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"Look," Johnny said, with a sigh that told D'avin that he cared and also that he worried too much about things not worth worrying about, "I think of Dutch like a sister, all right?"
"So do I!" D'avin leered.
Johnny scowled at him. "I'm trying to have a serious conversation with you here."
That made one of them, then. D'avin definitely had no intention of having a serious conversation with Johnny - about anything. Let the past (and all the sleeping hell hounds) lie.
Plenty of stuff to concern themselves with in the present, to say nothing of the future.
"Maybe I should put my clothes back on." Johnny's tone made it clear it wasn't an idle threat.
Of course, Johnny's threats usually weren't. He was very sincere, was Johnny. Focused, too. D'avin would have thought hanging out with Dutch and hunting down scumbags would have knocked some of the idealism out of him, but nope.
Nice to know, really, that the score was still universe: 0, Johnny: 1.
Dutch might have helped, naturally. For all that she wasn't sleeping with him, she seemed fond enough of Johnny - a lot more fond than she seemed to be of D'avin, sometimes. (Or, all right, often. Not like he didn't deserve it, though.)
Johnny sighed and reached for his shirt.
"You want me to stop sleeping with Dutch," D'avin said quickly. "All right. I get it."
"I feel weird about you sleeping with Dutch," Johnny corrected him. "And I'd like us to have a conversation about that, instead of, you know. Not having a conversation about that."
True enough, the stuff he didn't have conversations with Johnny about came back to bite him in the ass from time to time, usually at the absolute worst time.
"You think of Dutch as the cool big sister you don't want to have sex with," D'avin said.
Johnny grimaced.
"Me, on the other hand, you think of as the cool, older, attractive and charming big brother you do want to have sex with." To some degree, D'avin admitted, that was the part he didn't get.
Sleeping with people you'd grown up with - well, easy enough to see why that wasn't for everybody.
Family-like feelings aside though, Dutch and Johnny hadn't grown up together. Maybe that was the problem? Except that Johnny and Dutch not sleeping together wasn't any kind of problem, as far as D'avin was concerned. He'd have been fine with it if they were, but if they chose not to, well, no skin off his nose, was it? (And even if it had been, he'd have grinned and borne it, because Johnny deserved all the nice things the universe saw fit to throw at him.)
"I wouldn't say 'cool'," Johnny said. "Or 'attractive'. Or 'charming'."
D'avin gave that feeble attempt at taking him down a peg the response it deserved. "I like Dutch," he said carefully, feeling his way towards what, exactly, the problem was here.
"I like Dutch, too." Johnny glared.
"You think she deserves better. I'm hurt." Going by Johnny's expression, that wasn't quite what it was. Close, though, which stung just a bit. "Look, Johnny, you want to talk about this, let's talk about this. I'm all ears. Lay it on me, bro."
Johnny sighed. "You're going to mess it up."
Very probable. D'avin could count the number of times he hadn't messed things up sooner or later on one hand.
On the other hand, he'd gotten Johnny back, more or less, with a bonus Dutch attached. Provided he kept his head and stuck to doing what he was good at (aside from messing things up), D'avin kind of liked their chances.
Didn't mean Johnny had to agree with him, naturally.
"Guess you're going to have to stop me from letting that happen," he said.
Johnny scoffed. "Right. Because you always do exactly what I tell you to do."
Well. D'avin had left when Johnny'd told him to 'leave this shitty place already and don't worry about me'. (He hadn't really managed that second one. Still, it was the action that counted.) When it was just the two of them, in bed and naked, D'avin liked to think he was a pretty good listener, too.
He might even go so far as to say he liked it when Johnny got a bit bossy. D'avin was (or had been) a soldier, after all: following orders came naturally. It was one of the things he'd liked about being a soldier. You follow orders, you do good. You follow orders, you don't mess up.
You follow orders, some doctor screws with your memory and you end up without a fucking clue of why you've killed a bunch of people you thought of as your brothers and sisters in arms.
"Hey," D'avin said, "no messing this up. Scout's honor." Not that he'd ever noticed scouts being particularly honorable. "You want me to jump, only thing I need to know is how high."
"Right. That is totally how I remember things going - oh, how about any of the times I've told you what to do. Starting from that time you almost got killed."
D'avin opened his mouth to point out how little that narrowed things down.
"By Fancy!" Johnny snapped. "Don't bullshit me, D'av."
"I'll try," D'avin said, because fair was fair, and he couldn't make it fairer than that.
Johnny's expression softened, as D'avin'd known it would. Johnny was a marshmallow, always willing to believe the best of people, no matter what. "That's all I'm asking."
"Enough talk?" D'avin asked hopefully.
Johnny rolled his eyes, but he was still as naked as D'avin, and they'd both caught their breath by now, so it was pretty much a given what his answer was going to be.
Because that was the way things worked, later that night, sneaking out of bed for a nightcap to help him sleep, he ran into Dutch.
"Good night?"
Under other circumstances, he might have tried to charm her into telling him where she kept the good hokk, but Johnny'd worn him out enough to leave him feeling like he didn't need it.
"The best," he said. If Dutch ever found out her sleeping with him made Johnny feel 'weird', she'd dump him as quick as she might whip out a knife and gut him. (He'd liked to think it'd be quicker, that she'd hesitate at least a couple of seconds, but probably not.)
She arched an eyebrow at him. "Thanks for your honesty, I guess."
Right. "Sorry," D'avin said. "I just - I didn't mean it like that. You're - "
She laughed. No hurt feelings or bruised ego there, clearly. "Relax. I'm messing with you."
"Totally knew that," he lied. She'd know that, of course. In some ways, Dutch knew him far better than Johnny ever would.
Probably he should be worried about that a little. Instead, it felt sort of comforting. Dutch's priority would always be Johnny. Johnny's life, Johnny's happiness. No amount of great sex was going to change that. Why should it? Sex was just sex, after all. People like Johnny, though - they were rare. Worth protecting.
"You're a shit liar," she said.
Johnny was worse. Likely, that was due to a lack of practice. "Right now, mostly, I'm just plain tired."
She poured him some hokk. Not the expensive kind, but it'd do the trick. "Go back to bed, D'avin. Give Johnny a hug for me."
"I'm really not much of a hugger."
She only grinned at him.