fic | gk | on bonds and battles
Right--so, kubis, here it is--went a bit over drabble length, and way over self-indulgent; but, hey, what else is new. X)
Generation Kill | Brad/Nate | R | Predators-verse | 1.8K
previous installments:
patience
predators
on marking
The telepathy-if that's the right word-is frighteningly easy to get used to.
Brad doesn't know what to call it exactly, both since it's still unexpected and unbelievable and because Brad deeply and sincerely despises the idea of a term loaned from trashy pop culture intended for moronic, goat-fucking pseudo-liberals.
And although he'd never say it out loud, it also feels like something meant for him and Nate alone, like it's another version of the bond Brad thinks might have existed for longer than he really admits. He doesn't know what he's done to deserve it, this access to Nate's emotions, the closeness-and yes, he's given up berating himself for being a pathetic fuck where Nate is concerned. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, just knowing Nate is dreaming about him, lying warm and aroused right there beside him in their bed, and it threatens to make him shake apart with want and pride and gratitude.
If it means he can have this, have all of Nate, he'll use any pussy language and wear any scars Nate gives him like a badge, he'll tattoo Nate's mark into his skin to complete the way his body and brain are soaked with Nate's presence and his touch.
All of it, the shared dreams and the sensations he catches from Nate throughout the day, feels unobtrusive and safe to him; he doesn't know if Nate agrees. He seems to have taken it in in a stride, but Brad hasn't quite been able to make himself ask. His trust in Nate in absolute, but with all the impossible new realities Nate has already come to terms with-vampires, and centuries of invisible warfare and the threat of more bloodshed, and now this-he can't help but think that at some point, it is going to become too much.
+
By now, after knowing Brad almost a year and living with him for six months, it's easy for him to know when Brad is brooding over something needlessly.
(And hadn't that been anticlimactic, realizing somewhere around mid-November that he was spending nearly all his free time at Brad's house anyway, and had not a single reason to keep hanging onto a room at the campus: that his life or independence were by no means defined by a single cramped space, that he never felt more himself or freer than-
Yes, so the decision was easy. Telling Brad he'd be hanging onto a single key from then on, he was anticipating Brad's continuing, if less often articulated worry of keeping Nate from something, battling with the, well, happiness the announcement caused.
"Just think, you'll have me in your territory all the time," Nate teased him, having decided to derail all useless counterarguments in their infancy. "This place will smell like both of us, all the time."
No better way to bait a vampire. Brad's eyes darkened to black, and Nate had just enough time to smother his laugh before Brad's body slammed into him.)
Brad would probably just call it thinking, that underappreciated activity that should ideally prove that we have evolved as a species, instead of consisting of a herd of intellectually stagnating sheep, but it's clear in his stillness, increased quietness, the slight crease between his eyebrows. Brad claims he's lost all his human tells over the years but, as Nate often calmly reminds him, that is complete bullshit.
Or maybe Nate's just one of the few looking closely enough.
"What's up," he says, nudging Brad's shoulder. He's keeping his thoughts silent, because Brad can read his stance and his tone as precisely as anything.
It could be the coming separation-and yes, they had words about it, though less than Nate might have expected-or it could be something to do with Godfather. As it turns out, it's something else entirely.
For a minute or two, Brad seems to waver between feigning ignorance. Yeah, like that'll work, Nate reminds him with a quirked brow. Brad smiles ruefully.
Instead of responding out loud, Brad curves his palm over the side of Nate's head, long fingers brushing the fade at his neck. His eyes are asking, all right?, and for the first time in a while Nate has to really stop and think to untangle the possibilities.
Brad's fingers, the placement of his hand, decide it. Nate smiles.
"You remember, a while back, when I was being stupidly insecure?"
Brad's eyes are steady on his, one side of his mouth almost starting to twist up in a pleased acknowledgement.
"Brad, we're past all that," Nate says, more serious now, and he'd continue, but Brad's other hand comes up to bracket his face, and Brad's mouth on his is greedy, aggressive, familiar and right.
+
The first time Brad almost, almost regrets the bond, is during Nate's Crucible. Brad is in Boston, desperate enough to kill time that has seemed to stretch and stretch and stop completely since Nate's been in OCS, that he's voluntarily come to visit Ray and Walt.
Brad's sprawled on their leather couch, just talking shit with them, and suddenly his vision almost whites out, thoughts burned to nothing through bone-deep, visceral exhaustion, the sort of fatigue that doesn't exist in civilian world, that crosses into something animal and senseless, a desperation shot through with a violent, primal need for darkness and shelter.
Having it hit him with that magnitude, from over five hundred miles away and despite the dampener Nate has obviously been trying to keep on it, is surreal. Brad digs his fingers into the strained muscles in his thighs, back hard and curved, eyes squeezed shut tightly to remind himself that Nate is a tough sonofabitch and he wants this, has chosen it the way he chose Brad, intentional and deliberate.
All the same, it makes him wish he could use the skulls of Nate's DIs for target practice.
It's several minutes before he can uncurl, still tense and feeling oddly brittle. He doesn't have time to even haltingly try and resume the conversation before-
"Shit, homes."
"Don't, Ray." He can't talk about it, doesn't want Ray's wide dark eyes and Walt's worried frown, can't handle the way they know how close to the end of his rope Nate is, how the Crucible is designed to break young men so that they won't break in the war they're being groomed for; how Brad wants to take off and get him, bring him home, keep him. It's fucking embarrassing, being laid bare like this in front of anyone, even Ray and Walt.
"It's almost over, though, Brad." The tone is almost questioning, tentative. Almost over, for now, before the next leg, before desert sand and IEDs and ambushes.
Fuck.
Brad doesn't want to lash out at Walt, knows it's in his genetic makeup to want to help.
So he says nothing, only surges up and leaves the room, the house. Boston is no good for running, not the way he wants to, and not the way things are right now with Godfather's plans stalled but not destroyed, and even if Brad is itching for a fight he wants something else even more.
+
Nate's eyes snap open. It's dark outside, and with the Crucible finally over he should still be somewhere on the border of asleep and unconscious-
Oh, motherfucker. The curse is heartfelt but, at the same time, tinged with guilty, mortified delight.
Nate stops the groan only by newly honed discipline and clamping his lips tight together, but he can't prevent his back from arching, his hips from thrusting up. Nate's cockhead has soaked the front of his briefs so Brad must have been at this for a while already, and Nate can picture him with absolute stark clarity, has seen it enough times at home-the long, lazy pulls of Brad's big hands on his own cock, lying back on their shared bed like a fucking offering, Nate watching from the other end of the bed, waiting for the signs of Brad's iron self-control beginning to crack, the hard swallows, the hint of tremor in Brad's hands and legs-
Nate's dick twitches, spurting more precome, and Nate would want to kill Brad if he didn't feel so unequivocally, unprecedentedly good. Licking a drop of sweat from his upper lip, Nate gives up, relaxes into it, opens himself for a more explicit echo of the torture Brad is gifting him. Thighs shaking, nipples tight, he feels much too close already, has to throw his left forearm over his mouth to muffle the panting.
He senses Brad's smile, the triumphant fucking smirk that makes an appearance every time Brad makes him lose his mind like this-and Nate senses something else, too, as Brad's movements get rougher, the pulls tighter and deeper, his other hand creeping back behind his balls and Nate doesn't have time or the presence of mind to get a hand on himself before Brad's middle finger is pushing inside, and Nate is coming through the hot drugging pleasure of being fingered and having his cock stripped with brutal, knowing strokes-
He doesn't have time to clean himself up before falling into a deep, coma-like sleep afterward, as induced by Brad fucking Colbert.
+
The graduation of Nate's OCS class falls on an overcast day, grey clouds threatening rain at any moment. The parents and siblings milling around in the space appointed to guests on the parade ground are bitching about potentially ruined pictures, balancing smart phones, digital cameras and umbrellas.
Despite the thick crowd, Brad manages to stand slightly apart from everyone else. Well, almost everyone.
"Guess it pays to be tall like a Viking giraffe and practiced at promising dismembered limbs with a glance, right?"
"Ray-"
"Yeah, fine, homes; shutting up, now, so that you can continue staring at our Nathaniel like a rabid dog-"
"Ray-"
"Just saying, there're kids present, the innocent young minds of America; there're soccer moms and fag-hating redneck fathers-"
"RAY-"
+
"Ray Person, who the fuck invited you?" Nate is grinning ear to ear as he comes up to them, shaking Ray's hand and clapping him on the shoulder. Ray makes sure to keep a casual, relaxed smirk on his face, although inside he's crying little happy tears of joy at being present to witness the scene. Motherfucking Brad is looking tense and sort of slack-jawed at the same time; Ray wasn't exaggerating a fucking bit about the poor guy looking as hungry as if he hadn't fed in weeks.
Come to think of it-well, it's either a damned fitting analogy or a sad, sad truth, homes.
+
Brad hasn't touched Nate in ten weeks. Right now, he's afraid to, knows he wouldn't be able to restrain himself from doing more. Right now, he's content to look.
Nate's eyes catch his, green and bright and smiling.
Congratulations, Lieutenant.
Generation Kill | Brad/Nate | R | Predators-verse | 1.8K
previous installments:
patience
predators
on marking
The telepathy-if that's the right word-is frighteningly easy to get used to.
Brad doesn't know what to call it exactly, both since it's still unexpected and unbelievable and because Brad deeply and sincerely despises the idea of a term loaned from trashy pop culture intended for moronic, goat-fucking pseudo-liberals.
And although he'd never say it out loud, it also feels like something meant for him and Nate alone, like it's another version of the bond Brad thinks might have existed for longer than he really admits. He doesn't know what he's done to deserve it, this access to Nate's emotions, the closeness-and yes, he's given up berating himself for being a pathetic fuck where Nate is concerned. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night, just knowing Nate is dreaming about him, lying warm and aroused right there beside him in their bed, and it threatens to make him shake apart with want and pride and gratitude.
If it means he can have this, have all of Nate, he'll use any pussy language and wear any scars Nate gives him like a badge, he'll tattoo Nate's mark into his skin to complete the way his body and brain are soaked with Nate's presence and his touch.
All of it, the shared dreams and the sensations he catches from Nate throughout the day, feels unobtrusive and safe to him; he doesn't know if Nate agrees. He seems to have taken it in in a stride, but Brad hasn't quite been able to make himself ask. His trust in Nate in absolute, but with all the impossible new realities Nate has already come to terms with-vampires, and centuries of invisible warfare and the threat of more bloodshed, and now this-he can't help but think that at some point, it is going to become too much.
+
By now, after knowing Brad almost a year and living with him for six months, it's easy for him to know when Brad is brooding over something needlessly.
(And hadn't that been anticlimactic, realizing somewhere around mid-November that he was spending nearly all his free time at Brad's house anyway, and had not a single reason to keep hanging onto a room at the campus: that his life or independence were by no means defined by a single cramped space, that he never felt more himself or freer than-
Yes, so the decision was easy. Telling Brad he'd be hanging onto a single key from then on, he was anticipating Brad's continuing, if less often articulated worry of keeping Nate from something, battling with the, well, happiness the announcement caused.
"Just think, you'll have me in your territory all the time," Nate teased him, having decided to derail all useless counterarguments in their infancy. "This place will smell like both of us, all the time."
No better way to bait a vampire. Brad's eyes darkened to black, and Nate had just enough time to smother his laugh before Brad's body slammed into him.)
Brad would probably just call it thinking, that underappreciated activity that should ideally prove that we have evolved as a species, instead of consisting of a herd of intellectually stagnating sheep, but it's clear in his stillness, increased quietness, the slight crease between his eyebrows. Brad claims he's lost all his human tells over the years but, as Nate often calmly reminds him, that is complete bullshit.
Or maybe Nate's just one of the few looking closely enough.
"What's up," he says, nudging Brad's shoulder. He's keeping his thoughts silent, because Brad can read his stance and his tone as precisely as anything.
It could be the coming separation-and yes, they had words about it, though less than Nate might have expected-or it could be something to do with Godfather. As it turns out, it's something else entirely.
For a minute or two, Brad seems to waver between feigning ignorance. Yeah, like that'll work, Nate reminds him with a quirked brow. Brad smiles ruefully.
Instead of responding out loud, Brad curves his palm over the side of Nate's head, long fingers brushing the fade at his neck. His eyes are asking, all right?, and for the first time in a while Nate has to really stop and think to untangle the possibilities.
Brad's fingers, the placement of his hand, decide it. Nate smiles.
"You remember, a while back, when I was being stupidly insecure?"
Brad's eyes are steady on his, one side of his mouth almost starting to twist up in a pleased acknowledgement.
"Brad, we're past all that," Nate says, more serious now, and he'd continue, but Brad's other hand comes up to bracket his face, and Brad's mouth on his is greedy, aggressive, familiar and right.
+
The first time Brad almost, almost regrets the bond, is during Nate's Crucible. Brad is in Boston, desperate enough to kill time that has seemed to stretch and stretch and stop completely since Nate's been in OCS, that he's voluntarily come to visit Ray and Walt.
Brad's sprawled on their leather couch, just talking shit with them, and suddenly his vision almost whites out, thoughts burned to nothing through bone-deep, visceral exhaustion, the sort of fatigue that doesn't exist in civilian world, that crosses into something animal and senseless, a desperation shot through with a violent, primal need for darkness and shelter.
Having it hit him with that magnitude, from over five hundred miles away and despite the dampener Nate has obviously been trying to keep on it, is surreal. Brad digs his fingers into the strained muscles in his thighs, back hard and curved, eyes squeezed shut tightly to remind himself that Nate is a tough sonofabitch and he wants this, has chosen it the way he chose Brad, intentional and deliberate.
All the same, it makes him wish he could use the skulls of Nate's DIs for target practice.
It's several minutes before he can uncurl, still tense and feeling oddly brittle. He doesn't have time to even haltingly try and resume the conversation before-
"Shit, homes."
"Don't, Ray." He can't talk about it, doesn't want Ray's wide dark eyes and Walt's worried frown, can't handle the way they know how close to the end of his rope Nate is, how the Crucible is designed to break young men so that they won't break in the war they're being groomed for; how Brad wants to take off and get him, bring him home, keep him. It's fucking embarrassing, being laid bare like this in front of anyone, even Ray and Walt.
"It's almost over, though, Brad." The tone is almost questioning, tentative. Almost over, for now, before the next leg, before desert sand and IEDs and ambushes.
Fuck.
Brad doesn't want to lash out at Walt, knows it's in his genetic makeup to want to help.
So he says nothing, only surges up and leaves the room, the house. Boston is no good for running, not the way he wants to, and not the way things are right now with Godfather's plans stalled but not destroyed, and even if Brad is itching for a fight he wants something else even more.
+
Nate's eyes snap open. It's dark outside, and with the Crucible finally over he should still be somewhere on the border of asleep and unconscious-
Oh, motherfucker. The curse is heartfelt but, at the same time, tinged with guilty, mortified delight.
Nate stops the groan only by newly honed discipline and clamping his lips tight together, but he can't prevent his back from arching, his hips from thrusting up. Nate's cockhead has soaked the front of his briefs so Brad must have been at this for a while already, and Nate can picture him with absolute stark clarity, has seen it enough times at home-the long, lazy pulls of Brad's big hands on his own cock, lying back on their shared bed like a fucking offering, Nate watching from the other end of the bed, waiting for the signs of Brad's iron self-control beginning to crack, the hard swallows, the hint of tremor in Brad's hands and legs-
Nate's dick twitches, spurting more precome, and Nate would want to kill Brad if he didn't feel so unequivocally, unprecedentedly good. Licking a drop of sweat from his upper lip, Nate gives up, relaxes into it, opens himself for a more explicit echo of the torture Brad is gifting him. Thighs shaking, nipples tight, he feels much too close already, has to throw his left forearm over his mouth to muffle the panting.
He senses Brad's smile, the triumphant fucking smirk that makes an appearance every time Brad makes him lose his mind like this-and Nate senses something else, too, as Brad's movements get rougher, the pulls tighter and deeper, his other hand creeping back behind his balls and Nate doesn't have time or the presence of mind to get a hand on himself before Brad's middle finger is pushing inside, and Nate is coming through the hot drugging pleasure of being fingered and having his cock stripped with brutal, knowing strokes-
He doesn't have time to clean himself up before falling into a deep, coma-like sleep afterward, as induced by Brad fucking Colbert.
+
The graduation of Nate's OCS class falls on an overcast day, grey clouds threatening rain at any moment. The parents and siblings milling around in the space appointed to guests on the parade ground are bitching about potentially ruined pictures, balancing smart phones, digital cameras and umbrellas.
Despite the thick crowd, Brad manages to stand slightly apart from everyone else. Well, almost everyone.
"Guess it pays to be tall like a Viking giraffe and practiced at promising dismembered limbs with a glance, right?"
"Ray-"
"Yeah, fine, homes; shutting up, now, so that you can continue staring at our Nathaniel like a rabid dog-"
"Ray-"
"Just saying, there're kids present, the innocent young minds of America; there're soccer moms and fag-hating redneck fathers-"
"RAY-"
+
"Ray Person, who the fuck invited you?" Nate is grinning ear to ear as he comes up to them, shaking Ray's hand and clapping him on the shoulder. Ray makes sure to keep a casual, relaxed smirk on his face, although inside he's crying little happy tears of joy at being present to witness the scene. Motherfucking Brad is looking tense and sort of slack-jawed at the same time; Ray wasn't exaggerating a fucking bit about the poor guy looking as hungry as if he hadn't fed in weeks.
Come to think of it-well, it's either a damned fitting analogy or a sad, sad truth, homes.
+
Brad hasn't touched Nate in ten weeks. Right now, he's afraid to, knows he wouldn't be able to restrain himself from doing more. Right now, he's content to look.
Nate's eyes catch his, green and bright and smiling.
Congratulations, Lieutenant.