being (at one time) chiefly a home for wayward and doomed fictional mariners. call me tortie. some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me IRL, I thought I would scroll about a little and see the Tumblr-y part of the world. she/her, tumblr old, tortoiseshells over on AO3. here there be memes, period dramas, boats.
It is May of 1946, over a year after his fall from the Hydra train and losing his left arm, and James "Bucky" Barnes is struggling to adjust. Working as an analyst at the New York City SSR branch, Bucky tries to put the war and all of its sorted memories behind him. However, try as he might he is plagued by thoughts of Magdalene "Maggie" Ramirez, a Women's Army Corps (WAC) Corporal he met in London and hasn't spoken to since before his fall in January of 1945. Little does he know that Maggie, in her struggle to put the war behind her, has moved to the city and looking for a job with the New York Bell Telephone Company as a switchboard operator. Now, by sheer dumb luck, they are reunited as they both fight come to terms with what they were to one another during the war, and work to figure out how to move forward in a world that was unprepared to deal with the consequences of war in the unsteady peace.
Chapter 40: Time For Things
Synopsis: Now that they’re cleared to fraternize Maggie Ramirez and Bucky Barnes muddle through what all of this might mean for their future while also trying to find time to celebrate the little things.
Excerpt:
"When the lights go on again, all over the world. And the boys are home again, all over the world, and rain or snow is all that may fall from the sky above…" Maggie hummed under her breath, watching people walk past the window of the automat.
The street lights were already flickering on as the sun faded quickly in the late February sky. It wasn't snowing as it had been last Friday, but the snow drifts lingered in thick piles on the sidewalk—the weather was bitterly cold.
She paused, her pen poised over a thin page of stationery paper, and surveyed what she had written.
"Dear Pai,
I'm sorry I haven't written. Things were busy ahead of my friend Sarah's wedding, and I've only now had more than two minutes strung together to sit and write to you, Nelly, and Ingrid. We're well. The weather has been bitterly cold. We got almost a foot of snow last weekend, which has made our commute to work miserable. We hope that you are having an easier winter, and that Charlie and Lizzie can make good use of all this snow, and that everyone is in good health.
Daniel and I are already thinking of warmer weather and hope to make it up to Taunton for Easter."
It was there that the words had failed her. Well…not exactly failed her. She knew what she wanted to write next. She and James had talked about it on Friday. It was the next logical step. Only…only she wasn't sure if it was the right one.
What did that even mean anymore? What could that possibly mean anymore?
Maggie sighed, setting down her pen, and removed a note from her bag and re-read it for probably the 100th time.
"Meet me after work Wednesday at L&L Automat. ~P.C."
Nothing more. Nothing Less. Turning over the now-tattered stationery a few times in her hands, she returned it to its place.
Friday. She'd seen James Friday, and now, only six days later, Peggy wanted to talk. Well, that wasn't quite true. Peggy had sent the note sometime on Saturday or Monday, so Maggie received it on Tuesday. Meaning Peggy had intended to send the note before Maggie had gone to see James on Friday, or work had somehow caught wind of her visit to the Barnes household, and now Agent Carter was going to warn her against such imprudent behavior.
I signed the paperwork. I was cleared to see him. I haven't done anything wrong.
Not that it would matter. Right or wrong, she was only allowed to fraternize with James Barnes because the U.S. Government thought it was beneficial for her to do so at present. Any change in that evaluation…well, Maggie shuddered at the thought.
Don't speak too loudly. The sea will hear you. for Bill Malloy?
16. Don't speak too loudly. The sea will hear you. (Bill Malloy)
"I miss the boats," Bill said to Elizabeth Stoddard.
Her smile was, at least, sympathetic. "I know."
Neither of them said anything else on the subject; there was nothing else to be said. Bill had never been a man for idle chitchat or for fussing and moaning about things that couldn't be changed, and although Liz might've been the boss, there wasn't much she could do about the situation, either. Ned Calder had quit, and she needed someone to run the plant. Someone she could trust, who knew the business—if not as well as Ned, then at least better than Roger Collins.
That didn't make Bill like his place any better, but that was his own business. No one had made him give up the fleet for a desk in the cannery; Elizabeth had offered him the job and it had been his own decision to accept. Yessir, all Bill Malloy's choice and nobody else's.
(As though he could every deny Liz anything.)
He gathered up his papers and brought them out to his car, but he didn't get in. Instead, he walked. It had been a while since he'd gotten a bird's eye view of the bay, and it was a fine clear day for a change. He walked to Widow's Hill.
He knew all the stories about the place, of course—he'd been born and bred in Collinsport, as his father before him had been. (His grandfather had been born on the boat, to an Irish couple fleeing the famine, but apart from his name, Bill had never thought of himself as an Irishman, or even really as a Mainer, except when he was out of town on business. He only ever thought of himself as Bill Malloy from Collinsport, as though the little speck on the turn-up of the bay's collar was a land unto itself.) Bill even believed the stories, though he'd never admit that aloud; it didn't do to go around admitting such things. You never knew who, or what, might hear you.
But it was mid-morning on a sunny Tuesday and he wasn't a bereaved wife or a governess, and he knew the way up from boyhood, so he didn't see the harm in it.
It took him a bit longer to walk that track these days than it once had; he wasn't as limber as he'd been in his twenties. But he made it up alright. The bay sprawled out before him like a mirror. Far below his feet, the waves broke on cruel jagged rocks, but further off, the water was calm and sparkling in the sunlight, and the boats looked like toys in a child's bath. Those'd be the summer people from the little artist colony a bit outside the town. Nice folks, Bill thought, if a bit fanciful in their ways. Not artists like Sam Evans, who painted people and boats and houses, and could really paint when his mind was clear and his hands were steady—the artists who rented cottages and dressed in corduroy painted things Bill couldn't wrap his head around. That kind of art wasn't for him.
Running the Collins cannery wasn't for him.
His eyes were were drawn off to the horizon; past where anyone could see, the fishing fleet was in open ocean, hard at work, fetching up nets full of sardines. Bill's dad had shipped out in cod boats before the war, but the market was down now and so was the supply. Sardines were easier, and canned well. His back ached at the memory of the nets and the old manual winching mechanisms. It was going to over electronics now. Ned had been after Elizabeth to invest, to modernize. He'd left before he won that argument, and Bill hadn't kept up with the new equipment enough to continue it. Liz had told him to drop the discussion so he had. He didn't really care one way or the other; it wasn't really the fishing he missed.
It was the boats. It was the sea.
His granddad had been born in the middle of the Atlantic and the Atlantic had never let him go, and Bill had been named for him twenty years after the Atlantic had reclaimed him. Old Will Malloy wasn't buried under the headstone with his name—he was out there, somewhere, his ghost still on the waves, like all the other fishermen who'd never come back to their wives… but for all that, Bill couldn't say they'd never gone home.
This far up the cliff, he could only smell a hint of the salt tang from the water. No fish smells or seaweed or any of the other familiar shipboard scents. But his mind supplied all the old familiar smells, all the sounds of creaking and shouting and waves slapping the hull and crashing over the deck, and for a second, he was disoriented by the dazzle of the sunlight—he was on deck, surrounded by water on all sides, without a sigh of land, and a haunting soft voice that he only ever heard in his dreams was murmuring to him, coaxing, wheedling, "Come home."
Bill took a step forward—
Blinked. Looked down. A long, long way down.
Stepped back firmly.
He took a last longing look at the horizon and the toy boats on the bay, and then turned away and began the long walk back to the house and his car.
the weird schrödinger's emotion that is "that character death was narratively satisfying and emotionally impactful and ultimately the best way to handle their character arc" simultaneously with "noooo but I wanted them to live :( :( :("
I know Customs is a, at base, a fic from a movie based on a Disney theme park ride, so I've tried to give myself a little grace when I fudge things [or accidentally put two Royal Governors in Jamaica concurrently] but one of the things that really stick in my craw when writing is music. I know very little about it except to say I know a 20th century recording of lyrics from the 19th century probably do not entirely reflect a version of song someone might have known in Newport in 1720, for example! So I've avoided citing any song by name or referencing a certain lyric. Which is fine! It's just a wonderful example of reading only to discover how little I know about anything.
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
origamiaround
areudirty
blakekathryn
