#edie lockner

[mercurygray]

Hello! How about

29.— preparation from the one word prompts for Edie, please?

@ktredshoes also asked for Edie and the word 'bitter' - i hope you two don't mind that I decided to combine them!

This was as close as she'd ever get.

It was quiet, up here in the slow-curling light of dawn - outside, Winks and the rest of the crew were checking engines and spark plugs and surveying the rest of their repairs, and she was up in the nose of the plane, the light slowly illuminating the compartment through the plexiglass, sending shadows here and there. And right at the head of the compartment, leading the whole plane - the bombsight, sitting on its mounting like a Sphinx, knobs and dials ready to divine and deliver.

This one had come straight from the workshop this morning - she'd carried it out here herself in its special canvas bag and carefully mounted it into the stabilizers, sitting back to wait for the bombardier who'd be going out with this plane this morning.

The bombardier - who was not her. This was as close as she would ever get to the war.

Never mind that she knew the thing as well as she knew her own hands, never mind that she'd studied and trained on it more hours than anyone would care to count. Someone else would take the sight out this morning and make it do its terrible work, because the Army Air Forces were not in the business of putting women in airplanes. That's what she'd been told, angrily, after she'd handed in the same already-graded copy of the exam all the bomber boys were taking, shown her score to the instructor. Don't we keep hearing there's a shortage of qualified candidates?

"Now, don't you worry about that, Sergeant Lockner," he'd said, sputtering. "We've got plenty of men to take care of those things."

Plenty of men, was it? Plenty of men who'd scored lower than she had on that exam? But the nose of the plane as it sat on the ground in Norfolk was as far as she'd go. Plenty of men who wouldn't be able to do the work she could do inside the sight tuning and fixing and measuring, because she was a girl, and her fingers were finer, and those other things, the coarse-grained war things, could be handled by them.

A truck grumbled by outside, and Edie got off the bombardier's seat and moved to sit on the floor near the instrument panel, listening as the men got out of the truck and began loading into the plane, stubbing out cigarettes and joking about the weather, their kit bags landing with soft thumps into the belly of the plane. "You getting her all set up for me up here, Edie?"

"Locked and loaded for your checks, sir."

James Douglass sat down in his seat and looked over at her with a smile on his face. "Now when are you gonna quit it with the ranks and just call me Doug like everyone else does?"

She rolled her eyes. "When I'm sure you're not gonna make something of it, Lieutenant." Calling me Edie's bad enough, but everyone does that.

Douglass looked disappointed. "Is my reputation really that bad?" he asked. "Hold on - don't answer that. It's already all over your face."

Your reputation for being interested in every girl who'll give you the time of day? That reputation? "Would have thought you'd call that good, where you're sitting."

"Would be if I could get a date out of it," Douglass groused.

"Want me to run the checklist with you, sir?" Edie asked, walking straight past any remarks she wanted to make about how the doctrine of precision bombing worked on women, too, if they didn't think you were just dropping compliments on anything that moved, but it was early, and they had a war to fight, and she needed to be out of the plane before all four of those engines started firing.

"Cutting it a little close," Douglass observed, but made no move to stop her and reached for his checklist.

Of course I am, Edie agreed bitterly, reaching for the master switch, the first item on the list she could recite by heart. Close is all I've got.

[wexhappyxfew]

my friends call me edie.

— Edith ‘Edie’ Lockner

-> Right Where I Need To Be — @mercurygray

a/n: merc when i tell you i absolutely love this fic more than ANYTHING, i just knew i had to make a moodboard in some sort of way for it...i absolutely love this duo so much :,) edie and hoosier are definitely a force to be reckoned with <3

[wexhappyxfew]

@mercurygray your little fic today with Hoosier and Edie has made me 100% ON BOARD with a post-war friendship with those two and now it’s all i am currently thinking about 🤣

Bill ’Hoosier’ Smith in The Pacific Part One: Guadalcanal/Leckie

[mercurygray]

✍️ tell me about the new girls!

Nat, I will introduce you to a new but also old girl - Edie Lockner. She was originally written for a now-defunct project of a friend's and is being re-assigned here!

For as long as she can remember, Edie Lockner's been looking up. Not necessarily in the optimistic sense, although a person needs some of that, living on a farm in  Illinois with the price of corn being what it is, and the Depression only just clearing up, but up as in towards the stars. She read an article in Scientific American once about stars, and from then on, she was hooked. She'd  give anything to be able to study them - maybe explore them, one day?

But times are hard, and college isn't cheap, especially for doing something as silly as studying the universe. So when she starts seeing advertisements to join the Army - good pay, technical education, see the world! - that's her ticket out. Maybe there won't be stars - but anything's got to be better than here. Because there's not a whole lot of anything going on in McClean County, and unless she thinks of something clever, she's going to be stuck here doing the same thing her mother and grandmother did before her - marrying a farmer, settling down to raise a family, and forgetting any dreams she ever had about making something of herself. 

Edith Lockner - or Edie - is 22 years old, a high school graduate kicking her heels in Stanford, Illinois. As a farmer's daughter, she's an early riser who's used to long days and hard work. She loves to read Scientific American and Popular Mechanics, and has often helped her father fix things around the farm. She's stubborn with technical problems, and life in a small town has kept her friendly, but private. She scraped together money for flying lessons, but she is naturally more on the mechanical side, fixing things. Being on a team with a lot of other girls who think outside the box will be good for her, she thinks.

[mercurygray]

Hi Merc, could I please request ❛ are you sure this is a good idea? ❜ for Edie and Hoos? (Or another pairing of your choosing!) <3

It was a little late to be asking questions.

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Edie asked, her hands wrapped tightly around the cast iron of the fire escape ladder. It was nearly midnight on the university campus, without a moon to be seen, and they were climbing the outside of the science building in pursuit of the perfect blend of silence, darkness, and the waiting sky.

"No, I'm sure it's a terrible idea," Hoosier hissed, coming up the ladder behind her, "but when's that stopped you? Now pipe down or someone's gonna hear us."

Edie did as she was told and continued climbing, disappearing over the ledge as she reached the top. Hoosier paused and tried to catch his breath. It was a long time since anyone had made him climb a net, and if he stood still too long he could hear things he didn't want to hear, gunfire on beaches and waves on the side of an LCVP and the low, threatening hum of an engine. He closed his eyes in the dark and took another deep breath, feeling the cold of the iron under his hands. "Hoos, where are you?"

He began to climb again, and suddenly there was Edie's hand, pulling him up over the ledge until the two of them collapsed backwards under his weight with a soft sound of surprise. Hoosier brushed a stray hair out of her face, back under her beret, and smiled down at her, fully aware of the weight of his body on hers, the way her chest was rising and falling.

"Now just where did you get the idea that I'm the sweet and law-abiding kind, Miss Lockner? Because I'd like to disabuse you of that idea before we get further along here."

Even in the dark he could see she was grinning. "Couldn't say."

"You're not exactly one for following all the rules either, while we're on the subject."

She bit the side of her lip, just the way she always did when she was fixing to misbehave. "I thought you liked that."

He kissed the corner of her mouth for that."Mmmm, I do. Now, where are those blankets at?"

She pulled her knapsack off her shoulders, undoing the drawstring and wrestling the carefully folded blankets out of the bag. Hoosier took one and spread it on the flat expanse of the roof, his hand smoothing the familiar knap of the army blanket like it was an old friend. "Right, we can sit down here, use the bag as a pillow, and wrap up with the other one, since it's too damn cold out," he decided.

"You didn't just bring me up here to have your wicked way with me, Mr. Smith?" Edie said with another one of her grins, sitting down on the blanket with her legs tucked to one side. She looked pretty as anything, with her hair under that beret and the sweater under her coat hugging every inch and curve of her. And she's yours, Hoosier Smith, or as good as.

"Well, we'll get there when we get there, but no. If I only wanted that I would have stayed inside where it's warmer." Hoos rummaged around in his own bag and pulled out a thermos. "May I interest Madame in a cup of cocoa? The forty-six was a good year."

She laughed, but held out a hand - he handed over the thermos and kept digging for the packet of cookies he'd stashed near the bottom - probably crumbs after that climb, but tasty regardless.

"You think we'll see it?" Edie asked, passing over a cup of cocoa in the dark. Hoosier rubbed his hands together and wrapped them gratefully around the metallic cup, letting her pour herself another and leaning into him.

"The comet?" He tipped his head back and scanned the sky. Above them it was velvet dark, only slightly tipped with stars. They'd escaped most of the street lamps on campus, and the glow of town was far away. Edie had been looking forward to this since her astronomy professor had announced it nearly a month ago, and he'd spent the last week trying to plan everything so she'd get a glimpse. Who needed a party with cheese and crackers and the snooty faculty who said women didn't belong in observatories when you could have a roof to yourselves? "Hope so."

She took a sip of her cocoa."Thanks for doing this with me. I know you didn't have to."

That was true - she could have come alone, and done just as well. But they'd seen meteors, out on their small islands in the Pacific, wild streaks of light that made a man think about how alone in the universe he really was - and how lucky to have friends with him, too. It was better sharing wonder like that. He looked over at her and couldn't help but smile a little. "Who would I be if I didn't?"

[mercurygray]

Happy Thursday Merc <3 Could I please request #48 'dancing with each other' for Edie and Hoos?

Neither of them are what you'd call domestic.

Both of them are studying engineering, which means they're good at math and bad at cooking, and it's a rare and strange night when one of them is actually in the kitchen making something.

But coffee cups have to get cleaned, and the forks need to be returned to the drawer once in a while, and both of them were too long in the Army to let a mess accumulate anywhere, so washing the dishes is about as close as they get to playing house.

After the take-out containers have been tidied they turn on the radio and fill the sink with suds - he washes, she dries. If the night is nice they leave the window open and let the sounds of the city come inside a little.

Tonight they come in halfway through Les Paul and Mary Ford's How High the Moon and Edie stages something of a dance party while she's drying, moving her shoulders in time with the music.

The DJ must think he's being clever with this set list - "Let's bring it back down a little slower for all you lovers and dreamers out there in radioland!" - and Ella Fitzgerald begins crooning Blue Moon on the tinny kitchen radio.

Hoosier feels the night slow down with the sound of her voice.

Blue moon You saw me standing alone Without a dream in my heart Without a love of my own

He's not usually like this, soft and slow, but there's something about the song, and the darkness outside that makes him want to hold her very softly, making her put the dishtowel down, their hands every so slightly intertwined, like she is more delicate than she is, and he is more careful with precious things.

Blue moon You knew just what I was there for You heard me saying a prayer for Someone I really could care for

They stay like that for a long time, breathing in the feeling of each other until the song ends, and Hoosier switches off the radio so nothing breaks the spell.

The moon was never lovely during the war. Moonlight was a tool, a weapon that the enemy could use, nothing prayed for. He is still learning not to hate it, and he knows she is, too.

[mercurygray]

It’s @ktredshoes​‘ birthday today, and when I asked her what sort of drabble she wanted, she asked for Hoosier, from The Pacific, and a chance encounter with one of the Girl Gang somewhere. There’s a pretty wide gap between Melbourne and Aldbourne, though, so this is most def post war, and actually features someone I haven’t talked about at all yet - she’s an OFC who should be appearing later this year in a forthcoming ensemble fic from @wexhappyxfew​.

He thought going home would mean he wanted to stay there.

He'd had enough of traveling to last a lifetime, on troop transports and hospital ships, trucks and LCVPs and DUKWs and trains, and he'd thought by the time he made it home it would time for him to rest his feet.

But instead of resting, Hoosier Smith was restless.

There were no beaches in Loogootee, no oceans or waves except for the wind blowing through the cornfields, the endless horizons green and golden growing things, instead of blue water. Now, he was fairly certain he never wanted to see another beach again in his life, never mind another palm tree, crab, or coconut, but he found himself missing all those things - or rather, missing things around them, the friends that were now more dear to him than family.

People said that he'd changed, since he came home. He heard his parents' friends, talking about it over peanuts and beer during the weekly bridge game. "He's quieter, now," Mrs. Davidson said, inspecting her hand as the four of them sat around the card table.

"He was quiet afore," Mr. Davidson shot back. "Not all of us got it in ourselves to be chatterboxes, Pauline."

But it was true - he was keeping himself to himself, lately. People wanted stories that he wasn't ready to tell, not just yet, because how could they hear them and understand them at all, these faded farm people from southern Indiana who'd never been further from home than the state fair?

There was the Legion in town, and the VFW, which he'd been told he could join, but that seemed too far to go for beer on a Friday night, what with gas being what it was and the price of tires if he blew one out on the way. And anyway, seemed like the place was always full of Army types, shooting the shit about Europe, as if their war had been the only one that mattered. If you can't fight 'em drunk, don't fight 'em at all, wasn't that what they always said?

Well, he was tired of fighting - he knew that much.

There wasn’t much going in Loogootee, anyway - the Naval Ammunition Depot in Crane was winding down and jobs were scarce anyway. He found himself contemplating moving, more often - Vincennes, maybe, or Bloomington, or even Louisville, if he felt like changing states. Indianapolis seemed far, but there were jobs there, with good pay, factory jobs where he could make foreman, in a few years, if he had a certificate, proof positive that he was a man who could make something of what he was given. Manager, maybe, later, if he could use those GI benefits everyone was on about and scrape up a degree. He could work during the day and take classes at the night school, take some time to save up so they could one day afford that house that Lela had always talked about buying.

Lela. She’d been the one nice thing about coming home, the one thing he had to look forward to on all those boats and trains and buses. But it’d been three years, more or less, since they’d seen each other, about that long since they’d had an honest conversation, by letter or otherwise. Three years was a long time to grow older, and it didn’t seem right, jumping back in where they’d left off like nothing had happened. Can’t step into the same river twice - the water under your feet changes and so do you. 

In the end, he decided to use that college money sooner rather than later. The state school over in Bloomington meant he could come home, on weekends, if he wanted, help around the farm, and the cost of living wasn’t too much for a room near campus and three squares at a cafe. And on Fridays he could catch up on what he’d missed in Lela’s life while he’d been gone.

He didn’t realize he’d feel even less at home where people didn’t know him.

The problem wasn’t school, per se - there were plenty of other vets around campus, and the professors seemed nice enough. He declared for business, which felt like it should work - he was passable at math and had been told once or twice he could make decisions. No, the problem lay more with his classmates.

There was an uncrossable divide between him and the other students, of age and experience both. Too young to enlist, they'd all grown up down here with sisters working at the arsenal and older brothers in the service, their only battles fought over who got to ask the cute girl from science class out on a date, drinking in ideas about what was brave from war movies and John Wayne. 

And in his mind, all Bill could think when he saw them was Replacements. They were children, horsing between classes reading comic books about the war, and he felt...ancient. He’d done his growing up, on beaches and in foxholes, and there wasn’t a lot of that boy left in him. There were things they did that he couldn’t conscience, like showing up late for class and talking back to the teacher, and wasting time on questions that they could have known the answers to if they’d bothered to do the reading or get a lick of sleep the night before. They were plain rude, when it came to it, and he found he didn’t have a lot of time for it. (It was one thing for Leckie to sass Larkin, and for Runner to sleep in of a Monday - but they’d earned that privilege, and these kids were still wet behind the ears.) He was older, and looked it, and the others gave him a wide berth, his one word answers not necessarily hostile, but by no means friendly. He wasn’t here to  play football, or chase girls - he was here to study, to learn.

Lecture halls made him think of basic, somehow, or Melbourne’s cricket stadium, long rows of indifferent men thinking they knew better when they didn't. It was funny - even here, even now, he could see which of his classmates would flunk the test, and which would talk back to the professor. He picked a seat near the front of the classroom, away from the others, and carefully unloaded his books while they sat behind him talking about their dorms and the party they were going to later that week and a whole lot of things that didn’t sound a lick to him like school.

He wouldn't have looked up if they all hadn't whistled.

She was about his age, maybe a year younger - a blue sweater set and simple gray skirt set set her apart from the boys in their khaki slacks and penny loafers, her hair dressed in soft, dark curls around her shoulders - nothing fancy on the face of things, no class pin or Greek key marking her as a member of either of those tribes. But she was also a girl, exotic for math class, and therefore worthy of the attention being lavished upon her by the back row. She didn’t seem to think too much of the whistling, either, walking inside the classroom and setting her bag down on a desk. Most girls, Bill thought to himself, might have blushed for the attention - but that didn’t seem to be her style.

“You got the right classroom, miss?” one of the whiz kids asked from the back row. “This is Algebra. The room for stenography's down the hall.”

“Yeah,” his friend added, lounging in his letter sweater. “Wouldn't want you to overtire that pretty brain.”

She fixed the back row with an unimpressed stare. "I think I'm right where I need to be." And, shots thus fired, she selected a seat at the front, directly in front of Hoosier, and sat down, arranging her bag at her feet, and the rest of the room snickered uneasily, settling into their seats. Bill watched her for a moment, his eyes following her hands as she pulled out notebook and pencil and sliderule, his gaze catching on her watch - US Army issue. Well, now, that’s something.

But he didn't want to be the idiot who asked, not after that production from the back row, and the professor was arriving, anyway. A paunchy, balding type in coke-bottle glasses, he tossed his leather bag on the desk and announced, without much fanfare, that this was Mathematics 211, College Algebra, he would not be bothering to read the roll as they were not children any longer, and did not need to be so managed, and then launched dispassionately into his grading scale, the formatting he expected for assignments, and the reading they could expect to do for next week. Housekeeping thus finished, he pulled one of the chalkboards down from the vast array on the wall behind him, and went to work.

It was sixty minutes of hell, and Bill would have gladly signed up for another aerial bombardment from the Japanese before attempting it again - but the woman in front of him had silently consumed the whole lecture like a sponge, her pencil flying over her notebook and her hand raised for every question.

The professor never called on her.

The jokers in the back row, sure, more than once, even with the answers wrong, and the quivering, semi-somnambulant mass of boys in the middle of the room, but never her, even though she was in the front row and in his line of sight and obviously a deal more awake than half the others. She sat up straight in her chair in a way that looked vaguely military to the man sitting behind her, himself unable to lounge the way some of these jokers were doing.

 And in between her ability to stand her ground and the lightning fast figuring, Hoos was forming the opinion that of all the clowns in this class, this woman was not one of them, and probably a good one to have on your team besides.

At eleven o’clock precisely, the professor wrapped up his lecture, left a stack of neatly mimeographed syllabi on the desk, and left, allowing the class to filter out behind him, most, but not all, of the students stopping to pick up the syllabus. Hoosier waited until the hubbub died down before going to collect his copy, grabbing two on impulse and turning back to the woman, still carefully packing her bag.

He cleared his throat and held out the mimeograph. “Reckon they don't sell that watch at the women's counter at Montgomery Ward.” 

She looked up at him and then down at her wrist and smiled, briefly, before tucking the syllabus away in her notebook. "Reckon they don't."

“Bill Smith,” he said, holding out his hand to shake. “First Marines.”

She looked at his hand, surprised, perhaps, that he would greet her thus, one solider to another, and rose from her seat to shake his hand. She had a firm grip, and a strange callus on the palm of her hand. “Edith Lockner. Pathfinders.”

He’d been expecting her to say...something else, WACs or Nurse Corps or a boyfriend, and he couldn’t help the surprised laugh that jumped out of his mouth. “So you know something about finding your place, I guess.”

“Could say that. And I suppose you know something about front lines.”

“And guys who don’t know when to quit,” He added, more than a little pleased when the joke made her smile. “I’ll - ah - run point for you, next week, if you want. Veterans gotta stick together.” 

“You’re mighty kind to offer, Mr. Smith.”

“My friends call me Hoosier.” It was her turn to laugh, and he realized he might have to start shopping for a new nickname. “Not sure where that leaves me here at State, though.”

She nodded, still smiling. She had a nice smile - it reminded him of Lela’s, the kind that assured you she thought you were all right. “My friends call me Edie.”

[mercurygray]

Since I can’t get past that weird prompt now, maybe you can do something with #64 Violet bruised eyes for Edie and Hoosier?

This is...gosh, I’m pleased with it.

It had started simply enough - an offer to go for a drink at the Legion after the test on Thursday, a thank-you for helping him study. But there must have been something in the water, because they hadn't even finished the one drink before there was some loser at the bar asking Edie why she was out with some raggedy ass marine, and what right she had to be drinking with the boys, and those were fighting words where Hoosier came from, and, well.

The loser had gotten one good punch in at Bill - and Bill had gotten three or four good ones back before that had gotten the two of them kicked out, before they'd even had a chance to finish their drinks.

"Sorry," he offered, feeling incredibly foolish about the whole thing. His scars were aching something terrible, like they did after he forked hay a little too long, but there wasn't anything to be done about that.

"It's not the first bar I've gotten kicked out of," she shot back, rearranging her pocket book a little before she looked up at him. "Oh, we've got to put something on that eye," Edie said, almost afraid to touch him. "My place is just around the corner - and I can't let you go home like that."

So now here he was, sitting on her kitchen table with a bag of Birdseye frozen peas over his eye waiting for her to find the first aid kit in her bathroom. She lived in a little studio above a tailor's shop, maybe three other apartments on the floor. Down the hall Captain Midnight was battling this week's villain, and someone else was making dinner. It was a nice little place - small but neat - a tiny galley kitchen, a table, a comfortable chair, a bed tucked into the corner. He wanted to study the photos in the frames, but there hadn't been time.

"I know you can throw your own punches," he offered, feeling like he had to say something while he watched her rummage in her first aid kit for gauze and alcohol. "It was just the way he said it." Her mouth quirked a little, as though she were fighting a larger smile - and for half a moment, he wanted to see her do it, to make her laugh. "Also I didn't want you to, you know, split your dress or anything," he added, a little gruffly. The smile widened a little.

"I'm glad you're real concerned about my clothes as you sit here bleeding all over my table," Edie said mildly. "Now, watch where you put that bag down, I want to take a look at that cut."

He did as he was told, peeling the cool plastic away from his face so she could take a closer look, her fingers tracing over the slowly developing outlines of the bruise around his eye.

"Oh, he got you good," she said, opening a bottle and dabbing some alcohol on the break in his skin.

"I want the record to note I did lay him out after."

"My knight in shining armor over here," she said softly, and he was aware, suddenly, of how close she was to his slightly spread legs, how he could feel her breath on his face as she arranged a bandage over the corner of his eye. He hadn't been able to smell her perfume before. And for a moment, there were words on the tip of his tongue, words that couldn't be taken back once he'd said them. Home was far away and Lela farther still, and in this moment, there was only Edie.

His voice came out a little hoarse. "Can you kiss it and make it better?"

It was terribly quiet just then, and he realized, hanging his head, that he should have just shut up. But then her lips touched softly on the edge of the bruise, her breath trembling a little. "Why do you think I brought you home?"

[mercurygray]

Happy Saturday, Merc! 💕 Could I please request #37 Smile for Ruth and Joe, and/or #100 Relaxation for Irene & Shifty and/or #19 Gray for Edie & Hoosier?

oh, mmph, these are so good.

smile

Joe Toye doesn't smile.

He's well known for it - it's part of his persona, the immovable tough guy act that he's been putting on since well before the war took his leg and will doubtless continue long after his last visit to his physical therapist.

Ruth knows this extremely well; she married him, after all, even after her mother begged her to reconsider, because how could a man with a constant scowl be a source of joy?

She's just as much a part of the act as he is, convincing the world that nothing touches him, but the smile he puts on for his baby daughter looks like it could replace the sun, and that's a secret she'll happily keep for as long as he needs her to.

relaxation

He could already see the end of the war.

When Shifty closed his eyes they were there, clear as day, on a porch swing at a house that hadn't been built yet. There was a glass of tea in her hand and he could smell the sunshine from her dress drying on the line, and the curves of her lap were just the same as they were now, where his head was nestled.

They were there, and Irene’s hand was playing with his hair, humming the same song she was humming now, and there was wind in the grass and the creak of the swing, and he knew that was what peace looked like, what it meant to be content.

But Black is the color of my true love's hair. His face is like some rosy fair, The prettiest face and the neatest hands, I love the ground whereon he stands.

gray

Hoos doesn't care for funerals.

No one does, of course, but there's a finality there that he knows a lot of guys never got, shoveled into shallow pits with nothing but a poncho over their heads, slowly rotting out. No green fields for them, no sir - nothing holy about it.

But Edie needs him today, and he can't help notice as the coffin is lowered into the ground while the black-clad crowd sniffles or sobs that even the gray of the sky is in on the public act of mourning.

He catches her looking up, when the service is over, and watches her shiver, scowling before she catches his eye. "It's like the war," she offers, and he remembers, belatedly, that this is one more point where they diverge, one story like so many of his own that she may never tell him.

[soft saturday: send a word and a character, get a five sentence drabble!]

[mercurygray]

Since it’ll be a nice continuation of where things ended in the other one, Spots to kiss # 7 for Edie and Hoosier ❤️

#7, places to kiss: on the eyelid.

The sun wakes him up.

It's been a long time since he got up for anything but the alarm clock and the feeling is strange - softer, gentler, a slow tug from sleep rather than a hard yank into wakefulness. He's been woken up by the sun in lots of places, in the Solomons and the Russells and even in Australia, but it never felt friendly like it does here, a gentle kiss filtering through the curtains and touching his eyes.

Of course, it helps that there's a person there who is also, of her own will, kissing his eyes. He can feel her lips on the bruised orbital of his eye, the slight ridge of his eyebrow. Her lips are warm and dry and there's a slight tickle from her hair, which is loose and messy. (Well it should be; he had his hands in it last night and she liked them there.)

He can't help teasing her a little from behind closed eyes. "That was nice."

Edie's voice sounds apologetic. "I woke you."

"Gotten worse wake-up calls, I can assure you."

"You were tired, I should have let you sleep."

He blinks his eyes open, just to see her reaction. "Just couldn't resist my face, could you?"

She is nearly golden in the sunlight from her window, sitting up in bed wearing an old PT shirt she must have put on when she woke up.  "You sleep like every solder I know sleeps," she said, evading the question. "Like it's your last five minutes."

"And you're still getting up with the watch schedule," he observed wryly. She doesn't deny it - his body never took to sleeping three hours at a stretch like some of the others did. At the first opportunity in Melbourne he went right on back to sleeping like a brick, as he always had in places where he felt safe.

"Make you breakfast?"

"I could eat."

She smiled and got up to check her icebox, feet silent on her floorboards, and he sat up a little to watch her, taking it all in - the sunlight, the sheets, the sounds outside her window in the street.

Maybe she couldn't resist his face, but he couldn't resist her. He'd fooled around with Lela a time or two, back of her brother's truck or the hayloft, but he'd never slept with her, stayed in her bed. That was a different kind of being intimate, one he'd never...really allowed himself, never feeling like he belonged there where they'd landed. But then, that hadn't ever really been safe. He could have left last night - he wasn't all that tired when they'd finished. But he'd stayed here.

Because you know it's safe, his mind and the sun suggested in unison. Because she's safe.

[mercurygray]

😢 for Edie Lockner, with sugar on top

Edie comes from good Midwestern folks, who won't show an emotion unless they know you really well. Additionally, she's a woman in a very traditionally masculine role, where any display of any emotion is dismissed as hysteria. She likes to keep herself to herself - if you're seeing her feel anything, the chances are really good she likes you.

[emoji headcanons}

[mercurygray]

Happy Thursday Merc! Could I please request a 👗 fashion headcanon for Mary Alice and a 🎭 hobby headcanon for Edie?

👗 fashion headcanon:

Mary Alice's fashion sense is pretty well stuck in the Sears Catalog - her parents don't have a lot of money, even if she's an only child, so there's not a lot of room for personal expression where clothing's concerned (and she wasn't ever great shakes at dressmaking in home ec.) But she's not above taking the bus downtown and peeping in all the windows on State Street - Marshall Fields and Carson Pirie Scott, where all those ladies who lunch go for their evening gowns and gloves and little jeweled hats before tea time in the Walnut room. (One day she'll go for tea in the Walnut Room, in a lovely dress with gloves. One day.)

🎭 hobby headcanon

Edie built her own radio set as a kid - got the parts and the plan from Popular Mechanics and spent all her free time fiddling with vacuum tubes and a soldering iron. Did a little bit of ham radio, too - she could pick up broadcasts from Canada, on a good day.

[mercurygray]

It's a little rainy today which usually makes for a slow day, so I'm trying something a little lightweight today.

I just reblogged an emoji headcanon meme.

I have a couple of one hit wonder OCs that are sort of rattling around in the background while I work on TDS and I would LOVE an opportunity to talk or think about them a little more. You can send an emoji for one of them - or for your TDS fave, too. There’s a complete list of Girl Gang members here and an ongoing list of GG ships here, But! I could be persuaded to write for a different fandom iifff the right opportunity presented itself.

Edie Lockner (Right Where I Need to Be)

Julia Jones

Mary Alice Holbrook

Phyl McCray

[mercurygray]

1940s Girl Gang - The Official List

For strategic random generator purposes.

WAC (PIR) Bryant Judy Fowler June Gordon Marjorie Griffiths Julie Hammond Eileen Henderson Irene Mahoney Molly Mitchell Belinda "Billie" Russo Doris Schmidt Connie Shapiro Ruth Sutton Annie (1st Lt) Warren Joan

Lee Hannah Paquin Marguerite "Maggie" O'Connell Niamh Schwartz Lillie

WAC (Airborne, Pathfinders) Lockner, Edith “Edie

ANC Horgan Frances "Frankie" Arsenault Laura Arsenault Vivian

WLA Blake Constance Mansell Celia Scott Althea Stevens Jessie

Aldbourne Frobisher Abigail Stevens Elaine Morgan Harriet McCray Phyllis

Supporting

Grogan Katherine “Kitty” Winters Annie  Winters Ethel Warren Bess Holbrook Mary Alice

MCWR

Atcheson Marie

[ktredshoes]

Merc's usual excellent work on display. *chef's kiss*

Hello! How about

29.— preparation from the one word prompts for Edie, please?

@ktredshoes also asked for Edie and the word 'bitter' - i hope you two don't mind that I decided to combine them!

This was as close as she'd ever get.

It was quiet, up here in the slow-curling light of dawn - outside, Winks and the rest of the crew were checking engines and spark plugs and surveying the rest of their repairs, and she was up in the nose of the plane, the light slowly illuminating the compartment through the plexiglass, sending shadows here and there. And right at the head of the compartment, leading the whole plane - the bombsight, sitting on its mounting like a Sphinx, knobs and dials ready to divine and deliver.

This one had come straight from the workshop this morning - she'd carried it out here herself in its special canvas bag and carefully mounted it into the stabilizers, sitting back to wait for the bombardier who'd be going out with this plane this morning.

The bombardier - who was not her. This was as close as she would ever get to the war.

Never mind that she knew the thing as well as she knew her own hands, never mind that she'd studied and trained on it more hours than anyone would care to count. Someone else would take the sight out this morning and make it do its terrible work, because the Army Air Forces were not in the business of putting women in airplanes. That's what she'd been told, angrily, after she'd handed in the same already-graded copy of the exam all the bomber boys were taking, shown her score to the instructor. Don't we keep hearing there's a shortage of qualified candidates?

"Now, don't you worry about that, Sergeant Lockner," he'd said, sputtering. "We've got plenty of men to take care of those things."

Plenty of men, was it? Plenty of men who'd scored lower than she had on that exam? But the nose of the plane as it sat on the ground in Norfolk was as far as she'd go. Plenty of men who wouldn't be able to do the work she could do inside the sight tuning and fixing and measuring, because she was a girl, and her fingers were finer, and those other things, the coarse-grained war things, could be handled by them.

A truck grumbled by outside, and Edie got off the bombardier's seat and moved to sit on the floor near the instrument panel, listening as the men got out of the truck and began loading into the plane, stubbing out cigarettes and joking about the weather, their kit bags landing with soft thumps into the belly of the plane. "You getting her all set up for me up here, Edie?"

"Locked and loaded for your checks, sir."

James Douglass sat down in his seat and looked over at her with a smile on his face. "Now when are you gonna quit it with the ranks and just call me Doug like everyone else does?"

She rolled her eyes. "When I'm sure you're not gonna make something of it, Lieutenant." Calling me Edie's bad enough, but everyone does that.

Douglass looked disappointed. "Is my reputation really that bad?" he asked. "Hold on - don't answer that. It's already all over your face."

Your reputation for being interested in every girl who'll give you the time of day? That reputation? "Would have thought you'd call that good, where you're sitting."

"Would be if I could get a date out of it," Douglass groused.

"Want me to run the checklist with you, sir?" Edie asked, walking straight past any remarks she wanted to make about how the doctrine of precision bombing worked on women, too, if they didn't think you were just dropping compliments on anything that moved, but it was early, and they had a war to fight, and she needed to be out of the plane before all four of those engines started firing.

"Cutting it a little close," Douglass observed, but made no move to stop her and reached for his checklist.

Of course I am, Edie agreed bitterly, reaching for the master switch, the first item on the list she could recite by heart. Close is all I've got.

[ktredshoes]

Also one of the best birthday presents ever.

It’s @ktredshoes​‘ birthday today, and when I asked her what sort of drabble she wanted, she asked for Hoosier, from The Pacific, and a chance encounter with one of the Girl Gang somewhere. There’s a pretty wide gap between Melbourne and Aldbourne, though, so this is most def post war, and actually features someone I haven’t talked about at all yet - she’s an OFC who should be appearing later this year in a forthcoming ensemble fic from @wexhappyxfew​.

He thought going home would mean he wanted to stay there.

He’d had enough of traveling to last a lifetime, on troop transports and hospital ships, trucks and LCVPs and DUKWs and trains, and he’d thought by the time he made it home it would time for him to rest his feet.

But instead of resting, Hoosier Smith was restless.

There were no beaches in Loogootee, no oceans or waves except for the wind blowing through the cornfields, the endless horizons green and golden growing things, instead of blue water. Now, he was fairly certain he never wanted to see another beach again in his life, never mind another palm tree, crab, or coconut, but he found himself missing all those things - or rather, missing things around them, the friends that were now more dear to him than family.

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