The Catfish Invasion - Part Sixteen
“When The Lights Go On Again”
Pairing: Frankie x Reader.
Plot summary: It’s October 1943, the country in the grip of World War II, and your small English village is fast becoming home to an influx of American servicemen sending hearts a-flutter. Yours already belongs to your teenage sweetheart until, that is, you meet Frankie ‘Catfish’ Morales.
Chapter summary: Frankie’s on cloud nine, but not everyone feels the same. Then big news comes that shakes everything.
Warnings: 18+only.
A/N: It’s been a big old week for updates! Enjoy 🥰
Masterlist
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The two miles back up the lane are the longest two miles Frankie’s walked in England.
He walks them with his cap on and his hands in his pockets, and the whole of the morning going round in him – the gap in the hedge, your mouth, your hand on the front of his trousers before he could stop you, the I love you too, the last, sweet, closed-mouthed kiss in the gap – and he doesn’t turn around because, if he does, he knows he’ll run back to you. By the time he arrives back at the airfield gate his boots are soaked through with the wet of the verge where he’s walked on the grass to keep clear of the mud.
He doesn’t care about his damn boots.
The corporal at the gate, the same one who saw him on his way earlier, greets him back with a smile and a nod, as though he understands the purpose of Frankie’s constitutional that day, even though he couldn’t even begin to.
He goes through the gate onto the field with the runways laid across it and the hardstands round the edge and the aircraft sitting on the hardstands like a herd of grey animals asleep in the cold, and the ground crews out on some of them already, and the smell of aviation gas and cold mud and coke smoke from the huts. He walks across towards Hut Fourteen with the whole of the morning going round in him and doesn’t see any of it.
The hut is empty save for Santi on his bunk with his boots off, his feet up and a letter from home in his hand. When he looks up over the top of it when Frankie comes in and sees his friend’s face, he puts the letter down.
"Okay Fish," he says, “sit down and tell me what happened."
Frankie sits down on the end of his own bunk across from Santi's, takes his cap off and turns it round in his hands three times before replying.
“She was there."
"And?"
"And I told her I love her and she…she told me she loves me back and that she’s going to break up with her boyfriend and…” he stops to draw in a sharp breath. “And I’m going to ask her to marry me.”
“Okay…” Santi sits upright, drops his legs down over his bunk and peruses his friend carefully. “That’s a big step.”
“I know…I know it is…”
“I don’t think you do know. You’ve only just become acquainted with her, only just kissed her and…”
“Didn’t you hear me? She said that she loves me.”
“That’s ‘cause she doesn’t know you yet,” Santi quips, causing Frankie to glare at him. “Okay, look, in all seriousness…have you actually thought this through?”
“Why are you always so negative?” Frankie demands. “For once, can you stop being Sensible Santi and actually be, I don’t know, happy for me or something? I’ve found the girl I want to marry, Pope – that ought to mean something.”
“It does, or it would if we were at home, but we’re not.” Santi takes a breath. “I’m happy for you, Fish. If she’s the one you want to spend the rest of your life with then I’m happy for you, I am, but…it’s not as easy as just getting married and sticking her on a plane. You’re an active member of the US military, we’re at war and there’s rules.”
Frankie pauses, “What kind of rules?”
“All I know is what I heard from one of the gunners in Hut Eight. His older brother wanted to marry some girl he just met, and he had to wait three months and then get permission from the War Department and then have checks carried out on her. Even if you get through all that, how are you going to pay to get her to Florida? You don’t have any money. And you can bet your life neither do her folks – even if they did end up being happy with it, which is a big if. I doubt an American serviceman is what they have in mind for their daughter.”
Frankie’s gut twists with irritation. “So, what about Margery?”
Santi pales slightly and blinks twice. “I don’t…”
“Come on Pope – you like her, even if you won’t admit it.”
“So what if I do?”
“What are you going to do about it?”
Santi’s face hardens. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Yeah, Fish, nothing – because I don’t live in a fantasy world where you get to fall and love with and marry a girl in England and somehow take her home with you. That isn’t real life.”
Frankie gets to his feet. “It’s not a fantasy.”
“It is and you know it is.”
“Fuck you.”
“Oh, really?” Santi scowls at him, dropping to the floor. “That’s where we at right now – fuck me? I’m not the one about to fuck everything up by thinking I can build some kind of future in a foreign country where we don’t know if we’re going to survive from one day to the next…”
“No, because you’re too afraid to,” Frankie snaps, stepping closer to his friend. “You were too afraid to tell Pilar how you really felt and now you’re too afraid to tell Margery…”
“Shut up.”
“…too afraid to go after what you want. And you want everyone to be the same as you. It’d make you so happy if I got shipped back to Florida alone and heartbroken and single, just like you.”
“I said, shut up,” Santi says softly, moving closer.
“Or what, you’ll shut me up? You’re my best friend, Pope, my brother in arms and yet, right now, it feels like all you want to do is screw things up for me with your so-called advice. You know what you are? You’re a coward. You’re a coward who’s never gone after what he really wants, and you’d like it if I was a coward too. Well, I’m not, Pope. I’m not a coward, not when it comes to this. I want her and I’m going to get her and…”
Santi lunges before he can finish his sentence, catching him around the waist and propelling him backwards onto his bunk, pinning him to the mattress with surprising strength. Frankie twists, freeing one of his arms from underneath himself and lands a stinging blow against the left side of Santi’s head, causing the other man to momentarily soften his grip. Slamming his hands onto his friend’s chest, Frankie pushes him away, causing Santi to totter backwards towards the wall.
“You want to fight me, Fish?” he breathes, straightening himself up. “Fine, let’s fight.”
“I don’t want to fight you,” Frankie says. “I just want you to…”
But Santi lunges at him again, Frankie this time stopping the other man in his tracks with a blow to the face that sends him sprawling backwards with a howl, his hands moving quickly to his nose.
At that moment, the door of the hut opens and Tom steps inside, stopping dead in his tracks as he surveys the sight in front of him – Frankie, fists raised, Santi on the floor, blood leaking through his fingers.
“What the fuck is going on in here?!” He demands, eyes snapping to each of them in turn.
“Nothing,” Santi replies quickly, his voice muffled behind his hands. “Just a misunderstanding, Tom, that’s all.”
“A misunderstanding?” Tom echoes, looking at Frankie. “Lieutenant Morales, did you just strike Lieutenant Garcia?”
Frankie pauses, lowers his fists and nods.
“Would you like to tell me why?”
“It was nothing,” Santi says, again, hauling himself to his feet and wiping his face, blood smearing across his cheeks. “He didn’t mean any harm.”
“I find that odd considering the blood on your face,” Tom says, his voice hard. “I should march you both to the brig right now myself but seeing as the Group Commander’s just called a briefing it’ll have to wait.”
Frankie glances at Santi then back at Tom.
"The Old Man's called it himself?"
"Yes,” Tom nods, “and they've put the guards on the briefing hut already. Everyone has to be there, right now, including you two. So, you might want to clean yourself up and you might want to consider what excuse you’re going to give me when I ask you about this little incident again later.”
Frankie looks at Santi again. Guards on the briefing hut means one thing, and it’s the thing they’ve all been half-waiting for since they first arrived in England.
"Okay," Santi says finally. “Do we have ten minutes?”
“You have five,” Tom says curtly, turning back to the door, opening it and slamming it hard behind him.
For a moment, there’s silence in the hut. Two men, on the brink of pummelling one another into the ground, now frozen with the very real, visceral understanding that in the next half hour, everything is going to change.
Santi moves over to the sink in the corner and mops his face, wiping away the blood, leaving only the slight swelling that they both know everyone is going to ask about. Frankie watches him do it, poised to apologise, but something inside prevents him from doing so. For as long as they’ve known one another, Frankie has always deferred to Santi and this time – this time – he can’t.
“Let’s go,” Santi says stiffly when he’s satisfied with how he looks and the two of them leave the hut and walk silently, side by side, to the briefing hut.
It’s full inside – every lead crew and deputy on the field, a hundred and more men on the benches. On the wall at the front, the big map is covered over with a cloth and there’s the particular quiet in the hut that a covered map and guards on the door puts into a hundred men, the quiet of men doing arithmetic they don’t want to do about how far the red yarn is going to run when the cloth comes off.
Benny and Will are already sat on a bench at the far side, and Frankie and Santi move to join them, their brows furrowing when they take in the latter’s face.
“What happened to you?” Will asks.
“Nothing,” Santi replies.
“But it looks like…”
“Shut up,” Santi says sharply in a tone that beggars no further conversation.
Frankie keeps his eyes on the front of the room, waiting, the chatter dying down almost immediately as the door opens and Colonel Vandenberg comes in, causing everyone to automatically rise.
"Seats, gentlemen," he says with a curt nod before moving to the front by the covered map and looking out at the hundred of them on the benches.
Then he takes the cloth off the map, and it’s clear to everyone just how far the red yarn runs.
It runs out from the field across the North Sea, across the coast and to a place deep in the middle of Germany that has a name Frankie knows from the newspapers and the intelligence briefings. A place with the factories, the ball-bearing works or the aircraft works or whichever it’s going to turn out to be. A murmur goes up from the benches, the sound a hundred men make when they see how far in the yarn runs and do the arithmetic about the fighters and the fuel and the getting back.
The Colonel lets the sound settle before speaking.
"Gentlemen, I'm not going to tell you this is an easy one, because you can all read a map, and you can all see it isn't. This is a maximum-effort mission against a target that matters – and I mean it matters. This is not a marshalling yard or a coastal battery. This is a target that the people who count the war in years instead of missions tell me could take months off the whole of it if we do it right. And we are going to do it right."
He turns to the map and puts the tip of the pointer on the pin at the far end.
"I'm not going to give you the date because the date isn't set. It's weather, gentlemen. The weather over the target and the weather over the field for the getting back, and the meteorology people tell me it could be in two days or in five days or a week. What I'm telling you today, the reason I called you in today is because from now, from this afternoon, you are on notice. You'll get no warning when it comes. You'll be woken in the dark, you'll come to a briefing, the cloth will come off this map, you'll see this same yarn, and you'll go.”
His gaze travels across every man in the room.
“No notice,” he emphasises. “When the weather opens, we go, and we go the same morning. So…between now and then, gentlemen, you get your affairs in order. You write the letters you've been putting off writing. You square the things you've been meaning to square. You do it this week, because I can't tell you which morning I'm going to send an orderly down the huts in the dark, and I'd rather every man in this room went to that airplane with nothing left unsaid behind him.”
He pauses and nods.
“That's all. Major Parker will take you through the general shape of it now, but the details wait for the morning in question. Major?"
Major Parker, a thin man with greying hair, gets up, takes the pointer, and the briefing goes on – the general shape of it, the routes and the divisions and the fighter escort that will take them to the limit of their range and turn back and leave them, the flak belts marked in red along the run in – but Frankie, only hears the piece of it he needs to hear go round and round in him under the Major’s voice.
You do it this week. You write the letters you've been putting off. You square the things you've been meaning to square. You do it this week, because I can't tell you which morning I'm going to send an orderly down the huts in the dark.
He doesn’t hear the rest of the briefing. He hears the shape of it – the words go past him, marshalling points and IPs and the flak belt at the coast and the second flak belt at the river and the fighter belt in the middle where the escort would have turned for home – and none of it goes in, because the whole of him is down a lane two miles away in a gap in a hedge with you in his arms.
You’re going to tell Henry it’s over, you’re going to come to him and he’s going to be woken in the dark tomorrow or the next day and flown a long way into the middle of Germany to a target that matters. And some of the men on the benches beside him are not going to be woken in the dark the morning after.
And if Frankie is one of the ones the count comes up short on…if he’s one of the ones who goes a long way into the middle of Germany and doesn’t come back, then the last of him that there has ever been, the last true, unhidden piece of him, will have been said in a gap in a hedge on a Saturday morning. And the girl who heard it will spend the rest of her life not knowing whether he had meant it or whether it had been a lonely lieutenant far from home with his hands under her coat saying the thing that lonely lieutenants say.
And you’ll have broken it off with Henry, done the decent thing on the count of a promise from Frankie, and then Frankie will be a name read out at a service in a hut and a folded flag going home to Florida, and you’ll have nothing. Not Henry and not Frankie. Just the count of a few weeks of not-looking in the dying months of 1943 and two kisses and a young man who’s not coming back.
He can’t do that to you.
That’s the piece that comes to him on the bench, under the Major’s voice with the red yarn on the map running all the way in.
He can’t tell you about the mission, but he can’t let the thing between you sit the way it sits now, weeks of longing and a morning at a hedge and a promise made in the future tense, with the whole of it resting on Frankie who might, this week, in the dark, be woken and sent a long way in and not come back.
If that happens, then he wants you to have the truth of him plain and whole and unmistakable first. Not the hedge. Not the future tense. The truth, said sober, said in daylight, said in a way you can hold onto for the whole of your life if the whole of your life is going to have to hold it without him.
He has to tell you he wants to marry you.
"Frankie."
He looks up to see Santi on his feet, flanked by Benny and Will. The briefing is breaking up, the men standing off the benches, the noise coming back into the hut, the cloth going back over the map, and Frankie hasn’t moved.
"It’s done, come on.”
Frankie gets to his feet and the four of them file out of the briefing hut with the others and none of them say anything until they’re clear of the hut and the knots of men and walking back across the field towards the huts.
"You heard it." Santi says in a low voice, not looking at Frankie but rather looking straight ahead across the field
"I heard it."
"It’s a long way in."
"I know, Pope."
"That's the ball-bearing works, or one of the aircraft plants near it. I heard rumours months ago we’d have to go for that place sooner or later, and we’ll take a beating doing it, because there's no escort can reach it and you're on your own for the whole of the run in and the whole of the run out…”
Santi stops and takes a breath.
"Sorry, you know all that. I'm talking to keep from thinking, that's all.”
"I get it," Frankie replies, glancing behind to see where Will and Benny are and finding them deep in conversation with one another. “I’m sorry about before.”
Santi pauses. “Me too.”
“You’re not a coward.”
“I am, Fish, I know I am. What you said was right and…I am.” He claps his hand on Frankie’s shoulder as they keep walking. “But you’re not, and that’s a good thing.”
“I guess,” Frankie replies, swallowing hard. “I can’t wait now.”
Santi exhales sharply. “I know.”
“I left her with a promise that all of it hangs on me being here to keep it, and I might not be here, and if I'm not here then I've done a thing to that girl I can't…I've asked her to break it off with a decent man on the strength of me, and if the count comes up short on me this week, then she's got nothing. And I can't…I have to see her again before it comes. I have to tell her I want her to marry me so that she’s got the truth of me, even if that's all she ends up with."
“I hear you,” Santi says softly, “but all you can do is tell her that’s what you want. You can’t force her to give you an answer before she does what she needs to do.”
Frankie nods and they keep walking, back towards Hut Fourteen where pen and paper live. The four of them go inside silently and retire to their bunks safe in the knowledge of what each of them are intending to do.
He writes a letter to his mother first and it’s a hard letter to write because he can’t tell her the truth. Can’t tell her we're going a long way in this week and some of us aren't coming back. He can only say the ordinary things, that he’s well, that the food is still okay, that Santi sends his regards, that she isn’t to worry, that he’s thinking of them all and that he loves them.
He writes it, seals it and puts it where the letters go that are to be sent and then he sits on the bunk with the pen and a fresh sheet and looks at it for a long time.
Because the second letter is the one he can’t send.
He can’t send a letter to you because you’re not his yet – not really. You won’t be his until you’ve told Henry the truth and a letter from an American lieutenant arriving at the house before you’ve done it will be both a cruelty and a danger.
He can’t send it, but he sits on the bunk and writes it anyway because the writing of it is a way of getting the truth onto paper the way he’s going to try to get it into words when he sees you, and because if the count comes up short on him this week, then Santi will find it and know what to do with it. Santi will find a way to see that it gets to you when the time’s right, and that’s as much as a man can do.
He writes your name at the top of the sheet and then stops, looks at your name and thinks about the first time he saw you, from the jeep, going up the lane to the base and how he fell in love with you right then and there.
And then he begins to write.
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