Generation Kill fic: Don't You Shake Alone (2/2)

[dira]

When Brad woke up the shower was running, and Nate and Linus were both gone from the bedroom. He put on boxers--Linus was awake now, some kind of standard of decency ought to apply--and headed toward the bathroom, stopping short in the hallway when he realized Nate had left the door open.

Brad stared down at the floor, grinning helplessly at that casually undefended boundary, and then Nate started singing REO Speedwagon and Brad actually had to cover his face with his hands. When he had his breathing under control sufficiently, he stepped into the bathroom and started singing along, filling in when Nate lost a few words to a startled laugh. Brad brushed his teeth, still humming along until Nate's singing trailed off, and then he pushed the shower curtain aside far enough to see Nate running a washcloth down Linus's back.

Brad grabbed Linus's towel off the rack, slung it over his shoulder, and held his hands out. Nate shifted carefully toward him and met his eyes with a grin and a nod, and Brad took Linus and settled him against the towel. He carried Linus out to the bedroom and sat down to dry him off properly, rubbing his head and making his hair stand up in spikes while Linus flailed around. He managed to get a diaper on him fast enough not to get pissed on, and then just sat on the foot of the bed, playing around with Linus, tickling him with the towel and making him kick and squeal.

After one particularly loud shriek dropped into silence, Brad realized that the shower was off. He looked up to see Nate standing in the doorway with a towel around his hips, watching them with an expression that made Brad want to look away, like he wasn't supposed to see this. Like this was more naked than Nate had been in the shower, or last night in this bed--just smiling at the two of them, just looking perfectly happy to stand there in the doorway with his hair dripping down his forehead.

Brad tossed Linus's towel at Nate, and Nate grinned as he caught it and put it to use drying his own hair.

---

A little after noon Linus started crying and wouldn't stop. Nate and Brad passed him back and forth, checking all the obvious possibilities--neither of them were wound up enough to be upsetting Linus, he didn't need his diaper changed, and he wasn't hungry, or at least wouldn't stop crying to eat. He wasn't running a fever. Nate insisted that there was a specific cry for gas and this wasn't it, and Brad was half-certain he knew what Nate was talking about. Setting Linus down in his crib made him scream louder, but Nate and Brad agreed--mostly through hand signals--to rotate five minutes at a time through each of them holding him and leaving him in his crib. They'd just have to wait him out; eventually something had to work.

Brad had just finished his turn holding Linus and set him down when he noticed his phone, still on the night stand and blinking a text message notification. Brad picked it up, prepared to reply to Ray's latest obscene suggestions for him and Nate by dialing the phone and letting him listen to Linus scream.

But when Brad flipped open his phone, he realized the message wasn't from Ray.

Brad, Mom. Interrogative. What is your 20?

Brad winced. It was never a good sign when his mom resorted to radio protocol to get to his attention, and ignoring her wasn't an option.

"Brad?" Nate's voice was a welcome low tone against the ongoing shriek from Linus.

Nate was standing in the bedroom doorway, and the frown on his face deepened as Brad turned far enough for Nate to see the phone in his hand. "Something wrong?"

Brad mustered up a wry smile and walked over to Nate. "Aren't you supposed to be listening to soothing music for the next four and a half minutes?"

"You were supposed to come see if I was thirty seconds ago," Nate said evenly, not budging from the doorway. "I got worried."

Brad shrugged and held out his phone, keeping his eyes on Nate's face as he read it. Brad had never tried very hard to sell the Iceman shtick to the LT, but it would still be interesting to see if Nate took it the way a lot of Marines would, as if this were obviously SOP for communication between Brad and his family.

But Nate didn't look amused on any level. His frown deepened, and he looked up at Brad, giving him an uncomfortably intent look, as if Brad had Nate's undivided attention even when Linus was ten feet away screaming his head off.

"She does actually know my twenty," Brad explained. "At least, she knows I'm in DC with a friend who needed me to stay around for a while. I haven't updated her."

Nate shook his head slightly, raising a hand to wave away Brad's words. His focus didn't relax. "You're supposed to be in San Diego right now. That's where you were supposed to go on your leave, to see your family."

Brad shoved his phone into his pocket and shrugged again, not quite able to look away from Nate's stare even to roll his eyes. "It's my default, Nate. I go to California on leave because I don't usually have a reason to be anywhere else. Right now I have a compelling reason to be here, so here I am."

Nate's gaze jerked away from him, and Nate stepped backward, out of the doorway, clearing his path as he said, "You should call your mom."

Brad studied Nate, but Nate kept his gaze fixed on the door frame, and Brad gave up on figuring him out anytime soon. He'd put Linus down; it was his turn to spend ten minutes not getting stressed out by listening to him crying.

"Yeah," Brad said, "I know. I'm going to call her now."

Nate nodded without looking at him, and Brad stepped out of the bedroom, letting his arm brush against Nate's body as he went. He crossed the hallway to the bathroom, shut the door--which muffled but didn't eliminate the sound of Linus's crying--and dialed his mom even as he did the time zone calculation and tried to figure out if she would be home from work today, if she'd have taken vacation days this week because he might have been home.

"Who is this and what have you done with Brad?"

Brad smiled. "Hey, mom. It's me, I promise."

"I'll hold you to that," she said, and then "Is that a baby crying? Sweetheart, where are you?"

"At my friend's place in DC, like I told you," Brad said. "It's just him and his son, so I'm staying to help out."

"Are you calling for advice on why the baby might be crying?" His mom sounded honestly baffled.

"No, we covered all the logical possibilities and I think Nate's been looking stuff up on the internet when my back is turned. We're just trying to wait him out without anybody losing their minds, so I thought I'd call you while it's not my turn to hold him."

"I'm honored," his mom said, but she'd gone from confused to worried, and Brad realized that it hadn't been much of an accident that he hadn't called before now. He braced for impact a second before she said, "I don't think you've ever mentioned a Nate who you were close to."

Brad fixed his gaze on the opposite wall and said, "I always called him Lieutenant Fick before now."

Brad listened to Linus wailing for a solid thirty seconds, which in no way obscured the sound of his mother's silence sailing straight past worried and into really concerned, Bradley.

"And now you and Nate have become good friends, since you left recon."

"I'm still in recon, this is a temporary exchange," Brad corrected first, and then, "Nate's out of the Corps, he left in August. I didn't tell you about it because I wasn't really in touch with him then. He had a lot going on with the baby on the way and moving out here, and I was getting ready to go to England."

"And then you stopped to see him on your way home and realized that he needed help taking care of his baby and you decided to just stay indefinitely," his mom summarized in a calm tone that would have hidden her skepticism if Brad hadn't learned it from her and then carried it into the pressure-cooker of the Corps and refined it into an identity.

"He knows how I feel about him," Brad half-lied, just to head off the excruciating conclusion of his mother's line of thought.

"I'm sure he does," his mom said, not sounding the least bit perturbed by Brad's jump ahead in the script. "It's usually fairly difficult to miss when you get like this about someone. But if you say one word about not minding that he doesn't feel the same, I'm getting on a plane and dragging you away from him, crying baby or no crying baby."

"It's not," Brad said hastily, and then stopped. It's not like that was an argument guaranteed to make him sound exactly like the fifteen-year-old with a doomed crush on a straight military school classmate his mother clearly thought he still was. But there was nothing he could say that was concrete enough to refute her and wasn't a lie or a presumption.

"I can't promise you it's going to work out with me and Nate," Brad said finally. "But I love him too much not to try."

There was another little silence from his mom; he thought he might actually have surprised her with that one.

"I haven't said that to him yet," Brad added. He couldn't work up much anxiety over saying it to his mom--she'd held too many of his confidences too safely for too long, but he still had to cover his bases. "Don't tell him I said it to you first, okay?"
"I will put it on my list of topics not to mention at the Seder," she promised him after a briefer pause. "Or--Hanukkah, actually, if you think you'll be able to get leave and bring him out then."

"Maybe Hanukkah," Brad agreed, and didn't elaborate on the odds or everything that might interfere. "If things work out, and if Nate's ready to drag Linus cross-country for holidays by then. He'll be nine months old."

"Nine months in December," his mother said, sounding aghast. "Do you mean right now he's all by himself with a newborn?"

"Two weeks old today," Brad clarified, not sure when exactly babies stopped being new. "And he's not alone. He's got me. For the rest of my leave, anyway."

"Brad, how long has the baby--what is his name, anyway?--how long has he been crying?"

Brad glanced unnecessarily at his watch. Thirty seconds left until Nate's turn to pick him up. "Linus. Forty-seven minutes."

"Linus," his mother repeated, sounding exactly like a woman who knew better than to question her children's choices in naming her grandchildren. "Well, if he's two weeks old and nothing's broken, he doesn't even know what he's crying about. Put him in the car and just drive until he falls asleep. That always works sooner or later."

Brad abruptly remembered that--being small enough for his mother to carry and screaming, wailing, with some angry-sad thing in his chest that could only get out through his mouth. He remembered how she'd pulled the seatbelt tight against his chest, right where the knot sat, leaned across him to roll down the window, and then put the car in gear. When they hit the freeway the rushing air through the window was finally louder than he was and he could finally, finally stop screaming because he was finally moving fast enough to get away from whatever it was. He'd never been able to explain what it was that made him scream like that to his mom, the thing that tightened in his chest until it overwhelmed him, but it had never really mattered. Even though he could never make her understand, she was right there with him in the night, in the car, rushing him down the road to get him away from it.

"I think you were four or five before you outgrew that completely," his mother said, and Brad was momentarily disoriented to find himself still in the bathroom of Nate's apartment with Linus still crying outside. "Go on, go take care of your boys."

"Thanks, Mom," Brad said, and hung up before he could try to tell her what he was thanking her for.

As it turned out, Linus found the Beltway extremely soothing.

---

Nate went into his first therapy appointment with all the enthusiasm Brad would have expected him to show for a court martial. Less, actually, because Nate probably would have gone into a court martial full of righteous fury. When Dr. Gold--a tall black guy who was obviously ex-military from his shaved head all the way down to his perfectly-shined shoes--opened a door to the waiting room and called Nate back, Nate stood up, square-shouldered and grim, face devoid of expression, and followed without a word.

Dr. Gold's eyes skipped past Nate to Brad, who had Linus asleep on his chest, a diaper bag between his feet, and an ancient copy of People Magazine open on his knee. Brad raised his eyebrows and gave the faintly challenging smile he could get away with to an officer who wasn't directly in his chain of command. Dr. Gold's lips twitched before he stepped back from the door to let Nate through.

A couple of minutes later, Linus finally woke up from the limp, sodden sleep he'd fallen into four hours ago on the Beltway. Brad knelt on the floor to change him, unable to resist making the whole operation ostentatiously efficient under the bored gaze of the receptionist. When he'd squared everything away, he pulled the waiting bottle out of its pocket and settled back into his seat with Linus tucked safely against his chest. Brad did not look up to see if he was being watched.

Linus was halfway through his bottle when Brad heard the faint, distant sound of Nate yelling. He couldn't make out words, but he knew that voice. He focused on his breathing like he was aiming a rifle. Linus, so intent on drinking that he had a little wrinkle on his forehead, didn't seem to notice at all.

Nate quieted down within about thirty seconds, and only then did Brad glance up toward the receptionist. She offered him a warm, soft smile, and Brad was too thrown by it to do anything but nod and return his attention to Linus.

Brad managed to burp Linus without requiring a change of clothing for anybody, and then settled Linus in his arm.

"Sorry I didn't bring your book, little man," Brad said, studying the options on the table next to his chair. "We're not rotting your brain with tabloids."

He grabbed Popular Mechanics because it said SCIENCE on the cover and promised new cars, dinosaurs, and teleportation.

"Here we go, everything a growing boy needs," Brad said, and glanced at the date, curious about how old the new cars were going to turn out to be.

February 2003. He automatically translated the date to the place: Kuwait. He glanced toward the door--Nate had been quiet now for twenty minutes, and the hour was more than half gone--and then cleared his throat and flipped past the ads for cigarettes and hairspray and the Army in search of something worth reading to Linus, who was still looking up at him, waiting for him to say something interesting.

"Dinosaurs," Brad announced, and started reading.

At fifty minutes past the hour, Brad stopped and set the magazine aside, listening. Nearly another minute passed before he heard low voices on the other side of the door, but he stayed seated until Nate stepped through, looking tired and determined, holding a prescription-pad slip in his left hand.

Brad gave him a questioning look, and Nate nodded and came over to him, wordlessly taking Linus from Brad's arms and cuddling him to his shoulder. Brad stood, shouldering the diaper bag and putting a hand on Nate's elbow to turn him toward the exit.

---

Nate took the driver's seat. Brad, after a few seconds of consideration, took the passenger seat. Nate didn't say anything until they were out on the street.

At the first red light, Nate said, "I need to stop at the drugstore."

Brad nodded.

"I have to ask you for another favor. A series of favors," Nate said.

"Nate, I'm not going to say no."

"Yeah," Nate said. "But I have to ask, and it's.... He doesn't want to put me on Prozac or something right away. He thinks my PTSD was getting worse for a while before Linus was born, at the same time that I was losing sleep over breaking up with Cory and worrying about having full custody, and then it got a lot worse when Linus was born and I completely stopped sleeping."

Brad nodded. "So the prescription is for sleeping pills, and you need me to take care of Linus at night when you're knocked out?"

"Don't," Nate said sharply, and then sighed, opening and closing his hands. "You don't have to make this easy for me."

Brad gave that the solid ten seconds of silence it deserved and then said, "Nate, I don't have to do any of this. Yes, I will get up with your kid at night so you can get enough sleep. I've already been doing that."

Nate blew out a breath. "Some people have paradoxical reactions to sedatives. It could just make the hypervigilance worse or cause some other side effects. I need you to be my spotter."

"Done," Brad said. "And Ray's already offered to come out here when I have to leave. You don't have to be on your own."

Nate snorted. "Yeah, he emailed me the day after you showed up to say he was taking his turn next and that you probably wouldn't mention it. He keeps sending me pictures of things he's going to bring Linus as presents."

Brad felt almost physically jolted by the idea of Ray going over his head to the LT, and, simultaneously, the idea of Ray buying his way into Linus's affections when Brad had never given him anything.

"Good," Brad said after an unavoidably noticeable pause. "Then you're covered."

"For now," Nate said under his breath, and Brad didn't have an answer for that.

---

Nate came back from the kitchen with a bottle just as Brad finished changing Linus.

"Do you mind feeding him?" Nate held out the bottle, and Brad shook his head as he took it, offering Nate a neatly wrapped dirty diaper in exchange.

Nate smiled wryly at the trade and took the diaper back to the kitchen, dropping it into the trash with a surprisingly solid thud. Brad gathered Linus up and settled on the couch to feed him, listening as Nate poured himself a glass of water and pointedly rattled the pill bottle he'd left on the kitchen counter.

When Nate came back with the little orange bottle and the glass of water, he went straight over to his desk. He set them down and then dug through a couple of drawers before he came up with a pad of paper and a pen.

"I should go to bed once he's down," Nate explained, flipping open the pad without looking up. "It'll take about half an hour for the pill to kick in, and I have to do some homework before I fall asleep."

Brad raised his eyebrows. "Homework?"

Nate glanced up and shot Brad a familiar grimly amused look.

"It's the other half of my therapy prescription. I'm supposed to get more sleep." Nate set down the paper, picked up the pill bottle, and tipped out one pill--where Brad could see how many he was taking, though he didn't make much of a show of it--and knocked it back, taking a quick swig of water to wash it down.

"And I'm supposed to do this," Nate went on, as though there had been no pause, waving a hand at the pad of paper. "Keeping track of some of my thought processes, so I can learn how to redirect them when they go bad on me. Ultimately I'm supposed to learn how not to be afraid of being afraid, or get angry about it, or...."

Nate trailed off as he started writing. Brad watched him in silence until he paused, forehead wrinkled in concentration.

"You sound like you think it's bullshit."

"It's not," Nate said evenly, and started writing again. "It's one of the most scientifically quantifiable forms of therapy. I just don't like being told how to think."

Brad nodded. That was so self-evident it was almost meaningless. "I can't imagine anyone would."

Nate just nodded and kept writing, so Brad returned his attention to Linus. The bottle was three-quarters gone--tipped up almost vertical--when Nate spoke again.

"Don't look at this one, okay?"

Brad looked up, startled, but Nate was staring fixedly at the page, though his hand was still.

Brad shook his head. "Of course not."

Nate did look up then, holding Brad's gaze for a few seconds before he nodded. "Thanks."

Nate flipped the cover closed on the pad of paper and put it away in the top desk drawer. He shut off the desk light and came to sit close against Brad's side, their bare arms pressing together.

Brad tugged the bottle out of Linus's mouth and handed it to Nate without looking over. Linus's mouth kept working for a few seconds, his blobby tongue poking out through his pursed lips, before he realized it wasn't working. Linus opened his eyes with a grunt of annoyance, and Brad grinned and tipped him into Nate's waiting arms.

"Sure, piss him off and then give him to me," Nate grumbled, but his voice was warm, and he leaned into Brad as he got the bottle plugged back into Linus's mouth. "There you go, Linus, I've got you, you're not going hungry."

Linus settled down, looking perfectly content, and Brad tried not to think too much about the warm feeling in his own chest. The quiet between them didn't offer many distractions, so Brad reached for his own.

"I have just one question."

Nate gave him a quick, slightly wary look.

Brad let his smile spread slowly, a little in advance of the words. "Linus, Nate? Really? Linus?"

Nate huffed and elbowed him sharply, without letting the bottle get out of position, though the milk sloshed a little inside. "I named him after my grandfather, Brad. The horseshoe was his; it's melted-down shrapnel he took in World War Two."

"Oh," Brad said, and gave a respectful nod. "Okay, understood."

Linus finished his bottle. Brad reached over to the desk for a spit-rag and dropped it over Nate's arm. Nate turned Linus upright against it, propped on his lap, and started rubbing his back.

"Ulysses, though," Brad said, watching the steady motion of Nate's hand.

Nate did smile a little at that. "Better than the Greek version. Odysseus was the only soldier I could think of in literature who made it home safely in the end. His wife was waiting for him, he found his son. That seemed important, right then."

Brad had looked up a summary of The Odyssey once when Linus was sleeping, so he'd figured it was something like that. All the same, hearing Nate say it made the image of Nate in that first terrifying day of fatherhood uncomfortably vivid. Brad gave in to the minutes-old impulse to put his arm around Nate's shoulders, and Nate tipped his head back onto it with a smile. Brad leaned in for a kiss.

Linus let out a truly impressive belch. Brad jerked back and Nate started laughing. When Nate turned Linus around to reveal his startled expression, Brad joined in, leaning into Nate as he settled Linus against his chest. Even after they stopped laughing, Linus stayed wide-eyed, looking back and forth from Brad to Nate. Brad settled his free hand on Linus's belly, curling his arm around Nate's to reach.

"We've got you, little man. Go to sleep."

Linus's gaze settled on Brad when he spoke, and he blinked a couple of times and then yawned hugely, tailing off into a little kitten-noise before he mashed his face sleepily against Nate's shirt.

"Oh, I see how it is," Nate muttered. "You swoop in for a week and he'll do anything you say."

Brad had to take a breath before he could say lightly, "I am obviously destined to be the cool dad."

Nate smiled, but he didn't look up. Brad ducked his head to kiss the corner of Nate's mouth, and this time Linus didn't interrupt them.

"I should put him down," Nate murmured after a while. "We should get to bed."

They'd killed fifteen minutes of Nate's estimated thirty, but that left them another fifteen to get Nate truly relaxed. Brad smiled against Nate's mouth. "Good plan."

Brad stood up and Nate followed him a second after and went wide-eyed, wobbling. Brad steadied him, and Nate leaned against him for a few seconds, blinking, eyes fixed on the far wall.

"Okay," Nate mumbled. "I can feel that."

"You got Linus?" Brad kept his hands on Nate.

"Yeah." Nate straightened up firmly, hoisting Linus a little higher against his chest. "Yeah, I'm good. Come on, bedtime."

Nate would never overestimate his ability to take care of Linus, so he couldn't be too far gone. Brad let him go, and Nate turned crisply away. Brad went and checked the door and turned off the lights while Nate headed straight to the bedroom. When Brad got there, Linus was already down and Nate was standing shirtless by the foot of the bed, swaying slightly as he tried to get his jeans undone.

Brad got one hand on Nate's hip and one on his shoulder, steadying him, and Nate looked up with a lazy smile at the same time he got his pants open. His pupils were blown, his mouth hung slightly open as he smiled, and his cheeks were flushed pink.

"You," Brad declared, leaning in, "are fucking stoned."

"Yeah," Nate sighed against Brad's mouth. "If I lie down now I'm gonna fall asleep."

"You should lie down, then," Brad pointed out, but he didn't take his steadying hands off of Nate, and definitely didn't push him toward the bed.

Nate hooked an arm around Brad's neck and shook his head, his lips brushing Brad's. "Not yet."

Brad shifted the hand on Nate's shoulder down to his side. "Waiting for something?"

Nate leaned forward, pressing his other hand to the small of Brad's back. "You."

Brad couldn't help smiling as he kissed Nate. Nate rocked against him, a full-body press, and Brad's hand on Nate's hip slid easily into his unfastened jeans, getting his hand on Nate's ass to press him closer. Nate took his hand off Brad to shove his own jeans down a little further as he started really grinding against Brad's hip, making faint frustrated noises into the kiss.

Brad broke away, tightening both hands on Nate's hips. "Let me, Nate."

He dropped smoothly to his knees. Nate wobbled again, but Brad had him braced and Nate got with the program fast enough, spreading his feet to a safer stance and bending enough to settle his hands on Brad's shoulders. Brad leaned in to mouth at his dick through his shorts, watching Nate's abs go tight as he gasped and shivered. Brad closed his eyes for a few seconds, memorizing all of it, the heat and the muscular press of Nate's dick on the other side of his underwear, the smell of him, Nate's weight holding him here, the sound of Nate breathing above him, fast and careless.

Nate's weight shifted onto Brad's right shoulder--Nate's left hand--preparatory to Nate trying to use his right hand for something else. Brad beat him to the punch, reaching up and peeling Nate's boxers down. Nate moved anyway, getting a grip on his own dick before Brad had to decide whether to go for it hands-free or trust Nate to keep his own feet without Brad holding on.

Brad left his hands where they were and ducked his head, licking up the line of Nate's knuckles, making his fingers twitch and not quite touching his dick. Nate shifted his grip and Brad tilted his head, licking over Nate's fingers, flicking his tongue against the pad of Nate's thumb. Nate made another frustrated noise and moved his hand, jacking himself, and Brad leaned his head against Nate's hip and watched, hands tight on Nate's hips, until Nate's hand on Brad's shoulder shifted in, pressing against the side of his neck.

"Brad." It was a plea, though not a question.

Brad opened his mouth and didn't bother trying to figure out what to say; he swayed back enough to look up and meet Nate's eyes as he put his tongue to the head of Nate's dick, just pressing it there to get the sharp-salty taste of him.

Nate pushed, his knuckles bumping Brad's chin, his dick skidding in along the wetness of Brad's tongue, and Brad closed his lips around the head of Nate's cock and sucked softly, breathed through his nose and then sucked again. Nate's eyes were on him, wide and dark and unwavering, and Nate's fingers tightened and loosened rhythmically on Brad's shoulder.

The pressure of Nate's hand against Brad's chin vanished, and Brad pushed forward, taking Nate's dick further into his mouth as Nate's hand drew back. Nate let out a long shuddering breath and pressed one knuckle against Brad's lower lip, and Brad pulled off slowly and smoothly, letting Nate's hand follow him.

They went back and forth like that, gathering speed as Nate got harder. Nate's breathing got more ragged, gusting half-swallowed words down on top of Brad's head. Brad had to put some effort into balancing Nate, pushing first with one hand and then the other as Nate swayed in his grip, and all the while he was sucking him off slowly and patiently, ignoring his own dick, aching in his still-zipped jeans.

Brad pushed his tongue out past the head of Nate's dick on an upstroke, licking at Nate's fingers. Nate's grip went tight at the base of Brad's neck--fucking Vulcan neck-pinch territory, and he wondered if it would leave a mark and remembered it didn't fucking matter if it left a mark. Brad sucked suddenly harder, right at the head of Nate's cock.

Nate dropped his right hand to Brad's shoulder as Brad took Nate's weight on his hands. He bobbed his head a couple of times, taking him deep without the guide of Nate's fingers, only the urging of Nate's gasps and the spasmodic clenching of his hands.

Nate said, "Brad," sharp and clear.

Brad looked up and met Nate's eyes and then smiled and winked. Nate's eyes squeezed shut as he came, hips jerking in Brad's grip as come splattered onto Brad's tongue.

Nate held himself steady until Brad let his dick slip free of his mouth, and then Nate shuddered, his arms starting to give way. Brad stood nearly as smoothly as he'd gone down, his own dick throbbing insistently as soon as he moved.

Nate's arms looped readily around Brad's shoulders, and Nate leaned into him, pressing his forehead to Brad's throat, his bare skin pouring heat through Brad's clothes.

"Now you should lie down," Brad said. Nate was balanced at least partly on his own two feet, but he had the limpness of near-unconsciousness as he leaned on Brad.

Nate shook his head slightly against the crook of Brad's neck. "Your turn."

Brad laughed a little and contorted enough to kiss the back of Nate's neck. "Probably not going to be an even trade."

Nate shook his head again, but he dropped his right arm from Brad's shoulder and got his fingers tucked into the front of Brad's jeans, which was enough to make Brad's dick harder, straining toward the promise of Nate's touch.

Brad closed his left arm around Nate and finally opened his right hand, letting go of Nate to get his own pants undone. Nate's hand followed Brad's into his pants, curling around Brad's dick as he pulled it out. There wasn't a lot of strength to Nate's grip, but just the warmth of his touch was enough to make Brad shake right now. Brad leaned into Nate, and Nate braced just enough to let him, keeping them balanced.

Brad tangled Nate's fingers with his as he closed his hand on his dick, jacking himself in fast, tight strokes while Nate pressed clumsy, wet kisses to the side of his neck. Brad closed his eyes and leaned his cheek against Nate's hair. He exhaled a long, shaky, silent breath as he came, spattering Nate's stomach and dripping down over their fingers.

Brad stood still, focused on keeping them both upright, while Nate wiped his hand on the back of Brad's underwear and then helpfully pushed them, and Brad's jeans, further down his legs. Brad wiped his own hand on his shirt and then got both hands on Nate, holding him still while Brad kicked his own pants off.

He turned Nate and then shoved him just hard enough to tip him over. Nate dropped heavily, bouncing slightly when he hit the bed on his back. He opened his eyes just enough to glare sleepily at Brad, and Brad grinned and took off his shirt before he bent to tug Nate's pants off his ankles. Nate squirmed away up the bed, reaching for the night stand, Brad's come still wet on his belly.

"There's a spit rag here somewhere," Nate mumbled, starting to turn onto his side to look for it.

Brad moved quickly around the bed--sparing a fast glance to be sure that Linus was still sleeping undisturbed in his crib--and grabbed a box of wipes instead. He moved onto the bed, straddling Nate's hips, and Nate fell onto his back, lying still while Brad cleaned him up. He was asleep by the time Brad finished, and Brad cleaned his hands for good measure and then took the wad of dirtied wipes and threw them out in the bathroom, shutting off the bedroom light as he went.

By the time he came back Nate was snoring, but he stopped when Brad rolled him onto his side. Brad spooned up behind him, just to keep him properly situated, and was asleep himself before he had time to think anything of it.

---

Linus woke up crying. Nate didn't wake up, though he mumbled something anxious-sounding.

Brad murmured, "Shh, I've got him, it's okay," against the back of Nate's neck. He shut the door behind him as he took Linus out to the living room. Linus cried while Brad changed his diaper, cried while Brad made him a bottle, and for ten truly alarming seconds, cried instead of accepting the bottle.

When he finally did get down to it, Brad curled over him and kissed his forehead. "That's my boy."

Linus didn't respond, and in the quiet of him not crying Brad could hear Nate snoring in the bedroom. He waited for some other response, some objection, but it didn't come. Not from them, and not from himself.

"That's my boy," Brad repeated out loud, deliberately. Linus waved one hand but didn't stop steadily sucking.

Nate had only smiled when Brad called himself Linus's dad--the cool dad, sure, but they both knew which was the important word there. Brad might tell himself he knew better than to think it meant anything real that Nate wanted to sleep with him, wanted somebody to lean on, somebody to get off with, during the roughest time of his life. But he couldn't tell himself it meant anything other than what it meant for Nate to agree, however tacitly, however obliquely, that Brad was Linus's dad.

Brad might have to leave in a week, but he was coming back. There was no for now about this, not where it mattered. There was just this.

---

Linus apparently took that as a challenge: he slept barely ninety minutes at a time for the rest of the night. By seven in the morning Brad was yawning almost too much to drink his coffee while Linus sucked down another bottle.

There was a medium-strength yell--pillow-muffled and sleep-slurred but probably Brad?--from the bedroom. Brad gulped down the rest of his coffee and moved in that direction even as he heard the arrhythmic multi-stage thudding of Nate getting out of bed. By the time he made it to the bedroom doorway Nate was on his feet, rubbing his head and blinking.

He looked at Brad--sweatpants, t-shirt, baby--and then down at himself. "I'm naked."

"Affirmative," Brad said, trying not to yawn again.

"I don't," Nate said, scrubbing a hand over his face. "I'm not--what--"

"You're not really awake yet, you're just not drugged unconscious anymore," Brad volunteered. "Go back to sleep, we're fine."

"I can't," Nate mumbled, looking confused. Brad had never seen him helplessly disoriented like this; it was weirdly both endearing and disturbing.

"It's okay," Brad said, stepping farther into the room.

Nate seemed to latch on to the idea of moving; he walked straight into Brad, wrapping his arms around him and Linus together.

"Good morning." Nate ducked his head, probably talking to Linus although there was no telling right now. Maybe he just couldn't hold his head up. "You're okay? Everybody's okay?"

"Everything's fine," Brad assured him. "Linus is fine."

Nate tightened his arms around them for a moment, kissed the top of Brad's shoulder, and turned away. Brad stood there and watched him rebound hard off the night stand before he managed to fall back into bed.

When he was snoring again, Brad looked down at Linus and said seriously, "That is your daddy's brain on drugs."

---

Brad was stretched out on the couch with Linus asleep on his chest, watching with his eyes half-shut the crap that passed for Saturday morning cartoons these days.

"We'll get you some Schoolhouse Rock," Brad promised Linus, running a hand up and down his back. "At least you can sing along with that."

"They still show that one sometimes," Nate said, and Brad froze, startled, as he looked up and saw Nate coming over to the couch. He was fully clothed, not yet showered or shaved but looking basically alert and present.

He perched on the edge of the couch at Brad's hip, setting one hand over Brad's on Linus and leaning over the baby to kiss Brad good morning. Brad smiled and curled up into it and then flopped back as Nate sat up.

"I think they do, anyway," Nate added. "It's not out of the question that I hallucinated it on day eight."

"Saturday," Brad translated. "A week ago."

Nate blinked and then nodded. "A week ago."

"Remote's all yours if you want to look for it," Brad offered magnanimously.

Nate smiled and then looked away, toward the TV but not at it. Brad felt the chill of dread hit his stomach as Nate's smile fell away into a pensive look.

"Did I," Nate said, and then shook his head. "Did you notice anything last night? Did I seem to have any side effects?"

"You were out like a light once you were actually on the bed," Brad said slowly. "I didn't notice you having nightmares, you were sleeping pretty hard. Do you remember--"

And he stopped short, because Nate winced.

"Nate," Brad said, remembering to breathe in and out and to keep his hand on Linus light. "What do you remember."

Nate shook his head. "It's fine, it's--I assume we had sex, which I know I would have wanted. I trust you--"

"Nate," Brad repeated, holding down something unhelpful that felt like panic. "What is the last thing you remember."

Nate sighed, squared his shoulders, and looked over at Brad. "I remember making Linus a bottle while you changed his diaper. I remember looking at the clock and thinking I should take a sleeping pill soon. I don't remember actually taking it, but I kind of remember sitting on the couch with you and holding him. And then I remember waking up naked this morning and hugging you and being too groggy to function and going back to bed. I'm pretty sure that's where the bruise on my knee came from."

Brad elected to focus on Nate, on this moment, and not on any of the implications of that. "You're pretty calm right now. You're not surprised."

"It's a listed side effect," Nate said. "Memory loss. I didn't think it was likely, but I didn't look up any double-blind studies to check the odds. They list seizures and death, too."

"Seizures and death, I would have known how to handle," Brad said sharply, drawing a startled look from Nate. "You didn't tell me you might be fucking roofied."

"It's okay," Nate said, "I--"

"If you say you trust me I will fucking--" Brad sat up, handed Linus to Nate, and scrambled off the couch, away from them both.

That had been obviously stupid, in hindsight. He hadn't asked Nate what the side effects might be, hadn't read the fucking pamphlet himself rather than rely on Nate to supply information about his own condition; he'd been fucking careless. He'd been careless with Nate, with Nate's safety, after Nate had asked him to be on the lookout.

Behind him, Nate said evenly, "Brad, whatever I did, whatever I said--"

"You didn't--" Brad stopped short. You didn't say anything. You let me say it and then you smiled.

Brad shook his head and didn't turn around. "You're going to have to do your fucking therapy homework over again. Top desk drawer."

"Okay," Nate said.

"You asked me not to look at it," Brad said. "I told you I wouldn't. When you were done you sat down with me on the couch. I gave you Linus and you finished feeding him and you carried him into the bedroom and put him in his crib, and then--" and then Brad had realized Nate was stoned, and he'd had sex with him anyway, because Nate wanted to, because going down on a guy wasn't taking advantage of him, because he'd have done the same if Nate was drunk, because they'd gotten off together before and he knew Nate was all right with it.

"We got off, and then we went to sleep. That's what happened."

Nate stayed silent, and Brad managed to stand still through a count of thirty before he turned. Nate was sitting upright on the couch, all straight lines except for Linus asleep on his shoulder. Brad couldn't help seeing them as a unit like that, perfectly contained, perfectly complete.

Nate nodded. "Thanks for telling me what happened. I'm sorry I didn't warn you about the side effects."

Brad nodded back. "I should have asked. I should have checked."

Nate didn't say anything to that. Brad wanted him to, wanted to yell when Nate said it wasn't Brad's fault, but Nate didn't give him the opening.

Nate said, "How was Linus?"

Brad shrugged stiffly. "Up and down every hour and a half for eight hours, so I'm--" even as Brad said it it was true, a crushing weight of exhaustion dropping onto his shoulders, "--pretty beat. I'm gonna go grab some shuteye, if you're all right with him."

"We're fine," Nate said, and that was all Brad needed to hear before he turned and walked away.

---

He willed himself to sleep pretty quickly, only to wake up with a start at the first sound of Linus fussing. He knew Linus was fine with Nate. He lay there with his eyes closed, trying to fake himself back to sleep while cataloguing every sound from the obvious to the minuscule that told him Linus was just fine with Nate. Of course he was. Nate was Linus's dad.

Brad tried to push that thought aside and focus on something else, anything else, but it lodged in the front of his mind and prickled at him, useless and inarguable.

Brad played possum as hard as he could when he heard Nate moving in his direction, but Nate just laid Linus down and then sat on the edge of the bed between Brad and the crib. "Room for one more?"

Nate knew he wasn't asleep; there was no dignity to be saved by pretending he was. Brad opened his eyes and met Nate's searching gaze.

Brad thought he kept a pretty good poker face, but whatever Nate saw was enough. He scooted closer and then knelt up to straddle Brad's hips, folding down to look Brad in the eye with his hands braced beside Brad's shoulders.

"Are you ready to tell me what happened that you left out of your summary earlier?"

Brad shook his head.

"Okay," Nate said, obviously having expected that. "In that case, I'm cashing in the question you can't refuse to answer. Exactly what kind of sex did we have that I don't remember?"

"I sucked you off," Brad said baldly, aware that the bare fact of mouth and dick was a bigger lie than no information at all. "You were pretty useless after that, so I jerked myself off."

"Nothing else?" Nate said. "Zero to blowjob, you just pushed me down on the bed and put me to sleep with your mouth?"

Brad fixed his gaze on the ceiling over Nate's shoulder. "We kissed on the couch for a while before you were sure Linus was out and wanted to put him down. Once he was down, you wouldn't lie down until we'd both come, because you knew you would fall asleep once you did."

"So you were on your knees for me," Nate said meditatively. "And then--did you stay on your knees and jerk off like that?"

"Stood up," Brad reported, remembering the weight of Nate's increasing bonelessness. "Had to get you by the shoulders to hold you up."

Nate nodded. "Was I completely unconscious? I can't imagine being awake enough to stand and not wanting to touch you. Trying to touch you."

Brad remembered Nate's fingers caught between his own, Nate's wrist pressing against his as he jerked himself off, Nate's mouth on his neck.

Aware of the impulse, aware he could resist it if he wanted to badly enough, Brad raised his right hand and rubbed his fingers against the side of his neck where Nate's mouth had trailed open-mouthed kisses. He had looked carefully a few hours earlier; there was no mark.

Nate didn't say anything, just ducked down over Brad, following Brad's fingers with his mouth, licking over and between them. Brad tilted his head, giving Nate access as Nate kissed his way up Brad's throat. Brad closed his eyes, letting Nate do what he wanted, but Nate pulled away when he got to the point of Brad's jaw and Brad had to look again.

Nate pushed himself up and shook his head, looking down at Brad with a rueful little smile. "I didn't mean to do that. I'm going out of order."

Brad raised his eyebrows.

"I'm sorry," Nate said seriously, holding eye contact without flinching. "Not just because I didn't tell you, but because I made a considered decision not to tell you. I didn't want to think about possible side effects because I didn't want to trigger some kind of self-sustaining anxiety cycle over what might happen. I was thoughtless. You needed that information. If you'd had to deal with me having some kind of medical emergency and I hadn't warned you--"

"Hey," Brad said, his anger failing in the face of Nate's goddamn earnestness, and the sudden awareness that Nate had shaved while Brad was asleep. "Nate, like I said. I would have known what to do about that."

Nate nodded. "I know. You would have handled it. You're handling me having memory loss. You know how to make do. That doesn't mean it wasn't a shitty thing for me to do, sending you into that situation without all the intel I could possibly give you on what to expect. I regret it and I'm sorry."

Brad nodded slowly and then corrected, "You didn't send me anywhere, Nate. You were right here with me the whole time."

Nate smiled. "I hope so. And I know you don't want me to talk about this, but Brad, I was betting on us having sex last night. I knew I wouldn't want to take that pill and then lie in bed staring at the ceiling. I knew you'd want to distract me. That's what I meant when I said I trusted you. I trusted both of us. I hate that I can't remember having your mouth on me for the first time, but you couldn't have done anything I didn't want you to do. Just..." Nate shook his head. "Not logically possible."

Brad nodded again. "I did figure that out, actually."

"Okay," Nate said. "Well, I'm working on not assuming you'll figure things out when it's important to me that you know them."

Brad smiled a little bit, because he could see where this earnest and thorough apology was headed. "Are you going to warn me before you take your pants off, too?"

Nate snorted. "I'll keep you fully apprised of the situation, yes. Let me know if you have any questions."

"Roger that," Brad said, the end of the words muffled by Nate's mouth coming down onto his.

Nate kissed him carefully at first. Not tentatively, as if unsure of his welcome, but with care, lavishing attention on Brad's mouth. Brad could feel his dick stirring just from that, just from Nate's tongue on his, the drag of Nate's lips and the rush of his breath. It was good and it was a waste at the same time.

Brad pushed up into the kiss, nipping at Nate's lower lip, and Nate lifted his head. "Did you want to register an objection, Brad?"

"I was feeling inclined to reminisce," Brad replied, raising his hands and closing them around Nate's forearms, digging his fingers into the muscles.

"Last night, when I was on my knees for you--" Brad watched Nate's eyes flick down to his mouth and back up to his eyes, and he grinned, licking his lips and speaking slower. "You couldn't stand up without help. You had to keep your hands on my shoulders to hold yourself up. I liked that. I liked being the thing that held you up."

Nate smiled a little, his eyebrows tilting up, but he didn't say You liked me being the one holding you down.

Brad nodded anyway.

Nate made a thoughtful noise and raised one hand, setting it down on Brad's shoulder, but he lifted it away before he'd put much weight on it. It wasn't the same at this angle.

Nate put his hand back on the bed and shifted his whole body lower instead, knees sliding down and hands slipping up past Brad's head.

His weight settled onto Brad, and Brad put his arms around Nate, tugging him down the last hesitant half-inch. Nate grinned and ground down against him as he shifted forward for another kiss. Brad closed his eyes, breathing deeply to feel his body lifting Nate's weight on the inhale, and didn't think about anything beyond this, kissing Nate and keeping him here. He was getting hard, grinding against Nate, and he could feel that Nate was too, but there was no rush to do anything about that. He didn't doubt that Nate had a plan, and Nate had promised to keep him apprised.

Sure enough, right about the time when Brad's hips found a rhythm, pushing his dick up against Nate's thigh, Nate tilted his head back and said, "Brad."

Brad opened his eyes and got immediately distracted by Nate's mouth, wet and kissed-pink and hanging enticingly open as Nate caught his breath.

"Brad," Nate repeated, lips curving up, and Brad dragged his gaze up to Nate's eyes. Nate was grinning. "I'm going to blow you now, okay? I owe you one."

It wasn't a surprise, but Brad couldn't restrain the way his entire body responded to that, arching up against Nate, wanting it now. Still, Brad managed to keep his voice almost even as he said, "That seems fair."

If Brad closed his eyes he wouldn't know Nate was smiling at all. "I thought so. I'm also going to take my shirt off."

Brad nodded, and sat up when Nate pushed up onto his knees, tugging his own shirt off at the same time; he managed to avoid looking over at Linus as he did so, and if Nate looked, Brad missed it.

Nate pushed him gently back down to the bed, and his hands stayed on Brad, skimming down from his shoulders, over his chest; he knew it was nothing Nate hadn't seen before, but they'd never really had the opportunity to both look and touch at the same time. He could feel his skin heating under Nate's hands, like all the blood in his body wanted to be wherever Nate was touching him. This was new.

"I had my shirt on last night," Brad said, and Nate looked up sharply. "I didn't get around to taking it off until we were done."

Nate nodded, and then folded down over Brad--he had a sudden weird mental image of hajjis kneeling in prayer--and kissed the center of Brad's chest. He didn't straighten back up, just worked his way down Brad's body to his pants. He looked up when he'd hooked his fingers into them.

"Brad?"

"Ten-four," Brad said, reaching down and shoving lightly at the top of Nate's head. Nate resisted the push long enough to make the point that he could, and then he bowed his head and focused on getting Brad's pants off him. Brad watched Nate and focused on continuing to breathe.

Nate closed his hand on Brad's dick, and Brad's fingers tensed involuntarily in Nate's hair. Nate glanced up at him again, holding his eyes as he lowered his head to lick, and Brad shuddered as much for the look on Nate's face as the feel of Nate's tongue on the head of his cock. He rubbed his own tongue against the roof of his mouth, remembering the feel and taste of Nate last night.

Brad slid his hand down Nate's cheek, pressing his thumb to the corner of Nate's mouth. Nate looked over, turning his head to lick over the tip of Brad's thumb, then lapped at Brad's dick. Brad kept his hand on Nate's cheek, eyes just barely open as he watched Nate take him in.

He kept as still as he could under Nate's hand, Nate's mouth, didn't make a sound above ragged breathing. Nate was lying between his legs, not holding Brad down at all anymore, and he could have bucked, could have thrust, could have done anything. But he lay still and let Nate have him, let himself have the heat of Nate's mouth and the strong, steady grip of Nate's hand, Nate's perfect coordination. It didn't take long for him to get close; he'd always been ready to go wherever Nate would take him.

His fingers tightened on Nate's jaw and Nate looked up, pulling off Brad's dick almost entirely, just working his tongue against the head, mouth open around him. Brad nodded, Nate nodded back, and Brad closed his eyes and stopped breathing as he came, dropping his hand to clutch at the sheets rather than leave marks on Nate's skin. Nate sucked him through it, not letting up until Brad twitched away.

Exhaustion dropped onto him for the second time, softer now, a gently smothering weight. He didn't need the press of Nate's body to make him work at breathing anymore, and his eyes stayed half-shut even when Nate moved. Brad tilted his head back on the pillow to get him into view as he crawled up over Brad's body.

He kissed along Brad's collarbone and then up his throat again, brushing his lips along the stubble on Brad's jaw until Brad turned his head just enough to catch Nate's mouth with his. Now Nate seemed tentative, holding back, and Brad made a frustrated noise against his mouth and reached up to catch Nate's shoulder and pull him closer.

Nate took the hint, deepening the kiss, letting Brad have the taste of himself on Nate's tongue. Brad ran his hand down Nate's bare back to the top of his jeans. He slipped his fingers under, and that was enough to make Nate's whole body twitch down against him.

Brad smiled, and Nate lifted his head. "I promise not to be unduly shocked if you lose these," Brad offered, rubbing two fingers against the top of Nate's ass.

Nate rocked down into him, almost the same rhythm. The cloth of Nate's jeans was a strangely intense sensation against Brad's skin, not exactly good or bad, but mesmerizing.

"Good to know you're on board." Nate reached back and caught Brad's wrist, tugging his hand out of Nate's pants and pressing it down to the bed. "I've been informed that I was pretty useless when it was your turn to get off last night, so it's really only fair if you just lie there and relax while I take care of myself."

"Well," Brad said, and tucked his hand behind his head on the pillow. He was willing not to bring up Nate's hand on his dick last night if it meant letting Nate have his way now. "In the interests of fairness."

Nate pushed up off of Brad long enough to get his pants undone and shoved down. The sight of him tested Brad's resolve, and he was about to reach out when Nate's weight came down on him again, Nate's forearm a bar across his chest.

Nate met his eyes, and his smile had turned hungry. "Okay if I lean on you?"

"By all means." Brad could feel his breath strain against Nate's weight.

Nate pressed down for a kiss, his dick shoving hot against Brad's belly. He moved a little, hips hitching as he thrust lightly against Brad's skin, and then he pushed himself back up, reaching down with his free hand. Brad had exactly the right angle, lying there with his eyes half-closed, to look down between them and watch as Nate's hand closed around his own cock.

The sight of Nate jerking himself off in the space between their bodies sent little aftershocks of pleasure through Brad. If he could have gotten hard--if his body hadn't been three-quarters asleep already without him--he'd have been getting ready for round two. As it was, his breath caught, and Nate rocked forward without stopping the motion of his hand. Brad lifted his head to meet Nate in another kiss, and when Nate rocked back again, Brad raised one hand and wrapped it around Nate's arm, just to be touching him.

"Correct me," Nate said breathlessly, looking up at Brad again, "if I'm wrong. But I think if you were holding me up last night while you jerked off, you must have come all over me."

Brad nodded, mouth going dry with helpless want.

Nate's hungry smile got wider. "Good."

He pushed up a little higher, concentrating his weight on Brad's chest, giving Brad a better view as his hand sped up, working his dick until he shuddered and came in spatters over Brad's skin. Brad looked up to find Nate looking down, watching his own hand and his own dick. When he met Brad's eyes the hunger was still there even though he'd already come; his gaze was fierce and hot, holding Brad in place better than any weight.

Brad grinned, a come over here and make me smile, and Nate's full weight dropped onto him, Nate's sticky hand catching his jaw to hold him still as Nate kissed him roughly and thoroughly.

They were both even more breathless when Nate finally let up, and Brad's eyes slid shut almost at once. Even half asleep, he kept a hand on Nate when he shifted away. He didn't go far, and within seconds he was back, swiping something cool over Brad's skin. Brad laughed even as the smell hit him.

"Very fair."

"I woke up naked and smelling like baby wipes," Nate agreed. "So can you."

Nate lay back down half on top of him and was quiet for a while. Brad was nearly asleep when Nate said, "Whatever it was, I stand by it."

Brad opened his eyes; Nate sounded too serious to be ignored. He had his chin propped on one wrist, almost too close for Brad to focus on, and he looked as serious as he sounded.

"I don't think it was the sex," Nate said. "You were pissed that I didn't remember, but you didn't mind telling me what happened when we had sex, so I think it was something else, not the actual sex. And whatever it was that I said or did last night that I don't remember--I'll stand by it if you just tell me what it was."

Brad was too tired, and had already put himself too much into Nate's hands, to swallow the words any longer. "We were talking about Linus. I said I was obviously always going to be the cool dad."

Nate blinked twice--it was clearly nowhere near what he'd expected--and then a smile lit his face, spreading slowly as he got the idea and started to believe it. He was incandescent after a few seconds, and Brad couldn't help smiling back. He didn't even blink, trying to memorize the look on Nate's face. He hadn't seen it straight on before, hadn't seen those few seconds of surprise and then the instant when Nate understood him and was delighted by what he'd said, accepting it completely.

Nate opened his mouth, and Brad shook his head, raising a hand to press his fingers over Nate's parted lips, still stretched in a smile.

"That's all," Brad said. "You didn't say anything. You just smiled."

Nate pushed his hand down. "I stand by smiling, then."

"Yeah, I can see that."

"Well, stop." Nate reached over and covered his eyes. "Go to sleep, you need some shuteye before tonight. You're on fire watch again."

"He's a little young to be setting shit on fire when we're not looking," Brad muttered, but even as he said it he swatted Nate's hand away, pushing up to look over at the crib and make sure that Linus was still asleep.

Nate huffed and shoved Brad back down, sitting up and twisting away. When he came back he had Linus, and he set the baby down on Brad's chest and then pressed in close against Brad's side himself, throwing his arm over Linus and Brad together.

"There," Nate said against Brad's ear. "Problem solved. Now go to sleep."

Brad smiled, and laid his arm down over Nate's, and obeyed.

---

That night, after dinner and homework and fighting over which ABBA songs were the worst to sing to a baby--Linus, unhelpfully, didn't object to any of them--and putting Linus down in his crib, Nate sat on the edge of the bed with the orange bottle and a glass of water.

"Okay," he said. "I'm going to take this and then I'm not going to say anything or make eye contact with you."

Brad switched off the light, which meant his back was turned while Nate dropped the pill into his hand. When he turned back, Nate was still holding it there, waiting for Brad to be watching.

"You think you're joking, but you're not," Brad said.

Nate shrugged acknowledgment--he didn't know, he couldn't argue--and knocked the pill back, then lay down. Brad got in on Linus's side of the bed, and they lay there in the dark.

Brad remembered what Nate had said when he apologized: I didn't want to just lie there staring at the ceiling.

Brad reached over with his left hand, across Nate's body to catch his left wrist.

"Come here," Brad said, and turned onto his side, facing toward Linus, tugging Nate to him. "You snore when you sleep on your back."

Nate didn't resist, pressing up close against Brad's back, tucking his arm firmly over Brad's waist.

"And the best part is," Brad said, smiling just enough for Nate to hear. "In the morning you won't remember that I let you be the big spoon."

He felt the vibration of laughter against his back, but Nate didn't make a sound.

---

Linus relented, sleeping close to three hours at a stretch overnight. When the drugs started wearing off, Brad was half-asleep in bed, waiting to see which Fick would wake up next. Nate didn't yell this time when he woke up, just groped sideways across the bed.

The motion got Brad's eyes open and he spent a few entertaining seconds watching as Nate methodically patted his way across the foot of space neither of them were lying in. He found Brad's shoulder, squeezed it, and turned his head to squint at Brad while his hand continued to survey the terrain, traveling methodically down Brad's arm and back up.

"Hey," Nate yawned. "I have clothes this time."

"Your virtue is in fact safe with me," Brad assured him. Nate being sleepy wasn't nearly as disturbing when he was still in bed.

"Horse," Nate mumbled, scooting closer. "Barn door."

Brad turned onto his side and pulled Nate in, tangling their legs together. "Unlike virtually every other Marine you ever commanded, sir, I have no sexual interest in livestock."

"I am assured," Nate agreed, pressing a sleep-sour kiss to Brad's mouth. They didn't talk after that, trading lazy kisses until Nate slumped against Brad, heavy with sleep, and Brad followed his lead.

---

When Nate woke up for real he was obnoxiously well-rested. He kept looking around with wide eyes like he'd never seen Brad, or Linus, or his apartment before, and saying things like, "This is so weird, my chest doesn't hurt."

They went running, and Nate's constant scanning of their surroundings almost blended in with his generally disturbing state of sunny alertness. They ran mostly north this time, and Brad slotted their route into his mental map and watched Nate doing the same, taking note of every incline, every curb the stroller had to be hopped over. Nate's eyes darted to the sniper positions and the locations of potential cover.

He also talked to Brad, which was new. Occasionally he pointed things out to Linus as they passed, notwithstanding the fact that Linus was both asleep and probably unable to focus on things on the far side of the street. Nate said "good morning" to people they passed, smiled and nodded and looked completely plausible as a Civilian Jogger Dad if you didn't watch his eyes the whole time.

Nate offered Brad the first shower when they got back, and by the time Brad got out the sheets on the bed had been changed, the laundry was running, and Nate was scowling at the warnings on the back of a bottle of Windex. Brad took Linus from him first, and then the Windex. He gave Nate a kiss while Nate was still smiling ruefully, before he could say anything about it. Nate took the hint gracefully and went off to take a shower.

Brad put the Windex away on its high shelf and looked down at Linus. "Today is going to be a Grade-A officer-caliber fucking shitshow, little man."

Linus didn't have a response to that, so Brad propped the kid on his shoulder and went looking for his phone. He texted Ray first. Have you and Fick settled on dates?

He spent a few minutes considering what to send his mom--he and Nate still hadn't talked, and he still couldn't swear to her that this was going to work. Finally he gave up and sent By the end of the day I will probably need either bail money or the dates of Hanukkah.

Neither of them had replied by the time Nate popped back out of the shower, and Brad held down his own position as best he could over the next few hours, watching Nate bounce around from cleaning to cooking to working at his laptop to writing in his homework book, winding tighter and tighter with each lap around the apartment, getting progressively more obviously sick of being in the apartment.

Being pinned down somewhere didn't make it any more tolerable to stay in the same place indefinitely. Brad watched Nate and tried to work out the worst case scenario. At some point, if it got bad enough, he was going to break and fling himself out the door on a suicide mission just to get out.

Brad pegged that at an excursion to some fucking tourist trap. Nate would call it exposing Linus to culture--or somehow justify dragging Brad to see tourist shit because he was visiting--and then they would get to spend a few hours trying to prevent Nate from having a complete breakdown at the Tomb of the Unknowns with a thousand strangers looking on.

The best case scenario was some sort of genuinely necessary errand: with a concrete, finite mission to a location that was both nearby and familiar, they'd probably do just fine. It might not relieve Nate's restlessness any more than running had, but it might head him off from doing something completely disastrous.

Brad was still trying to think of something he could plausibly claim they needed--a delivery service had brought groceries and diapers while Brad was asleep the day before, which cut down his options--when Nate said, "I was thinking of taking Linus to visit my parents. We could go after the next time he eats."

That took the best case scenario off the table. Now that he'd suggested his own idea, Nate wasn't going to be foisted off onto something markedly easier. Still, visiting Nate's parents was way below visiting a war memorial on a sunny Sunday, so Brad didn't dig his heels in completely.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" He managed to keep his voice light, letting Nate choose his own level of "good idea" to address. He even succeeded in not saying sir. No need to turn this into any more of a bridge Nate was determined to take than it already was.

Nate didn't pretend not to know what Brad meant, which was almost reassuring.

"It's a thing people do, and I don't want to not do normal things. I can't let my condition keep Linus away from people. We've done the drive--we took Linus to the airport on Tuesday--and my dad hasn't seen him since I brought him home."

None of that actually added up to yes, I think this is a good idea, but that could only ever have been a lie, so it was just as well that Nate wasn't trying it.

"I don't know if you remember this," Brad said slowly, because he had to make the point. "but going to the airport didn't actually go that well."

He could see Nate's face closing down from persuasion into stubbornness with every word he said, but he had to try. "Why not invite your parents to come down here? You've been cleaning like you expect company, and it's--" a secure location, "familiar."

"I remember," Nate said, his words clipped. I'm not hearing the aggressiveness I'd like. "It's something I have to do, Brad. I have to push myself, I have to do things that challenge me. That's the only way I'm going to get better."

There was absolutely no utility in pointing out that Nate already found it a challenge just letting his mom hold Linus--and that had been here, on his own ground, with Brad standing right next to him for backup. Nate was determined to do this, and making him mad in advance was just going to mean he spent that much more time being mad.

"You told me that the other night," Brad said instead, making his words soft enough to deflect Nate off his primary trajectory. "That your therapy is about learning not to be afraid of being afraid."

Nate looked disarmed by that change in the angle of attack; he nodded and then sighed. "I've got a lot to learn," he admitted. "But I have to try."

Brad nodded. He had Nate's six, and he was going to hold that position as long as he possibly could, even if--when--it meant following Nate to stupid places. It wasn't the worst case scenario. It was almost certainly survivable.

"After Linus eats, then."

---

The drive up to Baltimore wasn't bad, except for the anticipation. Once they got off the freeway Nate was playing tour guide, pointing out places he'd hung out as a kid, a field where he'd played soccer, houses where his friends had lived. Brad obediently looked where Nate pointed, but his eyes kept coming back to the set of Nate's mouth, the tension of his hands, the constant restless wandering of his gaze.

His tells were getting less obvious as they wound through progressively quieter streets. Brad knew when they'd reached Nate's parents' street because his Stepford smile suddenly appeared as they rounded a corner. They turned in to the driveway of a house with a sightline to that end of the street, and as Nate turned off the car, it occurred to Brad that he was missing a vital piece of intel.

"Nate," he said, and when Nate met his eyes Brad could just barely see him in there, under the practiced calm and the plastic smile. "Do your parents know...."

Nate leaned in and kissed him, and when Brad closed his eyes he felt like Nate.

"I told my mom on the phone," Nate said, pulling back just far enough to breathe. "But she said she'd spotted us when she came to visit, thank you very much."

"I'll bet she did," Brad said, dredging up a smile of his own. That did answer all of Brad's questions, in fact.

The front door opened and Nate's parents both came out onto the stoop. Brad pulled away from Nate and got out of the car as Nate got out on the other side, and while Nate greeted his parents and submitted to hugs, Brad got Linus out of his car seat. Nate took the diaper bag before Brad had even made it around to the other side of the Jeep, but Brad managed to keep possession of Linus until they were inside with the door shut.

Brad kept his eyes on Nate as he handed off the baby to Nate's dad, but he couldn't read anything from Nate's expression. They found seats in the living room, and Brad stayed close to Nate while Nate's parents passed Linus back and forth, bringing out drinks and snacks and keeping up a bright patter of conversation. They talked about Linus, and about Nate and his sisters as babies, and other relatives of Nate's as babies, and other relatives of Nate's who had had or would soon have or might ever have babies, or who Nate in any other way needed to be updated on.

Brad kept quiet, filing away names and working out family relationships, answering as briefly as he politely could when asked direct questions. He kept one arm casually on the couch behind Nate, trying to pick up some kind of physical sense of him without getting into uncomfortable PDA territory.

At some point Nate's mother declared that they needed to take pictures, and she got up and handed Linus to Nate.

Brad's arm fell down onto Nate's shoulders without his volition. Nate didn't look at him, just cuddled Linus against his chest, and Linus, who'd been out less than ninety minutes, blinked his eyes open and yawned.

"Hey, buddy," Nate said softly, brushing a knuckle across his cheek. "Hey, there you are."

Brad leaned closer, shoulder to shoulder with Nate as he looked down at Linus. Tell me how daddy's doing, little man.

Linus's eyes darted back and forth between them, and he flailed his arms, his face starting to crumple.

"Yep," Brad knocked his shoulder against Nate's. "Definitely my turn to hold him. Come here, Linus."

Nate handed him over smoothly, in no apparent hurry, and Brad positioned Linus against his chest so that he was facing out, blinking curiously in the direction of his grandparents. Only when he'd secured Linus did Brad look up and realize that Nate's mom was already clicking away with the camera.

Linus made a little disgruntled sound, and Brad remembered to smile as he looked down, bouncing him a little. "Sorry, little man."

"Brad is pretty careful about allowing himself to be photographed," Nate said.

"Oh," Nate's mom looked crestfallen as she lowered the camera. "Brad, of course I won't--I wasn't thinking--"

Brad shook his head, still smiling. "It's fine as long as you don't email them to anyone with a dot-mil address. Could you send Nate copies for me? My parents will want to see them."

He felt Nate twitch very slightly at that, but he didn't look at Brad and didn't say a word.

Nate's mom just looked relieved. "Sure, of course--you said you'd be staying at Nate's for the rest of the week?"

"Something like that," Nate said, before Brad could answer, and Brad looked over at him. Before he could ask, or even wonder very much, what that had meant, Nate was saying, "Do you want us to actually all look at the camera and smile? We've got about two more minutes before Linus goes back to sleep."

"Nate, hey, don't jinx him like that." But when Brad looked down Linus was already doing the slow blink of impending sleep.

"Just a couple, your grandmother always complains if she doesn't get something that looks like it came from a portrait studio," Nate's mom said.

Nate pressed up against Brad's side and they all smiled for the camera, Brad jostling Linus enough to keep him awake a few seconds longer.

Once the camera was put away, there was a feeling in the air that the party was breaking up. They talked a little longer, but everyone was sitting a little closer to the edges of their seats, and pretty soon Nate's mom was gathering up glasses to take back to the kitchen. Nate picked up everything else and followed her out. That meant this was almost over, they were almost home safe, and Brad could take two minutes to go and take a piss before they drove back to DC.

He offered Linus to Nate's dad, excusing himself, and Nate's dad directed him to the location of the guest bathroom, which didn't require him to pass through the kitchen. All the better; he might get there and back before Nate realized that Linus hadn't been within grabbing distance of either of them for a couple of minutes.

When he got back to the living room Nate's parents were sitting on the couch where Brad and Nate had been, holding Linus while Nate took pictures with a slightly fixed and entirely dutiful smile on his face. Brad hesitated in the doorway, watching and repressing the urge to somehow extricate someone from this--Nate's parents kept up a bright and cheerful stream of chatter, and Linus was safely asleep--until Nate lowered the camera and looked right at him.

Nate dropped the smile, replacing it not with his blank air of calm but with a steady, resolved look. Brad tilted his head--are you sure, you don't have to--but Nate nodded firmly. Brad nodded back and came into the room to join him.

Nate handed the camera back to his dad, and took Linus from his mother in exchange.

"No, don't get up," Nate said, waving his parents down as he turned to hand Linus off to Brad. Nate dropped to perch on the seat his parents had shared. Brad sat down at his side but kept his eyes on Linus, letting Nate manage this himself.

"Mom, Dad," Nate said, sounding stiffly rehearsed. "I probably don't need to tell you, but I do need to say this out loud."

Brad shifted Linus to his shoulder and watched their faces. Nate's dad looked worried. His mom looked like she had in Nate's apartment, carefully expressionless.

"I have a probable diagnosis of PTSD. I had an assessment appointment last week, I have my next phone and office appointments scheduled. I'm doing cognitive reframing and I have a prescribed sleep aid that's working well so far."

As Nate spoke, Brad watched his dad relax a little, looking not surprised but relieved. Nate's mom kept very still, and didn't show anything. Brad thought again how like Nate she was with that poker face, and then he thought, oh.

"That's all," Nate said after a pause.

He stood, hauling himself up with a hand on Brad's shoulder, pushing him down slightly as he went. Brad stayed put, watching as Nate's mom got up, mirroring him.

She tugged Nate into a hug, and Nate just bowed his head at first, permitting it. She tugged his head down and whispered to him, her other hand rubbing his back. Brad spread his own hand on Linus's back and was suddenly, viscerally aware that even at twenty-six years old and eight inches taller than she was, Nate was still her baby.

Nate's shoulders jerked at something she said, and then his arms came up and he hugged her back, ducking his head down to her shoulder and holding on tight. Brad averted his eyes and caught Nate's dad still watching, covering his mouth with one hand, before he looked away and met Brad's eyes. Brad flinched from the contact, looking down at Linus instead.

He only raised his eyes when Nate cleared his throat and muttered, "Excuse me."

Brad watched him walk out the front door, and once again braced himself to stand and follow. He'd only shifted his weight when Nate's mom turned to face him, openly brushing tears from her face, and pinned Brad in place with a look.

"Thank you," she said, smiling, her voice steady.

"Ma'am," Brad said, unwilling to take credit for what Nate had done for himself and equally unwilling to contradict.

She didn't say anything else, just kept smiling at him and sat back down on the couch, taking her husband's hand. Brad figured he might as well get what intel he could out of this; Nate was probably fine, and would have told Brad to come with him if he hadn't wanted a few minutes alone.

"You're a therapist?" he guessed. Nate had seemed confident that his quick summation would be sufficient, and it made sense of the way Nate had simultaneously resented and defended his therapy. Don't you say that about my mom.

She nodded. "Nate asked me when he was fifteen not to express any judgments about his mental health."

Brad nodded slowly. "He decided a few days ago to tell people who needed to know. Another friend is going to come out and stay with him for a while when I leave, so he'll have someone to help him with nights, but I know he's going to need your support as well."

Nate's parents didn't actually look at each other, but Brad saw some communication pass between them--an exchange of touches, a shift of body language--before Nate's dad said, "I was wondering about that, Brad. You've been pretty quiet. You're staying in the Marine Corps as a career?"

"Yes, sir," Brad said, and realized that Nate had quietly run interference for him up until this point. Left alone with Nate's parents, he was going to get the what are your intentions toward our son talk, which was a strange sort of first. He'd only ever gotten to this point with Kristi, and he'd known her parents since he was twelve years old; he'd never gotten much further with a guy than maybe knowing his last name.

"I'll have my twenty years in before Linus is out of grade school," he added, looking down at Linus and feeling a little dizzied by that realization even as he said it like it was self-evident. "It's going to take me away from Nate and from Linus a lot; I'm on exchange to the Royal Marines for the next year and a half."

He stopped himself from saying more; that was a conversation he had to have with Nate before anyone else. He waited for them to ask more, to try to make him defend his service or his ability to be any kind of partner to Nate--he was bracing to refuse to defend either--but they didn't ask.

Instead, Nate's mom looked down at Linus and then back to Brad, and said, "I can see that you're very good with Linus, but does it bother you at all to be dating someone who already has a child?"

Brad put his head down and studied Linus, considering the question. The way she said it made Nate sound like a single mom he'd met on a blind date last week; they hadn't even started out anywhere near that, never mind where they were now. Even if he and Nate had never kissed, even if they'd never gotten to the point where Nate thought it was a good idea to introduce Brad to his parents, even if Brad had never had any right to think of Linus as his own kid--even then, Linus would have been a Bravo Two kid. He would always have been something to Brad, no matter how long it took Nate to finally let Brad know about him.

And now, after the week they'd had, after everything Nate had let Brad say and do, they were long past that. Brad and Nate had made their choices, and obviously Linus was part of the deal.

None of which Brad wanted to try to explain to civilians who figured he'd been dating their son for a week. Without looking up, Brad said, "I was just about the age Linus is now when my parents got me."

He gave them an extra second to put polite faces on, and then put his chin up and said evenly, "I've never belonged to a family that put biology first. I don't have any reason to start now."

Brad got two almost alarmingly warm smiles for that, and he looked away again, shifting Linus in his arms. He stage-whispered, "There you go, little man, no shotguns required."

Nate's mom laughed, and Nate's dad said, "Oh, we're long past the illusion that we can protect Nate from his relationship choices."

Brad smiled--he doubted Nate took direction in his personal life well at all--and then realized that he was holding in his arms the material evidence of Nate's last, apparently disastrous, relationship.

He looked up at Nate's parents--still smiling fondly at him, which did not make this any easier--and said cautiously, "Nate doesn't talk about Cory."

For this, Nate's parents actually did look at each other.

"Nate isn't talking to Cory," Brad elaborated when they stayed silent, even as he remembered Nate saying screen my calls and convince your friends to hate me. "Is he allowed to?"

"The agreement is informal," Nate's dad said. "But no, he isn't. He doesn't know where she lives, and he doesn't have her current phone number. We're staying in touch with Cory's parents, and we'll pass along pictures of Linus to them. In theory, they'll be able to visit Linus at times when we watch him for Nate; they don't want direct contact with Nate either."

Brad nodded slowly. "Is she--do you know if she's all right?" Their visit to the doctor, that how are you both doing, that should have been aimed at Linus's mom, too. Nate couldn't ask, but someone had to. "She just had a baby two weeks ago, is she...."

Another pause, and then Nate's mom said, "She's having a hard time. This wasn't easy for her. But she'll be all right."

Brad nodded--there was a deliberation in the words that told him he wasn't getting any more than that. He didn't really have any right to ask, nor was he honestly interested in knowing much more.

"I'd better go find Nate," Brad said, and this time no one tried to stop him when he got up.

Brad held Linus while each of his grandparents kissed him goodbye, and then received his own hugs. He dutifully hugged back this time, nodding his way through their assurances that they would worry about him when he was gone, and that he was welcome to come visit at any time, and finally escaped out the front door.

Nate was sitting so still in the passenger seat that Brad hesitated by the door and waited to see him breathing before he moved on to the back and got Linus settled into his car seat. When Brad came back to the driver's side, he saw the keys were already lying on the seat, and he picked them up and climbed in. He looked over at Nate for several seconds, waiting for Nate to show any kind of situational awareness, but he stayed where he was, slumped in the seat with his forehead resting against the window.

Brad reached over and prodded his thigh with one finger, and barely connected before Nate's hand closed hard on his wrist.

Brad waited, but Nate just held on. Brad flexed his fingers and considered the logistics of driving back to DC one-handed.

"That what you were thinking of when you said you needed to challenge yourself?"

Nate shrugged, then nodded, then let go. Brad took his hand back for exactly long enough to start the car, and then set it down on Nate's thigh, and kept it there all the way back to DC.

---

Nate got out of the car almost before Brad had turned it off and got Linus out of his car seat. Brad led the way back inside, unlocking the doors and holding them for Nate, who moved like it took all his concentration to hold on to Linus while putting one foot in front of the other. Once they were in the apartment, Nate went straight to the couch and dropped onto it with a soft thump, both hands steadying Linus against the muted impact.

Brad went and sat down beside him. After a while, he broke the silence to say, "I think that went pretty well."

Nate nodded in his peripheral vision. "It's fair game now that I said it. They'll tell my sisters."

Brad nodded understanding. They'd tell his sisters, which meant Nate wouldn't have to.

"I need to stay awake," Nate said next. "If I sleep for the next five hours I'll be too awake when it's time to take my sleeping pill."

Brad thought there wasn't actually much danger of Nate being too well-rested anytime in the foreseeable future, but he said, "Guess we'll have to keep you up, then."

Nate nodded, still staring vaguely toward the TV. Brad studied him, considering. All the tension had gone out of him; he reminded Brad of Linus, sleeping hard after that hour-long screaming fit, wrung out and exhausted. The difference was that any kind of threat or surprise right now would push Nate past that exhaustion. It was too familiar, too much like the way they'd functioned throughout the invasion, and Nate would go straight to high alert.

"No action movies," Brad opined aloud.

Nate winced and shook his head.

"I hoped it wouldn't come to this," Brad sighed, and he stood up and found his backpack, digging down to the bottom for the CD-folder full of burned discs. He flipped through the selection of bootlegs, considering, and then went straight for the hard stuff, taking it over to the DVD player. It started automatically--no menus--so the credits were already rolling by the time he got the TV turned on and returned to the couch to sit beside Nate, who was already laughing silently, his head tilting back in slow motion as it hit him.

Brad reached over and lifted Linus out of Nate's arms--Nate let him go without a twitch--and turned him so that his sleeping face was toward the TV.

"Linus," he said solemnly, while Nate's laughter ramped up to an actually audible sound. "This is Fantasia."

---

Brad sat up and pushed his pillow against Nate's stomach. Nate curled around it protectively and stayed on his side, never flickering an eyelash toward waking. Brad stood the rest of the way up and picked up Linus, carrying him to the living room for his first diaper change of the night.

When he took Linus into the kitchen, Brad discovered his phone sitting on top of the microwave, neatly in line with the row of clean bottles. He picked it up while Linus's bottle was in the microwave and flipped it open to a message from his mom.

Midnight and you haven't called for bail. Hanukkah is 12 7-15. Send pictures!

Brad glanced at the clock, but even with the time difference it was too late to call his mother for nothing important. He texted back Will do. Nate's parents took some of us today.

The microwave beeped, and Linus echoed it with a half-cry. Brad dropped his phone and got the bottle out, putting the lid on and shaking it one handed before testing it with a few drops on his own tongue.

Once he got the bottle into Linus's mouth and Linus had settled down to eat, Brad reached over and tapped out another message on his phone where it lay on the counter.

Linus wants whatever presents make the least noise.

---

The eight-hour mark after the sleeping pill came and went, and Nate stayed fast asleep. Brad took Linus out to the living room with him and checked his email and his phone. His mom had texted back Already shopping. Of course I won't get anything Nate will hate.

"Hear that?" Brad murmured. "You already have her wrapped around your little finger."

Linus squirmed in his sleep, mouth bending in something that looked like a smile, though Brad knew he was too young for it to be a real one. He found himself smiling back anyway.

Nate wandered out an hour later, looking wide awake. He came over to the couch and took Linus from Brad, hugging the baby to his chest and kissing the top of his head. Nate stayed sitting there, looking down at the baby. It wasn't sleepy abstraction; he was holding himself too carefully. He was refusing to look at or touch Brad while Brad sat blatantly watching him.

Brad kept very still and refused to think about worst case scenarios, about any scenarios at all.

"Let's go get coffee," Nate said when Brad had almost succeeded in making his mind entirely blank with non-anticipation.

It took Brad a few seconds to even hear what Nate had said, because he was bracing so hard against something worse.

Nate looked up with amusement almost covering the wary look in his eyes, and Brad forced his mouth and brain into gear. There were plenty of options, most of them hip local places, but only a few where Brad had noticed Nate studying the menu boards as they ran by.

"Starbucks or Potter's?"

Nate looked startled for an instant, and then pleased. He'd obviously expected resistance, but Brad wasn't going to argue about going somewhere they'd already run past a handful of times. Nate knew exactly how much he wouldn't like being a sitting target, but they'd be within sprinting distance of home if Nate got in over his head, and Brad was sure of the ground between here and most of the cafes and coffee shops within a six-block radius.

"I was thinking Starbucks," Nate said. His smile twisted a little, and he added dryly, "It's nice to know what to expect before I even walk in the door."

"Glad I don't have to explain the irony of railing against the man when you are the man, sir," Brad said. "Linus should sleep another hour, if you want to go now."

Nate leaned over and kissed him, fast but thorough.

---

Nate was on alert but kept his cool on the walk to Starbucks. Once inside and supplied with coffee, Nate led the way to a couple of chairs near the rear of the store--they sat with the wall at their backs and a good vantage on the door and everyone else in the room.

Since everyone else in the room consisted of parents with babies or small children, people squinting at laptops, and one guy monopolizing an entire table with a drift of papers and books, Brad felt pretty confident devoting all his strategic attention to Nate, who talked nonstop once they were settled. He started out staccato and brittle, and talked faster and more enthusiastically the more he added caffeine to his obvious adrenaline high. His eyes tracked nonstop over the room and the street outside the plate glass windows.

When he started gesturing, Brad stood up, took Linus from him, and sat back down. Nate stopped talking and focused on Brad long enough to look a little sheepish, but Brad just said, "Seriously, it's a wonder you survived that many consecutive philosophy classes without suffering repetitive strain injuries from the non-stop circle jerk."

Nate said, "I did know a guy who wound up in traction," and then he was off again.

Neither of them lingered in the process of drinking coffee; after the first five minutes it was purely and simply a test of how long Nate could stand to sit there, which turned out to be twelve and a half minutes. At that point, something happened--a car went by fast, and Brad thought that from the spot where Nate was sitting there would have been a startling flash of reflection off the windshields of the parked cars out front--and Nate went silent and froze, hands closing into fists.

Brad kept still and waited him out, and after about thirty seconds Nate said, "Let's go," in a low, controlled voice totally at odds with the story he'd just been telling about studying all night for some exam.

Brad nodded, and Nate stood up and led the way back out of the Starbucks, throwing out their empty coffee cups on the way. Brad had his hands full of Linus, and stayed on Nate's six until they reached the sidewalk.

Nate walked fast, looking everywhere, including checking in on Linus every ten or fifteen seconds. He was stretching his legs, and Brad had no problem keeping up, but two blocks from home Brad abruptly realized how hard Nate was working at not breaking into a run. Brad stopped walking, and Nate--tethered to Linus like they were handcuffed--stopped too.

"Nate, go," Brad said, taking a hand off Linus to wave down the street.

Nate looked up at him, uncomprehending, and Brad could see it on him, the need to move. He remembered being a kid with something furious and loud inside him fighting to get out, something that needed to scream or run or fight its way free. He remembered how he'd gotten over needing his mom to drive him down the freeway to get away from it, how he'd survived until he could jump on a bike and drive away himself.

"Run," Brad said. "Go, it'll help."

Nate looked for a second like he was going to kiss Brad right there in the middle of the sidewalk with cars going by. Then he leaned in and kissed Linus instead, resting his hand on Brad's hip for a second, hidden between their bodies, before he turned on his heel and took off running.

Brad walked after him toward the apartment, quickly enough to see Nate just keep on going past it, putting on speed. Brad slowed his own walk to a stroll, and made his way over to Nate's Jeep. It was parked in the sun, and Brad managed to haul himself up onto the hood one-handed and sat with Linus on his lap, enjoying the heat of the sun-warmed metal and the high vantage point while he waited for Nate to come back.

It took twenty minutes, and when Nate reached them he was dripping sweat and still looking a little wild, but he sounded almost normal when he said, "Sorry, I should have given you the keys."

Brad shrugged and handed Linus down to Nate, who took him gingerly and handed him back when Brad had his feet back down on the ground. But Linus didn't wake up and cry, and Nate turned away and walked at a normal pace to the door of his building to let them all in.

---

At 11:13 in the morning Nate said, "Phone appointment," and went and shut himself in Linus's bedroom with his phone. Brad put on Pocahontas, but she hadn't even met John Smith yet when Nate came back out to sit next to him on the couch.

Brad handed him the baby. They both sat there in silence for another few minutes, staring at the TV until Nate said, exactly as if he were making an unnecessary but inarguably correct observation about the movie, "I love you."

Brad looked over at him, and Nate looked back, meeting his eyes with a determined steadiness. Brad nodded, striving for the same tone and almost hitting it. "I love you."

Nate nodded and looked away, and then after a couple of minutes he grabbed the remote control and turned off the TV.

Nate kept his gaze fixed on the blank screen and spoke softly into the resounding silence. "I've been informed that there is no minimum sanity requirement for getting into a relationship, especially when you're already in the relationship and what you're really doing is putting off talking about how you're going to make it work."

Brad didn't look away from Nate. "It is going to work."

Nate finally looked over at him, staring for a few seconds before he turned his whole body to face Brad, shifting Linus up onto his shoulder. "You said before that the fact that you were here and the fact that I hadn't kicked you out covered a lot of what we had to say."

Brad shrugged. "I came looking for you when I had no idea why you cut me off for nine months, and I stuck around when I found out why. And you trust me."

Nate smiled, looking down at Linus. "And that's it."

"It's a start," Brad said, and reached over to put one hand on top of Nate's, resting on Linus's back. "We're doing this, and neither of us is going to back down because it's hard. I think you could do better than me, especially with a kid in the picture, but I'm not going to question my luck."

Nate looked up, startled, and Brad elaborated.

"I'm a Marine, Nate. I'm career. I'm not going to be around much and when I am I'll just be this guy passing through. There are a couple of wars on, and I'm going to be one more thing for you to worry about ninety percent of the time. I'll do my fucking best not to get myself killed, but I can't promise you shit."

Nate's eyes narrowed. Brad nodded.

"We're being deployed. Next month, Iraq. They gave me the option of switching to another unit to do more training instead, but like fuck am I skipping out on the guys I've been with for the last five months."

"You will never," Nate said, and then he broke off and looked away for a few seconds before he pushed Linus at Brad. Brad hugged Linus to his chest and Nate followed him right in, straddling Brad's lap and planting his hands on Brad's shoulders.

He looked angry in a weirdly simple, straightforward way as he said, "You will never be just some guy passing through. Never."

Brad shook his head. He hadn't meant it like that; he knew he was important to Nate. He was just never going to be very useful.

Nate wasn't letting it go. "If I don't see you again for ten years, I'll make sure Linus knows who you are, so he'll be as happy to see you again as I am. If I never see you again--"

Brad put a hand firmly over Nate's mouth. He didn't want to hear the end of that sentence; if he never came back he wanted Nate to move the fuck on, to find Linus a nice new mommy or daddy who would be around to make his lunches and tuck him into bed and do everything else Brad wasn't going to be around for.

Nate tugged Brad's hand off his mouth and held on to Brad's wrist as he leaned down to kiss him. Brad flattened his palm against Nate's chest, holding him off just far enough not to squish the baby. Nate backed off before either of them was out of breath, twisting to sit beside Brad. It was Brad's turn to stare at the darkened TV, giving Nate a moment to pull himself together.

"Anyway," Nate said, sounding almost calm. "You're not dropping off the face of the fucking Earth. You'll call when you can. I will write you the most boring letters you've ever seen go past the censors, but you'll know what I mean."

Brad shook his head. "For the next year and a half, you can send me the dirtiest combat jack material you can think up. And I want pictures of Linus, all the time. Just probably not in the same envelope."

Nate huffed a breath of laughter. "No DADT with the Royal Marines, huh?"

"Asking and telling are in fact actively encouraged if you have a hot boyfriend," Brad agreed. "And I have been repeatedly assured that they think DADT is bollocks and I can go right ahead and fuck anyone I like except the wives, girlfriends, and boyfriends of Royal Marines and no one in the States will ever hear about it from them."

Nate didn't argue with hot boyfriend--he smiled--but then tilted his head back against the back of the couch. "After next year, though. Linus makes it so much more dangerous for you, we're so much more obvious. I know you didn't want kids anyway, and this just--"

Brad waved a hand sharply, cutting Nate off.

"First," Brad said, scooting Linus up his chest, focusing for a beat on the warm weight of him, the solid, inarguable presence of this kid he'd never known existed before a week ago. "I still don't want 'kids'. But this kid right here, who has spent the last week pissing and shitting and puking on me and making sure I don't sleep more than three hours in a row and never letting me have both hands free and generally fucking torturing me into loving him--anybody who wants to stop me from being Linus's cool dad is going to have to pry him out of my cold dead hands."

Brad dared a glance over, but Nate had that smile on his face again, the same one he'd had the last time Brad called himself the cool dad, Linus's dad.

Brad hesitated, searching for the words and trying not to be distracted by that smile, the way it felt to stake that claim and have it accepted every time. "I'm going to have to lie about it. I'm going to have to pretend it's not like this, that he's not--that I don't feel like he's my kid too. But I will not hesitate to take the risk, and it's not as big a risk as you think it is."

"Brad, it would be a dishonorable--"

Brad shook his head. "You know too much about the chain of command to think it's fucking fair, Nate, or that I'm going to get treated the same as some half-trained DLI recruit. You know it's not black and white, the same standard for everyone."

Nate frowned, but he didn't disagree, and Brad laid it all out for him, the same way he'd worked it out for himself.

"You were a good officer and we probably owe you our fucking lives, but as far as the Corps was concerned there were ten more just like you waiting to take your place. You left, they didn't give a fuck. A combat-veteran recon E-6, with the level of training I have--this whole exchange is a long-term investment, not just in my skills but in keeping me happy with the Corps."

Brad shook his head, shifting Linus to the opposite shoulder and stretching his left arm. "Given what I'm hearing from guys at my level who've signed in the last year, when my re-up comes around I can not only get enough cash in a signing bonus to put Linus through the Ivy League school of his choice, odds are I can get written permission to fuck whoever I please as long as I don't put a gay wedding announcement in the Marine Corps Times. If I'm ever investigated my CO's going to demand video of me stating name, rank, serial number, and how much I love sucking cock. So if everybody you know in DC figures out that Linus has two daddies--unless you're hanging out with the Joint Chiefs, we're going to be fine. I’m too valuable for them to let me go that easy."

Nate gave the TV a dark look and said lightly, "Thank God there's a war on."

Brad shrugged and nodded. It was supply and demand and the chance to do what he was meant to do; he might not have chosen these wars, out of everything he could imagine, but he was never going to be wishing on a star for world peace. There didn't seem to be any real danger of that anymore anyway.

"It's weird if you think about it," Nate said, sounding calm and detached in a way that could only mean the opposite. "When you and I joined up--I couldn't imagine that there was ever going to be another real war, not with tens of thousands of troops on the ground, not going on for years. Peacekeeping actions, a few weeks mopping up after some three-day air war, but nothing like this. It seemed like big long ground wars were obsolete, didn't it? And now I can't imagine that the wars will ever end without being replaced by new ones."

Brad nodded slowly. It was true. War had changed--was changing on the ground over there, would keep changing--and it was also true that there would always be another one. There always had been.

Nate shook his head. "Brad, think. It's not always going to be our war. In twenty years it's going to be Linus's war."

Brad froze, his hands tightening instinctively on the baby.

"Linus, and Christeson's Maya, and Tony Junior, any kids Ray spawns, your sister's kids, every one of those toddlers at Starbucks--they're going to be the ones getting sent over there if things don't change."

Brad studied Nate, but Nate didn't look back at him. Finally, Brad said, "If you're going into politics, you're going to have to be even more closeted than I am, and that probably won't work."

Nate flashed a smile full of teeth, fierce and determined. "Not politics. Policy. I'm--" Nate looked away, scrubbing his hands over his face, and then settled himself back firmly at Brad's side. "I'm starting grad school in the fall. Harvard."

Brad wanted to make a joke about Nate already having master's-level cocksucking skills, but he couldn't help doing the calculation. Only yesterday he'd been saying He's going to need your support, figuring that once Nate came clean to his family they'd be able to look out for him.

There was no way for it not to sound wrong, but Brad had to ask. "Do your parents know that?"

Nate snorted, ducking his head, and then nodded without looking up. "Obviously they don't agree that I need to figure out how to take care of Linus on my own because I'm going to be on my own five months from now, but, yeah, they know. It's been on the table since before he was born."

Brad scooted closer to Nate, putting a hand on his shoulder. "You don't--even if your family's not there, I'm not there, you'll get the help you need."

Nate nodded. "Doc says if I can't face letting somebody other than you babysit him five months from now, I have to figure out some other way. I don't know, though, I could probably take him to class for the first semester at least. Once he starts walking and talking it'll be worse."

Brad tightened his grip on Nate, careful at the same time to keep his grip on Linus gentle. "Nate. You're going to figure this out."

Nate sat up straight under Brad's hand and then turned toward him, taking Linus from him and tucking himself tight against Brad's side.

"I am," Nate agreed, talking more to Linus than to Brad as Brad turned toward him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders to keep them--to keep all three of them--together. "I am going to figure out Harvard, because Harvard means connections and leverage. And I am going to need all the leverage I can get if I want to move the world fast enough to make it safe for Linus."

Brad pressed a kiss to Nate's temple. "World peace, seriously? If you put me out of work, you're going to have to support me."

Nate shrugged, a jerky push against Brad's chest. "World peace is a tall order. But I'd like Linus to have a better war to go off to, if that's what he chooses to do."

"So you're just aiming to take over a little bit of the world, then," Brad said.

"Just the foreign policy parts," Nate agreed, entirely seriously. Brad couldn't even begin to disbelieve him.

"You'll be back in DC, after Harvard," Brad said, and the pieces he'd been half-aware of shuffling around in the back of his head for the last few days started to fall into place.

Nate nodded. "Two years, and then I'll be back here for as long as it takes."

"All right," Brad said. "So I angle for Parris Island when I get back from the exchange."

Nate twisted to look up at him, and Brad set his hand on Linus's head, thinking again of what he'd said, almost casually, to Nate's parents. He'd have his twenty before Linus was out of elementary school.

"Sooner or later I let myself be talked into DI school," Brad went on, smoothing down the blond fuzz of Linus's hair with his thumb and not meeting Nate's eyes. He could see it in his mind's eye, playing out like any other mission he'd ever set himself.

"And then I do what it takes to get myself a tour at OCS. Quantico will be a shitty commute, but I'll be home most nights. Even if I'm training grunts at Parris Island, that's long leave every thirteen weeks and a few weekends in between. Access to a phone every night."

"Brad," Nate said, and then nothing. Brad eased away just enough to meet Nate's eyes.

Nate looked just as stunned as he had when he first ran out to the living room and found Brad holding his kid.

Brad looked away. "You're right. It's not going to be our war forever. I'm at the top of my game now, and the place for me is on the front lines. For now, for years yet. But not forever. You and Linus, you just make that more obvious."

Nate looked away and then back to Brad, searching his face.

Brad looked back, waiting him out. He could clarify more, talk about the various options he'd always seen for his career, the fact that he'd always liked bringing along younger Marines, how that had been one of the most satisfying things about being a team leader. He would, if Nate asked. But Nate didn't look like he'd gotten that far yet.

"Could you," Nate said, and Brad nodded and took Linus from him.

"I'm just going to," Nate said, standing up, and walked away. Brad listened, considering whether to put Pocahontas back on, but Nate just went and got the hamper and went into the kitchen.

When the deja vu got too bad to wait any longer, Brad stood up and went to the kitchen. He leaned in the doorway and watched Nate put stuff--Brad's clothes, Nate's, Linus's, all mixed together--into the washer.

"I'm not--I wouldn't ask that of you," Nate said, turning socks right side out. "I wouldn't ask you to avoid being deployed, I wouldn't..."

"I'm not saying I won't be deployed," Brad pointed out. "I'm just saying I've got a ten-year plan now, and it involves getting home to you."

Nate froze for a few seconds, just staring at Linus's bright red onesie without any expression at all. Then he tossed it sharply into the washer, shut the lid of the washer with such careful control that he obviously wanted to slam it, and walked stiffly around the kitchen table to Brad.

"I was going to be good," Nate said. "I was going to be rational, even though that's not coming easy right now. I was going to agree that you can't promise me anything, that there are things no one can promise."

Brad nodded slowly.

Nate reached up and closed a hand on the back of Brad's neck, fingers digging in hard enough to hurt.

"Fuck that," Nate said. "If you're going to say that--if you die on me after this, I will find you in the afterlife you don't even believe in and I will make it a hell. You had goddamn better come home. If it takes ten years, fine, but if you let me down now, Brad--"

Nate cut himself off, tightening his grip harder, shaking Brad a little.

Brad leaned into the grip, resting his forehead against Nate's. He let his hold on Linus sag slightly, so that the baby leaned against Nate's chest, and Nate caught a shuddering breath and loosened his grip on Brad just enough that it didn't send weird numb lightning bolts up and down his spine.

"Come home safe to us," Nate said quietly. "Or you will fucking regret it."

"I am assured of this," Brad said softly, and Nate laughed a little and squeezed tighter on the back of Brad's neck, then let up again and tilted his head enough to kiss.

Nate's kiss was as fierce and undeniable as his grip, and Brad let him have what he wanted, opening his mouth to Nate and letting him in. This time Nate did keep it up for long enough that Brad had to focus on breathing through his nose before it was over.
Nate backed off a half-step, chest heaving, his hand on the back of Brad's neck finally easing to just a flat palm. Only his eyes hadn't cooled off; he held Brad's gaze with an expression of absolute command. Brad knew he was being given an impossible order, and he knew that there was nothing he would not do to obey it.

He nodded, letting Nate see that it was as close as he could get to a salute with his hands full. Nate nodded back and then looked away. He let his hand slip from the back of Brad's neck, and his shoulders slumped. He looked exhausted, and Brad didn't feel much better. He closed the distance between them again, hooking his arm around Nate's neck, and murmured, "We have this window of about seven, maybe eight years, where we can watch all the Disney movies we want and pretend we're showing them to Linus."

Nate's laugh this time was hollow and weary, but he nodded, leaning into Brad, and said, "Let's go fucking watch some Disney movies, then."

---

By the end of Pocahontas they were tangled up together on the couch, Brad lying half on top of Nate with Linus on his chest, Nate's arms around them both and one of Nate's legs hooked around Brad's thigh. Brad dozed off like that in the middle of thinking he should get up and put another movie on. He was just the right kind of too warm in the middle of the dogpile, and he didn't want to disturb Nate or Linus, who were probably both asleep.

He woke up when Linus started squirming and grumbling, and Nate, sounding half-awake, said, "I've got this," and then tried and failed to maneuver himself out from under Brad before Brad moved.

Brad curled up and Nate wriggled free, staggering upright--one leg asleep, Brad diagnosed even as he fell back onto the couch. Nate took Linus from Brad and paced, muttering to him, for a minute before he headed for the diapers. Brad lasted another thirty seconds lying on the couch, and then noted the unbroken silence: the washer was finished. He got up and went into the kitchen and found himself making a bottle on autopilot, but once it was in the microwave he redirected over to the laundry.

Nate came in on his heels, getting the bottle from the microwave and doing the shake-and-test routine while Brad was still stuffing clothes into the dryer. Nate headed back into the living room a few seconds ahead of Brad, and they collapsed back onto the couch together, side-by-side instead of stacked, with the soundtrack of the dryer and Linus chowing down. Brad leaned over and tucked his finger into Linus's fist, and Linus held on tight and looked over at Brad, then back up at Nate.

"So, Hanukkah is December seventh to fifteenth and you're invited," Brad said to Linus. "My mom is already shopping for Linus."

"Oh," Nate said, sounding blank.

"I'd've taken you home to meet my parents, but I don't think planes are a good idea right now."

Nate snorted. "No. Not for a while yet. But you told your parents about us. About Linus."

Brad nodded, electing not to get into his communication strategies with his parents, or exactly when he'd said what. "Yeah. If you can't go for Hanukkah they'll probably come visit. They might come and visit anyway, I'll make sure you're in touch."

Nate looked over at him. "Do they--did you tell them...?"

"I said you needed help with the baby. I can explain the rest of it to them if you want me to."

Nate nodded more firmly this time.

Brad leaned into his shoulder, wiggling his finger in Linus's grip until Linus took over waving it around.

"I don't know what my exam schedule will be," Nate said after a while. "We'll try to get out there. We just have to be back in Baltimore by Christmas."

"Of course," Brad said, because Nate's family celebrated Christmas. Then he caught the undertone to the have to, remembered, and said with barely a pause, "Christmas is when you meet up with Cory, isn't it?"

Nate was very still and then nodded.

"I talked to your parents a little," Brad said. "And I read the custody agreement in your go-bag."

Nate let out a breath. "Yeah. We meet at Christmas. She'll--she was supposed to be in her last semester of law school right now, but she took a leave of absence because of the baby. She'll be able to graduate in December and take the bar in February, so at Christmas she'll be in between."

Nate curled forward a little, wrapping himself around Linus and pulling away from Brad.

"Hey," Brad said quietly, wrapping an arm around Nate's shoulders and tugging him closer. "I don't give a fuck what happened. You didn't tell me about it because it was complicated and nothing you wanted to say on the phone. Now I know and we get Linus out of it and I get you, so that's all I need to know."

Nate shook his head, but he didn't say anything for a while. Brad sat and listened to Linus eating, listened to the dryer running, listened to Nate sitting still beside him and searching for words.

"I didn't tell you because I knew if I talked to you I would remember how I felt about you," Nate said quietly. "And I needed--I was trying. I was trying so hard to make it not just something I did for the baby, something honest between me and Cory. It had to be real or we'd never have a chance. I knew if I told you, you would think of it as me trying to do the right thing because I knocked her up. Even if you didn't say it, I would know what you were thinking and I would have believed you. Anyone else could maybe suspect that I didn't--that I hadn't--that it was going to be an uphill battle. But you would have known for sure."

Brad winced. He'd been thinking that all along, that Nate stuck around as long as he did because he was a good guy, dutiful, devoted to his kid. But Nate really had cared about her at least enough to try.

"We were engaged for three days in November, the week before the birthday ball," Nate said. "I don't know which one of us was more terrified by it, once she had a ring on her finger. We didn't tell anyone. We hardly spoke to each other from the morning after until she gave the ring back and we agreed not to try that again. We didn't go to the ball and I took the ring back to the store. I think we both saw the writing on the wall then, but we thought we could make something else work. We'd never talked about the future until Cory got pregnant. Cory didn't--she's twenty-four, this is her 3L year, a baby wasn't in the plan. I convinced her it could work out. Except I was already kind of fucked up even then, and she wasn't the one I was in love with. It just didn't work."

Brad leaned his face against Nate's shoulder, trying to stay out of his peripheral vision while he played over Ray's words-- three days sleeping on my couch after a drunken screaming fight over the phone with his babymama--in his head, searching for some shred of a joke.

"You make it sound pretty civilized," Brad said, when he'd gotten his expression under control, and he looked up just in time to see Nate wince. So, yeah, Nate was sanitizing the story.

"We yelled a lot," Nate said. "Never--I swear to you it was never anything but yelling. Never."

Brad nodded against Nate's shoulder. Nate would never have done any kind of harm to Linus's mom.

Nate leaned back, and Brad went with him, slumping against the back of the couch.

"Whatever Ray told you is true," Nate said. "It was pretty bad right at the end."

"That's usually how you know it's the end," Brad agreed, even if he'd never really done it like that himself. By the time he'd seen Kristi and Pete again, afterward, they'd all moved past any screaming there might ever have been and into this being how things were.

"She--"

The rattling air-bubble sound of Linus finishing the bottle was loud in the quiet of Nate's hesitation, and Nate laughed a little as Brad leaned away from him to grab a spit-up rag. Nate offered him the baby when he sat back, so Brad laid the cloth over his own arm and propped Linus up, looking down at his own hands and Linus's blond-fuzzed head.

"When I went to St. Louis, when Lauren went into labor, Cory asked me if I'd fucked Christeson in Iraq. If that was why I cared more about his kid than my own pregnant girlfriend."

Brad froze--better that than patting Linus's back too hard. He didn't look at Nate. He didn't want to know what his face looked like right now.

Nate laughed again, harsher this time. "I mean--she didn't ask. But that was the semantic content of it. And when I said no, I said a bunch of things about Christeson being an E-2 and nineteen years old and nothing about me being straight or not willing to cheat on her.

"So that was," Nate waved a hand. "All over but the shouting. Lots of shouting. Probably a lot more than I remember."

Brad shifted Linus and the spit rag up to his shoulder and sat back beside Nate, looking him straight in the eye.

"It would probably be polite to express regret right now," Brad said. "Maybe apologize, because I'm somehow involved in the demise of your attempt at a perfect little heterosexual nuclear family."

Nate looked blank, but Brad could see the smile coming from a long way off. He'd had a lot of practice spotting it in camouflage.

"I'm fucking glad, Nate. I'm glad you ran off to St. Louis. I'm glad you were there to hold Christeson's baby girl for him, and I'm glad you spent three days drunk on Ray's couch, and I'm glad you were too stuck on me to make it work with her. I'm glad I get you and we get Linus."

"Asshole," Nate said, without particular inflection.

Brad flashed his teeth. "I promise to be totally fucking magnanimous in victory."

"My hero," Nate said dryly, but the smile was actually visible as he got up to put another movie in.

---

That night--after giving Nate a blowjob he promised to remember this time and getting one in return that Brad definitely wasn't going to forget--they lay a while in the dark. Brad was listening to Nate's breathing as it slowed, prepared to reach across him and get his sleeping pill before he fell asleep without it. They weren't quite there yet.

Then Nate said, "Do your parents know?"

Despite the first half of that question being ten hours away, Brad knew instantly what Nate meant. When he'd asked Nate that he'd meant Harvard; Nate meant Iraq. Brad's sleepy post-sex calm was interrupted by a twist of shame in his belly.

"I'll let them know. We don't leave for a few weeks after I get back to England."

"No," Nate said, and he rolled toward Brad and laid one hand flat on Brad's chest. "Brad, you were supposed to see them on this leave, weren't you? So you could say goodbye? To them and your sisters and your friends."

Brad shrugged. "My priorities changed."

There was enough light for Brad to make out Nate's look of utter frustration. No danger of anybody falling asleep on their own, now.

"Brad, we're your family now, but that doesn't mean we're your only family. You need to--look."

Nate moved his hand, touching Brad's shoulder lightly, running a hand down Brad's forearm. Brad twitched under the almost-ticklish touch, and Nate said, "You're not holding Linus. Linus isn't here."

Brad definitely twitched then, and looked toward the crib without thinking. Nate's hand slapped down on his jaw, tugging him back to face Nate.

"No," Nate said. "You don't get to hold him. You don't get to see him. Because it's twenty-nine years from now, and he's going off into harm's way without coming home to say goodbye, and without letting us hug him one more time and tell him we love him and give him pointless advice that he doesn't need because he knows a hell of a lot more about the war he's fighting than we ever will. We don't get to look at his face again and remind ourselves that he's all grown up and not the baby we remember him being. And we might never--"

"Fucking Christ," Brad snapped, shoving Nate away. He sat up and then hesitated a second to remember gentleness instead of the angry yank he could feel coiling in his arms. He picked Linus up carefully and settled the baby against the empty place on his shoulder, curled his empty arm around the familiar warm weight.

Nate sighed behind him, and Brad felt the movement through the mattress before Nate was plastered against his back, both his arms coming around Brad and Linus.

"I don't want you to leave one minute before you have to," Nate said against the side of his neck, resting his head on Brad's other shoulder, balancing Linus's weight. "But I can't help understanding their side now."

Brad nodded, unable to speak through the vast and horrible comprehension striking him with every one of Linus's breaths against his collarbone.

"I'll buy a plane ticket in the morning," Brad said, closing his eyes and leaning back into Nate. "You can call Ray."

---

Brad opened up his laptop during Linus's 0200 feeding and bought a ticket for the earliest flight he could find to San Diego on Friday morning. Linus would be three weeks old on Friday. Brad printed out the reservation and laid it down on the coffee table where Nate wouldn't miss it, and then he sat back and picked up his phone, looking back and forth from it to Linus. It was going on midnight in San Diego, a stupid time to call for a non-emergency, but he couldn't stop carrying out Nate's analogy; he'd want to know Linus was coming home the minute Linus knew it.

On the other hand, his mom would never believe he was in his right mind--or sober, at least--if he called her at midnight to say he was coming home.

He flipped open his phone and texted. Getting into SAN 0917 on Friday. Nate thinks you'll like him better if he doesn't keep me all to himself.

He hit send and then wondered if his mom kept her phone by the bed even when she knew he was safe. He wondered how sure he would have to be that Linus was safe to stop keeping his phone by the bed. Even when no one was in a war zone there were car accidents and the flu and heartbreaks--and even if his mom weren't worried about Brad at any given moment there were still his sisters to think of. He suddenly couldn't imagine how anyone ever coped with worrying about more than one kid at the same time.

Two minutes later he had an answer to as much of it as he could realistically hope for. See you then. Tell Nate he is officially favorite son-in-law. Kiss Linus. BRING PICTURES.

Brad looked down at Linus, who was looking back up at him intently.

"Hey," Brad said softly, postponing that kiss until the bottle was out of the way. "You're going to give us so much gray hair, aren't you?"

Linus blinked a couple of times, which Brad took to mean yes, because of course he was. Twenty-nine years from now... in twenty-nine years they'd probably have arrived at some kind of truce, at least. Fifteen years from now was going to be the killer. Nate had been ordering his mom out of his head at fifteen. Brad had already been out of his parents' house, off to military school. And from there they'd both ended up in the middle of the same clusterfuck; Nate had taken more injuries than anyone could see, and Brad was going back for more.

"Maybe your mom's been totally okay all her life," Brad suggested. Give or take the last nine months. "Maybe you should try to take after her."

Linus scrunched his face up, looking skeptical and so much like Nate that it hurt a little, right in the center of Brad's chest.

"You've got us in your corner no matter who you turn out to be," Brad promised. "Be Nate Junior if that's your thing. And if you turn out like me--Nate seems to understand that. I'll try to translate. And if you turn out to be your own kind of crazy, we'll still have your back. We'll always have your back."

Linus shut his eyes, still frowning in concentration, and Brad ducked around the bottle to kiss his forehead. "Just always come home, little man. We'll always be waiting up for you."

---

Brad kept getting up and going back to bed until the time Linus woke up and Nate was there, pushing Brad down into the pillow. "I've got him, I'm awake. My watch."

"I'm awake," Brad argued, except he still had his eyes closed. He didn't really need to look at anything to get up with Linus, he had all the routes memorized.

Nate's hand pressed a little harder into his chest. "I'm more awake than you. Sleep. We'll still be here when you wake up."

For now, Brad thought, and then he was asleep again.

---

Brad was standing in the living room before he understood that he had bolted out of bed at the sound of Ray's voice, and that Ray was now laughing at him from the screen of Nate's laptop while Nate laughed silently beside it.

"Take that, Nate, I told you he loves me best," Ray yelled. "Jesus, Brad, you look like you been rode hard and put away wet. What's the LT been doing to you?"

"Classified," Brad replied automatically.

"Whatever, I'll get all your filthy secrets out of him this weekend, we're going bar-hopping Friday night."

"Nate makes an excellent designated driver," Brad agreed, and gave up and went to sit next to Nate on the couch.

"Oh, God, family portrait," Ray said as Nate passed Linus to Brad, sounding obnoxiously delighted in the way Brad knew was actually completely sincere. "I am screencapping the shit out of this, you guys. You are a fucking gay Chrismukkah card."

"What if we just didn't pick him up from the airport?" Brad asked, turning to look at Nate. "Do you think they'd just lock him in with the lost luggage?"

"Fuck that, homes, I'm flying into National, it's on the subway. And I know about six alternate modes of transportation to get to Nate's place. Do you remember who gave you his address in the first place?"

"Thanks for that," Brad said, realizing halfway through that he was speaking in unison with Nate, right down to the dry tone.

Ray grinned hugely. "Someday you guys are going to get gay married and I will give the most epic fucking speech. I'm already writing it. It's going to be a whole PowerPoint presentation."

"Someday I am going to set your whole trailer park on fire," Brad said, and Ray grinned wider, because he knew perfectly well what Brad meant.

---

In the middle of the afternoon, when Brad was staring at his email and trying to remember what he'd meant to say when he started the sentence he was typing, Nate said out of nowhere, "Let's take a nap."

Brad looked up at him with exactly the same sense of bafflement, like he'd known how this went a minute ago and now it had gotten away from him. Even at his most exhausted--especially at his most exhausted--Nate had only slept when Brad pushed him to, and he had never tried to take Brad with him for such sincerely innocent-sounding purposes.

Nate stood in front of him, holding Linus in his left arm, his right hand held out to Brad.

"You're not tired," Brad said, realizing it as he said it. Nate actually didn't look tired right now.

Nate beckoned with his fingers, not budging and not dignifying that observation with a response. "Come on."

"Yeah," Brad said, because he recognized even a very gentle and persuasive order when he heard it.

He put his hand in Nate's and let Nate pull him to his feet. Nate adjusted his grip as he turned away and held on to Brad's hand, towing him to the bedroom and pushing him toward the bed when they got there. Brad fell onto the bed on his back while Nate laid Linus down in his crib, and then Nate shoved at his side, rolling him so that he had his back to Linus.

Nate spooned up behind him and wrapped an arm and leg around him, holding him still, though it felt pretty redundant. Now that he was horizontal Brad didn't think he was getting up again for anything less than gunfire.

"This is stupid," Brad muttered, trusting Nate to know that it wasn't really an objection. "I'm getting plenty of sleep."

Nate snorted against the back of his neck. "Compared to what? BRC? SERE?"

Brad reached up and put his hand on Nate's wrist. "That what you were telling yourself?"

Nate pressed tighter against Brad's back, his face against the back of Brad's shoulder, and he said, "It felt like that. It felt like doing SERE with no end date and a hostage who would take all the damage if I fucked anything up."

Brad slid his hand up Nate's arm and got hold of his shoulder, holding on to Nate as tightly as Nate was holding him.

"I don't want him to know that," Nate said quietly. "I don't even want to know that myself. I don't want to remember my first days with him being like that, being that desperate to get through the next minute and the next and the next."

Brad let go of Nate's shoulder and put enough force into twisting over that Nate let him do it. Brad tangled their legs together and put his arm around Nate and pressed in too close to meet his eyes. More necessary than a kiss, Brad said quietly, "It's not that bad. It doesn't feel like that, and I won't remember you like that. I'm just tired."

"I know," Nate said. "So we'll just take a nap."

---

Brad's phone rang after dinner, startling the hell out of him and Nate. Linus, who was settled on Brad's lap directly on top of the phone, made one of those shocked faces like he made sometimes when he farted really loudly. I didn't know I could make that noise.

"Not you, little man," Brad said, while Nate laughed at them both. Nate reached out for Linus, who was moving from startled to unnerved and possibly ready to cry as the phone kept ringing under him.

Brad tugged the phone from his pocket, fighting down a laugh as he flipped it open and said, "Colbert."

"Brad," his dad said, and Brad felt his incipient laughter freeze in his chest.

"Dad?" Brad couldn't help sounding anxious as he said it; he literally could not remember his dad ever calling him on the phone; they rarely even exchanged hellos when Brad's mom put him on at the end of a conversation. Nate looked up with a whole different startled look, catching Brad's worry even as he made soothing noises for Linus.

"No, go back to the other thing, you sounded like you were having a good time," his dad said, which meant nothing terrible had happened to precipitate the call.

Brad stood up, looking away from Nate's concern, making his voice light and easy. "Linus thought he farted my ringtone, it was a magical moment."

Brad's dad laughed, and Brad couldn't help smiling. He and his dad were so rarely on the same wavelength, any time Brad could make him laugh with something he said felt like a victory.

It was easier when they were in the same place. He and his dad could share disapproving looks over Brad's sisters' boyfriends, or go surfing together, or hang out in the garage working on one of Brad's bikes or one of the supernumerary cars his dad was forever fixing up. From the year before Brad went into military school until he came home from boot camp, Brad had barely spoken to his father. They'd been unable to exchange more than three words without it turning into a screaming fight. But they'd still gone surfing together whenever Brad was home, and they'd been able to laugh at each other and applaud each other without anybody getting angry.

"So how's the surf look for this weekend?" Brad asked. "We going to be able to go out Saturday?"

"Yeah, we should be able to find something." His dad knew what he meant, and sounded pleased at the prospect. "You missed some serious waves the last couple of days, but it sounds like you've been pretty busy."

"You could say that," Brad agreed, glancing over at Nate, who was settled back on the couch and watching Brad intently. Linus was quiet against his chest, but Nate was still rubbing his back. When Brad looked over, Nate kissed the top of Linus's head without looking away from Brad. Brad nodded acknowledgment.

"We've had our hands full with Linus. I don't know how Nate did this on his own for ten days. I don't know how people who aren't trained to function without sleep do this at all."

His father snorted. "We learned pretty fast, with you."

Brad hesitated, looking for the words to say he got that, that he understood it now--but he didn't know if he could claim that much, his eight days against his father's twenty-nine years. He didn't know what to say that might not be accidentally presumptuous or insulting or somehow damaging to this moment of near-rapport.

He kept silent until his father cleared his throat and the chance was gone. "There actually was a reason I called, Brad. Not that I'm not looking forward to seeing you on Friday, but I hear I have a new favorite son-in-law, and I'd like to actually hear his voice at some point."

Brad looked sharply away from Nate with a futile, irrelevant sense of trying not to give his position away. Christ, Nate was about to get the what are your intentions toward my son talk. From Brad's dad. Or....

"Is Mom there?"

"She does want to talk to Nate too. Did you want to...?"

"No, no," Brad said, before his dad could put the phone down and go get her. "I mean, I want to talk to both of you for a minute, before I hand you over to Nate."

Brad glanced over, and Nate nodded and gave him an unworried smile. Brad looked away again. He'd issued the warning. It was up to Nate what he did with that information.

"Sure," his dad said, faintly puzzled, and then the sound was muffled as he called for Brad's mom to pick up the phone.

"Sweetheart?" she said, almost instantly. She'd been waiting for that, but not hovering over his dad.

"Mom," Brad said. "Dad."

"I'm here," his dad said, confirming he was back on the line.

Brad closed his eyes. "I'm--one of the reasons it's important for me to come out there this week is that I'm being deployed again next month, back to Iraq."

There was silence on the other end of the line. He'd told them about being sent to Iraq in person, last time, months before the actual deployment materialized. He had no idea how they'd found out he was going to Afghanistan; maybe from CNN, or maybe through some company families phone tree. He'd never asked.

"I'll be with the same unit of the Royal Marines that I've been training with," Brad said. "I know and trust these men. I have the same confidence in them that I've had in my recon platoons. The situation over there is much more defined now. There are established bases; I should be able to keep in touch more than I could the last couple of times."

"Are you--" his mom said, and Brad braced himself against the raw emotion in her voice; he remembered the sight of Nate's mom wiping away tears. But when she spoke again she sounded matter-of-fact. "You're able to be open about Nate with them, aren't you? You said the rules are different there. Do you want to make him your next of kin, so he would--"

Brad stared very hard at the front door and didn't look toward Nate or give any other tell that he was discussing him.

"No," he said firmly. The last thing he wanted, if he got blown away on this deployment, was for Nate to get a knock on the door and hear the news alone, from some stranger. "We can talk about that when I'm there, but, no, I think it's better to keep things the way they are."

"I understand," his mom said. "We'll talk about it. And of course we'll keep Nate in the loop if there's anything he needs to know."

"Thank you," Brad said, because there wasn't anything else to say.

They weren't asking questions, and they wouldn't, not yet. They knew he would tell them what he could tell them and that when he reached the end of the available information, that was the end. They would talk about it more when he was actually in San Diego and could try to make them understand what had happened to him in the last eight days--or maybe they would just know. Maybe there was some secret sign on him now, like an IR chem light, that only other parents would recognize.

"Did you want to talk to Nate now?" Brad added, when neither of them said anything.

"Sure," his mom said, "I love you, honey, I'll see you at baggage claim on Friday."

There was a tiny pause, and then his dad added, "I love you, son."

"I love you," Brad parroted back. They always said it more when they knew he was going away, and he had never hesitated to say it back at those times, even when everything was complicated.

"Let me get Nate," Brad added, and turned back to the couch. Nate was standing, waiting for him, and they made the handoff, trading Linus for the phone.

Brad turned away and headed for Linus's room. Nate didn't need an audience for whatever--presumably pretty gentle--interrogation he was about to get as the new favorite son-in-law. Brad heard him say hello in something damn close to his talking-to-officers voice. He laughed and then said, "Nathaniel," and, "Sorry, Catholic."

Brad shut the door and looked down at Linus, who was, unhelpfully, asleep. Brad kissed the top of his head, the same spot Nate had kissed a couple of minutes ago. "I love you, little man."

The words seemed to echo in the quiet room, ringing in Brad's ears. He couldn't figure out why for a second; he'd never said that to Linus before, but he'd said other things. Saying it now wasn't momentous.

Except it was, Brad realized abruptly, because he'd heard it before, thousands of times, but not for twenty years.

He'd still been a lot smaller than his dad--maybe eight or nine, maybe even younger--when he'd responded to a bedtime, "I love you, little man," with a burst of rage, the kind he had to scream or run or drive away from until he learned to control it. He'd screamed, that time, right in his dad's face. Don't you call me that! I'm--not--little!

It had made some kind of sense at the time--he'd been big enough for his parents to talk about him being a big kid, the big brother, riding his own bike to school, taking some responsibility for himself, and being called little had rankled. Even so, the shocked look on his father's face had been awful; but it had only made him scream more, at the time, feeling horrified at what he had done, at how easy it had been to hurt his father.

His father had never called him little man again; and maybe that had been where it started, because his dad had been surprised, that time, when Brad turned suddenly vicious. A few years later that had been SOP. He and his dad had fought more and more and talked less and less. Even when Brad learned not to scream and run away and fight all the time, they still didn't talk much for fear of saying the wrong things.

"I'm sorry, Linus," Brad said quietly, shifting Linus against his chest. Linus just squirmed against him, settling himself comfortably, peaceful and oblivious to all the ways they were going to fuck each other up in the next twenty years.

It wasn't Linus he should apologize to, he knew, but he and his parents had made their peace years ago. They'd moved past the clusterfuck of Brad's adolescence--and the warning tremors of Brad's childhood--and into this adult thing where his parents respected the boundaries Brad set and Brad was as dutiful as he could be. He traded texts with his mom and surfed with his dad and loved his family in a careful, quiet way. It worked.

"And then you came along," Brad said quietly, looking down at Linus and turning things over in his mind.

The door opened behind him as Nate said, "Good talking to you, too, and I'll let you know as soon as I have my schedule. Yeah, of course. Thank you. Here's Brad."

Brad took the phone and let Nate take Linus from him. "Dad?"

"We're here," his dad said.

Brad took a breath and went for it. "I just thought of something I wanted to tell you. Take a wild guess what I call Linus all the time. Ever since I first met him."

There was a little silence, and Brad nearly held his breath. He should have just said it, shouldn't have made it a test. His dad might not remember it at all. Brad didn't look at Nate, who was still standing in the doorway with Linus.

And then his dad gave a breath of laughter and said, "Little man?"

Brad grinned with relief. "Yeah. All the time. I didn't even remember why until right now."

"Then I guess I did all right," his dad said, like it was easy to say.

"Yeah," Brad said, forcing the words out cleanly. "Yeah, you did."

---

By the time he and Nate were both properly awake on Wednesday morning, they had barely twenty-four hours left before Ray's flight got in. Once Ray arrived, Brad would be on his way to leaving, even if there was an eighteen-hour overlap. That would all be goodbye, but this was goodbye, too. This was their last day alone together, just the three of them.

They didn't get out of arm's reach of each other all day, passing Linus back and forth. They didn't talk much, didn't turn on the TV for noise to cover the silence. They both read for a while, Brad narrating some more of The Odyssey to Linus when he was awake, though they still had more than half of the thing to go and nowhere near enough time to read it all. Nate kept telling him how to pronounce things, just like any other day. Brad manfully resisted the temptation to say some of them wrong on purpose to make Nate correct him more.

Linus woke up again in the midafternoon, and they did the usual diaper-and-bottle routine, settling in together on the couch while Linus ate. When he was done, Nate got up and got a blanket, spreading it on the floor, and only had to make a little gesture at it to indicate that Brad should lay the baby down.

Linus started flailing almost right away. Nate reached over and petted his back. "We're right here, buddy."

Brad set his own hand down in front of Linus's face, wiggling his fingers enticingly, and Linus's flailing took on some focus as he tried to grab despite not actually having meaningful control of his limbs.

"This is one of those things you're supposed to do," Nate said.
"This morning I remembered reading about it. I read all these books before he was born. I thought all I was going to be worried about was whether he walked and talked soon enough, you know? And this morning I realized he's never going to learn to walk or talk or crawl or anything if I don't...."

Brad looked up from Linus to Nate, smiling enough to take the sting out of the obvious. "Let him go a little?"

Nate looked perfectly serious as he nodded.

Brad looked down at Linus again. "I have this feeling like I know exactly what you were thinking about when you remembered."

Nate snorted, and Brad looked up to see his mouth twisted up into a wry smile. "Not rocket science, Brad."

Brad nodded. There was no getting away from it. "It's going to be weird as fuck. I've never spent a deployment missing somebody. I wouldn't wish combat on you again, but it's going to suck doing it without you there."

Nate frowned. "You were engaged."

"Kristi," Brad agreed. "I'd been in love with her since I was twelve years old, but we were already doing the long-distance thing by the time we were in high school. Military school, boot camp, SoI, training, a couple of cruises. We spent more time apart than together, and we'd been doing that since before the first time I got my hands on her tits. She was never--when I was gone I was in a whole other life than when I was with her. She was this other planet I got to visit sometimes, but when I left--I would write her letters, but it was always this fantasy. I wanted her, but when I wasn't with her there wasn't any space for her in my life. You...."

Nate set his hand down close to Brad's, pushing a knuckle into Linus's chin, and Linus lifted his wobbly head to look at the new landscape.

"I missed you when I was in England," Brad confessed. He saw Nate look up, but Brad kept his gaze down on Linus and their hands, not quite touching each other.

"I thought--I told myself it was just because we'd never settled anything," Brad said. "But you would fit right in wherever I go. I'd be training and I'd wonder what you'd think of it, how good you'd be at it. I wondered what you would think of the men, of the officers, of every little stupid charlie foxtrot we ran into. When I heard we were going to be deployed again, all I could think was it was going to suck to go without you. That was about when I realized I had a problem."

Brad looked up in time to catch Nate smiling, then looked away again.

"Did you mean it when you said you trusted them as much as us?" Nate asked quietly.

Brad met his eyes before he nodded. "I do. They're good guys, good at what we do. We've got good gear, even. And the officers could be a lot worse."

Nate kept smiling. "Don't go getting too attached."

Brad shook his head, still serious. "I'm coming home to you."

Nate snorted. "When you're good and done kicking ass. Admit it, you're looking forward to getting back into it."

Brad shrugged and then nodded; there wasn't any point denying something so true. "There'll be parts of it when I forget about you and all I'm thinking about is a mission or a firefight or not dying, and that'll be...." Brad trailed off, because it wasn't happy or fun or even good, not in the way those words meant here, in a quiet apartment with an increasingly frustrated baby trying to figure out how his arms and legs worked on the floor between them. Brad scooted his hand closer to Nate's, crossing their fingers over each other. Linus promptly jammed his face down onto Brad's thumb, mouthing at it while windmilling his arms.

"Yeah," Nate said quietly, and Brad looked up. Nate knew, of course. Nate would never go back into combat now, didn't crave it like Brad did, but he still remembered how it had been.

Brad nodded. "But I'm still going to miss you."

"Don't get fucking distracted wondering what I'd do in a firefight, okay?"

"I'm coming home," Brad repeated adamantly. Surviving would mean forgetting them sometimes. It would mean keeping all his focus on staying alive. He would do what he had to do to come home safely.

"Anyway, I already know what you do in a firefight. You break cover and dodge bullets so you can direct traffic."

---

They dawdled over everything in the morning, right up until the point where they had to hurry up, taking showers and passing Linus back and forth to get fed and geared up to drive down to National. They were just about ready--Nate was trawling through the diaper bag to make sure they had something they probably wouldn't need--when someone knocked on the door.

Nate looked up, startled. Brad passed straight from surprise to understanding without a middle stage of suspicion, a snap of perfect informational sublimation. He walked over and opened the door without bothering to look, and sure enough Ray was standing there grinning, backpack dangling off his shoulder, suitcase at his feet.

"Oh, God, you look so much worse in person," Ray crowed over Brad's mutter of, "Conniving whiskey tango bastard." Brad leaned in to hug him before letting him in the door.

Ray mugged him before they parted, getting hold of Linus and tucking the baby expertly against his own shoulder as Brad took a step back, sensing Nate's approach behind him.

"Oh man, seriously, are you surprised?" Ray demanded, pushing past Brad to hug Nate. Brad watched and didn't even attempt to think anything of it. "Do you not remember the fucking sneaky part of the recon job description? Did you actually think I would give you my real flight information so you could drag your headcase ass, your baby, and Brad to an airport on a fucking weekday to get me?"

Nate stepped back, smiling and shaking his head. He hadn't immediately grabbed the baby from Ray, which was almost weirder than the hug. Brad looked back and forth from Nate--looking as happy and calm as he had a couple of hours ago, not like the Stepford face he'd put on for his parents--to Linus, who was snuggled up asleep on Ray's shoulder like he didn't know the difference. Brad turned away to grab Ray's suitcase and bring it inside before he shut and locked the door.

"Right now Brad is trying really hard not to look like he thinks I'm going to drop you," Ray was saying to Linus in an only slightly saccharine tone. "But this is not your Uncle Ray's first rodeo, little dude. I have babysat so many little cousins and neighbor kids I could probably change your diapers blindfolded."

"You should do that," Brad said, shoving his hands into his pockets and keeping an eye on Nate, who was standing just out of arm's reach of Ray, not looking at all like he was worried Ray was going to drop his kid. "I'll watch from over here."

"Well it'd be fuckin' easy right now," Ray said, still talking more to Linus than to Brad. "He's asleep and all nice clean and dry."

"If I'd known you were coming I'd have arranged for him to be screaming and covered in shit," Nate said, cheerful and calm and a world away from the guy who'd opened the door on Brad a week and a half ago. It was a good thing; Brad knew it was a good thing. He knew he should be happy for Nate and happy to see Ray and glad that Linus was going to be in slightly manic but essentially reliable hands.

Instead he forced a smile and said, "Speaking of," before he did an end-run around them, making for the head.

He took a leak, staring at the wall and trying to get his head squared away. This was stupid and he knew it was stupid and it didn't help to know it. He felt all cracked open and helpless against this, like one of those nightmares where he was standing naked on a berm watching bullets fly around him, not even smart enough to take cover. He flushed and washed his hands and didn't feel any more equipped to go back out there.

The bathroom door opened and Nate stepped inside, shutting it behind him and crowding Brad up against the sink with his hands still wet.

"I forgot to say I'm going to miss you too," Nate announced, pressed up against Brad's side.

Brad stared at the water spots on the tap and thought he should have cleaned that. He shut his eyes and put his arm around Nate.

"Harvard is going to be weird as fuck after the last five years," Nate said quietly. "After everything I've seen and done and been, to go back to a classroom like I'm that college kid again. It's going to be so fucking strange. And I know I'm going to spend the whole time wondering what you'd be saying about all the bullshit and all my Ivy League classmates."

"You'll know." Brad turned a little more toward Nate, putting his other arm around him. "Just try not to repeat it to their faces."

They stood in silence for a few more seconds, and then Brad shifted slightly away from Nate--the weirdness of Linus's absence was a nagging itch. Nate turned away at almost the same instant, and Brad followed him to the kitchen doorway, where they stopped side by side.

Ray was perched on the counter, a plastic container of pasta from the fridge balanced on top of Linus's belly, eating and talking. "And then you can get away with anything, because adults think you're too much of a loser to get into trouble."

A bit of pasta slipped off Ray's spoon and fell onto the top of Linus's head, and Brad snapped, "Ray."

Ray looked up and then down. He ducked his head and licked the food off of Linus's head; by the time he looked up again Brad was there, taking Linus gently but firmly away from him. Ray managed to grab the container fast enough not to have pasta dumped all over him. Brad touched his lips carefully to the spot Ray had licked clean, checking for residual heat and finding none.

"It's all good, " Ray said, unperturbed and with his mouth full again. "That's why I didn't heat it up."

"Nate," Brad said, without looking up. "You should feel free to say what I would think of Ray to his face. Threats and insults are the only way to keep him in line."

"I'll have to practice," Nate said dryly behind him. "I'm sure slack-jawed baby-licking degenerate is going to come into it somewhere."

Ray grinned with sauce all over his teeth.

Brad nodded and kept a straight face, patting Linus's back. "Good start."

---

A few hours later Ray had dug an assortment of weird and obnoxious and occasionally fascinating baby toys out of his suitcase and made them watch Toy Story. He'd also successfully changed an impressively shitty diaper, laughing in delighted disgust. He'd managed the bottle fine, too, following the directions off the cabinet without clarification from Brad, shaking and testing properly before offering the bottle to Linus.

When Linus was clean and fed and asleep on his shoulder, Ray looked from Nate to Brad and said seriously, "Okay, I get that we had to have a little probation, but I'm pretty sure I aced all my skill tests, so you guys can go."

Brad glanced over at Nate, who looked suddenly wary and closed off.

"No," Ray said, before either of them said a word. "Don't even argue. You got a fucking babysitter for Brad's last night in town, and unless you both turned into big hairy dykes since the last time I saw you, you're not getting married without going on at least one fucking date. Get the fuck out of here already. I've got this covered."

Brad's reflex was to argue, but he kept his eyes on Nate, considering the possibilities. Nate probably would stay calm knowing Ray was with Linus; he'd managed to leave him alone with Brad days ago, when he wasn't doing nearly this well. Nate was looking at him--not meeting his eyes, just looking him up and down, and Brad realized that they could have hours uninterrupted, and that after tonight there was no knowing when he'd have another chance to touch Nate, to see him, to be even remotely alone with him.

Nate's eyes snapped up to Brad's. "You need anything?"

Brad shook his head.

Nate jerked his chin and turned, and Brad fell in behind him. They each gave Linus a quick kiss goodbye; Brad squeezed Ray's shoulder in wordless thanks as he did. Nate grabbed his keys and they were out the door.

About the time they hit the stairs, Brad started laughing.

Nate looked back at him, and Brad said, "Oscar Mike in ten seconds."

Nate smiled and shook his head, facing front again and leading the way.

---

Checking into a hotel in the middle of the day carrying nothing but a plastic shopping bag from the drugstore down the street was actually more obvious than walking around with a baby. The woman at the front desk kept an admirably straight face, and Brad reveled in not giving a fuck what she thought. He swung the bag on his finger, letting the box of condoms press blatantly against the thin plastic until she handed a key over to Nate.

They stood in the elevator without touching, and by the time they got into the room the adrenaline of their escape and the supply run was wearing off. Brad tossed the bag onto a chair and started stripping. Nate flopped onto the bed and fought his way out of his clothes without even sitting up. Brad stood and watched for the last few seconds before Nate was finished and then lay down beside him.

They were completely still for a few seconds, watching each other. The longer they just lay there breathing, the more Brad could feel inertia settling over him. After thirty seconds he felt like he might never move again.

"Can we just," Brad said, and Nate's eyes closed before he even finished speaking.

"Fuck yeah," Nate said, breath escaping him like a deflating balloon.

Brad made the heroic effort to roll onto his side, laying one arm across Nate, and was asleep almost instantly.

---

Brad woke up with his face in a pillow and a weight on his back, kisses pressing softly against the nape of his neck. He recognized the generically unfamiliar smell of clean sheets--hotel--and the hands on his back and the pattern of kisses--Nate.

He lifted his head and looked to the left side of the bed, and everything snapped into focus when he registered the empty space there, like a missing tooth. Like a missing limb.

Nate shifted off him when Brad tensed, and Brad turned onto his side facing Nate, searching his eyes in the light of one of the bedside lamps. Dark had fallen, and Brad's glance at the clock revealed that he'd either been asleep about six hours or he'd already missed his flight out. "Did you sleep at all?"

Nate smiled and yawned, nodding. "More than I expected to. Checked my phone every time I woke up. Ray's sent about eight text messages to say that Linus loves him the best now, so apparently everything's fine."

Brad nodded. Obviously everything was fine. Of course Linus was just as safe with Ray as he was with them or any other reasonably competent adult.

And here they were, both awake, alone in a hotel room, with less than twelve hours left together before Brad had to leave. They wouldn't have another chance like this for months, maybe years, maybe....

Brad leaned in and kissed Nate, and Nate pressed in close to him again. Brad ran his fingers through Nate's hair, closing his eyes and trying to focus on nothing but this moment, Nate's mouth on his, the warmth of Nate's body against his and not the empty space in the room.

Nate pulled away suddenly, flopping over onto his back.

"Sorry," Nate said, eyes closed, and Brad swept a glance over his body, noting that Nate wasn't any more turned on than he was. "I just--this is so fucked up--"

"Nate," Brad said, poking him in the center of the chest. Nate opened his eyes. Brad pointed down his own body, and Nate squeezed his eyes shut again, laughing silently.

"It's distracting," Brad said, and when Nate kept shaking with silent laughter, Brad gave up on restraint and crawled over him to grab Nate's phone and check the text messages for himself. Brad held himself over Nate as he checked--Latest diaper is proof Linus loves me the most, His cuteness is a WMD, good thing no one's looking for those here, Linus and I have decided to write our own telenovela, Linus's first word: Ray!--and then a new one came in.

Linus likes Waylon better than Johnny Cash.

Brad texted back NO COUNTRY MUSIC without thinking about it, and only turned the phone to show Nate afterward. Nate snorted and took the phone from Brad, sending his own text back. He snapped his phone shut and dropped it, and Brad was still braced over him on the bed.

"I wanted to fuck you," Nate observed calmly, touching his fingers to Brad's lips. Brad experienced a weirdly intellectual burst of desire: he absolutely wanted that, in a way that currently did not connect to his dick at all. "But I think neither of us would enjoy it much at this point."

"There was a chance we could a minute ago," Brad agreed. "But I'm never going to get it up now that I have to worry about what horrors Ray is inflicting on Linus's developing ears."

"I could resurrect the ABBA debate right now," Nate said, pushing up onto his elbows to kiss Brad. "Or we could agree to a rain check on fucking and get out of here."

"Done."

---

They successfully rescued a wide-eyed Linus from line-dancing lessons, and Nate's neighbors from Ray playing the goddamn Achy Breaky song at a volume that would in fact justify homicide in most jurisdictions. Ray maintained that dance lessons could never start too early, and Nate snorted and said, "Yes, they can," in a long-suffering tone that revealed too much.

It took about five minutes for Brad to get the right part of Fantasia cued up. Nate gave in with good grace and waltzed Linus expertly around the room.

They wound up watching all of Fantasia, piecemeal and out of order, because Ray kept remembering something else that was his favorite part and demanding that Brad find it immediately. By the time the last segment ended, Ray had finished icing his knee after conclusively demonstrating that Nate's living room was a terrible place to do some kind of twirling flower dance he'd done to this movie as a kid, Linus was clean and fed and safely back to sleep with plenty of classical music to undo whatever brain damage he'd suffered in Ray's care, and it was too late for Nate to take a sleeping pill and have any hope of waking up before Brad's flight took off, never mind before Brad had to leave.

Brad figured that Nate could read a clock as well as any of them, but he still nodded questioningly toward the desk, where Nate kept his homework papers. Nate grimaced and nodded. He went and got his notebook from the drawer and went into the bedroom, leaving the door open behind him. Brad got a blanket and pillow from the hall closet for Ray, tossing them at him one-handed.

"Sleep tight," Brad said. "For about two hours, then we'll be up again for a feeding."

Ray shrugged and smiled. "Still more fun than waking up every two hours for Scud attacks. Night, Brad."

Brad went into the bedroom and shut the door, settling Linus in his crib before he stripped down to his boxers and lay down with his back to Nate, listening to the scratch of his pen. It seemed to go on longer than usual, but it might only have been that Brad didn't usually lie there and listen with his eyes closed, trying to memorize every second of this feeling, safely surrounded, everything he needed within easy reach.

He came fully awake when Nate shut the light off. He listened without moving as Nate undressed, but once he felt weight on the bed Brad dropped onto his back. Nate lay down half on top of him, one leg between Brad's and his head on the same pillow. Brad closed his arms around Nate, holding on while Nate held him still.

Brad listened to Nate's breathing and felt the way his own breaths had to lift Nate on each inhale. This was the opposite of the hotel; he could feel they were going to move, this time, just as inevitably as he'd known they couldn't before. When Nate turned his head and kissed the corner of Brad's mouth, it felt like the culmination of something long-planned, and the touch felt like it carried the weight of Nate's whole body, the last ten days, the last year.

Brad shifted to meet him in a kiss, licking into Nate's mouth, learning him all over again one more time. They traded deliberate kisses, purposeful but unhurried. They had only this one last night, but they had hours of it yet, hours until Linus was likely to wake up again. Brad let his hands move slowly over Nate, down to his bare ass and up to tangle in the short curls of his hair, tilting his head between one kiss and the next.

Nate's hands were mostly still on Brad's shoulder and side, but soon Nate was rocking down against him, grinding his dick slowly against Brad's hip. Once they were both fully hard and moving together, Nate's fingers hooked into the top of Brad's boxers. Brad shifted up enough to let Nate tug them down, kissing Nate the whole time, never making a sudden move, never rushing. They could go on like this all night, dragging it out for all the time they had.

The door slammed open, letting in a sudden flood of light and Ray in a flurry of motion. He threw something onto the bed in a rattle of flimsy plastic even as he said, "Jesus, Nate, you don't know where Brad's been, and also not in front of the baby."

He never broke stride, coming around the bed to Linus's crib, scooping him up, and storming back out while Nate and Brad stayed frozen on the bed.

Ray slammed the door behind him, dropping them into darkness with their dark adaption totally fucked. They stayed like that for a few seconds longer, until Brad couldn't keep still anymore and flexed up under Nate, driving his dick against Nate's belly.

Nate started shaking silently. The TV turned on in a sudden roar of Fantasia music, and Nate's laughter burst into sound a second before Brad started laughing too.

"Did he," Nate gasped, groping sideways on the bed and giggling, falling off of Brad as he searched for what Ray had thrown at them.

Brad rolled the other way, switching on the lamp by the bed so that he could see Nate laughing helplessly over the drugstore bag of supplies they'd never even opened at the hotel.

"You don't," Brad managed to get out, crawling over to him and still laughing as he pressed sloppy kisses to Nate's shoulder, his bicep, his cheek, reaching down to get a hand on Nate's dick, still just as hard as Brad's. "Be careful, Nate. You don't know where I've been."

Nate choked on laughter, coughing, and Brad pounded him helpfully on the back with the hand that wasn't jerking him off while Nate dumped out the condoms and lube with one hand, wiping his eyes with the other.

Nate pushed Brad away once he had both hands free, barely holding back a laugh as he said, "Lie down and think of England."

"Fuck England," Brad replied, controlling his voice with an effort as he dropped onto his stomach and spread his legs. "I'd rather think about you. Unless you want me to think about jerking off thinking about you, which is going to happen a lot in England."

Nate shoved at him again, settling over his back, dick against Brad's ass. He managed to sound mostly serious as he spoke against the back of Brad's neck. "Think about whatever makes you stop laughing long enough for me to fuck you."

"Understood." Brad pressed his ass up against Nate's dick, squirming to get him lined up--and rubbing his dick into the sheets--while Nate just stubbornly lay there on top of him, grinding into his ass cheek and kissing the back of his neck.

Brad heard Ray switch chapters to the part with the hippos and alligators and muffled his laugh in the pillow. Nate was shaking again, mostly holding it together to say into Brad's ear, "Piano music and rose petals?"

"Fuck you," Brad said, bursting out laughing again. The TV got louder, which made him laugh harder, and Nate was writhing with laughter on his back, grinding his dick against Brad's ass.

They both wound down to almost-not-laughing, and Nate got back on track first.

"Hands and knees," Nate said, and his voice shook but didn't break.

Brad pushed up under him even as Nate moved off of him and the music swelled out in the living room. Brad hung his head and bit his lip, staring at his own dick upside down and listening while Nate got the lube open, the obscene spurt of the stuff onto his fingers. Brad shifted his knees further apart in anticipation, feeling the stretch of muscle in his thighs, and a second later Nate's wet fingertip, chilly with lube, was pressing against his hole. Brad bit the tip of his tongue and concentrated on relaxing as Nate's finger pushed into him in one smooth, unhesitating motion.

Nate crooked his finger, jerking a bark of sound from Brad's throat. It was too exactly right, the fast progression of good, stretching pain and the weirdness of being opened up and then sudden, electric pleasure, all right on top of each other. Nate kept working his finger inside Brad, nailing his prostate and drowning out everything else with sharp bursts of sensation until Brad was shifting his ass back impatiently.

"You don't have to convince me," Brad managed to say. "Just. More."

"Mm-hm," Nate said, sounding completely distracted, but the motion of his finger changed. There was the always-disconcerting feeling of cold lube wet on the outside of his asshole, and then Nate was slicking another finger into him.

Brad managed to just exhale this time--the second finger was just more of everything, nowhere near the sharp shock of the first. Nate kept at it until Brad was not only fucking himself back onto Nate's fingers but letting out a low, involuntary growl of frustration. Nate crooked his fingers and Brad shifted his weight to slap one open hand against the wall at the head of the bed in sheer frustration at the not-enough of it. The volume of the TV got suddenly, sharply louder.

Brad pressed his face into his arm, refusing to actually laugh this time.

Nate said, "Yeah, okay, okay," and eased his fingers free in time with Brad's forcibly even breathing.

Brad took his hand off the wall and put it on his dick, jacking himself slowly, just enough to distract from the wet-open feeling of his ass while Nate tore a condom open and slicked himself.

Nate swatted Brad's hand away, and Brad put his hand--quietly--back up on the wall, bracing himself. Nate closed one hand on Brad's hip and then there was the pressure of Nate's cock against his ass. Brad pushed back to meet him, mastering that second of impossibility that always hit him, and then Nate was pushing inside and Brad's breath caught on the burn, the invasion, the overwhelming rightness of it.

Nate stayed still until Brad started breathing again, and then he flexed his fingers on Brad's hip. Brad felt the tiniest of shifts in Nate's weight as Nate's dick shifted inside him, and then Nate started to shake, his other hand closing on Brad's hip like he had to steady himself, had to hold himself up.

Brad looked over his shoulder just in time to watch Nate, staring down at Brad's ass, lose control of his face. It crumpled into something that looked like pain, and Nate folded forward, shoulders shaking, as a keening laugh escaped.

"My ass is ridiculously fantastic," Brad offered, just managing to get the words out without laughing at Nate.

"I can't," Nate gasped against Brad's back, as Brad shifted his weight to support them both, which made Nate's dick move inside him in a different way from the minute shaking of Nate's entire body. "She's--looking--at me. But it seems--"

Nate broke off in giggles, and Brad put his head down and let his own laughter shake him, realizing where this was going.

"It seems," Nate repeated, "so rude, to cover up her face."

Brad arched his back, shoving his ass up onto Nate's dick and his shoulders up under Nate's face. "Stay--right--there."

Nate made a noise against Brad's spine that wasn't quite a laugh and that vibrated through him like the buzz of a tattoo needle. His hands tightened hard on Brad's hips, anchoring them both, and when he finally moved a little, pulling out and thrusting in again, Brad's breath stuttered in his throat.

They were both quiet then, and all the frantic energy they'd been expending was suddenly focused here, on the snap of Nate's hips and Brad shoving back against him. Nate's breath rushed silently against Brad's skin as Nate started to fuck him as hard and fast as he could while leaning down onto Brad's back. Nate peeled a hand off Brad's hip, leaving it throbbing with incipient marks, and jerked him off with quick, tight strokes.

Brad pushed back as hard as he could, trying to push Nate over the edge, but Nate had the leverage and the control, syncing his strokes on Brad's dick with his thrusts into Brad's ass. Brad gritted his teeth and held on, trying to make it last, trying to stretch this fuck out as long as it would go. He tried to focus on anything other than his ass and his dick and the pleasure that rattled through him on every stroke: Nate's weight on his back, raising sweat between them that dripped down Brad's sides. His arms were aching from holding them both up, starting to shake as Nate kept fucking him. The music was playing, and Nate's room smelled familiar now, underneath the sex, and through all of it Nate was fucking him, jerking him off, pushing and pulling him relentlessly through this. Sensation piled on sensation until Brad couldn't hold himself back from it at all, giving in to his orgasm with a last soft gasp.

Nate fucked him straight through it, which made it seem to last forever. He only dropped his hand from Brad's dick when Brad grabbed his wrist--and only then because Brad overbalanced and Nate had to catch himself before they both collapsed flat onto the bed.

Brad still wound up face down in a pillow, with Nate still inside him, Nate's weight coming to rest on him again. Brad could feel him trying to slow down, trying to make it last, and then speeding up again because he couldn't resist.

Brad turned his head, reaching back to grab any part of Nate he could reach. He got his fingers onto the sweat-slick back of his arm and dug them in.

"Nate, come on."

Nate's rhythm faltered, and Brad rocked up until Nate shoved into him one more time and came in a long, silent shudder.

He collapsed onto Brad's back and they lay still a while. The music changed and changed again and finally Nate sighed and pulled away from him. Brad shivered and rolled over onto his side, feeling wrecked and raw. Nate was on him again a second later, pressing up to him chest-to-chest and sliding an arm around Brad to keep him close.

"I should clean up," Brad mumbled, with absolutely no intention of getting out of bed or breaking Nate's grip.

"No," Nate murmured. "You should promise me that you were either too young to drink or fucking wasted when you got that tattoo."

"Twenty-four and cold sober," Brad lied without a shred of remorse. "Fuck you, it's an awesome tattoo."

"Fuck you," Nate returned, lazy and nonsensical, before he pressed a long, sloppy kiss to Brad's mouth.

When he pulled away, Nate added breathlessly, "You know when you get to fuck me."

Brad closed his eyes and nodded, close enough for Nate to feel. "I will come home to you."

Nate's hand on Brad's back drifted down to the borders of Brad's tattoo, tracing idly. Brad closed his eyes and kept breathing, only to startle awake again when the music changed.

"Gotta clean up," he muttered, and this time Nate nodded and gave him a gentle push.

Brad grabbed clothes from the clean pile on top of Nate's dresser and slipped out into the hallway naked, squinting against the light of the TV until he got into the darkness of the bathroom. He had to turn a light on there, but he still cleaned up mostly by feel with his eyes closed, only opening them to watch while he washed his hands when he was done.

He pulled on shorts and a t-shirt and went out to the living room.

Ray was lying on the couch with Linus on his chest, watching Brad through half-open eyes. He picked up the remote and turned the music down enough that Brad didn't have to speak up.

"Can I have him back?"

"Did you wash your hands?"

Brad leaned over Ray, sticking a finger under his nose. Ray sniffed and then nodded, taking his hands off Linus and letting Brad gather him up.

Brad pressed a kiss to Linus's forehead before settling the baby against his chest, and Ray's eyes came open a little wider as he watched.

"I'm really fucking happy for you," Ray said quietly.

Brad nodded. "I don't think there's anyone else in the world who I'll hate less for being here with them when I can't."

Ray smiled a little at that, but not so much that Brad doubted he understood that as the exact truth it was.

"I keep trying to think of a way to say I'll take good care of them for you that doesn't sound like super fucking creepy innuendo, but I'm going to do my best."

"I know," Brad said, rubbing Linus's back. "Thanks."

Ray just nodded, and then closed his eyes and turned onto his side, his back to Brad and to the TV.

Brad picked up the remote and shut it off, leaving them in silence and darkness while he carried Linus back to bed, back to Nate.

---

Brad didn't think he slept--he was always conscious of his careful grip on Linus and Nate's arm over them both--but not nearly enough time passed before his phone alarm was chirping in the dark. Brad kept still, but Nate pushed up and reached across him to silence it. Nate took Linus, and that put it past the point of resistance. Brad got up.

He took a shower, fast but thorough. The people he'd be sharing a plane with really didn't need him smelling like baby wipes and sex sweat, to say nothing of the fact that he'd be hugging his parents when he got to San Diego. When he returned to Nate's bedroom wrapped in a towel, Nate had turned a light on and pulled Brad's backpack and sea bag onto the bed with him. He was reclining against the pillows with Linus on his chest, and he watched in silence while Brad pulled out clothes and got dressed, pocketed his phone and packed in the last of the clean laundry from the dresser. Everything else was already in his bag, but Brad looked through it one last time.

He looked up when Nate moved, pulling out something that had been half-hidden in a fold of the covers. The Odyssey, and under Nate's thumb, pressed against the cover, a silver-shining key that Brad recognized from his rummage through Nate's junk drawer on his first day here.

"I don't want to lock the door behind you," Nate said quietly, and Brad knew he didn't mean he couldn't be bothered to get out of bed and see Brad out.

"I'll lock up," Brad promised, reaching out his hand, pressing his thumb down beside Nate's on the key as he took hold of the book.

"You can read to him when you call," Nate added.

Brad nodded. "I'm not going to make you wait twenty years, Nate. Not even ten."

"Just come home safe," Nate said quietly. "I don't care when."

Brad moved around the bed to sit down on the edge beside him, his heart squeezing too tight to let him speak. This was it; this was the last moment. He reached out and shut off the light and then pulled Nate close, Linus held between them. He pressed his face to Nate's, not going for a kiss, just breathing close to him one more time, resting a hand on Linus's belly to feel it rise and fall.

"I will," he whispered. "As many times as I leave, I will always come home to you."

"Go on, then," Nate replied.

Brad nodded and stood, gathered up his things, and walked away in the dark without looking back.

---

Epilogue

Brad let most of the others go out ahead of him. He wasn't going to draw attention by making a point of going last, but it would be easier to lose himself in the crowd when there were plenty of other reunions in motion by the time his boots hit the ground.

He glanced at his watch and worked out the time difference, his other hand moving automatically to the rectangle in his blouse pocket, the photo he'd carried for months now of him and Nate and Linus together. Today was a Tuesday, Nate's shortest day of classes. Nate and Linus would be home for lunch already. If Brad could get his phone up and working within the next half-hour he had better than even odds of catching them before they went down for a mutual Tuesday afternoon nap.

He walked down the stairs, scanning the crowd by sheerest habit. It was full of waving Union flags, kids and women and camouflage fatigues and green berets and tear-streaked beaming faces. It was utterly safe, but still just another base of operations that was nowhere near home.

Brad registered out of place first, and then the little American flag being flapped wildly in a baby's fist. Someone shoved him from behind with a good-natured insult that was just a blur of English-accented noise. Nothing Brad's senses reported fit together or made any sense. Linus was perched on Nate's arm, in the middle of a tarmac in England, waving an American flag.

It was an entirely physical sensation: a head rush like being about to drown, like breaking the surface and drawing breath for the first time. Brad started running, and there was no coherent thought until he'd reached them, until he had his arms around them both, his face pressed against Nate's neck.

This is why, he thought. This is why guys run the last five yards.

Nate's free arm closed around him, and Linus's flag-holding fist was pounding at his shoulder. Brad straightened up when he could make himself loosen his grip that far.

"You had class today," he said, hands still clenched in Nate's USMC sweatshirt, because they were in public and he couldn't--

Nate reeled him back in and kissed him. Linus kept whacking Brad with the flag, and everyone around them kept screaming and chattering and crying just like they had been the minute before.

"It was worth skipping," Nate finally said when he broke away, grinning as bright as the desert sun. "Just to do that once."

Brad stared and then turned his head to actually look properly at Linus, who went abruptly still under Brad's scrutiny. His eyes had lightened up to the same translucent green as Nate's, which the computer screen had never shown right. His blond hair curled over his ears and at the back of his neck, and he was wearing a t-shirt with a devil dog on it under his jacket.

"Hey, little man," Brad said. "Guess we get to do story time in person tonight."

A look of total confusion came over Linus's face; he let go of Nate's shoulder with the hand not holding the flag and reached for Brad's face.

"Yeah, Dad's not on the computer tonight," Nate said, angling Linus closer. "But that's still him, I promise."

Linus smacked a hand onto Brad's chin, still frowning.

"What's the password?" Brad asked. "Telemachus? Penelope? Odysseus?"

He drew out the last name with a hiss the way he always did to make Linus laugh, and Linus's eyes went wide and his mouth stretched into a huge three-toothed grin.

"Yeah, it's me," Brad agreed, taking Linus from Nate before he could launch himself across. He had to adjust his grip hastily as Linus's full weight hit him. "You're not a rifle anymore, huh, little man? You're a fifty cal."

Linus crowed cheerfully, waving both arms and smacking Brad in the face while Brad pressed kisses to the top of his head. Nate stepped in closer to catch Linus's hands, guiding one hand to rest gently against Brad's jaw.

Brad grinned helplessly at him. "I was coming home, Nate."

"I know," Nate said, leaning into him. "I figured we could meet you halfway."

Comments

[elizaria]

Dead. So many emotions all over the place. This was gorgeous. I love how they come alive in your hands, how you made me read and enjoy kidfic, how happy I was to see the epilogue there at the end.

Amazing.

[dira]

Thank you! I'm thrilled that you enjoyed it so much, even as something you don't usually like! :)

[princessofgeeks]

You made me feel ALL THE FEELINGS.

I particularly liked the part where Brad realizes what he's been putting his parents through, all these years.

Great job. Thank you.

[dira]

Thank you back, I'm glad you enjoyed this! And, yeah, Brad had a lot to learn here. :)

[ravurian]

Jeez, the Baby Fick fic was sooo worth waiting for. I am full of admiration for your writing in this story, the space and simplicity of it, its situation within POV, the restraint and specificity of it. I very much liked how you managed to deliver emotion without being unduly or intrusively emotional, and yes, without retreating from it either. In short, I liked this not only because of the content, but the craft and care in its construction.

[dira]

Thank you! I think I instinctively try to keep the writing unemotional--because I have this phobia about being schmoopy--at the same time that I'm constantly wanting to write these intensely emotional experiences. So I'm glad I was able to strike a good balance. :)

[ravurian]

No, no, not good. Exquisite. Sorry, I couldn't let that go by unchallenged (lol).

[dira]

Duly noted, and thank you again! :)