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If it weren’t for the fact that the furniture of Mav and Ice’s living room has been updated recently, Bradley would feel sixteen again as he slams open the door to their house without knocking, strides across the first floor and flings himself down on the sofa across from the one that they are sitting on.
“I hate everything,” he groans, his face pressed into a particularly gaudy pillow with a dog on it – no doubt Mav’s choice of interior design, if only to annoy Ice with his very particular ideas of how their house should look.
“Hey, Bradley,” Ice says drily, and when Bradley turns his head to look at the two of them, he finds them with matching bemused smiles on their faces.
“What’s up, kid, how was New Orleans” Mav asks, and Bradley is reminded of why he’s here in the first place and groans again, flipping onto his back and throwing an arm across his face without answering the question. Two aspirins have thankfully stopped his head from pounding for a while, but that only exacerbates the other problem of his because now he has no distraction from thinking about it. His problem. Golden hair and soft smiles in the warm nights of New Orleans, and strong arms holding a baby and - well, you get it. The Problem, capital T, Capital P.
Through the gap between his forearm and his eyes he can see the two of them shrug and return to what they were doing before, which, appropriately for the old men that they are, is doing the crossword (Ice) and the sudoku (Mav) in today’s paper, the puzzle page cut apart neatly in the middle just like always, and if it weren’t so disgustingly sweet Bradley could almost appreciate it for what it is; a sign of decades of shared routines, unspoken agreements, reading each other’s minds.
It is disgustingly sweet, though, so he abhors it out of principle.
“This seems like an ice cream problem,” Ice says, out of nowhere, or maybe prompted by Bradley sighing like a sickly Victorian heroine, or something. Whatever.
Mav hums in agreement. “Are we thinking bowl or is it bad enough to go for the whole tub?”
“Look at him,” Ice says as if Bradley isn’t in the room with them, hearing every word, “poor guy looks like a drowned kitten. Definitely tub.”
“I’ll go get the tub, maybe he’ll share with the class who it was that drowned him.”
Bradley, just for show, and because he still hates this stupid double act of theirs, no matter how many times he has had to suffer through it, groans – and ignores the way his chest feels at the realization that this is the first time in over a decade he has had to suffer through it, and the relief that comes with it that some things have remained the same, despite the whole, you know, not talking for years thing. When Mav comes back into the room with a tub of Neapolitan ice cream that he sets down on the coffee table, he has had enough time to push his fondness deep down from where it can never, ever, resurface and can now happily sit up with a scowl on his face.
Ice takes one look at him and snorts. “Come on, kid, out with it.”
Mav, for his part, just hands him a spoon and sits down on the floor to be closer to the table. Ice and Bradley follow suit – although Ice grumbles about his knees significantly more than Bradley does, which is why he calls him an old man, which is why he gets faced with a sharp look that, despite of Ice’s years, has not lost its power to pierce right through him and into his soul. Damn Ice and his omnipotent glare.
It takes Bradley exactly two spoonfuls of chocolate ice cream to crack.
“So there’s someone.”
“Aha,” Mav says, and then promptly shuts up when Ice nudges him, if only to nudge back, which leads to Ice pushing his spoon away with his in the tub, which leads to –
Ignoring their antics, Bradley continues, “and we hung out a lot in New Orleans, and sometimes we held hands when we were walking down the street, and now I can’t think about anything else.”
Ice and Mav are suspiciously silent, and when he looks up, he finds them exchanging matching delighted grins.
“Shut up,” he groans, letting his head drop back against the sofa behind him.
“Do we know this person? Or is it someone you met while you were there?”
“You know him,” Bradley groans some more, staunchly not looking at them.
“Out with it.”
Bradley mutters something from where he is covering his face with his hands and, judging by their silence, he’s pretty sure they didn’t hear it, or if they did, just want to torture him to say it again. “It’s Hangman.”
He pulls his hands off his eyes just in time to catch the way Mav’s jaw drops, the way Ice’s eyebrows rise, if only by a smidgen, because out of the two of them, Ice has always had a way better poker face – to anyone else but Mav, of course, because somewhen over the past decades of their relationship they seem to have linked up telepathically and can now read each other’s minds without saying a word, which, incidentally, means that Mav is the only one who stands even a slight chance of beating Ice at poker.
“You’re dating Hangman.” Mav’s voice has apparently risen several octaves higher in the last ten seconds.
“I don’t know if we’re dating! That’s the whole problem!”
“You held hands when walking down the street,” Mav quotes, incredulously, apparently finding the fact that Bradley isn’t sure if he’s dating Hangman even more insolent than the fact that it’s Hangman, of all people.
“Yeah, but I don’t know if we’re, like, really friendly friends! We just stopped insulting each other all the time like, last month!”
“Gimme a break, you were still doing that weird bickering of yours the last time I supervised your training exercises and – oh god.”
His head swivels to Ice, who has been following their back-and-forth with a quiet grin on his face, and back to Bradley, and back to his husband.
“Oh god,” he repeats, “Ice, that was flirting. Ice, they’re us.”
He sounds so aghast that even Bradley cracks up.
It takes them a while to calm back down, to finish the ice cream – Mav and Bradley fighting over the last chocolate and generously leaving the strawberry part to Ice, because he’s the kind of maniac whose favorite ice cream flavor is strawberry. They ask him if he’ll stay for dinner and Bradley accepts, gladly, because he only stopped at his place on his return from the airport to drop off his baggage before coming here and only thing in his fridge right now is some probably-spoiled milk, and because he has missed this, has missed his dads, even if he doesn’t like to admit it.
They let him off the hook for now, talking about their week as they cook side by side, letting Bradley slip right back into their routine where he plants himself on the counter with a beer, gossiping about what Admiral so-and-so has done to piss off everyone else, and which Captain is hooking up with whose sister, mindless things that they can all share without breaching any topic too heavy to require a security clearance.
It's nice, cozy, and by the time Bradley bids them goodnight to head back home, both of them pull him into a tight hug.
“Bring him over for dinner next Friday,” Ice says from his spot in the doorway, wrapping an arm around Mav’s shoulder as they watch Bradley walk to his car. “I want to meet this guy, too.”
“Again, we’re not dating!” Bradley shouts, at which Mav hollers back,
“Yes, you are!”
He flips them the bird without looking back. When he gets in his car, he catches a glance of them in his rearview mirror, side by side, wearing matching grins.
Monday morning rolls around and with it, an RTB for the dagger squad – most of them still looking somewhat peakish from their week-long rager in New Orleans, also known as Bob and Nat’s Birthday Bash Extravaganza, or, as Payback had dubbed it after several tequila shots, Top Drunk, which had lead to groans and outcries about it not even making sense as wordplay, which Payback had ignored in favor of downing his drink and exclaiming that he’d be the one to win Top Drunk.
Needless to say, Bradley and Jake had carried him home that night, tipsily grinning at each other over the top of his head.
Bradley is reminded of the soft glow of streetlights and the warm air sticky-sweet around them and the way Jake’s eyes looked, the shadows his lashes cast on his cheekbones, his hand periodically brushing against Bradley’s side where he was holding Payback around the waist to keep him upright. The fondness of Jake’s face, the way the next evening, walking home drunk from another bar, their hands had found each other where they dawdled behind the rest of their group, the warmth of the night wrapping around them, and Bradley –
Bradley is at work. Bradley is hungover. Bradley should stop waxing poetics.
Anyway, it comes as no surprise that they all look somewhat worn down from their vacation, and Cyclone just shakes his head disappointedly as they saunter into their briefing room in small groups. It’s still a few minutes to the scheduled start of their briefing, though, so they all ignore him. Bradley drops down in the seat next to Nat, who has her head pillowed on her arms, wincing every time she moves.
“Why did we think returning on Sunday so we could get smashed one last time on Saturday night was a good idea?” She groans.
“Your birthday was on Saturday, and you wanted to celebrate it the day of,” he replies to her rhetorical question as his eyes roam over their cohort in their various states of disarray, looking for Jake’s figure and coming up empty. He does spot Bob who, annoyingly, seems to be the only one who’s perfectly fine and put together on this lovely, fantastic Monday morning, sitting up straight next to a greenish Javy. Bradley hates him just a little bit.
The back of his neck tingles, then, as if he were Spiderman and had a built-in Jake-sense, or something, because when he turns around, he finds the other man sitting down in a seat in the back next to where Payback has slumped over a table, gaze already on Bradley.
The corners of his mouth lift up into the approximation of a tiny, almost imperceptible smile, and Bradley suppresses his answering smile, ignores the way his heartbeat increases just because Jake is looking at him. Jake is rubbing Payback’s shoulders as if comforting him in his hour of need. Bradley raises a pointed eyebrow, because seeing Jake care for someone is a foreign sight.
Jake shrugs, and winks at him.
Bradley, lacking any normal response, winks back, and their silent conversation is only cut short by Cyclone clearing his throat.
“I don’t want to know what you were up to on your leave, but I expect full performance from every single one of you,” he begins his briefing, and when Bradley turns back to the front to face him and listen to what feels like him endlessly droning on, he only misses looking at Jake a normal amount. Whatever that is. He’s being so normal.
The squad gets split up into groups, Jake and Nat among those who will fly a new mission in a few weeks, Bradley in the group that will be helping with the new Top Gun cohort arriving next Monday. It separates them for the week, with meetings between the groups sparse and brief, happening in the shared locker rooms, overlapping lunch breaks, waving at each other from across an airstrip as one person climbs into their plane and the other out of theirs.
Fanboy and Payback, once fully recuperated, annoy the shit out of Bradley, but they also distract him enough that he doesn’t spend his days pining – which he wouldn’t do, anyway, because Bradley doesn’t pine, shut the fuck up, Nat –, their days long enough that he falls into bed early every night and is out like a light.
Jake and him do text now and then, exchanging silly observations from their days, stories about annoying Cyclone and bemusing Warlock. He’s got so much on his plate with preparing the training plans for the new Top Gun kids that he doesn’t even remember to extend Ice’s invitation to Jake until Friday morning, so he sends him a text.
bagman
u comin for dinner @ my dads place tonite?
Why would I want to hang out with your and Mav’s ugly faces in my spare time?
Also, your grammar is horrible. Did nobody ever teach you about possessive apostrophes? “Dad’s”, and so on.
ok, sorry grandpa
if you wanna miss out on a homecooked meal thats on u
Of course I’m coming. When are you picking me up?
Bradley realizes, then, that neither him nor Mav has ever mentioned Mav being married, or who he is married to, and then remembers their conversation with baby Tom about Big Bad Boss Tom, and then laughs to himself. Jake’s in for a surprise, and it serves him right for calling his face ugly. At least it might distract Bradley’s nerves for a while. Why Bradley’s nerves need to be distracted in the first place, he wouldn’t know. It’s not like the guy he’s maybe-dating is meeting his parents, or something. He texts back that he’ll pick Jake up at six, and that’s the end of that.
“You’re late,” is the first thing Bradley hears when he pulls up to Jake’s assigned housing at five past six and the other man opens the passenger door.
He doesn’t reply, not immediately, because Jake’s wearing a white henley, tastefully buttoned up but untastefully stretching across his shoulders when he twists in his seat to close the door behind himself and to buckle up his seatbelt. Settled in, he looks over at Bradley and, when he finds him staring, smirks.
“Take a picture, sugar, it’ll last longer,” he drawls, and Bradley does not blush.
Okay, maybe he does. Anyway, he rolls his eyes fondly and replies, “shut up,” shifts into first gear as he steers the car towards Mav and Ice’s place.
“I hope Maverick likes pinot,” Jake breaks the comfortable silence between them.
Bradley looks away from the road for a moment to look over at Jake, who is fiddling with a bottle of red wine. If he didn’t know Jake better, he’d say the other man was nervous, but Hangman doesn’t get nervous. Anyway, he knows Mav, there’s no reason to be nervous.
“You brought wine?” he asks, keeping his voice in a clear joking tone.
Jake scoffs. “It’s not my fault that you don’t have any manners, Rooster. If I get invited someplace, I bring a gift.”
A quick glance over tells him Jake has now moved on to bouncing his leg, again, incomprehensibly, because he has no reason to be nervous. Still, Bradley reaches over to rest his hand on Jake’s thigh, stopping his movement.
Jake inhales, sharply, and Bradley chooses not to read too much into it, if only for his own mental sanity.
“Relax,” he says. “It’s just Mav and Ice.”
“Mav and who?”
Bradley grins over at him. “Mav and his husband. My dads. Adopted dads, technically, but still my dads.”
“I didn’t know Mitchell was married! What the fuck, Bradshaw, way to drop this on me five minutes before meeting them!”
His leg bounces up again, so Bradley presses down a bit more with his hand, steadying him. He doesn’t let himself think about it.
“You’ll be fine. You already know Mav, and you and Ice are gonna get on like a house on fire.”
“Jesus, Bradshaw, warn a guy.” Jake still sounds slightly panicky, but he lays his hand over Bradley’s and, when Bradley turns his palm up, tangles their fingers together.
They drive in silence and keep holding hands, only letting go when Bradley has to wrap his arm around the back of Jake’s seat to look over his shoulder as he backs up to Mav and Ice’s driveway.
When he looks over at Jake, he finds him looking back, cheeks flushed, and he winks at him just to watch the pink darken.
“Take a picture, honey, it’ll last longer,” he echoes, and the two of them crack up, releasing the tension in a split second.
Jake straightens up first, takes a deep breath. “Alright, let’s get this over with.”
He only looks a little bit like a man about to face his execution.
They get out of the car and walk up to the door, Jake whistling at the house. Mav opens the door before either of them can knock – not that Bradley usually does, anyway – and greets them with a,
“Hey, guys, come on in!” The house smells amazing, music playing somewhere in the background, and the familiarity of it fills Bradley with so much warmth all of a sudden that when he gives Mav a hug, it’s a bit tighter than usual. Mav hugs back just as tightly.
“Hey, Mav.” Bradley says, then moves away to let Jake take a step closer.
“Maverick, sir,” he says, all stilted and almost-unsure.
Mav just slaps a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Hangman, none of that sir thing, we’re off duty for the weekend.”
“Well, thanks for having me.” Jake seems to shake his nerves off, putting on a layer of that familiar southern charm that Bradley loves – likes, he means, appreciates, maybe, like a normal friend does. “This is for you.”
Mav takes the bottle, thanks him for it, bids them to come inside.
“Ice is stuck stirring the polenta, let me go relieve him and he can say hello.”
He slips past them, disappearing into the kitchen, but not before sending a knowing grin at Bradley.
Jake and Bradley linger in the entrance, slipping off their shoes, Ice curiously looking at the pictures littering the wall of the hallway.
“Is that baby Rooster?” he asks, delighted, and Bradley takes a step closer to look over his shoulder at a photo of him circa age seven, wearing a baseball uniform and a helmet that was at least two sizes too big, a gap in his wide smile where his front teeth should be.
“That was after his first game,” Ice’s voice comes from behind them, raspier than it used to be but steadily gaining its strength back, and Bradley gives him a hug, too.
When they untangle, They both turn to look at Jake, who is frozen in his spot.
“Admiral Kazansky, sir.”
Ice chuckles. “No need for the formalities tonight, Lieutenant. This is a family dinner. Call me Tom, or Ice, if that makes you more comfortable.”
“Respectfully, sir, I don’t think I can do that.” Jake is as white as a sheet, but he manages to send Bradley a glare that lets him know he is in for it the minute they’re alone.
“Take it as an order, then. Call me Ice, Jake.” He’s calm, cordial, clearly uninterested in protocol for the night, and Bradley, who has seen him in action as Iceman, and can imagine how he is now that he is Admiral Kazansky, knows that it must be hard to unite the cold son of a bitch with this nice, friendly guy telling you to ignore the fact that he is the COMPACFLT.
Jake swallows, the gears in his head almost visibly turning. Nods, more to himself than to Ice’s request.
“Alright,” he says, takes a deep breath, smooths out his features until he’s all southern charm, again, and holds out his hand. “Hi, Ice, I’m Jake. It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.”
He ratters off the phrases just a bit too quickly, but Ice ignores it, shakes his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, too,” he says, amusement audible in his voice. “Now come on, get yourselves inside. I’m sure Pete is getting bored stirring polenta alone and planning all sorts of ways to get away from the stove.”
“Fuck you, too, I’m behaving perfectly well,” Pete calls from the kitchen, from where he has apparently been eavesdropping, and Ice follows his voice, already bickering back,
“The other day I came home to you building a contraption to stir a pot so that you can walk out of the kitchen, and…”
Jake and Bradley are left alone again in the hallway, and Bradley sends the other man a smile, which is firmly Not Reciprocated.
“Fuck you,” Jake hisses, glaring at him. “You couldn’t warn me that your other dad is the fucking COMPACFLT?”
Bradley shrugs. “Sorry, but you did call my face ugly when I invited you for tonight.”
Jake rubs a hand over his face. “And why the fuck is the COMPACFLT married to Mitchell, of all people.” Somehow, Jake seems more offended on Ice’s behalf that he’s married to Mav than by the fact that Bradley didn’t warn him about them, and Bradley will take a win where he can get one.
“They flew together at Top Gun,” he explains, “they’ve been together since shortly after that.”
“Oof,” Jake says, and Bradley knows what he’s thinking about, because he has thought about it many times, remembers how he felt when DADT was overturned, how his first thought was of Mav and Ice, even if he hadn’t spoken to them in years at that point.
“Yeah. They keep it pretty quiet, still. Habit, I guess.”
Jake nods, understanding passing over his face, and then he straightens his shoulders and puts on his cockiest grin. “Well, then, time to face the music.”
Before Bradley knows what’s happening, he’s walking into the kitchen, asking what he can help, insisting that he at least set the table if nothing else, making fun of Mav for something he did during a training exercise this week that Bradley wasn’t present for, and it seems that now that Jake’s over the first surprise, he takes to the situation like a fish to water. By the time Bradley joins the three of them in the kitchen, Jake presses a hand to the small of his back and a glass of wine into his hand.
“Here you go,” he says, and then moves past him to start setting the table in the adjacent living/dining room.
Mav grins at Bradley. Ice nods, appreciatively, and Bradley doesn’t know why he’s relieved that Ice likes Jake, because he knew he would, knew that Ice likes nothing more than people who think fast on their feet and get over themselves quickly. Still, it’s a relief that Jake is approved of, and Bradley only hates it a little bit because for years the stamp of approval only had to come from Nat, and it’s kind of nice to have more people in his life looking out for him.
Nice, until Ice raises an eyebrow and says, “well, don’t let your man do all the work by himself, go help him, or he’ll think we raised you without any manners!”
“You did raise him like that,” Mav remarks, and they’re immediately back to bickering.
Bradley ignores them and goes to help Jake, who is setting the table all wrong, which means Bradley has to correct him, which means they almost get into a fistfight over the proper placings of forks and plates.
Mav and Ice break it up by interrupting them with two huge pots of polenta and ragout, and Bradley does not blush when Ice drily remarks, “you’re right, Mav, they really are us, circa three decades ago.”
Jake looks from him to Bradley, questioningly, and Bradley distracts him by loudly complaining about his napkin folding technique.
Dinner is nice and relaxed and companiable, Ice teasing Mav about what he did last week to annoy poor Beau, aka, Vice Admiral Simpson, which has Jake looking like he regrets everything that led him to this point. He’s giving as good as he gets, though, recounting a stunt Bradley and Mav pulled during a training flight that has Ice looking at both of them very sharply and Bradley keeping his gaze pointedly on the plate of – fucking delicious – food in front of him. Mav just beams at his husband, and somehow gets away with it, because Ice might be the one person able to control Pete Mitchell, but Pete Mitchell is the one weak point in his armor of steel, always has been. Disgustingly sweet, the two of them.
After dinner, Mav and Bradley go clean up in the kitchen, and Bradley would be worried about leaving Jake on his own with Ice, if it weren’t for the sight that meets him when he returns to the living room of the two of them pouring over Bradley’s baby photos, and it only gets worse when Pete joins them, telling stories to go along with the photographs, to Jake’s delight and Bradley’s utmost abhorrence.
Finally, after one too many embarrassing story is told and the camera roll of Jake’s phone is filled with enough photos of baby Bradley they bid Ice and Mav goodnight.
Jake is very polite with it again, shaking both of their hands and thanking them for a nice evening, now fully comfortable being his cocky, charming self. He leaves first, already getting in the car so that Bradley can say goodbye in private.
“He’s good for you,” Ice muses when they pull away from their hug, grasping Bradley’s shoulders and staring at him intently. “He makes you smile.”
It’s a clear stamp of approval, spoken out loud despite the approval already being implicitly clear in the way Ice acted tonight, and Bradley loves him all the more for it.
Mav hugs him, too, and then adds, “just to be clear, I approve too, despite it being Hangman. And if you don’t know that you’re dating after tonight, I don’t know how to help you.”
Bradley scoffs, but Mav raises an eyebrow, unimpressed, looking scarily like Ice. “He looks at you like you hung the fucking stars in the sky, kid. Get over yourself, put the poor guy out of his misery.”
They wave as Bradley pulls out of their driveway.
Next to him, Jake lets his head drop back against the headrest, exhaling in relief, façade dropping just a bit. Bradley lets it happen, doesn’t say anything.
Puts a hand on Jake’s thigh again, rubbing his thumb over the fabric of his jeans in a soothing motion.
“Told you you’d get along with Ice.”
Jake snorts in disbelief. “Yeah, with fucking Admiral Kazansky. Jesus. What the fuck, man.”
“They liked you.” Bradley decides to forgo their usual joking for sincerity and is glad that he did so when Jake smiles, just a little.
“Thank god,” he says. “Wanted to make a good impression.”
“Yeah? Why?” Bradley decides that they might as well talk about it now.
When he looks over, Jake is staring back in disbelief. “Because I like you, Bradshaw. Of course I want your parents to like me.”
Bradley flushes.
“You like me, huh.”
“What, holding your hand for a week wasn’t clear enough? What did you think we were doing in New Orleans, being pals?”
Bradley shrugs, suddenly feeling sheepish because it’s pretty clear when it’s spelled out like that. He pulls up in front of Jake’s house, shuts off the engine. Unbuckles his seatbelt and twists in his seat until he can really, really look at Jake. Allows himself to take in his henley stretching over his arms, his shoulders, his jeans clinging to his thighs, his perfectly gelled hair that just calls for mussing up.
Jake lets him look, smirks.
Finally, Bradley’s eyes find Jake’s, and he says,
“You look good, Jake.”
Jake’s smirk grows wide. “I am good, Bradley. I am very good.” He pauses, licks his lips, grins wider when Bradley’s eyes follow the movement of his tongue.
“You know what would make better, sugar?”
Bradley hums, leans closer across the console, can’t look away from the way Jake’s eyes twinkle with mirth, the freckles splattered across the bridge of his nose that are only visible from this close.
“What would that be, honey,” he asks, and then Jake is leaning in close and grabbing the back of his neck and finally, finally kissing him.
Okay, so maybe Bradley has been pining, just a little bit. Maybe a lot. At the small of his back, Jake’s hand is slipping under his shirt, and his hair is soft under Bradley’s fingers, and nothing else matters, really.
nat !!!
Why the fuck did Javy see your car outside Bagman’s place this morning
What’s going on there
Never mind I don’t want to know
Just so you know I don’t approve of this
I stayed over
jake cooked me breakfast :)
HE’S JAKE NOW?????
Oh how the mighty have fallen…
(I’m happy for you)
Tell Bagman if he breaks your heart I’ll break him.
bobby bob bob <3<3
Thanks for getting together with Jake this weekend! I owe you a beer :)
???
Let’s just say I have recently come into a significant amount of money.
DID YOU GUYS BET ON US????
:)