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purple_penAlex wanted to be a pilot even when she was a child, sitting next to Sarah in the top maths group when they were eight.
Sarah was kind of scared of heights.
“Sarah?” Ryan asks, which means it isn’t the first time he’s tried to get her attention. He always calls her Sergeant on duty.
She looks up from ticking off the pre-flight check list. “Yes, sir?”
Ryan smiles, doing the sympathetic father thing he does with everyone in the Circus. “Everything OK?”
“Yep.” Sarah grins back at him, looking down at her check sheet again. “Ready to go in ten?”
“Sounds good,” Ryan says, hefting his duffel bag. He pats her shoulder reassuringly as he makes his way round to stow his luggage.
Sarah signs off on the check sheet and blinks, hard.
*
Alex insisted that being scared of heights was pathetic once they were in high school, and started taking her up every tall building in town. Sarah was never sure it was working, but it must have done, because she joined the Air Cadets with Alex when they were sixteen.
“Are you sure about this?” her mum asked.
“Of course,” Sarah said, adjusting her jacket. “Anyway, Alex says we might get to fly something.” She adjusted her jacket again, so her mum wouldn’t notice her hands were shaking.
“As long as you know what you’re doing,” her mum said.
“Of course,” Sarah said again, and tucked her keys in her pocket, heading out the front door.
*
She spent two years on the Blues, the Red Arrows’ ground crew, bouncing between tasks and watching the planes take off without her, wishing she could be up there like half the people around her, watching the engineering officers of the Circus climbing into the backs of the Arrows to leave for displays, before she got chosen to join them. That was seven months ago, and she spent the first six in training, getting used to her plane and her pilot, so she’s only been flying out to displays with him for a few weeks.
She loves her pilot, Flight Lieutenant Mark Ryan, and Red Six, her plane, their plane. She gets a kick out of knowing she helps get them both up in the air, and keep them up there, even when she doesn’t get to see the display.
It’s all the rest of it she has trouble with.
*
She didn’t choose her university because of where Alex wanted to go, just like Alex didn’t choose it just because it had a University Air Squadron. It was just coincidence that one of the best places for Aeronautical Engineering (Alex) and Mechanical Engineering (Sarah) was the same place.
Sarah, it turned out, was better at the ground crew side of the UAS, probably because her hands still shook when she was in charge of a take-off.
Alex took to the flight training like Sarah’d always known she would.
*
“We ready to go?” Ryan asks, coming up beside her, making more noise than usual.
Sarah tears her eyes back from the nothing she’s been looking at, and registers the rest of the Circus and the pilots climbing into their planes, the Blues readying them for take-off. “Sure, of course,” she says.
Ryan lets her climb in first, but doesn’t follow her, just looks up at her from the ground. “If you’re not well enough to go, one of the standby engineers can come,” he says quietly.
The problem with the Arrows, Sarah’s learnt, is that you spend too much time with your pilot, and you end up knowing each other too well. She’s young enough to be Ryan’s daughter, and since he doesn’t see much of his real one during display season, he’s taken to treating her as though she is, which means she’s told him a lot more than she’s told most people.
“You think I’m letting you take her out without me?” she asks, pulling up a grin that might look real. “Who knows what damage you’d do?”
Ryan looks at her for a long time, then swings himself up into the pilot’s seat. “Have it your way,” he says.
“I always do,” Sarah tells him, not loud enough for him to hear.
*
Sarah joined the gay pride society at the start of her second year.
“Why?” Alex asked, walking to their 9am Maths lecture together, when Sarah finally took a deep breath and told her.
“Because I think… I might not be… I think I might be, you know, bisexual. Or gay. Maybe.” Gay, probably, actually, but she couldn’t say that, didn’t want Alex asking what made her sure.
“OK.” Alex said. She linked her arm through Sarah’s and squeezed. “You know I’m always here for you, right?”
“Of course,” Sarah said, squeezing back.
*
The plane rumbles when Ryan finally starts up the engine, the vibrations running through Sarah’s body. She checks her belt again, tightens it a little like that will help. She’s not even worried about crashing, just scared of take-off in a way she can’t explain.
“We’re up next,” Ryan tells her, crackly through her headset.
“OK.” She watches Red Seven lift off, and twists her hands together as they start to taxi down the runway.
*
“So…” Alex said, leaning over the back of the sofa and grinning mischievously. Sarah unwound her scarf from her neck and hung it in the hall. “How did it go?”
“Good,” Sarah said, dropping onto the sofa and leaning on Alex’s shoulder. “We had a really nice time.”
“I’m happy for you,” Alex said. She closed her text book over her finger. “Are you going to see her again?”
“I hope so.” Ellie was nice and when they’d kissed goodbye outside the bar, she’d promised to call Sarah about doing something in the week. “I think so.”
“Great,” Alex said. She put her arm round Sarah and hugged her close for a minute.
Two days later, Alex started seeing someone from her Aerodynamics seminar.
*
Sarah closes her eyes when the end of the runway gets close, then opens them again because she’s a trained RAF sergeant, and she’s above that kind of thing. She stares down at her hands instead, feeling the ground drop away beneath them, the tug of gravity trying to keep them down before the engine wins and they start to rise.
She picks up voices from the control tower in her headset, not loud enough to hear over the rumble of the engine. It’s a female voice, though, half-familiar, and her hand twitches for her talk button, the name on the back of her tongue until she swallows against a history that doesn’t exist, never has.
Ryan levels the plane out, and Sarah looks out the window, watching Red Nine as it lifts off.
*
Alex got semi- serious about the guy she was seeing, then Sarah and Ellie broke up. Then Alex and Ian broke up, and Sarah started seeing Kate, mostly casually, and she introduced Alex to her co-worker at the union bar.
When they came back after summer vacation, Kate was in France for her year out and Alex decided she wasn’t that interested in Sean after all. They were third year students, and Alex was trying to talk Sarah into applying to join the Air Force with her, so they were spending more time at Squadron events than before.
“Meet me after class,” Alex said in the morning. “We’ll go over together.”
“Sure,” Sarah said. “Outside the engineering block?”
Alex nodded, and waved over her shoulder, hurrying to lectures.
When her phone rang, twenty minutes after they were meant to meet up, all Sarah could think was that they were the most pathetic last words ever spoken.
*
They’ve barely levelled out when Ryan tells her that they’re starting landing procedures. It hardly seems worth the effort of arranging time at the air strip they’re going to martial on for the display flight, but she got used to the idea when she first joined the Blues, long before she got chosen for the Circus.
The air field is controlled chaos, nine planes coming in to land, taxiing and parking, even without their pilots and engineers trying to run a final set of checks before they go out again. Ryan claps her firmly on the shoulder, reminds her to look out for taxiing planes until everyone’s in – like she might forget and get herself run over, she thinks, and it should be funny but it’s not – and goes off to the lounge they’ve got set up for the pilots to wait in.
It’s the eighth display she’s done, not enough that she’s stopped feeling protective of her aircraft yet. There’s nothing left for her to check, but she stays, perched on the edge of the cockpit, watching the last plane come in, looking down on the other engineers.
“You know no-one’s going to steal her if you want to get a Coke,” Daniel calls up to her, polishing a last invisible speck from Red Three.
“Yeah.” Sarah smiles down at him. “I know,” she says, and stays where she is.
*
It took Sarah three months before she could face going back to the Squadron, even after she’d seen some of them at the funeral. She actually figured she’d be going just to say she was leaving, because it had always been Alex’s thing, not hers, and take-off still made her hands shake, at least when she was responsible for it.
Their officer in command came over to her when she arrived, and handed her an envelope.
“What is it?” Sarah asked, already slitting it open.
“An offer to take a training flight in a Red Arrow,” he said. He waited a moment, like he was expecting Sarah to say something, then added, “Your friend was an exceptional member of the Squadron. This isn’t an opportunity many students get.”
Sarah stared at him, then at the letter in her hands. “It’s addressed to me.”
He smiled, sympathetic and a little like he was wondering if she was stupid. “You were the second choice.”
*
The event’s running late, they managed to land in take-off order and it’s hot on the air-strip, for June, so it doesn’t take long for everyone to drift inside. Sarah listens to the wind sock flapping in a breeze she can’t feel, and the deep silence of nine still planes. She thinks she might fall asleep where she’s sitting.
The first time she went in an Arrow, taking the controls for a few terrifying minutes when they were in open sky, nothing for miles around, she was in Red Ten, the Senior Engineering Officer’s plane. She felt a kind of affection for it when she joined the ground crew in her blue flight suit, tried to be the one who worked on it, and felt a twinge of disappointment when she heard that she was being assigned to Red Six in the Circus.
She’s glad now, because she can never look at Red Ten without thinking about how she came to fly in it the first time, about how it should never have happened, and she’s happy doing what she does, wouldn’t want to do anything else. It hurts, though, to think how easily it might never have been this way, and she wonders, some days, if she really would give this up for the accident not to have happened, for Alex to be in Flight Lieutenant Ryan’s place and Sarah to be somewhere else. She wonders if she would have followed Alex into the Red Arrows anyway, if Alex had been chosen, and if she hadn’t, if Sarah would have made the application anyway.
She’s glad when Ryan comes striding out of the pilots’ lounge, shooing her off the plane and announcing that they’re off. She doesn’t like the answers her brain sometimes throws at her.
*
Most people were surprised when Sarah announced that not only had she applied to join the RAF when she graduated, but that she’d been accepted.
None of them were surprised when she said that she wasn’t intending to pursue a career as a pilot, though a few said they thought she could, and would do well.
By the time she was through graduation and initial training, she didn’t even know who she was doing it for any more. Her mum asked, more than once, if it was because of Alex, because Sarah had never been sure what she wanted to do and Alex wouldn’t have the chance, now.
She said no, and then she started making sure she’d get assigned to the Red Arrows and chosen for the Circus. It seemed like the one thing she was doing that could only be for her.
*
The last display they did was close enough that she could see them from the air-strip; not well enough to pick out Ryan and their plane, but enough that she could see what was happening.
This one is further away, so they only catch the planes screaming out of sight of the audience to re-form for the next section of the show.
Sarah stands on the air-strip with the rest of the Circus, shading her eyes against the sun, and watches her plane re-appear.
Sarah was kind of scared of heights.
“Sarah?” Ryan asks, which means it isn’t the first time he’s tried to get her attention. He always calls her Sergeant on duty.
She looks up from ticking off the pre-flight check list. “Yes, sir?”
Ryan smiles, doing the sympathetic father thing he does with everyone in the Circus. “Everything OK?”
“Yep.” Sarah grins back at him, looking down at her check sheet again. “Ready to go in ten?”
“Sounds good,” Ryan says, hefting his duffel bag. He pats her shoulder reassuringly as he makes his way round to stow his luggage.
Sarah signs off on the check sheet and blinks, hard.
*
Alex insisted that being scared of heights was pathetic once they were in high school, and started taking her up every tall building in town. Sarah was never sure it was working, but it must have done, because she joined the Air Cadets with Alex when they were sixteen.
“Are you sure about this?” her mum asked.
“Of course,” Sarah said, adjusting her jacket. “Anyway, Alex says we might get to fly something.” She adjusted her jacket again, so her mum wouldn’t notice her hands were shaking.
“As long as you know what you’re doing,” her mum said.
“Of course,” Sarah said again, and tucked her keys in her pocket, heading out the front door.
*
She spent two years on the Blues, the Red Arrows’ ground crew, bouncing between tasks and watching the planes take off without her, wishing she could be up there like half the people around her, watching the engineering officers of the Circus climbing into the backs of the Arrows to leave for displays, before she got chosen to join them. That was seven months ago, and she spent the first six in training, getting used to her plane and her pilot, so she’s only been flying out to displays with him for a few weeks.
She loves her pilot, Flight Lieutenant Mark Ryan, and Red Six, her plane, their plane. She gets a kick out of knowing she helps get them both up in the air, and keep them up there, even when she doesn’t get to see the display.
It’s all the rest of it she has trouble with.
*
She didn’t choose her university because of where Alex wanted to go, just like Alex didn’t choose it just because it had a University Air Squadron. It was just coincidence that one of the best places for Aeronautical Engineering (Alex) and Mechanical Engineering (Sarah) was the same place.
Sarah, it turned out, was better at the ground crew side of the UAS, probably because her hands still shook when she was in charge of a take-off.
Alex took to the flight training like Sarah’d always known she would.
*
“We ready to go?” Ryan asks, coming up beside her, making more noise than usual.
Sarah tears her eyes back from the nothing she’s been looking at, and registers the rest of the Circus and the pilots climbing into their planes, the Blues readying them for take-off. “Sure, of course,” she says.
Ryan lets her climb in first, but doesn’t follow her, just looks up at her from the ground. “If you’re not well enough to go, one of the standby engineers can come,” he says quietly.
The problem with the Arrows, Sarah’s learnt, is that you spend too much time with your pilot, and you end up knowing each other too well. She’s young enough to be Ryan’s daughter, and since he doesn’t see much of his real one during display season, he’s taken to treating her as though she is, which means she’s told him a lot more than she’s told most people.
“You think I’m letting you take her out without me?” she asks, pulling up a grin that might look real. “Who knows what damage you’d do?”
Ryan looks at her for a long time, then swings himself up into the pilot’s seat. “Have it your way,” he says.
“I always do,” Sarah tells him, not loud enough for him to hear.
*
Sarah joined the gay pride society at the start of her second year.
“Why?” Alex asked, walking to their 9am Maths lecture together, when Sarah finally took a deep breath and told her.
“Because I think… I might not be… I think I might be, you know, bisexual. Or gay. Maybe.” Gay, probably, actually, but she couldn’t say that, didn’t want Alex asking what made her sure.
“OK.” Alex said. She linked her arm through Sarah’s and squeezed. “You know I’m always here for you, right?”
“Of course,” Sarah said, squeezing back.
*
The plane rumbles when Ryan finally starts up the engine, the vibrations running through Sarah’s body. She checks her belt again, tightens it a little like that will help. She’s not even worried about crashing, just scared of take-off in a way she can’t explain.
“We’re up next,” Ryan tells her, crackly through her headset.
“OK.” She watches Red Seven lift off, and twists her hands together as they start to taxi down the runway.
*
“So…” Alex said, leaning over the back of the sofa and grinning mischievously. Sarah unwound her scarf from her neck and hung it in the hall. “How did it go?”
“Good,” Sarah said, dropping onto the sofa and leaning on Alex’s shoulder. “We had a really nice time.”
“I’m happy for you,” Alex said. She closed her text book over her finger. “Are you going to see her again?”
“I hope so.” Ellie was nice and when they’d kissed goodbye outside the bar, she’d promised to call Sarah about doing something in the week. “I think so.”
“Great,” Alex said. She put her arm round Sarah and hugged her close for a minute.
Two days later, Alex started seeing someone from her Aerodynamics seminar.
*
Sarah closes her eyes when the end of the runway gets close, then opens them again because she’s a trained RAF sergeant, and she’s above that kind of thing. She stares down at her hands instead, feeling the ground drop away beneath them, the tug of gravity trying to keep them down before the engine wins and they start to rise.
She picks up voices from the control tower in her headset, not loud enough to hear over the rumble of the engine. It’s a female voice, though, half-familiar, and her hand twitches for her talk button, the name on the back of her tongue until she swallows against a history that doesn’t exist, never has.
Ryan levels the plane out, and Sarah looks out the window, watching Red Nine as it lifts off.
*
Alex got semi- serious about the guy she was seeing, then Sarah and Ellie broke up. Then Alex and Ian broke up, and Sarah started seeing Kate, mostly casually, and she introduced Alex to her co-worker at the union bar.
When they came back after summer vacation, Kate was in France for her year out and Alex decided she wasn’t that interested in Sean after all. They were third year students, and Alex was trying to talk Sarah into applying to join the Air Force with her, so they were spending more time at Squadron events than before.
“Meet me after class,” Alex said in the morning. “We’ll go over together.”
“Sure,” Sarah said. “Outside the engineering block?”
Alex nodded, and waved over her shoulder, hurrying to lectures.
When her phone rang, twenty minutes after they were meant to meet up, all Sarah could think was that they were the most pathetic last words ever spoken.
*
They’ve barely levelled out when Ryan tells her that they’re starting landing procedures. It hardly seems worth the effort of arranging time at the air strip they’re going to martial on for the display flight, but she got used to the idea when she first joined the Blues, long before she got chosen for the Circus.
The air field is controlled chaos, nine planes coming in to land, taxiing and parking, even without their pilots and engineers trying to run a final set of checks before they go out again. Ryan claps her firmly on the shoulder, reminds her to look out for taxiing planes until everyone’s in – like she might forget and get herself run over, she thinks, and it should be funny but it’s not – and goes off to the lounge they’ve got set up for the pilots to wait in.
It’s the eighth display she’s done, not enough that she’s stopped feeling protective of her aircraft yet. There’s nothing left for her to check, but she stays, perched on the edge of the cockpit, watching the last plane come in, looking down on the other engineers.
“You know no-one’s going to steal her if you want to get a Coke,” Daniel calls up to her, polishing a last invisible speck from Red Three.
“Yeah.” Sarah smiles down at him. “I know,” she says, and stays where she is.
*
It took Sarah three months before she could face going back to the Squadron, even after she’d seen some of them at the funeral. She actually figured she’d be going just to say she was leaving, because it had always been Alex’s thing, not hers, and take-off still made her hands shake, at least when she was responsible for it.
Their officer in command came over to her when she arrived, and handed her an envelope.
“What is it?” Sarah asked, already slitting it open.
“An offer to take a training flight in a Red Arrow,” he said. He waited a moment, like he was expecting Sarah to say something, then added, “Your friend was an exceptional member of the Squadron. This isn’t an opportunity many students get.”
Sarah stared at him, then at the letter in her hands. “It’s addressed to me.”
He smiled, sympathetic and a little like he was wondering if she was stupid. “You were the second choice.”
*
The event’s running late, they managed to land in take-off order and it’s hot on the air-strip, for June, so it doesn’t take long for everyone to drift inside. Sarah listens to the wind sock flapping in a breeze she can’t feel, and the deep silence of nine still planes. She thinks she might fall asleep where she’s sitting.
The first time she went in an Arrow, taking the controls for a few terrifying minutes when they were in open sky, nothing for miles around, she was in Red Ten, the Senior Engineering Officer’s plane. She felt a kind of affection for it when she joined the ground crew in her blue flight suit, tried to be the one who worked on it, and felt a twinge of disappointment when she heard that she was being assigned to Red Six in the Circus.
She’s glad now, because she can never look at Red Ten without thinking about how she came to fly in it the first time, about how it should never have happened, and she’s happy doing what she does, wouldn’t want to do anything else. It hurts, though, to think how easily it might never have been this way, and she wonders, some days, if she really would give this up for the accident not to have happened, for Alex to be in Flight Lieutenant Ryan’s place and Sarah to be somewhere else. She wonders if she would have followed Alex into the Red Arrows anyway, if Alex had been chosen, and if she hadn’t, if Sarah would have made the application anyway.
She’s glad when Ryan comes striding out of the pilots’ lounge, shooing her off the plane and announcing that they’re off. She doesn’t like the answers her brain sometimes throws at her.
*
Most people were surprised when Sarah announced that not only had she applied to join the RAF when she graduated, but that she’d been accepted.
None of them were surprised when she said that she wasn’t intending to pursue a career as a pilot, though a few said they thought she could, and would do well.
By the time she was through graduation and initial training, she didn’t even know who she was doing it for any more. Her mum asked, more than once, if it was because of Alex, because Sarah had never been sure what she wanted to do and Alex wouldn’t have the chance, now.
She said no, and then she started making sure she’d get assigned to the Red Arrows and chosen for the Circus. It seemed like the one thing she was doing that could only be for her.
*
The last display they did was close enough that she could see them from the air-strip; not well enough to pick out Ryan and their plane, but enough that she could see what was happening.
This one is further away, so they only catch the planes screaming out of sight of the audience to re-form for the next section of the show.
Sarah stands on the air-strip with the rest of the Circus, shading her eyes against the sun, and watches her plane re-appear.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-05 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-06 02:19 pm (UTC)