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Ever After - 1

A/N: This is the first installment of a HS AU vignette series titled Ever After that I'm starting. It will contain bite-sized or longer drabbles from the boys' lives, primarily their lives with the kids. This is for me to be able to post little scenes without having to work on a fully fleshed-out fic. Once I feel like the series is about final, I will post it on AO3. I will be tagging the Tumblr posts #hs au: ever after.

Enjoy reading! ❤️

The night breeze feels warm and soothing as Gale cradles his sleeping daughter by the window. He rocks her gently, looking at the sky outside, where he knows the stars are beaming at them even if the waxing moon eclipses their light. Summer is in full bloom. The air is thick with the honey-scent of linden from the tree blossoming in their backyard. The room is filled with it, and with the whiff of fresh laundry and the smells of home. But nothing, Gale thinks, will ever smell as sweet as her.

Abigail. His sweet little Abby.

In the silver glow of moonlight, he looks down at her perfect face. Her small nose, the curve of her lips, her chubby cheek squished against his bare chest as she sleeps. Her almond-shaped eyes - John's eyes, his blues - now closed, the tiniest eyelashes a faint shadow on her skin. His hand, so big and wide on her back. If he moves his thumb, he can stroke her baby curls. They're dark, like John's. She seems to take after him. Although it may just be that Gale's perception is wired to see it so.

Her hand is curled into a small fist right above Gale's heart. Gale wants to touch it, to caress her tiny fingers and feel them curl around the tip of his own, holding on with instinctive trust, but he doesn’t want to risk waking her. As expected, sleep has been a challenge since she entered their lives two months ago, and he wants to give John a chance to rest. He doesn’t know if unbuttoning his shirt helps, or if it was the lullabies he sang for her, but she seems attuned to him tonight, settling as soon as he gathers her in his arms when she cries.

He didn’t know that it would feel like this. Holding a tiny life and feeling the whole universe in every beat of her heart.

His sight blurs, and he sniffs, looking at the night sky again. There's a longing in him he can’t explain, a pain he doesn’t dare touch. He didn’t know. How could he have known?

Behind him, the door creaks open, and he hears careful footsteps, padding as lightly as a man as large as John ever could.

"Hey." John whispers.

Gale wants to tell him to go back to sleep, but he’s too tired, and that's too many words for something John already knows.

A warm hand presses to his neck, stroking a path down his back before coming to rest on his nape again. John's thumb moves back and forth over his skin as he leans over to look at their daughter. After a moment, he reaches out to caress her cheek with the back of a single finger, and as his hand moves away from her face, it comes to rest on top of Gale's.

Saltwater stings in Gale's tired eyes.

It doesn't escape John's notice. "Why are you crying?"

Gale shakes his head. He’s not crying. If it doesn't spill, it doesn’t count.

Trying to offer comfort, John squeezes the back of Gale's neck, and his lips press to Gale’s temple. "Let’s put her down and go back to bed, huh? I'll close the window."

"I tried. She woke up."

"Let’s try again." John insists gently, stepping away to close the window, then coming back to put his arm around Gale again. He leans his head against Gale's, half-asleep.

They stand there together, the three of them, swaying side to side like water cradling a weightless swimmer, and that pain flares up in Gale again. He had been so afraid before she was born. Afraid that he’d be like his father. Or John's father. That he’d never be able to love her the way she deserves to be loved. That he’d fail, that he would not be enough, not good enough, that she would feel all the dark shadows in his soul, his strangeness, and reject him. He was afraid he would never be able to become who she needs him to be.

He's not afraid anymore.

He leans into his husband's embrace. "I didn’t think I'd ever love anyone as much as I love you, Johnny."

John's exhale stutters against his cheek.

[middlingmay]

Anyways, I love them so deeply your honor

[middlingmay]

Masterpost: That Ol' Devil Called Love

Finally got round to making this masterpost! One year, 315K words, four side fics, three pieces of art, a Pinterest board, a playlist, and countless posts, headcanons and asks later...

Fics

That Ol' Devil Called Love

"D'you think you're a sinning man, John?" It's 1940s America, and street racing has passed from the gangs of the '30s to the youth of the '40s. John never started the Bloody 100th to make a name for himself in the criminal belly of racing; he just liked their money. It kept the shop open and his mechanics from the unemployment line. And his ma and sisters happy. But when he meets Gale Cleven, son of the local pastor who hates John and his crew with near religious fervour, John finds himself stumbling into a new kind of trouble - one that might just bring down everything he's worked for.

TODCL Side Stories

A collection of side stories that take place in the That Ol' Devil Called Love Universe, that don't make it into the main fic. Buddy DeMarco confronts the Stalag Six. Gale shows John just how much he likes to drive fast. Curt helps Marge connect to her wild side. Benny and Brady share a dance

Posts, Headcanons, Asks and more

Explore the TODCL tumblr tag

Art and visuals

Title card artwork commission by @swifty-fox. Final scene by @artisttess Did you even mean it? When you told me you loved me? plus timelapse by @swifty-fox TODCL art tag Pinterest board

Music

TODCL soundtrack tag Spotify playlist

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Freeze! 🔫 you're under arrest for being so lovely 🩷🥰 Copy this message to other blogs that you think are amazing and deserve it 🩷✨️ Keep the game going and make others feel amazing, appreciated, loved, wonderful and important 🩷🫂

You're a sweetie 🥰

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The Mirror and The Sun now also running items on Callum Turner as the next Bond. 63% of people posting about the role though Callum would be good for the role 😊😊

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♦️🔸️💎🔸️♦️🔹️💎🔹️♦️🔸️💎🔸️♦️

KEEP IT 🔸️ OR 🔸️SELL IT ❓️

1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk Supercharged 289 V8

[middlingmay]

Can we have a bit of 🏇 ? Pretty please 🥰

🫡aye aye!

...

Bucky really, really can’t take it anymore. He pulls Gale as close as he physically can and presses their lips together and it is everything he’s been missing. But after one perfect moment, Gale gently pushes him away. “John, we can’t-”

“Why not?” Bucky asks.

Gale motions vaguely to the world outside of Whiskey’s empty stall. “Because,” he says, so convincingly. That damn blush on his face is really selling it, and Bucky holds back a laugh, because Gale is still a little bit of a prude after all. “We’re at Santa Anita Park. For the Olympics. There’s people and-”

“Okay, one second.” Bucky steps away and peeks out through the stall door. He looks the aisle up and down, listening carefully for voices or footsteps or hooves clopping on the ground. Kenny won’t be back with Whiskey for at least ten minutes, and there’s no sign of the rest of team USA. There’s nothing but quiet. Nothing but the two of them. He ducks back into the stall. “Coast is clear.”

“John-”

Before Gale can protest any more, Bucky’s hands are back on his waist, and he’s pushing him back, back, back until he’s pressed against the wall. That shuts him right up, and he moans softly as Bucky kisses him with everything he has, everything he couldn’t say for the past few weeks.

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new little fic where bucky’s having a terrible time. if that interests you. 1.7k, rated M

Gale tells him he asked Marge to marry him. Gale tells him Marge said yes.

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Thanks for the tag @girlswiththecurls! Here’s the next little bit of my published wip, picks up right after the last snippet

He wished more than anything, more than he wished he was still in the air, that he could love Gale right. Buck was the perfect man, perfect friend, and John couldn’t just take him for what he was. He had to go and want more, and now Buck was— doing this. This was far worse than never having it at all. This was agony, torture.

Gale’s mouth was soft and sweet, and he was taking Bucky apart with confidence and skill. He knew in his mind that Gale didn’t mean it, but he couldn’t convince his body that was the case. The parts of John that were more animal than man now growled, filled with arousal that seeped from his pores.

Fuck it, John thought. It won’t matter soon anyway.

He let himself fall into Buck’s mouth, desperate for the taste of his tongue and starving for the cut of his teeth. If there was one thing in the world that he wanted, it was Gale, Gale, Gale. He was selfish enough to let this happen, a bad enough person to take advantage of Buck’s friendship and the lengths it had taken him to.

Something to take with me.

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I'm just thinking about Gale grabbing John by his dog tags, wrapping them around his hands and pulling him in to kiss the daylights out of him.... yes

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Safety Net

Summary: Clegan parenthood stuff with Betty.

Word count: 2.6k. (Based on @buckpregnant cleganverse!!)

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“How is she?”

“She’s beautiful.”

“No,” Gale murmured, a sliver of a laugh slipping from the corner of his mouth like a thread coming loose. “How is she? Hungry? Fussy? Sleeping?”

“Nah,” John replied, lazily, with the kind of blithe confidence Gale found most insufferable in him. “She’s perfect.”

Perfect.

Gale exhaled a sound that had no shape; no centre, no edges, just an exasperated ghost of breath that trickled from the thin line of his lips and vanished. It was neither relief nor resignation, but something liminal and low and worn like the polish on the edge of a well-used coin. He pushed himself up from the desk with hesitancy; his body a barely-stitched thing still uncertain of its own borders.

The Stalag, ever unyielding in its ascetic brutality, was no place for softness, yet John had made it into a nest, a throneroom of sorts, where he reclined on the couch like some sloppy monarch with their offspring on his chest. There lay Betty, tethered to him by breath and skin and impossible peace, tiny limbs sprawled, her miniature fingers splayed like pale sea stars against his collarbone. Her eyes—open, moonwide—tracked John’s face with a reverence that struck Gale as something almost offensive. Reverence. Already.

“You’re meant to be rocking her to sleep.” Gale said, the words falling dully into the room.

“I am,” John said, still watching her. “Or I will. I don’t know. She’s just so small. I don’t want to put her down.”

Gale stopped at the threshold of the couch, though not of the moment, and did not approach further. His hand, as if drawn by a marionette’s string, found its old post at his abdomen. The womb was empty, the stitches long dissolved, the blood long scrubbed away, and yet—there it was. The ache. Not of pain, but of vacancy. Of a hollow bell ringing with memory.

The omega instincts hadn’t caught up to time. His body, confused animal that it was, mistook absence for threat. And beneath that, something worse. A hunger. The notion—absurd, instinctual, unforgivable—that perhaps another child might settle this trembling, like a weight pressing down on a cornered sheet.

“I can’t get over how much she looks like you.” John said softly.

Gale gave the smallest of nods. His face, so practised in its defences, betrayed nothing. A master of careful vacancy. He adjusted the corners of his mouth with the delicacy of a man turning down a bedsheet.

“She’ll grow out of it.”

“I hope not!” John glanced up at him then, a brief flash of bright sincerity in a face Gale wished, just now, would remain bowed forever. “She’s beautiful. Like you. It’d be cruel if she ended up looking like me.”

Cruel.

Gale sat down, crosswise, near John’s legs and without ceremony. John shifted, ever the eager host, but Gale pressed a hand—pale, cold, almost papal—against his knee to still him. He preferred the closeness, or at least what passed for closeness. John’s legs jabbed gently at his side, and it grounded him in a way that almost justified the decision.

But he did not look at Betty.

Because John was right, maddeningly, innocently right; she looked like him. Not in that vague, flattering way new parents liked to assign features as if they were distributing favours at a party, but with exactitude. With eerie precision. A copy, carbon and cruel. As though her soul, on its way down from whatever holding place the unborn reside in, had passed by one of Gale’s old photographs and mistook it for a template. She was him. Down to the tilt of the brow, the sleepy melancholy of the eye, the slope of a nose too delicate to be called noble.

And yet.

No trace of John.

No rescue.

There was no indulgent, wide set nose, no cleft of that stubborn chin, no crooked grin that might have interrupted the mirror. Only Gale, rendered smaller, softer, and thereby more helpless. A dangerous thing.

Of course he loved her—biologically, chemically, irrevocably—but that love came perfumed with unease. Not resentment, exactly, but its distant cousin. He had lived with that face. Knew what it attracted. What it repelled. What it suffered. And to see it now, fragile and unknowing, looking up at John with that exultant, babyish worship; it made something inside Gale twitch. Not just pain. Not just jealousy. But guilt.

Because deep, deep in the animal heat of his second gender, Gale’s omega instincts whispered something treasonous; she should have looked like John. 

And she didn’t. 

And that meant Gale had failed her, somehow. Failed him.

Worse still—worse in that subterranean, tongue-biting, marrow-deep way she would never understand—was the fact that Betty had failed them both. By being born too soon, in the snarled, blood-slicked twilight of it all, when Gale’s body was still a howl of healing and his heart an unswept room full of broken teacups and breathless pauses. The very event of her arrival, that unconsented thunderclap of pink flesh and wet crying, had snatched away something; something unspoken, unborn, unmade, from Gale. Something unnamed and unnameable, yes, but not unlamented.

And though Gale—rational, refined, embarrassingly educated Gale—knew better, his body had not forgiven her. Not quite. It was not forgiveness he could give, nor blame he could justify, and yet; it lived in him. Grew in him. Like mould under wallpaper. It was a blame he was helpless to hold, and still, he held it like a lover’s secret.

It did not help. No, not at all, that the little usurper had apparently stolen the brightest part of his life with her mewling, milk-sour mouth. John. She had taken John. When he did not hold her, she held him. She laughed at his idiotic sounds and idiotic faces, as if the world were built of nothing but those stupid noises and the endless space of his grin. She went to Gale for the ugly things; the wipes, the midnight feeds, the nasal suction. She turned to John for joy.

Sometimes—God, the cruelty of sometimes—in the black-slick hush of three in the morning, with Betty fussing against the blankets and John gone off on his selfless night shift (because of course he would take the night shifts, sweet idiot, to earn extra ration cards so they could have socks, mittens, a second-hand wool cap), Gale would look at her. Just look.

And she would look back.

In that strange mirror-like silence, Gale would wonder. 

Did she know? Did she hate him, too? Was it mutual? 

He saw it then; that grim, ironic symmetry; she was his, down to the ghost-print of her eyes and the pout of her lip, and yet they were locked in this impossible geometry, two reflections forever failing to overlap. Perhaps they had both been built not to love themselves—only to love John. And now, condemned to this tragic comedy, they must compete for him.

The room, dim and chilled and thin-skinned with silence, burst—softly, impossibly—with a sudden peal of sleepy giggles. A breathless cascade, bubbles of joy too light for gravity. John had lowered his head to pepper Betty’s face with kisses; absurd, ticklish, relentless. Her tiny fists, comically ineffective, clutched at the two-day-old bristle of his cheeks. Her feet pattered against his ribs. It must have hurt—those little bones, so firm in their kicking—but if it did, John gave no sign. His face was lit from within. He glowed.

And more than that, he smelt happy.

That deep, resin-thick scent, cedar and sap and sun-warmed loam; joy, in the unmistakable language of alpha pheromones poured off him in waves. Gale had never smelt it this strong. Not even when they had first mated, not when they had lain together for hours in the empty classroom of the school house and whispered the future like prayers into each other’s mouths. 

No—this scent had arrived with Betty, bloodied and screaming and still half-wrapped in afterbirth, and John had cried and held her like the world had just been rebooted in miniature.

And something, everything, had changed after that.

Not overtly. Not in any way one could jot in a journal or mention aloud. But Gale noticed. He felt it. Or perhaps he had simply never seen it from the outside before, never known how radiant John could be without him as the source.

John, who now paraded Betty through the camp like a saint bearing a relic. Everyone knew her. Everyone adored her. John, who wrapped her in a sling under his coat when the winds turned cruel. Her little cheeks, pink and luminous, peeked out like rosebuds. 

John, who sang nonsense lullabies to her; off-key, off-tempo, perfect. Who rocked her through fever and teething. Who bartered his own ration cards for the sheer delight of gifting her something useless and beautiful. 

He began carving old, useless wood into small toys. Blocks. A car with no wheels. And, Betty’s personal favourite, a carved unicorn. Soft-wooded. Its horn had broken off within the week, and still she adored it. Refused to let it go unless she was in John’s arms.

John was everything a father ought to be. No—he was something more. The alpha in technicolour. Hyperreal. Constant, alert, unspeakably kind. He rose to every cry. He moved like the wind itself when Gale so much as twitched in sleep. And Gale, God help him, felt no resentment. Not really. Or if he did, it was the kind made sweet by longing.

Because watching John love Betty was, in its own aching way, a gift. A cruel, honey-dripped punishment. A thing Gale could swallow. He would have felt guilty, perhaps, if he weren’t already so utterly consumed by the pleasure of watching them from this place of half-shadow. Because this, too, was love. Warped, yes. Bitter as fruit too early picked. But real. 

And it was all he had left. It was, like it or not, his life now.

Gale let himself lean, just a fraction, into John’s leg.

It was an accident at first; an unconscious tilt of weight, like a flower stem bending towards sunlight, but John, ever attuned to his omega, shifted to catch it, to make space where there was none. His hand slid, large and dry-warm, to rest against Gale’s nape, the heel of his palm pressing lightly into the tense line of muscle there. Not possessive. Not even protective. Just there. A touch that didn’t ask for anything in return.

Betty giggled again—soft this time, breathy, half-asleep already—and Gale felt the vibration of it in the air. In his nerves. She reached one chubby arm up, smacking her fingers against John’s mouth, and he took them into his lips, play-biting, humming. She squirmed with sleepy delight.

“Little menace,” John murmured fondly.

Gale made a small sound—closer to a hum than a laugh—and let his hand drift, idly, towards John’s knee. He didn’t grip, didn’t need to. He just wanted to touch. He wanted to feel the ripple of muscle under his palm. A pulse. A grounding.

There was no urgency now. No sharpness. Only the strange, hush-wrapped feeling of a moment sealing itself shut before anyone could ruin it with speech. John, Betty, the slight weight of heat shared among them in a room far too cold and far too dim. And yet warm, somehow. Like the warmth had decided to exist here anyway, just for them. A quiet, illogical miracle.

“She’s getting heavy,” John said, and then, after a beat: “You want to hold her?”

Gale looked up, almost startled. He hadn’t thought John would ask. He hadn’t even realised how long it had been since he had held her like this—not just to feed, or change, or calm a screaming fit—but simply to hold. The suggestion felt frightening, and then shamefully wanted.

“I…yeah,” Gale said, softly. “If you’re tired.”

John moved slowly. Reverently. As if he were about to hand over something impossibly fragile. Gale sat up straighter, arms already instinctively forming that cradle curve. Betty, all warmth and drowsy resistance, whimpered a little in protest before her cheek found Gale’s shoulder. She settled with an unconscious sigh, snuffling into his collarbone with a heavy huff.

She smelt like sleep. Like milk and the dusty-sweet scent of baby scalp. And underneath it, faint but unmistakeable, was John. All of it; her skin, her softness, her trusting weight, was steeped in him. It hit Gale’s chest like a kiss pressed just under the sternum.

“Hey, bug,” Gale murmured, the words barely more than a vibration in his throat. “Hi.”

Betty blinked once; slowly, deliberately, with all the casual apathy of the moon turning its back to the sun. Her fingers flexed, groping his shirt in tiny, unsure pulses. Her face contorted—not into a cry, not exactly—but into something ancestral and unknowable. 

A grimace pulled from Gale’s own face like a weed from old soil. The tight cheeks. That solemn, blinking-less stare. A mimeograph of his unease. She did not cry. Not really. She made a soft noise, a fussy growl of dissatisfaction, and kicked her little legs in theatrical protest.

But no tears.

It wasn’t a victory. Not a revelation. Just a passing moment, a flicker, a pause in the storm—and God, Gale would take it. He would clutch it like a lucky coin rubbed smooth by a thousand prayers.

John was still close, always close, the constant orbit. His arm slipped around them both; not tentative, not performative, but instinctive, like an anchor thrown in deep waters. His cheek found Gale’s temple with practised ease.

“You’re doing good,” John whispered, and it was almost criminal, the warmth in his voice. “She likes you.”

“I’d hope so,” Gale replied with a dry grunt. “Tore me open on her way out. Least she could do is not scream bloody murder every time I pick her up.”

John laughed, low and amused, the sound like a velvet rope pulled gently in a dark room. Then he pressed his nose to Gale’s neck—familiar territory, conquered and reconquered—and kissed the bond, that raw, invisible seam where their lives had been stitched together. Lips against gland, pulse against pulse, until the tightness in Gale’s shoulders began to uncoil like old film unwinding. Tension evaporated. Something in him, some grim little soldier of shame, sat down and wept.

Perhaps Betty felt it, too. Her feet stilled. Her face, still scrunched in baby-level injustice, slowly unfurled like a morning leaf. Was it John’s scent—amber, cedar, that golden molasses of alpha serenity? Was it Gale’s own changing aroma, no longer sharp and electric with fear, but gentled now, soft and low, like lavender bruised under a thumb? Or was it simply that Gale had stopped holding her like a live grenade, and had begun, somehow, to hold her like his daughter?

“See,” John whispered, as if speaking into a dream. “It’s alright. You’re doing great.”

Gale said nothing. He didn’t nod. He barely breathed. But his hand—resting against Betty’s impossibly small spine—tightened just slightly. Not in hesitation, but in instinct. Protection. Possession. Not the kind born of obligation, but of some strange, half-forbidden hope. As if she were not just a stranger born of pain. Not just a mirror he couldn’t bear to look into. But something his. Something, maybe, to keep.

And in that moment, the three of them; tangled in the hush of their own slow, steady breathing, warm as bread in the fading chill, did not feel like a wound. Or a failure. Or a punishment. They felt, impossibly, like a constellation.

Not the clean kind you could name in books, no. But the kind that only wolves knew. Or madmen. Or lovers who walked too far from home. The kind you saw only once in a lifetime; above a desert, or a frozen lake, and never forgot. The kind that meant home. Or at least the aching, impossible possibility of it.

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buckbucky getting into a fight about which one of them is to be registered as an emotional support animal bc while on one hand bucky is obviously a dog the notion that gale NEEDS his EMOTIONAL SUPPORT is something he would rather not say out loud nor have notarized in any official documentation. and though gale contains about 85% or more of bucky’s will to live they simply can’t decide on a cool enough animal for gale to identify with. so it’s all pretty complicated

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Currently thinking of Bucky being mesmerized by the teardrops clinging to Gale's eyelashes when he cries

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Lazy day in bed. Love, whispers, cuddles.

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Alright, let's do this.

Canon or modern era Gale who leaves Marge because he realises right before their wedding that he's gay and can't give her what she wants.

Gale who struggles to come to terms with being gay and can't so much as flirt with another man or give them the eye - or so he thinks because whenever he so much as looks in a man's direction they accuse him of bedroom eyes, and get huffy when he awkwardly and uncomfortably gives them the silent brush off.

Gale who's prickly and standoffish because off it, and eventually gets a reputation for being an ice queen in the bars or clubs he goes to.

Gale who sees John across the room one day and can't look away. Not even when he sees John notice and a wicked smile creeps up his face. Not even when John adjusts himself to get comfy and spreads his thick legs wider.

Gale who gets half hard just looking at them.

Gale who blushes and stares at the bar and knows it's John who sits next to him without even looking.

Gale who smells cigarette smoke and something warm and spicy and gets harder just at the smell of it. John who drapes an arm behind Gale's barstool, leans in and says,

"Lookin' lonely, Buck."

Gale who bites his lip at the voice alone as he feels himself drip. Who almost shakes the closer John gets into his personal space, and has to make a getaway once John's friends distract him just for a sec, because he doesn't trust himself another second.

Gale who tumbles into the bathroom at home and lasts less than 5 strikes until he's done.

Gale who keeps going back. Gale who let's John get a little closer each time, and work a little harder each time. Gale who makes John earn a smile and a laugh but won't give him his number or tell him his name.

Gale who spends almost all his time round John aching in his pants.

Gale who comes in his pants like a teenager when he eventually lets John pull him outside and make out with him against the alley wall, rutting up against him with how desperate he is. John who stares at him in bewildered wonderment and with soul burning lust when he realises how quickly Gale came just from some heavy petting and slumps into Gale begging him to let John take him home.

"I'll make you feel so good, I promise. I wanna see... how many times do you think... please, Buck - "

Gale who smiles shy and a little embarrassed but pleased, and says, "No," and leaves John who's still hard with no release that night.

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Tag game: Post your last 4 non-selfie pictures

Thanks @guessimherenowtoo for that tag 😊No pressure tagging @avonne-writes @amiserableseriesofevents @ignalina-c0re

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Okay so Lesbian Buckies

Alright, I've been rotating this idea in my mind ever since I literally saw the words 'lesbian buckies' written in a text post. So much so that I had to come up with my own idea.

Alright, so I wanted it still set at Thorpe Abbotts during the war, but obviously they can't be pilots (thanks mr patriarchy!) so instead I thought ... Mechanic!Bucky and Red Cross!Gale.

Okay so we've got Joan 'Bucky' Egan - one of the only female members of the mechanic team/ ground crew. She's one of the boys, got this big laugh, big shoulders, big curly hair (that she ties up in a bandana), and big smile. She's charming and loud, too loud some would say for a woman, but goddamn is she a good time. She works with Kenny a lot and when pilots try give him attitude because of his age, she just stands behind him (a full head taller than him) with her arms crossed. Guard dog in every universe.

And then we've got Gail Cleven - the poster girl of the Red Cross. She's the beautiful girl-next-door that all the pilots dream about, with her soft blonde hair, full lips, wide blue eyes, long legs and tiny waist. She's so lovely and thoughtful, knows all the boys names and goes the extra mile for them all. But she's also shy and introverted, and even the other Red Cross girls can't get her out of her shell so they're not all that close. No one ever really flirts with her either because the one thing everyone knows about Gail Cleven is that she's already got a guy - Mark Spencer - who's off fighting in the war and she's in love and fully devoted to him.

No one flirts with her until of course ... Bucky Egan.

The first time they meet, Bucky's laughing at some insanely crass joke with the other ground crew boys and doesn't realise the Red Cross girls are there. When Gail clears her throat, all the boys scramble to apologise but Bucky just sits there grinning at her and introduces herself. Gail is not impressed at all, nope no way. (Bucky's wearing her overalls tied down around her waist, a grease stained singlet and is covered in sweat - Gail thinks she's about to black out when they shake hands).

From that point onwards, Bucky makes a point to come in to the Red Cross van and pester all the girls, but especially Gail. Everyone thinks it's so funny and that Gail hates her guts, until one day they all hear Gail laughing loud as hell at something Bucky has said and they realise they've literally never heard her laugh before, let alone like that.

Anyway, plot plot plot, they fuck nasty in the back of a plane.

The end!