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The world comes back to him like a slow drip of warm honey off the curve of a spoon. The aroma of bourbon doused coffee finds him first, curling under his nose on the faint hint of engine grease that Maverick never could quite chase from the house. There’s a twinge in his back that smarts at the deep, well-worn curve of couch cushions and soft threads of familiar fleece warm him a degree too much. He slips back under the awning of sleep, exhaustion and the feeling of home after all these years painless reasons to pretend that time isn’t moving forward at all.
Bradley dreams that it doesn’t like so many nights before, that he’s still a little kid tucked into Maverick’s side watching the animated movies his uncle pretends to hate even though he can feel the ghost of Mav’s singing voice tickle the ends of his curls at the crown of his head. It took a few drunken stupors and several more therapy sessions to rid himself of the bitter taste of guilt staining said dreams. He’s not a bad person for clinging to his years with Maverick rather than the silhouette of memories he has of his parents, or so Dr. Woodshaw claims.
When he drifts awake again, he feels the culmination of therapy at the back of his throat and swallows the urge to cry. He understands it now, that his parents would be happy to know that he stills feels safe, wanted, and loved inside the house that wasn’t built for him but weathered every storm for him anyway. Blinking the living room into focus, his gaze lands on the long scuff mark on the ceiling put there by the nose of a wooden plane his uncle Ice gave him for his eighth birthday. Mav had told him repeatedly not to throw it in the house, but it had been raining that day and he had no one else to play with since his uncle had spent the better part of the morning yelling on the phone upstairs.
He follows the line of wooden beams to the wall, eyes trailing down until he can spot the staircase tucked just beside the front door. He’d hidden under there that day, broken parts of his toy plane clutched in his hands and tears staining his shirt by the time Maverick found him. The shadows did little to shield him from the anger he expected, but the excess of space under the stairs gave his uncle ample room to surprise him. Mav had crawled underneath the stairs, tucked himself up against Bradley and pretended he could fix the plane by merely sticking it back together. He’s never had the luxury of believing things are that simple, that all things can be fixed with super glue and an apology, but if anyone could convince him otherwise it would be Mav.
The fireplace on the other side of the room crackles loudly as the burning wood shifts with ash and his focus settles back to the present. His eyes follow the sound and the flickering golden glow casting dancing shadows around the room, but he finds his uncle instead. The older man is in the leather bound armchair, brown stain faded tan and one of the legs nailed back in place. His back is to the fire for a clear view of the room if not for the book settled between his hands. Bradley knows he’s never been much of a fictional reader, or of anything that wasn’t a manual, so the small bound novel hiding his uncle’s face is peculiar. Squinting at the title, he feels amusement curl at the corner of his mouth and brings up an edge of the blanket he doesn’t remember covering himself with to hide it.
“Didn’t get enough action and adventure from the mission so you’re reading Jurassic Park?”
His voice is rough with sleep, maybe a touch hoarse from all the near-death yelling yesterday, but Mav’s gaze is smooth and slow as it lifts over the head of the book and settles on him. There’s a comfortable silence between them, one that they both don’t mind to linger, but eventually Maverick drops the book to his lap and smirks. “You had horrible taste in bedtime stories as a kid.”
“You’re the one who agreed to read it to me.”
“One of the more questionable things I’ve done in my life,” Mav grins around the words, but blinks in the time it takes for it to fall. “But definitely not the worst.”
Years worth of anger strikes hot against Bradley’s sternum, an easy emotion to fall back on despite the past twenty-four hours, but he smothers it down with the blanket, trapping it against himself as he curls onto his side to face his uncle. The heart-wrenching feeling of loss pitter-patters down his spine like the first sprinkles of rain against a window and the anger snuffs out completely as it continues to trickle down.
“No,” he mumbles against the blanket tucked comfortingly over his fists and feels guilty for the painful way Maverick shifts in the armchair. He tries to soothe the ache from across the room with, “No, I think that time you took me to the ER for skinned knees takes the top spot.”
A splotch of bruises stretch across Mav’s neck when he lets his head fall back with laughter. Rooster chuckles despite them, feeling more at ease when his uncle rolls his head along the back of the chair to grin at him. “You and Iceman are never gonna let that go, huh?”
“I thought you were crazy then,” Bradley says, making sure to catch the older man’s gaze when he adds, “But now I know you were just scared.”
“A fighter pilot scared of skinned knees, guys at Top Gun never would of let me back if Ice had let it slip,” Mav attempts half-heartedly, knowing full well they’re teetering on the edge of something just below the surface.
Rooster nudges them forward, “But Uncle Ice knew what you were really afraid of. I do, too.”
“Yeah?” It’s easy to hear the way Maverick’s breath hitches, easier to see him try to pretend it doesn’t. “And what’s that?”
“You were afraid of losing me.”
Bradley stays still under his uncle’s unwavering gaze, used to the silent way the older man commits things to memory. He drops the blanket from in front of his mouth and offers the ghost of a grin that he hopes echoes comfort whenever Maverick thinks back on this moment. Mav’s smile is sad, in the here and now, and Rooster knows why before he even explains.
“And yet, I did anyway.”
“Not really.” It feels like a knee-jerk reaction after their death-defying stunts yesterday, but sitting with it for a moment in the solace of a home he knew he could always return to despite everything else he knows it’s the truth. “I came…home a few times. A couple of holidays and when Uncle Ice called to tell me you’d gotten hurt in the desert.”
Mav doesn’t look surprised at the admission even though Rooster hadn’t made it past the driveway on each of those visits. Bradley tilts his head into the couch pillow to hide the pink stain of embarrassment dusting across his cheeks and the tips of his ears when he adds, “And after one really bad breakup.”
His uncle’s entire body shakes with quiet laughter. “Of all the times, that’s the one I wish you’d made it to the door for. You looked so miserable.”
“You could’ve opened it.”
It’s not accusatory, more curious in the way he says it, but his uncle falters under it anyway. “I was afraid you’d never come back if I opened the door before you were ready.” Mav fans the top corner of pages of Jurassic Park long forgotten in his lap, stops long enough to read a sentence and shrugs. “Or maybe I was just afraid you were going to hurt me as much as I hurt you.”
Rooster waits to see if the confession heals the cracks long left fissured by harsh words spoken years ago and thinks that maybe this is what it would feel like to be a broken toy plane mended by super glue. Not perfect, but loved and forgiven all the same.
Mav runs his fingers down the length of a page, clearly lost to a time past but not quite prehistoric. Bradley follows, thinking about laying underneath his NASA comforter at ten because, “I’m going to fly further than you one day, you’ll see. You’ll see me all the way at the moon, Mav.”, and how his uncle would tuck him in tight, push back wild strands of hair from his forehead and say, “You can go to the moon if you want, kiddo, just promise me you’ll come back home.”
He misses nights like those the most, tucked into bed with his uncle’s voice regaling him with action and adventure and feeling safe from every dangerous thing the book or the whole wide world had to offer. He looks to Mav now and asks, “Do you remember how you would wait to do the voices until after you thought I fell asleep?”
“I remember how you used to fall asleep faster because you would pretend to be asleep so I would do the voices.”
Rooster laughs at that and tries not to sound as sad as it makes him feel to know that, “Maybe we’ve always been a little dishonest with each other.”
“Maybe,” Mav says, settling back in his chair with the book propped on his stomach, “we’ve always been afraid of the same things but faced them different ways.”
Rooster wants to believe that’s true, but he knows yesterday was the first time he’d ever confronted something that truly frightened him. “Or maybe we always tried to keep each other from facing them at all.”
Mav smiles at him from across the room and shakes the book in his hand, “I don’t know how you turned out as smart as you did for as many times as you made me read this.”
There’s a lot of things Rooster has missed out on his life, a lot of normal he didn’t get, but, “I always had you,” he says and means it, feels it tenfold when Mav scratches at his nose to pretend he doesn’t have tears in his eyes.
“Yeah, kid,” he sniffs and adjusts the book in his hands. “Always. Now, close your eyes and get some more sleep.”
Rooster smiles at him one last time before wiggling further down into the comfort of the couch, eyes closing just as his uncle’s voice fills the room with the words he’d been staring at earlier.
"Malcolm coughed, and stared into the distance. 'Let’s be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.' ”
His uncle pauses in reading and Rooster opens his eyes to see Maverick staring back at him. “We’ve always been pretty good at that. Haven’t we, Uncle Mav?”
“Yeah, Roo. I guess we have.”