#gale cleven x oc
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Masters of the Air Fanfiction
Requested: yes…Virgin!Gale + Maureen/Gale bonding
Universe: Friends in the Crucible (pacific au)
Summary: “Get laid, Buck.” Doc Egan prescribed with his peculiar brand of deathly serious compassion, “Hell, I’ll write you a prescription for it, if it soothes your conscience, but I’m serious. Serve your jitters better than any syrette or Amphetamine.”
Warnings: all the sex! 18+.|| both tender and feral || Doc Egan being a unorthodox but loving menace, a theme of ptsd and body tremors/insomnia -poor Gale is going through it after a whole war, drug mentions, erectile disfunction, Maureen is aggressive but everything’s consensual, usage of the word “Jap”. Graphic descriptions of Gale’s virginity loss, male overstimulation and an amusing amount of thought given to Bucky’s existence during the act … im sure that won’t lead to anything when Maureen returns to base and reports to Egan about it, right? Hahaha of course not, that would be craaazy
Word count: 10k
“Buck, come on now, it’s not a prison sentence, it’s just a little time off.”
“I don’t need time off.” Gale reiterated, a panicked sort of fierceness creeping into his tone as his appeal now stretched into something longer than the usual flippant favors Egan was customarily so eager to dole out.
“Those hands suggest ya do.” John gave a not unkind glance of sympathy at the twitching fingers rattling on the armrests of Cleven’s chair.
12 rescue missions in 15 days. Flying upwards of ten hours each. He’d done worse before, but then again, that had been when he was fresh, younger, less banged up from the head hitting the cockpit wall.
“Sending me to go watch flamingos and contemplate sand or some shit isn’t gonna make me steadier.” Gale very much feared his gripes were beginning to sound like begs, “Don’t send me off like this. Don’t.”
“Petrified of flamingos?” John hummed, glancing down at his chart as if contemplating making a note of this new malady, “Maybe if your dad had taken you to a zoo once or twice as a kid you’d not be scared stiff of the prospect.”
Cleven stared back at him with the most hurt eyes John had ever seen. He balled his own fist up to remember the rightness of his point, even if he’d delivered it about as clumsily as a marriage proposal at a funeral. “The hell would you say something like that?” Buck whispered, not even angry, just utterly lost.
“Buck, I’m just sayin’ -inability to slow or be alone, it’s classic symptoms of battle fatigue.”
“I don’t wanna sit on a beach when I could be helping, I’m perfectly capable of still helping! You know it!”
“But you can’t sleep.” John circled back to where this all began, with Gale asking if there was anything to knock a fella out when 82 hours of insomnia wasn’t sufficiently exhausting.
“Give me something, you’re a doctor! Goddamnit, John!” Gale finally broke, voice raising and fists clenched.
“Surgeon, technically.” John gave him a wane smile, “And I can’t dope up an active pilot.”
“Just an active surgeon.” Gale sneered, tit for tat on the insults.
John nodded grimly but murmured, “The day Gale Cleven becomes John Egan is a day this whole operation can pack up and go home.”
“So you're being the better man,” Gale scoffed, “-sending me to watch flamingos.”
“I’m not givin’ you shit.“ he confirmed, “Unless it’s an assignment.”
“Will it keep me outta the flak asylum?”
“If you comply to all the regulations, maybe.” Egan shrugged.
“Go on?”
“Get laid, Buck.” his friend prescribed with his peculiar brand of deathly serious compassion, “Hell, I’ll write you a prescription for it, if it soothes your conscience, but I’m serious. Serve you better than any syrette or Amphetamine.”
“That’s your ultimatum?”
“No, no, my ultimatum is that you go on a little sabbatical with one of my nurses, she’ll keep an eye on you and you can make yourself useful, helping her unload heavy shit at the aid station they’re setting up at Peleliu. My recommendation is that when she comes into your room at the end of the day and drops her knickers, you lay back and think of Wyoming.”
Major Cleven had thought of a million and one ways to bribe or ally the prospective nurse to his side of the deal once he knew which unfortunate female Egan was going to pick for this deplorable detail. Calling his friend a pimp and a bastard had done little good, threatening malpractice and a hardness of heart towards Gale’s own principles -even less. So Gale figured when the time came he’d just gently turn the well meaning comfort gal away and maybe pay her off to lie that they’d done it: for his hand’s sake.
After all, if she was willing to do this, was she even a nurse or was she someone Bucky dressed up in Red Cross arm bands like some sleazy fantasy? Gale didn’t think any of the nurses he’d encountered would be willing to go along with such a sordid “assignment.” Sure, some of them were -carefree. Indulgent. Easy, as the men sometimes called them before getting a stinging cheek that proved them wrong. But they were a proud bunch and they had earned it.
Rolling a toothpick in his cheek, Buck pondered these things while sat on the bench of a Goony Bird waiting for his nurse to hop into the cargo hold with him and off they’d go to Pelilu. The situation was made worse by the suspense of who it might be and the insulting foreignness of being on a plane but not piloting. It made Gale feel an odd sort of feeling close to self pity that he hadn’t felt in ages, not since he was a kid and the nostalgia of it wrung him out of all energy. He made himself sit on that metal bench motionless as the heat index rose on the tarmac and made up a fun little game involving trying to see if he could get his hands to stop tremoring for five seconds straight.
So far he’d lost his own wager each time. He told himself if he could make it to five seconds then the nurse Bucky had sent would be a gray haired matron and this really was just a sabbatical to lift boxes and breathe ocean air and get Gale to laugh at himself.
Then Maureen Kendeigh climbed into the hold and squeezed past their cargo of medicine crates and plopped down right next to him, leg bumping his and breathing like a race horse. “I have jogged here the entire way from administration.” she wheezed, tugging at the collar of her shirt where her glistening throat was bobbing in thirst. “Sorry I’m so late, Major. Am I late?”
It could have been Bucky sat next to him: the choice of phrasing was so familiar, the damnable ability to force forgiveness for tardiness with a single smile so predictable. Gale found dread knotting his stomach at the realization it would be her, even as a warmth spread all over him at her sweet presence that had the odd effect of steadying his hands despite the panicked fuzz of his brain at her proximity.
Oh he didn’t want this. No, no, no. He’d like to think of Maureen very much apart, apart from anything but her heroism, not her wide spread stance on the bench beside him or the idea of her dropping her knickers and making him think of Wyoming. He preferred her very much not attainable in the deeper ways and very much not what he saw himself with when all this was over. Whatever she and Doc Egan had was between them and he’d held it up like a shield to keep himself in check, a boy's code of honor about not encroaching on his friend’s girl. Even if said friend didn’t have the decency to make said girl “his” girl.
But to have Maureen dished up to him on a platter by John when John must have suspected some of Gale’s appreciation for her professional merits -it was somehow worse than any dressed up floozy or the easy new intern. He’d not be able to pay Maureen off without insulting her. Or outing Egan’s intent. Maybe she didn’t know. What if Gale spilled the beans and she was as harmless as himself? What if—
“God, Major, did you sleep at all?” Maureen’s steady fingers were gripping his expressionless face and suddenly turned him towards her, one thumb swiping a tender crescent in his under eyes.
Gale’s eyes seemed to forget blinking was a thing, they grew wide and stayed wide at her inspection and the sandy wind blowing in from the tarmac stung at them as they dried out. “No,” he found his voice and it came out more winded than hers, “you’re not late.” he lied.
Once they get to the island, touchdown and unload, there’s then three hours of driving around the pitted old warzone to the aid station. There’s more foliage the more they go, less mortar pitted earth, but the increasing tropical paradise surroundings put Gale on edge. Maureen drives them to their unexplored destination as confident and recklessly as Bucky would, little surprise there. Gale can’t help glancing at her with unabashed amusement for the way she keeps her pistol propped on top of the steering wheel with one grip, facing out like a top turret for their hood, while keeping the map balanced on her thigh.
He cradles his own BAR with loose arms, ready to use it. Sure they secured the island months ago, but still, not infrequently some Jap comes out of his hiding hole, a cave, or whatever fucking tree he resides in and surrenders. Or, conversely, some of them have charged with guns blazing or sword drawn, deciding to go out and a bang of glory and take with them whichever hapless American happens to be nearby. That Emperor worship shit ain’t happening on on Gale’s watch, and so Maureen gets to drive -she didn’t have to beg like that, he was going to let her- and he shoulders the duty of keeping his eyes peeled for the next bush becoming animate and running at them, pulled pin grenade in hand.
“Some relaxation.” he jokes as their jeep lurches into another crater. If it’s not the bomb pits it’s the massive roots crawling over the smashed earth the Marine Corps call a road.
“It’s a reverse strategy!” she informs, grin wide as a shark’s and Gale could almost draw a little pencil mustache above that top lip and pretend it’s Bucky torturing him thus -hey, that might be a good mode of thought to keep everything strictly professional- “Like when nothing else works, you kick the broken thing.” Gale politely ignores the urge to argue about being broken, that’s not her point… he hopes, “You’re all shook up,” she goes on, voice raised to be heard over the rev of her driving, “and calm hasn’t worked, so why not shake you up worse?!”
He squints at her, fully aware he isn’t being chummy like she is trying to be, knowing he’s being a stick in the mud but he’s dying under the uncertainty, chafing under the pretense. Does she know? Or does she not? Five times today he’s resisted the urge to slap her chest like he would Demarco’s and ask her levelly, man to man, if she knows. “If this doesn’t work then what?” he asks anyway, sober as hell despite the comedic jostling and even Maureen’s joviality dims in the face of his dour mood.
“Then we’ll have to get real unorthodox.” she replies, allowing something close to annoyance at his attitude to seep into her own expression and Gale refuses to pull his eyes off her.
Do you know? He wants to ask.
“Stop scowling at me and watch for Japs.” she snaps at him so suddenly and so heated he genuinely spooks and turns his body back towards their horizon.
It’s worse than he thought. Worse than he imagined on the times he lost the bet with his hands and let his mind go somewhere besides a practical joke from Bucky and a gray haired spinster nurse as his companion. The aid station is on the edge of the new camp, far off enough to be genuinely secluded from both sights and smells of the navy station. It’s a tiki hut, thatched roof and swinging mesh door and lovely little veranda and palm trees and waves lapping up the back steps.
It looks like the sorta place people advertise for honeymoons and Gale stares at it with a 100 yard stare once Maureen grinds the gears to park.
“Jesus.” he knows his mouth is curling in disgust and beside him Maureen huffs in disgust with him.
She jumps out of her side of the jeep, not a shred of amusement left on her face. Gale sits and stares and listens to the roar of surf and the clinking of the cooling engine.
“Not bad.” she grunts under the burden of a crate which Gale should be lifting if he could just make his legs work and his mind obey. “But I bet it’s gonna be a bitch to keep the gnats out though, so much foliage around.”
Her hips sway like a tantalizing pendulum when she jogs up the bungalow stairs, her waist somehow accentuated by the way her arms are lifted to keep the crate hoisted on her strong shoulder and Gale has the perfect seat to watch it. How did he never notice the lines on her before she was doing hard labor? Then he recalls, she’s mostly been in flight suits around him, he’s never seen her paired down to collared shirts and belted pants. How’d he never notice the lines on that gi-
“Don’t make me drive this thing in the surf to wake you up.” her slap on his listless forearm rouses him to realize she’s back out at the jeep, standing beside him looking at him as he sits here catatonic like the mental case he’s showing symptoms of being. “And take your jacket off, you’re gonna get overheated being so formal.”
“Are you in on it?” he snaps suddenly as she grins at him over his first crate. He can’t tell if she’s mocking him or not but he’s damn tired of it.
“In on what?” Her face falls.
He can’t do it. He just can’t do it and he hates himself for being such a coward. “This.” he chooses vagueness and it tastes foreign and awful on his tongue.
“It’s a week out of the cockpit in paradise, Cleven,” Maureen’s own expression holds back no disdain for his pissy attitude, “man the hell up.”
What Maureen, Gale and five other technicians had loaded into the jeep and it’s buggy in the course of two hours, takes the mere two of them close to four to unload. And that’s even with Gale keeping a rapid pace to his work like a sweating maniac, feverishly wanting to stop thinking for once. His jacket and shirt are thrown over the chairs that are actually provided as furniture in the place and Maureen’s tie lays discarded on the accompanying desk. The rooms are bare but there’s two beds in the bedroom with crisp sheets that have only a bit of pollen dusting them and there’s a desk, as mentioned, three chairs in the main room and Maureen insists they can use crates for a table.
The back room is for the actual medical aid, and Maureen insists nothing gets moved into it until she can sanitize the whole place. So they stack the boxes in the main room and in the bedroom and when the sun gets lower they’re relieved to find there’s some dubious provisions for electricity in the place.
“I can get it to work.” Gale decides as Maureen tries flicking the light switch ten times as if to see if the bare bulb will grow a will of its own and turn on for her. It reminds him so much of Bucky’s brand of idiocy that Gale almost forgets himself and reaches out to swat her hand away from the futile flicking.
“Ok, then you do that while I keep unloading.” she insists, “Won’t be able to do anything if it’s pitch dark in here.”
So Gale drags a chair over and begins to fiddle with the wires tacked to the ceiling, risking electrocution so Maureen Kendeigh can see her way around as she tromps past him again and again in the same path with yet another crate.
He’s good with his hands. Excellent, in fact, judging by how one bulb flickers then stays steady, then another and another until the inside of the bungalow is aglow with cozy light: enough light for Maureen to appreciate his sweat soaked singlet and the way it rides up his belly when his arms are up and how it’s bright enough for her to scrub the exam room effectively when laying in a room with an insomniatic Gale Cleven gets to her at 3:00 am.
As it surely will. God! -the man is as impossible as he is beautiful, and while she doubted she’d manage it with him before, the sheer amount of fury she feels towards him right now leaves no doubt. She’ll shake him up. Like a Fuckin’ Martini. And he doesn’t have to like it, probably won’t, but they’ll both feel better after. “In on it” -he’s got the gall to ask but not the balls to spell it out, she can’t abide a quasi gentleman and so far Gale Cleven’s been nothing but the genuine article. Until now, now when he can’t accept certain human things about himself like fatigue or attraction, and he takes it out on her with a sullenness belonging to a much older man.
Maureen’s fine with that, she thinks as ogles the glowing golden skin of his sheened shoulders on one of her passes with a crate, she can take her mad out on him, too. And she’s got a lot of it. More than John Egan was ever able to lick away.
By 15:00, and some change to the second hand, Gale Cleven was still awake. Little surprise there, not to him, but even though it didn’t matter he found himself thoroughly annoyed and taking it out with a lethal glare at the vague gray ceiling, lit by a massive moon over the ocean. Wire and chairs but no curtains -an oversight about the furnishings. It wouldn’t have mattered, he knew that, and still the racket Maureen was making put his teeth on edge. It wasn’t Benny’s snoring or John’s drunken mumbling but it was a consistent *swoosh, swish* of industry that had Gale feeling a mixture of guilt and determination to keep lying here while she scrubbed.
It had not occurred to him she might’ve needed this break, too. Such as it was, effective as it was not proving. He knew she’d seen some combat in the beginning at Manila, maybe even worse than Iwo but long hours doing what she was doing now, where she was doing it, was no joke.
The urge to get up and help her was strong but then, so was the crippling fear of being around her in the dead of night and inviting any more of the bossy familiarity she’d tucked him into bed with. A magnesium capsule! She’d made him take three of the maternity horse pills and told him to calm the hell down as if he didn't have ample reason to be on edge with her laying a foot away on another bed, stripped down to her cotton slip. Of course Gale would cite war horrors if anyone asked why he couldn’t sleep but to be frank, he wasn’t sure why he wasn’t managing it these days and it had started awhile ago. Before Maureen Kendeigh glowed sweaty and luminous in the moonlight while gripping his cheeks and puckering his protesting mouth and plopping pills on his lolling tongue.
Thinking of it made his face flame with embarrassment for such a childish resistance. But god, her nursley familiarity sent a cross signal to his brain each time she helped herself to his flesh and no amount of berating himself while sweating in these rough sheets could dislodge the reaction. Closer to fifteen hundred than was remotely chivalrous, Gale threw off his sweat soaked bedding and tromped into the glow of light outside their bedroom, shuffling blearily into the little exam room. He faltered for a brief ten seconds at the doorway watching her undulating movements with sponge in hand and knees on the floor, white slip clinging like a second skin from the sweat.
He felt the sudden medical urge to lick her like the cattle back home lick at the salt block, a strange way of quenching thirst. Was ninety two hours without sleep considered genuine grounds for insanity? He felt like maybe he should be keeping a diary of these fevered thoughts to report back to John and see if he needed to get turned in. This wasn’t horniness, this was salt cravings. Yeah, yeah that’s what it was.
“You hypocrite.” he felt emboldened to tease and his voice came out rough and lower than even he expected, the disuse of laying there for ages taking a toll.
Maureen looked up like she’d been spooked herself, a slip and stall of her scrubbing, hair hanging about her face so unprofessionally he realized he’d never seen it in such…disarray. “Oh, the baby’s awake.” she grinned back and he felt an indulgence settle in his gut for her he didn’t know existed, “I see my magnesium capsules were a cure all.”
“Oh yeah, knock a horse out.” he agreed derisively.
“Your eyes are droopier.” she found a silver lining and as if reminded of the grit in them, his large fists came up and rubbed them meanly.
Like a little boy, she thought, watching him in the harsh light of the bare bulb, warm wood all around him the same color as all that sweaty skin and those skivvies hanging onto the lithest set of hips she may have ever seen. Looked as if one deep breath of that lean belly and the fabric would be goners, slipping down to the floor dramatically like a woman’s pantyhose in those unfortunate comics where that’s always occurring just when she wants to cross a busy street. Maybe if she could make him belly laugh-
She wished she knew how. She wondered if he knew how.
“Got another Sponge?” he asked and she was reminded why she liked him so much.
“Top crate, there, left, there that one.” She directed him with jerks of her chin until he was at the right one, “I’m using antiseptic.” she warned.
“I know,” he answered, dropping to his knees beside her and making use of her bucket to dunk his sponge, “smell’s been givin’ me a headache.”
Maureen’s mouth twitched at his tired grumpiness, more endearing now he was still putting effort into being near the caustic shit and the way his golden hair flopped on his forehead with his scrubbing movements. If his hips were that fluid, that rhythmic in cleaning a floor, how much more could she teach him to be—“Yeah, I’m sure it’s the anti-septic giving you a headache.” she snarked.
They ate sandwiches he’d gotten from the navy camp’s mess on the back porch, letting the sea water lap at their feet. A little stale but it was a much needed breakfast and Gale brought fresh water back, too, and a report that they were nice fellas and entirely too undressed for her to ever go see. That suited her fine, they’d be a pest if they knew a woman was up here and personally speaking she only needed one man for company, crate lifting, and doing the job well. And she rather had her heart set on it being Gale Cleven. Especially now she got to stare at him under the bright morning sun with a tropical breeze and more skin on display than at a swimsuit contest. He’d put on a singlet, as if to mark that a day had begun even if they hadn’t slept the night, but that was promptly sweat soaked and tiny nipples were pebbling under it from the breeze.
“Did they ask if a nurse came with you?” she pressed him between bites.
“Yeah.” he swallowed his bite thickly and licked at the mayo collecting at the corner of his mouth with typical precision, “And I lied.”
“Well, well,” she cooed, making him roll his eyes, “how’d that feel?”
“I have lied before.” he balked.
The look he gave her was both thunderous and remincent and she repented that line of questioning, used to distinguishing in her patients whether a wound was from wartime or stemmed from childhood. “Well who’d you say came with?” she asked.
“A technician.” he mumbled, blushing for some reason.
“Mm, someone nice and hairy and stinky-“
“Stop.” he begged.
“-not anyone they’d wanna meet.”
“I did it for you!”
“-if that makes you sleep at night, Cleven.” she humored him and like lightning, the back of his hand had flicked out and thumped her on the sternum, hard.
“Shit!” Maureen clutched the place, more in surprise than pain although he’d walloped her good and well.
“Shit!” He parroted in mortification, holding his hand like it was an offensive weapon.
“What was that for?” she laughed, “Do I remind you that much of Benny? Are you missing him that bad? Is that who you pretended was with you up here? Huh? Huh? Benny Demarco, now that’s a beauty to hide under a bushel-“
She was crowding him in on the steps and he was teetering towards falling off, too alarmed at his own outburst to trust his instincts now to shove her off without causing harm -and she knew it. She pressed her advantage and crawled over him with her teasing comments about Demarco until his long body had bowed so far away from her’s it was levitating and then toppled predictably into the surf.
“Fuck it’s cold!” he wheezed out as the embrace of the old pacific drenched him and rolled him about at her feet for a few delightful moments before he got his footing and rose, shaking his hair out of his eyes and grabbing for the steps.
“Sea bathing was in doctor Egan’s regimen.” she informed remorselessly before extending a merciful hand to help him up. He was slippery and shiny as an eel coming up and the grip of his hand was as strong as she expected. And still she found it intoxicating, the duality of him as he stood there pouting and bitchy over being cooled off. “Stay right there baby, I’ll get you a towel.” she patted his chest, right where he’d smacked hers, and went inside.
“I’m not your baby.” She heard him holler to her through the door-less porch. “I’m not your baby.” he reiterated vehemently but lower again when she came out with the towel.
“Yes you are.” she argued, “For this week you’re my baby, whether that’s a literal infant or not is your choice -and don’t start arguing, you’ve got to stop it, no one’s making you do a damn thing.” she insisted, hand raised and his mouth closed satisfyingly as a result, “You’ll be my baby. I know you already had a baby, no? Our baby? Shared her with ten other men, that’s generous of you-“
“-Ensign!-“
“-so I’m not gonna be your baby. You’ll be mine and you can find me something to be for the week.” she watched closely as recognition of her logic began to dawn and settle on him, “I could be anyone. I could be Benny Demarco, for instance. If that’s who you wanna lay next to.”
Gale didn’t speak for a long while, eyes off to the side watching the surf lap at the steps and she was still standing there, holding his unused towel. “Who do you want me to be?” he asked finally and his grave perception just about winded her in its raw honesty.
“You.” she replied honestly, “Whichever version of you made it here with me.”
“An infant -a baby.” he scoffed and she was suspicious those eyes were watery. And too delayed for it to be from the salt.
“My baby.” she replied, “Never had one before.”
“With respect ma’am, that’s Bullshit.” he argued in a fierce hiss, “I know you have, with John and -and-“
“I’ve been somebody’s,” she clarified, “but I think I’ve grown out of that. You’ll be my baby, huh? It’s not marriage, Cleven, it’s a week in paradise and hopefully some shut eye, too. So do you want me to be Benny?”
Those watery eyes let one single tear go trickling down his pink cheek alongside the rivulets of ocean water dripping from his hair and Maureen had never felt a single thing heat her up quite like it. “No,” his chuckle was thick and he sniffed, “not Benny. Maybe uh, God, I dunno, I’ve never had anyone.”
“Then we can make it up entirely.” she was pleased by the idea of not being a stand-in, although god knows she and John could sympathize more about the need for that than anyone. “We’ll be castaways.” she suggested, sitting back down on the porch now the confrontation was dwindling and in full confirmation of her suspicions, he sat again beside her without fuss.
“Marooned.” he disagreed, chin resting on his hands and a boyish tug pulling up the corner of his lips. “Something insane you did landed us here.”
“Mm, took liberties with the captain's daughter, perhaps?” she teased, daring to run a finger along those golden shoulders and collect a few salt drops. He shuddered under her but stayed put.
“I’m not playing fair maiden for you.” he retorted but his eyes were fond.
“Mm, I’ll believe it when I see it.” Maureen was still impossible and Gale felt his gut burn in a bizzare sort of drive to prove her wrong. He’d hardly ever felt this even with all the jokes from the boys, not even with all the temptations from the girls, it just hadn’t seemed something that needed proving. Every flea and salmon could do it, he never doubted when he got married he could manage it credibly enough.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jones.” his voice sounded like he’d come to a decision and Maureen squinted at his profile until it clicked.
“I’ve never been married before.” she observed breezily.
“And I never planned on being married for just a week.” he replied.
“Isn’t there a film about this?” she asked, “Cary Grant gets stuck on an island and he marries his castaway but then they get rescued and there’s a first wife?”
“Yeah, I think so, actually.” he thumbed at his bottom lip in contemplation and Maureen found it endlessly distracting, along with the bird song and the ocean crash and the sunshine.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jones.” she agreed then, settling back on her elbows to stare up at the sun and let it add a few freckles, “And when it’s over and you’re rescued, I’ll be the better woman and let Our Baby have you.”
“You’ll always be the best of women, Maureen.” he sounded like the admittance took every fiber of his resolve to say, but she’d heard it before in his voice weeks ago when she was patching him up.
If a tear slipped out the corner of her shut eyes and down a sun warmed cheek, she wasn’t going to make a deal of it, not until she felt his finger catch it tenderly before it dropped from her jaw and rolled it back up.
She felt her lip wobble traitorously and perhaps there were more tears planning to follow and betray her but the shivering shock of his full lips, pressed to her bare shoulder, stemmed the flood. Maureen held her breath and kept her eyelids sealed, an orange glow of sunshine behind them as all her senses attuned to the drag of his caresses up to the juncture of her shoulder, the press of his body next to her on the porch boards, the suspenseful absence of his hands. They were soft as marshmallows, those lips, and a stray tip of his tongue caught her clavicle as he worked his way up a path that almost seemed premeditated, as if he’d thought of doing this a million times but held back. Now he allowed himself and the assured intimacy of his mouth made her body heat soar almost beyond her endurance as he crept up her throat and onto her cheek.
A kitten lick to that tear track down her cheek and Maureen was whimpering from something else entirely, breaking ranks and turning her head to gaze at him, nearly stunned by how close he was, how alive, how beautiful, how blue. There were his hands now, one propped beneath her shoulder, the other cupping her cheek. Her lips were tingling with anticipation by the time he’d lowered his face far enough and brushed her mouth with his.
Maybe he’d done his fair share of kissing the girls back home goodbye, or maybe it was a talent given along with this impossible lips, or perhaps she’d wanted it so long that the final having of it sent Maureen spiraling with something oddly like obsession.
Kissing was enough for the longest time, the shore sounds and the squawking of ocean birds and the feel of Gale Cleven laying more and more atop her as his tongue met hers and danced. She scratched the back of that tanned neck like she dreamed of doing a dozen times, little scritches to his hairline that had him sagging against her kisses to the point of crushing.
She allowed herself the liberty of running her hands along his lean sides, taking in the graceful taper of his waist, the dip of his back, the sopping wet waistband of his briefs. She wondered if this is how men feel with a young girl, when there’s so much loveliness one wants to maul it and mark it and watch it respond. Anything to make him moan again into her mouth, wrenched and helpless and appreciative of her all at once, anything for him to hump his hips against her thigh in a manner so mindless he didn’t seem himself at all.
When he pulled away, dazed and winded from his own exertions, he seemed to have left behind all his inhibitions, stark need written on his face and only some doubt of what he was allowed yet remaining. “Are we gonna?-“ he trailed off, raspy voiced and trembling with suspense.
“Going to what?” she couldn’t abide it any longer, his demureness, “Say your mind, Cleven.”
“Do it.” he let out with a wince.
“Well I don’t know, Mr. Jones, you tell me. Are we gonna?”
Gale huffed and threw his head back, trying to regain some sense of mind, lip savagely pulled between his teeth. “Yeah. We are.” he decided.
“Then finish your sandwich.” she patted his waist and pushed him off.
“I can’t!” he begged with a groan from where he’d spilled out on the porch like a boneless dummy. “Not now.”
“You’re gonna need it, the water too, trust me on this.”
“Are we gonna -make love? Or go for a forced march?” he protested but lifted the canteen to his lips anyways when she gave him a look and proceeded to drink it dry.
“How would you know the difference?” she teased and he had the good humor to roll his eyes. If all went according to Egan’s plan, they oughta hibernate for twelve hours of sleep afterwards and she wanted him hydrated and ready for that. Maureen had a plan of her own, which certainly might lead to such a sleep, but it also involved not getting off that boy for love of God or money until he was as useless as a wet rag and the impertinent gnawing between her own legs was replaced by a good ache.
Cleven was staring at his sandwich remorsefully, “I can’t get this down, Maureen.” he declared with sudden finality and then, without preamble he threw it into the sea. “C’mon, Mrs Jones.” he held out his hand for her as he stood up, something close to an excited grin taking over his face.
He was so confident now, having come to a decision, and Maureen found herself naturally bending to his direction, placing her hand in his large palm and allowing him to haul her to her feet as gently as a dance partner. “We’ve got a bed.” she reminded blissfully into another kiss, anchored to his face by the persistent hands snarled lovingly into her salt tousled curls: this hair Maureen, this hair drove me mad.
“And we’re gonna use it.” he agreed, walking her backwards up the porch until he feet were skidding over the threshold, his tongue still sucking her own.
She stopped him there with a hand to the willowy plane of his belly, a regulated, principled woman to the last, and snapped the still soaked waistband of his drawers. “Off, you’ll make the sheets wet and sandy.”
Their sweat would accomplish dampening them enough in this muggy heat, they didn’t need sand and ocean water to boot. Maureen ducked beneath his arm and went back out to grab the discarded towel.
“I don’t want a trail of drips on our clean floor.”
Gale smiled softly at the usage of “our” -it felt right somehow, to share things with her. They’d been at it for some time, it came naturally like it had with Bucky and the few other boys who he knew would be something special and unlike anything else after this. It was a little bittersweet to know he was living the best days of his life, right here and now, enviable, irretrievable moments of raw connection slipping away with each drip, drip, drip onto the threshold. It was a heartache in the making and it was a spur for the moment. Back home they’d never understand, and any old observer would see nothing unique, but Gale could allow himself the rightness of sharing just one more thing. Why not cement it fully, irrevocably, as the closest brush he’d ever come to with another soul- he’d asked himself the same with Bucky, knew it was already an established fact.
Maureen’s lips were warm where they pressed to his back, the space between his shoulders, towel held to his waist. “You’re not shy of me, are ya, baby?” she whispered in his ear, thumbing at the still worn briefs.
He could feel himself this past hour hardening and softening, so many times in the space of so many minutes he was dizzy with it, the way his brain would have the upper hand and then, suddenly no, it all rushed south. Which now left shyness as the only real excuse for the way he burned and shrank and burned and shrank in turn at each of her touches.
“You gonna give me the towel?” he asked instead.
“Once it’s safe to do so.” she replied primly, in her familiar nursing voice, and he hated the shudder that tore through him. She stepped under his arm again, around him and into the house, and stood in the shade of the it with the towel spread invitingly, tauntingly. A whole yard and a half between then and she’d decreed no drips past the threshold. Gale’s cheeks burned as did his eyes, smarting with brimming tears from an odd frustration he’d only ever felt over a botched mission, an anger at not being able to bomb his target and make it worthwhile, a petty frustration he always felt before the cold rage of lost men fully registered.
Futile tears: Gale yanked the skivvies down and stepped out of them efficiently.
Maureen wasn’t smiling at him from the shade anymore, not even a smirk, she looked hungry. She looked like Bucky, taking in “a view.” Gale didn’t know ladies ticked that way -or maybe they didn’t, maybe only Maureen did. The blush in his cheeks ran down his chest and spilled onto his belly and his fists clenched without thought.
“When the man of the house,” Maureen was reciting some inane pamphlet she no doubt did not heed or else they’d never be here, “respects the whims of the lady in small matters, he will find the lady more submissive to issues of larger stake such a-“
Gale made a dash at her, to shut her up, and she fled from him to the bedroom, feet smacking on the hardwood and cotton slip fluttering up her thighs -his towel with her.
“I want you bare.” he told her when he had her, struggling in his arms before the bed, a lush friction where he pressed tightly behind her.
“Then sit,” she sounded genuinely breathy, trapped to him and he had never heard her like that before, it made him want to hold fast, “and I’ll make your dreams come true.”
It was just a slip, no garters and no braisere or girdle, yet still Gale sat himself on the bed and Maureen bit her cheek to keep from laughing at the modest way he deposited the towel on his lap, covering what she’d been eyeing and thanking her luck for. A cock as pretty as his face -now if she could just make it stand up fully.
“You ready?” she deferred to him as she stood there before the bed, being looked on with all the reverence and trepidation of a goddess by this seated acolyte.
“Please,” he nodded furiously, “please show me.”
It felt a little wrong to expose oneself in front of such an angelic being, curtainless windows throwing in the sun on him all golden and untouched, white scratchy sheets and white draped towel making it a bower of innocence for a brief moment. It also felt right, to throw off everything but what they’d been born with. Off went rank, obligations and expectations, as easily as dragging the slip over her head.
She tossed the article of clothing behind her for good measure -and dramatic effect- then noted with satisfaction the bleary eyed comprehension of her charms from Gale Cleven where he sat with his mouth hung so slack he was liable to drool.
“Incredible.” he muttered, husky and a little slurred, his hand raising without his own volition to beckon her closer, a plea, command.
Maureen swayed on her feet, nearer and nearer until she was standing above him, between his parted legs and she shuddered as he laid that broad palm on her hip and dragged it up her side in an admiring swath, thumbing at her belly and catching her ribs in his hold.
“Those flight suits of yours, they don’t…they don’t let show the half of it.” Gale declared, mesmerized, face hovering closer and closer until his lips were pressing against her flesh, right under her sternum, his forehead pressed to the underside of one pendulous breast, nuzzling as he became aware of that, bunting like a calf at her breast with his face, gone silly with access.
“Whadda ya think?” she giggled, the silliness of Gale Cleven gone stupid over making yams jiggle being the exact sort of thing that made life worth living, and being a woman exquisitely satisfying.
“They’re so goddamn soft.” he moaned around a bit of the underside, still hadn’t worked his way to a nipple. He seemed too preoccupied with their give and bounce to make a more calculated use of them. Maybe if men hadn’t been told what to do with them, they’d do what Gale Cleven was doing and rub their face against them and let them rest on their foreheads. There was a charm to this ignorance as he licked the salty sweat from their undersides with a surprisingly brave tongue.
The clumsy misuse was oddly effective for Maureen, what Gale lacked in skill he made up for in unstudied appreciation and nothing got her quite so ready as being appreciated to the point of foolishness. Her first conquest had been a boy at school who hadn’t minded tripping in his track shoes, day after day, to try to catch up to her on her bicycle, just to give her a flower or trinket. He was laughed at for his devotion until he broke the school track record next year, and Maureen was sure to remind him of her role in his success. They’d soon found a mutually beneficial reward system and Maureen had adopted that attitude as a maxim for the future, her dates and conquests may have been many but each of them in their own way had been appreciative -or else she was jumping out the window, damn the twelve foot drop out the dormitory.
No one, however, had looked quite so gifted by her mere existence as Gale Cleven did while he clutched at her hips and smushed her flesh between his hands like it were some fine dough and he was an artisan.
Discreetly, and it was easy to be so with his face buried in her bosoms, Maureen glanced between them at the tool she had such hopes for and found it, unsurprisingly, twitching and dribbling against his thigh, half hard but flapping about like a fish on dry land, the discarded towel no match for its movement. He’d need a hand, literally and metaphorically, and as she raked her nails through his blond curls and directed his slick mouth to a nipple, she felt him sag even further into her hold. Maureen weighed her next step carefully, trying to tamp down her own wants. She’d need to be sure but slow, careful not to spook him, or antagonize or embarrass.
She wondered if he even realized the same banged-up-head condition that sent him out here was most likely responsible for the jitters that kept him flopping. She wasn’t so conceited as to assume he’d not bedded a woman yet out of mere dysfunction, Cleven was a man of principle and strict notions regarding how the world should be, and he wasn’t one to build those notions on passing medical conditions.
“You like ‘em?” Maureen teased him, shocked at how hoarse her own voice had gone in the interim.
“Gonna make a home in here.” he mumbled in the affirmative, slack grin molded to the valley between them, blue eyes wide as the skies outside peering up at her.
“Got a job for you, baby.” she murmured, thumbing at the scar on his cheek.
“What’s that Mrs. Jones?” his voice alone made her mad with need, as did the saucy turn of his mouth so wonderfully foreign she didn’t know how she’d control herself until he was ready.
“Need you to lick a little landing strip, right here.” she ran her finger along the somewhat tacky skin between her breasts, sweat and his sloppy kisses having partway done the job already.
“What for?” Gale asked, hushed and curious.
“You’ll see soon enough.” she recalled how effective her nursing voice had been on him, and pulled it out now it seemed beneficial.
She had been right, with only a hesitant spark of aggravated defiance, Gale dipped his head and stuck out that pink tongue, lapping a swath up between her breasts as directed, flaming eyes locked on hers as she shivered from the breeze on spit slicked flesh.
“Again.” she told him, and his hands came up to hold her breasts apart as he did it again, and again and once more under his own direction until it was shiny and messy and his nose was gleaming, too.
“What’s it for?” He demanded once more, pink cheeked and swallowing hard as his mouth had dried out from his efforts.
“I told you, silly,” she replied casually, “it’s a landing strip.” and with as little fuss as possible she got to her knees before he’d registered the absence of her standing above him. “Gale, let go of the damned towel.”
She held in a laugh of delight at the tortured color he had grown to, veins running like so much ivy up and down him and a vibrant pink tip that matched his lips. Maureen wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to look him in the face again without thinking of this drizzling little pink mushroom.
“You oughta count your blessings, Gale Cleven, it was a close call, my coming along at all.” she informed him soberly while his mind visibly vacated his body at the repeated sighting of his sputtering cock emerging from between the pillowy press of her breasts, “It was pretty touch and go there for a bit, I was quite sure in fact, that Bucky was gonna help himself to this assignment.”
“Maureen!” Gale thundered, except his usual imposing ire was much diluted by his quivering belly and hoarse voice.
“What?” she brushed off his scandalized displeasure with a grin, feeling cocky herself as he hadn’t flagged on her in minutes and was beginning to gush in earnest, “Bucky loves the beach.”
“Sure, Maureen.”
“In the end he decided I had what it takes.” she went on conversationally, ignoring the inhuman sounds that came out of him when she casually spit on his tip, the better to work her lips around him, “These.” she clarified, pressing her breasts to his thighs as she wrapped her mouth around him and sucked.
“Fuck, hell, Maureen! Sorry, sorry, oh fuck!” -not even Gale Cleven had expected his hips to fly up that hard and fast, knocking on the back of her throat.
She laid her hands on his squirmy hips and did her best impression of a Listerine gargle round his tip, which sent a shudder through him so strong she thought he might’ve climaxed already.
“Maureen, Maureen come on, get up here, please.” now he yanked at her hair, desperate for once and that was a pleasure to hear.
“What baby?” she pulled off him.
“Gotta kiss you.” he told her firmly, and hauled her bodily up by her armpits, rolling her under him in the bed.
Kisses -sure, Gale, kisses.
He was moaning atop her, wiry and flexing his hips against her, wriggling to get between her thighs and she let him, hungry and expectant when he slotted easily in place. He pressed his lips to hers ardently, then reared back in shock at the taste of his own precum in her mouth and on her lips.
“Salty.” he whispered as if to himself before licking his lips and going back for more. “What do I need’to do?” he whispered urgently against her mouth as she rocked against him and he rocked back until they’d frustrated each other thoroughly with mere caresses.
“Put it in, my baby.” she whispered back.
“First though, don’t I need to-to do- something? Something first?” he could barely think straight but he’d heard enough talk about this, about gentlemen and the necessity of some form of chivalrous preparation. The way discipline and intuition set apart an average pilot from an excellent one. Bucky had talked a lot about getting girls ready, making them squirm, revving them up, for all his apparent disinterest during the topic, Gale had been listening.
“You’ve done it already, Mr. Jones.” she giggled, reaching between them to drag him more firmly through the wanton swamp he’d made of her. “I’m ready, I’m so ready.”
“Oh fuck, s’wet.” he mumbled the obvious before willingly letting her guide him in, his body following her tug like his cock were a leash.
“Jesus,— Gale!” Maureen choked as he bottomed out in a sudden plunge, shocked at the stretch despite the gauging of his size. “You’re so deep, oh baby you’re a big one aren't ya.”
“You ok?” he whimpered, shuddering on top of her again and again at the incomparable feeling of being inside another’s body.
“Oh yeah, yeah I’m fine,” she gasped, “Hurts so good, you can move, baby.”
“You’re so warm.” he sounded close to worshipful he was so drunk off her, and Maureen spared a moment to smirk at the fate of man: come tearing their way out of a woman to begin their lives only to spend the rest of it trying to and needing to get back in.
He did try to move, she’d give him that. And while Maureen was more than half expecting it, still, it was mildly comical to see the confusion flash across his blissful face right as the buildup was snatched from him and he was suddenly shaking into the real event before he knew it, betrayed and euphoric all at once. The muscles in his belly and back and neck seized and his hips lunged in a series of uncoordinated pumps and she could read the panic in his eyes right before they rolled back -a begrudging admittance that this was nothing at all like the steady predictability of his hand.
“That’s it baby, that’s my baby, feel nice, huh?”
Gale didn’t answer her, too occupied whimpering with a taut throat and jaw clenched so tight he could snap a hinge like that. He was shaking worse than before when the spasms subsided and the tiniest pressure to his sweat slicked neck had him buckling to lay pressed against her, half senseless from the force of his release.
Maureen had always loved this part of sex, the pliable, bewildered, smushed man atop her like she’d sucked his soul out, when he’d rendered it up to her so willingly, so desperately, forcefully even, chasing his own eventual weakness. Long limbs aligning on top of hers, the hot pants of winded breath against her breasts, the hands listlessly holding on wherever that had last tried to grip and control her. The view from above with Gale Cleven was something additional, beautiful and glistening with bronzed swaths of sun exposed skin and the pale whites of his thighs and ass making a perfect little outline of absent shorts, his golden hair tousled beyond salvaging and that luscious mouth, drooling like a babe’s.
“So this is what Bucky’s been talkin’ about.” he mumbled into her breast, cheek smashed and enunciation shot to hell.
Maureen laughed in disbelief, “Thinking of him even now? Really, he’s going to be impossible if we tell him.”
“Just sayin’, now I know.” he defended, lazily rubbing his partly softened cock inside her with a shimmy of his hips that was quickly followed by an overly sensitive mewl.
“You don’t know anything, Angel boy.” she insisted and Gale raised his head at that, sour that she’d still contradict him after thirty seconds of vigorous pumping. “Let me see your hands.”
He had some trouble recalling where he put them but eventually he found them under her hips and withdrew them from their warm shelter to present them, warily. “Well, damn.” he muttered to himself, somewhat shocked by just how badly the shakes had worsened. “Looks like that treatment backfired.”
“More of a dose dependent case, I’d say.” Maureen corrected and circled each wrist with her hands and brought them up to her lips to kiss.
Gale’s face smoothed at her softness and a shy smile lit up his bleary eyes while she felt a twitch of his spent cock deep inside her, swishing about the mess he’d made like a dog’s tail after getting pats. “You have the most beautiful hands.” she informed him earnestly and balls deep inside her she watched as one single innocuous compliment sent him scarlet with a blush. “And they’ll be yours again soon.” she promised.
His gentle expression and bright red cheeks crumpled rather suddenly and before either of them seemed to expect it, fat teardrops had escaped the blue of his eyes and rolled down the crimson flesh of his face.
“Goddamnit.” he cursed hoarsely, in an absolute rage at himself, regaining his hands from her grip insistently to bring them up to his own face, hiding from her behind harsh fists that rubbed at his wet eyes like he could grind the grief and weariness out between his knuckles.
Unbalanced as he was without hands to support him, and legs gone jellied from his fast fading pleasure, Maureen chose to capitalize on it as a nurse would a brief state of insensibility to move a patient to a cleaner cot. Remorselessly she pressed at his shoulder and lifted their still joined hips until he tipped over, rolling onto his back beneath her. “We’ll have none of that.” she told him with loving adamance from her new perch, prying his hands away and pressing them to the sheets beside his head. “The hiding, I mean.” she clarified and he looked all of hardly past twenty laying there with wobbly lips and wet eyes unobscured, “I’m a very great proponent of crying,” she went on conversationally which confused him more but kept him too preoccupied to stifle his tears, “De-sanguination is still a highly esteemed practice, you know, it means to drain the body. One type of draining often triggers the other.”
“You gonna start bleeding me?” he asked wryly.
“Oh, maybe, you’d look so pretty all streaked up.” she teased and ran a sharp thumbnail over his pinned wrist.
Well, that got him hard again. Fascinating.
“You know what’s got your hands like this-“ she whispered softly, “-probably the same reason you flop, too.”
“Huh.”
“Pretty common.” she assured.
“Quit tellin’ me I’m common.” He growled, tickling her sides and she grabbed his hands, pinning them again playfully.
“Nothing common about you, sweet baby.” she swore, leaning down to kiss him and enjoying the way he met her strongly, surely, “Gale, can I move?” she asked, half strangled by the taut string of need coiled in her belly, tugged to madness by the bulk of him still resting limply inside.
“Move?” he was perplexed.
“I’m going to die if I don’t get some friction.” she whispered, somehow shy to admit that in the face of his innocent bewilderment, “God -please tell me someone has informed you women finish, too?”
“Bucky says they clamp up so tight you can’t help but blow.” Gale recited dutifully, “Which is what just happened, right?”
Maureen grinned wide and wicked before dragging her hips up till he was barely in, then plopping down into the cradle of his hips, making him let out a “oomph.”
“Maureen?” he questioned, half knowing already he had been mistaken but hell, to go again? “Maureen- I’ll die if we go again.”
“What a way to go.” she muttered, her pace atop him increasing as did the tortured gasps tumbling from his lips. His spunk was making terribly wet, lewdly sloppy sounds of suction each time she slammed down on his cock and the visual of her exerting herself on top of him was something so blatant and jiggly he could hardly endure the visual feast of it.
“Shit, shit I can’t-“ he growled while his trembling hands latched onto her hips in a grip that was anything but dissuading. “Maureen.” he begged her for…he knew not what.
“Come on Mr. Jones,” she clasped her hands around his face and aligned their noses, rubbing like a kiss with each movement of her lower body, “you’re not one to leave your missus needy, I know you’re not. Not when you’ve got such pretty hands-“
-a shudder from him.
“and a clever tongue-“
-a whine from him that sounded close to a wounded dog’s it was so lasting.
“-or a tool this capable.”
“Maureen.” he groaned.
“Baby, my baby.” she begged, “You’ve got what I need, come on, take me apart.”
Like he trusted himself for the first time since they began this endeavor, she felt his body bow up beneath her, his arm flexing strongly across her hips, his legs braced beneath her and a heavy hand clutching her neck, then he was driving up into her with a wild abandon she only ever hoped was simmering beneath that cool exterior. When she finished he hadn’t stopped, and Maureen found herself crying out like a feral thing into the hollow of his clavicle as the brutal pummeling went on, satisfaction drug out of her over and over in harsh ruts.
“That more like it?” he panted the harsher he grew, a hand around her jaw pushing her face away from his so he might see the damage he was doing.
“Yes, yes oh baby, yes!” she swore through clenched teeth, it had been too long and each blissful peak only aggravated her further, made her hungrier, that and the fact he was so proportioned as to be a constant delight just shy of pain, “Hell Gale, do ya hear us?” she gloated, propping herself back on his thighs to watch the shiny pink of him flash in and out of her wet sheath.
Mesmerized, Gale didn’t reply, but he dragged a hand up her belly and felt for the way it tensed at each intrusion, the span of his fingers an incredible thing across her skin. “Can’t believe you can take it, easy as that.” he marveled, his thumb straying and pulling apart her petals the better to watch.
“Thumb it right there.” she directed gently, reaching down to move his calloused finger over her bud, right above where he split her apart, “That’s it, ya feel that too, huh?”
“Fuck you’re tight.” his voice cracked and his eyes shot wide again.
“Are you -?”
“Maybe.” there was a wobble of blissed uncertainty in his voice until she stopped her movements and he let out a sob before he could catch it. “Maureen, please.”
“Please what, baby?” she was chuckling at him, pushing his hair off his sweaty forehead, “I let you-“ he pleaded, still thinking things worked that way, “-now I need, please Maureen...”
“Oh you can.” she assured and his face lightened but his eyes stayed wary, “But just know, I won’t be stopping.”
“What?”
“You remember how that feels, don’t ya baby?” she reminded, gently pushing him to lie back and beginning their movements anew, “So good you can’t stand it, so messy and easy for me, so tender and much for you?”
“Jesus.” he wheezed, his lean belly caving in with his heavy pants, but she felt him throbbing inside her and his pupils were large as saucers, “You’re as mean as Bucky.” he whined, voice gone high in panicked pleasure.
“Thank you, but really I’m not.” she laughed, gently thumbing away an errant tear that rolled down his cheek. “Not quite.”
“Maureen, please, please you’re too pretty!” he begged nonsensically even as his hips began to snap into hers, invigorated and forceful.
“Hold it Gale, try to hold it.” Maureen gasped, staring down at the prettiest face she’d ever seen as his brow began to furrow, “Or don’t, all the same to me.”
“I’m gonna flip you.” he swore and a few seconds of inaction passed, marked by the slam of her hips down onto his, and she thought he didn’t mean it until she gave him a daring look and suddenly she was careening backwards, head jolting against the sheets and body laid out firmly beneath him.
“Goddamn.” she swore at the way he hadn’t dislodged an inch during the whole maneuver, suddenly pressed just as deeply as before, his hips working like a piston and his hands tight and strong on her neck. “Goddamn baby. Oh goddamn that’s good.”
“S’good?” he begged her to repeat, some dizzying natural force propelling him harder and faster and needier.
“You’re so good.” she was adamant as she hung about his neck and locked her ankles in the small of his back. “You’re so good I’m - I’m -gonna-“
“What was that about holdin’ it?” he hissed, smile cocky and smug.
“Bull ain’t out of the gate yet Cleven,” she cautioned but her hips had begun to lift of their own accord, a tremble taking hold of her, “But I’m close, I’m, i'm real cl- oh God!”
“Come on sweet Maureen, wanna make ya -wanna do it for ya. Give ya what you need, Mrs Jones.” Gale’s hoarse and sweet nothings poured hot and breathy in her ear and Maureen found herself locked and gripping him before she knew it, moaning into his neck as he moved in and out, in and out as she’d only ever dreamed of.
When she cracked her dazzled eyes open again he was panting above her, the clink of his dog tags gently bumping her chin with each sway deeper, lashes batting in a golden flutter as he too began to lose himself, slower, more drawn out and yet every bit as desperate as the first time.
“Look at me baby, look at me when ya do.” she pleaded, gently gripping his chin as his mouth fell open in a series of little noises of effort that went straight to her belly grown hot and molten with the feeling of him spurting inside.
“Ugh, ugh, ugh,” Gale was working atop her in pained delight, lips so smeared and face so sweaty he looked like he might melt at any minute, “thank you, oh fuck, thank you, sweet Maureen.” he chanted low and dreamy, again and again until he drove in once more and stayed.
Those clear blue eyes fagged in an exhausted ecstasy, his head dropping impossibly further with each ragged pant until his face was barely hovering over her breasts, neck bent and forhead slowly pressing into the swell of them. His forearms gave out and those hands of his stayed trapped beneath her shoulder blades.
“Sleep Angel baby,” Maureen coaxed, hand cradling the back of his dear head to her breasts, feeling a low lazy peace settle over her at the feel of his dead weight plugging her up and the lovely wringing out she’d just endured, “let’s just sleep, dear boy.”
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Chapter 1: Welcome to Thorpe Abbott
Gale Cleven x Hope Armstrong (ofc)
Series Masterlist
This story is based on on the fictional portrayal of these men from the MOTA to series.
Summary: When their plane is diverted to Thorpe Abbott airfield Hope and Ruth’s lives change forever. These two brave nurses must face the trials and tribulations of war, as well as suffering the heartache that war inevitable brings with it.
Collab: A Pair of Silver Wings by @major-mads
The hum of the engine was the only sound in the C47 as it soared over the English countryside. The patients had finally settled, the morphine taking effect and bringing them some sense of relief. Hope slumped back into her seat with a sigh, smiling over at Ruth who looked as exhausted as she was.
“You looked tired,” Hope smiled at her friend who just sighed.
“It’s been a long day. I can’t wait to get back to base,” Ruth pushed her blonde hair out of her eyes, sighing again.
Hope nodded in agreement, peeling her sweaty green overalls away from her neck. “Hey Frank, how much longer have we got?” Hope called to one of the pilots.
“We’ve had to make a detour, Love. We’re heading to Thorpe Abbot airfield and we’ll evacuate the wounded to Thorpe St Andrews hospital. It’s not far now.”
Hope felt her heart flutter, her throat going dry as she slouched back against her seat.
“Hey Hope, what’s wrong?” Ruth leant forward, gripping Hope’s hand and squeezing it, her large blue eyes watching her curiously.
“It’s Hugh,” Hope muttered, her eyes a little teary but a smile on her lips. “My brother is stationed at Thorpe Abbott with the 100th Bomb Group. I haven’t seen him in so long.”
Ruth grinned at her, “so I’m finally going to meet this Hugh I’ve heard so much about.”
Hope laughed, patting her friend on the back, “you will but don’t get any ideas.”
The aircraft soared towards its destination, the occasional jolting and shaking on the metal bird bringing no fear to the flight nurses anymore. Once the ratting metal coffin struck the fear of God into them but now this was a peaceful ride.
Hope watched out the window as the lush, green countryside grew closer and closer.
“Hey Frank! Stop hugging the hedgerows for crying out loud. Don’t let the girl down before we’ve reached the field,” Hope called, grimacing as the trees seemed to grow ever closer.
“Who’s flying this bird, Armstrong? You or me?” Frank retorted, not looking away from the cockpit.
“Well maybe you could use some lessons in keeping the old girl airborne then. We’ll beat up the airfield at this rate.”
Ruth laughed, watching Hope argue with the pilot once more, “You know Hope, maybe you should have got your wings. Then you could be flying us instead of Frank.”
“You’ve got a good point there Ruth. Ya hear that Frank, Ruth wants me flying instead of you.” Frank’s reply was a muffled curse and both girls found themselves giggling in response. The plane tooled along for a while longer until it began to descend, rattling as it lost altitude and shaking its victims vigorously. The wheels touching down on the tarmac filled everyone with great relief.
“Well that was one ropey landing Frank, maybe I could give ya a few lessons?” Hope asked politely, battering her eyelashes at the pilot who just huffed.
“Shove off, Hope. Now get to it, your blood wagons are waiting.”
Hope cringed at the nickname the ambulances had been given, they were lifesaving vehicles transporting sick men, why make it sound so ominous?
Hope hopped down from the plane, instructing the stretcher bearers on which soldiers were in the worst condition. Between them, Hope and Ruth helped carry three wounded men to the ambulances when an obnoxiously loud voice called, “Well I’ll be damned!”
Hope spun round, her boots scuffing at the earth.
“HUGH!” Her brother laughed jovially, jogging over to them.
“Christ, I’ve missed you, Little Bird,” Hugh threw his arms around Hope’s shoulders, nestling his head into her neck as he always did. Hope couldn’t comprehend what was happening. She was finally in her brother's arms, finally reunited with him after so long. She gripped tightly onto the back of his uniform, burying her face in his chest. He smelt of smoke and engine oil just like he always did.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she murmured, just loud enough for Hugh to hear and he tightened his grip on her further. She could feel Ruth hovering awkwardly behind her and she turned to greet her friend, pulling out of her brother's arms.
“Ruth, this is my brother, Hugh. Hugh, this is my friend, Ruth.”
Ruth smiled sweetly, sticking out her hand to shake Hugh’s but instead he pulled her into a bear hug.
“Any friend of Hope’s is a friend of mine,” he assured Ruth and she smiled, her cheeks turning a deep red at the embarrassment of the situation.
“Hugh, put her down. Look you're making the poor girl blush,” Hope laughed, which only caused Ruth to blush harder.
“My apologies Ruthie, where are my manners,” he bowed down, taking her hand and placing a gentle kiss on her knuckles. Ruth stumbled over her words, quickly excusing herself and hurrying back towards their plane.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?” Hope groaned, shoving her brother playfully in the ribs.
“I don’t know, I’ve always considered myself to be rather charming,” Hugh protested, puffing out his chest in pride. “Come on I’ve got some friends I’d like you to meet.”
Hope nodded, spinning around to call Ruth to join. The blonde soon was walking back toward the group, clad in her fleece aviation jacket, and to her relief, without a rosy dusting on her cheeks.
“I still can’t believe all the airfields in England, you managed to land at this one,” Hugh laughed, throwing an arm around both girls' shoulders. “You two are in for a real treat.”
As they walked through the base, Hugh pointed out the various hard stands.
“See, right there,” he pointed at a few heavies. “That’s ‘Just-a-Snappin’, ‘Our Baby’, and ‘the M’lle Zig Zig’.”
“Where do you guys get these names, Hugh?” Hope laughed, her eyes trailing over each one’s elaborate nose art, along with some very proud-looking engineers and artists who had clearly put so much love into the bombers.
Shrugging his shoulders, Hugh sighed, shaking his head. “I couldn’t tell ya. What’s your plane’s name?”
“Just ‘The Angel of Death’,” Hope chirped.
Hugh stared at her for a moment before shaking his head. “Always with the dark humor, aren’t you, Hope.”
After hearing so much about the man from Hope, Ruth felt as if she’d known Hugh for years when in reality she’d only known him for a few minutes. She knew the stories of how the siblings played in the woods of Columbia, Missouri, exploring the famous rock bridge that brought hikers and tourists into the town. She knew of his love for the St. Louis Cardinals, and how he wore his battered and dirty Dizzy Dean jersey for a week straight after they won the World Series in ‘31 and ‘34. Maybe he’d heard so much about Ruth from Hope that he felt the same way.
Before they knew it, the trio reached their destination: his officer Nissen hut. They were long semi-circular metal huts, not known for their warmth or comfortability, but they were a soft place to land at the end of the day…which is a lot more than most young men of the time could say.
“Welcome to my humble abode, ladies,” he announced as they neared the building, holding out his arms in a ‘ta-da’ motion. “She’s not much, but she’s home.”
He began to open the door for them, but a voice in the distance stopped him.
“Charlie! No girls in the huts,” the voice called. “I told you that a few weeks ago.”
Turning toward the voice, Hope did a double take when she saw who its owner was. Approaching them was a tall, tanned blond, who wore a bomber jacket with his hair messily combed to the side. He walked with a swagger that instantly put a bad taste in Hope’s mouth.
She sighed to herself, thinking, ‘Why do all the cute ones have to be cocky?’
Hugh groaned, pointing at Hope. “Buck, come on, this is my-”
The man finally reached them, and Hope stopped herself from being captivated by his blue-green eyes.
“I don’t care who she is. You know the rules,” he interrupted, turning to the girls. “Sorry girls, but I think it’s time for you to go.”
Ruth cringed and side-eyed Hope, already expecting a snarky response to his comment.
“Well,” she paused, checking her watch for effect. “Seeing as we have patients in the infirmary, it actually isn’t time for us to go.”
It was then that he looked down at her upper arm, taking in the bright red and white medic band that adorned her uniform. Ruth could see the slightest show of remorse in his expression as his eyes rose back up to Hope’s.
“My apologies, ma’am. I didn’t know-”
Hope didn’t let him finish, cutting him off. “Maybe you should know all the facts before you make an assumption, Buck.”
“Hope!” Ruth hissed, trying to placate her friend, but the woman ignored her.
“See, other than my brother, this is why I can’t stand airmen. They’re cocky-”
Realizing the flaw in Hope’s argument, Ruth ran a hand down her face, secondhand embarrassment filling her. Just when she was about to interject, Buck beat her to it.
“Now hold on. Maybe you should know all the facts before you make an assumption, sweetheart.”
Hope’s mind ran rampant with frustration, and she stared up at him with contempt as he smiled cheekily at her. His eyes were locked on hers as they had a stare-down, neither wanting to be the first to give in.
“So,” Hugh cleared his throat in an attempt to break their silent battle. “Let me introduce you guys. Ladies, this is my squadron commander, Major Buck Cleven.”
Buck tilted his head slightly, not breaking eye contact with Hope. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” she replied dryly.
Ruth shook her head and sighed, amazed at her fellow nurse’s childlike stubbornness.
“And Buck, this is my sister, Hope, and her friend Ruth. They’re flight nurses with the 806th MAETS.”
Ruth raised a hand and waved with a quiet, “Hello,” and Hope felt a little satisfaction when the man’s eyes widened at the word sister.
Buck’s eyes left Hope for a moment to acknowledge Ruth, who stood beside her, with a nod and a smile. “Nice to meet you, ma’am.”
“You, too, Major,” she responded with a small grin. He then turned back to Hope.
“So, you’re the infamous little sister we’ve all heard about?” Buck chuckled, placing his hands on his hips.
The woman glanced over at Hugh, who wore a guilty expression. “All good things, I hope.”
“For the most part,” Buck chimed, a mischievous glint in his eyes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I know about your little escapade to Kansas City, and how–”
Hope’s eyes widened in disbelief that her brother had divulged her most embarrassing moment. “Hugh!!” she cried, smacking his chest. “You lying piece of crap! You promised!”
“It’s not like I thought you’d ever meet anyone here, Hope!”
Composing herself, she took a deep breath and sent Buck a tight-lipped smile. “It looks like you know a lot more about me than I do about you, Major.”
“It would seem so, Nurse Armstrong.”
Hope trying to change the subject to avoid further embarrassment pointed towards the line of B17s. “Which plane is yours then, Buck?” She raised her eyebrow as if she was trying to challenge him but Buck just seemed amused by the situation and laughed.
“That beauty on the end, Our Baby,” he smiled fondly at it and Hope wrinkled her nose at the ridiculous name. How could grown men go to war in a plane called ‘Our Baby’.
“Well that's stupid,” she blurted out before her brain could catch up with her mouth and she slapped her hand over it with a gasp. She could feel Ruth begging for the ground to open up so she could disappear from the situation, and on the other side of her Hugh just groaned. Buck, on the other hand, just shook his head with a smile.
“Suit yourself. She's a good girl. Never caused any trouble yet.” Hope just wanted the conversation to be over, she and her big mouth had often caused a lot of trouble and just like in Kansas City, she didn't know when to stop.
“Well, I think I'll stick to ‘The Angel of Death’ thank you very much.”
Buck snorted loudly, finding the whole situation rather humorous, including the look on Hope’s face.
“You're C47 is called ‘The Angel of Death’ and yet ‘Our Baby’ is funny,” he cocked his eyebrow, looking at her as though she was a small child who had just told him something unbelievable.
“Yes, she is actually. What's so funny about that?” Hope crossed her arms, glaring at him defensively. This cocky pilot wasn't about to insult their plane and get away with it.
Trying to contain his laughter Buck continued, “Well it's not like you're raining death down on the enemy from that thing, are you? At most, it's a troop carrier.”
Hope opened her mouth in horror, stepping forward, ready to defend their plane's honour at all costs. Buck stepped forward to meet her, their chests almost touching and he leant forward, his breath fanning over her face as he spoke. Hope wasn't sure if her heart rate had increased because of her anger or Buck’s proximity. Hope went to open her mouth again but Buck placed a finger to her lips, silencing her in an instant. His finger remained on her lip for a few more seconds before he remembered himself and stepped back, straining his jacket.
“All I'm saying is your plane isn't exactly an instrument of war. I can't imagine going up without weapons onboard. We’ve got thirteen 50-cal brownings and sometimes I feel that's not enough.”
This time Hope didn't feel the need to comment, still somewhat stunned by Buck’s previous action and why her heart was pounding in her chest.
“Well Buck, congratulations. You're the first man to render my sister speechless,” Hugh laughed, groaning as soon as Hope’s elbow connected with his stomach.
“And my face will be the last one you see if you don't shut up, Hugh,” Hope threatened her brother before smiling sweetly at Buck, who just grinned back at her, enjoying the sibling comradery.
“I could happily live without this idiot but Ruth on the other hand keeps me sane when we're in the air,” Hope ignored her brother's protest and gently elbowed her friend who was unusually quiet behind her.
“What?” The blonde asked, looking over at her like a deer in headlights.
“I said that we would go insane without each other up there.”
“Oh,” she sighed with a small smile. “You would probably kill Frank if I weren’t there.”
The group broke out in laughter and Hope was left wishing that Buck didn’t think she was so violent but he didn't seem phased by the comment.
“No, I can understand that. You need someone you trust when you're up there. That's how I feel about my co-pilot Bucky,” Buck gestured to the sky, a solemn look crossing his face for a moment before it was broken by Hope’s laugh.
“So you're Buck and he's Bucky. Wow you guys really are original,” Hope snorted, normally she would have been embarrassed by the noise leaving her mouth but when Buck joined in laughing, it only caused Hope to laugh harder.
“Don't you start. I get that enough from everyone else,” Buck scolded but the smile on his lips told her he wasn't really upset. Suddenly, Hope noticed the tall dark-haired man had appeared next to Buck, how long he had been lingering there she wasn't sure and it seemed that Buck hadn't noticed him either.
“Speak of the devil. When did you sneak up on me?” Buck questioned, patting the other pilot on the back.
The dark-haired man smiled, his moustache twitching at the corners, “Oh, I've been here the whole time.”
Buck seemed content with his answer and turned back to the group, “Everyone meet John Egan or as he is more commonly known, Bucky.” Hope smiled at him, trying to make a better first impression with this pilot than the previous one.
“Hope Armstrong, it's nice to meet you,” Johnny took her hand and shook it slowly, seemingly preoccupied by something over Hope’s shoulder.
“The pleasure is mine,” Johnny replied, releasing Hope’s hand. Hope thought she noticed Buck tense a little at the interaction but that could have just been wishful thinking.
Hope turned to look over at Ruth. She took in her friend’s shy smile and blush, then followed her gaze to the airman across the circle. Realizing what was happening, she nudged Ruth lightly, a teasing eyebrow raised.
“What?” Ruth grumbled under her breath, leaning closer to her friend’s ear as the guys carried on the group’s conversation.
“You like him.”
The blonde’s smile fell and heat rushed up her neck. “Who?”
Hope tilted her head incredulously, rolling her eyes. “You know who.”
“No, I don’t,” she defended,
“He’s staring,” Hope grinned, nodding his direction subtly and Ruth’s eyes rose to look at him again. Hope watched as the pair made eye contact and Johnny smiled at Ruth, causing a deep red hue to spread across her pale cheeks.
“Uh, I need to go check on the patients,” Ruth sputtered, pointing her fingers in the direction of the infirmary and quickly excusing herself from the group, hurrying towards the infirmary, her blonde curls bouncing with each step. A few seconds later, she spun to face the group and called, “But it was…uh…nice to meet y’all.”
Hugh didn’t miss a beat and hollered back his reply. “You, too, Ruthie!” He then paused until she was out of earshot. “She alright?”
“She’s fine,” Hope sighed, used to her friend’s more timid personality. She had hoped that over time, her extroversion would rub off on the nurse, but so far, she had no such luck. Ruth was more of a one-on-one person, not one for groups of people unless she knew them pretty well. It seemed the smaller the group got, the more Ruth seemed to come alive. It was like pulling teeth to get Ruth to agree to go out with the other girls of the unit, but when she did, she usually had a decent time filled with friends, fellas, and amazing big band music.
Ruth’s admirer joined the conversation, and Hope smirked, watching his eyes follow her friend. “And how far away is your base?”
“We’re in Berkshire, so by car, it’s about three hours, but by plane, probably 45 minutes.”
“So not too far,” he chimed, raising his eyebrows and nodding to himself. Before anyone else could comment, he spoke again.
“I’ll see you boys later,” he said absentmindedly, clapping Buck’s shoulder before disappearing in the direction Ruth had gone. Three confused faces watched as he retreated around the corner. Hope pursed her lips at the new development, unsure of the man following Ruth. “Should I be worried?”
“Yep,” Hugh confirmed with a curt nod.
Buck hit him on the chest, chuckling under his breath. “No, Johnny’s as responsible as they come, darlin’.”
Hugh suppressed a snort, thinking of the commander’s wild habits.
“Anyways, back wh-”
And just like that, the conversation continued, and Hope had a strange feeling of contentment being on base. Finally being with family again.
The conversation flowed easily and it felt as though she and Hugh had known Buck their whole lives. She was about to tell Buck the story of how Hugh had gotten on the wrong train and ended up heading to California when a loud shout came from behind them.
A dark-haired pilot, also sporting a moustache, was waving at them, “COME ON CHARLIE!” He hollered, waving at Hugh.
“Jeez, sorry Hope, I've got to run, I promised Curt I'd help him with something. Buck will look after you though, won’t ya, Buck?”
Hope glared harshly at her brother. He knew better than anyone that she didn't need some man looking after her. She was about to protest when Buck spoke up.
“Absolutely. I’ll give her the grand tour, treat her like royalty,” Buck grinned at her, clearly turning on the charm now and Hope sighed.
“Excellent,” Hugh bundled Hope into a quick hug, “It was good to see you again Little Bird. Keep out of trouble okay?”
Hope hugged him back and nodded but stayed silent. It had been so long since they'd been together and now their reunion was so brief. She watched as her brother rushed away towards his fellow pilot, joining instantly in whatever conversation they were having.
“He’s a good man, your brother,” Buck interrupted Hope’s thoughts and this time she couldn't think of a witty reply.
“Yes, he is,” Hope smiled thoughtfully before turning back to Buck, “Did he just call that man Rosie?”
Buck quickly placed his arm around her shoulder, leading her quickly towards a parked jeep, “Again that is a story for another time.”
Hope had to try and control her breathing as the warmth from Buck’s side seeped into her. She hadn't noticed how cold she had gotten standing still and tried to suppress the silver that ran down her spine. Buck looked down at her worriedly, quickly shrugging off his jacket and wrapping her tightly in it, this time his hand coming to rest on her hip, “There we go, can't have you getting sick now can we, Nurse Armstrong.”
As they drove around the base and Buck pointed out all the highlights, Hope decided that there was definitely something appealing about the cocky blond pilot. Despite his apparent big-headedness at first, he was genuinely very sweet. Hope found herself drawn in by his stories of home and his adventures in England, and she found herself wishing that the drive would never end, that maybe they could even drive off the base and escape together. Alas, she knew they couldn't leave their duty and took comfort in knowing that he was only a three-hour drive away, only forty minutes if they flew. She’d have to let Frank divert more often.
Buck pulled into a layby beneath a few trees that lined the road, cutting out the engine of the jeep. Hope looked at him curiously, waiting as though he was going to say something profound.
“Well, what do you think?” He grinned at her, a crooked grin that didn’t show all his teeth but instantly made you smile back.
“Of the base or of you?” Hope retorted and Buck laughed once more.
“You are quite the character, Miss Armstrong, you know that?”
“It may have been mentioned once or twice.”
Buck nodded, clearly enjoying her no-nonsense attitude that often sent men running for the hills.
“Both? Or neither?”
“Are you asking me to hurt your feelings?” Hope laughed, watching as Buck’s eyebrows creased for a second before his face became expressionless once more.
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“HOPE! There you are, I've been looking everywhere. Franks fueled up the plane. We have to go,” Ruth huffed, clearly out of breath from running but her flushed cheeks Hope thought told a different story.
“Okay, I'll be over in five minutes,” Hope promised but Ruth didn't look convinced.
“Your five minutes or an actual five minutes,” the glare Hope sent her way had Ruth turning around and heading back in the direction she’d come. “Okay, but I'll be timing you.”
“I guess this is goodbye,” Buck smiled sadly but Hope just shook her head.
“It doesn't have to be goodbye.” Buck raised his eyebrows, unsure if she was joking or being serious.
“I don't want it to be goodbye,” she added, giving him the most genuine smile he'd ever seen. “Our base isn't too far away and if you want you can write to me. Hugh has my address.” She added curtly as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“Alright, I will.”
Seemingly pleased by this response, Hope leaned forward and placed her lips against his cheek. Despite the slight layer of stubble, his skin was soft and it had Hope wondering what his lips felt like.
“Goodbye, for now then, Major Cleven.” Hope hopped out of the truck, saluting the pilot.
“Goodbye, for now, Nurse Armstrong.”
Buck watched as Hope hurried across the field after her friend, her hips swaying as she walked, and although Buck appreciated the view he didn't like watching her walk away from him, but he supposed if she never walked away, he’d never see her walking back towards him.
Tags: @georgieluz @malarkgirlypop @docroesmorphine @major-mads @violetdaze25 @bcofl0ve @precious-little-scoundrel @kmc1989
#on a wing and a prayer#a pair of silver wings#masters of the air#gale cleven#Gale Cleven x oc#hope armstrong
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🏔️The Retreat 🏔️- Chapter II
Prologue | Chapter I | Misc references & details
Summary: Set about a month after the first Chapter, Gale heads into town for supplies and to make a reunion with the survivors of 'the bloody hundredth'. Lorena accompanies him on this journey, while the road-trip together is new territory - the reunion proves a success. Gale and Lorena get to see glimpses of each other at their best, in their elements and the new perceptions of each other are complimentary. Setting the foundation for bonds built to last.
Pairing: Gale Cleven x Lorena (black fem oc), everyones favorite Bucky Egan makes an appearance.
Warnings: Race is a factor but there will be no overwhelmingly racist outbursts. It is more so a discovery element and explorations, different worlds, a little forbidden love element.
Tropes: Slow Burn, opposites attract, forbidden love
Word Count: 3.3K
Chapter II
Sitting in the car Lorena takes inventory of her purse for a third time. The drive into the nearest major city is five hours and Gale makes the trip once a month to pick up necessities without the markup of the local city. With his current profit margins it’s no need but he’s a man of routine. Lorena looks him over realizing this is the only time he’s freshly shaven with coiffed hair. His clothes are pressed and starched to perfection and he looks like he could belong in the pictures. Turning back to her window she wonders if he has someone in town or if it’s a bid to get someone in particular’s attention. She’d never asked any questions about his romantic life in the four months she’d been with him. Rose had disclosed the important stuff. He had been engaged prior to the war, but then before victory his intended decided to leave him for a Hollywood producer. Gale’s fiance was beautiful, Rose says they looked like a Hollywood couple. It was now weeks since Lorena’s breakdown and things were closer to normal again now. She was back to her easy going nature. Reaching into her purse she gets out a book getting Gales attention as she flips through pages before starting at the beginning. He focuses on the road for about five minutes until Lorena grows restless again. It makes him smile remembering his best friend.
“My best friend’s gonna meet us in town,” Gale says, breaking the silence.
“You have friends?” Lorena asks, surprised.
“I do” he nods and Lorena smiles pleased for him.
“So you speak to him? Full sentences or … how was the friendship developed?” She asks, her tone slightly teasing.
“Bucky talks enough for the both of us, you two are very similar” Gale responds with a shady smile.
“Bucky’s a woman?” Lorena asks, being cheeky.
“No, he’s one of my brothers from the war. We trained together, flew in together and were prisoners of war together” he says candidly, sometimes it felt good to tell the truth.
“Sorry” Lorena says not wanting to mock anything about what was undoubtedly a painful time in his life.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Bucky’s a flirt but he means nothing by it, he’ll probably tease the both of us unmercifully but it’s just his character. He can be juvenile at times but there’s no better man to have on your side in a pinch” Gale says with reverence for his comrade.
“I’m not easily offended” Lorena comments. “Also, I’d rather not interrupt a reunion of soldiers” she says with the wounds still fresh from her own ejection of Reggies life and times as a soldier.
“It’s fine, some of the guys will have sisters, wives, girlfriends and such with them. Rose thought it would be a good idea. You could shop and have some female company.” Gale proposes always the Major, always considering others. Somehow, it wasn’t infuriating to Lorena that they were discussing her behind her back. Gale and Rose really did seem to have her best interest at heart.
Lorena takes in her surroundings the drive in had been so full of strife and anxiety that there was no time to enjoy the mountain ranges. Everything looked far more picturesque than any painting she’d ever seen of the west. If her granny was still alive she would tell Lorena that this was the kind of place you survived at god's mercy. Her childhood experiences lead her to think of exodus, or maybe this was her Joseph moment as a girl. She hoped her grandmother's prayers would protect her in this new journey, through her rebellion and absconding of her home and family. Her grandmother would be proud of her survival instincts. Gale pulls over into a gas station to top up the tank.
“I can drive if you’d like?” Lorena offers.
“I’m fine, doll. I’ve managed longer with more challenging hardware” Gale smiles, seeming happier than ever before. There was a gleam in his eye that she’d somehow seemed to miss every day at breakfast and dinner.
“Okay” Lorena nods, heading into the station with Gale. He checks the bathroom before allowing her inside. He stands outside the door considerate of the world’s ugliness and prejudice. Lorena found Gale even more protective than her own older brother. He was always hyper vigilant, assessing levels of danger and prospective threats. It was a symptom of the sickness the war left behind according to the mature ladies who’d lived through the return of men from the Great War. Gale catches all the eyes looking at Lorena and decides against using the restroom for the next few hours of his drive. He had his demons and didn’t need to risk letting that part of himself out while in the presence of a woman who’d never known that level of dysfunction. His daddy was a drunk man with a predisposition for violence. The very opposite of the kind of man Gale wanted to be.
“I’m fine to wait here” Lorena says.
“No” Gale swallows.
“You could ruin your bladder” Lorena tells Gale who smiles.
“I’ll be fine, doll” he scoffs.
“My Pa is a physician, he had a lot of patients in their old age suffering from incontinence, which means they can’t control their bladders.” Lorena explains.
“I know what it means, I’ll be fine Lorena” Gale says in an even tone. Smiling, Lorena turns away looking out the window as the sun begins to set. It was another thing that set Gale apart from the rest. She’d gone through life with the ability to charm the opposite sex with sweet smiles and fluttering lashes. Her granny always told her it was a danger to be so pretty - Gale seemed to think so too.
“What?” He asks, noticing her dimples.
“Just thinking about my Granny” she shares.
“Granny? You don’t send her any letters”
“No she’s passed on, something about you just now reminded me of her. She didn’t like many people either and was very protective. Took no advice or no nonsense, people gave her space and respect” Lorena explains. Gale shakes his head scoffing without comment.
“A woman” he says finally, a callback to the Bucky debacle.
“I meant no offense Gale and besides, Granny was knockout - way prettier than you” Lorena teases getting a genuine laugh out of him. He’d received the pretty boy jokes his entire life, especially in the war. Never from a woman though. It reminded him of something Bucky would say. It was a strange thing to find the qualities you admire in someone who’d entered your life so unexpectedly but it was settling to both Gale and Lorena. Granny and Bucky have both been pillars of their lives during the times they were becoming the core of the people they were now. It’s dark when they arrive in the city, Gale takes the cases up to a room leaving Lorena confused. There was only one bedroom and one bed.
“Is there another room?” She asks looking up at Gale who seems ashamed.
“Not tonight, take the bedroom. I’ll take the couch, it’ll be safer that way” he explains as Lorena turns towards the door again. He’d spent practically an entire day on the road in an uncomfortable car, a couch would not suffice. “Before you start, I’ve slept in far worse conditions” Gale says, taking a seat.
Sighing Lorena says not another word to avoid a quarrel, she heads to the bathroom to freshen up and ready for bed. When Lorena had shown up at his door he was suspicious at first, a beautiful woman, young and with an unbelievable story. At first he was sure someone had sent her for him, then he was sure she was pregnant and looking to hide a child and then he was puzzled. She was remarkable and somehow through dumb luck or divine intervention she managed to travel all this way without knowing the evils of this world. Divorcee’s were usually more prickly around the edges but Lorena’s naivete shone through. Perhaps Gale hadn’t yet placed it but it had helped him come a long way. Done a lot to show him that his sacrifice had meant something to this world. That there were eyes that would never see the worst of it.
__________________
Noise startles Lorena, rousing her from a deep sleep. Turning she finds the other side of the bed empty once again. Waking, she swallows her bitterness like she had every day since she’d discovered another woman was a part of her marriage. Pulling on a housecoat she pads to the bedroom door only to find a sleepy looking Gale speaking to a tall smiling brunette.
“Gale, where’d you find her?” The man says pushing past Gale breaking all rules of decorum to shake Lorena’s hand, bringing her knuckles to his lips as he looks her in the eyes.
“You must be Bucky” Lorena smiles amused by his pageantry.
“That’s right,” Bucky smiles.
“I’m Lorena” she says and it takes some time for it to register. Bucky frowns a bit before turning to Gale in confusion.
“Buck, you didn’t say she was gorgeous. That’s not the kind of thing you leave out.” Bucky exclaims before turning back to Lorena. “Lorena, it’s a pleasure doll” Bucky says more respectably.
“Gales, a man of few words, he was conserving ink” you tease.
“Ohhhhh, I like her,” Bucky laughs, turning to Gale who nods knowingly.
“Come on, I'll introduce you to the rest of the women.” Bucky suggests.
“Not like this! I have to get ready!” Lorena says, alarmed.
“Might as well sit Egan, she’ll be awhile” Gale comments putting on a kettle.
“If you wake up like an angel, I’m all for seeing how you look all done up” Bucky says with his special brand of charm, it makes Lorena giggle. Gale had gotten used to her pageantry. At first it seemed silly, but he noticed how uncomfortable not being put together made her. Marge was beautiful too, drop dead gorgeous, the first time he’d laid eyes on her his heart stopped. They hadn’t had time to get to know each other really before the war. She was this woman who was perfect every time she appeared in front of him. There were no hairspray, cans and palettes of makeup and products, rollers and itons. There were no bottles of nail polish and strange scents about the house. Perhaps that was one of the reasons she’d left him for someone else. Perhaps he’d taken her for granted, perhaps he was too quiet, boring, reclusive and all the other things people said about him. He’d heard the commentary, grouchy recluse, tyrant, miserable hoot. He’d also heard the rumors started by the women. He was impotent or maybe the Germans had castrated him when he was captured. None of it was true, it was heartbreak although no one saw it that was. Just like no one could see through all Lorena’s pretty that she spent some nights sobbing. That sometimes all the makeup and pageantry was used to cover her puffy eyes and flushed skin. Sometimes the partying and drinking was her only medicine. It had occurred to Gale, watching Lorena over the past four months, that the women of the war had their own pain they had no outlets for. That they didn’t think twice about setting their pain aside for their men.
“She’s nice and beautiful - why’s she in the middle of nowhere with you?” Bucky whispers curiously.
“Her husband… ex-husband found someone in Europe and brought her back home. That’s about all I know, she doesn’t talk about it much”
“I bet you never asked” Bucky swallows, turning back to her door.
“I hate to see her upset Egan, whatever it is she’s run pretty far she clearly doesn’t want to face it” Gale explains.
“Is she a flirt?” Bucky asks.
“Not genuinely no, her hearts still hemmed up in her ex. I think it was real” Gale shares with a close eye on the door.
“Well she doesn’t look hard to love” Egan comments leaving Buck to shake his head. “What about Marge, you hear from her?” He asks.
Gale sighs, tasting bitterness in his mouth, “No, but I think she'd be doing well in Hollywood, with that big producer. The mountains aren't her idea of happiness. I tried fighting for her - she doesn’t want me” he confesses with defeat.
“Screw it, there are plenty of good women out there, bad ones too - I know where to find those” Egan winks, making Buck laugh.
“Ready” Lorena smiles all done up in her finery. A touch more than even Gale was used to but they were in the city now and it seemed appropriate to bring her nicer items out of hiding.
“Where the hell did you find her?” Egan whispers as the three of them take the stairs to the party.
It had been months since Lorena was truly happy to throw a party. It was like a fish getting back in the water, she couldn’t help but smile along with the other women. In two hours she had the hall all done up for the 100th Bombardment Groups reunion. It looked swell, especially the champagne tower she’d managed all on her own. Everyone likes her sunny disposition and warm smile. She’d also disappeared with the women for the first two hours of the reunion, Gale knew it was to beautify them. He’d never met a person that enjoyed seeing others at their best as much as Lorena. The way the other woman clung to her and the way they laughed made his day. He hadn’t seen her laugh like that ever, he’d never seen her so happy. This seemed to be her element. She was a people person, generous with her time and natural abilities. She seemed to be so comfortable entertaining, a debutant of sorts. Even the wait staff was at her mercy getting drinks and hors d'oeuvres to the men and women of the reunion. Every time Gale took his eyes off of her she’d magically teleport to another corner of the room.
This reunion was therapeutic for Lorena, to see the men smiling and whole after all they’d endured. They were generous with the stories of their experiences both good and bad. She wasn’t prepared for some of the horrors she heard but they only made her appreciate the men all the more. Reggie had been on land while they had been in the sky. After learning about their “bloody hundredth' moniker she found herself thankful that Reggie had made it home whole, even if he didn’t love her the way he did before he left. Lorena hadn’t expected to host parties every weekend but she’d hoped to make a home for him, invite his comrades over, host, have children and give him something to look forward to so he could put the horrors of the past behind him.
Feeling her mood dip Lorena heads to the bar trading the happy bubbly for her newly acquired bad habit of whisky. The bartender gives her a glass and she turns to the party happening around her. Sipping the strong liquid she turns away from Alexander Jefferson and his wife. They share a kiss and it brings back fond memories. Spinning around on the barstool she looks at the glass of the liquor display trying to quiet the heartbreak in her chest. Reggie had been devoted to her like that once upon a time.
“Whisky” she hears from behind her only to see Bucky.
“A touch more ladylike than the moonshine the boys drink at the lakehouse” Lorena smiles.
“Don’t do that, not for me. Don’t pretend to be happy Lo - there’s nothing sadder” Bucky comments with sympathetic eyes. Smiling, she blinks away her tears. “I had all these grand plans and then I was in prison and week after week not a single letter. All the guys had their sweethearts and I had to find my own reasons” Bucky tells her candidly. It’s a deeply personal thing to share and incredibly vulnerable.
“Have you found anyone yet?” Lorena asks hopefully.
“Not yet, the guys write to me though” Bucky says.
“I will too and I’ll keep an eye out for you” Lorena adds, making Bucky smile.
“What’s your story, how does a city girl end up in the mountains?” Bucky asks, causing Lorena to drain her glass. Tapping the glass onto the bartop she beckons another needing more liquid courage for her truth.
“Reggie, my ex husband, was in the war. We were just married before he left, newly weds of sorts at least it was still the honeymoon. We had friends and a home and people say perfection doesn’t exist but I had no complaints. We were so complimentary, nothing he did annoyed me. He went over and heaven only knows what he saw, I understand it was horrible, I do, and my heart seems a small price to pay for his life but it's hard all the same” Lorena confesses wiping away stray tears. “He came back and it was different. He was trying to fill the shoes of what we had been. Bucky he’d never tried before. It was as easy as breathing, then I found letters from her and then I saw them together and as much as it hurt I was relieved. You know when you love someone that much it hurts to live with a ghost or a shell of them. So when I saw them and all my intuition was confirmed I left. Reggie didn’t need another great battle and it would’ve soured into resentment if I stayed. If I stayed at home I couldn’t survive it so I drove.” Lorena shrugs, wiping away more teats.
Bucky nods a few stray tears falling out of his own eyes.
“If I ever meet that sorry son of a bitch” he comments, making her smile. She takes her new glass of whisky, taking a sip as he stares at her. “I can tell you one thing for sure Lorena and I know men, your Reggie is a coward. A real man would’ve told the truth and carried the burden. You shouldn’t have had to run, you did nothing wrong but I’m glad to have met you. Glad to know you.” Bucky smiles, holding out a hand to her. Smiling, she shakes it.
“Likewise” Lorena agrees.
“I know what I’m gonna call you,” he smiles.
“What? Buck-ette?” Lorena teases, making him laugh.
“Angel,” he nods.
“Why Angel?” Lorena asks.
“Cause you're too good for this world” Bucky nods. “The kind of woman us men pray for” Bucky says.
Sitting at the bar Lorena finishes her drink and Bucky gets through three before he's up dancing and singing. He’s a hell of a good time, they dance together as friends until she overheats and finds a seat. Fanning herself as she watches Bucky go off on a tear she can't help but laugh. Familiar cologne tells her Gale is near and he sits in his perfectly tailored uniform. Lorena had known he was a good man but she never dreamed he was the kind of hero he was to these men. Brave, loyal, dependable and adventurous.
“Haven't seen you dance” Lorena comments.
“I don't dance,” Gale responds.
“No of course not” Lorena smiles watching Bucky belt out the words to the record playing.
“You have quite the moves”
“I was a debutant, there were lessons upon lessons and then there were lots of parties and I loved to dance. Seems silly now, but it's still a good time” Lorena confesses happily.
“Angel, I need you for the next one!” Bucky walls from the floor.
“Angel?”
“I’m officially one of you now, I’ve got my nickname” Lorena winks standing to smooth her dress. Watching them, Gale feels a curious longing in his chest. She fit so well he wondered if maybe the warm reception from his comrades at arms and neighbors in the mountains meant maybe they could be something more.
#austin butler imagine#austin butler x black reader#black authors#austin butler#major gale cleven#gale cleven x oc#gale cleven#buck cleven#bucky egan#masters of the air#masterlist#mota
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✦ It Had to be You: One ✦
John "Bucky" Egan x OC
Gale "Buck Cleven x OC
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and not associated with the real people mentioned from the show. This is simply based on the portrayals of the actors playing these characters.
Warning for this chapter: Cursing, mentions of sex, depression, rage anger.
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Black had become a staple in my wardrobe.
I used to despise the dark color – opting for more cheerful tones or floral patterns. I didn’t want to walk around looking like a depressive cloud – someone in constant mourning. I didn’t even own a black dress until I got the news – my mother making the journey to the store to buy one. I couldn’t bear to leave the house – not wanting the sympathetic glances of those in town that had learned the news. I can’t even begin to tell you how many letters I had received, those that knew Gale and even from those that didn’t. Each letter praised his heroic actions – thanking him in black ink for his level of service and dedication to the United States. Even received one from President Truman and the men of Washington D.C.
I used to look at women who had received the devastating news with such sorrow and sadness. Wonder how they would survive without their men - their source of comfort and love. I was certain that it would be very difficult to do so – have to learn to fend for yourself and go on without the man you loved. I didn’t realize that I would be in the same boat years later. I was a simple housewife – barely of age when we married. Gale and I were just two kids – two kids that were madly and deeply in love with each other. I had grown up more privileged than Gale or those that we knew. I didn’t know how to clean a house properly or cook a hearty meal that would fill the bellies of my husband and future children. I’ve always had someone do those things for me – my mother more focused on raising a proper lady. If you needed to know which fork went where, I was the girl to ask, but I couldn’t tell you anything domestic. I wanted to be able to learn all those things while he was away – making sure that when he returned home for good, I would be able to care for him like a wife should.
I had met Gale at a dance the local hall was putting on – a sendoff to some of the troops that lived in the area. He had just enlisted– saying that he was a week away from going to boot camp. He was cool as a cucumber – no evidence of fear etched on his beautiful face. He spoke of wanting to fight the good fight – getting up in the air and showing Germany the trouble they were in for. He was a born fighter – a genius when it came to life. We spent most of the night as close as two people could be while sitting upright- both speaking of our life and our dreams. Not to sound cliché but I was smitten as soon as I saw him. His blonde hair was slightly disheveled – his wool trousers fitting his frame nicely. His smile could light up a room – that deep voice causing my insides to quiver with a need that only he could give me.
I longed for him during those weeks he was away – smiling as I read his letters that would come bi-weekly. I could hear his voice as I read the words on paper – the excitement of finally flying and the annoyance he felt towards his roommate. The one true constant that popped up on each letter was the mention of his co-captain. His name was John Egan – Bucky – the nickname he had been given. Gale spoke highly of the man – praising him and saying that he couldn’t wait for us to meet. Gale was soft spoken – a bit reserved – he wasn’t into sports or gambling. He liked to sit outside the house and just listen to the sounds of nature. John Egan was the opposite that Gale needed in his life. He helped Gale open up and Gale helped John stay out of trouble...
Gale finally returned to me after weeks away – our reunion being one spent giving ourselves to one another. We were both virgins but the time away from one another ignited a feeling in both of us that we couldn’t suppress. He asked me to marry him a month after his return – wanting to get married sooner rather than later seeing as the war was ramping up. John Egan stood by Gale’s side as we exchanged vowels – his blue eyes shining bright as he watched us become husband and wife. He was the life of the party at our reception – singing along with the band as those around us danced to the music. I could see why Gale adored him so, but I was still weary.
That feeling came to a head when John convinced Gale that it was time for him to head over to England and join the ranks. He wrote to him about the fun he was having and all the missions they were accomplishing. He made it sound like a thrill ride – something that didn’t involve the chance of dying at any moment. Gale and I spent our last night together – wrapped up in each other – exploring and branding kisses into skin – almost as if we were creating a permanent road map to remember one another. It was the most sensual night we’ve had – that we would ever have.
The movie reel played on repeat in my head as I could still feel his lips on mine as he kissed me goodbye. Tears in both of our eyes as the sound of the car’s engine faded into the distance.
“I’m coming back to you – hell or high water – I will be back.”
He kept waving until his car was out of sight – my knees buckling – my body falling into grass below. A part of my heart left that Spring Day…
I received his first official letter a couple weeks later – screaming out in joy as I read his chicken scratch penmanship. He spoke of the area they were located – how it felt flying in – the fresh air that surrounded the base. He gushed about the new friends he had made –describing them as if he had known them for years. The most important was how much he missed and loved me – repeating the same words as above – hell or high water.
No letter from Gale would be complete without a mention of John Egan. Gale wrote of how John had taken him under his wing, but also being John’s protector. He wrote of how he’s stopped him from getting into several scuffles with the British soldiers or the townspeople. His writings detailing how much they truly cared for one another – they were like brothers.
As time progressed, his writings became darker – tragic even. He detailed his first mission in graphic detail – expressing his feelings and the slight betrayal that he felt towards Egan. He watched men he had befriended either die in the air in a fiery explosion or pass as they laid on the stretcher in the makeshift hospital on the base. He never wrote of his fear that I’m sure he had – choosing to stay strong and do everything he could for his squadron. He was the main pilot – he had the lives of nine other men to think about – he wanted them to be able to return home safely even if that meant he was the sacrificial lamb...
The last letter that would arrive on time came through the mail on October 10th, 1943. It was shorter than normal, Gale explaining that he was moments away from an important mission. He must’ve written “I love you” about a dozen times before signing off – xo following his name. I had learned about a week later that his plane had went down somewhere outside of Germany. The news articles praised their efforts – telling of how they put a damper into the German’s artillery. That was all well and good, but my husband was missing – the base having no record of his whereabouts or if he was still alive.
Months passed before a battered letter was placed inside the mail slot. The enveloped looked as if it had gone through hell, but Gale’s handwriting could be seen through the grime. He had been placed in a camp for captured soldiers. Many of the men that he had met at the base were there as well. He hadn’t been injured – keeping quiet and under the radar of the German soldiers. I fell to the floor after reading that letter – my heart shattering at the thoughts of what might happen. Tears fell on the paper as I replied – simply begging him to come back to me…
“Sweetheart?” I looked up from the mattress as my mother entered the room. “It’s nearing one in the afternoon, darling.” She threw open the curtains – the bright sunlight beaming into the once darkened room. “You need to get yourself together and get dressed.”
My mother had never seen me in such a state – not even recognizing the person I had become. Long gone was the smile and laughter – replaced by tears and screams of anger. I was angry at everyone – my parents, my friends, God.
Oh, I was especially mad at God.
Countless times I would ask why Gale – why was it his turn to be taken? Was he needed for greater things? Why wasn’t I granted more time with him? Just why?
Growing up in the church, it was frowned upon to ask why for anything, more so for why God chose those that he did. You never asked why – you just learned to accept the outcome. I was long past that – I wanted an answer – I demanded a Goddamn answer.
Sighing, I slowly moved to a sitting position as she laid the black dress and heels next to me. My eyes boring holes into the clothing – hoping that with another energy they would magically combust into flames, burning me alive with them. “I’ll do your hair when you get out of the bath.”
Our eyes connected, “I’m not taking a bath.”
Mother let out an exhausted sigh as her heels clicked on the hardwood floor. I watched as she walked to the window, her upper body jerking slightly as she wiped away the tears that started to fall. She never liked anyone to see her cry.
I started to speak, stopping before the first syllable could come out. I wanted to tell her not to cry but I didn’t have that right. She loved Gale too – she had been smitten by him from the get-go. We all held out hope that he would return to us – just not in a flag draped pine box.
A soft knock on the bedroom door caught both of our attention as my dad entered the room. His once bright face was downcast as he took in my appearance. “The car will be here soon, darling.” His voice soft as he exchanged glances with my mother.
The reality that I was an hour away from burying my only love hadn’t set in yet – just fog – fog that felt like it would never lift to clear skies. I fisted the black material, stepping over the kitten heels as I trudged towards the bathroom. The figure in the mirror was a stranger – someone who’s been through more things than a human is supposed to. Dark circles and pale skin stared back at me – my hair in a tangled mess – not even a comb could get through at this point. Gaunt would be the best word to describe this version of Carolina. I hadn’t bathed in several days – to numb to even remove myself from the bed at times. I barely made it to the bathroom to relieve myself, almost just wanting to go on myself so I wouldn’t have to get up.
Looking around, I noticed everything laid out by my mother. Toothbrush, toothpaste, the expensive makeup that I had collected over the years sitting on the vanity. I was supposed to look put together – still grieving – but have the attributes of a Hollywood starlet.
A guttural scream roared through my body as the vanity contents crashed to the floor – the glass bottles of perfume shattering as the liquid splashed in the air. I could feel the glass stabbing into my bare feet, the blood mixing with the perfume on the floor. I didn’t even register that my father had burst into the room until his arm wrapped around my waist, my back hitting his tailored chest. I thrashed against his hold like a wild animal trapped in a cage.
“Carolina, please!” My mother bawled as she took in my state. “Please, darling calm down before you hurt yourself!”
Another voice was added to the chaos – a deeper voice than that of my father. He was dressed in a black suit – his tall figure looming over my parents. His hands replaced my father’s – his grip on my waist tight and firm. “Calm down, Lina.” His hot breath hitting my ear as the world started to spin around me. My body was running on fumes – the last of those turning into smoke as my brain finally had enough, shutting down before any more damage could be done.
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So it begins. There had to be a Masters of the Air OC in me somewhere, and here she is. The Honourable Maureen Byrd-Caldwell, Reenie to her friends. Reenie to her acquaintances. Reenie to everyone except her parents, at the end of the day. I suppose this is an introduction, in its way.
When it came down to it, it was simply a case of the purest rotten luck.
She’d held out hope, as close as yesterday, that there would be some last minute reprieve, that the rumoured placement would somehow transform itself once put to ink on the page into a posting in Sussex or even Devon. Molly, her bunkmate of the last month, was already on her way to work the forests other side of Scotland. Reenie had seen her off onto the first train herself, spilling promises to write as soon as she knew the address she was going to. Scotland she could have liked too. She’d only ever been as far as Edinburgh. But the last remnants of her optimism had been dashed at dawn, with a quiet and entirely unassailable pronouncement from Mrs Iver. There would be no arguing now.
The Honourable Maureen Byrd-Caldwell had packed her things, picked up her bicycle, and headed over the county border towards Norfolk within the hour.
The training camp at Culford, a scant twenty miles behind her, is already beginning to feel like a distant dream. Here, the edges of the roads tilt in ways that are intimately familiar; years of absence have done little to reduce her body’s memory of these sharp turns and deceptively deep furrows that lie half-hidden behind them, bordering the fields from the roads. The last time she had cycled these paths, she’d been freshly nineteen and already itching to make her way across the country, to take up her place at college. Her brother had been with her then, all of fourteen and growing into limbs that were far too long for his skinny body. The two of them had careened wildly, screaming with laughter, down these roads in a manner that would surely have horrified their parents if either one had been there to witness it.
Reenie’s jaw clenches at the recollection. John would not be home this summer anyway, nor her father. There will be only Mother now, rattling around in the house they had grown up in, undoubtedly playing the gracious host to the officers billeted in the guest rooms. It had always been the role that suited her best.
A wobble in her wheel snaps her back to focus and she frowns, craning her neck to peer over the handlebars, though the ride has immediately smoothed back as much as these roads allow. A stone then, or maybe a rut she hadn’t noticed. She sighs. Stoddard Manor is another twenty miles away and not her destination today. There’s no need to be thinking about it yet, nor let the metallic taste in her mouth coat her tongue to choking. There will be more than time enough to deal with all of that.
She does not need to check her watch to know that it is coming into mid-morning. The summer sun beats on the back of her neck, prickling the skin beneath her vest with sweat. Reenie can feel it beading uncomfortably between her shoulder blades, while her hair sticks in clumps to her forehead. Something will have to be done about that before she reaches her first appointment at the farm. It had been hard enough to arrange these billets for the girls that would be arriving tomorrow, it would not do to have them lost again because she has not represented them well.
For a moment, she allows herself a fantasy, conjures up an image of the bath that would be waiting for her, and something scented to scrub the perspiration from her skin, but even the memory of it is hard to grasp, a wish long since left behind and far too distant from reality even to make believe. She will settle well enough for finding a place to change her uniform and take a brush through what is surely a bird nesting in the curls beneath her hat.
In the shade of a nearby copse, Reenie slides to a halt, pulling up her bike away from the lane. Dismounting, she sighs in relief and pulls a half-empty canteen from a saddlebag. The water is too warm to be pleasant, but after so many miles she’s thirsty enough to not care, and unobserved enough to gulp it down without any guilt for decorum. Wiping the back of her hand over her mouth, she stretches out her back, her legs. It has been a little while since she has cycled so far without pause. A proper rest will be a welcome thing.
The patch of trees is not thick, but it will do for what she needs. Reenie inspects it with a critical eye, peeking through leafy branches to the fields beyond, and then again towards the road. There is not an awful lot of space, but beggars cannot, she supposes, and so she takes one more furtive glance down the road before fetching her change of clothing and begins to strip in her makeshift privacy, peeling sweat-soaked layers from her body, until she is stood in nothing but her underwear. The half-breeze is welcome against her skin and for a moment before she dresses again, she raises her chin and lets herself enjoy it.
She is doing up the button on her trousers when she hears the shout.
Instinctively, she throws one arm over her chest, the other already scrabbling for the blouse she hasn’t yet put back on, but she barely has time to jump out of the way before she finds herself forced to move. The bike comes careening through the thinner part of the trees, its rider desperately clinging for some kind of control that isn’t coming as it skids towards her.
The breath is full knocked from her body as she thumps heavily to the ground, one arm caught painfully beneath her ribcage. Somewhere behind, the crash of metal against metal sounds like thunder; she can do nothing but gulp air and push herself back up to her knees.
The owner of the bicycle, she sees from the corner of her eye, has been flung from his seat, lying prone against the ground, half caught in branches and already trying to tug himself free. She slides herself over. He is going to do himself an injury, if he hasn’t already. There’s a nasty tear in the sleeve of his uniform - American, she can tell that much - and she wraps one hand around his arm gently, lifting it to inspect, leaving the other to rest against his shoulder, stilling him from movement. He blinks at her, unfocused at first, lips parted, before he breathes deep and something more settled, more schooled comes to rest over his - handsome - features. He stops his struggle, watching her face as she carefully unhooks torn fabric from sharp branches. It is something of a relief when nothing more sinister than the snapped ends of threads shows itself.
“Steady now,” she says, slow and soothing, like she has learned the last few years to do with the farm children, “are you all right? Make sure of it before you move anything. That was a nasty tumble you took.”
“Yeah,” he says, frowning. “Yes. I’m all right.”
She rocks back on her heels as he sits up, running a hand through his blond hair. He glances over her, eyes flicking down her body, and immediately looks away, lips pressed tight before he speaks again.
“Are… you?”
Hell’s bells.
She closes her eyes briefly.
“Please just keep looking that way.”
The blouse she finds half hidden under a nearby outcropping of shrubbery and she pulls it on, buttoning it as quickly as she can. It’s difficult, with the pain in her arm and she finds herself biting back another curse and flushing through her cheeks all the way to her chest. She knew it. She knew Norfolk was a bad idea.
“Are you injured?” she asks over her shoulder, and tries not to notice the creak of mortification in her voice.
“I’m not,” the young man says. There’s something underscoring his tone too, a blush in the rounded curves of his accent that makes her feel a little better, “I think your bike might be though.” A pause and the sound of metal scraping against metal. “Mine too.”
He still has his back towards her when she turns around again, though he’s standing now, peering down at the wreckage. She can hear him hum as he inspects the damage.
“I can get this fixed for you,” he says. His foot prods at a wheel. They both wince at the ping as something breaks off. “It would be the least I could do for running into you. I'm very sorry about that, miss.”
Embarrassment lost in an instant, Reenie feels herself bristle at the implication. She’s been elbow deep in oil and muck, fixing her own transportation more than enough times by now to be patronised by some golden film star of an airman. She moves to stand beside him to make her own assessment. A sharp breath catches, dissipates, between her teeth as she readies her argument and realises how futile it is. The fight in her disappears with it.
“You may even owe me a new bicycle,” she says instead.
He looks up at her. After a moment, his lip quirk into half a smile.
“I might at that.”
Naturally, it’s hers that’s in the sorriest state, they discover together. A series of sad little clanks sound as Reenie tries to right it and resigns herself instead to tying it for balance against the other bicycle with a length of twine. He runs his hands over his own as she does so, rotating the wheel back and forth against the earth. It moves smoothly enough, seemingly little worse for wear. She holds up a hand to stop the apology she can already see forming for the differences in their fortune.
“What’s done is done, I’ll save my tears for something bigger than a bicycle if it’s all the same to you, ah…” she pauses, “I’m sure I ought to be addressing you by rank but I’m equally sure I don’t have the faintest what it is.”
There’s a small breath that sounds a little like a laugh, soft enough that she can think to have heard it, but for the slight incline of his head letting her know the sound had not been in her imagination alone.
“You could call me Gale instead and sidestep the whole thing. Gale Cleven.” His teeth flash white at her raised eyebrow. “Major, if you would like, but just Gale is fine.”
“How dashingly American.”
One hand on the handlebars of his bicycle, he holds the other out to her; there is no hesitation before she takes it and shakes firmly.
“Miss…?”
“Byrd,” she says. “Reenie Byrd.”
“Miss Reenie Byrd,” he repeats. The syllables roll together pleasantly in his mouth, reeniebird. She rather likes the way it sounds. “Please, just… let me walk you back into the village and we can figure out what to do about the bike.”
“Back nowhere,” she tells him, stooping to pick up her bags. “I haven’t made it that far yet, I was still on my way.”
Before she can protest, he snags the strap of one of the bags and loops it over his arm. “That so?”
Her ruined bike, tethered to his, creaks as they push them both back towards the road.
“Quite,” she tells him. “You see, I was quite innocently having a rest, and there was this dreadful incident with an awfully clumsy young major.”
“He sounds terrible.”
“We’ll see,” she replies, as the two of them begin to walk, side by side and accompanied by the rattling of twisted metal. “It’s at least two miles.”
#mota oc#oc: maureen byrd-caldwell#mota fic#gale cleven#mota#masters of the air oc#gale cleven x oc#the moodboard is not an accident#this is the very first domino#bob: fic
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Ciao everyone 😌
I have a quick question, I can't choose which x reader to write first- So, I will let you choose with the themes + aesthetic
1]
Themes = Angst, Infidelity —not on the reader—, smut ?, not a happy ending.
Or
2]
Themes = angst, smut ?, forbidden relationship. /I changed Brandenburg to special agent because ultimately I prefer to invent rather than write a Nazi reader, although not all Germans were Nazis and many did not count their own actions. Thanks to the anon who made me reread again what I had found about them, I had not understood that it was a Nazi unit !/
#i lost my blog#i’m a shit#x reader#smut#gale cleven#gale cleven x reader#gale cleven x oc#masters of the air#austin butler x you#austin butler x reader#austin butler x reader smut#feyd x reader
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No one but you
Part 2
Prev
(More like a lil epilogue for Diane and Buck)
Cw: some smut, infertility issues
She knows of his return even before he arrives in English soil.
Diane is giddy, jumping from excitement as she readies the baby for the train ride from Birmingham to Thorpe Abbotts.
John Egan Cleven is seven months old with fine blonde hair like his father’s and his left blue eye just like his as well. He is like a cherub come to life especially in his new little clothes made for when he meets his father today.
She is greeted as Mrs. Cleven at the gate of the base and Lady Di by everyone there who met her. Most of the soldiers are new, everyone she had met during her short time here was dead or captured.
It is bittersweet, so many here were anxious to see their sweethearts return from the air and some foolishly hoping they are alive still. Diane is amongst the lucky ones who have their loves returned.
And because everyone knows who Gale Cleven is, little John Cleven is immediately christened as Baby Buck.
“How do you know he’s coming?” Helen asks as she steals away when Diane sees her with the excuse of meeting the baby. The last time they’d seen each other they had comforted each other for their losses, Herbert Nash had died while Gale was captured.
“Last letter I had from him hinted at a possible escape and then the cards confirmed it.” Di lies a little because the part where they coordinated his escape can only be revealed when the war is over, or they are dead.
And sure enough, Gale arrives in a fort wearing only the clothes on his back and sporting scars on his cheeks.
“I told you; I’d come back, I always do.” he hugs them tightly as if he feared they weren’t real.
He is crying, she is as well from the overwhelming joy and sadness and relief that their separation is over.
“I don’t want you to leave me ever again.” The witch says knowing his promise is a lie.
He is a soldier, there will always be another war that takes her from him.
Despite having missed the first six months of his son’s life, it is as if Buck was never gone.
Diane does not mind living simpler than she was raised on, even before the war she would join her relatives or the Lees on their travels in her modest yellow vardo.
Life in Wyoming is quiet, a nice change of pace after living at the edge of her seat at home. Gale went back to university and she takes up classes although she had no intention of ever finishing the finance courses she purposely dropped out of at Oxford.
“I want to have another baby with you.” Gale says in between kisses as they make love on the night of his graduation. “A girl, with your brown hair and charm.”
He has ambition and genius in spades, he’s been accepted to Harvard and they’ll be moving there until he earns his doctorate in Business. He wants to be a good husband and father too and Bucky having his own little girl put him in such a mood that Di finds herself infected with baby fever as well.
Gale’s insatiable, craving to fill her with his cum any moment they have alone together. Such a generous lover that Diane cannot find a reason to deny him.
“About time, isn’t it, love?” she agrees and hopes for a little girl like the one he dreams of.
It shouldn’t be difficult, little Bucky was conceived on the first and only time Buck had finished inside her during their affair.
And yet months pass by without success, even the cards do not show a new baby anywhere in them.
“Just gotta try harder, don’t we.” He whispers as he fucks his cum back into her. Buck doesn’t give up hope as easily as she does and that keeps the sex from feeling like a chore.
Her parents had taken two years to conceive Charlie and Gale’s family wasn’t known for its size either, his sister ,Doris, had struggled conceiving and had given up hopes of having a second baby after her son was born. It could take longer than they had hoped for, if it ever happened at all.
But it does. Right when Gale Cleven becomes Doctor Gale Cleven in 1950, Diane finds herself pregnant with Elizabeth Gale Cleven, a brown haired little girl with her father’s eyes. To be named for her mother and father, same father who will return to war soon after.
“I don’t want you to leave me ever again.” Di whispers that night before he leaves for Korea.
“I’ll come back, I always do.” He promises like he always did back then.
And he does, every time.
#diane shelby#gale cleven#buck cleven#buck cleven x oc#gale cleven x oc#mota fanfic#mota oc#masters of the air fanfiction
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Little Women Family Tree
(as of 31 December 1946)
(as of 31 December 1951)
(as of 31 December 1954)
Will be posted with the epilogue
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Summary: It's July 1943, and the Second World War is raging across Europe and the Pacific. Ruth Morgan and Hope Armstrong are flight nurses with the 806th MAETS, stationed at Berkshire in England. When an unexpected reunion introduces some new faces into their lives, things will never be the same for the "Skytrain Girls."
MOTA Collab: Read more of Hope's story in "On a Wing and a Prayer" by the wonderful @footprintsinthesxnd!!!
Here you can follow Hope and Ruth’s story, along with the men of the 100th Bomb Group. This story is based on the fictional portrayal of these men from the MOTA series. Jess and I both have nothing but the utmost respect for veterans on our blogs!!
You can learn more about Ruth Morgan here!!
Welcome to Thorpe Abbotts
The Dance
Listen to Your Heart
Bars, Bike Rides, and Bittersweet Goodbyes
The Dangerous Sky
One Helluva Party
Lucky 25
Airman Down!
The Anatomy of Courage - Coming Soon!
#masters of the air#hbo war#john egan#gale cleven#callum turner#austin butler#gale buck cleven#major buck cleven#johnny egan#major john bucky egan#bucky egan#mota x oc#john egan x oc#major john egan x oc#gale cleven x oc#buck cleven x oc#johnny egan x oc#bucky egan x oc#john bucky egan#buck cleven x ocs#masters of the air fanfiction#mota fanfiction#mota fanfic#masters of the air fanfic#masters of the air book#donald miller#apple tv+#hbowar#hbowar x oc#hbo war x oc
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Birdie
John "Bucky" Egan x female!reader
Summary: A rare night out in London has Bucky coming to terms with his feelings for you.
Word Count: 2.9k
Tags: mechanic!reader, songbird!reader, female!reader, she/her pronouns used, drinking culture, cursing, mutual pining, moderate bouts of denial, insecurities, women supporting women because it's what we deserve, let's pretend that The Old Therebefore is an ancient Appalachian folk song in this universe, maybe she's a Mary Sue idgaf, I just wanted to write something happy so LET ME LIVE, WWII era, there's no Y/N but reader has the nickname "Birdie"
A/N: Yeah, I'm obsessed with Masters of the Air. I had to write something for my mans before the creative procrastination literally killed me. Please leave a like, comment, or even a reblog if you're so inclined :)
You can read my OC version of this story on AO3!
Songs Mentioned in This Fic:
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy by The Andrews Sisters
G.I. Jive by Johnny Mercer
The Ole Therebefore (Accapella) by Rachel Zegler
Disclaimer: I own nothing. This story and any recognizably named characters are based solely on dramatic portrayals of the characters from the series, not the real individuals they represent. All the respect to the actual service people who fought and died in the Second World War. Also, don't copy my writing without explicit permission. That includes you, you AI sonuvabitch.
Your heels clicked on the cobblestone streets, turning into the pub you’d heard so much about. You were out celebrating a very rare weekend off. The Brass had somehow allowed you and twenty other mechanics from base two days leave, so you took advantage of the opportunity and headed straight to London.
Your two best girlfriends from base were with you. Teresa was one of the toughest nurses you’d ever come across. She could give you a wide grin, crinkles around her hazel eyes, and reset a broken bone without breaking a sweat. It helps that she was already working towards becoming a nurse back in New Mexico, the war just sped along that process. You had bonded over your love of books, giving each other recommendations almost weekly.
You’d met Irene on the boat to England. She puked on your shoes almost thirty minutes exactly after leaving the port in New York. You gave a small grin, offering her a handkerchief and a piece of ginger candy and the rest was history. Finding out that she was a fellow mechanic was the icing on the cake. Coming in at a whopping five foot two, the spritely blonde could easily be found in a crowd with her loud Appalachian accent.
It seemed almost like fate for the three of you to have found each other. Being some of the few women on base naturally made you close, but you were closer with Irene and Teresa than any of the others. That’s not to say that you weren’t friends with any of the men, because you were. Friendly.
All three of you were dressed to the nines, in contradiction to your everyday work wear. You all got ready together in your hotel room, giggling while you applied makeup here, spritzed some perfume there. You all felt confident and were ready to have a good time. You spotted some familiar faces and made your way over towards them, your friends linked arm-in-arm with you. Lemmons was the first to greet you.
Of the fifty men on the ground crew, Sgt. Ken Lemmons was the most welcoming of them all. From the get-go, he didn’t care if you were a man or woman. He just wanted to know that you were capable. You were sure he had to go through some hazing because of his age, which probably changed his perspective on gatekeeping the job. This made earning and maintaining respect a lot easier for the women on your crew. We all came over with the same goal, it was better for all if we just helped each other out.
“Hey Birdie! Nice to see you out and about.”
Ah, the famed nickname. You tend to hum and sing under your breath when elbow-deep in a project. It helps you pass the time and clear your mind. Of course, the rest of the ground crew quickly caught on to this habit of yours, which quickly earned you the nickname “Birdie”. You, of course, never sing solo in public, so this confuses anyone who’s not around you while you’re working. But the name stuck, so here you are. Birdie.
Chairs are quickly cleared for you and your friends, which you all graciously take. You go up to buy some drinks, knowing what your friends like, and quickly return with your drinks of choice. Conversation flows, laughs are shared, and a few drinking games are played over the next hours. Teresa soon speaks up on a topic you’d been hoping to avoid.
“Do you think he’ll be here tonight?”
You shrug and look into your drink, “Dunno. Why does it matter?”
Irene, the ever supportive best friend that she is, backs up Teresa. “What do you mean ‘why’? This is your chance to finally make a move!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You quickly deny, taking another sip.
An unladylike snort leaves Irene, “My ass! You and Major Egan have been making googly eyes at each other when you think the other’s not looking for months. I’m saying it’s time for you to perk your tits up, buck on over and ride that—!” You slam your drink on the table, pressing your hand over Irene’s mouth, heat rising to your cheeks in embarrassment.
“Are you insane?” You whisper harshly, looking around to make sure no one overheard you. You seem to be in the clear, which makes you calm down a bit. Irene pushes off your hand, takes a swig of her drink, and consults the person who started this whole conversation.
“Am I wrong?” You look to Teresa, who cringes slightly in agreement.
You gape at the pair of them. Normally, you were the median between the two girls who had vastly differing opinions. But this is what made them come to a consensus? Unbelievable.
“Look, I’m not saying that I don’t want to.” You start, which makes your friends nod encouragingly at you. “It’s just that… Is he really as interested as you think he is?”
They both groan and slump against each other, like they’d just run a marathon. Teresa sits up, scooching your chair in closer so that the three of you were in a private triangle, cut off from the rest of the group.
“Let’s look at the facts here, okay?” Teresa starts to tick off a finger with each point she and Irene make. But you seem to always have a rebuttal at the ready.
“He brings you coffee every morning.”
“I thought he does that for everyone.”
“He constantly fixes his hair when you’re around.”
“He takes care of his appearance!”
“He walks you to the mess hall every day for dinner.”
“We just happen to be going the same way. And we happen to have the same dinner schedule.”
“He read The Hobbit when you said how much you loved it.”
“He’s an adventurous guy, it’s an adventurous book, what’s not to like about it?”
“You two literally will walk and talk outside alone for hours.”
“A man can’t have a stimulating conversation with a woman?”
“He laughs at all your dumb jokes.”
“Hey! They’re not all dumb. Like, the one with the goose and the—”
“Point proven. Anyways! He has your picture in the inside pocket of his jacket.”
That one stops you in your tracks. You brain tries to justify this meaning but comes up blank.
“He…” You struggle with an excuse. “He…” Your best friends give victorious smirks in your direction.
“He… likes the extra padding in his jacket?” You stutter over what is possibly the most pathetic, sorry excuse you could have ever come up with.
“When are you gonna admit to yourself that he likes you? Like, actually truly likes you?”
You gave a sad sigh, letting the insecurity you were feeling deep down come to the surface. “I just… He’s just so…” You had stomped down your feelings for so long that it was becoming hard to articulate what exactly you’re feeling.
“He just seems so unreal. Like, of everyone he could have chosen, why me? I mean, I know I’m great. But you’ve seen the other girls on base. They’re all so beautiful, smart, classy… and none of them are covered in engine oil ninety percent of the time.” You looked down at your hands, specks of grease and oil peeking out from beneath your nail beds. It seems like it would never completely wash out, no matter how hard you scrubbed. You hadn’t even painted your nails for this weekend, knowing it would be money wasted come Monday morning when you’re back on the clock.
Teresa and Irene share a look that you don’t see, then come forward and grab each of your hands.
“The words you just used to describe those girls. All of that is you, Birdie. That and more. You being a mechanic doesn’t make you any less of a woman, and to hell with anyone else who thinks otherwise.” You nodded in agreement, Irene’s words of encouragement slowly washing away your anxieties.
Teresa spoke up next, “You deserve someone who will rearrange the stars and the whole night sky for you. And I’m more than willing to bet that Major Egan is up for the job.”
“Besides, none of that 'unreal' stuff. At the end of the day, John Egan is nothing more than a man. If he can’t look past his nose and his d—" You gave a squeak to cover up the vulgar word Irene was about to blurt in public. She rolled her eyes fondly and continued.
“If he can’t see what you’re worth and make the effort to treat you a hundred times better than that? That’s on him. Not you. You know what you deserve, and you deserve everything you want. Absolutely everything.”
You sniffed, happy tears coming to your eyes. You brought your best friends in for a hug, thanking them profusely.
“Don’t sweat it,” Teresa grins into your shoulder “every girl needs to be pulled out of her well sometime.”
You pull back from the hug, grabbing your glass and tipping your head back, finishing the rest of your drink. “Even if he’s not gonna be here, let’s have a ball!” Your girlfriends cheer as the three of you go to the bar for refills.
One drink turns into two, which turns into a few more, and suddenly you’re buzzed. Your group are having a rambunctious time, Irene dancing by the local piano player. Once Irene looks over to you, she stops and whispers in the player’s ear. He nods, then starts a new tune. Irene starts up her voice, walking over to you and Teresa, encouraging you to join her.
The alcohol has loosened you up enough that you don’t feel the nausea you usually associate with being perceived, so you join in the harmonies you and your friends have practiced in your bunks at night.
He was a famous trumpet man from out Chicago way
He had a boogie style that no one else could play
He was the top man at his craft
But then his number came up and he was gone with the draft
Soon the whole pub was jumping and dancing along to the tune as you brought a new vibe to the pub. It was like a spark that started an entirely new night and everyone was eager to go on forever.
One song turns into an entire set, which ends with a full rendition of G.I. Jive, which had everyone singing along. It was a magical moment; made you feel like you were a part of something important.
Irene sidles up to you, giving you a hug. She says in your ear,
“I think it’s time to slow it down a bit. How about you sing that song I taught you.”
She means an old Appalachian folk song that’s been in her family for generations. You had heard her sing it one night and immediately loved the dark, but strong nature of the lyrics. It was an honor to learn it from her.
“I don’t know, it’s your family’s song and…”
“And I can’t think of anyone better to sing it to these soldiers.” You gave each other a look, her slight eyebrow raise gave you the courage to nod in acceptance. She smiled, hugging you again, her voice yelled out to the crowd.
“Birdie’s gonna sing solo!”
The announcement is met with raucous applause, Irene and Teresa shoving you towards a dodgy looking table. Crank offers a hand up, which you take gratefully. As you find your bearings on the tabletop, you quickly spin around and find all eyes on you.
The crackling energy in the air seemed to simmer, the fast-beating hearts of the pubgoers recognizing a moment to acknowledge you. Nausea starts to make an appearance, but a deep breath quells the sensation within you for the time being.
You take another deep breath. Inhale, exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
You close your eyes, open your mouth, and sing.
Meanwhile….
Majors Gale Cleven and John Egan walk down the familiar street, one eager to catch up with his fellow countrymen’s alcohol intake, the other just happy to spend time with his friends. They were arriving later to the festivities due to being caught up in filling out reports. By far the worst part of having a higher rank was the paperwork.
“It’s pretty quiet.” Buck acknowledges. “They’re usually rowdier by this point.”
Bucky sniffs, shrugging off the concern. “Ah, it’s probably nothing.”
As the two men approach the pub, they find that a crowd has formed. Soldiers, civilians, RAF, USAAF, old, young— people had obviously stopped to watch whatever was going on. It was dead silent, save for a voice singing. Was there a radio show on or something?
A familiar face peeks out at them from the crowd, DeMarco quickly waving them over.
Bucky is quick to question, “Hey, what’s going on?” but is immediately shushed by nearby crowd members. Buck cringes in apology, despite not being the one to disturb the peace. His best friend, ever unshaken by the opinion of strangers, carries on.
DeMarco leans in, whispering, “Your girl’s taking us all to church.”
“My girl..?” Bucky’s nose scrunches in confusion. He makes space through the crowd and quickly makes sense of DeMarco’s words. It was you.
I’ll catch you up
When I’ve emptied my cup
When I’ve worn out my friends
When I’ve burned out both ends
Standing on a tabletop, watchful eyes sat all around you like baby ducks flocking to their mama. You were captivating everyone with each note and word that flows from your mouth. Damn, you've got a set of pipes— a voice that belongs on the radio, in concert halls, on Hollywood records. He had no idea.
His little Birdie.
“Wow.” Buck mutters in awe from behind him, and Bucky couldn’t be more in agreement.
When I’m pure like a dove
When I’ve learned how to love
He hadn’t noticed before, but her eyes were closed. Like she needed to concentrate on each and every breath she took, every single movement her body made, before letting them out in an angelic melody.
As if by divine intervention, her eyes pop open and lock on his as she belts “how to love”
It could’ve been an eternity, for all he knows, the amount of time that they spent locked in each other’s gaze. The world pauses around them, everything frozen. Her eyes were already the kind to knock a man clean off his feet with a single gaze, but he thinks- for a brief moment- that his heart completely stops beating.
John Clarence Egan would swear every day from then on, until his dying breath, that the course of his life was altered in that very moment. He knew how it would continue from then on, and how it would end. How he wanted it to end.
Then the world starts back up and carries on.
Right here in the old therebefore
When nothing is left anymore
Her final hums are joined by a short blonde woman who stands nearby, another face he recognizes from base.
The applause that picks up after the end of the song is near deafening. The star of the hour gives a shy smile, a quick curtsy and is given a hand to step down from the table.
Everyone soon starts mingling, the normal chatter of the bar returning. But Bucky is stuck in his spot, dumbfounded. In all the conversations you’d had together, somehow this never came up. He should’ve put two and two together, as he recalls overhearing your hums one morning as he made his daily coffee delivery to you. But you had been caught off guard, so much so that you tripped off the ladder you stood on and fell. Luckily, his quick reflexes kicked in to catch you before any serious injuries occurred.
Remembering the sensation of his hands on your waist and thighs, face just inches from yours, sent his brain into a tailspin. That’s not even considering just how damn cute you were when, after a beat, you turned away from him and playfully mourned the cups of coffee that were splattered all over the hardstand.
“John. John?” A hand waving in front of his face knocks him out of his reverie. He blinks once, twice. Then looks to his best friend.
His voice comes out uncharacteristically weak in response, to which he then clears his throat and corrects. “Yes—yeah?” He pops the collar of his sheepskin jacket to try and hide the rampant red of his ears that signals the heat radiating from them.
Buck just shakes his head and gives him a knowing smile. “You sure know how to pick ‘em, Egan. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“See what day?” Bucky starts to consciously return to his body, leaning on the bar.
“The day when a girl finally knocks you on your ass. I knew you had a thing for her, but that?” He points to his face and motions to indicate where they had just been standing. “That’s something else. That’s something real.”
Bucky gives another shrug in response, to which Buck throws back an unconvinced frown. He turns his head to gaze over the pub patrons and is distracted by you once again. Any denial he was about to spout immediately dies in his mouth when you lock eyes with him again and give him a dazzling smile. The world starts to fade away again.
His heart pumps faster in his chest at the sight. Damnit. He sighs, telling his best friend the truth he’s been privately wrestling with for a while now, all the while keeping his eyes locked on yours.
“I know, Buck. I know.”
Bucky smiles back at you and is elated when your face lights up. You give him a wave.
“She kinda snuck up on me.”
#masters of the air#mota#john egan x reader#john egan x oc#john bucky egan#john bucky egan x reader#bucky egan x reader#bucky x reader#bucky x female reader#john egan x female reader#bucky fanfic#bucky egan fanfiction#mota spoilers#ken lemmons#gale cleven#buck and bucky#buck x bucky#john egan#bucky egan#crank cruikshank#charles cruikshank#curt biddick#buck cleven#gale buck cleven#harry crosby#bubbles payne#hbo war#hbo war fanfic#hbo war fandom#hbo war oc
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send you away, major gale cleven
pairing: major gale cleven (masters of the air) x black fem oc (eden marie cleven)
content: eden is anxious about having to be separated from her husband when he reveals that he has to serve in England.
an: I was burnt out from writing elvis content, but, now we're on masters of the air content, yay!
“I’m sorry, baby, but I gotta go.” His voice was a song sung by an old church choir; soothing, warm like her mama’s hugs, then it got disruptive. Like the snares of the drums as the song reached a climax. “They need us in England.”
The pained look on her face would be engrained in his mind forever. There would be no way for him to forget it. Her thick eyebrows eat in a deep frown, pushing the rest of her features further down. Her eyes, those beautiful brown eyes, glistened with tears. She refused to blink. The gentle rivers would transition to monstrous waterfalls with no dam to keep them at bay. And her lips, full and swollen from tender kisses, quivered as she clenched her jaw to keep her composure.
“For how long?” Her voice was quiet. Gale sighed heavily and ran a heavy hand through his hair. If he had an answer, he’d give it to her. But, his silence spoke loud enough. She hummed and brushed his hand off her lap and began to trudge upstairs. A defeated sigh came from him.
“E,” Gale called out. He followed her up the wooden steps. “Eden!”
His large hand palmed their bedroom door that threatened to push him out. The lamp on her side of the bed was on, the blankets on the left side were pulled back, and she stood in front of the mounted mirror brushing her freshly pressed hair. Her sad expression had morphed into one like stone. He could see her jaw tick as each second passed.
Gale took slow steps toward her. He could only imagine what she was thinking. Her husband, whom she’d only been married to for six months, was being shipped off to England to assist them in bringing down Germany. How coulde she not be upset?
Gale stood behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. His advances didn’t keep her from wrapping her hair and tossing her satin scarf around her head. He leaned down, nose brushing against the shell of her ear. Eden’s breath hitched. His lips followed, pecking at the sensitive area below her ear. He pulled at her skin with his teeth and she whimpered softly, her hand falling on top of his. “Gale…” A warning.
“Talk to me,” he pleaded. “Please.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” she said after some time. “I knew what I got into when I married you but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m scared, Gale!” Finally, she turned to meet his gaze. So big and blue, they were. Filled with sympathy and remorse.
“I knew what I was getting into when I married you, but still! I gotta send my husband away and I don’t want to think about the day where someone could knock on the door telling me--”
Gale shushed her softly and pressed her body against his in a tight embrace. His warm hand gripped her chin and tapped softly. She met his eyes. “So let’s not think about that. I leave in three weeks. We’re gonna focus on making these three weeks worthwhile, and we’ll cross the other bridge when we get to it. But I’ll always be with you one way or another, you know that, darlin’. You do know that, don’t you?”
Eden nodded. Gale raised an eyebrow. “I know, baby.”
Gale hummed and drew invisible lines along the bare skin other thigh. The lace of her slip tickled her leg. His hand inched up slowly. “How about we practice for that final send off?”
Eden smiled knowingly and broke away from him, peeling the straps of her nightgown off her shoulders her bare body on display. “C’mon, we’ve got all night.”
All night indeed.
#black authors#austin butler x reader#austin butler x black!reader#austin butler#writers and authors#black!reader#masters of the air#gale cleven#john egan#curtis biddick#callum turner#major gale cleven#major gale cleven x black!reader#major gale cleven x eden marie cleven#just a little something#austin!elvis x reader#austin!elvis x black!reader#austin!elvis x black!oc#gale cleven x black!reader
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Those Who Can || integrated Female Air Force series
Introductory part 1: Flintenweiber, or “Rifle Broads”.
Summary: The American War Effort had conceded to the enlistment and commissioning of women into the Air Force at semi-integrated status. Deemed a more reliable if not safer combat post, the going rank of officer in the Air Force was intended to secure fair treatment and combatant status for these women, as it had for their male counterparts. Like most things in war -or life if one is a woman- such recognition must be fought for.
Authors Note: this is an Au, obviously, and I intend for the de-segregation in the force to not be entirely full, in fact in some ways they would mirror that of the Tuskegee Red Tails where they were held back from many opportunities and placed at a disadvantage, to say the least. However, as this is primarily a POW fic that aspect only effects their reception into the Stalag and the timeline of their crashes.
Inspo: thanks to all of y’all who contributed with suggestions and advice on this fic. I want to say that I based a great deal of the brutal treatment and indignity heaped on these fictional OC’s on the true and horrific treatment of the Soviet Female Soldiers taken as POWs. Taking into consideration that American ties would give these OC’s some leverage, I have moderated these horrors if anything, however as I intend for these girls to be some of the first of their kind, they in many ways endure the brunt of the cruel initiation. If you’ve got any questions or suggestions about this, have at the inbox.
Warnings: 18+ for disturbing content. War, brutality, cruelty, and references to sexual violence. Specifics: a woman’s head is forcefully shaved, a woman is kicked to death, a dog turned loose, concentration camps, brief infighting between Soviet’s and Americans, past tense illusions to rape which are underplayed and may be consequently more disturbing to some. Quite angsty ok?? It’s women at war. Rampant misogyny by Nazis.
Familiar faces: Gale Cleven, Benny Demarco, John Brady, “Hambone” Hamilton
Original Characters: Lt. Maureen Kendeigh (bombardier), Lt. Colonel Ida Brady, Lt. Tallulah Smith 
If Maureen Kendeigh heard the word “degenerate” used one more time in regards to her profession, her sacrifice and skill, -she just might do something regrettable.
By this point she was ready to get off this cattle car and go back to talk with Interrogator Glasses about stupid and unnerving shit like why the clock in the mess hall at Thorpe Abbots had a broken arm. Her distressed inner monologue of “how did he know that??” at the time was preferred to this newest method of demoralization: death by aspersion and suspense.
It was nice to be back with the girls, ones she knew and ones from other squadrons. But that held a misfortune too, the fact that it was just the girls, still not a single male crew member in sight. Apparently the Gestapo and the Luftwaffe were having a spat over who got to keep them, these Flintenweiber: “Rifle Broads”.
In the meantime Maureen and her fellows got punted back and forth between the two institutions like unwanted stepchildren. First the horrible isolation but humane treatment of the Air Force interrogation cells. Then back to the prison where all bets were off and the hope of safety came from a herd-like defense of each other against the ever more erratic guards. In these holdings, if one of their members hadn’t been executed by a pistol to the temple by end of day, it was considered a successful defense by the whole. All other atrocity, indignity and assault were unbearable’s that required bearing for the time being until the Luftwaffe took them back.
And then handed them back over.
And on and on it went.
It was effective, Maureen gave them that, after each hosting by the Gestapo, the girls were softer, tenderized and more susceptible to any deal that might procure them a shred of honor and safety. Only Ida Brady, the most senior amongst them at the incomprehensible rank of Lt. Colonel, had held ranks together, spine of steel and bearing more terrifying than most men’s, she’d fought for every grueling respect of rank they had been afforded. Even if it landed them in harsher conditions, worse interrogations -anything to ensure that what happened to her girls were considered as war crimes against lawful combatants when the time came for justice.
But they’d been collecting the downed girls and holding them apart like prized anomalies while conflicting orders came in from Berlin, and while the Red Cross fussed regarding combatant status. Now they had a tidy number collected, well over fifty by the time Maureen saw Ida Brady pushed into the cell, having been downed with a significant portion of them after Munich.
But now they hadn’t seen Brady in over a day. Not since they’d been loaded on this rail car headed to god knows where by soldiers with the dreaded lightning bolts on their collars.
The SS.
With Brady missing, Maureen supposed that made her and Lieutenant Smith a leader of sorts. Most of her “leading” currently took the form of not responding to a single vile threat or taunt by the guards mingling amongst them in the ever rocking car. Ida would be proud of her emotionless detachment at one guard’s suggestion to let the dog loose and see who it chose to maul.
Lieutenant Smith -tender hearted Tallulah with the bronzed skin and knack with animals that rivaled Snow White’s- had made the cryptic observation in Maureen’s ear that she’d never known a dog could be trained away from the throat to go for the breasts instead.
As of last Sunday they now knew, and none of them were likely to forget.
“I’ll be faster next time,” Smith had mumbled in a simmering rage, “I’ll be faster. I’ll have my fist down that cur’s throat before they finish slipping the leash.”
It was a nice sentiment, would’ve been made more so if Maureen wasn’t so sure it would land dear Smith with a bullet in her head. Would be made more so if Sergeant Forsyth had lived from her injuries long enough to benefit from it. Lots of things would be made nicer by heavier coats and the presence of drinking water.
One of the new ones, a terrified little replacement who wore her ordeal on her face, made the rookie mistake of asking for a drink. She’d been given the predictable initiation of being pissed on by a guard in answer and now she bore her thirst as doggedly as the veterans.
When the train cars rolled to a halt, and the great door was hauled back, sprawling out before them appeared the most idyllic scenery one could ever hope for. A crystalline blue lake, dotted on its border with charming structures adorned with red tile roofs, a quaint church of the same, lush fields and sparkling water and deep forest for miles. Maureen did not think they would haul them so near a town only to execute them. But then what did she know?
Nothing, not even where she was.
When they had lined the girls up, some in worse shape than others and a motley collective group from various military branches, they hauled off Ida Brady to the head of the pack, her bruised face considerably more busted than when she’d been loaded on. Maureen could see her craning her neck as she was drug past, counting down her flyer girls, looking for any missing from the trip.
They were marched, four abreast and with guns at their backs, down a wide and well traversed road into town, past cottages on its outskirts with little garden plots and clothes blowing on the line. Maureen was reminded of the idyllic countryside she had landed in with her chute before being seized and hauled off. There were women and children in row boats on the lake and the path they took through the woods was more peaceful than ominous. A traitorous sort of hope began to bloom in Maureen’s heart.
That was dashed when the tree line broke and out before them stretched what seemed to be miles of wire. And beside it a sign, welcoming them to Ravensbrück -a concentration camp. A camp for civilians, a camp to never return from.
Their new guards were ready for them, smiles on their faces and whips in their hands. Among them were a few remarkable for their sex, they were women too -if women who enjoyed such craft could still be called that. And for all the horror inflicted on them by their male captors so far, there seemed to be a general presentment amongst the arriving girls that the finer arts of terror had not yet been endured.
Standing for hours in the infamous square inside the compound, roll call and registration took on a form of torture yet unheard of. Round and round it went, repetitions of ranks and serials over and over and each time they were met with two alternatives. Renounce the ranks and be admitted as civilians with no further targeted harassment. Or-
“If you insist on being special, we will be forced to make you special.” as one officer put it to Brady’s stone cold face. “Ask your Soviet compatriots, the ones who wanted to be special like you. They claimed to be officers too, and now they service officers in Buchenwald. They have not left their beds in months. Special, no?”
“I’m not ‘claiming’ a goddamn thing.” Brady would go round and round with them in turn and up and down the line was the echo of ranks and serials.
Nothing but ranks and serials.
The minute they dropped one or the other, they’d be freed from this standing purgatory, and they’d be as good as dead. They might wish it were so anyway, if the threat was carried out but they’d suffer as officers, with honor. Whatever that meant this far from home and any appreciation of it. A fresh batch of guards relieved the first and the banter continued, even through roll call of the general camp where a mass of the most miserable specters of female kind poured out of the huts and were made to await the call of their one single number.
A serial for a serial. Maureen would keep hers. By dawn she had kept it, as had all but one of her group, a navy nurse with a broken leg who’d succumbed to the allure of a chair.
Civilian status for a seat.
Maureen thought a drop of water might be her own undoing were it offered, but one look at Smith's cracked yet unmoving lips cemented her in her own determination. As did Ida Brady’s talk, straight back in front of her, trousers bloodied on the inseam but not a cringe to be discerned in her stance.
By morning roll call for the entire camp, their guards were tiring of them, or else thought a new method of persuasion more likely to bring success. Off they were marched to their new billet to “meet their Allies” and what Smith wouldn’t give to have her brass knuckles back when met with a hut full of Soviet soldiers. Females, if females could have shoulders like that. They were impressive women with murder on their faces at the intrusion of a new gang of American blowhards.
“Did you give up already?” The one with the most English taunted and for the first time since capture, Maureen saw Ida Brady’s spine bow backwards just a fraction -a pacifying gesture in the face of the Russian’s nose to nose staredown.
“Hey, we’re not here to make trouble.” she insisted, cool and stern. “Did you?”
“We’d rather die.”
Brady gave a sharp nod, “Then we’re Allies in that, too.”
“Your precious Red Cross won’t come for you here.” That likely verdict seemed to bring the woman satisfaction, and Maureen wondered how many months, weeks, hours of this grueling place it would take before she too took savage satisfaction in another’s misfortune. How long before all better impulse to be glad for others was stamped out and all that was left was crowing self preservation. “You are not the firsts. There were others, Americans, like you, they are now wearing the ink of field whores- or they are dead.”
“One might assume the same of your predecessors.” Brady pointed out mildy, and both groups shifted behind their leaders, ready and tense.
“Anyone who accepts-“ the Russian warned, “-we kill.”
With that incentive clear, a tentative peace was made, which included a few trying to fraternize, converse and share news. There was little that aligned to create any cohesive figure, despite their shared experiences and sufferings.
When night fell they were hauled out for roll call amongst the masses, and together after hours of waiting to be called upon, they answered with their ranks and serials, each in their own language. The Russian who had confronted Brady was beaten so badly she did not rise again after it. The guard left her lying there and asked Brady herself what her occupation was.
“Lt. Colonel in the United States Air Force.”
The unfortunate rookie who had so ill advisedly asked for water on the train stood beside Brady; and got a bullet to the head for her superior’s answer. What Colonel Brady thought of her judgment being given to another did not show, her face white and her lips sealed, only the speckle of blood on her profile stood in stark relief in the early morning.
“Kneel.” a very shiny Luger barrel was pressed, still smoking to Brady’s temple.
She did so, braced for the inevitable execution. A soldier's death, it’s what they’d signed up for. The Kommandant waved over one of the female guards and spoke to her in German. She took off at a run to one of the buildings with a bright smile, and Ida Brady stayed kneeling, the splattered brains of the unfortunate dripping out of her hair and into the leather of her jacket, a mockery of her own upcoming fate.
The female guard returned with scissors. “Your poor hair, so pretty. Now it is ruined.” the Kommandant bemoaned, gloved fingers sliding though Brady’s wet tresses, “See what happens to beauty when you pervert the order of things? Now it must be sacrificed. Perhaps then you will see how ugly you are become.”
Maureen felt Smith’s restraining arm before she had even registered her impulse to charge forward, caught about the middle she strained against her friend's surprising strength and in the end was forced thusly to keep ranks and watch with the rest as the Nazis fucks scalped the Colonel of her femininity with a pair of sheep shears.
Dribbling blood down her face and shaking with rage, Ida was in better shape than her Russian counterpart. When her ordeal was over, she rose again, even if she swayed dangerously upon doing so.
And when asked, she had her serial at the ready.
Crowded back into the hut, Maureen and Smith watched the Russians hopelessly fuss over their insensible leader, knowing all too well how likely it might be that they could be found doing the same tomorrow, in a week’s time, who knew. For now, Brady sank down against the wall with the rest of them, the scowl of her formidable brows deflecting any potential commiserations for her battery.
When the navy nurse was pushed into their hut next evening, a dead silence greeted her. One of the Soviets, a sniper by her markings, came up to her and unceremoniously tore open her shirt. If the girls had doubted the Russian’s warning about “wearing the ink of field whores” upon their skin as mere hyperbole, such speculation was removed. It was a dreadful tattoo, large and damning as was the reaction it elicited amongst the servicewomen.
By the end of the night there were two dead bodies on the hut floor. And it didn’t seem to matter who had killed which. One had died for honor, the other for giving it up. And in the end? Where was this ephemeral honor? Ida Brady could only find it in the tense faces of her girls, lining the room from their places along the wall, waiting for another roll call or worse.
But in war, as in peace, sometimes the dead sent favors and in this instance it came to them with screams of:“Amerikaner Soldat!” in the middle of the night. They were marched out to the square and stood to attention once more in the sweep of the spotlight, all the while were shouts of “Amerikaner Soldat!”
All they knew was the bitter waiting in the gray dawn chill and the choking anticipation of some sick, final joke, or some methodical mass execution. Maureen wished she could knock her shoulder into Ida’s one last time and tell her she’d been a rock -she was a rock- but Brady stood there in front alone, as was her privilege and her curse. Talullah Smith would not meet Maureen’s side eyed glance for a farewell. Maureen wished she had less of a roar inside her, wished she could step off calmly into whatever was on the other side but the idea was repulsive, even after all she’d endured, and she looked about in vain for some semblance of the same revolt on her fellow’s faces.
What came instead was the dreaded whistles and the order to march. They were marched right out of the gates and down the idyllic lane they’d been marched up days ago, back through town to the railway station. There the soldiers herded them back up into a cattle car that smelled more of death than livestock, and then the train pulled away, hurtling south -perhaps the only one to do so with living cargo.
There were no guards inside the car, only the cramped space to keep them docile and the lack of promise that the great door would ever grind open again.
“The hell do you think happened?” Maureen hissed to Ida, finding her superior propped up in the corner in a suspiciously casual pose that she suspected hid a limp and unfathomable fatigue.
“Haven’t got a clue, Kendeigh.”
“Maybe someone got word out.” Maureen suggested, thinking of their predecessors, thinking of the useful dead.
“Or we’re headed to a nice rural dumping ground.” was all Ida would speculate. “Or brothels.” she added after a long minute.
Maureen chewed her cheek and kept peering out the slats at the beautiful countryside flashing past. “Well, at least they’ve ensured you’ll be least wanted of the bunch at such an establishment.” she joked and watched with the careful precision of a trained bombardier as her mean joke landed and Ida Brady’s legendary eyebrow ticked up in something that might have been amused disbelief, had she any energy left for such a display.
“Pistol whipped in the mouth and still no respect for rank, Kendeigh.” Brady observed and it was so like her brother John’s flat lined humor that Mauren’s heart throbbed with something alarmingly akin to sentimentally. For John Brady -and all the other lucky souls still at Thorpe Abbots, God willing. “I’m not laying on any damn beds for them.” Brady suddenly broke the silence again in a low voice, one Maureen knew was meant between officers only.
She pitched her head closer in agreement. “Me either.”
“I don’t care if they shoot me first,” Ida went on, as if reciting it to herself, “-and I don’t care if they shoot all of you first. I’m not going to.”
“Wouldn’t want you to.” Maureen agreed again, vacillating briefly in her intent before proceeding to say, “That Sergeant -she wasn’t your fault. The nurse either.”
“I know that Lieutenant.”
“I know you know,” Maureen muttured, “but some stuff bears repeating. Places like these, we’re liable to lose our bearings without a little repetition.”
“Mm.”
Maureen shuffled beside her and wracked her brain for pleasant conversation, something besides the Soviet girls they’d abandoned and the skeletons they’d seen at Ravensbrück. “Ya know,” she remarked tiredly, “if someone in here’s hydrated enough to pee, I might be ready to drink it.”
Brady slowly turned from her view out the slats to give Maureen a blank faced stare. “Should I make an announcement or are you hoping to keep that between us?”
“Oh hell, Colonel,” Maureen grinned, mischief bubbling to the surface at the first chance, “I wouldn’t trust anyone else but you, liable to get stds from this lot.”
“Kendeigh.” Ida hissed warningly but there was that disbelieving wobble to her stern mouth, “That’s not funny -not with where we’ve come from.”
“It kinda is.”
“It’s not.”
“It is- a little. Admit it, a little.”
“It’s not.” And still her cheeks were pink with suppressed amusement, just like John’s got when Maureen pressed him on a dig about basic training.
“You sure you’re ok?” she ventured again, eyeing Brady’s extensive injuries visible above her clothes.
“Yeah?” Ida looked nonplussed, “I mean -what’re you ranking as ok, these days, Lt. Kendeigh?
“It’s just,” Maureen bit her own busted tongue briefly as a spur to get it out,
“-you’re bleeding a lot, Ida. Couldn’t help but notice.”
Ida Brady didn’t even glance down at her trousers or make a motion to feel her lacerated scalp, instead she answered in the same, almost bored way she always did, “Yeah, Candy, it’s called being a good Catholic.”
Maureen blinked. “Oh. Oh Shit.”
“You know, maybe some of you girls had the right of it,” Ida actually winced before staring back out the slats, “go off and do it ahead, in peacetime. But here I am, twenty eight and as sacrosanct as the Virgin Mary, dropping into occupied territory. What could go wrong!” To her credit, her snort was wonderfully genuine.
Maureen kept after her, “You signed up to fight, to get fought against. We all did -never this.”
“Mm, well, couldn’t choose a better gang to get put down with.” Brady smiled, begrudgingly raising an imaginary glass of her own to Maureen’s already raised one.
“To bitches who bite back.” Maureen toasted.
“To bitches who bite back.”
——————————————————-
Two cases of MIA troubled John Brady the most: Egan, who he had seen jump first after their dispute, and Maureen Kendeigh who he had learned from Blakely had jumped over Bremman. That’s two flyers who should’ve been here by now, before him even, in the case of Kendeigh, and yet they weren’t.
He went round and round the argument with Cleven and Crank and Hambone, all three downed from separate missions yet here together - proving his point. Cleven held staunchly to the belief they were being kept segregated, as befitted their ranks and sex. They could be one sector apart and not hear of them. It was the only hopeful response, it was a leader’s response. There had been women downed before Kendeigh, not many but a few of the escort fighters, and none of them had showed either. Brady wasn’t sure that was a good sign at all.
“So where’s Egan then?” he’d always hit back with, “They mistake his shoulders’ for a dame’s?”
“I dunno John.” Cleven would reply with that newly blank gaze of his somehow enhanced by the twin cuts on his cheeks.
Demarco took Brady aside when he arrived to tell him that whatever had happened to Cleven in interrogation wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t ethical. Those cheek scars weren’t both due to flack. Like a dog with a bone, Brady took this already suspected information about his stoic superior and ran with it, pointing out hotly to an uninterested Demarco, “if it’s happened to Cleven, what about them?”
“What can we do about it?” Was Cleven’s demand that always wrapped up the little circular arguments as they sat huddled in their hut. “Red Cross knows they’re not here, no colored flyers either. They know where they are. What can we do besides ask after them?”
He was right, there wasn’t anything, but still, like a presentiment hung over him, Brady found himself leaning on the wire each time a new batch was marched in, counting heads and scanning faces.
“Ida hasn’t even been shot down, John.” Crank kindly reminded again and again.
“As of two weeks ago.” John snapped.
As of two weeks, and then as of three, and then it became four and -where the hell was Kendeigh? Gale had stopped arguing when the subject came up, apparent but impotent fury slowly racking his wiry frame, face gone wane already above his grimey fleece collar. Winter wasn’t even here and they were fading.
And then it happened, what John had been waiting by the fence for, and boy was there a crush at the wire to see them marched in when they came up the muddy enclosure through the gates.
“The fuck are they bringing the women here for?”
“They don’t belong in here, bastards!”
“Ar’those Brady’s Banshees?”
“They’re not gonna hold ‘em here are they?”
Like he’d been reanimated by the presence of a cause, Major Cleven cut his way through the rabble to the front, addressing the German officer escorting them.
“Hey, hey you can’t bring them in here. They’re women, they belong in their own section.”
“If they are women,” the Commandant pointed out, not unkindly, “then perhaps your country should have recognized that before enlisting them? They belong here.”
Cleven shook his head, vehement in his conventions and rules, “It’s not right, you know it’s not.”
“Then tell your Lt. Colonel to stop fighting for combatant status.” he jerked his chin towards Ida Brady and Gale’s eyes widened at her injuries and tufted hair, “The SS had them tucked away at our most prestigious female camp. But they would not accept. They want to be men.”
“Combatants!” Gale argued the point Ida had been making since her feet touched occupied soul.
John Brady yanked his arm, whispering urgently in his ear, “She’s makin’ sign to me, torture, she says. Don’t fight it, Buck.”
Cleven searched the battered faces, some he knew like Ida, T.Smith and Maureen, and some from other squadrons, -ones who must’ve been damned unlucky to get captured considering their safer postings.
“If it can happen to you it c-“ John Brady was a bit of a pain in the ass, Cleven had found, but he had never found him to be wrong.
“Roger, loud and clear, captain.” Cleven warned him his point was made with a bite in his own tone.
“Have we come to an understanding?” The Commandant, amused by the fluster his female charges had caused, it was ample proof that women could never be fully integrated, not even by a society so pervertedly equal as the American’s. “Ja? Sehr gut. It wasn’t like you had a choice anyway, was it?
Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed. Feedback is a writer’s life blood, let me hear your thoughts and screams, they mean so much to me.
We have so many prompts already thrown around for this AU, I can’t wait to explore them, and I welcome any more if you have them.
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#masters of the air#mota#masters of the air fanfic#mota fanfic#mota oc#hbo war fanfic#hbo war#mota Au#gale cleven x oc#john egan x oc#john brady#Maureen Kendeigh#Ida Brady#Tallulah Smith#Austin butler#austin butler fanfiction#Gale Cleven fanfiction#john egan fanfiction#Bucky Egan fanfic#Bucky Egan#buck cleven
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ʙᴀʙʏ ɪ’ᴍ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ
Chapter 2 - “Hates the Perfect Word”
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“Don’t stay out here too late, Baby.”
Sergeant Ken Lemmons was only partly joking with Baby when he said this to her. However over the three weeks of getting to know the stubborn blonde, he realized it wasn’t so far fetched for her to lose track of time.
And that would be proven correct as Baby was still out on the Airstrip, working away. She found it difficult to leave seeing as the view was so beautiful. The sunset painted the sky a warm orange and pink tone. A calm breeze briefly passed her, ruffling the tall grass, the trees, and even the bottom of her dress as it did so.
Sighing, she found a comfortable spot on a nearby crate. Busying herself by screwing two engine pieces together with a basic rod. The action was done smoothly like muscle memory.
A loud sound of an engine and the screech of tires had broken her peaceful state. Internally rolling her eyes, Baby prepared herself.
That could mean only one thing.
The jeep made a rough stop in front of her causing her to look up at the person responsible for the interruption.
Major John ‘Bucky’ Egan.
Even the thought of his name sparked annoyance in Delilah. She couldn’t pinpoint what it was about him that was so infuriating.
Maybe it was the way he walked around base like he was the king of the world. He had everybody under his spell, especially her brother Gale. She couldn’t understand how the two had ever became friends.
Or maybe it was how he would sometimes get caught looking at her but would never say anything.
It was like a game of tug of war. Always giving her signs of interest but then taking it back as if he physically and mentally couldn’t bring himself to go there with her. Like something was stopping him, more like someone.
She had a pretty good idea of who.
“A little birdy told me you were out here.” Leaning back in his seat, Bucky faced the woman.
Delilah, uninterested, gave him a nod before focusing back onto her work. “Never really liked birds.”
“Sad to hear that. They’re real fascinating creatures. I’m more of a unicorn guy myself-”
“I bet you are.”
After a beat of silence, Delilah glanced up to see him staring at her once again. It could’ve been because she had just rudely interrupted him but by the way the corner of his mouth twitched into his signature smirk made her think differently.
His eyes held nothing but admiration as he kept his gaze on her. The way she smoothly worked away like it was her second nature was wildly attractive. Not to mention the quick wits that shamelessly left her pretty mouth, which instead of feeling insulted he would always feel more amazed by her.
“Gale send you out here?”
“No.”
“So tell me…Major Bucky,” The name rolled off her tongue as a taunt. Placing the tool and engine piece down beside her, she leaned back onto her hands. “To what do I owe the pleasure of being in your presence?”
Bucky watched as she seductively crossed her legs and tilted her head awaiting for an answer. The reminder that she was his best friends little sister kept blaring in the back of his mind. But it was so damn hard to listen to.
“Maybe I just want to be in yours.” Copying her action, Bucky tilted his head. “You ever think of that?”
”It’s hard to when you’ve been avoiding me like the plague.”
He knew exactly what she referring to. Part of it was intentional but at the same time he really never knew how to approach her. Which was odd for him.
John Egan never struggled in talking to women. However he would always overthink with Delilah. She made him nervous, in a good way.
“Can’t say I know what you’re talking about, sweetheart.” Bucky let out a nervous scoff knowing he had been called out.
The use of the nickname made Baby raise her eyebrows in surprise. “That’s a new one.”
“You like it?”
“I’m not sure yet.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve been called many things, Major Bucky, but sweet has never been one of them.”
“What?” He dropped his jaw dramatically, pretended to be shocked. “You’re the sweetest.”
Bucky watched as she let out an adorable laugh as she threw her head back. A small wave of pride washed over him at the fact that he got her to smile, let alone talk to him for more than five seconds.
“If I’m sweet then you’re a good singer.” She playfully jutted.
“Oh,” He placed a hand on his heart. “You wound me, Baby. I’d have you know I’m an excellent singer.”
“A little birdy told me differently.”
Looking away Bucky chewed away on the piece of gum in his mouth. Damn, she was good.
“If this birdy happens to be tall, boring, and has a head full of blonde hair on his head than you should ignore him and come see for yourself.”
Delilah laughed not taking him seriously. “Yeah, okay.”
“I’m serious.” He said. Eyes connecting with her honey brown ones. “There’s a dance, day after tomorrow. Come and I’ll make it worth your while.”
“Might skip out on this one.” She declined.
Nodding Bucky looked down. An idea popped into his head that might change her mind.
“Huh, guess you Clevens are more alike than you want to admit.”
If there was anything he learned from witnessing the Cleven sibling duo was that they both were complete opposites. Buck was more serious, rule follower, and never really liked to do anything risky.
And although he didn’t talk to Delilah much, he would notice how she liked to do things in an untraditional way. Her presence here as one of the first female mechanics proves that. She also loved to make fun out of most situations. A small joke was always at the tip of her tongue and she could never keep it there.
He’d like to bet she loved to dance too.
Picking up the tool beside her she pointed it at Bucky with an annoyed glare. “Take that back right now.”
Bingo.
“Makes sense.” He shrugged his shoulders innocently. “Guess the ‘never have a good time’ genes got passed down to both of ya.”
“I can have a good time.” She rebutted.
Bucky nodded, not really convinced at all. “Okay.”
A moment of silence passed as Bucky continued to poke fun at Delilah as she thought over his words.
Letting go of her cheek, the one she was anxiously biting, Delilah sighed. “What times the stupid dance?”
A smile of victory took plastered across the Major's face as he mentally celebrated. “I’ll be there at 8:00, that’s when the real party starts.”
“Can’t wait.” She gave him a fake smile.
Taking a look around, they both knew that it was about to get dark soon and should head back.
Reaching over the passenger seat of the Jeep, Bucky propped open the door with one arm. “Hop in, sweetheart. I’ll give you a ride back.”
“I have a bike, you know?”
“That old thing?” Simultaneously the two turned to look at the bike leaning on the side of the crate she was sitting on.
“Yeah,” Delilah smiled proudly. It was one of the things she built on her own when she first got here. “Isn’t he pretty?”
“He?”
“Well you men always refer to your cars and planes as woman, so I’d thought I’d return the favor.”
As the blonde continued to admire her piece of work, Bucky’s gaze shifted to her. Taking in her smooth tan skin and pretty freckles that he’d like to individually kiss. And finally her full lips that were just calling his name.
He watched as she grabbed the handles of the bike and easily kicked her leg over to get on it. He furrowed his eyebrows. “Baby?”
“I’d rather ride a thousand miles on this old thang than one in there with you.”
He was left speechless as she petaled away without a second thought. The fact that her and a Buck were siblings was still a shock to him.
No matter how different the two were they both had something in common. The Clevens had captured John Egans heart. With a Buck it was respect and friendship. And with Delilah.
Oh, Delilah. He hadn’t even got to know her fully yet and she already had him hooked.
Snapping out of his trance he started the engine before catching up and riding along beside her. Now he was back to looking between the road and her pretty side profile.
“Still got you to go to the dance with me.” He gloated.
Once again, John Egan had managed to make her smile. Shaking her head she tried to petal faster but he would just match her speed. “I hate you!”
“Hates a strong word.”
“Hates the perfect word.”
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A/N : As y’all can tell I love a good slow burn. Hope y’all liked it! Let me know your thoughts on it please, I love to hear feedback.
ALSO DAYUM YALL REALLY CAME THREW WITH THE LIKES ON MY POSTS
Tag list(I can’t believe I have those now🤭):
@valenftcrush
@justheretoreadthhx
#john egan#john egan x reader#john egan x oc#madelyn cline#callum turner x reader#bucky egan#gale cleven#callum turner#buck cleven#austin butler#masters of the air#mota fanfic#motaedit#mota#mota spoilers#ken lemmons#harry crosby
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🏔️The Retreat 🏔️- Chapter IV
Prologue | Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III | Misc references & details
Summary: Lorena gets her first visitor at The Retreat, her sister Felicia who has absolutely no tact. Both Lorena and Gale are confronted with uncomfortable truths. Gale is confronted with the feelings he's been trying to suppress for Lorena - his unlikely visitor and companion.
Pairing: Gale Cleven x Lorena (black fem oc)
Warnings: None
Tropes: Slow Burn, opposites attract, forbidden love
Word Count: 2.2
PART IV - SISTER SISTER
It took everything in Gale to keep from smiling at the nerves coming from Lorena. He’d never seen a more nervous wreck of a woman, a ball of nerves and excitement. She had spend two hours on her hair and had Rose press out her clothing perfectly. He didn’t know how she wasn’t working up a sweat pacing in her heels awaiting the train.
“Lorena take it easy” he says with a hand on her shoulder eliciting looks from onlookers. She looks up at him settling at his side.
“Stop laughing at me” she mutters.
“I’m not laughing” Gale smiles.
“You are its in your eyes” she mutters and he breaks his composure for a moment chuckling.
“She’ll be here, and she’ll be happy to see you. It’ll all be fine” Gale says hopefully.
“That’s not what I’m worried about, what if daddy is on the train with her and he hauls me away?” Lorena asks.
“If your father gets off that train you let me know and we’ll make a run for it.” Gale says no longer smiling.
“Major Gale Cleven running, there’s a thought…” Lorena teases.
“You love your father, its the only option” he says as the roaring of the train and sounding of horn get closer. “It’s alright” he whispers down at your head standing in front of you slightly. You both wait near first class and very few folks exit the train. Felicia exits the train as the fifth person, she has a bag in each hand and there’s an attendant holding two more as she looks around in search of her younger sister.
“That’s her” Lorena squeaks running over to her sister she takes her into her arms both women jumping excitedly. Gale gets a trolley putting the four bags onto it and allowing the women to reacquaint themselves. It had been nearly a year now since the sisters had been together.
“Lolo you do know how to run!” Felicia smiles looking over her baby sister.
“I do” Lo affirms smiling as she takes her sisters hand. They turn to find Gale watching them. They shared little resemblance but enough. Gale can see the similarities in them, their mannerisms and smiles.
“Well, how do yo do?” Felicia says looking him over. “No wonder you like it out here” Felicia comments.
“This is Gale” Lo laughs at her sisters cantor.
“Nice to meet you” Gale blushes a little take a back by the forward sister.
“You made him sound like an old man” Felicia fails to whisper.
“Shut up why don’t you, and lets get on the road, we won’t be home until late” Lorena snaps embarrassed by her sisters mouth.
“Why? Are we’re far away?” Fefe asks Lorena who responds with a wink.
“May I put these in the back?” Gale asks motioning to the suitcases.
“Sure and it’s Felicia Clarence, I promise our mother taught Lorena manners she’s just so pretty she’s never needed to use them” Felicia smiles. Lorena scoffs at the irony of Felicia’s so called manners.
“Gale Cleven” he smiles shaking her hand. Both ladies sit up front in the truck leaving Gale without his usual person of space between him and Lorena.
“So how are mom and dad?” Lorena asks to fill some of the silence.
“Same as always, waiting for you to come back home” Felicia says honestly. Gale grips the wheel at the jarring reality.
“I keep telling them I won’t be home for awhile” Lorena reminds feeling claustrophobic.
“So this arrangement isn’t forever?” Felicia asks suspiciously sitting forward to point between her sister and the handsome stranger that was now both her landlord and employer.
“Lorena can stay as long as she’d like” Gale responds. Lorena notes there was o hesitation and raises a brow at her sister.
In not one of the letters had Lorena mentioned his fashion good looks to Felicia, not once had she described his physicality. He was dreamier than Felicia could have ever imagined, younger too. The Gale in the letters was an old man, chaste and probably well past his prime free of vice and with a bucketful of old man hobbies. Gale in person was something totally different.
“Middle of nowhere to let all that pretty and party planning expertise to go to waste” Felicia tuts shaking her head. “What happened to us having large estates across the street from each other filled with the finest china and a distinguished guest list?” Felicia asks.
“Felicia, I’m not like you I can’t just show my face anyways and pretend like the whispering doesn’t get to me when it does. I don’t need anyones pity either, I don’t need sharks circling I don’t need the drama of courtship and planing another wedding. I just need peace.” Lorena sighs being transparent with her sister.
“Whoa, you two really aren’t sleeping together” Felicia says shocked. Lorena and Gale both show healthy blushes, embarrassment burns their cheeks as Felicia says the quiet parts aloud.
“Fe!” Lorena grits.
“Sorry, I mean look at him but mama and daddy raised us with enough sense we wouldn’t morn one relationship while sitting with a man were in another with” Felicia says dismissively.
“Gale I told you she talks too much and she has no decorum. Please forgive her.” Lorena says embarrassed. Nodding he forces back a smile. He’d never seen Lorena embarrassed before.
“My apologies Gale, I’m just trying to figure out my sister. This is the biggest shock to all of us. If you knew where and how we grew up you’d understand my concern” Felicia reasons.
“I understand” Gale mutters.
“Do you?” Felicia pries looking at him. “Do you have siblings?”
“Only child” he responds keeping his eyes on the road.
“That must’ve been boring” she continues with her inquisition.
“It was alright” Gale shrugs.
“Well, we have a brother and then each other and that kept life interesting” Felicia shares. Gale turns looking at Lorena, she had never spoke about her brother in the past five months, not once, nor did she send him a letter.
“You have a brother?” Gale asks Lorena.
“Well we’re not close” she responds.
“They’re feuding because Kevin had an affair on his wife” Felicia discloses.
“It’s a dishonourable thing to do to your pregnant wife” Lorena mutters.
“He’s family, she’s not - he’s on your side you know. He’s scorned reggie from all social events he controls” Felicia says trying to mend fences.
“Hypocritical don’t you think?” Lorena chuffs still feeling the sting of her ex-husbands indiscretion.
“Him and Maria are doing better than ever. You going MIA scared him straight. You would be proud of him the kids are familiar with him, he’s been home and Maria is happy” Felicia adds but unlike both of Lorena’s siblings her marriage had been full of love and passion. It was alive and well, it was what Lorena wanted, she’d never had the luck of lukewarm love. If her marriage had been that perhaps it would have hurt less.
“Good for them” Lorena mutters trying to hide her smugness from Gale.
“You bitch” Felicia laughs shaking her head at her sister. Gale’s eyes grow in size as Lorena withholds a smile. “You’re pissed at Kev but you write Reggie” Felicia says taking it too far.
“Don’t go there Fe” Lorena warns sharply, Gale watches as the older raises her hands in surrender. Their dynamic is clear to him. Felicia has fashioned herself the antagonist, she’s the digger that’s relentless and doesn’t stop until she’s unearthed the truth. He watches Lorena read Felicia her rights at the gas station and the rest of the ride back is a lot more quiet with Lorena in a sour mood. He wonders if it was a bad idea on his end but only time can tell for sure.
…..
Gale straightens excited to see Lorena after last night, she’d gone up earlier than usual with her sister and he hadn’t wanted to intrude with a cool night. Felicia emerges in the doorway with a smile.
“Good morning” she smiles.
“Good morning, Rose brought by breakfast” he stands.
“Sit, its fine I can serve myself” Felicia smiles fixing herself a plate. Gale finds himself a little uneasy in her presence. “Relax, men show their tail after a month, it’s been about six since she’s been here you're a good man” Felicia says frankly. She’d decided that during the long ride into the Retreat. Lorena was herself and not a shell of who she had been, Felicia could see her sisters ease around Gale, anyone could see she was well in spite of the heartbreak.
“Thank you” Gale breathes relieved. Felicia’s personality was a kin to a bloodhound unable to let things go.
“She never had a real shot, she’s been spoiled rotten her whole life. Never had to fight for anything so um, she runs when she should be home giving Reggie hell for his betrayal” Felicia comments buttering her bread.
“Hell will find him when he realizes what he’s lost” Gale comments but Felicia scoffs.
“No, no Gale she’s not angry. If Reggie and that hussy run their course and his sorry ass comes back begging she’ll take him back. She’s still happy he’s alive. She is my sister but that girl is a special kind of crazy” Felicia says candidly. Gale sits back having lost his appetite at that thought.
“You think so?” He asks feeling bitterness.
“I know men, and I know my sister, that girl can’t hold a candle to her. Reggie still sends her money, people talk and the divorce was the girls doing. My brothers been doing a great job at blacklisting the vain bastard and absence only makes the heart grow fonder.” Felicia says talking like a man. Her words make sense to Gale, worse they scare him.
“But your folks won’t let that happen, he’s a coward and he humiliated her. She’s only just stopped crying whenever letters come” Gale shares.
“My folks miss their Lorena. They’d rather her up the block then on the other side of the country” Felicia shrugs. Its the opposite of what Gale wants to hear.
“What do you think?” Gale asks Felicia curiously.
“I think Lorena and Reggie were puppy love. I think he’s a scoundrel and doesn’t deserve to breathe her air. He doesn’t appreciate her or value her, there’s an absence or respect. Lorena deserves better” Felicia speaks frankly.
“I agree” Gale nods.
“Major Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven, I did a lot of research. Found out you're a great man, leader of men. You survived a prison camp in Germany and managed an escape during the coldest winter in 100 years.” Felicia says shocking him.
“You're right” he nods attention piqued.
“So fight for her” Felicia says silencing everything around him. The assertive strength in her eyes dissolves into something more soft hearted. “I know you love her Gale and she thinks the world of you. It’s an odd pairing and a peculiar circumstance but I can think of no other reason for her to be all the way here if it weren’t written in the stars” Felicia shrugs. Footsteps sound above them and Lorena emerges from upstairs. Swallowing her heart races at the sight of her sister and Gale who’s white as a ghost.
“What’d she say?’ Lorena asks unnerved placing a hand against Gales clammy forehead.
“I asked him if it’s common to go skinny dipping in the lake?” Felicia lies.
“Swimming naked?” Lorena questions her sister who smiles jostling her brows.
“Gale I’m sorry, her and Clarence her husband are progressive and he encourages this sort of thing. We’re all used to it” Lorena apologizes and Gale has time to recover.
“It’s alright Lorena, no skinny dipping in this spot. You want to do that near running water but it’s not safe now. You ladies don’t shoot and so one of the guys would have to keep watch and uh … no” Gale says turning a little red at the thought. Felicia laughs and Lorena casts an amused yet annoyed look at her sister placing her hand on Gales shoulder.
“He’ll ever invite you back” she scoffs.
“If she weren’t married I’d make an introduction with Bucky” Gale stands taking Lorena’s hand. He smiles holding her gaze until she smiles back and then he nods.
“I’ll be with the horses if you need me” Gale says bidding her a goodbye.
So fight for her. Felicia’s words dance around in his mind as he heads outside mounting his horse. It repeats on a loop. He would in every circumstance that Lorena needed, it wasn’t a second thought. Therein lied the issue. He’d never given specific thought to him and Lorena long enough. He was always rushing those thoughts out of his head. Marge had been sure he was no longer worth it. Yet, Felicia seemed to be convinced otherwise.
Hearing a scream Gale looks over to find Felicia in a puddle ad Lorena laughing hysterically. Finding his smile in hers Gale considered the unthinkable. In his heart, he’s willing to fight. In his heart he hopes Lorena feels the same.
#austin butler imagine#austin butler#austin#austin butler fanfiction#austin butler x black reader#mota#master#masters of the air#mas#masterlist#major gale#major gale cleven#major buck#major buck cleven#austin butler x oc#gale cleve#gale cleven x oc#major buck cleven x oc
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✦ It Had to be You: Two ✦
John “Bucky” Egan x OC
Gale “Buck Cleven x OC
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and not associated with the real people mentioned from the show. This is simply based on the portrayals of the actors playing these characters.
Warning for this chapter: Cursing, mention of death, suicidal ideations.
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“You need to eat something, Carolina – “ My mother’s voice straining. “You’re withering away to that of a corpse.”
The thought of eating anything at this point, especially the pickled beetroot, was enough to make me want to vomit. I moved the spoon around in the liquid, playing with it as if I were still a child. You really don’t feel like eating after watching the love of your life be lowered into the hard, cold ground.
I leaned back in the chair, crossing my arms over my chest. “I’m not hungry.” Mother darting her gaze in my direction. “Thank you anyway, Mother.”
I knew her patience with me was starting to wane, her emotions taking a direct hit as well. I didn’t want to do anything – eat, bathe, talk – I just wanted to be left alone and that was killing her to see. My father on the other hand just pushed everything to the side, whispering to mother that this too shall pass. He had fought in the Great War – seeing many of his fellow colleagues and friends shot down right in front of him. He knew the tolls of war and what they could do to someone’s psyche, especially the wives of the soldiers that never made it home. To him, this was a natural part of life. To my father, Gale was taken for a reason that we didn’t have any business knowing. It was his time to go and there was nothing that any of us could do about it.
She took a seat at the table across from me, pushing her greying hair from her face. The air was silent between us, neither her nor I making direct eye contact. She finally broke the ice, clearing her throat before speaking,
“Carolina –“She took a short pause as she gathered her words. “I won’t tell you that I know how you’re feeling right now because I’ve never had to deal with such tragedy, but I can’t stand seeing you act this way, darling.” Tears brimming her lined eyes. “You're love for Gale is something that I admire greatly and I know he was your everything if not more –“I narrow my eyes as she speaks. “But you can’t keep pushing yourself down this rabbit hole of self-neglect and mourning.”
I was appalled – dumbfounded that she would even say such a thing.
“He was you're first love – and while that is important – you are still young, and I don’t want to see your beauty go to waste.”
“I just buried my husband less than four hours ago and you’re telling me that I need to suck it up and go find another man?” My voice low. “Do you know how ridiculous you sound right now?”
She was taken back by my question – her eyes squinting at my argument. “I just want what’s best for you, Ca-“
“No-“ I cut her off. “I’m not gonna sit here and be lectured by someone who’s never been through what I’m going through at this moment.” My voice quivering with anger. “Gale was the love of my life – and I’m sorry if you’ve never felt that way towards Daddy, but there’s no man on this planet that could ever fill Gale’s shoes and there never will be.”
My chair scrapped against the hardwood floor as I jump up to leave. I could hear her calls as I marched back to the bedroom, slamming the door with all my might. The sobs that I had held back escaped as I slid to the floor – my knees curling into my chest as the tears streamed down my face.
I didn’t even cry when they lowered his casket into the ground.
The shock of that being the last image of Gale that I would ever see again sending my body into a hypnotic state. My mother’s words finally breaking the damn open – my anger allowing the floodgates to open…
“You see that soldier over there – “Her painted finger pointing in the man’s direction. “I bet you I can get him to ask me to dance during the next song.”
I rolled my eyes as I sipped on my coke, watching as Brenda and the other girls at the table laughed and flirted with the man in question. He was tall and dark headed – not really that handsome – but that was for her to worry about. Brenda Cogsworth was a girl that my mother forced me to be around. Her mother and my mother had grown up together, becoming friends while our fathers were fighting in the First World War. The Cogsworth family had money, but class was missed with their precious Brenda. She was wild as a stallion, kissing ever boy that looked in her direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up knocked up or infected by a disease that Penicillin couldn’t cure.
“Why aren’t you putting yourself out there, Carolina?”
Brenda smirked to her friends as she waited for my reply. It was obvious they were teasing - knowing that I hadn’t spoken to a single fella since I arrived. My mother had forced me to come to the dance – telling me that I needed to be cordial – silently demanding that I find a future husband. Initially, I was a very shy person, but I opened like a flower in the Spring once I got to know someone. By coming to dances such as these, I didn’t think I was up to par with the other ladies, such as Brenda and her gaggle of friends. They had bright blonde hair and smooth skin – I had dirty blonde hair and chastity pustules that would pop up during my flow. My mother always made sure I was well dressed but you must have a pretty face, not just a nice dress to get a soldier to notice you these days.
I kept quiet as I watched the man in question smile to his friends before sauntering towards our table. He removed his cap, tucking it under his arm, as he slicked back his already oiled hair. He introduced himself, taking Brenda’s hand in his, pressing a kiss against her skin. The table swooned as they watched the events they had just discussed unfold, quietly celebrating as the solider lifted Brenda was from the table and onto the dance floor. I guess you would call them good friends for being happy for her, but these girls were calculative. They would be happy for you to your front, but their bodies were raging with envy. They all wished they could be Brenda at that moment – dancing away with a soldier that you’d be lucky to see again once the war was over.
“Now he’s a looker.”
I followed the glances of the girls as they watched the man walk towards the bar. He was dressed in slacks and a collared shirt – his blonde hair positioned in a tousled fashion.
They were right – he was very attractive – too attractive to be from around here. I watched as he spoke with another male – his smile big and bright – as he laughed at their words. The girls continued to whisper about him, telling each other to make the first move before someone else decides too.
“If you ladies will excuse me.” I took one last sip before standing up, smoothing down my dress before turning towards the gentleman. I don’t know what had gotten into me – the fact that I was tired of being the butt of their jokes – or the gumption of just trying to find out if I could confront someone of the opposite sex. My mother always told me it was the man’s place to approach for the first time. Make him do the work as you sit back and bask in the attention.
Mother’s rule went flying out the window that night.
I let out a deep breath, my hand reaching out to tap his shoulder. His friends were the first to notice me, grinning at me as the man I had sought out slowly turned around. He was about a foot taller than me – his blue eyes connected with mine.
“Hello –“My cheeks blushing. “I’m Carolina Davies.”
His eyes trailed down my body – his friends snickering as they nursed their drinks. “Carolina?” His voice deep. “Like North Carolina?”
The tone of his voice having a hint of tease, “Yeah.” My confidence starting to slowly deflate as he looked at his friends, knocking into each other as they laughed.
“Not to be a drag or anything, Carolina-“He paused as he stood a little straighter. “But your looks aren’t doing it for me, sweetheart.” He spoke matter of fact. “Sorry if me looking over at the table you were sitting at made you think that I was interested in you –“Another pause. “But I was looking at the girl you were sitting next to – the pretty one.”
I could feel tears welling in my eyes as the shame and embarrassment draped over me. I had just made a complete fool of myself – knowing damn well that I should’ve just kept my butt in that chair.
I didn’t bother saying anything else to him – there was nothing to say to be honest. I just gave him a small smile before excusing myself. The girls I had been sitting with watching the interaction, hiding their smiles as I walked by.
My stride grew faster as I pushed past the dancing couples, needing the immediate feel of fresh air on my skin. I felt like an utter fool – a reject – ugly.
The cool autumn air provided me a sense of relief as my body pressed against the brick wall of the hall. I ignored the glances of those that were entering, wiping away the stale tear that would occasionally drop from my lashes.
“Carolina?”
My eyes darting over to the man standing to the right of me. “Carolina, right?” His smile growing as I looked at him confused.
I nodded, “Yeah?” My voice weary.
He took a step closer – his facial features coming to light as he stood under the singular bulb. His smile started to fall slightly as he ran a hand through his blonde hair. “Just wanted to make sure you were okay.” He shuffled his feet. “Saw what those guys did back there – should’ve never happened.”
Silence struck me – my brain trying to wrap around the words he was saying.
“I’m Gale Cleven.” A twinkle showing in his blue eyes.
“Carolina Davies.” My voice cracking.
His charming smile reappeared causing the theoretical butterflies to migrate around my stomach. He was very handsome – much more attractive than the guy at the bar. “Beautiful name for a gorgeous girl.”
I watched as the birds hopped around the yard – pulling the early worm from the soggy ground. The weather mimicked my mood – dark and grey – the sun disappearing the morning of Gale’s funeral. It had been over a week – a long week – full of sympathetic gestures and “I’m so sorry for your loss” sentiments. I had sent my parents away two days ago – no longer able to take their constant supervision – hiding sharp objects and medications so I wouldn’t harm myself in anyway.
I constantly thought about it though.
Just a flick of the blade one right way or a handful of the right pills – Gale and I would be reunited, and the worries of the world would dissipate. I could never get the gumption to do it. I was positive that Gale was looking down on me – just the way the wind would blow a certain way – or a red cardinal sitting on the fence that sat in front of the kitchen window. He wouldn’t want me to reach that level of despair. He would want me to go one and be happy, but it’s hard to do so when your heart is breaking into a million pieces. It’s hard to remain happy when lying in bed, reaching across to the spot where he once slept – the sheets cold – the empty void of waking up alone every morning.
The distant sound of a truck pulled me away from my thoughts – the familiar black Ford kicking up dust as it came closer. I let out a sigh, pulling Gale’s shirt tighter around my body, hiding the thin lace of my nightgown from John’s view.
“Morning, Carolina.” His gruff voice sounding as he removed himself from the driver’s side.
I stayed silent – rolling my eyes at the sight of him. I had gotten rid of everyone except him – John was like a piece of lint that just kept popping up – no matter how many times you swept – he still lingered long after.
My eyes glanced over as he walked to the back of the truck, pulling two suitcases from the bed. Worn leather and seeing better days, he placed them on the wooden steps. “Good to see you getting some fresh air.”
Pushing out of the rocker, I retreated into the house, the screen door slamming against the frame. Muttered words slipped past his lips; his boots heavy as he followed my direction. I had made myself a pot of coffee earlier, forgetting about it until reaching the kitchen. Pouring the dark liquid into my cup and the rest down the drain, not up to sharing with the likes of John Egan. I took a seat at the table – our eyes connecting over the coffee cup as he entered the room. Silence blanketed the room as he leaned against the counter, his gaze focused on the backyard.
“Why are you still coming around?”
His neck turning – our eyes meeting once again. “Pardon?”
Sitting up a little straighter, Gale’s shirt opening slightly as I moved. “I said –“My tone low. “Why are you still coming around? He’s dead and gone – your services around here are no longer warranted.”
“And what services might those be?” His jaw clenching.
A loud sigh blew through my nose, “Those of the mighty hero – the devoted friend – the courageous major who led his team out of the trenches. Only thing –“ I paused. “You weren’t brave enough to take the bullet yourself, letting your dear friend, Buck, take the lead instead. That’s a real heroic act if you ask me, Mr. Egan.”
The words dripped with venom – John’s eyes burning with utter rage as the room acquired a deafening silence. His diaphragm moving at a rapid rate as the anger coursed through his body – his fist balled together as he resisted the temptation to start swinging.
I struck a nerve – Gale’s death was the nail that was hammered into John’s figurative coffin on the daily. The thoughts of seeing his friend being shot down – only following his commands to go over the wall to a hopeful escape. Seeing Gale’s lifeless body lying on the snow-covered ground as blood seeped from the open wounds – John deserved to see that every time he closed his eyes.
“I never claimed to be a fucking hero, Lina.” His voice thick with emotion.
I rolled my eyes at the mention of the nickname he had given me. Crossing my arms in a defensive motion as he stepped close to where I sat.
His knees cracking as he crouched down, his blues level with mine.
“You think hiding behind this hateful wall is gonna make you feel better? Sayin hateful things to the people who are just trying to help you?”
My eyes narrowed.
“Get off your high horse, little girl. Your husband was my best friend – the only person that kept me going during those God-awful days at that fucking camp. You think you’re the only one hurting – honey, you don’t even know the half of it.”
Our faces were centimeters away – his eyes searching mine for a reaction.
Kicking my leg out as I stood, I bumped purposely into his body as I retreated to the front entrance. His bags still sitting by the door – no reason at all why they should even be in the house to begin with.
Taking each case in my hands, kicking open the screen door, I haphazardly tossed them into the muddy yard – a smile forming as they landed with a splash in the dirty water.
The thunderous sound of his footsteps met my ears, his jaw slacked at the sight of his things lying in the yard.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I couldn’t help but laugh, watching as he raced down the steps, pulling the leather out of the puddle, water dripping as he held it away from himself.
It was the first time I had laughed since the news of Gale’s death – coming at the misery and expense of John Egan.
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major gale ‘buck’ cleven and major john ‘bucky’ egan loved to share the pretty things they picked up at the bar. it always started the same, bucky scanning all the girls at the bar with their perfect dresses and rosy perfumes that reeked off them as he walked by, until one eventually caught his eye. you. and as soon as he saw you, he’s bumping his elbow to buck’s arm, who would roll his eyes and remind him of marge. well, at first he would care about her. poor marge, awaiting him at home, she had no idea how many girls he had picked up whilst away, how many lipstick stains coated his skin at the end of the night.
buck was more quiet, as opposed to bucky’s cocky, loud demeanor— so bucky always made the first move. “what’s a pretty thing like you doin’ here all alone?”
he always loved watching the sweet girls like you bat your lashes up at him, sweetly hitting him with a, “major?” which is soon followed by a shy, quiet, “‘m not sure.”
and that was bucky’s cue now, of course, to wave buck over, “y’know, we could give you some company.”
and of course, like all the others you would agree, nodding your head and following them back to the barracks. when you did eventually get there, it seemed like a ritual for bucky and buck with how quick they were to put you between them on one of the nearest beds. bucky sat to your left, and buck to your right. buck always took it slow, pressing soft kisses to your cheek where you melted into them, whereas bucky would move your jaw so you were looking at him, lips pressing to yours.
it wouldn’t take long for bucky and buck to assume their typical positions, bucky always called dibs on the mouth, whilst buck prefered to be balls deep inside of you, watching the way your lashes flutter as you slobber over bucky’s cock. something about it was so dirty, so sick, and yet they loved it so much— and of course, bucky loved to play with you as you’re being fucked dumb by buck, teasing his tip on your tongue and making you call him sir.
he always had a thing for that.
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