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writerpey · 7 months

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Cg!Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven & Regressor!John ‘Bucky’ Egan Headcanons

masters of the air was so good I had to write something for this pair. happy series finale, everyone! sad it’s over but so happy with the show, it totally blew my expectations out of the water. pls enjoy & request more of them if u want! & please be careful reading this if you’re sensitive to the topics of the show. take care of yourselves, everyone <3

John keeps his regression tucked away from the others at Thorpe Abbotts as a secret little part of himself that, before Gale found out about it, he wished he could drop straight out of a B-17. He tried to deal with things the way all his comrades did. He drank, slept around, got into fights with the British soldiers at the bar and placed bets on the Yankees against the Cubs. It just wasn’t enough. It felt close to enough when Gale would wrap a hand around the back of his neck and drag him away from a stupid midnight decision, or when he’d be drunk enough for Gale to walk him to his bunk and help him tug off his boots with a familiar sigh.

Gale could tell when John was close to a breaking point, when his best friend was itching at his own skin and antsy to get in a plane and out of one at the same time. He knew something was different about John, especially when it would get late and John’s eyes would glaze over and he would refuse to leave Gale’s side. Gale had an inkling that sometimes John acted out just to get his attention. And when Meatball would run over John would gasp happily, the joy of a little boy emanating from his excitement.

Gale climbed out of bed one night after seeing John’s was empty, throwing on his jacket and stepping outside. Sitting on the ground with his back against the wall, John was sniffling, hands rubbing at his eyes and shoulders shaking.

“Bucky? What’s goin’ on?” Gale questioned gently, concerned for his friend and ready to take any step necessary to comfort John.

John was terribly embarrassed that night. Sniffled and cried and blubbered unintelligibly to Gale about a fog in his brain that wouldn’t go away until he felt like a kid again. That Gale made it worse, but better, and he was so fucked in the head for being like this and—

Gale stopped John’s negativity in an instant. “Bucky. It’s okay. I’m here for you. You know that, I know that. That’s all that matters.”

The pair fell into step with one another with the ease expected for two soulmates. It took a lot of coaxing from Gale to get John to not only tell him when he was feeling small, but to encourage him to regress more often to avoid all the bad decisions that came with John not dealing with war trauma properly.

John had come back to his bunk one night with a bleeding nose from an escapade in town, and the lecture he got from Gale was enough to make him regress instantly. He looked up at Gale with big, apologetic eyes while Gale’s steady hands wiped away the blood under his nose with a damp rag. “Sorry, Buck. Shouldn’t have been bad.”

As a caregiver, Gale is very accustomed to John’s needs and loves to dote on him, though he’s never afraid to pull rank on the other. His stern tone carries an air of disappointment to John when it’s necessary, which serves to make John regress fairly easily.

John has a lot of energy when he’s small, well-rested, and knows his group isn’t going to be called on mission for a couple of days. He’ll tear around base on his bike and steal extra eggs from Lemmons at breakfast, play fight with Gale and beg Curt, Rosie and Croz to play a game of baseball together. He’s at his happiest when he can be as carefree as he wants while everyone except Gale has no idea he feels small.

Gale has to work hard to reign in John on those kinds of days. “Bucky, no. You can’t take without asking. I don’t wanna hear that you’re hungry. You ate a dozen eggs.”

John is a super touchy person in general, and when he’s small he’ll literally hang off whatever part of Gale he can get a hand on. Throwing himself over Gale’s shoulders at mealtimes. Clutching the back of Gale’s jacket while running away from Curt. Trying to stick his finger up Gale’s nose for no apparent reason. He likes to annoy Gale, a little shit-disturber at heart.

On harder days for John, fresh off a mission, he gets far more needy. Gale’s heart always breaks in his chest when he wakes up to John making small noises of distress in the night. He often wakes him up with soft shushing and his hand stroking through John’s dark curls. “Just a dream, Bucky. I got you.” Gale whispers, even while knowing that truly, they lived out their nightmares. But the deep timbre of Gale’s voice and his steadying presence always soothes John, who often stretches his arms out to be pulled into Gale’s lap.

Gale really likes when John is especially small. He flushed red the first time he asked John if “maybe, you would let me read you a story?” Gale loves the quiet, intimate moments they get to have together, tucked up in a B-17 with The Hobbit in hand and the sun setting, whisked away to another world even just for a few moments. He feels untouchable with John’s head under his chin and the sound of Lemmons tapping away under the hull of the plane.

When it comes to nicknames, Gale isn’t the most creative person in the world. And quite frankly, if he even dared to call John something too sappy, John would explode from embarrassment. So Gale sticks to Bucky most of the time, but Johnny also made its way into his vocabulary. John’s ears go red and he grins very, very widely when Gale taps him under the chin with a gentle utterance of “Good Johnny.”

John calls Gale a plethora of names. They range from Buck to old man to a very shy Papa, only when John is super small and feeling especially brave. It makes Gale cover his face in kisses.

All in all, Gale is an attentive, kind, thoughtful caregiver who is stern when he needs go be with the little rascal that John is. And John is a fireball when regressed, but in desperate need of the care that Gale is always, always willing to give him.

#mota #mota fic #mota agere #masters of the air #gale cleven #john egan #gale x john #sfw agere #sfw agere fic #mota headcanons #age regression #little space #austin butler #callum turner

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shankarjaikishanfansassnintl · 4 years

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Three Cheers for the Timeless Thrill of ‘Teesri Manzil’! Remembering RDB

Subramanium Viswanathan

Remembering RDB on his birthday ... and reposting my ‘matinee experience’, which made me sit up, and take notice of him!

Three Cheers for the Timeless Thrill of ‘Teesri Manzil’!

1971. SIES College of Arts & Science, Sion, Mumbai.

I had just stepped out of S.I.E.S High School and entered the S.I.E.S College as a First Year Science student. I was pleasantly surprised at the new-found privileges of being a college student, which included the freedom of ‘cutting classes’ (something unthinkable at school), whenever one just was not in a mood to attend the lectures, or whenever there was some ‘unavoidable circumstance’, such as having to attend the matinee show at the near-by theatre.

Rupam at Sion Circle (now PVR Multiplex or something) was strategically located near the college. The theatre was just a stone’s throw away from the college, but the students preferred to throw themselves at the spot, more often than into class-rooms.

Now before you all get my credentials wrong, let me declare that I was not the irresponsible undisciplined ‘tapori’ type of teen-ager that you would imagine. I was a shy, sincere, serious, studious and spectacled student that time. Bunking classes for a matinee show was not in my nature at all. But there are moments in a teenager’s life, when one succumbs to peer pressure. I had a few close friends who apparently had seen ‘Teesri Manzil’ before, and they all strongly felt that ‘TM’ was a better way of spending the afternoon, than attending the Physics and Zoology lectures. After all, Newton’s Laws are not going anywhere, they will remain to trouble you throughout the year till the exams. But ‘Teesri Manzil’ may disappear from Rupam by next week. Also the Zoology lecture was all about the slimy Amoeba, which luckily one can draw in any shape and get away with passing marks. So my friends rationalize with me. Also, since I had not seen the film before, they take upon themselves the responsibility of dragging me along. I start to roll my tongue to say, ‘No, but …’, but it’s too late.

So at 11.15 am we are already inside the AC comfort of Rupam, after a great deal of pushing and pulling at the ticket counter. There is chaos all around. It appears as if the entire college is inside the auditorium. Noisy banter, loud laughter, whistling etc. The commercials are on. Nobody is paying a damn heed to the ads. I think, why can’t these guys maintain some discipline and sit down quietly. Soon a documentary of Film Divisions on Rural Development starts. One student gets impatient and shouts towards the man at the projector, ‘Arre! Main Picture chalu karo re!’. Another gentleman from the matured uncles’ minority in the audience sounds an admonishing ‘Shhh!’ to the errant student, but poor uncle is instantly greeted back with hoots and ridicule. As Rural Development makes its painful way towards the conclusion, the catcalls grow louder. At last Film Divisions prove their point that Sanitation and Sewage System have indeed improved in some remote village of U.P.

Suddenly there is a hush as the Censors’ certificate of the main film is displayed. Somebody reads aloud the number of reels for the benefit of the short-sighted among us. Then the real show starts with a bang, a big banner of NH (Nasir Hussain) films and a thundering Urdu couplet. The audience screams for no apparent reason. I wonder, what is there to scream about an Urdu couplet that they don’t understand.

As the banner fades out, ‘Teesri Manzil’ explodes right on the face! Right from the first frame, this guy called Rahul Dev Burman who seemed to be hiding behind the screen for the attack, suddenly unleashes his deadly instruments on you! On the screen, a car is chasing another along the hill-ways on a rainy night. Two short violin pieces play continuously in quick succession exactly simulating the pace and tension of the situation. The credits roll on. The lady driving the first car gets down and runs towards a building. You can see from the glass pane outside, her silhouette rushing up the stairs followed by another shadow of a man close on heels. 1st floor, 2nd floor and further up—and then she desperately knocks at a door, ‘Rocky, Darwaza kholo!, Rocky, Darwaza kholo!’, as the shadow of the man is fast closing in on her. The back-ground music turns ominous and suddenly stops for a second, as the shrieking woman is bodily lifted and thrown by her predator from the ‘Teesri Manzil’!

RDB announces the bloody event with a loud trumpet, pauses a bit, then crashes his cymbals and goes at his drums with a beat that is sort of a cross between ‘Pink Panther’ theme and the 007 title track, but with lots of more punch. The camera swirls around the shocked faces including Shammi Kapoor’s, collected around the gravitated lady’s corpse. RDB’s beats raise the tempo culminating with the last credit-slide –‘Directed by Vijay Anand’. By now the audience is univocally vociferous giving out, not those hoots reserved for ‘Films Division’, but shrill shrieks of excitement and anticipation of more thrills!

‘Teesri Manzil’ was all thrills, not just because it was a murder mystery, but also because it was a musical wonder. Apparently unlike me, most of the audience were seeing the film for umpteenth time, as they knew exactly when to scream at RDB’s notes! I think, RDB would have jumped like a hungry tiger at the offer made by Nasir Hussain, who also knew his music fundas well, right from the time of ‘Tumsa nahin dekha’(OPN) and ‘Jab pyar kisise hota hai’(S-J) days! So for the cynics like me who had always wanted Shankar-Jaikishen for a Shammi Kappor movie (that included Shammi Kapoor himself), RDB silenced everybody’s ‘bolti’ with the opening orchestral blast!

It was not that ‘TM’ was an out-and-out RDB show. Apart from music, it had great style! Vijay Anand’s narration of a crime caper was slick and imaginative with loads of thrills and fun too! After the credits, you find Shammi Kapoor on the top berth of a compartment with Asha Parekh sitting below and one pot-bellied man (Ram Avtar?) sitting opposite to her. Shammi makes monkey-faces at the fatso and forces him to break into uncontrollable peals of laughter which invites Asha Parkh’s wrath and she starts bashing the poor ‘mota’!

Asha is on the track of one ‘Rocky’, a band-player to avenge the death of her sister. She traces him to the hotel where Rocky plays his band daily. Shammi Kapoor (Rocky) who is also trying to get to the bottom of ‘Third Floor Throw-out’ puzzle hood-winks Asha about his real identity. He says he is substituting on the drums for ‘Rocky’ who is on leave. Asha pouts contemptuously that she had come to hear Rocky’s drums and she had to listen to this non-entity. Shammi takes on the challenge. So does RDB, and throws at you ‘O haseena zulfonwali …’.

Now the shrieking session has revived! Shammi thrashes the drums, Helen swoops down a curved ramp and the collegians cry hoarse almost deafening the voices of Rafi and Asha Bhosle! Then Shammi and Helen sizzle on the floor to Majrooh Sultanpuri’s rapid repartee:

‘Garm hai, tez hai, yeh nigaahen meri

Kaam aa jaayengi sard aahen meri

Hey, Tum kisi raah-mein phir miloge kahin,

Arre, Ishq hoon, Main kahin teherta hi nahin!

Main bhi hoon galiyon-ki parchhai, Kabhi yahan Kabhi wahaan …’

Then RDB’s violins take you to high pitch and tug at you three times before dropping!

The steps and movements are wild, yet so gracefully executed, a far cry from some of today’s crude ‘item numbers’! Shammi tinkers with a glass and then blows a saxophone. Guitars and violins pump adrenalin into the auditorium. Now I am beginning to enjoy all this ‘shor’ around me! I don’t know what one calls it –Rock, Pop or Jazz, but ‘Jo bhi hai, khuda-ki kasam lajawaab hai’! I find myself rocking involuntarily on my seat to the RDB beats. Then I tell myself ‘Sit straight properly, like you were told at school’.

As the song ends, I compose myself and sit straight. But there is no respite. The second song starts soon. For prelude, RDB plays a crazy guitar piece that does somersaults repeatedly three or four times and hands over the mike to Rafi and Asha Bhosle. This time it is Shammi wooing Asha Parekh with ‘Aa jaa aa jaa, main hoon pyar tera …’, feverishly shaking his head and repeating ‘Ah-ha aa jaa’ eight times for emphasis. Parekh in pink swirls around Shammi giving him the slip and ‘pehnao’-ing him the ‘topi’. Shammi dances with ruffled hair and goes berserk gesticulating in eight different ways for each ‘aa jaa’ while Asha swings fluttering her eyelashes. All that frenetic head-shaking and hip-swinging on screen with trumpets blowing and drums beating, drive the public to delirious frenzy. I suppress my own urge to scream. Aakhir, discipline bhi koi cheez hai!

Agatha Christie’s whodunits could grip you, but you don’t read the same novel repeatedly. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of suspense who packed in some of the most bizarre situations in his script, some of them exciting and funny at the same time (Remember ‘North by North-West’ in which Cary Grant is left alone to drive on a treacherous hilly road after being forced to gulp a full bottle of Bourbon by a bunch of goons!). Nobody can beat Hitchcock when it comes to an intriguing plot, but Hitchcock Saab-ke filmon-mein aisa music kahan hota hai (if you don’t count ‘Que Sera Sera’ in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’)? Here our own Vijay Anand mixes all the ingredients like suspense, music, romance and comedy in the right proportions like an expert ‘bhel-puri-wala’ from Juhu and gives on the platter ekdum ‘paisa-wasool’ entertainment, worth every penny of your hard-extracted pocket-money from Daddy’s hard-earned money.

The first-half is great fun and romance giving RDB the avenue to come up with another two very pleasant numbers, ‘Diwana mujhsa nahin‘, a Rafi solo and ‘O mere sona-re sona-re’, a Rafi-Asha duet in which Asha Parekh concedes to Shammi Kapoor’s ‘patao-ing’. Before you know, it is already ‘Interval’. Now there is commotion at the Samosa stall outside! No Sir, I don’t join the mad scramble for a few samosas! I told you already that I was not the irresponsible undisciplined ‘tapori’ type of teen-ager that you would imagine! I was still a shy, sincere, spectacled student.

I try to take my mind off from the missed Samosas and focus on the second half. The plot thickens now … quite like the thick Tomato Ketchup that goes so well with Samosas! Now a whole lot of suspicious characters are hovering around the screen like Prem Chopra who points a rifle to shoot a distant bird, Iftekhar who leaves a misty cigarette smoke from wherever he spies on other suspects, Premnath (who generally opens his dialogue in most of his films with ‘Bloody Bushhtaard’) urf Rai Bahadur Singh who lives lavishly alone in a Dak Banglow, and K.N.Singh , Rai Saab’s drunken house-keeper. The needle of suspicion keeps swinging.

Who killed the lady? Well, that can wait. Meanwhile let’s have more of RDB. So we have a delightfully crazy ‘Dekhiye Sahibon’ in which Asha lets loose the ‘public’ on Shammi who clings to a ‘Merry-go- Round’ to avoid getting bashed up by a group of Sardars. The song is good fun with great camerawork matching the mood of the music.

It is time to get a bit serious. Helen has a ‘Raaz’ tucked up in her sleeveless. So she gets shot the same way as the ‘broads get the bullets’ in James Hadley Chase novels, before she could divulge the ‘secret’ to Shammi Kapoor. Shammi himself gets exposed as the real ‘Rocky’ making him eligible for titles like’Jhoothe’,’Makhhar’,‘Dhokebaaz’ etc. from Asha Parekh, but not before delivering a superb last song, a solo by Rafi, my most favourite in the film - ‘Tumne mujhe dekha hokar mehrban---Rukh gayi yeh zameen, tham gayaa aasmaan, Jaane man, Jaan-e-Jaan …’. What a song!

'Lekar yeh haseen jalwe, Tum bhi na kahan pahunche

Aakhir to mere dil tak kadmon-ke nishaan pahunche …’

One can as well sing these lines to that fantastic trio of Majrooh-RDB-Rafi for such an exquisite composition!

The stock of songs is sadly over, but RDB still has a fantastic piece in store, when Shammi discovers the identity of the murderer by his host’s coat in which one diamond stud is conspicuously missing. The missing button had been tightly clutched in the fist of the dead woman. Terrific close-ups of a sweaty shocked Shammi’s face when he realizes the truth, are accentuated with a more terrific back-ground score by RDB! Finally after a scuffle, the killer himself drops himself to death from an altitude equivalent to that from which he had thrown the lady in the title-scene. The police arrive dutifully after all action is over. The film ends with a funny note with Shammi and Asha again in a train compartment, this time on honey-moon, encountering the same pot-bellied man who tries to escape from them to avoid trouble!

Vijay Anand’s crisp and creative direction makes the film a gripping entertainer and places it a cut above the rest of typical crime thrillers. But ‘Teesri Manzil’ is more remembered as a musical classic that changed the trend of Hindi film music irreversibly! The film was released way back in 1966. But Rahul Dev Burman was a maverick clearly much ahead of his time. He broke all the rules and raised the tempo of Hindi film music to a feverish pitch several ‘manzil’s higher! Western music never sounded more jazzy and classy in any other Indian film, before or after ‘TM’. So it is no wonder that after five decades, the film and its music still rocks in memories, if not in matinees.

Well, to cut the long story short, we were back in college corridor next day and discussing the ‘TM’ experience. One of them starts, ‘Listen.Today is Thursday’. ‘So?’. ‘So, Today is the last day matinee show of ‘Teesri Manzil’ at Rupam. So why not we …’. I nod my head vehemently, ‘No, No … that’s too much… well … OK, Why not? OK, Sure’. The would-be IIM aspirant amongst us steps forward to manage the immediate crisis, ‘Let’s see what have we today? Oh! Physics Lab? The same silly experiment of moving the convex lens to and fro till you remove parallax. We can skip it. Journal? Not to worry, we can copy from that front-benchwala Bakul Mehta’.

So we are back again at Rupam, throwing all shame to the rains outside! There is chaos all around inside. The same FD documentary is on. One voice shouts ‘Arre! Main Picture chalu karo re!’. I turn towards the voice and am shocked to find that the shouter is none other than Bakul Mehta, the front-benchwala of college! I start fretting and mutter to my friend ‘Just look at that Bakul! What’s he doing here? How irresponsible! He is supposed to be at the Lab this time! Now how the hell are we going to finish our journals?’. My cool friend admonishes me, ‘Let’s worry about all that after the film. Relax. Try to concentrate on the movie. Don’t disturb, Pay attention … This is not Calculus class’.

So I pay attention all over again. The show starts with a bang … the big banner of NH (Nasir Hussain) films and the thundering Urdu couplet. People shriek cheeringly. And to my horror, I find myself whistling and screaming hoarse along with them for no apparent reason!

Now please don’t get my credentials wrong. I was not the irresponsible undisciplined student …. well, may be till I was coerced to see 'Teesri Manzil’ twice in quick succession, during peak college hours!

https://youtu.be/dDtKEtDA8sM

#shankar #shankarjaikishan #rdb #rdburman #pancham

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