It's a good Midwestern car, '35 Chevy standard coup — Daddy worked on the lines in Detroit, she knows her make and model — rusting at the bumpers and filled to bursting. A pair of shoes stacked in the back window; slacks pushing through the seam in a fraying suitcase that won't close; a picture frame sitting at the top of a box, the image obscured by the glare from the streetlight behind her; a crush cap tossed atop a crumpled dress jacket with the medals still pinned on the breast. She can't see a spare tire and it takes her two go-arounds to guess that he changed the front right, that he'd been on the road long enough to need a spare. Green Bay to Ypsi is eight-and-a-half hours, so Manitowoc would be what? Eight hours? Seven forty-five? Passing through to where?
His whole life is in there. If she opens the door, his things’ll go spilling onto the driveway.
"Frannie'll love these," Hazel says, scooping them over her last four fingers and raising them to the lamp with a modest smile as she rotates them with a thumb, catching the luster in the divots and swirls.
"They're—" The dryness in his throat catches him off guard, forcing out a few rumbly coughs before he can gets his words out. "They're for you."
She freezes, the mirth dropping from her face. "What?"
i was going to say hazel and bucky but idk if i want jack to murder me. he's already been through so much — @shoshiwrites
TOO BAD because hazelbucky is buzzy as fuck. hazel loves a tall man and he's got curls and blue eyes to boot? whew chile... it's not fair to say that bucky falls first because he always falls first but i think he starts carrying a ring in his pocket like two weeks into knowing her. he's down bad, down horrible even. and she's not oblivious, but she thinks he's joking when he flirts with her or asks for a picture to take on flights with "for good luck." by the time she believes him when he tells her that she's the one for him, it's too late. he's flying after buck and nothing will be the same again. there are so many juicy things to explore in terms of what the stalag period would look like for them. if bucky had someone to write to, would he still be gnawing at his own leg? and i see hazel almost wasting away because the one person who could get her out of her shell is gone and she just retreats inside herself. and they have two hands so jack can tag along if he wants i guess but ooooooh i think about them a lot i must confess
send me an oc + an alternate love interest for them and i’ll tell you what i think
"second-nature" for mahalia and bucky because she maybe needs her hands in his curls — @shoshiwrites
you sent this forever ago but i knew i needed to find just the right scene and you said 'reincarnation AU' last week and it reset my brain so how could i not!
She’s quiet after, wordlessly rising from his arms and swinging her leg over the side of the bed to put on her brace. He wants to reach out and trace the line of her spine, get some of her lost warmth back, but his arm stays flush with her pillow and misses her like hell. After securing the final strap across her thigh, he watches her hand linger for a moment on his discarded shirt, tenuous fingers tracing over the folds in the polycotton until they move to her hoodie and pick it up. The mattress creaks as she stands and the light changes in a blink from the white of her IKEA lamp to incandescence, the warm glow of a bulb on its last legs.
He’ll stop at the hardware store after work tomorrow and see if they can’t get it changed before they go to the pictures. The new Hitchcock starring Grant and Bergman — Mahalia can’t pass that up.
He blinks again and it’s back to the cool LED. Sitting up, he sniffs and wipes at his nose before reaching for his water — he’s got to stop letting Mahalia pick 50s movies when he comes over. But then it comes to him that Notorious came out in 1946 and he knows if he Googles it, he’ll be right. He’s also got to stop knowing things without knowing them.
The toilet flushes in the bathroom and he gets up as the sink turns on. He finds his sweatpants and makes sure they stay sweatpants as he pulls a leg through and then the other. Last week, they were brown-green wool for a moment and dark, paint-stained denim yesterday when he got out of the shower. She was there both times, but that’s just a coincidence. It has to be a coincidence.
She’s brushing her teeth in the dark when he walks into the bathroom, squinting as he flicks on the light and wrap his arms around her middle. It’s silent except for the buzz of her toothbrush, and she’s warm and without complaint about his fingers being cold or him being too hot. He’s allowed to hold her as she rinses and spits and stands back up so that she’s resting against his chest, one of her hands playing with his absentmindedly, her eyes drawn to their reflection in the mirror.
Sometimes, he imagines she can see it too. There are moments when she’s looking at him, through him, and past him at the same time, and he hopes that he’s not alone in this and going crazy, that she can also remember box scores from when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and mornings when they did nothing but kiss each other until the baby cried and pulled them into the nursery.
And sometimes he hopes she doesn’t see any of it, that this is the only life she has to struggle through. He’s only seen it once, but if everything else is real then so is the fall and the stiffness in her knee and miles and miles in the snow, those fucking Germans not letting her ride on a cart until she collapsed.
He has to kiss her and does, pressing his lips to her cheek before tucking his head into her shoulder where she smells like her good lotion, shea butter and a bit of coconut.
“You should go,” she says, but her hand comes up to tangle in his hair, her nails gently scraping over his scalp and making his nerves spark all the way down his back. Second-nature, he guesses.
⭐⭐(1 or 2, whatever you're feeling <3) — @shoshiwrites
okay i realized i haven't gone into the mahalia x veal lore in song of the summer at all so here we go
will veal falls in love with mahalia summerton at first sight and spends the next ten weeks volunteering for the same night duty shifts as her and trying not to look smug when she laughs at his jokes. it's half guilt — she's a newbie and he has his own friends — half amazement that keeps him in orbit around her with increasingly scrupulous stares from jack. she kisses him at the end-of-camp bonfire on the water front and he tastes the strawberry chapstick he'd spent the summer dreaming about, drunk on beer and the sound of her giggles.
they have to leave the next morning but they have the night, climbing onto the roof of his bunk with the last 6-pack of mike's hards and watching the sun rise over the lake. well, she watches the sun; he watches the wind tug through her curls and the light of a new day wash yellow and orange across her face.
he's down so bad.
mahalia likes him a lot. he's grumpy, a bit of an old man, and strong — not only physically but emotionally, robust to her snark and stubbornness. mahalia likes that he likes her and it's fun facetiming from their respective libraries and spending two days day-drinking at his school's rivalry weekend and rolling around in his sheets. he's good in bed, she likes that a lot.
the fundamental crack in this foundation is mahalia thinks his quiet, stoic nature is proof that he doesn't actually love her and so it doesn't matter when she hurts him and will thinks he can love her out of hating herself.
he calls her his girlfriend and she doesn't talk to people about him but he starts shopping for rings nonetheless because it's getting good and they're moving in together after she finishes her master's but then one of her safety lines snaps as she's helping guide a scared kid down the zipline obstacle course and bucky gets to her first and she won't talk to bill when he comes to visit her at the hospital and everything changes.
he's not a boy anymore and she's still a girl. she'll always be a girl in some ways, and that's okay. he'll always love her in some ways, but he realizes that he doesn't have to put up with this anymore. he's reaching out to her as hard as he can but his mom always told him this thing about horses and water and mahalia will be okay.
and that's where the song of the summer picks up. mahalia filled with guilt but not regret and bill watching his ex-fiance-but-only-in-his-mind hold on to bucky tighter and tighter and his stomach turns seeing how well they fit.
if you're feeling it, could i please request "playing with each other’s fingers" for an oc of your choice👀 — @shoshiwrites
happy (belated) bday my dear shosh. here is a very very belated prompt to celebrate. this is an AU i've had for years but @loveduringthewar's beautiful West Wing AU inspired me to get some real writing done on it.
summary: poet laureate mattie james is dutifully protected by secret service special agent joe toye.
a friday in autumn, 2:19 pm
Joe finds himself in a chair across from Mattie, who’s surrounded by a gaggle of vigilantly curious middle schoolers as she holds his palm and moves his hand around.
“See?” she says, angling his fingers toward the fluorescent lights overhead, “it’s too big. So,” she lets his hand down once more and slips her wire work off his finger. “We gotta make it smaller but if we squeeze it—”
“There’ll be a bend, like, a little point.” One of the kids makes a ‘V’ with his hands and Mattie beams.
“Exactly! Let me show you how to avoid that.” She sits back with the paperclip ring and the circle of kids closes around her once more.
Joe takes a moment to look around for help from any of the other adults in the room, hoping someone else is willing to jump in and play model while he gets back to his very serious job of protecting a representative of the state, but he’s only met with endeared smiles from the teachers and duty-bound refusal from his fellow agents. Bull’s at the door with a sympathetic but ultimately unmoved nod, Bill’s glancing over with a smug, thrilled sneer between chatting to one of the instructors, and Johnny shakes his head before looking at the floor. Joe knows what that means—you made your bed, now lie in it.
Or, as Mattie likes to say, grow a spine.
It’s not like Joe doesn’t have a spine. He spends his days telling people what they can and can’t do, where they can and can’t go, and who they can and can’t speak to, all without getting caught up in their pleas and compromises. This job does not allow for missteps; he’s not a man who takes chances. But this, and but is doing a lot of work here says the Mattie in his brain because she lives there now, this is different.
This is the fourth school they’ve been to this week and it goes the same every time. They arrive to a warm, overenthusiastic welcome from the teachers and an excited-slash-confused-to-borderline-hostile reception from the students. Mattie’s music isn’t necessarily targeted toward the middle grades, her poetry even less so. But she gets up there nonetheless.
Hi, I’m Mattie. I make music and I write poems.
Are you good at it? a kid will ask, always a boy—this one proudly introduced himself as Tyler, always towards the back of the room, always accompanied by giggles.
Mattie shrugs. Some people think I am, some people think I’m trash. And the shock of that admission, from an adult, from a capital-I important adult, breaks the spell of awkwardness and within a few minutes, she’s charmed the whole room. The kids are eating out of her palm. Even the ones who were determined to be difficult have either bought in or are about to.
Joe is now familiar with the mix of admiration and jealousy on a teacher’s face when they realize that Mattie’s nearing a participation rate that Maria Montessori would be jealous of. Johnny leans over to them with a grimace of empathy. It’s not you, it’s her. She’s a magician with this stuff.
Then, her least favorite part. She asks for a volunteer, just for a moment, just for a prompt. We can’t theorize our way into making art. We gotta do it. All the energy that had built up and the excitement on the kids’ faces fizzle. She’ll give it a few seconds and look at the adults in the room rather than the kids, half-pleading, half-resigned, then laugh like that was expected, like she asked them to skydive with no parachute.
She’ll let off steam about it later, when they’re in the car, when they’re back in her suite at the Library of Congress. How hard is it to set an example? They introduce me like I’m Nelson fucking Mandela but as soon as I ask them to engage for the sake of their kids, crickets.
Mattie, Johnny’ll say, it’s not that—
It’s because they don’t take this seriously. All this talk about how important artistic outlets are, but God forbid you have to do that art yourself. Because that’s not serious, that’s not real. She lets her bag hit the ground harder than necessary and runs her hands over her face before ripping open her beat-up laptop, mumbling to herself. It’s fine. It’s about the kids, it’s about the kids.
Bill’ll send a get a load of this guy eyebrow around to the other three, but Joe usually finds himself nodding in agreement with Mattie. Poet Laureate is quite a title, but it doesn’t mean anything when no one’s listening. People should listen.
So, on this particular Friday as Tyler, who reminds Joe of Bull—well-built and curly blonde—takes the awkward silence to look at him and the rest of the agents rather than his teachers or Mattie, Joe decides that it changes today. He knows the answers to her prompts already—think of a fruit, apple; think of a color that’s not also the color of an apple, purple. A four-man detail has one redundant agent and all entrances and exits have been secured; the other three can spare him for a while.
He pushes off the eastern wall or the room and half-raises a hand before fully raising it when he sees Mattie’s eyes light up upon realizing what he’s doing. He answers her questions only slightly disquieted by the sudden amount of eyes on him, but as she starts her poem building exercise with a thankful wink, he feels pretty good about it. He’s doing the thing, making art instead of theorizing, setting the example.
More like sitting the example. In his two months with Mattie, he forgot that making art could mean… y’know, making it, not just writing it down. It’s the whole point of the exercise, actually. Ten minutes of silent work, discussion, ten minutes of work with light conversation—Mattie’s the queen of light conversation, then presentations from anyone who wants to. The only rules are that you have to make something, whether it be using the poem prompt she walks them through or something from the classroom supplies at your teacher’s discretion.
The kids who wanted to write set off with their paper and pencils and Mattie walks around for a bit before settling into an empty chair and fiddling with the paper clips a girl is using crafts. Tyler wanders by first, then two of his friends, next a few of their friends, and soon, there’s a bundle of 7th graders watching Mattie make a paper clip ring. And of course, they want to make one too and of course, Mattie needs a model for show because if all of the kids are making one and she’s teaching, then who’s driving the boat? And of course Joe gets pulled in because he volunteered so nicely before.
The circle of children parts like the Red Sea and he’s face-to-face with Mattie again as she wraps the ring around his finger, her hands working around his to fit the metal securely. She’s full of focus, eyes locked on where their skin meets, still in her shoulders and steady in her breathing in the way she only ever is when she’s in the zone. He wants to laugh at the dedication to this tiny strip of wire, but he won’t, not in present company; he can’t have them think he’s laughing at her.
Maybe you don’t have to have volunteers, Johnny offers after their third visit with no adult participation.
Mattie sighs. It’s about the principle of the thing.
Oh, Bill snarks, the principle of the thing.
The kids don’t need to follow the teachers, they follow you just fine, Bull says from his spot at the door.
Johnny nods sagely. Yeah, monkey see, monkey do.
Well, Mattie says, tilting her head in sad consideration, maybe I’d hoped there’d be better monkeys.
Joe is being a better monkey, so no laughing. Instead, he looks from her face to their hands, wondering as always what she sees and how she sees it. It’s not just metal and space to her because nothing is ever just anything to her.
Her brain’s wired different than ours, as Bill says. And Johnny says, your brain isn’t wired at all.
He’s sure she’s watching the steel atoms bump into each other or she’s far beyond, watching the solar system spin on its galactic arm, just a blip in the rapidly approaching collision with Andromeda. Or she’s in both places at once, and here with him, too, capable of holding onto every eon and tense and time zone at once. He doesn’t understand it, not yet, where the poet ends and the person begins.
“There!” Mattie says, sitting back. Joe holds still for what seems like far too long as the kids investigate her handiwork and investigate him. Their inquisitive gazes wander from the ring to his face, some of them leaning in to squint at him, evaluative and unimpressed.
Most of them have figured what he’s doing here, with three other guys who have similar enough haircuts and stand with hands clasped at rest in front of them, plain clothed but suspiciously so. He likes kids, or at least, he’s discovered that he likes them more than he thought he would. They don’t understand that it’s some people’s job to fly under the radar. They meet his gaze as much as they meet Mattie’s instead of politely ignoring him and his fellow agents like adults know to do. And when they do look at him, they don’t care. He has to respect that.
He’s watching Mattie shape a paperclip for a kid when Tyler suddenly fills up his entire field of vision, staring wide-eyed like Joe is a fish in a tank. “Do you have a gun?”
“Okay,” Mattie says, reaching out and clapping Tyler on the shoulder, “it seems like we’re ready for presentations! Let’s take our seats.”
Joe bolts out of his chair and takes his place along the wall again as Mattie wraps up.
He doesn’t realize he still has the heart-shaped ring on until they’re back at the Library of Congress and walking into Mattie’s suite. It’s so light that he forgets he's wearing it and it’s only as she sets her bag down and the flower ring one of the girls gave her catches the sun that he remembers what sits on his finger.
He slips it off and holds it out to her. “Here.”
She takes it gently, turning it over in her decorated hands before flipping it back to him like a coin. “It’s a gift,” she says with a wink, “for being my guinea pig.”
His mouth opens to say something, anything, but the words die in his throat. Taking a moment, he studies it for the first time. It’s a delicate thing, slightly springy if he squeezes the sides, more of a square than a circle, and so very Mattie that he’d pick her if someone had him guess at the maker. The heart has been roughly colored by a red Crayola marker which she’d gotten all over a desk and apologetically wiped up and the imperfections of it—the bends that won’t come out from the original shape, the matte sheen from all the handling—makes it more beautiful.
He doesn’t know where to put it. It’ll fall right off the chain of his cross, and he can’t wear it and risk it getting snagged on something, but he wants it around. He wants to be able to see it and remember a day that was good, a day when he felt like they made a difference, that he made a difference. He hadn’t had a day like that in a long time.
It ends up in his locker at the D.C. headquarters office. Bringing it home feels too… too close, but this is a good spot, halfway between head and heart. He places it on the little shelf in the back next to his spare sunglasses and his old dog tags. He can’t seem to bring those home, either.
Johnny shakes his head as he passes on the way to his locker.
Joe pauses. “What?”
“You can’t say no to that girl.”
This is what Johnny’s amusement was about earlier in the classroom. There was nothing wrong with Joe stepping up or sitting down for a demonstration—it’s encouraged actually, especially at schools, something about giving the Service a friendlier face. Johnny’s gripe is with who Joe stepped up for and why he did it.
“No favorites, Joe.”
“You think I’m playing favorites?”
“I think you don’t understand her.”
“And you do?”
Johnny shrugs and shuts his locker. “No, but I don’t try to. You can’t let it go.”
“I think,” Joe starts as he follows the other agent down to check-out, “that if we understand her, we can understand this guy and get him.”
It’s the one thing that bothers Joe about this case. Lots of people get threats—protecting those people is eighty percent of his job—but there’s something about the ones Mattie gets that doesn’t sit right with him, hasn’t since the beginning. The letters are the one inroad that anyone has to solve this thing and as more show up with diminishing progress from the combined efforts of the Service and the FBI, he thinks it’s time to get a move on. Maybe the missing link is in the protectee and not the thing they’re protecting her from.
What’s the harm in trying? He keeps thinking about where Mattie gets stuck in her job, where she’s given status but no authority, and how she keeps returning to her painted corner with a brave smile, gracious to wait there until she gets called up to do her tricks again. People listen to poetry but they don’t understand it, she says and that’s not fair. When he looks at Mattie, he sees a girl who should be understood as completely as possible, if ever possible.
Johnny flashes his badge at the front desk sensor and looks back at Joe. “It’s not your job to understand. It’s your job to stand there. What if something happened while you were getting your ring sized?”
Joe’s offended. “Sitting down means I’m compromised?”
“Getting involved means you’re compromised.” Johnny’s facing him now that they’re both in the exit lobby, a pensive look on his face as his bag is slung over his shoulder. “Look, Joe, they’re not paying us to think on this one. If you think something’s up, talk to Dick, otherwise, this is not the kind of work you bring home.”
Right, ‘cause Johnny’s a family man now, with a wife and a kid and a baby on the way.
“I didn’t bring it home,” Joe says.
Johnny nods but his eyes are far away. “Yeah, but you thought about it.”
Silence falls for a moment before Johnny sniffs and shoulders his bag. “Who’s on duty tonight?”
“Talbert and Grant,” Joe replies.
Johnny nods. “Make sure they take a look at the cameras, see if they can figure out why they’re down.”
“Yeah,” Joe sighs and heads out with a nod.
The drive home is quiet except for the radio and as he pulls into the parking lot, one of Mattie’s songs comes on the folk station he’s been lurking on. He sits for as long as it takes to play—eyes closed, head rested on his seat—and lets her voice wash over him. She sings like she speaks, brassy and casual, effortless, not having to reach for what she wants, alluring, magnetic in a way that gets under his skin. He listens for anything that could teach him something and he’s so caught up in the mystery of the girl and the thing that goes bump in the night, that he doesn’t listen to the lyrics until the chorus.
But I’m in so deep, she sings, you know I’m such a fool for you. You got me wrapped around your finger, oh. Do you have to let it linger?
“What the hell do you know about The Cranberries?” he asks to the air, smiling softly.
It ends too soon, but the cool night outside shocks the spell of Mattie’s voice from his system as he enters his dark apartment. His nights off-duty are more and more standard as this assignment goes on; he’ll check in with his older sister as he gets dinner ready—Mom’s arthritis is flaring worse than usual and his niece is deciding between swim and soccer camp, catch the Pirates highlights on ESPN, do the dishes, then do his readings.
He started them on a curious whim, just to see what the hype was about and ended up standing in the aisle of a Brentwood bookstore for fifteen minutes, engrossed, until the attendant asked him if he was going to be making a purchase. He bought three books, none of them very long, but he’s not a book guy so they’ve been a task to get through.
He read Letters from a Convict Child first because it’s the book that put Mattie on the map and wrote a man out of incarceration and he’s not sure that he got all of it—he’s not sure that he got any of it—but he understands her now, at least more than he did two months ago. Each poem that paints a picture of the world paints a picture of the writer, too, and sometimes he wants to look away as Mattie touches her own raw nerves to get the words out. But he stays for her, he stays because people always look away. That’s why she writes.
As of yesterday, he’s officially halfway through reading grow lemon grow poem by poem and as he finds tonight’s selection, he’s struck by the opening lines.
Wire hurts my hands, makes my fingers stink
But I bend another paperclip
He underlines in his shitty pencil and reads the poem over and over again until his eyes start to droop close and he drags himself to bed wondering what Mattie’s night was like, if she offered her dinner to Tab and Chuck like she does he and Johnny, what music she played. It was Nina last week, but she’d spent the morning humming the Lumineers. Did she skip eleven songs before settling on the twelfth, or did she demand silence and curl up on the chair in the corner of her patio, legs tangled together, and write until Tab had to shuffle her to bed?
Did she make them rings despite the way the metal presses lines into the pads of her fingers? What did she say? Did either of them listen?
He jolts up in the dull gray light of morning, scrambling to shut off his alarm as his chest heaves. In the bathroom, he splashes his face with cold water until the scenes of his dreams—lemon trees, paper clip rings, the shredded and smoking hull of an armored vehicle in the desert, a shadowed figure slipping a letter under Mattie’s door—wash away with the chill. His phone dings.
my brain is evil today and still screaming about your baseball prompts so uhhhh mahalia plus ⁸⁰⁾ wet clothes and ambulance sirens please if i may — @shoshiwrites
this prompt is so EVOCATIVE shoshi. i was brought to lake harding immediately. cw for descriptions of injury/blood and descriptions of anxiety attacks.
All he can hear are the sirens — loud, they’re always so fucking loud. Screeching in his ears, making his eyes feel like they’re about to pop out of his skull. Non-stop, on and on and on and on and on, drilling into his brain, not getting any quieter as the ambulance speeds away to Saratoga Springs, yelling at him, screaming, bursting into his veins until his cells are vibrating at the same frequency.
Meatball started howling before they could even hear them and he’d stood no chance against that horn, the blaring panic that thumped along to the terrible heartbeat of the lights, flash flash, flash flash. The red and yellow flickered on Mahalia’s face like days passing too fast — ochre dawn and crimson dusk — as they rolled her up from the ropes course. She was with him the entire time, so completely herself as blood poured into her right eye due to burst vessels and the odd angle of her knee had Kyle radioing the hospital for Trauma Bay 2, and he was holding the back of her skull together with his hands while she insisted that Vera grab the “good charger” left of her bed and her Stitch crocs, not the Shrek ones.
And the sirens got louder as they neared the ambulance, and it’s not hospitals John has a problem with, but sirens. They only ever take people away.
He’s going to crack a tooth if he doesn’t unclench his jaw but he can’t ‘cause the sirens are so FUCKING loud. They’re gonna shatter his bones he was holding the back of her skull together with his hands—
“John.”
There’s a hand at his shoulder and he forgot he had a body for a moment but the hand is firm. The sirens get a driveway length’s quieter.
“John,” Buck says. John blinks and sees what he’s been looking at — the inside of his bunk, empty and grey on a dark evening, unable to remember when he started looking at it. The hand, Buck’s hand, squeezes his shoulder and his chest hurts because he’s been holding his breath. He exhales and it hurts like hell, biting at his insides, squeezing so hard it makes him nauseous and it feels like sirens in his ears.
Buck tugs at him and he gives, catching his balance as he comes back into his legs. It’s like looking at the sun when he sees someone else for the first time in however long he’s been standing here and he wants to cover his eyes but his hands are dead at his sides.
He forgot Buck had scars.
“John—“ And Buck’s hand’s at his collar now and if he could get the sirens to stop, he could say something. “Breathe, John.”
He was holding his breath again and as he exhales, the lights start turing orange with distance. They’re on the road now, blinkers flashing for left.
“You need to change.”
Right, it’s raining. The rain, that’s the reason they were… it’s raining.
He needs to get the blood off his hands but as he looks down, he finds that he already has. There’s nothing left, nothing out of the ordinary — no dark red, no white fleck of what he hopes isn’t bone — only a slight blue tinge along the muscles. It gets so cold when it rains up here.
Buck throws a shirt at him, then boxers and some joggers, and he doesn’t know if he can do it. There was so much blood on his hands as they lifted her into the ambulance and he’s treated more head wounds than he can count so he knows it isn’t good. He looks down at his hands and there was just so much blood and he doesn’t fucking know where he is. It’s so LOUD in his head.
It’s cold and loud and it’s always cold and loud when the ambulances come — in Wisconsin in November or the Catskills in June.
That’s when he notices the boys aren’t there. But where did—do they know? The lights are off so he didn’t see them before Buck showed, and the boys need to know. Harry’s boys too, and Buck’s, and everyone needs to know.
She fell so fast. One moment, she was making her way down the ladder above him as he turned to talk to Benny on the ground and the next, a gasp and a terrible two heartbeats before she was on her back below him with a leg the shape it shouldn’t be.
He’s freezing so he changes. His shirt’s on backwards but he really truly honestly couldn’t give less of a shit as his skin stops burning with dry things on and the sirens have to wait for one more car before they turn down Wilton Road and disappear from ear and eye. But they really, really want him to know they’re there.
hii cari, could i please request [ euphoric ] for a celebratory kiss for mahalia and bucky, either canon or au? — @shoshiwrites
a/n: can you tell i listened to california by chappell roan on repeat while i wrote this lmao. the operative word here is celebratory, i think.
[ euphoric ] for a celebratory kiss
Baker reports back with all of his usual gruffness. “We leave at 1900 hours.”
“Another night march?” John asks.
“Yeah,” the colonel replies, “but I told them we won’t go more than twenty kilometers a night, and they agree.” He nods to some of the lieutenants. “Spread the word.”
John watches them shoulder through the rain until they disappear into the maze of dirty tents pitched aimlessly in the barren field the Germans insist on calling a camp. A whole lotta fuckin’ nothing, Mahalia likes to say. He agrees; the decimated ground is no place to live, just another place to die.
Baker calls him before he and Buck can head out and prepare with the rest of the men. “Major Egan.”
“Yessir?” He nods to Buck, go. This’ll be quick and they don’t have much time.
The colonel waits for the last of the men to go before turning to him, his mouth pressed into an uneasy line. “There’s something else,” he says, and then he tells John the news.
She’s still asleep when he gets back to their section of tents, tucked under his coat on the cot George helped them scrounge from the Canadians. Despite the flurry of movement around her—Hambone shoving the last of the Red Cross rations into his bag, Crank wrapping his letters in a scarf to keep them dry, Alex and Richard splitting extra gloves and socks among some friends that they met up with from the 332nd—Mahalia is still, and it takes him a moment to catch the shallow rise and fall of her chest. Same as yesterday and the days before, it’s getting harder to know if she’s still with him.
Vera catches him as he enters and nods toward Mahalia’s bed. “I tried to wake her up, but she’s not—”
A wave turns her back to packing and he exhales with a low whistle, sliding down the wall to sit next to Mahalia. “So much for no secrets, huh?”
No response, no signs of life except for her watery, rattling breaths. He thuds his head into the wood behind him and tries to focus, but he’s never felt like this before, like he’s going to crawl out of his skin, like his head’s on fucking fire and his hands are completely numb. There are things he needs to do—gather his things, check Alex’s maps—but he can’t. His chest heaves with the effort to stay where he is instead of stepping out into the rain, finding a guard, and punching until he sees blood.
Buck finds him there half an hour later and after tossing John his bag, he nudges at him with his foot. “What is it?”
He tells him, repeats everything Baker told him about the transport and the exchange, and when he’s finished, Buck nods slowly before looking around. “Stuttgart, where’s that?”
Alex pipes up from the other end of the tent. “West, towards Fran—”
“I know that, fuck!” John snaps, louder and harsher than he means to, and the tent grinds to a halt.
He feels like he’s dying with everyone’s eyes on him and the burning feeling that floods his chest pushes him to his feet and out into camp. He doesn’t know where he’s going as he weaves through the tents, past the Russians and the Canadians, everything looking the goddamn same—stale, lifeless, dead on its feet—until he reaches the fence. The sight of guards and the blighted field that runs up to the ashes of Nuremberg is instantly sobering, and Buck’s right behind him as he turns to go back.
Silence eats away the minutes as he paces. His thoughts move faster than he can keep them—he can’t—there has to be something, another way. This can’t be—this isn’t—
“John,” Buck says, and he doesn’t realize he can’t breathe until he’s bent over, heaving toward the dirt. Buck thumps at his back once and he can’t stand it. He jolts away and stumbles back into camp like he’s being drawn along on a string and falls back into place against the wall next to Mahalia without a word to the wide-eyed expressions of his friends.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” he asks.
She stirs but doesn’t wake.
A prisoner exchange, American women for a few Nazi commandos, part of a campaign back in the States to ‘get our girls home.’ Mahalia ended up on a list when the Red Cross came through a few weeks ago; they didn’t like the look of her leg. High priority, they said. And she knew, she knew and she didn’t tell him, and now she can’t. She can’t do much of anything—walk, speak, eat. Baker asked them to start taking shifts with her overnight, just in case, and now he knows why. They were keeping her alive.
He sits with her until nightfall, until he’s the last man in the tent, everyone else making their way toward the gate, when the colonel arrives with two German medical personnel bearing a stretcher. He helps them lift her and she groans in pain as they move her, skin and bones now, and her hand twitches as they settle her between the two poles.
Her cracked, bleeding lips move once, twice and he calls out before they can take her away. “Wait, wait.”
It’s still for a second, and then he hears it.
“John?” she rasps.
His blood runs cold as he gathers her fragile hand in his. “I know, I know,” he says, leaning down and brushing a few curls off her forehead, pressing his lips against her feverish skin. “You did it, Mahalia. You’re going home.”
“John, I…” It's too much effort to go on.
It’s the most she’s said in three days, his name. He wishes she’d open her eyes so he could get one last look into the blazing, ruthless dark, so she’d know that it’s okay. After everything her country’s put her through, after everything he’s put her through, it’s okay. She fought to the end of her war, and she’ll get the hero’s welcome she deserves.
All he can do is kiss the back of her hand and lay it back at her side.
“They’re gonna take care of her, Major,” Baker says as they accompany her stretcher to the gate. It feels like the walk after his father passed, the rain-slicked mud underfoot as they followed his casket from the church to the graveyard.
He’s the surest he’s ever been that this is the end of his life as he watches the truck they loaded her into split off from the column, headed right as they continue south. His blood boils in his veins, screaming at him to do something—run, fight, kill. If he dies on this road, she gets to live, gets to see Lake Michigan again, gets to watch her beloved Red Wings play, gets to walk in the sun where everyone who sees her knows who she is and what she’s done.
The truck disappears down a westbound path, taking his last hope of home with it.
