#gonna watch early season episodes of project runway & move on!!!!

[kitnita]

whatever, i've reached a state of zen about it all actually. i don't want to blow up the team -otter with my mind anymore. they're just trying to build on the near-reverse-sweep vibes of last year's playoffs and lull all of vegas into a false sense of security by sucking as much as humanly possible

[a-sweet-pea]

The Last Flight

A/N: I see ‘hyperfixation’ pop up on my dash every so often, and as far as I can gather its sort of related to add / adhd, and it pretty much is what it sounds like. With that in mind, if a person had plenty of other writing projects to deal with but then they watched an episode of a TV show, and a thirty-second portion lodged itself in their brain so firmly that they watched just that clip, like, eighteen more times, while walking to pick up some takeout, while on lunchbreak at work, and it made them absolutely fall in love with the idea of reinterpreting that whole episode in a G/T context, such that they pretty much couldn’t focus on any other WIP because they were too in love with the performance of this particular actor, the combination of old-fashioned military politeness, cocky fly-boy attitude tempered with vulnerability and confusion, and big dark scared eyes and clark-kent style hair, and then they wrote almost two-thousand words about it, is that what hyperfixation is? Asking for a friend.

On an entirely unrelated note, this is a short fanfic of Season 1, Episode 18 of the Twilight Zone. Some pieces of the dialogue are taken directly from the episode, and I highly recommend watching it (it’s available on USA Netflix) if only the segment from 3 minutes in to 7 minutes in.

- - -

Witness Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France. The year is 1917. The problem is that the Lieutenant is hopelessly lost. Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of maps and miles, but also in time and dimension - and all of these navigational touchstones are waylaid in the Twilight Zone.

Sara was just stepping out of her front door when the plane landed. The street was empty. Not many people were up at six in the morning on a saturday, at least not in the early early spring, when the weather had a habit of acting as if it was still winter. Sara was only up because a particularly loud bird had taken up residence in the tree next to her bedroom, and she was never able to go back to sleep once she’d woken up. She was only outside because inbetween bouts of birdsong, she’d heard this weird chattering engine noise and wanted to see what it was. And she saw it the moment she stepped outside; a model airplane landing on the sidewalk going up to her house like it was a runway. It touched down at the far end of the walk, by the mailbox, and came to a stop about halfway to the stoop.

Who on the street owns a model plane? She looked the road up and down but there were no conspicuous remote-control-holding children in any of the nearby windows. Maybe someone got one for Christmas and they only ever play with it early in the morning.

The propeller slowed to a lazy twirl as she got closer. Hopefully whoever owns it put their name on it so I can return it.

Something climbed out of the plane.

What the hell?

Sara had seen videos of people putting their pets in model cars or planes; hamsters or lizards, anything small enough to fit in the cockpit. It seemed like such an awful thing to do to a pet. I hope they didn’t put their name on the plane, and then I’ll have an excuse not to return it. You don’t get to have a pet if you’re going to fly it around in a remote control plane; I don’t care how carefully you land it, that’s just irresponsible.

No, it wasn’t a pet. It must have just fallen out of the cockpit, not climbed out, because it was shaped like a person.

Now, putting an action figure in a model plane; that’s fine.

An action figure that was standing up on it’s own, despite having tumbled out of the plane. An action figure that took off it’s helmet and tossed it into the plane. An action figure that turned around and looked at her, and stumbled backward, and took off at a run in the opposite direction..

Small as it was, it didn’t get very far.

She knelt down on the concrete and curled her fingers around the fleeing figure. It wriggled in her grip; tiny hands pushed against her fingers, struggling to pry them apart.

It’s not…it isn’t…

She grabbed the plane in her other hand. It was metal, and it was still hot, like the hood of a car that’s been running all day.

They make remote control airplanes out of metal, don’t they?

She pushed back through the door, hands full, and let it slam shut behind her. The thing that could not be what it looked like still struggled in her right hand. She let her grip loosen a fraction. The plane, she set down on the coffee table. The other thing, she did not set down. She sat down on the couch and took a deep breath.

Why am I so shaky?

Her hand shook as she lifted it toward her face, opening it as she did so that her palm lay flat. And on it was an impossible creature, scrambling to his feet.

A man. A man with dark eyes and dark hair that was parted at the side and touseled at his forehead. A man dressed in a leather aviator jacket, a white scarf, clean pressed pants, and tall leather boots. A man who was four inches tall.

“Holy…” He flinched at the sound of her voice, raising his hands in front of his face as if to shield himself.

“Sorry!” She cut her volume in half. “A-are you okay?”

He wasn’t listening. His eyes were fixed on her, but his attention was elsewhere, fumbling for something at his waist; some miniscule metal implement. When he raised it, gripping the handle in one hand and steadying his grip with the other, it became clear what it was.

“Easy, easy.” His shoulders were steady but his chest was heaving with hyperventilated breaths, and his hands were shaking so much the gun didn’t stay pointed in any one direction for more than a moment. Even so, she was such a big target (relatively speaking) that he was liable to hit something if he fired. “Put the gun away.” He swallowed, readjusting his grip. “I’m not gonna hurt you, I promise.”

“Are you American?”

It took her a moment to answer, she was so startled. He can talk. That somehow made him more real (one would have thought that seeing and touching him would have been enough to establish the truth of his existence, but apparently she had still been partway unconvinced).

“Yes. Are you?”

He shook his head. “British.” The tip of the gun faltered, and then lowered. “What-who are you?”

“I’ll tell you if you put the gun away.” He nodded and holstered the gun. “Name’s Sara. Sorry for grabbing you, hope you’re not too shook up. What’s your name?”

He stood straighter, a puppet with it’s strings pulled tight all of a sudden. “Leftenant William Terrance Decker.” He brought his hand to his forehead with rigid military precision. “Royal Flying Corps.” Hearing him speak properly, she could have guessed he was British. A refined and educated, albeit currently out of sorts, English accent.

“Pleased to meet you, Leftenant.”

He lowered his arm, but he still stood rigid as a toy soldier. He turned his head one way and the other, taking in his surroundings with increasing confusion. “Where exactly am I?”

“Havelock, North Carolina. In my house, specifically. Where did you think you were?”

“Well, I thought I was landing at 56 Squadron RFC.” He laughed nervously. “But I also thought the worst thing that could happen on patrol would be to run into was a German plane, and well, here we are.”

German? Despite the fact that Germans had no doubt made many planes since, ‘German plane’ was a phrase somehow inexorably tangled up with the world wars. Add to that a British pilot, and the connection was almost undeniable. And his plane has a definite early-World-War look to it, like the one on display up at Cherry Point.

“What’s today’s date?”

He answered without hesitation, although he looked puzzled. “March the fifth.”

Correct. “What year?”

He looked doubly puzzled. “Why, nineteen-seventeen.”

“Nineteen-seventeen?” The little figure in her hand suddenly felt different. More alien. More lost.

“That’s correct.” What little composure he’d mustered over the past few minutes faltered slightly. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s…” She paused, trying to choose her words carefully. Was it possible to phrase this delicately? “It’s two-thousand and seventeen.”

He stared past her. There was different fear in his eyes now; not the wild, dangerous fear of seeing her. Something subtler and stranger.

“Uh…look here…” He spoke much softer now, voice steady despite his obvious distress. He looked down at her palm; she felt the toe of a minuscule boot tentatively tap her skin. “You…” He looked back up at her, eyes wide with concern and confusion. "You’re not joking with me, are you?"

She shook her head.

“Good lord…” Already unsteady on his feet, his weight shifted and he fell to one knee.

“Careful!”

He didn’t respond to her warning, if he even processed it. He was staring into the distance, lowering himself to a sitting position in the center of her palm. She could feel his arms shaking where they touched skin.

“When I was landing…” He was whispering still, Sara had to lift her hand closer to hear him. He was too lost in remembering to notice. “There was a thick white cloud…I couldn’t hear my engine. It was like being swallowed in a vacuum. The same sort of thing happened to Guy Niemayer. He disappeared one day while flying. At the memorial service the Cardinal said ‘He belonged to the sky, and the sky has taken him.”

“Well, he never showed up here, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

He jumped, shaken from a reverie.

“Well of course not, I only…” His voice trailed away. He was looking at her as if he’d only just remembered she was there. “Is this what he saw as he was dying?”

“You’re not dying!”

“Aren’t I?” He gestured at the air, at nothing. “Castaway in time and space; in the clutches of giant? It all feels to real to be a dream, and if it’s not then I don’t see what else it could be.”

“You’re not in my clutches!” Sara lowered her hand to the coffee table; the Leftenant’s fingers dug into her palm at the sudden movement. “I-I’m not clutching. Honest.” He didn’t move at first, but the longer she kept her hand flat and still, the more assured he was that it wasn’t going to suddenly lift off again. He pushed himself to his feet and walked unsteadily off the edge of her palm. Sara lifted her hand away and absent mindedly brushed her palm with the thumb of the other hand.

He’s so light.

He took a few cautious steps on the glass table top, looking up toward the ceiling, what must have been a hundred feet above him or more.

“I’m sorry…” He turned back to her with a very militaristic about face. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I didn’t mean to."

He crossed his arms and furrowed his brow. “I’m not afraid.”

She smiled wide and did one of those quick breathy laughs you can’t politely supress because you weren’t expecting it. “Good.”

A/N 2 : If this is rushed and unpolished, it’s because I farted it out. This idea was literally posessing me. Also, I spelled Lieutenant weird on purpose because they pronounced it that way. This whole post is a fever dream. I make no apologies.