#stop telling me amateurly isn't a word i'm saying it's a word

[shoshiwrites]

my dear, I'd like to submit a Touches prompt: "#35 grabbing the other's hand to pull them back to them" for anyone who tickles your fancy. just need that sorta passion in my life 🥹

I just want to apologize for the fact that this actually is not entirely the prompt, but was 100% inspired by it — I owe you one ❤️ Bucky Egan/War correspondent OC, also on Ao3! Set a little bit after this prompt. Featuring Jo with some new mail and Bucky having some thoughts and feelings about that.

The Clarion starts running her picture with the new pieces. 

She doesn’t hate it, but at the same time it doesn’t quite look like her, the posed portrait she’d sat for in London with her hair pinned back her uniform pressed. She’s more herself in the photos Kay takes, under the cloudy English skies. But she can’t argue with it either — a uniform means something official, and isn’t that what they’re working for? To be taken seriously, to get what the boys are given without having to fight tooth and nail for it, without jokes about lipstick or hair products or a million other things on top of it.

The problem with the picture now, though, is that everyone knows who she is. Not a celebrity, that idea is laughable, but named. Josephine R. Brandt, The Clarion’s Woman in England. 

They’re like name-tags too, the adjectives used to describe her and her fellow reporters in bite-sized news items. Marian Brenner is always petite, and Kay is statuesque. Marjory Manning is titian-haired, which always gets a laugh considering Marjory makes no secret that it comes from a bottle. Jo is brunette, and pert. That word always makes Kay choke a little on her cigarette, peering at Jo and the dark circles under her eyes.

She’s spent the last few days amongst the women of the Clubmobile, sleeping in an extra bed dragged in and photographing, rather amateurly, their truck and living quarters. They were much more accommodating to her than they should have been, especially when Jo attempted to work the fryer in the name of journalistic exploration. Thankfully she was much better at cleaning, with no qualms about rolling up her sleeves. 

Her hair still smells like grease as she sits in an empty mess hall, picking at one of her nails and ignoring the stack of letters beside her. Her photographs wouldn’t quite capture what she’d tried to in her writing: the smell of perfume and the lingering fryer grease, hair tonic and newsprint and cold evening air, the blankets and bedrolls and towels hanging, tables with books and magazines and framed photographs, small pots of rouge, rosaries, hair combs and extra socks. A sprig of chicory sitting in a drinking glass, the blue flowers starting to wilt at the edges.

A name. A picture. What she hadn’t been thinking about — fanmail. 

It was ridiculous, the pile Kay had passed along to her in London and the one she was now patently ignoring next to her elbow. Next to a copy of the paper, a newer one with the picture.

She’d always gotten responses to her pieces back home, whether that meant someone arguing with her about a labor statistic she’d quoted or offering their own version of a recipe back when she’d been on the society pages. Now, overseas, with her name and her picture clear as day, it was like a switch had been flipped.

The only thing that she didn’t have to worry about was William.

The ring was sitting at the bottom of her trunk, buried under a sweater. Tatty had offered to run it over with the Clubmobile, but Jo got worried about the tires. Helen had suggested the fryer. A WAC with strawberry blonde hair voted for a storm drain. Biddick had plans that involved Corporal Lemmons and an unknown quantity of explosives. Douglass, inexplicably, had volunteered to make neat work of it on an upcoming mission. She had no idea how he’d even found out. 

Well, she isn’t wearing it anymore, right?

“Thought I’d find you in here.”

She looks up to see Egan making his way through the doors.

“Someone looking for me?”

He glances behind him and smiles, like it’s obvious. “Yeah, me.”

Maybe she knows better by now than to ask what he’s ignoring to be here. Milk run earlier this afternoon. Not flying tomorrow. 

Isn’t it time for beers and darts, right about now?

“Just answering some mail.” Actual mail, from home. Not the other stack. 

Maybe fanmail is a generous term, she thinks. Most of it is opinions, loud, of where she should or shouldn’t be. Home. Doing war work instead if she had to do something. Some less savory suggestions. Being quiet. 

“You’re a popular correspondent,” he says, sitting down across from her. 

She snorts. 

“I’m just seeing that there’s lot of letters here.”

“Astute observation, Major.” But she’s smiling. 

“Friends back home?”

“Yeah. The rest is-” she gestures, almost sighing out the answer in a sudden yawn, the light outside the soft gold of early evening. “I don’t know. People have a lot to say.”

“They do, do they?”

“Sometimes I forget that I’m not just a disembodied voice, is all.”

He looks a little puzzled, but still amused. She throws the paper in front of him, and his eyes catch the column. He whistles. “Front page, huh.”

“They haven’t used a picture before.” She nods back at the stack of letters.

“Oh.” She can’t tell if he’s about to make a joke or not.

“Might just toss them,” she says. They’d be good for the paper pulp if nothing else.

He grabs one off the top, his expression clouding over as he reads.

“They write this kinda stuff to you?” he says after a minute. One of the ones that had ideas about where she should be, namely the writer’s bed. He tosses it down on the table.

She thinks of London, and Norwich, and Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. “They say it, too.”

He exhales, the sour expression still on his face. Like a lemon. “Sure.”

“You didn’t get to the marriage proposals yet.”

“The what?”

“They’re in there, I promise. They’re nicer.” He laughs a little, just this side of bitter. She tries to look offended, tries to lighten the mood. “Maybe I ought to be insulted.”

“No, no, I just-”

“Just what?”

He’s tapping his foot a little, she can feel it under the table. Fidgeting.

“I just feel lucky, is all.” The question of it is clear on her face. Lucky, sure, to go through hell every day and make it back here, to the ground and the summer-faded English fields. “That you’re not just a picture to me.”

Oh.

Something feels caught in her throat; it takes what feels like too many seconds. “You’re awfully sweet.”

“I mean it.” She wishes she had a little crabapple to pick at, something to do with her hands. “Don’t think a picture could’ve kissed that good either-”

She tries to whack the back of her hand against his arm, but he pulls away — hey, too quick — before he leans forward again, pulls her face to his. 

“Not here-” she says, a little too belatedly. He’s grinning, all wolfish. His hands are warm. 

“Will you go dancing with me, then?” 

A place where they can do this, she assumes, out of sight, or amongst a crowd. She says it because it feels like something she should say. “There’s something planned here for the weekend, right?”

He makes a gentle scoffing sound. “Nah, I don’t-”

“What?”

“I mean, sure, but. You know. Just be prepared for me to keep stealing you away, ok?”

“And how will that look?”Her stomach swoops, out of something like nervousness, the feel of him close to her again. 

He looks, maybe, the most boyish she’s seen him. “Like I don’t like sharing.”

Like she makes that space for anyone else. That exception. “You can reserve a spot or two on your dance card for me,” she says, diplomacy betrayed by the half-waver of her voice. 

He assents, not entirely satisfied, but doesn’t try for another kiss. Not here, at least. She feels a chill go through her then, when he pulls away from her, lets go.