Chapter Text
Being Maverick is, somewhat fittingly, a pretty lonely affair.
The Darkstar program staff appreciate his skill, and diligence, and perhaps even a bout of recklessness now and again, when it gets results, but they are mostly tech personnel, not pilots — so, quite naturally, there remains distance between them. Maverick likes the team well enough, and they're pleasant right back to him; that's as good as it gets. There's always a looming, inevitable possibility of being transferred, and hence little point in trying to close that rift. Hondo is a good friend, though. Maverick allows himself to have that one luxury.
There's Ice, and Maverick loves Ice; but Ice's got his own life and family now. Maverick comes when Ice calls, work permitting, and basks in the warmth of familiarity, of being close to the people who are benevolent and generous enough to want him. Sarah is sweet to him, and Ice keeps shielding him from the ire of whoever important Maverick managed to vex this time, but above all else, he still acts like he can stand Maverick's company. For their kindness, Maverick does his best to stay out of the way.
And then there's Bradley, and… well. The story’s getting old by now, but Maverick's infamously bad at letting go. For someone so glaringly absent from his life, Bradley is everywhere, in every nook and cranny of it. So much of Maverick’s free time and energy is — has been for years — dedicated to filling that empty space by painstakingly collecting tiny glimpses of Bradley’s life. Most of it remains steadily out of reach.
The official information on his career, even an occasional picture, Maverick can get his hands on — this part mostly involves asking embarrassing favours of Ice. And it should be, by any reasonable measure, enough. The pictures might even be too much. Bradley would have been furious with indignation, had he known. He would have seen it as an intrusion, and perhaps that's what it is. Perhaps seeking out anything about him, where Bradley has made it crystal clear Maverick’s presence and meddling were unwanted, is overstepping in and of itself.
But Maverick can’t help wondering about every other side to him; all the personal minutiae that family members know about each other and that you can't learn from anywhere if you're not at your loved ones' side. Bradley the child, even Bradley the teenager, used to tell Maverick everything. Losing that easy trust has been the hardest part, the ultimate price for keeping his promise to Carole. Maverick still misses it. Still thinks about it almost daily.
So much time has passed; the formative years that set and solidify personality and habits. What is Bradley like now, as a fully-fledged adult? Did he form his own circle, the navy aviators' brand of a band of brothers, with his peers? What is he like with his friends, his rivals, his jet? Does he still sing, and does he sing with infectious unabashed energy like his father?
Maverick doesn’t have all that much else to think about, save for his service and his flights, and, try as he might, they never managed to become quite the entirety of his life.
A pretty lonely affair, all and all.
Get threatened with court-martial enough times, and you get used to it.
For the record, the Darkstar stunt was plenty worth it. Asking for forgiveness gets you way further than asking for permission; once something is done, nobody — no matter how vindictive — can take that away. The triumph of it thrums under Maverick’s skin, heady and proud, keeping his back straight and shoulders set through the exhaustion and twinges of soreness. This is what he’s made for. The rush of being airborne never got old.
Thirty years and counting of flying notwithstanding, he’s never felt anything comparable. The view alone was… exceptional is too blank a word, lacking in vibrancy and scope for the wild, rampant sense of awe that took over once he'd hit Mach 10. The kind of awe astronauts must feel, looking down at Earth from the orbit. The kind of awe that makes your chest constrict with unadulterated joy for something larger than human senses can embrace.
Every pilot is a romantic at heart — even Ice, although that point remains viciously contested.
The Darkstar team has kept their funding; only for now, but there isn't much Maverick can do strategically, so he chooses to count his tactical, immediate blessings. Speaking of little things, the glass of water he was kindly offered in that diner after the ejection was the best he's ever tasted. How’s all that for a net positive?
He could have done without the bruised ribs and the feeling his brain got thoroughly scrambled in-place, but one's luck cannot be boundless, now can it? He’d just prefer if his head was throbbing a little less while a superior officer is chewing him out, is all.
It's not like he wants to be in the hospital; loathes these places, honestly — which is pretty unappreciative of him, considering the number of times various medics had to care for him over the years, but he can't change how he feels. He doesn't even want to be there, Maverick reasons, so it makes precisely zero difference whether anyone cares to put him through a medical or not. He walked away from the crash site unassisted, for fuck’s sake. (Walked is, as opposed to limped, a very dignified word.)
There's only a certain extent to which he can force himself to be amused by any of it. It’s not Maverick's first rodeo, hardly even the dozenth, but some of the words sting — mostly the ones he knows are true. He’s not getting any younger, and the high command is not getting any more forgiving. Justifying grounding one of the top pilots in his prime, especially if it takes defying a fleet commander, seems like a waste of effort. Forcing a vet into long-overdue retirement for his own supposed good is closer to charity than it is to being wasteful.
Maverick despises the notion of charity cases with burning passion. Escaping it is a different matter entirely.
Getting into Darkstar, he’s been steeling himself to finally meet the consequences of his actions — an easy choice at the time, despite the graveness of the outcome. Should have known it was going to come to this instead.
Ice protects him — again, like every other time before it. Maverick feels… he feels so much, and his head is pounding and his ribs ache so insistently he might end up needing that hospital after all. Above all, above any relief at being granted yet more undeserved grace, there’s shame.
He's ashamed of needing Ice’s protection and ashamed of wanting it. You screw up, Iceman makes the call, and you're back in the saddle again. He's heard it enough times to forget who said it first. They’ve been doing it for years, and it never fails to astound him — the tireless, unwavering quality Ice’s guardian angel act seems to possess. Without fail and with impeccable timing, it’s there, and Maverick never learnt to expect it.
“As much as I’m not disposed to admit it, you're an excellent pilot,” Ice once told him, one of the first times he’d bailed Maverick out of trouble of his own making. “One of a kind. The navy would do us all a disservice by grounding you. All these stripes have to be good for something.”
Sure, Maverick is useful enough, but the navy would do just fine without one pilot — even an exceptional one. He’s not so delusional as to think otherwise. A naval aviator without naval aviation, through? A bit of a sorrier sight, that one. At least some of Ice’s steadfast care is sympathy, Maverick knows, and sympathy is… a fickle thing. There's never enough to go around. The most important thing is not to ask for it; it's never looked upon kindly, and denial is harder to bear than negligence.
Never needed to ask Ice. From the first time he awkwardly approached Maverick after… after Goose, and they had their first civil conversation — one of condolences — that protective side to Ice has always been present, a supply of humanity that never ran out, however much Maverick tested his patience.
He thinks of calling Ice and saying thank you, and, with more of that stifling shame, decides against it. He cannot handle another lecture right now — even a half-hearted one — so he doesn't invite it. Ice might be in the mood to spare him; he might just be disappointed, and that's worse. Maverick thinks he might not even be surprised of having had to step in, considering how habitual this has become; that's worse.
The assignment is urgent, but Maverick gets a night to recuperate on his own; Ice’s doing, no doubt — and the issue must be pressing for Ice to accept this arrangement, or he would have found a way to force Maverick into a medical leave.
All he wants is some time to rest. On top of the world, in the cockpit of the fastest plane on Earth, he felt like — like none of him was present in that moment, so insignificant before the staggering beauty of the planet below. He wants that feeling of not being in his body, not being anywhere at all, back for a while.
Maverick returns to what passes for a home these days and crawls into his aeroplane, half-disassembled and unfit for any purpose; he’s feeling a surprising amount of kinship with that thing. The cockpit is not exactly like a fighter jet's, but it’s tight and uncomfortable enough, smells like fuel and machines enough, to trick himself into ignoring the difference. Curling up on the front seat — he’s always been small, and he went a long way from feeling threatened by anyone pointing that out to annoyed embarrassment to being able to laugh at the gentle teasing it earned him with some of his fellow flyers — Maverick can almost pretend someone is in the back one to keep him company as he’s lulling himself to sleep through the pain and apprehension of things to come.
Bradley — Rooster; Maverick wouldn’t be caught embarrassing either of them by slipping up in something this obvious and obviously unwanted — sings like his father, indeed. Rooster’s different in most other things, Maverick is long past that private, unfair habit of seeing Goose in the kid; way before their falling out, Rooster was his own person — stubborn where Goose was yielding, cautious where Goose could be swayed into mischief, smart and short-tempered and persevering and wonderful. He even sports the silly shirts with his own personal flair.
But he sings just the same.
The lieutenants are awkward in the obnoxious high school reunion fashion, and Rooster had a tense moment or two with Hangman, but being at that piano changes him; fires him up and makes him let go. The others, too — as abrasive as they seemed through the initial interactions. Maverick distracts himself from the memories by making a note of the dynamic; he’ll be making a team out of them soon, and moulding together people who are used to being the best of the best is no easy feat. As the piano hits the tune, they’re all over each other in perfect joyous disarray.
I can work with that, Maverick thinks, desperately, while the flashes of the worst day of his life overwhelm the flashes of one of the best ones before his eyes as Rooster plays.
It's supposed to be a happy memory. He's meant to be over it by now.
His chest is heaving with suffocating panic; lungs so full of air it pushes and pushes from within so hard it feels like they might burst, and hollowly devoid of it at the same time. He’s been pulling high-G manoeuvres for his entire career as an aviator; they never bothered him anywhere as much.
He’s not even—not even afraid, just so very sad, and he knows this is only a memory. Just a trick his head is playing on the rest of his body. Right after the incident, he used to get these flashes of confusion where he’d be utterly convinced he was still out there, in a flat spin, heading out to the sea, in the water washing over his head in great unrelenting waves with the dead weight that is Goose’s body in his arms. This is different; he’s aware and present, his body just won’t listen.
Penny’s eyes are soft and worried on the other side of the glass, and Maverick waves her off in reassurance and steps away before she can decide to intervene. He’s not out to become the talk of the whole base on his first day back. Every single person at the Hard Deck is having a lovely time, and the squad needs a jump-start to bond over Rooster is fortunately providing; old triggers are not worth ruining it over.
Sliding down onto the sand, back against the wall, Maverick waits for it to pass.
Thirty years, and every now and again, some trivial thing or another would still send him spiralling. He’d gotten reasonably good at keeping it together in public — and then went and wasted all that effort, spending most of his time alone in the desert. He can’t fall apart like that on an active base, surrounded by curious eyes, some of which belong to his soon-to-be students.
Maybe it’s seeing Rooster again that's wrecking his composure, layered over what Cyclone had to say. New COs always go for the incident, none of it is hot news — Maverick’s reputation precedes him, and it’s only fair they want to establish who’s in charge right off the bat by landing a solid hit. He’s the sort of package that comes with a manual and warnings from all the previous places that had the displeasure of having him; the irony of a foster system kid, bounced from one temporary home to another, turning into a problem officer, shipped back and forth between remote postings, doesn’t escape him.
It still gets to him, sometimes. Ice could have warned him.
He shouldn’t have. Ice knows what’s good for Maverick. There wasn’t any other choice — Maverick wouldn’t have said no to the last place willing to keep him in the air, not when Ice had to call in a personal favour to take care of him, and that secrecy spared him the nervous anticipation and agony of decision; but he can’t help but feel a little betrayed. It’s an irrational, hurt feeling that would not be controlled and demands no satisfaction. On every conscious level, Maverick understands that Ice is doing what’s right and is grateful to him for trying; some part of him still aches for acknowledgement of how hard that was, seeing Rooster’s face on that screen completely unprepared.
Drawing a shaky breath, Maverick closes his eyes, pressing the back of his head against the wall, and listens. Despite everything, he still loves that song, and when the panic is gone, the ache it leaves in its wake tastes sweet.