Brad steps under the netting stretched over Two-Two’s victor and immediately shucks off his pants and briefs, not even waiting for Nate to turn away before he starts in with a baby wipe. He scrubs furiously at his skin, at the spend and slick dried across his belly and practically down to his knees, attacking the mess with the same quiet focus that he brings to weapons maintenance.
Christ. Nate stares up at the canvas ceiling of the truck and swallows back bile.
He listens to the soft rasp of wet wipes against Brad's leg hair. Tries not to think about the wet whorls of blonde hair, dark with slick and sweat, framing Brad's dick and cunt.
There's blood, too, when Nate glances over again. A thin line of it streaking diluted and rusty down Brad's inner thigh; more of it visible in the pile of wipes forming at Brad's feet, crusted brown flecks and orangeish smears from wherever Ray'd torn him up.
“Doc's gonna need to take a look, Brad. When you're done. He thinks you might need sutures.”
For one quick second, Nate thinks he might refuse. That Brad – god, Brad – might snap out and bare his teeth in an insubordinate growl, that this will be the thing that breaks his TL. Not the cold-turkey withdrawal of his meds, and not the heat, and not the having to forcibly curb it without drugs in the middle of ass-fuck nowhere, but the indignity of having to talk to the corpsman about the injuries sustained.
Brad, so goddamn proud, but not in the peacocky way so many Recon Marines get; Brad, who climbed a mountain on a broken ankle, and sat on his hands when the corps got his suppressants blown up in the middle of the goddamn desert and the chain of command decided to fuck him in every conceivable way, and bit down into the muscle of Nate's shoulder so hard he drew blood.
But Brad just looks at him, the weight of his gaze like a rucksack full of rocks, heavy across Nate's shoulders. He drops the bloody wet wipe in his hand to meet the growing pile on the ground and shuffles his pants back up over his hips. “Yessir.”
The look is… bad. Brad's a patchwork mix of pale everywhere his MOPP suit covers and sunburnt everywhere it doesn't, and he's lost weight he didn't have to lose. They all have, but it hits Nate hardest when he sees the points of Brad’s hipbones, and the bones of his wrist.
The bruise on his forearm, smeary yellow-browns from who knows what a week before — sparring with Rudy, or chipping dried sabkha from the bottom of his Humvee, or just the recoil of his rifle jammed up against the door as they thumped over another godforsaken berm — contrasting with the ones stacked up in a line along his trapezius where Nate's fingertips had dug into the muscle, fresh and bloody plum-red and purple splotches.
His bare feet look weirdly vulnerable as he crouches to wrestle his boots back on, the skin around his ankles raw and abraded from heat rashes and the neverending motherfucking sand.
“Leave ‘em off,” Nate tells him, shoving the extremely irresponsible urge to pull Brad up by his dog tags and hold him in a something part chokehold and part bear-hug until the near-imperceptible trembling in Brad's limbs fucking stops back down into his guts to be further ignored. “You know he's gonna want to have a look at your feet, too, long as he's got you pinned down.”
Brad stops relacing his boots and glances up at Nate through his lashes, which is a thing Nate didn't really think people did until he met Brad.
“Forgive me for saying so, sir,” he says, rising from his stooped posture with a grace most people would find difficult if not impossible to replicate on their best day, “But is it possible that Doc Bryan’s fetishistic interest in feet developed as a direct result of one too many blows to head?”
Nate quirks an eyebrow at him.
“Well, sir, by my reckoning it must’ve developed after entering the Navy, since any man with an obsession for feet like that of our illustrious corpsman clearly would’ve gone into podiatry if he had any fucking sense whatsoever.”
Nate bites back the smile that threatens. He is so fucking fond of this man it makes him feel physically ill. He wants to take a big, bloody bite out of Brad and swallow it without chewing. (Brad's teethmarks throb in the thin skin where his neck and shoulder meet, mere fucking centimeters from his glands.) “I couldn't possibly venture a guess, Sargent.”
Brad heaves a sigh and Nate very studiously does not track the way his ribs rise and fall under his skin. “Better send him in, then. I'm sure Godfather's just itching to be oscar-mike.” There's a self-deprecating tilt to his mouth that Nate fucking hates with every fiber of his being.
“Fuck him,” Nate wants to say. “Fuck him and this whole goatfucked thing; I honestly don't give a shit anymore. I want you — you, plural, every one of my men, and you especially, you dumb motherfucker — home safe in Oceanside where your fucking prescriptions are filled and your meals are square and you are not under threat of live fire from small arms and artillery every time I turn around.”
“Solid copy,” he says instead, stepping out from the cover of the cammie nets and waving Bryan over with the universal open-palmed “come here” gesture.
“The fuck are you doing with your socks on?” he hears Doc snap as he ducks under the netting on the opposite side of the victor. “Take ‘em off, shitbird; lemme see how bad off you are.”
“It’s really not that bad.”
Doc scoffs. “Uh-huh. A likely story. You wanna run that by me again?”
“Been worse,” he hears Brad reply. “Been a whole hell of a lot better, too, but y'know. Been worse.”
“Hey, no use worrying about it. We'll getcha all squared away.”
The way he says it is somehow half flippant and half solemn vow, the unbreakable promise of a Hippocratic oath-taker.
“Yeah,” Brad says, unseen. “Of that, I am assured.”
