Archive of Our Own

Alone in the dark, Barney thought to himself there were three things that people tended to forget about Gunnar Jensen.

The first was pretty simple: on a good day, Gunnar could kick your ass from here to Tallahassee and there wouldn’t be a damn thing you could do about it. The problem was, he had a lot of bad days.

The second: Gunnar played the fool and yeah, it was mostly unintentional, but he's never been dumb. When he was thinking clearly, he was the smartest guy in the room by ten miles or more. The problem was, most days his head was not clear.

And the third: Gunnar was Barney’s friend. More than that: Barney was Gunnar’s friend. Gunnar didn’t have a whole lot of friends in the world, never really had, so that was one hell of an important fact to bear in mind.

These are the things people forgot about Gunnar, because sometimes he made it easy to forget. They forgot but they shouldn’t have, Barney thought, as the gunfire rang and then echoed and then stopped. They forgot but they shouldn’t have, Barney thinks now, months later, months after. They really shouldn’t have.

---

It was Barney’s birthday the day they met.

It was his 36th and he’d just been promoted - Senior Chief sounded pretty good, he thought - so there he was in a cheap but cheerful bar not far from base that night. He had a couple of weeks’ leave lined up before he was due to report for assignment at Little Creek, a couple of weeks before he’d finally get his own brand new team instead of playing adviser to a base captain out somewhere in the Middle East, and he liked the idea of doing some real work for a change. He’d always preferred being out in the field with a gun in his hands and a team at his back to dicking around on base dreaming up insertion strategies, though he guessed it was a blessing and a curse that he’d always been pretty good at both.

He’d invited Stonebanks and a couple of the guys from his old team along, at least the ones who happened to be stationed in the vicinity, and it was pretty good, not drinking cheap vodka on camp chairs that always seemed to be covered in sand, and the middle-of-the-road rock band wasn’t the worst he’d ever heard, either, wasn’t even half as loud or obnoxious as mortar fire or an AK-47. They sat around a table, reminiscing the way he guesses now that only the 30-somethings of the world can do because by then they thought they’d seen it all. And then, just as he’d thought it was all going so well, in walked a group of guys who he could tell were going to cause trouble. It was written all over them.

They were sailors, that was pretty damn obvious right from the start. Barney had joined up right out of high school so he’d been enlisted for eighteen whole years by then - half his life at the time - though he hadn’t come from a military family like most of the other guys had; his mom was a nurse in New York back then and his dad had just retired from the NYPD. But eighteen years around sailors had been more than enough to know the 20-somethings sauntering in with the Navy-issue buzz cuts were sailors. Not Marines, definitely not Army and he could've spotted Air Force a mile away: they were 100% Navy petty officers. He should’ve known, he’d been one of those guys once upon a time, not so very long ago.

For a while, they ignored them. For a while, they drank their beers at their table, listened to the band, Barney drumming his fingers against the sticky tabletop as he cradled his beer to try to push down the annoyance because the sailors were getting louder by the minute and a hell of a lot more obnoxious, flirting drunkenly with any girl who passed their way, heckling the band, three glasses accidentally knocked onto the floor. Then one of them, a blond giant of a guy who looked pretty much like he’d stepped right out of some kind of a viking movie, got himself into an argument with the bartender and that was it, Barney had absolutely had enough. He shoved back his seat as he stood and Stonebanks, playing with the neck of his beer bottle, just shook his head at him sadly. Barney knew what he was thinking: here we go again. Barney had always hated the kind of self-centred jerks who made the service look bad. This was far from the first time, and both he and Stonebanks knew it probably wouldn't be the last.

“Sailor!” Barney called, in just the right tone, loud enough over the guitars that the blond visibly tensed as Barney came closer, but he didn’t stop arguing. He leaned over the bar, pressing his forefinger to the bartender’s chest, prodding pretty damn sharply.

“Stand down, sailor,” Barney said, slapping one palm down hard against the bar, and the blond pulled himself back up tall with a glower in Barney’s direction. And damn, was he tall.

“Stay out of this, old man,” the guy said, then he turned back to the bartender, but Barney took hold of his arm and the next thing he knew the blond was taking a swing at him. He ducked, dodged the fist that was clearly aimed at his face though it was a close-run thing, and he buried his own fist in the giant’s gut, doubling him over. The guy’s friends rushed in, got him by the arms and pulled him away as Stonebanks finally decided enough was enough and clapped Barney around the chest, pulling him back too, but it was too late; the bouncers approached and the two of them were kicked out of the bar. It wasn’t exactly Barney’s first time around that particular block so he went semi-willingly, hands up, contrite; the blond muttered under his breath as they walked out the door and Barney found himself shaking his head at him. Asshole. He'd been having a pretty good night.

“You sure you don’t want us to come with?” Stonebanks asked, hanging back by the doorway, and Barney shook his head.

“You guys enjoy the night,” he said. “I’ll get some air, see you back on base.” And so Stonebanks took him at his word and went back inside and Barney shoved his hands into the hip pockets of his jeans and decided he’d go for a walk. It was July then, warm, a good night for it or it might’ve been if a couple of minutes later the huge blond guy hadn’t jogged right up next to him.

“You got me kicked out, old man,” he said, turning, walking backwards in front of Barney for a few steps till he stopped, abruptly. Barney stopped along with him, looking up because hell, the size of the guy meant he had to look up.

“You got yourself kicked out, sailor,” Barney replied, and the blond clenched his jaw. Barney sighed. “Look, man, you’re drunk. Go back to base and sleep it off. You’re still pissed in the morning, you find me and we’ll deal with it then.”

“Yeah, fuck that,” the guy said, hotly.

Of course, the sensible, reasonable option Barney had offered had never been going to fly and Barney had known it just by looking at the guy. He was ready for the punch but not for the knee that followed it up - the guy was good, even pretty damn inebriated, but Barney was a whole hell of a lot less drunk and he’d been a SEAL for twelve years by then; they traded blows, circled, wound up on the ground rolling awkwardly into an alley behind a Chinese restaurant, rolling over something wet that might’ve been noodles that were kinda past their best and they dragged each other up off of the asphalt; Barney got his shoulderblades pushed up uncomfortably against the rim of a dumpster, shoved the guy away and followed up with a punch to the jaw and they should’ve stopped or Barney should’ve ended it and walked away but for some dumb reason he didn’t feel particularly that way inclined right at that moment. Maybe he was pissed he’d had his birthday ruined. Maybe he hadn’t had a good fight in far too long. Maybe there was just something in the guy’s goddamn smirk that got his hackles up.

So, they kept going. A couple came by, glanced into the alley and Barney waved them on like it was nothing as the guy wrapped an arm around his neck; he’d got a counter for that and they were down on the ground again in a puddle of lo mein by the time the couple had made their hasty escape. They kept going, a chef and two waiters coming out to see what the hell was going on out there, and the guy waved them away as Barney wrapped his hands around his neck and squeezed. They kept going longer than Barney had intended to, going at it till they were both bloody and bruised and fucking exhausted, heaving in breaths; Barney pushed the guy up against a wall, shoved his fist up against his ribs but he’d got his forehead down against the guy’s shoulder and the fight was done, they both knew it. They were done.

“Let’s call it a draw,” Barney said.

The guy snorted and turned, pushed Barney up against the wall instead; Barney could see the guy's cheek was swelling already, there was a cut just above his eye that was trickling blood down over one prominent cheekbone and maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t as drunk as Barney had first thought. Maybe he was just fucking belligerent and Barney thought maybe it was going to start up again, exhausted punches, muscles screaming from the ridiculous fatigue of it because damn if they hadn’t gone at it like twelve rounds with Ali, but the next thing he knew the big blond guy’s mouth was on his and somehow it didn’t occur to him to object at all. All he did was hook his fingers into the hip pockets of the guy’s jeans and yank him in closer, right up flush against him. Neither of them seemed to mind how close they were.

Okay, it wasn’t one of Barney’s more sensible moments and he knew it, even at the time. The guy was clearly Navy and so was he; the guy was half-drunk and so was he; fuck, the guy was a guy and so was he. But they pushed against each other, rubbed against each other and Barney could feel that the guy was just as hard as he was in just as stupidly short a space of time because maybe the fight had gotten them halfway there already, like some kind of demented fucking foreplay. Six or seven inches of height difference made no difference at all the way the guy leaned down, both of his hands shoved in between Barney’s back and the wall, Barney’s hands taking handfuls of the back of the guy’s dark t-shirt and then one dipped down to the curve of his ass, one went up to the back of his neck, holding him in as the kiss deepened, all tongues and teeth and the taste of cheap beer and stray blood from the guy’s split eyebrow. It was stupidity of the highest order because anyone could’ve stumbled by and seen, another couple, another gang of waiters from the restaurant or maybe someone’d called the cops, but Barney could feel himself getting breathless as they rubbed together, the friction of his own clothes and the guy’s obvious erection against him pretty much the best birthday gift he could’ve wished for even after the damn fight, maybe because of the damn fight. And in no time at all they came like that, one after the other, shuddering, clawing at each other, pissed off and turned on. It really wasn't one of Barney's more sensible moments.

When they pulled back, the guy’s knuckles were raw from scrubbing against the wall at Barney's back and he was flushed and smiling an amused half-smile in spite of the thoroughly messed-up look of his face. They’d really done a number on each other, if the guy’s swelling face and Barney’s aching self were anything to go by.

“Hell of a way to end a fight, old man,” the guy said, glancing at Barney as he rubbed uselessly at the damp spot that’d spread over the front of his jeans.

Barney remembers chuckling in spite of himself. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Usually goes a hell of a lot worse.”

Then the guy held out his hand, suddenly, and Barney took it, shook it, not sure what else to do under the circumstances.

“Gunnar,” he said. “Stationed at Little Creek. You should look me up sometime.” He flashed him a toothy white smile. “Maybe next time we can skip the foreplay.”

“Barney,” Barney replied. “I might just do that, Gunnar.”

And Gunnar walked away and Barney watched him go, all swagger despite the fact he’d just come in his pants in an alley with some guy who’d just tried to hand him his ass. Barney remembers the way he smiled to himself and he shook his head as Gunnar turned the corner and vanished from sight. It wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done but right then he wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to do it again. He remembers thinking maybe it'd be a whole series of dumb moments.

Of course, two weeks later he reported for duty and his CO handed him a stack of files, evals and profiles for all the guys who made up his new team. Third in the stack was a face he remembered, a Nordic blond giant with blue eyes and a jaw he might’ve broken his fingers on the night of his 36th birthday: Petty Officer Third Class Gunnar Jensen.

“Fuck,” Barney muttered, under his breath, with a wince that almost hurt. And he went through to meet the team.

He knew he was going to regret this. Sometimes, over the years, he has.

---

“Isn’t that the guy--”

“Hey, Jensen. Didn’t--”

Gunnar turned. The team came to attention by their bunks there in their team's barracks at Little Creek. Gunnar frowned and he looked away.

“I don’t fucking believe it,” Gunnar muttered. Barney let that one go and took the team out for a run instead; he figured some hard PT would knock that shit right out of them.

They had three months to train together as a team before their first deployment was due and Barney snapped to it, joined in on the morning runs day in and day out, joined them in the gym, joined them for jumps and sea swims and boat training, didn’t get friendly but he was damn sure he was going to know them all just as well as he could if he was going to be putting his life in their hands, or asking them to trust him with theirs. They turned out to be a pretty damn good bunch, all in all, he thought. There were eight of them, different levels of experience, some transferring in from other teams, some fresh out of training. Gunnar had trained as a sniper, his file said, had a graduate degree in chemical engineering and Barney had no idea what the hell a wiseass bar-brawler with two official reprimands for insubordination was doing in his team, but there it was. He could work with it, he thought. He knows now he was wrong. He wishes he'd seen it earlier.

Gunnar was watching him the whole damn time, right from the start, and he knew it even if no one else did. He’d catch him looking while they were running, while they were working punch bags in the gym, while they were swimming; Barney knew it, saw it, and Gunnar had to know he saw it but he never flinched, not even once, never looked away. It was pretty damn disconcerting for the first couple of weeks while he was still cursing himself under his breath for letting anything happen in the first place, for even interfering back at the bar that night, and Stonebanks would’ve told him it served him right. Especially when it turned out the most effective way to deal with being watched was to jerk off in his bunk at night thinking about all the things he might’ve done with the guy had he not turned out to be under his command. The way Gunnar looked at him, Barney had a feeling he would’ve let him.

Gunnar spotted while Barney lifted weights one afternoon a couple of months in, watching him from above the weight bench and the way he did it was almost enough to get Barney hard right then and there. They sparred after that, got in the ring and went a few rounds though Barney knew from his file that Gunnar was some kind of karate whiz or something like that and he was really just asking for trouble, one of them or the other winding up on the floor and shit, Gunnar Jensen was as good at that as any guy he’d ever worked with, quick for his size, calculating when he wasn’t letting himself get all riled up and goaded into something he couldn’t get himself out of. Then they hit the pool after, swam laps, and when they got out and hit the showers, Gunnar was still watching. Sure, Barney was berthed with a bunch of other chiefs rather than with his guys, but the gym showers were still communal and there was Gunnar, three shower heads over, naked, watching him.

“You need to stop,” Barney said.

Gunnar raised his brows. “Stop what, senior chief?” he asked.

“You know damn well what.”

Gunnar shrugged and turned back to the wall, running one hand over his close-cropped blond hair. “That’s not what you said the first time, senior chief,” he said.

Barney sighed and he let it drop and so Gunnar kept on watching and on reflection, yeah, maybe the showers hadn’t been the best place to have the conversation because when Barney looked up again Gunnar was looking at him and fuck, the guy was really something. Maybe he shouldn’t’ve noticed or should’ve told himself to not to notice but he noticed anyway: broad shoulders, slim waist, maybe not as muscular as Barney was or is even now but Jesus, he was something then. He still is.

“Might want to try setting an example if you want me to stop, senior chief,” Gunnar said, and all Barney could do was rest his forehead down against the tiled wall and laugh at himself. The son of a bitch was right; the only way he knew Gunnar was watching him, the only way he’d ever known he was watching him, was because he was watching Gunnar too.

“Yeah,” he said, agreeing, in a fantastic display of wit. “Yeah.” And then Gunnar moved and then Gunnar was behind him, right there behind him, big hands hot at Barney’s hips. He should’ve moved away or at least asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing but apparently he was intent on fucking everything up because he did no such thing; he stood there while one of Gunnar’s hands shifted back to give his ass a teasing squeeze, a teasing slap under the shower spray. Gunnar’s other hand slid over Barney’s hip, pressed flat to his abdomen as his other thumb teased between his cheeks, the pad of it rubbing there and all Barney could do was smack his forehead less than lightly against the tiles and laugh under his breath.

Gunnar went down on his knees and Barney didn’t move though he should've. Gunnar bit at Barney’s ass and made himself laugh and made Barney laugh again, erratically, and Barney still didn’t move. Then Gunnar spread his cheeks and Barney let him and fuck, fuck, Gunnar’s thumbs rubbed against him and then Gunnar’s tongue rubbed against him and Barney squeezed his eyes shut, at least half as much from the fucking obscene thing that Gunnar was doing with his tongue as against the water running over his face.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Barney said, his voice sounding tight and strained though he guesses that only made good sense under the circumstances.

“Would’ve thought that was obvious, senior chief,” Gunnar replied, and Barney knew he was doing nothing useful to make him stop ‘cause all he’d done was shift his feet a couple of inches wider apart and that was pretty much just encouragement and maybe he'd even meant it that way, not even subconsciously. Gunnar’s fingers skimmed between Barney’s thighs, fingertips nudging back, rubbing against his perineum in just the right damn spot to make Barney’s knees feel just a little weaker, to make him lean more heavily against the wall. He hadn’t been so damn hard since, well. Since that night in the alley behind the goddamn Chinese restaurant, noodles stuck to his back, Gunnar Jensen’s smart mouth on his.

It was crazy, totally, but there was a moment there when Barney would’ve pretty much let Gunnar do whatever he wanted to do, let him stand and rub the impressive length of his cock against the crack of his ass, let him push into him, let him fuck him right then and there in the goddamn showers like even doing as much as they had was a good idea at all. What Gunnar did instead was pull back and push and pull at Barney’s hips until he turned around and when Barney looked down at him, Gunnar looked back up at him from his knees, all blue eyes and a fucking lascivious smile. Then he took him in his mouth and Barney clawed at the wall for support until that was it, he came like that, in the goddamn showers with Gunnar on his knees, jacking himself off.

Gunnar spat into the drain and stood up afterwards, pulled himself up tall and fucking grinned and all Barney could do was reach up and pat the big idiot on the cheek.

“That wasn’t what I had in mind, Gunnar,” he said.

Gunnar shrugged. “Yeah it was,” he replied, cocky, and Barney smiled despite himself and shook his head in exasperation. He was turning into a fucking prune so it felt really goddamn strange when he ran his wrinkly fingers down over Gunnar’s chest and then his abdomen. The guy knew exactly how he looked, knew exactly how attractive he was and what Barney thought of him, and damn if that wasn’t attractive in itself.

Barney chuckled. “Yeah, it was,” he said. He guessed he might as well admit it, it was just the two of them there and hell, some dumbass part of him hoped it wouldn’t be the last time it was just the two of them there, in spite of the general idiocy of it.

Gunnar gave an exaggerated wink and then he turned and he walked away. Barney just watched him go because watching him go wasn’t exactly painful on the eye.

And then, three days later, they got their orders.

---

What Barney remembers most about the op is how cold it was.

He guesses the temperature shouldn’t’ve been a surprise but somehow it still was, up there in the Rockies just as winter was kicking into gear, in the relative calm between two snowstorms. Why they’d sent in a SEAL team and not a team of Army Rangers or something a hell of a lot more sensible than sailors was a question Barney would really have liked to’ve asked back at Little Creek but once they were on the chopper and he read through their orders he guessed he got it once he had; some bigwig Navy intelligence officer had gone rogue and made off with millions and so the Secretary of the Navy had decided they’d clean up their own mess. Barney and his team were the official Navy cleanup crew. He wouldn’t be surprised now if that’s what his CO had planned for them all along, clearing up embarrassing Navy messes all around the world on a regular basis.

Of course, literally only three of the guys in the team had ever set foot on a mountain in their entire lives; Barney was one of them but that hadn’t been for maybe ten years in his case, one of his first assignments out somewhere on the Pakistani border with China and even then it hadn’t exactly been like they'd been summiting K2. They left the chopper and trudged through a snow-filled valley for about eight hours, feeling like a goddamn Arctic expedition with the amount of crap they were humping along with them, their demolitions guy Evans and medic Ramos having a too-loud conversation about how they’d rather be in Tijuana drinking tequila from the bottle while Gunnar rambled on about fucking fjords or some such total bullshit that no one was paying attention to. Barney shushed them three times like unruly schoolkids, four times, six, getting irritable then irritated then outright fucking snappy till he told them to shut the fuck up or he’d pull out his pistol and shoot them himself. It wasn’t that they were a bad team, far from it, but they’d got mouths like idle chatter was the height of goddamn fashion and the collective attention span of one hyperactive kindergartner.

He sent Gunnar ahead with his rifle, up onto a snow-topped ridge, while the rest of them hung back; Gunnar went up with a mutter that Barney pretended not to hear for the good of his sanity and the word came back that the coast was clear, of course the coast was fucking clear, what in the name of Christ were they expecting, ninjas? So they went on, crossed through between two of the lower peaks and found themselves sliding like total incompetent jackasses out onto a frozen lake and that was when it happened, where it happened; the rogue intel guy evidently had his own team out there with him and not just a chopper pilot because they next thing Barney knew they were under fire from both sides and the ice was cracking and and there was no goddamn cover anywhere around them, nowhere near them at all. Evans went down to Barney’s left in a juddering spray of bloody pink mist. Ramos slid down to him on his knees, hands going to Evans’ chest, but another round of gunfire put him down, too, a shudder and a cough and then he was still. Barney could see them, at the far edge of the lake, up on the ridge, and fucking Gunnar had been wrong or dumb or petulant or was currently lacking the eyes God gave him. They’d walked straight into an ambush.

Barney’s thigh erupted as a round went in and he went down, spraying automatic weapons fire as he went, but fuck, it wasn’t enough. There were twelve guys out there, maybe fourteen, and his team was going down, bleeding out on the ice, yelling. He could hear Gunnar shouting over the radio as he pulled himself back up to one knee and got off three shots with his revolver, deafening, saw two guys fall but his team was down, his whole team was down except then there was Gunnar, running, firing, yelling, sliding across the ice that was cracking into pieces and Barney didn’t even have time to shout as he slipped straight through sideways into the freezing water underneath.

He remembers how cold it was down there. He’d never been so damn cold in all his life and he hasn’t been again after that. He reached up in the dark, clawing for the surface but his pack was snagged and he knew he was going to drown, felt his chest burn, felt his vision swim as he broke his damn nails into pieces on the ice. He took a mouthful, a lungful of icy water and he knew he was drowning there in the damn unnatural quiet and the freezing cold, this was it, he was going to die out there in the goddamn Rockies just like a dumbass tourist who’d taken a wrong turn. It was almost funny. If he’d had the air to laugh, he might’ve.

But then he was up and out and puking up a gallon of ice water face-down on his belly and Gunnar was pulling him by the straps of his pack, his cheek burning from the friction of skin against ice. Gunnar fired twice, three times, then they were back at the snowline and Barney couldn’t get up, his thigh was fucked up and bleeding but he couldn’t feel a goddamn thing, couldn’t get his feet under him. Gunnar yanked off Barney’s pack, tossed down his own beside it, heaved Barney up with one arm tight around his waist and fucking hauled him out of there, bodily, stumbling in the snow. Barney passed out. He woke up around sunset to find Gunnar was dragging him by his jacket through a goddamn foot of snow. He passed out. He woke up in the night in some godforsaken cabin in the woods, shivering so damn hard his teeth chattered and Gunnar stripped off their soaked clothes, cocooned them both in shitty mildewed blankets and applied every possible part of the front of his body to the front of Barney’s, wrapped him up and in himself and shivered against him with drops of water frozen into ice in his hair. They were freezing, both shaking, Gunnar’s hands cold and unsteady as he rubbed at Barney’s back, as he breathed against Barney’s neck, clammy skin on skin.

He passed out again. He still has no idea how long he was out because they've never spoken about it, but when he woke again it was light outside and his leg was all sewn up, the bloody bullet discarded on the floor a few feet away with a pair of forceps and a suture needle and a pile of bloodied-up gauze. Gunnar was gone. Frankly, Barney had no idea right then if he’d ever see Gunnar again; they both knew he’d fucked up, given the all-clear when there was a whole goddamn team out there, even if his next move had been barrelling into the firefight to save Barney’s life. Barney remembers thinking the court martial wouldn’t be a pleasant affair. He remembers thinking maybe Gunnar would be better off disappeared.

But when he woke again, Gunnar was back. He was bloody and shivering and he’d started a fire there in the tiny cabin’s fireplace. He was kneeling in front of it, warming his hands as he shook.

“You’re gonna give away--” Barney started, trying to push up on one forearm to object to the damn fire he'd started, but Gunnar turned to him and shook his head. His face was white as a sheet, even in his stark white snow gear. It made his eyes look fucking eerie.

“They’re all dead, senior chief,” he said, flatly, his gaze flickering to his sniper rifle propped up by the cabin door, by the packs they’d discarded back at lake that Gunnar had apparently humped all the way out to the cabin, and Barney knew he wasn’t talking about their team though it was true of them, too. He didn’t say another word about the fire. He understood. Gunnar had trained as a sniper; maybe he’d fucked up but that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to do his job.

When the storm set in in earnest outside the crappy little cabin, Barney knew immediate rescue was right off the table and even if he’d been able to walk, even if Gunnar hadn’t needed to fish a bullet from his thigh with a pair of forceps, there’d have been no way they’d’ve made it out alive, at least not with all their fingers and toes intact. Gunnar boiled snow in an old steel kettle over the fire and he washed out Barney’s leg wound with disinfectant, made him hiss with it and clench his teeth, re-dressed it without a word. They ate shitty emergency ration packs and drank boiled-up snow and Gunnar helped Barney back into his clothes once they were dry so they could try to keep warm under the odd-smelling blankets that Barney was half convinced were going to give them some kind of disgusting bacterial infection. Gunnar was looking at him, but it wasn’t the same. Gunnar was touching him, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t even close, and Barney was in too much goddamn pain to do anything about it but notice.

It wasn’t till four days of stony semi-silence later that the storm subsided and they managed to get a radio signal out and in came the chopper a few hours later but Gunnar still had to haul him back out of the woods, Barney cursing out loud every false step of the way. It was the closest they'd been since Barney had been well enough to change his own dressings. And it wasn’t until after that that Barney learned Gunnar had also hauled all seven of the other guys’ bodies off of or out of the frozen lake and the rescue team sent a second chopper to pull them out in bodybags.

They took him to the naval hospital at Bethesda where he was poked and prodded, cut back open and stitched back up and when he woke up from the anaesthesia, Gunnar was there and then he was gone. Stonebanks was on assignment somewhere hush-hush and he told them not to bother his mom in New York because hell, he’d be out of the hospital faster than she could get the time off work anyway. Eventually, the verdict was he’d be kept in for another 48 hours’ observation then he could head back out to Little Creek. And the second morning of those 48 hours, in walked Gunnar.

He was out of uniform, jeans and leather jacket, big black bike boots, jaw still unshaven, bags under his eyes like he’d barely slept in a week and Barney guesses that might've been true. He slumped down into the chair at the side of Barney’s bed before either of them could say anything and Barney looked at him and Gunnar sat there, leaned forward with his forearms against his knees, rubbing his hands together. It was miles from the smirking and the posturing, and Barney guessed he knew why: Gunnar knew he’d fucked up, knew it was his fault his team was dead and all that was left then was him and Barney. He’d’ve liked to’ve told him it wasn’t his fault but they both knew it was, and before Barney had worked out what in the hell he was meant to say, Gunnar scooted the chair forward and leaned against the side of the bed. One hand went under the sheet. Barney leaned back against the pillow, shook his head.

“Gunnar…” he said, and he meant to warn him off, but then Gunnar’s fingers went around his cock and all Barney could do was chuckle mirthlessly and let him do it. Gunnar didn’t say he was sorry, didn’t say he was sorry for anything, he just jerked him off under the sheets while Barney screwed his eyes shut and tried not to think about how Gunnar’s fault was his fault, how his leg hurt even through the painkillers, how seven families would be getting seven visits from sailors in dress blues to tell them whatever bullshit their bosses had hammered together. He came quickly in spite of himself, straining his leg, straining his back, fucking ashamed, then Gunnar wiped off his hand on the sheets and he stood and he walked away while Barney just lay there and watched, catching his breath. Barney thinks now that he should’ve stopped him, gotten him back, talked to him; at the time, he just had no idea what the hell to say. At the time, it was a pretty effective goodbye.

---

It was five years till they met again.

Barney fell on his sword at the court martial but it didn’t save Gunnar, not even close, and he guesses he’s still not sure it would’ve been for the best if it had. But hell, their higher-ups didn’t even put a reprimand in Barney’s file, just blamed it all on the big half-Swede, and Gunnar didn’t even have a hell of a lot to say for himself in his own defence. He told the truth, flatly, matter-of-fact, no embellishments and no protests. For once, it was Barney who pissed off their CO and not Gunnar. He argued; Gunnar didn’t.

Then there Barney was five years later, standing on the sidewalk outside Gunnar’s apartment in New York in snow that was nearly ankle deep, hands shoved into his armpits for warmth as he loitered. He’d been colder, he remembers telling himself. He’d definitely been colder. A New York winter was nothing compared to the cold under the ice.

“Gunnar.”

He’d watched and waited for nearly forty minutes by then, stamping his feet in the falling snow, rubbing his hands, turning up the collar of his scuffed leather jacket, and then there Gunnar was. He looked azround sharply, frowned at Barney and then looked away again just as quickly as he went on up the steps to his building. He unlocked the front door and stepped inside then he turned back and raised his brows down at Barney.

“You coming?” he asked.

Barney went in after him. If nothing else, it had to be warmer in there.

“You look like shit, Gunnar,” Barney told him as Gunnar turned the key in his apartment door up on the third floor, down a corridor with a lingering aroma of weed and a guy passed out in a doorway with a bottle of cheap vodka spilled all over his shirt and pooling on the floor. Barney had seen worse places, in the military and out of it, there in New York even, but it was still pretty shitty even if it didn't even make his top twenty, never mind his top ten.

“You don’t look so hot yourself, senior chief,” Gunnar replied, and he heaved his wet coat off over the back of the couch. It was watermarked, so it probably wasn't the first time it’d been abused in that way.

He was still wearing the cheap tux that didn't quite fit with his shitty apartment, his workwear from the stripclub where he manned the doors every night, when Barney offered him the job. Barney had left the Navy by then, set up shop with Stonebanks, and Gunnar frowned at him when he said so.

“I’ll tell you all about it on the way,” he said.

Gunnar ran one hand through his damp hair, longer now but still not really long, spiking it up haphazardly.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why the hell not.” Barney got the sense that he wouldn't exactly be disrupting a busy schedule.

When they left together, Gunnar was still wearing the tux. Barney was only pretending not to notice how it looked on him, the material so cheap it almost shone like plastic but it lay well across his shoulders. He was only pretending not to notice the brass knuckles in his pockets and the bruises on his hands.

It was an easy job, recon, sitting on their asses in a van in Berlin then in an apartment in Moscow and it was cold, because of course it was, Germany and Russia in winter. They sat at the window in gloves and scarves and coats and thick goddamn socks that didn’t fit right inside their boots, Gunnar manning a camera instead of a sniper scope at the window. Six days and they were done and Barney deposited Gunnar back in New York, got out of the yellow cab by his shitty building and they stood there in the street in the snow that still hadn’t melted and probably wouldn’t for weeks.

“You said you’d tell me what happened,” Gunnar said, stamping his feet, his hands in his pockets. “I thought you were career Navy.”

Barney shrugged. “Maybe next time,” he said. He didn’t tell him the op had been a trial. He didn’t tell him he was damn sure there’d be a next time because that was exactly what this time had been about.

“Sure,” Gunnar replied, and he turned away and Barney thought about hailing another cab but then Gunnar turned back to him in the doorway. “Look, you wanna come in?”

So he went in, against his better judgement. Everything was against his goddamn better judgement where Gunnar Jensen was concerned and he drank beer on the couch in front of a movie they’d both already seen twice while Gunnar gave him lazy head. He crashed on Gunnar’s shitty couch and he left in the morning. He had no idea what to say so he left before he needed to say anything at all. It was easier that way, even if maybe it wasn't the best way.

Gunnar worked with Stonebanks the next time. Barney called him, asked him if he’d be interested in a job and Gunnar flew down to New Orleans where he and Conrad had decided to set up the business after more aggravating discussion than he likes to recall even now. Barney handed Gunnar a rifle in a case and a bag full of kit and sent him out with Stonebanks and three of the other guys. It sounded like they saw a little action down in South America and when they got back in, four days later, Conrad was grudgingly impressed with the guy even if Gunnar didn’t look quite so impressed in return. So, the time after that, some crappy surveillance op down in Mexico, Barney went himself and took Gunnar along instead of pressing the point. Gunnar going with Stonebanks probably would’ve ended in a pretty grisly murder anyway and he’s never been able to decide whose it would’ve been.

The op itself took three days but while they were down there something else came in. Stonebanks left a message with the hotel’s front desk and Barney stood there after they’d come back in, op complete, having a conversation in evasive shorthand just in case while Gunnar flirted badly with the girl at the front desk, getting all the intel in fits and starts between bouts of watching Gunnar make a happy ass of himself and the receptionist smile. The op wasn't smiling stuff. Kidnapping. Six-year-old girl. American. Cartel, because it was always about drugs, either that or illegal weapons. Sometimes both.

“Sure,” Barney told Stonebanks. “We’ll take it.”

“Great,” Stonebanks replied, over the crappy, crackling line. “I already said we would.” Honestly, Barney wasn’t surprised; that was Stonebanks to a fucking T. Once upon a time, it hadn't even occurred to him to be irritated by it.

Maybe more intel would’ve been useful, Barney thought later, after he’d been knocked unconscious and then woken up tied to a knocked-over chair on the dirt floor of a whitewashed cellar somewhere up in the hills. Might’ve been useful to know there was a small fucking army encamped on the grounds of the house where the girl was being held, he thought, but that was Stonebanks, money first and intel later, let Barney work out the details the way he always did. Always had. Might’ve been nice to’ve known exactly what they were up against before Barney had gone in and gotten himself cold-cocked by some lucky hamfisted jackass halfway down a poorly-lit corridor. But then there was Gunnar with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other and Barney watched him from the floor, watched him cut through three guys like they were all just pop-up targets on a shooting range, four, five. Then he dropped to his knees beside him.

“Looks like you got yourself into some trouble, senior chief,” Gunnar said, with a hint of a smile, a hint of his old smile, as he whipped the blade of his knife through the ropes around Barney’s wrists and ankles. Barney stood, flexing his knees in turn, shaking out his wrists; Gunnar handed him a gun from the holster at his thigh, still down there on the ground.

“Looks like you got me out of it, sailor,” he replied, and shot a guy over the top of Gunnar’s head while he was still down there on his knees. Gunnar looked up at him. Barney looked down at him. He took a half-step closer and ran his fingers through Gunnar’s bloodied blond hair. Gunnar had saved his life again, but that wasn’t what was on his mind. “Looks like you’re gonna get me into some more of it, too.”

Gunnar laughed and came back up to his feet, tall and ten times larger than life, and twenty minutes later they were gone, some jury-rigged explosive taking out the whole goddamn house because who knew household chemicals could reliably time-delay the detonation of a munitions cache that size? Apparently Gunnar did, smartass than he was sometimes. And the girl was in the back of their Jeep, heading back toward town for a tearful reunion with her rich American parents but all the damn time Gunnar was looking at him, on and off, off and on, and Jesus it was just like being back at Little Creek except they were older and probably dumber, God knew they'd probably had more head injuries between them than the average nation, and right then Barney didn’t even have the excuse of rank to tell himself it was a fucking stupid idea. It was like Gunnar was the old Gunnar again, like that spark that had made Barney want to fuck him up or just plain fuck him had lit up again. It was like they'd turned back time.

Once the girl was home and their payment hit the Expendables accounts back in the States, confirmed with Stonebanks, they drove out to the coast. Barney had an excuse: he’d been telling himself he’d visit Bonaparte and see if there were any new guys on the scene they might want to pick up for the team and back then Bonaparte’s summer place was a little beach house on the Pacific a couple of hundred miles south of the US border. Gunnar didn’t question it when they checked into the hotel with phony names and different rooms sometime around dusk, but then Barney pulled him into his room along with him instead of letting him go to his own, closed the door behind them, locked it.

“You hungry?” Barney asked, dropping his bag by the bed, stalking around the room though frankly there wasn’t all that much room to stalk in. “We should get something to eat.” But he knew he was just talking for the sake of talking, had no interest in food right at that moment, and before Gunnar could even muster a response Barney had pushed him up against the back of the door, dragged him down into a kiss, all the rings on all his fingers pressed against the nape of Gunnar's neck. Gunnar let him, hands drifting down to the curve of Barney’s ass over his tight jeans that were maybe stylish at the time and they pushed and pulled their way across the room till Barney’s jeans were round his thighs as he sat there on the edge of the bed and Gunnar was on his knees with Barney’s hands tangled in his hair.

“For fuck’s sake, Gunnar,” he said, pushing him back, pulling him up; Gunnar frowned but he let him do it and maybe that was the problem because he hadn’t been the same since the screwed up op back in Colorado and damn, as much as he thought he’d seen hints, flashes, Gunnar was not the old Gunnar, not right then, not ever. He pushed him down on the tiled floor, onto his hands and knees, and Gunnar let him do that, too; he let Barney unbuckle his jeans and pull them down over his hips, let him rub the length of his erection between his cheeks. Barney rummaged through his bag and came back with Vaseline, laughed at himself as he rubbed a glob of the stuff between Gunnar’s cheeks with the pad of one thumb and Gunnar let him do that, too, even pushed back against him.

He let him push in, slowly, till he was balls-deep inside him, skin on skin. He let Barney fuck him there on the floor, jerking himself off roughly till they were both sweat-slicked and panting and spent. It was a shitty first time and Barney knew it, when all they’d done before was handjobs and blowjobs and rubbing against each other like they’d just discovered what an erection was for. As good as it felt, it was a shitty first time. Barney hadn’t meant it to go so damn far. All he’d meant to do was test Gunnar’s limits, but it’d turned out he had none.

Gunnar pulled up his jeans and Barney tossed him his key.

“Your room’s next door,” Barney said, and he turned away as Gunnar left. It’d been a while since he’d felt so damn ashamed.

---

They spent three weeks in Mexico that summer, recruiting a new sniper for the team with Bonaparte, Gunnar putting the guys who made the shortlist through their paces while Barney watched from a safe distance. A couple of them were pretty good but still nowhere near Gunnar’s level, even then when he was getting drunk off his ass by midday every day and Barney wasn’t doing a damn thing to stop him. Then they’d go back to the hotel and back to Barney’s room and Gunnar would let Barney do whatever the hell he wanted. He didn’t even have to ask.

They spent three weeks there and Barney had him on his knees and on his back, pushed face-first into the mattress or bent over the dresser, making it rattle against the wall while a loose drawer worked its way out against Gunnar’s shins. Then they’d eat dinner together after in a little local place, speaking crappy Spanish to the waitress, the locals shaking their heads when neither of them could recall that the word for chili was just chile, before they walked back the long way to the hotel and once or twice Barney had Gunnar slick himself up and ride him there, straddling his thighs, flushed and straining. The guy looked fucking majestic, just as much as he always had, and Barney would grip at his hips and push up into him, his pulse racing sickly, his whole damn body thrumming with it, totally against his better judgement. He could’ve stayed there in that little town in Mexico for-fucking-ever, he thinks, just watching the way Gunnar blew him while he got himself off on his knees. But afterwards, every night, Gunnar went back to his own room and Barney lay there alone in bed, wondering what the fuck he thought he was doing. And, after three weeks, they left. Stonebanks had taken a job for him. It was for the best, anyway. They needed to move on.

They’ve got each other into and out of all manner of shit over the years, Barney thinks now; that was what he thought that night, months ago now, as the door opened. His hands were freed and then his feet, the familiar sound of a blade cutting through zip ties, then he pulled off the blindfold and he wasn’t surprised to see it was Gunnar there holding out a hand to him.

“Took you long enough,” Barney said, slurring.

Gunnar shrugged and he handed him a gun and Barney knew he could hold it, and he could maybe even fire it, but that was just about all he could do. He’d been drugged for days by then. He could barely even stand, let alone walk.

“Hey, I could leave you here next time,” Gunnar said, and he hauled Barney up, one arm around his waist. It felt just like they’d been there before as he dragged him out.

The guys were waiting outside, laying down cover fire, and they got the hell out of there ASAP; Christmas was in the pilot’s seat and in the back of his head somewhere Barney was irked by that, something about it being his damn plane so he should’ve been the one flying it but hell, it wasn’t like he didn’t trust Lee Christmas, isn’t like he doesn’t trust him now. Lee’s maybe the best friend he’s had in his whole miserable goddamn life but it was Gunnar that sat with him there on the damn floor, Barney’s back pulled up against Gunnar’s chest while the guys all looked at them both like they’d lost their minds. Not that that’s new where Gunnar’s concerned. Maybe it’s just the fact that none of them knew just how far back he and Gunnar go, not even Lee. Hell, none of them even knew the two of them were SEALs, back in the day, let alone any of the other shit. Maybe Barney's present's like an open book but his past's been as impenetrable as a damn mobster's ledger.

They’ve worked together over the years, more than once, more than twice, more times than they could count on all their fingers and toes combined. There’s been the times back in the early days of the Expendables with Stonebanks, times they needed a sniper or just a guy they could rely on and it was the easiest thing in the world to give Gunnar a call because he never said no, no matter what other shit he had going on in his life. He’d turn up on the next flight and Barney would be there with all of Gunnar’s old kit in a duffel he kept in his closet and they’d hand round the small arms and Gunnar’s rifle, the one that Barney kept in a hard case under his bed.

He remembers the time back in ‘98 when he turned up in New York and let himself into Gunnar’s apartment without the aid of a key, waited there on the couch in front of the TV and Gunnar got in sometime past 2am, drunk and with a guy who looked like a preppy college kid’s half-assed notion of a punk rocker. It was pretty sad.

“Hey, man, I didn’t sign up for a threesome,” the guy said when the door swung in and Barney stood, one hand on the revolver under the back of his shirt, but to be honest the guy in question didn’t look a whole lot like he actually objected to the idea. Gunnar laughed maybe just a little bitterly, maybe just a little drunkly, shaking his head.

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Gunnar said, ushering the guy back out of the door. “Sorry, man, tonight’s not your night.” And he closed the door behind him, apparently deaf to the vocal protest from the corridor and the brief hammering on the door that followed. It really was mercifully brief; apparently the anonymous hipster didn’t have that much fight in him, or maybe figured he'd just go get his rocks off elsewhere.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to ruin your plans,” Barney said, but Gunnar just shrugged as he threw his coat over the back of the couch and toed off his boots somewhere behind it, in the middle of the floor where he’d probably fall over them in the morning. Barney had seen it happen more than once over the years by then.

“He’s not my type anyway,” Gunnar said, but Barney looked him up and down and hell, if the kid wasn’t Gunnar’s type then he didn’t know what was; Gunnar looked like a fucking drummer from a metal band that night in '98, more tattoos over his arms than Barney remembered, hair an inch longer, rings on his fingers. Then again, neither of them looked the way they’d used to back in the 80s, back in Little Creek. Barney had more tattoos of his own, and a hell of a lot more scars.

“Thought your type was anything that moves and some things that don’t,” Barney said, and Gunnar snorted as he stepped forward. He went for the buckle of the belt of Barney’s worn jeans and Barney let him, let him go down on his knees and suck him, callused fingertips rubbing the smooth stretch of skin behind his balls and then Gunnar had his cock out, too, in his hand, and Barney pushed him back.

“Well shit, Gunnar,” he said, gesturing down between Gunnar’s thighs. There was a shiny ring there right through the tip of his cock, coming out through the underside, and that was something new; Barney went down on his knees on the floor despite its dubious cleanliness and ran his thumb over that ring, followed the line of the metal to rub at the place where it disappeared into the underside of the head. Gunnar shivered almost bodily, gripped at his own thighs as they sat there and Barney shifted the ring this way and that, jacked Gunnar’s foreskin up over it and back again and Gunnar fucking whimpered as he came all over Barney’s hand and Barney’s still bare abdomen. He was surprised it hadn’t taken more but he guessed he hadn’t really touched him that way before. He was surprised that Gunnar took an unsteady breath, went up to his feet and walked away. He was surprised but he guesses he was grateful.

Barney slept on the couch that night till he realised it was nearly 4am and he hadn’t really slept at all, so he insinuated himself into Gunnar’s bed because really, fuck sleeping alone. He hadn't come up to New York to sleep alone, hadn't gone to Gunnar's place to sleep on his couch like he couldn't afford a hotel. It wasn't a time like all the rest, after all. And in the morning he used Gunnar’s shower and Gunnar’s crappy shampoo and his foul-tasting toothpaste and Gunnar didn’t throw him out that day or the next. He let Barney stay for three weeks that winter while he visited his mom in the hospital, let him stay till the funeral and stood there with him while they buried her next to his dad, the two of them out of place in their jeans and bike boots in a sea of black suits and black dresses. Barney was an only child but his mom wasn’t; there were aunts and uncles and cousins as far as the eye could see, all inviting him to dinner once the casket was in the ground. Gunnar stepped up, slung an arm around Barney’s shoulders and sent them scampering away pretty damn comically with hasty excuses.

Barney remembers how he turned in, rested his forehead against Gunnar’s shoulder by the graveside in the snow.

“Thanks,” he said, tugging on the front of Gunnar’s coat, and Gunnar’s warm hands went up to Barney’s jaw, tilted his head up so he was looking up into Gunnar’s face. There were more lines there by then, now he was forty and not still some wiseass twenty-something.

“Hey, don’t thank me,” Gunnar said, with a hint of a smile through their breath steaming the air. “You’re gonna pay me back and come to my little sister’s wedding.”

Barney chuckled; he reached up and patted Gunnar on the cheek and they went back to his place for Chinese food and a hockey game on TV, like noodles didn’t still remind him of a summer night fifteen years before.

They left three days later. Barney didn’t even need to ask if he wanted the job because somewhere along the way it’d started to go without saying.

After Stonebanks - because somehow Barney’s life has wound up measured in Before and After - was when Gunnar finally bit the bullet and moved down to Louisiana. He just turned up one day while Barney was disappearing into a goddamn bottle ‘cause hell, he’d just killed his best friend; he knocked on Barney’s door and when Barney opened up it was Gunnar on his doorstep, everything he owned that was worth bringing with him packed up in a backpack and a big old Navy duffel he’d got slung over his shoulder. Barney let him in because he didn’t know what else to do and they passed the bottle back and forth between them till they were both too goddamn drunk to fuck. They passed out in Barney’s bed, Barney so drunk he barely even noticed Gunnar snoring like an outboard engine. He'd gotten used to it over the years anyway.

Gunnar was still there in the morning, still mostly dressed, still in Barney’s bed. He was still there the next morning, eating cereal on Barney’s couch. He was still there a week later, then three weeks later, wearing Barney’s shirts and underwear till neither of them had any clue anymore whose boxers and socks were whose once they came out of the laundry and they drank together, got really fucked up together, went out and started fights together like that’d ever been Barney’s style before and not just Gunnar’s. It helped. For a while, it helped.

Maybe it was the fact that Gunnar was the asshole who pushed him into accepting the next job that came in, a couple of weeks after that, that made Barney feel so damn sick when Gunnar turned in the end. Gunnar had been living in the city for eight years by then, in a laundry list of his own places he’d get kicked out of once in a while and he'd end up crashing on Barney’s couch or in Barney’s bed, getting high sometimes but it usually didn’t get in the way of the work. He was the one who told him maybe it was time to get a new team together, rebuild because fuck Conrad Stonebanks, that egotistical son of a whore. Gunnar had never had a problem saying what he meant, at least not in that way. Barney's always valued that directness.

And he thought he’d killed him like he thought he’d killed Stonebanks and then it turned out the bastard Swede was alive and that was great ‘cause it meant he didn’t have to phone any of the guy’s three sisters and tell them all about the funeral arrangements. The guys all acted like nothing had happened after that, like Gunnar hadn’t gone completely batshit just for a second there, like the meth wasn’t fucking him up and the work wasn’t fucking him up but Barney guessed what was really fucking him up, because it’d been ongoing for thirty years by then, was motherfucking Colorado. And there was still not a goddamn thing he could do about it except watch him and slap him upside the head every time he looked like he was about to slide sideways. He couldn't catch every slip. Clearly, he couldn't.

So then there Gunnar was, all their secrets spilling out ‘cause he was trying to keep Barney from passing out again on the floor of his beat-up old plane.

“I thought he was the biggest dick I’d ever met,” Gunnar said, and Barney sputtered a laugh. It didn't take a fucking chemical engineer to know who Gunnar was talking about.

“Yeah, you got that right,” Barney replied. And the guys were all looking at them like they’d both grown a second head ‘cause none of them knew Gunnar knew Stonebanks, not even Doc, but Doc had mostly worked out of the Middle East back in the day so maybe that made sense. And Gunnar rambled the whole damn way back home, about the surveillance op in Moscow that it turned out he knew was a trial, about Bosnia and South Africa and those three months training back at Little Creek and Barney knew he should’ve told him to stop but whatever was in him had gotten him well past caring and hell, maybe it was best they knew why he trusts Gunnar the way he does. They’ve known each other for more than half Gunnar’s life. They’ve known each other almost longer than he’s known the rest of them put together. Maybe right then it finally made sense why Barney had told Lee I’m ever captured or taken hostage, the first thing you do is tell Gunnar. Maybe it made sense why he told Lee the second thing you do is whatever the hell he tells you to do.

“Hey, you remember that time you saved my life?” Barney said.

“Which time?” Gunnar replied, and Barney smiled to himself as he closed his eyes.

“Yeah, that’s my point,” he said.

There’s been a few over the years. Gunnar just never seems to notice.

---

It was nine days later when Barney knocked on Gunnar’s door, sometime around 6am. He knew he wouldn’t answer right away ‘cause he probably hadn’t gone to bed till about an hour before that or maybe less, so he just kept hammering away and to hell with the neighbours, it wasn’t like he did it often and it wasn’t like they weren’t used to the unholy row Gunnar made sometimes. And, eventually, the door opened.

“You’re coming with me,” Barney said as Gunnar squinted at him. He was off the meth again by then, so this was just a good old-fashioned hangover like Barney had seen on him a hundred times before. “You can sleep on the plane.”

Gunnar hadn’t always been great at taking orders but he followed this one, grabbed his go bag, got into Barney’s truck and snored like fucking automatic weapons fire all the way to the airfield. Barney had actually logged a flight plan a couple of days before and they took off around 6.30, Gunnar in the co-pilot’s seat with his temple pressed against the window as he snored some more and he hadn’t even asked him where they were going before he'd nodded back off. That was maybe a good thing.

They were there in four hours, touching down on a snow-dusted airstrip in Colorado and Gunnar looked at him with his jaw set as realisation dawned but didn’t say a word. They swapped into a chopper, an old buddy of Barney’s at the stick who flew mountain rescues out there now his Navy career was over and the day was crisp but the sky was blue, the forecast was clear, and around an hour and a half dipping between hills, skimming treetops almost dangerously ‘cause it wasn’t like a single one of Barney’s old friends had ever played it safe in their lives, and there they were by the goddamn frozen lake. The chopper pilot dropped them there with a quick salute that Barney returned more from habit than design and Gunnar stood there in the chopper’s downdraft as it took off again, his hair all over, snow in his face, looking fucking woebegone.

“C’mon,” Barney said, slapping Gunnar against his well insulated chest as he shouldered his pack, then he started toward the woods. Gunnar followed. Barney had almost wondered if he would but he guesses in the end he didn't have much of a choice.

He knew where he was going because he’d been back there twice before, once in the summer when the lake had been full of skinny-dipping hikers first thing after dawn and then in fall another year, leaves all over, snow up on the peaks. He’d walked a few trails that first summer, gotten a guide and gone up higher into the hills, learned to climb, gotten pretty good ‘cause it wasn’t like SEAL training had been totally without ropes and harnesses, carabiners and sensible goddamn shoes. But none of that had been anything like slogging through the snow with Gunnar that day decades after the first day, through the trees, miles, aching, exhausted, up to the cabin.

They’d torn down the old place and built a new one in its place over the past thirty years, made it more or less watertight, more like a refuge and less like an occasional hunter’s lodge, had the mountain rangers keep it stocked with supplies in case of emergency, and Barney leaned his pack up against the wall and set about starting a fire in the hearth. After all, there was no one out there to worry about this time, no team with automatic weapons and millions of dollars all neatly stowed away in attaché cases.

Barney set up a crappy camp stove and cooked a couple of cans of shitty pasta shapes in tomato sauce over it, handed Gunnar a bowl once he was done and they sat there in front of the fire, eating with plastic spoons though it was pretty clear Gunnar, for once, had no appetite. Then Barney unzipped a sleeping bag from his pack and spread it out over the floor by the fireplace while Gunnar sat there mutely and watched him do it and eventually, in the end, ‘cause Gunnar was being dense about the whole damn thing, Barney shoved him by the shoulders and sent him sprawling on his back.

“What was that for?” Gunnar asked, but Barney just went down too, planted one knee either side of Gunnar’s hips and sat there, leaning forward with both hands spread firmly over Gunnar’s chest to keep him down.

He’d had a plan. Really, he had. There’d been some fancy speech he’d been planning to give, all planned out in his head like that would’ve made a difference to a guy like Gunnar, about how shit happens sometimes and you have to get on with your life in spite of it, but what he did instead was lean down and kiss him, long and hard, till none of the words in his head seemed to matter than much. Then he shuffled back over Gunnar’s thighs and pulled him up so they were both sitting up there on the floor, Barney over Gunnar’s thighs, Gunnar with his hands at the small of Barney’s back, almost too close to look at each other without crossed eyes. He kissed him again. He pushed the bandana from Gunnar’s forehead and tossed it away, gave not two shits where it wound up, ran his fingers through Gunnar’s snow-damp hair and kissed him again, one hand going to the back of Gunnar’s neck, the other taking a handful of the back of his sweater.

He’d had a plan and this wasn’t it as they both went back up to their feet, Barney first, reaching out a hand to Gunnar and digging in hard to help haul him up because jeez, that much muscle over a frame that tall was heavy. Gunnar leaned down but Barney pushed him back up tall, looked up at him, went up on tiptoe in his huge-ass snowboots like that wasn’t awkward as hell and pressed his mouth to his that way. He unbuckled the belt at Gunnar’s waist and unzipped his fly, pulled down at his waterproofs and Gunnar watched him, an odd kind of disconcerted expression on his face as Barney went down on his knees in front of him.

Needless to say, going down on Gunnar in a cabin in the woods, the shiny silver ring in the tip of his dick clacking against his teeth until he got the hang of it, was not part of the plan, but the look on Gunnar’s face when he did it was priceless. It was just a couple of minutes, Barney’s tongue playing with the ring, but that was enough to get Gunnar good and hard and then he pulled him back down, pushed him down on his back and stripped him down right to his skin. Gunnar let him. Of course, by then Barney knew Gunnar would’ve let him do any-goddamn-thing he’d wanted to do. That was the problem. That was the point.

“You ever think about what you were like before?” Barney asked, cupping Gunnar’s balls in one hand, giving a solid squeeze. Maybe that wasn’t totally conducive to getting a coherent response out of him but Barney figured he’d work it out, Gunnar was a smart guy.

“Before what?” Gunnar asked, and Barney gave him a sharp look that said they both knew exactly what he was talking about. But he shifted anyway, pulled off his own shirt, toed off his boots, got himself just as naked as Gunnar was and settled back down again, straddling his thighs.

“Before this,” Barney said, rubbing the heel of one hand over the scar in his thigh, the place where the bullet wound had been thirty years before. And Gunnar reached down, rested his hand there for a moment, traced the outline of it with his fingertips, rubbed with his thumb. Barney couldn’t think of a time Gunnar had ever touched that damn scar. He’d pretty much actively avoided it, he thought.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Gunnar said, eventually, finally answering the question. “I guess I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d seen those guys, y’know? And not been dicking around on the top of that ridge. I should’ve seen ‘em. Sometimes I think maybe I did.” He chuckled bitterly, his eyes flickering up, meeting Barney’s, though he looked away again pretty quickly. “Where d’you think we’d be now if I hadn’t fucked up?”

It was an interesting question, Barney guessed. Maybe they’d’ve gone on to go out on twenty more ops, thirty, fifty, been a team for another ten years or more and maybe Barney would’ve gotten Gunnar’s occasional, casual insubordination under control and maybe not. Maybe the old Gunnar would’ve fucked him in the showers one day after a run, weak-legged and half-exhausted but still pumped somehow, and maybe Barney would’ve let it get out of hand and maybe both of them would’ve ended up found out, kicked out, dishonourably discharged, who the hell knew. Maybe Barney would’ve gotten another promotion, made Master Chief and stepped up to run SEAL training or some shit like that while Gunnar got his own team and maybe they’d’ve met sometimes, off base, screwed in motel rooms till one retired or the other did or maybe both. But that was so much fucking bullshit because it wasn’t like Stonebanks wouldn’t’ve been there like a goddamn viper in Barney’s ear anyway. The Expendables would always have happened.

So, in the end, Barney shrugged. “We’d be right here,” he said. “‘Cept you wouldn’t’ve pissed away your whole goddamn life and mine feeling sorry for yourself.”

Gunnar chuckled, more amused than pissed though it looked like a close run thing. “You were hot back then, old man,” he said, and for a second that spark was back in him, his big hands at Barney’s hips. His hands strayed up till his fingers were tracing the tattoos over Barney’s shoulders, went up again and Barney let him tug him down till Gunnar could wrap his hands around his neck, his thumbs pressing lightly over his windpipe.

“What am I now, Gunnar, chopped liver?” Barney said, with a quirk of his brows, and Gunnar laughed, dropped back against the floor, his hands by his sides.

“You’re still hot, senior chief,” Gunnar said, but his smile faded away pretty quickly, into a frown. “Look, why’d you bring me here?”

And right at that moment Barney couldn’t think of a single goddamn reason except for the obvious one, his cock lying heavy against Gunnar’s hard abdomen, and so he decided maybe that’d speak for him.

He reached over to his bag and located the convenient tube of lube and Gunnar maybe looked amused for a second, but just a second. Barney uncapped it, squeezed some out into his palm and Gunnar probably thought he knew what was next, Barney slicking his cock and shifting around to push into him there on the thin fabric of the sleeping bag spread out over the wooden floor, but Barney’s hand went to Gunnar’s erection instead, stroked the stuff over him instead, rough fingers teasing at the ring there in the tip. Gunnar’s eyes widened just a fraction as his cock gave a little jerk of anticipation and then Gunnar watched him move his hand away behind his back, watched him get himself ready and if he hadn’t already been flushed from the heat of the nearby fire then Barney would’ve been red as a goddamn stop light right then. Then he pulled himself up higher on his knees and shuffled up, shuffled his knees either side of Gunnar’s hips and took Gunnar’s dick in his hand, trailed the pierced tip over his balls and his perineum behind, right up to the cleft of his ass. And he held him there while he sat back, while he settled down, while he breathed out a long breath and he pushed him up inside him.

“Jesus Christ, Barn,” Gunnar said, unsteady, his hands gripping at the flimsy sleeping bag, arms pressing down, muscles standing out. Barney could feel it as he shifted his legs, braced his heels against the floor, could feel it as he flexed his hips up move inside him just a fraction. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck are you doing?”

Barney just drew a shaky breath and pushed up an inch, sank back down. He thought it made a pretty eloquent explanation, even if his knees were gonna complain like hell in the morning. He wasn’t getting any younger. Neither of them were.

But then Gunnar moved. He got one arm to the small of Barney’s back, swept one leg to the side and the next thing Barney knew he was on his back and Gunnar was there on top of him, between his thighs, pushed up on his hands, looking down at him. That spark was back in Gunnar again as he went up on his knees and pulled out but it was only to tease Barney’s asshole with the ring in the tip of his cock before he pushed back in and Barney wrapped his legs up around Gunnar’s waist, cinched them at the ankles, arched against him.

They did it slow and hard and sweaty, the muscles standing out in Gunnar’s arms, under the tattoo he’d gotten one day in Tool’s workshop while Barney watched, the one that matched all the others. Gunnar’s dog tags hung down and brushed at Barney’s chest, Gunnar’s lengthening hair hung down into his eyes and Barney pulled him into a kiss, the angles awkward, muscles straining, but that was pretty low down the list of important factors right then. What mattered was the way Gunnar moved in him, the faint slap of skin on skin, the sweat on Gunnar’s brow that Barney brushed away with one palm and Gunnar laughed, brighter than he’d been in years, till his rhythm went wild and his eyes screwed shut and he came in him, juddering like it was fucking painful. Gunnar pushed back up on his knees, making a drama out of vaguely strained muscles till he rubbed at Barney’s thighs and Barney watched him watching him as he finished himself off, messy in the end but he couldn’t say he gave a good goddamn. He’d done worse. And it was only after Barney came that Gunnar finally pulled out of him.

“We should’ve done that thirty years ago,” Barney said, and Gunnar stretched out next to him, one tattooed shoulder pressed to one of Barney’s.

“Maybe you should’ve said you wanted to.”

“I wouldn’t’ve needed to, before.”

“Yeah,” Gunnar said. “People change. I changed.”

“But only with me.” And that was true because with anyone else, with everyone else, Gunnar was the same guy he’d always been, goofy sometimes, petulant sometimes, sometimes charming, sometimes damn near murderous. In the end, Barney was the only one he’d changed with, maybe just because Barney was the only one who knew.

“You want me to say I forgive you?” Barney asked, pushing up on his side and one forearm to look down at him. And right then, maybe only right then, looking Gunnar dead in the eye, he understood that maybe that was all Gunnar had ever wanted. But Gunnar looked away.

“No,” he said. “No.”

But he didn't believe him. He wished he could.

---

They left in the morning.

It was a hard walk in complete and utter stony silence, through the woods, back out to the lake where Barney’s buddy let down the ladder from the chopper and they climbed on up inside.

It was a long damn flight back to the airstrip and a long damn flight back home to Louisiana, Gunnar in the back instead of there in the co-pilot’s seat like maybe he’d decided it was really Lee’s seat after all and he had no place in it. Barney was just about pissed enough that he kept his head on flying and not on yelling at the dumbass Swede in the back of the beat-up old plane. Not that he’d’ve let anyone else call it that; the damn thing was like family as much as any of the guys were.

They tossed their stuff into the back of Barney’s truck and Gunnar climbed into the passenger side and they left the airfield, silent. And Barney decided fuck it, really, fuck it, and he bypassed Gunnar’s place entirely. He drove straight back to his own place instead, pulled up outside and killed the engine.

“You want me to walk home?” Gunnar said, like a total jackass, because sometimes he was.

Barney got out and slammed the damn door. Gunnar followed him with a frown and Barney tossed him his bag.

“Inside,” Barney said.

Gunnar raised his brows but didn’t talk back; he just followed him in, up the stairs and into the crappy, draughty open-plan loft Barney had owned for the best part of fifteen years, maybe twenty, he'd lost count. They dumped their crap by the door and Barney went over to the kitchen, pulled a couple of beers from the refrigerator and stopped and cursed and threw them both right into the sink, watched them break into beer-soaked shards that he’d have to clear up later but right now, screw that.

“Yeah, I should probably leave,” Gunnar said, taking a couple of steps backwards toward the door, and Barney glared at him.

“Yeah, you should,” he said, then cursed under his breath. “No. Shit. Stay.”

Gunnar frowned. “Yeah?”

Barney nodded. “Yeah.”

Barney rubbed his goatee with the fingers of one hand for a second then, leaning back against the kitchen counter, and Gunnar was looking at him like he’d lost it or at the very least like he had no goddamn clue what to do next, what Barney expected him to do. And maybe Barney didn’t, either, because hell, he knew now, he’d been labouring under the same damn misapprehension for the past thirty years, some damn fool idea that Gunnar was still the same guy inside, deep down, the same arrogant son of a bitch that he’d been before. And yeah, so in a way he was and always would be, at least with everyone else, when he put on the Gunnar show. But he could never go back because Barney knew what’d happened back there in Colorado, Barney had been there, Barney knew.

And goddamnit, Barney knew him, had been waiting for thirty goddamn years for the Gunnar he’d known before to swagger back in with a smirk but this was him, the guy he'd known for thirty years and not the one he'd known for three months. This was the guy he knew and he knew him inside out, knew every quirk, had danced at his little sister’s wedding. Gunnar wasn’t the one who’d wasted the past thirty years; Barney was. If he’d ever had anything to be ashamed of, that was it, right there.

Gunnar ran a hand over his hair, tugged off his bandana, shoved it into his back pocket. Barney took a breath and watched him do it and then he walked over there, got in close, close enough that Gunnar would’ve taken a step back if he hadn’t tucked two fingers in between the buttons of his shirt, and held him there.

“Stay,” Barney said.

“What, you need something?” Gunnar replied.

Barney smiled wryly. “You’re the smartest guy I know,” he said, “but you’re dumb as a goddamn stump sometimes.” And Gunnar bristled but he didn’t move away. “Stay here.”

“Like, overnight?”

Barney shook his head mock-sadly. “Yeah, overnight,” he said. “And tomorrow night. Then the night after that, and the night after that, okay?”

“Are you asking me to--”

“We’ve practically been going steady for thirty years, Gunnar,” Barney said, because hell if that wasn’t the truth of it. “Yeah, I’m asking you to.”

He didn’t expect Gunnar to laugh. He didn’t expect Gunnar to smile but he did, he practically grinned and then they were kissing, Gunnar’s mouth was down at the crook of Barney’s neck, Gunnar’s hands were on him and he fumbled at the buttons of Barney’s shirt, took too long and just gave a solid yank at each side of the collar so the buttons rained all over the damn hardwood floor. Barney cracked up as Gunnar’s hands went under his undershirt, as he stripped him to the waist and turned him around and then Gunnar’s mouth was between his shoulder blades, his unshaven jaw prickling at the skin where his big damn bird of a tattoo was.

They did it in Barney’s bed, took off all their jewellery first, rings and watches and chains and dog tags, took off each other’s clothes and did it slowly in the damn late afternoon sun in just their scars and their tattoos. Barney had never thought to ask where most of Gunnar’s scars came from before but Gunnar told him when he asked, told him all his damn stories, how the scar on the back of one shoulder was a beer bottle he’d taken in a strip club doorway, his face was a broken champagne flute of all the goddamn things, one hip was a butterfly knife in an alley while he’d been grabbing a quick smoke break. Barney shook his head; Gunnar had more scars from his days as a bouncer than he did from anything else.

And in the morning, Gunnar was still there, using Barney’s shower, using Barney’s shampoo and his towels and he guessed he could get used to that as Gunnar came back to bed and tossed his towel aside. He knew where the scar by his heart came from. He pressed his mouth there and Gunnar’s fingers tightened in his hair.

“I had it coming,” Gunnar said, with a shrug.

“Just make damn sure I don’t have to do it again,” Barney replied.

It seemed that was something they could agree on.

It’s been months now. They still fight because they’ll likely always fight sometimes and that’s not just at the gym in those shitty MMA gloves Lee gave him for his birthday like that’s a real gift but they go there sometimes, Barney lifts weights and Gunnar puts on a damn karate gi and does the splits or some such show-off shit. They still fight, bitching at each other over beers at the bar while Lee and Lacy give each other looks that say even they aren’t half as old-married-couple as Barney and Gunnar but maybe they have a perverse kind of hope they will be someday. Lee got hitched five weeks ago, a big fancy church thing, all the guys there in tuxes and Barney found himself wondering what’d happened to that crappy, shiny tux Gunnar used to wear when he worked at the strip club. Sometimes he wonders what happened to the girl Gunnar had been trying to impress by working the door there. He doubts either of them really give a damn.

They still fight but they still go back to Barney’s place together at the end of the day and Barney flushes Gunnar’s meth down the john and Gunnar pours Barney’s booze down the drain and they fight and they kiss and they fuck and Barney knows he doesn’t give a damn if the Gunnar he knew back at Little Creek even existed at all ‘cause he's damn sure this one does. And then they go out to work and he knows there’s no one he’d rather have at the far side of the scope, the other end of the rifle, watching his back. Gunnar will be trying to make it up to him for Colorado for the rest of his life, and Barney will be trying his damnedest to show him he doesn’t need to.

So, maybe Gunnar doesn’t have many clear days, and maybe he doesn’t have many good days; sometimes his goofy-ass plans work and sometimes they don’t. Maybe he doesn’t have many friends; sometimes he and the guys get on like a house on fire and sometimes it’s like they’re burning the damn house down on purpose.

But no one should forget he’s a kickass, smartass son of a bitch, and he'd kill for Barney Ross. He's done it more times than either of them can count.

And really, more than that, no one should forget he's a kickass, smartass son of a bitch, and that Barney Ross will love him for it till the day he dies.