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latibvles · 3 months

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true north.

and we’re back! a little late but I plan on doing all ten prompts TRUST AND BELIEVE! on that note, this next one is wedding — so here’s inez, post-war, where the invitation to a wedding between friends pushes her to leave the nest for a third time. luckily alex’s door is always open. tagging @upontherisers for listening to me rock back and forth over them. I did an embarrassing amount of googling about trains for this one that's how you KNOW it got serious.

—

Maybe it’s not fair of her to say that the invite is what did her in.

No, the invitation was the most expected part of this — going to June and Benny’s wedding sounds and feels more normal than most things. It was always going to turn out this way, wasn’t it? A big wedding with everyone there, practically acting both as a celebration and a reunion. Most who wanted to keep contact, kept it, Inez herself included — but knowing June and Benny, they probably went the extra mile anyway to hunt down those who had disappeared.

The combination of June’s fierce determination and Benny’s kindness is a force in its own right.

Maybe it’s just the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Maybe it’s that Inez is walking into her family’s living room, and telling her mother she’ll be going to Chicago in next May for the ceremony — and then has to remind her who June Cielinski is.

“What classes didja have? Y’never told me about her!” She’s bouncing Judith on her knee — who’s entranced with her father’s car keys at the moment. Inez’s jaw clenched.

“No ma she’s— she’s from my crew. She was our bombardier.”

There’s a click of her mother’s tongue, a feigned recollection of a June and an unrelated anecdote about how she’d always liked that name, how it was a contender before they decided on Judith for her baby sister, who looks at Inez and smiles, showing off a missing tooth.

So maybe it’s not the invitation itself, but the reminders that stem from it. Everything, from the moment she set her bag down in her family’s doorway, has felt unequivocally wrong. She loves her family — Inez is sure of that — but maybe there was a reason Ben married so quickly and then moved all the way to Texas that Inez is only just now seeing. The only things that feel right are the things she’s done that are separate from this house.

The collection of letters she keeps under her bed, namely. She’d asked for Alex’s address impulsively, not expecting him to so willingly give it over. But he did — tore a page from his sketchbook and scribbled it for her, and she’d kept that piece of paper tucked in her pocket from the camp, to Paris, to London, all the way back here, until it was crumpled beyond recognition and the writing faded with time. That was when he was still living at home. Now they wrote pretty regularly, back and forth, which was… nice.

With a little help from his parents and after figuring out his finances, he’d gotten himself a place a little bit out of the city. I love Detroit, he writes, but I think the quiet’s doing me some good. Sometimes, he sends drawings. He tells her about how he’s thinking of picking up teaching, now that he’s in the Reserve, and she tells him to go for it. He’d be good at it. He has the patience for children.

She tells him about Judith, and how the baby takes after their brother Ben more than herself. She tells him about the job she’s picked up at the schoolhouse, as a teacher’s assistant and how grateful she is that she could find work after all this. She doesn’t tell him about how out of place she feels, how stuck she is. Some things you just don’t say through a letter, and some things you just don’t say at all.

That all sounds great, he writes, I’m happy for you, and she knows he means it. You spend roughly nine months with someone, you can usually deduce whether or not they’re saying things just to be nice or not. Alex doesn’t just say things to placate people. If you ever find yourself coming this way, my door’s always open.

She hopes he means that, too. If this were five years ago, leaving home might’ve been terrifying to her. Now though, it was thoroughly scratched from the list of things that made her sick to her stomach.

My invite to Benny and June’s wedding came in, she writes.

Mine too. Looking forward to seeing everybody, he writes back.

That’ll be May of next year. A nice spring wedding in Chicago — because some people really do have it all figured out. Inez is not one of them. Part of her, pessimistically so, thinks that she never will be. She’s not resentful of her friends for moving on with their lives. She’s just angry that she can’t seem to do it herself.

It’s funny how she can reach her limit and still endure. The AAF taught her that. She packs a bag, but it goes untouched in the back of her closet for two whole weeks. At the very least — it’s enough time to pocket an extra check.

It’s enough time to say that she’s thought it through. To have an epiphany — to come to terms with it. At least she remained time conscious despite the changes she went through. She was molded into a pot but cast so quickly that there’s a crack in her now that feels impossible to ignore.

Leaving feels more natural to her than staying, even if she’ll end up coming back to this place in a few days. That much she knows of. But as of right now, this house feels like a bird cage with the door left open; her parents were probably just waiting for her to leave.

She heads to the train station after helping her mom wash dishes, after Judith’s gone to bed. Inez doesn’t announce her leaving like she might’ve in the past. She just takes one of Alex’s letters and walks the length of the beaten old sidewalks until she makes it to the station. The last time she was here, she was happy to be home. Now leaving brings a strange sort of relief.

It’s three different trains she’ll have to take. She’d probably end up on his doorstep in the afternoon if her math is right. And it usually is.

Inez tries, feebly, to sleep on the first train — from Nashville to Louisville, but some habits she just can’t seem to break. Thorpe Abbotts and the air raids made her a light sleeper, and the Stalag made it worse. She jerks back into consciousness with every bump, every coo of a baby, every high pitched squeal of the rails when they roll into a station. She’s always half expecting to wake up in that block again to Savorre grunting in suppressed pain, or Harrie right next to her, face shoved into the flimsy pillows to muffle whatever onslaught of tears was overtaking her.

It’s never that, though. It’s always the dim lights of the train car, the quiet murmurings of its occupants, her bag clutched tightly to her chest like it was a person because she didn’t want to fumble with shoving it in the space above her. She’d rather have a familiar weight in her lap. Inez would hardly call it sleep, more like sporadic naps, broken up by her snaps into being awake and trying to make some sense of what state she’s in to little avail. She hits Louisville at 2:00am.

There’s still time for her to turn back but, well, that doesn’t exactly make much sense. Doesn’t sit right with her, so she doesn’t.

About halfway through the second train that takes her from Kentucky to Ohio — she’s a livewire really, bouncing her knee, rustling through her bag for a book Jo sent her a couple weeks ago. As 4am ebbs into 5am and the night sky starts shifting into the gray-blue of dawn, she’s becoming more and more restless, and by the time she’s getting on that last train in Ohio that’ll take her to Detroit, she can’t help but wonder if this is a terrible idea.

Her nail beds, already the subject of her merciless picking, are a nightmare to look at and she wonders if she can get away with keeping her hands hidden in the pockets sewn into her skirt once she gets there. If she gets there. She could ask about direct routes back home the moment she hits the station and it’d be like she was never even here. She hugs her bag tighter to herself, like it would provide her some comfort.

And by the time she hits Detroit, it’s almost noon, and the city is busy, and Inez is reminded vaguely of pins in a map — of her old pilot who’d smiled as she put her pin right in the heart of it. Yeah, this makes sense, is really the only conclusion she comes to as she tries to hail down a cab. She half expects her pilot to be the driver.

It isn’t though. His name is Frank. He’s nice. For the thirty minute drive out from Detroit to a more suburban area, something that looks a little more like home, he tells her about how business has really been booming in the past year with all the soldiers coming back from overseas.

He asks if she knew everyone who served. She nods and dismisses it with a “feels like everybody knows somebody,” that makes him smile and laugh in agreement.

But talking to Frank doesn’t much prepare her for pulling up to the house that matched the address in her pocket. It’s a small house with a bright green lawn — white siding and a small porch, a pair of work boots by the front door. A bag of fertilizer. No flowers in the boxes yet though. She can feel her heart in her throat as the cab pulls off and she stares at the path up for a long, silent moment.

It feels right, being here, but he could easily tell her to go away. What was she even supposed to say? Anything she could come up with sounded petulant. My mother forgot who June was so I left. My house feels like a cage. My parents keep pretending I didn’t go to war and it sucks. She eyes one of the spindly cracks working its way through the pavement and her hands ball into fists, her bag feeling impossibly heavy. She should go home. She could walk it, she was paying attention the whole drive over. It’s only noon, there’s gotta be a direct train from here t—

The sound of the screen door rattling as it opens and shuts is familiar. Her gaze snaps up.

Alex is in a white singlet and jeans, wiping his hands with a dirty rag when he catches her. The shock on his face is evident, then the confusion.

“Inez?” She thinks he’s beelining it towards her, but he stops by his mailbox first, opening it. “Did I– Did I miss a letter? I didn’t know you were—”

“No. No I just…” Inez cringes as she lets go of her bag and it lands beside her feet with a gentle thump, but she can’t help picking at her hands. “You said your door’s always open so I…” Her mouth opens and closes like a fish, scrambling for some explanation beyond a simple it feels right, coming here. He’s coming towards her now, with the familiar, friendly smile, and relief washes over her as he looks over her face, then reaches down to take her bag.

“How long are you here for?” he asks then, moving on from her shoddy explanation.

“I… I don’t know,” she admits, rubbing the nape of her neck. “It was a little bit of spontaneous decision making.” She elects to withhold the fact that instead of waiting until the next day for the next direct ride to Detroit, she’d taken three trains. That it was hardly impulsive when she had three train rides to think about it, and going home just didn’t sit right with her.

“Well you let me know when you find out. I’d hug you but…” He gestures to the state of him — dirt stains on the front of his white singlet, sweat from the August heat shining on his skin. Inez laughs, a little breathlessly and nods in agreement.

“Didn’t know you were a gardener.”

“I’m not. My mama says the front of the house looks too plain so she bought me a bunch of flowers to put in the front.” He lets her walk in front of him until they reach the door, and then he’s getting the door for her to let her into the small living room, bleeding into a kitchen. A couple dishes laid out on a towel on the counter, a blanket tossed over a moss-colored couch. The windows are open, letting in a breeze. She assumes the hallway leads to his bedroom.

“I can help with that,” Inez offers as he sets her bag by the door. “The flowers.”

He smiles at that, something wide and warm and familiar in a way that doesn’t hurt — and Inez finds herself smiling back.

#ch: inez eckley #alexander jefferson #alexander jefferson x oc #masters of the air oc #mota oc #*wdawe #*poet writes #my pookie wookies #very normal about them #[CLENCHED TEETH THROUGH TEARS]#Cari has had to deal w me talking abt them for three days now so do the rest of yall

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