're past that point.
He doesn't think he has the strength to not try, to not fight for this. If it's a risk it's one he has to take.
Brad Colbert doesn't do leaps of faith. Except when he does.
Nate swallows heavily.
"I've been thinking of leaving the Corps," he says.
"I know," Brad says.
The lip-biting. Yes.
(It would be great if he could deny being easy and predictable, but at this point it's a fucking moot point anyway.)
Got to him from day one. Fuck, got to him from the introduction. Still wasn't as bad as the eyes. Green like that wasn't supposed to exist in his world, it promised too much. He got through the first meeting by fixing his eyes respectfully just past Fick's head, by telling himself their new LT had to be a bleeding-heart liberal dicksuck who would get them all killed in Iraq.
The next day he was asked for his input in planning the first training exercise for when the rest of the platoon arrived at Pendleton. Brad kept his guard up for about ten minutes. After that, he had to periodically glance at Nate's bars, just to remind himself.
When they were done, they got into a conversation about something else, something inconsequential. (He remembers, because he doesn't forget anything about Nate, but the topic under discussion isn't the point. The point is the discussion itself, which was the beginning.)
(He lies. The beginning was the goddamn beginning-seeing their improbably young-looking new Lieutenant walking towards him, led by Wynn. The subsequent less than 24 hours of refusing to acknowledge the fact was nothing but a futile, doomed struggle. The longer he talked with Nate, the harder it was to keep lying to himself. His reservations endured the one day and after that he was undeniably fucked.)
At the end of that first shared tactics session, when Nate shuffled the papers together, mind stuck on something they'd been debating, and his teeth began gnawing his lower lip, Brad silently choked on his own tongue, felt his nipples harden.
Pendleton, Kuwait, Iraq. Since then it's been downhill, gotten only worse, every day adding a layer of respect and admiration and need until it feels Brad will buckle under it all.
There are occasions in-country when the only thing he thinks of, mid-combat jack, is the sore-looking red of Nate's lips, and the care he would like to show them. His own mouth tingles in phantom sensation. When he comes, the tremors shake him from his neck to his thighs, and in a moment of post-orgasmic clarity he fears he'll never have the opportunity to touch Nate Fick at all.
"The LT sure chewed him up and spit him out."
"Are you for real, dickhead? The LT fucking handed him his ass in a platter. Did you fucking see the way Casey Kasem kept flinching every time Fick even looked his way?"
Brad hears the tail end of the exchange and smoothly changes his course to the group converging around 2-2's vehicle. "And what's got you girls tittering like someone gave you backstage passes for a fucking boyband concert?"
Poke turns to look at him with a half grin that tells Brad he's about to be sorry for asking. "It's your bee-ef-ef, dawg. The man is a stone cold motherfucker."
"Despite that cocksucking mouth," Chaffin drawls. Brad's spine stiffens.
"And this is a surprise to you pathetic whiskey tango ingrates?" He's directing his words to the group at large, but his eyes are on Staffin, cold and hard. "Keep this level of ineptitude up, and you can fucking wave your Recon badge goodbye."
"Nah, we know the LT's the shit, brah," Lilley injects, the unlikely peace-maker. "But tonight, fucking A, dude-that was something else."
Brad gets the whole story eventually. The guys are still laughing, building it up so that Brad already knows it will become one of Recon's legends. There's fierce pride coating every word, yeah, you can try to push the LT but when he decides to push back you're fucking dead, man.
They aren't thinking about how much more difficult Nate might have just made everything for himself, or rather, are choosing not to concentrate on that.
Brad should find the sir. Tell him his men've got his six, whether he likes it or not.
He's not supposed to notice a lot of the things he notices about Nate.
His voice on the comms. What he's saying, yes, but also the pitch and timber of it. (Admitting it makes him feel like he should have pussy tattooed on his forehead.) A couple of times he overhears Nate singing, usually with Mike, but once on his own, bent over a map on the hood of his Humvee. There's a double-vision suddenly, a scene with Nate leaning over a coffee table in an unfamiliar living room, books and a notepad and loose papers strewn in front of him, lips barely moving, lyrics delivered on a low, soft breath.
Brad shakes his head to dispel the picture, but he's not fast enough to miss someone coming to stand next to Nate, palm dropping to rest on the back of his neck.
He got the scar on the back of his left wrist back in military school. It's faded, white, almost unnoticeable.
"Catherine Zeta-fucking-Jones or Eva Mendes?"
"Either. No, Mendes."
"Megan Fox or Denise Richards?"
"Fox."
"Homes, I totally knew you had a thing for brunettes. Try to keep from molesting me while I'm sleeping, okay?"
"In good conscience, I cannot make any such promise, Ray."
"That's alright, I guess I could suffer through a blowjob. Hey, Brad, who would you rather blow-"
"Evening, gents."
"Heeey, LT," Ray's smirk spells trouble. "We were just talking about who Brad likes best in Bravo-Two."
Nate's eyes glitter in amusement, but he keeps his face straight. Of course he does. "I'll let the Gunny know we're having a platoon-wide tournament to compete for the favor of Sergeant Colbert," he says gravely.
"Well, when you say it like that, sir, you make Brad sound like a princess, and what's that going to do to his combat effectiveness?"
Nate strides off after a couple of minutes, never lingering, never completely immersing himself in his men's bullshitting. It's probably in the first chapter of the officers' handbook, being present but not too involved. Brad's had plenty of junior Lieutenants who've nervously toed the line, unsure of how much is too friendly, swinging wildly between back-slapping and detachment.
The thing about Nate is, he carries the command with him constantly, it's there in the lines of his body, the way he sees everything that happens around him, the way a look from him can check the platoon at its rowdiest. It doesn't keep his men from wanting to talk to him, from wanting to be in his company.
Ray watches him as he stares after Nate, a beat too long.
"You lying piece of shit," he says, without heat. "I fucking knew the thing about brunettes had to be total bullshit, homes."
They drive and get shot at and shoot back. They continue to get their asses reamed by the enduring atmosphere of failure, from the supply shortage to the unfortunate existence of algae like Encino fucking Man.
They drive some more, shoot some more. The mission makes as little sense as the previous day, the next day. They get thinner, angrier, more tired.
Running out of reason as fast as running out of days.
It's the invasion in a nutshell. Then the bitch gets named and suddenly it's a working part of the grand strategic plan, a clinical boardroom concoction of history and politics, a fever dream of liberation.
It doesn't change the facts on the streets of Baghdad, but Bravo Two isn't allowed to fix what's been fucked up. Under their mission parameters, the anarchy outside the walls of the power plant is collateral damage. Like little kids and bombs.
The way Nate looks, ashen and exhausted, worn to the bone-it makes Brad's own frustrations retreat to the back of his mind. He's a grunt. For him, wallowing is optional. He'd rather shore Nate up, if allowed.
Brad finds his peace of mind in the single shining piece of integrity in the desert. It gives him his hour of sleep each night, knowing that Nate's idealism will recover, and he'll change the world.
Afterwards.
(In Baghdad is the first time he tastes the word. Gives himself leave to think about it. His dick gets hard when he's thinking about making Nate coffee in the mornings, and eventually Brad gets off on the thought of kissing him in a kitchen. Their kitchen.
It might be the gayest moment of his life. But, then again-moot point.)
"This is wrong, too, isn't it?"
They're leaning their shoulders on a wall at a dark part of Paige, facing each other, the distance between their bodies and faces shrunk from the respectable two feet it was when Brad found Nate a while ago.
A shifting of his arm against the stone, a redistribution of weight, a rocking of his body without the backward movement that is a part of it. Nate raises his eyebrow at each transparent trick and allows it nonetheless.
Nate told him early on, without saying a word out loud, that he wouldn't touch Brad while he was still his subordinate. Brad hates it and understands it. Hates it more on nights like this, when every inch of the skin he sees before him seems infused with magnetism, making his mouth water, imagining his teeth pressing on Nate's jaw. Nights like this, he can't look at anything below Nate's neck, the idea of the body hidden beneath the dusty cammies too much like a tease, a torture, something to test his self-control to the breaking point when every little thing about Nate already makes him burn, decimating his discipline to cinders.
But he can imagine biting Nate's jaw-can't not-and licking the underside of it, licking Nate's ears, the sounds he'd make, tight, needy, asking Brad for it at last.
"Wrong isn't the word I'd use, no."
They breath the same air, talk about the end of their mission, with the undercurrent of waiting for something else entirely.
It's the DADT version of foreplay, and it hurts, in his chest, twists low in his stomach. Two weeks before they ship home he's hard pretty much constantly, seeks Nate out more than strictly smart, and walks off in a daze every time.
He asks himself, every time he's away from Nate for longer than an hour and his head clears some, what he's getting himself into-didn't he learn this lesson already?
Ivy League, a man, an officer. East Coast choirboy with a degree in Classics.
It sounds like a bad joke when broken down to basics.
Then the pull propels him in a certain direction, and when he catches sight of Nate-could be from the corner of his eye, almost outside his peripheral line of vision, doesn't matter, he recognizes Nate less with his eyes than with the lurch in his gut-and gets close enough to talk, or just to smirk at him, the standard multifunction Iceman expression, anything from a greeting to mockery-
Nate will look at him, and he will be concealing a total zero.
Brad knows he has issues, but if he didn't see the honesty and cautious pleasure in Nate's gaze, well, jesus-he's not that stupid, if he were he'd be in the fucking Army.
"It was a clusterfuck, dawg, no two ways about it. They'll be writing analyses and shit about this one for the next twenty years. It's fucking Vietnam all over again, right? The white man never learns. But we did our fucking jobs."
"Word, brah."
"You are so fucking moto when you're drunk, Poke. And your team is no better. Stop fucking embarrassing yourselves."
"Don't mind Brad," Ray pipes up, frighteningly eloquent still considering he's matched them shot for shot, and is about half their weight. Something to be said for his mutated trailer park genes. "He's fucking fronting, homes, because he can't admit this tour changed his fucking life."
"Indeed, Ray, if anything could make my trust in the Corps crumble, it would be this ridiculous fucking 40-day dog and pony show that completely undermined everything First Recon is meant for."
"Cute, homes. You know I meant your newfound faith in humanity. Speaking of, they got a date for the Captain's paddle party, yet?"
"How should I know?"
Poke snorts, and Lilley starts laughing.
At least he will know what to say when Nate, with his default setting of officer's fucking guilt-tripping, will inevitably bring up his fear of damaging Brad's career again.
"Maps, finally. And we got the warning order."
"The tone of your voice suggests you're less than pleased with the chronology, sir."
"Don't get smart with me, Sergeant. They can sense the disdain radiating off of you back in the chow hall."
"Sir, you've caught me. And no turret, either. Not the most promising of beginnings."
"Yes, because the Corps is synonymous with auspicious."
"I'm sure I would agree, sir, if I understood your higher education vocabulary."
It gets a laugh out of Nate. Brad is pleased. The invasion is off to a better start already.
"Make sure your men try to get some sleep. It may be a while before the next opportunity."
You too, Brad doesn't say. He'll pick his battles. "Semper fi, sir."
He doesn't know where to start.
When he pushes his chest to Nate's back, bringing them to clothed full-body contact, and traps Nate against the counter, for a moment he doesn't think they'll get any further, because he can't see himself moving, not to strip, not to find a bed. Months of waiting and he's overwhelmed by Nate's smell this close, by Nate's chin dipping to his chest, a flush covering the back of his neck.
He had a combat jack like this once.
The memories of theater, unexpectedly, help him ground himself. That AO has been inked in his mind, he can overlay it with the fuzzy reality of Nate's apartment, he can try every last thing he wanted, thought about, ached for.
His hands steal under Nate's shirt, trailing up his abs to his nipples. Nate surges in place when Brad flicks one. His hand flies up to grip Brad's wrist, to stay it in place.
Brad would grin, but his face feels unresponsive. He presses harder against Nate, cranes to mouth at the fade of Nate's haircut. His cock strains against his zipper.
They'll move soon. Just a minute. Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.