“You did so well. You did so well. I’m not the person who put his foot in it when he tried to introduce himself to you in the crew lounge. I like to think I’m better than him now. Now you’re going to let me go, like you let him go to bring me out—does that make sense, Linda? Do you understand?” Linda hesitated, still hiccuping a bit, then nodded, flashing him a wavering smile. “Ah, there she is,” Herc said softly. “It was an honor to see you, and it is an honor to let you go. But you know I’ll always be here for you if you need me. Okay?”

still can’t believe some guy with a slide whistle copied my intergenerational mentor-mentee dynamic exploration from 2022 /j

tagged by @punkvettel, @hon3y-badger, and @dioroscoe—thank you all!

What colour are your eyes? they used to be black but are now dark brown

What instantly tells you if a person is good? if they treat people working in retail or in restaurants with respect.

Do you have a recurring dream? i don’t often remember my dreams so can’t answer this one oof

What is the most interesting class you have taken: last term i took a required ancient history course and it was a lot of fun! i love history in general, i might take it up as a minor concentration. back in high school i also took an anatomy class which i loved.

How often do you find yourself day dreaming? all the time 😬

Name/Nickname: em

Zodiac: gemini

Height: 150cm

Nationality: fil-am

Favourite colour: blue-grey, blue-green, purple

Favourite season: winter and early spring

Favourite animals: owls, frogs, octopi, and orcas

Favourite fictional characters: carolyn knapp-shappey, douglas richardson, martin crieff, arthur shappey, herc shipwright, theresa of liechtenstein, and linda fairbairn…am i aware those are like. all the cabin pressure characters? yeah…i don’t care though ❤️

Tea, coffee or hot chocolate: tea, especially green tea…won’t say no to hot chocolate though…

Average hours of sleep: 7-8

Cat or dog person: cat

Number of blankets slept with: 2

Places ancestors are from: the philippines (batangas and ilocos)

Dream trip: hike around the lake district, train across europe, spending time in hokkaido, or attending rally stages or a grand prix!

Blog established: this one, march 2021; my main, 2015

Random fact about yourself: when i was a kid my dream job was to be the secretary-general of the united nations, or to have a career in espionage (those dream ended really well…😬)

Three ships: bobsled, therlinda, hercolyn (all cabin pressure)

Last song: tapestry (carole king)

Last movie: the schumacher documentary, does that count?

Currently reading: i’m a little overdue for my annual jane eyre reread, but better late than never…

Currently watching: the schumacher documentary (i didn’t finish. i have fifteen minutes left)

Currently craving: something of chocolate

tagging @gridcode, @pinklarenn, @koolbica, @powertrains, @missyourflight, @jevdumpster, @p1tstop, @maranello, and anyone else who wants to chip in. no pressure of course!

i imagine herc and linda got off the plane in newcastle with very different opinions about how their positioning flight went (credit to @sircarolyn for the inspiration)

29 pages of whoop-ass done. hardest 6k of my fucking life except the writing wasn’t the difficult part it was the nanosynthesis

It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t an accusation—it wasn’t a prompt for him to continue, either, but somehow it drew out the admission that he’d been holding back for so long, too long, the crew lounge whispers not around to push it back inside him. Only this young first officer, cross-legged on a bed, and an inflectionless statement of fact. “It was too much,” Herc said to the magazine. “He was too much.” Out of the corner of his eye, Linda slid off the bed after a few seconds of stunned silence; he concluded she was probably going to leave the room, and him to his past. Unexpectedly, however, the edge of his mattress dipped. He stiffened in shock as Linda hesitated, sitting right up next to him—then rested her head on his shoulder, decided to commit, and gave him a tight, silent hug. The breath came out of Herc in a soft oh, and Linda’s arms pressed tighter around him. “I’m sorry,” she said, in the way anyone would when there wasn’t much else to say, but from her it wasn’t insincere, and Herc bowed his head a little, overcome by emotion.

can't believe some guy with a slide whistle copied my intergenerational mentor-mentee dynamic exploration from 2022 /j

‘surely you’ve seen aeroplanes on stand at the airport before, linda?’

‘it never gets old, herc. thought you’d know that by now.’

Douglas knew, on some level, it was going to be like this: he was there mostly for Carolyn’s sake, Martin and Theresa having sent their well-wishes along with regrets that they couldn’t make the wedding, and God knew he had all sorts of complex feelings about the whole thing. It was good to see his friend and her son find their own closure, he’d never deny that—he’d spent years at their side, had some idea of what they’d been through, and it was a happy day—but he hadn’t expected, well—

The old friend from Air England was much better at all this than Douglas had ever, ever expected him to be.

(extract from WIP: Per finita lietamente, e all’usanza teatrale. drawing prompt from @sircarolyn way back in january: ‘douglas staring longingly at herc and linda’)

you can replace slightly awkward flights with coworkers who’ve known you since you were a baby with a deeply complex and undefinable platonic string of fate between you and the sad new guy your dad hired. but Watch Out (redraw of this)

my favorite bits from today’s shipwright & fairbairn sketch dump

full page. for fun

i can’t believe i forgot that linda is canonically a rally driver

it's the one-year anniversary of the publication of the first chapter of what i still think is one of my favorite fics, Shipwright and Fairbairn!

this fic holds a special place in my heart not only for its central focus, but because of how much i grew as a writer while planning and creating it. i wanted to write something exploratory and experimental while paying tribute to canon, and i think this one pulled that off pretty well :')

to celebrate, i've gone back and commented on the original fic, sharing where certain parts of the fic come from, what i wanted to imply in different places, and all the intentional choices i made in order to make the fic as canonically compliant as possible. if you want a behind-the-scenes look as to what went into the writing process, this should interest you! LINK HERE.

last, thank you to everyone who's enjoyed or commented on this fic in the past year. they say a writer puts pieces of themselves in their work; this fic has more of it than anything else i've ever written, and i'm proud of it. and if you've never read it before—now's a great time to have a look! you may like it 😉

‘…friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.’

debated putting quotes on here that make me think of them and want to bite furniture but couldn’t decide which i liked best so i made three :p

fun fact: linda’s doing the pilot flying checklist in the pre-start procedure, while herc is doing the pilot monitoring checklist. they’re both on the first step (beacon switch for linda, ATC for herc).

references: airbus has 360-degree views of the cockpits in their aircraft on their website. tumblr won’t let me link for some reason

the linda fairbairn extended universe! starring an only child, her co-driver, a silly dad, the best friend the silly dad pulled because he needed a home, and the brother the only child pulled because she got temporarily unemployed

whole spread below cut

honestly the first time i really began to critically question the idea of cabin pressure i had in my head (esp wrt the character of martin) was when i relistened to it late 2020-early 2021 over discord with one of my high school friends. he had been a fan of bbc sherlock in the past but got quite attached to the character of arthur throughout the listenthrough, we get through s1 and my friend gets really quiet and then he says sadly over the discord call ‘…martin’s really a dick, isn’t he’ and i was like lmao yea and then i thought about it for a while after we got off the call and really started to wonder why on earth attitudes toward martin were really… Like That when i was first getting into the show in 2016. like, if you were around then you know: he’s god’s most persecuted soldier, stronger than any us marine, he’s so victimized, poor little meow meow, cinnamon roll or whatever… i mean not to say that the fanon view of martin doesn’t persist to this day or to say that my current view of martin is The Correct One, namely that the deficits that martin is perceived to have are in his character more than in his circumstances, that his behavior does warrant a comeuppance at times, and that his autism and/or autistic traits doesn’t excuse him his early unkindness and is not disqualified by his growth and change throughout the show (also the attitude he should get a free pass from being an asshole because of his autism is…questionable at most and ableist at worst? like him being an asshole isn’t because he’s autistic. sometimes he is just being an asshole). and maybe that’s not the greatest take in the world but it has made my enjoyment of the show much deeper tbh

thinking about herc loving linda, not only with the posturing in the same direction as a friend would love a friend, not only just enough at arms’ length as a mentor would love a mentee, but in the closest approximation of a father’s love. thinking about herc watching chief pilot fairbairn—his superior, the one who holds his career in his hand, the father of the young pilot who, strangely, has taken a liking to him—and how deeply and openly the other man loves his daughter. thinking about herc going through the motions, copying him. giving linda room to grow, being there for her whenever she looked to her left.

then thinking about herc saying to martin on the positioning flight, ‘[arthur] says it’s a fire.’

now i’m thinking about the time i wrote herc cooking eggs and tomato for linda bc that was always the comfort food for me when i was little. and herc is pinoy. to me