#lamby.prompt
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icemav + chocolate
a discord prompt written for @nicejobkid
For all that Maverick has the need to always be moving like some kind of shark that grew two legs and two arms while developing the same amount of respect for authority as a sullen teenager, he's absolutely terrible at drinking coffee.
Remarkably bad at it, really. He has no appreciation for a finely roasted, freshly ground cup of coffee. Ice watched him drink Italian espresso once, when they had shore leave. It was a good thing it wasn't summer, otherwise his whites would've been ruined. On the few occasions Maverick does drink coffee, he takes it with an egregious amount of cream and sugar until it's almost unrecognizable as coffee.
("What's the point of drinking it like that? You can't even taste the coffee," he'd asked.
"Exactly," Maverick had answered.)
Ice takes his coffee black with one sugar. He and Maverick hate drinking the other's coffee order.
He travels a lot for work. He'd prefer to bring back locally roasted beans when he goes abroad, but he'd never be able to drink it all before his next trip, and Maverick is no help. Ice still sends a postcard or two if there's something that catches his eye, but he and Maverick mutually agreed years ago that getting souvenirs from every place they each visited would just result in an ungodly amount of fridge magnets. As it is, Maverick's hangar is covered with pictures and patches from every squad either of them flew with, and Slider, and Wood and Wolf, and Merlin...
They have their fill of memorabilia. Instead, Ice brings back fancy chocolates or expensive alcohol. There's a particular Scottish malt he always makes sure is in stock on Maverick's birthday, one of the very few luxuries that Maverick tolerates.
When he arrives home after a long trip out east, they go through their routine. Ice drops his bag in the foyer, hangs his keys on the hook by the door next to Mav's, and opens his arms to accept Maverick's embrace. They stand there for a few minutes, holding each other and simply being. The older he gets, the more he realizes that this really is all he wants, that Maverick is all he needs to be fulfilled, to have a complete life.
It's not until after dinner that Maverick starts rooting around in his go-bag for the treats he knows are in there, like a child with sticky fingers.
"Hey! You went back to that store!"
There's a chocolatier in a little town just north of NAS Jax that Maverick particularly enjoys. Ice can't always make the trip up there when he goes east, but when he can, he does. He finishes up the dishes, listening to Maverick open up his box of chocolates.
"Oh, ugh! What the hell is that?" Ice smiles knowingly, wiping his hands on the tea towel. He wanders into the living room, where Maverick has his go-bag open across the couch.
"Did you find them?"
"I thought they were chocolate covered peanuts," Maverick whines. Ice laughs and drops a kiss on Maverick's forehead. He takes the opportunity to shove a bit of fudge into Maverick's mouth to shut him up, then grabs a handful of "peanuts" for himself.
"Nope," he says, punctuating it with a crunch. "Espresso beans." Maverick pouts up at him.
Ice smirks, that same toothy, asshole grin he gave Maverick in a dingy bar in 1986. It's just the thing to make Maverick rise to his challenge, chasing him up the stairs to their bedroom. He knows he's baiting Maverick, but it's been a long three weeks.
He's missed his husband.
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icemav + reckless
a discord prompt written for @sluttyhenley
A sappy little Top Gun New Year's Eve prompt I forgot to post last night! Happy New Year, my friends!
In just a few hours, it will be 1996.
It will officially have been ten years since he met Maverick.
They’re all holed up in some shitty dive bar with a jukebox that predates Reagan, and the alcohol is free-flowing.
It’s probably the last time that they’ll all be together for the foreseeable future; it’s a miracle that none of them have taken promotions that have put them on desk duty.
Slider throws an arm around his shoulders, Wolfman’s got a mischievous glint in his eye.
They’re well away from base in their civvies; no one wanted to get clocked today. It’s a boys’ night out, one last hurrah for the men of ’86 before orders come down the pipeline and split them up after a scant eight weeks working together, before their careers take them out of the cockpit and ground them for good, never to fly with each other again.
“You know, Slider,” Ice muses, just loud enough that Slider can hear him. “This reminds me a lot of that first night at Top Gun.”
“You know what, Ice?” Slider plays along. “I think you’re right!”
Wolfman flashes a sharp grin, tapping Hollywood to let him know he’s heading out.
Merlin and Maverick sit at the bar, none the wiser, enjoying their beers as the NBC live coverage of Times Square plays on the TV behind them.
Slider slips over to the jukebox as Wolf darts up to the tiny stage. He passes Ice a microphone, “with the longest cord we could find!” Wolf tells him. Slider shoots him a thumbs-up above the heads of the crowd, and Ice makes his way to his target.
“Excuse me,” Hollywood says dramatically, tapping on Maverick’s shoulder. Maverick furrows his brow.
“Wood, don’t tell me you’re already wasted this early in the—”
“Is this guy bothering you?” Ice interrupts, cool as can be. Maverick stops short in the middle of his sentence, then catches on.
“Ice, don’t you dare—”
The Righteous Brothers kick up on the jukebox. “Oh, my looove,” Ice croons to Maverick, “my darling, I’ve hun-gered for your touch!”
Hollywood joins in, serenading Maverick as his face turns bright red, even under the dingy light of the bar. Somewhere in the crowd, Wolfman and Slider join in, and then the entire bar is coming along, slightly off-key, a little too loud, singing “Unchained Melody” at the top of their lungs as Maverick, larger than life and slick as can be, tries to shrink into his barstool. Merlin won’t have it, though, and he forces Maverick to stand up at the end and accept the ovations from his adoring crowd.
The boys crack a smile, and Merlin vacates his seat so Ice can slide in next to Maverick, whose cheeks are still flaming red.
“You know,” Ice says with a grin, “I’ve never seen you quite this red, even when you’ve got sunburn.” He jabs an elbow into Mav’s side, but Mav pushes him off.
“That was very reckless of you,” Maverick says lowly, intending to scold but coming off somewhat impressed. “Singing to me in the middle of a civilian bar like that.”
Ice shrugs, bolstered by his success and the alcohol already in his system. “What can I say, I’m a natural at it.”
“I bet you do this for all the girls. Does that play often work for you?” Maverick asks. Ice winks at him.
“I’ve never done it before. You’ll have to tell me how I’m doing.”
“You think it’s going well?” Maverick says. His voice is still low, but for an altogether different reason.
Ice leans in, knowing smile on his lips. “Why don’t you tell me in the morning?”
Maverick groans. “I cannot believe you just did that.”
Ice calls for another round for him and Maverick, then closes out both their tabs. “Ten years it took me to get the full story out of you, Mitchell.” He downs his vodka in one go, fully aware of Maverick’s eyes on his throat as he swallows. “You can’t have thought I was going to let you live it down that easily.”
Maverick knocks back his shot. “So then, sailor,” he looks up at Ice. There’s two hours to midnight yet. “You in town for long?”
“Not for much longer,” Ice answers truthfully. “But if you’ll have me, I’ll come back to you whenever I can.”
Maverick smiles, a big toothy grin that makes him look like that fresh-faced punk of a lieutenant he first met ten years ago. “I’d like nothing better, Ice.”
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From the prompt list: icemav + 6. patting the other’s head?? If it inspires
icemav + patting the other’s head
i do not know the meaning of brevity.
send me a pairing and a prompt!
To be a fighter pilot, you have to have ego.
It’s not just a requirement, it’s an immutable law. It’s on the checklist of fighter pilot eligibility. One: candidate must be a United States citizen of sound mind and body. Two: candidate must have a four-year degree from an accredited educational institution. Three: candidate must have ego the size of the Grand Canyon and the guts to back it up.
Fighter pilots are young, good-looking guys who grow into stately, well-tailored men. Elegant. Gentlemanly. Airs of class that have since ebbed away in the general population, but which find a home in the handful of officers who call themselves naval aviators, and they wear them damn well.
Ice has always been particular about his appearance; it’s hard not to be painfully aware of it, with twelve years of detentions earned for uniform infractions at elite private schools and four years of the Naval Academy bearing down on him. He holds it together through the six months of hellish diagnoses it takes for the doctors to figure out what’s making him sick (cancer), where the cancer is (his lungs), and where it metastasized to (his throat). There’s never a hair out of goddamn place through the whole endeavor. But when they finally figure it out and get him on a chemotherapy plan, the pristine picture of the Iceman falls apart.
His tan is the first to go; if he’s being honest, it was already on its way out. It’s been nigh on ten years since he was last in a cockpit, and trading his F-14 for another stripe on his sleeve meant he hardly saw the sun in his cramped offices. Maverick used to tease that he looked like a vampire, losing the California bronze that’s been embedded in his skin since he was old enough to walk. Jokes like that are far and few between now that it’s no longer the job that’s draining his color, but his own body.
In the end, it’s easy to let the tan go. What really gets him, what really hurts, is when his hair starts falling out. Iceman has impeccable hair. The sun rises in the east. The facts of life. He puts off shaving it as long as he can, because yes, it’s just hair, and yes, it should grow back—the doctors assured him it would probably grow back—but dammit, he’s a fighter pilot, and he has his pride.
He sulks about it for weeks: gently combing his hair, putting as little product into it as possible so as to prolong the life of the strands that remain, taking shorter showers to reduce the likelihood of tufts of blonde falling out and running down the drain.
Maverick is solid at his side, his own hair dark as the day they met. In the deepest parts of his heart, he hates Maverick just a little bit for it. The asshole doesn’t even have the decency to be going gray yet, and here Ice is losing it all.
But then Maverick will tell him he passed his driving test and got a proper driver’s license so he could drive Ice back and forth from his appointments so Ice wouldn’t have to ride in a smelly taxi on the way home when he’s already starting to feel nauseous, or he’ll smile at Ice when he gets home and say, “Hey, I called up Wolf and he found that baked potato soup recipe from that place we ate at in ’96,” or he’ll sit at Ice’s side at two in the morning on the bathroom floor when the vertigo has Ice kneeling at the altar of the porcelain throne, even though he has to be at the base at five-thirty to do briefings and pre-flight checks, and Ice can’t remember why he was annoyed about Maverick’s hair at all.
Maverick drives him to his next chemo appointment. He sits in the waiting room, perusing the latest copy of People Magazine. Maverick hates People Magazine, but there’s not much else the hospital waiting room can offer in terms of salient literature, so People Magazine it is.
Ice goes back for his chemo treatment. Phil, his technician, doesn’t say much as he putters around the room, hanging IV drip bags here and flipping switches on medical equipment there. When Ice is all hooked up, they chat about inane things. Phil recounts his daughter’s swim meet. Ice responds with tales of his own swim meets, back at the Naval Academy. Phil says his son signed up for flag football, but God bless him, he’s shit at the sport. Ice promises that he’s not going to get much better at it, if he sucks this much at it now; he’s got his own scars from high school to prove it.
Phil unhooks him from the infernal treatment and books him for an appointment in two weeks. Maverick puts down People Magazine—a different issue than he was reading before, Ice notes—and drives them both home. He helps Ice into the living room and lays him down on the couch with the quilt that Carole made for their sort-of-fifteenth-anniversary. He kisses Ice on the forehead and goes to the kitchen to start dinner, and Ice is out like a light.
When he wakes up again, the sky is a dusky gray. It’s just past sundown. Maverick let him sleep for hours.
“Mav?” he calls out. Ice pushes himself up off the couch, his elbows creaking as he goes. “Maverick?”
“In here!” Maverick replies from the guest bathroom. “I’ll be just a second!”
Ice hums and goes into the kitchen. There’s a pot on the counter, but it’s not one of theirs. He lifts the lid; savory chicken congee, with ginger root and scallions. The Reyes’ must have dropped something off while he was asleep.
“Oh, yeah, Martin came by with some soup,” Maverick says behind him. “He says there’s no better cure than his wife’s arroz caldo, not even your mama’s chicken noodle soup.”
Ice puts the lid back on the pot. He turns to Maverick, ready to bear all of his weight down on his partner, because chemo is a bitch and he feels exhausted just standing here in his own kitchen—
—And flinches.
“What the fuck did you do to your hair?” Ice cries. Maverick cracks a grin, his signature Colgate smile.
“Do ya like it?” he asks.
Like it? Ice reaches out for his head, and Maverick leans in. He runs his hand over Maverick’s scalp, feeling the smoothness of his skin. He passes over the whole landscape once, twice, his fingers tripping over the tips of Maverick’s ears and the nape of his neck, as if he’d find something there like a magician performing a sleight of hand, but there’s nothing there.
“It’s all gone,” Ice laughs, somewhat hysterical. “It’s gone, it’s gone! What did you do? What the fuck did you do!”
Maverick shaved all of his thick, dark hair off. All of it is gone. All of Maverick’s damnable, doesn’t-have-the-decency-to-go-even-a-little-salt-and-pepper hair has disappeared.
Maverick smiles, teary himself. “Yeah, babe, it’s all gone.” He takes Ice’s hands in his and holds them tight. Ice tries to fight his own tears, but they’re doing what they please.
“Mitchell, what the hell?”
Maverick laughs. “C’mon, Kazansky, give me some credit. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you worrying about your hair falling out.” He cups Ice’s chin with one hand, looking straight into his eyes. “I thought you’d be less scared of it if we did it together.”
“Maverick,” Ice starts.
He doesn’t know where to go. It’s a grand gesture, that’s for sure, and if fifteen-odd years of knowing Maverick have taught him anything, it’s that you cannot always listen to what Maverick Mitchell says, you must only listen to what he does.
“Maverick,” he says again.
“Ice,” Maverick replies. “Let’s eat. And when we’re done, we’ll call Slider up and tell him what I did, and you can make as much fun of me as you want—for tonight only!—and we can talk about what you want to do next.”
They end up eating dinner in the bathroom. Maverick takes bites of his congee in between bouts of shaving off Ice’s hair as Ice huddles in the tub, ducking his head keep anything from falling into his own bowl. When they’re finished, they cram next to each other in Ice’s office and call Slider on Skype. His laughter is piercing through the laptop speakers and echoes down the hall.
And when Slider arrives ten days later, to, “Make sure Mitchell isn’t leaving you to fend all for yourself, I mean does he even know how to make a proper chicken noodle soup,” he knocks on Ice and Maverick’s front door sporting a grin and a freshly-shaved head.
Fighter pilots might have egos, but they’re a fiercely loyal bunch, too.
#top gun#tom iceman kazansky#pete maverick mitchell#icemav#lamby.prompt#ask#sluttyhenley#thanks for playing!
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Dearest lamby what about icemav + 1 for the drunken love confessions if it inspires?
i am so sorry this is literal months late but i hope you enjoy!
“I like your stupid face. It’s so stupid. It’s so… I like it. Can I touch it?”
Slider is the first of them to get married.
He’s the last of them to settle down.
Merlin and his girl have done everything but the big white wedding; Maverick, who despite all evidence to the contrary, is a good, Church-going boy, looked like a cartoon character with his eyes bugged out when he realized that Merlin and Sandra had been together for the better part of two decades and hadn’t gotten married. They’re on their third kid and second house, and they have no intention of tying the knot any time soon.
It had become clear sometime around the time the Berlin Wall fell that Ice and Maverick were never going to have a formal wedding ceremony.
At least, it appeared that way to Slider. Ice and Maverick were circling in a stupidly elaborate mating dance that involved constantly competing on their hops and calling each other dumbass and denigrating their respective ability to operate a jet, while also glaring down any aviator who ever jumped in on the conversation—even just to tease!—as if to say, No, you fucker, you are not a part of this. You do not get to call this man lesser-than just because I can, you are not me, you have not earned the right to look at us.
It took a while, but Mav and Ice finally got their shit together (thanks in no small part to Slider and Merlin’s meddling, you’re welcome, asshats), and sure, they can’t get married in any way that the government would recognize, but somewhere along the line they turned into boring DINKs who doted on Bradshaw’s kid when they were stateside.
So Slider’s the first one to get married, and therefore the first one to get a bachelor party. They’re well into their mid-thirties, and it’s the first bachelor party they’ve ever thrown.
Well, except for Maverick, who was one of only two witnesses to Nicholas and Carole Bradshaw’s elopement, and who loved both the bride and groom so much that he wasn’t going to let the occasion go by without a Maverick-sized bang.
So God help him, Slider puts his fate into Maverick’s hands. It’s not the first time in his life, and it certainly won’t be the last, but giving Maverick free rein still sends a chill down his spine. He’s not a bad guy—Slider never would’ve let Ice get tangled up with him if he weren’t—but there’s something about him that could make even the most hardened naval aviator flinch.
They start off the night at a respectable Navy bar. Maverick buys them all a round of shots, and with a smirk, breaks out one of the three phrases he knows in Russian (To our health!) and downs the shot in one go. Slider, Ice, and Merlin follow suit. He has to fight a grimace when he comes back up. The asshole bought them vodka, even though the only one of them who still has a taste for it is Ice.
Typical.
Three hours and two bars later, Slider has regrets. He can’t remember how many drinks he’s had, and he hasn’t seen Merlin in at least forty-five minutes. He wants to be concerned about that, but he can’t bring up the energy to care. Mitchell’s all but killed his liver.
He stumbles through the crowd towards the bar, because he thinks he remembers seeing Ice’s stupidly-spiked, gelled hair around there. God, he hopes he still has his wallet on him somewhere. He crashes into a stool and hoists himself up, flagging down a bartender for a glass of seltzer, and she doesn’t charge him for the service. He must be really shitfaced if that’s the case.
He lifts his head when he hears Ice’s voice through the din.
“Mav, Mav!” he laughs. He slurs over the a just a bit, and oh, Ice must be really out of it if he’s tripping over his words.
Slider turns his head slowly to get Ice’s attention, and instead is treated to the image of Mitchell’s shortstack frame trying to support all six-foot-oh of Ice against the bartop.
“I like your stupid face,” Ice says, staring Mitchell down with all the intensity of a bird of prey. “It’s so stupid. It’s so… I like it. Can I touch it?”
Ice lifts a hand but is too uncoordinated to follow through. Slider snorts, drawing Maverick’s attention.
“Slider! Hey, buddy! How was your night?” he asks cheerfully, holding onto Ice’s waist.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to kill me,” Slider returns.
“Aw, but that’s how you know I care! C’mon, we gotta get the Iceman home before he ralphs in the bathroom. You know he’d hate to do that.”
So Slider helps his pilot and his wingman into a taxi at the end of the night and falls face-first into the couch in Ice’s living room like he’s still the twenty-something he was when they met, while Maverick wrangles Ice into bed.
And if he hears Maverick’s overly-loud whispering and Ice’s grunted responses from down the hall in the darkest hours, just before dawn, “Do you know what you said at the bar? I wanted to laugh, but you were so sincere, Ice. God. You really can’t hold your alcohol like I can anymore. Benefits of teaching TOPGUN! I like your face, too, Ice. I’ll always like your face. It’s a good face. I love you, Ice,” well…
Perhaps he’s too drunk to remember it in the morning.
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16 + icemav for the drunken confession prompts!!!
okay so this one kinda ran away from me, oops! thank you for playing <3
"This is not a dream, I think. In my dreams, we're usually kissing."
send me a pairing and a number!
It lasts sixteen months.
They run out the clock as best as they can, and then they put overtime on the clock and run that down too.
But Ice has always wanted, and then wanted more, and TOPGUN was only ever a stop on the way to the top for him.
He understood that going in; their time was limited. Maverick has never shied away from a challenge, though, especially one that Iceman placed in front of him.
Create a life that makes Iceman want to stop, for him. Make a place that Iceman won’t want to leave, when the time comes.
(It will be many years down the line when he finds out, but Maverick was almost successful in his attempt. It is only the decades they have behind them, spent together, that stops this from hurting.)
So Ice’s time at TOPGUN comes to an end. It’s almost a joke, really; Maverick’s track record of relationships in Miramar is oh-for-two. Charlie had packed off for D.C. before Ice rotated back stateside. Maverick was too burned by the experience to even think about approaching Ice in any way that hinted of romance.
Sixteen months of flying circles around hotshot flyboys with Ice on his wing, the wide expanse of the Pacific stretching out in front of him. He really couldn’t hope for anything better. He only wishes he had more time.
They spend their last night of freedom—Ice’s second-to-last night onshore—on a pub crawl that Mav will be feeling in the morning. He won’t regret it, but even as he matches Ice shot for shot, because Ice is an all-American poster boy but he hates beer more than anything, Maverick wants to slow down and take in these last memories of Ice at his side. They serve at the pleasure of the Navy, and only God knows when the brass will smile on them and send down orders to reunite Maverick Mitchell and the Iceman, the only fighter pilots on active duty to score air-to-air kills since the end of the Vietnam War.
They close out a bar on the other side of town, and then because it’s Ice’s last night and Ice gets what he wants, no matter how stupid Maverick thinks it might be, they end up on a picnic bench in some park, looking up at the admittedly bright stars.
“Do you ever miss it?” Ice asks.
“Hmm?” Maverick’s head is still fuzzy, his cheeks still warm with all the alcohol rushing through his body.
“The stars,” Ice says, staring up. “When you’re here, don’t you miss it? When you were out on the Enterprise. I swear I used to go up on deck every night just to look at the stars.”
Maverick shrugs. “They’re mostly the same, no matter where you go. Maybe if I crossed the line and the constellations changed, I’d care more, but stars are stars.”
“Huh.”
“Do you?” Maverick turns to look at Ice, who seems to be tracing out lines in his mind, vectors towards true north, or maybe the outline of Cygnus.
“Yeah. Where I grew up, the light pollution was so bad, you could barely make out the North Star. The city was just too bright. The first time I was on a carrier, and I saw the stars, what they actually looked like… Man, Slider must’ve thought I was dumb, walking around with my mouth gaping open like a fish. Nearly ate shit when we were heading back to bunk because my head was in the clouds, I hit the knee-knockers. He didn’t let that one go for weeks.”
“At least you’ll get to see them again,” Maverick tells him.
Stay, his heart begs him to say. Stay here, with me. I’m not the starry night sky, but can’t I be enough? Please, let me be enough to keep you.
“Yeah,” Ice muses. “I almost wish I could take you with me.”
“What?” Maverick lets out a shaky laugh.
Ice smiles, that small little thing that he does whenever he’s amused, the one that Maverick learned to look for early on. A blink-and-you-miss it grin, a glimpse into the real man behind the Iceman.
“What? Was it not obvious? You need me to say it out loud?”
“I don’t—”
“I’m gonna miss you, Mitchell,” Ice says easily. He doesn’t look in Maverick’s direction, even as he continues. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do out there without you on my wing. It’s been so long since I— since I flew without you right there, annoying me over the radio. What am I gonna do without you chattering in my ear?”
“I’m sure you’ll find another flyboy out there to talk your ear off,” Maverick replies, falling into the banter. It’s not what he expected from Ice, but maybe the alcohol had more of an effect on Ice than he thought it did.
“I would stay here, if I could,” Ice admits.
You can! Maverick wants to cry. You can stay here! Fly with me! Stay with me!
“I’m gonna be a tough act to follow,” he says instead.
“You sure are,” Ice agrees.
“You can’t stay here if you want that promotion, though. That’s what you want.”
“What I want,” Ice repeats. “You know, these last few weeks, I wanted nothing more than this.”
Ice looks at him now, a blush on his cheeks from the chill bite of the midnight air and the alcohol coursing through his veins.
Maverick furrows his brow. “This?”
“Just sitting here, taking a moment to enjoy your company. Don’t let it get to your head, Mitchell, I’m still the better pilot, but you’re a good man. Everyone’s wanted something from me these last few weeks, and I was worried I wouldn’t get a chance to say it.”
Maverick cracks a grin. “You were thinking about me?”
Ice groans. “Of course that’s what you latch onto.”
“Iceman, thinking about little ol’ me!” Maverick jumps up and yells it out to the world, teasing Ice. It’s the only way he can think to make it hurt a little less, that it took Ice this long to say anything. “I win!”
“This isn’t what I was dreaming of,” Ice deadpans.
Maverick turns to him, breathless. That… changes things. “You were dreaming of me?” He sits back down next to Ice, a little closer than before. Their knees are knocking together.
Ice stares down at the ground, focusing on the grass with deadly intent.
“Yes. Yeah,” he breathes out.
“And is this like your dream?” Maverick asks gently. “Is this the dream you wanted?”
“This is not a dream, I think,” Ice answers in a soft voice. “In my dreams, by now, we’re usually kissing.”
And Ice looks up at him, his heart fully bared and placed in Maverick’s hands, his eyes full of hope and fear in equal measures, and Maverick aches.
“I would’ve said something sooner,” Ice continues, “But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to risk it. It took me all night to work up the courage to say something, and all that alcohol to pry it from my own damn self, but the only thing I’ve wanted to do all night is just say it and take you back to mine, so I could have you, just for the one night—”
Maverick cuts him off with a hand on his jaw. He can feel the flush in Ice’s cheeks, the hot blush that rises to his skin. “Ice, it’s okay,” he says.
And slowly, so Ice knows that it’s coming, so Ice can stop him if he wants to (even though that might break Maverick’s heart, and maybe Ice’s too, if he’s understanding this right), Maverick presses his lips to Ice’s. He feels the hot puff of Ice’s sigh against his lips, then the hard tug of Ice’s hands on his hips as he deepens the kiss.
Maverick willingly follows where Ice leads him, because his wingman has never led him astray. He ends up straddled across Ice’s lap, hanging on desperately as Ice kisses him with a passion he’s never felt from anyone else.
It’s only when he can’t breathe anymore that he stops, leaning his forehead against Ice’s, his weight falling back on his haunches. Ice’s hands steady him as they breathe together, big, heaving sighs like they’d just done the thousand-yard dash.
Stay, Maverick’s heart chants. Stay with me, don’t leave. Ask me to go with you, and I will. Just say the words.
“You have to go,” Maverick says sadly. He’s sobering up faster than he ever has before, realizing that there are a scant few hours left between now and when Ice goes back to sea.
“I have to go,” Ice repeats. He presses a light kiss to Maverick’s lips.
I’m sorry.
“I’ll be here,” he says.
Come back to me. I can’t lose you too.
Maverick kisses him again, and again, and again, to drive the point home.
“I’ll come back,” Ice replies, understanding.
The timer on Ice’s last day has already started ticking. Maverick is surprised more than anything when Ice drives them back to his housing, seven hours after they first set out on their pub crawl, and opens the passenger door for Maverick. He leads him into his bedroom and holds him for the rest of the night, falling asleep just as the sun starts to peek through the blinds.
Maverick doesn’t want to let go, but he won’t stop Ice. He commits Ice to memory as best he can, and when the time comes, he kisses Ice hard, pouring sixteen months of wanting and desire and love into it.
Ice meets him with the same fervor, the same built-up emotion flowing out of him, a mirror image of his own feelings reflected back to him.
They’re wingmen, after all.
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Mav and Rooster for #13, please!
mav & rooster + nudging the other one
i still do not know the meaning of brevity.
send me a pairing and a prompt!
It should be a joyous occasion.
The prodigal son has returned home. Neither he nor Maverick died on their mission from hell. Ice, with his non-existent immune system, survived a lower respiratory infection, which turned out to be pneumonia, which nearly went septic. None of them managed to start World War Three, despite the fact they were all grasping at straws by the end of it.
And yet…
Maverick, Ice, and Bradley sit gathered around the dining table. It’s the same table Bradley remembers from his childhood, pockmarked with Sharpie stains, key scratches, and one notable gash from the summer Ice taught him how to properly use a steak knife.
They’ve all taken their usual seats: Ice at the head of the table, Maverick to his left, and Bradley to his right. When his mother was still alive, she would flit between sitting next to Maverick and Bradley on a whim. She’d always say she never could choose between her two boys.
Dinner is on the table in front of them. Maverick pulled out all the stops and made a spread fit for a holiday party. A rib roast, roasted potatoes, garlic green beans, and a slice of coconut cake for each of them from Ellen’s Diner across town.
They sit in stilted silence, looking at each other. Ice is glaring at Maverick. Maverick is staring at Bradley. Bradley is resolutely trying not to make eye contact with Maverick. He does not dare look in Ice’s direction; Ice is the Iceman after all, and he can feel Ice’s cold gaze from his own chair, thank you very much.
Ice taps his fingers on the table. Bradley’s learned, in the weeks since he came home, that it’s how Ice gets Maverick’s attention so he can sign. Maverick does not look at Ice at all, continuing to have a one-man Western showdown with Bradley.
Bradley trains his eyes on the table. He can just barely make out the outline of his sophomore year campaign posters for student government, if he squints. He’d tried new markers that year, in hopes of sparing the poor table more Sharpie stains, but the ink bled straight through the poster board and settled into the wood, permanently.
Ice taps the table again.
Maverick raises his eyebrows at Bradley, then kicks his ankle under the table.
Ice signs Maverick’s name, adapted from the sign for pilot: a sideways I-love-you with the fingers facing out like bull horns, and each hand forming an M instead of the normally straight palms. Maverick kicks him under the table again.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bradley sees Ice look up to the heavens, as if to ask for divine intervention to get Maverick to behave. Bradley bites the inside of his cheek. Ice knows better than anyone that Maverick lives up to his name. He might have mellowed out some with age, but he’s still Maverick at heart.
The F-14 that’s currently parked at North Island should be more than enough evidence of that.
Ice clears his throat and opens his mouth.
“Don’t!” Maverick whips his head to Ice. “The doctors said five more days before you try to talk again!”
Ice raises one perfect eyebrow, as if to say, Gotcha.
“Ice wouldn’t do that,” Bradley fills in, the words muttered under his breath. “He’s not stupid.”
Maverick kicks him again, but Ice looks pleased. At least one of you has some goddamn sense in this house, he seems to say. He feels the air moving as Mav winds his leg back, but he’s getting wise to his old man’s tricks, so Bradley beats him to the punch and sends the toe of his shoe straight into Maverick’s ankle.
Maverick smiles, a glint in his eye. Before he can act, Ice grabs both of their wrists.
The message is clear: knock it off.
“He started it,” Bradley says, throwing Mav under the bus.
“I did not!”
Ice rolls his eyes. They all know very well who started it.
“Why are you kicking me?” Bradley asks.
“Because when I went with you to get the replacement parts for the Bronco last weekend, you said you’d ask Ice what you told me when we had dinner this week.”
Ice turns to look at Bradley head on. He might be almost forty years old now, but sitting in his chair at this dining table from his childhood, with Ice’s full attention trained on nothing but him, makes him feel like a naughty teenager again.
“Oh, yeah,” he says sheepishly, glaring at Maverick as he does. “Yeah, I did say that, huh.” Thanks for throwing me under the bus, Mav.
Maverick only smiles. I give as good as I get, kiddo.
“Well, you know I’m rotating back Stateside for my next deployment, and I was wondering… Well, I wanted to ask…”
He bites his tongue. Why is it so hard to ask this of Maverick and Ice, the two men who raised him? His parents, for all intents and purposes?
“That is, base housing sucks. And I’ve still got Mom’s house, but I’ve been meaning to get the carpet ripped out and new floors put in for literal years now, and if I’m gonna do that, then I might as well get around to all the other updates and renovations I’ve been meaning to do for literal years now, and—”
“Bradley wants to know if he can move back in for a few months while he gets the house fixed up,” Maverick cuts him off.
Ice huffs a laugh.
“Yeah, yeah, yuck it up, you old geezers,” he sulks. He’s sure they enjoyed his squirming. It was probably the highlight of their very boring week.
Ice reaches out and squeezes his hand. Yes, he mouths. Of course.
“Sucks to be you, Maverick,” Bradley says as he serves himself a generous helping of potatoes. Ice tries to hide his smile in his own plate, but he isn’t fast enough.
Maverick smiles. “See? I told you! What did I say? Come on, let’s eat.”
Ice glares at Maverick again. He signs something that Bradley can’t translate for himself yet, but he’s been in the hot seat with Ice enough to know that Maverick is not even close to off the hook for whatever it was that Ice wanted to talk about.
Maverick scowls at them both, and then kicks him under the table. Again.
#top gun#bradley rooster bradshaw#pete maverick mitchell#tom iceman kazansky#ask#lamby.prompt#starrybouquet#thank you for the ask!
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what you'd call a dream
mav & baby bradley + day off: a discord prompt written for @malewifebillcage
Title from What You'd Call a Dream by Aaron Tveit
Mama wakes him up, just as the sun starts peeking through his curtains.
"Good morning, baby," she whispers. "I'm heading out to work now, but I just wanted to say bye bye."
"Bye bye, Mama, I love you," Bradley responds easily. He rubs at his eyes, full of sleep. He's just about to flop back into his pillow and let Mama tuck him back under his blankets when he remembers—
"Did Uncle Mav come in last night?" he asks, sitting up hopefully.
"Yeah," she smiles, tucking his hair behind his ear. Mrs. Walton keeps insisting that he needs a haircut, but Mama likes his hair long, and so does he. Their hair almost matches like this. Mama says his hair will probably be darker than hers when he grows up, because that's what Daddy's hair did too, and he's growing up into the spitting image of his daddy.
He thinks that makes her sad sometimes, but then Mama kisses him all over his cheeks and his forehead and Uncle Mav gives him a noogie, and it's all but forgotten.
"Can I go stay with him?" Bradley asks. He grabs Flopsy Bunny to get ready, even though he knows Mama will probably say no because Uncle Mav needs his rest.
"Only if you're real quiet, honey," Mama says, opening her arms to carry him to Uncle Mav's room. "He's still sleeping."
"I'll be real quiet, I promise!" Bradley whispers. "I'll go back to sleep!"
"Okay, honey," Mama says. She opens the door to Uncle Mav's room. He's sprawled out on the bed, but there's a perfectly Bradley-sized place to Uncle Mav's left that he snuggles into easily. Mama tucks the blankets around him, kisses him and Uncle Mav both on the forehead, and leaves for work.
Bradley snuggles into Uncle Mav's side, right underneath his arm. He does the same thing to Mama too, when she lets him stay in her bed. They laugh and call him a little baby bird, looking to roost someplace warm. He doesn't think he's all that sleepy, because Uncle Mav is home again, and he's so excited to have Uncle Mav home, because that means they will go to the park, and to the beach, and maybe even to an airshow over the summer—going to airshows with Uncle Mav is always the best because Uncle Mav lets Bradley sit on his shoulders and tells him all about the planes that are flying in the sky...
The next time he wakes up, Uncle Mav is awake too, reading a book. Bradley scrambles into his lap, cramming Flopsy Bunny in between their bodies.
"Hi, Uncle Mav!"
"Good morning, duckie," Uncle Mav says, hugging him close. "It was nice to wake up with my favorite baby bird next to me!"
"Did you sleep good?" Bradley asks. He doesn't really know why he's asking, only that Mama always asks Uncle Mav in the morning, so he should too.
"I slept much better with you beside me," Uncle Mav says.
"I slept good too," Bradley tells him. "I had the best dream!"
"Oh yeah? Why don't I go make pancakes, and you can tell me all about this dream of yours."
Bradley follows Uncle Mav into the kitchen and sits at the counter while he gets the Bisquick down from the pantry.
"I was playing Little League with my friend, you know Noah? And Noah was on first, and it was me at bat, and we were just about to win, Uncle Mav! It was four to three, bottom of the ninth—oh, can I have blueberries in mine?"
Uncle Mav smiles and adds the blueberries from the fridge into the pancake batter and scoops some out onto the stove. A big one, too. Uncle Mav is so good at making big pancakes. Mama and Bradley can never get them quite as big as his.
"And then it's my turn at bat, and everyone in the stands is lookin' at me, Uncle Mav, but I don't let it get to me and I hit the ball and wham! It flies all the way to the outfield! And it's a home run! And Noah runs home, and then I run home, and you were the umpire and you called me in safe, and then we won the game!"
"Sounds like a good dream, kiddo," Uncle Mav says. He puts a plate of perfect, big, blueberry pancakes in front of Bradley, with a glass of orange juice too.
"It was really good." Bradley gets quiet.
"Was there something else?" Uncle Mav asks.
"My dad was there, too," he admits. "Right behind home base, at the fence. He was waitin' for me, and he had that big camera that Mama always takes with us when we go to the beach. And he was cheering for me real loud."
Uncle Mav sits beside Bradley, his own plate of blueberry pancakes in front of him. "Hey, Bradley," he says quietly. "You know your mama and I are always gonna cheer you on."
"Mmhmm," Bradley nods, stabbing at his pancakes.
"And your daddy loved you more than anything in the world. Of course he's cheering you on, too, kiddo," Uncle Mav says. "Maybe that's what your dream was. Your daddy telling you he's always right behind home base, waiting for you to hit that home run."
Bradley leans into Uncle Mav and tucks himself under his arm again. They eat their pancakes just like that, Uncle Mav working with one arm.
When they're done, Uncle Mav shakes his shoulders.
"Hey, I have the whole day off. Wanna go to the park? We can practice hitting those home runs. Show off for your dad."
Bradley smiles. Days with Uncle Mav are the best.
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carole & mav + regret
a discord prompt written for @sluttyhenley
tw major character death — canon compliant
Carole has always been a good, Christian girl. She believed in Heaven, and forgiveness, and God’s unending grace. Life after death, that’s what her faith promised her.
Maybe that’s why she forgave Maverick so easily, after Nick died. It’s easy to give Maverick grace when she knows Goose is waiting for her at the Pearly Gates.
He might not go to church anymore, but Maverick is a good, Christian boy, too. Why else would he still be torturing himself by taking care of the Bradshaws—sending money for Bradley’s Little League dues, freezing lasagna for Carole to reheat on the nights she didn’t get home until seven, teaching Bradley to ride a bike, to swing a baseball bat, to tie a know in a cherry stem with his tongue? She can see it for what it is: atonement, for the mortal sin he committed when he walked away unscathed from the accident that killed her husband.
Maverick would fall on any sword she asked him to, if she told him it was what she wanted, if it would keep Bradley safe and happy. She is exceedingly carefully to never cross this boundary; Maverick is a bleeding heart, underneath all that bravado. He never recovered from losing Goose.
Bradley is the spitting image of his father, but he’s all the worst parts of her and Maverick at heart. Lose his favor, and lose him forever. He’s brash in a way all young boys are, but worse for it with Maverick Mitchell as a role model. She remembers what her boys were like at this age, but Bradley’s Maverick doesn’t have a Nicky Bradshaw to temper his impulses or smooth out his edges.
She wishes there were another way, but her time is running short; she’s finally going to reunite with her beloved Goose. It is all too easy to steer Maverick the way she wants him, to get him to protect Bradley from joining his father too soon—even if it means making Maverick carve out his own heart to sacrifice on the altar of his so-called penance, destroying the relationship with the boy his raised as his own son.
Carole dies knowing that Maverick will keep Bradley safe, at all costs. It’s the only thing that helps her go with any sort of peace.
When she gets to Heaven, it’s exactly like she dreamed. Goose is waiting for her in his jean jacket and Hawaiian shirt, and she runs into his arms the same way she’s craved to do for fifteen years.
But Goose’s smile is small and sad, and there’s a furrow between his brows. He wore it when Bradley spiked his first fever, and when Maverick was heartbroken after Penny Benjamin.
Goose doesn’t say anything right away. And then he sighs, “Oh, honey,” and she knows he heard what she asked of Maverick. It’s the first time she regrets it.
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humpback whales
mavdad + whales: a discord prompt written for @nicejobkid
So here’s the thing.
Bradley Bradshaw was all of eighteen years old with a head full of exactly jackshit nothing when he left Maverick and Iceman’s house on the end of the street. He didn’t know a goddamn thing about being an adult, even if he claimed otherwise. He left behind an entire life: baby pictures and journals and reels of home videos.
He really did think leaving was the only choice he had. In hindsight, it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever done.
On the one hand, he knew it would be fine. The Navy always provides. He got three square meals a day at Basic and an annual physical that he always aced, thanks to a lifetime of playing baseball and racing Maverick around the diamond. His old man had no right sprinting that fast.
But then there’s the other hand: the calendar of shots and immunizations a teenage boy going off to college required, the yearly appointments with an optometrist, a dermatologist, and most crucially of all, a dentist.
Bradley, Iceman always said, was blessed in that he didn’t take after either Goose or Maverick, both of whom had terrible teeth. Their x-rays were surely some kind of dental case study in a textbook somewhere. But Bradley had taken after his mother and Iceman, in this regard: his teeth all came in like ducks in a row, pearly white like ivory piano keys.
Maybe it was just bad timing, maybe it was because his teeth were just that good, but when he enlisted, no one bothered to ask Ensign Bradshaw if he’d ever had his wisdom teeth out.
So fifteen years later, with a toothache so bad it’s finally driven him to the clinic—and isn’t that embarrassing, to survive Maverick Mitchell’s particular brand of insanity, an ejection out of an F-18, a dogfight in a jet that had no business being in the air, and a (controlled!) crash landing, only to be done in by a goddamn toothache—Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, aged thirty-four, with his newly re-acquired father in tow, has his wisdom teeth removed.
They don’t hook him up with an IV, thank goodness. Instead, they give Maverick a packet of pills to make Bradley take an hour before surgery that will supposedly knock him out for the duration.
As a member of the F-18 Ejection Club, Bradley’s been on the good shit for the past few months. He has sincere doubts about these pills.
“Bottoms up, kiddo,” Maverick tells him, pushing the pills towards him with a cup of coffee. It’s the same mug he gave Maverick for Father’s Day when he was ten years old.
“You’re the worst,” Bradley says, swallowing the pills in one go with a scalding hot gulp.
Later, Maverick will laugh at him over the dinner table as he recounts to Ice what exactly happened when Bradley had his wisdom teeth out. (He really shouldn’t have doubted those pills.)
The meds hit about fifteen minutes after he takes them. It falls to Maverick, all five-foot-and-change of him, to wrangle six-foot-oh of Bradley into the Bronco, strap him in, and haul him back out into the dentist’s office. He vaguely remembers being wheeled into one of the surgery rooms and led to sit on the chair, falling asleep, and then waking up to the dentist telling him they’d finished taking his teeth and they just needed to stitch him up.
He immediately bursts into tears—he hates stitches more than anything—and then conks straight out again.
He doesn’t really remember getting home, only that the next time he wakes up, he’s back in Maverick and Ice’s house, laid out on the couch. Maverick is whistling in the kitchen. He’d covered Bradley with an old blanket. A smart move on his part; Bradley drooled on it in his sleep.
Maverick comes back into the room with two bowls of very boring chicken broth.
“Good morning!” he teases. “I didn’t know you were such a lightweight, ducky!”
“Yuh’re de wurst,” Bradley gums through the cotton gauze in his mouth.
Mav hands him a bowl and a spoon. The broth is barely hot. Gross. He looks up at Maverick with the same baleful expression he used to get dessert before dinner as a kid, but Maverick just laughs at him.
“No dice here, Brads. You’re not getting anything hotter, unless you wanna get your stitches replaced.”
Bradley rolls his eyes and slurps his lukewarm soup.
Maverick flips on the TV. He turns on a nature documentary on humpback whales, then kicks his feet up onto the coffee table, the exact way that Bradley knows Ice doesn’t let him.
He can see straight through Maverick. It’s the same routine he used to do when Bradley would stay home from school sick. Animal Planet never failed to knock him out. It was more effective than anything else at getting him to sleep.
But this time, Bradley finds himself staying awake as he watches this otherwise ordinary whale documentary with Maverick sitting next to him on the couch. He’s an adult now, but Maverick is treating him as if no time has passed. There’s no resentment, no blame, for all the pain he’d caused his father.
He missed moments like this, in the years they spent apart. He’d almost forgotten how nice it was to have someone to care for you.
In the end, Bradley stays awake for the whole movie. It’s Maverick who falls asleep, his head lolling to the side to rest on Bradley’s shoulder. It’s not such a bad place to be, Bradley thinks to himself, trapped on a cozy couch with his dad.
He hits play on the documentary again and settles in closer to Maverick. The whales are pretty cool, after all.
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