He doesn’t meet Evan until almost a year later. He’s stationed in the Masakos System, the most distant he’s ever been from home, as part of the security detail for the several colonies there that have recently transitioned from remotely administered territories to part of a full-fledged imperial province. It’s a long posting, two years, and the first time he hasn’t been quartered on a ship or a military base. Instead he has a tiny, army-issued one-room apartment on a space station, in a mixed-usage neighbourhood that’s evenly split between military, civilian, and commercial.

He likes it a lot more than he expected. It’s permanent enough that he’s brought some of his own things with him—had Oanez bring them when she came to stay with him at the Academy—and he’s decorated his room with vibrant patterned wall hangings, photos of his cousins, and a painting Franseza did of one of the olive trees. It’s nice to have a space that’s entirely his own, small as it is, and he gets used to the all-hours bustle of the station. It’s a little like how he imagines it would have been to grow up in town. He becomes a regular at the bakery one corridor over, develops a usual order at the nearest noodle shop, and makes friends with Chrissy, who runs the local dive bar.

The local is where he runs into Evan for the first time. He’s sitting at the bar, nursing a glass of cheap rum and chatting with Chrissy, when there’s a commotion behind him that sets his combat instincts into overdrive. He’s on his feet before he has a chance to think about it.

The source of the ruckus is two men halfway across the taproom. One is big, moving with a bruiser’s confidence despite the slight delay in his reflexes brought on by drink; the other is shorter, rangy and muscled, full of belligerent energy. He’s the one who slammed the chair to the floor.

“The fuck did you just say to me?” he shouts into the sudden hush of the rest of the patrons realizing what’s about to happen.

“Didn’t mean anything by it,” says the big guy. His voice is easy, but there’s a spark of—something—in his eyes. “Nothing you ain’t heard before.”

“Then you fucking know better, don’t you?” snarls the angry one, and lunges for the larger man.

Judicael glances back, catching the bartender’s eye. “You want me to...?”

Chrissy has already pulled out her baton and come around the bar, but she nods anyway. “If you can get ‘em to back down without breaking anything, I’d prefer that. I’m right behind you.”

He can understand her hesitation. She’s lethal with that baton, but it makes it hard to avoid damaging people: in its quiescent state, he once witnessed her break a man’s arm when he came at her with a knife, and when it’s charged up it can deliver a shock capable of knocking most people out. Judicael nods and plunges towards the melee without another moment wasted.

The floor surrounding the two brawling men is mostly clear, the other patrons smart enough to have scattered as best they can. Judicael ducks under a misaimed swing from the bigger man, shoves his way between the combatants, and catches a punch from the angry one on his raised forearm, deflecting it smoothly away from his face. “Alright,” he snaps, “that’s quite enough.”

Up close he can see that the smaller man isn’t actually that small; it’s just that the big guy has nearly five inches on Judicael himself, towering over most of the rest of the bar. He’s big enough that Judicael feels it jar through his whole body when he takes a hit on the back of his shoulder, and he twists around, grabbing the other man’s fist in one hand and forcing him back. “I said *enough*.”

The big man looks unexpectedly contrite. “Sorry,” he says. “Hard to stop once I’m swinging.”

“Who the hell are you?” says the shorter guy, and Judicael turns back to him. “Get the fuck out of my way if you don’t wanna get the same as him.”

“I’d advise against it,” Judicael says, his tone rough enough to stay clear of patronizing without falling too far the other way into aggressive. “I’m here to break this up so Chrissy doesn’t have to break your limbs. Think it over for a minute.”

The guy swings his head around to see Chrissy, looking murderous at the edge of the crowd with her baton halfway to charged. Judicael can see the gears moving in his head, but then he turns back to him and throws another punch. Judicael takes it on the jaw and moves with it, side-stepping out of the way and letting the man stumble past him.

“Right,” he says, and spins into one of the forms he learned sparring at the Academy.

The end result, after less than five seconds of rapid-fire blows, is the angry guy on the floor of the bar, one arm pinned under him and the other twisted up against his ribs, with Judicael’s knee pressing against his back. “I suggest you take it down a notch,” Judicael says. “Because the next time you try something I’m turning you over to Chrissy.”

“Get the fuck off me, man!” the man yells, his voice slightly muffled by the floor.

Judicael meets Chrissy’s eyes and lets him up. She’s there as soon as he staggers to his feet, jabbing her baton into his back. “Get the hell out of here,” she says pleasantly.

He goes, stalking out with offended dignity, not even bothering to shrug on his coat before he’s out the door. Judicael turns his gaze on the bigger guy, who has just been standing there since he stepped into the middle of the fight. “What about you?” he says. “Going to cause any more trouble?”

“Uh,” says the big guy. “No. No, sir. I’m good.”

“I swear to fuck, Evan,” Chrissy says, with a weary fondness that reminds Judicael strikingly of Oanez. “I told you to stop starting fights in my bar.”

“Sorry, Chrissy,” Evan says sheepishly. There’s a vibrant bruise blossoming across his cheekbone; it looks incongruously charming.

He ends up at the bar next to Judicael, while Chrissy hands them both fresh drinks and wraps up a bag of ice in a tea towel. “So,” Judicael says, taking a sip from his new glass of rum—a much nicer one than he usually bothers to pay for himself. “Why haven’t you been kicked out yet, if you keep starting fights?”

“Because he’s just an idiot, not an asshole,” Chrissy says, thumping her homemade icepack down on the bar in front of Evan. “He never throws the first punch, he just can’t keep his big stupid mouth shut.”

“Nana always said I never learned any tact,” Evan says mournfully, pressing the icepack to his cheek and taking a swig from the bottle Chrissy had set down in front of him. “I don’t *mean* to start fights.”

Chrissy sighs. “Also, he’s my cousin, and mom would never let me hear the end of it if I banned him from the bar.”

“Ah,” Judicael says, and thinks of how exasperated everyone got with him over the years he was dating Nathalie. “I think I might be that cousin in my family.”

“See?” Evan says, around another swig of beer. “You know what it’s like.”

“Don’t *you* start any fights in my bar,” says Chrissy in a warning tone.

“I’m not that sort of trouble,” Judicael says, smiling faintly. Chrissy just gives him a baleful look before moving off down the bar to serve another patron.

There’s a short pause, and then Evan says, “What sorta trouble are you, then?” He casts a dubious look over Judicael—his well-kept caftan and trousers, the neat line of his haircut, the tidy polish of his boots—and adds, “You don’t look like your life’s a mess.”

“My life’s not a mess,” Judicael says, and turns to face Evan properly. *He* looks like his life might be a mess: on top of the bruising on his face, his knuckles are roughed up, his jacket is battered and marked with questionable stains, he has about two days’ worth of five o’clock shadow, and there’s the edge of a dubious hand-poked tattoo peeking up over his collar. He’s also kind of drunk. But Judicael remembers the look he’d had in his eyes when the other man had been menacing him—like he was ready to take on the world, even if it was inevitably going to kick his ass.

Judicael knows he has a problem. “I’m too attracted to intensity,” he says. “It gets me into shit sometimes.”

Evan pauses in the middle of a mouthful of beer, looking at him sidelong as he swallows. “You’re pretty,” he says finally. “You a cop?”

He means *station security*. Judicael shakes his head. “Army,” he says, an involuntary grin tugging at his lips. “Is that better, or worse?”

“Oh, worse. Definitely worse,” Evan says, his hand settling on Judicael’s knee. “But what a way to go, yeah?”

Evan’s apartment is one level up and two corridors over, and is just as much of a mess as Judicael expected. There are crates stacked in half of the tiny kitchen, pointedly unlabelled; Evan kicks them out of the way and mutters, “Sorry about the mess. I’m just holding some stuff for some friends.”

“Sure,” Judicael says. He knows he’s meant to be appalled, but instead he’s unreasonably amused. “Didn’t think about those when you invited me over, huh?”

Evan looks stricken. “Please don’t tell Chrissy.”

“Don’t tell her what?” Judicael says, nudging him back against the nearby wall and easing his hands up Evan’s chest. “You’re just holding some stuff for your friends. Nothing wrong with that.”

Whatever Evan is going to say in response to that is lost against Judicael’s mouth.

His bed is a mattress on the floor, with one flat pillow and a mess of blankets—though it is, at least, clean. Evan grins sheepishly when Judicael hikes a brow at him and just says, “I’m too tall for a normal bedframe.”

“Mmm,” Judicael says, looking him over again. “True.”

It’s not often Judicael is smaller than his partners. He takes full advantage, letting Evan throw him down onto the mattress and pin him with his body weight as he fucks him from behind. They fall asleep—several rounds later—all tangled up in the blankets, Evan still half on top of him; Judicael wakes to his watch alarm in the early hours of the morning with his shoulder asleep and his hips pleasantly sore.

“Evan,” he says, pushing the other man’s side. It’s like trying to budge concrete. “Evan, let me up.”

“Mhghm,” Evan says, and rolls over enough to let Judicael sit up. “Time’s it?”

“Early,” Judicael says. “I have work. You can go back to sleep.”

“Mh,” Evan says, and shakes himself. His eyes open blearily. “See you again?”

“Absolutely,” Judicael says, bending down to kiss him as he pulls on his trousers. “I’ll leave you my contact info, you’re not awake enough to remember. Go back to *sleep*.”

“‘Kay,” Evan says, and does.

Unsurprisingly, Evan turns out to be terrible at texting back in a timely manner—but since he does always reply eventually, Judicael finds it more funny than irritating. They see each other often enough at Chrissy’s, anyway, even when they weren’t planning to meet up. Chrissy seems absolutely tickled that Judicael has started up an honest-to-god relationship with her cousin, and keeps joking about introducing him to their family; Judicael retaliates by threatening to video call his cousins from the bar and thereby subjecting it to Oanez’s judgement.

The first time Evan comes over to his apartment, he looks around in apparent satisfaction. “Knew your place would be nice,” he says. He indicates one of the wall hangings. “Those look expensive.”

Judicael has to laugh. “That’s a colonist’s craft where I’m from,” he says. “Woven from leftover bits of yarn. You could probably get half a dozen of them for the price of a decent day’s work, here.”

“Huh,” Evan says. “And the painting?”

“Franseza. My cousin.”

“You got a lot of cousins?”

Judicael gestures at the photos, arranged on the wall around the painting. “There’s eighteen of us,” he says. His father only has one brother, and and he’s never known that uncle especially well, but his mother has five younger siblings, all with at least two children. Judicael is the sole only child in his family.

“Shit,” Evan says. He studies the photos, lingering over the one of Judicael and Oanez with Annick, Franseza, Deniel, and Mael piled across their laps. “You miss them?”

“All the time,” Judicael says with a smile. “We video chat, but it’s not the same. I’ll introduce you sometime.” His bed is a low futon mattress on a synthetic wooden frame; he sits down on it now, hooking his finger into Evan’s belt loop and tugging him down to him.

Evan settles over him, pushing him onto his back. “Think they’d like me?” he says, kissing along Judicael’s jaw.

Annick would think he was sweet. Oanez would think he was a disaster waiting to happen. Mael—bless him—would think he was unreasonably hot. “You’d win them over,” he says, and arches into Evan’s body.

Not long after that, he gets the first call from the station security office.

His phone chirps in the middle of the night and he lifts himself up on his elbows, accepting the call and pressing it to his ear. “Hello?” he says groggily.

“It’s me,” says Evan. He sounds tired and miserable and probably drunk. “I’m really sorry. Cops picked me up. Can you come down to security and bail me out?”

“What?” Judicael says, instantly awake. He sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“It’s fine! M’fine,” Evan says. “It was just a fight. They took all of us in.”

“Chrissy’s right, you need to stop starting fights,” Judicael says, yanking on his trousers and stuffing his feet into his boots. “I’ll come get you. Be there in about twenty minutes.”

“Thank you,” Evan says. His voice is unusually small. “Normally I’d call Chrissy, but she’s working.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Judicael says. “What are boyfriends for? I’ll see you soon.”