Work Text:
Julie
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I am not, although this may be difficult for any of my captors to believe, a violent person by nature. I was certainly not raised to resort to violence, and in any case I am generally so good with my words and affect that I do not often feel the urge to use my fists, elbows, knees, or teeth. I have never used any of those parts of my body on someone in a violent way, outside of wartime efforts, except for one night at the Green Man that I just remembered and want to write down so that I can thoroughly relive (and enjoy) it.
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On the nights where men turned their eyes towards Queenie and Maddie, it was almost always Queenie they were looking at. This was something they were both used to and both regarded with similar disinterest- most of the time. Some nights Queenie would play cat-and-mouse with them, one or two of them, letting them buy her a drink if she had already had her shift, talking and flirting with them a while and then returning to Maddie, who was the best excuse not to make any sort of decision either way. Maddie didn’t mind this. It was fun to watch, at any rate. It was never something that she thought she might have to worry about, because everyone but Queenie seemed to look right past her unless she were in or around a plane (which she also did not mind).
That night at the Green Man was a lad named Paul, who Queenie didn’t recognize but Maddie did. It was obvious that she did as soon as they sat and she saw him over Queenie’s shoulder, sat at the proper bar with a few others and a drink in one hand. Maddie went very quiet and a little bit pale, which Queenie noticed immediately. She leaned over the table to speak to her friend over the din of all the others while Maddie looked down at her hands.
“What is it, a past conquest? Some scorned beau you’re afraid will approach you on his knees and beg for your hand?”
“No,” Maddie replied quickly, glancing his way, “just Paul.”
Queenie turned sharply, craning her neck to follow Maddie’s gaze, clasping her hands on the sticky wooden table, more on Maddie’s side than her own.
“Paul the Apostle? Fancy you knowing him!” she exclaimed, and Maddie rubbed her eyes, pushing air through her nose.
“I’m Jewish,” she mumbled, which Queenie already knew, “he’s just someone I dropped off at an airfield a bit ago.”
Queenie turned back to Maddie, having gotten the first part of a confession out of her and satisfied enough not to continue her (frankly rather embarrassing) carrying-on, at least for the moment. She raised her eyebrows and Maddie stubbornly resisted her for another fifteen seconds before she gave in and sighed.
“He’s a pig,” she explained, so quietly that Queenie had to again lean into the table to hear her, “or he was with me, when I flew him. Spent half the time in the air with his,” she gestured a little vaguely, her ears turning pink under piles of barely-tamed curls, “hand on my thigh.”
Queenie considered this very seriously for a moment.
“He did that while you were flying the plane?”
Maddie remembered it in detail then, his hand, so much larger than hers, just above her knee and squeezing a little higher. It had made her stomach lurch then in a way that flying never had, and even now with him full meters away from her it made her feel faintly ill. She only nodded, fighting the urge to say that it hadn’t been and wasn’t anything to be concerned about, but her gut was telling her the opposite. Paul was a pig, and she hated him, and she didn’t want to breathe the same air as him if she could help it.
“Which one is he?” Queenie asked, and Maddie pointed him out. He was the only one of the three men at the bar with dark hair. Queenie watched him for a minute before excusing herself and leaving Maddie alone at their table, which was far enough into a corner that Maddie wasn’t too concerned about anyone paying much attention to them. She was mostly concerned with the fact that Queenie made a beeline for Paul, taking the open seat at the bar to his left. Maddie was so overwhelmed with embarrassment and dread that she held her face in her hands for a full thirty seconds before she got ahold of herself.
Queenie was leaning up onto the counter coyly, one shoulder dipping down and forward. Seeing as she wasn’t in uniform, the front of her dress gapped a little bit. Maddie could only tell because she could see Paul look down at it and smile at her. When he did Maddie swore he had a hundred tiny teeth, like a shark, and felt another rush of dread that made her look away.
It only took Queenie about twenty minutes to convince Paul of her interest. Really, he was convinced as soon as she spoke to him, but after twenty minutes Queenie was secure enough to suggest they get some air, and he was secure enough to agree. Maddie watched them leave from the safety of her table, horribly afraid that Paul would notice her and tremendously worried about Queenie, who, with his arm snugly around her waist, only winked in her direction before they stepped outside.
There was a small crowd outside that door. Maddie lose sight of her friend through the frosted window and looked down at her hands again. Suddenly there was a commotion from just outside, some shouting or something, and those of them inside looked towards the opening turned almost in tandem to see Queenie come back inside. She didn’t slink or limp through the door. She walked through the door fully self-possessed, as always, without a hair out of place. Maddie wasn’t sure what had happened outside that door, but Queenie didn’t particularly look as if she had been a part of anything suspicious. That was what made her so good, though-- she never did.
“Miss me?” she asked, grinning widely at Maddie.
“Always,” Maddie replied. “What were you getting up to, you fantastic dolt?”
Queenie shrugged, tapping her perfectly-manicured nails against the tabletop and unable to control the grin that just kept spreading. She was pleased with herself. It was a good look for her.
“The same thing I’m always up to. Practising. That’s all it is. I never go home with anyone but you, do I?”
Maddie couldn’t quite tell whether that was something she needed to answer. They maintained eye contact for some time before she shrugged and said, “No,” but her mind had wandered and now she wasn’t sure where to guide it that was safe.
Fly the plane, Maddie.
“I don’t see anything wrong with practising,” Queenie continued, as Maddie gritted her teeth and prayed for the conversation to take any kind of turn, “how am I supposed to be good at any of it by the time I settle down if I’ve never practiced?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Maddie answered, in a way that she hoped was dismissive. Queenie’s grin took on a Cheshire quality and Maddie’s ears burned so hot she was afraid her curls would singe-- but to her incredible, unbelievable relief, Queenie let it drop. They enjoyed a drink and then biked back with no further incident. Maddie was so exhausted that it didn’t occur to her to ask anything further about Paul that night.
She wouldn’t find out what happened until later and she wouldn’t find out from Queenie, either. It was not modesty that kept Queenie quiet, but an aversion to embarrassing Maddie (which was ironic, because that was something she did rather frequently and generally with very little remorse, but this was different because it was serious and important and she didn’t want it to trouble Maddie any more than it already had). Maddie found out what had happened from the gossipers standing around the cafeteria.
Queenie had taken Paul outside, where he had, apparently put his hand somewhere she had rather him not have it. She had reacted to this by kneeing him swiftly in the groin and saying something to him that nobody had heard and that Paul had refused to repeat. The gossip was all speculation about what Queenie had said.
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Maddie
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“So you’ve never done anything of that sort?”
The question caught me off-guard and I couldn’t remember what Julie was asking until after I had turned and asked her, “What?”
Julie waggled her eyebrows and I remembered all in a rush the conversation-- if you could even call it that-- where she had referred to her flirtatiousness as ‘practising’. I shook my head at her and turned back to my bag. The Castle Craig was vast and a little bit cold but I was starting to wonder for the first time in my life about sharing a bed with my best friend. It wasn’t her fault, so I didn’t say a word about it.
Julie sat on the bed on her knees facing my back as if it wasn’t perfectly clear that I was trying to ignore her.
“Have you, Maddie Broddatt, never been kissed?”
I felt a lump start in the back of my throat, but I reminded myself of all the things I had done, starting and finishing with flying, which had always made things like kissing seem insignificant and petty. Only, because Julie was the one asking about it, I remembered all those times late in the dark of the night that I would wish I had been kissed, and the problem was not that I hadn’t the opportunity.
I had- twice. The first time I had been sixteen and a neighbor boy had put his hand on my neck. I had felt trapped and sick with claustrophobia and ducked out of his grasp before he could kiss me (as that was undoubtedly what he wanted; he licked his chapped lips somewhere between seven and twenty times). The second time had been one of the lads who regularly bought from my grandfather’s but had only spoken to me a few times. In a show of good faith I had been the one tasked with bringing his bike out to him, and he had leaned wickedly over his handlebars and asked if I had anything sweet for him.
I had pretended not to hear him. But I couldn’t pretend not to hear Julie. I shrugged but didn’t turn around. Julie shuffled across the bed- I could hear her- and touched my tense shoulders very gently until I turned around.
“It’s great fun, you know. Kissing.”
“Don’t rub it in,” I tried, but now that I was looking at her all I could think about was Julie and kissing in the same context. The man I imagined her kissing was faceless; the important part wasn’t him, it was her. I reckoned that Julie was probably a fantastic kisser. She was good at everything I wasn’t. She tilted her head a little and I noticed that she had let her hair down in all its soft and golden glory. It was another thing I had to be jealous of, only I found myself more and more often wanting to touch it rather than grow it myself.
“It’s even better with someone you trust,” she said, in a completely conversational way. It was so innocent that it took me a second to understand, and when I did my heart stalled like a Puss Moth nose up. This wasn’t a stall I knew how to ride through, so I stood there with my mouth hanging open and didn’t say anything. Julie left her hands on my shoulders and shuffled to the edge of the bed. With her on her knees and me standing, she was a few centimeters shorter than me, so that she was looking up at me through her eyelashes when she asked me if it was alright if she kissed me.
“I’m afraid I won’t be very good at it,” I blurted, and then immediately felt like running away. I didn’t know much about the castle, though, so I would have probably gotten nowhere. I expected Julie to laugh at me, but she didn’t, just shrugged and said, “Well, that’s what practise is for.”
It was absurd. It was so absurd that I had no way of thinking properly about how absurd it was, the idea of two women kissing. The idea of me kissing Julie. I felt a way about it that I had never felt about either of the boys who had tried to kiss me. I was terrified, but not of Julie, of something else I didn’t have word for, and I was getting dratted tired of not having the words for things, so I was grateful when she stopped waiting for permission and pressed her lips to mine.
She was so soft.
I’m not sure I can do this. I know nobody’s going to read this, but writing it down is like pulling bits of shrapnel out of my chest. It hurts. It’s necessary. I’m not pulling out bits of shrapnel, I’m pulling out bits of Julie, because I want-- I need-- for her to be whole.
I’m not sure how long we stayed like that. I remember Julie’s hands leaving my shoulders and going to the back of my neck, sliding into my hair, fingers tangling with curls I had stopped trying to tame a while ago. I actually was not bad at it, because it came so easily to me. Having a sense of direction in the air isn’t much different than having a sense of direction around a woman.I don’t mean for that to sound as crude as it looks on the page.
It wasn’t anything, really. We kissed until our lips were raw and our jaws ached. I touched her cheeks and stroked her skin with my thumbs and she let me. She even seemed to want me to. She even seemed to want me, because she was the one who kissed me first, and she was the one who opened her mouth into that kiss first, and she--
I don’t mean to suggest there was anything wrong with her. What we did didn’t feel wrong to us. And she didn’t mean anything by it, she’s just-- was just such an incredibly gifted pretender. She was helping me practise, getting me past something that I had been afraid of and skittish about, just like she had always done. Teaching me to focus enough that I could fly the plane. It was all for the benefit of someone else, some specter of a man in my future that I would presumably marry and conceive children with. She was trying to help me and she certainly thought she was.
She did help me. It was that night I found something about myself that was permanently broken. Julie didn’t break it, just drew my attention to it for the first time, but it’s only now, after the fact, years after the fact, that I’m understanding it. That part of a woman that makes her love a man is missing from me, or broken, or more accurately twisted. It’s like if you pointed a plane up and it went straight down. I have only, and, I expect, will only feel the way I felt kissing Julie about other women.
Julie loved men. Loved to play with them, to dangle herself in front of them like a cat and mouse game where the mouse turns out to be the cat. She was good at it, which was either why she loved it or a product of her loving it, and I have no doubt that by now, after the War, she would have been scooped up by someone who could match her wit and play her game. It was different with me; it never felt like we were playing a game. That’s how I know she wasn’t the way I am.
I keep having to remind myself that nobody is going to read this but me.
Julie did more than kiss me and I did more than kiss her back, and I am going to stop making excuses for us and for myself, because it there was nothing wrong with it at all. It didn’t all happen that night. We stayed at the castle for four days and four nights and every night was something new and different. During the day it was as if nothing had changed at all, except that every time she touched me I thought I would burst into flames. I’ve yet to do that.
The first night was the night she kissed me. When we tired of it-- and I don’t mean we wanted to stop, just that we were sleepy and it does wear you out, after a while-- we changed into our sleepclothes and got into the bed together. I thought it would be difficult or awkward, and I was wrong, it was the same as it always had been. We didn’t even touch each other that night at all, innocently or otherwise, just fell asleep sharing each other’s warmth under the covers. Julie fell asleep first with one hand tucked under her cheek. I remember watching her while I drifted off, the strange, slight smile that was just how her mouth naturally set and the way her eyelids fluttered, so pale I could see the little blue veins beneath. She seemed so fragile then. It was the only time I ever thought that about her. Even later, when I saw her after weeks of...of whatever they did to her, she never looked vulnerable or breakable or anything like that ever again.
The second night she held herself up over me, beneath the covers, and kissed more of me. For a little while I wasn’t sure what to do with my hands. She kissed my cheek and my jaw where I had it clenched.
“Relax,” she said, “it’s just practise,” and I did my best. I put an arm around her shoulders and found her waist with my other hand, but then I left my hands where they were while her lips wandered to my ear and along my neck.
The third night my hands moved. I touched her sides and rolled on top of her, flying the plane, or something like that. There I froze, with one hand splayed across Julie’s abdomen over her slip. I could see her skin through it, or thought I could.
“This part is different with a man,” she said, “but you’ll probably have to teach them what to do, most of them don’t know what feels good to us.” I swallowed and stroked my thumb across silk, but said nothing, and couldn’t even properly look up at her. I was burning and aching all over and had no way of even pretending to understand her or what she was saying. There was very little that I understood then. Julie picked my hand up off of her stomach and held it in her own, studying it for a moment.
“Your hands are smaller than I thought,” she said, and I had a moment where I wished fervently and for the only time in my life that I were male. When that passed I was just determined to prove my small and feminine hands could do anything a man’s could do, if not do better, which is, I’m sure, exactly what Julie was thinking when she (very gently) goaded me on.
My hands were plenty big enough, as it turned out. Her slip was so thin I could feel her heartbeat when I placed my hand in the center of her chest. I touched her over where the neckline scooped down, marveling at myself and at/her/, the way she shifted under me and held the back of my neck in her hand. For the first time I got to watch the redness go from her ears to her cheeks down her neck, and her skin was hot where I kissed it.
“See,” she breathed, still committed to this ‘practising’, “when you’re-- you’ll have to tell him to touch you there, like that. Yes, like that. Because he’ll--” she broke off when I kissed her again, which I did because I was tired of hearing her talk about a man I knew even then didn’t exist. Because I wasn’t going to sleep with a man. And I’m not going to. I think she got the idea that I didn’t care much. Somehow we stopped, fell asleep holding each other like we had that night she came back from a mission bruised all over, but not because she needed me. Because she wanted it. And I believed that.
That might be the best thing that Julie ever gave me- that time I lived and breathed believing that she wanted me, as I wanted her. And it wasn’t cruel, although I can see it might look like that, written down and not in my head. It was a gift. It was incredibly kind.
The fourth night was the real gift. I’m not sure if I can write about it- I keep saying that and then going on, but now I’m really not sure I can, and not sure I want to. I wouldn’t be able to get it all down if I tried.
The ghost of her breath against my ear and the little crescent-moons of the indents left by her fingernails in my shoulderblades and my upper arms. Where she clung to me. The way our hips fit together, the way she curled into me and against me; I knew exactly what I was doing, somehow, with very little urging or assistance. I had never seen her like that. I had never seen Julie not in control of herself or everything around her.
The gift wasn’t that. The gift was what she gave me later, lean and slight and hovering over me with an arm tucked behind my head and her self-satisfied smile pressed against my collarbone. She maintained, later, when we talked about it, because we had to, that we had not given up our chastities, or whatever it is when you give yourself up to a man. Where you’re dirty afterwards and not worth having anymore by anyone but him, or at least that’s the idea-- that’s not what we did, and not what we had.
After all, we did have something. And-
I don’t want to condemn her. I won’t condemn her and say that she loved me, when I don’t know that it was true the way I mean it. But I loved her. Love her.
This is the first time I’ve ever admitted that to myself not half-asleep wrapped up in my blankets and my memories of her.
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Julie
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They are going to send me away soon. I know that they’ve already decided it. It’s why they let me have all this paper. They don’t need anything else from me, so they don’t pick things up from me anymore, but they left the paper and the pen and there’s nothing else for me to do other than think about who’s coming for me and where I’m going.
I don’t know what else to write. I’ve written it all down, all that I wanted to write. I don’t want to think about things like what my training was like or my mother or my poor brother Jamie. There’s only one thing that doesn’t hurt to think about so I sit here and write to keep my hand moving and think about Maddie.
Maddie.
Maddie.
Maddie.
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I love you.