Chapter Text
When I was your man and you were my girl/We were technicolor in a black and white world/Yeah, they say young love just don't last/Well, it looks like they were right about that
Champagne made Nat into a giggly, giddy version of herself that she didn’t always recognize. She could hold her alcohol unless that alcohol happened to be bubbly, and then she had a problem. So when her birthday, coincidentally and conveniently marking the halfway point through her time at TOPGUN, started with champagne at Hard Deck, there was no way the night was going to end well for her.
* * *
She can predict when he’ll materialize almost to the second. She gets overwhelmed or frustrated, goes outside for a breather, and he gives her roughly three minutes to gather her thoughts before coming to check on her. He at least has the decency to wait so he doesn’t look like a complete stalker. But no more than one song.
The champagne has her feeling off kilter and she needs to regain control. That’s always how it goes– and she’s not about to lose control in front of her classmates. Get a rep as the female pilot who can’t hold her alcohol or who got sloppy? Absolutely not.
She sits on one of the railroad ties that separate parking lot from beach and stare out at the waves, taking deep breaths. It’s quiet and the classic rock is deadened behind closed doors and she tilts her head back, enjoying the breeze and the sound of the waves. The Pacific Ocean doesn’t always bring her the same comfort that the Atlantic does– it doesn’t feel like home the same way that the Chesapeake Bay and the river did when she was at Annapolis, but the quiet rhythm of the waves against the beach are enough to center her a little bit. The song ends and she counts backwards from thirty. She’s at three when she hears the sand shift.
“You’re supposed to be the center of attention tonight and you’re out here by yourself?”
She smiles. So damn predictable. She met Bradley Bradshaw during her first deployment after flight school the first week on the carrier– they became fast friends after she’d found him hiding, heartily embarrassed, with his head between his knees, trying desperately to quell the seasickness that should not have dogged someone in the goddamn Navy. That should have earned him a callsign to haunt him for his entire career– she’d briefly entertained both “Spew” and “Ol’ Faithful,” and she told him that cheerfully as he swore at her and was sick again.
No one knew that story. She’s not sure why she kept it a secret, except that something had flashed across his face when she told him that this was going to earn him his callsign– it clearly bothered to him. At the time, she thought that he could not bear to think he’d be tagged as the seasick sailor. It wasn’t until the last week of their deployment, well after he’d been christened “Rooster” that he confessed that he’d been doing everything he could to honor his dad, whose callsign had been Goose, and the thought of going by anything that wasn’t an homage to him was unbearable.
Keeping her mouth shut earned her a close friend¬– they developed an easy, teasing friendship over those months on the carrier that existed along a spectrum of flirtatious banter to all out bullying. Six years on active duty, and they hadn’t been stationed together again after that first deployment. They wound up in separate divisions, and usually on opposite ends of the earth, but they kept in touch. And every time they’d manage to find themselves in the same corner of the globe for a day or so, they could pick up like no time had passed. She was thrilled when she found out that he’d received an invitation to attend TOPGUN in the same class.
He drops onto the railroad tie next to her. They’re not quite hip to hip and she’s just sober enough to see he’s drunk too. His sunglasses, entirely unnecessary in the dark, sit precariously at the end of his nose, and she pushes them back up, smiling.
“I needed to let someone else win a game of pool. You were starting to look sad.” Nat wasn’t great at most of the bar games– she lost more money in darts than she cares to admit– but she was a phenomenal pool player.
He smirks and scratches his cheek.
“You did run the table a couple of times. I hope you know you aren’t getting a birthday present anymore.”
She looks at him in mock indignation,
“Why, because you’re a sore loser?”
He feigns being wounded by the accusation, a dramatic hand to his chest,
“How dare you? I, Bradley Bradshaw, have never been accused of being a poor sport. No, it’s because we can’t afford one anymore, you took all of our money.”
They both burst out laughing, and it’s a gleeful, tipsy peal of giggles, accompanying the sounds of the waves in a sort of beautiful melody.
She laughs and leans against him, grinning a little stupidly, feeling not so much drunk as just really warm and particularly fond of everyone in this very moment. He shifts ever so slightly closer to her so that their hips and knees are both touching. They’re quiet for a minute. This is what makes their friendship so easy despite going months at a time without seeing each other or indeed sometimes hearing from each other– their ability to go from drunken giggles to thoughtful silence without the need to fill the space. Rooster clears his throat a little,
“Actually, I just wanted to make sure that you were ok. We can’t have any pyrotechnics of the drunken digestive variety– not a great look for the birthday girl.”
Funny. She looks at him with one raised eyebrow and his face is completely serious. Nat adopts an air of superiority that takes every ounce of strength she has to maintain.
“Bradshaw, I do believe it was you who showed that particular proclivity, was it not? It would be an inefficient use of military resources to usurp that responsibility– I think you’ve got it more than covered.” Her façade breaks the second the corner of his mouth flicks up and they burst out laughing again.
They’re quiet again, but this time there’s that thickening of the air between them that sometimes happens when they’ve been drinking that they keep ignoring and she’s internally cursing the Navy for scheduling their stint at TOPGUN so that the halfway day falls on her birthday, because everyone is way too drunk, and she’s cursing her classmates for buying champagne because “we need to celebrate, let us celebrate” and internally cursing him for sitting so close and internally cursing herself for drinking the damn champagne because there’s no denying that they were on the flirting end of the friendship spectrum tonight and that’s her fault too. She keeps her eyes fixed on the waves and prays he can’t hear her heartbeat pounding a violent tattoo against her chest.
He shifts away from her ever so slightly and she thinks she can feel his gaze turn on her when he speaks again.
“Happy birthday, Nat.”
There’s something in how he says it that sends a shiver down her spine and she’s scared to look him in the eyes. But there’s also a stirring in her– a not-unfamiliar feeling that she’d get when she’d catch his gaze or when he’d laugh at a wisecrack. She stares at the ocean for a second, both scared and thrilled and the champagne urges her to turn her head.
There’s a softness in his gaze that is terrifying and exhilarating and she knows what’s going to happen a second before it does and suddenly they’re kissing.
It’s gentle at first and one of his hands is on her neck and she has to grab his stupid Hawaiian shirt with one hand to steady herself because the world is spinning a little bit and the kiss tastes like beer and that goddamn cheap champagne and vaguely of sweat and it’s intoxicating. They break apart for a second and she meets his eyes again and he looks down at her with a half-smile of triumph. Everything around them seems to be deadened except him and his features, which seem oversaturated with color, like he’s the only thing in the world and something in her snaps and now they’re kissing again, and his mouth is crushing hers and she can hear her own heartbeat and wonders vaguely when the sound of the waves disappeared and he lifts her onto his lap as if she weighs nothing and nothing exists in this moment except the two of them, just out of view of the windows of the bar. His hands, strong and warm, press into her back and she knots her hands into his hair and then they break apart again as he kisses her jaw.
His mustache tickles her neck and that’s what jolts her to reality. The stupid fucking mustache.
Her eyes fly open and the sound of the waves comes back. She pushes away and stands up, backing away faster than she means to. He confused and just as punch drunk from the kiss as she feels.
“This can’t happen.”
She closes her eyes, unable to meet his for a second. When she opens them again, he looks half-exasperated, half-amused, which is both unbelievably annoying and also endearing.
“Nat, we’re not going to get tossed out for this.”
He thinks it’s about the regulations around fraternization. It’s a fair assumption, especially coming from him, the conservative flier who plays everything according to the book. The truth is that they probably wouldn’t. They aren’t in the same division, there’s no discrepancy in rank, and they’re heading back to separate units once their time at TOPGUN ends. There’s a rueful grin on his face and she’s equal parts fighting the urges to kiss the smirk off of his face, break down crying, and smack him for laughing at her, because that’s not even a little bit what this is about.
“No, you don’t get it. You’ll never get it because when you hook up with someone, you’re a stud and your buddies high-five you and no one, ranked above or below you, questions your ability to do your job or whether you belong here or whether you slept your way through the ranks.”
The grin slips off his face and he looks… mad? Frustrated? Confused? Her voice is rising and the sober part of her is screaming at the champagne to shut up and quiet down, but it’s not working and she pushes on because if she doesn’t, she’ll start crying and she absolutely cannot start crying,
“No one whispers that you’ll retire when you get knocked up, or that your hormones make you unreliable or dramatic or–”
It's brutal. Every fucking word. And the expression on his face, that flash of something that she recognizes from the carrier, says that it’s hurting him just as much as it’s hurting her to push him away. Again she curses how touchy she gets when she champagne-drunk, how giggly and flirty she was with him tonight, and how she made no effort to shut it down when he reciprocated. Because he only reciprocated because she started it, she knows that.
He stands up, making like he’s going to close the gap between them again, to wrap his arms around her again. Part of her wishes he would. Part of her hopes he just walks away so she doesn’t have to keep looking at the hurt and confused expression on his face.
“Do you think you’re some hook-up–” he breaks off, looking scared of what he was about to say and she’s so glad he stops himself because she can’t hear that she’s more than a hook-up to him, even though he’s more than a hook-up to her, because telling him no becomes infinitely harder when it’s not just sex. He’s silent for a second, mercifully changing tacks,
“People don’t still say shit like that about you.”
That’s probably true for him. He’s never questioned women’s capabilities behind the stick. One of her favorite nights with him was when they both got tossed out of a bar in Singapore when the USS John C. Stennis and the USS Theodore Roosevelt made port there at the same time. A pilot in Rooster’s unit who had been the year ahead of Nat at the Academy made a jibe about how the only joystick a woman should handle was his. She’d ignored it. It certainly wasn’t the worst– or most creative– jibe she’d heard in her time in the Navy, and she was so startled when Rooster took a swing at the guy that she just barely recognized what was happening before it did. She’d jumped in the middle of it because she didn’t need anyone fighting her battles for her and good god, he was about to get court martialed and thankfully the bouncer tossed all three of them before a ranking officer could see. Rooster had paced on the sidewalk for ten minutes, ranting about the audacity of that guy and the bullshit of the military’s misogyny and all Phoenix could do in that moment was laugh at him because it was usually him trying to stop her from taking a swing at someone. Word got around pretty quickly after that that Bradshaw didn’t believe in the boys-club mentality. She knows he got some shit for it when he got back on the carrier.
Part of her wonders if his desire to stick up for her and for the women in the Navy because he also felt like he had to prove that he belonged there and he feels like he gets it. Not that it had been objectively challenging for him– the University of Virginia to officer candidacy school to flight school to deployment hadn’t been a rough road, but there was always that chip on his shoulder. It was like he didn’t think he belonged there because he hadn’t been at Annapolis. But that was self-imposed, so different from what she went through. What her female classmates went through. No one ever questioned if Rooster belonged there. People assumed that she didn’t until she proved that she did.
“Not to you. They know better than to say it to you. But ask all three female pilots here if they’ve had someone say shit like that about them or to them. Every single one of us will say yes, and then point out that there are only three of us here. Do you know how hard I had to bust my ass to get an invitation? How much shit I took at the Academy?”
She knows she’s yelling again and she’s unsteady and she has to take a step to regain her balance. He’s mad now, and she can tell. Any softness in his features is gone, replaced by a frustration at her and the Navy that he can’t really get his words around when he’s drunk.
“So you’re going to let the sexist bullshit scare you off? It’s their problem, not yours.”
She wants to laugh. If only it were that simple. How easy it would be to think that, to let this happen and damn the consequences. But she knows word would get around. Not because he’d say anything but because fighter pilots are perceptive and there’s already been gossip about them and if they disappeared together tonight, it would only be a matter of time before the jibes started again. And it wouldn’t just be jibes. It would lead to her getting kept off of missions, her being unable to trust the guys she’s flying with. She could get killed because someone doesn’t trust her. Someone else could get killed because they kept a talented pilot off of a mission because they thought she didn’t actually deserve to be there. It is their problem. But the reality is that it’s going to be her problem as long as it’s theirs.
“Yes. Because they’ll make it my problem and I won’t let them. I’m not getting killed because some sexist prick decides he can’t trust me on a mission or because I can’t trust him and shit like this makes trusting me hard which fucking sucks but I can’t change that and I–”
Deep breath.
“I cannot let them make it my problem and that means this can’t happen and I am sorry.”
She closes her eyes again and this time she really does feel like she’s going to cry. They stare at each other for a second longer and the color seems to have gone from the world again. She aches for the technicolor comfort of the moments before, but she knows that she can’t have it back.
“I’m going back to base. Are you going to be ok?”
He holds her gaze, and his expression is unreadable.
“Yeah.”
She’s not sure she believes him.