#mota

[amiserableseriesofevents]

to the point of invention, ch.29

And he must have done something good for real because once the nominations start to come out, his name is always there — the Critics' Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, and people online say he has a good chance of getting one for the BAFTA since he's half British, and maybe even for the SAG if things go well enough with the early awards. If they say something about the Oscars, John doesn't want to know; he's already stressed out enough as it is.

[benstars]

I commissioned @captainaubreysbicorne to draw Bucky Egan! He turned out so handsomely :)

[pietroabelardo]

Gale & abortion beneath heed my warnings

Three days after the blood-sodden truth was torn out of him with pliers, John drives them home, both hands on the steering wheel. On the horizon's edge the red trickle of the sun's descent illuminates the West in an ancient goodbye; its March warmth is nonexistent, Gale has never once thought a sunset could be a disgusting thing, but on the straight, narrow road home he hates every lit thing.

There's nowhere else to look.

Gale knew. Lying on his side, he realizes he knew from the start. Old wives’ tales, superstition, God. He knew; he could recognize the heartbeat, dilated and prolonged, calmer than his own, so securely entrapped within him.

Want to know a secret? his mother told him, when he'd just presented, I knew you before you even existed, she said, frail fingers over his forehead. She'd bleed to death giving birth to his dead sister two uneventful years later.

Gale holds his stomach, feels it flat and hard. John sits next to him, Gale can't bear to be seen, nor to see. He wants this to be a secret only he knows. Sometimes, Bucky's presence is a reminder that the World is an unjust place full of beautiful things, and Gale almost feels like the sort of person who would spontaneously take off their shoes to dance in freshly cut grass. Right now, though, John's love is the husk of a crashed car warping around cut off tree trunks. A humid summer, offering no respite, only soft cruelty and birds’ nests all empty.

“Baby,” John whispers, voice like a spindly, dark prayer.

Gale shakes his head, there are simply no words. That's the most awful truth, that in whatever how-many thousands of years humanity has walked the Earth, not a single person has been able to do something about its enormous, shapeless existence.

“I love you,” says John, at full volume, “I love you.”

He closes his eyes, John keeping vigil, the night vast and wide.

For weeks he tries to find a scientific solution to ending the pain. How long, how much until it ends, what is the lowest amount of waking hours he can spend thinking about it in order not to end up walking around in a daze like a shellshocked cadaver. Bucky force-feeds him two meals a day; it used to be three but inevitably Gale would puke around eleven A.M. (flushing the poison away, he thought, even though he knew it wasn't true) and so he started to skip breakfast, too. It was a dot, the doctor told him, a peep. No bigger than a blueberry. But then, it doesn't make sense, he swears he could feel its beginnings, where the ribcage would grow to protect the softest parts, he could picture it.

His mind snags on its own thorns, as he reaches for two glasses, and sets them down on the formica counters. Ugly, marble reproductions that are made of unnatural plastic and smell like burnt oil no matter how much he cleans them. And the curtains are plastic, too. Suddenly, even water feels like too much. He walks back towards the bed, opens the windows and lies down to the drowned-out city’s shouts. After the war, in that gawping hole they dug themselves in and pretended not to know how to exit, Bucky asked him why he was never angrier. Lord knows I am, he said. Lord knows you deserve to be.

Gale didn't answer him then, because then a hand had slithered itself over the back of his pants and that had been that. In truth, he's never found much point in getting bitter at the cards you've been dealt with, since no amount of reshuffling could change them. And, control was the only thing he could barter, too, with which he bought a future, some smiles, a great deal of hope. But hope is fickle, and smiles don't nurture, and Gale is now so angry at the world he breaks his skin with it.

A sudden spring breeze shifts the bed covers, makes some papers shuffle over their tiny desk, nudged into a corner. He closes his fists over Bucky's pillows as life outside goes on, dreaming of yesterdays.

[grrrl-help]

Mota rewatch on Father’s Day while my dad flies us to another part of bumfuck nowhere? I think yes!

[thatsrightice]

Honoring the 100th Bomb Group at EAA Wright Brothers Banquet ft. special guests

With a focus on the 100th Bomb Group and its depiction in the Apple TV miniseries Masters of the Air, EAA's annual Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet in December featured a presentation from Rebecca Crosby Hutchinson, daughter of 100th Bomb Group navigator Harry Crosby, and Michael Faley, executive vice president of the 100th Bomb Group Foundation and technical advisor on the production.

You can find a recording of this presentation at EAA’s website using the link here.

[magneticghouls]

are you good at staying still

[pietroabelardo]

There is something very comforting in thinking about the Complexities re: Buckies → Bucky being outward and Buck being inward, how well they compensate each other but also how their balance is Very precarious and they are not at all prepared for it shifting (obviously the stalag, but also the first time Gale lands in England). It's just the dynamic of all time, they truly are like those fish that only live in One Singulae specific hole in the whole wide world and they can only exist within each other, which leads to them hurting each other so so much #smile. And since I went to Whump university they're breeding grounds for my sicko fantasies. It's a great excuse and it allows me to award Buck the highest honour I can bestow him (disordered eating & infertility)