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In the six weeks that he’s known the man, Hangman has never seen the legendary Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell look so small.
The thin blue gown, the stark white sheets would dwarf anyone, but that’s not what draws Hangman’s attention through the tempered glass of the hospital room window. No, towering above his miniscule form, which is hooked to wires and patches and at least two different IVs, is an admiral waving his finger in the omega’s face, medals gleaming off his dress uniform in the too-bright sterile lights.
The alpha—and the man must be an alpha, judging by the everything about him—looks furious, face twisted up and red. He seems familiar. Hangman is certain he’s seen him before, but then those old-guard alphas all tend to look the same. Straight backs and steely eyes and well-pressed uniforms.
The only thing that Hangman wants to do is go back to his base housing and sleep for a week. Maybe two, if he can manage. All-in-all, the mission hadn’t been long, a handful of hours, maybe, those weeks of training over and done with in a breath, but it had drained every drop of Hangman’s energy away from him. Once they had landed, it had been a quick and thorough debrief, followed by a less quick and much more thorough medical check. He and Rooster had been stuck in the same 7’x7’ room for half the day, getting poked and prodded and turned around by medics who wanted to check their skin, their chests, their spines.
Their hormones were a bit haywire, something to be expected after a dogfight like that, but aside from that they were cleared entirely. Perfectly fine.
Maverick, however, was decidedly not.
He’d begun to fade during the reports. The second time he’d relayed the story in full to the suits, his words had grown slow and slurred, his movements sluggish, his eyes drooping. It was Hangman, actually, who had noticed first, who had caught him when he’d fallen sideways out of his chair, keeping his head from banging against the concrete floor. Rooster had lurched after him a second too late, ending up with his hands hovering uselessly in the air, which Hangman didn’t feel any sense of smugness about whatsoever. No sir. That would be entirely inappropriate for the situation at hand.
That’s when they’d all been shipped off to medical, Mav loaded up on a stretcher, Hangman and Rooster trailing behind him like anxious pups.
“Any updates?” he asks Phoenix, both of them watching through the window from the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the hall.
“They won’t tell me,” Phoenix says, angling her head to keep an eye on the unknown alpha. Her frown deepens as the interaction goes on. “But I heard the nurses talking. Sounds like he broke his ribs. Someone called his alpha to handle the drop.”
Jake flinches, a grimace taking over his face.
He’s never had to handle a dropped omega before. He’s gone through the training, of course, memorized those medical pamphlets along with all of the others. It’s a common sight in combat zones, the stress sending an omega’s cycle into freefall. Drops were a vestigial evolutionary response from a more harrowing past, a dumping of hormones that was designed to make alphas flock to protect them, to comfort them.
Whatever Maverick smells like in there, whatever he’s pumping out right now, it doesn’t seem to be doing much to that admiral, who bares his teeth and growls loud enough for them to hear it in the hall. Maverick, who had been tugging at his IV, stills completely at the sound, hunching in on himself. It makes him look even smaller than he already is.
“When’s his alpha supposed to get here?” Jake asks.
“I don’t know,” Phoenix says, cautious.
He knows they’re both hoping it’ll be soon. Hoping that Maverick’s elusive mate, the oft-referenced Iceman, will show up and end whatever dispute is happening in front of them right now.
“Man,” Jake shifts uncomfortably. “Can’t they hold the disciplinary review for a couple of days? Keep it out of medical, at least?”
“I don’t know why they let him in at all with the state Mav’s in,” Phoenix replies, her brow furrowed. “It’s against regulation, isn’t it?”
As if to immediately prove Phoenix’s point, the alpha leans over Maverick, face pressing far too close to the smaller man’s neck.
Hangman stands up in an instant, hackles raised, steeling himself to enter the room and separate the two. Phoenix’s hand on his arm stops him.
“Don’t get yourself in trouble,” she says, chewing on her bottom lip.
Hangman’s eyebrows climb to the top of his head. “You serious right now? Look at him in there.”
The man’s hand is spread, large and wide, across the span on Maverick’s neck, reaching up the side of his face. He’s talking in low tones now, face inches away from Mav’s wide, blown out eyes.
As much as it pains him to say it, it’s not an unfamiliar sight in the military. The world liked to pretend it didn’t happen, that they were all equal now, living in a post-gender world, but the service was steeped in much thicker, deeper traditions. An alpha CO getting… overly familiar with an omega was barely enough to turn heads.
“Starting a fight won’t help anyone, least of all Mav,” she says. Her eyes are flitting back and forth over the scene, her muscles growing more tense with every passing second. “Look, I’ll go get the charge nurse, alright? She’ll kick him out. We can grab the admiral’s name and file a report later.”
It’s the sensible thing to do. Hangman can recognize that, despite the itch growing under his skin, the one telling him to make himself bigger, to growl and snarl and step in between the strange alpha and the omega he’d come to… Well, that he’d come to respect, and like, and maybe that he’d wanted to sink his teeth into over the last few weeks. Jake wonders again what corner of the world Mav’s alpha has fucked off to, to leave him alone and vulnerable as much as he has.
Rooster, of course, picks that exact second to show up, as if the moment couldn’t get worse. “How is he?” he asks, wringing his hands and shuffling around, pulling that lumbering contrition act he’s been sticking to for days.
“Fine,” Hangman responds gruffly, peering around his stupidly huge frame to try and flag down a nurse. “Some asshole’s in there with him now.”
Rooster whips around like Jake had said the room is on fire, snarling on instinct, but he falters when he looks through the window, his whole body sagging like the strings were cut off him.
“I’ll go get somebody,” Phoenix says decidedly, nose scrunched, eyebrows furrowed.
“Right, yeah, yeah,” Rooster says, almost as if he’s distracted, and isn’t that rich. What could possibly be more important than Maverick right now?
He takes Phoenix’s seat when she leaves, shoulders hunched up to his ears. He flinches when the yelling starts up again.
When it reaches a particularly bad peak, when Hangman can hear the man’s words even through the insulated walls—“You’re done, do you hear me? This is the last time. You can’t do this to me again.”— he decides fuck it and gets up to bang on the door.
“Wait, no, don’t-” Rooster tries, but Jake doesn’t exactly care about propriety or chain of command here. Maverick needs to rest, and this guy needs to shove it.
He slams his fist against the window one, two, three times, startling the room’s occupants. The alpha’s head whips around, teeth bared, and he places himself between the bed and the door, as if he were protecting Mav. What a fucking joke. This dude’s an even bigger knothead than Rooster is, and that’s saying something.
Maverick says something, and Hangman can’t hear it, but he can hear the sharp click of the admiral’s heels on the tile, the rough squeaking of the door as its wrenched open and then slammed shut.
“You,” he grits out, pointing a finger.
Not at Hangman, though. In fact, it’s almost as if Hangman doesn’t exist at all, despite standing right in front of the man. No, he’s looking at, pointing at, Rooster, looking twice as angry as he had in the room, which Jake hadn’t thought possible. His contorted face is almost comical, veins throbbing and skin flushed red.
Rooster doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look up, but his scent sours something awful, a disgusting, bleeding alpha scent that makes Jake’s skin crawl. The admiral is rounding forward with purpose, undeterred, back perfectly straight, head perfectly high. It’s a rather distinct contrast to Rooster, who has gone entirely slouched and avoidant, pouting like a disgruntled teen.
When the alpha’s hand comes down hard on the back of Rooster’s neck, Hangman nearly chokes.
It’s another tradition, another relic that doesn’t see much play in the public eye, higher ranking alphas scruffing lower ranking ones to put them into place. The practice had been phased out officially in the early 2000s. It was considered assault now in most places. Hangman’s still seen it a couple of times, mostly back in basic, but it wasn’t something that tended to happen out in the open any longer.
“Where the hell have you been?” the stranger barks at him, pushing Rooster down into his seat. Rooster mumbles something, and while Hangman can’t place the words, he can absolutely place the petulant tone they come out in.
“He’s been asking for you for hours. Where have you been, Bradley?” the admiral asks again, not letting up in the slightest.
“They were running tests,” Rooster says, sullen.
The admiral takes a deep breath. In through his mouth, out through his nose. “You’re going to go in there and tell him you’re fine. Not a hair was harmed on your head. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir,” Rooster answers, still mumbling.
“Are you?” the alpha spits out.
“Am I what, sir?” Rooster asks.
“Are you fine, Bradley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Go. Now.”
The alpha lets him go, and he rises steadily to his feet, hand coming up to massage at the skin of his neck. He shuffles towards the door, towards where Hangman is watching their little soap opera play out, looking like a man headed towards the gallows. He drags his feet against the linoleum. The sound is grating.
The door clicks much more softly behind him as he enters the room, and Hangman is close enough to hear the anguished, choked out “Bradley,” that Mav lets out as the guy enters the room before the silence returns.
With nothing else to do, and the growing sense that he has no idea what’s happening right now, he turns to look at the alpha again. He’s glaring through the window, watching the scene like a hawk. Hangman honestly wouldn’t put it past him to kill Rooster the second he steps back into the hallway. He gets it, honestly. Rooster has that effect on people.
“He needs to rest,” Hangman says, steely. He’s never been the best at the politics of this job, and he’ll be damned if he starts conforming to it today. “You can go now.”
The alpha looks at him without an ounce of humor. “Name and rank, son,” he says, issuing the command with the ease and surety afforded to him by his age and station.
“Lt. Jake ‘Hangman’ Seresin, sir,” Jake responds dutifully, rising to attention. “And I just saved the life of that man in there, so I’d appreciate it if you could lay off. Sir.”
And the man just… deflates. He can practically hear all of the air leaking out of him as he takes up Rooster’s seat, dragging a hand across his face and leaning forward across his knees.
“I read the report,” he says with some weight to the words. “You did good out there, kid.”
Hangman stands, awkward, unsure of where to place himself. In his periphery he can see Maverick and Rooster engaged in a teary-eyed embrace. Directly in his line of sight, he can see tears clinging to the corner of the admiral’s eyes. He’s getting worse whiplash from all these emotional extremes on display than he got from the damned plane.
“I’ll make sure you get your proper commendations,” the admiral says, quiet now. Almost calm. It would be a convincing look if Jake hadn’t seen the man bursting out of his own skin not thirty seconds prior.
“Respectfully, sir, I don’t care about that right now. I’m just happy I got my team back safe,” he says, nodding his head towards the window.
“You’re the reason he’s in that bed right now,” the alpha whispers, and Jake’s hackles raise. If this guy wants to blame him for Maverick’s condition, then he’s got another thing coming to him. It’s not-
“You’re the reason he’s here and not scattered in a bunch of pieces somewhere in the Pacific. Whatever medal I can give you, whatever letter I can write, it’ll never be enough to thank you for bringing my mate back to me,” he says, gruff. Choked up.
That’s-
It takes Jake a minute to turn those words around in his head. His eyes finally drift down to the man’s chest, to the brass there that reads, rather helpfully, COMPACFLT KAZANSKY in big, bold letters. The Iceman.
And it’s been a long, complicated day, so Jake takes the seat next to the man and copies his pose, elbows to his knees.
“I’ve never met anyone like him,” he offers, not exactly in comfort. More in commiseration. More in awe.
It gets the man to laugh, and that’s at least something. “Neither have I,” he says, and Jake can’t believe he ever looked at this guy and found him threatening. He looks absolutely dopey now, hearts in his eyes. More tears, too, and in all honesty, Jake’s not sure he’d be able to handle it if the guy started crying for real. He’s running on the very last dregs of the day’s adrenaline, and he’s going to crash sooner rather than later. He’d prefer to do it at home, in his bed, and not here in this sterile, cramped hallway.
“You should ease up on him, though,” Hangman says, and he hopes the advice isn’t taken as an insult. “Apparently the nurses were saying he might be dropping.”
Iceman sighs, shakes his head ruefully. “Wouldn’t settle until he saw Bradley. He’s always been like that with the pup.”
Hangman does his absolute best not to laugh at Rooster being called a pup. This is not the time or the place for that. He thinks he manages to school his face into something appropriate. Mostly, anyways.
He might be a little hysterical at the moment.
Speaking of ‘the pup’, he’s slouching out of the room now, face and eyes splotched red, and he nods at Kazansky as he wipes his nose on the back of his hand. “He wants you,” he says simply.
Iceman stands, a crisp and sharp rise to attention, pausing to turn Jake’s way. He offers out a gloved hand. Jake takes it.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he says.
Jake nods.
Iceman walks back to the room with purpose, passing Rooster like he’s not even there. Jake watches them again; sees the parts he was missing before. The way Iceman grips at the railing of the bed like he’s holding on for dear life, the way Maverick’s eyes are wide and shiny and looking up at his alpha like he’s the sun and the moon and the stars all rolled into one man.
When Ice’s hand goes up to Mav’s neck, when he squeezes there, just as firm and commanding as he had been with Rooster, Hangman doesn’t flinch. He just looks on as all the tension bleeds out of the omega, leaving him loose-limbed and lolling against the pillows, his heartbeat finally falling into something within normal range on the EKG machine.
“-ridiculous,” Phoenix spits out, rounding back to them. “No one will do anything. Everyone just keeps telling me that he’s allowed in there.”
“He is,” both he and Rooster’s voices echo the words down the hall.