#ch: fern carmine

[latibvles]

Hello! Could you please write 17. Audience for Fern Carmine!

##17 — AUDIENCE.

my kind anon, this ended up longer than intended, hence the header. this feels like a fic in its own right. and now there's some OC mitosis getting thrown into the mix with some background girls. anyways I love you fern carmine and you have a lovely voice <3

—

There’s no singing and dancing in the Army.

That was the first thing her father said to her, looking at the enlistment papers on her desk. There’s no singing, no dancing, no time to stir trouble like you so often do. Maybe he was just angry that, with no sons, he thought he wouldn’t have to deal with sending one of his own off to war. Maybe it’d be his intent to dissuade her.

But then she’d heard her uncle musing about how she’d “wash out” of basic anyway in their sun room, and there was no longer any doubt in her being: she had to go, just to prove that she could, just to make the statement that you don’t tell her what she could and couldn’t do.

So it turns out, both her father and her uncle were wrong. Fern did not wash out of basic training, and there was singing and dancing in the Army. Quite a bit of it, actually, and it seemed to only increase once they hit Europe and the men had their pick of pretty local girls who didn't know them too well. 

So really, there’s just an addendum: in order to have singing and dancing and martini glasses with little olives, you must also go up in a fort and risk your life day-in and day-out.

She’s known quite a few men who’ve made worse deals.

The band is playing something quick and brassy — sounds like Goodman. The people on the floor are moving just as quick: Club Mobile girls and airmen, ground crews and local girls, reminding her vaguely of dances that she’d gone to in high school but without the need to spike the punch. A couple of the replacement girls had latched onto her already, not that she minds as she surveys the room and its occupants.

Wakes could be fun in a place like this.

“He’s got that look again,” Lorraine already sounds bewildered, and Fern follows her friend's gaze over to Bucky Egan — knee bouncing, fingers tapping like a kid waiting desperately for everyone else at the table to finish eating so he could run loose. One of the new girls, a gunner named Diane, looks over as well, and with that, her two crewmates Sherry and Kat follow suit.

“Who, Major Egan?” Sherry inquires, “Looks like he’s having a grand ol’ time.”

“Oh he definitely is,” Lorraine turns her head to fix her gaze on the girl once more. “Then he takes the mic stand and we’ve all gotta listen to him sing loud and offkey for the next hour.”

“Be nice,” Fern chides half-heartedly. There were few things that she knew could break Lorraine’s steely disposition: to see her being so bothered by something was amusing in its own right. “He’s mostly on key. Besides, he's got a lot of enthusiasm.” Lorraine gives her a flat stare.

“Uh huh. Sure. Weren’t you a chorus girl or something before? I don’t get why you don’t just take the damn mic stand.” At that, the shortest of the three, Kat, gasps a little and looks at her with a dazzled expression that has Fern grinning to herself.

“You were a chorus girl?”

“My cousin was. She taught me a couple things. I just did choir in school,” Lorraine waves her hand dismissively — chorus girl, choir girl, same thing — “And you could be a whole lot nicer about asking me, Lori.” Fern decides, dragging an olive from the toothpick they’d put in her glass into her mouth. Lorraine stalls a moment, then twists her body towards Fern further to put a hand on her knee, letting out a long, languide sigh.

“Fern, my dear friend, my favorite radio-woman, would you please go on and sing something to spare both me and the rest of the Hundredth from listening to Bucky’s piss-poor rendition of Takin’ the A Train. Again.”

Fern’s lips curl into a smile.

“You mean your dear friend, and favorite, most talented radio-woman.”

“Fern.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll do it…” Fern sits up, and Lorraine lets out a groan of relief. “If you get my special audience on the floor. No fun to sing with no devoted fans in the crowd.” Fern’s smile grows impossibly wider, morphing into the mischievous smirk she can’t fight back when she’s looped into a game of darts or cards. Lorraine’s eyes narrow.

“June’ll never agree to that.”

“Have a little faith, Ivanova. You’ve got three minutes or until Bucky pries that mic stand from my cold, dead hands.” Fern tucks an auburn strand back into its place, then watches Lorraine huff as she gets up to make her rounds to locate the rest of their crew. Some were dancers, others weren’t, and that’d be half the fun of it — at least on Fern’s end of things. That’d been half the fun in school; hatching a new scheme, observing who paired up with who or seeking out the trouble their parents had all sent them away to pointedly keep them from.

On their better days, Thorpe Abbotts could feel a little like a COED dorm.

Fern approaches just as the band’s finishing up another song, waving to catch their attention. Then she gives their conductor a smile.

“I need you to play somethin’ for me,” she declares, before murmuring her request in their conductor’s ear. He nods, parrots the request up and through the band as she sidles up by the mic stand, letting her eyes sweep once more over the room. Some of the guys were sitting in chairs, others in the middle of the floor and some dotting the edges — it’s easy to find Harrie grinning like a crazy woman as Blakely tries to keep her from stepping on his toes. Then she catches Buck yanking Bucky back down into his chair by the shoulder, Viv and Willie next to them. The hand Viv puts on Bucky’s shoulder to keep him sitting makes her snort as she counts heads. Lena, Jo, Carrie… Lorraine’s got June by the arm and June is giving her a look of melodramatic betrayal.

“You gonna sing us a little something, Fernie?” she’d recognize Viv’s goading anywhere, locks eyes with her brightly-grinning captain and flicks her own hair back into place.

“Well I just can’t say no to a face like that, can I?” There’s a few laughs, a couple shouts of encouragement, egging her on. She gives the band a nod as if they’ve rehearsed this a thousand times before and recognizes that loud brassy start as she brings her lips to the mic.

Days can be sunny, with never a sigh, Don’t need what money can buy. Birds in the trees sing their day full of song, Why shouldn’t we sing along? I’m chipper all the day, happy with my lot. How do I get that way? Look at what I’ve got.

She makes a sweeping gesture with her free arm, leaning into the music in a way she might not have been allowed to way back when during school choir. Maybe she never got to be a chorus girl, but there were enough show-women and conmen in her family for her to mirror. She could be entertaining and funny like it was second nature — and Fern would still get back in the seat tomorrow all the same if need be.

The music kicks up, nice and quick, she watches Harrie scurry across to one of the clubmobile girls, Helen, and Fern’s grin only grows a little wider once her friends all start trickling onto the floor. She makes a show of walking with the mic stand this way and that, like it’s her own one-woman show. Guys spinning girls around, a couple of those replacements getting the courage to take to the floor with each other or with somebody new - she thinks she catches Sherry’s straw-colored curls among the moving bodies - that’s what Fern liked to see. No point in sitting and stewing on what could happen tomorrow when they could have fun right now.

Jo’s laughing as Douglass gives her a spin about the floor. Inez seems to be taking some type of lead with Carrie, who’s all flushed-cheeks and baby deer steps. Bucky’s like a springboard jumping out of his seat, Viv’s shaking her head no but she’s smiling as he says it. He’s pulling her by the arm anyway onto the floor, spinning her while Buck drags a hand down his face in amusement and Willie’s grinning to herself, as small as it may be. Fern tries not to laugh through her singing, but it’s a sight to see. Her special audience of girls, knowing that she’d only do something like this if it meant she’d get to see them let loose like that.

Fern was a dealmaker after all.

I got rhythm, I got music, I got my man — Who could ask for anything more? I got daisies in green pastures, I’ve got my man — Who could ask for anything more?