valmora | [snippet] Cooler Talk (tGE, Hilts/?)

Title: Cooler Talk
Author:

valmora
Fandom: The Great Escape, the movie
Pairing: Hilts/? (I don't name names, but if you've watched closely, you'll know)
Disclaimer: Not mine. Er. I hope the estate of Steve McQueen doesn't sue me. Yeah.
Notes: This was written because I had a Scottish accent stuck in my head and decided to do something about it. That something is a giftfic for

figletofvenice, who is one of the few people who would appreciate it.

Hilts has never known a man more chatty than Ives. You know those stories about how Scots are either drunk or never say a thing? Wrong. Wronger than wrong.

Of course, Ives would like to be drunk, but he’s not, and he just keeps on going.

Hilts figures that Ives is chatty ‘cause he can’t stand not being around people, and Hilts’s noncommittal responses are making him nervous.

Of course, when he comes to this decision, it’s probably time to open up a little.

He starts off getting Ives going about being a jockey, because it’s what he likes talking about, and then there’re the ‘birds,’ Ives going on about his old girlfriends.

Hilts should’ve stopped him there. He really should’ve.

“What about you?” Ives asks after a bout of silence broken only by the sound of the baseball. “You got a girl back in the States, Hilts?”

The baseball goes thunk-thunk-thud, and then stops, held carelessly in Hilts’s glove, and for once he can’t breathe. Thinks of the slide of skin on skin, the heat of another body, the memory of seeing fingers wrapped around the baseball glove instead over his shoulders where they should be, and his hand clenches into a fist against his thigh.

“Hilts?”

Twenty-two more days.

“No,” he says, and it sounds choked, before he goes back to throwing the baseball, thunk-thunk-thud.

For those of you who want to know who he's thinking of: it's Goff. Remember the third guy who makes the vodka? Goff also throws him his baseball glove when he gets sent to the cooler.