Team Day, Prompt: Out of Bounds, Paint the ocean blue and marigold too
Title: Paint the ocean blue,and marigold too.
By: godofwine
Prompt: Out of Bounds - Straying into an area restricted from use by normal traffic, prohibited to Marines, or too far from base for a given liberty period.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Based on mini-series, not intended to reflect actual people.
Summary: Due north. (marine biology AU)
Author's Note: Thank you so much to hypertwink and oxonensis for the beta!
Paint the ocean blue,
and marigold too.
*
When Brad lands in Anchorage, the weather surprises him by being a fucking balmy 71°. It's not even particularly unseasonably warm, the pilot tells him. Brad shoves his parka further into his carry-on bag and tries to look like less of an idiot.
Brad's actually been across the world before, but almost only in the Southern Hemisphere. Mostly, he's stayed along the 200 miles of Southern California coast. All he knows about Alaska is "big" and "cold".
It's a quiet twenty-minute ride from the airport to the harbor. His cabby doesn't say anything after he takes Brad's bags with a perfunctory "Where to?" Brad likes it better this way anyway. He cranks down the window and watches the city go by, feels the passing breeze tug on the stray hairs of his bangs. Not for the first time, he wishes he kept them short.
At the harbor, the Alexandria's not hard to spot, easily dwarfing a few pleasure yachts nearby. She doesn't get impressive though until Brad's made it almost all the way down the long stretch of jetty, her jagged metal silhouette sharpening into the wires and antennas of a fine piece of technology.
There's a group of people waiting at the bottom of the gangplank. Brad aims for the one with the clipboard and introduces himself.
"Oh right, Colbert, gray whales, gotcha," the guy says. He shifts his clipboard under his armpit and holds out his hand. "I'm Nate by the way."
Brad's been baking underneath his sweater since he got here. His hand is clammy with sweat against Nate's firm, dry palm. If Nate notices, he doesn't say anything.
The other guys are Ray (narwhals), Mike (phytoplankton), some environmentalists, a few stragglers. None of them are much reminiscent of scientists. Ray's got tattoos peeking out of the edges of his t-shirt sleeves, and Mike's got bulging muscles coming out of his.
It's Nate who looks the part, big ears under his floppy hat and an eager grin. Up close, his cheeks already look pink from sunburn.
"Are you interning here?" Brad asks to be polite.
"He's leading this thing," Antonio laughs. Antonio (aka Poke) is a Sociologist who came up studying discrimination in low-density populations and stayed. Brad's not sure what he's looking to find on an Arctic research expedition, but he knows the local waters well.
"Nate's the wiz kid," Poke explains, "tenure track and everything."
Brad had pegged Nate for a fresh grad at best, maybe even still an undergrad with ambition. Nate looks at him and smiles conspiratorially. "I'm older than I look," he whispers.
"More importantly, is that wool?" Ray jumps in.
For a minute there, Brad had forgotten about his sweater. Now, he's acutely aware of it, sticking to the skin his undershirt didn't cover. The tag itches at the base of his neck.
"Should have checked the weather report, son," Mike adds. His accent is softly southern. It makes him come off genteel, fatherly instead of dickish.
Despite the sea salt air, Brad feels far from home. He says, "I'll remember that next time."
*
The Alexandria is big enough to let them all have personal cabins, but not big enough for those cabins to be comfortable.
Brad hasn't been in quarters this cramped for a while now. He's struck with a moment of claustrophobia when his fingertips brush two parallel walls, but he wills it away.
After a few minutes, there's a knock on his door. It's Nate. Without his hat, he looks even younger. Brad wants to ask him his age but doesn't.
"Just wanted to see how you were settling in," Nate says. He doesn't try to come in any further than the doorjamb. His eyes focus on Brad instead of dancing around the rest of the room. "I hope the rocking doesn't bother you too much."
"Nah, I'm used to it," Brad says.
"Oh yeah? Been on a lot of boats?" Nate sounds more friendly than curious. It's been a long day though; Brad's too tired to have this conversation. Too old.
"A bit," Brad says back.
Nate doesn't pry. He smiles and says, "We'll be sailing off soon if you want to come and watch."
Brad doesn't particularly want to, but he follows Nate up anyway. At the stern, the rest of the expedition shout and wave to the strangers that are watching from shore. The foghorn sounds twice.
Brad watches the last vestiges of land slip away. It's a familiar sight, exciting and frightening.
*
Once upon a time, Brad used to be a Marine Corps man. Once, it was all he was supposed to be.
After he left, Brad wasn't so much lost as unmotivated.
When his discharge finally came through, he spent a lot of time surfing and running on the beach and getting sunburned. After a few weeks, his shoulders finally got with the program and started to freckle and tan instead of shedding off strips of days-old skin.
His parents fussed over him and started a lot of conversations with "But what do you want to do?" He told them "I don't know" and waited for the strain of their disappointment. They didn't ask for their guest room back though.
In the end, it was his cousin who brought up the idea of college "because I mean, what are else are you going to do?" She was applying herself that year.
It was strange listening to her offering him life advice. As a teen, Brad used to babysit her after school. He remembered watching her chubby legs floundering in the waddle pool in his aunt and uncle's backyard. It felt like a lifetime ago.
The next day, Brad got an application for UC San Diego because she was right; he had given up the right to ask for boyish adventures and ready heroism. He felt the future closing in on him, grey and unavoidable. He thought, Semper gumby, and wondered when it became so fitting.
It only took him twenty minutes to finish the whole thing. He got a recommendation letter from his old Sergeant Major who he wasn't even sure knew how to spell "university" much less understood why anyone would want to waste their money going. It seemed appropriate. He went to the interview in board shorts with leftover sea salt still clinging to his skin. The interviewer was barely older than him and spent the whole half-hour asking about his favorite places to surf. Brad didn't say "Thailand" though he wanted to.
He found out that he was accepted in January. It was his cousin who saw the letter first, already jumping and screaming before she had even opened it. "It's thick!" she said, and, "That means you got in!" when he didn't respond.
"Oh," he said and wished it were for her instead.
College ended up being mild and predictable. After the Marines, most things were.
Three months in, he started dating a girl from ecology. She was pretty and smart, good family, bright future, the works. She was the kind of girl you didn't get to date if you were in the Corps.
It took six dinners before she invited Brad back up to her place. Afterwards, he spent the whole night in her cramped dorm room bed and woke up with the taste of her perfume on his tongue. Brad hadn't done anything like that since high school. He wasn't sure that he'd actually missed it.
He didn't expect her to change his life.
In December, over an earmarked copy of the Course Catalogue, she said, "Let's take Marine Biology together. I think it would be fun."
Brad tried not to laugh. It was the softest science he could imagine. Brad had been circling around a Comp Sci major for the last semester, but he wasn't entirely committed. He had audited a course in Astrophysics on side, was thinking about taking it on full-time; he thought that would be fun.
She turned back to look at him from her lounge chair across the pool. It was chilly for SoCal's usual temperateness; Brad could just make out the bumps of her nipples against the stretched cotton of her tank top.
"Yeah, let's do it," he told her. It was probably one of the dumbest things he's ever said.
The good news was the class only met for one two-hour session on Tuesday afternoons. The bad news was Brad spotted three separate tie-dyed t-shirts on the first day.
The Professor was willowy and tall, engulfed in strands of beaded jewelry and a silk dress that trailed the floor as she walked. She reminded Brad of a gypsy fortuneteller.
"The ocean," she began and repeated it again, louder, for effect. She sounded like she was starting some sort of epic poetry recitation the way she pulled out the syllables from deep within her lungs.
She lectured with a lot of gestures and no notes. It wasn't rhythmic enough to fall asleep to, but it wasn't exactly conducive to paying attention either.
Brad was doodling Feynman diagrams when the Prof paused and pointed to him. "You. Young man, what do you know about Takifugu rubripes, the tiger pufferfish?"
"It's very delicious," Brad answered.
No one laughed. The Prof smiled at him, strained and patronizing, and moved on. Next to him, his girlfriend squeezed his hand once, hard.
Despite the inauspicious start, he learned more than he expected. The class wasn't boring, not like he thought it would be. He watched slides of deep sea blue and felt an echo of yearning.
He wasn't in love, wasn't even entirely convinced it mattered, but he was listening.
By the end of the semester, only half the class still looked at him like he spent his free time charting out whaling expeditions. He broke up with his girlfriend but made some new friends. They talked a lot about continuing with the sequence, working for the IUCN or getting a University grant when they graduated. They sounded genuine, concerned. Brad was not, but he respected the passion of their words.
Four years later though, he was the only one who made it through the major. He's the only one signing his life away to study freaking fish.
*
After a week, the expedition is already nearing the Bering Sea.
Aside from a few Jet Ski runs along the coast, Brad hasn't been out on the real ocean in years now. He's not been a field work type of guy even though he suspects, instinctively, that he probably would have preferred it to chemical-fake lab rooms and musty student-dense offices.
He spends a lot of time outside above deck when he can. The scenery is gorgeous, all deep blue water and sheer cliffs when they're close to the coast. It looks like they're traveling through a Discovery Channel special.
He gets a mild case of insomnia that slowly worsens. He gets up at midnight and runs laps around the deck in the jacket that he finally needs. He stays and watches the sun hover and hover over the horizon. He likes to see it finally set before he goes down for the night. Just to make sure it actually does.
It's probably fucking up his circadian cycle even more, but it's no use otherwise. Sometimes, he'd lie awake in his cabin thinking about it, feeling phantom rays of sunlight burning through his closed eyelids. It's a mild irritation he can't shake, this constant presence of day, like an itch underneath layers of skin and muscle, at the heart of bone itself.
He's not used to a place so strange. He's not used to this life at all.
*
The expedition organizes itself pretty quickly by specialization. Brad's in marine mammals with Ray and Walt. Walt used to train Beluga whales at Marineland before he figured out what he really wanted to do was study them in the wild. As far as Brad can tell, Ray only picked narwhals because they “look like unicorns man”.
There's an entire group devoted to jellyfish, four men and two women. Between them, they take up a whole corner table. With the way Ray and Walt like to sit uncomfortably close, marine mammals fit on a love seat. It makes Brad a little sad.
Aside from the usual, they've got a good range of interests onboard. Besides Poke, there's Evangeline the photographer and Doc the doctor, MD not veterinary. Not people Brad was expecting.
Ruby Reyes joins them at Anchor Point, the last stop before they hit real wilderness. She's supposed to be a psychologist, help them work out their issues and make sure they don't kill each other when they're 500 miles from civilization, but she seems to moonlight as a survivalist junkie on the side. She tells Brad a lot of stories about camping with grizzly bears and swimming fjords. Most of the guys like Ruby's stories, but it's probably less for the vicarious thrill and more because she's got the cheekbones of a supermodel and the tits of a porn star. Ray probably spends more time looking at her than his research material.
Of everyone, it's Nate that Brad can't exactly figure out. Officially, Nate is working on a government report on the fluctuations in biodiversity due to increased climate change. He could probably do it more easily from his cushy Harvard office, getting data streaming off the internet, instead of drifting out here in the middle of nowhere with the castoffs and the crazies.
Unofficially, Nate is a walking Encyclopedia. He points out passing landmarks, identifies sea birds by their Latin names, hands out advice on everything from saline levels in the Arctic over the last decades to Mike's crazy photosynthesis theories.
Brad doesn't talk to him much. Nate's friendly without encouraging chatter, smiling and listening and never telling much about himself. After the first day, he lets the rest of expedition figure out their social inclinations for themselves.
Brad can appreciate that.
Mostly, Nate sits by himself, commandeering a table in the forward lounge, and reads everything. Reports, academic journals and student papers, Inuit poetry once in paperback. Brad gets in the habit of checking just to see what Nate will come up with next.
Two weeks in, Brad loses his copy of the travel schedule to Ray's propensity for "borrowing". He heads to Nate's cabin for another one.
Nate's door is always unlocked. Facilitates availability, Nate says, though Brad's rarely seen anyone go in. He wonders if Nate's just lonely or if he's really kidding himself.
Brad knocks once and enters without hesitation.
Inside, Walt is on his knees, head bobbing in front of Nate's crotch. It's a motion that's universally unmistakable.
"Sorry," Brad says quickly and shuts the door again. He doesn't know what to think. His mind flashes on Nate's cock, wet and saliva slick, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut. The image doesn't fade though.
An hour later, Walt's running after him in the mess hall. He looks more distressed than embarrassed. It's not something that happens often, he says. He's not that type of guy - he doesn't want Brad to think so. He's just homesick. It doesn't mean anything.
Brad nods along, tries not to interject with anything harsh.
"Please don't say anything to Ray," Walt begs.
Brad's wondered about them. Not conspicuously or purposefully but a low-grade curiosity about whether there's actually anything there. He watches Ray's determined flirtation with anyone female alongside his casual presence in Walt's personal space and wonders which one is the ruse. Or if they are both somehow a mutually enforcing picture of a Lothario-Ray that Brad's never entirely doubted.
"I won't," he tells Walt. He doesn't know them, any of them, well enough; it's none of his business anyway.
Nate doesn't mention it at all.
*
The work actually isn't much different than at the University. Brad's yet to find the migratory gray whales that he's been promised so he's back skimming through known data.
Most of the time, there's not much to see at all besides spotty clumps of refuse and the odd flurry of seabirds here and there. After a while, even they get fewer and fewer.
"That's just the way it is, homes," Ray tells him. "Good things come to those who wait."
Ray's been on two of these expeditions already, and it's only his third dissertation year. He still runs after every would-be blow spray. Brad's not sure how he still has the energy.
As far as Brad knows, it's only the jellyfish people who've gotten anything usable. They've organized two dives already. They spend hours waving around tubes of water samples, talking to each other in excited Russian that sounds like arguing.
Brad doesn't get the appeal.
Still, it's hard not to be impressed when it’s the Arctic they’re heading to. There's a real sharpness to the chill now, a sting in the wind like needles that instantly brings goose bumps to any exposed flesh. They pass a small floating island of ice and Brad thinks, End of the world. He wonders if there's some way to fall off after all, some precipice waiting for the mortal intruders who've strayed too far.
He wonders what comes after the edge.
It's not enough to keep him below deck - not the temperature nor the vertigo-inducing landscapes. He piles on sweaters and the parka and stays after the cold has penetrated through layers of down and wool, feels the magnetic draw of the ocean around them.
Brad's daydreaming of hot cocoa when he sees it.
A tail fluke.
He waits and waits for another flash of black, but there's nothing but choppy, icy blue waters. He calls Ray up anyway.
Ray spends a good five minutes starring at the spot Brad indicted without comment. Brad's ready to concede that he's mistaken after all, caught the shadow of some stray sea weed or something, when Ray says, "Fuck, homes, I see them," and runs for Nate.
Everyone comes up to watch. It's the first sign of marine life that matches the other-worldliness of their surroundings. The excitement spreads beyond Brad's little group of whale aficionados. One of the Brazilian environmentalists slaps his back and says, "Bom, Colbert, bom."
Brad only knows him from a couple of Xbox tournaments, hasn't exchanged more than ten words with him total, but he still grins back like an old friend and says, "Sim, sim."
When the ship's closer, it's hard to imagine they could have missed these whales. There's a whole pod here, easily twenty individuals, the silhouettes of their breeches vivid against the horizon.
Everyone crowds around the banisters, pointing and laughing like tourists. Over the noise, Nate tells them, "Look at the jawlines. They're bowheads, gotta be."
Brad's only ever heard of bowheads in passing. They're common enough in Arctic waters, but the alienness of their physiology - the wide curved mouth, the grills of baleen - makes them seem extra exciting.
"This is amazing," Nate says.
"Fuck yeah!" Ray shouts. Next to him, Nate laughs. It's a good sound.
It's one of those ridiculously clear days. Not a cloud in sight. When Nate turns to him, Brad is struck by the brilliant gold of Nate's hair.
Wow, Nate mouths.
Brad nods back and breathes and tries to take in everything around him. Wow, he thinks.
*
Things settle.
Brad finally finds a family of gray whales traveling along the eastern coast of the Bering. He goes through a whole memory stick of pictures before he finds out that Nate's been shooting them for him with his HD video camera. Nate grins back at him and says, "Amateur," as he passes.
They get close enough to tag a few. After so long looking at old reports, Brad's suddenly swamped with incoming data. GPS locations, swim speeds, dive depths. In the days after, he gets more work done than he has in months.
He's still not sleeping properly, but it doesn't bother him as much as before. He stays up late watching satellite blips and for once, is glad that the sun is there to keep him company.
The good cheer is contagious. Walt's still high over seeing the bowheads. Brad catches him giggling with Ray over some of the earlier footage, letting Ray point out penises and boobs in the identifying scars of the bowheads' tails.
Even Nate is more engaged, more there with them. He starts telling jokes at lunches and joining them for movie nights. Brad catches him humming snatches of The Killers, surprisingly in tune. He winks when Brad joins in.
Nate's cabin is three doors down and across the corridor from Brad's. Sometimes, Brad thinks about visiting him when the light is on particularly deep in the night.
Once, as Brad's heading back to his bunk for the day, he sees a man come out. Some guy from the bony fish team whose name Brad never bothered to remember.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything.
The next day, Brad sits down at Nate's table and gets him to teach him about whalebone density. As always, Nate is knowledgeable and happy to help. They talk for two hours straight.
Brad looks down at glacier-clear green eyes, long artist fingers and tries not to want.
*
In mid-July, they finally round the corner of the Bering Straight, coming into the Chukchi Sea. It's proper Arctic Ocean now.
They detour into an inlet of calmer water, a ten-mile wide passage between the arm of a peninsula and the Alaskan coast. The Alexandria trails a foamy white behind her, the only real disturbance of the water in sight.
Against such wildness, such stillness, it's hard not to feel like a trespasser.
The jellyfish people want to do another dive. Unique blooming opportunity, they say. Nate okays it, and they stop.
It's a nice day out, too good to waste. Brad should be drawing up spreadsheets for the new data, but he throws on a pair of dark shades instead and dozes in the sun.
"What's that?"
It's Nate, Mike beside him. Brad shakes himself off and scans the water for anything conspicuous, but Mike nods towards land instead.
They're two miles off the coast; it's hard to make out anything. Brad squints, sees a dark shadow and looks to Nate.
"We'll have to check it out," Nate says. His mouth is curved and unhappy. It could be anything, Brad thinks. It could be nothing.
They take a motorboat to shore. Just a small group: Brad, Nate, Walt, and Mike.
It doesn't take long to figure it out.
Of course, it's a beached whale. When they're closer, Brad sees the mouth: a bowhead. Her size says mature female. He wonders if she's one of the breechers they saw earlier.
Nate docks the boat a good hundred meters away and warns them to approach slowly. It's empty caution though; from the depth that her skin has dried, she must have been out of the water for days now.
"We'll fix this, right?" Walt says. He sounds convinced.
"There's not enough time," Nate tells him. They all know it. Even if they had the capacity to get her back into ocean, she'd die anyway.
"We have to," Walt says and takes off running.
Brad watches him go. It's the first time he has a clear perspective of the dimension of the whale. Next to her, it's Walt who seems unreal, too dwarfed to feel significant. It makes it sadder somehow.
They stop some ten feet away. The whale's giant eye is still open though she is barely moving now. Brad wonders what she sees.
There are footsteps behind them. They turn and see Nate jogging to catch up. Brad wasn’t aware that he wasn’t following.
When he gets closer, they see that he is carrying a rifle, the emergency one that everyone understood wasn't ever really going to be used. For a second, Brad is angry that Nate remembered to bring it at all.
Walt waits until Nate is almost on them and says, "You can't." He sounds final. Brad is glad someone said it out loud.
Nate looks at Walt straight in the eye. "It would be crueler otherwise," he says back. He is not wrong.
Walt shakes his head, turns once to look at the whale, and walks back towards the boat. His long, angry strong strides cover distance as fast as Nate's jog.
Mike shrugs and starts after him.
In Nate's shoes, Brad would do the same. He wants to take Walt's side anyway.
Against the lingering silence, Nate says, "You used to be a Marine right?" He holds the rifle out to Brad. "I saw your tattoo."
Brad's only had his shirt off twice, maybe three times in front of Nate. He had the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor added when he made Recon, a little dab of color on his shoulder. Nothing Nate should have noticed.
Brad looks at the rifle and feels his fingers begin to tense. He stills them into fists. "I've been out for a while now," he says. It's not no.
"Ok," Nate says. He doesn't sound mad. He takes the rifle back, loads it with practiced ease.
Brad thinks about stopping him. If it has to be anyone, it should be him. It's on the tip of his tongue to say so.
He hesitates.
"Look away," Nate says.
Brad doesn't.
Nate's aim is surprisingly good. He holds the stock tight against his shoulder bone like he's supposed to and pulls the trigger, once, twice.
Bang, bang.
She bleeds more than Brad expects.
There's a stretch of silence afterwards, like the world's holding its collective breath. It's just an illusion though. When they're back on the ship again, surrounded by crewmates and questions, the moment is broken, and the crash of waves and the grind of engine motors come rushing in.
It's dizzying. Brad's never been seasick in his life but he pukes for a solid half-hour afterwards.
*
Most days, Brad doesn't like to think about the Corps much.
He goes through long days where he forgets to remember that there was another him, the one who grew up dreaming in Marine camouflage, the one who memorized machine gun parts and alpha bravo charlie instead of names in Latin.
It's better to forget, he thinks.
When he does remember, when he thinks about it, he thinks about leaving - how unforeseeable it was, how cowardly. How absolutely necessary.
It started simply. They were playing a pickup game of basketball on an off day in Afghanistan. Or maybe they were already back in Oceanside then. Some days, he forgets even that.
What he does remember comes back to him in bits: the pebbled skin of the ball against his palm, jumping, the crash of a sharp elbow - he doesn't even know whose - coming down hard on his eye, falling, the rough heat of the pavement against his face.
Blinking up and seeing a red tinted world and just for second, wondering if the hell that he never believed in had come to take him after all.
He's not sure why he played that day. He isn't even any good. He's tall enough and fast enough, but his shots were often a little too hard or a little too wide.
But they all asked him to. They were down a man, Huntington can't play with that leg, come on Brad, use that freakish height for something productive. Ok, ok, he said, I guess someone needs to teach you whiskey tango fucks how to play.
He was in the infirmary for a day before they cleared him for duty. He had a residual headache, a little bit of blurriness in his peripheral vision, nothing serious. Nothing worth mentioning.
Two weeks later, he shot the hell out of a new Private's leg during a routine search and seizure mission. He was at least a meter off.
They said it wasn't really because of the eye, he just needed time to adjust a little, he could stay, he should, they need men like him out there.
He nodded and tried to believe them, but he just didn't feel right with a gun afterwards.
*
There are about ten thousand statutes dealing with the proper handling and disposal of a whale carcass.
Nate seems to know them all by heart. He radios the EPA and IUNC and gets Ruby to call up her friends at the Alaskan Parks and Recreation Department. It's ok, he says. It's taken care of.
They can't stay. There's a careful balance between the amount of fuel they have left and the narrow window of Arctic ice recession. Brad can see the body for a solid ten minutes after they've started sailing away.
The ship settles down to an unnatural hushed quiet. It's probably supposed to be respectful, like the whispered reception after a funeral, but to Brad, it just feels ominous. Like they're waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for it to get worse.
Brad moves to the forward lounge. For once, it's empty. Brad gets a table by the starboard windows and takes out his laptop. He’s supposed to be tracking the GPS signal on his pod - they've moved further ahead than he anticipated - but he keeps flashing back to the smell. The sharp ocean brine of the air. Nothing unusual out here, but it sticks out in his mind even though he's been used to it for weeks now.
After a while, Nate wanders in. He sits at Brad's table without asking. "I know it's hard sometimes," he says, "but I promise you it's worth it. At the end of the day, it's worth it."
They're surrounded by tree-huggers. Brad's not dead inside, but he's not the one Nate needs to talk to.
"You got me wrong," he says. "I don't really care about any of this. I'm not even supposed to be in this field. I just - got stuck."
"Of course you care." Nate says it like a fact, like a regular comment - Oh, the weather is nice outside - instead of a declarative sentence on his life. "You wouldn't be here if you didn't."
Brad doesn't bother pointing out that they've only met each other a month ago, that what Nate knows about the natural world doesn't stretch to include what goes on in Brad's head.
He doesn't tell Nate that he hadn't wanted to come. That after the bitter loss of the Corps, the Arctic had felt like another forbidden adventure.
After a while, Nate adds, "It's not a bad thing you know."
"I'm sorry, you're wrong," Brad says again.
Nate nods. Brad's never known Nate to argue with anyone. He pushes by implication and confidence, no direct attack. It's a hard tactic to plan a defense against. It's something Brad admires him for.
"You'll have tell me your story some time," Nate says, getting up.
Brad looks up at him. He still seems too young to be here. "You'll have to tell me yours," Brad offers.
Nate's mouth freezes into little boy sad though he keeps his smile. Brad wonders if his story ends with heartbreak or death. Or both.
"Rain check?" Nate says.
Brad nods and lets him go.
*
It stays with Brad.
He thinks about Nate's words - "Of course you care" - and wonders if it's that simple. A month ago, a day ago, he would have been sure. He didn't fit in at his department in San Diego, he barely fits in here. He took marine biology, kept with it because it was something to do, because the siren song of the seas beckoned and he was helpless to resist.
It doesn't mean he likes it though.
Or does it? He thinks about the dead whale, the way the image, the sound penetrates, straight to the memory lobe of his brain. He thinks about how he's stayed, how the new data coming in excites him, grabs his attention like the way AO maps once did. How actions more often than not belie any words.
It's not doing him any good to dwell on it. He's been pacing the nine feet of open floor of his room for half an hour now.
He gets out and walks the three doors down to Nate's cabin, straight to the source. He knocks softly in case Nate is asleep, but Nate calls out, "It's open," quickly enough.
Brad opens the door and stops. There's a bottle of scotch uncapped on the dresser. The smell suffocates the room. It's unexpected.
Nate's stretched out on his bunk, his shirt off, sweatpants low on his hips. Miles of clear, pristine skin for Brad see. It strikes him: no scars or tats. Almost everyone Brad knows here has a tattoo. Even Walt has a blue and green Earth on his ankle. Brad wonders if it's another façade.
"Sit," Nate orders. Brad does.
The scotch is more than half empty. There's a residual ring of amber in the tumbler resting on Nate's abdomen. It's swirls with Nate's breaths.
When Nate speaks though, his speech is smooth and purposeful, unslurred. "I used to be in the Corps too," he says.
Brad thinks about the faint pink of sunburn on Nate's cheeks that first day. "I can't really see it," he says back.
Nate laughs. "Oh yeah, made it to Captain."
It's still hard to picture, but maybe it makes sense after all. There's a core of steel to Nate that's common in the Corps. With Nate though, it wouldn't be something that the Marines taught him.
"Why'd you leave?" Brad asks.
"Policy disagreements." Nate's lips tug up into a smirk.
"You mean the lack of assfucking?" Brad says back.
Nate isn't smiling anymore. His eyebrows furrow, revealing groves of wrinkles in his forehead. "More like a war that wasn't going anywhere. Or the needless endangerment of my men. A lot of bad fucking decisions in general." It's a confession. Brad didn't know he was looking for one. Nate pauses, adds, "Oh yeah, and the lack of assfucking."
The way Nate's lips say "fucking" looks filthy. Brad feels it straight to his cock.
Nate seems to sense it. His smirk is back. He sits up, leans over, Eskimo kiss close. Brad gets lost in miles of eyelashes. It's dizzying; Brad wishes he could see the shape of Nate's mouth.
"What about you, Brad?" Nate says. "Is that why you left? Because of the lack of assfucking?"
He's somehow even closer now, close enough that Brad can taste the alcohol on his breath. It would be easy to cover the last bit of distance, to take Nate's mouth, his cock maybe, but it wouldn't be what Brad wants.
This isn't the Nate that Brad wants.
"I don't really do that," Brad says. It isn't exactly a lie. He hasn't since high school.
Nate lets him get away with it. "Too bad," he says, pulling back, lying down again.
It's as an effective dismissal as any. Brad gets up to go.
At the door, Nate calls out, "Stay with me?" His voice is raw. Brad's glad he said no to the sex.
He comes back, kneels so they’re eye level. He takes the tumbler from Nate's loose fingers, pulls up the comforter crumpled at the foot of the bed. Nate lets him.
Brad smiles. "I shouldn't," he says softly. He wants Nate to understand. "You need to rest."
"Ok," Nate says.
Brad watches him for a moment. He gets back up. "Ask me again tomorrow," Brad says.
Nate's eyes are closed. Brad thinks he's heard anyway.
*
Since the first days, Brad's learned the best place to think is outside. Something about the sharpness of the air, the immensity of their environment; it gives him perspective. He likes to stake out a bench near the bow when most everyone else is asleep and feel alone for a while.
This far north, the sun won't quite reach the horizon for months yet. Miles out, it paints the ocean in shimmering strips of gold, brilliant and surreal like a mirage.
There's a slight breeze. It's cool without being cold, more reminiscent of the crisp chill of Oceanside in December than any Arctic nights.
He's getting used to it here, he thinks.
It's 1 am when Brad finally goes back down again. Against the quiet of the rest of the ship, the steady splash of waves against the hull is soothing like a lullaby.
When they leave, he will miss this place.
*
Poll
By: godofwine
Prompt: Out of Bounds - Straying into an area restricted from use by normal traffic, prohibited to Marines, or too far from base for a given liberty period.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: Based on mini-series, not intended to reflect actual people.
Summary: Due north. (marine biology AU)
Author's Note: Thank you so much to hypertwink and oxonensis for the beta!
Paint the ocean blue,
and marigold too.
*
When Brad lands in Anchorage, the weather surprises him by being a fucking balmy 71°. It's not even particularly unseasonably warm, the pilot tells him. Brad shoves his parka further into his carry-on bag and tries to look like less of an idiot.
Brad's actually been across the world before, but almost only in the Southern Hemisphere. Mostly, he's stayed along the 200 miles of Southern California coast. All he knows about Alaska is "big" and "cold".
It's a quiet twenty-minute ride from the airport to the harbor. His cabby doesn't say anything after he takes Brad's bags with a perfunctory "Where to?" Brad likes it better this way anyway. He cranks down the window and watches the city go by, feels the passing breeze tug on the stray hairs of his bangs. Not for the first time, he wishes he kept them short.
At the harbor, the Alexandria's not hard to spot, easily dwarfing a few pleasure yachts nearby. She doesn't get impressive though until Brad's made it almost all the way down the long stretch of jetty, her jagged metal silhouette sharpening into the wires and antennas of a fine piece of technology.
There's a group of people waiting at the bottom of the gangplank. Brad aims for the one with the clipboard and introduces himself.
"Oh right, Colbert, gray whales, gotcha," the guy says. He shifts his clipboard under his armpit and holds out his hand. "I'm Nate by the way."
Brad's been baking underneath his sweater since he got here. His hand is clammy with sweat against Nate's firm, dry palm. If Nate notices, he doesn't say anything.
The other guys are Ray (narwhals), Mike (phytoplankton), some environmentalists, a few stragglers. None of them are much reminiscent of scientists. Ray's got tattoos peeking out of the edges of his t-shirt sleeves, and Mike's got bulging muscles coming out of his.
It's Nate who looks the part, big ears under his floppy hat and an eager grin. Up close, his cheeks already look pink from sunburn.
"Are you interning here?" Brad asks to be polite.
"He's leading this thing," Antonio laughs. Antonio (aka Poke) is a Sociologist who came up studying discrimination in low-density populations and stayed. Brad's not sure what he's looking to find on an Arctic research expedition, but he knows the local waters well.
"Nate's the wiz kid," Poke explains, "tenure track and everything."
Brad had pegged Nate for a fresh grad at best, maybe even still an undergrad with ambition. Nate looks at him and smiles conspiratorially. "I'm older than I look," he whispers.
"More importantly, is that wool?" Ray jumps in.
For a minute there, Brad had forgotten about his sweater. Now, he's acutely aware of it, sticking to the skin his undershirt didn't cover. The tag itches at the base of his neck.
"Should have checked the weather report, son," Mike adds. His accent is softly southern. It makes him come off genteel, fatherly instead of dickish.
Despite the sea salt air, Brad feels far from home. He says, "I'll remember that next time."
*
The Alexandria is big enough to let them all have personal cabins, but not big enough for those cabins to be comfortable.
Brad hasn't been in quarters this cramped for a while now. He's struck with a moment of claustrophobia when his fingertips brush two parallel walls, but he wills it away.
After a few minutes, there's a knock on his door. It's Nate. Without his hat, he looks even younger. Brad wants to ask him his age but doesn't.
"Just wanted to see how you were settling in," Nate says. He doesn't try to come in any further than the doorjamb. His eyes focus on Brad instead of dancing around the rest of the room. "I hope the rocking doesn't bother you too much."
"Nah, I'm used to it," Brad says.
"Oh yeah? Been on a lot of boats?" Nate sounds more friendly than curious. It's been a long day though; Brad's too tired to have this conversation. Too old.
"A bit," Brad says back.
Nate doesn't pry. He smiles and says, "We'll be sailing off soon if you want to come and watch."
Brad doesn't particularly want to, but he follows Nate up anyway. At the stern, the rest of the expedition shout and wave to the strangers that are watching from shore. The foghorn sounds twice.
Brad watches the last vestiges of land slip away. It's a familiar sight, exciting and frightening.
*
Once upon a time, Brad used to be a Marine Corps man. Once, it was all he was supposed to be.
After he left, Brad wasn't so much lost as unmotivated.
When his discharge finally came through, he spent a lot of time surfing and running on the beach and getting sunburned. After a few weeks, his shoulders finally got with the program and started to freckle and tan instead of shedding off strips of days-old skin.
His parents fussed over him and started a lot of conversations with "But what do you want to do?" He told them "I don't know" and waited for the strain of their disappointment. They didn't ask for their guest room back though.
In the end, it was his cousin who brought up the idea of college "because I mean, what are else are you going to do?" She was applying herself that year.
It was strange listening to her offering him life advice. As a teen, Brad used to babysit her after school. He remembered watching her chubby legs floundering in the waddle pool in his aunt and uncle's backyard. It felt like a lifetime ago.
The next day, Brad got an application for UC San Diego because she was right; he had given up the right to ask for boyish adventures and ready heroism. He felt the future closing in on him, grey and unavoidable. He thought, Semper gumby, and wondered when it became so fitting.
It only took him twenty minutes to finish the whole thing. He got a recommendation letter from his old Sergeant Major who he wasn't even sure knew how to spell "university" much less understood why anyone would want to waste their money going. It seemed appropriate. He went to the interview in board shorts with leftover sea salt still clinging to his skin. The interviewer was barely older than him and spent the whole half-hour asking about his favorite places to surf. Brad didn't say "Thailand" though he wanted to.
He found out that he was accepted in January. It was his cousin who saw the letter first, already jumping and screaming before she had even opened it. "It's thick!" she said, and, "That means you got in!" when he didn't respond.
"Oh," he said and wished it were for her instead.
College ended up being mild and predictable. After the Marines, most things were.
Three months in, he started dating a girl from ecology. She was pretty and smart, good family, bright future, the works. She was the kind of girl you didn't get to date if you were in the Corps.
It took six dinners before she invited Brad back up to her place. Afterwards, he spent the whole night in her cramped dorm room bed and woke up with the taste of her perfume on his tongue. Brad hadn't done anything like that since high school. He wasn't sure that he'd actually missed it.
He didn't expect her to change his life.
In December, over an earmarked copy of the Course Catalogue, she said, "Let's take Marine Biology together. I think it would be fun."
Brad tried not to laugh. It was the softest science he could imagine. Brad had been circling around a Comp Sci major for the last semester, but he wasn't entirely committed. He had audited a course in Astrophysics on side, was thinking about taking it on full-time; he thought that would be fun.
She turned back to look at him from her lounge chair across the pool. It was chilly for SoCal's usual temperateness; Brad could just make out the bumps of her nipples against the stretched cotton of her tank top.
"Yeah, let's do it," he told her. It was probably one of the dumbest things he's ever said.
The good news was the class only met for one two-hour session on Tuesday afternoons. The bad news was Brad spotted three separate tie-dyed t-shirts on the first day.
The Professor was willowy and tall, engulfed in strands of beaded jewelry and a silk dress that trailed the floor as she walked. She reminded Brad of a gypsy fortuneteller.
"The ocean," she began and repeated it again, louder, for effect. She sounded like she was starting some sort of epic poetry recitation the way she pulled out the syllables from deep within her lungs.
She lectured with a lot of gestures and no notes. It wasn't rhythmic enough to fall asleep to, but it wasn't exactly conducive to paying attention either.
Brad was doodling Feynman diagrams when the Prof paused and pointed to him. "You. Young man, what do you know about Takifugu rubripes, the tiger pufferfish?"
"It's very delicious," Brad answered.
No one laughed. The Prof smiled at him, strained and patronizing, and moved on. Next to him, his girlfriend squeezed his hand once, hard.
Despite the inauspicious start, he learned more than he expected. The class wasn't boring, not like he thought it would be. He watched slides of deep sea blue and felt an echo of yearning.
He wasn't in love, wasn't even entirely convinced it mattered, but he was listening.
By the end of the semester, only half the class still looked at him like he spent his free time charting out whaling expeditions. He broke up with his girlfriend but made some new friends. They talked a lot about continuing with the sequence, working for the IUCN or getting a University grant when they graduated. They sounded genuine, concerned. Brad was not, but he respected the passion of their words.
Four years later though, he was the only one who made it through the major. He's the only one signing his life away to study freaking fish.
*
After a week, the expedition is already nearing the Bering Sea.
Aside from a few Jet Ski runs along the coast, Brad hasn't been out on the real ocean in years now. He's not been a field work type of guy even though he suspects, instinctively, that he probably would have preferred it to chemical-fake lab rooms and musty student-dense offices.
He spends a lot of time outside above deck when he can. The scenery is gorgeous, all deep blue water and sheer cliffs when they're close to the coast. It looks like they're traveling through a Discovery Channel special.
He gets a mild case of insomnia that slowly worsens. He gets up at midnight and runs laps around the deck in the jacket that he finally needs. He stays and watches the sun hover and hover over the horizon. He likes to see it finally set before he goes down for the night. Just to make sure it actually does.
It's probably fucking up his circadian cycle even more, but it's no use otherwise. Sometimes, he'd lie awake in his cabin thinking about it, feeling phantom rays of sunlight burning through his closed eyelids. It's a mild irritation he can't shake, this constant presence of day, like an itch underneath layers of skin and muscle, at the heart of bone itself.
He's not used to a place so strange. He's not used to this life at all.
*
The expedition organizes itself pretty quickly by specialization. Brad's in marine mammals with Ray and Walt. Walt used to train Beluga whales at Marineland before he figured out what he really wanted to do was study them in the wild. As far as Brad can tell, Ray only picked narwhals because they “look like unicorns man”.
There's an entire group devoted to jellyfish, four men and two women. Between them, they take up a whole corner table. With the way Ray and Walt like to sit uncomfortably close, marine mammals fit on a love seat. It makes Brad a little sad.
Aside from the usual, they've got a good range of interests onboard. Besides Poke, there's Evangeline the photographer and Doc the doctor, MD not veterinary. Not people Brad was expecting.
Ruby Reyes joins them at Anchor Point, the last stop before they hit real wilderness. She's supposed to be a psychologist, help them work out their issues and make sure they don't kill each other when they're 500 miles from civilization, but she seems to moonlight as a survivalist junkie on the side. She tells Brad a lot of stories about camping with grizzly bears and swimming fjords. Most of the guys like Ruby's stories, but it's probably less for the vicarious thrill and more because she's got the cheekbones of a supermodel and the tits of a porn star. Ray probably spends more time looking at her than his research material.
Of everyone, it's Nate that Brad can't exactly figure out. Officially, Nate is working on a government report on the fluctuations in biodiversity due to increased climate change. He could probably do it more easily from his cushy Harvard office, getting data streaming off the internet, instead of drifting out here in the middle of nowhere with the castoffs and the crazies.
Unofficially, Nate is a walking Encyclopedia. He points out passing landmarks, identifies sea birds by their Latin names, hands out advice on everything from saline levels in the Arctic over the last decades to Mike's crazy photosynthesis theories.
Brad doesn't talk to him much. Nate's friendly without encouraging chatter, smiling and listening and never telling much about himself. After the first day, he lets the rest of expedition figure out their social inclinations for themselves.
Brad can appreciate that.
Mostly, Nate sits by himself, commandeering a table in the forward lounge, and reads everything. Reports, academic journals and student papers, Inuit poetry once in paperback. Brad gets in the habit of checking just to see what Nate will come up with next.
Two weeks in, Brad loses his copy of the travel schedule to Ray's propensity for "borrowing". He heads to Nate's cabin for another one.
Nate's door is always unlocked. Facilitates availability, Nate says, though Brad's rarely seen anyone go in. He wonders if Nate's just lonely or if he's really kidding himself.
Brad knocks once and enters without hesitation.
Inside, Walt is on his knees, head bobbing in front of Nate's crotch. It's a motion that's universally unmistakable.
"Sorry," Brad says quickly and shuts the door again. He doesn't know what to think. His mind flashes on Nate's cock, wet and saliva slick, and he has to squeeze his eyes shut. The image doesn't fade though.
An hour later, Walt's running after him in the mess hall. He looks more distressed than embarrassed. It's not something that happens often, he says. He's not that type of guy - he doesn't want Brad to think so. He's just homesick. It doesn't mean anything.
Brad nods along, tries not to interject with anything harsh.
"Please don't say anything to Ray," Walt begs.
Brad's wondered about them. Not conspicuously or purposefully but a low-grade curiosity about whether there's actually anything there. He watches Ray's determined flirtation with anyone female alongside his casual presence in Walt's personal space and wonders which one is the ruse. Or if they are both somehow a mutually enforcing picture of a Lothario-Ray that Brad's never entirely doubted.
"I won't," he tells Walt. He doesn't know them, any of them, well enough; it's none of his business anyway.
Nate doesn't mention it at all.
*
The work actually isn't much different than at the University. Brad's yet to find the migratory gray whales that he's been promised so he's back skimming through known data.
Most of the time, there's not much to see at all besides spotty clumps of refuse and the odd flurry of seabirds here and there. After a while, even they get fewer and fewer.
"That's just the way it is, homes," Ray tells him. "Good things come to those who wait."
Ray's been on two of these expeditions already, and it's only his third dissertation year. He still runs after every would-be blow spray. Brad's not sure how he still has the energy.
As far as Brad knows, it's only the jellyfish people who've gotten anything usable. They've organized two dives already. They spend hours waving around tubes of water samples, talking to each other in excited Russian that sounds like arguing.
Brad doesn't get the appeal.
Still, it's hard not to be impressed when it’s the Arctic they’re heading to. There's a real sharpness to the chill now, a sting in the wind like needles that instantly brings goose bumps to any exposed flesh. They pass a small floating island of ice and Brad thinks, End of the world. He wonders if there's some way to fall off after all, some precipice waiting for the mortal intruders who've strayed too far.
He wonders what comes after the edge.
It's not enough to keep him below deck - not the temperature nor the vertigo-inducing landscapes. He piles on sweaters and the parka and stays after the cold has penetrated through layers of down and wool, feels the magnetic draw of the ocean around them.
Brad's daydreaming of hot cocoa when he sees it.
A tail fluke.
He waits and waits for another flash of black, but there's nothing but choppy, icy blue waters. He calls Ray up anyway.
Ray spends a good five minutes starring at the spot Brad indicted without comment. Brad's ready to concede that he's mistaken after all, caught the shadow of some stray sea weed or something, when Ray says, "Fuck, homes, I see them," and runs for Nate.
Everyone comes up to watch. It's the first sign of marine life that matches the other-worldliness of their surroundings. The excitement spreads beyond Brad's little group of whale aficionados. One of the Brazilian environmentalists slaps his back and says, "Bom, Colbert, bom."
Brad only knows him from a couple of Xbox tournaments, hasn't exchanged more than ten words with him total, but he still grins back like an old friend and says, "Sim, sim."
When the ship's closer, it's hard to imagine they could have missed these whales. There's a whole pod here, easily twenty individuals, the silhouettes of their breeches vivid against the horizon.
Everyone crowds around the banisters, pointing and laughing like tourists. Over the noise, Nate tells them, "Look at the jawlines. They're bowheads, gotta be."
Brad's only ever heard of bowheads in passing. They're common enough in Arctic waters, but the alienness of their physiology - the wide curved mouth, the grills of baleen - makes them seem extra exciting.
"This is amazing," Nate says.
"Fuck yeah!" Ray shouts. Next to him, Nate laughs. It's a good sound.
It's one of those ridiculously clear days. Not a cloud in sight. When Nate turns to him, Brad is struck by the brilliant gold of Nate's hair.
Wow, Nate mouths.
Brad nods back and breathes and tries to take in everything around him. Wow, he thinks.
*
Things settle.
Brad finally finds a family of gray whales traveling along the eastern coast of the Bering. He goes through a whole memory stick of pictures before he finds out that Nate's been shooting them for him with his HD video camera. Nate grins back at him and says, "Amateur," as he passes.
They get close enough to tag a few. After so long looking at old reports, Brad's suddenly swamped with incoming data. GPS locations, swim speeds, dive depths. In the days after, he gets more work done than he has in months.
He's still not sleeping properly, but it doesn't bother him as much as before. He stays up late watching satellite blips and for once, is glad that the sun is there to keep him company.
The good cheer is contagious. Walt's still high over seeing the bowheads. Brad catches him giggling with Ray over some of the earlier footage, letting Ray point out penises and boobs in the identifying scars of the bowheads' tails.
Even Nate is more engaged, more there with them. He starts telling jokes at lunches and joining them for movie nights. Brad catches him humming snatches of The Killers, surprisingly in tune. He winks when Brad joins in.
Nate's cabin is three doors down and across the corridor from Brad's. Sometimes, Brad thinks about visiting him when the light is on particularly deep in the night.
Once, as Brad's heading back to his bunk for the day, he sees a man come out. Some guy from the bony fish team whose name Brad never bothered to remember.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything.
The next day, Brad sits down at Nate's table and gets him to teach him about whalebone density. As always, Nate is knowledgeable and happy to help. They talk for two hours straight.
Brad looks down at glacier-clear green eyes, long artist fingers and tries not to want.
*
In mid-July, they finally round the corner of the Bering Straight, coming into the Chukchi Sea. It's proper Arctic Ocean now.
They detour into an inlet of calmer water, a ten-mile wide passage between the arm of a peninsula and the Alaskan coast. The Alexandria trails a foamy white behind her, the only real disturbance of the water in sight.
Against such wildness, such stillness, it's hard not to feel like a trespasser.
The jellyfish people want to do another dive. Unique blooming opportunity, they say. Nate okays it, and they stop.
It's a nice day out, too good to waste. Brad should be drawing up spreadsheets for the new data, but he throws on a pair of dark shades instead and dozes in the sun.
"What's that?"
It's Nate, Mike beside him. Brad shakes himself off and scans the water for anything conspicuous, but Mike nods towards land instead.
They're two miles off the coast; it's hard to make out anything. Brad squints, sees a dark shadow and looks to Nate.
"We'll have to check it out," Nate says. His mouth is curved and unhappy. It could be anything, Brad thinks. It could be nothing.
They take a motorboat to shore. Just a small group: Brad, Nate, Walt, and Mike.
It doesn't take long to figure it out.
Of course, it's a beached whale. When they're closer, Brad sees the mouth: a bowhead. Her size says mature female. He wonders if she's one of the breechers they saw earlier.
Nate docks the boat a good hundred meters away and warns them to approach slowly. It's empty caution though; from the depth that her skin has dried, she must have been out of the water for days now.
"We'll fix this, right?" Walt says. He sounds convinced.
"There's not enough time," Nate tells him. They all know it. Even if they had the capacity to get her back into ocean, she'd die anyway.
"We have to," Walt says and takes off running.
Brad watches him go. It's the first time he has a clear perspective of the dimension of the whale. Next to her, it's Walt who seems unreal, too dwarfed to feel significant. It makes it sadder somehow.
They stop some ten feet away. The whale's giant eye is still open though she is barely moving now. Brad wonders what she sees.
There are footsteps behind them. They turn and see Nate jogging to catch up. Brad wasn’t aware that he wasn’t following.
When he gets closer, they see that he is carrying a rifle, the emergency one that everyone understood wasn't ever really going to be used. For a second, Brad is angry that Nate remembered to bring it at all.
Walt waits until Nate is almost on them and says, "You can't." He sounds final. Brad is glad someone said it out loud.
Nate looks at Walt straight in the eye. "It would be crueler otherwise," he says back. He is not wrong.
Walt shakes his head, turns once to look at the whale, and walks back towards the boat. His long, angry strong strides cover distance as fast as Nate's jog.
Mike shrugs and starts after him.
In Nate's shoes, Brad would do the same. He wants to take Walt's side anyway.
Against the lingering silence, Nate says, "You used to be a Marine right?" He holds the rifle out to Brad. "I saw your tattoo."
Brad's only had his shirt off twice, maybe three times in front of Nate. He had the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor added when he made Recon, a little dab of color on his shoulder. Nothing Nate should have noticed.
Brad looks at the rifle and feels his fingers begin to tense. He stills them into fists. "I've been out for a while now," he says. It's not no.
"Ok," Nate says. He doesn't sound mad. He takes the rifle back, loads it with practiced ease.
Brad thinks about stopping him. If it has to be anyone, it should be him. It's on the tip of his tongue to say so.
He hesitates.
"Look away," Nate says.
Brad doesn't.
Nate's aim is surprisingly good. He holds the stock tight against his shoulder bone like he's supposed to and pulls the trigger, once, twice.
Bang, bang.
She bleeds more than Brad expects.
There's a stretch of silence afterwards, like the world's holding its collective breath. It's just an illusion though. When they're back on the ship again, surrounded by crewmates and questions, the moment is broken, and the crash of waves and the grind of engine motors come rushing in.
It's dizzying. Brad's never been seasick in his life but he pukes for a solid half-hour afterwards.
*
Most days, Brad doesn't like to think about the Corps much.
He goes through long days where he forgets to remember that there was another him, the one who grew up dreaming in Marine camouflage, the one who memorized machine gun parts and alpha bravo charlie instead of names in Latin.
It's better to forget, he thinks.
When he does remember, when he thinks about it, he thinks about leaving - how unforeseeable it was, how cowardly. How absolutely necessary.
It started simply. They were playing a pickup game of basketball on an off day in Afghanistan. Or maybe they were already back in Oceanside then. Some days, he forgets even that.
What he does remember comes back to him in bits: the pebbled skin of the ball against his palm, jumping, the crash of a sharp elbow - he doesn't even know whose - coming down hard on his eye, falling, the rough heat of the pavement against his face.
Blinking up and seeing a red tinted world and just for second, wondering if the hell that he never believed in had come to take him after all.
He's not sure why he played that day. He isn't even any good. He's tall enough and fast enough, but his shots were often a little too hard or a little too wide.
But they all asked him to. They were down a man, Huntington can't play with that leg, come on Brad, use that freakish height for something productive. Ok, ok, he said, I guess someone needs to teach you whiskey tango fucks how to play.
He was in the infirmary for a day before they cleared him for duty. He had a residual headache, a little bit of blurriness in his peripheral vision, nothing serious. Nothing worth mentioning.
Two weeks later, he shot the hell out of a new Private's leg during a routine search and seizure mission. He was at least a meter off.
They said it wasn't really because of the eye, he just needed time to adjust a little, he could stay, he should, they need men like him out there.
He nodded and tried to believe them, but he just didn't feel right with a gun afterwards.
*
There are about ten thousand statutes dealing with the proper handling and disposal of a whale carcass.
Nate seems to know them all by heart. He radios the EPA and IUNC and gets Ruby to call up her friends at the Alaskan Parks and Recreation Department. It's ok, he says. It's taken care of.
They can't stay. There's a careful balance between the amount of fuel they have left and the narrow window of Arctic ice recession. Brad can see the body for a solid ten minutes after they've started sailing away.
The ship settles down to an unnatural hushed quiet. It's probably supposed to be respectful, like the whispered reception after a funeral, but to Brad, it just feels ominous. Like they're waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for it to get worse.
Brad moves to the forward lounge. For once, it's empty. Brad gets a table by the starboard windows and takes out his laptop. He’s supposed to be tracking the GPS signal on his pod - they've moved further ahead than he anticipated - but he keeps flashing back to the smell. The sharp ocean brine of the air. Nothing unusual out here, but it sticks out in his mind even though he's been used to it for weeks now.
After a while, Nate wanders in. He sits at Brad's table without asking. "I know it's hard sometimes," he says, "but I promise you it's worth it. At the end of the day, it's worth it."
They're surrounded by tree-huggers. Brad's not dead inside, but he's not the one Nate needs to talk to.
"You got me wrong," he says. "I don't really care about any of this. I'm not even supposed to be in this field. I just - got stuck."
"Of course you care." Nate says it like a fact, like a regular comment - Oh, the weather is nice outside - instead of a declarative sentence on his life. "You wouldn't be here if you didn't."
Brad doesn't bother pointing out that they've only met each other a month ago, that what Nate knows about the natural world doesn't stretch to include what goes on in Brad's head.
He doesn't tell Nate that he hadn't wanted to come. That after the bitter loss of the Corps, the Arctic had felt like another forbidden adventure.
After a while, Nate adds, "It's not a bad thing you know."
"I'm sorry, you're wrong," Brad says again.
Nate nods. Brad's never known Nate to argue with anyone. He pushes by implication and confidence, no direct attack. It's a hard tactic to plan a defense against. It's something Brad admires him for.
"You'll have tell me your story some time," Nate says, getting up.
Brad looks up at him. He still seems too young to be here. "You'll have to tell me yours," Brad offers.
Nate's mouth freezes into little boy sad though he keeps his smile. Brad wonders if his story ends with heartbreak or death. Or both.
"Rain check?" Nate says.
Brad nods and lets him go.
*
It stays with Brad.
He thinks about Nate's words - "Of course you care" - and wonders if it's that simple. A month ago, a day ago, he would have been sure. He didn't fit in at his department in San Diego, he barely fits in here. He took marine biology, kept with it because it was something to do, because the siren song of the seas beckoned and he was helpless to resist.
It doesn't mean he likes it though.
Or does it? He thinks about the dead whale, the way the image, the sound penetrates, straight to the memory lobe of his brain. He thinks about how he's stayed, how the new data coming in excites him, grabs his attention like the way AO maps once did. How actions more often than not belie any words.
It's not doing him any good to dwell on it. He's been pacing the nine feet of open floor of his room for half an hour now.
He gets out and walks the three doors down to Nate's cabin, straight to the source. He knocks softly in case Nate is asleep, but Nate calls out, "It's open," quickly enough.
Brad opens the door and stops. There's a bottle of scotch uncapped on the dresser. The smell suffocates the room. It's unexpected.
Nate's stretched out on his bunk, his shirt off, sweatpants low on his hips. Miles of clear, pristine skin for Brad see. It strikes him: no scars or tats. Almost everyone Brad knows here has a tattoo. Even Walt has a blue and green Earth on his ankle. Brad wonders if it's another façade.
"Sit," Nate orders. Brad does.
The scotch is more than half empty. There's a residual ring of amber in the tumbler resting on Nate's abdomen. It's swirls with Nate's breaths.
When Nate speaks though, his speech is smooth and purposeful, unslurred. "I used to be in the Corps too," he says.
Brad thinks about the faint pink of sunburn on Nate's cheeks that first day. "I can't really see it," he says back.
Nate laughs. "Oh yeah, made it to Captain."
It's still hard to picture, but maybe it makes sense after all. There's a core of steel to Nate that's common in the Corps. With Nate though, it wouldn't be something that the Marines taught him.
"Why'd you leave?" Brad asks.
"Policy disagreements." Nate's lips tug up into a smirk.
"You mean the lack of assfucking?" Brad says back.
Nate isn't smiling anymore. His eyebrows furrow, revealing groves of wrinkles in his forehead. "More like a war that wasn't going anywhere. Or the needless endangerment of my men. A lot of bad fucking decisions in general." It's a confession. Brad didn't know he was looking for one. Nate pauses, adds, "Oh yeah, and the lack of assfucking."
The way Nate's lips say "fucking" looks filthy. Brad feels it straight to his cock.
Nate seems to sense it. His smirk is back. He sits up, leans over, Eskimo kiss close. Brad gets lost in miles of eyelashes. It's dizzying; Brad wishes he could see the shape of Nate's mouth.
"What about you, Brad?" Nate says. "Is that why you left? Because of the lack of assfucking?"
He's somehow even closer now, close enough that Brad can taste the alcohol on his breath. It would be easy to cover the last bit of distance, to take Nate's mouth, his cock maybe, but it wouldn't be what Brad wants.
This isn't the Nate that Brad wants.
"I don't really do that," Brad says. It isn't exactly a lie. He hasn't since high school.
Nate lets him get away with it. "Too bad," he says, pulling back, lying down again.
It's as an effective dismissal as any. Brad gets up to go.
At the door, Nate calls out, "Stay with me?" His voice is raw. Brad's glad he said no to the sex.
He comes back, kneels so they’re eye level. He takes the tumbler from Nate's loose fingers, pulls up the comforter crumpled at the foot of the bed. Nate lets him.
Brad smiles. "I shouldn't," he says softly. He wants Nate to understand. "You need to rest."
"Ok," Nate says.
Brad watches him for a moment. He gets back up. "Ask me again tomorrow," Brad says.
Nate's eyes are closed. Brad thinks he's heard anyway.
*
Since the first days, Brad's learned the best place to think is outside. Something about the sharpness of the air, the immensity of their environment; it gives him perspective. He likes to stake out a bench near the bow when most everyone else is asleep and feel alone for a while.
This far north, the sun won't quite reach the horizon for months yet. Miles out, it paints the ocean in shimmering strips of gold, brilliant and surreal like a mirage.
There's a slight breeze. It's cool without being cold, more reminiscent of the crisp chill of Oceanside in December than any Arctic nights.
He's getting used to it here, he thinks.
It's 1 am when Brad finally goes back down again. Against the quiet of the rest of the ship, the steady splash of waves against the hull is soothing like a lullaby.
When they leave, he will miss this place.
*
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