Chapter Text
i.
After the man, who, as it turns out is not from outer space – even if he looks like he very well could be – drinks a glass of water and inquires where he is, he asks Dorothy if there is a telephone he can use.
Assuming that he does not have any spare quarters in his space suit pockets for the payphones in the corner, Dorothy shows him to the back office and tells him to use the landline. She hovers in the doorway, though, because she does not trust him to be alone with the entirety of the diner’s files, and observes as he picks up the receiver and dials a number from memory.
“This is Captain Mitchell, callsign Maverick,” he says when someone on the other end picks up, voice raspy from what, inhaling space fumes? “Calling in after ejection, SAR can pick me up in –“ he looks at Dorothy and repeats the name of the town she gives him, the name of the diner. He affirms something, spouts a few technical abbreviations, then hangs up.
Dorothy watches as he rubs a hand over his face, dragging soot over his beautiful, but clearly exhausted features. When he looks up at her, the tiredness is replaced with a roguish grin that has Dorothy feel a good decade younger than she is.
“Mind if I make another call? My better half will be worried.”
She nods. He dials, again from memory. It barely rings for a few seconds until someone picks up, as if the person on the other end had been hovering over their phone.
“Hey,” the man – Captain Mitchell – says, and then cringes as, presumably, his better half’s reply is not as friendly as his own greeting was.
“No, I’m fine, I just wanted to –“ he stops again, sends Dorothy an exasperated look, and immediately lets it fall again, insisting over the phone that he “wasn’t doing anything with my face just now, I swear!”
Dorothy doesn’t bother to hide her amused smile.
Finally, he softens. “Okay,” he says, and then, “I know. I’m not asking you to get me out of this. We’ll talk when I get back.”
He hangs up without any words of goodbye, but the second phone call must have worked because he seems almost relaxed, settled back down on earth after his trip to space or wherever he dropped in from. “Should take a few hours for them to pick me up”, he explains, somewhat apologetically, pointing at the phone. “Is it okay if I wait here?”
Dorothy takes a long look at him, studies the grime around his hairline, the way he winces when he moves his arm to straighten out the receiver of the phone, the way he is rubbing a thumb over his shoulder, managing to look devastatingly handsome and bone-tired at the same time. She spares a thought for his better half, and, without knowing them, promises them that she’ll take care of the captain until he is safely back home.
“Stay as long as you’d like, honey. I’ll bring you a piece of pie.”
ii.
“I told you I could handle it, remember?” Pete is saying when Penny finds him outside, hidden away where he is leaning against the porch.
She’d seen his face crumble as he watched Bradley playing the piano, had wanted to check on him immediately but it took a few minutes to serve all the guests waiting in line and get someone else to cover her as she takes her break, in which time he managed to take a phone call, apparently.
“Oh, hey Penny,” he waves in her general direction, a clear invitation to join him, so she takes the few steps down and leans against the porch next to him, closing her eyes as the ocean breeze gently blows through her hair and Pete keeps talking away on his phone, lets the sound wash over her, mingle with the white noise of conversations and music coming from the bar.
“Penny agrees with me.”
Penny, who has no idea what she was just dragged into, glares at him. “What do I agree with?”
“I’ll be fine working with Bradley, right?”
Penny stares at him wordlessly, watches emotions flicker over his face until it settles on a sheepish grin, clearly getting her point but also deciding that the emotional part of this conversation is over. “Okay, maybe she doesn’t. I’ll prove both of you wrong, though.”
Penny raises an eyebrow. There’s some reply from the person on the other end of the phone – and it has to be Tom, right? Pete never confirmed anything, and Penny gets it, gets the career suicide and the decades of hiding weighing down on them, but she has known Pete in this comfortable, loose friendship of theirs that blooms back into existence whenever he’s stationed close to her for longer than most other people in her life, and it is always Tom. Has been Tom ever since the mid-eighties when Pete suddenly stopped their hook-ups without any explanation but looked happier than she’d ever seen him when he took her out for friendly dinners instead and casually mentioned his friendship with The Iceman. He never said anything, and she never asked, and this phone call is so anonymously neutral that it could be anyone on the other end, but she knows.
“I don’t think they’ll end up killing each other,” she placates into the receiver, stepping closer to Pete to do so, and is pleased with the warmth of his arm wrapping around her waist, pulling her into a half-hug.
Pete gets a response through the receiver and laughs. “Penny and I are running away together,” he replies, slapping a dramatic kiss on her cheek and Penny finds herself giggling as if they’re not far too old for these kinds of antics. It’s a side only Pete brings out in her, and she knows that she should be worried about whatever mission pulled him and a series of familiar faces of Top Gun graduates back to North Island but she’s also just glad to see him again.
After kissing the side of his head, a lot more genuine than his earlier smacker, she disentangles herself from his hold. “Break’s over, I have to get back inside.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Pete promises, then turns back to his phone to snark into it in a way that lets Penny know that only Tom could be on the other side.
As she heads inside, she turns to watch him climb on his bike, still on his phone, and suddenly is reminded of that time in the late nineties when they met for drinks at a bar and Pete dragged Tom along and she told them about the guy she had just started dating, bemoaning his annoyingly NSYNC-esque dyed-blond spikey hair, at which Tom had commented, “sounds really obnoxious, you shouldn’t date a guy like that,” at which Pete had cracked up at some kind of secret inside joke of theirs. She had turned to grab her drink from the bar and, just out of the corner of her eye, saw his smile suddenly shift into something softer, his eyes crinkling fondly up at Tom, just for a brief moment, a millisecond, there and gone again.
He might be a few decades older and have a few more wrinkles by his eyes, but the fond look as he talks into the phone has remained the same.
Penny leaves him to it.
iii.
Hondo has known the captain long enough to know he must still be sitting somewhere on base close to the med wing, beating himself up over Phoenix and Bob’s ejections even though the afternoon has turned into evening and he should have been home a long time ago.
It’s why he’s here, back from his temporary on-base housing after a shower and a change of clothes, looking for the man so he can get him on his bike and off towards his mysterious off-base housing situation, and it’s why he walks into the locker room Maverick is hiding in just in time to see him pick up the phone with a fond “hey,” and just in time to watch his face fall.
“Why are you using text-to-speech, what’s going on?”
The response he gets makes his frown deepen, his next words sound ever-so-slightly frantic. “What do you mean you’re at the hospital? Jesus, T, what –“
Hondo watches as he starts shrugging out of his uniform, struggles with the phone clutched between his shoulder and ear, puts it on speaker as he continues to get changed rapidly. Hondo wants to bow out of this clearly private moment but Maverick, who apparently has Spidey-senses and knew he was lingering in the doorway this entire time, vaguely waves in his direction in a way that Hondo interprets as a plea to stay. He stays.
“- just minor complications,” the robotic text-to-speech voice recites, now on speaker, “they are keeping me here for a day or two to run some tests.”
Mav pulls his jeans up, hisses, “it’s not minor complications if you collapse at your desk.”
A pause, probably due to whoever is on the other side types out the message, and then, “again, just a brief collapse. By the time Sarah called the EMTs I was conscious again.”
“Again, you collapsed. I’m coming to you.” Throwing on his leather jacket, Mav bangs the locker shut and grabs his phone, turning speaker off again so Hondo doesn’t hear whatever the reply is, but Mav just scoffs and snaps, “I’m coming. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Hanging up, he turns to Hondo, motioning him to follow as he storms off towards the parking lot. “I need to handle this,” he says, as if it’s a minor hitch in his evening plans and not a clearly upsetting medical emergency of someone who is important to him. Hondo, who has known the captain for years, stops to wonder for just a second – despite his general affability, he has never mentioned a wife or partner, doesn’t talk much about his private life at all, actually, other than his P-51 and his bike, and Hondo realizes he has never asked.
“Can you give me an update if anything changes with Bob and Phoenix?” Mav asks, swinging a leg over his bike.
Hondo nods.
Mav gives that infamous grin, but while Hondo does not know who he’s rushing off to or with whom he spends his evenings when they are in his home base in San Diego – other than the P-51, of course –, he has known him for long enough to see the tightness around his eyes, the jittery leg.
He claps a hand on the captain’s shoulder and watches him drive off into the twilight.
iv.
The smell of the sea hits Jake the moment he steps outside.
He knows he should be snoring away like the chainsaw that is Javy in their shared cabin, should be saving his energy for tomorrow, but despite all his bravado he has never been too good at sleeping the night before a mission. He’d been tossing and turning in his cot for over an hour until he decided to get up because years of experience tell him that the ocean is the one thing that can calm him down a bit. There’s a reason why an Army brat from northern Texas ends up in the Navy, and the feeling of freedom he got the first time he saw the open sea on a visit to Corpus Christi as a child might have had something to do with that decision.
It's quiet on deck, the skeleton crew on night shift clearly having withdrawn to less windy quarters. Jake relishes the way the breeze hits his face, tastes salt on his tongue and feels his heartbeat even out.
He steps closer to the railing to stare out into the endless black ocean when he spots another figure further to the right. Weeks of staring at the man as he wrote things on the blackboard in debriefing rooms, climbed into and out of his jet with singular confidence and ease, took apart every one of Jake’s – of all of their – mistakes, weeks of trying to figure Maverick out makes the silhouette unmistakable, and all Jake is left to do is wonder why he, of all people, with three air-to-air kills and more distinctions to his name than Jake can count, would be sleepless before a mission. Sure, it’s a tough one, but shouldn’t he, of all people, be able to handle it?
He's just about to walk up to him, maybe exchange a few pleasantries to get his mind off things, needle him a bit to see if he lets go of that relaxed, congenial façade of his again like he only did when Jake and Rooster got into their spat and during the trainwreck of training session that ended with Javy passing out and Bob and Phoenix ejecting, but he stops in his tracks when he realizes the other man is on the phone.
He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, honest, but leaving now would draw attention to him and the deck isn’t off-limits and sue him, he’s curious who Maverick makes his late-night phone calls to.
“Don’t talk too much, your throat is still fucked,” he hears him say, the cursing new but not surprising. Maverick huffs, almost fondly, at whatever the other person responds with. “I’m allowed to worry too, you asshole.”
The asshole sounds more like a term of endearment than many a babe and darling that Jake has let slip over the years. It’s fascinating, this new side of Maverick. He dares to sneak a peek over at the captain and sees him rubbing his palm over his face, exhaling audibly. When he speaks next, he suddenly sounds older, more his age than anything Jake has ever heard from him. He sounds exhausted.
“Yeah, I know.” A beat. “You know I’ll pick him. I have to.” Another beat, then, “I have to believe he’s ready. And I have this weird memory of someone telling me that it’s time to let go recently.”
Jake realizes that this is Rooster he’s talking about, and, again, wonders who the other person on the phone is. Maverick has never mentioned any girlfriend or wife and definitely doesn’t wear a wedding ring, at least not on base, but that doesn’t mean anything. For all Jake knows, he’s happily married to another batshit insane pilot that just happens to be stationed somewhere else, ranked high enough that Maverick can share highly classified mission parameters with them.
Finally, Maverick snorts. “You worry about getting better. If I come home and find out you’ve been burying yourself in work again even though you should be focusing on recovering, T, I swear to god – “ He listens for a moment, then adds, “yeah. I’m getting everyone back safely and in one piece tomorrow, and you bet your sweet ass that I’m coming home after that. Someone has to keep you in line.”
He clears his throat and adds a hoarse, “yeah. Promise.” Hangs up, puts his phone in his pocket.
Just as Jake wonders what the best strategy to sneak off unnoticed is, he hears, “enjoying the fresh air, lieutenant?”
Jake hides his wince, puts on a brave face, smirks. “Just taking a midnight stroll, sir.”
Maverick ambles over to him, raises an eyebrow, and Jake can’t help but be awed by how quickly he is back to being, well Maverick, no matter the heaviness of the conversation he was just having. Jake is no stranger to putting on a front, playing a character to hide any feelings away from the world, but Maverick is a whole other category. He wonders how much of it comes easily, like slipping on a second skin, and how much of it is just decades of practice. He doesn’t ask Maverick about any of that, though, because he hasn’t lost his mind just yet.
“What about you, sir, enjoying the sea?”
Maverick leans his elbows on the railing, stares out into the night. The wind tousles his unstyled hair and he looks like he is exactly where he belongs. “I’ve always liked it best in the early morning, when the first light is just starting to appear over the horizon.”
“Promise of a new day?” Jake asks.
“Something like that,” Maverick muses, then checks his watch. “Alright, lieutenant, time to catch some shuteye. I need you on your best tomorrow, not tired because you’ve been eavesdropping all night.”
“I wasn’t –“ Jake protests, but Maverick just sends him an amused look and he sheepishly continues, “sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.”
The captain shakes his head, smiling small and fond, mind clearly back on whoever he was talking to. “Don’t worry, nothing that wasn’t meant for other people’s ears,” he says.
Jake notes the particular turn of phrase, wonders why Maverick would be thinking about what other people can or can’t hear when he’s on the phone.
“Don’t worry about it,” Maverick says, claps a hand on Jake’s shoulder, as if it’s that easy. “Goodnight, lieutenant.”
He disappears towards the cabins for the higher-ranking officers. Jake barely remembers to call, “goodnight, sir!” after him.
When he returns to his cabin, he finds Javy still snoring away like a chainsaw. He tosses and turns for a while longer, but at least now he’s distracted from the mission.
v.
Beau Simpson can still barely believe his eyes and ears, staring firmly at where Pete fucking Mitchell just crash-landed a goddamn F-14 into the net and two heads are poking out of the cockpit when he tells the communications officer on duty to send off an encrypted memo to his superior officers letting them know that the mission ended up not having any casualties after all.
No sooner than the officer hits send, the phone next to him rings.
“It’s the COMPACFLT,” the lieutenant says as he hands Beau the phone, and Beau barely has time to take a breath and says, “Admiral Kazansky, sir,” when he is interrupted by a raspy, slightly shaking voice.
“Admiral Simpson, care to explain what is going on over there?”
Beau exhales, forces himself not to do something insane like laughing hysterically. One of these days, he’s going to strangle Mitchell. “Well,” he answers instead, trusting the Admiral to be calling from a secure line that won’t have any mission details leaked, “Captain Mitchell just landed on our deck in a stolen F-14 with Lieutenant Bradshaw in the back seat.”
A beat of silence.
“Hm.”
He’s unreadable as Kazansky always is, and Beau has no idea if he should expect ice-cold rage at not keeping Mitchell in check and probably causing an international diplomatic incident, or a medal for getting all off the pilots back safely, even if technically, none of it was his doing.
Kazansky clears his throat, reminding Beau of his recent stint in the hospital that had the rumor mill going wild with who his replacement might be until Kazansky issued an unofficial statement that he pushed through the gossip channels that amounted to, stop talking about me as if I’m dead, you’re not getting rid of me that easily, get back to doing your damn jobs. He’s scary, sure, but mostly scary at how good he is at this game.
“I look forward to reading about what exactly happened in your briefing,” Kazansky says, diplomatically, and just as Beau exhales with relief, he adds, “can you get me Maverick on the phone?”
“Sure, sir. We’ll get him for you.”
“Thank you,” Kazansky says, and seems too sincere in his thanks.
With a nod of his head, one of the junior officers rushes downstairs to go grab Mitchell, and Beau joins Bates outside, observing the crowd celebrating the two heroes. He’s just in time to see Mitchell and Bradshaw hugging it out. Good for them, he thinks, and then nods at Mitchell when he sees the man look up at him just as the junior officer reaches him, shouts into his ear, gesturing up to the command center.
Mitchell follows him, climbing the stairs slowly, clearly aching all over and only still upright due to the adrenaline cursing through his body. “Sir,” he greets Beau, and Beau offers him a hand to shake.
“Welcome back, captain,” he says, jerks his head towards the room behind them. “Phone call for you.”
Mitchell follows him inside, sheepishly waves when the remaining officers applaud his entrance. He picks up the receiver and grins wide when he hears who’s on the other side. Not for the first time, Beau wonders why in the hell someone as prim and proper and respectable as the COMPACFLT is friends with someone as insane as Mitchell, but then again, it does take a certain level of lunacy to raise through the ranks like Kazansky did, and if nothing else, the two of them have their balls of steel in common.
“Admiral,” Mitchell says, his voice affable, fond, even, sounding relaxed despite having to prop himself up against the wall to keep on his feet. “Good to hear from you.”
Beau turns to one of the screens to give him a sense of privacy. If the COMPACFLT wants to take the headache that is Mitchell out of his hands for even a few minutes, he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
+i.
“Maverick,” Tom says, and they have been wingmen for decades, have been reading each other’s minds for basically ever, at this point, have spent years perfecting their public conversations so that they can private conversations without anyone else realizing, and it’s clear that it means you asshole, giving me a heart attack, and you marvel, and darling.
“Admiral,” Pete responds, eyes crinkling with a smile, and it means sweetheart.