#*mota | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

middlingmay · 8 hours

Text

Rebel!John x Pastor's son!Gale AU

“D’you think you’re a sinning man, John?”

That was the thing Gale Cleven was best at: taking any assumptions you had or expectations you made about him, tossing them in the dirt between your legs where you lay sprawled, and grinding them down into dust under his boot while you watched.

Metaphorically speaking. But it was a metaphor John had been thinking about a lot lately.

They sat parked up in his car, a town over from Daddy Cleven’s parish. John wasn’t sure what tale Gale had spun when he escaped the old man’s clutches. But he was sure that he didn’t care.

What he did care about, very much, was the way Gale looked in the fading light. Golden hair, golden skin - even the blue of his eyes absorbed the gold of the sun as it started to make its way to bed.

His shirt buttons still stood to attention, done right up to the top and his shirt was starched so it dug a little into his throat. Evidently he’d not had a chance to change into the soft cotton collars and cardigans he preferred when he didn’t have to be at attention for the Pastor.

But in a rare display of abandon, Gale had rolled up his cuffs and stretched out his arms as he lounged in the front seat of John’s beloved car, top down. One arm dangled over the end of the door, the other stretched over the back of the seat. John had never fully appreciated that particular design feature of his Buick Super Convertible Coupe; that the two front seats ran end to end, so it was a little like sitting on a couch. Not until the first time it allowed him to press his legs against the local pastor’s son in the name of ‘getting comfortable’.

The deep red leather was soft and supple and today Gale had felt some kind of way that had him knocking his knee against John’s and draping his arm across the divide so his fingertips nearly, nearly, tickled the very edges of John’s arms - right at the top, where it met the short cuff of his t-shirt.

His mom hated this shirt - said it showed more of him than was Godly. When he paired it like he did today, with tight blue denim jeans which hugged his strong waist and showed just how thick his thighs were, she tutted and swatted his behind with whatever she was holding before she ushered him outta her door until he “learned some damn sense! What kinda girl you gonna bring home to me looking like that?”

And the longer John spent with Gale, the clearer the answer was to him. Not a damn one.

Gale was staring at him and John realised he hadn’t answered the question. He’d just been staring at Gale like some love-sick dame.

John grinned, the one that revealed his teeth as it spread, and let him bite on his lip a little on the way.

Gale’s eyes flicked to it like they always did.

“Isn’t that a given?”

But Gale was good at recovering from John’s teasing, and levelled him with his own look, head cocked, like John was a child who was being deliberately obtuse.

“Is it?” he asked. “Because depsite your reputation around town, I ain’t seen you do anything immoral.”

Immoral. John latched onto the word like it was prey; a perfect opportunity to get Gale a little worked up.

“Well which are you asking? Immoral, or sinful?”

Gale’s brown furrowed, and he looked at John all suspicious like. “I don’t follow.”

John turned his body towards Gale, his own arm coming up to the back of the seat, draping over Gale’s who didn’t budget an inch.

“They’re not the same, Buck,” he said, using the nickname Gale pretended to hate.

There. He saw it. The intrigue; the temptation to bite the bait.

“Okay. How are they different?”

Hook, line, and sinker.

“Tell me what your seven sins are.”

Gale snorted. “You’re a Catholic, John. You know what they are.”

John didn’t laugh. “Say them.”

Noting the tone - the order - Gale sat up a little straighter. His arms dragged along the line of John’s as he did so. John felt it like static electricity.

“Pride.”

John nodded. “I got plenty of that. I’m proud of my car,” he gestured with his hand.

“You worked hard on it—”

“I’m proud of my looks. I like keeping my curls longer because I know what it looks like when someone wants to pull on ‘em. I like my legs,” he stretched them out a bit further and Gale’s first blush of the evening made its appearance. “They make me feel strong. And that makes me feel good. All those folks lookin’ at what I got.”

Gale was silent.

“What’s next?”

“Greed and gluttony.”

“Hm,” John made it a satisfied and contented sound. “Well, I’m not greedy for money, you know that. And if It was success and fame I was after, I’d have trotted to New York after my dad.”

Gale’s eyes softened at that, well aware of John’s tendency to self-sacrifice for the comfort of his mother and his sisters - something no one else knew apart from John’s best friend, Curt.

John was pleased to see it, that false sense of security, before he made his move. “At first, I told myself that everytime I saw you would be the last. I’d leave the pretty pastor’s son be, stop teasin’ and tormentin’ him and let him find some friends more like him.”

Blush number two.

“But each time we spoke, every time I got you to laugh, every time you caught me lookin’ - it just made me greedier, Gale. Just got me hungry.”

A soft breathe rushed from Gale’s lungs. His fists clenched where they rested. Perfect control.

“Sloth.”

John laughed, bright and happy. “The day you let me, I’ll spend the whole morning after showing you sloth, just you wait.”

Gale covered his mouth with the hand that had been resting on the door and snickered. John loved that he could make this boy, normally so solemn and serious with the weight of his father dragging him down, laugh so easily now. Gale shoved John back and inch and John let him, smiling like a fool.

“Alright, envy,” Gale said, finally getting into the game.

“Your buttons.”

Gale spluttered. “My what?”

John nodded at his buttoned up collar. “Your buttons. Your shirt.”

“You can’t be serious? You’re jealous of cloth?”

“Ah, ah,” John corrected him gleefully. “I’m envious.”

Gale rolled his eyes but John leaned over under the pretense of studying the button at the base of Gale’s throat, and the younger boy stilled like a deer. From here John could draw in the scent of him: soap something sweet, like chocolate.

A breath away from the lip of Gale’s shirt collar, John murmured,” They get to kiss ya in ways you ain’t let me, yet.”

Gale whipped his head round and John had to rear back lest he get smacked in the head, but he didn’t go far. He saw Gale walk that edge; the one between excitement and fear, both centred on what he really wanted.

The other thing John liked about Gale, was that he had a complete and utter inability to back down. In the fractional space between them now, Gale let the arm resting along the back of the seat drop in a ghost of an embrace as it curled around John where he sat. The other he slowly but deliberately brought to rest of John’s denim-clad knee, high though, and gripped like if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to control where it went.

“Lust?” Gale whispered against his face.

And it would have been easy, so easy for John to finally bridge that distance and claim a kiss. But just like all the other times, he couldn’t help but think it had to be perfect, not easy.

Instead, he tipped forward just enough to brush his nose against Gale’s; for their eyelashes to flutter against each other, and for their stubble to catch in a delicious scrape and burn as they breathed in each other’s air.

“You have no idea,” John’s voice rumbled in the coming dusk, “the fire I got inside me for you, Gale Cleven.”

Gale’s breathe was shaky and laboured and tumbled out of him in a stutter. And then, “Don’t I?”

John dropped his head to the curve of Gale’s neck with a thud and a pained groan, and Gale chuckled, deep and syrupy now that John wasn’t stealing his breath.

But never let it be said that John Egan did not give as good as he got.

“I am a sinful man, Gale,” he spoke, just below Gale’s ear. “I don’t look at you with piety or good, clean Christian love for mankind. If you judge me based on the Good Book, you make me wanna be a very bad man.”

Gale’s hand spasmed on his leg as John felt the weight of the other man’s head rest on the back of his, just for a second.

Then John asked, “But does that make me immoral? Does that make me evil?”

Gale pulled back and looked at John with horror. He could see the refusal in Gale’s eyes that the younger man wanted to speak into the air. Of course John wasn’t evil. How could he be?

Gently, John cupped Gale’s chin between a finger and a thumb. “Does my - do my feelings for you mean I gotta burn?”

Gale closed his eyes but not before John caught the flash of hurt. Gale tilted his head down so his mouth laid in the curve of John’s palm, and in that sacred hollow he said, “I won’t let you burn, Johnny. Least not alone.”

There. As close to an admission as Gale got that John wasn’t going crazy and he wasn’t in this alone. That Gale saw John the way John saw him, and he wasn’t getting himself off every night to a damned fantasy.

With more effort than he thought he had in him, John pulled back to the driver’s seat and shook it out: all the tension, his desire, his temptation. He shook his head, rolled his shoulders, smacked his hands on the steering wheel, and when he turned to Gale he looked near pristine, but for the raw, bare look in his eyes.

“I gotta get you home,” and John said it like a vow.

A few streets away from the Pastor’s house - because even Gale didn’t make John stupid enough to tempt fate like that and Gale wouldn’t let him even if he did - Gale paused before getting out the car.

“What about wrath?”

John, who hated dropping Gale off but always appreciated the momentary but completely unobstructed view of his ass as he left the car, took a second to catch up. “Huh?”

“Wrath. You never said how you were a wrathful man. You left it out.”

And John thought back to the busted lip that started this whole thing. To subsequent red cheeks and black eyes and that one time he walked into the garage to Curt pointing viciously at the back room and finding Gale curled up on the ratty couch there under his jacket, soaked to the bone and nose red, sleeping.

He couldn’t touch Gale, now. Not around so many houses full of curtain twitchers, night time or not. But he could hold his gaze, which so many people found hard to do with the pastor’s son, and he could promise:

“I will never hurt you, Gale.”

And if he expected some heartfelt look or words at the declaration, he would have been mightily disappointed. Gale looked affronted, like John had just treated him like he was stupid.

“I know that, idjit.”

John spluttered.

“But your boys say you’re awful good a fightin’”

When he was a little younger and a lot stupider, John used to fight for the hell of it; to feel something in the wake of his father walking out his life. But now he only fought for a good reason. And Gale and his boys were very good reasons.

“I look after mine, Gale.”

And Gale bit his lip at the meaning left unsaid and wished John a goodnight, before he exited the car and walked off into the night.

John watched Gale until he turned the corner, like he always did, before he collapsed against the back of the seat and rubbed his face hard with his hands.

Gale Cleven. John was fairly sure he was going to hell for that man.

#clegan #buck x bucky #john egan #gale cleven #mota #masters of the air #fic #alternate universe #rebel!john AU #pastor's son!gale AU

71 notes · View notes

spaceshipkat · 16 hours

Text

here, have a collection of clegan fic recs!! not every author will be tagged because i'm not aware of their blogs as they aren't linked in the fics' notes/ao3 author profile. if you're an author of one of these fics and you see this post, let me know so i can tag you!

naturally this got long so under a cut it goes!

Touching by FreeLove/smallMar

"Gale wonders, not for the first time, when it was that Bucky started affecting him so. When was the first time his stomach dropped at the sight of Bucky’s smile? When did he start feeling the emptiness of the rack next to his when Bucky is on a late night out? When was the first time he felt his skin tingle under the casual, friendly touch of Bucky’s fingers? He doesn’t have an answer. All he knows is that one day, from his bunk, he looked up at Bucky, silhouetted in the early morning Texan sun, gazing out of a window in their barracks, the light streaming down his naked torso, and the sight took his breath away." January 1943, six months from deployment to Europe. At Kearney Airfield, Nebraska, Gale's feelings for John threaten to break him, until he finds that they're not as unrequited as he thought.

it just published a day or two ago, but goddddd this one!!! absolutely filled with yearning and angst set in a pre-canon setting. can't recommend it enough.

I'll be coming home, wait for me by FreeLove/smallMar

“What got you so riled up with the Brits earlier, Buck?” John asks suddenly, and Gale’s breath hitches. Either the walk has sobered Bucky up, or he was never as intoxicated as he was trying to appear. “You noticed?” Gale shoots back, genuinely surprised. His blood had been boiling, it’s true, but he didn’t think he’d let it on. “Of course I noticed, you’re my best friend. And your fists were so tight you looked ready to punch those guys yourself,” Bucky says easily, and something moves in Gale’s chest, something fond and warm that he instinctively wants to hold close and cherish. “We’re losing our boys up there and that prick acted like we’re not fighting for him, too,” he replies, and though it’s the truth, it’s not the whole truth. “Hm. Somehow it seemed about more than that.” After a night at the pub, something stirs inside Gale that he's unwilling to put a name to. But as time goes by, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

i've reread this one a frankly embarrassing number of times, but the getting together is just so! lovely! and i lovelovelove the dive into Gale's headspace throughout episode 2.

One of your Girls by @soliloquy-dawn

“What good are you over there? I want you here.” They’ve done this numerous times before, back in flight school. Bucky cosied up to his side in bed, the scruff on his cheek scraping over Gale’s collarbone. It only happened when the nights were cold, and Bucky was sloshed. Plausible deniability. In what Gale does now, they would be hard-pressed to find deniability of any kind. Both of them eagerly ignore that Bucky is not drunk enough, and that the woefully public nature of their surroundings in no way resembles the safety of their shared room back in Texas. Climbing into the cot, Gale tries to temper his rapidly beating heart. Bucky will find a way to snug close enough to plaster his ear to his chest. He will hear it, but won’t comment—skirting the line, never to cross it. Or, Gale is jealous of Bucky's girls.

the fic i read just before deciding i'd try my hand at writing clegan fic myself. but oh my god the yearning in this!!!! "Because you're mine. You should be mine."?????? like fuck me i am but a simple bisexual dealing with mota brainrot!!!!

in our bedroom after the war by @stereobone

After the war, Bucky and Gale reunite to fix up a house. They end up finding a life together.

look i've been a fan of stereobone from their good omens days, so seeing them write mota fic? dream come true. and when that mota fic fucking wrecks me? so much the better.

Obligate Mutualism by bowhuntress

"They had a strained conversation after mail call, all those months ago, walking slowly across the barren, muddy ground, and John wouldn’t look at him when he told him he was afraid that people would only ever know the person he was becoming. Gale could see it hanging over him, then: the spectre of the person John thought so diminished and so unworthy of being known. The person he was so afraid of becoming. And Gale thought, back then ‘what kind of person would not want to know every aspect of him? What kind of person would not love every version of this man?’" Or: Gale, through it all.

this is another one i've reread an ungodly number of times. i just LOVE seeing the details of the Stalag Luft III and watching how Gale and John keep each other going. it's just SO fucking touching, and the reunion back at Thorpe Abbotts? fuck me.

Breathe Me In (Exhale Slow) by @johnslittlespoon

Gale’s boot taps restlessly, knees bent to half–hunch over them, only his lower back leaning against the wall of the plane. He picks at the skin of baby–soft lips, staring out to the edge of the wing with glazed over eyes, and John’s heart twists. He can think of a hundred and one ways to distract him, but not a single word of reassurance. He’s not good at that sort of thing; that’s Gale’s area of expertise. He feels useless. “Here,” he murmurs, holding out his cigarette.

it's a fucking shotgunning first kiss fic. on a b-17. obviously i have to recommend this one. do yourself a favor and go read it.

dear john by @forasecondtherewedwon

The Regensburg-Schweinfurt mission changes John. What Gale can't say aloud, he puts in the letters he writes to John in his head.

six words: "Thank you again for my bicycle." Why does this one line fuck me up so very much? idk man! it just does!!

bomber’s moon by @ww2yaoi

Gale goes with John to London. Somebody should have told them there was a war on.

the confession!!!! on the bronze lions!!!!!!! ahem. look, it's a gorgeous fic with some excellent smut and Gale and John are so fucking sweet for each other. do yourself a favor and read it.

back home where you're from, that's the measure of a man by wolfhalls

Something sharp and possessive flares up in him, and it must be written all over his face judging by the way John’s mouth curls up at the corners. “We should—” Gale begins. Since he met John, he has become familiar with the distinct difference between should and whatever ends up happening anyway. (or: Gale falls in love. It's a shame there's a war on.)

the very first clegan fic i read naturally needs to be included. the author has John and Gale's voices down so perfectly, and the established relationship is so lovely. the absolute sweetness between John and Gale is just [chef's kiss]

flak-happy, fancy-free by mercess (aka yours truly)

The war is over, but some questions remain about where Gale and John go from here. ----- Gale’s not sure who he’ll be without the war, without the Hundredth, without a B-17. But he knows he won’t be Buck without Bucky. Won’t be himself without John. Perhaps that’s why John tried to slip away unnoticed tonight, why he came out here and tucked himself into the copilot’s seat. An attempt to sever a limb, one he knows he can’t take home with him. They’ll hang up their dog tags, box up their flight jackets, try to forget the rumble of a nine-cylinder engine and the buzz of a voice in your ear and a blue, blue sky. Gale doesn’t know how to tell John that a life without him would be like never feeling the sunlight again.

idk man, i'm just really proud of this one. set during episode 9, it features John and Gale finally doing something about their feelings. and yes, i've reread my own fic an ungodly number of times and i've been guaranteed that it fucks readers up as much as it fucked me up. (don't worry, there's a happy ending. i can't write anything else.)

i'm also working on another fic from John's POV, so y'know, keep an eye out for that if you like my writing!

this is by no means an exhaustive list (it's not even all the fics i have bookmarked) but it's long enough, so i'll leave it here! i'm sure i'll be making another one of these posts before long.

#masters of the air #mota #clegan #clegan fic #buck x bucky #john egan #gale cleven #mota fic #fic recs #mota fic recs #my writing #long post

71 notes · View notes