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kiwisbell · 20 days

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helen ; chapter four

nowhere to run

Si vis pacem, para bellum. Or, the capture.

series masterlist | my masterlist pairing: joel miller x f!reader tags/warnings: 18+ (MDNI), john wick AU, hitman!joel, husband!joel, established relationship, artist!reader, love as worship (and blasphemy), sacrilege in the name of romance, flashbacks, graphic violence, guns, blood + injuries, tommy gets stuck with the babysitting gig, joel is still a bit of an idiot, childhood/religious trauma, joel in a church, violence against pastors, criminal underworld, secrecy/lies, betrayal, Big Angst, we're getting there though, the smut returns, fingering, conflicting emotions, kidnapping, Angry!Joel, cliffhanger (oopsie daisy), the typical alcohol/smoking/profanity, dividers by @/saradika word count: ~ 9k a/n: fucking hell. i'm so sorry for how long it took me to bring this chapter to you, friends! my thesis sucked all the life from me and i had to go on a quick trip to the underworld and back to get it back again. thank you so much to my baby @cavillscurls for beta reading and as always being the biggest goddamn help throughout the process. below is the moodboard that mya made for this chapter and the reason i'm her no. 1 lovergirl. prev | next

When he was young, he fed stray dogs on the street.

He would steal sandwiches, pluck out the meat to gnaw on himself, and toss the bread onto the pavement. He would sit back on his haunches just like them and lick his chops when he was finished. Being a runner earned him good money, but it was hard to find jobs that would take a scrawny eight-year-old with dirt on his nose. His memories of those days are far away, foggy around the edges, but he still smells the eye-watering prickle of trash, cigarette smoke, wet fur of the dogs. He still remembers the moist scratch of soaked-through denim after a night sleeping outside in the rain, the bone-deep chill that lasted for days in winter.

One night, a Sunday in July, a hand stretched out toward him. He had not eaten in days, and he’d begun to feel the stretch of his skin around his ribs. A skeleton haunting the wrong body. The face is blurred now, but he remembers the hand. Long-fingered and a little wrinkled, a bracelet dangling from the bluish vein-ringed wrist, a charm in the shape of a cross.

The hand brought him from his bed of ratty blankets and old newspapers to a giant cathedral. The bold lettering above the grand doors read The Sisters of Saint Eustace. Joel had been too small, too weak, to reach up and touch the golden words, but they were tarnished with age and buffed around the edges. He looked up at the owner of the hand—the hand which then lowered onto his shoulder, collarbones protruding, and squeezed just hard enough to sting.

He felt the warm soak of the daytime breeze on his face.

“You must come inside with me,” said the woman. He remembers that the hand belonged to a woman. There was a black hood around her head that made her appear as wraithlike as death itself.

The Creation of Adam was immortalised on the north wall. It was the first thing he saw when he walked inside.

“I can’t go inside,” he said.

“And why not?”

He turned his head away from the image of Adam and God, whom he did not know at the time, and could never have hoped to know. How could he, after all, when God had never appeared to him? Then, God was only a man, frail and old, reaching out a wrinkled hand. Why should the weak ask for aid from the strong?

“The dogs need someone to feed them,” he said.

He still does not know God. He does not suspect he ever will. But there’s a warm, soft palm encasing the skin and muscle over his heart, irradiating down to the bone. There’s an intermittent puff of air on the back of his neck, slow and ticklish, the way snow melts. The dog that still lives in the core of him shows its belly.

You’ve moved closer in the night, your soft skin warming his back where your shirt rides up. You breathe silently, catlike, as measured as the rise and fall of the winter sun. He listens for a while, his chest pushing out to match you. As he settles into the new rhythm, he feels for a moment as if it’s all been a dream. As if he never lost you, never lied.

His name leaves your sleeping mouth and his heart ceases altogether. It’s the breathless sound of need, of a desire he supposes you’ve forgotten. In your sleep, some stale withered flower blooms under a fresh rainfall, and he wonders what you’re dreaming about.

Before Joel put his mouth between your legs for the first time, you had forgotten what pleasure tasted like.

It was July, sweltering, and you were draped across the sofa with his head in your lap. It was date night, and his turn to choose the movie: some god-awful karate action film that was a sequel to a sequel to a sequel and so on, infinitely repeating. Neither of you were paying attention to the exchange of staged punches. You were occupying yourself with threading your fingers through Joel’s hair, and he’d taken to toying with the little bow that held up the waistband of your shorts. You watched him pull the strings until they unfurled only to tie them again with one hand. The white noise of on-screen blows lulled you into a gentle doze as you both lay idle.

“Joel.”

“Hm,” he said, the scratch of his beard tickling your belly.

“The door,” you said. “Someone’s knocking.”

“Hm,” he said again, his questioning pitch the only indication he was truly listening.

“You should probably get it.”

His sleep-soaked eyes fluttered shut, his lashes brushing your skin. He gently squeezed your hip. “I’m just fine here.”

“What if I told you I had a surprise for you? And what if I told you I worked very hard to find your surprise?” you cooed.

Joel blinked up at you. “You got me somethin’?”

Your heart swelled. “Yeah, I did. Come on, cowboy.”

Outside, Tommy lounged against the hood of the surprise as you guided Joel outside, your fingers over his eyes.

“I don't like bein’ blind,” he grumbled. “Can't you just tell me?”

“How about I show you?”

You lifted your hands. For a moment, Joel blinked, his eyes adjusting to the blazing light of the sunset, and his lips parted at the sight before him.

“Jesus,” he said under his breath. “You… got me a car?”

“It's not just a car. Boss Mustang 429,” you said sheepishly. “1969. You know, the one you never shut up about. I thought this might help.”

Joel’s breath hitched, and you watched him swallow it. “How…”

“Tommy called me a while back. He'd sourced it from another garage; it was bound for the dump, but I wanted to surprise you by fixing it up. So… surprise.”

Tommy tossed the keys to Joel, who caught them without even looking. “Your girl can get her hands dirty. Helped me fix up the whole damn thing.”

You tried to gauge his reaction, the slight hollow in his throat where he seemed to store the falling sunlight, a faint sheen of sweat turning him gold. Your heart plummeted into your stomach when he didn't say a word.

“It's too soon.”

His head whipped around, his brows curving up in the middle. “What?”

You wetted your lips, panic closing your throat in at all sides. “I know we haven't been dating long, but… I don't know, I couldn't pass up the chance. But now I know it's too soon. I shouldn't have presumed—”

Faintly, he shook his head, his eyes darting across your face as if he were trying to trace it, and closed the distance between you. You gasped as he slanted his mouth over yours, his hands cradling your face, old paper and salt and your perfume. You threw your arms around his neck, a buoy for the drowning man whose arms wound around your waist and pulled you so close he could disappear altogether. Maybe he was trying to. Selfishly, you would let him.

Tommy grumbled something—“You’re welcome, asshole,” probably—and his own car roared to life as it pulled away.

The car keys jingled in the bowl in your foyer as Joel tossed them blindly behind him, his heel shutting the front door. He kissed you like you were a fever he needed to burn out, and you felt the match strike where his hand curled its heavy weight around your neck.

“What time do you fly out?” he grumbled against your mouth.

“Not until morning,” you said breathlessly, watching him drop to his knees in front of you, taking your little shorts with him. Your chest heaved at the sight of your Joel, made humble at your feet, pressing his searing-hot lips to the bare skin of your belly. “Joel…”

“Nobody,” he said, his voice the velvety drag of night, “is like you. Not a goddamn soul.”

The admission caught in your throat the way a web ensnares dewdrops. The intricate folds of your brain would forever carry the imprint of the words—words no one else had ever said.

A starving artist, an old teacher of yours had said, remembers every kind word said about their art. They eat from them when there's no other food in the house.

“You're it for me,” he told you. “There's nothing else.”

You wake slowly, serenely, a yawning ache blossoming in the core of you.

Maybe that's why, even now, you cannot forget the way he touched you that night. You still recall every thumbprint, every stroke of his tongue, every soft cry into the otherwise empty room.

The fact is that nobody can love you the way Joel Miller does. Not even when his love hurts more than anything else.

He's watching you now. His eyes are half-open but alert, instinct pulling him closer to your side of the bed. Or, maybe you're the one who’s crawled closer to him.

“Joel…”

He doesn’t speak, but you feel the pads of his fingers on your belly, the soft fabric of your shirt bunching over his bruised knuckles, and his eyes shutter at the touch alone, a worn sinner.

“Tell me what you need,” he whispers, and it's chipped porcelain, the sound of his voice.

A part of you wants to cry, to let the pressure build until it crests, to feel the salt settle in the pores at the sight of him so close, so open. But you've shed your tears and he’s slept in your bed, and now his fingers brush the hem of your panties, not begging entrance, but asking, wondering—

You say so weakly, “I need you to touch me,” and he nods because he knows, because he's Joel, because your body has not become foreign to him even if you've made your heart a stranger.

You shiver as his hand dips beneath the cotton, two fingers sliding through the gathering wetness between your legs. Joel's gaze is fixed on you, black as the sky, his bicep flexing as he parts your folds with his fingers. Absently, possessed, you sling your leg up over his hip to spread your thighs.

The shockwave brings you down as he slides his middle finger inside you, sinking to the knuckle. The gasp that leaves your mouth feels like inhaling glass. You cup the back of his neck for purchase, tugging the little curls at his scalp, and watch as he bares his teeth.

“That's it, baby,” he says brokenly, the heel of his palm applying pressure to your clit as you writhe. Back in his arms, your heart thunders in your chest, the ache of his absence ringing in each rib like the aftershocks of a blow. He pumps his fingers inside you, curling up against the spot he knows as intimately as his own hand, studying your face as if he has become the artist and you the muse. For a moment, you think you see the reflection of your face in the whites of his eyes, and you’re overcome with a shudder that compresses your spine.

He’s too close. Too far away. Your hand curls around the scruff of his neck, a misbehaved dog. You’ve let him in, it’s too late, too soon, and you’ve assumed all the blood he’s spilled, taken it inside your body with the press of his fingertips past your begging entrance.

You hate that your body still sings for him, that your eyes cannot shutter, that you cannot shuck the curtains closed despite all he’s done. You hate that his eyes still hold the sorrow you’d seen in him since that very first night, and you hate that you existed so happily, so blindly, with him, in spite of the arid darkness that has always lingered just under the brown you thought you knew so well.

But he’s always known you, and that may be what hurts the most.

He’s always been keenly aware of your moods, your tastes, your body, and he plays you now like a pipe, lending his body to yours in supplication. Your heart aches as you let him inside, some feeble breach of contract, as if nothing is wrong, as if nothing was a lie.

He slides his fingers from you and spreads them before your eyes, the sight of the slick webbing eliciting a gasp you can barely hear. He licks his fingers clean and dips them back between your bodies, circling your clit with a renewed fervour.

“Fuck.” Your eyelids droop, your stomach tightens, and the glint of Joel’s bared teeth is that of a wolf’s in the dark. “I’m… fuck, I’m…”

“I know,” he says, “I know,” and you wish he wouldn’t.

The rhythmic, meticulous path of his fingers is nothing like the desperate writhing of your hips, the feverish grinding, the cries. Prey caught in a trap, you grasp the iron bars of his shoulders tight and beg for mercy.

And it feels so good, so right, that it slashes open your heart and spills the blood. The cold bite of his wedding ring bumps up against your opening as you blossom, brittle as a new bud, his fingers pumping in, out, in—

“Oh, God,” you whimper, burying your face in his throat, sinking into the familiar warmth.

Joel grunts, his nose sliding across your temple. “C’mon, baby girl, c’mon… I’ve got you… Can feel it…”

Normally, you would lick and bite and kiss the sweet, humid skin of his throat until you came, soft as dough in his arms. There’s a steel edge to the way you come now, fingers stiffly prickling his scalp, eyes bleeding tears into the crook of his neck. It feels good—good to slash at the bars that cage you in, good to weep over the loss of some willpower you let dissolve.

He doesn’t stop until he’s wrung every drop, inhaling the cloying smell of soiled linen and sticky perfume and saltwater. He closes his eyes against your temple and you can feel the caress of his lashes—wet, like yours.

His lips always carried the faint bitter bite of black coffee, and he always said yours tasted sweet. Like goddamn honey, he’d whispered into your throat the first night you let him inside, and you’d laughed—maybe the graze of his mouth was ticklish, or maybe you thought it was funny: the idea that you could be so sweet.

Now, you’re splintering as your eyes flicker down to his mouth, plush lips moist but split from the blow of an enemy. If you kissed him now, he would only feel a sharp sting. If you kissed him now, you’d let the blood win out. You would only hurt him and yourself alike.

“What are we doing, Joel?”

His eyes shimmer in the dark, his palm tentatively cradling the crown of your head. The hollow of his throat deepens, and you hold your breath.

“I’ll be anything you want me to be,” says Joel. “If you want me just to use me, then use me. You can have me whenever you want. I just wanna be someone you need—even if you don’t need me the way you used to.”

The sob lurches out of your throat, your forehead dropping to his as the climax burns out, smoke from a snuffed candle.

When you can breathe again, you push yourself upright and cross the room to gather your toiletries. “I’m not going to use you. I never should have done this.”

“Stop.” Joel grunts as he stands, apparently forgetting about his wounded ankle. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Joel, let’s just—”

“I don't want it to be like this,” he says. “I don’t want it to hurt when I touch you.”

“It doesn't,” you whisper, hugging your bag to your chest along with a bundle of clothes. “That's what scares me.”

His brows curve upward in the middle and you're overcome by the need to fix your eyes to the floor. “Baby, please… Please just look at me.”

You swipe your thumbs under your eyes and pin him with your gaze. “I feel like I’m mourning a marriage that didn't even end,” you tell him, and Joel lurches forward as if he means to grab the words in mid-air.

“And maybe we did lose it,” you say softly, though the words sting on the way out of your mouth. “But maybe that's… good. I don't want a relationship based on lies, Joel. I don’t want to wake up every morning next to the man I love and wonder what he’s still keeping from me.”

Joel lowers himself into the chair by the table like a weight is tied to his chest. He's still shirtless, his wound bleeding through the gauze around his arm, but he's staring at you. Suffocating you.

Twisting his wedding band around his finger, he says, “If there's even the smallest chance that you really could still love me… that this ain't over, even though I’ve done everything wrong by you… I’m gonna fight for it.”

Not everything, you want to say. Not everything, or I wouldn't be so hurt right now. It’s funny that the words won't take shape—wraithlike as the black ink snaking up and down his back. “I know you will.”

“And if you want all the truth I‘ve got, even if it's bloody, I’ll give it to you.” He leans forward, muscles flexing under inked skin. “You’re my everything. Nothin’ about that has changed. Not one goddamn thing.”

You chew on the inside of your cheek, the tang of iron flooding into your mouth. “It’s not just about the lies,” you say, dropping into the chair across from him. “You've put me on a pedestal. You may be strong and you may know how to fight, and everyone in the world may know your name, but… I don't think I can survive being all that you breathe for. Not if it leads to this.”

He remembers waking up each morning in the orphanage, sunlight turning technicolour through stained glass images of praying hands. He’d always thought the sun was so strong, gathering pieces of itself just to wake half the world, reviving dead plants, rattling the bones that stirred dead in the earth. He’d put his fingers through the many colours just to watch them dance. He’d wiggle his digits and remember he was alive.

He watched you walk down the long aisle toward him in a white dress, a bouquet of daisies in your hands, the sun carving your path. His hand flexed at his side like it did on those long-gone mornings, and he briefly doubted he’d be able to touch you at all—like you’d disappear, smoke curling around the contours of his fingers, a dream.

“My heart hurts, Joel,” you say brokenly, your palm flattening against your chest. “I’m not as strong as you are. I’m just a girl who married the man she loved. One day, you're going to realise that I don't bleed gold. I’m not a deity. I’m not someone you go to war over. I’m not fucking perfect, and if you keep treating me like I am, you’re only going to be disappointed.”

Joel just watches the tears fall, somewhat enraptured by the way they linger like dew on your lashes, until you blink them away and they cascade down the curve of your cheek. He wonders if this is how it feels to be the painter, desperate to capture even a brushstroke of the subject in front of him. He used to watch you paint for hours, holed up in your studio, covered in splotches of oils he would later take his time to wash away. The colours would curl around the drain, a snake poised to strike, and he’d kiss you, his canvas, tasting the poison of paint at the corner of your mouth.

He’s made something dark of the light that grew inside you. He’s tainted your image with the blood he’s shed, and every one of the thousand cuts has struck true. He thought he was protecting you.

He was only hurting you.

“I just wanted to have you. And you wanted to forget.” Your eyes no longer meet his, tracing the lifelines in the oak table back and forth. “So where do we go from here?”

There’s a troubled tic in his brow, punctuating the feverish flitting of his eyes between each of yours, always restless. “You think I fell in love with you because I thought you were invincible?”

You lift your head, the whites of your eyes gleaming. Joel brings his chair closer to yours, and you don’t make a move to pull away.

“I fell in love with you because you’re human,” he says. “Because you’re kind. Because you have a heart bigger than any I’ve seen. Because you’re funny, and talented, and you love to make art, and when you find something you love, you give your soul to it. I love you because you’re an angry drunk and you hate mornings and you’re so fuckin’ frustrating when you won’t give up. I fell in love with you because you were the only person who’s ever taken a real shot at lovin’ me.”

Your bottom lip quivers and he wants to coax the heavy ache from your very soul, venom from the wound.

“You are my everything, baby. You are. And I know it ain't healthy, but I don't care. If that means I see you as a god, fine. You think I can stop lovin’ you the way I do? I can’t. But I never once thought you were perfect. Perfect people don’t fall in love with men like me.”

You laugh a little, but it’s taut, stuck in the back of your throat.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I’m not even sure I want that. But I do want to be the kind of man you’re willing to love again. You’re my best friend, and I’ll do whatever it takes, you hear me? I’m not givin’ up.”

You sniffle, your quivering hands folded into one another atop the table. He wants to reach out and touch you, pull you back into his gravity, smell your perfume. He wants to do a thousand other things he does not deserve.

“You’ve killed Manuel’s son,” you say quietly. “There’s still a contract on your head.”

Joel nods. “And he’s gonna pull it.”

You shake your head, lips parted around words you choose not to say. Instead, you look away, and he feels he's lost something he'd been holding.

“Do what you need to do,” you say, and every syllable cuts him along the bias of the bone.

He has known your hurt, your anger, your sadness. Something in an artist’s heart has never seen a day of peace, you told him once. He thought it was a joke; he may have even laughed.

I loved you.

Joel swallows. “I need you—”

“—to stay here.” The corner of your mouth pulls up despite your sombre tone. “Yeah, I know.”

There’s a knock at the door before he can open his mouth to reply. You stay apprehensively glued to your seat as Joel peers through the peephole only to unlatch the chain on the door.

“Anyone see you come in?” he asks Tommy.

“I’m sure plenty of people saw me, brother. But they can’t do anything, now, can they?”

A muscle in Joel’s jaw feathers. “You bring everything?”

Tommy scoffs, gesturing toward the bags weighing down his arms. “Everything on your fuckin’ mile-long list? Yeah. You gonna let me in?”

Joel ushers him inside and triple-checks the hallway to make sure nobody is lurking nearby. Your voice brightens by a fraction and it feels like an electric shock tingling at his fingertips.

“Tommy.”

“Hey, sweetheart.” He squeezes your shoulder and drops the bags at your feet. “You hangin’ in there?”

Joel watches from the shadows of the hall, his heart leaden at the sight of you smiling for someone else. He’ll do anything to earn that. He’ll forsake all he has, all he is. He’ll crawl on his hands and knees all the way back through hell; he already knows the way.

“Brought your supplies,” says Tommy, kneeling at your feet and opening the bags. Your brows knit together at the sight of your oils from home, your brushes, your pallets long ago stained with colour. “Heard you were feeling inspired.”

Your gaze lifts to Joel, eyes narrowed. “Is that right?”

He’s sheepish, ducking his head. “Just… thought you might be goin’ crazy, stuck in here.”

“That's not why I’m going crazy,” you grumble.

Tommy chuckles. “Well, if anything’s missin’, it's his fault. Most of your canvases were destroyed, but these are all good.”

Your heart feels a little lighter now that you can smell the tangy, cloying scent of your paints and run your fingers over the bristle of your brushes. You give Tommy’s hand a pulse, your thank-you barely snaking past the lump in your throat. “Tell Maria I said hi.”

He gives you a knowing look. “I’m holdin’ you to your promise, y’know. You still have to paint the nursery.”

You cast your eyes toward Joel, who leans against the wall in the dark corridor. “Yeah,” you say softly, stripped to the bone by the way he watches you, unblinking. “I don't break my promises.”

His fingers twitch at his sides, and the gleam of his wedding ring lingers in your periphery long after you've torn your gaze away.

“Tommy’s gonna stay with you,” says Joel, “while I take care of the rest.”

The rest. Of course. “Why now?”

“He just killed Cabrera’s son,” says Tommy. “And we don't want to risk anyone comin’ around, lookin’ for revenge.”

“But you said no business can be conducted here.”

“For enough money, a person will break any rule.”

“That kind of undermines the entire concept of your entire Underworld, doesn't it?” you say. “Rules aren't really rules.”

“But there are consequences,” says Tommy. “Just… if you’ve got enough money, you can hide from ‘em for a while.”

“Until they hunt you down,” you utter, looking across the room at Joel. His silence feels like hot hands on your bare skin. You turn back to Tommy. “What about Maria?”

“She's with her mom this weekend,” says Tommy. “Won't even notice I left the house. You need someone to model, I’m your guy.”

“No,” says Joel.

“I didn’t mean I’d get naked,” says Tommy.

Joel clips Tommy’s shoulder on his way to you, and his brother takes the hint to make himself scarce, disappearing into the bathroom. Joel kneels at your feet and places his hand on your calf. The weight of it is warm, carrying words he has no time left to give.

“This will be over soon,” he says, and he sounds so sure that you almost believe it.

“And then what, Joel?”

He sets his jaw. There's little of the predator, of the boogeyman, in his eyes. All that rich brown betrays now is a quiet resolve. A promise.

“Home,” says your husband. “We’ll make another.”

You squeeze your eyes shut only to open them again and find the hand that rests on your skin. He's bruised, bloodied, and violent, but he does not squeeze or press. He never once has. You wonder idly how often he's put those hands on your body while thinking of a time he'd taken the life of another.

“And what if we can’t?” you ask him.

The first time you'd unveiled a piece to him—the first piece you'd ever painted of you and him, together—Joel had instinctively touched the supple blue skin beneath the woman’s breast, as quickly as a nurse finds a vein.

“She’s blue,” he said. “Is that… how you feel? Like you’re… blue?”

“Blue doesn't just mean sadness,” you told him. “It could almost mean serenity. Stability.”

He looked at you, puzzled, for a while, his hand still extended, pressed to the barely-dry canvas. “Where I grew up,” he said, “I was never really taught anything besides black and white.”

“Colours are different that way,” you said. “They mean a thousand things to a thousand people. They can all look at the same painting and feel something unique.” You gave him a wry smile. “You look at a painting of us having sex and see sadness. I’m trying not to read into it.”

He chuckled. “You should know that's not true. And I like the way you think.”

“You never told me what you think about the painting,” you said playfully. “Do you like it?”

Joel’s hand travelled from the woman’s breast to her hand as if pondering the wash of blues that coloured her skin. Her fingers, intertwined with her lover’s, squeezed down on him—a lifeline.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It's the way I feel when you touch me,” you said. “Like I’m falling apart and coming together at the same time.”

Joel tentatively reaches for your hand and turns it over in your lap, palm to the ceiling. “If you decide a home isn't what you want with me,” he says, tracing your lifeline, “then that’s all right. But I just… I want to know if—”

“Don’t,” you whisper, pressure accumulating behind the inner corners of your eyes. Joel meets your gaze and it takes all you have to suppress the shudder at the feeling of his thumb making its ghostly pilgrimage across your palm. “Don't ask me yet. Please.”

He bows his head and his hand slips from yours, and you choke on the memory of a love uncompromising, effortless, simplistic.

“Just come back alive,” you tell him. “Come back to me, okay?”

Joel rises to his feet, and a kiss plants its roots at your hairline. “Always.”

“When he said to watch me, I don't think he meant the whole time.”

Beside you, Tommy clears his throat, averting his gaze to the floor. “Sorry. Just… it’s impressive, what you do.”

You’re still outlining the tangled limbs of the man and woman, their bodies disappearing into one another, each line indistinguishable from the next. “Well, if it helps, I don't know how cars work.”

He laughs. “Yeah, all right.”

You set down your pencil, casting a glance out the window. Outside, the stars wink down at you. “Will he be okay?” you say softly.

Tommy sighs. Now that he no longer needs to hide the fact that it isn't his brother doing the books, the sting of the reminder rings in your chest with the sound of his binder closing.

“I don't blame you, y’know,” he says, “for stayin’ pissed at him.”

“Good,” you reply, “because he's an idiot.”

“Yeah, that's one thing that's never gonna change.” Tommy leans back in the chair, taking a swig from his beer. “I tried to tell him he was makin’ a mistake. He's a stubborn bastard.”

“He is,” you say, frowning at the curl you've drawn over your subject’s forehead. He looks back at you, brow furrowed, one eye visible, the other blending with hers. It's gruesome, in a way: the frenetic lines, the frantic way their fingers dimple one another’s flesh. “But I can be stubborn, too.”

Tommy leans forward, studying the beginnings of your sketch. “I know he's made mistakes, and Christ knows I’m crazy for defending my dumbass brother. But if you knew how much he loved you…”

“Tommy,” you cut in, setting down your pencil. “Loving me isn’t the problem.” The outline of the bodies on your canvas blur as your eyes burn with tears. “I wonder if he ever really left—in his heart, I mean.”

Tommy’s voice is quiet. He’s twirling a small switchblade in his hand. “All he's ever wanted is peace.”

You cast your eyes toward the ceiling to stop the tears from spilling over, or to find some answer spelled in stars you cannot see. “Then why couldn't he just stay out?” you whisper. “Why did he have to come back?”

“You know, when we were kids, Joel would take all my beatings,” says Tommy, flicking out the blade. It glimmers in a way that catches the light as easily as a flame on kindling. “He'd say everything was his fault when it was really me who knocked over a shitty old vase or vandalised a fresco. And he'd just fuckin’ grin and bear it because that's who he is.”

He’d just been a kid. Just a kid who wanted to protect his little brother, who took every beating, who grew up in a faith he never had faith in.

The fragile wobble in your voice betrays the steel wall of your back. “He let me fall in love with him, Tommy. He let me give my soul to him.”

He ducks his head, folding the blade back into its wooden hilt. “Yeah, I know,” he says softly.

“And Maria?” You let out an airy laugh. “How did she react when you told her about all this?”

He doesn't meet your eye, and you feel your stomach turn over as he sets the blade on the table, bringing his hand over his jaw.

“Oh,” you say.

“We all do things we’re not proud of. Anyway, I had it easier,” he says, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “I’m just a mechanic.”

“And my husband’s a killer, right?”

Tommy sighs. “I know you shouldn't take my word for it. But he does want peace. And he came back because he didn't see another choice.”

On the canvas, the man holds the woman close, pulling her tight to his chest, as if he knows she's about to fall. “I hate it,” you say softly, “knowing he's felt so much pain, and I can't make it better. I hate that this is something he needs to figure out himself, Tommy. I hate that I can't be the person he thinks I am.”

“I think you don't give yourself enough credit.” When you turn to face him, Tommy puts the switchblade in your open palm. Your fingers reflexively close around it, and it's cool to the touch. Smooth. The grain in the wood looks like the wriggling lifelines in a human hand. “You made him leave this life. You got him to care enough to make a real one, and you didn't even know it.”

You flick open the switchblade. “This is beautiful.”

“Gave it to me for safekeeping when he retired,” says Tommy. “It was the prize for completing his first job.”

You frown at your reflection, angling the knife up and down. “How old was he?”

Tommy covers the blade with his hand and retracts it. “Keep it,” he says. “It never belonged to me.”

You try to push it toward him, suddenly repulsed. You've heard from his own mouth about the lives he's taken, but the thought of your Joel holding the very same weapon, sinking it into flesh, slicing through the strings that hold a person together, makes your fingers tremble. “It doesn't belong to me either, Tommy.”

“Maybe not,” he says, “but I think you’d know what to do with it better than me.”

You swallow hard. “A man declares war because he wants peace.” Your thumb slides along the smooth edge of the hilt before you hide it inside your bag. “I can't pretend to understand what you both went through, Tommy. But know that I’m glad you found a good life. And know that if you break Maria’s heart, I’ll make you swallow paint.”

Tommy nods sombrely. “I’ll tip the can myself. We're thinking green for the nursery.”

“Green is good.” You give him a conciliatory smile.

“Joel’s a good man,” he says. “He's just… misguided.”

“Are you a man of God, Tommy?”

He laughs. “I don't think anyone who came out of that place alive still believes there's a God. If only the Sisters could see us now.”

“I hope they never do,” you tell him. “I hope they never get the satisfaction of knowing they hurt him.”

“I don't think they’d be much satisfied,” says Tommy, “if they knew he'd found peace after all.”

Hours unfold. The canvas sits untouched as you and Tommy sit next to one another, the moon outside slowly enveloped by clouds. The silver silhouette casts a halo through the grey, and you think of your Joel, alone on his warpath, bloodying the ring on his finger. You think of your name on his back, nestled above the praying hands, and the pit of restlessness yawns wide open.

“He should be back by now.”

Tommy rubs his palms over his thighs, a behaviour you've noticed in Joel. “Yeah, he should.”

“But he'll be okay,” you say, a minute warble colouring your voice, “right?”

“He's Joel,” is all he gives you in return.

Your fingers twist themselves into knots in your lap until the jab of a car horn outside jolts you back to life. “Tommy,” you rasp, wetting your lips. “Go find him.”

He nods, standing abruptly from his chair and yanking his coat free from the hook by the door. “He’ll kill me for leavin’ you alone,” he says.

“We both know he needs you,” you say, turning your head to watch the moon peek out from behind the sheet of grey. “Just bring my husband back.”

There's a distinct sensation that erupts across the skin of a nonbeliever who crosses the threshold of a church. It begins in the floorboards, where the soul of a supposed Christ lingers, and radiates up through the soles of the feet, through the knees, until it circles the brain, persistent as a murder of crows. You don't belong here.

The little church is nothing extravagant, which Joel has to find a little funny. Five rows of pews on either side, a basin of holy water next to the pulpit, a smattering of devotees kneeling on the padded seats in front of them. He swallows the burn and approaches the pastor.

“My son,” says the man, spreading his arms wide as if welcoming Joel back from a pilgrimage. “Welcome. What troubles your heart today?”

Joel pulls the Benelli from his canvas bag and blows out the pastor’s kneecap.

His deafening roar echoes off the domed ceiling and reverberates through the stained-glass paintings of the Virgin Mary. “Fuck!” cries the pastor, scrambling backward with a hand covering his bloodied leg. “Fucking cunt, fucking asshole, vete a la mierda! What the fuck is your problem?”

Joel turns and fires another two shots at the guards on the balcony. One of them tumbles over the edge. The kneeling figures flee the scene, some screaming, some praying.

“Donde esta Cabrera?” Joel growls, bunching the pastor’s white collar in his bloodstained fist. When he doesn't reply, Joel applies pressure to the wound in his knee between his thumb and forefinger. “Habla.”

“Fuck!” he howls. “He isn't here. Hijo de puta, he's not here!”

“Fine,” says Joel, hauling the man upright with little regard for his obliterated knee. “Then we're takin’ a little field trip.”

Joel knew many of Cabrera’s secrets during his time working for the bastard. He would have changed the codes to the vault, but it’s the same nonetheless. Joel shoves the pastor down the winding staircase and aims the barrel of the shotgun between his eyes.

“Open the vault.”

“Manuel will kill me,” pleads the pastor.

Joel lifts a brow. “You see me cryin’?”

A pale, trembling hand rises to the keypad and types in the code. Inside the vault, two women are counting piles of cash behind the counter. Joel gestures toward the door with his shotgun. “Ladies,” he greets, “out.”

They scurry out of the vault with their hands in the air. Inside the small concrete cell, safes are embedded in the walls, twice Joel’s height, one of them unlocked and brimming with neatly piled heaps of bound bills and documents. Joel reaches up and unlatches a shelf, watching the avalanche of blood money cascade onto the floor around his feet. With one hand, he produces a lighter from his pocket and flicks on the flame. It ignites the piles of cash and papers as Joel walks out, leaving the wounded pastor on the floor.

A whisper goes up in flames behind his back. “El espectro.”

At the aggressive slam of car doors, Joel climbs the staircase to the balcony and looks over the rear exit. Outside, Manuel Cabrera and his men cross the concrete toward the church. Joel curses, ejecting the shell from his shotgun and inserting a new clip. The stained glass crumbles with the first shot as he puts a bullet in a bodyguard’s head. The shouts flutter toward the sky in the ensuing panic. Joel hears Manuel cry out his orders: Around the back. You two, flank him. The bastard’s here; go fucking kill him.

The smell of smoke begins to stick to his throat as he takes another shot. The sound of dress shoes clatters, echoing, across the floorboards below him. “Goddamn it,” he growls. He’ll be flushed out before long if he doesn't move. Joel checks his clip, fruitlessly searches the body on the balcony for more ammunition, and kicks him over the edge. The resounding thud of his corpse against the pews is somewhat gratifying. Cabrera’s men crowd the dead man, which gives Joel just enough time to descend the staircase and shoulder open the back door. The parking lot teems with Cabrera’s army ants, creeping around parked cars as they search for the boogeyman.

One of the bodyguards ducks behind a Range Rover, and Joel bares his teeth, the wolf at the hunt. He shoots out the front tires, which deflates the car just enough to give him a glimpse of the man’s head. He takes the shot.

“Puta!” someone cries. Joel ducks as a shot pings off the front bumper of the Cadillac next to him, and he briefly takes stock of his ammunition. Fuck. He would have really liked to keep the fucking high ground. Now, he's as trapped as they are. Rats in a maze of shiny new cars.

Joel peeks around the corner and feels the heat of a bullet seat through the sleeve of his jacket. He shoulders the sting of the new wound and rounds the corner, raising his weapon and firing. He counts another two, three, five dead, and the moist air begins to cling to the back of his neck, sweat lining his collar, blood soaking his sleeve. He calls Cabrera’s name. He calls again.

“Let's end this,” he growls. “Come out, and I’ll spare the rest of them.”

An explosion nearby sets him off-kilter, rattling the earth beneath him. The church goes up easily, flames licking the sky, sirens blaring several blocks over, the steady eruption of chaos like golden nectar in his mouth. Joel rises to his feet and continues his charge.

He calls Cabrera’s name again. He thinks of your body, prone and cold on the floor, reaching for him. He thinks of that night and imagines himself saving you before any of it happened. He imagines turning out of the restaurant that very first night, retreating into the darkness where it was comfortable and you were safe.

No—he'd gone to the light. He’d let it all topple, and he'd do it again. This world is not where he belongs. You are what the word has led him to. All the gospel and the hymnals and the nights spent praying on his knees to a false god led him to your soft, supple side, not to the jagged edges of this unforgiving Underworld.

He calls Cabrera’s name again, but he hears the roar of the engine too late. The circle of vehicles crowds him, claustrophobic, and it's Manuel Cabrera who steps out.

He looks the same as he did eight years ago, when Joel approached him and asked to be released from his contract, if not a little more grey. He's dressed in an Italian suit and his shoes are unscuffed. His hair is combed back and his eyes are sunken into his face.

Something strikes Joel in the back of his head, and he sees the Creation of Adam on the north wall of the orphanage, the wrinkled old hand, the stray dogs.

The starchy scent of the canvas sack jolts him awake. Someone yanks it up over his head, and he blinks in the harsh light of day.

He's in a giant empty warehouse. Light filters through the broken glass windows high above their heads, shards and empty bullet casings and cigarette butts crunching underfoot. Judging from the scuffling of feet around him, ten or so men surround him where he sits in an old folding chair, bound by the wrists. He feels a throbbing ache in his skull and winces. You’ll give him hell for this.

“It’s good to see you, Joel,” says the silhouette sitting across from him, flanked by two more shadows. Joel blinks them into focus. “It’s been a long time.”

The edges soften until he can see the whites of the eyes, the cool detached gaze, the glimmer of a silver watch. “Manuel,” says Joel. “¿Cómo está su hijo?”

A huff of air is all he gets in reply. Manuel sheds his long coat and leans forward on his elbows. “You know, Joel, my son was a fucking moron.”

“I could've told you that,” says Joel, “and I would've saved you a lot of breath.”

“My son,” growls Manuel, “was a moron, but he was my son. I told him as much—told him there was nothing he could do, not when Joel Miller was hunting him down. And when I asked him what he had done to warrant the boogeyman’s vengeance, he said it was because of a girl.”

Manuel rubs his hand over his stubbled jaw, laughing like the situation is amusing. “Well, that’s good for you, Joel. Good to finally find something you care about, to find a reason. I see you're putting your retirement to good use. Fighting for your very own Helen of Troy.”

Joel says nothing, studying the manic glint in Cabrera’s eye. He recalls that same look from the night he asked to leave, placing his gun on the desk between them.

“I want out,” he said.

“Out?” said Cabrera. “And why, Joel, would you ever want out?”

“Because I’m done here,” he said. “I'm done in this world and I’m done with you.”

Joel wonders if Cabrera had been waiting for that exact moment: for Joel Miller, the ghost in the corner of the Underworld’s bedroom, to step forward and give Manuel Cabrera the opportunity he needed to rise to the very top.

“Very well,” he said after a long silence. “But I want you to consider whether your freedom is worth what I’m about to ask of you. It will not be easy.”

“It’s worth it,” said Joel. “Now tell me what I need to do.”

Cabrera sits across from Joel the same way he did eight years ago, the same insidious gleam in those black eyes, smiling smugly without moving his face at all.

“You've changed,” he says. “You’re softer, Joel. That wedding ring must've done a number on my killer.”

“Maybe I never stopped bein’ a killer,” says Joel.

“Maybe not. But the difference is that now, you have a reason to keep living.” Cabrera has the gall to feign remorse as he shrugs his shoulders. “You took my son from me, Joel. You understand how this world works.”

Joel kicks out his leg instinctively, baring his teeth at Cabrera like a caged dog. Two henchmen clap down on his shoulders and abruptly pull him backward in the chair. The rope around his wrists chafe.

“When I signed that contract,” he growled, “I had nothing to live for. Nobody to love. Until the day she showed up in my life. She gave me a word to follow that wasn’t yours or your God’s.” His mouth hardly fits around the name. Yours has always felt softer on his tongue. “Trust that Emiliano deserved worse than the death I gave him.”

“A woman above God,” Cabrera utters under his breath, rubbing his palms over his thighs before he rises to his feet and grabs Joel by the hair at the scruff of his neck. Joel winces at the prickling sensation erupting across his scalp. Cabrera’s breath stinks of weed. “El espectro,” he says mockingly. “The fuckin’ boogeyman. You're not so scary like this.”

Cabrera forces Joel to look up at him. The pressure accumulates behind his nose, painful enough to make his eyes water. “You burned my church down, Joel,” says his captor. “Money is replaceable, sure, but the leverage I had on this city… Hijo de puta. Just for a fuckin’ girl, Joel?”

Joel can't help but sneer. “Yeah, I enjoyed that part.”

It earns him a blow across the jaw, and he relishes the electric lash that wriggles down his side. Cabrera lets go of his hair and gestures with a glance to his men before he turns away, plucking his coat from the chair.

“Manuel.”

He watches Cabrera consider it: to indulge Joel, or to let him rot.

The first hit he executed on Cabrera’s behalf earned him just ten thousand. Then thirty-something, having long ago left the Sisters, the hard wooden floors worn with the pressure of so many kneeling bodies, the Marines, and the sound of warfare, Joel didn’t have many places to stay. He took the red money, earned from the body and probably the pockets of a dead senator, and rented a place.

Nighttime in the city didn't mean quiet, not outside nor in. That night, Joel sat on the side of his bed in a cockroach-infested Brooklyn apartment whose walls smelled of cigarette smoke, and he put his face in his hands. Leaving one war only to enter another, Cabrera told him, is just the way of life. You, Joel, are a killer.

But that can’t be all, he thinks now, his hands bound and his blood singing in his heart. He wonders if you're asleep by now, if you've taken to his side of the bed like you used to, if you've stretched your hand across the linen for a taste of the memory of that love-like-sunlight.

It's your blood, he realises, that courses through him. Your blood that tastes sweet as ichor, your blood that runs in his blue-green veins. It's your blood he hears whispering to him when the dreams go black as pitch and he cannot hope to breathe.

The last contract he took for Cabrera earned him no prize but his freedom. Nothing but the smell of your perfume and your warm body tucked neatly into his every night and the cool kiss of your twin wedding bands could have satisfied him. He was not just a killer. He’d proven it. He’d lived it in eight years of gentle mornings, kissing you awake starting at the roots of your hair, and he’d loved it as much as they all had tried to make him love a God that never loved him.

He’d never forgotten how to kill. But he hasn't forgotten how to love, either. That, he figured out all on his own.

“All I wanted was peace. And your son took that from me.” Joel lifts his head to watch Cabrera: the way his spine stiffens, the way his eyes narrow minutely. “He killed my peace and so I killed him. So you can either pull your contract,” Joel says, feeling the snarl pull at his vocal cords like jagged claws as his voice begins to rise, “or you can die screaming like your bastard son.”

He barely lurches forward in the chair before a plastic bag is shucked over his head, suctioned tight around his throat. Two men hold him down as Joel struggles against his bonds, gasping against the cool plastic. He's overpowered, hands wrenching his shoulders back against the chair. He kicks out for leverage, but his strength is waning, and the brief high of losing consciousness brings him back to you.

He took you to Greece for your honeymoon—or, rather, you took him. You were more travelled, more comfortable in the bright spots of the world, more settled in the spotlight. He thinks about how the sun adorned your skin like sequins, how eyes followed you everywhere you went, how you would see him frowning at all the attention and quietly take his hand.

They don't exist, you would tell him. You're all mine now, Joel Miller. And it’s just you and me.

Maybe there's a scrap of truth to fate. He's always been yours, long before he ever knew your face.

He basks in the sunlight on the beach for the time being. You wore his sunglasses when yours broke. You let him apply your sunscreen and you tucked your head into his shoulder on the luxurious chair. You fell asleep with your hand on his chest. Joel spent an hour studying the band around your ring finger.

Maybe Greece was a dream. Maybe the sun was a trick of the light and the clouds were smoke and the sky was black and the memory dwindles to a pinprick and he's grasping onto the image, your smile, your laugh, bells and perfume and a candle set at the foot of a golden statue—

“Stop.”

“Stop,” says a voice, and the air comes rushing back in. Joel wheezes, blinking hard to clear the spots or maybe to preserve the picture. But you're gone, slipping softly away as the brush of your knuckle over his cheek, and Joel is alive again.

“Tommy?”

His brother doesn't look at him, but Joel sees the brief shimmer of gunmetal hidden in his waistband.

He can feel the bruises blooming in a circle of fire around his throat. You’ll really be furious with him.

Joel watches his brother pull the handgun and feels the ropes cut into the tender skin of his wrists, helpless as he feels now. “What in the hell…”

“I’m sorry, brother,” says Tommy, turning the gun on Joel.

#fic: helen #kiwisbell's fics #pedro pascal #joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller smut #joel miller x you #the last of us #the last of us hbo #tlou fic #joel miller angst #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller x female reader #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller au #john wick au

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hldailyupdate · 9 months

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Kit Connor wearing an exclusive 28 Official Programme hoodie for his cover of Guardian Saturday, the photoshoot was styled by Helen Seamons, Louis’ stylist! (21 July 2023)

#louis tomlinson #louis update #kit connor #28 official programme #july 2023

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buckets-and-trees · 2 years

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Into Cursed Pixie Dust

Fandom: MCU

Characters/Pairings: Winter Soldier x female!Reader

Word Count: 8.9K

Summary: “He's credited over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years…” but you don’t know that. You run into him once, then again, again, again. Destiny draws you together, and neither of you can deny the pull. And yet though he never ages, you do.

Warnings: SMUT, morally grey Winter Soldier, cheating (don’t read/complain if you don’t want it), penetrative sex, sex while pregnant, fingering, WS doesn’t stalk reader but territorially has his eyes on her/is aware of her when she’s in his orbit? Minors do not interact.

Additional Notes: First LENGTHY fic here. This idea crept up on me somewhat inspired by the feeling and some of the lyrics of Mazzy Star’s Into Dust, elements of Peter Pan folklore as he never ages and Winter Soldier also has that unconventional relationship with time, and the concept that he could keep encountering the same person – not every time he’s sent on a mission, but a few times, enough for it to be significant. Part of me also liked the challenge of trying to tie him to nefarious deeds/political intrigue/etc and going down some Google and Wikipedia rabbit holes to spin the timeline of encounters together (you can see the notes/significance/context for each date at the end of the fic).

July 1961 – St. Tropez, France

You are rushing as fast as your short heels would allow down to the docks. Your parents had left the house late for their weekend away to Cannes, which meant you were late sneaking out to Hank’s boat party, but you knew you could still make it if you kept a quick enough pace. You couldn’t run and show up in a huff of sweat and disheveled hair, but swift strides should still serve to get you there before Hank gave word to pull away from shore. Hank usually ran a little late himself, but you still needed to make good time.

Hank was the oldest of the Stanton siblings, and it was his youngest sister and your best friend Helen who was your connection to this social circle. It wasn’t going to be an excessively large party, but Hank hadn’t put a stop to any of the rumors of the various summer St. Tropez social elites that could be confirmed on his guest list. Brigette Bardot was among those names, but you were angling to catch Hudson Stanton’s eye – middle son of the Stantons and recently unattached and thus newly eligible bachelor.

You don’t give more than a glance as you approach the next street and made to cross, hearing no engines around this part of the town, and so swift is your pace that you are knocked clean off your feet as someone else appears from around the corner, colliding with your path.

You let out a small scream as you fall, not out of fear, but frustration.

“Are you alright?”

Your pride is smashed for the moment, and you can already feel that your right hip, right elbow, and the heel of your right hand would be very tender and sore, if not bruised, but you didn’t seem to be bleeding, thank goodness.

You frown but reach to take the hand of the offender, who’d leaned closer to help you get up. “You should be more careful and watch where you’re going!” you huff as he hoists you up almost effortlessly. You know you should have been looking more closely yourself, but it was definitely him, too.

After smoothing the fabric of your dress, you lift your face up to look at him, and your breath catches in your throat.

The stranger is tall and dressed in a black dinner jacket, with short brown hair, piercing blue eyes, and a firm jaw. “My apologies,” he said.

You take half a step back, pulling your hand out of his gloved hand, and smooth it over your dress again, looking down to see if it has torn or been soiled. “Is my dress alright?” you ask, looking back up to his face and turning slightly.

His eyes scan your figure, and suddenly you wish you hadn’t asked, heat rising up your neck and across your cheeks under the man’s intense gaze.

He reaches out and straightens part of your sleeve. “There. Good now.”

“Thank you.”

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” he asks.

“The docks; a boat party is leaving soon.”

“A young dame like you shouldn’t be walking through this part of the city alone.”

You frown at him. “I’m twenty-one and perfectly capable of getting somewhere on my own, thank you very much.”

The corner of his mouth twitches up. “I’d feel better if I could walk you there after our little incident.”

Maybe it would be good to have an escort for a few more minutes. “Fine, but only because you’re insisting, and only until we get to the docks. I can’t sneak you into the party.” And you didn’t want anyone to see this man walking you straight up to Hank’s boat. There were more than enough nosy Nellies that would immediately ask about him and spread that circulate the rumors like lightning.

With a nod of his head, he takes your hand and tucks it in the crook of his elbow, his gloved hand covering your fingers, a silent indication to keep hold of his arm.

“This way?” he asks, inclining his head to the left. You nod, and he whisks you away immediately.

He asks short, leading questions designed to keep words tumbling out of your mouth so he could stay focused on completing his mission, but of course you don’t know that. He’s too good at what he does for you to even question. You assume the kindness of a gallant, tall, dark, and handsome stranger. To him you’ve become the convenient cover as he puts distance between himself and the restaurant where three still bodies bleed out. Anyone looking for him won’t consider what looks like a young couple in love as they comb the streets for an assassin.

He’s walked you nearly all the way to the docks when tires screech as a car up at the corner ahead takes the sharp turn and begins coming your way, and no less suddenly, your escort has flung you up against the wall, a hand over your mouth before you can make a sound. You are breathless as your turn your head slightly to look at him. The two of you are not entirely in the shadows, and your bodies aren’t totally flush against each other, but the right half of his body has you pinned up against the wall, one leg planted between yours. You’ve shared a few kisses with some suitors, but this is the closest a man has ever been to you, complete contact from hips to shoulders. One hand is still hovering over your mouth, and the other has come up to brace your shoulder. He inclines his head down slightly to hover next to your ear, and the whisper of a breath you feel on your neck makes you shiver.

“Just a moment,” he promises.

It’s intoxicating.

The car passes. You both hear another car speeding down the road from the opposite direction, and he continues to hold you in what looks to anyone else like an intimate daliance.

Once the second car has passed, he steps away, and you can only blink at him for a few seconds before you recover.

He slips your hand into his arm again and tugs you back along the street.

He doesn’t usher you back into conversation, but it’s only another block before the buildings come to an end to give way to the network of St. Tropez docks.

He removes your hand from his arm and says, “Stay out of trouble,” before stepping back away from you and disappearing into the shadows, heading down another alley.

You shake your head and turn around, not knowing whether you really expect to see him or where he went. Ahead you hear another car pass, but this one has music playing loudly, and you smile and remember where you’re going. The more steps you take toward the docks, the more the music and then loud voices and laughter pull you in and push out the thoughts surrounding the man you just encountered. Helen calls your name, jumping and waving at the end of a small yacht, and then a smile beams across your face, and you forget the stranger almost completely.

November 21, 1963 – Dallas, Texas, United States

You didn’t think of him again until you see him across the way at the hotel bar, a small glass of something in front of him that looks untouched, his eyes on you. You bite your lip and incline your head to the side slightly. He gives a single small nod in response.

Suddenly Helen is arriving in a huff next to you, explaining the chaos of the last hour she’s had getting ready, the unexpected call from her soon-to-be mother-in-law, and the handful of other excuses that made her late meeting you here. Once she’s settled and ordering her drink, you look back across the bar, but your forgotten memory of a man is nowhere to be seen, the now empty glass the only indication you hadn’t made it up entirely.

You and Helen have a cocktail each before it’s time to head across the street to the restaurant to meet your respective fiancés for dinner.

The reason you hadn’t thought of that whirlwind encounter again was because that night on the yacht had exceeded your own expectations, catching Hudson Stanton’s eye early in the evening, laughing over dinner, dancing, watching the stars alone on the top deck, sharing your first kiss, and then, and then, and endless letters while you were apart, summers and holidays and weekends together while you finished school, and now an engagement ring on your finger, and you in Dallas this weekend to look at a house as Hudson’s firm has transferred him to head up their first office in the great state of Texas, your big New Year’s Day wedding less than six weeks away.

Dinner with Hudson, Helen, and Jack is just as you expected. Helen and Jack beg the pair of you to go dancing with them, but Hudson maintains he’s got to turn in early since he has to pick up his boss from the airport in the morning, Helen and Jack don’t press too hard, and you don’t expect to see Helen return to your hotel room that night, suspecting she’ll end up with Jack all night instead.

Hudson walks you back to your hotel and kisses you goodnight before you go inside. He won’t even walk you to the elevator because you both know if you get him that far, he won’t be able to refuse just the ride up, and then just walking you to your door, and…

You love and loathe how much of a gentleman he is.

Your thoughts are still sweetly lingering on Hudson as you walk through the hotel lobby. It’s busy tonight, music spilling out from the ballroom, and you start humming along with the familiar tune the band is playing.

You’re reaching to press the button for the elevator when a hand catches yours, and you whip your head to find it’s the stranger from the bar, the mystery man from that night in St. Tropez.

“You!” Your rockets into your throat.

“Come with me,” he insists.

His hand is warm, and your eyes are locked, and that intoxicating feeling you’d felt with your back pressed up against the wall floods back over you because even just the gaze from his intense blue eyes is too much. He’s not real. He can’t be.

But you nod, and he pulls you swiftly through the bodies milling about the lobby and into the ballroom. Once inside, he continues further into the room, and sweeps you into the swirl of bodies dancing in the middle. It’s darker here, but you can see every detail of his face, suddenly so close to yours again. There are too many questions you could ask, so you ask none. Your bones are melting as he holds your body flush against his, totally caught up in the movement and the music as he leads you around the dance floor.

You’re blissfully unaware that you have become an invisibility cloak to him again, this time an instrument to get close enough to his targets to verify them and register their voices in his head. He could have done this without you, but he ignores that. Using you as a cover make this easier, and his superiors don’t care how an assignment is completed if it’s done efficiently and without any trouble to clean up.

The first song you dance to is jaunty and keeps you smiling and feeling breathless. You don’t look at him much, your eyes moving around the room, taking everything in. He leads well, but the pace is so quick that you’re looking around as well to make sure you don’t bump into anyone. The next song is slow, a sweet Sinatra standard. You don’t know if he pulls you in or if you push your body closer to him, but within moments of the shift of the tone on the dance floor, you’re moving as one. His right hand has dropped to the small of your back and is not merely resting there, but intently holding you against him.

This was never part of his training, but his body knows how to move around the ballroom without a second thought. As you sway slowly together, he maneuvers you to a darker corner of the dance floor. Your head is inclined slightly, placing your cheek closer to his, and he presses his face to yours briefly. Then the two of you are in an alcove, hidden from nearly everyone, and your back is against the wall again. His lips brush your cheek, and you turn your head up to look at him. He keeps his right hand at the small of your back, but his left hand drops your hand and comes to the side of your neck, his thumb brushing softly over your jawline, his eyes searching yours. You nod, and his mouth captures yours.

The kiss is heated and hungry, he will devour you, and in this moment you don’t care. You cling to him, one hand snaking up his back to hold desperately to his shoulder as you pull closer to him, and the other clutching at his chest where you feel some sort of armored metal near his heart for a moment. He nips at your bottom lip, and you gasp and open your mouth to him. His tongue plunges in to stroke yours, to taste you.

He’s on an entirely different mission now, and his lips move from your mouth to trail along your jaw to that spot behind your ear, and you moan. You can feel an answering rumble in his chest, and his lips continue down the side of your neck, to your collarbone, making you gasp. You long to whimper his name but realize you can’t.

“Wait, wait,” you whisper, and his lips trail back up your throat.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks, his breath hot as it ghosts over your ear.

“No, just–” you fight to coherently string your words together, “What’s your name?”

He pulls away slightly to look into your eyes, and you think you see a flash of uncertainty, but then it’s gone, and his lips move back to burrow in the crook of your neck, and he murmurs, “You don’t need to know that.”

“But I want to know,” you press, your fingers softly playing with his bowtie.

“We don’t always get what we want,” he says firmly, and suddenly there’s all kinds of space between you. He’s retreating, and you reach your hand out to touch his face, but he shakes his head, and then he disappears around the corner.

You stomach has plummeted, and so it takes you too long to step forward and look around the corner and back into the crowd. There’s no sign of him, so there’s no point in following, you know that. You fall back into the alcove and press up against the wall, hands clutched to your chest, heaving from the heated moment but also now from the fight to keep from crying.

You wait until you’re calm enough to step out of the shadows again, smoothing your dress and your hair. You keep along the edges of the party, careful not to draw anyone’s attention, then move across the lobby and to the elevator. You keep your eyes focused up on the arrow above the sliding doors that moves slowly from left to right as the lift rises to your floor, dinging when it hits the ten. Once you’re in your room, you close the door behind you, and rest back against it, letting your head fall back, eyes stinging again, but you bite your lip and shake your head and push away from the door.

As you move further into your room, your breath catches as you see an enormous display of more white and pink roses and peonies than you can count. You step quickly forward and snatch the card that is sticking out of the arrangement.

All my love, Holden

You smile and press the card to your chest, letting your other hand drift to touch the soft petals. With reluctance you set down the card and step away from the flowers to kick your shoes off and start to get ready for bed. Your eyes are drawn back to the flowers frequently as you move around the room and in and out of the bathroom.

The phone rings, and you pick up after the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Darling, did you get the flowers?”

“Yes, they’re perfect,” you sigh and sit on the bed.

The longer you talk, the more you’re glad you shared nothing more than a few kisses with your stranger, and the sting of shock and his sudden abandonment drift further and further away. Holden’s voice is a balm to your soul. You settle more comfortably into the bed, and you two talk until you fall asleep.

You wake again at some point not long after midnight to the beeping of the phone being off the hook, place it back on its cradle, and properly crawl under the covers, finding sleep again almost instantly.

Planning for a wedding and a move to a new home out of state would have been enough to occupy your thoughts and push the stranger and his intense blue eyes and heated kisses out of your mind, but added to that the following day in Dallas, minutes after you stood and waved at the presidential motorcade with Holden and Helen and Jack, you and the rest of the country and the rest of the world receive the horrifying news that John F. Kennedy has been shot, and then the news escalates from a shooting to the assassination of the American president. Trivial thoughts are long gone.

March 14, 1972 – Milan, Italy

You’re on a business trip with Hudson. Well, sometimes. Mostly you’re on a trip where you’re scheduled and bustled around with fifteen of the other office wives. You don’t usually mind, but there was no way you wanted to spend two hours on a bus to and then another two hours back from today’s excursion, and the women don’t fuss over you making your excuses to stay behind since you haven’t made them often on this trip, and you have ample valid excuses to draw from at the drop of a hat in your condition.

Today you wanted the day to yourself, just one day away from Marjorie, the middle-aged queen bee of all the wives. One day to do as you please.

You stay in bed just a little later than usual, eat breakfast on the patio of the hotel restaurant, then slowly amble around some of the tourist points of the city that your hired guides had whipped through in a frenzy the first few days with you and the other wives.

You think you see him first during your long lunch, but it’s across the street, and it’s probably not him anyway.

But it is him, and you didn’t see him first. You don’t know he saw you yesterday.

After you meander back to your hotel room, you draw a bath, intending to read for the rest of the afternoon. You twist your hair up, then sink into the tub. You read until the water’s lost its heat, then you wrap up in a silk robe and move out to the chaise lounge chair. You ring down to have afternoon tea service brought up to your room. It’s been years since you’ve had this kind of time – husband and house and two children already traipsing around your home while preparing for a third and the Junior League meetings and social and work functions. It’s been eight days in Italy, and half of you misses the hustle of home, but half of you wants to stay here away from the bustle like this forever.

A quarter of an hour later, there’s a quick trio of knocks, and you stretch and set your book down before rising to answer the door.

“Come in,” you offer, pulling the door open wide so the tea cart can be pushed in, and you quickly walk toward the small balcony and slide the glass door open to indicate that’s where you’d like them to leave your tea.

The tea cart has not been pushed along behind you though. It’s only been pushed a few feet into the room from the door, which the man, who is not hotel staff, is closing quietly.

He removes the uniform hat, places it on the corner of the tea cart, and runs a hand through his hair as he turns to look at you. His hair is a longer than it was in Dallas almost ten years earlier, but those impossibly blue eyes lock onto yours with the same intensity they did back then.

“It was you earlier today.”

He nods.

You stand motionless, but he strides across the room, not quickly, but not slowly either.

“What are you doing here?”

He does not answer with words, but with a kiss that pulls your soul from your chest up into your throat. Your hands come to his chest, and the natural inclination is to pull him closer, but somehow your brain registers that you should push him away. You can’t seem to put the effort into pushing against him, but you do hold him at bay and manage to turn away from him.

“I’m married,” you say.

“I don’t care that you’re married,” he responds, his hand brushing up your arm to your shoulder, then across to the base of your neck, drawing a shiver from you. “Unless he’s a bastard,” he adds.

“Why do you care at all?” It’s not a bitter question, just honest curiosity from you.

“I shouldn’t, but our paths have crossed too many times not to. We must belong to each other.”

He steps closer, and you feel the heat of him against your back. His hand moves to skim over your right collar bone, then down across your chest, slipping so easily into your silk robe, and palming your left breast. You moan sinfully, your right hand coming up to cover his, your fingers twining together.

Then another flash in your mind and you pull his hand away and turn back to face him.

“I’m married,” you repeat again, and you draw his hand down to the very new baby bump that is still mostly undetectable to others.

His eyes drop to your stomach, where your hands are resting together. The calculations are happening quickly, you can see it on his face. His eyes dart back up to yours, hand moving from your stomach to your hip.

“I came to claim what’s mine.”

He’s so close, and he’s looking at you with so much heat.

“I–“

You lose your ability to continue thinking clearly when both of his hands come up to capture either side of your neck.

“You,” he insists, his lips descending on yours, cutting off any more protest. “You’re mine.”

The kiss is demanding, and his hands don’t move from where they frame your neck until he can feel the moment you surrender to the kiss and to him. It’s a small sigh falling from your mouth that you can’t hold back, parting your lips, and his tongue slips in. Both of his hands from your neck across your clavicle to your shoulders, purposefully slipping beneath the silk robe, pushing it off. He easily releases the tie at your waist, and you don’t stop the robe from falling away completely, pooling on the floor.

His kisses are relentless, but his lips move to your jaw, and then your neck. Your head falls back, and he draws a moan from you when he pauses to tongue the sensitive spot where your neck and collarbone meet.

Then his mouth descends to your breasts, kissing along the curve of your left breast, then moving to the right. His right hand moves up to palm and gently squeeze one breast while he licks and sucks the nipple of the other. Finally powerless to fight anymore, your hands thread through his hair, urging him to continue. He easily scoops you up into his arms, bringing you into his chest, and your legs wrap around him, lips meeting each other again. He walks you over to the bed and tosses you onto the mattress.

You’re breathless, but so is he, standing above you at the edge of the bed. His blue eyes have blown with the lust he won’t deny, the lust he demands. He’s only looking at you, but the scorching heat of his eyes as they move over your nearly naked body have you burning in a way that you’ve never felt before. It’s overwhelming, and yet not unwelcome.

Before your head and your heart can catch up with your core, he reaches for your ankles and draws your body down to the edge of the mattress. He is quick in removing the last bit of clothing from your body, tossing the panties behind him without another thought.

Your arms are down by your sides, hands grasping at the sheets, watching as he undoes his pants, pushing them down around his thighs with his underwear in one go. His cock is hard and ready. Your eyes follow his hands now, and his right hand grazes along your inner thigh, coming to rest on top of your mound. He brushes his thumb over your folds and releases a deep satisfied hum, finding you hot and wet. You bite your lip as you look back up into his face. His thumb pushes inside you, and the small whimper that escapes you betrays what you were trying desperately to deny from him and from yourself.

He leans down over you, using his left arm to brace himself above you, removes his thumb from your entrance and slips in two long fingers, drawing a sigh from you.

“Just this moment,” he says, “this afternoon.” His lips seek yours again.

“Just this,” you agree and then continue the feverish kiss.

“Just you,” he murmurs against your cheek. He moves his hand and presses his cock warmly against you, teasing the tip in and out of your folds.

You look down to see where your bodies are connecting as he slides his into your cunt. Slowly he pulls back out, guiding the head of his penis over your clit, causing your hips to buck up into him at the sensation. You can feel him watching your face, taking in your reaction. You close your eyes as he slides into you again, and the exquisite fullness draws a moan from your lips.

He draws back out, then pushes in again, then another slow draw out, and back in till you take his length completely. Your breath comes in short gasps as you adjust to his size, and you clutch at the front of his uniform jacket. He brushes his right hand over your cheek, and you turn your head slightly to kiss his palm, a silent assurance that you’re okay.

He pulls your leg up to rest over his shoulder, and it seats him more deeply inside of you. The sound you make is one you’ve never made before as he starts thrusting again with this new angle. While his left hand stays planted at your side on the bed, his right hand freely explores your body, drifting up and down your neck, palming your breast, squeezing at your waist, brushing along your thigh, gripping your hips, threading into your hair to pull you in for another kiss, skimming over your shoulder. It’s a starved, hungry touch, and your body sings everywhere his fingers seek out.

Once he finds his rhythm, he is relentless, pumping more quickly. That he’s still mostly clothed while you’re naked beneath him is maddening but reassuring – you feel vulnerable beneath him, but if it was skin to skin with every inch of your bones pressing into his, it would be too intimate, completely undeniable. The single barrier keeps you from being consumed by this enigma, and since you know he’s going to disappear, you need that.

Both of you are breathing in heavy pants, and while he’s still drawing moans and whimpers from you, he’s been maddeningly silent. He adjusts his hips slightly so he can move his hand between you, fingers seeking out your aching clit, rubbing concentrated, furious circles over the bud. The band within you is pulling tighter and tighter, until and he achieves his goal in pushing you over the edge. You bite back a scream, and his mouth covers yours once again with a kiss to stifle the noise and possibly steal a bit of your soul – at least that’s how it feels as he fucks you through your climax, chasing his own end. You roll your hips slightly beneath him, and the shift makes his breath hitch. Two more powerful thrusts, and he stops, spilling his seed inside you, the low groan escaping him as gratifying to your ears as the feel of him sinking against you, pumping in and out of you slowly a few more times. Then he stills, and time seems to stop, the two of you just holding onto each other.

Satisfied.

He kisses the side of your neck again, and you hum contentedly. Your fingers brush gently through his hair. He squeezes your hip again, then suddenly rolls off you and moves from the bed. You want to reach for him, pull him back for more, but you don’t. He must disappear again.

After pulling up his trousers, he retrieves your robe and panties from the floor and sets them on the bed next to you. He does lean in for one final kiss, and you arch up to meet his lips. When he can feel you begin to melt again, he draws away, looking back only once when he reaches the door. You will remember that hint of a smile for years.

He disappears like a shadow.

December 16, 1991 – suburban area of Washington, D.C., United States

You sigh and drum your fingers against the steering wheel. You’ve just dropped your youngest off at high school and been to the grocery store. The traffic isn’t terrible, but it seems to be more congested and moving more slowly through this part of town than normal, and you’re bored and impatient. Suddenly you hear a commotion above the sounds of your radio, and you roll your window down and look around. There are cars honking, screeching of tires, and shouts in the street, but you can’t see clearly what’s happening as you crane your head to look all around. Only a few other drivers seem to be noticing the strangeness as well. You give up for a moment as the light changes and you pass through the intersection and then into the next block, but then you’re stopped again, waiting at another light, and the sounds grow softer, more distant. You look around again and still can’t seem to see any clue as to what’s going on, but you do see a man all in black with almost shoulder length hair walking incredibly fast down the sidewalk, moving quickly past the pedestrians around him. He is on the left side of the road, but walking your way, so it’s easy for you to follow his progress. He looks up and scans his surroundings, eyes naturally glancing your way, but when he does a doubletake your jaw drops because you know those eyes, that face, though the hair is longer.

His eyes now locked on you. He quickly but casually begins to cross the two lanes of traffic that separated you. “Let me in,” he says when he’s close enough before crossing in front of your car. You reach to unlock the passenger side door, and he slips in just before the light at the next intersection changes and the line of cars you were waiting behind begins to move again.

He sees a dark blue baseball cap left on the backseat by your son and quickly reaches for it, putting it on his own head. “Just drive like normal,” he says, “keep heading north or east.”

You nod and keep going, glancing over briefly to look at his face. He’s watching the streets.

The sound of sirens begins blaring behind you, and a glance in the rearview mirror shows a Chevy Blazer speeding through the quaint traffic, the cops in pursuit right behind. You and the cars around you move to the right and stop as quickly as you can as you’re supposed to – and to get out of the way – and you give your companion a quizzical look.

He shrugs, but there’s a hint of a smirk at the corner of his mouth.

“So, hello,” you finally say after the commotion speeds past and normal traffic has resumes.

“Hello,” he responds.

You tuck your hair behind your ear, then glance at him again. It’s been almost twenty years since that afternoon in your hotel room in Milan. Before you slept together in Italy, you’d been so blissfully and happily married to Hudson. After sex with this stranger, you remained happily married to Hudson – you had certainly reeled from the realization of what had occurred between you two, but you genuinely didn’t have a desire for anything in your life to change. You never told a soul what happened, and after years it finally faded from your conscience.

With this man in your car, however, all the heat and memories from every encounter have flooded back immediately, vivid and undeniable. Part of your core aches. And you try to concentrate on your driving and keeping your breath even. All of that seems like a lifetime ago, almost made up like a fairytale, and yet he’s here, beside you again today, hardly a foot away.

And now he’s looking at you.

“Are you alright?”

His gaze is as intense as it always has been.

Everything about him is the same as it always has been.

But that can’t possibly be true, can it?

“You haven’t changed at all.” The words tumble so quickly out of your mouth, after you finally think of something to say. “What are you… some kind of Peter Pan?”

“If you want.”

“Well, you’ve never given me any other name.”

And just how much he hasn’t changed magnifies in your own mind how much you feel you’ve changed. You’ve aged, with lines around your eyes, five children rounding out your body, elbows the only true angle you feel your figure still has to boast, you know the grey in your hair has started to become more prominent despite your efforts to cover it up. You didn’t do all your make up today, only the essentials, and you’d only tossed on a sweater and jeans for what was supposed to be a typical Monday.

After another few minutes, you’re outside of the town and driving down a stretch of wooded highway.

“When you want to pull over and let me out, anywhere is good, I can make it where I need to go.”

You nod but don’t know exactly how to respond. There’s not an immediately convenient place to pull off, but your mind recalls some of the turn offs up ahead that you’ve passed a few hundred times. You don’t notice you nervously biting your bottom lip.

But he does, his eyes on you more than they are on the road.

“Or we can drive for a while.”

You glance back over at him, then turn your attention back to the road, tapping your thumbs anxiously on the steering wheel, your hands diligently gripping the ten and two position, the speed a little ahead of whatever is playing over the radio because you’re not even aware of the music at this point.

“Are you alright?” he asks again.

You huff out a breath you’ve been holding in. “You make me nervous.”

“You know I will never hurt you, don’t you?”

“Not that kind of nervous.”

The last time you were this close to each other, this man thoroughly fucked you into a mattress, and two decades later your body can’t deny the memories.

Finally, you reach a turnoff for a relatively unimportant road, flanked by forest on both sides. You drive a fair distance from the main road before you finally stop. Then you turn off the car, and return your hand to the wheel, needing that grounding to turn and face those blue eyes.

“I don’t understand. How can you look almost the same? The only thing that’s changed is your hair, some stubble, a new leather jacket.” You turn your head back to look out the windshield at the empty road before you. “You even look at me the same way you did back then, but I’m in no way the same young woman you came across a lifetime ago!”

Hudson still loves and adores you, but he hasn’t looked at you the way this man does in years – with this much heat, so intensely you can hardly breathe.

He never buckled in, so he easily angles his body to face you. Slowly, he reaches across the short space between you, brushing the fingers of his right hand tentatively over your fingers, giving you time to react or stop him, before he eases your hand off the wheel, letting your hand gently fall to rest in your lap. His eyes move to your face, and you close your eyes, holding your breath. His hands move down to unbuckle your seatbelt, and you let your left hand release from its grip on the wheel and shift out of the strap, drawing your hand to your chest. You nervously inhale and exhale. You can feel your heart pounding in your chest.

Then suddenly the slow hesitation is abandoned, and he turns your head towards him to receive his kiss. Lips and tongue urging you to surrender immediately, and you do, mouth opening to him, and he angles your head to deepen the kiss further. The kisses are hungry, those of a starved man. Your hands come up to hold helplessly onto his wrists as he continues to hold your face in his grasp, the overwhelming desire he won’t hold back any longer sweeping you away with him to a neverland where nothing else exists.

After a few moments or a few minutes, you really don’t know, his hands drop down and quickly find the button and zipper of your jeans, unbuttoning and unzipping eagerly. Swiftly his left hand pushes your legs apart, his right hand slips down the front of your panties, and your breath hitches as his middle finger purposefully strokes from your clit down your slit, finding you very wet – all for him now. He continues to trace back and forth across your folds, but not quite back up to your clit.

When he finally slides that single long finger inside your heat, you moan, dropping your head back against the headrest. His lips move to your neck, pressing heated kisses slowly up and down the column of your throat, each press of his lips matching the rhythm of his finger moving in and out of you. You press your left hand up to the roof of your car, and the other clutches his forearm. He starts to draw his hand away, but you push him back, your hand sliding now over the back of his, holding him there, and now he slips in a second finger, curling deliciously into your core.

He pulls his head back to watch your face when he moves his thumb to start circling your clit while he continues pumping his fingers, seemingly fascinated by the whimpers and keens he’s pulling from you as he plays your core with expert touch, stroking that spongy spot that deliciously tightens the coil tighter and tighter within you. Your cheeks are totally flushed, and you feel like you’re flying as he pulls you closer to the edge.

“Please,” you rasp desperately, hips rocking into his hand.

He quickens his motions while applying more pressure, giving you what you ask for, and watches your face as you come undone with a breathy, wordless shout, body shaking, your other hand grasping his bicep, curling forward as he slows but continues stroking your clenching walls through the immediate comedown, slowly and more slowly until your breathing finally evens out.

“Look at me,” he says in a low voice that makes your stomach flip again, and you open your eyes. His face is still so close to you.

He withdraws his hand from your core and slips just the tip of his index finger into your open and panting mouth, urging you to taste yourself on him. You suck without thinking, but he only allows you a moment before drawing his hand away and then sucking each of his fingers clean. He wants you to see him enjoy the taste of you on his lips, and when he’s done, he licks his lips, reaches down and gathers more slick from your release on his index finger and then licks it off again, and you can only whimper as you watch, overcome by the still unsatiated level of his lust.

He places slow deliberate kisses up along your jaw, and when he reaches your ear, he whispers, “That’s how I still see you,” and licks the shell of your ear, making you shiver and melt back against the seat.

Then suddenly he withdraws from your personal space, and in the next second opens and closes the passenger side door and you only register the sound quickly enough to see him disappear into the trees.

October 11, 2001 – Seattle, Washington, United States

You are with Hudson in Seattle. Over the years you have been with him on many business trips, but this was a trip from one coast to the other to see a new grandbaby. The other grandparents have just arrived, so the two of you decided to go to dinner on your own.

As you’re led through the restaurant to your table, you think you see his familiar face far across the dining room, eyes catching briefly, but it’s likely not him.

An hour later you are taking one of the last bites of the dessert you shared with Hudson when the waiter returns. “Is there anything else I can get for you this evening?” he asks.

“Oh, no,” Hudson responds, “just the check, please.”

“It’s already been taken care of, sir.”

“What?” you both ask.

“I was told to say it’s compliments of someone who admires your relationship.”

Hudson reaches across the table to take your hand and says something to the waiter, but you don’t pay attention to his words.

You have no idea how to feel, but you know it had to be him.

2014

You have seen him a lot this year, but it’s been on the television screen. First as a piece in a storm of news and revelations the day S.H.I.E.L.D. launched and sank three hellicarriers in Washington D.C. and Captain America exposed the remnants of HYDRA that had burrowed within the organization – HYDRA and their “fist,” the Winter Soldier. Then there was the Senate investigation into what went on that day, preceded and followed by many news specials. Now you know more about him than you ever did before, and so much about him makes sense to you, though you imagine you will never know the whole story. Even now, so much that has been pieced together by the media and further sketched out by you is fractured, pieces missing, conjectures tying gaps together.

That he’s resurfaced in your life at this point is perhaps just as it should be. Though not physically present, he provides a consuming something else to think about in the new stage of your life where the other man who has been at the center of your life is also no longer physically present, as you awake and remember with a fresh wave of grief each day.

You’re not consumed by grief, there are still children, and grandchildren, friends, errands, hobbies, dreams, social obligations, but the person who was your constant is gone, and it’s always an ache.

You and Hudson had celebrated your fiftieth wedding anniversary at the beginning of the year, a stroke taking him one afternoon unexpectedly in the early spring. He was your best friend, and the two of you had certainly built a life together. It was not a fairytale perfect marriage, but pretty damn near close, and Hudson was the love of your life despite the man you now know was the Winter Soldier dropping incidents of indiscretion into your history. Over the years you had never spoken of the other man to anyone, reckoning with the incongruence on your own, knowing that the ties to both men existed but who your home was.

Nobody needs to know, all of that merely moments, unconnected to your true life.

Spring 2016 – Bucharest, Romania

You see him one last time as you lay in a hospital bed. He hovers just outside your door wearing the medical scrubs of the other nurses.

“Jane?” You draw your granddaughter’s attention from her book as she’s curled up in what can only be a moderately comfortable chair at your bedside.

“Yes, Gran?”

“Be a dear and go get me a real cup tea? You said there’s a good café just down at the corner, right?”

She stands and smiles. “I did. And if you’re craving tea, you must be feeling a little better.”

“Mhmm,” you hum. “It will be good for you to stretch your legs, too.”

“Alright, I’ll be back soon.”

“I’ll just wait here.”

She grins and shakes her head. “You better. No adventures without me.”

She slips her jacket on and slips out of your room.

A moment later, he enters.

“Hello, Sergeant Barnes.”

He smirks. “You know who I actually am.”

You nod. “How did you know I was here?”

“I saw you collapse this morning in the museum.”

You shake your head. “It’s nothing serious,” you say as he reaches for your charts.

“Cardiac arrhythmias.”

“Heart palpitations. Light fainting spell this morning. It hasn’t happened for a few years, and I hadn’t been eating properly the last few days. They’re keeping me for observation for twenty-four hours and then they’ll let me go if my heart behaves.”

“Good, you should have a good few years ahead of you still,” he says, almost admonishingly.

He stands at the side of your bed, but at the very foot of it seemingly trying to keep his distance, as if he doesn’t trust himself around others. Now that you know his story, his current behavior makes sense – especially why he was guarded but never hesitant before but keeps that buffer of distance now.

“She looks like you.”

“Jane? She’s a beautiful and brilliant young woman,” you say, a warm smile spreading across your face. “I’ll never admit aloud that she’s my favorite grandchild though.”

He doesn’t respond but gives you a tight-lipped smile.

“She’s my traveling companion for a grand adventure around Europe.”

“It’s only the two of you here in Bucharest?”

You hesitate before answering. “Yes.”

This ageless Peter Pan could capture her easily into his orbit. She’s twenty-one, the same age you were when you first ran into the Winter Soldier. He must suspect that’s what you’re thinking.

“I’ll make sure she stays safe.”

“She’s young.”

“No younger than you were when we met.”

The heat rises in your cheeks. “It’s different.”

He nods and you notice his face soften slightly. “It is. I’m ancient.”

“Come sit by me, old man.” You motion to the chair next to your bed, and he comes forward and takes a seat, perching on the edge, back ramrod straight.

“You said you saw us at the museum. Why do I have the feeling you’ve been watching us since before today?”

He regards you for just a split second before answering. “I stay near the train station, close enough to leave town quickly if I need to. I saw you arrive two nights ago when I was walking back to my place.”

“How often did you see me before I saw you?”

“Every time. There were times you never knew I was there.”

“Were you checking up on me?”

He shook his head. “Not at first. St. Tropez, Dallas, Milan, DC, and Seattle were purely circumstantial, but after DC I did check on where you were when I could.”

“But how did you remember me when they took so much else away from you?”

His face churns out a wry, bitter smile. “Yeah, they took away a lot of who I was, tried to overwrite my memories and what I knew before they took me, but after the initial programming,” his tone with that particular word is more vitriolic than the rest, ”they thought it was good for me to have context and history for the missions they sent me on, the new skills I learned, knowledge I acquired. Wiping was messy, and they had to know what to wipe. You were never an interference of any kind all those years and part of the Winter Soldier – part of me – I think never gave them a hint of your existence because I knew they knew everything else about me, had control over everything, and I didn’t want to risk losing this one piece I had found outside of what they made me. The Winter Soldier wanted the secret and thank God for that because If they’d ever found out about you...”

He doesn’t need to finish the sentence. He studies the pattern of the hospital bedding, and it gives you a moment to study his face – you’re sure he knows this, allows it.

After a moment, you say, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk so much in all our meetings over the years.”

“I didn’t converse much as the Winter Soldier,” he replies, his eyes meeting yours again, his entire presence softening just a degree. “It’s still not something I’m used to yet.”

“I know so much about you now, and I thought I’d have a hundred questions to ask if I ever saw you again, but…”

“But?”

“But I imagine you are still searching and want answers about your own more than I do.” You move your hand to the edge of the bed and offer him your palm. “So just sit with me.”

You almost thought he would refuse, but he removes the glove from his right hand and then carefully puts his hand in yours, his gaze returning to your face.

“Just this afternoon.”

“Just us.”

You brush your thumb over the back of his hand. There isn’t heat between you today, but there’s still a closeness that is only the two of you.

2026

The next and last time he sees you is from a distance, laid to rest in a beautifully polished wooden casket covered in an abundant spray of white flowers, surrounded in a sea of people in black. He recognizes Jane among them, as well. Though the Winter Soldier had claimed a piece of you belonged to him, destiny entwining your paths too many times in those early years, he could see now and had always been glad to know you had a full life outside your scattered encounters. He sends his goodbye silently across the cemetery from where he watches unseen, and finally slips away.

↠ Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

If you want to see more of this, anything else I'm working on, or chat about anything about my stories, MY ASKBOX IS ALWAYS OPEN!

VERY INFORMAL HISTORICAL/TIMELINE NOTES:

St. Tropez 1961 = St. Tropez was a big port for shipping at the time, so these deaths were two problematic traders making moving things in and out of the port difficult for Hydra.

Dallas 1963 = Assassination of President John F. Kennedy

Milan 1972 = From Wikipedia: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (45), who had during the 1950s published the smuggled manuscript of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, but later became a left-wing militant during Italy's Years of Lead, was found dead at the base of a power-line transmission tower outside Segrate, near his native Milan, on 15 March 1972. It was believed that he had died when a bomb he was attempting to plant on the tower went off, and later testimony by other members of the Red Brigades supported this. However, the death was always viewed suspiciously, and in the 2010s forensic reports surfaced that suggested he had been tied to the tower before the bomb went off, with various intelligence agencies inside and outside of Italy suspected of responsibility.

…sounds like the Winter Soldier to me.

Washington 1991 = Howard and Maria Stark and the acquisition of the newly developed super soldier serum.

Seattle 2001 = Unsolved murder of former US Attorney General Thomas Crane Wales, announced by the FBI in 2018 to likely have been the work of a paid hitman – or the Winter Soldier.

2014 = Aftermath of Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Romania 2016 = Theoretically just before the events of Captain America: Civil War.

2026 = arbitrary future date, Bucky just came to pay his respects, no mission or happenstance connected

#bucky x yn #bucky x female reader #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes #bucky x you #the winter soldier #winter soldier #winter soldier x y/n #winter soldier x you #winter soldier x reader #winter soldier x female reader #winter soldier smut #bucky barnes smut #smut #peter pan influence #aspen wrote something #female reader

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harryforvogue · 10 months

Text

book recommendations that are similar to my fics

i tried <333

harry and mia

dreamland billionaires by lauren asher (ceo trope)

the dead romantics by ashley poston (quiet reserved MC x overwhelmed FMC in literary setting)

the spanish love deception by elena armas (grumpy x sunshine),

beautiful bastard by christina lauren (serious MC, workplace setting)

the hating game by sally thorne (grumpy MC, workplace rivals)

love on the brain by ali hazelwood (grumpy MC x sunshine FMC, workplace, male pining)

neon gods by katee roberts (grumpy MC, hades x persephone)

harry and faye

practice makes perfect by sarah adams (nervous FMC x tattooed hottie MC)

all the lovers in the dark by mieko kawakami (depressed FMC wanting to change her life around)

georgie, all along by kate clayborn (FMC has anxiety)

harry and fleur

the wisteria society of lady scoundrels by india holton (grumpy/serious FMC x flirty MC, rivals-to-lovers, forced to work together)

these violent delights by chloe gong (friends to lovers to exes to enemies to lovers to enemies to lovers),

harry and lucia

the heart principle by helen hoang (FMC has OCD)

forget me not by julie soto (grumpy x sunshine, second chance romance)

happy place by emily henry (second chance romance, break up for a good reason)

alone with you in the ether by olivie blake (characters messed up all around)

harry and miriam

yours truly by abby jimenez (MC has really bad anxiety)

people we meet on vacation by emily henry (sunshine FMC x nervous MC, second chance romance-ish)

below zero by ali hazelwood (MC doesn’t know he’s hot, nervous MC x happy FMC)

harry and yasmine

a rogue of one's own by evie dunmore (enemies to lovers, male pining, historical romance)

emily wilde’s encylopaedia of fairies by heather fawcett (academic setting, serious FMC x playful MC)

love theoretically by ali hazelwood (academic rivals)

divine rivals by rebecca ross (enemies to lovers, rivals to lovers)

harry and aaliyah

portrait of a scotsman by evie dunmore (grumpy MC x artsy FMC)

pride and prejudice by jane austen (duh!)

the belle of belgrave square by mimi matthews (marriage of convenience, grumpy MC)

harry and annaliese

the poppy wife by caroline scott (post ww1 romance)

the princess diaries by meg cabot (best friend’s brother LOLLL)

when i come home again by caroline scott (post war romance)

divine rivals by rebecca ross (again but it’s also ww1 inspired)

#when i tell you i put my BACK into this #i think it's a decent list!#i've read 80 percent of it okay #book recommendations

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dontlookheswatching · 23 days

Text

Im bored and also working on a big post with some head canons about several characters with ref sheets, so im gonna make a birthday list real quick. I tried to keep a lot of this as canon as possible, but I have changed some ages and some birthdays aren't accurate because for some of these characters nothing would show up. Itll be going in order from January to December, 1st to the last day of the month.

January:

-Rogue(Heather Sam Marshall) - January 7th. She's currently 24, and her zodiac sign is a Capricorn.

February:

-Hoodie(Brian Hiatt Thomas) - February 5th. He's 24, and his zodiac is a Aquarius.

March:

-Eyeless Jack(Jack Zin Nyras) - March 15th. He's 24, and his zodiac sign is a Pieces.

April:

-Judge Angels(Dina Angela Clark) - April 2nd. She's 26, and her zodiac sign is a Aries.

-Alex Kralie - April 4th. He's 27, and his zodiac is a Aries.

-Sally Mae Williams - April 5th. She's physically and mentally 8. Her zodiac is a Aries.

-Ben Drowned(Benjamin Scott Lawman) - April 23rd. He's 22, and his zodiac sign is a Taurus.

-Ticci Toby(Toby Erin Rogers) - April 28th. Hes 21, and his zodiac sign is a Taurus.

May:

-Seedeater - May 27th. His zodiac sign is a Gemini. He is a creature that does not age, just exists.

June:

-Jeff the Killer(Jeffery Alan Woods) - June 2nd. He's 22, and his zodiac sign is a Gemini.

-Lost Silver(Jae-Ing) - June 6th. Hes 21, and his zodiac sign is a Gemini.

-Skitles(OC) - June 24th. He has no age. His zodiac sign is a Cancer

Kate the Chaser(Kate Miller Hayes) - June 25th. She's 25, and her zodiac sign is a Cancer.

July:

-Nina the Killer(Nina Rose Hopkins) - July 24th. She's 20, and her zodiac sign is a Leo.

-The Puppeteer(Blake Simon Smith) - July 25th. He has no age. His zodiac sign is a Leo.

August:

-Candypop - August 1st. He has no age. His zodiac sign is a Leo.

-Hobo Heart - August 3rd. He’s 23, and his zodiac sign is a Virgo.

-Eyeless Lulu(Lulu Mary Millers) - August 6th. She’s 15, and her zodiac sign is a Virgo.

-Occisus(OC/Samantha Lin Locke) - August 11th. She’s 24, and her zodiac sign is a Virgo.

September:

-Jane the Killer(Jane Eve Richardson) - September 1st. She’s 23, and her zodiac sign is a Virgo.

-HeartFixer(OC/Jamie Noel Martinez) - September 3rd. She’s 25, and her zodiac sign is a Virgo.

October:

-Bloody Painter(Helen James Otis) - October 1st. He’s 24, and his zodiac is a Libra.

-Suicide Sadie(Sadie Dawn Myers) - October 21st. She’s 20, and her zodiac sign is a Libra.

-Zero - October 25th. She’s 23, and her zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

-NightOwl(My boyfriends OC/Lin Felix Gaspar) - October 29th. He’s 25, and his zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

Nurse Ann(Michelle Ann Quesnberry) - October 31st. She’s 28, and her zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

November:

-Clockwork(Natalie Gwen Oulette) - November 6th. She’s 23, and her zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

-Sonic.exe - November 7th. He’s 15, and his zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

-Tails Doll - November 7th. He’s 15, and his zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

-Jason the Toymaker - November 15th. He doesn’t have a age. His zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

-Lure(OC) - November 17th. Hes 21, and his zodiac sign is a Scorpio.

-Dark Link(Shadow) - November 21st. Hes 21, and his zodiac sign is a Sagittarius.

-Jay Merrick - November 23rd. Hes 26, and his zodiac sign is a Sagittarius.

-Smile Dog - November 27th. He has no known age, as a hellhound. His zodiac sign is Sagittarius.

December:

-X-Vrius(Cody Swann Diller) - December 9th. He’s 21, and his zodiac sign is a Sagittarius.

-Homicidal Liu(Liu Vicki Woods) - December 21st. He’s 24, and his zodiac sign is a Sagittarius.

-Laughing Jack - December 25th. He has no age. His zodiac sign is a Capricorn.

-Lazarus(Lazarus Dae Swann) - December 25th. He’s 12, and only ages every two years due to being part Zalgoid. His zodiac sign is a Capricorn.

-Masky(Timothy Que Wright) - December 26th. He’s 25, and his zodiac sign is a Capricorn.

-Kagekao - December 29th. He’s 27, and his zodiac sign is a Capricorn.

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lovecanyon · 2 years

Note

please make a instagram blurb with ellie from wolf alice 😭🙏

INSTAGRAM BLURB

harry x opener!y/n

MASTERLIST | PATREON

liked by harryfan2, ynfan5 and 320,712 others

harryflorals Harry watching Wolf Alice perform before his show!

view all commons

harryfan9 i love him

ynfan3 HARRY IS SO OBSESSED WITH THEM

harryfan6 more like obsessed with y/n

ynfan8 right…

harryfan10 harry is literally fueling the y/n rumors

ynfan7 the way he always watches wolf alice preform 🤭

harryfan12 i honestly love the idea of him with y/n

ynfan14 boyfriendrry…

harryfan16 hoping 🙏

ynfan11 this is why y/n was so smiley on stage

harryfan15 he’s definitely dating y/n…😭

liked by ynfan17, harryfan19 and 502,784 others

loveontournews Y/N signing a fans arm tonight!

view all comments

ynfan13 SHE’S SO COOL

harryfan20 i want her to sign my arm

ynfan18 when will it be my turn

harryfan22 that was me!!

ynfan25 you are so lucky 😭

harryfan21 i really am! y/n is the sweetest ever, she literally reminds me of harry

ynfan24 i need to meet her

harryfan23 harry choosing y/n’s band as his opener is one of the best things he’s ever done

ynfan28 y/n supremacy forever

harryfan26 wondering if her and harry are actually dating…

liked by yourinstagram, harrystyles and 1,802,441 others

anthonypham Y/N in Italy, 2022!

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ynfan32 SLAY

harryfan35 the love of my life

harrystyles My pretty girl.

yourinstagram don’t make me blush harry

ynfan31 WHAT?? IS?? HAPPENING??

harryfan33 i knew it 😭

mitchrowland best singer of all time

ynfan37 can she run me over

billieeilish I LOVE Y/N

harryfan34 if harry is dating y/n like everyone is saying…i don’t blame him

pillowpersonpp just rockstar things

ynfan36 going feral

liked by yourinstagram, jefezoff and 4,270,165 others

harrystyles Love on Tour. Cologne. July, 2022.

view all comments

harryfan42 Y/N AND HARRY?

ynfan46 i can’t handle this right now 😭

yourinstagram tour is the best with you!

harrystyles Y/N, touring with you is such a dream come true.

harryfan40 i am crying

ynfan43 yeah they definitely are dating

paulithepsm the best people ever

harryfan47 the way y/n is looking at harry has me sliding down the wall

jefezoff it really is love on tour

ynfan49 JEFF????

harryfan41 i am now a harry and y/n shipper

liked by harrystyles, florencepugh and 5,202,743 others

yourinstagram love on tour, italy

view all comments

clairo i miss you!

taylorswift THE BEST GIRL EVER

pillowpersonpp touring with you is everything to me!

harrystyles You are so talented, I’m seriously in love.

yourinstagram i love you baby!

paulithepsm parents

gemmastyles you are the coolest

_basselin greatest musician out there

phoebebridgers everything you do, i love

annetwist can’t wait to see you again!!

harry_lambert i love styling you

(comments on this post have been limited)

tag list: @harrysmatcha @harryspinkpillow @helen-with-an-a @florencepughily @peterparkerbae @toji-dabi-wife @fallonx @drphilssoulmate @cherriesrae @alienorknight @valluvsu @ivegotparticulartaste @ayeshathestyles @hazgoldenstyles @eiffelmezarry @tsukishimawhore @renatavieira @michellekstyles @eleanordaisy @shawnsblue @academiaghosts @japanchrry @agustdpeach @hannahnikohl @hrryscherrys @whoscamila @ch3rryrry @msolbesg @newyorker14 @futuristicpalacegardenpsychic @youusunshineyoutemptress @eunoiamaa @kaitieskidmore1 @gublerscherry @cherryfragrancx @ssuziess @milkiane @golden-hoax @flwrmuse @sunshinemendes8 @your--sweetest--downfall @melllinaa @iluvjj @evansglrl @tenaciousperfectionunknown @cashtons-wife @stellarossii @scenesofobx @manifestrry

#harry styles x reader #harry styles #harry styles au #harry styles fake social media #harry styles fake ig #harry styles fake instagram #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x you #boyfriend!harry #harry styles blurb #harry styles one shot

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undercoverpena · 10 months

Text

in the interest of trying to be positive about another year around the sun. welcome to:

mvtthewmurdvck's birthday bash 🎉 BEGINNING ON THE 6TH OF JULY

so we all know i'm not good with compliments, but as it tied well with me hitting 5k (thank you, btw. i adore you all), i thought i could use my birthday time, to give you all something. so, over five days, you'll receive a birthday-orientated fic with some of my favourite characters (see the list under the see more).

YOU CAN ALSO SEND IN (before the 6th, but won't be answered until the 6th):

🩷 ask me anything (anything you'd want to know about me) 5️⃣ top five (doesn't have to be characters or fics. can be songs, books, tv shows etc) 🎬 directors cut (questions about my fics, writing)

06. BADLY WRAPPED SECRETS (COD: Ghost x Helen)

07. UNWRAP ME NOW (Triple Frontier: Frankie M x F!Reader)

08. PHONE SEX BONUS LATE NIGHT TEXTS PHONE SCENE (smut)

09. A PILE OF CARDS (Narcos: Javi P x F!Reader)

10. COVERT CELEBRATIONS (Marvel: Bucky x F!Reader)

one rule only: do not ask me which of these days is my actual birthday. you're getting the small nugget of info that it is somewhere in these days.

masterlist ⧐ fic recs

#mm birthday bash #ghost x helen #frankie morales x reader #javier peña x reader #bucky x reader #matt murdock x reader

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sunshineandlyrics · 10 months

Text

Helen, Isaac and Matt met Dolly in Nashville (17 July 2023) x

#they must have so much fun exploring the cities together #im so jealous #English tourists #team Louis #Helen Seamons #Matt wearing his sunglasses at night again #Matt Dinnadge #Isaac Anderson #Nashville #Dolly Parton #mine

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next-autopsy · 5 months

Text

A/N: Well, hi there!

I'm back! Hope y'all enjoy this chapter, lmk what you think, I love hearing from you guys x

Based on the actors portrayal/hbo show and written with no disrespect to the real life veterans. Also all images found on Pinterest.

TW: swearing, casual 1940s racism, yelling/fighting, not much else tbh....

Tags: @malarkgirlypop, @panzershrike-pretz hmu if you want to be added

Made of Glass

Chapter twenty one: Chock-a-Block

The next month was uneventful compared to previous ones. June was slow and felt heavy, dragging on and seeming longer than it was. Birdie spent a lot of the month by George’s side The two became increasingly close, sharing all sorts of pleasantries and childhood stories. Birdie loved hearing about his nine siblings and the practical jokes he pulled on them. It reminded her of her own mischievous family who she was missing more than ever.

July came and went by comparison. Birdie received a letter from her brother-in-law, stating his wife, her oldest sister, Helen had safely given birth to the couple's second child. They already had a little boy, Daniel and now were blessed with a girl. They named her Gracie, a variation of Bernadette's middle name and asked her to be the newborns' Godmother. Of course she was ecstatic and accepted gleefully. Sadly, she would miss the babies christening but the sentiment was there.

By the end of August, rumours were spreading that they would soon be on the move. Their next destination was a curious speculation. A bet ran through the regiment: Europe or the Pacific?

September started and the 506th was preparing to move once again, leaving Camp Mackall behind. Easy presented themselves prim and proper in their class A uniforms and packed everything they had in the basic olive green sacks provided for their belongings.

A train awaited them, the soldiers climbed aboard without question. It was packed but no one minded too much, they just bunched up and invaded their neighbours personal space like it was a game.

Bernadette shuffled through the teeny walkway of the moving train, legs and bags stuck out making her journey that much more difficult.

“Birdie! Saved you a seat!” Her attention was captured by the brown haired man calling out to her. She smiled when she saw him, guarding the space next to him like it was his job. Bernadette tried to make her way closer to Luz but the train wobbled and threw her off balance. She toppled over ungracefully and landed atop someone's lap.

She began spitting out apologies and her face turned red, rightfully embarrassed by the situation. When she looked up and saw Liebgott's face smirking at her, she wanted to die; right then and there.

“Good trip?” That shit eating grin made Birdie want to slap him, she settled for rolling her eyes and scoffing instead. Birdie got up and balanced herself, making sure to use his shoulders to aid her ascent. She shoved him hard enough for him to understand she was less than pleased about the whole ordeal, but in a playful manner so that he knew she wasn’t really mad. Joe smiled at her, a genuine smile that reached his eyes and caused her to reciprocate.

“Birdie!” George called out again, sensing she was distracted and needed some prompting. She whipped her head round to him and nodded to show she had heard the impatient man.

“You better go before he screams so loud the whole train hears.” Lieb joked, he didn’t really want to send her away but there was no real reason for her to stay. The southern woman spoke softly, telling him she would see him around before joining her friend at the other end of the train car.

Liebgott had been accepted into her posse with little resistance, he was already friends with most of the guys she hung around anyway. It was mainly Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere who didn’t love the fact that he and Bernadette were on friendlier terms, the two still held grudges against him for his previous treatment of the woman. He didn't really blame them, he had been particularly difficult when it came to Coldwell.

Over the past months, Joe had come to terms with the fact he actually wanted to be Birdie’s friend. Tipper kept trying to get a love confession out of him but he was adamant it wasn't like that. Sure he liked the woman, but in a totally platonic way of course. Besides, they were both soldiers being sent to the front lines, when would they have time to date and fall in love? Not that he wanted that. He didn’t.

Joseph Liebgott was perfectly happy being friends with Bernadette Coldwell and that was that.

The train had taken hundreds, if not thousands of soldiers aboard to a shipyard in Brooklyn, New York. It was Birdie’s first time in the city, though she didn't get to see much of it as they were ushered onto the SS Samaria in an orderly fashion.

The sun began settling, turning the sky a beautiful mix of pink and pastel orange, Birdie's favourite shade of the fiery colour. Luz had snagged a life vest for the woman and shoved it on her so he could pull her out onto the deck and watch as the ship passed the statue of liberty.

It was a surreal moment, one Bernadette would always remember. The green lady loomed over them, as if bidding the soldiers goodbye and good luck. It felt real now, they were finally leaving their beloved home country and joining the war effort.

As the ship left the mainland of America behind, the sombre mood grew. George and Birdie shared a cigarette on the deck before returning to the bunks below. It was crowded, more than the train had been and now, the lack of space was starting to get on everyone's nerves.

Everyone tried to keep themselves busy, playing cards, writing letters home or reading whatever books they could find. Most of the men smoked freely which caused the already state air locked in with them to be tainted with tobacco.

After five full days stuck in the overcrowded, sweaty mass of men, Birdie had had enough. She was ready to get off this ship, unsure if she could take another day. She had seen men get sick from the constant swaying and vomit where they stood and now she was noticing the raise in tempers as cabin fever descended.

It was unbelievably hot and all Birdie wanted was some fresh air and silence but conversation continued on around her, disregarding her wants.

She could hear Muck and Malarkey chatting to each other while they approached the area she was stewing in. The men in question climbed up the sides of the hammock like cots as you would a ladder and settled into the spaces next to and above her.

“Hey guys, I’m glad I'm going to Europe.” Toye spoke up, inserting himself into the conversation. He pulled out his switchblade knife and flicked it open for dramatic effect, “Hilter gets one of these right across the windpipe. Roosevelt changes Thanksgiving to Joe Toye day, and pays me ten grand a year for the rest of my fuckin’ life.”

“What if we don’t get to Europe? What if they send us to North Africa?” A voice from above Birdie called down. The woman tried to shuffle closer to Bill, her bunk mate, to see who it was but his body got in the way and unless Birdie wanted to mount the man, it would remain a mystery. Bill ruffled her hair and plucked the cigarette out of her hand.

“My brothers in North Africa.” Guarnere took a long drag of the stolen smoke, “He says it's hot.”

“Really? It’s hot in Africa?” You could actually see the sarcasm coming off of Malakey and he paused his reading of the comic he held in front of him to make fun of the man's obvious comment.

“Shuddup!” The Philadelphian shot at the redhead before continuing, “The point is, it don’t matter where we go.” Birdie reclaimed her cigarette while Bill was distracted, mid sentence, “Once we get into combat, the only person you can trust is yourself, and the fella next to you.”

Bernadette cleared her throat, raising her eyebrow at her talkative friend as if to tell him to rethink his words. Bill rolled his eyes and added, “Or lady next to ya. Happy?” She nodded, that would suffice.

“Hey, as long as he’s- uh… they’re a paratrooper.” Toye added from his place by their boots, trying to avoid a glare from the Mississippi woman.

“Oh yeah?” Luz exclaimed from the opposite side of the aisle, “And what if that paratrooper turns out to be Sobel?” He was climbing up to his bunk on the top most rack, George hoisted himself up and past Christenson, who added his two cents to the discussion,

“If I'm next to Sobel in combat, I'm moving on down the line. Hook up with some other officer, like Heyliger or Winters.” Pat had a special hatred for the CO after he was made to march twenty-four miles, full pack and in the dark, half of it completely alone; all on Sobel’s orders.

“I like Winters. He’s a good man.” Bill began speaking once more. It was then that Birdie noticed Skip leaning over his hammock above her and poking his head down so she and Malarkey could see him. Malarkey eyed up the cigarette he had in his hand and silently asked Muck for a puff, she shook her head and giggled at the two.

“But when the bullets start flying, I don't know if I want a Quaker doing my fighting for me.” Guarnere thieved Birdie’s nearly finished smoke yet again, she responded with an outraged, “Hey!” but he ignored her, pushing himself up and jumping down to the ground. Bernadette shuffled over into the empty space Guarnere had left.

“How do you know he’s a Quaker?” Skip asked, flipping down into Birdie’s, now vacant, cot and giving her an unlit cigarette to make up for the blatant robbery he had witnessed.

“He ain’t Catholic.” Bill shrugged, snubbing out the butt of his pilfered tobacco stick on the floor with his boot.

“Neither is Sobel.” Don called, passing his comic to Skip who immediately started flicking through the pages with interest.

“That pricks a Son of Abraham.”

“He’s what?” Liebgott, who sat across from where Bill now stood, had perked up at the term he used. He was happy to listen in to the conversation, it kept his mind occupied but when the expression was used like a slur he had to say something.

“He’s a Jew.” Bill clarified, assuming Lieb just hadn't heard the phrase before.

“Oh fuck…” Liebgott muttered under his breath, he laughed but not because anything humorous had been said. He threw the cigarette butt he was fiddling with down before shuffling off his bunk and jumping. He landed with a thud and stepped over to Guarnere so they were face to face. Joe looked down at the man, chest puffed, “I’m a Jew.”

Several men (and Birdie) sat up or shuffled closer to the two hot heads, anticipating a fight to break out.

“Congratulations.” Pronounced bitingly, not actually intended to congratulate, “Get your nose outta my face.” Bill pushed Lieb’s chest, forcing him backwards.

Birdie stared, she knew Lieb was going to swing, she could see him planning it out in his mind. She noticed his curled fist and knew an attack was imminent, before she could do anything, Lieb took a jab. His target blocked him and they grabbed onto each other attempting to… Birdie didn’t know what. Strangle each other? Hug? Who knew?

Multiple men also grabbed into the pair but no one could break them apart. Birdie scoffed and jumped down, she shoved people out of her way and when she got close enough to see her friends through the growing crowd, she yelled. It was the loudest her voice had ever gone; a screech, if you will.

“That’s enough!” Her words froze the horde of angry sweaty men. Bill and Joe still held onto each other, fists grabbed onto handfuls of shirt but now their focus was on the girl. She huffed and pushed surrounding men away from the idiots who began the kerfuffle until she reached them. Everyone else watched on, curious to see angry Birdie in action.

Bernadette yanked them apart, fuming. She turned to Guarnere first, her eyebrows were furrowed and her teeth clenched.

“You!” She pointed to him, glaring, “Keep that prejudice bullshit to yourself! No one wants to hear your stupid ass opinions! What the fuck is your problem?” Bill shrunk back, he had never seen Birdie this angry before and he didn't care to see it again. The woman whipped around to face Joe, he was smiling at her rude comments aimed at the man he wanted to punch. His joy in the situation only pissed her off more, if that were even possible.

“You think this is funny, huh?” She hissed at him, Joe’s smile dropped.

“Not everything is a personal attack so calm the fuck down. Why do you think punching him is the solution to everything?” The question was rhetorical so Joe only looked down to the floor, avoiding eye contact with the scary southerner. She was absolutely at her wits end and just had to get out of there.

“It’s like a fuckin’ pissin’ contest in here, Jesus!” Birdie growled as she turned and stomped off to get some fresh air on the deck of the overcrowded ship.

A/N: ooooo she's mad...

~ next-autopsy ~

Chapter twenty two

#band of brothers #easy company #hbo war #made of glass #band of brothers fanfic #fem oc #oc #made of glass chapter twenty one #next autopsy #george luz #joe liebgott #joe toye #bill guarnere #pat christenson #skip muck #donald malarkey

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halfmoth-halfman · 10 months

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fun fact: july 2nd is is the exact halfway point of the year, so what better day to be sappy on main and do a mid-year fic rec list???

this one is gonna be a little different, i'm gonna get all my praises and cheesiness out here with the list under the cut so this post isn't a million years long.

i started my rec lists in february as a way to show my appreciation for fics that i read/were written that month, but i know there are some i missed, some i found too late, and some i just think deserve more love. soooo here's a list of the fics i've read and reread so far this year that have a very special place in my heart and have, at many times, inspired me to keep writing and been major comforts for me.

and here's a big, enormous, gigantic thank you to all of the writers and friends i've found, you are all such amazing people and incredibly talented writers that deserve far more praise than i can possibly give in a single post!!! thank you all so much!!!💜

Alex Keller

sun and stars - @halcyone-of-the-sea

convallaria majalis - @nightingale-ghost-writer

Arthur Morgan

the fire in your eyes - @cowboydisaster

cabin in the mountains - @chaoskrakenuwu

Jason Todd

in the middle of the night - @as-is-above-so-below

Javier Peña

nowhere to run - @mvtthewmurdvck

late night texts - @mvtthewmurdvck

arepas - @mvtthewmurdvck

Javy "Coyote" Machado

i don't love you like i used to - @beyondthesefourwalls

worry, my love - @uselsshuman

John "Soap" MacTavish

coorie - @yeyinde

sweet melodies - @johnnytavish

three times i loved you - @uselsshuman

it happens - @mvtthewmurdvck

infinity in the palm of your hand (eternity in an hour) - @yeyinde

John Price

the mothiverse - @lunarvicar

willow tree march - @yeyinde

neighbors au - @soapskneebrace

languish - @moriflos

professor price - @guyfieriii

soulmate au - @ghostaholics

past and pending - @yeyinde

see no evil - @halcyone-of-the-sea

though you say it's only days - @uselsshuman

turn me to ashes - @guyfieriii

songs that sound like sea-foam - @halcyone-of-the-sea

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick

gossamer silk smiles - @halcyone-of-the-sea

keepsakes - @soapskneebrace

speak now - @sprout-fics

high hopes - @writesforfandoms

kiss prompts - @cowboybxtch

he loves me not - @deadbranch

Multi

141 Family AU - @uselsshuman

the confessional booth - @antigonusyuki

dead disco - @peachesofteal

OCs

benji x xavier - @fr0ntier & @day0walker

Simon "Ghost" Riley

the captain - @as-is-above-so-below

happiness - @lethalchiralium

helen series - @mvtthewmurdvck

ménage - @lilywastaken

lilium candidum - @kil-g

give peace a chance - @moondirti

ghost on pain meds - @fr0ntier

something to live for - @floralpascal

simon struggles with anger (you struggle to help him) - @nsharks

earl grey tea - @a-sibyl

mermaids - @peachesofteal

#moth fic recs #fave fics #monthly fic recs

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footprintsinthesxnd · 13 days

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Chapter two: Bike Rides and Turning Tides

Harry Crosby x Maggie Reid / Ken Lemmons x Maggie Reid

Series Masterlist

This story is based on on the fictional portrayal of these men from the MOTA to series.

Summary: As Maggie is still trying to figure out what Ken and Harry mean to her, she realises who is there for her when she really needs them.

Collab with @georgieluz

July 4th 1943, Thorpe Abbot AAF base, 07:00

"Tell me everything," Mads threw herself down into the wooden chair on the opposite side of the table, her coffee steaming in front of her as she waited expectantly. "You avoided me all day yesterday, but I hear you were out on the hard stand with Ken all morning." She winked cheekily at her.

"There's nothing to tell," Maggie sighed, pushing her mushy, scrambled egg around on the plate in front of her. All morning Tatty, Helen and Mads had been quizzing her on her 'date' with Harry Crosby.

"Honestly, nothing happened. Harry just happened to be there, we had a nice chat, he walked me home. Then Ken showed up with flowers and a wrench, and then he left. So yes, nothing happened."

Mads looked a little disappointed running her index finger around the top of her mug before a new idea popped into her head. "But you wanted something to happen, right? I mean you like them right?"

"I don't know, Mads," Maggie groaned, she loved her friend's enthusiasm but right now it was just too much. Her mind was too preoccupied with the thoughts of two different men that Mad's chaotic behaviour was not helping.

"What are we talking about?" Archie and Jimmy appeared behind her, Archie bent over pressing a kiss to her temple as he sat down, stealing a piece of toast off Maggie's plate and biting into it.

"We're discussing Maggie's love life but she's giving me nothing," Mad's pouted.

"Like I said, there's nothing to tell," Maggie corrected her.

"So Harry Crosby truly was a gentleman then," Archie mused, finishing the piece of toast before he took a long swig of his coffee.

"Yes, but there wasn't just Harry. Lovely little Ken Lemmons was waiting outside our hut for her all night with a wrench and some primroses," Mads added, ignoring the glare Maggie sent her way.

"Ken Lemmons hey, who would have thought it, and primroses too. They're your favourites, right Maggie?" Jimmy added, winking at Archie.

Maggie glared at him. Of course, those two had something to do with this. The mischievous smile on their faces instantly gave them away as the culprits.

"They are actually," she replied nonchalantly, trying to ignore the two smirking faces in front of her. Instead, her eyes trailed upwards, catching those of a certain navigator who waved shyly at her across the mess hall.

She waved back, ignoring her friends who spun frantically around in their seats to see who she was waving at.

"Crosby!" The three exclaimed, turning back quickly as a few eyes, including Harry's glanced over.

Maggie's face grew redder as she felt Harry's eyes still on her, she wanted to look back over but then she knew she'd be blushing even more. Her heartbeat quickened in her chest as a pair of legs appeared out of the corner of her eye.

"Good morning, Crosby. Did you sleep well?" Archie asked cheerfully, sipping his fresh cup of coffee with a wide smile. Mads leant back in her chair beside him, smiling sweetly.

"Yes I-I did… thank you," Harry stumbled over his words, eyes trained on Maggie who plucked up the courage to send him a small smile. Harry looked so happy that the crushing guilt began to grow in her chest. Why had she expected the flowers from Ken? She'd had such a lovely evening with Harry, but then Ken…

"Isn't that right, Maggie?" Archie asked, sending a knowing look her way as she felt three pairs of eyes on her.

"Umm… yes, yes of course," she replied, absolutely oblivious to what she was agreeing to, but from the three smiling faces looking at her it must have been the right answer.

"Excellent, I still have the bikes from last night so feel free to borrow those," Archie declared, standing up and dragging Mads and Jimmy up beside him. "Come on Madison, let's leave these two to their fun day of activities."

Mads and Jimmy nodded, following after Archie but not before turning to give Maggie a 'thumbs up'. Maggie made it her mission to scold her when she next saw the nurse, but Harry quickly took the seat that Mads had occupied.

"I hope that's okay with you…b-because if not I can…” Harry began rambling but Maggie grabbed his hand, stopping the blushing navigator mid-sentence.

"Harry, I'm sure it's fine but I maybe…sort of…did zone out and I'm not entirely sure what I've volunteered for," she admitted, biting her lip anxiously while Harry's face relaxed and he chuckled.

"You've volunteered to take me out on a bicycle ride," he smiled cheerfully, "and a picnic."

Harry seemed awfully pleased with himself and Maggie could find it in her to tell him she had a lot of work to get through today.

"Of course, I'd be happy to. How about you arrange the picnic and I'll grab the bikes?" She asked hopefully, shovelling in the last of the powdered eggs on her plate.

"Yes, yes of course….absolutely…I'll," Harry stumbled backwards away from his chair, catching himself before he fell. "I'll get right on that… Yes, I will." His cheeks glowed bright red and Maggie couldn't help the smile growing on her lips as she watched him hurry away on his important mission.

Finishing her coffee, Maggie glanced down at her overalls, noticing the dark oil stains and rips in the fabric. She couldn't go out with Harry looking like this. What would people say?

Pushing herself hastily away from the table, she rushed from the mess hall, hurrying back towards the Red Cross hut, praying that either Tatty or Helen would still be there to help her. She wasn't sure why she was so worried. The first time she'd met Harry she'd fallen on her arse, flailing around on the floor in her overalls, but somehow this time was different. This time she wanted to impress her.

Her boots hammered at the Nissan but steps as she threw open the door, startling Helen and Tatty who were sitting on their beds, chatting quietly,

"Girls!" She exclaimed, "I need your help."

Thorpe Abbotts Base AAF Sector, 09:00

Maggie, tugged at the blue shirt that seemed to stick to her body, praying that she wasn't sweating through the thin material. She'd opted for a shirt and thin summer trousers after the fiasco with her dress last time she ridden the bike. Helen and Tatty had helped style her hair, pinning the front parts of her hair neatly, while her remaining curls hung loosely at her shoulders.

She waited anxiously, checking her watch for the fourth time in a few minutes. Maggie knew she hadn't set an exact time to meet Harry but the apprehension only grew and she began to chew at her cheek.

A dark-haired figure appeared from behind one of the Nissen huts, a wide smile on his face and a wicker basket underneath his arm. He waved excitedly at her, tripping over but managing to save himself before he hit the ground. Maggie gasped, hurrying forward but he recovered, cheeks a little redder but still smiling nonetheless.

"Sorry I'm late, Bubbles was drilling me about the other night," he admitted, placing the basket down beside him, "Don't worry, I didn't tell him too much."

Maggie laughed, leaning back against the bikes, "I do hope so, Harry. I can't have the whole of the Eighth Air Force knowing all my secrets."

"Duly noted," Harry saluted her, allowing his eyes to trail over her. "Maggie, you look… wow you look amazing," Harry breathed as he reached her. His dark eyes shone brightly and his cheeks crinkled as he smiled.

"Thank you," Maggie blushed, pulling at the sleeves of the shirt Helen had lent her. It wasn't normally her style, but then again her style mainly consisted of overalls, or corduroy trousers and boots back home.

The pair watched each other nervously, neither too sure what to say next before they both spoke in unison.

"We should…"

"Shall we…"

Harry chuckled, "Shall we go?"

Maggie nodded, pushing one of the bikes towards Harry so he could secure the picnic basket on the back, before climbing into the saddle.

"So, do you know the area well?" He asked, pushing down the pedals shakily and pulling onto the gravel road beside her.

"Well enough," she mused, pushing her bike ahead of his, "Keep up, Crosby, I don't want you lagging".

The chains in the bike creaked as Maggie's feet came in contact with the pedals, her boots pushing them forward as the rickety metal frame began to move. She couldn't vouch for the safety of this bike, especially considering Archie was just borrowing them, but she appreciated the sentiment and the fact that they didn't have to walk.

Harry grinned cheerfully beside her, his legs slowly pushing the bike forward down the tarmacked road leading out of the base. Maggie was glad that she had chosen to wear trousers instead of a dress after her last mishap with a bike resulting in her blue dress being stained with oil.

Maggie couldn't help but chuckle, watching as Harry threw his head back, allowing the sun to cast its glow over his handsome features, his eyes shining brightly as he glanced over at her.

They neared the exit to the base, turning right and following the road away from the village and towards the lush, open green landscape. The viridescent fields and hills roll by calmly.

Maggie pushed herself forward, keeping up with Harry easily.

"You enjoying the view," she jested, watching as Harry's cheeks grew a dark crimson and he glanced away. "I don't mind if you are, just nice to know."

Harry cleared his throat, "Well, maybe I do like the view actually," he admitted rather sheepishly, meeting his gaze for a few seconds.

"Good," she declared, "Maybe you'll enjoy the view as you eat my dust." She took off down the road, legs pedalling faster than before as the bike carried her swiftly away. She cheered and whooped, ignoring Harry's shouts of protest from behind her as he trailed along, bringing up the rear.

Maggie continued to cycle on, following the winding road down around the perimeter of the base, until the road forked over the river and she stopped at the small stone bridge. Harry appeared from around the bend, his legs pedalling faster than ever as he came to a screeching halt before her.

"Well," Harry sighed, catching his breath with a chuckle, "You sure did give me a run for my money."

Maggie laughed, "Never underestimate an English girl, Croz," she pointed her finger at his chest and he raised his hands in mock surrender.

"I would never."

The afternoon trundled on and Maggie finally found the spot she was looking for beside the river. It's where the river bent around an old tree, following either side of it on its path towards the sea.

She dropped her bike down on the grassy verge, flopping down beside it with a sigh. Harry followed suit, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as the hot summer sun began to get to him.

"What's Iowa like, Harry?" Maggie asked, picking at the grass beside her leg as she glanced at him.

Harry smiled fondly, "Well it's generally pretty cold in the winter, it snows but it's not too heavy. The summers are my favourite, hot and humid and you have really long summer evenings. The summer evenings are my favourite. It's normally around mid-eighties Fahrenheit."

Maggie chuckled, "You Yanks and your Fahrenheit."

Harry shook his head, "Sorry, it's just the measurements I know." He waited a minute before continuing his story about Iowa. Maggie loved how passionately he talked about his home, she'd never travelled more than four hours from where she was born and yet many of the young men on base were hundreds of miles from theirs.

Harry paused for a moment, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "The State's flag has an eagle on it."

He seemed rather chuffed about that particular fact and Maggie laughed, enjoying his boyish behaviour.

"Well if I'm ever in a quiz about the State of Iowa I have a pretty good chance of winning," she laughed, causing Harry to blush, ducking his head down in embarrassment.

"Sorry, I know I reeled off a lot, it's just things that are familiar to me and…"

"No not at all," she interrupted him, "No I like hearing about your home. I can't even imagine what it must be like to be so far from your home. I'd love to visit the States someday," she mumbled, tugging absentmindedly at the sleeve of the shirt, "I just can't imagine travelling so far."

"Maybe one day I could take you there, to Iowa I mean. You could come to visit," Harry suggested a nervous smile on his lips.

Maggie smiled, "I don't know about that, leaving England. I'd never even left Dorset until the war began, now I've been to a few more places but nothing too far," she admitted, suddenly feeling self-conscious that she hadn't had to brave the trip to a new country to help with the war effort. Even the Red Cross girls had come further than she had.

Harry, sensing her uncertainty, reached forward, grasping her hand in his, "Then maybe this could be your first big adventure."

Harry was right, nothing was stopping her from travelling to the States with Harry after the war. She didn't have to stay there if she didn't like it, and her family would always be here waiting for her.

"Alright Croz, you've got yourself a deal. If this war ever ends you owe me a trip to the States."

Harry laughed at her enthusiasm, "You've got yourself a deal."

All too soon the morning drew into afternoon, and the pair decided to head back, pedalling slowly along the deserted road. The summers sun still hung high in the sky, beating down onto their backs. Maggie was pleased that the shirt she had borrowed was thin and the wind blew through the fine material cooling her easily.

Cycling home was nowhere near as fun as when they'd flown down these roads earlier, and Maggie could see by the way Harry hung his head low that he felt the same. Back on base, everything was loud and demanding, but out here, just the two of them the world was soft and quiet. If only they could say here forever.

"We should do this again sometime," Maggie suggested as they turned up the gravel road, and through the gates back onto the air base. The sign to Thorpe Abbott hanging by the post, and they both nodded to the guard on the gate.

"I'd like that very much," Harry nodded enthusiastically, his smile a little brighter than the gloomy look on his face a few moments before. Maggie's heart swelled as she looked at him, his face crinkling as he grinned at her. There was something warm and safe about Harry Crosby, like she'd known him forever and knew that he'd look out for her. Maggie wasn't sure what it was but it made her smile at him in return.

"Then we will have to arrange it. My sister and I cycled all over the place when we were children."

"I'd like to meet your family someday, I-if you'd let me of course," he added nervously, "They seem like lovely people."

Maggie wasn't sure whether she wanted Harry to meet her family. Life at home was so different from her life on base, here she was strong and independent but at home, she was back beneath the shadow of her perfect sister.

"Sure, maybe one day," Maggie replied vaguely, hoping the answer would settle Harry for the time being.

Pulling up their bikes beside the RAF Nissen hut and propping them against the wall, Maggie noticed a familiar figure watching them.

Ken sat on the bench across the field, fiddling with some spare parts on the table with Billy and Sammy. The two boys spotted Maggie, waving frantically and calling them over. Ken sent her a cold smile and Maggie couldn't help but feel out of place joining their peaceful moment. Harry walked beside her, grinning happily at Ken who greeted them indifferently, his voice low.

"Maggie. Lieutenant Crosby," he nodded, his eyes never leaving the motor he was tinkering with.

"Lemmons," Harry greeted him somewhat smugly and Maggie wondered if there was some unspoken conversation going on between them that she wasn't aware of.

"Maggie, did you go on a bike ride?" Billy asked, squeezing in between Maggie and Harry and looking up at her excitedly.

"I sure did, kiddo. We went on a little tour of the countryside, gotta show Harry here was England's all about."

The two boys nodded enthusiastically and Sammy moved around to join Maggie, both of them wrapping their arms around her to which Maggie did the same. She couldn't help but smile at their affection, but glancing up she noticed Harry and Ken watching her, both with soft expressions and round eyes that made Maggie feel slightly uncomfortable. She coughed, bringing them back to attention and Ken bent his head down, collecting his tools that were littered across the table.

"I should probably be heading back to the handstand, gotta finish up over there," he mumbled, never once looking in Maggie's direction. She couldn't help the guilt that brewed inside her as she watched him and the two boys go all away. How could she do this to Ken? But then again they were just friends, right?

It was strange really. When Maggie was with Harry she felt jovial, and carefree, like she could laugh forever, and she was happy when she was in Harry's presence. Then Ken came along, he was soft, quiet, and gentle and Maggie felt her heart rate increase for a completely different reason. She didn't know what she was feeling, but her heart felt more conflicted than it had the other evening.

Harry stirred beside her, leaning a little closer than he had before and tentatively wrapped his arm around her shoulder. For a moment Maggie froze, shoulders stiffening under Harry's touch but the warmth she felt from him quickly soothed her nerves. She leant into his touch smiling up at him. A pink blush was spreading across his cheeks and the tips of his ears turned a little red.

"I had a nice time today, Maggie," Harry spoke quietly, his lips seemingly moving in slow motion as Maggie processed his words.

"I had a nice time today too," she assured him, "but I'm still better at riding a bike than you, you're like an old man on that bike."

Harry chuckled, shoving Maggie's shoulder lightly, "All right you little Spitfire."

Maggie grinned at the nickname and Harry quickly interjected, "I know you're a Lancaster mechanic but geewiz you were quick down those lanes."

"No, no it's okay," Maggie turned so she could face Harry better, her hand coming to rest on his own, "No, I like the nickname."

Harry's nervousness from earlier disappeared, and he reached out, brushing a loose blonde lock that had blown across Maggie's face. "Good," he mumbled, his eyes looking down at her and Maggie could feel the heat growing in her cheeks. Maggie could feel Harry leaning forward, his breath fanning across her face. This was the closest they had ever been and…

"Maggie?" Jimmy called out, jogging over to the couple with his toolbox in hand. "I'm really sorry to break up whatever's going on here," his eyes darting between the two before he continued, "But Maggie I really need your help. The boys have a mission tonight and we've got a problem with our lead bomber."

Maggie shot up from her seat, dropping Harry's hand a little harsher than she would have liked. She watched as his face fell and she leant forward, pressing a quick kiss to his cheek.

"I'm so sorry, Harry but I have to go," she couldn't decide whether the interruption of their almost kiss was a good thing or not, but she pushed it from her mind.

Harry nodded quickly, the small smile returning to his face, "No not at all, don't worry. I'll see you later."

Maggie turned, quickly falling into step beside Jimmy. She wasn't sure whether she should have glanced over her shoulder and smiled at Harry or not, but her eyes remained focused ahead of her.

Jimmy could sense the tension around the situation and nudged into her shoulder, "Now it's none of my business and I don't know what I just interrupted, but you should know that Ken Lemmons's kid came around asking for you today. Came over to the handstand. I told him you weren't there and would be back later, then he stayed another hour or so playing with June. She's really taken a shine to him and you know dogs are a good judge of character."

Maggie turned, "You're right, Jimmy it isn't any of your business," she snapped, watching as her friend's eyebrows raised and his lips set in a thin line.

"As you wish," he began walking in the direction of the handstand, not glancing back to see if she was following. Jimmy was one of her best friends and despite their stressful jobs she'd never once snapped at him.

"Jimmy, wait. I'm sorry," she ran after him, grabbing his arm so he couldn't keep walking away from her. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it, I justâ€¦" She sighed, tugging her fingers through her blonde curls, "I just don't know what to do".

It was true, she didn't know what to do. All of a sudden two men were showing great interest in her, seemingly aware of each other and yet they still wanted to be around her. She wasn't sure which was worse, having no men interested in her or having two at the same time.

"It's no big deal," Jimmy shrugged, throwing his arm around Maggie's shoulders and pulling her after him. "Now were not placing bets or anything, but my money's on Kenny boy."

Maggie snorted, shoving him dramatically, "You are no help at all, Jimmy."

"Well, the boys got my vote."

And just like that, everything was back to normal, at least for Jimmy it was. He whistled the rest of the way to the handstand, swinging his toolbox as he went. Maggie remained quiet, her mind too preoccupied to join in with the tune. Every time she thought of the lovely day she'd had with Harry she saw Kenny's disappointed face smiling sadly back at her. The sooner the job on the bombers was done, the sooner she could go and find him. She had to talk to him, to explain herself in some way and…well she didn't know what to do after that, but she had to do something.

Thorpe Abbott base RAF sector, 19:00

"Are 'The Girls' airworthy?" Archie asked, swinging his bag onto his back as he sauntered towards his bomber. His flying jacket hung loosely on his arm and he looked like a poster boy for the RAF.

Maggie smiled, "She's as airworthy as she can be after the beatings you keep giving her, but she'll get you there and back if you treat her right."

Archie nodded, watching as his copilot, Murray, hoisted himself up into the fuselage, "Well, then I know she'll be fine."

Maggie nodded, throwing her arms around Archie's shoulders, "Just be safe okay? I don't want to find out you did something stupid and got yourself killed."

"I promise, nothing stupid Mags," he pressed his lips to her forehead, holding her close for a moment longer before he pulled away. This was the same ritual they had for every mission Archie had flown since they met, and so far it had worked.

Pulling away Maggie cupped his cheek tenderly, "You know you're a real pain in the ass sometimes, but I wouldn't trade you for anyone."

Archie grinned, squeezing Maggie's hand, "I'll be back before you know it." He stepped away, turning and heading to the plane before Maggie could say anything else, before she could protest, begging him not to go. He knew she wanted to and he couldn't blame her, but this was war, it's what he came here to do.

Maggie remained frozen to the spot, unable to move until Archie was back on the hard stand. She hated mission nights more than anything else that this wretched war had thrown at her, mission nights were the worst. She could never settle, could never sleep. Some of the other ground crew would try and catch a few hours shut eye until the siren went off to announce the bomber's arrival back home, but Maggie couldn't bring herself to leave.

She found her usual seat on the nearby stack of crates, settling herself in for a long night. June curled up on the lower crate beside her, nuzzling into Maggie's flight jacket that she'd laid out for the spaniel. Despite the warm afternoon weather, the nights were still cool in July and Maggie knew she'd grow to regret not having her jacket on, but how could she leave June without something soft to lie on?

The Lancaster's began to roar to life, pulling off the hard stand and out onto the runway. Archie saluted her through the small cockpit window as his plane pulled away, she saluted back, a large lump forming in her throat.

Before the tears could begin to fall, a coat was pulled around her shoulders causing Maggie to jump, before she noticed Ken looking down at her, a soft smile on his lips.

"Sorry, didn't mean to startle you."

"No, it's okay," Maggie replied, her voice thick with emotion. She couldn't bring herself to let her voice grow any louder.

"Thought you could use some company."

Maggie nodded, "Thanks Ken." She patted the crate, and Ken wriggled in closely, stroking June's head to which the little spaniel wagged her tail, beating it against the crate beneath her.

The Lancasters were at the end of the runway, lifting off into the sky one at a time. The sun was setting now, the blues of the day drifting into purples and pinks before the fiery orange spread across the landscape. The planes creating dark silhouettes against the terracotta sky. It felt like a bad omen, as if the planes were doomed to go up in flames, but Maggie tried to push the thought away. As they disappeared into the distance the airfield grew quiet, the rumble of the plane's engines disappearing leaving everyone waiting with baited breath for their return.

The hours seemed to pass so slowly that Maggie had begun to wonder if time was frozen until the sun had completely set and the sky grew dark. At some point in the silence, Ken had wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer when she shivered at the night's harsh breeze.

June whined sadly, scratching at Ken's leg until he lifted her, placing her onto Maggie's lap.

"It's okay June, Uncle Archie will be back. He always comes back to us," Maggie reassure her and the spaniel looked up, her brown eyes looking sadly at her.

"How long have you known Archie?" Ken asked, leaning his head against Maggie's, his hand rubbing small circles on her back.

The blonde thought for a moment, a smile forming on her lips as she spoke, "Just over a year. We became friends almost instantly. He's all I had for a long time."

Ken nodded, his lips forming a smile as he looked down at the girl in his arms. He wasn't sure what he was doing. Something just seemed to draw him to Maggie, and despite her obvious friendship with Harry, he couldn't help himself. Her head lay gently against his shoulder, her blonde hair fanning over his chest.

Maggie glanced up at Ken, their faces just inches away as she spoke and Ken could feel her breath on his face. "About earlier…with Harry, I mean…it's…it's not what…"

"Hey, shhh shhh, you don't have to explain anything. There's nothing to explain," he pressed his head against hers, nearly pressing his lips to her forehead. The closeness they shared was the most intimate moment that Maggie had ever felt, maybe even more intimate than her almost kiss with Harry that she tried to push from her mind. It didn't seem right, not like it did with Ken. Maggie's heart felt heavy as she snuggled further into Ken's arms. Why did emotions have to be so complicated?

"You don't have to wait out here with me all night if you don't want to. I'm used to waiting on my own, except June of course," Maggie added, her blue eyes drifting up to meet his.

Ken shook his head, "No it's alright. I want to stay with you…if that's okay with you of course," Ken added, scratching the back of his neck.

Maggie lifted her arm, running her finger over his cheek, turning his head to look at her, "Of course, I do, Ken. It's nice to have some company."

"Good," Ken pulled her close, ensuring his jacket was tightly wrapped around Maggie's shoulders, June shuffled up closer to benefit from the warmth of the jacket. "I'm not going anywhere."

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#beneath the blue sky #masters of the air #harry crosby #Harry Crosby x oc #Ken Lemmons #Ken Lemmons x oc #maggie reid #Archie Sullivan #mota

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