(a lyric from a Clash song I heard on the radio today)
It's 1959, and Bucky Egan is rolling into DC with a fast car, a flight bag, and a letter from the Department of Defense saying they'd like to talk to him about a need-to-know project that no one seems to be able to spill the beans on. Gale knows, of course - Gale knows everything - casually lighting his pipe and looking at his friend over the remains of a sandwich and several martinis. "John, how do you feel about the moon?"
“Sergeant Mitchell, I think you’re drunk.”
So she hadn’t gotten the right door - oh well. Billie smiled through the lingering feeling from the wine - sweet golden stuff from a place she couldn’t name even if she had been completely sober. Gewur- Gewurtz - it was too many letters. Anyway, she’d had nearly a whole bottle of that and was feeling pretty loose for it, and who was around to care about it?
Only one person would call her Sergeant Mitchell at this hour.
It's probably on account of her hair, but Billie is all coppers and oranges - take no prisoners, accept no substitutes, hard not to notice, the kind of person who warms the people she cares about, and burns if she isn't treated with respect.
Happy New Year! For the January prompts, how about an older woman for any character or ship, please?
Thanks for the prompt, Jess! This scene's been bugging me for a while and I'm glad to finally get it on paper.
She had a good reason for being late.
No one was looking for Marion Brennan at parties like this one - a no-holds-barred blow-out to celebrate 25 missions was something for the young people, not for her, and she knew she would not be missed. They needed their fun - and she'd had very important business to wrap up before she made her way to the officers club, ten crisp envelopes in hand.
Not travel orders - those would come tomorrow, or the day after. No, this was something a little more …personal.
The photo had been snapped that afternoon and the film rushed to the photo lab so that it could be duly enlarged, printed, and marked on the back with the date and the names of the ten men in Marion's fine, clear handwriting, ready to be nestled carefully into footlockers and hopefully one day framed on a wall. A nice change of pace for the lab girls, used to spending their hours with reconnaissance films and gunnery practice - smiling faces and sunshine and Sunny, the plane framing out the group that had safely brought her home.
And each man, she thought, had been happy to get them - even Luckadoo and Dickinson, who by some trick of fate weren't heading home like the rest of them, their logs only at 21 and 23 on account of several badly timed colds and hospital stays and standing down because a co-pilot seat was not on offer. This would always be their crew, and that deserved a picture in their hour of glory, a single shining moment of victory in a war that so far had held few of them. "So you don't forget," she'd said, presenting each man with his envelope and watching them unwrap them and compare grins.
Dye had taken his copy, silent and overcome, and looked at her with suddenly watery eyes. "Thanks for always getting us home, ma'am," he'd said, and the tears crowding at the corners made her know he meant it.
Then Lil had appeared, and he was gone, back to the party and his girl and being young and celebrated, and Marion, somewhat overcome herself, turned her attention to the emptying room and the slowing music, blotting at her eye. "Get you something, Captain Brennan?"
"Just a soda-water, Mike, thanks."
The bartender nodded, filling the glass from his siphon and passing it across the bar, and Marion moved away to an empty table near the divide between the dance floor and the day room, nodding a greeting to the new officers whose names she'd only just seen on rosters this afternoon. (There'd be time for names later. She was owed a little time off.) There was a large crowd at the nearer end of the bar, all original roster men who'd flown in with Dye -- and would themselves be close to twenty-five, if their luck continued to hold.
And when they went home? What would this room be like without Blakely or DeMarco in it? They'd been here for so long to imagine the base without them felt …empty. Eleven missions - wasn't that the lucky number? Survive past that and you were practically part of the furniture, and everyone else was -
She cleared her throat and took another sip of her drink. Best not to dwell on it. It was strange enough, this changing of the guard, without borrowing trouble from tomorrow.
"My boys!"
The room turned towards the loud voice - Colonel Harding, with Major Bowman in close step behind him. Harding's smile was mischievous, a sure sign that he had already been drinking, his manner too loose and easy for a sober man. "Listen up. I just had a …mood-killing conversation with Doc Stover." Marion sat up a little, wondering what this could mean. He hadn't seen her, or at least she didn't think he had, or she didn't think he'd be speaking in this collegial way. "Now, he thinks you sissies could be getting flak-happy."
There were general murmurs in the negative, to which Harding seemed to agree. It was a serious charge for Stover to make, and one she was sure the surgeon did not do lightly. Flak-happy came after too many missions - and flak-happy men did not fly. She knew that better than most - it was her that took those kinds of first-hand observations to Stover to begin with. It took a light touch - a few days leave here, a few days of office work there - and not a loud reprimand in the bar room in front of his peers. "Now, I told him war is war, and the longer you go at it, the more it screws a man up. And it's been that way since the first caveman son of a bitch picked up a club and went after the other." He scoffed. "Did cavemen go for head-shrinking?" He looked around for his answer. "You're damn sure not. What counts is that you soldiers show up ready and able to fight, hmm? And what you do between battles… well."
His eye slid, almost unconsciously, to John Egan and Cordelia Callaway, smirking as he did so, and Marion watched Callaway's smile fade a little at the implication, sly but there, that she was only worthy of consideration as a matter of …boosting morale. Beside her, Egan's expression was stormy - the same face he got when he was being given an order he didn't agree with.
Red must have seen it, too, because he took it upon himself to speak. "Aerial combat like this hasn't been around since the cavemen, sir."
"Well, of course not, Red. Every war has its novelties." But Harding's train of thought had clearly gone elsewhere. "Now, just who in the hell decorated this fiesta?" Jack Kidd raised a tentative hand, but Harding didn't seem interested in answers. "The damn plane looks like it's in a nosedive."
Jack Kidd's expression, usually cold and stoic, dropped a few degrees. "I won't bother next time."
Harding seemed not to care. "Now, come on, get in. Come here. Got something to tell ya." They moved in close, a team huddle around Coach, waiting for him to call the play. "You know how we could end this whole thing tonight?" He paused, glancing around the group. "We fill up one of our forts with as many 500-pounders as she can hold, and bomb the hell out of Hitler's hidey-hole. I'm sure Red and Bubbles could locate that …mustachioed little fսckеr."
Red did not look excited by the prospect, but there were more chuckles, and some back-slaps for Bubbles Payne at being so singled. He really was drunk, then - for who could think of war in such simple terms as these? Then out of the chuckling came one hard, angry voice. "Now who's flak-happy?"
The group immediately froze for a moment, and Marion's gaze went straight to John Egan, standing toe to toe with his commanding officer with the same stormy expression on his face that he'd had earlier, unchanged and undimmed.
Harding's gaze was unfocused, but he took the bait. "Who?"
"You are." Egan wasn't moving an inch, even though he was perilously close to an edge that everyone else could see. Clearly there was a line, for him, and somewhere between insulting his girlfriend and this outrageous idea Harding had crossed it.
The CO chuckled, still not quite seeing his officer's point. "You are."
"No, you are. Sir." The last word, added to give the bare minimum of respect due a senior officer, was only just this side of insubordinate, and every officer there knew it. And that would have been bad enough but that Egan delivered it with a slap to Harding's chest, as though he were physically pinning the charge to him. The whole group stared. Behind Harding, Red, too, was bracing for an outburst, an accusation - a charge for court martial.
But one never came. Harding only laughed, and one by one, the others joined him - all of them except Egan, who was still staring coldly, and Gale Cleven beside him, watching carefully as was his wont, and Cordelia Callaway, who seemed not to do with what she had just seen. Marion looked at the squad leader with fresh eyes, and realized Stover might have seen something about Egan and the rest that she hadn't. Am I getting flak happy, too?
"Come on, boys," the CO said with a smile, turning to the room behind him and taking a long draw of his cigar with a smile that could only be described as salacious. "Single fillies - let's get the lead out. Mary Boyle!" His eye landed on the nearest clubmobiler. "Why the hell aren't you already dancing? Get on out here, you'll dance with me. Have to make sure our girls have a good time."
The way he said 'good time' made her skin crawl a moment, and Marion thought, suddenly, of Glen Dye's voice, the waver in it - Thanks for always getting us home.
No. It would not do. She crossed the floor on quick feet and tapped the young woman quickly on the shoulder. (The Colonel's hold on her was a bit too close.) "I'm sorry, Mary, but I'm going to have to cut in. The Colonel promised me a dance this evening and I mean to get it."
It was a lie, but a believable one, and even if it wasn't, Mary was only too glad to go along with the sentiment, and left the dance floor with a grateful glance at Marion. Harding, for his part, hardly noticed, his arms just as comfortable around her as they'd been around Mary. "I haven't had a pair of pretty girls fight over me since college," he said with a grin, underneath the music. "Guess I'm just that irresistible."
"No," Marion said, her voice pitched low, "you're just that drunk. That girl is under my care and I'm not going to let you take advantage."
That seemed to hit him, and he started paying a little more attention. "I wasn't -"
"You know you were," she insisted. "Talking about what you do between battles with a wink and a smile like they didn't already know and going on about …single fillies."
His smile was irrepressible. "You going to send me back to my room, Captain? For being a bad little boy?"
"I wouldn't dream of it," Marion said evenly. "You're going to go on your own. You're a grown man and perfectly capable. And you'll keep that hand where it is if you know what's good for you," she added snappishly, feeling his hand slip a little past her waist. "Mary Boyle might not be able to say no but I am." That caught his attention, and he did as he was told. "You should be setting a good example."
"They're grown men, Captain, they know -"
"They are boys, Colonel. And they look up to you. Which means you owe them better. So we'll finish this dance, and you'll say good night like a gentleman and go back to your room to sober up."
A little bit of his loose, easy smile was slipping, but not much - there was still a fondness in his eyes he could not lose, a certain …kind of desire. "Are you angry with me, Captain Brennan?"
"Yes, Colonel. I think I am."
"Oh, for - for what? Boys will be -"
"- Not all of your soldiers are boys," Marion said strongly. "Kent and Callaway and Warner, don't they deserve a good example, of how to be treated? Of knowing their Colonel thinks about their welfare, too, and not as just…something to do between battles?" She repeated the phrase with an unmatched bitterness. She wasn't his equal, perhaps, as far as rank was concerned, but age and experience would do just as well. "To say nothing about what you said to poor Jack Kidd about the decorations. That was just unkind."
He was slowly sobering now, realizing that she meant business and she was going to get it. "Oh, that was the - the whisk-"
"I don't care whether it was the whiskey or not. You'll owe him an apology in the morning."
"You really are angry."
"And after this dance I am saying good night," Marion said, turning the wattage of her smile back on as the dance finished up and letting her silence on his actual question speak for itself. "Thank you so much, Colonel. That was lovely."
The band started up again, but she was already on her way out, a quick stop in the coatroom for her hat and her overcoat and then out into the warm air of an early autumn evening. Tomorrow there was no mission scheduled, but that didn't mean she was going to miss out on a good night's sleep. How many sleepless nights had it taken them to get one crew to twenty five missions, to get eight men home? A young woman might have stayed out dancing but she was older and wiser and she'd take her comforts where she could get them, slim though they might be - a room of her own, and water to wash her face, clean sheets, a bed that was not too lumpy, and six whole glorious hours that were all her own before she would need to wake and dress and do everything all over again.
She'd only just turned out her light when she realized there were footsteps in the gravel outside, and a figure moved past the window, away from the path to the door - someone thinking the better of a plan and turning silently away, perhaps. A quick glance through the curtains revealed the Colonel, the set of his shoulders unmistakable under his overcoat, heading in the direction of his own quarters. Coming back to carry on the argument, perhaps?
Or to apologize? The provocation hung silently in the air as she watched him go. You're one of his soldiers, too. Maybe he's remembered you help bring the boys home.
It was hardly a court receiving room, this half-underground vault with its demilune windows and barrel chairs and the constant fug of smoke from the students and their assorted pipes and cigarettes. And it was hardly court manners, to have the girls all tucked up in their boys' laps, long skirts trailed over high button boots, everyone discussing equally the news of the day and the actions of the administration and (he pointedly ignored this) what everyone thought of the King and the Prince Royal.
But everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn't we, John thought to himself, secretly delighted that Fred hadn't even thought to ask before sitting herself down in his lap.
Ooh, how about Bill and Grace for the "If they had a kid" meme, please.
okay okay okay. So. Had to really figure out how this was going to happen, because Bill and Grace are… not simple is the best phrase, I think.
I don't think they were a Thing during training in Scotland - Bill was very married and Grace was too focused on doing the job right to get involved with her teacher. (Maybe someone else tried that, and Bill appreciated her more because she didn't.) I also don't think they were a Thing in Italy, although she certainly sets up that they could be. Bill sees her in those moments as a woman who could be, and is, desired by others. (But not him. He's married.) When they meet again, it's London just before the invasion and Bill's just lost command of the SAS, and Susan has dropped the bombshell that she was sort of hoping that Italy or France would finish him off because she's met someone else and they'll figure something out about the boys. Maybe Grace fishes him out of a place he was going to make some bad decisions, and he kisses her, and she stops him before anything more serious happens and doesn't say a word about it the next day until he remembers that he really did that.
Maybe it's not until VE day - or even more time after that. He's in London for drinks with friends, out on the town to have a bit of fun (Divorce has finally gone through - Susan had pictures taken of her latest rendez-vous) and who should he find at the door of the nightclub but Grace? (But also not Grace. "Ah, Livia," his friend says, like he comes here often. "Here, Bill, here's what you need. Lovely little Italian trifle like this." Their eyes meet and Bill can only smile.)
He comes back to the club another night - no friends, no flashy plans - and offers to at least buy her a drink so they can talk. She took the job because she didn't want to go home to Margate, and being a hostess is almost the same as running a circuit - connecting what people want with what people need. No one thinks twice about a shopgirl from Kent, but an Italian refugee has a bit of glamour to it. They spend a long time talking, and he realizes, watching her speak, how much he wants to kiss her again. (She kisses him, after he stays for her entire shift and offers to walk her back to the train.)
He has …some kind of job in the city. The boys are at school and the estates have a manager and he has dinner dates and dancehalls at 2 in the morning and pretty soon he has Grace's apartment and early mornings fishing socks from under the bed until he has several spare shirts in the wardrobe and a toothbrush at hers and there is a dish with her favorite soap and the tea she likes better at his flat and his friends are asking if they're ever going to meet his mystery woman.
He proposes because he doesn't want to lose a good thing, and she's the best thing he's had for a while. She says he ought to have all the facts first, and draws his attention to the fact that she had to let a skirt out and her favorite girdle doesn't fit. Three months, maybe. Enough to be pretty sure. She didn't want to tell him because she didn't want to be that woman. He says he doesn't care and runs off to apply for a special license and this little darling appears six months later and everyone has a field day and Bill doesn't care, because he's done doing the done thing.
Name: Amelia Margaret Stirling
Gender: female
General Appearance: Dark, like her mother, but with the definite strong Stirling nose and chin like her father. Not quite as tall, but certainly looks like she belongs to the tribe when there's a group photo to be staged. She wears her hair long because she likes it.
Personality: Her mother is incredibly at home in the middle of a party, but Amelia is a shy child who finds it much less fun to be in a room full of people. She's much more at home in a shooting blind with her father, trying to be quiet and patient.
Special Talents: She's much more of an academic, but not in the way of the schoolroom - she has a great capacity to learn from working people, and the farms and estates around Keir are ripe for opportunity. She's watched every animal birth, learned to fix cars and small engines, dry-stoned walls...and she loves making rounds with the gamekeeper. Make an excellent estate manager someday, she will.
Who they like better: Bill. Grace can be quiet and observant but she really thrives in big crowds, and she recognizes that doesn't win her many points with her daughter.
Who they take after more: Bill, again.
Personal Head canon: She doesn't have a super robust relationship with her two older half-brothers, both of whom were away at school when she was born. There's a seven year gap between them and that doesn't make for super close siblings.
Face Claim: undecided.
Hiya Merc. Happy December! I wish you would write a fic where Billie and Ron have a talk the morning after their night in Hawaii OR where Chick and Marion meet up at a reunion after the war.
He used to be good at parties.
There was an art to it - the small talk, the bonhomie, the bluster, the jokes and the laughing as you shared around cigars. It was easy, when you knew who you were and where you stood with the other men in the room - but he hadn't known where he stood for quite some time now. First it was the war, and then it was the divorce, and now it was a new job at a new base in a new state.
He'd taken the job here because it was far away - far away from what he knew and who he knew, hoping it would be the fresh start he needed after his divorce had been finalized. And - Doris had observed this crisply - the expense of getting there meant the girls wouldn't trouble him by visiting as often. The way she said 'trouble' meant it would be trouble for her that she didn't want to bother with - that he was trouble she didn't want her girls to see.
But knowing no one meant there were people to meet and parties to attend, especially if one was one link in a chain of the rapidly rebuilding Air Forces presence in Hawaii. So there were hands to shake and jokes to make and wives to compliment, all the while artfully dodging whatever rumors had made their way across an entire ocean about where Mrs. Harding was.
It didn't help that white sand beaches still made him think of her - and there was no shortage of beaches in Hawaii.
Tonight was all businessmen and their wives, investors in hotels and pineapples and construction companies, mild men in suits who'd sat in their offices and made a pretty profit off the war, and his guide for the evening steered him towards someone he thought might be a friendly face - "RAF chap - flew fighters, I believe. Family money out here. His wife's American, though. Mr. Forsythe, have you met our new Colonel?"
Prentis Forsythe turned out to be former Wing Commander Forsythe, and they chatted for a bit about air strategy and Norfolk and where to get the best cigars in Honolulu. "Darling, come here and meet the new Colonel over at Hickam."
The woman at his shoulder was dark hair and blush-pink orchids, and before he saw her face he knew her, even if she'd only been introduced as Mrs. Forsythe. "Marion." Her name dropped out of his mouth lush with surprise.
"Oh, you two know each other?" Forsythe's face was pleasant and unafraid, his arm assuming its regular posture around his wife's waist.
The truth floated between them like a spark, threatening to land and catch fire. I know all of her, and she knows all of me.
"We worked together, for a little while, during the war," he heard Marion say smoothly, her eyes in that determined set she got in the interrogation room when everything had gone wrong and it was her job to make it right. "It's nice to see you again, Colonel."
He wished, looking at her dress and her flowers and the diamond on her hand, that he could honestly say the same.
#76 broken pieces for whatever two characters you would like, please.
I have a brainwave that these two needed to share a scene - so here they are.
This was the third date this month.
It felt funny, saying that, that Molly was going on a date, but Billie wasn't sure she had any other word for when a fellow dropped by in a nice suit, picked up a girl in a nice dress, and the two of them went out to dinner.
A date. Could you even imagine? It was Berlin and the war was over and they were going on dates again, real dates, where you spent time cleaning yourself up first and the fellow actually had a front door to show up at. Not like they'd done during the war, where a date could be meeting a guy for dinner in the next foxhole, or sharing a blanket, or watching a fire. Any spare five minutes alone.
But here he was, on the front mat, shoes shined and hair combed. She wondered what they were paying him - his suit looked too nice for Berlin. Everything here was shabby after six years of war, and he looked out of place in the hallway. "Mr. Rosenthal." She opened the door and let him inside before returning to her seat at the table.
"Sergeant Mitchell."
"She's almost ready - she found a run in her stocking and had to change."
He shrugged. "We're not in any hurry."
Billie nodded, and returned cagily to her magazine, glancing up to follow his eyes around the room, taking in the small bits of art on the walls, some of it stuck up with tape, the calendar in the kitchen, the dishes in the drainer by the sink.
George Stout wasn't ever one for running a really military outfit, and the fact that they were Army without the Army meant private billeting rather than barracks. It was just the two of them in the apartment, though there were several other officers in the building, which was run by an absolutely ancient little old lady who knew very little English. (Molly was trying to learn German, just to get by a little with her, but the Army phrasebook wasn't getting them very far.)
He looked a picture, standing there in the front room - you could say that much. He would have looked even more handsome in class As, with that dark dark brown bringing his eyes out in full force and the mustache that made him look like Tyrone Power. An easy charmer, one of the gang would have said. But she'd known easy charmers before. What do you know about him, Mol? Like, really know? Apart from the blue eyes and the curly hair and the manners and the smile and the fact that he can't sing? He's been coming here for a month and what is he? A hotshot pilot and a lawyer and what else? What's he hiding? Where's the catch?
Because there's always a catch, isn't there? With a boy like that. He's too good.
Billie rose from her chair and moved to put her now-cold cup of coffee in the sink. "I don't think she ever told me where you're from, Mr. Rosenthal."
"Brooklyn - Flatbush."
Billie had a sudden desire to call up Ruth and ask her what she knew about flyerboys from Flatbush. "And you still have family there? Parents, siblings? Girlfriend?"
He nodded. "My mother, and my sister." He smiled a little. "And no girlfriend."
Notice I didn't ask about a wife. "You still close with them?"
His smile never wavered for a moment. "My mother writes me nearly every week. Sister less often, but she'll put a word in Mom's."
"And your firm, are they - are they taking you back, when this is over?"
"I'm sure they will be." He moved closer to the kitchen and looked her in the eye. "You know, I could provide personal references, if that would take less time, Sergeant. Former commanding officers, friends - my rabbi." He smiled at her surprise. "I'm a lawyer. I know what an interrogation looks like."
Billie squared up, her eyes meeting his with no hint now of gentle prying. If you thought the rabbi was going to trip me up, I'll tell you now I don't care. "I like having all the facts." And the fact is that I don't know you, Robert Rosenthal, and I don't like that.
"And the fact that I like Molly an awful lot?"
See, you say that and I believe you, and I hate that I do. "Lots of guys can say they like a girl, Mr. Rosenthal. Maybe even use the word love. Doesn't mean a thing later. I'm trying to establish intention and motive." There's been a war on. People say things they don't mean all the time. Isn't that why you have a job?
He was watching her with a kind of respect in his eyes, smile tugging at his mouth. "Have you ever considered becoming a lawyer, Sergeant?"
Billie felt off balance at the compliment. "The bar wouldn't have me."
He laughed at her casual brutalism, and glanced down at his shoes, considering his next words very carefully. "When you fly a bomber, the only guys you trust are the other nine in the plane with you. Imagine it's the same in a foxhole."
"After they've given you a reason to, sure."
"Guess I'll just have to work on that, then."
It was then, of course, when they were nose to nose and eye to eye that Molly walked in, beautiful in her dress uniform. "Billie Mitchell, are you interrogating him?"
Rosie stepped back, supremely unconcerned by all of it. "It's all right, Mol. We were just talking. It never hurt to have friends who care."
He calls her Mol. And he calls me Sergeant, because he knows we're not friends yet. That's what Ron did, too.
Billie met Molly's eye with a clenched jaw, almost afraid of what she'd find there. It's what you did for me, isn't it, care? And I never listened. But you're smarter and better than me, and you deserve better, too, better than broken promises and broken pieces of a heart. And if he is what he says, you deserve him, Molly. You deserve the world. And if he's not then I'll bury him.
"No," Molly said, softening a little, realizing what they were saying. "No, it never did." She sniffed and checked the fastening on her purse, fiddled with a button. "Will you wait up?"
Billie shook her head. "You'd better take the key. I'm not going out."
Molly nodded, grabbing the key and its chain from where it hung near the door and closing the door behind her as she and Rosie left. He would ask her, at dinner, what that had all been about, and perhaps Molly would tell him - or not. She fell in love with a guy she thought she knew. It ended like you think it did.
