templemarker

Just before they go inside, Brad glances at Nate sidelong. Nate is resolute, unafraid, but Brad knows that look. He made his home in that look.

The day Walt agreed to let Ray move into his house, Ray went and got his ass tattooed with “Property of Walt Hasser.”

“C’mon,” he said. “I need to keep warm or something, and you’re the warmest thing I’ve got.”

Nate had never particularly sought happiness; he had always believed his destiny lay more in the realm of duty, in service, in something greater than himself. But he had found it nonetheless, here with Brad, here in the life they had built together. )

Bryan sat at the bar, nursing Maker’s and surveying the room.

The first day Brad walked into Langley, he took a deep breath of recycled air and spent twenty minutes trying to find the bathroom.

Brad didn’t shift, didn’t move, and Nate smiled; maybe there was some kind of Nate-shaped hole in Brad’s defense system, something that let Nate enter when all others were barred.

They figured out the car wasn’t going to make it about a hundred miles out of Sacramento.

Hasser bit his lip. “No, not that boy. Okay, don’t freak out, but Nate’s over by the tower. He’s talking to Mike.”

Ray is not stupid. He’s actually really fucking smart. And he knows things – especially things about Brad. Shit that Brad doesn’t even seem to know about himself. Like the fact that Brad’s so fucking in love with the LT it’s made him retarded. And possibly blind.


Nate and Brad arrive in Australia on a prison ship from England.

At some point during the paddle party, Rudy announces that they should all go down to the beach and watch the sun rise over the ocean. It’s a hundred percent the gayest thing he’s ever said.

The thing was, Nate broke his leg hiking.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Nate called from his study. “I got some of those stuffed pork chops you like on my way home from that meeting. I thought we could grill them tonight, before it gets too cold.”

“It’s never too cold to grill,” Brad said, rolling his eyes. “And I’m going to temple, Nate,” he said, pulling on his shoes. “I told you that this morning.”

Ray’s been out for three months when the first postcard arrives.

Twenty years in the service, twenty-four embracing military life, and that devotion had only ever been tested once.

“Your game doesn’t make any fucking sense, you retards,” Person shouts.

Nate was on the phone with Mike Wynn at least once a week, sometimes twice if he needed to be. Mike’s wife Alice was used to laughing when Nate called, passing over the phone to Mike and saying they talked more than the Wynns’ teenaged daughter did on the phone. It wasn’t their fault–Nate was in DC, and Mike was happily entrenched in Texas, and they had shit to talk about.

“I fucking hate spies,” Brad said drily as Michael Westen walked into the bar.

“I don’t know, I think it would be kind of uncomfortable to ride. With your legs all tucked up like that? I don’t think it would be an hour before I’d need to take a walk.”