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The motel they’d crashed in somewhere west of Albuquerque smelled like old cigarettes. Curling between the stretch of wall and the ridge of the floorboards, the edges of the yellowing wallpaper were stained, presumably with tobacco and ash. Ice tried his hardest not to cringe as Maverick flopped down onto the bed, quilt equally yellowed, bed springs creaking in protest.
“This place is a shithole.” Even sitting down on the corner of his own bed felt dangerous, like the bedbugs and whatever previous residents had left behind would spring up and sink beneath his skin. After nearly twelve hours on the road, though, his body ached. His eyes yearned for sleep, and tried their best to drag him horizontal to match Maverick’s position as he ragdolled in the bed next to him, splayed out without a care in the world.
Dallas had been Maverick’s idea. They had shore leave for six months, and with Slider gone visiting family, Ice was left, listless, trying to find ways to make himself useful. He fixed his car’s transmission, with Maverick’s egging. He read books, finally knocking out 1984 , which he had promised himself he’d read before he turned thirty. Hell, he picked up piano again, dusting off the upright his mother had insisted he bring with him to his lodgings in San Diego, much to the dismay of the poor bastard across the road.
There was a stagnancy to it, despite his best efforts. Ice couldn’t quite settle into his new routine. He rose before the sun, ran before it got too hot, occupied his time with whatever he could, and that was that.
Maverick, on the other hand, seemed to keep himself busy and liked it.
As much as the man was a cowboy in the air, a reckless, impulsive maverick, he managed on solid ground just fine. Traveled with the Navy pension he’d been given. Ice had received postcards from Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tulsa, all with the same handwriting scrawling his name, filling him in on his endeavors. There were postcards from towns he’d never even heard of, too, in between postcards from tourist traps that Maverick would surely defend until his dying breath.
(The Roswell postcard had been his favorite. The design was just kitschy enough to make him huff out a laugh, and Maverick’s attempt to draw an alien giving Mr. Spock’s “live long and prosper” salute looked closer to a bird giving him the bird. It had a place of honor, pinned to the corkboard in Ice’s kitchen, the drawing greeting him each time he went to grab a glass of water.)
I love the desert. Maverick had written, in his most recent account of his travels. The sky goes on forever. It feels like you’re flying when you’re on a bike. You ever ride one? You don’t seem like the type. Remind me next time I’m back. We can take her for a spin.
It had taken him a while to wrap his head around it. Being thought of, while someone else was away. For all Ice knew, the second he left a room, his memory left with him. Maybe he was too hard on the object permanence of his colleagues, the men he flew with, his few and far between friends, but the idea of being remembered, thought of , still made him feel unsteady. He was a pilot—a damn good pilot—and left what he assumed was a good impression on those he flew with, those he flew for. Regardless, Maverick’s postcards made him feel visible in a way he’d been searching for since he was a child.
When Maverick had invited Ice alongside him on his next great adventure, traveling to visit some old friend in Dallas, Ice had agreed on the condition that they took his car.
”I’m not riding that deathtrap of a bike unless I’m already dead, Mitchell.”
So, they went. Drove from their little Navy-issued rentals to the Lone Star State, Maverick blasting his music through the newly-refurbished stereo of Ice’s car. As it turned out, Maverick’s license only extended to his motorcycle, and Ice wouldn’t dream of letting the man lay a hand on his girl, with or without that information, so he drove. Twenty-something hours, stopping for gas and in diners, dozing off in a motel on the border of Texas and New Mexico.
The visit itself had been well-planned, even Ice had to admit. Things to do each day they were there, each meticulously timed in a way that Maverick swore up and down would be “Iceman approved”. A museum one day, the rodeo the next, even a trip to some sleepy town a couple miles north that had some of the best damn pies Ice had ever tasted. Somehow, Maverick’s picks were as varied as anything. The big, well-known attractions, and the mom-and-pop holes in the wall just made Ice wonder, more than ever, how the hell Maverick happened to know people in the strangest places.
In the blink of an eye, it was time to go back. A fleeting, breathless moment without restraint, and then it would be back to mundanity. Back to twiddling his thumbs, waiting, trying to fill his days with whatever distractions he could manage before he inevitably left it all again for the air.
Maverick had always been running. He’d made a joke about it somewhere in the middle of Arizona on the road, where the arid desert air made Ice’s throat dry, regardless of how much water he drank to quell it.
“You’re running to the future,” he’d said, idly playing with his dog-tags. Clllck, cllllck, clllllck, filled the air, the metal catching on the chain looped around his fingers, as Prince crooned in the background. “Always going, going, going. I swear, you’ve got a plan for everything.”
“Not true.” Certainly not everything . He hadn’t planned for this, at the very least, or for the moments where he felt like his lungs and muscles and bones were too big for his skin, too used to the constant pressure from flight that they might as well burst out of his body. Ice’s finger tapped on the wheel, half-echoing the rhythm of the song. He was never much of a singer, but unlike Maverick, he actually let that stop him.
“Come on.” Maverick tilted his head towards Ice, as if urging him to say more. “Somewhere, there’s a binder with your plans in it, isn’t there? What’s next, after you’re done flying? Desk work? Teaching?”
( All of the above, Ice silently responded. Maverick didn’t stop.)
“Not me.” He said it like it was a point of pride. There were moments like this where Ice was reminded just how young Maverick was, regardless of the fact that there were only three years between them. “I’m on the lam, Kazansky. Never gonna let anyone catch up to me. The Navy’s gonna have to drag me away kicking and screaming if they try to ground me.”
Ice had known military men in the past, all branches, who would be happy to live, bleed, and die in the line of duty. Maverick, he had thought, was one of them. Anything to die flying, anything to stick it to the men who had barred him from the Academy and who reminded him, again and again, that he was the product of his father’s failures. Anything to keep fighting until the last second.
It wasn’t duty, really, that drew Maverick in.
It was the freedom. The rush, the thrill, the way that the air seemed to course through his veins and make its way into his heart itself, as if he could survive on just flight alone for the rest of his life. Maybe he could, if he tried hard enough.
“So you’re running from your past.” It was said as matter-of-factly as Ice could muster, with a hint of the dry sarcasm he was thoroughly used to.
To his relief (and mild confusion), Maverick laughed. “I’m being chased by it,” he had said, the now-familiar sound of the dog-tags growing quiet as he switched from running the tags up and down the chain to looping it around his fingers, between them, dangling them and snatching them up in one fluid motion. “‘S not the same thing.”
“Sure it is.”
“If you’re someone else, maybe.”
The confusion on Ice’s face must have read loud and clear, because Maverick clapped a hand on his shoulder, the sound almost loud enough to startle, if only they hadn’t had the windows cranked all the way down. Instead, the noise got lost in the rush of air, traveling off into the distant, near-silent, Arizona landscape. “I’ll explain when you’re older.” Maverick grinned a toothy, smug grin, as if he hadn’t been born three years after Ice, and was therefore the younger of the two. “Don’t crash the car thinking about it too hard.”
He didn’t.
That didn’t stop him from rolling the words through his mind over and over again.
Eventually, Prince’s tape clicked to a stop, and Maverick replaced it with Baez’s Blowin’ Away . The conversation faded. I am flying, I am flying. The songs coursed the stereo as the late afternoon sun ebbed into dusk, filling Ice’s car with a life he hadn’t realized he’d been missing.
After Baez, Carole King. The earth moved. How much was Maverick’s own taste? How much was Carole’s? His mother’s? Father’s? Goose’s? There was so much he didn’t know. None of it felt right to ask about, regardless of their current proximity. Ice just tapped his fingers against the wheel, listened to whatever stories Maverick pulled from thin air. Carole’s first dance at her and Goose’s wedding. The songs she’d sing to Bradley to coax him to sleep the nights before he and Goose deployed the first time after his birth. The way Goose would always try to carry a tune—never perfectly, but by God, he’d try , and Maverick’s accounts of him felt larger than life in a way that fit the man to a tee.
Time passed. Dallas came and went.
Then, they were there. In some motel, trying to avoid the loneliness that had become a staple of their lives on the run.
No matter how intertwined their stories were, Ice knew that the solitude was inevitable. It was just how they worked; Tom Kazansky was focused on the future, prepared to forge ahead and carve the trail that he’d laid out over years. Pete Mitchell was running from ghosts and shadows and expectation, hacking at the path before him and making it his own before he was inevitably caught, inevitably chained down, inevitably forced to ignore his inertia and landlocked. He’d avoid that at all costs, even if it killed him.
“I’m thinking of switching it up tomorrow.”
Maverick’s voice jarred Ice from his thoughts. “What?”
“We flipped through genres today. Tomorrow, we’re sticking with one.” Ice just blinked at him, even though Maverick wasn’t even looking in his direction. If Ice hadn’t responded, he wasn’t certain Maverick would have even known he was awake. “I’ve got a couple new wave tapes that should get us the bulk of the way, if I throw in a couple post-punk ones, that might fit the—“
Honestly, Ice wasn’t sure when he stopped processing the words. The exhaustion weighed his body down into the bed, but the sound of Maverick’s voice wrapped around him like a blanket.
At some point, they had stopped being rivals. Maybe it was after TOPGUN. After Goose. After his jetwash and Maverick’s flat spin and all that came after. Maybe it was in the air off Layton, the realization that Maverick wouldn’t leave him and Slider out to dry changing the way he looked at the man.
Pete Mitchell was his wingman. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind of that fact.
They started being friends. Maybe it was the postcards, the way that Maverick scribbled his name, the shitty drawings and the simple updates on his escapades. They were tucked in a shoebox beneath his bed, a reminder that he wasn’t stranded with no anchor tying him back to the Earth. Postcards and phone calls, beer shared and games watched on the little TV in Ice’s rental.
And then, at some point between San Diego and Dallas, they had stopped being strangers.
Now, they were something else altogether, lying in a dingy motel that smelled of stale smoke and looked like something out of a Hitchcock flick. Maverick, cycling through songs like he had an encyclopedic knowledge of every band from the past twenty-something years, even those from before either of them were born. Ice, half-awake, letting the low drone of his voice lull him into a dazed, contented, state of relaxation. They were caught in between something familiar and something strange, something new, something bordering on intimate.
Ice wasn’t sure he was equipped to handle it.
Finally, after gathering the energy to sit upright again, he rid himself of his shoes, his jeans, his shirt. He wouldn’t sleep beneath the yellowing quilt—even disregarding the summer heat, broiling the coal-black streets outside, he wasn’t going to risk his bare skin on sheets like this. Besides, he ran warm, despite the callsign. Slider swore up and down back at the Academy that he’d melt any ice he came across, besides himself.
Maverick was still talking. It was less to Ice, more to himself, to fill up the silence.
Did he talk to himself after Goose died?
There was so much he didn’t know about Maverick. Hell, there was so much Maverick didn’t know about him, too. As close as they had become over the past months, Maverick had never mentioned his father. His mother. Ice hadn’t even known that he spent the first seven years of his life in Dallas until they drove past the street his old school was on, Maverick pointing it out with a bitterness that could have been directed at the old teachers if not for the glimpse of openness that Maverick offered.
“Ma lived a mile away. After Dad died, she’d forget to pick me up.”
“Didn’t any of your friends offer you a ride?”
Maverick’s silence was answer enough. No one wanted to be friends with the Navy brat, the boy whose mother drank to get through parent-teacher conferences about his bad attitude , the kid who would always be singled out because he had the audacity to stand up for himself.
The conversation shifted pretty quickly after that.
It was the little glimpses into Maverick’s inner world, his past, present, and future, that reminded him that he wasn’t some idol, some untouchable figure. Maverick had never been a symbol. He wasn’t meant to be a figurehead, to sit pretty behind a desk or ascend through the ranks, regardless of how badly Ice wanted to see him soar. He was destined for the air, to be in constant movement, and to never touch down.
Ice offered little things about himself, too. Small things. He mentioned, finally, that his father was military. Deployed a few times while he was in junior high, but wound up doing desk work in front of a too-imposing portrait of himself that a young Ice swore watched his every move. He brought up his sister’s grad school, her dreams of helping people. It wasn’t much, in comparison; Ice never had too much nostalgia for his childhood, like Maverick, but his adventures were few and far between. He never had a rebellious phase, or flirted with the wrong girl. For all intents and purposes, Ice was good .
(He, pointedly, did not mention the peculiarities that his peers pointed out in whispers. How Ice never seemed to snag a date to the dances. How he’d bury himself in work and swimming, never making any friends beyond acquaintances, allies. How he’d look just a bit too long at Robbie Wheeler in the locker rooms after practice, mouth suddenly dry in the way the boys in his grade all described their sudden, burning attraction to every girl in sight.)
At some point, while Ice was lost in thought, Maverick had gone silent.
When Ice glanced over, he was greeted with the sight of the man asleep, sprawled in a way that could only be comfortable to him. He looked softer as he slept, the tension in his muscles all lax. It was strange—Maverick was so full of potential energy, ready for the rubber band to snap and go flying each time he spoke, each time he sat still for more than a minute at a time. It was always the next, next, next, that made up his life, and to see him still was almost a shock.
Ice had grown used to loneliness. Solitude marked him wherever he went—self-imposed, most of the time, but even when he went out with Slider, Maverick, the other members of the class of ‘86, he always felt on the other side of things. Distanced from them to the point of almost feeling alien, like they spoke a language he didn’t quite understand. He played along, said the right words, made the right expressions, because he had taught himself to. And when Maverick had invited him to Dallas, coaxed him from his routine into something new, he had expected that it would be much of the same.
It wasn’t.
It was easy, Ice realized, to not be alone.
Letting Maverick into his world, letting Maverick let him into his world, felt as effortless as breathing. He didn’t have to pretend around him, didn’t have to put up a front and lie. He was allowed, for the first time in however long, to exist as himself—not as Iceman, the stone-cold fighter pilot, but as Ice .
Of course, when he realized that it was Maverick and Maverick alone who could break him from the spiral of self-imposed isolation, other things began to creep out.
Watching Maverick’s chest rise and fall—the small movements of his lidded eyes, the twitching of his limbs, ever full of momentum—a funny warmth simmered in Ice’s body. Not the same as he had felt the few times he had had the opportunity to be with other men; those had been rushed, hasty, with strangers whose names he couldn’t remember even if interrogated. It wasn’t unfamiliar, though. Ice had felt it before, in the moments where Maverick pulled some stunt, or laughed like an idiot, or when they had made eye contact for the first time at the Officers’ Club what felt like a lifetime ago. A spark, somewhere beneath his skin, that reminded him how different Pete Mitchell was from the rest.
Putting a name to it was dangerous. Then again, everything with Maverick was bound to be dangerous.
But he was learning. And every moment they spent together, Ice learned that danger wasn’t always something to run from.
At some point, Ice succumbed to sleep. The exhaustion blurred the lines between consciousness and dreams, so he wasn’t entirely certain if the sound of shifting, of a low murmur, was his mind’s creation or Maverick’s. Regardless, it just allowed another wave of comfort to pass over him. He was allowed, now, to rest. To be not alone, to be cared for and listened to, to sleep and know that, when he woke, Maverick would be there. They’d talk about music, about the landmarks that Maverick wanted to stop by on the way back to San Diego. He’d sing, off-key but enthusiastically, and would grin over at Ice like he expected him to join in the chorus.
Tomorrow, maybe he would.
For now, in the dark of the motel, with Maverick’s steady breathing reminding him of his presence, Ice slept.
The open road, a vast unknown
But look at us, we're not alone