Chapter Text
“I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (about his wife, Zelda)
“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Ice, fire or clear! Look at this! Jesus Christ, I can take a shot right here!”
“I need another twenty seconds, then I’ve got it.”
Tom Kazansky didn’t realize that he was in love with Pete Mitchell until he watched his plane crash into the ocean.
“Maverick’s getting impatient, Ice. Come on, take the shot.”
The morning of July 29, 1986 dawned like any other. Up with the sun just like always, and then they all assembled in the hanger for a full day of classes and hops. TOPGUN had been in session for three weeks, after all, three identical weeks, and no one had any reason to expect for this day to be anything different. Iceman remembered the day in bits and pieces: Jester’s morning recap of the current standings for the Top Gun trophy, the way Slider had smirked over at Maverick when his name was listed second, the words “Up first today is Iceman and Slider with Maverick and Goose”. After that, though, the next thing that was really clear in his memory was after they were already in the air, him squaring off against Maverick just like always.
“Ten more seconds, then I’ve got him.”
Tom Kazansky was the Iceman, he was good under pressure. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he thrived under it, he didn’t fly instinctually the way Maverick did, but one thing he could do was divorce himself from whatever was happening around him and not let it keep him from flying just as ice-cold and flawlessly as he always did.
“Ice, come off high right. I’m in.”
“Five more seconds.”
“Come off high right, Ice. I’m in.”
“I’m off. Shit!”
It had been three weeks, and one thing that Iceman hadn’t been able to figure out was why, when it came to Maverick, all of that seemed to go out the window. As he patiently tried to find the right angle for the shot and ignore Maverick’s loud complaints in his ear, the other thing that Iceman was aware of was anger, simmering barely contained under the surface. It was anger at Maverick, sure, because being angry at Maverick was pretty much the default state of anyone who knew him, but a significant portion of it was anger at himself. Because he was Tom Kazansky, he was the Iceman, he was going to win the Top Gun trophy, and he was absolutely better than this.
He jerked the stick up hard, mentally cursing himself and Maverick in equal measure. Frustration rolled over him in a wave, one that Iceman was powerless to avoid or ignore the way he usually did. When it was just him and Slider flying against Viper or Jester, or when it was him and Slider paired with literally anyone else in their class, he was able to do it. He was patient, and he could wait, bide his time and then swoop in at the first sign of a mistake. Never did Tom Kazansky give up a shot he knew he could make, because he never let anything past the Iceman mask enough to need to. Never, unless he was flying against Maverick Mitchell.
Flying against Maverick was the only time when Iceman felt like he was beside someone who matched him. But flying against Maverick also felt like he was chasing endlessly after something that was always just out of reach. He looked forward to it and dreaded it in equal measures. And so, he abandoned the shot to let Maverick move in, because he knew Maverick would take it. For Maverick felt things and if he wanted them, he went after them, sunk in his teeth and refused to let go, and winning was absolutely something that Maverick wanted. Iceman tried to shove the frustration and anger and admiration and jealousy and everything else he was feeling into a tiny box in his mind, where it could be hidden away in the shadows.
Struggling to accomplish something that he was usually able to do without a second thought, Iceman was blind to the world for a moment. The next thing he could remember was Goose’s voice over their shared comms, laced with panic as he yelled, “This is not good!”
His heart in his throat, Tom turned and looked down at the sky beneath the canopy.
The first time Tom Kazansky heard the name Maverick Mitchell was the night before their first day at TOPGUN.
He and Slider were sitting in the living room of the off-base house they would be sharing for the next five weeks. Slider was reclined on the couch, his legs kicked up and hands propped behind his head as he relayed everything new that he had learned about the program and the people who would be completing it with them. Ice was curled up in the armchair opposite him, focused more on the book in his lap than he was on his RIO’s words.
Most of the things Slider had heard about TOPGUN, Ice had already heard, too—they’d spent the past several months on an aircraft carrier living out of each other’s pockets, after all—so he offered the occasional hum of acknowledgement but mostly let his words filter in one ear and out the other. Everything that there was to learn about the people they’d be flying with for the next month, after all, he would learn on his own soon enough.
“... Yeah, so the two of them, and, shit, Bradshaw! Heard this morning that he got a spot last-minute. Man, I haven’t seen him in forever.”
This, unlike most of the things that Slider had said so far, was enough to give Ice pause. He looked up from The Great Gatsby to squint at his RIO. “Mother Goose? Isn’t he on the Enterprise? I thought Cougar and Merlin were getting that spot.”
Slider tipped his head to the side until they made eye contact. “They were supposed to, yeah,” he said, “until Cougar bugged out and turned in his wings.”
“He what?” Now, Ice shut the book fully and twisted around so he was facing Slider, who was grinning.
“Yep. Turned ‘em in yesterday, or so I heard. They were out on patrol and a MiG-28 got missile lock on him. Fucked him up enough that he went to the CO as soon as they landed. Bradshaw and his new pilot were second place, so they get the spot now.”
Tom’s heart was pounding in his ears as he slowly sunk back into his chair. He squeezed the book in his hands hard enough that the cardboard cover dug into his palms, but he barely even felt it. Slider was still talking, probably, but with the rest of the world filtering in like he was underwater, he wouldn’t have been able to tell.
It had been years since the last time Tom had seen Bill Cortell, but he knew he would never forget the months they’d spent together in flight school. He’d graduated at the top of his class at the Academy, but Tom had never truly felt like he belonged until he got to Pensacola with the sky spread out below him and with people who loved flying just as much as he did on his wing. Even back then, Iceman was determined to make it to the very top, to fly as much and as long as he could until he was the best, and when he’d met Cougar, he knew that he’d finally found someone who felt the same. They’d been inseparable after that, and up until he’d met Slider a few years later, he would have said that Cougar was the person in the entire world who knew him best.
Cougar was one of the few people who Tom Kazansky allowed to see the real him, but, he realized abruptly, the feeling had obviously never been mutual. He had thought it was, at the time, had thought that Bill telling him about his girlfriend and his parents and always sticking to his wing when they flew together meant that he’d trusted Tom, or some shit like that. And so Tom had opened up back—told Bill about his own family, why he’d picked the Navy, his goddamned hopes and dreams for the future. But apparently it had all been for nothing, apparently Cougar wasn’t who Iceman had thought he was.
Tom Kazansky loved flying more than he loved almost anything in the world. He couldn’t imagine giving it up, not for anything, not for a million near-misses with death. And he knew Bill loved his family, but Tom had thought he agreed, thought he understood what it was like to be drawn to the sky.
Well, he thought, ironic and rueful, apparently he’d been wrong about that, too.
“... Ice? Ice, you good? Ice… hey, Tom!”
Iceman forced himself to exhale, and it felt like it had been punched out of him. The world swam back into focus and he found himself face-to-face with Slider, who had stood from the couch and was looking down at him with his brow pinched in worry. Tom held onto The Great Gatsby, still in his hands, and took a deep, measured inhale. By the time he released it, everything felt a little bit more real. Cougar had turned in his wings, but Tom was there in Fightertown, his first day at TOPGUN was tomorrow, and he had Slider by his side.
“I’m fine,” he said, shoving Slider back with a hand in his face and mostly meaning it. Ice’s RIO let himself be pushed, collapsing back onto the couch even if he continued to watch Ice with a far too knowing look in his eyes. Desperate to change the subject before Slider could launch a full-scale interrogation, Ice rooted around for anything to say and finally settled on, “So who else is coming?”
Luckily, it worked. Slider blinked and the tension shattered. “What?”
“You said Mother Goose has a new pilot. Know anything about him?”
The thing about naval aviators was that there weren't really a lot of them. Even if Iceman hadn’t met all of them, people flew with other people enough on deployments that there were names they ran into over and over. Especially if this guy was good enough to get into TOPGUN, Ice expected to at least recognize his name.
That was not what happened. Instead, Slider snorted a little and shook his head with a half-smile on his face. Tom didn’t realize he was leaning closer in anticipation until his RIO raised an eyebrow at him, then he pulled back and tried not to blush.
“Never met him, but I’ve heard about him. He’s pretty young and he bounced between RIOs for years because no one wanted to fly with him. He’s reckless and impulsive and does whatever he wants in the air, so they say.”
Ice slumped back into his chair with a huff, wrinkling his nose. He wasn’t sure why he felt so disappointed. Even if this new kid was irresponsible, he doubted it would be anything that he couldn’t handle. For years, Iceman had been the best wherever he went—there was no way some hotshot who was offered a spot as a consolation prize would even be able to challenge him. “Sounds like he’ll wash out in the first week, then.”
Slider grinned wolfishly. “That a bet, Tommy?”
Ice worried the cover of his book where the cardboard was starting to split apart at the corners. He tried to meet Slider’s eyes, but trying to look him in the face right now felt like looking into the sun. Something in his stomach was still twisted up in knots. He tried to take a deep breath as discreetly as he could but didn’t even need to look to know that Slider had noticed. “Maybe, Ronnie. What’s his name?”
“Pete Mitchell,” said Slider. “Callsign Maverick.”
Tom mouthed the word to himself. There was something about that name, Pete Mitchell, that was familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Not that it mattered, anyway, not if he was anything like his callsign suggested. Someone like that, he mused, was bound to cause destruction and take out everyone in his path. He would make things entertaining, for sure, but not truly challenging. Iceman was ice-cold, no mistakes in the air, he avoided mavericks in general and would avoid this Maverick in particular like the plague. He would watch once TOPGUN got started, but from a safe enough distance away so as to not get caught in the crossfire.
“Maverick,” Iceman said slowly, drawing the name out to get a feel for how it was to say. “Know why the spot went to him?”
Slider narrowed his eyes at Ice suspiciously, like he was seeing something he didn’t know how to interpret. Ice wasn’t sure what his RIO was looking for, so he kept his face carefully blank. Still, it was a relief when he moved on a few seconds later and actually answered the question. “I’m not sure. I heard something about Maverick disobeying orders to save Cougar’s life, but someone else said that Maverick abandoned him up in the air and that’s why the MiG was able to get missile lock on him in the first place.”
It was Ice’s turn to narrow his eyes. That was expected in some aspects, from the scant picture that was forming in his head, but unexpected in others, and they had no way of knowing which was true, not yet. Interesting. This was new, this was something different. Carefully, he leaned back in the armchair, making a point to never take his eyes off of Slider’s. He clutched again at The Great Gatsby. “Doesn’t sound like much of a team player either way.”
Something about the way Slider was looking at him gave Ice the impression that he was being handled, like his RIO was picking his words very carefully and listening closely to everything Ice said in return. It brought his hackles up, because Slider was one of the only people in the world who knew him well enough to be able to do it, and he really didn’t want his every move to be scrutinized while he was already distracted. A sudden sharp pain across his palm made him realize how tightly he was holding onto the book and he forced himself to let go.
By the look in Slider’s eyes, he didn’t miss this. But he didn’t comment on it, instead saying, “Doubt you’ll get along with him, then,” with a pointed sort of look.
Again, Tom found himself unable to meet that gaze. He hummed, tapping his fingers against the cover of his book but otherwise holding himself perfectly still. “We’ll see. Things are bound to get interesting.”
Slider shook his head and smiled a little half-smile. “Entertaining, you mean.”
And with that, he finally looked away and threw himself back down onto the couch. The tension in the room popped like a soap bubble. Tom’s shoulders slumped down before he could catch himself, but he knew that this time Slider wouldn’t notice.
“Right.”
It was getting late and they had to be up bright and early the next morning for their first day at TOPGUN. They would need to go to bed soon, but for now it seemed like Slider was still content to continue repeating everything he’d ever heard about everyone the two of them had ever met. And he was perfectly capable of and willing to carry on the entire conversation on his own, so Ice relaxed a bit more and let his RIO’s voice blanket him with a soothing hum of noise. Now that the tension from whatever that conversation had been was beginning to bleed away, it left him feeling tired in its wake.
Tom’s eyes slipped down to the book still in his lap as he listened to Slider drone on about Hollywood and Wolfman—a pilot-RIO pair the two of them had flown with on deployment once, years ago. He traced his fingers over the raised lettering that spelled out the words F. Scott Fitzgerald as he hummed in agreement with Slider’s assessment that they would beat Hollywood and Wolfman, and as he stared at the floating illustration of Daisy’s eyes and the green light trailing down her cheek, he thought one last time of Maverick Mitchell.
They didn’t fly any hops on their first day at TOPGUN, in favor of listening to Commander Metcalf and Lieutenant Commander Heatherly describe what would become their lives for the next five weeks. Ice sat beside Slider in the classroom and listened diligently to each of the presentations, because he knew he was going to be the one to win the Top Gun trophy, and he was prepared to do everything he needed to earn it.
But that also involved scoping out his fellow aviators, his rivals, and so he and Slider also paid close attention to everyone else who was in the classroom with them. Many of them were people he recognized or whose names he’d heard before, a few of the others there were people Iceman had flown beside on deployments in the past. It meant that he was able to gain a fairly accurate assessment, he thought, of the way everyone around him flew and what he would have to expect flying with and against them in the coming weeks.
Or, nearly everyone. There was one wildcard, of course, and it didn’t take Tom long at all to spot him.
Maverick Mitchell was short, had dark hair, and sat up in the front row beside Goose Bradshaw, whispering between themselves as they surveyed the room around them. They were too far away for Ice to hear what they were saying, but from the self-satisfied smile on Maverick’s face, they were doing what he had done and sizing up the others. It was equally clear that Maverick found those around him to be lacking, and the notion had Ice smiling to himself when he was sure no one else would see it. If Mitchell truly had snuck into the program at the last minute, then he wouldn’t have had time to riddle out what to expect, now would he?
When Viper got up to the front of the room and started talking, Maverick turned his attention to him and listened. Iceman listened, too, but Viper wasn’t saying anything that they hadn’t already heard a hundred times that day, so he didn’t feel bad about only giving him and his speech half of his focus. Mostly, he twirled his pen between his fingers and kept his eyes on Maverick, taking the opportunity to study the other man while he wasn’t paying attention.
Maverick was smiling a little as Viper described the way TOPGUN would push them to their limits, but if he was truly as careless in the air as Slider said, that wasn’t surprising. Neither was the way that smile grew when Viper said the word “dangerous”. Between that and the way he sat on the couch—both relaxed and self-assured, like he was confident that he was the best pilot in that room and nothing anyone else could do would change his mind—Ice had almost everything he needed to conclude that Slider had been right about at least some of what he’d said last night.
When Maverick’s head tipped backwards to face him, Iceman remembered abruptly that he was still twirling his pen between his fingers. The movement must have caught Maverick’s eye, he thought as their gazes locked. The unexpectedness of the action sent a jolt through him—he didn’t feel guilty for staring, especially considering that Maverick had been doing the exact damn thing himself—but he kept it from showing on his face. Instead, he lifted the hand that was still twirling the pen until the bright blue stone of his Academy ring was impossible for Mitchell to ignore. If Iceman was right about him, about why his name sounded familiar, then it should be enough to provoke a reaction.
Sure enough, Maverick quickly looked away.
He looked back over a couple of seconds later, under the pretense of following Viper as he paced down the aisle. This time, his smile was gone, face held carefully blank in a way Ice could tell was requiring a great deal of effort, and he looked Ice over with purpose. When Maverick’s eyes connected with his again, high on the knowledge that he’d been right, that he’d riddled something out, Iceman smirked at him, and kept smiling even once Maverick turned back around.
And then Maverick assured Viper that it was going to be his name on the Top Gun plaque, and Iceman thought about how Slider had said Maverick left Cougar alone against a MiG in order to go fuck around by himself.
Arrogance was something that all of them had in spades, but there was a big difference between being impulsive and leaving someone else to nearly die. A cocky claim to their instructor could be nothing more than the program’s newest alternate choosing to showboat, or it could be indicative of something more. Right now, Ice didn’t know enough about Maverick to say which one it was.
Once Viper dismissed them, Ice sat up straighter in his seat and grinned over at Slider. Even if he didn’t know what the look was for this time, his RIO knew what it meant, and he nodded. Ice leaned back and as Maverick and Goose passed them said, “The plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies’ room.” He could see the pieces all slotting perfectly into place in his head.
Iceman needed more information about Maverick Mitchell, and he knew exactly how he was going to get it. There was, after all, only one place someone like him would possibly be that night.
Ice dragged Slider along with him to the O Club that night, and they hadn’t even been there an hour when he saw Goose and Maverick arrive. Goose was tall enough that his head sailed above most of the crowd and Maverick was short enough that he was mostly hidden beneath it, but it was Maverick that Tom spotted first.
Maverick and Goose came to a stop on the other side of the bar from where he was politely listening to the girl who had been hanging off his arm for almost an hour, despite Tom’s gentle attempts to escape. He tracked their movement, grateful for the aviators he was wearing to hide his eyes from the rest of the room. Slider never failed to remark on how much of an asshole it made him look to wear sunglasses inside, but by now he’d given up explaining that he liked the way it prevented people from being able to read him the way he tried to read them, kept them from getting too close. Slider was probably right, anyway—Iceman knew how he was perceived.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled and Tom didn’t need to look to tell that Maverick was staring at him, but his eyes were hidden, so he unabashedly looked anyway. Goose was staring, too, he quickly confirmed, meaning that the two of them were probably talking about him. He knew they probably wouldn’t be able to see it, but he lifted his chin in challenge anyway. Let Pete Mitchell try to figure him out all he wanted—it wouldn’t work, because Tom Kazansky was the Iceman, and many others had already tried and failed.
He was disappointed, almost, when Maverick looked away, but he did follow his gaze back to Goose and then to Slider as he passed by. He watched Goose pull Slider to a stop and it only took a brief glance from his RIO to have Ice politely making his excuses to the girl and heading to the other side of the bar. He slid his aviators into his pocket as he approached and was taken aback for a moment by how bright the rest of the world seemed in comparison. Maverick’s eyes slid to him as he shook Goose’s hand, but he didn’t let himself look over until Goose introduced him, formally, to Pete Mitchell.
“Congratulations on TOPGUN,” Tom told Maverick as they shook hands.
“Thank you,” Pete Mitchell said back with a smile that lit up his entire face. Tom distantly wished that he could put his aviators back on. He spotted a bowl of nuts on the bar next to where Maverick was leaning and set his sights on it. He was here, after all, for one purpose and one purpose only: to get information on Mitchell.
“Sorry to hear about Cougar. He and I were like brothers in flight school. He was a good man.” As he spoke, Tom reached for the bowl of nuts, leaning towards the counter and slanting his body so that he was facing Maverick. It cut Slider and Goose out of their conversation entirely and brought him right up close to Maverick and his fading smile and his dark hair and his eyes that Tom could now tell were green. He focused on all of it, focused so hard that it felt like everything else faded away and the world narrowed to just the two of them.
“Still is a good man,” was what Pete Mitchell answered.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
“Thought so.”
Maverick didn’t know about the history that Ice had with Cougar and, again, he knew how he was perceived. That he had misjudged Cougar still stung, but he pushed it down, away, because he was good at that, and focused instead on Maverick’s reaction. He seemed to care about how Tom viewed Cougar, which went against Slider’s assessment that Cougar turning in his wings had been Maverick’s fault, and was infinitely more interesting than anything that had happened so far that day.
Tom braced a hand against the counter and leaned in close, even closer than he had been. He could already imagine all the shit he would get later from Slider for pulling something as overt as this, but he kept his eyes unwaveringly on Pete Mitchell. It did not escape his notice that Maverick didn’t look back for more than a second or two at a time. “Say, you need any help?”
That earned him a slightly longer bout of eye contact. This close, Tom could see the flecks of brown in Maverick’s green eyes, even in the dim lighting of the O Club. “With what?”
“You figured it out yet?”
“What’s that?” Maverick’s smile was back, but it was wary, like Ice was telling a joke at his expense and he was waiting for the punchline. It was, he supposed, not an entirely inaccurate statement at the root of things.
“Who’s the best pilot.”
Now, Maverick’s eyes snapped to his and held on like radar lock. They stayed there, intense and blazing like a fire, as he said, “No, I think I can figure that one out on my own.”
Mitchell had already made it very clear that afternoon what his thoughts were on who was the best pilot at TOPGUN. Tom would be willing to bet that he’d do anything he could think of to prove it, and he knew that meant there would be a lot of things that Maverick would be willing to do. He let himself smile because that, that had been a challenge, and Pete Mitchell had risen to meet it perfectly.
Tom lifted his eyes and stared just as unwaveringly back. It was time to see if his second assumption had been as accurate as the first. “I heard that about you. You like to work alone.”
Based on the way he’d done a terrible job of keeping his cool in class that afternoon, Maverick had a shit poker face. But his eyes never wavered from Ice’s, nor did his face slip from that same wary smile, until Slider called his name and the rest of the world came rushing back in all at once.
Reluctantly, Tom stood back up straight, but he studied Maverick for a few seconds more. He hadn’t denied the claim, but then, Ice hadn’t expected him to. Someone who flew like that had to know that the only place where promises meant anything was in the air. So he hadn’t denied it, because he was smarter than that, but he also hadn’t done anything that Ice could take as a confirmation, either.
Tom smiled. He would have to wait until he could see Maverick fly to get his answer, and he was surprised to find that he was genuinely looking forward to it. “I’ll see you later,” he said as he and Slider prepared to leave, because Pete Mitchell had risen to his challenge, so it only seemed fair to do the same in response.
“You can count on it,” Maverick told him.
He knew better than to do so, but for a moment, Tom wished that he could believe him.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Ice, what the fuck was that?!” Slider was yelling at him as soon as the door to their house closed behind him.
Iceman, however, was unfazed, or at least that was how he made sure it looked on the outside. He could tell by the twitch in his RIO’s jaw that it worked, although he was careful to keep Slider from getting too close of a look at his face. He had known that something like this was coming, that it had been inevitable from the moment he’d gotten up in Maverick’s face the previous night at the O Club.
Even after last night, and even with his preliminary assumptions on Maverick Mitchell, Tom still hadn’t expected their second day at TOPGUN to go quite like that. From whatever the hell was going on between Maverick and their instructor Charlie, to learning more about Cougar’s final mission, to Maverick getting Jester by breaking the fucking hard deck on their first goddamned hop, to their face-off in the locker room afterwards… well. The day certainly hadn’t been boring, that was for sure, but the most distressing development was how very, very little of it had gone according to Iceman’s plan.
Not, of course, that he was going to admit as much to Slider. Not willingly, at least. And so Ice shrugged off his jacket and headed for the coat closet. “What was what, Slider? It was a long day, you’re going to have to be more specific.”
By the angry stomping of feet against the hardwood, Slider had followed him. Ice continued draping his jacket over the hanger with the same calm precision as always and refused to look over at his RIO.
“Oh, nuh-uh, you do not get to do this with me,” Slider bit out. He sounded angry, angrier than Ice had expected him to be, and his hands stilled for a moment on his coat. “Cut the bullshit and answer: what the hell were you thinking? You know that’s twice you’ve gotten in Mitchell’s face like that in the past twenty-four hours, right?”
“He’s dangerous,” Ice said, replacing the hanger in the closet and shutting the door. He thought about confronting Maverick about Cougar before the first hop and pointedly did not correct Slider’s count. “You said so yourself. And he’s reckless in the air. He needed to know it, because if he keeps flying the way he does, he’s going to get someone hurt someday.”
Ice kept his back to Slider, so he couldn’t tell what expression was on his RIO’s face, but the silence that descended between them was charged and heavy. He tensed up for a moment, then forced himself to relax.
When Slider’s voice finally came, it was steely, deceptively calm. His words, too, were short and clipped. “Tom. You snapped your fucking teeth at him.”
Tom Kazansky was the Iceman, so he did not blush. Instead, he studied the furniture in the living room at the end of the hallway as an excuse not to turn around. His eyes caught on the armchair he’d been sitting in the night before last—had it really only been that long ago?—and he thought about everything he and Slider had discussed concerning Maverick. They’d agreed, then, that Maverick would surely make things more eventful, and they certainly hadn’t been wrong.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Slider let out a bark of humorless laughter. Something was twisting in Ice’s gut, hot and uncomfortable, and it made him angry. He took a deep breath and pushed it down, but he knew even as he did so that it would only work for so long, because this argument had been building for the entire goddamn day. “It worked? You’re trying to tell me that you did all of that on purpose? You stared at Mitchell all day in class yesterday, trapped him against the bar in the O Club, and then fucking bit at him because you were trying to, what? Let him know that you think he’s dangerous? What the fuck, Ice?”
The disbelief and the scorn dripping from every word out of Slider’s mouth was enough for Ice’s anger to bubble over, and he whirled around to glare at his RIO. “You saw what he was like out there!” He pointed accusingly in the vague direction of the base. “He challenged an instructor, he broke the hard deck in order to pursue a kill, and he abandoned Cougar in order to fuck around in an inverted dive with a fucking MiG. Excuse me if I thought that he needed to be taught a lesson.”
When he was so caught up in his anger that it was all he could think of, Ice had forgotten why he wasn’t turning around: if Slider could see his face, he would be able to look beneath the mask and see why he’d actually done it. Once he’d finished his speech, chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath, it crashed down on him, all at once, what he’d done.
It was comical, almost, the way Slider's expression changed. All the anger vanished in a second, replaced by understanding and something that almost looked like pity. He took a half step forward and reached out as if to place a hand on Ice’s shoulder. “Is this about Cougar?”
Without even thinking about it, Ice took a matching step back so that Slider's hand fell away into empty air. He was still breathing quick and shallow, but it was no longer from exertion, and he glared at his RIO with his coldest glare, the one that caused everyone to flinch and mutter under their breaths that he really was just like his callsign.
But because this was Slider, that wasn't what happened, and he met the stare head-on with a cool look of his own. Ice wanted to scream at him because his skin felt tight and itchy with the buildup of everything he was feeling, and Slider may think that he had everything all worked out, but he didn't understand one goddamn thing. “You’d like that, wouldn't you?”
Slider’s eyes narrowed. Iceman could see him thinking, back to trying to piece together a picture from his reactions, but he also saw the way his anger was building up again. Good. “The fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“It would be convenient,” he spat, “if I was acting out against Maverick because I felt betrayed by Cougar, right? Or whatever bullshit you were thinking? I hate to break it to you, but I don’t care about Cougar. He can turn in his wings if he wants, I haven’t seen him in years, it doesn’t matter to me.”
There was a cold feeling in his gut that told him that these words weren’t as true as he wanted them to be, but Iceman had already known that. It would take a lot longer than a day, he was sure, to compartmentalize everything that Cougar’s resignation made him feel. But what he’d told Slider still wasn’t a lie, not entirely, and Ice wished that it was. It truly would be simpler if the entirety of Ice’s feelings towards Maverick were defined by his feelings towards Cougar, because he was smart enough to realize that they were separate things. Even if he didn’t know how to separate them yet, he wasn’t the Iceman for nothing—he could put up a mask and be polite to Maverick if nothing about the way he was feeling was because of the man himself.
Some of the way Ice viewed Maverick was probably because of the way he’d learned about Cougar’s resignation. Especially with the revelation that Maverick apparently thought it was more important to showboat with MiGs than defend his wingman. But Tom had spent the past day studying Maverick, trying to figure out who he was and why. And he thought he had the big picture by now, but there were a few little details—small things that would be easy to overlook, like the way he’d shut down when he thought Ice was judging Cougar—that didn’t quite line up.
Tom Kazansky was, he could admit, an obsessive perfectionist. Normally, it wasn’t very difficult to pin a person down to their basic hopes, desires, likes, and dislikes, at least not once he’d watched them long enough. It had only been a day, but Maverick, Maverick, he could tell, was going to be different. And Tom wasn’t entirely sure yet how that made him feel.
“So what is it about, then?” Slider’s voice, both angry and tired, broke him out of his thoughts. Ice blinked to try and clear his head, and noticed the way Slider’s jaw was clenched, his entire body coiled tight. He looked like he’d gone through the whole range of possible emotions just in the time they’d been arguing and he was just one wrong move away from either snapping or giving up entirely.
Normally, Iceman was precise with his words. He knew the power they had, and he understood the merit of assigning the right ones to what he was feeling in order to best convey his thoughts. Normally, he’d thought things through carefully before he said them, because he knew it was the best way to manipulate a situation the way he wanted. He went into things as prepared as he possibly could be, it was how he stayed in control, because if he wasn’t it felt the same as trying to avoid crashing into the ground in a plane where both engines had gone out.
If there was an opposite end to that extreme, though, that was how Tom Kazansky had been feeling for the entirety of this conversation. He was reeling, grasping at straws to try and pull together a picture in his head that still wouldn't come out right no matter what he did. He felt off-kilter in a similar way to how he’d felt the previous night talking to Maverick in the O Club, and it was another thing contributing to the anger, to the itchy discomfort that was making him feel out-of-place in his own skin, like it belonged to someone else.
“It’s about Maverick.” Something about the words made them hard to get out, like Ice was telling Slider some dark secret instead of saying what he knew would win the argument. “Just Maverick. About how he needs to be stopped before it’s too late.”
The set of Slider’s jaw told Ice that he was preparing to snap back even before he’d finished speaking, but then he abruptly froze in place. “What do you mean, before it’s too late?”
A sickening feeling was beginning to rise in Ice’s gut. He took half a step backwards and staggered into the wall of the hallway. Neither of them had made it more than a few steps beyond the coat closet, some small part of his brain noted ironically. He studied the swirls in the hardwood in order to avoid having to meet his RIO’s eyes.
“Ice, what do you—”
“You’ve seen him,” Ice interrupted, because there was a part of him that was afraid to let Slider finish. “You’ve seen the way he flies. You even said it yourself, the night before we started TOPGUN. If no one stops him, eventually he’s going to crash and burn, and he’s going to take someone out with him.”
A silence fell between them under the weight of that revelation, a tense silence that was deafening from everything left unspoken. Iceman traced the planks of hardwood for as long as he could stand before finally forcing himself to look up and make eye contact with Slider. He found his RIO already looking back with an expression that he had no idea how to read.
Ice crossed his arms and tilted his chin in challenge, but nothing in Slider’s expression changed even a little. It was almost like he was looking through him, Ice thought, and he didn’t seem to realize that Ice was looking back. Slider no longer seemed ready to scream at him, which was probably a good thing because he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from yelling right back, but he wasn’t sure what about his words had done it, and wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
“Slider?” Ice pushed off the wall and took a cautious step towards his RIO after the staring had gone on for several more moments with absolutely no explanation as to why. “Are you alright? Slider!”
Slider snapped back to himself just in time to bat away the hand that Ice was raising to place on his shoulder. Quickly, Ice withdrew it and stepped back, because Slider’s face immediately creased into anger as soon as he came back to himself. Iceman braced himself for another explosion, an explosion that he honestly wasn’t sure how he would combat, because he still had no idea what all that had been, but it never came.
Instead, he watched Slider take a deep breath and visibly steel himself. He lifted his head and looked Ice straight in the eyes. There was a seriousness, a coldness, there that hit him like a bucket of water to the face, but he forced himself not to look away. “I’m perfectly fine. But you need to get your shit together, Ice. We have five weeks of this, and if you let Maverick fucking Mitchell distract you from why we’re here, I swear to god that I will kill you.”
Something about the way these words were presented made Tom believe that Slider was giving him some sort of serious, dire warning. But if that was the case, he couldn’t figure out what it was—yes, Maverick was dangerous, and yes, Ice had been perhaps a bit too overt in letting him know in class that day, but the two of them were the best pilot-RIO pair there, and none of Pete Mitchell’s showboating was going to be enough to keep them from getting that trophy.
“He won’t distract me,” Tom said with all the conviction that he could put behind the words. He lifted his chin and didn’t look away even when Slider turned that same searching gaze from before on him. They stared at each other in silence for a few more minutes. Tom had expected yelling, he’d expected a big fight that had the two of them at each other’s throats. They couldn’t afford something like that right now and they both knew it, but Tom couldn’t help but imagine that by sidestepping it now, it would only be worse when things finally came crashing down around them.
Eventually, Slider clapped him on the shoulder and brushed past him to head towards his bedroom. Tom stared after him for a moment before collapsing back against the wall, the heels of his palms pressed against his eyes. He took several deep breaths and tried to run backwards through what a mess that conversation—that whole day —had spiraled into. A pattern was forming in the back of his mind, a pattern that Iceman did not like the look of.
He had no idea what sort of reassurance Slider had been looking for when he stared at him, but Tom had a horrible suspicion that he hadn’t found it.
The next week at TOPGUN passed in a bit of a blur. For the sake of his sanity, Iceman thought that was probably a good thing.
He’d been careful in the aftermath of his argument with Slider, and the two of them had managed to avoid coming to blows since that first day. Same with Maverick, although in that case it was more because Iceman restrained himself from commenting on every dumb thing Maverick did than it was because he stopped doing them. He and Goose were just as much the dynamic duo they had been on the first day, executing whatever maneuver Maverick thought the most fun at the time, and yet somehow never falling more than a few points between Iceman and Slider’s own score in the race for the Top Gun trophy. It was, in a word, infuriating.
Iceman wished that infuriating was all it was. But the more that he flew with Maverick, the more he looked, the more he began to realize something about the other pilot. To that point, Ice had been operating under the assumption that Slider’s initial characterization of Maverick was correct: that he was a decent pilot, sure, but that doing things because he wanted to do them would always be the most important thing to him, the best predictor of his actions. It was clear that nothing Ice could say was going to change anything about who Maverick was, so Ice had almost convinced himself to let the whole thing go by the time he saw the first inkling of something more.
Almost.
They were in the classroom after a hop, Viper and Charlie debriefing them. As the days progressed, more and more of the others had started being able to take out their instructors, but today two of the few who had avoided being shot down were Iceman and Maverick. Viper was going over the simulations of their maneuvers, picking out specific aspects that had gone wrong or right, and Iceman was not surprised in the slightest to see Maverick’s flight appear as the example of a bad decision.
As the simulation of Maverick’s plane played out across the screen, Tom had to admit that he was impressed despite himself. When he had flown the course, he was able to break away from the MiG early enough that he and Slider wouldn’t have been in any serious danger had they been in it for real. And if they had been in a situation like that in real life, he knew that was the way he would want it. He wasn’t insane, after all, and did not enjoy risking his life for fun. Viper, Charlie, and the Navy at large would agree that the way Iceman flew the mission was the best way to do so, and he knew it.
Maverick, on the other hand, flew dangerously close to the MiG, almost close enough for it to get a lock on him, and managed to escape only by pushing his plane and his skills as a pilot to the limit. It had worked, in the end, if one defined success in the broadest of terms. But something that dangerous, that difficult, could only be pulled off by someone who knew their limits, not the limits of their plane but of themselves, and knew exactly how to toe the line without ever stepping too far. He was flashy about it—too flashy, in Iceman’s opinion, which he had made known —but there was no denying that Maverick was good.
“The MiG has you in his gunsight, what were you thinking at this point?” Charlie asked, drawing up close to Maverick like there was nothing more important in the world to her than his answer.
“You don’t have time to think up there.” Maverick’s words were solemn, with an unusual sort of weight. Ice squinted at him from behind the lenses of his aviators. “If you think, you’re dead.”
“That’s a big gamble with a $30 million plane, Lieutenant,” Charlie said, and Ice couldn’t help but to smile. He’d seen the way Maverick looked at Charlie, so maybe he would listen to her telling him not to be a fucking idiot up in the air if he wouldn’t listen to Iceman. Nevermind that Charlie was a civilian contractor who had never been behind the controls of a plane in her life and understood even less about the way Maverick flew than Iceman did.
Tom could understand, objectively, Maverick’s attraction to Charlie—she was intelligent and, he supposed, pretty. But objective was all that it would ever be, as always when it came to matters of the opposite sex, and his opinion was not at all improved by the truly outlandish things the other pilot did to try and get her attention. Ice was embarrassed to watch, sometimes, and when that was combined with the fact that Charlie was their instructor with her own life and career that would only overlap with theirs for five weeks… well. But it wasn’t like Maverick was going to take Iceman’s advice about his love life, and there were other, more deserving things about Maverick he could be angry about. Tom could ignore this one, really, he could.
He repeated this to himself later, after they had been dismissed for the day and he caught sight of Charlie chasing after Maverick. They passed him in a hallway inside, and he didn’t care enough to follow either of them out to see what was going on this time. No one else was around, either, so Tom didn’t feel any remorse about the face he made at the door as it closed behind Charlie. He felt overheated and his chest was tight with anger, and he knew he was only making it worse by mentally replaying every word of their interaction. Tom collapsed bonelessly against the wall, forced a deep breath, and tried to think of something, anything else.
It was then that he remembered Maverick’s answer to Charlie’s question. What were you thinking at this point was a question that Iceman had asked himself many times when seeing or hearing about Maverick’s flying, but he hadn’t anticipated the answer. You don’t have time to think up there. If you think, you’re dead.
His first instinct, Ice thought as he continued staring blankly at the closed door, was to dismiss the whole thing. Every single move that he made when he was up in the air was thought out to the point of perfection. It came naturally to him at this point, his mind running through a list of necessary information almost automatically. All pilots had to have good instincts, of course, they wouldn’t need to pass tests that relied on them if they weren’t important, but it was impossible to fly only on instinct. Even Maverick Mitchell needed to use his goddamned head sometimes if he wanted to make it back to the ground, so the notion that you don’t have time to think was surely just as improbable as it sounded.
But then Tom remembered the way Maverick’s face had shuttered closed that night in the O Club, when they were talking about Cougar. He had said what he said— he was a good man, was—not because he believed it but because he had wanted to see Maverick’s reaction. If it was Maverick’s fault that Cougar had turned in his wings, then he should have been pleased that Ice didn’t hold it against him. But he’d been indignant, not pleased.
It had been over a week since then, but Iceman still hadn’t been able to figure out why. Everything about Maverick’s behavior was predictable, in line with the couple-sentence briefing Slider had given him the night before they started TOPGUN. Everything fit, except for that one, tiny detail, and it was why Tom hadn’t been able to move on, to dismiss Maverick as nothing more than a reckless flyboy the way he wanted to.
There had been that, that still is a good man, and now this you don’t have time to think up there. It was hardly anything, but it was enough for Tom Kazansky to realize that maybe he hadn’t figured Pete Mitchell out quite as well as he thought he had.
For nearly a week, sustained by this thought, Tom watched Maverick even more closely than he usually did. The possibility of finally being able to put this whole thing to rest was too attractive to ignore—it wasn’t affecting their performance in the race for the trophy, not yet, but if Ice let this get any further out of hand, it might. Slider’s warning from that first night, about Maverick and being distracted, nudged at the edges of his mind several times, and he forcibly pushed it down. It wouldn’t come to that, he would make sure of it.
Iceman knew better than to give in to something like hope. Knew that if he did, he would nearly always end up disappointed. He just hadn’t realized that that was what was happening until it was too late.
Hop 19. Maverick and Goose and Hollywood and Wolfman, up in the air against Viper and Jester. They were supposed to work as a team, so Ice knew even before they began that there would be trouble. He and Slider had already taken their turn—they’d been shot down by Viper, but they were still ahead of Maverick in ranking, which was what was most important—so they retreated to the ready room in their flight gear to listen in on the comms.
At first, things went well enough. Each group had been unpleasantly surprised, so far, to find Viper in the air alongside Jester, and the way they reacted to it, Ice was beginning to see, could predict a lot about what they would do next. He was skeptical right away when they heard Maverick say, “Hollywood, you’ve got the lead, I’ll cover you,” but Maverick did stick on Hollywood’s wing for longer than Iceman had expected, at the very least. They might have even been able to win, together they were good enough, if Viper didn’t know Maverick well enough to tempt him away from Jester and Hollywood with the promise of a kill.
When Maverick eventually did pull away, Ice wasn’t all that surprised. Maybe a little more so with the way Goose had been urging him not to, but everyone there probably understood Maverick well enough to know that him chasing after Viper had been inevitable. It was flashy, and it would be impressive if he was able to make the kill all on his own. Only, Iceman knew that Maverick wouldn’t be able to do it, and if Maverick bothered to think for more than one fucking second, he would know it, too.
“God damn you, Maverick.” Hollywood’s voice crackled over the radio, presumably as Maverick left him hanging, and Ice exchanged looks with Slider. If he was flying a combat mission, if it was life-or-death and it was up to his wingman to keep him alive, Ice thought, the very last person that he would want up in the air with him was Maverick Mitchell. He had no right to be as disappointed by this revelation as he was. Maverick was good, sure, better than most, but that was absolutely not enough to excuse his unreliability. Nothing was, and that should be it.
For the next several minutes, Ice, Slider, and several of their other classmates listened as Viper baited Maverick to come after him. It didn’t take long for Jester to get radar lock on Hollywood and Wolfman, and then they heard him come back around to ambush Maverick and Goose. For being the top one percent of all naval aviators—for being second in the race for the Top Gun trophy—it was almost too easy for Jester to take out the two of them.
Once Maverick and Goose were dead, everyone in the room around Ice erupted into conversation, a mix of gloating and griping. He was sure that bets had been placed about if Maverick would be able to do it—everyone knew that it was always him and Iceman vying back and forth for the lead—but Ice didn’t look away from the radio for long enough to check. Instead, he continued staring at it without really seeing it, listening idly to Jester, Viper, Hollywood, and Maverick RTB.
Virtually everything on that hop, Iceman thought, had gone exactly the way he had expected. Maverick Mitchell lived up to his callsign: he was impulsive and short-sighted. If Ice had known what Viper and Jester’s plan was beforehand, he would have been able to predict Maverick’s results down to the fucking letter.
There was something churning in his gut as he sat there and listened to the sounds of talking surrounding him, something that Tom would be able to identify if he tried to. But he had a feeling that he didn’t want to know for sure, so he shoved it down hard like that would be enough to make it go away.
He hadn’t showered yet or changed out of his flight suit—there hadn’t been time if he’d wanted to listen to Maverick’s hop. All at once, the world came rushing back and the feeling caught up to him. Overheated, sticky with sweat, and out-of-place in his own skin, Tom shoved himself to his feet and stomped his way from the ready room to the locker room. He thought he heard Slider and one or two others following him, but at that moment, all he cared about was getting a fucking shower, like the water could wash his emotions away with it.
It didn’t occur to him until he was there that Maverick fucking Mitchell would be showering, too. He and Goose were at their lockers, stripping out of their flight suits, when Iceman stomped past them. They were talking—or, more accurately, Goose was—but Ice didn’t let himself stop for long enough to listen or even look. Standing under the shower spray for all of three goddamned minutes shockingly didn’t do much to make him feel better, either.
As he stepped out of the stall and made his way back over to where everyone else was waiting, Ice heard a sharp whistle pierce the air and caught the tail end of Jester scolding Maverick. “... you never, never leave your wingman.”
Tom leaned against the pillar Maverick had vacated and scrubbed his hands across his face to give himself a chance to gather his thoughts. He went back over their flight, thought about the way the comms had been mostly silent for a few minutes in the middle, aside from occasional comments from Maverick to Goose and the way Jester had repeatedly praised Maverick’s flying. Maybe that had been motivated by the fact that Maverick had given him an actual chase and maybe it was because he knew Maverick hadn’t been able to hear him say it, but neither of those details changed the fact that it was true.
If it came down to it, Iceman wouldn’t trust Maverick to have his back in the air. But he wished more than anything that he could, because Maverick was good. For the first time in a long time, Tom felt like he was having to work to be the best, having to fight to remain in the lead. He’d begun to forget the feeling of having to chase after something elusive, forgotten what it was like to set his sights on a light blinking way off in the distance and know that, one way or another, he would reach it.
“Maverick, it’s not your flying, it’s your attitude.”
Maverick Mitchell had one leg propped up on the bench and was staring very pointedly at the completely uninteresting plain white ceiling. It was a move that made it very difficult for Tom to ignore that he was wearing nothing besides a goddamned towel. Which made sense seeing that they were in the fucking locker room, he wasn’t wearing anything else either, but he also knew he had to ignore it for the sake for his rapidly-fraying sanity.
Another thing that was clear was that by the look on his face, there was nothing Tom could say that would be able to touch Maverick. Right. He supposed it would be too much to hope for for them to be on the same page.
“The enemy’s dangerous, but right now, you’re worse than the enemy.” As he spoke, Tom stared at Maverick, poured all of his focus into trying to figure out what the fuck was going on inside his head. It reminded him of that first night at the O Club, when he’d looked into Maverick’s eyes and the world around them had gone silent.
There were several noticeable differences between that day and this one, though, the biggest of which being that Maverick was not staring back, but rather keeping his attention firmly on the ceiling, the bulletin board in front of him, Goose, anything and everything that would let him pretend that Tom didn’t exist. He kept speaking, though, because he had something he needed to say and he was going to fucking say it, trying to put all the force he could behind the words, like that would be enough to make Maverick listen. “You’re dangerous and foolish. You may not like the guys flying with you, they may not like you, but whose side are you on?”
There was a few feet of space between Tom’s pillar and Maverick’s bench, but it might as well have been an uncrossable ocean. He stood there and watched, clocked the set of Maverick’s jaw and the measured way he was breathing, and thought back to the first day when his Academy ring had managed to rattle Maverick and he’d done a shit job of trying to hide it. He had that same deliberately blank expression on his face now, from what little Tom could see of it, and he was sure that everyone around them—if, truly, anyone else besides Goose was listening—knew exactly what he was feeling. There was no fucking mystery. Tom had thought there was, but he’d been wrong. Maverick Mitchell really was no more than he appeared to be, so Ice didn’t understand why he was trying to pretend otherwise.
Tom stared across the chasm between them for what could have been seconds or years. He silently commanded Maverick to say something back, to turn around, to fucking look over, but it was like all of Tom’s words had bounced off and been deflected back at him, like Tom wasn’t even worth the effort it would take for Mitchell to turn his head.
Pressing his lips together, Tom Kazansky turned and walked away. He did not look back.