Page 22 of Rust of Control

Then they brought Easton out, and Nate stood, the way he always stood, and for a second it was just the two of them and five years and the whole long friendship under the fluorescents.

Easton Davros was a big man, bigger than he'd been in school, the weight room being one of the few honest things to do with the time. He had his mother's face and his father's hands and the careful walk of a man who had learned which parts of a room to keep his back to. He saw the honey bun on the table and something in his face eased before the rest of him did.

"You remembered the honey bun," Easton said. "Five years and you still get the honey bun."

"You'd give me hell if I didn't."

"I would. Sit down, you're making the desk nervous." Easton sat. He moved the honey bun a quarter-inch toward himself, claiming it, and looked at Nate across the bolted table with the easy attention of a man reading a friend he'd been reading for half his life. "You drove up off-schedule. You come the first Saturday. It's the third Tuesday." He cracked the coffee lid. "So either somebody died or you've got something stuck in your teeth. And you'd have led with it if somebody died."

The years inside had not touched this part of him. Easton had always read Nate faster than anyone, faster than Marcus even, because he'd been doing it the longest, since they were two kids at a kitchen table with a textbook open between them and Easton learning every tell in Nate's face the same year he taught it to read. He could still do it through prison glass and a bolted table. He'd done it just now, off nothing but an off-schedule visit and the set of Nate's shoulders.

"It's about Jude," Nate said.

Easton went still in the particular way of a man whose little brother's name had just been said in a room like this one. The coffee stopped halfway up. "Is he hurt? Nate, is he-"

"He's safe." Nate said it fast, because the alternative had lived in Easton's face for half a second and Nate would not let it live there a second longer than it had to. "He's safe. He's at the safehouse. Marcus's house. He's eating, he's sleeping, Scarlet's looked him over and the worst of it's healing." He had not meant to say the worst of it. He watched it land.

"The worst of what?"

So Nate told him. Not all of it, not the parts that were Jude's to tell, but the shape: that Rand had been bad to him for a long time, that it had gotten physical, that there'd been a night in an alley, that Jude was out now and staying out. He told it flat and complete, the way he'd tell Marcus a case, because Easton was not a man you softened things for and would not thank you for trying.

Easton listened with his big hands flat on the bolted table and his jaw getting harder by the sentence, and when Nate finished he was quiet for a long moment, looking at the purple stamp on the back of his own hand like it was something that had been done to him.

"Five years," Easton said, low. "Five years I've been asking you how he is. And you've been telling me fine. Every month. Fine, Easton, he's fine, the band's good, he sounds good." He looked up. "He was getting beat in an alley and you've been telling me fine."

"Yeah," Nate said. "I have."

"Why?"

"Because there was nothing you could do from in here but lose your mind, and a man losing his mind in here gets himself another year." Nate held his eyes. "I made a call. It might've been the wrong one. I told myself I was protecting you. Maybe I was just making it easier on me, not having to watch you not be able to do anything. You can be as angry about that as you want. You're owed it."

Easton's hands closed slowly into fists on the table, and then, with visible effort, opened again. Three years had taught him that, too: what closing his fists in this room cost.

"Okay," he said finally. "Okay. That's a thing we'll come back to." He took a breath. "But that's not what's stuck in your teeth. You'd have written me about Rand. You drove up to say something to my face. So say it."

Here it was. He had built the sentence on the drive and discarded every version, because every version sounded like a man asking permission for something he'd already done. He was not going to dress it up.

"I'm in love with him," Nate said. "With Jude. I have been for years. I didn't do anything about it the whole time he was with Rand, or the whole time I was lying to you about how he was. I'm doing something about it now. And I wasn't going to take one step further with him without driving up here and telling you to your face, because he's your brother and you've been trusting me to look out for him, and I'm not going to be a man who took what he wanted out of that trust in the dark."

The room did not change. The vending machines hummed. A guard shifted his weight by the door.

Easton looked at him for a long time.

"You, of all people," Easton said.

It was not loud. That was the worst of it. Nate had braced for loud and gotten this instead, quiet and flat and cut to size.

"You watched him grow up." Easton's voice stayed low and even and got harder underneath. "You met him when he was nine. Nine, Nate. He was a kid hiding behind my leg at the funeral. You used to carry him on your shoulders so he could see over the fence at the games. And now you're telling me, while I'm in here and can't do a damn thing about it, that you-" He stopped. His jaw worked. "He just got out from under a man who used him. He's got a hole in him you could drive a truck through, the same hole he's had since he was that orphaned kid, the I'll-be-good-if-you-keep-me hole. And you want me to believe the next set of hands on him is just gonna be the gentle kind. You. Of all the people in his life. The one I trusted to not be one more thing he had to survive."

Nate took it. Every word. He did not defend himself; there was no defense that wasn't just noise over the true thing, and Easton would hear the noise for what it was.

"If you're another man who hurts him," Easton said, and the flat cracked wet at its edges, "I will do the rest of my time and however much more it takes and I will find you. I need you to understand I mean that the regular way, not the prison-talk way. You are my friend and I love you… but I will end you."

"I know," Nate said.

"Do you?"

"I helped you bury your standards low enough to pass tenth-grade algebra," Nate said. "I know exactly what you mean and exactly how much you mean it."