Chapter Text
It was a calm day out on the Indian Ocean when the MiGs appeared. Maverick was in the lead, Cougar on his wing. He stuck to his training, kept his nerve, and the MiGs bugged out. By all accounts, a successful encounter.
But something went wrong. Cougar couldn’t land his jet. Maverick pulled back on his throttle, missed the trap and flew right back out to sea to talk Cougar in, technically against orders, but well within the code of brotherhood. Call it mechanical issues, call it weather, call it stress, but Cougar looked a little shaky. Top Gun couldn’t have come at a better time. It would be a good break for him.
Getting stuck on the boat for the next few weeks was worth it, even if Goose was a bit grumpy about it. They both knew they’d done a fellow aviator a solid. It was worth it right up until Goose got a call from an old Academy buddy telling him that Cougar had dropped out of Top Gun and turned in his wings anyway.
Maverick turned it over in his head, replaying the incident from start to finish again and again, trying to figure out where he went wrong.
“Should I have known better?” he asked Goose late that night, unable to sleep. “I saw how shaky he was, coming in that last time.”
“It’s not your fault, Mav,” Goose answered immediately, like he’d been thinking about it too. “You can do everything right and still fail.”
“But I should try to do everything right, huh?” he asked, staring at the ceiling. It was an old, familiar refrain between them, for all that Goose went along with him more often than not.
“Yeah, that would help,” Goose agreed easily.
He resolved to try. But then again, he always tried. He just couldn’t always control it, the thing that burned inside him, made him seek thrill after thrill despite the rules, made him disregard the consequences.
It hadn’t been like that with Cougar. It hadn’t been about his ego or about his self-destructive streak, but when you were that guy, the Maverick, you didn’t get the benefit of the doubt, not even when you were doing the right thing.
A few weeks after that, he got to meet Goose’s old buddy from the Academy, the one who’d given him the news, when the Navy ferried in some fresh graduates from Top Gun to run air support in a crisis situation.
Maverick didn’t see why the Enterprise couldn’t just handle the rescue themselves with their own complement of pilots, but there they were, a pair of pilots and their RIOs, fresh as daisies in their khakis, stepping off the helicopter onto his turf.
Goose approached the taller guy first, a shit-eating grin on his face. “Hey, Slider,” he called out to the tallest of the bunch. “I thought you wanted to be a pilot, what happened?”
“Goose, you’re such a—” the guy, Slider, started to respond, but then cut off when he saw Stinger over Goose’s shoulder.
The new guys all snapped to attention for the CAG. Maverick did too, his most recent stint in hack fresh on his mind. “Briefing in thirty,” Stinger snapped, side eying Maverick. “Iceman and Slider, you’re with Maverick and Goose. Hollywood, Wolfman, with me.”
Stinger left with two of the new guys in tow and Maverick turned his attention to the two remaining. Slider and Iceman, who was looking back at Maverick from behind gold rimmed sunglasses. There was something assessing about it, and Maverick felt frozen in the moment, until Iceman’s whole expression changed, melting into a wide grin.
“Mother Goose,” Iceman said, pulling his glasses off and folding them. “Fancy meeting you here.”
His eyes were blue. An almost startling shade of clear, ice blue. He heard Goose making some retort that he didn’t quite catch the content of, heard the three of them bantering as they cleared the flight deck and headed to their quarters. Goose introduced them at some point.
“… an old friend from the Academy, he gave me the heads up about Cougar,” Goose was saying. Maverick felt the Iceman’s eyes on him, assessing him.
Goose and Slider were in and out, dumping their bags and heading off who-knew-where, but Iceman lingered in their stateroom. He had his glasses in his hand again, and the way he fiddled with them drew attention to his Academy ring.
“Cougar told me you saved his life,” Iceman said, leaning casually back against the bunks.
Maverick shrugged. “I just helped him get home.” It wasn’t something he wanted to brag about, particularly. “Did he tell you about the MiGs?”
Iceman grinned again, and it was just as blinding as before, directed at Maverick this time. “I figure we’re about to see some of our own.”
Maverick nodded, the wind taken out of his sails. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Iceman blinked slowly and his grin sharpened, became shark like. “You tell me about it. So I know what to expect.”
Maverick told him about it as they made their way to the locker room, not in the way he’d described it to the other guys in his squadron, full of bravado about the stunt he’d pulled, and not in the dry, palatable words he’d written down in his report, but in pure technical terms.
He talked about the planes and the way they flew. About the inverted dive – which, according to Iceman, the instructors at Top Gun hadn’t believed the MiG-28 was capable of – but also about the pilots, their mentality. And Iceman… Iceman seemed willing to be impressed.
He loitered in the locker room while Iceman changed, surveyed him casually as he put his shit in Cougar’s old locker and stripped down to his briefs, and Iceman didn’t say a single thing about it.
“Tell me about Top Gun,” Maverick said casually, somewhere between a question and a demand, taking in the lines of Iceman’s body as he pulled on a blue polo shirt that made his eyes pop even more.
“You sure you’ve earned it?” Iceman threw back, stepping into his flight suit.
“I would have been there already, if not for—” He cut off, frowning furiously at the floor somewhere to Iceman’s right. Why had he brought that up?
“Yeah, I heard about that, too.” The shark grin was back again, and Iceman crowded him back against the lockers, flight suit hanging off his hips. “I’ll tell you—if you behave for me.”
Maverick opened his mouth, then closed it. There was nothing in him that had a response to that, not one that was suitable for the locker room of an aircraft carrier. Not one that was suitable for life in the Navy.
They both jumped at the sudden knock at the door. “Five minutes,” Goose called, his footsteps retreating without waiting for an answer. Maverick put it at even money that Goose knew that it was him in there, that Goose knew who he was with.
Goose raised an eyebrow as he slid into his seat right before the briefing started and Maverick shrugged him off. Nothing to talk about now, not in public. Not when they were about to engage in the real deal.
“Alert 5, Maverick and Goose,” Stinger announced at the end of the briefing.
“We’re trusting the locals now?” one of the new guys cracked, just low enough to escape Stinger’s notice. Hollywood, Maverick thought, the other pilot. Maverick turned around just in time to see Iceman shove him and mutter something under his breath.
He went with Goose to gear up. He was locked in, he was confident. Sure, they hadn’t been to Top Gun, not yet, but of the two planes to have encountered a MiG-28 up close, his was the only one available. Cougar wasn’t flying anymore, and Merlin was still back at Miramar without a pilot.
He was confident, and then they launched. And then he saw what Iceman and Slider were up against. And then he flew straight through a MiG’s jetwash and almost lost control of his goddamned plane.
This wasn’t a game. It wasn’t a test of wills, waiting to see who’d blink first, because somebody had already blinked and that’s why they were up there. It was combat, it was a fight to the death. This was what he’d trained for, whether he’d thought the day would ever come or not.
Control of his plane regained, Goose’s voice steady in his ear, he engaged. He felt out of his depth next to Iceman, wholly unprepared, but he kept shooting, and then it was over. It was over and they’d survived, four kills between them, the rescue mission complete. High on the adrenaline and euphoria of the moment, he buzzed the tower on the way in.
“What the fuck, Maverick?” Iceman shouted, even as he embraced him.
“You should live a little,” he yelled back, over the noise of the flight deck, the roar of celebration all around them, and then he was swept away into Slider’s arms, into Goose’s, carried away on the wave of victory.
“You’d be a better pilot if you cut that shit out,” Iceman said to him later, when they were alone in their stateroom, Goose and Slider off with the other RIOs.
Maverick laughed softly, strung out and tired from the adrenaline dump. “You probably think I’d be better at everything if I just did what you told me.”
Iceman shook his head. “Maybe you would be.”
They looked at each other across the narrow space between the bunks for long moments before Iceman looked away, and that was that. They both got into bed. Goose came back at some point, climbed into the bunk on top of Maverick’s with a mumbled “Night darling” that Maverick responded to with “Good night, dear.” He thought he heard a huff of laughter from Iceman’s bunk, but he couldn’t be sure.
The imports stayed on the boat for a week more, before shipping back to Miramar to make their way to their regular posts. Iceman and Hollywood, who wasn’t as much of a dick as he’d seemed like at first, slotted right into the rotation, Iceman flying on Maverick’s wing more often than not. Maverick could tell he hated it a little bit, but Iceman was a guest here; it was only fair for Maverick to take the lead.
They held a couple sessions, classes, whatever, going over some of the stuff they’d learned at Top Gun. That was the whole point of the program, and Maverick wanted to learn, but part of him couldn’t help staring at Iceman, words going in one ear and out the other, as he talked his way through maneuvers and formations, attack and counter.
“What did you major in?” Maverick asked one day, as Iceman perched on the edge of Maverick’s desk, looking over his work while he twirled a pen between his fingers, drawing attention to his Academy ring.
Iceman grinned at him wolfishly. “Political science,” he answered almost too easily, as if daring Maverick to say something. Maverick said nothing. It was the Naval Academy; everyone there had majored in becoming an officer, and he hadn’t even been able to get in.
The morning the transport was due, Maverick found himself alone with Iceman again, in the lounge area off of the mess. Everything felt tenuous, fragile, in a way Maverick couldn’t explain, not even to himself. He had no excuse to see Iceman again after this, no reason to prolong this dance.
“What are you doing next?” Iceman asked suddenly, looking carefully at a spot somewhere to Maverick’s left.
“Goose and I are heading to Top Gun.” He said it casually, like it wasn’t still a thrill after learning about it two days ago.
Iceman looked over at him, making eye contact for the first time all morning. His smile developed slowly, not quite a full-blown grin, but somehow more honest for it. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”
Maverick raised an eyebrow, his pulse beating heavily beneath his skin. “What, you get held back or something?”
“You didn’t hear? Winner gets to come back as an instructor.”
And there was that grin again, sharp like a shark’s teeth, but Maverick couldn’t even bring himself to care. Whatever this was, he wasn’t ready for it to end.
It was sunny and unseasonably hot when they landed at Miramar in mid-September, heat shimmer on the tarmac in the haze of jet exhaust. Maverick breathed it in, let it settle into his bones. Their squadron was based out of Miramar; it was the closest thing he had to home right now, outside of Goose’s place back in Tennessee.
He couldn’t do anything so prosaic as sleep in his own bed, but after they checked in and got their housing assignment, he went to his storage locker, touched some of his own things, got out his jacket and his bike, and went for a ride.
Speeding along the California roads into the setting sun, jets landing in the distance, a cool breeze in his hair, he almost felt free, like all the bullshit in his life was behind him. It almost felt like flying. He hadn’t felt that, not even when he actually was flying, in weeks.
Not even the promise of Top Gun had been enough to keep the pressure from building inside him, the need to do something stupid and reckless, and it had been long enough since the rescue mission that he didn’t think it would be looked over so easily anymore. So he drove, and he drove fast.
Of course he ended up getting pulled over. Oddly enough, the first thing he thought of wasn’t the reaction of his superiors or even Goose’s quiet admonition to be careful out there as he’d gotten into a cab on his way out. It was Iceman’s pursed lips and disappointed eyes.
Cut that shit out, he heard echoing in his mind as he charmed his way out of a ticket and got escorted back to base. He couldn’t even bring himself to tell Goose what had happened.
The next night, the last before classes started, they went out to the O Club. He wasn’t even really thinking about it, not at that moment, but as soon as they walked in, there was Iceman, looking as cool as ever in his summer whites, aviators blocking his eyes.
Behind him, pressed up against him in the crowd, Goose caught him looking and sighed heavily in Maverick’s ear. “So much for having a good time,” he said.
Maverick half turned back to him. “What do you mean by that?”
“I hate being the other woman,” Goose returned, something serious behind the joking tone. Not jealousy, not exactly, but—
Maverick shook his head. “You know you’re the only girl for me.”
“You don’t even look surprised to see him, Mav,” Goose said with a sigh.
He looked away from Iceman, who didn’t seem to have noticed them yet, and maneuvered his way to the bar to order them a couple of beers. So Iceman was here. He’d known that he would be, even if he hadn’t told Goose that. It didn’t change anything.
Iceman wandered over after a few minutes that Maverick spent surveying the bar, wondering who among the patrons would be his competition, how good they’d be and if they’d pose a challenge.
His smile was warm, friendly, and the glasses were gone, folded up and hanging out of his pocket. His eyes were not on Maverick. “Mother Goose,” he greeted, reaching out a hand.
“Mr. Iceman,” Goose answered, with a mischievous grin, like it was an inside joke that Maverick wasn’t in on.
Maverick felt left out, until Iceman’s eyes slid to him, his grin widening somehow. “Behaving yourself?” he asked, as if he already knew the answer.
Something in Maverick burned in shame as he remembered being pulled over the night before. “Doing my best,” he returned, taking a swig of beer.
Iceman just smirked in response. “See you in class,” he said, reaching past Maverick, well into his personal space, to grab some peanuts off the bar. He stayed close while he popped them into his mouth, crunched them one by one, while Maverick could only watch.
“Ho-oly shit,” Goose said under his breath when Iceman was gone, melting into the fabric of the bar like he’d never even been there. “I think that’s about enough for tonight.”
Privately, Maverick agreed with him, but they both stayed until their beers were finished. Maverick didn’t think Goose had a problem with it, not really, not with the way he’d always looked out for him, but they didn’t talk about it. Not in general, and not that night, either.
It was better if they didn’t talk about it. That way, Goose could always claim not to know, just like Goose could claim he had no choice when Maverick chose to disobey orders with him in the plane.