|
Lance grabbed Hunk just as he was coming off his shift, covered in grease and oil and smelling a bit rank. He swung Hunk around and pushed him against the wall. "Dude," he said. "Is it true? Are you really quitting?" "Hello, Lance. Yes, I'm fine, thanks for asking." Hunk wiped his hands on a rag and pulled the top of his coverall down to reveal clean, white shoulders and a sweat-stained undershirt. "And, no. I haven't quit. Yet. I'm just." He wiped his forehead with his forearm and left a trail of black grime. "I'm thinking about it." "Why!" Lance threw his hands into the air and spun away. He turned back to Hunk, put his hands on his hips. "I thought you liked being in the G.G." He didn't have to say it, but Hunk knew that Lance meant, "I thought you liked us." "I do. It's just." Hunk sighed and looked down at his dirty hands. "It's kind of complicated. Look. Wait here. I'm going to go get a shower. Then we'll talk." "Fine." Lance crossed his arms and his petulant look would have been better suited on a five year old. "But if you ditch me, just remember. I know where you live." "Yeah, yeah." Hunk waved his hand at Lance and then went to take a shower. He came back out a half hour later, smelling cleaner, but with oil and grime still stuck under his fingernails. Lance scrambled up from where he had been sitting, still pouting, though it was more for show now that he'd cooled down. Hunk swirled his towel in his ear and grinned. "Still here, huh." "Yes, I'm still here." "I don't need saving, Lance. I'm fine." Hunk chucked the towel into the laundry bin by the door. "Well. That's good. Since, y'know. I could never be a savior." Lance rubbed his hand through his hair. "Look. How much money do you have?" Hunk felt around in his pockets. "I got about a buck." He eyed Lance suspiciously. "Why?" "Well it's a damn good thing I've got some cash." Lance jerked his head commandingly and stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Come on. Let's go have a beer."
The Funky Monkey was a very average bar, which was good because it's military patrons were, on the whole, very average. It served beer, mostly, although there were shelves of bottles of strangely colored liquids--sometimes with a worm or some other lower life form in the bottles--behind the bar. Sometimes, on a dare, the green recruits would order a shot or a pint from one of them, and then blessed whatever deity they subscribed to that the Base Hospital was just a few blocks away. The G.G. grunts liked it because it was close to the base's housing, had a couple of pool tables and a dartboard and the furniture was cheap so Sam, the owner, didn't mind too much if it got broken during a fight. It was a noisy, active, crazy place, largely because it was the best distraction on the base. At three o'clock on a Tuesday, however, the bar was very quiet. Which was bad for Lance because he always played darts better when there were other people around. He liked to be impressive. Of course, he was here with Hunk, so Lance took careful aim--very careful aim since he'd had a couple of beers in him now--and tried to focus entirely on the dartboard and not on Hunk and his stubbornness. Or how Hunk smelled, and how his dark curls stuck to his forehead after his shower, or how close they had come to kissing on a dark night many years ago. He wasn't very good at blocking Hunk from his thoughts, though, and when he let the dart fly it stuck into the scarred wood that surrounded the dartboard. Lance snorted and grabbed his beer. The glass was slick and heavy and oddly comforting. "Nice," Hunk said. He took his place behind the line and aimed. His tongue stuck up out of the corner of his mouth. "At this rate, you'll be buying me beer for the next six years." "If we're still around in six years." The beer was bitter and warm and had grown flat. Lance drank it anyway. "That's exactly what I'm talking about," Hunk said. "I can't. I need to know what I'm going to be doing in the future." "You mean you need to be boring." "Fine. Yes. I want to be boring. I want out." Hunk looked down into his glass, swirled the last of the head around. "I've got some pretty good offers. And my Uncle is always looking for a good pair of hands. In six years I could be running my own garage. I could make some good money, have some time to develop a couple of my own designs. And, um. Deb. She deserves a better life than this. She deserves a husband who knows he's always coming home at the end of the day." "Oh." Lance leaned against the bar and looked away from Hunk. He suddenly wanted something a little stronger than beer. "So you. Uh. You and Deb. You're...?" "Yeah." Hunk grinned, scratched the back of his head. "Um. It's been almost two years. It's time. I'm going to ask her to marry me." "Ah. Well. Congratulations." Lance laughed, a little. "So, I guess you aren't interested in this special ops gig, then." He waved his hand. "Never mind. Never mind. It's. Yeah. Keith's been given this assignment and he gets to pick his own team so. Well. You're a good man to have around. And." He laughed again. "Hey. Listen. We need something stronger than beer. We need to celebrate, man! You're, y'know. Taking a big step." "Lance..." "Sammy! A pint of the blue stuff!" Lance sat down at a table, rather clumsily, rocking the chair back. Sam looked at the wall behind him. "The one with the worm or the one with out?" "Both!" Lance took another look at Hunk and felt his heart twinge. "In the same glass." "Right." Sam flicked the tops off both bottles and nodded at Hunk. "Same for you?" "Nah. Just give me another beer." Hunk gave Sam the 'eye', trying to convey just how bad an idea it would be to give Lance that drink; Sam shrugged and poured and indicated that, hey, he understood Hunk's unfortunate situation but he was still a businessman and, if it made Hunk feel any better, the ambulance knew the fastest way to his bar and always brought the stomach pump along. Hunk sighed and sat down and watched Lance with wary intensity. The intensity increased to suicide watch level when Sam put the drinks down before them. "Lance. I don't think you should drink that." "Be quiet Hunk. I'm drinking to you impending marriage. I'm seizing the moment. Seize it with me. Since it's y'know. Your moment and all." Lance grabbed the container--which, ominously, was made of wood--and took a sip of the slightly fizzing concoction. When his head didn't explode, he took a longer drought and grinned. Or, at least, moved his lips into something that looked more or less like a grin. His teeth were showing at any rate. "Look. Lance. I just said. I've been going with Deb for so long that, y'know, it's time that I married her." "Do you love her?" Lance put the mug down and it sloshed blue fizz all down the sides. It smelled fruity, which was funny because it tasted vaguely like metal but mostly like alcohol. "Do you. Do you burn for her? Do you. Does your breath stop, sometimes, because, because all you want is to kiss her, drink her in?" "Um." Hunk looked down and used the condensation to draw a smiley face on the table. "I." "Because you should. If you're going to marry her." Lance licked the fizz off his hand. "You should burn." "Huh." Hunk added horns to his drawing and looked anywhere but Lance. "Yeah. Let's just. Let's drink." Lance snorted. "You're so...boring sometimes." "Yeah." Hunk drained the last of his beer and then nodded at Sam. He stared at Lance, carefully, and then looked away. And his mind kept drifting back what Lance had said. About Keith and the special ops. "So. This mission you're going on. Is it dangerous?" Lance laughed. "It's Keith." "Yeah." Hunk hung his head and thought about Deb and about a garage of his own and about his father, who had been a mechanic too. He thought about burning, about danger and about seizing a moment. He wanted to be a mechanic. Or, at least, he'd been told all his life that he wanted to be a mechanic. He was told that he wanted to have a safe, mundane life, have a couple of kids, grow a beer belly and end up with a heart attack as the most exciting thing to happen to him. And he had believed it, mostly, until he had joined the G.G and met Lance and found that marriage and the two kids and a dog weren't the only options in life. There were other choices, other ways to live. Sometimes with rubber and leather and snappy things and shiny buckles. Not that he'd actually done anything in that, well, he was going to call it a bar for lack of a better word. Just watched those men do things to each other and drank a lot more than was good for him and then picked up the first girl he came across. But he had wanted to. Wanted to be one of those men. Possibly the one in the straps; he wasn't entirely sure. Point was he had to choose now. Between that life, which was shiny and kind of spiky but was with his friends, and the life he was heading toward at full steam. The life of barbeques on the weekend, a pool, a mortgage, kids, heart attacks, a wife who would lose her figure over the years. Of a garage of his own and working on cars for the rest of his life and never, never, feeling a burn. God. When he put it like that it sounded so *boring*. He didn't want to do that. He didn't want to be that guy. He didn't want to be his father. "Don't worry," Lance said. He'd obviously thought Hunk had been too quiet. "I'll come back. I always come back." He laughed, a little bitterly. "It just. It might take a few years." "Yeah." Hunk rubbed the back of his head. "Listen." He laughed a little and looked up at the ceiling. "I can't believe I'm about to say this. Keith's thingy. Uh. This mission you mentioned. He. He's still looking for people? He still wants me?" Lance blinked. Reached across and touched Hunk's hand, then looked away. "I. I thought that you wanted to stay here. Get married. Own your own business." He made a small 'urping' noise as the carbon in his drink came up. "Blah." "Yeah. Well." Hunk snorted. "I decided that I didn't want to be boring." "Too late. Boring is in your bones." Lance shook his head. "I can't let you do this, man. I can't let you through away a perfectly good life." "Look. I'm seizing a moment. It's a different moment than the one you're seizing, but it's my moment." "You're going to get married." Hunk shrugged. "Not if I don't propose." He looked at Lance very carefully and decided that he hadn't had enough beers to call what he was going to do next into question. He didn't want anybody to say that he had kissed Lance because he was drunk. He leaned over the table and Lance met him halfway. And Hunk felt his lips burn at the touch--though it was possible that this was just the alcohol left on Lance's tongue. He'd rather think that it was Lance who made him burn. "Hmm." "Why are you doing this?" Lance asked. "Why are you throwing away your future?"
"Because I didn't like it." He kissed Lance again. "I like this one more."
|