Title: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
Fandom: Masters of the Air
Pairing: John Brady/Harry Crosby/Everett Blakely
Word count: 15,986
Rating: Explicit
Summary:
Harry hesitates. “Ev and I went on leave together,” he says. “For a month, a little while ago. And we just – rented a house and made a go of it. You know, normal living.”
John is very aware of the nighttime chill, even though it’s late spring. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Harry shifts slightly. He doesn’t speak for so long that John’s fingers twitch, reflexively reaching for his pipe, the way he often does in these moments. “And I thought maybe we could try that. For a little while. No pressure to stick around, just until we figure out what’s what. What we want to do.”
Written for the Heavy Artillery 2025 holiday exchange. For @lazicalm.
Chapters: 17/17
Fandom: Masters of the Air (TV 2024)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Everett Ernest Blakely/John D. Brady/Harry Crosby, Harry Crosby & Joseph "Bubbles" Payne
Characters: Harry Crosby (1919-2010), Everett Ernest Blakely, John D. Brady, John Clarence "Bucky" Egan, John B. "Jack" Kidd, Charles "Crank" Cruikshank, Frank D. Murphy (1921-2007), Howard "Hambone" Hamilton, Alexander Jefferson (1921-2022), Gale "Buck" Cleven, Original Male Character(s), Ken Lemmons, John "Winks" Herrmann, David "Solly" Solomon, James Douglass (1920-1988), Bernard "Benny" DeMarco, Joseph "Bubbles" Payne
Additional Tags: Polyamory, Throuple, Angst with a Happy Ending, Masturbation, Hand Jobs, Friends to Lovers, Cheating, cheating that turns into polyamory, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Girlfriends/No Wives
Summary:
What’s a boy to do when he falls for not one, but two of his pilots?
Written for the always amazing @almost-a-class-act
BradyCrozBlakely, postwar, nighttime. This will go on ao3 as part of the one-shot collection... eventually.
--
John flickers awake and takes inventory.
He can't have been asleep very long, but the street outside is very quiet. He's not used to it yet, this exact brand of stillness. It makes him reach for familiar things.
"Where's Harry?" he murmurs.
Ev makes a grunt that John thinks might be the only answer he's going to get, but then real words do emerge, albeit mumbled: "Living room or porch."
John wonders how he knows, with a little off-key pang he wishes he didn't feel. He doesn't move for a moment in the dark, listening to Ev's breathing even back out again, and then, soundlessly, he rolls to his feet and goes looking.
He almost misses him, passing by the living room doorway and assuming that it's empty because it's dark. But then he hears the rustle of fabric, and backtracks. Harry's eyes pick up the ambient glow from the streetlight outside and it sketches out the rest of his face around them, but otherwise he is a dark, silent huddle on the couch.
There is something about being awake this late that instills in John the need to move quietly, even though the only remaining sleeper is on the other side of a closed door above them. He makes a detour on his path across the room to grab the folded blanket from the back of the chair nearest the window, and shakes it out. Harry doesn't say anything as John climbs onto the couch next to him and drapes the blanket around both of their shoulders, though he does take the end of the blanket on his side and tug it into his lap, securing it.
After a moment, he leans over very slowly and rests his weight against John's shoulder. John tucks an arm around him, fingers sliding too easily into the gaps between ribs that are deeper than he remembers from before. Harry's body is an insubstantial thing in his grip, as if he will drift away without John keeping hold of him.
"Wish I remembered what it was like to get a full night of sleep," Harry murmurs.
John hums an acknowledgement. "If you do, let me know."
There's a lapse, during which John glances down and can just about make out that Harry's eyes are closed. He can tell he's not sleeping, because he's stroking aimless circles into the inside of John's knee with the very tips of his fingers.
"Put your head in my lap," John suggests, giving him a light tug. Harry obliges without opening his eyes, shifting over and curling up with his cheek on John's thigh. After a moment, he rejigs himself again, turning over this time so that he can press his face gently into John's sweater.
"My nose is cold," he tells John's belly.
John readjusts the blanket so that Harry is as tucked in as he can be. "It would be warmer in bed," he points out.
"I can't sleep," Harry returns. "I have to get up. I can't stare at the ceiling."
"You don't want to read?" John asks, thinking about the way he'd come upon him in the dark, immobile.
"No, I..." Harry sounds faintly rueful, as though he doesn't have the energy to be properly impatient with himself. "I don't know. I feel disconnected, when I wake up in the night. Like... can't get traction, I guess."
"Traction," John echoes.
"Also can't explain it when I'm tired," Harry says pointedly, in a tone that makes John smile very faintly. After a beat, he adds: "Ev sleeping?"
"Yeah." John settles a hand in his hair. "He knew where you'd be, though."
"That month we had on leave," Harry says, not a full-stop explanation, but the timelessness of this hour of the night means neither of them are in a rush to get through the brief silence that follows. And then: "He used to put me to bed on the couch like a toddler. He said I was going to end up there anyway so he was cutting out the middle man."
That immediately seems like exactly something Ev would do. John wonders if he would have handled it the same way. "And?" he asks. "Did you sleep?"
"Like a toddler," Harry admits.
John strokes a lock of hair back of his ear. "You could go to sleep on the couch any night you want," he offers, after a moment. Ev had probably been more sure of himself when he had suggested it, too. Sometimes John finds himself reaching for his own granite self-concept and lurches, discovering it not in the shape he remembers.
"No," Harry says firmly, and John knows at once he's thought about this at some length. "This is real life. I need to... I can't get used to that."
John doesn't argue with him. Maybe he's right, after all. Real life is another new shape to figure out, to fit themselves into - whether any of them like it or not.
"And anyway," Harry adds. "Something in me..." He hovers over it. John knows he has the words already, he's just figuring out if he should say it. "...settles back, I guess, when Ev and I are on either side of you."
"Yeah," John agrees quietly. He thinks Ev would agree, if asked. "Yeah. I like that, too."
Harry's breath is warm through his sweater. "We can go upstairs," he offers. "If you want."
I don't want to stare at the ceiling but I'd do it for you. As much romance as you can offer a person at this hour. John's heart dips a very little.
"I'm okay," he says. "I'm up, anyway. Is it alright if I smoke?"
Harry sighs softly.
John frowns at the unexpectedness of it. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." Harry breathes in and out once, the warmth resurgent against John's belly again. "I just... when I was too tired to remember anything else, I could remember your hands packing that pipe." A beat. "Sorry. Sorry, sorry. I keep saying things that don't let time pass."
"I don't mind," John says. It's a nice thing to know, after all. And he knows more than a little about the nature of time, after everything. "Maybe time doesn't really pass like that, anyway."
Harry considers that. "Yeah," he says at last. "Yeah, maybe."
John twists around him to reach for his tobacco on the side table, and packs his pipe in the quiet.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
The BradyCrozBlakely ficlets - now on AO3!
Summary:
“Ev," Harry says at last. He's exhausted, and he's sick, and both of those drag his voice lower than it would usually be. "If I can end it a week earlier. Or a day. An hour. Five goddamn minutes. I have to. You know I have to.”
When there is a ghost in every room you stand in, you do not have to say his name to invoke him.
2 for bradycrozblakely from the taking care of a tired lover prompts?
Obsessed with the fact that two separate people requested this prompt for this pairing. I'm excited that we're all excited about BradyCrozBlakely round these parts.
@daysofxavierspast
--
Ev had gone on leave first, and done much more planning than Harry had in this regard, which is to say: any planning whatsoever.
When Harry turns up at the address in Chicago, he doesn’t have high hopes for a house you can rent by the week, but he’s so wrung out that it feels hard to care about it. Ev is here, and they can both try and figure out how not to be working for a month, and then they’ll go back. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our dead.
He has to admit to being pleasantly surprised. The house is small, and the shingles are lifting badly, but the shutters are painted bright green and there’s a slightly chaotic but cheerful flowerbed out front. When Harry comes inside, it smells good, like something is cooking, and there’s music on in the living room, and he thinks, with a clarity that startles him, not least because he hasn’t thought about anything for himself in such a long time it feels like an underused muscle: could we have this?
Could we have this. As if they can decide to live together and it will happen, over and beyond every obstacle; as if there’s some version of events where John comes back with his feelings unchanged by eighteen months or two years of deprivation and abuse and wants to do one more difficult thing.
It’s an absurd thing to think, not least because planning for the future in the middle of a war walks a fine line between invoking the necessity of enduring hope and issuing a suicidal challenge to a vengeful God. But maybe, for now, with Ev in the kitchen and music on in the living room, they won’t have to work as hard as Harry had thought to figure how not to be working for a month.
Which is, you know – something.
“Harry?” Ev calls. “Is that you?”
“It’s me.” Harry takes off his coat and hangs it on a hook behind the door. Leaving his travel bag behind, he makes his way toward the room spilling cheerful yellow light into the rest of the house. Ev is wearing an apron that must have come from the whole collection of them that are hung on the back of the kitchen door; it has hearts printed on it and ‘KISS THE COOK’ across the chest, and his hair is trying to curl over his forehead a little as he efficiently tidies a minor disaster area on the kitchen counter.
Harry smiles, coming up on his toes for a hello kiss that turns into a real one, despite the fact that Ev is holding his hands away from Harry’s body to avoid getting sauce of some kind on his clothes.
“Was that because I cook now?” Ev asks. “Because fair warning, it smells much better than it looks and I can’t vouch for the taste.”
“It was the call of the apron,” Harry says. “I was powerless.”
Ev grins. “I think I might take it with me when we go.”
Harry reaches for a bowl to start washing dishes, but Ev shoos him politely but firmly away. “Sit down, Harry. We’re not on base, you don’t have to do everything.”
“You cooked,” Harry protests. “You shouldn’t have to wash the dishes.”
“Sit down,” Ev repeats. “I’ll hit you with this spoon.”
Harry, slightly sheepish, takes up a post in the nearest kitchen chair instead. “How are your first few days of stress leave going?”
“Stress leave,” Ev echoes, with a hint of a smile. “I was told I was going on a much-needed vacation. I said, I’ve never been on vacation. Why not?”
“Vacation feels a lot like stress leave,” Harry says dryly.
“Would I be wearing this apron on stress leave?” Ev gestures at his body with a fork that’s on its way to the sink. “This is a vacation apron.”
“You’re right,” Harry concedes. “It’s the whimsy of the apron that makes the difference. I see it now.”
It’s not a coincidence that they’ve both been overseas longer than anyone. Sooner or later, the cracks start to show. Everyone had been very nice about it, of course. Take some time. You need rest. Come back in a month.
Though Harry, you have to go away now until you stop being an irredeemable asshole would have been substantially closer to the truth.
But a leave at the same time is a leave at the same time.
He lets Ev make him dinner, and they don’t even talk about work that much; Ev tells a story and says John’s name like he’s just stepped out for a minute, which is Harry’s favourite way to hear it.
Afterward, full of shepherd’s pie that will be photographed for no one’s food magazine but had tasted so good that Ev had come over very pleased with himself, Harry stands in the middle of the room for a moment, fingertips resting on the edge of the table. “It feels like I should be doing something.”
“I know.” Ev closes the cupboard, having finished putting the dishes away. “I didn’t know what to do with myself, the first couple of nights. Listened to the baseball game. Smoked about five hundred cigarettes on the porch and then went to bed.”
Harry nods slowly. “I don’t know if I remember how to go to bed,” he admits ruefully. “Actually get undressed and brush my teeth and get into bed at a normal time and just… sleep for eight hours.”
“You’re going to bed,” Ev says, faintly cheerful - faintly threatening. “Even if I have to carry you there myself.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to,” Harry tells him, because if he’s being honest with himself, his body has been trying to fall asleep since he got up this morning and sooner or later it will stop asking nicely.
They have one drink on the porch, because Harry brought a bottle and eight o’clock feels early to turn in, though Ev knocks his knee lightly against Harry’s at one point and Harry realizes, sheepishly, that he had been nodding off.
“Come in the house,” Ev suggests, in the way people say it when they mean our house, and Harry’s too tired to be reasonable. We could.
⁴⁾ “if there’s one thing i can promise you, it’s that there’s always going to be work to be done. you might as well face it rested, right?” <<<<< hi.
I'll preface this by saying that I know you wrote a better version of this interaction already but it's too perfect a line not to make it BradyCrozBlakely circa 1944.
From this prompt list.
--
There’s a moment of hope, at first, because Harry’s desk is deserted.
Ev has his own reasons to get less sleep than he should, but he makes it a point to track down Harry whenever he can. If he didn’t, they’d never see each other, which is less a commentary on Harry’s affections and more a commentary on the fact that no one sees Harry these days unless it’s on the hardstands or he needs something from you. Ev doesn’t take it personally, mainly because it’s very apparent from the way that Harry’s been coiled up like a spring that the war is a bitch of a mistress.
When he hears someone coming, he recognizes the footsteps before he turns around. Not asleep, then, as Ev's wishful thinking would have it. He watches as Harry approaches with a fresh cup of coffee in hand, head tipped down over a piece of paper, hair like ink in this light.
“Whatever it is, it has to wait – ” Harry starts, before he tears his eyes away from the list and clocks who’s standing next to his desk. “Oh. Hi.”
“You don’t even know what I want,” Ev says mildly. “It could be important.”
“Everything’s important,” Harry replies, with a hint of dryness that prevents him from completely wringing the joke out of it. He circles the desk and distractedly sets his coffee down as if part of him is already trying to remember four new things at once.
Ev waits until he is sitting before he surreptitiously moves the mug full of scalding liquid away from the very edge of the desk.
“You sound terrible,” he notes.
Harry leans back in the chair and closes his eyes. “My head is precariously full of snot.”
Ev doesn't smile, taking the opportunity to study him uninterrupted. The meals he keeps forgetting to eat are showing up in his face, stretched tighter over his bones than it was when they met, and he has ground-in circles under his eyes like an old man.
“Sick?” he asks, light. “Or just England.”
“England,” Harry says, apparently belatedly aware that he's handed Ev ammunition. “My nose hasn’t stopped running since I got here.”
He gives a miserable little sniff that doesn’t seem like it accomplishes much, audibly blocked in a way that suggests it’s not just England.
“It might go away if you got a full night of sleep,” Ev offers.
Harry opens his eyes, head still tipped back as he trains that gaze on Ev’s face. “I have work to do.”
Ev offers up a shrug, leaning on the side of the desk. It's easier to win these when he makes it clear that he's not going anywhere until he does. “The war will still be here in the morning.”
Harry doesn’t say anything for a second, watching him. Ev waits him out.
“Ev," he says at last. He's exhausted, and he's sick, and both of those drag his voice lower than it would usually be. "If I can end it a week earlier. Or a day. An hour. Five goddamn minutes. I have to. You know I have to.”
When there is a ghost in every room you stand in, you do not have to say his name to invoke him.
“How can you even know you have that kind of juice?” Ev asks patiently, because it won't do to let on what a quietly devastating thing that had been for Harry to say.
“I can’t,” Harry replies. “But if I do, then every minute I sleep is a waste of everyone’s time.”
Ev takes a breath. He does not name the ghost, either. He can only bring it back to something he can change. “If there’s one thing I can promise you, it’s that there’s always going to be work to be done. You might as well face it rested, right?”
Harry looks at him a moment longer, and then slowly closes his eyes. He's going to fold; Ev gets the sense that he might have put up more of a fight if his body weren’t running on some dark magic blend of coffee and guilt, and running out of road faster than usual with whatever bug he’s got. “Stop making sense.”
“Think of the circles you’ll be able to logic around me after a full night of sleep,” Ev points out.
“Ngh,” Harry says, inarticulately. After a moment, he grudgingly takes the offered hand and lets Ev pull him out of his chair.
John is already pulling on one of Ev's old jumpers before the car door even has a chance to close, his coat only half-shucked and ready to be tugged back over his shoulders immediately. There's an old coffee stain down the front of it, which makes his nose wrinkle briefly when he notices, though he doesn't say a word as he settles himself into the passenger seat and looks out back towards the hall with only the flickered ember of guilt at the windows still lit, dancing with the lights of the party that continues within.
Neither Harry nor Ev had questioned it when he'd asked to go, had simply risen from their tables with waves and smiles and promises to keep in touch that he's only half-sure that any of them will be good at, before stepping out into the cooling night air.
They hadn't been the first to leave; Buck had made his own goodbyes almost an hour ago, his arm looped tight around his wife's waist like even still he can't be sure that she is really there, standing with him, next to him, beautiful and real and alive. Now, as Ev lights a cigarette beside him, the momentary blaze lighting up the curve of his mouth in orange and gold, John knows he knows exactly how he feels.
"You all right?" Ev asks. He doesn't look at John, just starts the car, cigarette hanging from his lips in a deliberate lack of scrutiny that doesn't come naturally to him.
"Yeah," he says.
He wants to say it was good to see everyone, and it was, he knows it was, every handshake, every embrace, every drink pressed into his hand and kiss pressed to his cheek. He wants to say that he loved it, and he did, celebrating all the things that they could allow themselves to remember, and holding space in silence for all those that they could not. He wants to say that in the reunion there was healing and hope and joy, and there was, there was, all of these wrapped in a celebration for a family back home on land that knew them all.
"It was enough," he says instead.
Behind them both, Harry shifts clumsily in the backseat, leaning forwards till his elbows rest on the back of the carseats. He wiggles his fingers until Ev leans his head close enough for him to reach forward and nip the cigarette neatly from his lips and place it between his own. Smoke gusts in the space between the two men in the front when he exhales.
"There'll be a mess in the morning," he says, his speech slightly slurred and slow, low with contented inebriation. He slides one arm over the seat, letting it hang over John's shoulder. It's almost casual, the movement, but Harry's never been quite the actor Ev is, especially not now, warmed through with drink and chatter. The solid weight of his attempt at comfort rests almost too heavily for a moment before John bites back the frustration at his own need for it, and forces himself to lean back and accept the gesture for everything it means. It's almost surprising when he feels tension draining beneath the touch.
"You'll be a mess in the morning," Ev drawls. Close to his ear, John can hear Harry laugh.
"Probably," he allows. He blows out another cigarette-breath and turns his face until he is all but nuzzling into the side of John's jaw. "But you're gonna look after me." He does not say it like a question.
Harry's lips are soft, and John knows that he is smiling. He finds himself returning it without thinking.
