Archive of Our Own

For whatever godfucking reason it's always the middle of the night when they get back. It's cold out, a don't-even-want-you-back-anyway kind of cold that's as welcoming as a slap. The parade ground lights pick out the small crowd of waiting families as the bus pulls up. All the usual Military Channel bullshit clichés: tears, screaming, banners. It's enough to make Brad sick.

His car is still in Pendleton's long-term parking, covered in a layer of grime. It refuses to start. Of course. The thought of squeezing into the fucking backseat of Poke's car, watching Poke and his wife exchange loving glances all the way down the I-5, makes him think he'd rather be waterboarded. He slings his duffle over his shoulder and skulks out on foot. Six miles. No IEDs, no snipers, no suicides, a stroll in the fucking park. It's refreshing, that's what it is.

His house keys are still in the side pocket of his duffle, an odd little domestic talisman he's had all along. He lets himself in through the garage. Bike and jetski under dust sheets, surfboards racked against the wall, the stale smell of old auto parts. He's cracking open his life like a self-storage unit that hasn't seen the light of day in years. Upstairs the paint around the windows is blistering with salt rot. There's a forgotten lipstick on the sink in the ensuite, the only sign his sister's been and gone.

The inside of his bag smells like Iraq. It fucking stinks. He showers. The pipes screech. Showers again, just for the hell of it, carefully scrubbing all the places nobody ever really bothers with back in the real world: the soles of his feet, between his toes, the hollows behind each ankle. Later, he lies in bed and tries to sleep. It comes in hour-long chunks. The insomnia's familiar. Nothing else is.

Unlike his piece of shit embarrassment of a car, his bike actually starts. Thirty-five miles of southbound highway, glossy black from a light rain. Brad rides fast, weaving through the few other vehicles. The road is just an endless smooth expanse in his headlight, mile after mile. It feels like he's still asleep. Like if he rides long enough the dream road he's on will decay into potholes and bomb craters and he'll wake up in Iraq.

The airport feels closer to normal: lit up brighter than a fedayeen in front of a Marine squad, loud and awake and chaotic. Brad stands and looks at the departures board. Anywhere but here. At the ticket counter he has to hunt through all the inner pockets of his duffle before he can find his wallet. It's still full of ratty Iraqi dinars, the smell from them expanding around him like a malicious genie. His signature looks unconvincing on the credit card receipt. The 2005 version of Brad Colbert trying to pass himself off as 2004, failing.

They pull him aside at the security screening; go through his bag with gloved hands. The security guy's eyes are kind as he feels down through layers of unwashed cammies. The kindness makes Brad feel vicious. The guy finds Brad's Ziploc of toiletries and confiscates his nail clippers, then waves him through.

The noise and cramped size of the plane are comforting. Brad sleeps and wakes up in Boston. The sky is moist and blue, everything wet and tender like a new bruise and he can't wrap his mind around the fact a place this soft and vulnerable can even exist. It feels unreal, some preschooler's primary-coloured imagining of what the world should be like. The air bites slightly. Spring.

He identifies Nate's apartment and stakes it out from the Starbucks across the road. 1500 hours. Brad has no idea about college class schedules, whether Nate will come past in an hour, or five, or not at all. Starbucks is global and soothingly impersonal. Brad had some pussy coffee concoction at the BIA Starbucks before he left, just because he could. Paid for it in US dollars, like Baghdad was just some shitty suburb down near TJ.

He jitters in the window, nursing his one cup of coffee. Wonders how long they'll let him sit here, loitering with purpose. Loiterers with purpose in Iraq got shot. He did most of the shooting. Sometimes they shot back. Sometimes they exploded. He feels lost: no map to consult, no orders to follow. He never trained for this, for coming back.

1643. Nate walks past the window. Brad feels a warm hit of professional satisfaction. He's had a million dollars of training, he knows he wouldn't have missed him, but he'd been second-guessing. Nate's glance falls sideways through the window and lands on Brad. His expression doesn't change, pleasant-faced seriousness. He's wearing a baseball cap and a hoodie, jeans. He doesn't look at all like who Brad came to find.

Nate comes inside in a puff of cold air. He sits opposite Brad and examines him silently. Brad suddenly realises he's wrong. This kid looks just like his LT, green gaze from under his baseball cap, face composed and calm. Something inside Brad relaxes slightly.

Nate finishes his assessment or whatever he's doing. He doesn't look at Brad's bag or the creases in the jeans that Brad pulled straight from the closet, but Brad knows the detail doesn't escape him. Nate just says, "Come on, Sergeant." It's so familiar it makes him woozy. The first familiar thing, he thinks.

Brad follows Nate obediently into the apartment building. Everything is vividly not quite real except for Nate's solid presence leading him into the elevator and down the corridor. Nate's apartment is bright and sterile, new carpet and too-large clean windows showing a huge square of moist sky and something it takes Brad too long to notice isn't a minaret. Church steeple.

Nate sits Brad on the couch and goes off somewhere. Brad stares around. Even in this small space there's too much to look at. He's used to desert-coloured everything. He realises he's exhausted. There are household noises behind him: a toilet flushing, drawers being opened and closed. He falls asleep.

He wakes later with a start. Outside it's dark, city lights gleaming, the apartment so silent that for a moment he thinks he's gone deaf. His eyes settle on Nate sitting casually at a desk in a pool of lamplight. Studying. Nate looks around and nods, a little inward gesture that doesn't seem to be for Brad. He's wearing different clothes. Brad feels thick-headed, queasy. He's learned to digest pretty much all manner of indigestible things, but the milky Starbucks coffee has launched a sneak offensive on his guts.

When he gets back from the bathroom Nate offers him a plate of something. Lasagna, Brad decides. Navigating the world has turned into pattern recognition, painfully slotting everything back into his lexicon of familiarity. Nate goes back to studying. Brad sits on the couch and eats. His fork clacks musically against the plate. He doesn't even remember finishing.

When he wakes up again the apartment is bright and empty. There's a set of keys on the kitchen island, no note. Brad doesn't have any clothes with him apart from the festering uniforms in his bag. He goes into Nate's bedroom, feeling apologetic, and picks out a t-shirt. A faded print on pale yellow: Rumble in the Jungle. It's soft and thin, stretching against Brad's shoulders and a little short in the waist. It smells completely alien, like soothing chemicals rather than a person. He looks at himself in the mirrored sliding door of the closet. The bags under his eyes are ridiculous. The t-shirt is ridiculous. He wears it anyway; resists the urge to pull it down to meet his jeans, to tuck it in. He feels naked, but the person in the mirror looks normal enough.

He goes outside and wanders around the city, feeling like an alien tourist. He lies in the park. There are weeping willows and bridges, boaters. Ducks. Moisture's seeping into his jeans. He can't relax. People walk around him, behind him, and he feels like flinching every time anyone comes within five feet. The sun tilts down behind the bridge. He investigates the supermarket at the end of Nate's street. Whole Foods, what else. Inside, it's like every yuppie in the States is waging war to get their hands on the last bunch of fucking arugula. Despite the hordes, he feels strangely invisible. No kids yelling 'Hey mister!' and trying to sell him porn DVDs, no guys casually watching him through binoculars. The only attack comes from a woman who thrusts a weenie on a stick in his face. Later he finds himself paralysed in the cereal aisle. He doesn't know the difference between low sodium and reduced sodium, or why the fuck he should care. The apple section is easier, a choice between red or green. He buys green.

When he gets back, Nate's home. He's cooking barefoot in sweats and a t-shirt. He smiles in greeting, nods as Brad puts down the bag of apples on the island, then goes back to stirring the pot. Brad wanders around the living room. He eats. Chili, pretty good. He showers. When he steps out of the bathroom Nate's disappeared and his bedroom door's shut, but there's a pile of t-shirts and Harvard sweats at the end of the couch.

The next night Brad attempts cooking. Nate says gravely, "Thank you, Brad," and puts on the dishwasher. Brad wonders if he's become narcoleptic, forgetting the parts where they talk to each other. It's good though, he thinks. Quiet. Understanding.

The morning after that Nate looks at Brad and says, "It's the weekend."

Brad says, "Is it?" His voice sounds rusty, not really like him at all.

Nate smiles at him. He's wearing shorts and sneakers. His legs are almost as pale as Brad's, muscular and fuzzed blond. "Up and at 'em, Sergeant." Brad thinks Nate is deliberately speaking to him in words he still understands. Makes sense.

They run bridge to bridge. The water is muddy and blue and everything sparkles like light off a lens. Nate doesn't say anything when Brad flinches when they run under overpasses, or when the flash of sun off a windshield catches him in the eye.

They stop for breakfast around the corner. Nate reads the Wall Street Journal and shakes his head over the editorials. Brad has a small religious experience over a plate of bacon. The café's theme is white-on-white with a single black canvas on the wall for extra artistic wankitude. It's all so quasi-intellectual pretentious sister-fucking gay that the thought spills unbidden out of Brad's mouth. Nate looks at him over the paper and laughs. Brad can't remember ever having seen Nate laugh before, or at least give anything more than a bitter cough. The people next to them at the communal table are glaring at Brad like he's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad crashing their Rosh Hashanah service, so for extra credit he says, "Michael Jackson has a freckle on his penis levels of gay, sir."

Nate's repressing a smile in deference to the outrage next to them, but his eyes crinkle as he says, "We're two grown men in thigh-exposing slightly moist running shorts reading the newspaper on a Saturday morning together over waffles, Brad. I think we're proving rather than disproving the alleged homosexuality of the situation."

"Homoeroticism, sir. Not homosexuality," Brad corrects. "Marines are homoerotic, not gay." Nate just grins at him around the lip of his coffee cup and starts reading the paper again.

Brad realises he's talked more in the past five minutes than the whole time since he's been back. He chews his bacon thoughtfully. Everything still feels odd, but it's more curious than nightmarish. The hushed quiet of the city has stopped reminding him of the silence after a bomb blast. It's comfortable, like floating in a warm swimming pool with his ears underwater. Their table neighbours are complaining about sunshowers and parking spaces and the waitress forgetting their coffee.

They go home and play Mario Kart. Brad's Pac Man comfortably whups Nate's Luigi's ass. Nate cooks. Brad loads the dishwasher. They watch a movie, some subtitled thing about oppressed women in China. The lead actress is hot. "You think?" Nate says, contemplatively. "I've watched this so many times I can't tell anymore." He grins at Brad then his attention drifts back to the screen. Brad falls asleep on the couch, perfectly upright. Survival muscle memory. When he wakes up the living room's still and dark and full of unfamiliar shapes. Shadows whirl across the floor through the half-closed venetian blinds: cars, streetlights, cleaning machines, police. All the things in the first world that never stop. He realises he's cold. There's a neatly folded blanket next to him, where Nate had been sitting. Someone else might have tried to put it over him, but Nate knows better.

On Sunday Brad calls his mom from Nate's house phone. Early evening East Coast, still afternoon on the West. "Where are you?" his mom asks suspiciously, and squawks in his ear when he confesses. She peppers him with questions: How are you? How come you never wrote? How was it? It's possibly the most awkward conversation in the world, and he can't change the topic soon enough. How's his sister, is she still with that brains-for-balls egghead in Silicon Valley? His mom just clucks and says, "Brad."

When Brad puts the phone down Nate is there. Nate doesn't say anything, just raises his eyebrows at Brad and says, "Cheese?" It's a packet of goddamn Kraft Singles, and Brad reflexively says, "Please tell me you spent your entire fucking food allowance on books, and that's the only reason you're eating that shit."

Nate just grins brightly. "Unless there's been some miraculous breakthrough in the taste technology of MREs since 2003, I would've thought you'd find this five-star dining." Brad scowls and takes a slice. It's disgusting but oddly comforting in a childhood memory kind of way. Another familiar thing. It doesn't taste anything like MRE cheese. Nate puts the cheese slices back in the fridge and turns to regard Brad carefully. It's that look that always seems to unwrap the inside of Brad's head, turning it inside out just for Nate so he can see all the ugly shit in there. New shit, now: Captain Morel bleeding out, Kocher's fucking arm, everything that's happened since Nate left, and for a moment Brad feels a surge of anger at Nate for leaving them. For moving to this bright safe unreal place where there's plastic cheese and everything works perfectly while Brad and the rest of them are stuck in some shithole in Fallujah, baked into their own sweat and piss and shit in their cammies in an OP with boarded up windows, snipers outside and no fucking A/C. But Brad's anger vanishes as quickly as it comes. Nate's the only goddamned person in this unreal city who does know.

Nate's still regarding him. Brad meets his look steadily. He'd kiss Casey Kasem's one descended testicle right now for something to hide behind: NVGs, a PAS-13. He wonders when his Iceman façade deserted him; suspects it never really worked on Nate, anyway.

Nate steps into Brad's space. Anyone else Brad would freak the fuck out, but it's Nate. Nate contemplates Brad up close, inspecting the troops. Brad's spine automatically snaps straight and he fixes his eyes past Nate's ear. In his peripheral vision he sees Nate's mouth curve and he says, "At ease, Sergeant," soft and teasing in a tone Brad hasn't heard before. Nate places his hand slowly and deliberately on Brad's chest, the way you try not to startle a dog or horse. Brad feels it perfectly through the thin cotton of the too-small borrowed t-shirt he's wearing. Command, Brad thinks, a forestalling weight disproportionate to the actual touch itself, and then Nate leans in and kisses him.

"Uh," Brad says stupidly, when they separate.

Nate looks at him, mouth still curved. A happy civilian, the same and not at all the same as Brad's LT, who says, "Goodnight, Brad," and disappears down the hallway, leaving Brad blinking with his mouth still open like an idiot.

The next day is a school day. Nate comes home late after classes. They eat Thai takeout. Brad lies flat on the floor propped on his elbows reading Racer, hearing the dry rustling and scratching sounds of Nate studying. Sometimes Nate gets up and steps over Brad to consult something on the bookcase. Nate finishes studying and starts balancing his checkbook. Brad gets off the floor and does a load of laundry. Nate is the kind of guy who separates whites from darks. Brad dumps his laundry in with Nate's from the hamper - they're all Nate's clothes, after all. The detergent has that same soothing chemical smell, homey. Brad puts the clothes in and watches them go around in the little window, while Nate calls indistinctly from the corridor, "Night." He sounds like he's eating something.

Brad watches the clothes go around a bit more, then wanders down the hallway to Nate's room. The door's half open. Nate's lying on the bed reading, half-eaten apple on the nightstand. He's wearing grey sweats, his knees falling apart into a sprawl. The sweats are the same ones Brad wore the day before yesterday. They'd ended just above his ankles. The main light's off, just the bedside lamp on. It makes Nate's new apartment look like a hotel. Brad doesn't go in, just looks from the hallway until Nate puts down his book. Nate sits up as Brad goes over, reaching out to draw Brad down to kneel awkwardly between his knees, and kisses him.

The angle's strange, Nate leaning up into Brad's mouth. Brad lets his mouth open softly, feels Nate mirror him, Nate's tongue slipping over Brad's in an erotic slide that Brad feels all the way to his dick. Their lips are wet, smooth against each other, and then Brad feels Nate's mouth change shape: a grin. Brad's tongue briefly hits Nate's teeth as Nate laughs, hooks a leg behind Brad's knees and flips them over to land horizontal on the bed. Brad has to suppress a grunt as Nate sprawls across him, heavy and dense in a way women never are. During his combat jacks he never thought about kissing, it was all asses and cunts and thrusting, but now all he and Nate do is lie there and neck like teenagers. Nate braces himself on one hand behind Brad's head, leaning down to alternate kisses with exploratory mouthing of all the other exposed bits of Brad's upper body: the corner of his neck where it disappears into his t-shirt, the corner of Brad's jaw, the hollow of his throat. Nate's thousand-dollar bed is soft but level against Brad's back, quilt bunching under Nate's knees as they drop to either side of his hips, Nate's weight pinning him down, owning him.

Brad's so focused on the kissing that when Nate reaches a hand down Brad's shorts, it's such a shock that he comes embarrassingly all over Nate's fingers. He feels like he's just been slammed in the chest with a 203, stunned, shuddering within the lingering touch. Nate just grins and breaks the kiss to lean up and whisper in Brad's ear, "I remember what it was like the first time someone touched my cock after I got back." Brad blinks, and Nate shifts his weight back and laughs. "Don't look at me like that. You didn't really think I was a virgin officer choirboy, did you?"

Brad says, "All zipped up in your officer cammies, I didn't even know you had a cock. Sir. Didn't even know you knew the word."

"Lots of things you haven't heard me say," Nate says agreeably. "Like: I want you to suck my dick. Or, I want to fuck you."

Brad's dick twitches, and Nate feels it because he laughs again and promises, "In the morning, you can fuck me."

Nate lines Brad up just the way he wants him, fucking him carefully from behind. His hands are spread in a wide V at the bottom edge of Brad's tattoo, a strong guiding pressure that Brad grunts and pushes back up against. He feels completely open, as vulnerable as it's possible to be, Nate sliding inside him in a comfortable rhythm that's somehow the most perfect thing he's ever fucking felt. Everything might be fake here in Boston, in the whole damn United States, but Nate is as real as it gets, strong and heavy against him, skin against skin. All of it's real, Brad's jangling nerves and the building pleasure that makes him fall to his elbows and push his face against the sheets as Nate fucks him at just the right angle. He rubs his cock against the pillow wedged underneath his belly, hears himself groan and then his ragged inhale as Nate slides out then in again. It's real, possibly the realest thing he's ever experienced, and he must have said it out loud right before he comes again, because Nate leans forward to bite his neck softly, moves his hips in a way that makes Brad's eyes roll back, and says, "Yeah, it is."

ENDS