Chapter Text
Brad eyed himself in the crappy hotel mirror, running his hand over his freshly shorn head. It never looked as good when he shaved it himself, but he didn’t want to wait. The guys in his platoon made fun of him for keeping it short even when he was on leave, but he looked more like himself when his hair was regulation length, and it wasn’t like he had anything better to do in a snowed-in Chicago.
And wasn’t that an appropriate greeting from the old US of A. Welcome home, your flight was canceled, because even though Chicago gets an average of 36 inches of snow a year, it’s run by useless civilians who don’t want to risk scratching their precious Honda Civics, so you’re shit out of luck until they decide to show up for work again.
Still, not even travel delays could fully sink Brad’s mood. He was going home, where he wouldn’t have to put up with low, cold skies and fretful snow. Brad hadn’t been back to California in almost two years, and he was arriving with stories that were going to make Tony weep with envy; stories that he’d earned on his own shoulders without the puffed-up Iceman reputation to smooth the way.
Brad grabbed his duffel and slung it over his shoulder, heading for the lobby and the airport shuttle. As he waited for the shuttle, Brad scrolled through his texts and mapped out his weekend - lunch with his parents tomorrow, a backyard thing at Poke’s and then a big welcome home dinner with his extended family the next night.
Poke had promised that the backyard thing would be small, not even deserving of the name barbeque, but Brad’s text message history showed that as a clear lie. Pappy would be there, as would Lilley, Mike and his entire family, Jacks and his kids. No mention of Nate, but then, there wouldn’t be.
Poke didn’t know anything about what had happened between them, or if he did, he was being uncharacteristically merciful and minding his own business. As far as Brad knew, no one knew that he and Nate had been together, except, at the end, Mike.
Sliding into the back row of the shuttle, Brad watched the sky lighten. Brad had now been overseas for more than twice as long as he and Nate had been together, and that word was twice as specific as they had ever been about what they were doing while they were doing it.
It was still infuriating. Nate had slid so seamlessly into his life, filling cracks that Brad hadn’t even known were there, only to come to him after eight months wanting to talk about “their circumstances.”
Nate had sworn he wasn’t breaking up with Brad, but Brad wasn’t an idiot. The only “circumstance” that had changed was Brad’s upcoming assignment overseas. He’d thought he could trust Nate, because Nate knew that being a Marine meant being gone, but apparently not because Nate had sat in front of him looking earnest and regretful and talking about being practical.
Fuck his practicality and fuck his regrets.
The whole scene still left a bitter taste in Brad’s mouth. If Nate didn’t have the sack to be with him as he was, then Nate shouldn’t have started anything with him in the first place. Sometimes, when Brad was feeling generous, he wondered if Nate hadn’t known what he meant to Brad. Brad could see how it could have felt temporary to Nate - he wasn’t on the lease, he’d never taken his things out of storage- but it was the most honest relationship Brad had ever been in. Brad had told Nate things, he’d wanted things, with Nate that he’d never wanted with anyone else; he would have welcomed every single box of ratty textbooks that Nate wanted to bring over from his storage unit.
Either way, Nate’s mind had clearly already been made up by the time he spoke to Brad, and Brad was never going to be the kind of person who begged someone to stay when they didn’t want to. He didn’t remember exactly what he’d said, but the upside was that Nate had left the apartment, and they hadn’t spoken about it again before Brad left. Brad had stayed away from California, taking his leave in less fraught locations, and Nate had, well, Brad didn’t know exactly what Nate had done.
Brad stood in line to print his boarding pass and ignored the people giving him and rucksack a second and sometimes third glance. Apparently, men carrying military issued gear weren’t as common in Chicago as they were in California, and the people of the great state of Illinois hadn’t been raised to mind their own business. Christeson was from Illinois, and he certainly did his fair share of slack-jawed gaping.
Brad was just glad not to be in his Class Bs. He was happy to do his duty and remind the sheltered civilians that they were, in fact, a nation at war, but they were a hassle and air travel was uncomfortable enough for people of Brad’s height without the added addition of Marine issued pants.
Nate’d left the Marines, Brad knew that much. He was surely in a serious relationship by now. Brad imagined that Nate thought he was happy with his Gap catalog life.
He had such a clear image of Nate planning his mediocre fucking life in a nice, normal suburb. A pretty wife would certainly be easier than a Marine boyfriend. Nate was checking off the boxes one by one, well on his way to three kids, a golden fucking retriever, a sensible sedan. All the things Nate thought he should want. The poster boy of the American Dream.
Brad handed his ID and boarding pass to the security agent and wondered if Nate had realized yet that the American Dream was boring as shit. He hoped he had, that the quiet desperation was quietly eating him up.
He’d never admit it, Brad knew, but Nate would look at Brad and know in his bones that he’d made a mistake. He’d chosen wrong. Brad had turned himself inside out for Nate, and Nate had chosen normalcy and mediocrity, and Brad hoped it choked him every night.
At his gate, Brad tucked himself firmly into a corner where he could stretch his legs and tried to shake himself firmly into the present. As Nate himself would say, Brad needed to snap to. Oceanside had been his home long before Nate, and he had more to look forward to than to regret.
He couldn’t maintain a long-term relationship and be a Marine. If it were going to happen, it would have happened with Nate. He knew that now and he accepted it. The Marines made a better mistress than one person could anyway. These last two years had been some of the best of his career, and he was going to parlay them into a promotion and a prime position. He hadn’t been given a choice, but if he had, the Marines still would have been the right one.
✦
Nate had been at work for fourteen hours when Mike’s call came through. Of course, he didn’t know how late it had gotten until after he dug underneath the scattered files from three different cases and found his phone in the drifts of paper. He’d wanted to be annoyed with Mike for calling when he was at work until he’d noticed that it was 8:15; In his windowless box of an office, all times of day looked the same.
“Hello, Mike.”
Mike got straight to business, “Nate, Colbert’s coming back, coupla new doodads pinned to his uniform. Thought you’d want to know.”
“I heard,” Nate said easily, “Good for him. Apparently, I’m on cups and napkin duty for Espera’s party.”
Poke had texted him the time, place and an assignment to bring paper goods for Brad’s homecoming barbeque without even asking if he were free. Everyone knew how well Brad and Nate had gotten on, there was no question in their minds that Nate would clear his schedule to welcome home their long-overdue comrade.
The only one who knew enough to question it was Mike, and sure enough, here he was, checking in. Nate shuffled through some of the pages on his desk, throwing away a few empty coffee cups and the core from the apple which had served as his lunch.
“Fuck. I wanted you to hear it from me. Should’ve known Poke would be quick to get the word out. He pretends to be hard, but he fusses over that boy more’n he does his own babies.”
“It’s fine,” Nate reassured him, “It was all a long time ago.”
Mike snorted, but all he said was, “So you’re coming to the thing?”
“I think we both know that Brad will feel more welcomed if I’m not there. And I can’t, anyway, I’ve got a race that day.”
He hadn’t before he’d gotten the text, but Mike didn’t need to know that. A quick search of his running message boards had turned up someone selling a bib to a 10k, so that was that. An unalterable commitment that would prevent him from attending the barbeque, what a shame. It wasn’t his finest moment.
Still. There was no good place to run into the ex you still hadn’t gotten over, but in front of all of your closest friends and colleagues, most of whom had no idea you’d ever been together, certainly had to be one of the worst.
“Another one?” Mike asked, “Don’t you think you’re overdoing it? You have to sleep sometime, kid.”
Nate had been planning on taking more time off after his triathlon, but he was confident in his ability to run a 10k without much prep, so the risk of overtraining was low.
“Speaking of fussing over Marines more than you do your own children…” Nate countered, making Mike laugh.
“You’re a different case. If I didn’t keep after you, you wouldn’t do anything but train and work.” His tone became more cautious, “You’re good?”
“Mike, I’m fine.”
Mike didn’t have to say anything to call bullshit on that. It was one of his strongest talents.
Nate doubled down. “I knew his posting was temporary, and we all expected him back weeks ago. I’m honestly fine.”
And so are we, Nate didn’t say, though he knew that was largely the impetus behind Mike’s call. He’d long since made his peace with Mike’s role in the catastrophic breakup of his relationship with Brad.
Nate stood and paced a small circle in his office, as Mike told him what everyone else had told him about Brad and his triumphant return. If the grapevine were to trusted, Brad had single-handedly turned the tide of the US war in Afghanistan. Nate almost believed it.
It had probably been better for Brad, in the long run, to go off to his amazing opportunity without the distraction of Nate’s life imploding back in the States. Brad had excelled just as Nate had known that he would. Nate had struggled for a while, but he’d gotten his feet under him eventually, and none of it was Mike’s fault.
He couldn’t blame Mike for his own weakness. If Nate had had the self-assurance to stand for what he knew was right for him, well. It was a lesson that cost dearly, but Nate had learned it just the same and there was no use mulling over what could have been.
Mike and Nate spoke for a few more minutes about work and Mike’s kids and then Nate snapped his phone shut and pressed it to the desk while waiting for his heartbeat to even out. After a few seconds, he began sorting his files into their appropriate piles.
The third time he caught himself staring blankly at a clearly labeled piece of paper, he realized that he wasn’t going to get any more work done tonight; not now that the spectre of Brad had been raised by Poke and then made painfully real by Mike’s gruff concern. He needed to go home, get some sleep, and gather his defenses.
Brad was coming back to Oceanside, and Nate needed to pull himself together. They’d been uneasy friends before they’d been anything else when they’d had the officer-enlisted divide, Captain Schwetje, and a dozen unforgiveable cockups by command in between them. Surely, they could occupy the same social circle without casualty. He was going to be fine. His friends needed him to be fine.
✦
Tony Espera was a goddammed liar. He’d promised that he wasn’t going to go overboard, but when Brad arrived at the house, he had to park two blocks away because of all the people who’d already arrived. Poke’s two-bedroom ranch house was packed with Marines and their families and what looked like all of his and Alicia’s extended family plus more than half the Mexican population of Oceanside.
Bypassing the scrum in the house, Brad skirted around the kids playing soccer in the yard and walked down the side yard. Poke might have endless shit to say about the emptiness of the American dream, but his house had always given him away. It was on the small side, but it was meticulously maintained. The fence around the backyard was given a fresh coat of paint every year, and one corner of the not-expansive backyard was given over to a large raised garden bed that Brad had helped Poke build a few years back. Whenever they were stateside, Poke’s days off were endless home improvement projects, interspersed with children’s birthday parties.
For a second after Brad turned the corner of Poke’s house, everything seemed wrong. The constellation of bundled-up men scattered around Poke’s patio was unfamiliar; then he blinked and they weren’t. Poke was exactly where Brad expected him to be - manning the new grill he was determined to use despite that fact that it was winter.
Pappy, sprawled in one of the chairs, raised his chin in Brad’s direction and said, “Look alive, gents, the Iceman cometh.”
Brad didn’t bother pretending he wasn't glad to see them. It had been a long time, and they’d know he was full of shit anyway. He received hugs and back pats from Poke, Pappy, and Lilley, and was handed a beer by Tony’s brother-in-law, who, if Brad remembered correctly, wasn’t too much of an asshole. Fucked if Brad could remember his name, though.
Brad took a seat in one of the metal chairs and stretched his legs across the concrete slab that functioned as Poke’s back patio. Poke had added a sheet metal awning since Brad had been gone, which was ugly as all fuck but served to keep them out of the damp day, so Brad wasn’t going to complain.
Poke started taking ears of corn from a platter and placing them on the upper rack of the grill.
“Isn’t it beautiful? Just got it last week. Got a great deal.”
Brad eyed the dull metal casing. It looked like a pretty standard grill to him, but he was spared the lie by Lilley who piped up, “Yeah, brah, ‘cause no one else is crazy enough to grill out in January.”
Poke tossed him an aggressive grin, “You cold, Lilley? I’m sure there’s room for you in the kitchen with the other bitches. Nah,” he continued without waiting for Lilley to answer, “that’s just a problem you white motherfuckers have. My people have been here since the beginning, dawg. We’re acclimated to this place. We belong .”
“That don’t make no fucking sense,” Pappy objected from his seat, “Eskimos have been in the Arctic since the beginning but they ain’t running around a blizzard in their skivvies talking about how great the weather is.”
“Pretty sure the first settlers didn’t have Goretex jackets keeping them warm either,” Brad said.
Tony’s unnamed brother-in-law snorted into his beer. Cheerfully, Poke flipped them all off and turned back to his grilling. Brad grinned.
“Kocher’s inside.” Pappy said conversationally, “his kids’re playin’ with Jacks’. So’s Stafford.”
Brad was pleasantly surprised. Kocher’d had trouble with seeing Brad be rewarded at the same time his career was in the shitter with no difference between them but the commander of their platoon. He’d tried to hide it, but things had been strained. Brad was glad he was here.
“Nate wanted to come.” Lilley said, visibly gratified to be on a first name basis with the man, “but he had a race. A 10k. If he hadn’t already paid for the registration, he would’ve come.”
That was obviously a lie, but Brad didn’t bother to correct him. Nate was off doing whatever it was Nate did these days, and Brad didn’t give a shit. The only benefit to Nate being here would have been so that Brad could show him exactly how much of a shit he didn’t give but there’d be plenty of time for that later.
He lifted his beer in acknowledgment and said, “I’ll head into the lunacy after I’ve fortified my spirit.”
Pappy laughed. “Reyes said to tell you hey. He’s working today .”
Brad nodded. Lilley held up his phone, “Qtip says Mike just got here. Says not to ask why his wife isn’t here with him. Apparently, it’s a fucking mess.”
Brad wasn’t thrilled by the idea of seeing Mike again. He might never know exactly what prompted Nate to turn tail and run, but he knew Mike was involved. The words resounded in Brad’s head like artillery shells.
“I was talking to Mike, and it all became clear. I was naive to think I could make this work.” As if it were all on him. As if Brad were a bystander in their relationship, or, more likely, as if Brad were so deeply fucked up that he couldn’t build something functional on his own. Brad could be pretty clear whom that idea had come from.
Mike had never thought Brad was good enough for his golden child. Not romantically, not professionally. It hadn’t escaped Brad’s notice that half of his conversations with Nate in Iraq ended up including Wynn as well, even if the man hadn’t been anywhere in sight when he’d approached.
Mike had a second sense for when the two of them were talking and appeared out of nowhere to drag Nate away or to hover and shoot disapproving looks. At the time, Brad had assumed that Mike was worried about Nate’s reputation. He was already suspect with battalion and showing favoritism among his team leaders would only give Encino Man another reason to jump up Nate’s ass.
But then it had continued once they were home. Brad would look up from a conversation and find Mike’s concerned eyes watching them or turn to find Nate being dragged into another conversation. They’d joked about it once, him and Nate, how Mike was like a social sheepdog, trying to herd them all into their proper groups.
After they’d broken up, when Nate was avoiding Brad’s eye at work and, presumably, sleeping on Mike’s couch, Mike had tried to approach Brad a couple of times, hound dog eyes soft, to ask how he was doing. Brad had blown him off only because punching Mike in the face was likely to delay his transfer and he needed to get the fuck out of Oceanside.
But now Brad was back and when he was reactivated, he and Mike were likely going to be part of the same unit, so Brad needed to set it aside. Mike was good at babysitting the cherry officers and keeping them from all getting their asses blown off because somebody in the chain of command panicked. Brad didn’t have to like him to work well with him.
They’d see each other at a lot of the same events, but proximity didn’t have to equal intimacy, and Brad was sure he could mostly avoid the man. After he finished his beer, Brad decided to head into the house. He wanted to see Kocher and Stafford, and he wasn’t going to let Mike decide any more of his actions for him. He said his goodbyes and stepped through the cloudy sliding door.
As predicted, Poke’s house was a madhouse. Every chair was taken and clusters of people blocked most of the paths through the den and living room, with walking made more difficult by the children weaving heedlessly through the crowd at knee height. Poke had painted since the last time Brad had been there, but no amount of daisy yellow would make that room feel large enough for all of these people. Five people were squeezed on the threadbare couch, and another person was keeping toddler heads from sharp coffee table corners. As always, the Virgin Mary stared sanctimoniously at Brad from above the door to the kitchen. Brad stood by the door for a moment, soaking in the familiar chaos, then spotted Stafford and Garza talking to Jacks and headed their way.
He exchanged the same basic pleasantries with them that he had with his friends on the patio. He’d never understand why people insisted on asking about flights - no one had an interesting response to that question.
Jacks spouted off some moto bullshit about Brad “getting back into shape so he could be ready for First Recon,” and Brad considered putting him in his place just because he could, but Stafford interrupted.
“Sgt. Colbert could kick your ass; Tell him the real news like Sixta’s fucking failure of a training mission!”
Wynn was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the narrow door frame. Brad saw Wynn notice his arrival, and was gratified to see Mike content himself with a head nod and nothing more. Brad nodded cooly back, and duty done, turned back to the story Stafford was telling about a trip that either gone horribly wrong or horribly right depending on if you found frozen vomit hilarious. Not for the first time, Brad pitied Stafford’s parents.
“Colbert,” said Kocher’s gravely voice over his shoulder, and Brad turned to a firm handshake and a welcome hug. “Good to have you back among the righteous, brother. How was your flight?”
“Miserable,” Brad said, “but over.”
He told them all about his posting and fielded the questions Garza and Stafford peppered him with. At some point, someone pressed a fresh beer into his hands. Kocher laughed so hard he nearly knocked a stack of DVDs off the bookshelf at Brad’s complaints about the RTO who’d made the mistake of thinking that Brad was kidding about his Charms ban. The empty-headed asshole was lucky Brad had ever let him eat a complete meal again.
✦
According to Lilley, who’d texted him first thing Sunday morning, Nate had missed an awesome party. Brad was back, and it was like he’d never left. While Nate lay on the couch with ice packs on both knees, Lilley gleefully filled him in on every one of Brad’s sarcastic put-downs and tales of valor from his time abroad.
Nate didn’t know how to indicate that he wasn’t interested without seeming suspiciously uninterested, so he stretched his aching muscles and texted Lilley variations on “That’s great” and “It sounds like you had fun” for an hour, as his stomach knotted and cramped. This was going to be harder than he’d thought. Despite the fact that all of his joints were letting him know that the 10k had been too much too soon after his last road race, it had clearly been the right decision.
Brad was back and it had taken less than one event for him to establish himself as the center of their social circle. Nate was going to have to rid himself of this gnawing pit of wistfulness and pain or he was going to have to get an entirely new set of friends.
Nate gingerly made his way into the kitchen to grab more ice for his knees. Unfortunately, Brad’s successful re-entry into Oceanside circles was only one of the problems facing Nate this morning.
His boss had decided, overnight, that he wanted to take a completely different approach to the case he was arguing next week, which meant that Nate had to re-research and re-write six weeks of work in five days, while fielding a constant stream of abuse about what a waste of space he was for not thinking of it sooner.
Nate was facing another Sunday of strained eyes and, he realized as he looked in his dingy refrigerator, take out. He wasn’t going to have time to make it to the grocery store if he wanted to get a decent list of citations pulled for Caplan by tomorrow.
The fact that Nate had thought of this angle when they were first handed the case was irrelevant. When Nate had first started this job, after the first time he was screamed at for changing something that he knew he’d been instructed to change, Nate argued. For a while, he’d emailed summaries of their discussions back to his boss, to ensure he had the directions correct, but he’d quickly learned that the only crime in his office worse than actually making a mistake was pointing out that Caplan had made a mistake.
At this point, Nate didn’t bother to do anything other than apologize and fix whatever Caplan was spouting off about, because anything else bogged down his week in a back and forth about who was right and why Nate had misinterpreted the instructions he’d been given. Nate had too much to get done, and their clients’ cases were too important, for Nate to waste time indulging his own ego. If Caplan wanted to tell Nate that any kindergartener could do his job without this much handholding, it meant nothing to Nate. As long as Caplan stayed out of his way and let him do the work.
Nate was so tired. He’d taken this job because Caplan had told him they’d be the last line of resistance keeping families in their homes, and he’d wanted to do something with clear wins and losses. Most people didn’t know the rights tenants had under the law, and, on the straightforward cases, he was often genuinely was able to help people advocate for themselves and improve their living situations. Besides, he figured that being a “research assistant,” which was code for gopher, chief filing officer, and lackey, would give him a sense of whether or not law school was right for him.
So far all he’d learned was that landlords were scum, the system was rigged against his clients, his boss was an asshole, and while he didn’t want to do this forever, he had no idea what he wanted to do instead. He was so sick of being told to keep his head down and make concessions now, because maybe, someday, if he was lucky, he’d be in a position to make real change. Caplan loved to tell Nate that he’d understand, eventually, why they couldn’t do one thing or another or they couldn’t take on that landlord, even though their client was clearly right. How Nate would learn “how things worked.”
Nate leaned against the counter and picked at the chipping paint on the cabinet. Underneath the current red, he could see at least four other layers of paint. He shouldn’t, but one more ding wouldn’t really make a difference. The whole place was falling apart.
He hated his boss and he hated this place. It was drafty and small, and it came furnished, which meant that half of the furniture was uncomfortable and all of it was ugly. Nate had never intended to stay in this apartment this long. He’d never intended to stay in this job for this long either, but every time he pulled up rental listings or job postings, one of his clients called frantically about an eviction notice or one of his Marines broke up with his girlfriend and spent two weeks hungover on Nate’s couch or Caplan decided he needed six weeks of work redone in less than a week.
Once Nate started at the firm, Caplan had realized that, despite his lack of credentials, Nate was a good researcher and a decent legal writer, and he’d started pawning off more and more of the casework on Nate. Nate had hired another associate, who now did most of the straightforward client-facing work, leaving Nate over his head and struggling to help people through complicated legal issues he was only beginning to learn himself. Caplan showed up at the office long enough to highlight all of Nate’s failures and incompetencies and then left again to see and be seen, dining out on his reputation as a lawyer with the heart of gold, champion of the downtrodden.
Most of the time, Nate didn’t mind that he hadn’t progressed as far as he’d thought he would in his career. He was proud of the work he did, and his clients were good people who deserved better representation than Caplan’s half-assed grandstanding.
But Brad had left and come back, and Nate was working insane hours at what should have been an entry-level position, and he was still living in the month-to-month studio apartment Brad had rented to bide the time before his transfer. Nate had taken over the lease when Brad left, only intending to stay for a month or two, but between the breakup, deciding to resign his commission, and the job opportunity with Caplan, moving hadn’t seemed like a priority.
Standing in his kitchen, which Brad had not-so-lovingly referred to as the shitbox when they’d lived there together, Nate thought that he should have reprioritized at some point in the last year and a half. A job he hated, an apartment he hated, a Sunday full of work and a circle of friends who idolized the man who’d broken his heart. Even he had to admit that was pathetic.