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Of all the bars in the Milky Way, he had to show up at this one.
Kaidan bloody Alenko.
It had been a year since he’d seen him, maybe more. Hard to forget the day the freshly minted Commander Alenko showed up on Luna with a gaggle of young biotic recruits, eager to get their hands dirty. Coats trained his baby snipers and Alenko trained his baby biotics, and they both trained them to work together.
Of course, to train others to work together you have to be able to do it yourself. And they did. Quite well, if Coats was being honest. There was a learning curve – Coats wasn’t used to working with a sentinel that not only claimed to know more about tech than he did but actually did know more about tech than he did.
Coats pretended to be grumpy about it, but honestly, he’d always had a bit of a competency kink.
Alenko was a little stiff at times – a little too by the book – almost sour, but Coats chalked it up to what happened with the Normandy. You couldn’t walk by a news vid for months afterwards without seeing a report on the ‘incident’ as it was called. Coats caught him scowling at the screen one morning over shitty coffee and shittier breakfast and Alenko actually opened up a bit. It wasn’t the geth, he’d said. And it pissed him off that they kept saying it was.
Coats figured that’d make anyone pissed off and cut the guy some slack.
Eventually, Alenko eased up a bit, and there were times Coats even got him to smile or even laugh.
It was a nice smile. A nicer laugh. But that was neither here nor there.
Once they learned how to work together, it had just clicked. So much so that the brass sent their combined squad on a few missions together before Alenko was reassigned to somewhere in the Terminus Systems and his students were sent to other instructors.
Coats honestly never expected to see the man again.
So...
“Of all the bars in the Milky Way, you show up at mine.”
Alenko’s expression shifted from suspicion to recognition to something resembling delight in under a second. He snorted into his high ball, a half-smile crossing his face.
“Yours?”
Coats shrugged, slipping onto the stool next to Alenko. “Might as well be. I have my name on a barstool and everything.”
One of Alenko’s impressive eyebrows rose towards his hairline. “No, you don’t.”
Coats gave him his best shitting eating grin, nodding down to the stool that Alenko’s impressive ass was resting on. “You sure about that?”
Alenko stood up enough to peer at the bronze plate on the back of the stool. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Alenko.”
Alenko huffed out a laugh, one that started deep and husky in his chest. “So should I just pay you for the drinks, then?”
“Nah, mate,” Coats replied, sliding his empty glass across the ball. “Just buy me another one.”
Alenko was still grinning. It brightened his entire face, made the corner of his eyes crinkle. “Least I could do, since I stole your bar stool.”
Coats waved down the bartender and Alenko ordered them another round of the same.
“You’re welcome to borrow my seat anytime,” Coats told him, and – shit – was that flirting? The way Alenko kind of blinked at him indicated that, yeah, it was probably flirting. Which he had not intended on doing but he’d had a few of these drinks and Alenko looked good. Really good.
The chatted about what they’d been up to since they left Luna. Coats had taken an attaché position on Arcturus and had been there ever since. Got an apartment and a barstool with his name on it and everything.
As for Alenko, things in the Terminus Systems had gone tits up.
“Fuck, mate, I didn’t know you were on Horizon when that shit went down.”
Alenko pulled a face. Coats had seen the reports of the attack, but something in Alenko’s posture, in the haunted look on his face, told Coats that something had happened on Horizon that wasn’t in the reports.
“Well, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you got out of there alive. Sounds like a lot of people didn’t.”
Coats ordered them around round, on him. He didn’t know how many drinks it would take for a biotic to forget bad memories for a few hours, but he was willing to try to keep up.
“Thanks,” Alenko replied, trading his empty whisky glass for another. “It brought up a lot of shit from when the Normandy went down that I thought I’d packed away,” He took a sip, staring at the back wall of the bar like it had answers. “Can I tell you something?”
Coats nodded.
“Training those biotics on Luna with your squad…that was when things started to feel…ok again. So, thank you, for making that possible.”
Coats gazed at him for a moment, feeling lightheaded but not from the booze.
“Well, um, since we’re sharing secrets, is this the part where I tell you I had the hots for you from the moment you walked onto that moon?”
Alenko sputtered into his drink, raising a hand to hide a cough. He looked over at Coats like he’d sprouted another head.
“Really,” he said, voice raspy from coughing.
Coats hummed, casually sipping his drink as if his mouth hadn’t just passed his brain at light speed.
“Really. And the first time you started glowing blue during a training exercise? If I’d had a ring in my pocket, I might have offered it to you right there.”
Alenko laughed, open and free. His eyes were bright and crinkling at the corners. He was probably about to rip Coats’ heart out of his chest and stomp on it, but it was almost worth it to hear that laugh.
Once Alenko stopped laughing, the expression on his face shifted to something softer.
“So…’had’?”
Coats looked at him, confused.
“Had… as in past tense? Or…”
Coats’ cheeks burned, and an entire flue of butterflies took off in his stomach. “Are you asking me if I still think you’re the most gorgeous thing on two legs?”
Alenko blushed – and if that wasn’t god damn adorable – but nodded.
Coats moved his bar stool closer. Their knees bumped when he settled back in, and neither of them made a move to fix it.
“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Coats said, dropping his voice an octave and pinning Alenko with a stare that showed just how much he meant that.
Alenko pulled his bottom lip between his teeth, gaze dropping to Coats’ mouth. Christ, that wasn’t fair.
“Good to know,” he said, voice low and raspy.
Ok, that wasn’t fair, either.
“So,” Coats continued, reaching a hand between them and lightly brushing Alenko’s knuckles with a finger. “Now that that’s out of the way – and if you’re going be on station for a while – can I take you out? Actual date, Scout’s honor. No names on bar stools, even.”
Alenko’s smile was soft. “On one condition.”
Coats blinked at him. “What’s that?”
“What’s my first name?” he said, deadpan, and Coats blinked again. “I get we never used it, but if our relationship is going to change, I at least need to know if you know what it is.”
Coats huffed, grinning like an idiot. “Now you’re just messing with me, Kaidan.”
Kaidan hummed, a pleasant sound from deep in his chest that tingled Coats’ nerves. The smile on his face turned impish.
“That’s more like it, Declan.”