Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[September 2015]

There are few things more universally feared in the Navy than owing Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky a favor.

As he sits in his office one afternoon, Tom reflects on how very funny that is.

First, there’s the obvious insinuation that he is somehow the worst person in the world to owe something to. Now, Tom’s not delusional enough to think he’s always an easy man to please—that sort of denial is really more his partner’s department—but he knows for a fact that worse people exist. Admiral Cain’s unfortunate and continued insistence on breathing is actual living proof of that much. 

Perhaps more ludicrous is the inherent suggestion that Tom’s somehow the only officer in the fleet who’s well connected enough to be frightening. To be perfectly blunt, he’s not. There’s not a flag or general officer alive who got to where they are today without knowing people in high places. As it turns out, when personal recommendations are required for promotion, having a sphere of influence isn’t special—it’s an actual job requirement. Just because he’s better at it than most doesn’t mean he’s unique.

Tom's built his bridges carefully over the years. Personal engagements approached correctly beget good will and good will helps ensure important things can be accomplished with a minimum of difficulty in the future. What some people boil down to mere favors, Tom instead views as responsible networking—and no, he’s not splitting hairs, regardless of what his pest of a wingman may have to say on the matter.

Speaking of, there’s the small matter of why owing Tom a favor is considered such a burden in the first place: Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.

The man, the myth, the menace, Tom thinks with a snort. He’s said it before, he’ll say it again, and it’ll probably be a thrice daily mantra he mutters under his breath until he dies. Pete’s a royal pain in the ass most days. He's undeniably competent and objectively unparalleled in his abilities, but he's a goddamned pain none the less.

It’s understandable that people approach Maverick and his antics with a sense of trepidation. Hell, as a measure of a person’s sense of self-preservation goes, it’s practically the gold standard. Tom doesn’t begrudge them for being hesitant in the face of his chosen partner and lifelong personal headache. Maverick, for the most part, is someone best appreciated from a distance. 

What does get to him is the implication of the whole thing.

If there were few things in the Navy more universally feared than Maverick, Tom would understand it. But no—instead, Tom finds his own name at the top of the list and it’s there for the most absurd reason possible. It’s not because he’s a four-star admiral. It’s not because he’s the Pacific Fleet Commander. It’s not even because he’s on the short list to join the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

No, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky is feared by proxy.

It’s hilarious to him—absolutely gut-splittingly laughable—to know people are most terrified that he’ll ask them to do a favor for Pete Mitchell, as if Tom’s entire career has been built with the singular goal of covering his wingman’s ass.

It really hasn’t.

Well, not usually anyway.

The point being—his metaphorical jar of favors doesn’t deserve nearly the notoriety it gets. He keeps it as a matter of professional necessity, not because putting out his partner’s fires is his life’s calling.

Unfortunately, his ringing office phone and the universe at large both beg to differ, as does his well-developed sixth sense for when Pete’s done something foolish.

“Your dog pissed on the rug again,” Admiral Fletcher informs him by way of greeting.

“Will it cost more than a million dollars to clean up?”

“Christ, Kazansky. You can’t keep acting like that’s a reasonable threshold for what deserves punishment.”

“Ah,” Tom says, “so this fuck up doesn’t have an expense report attached to it.”

“No, just a very pissed off senator.”

“Did he at least have a good reason?”

Fletcher’s sigh is probably audible in the next town over. Tom idly wonders if he’s calling more because he doesn’t want to deal with whatever Maverick’s done himself or because he feels a sense of lingering obligation to keep Tom up to date after he helped Markus secure his dream duty station a few years back. Probably both.

It goes without saying that Fletcher’s primary motivation for calling was to complain.

“...so this weasel-nosed little shit from bum fuck no where was paying a visit to our jet testing facility with the rest of the Senate appropriations committee. Started hinting how we should divert funding to an obvious pet project of his and—”

“Let me guess,” Tom interjects dryly, “Maverick started explaining—very politely and with absolutely no implications about our illustrious senator’s intelligence—exactly how close our foreign adversaries are to outpacing us technologically, thereby embarrassing the man and his delicate sensibilities completely in an effort to dissuade him from getting too attached to a stupid ass idea.”

“While his colleagues watched, yes.”

Tom closes his eyes and shakes his head. He and Pete have talked about this before. On the list of things Tom hates most in the world, placating pompous elected officials and their egos is up near the top. While that’s most of Tom’s job whether Pete’s involved or not, he would really appreciate it if Pete could refrain from actively adding to his workload.

Still, in this instance, he has to grant his partner points for expediency. Tom would much rather spend an hour of his afternoon smoothing the ruffled feathers of a single self-important blowhard than an entire week reasoning with a dozen members of the appropriations committee who’ve been given time to decide their colleague may have a point about next year’s budget. Whether Pete bothered to consider that before he opened his mouth or not, Tom’s still willing to grant him a bit of clemency.

“I don’t know why you’re calling me,” Tom says after a moment. “If anything, you should be grateful he saved you the trouble of shooting the idiot down diplomatically. It needed saying and he’s not worried about sitting before a promotion board at any point in the future.”

“And thank god for that,” Markus tells him with no actual heat. “Still—make a show of chastising him, would you?”

“Of course. Who do you take me for?”

“His minder,” he says flatly, and Tom can’t even argue with that given the content of this conversation. “I’ve taken care of triage, but repairing our esteemed elected imbecile’s wounded pride is all on you, Ice.”

“Fair enough.”

“I’ll email you the details. Have fun.”

“I won’t,” Tom tells him in parting, already idly debating if it’ll be easier to promise the senator in question carefully-worded expert testimony at his next military budget hearing or if he should just launch Pete directly into the sun and call it a day. He returns his office phone to its cradle and picks up his personal cell with the air of the long suffering.

That’s another one, he types.

Put it on my tab, comes the immediate reply.

Tom scoffs. If he were actually bothering to keep score anymore, Pete would owe him more favors than he could feasibly repay before the inevitable heat death of the universe.

His phone dings again.

Love you. Mean it.

In the privacy of his office, Tom allows himself to roll his eyes. Why he bothers to keep Pete is beyond him some days.

Chapter Text

[May 1987]

The first time it happens, it’s so small Tom misses it.

He and Slider are in the rec room a week after they set sail on the USS Enterprise when Pete strolls in, fielding questions the moment he steps through the door. He’s fresh off a special detachment to some hell hole of a black op none of them are supposed to know about, although Tom’s not sure how anyone expected the job to stay quiet when it necessitated Pete joining the crew at their stop over in Pearl Harbor instead of shipping out from San Diego with the rest of them.

“Hey Ice, long time no see,” he says when he finally shakes everyone off, smiling like Tom didn’t see him off at the shipyard for his assignment a mere two weeks ago. Pete inclines his head to Slider in greeting. “Kerner.”

“Mitchell,” Ron replies.

They aren’t quite friends, but Slider kindly agreed to tone down the animosity at Tom’s request. Between saving both their asses during the USS Layton rescue and putting Tom up for the length of his recent medical leave, Ron’s willing to play nice with Pete despite him being, quote, “the most annoying motherfuck on god’s green earth.”

As much as Tom loves Pete, it’s not like Slider’s wrong. 

Tom counts himself fortunate that Ron and Pete didn’t kill each other while the three of them were in San Diego the last six months. He suspects the only reason for that boils down to Maverick’s transfer from Top Gun to a special F-18 cross-training detachment on the opposite end of Miramar just prior to Ice and Slider’s arrival. He can only pray their ceasefire holds now that they’re in the close quarters of a carrier ship. 

“How’s the leg, Ice?” Pete asks, tossing the file folder he’s carrying on the coffee table and dropping onto the sofa next to him.

“All healed up, same as it was before you left,” he mutters. It’s a little petulant, but he figures he’s earned the right after a broken ankle ended in him being reassigned to a new squadron entirely. If he ever gets his hands on the idiot of a technician responsible for the tailhook-arresting line screw up that resulted in his clusterfuck carrier deck crash landing, he might actually murder the bastard. 

“Stop plotting the guy’s demise, Ice,” Pete tells him. “We’ve been over this. I can’t afford to bail you out of jail now that I have a mortgage.”

“I’d be doing the Navy a service. He’s a walking source of collateral damage.”

“The only reason you’re actually mad is because you had to burn your teaching slot at Top Gun to make sure Slider didn’t get reassigned to another pilot,” Pete says. “Seriously, I can’t tell if you’re codependent or just plain possessive, Ice.”

“Fuck you very much, Mitchell,” Ron interjects, complete with a middle finger salute. Tom whole-heartedly agrees with the sentiment. “Unlike you and your two month stint, we’re good at teaching.”

“Yup, because you’re boring and I’m not!”

When Pete sticks his tongue out at Slider like the actual child he is, Kerner throws his hands up and turns away, apparently already at his daily limit for Mav and his madness. Tom permits his eyes to roll skyward for a moment. Why a part of him was pleased to be reassigned to Pete’s squadron, he’ll never know.

Then Pete nudges him in the shoulder, gives him a soft smile, and quietly says, “Missed you.”

Tom can only hope his answering smile isn’t transparently affectionate.

“What the fuck is this, Maverick?” Slider asks, abruptly jolting both of them back to reality.

Slider’s flipping through the folder Pete left on the table with a look that’s equal parts disdain and fascination. Pete immediately lunges over to snatch it out of his hands, but Ron’s a good foot taller than him and his promise to play nice apparently doesn’t extend to games of keep away.

“Is this fucking sheet music, Mitchell?”

“Hand it over right now, Kerner, or so help me god—”

“What the shit do you need this for?”

“Slider!”

“Please tell me there’s not a fucking piano on this goddamned ship—”

Tom pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Children.” They both turn to glare at him. Pete’s hands are fisted in the front of Slider’s shirt and Slider continues to hold the folder out of reach. He sighs again. “Ron.”

“Thank you,” Pete mutters when Slider reluctantly hands it back. “Dick.”

“Pete.”

“Not apologizing for that, Ice. He earned it.”

God, he’s too sober for this.

It’s not until Slider steps away to find himself something to snack on that Tom gets a chance to bring it up again. “Still on about learning to play, huh?”

“You know I am.”

“I do,” he says quietly, because he’s spent the better part of the last three months listening to Pete’s attempts in the evenings. “But I don’t think this is something you’re going to figure out with a book and a prayer.”

“Well, unless you’ve got a better idea…”

“I know you miss Goose.”

“That’s not…” Pete trails off, tapping the arm of the couch for a moment before he sighs. “It’s for Bradley. I can’t give him his dad back. This is the least I can do.”

Oh.

Tom’s more than a little disappointed in himself for not realizing it before now.

“I’m sorry, Pete.” He brushes a hand down the back of Pete’s neck, there and gone quick enough for plausible deniability. It’s the most comfort he can offer when they’re in a crowded room. “If I could help you, you know I would.”

Pete shoots him a small smile. “Thanks.”

“That’s what that shit’s about?” Ron asks from behind them, and Tom would have jumped if he wasn’t so focused on the sudden fury clouding Pete’s face. About this of all things, Pete won’t tolerate teasing.

“What of it, Kerner?”

“I fucking hate the piano,” he replies venomously.

That’s true enough, Tom knows, but he really wishes Ron hadn’t said it quite like that. Pianos are far and away his least favorite instrument of torture after the decade of lessons his mother subjected him to as a child. He’s harbored an irrational loathing for them all the years Tom’s known him. Hell, that’s the reason he took such an instantaneous dislike to Goose and his impromptu concerts back at the Academy—the man had been good at it and he enjoyed playing. Slider has only ever been able to claim one of those things.

Beside him, Pete looks to be gearing up for a truly explosive argument, if not a fistfight. Tom doubts even he can talk them down from this one, already quietly resigning himself to a night spent doing damage control and a lifetime of mediating between his two morons.

Which is why it comes as such a surprise when Ron catches his eyes over the top of Pete’s head, his gaze flickering to Pete once before he looks back and nods tightly at Tom. “Come on, Mav. I’ll teach you.”

When Ron leads him off to the little upright piano crammed in the corner of the rec room behind a divider screen, no one is more surprised than Tom.

Maybe they’ll learn to get along after all.

—

It takes far, far longer than it should for Tom to catch onto what’s happening. In hindsight, that’s for two reasons—one, he wasn’t attempting to curry favor with people in the first place and, two, he never actually asked them to pass that favor onto Mav on his behalf.

There’s also the small matter of all these innocuous little favors being, well, small. For example—

“Port leave schedule got posted,” Pete announces when he sits down beside him in the mess.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got first. You’ve got second.”

Pete really needs to develop a poker face. His pout might actually be visible from space.

“Rain check on sightseeing together,” Tom says with a gentle nudge to Pete’s shoulder.

“Fuck sightseeing. I was looking forward to getting drunk with you,” he says.

They were both looking forward to spending time with each other in a hotel room is more like it, but months of stolen moments and nights spent in separate beds while at sea is the price they pay for staying in the service. Tom considers it fortunate that they’re even on the same carrier together. They could go years without seeing each other otherwise. God knows they already have.

“Next time,” Tom tells him.

Dinner continues on as usual, complete with Tom sliding his slice of cake over to Merlin before he and Pete head to meet Ron for Pete’s twice weekly piano lessons.

“Hey, uh, guys,” Sam says as they get up. “I’ve got the second rotation off. I can probably swap with you, Mav. The scheduling officer likes me pretty well.”

“Thank you, Merlin,” Tom says before Pete can jump on that offer, “but you really don’t have to go to that much trouble.”

Pete shoots him the least subtle ‘what the fuck, Ice’ look Tom’s ever seen. He understands Pete’s frustration, but he also knows their scheduling officer. Despite Merlin’s assertion, the last person who asked for a change to the roster got their head bitten off and ended up stuck on the boat for the next two port calls. Tom refuses to be responsible for Merlin experiencing either.

“Nah, man, it’s cool, I swear. You guys go have fun,” Sam says, then gestures at the cake he’s currently inhaling. “Fair trade for you always giving me the only decent thing in the mess. I know you say you don’t have a sweet tooth, Ice, but I sure as hell do.”

Tom purses his lips and chances a look at Pete. His hopeful expression is exactly as bad as he expected and twice as hard to deny a second time. Besides, it’s not like it’s an offer Tom wants to turn down. He misses sleeping next to Pete at night.

“If it’s really no trouble,” Tom says, and soon after finds himself with two days to spend with the man he loves.

—

Maverick is a trouble magnet in and out of the air. For all that he means well, some of the stunts he pulls are damn foolish. Delaying his return to carrier to provide cover during an unanticipated MiG sighting is only one such example.

“You were low on fuel, you idiot,” Tom hisses into his ear the second they get back to the deck. Slider and Merlin have already made themselves scarce, both of their RIOs smart enough to stay out of the way of this train wreck.

“I was fine, Ice.”

“Really? Because I went out after you and I know exactly how low my gauge was when I landed just now.”

“Ok, mom.”

Tom barely resists the urge to snarl at that dismissive bullshit. Tom knows there are too many people looking their way for him to tear into Pete the way he deserves right now, but that doesn’t make him any less furious when Pete’s all but baiting him into an argument. “God, you’re reckless sometimes.”

“I wasn’t leaving until backup got there.”

“And I got there, which still doesn’t explain you staying after, you goddamned—”

“Yeah, because then you were there, you fucking ass—”

When the door leading to the command room slams open, Tom shuts his mouth with an audible click, almost perfectly synced with Pete’s sharp exhale as he closes his own. Fighting in front of the brass—it’s the one thing they refuse to do if they can help it.

“Lieutenant Mitchell,” Stinger barks. “Stow your gear and get your ass inside my office in the next ten minutes.”

Pete fires off a tight salute, shoulders stiff as he turns to leave. Tom sighs and makes to follow him.

“Not you, Kazansky,” Stinger says, clamping a hand on his shoulder. “We need to have a word about this.”

Tom nods, because it’s hardly the first time he’s been subjected to a post-Maverick debriefing. The only thing abnormal about this one is the fact Stinger’s finally making Pete aware they happen, something Tom’s been trying very hard to avoid. He figures that means he’s probably about to hear his partner described with a more vicious string of superlatives than usual, all while Pete’s still in ear shot to feel badly about it.

Fuck. 

Pete looks back at him for a fleeting moment, a hint of remorse in his eyes. Tom just shakes his head, motioning for him to go. He does so without argument, even though he looks reluctant as all hell when he steps through the door.

Stinger catches all of this, because he’d have to be blind not to.

Tom wonders what Stinger sees when he looks at the two of them, then immediately decides he’s better off not knowing. Quite frankly, he’s too exhausted to muster up the energy to care about how obvious they must be at the moment. Most of the time, Tom loves Pete more than he wants to throttle him. Other times, he feels affection and despair in equal measures. On days when he’s forced to stand next to their commander and defend his wingman while knowing full well Pete’ll be in a foul mood for the rest of the night…

Well—suffice to say he’s old friends with resigned acceptance at this point.

Stinger takes a long drag off his cigar, apparently content to linger in the silence that follows Pete’s departure. Tom understands the feeling, especially when he’s just pulled a Maverick Special.

“Your friend’s got some real balls, Kazansky,” he says eventually.

“He certainly does, sir,” Tom replies wearily, and hopes whatever he’s in for this time is over quickly. His undershirt is starting to cling uncomfortably where he sweated through it during their latest MiG encounter.

“Alright,” Stinger says, exhaling a thick plume of smoke, “you were up there. Gimme a reason not to bust his ass.”

Tom’s blinks, thrown off by the abrupt deviation from their usual script. “Sir?”

“You heard me. Save me some paperwork, kid.”

“I…”

Stinger raises his eyebrows. “Don’t make me doubt your good judgment now, Lieutenant. After three months of watching you two, I can’t help but think it’s no accident that my most responsible pilot is so close to my most brazen one. So tell me—why should I let him off?”

Tom thinks this has to be a trap, but the ingrained need to defend Pete overrides everything else. “Maverick… Maverick isn’t actually stupid, sir, and we both know it. If he stayed, he knew he was safe to do so.”

That it’s true makes it all the more galling. There’s no fuel gauge on earth more accurate than Pete’s instinctive feel for his plane.

“Maybe, but his magic intuition sure as shit doesn’t justify ignoring a direct order to return to carrier when the other pair wasn’t under active fire. Back up was sixty seconds out. You were sixty seconds out, son.”

Also true, but knowing there’s virtually no risk of an enemy causing an international incident by firing unprovoked doesn’t mean much when you’re listening to your teammates engage in a game of aerial chicken. “A minute is a lifetime when it’s two on five, sir.”

“Yeah, and you’d know all about that one, but you also know that’s not why he’s actually in trouble here,” Stinger replies. “Staying sixty seconds was brave. The next five minutes were just foolish. Help got there, fully fueled. His wingman came back. He didn’t.”

That’s because at least one pilot on alpha team has a goddamned brain in his head, Tom allows himself to think snidely, then diplomatically says, “Four on five is still a disadvantage, sir.”

“Brave and reckless—an interesting combination in someone you trust with your life.”

It sounds like a statement, but the way Stinger says it makes it seem like a test. On any other day, Tom would try to parse out the implied question before answering. As it is, he just huffs and opts for honesty. “Tell me about it.”

Stinger smiles and nods, apparently satisfied, though Tom couldn’t for the life of him say why.

“So here’s what’s gonna happen,” he tells him. “From here on out, Maverick’s your wingman. Every hop, every patrol, every engagement—you two are together. No deviations. No exceptions.”

And that’s another unexpected departure from the way these conversations usually go. In Maverick's mind, getting to fly together won’t be a punishment. If anything, it’s a reward. “I…have to admit I’m not following your logic here, sir.”

“Kazansky, Mitchell is a problem,” he says bluntly. “He’s a good man—hell, believe it or not, I genuinely like the guy—but at the end of the day, he’s still a problem. Right now, he’s a valuable asset and the Navy is willing to overlook a lot of shit for the guy responsible for shooting down three fucking MiGs in an incident that would’ve started a war, but—” Stinger gestures expansively towards their jets as he blows out another ring of smoke. “—if Maverick keeps pulling crap like this, he’s gonna outlive his usefulness real quick. The Navy ain’t gonna overlook his bullshit forever, especially when his luck finally runs out and the kid makes a mistake.”

Tom nods stiffly. It’s not like Stinger’s saying anything Tom doesn’t already know. It’s also not like Tom hasn’t tried to convey this exact point to Pete a hundred times by now. “I don’t disagree with your assessment, sir, but I also don’t see how pairing us off is going to fix it.”

If it were that easy, Tom would fly with him until they’re both in the ground. He loves Pete, has for years, and intends to do so until he dies. There’s virtually nothing he wouldn’t do for the other man. Still, Tom’s hardly unaware of Pete’s faults. Pete’s as stubborn as he is skilled. It’s a miracle he hasn’t burned in yet.

When Tom stops to think about it, that fact absolutely terrifies him.

His commander looks at him like he’s being particularly thick headed, then says, “Call it a last resort, son.”

“That’s neither clarifying nor reassuring, sir.”

Stinger snorts, twin trails of smoke coming out his nose as he does. “Look—this is what doing each other a favor looks like, Kazansky. You want to keep your friend out of trouble. I want your friend to stop being trouble. Being that you’re the only person on this god forsaken boat who can manage to talk sense into him—and let’s neither of us pretend otherwise after that little display a minute ago—he’s officially your responsibility. Clear?”

Jesus christ, that’s not a responsibility—it’s a full-time ball and chain.

“I’ll do my best, sir,” Tom says instead.

Stinger claps him on the back. “You’re gonna need to do better than your best with that flea-brained excuse for a dipshit. Now—” Stinger glances at his watch. “Time’s up. Let’s see if he’s actually in my office.”

Tom doesn’t even try to restrain his snort. “Good luck with that, sir.”

“Son,” Stinger says gravely, “that’s my line now.”

And so Tom “Iceman” Kazansky is made Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s professional minder in addition to his personal one, an undertaking that probably merits sainthood whether Tom succeeds or not. For all Stinger seems to think he can keep the bastard in line, Tom knows the combined powers of heaven and earth couldn’t keep Pete’s ass out of trouble.

What a fucking joke, Tom thinks as he heads off in the direction of the showers. If he’s lucky, he’ll have time to get cleaned up before he has to collect Pete from Stinger’s office.

God, he hates this babysitting gig already.

—

Over the remainder of their seven month tour on the Enterprise, Tom comes to understand a few important things.

First, people want Maverick to succeed. Initially, Tom thinks this has more to do with Pete’s extraordinary aptitude in the cockpit than anything, but he soon realizes that’s not all that endears Maverick to people. Managing death-defying feats in a multi-million dollar aircraft isn’t enough to explain the sheer delight people take in helping him along, giving him more chances than his mad hatter act possibly deserves. Moreover, the stories he hears of Pete’s antics from before Tom joined the Enterprise indicate that this is a relatively new phenomena.

“Well, you know, it’s Maverick,” Merlin says one afternoon in the rec room. He waves his hand toward the piano where Pete’s methodically plucking at keys under Ron’s watchful eye, occasionally hitting the wrong note just to make Slider twitch. “He’s a dumbass cornball, but he’s our dumbass cornball.”

“You can say that again,” Tom mutters.

“Besides,” Sam continues, “he’s—well, he’s different now, you know? Used to be Mav against the world. But ever since Goose, it’s been Mav standing between the world and us. The guy can buzz as many towers as he wants—he’s a damn good friend these days.”

Tom nods. “He really is.”

“And,” Sam says brightly, “we’ve got you to reign him in now, ain’t that right, Wrangler?”

Tom flicks him in the nose with the end of his pen. “Never call me that again, Merlin.”

“Oh, we’re gonna be calling you that forever, Ice.”

Which brings Tom to his second realization: people trust him to keep Maverick out of trouble.

Well, the worst of it anyway. “You understand I’m not actually a miracle worker, right?”

“You talked him out of trying to do an ill-advised barrel roll at 20,000 feet yesterday,” Merlin points out. “Thanks for that by the way. Really appreciated your wrangling skills while I was trapped in the backseat.”

Tom drops his head against the back of the sofa with a quiet groan and closes his eyes in an effort to block out the world at large. In response, Sam pats him on the shoulder and laughs like the asshole he is.

Professionally, it started with Stinger, but eventually everyone started calling Iceman in when they found themselves with a Maverick-shaped problem on their hands. Now if there’s even a whiff of Mav getting up to trouble, their first response is to page him. It’s gotten to the point where the other guys are threatening to repaint his helmet with a new callsign.

Perhaps most upsetting is the knowledge that this new arrangement is actually working.

“It’s good to know I have my uses,” Tom mutters.

“We also just like you.”

“You like me because I give you chocolate, Wells.”

Sam fixes him with a peculiar look, frowning like he thinks Tom’s being a bit stupid. “I mean, yeah,” he says slowly, “but that’s not why everyone on the squadron would take a missile for you.” Tom stares at him. Sam sighs. “For your personality, you big dumb girl. We like you as a human being, jesus christ. Please tell me that isn’t news to you.”

It is actually, just a little. Tom knows he’s not a raging asshole, but the idea that most people on board enjoy him on a personal level is still a bit foreign. While he’s been respected his entire adult life, he’s hardly had a lot of friends—Pete, Carole, Slider, Cougar back in the day…

He realizes it’s only since he’s joined the Enterprise that that’s changed.

People genuinely like him—what a novel concept.

He’s saved from conjuring up some sort of reply by the cacophony of noise coming from the far corner of the room, so jarring and unexpected that his eardrums physically shiver. When he looks, Ron’s already swearing a blue streak in the face of Pete’s devious grin. Tom shakes his head fondly and sets his book aside, preparing to go run interference again.

“That’s part of it too,” Merlin says, and it halts Tom in his tracks.

“What?”

“You see shit in people others don’t, Kazansky, and it makes the rest of us see it too,” Sam says. It’s the sort of earnest praise that makes Tom uncomfortable for reasons he can’t quite explain. Sam seems to understand that, because he inclines his head in the direction of the concerto gone wrong and says, “Now please go save our ears before Kerner decides murdering Mitchell is more expedient than making him happy for you.”

“For me—”

“Please.”

Later, when he’s sliding into his too small bunk in quarters he shares with Merlin, Mav, and Slider, Tom replays that conversation and comes to yet another realization. Somewhere along the way, everyone realized how close he and Pete are, and so they extend courtesies to him on Tom’s behalf. It’s almost surreal, he thinks as he stares at Pete, already fast asleep in the bunk across from him, but it also explains a lot of things.

God, maybe they really should change his callsign to Wrangler.

Chapter Text

[December 1987]

When they dock in San Diego, Carole and Bradley are there to receive them both, camped out near the front of the crowd of eager relatives reuniting with their sailors. In the interest of sparing his hearing, he lets Pete go ahead of him when they get to the bottom of the gangplank, remaining a safe few yards behind during initial contact. There’s a great deal of shouting, then some hollering, then another round of shouting as Pete swings first Bradley and then Carole up in the air. 

After half a year away from them, he almost forgot how boisterous this family gets. He smiles indulgently as he watches Carole fuss over Pete. She’s alternating between swatting him in the arm and raining kisses on his cheeks. He suspects she chose today’s particular shade of fluorescent pink lipstick for the sole purpose of annoying her brother. 

A small hand fists itself in the fabric of his uniform pants, tugging insistently. Tom softens further at the serious face looking back at him. “Hello, little rooster. You’ve gotten bigger.”

Bradley breaks into a wide grin. “Up!”

“What do we say?”

“Please! ” He wraps his arms around Tom as high as he can get them, tiny hands clinging to his waist. “Up, Ice!”

Once Bradley’s situated with his head tucked in the crook of Tom’s neck—surprisingly calm for a boy of three and a half who’s in the middle of a raucous crowd—he looks back to see what Pete and Carole have gotten up to. 

They’re both watching him with particularly sappy expressions on their faces. 

“Can I help you two?” he asks dryly. 

“Yes actually,” Carole says, whipping out a camera with surprising speed. “Smile!”

Tom blinks away the sudden flash with a scowl, glad Bradley was wise enough to keep his face turned away. The kid deserves better than the ill-behaved children he’s unfortunate enough to call family.

“God, your face!” Pete laughs so hard he has to clutch his ribs, looking dangerously close to straining something. In between snickers, he tells Carole, “Make sure I get a copy of that, will you?”

“Two copies if it’s very bad,” she promises.

“Bradley,” Tom says to the boy clinging to his neck. “Would you like to run away to Alaska with me?”

Brown eyes turn to meet his, mouth pursed in a contemplative frown Ice halfway suspects Bradley learned from him. “Yes please,” he says, and nods.

“Traitor!” Pete yells. 

—

Pulling up to their house that evening is almost surreal. 

It’s early December and for all that San Diego never looks anything like a winter wonderland, the neighborhood is decked out in enough Christmas lights to blind someone. He thinks Carole’s put up more than the entire rest of the block combined, twining them around the front porch rails, around every window, and along the gutters on all sides of the house. She’s even strung them around her hanging flower baskets. Through the living room window, he spies the outline of a brightly lit Christmas tree.

“I felt like being festive this year,” she tells him with a wink when she catches him taking it all in as they unpack the car.

“I like it,” he tells her, and he means it. Neither she nor Pete had been in any mood for festivities last year, not on their first Christmas without Goose. Hell, even Tom hadn’t been, not when he’d been laid up for two months at that point. The only reason they’d bothered at all was for Bradley’s sake. “It looks great.”

She beams at him as she goes to scoop Bradley up from the backseat where he’d fallen asleep.

“Welcome home, boys,” she tells them both, grinning as she leads them up the path to the front door.

Tom looks over at Pete and smiles at him. “It’s good to be back,” he says.

—

After dinner, which is loud, and hours of catching up, which are louder, and putting Bradley to bed—an activity that Pete firmly believes requires animated retellings of their few toddler-appropriate mission stories, complete with model airplanes to demonstrate what went on—they make it back to their bedroom.

Theirs. 

Lord, the last time he came home with Pete, he was a guest on med leave who needed looking after. They’d been caught in the nebulous in-between of a something more that had no clear path forward after they went their separate ways following the rescue mission and something possible after Pete offered him a place to stay, ex-lovers who suddenly had another chance.

“Feels different, huh?” Pete asks, but it definitely sounds more like a statement. He shuts the door behind them and reaches down to lace their fingers together, pressing himself firmly against Tom as he leans up to kiss him. Tom hums his agreement and lets his hands slip under the hem of Pete’s shirt, pulling him in closer. 

“Feels like the first time,” he says when they break apart, foreheads resting against each other, breathing the same air. 

Pete laughs softly and tightens his hold on Tom’s waist. “Pretty sure you were too drugged up to feel anything the first time you slept in here, Ice.”

“No,” he says. “The first time I came to your apartment in Baltimore. It was around this time of year too.”

“Almost our anniversary by that count.”

Tom reaches out to brush a strand of hair off Pete’s face, hand ghosting across the shell of his ear and down the column of his throat before he cups the back of his neck, thumb rubbing lightly along his pulse point in steady circles. “Six years,” he says reverently. “I’ve loved you six years.”

A comfortable silence unfolds in the space between breaths as they hold each other.

“Yeah, ok,” Pete eventually says as he threads his fingers through Tom’s belt loops and starts walking them backwards, “if you’re gonna say things like that, then I’m really gonna need you to take me to bed.”

“Lead the way, Maverick.”

—

Once their month long leave ends, Tom fully expects he’ll spend the next nine months of his shore time teaching at an air station. 

It’s always the same cycle—three months of prep in home port for deployment, half a year of sea duty on the carrier, then nine months of teaching tactics shore-side at whichever installation is shortest on staff. Where he ends up depends entirely on the needs of the Navy, a phrase he loathes for all that he knew what he was signing up for. Knowing his luck, he’ll end up back in Georgia while Pete remains here in San Diego between special op stints in the Gulf. He almost wishes he hadn’t used up his teaching slot at Top Gun while he was on medical leave, but it was that or Slider was getting permanently reassigned to a pilot out in Oceana and he doesn’t have it in himself to truly regret that decision.

Tom’s catching up on his personal reading in the recliner when the phone rings. He scrambles to grab it without dislodging Bradley from his spot in his lap, swearing softly when he starts to stir from his nap on the second ring. 

“Go back to sleep, little rooster,” he murmurs, carding a hand through the boy’s hair to settle him as he brings the phone to his ear.

“Babysitting Goose’s kid again, Ice?” 

“A fair trade for the exceptionally cheap rent. Free is a very good price.”

Slider snorts down the line. “Just admit you don’t wanna bother with finding a place when you can crash in their guestroom, Kazansky. I won’t even blame you—I remember Bradshaw waxing poetic about his wife’s cooking and you burn water.”

“Did you call for a reason besides heckling me, Kerner?” 

The silence stretches just long enough that Tom thinks the call disconnected. 

Slider breathes out heavily. “Ok, so don’t get mad…”

“Funny, that’s usually Maverick’s line.” 

“I ran into Viper on post today.”

Tom sits up a bit straighter. “Did you now?”

“And I maybe mentioned that we haven’t gotten our shore assignments yet—”

“Ron,” he interrupts, already feeling the start of a headache developing, “Please tell me you didn’t ask him to pull strings for us.”

There’s a reason the reward for graduating first in class is a guaranteed slot at Top Gun: everyone wants to teach there. 

It’s the sweetheart deal to end all sweetheart deals. Where most graduates go back to their squadrons or other installations to pass on the watered down version of the techniques taught in Miramar to their colleagues who weren’t fortunate enough to go, Top Gun instructors get to spend their days flying through maneuvers that would otherwise get them court martialed. Getting assigned a permanent position there is like striking gold, a way to keep flying regularly past the rank of lieutenant and an unspoken promise that an aviator’s career is headed towards a flag promotion someday. Tom had originally planned to hang onto his slot until his next promotion, a way to pick his desk job, stay in the air longer, and advance his career all rolled into one. He'd hoped for at least a year to prove himself there, to try his odds at securing a longer term position, especially after Pete had gotten a semi-permanent shore assignment in San Diego for any black ops he was called to run between sea deployments.

Then Ice got injured and Slider was told he was being reassigned to a new pilot back in Oceana, 2800 miles away, and Tom threw his original plan straight in the trash. 

“You gave up your slot for me during a time you weren’t even able to fly, Ice. I've got a fiancée because of you.”

“That doesn’t mean you owe me, Ron. I chose to do that. I’d do it again. I know how much it meant to you to finally be stationed near your family.”

“And yet you wonder why I’d take an opportunity to do the same for you,” Slider mutters. “You really are such a piece of work, Kazansky.”

“That’s not how you say thank you to someone, Ronald."

“And you don’t call a guy Ronald when he just got your asses two tickets back to Top Gun.”

Tom’s hand spasms around the phone. “No.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I’m very convincing.”

“No, you’re not!”

“Dick!” Kerner says, but he’s laughing too hard for Tom to be offended, especially when he’s dropped this kind of gift in Tom’s lap. “Maybe I should call Mitchell up and ask him to join me instead, hey? Viper might miss him by now. Oh wait, no, you live with him. Just pass him the phone, will you asshole?”

“He’s not home,” Tom replies snidely. 

“Oh thank god, I don’t actually wanna fly with that crazy motherfucker of yours. Leave that bastard to the special ops jobs we’re not supposed to know he goes on.”

They lapse into a comfortable silence. Tom’s smiling at nothing in particular, then down at the boy sprawled sideways across his lap. Bradley’s snoring softly, a mess of limbs and movement, totally unlike his waking self. He runs his free hand along Bradley’s back as the knowledge he’ll get to stick around a bit longer slowly settles in. 

It’s a nice thought. 

“How’d you manage this one, Slider?”

“Honestly, Ice? I’m just lucky to ride in on your coat tails,” Ron says, laughing. “Viper looked about ready to cry when I told him you’d be up for it. After two months of Mav’s madness and with your reputation for corralling his ass, you’re the ideal candidate for teaching a collective of—and I’m quoting Viper here—hotshot idiot flyboys with an attitude problem.”

“He didn't say that.”

Slider snickers. “He really did. Anyway—January 4th. Mark your calendar.”

“I will,” he says, more than a touch awed. “Thank you, Slider. Really.”

“Anytime, Ice. Anytime.”

Tom sets the phone back in its cradle and leans back in the recliner with a delighted chuckle. When he looks down again, he finds Bradley staring up at him with drowsy eyes, blinking away sleep and struggling to sit up. 

“Who’s’at?” he manages around a jaw cracking yawn, clamoring up to his preferred perch on Tom’s chest. 

“A good friend,” he replies, tucking the child he’s become so absurdly fond of under his arm. 

Tom never much cared for children before Bradley. When he first met Pete’s godson, he was drugged to the gills and terrified of upsetting the tiny chatterbox who’d glommed onto him. His own father hadn’t made for the best example, absent most of the time and distantly uninterested the rest, so Tom had no idea how to respond. He knew Pete would never forgive him if he upset his kid though, so he soldiered on, listening raptly to the tiny boy’s many, many opinions on dinosaurs while fresh off surgery and high on painkillers.

It worked out well in the end. Bradley adored being conversed with like a miniature adult.

“He doesn’t usually take to people like that,” Pete had told him the next day, genuinely flabbergasted. “He refuses to talk to most people at all actually.”

“Then they’re talking to him wrong,” Tom had replied. 

It was wisdom he followed to this day.

“Little rooster,” he says seriously. Bradley looks up at him curiously. “I’m going to be staying in San Diego.”

Tom didn’t know Bradley’s eyes could go that wide.

When Pete and Carole get home from their errands, arms loaded down with enough groceries to feed a small army, they both nearly have a heart attack. Tom’s about ready to have one himself, so he doesn’t hold it against either of them when they dump the bags in a pile at the door, spilling oranges and soup cans across the entryway in their rush to get to the living room. He’s never heard Bradley shriek like this either and he’s been listening to it for a solid twenty minutes.

—

“You’re staying,” Pete whispers, sprawled across his chest in their bed hours later. 

Pete leans up to kiss him soundly for what has to be the hundredth time that night, breaking away long enough to laugh in pure delight. Tom curls a hand around the back of his neck and drags him back down, pressing their mouths together firmly, hands running over every part of him he can reach for the sheer joy of it.

“Holy shit, you’re staying,” Pete says when they finally, finally break for air again. 

“Can’t get rid of me that easily, Mitchell.”

“Wouldn’t want to, sweetheart.”

A whole year to fall asleep together, he thinks, tightening his arms around Pete further. He can feel Pete’s wide grin in the crook of his neck, his soft exhales, the way he holds onto Tom in return.

“God,” Pete says, full of wonder. “God, did you ever think we’d get back to this, Ice? After all our fucking shit, if you’d told me two years ago—hell, even one year ago…” 

“I wouldn’t have dared to believe you,” he finishes softly.

Life is good.

—

In a shocking turn of events, life remains good. 

For most of the next year, Tom teaches at Top Gun with Slider. He goes to the office five mornings a week, spends the day demolishing the egos of another batch of young hotshots in an effort to improve them, returns home to a hot meal with his family in the evening, and, most nights, falls asleep next to Pete. 

Most aviators dread their shore side teaching assignments, but Iceman thrives in his.

Pete, meanwhile, has officially been assigned to a year long special training detachment with the occasional short deployment to “fill-in” for squadrons that need additional support. It’s the thinnest veil of a cover the Department of Defense could’ve possibly given him for his actual job running as-needed black ops, but it keeps him in San Diego.

It doesn't keep him out of trouble.

“Jesus,” Viper says after he puts the phone down one afternoon in early February. Tom looks up from his desk in their shared office with a raised brow. “I think Johnson might actually murder Maverick one of these days. He’s gone from demanding his butt to threatening to mount it on a pike as a warning.”

“Buzzed the tower again, did he?” Tom asks, idly reaching for his mug. Maverick probably hasn’t done that, but only because he’s dedicated himself to finding new and inventive ways to cause trouble in the month since they got back to Miramar. It’s become something of a running joke, seeing how long he’ll last before he does finally indulge in his old standby trick.

“No, this time he might’ve bent the frame of an F-18.”

Tom almost chokes on his coffee. “How?” 

“Prepping for that assignment we’re not supposed to know about. Something, something, G-force training.” Viper sighs and draws a hand over his chin as he stares out the window, pensive. “Kid gets bored too easily.”

“Only when he’s left unattended,” Tom mutters, wiping his desk clean of the stray droplets he hadn't managed to keep in his mouth at Viper's announcement. “He’s not a tenth this bad when he’s flying with a team regularly.”

It’s true too. For all that Maverick has a reputation as a lone ranger type, it was virtually unheard of for him to leave his wingman even before Goose died. He’s always at the front of the pack, the first to dive headlong into danger with vexingly creative solutions to problems, but having a team to consider reigns in the worst of his impulses to push it.

“Well, until he’s back on a carrier, that’s not gonna happen very often,” Viper replies. “It’s a shame the DoD wants him flying more than they want him teaching squadrons. If he doesn’t settle down, the Navy is gonna throw him out on his ass.”

Tom’s mouth tips down in a contemplative frown. 

“Well, Kazansky?” Viper inquires. 

“Sir?”

“Don’t think I don’t know about your reputation, Wrangler.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Tom mutters as he drops his head in hand. 

Viper shrugs casually, an almost mischievous grin tugging at the corner of his mouth for a moment, then turns serious again. “I went to bat for him once, you know.” 

“His OCS contract, yeah. And more than the once, if I recall correctly.”

“I don’t want to be proven wrong, Ice. If you’ve got any ideas on how to reign in our idiot flyboy before the air boss disappears him, I’m listening.”

Tom juggles his pen across his knuckles for a moment before a thought occurs to him. “Actually…”

—

Pete flies four separate black ops that year. In between missions, he keeps up his training at NAS Miramar, either prepping for his next assignment or debriefing from the one he just came off of. It’s all very regular with one minor exception: at least once per Top Gun class, Maverick acts as an unanticipated bogey whose sole purpose is scaring the everloving daylights out of the “hotshot idiot flyboys with an attitude problem” Viper calls their students. 

“I never should’ve gotten him wings,” Viper mutters after the first cohort has spent a day with Maverick gleefully blasting them out of the sky alongside Jester and Ice.

It works though—incredibly well even. Admiral Johnson goes so far as to personally thank Tom for solving his Maverick-problem, joking for the first time in Tom’s memory, “I owe you one, Kazansky.”

By the time the third class shows up for training, everyone is aware that Maverick is going to pop up like a malevolent jack-in-the-box at some point. Tom suspects it must be quite the blow to their egos when they still can’t manage to out-fly him in spite of the forewarning. Nothing makes the kids pay attention in tactics lectures quite like being freshly humiliated. When Mav misses the fourth class on an extra long deployment, the students spend their entire rotation waiting for him to show up and embarrass them, jumping at every radar blip on every hop, as vigilant as a stealth mission over enemy territory. 

“I’m keeping you, Lieutenant,” Viper tells him after the cohort graduates. It’s Ice's last class before he returns to his squadron for carrier deployment preparations. “Mark my words—your three year shore tour is mine.”

“I’d love to stay, sir.” 

—

“Aw! They missed me,” Pete coos when he gets home late the following night, immediately demanding stories of Tom's latest batch of students. 

“Like a bad rash,” Tom replies as he forces Pete to sit on the edge of their bed while he helps him out of his uniform. He’s bruised all to hell when Tom finally gets him out of it, a crisscross mash of vivid purple lines all across the front of his chest that are starkly visible even in the low light of their bedroom. “Did your harness try to take a bite out of you?”

“Abrupt turn at high velocity,” he replies, waving Tom off even as he winces. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I worry about you constantly, you moron.”

Pete leans up to kiss him softly. “Love you too, sweetheart.”

“God, you’re nothing but trouble,” Tom mutters as he helps him under the covers.

—

[July 1989]

Three days before they’re slated to return to San Diego from their six month sea tour, Pete passes him the phone during his weekly call with Carole, grumbling about her demands to “talk to my parent.”

“Ok,” she says, breathless with excitement even over the tinny satellite connection, “So you know the house on the next street over with the giant hedges out front? It’s up for sale.”

“Tired of me crashing in your spare room, are you?” he asks her wryly, absently dodging Pete’s attempts to lean close enough to listen in on the conversation now that Tom’s clued him in on what Carole’s talking about. Pete’s about as subtle as a brick and the rec room is far from empty. Tom doesn’t need to explain why Pete’s asking after “their” new house. “I suppose asking you to put me up for three more years of shore duty would be pushing my luck.”

“Oh, I’d keep you around forever,” she tells him, “but I need somewhere to send Mav to when he’s in timeout.”

Tom snorts. “So all the time?”

Pete tries to grab the phone back from him, muttering threats to disown them both if they don’t stop shit-talking him even though he can’t possibly have heard what she said. Tom rolls his eyes and swats him away, Carole’s delighted laughter in his ear.

“Only most of the time,” she says brightly, “and Bradley will like it if you stay close.”

He smiles to himself at that. “Did little rooster like his birthday present?”

“The best dinosaurs are the ones that fly,” she informs him very seriously. Tom grins. It’s good to know Bradley’s still firm in his (entirely correct) opinion. “I’ve been subjected to discussions on pterodactyls nonstop for the last week. He even sleeps with it.” 

“I’m glad,” he says. “I half expected him to find it the day after we left.”

He’d hidden the toy away in the back of his closet before he went on deployment, right beside the model F-14 plushie Pete spent weeks hunting down. Both of them had been more than a bit concerned Bradley would find them early anyway. He’d gotten his relentless curiosity from Carole, his troublemaking from Nick and Pete, and his ability to be quiet about it from Tom—and god if that wasn't a terrifying combination.

It’s actually part of the reason he and Pete have agreed to look for a new place when they get back to San Diego. Bradley’s getting to the age where he’s going to notice how unusual it is that his godfather and honorary uncle share a bedroom, and neither of them are in any way prepared to explain the need for secrecy to a child. Now that they both have long term orders in Miramar, it’s time they get a home of their own.

“Thank you for keeping an eye out on places for me, Carole. I’ll look at it as soon as we hit land,” he tells her.

Pete beams at him as he hangs up the phone, practically bouncing on his heels. “Well—which house is it?”

—

Carole was right, as she usually is. Tom does love the house and he ends up buying it the same week they get to San Diego. The two story, three bedroom home is extravagant for his needs, but it leaves plenty of space if either Bradley and Carole or his sister Sarah should stay the night, and he’s always secretly wanted a study with built-in bookshelves.

Legally speaking, it’s his and his alone. As far as the Navy is concerned, Pete’s permanent residence is one street over in a home he, his sister, and her son share. Pragmatically speaking, Tom will never step foot inside either the garage or the workshop on the back lawn of his own property. The day after they move in, Pete’s already claimed both for his bikes and tools respectively, taking out—or, perhaps more accurately, exploding—his collection of spare parts and toys across every available surface before they can even finish unpacking the kitchen.

“Pete, put down the wrench and get back to the boxes.”

“One sec!” he shouts back from the garage. Tom shakes his head and continues unpacking the living room alone, completely unsurprised when Pete shows up thirty-two minutes later and entirely unaware of the passage of time. “What’s up?”

He gestures pointedly at the boxes surrounding him. 

Pete ruffles his hair with a rueful grin. There’s a streak of dirt across the bridge of his nose that Tom’s trying very hard not to find endearing and the stretch of his shirt across his chest is a temptation unto itself. “Sorry, I got distracted.”

“I’m used to it. Now go wash your hands and help me.”

He shoots him a jaunty salute and heads for the kitchen. “Yes, mother.”

“You’re sleeping on the floor tonight,” Tom calls after him.

“Not when you’re staring at my ass like that, Kazansky!”

Chapter Text

[May 1996]

Things just fall into place after that. 

He teaches at Top Gun between sea rotations until Viper makes his position permanent after Jester accepts a job elsewhere. Tom’s promoted to lieutenant commander and then full commander, jumping back and forth between Top Gun and overseeing joint command operations across the state of California.

Pete dances his way between squadrons, collecting patches from every team he flies with to hang on the workshop wall in a silent nod to his illustrious but classified career. Sometimes he’s gone a few days, sometimes he’s gone a few months. Once, it’s half a year. 

That time, Tom admits that he’s gotten spoiled—he doesn’t care for Pete being away so long.

Also, much to his eternal irritation, the wrangler thing seems to have stuck. Hardly a deployment goes by that he doesn’t get a call from someone annoyed by Pete’s utter irreverence, expecting Tom to either play therapist as they complain, smooth things over with the higher ups, or both. Pete’s gotten a lot better since he broke thirty—knows exactly how to toe the line now—but that just means he’s started using his dumbass cornball routine as a cover to get away with shit when he thinks a higher up is being unreasonably stubborn. How people fall for his immature child act every damned time is beyond Tom. One would think officer’s entrusted with the lives of hundreds and thousands of men would be more intelligent than that.

“Not everyone has known Maverick as long as you have, Kazansky,” Viper tells him when he gets off the phone with the disgruntled commander in charge of Pete’s latest deployment. Apparently, after three days of Pete saying the prescribed flight path was wildly inefficient and unnecessarily risky, he was somehow surprised when Pete’s comm system “glitched out” on takeoff and he flew the recon mission his own way. Successfully, of course. 

“Still,” Tom mutters.

“Well, not to blow smoke up your ass, but you’re smarter than the rest of the brass on post combined, Ice.”

“Yourself included, sir?” Tom asks wryly, leaning back in his office chair to shoot Mike a conspiratorial look.

“Now I wouldn’t go that far, kid.” 

They share a good laugh over that. 

Tom’s just returning to his paperwork when Viper sees fit to drop a bomb on him. “I’m retiring in two months.”

He snaps his head up to look at Mike. “You’re what?”

“Well, I figure the place is in good hands and my wife has been dropping hints about wanting to travel, so…” Viper smiles. “It’s time.”

“You’re…leaving it to me,” he says slowly.

“Sure am. Of course, if you ever need anything at all, Kazansky, you call me. Got it?”

“Of course, sir,” Tom answers, still stunned. He’s wanted this position for years, but Viper’s played his cards so close to his chest that Tom still never saw it coming. 

“Not that I expect you to need me, of course,” Viper continues offhandedly. “Dunno if you’ve noticed or not, but you’ve got the unwavering devotion of every kid who’s ever come through this program and the respect of half the flag staff on top of it. You’re going places, son, no question about it.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“That said,” Viper says with one of his rare private grins, “I’m going to give you the pleasure of a send off favor. Whatever you want, if I can make it happen, it’s yours.”

Tom admits to being floored in that moment. A captain of Viper’s caliber has more sway than most understand. He’s held command of Top Gun for nearly fifteen years, delaying a well-deserved promotion to the flag staff twice to keep the job merely by asking for it.

“And if I may make a suggestion?” His eyes are glittering. “We don’t normally let civilian kids go up in planes, Iceman, and I know a friend of ours who’s been trying very hard to get approval for that. Hell, I might even give you that one for free.”

Tom barks out a laugh, almost chokes on it for how hard it forces its way out of his throat, damned near in tears by the time he gets himself back under control. Whatever tension he’d been feeling before, that snaps him right out of it. 

“Oh fuck,” he says, still chuckling.

“Something funny, Commander?” 

“You think Carole Bradshaw is going to let Maverick take her boy up in a plane, Mike? Even you don’t have that kind of sway.”

Mike looks momentarily offended. “He won’t hurt the kid, Tom.”

“Jesus, no!” Tom says, and now he’s the one who’s a little offended. “I mean that if we let him up there, he’d never land again.”

Mike snorts. “Ok, that’s a legitimate concern.”

“Rooster’s birthday is coming up next month though…”

Viper smiles. “I’ll start getting the paperwork together.”

“I’ll talk to Carole.”

—

At nearly twelve years old, Bradley Bradshaw has firmly grown from a little rooster to Rooster altogether. Nick had been spot on when he bestowed the nickname on his son. He’s almost as tall as Pete now—a fact that rankles Mav endlessly—fiercely territorial over his loved ones, and still wakes up at the crack of dawn every morning even as he closes in on his teenage years. 

He looks more like Goose by the day, Tom thinks as he sits next to Carole on the bleachers watching their kid’s baseball game.

He leans forwards, hands clasped between his knees as he works out how to broach the subject.

“Spit it out, Tom,” Carole says. Her sixth sense for her boys' nonsense has expanded to include him over the years, for all that it’s rare he gets up to any.

“Viper is retiring.”

“You already told me that.”

“He offered to let Mav take Bradley up.” Tom thinks Carole stops breathing for a moment, gone impossibly still beside him. If the wind weren’t rustling her curls, she could pass for a statue. It’s the exact reaction Tom expected and the precise reason he asked her first. “If you say no, I’ll make sure they don’t find out. I understand if you hate the idea.”

“I hate the idea completely,” she agrees immediately. “It scares the hell out of me.” 

Tom nods his acceptance and looks back out at the field. Bradley’s up to bat, bases loaded. With any luck, he’s about to bring one home for the team. Carole sighs loudly, wetly, lips pursed tightly together. Tom wraps an arm around her as the pitch goes out.

“But I won’t say no. I won’t keep him from what he loves.”

Later, Tom will remember the sound of his kid’s bat knocking the ball clean past the outfield as Carole smiles at him, watery but firm, and rests her head against his shoulder.

“I never want him in a plane,” she whispers, “but our boy comes from a family that flies and I can’t keep him safe on the ground forever. Take him up, Tom. I know you two will take care of him.”

—

When the final clearance comes through two weeks before Bradley’s birthday, Tom’s not sure which of them is more excited.

“Yes!” Rooster crows, nearly knocking his chair over in his rush to get up from the dinner table. “Oh my god, thank you, Pops!”

“You managed it?!” Mav all but shouts. “How?”

“Oh, you know.” Tom shares a private smile with Carole. She winks back at him, putting on a brave front for all that she’s got his hand clasped in a death grip under the table. “Personal networking.”

“How many favors did you burn for this, Ice?” Pete asks, caught somewhere between astonished and thrilled. His hands are flitting madly at his sides like he can’t quite decide what to do with them. 

Tom shrugs. “Just the one.”

Also, six hours worth of paperwork, two lunches with the air boss, and a genuinely exasperating level of hand holding as he walked the ground crew through how they could safely allow a twelve year old up in a jet. 

It was all worth it for the way Bradley and Pete are now clinging to each other’s shoulders and dancing around the kitchen, even though their matching grins of delight promise this flight will involve no fewer than three headaches for Ice. He’s sure Pete will pull out at least a few daring maneuvers, if only to make their boy whoop with laughter, and he’ll probably buzz the tower twice, but Ice can always pull a few strings to smooth things over afterwards.

—

An emergency deployment to Kuwait derails the entire production the morning before Bradley’s twelfth birthday.

“I’m so sorry, kid,” Pete tells him over the phone, throwing his go-bag over his shoulder as he hurries to leave. Tom runs a hand across the small of Pete’s back, the other reaching up to finish zipping the duffle he’d left half-open in his haste. “As soon as I get back. I promise.”

Tom can just make out Bradley’s quiet, “It’s ok, Mav. I can wait.”

Bradley always does his best to conceal his disappointment—his concern—when Pete’s called away unexpectedly. He once admitted to Tom that he hates how guilty his godfather looks whenever Bradley can’t keep a handle on it. The kid’s more understanding than most his age—more understanding than any kid should have to be, frankly—about what having a parent in the service means. Unfortunately, in the early hours of June 26th, Bradley’s not hiding it as well as he usually does. 

“Be safe,” Bradley tells him, and the open worry in his voice leaves Pete looking gutted even before he says, “Love you, dad.”

Bradley only calls him that when he's truly upset.

“Love you too, kiddo,” Pete manages before hanging up the phone. He drops his head back against Tom’s shoulder, inhaling sharply. “Fuck, I hate this job sometimes.”

Tom slips an arm around his waist and squeezes him twice, a too-brief moment of comfort all he can really provide. “If all goes well, you'll be home in a week. I’ll make sure the offer stays open until then.”

“Thanks, Tom.” Pete smiles weakly. “Make sure he still gets his present, ok?”

“Of course.”

“And stay out of trouble while I’m gone.”

“That’s my line, menace," Tom tells him softly.

With obvious effort, Maverick pastes on a winning grin, sends him a wink, and saunters off to the garage with a flippant wave. “See you in July, honey.”

—

The real kicker of it all is they had the whole thing planned out. 

Carole put together an early birthday party for Bradley and his friends the weekend prior, complete with a plane-shaped cake she spent hours painstakingly recreating off of Rooster’s favorite F-18 model. Tom managed to secure permission to send Pete and Bradley up in his teaching jet, an A-4 Skyhawk he and Maverick were both well versed in. Then, of course, there was the handmade present portion of their program that had taken the combined efforts of Tom, Pete, and Carole to finally get right.

Everything was set for a late afternoon flight on the 27th, Maverick finally able to make good on a years long promise to his godson in spectacular fashion.

“I’ll take you on a private tour of Top Gun this afternoon, little rooster,” Tom promises Bradley when he picks him up in the morning. Carole has to work all day and neither of them want to leave him home alone on his birthday. 

“Thanks, Pops,” he replies, then scrunches his nose. “And I’m not little anymore. I’m practically taller than Mav.”

“A fact which delights us all, I assure you.”

Bradley shoots him an amused look. “Including Mav?”

“Well…”

They both laugh at that and keep laughing most of the morning. Top Gun is between cohorts of students for the next two weeks, too close to the 4th of July to bother starting a new class now, and that means Iceman has plenty of time to entertain his kid. The promised tour goes well. The present goes over better. 

“Holy shit,” he breathes when he opens the box.

“Language,” Tom says automatically, but the effect is somewhat lost with the way he’s grinning. 

“Oh my god,” Bradley says, scattering tissue paper across his lap and onto the floor as he tears the helmet out of its box. “Oh my god. Is this real?”

“What do you take us for? Amateurs?” 

It had cost a pretty penny and the paint job had taken days, but Bradley Bradshaw was holding a near-perfect replica of Goose’s helmet in his hands. The only difference was the “Rooster” emblazoned across the forehead and the extra padding they’d needed to make it fit the boy’s head. Fittings, Tom came to realize, were much easier when you could use a person’s actual skull instead of their baseball helmet.

“You’ll need it to go up next week,” he tells him quietly.

Bradley is a flail of limbs when he gets up, shoving the helmet on with one hand and launching himself at Tom with the rest, a flurry of tissue paper fluttering in his wake. Tom finds himself being crushed half to death under the force of his hug, the helmet formally declaring Bradley to be Rooster jammed tightly under his chin. 

Tom squeezes him back. “Want to go watch the jets?”

“Yeah!”

—

In retrospect, Tom thinks taking Bradley out to watch the jets was a poor choice.

Oh, don’t get him wrong, Bradley is as delighted to see them take off and land between training hops as Ice had hoped. His enthusiastic pointing and waving has the entire ground crew in love with him despite their initial hesitance at the prospect of having a child in their midst. That he listens to their explanations on air traffic control planning so carefully probably doesn’t hurt either, his unbridled curiosity for all things flight, their work included, undeniably endearing.

No, the mistake was that now Tom gets to see the longing look on Bradley’s face as he watches every takeoff. 

“You know, sir,” Hondo tells him, leaning in close to his ear, “The range is technically still clear after 1600. Just enough time left to suit up for pre-flight.”

“Maverick would kill me,” he replies, as if he hasn’t been thinking the same thing for the last thirty minutes. 

Hondo gives him an unimpressed look. “Only if he finds out.”

And Tom considers it. As much as this had been a favor to Pete, it was primarily a gift for Bradley—one he was meant to receive on his birthday.

“My crew can keep a secret, sir, and I know you can."

“He’ll know the second he finds out the flight was already redeemed.”

“Not if I quietly approve a second one,” Viper chimes in from behind them, hands casually shoved in his pockets as he raises his eyebrows at Ice. “You know the best part about retiring, Iceman? You’re finally forced to cash in on all your outstanding favors.”

Tom looks to where Bradley’s raptly watching the ground crew direct traffic flow in preparation for the second-to-last scheduled takeoff of the day. "Make sure he gets his present," Pete had said as he left. The helmet, not the flight they'd looked forward to going on together, Tom knew—but with two flights on offer...

“Fuck it. He’ll fit in Maverick’s spare flight suit.”

—

“Holy shit!” and “oh my god” and “that was amazing” and “thank you, Pops” have been falling out of Bradley’s mouth for the last ten minutes in an endless stream. Tom’s not actually sure the kid’s taken a break to breathe.

“My pleasure.” He grins and taps Bradley’s helmet. “Rooster.”

Bradley beams at him, a full megawatt smile that’s in danger of splitting his face wide open, eyes shaded behind his borrowed aviators. His hair is sweat-slicked and curling riotously around his ears, matted down on top, and the undershirt peeking out from beneath Mav’s borrowed flight suit is absolutely soaked. His helmet is dangling from his fingertips, bright red and yellow and black, swinging in time with his steps as they head back to the hangar an hour later.

He looks like Goose.

He looks like an aviator.

Iceman has never been so proud. 

“Oh, and what did we agree on again, Rooster?”

“We do not tell mom or Mav!”

“That’s my boy,” Tom says, clapping him on the back. “And what do we do when he gets back?”

“Absolutely nothing,” he says dutifully, “or I won’t get to go up twice.”

“Excellent.”

Carole figures it out immediately, which was honestly to be expected, but at least he manages to get away with it in Pete’s case. He’s still none the wiser when he returns home five days later.

—

Tom slams the door to his office behind him with enough force to rattle the glass. 

“You stole an F-18?!” 

“No,” Mav replies slowly, calmly, sprawled out in Ice’s office chair with a cat that got the cream expression that has Tom seeing red. “I appropriated it for the purposes of our flight. Stealing implies—” 

“I don’t care what stealing implies, you absolute—”

“Also,” he continues undeterred, safely out of strangling range behind Tom’s desk, “Technically, it’s my jet. That’s why my name’s on it. I fly it on the regular. Can’t say the same about your A-4. It was a practical safety consideration.”

“Oh, yes, because that was definitely what you were thinking when you told range, ‘oh, is this the wrong plane? Too late to trade jets now,’ and then took off anyway.” 

From his seat in the guest chair on the far wall, Bradley snorts. 

Tom reels on him. “And you!”

Bradley throws his hands up, lanky frame hunched up defensively. “I didn’t do anything!” 

“You got in the plane with him!”

“He said it was ok!”

Tom lets out a long, deep breath and counts slowly down from ten, pinching the bridge of his nose as he does. It does absolutely nothing to calm him. If anything, it gives him more time to consider how, precisely, he intends to murder his partner.

“Bradley Peter Bradshaw,” Tom says quietly. “Wait in the hall.”

A part of him relishes the tandem gulps that follow that proclamation. 

A large part.

Actually, all of him relishes it. It’s the only bright spot he’s found since he stepped out of his meeting and into this clusterfuck.

“Now Tom,” Pete says carefully, hands up as he mirrors Bradley’s earlier position as soon as they’re alone. “You wouldn’t kill a guy on his birthday, would you?”

“Lieutenant Commander Mitchell,” he says, frigid, “I am sending you back to Kuwait.”

“You—” Pete stares at him blankly. “You can’t actually do that.”

“Oh, I assure you—” Tom makes sure his smile is all teeth. “—I can make it happen.”

“Come on, Ice—”

“And with any luck,” Tom continues, still glaring, “I’ll have managed to smooth over this utter shitshow by the time I see fit to bring you home.”

“The flight plan was cleared. We had permission.”

“Not for the F-18, you didn’t.”

Pete points an accusing finger at him, managing to sound the slightest bit hurt when he says, “You took him up in the A-4 without me.”

“As a prearranged birthday present,” Tom snarls.

“That you expected me not to find out about!” He throws his hands up, exasperated. “Is it so bad I wanted to take him on his first flight in an F-18 when I couldn’t take him on his first flight entirely?”

“You…” Tom sighs heavily and slumps into the visitor’s chair in front of his desk, rubbing his temples. “You are such an emotionally manipulative shit sometimes,” he finishes, but all the heat has gone out of it. Stolen jet aside, Pete does, unfortunately, have a point.

Pete shoots him a weak smile. “At least I’m cute, right?”

Tom drops his head back and stares at the ceiling in dismay. Sometimes, he truly wonders why he keeps this impulsive idiot of his. “You do have that going for you.”

They sit in relative silence for a long moment, then Pete says, “Please don’t send me back to Kuwait. I hate it there.”

“That’s why it’s a good threat,” Tom replies dryly.

“It is actually my birthday, Tom,” Pete says cajolingly. “Please.”

It’ll take an act of god—or at least a lunch with the air boss where he’s forced to feign interest in golf to get a paperwork revision approval—but he suspects he can make it work without deporting him. Of course, smoothing things over is always easier when Maverick is out of sight since Pete tends to make things worse in his efforts to explain himself, but… 

“If you promise to look and sound appropriately apologetic,” he says. Pete immediately starts to grin. “My version of appropriately apologetic,” he clarifies, and benevolently allows Pete’s ensuing eye roll to slide.

“Deal.” Pete agrees easily.  

“And I’m sending your birthday present back.”

“Not the bike!”

Tom stares at him. “How do you find everything I hide, Pete?”

There’s a quiet knock on the door before Bradley pokes his head through cautiously. “Are you done chastising him, Uncle Ice?”

“For now,” Tom replies, beckoning him back inside.

“Oh thank god,” both of them say.

He smiles in spite of himself. Bradley’s got his helmet clutched loosely in his hands, still in the flight suit he got from Mav. Tom kicks out the chair across from him and nods for him to sit down in it. “Alright, tell me how good it was.”

Rooster lights up. “The best! We inverted, Pops!”

“Of course you did,” he says indulgently.

Chapter Text

[December 2000]

“Captain Kazansky,” his secretary calls from the doorway, the picture of professionalism as always.

He sets his glasses aside with the budget reports he’s been reviewing. “Yes, Ms. Davis?” 

Tiana shuts the door behind herself and takes a seat at his desk, perfect posture loosening in the privacy of his office as her lips stretch into a secretive smile. She’s got a single file folder in her hands, holding it like a prize. “I found something for you.”

Tom raises his eyebrows. “Did you now?”

“Something you’ve been looking for,” she clarifies a touch wickedly, brown eyes dancing. 

Ah. Tom grins and leans back in his chair, hands linked loosely behind his head. “Name your price.”

“Well.” She sets her elbows on the desk and rests her chin on the backs of her clasped hands. “I think it’s past time that Bernie turn ‘miss’ into ‘missus.’”  

“That so?”

“He’s been sniffing around for hints about what kind of ring I want for months. Given how long it took him to muster up the courage to talk to me in the first place—” 

Tom snorts. Watching Hondo had been like witnessing a remixed version of Carole and Goose’s year long dance. Tom had finally felt obligated to help the poor bastard out in the form of a well-timed pep talk that had Tiana rolling her eyes when he told her about it afterwards.

“Yes,” she agrees drily as she passed him the file folder. “So you understand it’s time someone helps him along before I die of old age.”

Tom flips it open. On the inner cover is a pinned note in Tiana’s precise script—.75ct, round solitaire, yellow gold, size 6. On the other page, neatly stapled, is a property listing. Tom lets out a whistle as he reads it over. “Oh, that’s perfect.” 

“I’ll put in an offer with the account Maverick doesn’t know about. Bidding ends tonight.”

“I’ll make sure Hondo thinks I merely overheard a phone call to your sister on your lunch break.”

Tiana nods, satisfied. “The lengths we go to for these foolish men, honestly.”

Tom lets out an exasperated breath, eyebrows flickering up in agreement. Words can’t adequately describe how difficult it is to keep a secret from Pete. In order, this particular gift has required waiting for him to leave the country on assignment, procuring another bank account, and shredding all documents that aren’t kept in Tiana’s locked desk drawer. 

After the bike incident of ‘96, Tom’s not taking any chances. 

—

“How was Yemen?” Tom asks when Pete gets home from his latest deployment.

“Awful,” he answers. He dumps his go-bag in a heap by the couch before straddling Tom’s lap and pressing his face into the crook of his neck with a quiet sigh that speaks of bone deep exhaustion.

Tom frowns and wraps his arms around him. As tactile as Pete is, it’s unusual for him to cling like this, especially when it was such a short assignment. It must’ve gone badly. “Can’t talk about it?” he guesses.

“Don’t want to.”

He presses a kiss to the side of Pete’s head. “You alright?”

“I’m home and you’re holding me, so yes.” Pete shifts sideways to look up at him, green eyes pensive as his fingers trail along Tom’s jaw. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

Pete sits up properly then, palm coming to rest on his cheek for a long moment before Pete leans in to kiss him. It’s slow and thorough without an ounce of heat, the way he kisses when he wants to be comforted. Tom slides his hands down his back, fingers rubbing circles into the base of his spine, breathing in the scent of motor oil and jet fuel that always seems to cling to him. When Pete eventually breaks away, he rewards him with a soft smile that’s almost up to its usual caliber.

Almost.

“Want to go for a drive?” Tom asks impulsively. It’s a few days early, but…

“It’s kinda late.”

“I don’t have to be at the office tomorrow,” he says, breaking into one of his rare mischievous smiles. 

Pete clocks it right away, curious head tilt and all. “What is it?”

“You’ll see.”

The last of the shadows lingering in his eyes recede, replaced by poorly concealed excitement. “An early Christmas present?” 

“No, those are hidden elsewhere, but I do have a surprise for you.”

“Hell yes!” Pete’s on his feet faster than a thirty-eight year old man should possibly be able to move, bouncing on the balls of his feet like an overeager puppy as he hauls Tom up after him. “Lead the way, Ice.”

Tom shakes his head fondly. Nineteen years they’ve known each other and absolutely nothing has changed. “I should mention that it’s a long drive.”

“Don’t care,” Pete replies, tugging him towards the front door so insistently Tom barely has time to grab his wallet and keys off the hall table. “You never manage to hide surprises this long—”

“I’d ask whose fault that is, but your unfailing need to snoop is well-established by now,” he says, forcing Pete to stop long enough to grab their coats.

“Stop stalling and let’s go already! We’re burning daylight!”

—

Three hours and a truly staggering number of prying questions later—“Honestly, Pete, let something be a surprise for once in your goddamned life”—Tom pulls off US-395.

“China Lake?”

Tom smiles smugly, eyes fixed firmly on the road.

“Tom,” Pete whines. “Come on. Tell me. Is it a plane?”

“Twenty more minutes. And stop that,” he says in response to the hand Pete’s slowly dragging up the inside of his thigh. “I’ve worked entirely too hard on this to crash before we get there because you're feeling handsy.”

For a grown man, his partner really does know how to pout, drawing his hand away with a half-hearted scowl. “Spoil sport.”

It’s all absolutely worth it when they finally pull up to the building Tom bought though. 

“Holy shit,” Pete whispers, staring up at in something like awe. Tom thinks Pete’s probably the only person alive who’d look at a place like this with such reverence. “What’s inside?”

“Whatever you want to put in it, darling,” he says softly. “It’s yours.”

Pete snaps his head around to look at him, jaw hanging wide open. “You got me an old naval hangar?”

Tom grins. “With available airspace. Happy anniversary.”

Chapter Text

[January 2001]

Carole is diagnosed with stage four cancer on the 2nd of January. There’s very little the doctors can do.

Tom is the first one she tells.

He stares at her across the kitchen table, hands clasped together over the top of it, and feels the world drop out from under his feet. There’s a chasm opening up somewhere in his stomach, ready to swallow him whole. She presses her lips together tightly, her breaths shaky and numbered.

“I need to know you’ll look after our boys, Tom.”

He nods numbly. 

—

Deployable active duty personnel can’t hold sole custody of a minor. Both he and Pete are deployable. 

Pete’s deployment schedule is erratic and frequent. While Tom’s is limited, particularly as a captain with a semi-permanent position, he can still be called out. That needs to stop for at least one of them and, given the nature of Pete’s career, the Pentagon will be loath to let go of him for any length of time.

Before now, Tom has never truly had to call in favors. For all that Pete gets into trouble from time to time, needs a more diplomatic hand to smooth over the worst of the complaints before he’s shipped off to Antarctica permanently, it’s nothing remotely like this. This is a full scale offensive, no holds barred.

He starts with Viper, then Stinger, then moves onto Johnson. He calls the current air boss at Miramar, feeling out the odds of any upcoming retirements, then checks with North Island and San Diego, working through his list of options ruthlessly until he has the most viable routes mapped out. 

It’s then the real work starts. 

First, he seeks out the Pacific Fleet Commander personally. Next, he lines up the promotion board. Finally, he calls every senator he’s ever led on a tour of Top Gun, received in his office in North Island, or encountered at a formal function. He needs every last one of them in his corner.

In July of that year, he’s quietly confirmed to the rank of rear admiral and permanently billeted in San Diego as a carrier group commander. Pete follows him, sitting before a Senate confirmation committee Tom’s worked tirelessly to sway, ensuring not a soul on it would have any reason to object. Maverick accepts his captain’s bars and command of a carrier air wing under Tom’s new purview, ready and willing to stop flying all but the most pressing of missions with the DoD’s begrudging blessing, and Tom accepts custody of their kid.

Now more than ever, Bradley needs them to be home.

They help him move into their house in mid-August, quietly packing away his childhood home when they’re not visiting Carole in the hospital. Pete and Carole have shared most assets for decades, including the house, but there’s still an ungodly amount of paperwork involved in preparing for someone’s untimely death.

She passes away on Sunday, August 26th. They bury her the following Saturday.

It’s all exhausting. 

When they get home that night, Bradley excuses himself to take a walk, Pete heads for one in the opposite direction, and Tom sits in the deathly silent kitchen, wearing the dress uniform he can’t muster up the energy to take off and praying the worst is over.

It’s not.

—

“What the fuck did you do, Pete?” He demands the second Pete walks through the kitchen doorway.

“Wow,” Pete says, his voice cracking under the weight of bone deep weariness as he slumps against the counter across from him. “You really do have the entire Navy at your beck and call.”

“Not a time to joke, Mitchell,” Tom snaps, advancing across the room towards him. “I just got off the phone with the director of admissions at the Academy.”

Pete manages to look defiant, chin tilted up, refusing to yield ground. “And?” 

“I repeat—what the fuck did you do?”

“Sounds like you already know what I did, Tom.”

“Why?” 

Because if Tom’s being entirely honest, underneath the abject rage, that’s the part he really doesn’t understand here. Pulling Bradley’s application to the Academy doesn’t make a damned bit of sense, not when he’s wanted to go since he was a kid, not when it’s been the only topic that’s excited him in the last eight months, and definitely not when Pete was the one who made sure Bradley got his fucking nomination.

It makes absolutely no fucking sense.

“Carole asked me to.”

Tom recoils. “The hell she did!”

“Four days before she died, yeah. Last time she was properly conscious.”

“Pete, she hasn’t been talking sense in a month! You can’t seriously think she meant it.”

“She did,” and his tone brooks no arguments. He smiles tightly, knuckles gone white where he’s gripping the counter like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. “And I just buried Carole.”

“So did I, Pete,” he says, because while Pete knew her the longest, Tom has still counted her as family for nearly twenty years. 

“I buried Goose too.” Tom freezes, hands on either side of the counter Pete’s leaned against, pinning him in place. Pete turns his head away, fixing his eyes somewhere on the opposite wall, jaw clenched hard enough to crack a molar. If he weren’t past the point of tears by now, Tom thinks he might be crying. “I can’t do it again.”

Tom sighs, all the fight gone out of him. He pulls Pete against him, says softly, “You can’t do this to him either. It’s not fair to take his choice away. Let me call and get it reinstated.”

Pete swallows roughly, face pressed against his chest, head bowed, hands clenching and unclenching in Tom’s uniform jacket. He stays silent for a long moment, and then, “I don’t ask you for much, Tom.”

“Pete,” he whispers, stunned.

“I don’t ever ask you for anything actually.”

“Pete, please.”

“Just—promise me you won’t tell him and—and maybe he’ll pick something else. Something that doesn’t end in a bodybag.”

“He won’t and he’ll never forgive you for this.” Of both things, Tom is certain.

“Ice.” Pete breathes out wetly. “Promise me.”

He exhales heavily, holding Pete tighter as he tries to work out something that’ll change his mind. Tom knows this is his grief talking and he’ll be damned if he lets Pete destroy himself with it. “You’re not thinking clearly.”

“I really am,” he says. “I can’t bury anyone else.”

“You—” They’re interrupted by the front door unlocking as Bradley gets back from his walk. Pete clutches at his waist reflexively before he lets his arms drop away. Tom doesn’t let him go. “We’ll talk about this later.”

Bradley comes into the kitchen, takes one look at both of them, and asks, “Is it time to cry in front of the sink now? ‘Cause I think I’ve already done that today. Twice.”

It could almost pass as a joke if he hadn’t said it so flatly.

Tom huffs softly. “Come here, Rooster. We’ve got a schedule to keep. Thirty minutes of dramatic sobbing before dinner, another round after dessert.”

Bradley laughs humorlessly. “Great.”

In his arms, Pete trembles.

I can’t bury anyone else, echoes through Tom’s head for the rest of the evening. I don’t ask you for much.

—

Here’s something Tom hasn’t had to think about in fifteen years: the first time he walked away from Pete. 

They’ve been together, been happy, since the winter of ‘86. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t remember leaving in ‘82, firmly convinced he was doing the right thing for both of their futures. When he reflects on those years in-between, he mostly just remembers being miserable and alone. When they finally made it back to each other, Tom swore to himself that he’d never, under any circumstances, turn his back on Pete again. No matter the cost, he’d promised.

In their bedroom that night, he wonders if he’s finally found a price too high.

Because here’s what Tom knows: Pete will never forgive him if he goes over his head and Bradley will never speak to him again if he doesn’t. It’s a no win scenario even the legendary Iceman isn’t equipped to handle.

Pete’s not talking to him, perched on the edge of their bed with an expression alternating between defiant and devastated, communicating all he needs to wordlessly. He doesn’t want to be reasoned with. That doesn’t mean Tom won’t try.

“Pete,” Tom starts, but for once he’s at a loss for what to do.

“Don’t,” he says. “Just—please don’t.”

Tom kneels in front of him and lays a hand on the side of his jaw. Pete leans into it and closes his eyes. “Talk to me, Maverick. Help me understand.”

“I finally get it—why Carole never wanted him in a plane.” He runs his tongue along his teeth and sucks in his lip, worrying it for a long moment before he looks down at Tom. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared in my life. Hell, I don’t think I knew what fear was before. He’s our son now, Tom. Our responsibility to keep safe.”

“And we will,” he says fiercely, because Tom knows they’d move heaven and earth to make it so.

“You’re not actually god, Iceman,” Pete tells him humorlessly. “You’ve written too many condolence letters to believe otherwise. Up there? We’re not in charge of what happens to him. And up there is exactly where he’s headed if you override me.”

That’s a slap in the face if ever there was one and Tom physically jerks away from the truth of it, fingers clutching at Pete’s knees. Pete nods down at him tightly, knowing Tom understands him now.

Tom looks back at him, completely at a loss. For all that Pete may have a point, the truth remains: “Do you really think this is going to stop our boy?”

Pete’s face crumples as he hunches in on himself. “I don’t know what else to do, Ice. I lost my dad, and I lost my brother, and I can’t lose my kid up there too.” 

Tom sits on the edge of the bed and gathers him up in his arms. Pete collapses into him, hands gripping his shoulders hard enough to tear through his shirt, hanging on like the world is ending. 

“Promise me, Tom.”

Tom closes his eyes and listens to Pete’s harsh exhales, the sharp thump of his racing heart, feels the fine tremors running from his shoulders down to the base of his spine. He thinks of the boy he’s raised, his in all but name, who used to fall asleep in his lap. He thinks of taking him up on his first flight, the moment before launch, of looking out at the heavens and swearing to Nick Bradshaw that he wouldn’t be responsible for his son’s death too. He thinks of the walk back to the hangar with Bradley, of looking at him and knowing this boy was made to fly.

When the knock on their door comes, Tom still doesn’t have an answer. “Lay down, Pete,” he murmurs softly. Tom hears him slip under the sheets as he opens the door. “Hey kiddo.”

“Hey Pops.” 

Bradley’s nearly grown now, taller than even Tom. He’s got Carole’s wild curls and Nick’s face, his eyes and her smile. It’s been years since Tom looked at him and saw a ghost. Tonight, he sees two. 

“Mind if I, uh—” He ruffles his hair awkwardly. He looks exhausted, but then they all are. “Can I join the slumber party tonight?”

Tom’s eyebrows flit up. “Slumber party?”

“Yeah, you know.” He inclines his head toward the ensuite bathroom connecting the master with the second bedroom Pete’s never actually used. “The nightly sleep overs I’m supposed to pretend I don’t know about.”

Tom manages a weak laugh in spite of everything. “As long as you’re not offended when we deny it in the morning.”

“That’d be preferable actually,” he says, shouldering his way inside and heading for the bed. “I’m too old for this, but I also really don’t give a fuck.”

“Language,” Pete mutters, a piss poor approximation of Tom’s own voice. 

“I haven’t slept in a week. Ask me if I care,” he says as he dumps himself directly in the middle of the mattress and works his way under the covers, shuffling until he’s got his face pressed against Pete’s chest. He lets out a quiet sigh. “I miss mom.”

Tom slides in behind him and rests a hand on his shoulder. “We do too.”

Bradley’s breaths are shaky and wet. He trembles under Tom’s hand, in Pete’s arms, too young for this bullshit by far. At forty-one, even Tom isn’t old enough for this crap. He doesn’t think anyone ever is. 

Orphaned at seventeen. God, Bradley deserves better than this, better than more tragedy.

It takes half an hour for him to fall asleep between them, breathing finally evening out under the weight of pure exhaustion. Pete stares at him over the top of Bradley’s head, openly terrified the entire time. 

“Promise me, Tom.” 

Tom purses his lips and looks away, but he can’t escape Pete’s gaze even in the low light of the room. 

The worst of it is, Tom’s feeling it now too. He’s Nick and Carole Bradshaw’s son, Pete’s boy, Tom in younger form. The kid between them is their responsibility, theirs to keep safe, even if he hates them for it. Pete’s going about it wrong, but…

“I promise.” 

—

Regardless of what Pete made him promise, Tom truly believes Pete will renege on his decision. So much so, in fact, that he expressly requests Bradley’s application be returned to his office instead of discarded, kept safe in the locked file cabinet even Pete doesn’t know about, and tells his old friend in charge of admissions to keep a slot open in this fall's class. He fully expects Pete to change his mind by Christmas, well before the application deadline for consideration. At worst, come spring he'll play the rejection letter off as a clerical error, confident that seeing Bradley’s reaction will bring Pete around to the understanding he can’t interfere with their kid's choices—now or in the future—and have the entire thing corrected before the start of plebe summer in July. 

In no scenario does Tom imagine that Pete won’t pull himself out of this spiral by then. After all, it’s not his first time witnessing the catastrophic flameout of Pete’s grief. On that front, he has twenty years of experience. 

Then 9/11 happens.

Maverick’s deployment deferral is revoked, immediately recalled back to black ops in the sudden face of a full scale war. His smile is a little more strained every time he comes home. It shatters further whenever Bradley says he’ll join him out there soon, alight with the naive sense of patriotism only a seventeen year old kid can manage.

Tom forces himself to reread Bradley’s Academy application after every condolence letter he sends, then tells him a story from Annapolis over dinner when he gets home. Pete’s expression is always warning and remorseful in equal measures as he does, but he never stops him. 

Maverick knows Iceman has his back. Pete knows Tom disagrees.

It’s a matter of time before he folds.

—

[June 2002]

“Sorry kid, better luck next time,” Tom says when Bradley shows them the rejection letter from the Academy. Only years of long practice keep him from choking on the line. Bradley’s disappointment is palpable, radiating from him in waves. 

Tom always knew this was the worst case scenario, but he still finds himself unprepared for the consequences. Back up plan in place or not, good intentions or not, in this moment, Tom knows he made the wrong call by not intervening sooner. He's been holding as tightly to the belief Pete would pull up in time as Pete has been holding onto Bradley. 

Iceman stares at Maverick, lets his jaw go tight as he sets a consoling hand on his son’s shoulder. Pete stares back, visibly swallowing as he deflates, and it’s clear as day that he’s finally come around. 

Tom nods. Good.

“Funny,” Bradley says, like it’s really, really not. Tom jerks to look at him in dawning horror, all too familiar with that tone. It’s the opening volley of an argument. “Somehow I don’t think the answer will change next cycle, what with you having personally pulled my papers out of consideration.”

Fuck. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.

There’s not enough damage control in the world after that, a cacophony of shouting and betrayal and absolute wrath coming out of his son’s mouth, face apoplectic in his rage. He’s hissing like a cornered cat—no, more like a rooster ready to attack, hands curled up like he’s going to claw Pete right across the face. And Pete—

Pete is not helping.

Between trying to put the blame squarely on himself and stumbling over his explanations and absolutely refusing to apologize, he’s only succeeding in throwing Bradley’s hackles up further. They’re both so deep in it that they’re ignoring Tom’s every attempt to de-escalate, Bradley going so far as to laugh in his face when he says Pete loves him. And then, grim and desperate, Pete says: “You aren’t ready and it’s going to get you killed.” 

“Pete!”

“We’re done,” Bradley says, slamming out the front door.

“Give him some goddamn space, Maverick,” Tom snarls when Pete makes to follow him, and it takes all his weight to haul him back through the front door. They both watch their kid throw himself into the driver’s seat of his mom’s old Bronco, tearing out of the driveway in a squeal of tires and burnt rubber, left alone in the echoing silence that follows.

“Fuck,” Pete whispers, staggering back against Tom’s chest like a puppet with its strings cut. “Oh fuck. I really fucked it all up.”

“Yes,” he tells him firmly, “but we’ll fix it.”

It’s a promise.

—

They don’t fix it. 

Bradley’s at Great Lakes by morning, the ink on his enlistment contract long dried. There’s very little Iceman can do about it unless he wants his kid barred from the service altogether. Even if he could get it voided, he knows his interference wouldn’t be welcome right now.

Their letters to him go unanswered, probably thrown directly in the trash. When Bradley’s eighteenth birthday arrives three weeks after he stormed out, Tom and Pete spend the day in near total silence, Pete brooding while Tom tries his very best not to snap at him for the sheer magnitude of this screw up. 

Tom had his role to play in it too.

Things come to a head when Bradley’s boot camp graduation comes. Tom can’t get the time off, but he wishes he had when Pete gets home, alone and gutted beyond repair.

“He wouldn’t even look at me,” Pete whispers when he slips into bed beside him late that night. “I called after him and he just…pretended I didn’t exist.”

“He’ll come around,” Tom tells him as he cards his fingers through Pete’s hair, but he's self-aware enough to know that's optimism talking. There's a reason Tom didn't warn Bradley and it had absolutely nothing to do with promising Pete. Even if he had, Bradley would've been furious, would never have believed it was anything less than a lack of faith on Pete's part, too young to believe fear could ever be that kind of motivator for a man like Maverick.

And Iceman—well, he's just cursing his own hubris for believing he could manage this without either of them being any the wiser.

“Never again, Tom.” Pete lets out a heavy breath. “If I ever ask you for something so stupid again, you fucking veto me. I don’t care how much it pisses me off. I knew better and I still—”

“Stop, Pete,” he says. The sharp exhale against his collarbone might be a sigh, but Tom suspects it’s closer to a sob. “You made a mistake. We both did. Don’t kill yourself over it. We’ll work it out eventually.”

Maverick is called out on a deployment the next day. When he gets back, his arm is in a sling, he’s wrecked a plane, and there’s an admiral threatening to skip over deeming him unfit and just discharge him altogether. Tom is fortunate he worked with Admiral Martinez back at North Island in ‘98, that he was the one who caught a misappropriation of funds before it could end Martinez’s career, that he takes Tom at his word when he says he’ll take care of something—and so the whole thing is smoothed over with minimal fuss considering the loss of a multi-million dollar aircraft was involved. 

“You can’t do this again, Pete,” he tells him firmly, but his hand is shaking where it rests on Pete’s cheek, thumb hovering over a sharp gash running just below his eye. “You can’t do this to me again.”

Pete rolls his good shoulder, clenches and unclenches his jaw, then looks at him and nods. “I promise.”

—

Soon after, Maverick is pulled from command entirely, his short lived career as an air wing commander replaced by nothing but spec ops for the next decade after the DoD gives up on pretending they want him anywhere else. He keeps his promise—never repeats the plane incident of ‘02 again—but that doesn’t mean he stays out of trouble. Losing Bradley has left him unmoored and projecting. He can’t look after his son anymore, so he looks after everyone else’s, flying every mission like he’s the bottom of the priority list to come home. 

If it weren’t for the second promise hanging from Tom’s dog tags, the one Pete gave Tom the day after the ‘02 incident, he’d ground Pete for it. As it is, Tom knows flying is one of the only two things giving Pete purpose anymore, so he quietly puts his faith in Pete’s promise to always come home.

Maverick becomes well-known for his refusal to leave anyone behind, for the way he won’t allow a mission to launch until the odds of survival are highest. It makes him a lot of friends in the lower ranks of the service—people who’d flat out lay down and die for him, for all that he doesn’t seem to realize it—but not among the brass who expect a mere captain to follow orders. 

Quite frankly, he should’ve been thrown out by the end of ‘02 for his sheer bloody-minded insubordination, if not well before that, but the decade is also known for something else: Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky’s bottomless Jar of Favors.

If Maverick is well-connected at the lower ranks, then the brass is Iceman’s domain. If Tom doesn’t know someone personally, he knows someone else who does. If a commander can’t handle Maverick, he’s quietly reassigned to another who can. If an admiral takes issue with Maverick’s behavior, they know to call him first—assuming, of course, that Tom hasn’t already called them. There’s virtually nothing he can’t explain, rationalize, smooth over, or outright expense so long as Pete continues to keep the worst of his disobedience within the realm of irritating and not reckless disregard.

The traditionalists among the upper ranks—the ones with no patience for cheek and no tolerance for being told they’re wrong—frequently ask him why he continues to put his reputation on the line protecting a captain with a rebellious streak. Admiral Kazansky always tells them some version of the same: the Navy has need of men like him.

It’s true. If it weren’t, Maverick wouldn’t still be in the service, regardless of Iceman’s interference.

As for why Tom does it, well—

In his more honest moments, Tom admits he’s unmoored and projecting too, intervening in every situation to make up for the one time he didn’t. He’s not willing to risk being the only anchor Pete has left if they take his wings.

Chapter Text

[July 2011]

When he was selected for promotion this year, it was entirely on merit. That merit was not the expediency of cutting out the middle-man in putting out Maverick’s many fires, no matter how often he’s been subjected to jokes on the matter. At fifty-one years old, Tom’s sole purpose in life most certainly isn’t wrangling his lifelong wingman, thank you very much.

“You say that really defensively, sweetheart," Pete tells him as he buttons Tom into his dress uniform. When he finishes, he leans up to steal a quick kiss, winking suggestively as he pulls back. “Also, you look very hot with those extra stars on your shoulders.”

Tom rolls his eyes, reaching out to straighten Pete’s collar before he shoves him in the direction of the door. “We’re expected tonight, Captain Mitchell.”

“Mmhm,” Pete hums agreeably, stepping back in and shamelessly running his hands over Tom’s chest. After all these years, Tom thinks he should be immune to the way Pete looks at him, but instead he still feels a slow flush bloom across his face. “So I’ll have to wait until later to see them on our bedroom floor.”

The heat immediately turns to mild irritation. “You are never, under any circumstance, putting my dress uniform on the floor,” he tells him flatly.

“So touchy, my dear fleet commander.” Pete dances away, grinning as he goes, and stoops down to grab his cap with a bounce in his step. “God, I’m actually excited to go to one of these for once.”

“You’re excited to cause trouble,” Tom corrects as they head out of their bedroom. 

“I’m excited,” Pete tells him seriously, “because I can finally do this—” here, he presses Tom up against the wall and kisses him firmly, pulling back just far enough that Tom can see his pleased smile “—I can finally do that in public.”

“Technically,” Tom says as he drags him back in, “that won’t be fully permissible until the end of September. Or ever—I’m a fleet commander, Maverick.” He kisses him again just for the hell of it, or maybe because it really is a rush not to worry about hiding anymore, then says, “Behave in front of my subordinates, please.”

“I always behave,” he says, reaching back to link their fingers together, ghosting over the band Tom’s finally taken to wearing publicly, a match to the one normally found on Pete’s tags. It’s not official—they’ve never married and don’t know if they ever will—but the rings have represented their own sort of promise for nearly a decade now.

Pete’s wearing his tonight too. Tom smiles softly at the sight of it.

“You never behave,” he says.

Pete grins at him over his shoulder, absolutely devastating in his dress whites. “You love me.”

“I do.” 

“Come on, sweetheart,” Pete tells him as he leads him out the front door. “Can’t be late to our first prom.”

—

Formal dinners are excellent networking opportunities for any officer, both a chance to catch up with old friends and a time to make new acquaintances. In Admiral Kazansky’s case, they’re also an opportunity to put established plans into motion. By the time the guests have officially been released to mingle following the awards presentation, Tom has been quietly working the room for over an hour, discreetly interviewing potential promotees and assessing future assignment suitability. Once that bit of bureaucracy is taken care of, however, he slips away from Pete and moves onto the most pressing conversation of the night.

“Captain Lewis,” Tom says quietly, placing a hand on the man’s shoulder and effectively trapping him at the end of the buffet table, “How are you this evening?”

Josiah “Rock” Lewis is as good as his callsign, stalwart enough not to startle and brave enough to cut the bullshit. He glances over his shoulder at Tom and graces him with a wry smile. “You know, you always work a room top to bottom, Admiral. Gives those of us further down the line time to see the dominos falling towards us.” 

They both chuckle good-naturedly. Tom really does like Josiah. He was one of his last Top Gun students back in the day.

“So, what’d Maverick do this time? Because I’m telling you right now, if you send him to Lemoore, I’m going to need a few million more dollars in my air tower budget. They’re not built to withstand his buzz-buzz bullshit.” 

“Not Maverick.”

Josiah’s eyebrows creep upwards. “I can’t decide if that’s comforting or terrifying, sir. Either way, I’ve got this sense of impending doom that says I’m going to regret telling you my kid wanted to finish high school before we moved again.”

“Captain Lewis,” Tom tells him seriously, “I extended your billet because you were qualified and interested. You don’t actually owe me anything for it.”

“See, that, that’s the part that always gets me, sir,” Josiah says, pointing a finger in Tom’s general direction as he leans against the wall beside the table. “I’m confident if I said no to whatever you’re about to ask for, you’d be fine with it.” 

Tom nods patiently. “I would.”

“Exactly. And then I’d feel bad for turning away the man who always looks out for us without expectation,” Josiah tells him dryly. “So, how can I help you, Admiral Kazansky?”

“I need you to hold two FRS slots open in Lemoore in October.”

“Too easy. I’ve got loads of ‘em,” he replies. “What’s the actual request?”

“And two more on the same squadron once those training posts are complete.” Josiah pulls a face at the sheer magnitude of shuffling that’s going to require. Tom sympathizes—he had to map it out himself after all. “VFA-151.”

“You want two slots for brand new aviators and you want them sent to the Vigilantes.”

“It’ll be the easiest squadron to adjust. There are two lieutenants there who’ll need replacing at the end of next year. Move them out a few months early. Early promotion with choice in teaching station for the first, early release without penalty for the other. I hear he wants more time with his family.”

Josiah stares at him, openly astonished by the amount of planning he’s put into this. It’s the sort of generous offer that took even Tom weeks to hammer out. “Who are you sending me?”

Tom taps his fingers against the table for a moment. Across the room, Pete is having an animated discussion with a trio of NFOs frequently assigned to his spec ops missions. He catches Tom’s eye and takes a moment to shoot him that playful little grin Tom’s loved for so long. 

As happy as Pete seems tonight, it’s been a very long ten years. 

“My son, with any luck.”

Josiah hums thoughtfully. “Still on the outs, huh?”

After the production Tom made of arranging custody a decade ago, Bradley’s subsequent enlistment was too conspicuous to go unnoticed entirely. While no one outside their family and the Academy’s senior admissions officer knows about Bradley’s papers, plenty of officers have seen a kid enlist in the face of their parents disapproval of them joining the service. It's hardly a great leap of logic to assume why they’d fallen out. 

“Navy scuttlebutt really doesn’t miss anything, does it?” Tom comments ruefully.

“You know it,” Josiah replies. “And I see why you asked me, you wily bastard.” Josiah pauses and smiles. “Sir.”

Tom chuckles. “For the same reason you let that bit about your daughter slip in front of me, yes,” he says, then adds, “The second slot is for his partner.” 

“A duty station together and no long deployments apart.” Josiah whistles. “That’s one helluva peace offering.”

“His partner is slated to graduate first in class right now. Bradley's second,” Tom adds. “If the slots existed, they’d have first shot at them anyway.”

“Ah, so I don’t have to feel too bad about the nepotism angle.” 

“You can absolutely say no, Josiah.”

The younger man shoots him an amused look. “Like I would. I trust Mrs. Davis will forward me the relevant paperwork for my lieutenants in the coming months, both outgoing and incoming.”

Tom exhales heavily. “Hopefully.”

He looks at Pete—looks at the band on his finger, remembers Pete’s promise to always come home—and remembers his own promise to make this wrong right, to bring their boy back home too. 

With any luck, he’ll finally be able to make good on it. 

—

[October 2011]

When Admiral Kazansky arrives at NAS Kingsville, the immediate assumption by most is that it’s a surprise inspection. Tom doesn’t bother to correct them. 

“Alright,” Ron tells him as he passes him a copy of Bradley’s scheduled assessment times. “Observation room one. You’re looking for tall, tan, blond, and cocky. You know,” he says, grinning, “you, but with the addition of Mitchell’s ego. Apparently, your kid’s taste is more environmental than genetic, Ice.”

Tom shoots him an unimpressed look. “Thank you for that, Slider.”

“You sure you don’t want to make the offer to him directly?”

“You mean assuming he’ll even talk to me long enough to hear it?” Tom asks. Bradley’s always been scorched earth about things when he’s angry and they gave him ample reasons to be furious. “Regardless of what Bradley’s told him about me, his partner will be the more receptive target. I’ll talk to Bradley after.”

“Good luck,” Ron tells him. “And Ice? Stop pretending it isn’t a little bit about interrogating the kid's intentions too.”

Tom thinks he’s probably too old to give his old RIO the finger, so he settles for waving him off and heads for room one instead.

—

Jake Seresin really is the easier target, though not for the reason he expected. Where Tom had imagined every reaction from awkwardness to thinly veiled disdain from Bradley’s other half, what he gets instead is one he’s become very familiar with over the years—

“Admiral Tom Kazansky, Pacific Fleet Commander,” he says as he offers his hand. “Iceman.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir.” 

—hero worship.  

If Slider's to be believed, Seresin’s been making a fool of himself over Bradley since they met at preflight training in Pensacola. They’ve lived together for over a year, been attached at the hip for two, and yet…

Jake Seresin knows who Admiral Kazansky is, who the Pacific Fleet Commander is, who Iceman is. He has absolutely no idea who Tom is to Bradley. 

For a moment—just one—Tom allows himself to be blown away by how badly that hurts.

Scorched earth indeed.

—

While it’s been almost three decades since Tom flew with Joseph Seresin, he can still confidently say Jake is the spitting image of his father, personality and all. That’s fortunate considering Tom’s original plan for delivering his peace offering involved being recognized. As it is, Jake shares his father’s tendency to preen under praise, particularly when the man commending his flight scores is a famous naval aviator, and is therefore predictably thrilled by his casual recruitment pitch. 

Now to find out if he inherited Joseph’s unwavering loyalty. 

“The final vacancies list will go up after exams are concluded,” Tom tells him after they’ve gotten through the pleasantries of introductions and ego-stroking. “Captain Kerner tells me you’re quite committed to the Germany slot, but I’d much rather snatch up this cohort’s first in class for the Pacific Fleet if it’s all the same to you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Seresin tells him, and then slower—hedging—says, “Really, thank you.”

Tom gives him a pleased smile in response. He’s sure the kid thinks it’s Tom’s satisfaction at stealing him away, but Slider was right. This is a test. “Are you about to turn me down, Lieutenant?”

“Sorry, sir.” Seresin shrugs apologetically, and it’s entirely for show. Tom can see the instant his ego takes a backseat, packed away with genuinely impressive speed. “My partner and I are aiming for the same carrier wing. There’s really only one option leading there last we checked, so…” Seresin looks out the observation window then, eyes immediately focusing on a figure a hundred feet away. 

Out on the tarmac, Bradley is going through pre-check for his training jet. 

Tom half wishes he’d look up, hopes his kid would recognize him even at a distance. The other half of him thinks he’d just be an unwanted distraction before Bradley’s evaluation. His heart clenches a little, once again aware of the span of time and space. 

“Dedicated, are you?” Tom asks after a beat too long, then inclines his head in Bradley’s direction. “I suppose that’s your friend.”

Seresin looks back at him, then back at Bradley. There’s something calculating in his eyes, like he’s weighing his next words carefully. It’s an expression Tom’s become familiar with—even worn himself recently. The repeal of DADT has been coming for nearly a year, but it’s still only been a few weeks since it became formal policy and there are plenty of people left who disagree with the decision.

“Partner,” Seresin corrects firmly, displaying absolute balls of steel as he stares down a four-star admiral and dares him to say a word. 

Good. Bradley deserves someone who loves him that much.

“Partner,” Tom repeats, polite and apologetic. “You’ll have to forgive me, Lieutenant. Recent changes being what they are, I’m still adjusting to it being safe to assume out loud.”

Seresin’s hackles smooth down almost instantly, relaxing at the tacit approval in Tom’s words. “No apologies necessary, sir. I understand.”

“Mm, still,” Tom tells him pleasantly, “I now feel compelled to mention that tomorrow’s vacancy list will include two Lemoore slots pipelining to the same final squadron.”

Seresin’s jaw drops. “You’re shitting me.” His eyes go wide, absolutely floundering in the wake of what just came out of his mouth. “Sorry—fuck, jesus—I apologize, sir!” 

Tom almost snorts, barely managing to wave off what’s sure to be a fantastic string of word vomit before he gives the game away by laughing. Kids these days—so easily spooked by a few stars on a shoulder board.

“Consider the offer, Lieutenant. Lemoore would be pleased to have you both.” He leans back in his seat and turns his attention to the tarmac as the observation room speakers go live with the flight comms. “Now let’s see what your boy can do, shall we, Seresin?”

One conversation down…

—

Well, Bradley definitely noticed he was here, Tom thinks as he steps out of the observation room and makes his way down to the tarmac. If Seresin’s horrified expression throughout was any indicator, that wasn’t an impressive showing of his son’s skills. The quiet murmuring from his other classmates only confirmed it. It’s yet another thing Tom will have to apologize for.

He steps into an alcove out of the way of the entrance door, mentally bracing himself for the conversation to come. With any luck, Bradley will hear him out enough to see the slots for the reparations they are. If he’s very, very lucky, his kid might even start to consider forgiving them both.

When Bradley steps through the door, his eyes lock on Tom immediately, absolutely blazing. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Watching my kid finish flight school,” Tom tells him quietly.  

“Oh,” Bradley says sarcastically, “so you feel benevolent enough to allow that today.”

Tom flinches. As much as he was expecting it, it still hurts to be on the receiving end of his fury. “I’m sorry, Bradley. I really am. You deserved better.”

“That’s nice,” he says, tightening his grip on his helmet and turning to go. “Now leave me the fuck alone.”

Tom reaches out to stop him, fingers wrapping around his shoulder for the first time in years. It’s broader than the last time Tom laid a hand on him—all of him is, actually. He’s undeniably fully grown now, a man and not the child Tom used to carry in his arms. For all that he was prepared for his anger, Tom hadn’t prepared for this, for the indisputable proof of a decade apart, a decade lost. 

His heart absolutely aches with it. 

Bradley glares at his hand. “Let go of me.”

“I didn’t find out until after it happened.”

He stares, wrong-footed, and suddenly he’s Tom’s kid all over again. When he speaks, Tom hears a kernel of hope in his voice. “You didn’t help him pull it?”

“No, Bradley, I didn’t. In fact—”

“When did you find out?” he interrupts, abruptly halting Tom’s attempts to explain his intention to have it reinstated and Pete’s motivations. “After he pulled it. When did you find out?”

“I—” 

“Because, here’s the thing,” and the anger in his voice is well-honed, no longer the wildly lashing rage from the night he’d stormed out or even when Tom found him moments ago. Now, it’s a sharpened blade, cutting through years of carefully planned explanations in an instant. “I know when it happened and I know for a fact Maverick was involved. I always assumed you helped him pull them—”

“No,” Tom interjects immediately. “I didn’t—”

“So when did you know?” Bradley demands, raw and aching and desperate. “When did you find out, Pops?”

Tom sucks in a wounded breath, absolutely gutted to hear Bradley call him that after so many years. Worse, he realizes he was right all those years ago. It won’t matter that he always intended to have the application reinstated, because Bradley’s forgiveness is entirely dependent on his non-involvement. 

His ignorance—it’s the one thing Tom can’t offer him. 

Bradley’s face hardens. “Before I left then.” He jerks back a step, tears himself away from Tom’s hand and out of range, lost again. “Should’ve known it was too good to be true.”

“I didn’t agree with his decision.” 

“Yeah, you did,” Bradley tells him brutally, “or you would’ve stopped him.”

“Bradley—”

“You agreed with him. That I wasn’t ready, couldn’t handle it, didn’t deserve a shot—”

“He didn’t mean—”

“You took his side. You chose him,” Bradley says with an accusing finger. 

“Listen to me—”

“And you know the worst part?” he asks, suddenly quiet. Tom freezes at the abrupt shift. “I don’t even know why I’m so surprised.” Bradley deflates slowly, folding in on himself, all the fight gone out of him. “You always choose him. Even over your own kid.” 

Tom physically recoils, every word a blow, landing all the harder for how calmly—how factually—he says it. 

“Yeah,” Bradley says, resigned and exhausted. “I guess it was real dumb of me to hope one of you actually believed in me, wasn’t it?”

Tom stares down the hallway after him long after he’s out of sight.

—

The thing is—giving up on his kid isn’t an option, especially not when Bradley’s so obviously wrecked by it too. If nothing else, whether or not he ever forgives them, he’s still their son and Tom’s still going to look after him, even if it has to be at a distance. Right now, Tom just hopes Bradley will accept the slots in Lemoore because he’ll rest easier knowing Bradley has at least one person he loves beside him at all times. 

It’s not until Seresin shows up to California alone that Tom realizes how badly he miscalculated.

It takes only the slightest digging to piece the story together—they've broken things off, and abruptly so. Bradley’s gone to Germany and Jake’s changed his emergency contact along with his phone number. When Tom seeks him out shortly after his arrival, Jake inadvertently fills in the rest, letting slip that his relationship ended the same day Tom came to Kingsville. Given how poorly their reunion went and exactly what Tom dredged up, he knows that's not a coincidence.

If it weren’t so catastrophically tragic, he'd laugh at his own ineptitude, at his inability to keep his family happy. On that front, it seems all the connections in the world aren’t enough. Where his failure to intervene had destroyed his own relationship with Bradley, now his efforts to intervene have inadvertently ruined another one for him. 

The infallible Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, he thinks reproachfully. Ice cold, no mistakes.

What a goddamn joke.

He really can’t win for trying.

—

[October 2015]

Four years to the day since he last spoke to Bradley, Admiral Tom Kazansky stands beside Lieutenant Jake Seresin on a carrier in the middle of the Pacific, listening to him talk about the man he loved and the son Tom lost. It’s a special sort of hell, hearing about the man his kid became without him. What’s worse, Tom has to live with the knowledge that he had a hand in destroying this for Bradley too.

It’s a little ironic—Tom initially thought Jake was more like Pete than himself, but the kid’s actually the worst of both of them combined.  He's faithfully devoted to his chosen course of action even if it’s likely to bury him, particularly where his heart’s concerned. Bradley may have been the one to walk away first, but Jake’s the one who won’t take him back even though he so clearly wants to.

“Forgive a meddling old man his questions,” Tom begins during the last of their now nightly conversations.

Jake doesn’t try to hold back his snort. After two weeks of talking, he's finally gotten comfortable joking with him. “You’re not that old, sir.”

“But I am meddling,” he says truthfully, because unlike his own relationship with Bradley, this one might not be irreparably damaged. And so he begs the question: “Why haven’t you ever forgiven him? You’re miserable and he’s obviously making an effort.”

Jake remains silent beside him, swallowing heavily, fingers rolling a gold ring in endless circles. 

“Ah, I see,” he says. “You think you’re being careful.” 

The kid nods, staring out at the roiling ocean. Tom hums, considering. Maybe, just maybe, he can right at least one wrong for his kid.

“Bit of advice I learned the hard way.” Tom tells him, and it’s what his younger self needed to hear once, a lesson that'd taken him entirely too long to learn where Pete was concerned. With any luck, it’ll be well received. “If this many years wasn’t enough to make you forget someone, it’s time to seriously consider giving it another go. Life’s too short to live in a holding pattern.” 

He grips Jake’s shoulder for a long moment before taking his leave. He can only hope the kid listens to him.

Chapter Text

[June 2016]

Once, when Tom was five years younger and infinitely more naive, he thought that Pete hitting his mandatory active duty service limit and being pulled from spec ops would, if not totally eliminate, at least substantially reduce the number of calls from irate commanding officers. He even gave him the privilege of a position as a test pilot—one that Pete hasn't overtly abused at any point in the last five years—to keep him from getting too bored. His good behavior had been such that, when the Darkstar contract came up and coincided with Pete’s mandatory retirement date in six months, Tom gave it to him. At two months until the contract’s completion deadline, Tom has even started to think they’re in the clear.

Alas.

“My husband just called,” Tiana tells him as she shuts the door to his office behind her. Not Hondo. Not Mr. Coleman. Her husband.

It would seem Tom has allowed himself to be lulled into a false sense of security. Clearly, Pete has just been saving up his energy for one last grand act of insubordination.

Tom drops his head in his hand, swallows around the ache in his throat that’s been his constant companion these last six weeks, and twirls a finger for her to get on with it. 

“He wrecked it. Over southwestern Idaho. Pushing to Mach 10.4,” she says. Then: “Oh, and he’s not dead.”

“Yet,” Tom grits out roughly.

“Shockingly, not the most pressing problem,” Tiana says as she drops into the chair in front of his desk. “The Pentagon is still stonewalling me. Whatever the hell has their feathers ruffled enough to send out selection notices, they aren’t telling anyone we know. I can’t even get a list of who’s been recalled to where. Even Dr. Blackwood’s being kept in the dark.”

Tom leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, frowning. There’s very little he doesn’t know and even less his few superiors would see fit to keep from him. That means it’s something that would normally be under his purview, something he wouldn’t agree with, and something they intend to act on quickly. As triple threats go, it’s about the worst that can crop up.

“Ears to the ground then,” he tells her. 

“Yes, well,” Tiana says. She flips open her agenda and withdraws a fluorescent green post-it note. The script is neat, but it's not her handwriting. “This might be something.”

‘North Island Coffee. 1430.'

“Who?” 

“Mrs. Perez. She dropped it off very discreetly in the mess at lunch.”

“Really,” Tom says slowly, brows slowly creeping upward. When another admiral’s assistant leaves a note with Tiana like this, it’s not a request. “I guess I know where I’m going next.”

“And what do you want to do about Maverick?”

“Let him sweat a bit,” Tom replies as he stands, swaying enough that he has to brace against the edge of his desk for a moment. 

Tiana frowns at him in such open concern that he wishes he’d waited for her to leave first. “You should move that medical appointment up, sir.”

“Not until we figure this clusterfuck out.”

She taps her nails lightly against the top of his desk, lips pursed, then shakes her head to herself, probably thinking all manner of offensively truthful things about Tom’s decision as she does. “You know,” she says eventually, “I never thought I’d see the day it wasn’t Maverick you were talking about.”

“Apocalypse?”

“One of the seven seals at least,” she confirms solemnly.

—

Ostensibly, Tom just wants a change of scenery for reviewing this afternoon’s files. It’s not unheard of—he does this periodically just to get out of the office, not always on the same days but always at the same time. Given that the entirety of the clientele here are base personnel, it’s the sort of habit people notice after a while. It’s also the sort of habit subordinates take advantage of when they need to speak to him as privately as possible about something they’re not supposed to discuss. 

The man who pauses at his table to say hello is well aware of this. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Good afternoon, Admiral. How are you?” Tom asks.

“Keeping busy,” he replies dryly, tapping his own collective of folders against the table. They’re all aviator personnel files—all except for one. 

“What’s on your mind, Beau?”

“Iraq. 2014.” Cyclone sits down in the chair across from him carefully, files fanned out just so. Tom recognizes a few of the names—all Top Gun graduates. Jake Seresin is in the stack. “The recovery operation you authorized after relieving Admiral Cain of duty. Rumor has it, he’s still non-promotable after that fiasco. The Drone Ranger—stuck overseeing human test pilots until he finally retires.”

“If that’s merely a rumor,” Tom tells him sharply, “I need to make a few phone calls.”

Cyclone’s smile is too bland to be satisfied, but something in the tilt of his jaw still indicates he is. While Tom’s never had the opportunity to get to know the other man on a personal level, he’s familiar with his infamous poker face. If he’s showing anything now, it’s not an accident. 

“It’s nice to know your hit list is still alive and well, sir,” Simpson says evenly.

“Admiral Cain’s excuses about survivability be damned—when the air clears, you send search and rescue. I don’t care if it’s been over twenty-four hours,” Tom mutters quietly, voice dripping with scorn. “He nearly cost five men their lives. I won’t ever let him forget that leadership failure.”

“Good,” Beau tells him. “And it was three men and two women, sir. My daughter was one of them.” Then Cyclone moves his hand and Tom catches sight of Bradley’s name on the second to last folder. “I never did get a chance to thank you for that, Admiral Kazansky.” When he stands to leave, the sleight of hand is so quick Tom almost misses it even though he’s watching. “If you ever need anything—whatever you want done—I’ll make it happen, sir.” 

“I appreciate that, Beau.”

Cyclone bundles the rest of his files back under his arm, nods, and heads to collect his coffee from the bar before heading out. Tom doesn’t watch him go, eyes already back on the file he was reading earlier, resolutely ignoring the newest one at the bottom of his stack. 

Internally, he swears a blue streak. Poor leadership at the top, low chances of survival even for the best pilots they have, and the Pentagon doesn’t want Iceman to know. Worst of all, his kid is on the team.

Cyclone knows exactly how to deliver a warning quietly.

—

In the sanctity of his office an hour later, Tom sets first his glasses aside, then the folder Cyclone slipped him, every movement careful and measured. He doesn’t know who he wants to scream at first.

“How bad?” Tiana asks him.

“The Pentagon, in its infinite wisdom, has recalled twelve Top Gun graduates—one of them my kid—to fly a highly specialized bombing run through a death trap of a canyon to take out an unsanctioned uranium enrichment facility with a drop target three meters wide,” he says. Then, because that somehow isn’t enough, he adds: “In five days. 

“What in the sweet fuck.” 

That really does sum things up.

“The plant will be operational in the next three weeks.”

Tiana leans forward in her chair, frowning as she opens the file. “Why are they sending them so soon?”

“Because the analysts don’t think extended training will make a difference and the brass doesn’t want to risk the plant coming online early.”

“Christ,” she mutters when she catches sight of the three-dimensional renderings of the crater housing the target. “Is that climb even survivable in an F-18?”

“Before or after you take the defensive missiles into account?”

When she looks up, her face mirrors his own internal fury. “They don’t expect anyone back.”

Twelve pilots, eight planes, four teams, and a target that needs to be struck twice. If even half of them can hit it, the Pentagon will consider it a successful operation. Getting them back home is barely a factor in the equation when the rest already borders on impossible. 

“No they don’t.” He turns the file to the last page where another bright green post-it note lists the time and location of the next task force meeting. It starts in thirty minutes. “Let’s go crash a party, shall we Mrs. Davis?”

“I’ll dust off my best pair of ball-crusher heels, sir.”

—

Admiral Kazansky is a well known entity among the fleet, fifteen years of service in the flag staff and counting, an astute but benevolent man. There are entire generations of officers who’ve never known him as anyone else. As for the rest, well—

Some of them have forgotten who he was first. 

It’s rare for the Iceman to make an appearance these days. 

“Gentlemen,” Ice says as he steps through the door, Chief Warrant Officer Davis a half-step behind him. Inside, a dozen admirals of varying grades are assembled, all but two staring at him in open alarm. Cyclone leans back in his chair, eyes sharp. Beside him, Warlock smiles openly. “I’d ask if my invitation got lost in the mail, but it’s abundantly apparent you never sent it.”

“Admiral Kaz—” 

Ice turns the full force of his glare on the Pentagon fool sitting in his chair.

“This is my command, Admiral Zarrale, not yours. Top Gun is mine. Miramar is mine. North Island is mine. The entire Pacific is mine. And you damn well will not use any of that to launch against the Russians without my express permission,” he snarls. “Am I understood?”

Silence.

“Good,” he says as he moves to the seat at the head of the briefing table. With a dismissive flick of his wrist, he indicates for the man in it to move. Zarrale does—quickly—and Ice assumes his rightful place.

As it should be.

“Do you know, gentlemen, why it is I’ve spent the better part of a decade pushing for a special operations carrier wing? A squadron, at least? Do you have even the slightest inkling?” Behind him, Chief Davis pulls up the mission course map on one half of the briefing screen and the candidates list on the other. “It’s so twelve of our best aviators aren’t sent to their deaths like expendable cannon fodder because we didn’t find it most expedient to pay the upkeep of keeping them on reserve for high risk situations.”

“Sir—”

“My partner spent twenty-five years flying black ops with men and women whose lackluster training left them so far below his skill level that many of them never made it home. That’s all because of your reliance on special detachments and luck,” he continues. “When this is over, that will be changing. For now—” Chief Davis transitions to a slide with the new deployment training schedule. “Captain Mitchell will be recalled to active duty to teach this detachment on my timeline.”

Across the room, Admiral Simpson twitches faintly.

—

When the room clears out, Cyclone stays behind, sending Tiana and Warlock ahead to hammer out details. Tom allows himself to relax back into his chair once they’re alone, suddenly exhausted. He clears his throat heavily, hand running along it with a wince. The yelling really didn’t help whatever infection’s got a grip on him.

“Thank you for coming, sir.”

“No, thank you, Beau,” he replies, a little raspy. “They can’t outright punish you for telling me—I won’t allow it—but you’re going to hear about this later.”

Beau shrugs, unbothered. “It was the right call.”

Tom smiles. Beau Simpson—there’s a name that just moved up several tiers on his personal approval list.

Cyclone leans against the table, idly tapping his fingers along the top as he stares at the presentation screen still displaying the updated mission timeline. Eventually, he sighs and looks at Tom with something akin to trepidation. “Look, sir, I really want to believe this thing has a better ending than it looks like it will, but…”

“You don’t think it can be done?”

“I just don’t see how,” he admits. “You’re spot on about our lack of dedicated spec ops. These officers are the best aviators in the world, but—hell, they’re not ready for this kind of obstacle course and two weeks can’t possibly be enough time to get them there. The inherent risk—”

“With the right instructor and the right parameters, it’s possible,” Tom says. “Two teams, maybe two single seaters if they perform well enough. There’s definitely no sense in sending all of them. That’s just asking to get caught on approach.”

“Not even a third team as a precaution?”

“I’ll let Captain Mitchell make that call.”

“Sir,” he begins carefully. Tom raises an eyebrow. “I know I said I’d make sure whatever you want gets done, but…” He sighs in dismay. “Does it have to be Maverick?”

“Have you ever flown with him, Beau?”

“God no,” he replies, pulling the closest thing to a disgruntled face Tom’s ever seen on him. “Apologies, sir, but he just wrecked a scramjet and—”

It sets Tom off laughing—then coughing, then not quite able to breathe properly at all. 

“Jesus,” he wheezes when he finally collects himself, wincing at the tight punch of another cough trying to work its way up his throat. Cyclone’s hand is hovering uncertainly over Tom’s shoulder, his expression openly concerned. “Shit.”

“Are you alright?”

“No,” he acknowledges for the first time. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of addressing mundane personal bullshit like bronchitis right now.” 

“Is that what it is?”

“Probably. I've got an appointment Saturday morning. I’ll live until then.”

“You’d better, sir,” Cyclone says seriously, eyes drifting back to the deployment timeline. “Otherwise, the Pentagon will launch in forty-eight hours, your professional approval be damned.” The silence stretches, until: “What do you want to do about your kid, Iceman?”

Tom leans back in his chair carefully, considering, and eventually says, “I’ll let Maverick make that call too.”

“May I ask what happened between them, sir?”

Tom graces him with a surprised look. “I assumed everyone already knew.”

“Everyone already assumes,” Beau corrects, “but that doesn’t mean they’re right and it might become relevant given that they’ll both be under my supervision for the foreseeable future.”

A fair point, Tom concedes, for all that it’s a private matter. “All you really need to know,” he says softly, “is that many years ago, Pete made a mistake and Bradley has never forgiven him for that.”

“Ah.” 

For all that Cyclone can’t possibly understand how deep this particular well of misery goes, that single syllable still manages to capture the last fourteen years. Tom looks up at the candidates list on the far wall again and wonders if maybe, just maybe, this time they’ll work it out. 

He’s not so confident, but hope does spring eternal.

—

By Wednesday night, Tom’s powering through his physical exhaustion by sheer force of will alone. When his computer goes into sleep mode after what he could’ve sworn was only a few minutes of blank staring in the wake of a coughing fit, he knows he’s losing this fight. He’s been up since dawn and it’s pushing nine o’clock now, but he’s only been home for half an hour, caught up in the endless string of calls required to bring the Pentagon to heel until well beyond standard business hours.  

Tom’s winning this argument—for the moment. 

He presses a finger to the tender lymph nodes in his neck and winces. Whatever this is, if it requires his full attention, it’ll need to wait until after the mission. His kid’s safety comes first.

The door to his study clicks open.

“Gotta say,” Pete begins as he sulks through the door, “chaining me to a desk at Top Gun again is a new punishment even for you.” 

Tom huffs—or he tries to, taken in by another coughing fit. By the time he comes out of it, Pete’s beside him, hands running along Tom’s shoulders and down across his back. It’s as soothing as it is irritating. He’s meant to be chastising Pete for wrecking their scramjet, a feat that’s rather hard to accomplish when he’s actively hacking his lungs up and Pete’s being good to him after a month apart. 

“Jesus, sweetheart, you look like shit.” 

“I’m fine,” he says, but he’s self-aware enough to realize he sounds like he’s swallowed a frog and looks like he’s been hit by a bus. He’s not even surprised when Pete immediately calls him on it, concerned enough that he sounds willing to drag Tom to a doctor by force, especially when he halfway collapses getting to his feet, nearly knocked over by a sudden head rush.

Tom’s not doing well tonight. Honestly, he hasn’t been doing well in a while. If he somehow hadn’t been aware of that by now, well—

Pete’s worried frown really says it all. 

“Don’t—” He grunts through the tightness in his throat, shamelessly leaning against the other man just to stay upright. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Only look I got, Ice,” Pete tells him. “Now let’s get you to bed before you drop.”

“No, I need to—” He manages to gesture in the direction of the explosion of paperwork across his desk. “There’s a mission briefing. We need to talk about—”

“It’ll keep ‘til morning.” Tom groans and lets himself be carted off. He’s fairly confident it won’t actually wait, but he’s also not up to arguing anymore. Frankly, now that he’s up, the only thing he can think of is laying down and staying there. “Come on, sweetheart, help me get you out of these clothes.”

Tom blinks a few times, surprised to find himself on the edge of their bed already. How the hell had he managed to lose that much time? But Pete’s dragging his shirt off, fussing about him having lost weight—like that’s a bad thing for a man stuck at a desk all day—and then he’s being pressed back into the pillows. God, that’s nice. 

Pete sits down on the edge of the bed and tucks the blankets up higher. “Still with me, Tom?”

“Reluctantly,” he admits, closing his eyes. “Fuck, I’m tired.”

“Sick will do that to you,” he replies. “Get some rest, sweetheart.”

There are hands in his hair then, carding through gently, and he slips off just like that.

—

Tom wakes up warm and comfortable, blessedly feeling much more like himself after a good night’s sleep for all that his chest still aches. Pete smiles down at him, propped up on one elbow, his other hand in Tom’s hair the same as it was when he fell asleep. Pete looks especially devastating in the pre-dawn summer light filtering through their bedroom curtains, green eyes bright and hair sleep-rumpled, but then again he always looks gorgeous. 

He rolls onto his side and tugs Pete towards him, sighing as he buries his face in the crook of Pete’s neck. “What time is it?” 

“Too early to be alive,” Pete says. “Why is this meeting scheduled at 0500, Ice? That’s just mean.”

“Punishment for wrecking my plane,” he murmurs drowsily, lulled by the steady heartbeat under his ear and the fingertips gently massaging the nape of his neck. He’s sure there’s something he’s forgetting to mention, but it’s just after four in the morning and he really can’t be assed to recall it.

“You feeling better, sweetheart?” Tom nods, tilting his head to guide Pete’s fingers where he wants them, luxuriating in the simple comfort of it. “You should stay home and rest today.”

“Can’t. Pentagon will win.” 

Tom feels Pete’s laughter as much as he hears it. “Go back to sleep, Tom. You’ve still got an hour.”

He hums his agreement, already drifting back off.

When he wakes up again, his phone reads 0530—much later than he’d like considering his first call of the day starts at six—and Pete’s irate text reads, You’ve gotta be shitting me, Tom.

Now you know what it feels like, he replies spitefully, and rushes to get ready to face down the DoD powers that be for the third day in a row. After years of finding out about Pete’s shit via others calling to complain, it’s about time Tom got his comeuppance.

—

Admiral Beau “Cyclone” Simpson is, to put it mildly, not impressed by Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and he’s not afraid to let Tom know that. “Look, sir, I’m sure you have your reasons, but he’s—”

“The only qualified instructor for the job,” Tom finishes pointedly, resting his elbows on his desk and steepling his fingers as he considers the man sitting across from him. Beau’s reaction to Pete is a near carbon copy of Tom’s first impression of Maverick in an official capacity, so he understands his hesitance. “Are you familiar with his service record, Beau?”

“I don’t doubt his ability to fly this mission, sir. I doubt his qualifications to teach it. By his own admission, Top Gun fired him.”

“Thirty years ago, and at the DoD’s behest to free him up for spec ops,” Tom replies. “Admittedly, he wasn’t much of a teacher at the time, but there’s no one alive today who knows tactics better than he does and he’s spent years leading teams assigned to run black ops with him. He’s more than capable.”

Cyclone frowns, but nods his acceptance all the same. “I’m honestly surprised you didn’t have him sent to me as team leader.”

Tom nods. It’s a fair point—one he’d considered too. That said, “At some point, we need to train a new generation, not call the past one out of retirement. That’s our job here.”

Cyclone smiles ruefully. “So he’s the last resort option is what I’m hearing.”

Tom rewards him with a pleased grin. “Smart man, Simpson. You’re a smart man.”

Cyclone gets to his feet and prepares to leave at the clear dismissal. 

“Oh, and Beau?” Tom says. Cyclone looks back at him sharply. “You don’t have to be nice to him on my account. He does his best work under a firm hand.”

Beau actually laughs at that. Sarcastic and short, but a laugh all the same. “That explains so much, Admiral.”

—

When Tom hears the front door open that evening, he’s in the living room reviewing the authorizations the mission will require. He flicks to the next page without looking up and says, “I left your dinner warming in the oven.”

Then Pete says, “I saw Bradley,” and Tom’s heart skips a beat.

“Did you talk to him?” he asks immediately, but Pete’s already shaking his head. 

“No, I—” Pete exhales roughly, expression pinched, and Tom is brutally reminded of the day he last laid eyes on their son himself. “No.”

Photos really can’t prepare a father for the reality of his boy turning into a man in his absence. The light catches Pete’s eyes, shining faintly in the low glow of the room, and Tom knows exactly how hard it must’ve hit him. He stretches out his arm and Pete curls into his side without hesitation, sighing when Tom draws a comforting hand across his back. “Are you going to be able to do this tomorrow?”

There’s a poignant pause before Pete nods. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m gonna do it,” he says, then more firmly, “I’ve gotta do it.” Tom’s relieved to hear the resolve in his voice. “You were right not to warn me he'd been selected, Ice. There’s no one better and I need to get over my own bullshit. It’s been fourteen years. It’s time to face him again.” Pete pauses, then says, “You know the worst part, Tom?”

“Besides the DoD pushing for immediate deployment, the threat of impending death, and the illegal Russian nuclear facility?” he asks dryly.

Pete huffs and shoots him a half-hearted grin. “Yeah, besides all that,” he says, then sighs and continues, “The worst part is we both know he’ll be at the front of the pack here. I can pick him, prove I believe in him, and then immediately send him off to die—or I can choose someone else and find out if it’s possible for him to hate me more, while also being down a team leader.”

They sit together in silence for a long moment before Pete speaks again. “Any chance your endless list of personal connections has a fix for this?”

“Why do you think I recalled you, Pete?” he asks seriously. “You’re it.”

“Well fuck,” Pete mutters. “That’s a sign of the apocalypse if ever there was one.” 

He drops his head back onto Tom’s shoulder and Tom squeezes his arm softly in return as they lapse into another heavy silence. Tom thinks maybe he’s finally getting too old for this shit, too run down. It never used to exhaust him pulling strings like this. 

Maybe it’s just that his kid is involved this time.

Pete, well acquainted with Tom’s tendency to brood and forever trying to lighten the mood, eventually breaks the tension. “Okay, Bradley and Seresin though.” Tom snorts at the abrupt change in subject and shoots Pete an amused glance. “No, seriously, they were at the Hard Deck tonight and—jesus. Have you ever seen them together, Ice?”

“Not in the same room,” he admits. “Although Seresin’s pining is probably still visible from space, the stubborn idiot.”

“You should’ve seen our Rooster. It was painful to watch. The secondhand embarrassment alone was…” Pete lets out a low whistle and shakes his head. “We were never that bad, right?”

“Well I certainly wasn’t.”

—

When his Saturday appointment finally arrives, Tom almost isn’t surprised by what the doctor tells him—not after everything else has gone so catastrophically sideways in the span of a week. Of course his body has betrayed him when he can least afford it.

As he sits in the exam room and awaits the doctor’s return, he palms his cellphone and debates who he needs to call first. The obvious answer is Pete, but he’s probably at 20,000 feet right now and that’s where he needs to stay when every minute of training counts. When he eventually puts the phone to his ear, it only rings twice before the call is answered. “Cyclone,” he says without preamble, “do you have a moment to speak privately?”

“Of course, sir,” he replies. “If you’re calling about Maverick—”

“I have stage four throat cancer.” 

Abrupt silence follows his pronouncement. Tom stares blankly at the far wall of the exam room and counts his breaths. He wonders if this is how Carole felt all those years ago, wonders if she even paused to grieve before she came to him for help. 

“Sir…” Beau says shakily. “I’m so—”

“None of that,” Iceman tells him firmly. “I’m calling to discuss logistics. When Maverick picks Rooster to lead this—”

“He’s not going to—”

“You’ll find I have thirty-five years of insight on the subject, Admiral Simpson. He will. And when he does…” Tom exhales heavily. It tastes of his own mortality, weaker and more fleeting than Tom ever realized. It terrifies him, but not because of what it means for his own life. “I need to know you’ll look after my boys for me, because I may not be able to do it much longer.”

The line goes quiet again. 

A lesser man may have immediately offered insincere reassurances or false platitudes, even rejected the truth altogether. There are those who believe Tom Kazansky to be infallible, perhaps even immortal, as immutable and unchanging a force as gravity itself.

Beau Simpson is not that man. 

When he eventually speaks, he chooses his words carefully, but the certainty in his voice leaves no room to doubt that he means them. “I’ll do everything in my power to get your son home safe from this, Admiral. Of that, you have my word.”

Something in Tom’s chest settles with the knowledge. “Thank you, Beau. I owe you.”

“No, Tom. You absolutely don’t.”

—

Tom collapses in his office a week later. He doesn’t remember that part. What he does remember is waking up in a hospital bed with a tube down his throat, then Pete sitting at his bedside and telling him the doctor’s have agreed to operate. 

He also remembers the look on Bradley’s face, the way he gripped Tom’s hand, the way he sobbed when Tom told him he loved him through the pathetic intermediary of a typed message. He wishes he’d been able to say it instead.

Look after each other, he thinks as he goes under. 

He wishes he’d been able to say that too.

Chapter Text

[July 2016]

When Tom wakes up five days later, the second sign that something is off is that his sister Sarah is at his bedside instead of Pete. The first, of course, is that he’s woken up with his internal Maverick Bullshit Radar pinging in at Defcon 1 levels of nonsense afoot.

He’s known Pete for too many years not to have an intimate understanding of how he behaves when left untethered or unattended, and Tom’s near death experience certainly would've meant both. This instinct is quickly confirmed when Sarah doesn’t immediately call Pete back from wherever he’s at. It turns to outright alarm when she admits he deployed with the special detachment as team leader. 

Once the breathing tube is removed, Tom finds that while he still can’t speak—an anticipated consequence of the surgery that he’ll deal with later—he’s absolutely fit to raise an inquisition. Regardless of what his doctor may have to say on the matter, he'll be damned if he doesn't find out what's happened to his boys in his absence.

Tiana arrives within twenty minutes of his text, loaded down with equipment for a secure video call, cellphone already cradled between her ear and shoulder when she walks through the door. “Admiral Simpson,” she says as she makes her way toward him. “Status report.”

She freezes midway. Tom's breath catches, bracing for the worst.

“Maverick stole what?” she asks sharply instead, eyes darting to Tom's in utter disbelief. “An F-14? An enemy F-14 Tomcat? With Rooster?” Tom's torn between relief and incredulity, because what in the actual hell. “Forward me everything, sir, and contact me the moment they land.”

"Well," she says when she hangs up, "the good news is no one died and they managed to hit the target. The bad news is everything else."

So he's woken up to nothing short of a shitstorm. Fantastic.

Tom grants himself a moment to close his eyes and count backwards from ten very, very, very slowly. As he accepts the computer Tiana passes to him, he spares a moment to wonder why he’s even surprised. One would think thirty-some years of this shit would leave him incapable of that particular feeling where Maverick is concerned. 

If nothing else, he thinks with no small amount of gratitude, at least his boys are still alive. Anything else, Tom can deal with.

—

Relief, in Tom's experience, doesn't prevent him from also being furious, so it’s probably in everyone’s best interest he doesn’t currently have the ability to talk. If he could, he’s not sure he’d be able to stop swearing long enough for Cyclone to finish updating him on the sheer volume of bullshit his stupider half got up to in his absence.

And here he'd foolishly allowed himself to believe the Darkstar incident was Pete’s last grand act of insubordination. At best, it was an appetizer.

Tom can almost understand his unauthorized course run after Cyclone’s well-intentioned but misguided efforts to relieve him of his teaching position following Tom's hospitalization. Tom can definitely understand Maverick getting himself shot down covering Rooster from a missile strike. Stealing an F-14 right off the enemy’s bombed out airfield because he apparently had more faith in his ability to out-fly fifth gen fighters in a relic than he did in Cyclone getting search and rescue in once the air cleared, on the other hand...

His laptop case creaks ominously under the sheer force of his grip.

Add to that the fact Pete dragged Bradley with him on this little field trip from hell and it really is a miracle that—

“—somehow no one is dead,” Cyclone concludes from his seat at a briefing room table aboard an air carrier in the middle of Russian waters. “Maverick included.”

Yet, he types into the video call chat threateningly. It’s the second time he's said so in the last three weeks. Considering he hasn’t actually been conscious for most of one of them, it might be time to change that.

“Yet,” Cyclone agrees darkly. “Although given that he’s already spread his preferred brand of impulsive insubordination to the next generation, I’m not sure his demise would actually relieve my headache. My entire command team, for example, seemed to forget that S&R choppers wouldn’t have made it to land without being shot down while bandits were in the air. Meanwhile, the remaining Daggers were ready to fly in circles while fifth-gens picked them off just to see if he’d wave at them from the ground.”

The resigned sigh Cyclone lets out in the ensuing quiet is one Tom's well acquainted with.

“You know," Simpson continues, "for all that he’s a pain in my ass, I grant Maverick this—he inspires astonishing loyalty.”

Tom smiles slightly, silently commiserating. It’s a frustration he’s heard echoed by dozens of commanders over the years and one he’s experienced more than once himself. Command is a lonely position, particularly when the choice being made looks like abandoning a man to his fate.

“Even I thought about ignoring protocol for a moment,” Beau admits quietly. “And I didn’t think he survived.”

Careful, Admiral. It sounds like he’s growing on you too.

“Like a fungus, sir.”

Tom lets out a quiet huff of laughter. That’s definitely his idiot. 

Tell me about the launch.

“You mean the one that happened in the twenty seconds it took for us to verify that Rooster’s satellite signal and the F-14 Tomcat were one and the same instead of, say, a glitch and an enemy aircraft we’d have sent Dagger Spare to handle anyway?” 

Tom’s brows flit up. That’s the one.

“As I said, sir, it seems he's passed his impulsiveness on without reproducing.” Cyclone exhales heavily as he leans back in his chair. “In this instance, it was for the best. If Seresin had waited for clearance, he wouldn’t have made it in time.”

They both lapse into a contemplative silence at that. Tom very nearly lost both his partner and his son in the same moment, stuck in a hospital bed halfway across the world and absolutely powerless to do anything about it. It’s a deeply sobering thought, the kind that would incline him to show mercy even without knowing what he and Bradley are to each other.

Modify the record to show prior authorization occurred and threaten them such that they never do it again.

“How threatening are we talking, sir?”

Iceman smiles. Cyclone’s eyes widen fractionally in response.

Imagine what I’m going to do to Maverick and use it as inspiration.

Beau blinks several times, then lets out a long, slow breath and says, “I think the looming specter of a court martial might be more humane.” 

That’ll do too.

—

When the Dagger team, sans Rooster and Maverick, finally leaves the debriefing, Tom thinks he can faintly detect their embarrassment from all the way across the ocean. Four separate grounds for court martial, each followed by the simple way it could’ve been avoided, all delivered without Cyclone giving away that it was entirely for show. It’s heartening to see the art of discouraging bad behavior with cold reality is still alive and well. Beau really has quite the knack for it.

Still, he thinks as he rewatches the video Pete sent him an hour ago, he supposes he owes his future son-in-law an engagement present. It was a comedic tragedy of a proposal—if one can even call throwing a wedding band at Bradley’s face and demanding he put it on a proposal at all—but he did it. In the middle of a medbay with Maverick as his witness, Seresin finally got the fuck out of his holding pattern. It took five years of carting around a ring and shooting down an enemy plane at the last second, but he did it.

Tom pauses the video on the shot of Bradley smiling at the ring in open delight. It’s the same overjoyed expression he wore as he climbed into Ice’s jet on his twelfth birthday, something he'd wanted for years finally in his grasp. The way Jake looks at him only seals the deal, soft and sweet and utterly devoted. Maybe Tom's just getting sentimental in his old age, but it’s nice to see his kid so happy. 

Kids, he corrects, because apparently he’s getting another one. 

At any rate, Tom can be benevolent today.

I’ll handle it, reads the text he sends to Jake. And then, to be sure the message is passed along: This conversation didn’t happen. - COMPACFLT

Letting the children think he overrode their air boss just saves Cyclone the trouble of them realizing he’s not going to make good on his threats anyway. 

—

Bruised and bloodied and sitting in a medbay though they are when Tom calls, it's still wonderful to see Bradley and Pete together again after so many years apart. Unfortunately, relief still doesn't mean Tom isn't furious about the entire debacle, particularly now that he's aware of the details. If anything, the knowledge of how badly things could've gone—should have gone—only makes him angrier.

Right now, they're both on his shit list, personally and professionally.

Between the two of them, Rooster is undeniably more deserving of a pass. He’s younger, more impressionable, more easily led astray by Maverick and his "don't think, just do" mindset. He shouldn't have gone back—god, he could've gotten himself killed—but it's not a surprise he did it. Why the hell Cyclone approved them flying this mission together is beyond Tom, although he suspects Maverick's usual pigheaded insistence can be blamed for that. Pete must've believed Bradley wouldn't be affected watching him burn in—hell, Bradley might've believed the same before it happened—but Tom never would've allowed them to go together if he'd been conscious. 

Maverick has more lives than a cat. Rooster wouldn't have believed it though, not in the thick of things, not when he must've thought it meant leaving the man who raised him to die.

Not when it would have meant exactly that—jesus, listening to the mission audio as Bradley shot down an enemy helicopter with guns pointed right at Pete had been...

Hell. Absolute hell. 

So Tom is willing to give Rooster a pass for his part in this mess. Maverick himself, on the other hand—

“Captain Mitchell,” Tiana decrees on his behalf, “you’re grounded.”

Pete has the audacity to look indignant. “I—!”

Tom is having exactly none of that shit today, mercilessly glaring him into a chastened slouch.

It's not that he got himself assigned team leader—he was Tom's back up choice after all. It's also not that he chose their son to fly with him—that's defensible given Rooster's skill and the stakes of the mission. It's not even that he got shot down covering Bradley—god knows Tom would've done the same.

No, it's everything that came afterwards.

Maverick could’ve hiked his ass to a preassigned evac point or camped out with his GPS transmitting coordinates until the search teams arrived, but did he do that? Absolutely not. Instead, he stole a forty year old plane out of an enemy hangar, took off from a crater-filled taxiway of a tarmac, and took their kid on a joyride involving not one, not two, but three fifth-gen fighter engagements.

How the hell either of them made it out of that alive is beyond even Tom.

“Dunno where you’re gonna find a qualified babysitter for that one,” Bradley very bravely dares to mutter from his spot halfway behind Jake, as if he isn’t actively using his partner as a human shield. 

Tom turns the force of his glare on his son momentarily, viscerally pleased to learn it still cows him just as well now as it did when he was seventeen. Bradley may be his kid, but Rooster is a thirty-two year old grown man who damn well should’ve known better. After that comment, he’s burned his one free pass.

“Lieutenant Bradshaw,” Tiana continues without so much as looking to Tom for confirmation, “You’ll be joining him for the time being.”

Tom makes a mental note to buy her something nice when he gets released from the hospital. He’s often suspected she knows him well enough to read his mind, but it’s something else altogether to have it confirmed.

“But I—!”

“Shut up and take your lumps, both of you,” Jake says flatly. Tom raises his brows in quick agreement. Unauthorized jet launches aside, he thinks it’ll be nice to have someone else sensible in the family. He’s getting damn tired of carrying the load by himself.

Pete and Bradley look appropriately tenderized now, possibly even lulled into a false sense of security that Tom is done with them as Tiana signs off. After all these years, they should both know better than that. Tom has always made a point of ensuring their punishment lasts at least as long as his inconvenience does and Tom expects he’ll be inconvenienced by this particular mission for months. By the time he’s done, their asses will be fully cooked and they won't be doing it again.

He's not sure he'll survive them scaring him like this a second time.

When the call ends, Tom lays back against the frankly offensive number of pillows propping him up with an exhausted grunt, idly flipping his phone over in his hand as he contemplates the mission in its entirety. Now that the worst of his terror and fury have passed, something else starts to niggle at him: Pete's decision itself. Stealing an enemy F-14 was a stupid maneuver, far beyond even Maverick’s more creative fare, and that means there was a reason for his absurdity.

Pete. Explain.

To his credit, he doesn’t bother asking what. Established evac points too exposed to patrolling enemy choppers. GPS-jammer coverage much wider than expected. Probable S&R response time too long, if even possible. Risk of capture very high. 

So you stole a plane.

So I stole a plane.

Tom closes his eyes and massages his temples, fairly confident it shouldn’t be possible to have a headache when he’s on this many painkillers. Alas, as with everything, all things are possible where Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is concerned. 

When this is over, Tom’s retiring. Leaving the service won’t change that he’s essentially married to the eternal source of his stress, but it’ll at least eliminate the paperwork. He’s officially getting too goddamn old to keep up with both.

He swipes his phone back on and sends out one last message, half-genuine, half-commiserating. Welcome to the family, kid. No backing out now.

Seresin’s reply is immediate. Thanks. Now go the fuck to sleep, sir. I’ll watch the idiots.

“Listen to your future son-in-law, Tom,” Tiana murmurs from her seat at his bedside, already typing an updated mission report to include Pete’s information. “I’ve got this end under control.”

He nods slightly. Given that it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep his eyes open, he suspects compliance is mandatory anyway. For all that he’s slept for nearly a week, he could definitely do with a nap.

His phone pings one more time. 

I love you.

Tom smiles in spite of himself. Love you too, Pete.

Chapter Text

[August 2016]

When Tom told himself he was going to retire after the latest fiasco, it'd been more of a complaint than a promise. That said, when the smoke clears and he's given proper time to consider it, he realizes it’s actually the pragmatic decision. While his health is on the upswing, his career is at a tipping point. He's had a long tenure as Pacific Fleet Commander—far longer than usual in fact—and he's due a new assignment soon, likely in D.C. A year ago, the prospect would've appealed to him, but that was before he had his family back together. Now—

Well, now all he wants is time to spend with them. In the end, that makes the decision a simple one.

Of course, choosing to retire is easier said than done, particularly as a fleet commander. The sheer volume of paperwork alone is liable to make a lesser man weep, although it's actually the practical considerations required to ensure a smooth transition that'll take the most time. To that end, he has preparations to make and promises to keep before he formally takes his leave of the service.

Thankfully, he has the connections for both.

Back when Viper retired, Tom thought a career captain’s vault of favors was impressive. Now he realizes it pales in comparison to the accumulated goodwill collected by a four-star admiral. After thirty-five years, his personal war chest truly is something to behold. As he sits at his desk in his study and contemplates the long list of work in front of him, he’s reminded of Viper’s wisdom from twenty years ago: “You know the best part about retiring, Iceman? You’re finally forced to cash in on all your outstanding favors.”

Tom leans back in his chair and smiles, fully intending to do just that.

“Ice,” Pete says reproachfully as he steps into the room, “Out of curiosity, what part of resting is hard for you? Is it the laying down part or…?”

The not doing anything part, he types in the face of Pete’s scowl. I don’t judge what you do when you’re bored.

"That's literally all you've done since we met, Tom."

He waves a dismissive hand in Pete's direction, attention back on the outline he’s drafting. He’s already got the broad strokes of it mapped out, has set large swaths of it in motion, but the devil’s always in the details and he’s not announcing his intentions to retire until the last of his plans are firmly in place. 

“What’re you even doing?” Pete asks, passing him the mug of tea he brought before putting his chin on Tom's shoulder to get a better view of the screen. He can practically feel Pete’s eyebrows making their way up to his hairline as he reads. “Holy shit,” he says slowly. “Seriously?”

Tom takes a very satisfying sip and shrugs the shoulder Pete’s not currently leaning against.

“Fletcher, Thompson, King—shit, you’ve got Warlock on here.” Tom takes another sip. “Admiral Zarrale owes you? For what?”

Besides the latest fuck up? Nothing. He’s just terrified of me.

“Coward,” Pete mutters, absently turning to kiss the side of Tom’s head as he scrolls through the list. When he gets to the last name, Pete startles. “I’m sorry—you have the President’s personal cell number on here? How?” 

Golf.

“You hate golf.”

Needs must, he types. Pete shoots him an incredulous look. Tom grins at him then pulls up another document for Pete’s perusal.

“Oh.” Tom nods. “For me?” Tom gives him a flat look. “Oh, sorry, are we still pretending you only do things for the good of the Navy? Alright sweetheart, whatever you say.”

It’s also for the kids.  

“You’re giving me command of a special operations air carrier wing with the kids making up the first squadron.” Pete slips his arms around his waist and beams. It’s his megawatt smile, the one that absolutely devastates anyone on the receiving end of it, all unbridled joy with a promise of mischief that can make anything seem like a good idea. Not even Tom is immune to its effects. “Shit, sweetheart, it’s not even my birthday!”

Tom leans back in his chair slightly, glancing over at the door to the study for a brief moment before inclining his head at Pete conspiratorially. For this to work, there’s one thing you’ll have to do.

“Anything,” Pete replies immediately.

Tom grins and clicks on a minimized document.

Pete freezes, face slowly morphing into the sort of abject horror normally reserved for the moment just before an enemy missile connects. It is, to put it mildly, deeply and viscerally satisfying, warming Tom all the way down to the tips of his toes. He doesn’t even try to conceal his pleasure in the wake of it. Hell, he thinks smugly, of all people, he has the most right to wear his triumph openly. Thirty-five years of this man’s bullshit, insubordination, headaches, and grief—thirty-five fucking years of it—and this is Tom’s grand act of revenge.

Pete looks a bit like he’s going to cry. It’s absolutely beautiful.

When he speaks, his voice cracks. “You can’t promote me.”

‘Anything,’ Tom mouths smugly, pointing at the carrier wing orders pulled up alongside Pete’s promotion selection notice. Tiana abandons her post filming in the doorway to snap a picture of Pete’s face up close. 

Admiral Pete “Maverick” Mitchell—it really is a moment that needs to be saved for posterity.

—

“You promoted him?!” 

I told you I’d handle punishing him, he types into the video call chat.

“I’m not sure you understand the definition of punishment, sir. It’s supposed to be directed at the perpetrator, not the rest of us.”

Tom smiles indulgently. Personally, he thinks it’s a good sign that the only person taking Maverick’s promotion worse than Pete himself is the man whom he’s leaving him to. 

Good luck, Admiral, he tells Cyclone just before he ends the call. For good measure—and just in case Beau gets it in his head to quit before Tom can get out himself—Tom forwards him a copy of both the photo and video of Pete’s reaction to Tom’s decree.

The text bubble that shows Cyclone is typing appears and reappears a half dozen times before he finally pulls himself together enough to reply. If you’re going to subject me to a squadron of Maverick’s hand trained flying monkeys, we’re naming them the Bane Daggers, sir.

Fair terms, Tom thinks as he makes a note to have it done, and accurate besides. 

He’s so glad to know this won’t be wholly his problem for much longer.

—

[October 2016]

The longer he gets to linger in it, the more Tom comes to understand Viper’s poorly concealed glee when he finally announced his retirement a mere two months ahead of its arrival. There’s a certain satisfaction in calling in favors he’s held in reserve for years, acting with near impunity while people still can’t determine if he’s preparing to move up or move out, all while having more free time than he’s had in decades as he delegates his less pressing responsibilities.

Life is good, he thinks as he sits in the hangar he bought Pete almost sixteen years ago and watches him willingly hand over control of the P-51 to Bradley for their next trip up. His kid is home, he’s got two weddings to look forward to, and he’s about to pass the reins onto the next generation. 

“So, it’s been bugging me,” Jake says from his seat beside Tom. “Do you even have an office up in Lemoore?”

Tom grins—speaking of the next generation. He and Maverick have something of a bet going on. Maverick’s got his money on Rooster being the next member of their family to play admiral, but Iceman, well… 

Watching Bradley’s louder half work through exactly how Tom managed to use him as bait to get his son back home is all the proof he needs that he’s put his money down on the winning proposition. Seresin’s got a real future as a wrangler.

(And a shit-stirrer, as Tom finds out several weeks later when he has to bail out both his future son-in-law and his future spouse after they nearly destroy the engine of an F-18 showing off for the current Top Gun cohort during an “educational demonstration” on the restricted-range. Maybe he should’ve put his money on Bradley after all.)

—

[November 2016]

Admiral Kazansky stops by his office one afternoon at the start of November and asks, apropos of nothing, “Are you aware of my Jar of Favors, Beau?” 

“I…think the entire Navy is, sir,” Cyclone replies slowly. After the bombshell that was Maverick’s promotion, Beau’s developed something of an intuition for when Kazansky is about to drop another—though perhaps that’s just his healthy sense of self-preservation kicking in.

At any rate, alarm bells are going off.

“Well,” Kazansky continues as he steps inside and closes the door, “seeing as I’m retiring at the end of next month, I think it’s about time I cash them in en masse.” 

“I was under the impression that was how we got the newest air wing, sir.”

“Oh, that?” Kazansky shrugs casually. “That was a mid-range payout at best. I saved the bulk of my collection for ensuring one last minor detail.”

Beau blinks. As a three-star admiral and someone who witnessed the creation of said carrier wing, he’s firmly aware of exactly how much effort it must’ve taken Kazansky to finally convince the Pentagon to cede to his decade long demands for a dedicated special operations division. The idea that he considers that mid-range at best is slightly terrifying and Cyclone isn’t a man who’s easily frightened. He spares a moment to contemplate what that sort of leverage could possibly end with, but his brain draws a blank, no results returned. 

“To that end—” Oh hell, he thinks with nothing short of trepidation. “—I’d like to personally congratulate you, Beau.” 

“On what, sir?” he asks, openly suspicious.

“Your selection for promotion.” 

“...what?” 

“And pending appointment to the Pacific Fleet Command.” Beau distantly hears his hand clatter to the desk with a thunk, jaw dropping open. Never mind what he thought before, this is his brain drawing a blank. Outgoing Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky claps him firmly on the shoulder and heads for the door. “Time to start your own jar, Beau. Assuming you haven’t already.”

When the door clicks shut behind him, Beau allows himself the luxury of a quiet but dignified meltdown. “Oh, fuck me.”

—

[December 2016]

After fourteen years of holidays spent alone together, Tom's forgotten what it's like to have more than just Pete at home with him. While Jake and Pete combined are enough to bring the noise level back up to pre-2000s levels, reminding him sharply of the way Carole and Mav used to bicker while he and Bradley tucked themselves away in the nearest quiet corner for safety, it's the rest of the menagerie that's brought it to ear-splitting levels. As he exchanges a look with his son from their usual spot on the couch that New Years Eve, he accepts that peace is probably nothing more than a pipe dream from here on out. 

Maverick, Tom is coming to understand, views commanding his own air wing as a lesser form of adoption. By extension, Tom now has the dubious honor of playing father figure to a baseball team worth of adult children. Between trips home to see their actual families for the holidays, they've been popping in and out of his house, merrily fighting over the guest bedroom and various couches whenever they've stayed too late visiting, as if they don't all have their own places on post. Tonight, all twelve of the Daggers and a handful of their significant others have taken up residence in Tom's house, drunk and reveling their way into the new year.

"I need new friends," Bradley mutters as they watch Coyote and Payback try to cheat their way through a game of poker with Jake and Phoenix. "And maybe a new fiancé," he adds when Jake flicks a card directly down the front of Phoenix's shirt after the other two try to slip it into the stack. 

"For safe keeping, assholes," Jake shouts at them, entirely too loudly for how small the living room is, while Phoenix pats her chest and smirks. Behind Jake, Pete is so focused on shamelessly giving Coyote and Payback hand signals in an effort to help them out that he misses Phoenix's well-timed elbow to the stomach, doubling over with a faint wheeze when it lands. 

Tom sighs. "I shouldn't have given him an air wing."

Bradley graces him with a private grin and tells him softly, "Glad you did though, Pops."

"Yeah," Tom says, smiling. "I am too."

"Glad to be home too," Bradley admits quietly. "I'm sorry I was gone so long."

"I'm sorry we drove you away," he replies, reaching out to squeeze his hand briefly. "We always missed you."

Bradley squeezes back. "Always missed you guys too. Let's make a point of not doing it again."

"Agreed."

"What're my favorite trouble makers plotting, huh?" Pete demands as he leans over the back of the couch and claps his hands on their shoulders. "Birthday shenanigans for the old man?"

Tom closes his eyes and sighs. It's probably too late to call off the wedding at this juncture, but it remains a constant temptation. 

"Brave words from a man who dyes his gray hairs and tries to pass it off as good genetics," Bradley informs him. Pete flicks a finger into his ear repeatedly until Bradley abandons the sofa with a scowl, slapping his hand away. "Yeah, alright, you're on your own, Pops. I'm gonna go supervise poker before it turns into a strip tease."

Given that Jake and Payback have both taken off their shirts amid catcalls from Halo and Fanboy, Tom thinks that's already a lost cause. Still, "Good luck, kiddo."

Pete takes over Bradley's spot immediately, stretching his arm along the back of the sofa and over Tom's shoulders. It's one of his more subtle maneuvers—one of the few public displays of affection Tom allows in front of the kids actually—and it never fails to make Tom smile. Then Pete presses his luck, darting in close to drop a quick peck on his cheek and grinning widely when he leans away. 

"Pete..." he warns.

"Happy birthday, sweetheart," he says, a little smug but mostly sincere. His grin turns into a softer smile as he leans in for another kiss, slower this time, chaste and sweet. When he pulls away, his eyes are half-lidded, expression as fond now as it was the night they first met. Tom suspects his own is much the same.

Across the room, half the kids have started chanting for a proper game of strip poker amid Bradley and Bob's fierce protests. If the pile of shirts at the center of the table is any indicator, the buy in process has already started.

"Should we put a stop to that?" Pete asks as they turn to look at their collective of feral aviators. 

"You're welcome to try," Tom answers mildly, "but I'm retired from the wrangling business these days."

"That so?" 

"Well," he clarifies in the face of Pete's knowing grin, "with one exception."

This time, Tom's the one to lean in, unbothered by the sudden attention of the squadron as they send up a drunken cheer at his unexpected lapse in propriety. He figures he's allowed the occasional indulgence. It's his birthday and retirement party all rolled into one after all.

"I love you," Pete tells him softly after they pull apart.

Tom taps the space over his heart twice. "Always." 

It's an easy promise to keep.