Fic: 16 Proofs of Love, #3 Kiss on the hand: longing
Title: We'll Dance Until Morning ('Til There's Just You And Me)
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: T
Genres: het
Summary: It's Vietnam 1966 and Major Evan Lorne is just back from thirty days of compassionate leave, and firmly set on a bottle of Jack being his only companion for his first night back in-country.
A/N: It's err still this Foreign Wars AU thing, and yes, this is the sequel to Kennedy Made Him Believe. It wasn't actually planned but then I watched The '60s (the one from 1999 with Julia Stiles and Jerry O'Connel) and I started to watch China Beach, as well (I'm pretty sure Kavan Smith and Jaime Ray Newman would make a great Natch Austin and Colleen McMurphy in a remake, even with all the shit going down between Natch and McMurphy...) and somehow all those 60s songs just kind of appeared on my computer and before I knew it the one-shot had turned into a trilogy (so there's gonna be another part, hopefully soon). I'm sorry. This wasn't supposed to happen. Um.
Also, language warning. Evan's mouth is even filthier than Laura's. Who would have guessed.
PS.: You can see the other finished stories here.
( Kennedy Made Him Believe (We Could Do Much More) )
We’ll Dance Until Morning (‘Til There’s Just You And Me)
“If you believe in magic, come along with me
We'll dance until morning 'til there's just you and me
And maybe, if the music is right
I'll meet you tomorrow, sort of late at night
And we'll go dancing, baby, then you'll see
How the magic's in the music and the music's in me.”
The Lovin’ Spoonful, “Do You Believe In Magic”
It’s almost funny, he thinks, that he still can’t believe he’s been thirty days out of country when the plane touches down at Cam Ranh airfield. He keeps wondering if that is how his father felt when they pulled him from the front in 1944 when Grandpa and Grandma Lorne died in a car accident and there was no one else to sort out all the things with the old farm and then send him back to the carnage a week later.
Okay.
Maybe he didn’t. Because he’s pretty sure that when Dad got back to Europe, he didn’t keep obsessing about a little firecracker WAC Lieutenant waiting for him back in the dirt. He knows he should be thinking about a lot of other things but it’s Laura he keeps thinking about. Maybe… maybe because for a long time now, Laura’s been the only positive thing he found to think about.
He shakes his head. Ever since the night at the Heliport he can’t stop wondering if it’s all just a dope induced fever dream, starting right down with the moment he heard Charlie say, “Evan… if you still want to punch me for coming here… you should do it now.”
Ironic that of all the things Charlie could have said, those were his last words. Needless to say, it wasn’t what he told Anna.
Rubbing a hand over his eyes and trying desperately to forget the terrible sound Charlie’s last breath had made in his brother-in-law’s bloody chest, he nearly misses the stewardess telling them they arrived at their parking position and will be able to exit shortly. All around him, the excitement that had been contained until now starts to stir awake and all those teenagers around him are starting to become giddy. His luck that he had to catch that one flight full of USMC draftees more or less fresh out of high school out of McChord.
He tries to tune out the chatter and bullshitting all around him and the cynical running commentary in his head as he’s unconsciously assessing who’s going to make it and who isn’t. The little geek with the BCGs who’s so awfully quiet, he’s probably gonna make it, provided he doesn’t get the stupid notion he needs to prove something to someone somewhere down the road. The Don Juan who can’t stop hitting on the stewardess, he’s probably gonna keep the nurses busy, but not with his charm. The John Wayne who’s seen Flying Leathernecks one time too many, he’s not gonna make it home. The…
Leave it the fuck alone.
Thank God he’s out of the plane only a short moment later, demonstratively ignoring the stewardess’s blatant attempt to get the one guy over twenty-five on the entire flight to take her to one of the local clubs tonight. He’s already got plans and they most certainly don’t involve any women at all. Instead, they involve finding a hooch that serves some non-lethal alcohol and no customers he might know. They told him already at McChord that there’s no way he’s gonna make it to Tan Son Nhut before tomorrow and both Tom and Sheppard said there’s no way they’d be able to squeeze Cam Ranh Bay into their itinerary to pick him up. Laura… well. Apparently, she’s on some assignment or other somewhere in the Ia Drang area and he’s resolved not to try to imagine any worst case scenarios.
Anyway. Be it as it may, if he’s gonna have to spend his first night back in-country with a bottle of Jack as his sole companion, so be it. Could be worse.
Reaching the baggage claim hut, he tries not to pace. He doesn’t have anywhere to be except the R&R center at some point during the night today so there’s no need to let the grunts all around him think the Air Force can’t take a bit of waiting for their baggage.
He’s about to do it anyway just moments before they finally start putting bags from his flight up and thank God they put his bag in with the last ones, so that he’s one of the first people out the damn hut with the damn grunts and the damn chatter. God, how he’s longing for that little lonely place and the bottle of Ja…
Jesus H. Christ on a fucking tarmac.
For a moment, he thinks he must be imagining it - going neatly with his dope induced fever dream theory - but then some idiot Marine actually stops to check her out only to receive a pretty sure very unladylike snap and he knows that she’s really here.
She’s… a vision, actually. Stupid as that sounds but she’s… she’s so beautiful with her hair down and her little white local style dress fluttering a little in the breeze… and she’s actually running at him at full tilt.
Whoa… whoa that girl can jump. And hug. And wrap her legs around him. And holy Mother of God, can she kiss. He doesn’t even hear the catcalls and whistles erupting all around them, he only sees her, hears her, feels her in that moment.
He tastes her, too and she tastes of smoke and cheap chocolate and Wrigley’s. She tastes so real.
At home… at home everything tasted like sawdust and everything smelled of stale cleaner and here he is back in the dirt and it tastes like Laura and it smells like Laura and it’s the best thing his senses have ever experienced. He sets her down and cups her face, to tell her “I’m so glad you’re still here,” in a voice like a drill sergeant after screaming at recruits for three days straight.
She smiles and it’s as if the sun rises all over again. “I’m glad you came back.” She gives him another peck on the lips and for a moment, only the two of them exist. No war, no casualties, just a guy and a girl and then the sound of a Phantom II drones all over them, as if the fighter jet is direct above them. She lets go of him, still smiling but he can see in the slight veneer over her eyes that she knows very well where they are and great, now he does, too.
“Welcome back,” she says, a little belatedly and it makes him chuckle, probably the first real laugh since he left for Buckley AFB a month ago and he’s so grateful that he has this one person left, this one person who still manages to make him laugh.
“Thanks for the welcome. Very enthusiastic.” She grins at him. He can’t help grinning back. Then, suddenly, he sobers up. “A lot better than the greeting I received back home.”
She frowns and takes his hand. Apparently, she’s gonna take full advantage of the fact that she’s out of uniform and not often enough at Cam Ranh Bay for being universally known as That Female WAC LT With The Camera And The Big Mouth. “That bad, huh?”
He squeezes her hand and starts walking towards the R&R center. “Worse.” He feels her tighten her grip as well. “People actually weren’t above spitting this time.”
“Huh,” she says, “I always thought they were against the war, not the soldiers.”
Shrugging and trying not to appear to be too fazed about the welcome he’d received at Stapleton in Denver, he replies, “Doesn’t apply to all protestors, I guess.”
She snorts with derision. “Do they still burn their draft cards?”
People had started doing that in 1964 and it had only increased over the last two years, even though it’s officially forbidden since sometime in 1965. It’s his turn to snort now, thinking back to one memorable occasion of visiting the campus of his sister’s alma mater, Berkeley, two weeks ago. “Hell yeah.” Before she can counter with something probably not so nice, he adds, “And good for them.”
At that, she frowns. “Is it now?”
Strange that she would ask that. It’s not like all she’s doing is sitting around Le Van Loc, smoking, drinking and flirting all day. “Sure is. You really want even more nineteen-year-olds flooding into this country and leaving it in tin coffins?”
He sees a shadow wash across her face, this weird weariness he sees in so many of his fellow soldiers, the one she once said that makes it “hard to get up in the morning and stop drinking in the evening” and again he wishes she never even came here. Sure, he’d probably have never met her then, but she’d maybe also never have to look like this. “You’re right, I guess. You’re… Anyway… you got anything planned for tonight?” He wants to tell her what he’d thought when he’d left that plane but she’s faster. “Except making really good friends with a bottle of Jack, I mean.”
“Why aren’t you in Intelligence, huh?” She stops, crossing her arms in front of her chest, giving him one of those withering looks he always found very sexy. Maybe that’s why he kept annoying her. “I mean, you being psychic and all…”
She sticks out her tongue, making him want to kiss her senseless right again. “Flattery will get you nowhere. Now… go unpack and put some civvies on, I’ll be waiting here.”
It stupid and silly but he can’t help it. He grins, saying, “Yes, ma’am,” and damn, does her eye-rolling turn him on. Leave it to him to get horny the moment he gets back to the dirt. Hoping the amount of being turned on is nowhere near visible, he shoulders his bag again, turning to go into the R&R center but throwing, “Try not to break too many bones as long as I’m in there,” over his shoulder. The little indignant huff she lets out actually follows him inside, making him grin again. Weird that he can still do that, multiple times in the space of a few minutes, actually.
They assign him a two-bed-room and for some reason he’s really glad that he sees that he’s alone in there, at least for now. Putting his duffle on the bed, he actually considers disobeying her “order” and walk out in jungle greens but she’d probably give him her right hook or something, so he actually starts rummaging round for some civvies. But damn if Major Evan Lorne heeds his girlfriend’s commands to the tee.
Girlfriend.
Huh.
Where the hell’d just that come from?
Anyway… it’s been a long flight and a shower is definitely in order. And possibly a shave, as well. God, she’s gonna hate having to wait.
And yep, she totally does. When he’s exiting the R&R center after shower, shave and lingering inside for five more minutes just for good measure, she’s pretty much looking ready to explode. Very adorable, that, actually. “Well,” she says after staring at him for a full thirty seconds with a really mean look in her eyes, probably expecting him to blow up in flames or something, “at least you clean up nice.”
He works very hard to keep a straight face, telling her, “Yeah, well, wish I could say the same… Jesus fucking Christ, Crackers!” That damn punch in the damn shoulder fucking hurt.
She raises an eyebrow, looking absolutely not apologetic. “Crackers?” She even gives him air quotes and a questioning face and… yeah, where the hell did that just come from?
Probably from the same place as the “girlfriend” from earlier and he really, really needs something to cover up his slip up. Because well, that’s basically the first thing he thought about her when she climbed in his bird for the very first time. Red-haired, much too brazen for her own good and damn well crackers for coming to a place like ‘Nam in the first place. He clears his throat. “Well, uh… seeing as you’ve spent enough time on aircraft to actually qualify as having “flight hours”, we thought you needed a call sign.”
She doesn’t look convinced. “And that’s what you came up with? Since when are you guys British?”
Well. He shrugs and tries to take it all in stride. If faced with a dangerous animal, never show fear. “Not the guys, just me.”
Still not buying it. Mh. “Since when are you British?”
He can’t help sighing. “It’s… a long story. Just go with it?” One day he’ll tell her about Mrs. Finch-Bosworth, the English teacher who came over with a GI from the UK with the soft spot for kids who were left fatherless after World War II. One day he’ll tell her all about growing up without a father, all about getting married only a year after graduating to a girl he should never have married, for the sake of both of them, all about feeling more at home in ‘Nam than he has felt back stateside in a very long time. One day will be the day.
Just not today.
And, just to prove his point about Laura possibly being if not the only good, then certainly the best thing about ‘Nam, she just rolls her eyes, disentangles her arms in front of her chest and takes his hand again. “Come on, I want to get to the USO club before those Marines drink away all the potable alcohol. If they’re anything like those back at TSN…”
She half drags him, telling him about she had this local club all scouted out and ready, only to be told no one would be going out today because of the warnings they’d received and that she hadn’t wanted to jinx his first night back in-country and how hard it had been to keep Tom and Sheppard to keep quiet about her little plan to surprise him and how Reece had made her wear this damn dress that shows off the legs that usually are obscured by damn jungle green pants and he lets her.
He knows he shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be enjoying himself with her, getting to annoy her by taking away her precious cigarette mid-drag - he knows she thinks he hates her smoking but the truth is, taking her cigs away under the pretense of propriety had been one of the only ways he could get close to her, possibly even actually touch her and he just can’t let go of that habit - but he just can’t help it.
She’s here and he’s here and they’re wearing civvies and halfway through their visit to the USO club someone puts a dime in the jukebox and ‘Unchained Melody’ starts floating through the room and he finds himself getting up from the barstool and actually leaning down to put a kiss on her hand, just like his mother had taught him to in one of her pre-war moods and when he holds her in his arms, swaying a little to the lilting tones of the Righteous Brothers, a deep, nameless longing fills him, filling him with a pain even worse than that of feeling one of his best friends slip away in his arms. A longing for things to always be like this, never change, this moment frozen in time. A longing…
“Me, too, Cookie. Me, too,” she says, her voice nearly unintelligible over the din, nearly breaking when she calls him by half his call sign and all he can do is lean down and gently kiss that spot in the crook of her, right above where her dog tags are always showing through, just like now. He knows how it looks, two Americans in civvies with the chains of their dog tags shining through here and there, embracing each other on the dance floor but right now, he doesn’t give a fucking damn about that because there is no other place he’d rather be than right here, right now and he’ll hold on to all of that until his last damn breath. What else is there left for him to do, anyway?
~*~
TBC in With No Direction Home (Like a Complete Unknown).