C'est une fic.
Apr. 22nd, 2013 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trace_of_scarletFic: If X=Y, Then...?
Fandoms: The Bletchley Circle/Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: PG
Words: 748
Warnings: None.
Notes: Beta-ed by my Eric. Follow-up to Rows and Columns and Columns And Rows.
Summary: Jean knows all about doing one's duty. So does Captain Fury.
Of course, he's not a GI, not really - he's a good deal more important than that, if he's who she's reasonably certain he is. But the GIs during the war were the first black Americans she'd ever met, and some associations stick.
She wonders what she's doing here. Whatever it is, isn't she too old for it? She should still be married, a mother like Susan, doing infinite tiny tasks and pretending that they make her happy. Even her mother on her death bed wanted to know when Jean would find herself another 'nice young man', regardless of the fact that at the time she was gone forty. (And anyway, these days there are no nice young men. All their young men are dead, or still fighting the war raging in their heads.) But even in her teens, fighting her own battle for Oxford, she had guessed then that she could have sums and calculations or she could have a husband, a cosy warm life in slippers, and chose without hesitation the shining curves of a graph over those of a shining ring. Then it had seemed a golden, pioneering choice, wrought in newness... But now?
She doesn't know. In the war she had a purpose again, following her patterns into battle and bringing home seamen safe from U-Boats, and that purpose flickered again when Susan turned up pell-mell at her door two years ago. And now?
Now there has been no Susan to flip the blackboard and call them down the rabbit-hole after her, only a coloured American with a faintly ridiculous name and far too much knowledge about the SoE, who is now escorting them to who knows where.
We're going to see the Queen of Hearts, she thinks absurdly, feeling her lips (always so dour, so hard; you'll never get a man with a face like that) smooth into a very faint smile. Off with their heads!
As if they hadn't all lost their heads already, she thinks, as the nice young GI opens the car door for her to step out: she has thought all this in the long seconds the car took to turn the corner and pass through security. The airfield's breeze is wolf-whistling through her hair; Lucy is wide-eyed and shyly silent at her side. She wonders if it was wise, bringing a child like Lucy into this. But then Lucy is in fact not a child, she reminds herself sternly: she may be the group baby, but she has seen as many wars as any of them; has shown her own steel. If she sobs in the night over the dead her perfect memory cannot allow her to forget, then who amongst them can say she is alone?
The weather is grey but flighty as a dancer; her hairdo (never exactly glamorous to begin with) is a buffeted as if she were at sea. She puts her arm around Lucy, who smiles back at her as if she isn't scared at all.
"We're at Heathrow," Lucy tells her, voice soft. "Seventeen point two five miles from Charing Cross."
Jean believes her: such details are not the kind of information Lucy ever gets wrong. "Aye, but I think we've still a fair way to go."
"That we have, ma'am," their guide agrees, flashing them the briefest of all-American movie-star smiles. "But from here on in, we'll be getting there in style."
"Well, I'll grant you it's certainly a style," Jean allows herself to remark, and doesn't wait for his guidance before beginning to ascend the gangway. Lucy follows her, silent and curious, and their escort brings up the rear like military guard.
They aren't off to see the Queen of Hearts at all: they're inside the belly of the beast, dutiful - to mangle her mataphors disgracefully - as Daniel in the lions' den. Surely she should be old enough and wise enough to know better than to entertain such childish notions, but after all she is only a woman, isn't she? Or so that's what they told her when the war was over and she was no longer an SOE operative, merely another discarded female.
Still, she knows her duty; she is prepared to do it. And perhaps she will be useful, and perhaps - just perhaps - it might be even be interesting.
Fandoms: The Bletchley Circle/Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: PG
Words: 748
Warnings: None.
Notes: Beta-ed by my Eric. Follow-up to Rows and Columns and Columns And Rows.
Summary: Jean knows all about doing one's duty. So does Captain Fury.
Of course, he's not a GI, not really - he's a good deal more important than that, if he's who she's reasonably certain he is. But the GIs during the war were the first black Americans she'd ever met, and some associations stick.
She wonders what she's doing here. Whatever it is, isn't she too old for it? She should still be married, a mother like Susan, doing infinite tiny tasks and pretending that they make her happy. Even her mother on her death bed wanted to know when Jean would find herself another 'nice young man', regardless of the fact that at the time she was gone forty. (And anyway, these days there are no nice young men. All their young men are dead, or still fighting the war raging in their heads.) But even in her teens, fighting her own battle for Oxford, she had guessed then that she could have sums and calculations or she could have a husband, a cosy warm life in slippers, and chose without hesitation the shining curves of a graph over those of a shining ring. Then it had seemed a golden, pioneering choice, wrought in newness... But now?
She doesn't know. In the war she had a purpose again, following her patterns into battle and bringing home seamen safe from U-Boats, and that purpose flickered again when Susan turned up pell-mell at her door two years ago. And now?
Now there has been no Susan to flip the blackboard and call them down the rabbit-hole after her, only a coloured American with a faintly ridiculous name and far too much knowledge about the SoE, who is now escorting them to who knows where.
We're going to see the Queen of Hearts, she thinks absurdly, feeling her lips (always so dour, so hard; you'll never get a man with a face like that) smooth into a very faint smile. Off with their heads!
As if they hadn't all lost their heads already, she thinks, as the nice young GI opens the car door for her to step out: she has thought all this in the long seconds the car took to turn the corner and pass through security. The airfield's breeze is wolf-whistling through her hair; Lucy is wide-eyed and shyly silent at her side. She wonders if it was wise, bringing a child like Lucy into this. But then Lucy is in fact not a child, she reminds herself sternly: she may be the group baby, but she has seen as many wars as any of them; has shown her own steel. If she sobs in the night over the dead her perfect memory cannot allow her to forget, then who amongst them can say she is alone?
The weather is grey but flighty as a dancer; her hairdo (never exactly glamorous to begin with) is a buffeted as if she were at sea. She puts her arm around Lucy, who smiles back at her as if she isn't scared at all.
"We're at Heathrow," Lucy tells her, voice soft. "Seventeen point two five miles from Charing Cross."
Jean believes her: such details are not the kind of information Lucy ever gets wrong. "Aye, but I think we've still a fair way to go."
"That we have, ma'am," their guide agrees, flashing them the briefest of all-American movie-star smiles. "But from here on in, we'll be getting there in style."
"Well, I'll grant you it's certainly a style," Jean allows herself to remark, and doesn't wait for his guidance before beginning to ascend the gangway. Lucy follows her, silent and curious, and their escort brings up the rear like military guard.
They aren't off to see the Queen of Hearts at all: they're inside the belly of the beast, dutiful - to mangle her mataphors disgracefully - as Daniel in the lions' den. Surely she should be old enough and wise enough to know better than to entertain such childish notions, but after all she is only a woman, isn't she? Or so that's what they told her when the war was over and she was no longer an SOE operative, merely another discarded female.
Still, she knows her duty; she is prepared to do it. And perhaps she will be useful, and perhaps - just perhaps - it might be even be interesting.
