#thestrayco

This really isn’t Alaric’s kind of party.

But he’s here to experience things, right? He’s suppose to get a feel for the country, for the city, and this is as much a part of it as any other. Besides, Jude’s a nice guy, helped him out when he was trying to talk to the hotel manager in his awful French. Of course, either Alaric is early or Jude already left, because he can’t see him. Should be easy, since they’d be the tallest two in the entire place.

He’s about to talk himself into leaving again, maybe finding a way to get in contact with Jude, take him to lunch to apologize, maybe. He’d liked the guy, wouldn’t mind seeing a little more of him. Hadn’t picked him for this kind of… well, the music’s loud, people are dancing so close there’s a genuine risk of pregnancy, and if he thought it was hot outside, he was wrong.

Alaric accepts a bottle of beer that’s been pushed into his hand by a black girl in a peasant skirt who looks at him like she’s assumed they must have met but she can’t remember where, and she drifts away with a smile. The beer is cold, and Alaric presses it to his forehead, and then his neck, closing his eyes for a moment while he enjoys the brief respite.

Maybe he should ask if anyone knows Jude.

He looks up at exactly the right moment to catch sight of a gorgeous face — can’t blame a guy for noticing — atop a very nice pair of shoulders, curls bobbing over the guy’s dark eyes. For a moment, Alaric wishes he’d brought his camera, but that’s not what he’s here for. He’s never been great at portraiture anyway, and he’d hardly go up to a perfect stranger and ask to take their photograph.

He photographs things. Places. Forgotten places. Ignored places. Broken things.

The guy is gone in a throng of people, and Alaric sips his beer.

“There you are,” comes a familiar voice with a familiar accent. Jude appears to be somewhat tipsy — he doesn’t seem the type to really get drunk, not with a job as important as the one he has. He’s in a good mood, though. Expansive and happy. Must have talked to the guy he mentioned back home. Alaric has already forgotten his name, only heard it the once when they’d had a beer in the hotel bar after Alaric had managed to secure his key. “I thought you might skip out on me.”

“No, no,” Alaric replies. “I wouldn’t do that.” (He’d totally do that. He nearly did that.) “Look, I really appreciate this. I’m not very good at…” Talking to people? Introducing himself? Making friends? Making small talk?

He laughs self-deprecatingly, and sips his beer again.

“Come on, there’s someone I want you to meet,” Jude says, beckoning Alaric with a tilt of his chin. He’s not the most tactile guy, Alaric noticed that the other day. Keeps a little distance.

“Okay,” Alaric agrees, following him through the crowd, and out onto a balcony where a few people are smoking.

Oh, no. It’s the guy. Freckles guy. Up close, he’s even nicer to look at than from a distance.

“Bellamy, this is Ric. Ric, Bellamy. Ric’s from the States. He just got in town a few days ago. I thought he could use a party.”

“Hello,” Alaric says, his mouth suddenly dry. He raises his beer to clink against Bellamy’s drink. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Wow. What an amazing first impression. He could win awards.

Hard to believe it’s been less than four months. But it’s been less than four months. Eddie collects family; he’s always done that, likes a lot of people around. Maybe a little because it’s like a safety net but that’s not all it is; after all, he’s been operating without one for a while. And not because he doesn’t treasure his time alone with Christopher, because he does, so much, all the little rituals they’ve created together, the smile on the kid’s face when he’s happy, which is most of the time… Eddie likes family, and this, this fire house, this is definitely his family now too.

There was never any hope of everyone being off shift on New Year’s Eve, but that hadn’t stopped them from having a party. The tinsel and fairy lights are still up from Christmas, to Christopher’s delight. New Year’s banners and foil balloons shaped like numbers and in groups of four reading ‘2019’ are tied here and there, to rails and furniture. The music is sort of celebratory, Eddie thinks, but he’s pretty sure the newest stuff on Athena’s playlist was released when he was still playing with Lego. The TV’s on. Someone offset the live feed from Times Square by a few hours so they can still watch the ball drop at midnight, West Coast time.

There’s a bowl of punch and a bowl of real punch, one for the poor suckers on call tonight and one for the rest of them. But Eddie has Christopher with him, so he had a couple of cups of the lethal stuff early in the evening and has been drinking straight coke for the last few hours, watching people dance.

He glances at his watch, and then at Christopher, asleep on a couch nearby. If Eddie doesn’t wake him in time, Chris might take back his ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ trophy.

“He should be at home in his bed,” Eddie laments. He reaches for another pig in a blanket (tell no one, but he actually likes them better a bit cold and chewy) — it’s a miracle there are any left at all, the way the garbage disposal next to him on the couch has been eating tonight. “I can’t say no to this kid. I hope he never decides he wants a pony.”

Eddie scrubs a hand over his face and leans back. Christopher might be determined to be up at midnight, but Christopher hasn’t worked three hundred hours this week.

Eddie’s sitting too close to Buck. He seems to do that a lot. He’s not sure exactly when it started happening, but no amount of trying will make him care about it. He eats the sausage slowly — there’s cheat days, and then there’s no self control between December 24th and January 1st — and he lets himself relax.

The impromptu engagement party for Bobby and Athena is kind of a trip.

“Gotta remind myself that not all marriages end in disaster,” he says, low enough so that no one but Buck will hear. “Just most of them. You’ve known them longer than I have — you think that’s the real deal? They look happy.”

Eddie’s pretty sure he and Shannon never looked at each other that way; and he’d been shipped out not long after the whirlwind courtship and the hasty wedding. He’s pretty sure in retrospect that she never imagined that being married to a soldier would be quite that way.

Buck’s thigh is warm against his own.

“So you got any new year’s resolutions?” he asks, shooting Buck a grin, and wishing there was some rum in his coke. He’s always liked new year’s, and it’s always better a little tipsy. But nothing’s better than Christopher wanting to be at the ‘fire party’, so he’s fine.

There is a slim possibility that Jude is doing this all wrong. First, by showing up a day early, which means Conrad is going to be caught unaware and (given the weather) extremely stressed out. That’s the first thing. Also, there is the little matter of the ring in Jude’s satchel, which is almost definitely premature (… but doesn’t feel premature. It just doesn’t). He’s rehearsed the proposal a thousand times in his head. Dinner tomorrow night. And before dessert, Jude will get down on one knee, and…

It’s the weirdest thing. The restaurant thing. It sounds like the right thing to do. Fuck, it’s really raining, the pilot must have had an IFR license or something. The restaurant. Yeah, it sounds like the right thing to do. On paper, it does. It’s the nicest restaurant in Atlanta, or so he’s heard, never having been there. Up-market, he supposes. A lot more expensive than either of them would usually pick. But that sounds like the right ambience for something this monumental, right? Maybe it’s not exactly ‘them’. But proposing while covered in mud and scratches at the bottom of a hill isn’t what he can imagine telling kids someday. It should be different, right?

The rain is really coming down. Which means he spends longer than usual waiting for a taxi. When he climbs into the back and asks for Chastain, the taxi driver gives him a sharp look in the rear view mirror.

“You a doctor or a patient?” he asks.

“Doctor. But I don’t work there. Why?”

“Heard their electricity went out with the storm. Ambulances taking people out of there to other hospitals. I might have to drop you away from the door, is all I’m saying.”

Conrad doesn’t answer the phone, but of course he doesn’t, he’s in the middle of complete chaos. Jude’s heart races in his throat, and he doesn’t wait for change as he leaps out of the taxi and runs for the emergency entrance.

Ellen Hundley is directing traffic like a cop and looking stressed as hell.

“Jude Silva,” she says. “Are you no longer fired?”

“I wasn’t fired. I quit before they got the chance,” he deadpans.

She nods slowly, and then shakes her head. “Keep your head down, Doctor Silva, think you’re gonna find you’re needed in the ER. But you didn’t hear it from me,” he barely hears, as he races inside. The generators are flagging, the lights are dim and flickering, the storm means trauma is backed up even without taking more patients. Why people think it’s a good idea to drive faster in the rain, Jude is never going to know.

Conrad is the eye of the storm. Collected, calm, beautiful.

(Fuck, though, he’s lost weight since Christmas, and he didn’t have a gram to lose.)

Also, Conrad has a scalpel in his hand, and there’s blood everywhere. Someone is saying things like ‘nine years old’ and ‘gunshot wound’ and ‘is that resident a surgeon?’.

A nine year old with gunshot wounds. Jude has a brief, and terrible, flashback. Or two, one laid over the other. The smell of sand, and the smell of rich jungle. And the always pervasive metallic scent of blood.

Jude is at Conrad’s side in a second, taking a report from Pravesh (who looks pretty glad to see him, if also rather furtive — Conrad’s best friend HODAD is no doubt prowling the halls being ineffective right now and would love to take a break from that to have Jude escorted off the premises, instead of letting him sew this kid’s artery closed. He hasn’t even said hello, yet, but he has a penlight in his hand, since there’s not enough light from the ceiling to see what’s going on in that mess.

“Bullet must have nicked the aorta. Hang five units of O-pos. Is there an operating room? Conrad… that cut is perfect, well done. Can someone scrub me in, please? Starting with clean scrubs? Uh… tall ones?”

There’s not too much headwind. Which means initially that Jude has this soaring in his heart that he’ll be face-to-face with Conrad for the first time in three months that bit sooner. And then they lose the time they made up sitting on the tarmac, waiting for someone to fix the aerobridge.

                   Jude is tired. Feels like he’s been working seven days a week for three years, instead of three months, and sleep doesn’t exactly come easy. Some of it has been incredibly difficult; taking the lower leg off a guy his own age was a somber moment. Untreated diabetes will do that.

He’s also birthed more babies in the last few months than in the rest of his medical career. Not that it was all that many, but after being an army medic, and a handful of weeks at Chastain, obstetrics has never been high on his list of priorities. Thing about MSF, though. Yeah, they want him for trauma, and for surgeries no one else could do; but there’s no such thing as specialization, they don’t have the manpower. So sure. Spend the morning removing a tumor the size of a lemon from someone’s neck without severing an artery, check. And then spend the afternoon vaccinating children and handing out condoms.

So what’s been keeping him going, beyond the dizzying knowledge that he’s saving lives and changing things every day from the time he opens his eyes in the morning until he collapses in a heap every night?

Jude glances at his phone. The lock screen is cropped from a larger photo. He’s never bothered with a lock screen before, thinks the photo that was there before was the forest scene the phone shipped with. It’s himself and Conrad after a trail ride; they’re filthy and grinning and standing closer together than he’d realized at the time, back when he was still trying to maintain some… decorum, or whatever, but finding it hard to keep much distance. Those guys were always a bit too touchy for Jude’s taste, anyway; better to stand close to Conrad, when Conrad touching him had never been annoying. Superfluous detail. Point is, they’re dirty and grinning and Jude’s arm is bleeding from a tussle with a low-hanging tree branch and Conrad’s knee is grazed, and it’s the only photo he has of the two of them outside of Afghanistan.

And he fucking loves it.

Jude can feel the anticipation building as he makes his way through America’s worst airport, almost like butterflies, feels the smile on his face widen as he gets closer to the arrivals gates.

And there he is. Messy hair and a dark smudge beneath each eye, look slightly sheepish and holding a sign that says hero boyfriend, like the world’s cutest chauffeur.

Jude really isn’t sure about PDA and it’s occurred to him more than once that he left before they got a chance to even start to figure out their own dynamics. Before he can outthink himself, though, he’s got his arms around Conrad, face buried in his neck.

The little shit managed to lose some more weight. Which is a conversation for tomorrow.

“God, I missed you,” he murmurs. What about a kiss; would that be too much? Maybe. Probably.

@thestrayco

In retrospect, the first time might have been perfectly innocent.

Thing is, even if you fall in love with your best friend, you don’t really expect there to be a next step. It’s a thing that can happen when you’ve got a lot of shared history; just a little brain fart, some transference, whatever. It happens and it passes and you move on.

But when instead your rational brain takes a holiday and your said best friend giving you his blessing to date his ex-girlfriend results in a complicated series of events, starting with kissing in a locked on-call room and followed hours later by dragging him from the room of a dead cancer patient and somehow adopting a dog?

Honestly, there’s no rulebook for that.

So when, the next day, they have to burst the bubble just enough to make it to work — yeah. Conrad borrows a shirt. Too big for him by miles, especially at his current weight of… seventh grader. Gaping at the neck so after thirty seconds Jude could draw Conrad’s collarbones from memory. It’s appealing. And it’s sort of hot. And it might be — in fact it probably is — perfectly innocent.

But time goes by.

Though they still nominally live at separate addresses, it’s been a while since they spent a night apart, when they weren’t both working. (Or a day. Whatever, it’s shift work, you make do.) A while since they haven’t made some agreement about whose place to go to when a night shift ends, even if it means sharing a bed for a couple of unconscious hours before someone has to sneak out and back to work. After a few weeks like that, the wardrobes are thoroughly mixed, and Conrad always has a pile of clean laundry at Jude’s place.

So borrowing a t-shirt which reveals not only those gorgeous collarbones but the bruises Jude left on them the night before? Yeah, it’s not innocent, and it’s hot as fuck.

Not like Jude hasn’t been aware of his possessive streak since he started dating, but no one’s ever brought it out of him like this.

“You don’t mind?” Conrad’s eyes are all crinkly, but there’s a testing note in his voice as well. They’re still navigating things. Jude’s throat is dry. So is his mouth.

“I don’t mind,” he says, evenly, stretched out on the bed, sheet barely keeping him decent.

He needs sleep, yes. He needs Conrad more.

Conrad doesn’t kiss him on the way out the door. It’s calculated. He just smiles that smile and Jude knows he’ll be on his knees in the on-call room in a handful of hours making sure Conrad knows exactly what Jude thinks about his boyfriend borrowing his clothes.

—

On the one hand it feels like moving in together is nothing more than a convenient technicality; Jude could, he supposes, rent a storage locker while he is away, but leaving Conrad those few items of furniture he likes enough not to post on Craigslist (the coffee table shaped like a cartoon bacteria cell, the old chest, both of his bookshelves) and his clothes makes it feel more like a promise that this isn’t just an informal breakup. He’s coming home, and when he does, this apartment will be his home. Conrad is his home, all ribs and determination and ingenuity.

—

Some meme I abandoned a while ago whoops

It’s the thing, working for themselves. Sometimes Alaric’s week starts with a couple of sixteen-hour days, and then by Friday, there’s no work. It suits him, so it’s fine. No different to Bellamy sitting up for half the night writing while Alaric dozes in an armchair nearby, or waking at four in the morning full of inspiration and energy. So their hours are as regular as they can manage, but never too regular -- just like the rest of their happy little circle, with their on-call hours and their badass surgeries at ungodly hours, chasing bad guys over rooftops and saving the uninsured. 

Alaric doesn’t open his eyes. He just smiles, and shakes his head, not shifting from where he’s been stretched out on the couch since the carb coma hit him after lunch. 

“Still sleeping,” he says, with a wonky smile, and only then does he crack one eye open about an eighth of an inch. Bellamy has that feline look on his face. Wants attention. It’s a good mood on him; Alaric has always appreciated it. He holds an arm out, and Bellamy climbs on top of him, stretching out gracefully and tucking his head beneath Alaric’s chin. 

“Good,” Bellamy murmurs. “You need your strength. We have a small guest tonight, ouais? One who has recently mastered propelling herself across a room in a second or two.”

Alaric groans, but he has been looking forward to it (and he’s pretty sure Jude and Conrad have, too). 

Joel yawns and stretches. “Thanks,” he says, reaching for a menu. The bar is pretty busy, pretty noisy. Another night he’d be enjoying it, maybe meeting new people, and a couple of beers down the track he’d probably be on the dance floor. Grinning, trying to conjure some cheer, trying to seem like himself, he offers Jay a wink. “It’s the tiredness.”

The menu items swim. And they’ll probably take a really long time to get fed, because the place is packed, and he can see cutlery and paper napkins on most of the tables, the international symbol of ‘these guys have ordered’. But meeting up mid-week had been Joel’s idea, and as lame as he feels about being disappointed that the world (i.e. work) had conspired to keep him and Jay apart the weekend before he’ll feel even lamer if he cancels because a bar is too loud and full of people.

Joel rubs his eyes and looks at the menu again. A burger, he’ll just have a normal burger. Except there are no normal burgers — everything is a choice. He could just point, but then what if he points at something with poison in it? Or pineapple? Or egg, and the egg is hard instead of runny?

Joel rubs his eyes, and then he’s startled, hearing Jay speak.

“What’s that?”

“I said, we can rain check. Seriously, Joel.”

He doesn’t want to, though. Just because he doesn’t want to be in a bar with two hundred people who don’t start work until 9 am, and will definitely knock off at 5 pm doesn’t mean he wants to be alone. And without a bit of Jay-time (fuck, he’s a wreck) to tide him over, he’s going to be a bear tomorrow, and not in the cuddly way.

“You know,” he says, “if we call for a pizza now, we’d be back at my place before it arrived.”

Jay’s face relaxes minutely and Joel realizes they’re both relieved.

“Alright. Pizza,” Jay says, raising his glass to knock the rest down. “Pizza it is, but you know my rules about topping. Don’t even know how they call it pizza,” he adds, grumbling. “The hell is the matter with deep dish, is what I wanna know.”

They don’t talk, much. They don’t pay much attention to the television, either. They eat, they bask in each other’s company, and they discuss plans for the weekend as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll spend most of it together. So, so close to what Joel wants, and even if it aches, it’s enough to keep him happy.

Joel blinks slowly and reaches out with one hand. Weak as a kitten; supposed to nap for ten minutes and instead it must have been about forty because his eyes have gone fuzzy and his body feels heavy on the rumpled bedspread.

The novelty of Jay being around all the time — not nearly around, not around bro no homo, just… around, with clothing in the wardrobe and washing in the machine and the dog who knows without a doubt that he will never be booted off the bed unless there are clothes flying everywhere — it may never wear off, and honestly, Joel kind of hopes it won’t.

“I was,” he says, and if he’s disappointed for a second that Jay doesn’t join him on the bed it’s not for very long, because he strips off the shirt he’s been running around all day in like John McClane and tosses it in the general direction of the laundry hamper. All that muscle, all that skin.

“Don’t feel you have to get dressed again on my account,” he says, lazily, settling his hands behind his head.

Sometimes Jay still looks a little sheepish or startled, to have found himself here, sharing another man’s bed. Sometimes he smiles just exactly like this and lights the room up.

“It’s been a long week. Couldn’t believe it when Kitt told me to go home at four. I’m not even on call this weekend. Might just drop your phone in a glass of beer so you’re not either.” He reaches out again, and this time, Jay lets himself be dragged down onto the bed. The dog makes a disgruntled noise as Joel pulls Jay down on top of him, and jumps off the bed. They kiss for a little while, aimless and affectionate. Wouldn’t take much encouragement to get a whole lot less aimless, but Joel is hungry, too. All this skin, though. All this delicious muscle, and Jay looking kind of hungry for something other than takeaway Mexican from down the street.

“I don’t mind you waking me up.”