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i.
He gets out of the Marine Corps, and he gets his brains back.
He almost wishes he didn’t, some days, the ambiguity deliberate, wishes he never left, wishes he’d never thought to question a single order, wishes he could explain the scars on his face without snorting laughter and a twist to the side of his mouth that is the first thing that makes him a Marine in most people’s eyes, unmasks him as something more than a skinny mouthy hick you’d expect to beat easy in a barfight, that fucking mocking twist, the solid arrogant I-could-kick-the-shit-out-of-you surety of it.
“You never got your fucking brain back,” says Brad, a month home from Iraq and itchy with it, in that precise, stone-cold, overeducated and underempathetic way of his, and Ray wonders, sometimes. Who rolls into a desert in what’s basically a car with its fucking roof cut open and laughs and yells obscenities at sheep and sings until his lungs ache. Who cleans the blood off his wheels when the sun goes down and tans on the hood of the same humvee the next morning. Who drives through a motherfucking war.
But: he did. He did and he can’t take it back and he doesn’t know how he’d even try.
“I’m still smarter than you, dude,” he says to Brad, and Brad raises an eloquent eyebrow, but he doesn’t argue, because, yeah, Brad’s smart, but he’s smart enough to know what he’s not. They’re the same, that way, Ray guesses. Smartest guy in the platoon’s a corporal who can’t stop talking with milkshake smeared all over his face, covering scars a coffee maker left wrought on flesh scrubbed red-raw by sun and sand and (carefully ignored) sedition. You couldn’t make this shit up if you fucking tried.
(Reporter writes his book, and he doesn’t.)
Ray meets Brad at the airport, a stint in England and another tour under his belt.
Ray’s exactly the same and totally different, tattoos on his hands and his hair grown out, bruises on the side of his neck and battered sneakers rubbing the floor and the back of his calf and grinding out a cigarette on the bright California sidewalk. He looks barely older and a whole hell of a lot tougher, or less, depending on what it is precisely you’re looking for.
“What the fuck happened to you,” says Brad, and it’s a fair question, even if he doesn’t let it lilt up to be one, because Brad’s never quite managed how to forget giving Ray orders.
“What the fuck hasn’t,” says Ray, and when he grins, he shows every single one of his teeth. Just because Brad still gives orders, it doesn’t mean Ray’s still taking them.
“What happened to your neck?” says Brad, eyes narrowed, and it could be jealously or concern that he doesn’t want to show, that he’s trying to hide, badly, hurriedly and lazily all at once, or it could be nothing at all.
“Mosh pit,” says Ray, but his eyes say he’s laughing, his eyes say he’s full of shit, his eyes say this is all you’re getting, baby, loverboy, shitstain.
He’s eerie and manic and beautiful, skin tan under the same sun on a different continent, scars on his arms that Brad doesn’t remember and isn’t sure he was there to have forgotten.
It’s all about forgetting, somehow. It’s all about the things that never got left behind.
“Come on, your Nordic fuckin’ majesty,” says Ray, and his arm slung around Brad’s neck smells like motor oil and gunpowder and, Jesus, sex, “Let’s get you fuckin’ drunk.”
There’s a tattoo on the inside of Ray’s left wrist that Brad has never seen before, and that Brad doesn’t understand. It’s bisected by a thin, ragged scar, that to Brad’s expert eye looks like a knife wound. It looks-- it looks, to his expert eye, self-inflicted. Ray’s right-handed, after all. Ray’s arm is flat against the bar, his wrist lying open and obvious, and it’s almost like he wants Brad to look. It’s almost like he wants Brad to see.
“Your emails didn’t make any fucking sense,” says Brad, because they didn’t.
“Clearly my capacity for thinking circles around you has merely been honed by the benefits of a Berkeley education,” says Ray, and then pulls a face, to let Brad know that he didn’t believe a word that just came out of his mouth. (Brad, for all the good it’s doing him, believes every one, even if Ray doesn’t. Especially if Ray doesn’t.)
“You don’t have the capacity to think circles around livestock, Joshua Ray,” says Brad, and Ray snorts, loud and unattractive, and Brad hides his smile in his beer.
There’s a sigil carved into the wood behind Ray’s smile, just visible behind the jut of sharp cheekbone. It looks a lot like the ink on the inside of his wrist.
When his eyes meet Brad’s, there’s a secret in them, and it looks like one he’s willing to share.
“My place?” he says, and the white trash is too strong in him for him to make it sound innocent-- although, truth be told, Ray’s better at playing dumb than anyone Brad’s ever met.
“Your place,” agrees Brad, and it isn’t a promise, or, perhaps better put, it doesn’t need to be. His teeth are bared, mouth twisting into a wolf’s grin. Ray raises an eyebrow just looking at him.
“Son, your ego is writing cheques your body can’t cash,” says Ray, and then laughs, the harsh high-pitched giggle that’s haunted Brad’s dreams for years.
“Nah, you know I’m just messin’. Fuckin’ hate that movie,” he says, slips his jacket on, inclines his head, leaves Brad with no choice but to follow--
--and, in its way, doesn’t that just say it all.
Ray hasn’t lost his art, is still so in tune with his ride that he can almost drive it without even looking.
(He does, for a few hot white seconds, and Brad doesn’t even know what it is anymore, to be afraid, but he feels the ghost of it as Ray screeches into rush hour LA traffic with his eyes closed, still laughing that hyena chuckle.)
“My Mom will kill you if I survived two war zones only to be killed by your terrible fucking driving,” says Brad, with a serenity he doesn’t feel, that itch he’s always felt when Ray does something truly impossible back beneath his skin, and Ray throws back his head and laughs again, his eyes flashing in the neon lights of whatever fucking unbelievably rough part of town he’s living in.
There’s a fire up in the hills, where the rich people live. It reflects in Ray’s eyes even brighter than the neon. He turns his face away and Brad looks, looks, calculates and waits to make his tactical strike.
He doesn’t wait very long.
“So I hear someone killed the Mayor last week,” he says, and Ray’s hands tighten on the wheel, his knuckles startlingly white beneath tan skin.
“Yeah,” says Ray, “I heard that too. And saw it. Those were some nice photos. Even I didn’t know heads could do that, and I’m a fuckin’ marine, y’know?”
Ex-marine, Brad almost says, but.
“I heard he was a slum lord,” says Brad, “I heard children died in those rotting holes he called low-rent housing. I heard those places were so shitty that if you so much as struck a match in one they went up in flames. Real hardcore shit.”
“Yeah?” says Ray, and his eyes flicker sideways, and yeah, yeah, yeah, there, that’s the tell Brad’s been looking for, “Must have been a real hardcore motherfucker who killed him, then.”
The silence stretches, and Ray is pink under neon, green and gold and red, and then blue, blue blue blue and he’s beautiful, he’s deadly, he’s driving his ride like it’s part of him and if Brad knew what fear was, he’d fear him, if he didn’t want to crawl under his skin and fuck him until they’re bleeding and shoot the shit with him until the day they both die. (Together, please, God, together.)
“Don’t flatter yourself,” says Brad, and Ray brakes so hard he almost wraps them around a tree.
“I fuckin’ love you, Brad Colbert, you crazy bitch,” he says, face feral, and terrifying, and gorgeous, and then presses on the accelerator until it squeals.
ii.
“I should’ve died, but I didn’t,” says Ray, or would have said, if anyone ever asked him.
But nobody ever did, because you gave men like Ray orders, because he was a piece on a chessboard, was collateral fuckin’ damage. He should’ve died, or could’ve died, or it wouldn’t made no difference, because that was war and that is how wars are won, with poor boys from poor states killing other poor boys from other places that are usually even poorer, with a good measure of the women and kids and livestock thrown in just for shits and giggles.
Naive is not a word you could ever apply to Joshua Ray Person, okay. He knew what he signed up for. He knew he was signing in fucking blood. (He knew it was his own.)
But it itched. It itched and he poked at it and scratched at the skin until he saw that blood, felt it beating in his eyes under the baking sun and saw it on the sand of a land so ancient it hurt his head to even think of it, waited every day to die with a placid patience that’d even make the Iceman proud, and then--
--and then, they sent him back home.
Well. They thought they did.
The first thing he missed was a weapon. His weapon, his second fucking skin, the thing that kept him alive and damned him in one fell swoop. Without a gun he was naked. Without a gun he was a thing he’d never been, a grown man drinking coffee under the sun and that sun didn’t come with the price of blood on his hands. It was alien. It was literally so fucking alien that he could barely even process it, and the weeks dragged on and on and on and he kept waiting to wake up. He kept waiting for the whine that meant explosions and the sound of bullets only-just-missing his head.
He came back from the war, and came back, and came back. He was walking wounded with scars all over and blood on his hands and every single night he woke up screaming. He came back every time he opened his eyes. He was still there. He’d never left. There was blood dry under his fingernails and long thin lines on his face and although somehow it was still worth the price he’d paid to get out of the trailer park it wasn’t worth this.
Here was his thirty pieces of silver. Here was his bit part in empire, the cog in the machine where the white man ruled the world.
He didn’t miss it. He just didn’t know how to live without it.
Three weeks after he got back from Iraq, he bought a shotgun in Walmart and hid it under his bed.
That was how it started. Kind of. Except for how it started in Afghanistan, in basic, in that fucking trailer park it Buttfuck, Missouri. It kind of started in a lot of places. That’s what goes into making a person, after all.
Three months after those three weeks, one of the most senior officers in the LAPD was acquitted on charges of corruption and brutality and murder. Everyone knew he’d done it. Everyone knew exactly how little the life of a man like Ray Person mattered, because he could read it on the front page of the fucking newspaper. The marine corps was supposed to give him a lot of things, but mostly? It just gave him more shit to be angry about, when all was said and done.
Here was what Ray Person had: the training to kill a man with his bare hands, a brain that wasn’t half bad, and a fuckload of matches.
He only goes to Berkeley during the semesters. He tells everyone he likes the LA weather better. No one ever asks him questions. See how that’s starting to work in his favour?
I love you, I miss you, I murdered a man today because he killed children and didn’t even give a fucking shit, so I took him out quick and clean and now they can’t pretend anymore, now they can’t make that motherfucker a Senator, I miss you, I miss you, I miss the way you smile at me like I’m the dirt on the bottom of your shoe and the gas in your lighter, come home come home come home--
--is not what Ray’s emails to Brad read.
He can’t tell him the truth he aches to tell him, the truth he feels in his bones and with a gun in his hands and the slow small rumble of change in the air, so he feeds him the mundanity that keeps a soldier alive when he’s in battle, and pretends he’s not fighting a war of his own. He doesn’t tell him that he loves him and doesn’t admit that he misses him and pretends, pretends so hard he laughs at it sometimes, because if only you could see, Bradley, man, you’d be so turned on, Jesus.
Well. He thinks he would. He doesn’t think he’s wrong, and he’s not been wrong about a lot of shit since he came home. It’s weird, being 24 and rarely wrong, but there you go. War’s good for something, other than badass scars, you heard it here first.
I’ll be back in the states at 0900 on Thursday, is all Brad’s message says.
Ray jerks off, cleans his gun, and digs out his best leather jacket.
He’s a man with a goddamn plan, and the best part--
--the best part, it’s knowing how much it’s going to get Brad fucking going once he finds out Ray had a plan all along.
iii.
Brad doesn’t say any of the things Ray expected him to say, which is awesome.
“Your second to last one was sloppy,” he says, instead, and Ray gets hard so fast he sees stars. He’s driving and Brad’s tacitly told him he’ll join Ray on a crusade which’ll last until both of them are full of lead and all he wants to do is climb Brad’s lap and push both their pants’ down and go to town.
“Fuck you,” he says, eyes on the road and mind in the gutter, right where they both belong, “That guy was fuckin’ huge, okay, we can’t all be you, man, we can’t all be tall enough to stab some freak in the neck without even trying.”
“Maybe you should’ve waited for me to do it, then,” says Brad, placidly, and Ray shakes his head, says, “You are fuckin’ killing me, dude, hang on, I’m gonna do something illegal and not the fun kind--”
They make it to his apartment in three minutes flat. Ray doesn’t spend most of it trying not to look at how the street lamps make Brad look almost ethereal, of course not.
“Get out of my car right the fuck now,” says Ray and Brad--
--Brad obeys.
“Take your fucking clothes off, where did you even find pants this tight,” says Brad, low and harsh and almost angry in Ray’s ear, rutting against Ray’s skinny jeans and fingers scrabbling over Ray’s belt, and it would be comical, the Iceman reduced to this, except for how it’s just really fucking hot.
“Stop getting your panties in such a bunch, you total fucking retard,” says Ray, fondly, and strips his belt out of his belt loops and shoves his pants down, “See? Off now. You can wow me with all the secret gay sex moves the army doesn’t know about, now.”
Brad raises an eyebrow, and snarls a little, and that’s when Ray knows, and wow, real wow, Christ. Shit, okay.
“Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?” demands Ray, and Brad’s eyebrow is crawling up his face, now, and that’s not exactly great either, “Jesus, Brad, you’re such a fucking lifer, did you really think they’d catch you if you stuck your dick in some, uh. Other dick? Have you met me? And how they, y’know, let me in the fucking marines and all? Did you see those shades I wore in Iraq, I don’t even know how they let me on the fucking plane--”
“Charming as this expletive-ridden tirade is,” says Brad, curling his hand around the back of Ray’s neck, “I’m noticing a notable absence of getting my dick sucked, right now.”
“I hate you,” says Ray, dropping to his knees, “You are unworthy of this mouth and the life-altering things it can do, you really are.”
“I am one hundred percent sure none of that is true,” says Brad, and after that, Ray has to undo his zipper with his teeth, just to fuck with him.
They fuck three times that night, and again in the morning, and Brad learns to suck cock, and learns to like it, to really like it, to like it so much that he comes while doing it and Ray sucks in the air to laugh and then comes so hard in turn that he almost passes out. Ray rides him and then almost swallows his tongue when Brad says he wants to try it, and that’s when he almost says it, you’re the hottest ass I’ve ever had, you’re better than me and I know it but I think you don’t, you could marry some nice girl and have some nice Jewish babies and why are you doing this how are going to take home trailer trash to your parents and your friends and every person you’ve ever known, why are you doing this, why why why, but--
--but, look, he doesn’t, because he knows that voice is a lie. It’s a homophobic, biphobic, class-hatred based lie, and those are some big words he knew the meanings of before he knew they were words. One of his professors has some even longer words but he doesn’t fucking like the words or the professor, especially after he made his views on the armed forces known. He knows some words for this he’d never say to Brad, but it doesn’t matter. Brad’s ass is sculpted by the gods and he knows he’ll sit across the table from Brad’s mom one day with scrapes on his knuckles and cigarettes in his pocket, and it won’t matter. They’re not normal anymore. They probably never were.
“Do it to me,” says Brad, pressing strong fingers into the scar on Ray’s wrist, and Ray knows he knows, without even being told, because he’s Brad, because this is who and what they are.
“Okay,” he says, instead of something smart, and smiles when Brad waits a splitsecond before moving in to kiss him, because Brad is always chasing that smart sharp wit, and sometimes even he doesn’t know it.
iv.
“You could re-enlist, you know,” says Nate, his eyes tight with worry, sitting awkward in Ray’s filthy apartment, carefully not looking at the things he doesn’t want to see but is too decent to pretend he hasn’t, because that’s Nate, that’s always Nate, the man who looks at the things that are too hard to hold onto but looks anyway, because that’s just who he is.
“Nah, man,” says Ray, and Brad meets his eyes, leaning against the kitchen counter, and that, as they motherfucking say, is that.
v.
Mostly, it’s not all burning down the world to save it.
They eat pancakes at 3am and fuck every night and almost every morning, in alleyways and restroom stalls and in the back of Ray’s car, his hands leaving marks on the windows and hickeys all over his neck.
They can’t ever quite turn off the need to always keep their backs to the wall, to stand up straighter when a car exhaust backfires, to stand too close and smile too much and laugh in a way that makes people move away from them in the line at the movies. They’re too hard and too mean and too dangerous, and Ray slips out ain’t more and more, just so Brad can snarl at the people who treat him stupid -- like he’s stupid -- for it. One of his professors tells him he should go to grad school. They buy a helluva lot more guns. Brad tells him that he loves him, exactly once, half-asleep and fucked out into the back of Ray’s neck, and Ray calls him the worst thing he can think of and goes for his balls. (They fuck again, after that. Brad makes Ray pay.)
Life goes on, and on, and on, and this war never ends, but that’s okay. That’s the lesson, Ray guesses. It’s kind of always going to be okay.
Ray does it on a sunny Tuesday morning, the morning after the night before, after marathon fucking and mailing a disc full of proof that a council official embezzled a million dollars to the LA Times.
The blood is bright and shiny and sticky and smells like home, and he presses his fingertips to his lips, lets his mind shake with the realisation that this is more than even a wedding ring, a thing neither he nor Brad can ever take off.
“You’ve got shit all over your face,” says Brad, and Ray grins with blood in his teeth, waits for Brad to tackle him so hard he’ll already be bruising by the time he hits the floor.
“How about this time ‘round, you take my orders?” says Ray, a gun under his coat and Brad’s fingertips on his hips, and Brad needs to take orders, will always need to take orders, and Ray needs to never be given them, ever ever again--
--so, so, so, they scratch that motherfucking itch, Ray says fire, Brad pulls the trigger, and they learn their final lesson: war can be nothing but two people and a vendetta and a four letter word neither of them ever need to say again, given enough time.