Chapter Text
He hated him.
That was the one thing he was sure about as of now.
He hated Maverick Mitchell with such a burning passion that he was the only thing in his mind.
For gods sake.
Of course, of course he’d fallen, in love – jesus – for the most reckless, most dangerous and most annoying pilot in the class.
He was cocky, christ he was cocky, arrogant and an irritating good flyer, if one omitted the fact that his style was verging on completely insane and possibly not wholly safe. The guy had a stupid lopsided grin and the greenest eyes that shone like glittering emeralds in the sun if he didn’t hide them with those aviators of his. His ridiculously fluffy hair was so dark, so black that the light seemed to fall into it, and it felt worryingly like Ice was going to fall into it as well.
Good god he was down so bad and he absolutely detested it.
Ice turns over.
Opens his eyes. Glares at the blackness of the room and flicks his eyes over to his alarm clock on the bedside table. Two forty three. He groans, shoving the heels of his hands into his eyes, rolling back over onto his left, and willing his mind to shut up.
He had to be up at six! At the very latest!
And, as was common nowadays, Maverick was in his head, buzzing round like a fly that you just couldn’t swat.
Slider was officially no help.
The ‘help’ he offered was ‘why don’t you just kiss him?’. Which was by far the stupidest way of going about it.
But then again, at times it felt like that was his only choice.
But god dammit he was going to resist that even if it felt like chewing metal. Which it did.
But he knew he could do so, and he would do so. His callsign was Iceman for a reason, and he was not going to let Maverick distract him from what he was here for.
Which was to win the trophy.
Not to fall in love.
~~~
Maverick tilts his head, shifting in his seat again, his left arm now resting on his knee that he’d lifted up almost as soon as he’d sat down at the beginning of the lecture. He clenches his jaw for a second, directing his gaze toward Charlie, listening intently, as it seemed, to whatever she was saying, something about someone's flying, a risky manoeuvrer that wasn’t the right thing to do in that particular situation or whatever.
Probably his. As he was great at doing just that.
Ice’s RIO lands an elbow directly in his ribs, and he snaps his head towards him, glaring at him from behind his aviators as his neck twinges.
“You’re staring at him,” Slider says through his teeth, voice lowered, eyebrows raised.
Ice exhales, lifting his head from his arms and sitting back in his seat, gluing his eyes to the blackboard, and not Maverick. Listening to Charlie, and not looking at Maverick. Concentrating on her and not.. not on… fuck.
Jesus he was tantalising from every angle. Even this one. Maverick’s seven, Ice’s one.
He wanted to tear his eyes out of his skull, but he doubted even that would put a halt to this ridiculous pining that was churning his guts. It was sickening, having literally zero concentration on whatever Charlie was saying – which was most probably helpful, as were most lectures, going through peoples flying and critiquing them and seeing what went wrong and what went well. Et cetera.
But of course, his mind was fixed, glued, locked to Mitchell. And nothing seemed to able to change that.
He inhales sharply through his nose, trying to wake up his mind and concentrate on the board.
Lines. White lines, scribbled in looping circles, arrows representing acceleration, a column of numbers representing g-force, probably. To Ice, senseless.
He switches his gaze to Charlie, anyone was better than Maverick, and she was the easiest to look at and thus he would not get caught out by Slider for the hundredth time.
She was wearing glasses, that had a clear frame, which was sorta strange. Sure, they suited her, but he wouldn’t go for them if he had a choice. She was holding a folder, a thick one, pointing her pen at the jittering paused screen, saying something that didn’t really sound like words.
The room was another thing; stuffy, darkened and humid, and the lights that were on were bright and buzzing loudly. The nearest thing to hell on earth. He hated humidity, it was dank and horrible and weighed down on him like a rain-cloud that was resisting bursting.
If it was raining, that was fine. If it was sunny, that was fine.
This dark and stifling room, was not fine.
Maybe he was getting sick. Maybe that’s why nothing made sense and he was feeling the humidity and the piercing lights worse than usual.
He sighs, resting his forearms on the bar in front of him again and dropping his head down. What he wanted to do right now was to take a shower and scrub the heat from his skin, then lay down in a dark airy room and chew on at least seven ice-cubes.
~~~
The next Tuesday, one of the worst things to happen, did happen. He was scheduled to go up, with Maverick. And work as a team. Jesus.
Work as a team with the guy who made it crystal clear he was a lone wolf. Joy of joys. The only way to get over this? Get in lead first.
Did he? No. Was Maverick as annoying as possible about it? Yes.
Ice’s body felt like lead and his skull was going to crack open as soon as he heard his voice laughing down the radio, as bright and as sunny as any other time.
Maverick insists on circling the defeated Ice jeering, up until he gets too low on fuel and has to land before him. Ice couldn’t resist a smirk at that.
“I’m so ill,” He grumbles as he takes his helmet off.
“You’re lovesick, genius,” Slider says, Ice can almost hear the eye roll his RIO was doing as he climbs down the ladder of their jet.
“Thanks,” he says sarcastically. “But I’m not,”
“You’re welcome and yes you are,” Slider drawls, shielding his eyes from the setting sun as Ice drops from the ladder to the tarmac. The impact of his feet with the ground was heavy, it sent shockwaves up his unsteady legs worse than it usually would do.
He runs his hand over his face and through his hair, attempting to spike it up again, it always went stupidly flat after having his helmet on.
“Oi,” Slider nudges him. “You wanna go to the O?”
Ice stares at him through his eyebrows. He might actually die if he stepped one foot into that deafening, cramped, hot, sticky place.
“Nope, alright, I’ll go change first, you good doing the last checks?”
“Mhm,”
“Alright, gimme that,” Slider says, reaching for his helmet.
“Thank you,”
“Welcome, I’ll see you tomorrow,”
Ice nods at his departing RIO.
If he even was alive tomorrow.
The sickness he’d felt coming over him in Charlie’s lecture a few days before had been doing nothing but increasing in uncomfortability. Being in a dark room hadn’t helped, and neither had nobody but Maverick Mitchell getting Jester before he had.
His mind was fully on auto pilot as he circles the jet and makes sure everything was good and a missile wasn’t going to randomly drop onto the tarmac and explode overnight.
Nothing was out of order, so he finally gets out his sunglasses and puts them on, the sun was giving him a my-heart-is-smacking-my-skull-with-every-beat type of headache.
This was not lovesickness. This was ‘I will have to lay in bed the whole week and probably lose my chance at coming even remotely close to winning the trophy’ type of sickness.
The hell did Slider know about this type of thing anyway?
Ice begins to trudge down the long strip of sun-baked tarmac, his head down and squinting from the sunset burning into the side of his head. He sighs out the heated air and inhales through his mouth, hoping to clear his sticky-feeling throat, but to no avail. He just felt full of moisture and his sinuses were blocked and he was too hot and too irritable to do anything about it.
The last thing he wanted was anyone to be in the locker rooms. All he wanted was no more human interaction, a cooling shower, to change into a t-shirt and sweatpants, get to his house and collapse.
Was that really too much to ask for?
He knew Slider would change quickly, and as for Goose and Maverick, they’d have been gone for ages, so there wasn’t much to worry about. He could hope, at least, for his plan to work.
“Still sour about your bitter defeat, huh?”
Oh for christ’s sake he was still here.
Ice screws shut his eyes and exhales, not rising to his bait, not looking at him bouncing round in his peripheral.
“Oh you are sour!” Maverick says joyously.
He still does nothing, staring at his locker, his aviators still on his face, his heart, or the headache, or both, thudding against his right temple.
“Looks like I have a chance now, doesn’t it? It looked to me like you were too slow,”
He takes off his aviators, folding the arms as slowly as he could, placing them inside his locker door he’d just opened.
“Wow, the Iceman, being too slow, I would never have expected that, no way, not in a million years,”
Maybe Slider’s solution didn’t seem like such a bad idea right now.
“It seems to me that that was much less than ice cold no mistakes, right? Like I didn’t think you even could survive such a miss of something so easy,” Maverick keeps rambling, metaphorically poking him, wanting, or perhaps even needing his attention, a snipe back, Ice reckoned anything would satisfy him at this point.
He inhales.
Now or never Kazansky. Now or never.
And suddenly, he snaps, reeling round on his heel and pushing him against the locker and fixing him with the stare he was famous for.
“For once in your life just shut up,” Ice hisses, and before he actually knew what he was doing, he’d pressed his hands to the sides of his face, and kissed him.
And he liked it. And he wanted another.
Oh fuck. He was absolutely never going to escape this vicious circle of wanting, yes, wanting, Maverick now.
He pulls back, turning like nothing had happened, only just catching Maverick standing there, stunned, his mouth hanging open.
Now he had two options. Never speak to Maverick again, or apologise. Or both. But he didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to apologise for giving in to himself and kissing him, even though he probably should do.
But for one thing, it did shut him up. Worryingly so.
“Kazansky-?” Maverick says, his voice completely changed from the irritating tone. Now it was stunned, breathless, and Ice had to fight the very real urge to stop himself spinning around and kissing him until the sun rose.
“What,”
“Jesus christ that was the best kiss I’ve ever had,” He says in one breath.
Ice stares wide-eyed at the inside of his locker. What?!
Maverick inhales, tension in the rush of air.
Fucks sake answer him!
“What-?” he croaks out, turning slowly to face him again. “What?”
Maverick steps closer to him, and stares at him.
Ice swallows, his heartbeat in his ears, knowing his cheeks were flushed, his lips parted for ease to inhale more air.
He keeps his eyes on his for a moment longer, before very deliberately staring at his lips.
It felt like his eyes were glued on the pilot in front of him, on his hair, on his eyelashes fanning out across the tops of his cheekbones, the tips catching the light and sparkling.
Ice felt like he was going to explode if he didn’t have contact with his lips in the next five seconds.
Then he looks back up, a smirk on his lips.
“You just gonna stand there and stare at me or are you gonna kiss me again?” Ice says, half shocked at the words coming out of his mouth.
Maverick’s face splits into a grin and he smashes his lips back against Ice’s.
God he’d never kissed someone like this before in his entire life.
And he loved it.
~~~
The two of them are breathless and exhausted a heated twenty minutes later, the overpowering lust that had filled them had been replaced by sweetness. Ice didn’t want to move and neither, as it seemed, did Maverick – from where they sat on the floor, leaning on each other, flightsuits tugged down to their waists, fingers tracing the shape of each other.
“’m surprised it took you that long to give in,” Maverick murmurs, his head in Ice’s bare shoulder.
He raises his eyebrows. “Give in?”
Maverick smiles into his shoulder. “Course,”
“Whatever you say,” he replies, rolling his eyes.
He wouldn’t exactly call it giving in, but he kind of did, so he guessed he had a point.
“Are you still lovesick?”
“What? How did you know I was?”
“Meh, just Goose talking to me after talking to Slider,”
Ice sighs. “Typical,” Of course Slider had been talking to Maverick’s RIO about his downright obsession over him.
“Are you still lovesick?”
“...I suppose not,” He can’t resist the smile, running his left hand gently over Maverick’s shoulder, caressing his sunkissed skin. Of course he could tan so well. His other hand was currently connected to Maverick’s, who was holding on like his hand was glued to his. Not that Ice minded about that, of course.
“I meant what I said, by the way,” He says, twisting slightly to rest the side of his head on his shoulder. “About how that was the best kiss of my life,”
“I could tell,”
“You could tell?”
“Mhm,” he muses. “It’s not like you’d say that if it wasn’t,”
“You know me too well,”
“I don’t know you at all,” He replies honestly, gazing lazily at his fingertips over his shoulder.
Maverick lifts his head up, fixing his eyes on his as soon as he could. “Do you want to know me?” he asks, slowly, deliberately.
Yes. Ice looks at him, carefully, not daring to blink. “Yes. I do,”
“You do,”
“I do,” he replies instantly.
He stares at him, occasionally flicking his eyes between his, his lips ever so slightly parted, his head tilted to the side, his hair fluffed up and spiky.
God he was so gorgeous.
“Your eyes are so pretty,” Ice says, entranced by his shimmering green irises, he’d never been this close to him, close enough to see just exactly what his eyes looked like. They were green, yes, although the outside rim was darker, and the centres almost yellow.
Maverick smirks, no- smiles – one Ice had never seen before, a little lopsided, but effortlessly cute – and tilts his head forward a touch, embarrassed at his compliment. “Yours are the pretty ones,” he says through his smile.
“You think so?”
He raises his eyebrows, looking directly back into Ice’s eyes. “I know so,”
“Do you?” Ice asks, not letting go of the stare.
“Yup,” Maverick replies, slowly lifting up his spare hand from where he was stroking his collarbone, and running his fingers under his eye and down his jawline, tracing the line of his face. “I do,”
He smiles, it felt warm in his chest, and not just because Maverick, whom he’d discovered to be a hot water bottle in the last thirty minutes, had been leaning against him.
Ice could no longer deny it, he was completely head-over-heels in love with nobody but Pete Maverick Mitchell.
And the thing was, he no longer minded.