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Iceman
You can’t love a man with nothing to lose. Ice knows that. You can’t save him, you can’t keep him, and you can’t ever be what he needs.
He’d learned it, in those early years, through failed teaching assignments and a failed friendship and a failed relationship, begging Maverick with every breath he took to let me be the one you come back to, telling him, pressing the words into his skin, that if you have no one else, you still have me, you’ll always have me.
On the deck of the USS Enterprise, fresh with the flush of victory, he thinks that life has never been better. He has the Top Gun trophy, a confirmed kill, and Maverick by his side. In a way, he’s right.
Things break down slowly. Carole goes back home to Tennessee. There are calls, at first, and then they taper off. A visit, when Mav has some leave. Then she hits him with it. She doesn’t want the kid to get confused, and she doesn’t want him to get any ideas about joining the Navy. It would be better if they didn’t see each other anymore.
Mav tries, at first, because they’re family to him. He begs and he pleads, and he goes down fighting. The kid is his family, the last thing he has left, and she takes that from him. It’s not long after that that he washes out of Top Gun and gets sent back to sea, leaving Ice to pick up the pieces.
The 80s end that way. Unable to be the friend that Maverick lost or replace the kid he wasn’t allowed to see, or even to help him do anything more than just survive, he’d let them drift apart, for a month, for a year, until slowly, through letters and phone calls and leaves, the pendulum and swung the other way, and they’d reset. Gone back to the beginning. Wingmen. Friends. A tether, if not an anchor.
He wishes he could tell Penny, as he watches them make fragile overtures towards each other. But he doesn’t want to be that guy, spoil things for Mav in case it’s different this time, in case he manages to get it together. And ultimately, he knows it’s not a thing you can be told, it’s a thing you have to learn for yourself. How you can love him until your heart breaks, and then love him some more, but never fully, never properly, because he doesn’t have it in himself to let you.
The 90s pass, and Penny comes and goes. She learns. The Cold War ends, but other ones begin, and Maverick throws himself into the fire over and over again while Ice rises through the ranks at a more sedate pace, scrupulously doing his duty. They keep in contact, see each other when they can, steadfast friends. Ice dates and he settles down and he gets married. Slider is his best man, but Maverick is right there too, standing up with him, and for a moment he thinks that it’s over. That this is all they’ll ever be.
The century turns. The Towers fall. The Pentagon burns, taking good men with it. There’s always a war to fight somewhere. Ice cradles his newborn son in his arms and he can’t imagine what he would do, who he would be, if he lost him. He starts to understand Maverick a little better.
A couple years in, on a tour in DC, a newborn daughter at home to go along with his son, he gets a letter from Maverick, who heard from a guy who knows another guy, that Bradley Bradshaw has enrolled in the Naval Academy. Maverick comes home and Ice gets a divorce. He tries to tell himself these things aren’t related.
Bradley goes to flight school, becomes Rooster. A copy of his graduation photo makes its way into Maverick’s hands. He looks so much like his father. For the first time in years, Ice sleeps in Maverick’s bed and holds him as he cries, harsh sobs that wrack his body. After that, it’s a foregone conclusion.
Maybe you can’t love a man with nothing to lose, but Ice has never really been able to love anyone else.
Bradley
As long as Bradley can remember, there have been holes in his life. Pictures missing from the family album, the discolored edges of the contact paper mocking him as he flips through the pages. Memories that tease at him, don’t quite match up with what he knows about his father. Things his mother won’t talk about or glosses over.
Things he knows better than to ask about. She’d get mad at him sometimes and send him to his room, even when he hadn’t done anything wrong, or she’d get sad, go to her own room and later he might hear her crying softly, but she’d never, ever give him the answers he’s looking for.
There are some things he knows for certain. That his father had been in the Navy, that he’d flown in the backseat of a jet. That he’d died in that jet. They’d lived a nomadic existence, in those early years, following his father’s career. There are pictures of them at this base or that – Pensacola, Oceana, Miramar – his mother, his parents, the three of them.
They’d ended up back in Tennessee, near his mother’s parents. His father’s had already been gone by then. He hadn’t grown up with the military, and he’d never met another person who’d really known his father; not even his grandparents; they’d only met him a handful of times, brief leaves and a couple holidays.
When his mother dies, it feels like the chain has been severed for good. Her illness had been long and hard on them all. In the end, she asks for people whose names he doesn’t know—Goose, Maverick, Pete.
She catches an infection, once, and apologizes to him fervently. “I never should have done it,” she says, her eyes glossy with fever and wet with tears. “Please, forgive me. I couldn’t lose you like I lost him. Forgive me.”
He holds her hand and tells her he forgives her, that there’s nothing to forgive, that she’d never lose him, even though he can’t even be sure she’s really even talking to him or someone that only exists in her memory. He holds back the tears until she falls asleep.
She tries to tell him something, closer to the end, but her speech is slurred to the point where he can’t even make out the words.
Later, cleaning out the house they’d lived in so they could sell it, he finds some pictures, hidden away in a box in his mother’s closet. More of the ones he’s familiar with from when he was little, but with another man in them, shorter, dark hair. Green eyes, he thinks, even though he can’t really make them out in any of the shots. In uniform, his arm around his father’s shoulders; out of uniform, arm around his mother’s waist. Carrying little baby Bradley, smiling down at him.
A friend, a close friend. His father’s pilot? There are a couple shots of the two of them in front of a plane, out of focus in the background. If he closes his eyes, he almost feels like he can remember, like he sometimes feels like he can remember his father. His moustache brushing his skin as he kissed him goodnight. His voice as he’d sing at the piano. Green eyes and crooked teeth grinning down at him.
It isn’t until much later that he manages to put a name to the face.
There isn’t a lot of money for college, not after all his mother’s treatments. He has good enough grades for some scholarships, plays baseball pretty well, but the Naval Academy is free, and the recruiter at the college fair informs him that he gets a nomination on account of his father’s death in service.
He isn’t sure if he wants to give his life to the Navy, but the five-year commitment seems doable, even in the wake of 9/11. It will be four years before he reaches active duty, anyway. It might all be over by then, and what could happen to him out at sea, anyway?
And, though he never tells anyone, not his friends from high school or his advisors or his grandparents, it feels like a way back in. His father had gone to the Academy, been in the Navy. Surely there’d be someone there who’d known him, who could answer the questions that have always haunted him.
By the time his junior year rolls around and he goes to a seminar about the aviation track, he’s almost forgotten that he’s waiting for something.
“Hey, are you Goose’s kid?” the guest speaker asks as everyone mills around the refreshment table during a break, eyes focusing on Bradley with a sudden intensity. All at once, he remembers turning over one of those old photographs and seeing “Maverick and Goose” scrawled on the back in his mother’s handwriting.
“Yeah, I guess so,” he answers with a shrug. He’d wanted to know, but all of a sudden, he can’t bring himself to ask a single question.
“How’s Maverick doing these days?” the guy, an old pilot whose name Bradley can’t remember, asks. “He and your father, man…”
He’s saved from having to answer by the session being called back to order, and he cuts out early, his hands sweaty and shaking, not quite sure what he’s so afraid of.
It isn’t the last time. He’d known it wouldn’t be, when he’d decided he wanted to be a pilot. On his summer program he hears about Maverick and Goose. Down in Pensacola, he hears about Maverick and Goose. He gets used to brushing it off, offering vague platitudes about drifting apart.
Flight school is two years, and adds another three to his commitment after that, but that doesn’t matter to him. He’d known what he wanted to do the first time he went up in a jet. He’d known that he’d probably do it for the rest of his life.
What he isn’t prepared for is coming face to face with the ghosts from his past that he’d gone looking for, over six years ago now. Everyone had always spoken about Maverick like he was a legend or even a myth, consigned to the past like his father, who’d died there, not a living man.
Then he arrives on the boat for his first carrier deployment. Then he comes face to face with the CAG. Bradley, now Rooster, doesn’t place him at first. He’s young looking, except in the ways that he isn’t – it’s something in the eyes, Bradley thinks, something in the way he holds his body. He looks familiar, but only a little, despite the fact that he hasn’t changed that much.
“Commander Pete Mitchell,” Warlock says at his side, by way of introduction. “Maverick.”
His eyes are green.
Maverick
There’s a toy plane, an F-14, that Maverick keeps on his desk that used to belong to Bradley.
Goose had bought it, gifted it proudly when Bradley and Carole had visited at Top Gun. Carole had given it to Maverick when she’d told him never to come back. He’s never been sure if she’d meant it as a kindness or not.
He picks it up sometimes and adjusts the wings. Pulls it back on the flat surface of his desk, lets it zip forward until it runs into a folder or a stack of paperwork. He misses when he used to fly Tomcats. He misses Goose.
He misses Bradley, too, but that’s the problem. Bradley is about to join his squadron.
It had felt like waking up slowly, when he’d first heard the news that Bradley had enrolled in the Naval Academy. It had hurt in a way that he hadn’t let things hurt him for a while. It had hurt for a long time.
He’d mourned Carole when he’d learned that she was gone, all sins forgiven in that instant. Knowing it was over, all that he could remember were the good times, how happy she’d been, how happy they’d all been, back then. He’d mourned for Goose all over again.
He doesn’t know how to mourn for the little boy he’d lost, the boy he’d cradled in his arms as a baby and hoisted on his hip as a toddler and loved almost like his own. That boy isn’t gone. He’s an adult now. A fully fledged naval aviator.
Does he even know who Maverick is? Will Maverick ever know his story? Does he deserve to?
Maverick has ruined everything good he’s ever touched. He’d spent a long time believing that, knowing it down to his bones. That it’s in his blood, born into him like sin, that the Navy had been right about him all along.
On his better days, he doesn’t believe it anymore, but then he thinks about all the wreckage he’s left behind. About Goose. About Carole, Bradley. Penny. Sarah. Ice’s kids, as precious to him now as Bradley ever was.
God, but Ice is still there, waiting for him to come home. After all this time, Ice is there, a steady presence at his back. He’s never been able to do this without Ice. He never wants to.
He has no mementos of Ice, nothing littering his desk to remind him, but he remembers all the same. A wide grin on Ice’s face. Hands on his skin, spanning his ribcage, wrapping around his waist. Lips on the back of his neck, kissing softly, reverently, curving into a smile. A low chuckle in his ear.
He’d taken Ice for granted in those early years, lost him for what he thought might be forever, and then had gained him back slowly. Would Bradley ever know that about him? Would he want to?
He writes to Ice on the eve of it, laying down details in careful phrasing designed to avoid outside scrutiny. He pours his anxiety out onto the page, then seals it in an envelope and sends it off. He thinks of what Ice would say. He stands straight and tall and proud.
“Commander Pete Mitchell,” Warlock says, introducing him to the new pilot. “Maverick.”
He nods to Warlock and he goes, shutting the door behind himself and leaving the two of them alone in the office together.
“Lieutenant Bradshaw,” Maverick says crisply, willing his voice not to break. The kid had needed no introduction. He was the image of his father. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“Rooster, sir,” Bradley answers, remaining stiffly at attention.
“At ease,” Maverick commands, rounding his desk and sitting behind it.
Rooster’s eyes flick to the surface of it as he relaxes his posture. His eyes settle on the plane. His arm twitches as if to reach out. He looks decidedly green. “Sir. Permission to…”
When Maverick nods, Rooster collapses into the chair on the other side of the desk like a bag of bricks. When he looks up, his eyes are wet with tears. “My dad gave me that, didn’t he?”
Maverick picks it up and holds it out. Rooster takes it.