Alright! You also asked for some hurt/comfort…so…in my efforts to try to do both of these things I erred on the side of not doing either much. So…sorry about that. Hopefully, you enjoy anyway! ❤
“This is not good,” Nate mumbled again, chewing the end of his pen, and Mike paused the DVR.
“What’s going on?”
“Hm?” Nate glanced up and blinked at Mike and the screen as if he was startled to find them in the room. “Oh, nothing. Go ahead, you can keep watching.”
“It’s nothing interesting anyway. What’s not good? Also, why the hell are you so far away?”
Despite his apparent distress, Nate managed a grin, and unfolded himself from his position in Mike’s favorite big comfy armchair. He stretched as he stood, cracking something in his back, and his dark blue Berkeley t-shirt rode up on his stomach. He was wearing pajama pants that hung low on his hips, and two days ago that probably would have been enough to interrupt their conversation entirely. But they had had plenty of time to reacquaint themselves since then, and Mike was able to not ravish Nate when he sat down again, this time on the couch, and curled up against Mike’s shoulder. He was clutching a sheaf of paper, and he smacked the front sheet for emphasis.
“I’ve got fifty-two quizzes and fifty-two essays to grade, I’m only two-thirds of the way through the quizzes and I’ve had to give ten grades under 70. And some of these are such stupid mistakes! Like mixing up countries–I don’t expect you to be mixing up any countries by Thanksgiving break, honestly, but I’ll grudgingly allow it for something like Yemen and Oman, or Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. But Turkey and Saudi Arabia? No!”
Mike Wynn tried not to judge all the behaviors of other people, but it did make him awfully curious about what kind of man got shitfaced and then started to recite The Aeneid from memory. In Latin. In all his years as a bartender, he had to admit this one was a first.
“Just don’t throw yourself on an pyres,” Mike said as he pushed a glass of water at the man before him.
“Oh, we won’t let Nate here get hurt,” Poke said.
“That kid is legal right?” Mike asked.
Poke nodded as Nate sighed. “I’m thirty. No one believes me. Nooooo one knows the trouble I’ve seen,” he started to sing.
Mike tried not to laugh. He didn’t succeed one bit. “I think it’s water on the rocks for you the rest of the night.”
“Do you know why it’s ‘on the rocks’?” Nate asked. “Pretty sure it has something to do with the glass. I think.”
Mike nodded. “I think so too.” He wave at Poke. “Go back to your party. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“Thanks, Mike,” Poke said.
Nate was running a finger through the condensation on his glass. “Water’s funny,” he said.
Mike, in all his years, had never been so charmed by a drunk with such a dramatic pout. It made him want to know what the kid was like sober.
“Did you know salt used to be more valuable than gold?” Nate asked.
“You always a walking Wikipedia?” Mike asked.
Nate ducked his head. “Oh, sorry.”
“No,” Mike said, leaning against the bar. “I like it. Keep going.”
For @msridcully : this was the level of ‘just getting each other’ that Nate and Wynn were at.
The platoon’s eldest member, thirty-five-year-old Gunnery Sergeant Mike “Gunny” Wynn, walks among the Marines, grabbing their heads and shaking them like you would with a puppy. “All right!” he repeats in his mild Texas accent. “You made it, man!”
lookashiny 