I've Got My Love (To Keep Me Warm)

“Ranger Lambert,” Jake says.

Nate looks up from his meal tray to see Jake lurking over his shoulder, grinning that huge shit-eating grin he’s so fond of. “Ranger Pentecost,” Nate responds, matching Jake’s snide, smug tone.

Jake laughs at that, because Jake does his best to pretend that life is nothing but a joke. He sets his tray down on the long table, plops his ass down next to Nate. He stabs his food with his fork, shoves it into his mouth and barely even chews any of it.

“So,” Nate says. He’s still not quite sure how to talk to Jake these days. Their partnership had been rocky even when they were at their best, because for all their Drift compatibility, Jake liked to be a combative, contrary bastard just for the hell of it.

Jake snorts. “So what?” he asks, mimicking Nate’s voice. “You got a rest of sentence to go with that?” Case in point.

Nate sighs. “You ready for the trip to Anchorage today?” There’s been talk of reclaiming the space and turning it into a research facility, and Nate and Jake have been put on the initial recon team in order to scope out and test some of the leftover Drift tech. Even with everything else going on, they’re still the oldest and most experienced Drift-compatible team still working for the PPDC.

“Me? I was born ready,” Jake says. He waggles his eyebrows in Nate’s direction, and despite himself, Nate laughs.

Jake grins, smug. It’s a little too much like their cadet days, when Nate was always afraid that someone else would realize he was a fuckup who didn’t belong here, and Jake was basically the prince of the PPDC, the son of the legendary Stacker Pentecost, who could do whatever he wanted. Even now, when Jake has a rap sheet and Nate’s running the training program, and they’re both in their thirties, it seems like there are some behavior patterns they just can’t shake.

Something of what Nate’s feeling must show on his face, because Jake gives him a nudge to the ribs. “It’ll be fun. Like old times.”

Nate doesn’t mention that ‘old times’ frequently involved more running from the cops, puke, and crying J-techs than Nate was ever strictly comfortable with. “Sure,” he says instead. “Just as long as you don’t pull any of your usual shit.” Nate doesn’t love being the responsible one all the time, but at least it’s a familiar role for him. He knows all the lines in this script.

“‘Course not,” Jake says. “Wouldn’t want to get you into trouble, would I?” His smile gets a little wider, a little sweeter, and it’s a terrible reminder that even though a goddamn decade has passed, Nate is still in love with him.

---

Nate was nineteen the first time he realized he was always going to be a little bit in love with Jake Pentecost. They’d been drunk at the time, because that was the way of the things when you’re nineteen and a Ranger and stuck in a barracks with only a handful of other Rangers around for entertainment.

Jake was laughing at something stupid, one of his own stupid jokes maybe, and it was something about his face, the curl of his lip, the scrunch at the edges of his eyes. All Nate could think about was how badly he wanted to kiss the underside of Jake’s jaw. If Nate were a romantic or some shit, he would probably describe it as a bolt of lightning, a sudden flash of insight that knocked him over the head and kicked him in the balls for good measure. But in reality, it was more of a looming dread, a creeping awareness that twisted his stomach up into knots and made him want to vomit from something other than just the alcohol sloshing its way through his system.

It had been a rational reaction at the time, even considering that Nate was three sheets to the wind and not capable of pronouncing the word “responsible” or walking in a straight line. Because Jake was a great guy, a great Drift partner, a killer fighter, but he was also a flaming asshole with a laundry list of daddy issues who balked at the tiniest hint of soft, fuzzy feelings. Perhaps the worst part about this realization was that Nate knew all of these things about Jake, knew them in a deep, intimate way that you could only get by Drifting with someone, and Nate still had fucking fallen in love with him anyway. Like the worst possible fucking cliche.

It sucked hairy monkey balls, but Nate was, if nothing else, a soldier. The next day, he woke up to the angry chiming of his alarm, grimaced his way through an awful hangover, and didn’t say a word of any of it to Jake.

And because he was, in fact, a great guy despite the rest of it, Jake didn’t say a word about it either, even after they spent a session together in the Drift.

---

The thing that Nate notices first about the Anchorage shatterdome is how huge it is, cavernous and cold. All shatterdomes are huge, but they’re also usually filled up with people and activity, the sound of it permeating up the enormous space. Here, even with the sounds of chatter and footsteps and equipment from their little team, it feels empty and echoing.

He glances over at Jake, who is unusually quiet. His dad served here, Nate remembers.

Jake doesn’t talk about him much, or what it was like to grow up with all of that in the ambient radiation of his childhood, but it’s obvious how it’s left its own mark on him. He’s still here, still serving with the PPDC, after all. And Nate has bits and pieces of it, fleeting feelings and sensations from their times Drifting together, but that’s not-- that’s not the same thing at all.

“You doing okay there, brother?” Nate asks. He thinks about putting his hand on Jake’s shoulder, about leaning in to say something so that none of the rest of the recon team could overhear, but he still doesn’t have the words. He was never the clever one, the one capable of talking them out of scrapes, of making all the other cadets laugh, of chatting up the local girls and boys when they had a night on the town. That has always been Jake’s job. Nate’s job is to drag the both of them back from the brink whenever Jake gets too close to it, to be the steady, dependable one.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Jake says, flashing Nate a smile that is 100% bullshit.

“Hey,” Nate says, and he can’t quite keep the frown off his face. “Just don’t-- don’t ditch me, okay?” That was what started happening at the end, when Nate decided to stop enabling the worst of Jake’s impulses. Of course, that didn’t mean Jake didn’t follow any of his impulses anymore. It just meant that Jake followed all of his worst impulses without Nate there to keep any of them in check.

Jake holds Nate’s gaze for a moment. His expression sobers. “All right,” he says. It still feels like a gift, every time Jake gives Nate a peek behind the mask he likes to wear. Yeah, he gets to see all of Jake when they Drift, but that’s an uncomfortable sort of forced intimacy, and Jake likes to pretend that nothing that happens inside the Drift matters outside of it. This is a different sort of trust.

They follow the rest of the team a bit as they poke around the wreckage. A good deal of the equipment has already been stripped away, taken to the other shatterdomes when this one was decommissioned or picked clean by scavengers. A few drivesuit pods are mostly intact, which the techs nod and hmm to themselves about, but there isn’t much in the way left of the original Drift tech, leaving Jake and Nate much to their own devices.

Jake’s already restless mood seems to worsen when the techs find a formerly locked storage room, filled with spare and discarded equipment. The two of them are shuffled to the side, while the rest of the team hunch over their screens, every so often tapping out a few things on their pads. Jake tries to poke around some of the scrap himself, but the techs are not pleased with that and he’s shooed away. That leaves him cold-faced and sour, his lips pulled into a displeased line. Through all of this, Nate stands back, unwilling to step in. Maybe he shouldn’t be so attuned to every one of Jake’s emotions, shouldn’t be so constantly aware of Jake’s shifting moods, but one of the saddest truths of Nate’s life is that he’s always watching Jake, always tracking Jake out of the corner of his eye, whether he wants to or not.

---

Nate doesn’t remember how he met Jake. His first days in the Ranger Academy were a blur of introductions, paperwork, rules, hallways. Jake was just another name, another face in a sea of names and faces that Nate was struggling to remember.

What Nate does remember is when Jake grabbed his arm when they were pairing up for their first Drift drills, those early exercises to understand compatibility between the current crop of cadets. “This one’s with me,” Jake said to their instructor, eyebrows raised in a clear challenge. He was a gangly kid back then, not quite grown into the stockiness of his frame, all arms and legs.

Their instructor had smirked back, her expression far too knowing. “You alright with that, Cadet Lambert?”

Nate wasn’t much of a talker back then (not that he’s much better now), so he just stuttered out a vague affirmative. Jake flashed him a grin, smug about getting his way. There had been a few whispered rumors about him that had reached even Nate’s ears at that point. Marshall Pentecost had never been a flashy Jaeger pilot, one who went on late-night talk shows or gave public interviews, but of course the PPDC had its own version of celebrity, and Nate was becoming increasingly familiar with it.

“You’re the only one who isn’t a complete wanker,” Jake said by way of explanation to Nate. There was still a stubborn tilt to his jaw, as if he was daring Nate to contradict that statement.

Nate had barely scraped his way into the Academy in the first place. His test scores were mediocre, and he didn’t have the engineering background that the PPDC liked to see, but he did do ROTC for a few years before he was finally accepted. He was lucky his COs were willing to write him recommendations glowing enough to squeak him over the line. And now that he was here, he felt awkward and out of place, not good enough at the tech speak to talk to the nerds, too experienced compared to the gifted kids who had skipped years of school and were still getting used to the rhythms and patterns of military life after a life dedicated to maximizing their grades.

He still doesn’t know why Jake decided to pick him out of all their classmates -- Jake’s memories of the moment are all just saturated with a conviction that Nate was going to be his co-pilot -- but at the time, Nate was so startled that all he felt was a bit confused and off-balance and didn’t register what any of it meant.

At least, not until he was strapped into a drive helmet, staring into the dark intensity of Jake’s gaze, and he got his very first taste of the Drift.

---

As expected, Jake gets restless enough to want to go exploring. He nudges Nate’s shoulder. “Come on,” he says with a tilt of his head. “There’s something I want to see.”

Nate sighs. He has a chat with Jenkins, the leader of their expedition, to let her know that they’re going to be exploring other parts of the shatterdome while the techs are busy in the storage room. Jake just lingers at the door, impatient and annoyed.

“Chill out,” Nate says to him after he’s done talking with Jenkins.

Jake rolls his eyes, but his lips also quirk upwards, and he doesn’t object when Nate leads him out into the hallway.

It’s obvious that Jake has been here before, in this shatterdome. He knows his way through these hallways, up and down these stairs. Nate follows him, losing track of their location a few hallways in. He knows the Moyulan Shatterdome like the back of his own hand at this point, every shortcut through the back staircases no one uses, every hiding place the cadets use to smoke that Nate pretends not to know about, every hatch that leads onto the roof and which ones aren’t alarmed to go off when opened. That’s what a decade in the same place will do for you.

Even with Nate’s unfamiliarity, he recognizes the family living quarters as soon as he gets there. It’s not near the main hub of the shatterdome. The arrangements are larger, more spacious than the sort of officer’s quarters that Nate is used to. Designed to fit a spouse, maybe a few kids over the years of service. From the hallway, it just looks like rows and rows of doors, like any standard apartment complex in a big city. But it has a rough, unfinished quality to it, like they didn’t bother to paint the walls, and all the doors are of a heavy, industrial cast.

Jake stops outside one of the doors. He frowns as he reaches out, presses his hand against the metal of the latch, and takes a deep breath. “This was ours,” he says to Nate.

Nate blinks, and the entire space reorients itself, a memory of chasing a few of the other kids down this very hallway, the echoing screech as someone further down runs further away, ducking into another doorway. The heaviness in his breath from the running, the way the walls seem taller, the space bigger.

He blinks again, and he’s back in the present, watching the back of Jake’s head as Jake flips open the latch and pushes the door open. The memories are easier to manage, now that Nate’s prepared for them. Mako (Secretary-General Mori) features in them heavily, hunched over her tablet studying or frowning at the stove as she tried to reproduce her mother’s cooking.

“Smaller than I remember it,” Jake says. Some of the blandly industrial furniture was left behind; blocky, boxy things that remind Nate of the furniture in his own quarters back in Moyulan. But other than that, the space is just musty and bare. The painting of a boat floating in a wide ocean that hung in the kitchen is gone, as is the ugly end table that held their makeshift spice rack. Nate’s gotten used to the oddness of having memories that are his own and yet not his own, but it’s still weird to have something that only used to exist in that part of his brain cordoned off for Jake become tangible and real, something that exists in front of him right here and right now.

“It’s always like that,” Nate says. He went back to Iowa nine years ago to go help pack up his grandmother’s house after she passed away, and it had felt hollow and alien and strange compared to the warm, homey refuge he’d visited for every Thanksgiving and Christmas until he left for the PPDC.

Jake nods. His expression turns inward. It’s only because of Nate’s experience and his expertise in reading Jake that he can see the moment something shifts. An acceptance, maybe. Of what, thought? Of Nate’s statement? Of his own past? These moments are always the most difficult, the ones in between Drifts, when words aren’t quite enough to get across everything they mean.

“Let’s head back,” Nate suggests. They’ve been away for long enough that the rest of the team may have moved on from the science closet.

Jake shrugs. “Yeah, all right.” He shoots Nate a tiny smile, and the expression on his face almost seems like gratitude.

They’re making their way out of the Pentecosts’ former quarters when the room begins to rattle, shaking. Nate stumbles, only managing to find his balance as the heavy metal door slams shut, followed by an ominous click. The emergency lights flicker and shut off.

His comm bursts to life. “Ranger Lambert,” Jenkins yells, her voice staticky, “are you there?”

“Yeah,” Nate says. “Ranger Lambert and Ranger Pentecost here, checking in.”

He can hear Jenkins’ heavy sigh of relief from over the comms. “Good. We got hit by an earthquake, and unfortunately, since this place hasn’t been maintained at all, and I think the main generator got knocked out, but not before some of the anti-Kaiju protection measures were activated. I think we’re locked in until a rescue team can get to us tomorrow.”

Nate takes a deep breath. “We’re in the officers’ quarters,” he says. He fumbles in the dark for the door, then for the latch to the door. He tries to move it, but to his lack of surprise, it doesn’t budge. “We’ve been locked in, too.”

“Okay,” Jenkins says. Her sigh is much less relieved this time. “You’re just going to have to sit tight there until tomorrow. There’s nothing we can do from here.”

“Roger that,” Nate says

Jake has flicked on a flashlight, a single beam of light in the darkness. “Sounds like we better settle in for the night.”

They settle in. The air is chilled, stale from years of disuse and cooled the Alaskan winter outside. It’s not as noticeable when they’re moving around and have other tasks to distract them, but now that they’re stationary and stuck, it’s hard for Nate to ignore it. He’s too used to the heat and humidity of Hong Kong, that sweltering, sticky breeze coming off the South China Sea. This cold is seeping in, layer by layer. Nate hates it.

“You alright, mate?” Jake asks. They’ve been digging through their packs, pulling out their MREs, a few packs of dried fruits. Not much of a dinner, but they’re making do with what they have.

Nate jerks back. He must have shivered without noticing. “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just-- it’s a little bit chilly.”

A small smile crosses Jake’s face. “That’s an understatement, right there. And I remember how you’re a delicate flower about the cold.” He chucks a MRE at Nate’s head, and Nate laughs, despite the fact that his fingers feel like they’re turning into blocks of ice.

---

The first memory of Jake’s that Nate has is of heat. A sunny beach in Hawaii. Warm sand between his toes. His mother’s voice, ringing out over the sound of the waves. Sweat on the back of his neck. A siren, echoing overhead. Hands, arms, sweeping him up and away. A strange tension, a fear in all the adults around him.

Nate has spent too much of his lifetime lingering on that moment, that warmth threaded through by so much confusing fear. It should mean something, maybe. It should be something pivotal and transformative for Jake, a piece of the puzzle that makes up Jake Pentecost.

But Nate’s had other Drift partners since Jake, and if there’s anything that Nate has learned, it’s how messy human beings are from the inside. There’s no real way to ‘solve’ Jake, and the part of Nate that’s still desperately in love with him doesn’t even want to.

---

After dinner, they search through the closets and find a single wool blanket and a mostly flat pillow.

“Well, I guess we’ll have to share,” Jake says. “If I knew this was all it took to get you into bed, I would have trapped us in a freezing-cold bunker sooner.” His grin is sharp, bright, even in the soft glow of their flashlights.

“Don’t even--” Nate says, shaking his head.

“Don’t what?” Jake asks, feigning innocence.

“That,” Nate grits out. “Don’t even with your--”

“I’m not doing anything,” Jake insists.

“You are, with your stupid-- you don’t have to pull that bullshit with me.”

Jake holds his hands up. His flashlight casts a beam of light on the ceiling, illuminating nothing. “No bullshit, honest.”

“Whatever,” Nate mutters, because he’s tired, and he’s cold, and he doesn’t want to deal with Jake’s flirting. His nerves are on edge enough as it is.

“I’m just saying,” Jake says, “we’ve done worse.”

“I’m not sure comparing this to the hazing we went through as cadets makes this any better.”

“You don’t have to make it sound like a chore, spending time with me.” The light is pointing away from his face, and Nate can’t get a read on his expression.

Nate sighs. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

A pause from Jake. A huffed out breath. “Yeah, all right,” he says, letting those last two words bleed together.

This feels like an echo of every time they’ve had a stupid argument that never quite resolved, every petty grudge that has stacked up between them, every time Jake’s walked away, every time he’s decided not to come back. Nate knows that there’s some shit involved in this, about getting stuck in repeating patterns, but he didn’t know how to break the cycle then, and he doesn’t know how to break the cycle now.

---

Nate was asleep when Jake pulled the stunt that got him kicked out of the PPDC. They had a fight earlier, an ugly fight about the correct way to store their equipment. It hadn’t been anything, really, just another blowup about procedure like so many of their other blowups. Nate was getting tired of Jake’s bullshit, and Jake was getting tired of the PPDC’s bullshit, and it was getting close, right to the edge, of bubbling over. Nate hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, because they’d been a team, a unit. If one of them went, it was likely that the other would be expected to follow. And Nate -- Nate wasn’t ready to leave.

But he woke up the next day to news that Jake had decided to attempt piloting a Jaeger alone, was sleeping the result of that attempt off in the infirmary, and was going to be dismissed from service as soon as his father could show up and chew him out in person.

It was the most surreal morning of Nate’s life, and he piloted giant mechs with his brain fused to someone else’s for a living.

Burke showed up a few months later, and it was a relief to everyone when he was Drift-compatible with Nate.

He had been a football player back in his Oregon high school. The only type of pizza he would eat was pepperoni. He had two older brothers that he had a scheduled phone call with every week. He was steady and serious and level-headed, a soldier in all the ways that Jake was not. He was a good guy, and Nate loved him like he was family.

But he wasn’t Jake, and Nate didn’t even realize how much that meant until Secretary-General Mori pulled him aside to tell him that Jake was coming back.

---

“I’m just saying,” Jake says, “I get to be the big spoon.”

They’ve finished packing up the remaining waste from dinner, and they’re prepping for bed, trying to figure out what combination of packs, jackets, pillow, and blanket will be most effective at keeping in the heat. It’s uncomfortably similar to a camping trip that they took with the rest of their cadet class while they were still in training. Jake had spent the entire trip bitching about the bugs, the lingering misty rain, and about how Nate ate the last of his birthday cake (which had been an accident). The rest of the cadets and their instructor had been less than amused by Jake’s antics, but Nate had ended up laughing so hard both he and Jake had gotten in trouble for it.

That whole thing feels like a lifetime ago, because he and Jake are not who they were then -- Jake’s grown up a bit, and Nate’s grown up a lot -- and yet they feel exactly the same. Jake still needs to cover for his real feelings by running his mouth, and Nate is still the one who is constantly trying to do the right thing, the responsible thing despite it all.

“What?” Nate asks as he unzips his outer jacket, because he’s still trying to process any and all of this.

“You’re taller and all of that, but I’m calling dibs right here and right now,” Jake continues. He wraps their only blanket around his shoulders and has the balls to look cozy and warm in the middle of the pile of their stuff.

“You can’t call dibs on what spoon you are,” Nate says.

“Yeah, I can. ‘Cause I just did it.”

Nate does his best to ignore the tease in Jake’s voice and climbs into the makeshift nest they’ve made and tugs one corner of the blanket out of Jake’s hands. “Fuck off,” Nate says. He lays down, yanking as much of the blanket over himself as he can get while he tries to use his jacket to cover all the other exposed areas of his body.

Of course, Jake is also attached to the blanket, and when all the tussling is said and done, they end up spooned, Nate’s back to Jake’s front.

It’s startling, this sudden awareness of heat, the weight of human presence. For him and Jake, the only intimacies they’ve shared have been in the Drift. Outside of it, they only touch to punch each other on the arms, to tap each other’s shoulders, to grasp hands when they pull each other off the floor. This is the closest they’ve ever been, physically, and Nate doesn’t know how to handle it. He wants to be closer, but he doesn’t want to want to be closer.

“Like I said, dibs,” Jake says. His breath is hot on the back of Nate’s neck. Goosebumps form in its wake. Jake’s arm snakes around Nate’s chest and pulls Nate into an awkward hug.

“Ugh,” Nate says, because he feels like he’s expected to grumble about this, even as he’s grateful for the body heat. “That’s really not a thing.” He doesn’t know how to get his body to relax.

Jake laughs. “Yeah it is, Because now I’m the big spoon, and you’re the itsy, bitsy spoon.” He lifts his hand, makes like he wants to pat Nate on the head, but his fingers end up poking Nate in the nose instead.

Nate jerks away from it, even if there’s no place to jerk to. “Fuck, your fingers are like ice cubes.”

“Yeah, that’s why we turned ourselves into a human burrito, mate,” Jake says. He snuggles in closer. His chin rests on Nate’s shoulder, and Nate has no idea how to deal with any of this. His love for Jake had always felt a bit distant, a bit removed. It had always been a hopeless sort of longing, a feeling buried deep, a constant background hum. He’s not-- he’s not meant to deal with being wrapped up in Jake’s arms, not meant to feel the weight of Jake’s body against his own. He can’t pull away, though. Not when Jake is so goddamn warm.

“Right,” Nate grits out. “Not freezing to death and all of that.” His heart races despite the chill, his shoulders tense, his fingers clutching his jacket.

Jake huffs out a breath. “Also, relax, man. I’m not going to molest you in your sleep or anything. You’re pretty, but you’re not that pretty.”

“That’s not--” Nate says. His chest hurts. “You know that’s not what this is.”

A pause. Another breath. “You’ve never been a dick about it before,” Jake concedes.

Nate’s always known that Jake likes men, has had sex with men, has dated men. They’ve never mentioned it before, though. Off limits outside of the Drift. “It just-- it sucks that we’re stuck here like this until morning, you know? It would be so much nicer in my own bed.”

Another pause. “Yeah,” Jake says, “agreed.”

They don’t have anything to say after that. The room narrows down to the sound of their breaths, the rise and fall of Jake’s chest against Nate’s back, and eventually, without even realizing it, Nate relaxes enough to fall asleep.

---

Nate stumbles into wakefulness when his heat source -- the only good thing left in his universe -- shifts and pulls away. He blinks his eyes open, but everything is still in darkness.

“Gotta piss,” Jake mutters. The flashlight clicks on, and Jake crawls out of the nest, leaving Nate annoyed and resentful and cold.

He grits his teeth and doesn’t let himself make any noise. Just because he misses the heat of Jake’s body -- it doesn’t have to mean anything.

It’s only a few minutes, but Nate can hear the footfalls, see the bright beam of the flashlight, as Jake makes his way back. “I think it’s morning,” Jake mumbles. “Said so on my watch.” Even then, he crawls underneath the blanket again, plastering himself against Nate’s back.

Nate doesn’t even think about it. He just lets himself lean even further into Jake’s touch, because he’s still too sleepy to have his inhibitions around to stop him, and he wants so much and so badly. “‘Kay,” he says.

This time it’s Jake who goes stiff and still. “Mate--” he starts.

There’s something odd in his voice that startles Nate into wakefulness. “What?” he asks, blinking into the darkness.

“You’re sending me mixed messages here, man,” Jake says. His voice has a tight, tense undertone to it. “Like, I know you aren’t homophobic, and I know you don’t freak when I flirt with you, and I know we’re kind of required to cuddle right now so that we don’t freeze to death and all of that, but I really-- you can’t get my hopes up like this.”

“What?” Nate repeats stupidly. He wants to see Jake’s face, but he’s not sure he could handle it right now. He’s thankful for the cover of darkness. This moment feels heavy, weighted down by their history, by all the things they’ve never said out loud. He needs to focus. He needs to make sure he gets it right.

“It’s like-- you’ve got to know how I feel at this point, and I know you do give a shit about me, no matter how you play otherwise sometimes, and I--”

“Wait,” Nate says, interrupting Jake’s rambling. “What do you mean I know how you feel?” Jake’s always been a complicated guy, and his feelings about everything have always been messy and layered, and his feelings about Nate have been some of the messiest.

“C’mon, mate. You don’t have to make me say it out loud.” The strain hasn’t left Jake’s voice.

Nate says, “I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.” His own feelings for Jake have felt like a splinter lodged in his chest for over a decade now. “You’re the one who’s never said anything about how I feel about you.” He’s not like Jake. He’s simple. He’s boring. His feelings must have been written across him plain as day in the Drift.

Jake snorts. “Yeah right. This is what I mean about the mixed messages. What was I supposed to say, ‘Thanks for hoping I don’t smash my brains open on a console’?”

“You know--” Nate says, swallowing around the lump in his throat. “-- you know it’s a lot more than that.”

That seems to bring Jake’s rant up short. There’s a moment of silence, just the sound of their own breathing filling the space. “No, I fucking don’t,” he says eventually.

Nate laughs, a harsh, rasping sound. The ache at the center of him radiates outwards, until it seems to fill his entire rib cage. “Jesus, I’ve been in love with you since we were nineteen.” God, Nate wishes he were that drunk right now.

“What?” Now it’s Jake’s turn to be shocked into one-word responses.

“I can’t fucking believe you didn’t know.” Nate says. His head spins like he just stood up too fast, leaving him disoriented and dizzy. He finds himself leaning into Jake, just for something stable and real that he can ground himself with.

Jake lets him. “How the fuck was I supposed to know you loved me too?” Jake hisses. “You’re Mr. I-won’t-talk-about-my-feelings-even-if-I’m-dying over here, and I’m the fuckup ex-Drift partner who keeps telling you how pretty you are.”

“You only do that to mess with me,” Nate points out, though he’s still trying to parse the fact that Jake said that he loved him like it wasn’t a big deal, like Nate’s whole world didn’t just tilt on its axis.

“Yeah, but I mean it, too,” Jake snaps back. He pauses. His voice changes, turning softer, more thoughtful. “You really had no idea?”

Nate knows that Jake likes him, likes him more than he likes most people, and he knows that Jake picked him out of their entire cadet class, and he knows that Jake is weird about his fucking sprinkles because his dad never liked them, but he can’t say that he ever knew this. “No,” he admits, “but you didn’t figure out how I felt about you either.” He turns towards Jake, even though they can’t see each other, just because he feels like they need to be face-to-face for this conversation

“Hey, fuck you. You’re so repressed that your repression has repression issues,” Jake says, but his voice has that playful, teasing edge that Nate loves despite all his better judgement.

Nate reaches out in the dark, gropes blindly until he finds Jake’s hand with his own. His fingers are still cold, but Nate laces them with his own, so that their palms are pressed together. “You’re one to fucking talk,” he says, using his leverage to drag Jake closer.

He blinks in surprise when Jake flicks the flashlight on with his free hand. Nate’s eyes are not used to the brightness of it after the darkness. Jake says, “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t poke my eye out when I kissed you for the first time.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Nate says, but now he can see the smile on Jake’s face and way it reaches Jake’s eyes, and he feels so much it doesn’t seem like his heart can physically contain it.

He squeezes Jake’s cold fingers with his own and leans in to press their lips together. Jake laughs a little bit into Nate’s mouth, and Nate nips at Jake’s lips. He presses closer, until they’re lined up, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. It’s still dizzying, the knowledge that Nate can do this, the knowledge that Jake wants it too

Nate is considering sliding his hand underneath Jake’s shirt -- just to feel the heat, the skin of Jake’s chest -- when an electric hum echoes through the room and the lights flicker back on. His comm crackles to life. “Ranger Lambert,” Jenkins calls out.

Reluctantly, Nate pulls away from Jake and their weird nest so that he can rummage through his pack for the radio. “Ranger Lambert here,” he says.

“It’s good to hear from you,” she says. “I hope you have Ranger Pentecost with you. You’ll both be happy to know the rescue team got the generators back up and running.”

“We noticed,” Nate says. He glances over at Jake, who’s pulling on his own layers and trying to look moderately respectable. He can’t quite maintain the serious-soldier expression, though. A grin keeps breaking through. “We’ll pack up here and head back in your direction.”

“See you soon,” Jenkins says.

---

“Ranger Lambert,” Jake says.

They’re stepping off the transport back onto the landing pad at Moyulan, and after the cold of Alaska and the sterile climate control of the transport, the blast of heat and humidity is a shock to the system. “Ranger Pentecost,” Nate says, because he’s not quite sure where Jake is going with this.

There’s a sly grin on Jake’s face, so he has some idea, though. “We’ve got some things to discuss, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” Nate says. “We do.” He takes a deep breath. Like everything else when it comes to Jake, this new thing is exciting and terrifying in equal measure. He’s wanted it for so long, he’s not sure what to do now that he has it.

“You could come back to mine. We could talk there.” He gives Nate an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows. It’s probably a good thing that everyone’s used to Jake’s terrible version of flirting, or else this would be an excruciatingly awkward conversation to be having in public.

Nate rolls his eyes, because he’s supposed to be the responsible one. “Yeah, all right,” he says.

“Good,” Jake says, and his smile is so radiant, Nate briefly considers putting his shades on.

“I can’t believe how much of an asshole you are,” Nate mutters to him as they take the familiar, winding trip up to the Ranger quarters.

“Aww, Nate,” Jake says, “I love you, too.”

FIN.