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“Going in.”
There’s no trace of fear or hesitation in Mav’s voice, only an intense focus. It’s easy to fall in line behind him and follow; there’s a quiet confidence in his dad’s leadership that Bradley envies a little.
Okay—a lot.
But he can’t imagine flying this mission with anybody else.
They round their first curve deeper into the mountains, the river snaking out underneath them.
”First SAM site overhead,” Mav calls out calmly, and Bradley raises his head a little to look at them—gleaming white, just barely visible against the snow capped peaks. They’re lethal, and large, and entirely too close.
Bradley feels his breath quicken and fights for control. He can’t freak out now.
“Looks like we’re clear on radar, Mav,” Phoenix calls out. Bradley focuses on following her tail.
Mav pushes ahead, and they follow. “Let’s not take it for granted.”
It’s Fanboy who alerts them next. “More SAMs, three o’clock high!”
Bradley takes only a quicker glance this time because there are three loads, Jesus—
“We got two minutes to target!”
”Copy,” Payback acknowledges. “We’re two seconds behind, Rooster. We got to move!”
Bradley takes a deep breath and shakes his head to clear it.
”Dagger, Comanche. We’re picking up two bandits. Single group, two contacts.”
“Comanche, what’s their heading?”
The corner of Mav’s mouth pulls up just a little as he closes his mouth before he can ask that exact question. Trust Phoenix to pick up his slack. She’s good.
“Bullseye, 09, 050, tacked southwest.”
”They’re headed away from us,” Bradley notes, and something in Mav still warms at hearing his kid through the radio, all grown up and right alongside Mav in the sky. “They don’t know we’re here.”
In this case, though, he’s wrong.
”The second those Tomahawks hit the air base, those bandits are gonna move to defend the target.” Mav refocuses, the mission parameters morphing and reforming in his mind. “We have to get there before they do. Increase speed.”
He pushes it, praying the kids follow because there is no way in hell he’s leaving any of them behind.
“We got you, Mav,” Phoenix replies, steady and assuring. “Don’t wait for me.”
Bradley quickly loses sight of Mav and Phoenix in the canyon as they speed up, the bandits adding another layer of danger to an already-dangerous mission.
Hesitation holds his hand back from pushing the throttle, the SAMs looming over their flight path like monsters from his childhood nightmares. Phoenix’s trail is already long gone, his friend gamely following after Mav.
“Tomahawk impact in 3, 2, 1–impact! Enemy runway is destroyed.”
“Bandits are switching course to defend the target.”
“Rooster, where are you?”
That’s Mav’s voice. Mav is looking for him, Mav choose him as his wingman and Bradley is freezing ohgod he was right I wasn’t ready I’m going to let him down–
“Come on, Rooster!” Payback and Fanboy. They’re on his wing, he can’t let them down too but he can’t–
”Bandits inbound! We gotta make up time now. Let’s turn and burn!”
Bradley takes a deep breath and nudges his plane forward at a slightly faster rate, but nothing near what Mav must be pulling, what the goddamn mission needs from him and what he can’t give because maybe they were all right, he’s not ready he’s snug on his perch he wants to take it slow he’s so fucking scared—
“Guys! We’re falling behind, we really need to move!”
“If we don’t increase our speed right now, those bandits are going to be waiting for us when we reach the target!”
Bradley makes a deliberate effort to slow his breath down from panting as he blinks, the flight path unspooling before him, the vibrant hum of his plane surrounding him, the radio chatter bordering on panic in his ears.
Something long buried within him rears its childish head, and the words leave Bradley’s mouth before he realizes that they’re all on open comms.
”Talk to me, Dad.”
Mav’s heart falls as he keeps one ear on the radio chatter, realizing that he and Phoenix must have long left Rooster and Payback behind.
“Rooster, where are you?!”
He barely keeps his voice an octave below panicked, he’s the goddamn mission leader and he can appreciate the Navy’s need for stoic calm in the proverbial hot seat, but some part of him remembers losing Bradley on the playground once. He had just taken his eyes off him for five seconds, and the little blond boy was gone.
Bradley, where are you?! Bradley? Bradley!
Mav had been ten seconds away from calling the police when he found him, his unfathomable kid having helped a friend go to the bathroom. The experience of those five long, desperate, panicked, soul-crushing minutes was not something that Mav ever wanted to repeat. Give him impossible missions and maneuvers and bone-crushing G’s any day—but never make him lose his son.
There isn’t any answer from Rooster, but Payback’s and Fanboy’s frustrated responses fill him in. God, he must be so scared.
”Talk to me, Dad.”
There he is. It’s instinct to Mav, even after fifteen years, to step up to the plate—a large part of him still aches because Bradley must be calling for Goose, and Mav has spent long years of his life trying his hardest to be a very poor substitute, but Bradley used to call him by that name too. Granted, he had to be very sick or sad or frustrated or wanting something really really badly, but there used to be a time when he was Dad to the kid.
I’m sorry, Goose.
”Come on, kid, you can do it. Don’t think, just do.”
The response is almost instantaneous, as if Mav is right beside him in the cockpit, the same way he was in the Bronco teaching Bradley how to drive a stick shift, or in the stands during that one baseball game, home from deployment. He told Bradley the same thing then, too.
Bradley remembers despairing as the pitches flew past him. One, two.
Payback and Fanboy are still frantically calling him out over the radio, but he only pays attention to one voice—just like all those years ago, one voice past the groaning disappointment of the field’s audience.
Come on, kid, you can do it.
Don’t think, just do.
Bradley remembers the third pitch, the way he looked back desperately at his dad in the stands, the unwavering belief in those dark eyes.
If his dad believed in him, he could do anything.
Bradley lets out a breath and punches the throttle.
“Jesus, Rooster, not that fast!”
Mav grins as he navigates his own path. “That’s it, kid, that’s it.”
His kid’s voice comes through comms again, calm and sure. “All right, let’s go.”
”Damn, Rooster! Take it easy!”
Mav almost laughs. They’d have to make up their mind on what they wanted his boy to be. From the sound of it, he looks to be flying just fine. Mav breathes a little easier and brings himself back to his part in the mission. Bradley would catch up soon, and Mav better make sure that their target was ready.
”Thirty seconds to target. Bob, check your laser.”
”Air-to-ground check complete. Laser code verified, 1688. Laser is a go!”
Attaboy. Alright then, just the pop-up left.
”Watch your heads,” his kid says, and it ends with Fanboy cursing. Mav takes that to mean they’ve just passed the bridge. Team two is cutting it close, but they’ll make it. They have to.
Rooster listens as Mav and Phoenix take the first go at the pop-up strike, his dad’s voice calm and steady as he counts out their pace.
“Get me eyes on that target, Bob.”
That was fast. Rooster pushes his plane steadily onward, brain rushing to calculate the needed speed for them to catch up. Once Mav hits his target, they have a very small window of time for team two to get there and make it. He can’t let him down.
“Dagger Three. Stand by, Mav!”
”Come on, Bob, come on.”
”Stand by!”
Rooster sucks in a breath.
“I’ve got it! Captured!”
”Target acquired. Bombs away.”
Hard breathing comes over the comms as they take the grueling climb out of the valley.
“We’ve got impact! Check, direct hit! Direct hit!”
Smooth as always. Rooster spares a split-second to just be in awe of how good his dad is at what he does. He’d heard stories, of course—from his uncles growing up, from colleagues and acquaintances throughout his career, but nothing compared to seeing and hearing it done first-hand.
“Dagger Two, status!”
That’s him. “Almost there, Mav. Almost there.” He pushes it again, faster and faster, willing Payback to keep up as they take the pop-up strike.
“Fanboy, where’s my laser?”
”Rooster, there’s something wrong with this laser!”
Oh no. In the middle of the climb, Mav sucks in a breath.
“Shit! Deadeye! Deadeye! Deadeye!”
”Come on, guys, we’re running out of time. Get it online!”
”I’m trying! I’m trying!”
”Come on, Fanboy!”
”Nearly there! Nearly there!”
”Come on, Fanboy, get it online!”
”There’s no time. I’m dropping blind.”
Oh, there’s the boy he raised. Headstrong and just daring enough to make even Mav’s adrenaline-pumped heart beat a little bit faster, taking his breath away.
“Just a little?” Ice would have snorted. “Well. He’s yours alright.”
The G’s are just about crushing his windpipe, but Mav thinks the words anyway. Come on, kid. You can do it.
“Rooster, I got this! I got this!”
“No time. Pull up.” Mav, counting the seconds in his head, is inclined to agree—they don’t have more time. He spares a moment to admire his kid’s tone under pressure: certain, calm, and steady. Cyclone better be listening, because if the Navy knew what was good for them they’d have a promotion waiting for his kid when he got back. That was command potential, sure and strong.
“Rooster, wait!”
Mav wants to laugh. He’s not waiting. Not this time.
”Bombs away! Bombs away!”
Mav waits with bated breath as they near the crest of the mountain. Panting and groaning over comms tell him that team two has started their climb up.
A boom echoes outside their cockpits.
”Bullseye! Bullseye! Bullseye!”
The unfathomable pride fills his chest so hard and fast, he thinks he might be the next thing to explode.
Miracle number 2. Incredible job, kiddo. I’m so damn proud of you.
“We’re not out of this yet,” his dad warns, once Rooster breathes a sigh of relief at the mission objectives fulfilled. They did it—now they’ve just got to get home.
“Here it comes!”
And then chaos takes over. Rooster listens over comms, his heart beating faster and faster as his best friend and his dad call out their defense and evasive maneuvers, the SAMs exploding in the background.
”Rooster, status!”
Rooster grunts in lieu of a reply as they make it over the crest of the mountain and immediately get greeted by missiles launching and honing in on them like prey.
”Oh my god.”
Don’t you worry, kid, I’m going to bring you all home.
Mav spares a thought to worry for the fear in Bradley’s voice, but he has to keep them all in mind. These kids have got to come home.
”Smoke in the air! Smoke in the air!”
”Break right, Payback, break right!”
”SAM on your six, Rooster!” “Negative contact!”
Maverick evades and flies the fastest he’s ever flown, ears listening intently to his team while he whips his head back and forth across the sky, keeping all planes in his view.
”Talk to me, Bob!”
”Break right, Phoenix, break right!”
”Rooster, two more on your six!”
This is where he can’t help all of them, this is where he hopes and prays their training pays off, that they can work as a team because that’s the only thing that can save them now.
“Dagger Two defending!—shit, I’m out of flares.”
Oh no. Mav hones in on his kid’s plane behind him, the SAMs zooming after him. “Rooster! Evade, evade!”
”I can’t shake ‘em! They’re on me! They’re on me!”
There’s no hesitation, no pause in what he’s about to do, what he knows he has to do. His kid’s plane is right behind him, the SAMs a few seconds away.
Give him impossible missions and maneuvers and bone-crushing G’s any day—but never make him lose his son.
And so he goes for it. The same maneuver that had ignited a cold hatred in his kid’s eyes during training, the same one he used to take him out–he does it now again, the cobra making sure his boy goes home.
It’s as easy as breathing, to pull his plane up and over, shielding his son with his own wings. His flares take out one missile, but he knows more are on the way.
“Love you, sweetheart,” he whispers under his breath, not sure if the radio picks it up, but trying anyway. “Please make it home.”
The second SAM hits, like he knew it would; and his plane goes down in flames, the heat searing and sudden and inescapable, the ejection handle flimsy in his hands—
—the last thing he sees is Rooster’s plane blasting its engines, taking him out of range of the SAMs, leaving Mav and his wreckage behind—
—and he smiles, content.
My baby’s alive, he thinks, before pulling the handle with all his might (much too late, too little too late, pretty much his life’s theme) as his plane hurtles toward the ground, burning burning burning—
Goose, I saved him I saved our boy like I promised Carole please watch over him now because I can’t–
—something swooshes out behind him, and snaps–
—everything goes dark—
—anymore.
The first thing Bradley feels—God, he’s going to hate his cowardly self forever—is a bone-numbing relief, because Mav is here, the same way he’s always been, the same way Bradley could count on him as a kid, the same way he tried to be there across time zones and continents and oceans because Bradley needed him for the small and big things, whether it was math homework or missing his parents or a scraped knee or a school play, Mav was there; and he’s here now. He’s here now, and the breath that Bradley was holding can finally be let go.
Mav’s here, Mav will fix it, Mav can do anything, Mav, Mav, Mav—
Mav is climbing over him in a maneuver that isn’t fucking taught in flight school because it slows you down and leaves you vulnerable—
—those are his flares over my plane oh my god–
—the explosion of one missile taken out by Mav’s flares pushes Rooster out of danger one more time, it’s so close that he can feel the heat—
“Mav!”
—there’s another one!—
“Love you, sweetheart.” Mav’s voice cuts through the radio chatter, soft and gentle and tender and reassuring and everything Bradley needs and wants in that moment, steady and sure—”please make it home.”
The second thing Bradley feels is more logic than emotion, because damn the man, he already knew.
Because Bradley may have been angry for fifteen years but that didn’t erase his memories, and he distinctly remembers his uncles Ice and Slider telling him that Mav scored the highest in their class for aviation mathematics, that his flying was at least one part luck and two parts skill and three parts audacity but always guided by swift calculations that would rival Iceman’s own precision—
—which means the man whose shadow hung over Bradley’s whole life knew the exact angle to position his plane to cover Rooster from not just one, but two SAMs—
—that once the flares did their job, his own wings would finish it.
He knew, and he went for it anyway.
“MAV, NO!”
Bradley screams, the sound tearing from his throat, guttural and hoarse, the oxygen from his mask suddenly inadequate as he gasps for his dad.
He watches the plane split in two and fall, and his heart seems to follow, chamber tearing from bloody chamber and dropping to his stomach as he watches the plane burn in ohmygod I told him nobody would mourn him—
It’s Phoenix who calls it, and an irrational frightened part of Bradley hates her for it. “Dagger One is hit! I repeat, Dagger One is hit! Maverick is down!”
No no no no nononononono please god he can’t be—
Hot tears run down his cheeks and over his mask, his mouth open and screaming without sound, desperate in a way he hasn’t been since he was eighteen. His own heartbeat rings in his ears, a taunting sound because he’s alive because Mav took a missile for him because of him he’s—
He pleads, and begs, and if whatever deity was looking thought it would matter then he’d be groveling on his knees in the cockpit. “Dagger One, status! Status!”
He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, screaming over the radio when he’s seen with his two eyes the plane holding said radio burst into flames.
Talk to me, Dad!
The radio is deathly silent.
“Anyone see him?” he gasps, turning to his team and vaguely registering the rest of them falling into formation behind him. He’s Dagger Two, he’s Maverick’s goddamn wingman, he’s second in command according to field protocol oh god they’re following him because Mav is—
“Does anyone see him? Dagger One, come in!!”
He’d spent fifteen years ignoring it and the last two weeks convincing himself it grated on his ears, but he’d give up anything to hear his dad’s voice over the radio now—
anything, Mav, please, give me a sign, crack one of your stupid jokes, say “this is your captain speaking” and I promise I’ll never give you shit about it ever again, please God give him back—
“I didn’t see a parachute!”
”We have to circle back,” Bradley argues, because no parachute didn’t mean anything if it was Maverick in the plane if his childhood stories were to be believed (and Bradley believed them wholeheartedly), because he’d pulled off the impossible before and he had to again, he had just promised Bradley they’d talk when they get back, and Maverick never broke his promises, never ever ever—
“Comanche. Bandits inbound. Single group, hot. Recommend Dagger flow south. One minute to intercept.”
”All Daggers flow to ECP. You have bandits headed for you.”
They’re calling them back. They’re calling them back and they’re going to leave Maverick.
”What about Maverick?!”
They don’t understand, none of them do.
There’s a few seconds of radio silence where Bradley thinks Cyclone might just send him back to look, because at the most basic level his dad is one of the most decorated pilots in the whole goddamn Navy and there’s no way they would leave him, right?
(“I’m good, but I’m not indispensable, kid,” Mav had told him once wryly. “Who knows, you might even be flying better than me one day.”
Bradley had turned to him and grinned. “Really?”
Mav had rolled his eyes and ruffled his hair. “A very far away day, bud.”)
“Dagger, you are not to engage. Repeat, do not engage.”
”Dagger Two, return to carrier. Acknowledge.”
Bradley slows down, on the borderline of insubordination because he’s not leaving but logic and the command obedience beaten into him by the Navy tells him that he can’t stay. His heart pounds in his chest.
“Acknowledge!”
His team stays in formation, their voices in his ears.
“Rooster, those bandits are closing.” Phoenix. She would never admit it but she’s scared; Bradley can tell. They all are. Low or empty on flares and ammunition jettisoned—they’d be sitting ducks if bandits found them. Fifth-gens, if their intel was right.
(“Then it’s a dogfight.”
“Against fifth-generation fighters?”
”Yeah, we’d still have a chance.”
”In an F-18?”
“It’s not the plane, sir. It’s the pilot.”
”Exactly!”)
His plane thrums underneath his control as Phoenix and Payback follow him through his delaying tactic, still in attack formation. They’re missing a plane in front of them; but he’s in Mav’s position now, he’s Dagger Two, and he can’t risk their lives along with his own.
Phoenix keeps pleading. “We can’t go back.”
“Rooster. He’s gone,” Bob tries. “Maverick’s gone.”
Bradley shakes his head and blinks away another wave of angry tears, because no one in his life has ever told him that. Not his mom, not even his uncles who orbited around his boundaries like sentinel planets for fifteen years.
“Mav’s not here right now, honey; he’s deployed, but he’ll be back soon.”
“Go to sleep, darling; Mav will be here when you wake up.”
“Hey, kid. Mav’s over the moon proud of you, just so you know.”
“Passed on your simulator scores to the pipsqueak. He’s showing them off to anyone who’ll listen.”
“I know you two aren’t talking, but he sends his love.”
Mav had always been there. He couldn’t be gone.
“I can’t leave him,” he says, once under his breath. His radio erupts in his ear, a combination of control frantically repeating Cyclone’s orders, and his team trying to dissuade him.
“Dagger Two, flow to ECP. Repeat, flow to ECP. Acknowledge!”
There’s a crackle as Cyclone’s voice comes over the mic. “Lieutenant, return to the boat. This is an order from your commanding officer.”
“Rooster!” That’s Phoenix, and god, she’s actually begging. Phoenix would never beg. “Please.”
“I swear to god, Lieutenant, if you don’t return now, you’ll be facing a court-martial for disobeying direct orders—”
Payback, Fanboy, and Bob join in. “Rooster! Come on, man–”
“Rooster, please–”
“Lieutenant Bradshaw!”
Bradley listens to all of them and wonders how they don’t understand—if he leaves Mav now, he won’t be worth his wings anyway. Won’t be worth the name he carries, officially and unofficially.
“You may have been born a Bradshaw, kid,” Uncle Slider told him once, shaking his head at Bradley’s utter stubbornness during those fifteen years. “But you’re also a Mitchell through and through.”
Bradley had resented him for saying that, at the time. Now, though, it fuels his resolve.
I’m Maverick’s kid too.
The third thing he feels is clarity.
They can’t go back, but he can.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, impossibly calm. “I can’t leave him. Dagger Three and Four, return to carrier. Lieutenant Bradshaw, going dark.”
It’s as easy as breathing, to pull his plane sharply left and turn around, breaking formation and turning off his comms so as not to hear Cyclone’s frantic commands or Phoenix’s and Payback’s panicked screams.