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"No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear."
-C.S Lewis
Maverick used to think about his life in terms of accomplishments. His best report card, his school awards, getting his first car. His first kiss. The first time he snuck out and actually got away with it, going to the skate park with friends he no longer remembers.
And then his father died.
That was bad enough. A deep crevice carved into his chest that he knew would never be filled again. The lack of information on the death only made it harder to reconcile that he was truly dead.
He would never listen to his father lecture him about trust, or family obligations, or even getting up and doing the dishes. He could scrub until his fingertips bled on the glass but his father would still be gone.
Pete’s mother fell into the depression he never allowed himself to openly feel. He appreciated how long she tried, for his sake.
She would smile at him when he came home from school. She would set down the meal she cooked for him that was so delicious his mouth watered just from the smell alone; he knew she spent all day making it as a way to distract herself from the pain. He savored every last bite because he didn’t know how long home cooked meals would last.
It wasn’t long before they stopped. He would hear the music from upstairs playing over and over and over again until he knew every fucking lyric before the opening chords even started. He would never see his mother, and assumed she was in bed all day, every day. He almost let himself do the same thing.
There was something incredibly tempting about rotting, and letting the world around you move on without you.
Pete found his mother, dead, the morning of her birthday.
It was six months after the government told her that her husband was dead; six months of not knowing the reasons behind it. Six months of nothingness.
He had woken up at sunrise to turn on his favorite show on the shitty television in the living room. He brought out the flour and eggs, and milk that was about to expire but still worked just fine. He made pancakes.
Pete remembered when his dad would make pancakes, and they would always be too dry. It didn’t matter if he had a recipe book right in front of him, there would always be something off about his cooking. Pete would drench them in syrup and force them into his mouth anyways, just to hear his parents laugh together.
“I knew they were good, look darling!” His father would proclaim. “Pete is eating them right up.”
His mother would laugh and nibble at the piece of pancake stabbed on her fork. “Oh, honey, he’s just making you feel better, right Pete?”
Pete would make the motion of zipping up his mouth before chowing down on another pancake.
That morning, he finished the pancakes and deemed them edible. He cut up half a banana and threw away the rotted other half before putting it all on the plate. Pete even smiled a blissfully ignorant smile: this would cheer his mom up. Maybe she’d even get up for her birthday and they could go somewhere nice and actually look like a mother and her son for the first time in a while.
The door creaked loudly on its hinges when he opened it, and he immediately dropped the plate onto the floor where it shattered. The smell of blood was so sharp and bitter he could almost taste it on his tongue.
His stomach dropped just as he doubled over to his knees to vomit on the floor. It was the second person in a long list that he’d lose, but his heart would never get used to being ripped apart at the very seams.
A decade later, he would recount his mother’s descent into depression to Charlie. The music he now missed, the food she would cook through her tears. He could see in Charlie’s eyes that she understood what had happened without him even saying it.
Good thing, too. He doesn’t think he could have found the words if he tried.
Up until meeting Goose, Pete would have been happy to forget every waking moment of his life thus far. There were good times, sure, but the lows outweighed the brief highs.
Then came the pat on the shoulder, and the tall man beside him saying: “Maverick, right? Thought I’d finally get to know you!”
He was so radiant in the golden light of the setting sun on the carrier they were on. With that sort of backdrop, anyone would look like an angel. But Goose stood out like a tree in the middle of a desert planet.
The road to friendship was swift. They understood each other. Maverick wasn’t sure he had ever laughed so hard in his life before he met Goose. It was like every moment spent with the man was filling the deep void in his chest brick by brick.
“—so my dad, right, he comes up to me after it all went down and goes: did you win, son?”
Mav doubled over with laughter, slapping his knee before taking another swing of his beer. They were sitting in a bar at the base way after midnight, drinking and sharing stories. They had known each other for a few months at this point.
“What about you, Mav?” Goose had looked over at him, sipping his disgustingly sweet drink. “I bet your parents were some interesting people for you to turn out the way you are.” He said it with no venom, like he actually liked the person that Maverick was. Mav almost couldn’t believe it.
“Oh…” Mav trailed off, frowning. He gripped the bottle a little harder and set his jaw. “They’re…they died when I was younger.”
He watched Goose’s mouth fall open and his eyes widen a bit. Maverick immediately felt bad; he didn’t want to make the moment depressing and he certainly didn’t want to make Goose uncomfortable.
“Shit, Mav,” Goose pat his hand that was on the table. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”
Maverick wanted to tell him that it was okay, that it was a long time ago, that he doesn’t think about it anymore. But they’re all lies, and he wouldn’t lie to the best friend he’d ever had, so he doesn’t say any of that. He doesn’t say a word; instead, he gulps down the rest of his beer and tells Goose that it’s about time they get some rest.
They stumble through the night together, leaning onto each other and laughing at bad jokes that are only funny when fueled by alcohol.
The first time Maverick meets Carole, she hugs him tighter that he’s felt in a long time. She smells like vanilla and a touch of cinnamon. After hearing so much about her from Goose—how they fell in love in high school, when Carole wasn’t Carole yet and instead Colin, and how they were inseparable since—she lived up to every expectation and more.
“You must be the Maverick that my Goose is always writing home about!” She grinned up at him, arm still around his shoulders. Goose was holding a young Bradley on his hip; he started to deny that he wrote about Mav, but the words quickly died out with a grin.
“I hope he said some good things,” Maverick said, unable to stop the insecurity blooming in his chest. “Or else I’d have to have a stern talking to with Goose over here.”
“Oh, only the very best things, Mav,” Goose assured him, smiling.
Maverick took a good look at the family they had built. Carole looked at Goose with so much warmth, and Goose looked at her in return like she hung the stars and moon in the sky. And with Bradley between them, one hand in each of his parent’s hands, looking up in awe of two people so deeply in love.
They were so beautiful Mav almost broke down on the spot. He just couldn’t stop the wave of memories that began to suffocate him; his parents were that in love once, so long ago. And in that moment he was so unbelievably happy that Bradley would see that love reflected in his parents for much longer than he had been able to. That he would grow up in a family exuding love.
How deeply, devastatingly wrong he had been.
That day haunts him.
Maverick lacks the ability to articulate how painful the mere memory of that day is, let alone the day itself.
“He loved flying with you, Maverick.”
The words are a sharp knife that plummets into the vast empty space that has opened up in his soul. Watch the canopy. If only he had been better, if only he had flown better, if only he wasn’t the pilot.
If only he had died instead of Goose.
It’s survivor’s guilt, the therapist he finally agrees to visit tells him. It’s common for people that survive traumatic incidents where others don’t. It never truly goes away, she tells him. Good, he thinks. He doesn’t deserve to ever feel okay again. He doesn’t deserve to be alive in the first place.
He can’t see Carole for a long time. It takes almost a year for him to find it in himself to visit her and Bradley. The guilt is a crushing weight on his chest, but Ice tells him it’s important.
”Mav,” he had said. ”You both lost him. You’re both feeling that hurt. Don’t lose her too.”
They were right, of course. Maverick quickly learned that Ice was right about a great deal of things. He was first in their class, after all. There was something slowly unraveling between them (or maybe being knitted together, thread by thread).
He had cried, seeing Carole again. She was radiant as ever. A kind of sadness lingered in her eyes, one that he knew from experience would never truly go away. Grief was something that imbedded itself into every cell of your body, jumping from one dying cell to another forever.
“Oh Mav, it’s so great to see you.” She had smiled with tears streaming down her face, hugging him for what felt like hours. “I wanna know everything.”
He told her about the Navy, about how he had been fired from Top Gun (which she had just laughed at, like it was the most fitting thing she’d ever heard). He had told her about Ice: how they made him feel, how he would stay up some nights thinking about a future between them. How that was what made him realize he was in love—Maverick was never one to imagine a future for himself, instead living every day like it might be his last. Being surrounded by death made him unable to properly engage with life; add that to the list of realizations his brief therapists have made him realize.
Carole had been engaged with every word he spoke, sipping her coffee and smiling like they never stopped talking to each other.
She, in turn, told him about what occupied her life in the year they had both taken to process some of the grief. Carole told him about Bradley’s school and how he had made a good friend that slept over all the time. She told him about her new hobbies that she had thrown herself into, like baking and gardening.
They had gone to the back of the house and pulled weeds in the sun, talking while it lowered in the sky. Bradley got home from school and had jumped up and down when he had seen Mav, immediately starting to sing Great Balls of Fire off-key and beautifully.
And Mav felt whole again that evening, for the first time since that day.
The funeral had been small.
He couldn’t even bring himself to cry. Maverick just stared at the casket; numb. He could feel Ice rubbing their thumb across his knuckles in soothing motions. He could hear Bradley sniffling beside him; his brain yelled at him to try and comfort him. Just a kid. Too young to have no parents. Where had he heard that before?
He thought of his own parents: in love one moment, and dead the next. The blood on the sheets of the bed he found his mother in. The lack of body to be buried in his father’s grave. He couldn’t bring himself to comfort Bradley for one simple reason: he knew what it felt like, and there were no words in any human fucking language to ease the pain. The pain that he would carry for the rest of his life.
The one aspect of Maverick that he never wanted Bradley to reflect now shone on his face at every glance.
“Promise me,” Carole had begged. Her thin body much too young to be wrapped in blankets on the hospital bed. She looked exhausted; a radiant star he had to watch slowly die out. “Promise me you won’t let him fly. I want one—,” she had paused to cough miserably into her elbow. “—I want one of us to not die young, okay?”
Maverick knew he wasn’t just watching one of his best friends be lowered into the ground that funeral. He knew that he was watching Goose die again. He knew that he was watching any love Bradley had for him be lowered in after her. Because he was dead set on following Goose’s footsteps and applying to the academy, and he knew he had a promise to keep. A promise to Goose and Carole alike.
He promised to keep one Bradshaw alive, god dammit, if it was the last thing he did.
It takes Ice a few weeks to delete Bradley’s voice message on their answering machine. He had probably gotten tired of hearing Mav replay it, listening to Bradley’s rough voice saying all those awful things one only says when consumed by anger.
Ice knew about the papers.
Of course they did. They were an admiral. He was the one that even allowed the papers to be pulled. Not for Bradley’s benefit—not in the slightest. He had been against it wholeheartedly, even with the knowledge of Carole and Maverick’s promise.
Arguments upon arguments were had about it until Maverick finally snapped. He had fallen to his knees in physical pain, clenching his hands in his hair and screaming.
”YOU DON’T FUCKING GET IT KAZANSKY,” and Ice had clenched at the usage of their last name. ”I CANNOT WATCH THE LAST BRADSHAW DIE! EVEN IF HE HATES ME FOR THE REST OF HIS FUCKING LIFE…at least it’ll be a long one.”
Iceman had pulled the papers himself. They knew what would happen. They knew Mav would suffer either way, from either having to watch Bradley throw himself into a job that might kill him like it did his father, or from breaking any semblance of relationship he had with the kid. He pulled the papers, and that was that.
You have one new voice message from: Bradley Bradshaw
”You fucking asshole! You had no fucking right to pull my papers! Do you have any fucking idea what this has done to my career! You’ve set me back years, FUCKING YEARS! Did you think this would get me to fucking give up? To not become a naval aviator? All you’ve done is piss me off. Don’t you dare fucking speak to me again, you hear me?! YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME! If only my father had lived instead, you absolute—”
Please press 1 to replay. Press 2 to delete. Press 3 to save message for a later ti—
[1] (Maverick replayed it until he had every word memorized. Until it didn’t even matter that Ice had deleted it. Until it was carved into his ribs.)
The first time Ice had gone to the hospital, Maverick’s heart sunk deep within itself.
No, please, he prayed outside the hospital room. Not them. Please just let me have one person. Please. Not Ice.
Saying it had been a hard process would be an understatement.
But Mav stayed beside Ice the entire time, through every treatment and medication that left them weak and groggy. He would read Ice’s favorite books by the hospital bed, for hours until he passed out on the uncomfortable chairs. He would write down everything the doctors said to him, like every word was a piece of solid gold.
Ice’s voice had slowly gone.
Maverick missed its teasing notes, and its loving cadences. He missed when he would make Ice laugh until his chest hurt and he wheezed; now, a simple chuckle sent them coughing for a few seconds.
But if it kept Ice here with him, sleeping against his chest in the apartment they shared, he would be okay with never hearing him speak again. As long as they were here together, breathing.
They would spend hours practicing sign language with each other; simple phrases at first, to lessen the pressure of having to speak so much day to day. The first sentence Mav learned was I love you.
It’s what he wants Ice to never forget, no matter what.
He gets called back to Top Gun.
Maverick has learned, with the help of therapy and medication and a loving marriage, how to process emotions in a healthy way. Years ago, if he had seen Bradley’s eyes staring back at him from his seat in front of the podium, he would have broken down. But that was years ago, and this was now.
Now, he can look in Rooster’s eyes and not break down at him having Carole’s nose, or the mustache he has obviously grown to resemble Goose’s.
Now, he just focuses on keeping Bradley alive.
It’s time to let go.
The phrase has been a constant in his life, and lord is he tired of hearing it. He knows what Ice is really saying to him. He knows that the cancer is back, and the next time they go to the hospital will almost certainly be the last. He knows that Ice doesn’t just want him to let go of Goose, but also let go of them.
Mav has come to terms with the fact that the void in his chest will never be filled. It opened up a long time ago, and loss continues to simmer in there.
It never gets easier.
Grief never gets easier.
You grow around it, as they say. But Mav doesn’t want to grow. He’s fucking tired of growing. He wants them all back. He wants peace. He wants the pain and hurt to melt away, even though he knows it would feel worse if they did.
He wants more time. Time is his greatest adversary, and he keeps fucking losing.
He feels numb at the funeral.
He goes through the motions of a human being, when inside he feels like the shell of one.
He slams the pin on the box and salutes, as if that motion could ever reflect everything he felt for the person he’s burying today. He takes the flag that Cyclone has folded for him. He doesn’t wipe the tears on his face. He doesn’t look at anybody.
His eyes focus in on the casket where the love of his life lays, peaceful at last, and promises to see them soon. He’d see them all soon. Ice, Goose, Carole, his parents. He’d see them all and apologize for living longer than them all.
He would tell them all that he loved them, and he’d know they loved him too.
He stands there for a long time after the funeral ends and everyone goes home. He doesn’t even notice Rooster until he speaks from beside him, soft and willowy.
“I really miss him.”
Maverick straightens up and looks at the man next to him. He’s the last one. The last one Mav has.
“I miss him too.”
They stand in silence for a while, reminiscing on memories they won’t speak out loud. Rooster gives him a brief hug before he leaves, presumably to meet up with the rest of the team at the Hard Deck for drinks in remembrance. When the stars glitter in the sky, Mav falls to his knees and presses his dry lips onto the cool stone.
“I love you, baby.” He rests his forehead on the tombstone. “Tell them all I say hi, alright? I miss you.”
He closes his eyes before the missile hits his plane with a sickening boom. The last thing he thinks is: finally.
Then he wakes up in the snow. Then Rooster’s plane shoots the chopper. Then he watches Rooster’s plane go down, and thanks every god anyone has ever believed in that the eject button didn’t fail him.
It’s miracle after miracle for him, as if the universe is giving him mercy. It’s the least it could do, after all its taken from Maverick throughout his life.
“Thank you,” Maverick tells the last puzzle piece in his life, the last thing keeping him going, “for saving my life.”
“It’s what my dad would have done!”
He laughs at the adrenaline flowing through his veins and hugs the boy tight.
And in that moment, he’s hugging Goose. He’s hugging Carole. He’s hugging his mom and dad. He’s hugging Ice.
He’s hugging everyone he has lost, through the body of the one thing he had finally found again.
I’ll see you all again soon, he thinks as he lets Rooster go, “but I’ll cherish what I have left until we meet again.”
fin.