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Phoenix was going to kill Bradley Bradshaw.
What kind of moron made another active-duty aviator, let alone the person who was up in air beside them, their emergency contact? For that matter, what kind of idiot made someone their emergency contact without fucking telling them?
Yet, there it was, right there on paper. Primary emergency contact: Natasha Trace.
She was going to ream him out until he crowed in protest like his goddam call sign.
“Lieutenant. We need you to answer the question.” The nurse was looking at her sternly, lined face and purple scrubs pulling Phoenix out of her frustration and back to the matter at hand.
“I don’t know.” Her teeth ground around the words. How the fuck was she supposed to know if Rooster was allergic to penicillin?
The nurse frowned at her, disappointed. The woman bore a striking resemblance to her third-grade teacher. If Phoenix hadn’t been standing there still in her flight suit from her hasty landing, she would have sworn she was back in the halls of her elementary school. The walls were even the same ugly colour of 90s yellow.
“We need to know before we administer antibiotics, Lieutenant. We don’t need another surprise, like with the morphine.”
That was why she was even answering the questions— Rooster had been knocked ass over tea kettle when he’d put the plane down into the ground and then gotten himself knocked out by drugs by not including a morphine sensitivity on his medical forms when he’d submitted them to the Navy.
“That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t know.” Phoenix swallowed the stinging retort on the top of her tongue. It would be downright disrespectful. Besides, this wasn’t the target she wanted to aim it at.
“We need Lieutenant Bradshaw’s paperwork completed ASAP,” another nurse said as she breezed by, this one younger and blonder than Phoenix. She got to move past this damn counter to the hospital room Phoenix wasn’t allowed to enter until she’d filled out the forms on the clipboard she was currently clutching.
The older nurse’s face turned from stern to unimpressed. “You understand the responsibilities of an emergency contact, Lieutenant Trace?”
“I wasn’t even aware I was his emergency contact.” The words sounded clipped, even to Phoenix, so she hastily tacked on, “Ma’am. Please, can I just see him?”
Maybe her desperation bled through, maybe the nurse could see she was barely resisting the urge to chuck the clipboard down the hallway like a frisbee. Either way, she inclined her head and nodded Phoenix through with a forceful whisper that they needed the info sooner, not later.
Closing the door gently behind her, Phoenix scooted the closest chair to the side of the bed and slumped down in it.
It was just supposed to be a training exercise.
In reality, it hadn’t been that bad. A controlled crash from a low altitude and a low speed, one engine blown. Rooster had put the F-18 down in a maneuver so textbook the majority of the plane was salvageable. It might not even have been a problem with a smaller pilot, without Rooster’s long ass legs to get jammed. It shouldn’t have been possible, but the idiot had managed to impale himself on a piece of compromised metal, straight into his thigh. Life threatening, no. Painful and with a high risk of infection, yes.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” Phoenix let the question hang between them. He was pale and so much younger all drugged-up, brow smooth and jaw slack. Rooster usually carried his worries into his sleep, waking up gasping in the middle of the night until she carded a hand through his hair and told him to shut the fuck up and hold her.
“You really wanted to add fuel to that fire, huh?” She accused him lightly, smoothing down the hair trying to escape from her bun. “Making me your emergency contact is not going to convince anybody we aren’t sleeping together.” They were, and had been since that glorious two weeks of overlapping leave after she graduated Top Gun, but it was nobody’s damn business. Hangman could take his betting pool and shove it up his ass.
Phoenix fiddled with the clip holding the paper to the clipboard. Flipping through the pages, several sections were starred for further information. The next of kin section was blank, but Phoenix wasn’t surprised by that. What was a surprise was that the optional secondary emergency contact was also blank. She and Rooster had known each other for a long time now— since they wound up in the same flight school class— and she had no idea when he’d made her his emergency contact, but there had to have been someone before her. Someone had to have loved Bradley before he was Rooster.
It was a touchy subject for him, his past. Phoenix had only gotten the story from him in fits and starts, solving a jigsaw puzzle blind. He was fairly open with her about his mom and dad; the tragedy of his father’s death a healed wound, the grief of his mother’s cancer more raw. He was cagier about his godfather, a man Phoenix didn’t know the name of and whom any accidental mention of could immediately ruin Rooster’s good mood— more than a few stories had ended with a laugh cut off halfway through when Rooster managed to piss himself off with a memory. A few family friends were mentioned in a vague sort of way that made Phoenix sure Rooster, a Navy legacy even if he didn’t act like one, knew people. There had to be someone who had the answers she was looking for.
It hit her then, that she was a goddamn doorknob. There might not be any other contacts listed on the form, but she had one saved in her phone for a situation like this.
Just in case of a real emergency, he’d shrugged and typed the number into her phone as they sat on her couch on a night not long before he’d gone to Top Gun.
How am I supposed to know it’s a real emergency? She’d elbowed him, teasing.
His content smile had turned bashful. I trust you.
That bastard. He attended Top Gun the class before she had, yet she would put money on him designating her as his emergency contact then. Before they’d added anything more to their friendship. Ages ago, an absolute lifetime.
Pulling out her phone, Phoenix scrolled through her contacts. It was close to the top, where Bradley’s name had been before he changed it to Rooster and paired it with the appropriate emoji.
BB’s ICE. Straightforward, so she wouldn’t lose it. Bradley Bradshaw’s In Case of Emergency contact.
Resolute, she pushed the call icon. Her eyes rested on his sleeping face, on the scrapes littered across his chin and cheek, on the harness shaped bruise slowly starting to peek out from under his hospital gown. It wasn’t an emergency, necessarily, but she was desperate. He’d have to trust her.
The phone rang twice before a hoarse voice answered, “Admiral Kazansky.”
Phoenix choked, her prepared words sliding backwards off her tongue and down her throat. If getting caught off guard hadn’t been embarrassing enough, the only thing that came out was an odd squeak.
“Hello?” The man— Admiral fucking Kazansky, unless Phoenix was hallucinating— asked before sharply adding, “Who is this and how did you get this number?”
The implied command was enough to prod Phoenix back into action. “Lieutenant Trace, sir. Natasha Trace. Um, I’m calling about Roost-Bradley. Bradshaw. He gave me your number but I didn’t realize who, um yeah. Sir.”
Rarely was Phoenix reduced to feeling like a fool but here she was tripping over her words while addressing a higher up. Not just any higher up, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet. A living legend.
It had never occurred to her when Rooster saved the contact that ICE was anything but the acronym (they were Navy, after all). It had never occurred to her that it was a name, a nickname of a nickname. A callsign.
ICE. Ice. Iceman. The fucking Iceman.
In the time it took Phoenix to process this bizarre turn of events, Admiral Kazansky shifted from sounding suspicious to concerned. “What’s happened to Bradley?”
“Training accident, sir.” At his shocked sniff, Phoenix rushed into her next words. “He’s going to be fine, sir, really. Doesn’t even have a concussion. But there was some damage to the plane and he was impaled in the thigh by some compromised metal on the control panel.”
“How bad is it?” The Admiral’s voice is low and strained. Worried. Phoenix knew the feeling.
“It missed the femoral artery, sir,” Phoenix relayed the sentiment that had soothed her the most. “Some deep muscle tissue damage and they’re concerned about tetanus and infection, but he’s had surgery and isn’t in any immediate danger.”
“I see.”
It was a loaded statement, layered, and Phoenix wasn’t really sure how to handle it. But she hadn’t graduated number one of her Top Gun class by shying away from uncertainty and ignoring her instincts.
“May I be frank, sir?”
“Speak freely, Lieutenant.”
If Phoenix wasn’t mistaken, there was a touch of amusement in the Admiral’s blunt voice.
“Bradley is very important to me but he’s an idiot who made me his emergency contact without telling me.” Frustration seeped back into her words. “His paperwork is spotty and he forgot to include a morphine allergy and now I’m being asked about a penicillin allergy I don’t have a damn clue about because the doctors are panicking about what else he forgot, and I get to fill out this garbage while he takes a medicated nap and I don’t know the answers and- and it’s just been a very long day, sir.”
The heart-stopping moments of the crash, Phoenix watching helplessly while her back-seater relayed Rooster’s declining altitude to him. The static in her brain as she reflexively followed the landing order. Mindlessly going through her post-flight routine until she got the call to go to the base hospital. Helplessness a tidal wave crashing over her once and tossing her around over and over and over.
“I need your help, sir.”
There was a pause and then-
“Unfortunately, Lieutenant, I don’t have the relevant information.”
Phoenix’s last hope fell, the final domino in the disaster the day had been.
The Admiral sighed deeply. “I’m going to make a call and then I’m going to send you a number. Bradley’s godfather should be able to answer any questions you have.”
The line went quiet for long enough that Phoenix was ready to thank him and hang the fuck up, when he spoke again.
“Lieutenant Trace, if you have this number then I’m assuming you’re close enough with Bradley to know things between him and his godfather are fraught?”
“That’s putting it mildly,” Phoenix muttered before she could stop herself. To her surprise, Admiral Kazansky chuckled.
“Bradley’s blind stubbornness is a learned trait, I’m afraid. It may be best for you to keep your conversation with his godfather between the two of you.”
It was disclosed in a way Phoenix imagined was similar to state secrets.
“Copy that, sir.”
“Good. Thank you for calling, Lieutenant, but these are private numbers. I expect them to remain as such.”
An actual state secret then.
“I understand, Admiral.”
“Goodbye, Lieutenant Trace.”
Admiral Kazansky hung up without waiting for a reply. Phoenix dropped her phone onto the clipboard and buried her face in her hands. She wasn’t sure what the fuck just happened, but she did have the nagging feeling her OMPF was about to be subjected to some high-level scrutiny.
Scrubbing at her eyes, Phoenix glared accusingly at Rooster’s peaceful face. “I knew you knew people, you asshole. But seriously? Iceman?”
He didn't respond, obviously, but Phoenix still scoffed at him. He was in for it when he woke up.
After a long enough time for one of the nurses to peek disapprovingly through the window, vibrations signaled the arrival of a text from Admiral Kazansky. A string of numbers followed with a single sentence: He’s expecting your call.
Before she could overthink it, Phoenix dialed. This time, the phone was picked up on the first ring.
“Captain Mitchell.”
The first thing to hit Phoenix was the sheer amount of anxiety in the man’s voice. The second was that, of course, Rooster’s godfather was active military too.
“Sir. It’s Lieutenant Trace. Admiral Kazansky gave me your number?” Phoenix couldn’t help the rise at the end of her sentence.
“Bradley’s okay?” He asked, breathless.
“He’s going to be fine,” she assured him as best she could. “Surgery to remove the impaled object went well, they’re pumping him full of fluids and he’s knocked out from the morphine.”
“They gave him a full dose of morphine? Did no one read his tags?”
It’s the incredulous tone in his voice that set Phoenix off. “Rooster didn’t write down any allergies when he signed up because he lives to get in his own goddamn way!”
Captain Mitchell sighed just like Admiral Kazansky, exasperated if a little fonder. “Tell me everything.”
It spilled out of her, everything in too much detail because Phoenix was nothing if not thorough. A full explanation of the training accident, the situation with his records and finding out about her field promotion to emergency contact, the problems she’s facing in trying to organize Rooster’s care while he’s unconscious.
“… and I just need to know if he’s allergic to penicillin.”
Captain Mitchell went quiet, no more of the encouraging hums he gave while she talked at him.
“I’m sorry Lieutenant, I don’t know if he’s allergic,” he said. Phoenix was actually ready to throw in the towel, to give up and beg the doctors to just fuck around and find out. However, he’s not finished. “We never risked it because his mother was allergic. I have the names of the other antibiotics he’s been given, if that helps?”
The sigh that she let out is a little too wet to not be mistaken for the sob it was but Phoenix does not give a single flying fuck if this man hears her cry, that’s how palpable her relief is. “Please.”
He gave her the names of two antibiotics and what they were used for— how he remembered, off the top of his head, the medical name for a drug given to Bradley when he was eight for a stubborn ear infection is a goddamn mystery to her— and Phoenix dutifully wrote it down in the medical history section to relay to the nearest nurse.
“Thank you, so much, Captain Mitchell. I need to go let the doctors know, but really, thank you.”
“Of course, Lieutenant. Anything for Bradley.” From the way Captain Mitchell stated it, Phoenix knew it was a fact. She was about to say goodbye when he spoke again, voice hesitant for the first time on the call. “It sounds like there’s a lot missing. I could help with that, might know a few things Bradley doesn’t. If you like?”
Phoenix doesn’t consider the offer long enough to seriously think she’ll ignore this help, even if Rooster will be pissed if he finds out. “God yes, please. Just give me a minute to tell them about the meds.”
“I’ve got time.”
She’s gone only long enough to name-drop the drugs on the younger-blonder nurse before reclaiming her chair beside Rooster’s bed. Captain Mitchell is still waiting politely on the other end of the line as Phoenix sorted out the clipboard and pinned the phone between her shoulder and ear.
“Sorry about that, Captain Mitchell. And for, um, piling all that on you. It’s been … overwhelming.” Phoenix doesn’t know why she’s decided to confide in this man but there’s something comfortable about sharing Rooster with another person. Something that makes her think he won’t doubt her capabilities just because she was a bit frazzled over the life of her friend.
“Nothing hits like watching a fellow aviator go down. You never get used to it,” he said, somber. And then, “No need for formalities, Lieutenant, Maverick is fine.”
For the second time in an hour, Phoenix was speechless. Dumbstruck because Rooster’s godfather is Maverick— equal parts warning story and urban legend at Top Gun. As close to a modern Icarus as Naval Aviation has ever seen.
Maybe that was the reason Rooster never flew too close to the sun.
“Phoenix,” she managed to utter. This time, at least, she didn’t squeak. But, fuck, she lost her cool and cried a little on the phone to Maverick.
“Phoenix.” He said her name appraisingly, and she is once again faced with the nagging feeling that her OMPF is about to be requested. “What did Bradley put down for allergies, minus the morphine sensitivity?”
Double checking the sheet, Phoenix rolled her eyes. Her scorn bled into her voice. “Not a damn thing. And I know he’s allergic to strawberries; his tongue swells up.”
That had been an interesting Valentine’s Day.
“Does the same thing from poppy seeds, too,” added Maverick. That made sense. She never would’ve known about that one since they couldn’t eat them— poppy seeds messed with the results of mandatory drug tests.
“So strawberries, poppy seeds, and morphine sensitivity. I don’t know any others?” Phoenix left the statement hanging for Maverick.
“Those are what I know,” Maverick confirmed. “Let’s get the big ones done. Family history?”
Phoenix doesn’t have to check to know this one is blank except for a note with his father’s name and serial number, and what she thinks might be a Navy archive file number. “Better start from scratch.”
They spent the better part of an hour completing the paperwork, Phoenix recording the seemingly endless information Maverick is only too happy to supply. She wondered, as several facts turned into anecdotes about Bradley she’s never heard, when the last time Maverick got to embarrass his godson to his friends.
When they’re ready to hang up, Maverick’s voice went hesitant once again. “Could you keep me updated on Bradley’s condition? Until he’s discharged?”
“Sure,” Phoenix agreed more easily than she should. She’s going to have to delete her call history so Rooster doesn’t see. “If you can keep Admiral Kazansky in the loop? I don’t think I made the best impression when I cold-called him.”
Maverick laughed at her accidental pun, the sound rich but a little rusty. “You made quite the impression.”
Phoenix groaned before she could help it, switching the phone to her other ear and stretching out her neck.
Maverick laughed again. “A good one, I promise. It takes gumption to ask Ice for help. He’s— we’re happy to know Bradley has found you for a friend.”
She heard it, the waver on the word friend and the implied question of girlfriend? and ignored it. There is no way she’s disclosing her situationship status with Rooster to Maverick. Let him and the Admiral have something to gossip about.
“Thank you for everything, Maverick,” she said instead. Maverick recognized a dismissal when he heard one.
“Take care, Phoenix. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Yes, sir.” She did promise to keep him updated.
There was a smile in his voice as he said goodbye and hung up. Phoenix saved his number to her contacts under the innocuous name BBM before she tossed her phone onto the bed near Rooster’s knees. She felt settled for the first time since Rooster’s engine gave out.
“That man loves you,” she declared to Rooster as she slouched down in her uncomfortable chair. He’s lucky this conversation is a secret she’s willing to keep, or she would be waking him up to interrogate him on what the fuck him and his godfather Maverick had a falling out about for the older man to be this desperate for any morsel of Rooster’s life.
“Don’t think I’m going to let this go.” Kicking off her boots, Phoenix stretched her legs onto the bed and crossed her ankles somewhere near her phone. She knocked the pen against the clipboard, internally debating a terrible idea. “I’ll wait, but I won’t forget.”
She tried out the tang of traitor on her tongue and found she didn’t mind the taste.
Phoenix flipped to the blank space under Next of Kin and wrote in Maverick’s name and number. If Rooster didn’t like it, he could fill out his own fucking forms and find a new emergency contact.