#WIPalooza

[reallylilyreally]

For @citedkisses and @thehatchette and @akane171 and @neykalou who wanted the Webgott follow up to pulling heartbreak out of hats... I've been thinking about this for a YEAR and finally, thanks to you, I actually got words on paper about it.

The phone rings in the farmhouse, and Lewis is the only one there to answer it, because it’s the middle of the afternoon in the middle of the week, and Dick is making his monthly pilgrimage to Lancaster, and Bunny is out doing something incomprehensible with a tractor, leaving Lewis with the ledgers and the dinner prep.

He picks up the phone, the way he usually does, cheerful detached business voice.

“Winters Feed and Farm Supplies,” he says into the receiver, looking at the daily calendar next to the phone desk. It’s one page out of date, he turns it over - 10th September 1961.

“Captain Nixon?” says the voice at the end of the line, perfectly familiar and completely shocking.

Jesus Christ. 

“Liebgott?” Lewis manages, feeling a little like he might choke on the syllables. “Fucking hell, where have you been?”

Where have you been, for the last fifteen years, we looked for you, Webster looked for you, why didn’t you call, why are you calling?

Liebgott, unsurprisingly, ignores the question. “I need help, sir, and I’m flat out of options.”

And you called me? Lewis thinks, incredulous, before realising that actually, Liebgott had called Dick, or Bunny, which makes a lot more sense.

“What can I do for you, Joe?” he asks, all easy geniality because he can’t work out how to react otherwise.

“I need you to wire me some money,” Joe says into the phone, tense. “Probably a lot. And I need you to send Talbert out to California on the next flight you can. To Santa Barbara.”

“What the fuck, Liebgott? What the hell’s going on?”

There’s a desperate noise at the end of the line. “David took a boat out this morning,” he says, “And didn’t come back.”

It feels like everything is lining up wrong in his head, the words don’t make any sense. “David Webster?” he asks, voice sounding strange to his ears. “He found you? When?”

“1946,” Liebgott says. Holy fuck. “And now he’s gone, and I have to get him back, and I don’t have anyone else to call for help. Sir.”

[reallylilyreally]

For @valstarsandgalaxies, who wanted some second string...

“They’ve got their work cut out,” Johnny says, without really thinking.

“I’d back Buck and Marge over Bucky any day of the week,” Benny tells him, and Johnny goes cold.

The blue sky is right there, stretched out across everything, all he can see, and the horizon is empty. There’s planes that aren’t coming. Forts they’ve lost, mothers’ sons they’re never getting back. 

Benny takes his hand, wraps it around his wrist, presses Johnny’s fingers into the meat of his tendons until it must hurt, until Johnny comes back.

“Tell me” he says, very quietly.

“I said ‘they’,” Johnny tells him. “And I meant Buck and Biddick.”

“Oh,” Benny says, and holds him a little tighter. 

“I forget all the damn time,” Johnny says. “He just won’t stay dead, in my head.”

Benny presses his mouth against the side of Johnny’s face, almost a kiss but more like a breath he doesn’t want to finish. “I feel like I think about them all so much more now we’re home than I did when we were out there,” he murmurs. “None of them are staying dead.”

[reallylilyreally]

Honestly, I’d read anything you write, it’s that bloody good.

But if I had to pick - its more of your spectacular characterisation in either second string or in proximal damage.

Second string, I would welcome every and any crumb and morsel; but proximal damage, ngl, have been thinking regularly on the bittersweet position James Douglass has been currently left in. The need for Goblin Fort resolution might be winning by a hair here.

Love your work.

JUST FOR YOU i have started this! Don't hold out much hope for actual resolution though, this is looking like the first thing i've ever written that doesn't end well for the babes.

Margaret thinks about lying, when Ev asked her what she thought of James Douglass. But she's pretty sure she's going to marry this man, and she doesn't want to get into the habit of not telling him what she's thinking.

"I think he might be the saddest man I've ever met," she says, and isn't shocked by the shock on Ev's face.

“You think he’s sad?” Ev asks her, brow furrowed with concern.

She shrugs, doesn’t say you don’t? and let the topic drop, leans over the center console of the car Ev’s managed to beg, borrow or steal from someone, and lets him smudge her lipstick for the last ten minutes of their evening. He kisses her like he can’t quite forget he might be gone in a week and dead a week after that, and she burns with the need to have as much of him as she can while he’s still mostly hers. Because even ruining her hair and creasing her skirts and making her sob into his mouth, Everett Blakely still belongs more than a little bit to the United States Armed Forces and they’ll claim the rest of him eventually. 

So she lets him worship her, for ten minutes, swift and efficient with all that pilot focus, and then teases him for the mess he’s made of them both as he pulls the seat back to driving height. 

“I think that one was a team effort,” he says, sucking his fingers clean and reaching over with his other hand to fix her hair. 

Margaret leans into the touch, eyes on the soft smile on his red mouth, and thinks that they make a wonderful team as he puts the car into gear and pulls out of the dark spot in the woods, heading back towards the lights of town and the barracks and the looming threat of curfew.

“Really though,” he asks, just before they reach her street. “What did you think of Dougie?”

She thinks about it. Douglass is Ev’s bombardier, and his best friend, as far as she can tell. “He seems very sweet,” she tells him, and means it.

[reallylilyreally]

SO I am currently in the unprecedented position of having ONLY ONE FIC on the go. Which is insane. And obviously can't be allowed to continue. There's a lot in the WIP folder and I'm literally paralysed by the list, so, I ask you, the public, what should I be writing right now:

pt 7 to pulling heartbreak out of hats - the 1960s Webgott section no one asked for

pt 3 to proximal damage - the Margaret Blakely POV several people asked for

pt 6 to second string - Korean War nonsense

pt 6 to if you try sometimes you might just find - Bill Leyden shenanigans

OR something else entirely that I haven't even thought of. Asks will be rewarded with me scribbling something down for you.

[reallylilyreally]

part 6 of if you try sometimes you might just find!!!!

GIMME BILL LEYDEN NONSENSE I BEG YOU 😩😩😩

OH MY GOD there's someone out there reading my Pacific fics! You're my new best friend, we're married now.

Bill Leyden leaves the Marines down a couple of fingers, and up a whole bunch of lunatics he has a horrible suspicion he’s never going to be able to get rid of. 

He leaves the Marines mostly the way he joined them, a little lost, a little fucked up, but somehow less angry than he was at the beginning. He thinks, looking around him in the hospital, that he might be the only man to come home from Iraq with less anger than he went with, but Bill’s never been very good at being like everyone else. It’s why he was a Marine in the first place.

Being out of the Marines is alright, really, and missing a bunch of fingers is alright too, mostly. He’s a little lost still, and nothing’s really the same, but he spends plenty of time on the phone to Burgie and Flo, and plenty of time on the phone to Jay, and plenty of time trying to get Gunny on the phone, and he’s alright, really.

If he lies awake at night sometimes wondering what the fuck has happened to Sledge and why he’s not replying to emails, well, he knows he’s not the only one. If sometimes he wakes up screaming from a nightmare where he wasn’t quick enough on the hook and couldn’t get the casevac down in time to save Hillbilly’s life, he’s probably not the only one having those nightmares either. 

The fingers he doesn’t have anymore hurt, sometimes, and every now and then he goes a full day without eating because there’s a photo of K35 stuck to his fridge with Oswalt on one side of him and Hamm on the other, but he’s alright, really. A little lost, a little fucked up, but mostly, Bill Leyden is doing ok.