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He's thrown about fifteen feet clear when it happens. A line, fraught with overuse and unchecked as it should be according to regulation, snaps without even half a second's worth of warning. There are shouts, a loud crack, and then all Rooster remembers is the back of his skull snapping back against the far wall of the hangar before a splitting darkness overtakes him.
It's the smell that wakes him next: sterile bandages and antibiotic ointment, dry air that isn’t coming off burnt tarmac, but rather stale air-conditioning. He’s probably back on base. Not in the hangar but in the medical center—and his brain kickstarts to capacity the second he realises it.
Mom, he thinks, before a wave of embarrassment washes over him. Not now. He’s too grown to be wanting his mother when he gets hurt—but he’s never gotten this hurt before, never had to get checked into a hospital or wake up alone. She’d always been there for him, every scrape and every sprain, before he’d applied for U of SC. Before he'd lost her.
(And if it hadn’t been her, if she couldn’t be there, it’d always been Mav—)
The thought of it stings more than whatever’s knocked his head about. Out of sight, out of mind, he thinks grimly, and steadies himself to take his surroundings in.
It hurts to open his eyes but he does it anyway, and he’s greeted by the sight of one of the base nurses peering down at him. “Wh’sappened?” he thinks he asks, barely able to get the words out, his head pounding so hard that for a moment he wonders if he’s gone the same way as his dear old dad.
“Hangar accident,” the nurse says primly, stepping over to him to shine a little light into his eyes. Rooster squints and attempts to avoid it, but all it does is make his headache worse. “Cable on a rig gave way; you’re the lucky pilot who got caught in the whiplash. Try not to move, you’ve got a concussion,” she tells him, as if Rooster’s going to do anything other than lie here in excruciating pain. “You’ve suffered a linear skull fracture. We’re going to need to keep you for a few days for observation, but you should heal up fine in no time. Maybe a month or two until you’re up in the air again.”
“Yeah?” Rooster tracks her movements across the room with hazy eyes and a throbbing ache in the side of his head where the fracture must be. “Y’sure?”
“You have my word, flyboy.” The base nurse pauses at the door before turning back to him. “Speaking of which—you’ve got visitors. Seems like your squadron’s brought an entire florist’s shop along.”
Of course they did. If only Rooster could roll his eyes without it hurting. “Send ‘em in,” he says, his tongue finally unstuck from the roof of his mouth, “but confiscate the flowers, would you?”
The door opens five minutes later, and in stumble his surprisingly quiet squadmates—CT, Hazy, Warden all empty-handed, Grenada the only one bearing a gift in her hands. It’s a teddy bear wearing a little sailor’s outfit. “Your sunflowers got stolen by a rogue nurse,” Hazy whispers loudly, defeating the entire purpose of whispering. “She also told us to shut up or we wouldn’t be allowed in.”
Rooster decides that his nurse is now his new favourite person. “Gimme my bear, Nada,” he says, wriggling the fingers of the arm that’s still lying at his side. “He got a name yet?”
“That honour’s been left to you.” Grenada tucks the bear into the crook of his arm and gives him a tight smile. “How you feelin’, Roo?”
“Like I got run over by a bus,” Rooster admits. “Shit. They’re not gonna let me fly for fucking weeks.”
“Good,” Warden says, surprising Rooster by how firmly he says it. “When you got hit by that cable—I seriously thought you were a goner, dude. Scared the shit out of me.”
“And the rest of us,” Hazy adds, fidgeting where he’s standing at the edge of Rooster’s cot. “There was so much blood.”
It’s then that Rooster sees the way all of them look—pale, smudges under their eyes like they’ve lost sleep. He’s never seen them like this, not even when CT almost flew his Hornet into the ground that one time during a hop.
Something awful and shaky threatens to climb up his throat. “Head wounds bleed a lot,” Rooster croaks, attempting to put some bravado on for them. Shit, he hadn’t realized they’d be so affected. “I’m fine, guys. Really. Gonna be good to go in no time.”
“Don’t overdo it, Bradshaw.” Grenada chewing on her lip. She only ever does that when she’s anxious about something. About someone. “I still need you on my wing.”
Rooster’s about to respond with something like, watch me be up and about in a week tops, when the door opens. “You’ve got another visitor,” his nurse says, her eyebrows so far up her forehead that they’ve almost disappeared into her hairline. “He’s—someone important.”
She steps aside before Rooster can ask who it is, and in walks a man he hasn’t seen in person in years, someone he’s still got in his phone contacts despite changing his number twice, someone who primarily exists in photographs and reports and Wikipedia pages. His entire squadron snaps to attention. “Sir!” Warden says, the tremor in his voice betraying his surprise.
“At ease.” With the soft click-shut of the door behind him, Admiral Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, ever the striking figure of authority in his service khakis, pins Rooster with a single imposing look that says everything and nothing all at once. Abruptly, Rooster feels just as young as his CO likes to tell them they are, if not more. “Lieutenant Bradshaw.”
“Admiral Kazansky,” Rooster says, unsure why a two-star admiral has just shown up on a base that’s miles away from the carrier that he’s supposed to be stationed on for a pilot he doesn’t know. “Sir.”
Iceman moves closer to the bed. “I spoke to your doctor and your nurse,” he says casually, like he’s speaking about the weather. “They’ve informed me that you’ll be discharged within the week. Grounded for at least a month.”
Rooster can’t help the twitch in his face from the wince he can’t hold back. “Yessir.”
“Bradley,” Iceman says, and his hand lands carefully on Rooster’s shoulder, careful not to jostle him. “I’m sorry I could only come alone.”
Bradley? CT mouths from where he’s still standing extremely still next to the others. Rooster ignores him, focus entirely drawn to the incredibly informal gesture Iceman’s just made. Both the hand on his shoulder and the use of his first name.
He knows why he’s here now.
“He put you up to this?” Rooster’s mouth curls unhappily. “He should mind his own business. Sir.”
Iceman raises an eyebrow. “I’m only going to say this once,” he starts, voice soft but sharp, and Rooster immediately regrets giving in to the ever-present bitterness. “So you’re going to listen. The base called him as soon as it happened, but you know where he is.”
Rooster lets out a breath. “Bosnia,” he murmurs. Shunted off after pissing off some admiral for some reckless stunt or other. What’s new?
“He would’ve given everything to be here,” Iceman says, “and he couldn’t, so he asked me. He’s never asked me for anything, Bradley, not in the last twenty years. But he asked me to come here. To come see you, to find out if you were alright. To see if you needed anything.”
Rooster’s eyes slide to his squadmates, who seem to be taking in the entire exchange with matching expressions of confusion and disbelief. “My squadron is here,” he says roughly. “I don’t need him.”
I don’t need Maverick.
Iceman’s face doesn’t give anything away. Maybe that’s why they call him that. Rooster wonders how good he is at poker. “That’s fine,” he says. “He doesn’t need to be needed. He just needs you to be safe.”
Every scrape and every sprain. Mav, he’d cried, falling off his bike at six. Mav, he’d called from the principal’s office after getting into a fight at fourteen, his mom too sick to be there in person. Mav, he’d shouted, running himself ragged when he’d found out Maverick pulled his papers at eighteen.
He doesn’t need him. He doesn’t.
Maverick, holed up on a carrier floating off the coast of Herzegovina, being told that the kid he’s been looking out for for years has just gotten his skull fucking split open in a freak accident thousands of miles away from where he is.
Rooster swallows hard and ignores the ache in his brain when he tilts his head slightly, not wanting to meet Iceman’s eyes. “I’m safe, sir. You can—you can tell him that.”
Iceman’s nod is barely perceptible. “Is that the only thing you want to tell him?”
No, Rooster wants to say, no, there’s so much more that I want to say to his fucking face but I don’t know how and I don’t want to know, so no. “Yessir,” Rooster whispers, and Iceman’s hand leaves his shoulder as gently as it’d been placed there in the beginning. “That’s all, sir.”
Iceman straightens up, and makes for the door. The rest of Rooster’s squadron salutes him as he turns to say, “Get some rest, Lieutenant. You’ll be back in the air in no time.” He gives Rooster’s squadron a nod, and adds, “They’ll need their wingman at a hundred percent.”
“Sir,” Rooster says, and Iceman leaves without another glance. “Christ alive.”
“You’re telling me,” Hazy says, and Rooster’s attention snaps back to them. “What the fuck was that about?”
“Long story.” The last thing Rooster wants to do is to delve into old history while he’s still feeling like he’s been crushed by a semi and left out to dry in the cold, hard sun. “He knew my dad. Back in TOPGUN.”
And my—and Maverick, he doesn’t say. And Maverick.
“That’s crazy,” CT gushes. “You never said.”
“It never came up.” Rooster leans back, the exhaustion finally setting back in. “We’re not—close or anything.” His jaw cracks on a yawn. “He shouldn’t have come.”
They must realise that he’s fading fast, because Grenada and Warden share a look between themselves before Grenada’s saying, “Get some sleep, Rooster. We’ll be back in the morning.”
Rooster shuts his eyes and listens to them leave.
It’s when their footsteps no longer ring out down the hallway that he opens them again, finally alone for the first time since waking up. No one at his bedside. No one to push his hair back and hold his hand and tell him that it’s fine to be scared of death.
Mav would’ve. Rooster blames the concussion and the delirium, he never would admit this, not now—but Maverick would. If he were here. He’d crack a joke or tell some story about his dad. Make Rooster forget that he was ever alone.
He wonders if Iceman’s called Maverick yet. If Iceman’s told him how banged up Rooster is, if he’s told him what he said—all of it, not just the last part. If he still thinks of Rooster the way he had as a kid, or if he’s just someone he owes just because of what happened twenty years ago.
“I don’t need you,” Rooster murmurs. “I don’t need Mav here.”
He doesn’t need him. But, he thinks as sleep takes him once again, despite everything, he still wants him to be here.
(It’s after they’ve crash-landed on the USS Leyte Gulf, when everything is done and over with, when they’ve come back in one piece, when Maverick has his arms around him and Rooster’s face is buried in Maverick’s shoulder that he thinks about what he’d wanted to say to him.
I just wanted to say, he’d started before he’d been cut off. And Maverick had understood, had told him that they’d talk after. But—at some point during the mission, he thought he’d never get to say it at all. That he wouldn’t be going home—that Mav wouldn’t be going home either.
But they had, and Iceman’s voice had been the counterpoint in his head to the look of sheer, overjoyed relief on Mav’s face when they met in the crowd. He just needs you to be safe, Iceman had said all those years ago to the injured boy in the bed.
They’ve both lost enough people to last a lifetime. His dad, his mom. Ice, whose passing had taken more soul out of Mav than Rooster can ever remember witnessing.
They’re not losing each other. Not anymore.
Rooster clutches at Maverick, knowing that he doesn’t need to say it. Mav knows.
I just wanted to say that I’m safe.
He’s safe, and he’s home.)