Those of you who've been with me from the beginning will likely remember my Form & Void series. Those of you who're newer to my blog might not know it, but this series kinda explains itself as "the god-chosen AU" in which different characters are chosen by gods such as War and Wisdom. You really don't need to know more than that to be able to jump into it. 😉
It's been a good while since I last visited this AU in earnest, and what I'm posting here today isn't new by any stretch. There are just some unfinished scraps from this AU that never saw publication back in the day (we're talking 2021-ish), but which honestly feel like they are too nice not to share. And though my fic projects are currently such that I know I will never write a continuation of this myself, I don't want to keep it to myself for all eternity either. So, without further ado, let me take you back...
slow ground
The forest around him comes alive with every step he takes. The world, so hushed around him after the battle fell away, seems to awaken beneath his footsteps. There’s a pulse beneath his feet that slows to the steady beat of his heart. You’re alive, it seems to say, you’re still here.
He spots slivers of blue sky between the greens of the forest. High, higher than he can ever reach, the sun’s rays hit the upper branches and crown the trees in golden light. A song lilts and weaves around the branches, carried on the same wind that brings the sea back to him.
John Basilone shakes his head. Is certain he’s misheard the notes that now linger in his ears. There’s no reason why an old lullaby would be sung in the middle of a foreign island in the aftermath of battle. He must be hearing things – stumbling around on no sleep as he is – and thinking of home somehow. Yes, that must be it.
Except that’s not it at all.
He comes to a halt at the edge of a clearing in the woods. His heart seizes up, claws its way toward his throat, wedges itself in the part of his brain that pleads in silent no no no with the sight before him. His hand finds his weapon seconds after. He raises it, more in warning than in any form of retaliation, and hisses out the ache that settles in the burns on his skin.
“Get away from him.”
He knows Manny is dead. There’s a pallor to his skin that’s never been there before – not on Manny, whose tanned skin survives even the toughest winters – and the man is eerily silent. Manny’s loud in the way all his friends are. He’s never quiet for long. He’s not the type to play a prank this fucking cruel, either, not when life is already so uncertain and so many things come to an end.
Manny’s dead. The woman kneeling beside him certainly is not.
“I said,” he repeats, voice stronger and louder now, “get away from him.”
She raises her head and tilts it slowly. Dark, near-black eyes meet his gaze. A smile curves around her bloodied mouth a moment. It creases the dirt and white scars upon her skin fleetingly, so swiftly that he thinks he has imagined it. The set of her mouth hardens into something akin to cruelty the longer he looks at her. Her eyes burn. Her eyes don’t release him.
He gasps out a breath. Coughs as his lungs constrict in warning. His weapon shakes as his hand begins to tremble.
“Don’t make me,” he rasps out between one breath and the next, desperate for air as much as he is for this fight, “put a bullet between your eyes.”
Her laughter rings out in the clearing. He hears the rustle of feathers overhead, though the rest of the forest seems to go utterly silent at the sound of her voice. There’s something of honey and molasses in the sound of her amusement, thick and syrupy in a way that clings to skin and throat, but there’s something darker in the lower notes that makes him shudder.
“Brave, aren’t you?”
He takes a step back at that. There’s too much approval in her voice. Too much warmth, heat, fire in her gaze. He almost thinks to turn away altogether, but Manny’s still at her feet as she rises to face him. Manny’s body lies on the ground between them. He will not leave his friend to a god so cruel. To one so capricious, which this one seems to be.
Her laughter dies abruptly. There’s a chill in the air.
“If you’re going to shoot me, caro,” she says, caressing the Italian pet name in a way that makes him shiver, “you’d better be quick about it. Do you think yourself faster than me?”
The shadows in the forest blur. Her form blurs a moment, too, and the dark wraps around her as the golden light fades from the trees. He snarls out what could be a warning – would be a warning, again, because he was raised to not raise a hand against a woman like that at all – and then finds his back against the tree and her body pressed up against his.
He lowers his weapon. Drops it to the floor. Thinks he sees disappointment in her eyes, those dark cruel hard searing burning eyes, and almost laughs a challenge into her ear to tell her you didn’t get to me just yet.
“Are all gods like you? So quick to show off?”
“Some.”
She smiles a hunter’s smile. Gazes at him as though he’s a mouse she’s going to catch and release half a dozen times before she eats him. He bares his teeth at the thought. He will not comply. He will not be taken, not like this, not by any god and least of all by her, and he doesn’t need a weapon to get that point across.
His hand wraps around her throat. Squeezes. Squeezes tighter than he would if she were human, if she were anything but the destructive god who caused the world to bend to her whims and wants. His nails dig into her skin hard enough to draw blood.
“I’m not faster,” he breathes, “but I’ll rip you apart if you pull that trick on me again.”
“You’ll try.” Her laugh, though rasping, is too delighted by far. Her voice drops into a purr even when his grip turns firmer still. “I like that about you, John.”
“Lady, no offense,” he says, in a voice that says he absolutely means to offend and then some, “what the hell is wrong with you?”
the long bright dark ∞ main fic of the form & void series
War chose Ronald Speirs a long time ago. He has always claimed to be at peace with that. Now, as his life finally leads him into battle-torn Europe, he believes that he is entering his final months of service. With the thought of death a near-constant companion and the rush of combat running rampant in his veins, he may yet be forced to re-examine what it truly means to be bonded to a god...
hi killy! did you ever explore which gods belong to which the pacific characters? just curious because i love that au so much!
all my love,
sara, @cinnamoncowboy
Hellooo my friend! 😊 I have spent a little less time in the god-chosen side of The Pacific than I have in BoB, but I have certainly had some thoughts about it here and there.
(Sidenote for new followers: the main AU can be found here and the tag for it on my blog is here. There is also a sideslip collection that features works other people have written in this verse, which is still a huge honor for me! It's an AU that's kept growing over the years, and I'm always open to writing more for it here and there.)
My explorations on The Pacific side of it have thus far led me to the following, but I'm sure I'm forgetting some of my own lore here. 😂
John Basilone - War
Lena Basilone-Riggi - Victory
Hoosier - Night (@ktredshoes has written some of that)
Andy Haldane - Peace (@mercurygray has written some of this)
Eva, Eva, Eva, I've been overwhelmed and letting this simmer, hoping I could come up with the words to tell you how much I loved this. SO. MUCH. Oh my, there needs to be more MotA Formvoid universe!! More, I tell you, MOOOOORRRREE! Air-chosen Buck: perfect! And of course Bucky Egan is Trickster-chosen! Would not have guessed Rosie would be Love-chosen, but it works! Benny DeMarco complaining about scorch marks: oh, yes! But Benny is not god-chosen, really? Must think on that... Interesting there are no War-chosen here but it makes sense, actually. I've reread this several times already and will again. Oh, I do love your FormVoid universe! THANK YOUUUUUUUUU!
Ahhh, I'm so glad to hear that you loved this little piece I wrote for your lovely prompt! 💙 I'm definitely not opposed to writing more of this AU for MotA in future.
You say that about Bucky like that, but... 😏 I specified a questionmark at that notation for a very good reason, which is to say that he might come across as someone who could be Trickster-chosen in future buttttt his actual calling is something else entirely. Something very dark night of the soul for him, which I might dig into because I have a visual for that.
Rosie as Love-chosen made sense to me once I sat with that a minute. So much of what Rosie does in-show comes from love. He shows up for people, makes them feel at ease, all of that... and it's different from how we've seen Love-chosen in this AU so far, which makes it fun!
Benny not being god-chosen really comes from the fact that I was archly told "I'm not putting myself through being chosen by anybody for any damn thing, thanks". He thinks it's a hassle and he's not putting himself through that, no ma'am. 😂
There being no War-chosen here checks out, though perhaps she might show up... when we least want her to.
I am summoning another fic from the groupchat vault today while I work on the prompts left in my inbox. 😊It's a little look at what the war has been like for Soviet captain Tatiana Petrova, only told through the lens of my god-chosen AU instead of the main fic this time. My fellow Speirs fans might enjoy the very clear nods to him here. 😉 As always, the AU is written in such a way that you do not need to know more beyond "certain gods choose certain soldiers, Speirs is chosen by War" — I strive to make my fics as accessible as possible!
Warnings: mentions of graphic violence and death. (We're in Stalingrad for this one, after all.)
She’s losing the city.
It’s a knowledge that has sat in her chest for at least two barely-dark nights now. She’s felt the rush of it pound through her skull with every thunderclap of a bomb strike. There’s not a lot left in this rubble – skeletons of houses that harbor the decaying and the newly dead alike, gaping maws of craters where roads should never have ended – save for that feeling that it’s still a city, sprawled out from where she stands, stone and dirt as far as the eye can see.
And it isn’t hers to lose. Cities don’t do that. They don’t belong to anyone. It doesn’t matter that she knows every street of this section she’s been allotted. Doesn’t matter that she knows exactly how many steps she needs to take every time to move past the tallest skeleton house where death tends to loom in windowseats. (It’s forty-three steps, just like the year she thinks they’re in now, and every time she tries she knows that she’s only safe on step twenty-five when she can duck behind the remains of a bench.)
This city isn’t hers, but it might as well be. Who else remains here but she, allowing the rats to swarm her feet without screeching about it the way she might’ve done in some other life? (Where the sun was not a traitor and Sasha’s smile was not a photograph.) Who else draws breath in this city between one shelling and the next, between one shot and the other, between the tank that cannot move its turret and the carcasses of good intentions? (She’s not alone. There are others here. Sometimes, the streets ring out with song before the silence comes and chokes the air from her lungs.)
It doesn’t feel like it’s hers to keep. They fight for every room in every house. They fight for every street corner. For every alleyway. For every access point below the city, for every vantage point above it, for every route to the water that does not end with blood. They’re losing, they must be, because she’s in new rooms every time she blinks and she’s forgotten the taste of crystal clear water by now. (And they’re not losing, they’re not, because Katya’s exhale is sharp in the morning air and not a single bullet goes to waste. They’re not losing, they can’t, because Sergey moves rock and root to clear their path and then obstructs the way for those who’re following them. They are not losing this city, not while they are here, not while they share whatever food they find and rig the remains to be a trap for the hungry that come after they’ve gone.)
Lately, she’s been functioning on a breath and a prayer.
She’s tried to curb the latter. Tried to stomp it out, to quench its finicky flame, because there’s not a whole lot that gets done with prayer at all. Whatever she’s doing to it – protect us, she snarls, let us live – probably would be classified as demand instead of prayer. She bares her teeth the way wolves do, snap and lock around the panic of inhale-exhale, and offers her throat to the unseen and unheard. May you take me if you think me coward, she seethes, opening her enemy from sternum to throat just like the rabbits Kolya used to skin, but you owe me this fucking city and its fucking peace at this point.
She does not believe in bargaining chips. Does not buy into a truce, or a standoff, or any of the other things they call when they’re all too exhausted and night comes with too swift a foot. She doesn’t think she can cut a deal with a god at all, but there’s only so many breaths she’s got before the panic hits. (She knows it’s that. Can feel the fear of it tremble in her fingertips as she wrenches her knife free. Can feel the huff and puff of it in her lungs, too quick, too constricting. She doesn’t look at the glazed-over eyes of the dead and dying. Can’t meet them, not with the wellspring in the back of her mind that dares her to look and see come and see hear the squalling babe’s cry thunk boom splash –)
She’s alone now, or as alone as someone can be when they know exactly where their allies are and the crudely-drawn map before her tells her more of the story than she’d cared to know. There’s just her in this room, in this fucking cavern the enemy created for itself from the rubble of her houses in her city, and her throat’s parched with a scream that renders her belly full to bursting. (There have been rats here, too, and they’ve eaten and eaten and feasted long before her boots crushed the bones underfoot.)
She’s alone and her breath won’t leave her lungs.
Her hand bleeds around the rock she used to break through the glass casings. (Who puts glass casings in a war? Who makes the glass survive the shatter-bang of bullets?) There’s red drip-dropping onto the parchment, onto the paper and vellum and all the other things they used to tell stories on. Some of her strength is bleeding out of her as she stares at lines she does not understand, as a language she only knows to speak in garbled wartongue glares up at her from note after note.
There’s her tongue here, too, older than their scraps of paper. And thus it came to pass, she squints in the dim light, that the ancients revealed themselves from sea and mountain, hungering in the passageways…
“Fuck that,” she rasps out, recognizing the myth for what it is. Tucks the offending parchment in the same pouch where she keeps her gunpowder. If it survives, it will pass to Kolya who alone knows the chaos that resides within such matter. “Ghost stories. Fairytales. Sad lies to tell our children.”
There’s anger in her belly, coarse and seething, which twists in her lap like a viper’s pit and gleams darkly whenever she allows it to meet a semblance of light. Where will they reveal themselves now that this city is about to fall?
She blinks at the dark that sweeps into her space. Stares at the night that unfolds from the corners of the room, where the dead have met the living earth, and scatters all the light away from itself. There’s dirt in its scent, heavy with muck and grime and something utterly deathless that makes her drop her stone onto the floor. There are shards of dust in her wound that begin to bite and snap at her skin like the embers of a wildfire. Like termites eating their own. There’s ash on her tongue.
She blinks at the dark. The dark blinks back.
“Here,” it says. They say, for they are many. He says, for he is just one man. “Here will I reveal myself.”
“Vyyti, uyti,” she snarls back, voice cracking on the demand of get out, leave. Her eyes widen in a refusal to close for the encroaching dark. “You are not welcome.”
His head tilts. His eyes carry pinpricks of light that should not be warm, except they are and he must think her stupid if he thinks she will follow that. (There is no safety in the light. The light gets you killed. Fire murders, hope dies, the flicker of a flame is only good when attached to something that can raze the enemy to the ground. These things she knows. These things she has learned. She will not follow.)
“You called for me.”
He makes it sound simple. She doesn’t think it is. She huffs. Rolls her eyes for good measure. Tastes the iron twang of blood on her tongue when her head meets the stone wall behind her and she bites down on her lip to stop the dark from changing the colors around her to endless black.
“Any god, any relief,” she spits out, aiming the blood at him despite the gap between them. “Anything that lets me live.” Her laughter is sharp, biting, barking like that of the rabid dogs that have overtaken the river’s second bank. “You must be something desperate, nyet?”
“Not quite.”
Her eyebrow raises. “Everyone here is.”
“I am not everyone.”
“You are here, also,” she points out, rising to her feet soon after. The bones snap and crunch beneath her heel. “Desperate,” she hisses, viper’s venom coating her tongue in earnest now, “tricky, false. Preying on dead and dying, look at you, shadow to hopelessness. What kind of god is that, hm? What are you?”
“I thought you do not believe in gods, Tatiana Ilyinichna.”
“So did I.”
(And she doesn’t, still, though she’s seen the shining ones amid the enemy. She doesn’t, still, though this creature before her speaks her name like a caress and she has not given him such privilege. She doesn’t, still, because to believe is to know the war is lost.)
“I am here,” he says again.
“Congratulations. Now leave.”
“Not…”
“Not…?”
She stares him down, this man with darkness flitting around him, this creature with eyes like midnight, this abomination dressed in a soldier’s garb. Her blood drips from her hand. She’s certain at least one other wound reopened. The burns she sustained from that ill-fated run-in with that tank itch and scrape against her uniform. The hair on the back of her neck stands upright the longer she looks at him. Raises against her as though she were a cat being stroked wrong, as though it means to warn her.
Her sense of danger fled this city long ago. There is just fear now, stark in this room, stark everywhere she walks, and there’s the act of doing.
She walks up to this one, whom all the vellums around her call a god, and aims for its throat.
“There you are,” he says, from beside her this time, because her fist meets air and he moves the way shadows do before the midday sun eats them whole. “There is your fight.”
There’s hunger there, ravenous in the familiar syllables that flood his tongue and coat her language with something utterly foreign, and something that she thinks would’ve sounded like pride if Kolya or Sasha had spoken it. (Kolya never speaks these days. Sasha cannot speak, though she thinks she used to hear his voice in the trees before they burned too.)
“Fuck you,” she replies conversationally, turning and balling her fist anew. “I am not yours to judge.”
“No, you are not. You are mine to want.”
She steps back. Snaps like an animal that knows it is about to be wounded. “Gods don’t want. They take.”
“So let me,” he responds, smile gleaming like hers did in the mirror before she watched herself kill five grown men and a sniveling boy. “Let me take.”
“I do not even know what you are.”
“Don’t you? You, who sung me to life the moment you could speak? You, who took three pills every day to be rid of me?”
“I will eat them as soon as I find them,” she promises. Her voice does not waver, though of course she knows. She knows him. Knows this dark as well as she knows the sound of her own pulse. “You will fall back into shadow. You will not be in me.”
“I expect no less from you, Tatusha.”
“Do not speak that name!”
“Tatiana,” he corrects, so smoothly it is as though he has never uttered Sasha’s name for her at all. “I know your choices. It will only be for this time. For this battle, such as it is.”
“We are losing. I am losing my city.”
He inclines his head. “For now.”
“And you can change it?”
“No.” A beat. An offered hand. “You can. If you are, ah, something desperate.”
He sings in her blood. The dark swallows her, drapes itself around her shoulders like a second coat, turns and enters her wounds until she gasps and her hand jerks upward of its own volition. There’s nothing else to be in this world but desperate. There’s nothing else that remains of her, such as the fear is, such as her heart is also.
Something desperate.
Her hand closes around his. Around theirs. Around hers.
“Good,” says the dark-eyed woman with a voice that sounds like the rush of wings. “Let us begin.”
(Two years and some time to this day, she finally meets the man. He is tall like most of these Americans are, though far more unsmiling than those he is surrounded by, and he fills the room before she turns to greet him. His too-dark eyes barely linger on the patches of blood that still coat her uniform, nor does he seem surprised by the state of her boots or the absence of most of her hair. There’s something of her in the grace of his movements.
She’s alive through them. And she, being who she is, summons her desperation one more time and gives him war.)
This originally appeared as a three-part blog installment right here, but is now on ao3! The lovely Billie is on loan from @mercurygray, while the universe setting is my own Form & Void AU series.
Ronald Speirs has been chosen by War for as long as he can remember. Now, in the middle of the European war theatre, he begins to teach another what it means to summon divine War at one's fingertips.. but Billie Mitchell takes to her choice far differently.
Happy birthday to you, my dear friend @mercurygray! 💕😊 I hope you’re having a most fantabulous day and that the new year of your life is going to bring you many great things. I had a little time to put something together for today.. and so I’ve dipped into my gods AU and come out with a TDS AU that I hope you’ll enjoy!
For completion’s sake.. quotes in this piece are taken from the Völuspá, Shakespeare, and a real-life saint respectively. As one does, when Wisdom gets involved..
in the dim hours before the morning
“Know any Storm-chosen?”
Nix’s eyes remain fixed on the sky even as he offers the question out loud. He’s not one to glare at the darkened haze that has descended upon the airfield, but a small frown creases his features all the same.
They had expected to make their jump tonight. The well-oiled machine of vehicles, planes, and people had certainly turned up on time to make it happen: there wasn’t so much as a hair out of place on his soldiers, nor was there anything amiss with the chutes that would hopefully see them safely across the water. And, really, they should have predicted this. Should have listened to the weather forecast as obsessively as they’d listened to Joe Toye listing all of his supplies in increasing tones of ire and resignation.
Dick snorts as he seats himself next to Nix. “I don’t recall seeing one on Strayer’s roster.”
“He still has that thing?”
“Yeah. Hester keeps crossing names off it,” smiles Dick. “Says it’s a liability if the enemy gets its hands on a full roster of god-chosen, even when we know half of theirs already.”
“Propaganda, thy name is convenience.” Nix reaches down to his belt. Unscrews his canteen thoughtfully, then sniffs at its contents. The small and rather measured sip he takes from it tells Dick he needs to shake his head when it’s offered to him, which he does moments later. “Someone ought to tell Speirs that Strayer keeps a roster of all god-chosen. See how fast that thing disappears.”
“Or how fast Strayer does.”
Nix’s laugh contains a hint of surprise at Dick’s wry words. He quirks a smile in turn, confident as he is by now that Nix will take anything said between them to the grave. The dark-haired and even darker-eyed man may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but Dick doesn’t quite think he’ll ever get over the fact that Nix refused to jump through any society-made hoops unless Dick got to jump through the same ones too. It’s always ever been about one look passing between them. One glance to know they are on the same page and destined to stay there.
“Shame we don’t have a Storm-chosen. You’d think” – says Nix, undeterred by Dick’s discontented groan at the conversation not moving on from this point – “that they would have wanted one on board. All thunder and lightning. Could blow the Germans straight back to Berlin.”
“Rumor has it that’s what those Soviet pilots are.”
“What, Storm-chosen? Huh.” Light flickers in Nix’s eyes as he turns to face Dick. He’s frowning outright, now, and his hand plays with one of his uniform straps before he balls it into a fist. “I thought the Soviets didn’t like our kind? They suppress us, chain us, and now they use us at their convenience?”
“Historically–”
“We’ve had worse.” Nix finishes his sentence. Shrugs. “Doesn’t mean I am used to it. Don’t think you can get used to it. No matter how many stories you hear about suppression. About our people dying at the hands of non-chosen.”
“Nix..”
“I know, I know. Us versus them is bad, even coming from me.”
“Especially coming from you,” hums a new voice, crystalline and soothing, as the haze of darkness around them flickers with bright iridescence. With its presence, as always, comes that age-old feeling of having been caught stuffing one’s hand into the cookie jar. It’s only a small mercy that the admonishment, when it comes, is not directed at Dick at all. “I taught you better, Lewis.”
Nix’s smile is that of a fox’s mischief. “You also taught me to not go looking for trouble.”
“And?” comes the swift demand.
“It’s not my fault trouble usually finds me.”
She flutters into being between them. Takes up residence in the small space between them as though she is the glue that binds them together. Dick has often wondered at it, in those early days of knowing Lewis Nixon, because men like Nix don’t play nice with men like him. All they do is take, or so his father would say, and Dick hadn’t known how to disagree prior to meeting her.
Wisdom.
He’d asked for it. Asked for her, specifically, down in the Shepherd’s Church where one asked for such impossibilities on one’s bare knees and expected no answer. I’m off to war, he’d whispered to a golden-hued effigy, thinking it ridiculous that only a quarter of all gods even had a thing such as that to pray to. I don’t ask this for myself, but for the men I will serve with. Help us. Help me help them.
And there she had perched, atop the window seat opposite his on a train, with her golden curls all in disarray and her eyes piercingly steady, and he’d felt the air rush out of him the same way it’d rushed out of him when he laid eyes on Nix after. The same way he’d felt when he..
“Dick.” Wisdom’s head tilts as he swallows the thought. He refuses to meet her too-knowing eyes. “Are you ready for what follows?”
Which part?
He almost asks the question, though he halts himself when Nix murmurs the same on her other side. Her mouth quirks into a smile at the challenge.
“Much do I know, and more can see,” she says, lilting into the cadence of poetry he’s never learned at her feet, “of the fate of the gods.”
“Is that what hangs in the balance here?” He shakes his head. Tries to recall how many god-chosen litter their army’s ranks, how many more are on suppressants so strong that it would take a miracle for their god to connect with them, how many more will be chosen once the thrum of the earth rolls underfoot. “Some divine battle, like..”
Like Joan had claimed with too-bright eyes, once, before she could school her features. Like she’d whispered, steady beside him as he watched Easy slip and fall but not break under Sobel. Like they had agreed, earlier, standing beneath a darkening sky with no jump tonight. Divine hands, divine eyes, and no one he’d rather tumble into war alongside.
Wisdom’s laughter turns challenging. “All battles are sacred things. Would you yet know more?”
“The evil that men do lives after them,” refutes Nix, with a wry smile piercing his citation. “The good is oft interred with their bones.”
“Doesn’t mean we should not try and live well,” responds Dick evenly. Joan had thought so. Had hummed it once, low and knowing, before she’d turned to Gordon and Shapiro and broken the spell. “We’re jumping tomorrow night. There’s no room for death.”
I won’t allow it. The thought had been so stark in her mind. So clear that he’d caught it, long before she’d ever speak it aloud. I won’t allow death to come.
“You cannot stave it off,” his god warns with furrowed brow.
“I know. But who am I if I don’t try?”
“Knight, shining armor,” quips Nix, with raised canteen and a spark in his eyes Dick knows is mirrored in his own. “I do not fear men-at-arms; my way has been made plain before me.”
“Sun Tzu?”
Nix’s grin is almost feral in the haze. “A saint, actually. Jeanne d’Arc.”
“Jehanne.”
“Joan,” sighs Dick, and turns his burning face away.
hi eva!! id love some commentary on this part from love you home, ive missed tab and katya a LOT, and this snippet is what made me fall in love with the ship 🧡
She reaches up. Warmth flares to life in his cheeks as her fingertips land on his face. Heat unfurls in his belly, too, in reply, when her lips land on his and she breathes a kiss into him that is so much more than a hello. He doesn’t know the first thing about her, but he knows his god when he feels it. He knows a Love-chosen – he’s not alone, not anymore, not at the end of this war, and the knowledge trembles through his fingertips as he grasps hold of her and kisses her back.
She tastes of salt. Tastes of strawberries, of sweetened cherries, and of all the things he loves. She’s crowned by sunlight and he resists the urge to bow. To this, he knows he’s equal.
Floyd can’t help the surprised sound that travels from his mouth to hers. Can’t stop the gasp she coaxes from him now that the air around them hums and buzzes to life the likes of which he hasn’t sensed since he said yes to his god some years ago. He laughs joy against her lips before he presses a new kiss to her wet cheek.
Katya’s demand is swift, fierce, piercing. “What?”
“Never had a girl kiss me first before.”
“You Americans are very strange, yes?”
“You know,” he says, “I heard your captain tell mine the same thing. We think you’re the odd ones, here.”
“Not odd. Just.. different.” She nudges him in good spirit. Her head comes to rest against him. The sound of her voice is muffled by his embrace. “I waited for this. For something – someone – to see cage.”
“Love isn’t supposed to be trapped.” This much he knows. This much, he has taught the whole of his company throughout this war. “Love freely and you have more love, that’s how it goes.”
“That is how it goes,” she echoes.
He can’t help but kiss her all over again.
Hi!! Oh goodness me, an excuse to talk about this sweet ship and a bit of love you home in addition to my big project? Count me in! 💕
I had long wanted to do something in my AU that showcased some of Tab’s abilities in this universe, but could never really find the right outlet for it. Tab is the lone Love-chosen in Easy, having elected to join the war as a constant beacon that reminds people of what it is they’re fighting to salvage amid the rubble. Tab’s war has been a rough one, in this universe, but the main narrative in the AU doesn’t acknowledge this. Here, though, there is the realization that he is not alone anymore.. and the fact that this is his main feeling, that he is no longer on his own, speaks volumes about the weight he’s carried in this AU and how good it is to finally get to share this.
While he gets his mic drop moment in the main fic and has many great little tidbits in this AU, it’s in a fic like this one where we really get to see Tab display more than a fraction of what it means to him to be god-chosen. It’s a little banner moment for him in this fic, but it’s prompted entirely by the confrontation with someone who’s like him and has been kept dormant all this time. Tab shows his true colors only because he’s in a space with someone he thinks needs to experience Love on that level.
And that’s where Katya comes in.
Katya is one of the Soviet soldiers in my big project and the role she fulfills in that one is very similar to the one she takes on here. She is the bridge-builder, the mediator, the open and curious one who talks a mile a minute and is genuinely interested in what other people have to say. Katya loves life and almost everyone in it, no matter which story I place her in, and she’s not scared to say how she feels. There’s a disarming sort of bluntness to her that can often be hilarious, and she gets to the point very fast in conversation because of that quality. Katya says how she feels at the moment she feels it, even when it renders her vulnerable, and that’s something on display here.. especially when you realize she only just met Tab.
These two, in any universe, are the love-at-first-sight ship. In their canon version, Katya jumps out of a tree right in front of him and brightly introduces herself.. after which she proceeds to ask Tab a gazillion questions about himself, his friends, his family, his home, etc. Tab is a little taken aback mostly because normally he is the one talking and asking questions, and he’s doggedly pushing back at her before long with questions of his own about her. There’s an instant-vibe of them being a little similar in their people-person ways and their flirtations, which in canon serves as a contrast to the very frosty meeting going on between their respective captains.
“You Americans are very strange, yes?” is a bit of a running gag in the canon version that gets used primarily by Katya’s captain, Petrova, in horrified-surprised-dismayed-resigned-amused fashion against captain Speirs. Tab’s response, here, is close to Speirs’s own “you Soviets are very odd”-observation that inevitably pops up from time to time as well. Petrova and Speirs have a very complex relationship to navigate in comparison to the one Tab and Katya jump into, and the relationship between Tab and Katya serves as a narrative foil to that main relationship in that respect.
Because Tab and Katya, let’s face it, have one setting together and it’s the one we see above. It’s a relationship that’s very openly communicative and physically grounding. It’s difficult to imagine them arguing, and even more difficult to see them apart once they meet, because they ‘feel right’ with one another and coax each other’s best traits out to play. There’s something uplifting to them, something joyful that’s about tasting life’s pleasures and having a great time, something deeply loving.. and so it felt only right to make Katya Tab’s equal, within the confines of this AU, and let her be the first Love-chosen he meets after the war. Let her be the first reminder of love, and the best things in life, which is why the kiss between them here is written as this sensory blend of taste and light.
