The Shadow That You're Standing On
Author: Dira Sudis (dsudis)
Date: 2011-09-20T04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: FanFiction; M/M; Generation Kill; Brad Colbert; Mike Wynn; Nate Fick; Ray Person; Brad Colbert/Nate Fick; Completed
Description: When Brad takes Nate home to meet his parents, Nate recognizes his own father in a pre-adoption baby picture of Brad.
Publisher: archiveofourown.org

The Shadow That You’re Standing On by Dira Sudis (dsudis)

Fandoms: Generation Kill
AO3 Categories: M/M
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Brad Colbert/Nate Fick
Characters: Brad Colbert, Mike Wynn, Nate Fick, Ray Person
Status: Completed
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Published: 2011-09-20
Updated: 2011-09-20
Packaged: 2023-10-15 19:02:23
Summary:

When Brad takes Nate home to meet his parents, Nate recognizes his own father in a pre-adoption baby picture of Brad.

The Shadow That You’re Standing On

Author’s Note:

Many thanks for support, cheerleading, general not-defriending, and beta services to Iulia, Templemarker, Petra, and Miss Molly Etc!

The weirdest thing about waking up next to Brad was that even though Nate had only done it three times, and nowhere near consecutively, he was never disoriented by it. He knew it was Brad next to him. He knew they were at Brad’s, which was a first—a birthday gift, not from Nate to Brad, but from the guys in the know (unasked, untold) to both of them.

After the normal birthday celebration at the bar, a handful of them had come back to Brad’s place—Mike, Ray, Tony, Eric, Pappy, and Nate—and when Nate fell asleep on the couch, they’d all neglected to wake him up and take him along as they left. Tony and Ray had said Brad could have one last birthday present, giving the LT—the Cap, sorry—shit for being such a lightweight in the morning. Brad had made a crack about never getting a break from looking after officers even when they weren’t his CO anymore. Nate hadn’t twitched an eyelash or let himself smile. And there it was—eight or more hours of plausibly deniable time alone.

Here Nate was, waking up next to Brad and knowing exactly where he was though they’d never had a chance to actually learn each other. They might never, Nate thought. Even in the best case scenario, how many times would they have a chance to wake up in the same bed? They had this morning through the collusion of a half-dozen guys they trusted with their lives, but they were only a week away from Nate’s separation date and paddle party. There were just days left before he was off into some other life, a continent or an ocean or half the world away from Brad.

Brad turned over onto his side, throwing an arm over Nate.

“Sir,” Brad mumbled. “Think quieter. Some of us weren’t faking drinking last night.”

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Nate murmured, and flexed just enough muscles to be plausibly about to move. “I’ll let you fake your hangover in peace.”

Brad’s grip tightened and Nate relaxed into it and closed his eyes. He always knew where he was with Brad, because he was where he was supposed to be.

He snorted silently at himself, and Brad said, “What?”

Nate shook his head. He’d save that one to tell Brad sometime when he needed to give Brad a reason to mock him for the rest of time. For now, he’d just have to think of some other way to answer Brad’s question.

The next time Nate woke up—stickier, sun definitely up, Brad still beside him—it was because Brad’s phone was ringing. Nate automatically turned over to check his own phone, but Brad waved a reassurance at him as he flipped his open. “Hi, Mom.”

Nate relaxed and lay still, trying not to watch or listen too obviously, but Brad didn’t seem to have a problem with him being there—or with talking to his mom on the phone while naked in bed with Nate.

“Yeah, I know what day today is,” Brad said. “Yes. Yes. I would have changed my name by now if I didn’t. That’s fine. Sure.”

Nate felt Brad look over at him, and met his eyes. Brad tilted his head and said, “Yeah, I could probably round up one or two without much trouble. Ray’s always hungry, but he might still be sleeping off my birthday party.”

Nate raised an eyebrow. Brad shrugged.

“I will tell him. No. Yes. Goodbye.”

Brad looked away to set his phone down, and Nate seized that second to ask, “What day is today?”

Brad’s actual birthday had been days ago, in the middle of the week when no one could get free to celebrate apart from the practical jokes Nate had heard about in, he was sure, strategically edited forms. He wasn’t their CO anymore, but he was still an officer.

“Gotcha day,” Brad said, turning back with no sign of finding the question startling or intrusive. “I was five days old when my parents got me. They always did this when I was a kid—let me party with my friends on my birthday, and then had a family thing five days after. It’s mandatory whenever I’ve got liberty on the day. Just brunch with my parents this morning. I’ll probably go over to my sister’s later.”

“And Ray….” Nate said. He was pretty sure he knew—he was pretty sure Brad was just giving him cover, making no promises for him—but Brad hadn’t actually invited Nate to come meet his parents anywhere in there.

“My parents, like most civilized people, continue to be baffled by Ray,” Brad said, looking back toward his phone. Nate watched the line of his throat and the curve of his shoulder. “I mentioned his girlfriend the first time I brought him over, but he asked to see my baby pictures anyway.”

Brad looked at Nate again and flashed a smile. “Ray, of course, delights in sowing discord wherever he goes.”

Nate had no trouble parsing what Brad had just said, and wasn’t even surprised by it. This was Brad, after all. “So if you took a guy to your parents’ house and didn’t mention his girlfriend….”

“He’s definitely getting shown the baby pictures,” Brad said, his expression turning serious. “I can make up a girlfriend for you if you want one, Nate. The baby pictures go on for a while, and my mom always includes the hilarious saga of how they put together a bris on three days’ notice.”

“And your parents will know,” Nate said, because every once in a while, when it was just the two of them, somebody had to ask. Or tell.

Brad nodded. “They know. And they understand that I’m safer—we’re safer—if they never say what it is they know.”

Nate nodded back, assimilating, and Brad quirked a smile. “I guess you had a tearful heart-to-heart with your parents at some point, and now they’ve got a rainbow sticker on the back of their Volvo?”

Nate felt himself flush.

Brad raised his eyebrows.

Nate shrugged. “There was never anyone worth telling them about. And if I could—if they didn’t have to know, I didn’t want to upset them. Worry them. They would have worried about me.”

Brad’s eyebrows did not come down.

“Will worry about me,” Nate corrected himself. “And you. When I tell them. Right now, if you want.”

Brad rolled his eyes and caught Nate’s wrist as he reached for his phone.

“It can wait a week, Nate,” Brad said.

Nate flexed his fingers but didn’t try to break Brad’s grip. “I don’t want a girlfriend.”

Brad grinned and tugged him closer.

“Good,” Brad muttered against Nate’s lips. “Because I was going to make her such a—”

Nate didn’t let him finish that thought.

“The part Brad leaves out when he tries to tell the story—”

“I don’t try to tell the story. I don’t tell the story. Ever.”

“—is that he screamed for the entire three days—”

“I was a newborn.”

“So that was no help at all—calling all over the city to make arrangements with our little fire engine wailing in the background.”

Nate grinned. It was a little unnerving how much Brad talking to his mother sounded like Brad talking to Ray, but at least it meant Nate knew what cues to listen for to gauge Brad’s actual mood. So far, so good.

“Anyway,” Brad’s mom turned her attention back to the photo album. “Where were we?”

“Day two,” Brad said, and Nate did look up, then. Nate was sitting on the couch with Brad’s mom—which put their backs to a window—but Brad had Nate’s six covered. Brad was leaning in the doorway across the room, where he could also keep an eye on the back door and his father doing dishes in the kitchen. Nate wondered if Brad always stood there when he was in this house, or if it was something OIF had done to him. He wondered when it would be all right to ask.

“Day two!” Brad’s mom slid the album over, half onto Nate’s lap, but when Nate reached out to steady it something slid out from between the pages. He caught it—a small white envelope, with another handful of photos peeking out.

“Oh,” Brad’s mom said, and the easy teasing tone of her voice dried up suddenly. “Those shouldn’t….”

Nate looked to Brad, but Brad shook his head. “It’s fine, Mom. Nate can see those.”

Nate didn’t turn his head, but he saw Brad’s mom go still, looking across the room at her son, and Brad nodded again. It had been Brad who took the album from the shelf and handed it over to his mother. If the envelope wasn’t normally in the album, Brad had put it there.

“Those were taken by Brad’s biological parents,” Brad’s mom said, trying for matter-of-fact and not missing it by very far.

She hadn’t done this spiel before. Ray hadn’t gotten to see these. Maybe no one had. Nate felt like he should be wearing gloves—they should be under glass, like fragments of papyrus—but Brad’s mom didn’t even take them from his hands. When Nate looked up again, Brad himself was looking toward the back door, not making eye contact with anyone.

Nate was on his own. He shook the photos gently out of the envelope. The picture on top wasn’t much different from the other photos Nate had seen so far—it had only been taken a day or two earlier. The baby in the picture was curled against someone’s shoulder, and the photo was focused too closely for Nate to even say for sure if it was a man’s body or a woman’s. If he hadn’t just been shown a couple of dozen photos of five-day-old Brad he wouldn’t even have been sure it was the same baby.

It didn’t really matter what it looked like, though. The important thing about the picture was that Brad must have stared at it for hours when he was younger, trying to find meaning— identity—in it. He must have scrutinized the angle of that shoulder, the yellow-and-white stripe of that shirt, the plain white onesie he was wearing. The fact that he wasn’t screaming.

The next photo was similar—Brad being cradled against someone’s chest, a glimpse of a green shirt and a sliver of masculine arm. The one after that made Nate’s breath catch—it was taken from farther away, and it showed a woman from behind, straight honey-blond hair parted in the middle and pouring halfway down her back. She was wearing jeans and a yellow-and-white shirt. There was a baby barely visible in the crook of her arm, just the curve of his head, wispy blond hair catching the light. Brad and his mother.

Nate saw Brad’s mom shift in his peripheral vision, and didn’t dare move himself. In the silence he could hear the clink of dishes in the kitchen, water running and then shutting off. No one said anything; there were no stories to tell about these pictures. No one knew anything about them but the barest fact of what they were. Nate moved on to the next photograph.

Oh, he thought. The sense of recognition was instantaneous and absolute. He’d seen this picture before.

He’d seen this picture before.

No, not quite. The shirt was the wrong color. The tiny blond baby’s expression was wrong. His father hadn’t grown that disastrous beard yet.

His father.

Nate flipped to the next picture, but didn’t see it. It was an incoherent blur of color, vaguely Seventies-toned. The next picture after that was the same. The one after that was a familiar color and shape, probably the first one again. He slipped the photos gently back into the envelope. He said in a calm voice, “Anyway—what happened on day two?”

Brad’s mom laughed a little, and returned to the saga of Brad’s various grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles meeting him for the first time and what his sisters had tried to make him stop crying. Nate held the envelope against the back cover of the album and didn’t see a goddamn thing.

It didn’t feel like combat. He wished it felt like combat. Nothing should feel this bad without being able to fight back against it. Without the assurance that it might kill him cleanly. But there was nothing to fight. There was just the fact, and the paper his fingers pressed against, and the need to sit quietly and keep breathing and wait this out. Brunch was a lead weight in his stomach. That had been a mistake. You never wanted to go into danger on a full stomach.

On the other hand, you couldn’t plan for an ambush.

Brad’s voice suddenly cut across his mother’s. “Nate, what’s—”

Nate shook his head at the impossibility of answering. He stood up and walked out. Past Brad, necessarily, but Brad let him go. Door. Backyard. Patio, pool, wall at the back. No real cover unless he went far enough to be obvious about trying to get away. Nate went as far back in the yard as he could get and sat down on the further side of a couple of bushes that would partially screen him from Brad’s most likely vantage point.

He still had the envelope in his hand. He shook out the pictures again—they spilled across the decorative mulch between him and the next plants—and there it was. Nate picked it up.

His father.

He turned Brad’s photo over, the way he’d turned over his own a hundred times, and the handwriting on the back was so familiar he lost his breath.

Goodbye, baby boy.

He turned it over again and looked at the photo, but it was still the same—a man holding a baby up to his face, cheek to cheek. The baby—this baby, Brad—seemed to be looking at the camera, slate-blue eyes wide open. The man had his eyes closed, and his expression was impossible to read, except for what he’d written. Goodbye.

Footsteps approached. Nate closed his eyes.

“Hey,” Brad said softly, crouching down beside him, “what—Nate, are you freaking out because the people who gave me up took a couple of fucking—”

Nate opened his eyes and looked up. He showed Brad the picture he was holding. Brad shrugged. Brad had no idea.

Nate’s voice wobbled dangerously when he spoke, the calm of combat still unreachable. “There’s a picture exactly like this in my baby book.”

“Yeah,” Brad said, “Could’ve happened to anyone, so—”

“No,” Nate said. “Exactly like this. Brad. This is a picture of my father. This is his handwriting. Mine says Hello, Nathaniel on the back—that’s not a coincidence, this is—we’re—”

Brad’s face went ice-still, and Nate made himself shut up and look away. He’d gotten a couple of minutes to try to process in silence; he had to give Brad the same chance. Nate gathered up the other pictures that had fallen on the ground, tucking five of them back into the envelope. He couldn’t let go of the picture of his dad.

Their. Dad. Because he and Brad were—

“No we aren’t,” Brad said, his voice perfectly calm. Nate was sharply reminded of Brad’s voice in his ear over comms, saying there are men in the trees. So maybe this felt like combat for Brad.

Nate looked back at him.

“We aren’t,” Brad said, like he could just say that and it would be true; like it was completely obvious. “We aren’t brothers. We never were. We never can be.”

Brad nodded toward the photo. “He decided that twenty-nine years ago when he fucked off without even giving me a fucking name. Why do I care who—”

“He’s my father,” Nate snapped.

“Sure,” Brad said, still perfectly, infuriatingly calm. “Yours. Not mine. That was his doing. I guess that explains why it took five days for my parents to get me—he must have driven his trash all the way across the country to dump it. Probably didn’t want your mom to find out, right? That other picture isn’t your mom, I know that much.”

Nate gritted his teeth, but Brad wasn’t wrong, even if he was only working off the couple of family pictures Nate kept in his apartment. His parents had met at a New Year’s party, 1973. They’d gotten married in October of ‘74, two months after Brad was born. In all the pictures Nate had seen of her during those years, her hair was red as a penny and curly. Nate’s dad had still been in grad school then, in Baltimore, and here Brad was—here he’d been all his life—in California. And here was the picture.

“That doesn’t—” Nate said. “He wouldn’t. You don’t know him, he would never—”

“There’s photographic fucking evidence, Nate, you’re the one who’s telling me he did. Apparently you don’t know him.”

Nate shook his head silently, but he couldn’t—there was no arguing with this. His father wasn’t even really the important thing; this was about him and Brad, because everything had changed in the last five minutes. Everything.

“Give me the pictures, Nate. This is just a—this didn’t have to happen. If you didn’t see them we’d never know the difference.”

Nate stared. “You want to just forget this?”

“Yes,” Brad said, and Nate finally heard it, the shocky falseness of Brad’s calm. “This can just go away. It might have never happened. No one has to know.”

Nate laughed, and it hurt like broken ribs grating. “This isn’t a fucking plausible deniability situation, Brad, you’re my fucking brother—”

“Yeah,” Brad said, and Nate’s mouth went dry as he realized what he’d just said. “And those things don’t go together, so we pick one and stick with it. I know which one I pick, and I don’t give a fuck for whoever didn’t fucking want me when I was five days old. It doesn’t fucking matter—”

“How can it not matter—”

Brad reached across him for the photos, striking fast. Nate pushed back automatically against the violent motion, and Brad, balanced in a crouch, started to go over backward. The kick was probably half accident and half instinct, but when it connected with Nate’s knee something broke loose—not in his knee, but everywhere else. He launched himself at Brad.

From the first second of bodily impact, everything was very simple. This wasn’t just like combat. It was combat. Nate had trained for this; he knew what to do. He knew how to answer a blow with a blow, knew how to break a grip, how to secure his own, automatically pursued his own best advantage. He knew Brad’s reach, his strength, his style. He knew where Brad’s last training rotation had left vulnerable bruises.

Nate fought to win—to survive—and everything about that was very simple, even when he lost the advantage, even when Brad rolled him over and got a fist clenched in the collar of Nate’s shirt. Nate was more focused on the flash of white and blue in his peripheral vision—sidewalk, pool, use the terrain—than on the grim violence in Brad’s eyes.

Nate bucked under him, trying to get a leg free—he had his hands fisted in Brad’s shirt but no leverage. If he could flip them the pool was right there—bad idea, good idea, any idea in a pinch. Brad jerked him up by the neck and Nate realized this was going to hurt, and a woman screamed, “Brad!”

Brad froze just long enough to break his momentum, still holding Nate’s head and neck off the ground. It was enough of an opening for Nate, who was still moving. He got his leg free and Brad snapped back into motion at the same instant. Brad drove Nate’s head down into the grass with a fist at his throat a second before Nate got his leg up and flipped them, twisting Brad down sideways onto the concrete. Brad hit shoulder-first, head snapping down as a secondary impact as Nate watched in strobe-flashes, between the sudden blossoming pain engulfing his skull and striking like lightning down his spinal cord.

They were face to face for a suspended moment, closer than they’d slept. They were both still clutching each other—Nate’s leg was curled around Brad’s thigh, Brad’s knuckles pressed against his throat. Brad’s eyes looked unfocused, lost, and Nate had to unclench his fist from Brad’s shirt to try to touch him and see if he was all right. Before he could connect, Brad pulled away from him. He shoved Nate onto his back as he pushed himself up to his feet, and he was saying something Nate couldn’t make out over the ringing in his ears.

Nate rolled onto his opposite side, keeping his eyes on Brad as he walked away. Concussion, he thought. Concussion. Brad didn’t seem to be having any trouble moving, but Nate could see the livid red of blood on the side of his face as he bent down by the flower bushes and picked up something white.

The envelope. Nate closed his eyes. Brad walked away without breaking stride—Nate felt the vibration through the ground more than he heard it, or maybe he only imagined it because he knew the rhythm of Brad’s stride. When he opened his eyes again Brad was gone.

Nate pushed himself up onto all fours without quite blacking out. He got up into a half-crouch next, and made his way over to the flower bushes like there were snipers on the other side of the wall.

It was still there. A flash of Seventies color half-hidden among the flowers where Nate had thrown it as he jumped on Brad. Brad had missed the most important picture of all. Nate’s vision was a little blurred, but he was never going to forget that pattern of color and shape. He reached for it and only got halfway, finally losing his brunch all over the decorative mulch.

Good, he thought as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. (Bad. Definitely a concussion.) That gives me a reason to have been back here. He picked up the photo left-handed—the hand screened by his body from the house—and tucked it into his hip pocket. He stayed still for another couple of minutes, waiting for something—more vomiting, Brad—and when nothing materialized he pushed up into a crouch again, then slowly straightened to his full height, and turned to look for a route out of the yard that wouldn’t take him through the house.

Brad’s dad was standing by the back door, hands at his sides, watching.

Nate wiped his mouth again on the back of his hand and tried to speak, but his first attempt at words caught on his raw throat. Brad’s dad. Nate’s fingers twitched toward his pocket and away. Nate cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, sir. Thank you for brunch.”

Brad’s dad didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

Nate looked away, spotted his best exit route, and started putting one foot in front of the other.

Brad had joked about making sure Nate had a clear line of retreat when they went to get Nate’s car from the bar before driving down here separately. It had been funny at the time, maybe two hours ago.

Nate made it halfway back to Oceanside on the 101—never take the same route back as you took there if you could help it—before he had to stop at a lookout and throw up again. When he’d done that he slid down to sit against the side of his car and shook for a while. Brad was. His dad had. Nate had—there had been blood on Brad’s face. Brad’s mom. Brad’s dad. There were tears on Nate’s face, and he looked around furtively as he wiped them away, but he’d come around to the far side of the car to puke. There were tourists talking and taking pictures of the ocean a couple of cars down, and traffic whooshing by on the road behind him, but no one was likely to notice him here unless he did something much more conspicuous than sitting mostly still and being mostly quiet.

He reached into his pocket to touch the photo, and his fingers slipped over it to the plastic solidity of his phone. He jerked his hand away, feeling suddenly desperate to call and not knowing who. Brad. Dad. It couldn’t—it had to not be true, not like Brad had said. His dad couldn’t have cheated on his mom and bolted across the country to get rid of the evidence. The baby. Brad. Nate’s brother. Nate’s—

Nothing anymore. Not after all that.

He didn’t want it to be true any more than Brad did, but he couldn’t actually call his dad while he was sitting here on the side of the road and demand to know what had happened on this day twenty-nine years ago. He remembered Brad’s hand on his wrist, holding him back from picking up his phone this morning. It can wait a week.

There was no hurry at all, now. Nate leaned his head against the side of the car and waited for the shakes to ease up enough so he could drive.

He’d been on base for less than an hour the next day when Mike appeared in the doorway of his office. He looked grim enough that Nate didn’t have to wonder what he was doing up here in SOI territory. Nate knew better than to try to shut him down completely, but he also wasn’t giving anything away for free.

He looked back down at the same stack of paperwork he’d been staring at for the last hour, and said, “Mike, come in. Have a seat.”

Mike closed the door firmly behind him, and Nate looked up at the sound of the blinds being snapped shut. Mike turned to face him and said, “Could you do me a favor, sir, and stand up?”

Nate blinked, and made himself lean back slightly from the least-excruciating sitting position into one that might plausibly look relaxed. “I’d rather not, Gunnery Sergeant.”

Mike gave him a look like he’d just quoted Craig in all seriousness. Nate kept his face blank, hiding his flinch at the silent rebuke. Mike walked over and placed both hands flat on Nate’s desk, and Nate resisted the instinctive urge to stand up just to keep from being loomed over like that. Standing up quickly was not his best skill today.

“Don’t give me this bullshit, Nate. I’ve already had it from Brad and he’s had more practice dishing it out. I don’t care if you haven’t got a mark I can see from here, I know you’re hurt, and I need to know how badly.”

“Is Brad hurt?” Nate said, and the concern in his voice came out horribly real. “Is he okay?”

Mike’s irritated look changed—not into something less irritated, exactly, but Nate still had the impression that that had been the right thing to say. Or not completely the wrong thing, at least.

“Brad had a surfing accident yesterday and fell on a lot of strangely fist-sized rocks—banged up the backs of his hands, too. He didn’t break anything, but he’s got a big sexy cut on the side of his face that everybody’s going to be wanting to touch for the next week or two. What about you, sir? You had any accidents recently?”

Nate nodded slowly. “I went hiking yesterday. Took a pretty bad fall, but I didn’t think it was anything worth getting checked out.”

“Sure,” Mike said. “Why don’t you let me be the judge of that.”

Nate had never really locked horns with Mike. They’d clicked instantly and worked together as a team to manage the platoon, and neither of them had the kind of ego that would create conflict between them just for the sake of conflict. They’d needed each other too much.

Still, Nate knew that Mike wasn’t going to back down on this. He still had authority over Brad; he could take Brad’s injuries to his new CO as evidence of a fight. He could force Nate to confess something like the truth to keep Brad from being accused of worse. No matter what spin Nate put on it, it would be vastly worse for Brad than for Nate. Nate didn’t quite think Mike would actually do that to Brad, but he also didn’t think Mike was going to leave this room until he knew how badly Nate was hurt.

“I hit my head,” Nate admitted, and raised his hand to indicate the spot without touching it.

Mike came around the desk and bent over him, fingers ghosting over the back of Nate’s head. The spot he’d hit was weirdly numb—there was a dark bruise there, barely camouflaged by Nate’s short hair, and where the skin was swollen Nate couldn’t feel a touch unless he pressed hard enough to hurt. Mike didn’t hurt him, but he did mutter, “Jesus skull-fucking Christ, Nate.”

Nate sighed. “My ears were ringing, and I threw up twice in the first hour, but it—it might have been something I ate.”

“Sure,” Mike said, pulling his hand back and leaning hip-slung against Nate’s desk. “That’s a pretty common symptom of food poisoning—eat something, decide to go for a hike, hit your head, and then puke. Happens all the time.”

Nate shrugged. There was no level on which he could possibly explain what had actually happened, or why it hadn’t been only the concussion that could have made him throw up.

“Where else, Nate?” Mike asked, and his voice was a little gentler, like he’d realized what an icepick of a headache Nate had to have, and didn’t want to make it worse.

Nate glanced toward the closed door and the covered window, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

“Mike,” he said as his fingers worked, because he just might win an answer by cooperating, “Is Brad okay?”

“Brad looks like he wants a Humvee to hide under,” Mike said. “When we’re done here, I’ll go try to find him one. Anything beyond that is up to you.”

That night when Nate went home and checked his email, he found a message from his dad. The sight of it in his inbox hit him like the first shot fired into a waiting silence; he felt the adrenaline spike hit, the sudden perfect clarity, the chill of sweat down his spine as his heart rate jumped. His fingers twitched in, seeking a weapon, and one accidental keystroke or another popped up the email.

Nate,

I’ll assume this weekend’s radio silence was the no-news-is-good-news variety

Nate slapped his laptop shut, and then sat still as long as he could with his fists clenched, his whole body tensed for a fight.

It wasn’t Brad he’d wanted to hit yesterday, Nate realized. It probably hadn’t been him Brad wanted to hit, either. But letting himself think about who he did want to hit was actually worse, and anyway he was four thousand miles away.

When he couldn’t sit still anymore, Nate got up and went for a run.

His feet fell into the cadence of how could you, how could you, how fucking could you, and he couldn’t run fast enough to leave it behind.

Brad stood up from sitting against Nate’s front door as Nate walked up. Nate stopped six feet away and stared at him. Everything that he hadn’t been able to outrun was suddenly turned up to eleven, clamoring in his head and chest. The worst was that even feeling half-sick with all of it, head still pounding where it had hit the ground, more than anything Nate felt glad to see Brad, just like he always did.

Looking at Brad standing there now, it occurred to Nate that there was a pretty good chance Brad was not at all pleased to see him. It was Nate’s fault Brad had been subjected to whatever attention he’d gotten from Mike this morning. The side of Brad’s face was darkly bruised, and at the center was the black line of a scabbed cut, neatly crossed by a couple of bright white butterfly bandages.

Nate started walking again, and Brad backed away from the door to let Nate get at it. “Hello, Brad.”

“Captain,” Brad said, and Nate stopped with his keys in his hand.

Brad was definitely angry. He’d have said sir if it was just that they were in public. If they went inside this was going to be an argument, and there were only two ways that argument could end. Both of them were physical, and Nate couldn’t say which option made him feel queasier right now.

Nate turned to lean one shoulder against the door, closing his fist around his keys and folding his arms. “Something I can do for you, Staff Sergeant?”

Brad glanced toward the door and back to Nate’s eyes, and Nate saw him realize there was no point asking to have this conversation inside. He no doubt recognized every possibility Nate was forestalling, but there was no chance of remarking on any of them here.

Instead, Brad said quietly, “You have something that belongs to me.”

Nate nodded. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll return it as soon as I’m finished with it.”

He’d figured out that much while he was running. He was going to have to actually confront his father; he couldn’t spend the rest of his life wondering how could you and not know. He wasn’t sure he’d even last the rest of the week, but it was a conversation he needed to have face to face, and he needed to have the picture with him. He didn’t want to leave any room for his father to deny it. Nate would have liked to think that he didn’t need material evidence, that his father would tell the truth as soon as Nate asked. But there had been somebody missing out of Nate’s family, out of his life, for twenty-nine years, and his father had never let on. Nate really didn’t know his dad as well as he’d have thought he did two days ago.

“Finished with it,” Brad repeated flatly. “Sir, I think you know how I feel about having my likeness distributed to strangers.”

Not a stranger, Nate wanted to object, but of course he was, to Brad. Instead, Nate said, “Yours isn’t the only likeness in question.”

Nate watched Brad grind his teeth. It was interesting, in an awful way. Brad’s poker face had been better than this during the invasion. Nate wasn’t sure whether that meant Brad was deliberately letting Nate see his reactions, or if this situation was actually pushing Brad beyond his endurance.

“Sir,” Brad said, “I feel obligated to inform you that this is, bar none, the worst strategic plan I have ever heard put forward by an officer. There is no possible good outcome here. Just a lot of burning dogs.”

“As always I value your input, Brad,” Nate said. It was easy to say it, easy to fall into the patterns of speech they’d shared across the hoods of Humvees. “But the plan is the plan. I’m not going to let a burning dog lie.”

Nate watched Brad start to answer, and bite his tongue.

No. He watched Staff Sergeant Colbert bite his tongue, because Captain Fick had just said the plan is the plan. Because Nate had insisted on having a conversation about their relationship in terms that allowed him to shut Brad down unilaterally. For the first time he really felt like it was possible for him to abuse his power over Brad, and he unfolded his arms immediately, turning to unlock the door, take this inside and walk it back and have it out for real, on a first-name basis, in private.

He saw Brad see him getting it, and he thought that might be enough—but Brad just flashed a short, vicious smile, shook his head slightly, and turned to walk away.

“Brad,” Nate said, but he couldn’t make it an order, and Brad didn’t turn back.

The next morning Nate made himself read enough of his father’s email to respond coherently, though he couldn’t bring himself to mention that he’d been busy over the weekend celebrating a birthday. (Did he remember Brad’s birthday? Did he remember the day he’d let Brad go? He had to, if Nate knew anything about him at all, and yet—and yet.) Nate reiterated his flight information, instead. See you soon. Love, Nate.

The reply waiting for him that night ended with got some space cleared in the basement for whatever won’t fit in your room—any idea when your boxes will arrive? See you Saturday! Love, Dad

Nate looked around his apartment—nearly all packed—and thought about his father, about the picture, how could you. He thought about keeping a clear line of retreat.

He checked the time and then picked up his phone.

“Nate?” Kristen sounded worried, like her big brother might be calling to say he wasn’t coming home safely after all.

“It’s okay, Kris,” Nate said, even if it was in fact pretty fucking far from okay. Even if he might have to explain why once he knew for sure, because his sisters deserved to know as much as he did—if it was true, if their father had been lying to them all this time. It might not be true, though Nate couldn’t actually imagine how. “I just have to ask you for a favor.”

“Sure, anything,” Kristen said immediately. “Did your flight change? Do you need a ride? I can—”

“No, it’s okay, Mom and Dad are getting me. I’ll see you and Jen on Sunday like we planned. That’s why—look, can I ship my stuff to your place?”

There was a silence, and Nate found himself mentally measuring out Kristen’s current apartment. It wasn’t a lot bigger than the one Nate lived in, and she had a roommate. Nate wasn’t moving any furniture, and he really didn’t have that much stuff, but it would still be a tight fit—and—

“Nate—I mean, yes, sure, I’ll stack boxes in the living room, but what the fuck.”

“I have to talk to Mom and Dad when I get home. And I’m not sure how it’s going to go.”

“You have to—”

This silence was different; Nate could hear her drawing conclusions. He and Kris were just over a year apart in age, and they’d always been closer to each other than to their baby sister. He remembered sitting up with her at two in the morning his first Christmas break home from Dartmouth, with no lights on but the tree. He’d stared at the stockings because he couldn’t look her in the eye while telling her about the guy he’d met who he really liked and that he was maybe definitely sort of, yes.

He remembered her showing up at his apartment within a couple of hours after he’d sent her an email that said Do you think I could be a Marine? They’d sat on his bed and talked about DADT, and about Somalia and Bosnia and Iraq, about Gulf War Syndrome and PTSD and dress blues and Grandpa’s horseshoe. I think you can do anything, Nate.

“Nate, Mom and Dad will be fine.”

Nate squeezed his eyes shut. They would be fine, if it was what Kristen thought, and that just made it worse. They’d always been good to him; he’d always known he could trust them. So how could his father have lied to his mother? How could he have let Brad down so completely? “I just need to know I’m prepared for things to go wrong.”

Kristen said, “Okay, so, yes, you can have them send your stuff to my place for five minutes before you and dad come get everything and take it back to theirs, sure. Yes. Now tell me—” and her voice brightened, “why do you suddenly need to have this talk with Mom and Dad as soon as you get home, hmm?”

Nate winced. “Don’t. It’s not like that. You’re not—” Nate nearly choked on the words, but forced himself to say them anyway. “You’re not getting a new brother out of this.”

Nate didn’t let himself wonder who it was, in the seconds between hearing the knock and reaching the door to look through the peephole. It didn’t make a difference; it was no one he would have guessed. Nate rested his forehead against the door and looked for a moment, taking in the way he stood, patient and expressionless, with his hands at his sides. He looked just like Nate had last seen him.

Family resemblance, Nate thought. He squeezed his eyes shut and ran a hand over his face, like he could physically push his own expression to the same neutrality (fucking family resemblance) and then he stepped back and opened the door.

“Mr. Colbert,” he said.

Brad’s dad gave him a tempered smile. “Under the circumstances, I suppose it’s pointless to tell you to call me Mark, yes. Hello, Nate. May I come in?”

Nate nodded and stepped back automatically, before he could think better of it. Brad’s dad preceded him into his mostly-packed-up apartment, and there was nothing for Nate to do but lock the door and follow him.

“Sorry about the boxes,” Nate said, when they were both standing in the living room and Brad’s dad just stopped, looking around. “I think Brad mentioned I’m leaving soon. Can I get you anything to drink?”

Brad’s dad turned to look at Nate, silently sizing him up again, and Nate jerked his chin up and waited. Brad’s dad shook his head. “I’m glad to see you’re all right, Nate. I wasn’t sure I should let you leave, but I’ve learned a few things about handling an unhappy recon Marine in the last nine years, and I thought it was best to let you work it out yourself.”

Nate ran his hand over his hair. It was already automatic to press down at the edges of the bruise, to make the pain lance out and test it against the last time he’d done it. Still not better yet.

“I’m fine,” Nate said. Maybe that was all this was, just a decent person checking in to make sure Nate hadn’t been more injured than he’d looked.

Brad’s dad snorted. “You sound remarkably like my son when you say that. Except from you it sounds very polite.”

“I’m sure Brad—” Nate said, and then realized he wasn’t sure of a thing, regarding Brad.

Brad’s dad raised an eyebrow, but it seemed more commiserating than scornful. “Do you mind if I sit, Nate?”

Nate shook his head, and waited for Brad’s dad to take a seat on the couch before he took the chair, which gave Nate a good sightline to the door.

“I hope you won’t be too offended,” Brad’s dad said, “if I tell you that you weren’t my first choice of person to talk to tonight.”

Nate shook his head. Of course he’d come up to Oceanside for Brad; that was logical. And of course Brad had insisted he was fine. “Did you speak to Brad at all?”

Brad’s dad shook his head. “I didn’t call ahead; normally you can catch him at home if he’s on duty the next day, but he and his bike were gone. Which is probably what would have happened if I had called, so it had already crossed my mind that if I couldn’t find Brad, I might be able to find you.”

Nate nodded slowly. “Sir, I can’t tell you what Brad and I—”

But Brad’s dad was already waving him off. “I’ve known Brad his whole life, Nate. I would never ask you to break his confidence. And likewise, I can’t tell you what he’s thinking or put words in his mouth. But Brad treated you like someone who was very important to him—someone he trusted, which I can tell you is rare—so I want to offer you my perspective on him. I can’t help being biased, I know, but I came up here to dispense fatherly advice to someone, so why not you?”

Nate opened his mouth to say that he wasn’t sure it mattered anymore whether he understood Brad, and then realized it did matter. It mattered more than anything; it was going to matter for the rest of Nate’s life.

Brad was his brother, and there was no undoing that. There was no breaking up, no deciding they couldn’t hack this and giving up on it. Even if he and Brad drifted apart—even if Brad refused ever to acknowledge it, even if they never spoke again—it would always be there. This was different than having gone to war with Brad, different than Brad being one of his Marines when Nate was on his way out. This was forever.

If it’s true, Nate found himself thinking, feeling suddenly frantic at the thought of this absolute permanence. But even as he thought it he recognized it as nothing but that, just an instinctive search for reprieve. It had to be true; there was no alternative explanation that made any sense.

And if it wasn’t true then Nate was nothing to Brad except an asshole who’d thrown away everything over a picture, over a mistake, and the thought of that was even worse than the thought of Brad being always a part of his life, whoever he was, even if he refused to be anything but an absence. Even then, Brad would always be something important to Nate, if only my brother who doesn’t talk to me.

He looked up to find Brad’s dad watching him with a concerned expression. Nate swallowed hard. He would always be something to Brad’s dad, too, and the man before him was someone he could be sure hadn’t done anything wrong here.

“I would appreciate that, sir.”

Brad’s dad nodded slightly and said, “I just wanted to say that you seem like you’re inclined to think that a fight like that means it’s all over, and there’s no going back from hurting someone you love that way. But Brad doesn’t give up that easily. He doesn’t let people go.”

Nate dropped his face into his hands, experiencing a sudden, awful premonition of Brad telling someone, someday, It’s okay, we’re brothers now, the same way he had shrugged and said to Nate, We’re still friends, you should meet them sometime.

It couldn’t really be like that. Even Brad had his breaking point. This might be forever, but Nate couldn’t see how it could ever be okay. He couldn’t picture Brad saying his name with that kind of forgiving smile.

“Whatever you fought about the other day,” Brad’s dad went on, and Nate flinched and looked up, searching his face for any sign that he knew. There was nothing there, just the same steady concern.

“Whatever had you suddenly blowing up at each other like that—he’s the same person he was before, and so are you. Whatever made you want to give it a try, despite all the obstacles, it’s all still true, Nate. Brad is still Brad, and you’re still the man Brad introduced me to. You’re still the man he trusted enough to show those pictures to, which he doesn’t often—”

Nate couldn’t help looking away then. His gaze fell on the book he’d been reading, but he couldn’t make sense of the words.

“Nate?”

Nate shook his head, but he couldn’t make himself meet Brad’s father’s eyes again. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

There was a silence. Nate stared at the book. He could see all the letters; they just didn’t add up to anything coherent.

Brad’s dad said softly, “You really do sound just like my son when you say that.”

“Here’s the thing,” Ray said as he settled onto the barstool next to Nate’s.

Nate closed his eyes and knocked back the rest of his beer. When he opened them again he raised the glass in the bartender’s direction, and though he didn’t look up Nate was confident he’d have a refill soon.

“I’m alive because of you and Brad,” Ray said. “The two of you are, like, probably ninety percent of the reason I got through Iraq in one piece, okay? And the other ten percent—I mean, like three is Walt and three is Trombley, and the rest is probably just dumb luck and hajjis with dust in their eyes.”

Nate stared into his empty glass. “I’m not sure about your math, Ray.”

Ray shook his head. “I’m not talking about math, Cap. I’m talking about the fact that I’m not here to question your judgment. Or Brad’s. Not on the big stuff, anyway. If you and Brad both think a situation is fucked beyond unfucking then that shit is fucked, and I’m not here to tell you it’s all a big misunderstanding, because what the fuck do I know about it?”

Another beer appeared in front of Nate.

“I could ask you that very question,” Nate agreed. “Right after I ask you why you’re here.”

There was no point in asking how Ray had found him; Nate’s tactical retreat away from his email, his phone, and anyone who might knock on his front door had only brought him to a dive bar within easy walking distance of his apartment. He and Brad had been drinking here together the night before the first time they woke up together at Nate’s. Ray had nearly killed someone playing darts. It had been a memorable evening all around.

“Brad’s mom called me,” Ray said, and Nate picked up his beer and gulped.

“Yeah, I wasn’t really any happier about it, believe me. But she was worried that you didn’t have the—I am not even kidding here—the support that Brad has at this difficult time—”

Brad’s dad, Nate realized, had reported on him to Brad’s mom—reported on both of them, probably, even if Brad was just SNAFU—and she had called Ray. Nate supposed he should just be glad she hadn’t worked the Second Platoon emergency contact phone tree and called his mother.

“And I realized she’s probably right,” Ray went on blithely. “And here you are, sir. Drinking alone. Next thing you know you’ll be spilling your guts to the bartender, or some Suzie Rottencrotch who starts looking good to you after about three more of those.”

Nate turned his head and looked straight at Ray for the first time. “Are you here to keep me company, or here to keep me from talking to strangers about Brad?”

Ray shrugged. “Yes. I owe both of you, and I’m not taking sides other than, you know, the obvious. Also, unless you’re actually as much as a lightweight as you usually pretend to be, you’re never going to drink yourself unconscious at this rate.”

Nate looked down at his beer again and shrugged.

Beside him, Ray yelled, “Hey! Tequila over here, this guy’s getting separated!”

Nate started his last day as a Marine hung over. He was in his own bed, fully clothed but for his belt and shoes, and there was a note on the bedside table, lined up next to a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of aspirin. Nate got to the note last.

I am never letting you near tequila again. You spent two hours picking out my ideal college major and telling me which East Coast ivory tower I should apply to for it. I really don’t think MIT’s Electrical Engineering program wants me, but I do want the letter of recommendation you promised me sometime around your fifth shot.

Nate had all his other paperwork in order, so he killed one of his last hours in his office writing it up. Ray had certainly earned it.

Leaving the Marine Corps turned out to be almost easier than joining, when it came down to the end. He handed them papers. They gave papers back, including his final orders, directing him to return to Baltimore. He shook hands all around, made all the right jokes, and when it was all over he took his uniform off for the last time, put on civvies and tried to mean it.

There was just one thing left to do, a gauntlet disguised as a celebration. Nate was a little worried that the paddle parties they had for men killed in action would be more festive than his, after the last week. But even out of uniform he found he could still play the part his men expected him to play, when he was standing there in their midst again. Drinking and laughing and telling stories wasn’t, in the end, harder than ordering them into ambushes. Mike stuck close to his side through it all, backing him up when and as needed.

Brad was always just at the edge of Nate’s peripheral vision, never close enough to touch, never quite in focus. Nate didn’t even try to bridge the distance, not in public like they were, not when he was so close to knowing for sure, knowing the whole truth. (The photo was nestled in beside his plane ticket and his orders, waiting for tomorrow.) If Brad hadn’t given up on him completely, they could get through this to whatever was on the other side. Nate just needed a little more time.

For now, Nate said his goodbyes to everyone but Brad, and drank enough that that omission almost didn’t bother him.

“Captain,” the cab driver said, and Nate opened his eyes.

They weren’t at the hotel yet, just stopped at a light. The cab driver met Nate’s eyes in the rearview mirror and jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

“The guy on the bike a friend of yours, or do you want to take a detour by the MPs?”

Nate didn’t have to look back to know the answer, but he turned his head anyway, and spotted Brad a couple of cars back. Even with nothing clearly in sight but the foot he’d put to the ground, Nate’s heart beat faster at the sight of him. They were headed completely the wrong direction for Brad’s place.

“Not a friend, exactly,” Nate said, enunciating carefully. “But it’s all right. I can handle him.”

“Roger that.”

Nate kept his head turned as they got into motion again, getting glimpses of Brad between shifts in traffic and the occasional long blink—thigh, hand, shoulder, and just once, going around a corner, his face as he passed under a streetlight. He seemed to be looking right at Nate, though he was too far away for Nate to read anything from his expression.

Interrogative, Nate mouthed against the seat he was leaning on. Brad was hidden again by traffic, and Nate lost time to another long blink.

Nate opened his eyes again when the car stopped, and this time they’d gotten where they were going.

Brad was outside the open door, saying, “I can take him from here. Sir? Come on, let me get you inside.”

This was the simplest plausible deniability scenario: one of them was too drunk to be trusted alone. And he was sir again. Nate grinned as he took Brad’s extended hand, and let himself stumble a little as he stood. Brad steadied him, and Nate saw the cab driver’s expression lose every trace of curiosity. It was just what it looked like, a drunk newly-former officer and a long-suffering NCO looking after him like he always had.

Nate nodded to the cabbie, making it look like a dismissal in theater, where salutes were in abeyance. The cab driver turned away. Brad steered him away from the cab and—unerringly, as if he already knew—to the door of Nate’s room.

Brad’s arm was firm around him, and Nate leaned into the warmth of Brad’s body and the fact of Brad’s presence. Brad hardly groped him at all while pulling the hotel key from his pocket, but he didn’t hesitate to do it either. Inside, Brad propped Nate against the door as he shut it.

“Nate,” he said, looking Nate squarely in the eye. Nate had to smile at that. “Exactly how drunk are you?”

Nate’s smile widened, because that resolved all questions of exactly why Brad had followed him here. The involuntary twitch of Brad’s lips—not a smile, but close—made Nate’s mouth water.

“A little stupid,” Nate said, almost a laugh, remembering to enunciate. “Not incapacitated.”

Brad’s expression seemed to change at that. Nate didn’t get a good look, because Brad leaned in for a kiss at the same time. Nate’s mouth was open for it even before Brad touched him, but Brad kept pushing like Nate was holding something back, shoving his tongue into Nate’s mouth, his hands hard on Nate’s shoulders like Nate was going to try to get away. Nate tilted his head into the kiss, welcomed Brad back with his lips and tongue, with his hands on Brad’s hips.

“Tell me no,” Brad whispered against Nate’s mouth, and then was kissing him again before Nate even heard what he said. Nate just pushed back into the kiss, into the grinding pressure of Brad’s mouth against his, the scrape of Brad’s teeth against his lip, the pressure of Brad’s grip.

“Tell me,” Brad demanded, grinding up against Nate, his thigh between Nate’s legs. “Tell me you don’t want this. Tell me you don’t fucking want me.”

Nate’s hips jerked, and he was half hard already and rubbing up against Brad, pushing up on his toes to line them up better, to feel Brad hard against him. Brad’s mouth dragged away from Nate’s, down the line of his jaw. Brad’s hands flexed on him, and he muttered, “Say it, Nate, fucking say you don’t. Right now. Tell me to stop. Say no.”

Nate finally got it, and he shimmied against Brad to get friction on Brad’s dick at the same time he was planting one foot behind him on the door, so he could push off and spin Brad around.

“Yes,” Nate said as he pressed Brad to the door. Brad’s eyes were wide, and Nate darted in to kiss him as lightly as Brad had been harsh. “Yes.”

He took one hand off of Brad’s hip to trace the edge of the bruise on Brad’s face with his thumb, wondering if Brad tested his bruise as often as Nate touched his own. Brad’s eyes were narrowed, braced for impact, but Nate tried not to hurt him.

They shouldn’t want this. Fucking and brothers didn’t go together. But they did want this—Nate rocked against Brad, unable to resist just a little more friction, and Brad’s hips pushed back—and this was just how it was, now. One more secret to keep, one more weight in Nate’s stomach alongside frat regs and conduct unbecoming, DADT and abuse of authority and what it could do to Brad and to Brad’s career—just barely separate entities—if this ever got out. But if Brad was with him then Nate would carry that weight and never regret it.

“Yes,” Nate said, “Fuck you, yes, I want this.”

He turned the kiss rough again, pressing his thumb into Brad’s cheekbone until Brad arched against him and made broken, breathless noises into his mouth. Brad closed a hand on the nape of Nate’s neck, fingers digging in hard, and his other hand tightened on Nate’s ribcage right where the bruises were the worst. It sent a shock of pain through Nate that made him push harder against Brad, baring his teeth into their kiss.

Brad’s push-pull resolved into a push, and he said, “Bed,” as Nate stumbled away from him.

Nate nodded, backing toward it as he pulled his shirt off. “Come on. I want to see.”

Brad was already stripping by the time Nate got his head out of his shirt. This part could suck if there were boots involved, but they were both in go-fasters—and Brad was riding his bike, which meant Brad had weighed his priorities and chosen with this in mind. Yes, yes, yes.

Nate had his kicked off by the time he dropped onto the bed to wriggle out of his jeans, and Brad was keeping pace with him. Nate sprawled sideways on the bed with one arm tucked behind his head to watch Brad coming toward him—his eyes kept skipping around from Brad’s hard cock to the multicolored layers of bruises down his left side. They stretched from hip to armpit, looking like the purple sky of Brad’s tattoo had spawned a terrible thunderstorm. He watched Brad’s gaze making the same catalogue, from Nate’s knee to his cock to the mess over his ribs and just under his collarbones. Nate raised a hand to touch himself under Brad’s dark gaze, and then wasn’t sure whether to grab his cock or press down on a bruise.

Brad solved the problem by closing the distance between them, catching Nate’s raised hand by the wrist and pinning it to the mattress. He bent over Nate, still on his feet, and Nate remembered that instant when Brad had held him half-suspended by the collar of his shirt. His eyes had been just as dark then, just as focused.

This time Brad said mildly, “Let me handle that, sir,” and dropped to his knees, still holding Nate’s right hand to the bed with his left.

Nate meant to say something like, “Hey, come here,” but it came out as nothing but noise, because Brad didn’t fuck around. His mouth was on the head of Nate’s cock almost before Nate realized what he was doing. Nate looked down and caught Brad’s eyes smiling smugly up at him. Nate gave himself up to it then, because he had learned that when it came to sex, Brad winning didn’t mean Nate lost, not by a long shot.

He was dimly aware that he could have gotten one of his hands free if he tried, but his head rested heavy on one and the other was in Brad’s grip. He let his hips buck up, chasing Brad’s mouth, but Brad’s mouth was always exactly where Brad intended it to be, licking, sucking, teeth scraping just to the edge of pain. It was a blur of sensation that made Nate feel way more drunk than he’d been a minute ago, and he sunk his teeth into his lip to keep from saying something stupid. He spread his legs wider and let Brad have him.

Brad’s hand was on him, too, on his balls and sliding further back, spit-wet, pressing against his hole. Nate unlocked his jaw to say, “Yes, fuck, yes, Brad.”

Brad took him deeper even as he pressed just inside, taking Nate and being taken. Nate tilted his head to drive the bruise hard against the bone of his wrist, lightning strikes of pain that could only make this last a little longer, because it was all Brad, all them together.

“Brad,” Nate gasped, trying to make it sound like a warning, and Brad squeezed hard, twice, on his wrist. Go ahead. Nate thrust up into Brad’s mouth as well as he could, and this time Brad let him, holding steady to let Nate ride his building orgasm until he was spilling down Brad’s throat with Brad’s hand tight on his wrist, Brad’s hand cradling his balls, Brad marked all over his body.

After a while Nate was aware of the separate sounds of his own ragged breathing and Brad’s, and he raised his head to see Brad still kneeling between his legs, head still bent. He’d let go of Nate’s wrist, and Nate pushed himself down and off the bed, practically into Brad’s lap. Brad looked up in time to get his hands on Nate’s hips, easing his descent. Nate straddled him, leaning his head on Brad’s shoulder and getting his right hand—clumsy and aching a little from the strength of Brad’s grip—on Brad’s cock.

Nate remembered—even drunk it was never safe to forget—to keep his mouth soft on the side of Brad’s throat, to leave no marks that would show. Not marks from this. So much safer to explain a fight away than this.

“There’s—a perfectly—” Brad said, and then made a strangled noise of his own, as Nate’s thumb circled the head of his cock. Nate raised his head enough to find a safe place, and closed his teeth on the muscle at the top of Brad’s shoulder, exactly where it would be covered even by an undershirt.

“Fuck, Nate, fuck,” Brad gasped, and Nate kept his hand moving, alternating teeth and tongue on that one spot until Brad went silent again. He was always silent when he came, too many formative years with too little privacy. Nate picked himself up then, pressed his mouth to Brad’s and tasted himself, made all the little sounds Brad never allowed himself as Brad came in his hand.

Brad kept kissing him, after, until Nate was leaning back onto the bed with one sticky hand on the back of Brad’s neck.

“Stay,” Nate said against Brad’s mouth, and Brad went still. “You can stay tonight, can’t you? No one knows where you are.”

Brad kissed him again, a strangely singular and deliberate kiss, and then pulled back to look him in the eye.

“Nate,” he said quietly. “This is it, then. We—you choose this. Us, like this.”

Nate blinked. He wanted to say yes, of course, yes, yes, but he remembered Brad saying we pick one and stick with it. The weight of brothers was suddenly like a punch in the gut.

“Brad,” he said helplessly, “I have to—I can’t not ask him. I have to know. And if we—we’re—”

If they were brothers then that was forever, they belonged to each other forever. How could Nate give that up? He just didn’t know how to say it, when it might not be true, when he couldn’t promise.

Brad blinked, but his expression didn’t change.

“Okay,” Brad said. “Then you—okay. Then that’s it.”

Brad shifted backward and stood up, turned and grabbed his underwear off the floor.

“No,” Nate said. “Brad, no, don’t—”

Brad was getting dressed, and Nate knew he should get up off the floor, get up and—

But he couldn’t fight this. He couldn’t order Brad to stay, and he didn’t know enough yet to argue.

“I’m not choosing,” Nate said. “You’re choosing. I’m just—Brad, I need to know what happened. We need to know what really—”

Brad stopped short and looked down at Nate and then went back to zipping his pants. “You can’t have both, Nate. I’m not going to wait around for your gag reflex to kick in when you realize what the hell you’re doing. This is it. I already made my choice, and it’s time for you to make yours.”

Brad had already picked up his shoes, socks, and t-shirt by the time Nate managed to say, “Brad, it’s not that simple, it’s—”

Brad yanked his shirt on and didn’t say another word, just jerked the door open and walked out barefoot, Nate’s sticky fingerprints on the nape of his neck. Nate sat still for a long time after the door slammed, trying to think of what he could have said, when yes was just as wrong as no.

When Nate woke up, he had no idea where he was. He looked up from silencing the alarm on his phone and recognized that he was in a hotel room, but for a few dizzy seconds he had no idea where, or why, or what came next. Then he registered his own physical state—exhaustion shading into hangover and sex-stickiness over the familiar bruises—and the absence of Brad, and everything slotted into place.

He was going home—he was going to Baltimore today.

He had exactly enough time to shit, shower, shave, and get out the door to catch his flight, but he still stopped and pulled the folder out of his backpack to check. His ticket, his orders, and the photo were all still there. He looked down at his phone, but he didn’t have any time to waste and he still didn’t have anything to say. Tonight, maybe. By tonight at least he would know, and then he could figure out what to tell Brad, even if Brad didn’t want to hear it.

He dozed on the flight with his chin on his chest. If he put his head back he wound up resting directly on the bruise on the back of his head, which kept him awake. The thought of landing and seeing his parents gave him a jittery feeling like rolling toward a target with no recon, a village of unknown sympathies. It wasn’t going to be that simple, but the feeling did make it easier to force himself to catch what sleep he could.

Nate took his silver lining where he could find it.

His parents were waiting for him just past security, both looking so simply and openly happy to see him that Nate couldn’t help smiling back. The reflexes of a lifetime kicked in, and he hugged them both and remembered that he loved them, that these were his parents and no matter what Brad thought of it, the truth had to be something he could—they could—live with. Brad didn’t know them—should have, in a perfect world, but didn’t—and Nate couldn’t knowingly rely on the person whose relevant intel was all secondhand or worse.

“Sweetheart,” his mother said with her hand on his cheek, “you look terrible. I thought you said you were just on a desk job, this last couple of months.”

Nate felt his face freeze, and then summoned up a smile and slanted a glance toward his father. He looked worried, too—too worried to tease Nate’s mom about being hard on him or Nate himself about what he’d been up to. Nate felt a knot form in his stomach again, even though his dad couldn’t possibly be worried about the same thing Nate was.

“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” Nate said, which was completely true. “We got briefings about this, it happens. I’ll be fine.”

His mother hugged him again, but Nate kept his eyes on his dad, who didn’t look any less worried. His mouth flattened out into a grim expression Nate couldn’t ever remember seeing on his father’s face. It was easy to remember it on Brad’s, framed by Kevlar and squinting in the desert sun.

When his mom let him step back, his dad reached out and squeezed Nate’s shoulder. “Why don’t we just get you home, son.”

Nate wanted to delay, but there was no way to put it off. He nodded and slung his arm around his mom, and let his dad steer him through BWI, like he couldn’t have walked it blindfolded.

Nate didn’t really have anything to unpack—just a few changes of clothes, enough to keep him going until the rest of his stuff arrived. At Kristen’s.

Nate took out the folder and set it on top of his dresser in his old bedroom and then just stood there, staring down at it, trying to work up the courage to go and talk to his father. There was a quiet knock and Nate jerked around to face his father standing in the open door, still looking grim and worried.

“Nate,” he said in a low voice, obviously the start of a question he didn’t want Nate’s mother to hear.

Nate didn’t wait to hear what it was, forcing out the words abruptly. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”

His dad’s eyebrows twitched up, but he nodded and stepped inside, pushing the door shut behind him. Nate’s heart was beating fast. In all the time he’d had, he hadn’t actually thought of how to ask everything he needed to ask. He turned away to pick up the photo, and when he turned back his dad was half-sitting on Nate’s desk, hands folded around the edge. His knuckles stood out; he was holding on tight.

Nate swallowed hard and held out the photo and said, “Dad, who is this? How—”

That was as far as he got before his father’s face went shock-white.

It’s true, Nate thought, and everything else was a blank, a blur of light and silence. He couldn’t even tighten his fingers to resist when his father reached out and took the picture from his hand.

“How did you…” his father said blankly, staring down at the picture. He turned it over to reveal the writing on the back and then looked up sharply at Nate. “Where is he? Is he all right? How did you find him, is he—who is he, now? Oh, God, Nate, you found him.”

He didn’t sound caught out. He sounded glad. Nate’s mouth worked helplessly for a moment, all his anger lost somewhere on the other side of this sense of all-encompassing shock. How could you? How can you be happy, now?

“He’s my brother,” Nate said. “Isn’t he? He’s my brother and you just—you gave him up and you never—”

His dad’s face went from white to red, his eyes opened wide, and now he looked like Nate had hit him. “Nate, I—no, God no. I never—if it had been that simple I never would have let him go, Nate. Not if he was mine. Never.”

Nate stared.

His father stood up straight and set the picture down gently on the desk. He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet, flipped it open to a photo of the family—it was one Nate hadn’t seen before, though he recognized it. Christmas, before he’d gone to Iraq. They’d taken a picture just before going to midnight mass, Nate in his dress blues and Dad in a suit, his mother and sisters in dresses.

His father slipped his finger behind that and pulled out another picture, creased and bent at the corners, old and faded. He handed it to Nate like it was something fragile and precious, and Nate cupped his palm under it and stared.

For a second all he could think was to wonder where his dad had gotten a picture of Brad, and then he realized what he was looking at. He’d seen enough pictures of his dad as a teenager to recognize the kid on the left. The one on the right, with his blond hair buzzed short and his careless smile and his dog tags shining against his skinny bare chest—he only looked like Brad.

If Brad had been a teenager thirty-five years ago.

“He was my best friend,” Nate’s dad said quietly. “He’s the buddy in most of the stories I ever told you about high school. I never said his name to you because I never wanted you to ask me why I named you after him. I didn’t want to have to tell you the whole story.”

Nate’s head jerked up almost involuntarily, staring at his father for a moment before he looked down at the picture again. He turned it over, but it was someone else’s handwriting on the back, Jimmy and Nat. Perpendicular to that, on the other side of the fold, there was a series of phone numbers, all of them crossed out but the last.

“Nat,” Nate repeated. Hello, Nathaniel.

“I was so glad you settled on Nate when you were six,” his dad said softly. “I always meant to tell you about him sometime, but ever since you joined the Marines, I’ve been scared to death of history repeating itself.”

Nate looked down again at the smiling boy with Brad’s face and gleaming dog tags. His dad had graduated from high school in 1968. His stories from after high school never had an unnamed buddy in them.

Nate looked up to see his dad holding the photo of Brad again, smiling even as he brushed away tears with the back of his other hand. “But you—you found Nat’s little boy, so I guess—” His dad laughed a little, sounding almost giddy. “I guess history wasn’t over yet.”

Nate had been sitting in front of Brad’s front door for about an hour when he spotted Brad approaching on his bike. He’d tried to call Brad the night before, when he finally had the whole story, but the number was disconnected. Nate had spent the night—what there was of it before the red-eye flight back to San Diego—wondering if Brad changed his phone number like his email password any time he thought it might have been compromised.

It didn’t matter. Brad had been bound to come home eventually, and Nate was willing to wait him out. There was nothing more important than this.

Nate saw the moment Brad spotted him. He got to his feet and stepped aside to clear the path to the door while Brad just stood there, frozen, helmet in hand.

Nate held out the photo and didn’t say a word. Brad got into motion again, walking toward him in long strides. When he was close enough to see that it wasn’t the photo he’d asked Nate to give back, he stopped again, but they were close enough to speak without everyone on the block hearing them.

“Your biological father’s name was Nathaniel Hendriks,” Nate said quietly. “He died in San Diego two months before you were born. My dad asked me to give you this picture of the two of them.”

Brad wiped his hand on his shirt and then took the picture from Nate’s hand. Nate saw his shoulders jerk when he registered the resemblance.

“Maybe we could talk inside,” Nate added after a few seconds, and Brad looked up like he’d forgotten Nate was there, wide-eyed and lost. Nate reached out and gently tugged the helmet from Brad’s hand, and Brad blinked and then got his keys out left-handed. He fumbled at the lock for a minute, but he didn’t lower the photo in his right hand or even look away from it, as far as Nate could see.

Inside, Brad walked straight to the kitchen, dropped his keys on the table, and went to the fridge. Nate set Brad’s helmet by the keys and leaned in the doorway, watching.

Brad turned around with a beer in one hand and the photo in the other, and said, “Nate.”

Nate braced to answer any and all of Brad’s possible questions, including offering supporting evidence. His dad had rounded up all the paperwork and pictures he had—including the rest of the roll of film from when Brad was four days old—but the folded sheets in Nate’s pocket only hit the highlights.

“Nate,” Brad said again, and then he set the beer down and came around the table to sit on the edge closest to Nate. “You fixed it.”

Nate opened his mouth and then closed it without saying anything.

Brad looked back down at the picture.

“You’re named after him,” Brad added, flipping the picture over to look at the back. “They were—friends, right? Not even related. Hendriks.”

“Yeah,” Nate said, and then, “Brad, I didn’t—I didn’t do anything. It was always….”

Brad looked up, and half his mouth turned up in a smile. “I’m not joining your cargo cult, Nate. I’m just saying—you didn’t give up on this. You fixed it.”

Nate shrugged. “I just—I had to ask.”

Brad nodded, looking down at the picture again like he couldn’t look away from it for long, and then back up at Nate. For all that Brad insisted that he knew Nate hadn’t actually done anything, he was looking at Nate like he was something unbelievable. There was something naked in his eyes, something trusting, and for a second Nate had no idea how Brad could ever trust Nate again, and then, all of a sudden, he got it.

Brad didn’t let people go, but other people let Brad go all the time. That was why he held on so hard at the same time he pretended not to care. Brad held on even after they hurt him. Even when they married his best friend, or his fiancée. Even when all he had left of them was a handful of photos and the knowledge that they hadn’t stuck around long enough to give him a name.

“Brad,” Nate said, but Brad was already moving, stepping across the distance between them to push Nate against the wall and kiss him.

“I’m sorry,” Nate said, when Brad let him. He was distantly aware that his knuckles hurt from how tightly he was holding on to Brad, one hand bunched in his shirt at the back of his neck, the other on his hip.

“Shut up, sir,” Brad muttered. “You fixed it. You came back. Problem solved.”

Nate kissed Brad until he’d completely lost track of why there should have been more to that apology, until he’d lost his breath, until he shifted to deepen the kiss and whacked the back of his head against the wall.

Brad jerked back a little at Nate’s startled noise. He raised his hand from Nate’s shoulder to the back of Nate’s head, running his fingers over the bruise there. Nate watched his eyes as he realized what it was, his mouth tightening grimly. Nate raised his own hand to run down the edge of the bruise on Brad’s face.

“I should tell you,” Nate said. “Before—anything else.”

Brad raised his eyebrows but shifted back slightly, giving Nate room to breathe.

“I wasn’t presuming anything,” Nate said, “but I did wind up coming out to my parents last night.”

Brad smiled a little.

“They wanted to know how I wound up seeing your baby pictures,” Nate added. “So they know that we had been together, before. I mean, they said they’d known about me since I was twelve and apparently had this huge crush on my best friend that I was never aware of, but—I told them about us, in the past tense, and it’s salient now because my dad came back to Oceanside with me.”

Brad’s eyes narrowed—not angry, but intense—and Nate said, “The first thing he asked me, when I showed him the picture, was where you were, and whether you were okay. He’s been wondering for twenty-nine years. I told him you might not want to see him right away, or ever, but he—he could explain things to you firsthand. If you wanted to know the rest of it, what happened.”

Brad kissed him again, softly, more a goodbye than a hello, except that he didn’t loosen his grip on Nate. When he straightened up Brad said, “Let’s not keep him waiting, then.”

Nate couldn’t quite ask, but he darted in for another kiss, still holding on to Brad, and Brad gave it to him.

“Come on,” Brad said. “The sooner we go, the sooner we can come back.”

Nate couldn’t argue with that.

Nate called ahead, so his dad opened the door almost before he knocked, and then stood staring over Nate’s shoulder for a couple of seconds. Brad, behind him, was equally motionless.

“Dad,” Nate said, turning slightly. “Staff Sergeant Brad Colbert, one of my team leaders in Iraq. Brad, this is my father, Jim Fick.”

They both responded automatically, shaking hands across Nate’s body, and then Nate’s dad backed up, waving them inside.

There was a couch and chair by the door, and Nate’s dad moved toward the chair but stopped still standing, to say, “Staff Sergeant—”

“Brad,” Brad corrected, quirking a sideways smile at Nate.

“Brad,” Nate’s dad conceded on a sigh. “God, it’s good to see you. You look just like—did Nate explain…?”

“Just that my biological father was a friend of yours, and that he died before I was born,” Brad said.

Nate maneuvered Brad in front of the couch—which faced the door, so he and Brad would both have the sightline and a solid wall at their backs—and pushed down on Brad’s shoulder so he’d sit down before they tried to have this entire conversation just standing there staring at each other. Nate’s dad sat at the same time, so that he and Brad were practically knee to knee. Nate sat on the farther side of the couch, watching them both.

Brad had the picture in his hand, and he offered it back to Nate’s dad, but he waved it off. “You keep that, Brad, it was Nat’s to begin with. You should have it. All the phone numbers on the back were mine, from the time he went to boot camp until—but I’m getting ahead of myself, if Nate hasn’t told you anything.”

“Boot camp,” Brad repeated, looking down at the picture.

“Army, not Marines, sorry,” Nate’s dad said. “He volunteered the summer after we finished high school—1968.”

Nate saw Brad’s mouth tighten in instant comprehension.

“He said he felt like he should,” Nate’s dad said, and Nate watched his eyes move over Brad, searching out similarities or differences—Brad was six years older now than Nat Hendriks had ever lived to be. “He felt like he could do it, he could go to war, so he ought to go, to save someone having to go who didn’t think he could. He was never very talkative about it, but—it was his choice, and he was proud of it. Everyone was proud of him, his family, all of our friends.”

“And you,” Brad said quietly, his eyes on the picture.

“And me,” Nate’s dad agreed. “I was scared to death for him, and I worried a lot about whether I should have enlisted with him—we’d done everything together until then, and it didn’t seem fair to be safe at home when Nat wasn’t—but I was going to college that fall. He told me not to throw that away, and that we wouldn’t get to serve together even if I did join up.”

Brad glanced sideways at Nate, and Nate shifted close enough to bump shoulders with him.

“I still have the letters he wrote me,” Nate’s dad said. “He was a good soldier, decorated—but he didn’t talk much about the war, not in letters and not when he came home on leave. I didn’t realize—I don’t think anybody realized then, not right away—how different it was for them than it was for our dads. We knew it was a different war, we knew about the things that happened over there, but—Nat’s family had a blue star in their window, lots of families we knew did. We were proud of him, we knew he would never….”

Brad didn’t raise his head, this time, and Nate didn’t dare touch him, couldn’t move.

“Nat came back different,” Nate’s dad went on after a while. “Not just grown up, not just not wanting to talk about the war, but—we didn’t know what PTSD was, then. I just knew Nat drank too much and it didn’t seem like he could stop. He was angry all the time. His dad had died while he was over there—heart attack—and his mom didn’t know how to handle Nat. She threw him out after the first couple of months. He stayed with me for a while, then found a place, and I thought he’d get himself sorted out. But he couldn’t hold down a job, and every girl he dated he broke up with spectacularly. By the time he’d been home a year, hardly any of our friends were still speaking to him.”

Nate’s dad looked across at him, then focused on Brad again, though Brad was still staring down at the picture of two smiling boys, creased across their middles, phone numbers written on the back.

“I started dating Karen—Nate’s mom—that winter, and she couldn’t stand him,” Nate’s dad said quietly. “She’d never met him before he came home; she didn’t know who he really was. I didn’t have any way to say that Nat was sick, that he needed help, even though I knew something was wrong—it was different then, to say somebody was mentally ill, you couldn’t. I stuck by him the best I could.

“She and I got into a big fight over Nat at the end of that summer, 1973. I don’t even remember how, but when I went to Nat to blow off steam about how she didn’t understand, it turned into a fight between me and Nat. We’d always tussled when we were kids, but that night, I—”

Nate saw Brad’s fist clench, and he had to reach out and wrap his own hand around it. At least it had been a fair fight, for the two of them.

“I don’t remember much of it,” Nate’s dad said quietly. “I woke up in the hospital with Karen crying over me, and the first thing I said was it wasn’t Nat’s fault. He’d never been a bully, he’d never have meant to really hurt me. By the time I got out, Nat had disappeared—I even thought about pressing charges, if it meant they might find him and bring him home, but the police officer I talked to told me they weren’t going to start a manhunt for a fistfight. I tried like hell to find him, but he’d cut ties with everyone, and back then—there was just nothing to go on. I never heard from Nat again. I never got to say goodbye to him.”

Brad turned the picture over and touched the phone numbers.

“It was almost a year later that I got a phone call,” he said. “From a girl named Sarah in San Diego who’d dug that picture out of Nat’s wallet. He carried it with him until the day he died. She was—I honestly don’t know if they were ever actually married, she said things sometimes that made me wonder—but by the time I heard from her she was introducing herself as Nat’s wife—widow—which meant everyone let her arrange things. I spent every penny I had to get on a plane the next day, in order to get to the funeral in time.”

Brad’s mouth moved around the shape of the name. Sarah. His biological mother, the woman with the honey-blond hair.

“I didn’t find out she was pregnant until I got there, and I asked her, right then, if she needed help—she was hardly more than a kid. She said she was nineteen but for all I know that was as true as her and Nat being married. She said she wasn’t going to need any help; she was giving the baby up for adoption. She’d already made up her mind.

“I—God, I tried to change her mind, and then I tried to convince her to give the baby up to me, if she didn’t want it. Karen and I were engaged by then, planning to get married that fall, and I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t leave me if I came home and told her we were adopting Nat’s baby, but you have to believe me, Brad, I tried.”

Brad did look up at that, as though he were only now being directly addressed. He nodded slowly, holding Nate’s dad’s gaze.

Nate’s dad gave a sad smile. “I was prepared to promise her anything. I’d have moved to California, or taken you away and never spoken her name to you, but in the end the thing she stuck on was that I was Catholic. She was Jewish, and that meant you were, regardless of Nat, and she wanted you brought up in a Jewish family. I couldn’t give you that, and she wouldn’t relent. The only thing she would agree to, in the end, was to call me when she had her baby, and to let me come out and say goodbye in person, before she gave the baby to the agency.”

Nate’s dad looked down, and Brad looked away. Nate could hardly bear to keep watching either of them, but he couldn’t look away. This was too important not to witness.

“So I went home, and I told Karen what happened, and two months later when we got the next phone call—I didn’t have any money left to fly across the country again, but Karen agreed to come with me. We drove in shifts and got to California in three days. I was so scared, the whole time, that she’d decide she couldn’t wait anymore and send you away before I saw you. I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to Nat, and I had to….”

Goodbye, baby boy. Nate slid his hand from Brad’s hand up to his arm and gripped the corded muscle, sharing Brad’s desperate tension. Brad’s hand shifted back, grabbing Nate’s knee, and he squeezed hard.

Nate’s dad shook his head. “Anyway, she kept her promise. She was living in the same tiny apartment she and Nat had rented—she hadn’t bought much for you; you were honest to God sleeping in a dresser drawer. But she took good care of you, and I—I still feel bad, thinking about how much more time she had to get attached to you, when she’d already decided she couldn’t take care of you. It must have made it a lot harder for her. And it was—it was hard for us, too. I spent years being angry at myself for not just kidnapping you.”

Brad laughed at that, sudden and loud. Nate grinned, and on the other side of Brad his father grinned too.

“Eventually I had to accept that the agency had probably found you good parents, a good family, and that had to be better than life on the lam with us. I wondered sometimes if they gave you the pictures, if you knew that it meant we loved you. I wondered where you were, if you were happy and safe and….”

Brad glanced over at Nate, and Nate shook his head slightly. He hadn’t told his dad any of the things Brad had told him, about military school, about his broken engagement, any of that. He’d stuck to the good stories—Brad’s love affair with his bike, their time together in Bravo. Brad as a hero, Brad respected by his men.

Brad looked back to Nate’s dad, reached out to rest one hand lightly on his arm, and said, “I’ve been fine. I was never—if Nate hadn’t recognized you, I was content not to know who those people were in the pictures. I had—I have a family, and they love me. I’m kind of a cuckoo in the nest, but it’s not like we didn’t all know that all along.”

Nate’s dad nodded slowly. It was pretty close to what Nate had told him to expect; if it wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear, it didn’t show on his face. “Do you have any questions? I tried to write out everything I know about Nat’s medical history, all that, and I have his medals and papers and things. His mother died about ten years ago. I never told her about you. She and Nat were estranged, and when I told her he’d died, she just—well. She didn’t understand what the war had done to him. It was easier for her to act like he’d died over there. He did, in a way.”

Brad cleared his throat and then said, “Was it suicide?”

Nate hadn’t managed to ask that baldly, but it was the obvious question, for a Vietnam vet with that history.

His dad grimaced, turning his hands palm up. “It was a single car accident. He’d been drinking, maybe using something else—there was a lot Sarah wasn’t saying about what their life was like, but it wasn’t hard to get an idea. The police didn’t investigate any further than that, and even the fact that he’d been drinking didn’t interest them much. It was too common back then, there was no friends don’t let friends drive drunk or any of that. There’s no way to know where the line was for him, that night, between recklessness and something else.”

Brad nodded, and turned the picture in his hands over and over. “Was she—Sarah—I used to try to guess what she was like, and all I had to go on was her hair.” Brad smiled down at his own hands, but the expression was so tense it looked painful. “Was she—did she protest the war? Was she….”

Nate’s dad sighed. “If she did, it was for what the war did to Nat. I never heard her speak ill of the Army, or of Nat’s service. She had his rank and honors put on his gravestone, all of that. I think—if she knew you now, Brad, I think she’d respect what you do. I think she’d be as scared for you as I am—”

Brad twitched at that and looked up sharply, and Nate’s dad nodded past him. “Four years I’ve been worrying about Nate, and just when I think I can breathe a sigh of relief, he tells me you’re a career man.”

Brad smiled again—almost a real smile, this time, and he said, “They look after us pretty well, now.”

Nate’s dad smiled back, waving it off. “Don’t bother with reassurances, I know how it is. I just want you to know that I care. Even if I didn’t know where you were, I always cared.”

Brad nodded acceptance of that, and Nate could see him moving on to the next question rather than dwell on it. “Do you know where she is now?”

Nate’s dad shook his head. “Not even her name, other than Sarah Hendriks, and I’m not sure that was legal. She moved out of that apartment within weeks, left no forwarding address. None of her family came to the funeral, or were around when you were born—I got the impression she’d come out west from some small town, but I don’t know if she went back there, or somewhere else in California, or just moved across town. When we got the internet I would search for her sometimes, but Sarah Hendriks isn’t a terribly rare name, and there’s a good chance she’s called something else now. I don’t even have a picture of her—the ones I left for you were the only ones she would let me take of her, nothing that showed her face.”

Brad nodded, frowning in thought. “Do you think—this is kind of a stupid question.”

They all sat silent, waiting for Brad to decide whether to ask, and Brad said to his hands, still turning the picture over and over, “You named Nate after him. Do you think he would have named me after you?”

Nate’s dad smiled sadly. “He might have, yeah. Me or his dad, probably. If we—if Sarah had let me and Karen adopt you, we’d have named you after Nat’s dad. Thomas Hendriks.”

Nate watched Brad sound that out—Tom Hendriks and then—a gut punch, because Nate had learned a long time ago to read his own name off Brad’s lips—Tom Fick. A name for a what-if, an answer to a question Brad must have wondered about whenever he looked at those pictures—who would he have been?

Brad pressed his lips together and shook his head slightly, glancing over at Nate, and Nate smiled at him. He didn’t get a smile back, but a little tension eased from around Brad’s eyes, and he tightened his hand on Nate’s knee What if didn’t matter anymore. They had this, now.

Brad looked back to Nate’s dad, shifting to sit up perfectly straight. Nate copied his posture automatically, with Brad’s hand still on his knee and his father looking on, his gaze going back and forth between the two of them.

“The only other thing I want to ask, then,” Brad said, “is whether it bothers you that Nate and I are involved.”

He raised his eyebrows at the present tense, and looked to Nate. Nate shrugged and smiled a little. His dad smiled back. “No, that doesn’t bother me. I’m sorry the picture I left you turned out to be such a land mine, and I’m glad you two worked things out. And I hope you know, Brad—I know you have a family, I know I’m always going to be Nate’s dad to you, but even if things don’t work out between you and my son, I will always consider you family. Nate told me not to say I was your godfather.”

Brad barked out a laugh, shoving at Nate without quite turning to face him, and Nate grinned and shoved back.

“I appreciate the sentiment, sir,” Brad said. “But I’m never going to call you that, no.”

Nate’s dad nodded, looked past him to Nate again, and Nate nodded slightly. Don’t overwhelm him, Nate had said. Don’t push for too much right away.

“On that note, then,” Nate’s dad said, getting to his feet. “I’m jet-lagged as hell, and I need to call Nate’s mom and tell her we’re all in one piece over here. I’m sure you boys have things to discuss, as well.”

Brad did turn to look at Nate, then, and Nate tilted his head and shrugged. “Like you said.”

The sooner we go, the sooner we can come back.

Brad’s smile tilted, and for a second Nate thought Brad was actually going to kiss him in front of a witness, but then Brad stood up and offered his hand to Nate’s dad. Nate got a quick hug and promised to see his dad in the morning, without committing Brad to anything. A moment later they were back in the hotel hallway. Brad looked both ways and then set off, stretching his legs so that Nate had to hurry a little to keep up with him. He turned aside well short of the elevator, though, ducking into the little room with the ice and vending machines.

Nate followed him without hesitation. There was barely room for the two of them in the space between the wall and the humming machines, but that problem was solved when Brad grabbed him and hauled him into an embrace. Nate threw his arms around Brad and held on, and Brad’s arms around him were painfully tight, almost enough to take the hug back around into macho territory. Nate hid his face against Brad’s shoulder and pretended he couldn’t feel the faint, persistent shiver wracking Brad’s entire body. Nate never let his own grip ease up. Neither of them needed to breathe very much, and Brad needed this enough to risk it here. Nate could do this for a while.

Halfway back to Brad’s place, he said out of nowhere, “This is good cover.”

Nate catalogued defensive positions automatically when he drove—he’d completely mapped Oceanside weeks ago, which didn’t stop him from constantly tracking his distance to the best spots now—and while he didn’t doubt Brad did the same, he also knew exactly what Brad was talking about. “Yeah. Nothing’s bulletproof, but a family connection will take us a long way.”

Brad nodded. “I’ll tell Ray tomorrow. The entire Corps should know about it by the end of watch.”

They had an excuse now to keep in touch, to visit regularly—even for Brad to meet Nate’s family. Nate laughed a little, suddenly, remembering what he’d said. You’re not getting a new brother out of this. “Kristen’s never going to let me hear the end of it.”

It was still only early afternoon when they got to Brad’s. Nate felt off-balance partly because he’d been awake much too long for it to still be this early and partly because he was standing in Brad’s bedroom in the middle of the day, undeniably sober. He was kissing Brad with his hands on Brad’s hips like there was nothing else to this and nowhere else to go, no clock ticking on the time they could get away with being alone together.

Nate opened his eyes to see Brad in the warm diffuse light that leaked through the closed blinds, blinking back at Nate with a lazy smile at the corners of his eyes. Brad’s arms were looped over Nate’s shoulders, just enough weight to let Nate know that Brad wasn’t going anywhere either. Nate closed his eyes again, tilted his head, leaned into Brad and kissed him until Brad said in a conversational tone with his mouth a quarter-inch from Nate’s, “I want you to fuck me.”

Nate exhaled a shuddering breath against Brad’s mouth—they never just said it like that, without making it a dare or a joke or a struggle. Never in daylight, open-eyed.

Nate swallowed a joke about the oppression of the enlisted man, a dry I think that could be arranged, a bland solid copy, and said, “Yes. Whatever you want.”

“You,” Brad agreed between kisses, and a while later, when the little space between them had collapsed and their kisses had turned wet and breathless, “Naked. Now.”

“Yes,” Nate said again, sliding his hands to the hem of Brad’s shirt and tugging it up. Brad let Nate strip it off him, then smiled crookedly and returned the favor, tugging Nate’s shirt off. They shuffled sideways toward the bed, undoing each other’s belts and pants, and then had to stop and toe off their own shoes and drop their pants. Brad kept a steady hand under Nate’s elbow until Nate had both feet back on the ground, and then Nate shoved him gently toward the bed.

Brad pushed back a little, just enough not to be going because Nate put him there, and then fell back onto the bed, rolling over to get supplies from the nightstand while Nate was still crawling up level with him. Brad twisted back with two plastic packets—lube in one, condom in the other.

Nate took them and said, “Where do you want me?”

Brad raised his eyebrows and smirked, pulling one leg up and letting his knee fall to the side.

Nate shook his head and smiled back, leaning across Brad’s body to kiss that smirk. “Whatever you want, Brad.”

Brad exhaled softly against Nate’s mouth and then rolled away from Nate to lay on his side, drawing one knee up almost to his chest. He turned to look at Nate over his shoulder, and Nate leaned over him to kiss him again, and then knelt up to look down at him.

Brad was lying with his more-bruised side up; Nate couldn’t resist gently fitting his knuckles to one particularly obvious outline, just below Brad’s ribcage. Then Nate opened his hand, running it down Brad’s side, down to his cock, as he bent to kiss the bruise.

“Almost there, sir,” Brad said, sounding more fond than amused. “Further down.”

Nate touched his teeth to Brad’s skin—licked the spot, while he was there—and then sighed pointedly and said, “If you insist.”

Nate straightened up, taking his hand off Brad’s cock as he did. Brad reached down and took over, jacking himself slowly while Nate put the condom on. He stroked himself with it on a few times, his hand moving in sync with Brad’s as Brad watched, not complaining at all now. Nate stopped with an effort and slicked his fingers.

Brad’s eyelids fluttered when Nate pushed a finger into him, but his hand kept moving steadily. Nate had a goal in sight, then. He bit his lip and got to it, working his finger—then two fingers—into Brad, pressing and twisting until he found just the right angle. It was murder on his wrist, but the first time he nailed it Brad’s eyes shut completely. The second time his breath hitched, and the third time his hand sped up. Score. Nate reached down and caught his wrist, slowing him down.

Brad glared; Nate twisted his fingers inside Brad and watched his eyelids flicker.

“Nate. Now.”

Nate squeezed Brad’s wrist and obeyed, shifting his hand from Brad’s wrist to his hip. Brad nodded slightly, exhaling as Nate slipped his fingers free, and then Nate lay down behind him, lining up and pushing inside before Brad could argue any more. Nate’s breath went out in a long shaky sigh against Brad’s shoulder as he sank into Brad’s ass, his cock gripped tight. His hips stuttered awkwardly without leverage, and Brad pushed back into it as Nate reached down and tangled his fingers with Brad’s on his cock. He was tempted for a second to roll Brad over, push him flat and fuck him hard, do this fast in case there wasn’t time, in case—in case—

Brad shook his hand free of Nate’s, and Nate kept his hand moving on Brad’s cock, kept rocking into Brad’s ass. Brad reached back, turning his head a little as he touched his fingers to Nate’s cheek. Nate nodded and closed his eyes. He let his head rest on the pillow behind Brad’s and kept it slow and easy, fucking Brad in hitches of hips, stroking him at the same languid pace.

It was a different kind of intense, a different kind of absorbing—Nate fell into the rhythm, the slow motion fuck. There might be nothing else than this in the world, nothing before or after.

Then Brad said, “Nate,” with a familiar kind of desperation, and Nate rolled just a little, shifting his weight until he got the angle right. Brad’s cock jerked in his hand and Brad hissed out one last audible breath before going silent. Nate kissed the back of his neck, the top of his shoulder, kissed the faint red curve of the bite-mark he’d left two nights ago, fucking Brad just that little bit faster, jerking him just a little bit harder, until he felt Brad coming in his hand, around his cock.

Nate bit down hard on his own lip, keeping still while Brad shook. Brad took a breath and his hand found Nate’s hip, urging him on, and Nate moved again, fucking Brad as slowly as he could, savoring every little sound he wrenched out of Brad. His orgasm hit him like a concussion blast, striking his whole body at once. He was draped limply over Brad when it was over, gasping for breath.

Brad shifted away from him, disengaging, and Nate tipped onto his back, thought about cleaning up, thought about saying something to Brad, blinked against daylight, and closed his eyes.

Nate half-woke and knew Brad was beside him, and that it wasn’t him Brad was talking to. “I know it’s a stretch for your congenitally stunted imagination, but I have something better to do today,” he was saying.

His hand landed on Nate’s chest, pressing down slightly, like he knew Nate was awake and didn’t want him to move. Nate pushed up stubbornly into the touch, and Brad’s hand slid sideways as Nate turned onto his side. Brad’s arm went around him, and Nate slept again with his face hidden against Brad’s chest.

Nate’s phone rang and he reached to his left for it—Brad’s bed, he always put it over there—but it shouldn’t have been there. He’d left it in his pants. Brad must have moved it for him, though, and Brad was leaning over him to grab it before Nate had actually moved enough to reach it.

Brad snorted and then flipped it open and said, “Hi, Mom. Nate’s in my bed right now, so whatever you’re calling him to say, you can probably skip it. Did Ray give you this number?”

Nate looked up at him with a smile, intensely glad not to have to have whatever conversation that would have been. Brad rolled his eyes and then looked down at Nate’s phone and found the right button. He dropped it and said, “Okay, there, you’re on speaker. You can talk to Nate, but I’m still supervising.”

“Nate,” Brad’s mom said. “I apologize for my son and his control issues, but I’m so glad you’re back in town. I just had the most interesting talk with your dad—which is how I got this number, Bradley.”

Nate felt suddenly wide awake, and glanced up at Brad’s face to see him covering his eyes with one hand. There was a smile lurking at the corner of his mouth, though. The emergency contact phone list had been bound to catch up with them eventually.

“Yes, Brad and I talked to him earlier,” Nate said, trying not to feel too much like he was speaking in code. “He had some stories I hadn’t heard before.”

“I was thinking we should all sit down together,” Brad’s mom went on. “How about dinner—we’ll come up, we don’t want you to have to drive. Could you boys be out of bed and ready in two hours?”

Brad dropped his hand and met Nate’s eyes, and Nate tilted his head and shrugged, trying to ignore the fact that he could feel his face going red. Brad smirked.

“Two hours is fine, Mom,” Brad said. “We’ll see you then.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Nate’s father said to tell you he’s bringing baby pictures.”

Works inspired by this one:

- [podfic] The Shadow That You’re Standing On by n00blici0us

Table of Contents

- Title Page

- The Shadow That You're Standing On