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In retrospect, she realizes that they're in a relationship long after Hangman does because he keeps it so close to the vest that it takes a near-death experience for Phoenix to realize that their whole thing isn't quite as casual as she thought it was. The best worst kept secret is a lot to take in so she does what any person with a probable concussion and a healthy fear of commitment would do: she ignores it completely. After all, maintaining the status quo is a classic for a reason.
*
After the bird strike, the chopper plucks Phoenix and Bob out of the water and air lifts them straight to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego because protocol dictates that all mid-air evacs need to be evaluated with a CT scan. It seems unnecessarily dramatic to Natasha, but no one takes her medical-degree-by-virtue-of-watching-ER-reruns seriously so she is whisked to radiology fifteen minutes after being assessed in triage and offered half a tablet of Ativan for her troubles in case she starts to freak out during the scans.
Natasha reminds Doogie Howser that she didn't even freak out when her plane was literally on fire, but then the intern mentions that in times like this most people jump to thinking about those celebrity ski accidents where an epidural hematoma was wreaking havoc on some Oscar-nominated actress' brain while everyone thought she was in the clear. After that, Phoenix can't stop seeing a silent film on a loop of Bob crumpling to the ground when she closes her eyes, her breathing speeding up with every repeat until they hand her the meds to take the edge off.
For the next twenty minutes, Natasha feels like she is floating on a cotton candy cloud. Monitors beep and blood pressure cuffs cycle through recordings, but she is perfectly ensconced in an underwater snow globe where nothing can touch her. Even the needle prick in her arm to inject contrast feels like it is happening to a stranger; Phoenix is merely a spectator to someone else's near-death experience. She's still riding the buzz after they take her out of the CT machine and put her in a wheelchair to go back to the double room she'll be sharing with Bob until their films are read and the doctors can give them a disposition.
The nurse tells her that Bob is still being scanned so Natasha expects the room to be empty, but instead the door opens to reveal Hangman pacing the length of the room. He's still in his flight suit and his normally perfectly coiffed hair looks like it has been through a wind tunnel at the speed of light. When he sees her, a flash of something that could pass for concern flits over his features momentarily before being replaced by the more familiar sight of him relaxing into his surroundings like every room is just waiting for him to walk into it.
"Am I in purgatory?" Phoenix groans at Hangman before rejecting the transport person's offer to help her get back into bed. Her benzodiazepine bubble has popped and now she's back to being annoyed that she's here using up valuable hospital resources when she should be back in the air chasing down Mach 9.
"Is that any way to talk to someone who brought you a gift?" Hangman asks good-naturedly. To the nurse, he condescendingly explains, "She gets hangry when she hasn't eaten lunch." Natasha wonders if maybe the gift is making her so mad that she has no choice but to punch him in the face. Before she can ask, Jake pats the guy on the shoulder as he ushers him out of the room and closes the door.
"I don't see any nicely wrapped boxes around here, Bagman," Phoenix starts to say, still searching for the remote when he's at her bedside in three strides. She doesn't expect Jake to be this close when she looks up, his broad shoulders blocking the fluorescent light as he hovers over her. He looks simultaneously relieved and furious, but before Natasha can ask him if the concept of personal space has suddenly become foreign to him, Hangman cups her face with both hands and kisses her like the answer to that question is a resolute yes.
The whole point of sneaking around is not to do it where anyone can walk in at any moment to discover that she's been sleeping with her self-proclaimed nemesis. This is not what they do. Jake might be an exhibitionist, but Natasha doesn't get off on the thrill of getting caught so she should be pushing him away, but he's such a good kisser that her fingers curl around his dog tags to pull him closer instead.
"Was that the gift?" she asks when they finally pull apart. Natasha takes deep breaths to steady her heartbeat. The last thing she needs is for a well-meaning nurse to burst into the room because she thinks Phoenix is having an arrhythmia. Cheekily, she adds, "Good manners dictate bringing some sort of dessert when visiting someone at the hospital, Don Juan."
Phoenix expects a quip along the lines of Hangman telling her that he is the dessert, but what she gets instead is a frown and "You got a death wish, Phoenix? What kind of crazy person waits until the last possible moment to punch out of a burning aircraft?"
She pushes him off her so hard that he almost loses his balance as he wobbles on one foot. There is nothing less sexy than shop talk of the Monday morning quarterback variety. She doesn't expect him to understand her waiting for Bob to punch out first; to a one-man-show like Hangman, it would seem like Phoenix thought her engines would come back to life through the sheer force of her will and not that she felt accountable for someone else's life besides her own.
"I'm not in the mood to explain the concept of being supportive to you, Seresin."
"You mean stupid."
"I mean selfless," Natasha corrects.
"Hey, I'm plenty selfless!" he insists, waggling his eyebrows in case the in bed wasn't implied. Phoenix knows that he expects her to immediately counter with how much of a humanitarian he is not, but she settles for shooting daggers from her eyes until he holds his hands up in the air and apologizes for being a prick. Dropping into the maroon chair next to her bed, Hangman softly asks, "Am I allowed to ask if you're okay at least?"
"Other than whatever brain damage makes me keep saying yes to this," and here Natasha gestures between them while Jake smirks like he's so proud of being her favorite mistake, "I am totally fine. This song-and-dance is a formality."
He looks like he doesn't believe her, but after a beat, Jake announces, "Well, I did get you a gift," before fishing his phone out of his pocket, swiping a finger across the screen, and handing it to her. It is open to an email from The San Diego Audubon Society thanking Hangman for his generous donation on behalf of Natasha Trace and Robert Floyd to help foster the protection and appreciation of over one hundred and thirty different species of birds.
"You made us patrons of a bird conservancy?"
"After the trail of feathered destruction left in the air today, I figured you two needed all the good karma you could get," Hangman explains with a grin. For his trouble, she pelts him square in the shoulder with his own iPhone.
There's a knock before the same guy from earlier throws the door open to wheel Bob in. Bob's smile at seeing Phoenix is quickly replaced with a frown when he notices Hangman waving back at him.
"Did we die and go to hell?" Bob whines.
Hangman's only response is to toss her wingman a stuffed toucan he bought from the hospital gift shop.
*
Phoenix expects Hangman to leave after that – he's got a short attention span and hospitals are notoriously boring – but he makes himself at home by leaning back into the hard plastic chair as if it is as comfortable as one of those leather Ethan Allen recliners that Natasha's father has in his man cave. Jake sweet talks a nurse into sneaking him a cup of key lime Jell-O so he won't feel left out and shouts answers at the television screen faster than Alex Trebek can read the questions. It would be more impressive if they weren't watching a rerun of Jeopardy! Kids Week from 2013 and the entire category wasn't devoted to Katy Perry's discography, but with how smug Hangman looks when he gets the daily double before Bob, you'd think that he was securing an invite to join Mensa.
"Shouldn't you be at The Hard Deck celebrating Coyote not crashing into the side of a mountain today?" her wingman finally asks Hangman because every time Bob has mouthed why is he here to Phoenix, the best she can do is shrug.
"Javy decompresses with meditation," Natasha explains. It always takes a second for Phoenix to remember that Bob didn't go to flight school with them. She takes for granted that he doesn't have the same shared history because she and Bob are so in sync that it feels like she has known him forever.
"He'll do yoga, drink some ashwagandha tea to re-center himself, and be as good as new tomorrow morning," Hangman adds, his casual tone belying the worry that she knows he feels for his friend.
Doogie Howser chooses that moment to walk back in to tell them that the scans are normal and, other than having a few nasty bruises, they're both fine. In the same breath that Doogie clears them to return to flying tomorrow, he advises Phoenix and Bob to take it easy for the next few days, which leads Natasha to believe that he doesn't have any idea what a Top Gun pilot does for a living. Everything the Navy asks of them is counter to taking it easy, but Phoenix chooses to nod instead once he says that someone will be in shortly with the discharge paperwork.
"I'll give you guys a lift home," Hangman offers once their doctor has left, "but please try not to fight over who gets to sit in the front with yours truly."
"What's the opposite of calling shotgun?" Bob deadpans.
*
Hangman takes the long way back so that he can drop off Bob first, lying about how the gas station is closer if he takes Alameda when she raises an eyebrow at his transparency. He's such a control freak that she has never seen him drive on less than half a tank and she doubts that he has started now, but Natasha lets it go in favor of switching the Bluetooth to sync up with her phone once Bob is out of the car. The shift from Johnny Cash to Linda Ronstadt would be jarring if she wasn't used to bogarting his speakers by now.
Jake insists on walking her to the front door "like a proper Texas gentleman" and then has Phoenix struggling to remember which potted plant she taped her spare key to because she is too busy ogling his ass in that flight suit when he bends down to look under half a dozen flowerpots while mumbling about how her security measures need work.
"Now I remember," she finally proclaims with the snap of her fingers before going to the windowsill and grabbing the fake rock with a false bottom for her keys.
"Seriously? Why don't you just put out a welcome mat that says rob me?" Hangman frowns before straightening with a groan.
"You okay there, Grandpa?" Natasha leans against the doorway as she watches him put both hands on his hips and overextend his back until he hears a satisfying crack.
"You try sitting in the saddest chair from IKEA's Broke College Student Collection for four hours and then get back to me, Phoenix."
"Oh no, I think I left my tiny violin on the mantle!"
Whatever witty reply he's about to make is lost when Natasha grabs the front of his flight suit as she walks backwards into the house. He lets the momentum propel them in as he winds one arm around her waist to keep her close while she hooks hers around the nape of his neck. She kisses him unhurriedly, the frenzied worry from earlier that she could have died displaced by the lazy relief that things are back to normal. This is not the first time they've done this – this isn't even the fourth or fifth time by her best estimation – but it's not as if she has been keeping receipts in case she gets audited. All Phoenix can say is that it has been enough times that Hangman knows just when to kick his leg back to close the door behind him and can move them through her den and onto her couch without bumping into any lamps or side tables in the process.
Natasha winces ever so slightly when the back of her shoulder presses against the arm of the sofa. Jake jumps back to the other end of the couch immediately like someone blew an air horn between them. An apology tumbles from his lips like a babbling brook while he looks at her with enough apprehension that, if Phoenix didn't know any better, she'd think she was recovering from a bullet wound and not just sore from where the parachute strap pulled on the joint when it opened.
"Hey, come here," she says softly as she extends her arm and gestures for him to move closer. She has already pushed the accident out of her mind, but he still looks worried. "It's just a bruise."
"Didn't your doctor say to take it easy?"
Phoenix rolls her eyes. Of course, Jake chooses the worst moment to be considerate. Taking matters into her own hands, Natasha crosses the chasm between them until she's practically in his lap.
"You are easy," she reminds him before running her fingers through his soft hair. Like clockwork, Jake groans Natasha's name into her neck as the last vestiges of his resolve give in to her highly effective skills of persuasion. Kissing the hinge of his jaw, Phoenix reminds him that her doctor might as well be a teenage dweeb who has never gotten laid. "Can't let one nerd's celibacy ruin it for the rest of us, Seresin."
"Actually, if you ever bothered watching the show, you'd know that Doogie Howser was quite a hit with the—"
"Shut up."
Jake finally gets on the same page and leans in to kiss her back with a reverence that leaves Natasha a little lightheaded. Her doctor also told her to be on the lookout for things like this, but she's positive this isn't the context he had in mind.
"Is this okay?" With his forehead touching hers, he whispers, "It sounded really bad over comms today, Nat. I thought…" Jake stops short of reminding her that she could have died.
"How embarrassing would it have been if a bird strike took out the Phoenix?" Natasha deflects with a chuckle. Examining her mortality would only kill the mood right now. With an exaggerated eye roll, she continues, "If you're that concerned, Bagman, I'll let you do all the work this time."
"How is that different from every other time?" Hangman asks as one corner of his lip tugs up into a smirk before he kisses her shoulder. It's not her fault that he fucks like it's an Olympic sport. Who is Natasha to dissuade him from following his passions?
"So mouthy," she shoots back before dragging his face closer, his own desperation hungry against her lips.
*
Isn't this how these things always go? Phoenix is fine until she's not. Until she wakes up in the middle of the night covered in sweat with her brain flitting between REM sleep and wakefulness while a fight-or-flight response surges through her body. Even under the harsh fluorescent lights of her bathroom, Natasha can't shake the feeling. She tries to wake herself up under a stream of freezing water, but the flames lick at her lungs and her nostrils singe as if she's still in the burning cockpit of her nightmares. Bob screams and screams and screams until his voice is hoarse from the blanket of smoke covering his mouth. They are fixed in place like troublemaking children stuck in time out because they can't eject from their seats in this alternate timeline and Natasha feels so powerless that she stops breathing long before they sink into the Pacific Ocean.
It's just a stupid dream, she tells herself, but Phoenix feels untethered and listless even after her shower. Standing in the kitchen, she waits for the hot water to boil and calls the last number on her phone without thinking too much about what that might mean.
"Miss me already?" the groggy voice greets after the third ring. Instantaneously, the slow-motion film of the bird strike is replaced by the image of Jake star fished on his bed as he tries to keep himself in that half-awake state so that he can slip back to sleep once she hangs up. "Nat, you still there?"
"I need a ride in the morning," she blurts out. "My car is back on base."
"You called me for a ride?" He sounds amused.
"Why else would I call you?" She can practically hear him smirking over the phone, but before he can shoot back with the obvious phone sex comment, Natasha quickly presses on with, "And you have to pick up Bob too."
"Bob too," he repeats with a yawn. "Why are you up so late?"
She lies about tackling the mountain of dirty dishes in her sink as if that is a normal midnight activity. There's a long pause on the other end of the line which means that Jake is trying to figure out a creative way to ask if she's okay, but rather than give him the opportunity to start the same infuriating conversation again – fine, she's (not) fine – Natasha warns him not to be late and ends the call.
*
"Good manners, right?" Hangman says when he shows up half an hour later with a pint of Rocky Road. He's a fast learner when he bothers to listen to direction, but that's such a rare occurrence that Natasha isn't sold that this isn't her imagination at work.
"I thought it was obvious that I didn't want you to come over, Bagman." She takes his offering anyway.
"I'm bad at context clues," he replies with a shrug before inviting himself in.
"Apparently bad with signals of any kind, really," Natasha huffs as she follows him into the kitchen.
"Are you still mad about earlier?" His smirk is so infuriating that when the microwave beeps an end to the third cycle of reheating the same cup of tea, Phoenix is very tempted to throw the hot liquid in his lap. "I was giving you space!"
Natasha crosses her arms and arches an eyebrow at him before cruelly countering, "Is that what they call performance anxiety these days?"
"I was being chivalrous."
"Do you even know what that word means?"
"Not pouncing on someone who just fell out of a plane hours before?"
She rolls her eyes. What is the point of this thing if he won't put out when she's looking for a distraction? Isn't that the very foundation of their relationship? Natasha winces. Even thinking about a relationship – is that what this is? – is like allowing a foreign pathogen into her bloodstream, but it feels traitorous to call it a booty call after Hangman spent all day at Phoenix's bedside to make sure she didn't die. It would've been easier if she could convince herself that he wanted a front row seat to the implosion of her chances of making the principal team for the mission, but Phoenix knows Jake well enough to know that he wouldn't be satisfied with a victory if he won it by default just like she knows herself well enough to know that she's not out of the fight yet. The bird strike incident changes nothing so if she pushes it out of her mind, it's only because it makes no difference in their zero-sum game to the top.
Phoenix wishes he could see that, but when she finally snaps out of it, Jake is looking at her like he's worried that she's having an absence seizure. Quickly, Natasha reminds him that she didn't fall out of a plane. "Stop treating me like I'm made of glass. It was a highly choreographed exit, dingus."
She's not sure when he moved this close to her, but it takes all her energy not to shiver when he leans in and whispers conspiratorially, "I only gave you a five on the dismount."
"Unwelcome visits and unwelcome opinions!" When she presses the pads of her fingers against his chest, he doesn't even have the decency to move an inch. "Care to complete the trifecta and mansplain something to me, Bagman?"
"The only way you're getting through that avalanche is with lots of help and a little bit of magic?"
Hangman pulls out a pair of yellow rubber gloves from his back pocket and wiggles the canister of Bar Keepers Friend he brought with him. Natasha shouldn't be surprised that the prospect of cleaning is enough to get Jake to leapfrog out of bed and invite himself over given that he's the only man she has ever met who cleans the kitchen as he's cooking because he can't stand mess. It figures that someone whose apartment looks like it inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey would consider this to be foreplay. Natasha is reminded of the look that elite climbers get before they go on an Everest expedition in those NatGeo documentaries when Jake surveys the pile of dirty dishes in her sink.
"We need to rethink our arrangement if this is what gets you hot."
"Don't kink shame me, Trace," he says with a grin before rolling up his sleeves and turning on the faucet. She knows she's hard up for a diversion when she can't stop noticing the way the corded muscles of his forearm shift as he attacks the plate on top. "Earth to Natasha: are you going to help?"
Phoenix knows that she should since this is her mess, but she's positive he has already worked out a highly efficient system to tackle the dishes on the drive over so she hops onto the counter and tells him that she's going to supervise. As he cuts through a week's worth of baked on grease with a sponge and a generous helping of scouring powder, Jake starts to paint an elaborate story about the time he almost set his mother's kitchen on fire by trying to microwave a carbon steel pan to deglaze it like he was Julia Child. He loves to hear himself speak so she knows that he doesn't mind that this is mostly a one-sided conversation. Natasha chips away at the carton of Ben & Jerry's and lets his steady cadence ground her as Jake's voice weaves enough details in that it blocks out the residual noise of warning alarms and Bob's screams and hornet down, hornet down, hornet down in her ear until the nightmare finally fades away. For the first time all night, the only thing she hears is Hangman telling her that his parents came back from their anniversary dinner to find his sister covered in foam from the fire extinguisher and half of their freshly painted kitchen decorated with sunburst patterns made of ash.
By then, she has reached the bottom of the pint of ice cream and realizes that he has finished putting away her pans and is in the middle of cleaning her sink with the same attention to detail that he has during pre-flight equipment checks. He has probably been talking for a good hour and, knowing Jake, he could go for another if she was monosyllabic enough, but she does feel guilty about being such terrible company all day. As he finishes wiping down the counter space next to her, Natasha wraps her fingers around his wrist and tugs Hangman away from the sink until he is in front of her, his thumbs tracing circles on her knees as he stands between her dangling legs.
"Who knew I had Rosie the Robot on speed dial?" she jokes as she offers him the carton.
Hangman finishes off the remnants of her now-soupy toasted marshmallow ice cream from the pint container before admitting, "Rosie looks better in a frilly apron."
Phoenix clutches her chest. "Are you being humble?"
He cranes his neck to look up at her face. At that angle, there's nothing to stop his eyes from catching the moonlight and reflecting it back to her in dynamic green swirls before he gives her a sly grin.
"Doesn't seem like me. It's two in the morning so maybe you're hallucinating."
Her gaze snaps to the wall clock to confirm with a groan that they need to be at the hangar in five hours. When Natasha turns back to him, Hangman is licking the back of the spoon. Later, she'll blame this next minor lapse on being sidetracked by his stupid tongue – she blames a lot of their relationship on the distractibility of his mouth – but she nonchalantly offers, "You can stay if you want."
His eyebrow arches in surprise. Jake has been trying to find excuses to spend the night since the first time they slept together, but Phoenix keeps telling him that she knows better than to let the fox into the henhouse. Never mind that it's a deeply faulty comparison when she's already fucking the fox, but Natasha likes to believe that she can maintain a proverbial separation of church and state through determination alone.
"Is that what you want?" Hangman asks cautiously like she's asking him a trick question and he's trying to navigate the minefield around him.
"I don't want you driving into a telephone pole because you're asleep at the wheel."
"Do I detect a hint of concern?" Natasha rolls her eyes and tells him that the Navy never gives Uber drivers clearance to go on base so the only thing she's concerned about is having to walk a mile from the gates that early in the morning if he's too dead to give her a ride. Jake's palms push off her marble counter as he gets on his tiptoes until his face is so close to hers that they might as well synchronize their breathing. Batting his eyelashes, he demurs, "Phoenix, when will you just admit that you lured me here under false pretenses because you wanted to cuddle?"
Natasha cups a hand against the side of his neck as her thumb draws concentric circles behind his earlobe. Jake squeezes his eyes shut, his jaw clenching as he strains to play it cool when she whispers into his ear, "You invited yourself over, remember?"
"So maybe I wanted to cuddle," he chuckles. The vulnerability when he looks at her takes Natasha by surprise. Whatever he's about to admit next seems like the kind of thing that would be difficult to walk back later and since Phoenix can't afford the complication when his presence is the only thing keeping the horror movie that she doesn't want to relive from starting up again in her brain, she kisses him before any stupid words can leave his mouth. For someone with enough unearned confidence in everything he does to power a SpaceX rocket ship, Hangman always seems surprised when she is the one to initiate. In her defense, it's usually to make him shut up, but there's always a beat when Natasha can sense him overthinking it before he scrambles to kiss her back like he's making up for lost time.
"So I guess chivalry is dead, then?"
Natasha grins against his lips, precariously close to the edge of the counter as he pulls her closer in response. When she braces herself with a palm against his chest, Natasha can feel his heart thumping frantically against her hand and betraying any chance Hangman has of playing it cool.
"Technically, it's a new day. Chivalry's on hiatus," he murmurs into her neck with a laugh. He doesn't bother dodging when she smacks him with a dish towel.
"Are you trying to tell me that you turn into a rake after midnight?"
"Rakish," he clarifies with a dashing smile. Her treacherous stomach does the same little flip it does every time she's about to make a bad decision, that transient feeling of being in zero gravity before the weight of everything catches up to her. Jake's eyes practically twinkle when he adds, "You like that about me."
Phoenix's hand slips under his shirt, the shiver rippling through him immediately. Her hands are still cold from the ice cream carton, but when she mumbles that she's sorry, he laughs that they both know she's not.
"I'm really not." Natasha's fingers tap dance up his spine like she's trying to leave prints behind. "Let's get you to bed, Grandpa."
"Suddenly, I'm not sleepy."
"Stay anyway." Maybe she needs him a little, but she'd never be able to live it down if she admitted something like that to a person with an ego as big as Hangman's so this is as close to a declaration as he's going to get.
"Because you need help getting dressed in the morning?"
Natasha laughs and reminds Jake that encouraging her to put on clothes has never been in his wheelhouse.