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It’s 1986, and he’s young and brash and reckless. He has the world at his feet, the wind at his back, and his beloved F-14 under his capable hands.
She’s an extension of himself; his wish is her reality. When he’s behind the stick of his Tomcat, Goose talking in his ear, there’s nothing he can’t achieve.
And then there’s a flat spin, heading out to sea.
And then everything changes.
Maverick looks up at the screen of candidate photos, then back at Cyclone. The Vice Admiral stares him down. They both know what is being asked of them. Of all of them.
Somebody isn’t coming back from this, Maverick thinks. Then he says it out loud, for the avoidance of doubt.
It doesn’t matter. What the Navy asks, the Navy gets, and now they have to work out how to make it happen.
He looks back at the photos, instinctively picking out the most important face in the lineup. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw stares seriously back at him. Even his picture seems to judge Maverick - and find him wanting.
It won’t be you, Maverick promises silently. One Bradshaw is enough, they can’t take you both. Not on my watch.
He goes to the Hard Deck, flirts with Penny for old times’ sake. Nurses a beer, and plans his attack. It’ll be hard, but these kids are the best of the best. As long as he can make the strategy work, he knows they’ll be able to fly it.
His plan is shaping up and he’s feeling good, steady in the air. Then he walks in. Six feet of tan and swagger and oh-so-easy charm, and Maverick’s soul swerves dangerously into enemy territory.
Then he hears the opening strains of a song that still haunts his dreams, and he’s dead in the air, defenseless against the oncoming jet wash of all his past mistakes.
There’s no saving this. Eject, Eject, Eject.
It’s 1987, and he lasts two months as an instructor.
He looks out at a sea of nameless faces and sees the shadows of his own class staring back at him. Him and Ice and Slider and Goose.
And Goose.
They all seem so fucking young. Probably only a few years between him and them but it feels like a lifetime. He doesn’t know how to prepare them for what’s coming. What’s always going to come for them.
First one dies, you die too. But there will be others. Fly long enough, and it’ll happen.
So he hands in his notice, returns to active duty. Uses what little collateral he’s amassed to get himself assigned to Ice’s squadron. Flies with his wingman again and tries not to think about all the ways it might go wrong.
His Tomcat doesn’t sing beneath his hands like she used to, but he has Ice on his six and Merlin in his ear, and that’s enough.
It has to be. There isn’t anything else.
“Why are you dead?”
Maverick stares down his squadron and tries to get them to understand. Excuses mean nothing, not when the stakes are this high.
“Don’t tell me, tell it to his family.”
He hears a hitch of breath from where Rooster is sitting, but he doesn’t look over. Can’t, not when Rooster's the only one in the room who knows what it’s like to be on that side of the phone call, Maverick included.
Maverick’s had an empty next-of-kin field on his naval paperwork ever since Carole passed. It was selfish of him to add her in the first place, really. He was never scared of a KIA designation, but he’s glad he never had to put her through getting that call twice.
Maybe that’s why he always came home, even when the odds were stacked so high against him he couldn’t see the landing strip. Not for himself, but for Carole and Bradley. The family he never truly deserved but managed to pretend with, just for a little while.
The fight breaks out not long after that - obvious, necessary, painful. Hangman reminds Maverick so much of himself sometimes it hurts, and he wishes he could grab the young aviator by the scruff and shake some sense into him.
And Rooster, god-- Rooster. After watching him in the air, Maverick now knows that he’s been seeing the wrong shadow of the past behind those hazel eyes. Rooster might have his father’s mustache, but he has Iceman’s heart. His strength and fortitude and courage of conviction.
Hangman can fly like the best, and will surely take Maverick’s ace title from him eventually. But it’s Rooster who will one day have his picture on the wall, the words ‘Commander of the Pacific Fleet’ embossed in gold underneath it.
But before any of that can happen, Maverick has to teach them all how to come home.
He squares his shoulders, instructs them all to go and cool off, and then gets back to work.
It’s 1996, and he’s gone from posting to posting to posting, never staying anywhere long enough to call home.
He thinks he might have housing on-base in Miramar, but he’s never actually seen it. When he’s stateside he stays with Carole and Bradley, in the same room Goose had proudly declared ‘Maverick’s’ when he and Carole first bought the place, and wouldn’t hear otherwise despite Maverick’s numerous protestations.
Carole had insisted just as loudly the first time after… the first time it was just Maverick stepping off the carrier. Maverick had called to tell her about the B&B he’d booked down the road, and tentatively asked if it would be okay for him to visit one evening. There had been a long silence on the other end of the phone, and then Carole had called him an idiot in language far more colorful than anything he ever heard from his fellow sailors.
He’s reasonably sure that she’s genuine when she tells him she wants him here. Carole is a woman who’s always worn her heart on her sleeve, no artifice anywhere to be found, and even Maverick at his most self-destructive can’t find it in him to believe that she’s been lying to him for the better part of a decade.
So it’s not the what that confuses him, it’s the why.
Why does Carole insist on keeping him around, when he has the spectral hand of death on his shoulder like the most unwelcome of companions? He tried to ask her once, but she leveled him a look of such pity that he never tried again. Clearly it’s a mystery he’ll be taking to his grave, along with all the other secrets of the universe like:
‘Why Goose?’
and
‘Why not me?’
There’s a new picture up on one of the walls since the last time he stayed. He remembers Bradley taking it, the kid pleased as punch about the polaroid camera Maverick had bought him for his birthday the previous year. The photo is of Maverick and Carole, waving and laughing at the camera. They’re off-center and a little blurry, and Maverick loves it to pieces.
He wonders if Carole would let him make a copy to take with him when he leaves. He wonders if it would be inappropriate to ask.
He hasn’t seen Bradley yet on this visit. He’s fourteen and moody, like all teenagers are. He used to come running when Maverick rode up on his bike. Now he refuses to leave his room. Maverick understands, but he hopes he gets to see him before he's next deployed.
His next mission is categorized as high risk, his CO told him on the phone this morning, and he hates the idea that he might have already seen Bradley for the last time and not even known it.
“Easy for you to say. No wife, no kids. Nobody to mourn you when you burn in.”
Maverick stands and lets Rooster yell at him. Absorbs all the hurt, and fear, and frustration he knows the other man must be feeling after having to listen to Phoenix and Bob punch out over the radio. Takes the vitriol, and reminds himself to breathe.
Just like he told Rooster, there had been others in his career. But the last time it happened during a training exercise was-
He can still hear Phoenix in his ear: Eject, Eject, Eject.
So he takes it all without complaint as Rooster shouts him down, all fire and fury and impotent rage. But when Warlock quietly interrupts with news that is somehow, impossibly worse, he crumbles.
He’s a mess, after the funeral.
Buys a bottle of Ice’s favorite whiskey, and drinks it alone on the beach, staining his dress blues with sand and dust and memories of the past. He’d known it was coming - they all had - but actually hearing the news had still been a gut-punch that left him struggling to breathe for hours afterwards.
He can’t stop thinking about all the things he wishes he’d said to his wingman that last time he saw him. There will be others and yet it’s always like this. A lifetime of losing people, and somehow he never realizes that it’s the last time until it’s too late.
He’s the fastest man alive, but he’ll always be too late for this.
He’s three quarters of the way through the bottle when somebody sits down next to him.
“I’m sorry for what I said, before,” Rooster says, taking the bottle from Maverick’s unresisting hand and taking a deep swig. “I didn’t mean it.”
Maverick takes the bottle back, but doesn’t take another sip. Not just yet. “You did, but it’s okay. I understand.”
The alcohol has softened the sharp edges of his restraint, and before he can think better of it he shifts minutely closer, so that their shoulders are just barely brushing together. Letting himself have just a taste of the closeness that he’s been denying himself for so long. Rooster makes an incomprehensible sound in the back of his throat, and he doesn’t move closer, but he doesn’t move away either. Maverick feels bold with his own daring.
They don’t say anything more after that, but pass the bottle back and forth until the sun rises out of the ocean, bringing with it the promise of a new day. Maverick can feel the warmth of Rooster’s body pressed all along his side, and in a week filled with heartbreak and loss, it’s the first thing that doesn’t hurt.
It’s 2000, and Carole died six months ago. Bradley hasn’t talked to Maverick since he found out about his Academy rejection two months later.
It shouldn’t be like this, Maverick thinks as he packs his life into boxes for the umpteenth time, taking special care as he takes his favorite polaroid photo down off the wall.
He never did ask Carole if he could make a copy, and now he knows he doesn’t have the right to the original. Everything in this house is Bradley’s now, which is exactly why Maverick can no longer be here.
His heart aches with the weight of what he’s lost. Carole and Bradley both, in one devastating blow. But he can’t bring himself to regret it, not when his actions will keep Bradley safe, keep him alive.
The Navy can’t have them both, not on his watch.
He posts his key through the letterbox, and resists the urge to grab for it as it slips from his fingers.
His next mission is a rough one. There’s an unexpected engagement with enemy fighters and he takes damage to his left wing and engine. He crash lands back onto the carrier with cries of “Foul Deck” in his ears, and the whiplash replaces it with high-pitched ringing for hours afterwards.
He visits the mechanical deck once he’s discharged from the med bay. The engineers say the damage to his Tomcat is extensive, it’ll be months before she’s airworthy again. They’re still running the numbers but it’s looking increasingly like a scrap job; odds are he’ll be flying a new plane the next time he’s called up.
Maverick searches in his soul and finds he doesn’t care. That revelation hurts more than any of the fresh bruises blooming on his skin. He pats the nose of the F-14 he’s been flying for years, and leaves without saying goodbye.
He thought he had nothing, before. Now he’s truly on his own.
The mission speedrun is a blur, the dogfight chaotic, and the crash: excruciating.
Maverick only truly comes back to himself when he sees Rooster’s plane go up in flames. A parachute careening towards earth, his aching legs spurred into motion from the type of adrenaline rush that can only come from pure, unmitigated fear.
He wants to hug Rooster for coming back for him even after everything that’s passed between them. He wants to punch him for being so careless with his own life, when Maverick has crawled over hot coals to protect it up until now.
He may well still do both of those things, but first, they have to survive.
“So, what do we do now?”
The question hangs in the air between them, a request that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Maverick can instinctively tell that Rooster isn’t asking the man who used to be his childhood mentor, or the aviator who’s currently his superior officer. It’s a question with equality behind it; they get out of this mess together, or not at all.
Maverick breathes deep through the sharp ache in his chest and looks - truly looks, for perhaps the first time he came back to Top Gun - at the man Rooster has become in the years since they’ve been estranged.
He’s taller than Maverick is.
Maverick knew that in the abstract, of course. He’s a lot of things, but a giant he most certainly is not. At sixteen Bradley was already the same height as him, but scrawny and lanky, still growing into himself. Nothing at all like the Rooster of today, stocky and sure and settled in his own skin in a way Maverick could almost never have imagined.
Rooster's no longer the kid whose papers Maverick pulled, a lifetime ago. He’s grown and evolved and been made anew by life a hundred times over between now and then. He’s a Top Gun aviator, best in his class, Maverick’s wingman.
It comes to him in that moment, simultaneously a revelation and the most obvious thought in the world. Rooster is no longer someone Maverick needs to protect, he’s someone he needs to trust.
And as the cogs start to turn in his brain, the first broad strokes of a plan starting to come together, a second realization comes hot on the heels of the first: trusting Rooster is easy. It’s everything else that makes it so hard.
It’s a terrible plan, a true last gasp, Hail Mary, Charge of the Light Brigade plan. But Maverick leans into that trust; in Rooster, in himself, in the unshakable belief that this can’t possibly be the end of both their stories.
He settles into the cockpit of an F-14 for the first time in over a decade, and feels the weight of history wash over him. Here, too, is a bond he needs to remember to trust in again. The past is not the present, what went before is not predestined to occur again. He is more than his history, just like this plane is more than its own.
She’s his Tomcat. She’s every single F-14 he’s ever flown, ready to take him and Rooster into the skies where they both belong.
He strips off his glove, because he needs to feel the controls against his bare skin, and it’s quiet, so quiet, but if he listens very closely, he can almost hear her singing again.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he says, surprised to find he means it. “It’s been a while, huh?”
It’s 2006, and Maverick has been flying for the Navy for almost half his life when the last F-14 is retired from active duty. There’s a formal ceremony, followed by an informal party at the local military bar.
It’s late, and they’re all well past tipsy on their way to blackout drunk. Every aviator in the bar has a story about their faithful Tomcat, and the myriad ways she’s influenced their career over the years. Hundreds of thousands of flight hours between them, and none of them know any different.
Tomorrow’s F-18 is a new day, but tonight they salute the old guard, and drink in her honor.
Maverick stares into the bottom of his pint, and picks through the detritus of his emotions. He thinks he should feel some sort of loss, at the very least some appreciation for such an auspicious end of an era.
The truth is, all he feels is relief, and maybe a little guilt for feeling that way.
The truth is, he’s not the same man he was back in ‘86. He appreciates his bird, but he doesn’t love her, not the way he did before she took the most important thing in his life away from him.
The truth is, tonight feels like the first time he’s been able to breathe easy in over two decades, and he has no idea what to do with all this newfound space underneath his ribs.
He finishes his drink, says his goodbyes, and leaves the bar. He fully intends on heading back to his temporary accommodation on base, but instead finds himself on a beach, staring out into the inky blackness of a sea lit only by the light of a new moon.
His dog tags are in his hand, the sharp press of the edge of the metal grounding him in the here and now. He doesn’t think about what he’s doing, his actions driven by instinct and a desperate need to close this chapter with more than just alcohol and pretty words. His arm moves in a wide arc; the tags shine as they fly, hitting the water far enough out that it’s silent to Maverick’s ears. It’s a different body of water to where he laid Goose’s tags to rest, but he thinks they’ll find one another in the deep beyond all the same.
Tomorrow he’ll report his tags lost; pay a couple of bucks for a new set and stand and wait for twenty minutes while his name and identification is punched into a fresh sheet of metal. It seems like too small a price to pay for the catharsis he’s currently feeling, but maybe that’s the way it always is; the hardest part of moving on is the decision itself.
“Eject! Eject!”
“I’m trying!”
“Pull the handle, Rooster.”
“I am! It’s not working.”
Maverick closes his eyes, feels his heart break in two and thinks: I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Goose.
He knows he’s spent too much of his life flirting with the sharp edge of the Grim Reaper’s scythe, but he likes to think he always danced this dance with a certain amount of dignified acceptance. Obviously it was only a matter of time before he’d finally be called on to pay the debt he skipped out on back in ‘86, so he promised himself that as long as his death meant something - did some good for someone, somewhere - as long as that was the case, he would go quietly, willingly.
Today he breaks that promise. Today there’s no acceptance, only anger. Pure, incandescent rage that fills his throat and blockades his airways. No , he wants to scream, cry, rail against the indifference of an unfair universe. I’ve changed my mind. I’m not ready, you can’t have me yet. You can’t bring him back to me and then make me let him go so soon. It’s not fair, I’m not ready.
They’ll never get to have that talk Maverick promised them both. Maverick thinks he’d burn the world to the ground if he thought it would make a difference; if he thought it would give them that time back. He’s spent so much of his life not thinking he deserved anything, but for Rooster, he thinks he could have learned to be selfish.
Too bad he’ll never find out, because like always, he’s too late.
He doesn’t expect salvation, much less for it to come with a wry Texas drawl, but Hangman’s voice echoes over the comms and the relief Maverick feels is so overwhelming in its intensity he almost blacks out. He chokes out a wet laugh, and hears Rooster do the same behind him. For the first time in his life, Maverick wishes he wasn’t in a cockpit. He needs to be able to see Rooster, hold him, and reassure them both that they’re still alive.
He points their nose towards home, lets out a slightly hysterical cackle at the landing gear that chooses that exact moment to give up on them, and makes himself a new promise: If they make it back onto the carrier deck in one piece then he’s done with death’s unending courtship.
It’s time to learn the steps to a new dance.
It’s 2010. He hears murmurings of a desk job coming his way, and knows that not even Ice can get him out of this one.
It’s about time, they say. It’s inevitable.
Maverick’s never been much of a fan of the inevitable, so he finds himself an assignment as a test pilot out in the Mojave Desert.
Turns out, he likes it. After years of high-altitude precision strikes and low-risk support runs, this feels like a new kind of challenge. When the engineers realize he’s not some idiot stick-jockey, they start coming to him for feedback, suggestions.
The first question he always asks is: How does she eject?
The second question is: How can you make it better?
Maverick finds himself back on deck after the celebrations have died down.
It’s past midnight and quiet, so quiet. An entire carrier finally letting themselves relax after a day that will be retold over drinks for years to come. Maverick’s boots click against the metal deck, a steady metronome against the rapid beating of his heart which still can’t quite accept that he made it back. That they both made it back.
There’s no conscious thought to his direction of travel, just a desire to be out under the open sky. He’s still not surprised when he finds himself on the engineering deck in front of their F-14: beat up to all hell, but somehow still standing.
There’s a parallel there somewhere, Maverick is sure of it.
He walks up to her cautiously, like she’s a live tiger and not an inanimate object of metal and wiring. He reaches up to stroke her nose, and something settles in his chest. Something that shook loose thirty years ago and never quite found its way home again.
Thank you, sweetheart. His lips move near-silently, a confessional between man and machine. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for saving him. I’m sorry for abandoning you. I’m sorry for not loving you like I should have.
“What are you doing?”
Maverick turns around with a start. Rooster is just a few feet away, looking confused. Maverick has no idea how long he’s been standing there, watching him bear his soul.
He shrugs, hand falling away from the Tomcat’s nose. “Communing with history, I suppose.”
Rooster steps up so that they’re shoulder to shoulder, hands jammed in his pockets as he stares up at the plane. “I had so many pictures of her up on my wall, growing up,” he says, giving a wry chuckle. “All my classmates had movie star pin-ups, but she was the girl of my dreams. They retired her two months before I started fighter training; I was devastated.”
“Why?” Maverick has to ask.
Rooster frowns. “Why, what?”
Maverick gestures towards the F-14, struggling to find the words. “Why did you want to fly her so badly? How were you okay with getting in the cockpit of the plane that Goose- that your dad-”
“Is that how you see her, really?”
“How- how can you not?”
Rooster shrugs, still staring up at the Tomcat. “Because she’s never been that plane, not to me. She’s the plane that brought the two of you together, the one that brought you into all of our lives: Dad’s, Mom’s and mine. She’s your plane, the one that you flew for years, the one I chased right up into the skies just so I could stay by your side.”
Rooster turns to face Maverick, a glint in his eyes that looks suspiciously like something neither of them can come back from, and all Maverick can think of is how desperately he loves the man in front of him; with all that he is, and all that he’s not.
It would have been all too easy for Bradley Bradshaw to grow up harsh, callous, jaded . A chip on his shoulder against a cruel world that saw fit to tear both of his parents away from him well before their time. Nobody would have blamed him, least of all Maverick, but somehow he stayed kind. Caring. Able to see the good in things where Maverick can only see past mistakes.
Maverick isn’t good - not naturally at least - but Rooster makes him want to do better, be better. He has a horrible feeling that when Rooster loves, he loves unconditionally, which makes it all the more important that Maverick be deserving of it.
The soft press of chapped lips against his own breaks him out of his spiral, and the something in his chest clicks even more firmly into place - a final, inevitable acceptance of all that he’s been vehemently denying for weeks now. Hands grab at his waist, and he clutches back at broad shoulders, drawing Rooster into his orbit as he loses himself in Rooster’s.
They collide with a rolling cart, sending tools clattering noisily to the ground, and the unexpected commotion has them breaking apart with a jolt. Rooster’s expression is wild, and Maverick is sure that he isn’t much better.
The sound of their mingled panting breaths fills the space between them, growing more cavernous and insurmountable with every passing second.
“Um,” Rooster says, sounding unsure for the first time since he arrived, and Maverick is done. He promised himself that if they made it back then things would be different; no more dancing to death’s tune, it’s time for something new.
He’s all too aware that hope is a dangerous creature. Her siren song lures naval aviators in with sweet promises, only to brain them on the hidden rocks below. But it seems Maverick is in the market for a new patron, and if Rooster can put his faith in her, then maybe so can he.
The cart goes flying for a second time, and this time they don’t stop.
It’s 2025, and Rooster’s hands tap the steering wheel in time with the music blaring from the crappy car speakers, his rich tenor filling the air as he effortlessly harmonizes with the female singer on the radio.
Maverick thinks he’ll upgrade the Bronco’s sound system for Rooster’s birthday. He thinks Rooster would like that.
The sun is high in the sky, the windows rolled down to let in the fresh outside air. A bead of sweat forms in the dip of Rooster’s throat, hanging in suspense for a moment before losing its battle with gravity and rolling down to disappear underneath the vee of his shirt. Maverick imagines it rolling along the swell of his pec, and finds himself jealous of a droplet of water.
Rooster takes his eyes off the road to grin over at Maverick, his expression bright and carefree in a way Maverick once thought he might never see on his face again. It makes something ache in his chest, something sharp and pure and clean.
He thinks, I love you. He thinks, You’re everything I didn't know I was allowed to have.
“What’cha looking at?” Rooster asks, all toothy smile and carefree charm.
Maverick finds himself smiling in response, and for once doesn’t second guess himself as he simply replies: “You.”