Chapter Text
Ray knew what was going to happen when he walked through the door into the living room and found Brad and Nate sitting together on the sofa, hands held between them.
--
It had been maybe 7 months since they’d all come back from Iraq, thin and wired and shamal-scrubbed but intact in body, mostly intact in mind.
For a while there it looked like Nate was going to be ground into paste between the wheels of Encino Man’s incompetence, Casey Kasem’s spiteful, jealous little power plays, and the inability to do right by his men when he was powerless under baffling but unyielding orders.
He seemed to bite his tongue so much that his mouth filled with blood he could never spit out.
The men liked him; even without the contrast of Captain America losing his mind the minute they crossed through from Kuwait, Nate was still the best Lieutenant they could have wished for. He wasn’t afraid of laying down a firm order, but he wasn’t so prideful that he wouldn’t actively seek the experience and knowledge of his Gunny, Mike Wynn, or from Brad himself.
That kind of flexibility worked well for a man trying to lead a platoon of Marines, who were used to working in small groups, without the supervision of Officers and with more freedom than was afforded to them crossing Iraq in Humvees.
Ray had been running himself into the ground on Ripped Fuel and instant coffee granules, and Brad, well, Brad lived and breathed Recon; they wouldn’t be able to pry him from the Corps with such small annoyances as crossing a bridge without reconnaissance, or seizing an airfield in the dark, or losing the battalion’s supply of chow.
Nate could hold his own, had done so in Afghanistan, but he was struggling a little in Iraq. Personnel problems, the isolation of command, the constant awareness that there was no good or right answer to any of the questions the entire endeavour raised. It was a situation almost specifically designed to wear down a man like Nate Fick.
It was in Brad’s best interests to make sure that Nate didn’t start to fracture, that the cracks didn’t show. It was in Ray’s best interests to look out for Brad’s best interests, and so he consented to letting Brad get closer to Nate. Support him maybe. Maybe more than that.
Brad had done that for Ray, just as he’d done that for Brad, back in the rocky landscape of Afghanistan. Huddled together in a bombed out former-house, keeping each other awake through long hours on watch; Brad guided the boot recruit and Ray keeping Brad buoyed when he’d just had his heart broken and wanted to sink.
It wasn’t as though Ray hadn’t noticed the imperial line of Nate’s nose, or that quick-talking voice of effortless command, or those hands. And Nate didn’t just tolerate Ray; he seemed to welcome Ray’s antics as a distraction from the sheer crush of the mutated responsibility he had to carry around.
So maybe Ray had a bit of a crush on the LT, and maybe there were magnets buried somewhere in Brad and Nate that were drawing them together, and maybe Ray was happy to be the hapless piece of metal sandwiched in between.
And maybe a prologue had started after he’d been beaten into the ground by Rudy on the makeshift football field, when he’d retreated to lick his wounds and smother his embarrassment. He thought that Brad might turn up, and he did, quietly like some kind of big cat. Brad had put a hand on his shoulder, and Ray had rested his forehead against Brad’s arm for a moment, as intimate as they could allow themselves to be in the middle of the AO.
He hadn’t expected the steady hand on his back, shoring him up in slow, firm circles. He’d twitched, tensed, but Brad reassured him and then Nate quieted him and no one had kissed but it felt as though they had.
They found each other again a week after they’d arrived home, where Brad and Ray welcomed Nate into their house and into their bed.
Nate fit in with them so thoroughly it was less like a puzzle piece and more like flour being folded into cake batter, inseparable and necessary.
It wasn’t difficult to make space for Nate in the mundane movements of their lives and between their sleeping bodies. Nate wasn’t the kind of person to show his affection through long-winded insults, but there were times when Ray would mention something suddenly and unexpectedly insightful or astute and Nate would flash a delighted smile at him.
After so long watching Nate in Iraq, seeing those pained smiles become less smile and more pain, Ray felt giddy bolt of happiness whenever he inadvertently pulled that expression from Nate. Nate had a different smile for Brad, so this one was all his, just something he and Nate shared.
Brad and Ray had a baked in familiarity with each other which felt almost as old as Mesopotamia itself. They didn’t have to make room for each other; there were no spaces in Brad or Ray that the other could fill, because they were intertwined, threads that made a single rope.
But Brad and Nate… they had been attuned to each other from the start, in a manner deeper than anticipating each other’s needs. Once they were stateside, the pull between them grew so fast and hard that it seemed to spook them, and they spent some time avoiding eye contact and anything too close to intimacy.
Having Ray in the middle to burst that awkwardness was probably the only reason they’d been able to let themselves be together without panicking, without misunderstandings and awkward conversations. Those who knew Brad also knew that he was soft with emotion, surprisingly easy to hurt.
For his part, Nate kept his emotions carefully guarded; they’d been too injured through Iraq for him to be able to feel comfortable letting any of that restraint go. It was hard for him to step out of the role of superior officer and re-learn that it was okay for him to show weakness in front of Brad and Ray.
Nate and Brad wouldn’t have been able to breach that weird gap between them without Ray doing as he did in Iraq and talking the tension out of them. He was quietly proud, and maybe even a little smug, to be the one to have smoothed the way between the other two.
It was paid back as well. Brad could tell when Ray was feeling unhappy, able to see through his smiling and joking when it was hiding upset underneath, but seeing Ray in distress tended to make Brad paralysed with helplessness. He didn’t know what to do with Ray when he was hurting, and so he didn’t really do anything but give Ray space.
While Nate wasn’t as good at seeing through Rays’ bluff as Brad was, he was good at realising when Brad was reacting to it, and he sought Ray out when he did. Nate let Ray be fragile with him without having to reassure Brad at the same time, and Ray ended up telling Nate in months what had taken him over a year to tell Brad, all his little self-doubts and the things that haunted him.
As good as the relationship was, as well as they grew to work together, the sex had been fantastic since the first night. Ray had only ever slept with Brad, who had only slept with his ex-fiancée until she broke up with him, spurring him to try and fuck her out of his system.
They had this vague idea that Nate had never had sex with a man before, but turned out to be completely wrong. Nate had discovered that he was an exclusive top as he took advantage of the opportunity to play the field while he was in college getting his double-major. Brad was a self-professed lifer in the Marine Corps, but Nate had separated with an honourable discharge and plans to go back to college for even more degrees.
Ray, who had been painfully sharp but still had a completely miserable time at school, hadn’t been able to understand willingly subjecting yourself to yet another 3 or more years of the education system. Nate had tried talking Ray into attending himself, but Ray remained unconvinced.
So, it turned out that Brad and Ray’s expectations were wrong. Not only did Nate have more experience sleeping with other men than they did, he was also not about to bottom for anyone. He was worried this would be the thing that splintered their happy lives, but Ray was at his happiest on his back being screwed, and Brad didn’t care if he was top or bottom as long as he was in control.
Like everything else about their unconventional relationship, it all seemed to work out between them beautifully. For a while, at least.
It was the differences that started to show up in their sex life that set off a little alarm in Ray’s head, telling him that something was changing. They didn’t always wait for all three of them to be around before they had sex – it wasn’t unusual for Brad to come in to find Nate biting into Ray’s neck and fucking him into the sofa, or for Ray to come home and find Brad riding Nate and choking him out with his belt at the same time – but lately it seemed that Brad and Nate were always occupied with each other.
They seemed to make more time to be able to have sex one-on-one, and even when Ray was there, he got the feeling that he was peripheral to whatever was going on between Nate and Brad. As much as Ray bragged and ran his mouth, he was actually pretty insecure. He’d had a childhood of abandonment and bullying and it hadn’t failed to have an impact on him.
He was afraid of what Brad and Nate might say if he brought up how he felt, so he didn’t. It happened more often until he had to distance himself from them a little bit for his stomach’s sake, claimed he was tired or not in the mood when the topic of sleeping together came up. He knew Brad could tell that something was wrong, because he always could. And he knew Nate would talk to him about it, because he always would.
Except now. It was like they were relived that Ray made excuses not to join them, and that their relief made them guilty enough not to try and bring the issue out into the open.
This weird avoidance during sex started to bleed over into the rest of their lives. Nate began to be more irritated, or worse, paid no attention to Ray’s rambling insights which had entertained him before. When he did shoot Ray a smile, it was the polite, vaguely friendly smile that he gave to service sector workers.
Brad didn’t take the time to craft long-winded insults about Ray, and that was worse than realising that Brad didn’t say ‘I love you’ anymore.
It was a choke chain cutting off his air, and Ray spent more time out of the house to escape it. He’d go on a run or spend hours at the skatepark riding on his own; he was never able to convince either of them to spend time with him out there anymore.
--
He was coming in from being out at the skatepark, and he took a moment to lean his board against the wall before looking back to where Brad and Nate were sat together.
They both looked up when he shut the front door; Brad looked guilty and unsure, and pained because he was unsure and a little broken on top of that. Nate, always direct since spending a tour biting his tongue, couldn't look him in the eye.
Even though a large part of him wanted to force them to say it, he still couldn't see that anxious look on Brad's face without needing to do something to relieve it.
"You're dumping me." He said, not angry, not flat, just even. And hollow.
Brad flinched and Nate twitched and Ray knew they hadn't been planning on using those words, but that's what this was.
"Ray..." Brad said,
Ray cut him off, even though he knew that Brad wasn't actually starting a sentence with that.
"I'm right. You don't want me in this anymore." he stated, not asking for confirmation because he'd already had it, had been having it for weeks now.
Brad didn't say anything. Nate looked like he wanted to, but wasn't sure if it was his place to speak. They looked at Ray as though they wanted him to absolve them, but he couldn’t.
What could he do, what could he say that was going to help?
He knew a long time ago that something in Brad had been eviscerated when his fiancée and his best friend had torn him from their lives, and maybe that’s when he’d forgotten what love actually felt like.
Maybe Brad had believed that his feelings of responsibility for a subordinate, and his pride in his RTO, and the friendship they'd developed, was more than that. Maybe he'd mistaken the warm feeling he had when Ray did something particularly clever, or said something witty, or just looked a certain way in a certain light, for the kind of love that he now felt with Nate.
And maybe on meeting Nate, he’d remembered the way love was supposed to feel; that it could burn like this, all the time, without hurting, and that it overshadowed the softness he'd felt for Ray. Brad's heart had been broken, and Ray had glued it back together, but Nate had made it whole again.
And maybe Nate had done the same thing. He'd been proud of Ray as well, had felt protective over him as he did all his men, but had confused that for actual love when Ray and Brad had said 'come into our relationship, expand this definition of 'ours''
Maybe he thought he'd loved Ray like that because he thought had had to in a situation like this. Maybe he really wanted to feel that way about Ray, but had never been able to make himself feel something that wasn’t there. Had he really been any kinder to Ray than he would have regardless?
Whatever it was, whatever the reason, Brad didn't feel love for him anymore, and Nate had never really felt it in the first place.
So, what was he supposed to do? Cry and scream at them until their feelings magically changed? Force Brad to make Nate leave, as if they could go back to how they were, and keep him tied to Ray through guilt? Make them stay together that way until guilt grew to resentment and then into hate?
What was he supposed to do? What else could he do but save them the hassle and just go?
He didn't want to listen to them struggle awkwardly to find a way to tell him that they'd fallen in love with each other without hurting his feelings. It hurt, and there was nothing anyone could do about that.
"Okay." he tapped his knuckles against the doorframe, resolute. "I'm gonna go pack my shit."
Brad tensed now, stood up. "Hey, you don't have to-" Ray didn't give him the benefit of interrupting this time and Brad had to pause, then reword. "We're not kicking you out."
"I can't stay." Ray disagreed. And before any show of guilty protest could be made, "I know you're not going to have me still live here, pretending that this hasn't happened." The way Brad's fiancée and best friend were still doing with him. Ray knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it, not even to spare Brad and Nate’s feelings; he’d never claimed to be the bigger man and he wasn't about to start now.
Neither of them could say anything to that.
"I'm going to grab some boxes from the garage. I won't need a hand." he stated, before disappearing away to do just that.
He'd had a home here with Brad for nearly three years. He'd moved in from a college-esque life in barracks, and while they'd replaced the sofa and the bed together, Ray had made his own few additions: added a garlic press and a grater for nutmeg; a strip on the wall to hang pans on in the kitchen; a shower caddy in the bathroom, because he hated the watery goo that collected on the bottom of the shower gel cap if you left it on the bath rim.
All his dumb little thumbprints around the house, and he still didn't really have much there that he couldn't take away in a few boxes.
The Marines tended to make you lean towards carrying light: Ray had his clothes, already stripped of superfluousness – he left anything he’d ‘borrowed’ from Brad or Nate folded on the bed; a tiny library of purposely diverse books; his DVDs already pulled from their cases and stashed in a couple of large wallet folders, along with a couple CDs that he hadn’t ripped to his Creative Zen MP3 player, because fuck Apple.
He had a handful of PS2 and Xbox games, but Brad had gone halves on the consoles themselves and Ray wasn’t interested in sorting out custody – he’d just leave them where they were, take his Gameboy Advance and the few games he had for that.
Between the things he was leaving behind and the items remaining, Ray was all gathered and packed within maybe 3 hours. It seemed sad now, how little he’d really owned here.
He was leaving all the small trappings that made a home behind; it felt stupid to live by himself with a quartet of egg cups bought to turn a different house into a home.
He let Brad and Nate help him carry boxes out to his truck, even said 'thanks' when they were done, backpack over his shoulder and his seabag at his feet.
They made an awkward triangle at the front door, Ray standing beside his truck with his hands buried in his pockets, Nate and Brad closer to the front door. Brad had a hand on the back of his neck like he had a growing headache, and Nate stood at ease like he was retreating into his military training to deal with this.
“I guess I’ll see you around.” Ray shrugged, but then reconsidered. “Actually, I think I’ll need some time before I can see you guys again.” He took a breath that wanted to come out as a sob, but didn’t. He could have a breakdown later, on his own. “I’ll be civil, but… I just need to not see you for a while.”
Brad looked like he was going to cry, which wasn’t surprising to Ray. Nate nodded for the both of them, and Ray didn’t look back as he reversed out and drove away.