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antigonenikk · 3 months

Text

an ode to the color red

fandom: masters of the air, band of brothers

pairing: marjorie spencer/ronald speirs, marjorie spencer/gale cleven, gale cleven/john ‘bucky’ egan

warnings: crossover, grooming, child abuse, murder, cheating, daddy issues, smut, period typical homophobia, major character death

summary: “There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other.” -Mary Shelley

"“Call me Daddy.”

Again. He freezes. Eyes wide with desire.

“Say it. Say it.”

She’s going to scream in his face until her skin is just as red as her brain. She is going to destroy him. She wants it like this. Bucky is Gale’s Daddy. And Marge is Bucky’s. And Marge’s is Ron. Like one chain link fence, unending with the weight of its betrayal."

1945

She discovers them by accident. The wedding is still three weeks away. They’ve decided on a blue and white theme. Which…. Marge doesn’t like the color blue but Gale does. And her Father does. And so it’s okay. Really.

In actuality, Marge doesn’t want a big wedding. She wants to elope, like Mary Shelley did with Percy, and go on a tour of the Continent, and write poetry while her husband tries to drown himself on the Mediterranean Coast. But with the war that dream has become an impossibility.

And really, who is Marge kidding. It was always an impossibility. Sometimes she wishes the librarians never gave her such free reign as a child. Then she wouldn’t have been so influenced by the Romantics, Joyce and Shelley and Byron. Maybe then Casper, Wyoming and its barren hills and her high school sweetheart would fill her with love. The type of love she’s supposed to feel for the things that have been so good to her. Because they have. Or. She thought they had.

She met Gale when they were ten years old. Her Father had taken the belt to her hard the night before, and had dragged her along to the race track, where she sat uncomfortably on her hands, her knees crossed ladylike, trying not to wince. Beside her a little boy sat down. Three years older, maybe. He was skinny and underfed and wearing the ugliest suspenders. But he offered to play marbles with her on the grass, and sat with her for hours until their fathers came to get them, roaring drunk and laughing together. No one had ever spent so much time looking after her. After that it was a done deal. She was his creature. Handed over like a piece of worn silverware. There was no Marge. No Gale. Just MargeandGale. If you wanted one, you asked for the other.

At first it was nice. And she liked it when Gale decided on what she should wear, and what she should think, and what she should eat. It was very easy as a little girl to let someone else take the lead. And Gale loved to take the lead. Gale wanted certain things out of her. He did not want her to read her gothic stories. He thought they were morbid. He did not want her to drink, or talk with “loose girls” from school, or climb trees in Old Mr. Jenkin’s farms for apples. He wanted her to be a good person, with firm morals, who never slipped, and was always modest. He kissed her. And he would touch her, as they grew older and she grew into her prettiness. But never anything under the blouse. It was frustrating. She didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t know how to put it into words. Only that it was wild and it was the color red and it flew from the ancient Oak trees and would not leave her at peace.

Marge wanted to lose her virginity against a gravestone. A feeling that only intensified when her Mother died. Just like Mary Shelley. She wanted to be Mary, have everything she had. Her horrors and small griefs and immense talent. She wanted to lose her virginity on her mother’s gravestone, just like Mary did with Percy. But she was no Mary. She was mediocre. A bad writer. A worse piano player. A passable seamstress. And Gale was no Percy. He had no romantic ambitions, or love of history. He wanted an easy life. And so it was fine. She would finally, in three weeks, after years of waiting and waiting and crying and wringing her hands, she would finally have him inside of her. It would be worth it. She would prove to herself once and for all that she loved him. Him, and not… Well. The point was moot. She wasn’t at Georgia State anymore. The war was over. She was back in her little cage, and she had made peace with what she had to give up, what she wanted to give up. She stopped thinking about it. Stop thinking about it, Marge. The voice that reprimanded her sounded like Gale’s. It always did. Ever since she was ten years old.

But then she found them. They were in the barn, Gale’s barn, the one that had gone empty since his Father’s passing. She found them there, doing unnatural things to each other. Bucky, who she had thought was so handsome and charming when he breezed into town three days ago, was on his knees. His head to Gale’s… she didn’t even know you could do that. No one had told her you could do that. And Gale, with his head tilted back, was letting out little groans. She felt sick. It wasn’t right. She had given up so much. Had given eleven years to this man. She had given up her childhood home. She had taken care of the house while doing her homework after school, staying up all night to make sure her grades were good enough for him. She had sat in those pews for hours every Sunday. Hot and sour with resentment. She watched as he came down his Best Friend’s throat. She didn’t feel like crying. Really. Instead, inside her head, she started to feel a bit funny. Like she wanted to laugh. It was almost like she was Jane Eyre, really. And her evil Mr. Rochester had revealed his hidden secret at last. And then Gale whispered the word “Daddy,” and Marge had to run on silent feet back to the main house, stifling her laughter.

To think she had ever respected this man. Ever took his word for law. The type of man who called another man Daddy…

That night she lay in bed and contemplated her options. Back when Gale shipped off for flight school, when she was Seventeen, he had allowed her to apply for colleges. She had chosen Georgia State. It was in the south, like where Faulkner lived. But it was also in a big city. So she could run around, pretending to be Sonia from Crime and Punishment, doing her hair up in a bun, looking through book stores and writing poetry and drinking whiskey. And she could make friends. Real girlfriends.

______________

1942

Atlanta was hot. And humid. And the girls in her class were nice, but distant. Except of course for Birdie. Birdie wasn’t her real name. They had been assigned roommates at the beginning of term. And Marge had never been so glad of anything in her entire life. Birdie was a Fine Arts major, who desperately wanted to be a painter like Kathe Kollwitz. She had horrific black and white lithographs hung up all over their room, and Marge adored them. The hulking faces, the wide eyed starving children, the grieving mothers. They were incredible. Birdie’s really name, which they never mentioned after first introductions, was Dove. Her eight year old brother had been allowed to name her. A decision the family realized in retrospect was a grave mistake. But she had come out with white blonde hair and blue eyes and looked nothing like her Mother, so she had been handed off to a frightened eight year old boy to do with as he saw fit.

Their pasts, it felt like, were interlocked. Both of them growing up under the thumb of an older man. Except Dove’s brother was only ever half there. His presence was more an absence than anything else. Just like Marge’s parents. She was allowed to run free, reading and painting and lighting off fireworks. But like Marge her brother never let her have any real fun. No boys, no drinking, no dancing unless he was there to supervise. The two of them had pooled together their courage and decided they would make a break for it on their first weekend there, under the close watchful eye of the boarding house’s owner.

Their first stop was to a jazz club. The kind of thing that they would never be allowed to do back home. Best to rip the band-aid of rebellion off fast and with violence. They walked in, and it was like the whole world fell away. It was smoky, and loud. Marge had been to a dinner club once, the night before Gale shipped out. But that was nothing like this. The place was filled to the brim with soldiers of all sorts. Laughing and screaming and making fools of themselves. The two of them stood there for a moment, grabbing at each other, desperately nervous about looking silly. And then Marge felt a tap on her shoulder. And the rest was history.

______________

1945

In between the silverware which she hid under her floorboards, Marge kept his letters. They were all there. Some of them, torn and ashen from when she had half burned them after Gale’s return from the Stalag. She had thought. She had thought Gale was as good as dead. That was her excuse. The type of excuse even she didn’t put much faith in. She never thought he would get out. And then he did. And the silverware, and the looted Nazi flag, and the letters, and the slip with his phone number all went under the floorboards. She pulled out each letter, and set them in front of her in a circle. Ronnie would never call another man Daddy. That she was sure of. And there was no way he would give a damn about fucking her against her Mother’s headstone. God knows when she had brought the idea up to him, after her Mother had first died, he had gotten a hungry look in his eye. The sort of look that made her forget all about the nasty little tricks he liked to play on her. Or the way he got cold and mean and distant when she wanted to talk about her feelings. Or the way he would stare at her without blinking, like a hunter closing in on some sort of helpless prey. Well. Let him. She thought. He kept saying he wanted to steal her away. Kept raising the ante with more and more lavish gifts as he worked his way through Europe, leaving a trail of corpses behind him. Let him prove that he wasn’t all talk after all.

In the dead of the night she dialed his number. It rang once, twice, three times. He picked up.

“Speirs.”

“Ronnie…”

She felt like Catherine maybe, calling Heathcliffe home. Or like Jane Eyre still, returning to Rochester, finding the castle all in ruins. Only she was going to be the one to finish the job of burning it down.

He told her, as she put on the waterworks, that he would be there in two days. They would fix things. Together. Of course she couldn’t marry an invert. Of course she couldn’t be expected to carry the burdens of his sins. Marge didn’t care much about sin. Not in the way she should. Not even a sin like inversion. But the words were soothing excuses. The type that she could force herself this time to believe. She was very good at that. Forcing a belief down her throat until it tasted like the truth. Really, she just wanted Gale dead and fucking gone. It didn’t matter what it took to get there. For a second, she hesitated. Then she calmed her breathing, and listening to the rustling of the trees, and realized there was no other way out but through.

______________

1942

It’s New Year's Eve, and Marge’s Mother is dead. It’s New Year's Eve, and Birdie’s boyfriend is about to ship off. So she’s moping in her room, drawing sketches of dead dogs and crying about the fact that he doesn’t love her enough to marry her. She knows she could tell her friend about the death. And Birdie would drop everything. And they would hold each other and smoke bad reefer and fall asleep in each other’s arms. But she doesn’t want that. She doesn’t want it to be real. To say it out loud…Marge is restless.

Ron is leaving soon. And their little game is coming to a close. Him. Taking her dancing when he’s on liberty at every bar in town, spinning her in his arms until she’s dizzy. Him. Listening as she rambles on about Keats and Byron and how romantic double-suicide must feel, nodding along. Agreeing with her completely. They are of the same mind somehow. Everything she feels about the world, he feels twice as strongly. She tells him she thinks the painting Birdie showed her of St. Thomas poking Jesus’ holy wound is the most beautiful thing in the world. He agrees, and leans forward, and goes on a diatribe about the erotic connotations of penetration, talking about some analyst named Freud. And wouldn’t Marge want to read him? The offer of it. Knowledge freely given is a high unlike anything she has ever experienced.

She opens the book he lends her that night and starts laughing. Two years past due from a library in the Northeast. What a little thief. She tells him that if she got married, she would follow her husband to Siberia, just like Sonia did. Even if he killed an old lady in cold blood? He asked. Especially then. Killing doesn’t bother her. It should. But if it’s done for the right reasons….Killing doesn’t seem to bother him either. The same red that flows in her from the those old Oak trees rests inside of him, bubbling up and over through his ears and eyes. Wrapping them both in string, tied about the middle, unable to escape.

That night, with two Sazeracs between them, he tells her about Carthage, and about Alcibiades, who rode into battle holding only a golden shield with the image of Eros, God of desire, on it. She can’t stand it. Grief and desire fight each other inside her stomach, each one intensifying the other. You’re sick. Gale’s voice says to her. She imagines Ron to block the thought out, naked and broad muscled, holding up a gold shield, bloody and broken by arrows, and squirms in her seat. When she opens her eyes he’s staring at her again, odd and still, like a snake waiting to bite. He lights her cigarette as she tries not to cry. And he talks about what it means to have a true warrior’s spirit. And she begins to understand what it’s like to be understood. Birdie, for all that she loves her, is too sweet to withstand the idea of killing. Relentless violence frightens her in a way it does not frighten Marge.

The game is up though. She knows this as she half listens to him, the smoke making him look hazy. And the late night conversations and the absinthe and the music and the laughter. It’s all gone up in flames. She owes so much to Gale. Her whole life, really. She can’t abandon him now. But, she figures. Ron is going away. And he’s so sure he’s going to die. It won’t hurt to keep writing to him.

Right?

__________

1945

Marge has a plan. Before Ronnie arrives, she wants to have her own fun. She wants to prove to him that he’s nothing. Gale, that is. She realized, last night, after hanging up the phone, that she had loved him. For the gentle curve of his face. For his air of desperation. For the odd sense she always got from him that he was meant to die young and beautiful, leaving her a pretty widow with a big house and haunted memories of her first love. Stupid little girl ideas.

But he had betrayed her. Had betrayed her sacrifice. The destruction she undertook of any sort of real personality she held inside of herself in honor of him, of the sacrifices he took to raise her and put a roof over her head. And so, she was going to prove that even his Daddy could be stolen from him, just in the same way he had stolen her from her own Father. The way she had been given over, like a piece of day old garbage. Again. Gale’s voice. Always in her ear. Red kept growing. It never stopped. Sometimes, she thought. Sometimes killing could be right.

She catches Bucky alone that morning, sitting on the patio, white shirt stretched over his muscled chest. She won’t let him fuck her. But she’s willing to do just about anything else.

She slides up to him, pouring him a lemonade. Putting on her best smile.

“Here you go.”

He looks up to her, smiling with what she now realizes is a smug superiority, mingled with hazy lust. He thinks he’s won. She wants to claw his little blue eyes out.

He takes the drink from her, and swigs it down.

“Thank you kindly, sweetheart.”

“No problem, Daddy.”

He whips his face back up to her. She can see the shock there clear as day. Sad, and lonely, and hunted. He cracks a grin. It’s fake. She’s good at telling a fake grin.

“What?” He croaks out.

She slides into his lap, as easy as pie.

“What?” She parrots back.

He seems confused. Poor baby. She puts her arms around his neck, leaning in to whisper in his ear.

“I don’t think it’s very fair. Do you? That you’re Gale’s Daddy, but not mine.”

She can feel him growing hard underneath her. He reaches up, looking torn, like he might push her to the floor. Like he might rip her clothes off right there and fuck her in the open like an animal.

“Marge. I…”

“I don’t mind. I don’t mind, really.”

She kisses his neck. And imagines he is another dark haired, broad chested man.

“I don’t mind it, but I don’t want to be left out. You understand?”

He groans, grinding himself into her. She straddles him, slipping his hand inside her the front of her dress, until she can feel his large palm cupping the entirety of her breast.

“Do you feel it? My heart?”

He grabs her then, like a dog longing for its master. He grinds up into her, fabric on fabric. It’s the most she’s ever done with a man. And she doesn’t like it. Instead she sinks to her knees, opening the fly of his pants, placing her mouth on him like she saw him do to Gale.

He grabs ahold of her hair, tugging too tight, and fucks into her mouth.

“Jesus…fuck…fucking whore–”

She grabs his balls then, just a touch too hard, hard enough to make him freeze with pain. If she kept squeezing. What then? If she never stopped? But the rage leaves her, or rather, it grows cold. She pulls off of him. Him, her willing captive.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Nothing.”

She knows what he thinks about her. Luckily for him it doesn’t matter. She sucks him down again, her jaw aching with pressure. He places his hands back in her hair, hesitant this time. She goes at it for what feels like an hour, until he starts panting hard, choking out,

“I’m gonna–”

She pulls off, and grabs him by the base. She wants something out of him first.

“Please. Marge, please. Sweetheart. I’ll do anything.”

“Call me Daddy.”

Again. He freezes. Eyes wide with desire.

“Say it. Say it.”

“Daddy. Daddy, fuck.”

She puts her mouth back on him, and he’s coming hard, his body curling over her head, face scrunched up in agony.

She gets up when he’s done, holding the bitter tang in her mouth, and spits it into his glass of lemonade. He watches her like he’s seen a ghost as she straightens her clothes, fixes her lipstick in the sliding glass door, and heads back inside. Ten hours until Ronnie arrives. She has to run to the hardware store.

______________

1944

My Percy, I’m so sorry. I can’t do it anymore. Gale has been captured by Germans. I can’t stand the thought, even in my head, of being so disloyal to him when he’s this close to death. It was never going to last. Don’t wait for me. I feel lost and alone. The dorm rooms are so empty. I’m afraid sometimes. That I’m a bad person. For the thoughts I have. Something inside of me is broken. Some cog doesn’t turn correctly. The hands of the watch have all stopped moving and I’m stuck in a world I don’t understand, which does not understand me. Please forget about me. Your Mary

______________

1945

He drives up to the house around two in the morning. Marge is in her room, sleeping next to Gale, the same way she has since she was fifteen and her Father and Mother decided it would be best if she moved up to the Cleven’s. After all, his parents had just died, and he was eighteen now, and they would be married soon anyways. She remembers the last time she went to the Casper library was the day before she moved in officially.

She can sense that he’s on the property. She gets up, slowly, and on tip toes walks down the stairs to the front door. He’s waiting there for her. His eyes shadowed in the dark night. Marge has done her part already. She put the sleeping pills in their drinks, crushed and hidden under the tang of gingerale and whiskey. Now they’re both in separate rooms, dead to the world.

“Where is he?”

She takes his hard hand in hers, and leads him back up the stairs. The night is dark and gloomy. She imagines that instead of the boring plains of Casper that it’s the moors of the Scottish Highlands that stretch for three acres in each direction. This kind of house, well, there’s no one here to hear you scream in this kind of house. She knows. She’s done enough screaming in this house to last a lifetime. And no one, until now, had ever come.

He approaches their bed, unmade, and leans over Gale’s sleeping face. She realizes that Ron is seeing him for the first time. She had made sure, before, to never wear any sort of locket with his picture in it. She can’t tell what Ronnie is thinking, but she watches with rapture as he reaches his hands out and drops a pillow over Gale’s face. She had thought…maybe a gun, or…well. This way was better. Less interesting. But better. Easier to explain.

She can tell when Gale wakes up. He starts thrashing. Slowly at first, then like a fish out of water begging for air. The only word banging around her head is “Daddy.” Daddy Daddy Daddy DADDY. As if he hadn’t been her Daddy for years and years. Even when she betrayed him, going out on little dates with Ron, writing him love letters. Even then it was all Gale in the end. Ruler of her heart and her brain. Taking up room he had carved out for himself inside of her. In the end it was always supposed to be the two of them. GaleandMarge. Now. Now she was just going to be Marge. Marge alone. With Ron two steps ahead, cold and hard edged and filled with anger. She feels afraid of the future.

Out of the corner of her eye there’s movement. Quick as anything, Bucky bounds into the room, stumbling over himself, vertigo drawing on the drugs to make him as clumsy as a newborn deer. Marge screams. This wasn’t part of the plan. Ron doesn’t panic. Not even when Bucky reaches out and grabs her by the throat, tossing her into the wardrobe. She lands hard, and is reminded of her own Father, his hulking size, his tempestuous anger. She understands for a brief moment what Gale sees in him.

Then the noise like a firecracker. Bang. And Bucky drops. She looks up from the red. Up and up and up. Ron stands there, pistol in hand, like a God of death. She loves him. She needs him. She is deathly afraid. He turns, returns to the bed, and checks Gale’s pulse. He places the gun in Gale’s hand, wiping it off with a handkerchief. She clings to his back, pressing desperate little kisses along the back of his neck, clinging like a sea urchin.

He holds her close, turning her around, mouth pressing to hers, squeezing her so tight she can’t breath. He doesn’t check the bleeding she can feel at the back of her head from when she knocked into the dresser. That’s okay though.

“You’re not leaving me again. Not again. It’s finished.”

She nods. Where else would she go now?

He takes her hand and leads her down the stairs and into the car and out onto the rough paved roads.

“Where?”

She knows what he means before he even finishes asking.

“Take a left.”

It takes them twenty minutes to get there. The anticipation is killing her. He parks the car, and giddy like a school girl she drags him along, pulling her nightgown over her head. Laughing. This is what freedom feels like. Like fresh air from the pitch black night on your naked breasts.

They reach the gravestone and he’s on her immediately. His hands wander, up and down, grasping her breasts and her naked thighs, wanting to touch every at once, wanting to consume her.

“Daddy…”

She whispers it to him, and something seems to snap. He tosses her down onto the dirt, the back of her head hitting the gravestone. She starts to bleed even more. Red everywhere. She feels behind her and touches the engraved letters of her Mother’s name. Red in the air. He stays clothed, but shucks his wool coat, his tie, places himself above her, knees in the wet dirt, biting at her neck until she cries out in pain. He touches her, but not gently.

“It’s finished. You understand? You’re not getting away from me again. Not even another war. Not even another continent is going to stop me from getting to you.”

The words should scare her, but they don’t. She’s used to being owned. At least Ron is good at it. He keeps his stolen things close to the chest, treating them like a magpie. He guards his nest. He would sooner kill her before he let her touch another man. And he lets her do what she wants. All of that. It makes her love him more than she can stand. Her mind might belong to Gale. It might always belong to him. But her body, her heart, her soul. Those she can give away as she chooses.

He slides into her, and it hurts unlike anything she’s ever felt before. She grabs at the stone behind her, bending her back to get away. But she can’t. The pain and pleasure are mixing. She can feel herself bleeding down into the Earth. She’s finally gotten what she wanted. Finally. A sigh of relief escapes her, fluttering her eyes closed. All around her, inside of her, is him. Warm and dark. From him to her, from the Oak trees that surround them like a canopy. Red flows out of her into the night. She screams out a long, loud laugh. He smiles into her neck, biting even harder. She wants to live the rest of her life just like this.

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