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Bob trusted Natasha Trace with his life. Flying the uranium mission, while fucking terrifying, had also in some twisted fate delivered him his best friend on a silver plater.
He admired her in the air and on the ground. Sometimes he got the eerie feeling that their brains were wired exactly the same way. They were in sync. By the time they had realised this and decided to stay a team for the unforeseen future after the call back to Top Gun (but if they were honest, they both hoped it would be until the end of their careers) they were unbeatable.
Bob was as confident in his abilities and skills as ever. Gone was the imposter syndrome he had felt in the past while rising through the ranks at the academy and his first postings. He did not expect anyone to come up behind him, grab him by the back of his shirt like a little kitten and declare him the biggest fraud in new american history anymore, like he had for so many years. He had accepted that he was the best of the best and had acquired a healthy portion of self esteem. Nothing would change that. Or at least so he thought.
Two years after the afromentioned uranium mission he now found himself sitting in an empty mess hall on a carrier, listening to the engines of the planes flying over his head, missing out on his first training flight since he got food poisoning that one time in flight school.
He was waiting for Phoenix.
When they had met outside the locker rooms this morning she had looked pale, nearly ghost like, but had blamed it on a rough night caused by bad dreams and Paybacks snoring in the next room over. And she had insisted that she was fine. Bob had believed her, because in all the time he had known her she had never been sick. Not once. She had not even caught a single cold. Natasha Trace was a perfect picture of health.
That she was indeed not fine he had realised when, ten minutes later, she had thrown up her breakfast next to the wheels of their plane. The tower had promptly banned them from going up in the air and Natasha had been sent to the medbay on board. Puzzled Bob had looked after her. There was a first time for everything after all.
Omaha and Halo had taken their place and he had gone to the mess hall to wait for her.
He was very sure that Phoenix didn’t have food poisoning though, because everyone on their squadron, hell, the entire carrier had had the same dish for every meal since they left the harbour in April and they were doing fine.
He‘d been trying to piece together what could have made his pilot feel so sick for nearly fourty minutes when she finally appeared from the hallway and came over to where he was sitting, joining him on the hard metal benches of the carrier.
Deep down he felt ashamed that he had not second guessed her declaration of health earlier. Catching things she did not was literally his job. He was a WSO, he should guide her, give her advice. And after having worked with her for so long, he silently prided himself in being able to read her like a book at this point, having seen her go through nearly every emotion humanly possible.
Hungover after nights at the Hard Deck, sad when Rooster left for his last deployment, giddy when her sisters came to visit her on family day, eager when they were flying, focus, relaxed, angry to name a few. He should have known.
He couldn‘t make out the expression on her face now as she dropped down across from him.
“So?,” he asked her curiously.
Natasha blew away a strand of dark hair that had fallen out of the tight braid she wore for flying and looked at him through heavy lids. Her skin was still pale and her temples still a bit sweaty.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
“Oh”, he responded.
Out of all the possible outcomes, this was the one he had least expected. Maybe it hadn‘t even been on his list of guesses.
“Yeah. Oh.” Her voice was dry.
“How?”
Sighing, she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms before answering.
“You know, when a girl and a boy like each other very much…”
“I know how sex works, Phoenix.”
“Do you?”, she shot back. At least her humor was still intact.
“I think I mean more who?,” he corrected himself. “You don’t have a boyfriend. You have spent the past three months with me on this ship in the Atlantic surrounded by water. And you have a strict principle against dating navy guys.”
Which was true. Halo had tried several times to set her up with other pilots at the Hard Deck. Even with her cousin who was in the army.
Every time Natasha had politely declined her offer and exclaimed that she did not want her partner to be in the military as well. She was afraid that it would bleed to much into her personal life, she had explained. Which was a reasonable desire in Bobs opinion.
Then Nat would down her beer, join the others for a game of pool and that had been that.
“So who is it?”, he repeated his question.
Phoenix folded her arms on the table and let her head fall down on them.
Her voice was muffled by her clothes, but he could still understand her when she answered him.
“Maybe I have at one point in the past few months decided to throw my principles out the window.”
She sounded pained. Maybe even a bit embarrassed.
“So it is someone in the Navy?”, he followed up. Just to double check.
He took her groan as a yes.
“Spit it out Phe. I promise I wont say anything.”
“Guess.”
He huffed. Fine.
“Fanboy.”
“Mickey????,” she exclaimed and raised her head, staring at him in a mixture of shock and horror.
“You said he was cute!!!”
“Yeah, adorable cute, not having his baby cute!!”
“Jesus, alright I take it back. Coyote.”
“No.”
Mentally he went through every man she knew on this carrier.
His next guess was Fritz.
“He is married Robert. And I’m not a homewrecker. We went to his wedding in march, how could you forget that.”
“Payback.”
“Also in a relationship.”
This was getting increasingly difficult.
“Alright. Omaha.”
“Nope, pretty sure he is gay.”
There were only three options left.
“I think I’ve got it now“, he exclaimed triumphantly. “You and Rooster decided to become friends with benefits and now you are pregnant with your other best friends child.”
“Oh my god, Bob”, she groaned again. “ I love Rooster, but I wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole.”
“But that leaves Cyclone and Hangman and you’re not even into older guys!”, Bob exclaimed and threw his hands up in the air to emphasise on his frustration and cluelessness.
Silence fell over them.
Phoenix stared deep into his eyes.
“Bob.”
And then it sunk in.
“HANGMAN???“
He shrieked in shock like a schoolgirl during lunch break.
Natasha dropped her head again, this time fully on the table.
“You promised you wouldn’t judge me.”
“But you hate Hangman”, he stated, confusion tainting his words.
“I don’t hate Jake.”
“Oh my god, you called him Jake!”
“Yeah, he is the father of my child, can’t call him by the callsign forever right?”, she uttered sarcastically.
Then she raised her head again, only to flash him a devilish grin.
“Except in bed. He really likes to hear it there.”
“You are disgusting. I didn’t need to know that.”
She chuckled, proud to have reached her goal of weirding him out, although she didn‘t really feel like joking. Within the last hour her life had been turned upside down.
There was a storm roaring inside of her. She couldn’t focus on a single thought rushing through her head. She still felt sick, even if emptying her stomach out on the tarmac had helped her to get rid of the nasty sensation that had been plaguing her before the sun had even tried to shine its light on the waves surrounding them.
What was she supposed to do now? Soon she wouldn’t be allowed to fly any longer and then she would be on the ground for at least the next year. Her stomach would grow up to the size of a basketball and then she would have to push out said basketball and make sure it grew up to become a decent human being.
And oh god, she would have to tell Jake. Jake Seresin, who had been getting on her last nerve since they met back in the academy. Who was admittedly a great pilot and an even greater asshole. Who had saved Roosters and Mavericks asses on the Uranium Mission, and had refused to leave her alone ever since.
If she thought about it, she probably wouldn’t have ended up in this situation if the Navy hadn’t decided to put them on the same missions and deployments for the past two years. Probably not if they weren’t both so very stubborn and ambitious that every task and every training exercise turned into a competition between them.
And definitely not if they hadn’t stayed behind at the last yearly dagger squad get together to finish their last game of pool, which had culminated in their pent up sexual tension boiling over and them ending up in the Hard Deck bathroom. Poor Penny.
Natasha had promised herself then and there that it had been a one time thing. She was greatful that he had saved the life of one of her closest friends, but that was it.
Which of course, it wasn’t. Three weeks later they had found themselves in the showers on base after a particularly awful exercise. Then in the gyms storage room after everyone had left and more often than not they didn’t even make it home and just got to one of their cars.
Before the deployment, a few weeks after the Hard Deck bathroom he took her up to her family on Christmas, but that had been just kind of him, it lay on the way to his own either way. They talked the full five hours it took them to get to Bakersfield, and not once did he sound like the asshole that he was on duty.
She had called him on new years day when he had answered her traditional happy new years text she sent out to everyone with the words “thank you, hope yours started better than mine”.
From this call on she was very sure that most of his macho behaviour stemmed from highly dysfunctional family dynamics. Three older brothers, all of them in the army and parents that Jake only called and saw on festive occasions sounded like an icy cold enviroment to grow up in.
When they returned to base in the new year, nights together turned into days together. Not on purpose obviously. But no one else wanted to try out the new restaurants in town that Natasha wanted to give a go and she was the only one from their squadron that liked to go on her runs in the morning like Jake. It was just a new level of benefit. They still didn’t like each other. They just started to discover that there were less things they disliked about each other than both originally thought.
The bickering continued. The sarcastic comments, the rivalry in the air and on the ground became more heated in their colleagues eyes and just created more tension in theirs.
There just seemed to be this unexplainable energy that would always end up pulling them back together.
Six months of sneaking around and now Natasha was sitting there, pregnant, and it slowly dawned on her that maybe she had fooled herself.
It felt like a cruel joke of the universe that it took her to get pregnant to realise that maybe she had feelings for the one guy that had been the bane of her existence for most of the time she had known him.
Hangman was still an asshole. Just maybe he was her asshole.
While she had this inner monologue, Bob watched his pilots eyes turn glassy. He had truly never seen her like this.
On the other hand it was also his first time trying to support one of his best friends over an unplanned pregnancy with a guy he had never suspected that she had more than neutral feelings for.
He was wondering how this all had come together. He spent more time with Phoenix than anyone else. Well, considering her predicament apparently not, point still stood, they were together all the time. How had he not caught her sneaking off to have secret sex with Bagman? He had been sure that his observation skills were equally perfect on the ground as they were in the air. Apparently not.
But this was not what he should be focusing on.
“Nat?”, Bob adressed her. “You okay?”
He would need to find a new Pilot until she was able to come back to work.
Her bottom lip began to tremble.
“I don’t know”; she answered honestly, feeling tears well up in her eyes. Pregnancy hormones already seemed to take a toll on her.
“I can’t fly for the next year. You’ll have to find a new Pilot. I never really thought about having children and I don’t know how to tell him.“
„ Phe, you are going to be fine,“ he said and reached over the table to take her hands in his. „You are a great pilot. You will be a great mother and when you return you will be a great pilot again. As for Hangman, or Jake, as you like to call him now, while I am still unsure about what you see in him, I am certain I could have misjudged him if he was able to change your mind about him.“
Natasha made a sound that was a mixture of sobbing and laughing. But the glassy edge in her eyes had disappeared. He booked that as a win.
„Thank you Bobby“; she chuckled while simultaneously wiping at her eyes.
„Anytime, Phe. You know, Robert is actually a really cute baby name“, he said.
„I think I will have to add that to the list.“