Chapter Text
It goes like this: Maverick—of literally all the people, all the people—is the one who tells Slider to get his act together.
“You gonna ever take your own advice, Mav?” he snarks, sitting at the bar at the Hard Deck—never, never the O Club—nursing a beer, trying not to listen to Bryan Adams blare in the background, and feeling bad for himself. Maverick just rolls his eyes and kicks him under the counter.
“Hey—you midget asshole—“
“Look, any shit you’re going to say about my height’s been pretty much done to death by Ice,” Maverick says, sounding way too goddamn smug. Slider kicks him back anyway, making him yelp. He’d add Any luck on that front? too but he’s not really going to say that in the middle of this goddamn bar, for obvious reasons.
“He stole all those lines from me,” Slider replies instead, and smirks at Maverick when he pulls a face. He looks back down, rubs at a nick on the counter, trying to bite down what he’s feeling. It’s not going well. “Anyway—no, I don’t. Sarah’s…moved on. Pretty fucking obviously.”
“It doesn’t mean you can’t try,” Maverick says stubbornly, and that’s really his motto, isn’t it. Get kicked down. Get put through the fucking wringer. Get rejected and get rejected again. Get up. Try again anyway. Slider admires him for that, even if he’ll only admit it on pain of death. “Look, she still—“
“Sometimes you need to know when to let things go too,” Slider points out, because whatever Mav’s trying to say can’t be true—it’s been too long—and tries not to sound too bitter.
—
Here’s the score: in 1977, Slider had met Ice during the brutal hell of Plebe Summer, and it’d been pretty much ride and die with them from the start. Around six months later, he’d met Sarah. It’d went like this:
“Where you headed for winter break?” Slider asked Ice—or, well, they’d been Ron and Tom, then. He had his last final on the nineteenth; he was flying back home on the twenty-first, back to Mom and Dad and their farm in Montana. Peace and quiet and absolutely no firsties to ream him out. It sounded like heaven.
Tom didn’t look up from his physics textbook; his last final was on the twentieth. “Nowhere. I’m staying in Maryland.”
He didn’t see the startled look on Ron's face. Sure, Ron's parents were a little ridiculous, but he missed them more than he thought he would, the homesickness sitting in his chest like rocks. When his mom had sent him his first care package back in September, Rob had opened it while swallowing around the sentiment of it—the way his mom must’ve spent an afternoon putting it together while his dad made sure everything was there and ready to go.
“Come on,” he said. “No, you’re not. Your lonely ass is going to be here all break? No way, man.” He was already halfway into thinking about hauling Tom to Montana instead; his folks had heard enough about Ice from his letters anyway, and wouldn’t mind.
Ton still didn’t look up. “I didn’t say I was spending it alone, Ronald.”
That stopped Ron in his tracks because—well, Tom barely talked about himself. Ron had shared big chunks about home in Montana: the farm and its wide open spaces, the easy way his parents adored each other, and how he’d learned to fix a tractor and drive one before he’d even driven a car, but all he knew about Ton from before Annapolis was that he’d been a military brat and that he had, at one point, lived in both California and Hawaii. Explained the swimming fixation thing, anyway.
“Hey, you’ve got a girl?” Ron grinned and went to slap him on the back, except Tom, like the secretly petty bastard he was, just moved his desk chair so Ron's hand hit air instead. He was grinning, and Slider simultaneously wanted to snark at him and still give him that backslap anyway; that was the kind of friends they were becoming. The ones you’d do both to. “Oh, come on. I was trying to—”
“It’s my sister, you dumbass,” Tom replied dryly, then stared at his textbook hard before taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose in a way that made Ron forget that Tom was still only eighteen, just like him. Sometimes, he seemed so much older, like he’d already lived a whole life and a half before coming here.
“Hold on,” said Ron, stunned. “You’ve got a—since when?”
“Since I was born? We’re twins.”
“You’ve got a twin sister? What, you got any other aces up your sleeve, Tommy? I think you might shock me into actually liking you.”
Tom studied him; Ron looked him right in the eye. Finally, Tom's mouth flickered a little, like he was about to smile.
“Hey, Ron,” he said. “You know why I like you?”
Ron didn’t know what to make of that; they’d just clicked over Plebe Summer, clicked even though it was basically up to stupid chance that they’d even met. It could’ve been worse, but it hadn’t been. They were friends—they’d become best friends for the rest of their lives, but eighteen-year old Ron didn’t know that yet.
So he said: “Because I put up with your fucking nightmare of a note-taking system and your secret stash of Steinbeck novels?” He was only half-joking.
Tom blinked, startled, then started laughing under his breath; whenever he laughed, it sounded like he’d forgotten how to since the last time. He didn’t answer his own question anyway, because Ron cut in. “Hey, you and your sister. That’s not too bad. But look: now, I have to know who put up with you all these years.”