A little holiday treat for my illustrious colleague in the Generation Kill trenches, @gouden-carolus! You can imagine they're wearing Santa hats the whole time if it makes it more festive for you. Enjoy!
Find this on AO3 here.
In various small towns around the Middle East, Brad had been developing a private fantasy about Tim. Well, more than one. But while most were run-of-the-mill, hands and mouths, secret hidden corners, the most private and shameful of all Brad was barely able to think about unless he was dog-tired, almost asleep, with no inhibitions left to speak of.
In his fantasy, it always goes like this: the howling of artillery above, the shrieking of men below and everywhere sand, choking yellow-grey sand. A cluster of walls and fences in the near distance, the ruins of a house and its attendant shacks and outhouses. They have to get there. They run together, Brad and Tim, or at least they slip and plunge together across the torn-up desert. Men die all around them. A mortar shell comes down close, too close, and Brad knows it’s going to be a bad one. Too near to the zigzag of half-destroyed walls around the house. He pictures fragments of rock, sharp shards, wooden stakes flying. So he grabs Tim around the waist, bearing him down onto the ground.
In his fantasy, it gets very quiet, then. The shelling stops. It must have, because all Brad can hear is Tim’s fast, harsh breathing. He curls up over Tim, one hand on the back of his neck keeping his head low. He makes a barrier out of his body, covering as much of Tim as he can. They wait it out for a few minutes longer: the Iraqis love to space their barrages so they can catch you coming and going. Then it’s been silent a while, and all around Brad men start peeling themselves out of shell holes and ditches, coming up from cover behind walls and rocks and vehicles although none of it makes a damn difference if you get hit.
Brad gets hit, torn down the back with a picturesque but not life-limiting foreign body. A rock, maybe, or a stray shell casing. He winces, bleeds, carries on nobly marked by his warrior's sacrifice. He protects the medic.
In his fantasy, Brad saves Tim’s life.
What a joke.
—
It was two months after they arrived home, two months after Tim had taken up Brad’s offer to bunk with him a while and see what he thought of Brad’s ancestral homelands, two months of domestic cohabitation, before Brad began to think that he may have made a mistake. Or, more accurately, that Tim had made a mistake and was somehow against all inclination too polite to say anything about it.
‘I guess,’ Brad had said with a casual air as he pulled up into his driveway for the first time with Tim in the passenger seat, ‘we’ll carry on as usual.’
‘Guess so,’ Tim had said equably.
The <i>usual</i> Brad meant referred to nothing more considered or complex than an ongoing campaign of secret handjobs, and Tim was just a little too cool under the collar to indicate whether or not he meant the same thing as Brad. That was a puzzler. Brad liked some certainty about these things. It didn’t seem right to enquire.
That Tim not infrequently broke many the strictures of regular good manners with Brad was irrelevant. There were things that a man didn't talk about: money, politics, what you thought of someone's upbringing or family members. You especially didn’t talk about them as a guest in another man’s house, and although Tim’s toothbrush and razor were next to Brad’s in the bathroom, Tim still behaved as if he were a guest. As if he were only there temporarily, passing the time. Something like like a stray cat, drifting in and out as the mood struck him and often returning around mealtimes.
Tim always popped out of bed after sex, for instance, slipping through Brad’s sleepy clutches with athletic ease. He always had somewhere to be, it seemed. No rancour, no visible signs of evasion.
Want anything from the kitchen? Tim would ask casually. Or, just going to check the mail. Or, pulling on shorts and a t-shirt, he’d dive out the door for a run, leaving Brad sweaty and alone in their bed. It almost felt rude, Brad thought. Then, later, coming back in, Tim would ask him about rent money and Brad would reiterate (again) that he owned the place and Tim didn't need to pay rent.
Do you even know me? Brad wanted to ask. But it was too horrifying a conversation to contemplate. Brad could feel himself shrivelling up with secondhand embarrassment. Could hear his mother's voice in his head telling him it was only practical to pin down the details of these things.
I'm detail-oriented, Brad told himself crisply one morning, walking into the kitchen fully intending to have the conversation once and for all. And then: Tim's casual nod, the flex of his rangy forearms as he unscrewed the coffee jar, the way he slid past Brad and knocked their shoulders together instead of saying anything.
Brad fled to the garage.
—
It hadn't been life-saving, in the end. Perhaps it would have been in the medieval period, or mired in a trench in 1915: shrapnel in knee, infection, gangrene, sepsis, death.
Tim's voice cutting through the boisterous post-engagement chatter of Marines, through the thrum of a helicopter overhead, through the sibilant sound of wind over sand. 'You're good, Brad. Don't mess with the dressing.' Tim's dirty hand cupping a cluster of pills, a water bottle. These little snapshots remained even months later. The deft gestures, and all the while Tim aware, so aware, never letting his guard down—as well trained as Brad, smarter than anyone, tough as hell. Tim wiping his hands on his thighs and then giving Brad's good knee a shake. 'You're good.'
'Thanks, Doc.' As soon as it had come out of his mouth he realised that the word sounded strange now, impersonal. Their corpsman; his friend. Tim must have felt it too because his eyes stopped their restless shifting and met Brad's. His mouth did something wry. Brad clocked it, mentally revised the word 'friend' because it was important to be honest, especially with oneself.
—
'Jesus Christ—listen to this—unleashing the power of cordyceps to adaptogenically revitalize you in body and spirit… enhances vitality and wellness and binds to toxins to naturally flush them from the body—that's bullshit, you've got a fucking liver. Brad, we gotta get out of California.'
We, Tim said, and Brad felt a momentary clench in his chest.
Brad explained that he stayed for the surfing and the proximity to work, knowing he sounded slightly defensive. 'What do the locals do in rural Pennsylvania, anyway?'
Tim gave him a knowing look and played along. 'Meth, mostly. When we're not fucking our cousins.' He gave a sharp laugh. 'It's fine, Brad. California's fine. I'm just screwing with you.' He waved the mushroom coffee sample in the air. 'You want this?'
'I'm not against Pennsylvania. We could visit. It's, you know.' He circled his hand as though flipping calendar pages, inferring that holidays were upcoming for those who cared about things like that.
'You want to meet my family for Thanksgiving?' Tim laughed, incredulous.
'That seems,' Brad hunted for an appropriate word, 'premature.'
'Does it?'
'Doesn't it?'
Nobody turned Brad around like Tim. The whole conversation had been dumb. Now it was suddenly serious. Brad liked serious, often: factual, talk with a point to it. If he had hooked Tim into seriousness, perhaps he could reel him into the real conversation: what the hell were they doing?
And Tim arched away from it, silvery-quick, twisted his mouth into his wry smile. 'How's your mom's cooking?'
'Good. How's yours?'
Tim flicked the kettle on and leaned back against the counter. 'She's dead,' he said, surprisingly casually. Brad opened his mouth, but Tim held up a hand. 'It was years ago, Brad. I was in middle school.'
'What about your dad?'
'Still kickin'.' Tim shrugged as he said it, hands restlessly moving around the counter for coffee, spoon, French press.
'Well, he sounds like a stand-up guy,' Brad said, setting bait.
Tim grinned as he always did, teeth flashing, a vicious joy that appeared and disappeared in a heartbeat. Why he should be amused, Brad didn't know. Rarely understood. Talking to Tim was a roll of the dice, at times. Coffee filter, creamer, one mug, two mugs.
'Do whatever you like for Christmas,' Tim said neutrally. 'Drive you to the airport if you want. Here.' He handed Brad a mug of coffee, made exactly how Brad liked it. Strong, a splash of creamer.
'I'll keep you apprised,' Brad said, feeling stupid—somehow Tim had slipped around him again, turned him around again, left the bait on the hook. Here he was no wiser than before, no invites issued, none received. Brad, save Tim's life? He couldn't even get through a conversation that made sense with his erstwhile medic and, he supposed, present lover.
At the kitchen door, Tim hesitated. 'Dad doesn't get out much these days,' he said over his shoulder.
'You could visit.'
'Alzheimer's,' Tim said. He touched his tongue to his coffee, testing the temperature.
'You're not really batting a thousand with parents, are you?' Brad observed, learning from Tim's mistake and blowing on his own coffee to cool it.
'He was an asshole before the dementia.'
Brad arranged his face into a knowing expression, psychically beamed the phrase that explains a lot into Tim's brain. And there was Tim's smile—his sharp, clever smile.
—
Sometime after midnight and a flurry of hands and muscle against muscle, sweaty and shuddering—sometime later again, Brad slid back into the warm bed and pressed the residual bathroom tile chill out of his feet against Tim's leg.
Tim grunted but didn't complain, soothed into benevolence.
'Seventy-five percent,' Brad said into the darkness.
'What?'
'That’s how much I know you.'
There was a long pause. Tim shifted and pressed his leg against Brad's. 'That’s not bad. If I string you along at a couple of percent a year, perhaps I’ll stay interesting.'
'At what percent do you think you'd become boring?' Brad asked. It wasn't exactly what he meant. Knowing someone, surely, was the point of it all.
'Shit, I'm surprised you're still in at seventy-five.'
'I'm in,' Brad said. 'Indefinitely.' The silence stretched out and Brad wondered if it was too far. 'At least until the neurodegenerative disease kicks in.'
Tim snorted. 'Yours or mine?'
'Yours, obviously. My knee still hurts, by the way.'
'Yours and mine both.' Tim flexed one of his own knees and put Brad's hand on his kneecap. Something in there made a grinding vibration against Brad's hand.
'So we're both fucked?' Brad asked. He didn't move his hand.
'That'll happen,' Tim said, and suddenly he was laughing, a real one, a chuckle that started in his chest and made his body shake against Brad. It was so unexpected that it set Brad off and they gurgled away stupidly for a while. Thank fuck nobody else could hear them. It was the fatalism of it, he supposed, so close to the fatalism required to get through their respective jobs.
After a while they settled back down.
'I'm not going to bolt in the night, if that's what's eating you, Colbert.'
And a thousand smart-ass remarks sprung fully-formed into Brad's head: who'd have you, with those knees, and it's not like you'd get far uncaffeinated, and besides, you sold your car. In the end, he didn't say anything at all. He stretched out, shoved an arm under Tim's pillow, and fell asleep.
Happy holidays @sheletlune ! You mentioned domestic fluff as one of your keywords and my mind immediately went to Brad's #1 canon love interest :') I hope you like it!
hello i am a secret long time admirer who perhaps has a fun red suit and a big red beard and is perhaps creating you a little christmas treat for a certain exchange!
perhaps a certain young bradley is going to experience combat medicine and post canon shenanigans and sleep deprivation and romantic intrigue but... who can say! it's all a great mystery until december 24th...
*i disappear back into our shared discord channel in a puff of sexy christmas smoke*
Hi, lovely anonymous schrödinger's stranger!
I'm always excited to see people put young Bradley in situations, and doubly so when they've been tailored to my wishes.
I hope my prompts sparked some kind of inspiration rather than existential dread. And if that's not the case then feel free to come back and complain.
extremely funny moment in gk is when they're all getting ambushed and brad's just mumbling lyrics from "sundown" over and over again like some kind of ironic mantra, to the point where reporter explicitly makes a point of informing us that this song is depressing as shit, and then exactly one chapter later, this man just straight up goes, "wish i knew the rest of the song."
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