Work Text:
Jack Bellingham is not actually as stupid as most people think he is.
He'll grant lazy and he'll grant sloppy and he'll grant so damn laid back a ladder truck could run over him and he'd barely break a sweat.
(He has a funny story, actually, about how he did get hit by an engine once, the damn thing's brakes slipped and bumped him at about five miles an hour while he was busy fixing up the drug box. Cost him a few weeks in a splint and a beauty of a bruise with 3 of the engine's plate numbers on his shoulder, but not a scratch besides.)
(But he doesn't tell that story because he has no one to tell it to, anyway.)
So lazy and sloppy he'll grant, but he passed the course and he knows it backward and forward and don't let anyone ever said he's a slouch when it comes to caring for his patients. He likes to think he's even pretty good, with the scared ones, with the mad ones. Sets back on his heels and does his job and doesn't let anybody get under his skin. Gonna be alright, he tells them, steady and deep, gonna be alright.
Jack is pretty sure they assigned him Craig Brice as some kind of joke. The whole damn department knows how anal-fucking-retentive (and yeah, Jack Bellingham ain't nobody's fool, he reads up) Craig Brice is, how he goes through partners like hay through a horse. Jack is pretty sure they think Craig Brice will drive him crazy, but Mama Bellingham once told him when he was a kid, son, you're like one of them breakwaters out on the harbor - you take the storm, boy, and you keep the waters calm, and you keep the ships safe.
It's why he wanted to be a firefighter. If he could break the storm (and, even in school, he was everybody's friend, everybody's listening ear), surely he could break a fire. He might not have eaten up the coursework and spit it out like - like - well like Craig Brice, surely - but he went through it steady, and he knew it, and he kept a whole lot of folks calm where they might've gone wild on him.
Lazy, sloppy he might be, but he can start an IV on a diabetic grandma with a toddler on his back and a grade-schooler asking him every question that's ever been questioned about what he's doing, and what's in the bag, and what's in the box.
He knows that the Battalion Chief thinks he'll drop Craig Brice like a bad habit after a week. The Chief's sort of like that, he thinks. He's subtle, most often, but Jack's seen him slip assignments around to test guys, whole stations even. Test their mettle and their patience. Well. Jack Bellingham can be patient. Patient as a breakwater, just like Mama said.
He'll make it two weeks, he thinks, maybe even three. Depends on how crazy Craig Brice really is. The other men at the station (and other stations, he knows, 51s for sure, maybe 68s and 39s) are wagering on him. He laughs, takes it friendly. He wagers, too. Wagers high. They think he'll take his money. Maybe they will.
Two weeks in, he won't deny, he understands why Craig Brice makes his partners crazy. Jack isn't totally sure how Craig Brice made it through the academy, but then, other men aren't too sure how Jack made it through paramedic training, either.
Two weeks in is already better than the odds the station gave him, and better than the odds he gave himself.
Breakwater, he thinks. Catching the storm. Busting his shoulder on a slideaway engine. Barreling into fire like a mole going underground. Breakwater. Craig Brice is relentless. Maybe he needs to be. Jack Bellingham takes it in stride. He wants to drive, that's alright. He wants to sort the drug box, that's fine. He wants to count it five times over before they leave the hospital, that's strange, but maybe it's also fine. He locks the doors to the Squad's compartments three times, lock, unlock, lock, unlock - that's downright odd, but alright. As long as they get to the calls on time.
It's the way he is with patients that gets under Brice's skin. You don't need to toss a pile of ten-dollar words on an eight year having an asthma attack. For all those words make sense, you might ought to be dumping a sack of gravel on the poor kid. Not a lot gets Jack wound up, but the way that kid's wheezing hard, well, he puts Brice on the biophone and takes right over.
Turns out, Craig Brice takes direction pretty nice when you spell it straight out for him. Maybe being six-four and two-thirty-some helps. But he tells him right out, you get on the biophone and I'll take the vitals, got it, and Craig Brice's eyes get a little wide under his big glasses and he takes the order.
After that Jack Bellingham pays a little more attention. He's lazy, his uniform's always rumpled and he's never on time for roll call, but he does pay attention, and no one really bothers to hide anything from him, 'cause he just sits there between calls, as sleepy-eyed as any firehouse dog. So he sees a lot, more than most might think.
He sees why Craig Brice makes people crazy. But he sees him hanging his uniform shirts up three times - just the way he locks the compartments on the Squad, just the way he sorts the drug box. In the morning, if he can get away with it, he makes his bunk up at least twice, sometimes out to five times over.
"Craig," Jack says, because it needles him and gets his attention, "the bed ain't goin' on a date."
"It's important to have things neat and in order, Bellingham."
"Mmhm."
One night Jack woke up and saw his partner sleeping, and it was the first time he'd seen him without glasses and not moving like he had wires in his limbs and a two-foot stick up his ass. Looked relaxed, he did, asleep, and young. Cute fella, behind the glasses, in Jack's estimation.
(Once, a long time ago, Jack got a little scared when he realized he was estimating other boys just the way he estimated the girls. But he thought about it, came to the conclusion wasn't anybody getting hurt, and decided it was pretty alright.)
A month in, and Jack Bellingham has long since won the bet, and Cap keeps looking at him like he's got to have lost his damn mind, and Jack lets Craig Brice drive and lock the doors three times and rearrange the drug box and make his bed and tap the wheel five times before he starts the Squad. The wheels are turning in his mind. He liked the way Craig Brice looked, at night, with the emergency lights falling in soft and dull yellow from the bay, glasses off, kind of a cute fella, by his estimation.
A month in, and Jack Bellingham gets to wondering what Craig Brice might do if he really interrupted his little routines. Put his back into the breakwater. They've had a few too many calls where Craig Brice and his word-gravel have scared the daylights out of patients who could not afford to panic, and while he likes to err on the side of some human decency that makes Craig Brice think he's actually helping, well - he might be getting a little tired of it. He'll put up with a lot. Messing around with patients is outside his limits, though. Craig Brice is good - great, even - at his technicals, he just needs a little shaking up.
It's not like Jack's gonna hit him or anything. It's not his style.
He just sits on Craig's bed after the second time he makes it in the morning. Craig stands there, staring, almost seething, almost, and then he does something Jack has never seen him do before - he pushes his glasses up his nose, three times.
"Why don't you go have some coffee, Craig," Jack says, crooking a smile at his partner. "Russo's turn on breakfast today."
Jack sits and Craig Brice stares, for almost ten minutes (Jack watches the clock on the wall of the dorm) until Cap yells at the both of them to hurry the hell up.
Later, he just happens to leave a couple of his buttons undone after a wrestling match with a recalcitrant junkie. He can see Craig Brice's eyes flicking toward his chest, where his shirt parts slightly. He taps the steering wheel more compulsively than usual at every stop light.
Jack Bellingham is a patient man.
Two days later, in the station parking lot, between Jack's muddy Bronco and Craig Brice's sensible sedan, Jack leans (casually, not caring about the grime on his jacket from the truck) and says, "Hey, Craig, you wanna go for a beer?"
"It's eight o clock in the morning, Bellingham."
"It's always five somewhere, Craig."
That faint, seething look, like there is some kind of electric current running under Craig Brice's skin. There is no one else around. Mama always told him he was like the breakwater, he'd bear the storm and keep the harbor still.
"That's not a very logical way to plan your day, Bellingham."
"What's logic? I got kicked in the balls by a ninety-pound lady junkie. I need a drink, Craig, and so do you."
"I do not need alcohol for - "
"Shut up." Jack folds his arms. "Okay? Shut up."
" - Bellingham."
No one else is around. Bellingham glances around the parking lot and they're close and hidden by the cars. Craig Brice is a cute fella, when he's taken off his glasses and shed his obnoxious attention to the rules. Jack bears himself up to his full height, grabs Craig Brice, yanks his shirt out from his belt and slams him against his Bronco. Not so hard to bruise; hard enough to make an impression, hard enough to smear dust and caked mud all over him.
Jack's not sure what he expected. Panic isn't quite what he expected, neither is the punch that sails crookedly through the air and lands a glancing, smarting blow to the side of his nose. Craig Brice hit him. Actually hit him. A surge of mad delight runs through him. He grabs Craig's wrists and pins him against the truck. He laughs.
"What're you gonna do, Craig?"
Craig swears at him. "Fucking - fuck - fuck you - goddammit - dammit - "
He's never heard Craig Brice swear before and with his glasses askew and his hair mussed and profaning fit to burn the angels out of heaven - well it punches Jack right in the groin.
"There. Are. Rules." Craig pants at him. "For. A. Reason."
And the poor son of a bitch looks so ghastly at that moment that Jack lays off him. Craig Brice is shaking and pale as milk. "Ah, jesus, Craig, I'm sorry."
Craig is trying desperately to sort his clothes in order - tuck in his shirt, brush as much dust off as he can, then he looks at his hands and tries to brush them off, which only puts the dirt back on his clothes, and then, and then -
And then he takes off his glasses and presses the heel of his hand into his eyes and looks like he might cry.
"Craig. Really. I'm sorry." Jack doesn't like to hurt people. He wouldn't have hit Craig, to knock some sense into him. "Look - I'll just - we can forget about this, okay? You go do your crazy routines, memorize the manuals, whatever, I'm gonna go home and have a drink and sleep, and next shift it'll be like this never happened." Jack's got his hand on the doorhandle, about to pop it, when Craig clears his throat.
His glasses are back on his face and slightly askew. "Bellingham," he says, his voice on the fine edge of cracking, "it is my estimation as a medical professional, based on physiological findings, that you were experiencing sexual arousal when you threw me against your truck."
Jack shrugs. "I had a hard-on, if that's what you're asking me." He hadn't thought Craig Brice would notice. He's not totally sure Craig Brice even knows what sexual arousal is.
Craig Brice is looking at him through his tilted glasses like he's trying to read some kind of hieroglyphs, like Jack is some kind of foreign language or a disease he's never seen before and doesn't have a book to understand. Craig moves closer to him, then, licking his lips, the most earnest and awkward parody of seduction that Jack has ever seen, and it practically melts his lazy heart to see it.
"I - um. I would like to drink, Bellingham."
"I'll buy," Jack says. "But on one condition."
Craig's eyes go wide again, and Jack reaches out and touches Craig's arm the way he soothes the frightened, mad, panicked, young ones. "What condition?"
"Call me Jack."