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Major Egan. Major Cleven. I heard you were already on twenty missions.

MASTERS OF THE AIR Part Four

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Leliana found her.

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you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

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I've Got You Under My Skin

john brady x gn!reader

john brady the man that you are... also this turned out a little more angsty than i thought it would be

wc: 1.5k

John Brady’s already annoyed before the band goes on for their set. He snapped a reed during practice, cut his chin while shaving, and now you’ve shown up for drinks with an irksome smile on your face. Dougie’s chatting you up and Hambone’s already bought your drink, and you’re laughing at something Blakely’s just said.

It’s always like this when you come to the bar and Brady can’t help but roll his eyes. When you come for drinks, you take the time to press your hair into curls and scrub the grime out from under your nails. You look sort of pretty, but Brady knows it’s a guise to cover up how venomous you really are.

The guys usually see you on the hardstand working on the forts with Kenny in your coveralls with grease smudged across your face. Sometimes you wear a white ribbon in your hair and it’s the most ridiculous thing John Brady’s ever seen. Even as his plane is in taxi, he sees that stupid silk tied into your hair. You’re the first and last thing he sees before and after each mission. When he lands and is forced to give his fort into your care, you always have some snide comment waiting and a forced smile on your face.

He gives you a sarcastic smile, and when his crew isn’t looking and Kenny’s inspecting the plane both of you drop the façade and glare openly at each other. You looked exhausted this morning, dark shadows stamped under your eyes, and you didn’t give him nearly as much energy as he’d expected.

“I hope your face gets stuck like that, Brady.”

That’s all you have to say and he’s still frowning at you, dark brows pinched close together. “You think about my face often?”

“I try not to think of you at all.” You look more deflated than usual, and Brady’s throat closes up. He’s still standing there like an idiot when you sigh. “Go away, Captain. There’s a lot of work to be done.”  

He thinks about it all day. The tiredness in your eyes. The way your shoulders slumped as you walked away. Usually, you’re annoyingly springy. He hates the way your hips move as you walk away from him, the way his eyes can’t look away, but this—your sullen retreat—it makes him sick to his stomach. You don’t call him Captain and you’ve never told him to go away. You’re on his mind during rehearsal when his jaw clenches, cracking the reed between his teeth. He’s remembering the purple of your eyebags when his razor slips. And now Brady’s watching you laugh with his friends like nothing’s wrong.

So, he’s already pissed when the band starts up and you peel away to dance with Hambone. He knows you’re just friends. Hambone laughed in his face when Brady tried to lecture him about the irresponsibility of relationships on base. Still, the way he’s swinging you around makes something nasty coil in the pit of his stomach. He hears your laugh over his sax and struggles to keep playing.

You dance like that for the first several songs of the set, twisting between Blakely and Hambone. Brady can see the flush on your skin and, just for a moment, he wonders what the feel of you would be like under his hands. He’s dreamt about it—and they’re terrible dreams—but they leave him with a nervous twitch in his hands and a bounce in his leg. He’s taping his foot now, to keep in time with the beat of the song, and he tells himself the tremor in his arms is from holding his instrument.

As the song reaches its crescendo, the music loud and consuming and overpowering, your eyes flick to his and they don’t move. Your eyes, big and searching, bore into him and Brady thinks you must be crazy to be looking at him like that while dancing with another man.

Maybe you’ve learned to read his signs of irritation—the tops of his ears have turned a fiery red, his nostrils flaring of their own accord—because you certainly know how to push him over the edge. Hambone spins you, and from your place tangled in his arms, you grin at Brady.

That does it for him.

Your smile is a taunt, a trap, and he knows it. But when the band finishes their last song and the vinyl takes over, he’s rushing for you, searching for you in the crowd. Brady finds you, crowded against the wall as Colonel Harding laughs at some terrible joke you must have made. It makes his eye twitch, seeing his CO lean close to whisper in your ear.

Brady reaches you as you give the Colonel an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, Sir. I promised Captain Brady that I’d save him a dance.”

And then you’re looping your arm through his, smiling up at Brady’s flushed face, tugging him onto the dancefloor.

Brady nearly stumbles, his mind going blank at the feeling of your skin on his. He has no idea where your jacket has gone, and your sleeves are rolled up. Your bare forearm brushes against his wrist as you guide him through the crowd. His senses have narrowed to that point of contact and Brady wonders if you have freckles or birthmarks under the rest of your clothes. For just a moment, he imagines mapping all the lines and marks of your body—imagines knowing you beyond a brush of skin.

You stop, twisting to stand in front of him with that petulant, expecting look on your pretty face. “Are we going to dance, or are you going to keep staring at me?”

“I’m not staring,” he says, and his traitorous body clenches up as you inch closer to him.

You hum under your breath. “Could feel you watching me all night, Brady.”

His body feels like it’s on fire as you wrap his arm around your waist, clasping his other hand in yours. He shudders under your hands and says, “It’s cause you’re a horrible dancer.”

“Look who’s talking,” you scoff. “You’re stiff as a board. If you weren’t in the band, I’d think you didn’t know a thing about music.”

He pulls you closer by the waist, your chest brushing against his. Your cheeks are turning a lovely shade of pink and when he hears your breathing hitch, Brady knows—with no small amount of quilt—that little noise will linger with him far longer than it should.

He’s looking at you through that heavy-lidded gaze you detest so dearly and it’s not enough to be swaying in his arms “I’m sorry for being sore with you this morning.”

Your whisper hits the shell of his ear, your nose dragging up the line of his neck. It’s instinct, the way his hand flexes on your hip and Brady prays to God for patience, because he’s not sure how much longer he can dance with you like this.

“Cold is what you were this morning. Worried all day about you, and then you show up— flouncing around—,”

“I don’t flounce.”

He pulls back to glare at you. “I saw no shortage of flouncing between Blakely and Hambone.”

“You jealous, Brady?” Your hand slides up his shoulder to the back of his neck, dragging your nails over his nape.

It’s too easy to fall back into your arms, to curl his body against yours. His heart is pounding in his chest and he’s certain you can feel it where he’s pressed against you. He wants to scoff, to make fun of you for insinuating something so ridiculous, but the words catch in his throat.

You don’t give him the mercy of silence. “Can’t dance with you while the band’s playing, can I? Would if I could, Captain.”

You look up at him with a nervous smile—small and timid—so at odds with your usual daring grin, Brady’s desperate to reassure you. “I know,” he says, pulling you impossibly closer. “I know.”

With your face pressed into his chest, it’s hard to hear your next words. Brady strains to hear you over the slow music, the way his body muffles your voice. He catches the sentence, and it breaks his heart.

“I’m tired of cleaning blood out of B-17s.”

The music is quiet and the vinyl creaks as the needle skips.

“I’m worried one day it’ll be yours.”

Brady doesn’t know what to say. He’s a pragmatist and a Catholic; there’s no comfort he can offer you, no promise he can make. For now, the only thing he can do is hold you close and let the music wash over your bodies as the dancefloor empties. At the end of the night, when the record has stopped spinning and the stars have climbed into the sky, the only audible sound is the disquiet of your shared breath and the rhythmic pounding of your hearts.

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suddenly being hit by hambone thoughts as I’m trying to finish this brady piece and it’s getting distracting

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nate mann was soooo perfectly cast that mans charisma and grace and whimsical spirit and reflective nature are so mind bogglingly off the charts that every time hes on screen im like 100000000 more hours of this guy please

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have never seen a person with more insane grandpa swag attractiveness than rosie rosenthal

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task manager kill this man

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you could know this man for two minutes and he’s already thinking “have they thought of me in my underwear yet? they’re about to”

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Masters of the Air -> Costume design by Colleen Atwood requested by anon, layout insp by this

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thinking about rosie, confidently and UNPROVOKED, telling buck and bucky about him and the boys flying in their skivvies, and the boys backing him up like, yes, we did, in fact, fly in our underwear, majors 😭😭😭😭😭 crying if this interaction – word per word – really happened

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something big brewing for the ladies who brady...

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Good Friends

pining and in denial rosie is doing something to my brain chemistry

rosie rosenthal x gn!reader

wc; 699

Rosie likes to think he’s friends with everyone at Thorpe Abbott. He’s been with his crew for years and he makes an effort to befriend the new guys when they come in, even if they won’t be around for long. Even John Brady’s stopped making snide remarks, and Rosie swears the band has started playing more of the songs he likes.

He’s definitely friends with you. That’s what he says when Pappy elbows him in the ribs, grinning, and when Crosby wags his eyebrows over the rim of his glass. It’s just that you like to dance and Rosie’s usually the one to indulge you. He can’t control when the music slows down and he can’t help but pull you close because he’d never ruin the last song of the night for you.

Maybe he’s given you a ride or two on the handlebars of his bike, or when he’s conveniently forgotten his bike at home, he takes the time to walk you across base. He likes hearing your laugh and even during those late nights, your smile is radiant under the moonlight. He’s chased you through the rain and let you muss his water-logged curls. Rosie’s hands tense at his sides when he sees the hair plastered to your neck. He tells himself he’d do the same for any of his friends and brushes the wayward tendrils into place. He says goodnight but Rosie knows you’ll haunt his dreams. The curl of your lips is superimposed on the inside of his eyelids. Your whispered taunts linger, brushing up against the shell of his ear. Even the smell of you is stuck on his skin.

He does his best to scrub himself of you before each mission. Rosie knows there’s a job to be done and he hates that the thought of you might distract him. So, he uses extra aftershave the morning he flies and slicks his curls into submission. He doesn’t have time to think about his friends flying in other forts, certainly not enough time to think of you. There’s only him, his crew, and the mission. There’s no room in the plane for the ghost of you.

When he lands and interrogation is over, Crosby tells him you’ve been a live wire, on edge for hours up in Air Exec. Rosie aches to know you’ve been fretting, but when he sees you, he plasters on a cocky smile—the one that always has you rolling your eyes—and asks if you’ve been missing him.

You always look a little shaken, a little like a ghost when you see him again, but without fail you scoff and turn to walk away from him, allowing him to sling an arm around your shoulders and haul you into his side. You walk like that, hip to hip, and Rosie can almost feel your ribs folding, making room to interlace with his.

You stop outside the gear room, and the rest of Rosie’s crew is already inside, stripping out of their flysuits. It’s the two of you alone in the hallway and his name is a hoarse whisper on your lips. Rosie. He’s never Captain Rosenthal when it’s just the two of you. You called him Robert once, to accuse him of cheating in cards, and the aghast look on his face sent you into such a fit of laughter, the game of cards was abandoned. But when you say his name like that…

Rosie.

Your bodies are pressed close, near enough to share breath. You’re looking up at him with those pretty eyes of yours, cheeks flushed and—he shouldn’t notice but he does—your lips are bitten-red. He doesn’t need to hear your question to know he’ll say yes. You could ask him to fish down the moon and he’d steal it from the sky. Usually, you’re asking to see his plane or to swap sides at meals. There are some things, some things that make his breathing hitch, that Rosie wonders if you’ll ever ask. He could ask, step just an inch closer, but the question tangles in his throat and he repeats the same mantra he’s been saying for months.

You’re just friends. Good friends.

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me: omg!!! Mr. RR Martin you changed my life and I can't thank you enough for writing my favorite book series of all time !

george RR Martin: why did you tweet that you wanted to get Jaime pregnant?

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But [Rosie] was not very good at maneuvering a spindly British bicycle. As "airplane commander," Rosenthal was issued along with a good deal of other matériel, a bicycle for getting around the wide vistas of Thorpe Abbotts. He found himself heavily burdened by all this issue but somehow managed to get himself upon the cycle. He carried a load of gear in one arm, had draped his life preserver around his neck, and set off in the general direction of his quarters.

Rosenthal managed to do pretty well, for he got some distance away from the supply hut and was pedaling his uncertain way along a little dirt road. A shift in the load contributed to a series of unusual course changes which came to a sudden, damp conclusion as Rosenthal, newly issued supplies and bicycle plunged down an embankment into one of those charming little ditches that run along the picturesque rural English roads.

Lying in the water (which was not deep), Lieutenant Rosenthal felt there was only one thing to do in this emergency as he lay there, face up in the ditch: he inflated his Mae West. This was probably the only time during all of the Second World War that a member of the 8th Air Force was thus saved from British waters.

— an except from Edward Jablonski’s Flying Fortress : the illustrated biography of the B-17s and the men who flew them

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Callum Turner & Austin Butler in Masters of The Air (2024—)

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