Chapter Text
Trip isn’t so much drafted as he is invited to join the war effort. He’s always been good with machines, and he’s been working in his granddaddy’s shop since he was old enough to hold a wrench. TUCKER ENGINE REPAIR, it says, and they work on boats, on cars, on people’s strange little hobby airplanes, refrigerators and typewriters and boilers and radios and just about anything that could break. No one can afford to buy anything new these days. He squirrels away the half-broken parts to build his own toys, solders rotors onto model airplanes to see if he can make them fly. He practices his reading on old issues of Popular Mechanics, learns about the Good brothers and their radio-controlled airplanes when he’s eleven and tries to build one himself, but he doesn’t have the right kind of radio.
He’s not much for English and history, but math comes easy to him, physics and chemistry too. His shop teacher tells him he could do more than fix cars, maybe even go to college for engineering. He knows better than to bring it up at home. His father got blown up during the Great War and came back a little wrong, his momma says, but that was long before Trip knew him. All he knows is that his granddaddy runs the shop and his father can’t be counted on to take it over, which means it’ll be his in a few years.
He doesn’t so much graduate high school as he decides to be done with it. By then it’s ’43, and he figures he’ll be drafted if the war isn’t over by the time he turns 18. He’s hoping to be an airplane mechanic, but he knows someone will probably put a gun in his hand and send him off to France.
Around the time the war starts, an odd blue-eyed man named Gary begins coming into the shop now and then with strange little machines for Trip to fix. Trip knows just about everyone in Panama City—it’s not that big a place—and he only ever sees Gary in the shop. He has an unerring sense for when Trip is working, and Trip has stopped asking “What’s it supposed to do?” when he accepts a project. Gary seems happy when he gets a tiny engine running, even if it never makes anything happen, and he pays Trip whether or not it’s a success.
One day, Trip’s working on a particularly fiddly little puzzle when Gary comes back early. “’Fraid it’s not quite ready,” Trip says. “Give me another few hours.”
“Have you figured out what it does?” Gary sounds curious rather than doubtful.
“No,” Trip admits. Well. “Takes some kind of input and—puts out something else.” It’s the best way that he can describe it. He understands it, even if he doesn’t have the words to say it.
Gary doesn’t give any indication whether he’s right. “How old are you, son?”
“Seventeen.” Or he will be, in a couple months.
“How would you like to serve your country doing something more interesting than firing a gun?”
Trip’s breath catches at that. There’s no sign of the war ending. If he’s going— “Doing what?”
* * *
He signs on the line and goes through the physical and his momma cries, “We were supposed to have two more years,” and his father goes even quieter than before and his little brother Bert stares up at him with big sad eyes.
“You sure about this, Charlie?” His granddaddy is the only one who doesn’t call him Trip. Charles Tucker III has always sounded too fancy to Trip, but it means something to his granddaddy.
Trip nods. “I’ll be back for the shop when it’s over,” he promises.
There’s something doubtful in his granddaddy’s eyes, but he shakes Trip’s hand and says, “Keep your head down,” and then Trip gets on the bus to Arlington, Virginia.
He almost laughs when he gets there. There’s no sign of Gary, only big rooms full of messy desks with people typing away or flipping through manuals. A good number more women than men, too, which he supposes makes sense when he thinks about it, and which he doesn’t mind much. He’s shown to a desk with three different typewriters, a mechanical calculator, and a set of tools. “Take them apart and put them back together,” his manager tells him. “There’ll be plenty more for you soon enough.”
Well, it’s not exactly aircraft engines, but there’s an energy throughout the whole place that’s contagious. The typewriters are all a little different, some with slots for punch-cards, and when he’s not busy he amuses himself by modifying them more, streamlining their operations, rearranging bits to operate more smoothly. Electric typewriters are rife with little things that can go wrong, after all. Eventually, a girl named Amanda Cole comes to him and says, “How would you like to do something a little more complicated?” She has long dark hair and an easy smile and she’s from Florida too, and she’s gotten him permission to work on code himself, when he’s not repairing machines. “It’s math,” she tells him, when he struggles initially. “It’s all just math and logic.”
It's not, really, but it’s fun to look for the patterns. Anything he finds gets passed up the ladder, and sometimes he wants to know more, but Amanda smiles at him and shakes her head and sometimes they go dancing together. They would be simple together, he thinks. Go home to their folks when the war is over; he’ll take over the garage and she’ll stay home and raise Charles Tucker IV, and—And that’s where his brain stutters to a halt, because he likes this, likes the challenge of it, and he doesn’t think Amanda has much interest in ever moving back to Florida.
Trip is in the midst of this emotional crisis when Gary comes to visit Arlington Hall. Trip is summoned into his supervisor’s room and left alone. The man is in uniform, but without any markings of rank at all. His hair is a little longer than regulation, his blue eyes so sharp now that it’s almost painful to meet them, and he says, “Trip, isn’t it?” as though he might have accidentally summoned the wrong Charles Tucker III from Florida.
“Yes, sir.” Trip salutes, mostly because he assumes anyone older than him is higher ranked. He’d always figured Gary was in the military somehow, what with the recruiting speech, but he’d pretty much stopped expecting to see him.
“How would you like to do something a little different?”
He hears the echoes of Amanda’s words. “Different, sir?”
Gary’s smile is almost conspiratorial. “I understand you have a knack with machines,” he says. “I—travel a great deal, in the service of the Army, and I could use a man who can fix things when they go wrong.” He offers his hand to shake. “You can call me Garak.”
Trip takes it. Garak’s hand is very hot. “Where are we going?”
He doesn’t get the chance to say goodbye to Amanda.
* * *
The things he fixes, as they travel around! Coaxing the last bit of life out of a half-burnt truck outside of Asmara to reach the city so he can set listening devices into the niches of the Italian villas there. Skulking through New Delhi as tensions simmer around Independence Day and he thinks to himself that Britain won’t hold on much longer here, even as he scrounges for the parts they need to repair the listening station there. Garak seems to trust him implicitly, because Garak is off meeting with the sort of people that Trip steers well clear of while Trip is up to his arms in grease and wires. They go to Hawaii, where the ocean thunders against the beaches like it never did in Florida, and he muffles the motors of boats as they transport a linguist, Hoshi Sato, from island to island. He’s not really supposed to look at the information coming in through the listening stations, only to make sure that it gets relayed onward, but sometimes he can’t resist and he marks the patterns that he does see. No one ever complains about it.
Trip realizes that Garak is queer the second time that they’re in New Delhi. It’s a very little thing, the tenderness in a contact’s hand as the man brushes some invisible insect off Garak’s face. Huh, he thinks. He’s never known anyone queer before. Maybe it should feel like a revelation, but he’s already realized that the world is a great deal bigger than his home in Florida—it feels as though he’s spent the last few years realizing it over and over again. Maybe Trip should be unsettled by it, but if so, it would be at the very bottom of a long list of all the things that unsettle him about Garak. “Is that—your fellow?” he asks Garak, once they’ve gotten back to their room for the night.
If Garak is startled, he doesn’t show it. “What, Anjan? No,” he says, his voice a little sharp. “It’s one thing to have someone waiting for you when you march off to war. It’s something very different when you simply—disappear, and reappear sometimes.” He looks hard at Trip, as though he’s about to ask a question, and then doesn’t.
Of course, even as the war winds down, the Allies are already cannibalizing themselves. He sees Russian code intercepts in Alaska and keeps his thoughts to himself until the day that Garak turns to him and says, “I suppose it’s about time for you to go home to Florida.”
Trip stares at him. They’ve just announced the reorganization of the Signal Intelligence Service into the Army Security Agency. He’s seen those lightning-bolt patches that they’re issuing, and it’s not that they really remind him of SS patches but there’s something uneasy in his stomach when he thinks about returning to the United States. He tries to imagine going back to the garage and spending the rest of his life repairing engines and refrigerators. “What are you going to do?”
Garak fixes a sharp look on him, like he knows exactly what Trip is thinking. Over these last two years, Trip has come to realize that Garak pretty much always knows what he’s thinking. “I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have a few friends out in California,” Garak says. “I think I’ll—take a little time off. Consider the future.” His eyes are hard as he looks at Trip. “You have a family back in Florida, Trip.” The don’t waste it is unspoken but clear.
His father died during the war, under circumstances that no one wants to think about too closely. It’s just his momma and his granddaddy and Bert now. He’ll miss them, but—he’s not the same person that left them. “I’ll write to them,” he says. “If I stayed with the ASA, the agency would probably send me away anyway.” As a young, unattached man—almost certainly. It’s reorganizing into units now, SIGINT and HUMINT. He knows what human intelligence means, and that’s Garak’s skill set, not his. “Take me with you to California?”
* * *
California, it turns out, means a crowded bunkhouse on a big piece of property, deep in the woods of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The others are all refugees, for lack of a better word, from the reorganization of the American security state. Three from what used to be the OSS and one from the Army, recognizable even without a uniform.
Maybe things would’ve been different if she hadn’t been the first one that he spotted. “Polly,” Garak says, “This is Trip Tucker,” and when he offers a hand, her nose crinkles with the slightest expression of distaste. She hesitates before accepting it.
“It is nice to meet you, Mr. Tucker,” she says, and he thinks her voice is a little velvety. Her dark hair is cut short and blunt across her forehead like a man’s, her cheekbones sharp and her chin almost pointed, and there’s no smile in her eyes. There’s the slightest wrinkle to her nose as though he smells. He’s caught somewhere between hypnotized and defensive. Polly looks annoyed at the simple fact of his presence, and he wonders if Garak wasn’t supposed to bring him along.
The others are more welcoming—Katie, Captain Chakotay, and Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, who mostly looks uncomfortable. Polly is the only one who watches him like he’s something dangerous. He doesn’t know if it’s his mannerisms—the way he tends to drawl and slur through contractions when she’s so precise—or his slouch or his smile or what, but he finds himself wanting to poke at her a little more, like a little boy trying to get her attention. He shouldn’t do it, not when he’s the odd man out already, but everyone else is happy enough to welcome him in.
The end of the war should be a relief. Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel quite like the end. He doesn’t know what to do with himself and the lurking specter of the split between the United States and the Soviet Union looms larger every day. The cold war, Garak calls it, and tells Trip that he should read more Orwell. Polly still has contacts in the government; the things that she tells them about Operation Paperclip, in her measured, emotionless way, make Trip’s stomach churn.
“I can’t,” he says. He leaves for nearly a year. He goes to San Francisco and works on anything he can find, anything he can fix. The city is full of new people, returning soldiers and new immigrants and new thoughts. Trip loses himself in it, telling himself that he could be satisfied like this. But then comes the general strike in Oakland, and at the same time the XS-1 rocket plane flies and he remembers that there was a time when he wanted to do more than fix cars.
He's not surprised when Garak comes to see him. “You look good,” he tells Garak. Garak does, a little less gaunt than he was during the war, his eyes a little less sunken. “You’ve been watching me, haven’t you.”
Garak smiles in the way that means obviously. “You heard about the XS-1, I assume,” he says.
“They’ll get it supersonic.” Mach 0.8 on a test flight? They’ll get it there soon.
“You could work there,” Garak tells him, and Trip scoffs.
“I don’t think I’m quite what they’re looking for,” even as everything inside him yearns for it. He never went to college, never learned anything he didn’t figure out from taking something apart and trying to put it back together.
“I can get you in.”
“Why?” It’s been a long time since he knew what Garak was into, since they had common goals. “I’m not—sabotaging, or stealing secrets.” He keeps his voice low. His landlady has excellent ears and is always home.
“Not at all.” Garak looks a little insulted. “No, Mr. Tucker, this is—if I’m right, this is the beginning of something, something that could unite the entire world.” He sounds entirely sincere, but Trip has heard him sound sincere before. “If we can build a supersonic plane—if rocket engines become the reality of things, you know what the next step is.”
Trip can’t quite scoff at that. He read the stories about outer space like everyone else, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs when he was supposed to be reading Shakespeare. Sure, they’re only stories but they still live deep in his heart. “And you can get me a job at Bell?”
“Yes,” Garak says. Maybe it’s all a trick, but Trip has been missing adrenaline for far too long.
* * *
He spends six months at Bell Aircraft before Garak has to get him into the Army Air Force to keep working on the project. Some part of him—maybe even some large part of him—wishes that he’d found this before he’d ever met Garak. He could be almost happy working on aircraft design, he thinks. “Polly will be your contact,” Garak tells him. “Your long-distance fiancée.”
“Polly agreed to that?” He’s thought of her a few times, during his time in San Francisco—how vindicated she must have felt, watching him walk away at last. He hasn’t seen her since the day he left Katie’s ranch.
“Eventually.” Garak’s tone suggests that Trip doesn’t want to know how many times she refused first.
Polly arrives in Muroc on the weekly bus a few days later. “Hello, Mr. Tucker,” she says flatly. “How nice to see you again.”
“You know, I don’t think that’s how my girl would greet me after months apart.” There’s a strange energy curling in his stomach and surging through his body, and he doesn’t think it’s heat stroke.
“Very well.” Polly drops a perfunctory kiss on his cheek. She smells like cheap hand soap and, beneath it, other people’s sweat. Her cheek, when she presses it against his, is very smooth. “You did not shave,” she observes, touching her own cheek. “Would you greet your girl in such a manner?”
“Late nights,” he tells her. “We think we’ll have the X-1 ready for Captain Yeager to take up the day after tomorrow.” He’d blushed and stammered and nearly tripped over his own feet when he’d met Captain Yeager the day before. “Come on.” He hefts her suitcase and has to keep himself from swinging it in eagerness. Strictly speaking, Polly is staying at Rancho Oro Verde and he’s bunking at the airfield itself, but there’d been a lot of laughing and elbowing when he’d said his girl was coming to visit and it was clear that no one expected him to come back until late.
Polly’s bag bangs hard against his leg and he stumbles a little, leaning against her. That’s not so bad, Trip thinks. It’s still in the high 80s during the day, even at the beginning of October, and he’s sweating clean through his uniform, but he likes the press of her arm against him.
The bartender glances a little judgmentally at Trip as he guides Polly upstairs to her room. This is a respectable establishment, more or less, but no one makes a fuss when Polly flashes a ring on her finger. The electricity is working—Rancho Oro Verde is one of the few places to stay where it’s reliable—and there’s a big ceiling fan sweeping around with a thwip-thwip-thwip kind of noise. As soon as Polly closes the door, Trip unzips his uniform down nearly to his waist and gasps in a sigh of relief. The heat here at Muroc is brutal, and that’s a Florida boy talking.
Polly raises an eyebrow. “A breach of decorum, undoubtedly.” Her voice is dry, and he wonders if she’s teasing him.
“For sure.” He’d strip to his skivvies if he thought he could get away with it. “How’re things, Polly?” He mops at his face with a kerchief and for just a minute, he thinks he sees her eyes dart to his neck, his shoulders, the swell of his biceps. “I figure I should stay a couple hours or it’ll look suspicious.”
“I am here for your report,” she says. “Things remain stable.”
Trip stretches, arms over his head, just to devil her. There’s a certain pinched expression on her face and he can’t tell a damn thing about what’s in her mind. “All right,” he says, and he launches into the report. When he gets back to the bunkhouse at nearly 2 AM, there’s a lot of teasing and elbowing until someone growls that they’re all fired, and then they quiet down.
He doesn’t have time to see her the next night, not as they spend their time checking over every inch of the X-1, making sure that every part is just right. In the morning, Captain Yeager looks to be favoring his ribs, but no one dares to say it to him. He pats Glamorous Glennis with gentle fingers and Trip thinks that this plane might be a little bit a part of Captain Yeager, just as it’s grown to be a little part of his own heart.
The flight is—incredible. The B-29 lifts Glennis up and up and then releases her, and Trip swallows back the stinging in his eyes when the technician cries, “That’s Mach 1!” All around him, people are cheering and pounding each other on the back. When Captain Yeager returns, there’s champagne sprayed everywhere and the bar is full of people pouring each other shots of liquor and music playing. Polly comes downstairs from her room and he grabs her by the hand and pulls her into a spin and then kisses her full on the mouth, for sheer joy more than anything else. No one’s paying attention to them, not enough to do anything but wolf-whistle before turning back to the celebration.
Polly’s hand is pressed to his chest, as though to push him back, and he pants, “Sorry—sorry—but you should’ve seen it, Pol, it was incredible!” She hasn’t lifted her hand away. If anything, she’s gripped the material a little, sticky with sweat and liquor and grit, to hold him there, and he can’t help thinking she’s the prettiest girl in this bar, whiskey in his blood or not. She stays tucked at his side, quiet and dark-eyed as she watches everything, for the next few hours, as everyone works themselves into a frenzy.
Eventually, the men start to trickle away—or upstairs—with the girls they’ve been celebrating with, and Polly says, “We should go upstairs. It will look strange if we remain down here as the others leave.” Trip stumbles over the stairs a little on his way up, brushing his hand across her hip as he catches himself. The look Polly gives him is—different than he’d expected. Something he felt when they kissed, but something he’s never seen on her face.
Trip is a nice boy, his momma raised him right, and so he holds the bedroom door open for Polly. He follows her in, but he keeps his hands to himself until the door is closed behind them and she pushes him back against it. His back hits it with a thump. If it hurts he can’t feel it because Polly is unbuttoning her dress all the way down the front, one little metal button after another, and her eyes are hot and dark. “Mr. Tucker,” she says.
“Trip,” he corrects automatically, because whatever’s about to happen, he can’t have her calling him Mr. Tucker for it. “Pol—” She curls her long fingers on the back of his neck and tugs his head down a little, enough to meet her lips again. His breath catches in his throat and the world isn’t just spinning because of the alcohol anymore. His hands drop to her hips, then skate up her sides to sneak in where her dress hangs open. Her bare skin is soft and a little damp and he can’t seem to touch enough of it. He’s a nice boy, he reminds himself. He’s twenty-one and he’s gone with modern girls before, but he’s never found someone as hard to read as Polly. The noises that she makes are the barest of sighs, a sharp breath revealed only by the slight rise and fall of her chest when he kisses the hollow of her collarbone. “What do you want?” He says it against her breast and she shrugs out of her dress, letting it flutter to the tile floor. “Tell me—”
“I should think it was obvious.” Polly unzips his jumpsuit down to his waist and slides her hand inside to cup him through the fabric of his briefs, and the back of his head hits the door with a thunk.
“Pol,” he says, because he’s having trouble with words now, his hips hitching forward against the warmth of her hand. God. “I don’t—” Nice boys are careful, careful never to get a girl into trouble (all right, nice boys don’t have to worry about that at all). Her hand is searing but he wants to see more of her if she’ll let him. His fingers find the clasp of her bra and— “Christ, you’re beautiful,” the words just spill out of him and he winces internally, Lord’s name in vain and all but he’d happily go to hell for this.
“Your mouth could be put to better use,” she tells him, in that stern unimpressed way she has. He surges forward and half-carries her to the bed so he can lay her down. The noises she makes now are a little less quiet and her fingers slip inside his briefs to find bare skin. He’s half curved over her so that he can lick at her nipples, his jumpsuit trapped on by his boots, and if she keeps stroking him he’ll make a mess of himself. As though she can hear him, she releases him—he takes it back, all he wants is her hand back, he’ll happily make a fool of himself—and touches her hand to the top of his head, just lightly enough to tell him exactly where she wants his mouth. He leaves her garter belt in place, hooks his finger into one strap just enough to snap it a little, and tugs her panties out of the way. He’s a little sloppy, uncoordinated with whiskey and adrenaline, but she tightens her fingers in his hair even if she won’t make more than the slightest noises in the back of her throat. She’s so quiet that he almost misses it until she stiffens like she’s been shocked and pulls his hair hard for a moment. There, he wants that, more of that— She pulls him back up and half-rolls them both over and grips him tight, and Trip is twenty-one years old and it doesn’t take much more than that to set him off.
He lies on the narrow bed, gasping in long breaths, while Polly stands and retrieves her dress. He likes to think it’s a mark of how unsettled she is that she buttons it back up without putting her bra back on, as though she’s about to go back out into the world. “Pol,” he says, and he doesn’t quite know what he wants to say from there. Marry me would be especially funny, considering the ring on her finger. It’s nothing he hasn’t done before, but somehow his skin feels strange all over. He remembers there was a day in Alaska, during the war, when they’d been out in knee-deep snow for hours and then he’d gone inside to sit by a fire, and the heat had been an almost painful relief. It’s like that, this feeling.
“You should get back,” Polly says, as though it’s been just another of their debriefing sessions. “They’ll notice you’ve been gone.”
“No one is noticing a damn thing tonight.” He’d wager his life—no, he’s wagered his life before, not that but a lot—that the bunkhouse is either empty or very, very loudly occupied right now. “You want me to leave, Pol?”
The stiffness is back. “Is there further information that you need to share?” She raises an eyebrow as though that’s the only reason he might stay. Not to kick off his boots and lie down in bed with her, not to feel her body pressed against him again, not to kiss her in the sticky heat.
Trip swallows the slight hysterical laugh bubbling up in his throat. “No,” he manages to say. “No, I’ll let you know if I think of anything.” And look at that, he never even took off his boots—it’s easy to reassemble himself well enough. He stumbles his way back through the desert to Muroc in the predawn light. It would be humiliating to step on a rattlesnake and die now, in these days of miracles and wonder.
Polly leaves two days later. “You better marry that girl,” Georgie teases him, “before she gets sick of waiting.”
“Gotta talk her folks around,” Trip says. Lord, but he can’t imagine the kind of people who would’ve produced Polly. “Catholics,” he improvises. “Real religious types.”
Georgie groans and Trip laughs and shoves him and they wrestle a little, still high on their own success.
Polly has her suitcase packed the next time he visits her. The bus only runs every week, and she’s already stayed for two. “Garak will contact you,” she says. “When it’s time to leave.” He knows—can feel it in his bones—that Captain Yeager’s flight means the end of his own time working on the X-1 project, at least if he stays with Garak and whatever, exactly their plan is.
“Not you?” It’s strange to look at her now, knowing what’s under all the buttons—knowing what her face looks like when she’s not quite so careful.
“I believe our pretense will no longer be required.” Polly doesn’t quite fidget with the ring on her finger, but she comes close.
“The fellas will be disappointed,” he says. “They all warned me to marry you before you get tired of waiting around.” He doesn’t know why he says it. This was never a complicated deception. They only ever had that one night, whatever it was. He spent more time half-naked with Amanda Cole than he has with Polly.
Polly frowns. “If you feel that would add verisimilitude—” She moves as though she’s going to pull the ring off.
“Christ, no.” He grabs her hands to stop her, and it feels right, her hands in his. He rubs his thumb across the plain metal circle. “Just—we might need it again later,” he says weakly. “No reason to throw it away now.”
“I did not intend to dispose—” She stops. “I suppose you are correct.”
Trip carries her bag to the bus station in the October heat and waits with her. They don’t talk much, standing there—what’s there to talk about that they could say freely aloud? When the bus wheezes up in a cloud of dust, Trip hands Polly her bag. “Goodbye,” she says.
Trip cups her face in both hands and kisses her in defiance of propriety and good sense and everything else in the world. When he releases her, she stares at him, expressionless, for a minute, and then boards the bus.
He spends another eight months at Muroc, helping to examine the X-1 and carefully not thinking about whatever it was between him and Polly. Mach 2 is the next step, he knows. There are a dozen new wanna-be-Yeagers arriving in town every day, all ready to face that demon in the sky. It’s nearly Christmas when Georgie tells him, “You could get yourself transferred here, if you wanted.” Georgie’s the wrong color to be in charge of any project, at least now, but no one goes up in a plane that he hasn’t looked over with his sharp eyes first. “You’re good, everyone’s seen it.” When Trip starts to answer, Georgie puts a hand on his shoulder and says quietly, “Think about it.”
Trip does. He thinks about the feeling of an engine beneath his hand, about the way he used to solder parts from different machines together to see if he could make them do something else entirely. He thinks of the Sabre XP-86 that flew two weeks before Yeager—and then, of his father, the bleak expression he’d get on his face sometimes, like he was somewhere else entirely. The way that America and the Soviet Union have been squaring off against each other since before the war ended, and the things that President Truman said more than a year ago and has been saying ever since while people kill each other in Greece and Turkey. The B-29 bomber that dropped Glennis in the first place, and the Sabre’s bomb bays that he knows are meant to hold napalm. “No,” he tells Georgie, and then he picks up the telephone and dials the secure phone number that will connect him to Katie and Chakotay’s. “I’ve been pretty homesick lately,” he says, and by Easter he’s back at their ranch.