bahahaha you know it and Bucky complaining back about how “Jack don’t you know any nice Irish fairytales or something?”
while squeezing his baby to protect her from whatever the fuck is in jack’s haunting stories
“Don’t you know any nice Irish fairytales or something, Jesus Jack.” Bucky usually gripes and takes the opportunity of wiping her forehead to fully pull her up into a little hug, half of her left in bed with the very heartlessly giggling Captain and the other half safe in Bucky’s rancid, oily sweater.
Jack always just drawls, “well there’s this one about a banshee-“
“Jack no.”
“What-“
“Jack,” Benny will cut in from across the fetid, steamy bunkroom, “Keep this up and I’ll reread you Tennyson again.”
That threat shuts him up. Although he lets out a last little grumble about how “everyone wants variety until i give them variety.”
does Ida care about her hair and what happened to it? Is she pulling a Jo March and waiting to break down later when she’s alone over her hair because she doesn’t want to come off as shallow or vain? She’s on my mind too much 😭
I could and should’ve just answered this lovely ask straight up, with a yes and yes and yes and freely admit the Jo March comparison took me out and beat me up. However, brevity is not my strong suit so I wrote you a blurb as well:
Usual universe warnings apply
| | Showers
The shower room at the stalag was more than a little drafty. Worse than inside the combines with no dividing walls or body heat or the padding of blankets and cloth to make it insulated. Utilitarian, drafty and -once Cleven had shut the door behind him and left them alone- slightly ominous.
Or maybe that was just the mood, hanging about like a malevolent spirit, shining in late evening rays through the slit windows high above, altogether too wide a space and too bright a light for the awful task of stripping and washing and making an inventory of hurts like theirs.
Ida for her part would have rather done it at midnight by torch light, just enough visibility to wet her cloth and find the soap. She already knew -as much as she ever wanted to know- what had been done to her. It was over, and any lasting bruise and scar noticed and remarked on was like bringing it all back into the present. That’s something you did for nice memories, photographs of whoever was “home” stashed in a locket hung around Lemmon’s neck, homemade sticky smells wafting up from Croz’s footlocker -a last piece of melting fudge from the plate Jean had sent over. That’s the sort of talisman you kept around, rubbed at, sniffed, turned over in your mind again and again like a physical thing, like a Crucifix represented an all powerful, ephemeral, removed savior.
You didn’t rub your bruises if you wanted to forget them. You didn’t comment on your friend’s cuts if you wanted her to forget either.
Feeling this collective dread, they all just mulled around for a bit, flicking on faucets and drinking eagerly from the icy stream. Acting shy like they all hadn’t been showering together and living atop each other for ages. There was prevarication in the air and Ida knew she needed to put a stop to it, make an effort to lead, but she hardly wanted to see what was under her clothes herself.
In the end it was Tallulah -Lt. Smith- who took the first step back from the sinks and shucked her clothes with an impressive display of casualness. Knowing a thing or two about rhythm and the effectiveness of a slow, steady build, Ida pushed her own throbbing face out of the cooling stream and followed suit. Soon it caught on, each doing their damndest to be uncharacteristically discreet and efficient.
“Can’t undo these shit-ass buttons.” she heard Maureen hissing beside her while she was braving the shock of a frigid soaked cloth between her rawed legs.
Ida dropped the bloody rag in the sink and flung her hands out to disperse the extra drips. “Come here.” she muttered, eyes lowered on the offending buttons and Maureen’s poor, swollen hands that looked more like paws than the graceful, skilled instruments they’d once been at her bombsight in the nose of her plane. “I’ll do them till you get your fingers back. You might need one or two of them set, you know that? That middle one’s going in the wrong direction.”
“I thought it looked wacky.” Maureen agreed, holding it up for inspection. “Gale wouldn’t stop asking.” she went on.
Ida focused on sliping buttons through their holes and answered steadily as she could, “And he’s likely to keep asking.”
“Doesn’t he know.” Maureen whispered, suddenly sounding very hurt, confused, petulant even.
Ida paused with Maureen’s shirt undone, the dingy plain, military issued bra in view -Ida envied her the possession of it, she’d lost hers with her jacket somewhere along the way. “He knows.” She answered firmly, meeting Maureen’s eyes with assurance, “But he’ll likely keep asking.”
“He wouldn't answer about his face.” Maureen said, turning round and letting Ida help tug her arms out of the sleeves.
“I think you know what happened there.” Ida was implacable.
“But-“ Maureen bit her lip to keep from getting loud, “-but what else?” she threw at Ida over her shoulder, “Why? What else did they -why would they do that to him?”
“And now you know why he keeps asking what he already knows.” Ida pointed out, coming back to her front and bending to unlace Maureen’s boots. “They’re probably all standing out there asking each other the same. Doesn’t do anybody any good. The details. It’s the apple of knowledge, leads to nothing but a sick fascination with what hurts you.”
Maureen had always been a rambunctious, animated figure in Ida’s life. Her anger came easy and was obvious, as were her loves. And if something didn’t make sense to her she’d rail at it or about it until God answered. She had teased Ida and John about it, that if they’d just come over to the Protestant side, they’d have a direct line to god and a whole lot more fun. Ida didn’t care about doctrine or fun right now, she cared about Maureen not trying to make a philosophy out of what she’d endured, or rope-in Gale to mull it over until they both went nuts. Ida wasn’t going to order her not to talk about it, but she could hint that details would hurt Cleven more than help him.
Here and now at least.
Maybe there was some moment waiting for them after all this when things could be said, horrors swapped like every other hard memory told in the officer’s lounge.
For herself, Ida doubted that day would ever come.
“I think your head might need stitches.” Maureen said in lieu of a response, puffy sausage fingers running gently along Ida’s throbbing and freshly washed scalp. “You’ve got a big gash here. It’s still bleeding.”
Maybe it was the gravity of bending over to tug off Kendeigh’s boots but Ida suddenly felt a pooling in her eyes, stinging tears after hours of dried out watchfulness.
God! She’d been ready to die, to be put down with a bullet in the head like their family coonhound when he got rabies.
Not this, not that replaying memory of her face suffocated in the Kommandant’s thigh and the slicing pain of the shears that went on forever, the way the blood burned her eyes so badly when she stood back up, the way he dared call her ugly when she had spent hours before wishing those other men found her abhorrent. Ida’s eyes were burning again and three damning droplets fell to the dusty toe of Maureen’s boot.
Ida made certain to swipe her thumb over the evidence as she tugged it off. “Luckily my brother is good with needles.” she joked softly, rising and turning Kendeigh toward the sinks, “Those fingers are useless, Candy. I’ll wash your hair.”
💋Hope you enjoyed! Feedback is a writer’s lifeblood, please feel free to scream in comments or the inbox, I love it and wanna hear it all. Trust me, nothing is “too dumb”. Your thoughts mean the world to me.
MOTA taglist, I only have one so ignore if this is not the universe you signed up for. 🤓 :
Thanks for the tag, sweet @softspeirs ! I’ve got way too many going but I stuck with the one Google docs said I had indeed touched last 🤓 no pressure tags: @blurredcolour @whirlpool-blogs @prompted-wordsmith
rules: share the last line you've written, then tag some people, and have fun.
Lu makes excellent time, however, and it is with a small twinge of guest-guilt that she wheels the car into his drive a good twenty minutes before their agreed on time. She supposed she could wait in the drive until he came home from work, enjoy the sunshine and windy coolness of a northern state in late August, she doesn’t know the town and she doesn’t feel like exploring.
The plan fails right away as upon turning into his drive she sees the garage is open, and having intruded this confidently so far, she shuts off the engine and steps out of the car right as Benny Demarco slithers his jean clad self out from under his pristine red corvette in absolute surprise.
Her first thought is how healthy he looks. Here in the fresh air, skin glowing and cheeks back to a healthy fullness, and it all contrasts so strongly to his state of undress, ratty shirt undone and a sweat soaked singlet— it’s entirely like the stalag and yet, it’s not. And Lu allows herself a self soothing catalog of the improvements peacetime has made in Captain Demarco.
grim reader here!! I’d personally like to see some of the scenes where Ida THINKS she’s ready for intimacy and it devolves into panic or whatever bc I think it’s formative to how they approach things in the future :) you know; the angst stuff haha
Nine times Ida Rosenthal thought she was ready, and the one time she really was —
coming to a bookstore near you!
Ok, I’m joking because I’ve not even written it out yet however, this is exactly how I imagine it, and I think each of those non instances are huge, crucial to their growth and going to be amazing to explore.
Literally I wanna have a set number, and each is a vignette of its own. I just need to plot out what those scenarios are.
Because there is so much before the sex.
NSFW BELOW:
There’s the lost art of necking which they reinvent, the first few times she turns into his touch in her sleep, it’s waking up to him warm and hard and not feeling a jolt of terror, it’s stumbling into him in the shower when he’s otherwise occupied, it’s kissing gone so intense on the couch they fall to the rug before the hearth and she thinks in a wine daze that she’s ready -she’s not. It’s holidays with her folks and Johnny and his new wifey breaking the bed upstairs and Ida getting genuinely miffed by the sounds of it that her brother bounced back so easily from all his fuckery and, in a competitive lurch, she climbs into Rosie’s lap and must be lawyerly dissuaded from competitive intimacy. It’s allllll the little gestures of romance and kindness beforehand, it’s Rosie helping her study for the bar once she chooses to leave the Air Force, it’s him helping her with the homework and his rewards get more and more tantalizing until she learns what that man’s hands can do -so much for all those protestations about not playing a instrument, Mr. Rosenthal. It’s the first time Ida asks him in the morning not to take care of things in the shower but to stay abed, to show her, teach her even. She wants to watch him, hear him, learn him. It’s her learning to associate sounds of male pleasure with a good thing, with Robert’s raw adoration and ecstasy as her hand grows more firm and her thumb clever.
It’s the first time she manages to put him fully in, after he’d just spent in her hand. There’s nothing much to be done then, just hold each other and process their oneness until he shrinks and slips out. It’s something though.
