Chapter Text
As much as Maverick knows that the investigatory board is kind of a formality, he’s still sweating bullets the whole morning. Or maybe that’s the hangover. His head’s pounding as the board reviews the facts, and he’s only half-listening.
He knows Ice has already made his statement, and so has Viper. Chances are the board’s already made their decision, but he’s still locked up at attention, staring at the seal on the wall behind the board. He’s not sure what he’ll do if they tell him to turn in his wings. He’s never considered the idea that he’d ever have to stop flying, never thought about what he’d do after. If there would be an after.
“…We find that the F-14 flat spin was induced by the disruption of airflow into the starboard engine. This disruption stalled the engine, which produced enough yaw-rate to induce a spin which was unrecoverable.” The chairman of the board says, and he tunes back in. He should probably be paying attention when they take his wings.
“There was no way Lieutenant Mitchell could have either seen or avoided the jetwash which produced the engine stall. Therefore the board of inquiry finds that lieutenant Mitchell was not at fault in the accident of twenty-nine July. Lieutenant Mitchell’s record will be cleared of this incident and he will be restored to flight status without further delay. These proceedings are now closed.”
It should feel like a stay of execution. Not at fault. Restored to flight status.
For some reason, he feels exactly the same. Numb, sitting at ten-thousand feet and descending rapidly, tumbling through the air in a flat spin.
He’s been dismissed, so he grabs his cover from the desk and retreats out into the hallway. He passes Ice, he thinks. He’s halfway to the parking lot when he stops. He doesn’t know where he’s going. There’s a hop this afternoon, he thinks, but he hasn’t done any prep, wasn’t in class that morning. Doesn’t have a RIO, either. He’s saved by Viper, who steps into his field of view.
“Go home, Maverick. Get some rest. You’re up on the hop tomorrow.”
Maverick just nods.
“Yes, sir.”
And then he leaves.
The next morning he’s back in the cockpit, Sundown behind him. He’s still uncaged, a little unfocused. It just feels off. So he snaps on his O2 mask, takes a deep breath, and tries to clear his head.
Leave it all on the ground, he thinks, don’t think, just do.
The hop’s—it’s fine, he supposes. They get a kill. Sundown’s a good enough RIO. Well, he’s a damn good RIO, actually. He’s just not Goose.
His calls are just a bit too different. He’s too aggressive, and something about it grates on Maverick. It’s not Sundown’s fault he’s not Goose. It’s Maverick’s. Maverick’s always relied on Goose to throttle him back, to make him stop and think when he was being a moron. They’d balanced each other out perfectly, been MaverickAndGoose, a single unit working in glorious tandem with the aircraft. But now it’s just Maverick. And Sundown.
The afternoon hop’s equally underwhelming. He can feel Sundown’s irritation growing, but he also doesn’t give a single flying fuck. They land, tensely do their debrief, and go the fuck home. Goose has been gone for four days.
It comes to a boiling point the next afternoon. The morning hop’s all right, they get their shot in, take out Jester. Maverick’s still faintly amazed that they cleared him to fly. He certainly wouldn’t have, but it’s up to the flight surgeon, so here he is. He shouldn’t be flying. He’s so unfocused he might as well be drunk on the controls. But like any good addict, he can’t turn down a dose, so he flies.
He mitigates the risk as far as he can. He sets limits for himself, conservative ones, ones that will get them both back to the airfield in one piece at the end of the hop.
Sundown’s patience is clearly running thin.
“Take the shot, Maverick,” He snaps, and Maverick ignores him. He doesn’t have it, not for certain.
“You can engage at any time now,” Sundown says testily, and Maverick can’t bring himself to give a single flying fuck. He’s the one on the controls, he’s the one with the instructor off his nose, and he’ll engage when he has a solid, incontrovertible window. The window he’s got now is just okay. That, and something in his gut is still telling him that it’s not right, that something’s off, and he’s learned his lesson, he knows better than to ignore the signs.
Sundown’s yelling something at him from the back, but Maverick’s ignoring him. Not ignoring him, really. Filtering. He hasn’t heard any aircraft advisories or anything actually related to safety of flight, so he’s not listening. Maybe ignoring is the right terminology, then. He’s ignoring Sundown’s outburst, because he’s the goddamn pilot, and his gut and his thousands of hours of flight time are telling him no.
Last week, he would’ve take the shot in a heartbeat. Last week, he would’ve made it, easily.
Last week, Goose was behind him.
He’s made his decision. He doesn’t take the shot. He pulls off. They break contact.
Iceman surges past them, and as he takes the shot, Maverick pulls them up, well clear of the engagement and the jetwash and the hazards.
On the flight back to the airfield, he can feel Sundown’s anger building like a storm in the back seat.
He ignores it. He ignores it while they shut down, he ignores it while they climb out, he ignores it as he walks down the flightline back towards the building.
“We could’ve had him!” Sundown calls after him.
And we could be dead, Maverick thinks. They didn’t get their bogey, but their bogey also didn’t get them. They live to fight another day after all.
“Hey!” Sundown catches up to him and grabs Maverick by the arm, “I’m telling you, if you’d just listened to me, we could’ve had him! Why didn’t you fire?”
With his feet back on solid ground, all his control used up in the air, something inside Maverick cracks open. He whirls around and grabs Sundown by the front of his gear—(his hands tight on Goose’s vest, numb fingers peeled away one at a time--) and snarls in the man’s face.
“I will fire when I am good and goddamn ready to fire.”
He’s inches from the other man, so close he can see right through Sundown’s mirrored sunglasses. Sundown’s eyes are wide and white and shocked, and when Maverick releases him, pushes him away, he says back. Maverick turns back and continues for the building, feeling everyone’s eyes tracking him as he goes. It’s an old, familiar, uncomfortable itch. There goes Pete Mitchell, the fuckup with the dead father. There goes Maverick, the fuckup with the dead best friend.
He hears Jester and Viper talking as he walks past their jets, the old deaf bastards clearly audible over the buzz of the flight line.
“Keep sending him up,” Viper orders, and something in Maverick, already cracked and brittle, shatters entirely.
It’s how he finds himself doing something he’d never imagined. He knocks on the door to Viper’s office, and when he’s standing in front of the desk it feels like he’s a world away from his body.
“I can’t do it, sir.” He hears himself say, and he can’t meet he older man’s eyes. Viper doesn’t yell, at least. He doesn’t try to talk Maverick out of it.
“If that’s what you need to do,” Viper tells him, “We can do that.”
When Maverick finally manages to lift his head, Viper doesn’t even look pittying, thank fuck, because that would be the last straw. He just levels his gaze at Maverick, heavy with understanding, and for a moment it reminds Maverick so much of another old flight instructor that he can hardly breathe. Viper scribbles something—an address, it looks like, on a piece of paper, and hands it to him.
“Go get cleaned up, Mitchell. And come by before you leave,” He says, “Dinner’s at six-thirty.”
It’s more of an order than a request, and Maverick nods, looking back at the floor.
He can’t look up, he can’t fucking do it. He looks at Viper and all he sees is Doc’s calm understanding and it feels like there’s something horrible and yawning opening up in the pit of his stomach, chewing its way out. He swallows it back, tries to force the feeling down and not fully crack up in the hallway to the locker room as he goes to pack his shit, eyes burning the whole way.
He’s got most of his stuff packed away—not that there was much to begin with—when someone clears their throat and he almost jumps out of his skin in surprise.
“I’m sorry about Goose,” Ice says, entirely to gently, “He was a good man.”
He isn’t sure what does it, the total understatement of wrapping all that Goose was under the auspice of a good man, or the fact that it’s in past tense. But his throat closes and the lockers behind Kazansky and Kazansky both blur and he’s drowning. Maybe he’s finally cracking, falling apart for good.
Maybe that’s what makes him kiss Tom Kazansky, cling to him like a lifeboat. It’s so, so stupid, and he’s probably about to get the shit beat out of him, and really kicked out of the Navy this time—But instead, Kazansky kisses him back, and he’s lost to it. Until a pipe clanks and he comes to his senses and runs. He doesn’t stop until he gets to his bike, kicks it into gear and keeps running.
A jet takes off as he’s passing the runway and his heart’s still hammering in his chest but it doesn’t flip like it should. He keeps going, faster and faster down the straightaways, taking curves too sharp and blowing through stop signs until he hits the highway. He opens up the throttle, guns it so hard he almost pops a wheelie and tries to outrun the horrible emptiness he knows from experience he can’t drink away. He’s going to have to bury Goose, just like everyone else he’s ever loved.
And the cherry on top of the whole damn fucked up cake is Kazansky. There’s about a fifty percent chance he’s already ratted Mav out for the whole thing in the locker room. But that would probably get him booted out too, and the guy’s been eye-fucking him the whole course, so maybe not. He screams down the highway, not aiming for anything in particular, until the town fades into desert. He’s still distracted, still spiraling, still feeling like his heart is going to pound right out of his chest and explode, leave him nothing but a smear on the asphalt, the way he always was probably going to end up anyway.
That’s when his front tire catches a patch of gravel and loses traction. His heart jumps, and he’s skidding, out of control and barely having time to think shit, I’m going to die, as he veers. He can see it now, playing out in slow motion like it’s already happened and they’re just re-running the tape. He won’t get control back. The bike will continue its inexorable path towards the guardrail at top speed and it’ll be over. It’ll be over. He can stop trying.
It feels like a weight lifting off his shoulders.
I just have to let go, he thinks, and it’ll be over. I can see everyone again.
The light glints off the windscreen as he veers and he feels a pang of premature grief for the bike that Doc gave him, and then it reflects off his watch and into his eyes. He blinks it away, and the bike wobbles back onto clear road and it hits him like an eighteen-wheeler. He almost died, and the thought didn’t really bother him, and that’s—that scares the shit out of him, scares his senses right back to where they’re supposed to be.
He pulls off on the side of the highway. He barely gets the kickstand down before he’s off.
“Fuck,” He says out loud, and kicks the guardrail. Pain radiates up his foot from the point of impact.
“Fuck!” He says again, louder and with feeling.
What the fuck did I just almost do? He thinks. He scrapes a hand through his hair and paces in frantic circles, waiting for his heart to stop pounding like it’s trying to escape his chest. It doesn’t. It gets worse and worse as it really sinks in, and then he's gripping the guardrail like a lifeline as the contents of his stomach rebel and he pukes his guts out all over the side of the road.
He hasn’t eaten much in the last few days, so it’s mostly just bile, sour and hot and awful. It stops eventually, when he’s shaking and his eyes are streaming. He wipes his mouth and leans heavily on the rail.
“Fuck,” he repeats. His throat’s raw and scratched and he feels like a wrung-out rag.
“What the fuck do I do now?” He asks out loud. It’s hot as fuck out, waves of heat shimmering like an oil slick over the ground and the desert doesn’t have an answer for him. He just stands there for a moment, looking out across the dry ground, the wide, empty sky. It might be five minutes later, or maybe half an hour’s gone by, but eventually he checks his watch. Five forty-five.
“Dinner’s at six thirty.”
Now that he’s figured out that he’s not going to die, he should probably figure out what comes next. Dinner seems to be as good of a plan as any. He walks back towards his bike and kicks himself mentally. He can’t believe he almost crashed her.
Jesus, Doc would’ve knocked my block off if he’d been around to see that shit. He pats the side of the bike, like an apology, and climbs back on. He starts his bike again and heads back towards base. If he’s going to burn in, he feels like he owes Viper an apology, at least, for having to watch the sorry show.
The address on the paper that Viper gave him is a beautiful house on a bluff over the ocean. He parks his bike off the road and heads up the walk, still feeling kind of unreal. There’s flowers hanging on the porch, and the whole place smells like them, sweet and heady in the hot evening air.
Viper’s wife answers the door almost as soon as he knocks, with a warm smile on her face.
“Hi, Maverick, come on in! How’re you doing?” She’s so cheerful that it throws him off a little—the world’s still turning, even as he’s been shaking apart.
“Good,” he says vaguely, “How are you?”
“Really?” She asks, keen eyes looking right through him, “Sure you’re doing okay?” It’s completely unnerving, actually, but he’s not about to say, well, no, this afternoon I kissed another Naval officer and then about a half an hour ago I’m pretty sure I tried to off myself, so instead he says,
“Oh, I feel great.” As she shows him into the living room and offers him a drink, which he politely turns down. He probably shouldn’t start drinking, especially not with Viper’s kids in the house. It seems… rude, maybe. Or just a bad idea in general.
“Okay, make yourself comfortable, Mike’ll be right down.”
“Thanks,” he says, still a little lost.
As he waits, he looks around. The living room is full of old black and white photos. One on the far wall catches his eye, and for a moment he can’t quite wrap his head around what he’s seeing. Two men stand shoulder to shoulder in their flight suits before an F-4. One is, recognizably, a much younger Viper. The other—
“I flew with your old man,” Viper says from behind him, “VF-51, the Oriskany.”
That was his dad’s last squadron, the one he way flying with when he died.
He’s never seen Viper out of uniform before, and it’s almost weird. He’s in a lightweight linen shirt and he looks almost approachable without his TOPGUN Instructor hat pulled low and menacing over his brow.
“You’re a lot like he was,” Viper continues, “Only better.”
Maverick looks back at him sharply.
“And worse,” Viper adds dryly, and yeah, that sounds more like it. “He was a natural heroic son of a bitch, that one.” There’s something a little resigned in Viper’s voice as he says it, and it feels for a moment like Maverick’s ten years old again, poking at ants in the back yard while two pilots toast on the porch above him.
“So he did do it right.” Maverick can’t help a little smile at the confirmation. Even as he’d gotten older, gotten to know a lot more about how the Navy really worked, he could never shake the belief that his dad hadn’t fucked up, that something else had been going on.
“Yeah,” Viper agrees, with a half-smile. “He did it right. C’mon, kid, let’s take a walk.”
Maverick follows him out of the house.
“That why you fly the way you do?” Viper asks him as they walk down the steps, “Trying to prove something?”
When Maverick doesn’t answer, Viper continues.
“Yeah, your old man did it right.” He pauses, searching for something out on the horizon. Maverick follows his gaze, but there’s nothing there he can see. “What I’m about to tell you is classified, and probably always will be. Could end my career.” Viper shrugs, like he’s not too concerned.
That’s…not exactly what Maverick expected, but he can’t say he’s not hooked. He’s never been so focused in his life.
“But frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Viper puffs on his cigar pensively. “I know what the Navy says happened to Duke Mitchell. But it’s a load of horseshit, and I think you know it.”
He knows. He’s known it his whole life, but it’s the first time he’s ever heard someone say it out loud. It’s all he’s wanted to hear for damn near twenty years, and for a moment he’s almost convinced he misheard.
“We were in the worst dogfight I ever dreamed of,” Viper says, still looking out into the distance, “Bogies all over the sky, like fireflies. He’d been hit, his aircraft was damaged pretty bad, but he could’ve made it back. But he stayed in it. Saved three planes before he bought it.” He’s matter-of-fact about it, like the time’s given him enough distance that it doesn’t hurt much anymore.
“How come I never heard that before?” Maverick asks.
Viper snorts.
“Not something the State Department tells dependents. Not when the battle happened on the wrong side of a line on a map.”
“You were there?”
Viper stops walking, takes his sunglasses off.
“I was there,” He confirms, sitting down on the edge of picnic table in the yard, “What’s on your mind?”
Maverick pauses. There’s a lot on his mind. Most of it he won’t say out loud. Can’t, really.
Viper takes another pull from his cigar.
“You’ve got something on your mind, that’s for sure. Duke looked just like that when he didn’t want to say something.”
“Yeah,” Maverick admits, “I do, I guess.” He rolls the questions in his head over and over, trying to find a good angle to come at them, a way to talk about it that doesn’t feel like spilling his guts.
“How do you do it?” he asks finally.
“Do what?”
“…Keep flying?” Keep going, he doesn’t add, because it would feel like too much of a confession, too close to admitting where his head’s at. Viper rolls the cigar in his hands pensively.
“You just do,” He shrugs, “Not the best advice, but it’s what I’ve got.”
“Don’t think, just do.” Maverick recites, and leans back on the table, too.
Viper raises an eyebrow.
“Something my first flight instructor used to say.”
Viper grins.
“That’s right, you’ve got what, three thousand hours?”
Maverick nods, a little hesitant.
“Yeah, I checked your file.” Viper huffs a laugh. It makes him look about a decade younger. “You worked your ass off to get here, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did,” Maverick agrees, thinking about endless hours over East Texas, about all the time he’d spent at the table with other students, grilling each other on academic knowledge.
“That sounds about right,” Viper nods, “Your old man wasn’t the quitting type, and I don’t think you are either.”
Maverick looks away, trying not to think about that afternoon, about how he’d almost quit in a big way. Viper’s words echo in his head, so similar to something he’d heard, years and years ago when he was just a kid whose whole world was falling down around his ears.
This isn’t the only time his world has ended. The sun still rose the day after his father died, the day after his packet was pulled, the day after he got Bud’s call about Doc. It’ll rise again tomorrow, too, and he’ll fly out to meet it like he always does.
“Sure,” He agrees, “I guess.”
“You know,” Viper shoots him a sideways glance, “You’ve got enough points to graduate tomorrow. Or,” he pauses, “You can quit. No shame in it. That spin was hell, it would’ve shook me up.”
“You think I should quit?” Maverick asks. It comes out sharper than he means it to, one more fuckup to add to the days laundry-list of them.
“I didn’t say that.” Viper corrects him. “Simple fact is, you feel responsible for Goose, and it’s giving you a confidence problem.”
Maverick almost laughs. That’s probably the first time anyone’s ever accused him of that particular flaw.
“Now, I’m not going to sit here and blow smoke up your ass, Mitchell. A good pilot always evaluates what’s happened. And then he applies what he’s learned. Up there,” He flicks his grey eyes up to the sky, “Up there we’ve got to push it. That’s our job.”
“For what it’s worth,” He continues, “That first hop, well, I hadn’t seen anyone fly like that in years. You fly just like him. Duke always had more guts than common sense.” It doesn’t sound like an admonishment, somehow. Viper almost sounds proud.
“Sometimes, the common-sense thing to do isn’t what’s required. Sometimes…” He trails off, then grins, “Sometimes you just have to let the balls win out over the brains, you know?”
“Yeah,” Maverick thinks about flying inverted over the Indian Ocean, thinks about landing on a dirty back road. Thinks about flying in a sky full of bogeys with a half-busted aircraft and a dozen men at your back and making the hard choice. “Yeah, I do.”
When Viper said he could quit, it wasn’t a gotcha. He’d presented it as an actual option, and it is. Hell, Viper probably wouldn’t even think less of him for taking it, for what it’s worth but—
He thinks about Carole, telling him to stick it out. He thinks about how it would feel to go back to the boat, head down and empty handed. He thinks about how it would just confirm every shitty thing that anyone’s ever said about him, about his family. It’s a choice between a lifetime of regret and moving on. He can’t bring Goose back, and he can’t ever make up for what he’s done. All he can do is try to be better.
“It’s your choice, Lieutenant,” Viper says, “You have the controls.”
The sun’s going to come up in the morning, he thinks to himself.
“Sorry to bother you after work, sir. And—thanks.” He says, and makes up his mind.
“No problem,” Viper shakes his hand, firm, “Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Maverick climbs onto his bike and begins the ride home. He takes a looping, circuitous route along the seaside, comes back towards the base as the sun’s setting. He parks his bike at the departure end of the runway on the perimeter road that him and Kazansky have run for weeks and just. Sits.
An F-14 rockets off above his head on an unrestricted takeoff, a bullet into the center of the sunset, and his heart kicks back to life, pounding in his chest the same old way it always has.
I’m sorry, Goose, he thinks, and wishes it could be enough. It isn’t, and it never will be, but he’s still here. He owes it to Goose, and to Carole, and to Bradley, to get his shit together and keep going. He watches the sun sink into the ocean and somehow, he knows he’ll survive this, too.