Chapter Text
1.
There was no pain. That was the first thing that was wrong.
In fact, it was quite the opposite, Maverick found himself very much comfortable. He was aware that he was leaning back against something solid, his legs extended out in front of him. His hands were folded across his lap and his head was canted back as though he was enjoying the warmth on his face. He was enjoying it, he realised distantly.
He felt whole and the strangeness of it was jarring, making his mind move sluggishly. There was no burn and slick, no creeping numbness and he couldn’t feel his pulse in his side. He couldn’t feel his pulse at all.
It wasn’t right, it was wrong all of it. There had been ringing, tone, there had been-
“Hey, kiddo, are you with me?”
Maverick opened his eyes and found that he could see. He blinked in the sudden light as his surroundings came into focus. Quite literally came into focus, as though his surroundings were resolving into themselves as he looked, deciding to form a lawn, flowerbeds, the tree trunk that he had been leant against. The sun was blinding overhead, high noon. In the distance, hazy and indistinct, he could make out a house. It looked vague, like a half formed memory, but it was familiar.
Just like the man crouched in front of him.
“Dad?” He croaked.
Duke Mitchell grinned and held out his hand. Maverick took it by instinct and found himself being levered to his feet and immediately pulled into a crushing hug. He’d barely gathered himself enough to return it when he was pushed back and held at arms length.
“My god, look at you,” His father said, eyes raking over him. “Look at what a man you’ve become.”
His father was looking at him, his father. It couldn’t be right, it most certainly couldn’t be true and yet Maverick knew the face before him. First from his own nebulous early memories, and then from the photos that his mother, and later he himself, had kept a hold of. He could even recognise some of his features from the mirror. None of it compared to having the man in front of him. His memories of his father were more impressions and the photos had been static. Neither of them could do the man in front of him justice.
Duke Mitchell was a tall man, taller than Maverick, for the little that that was worth. He had dark hair, a moustache and a smile which quirked higher on the left than the right.
“I’m dead,” Maverick said out loud for the first time. His father’s smile dimmed to something rueful and he nodded.
“‘Fraid so, Pete. Or do you go by Maverick these days?”
Maverick shook his head, unable to accept such an enormous truth. “I can’t be dead, I was just…I was just with-”
Oh god, there had been tone. There had been tone, the back of Bradley’s head, the desperation in his voice and, Jesus Christ, there had been tone.
His father’s hand squeezed his shoulder. “Pete, listen to me. I know it’s a shock but-”
“I failed him,” Maverick said blankly. “I was meant to get him home.”
“That’s all behind you now,” his father said firmly. “This is what comes next. Do you know where we are?”
The question pulled him out of his own spiralling thoughts. “We’re…” he began before looking around, “wait a minute. Are we at home?”
The more he focused the more certain he became. He hadn’t thought of the place in years, his mother had moved them way when he was six and he’d barely ever thought to look back. But he recognised it now, the garden with its neat flowerbeds and winding path, the house with the white screen door and a window that he knew looked right through into the kitchen.
“It is,” his father agreed, “and this right here, this is where we said goodbye for the last time.”
His tone was so matter of fact that for a moment Maverick didn’t understand. “Really?” He asked.
His father smiled and looked back up the garden to the house. The sun was lowering in the sky. After a moment he sat where Maverick himself had been only a moment before. Slowly, Maverick sat beside him.
“Yeah, it was. I don’t expect you remember. You were still just so small. But I had my orders come through and I thought you might be getting to the age where you could understand those sorts of things. So I picked you up and brought you down here. I explained it the best I could but I don’t know how much you understood.” His father huffed a laugh and looked at him, “And that was it. Right up until now.”
“Until now,” Maverick echoed. He looked at his father again, that face that was so familiar and so alien all at once. Duke Mitchell had died a young man just entering his thirties. He had a few lines creasing the corners of his eyes, looked a little weather beaten around the edges. Maverick had passed his fifty-eighth birthday a month before being recalled to Top Gun.
He gathered himself and tried to look like he wasn’t staring. “Is this what happens then? Is this what’s…next?” The question felt too big, too all encompassing, but he had to ask it. He barely knew what he hoped would be the answer.
His father shrugged. “Kind of.”
“Kind of?” He asked, incredulity winning out over numbing despair, “Is that the best you’ve got?"
To his relief his father laughed. “I don’t have all the answers, kiddo, not even close. You’re going to have to find those for yourself. But this much I can tell you: I can tell you how it works.”
“It?”
“Death.”
“Oh,” he said and without thought his hand was once more pressed to his side. He was still wearing his flight suit, exactly as he remembered it, he realised, but there was no tear, no blood. His hand smoothed over his side, and over the fabric as if nothing had been there at all. Curious, he pressed his fingers to his jugular. Nothing. “Okay,” he said to himself and then to his father, “okay, tell me how death works.”
“You’re going to meet five people, Pete. Five people who, whether you know it or not, have shaped your life into what it is— was. For better or for worse.”
If his heart still worked it would have been in his throat, it would have pounded through his chest. There were so many people, so many possibilities.
“And I’ll be able to…talk to them?” He asked. Talk, beg, grovel, plead on bended knee.
His father nodded. “You will.”
“Why?”
“You wanted to answers, kid. This is how you get them. Answers about your whole life.”
There were some things he didn’t want answered, some questions he was too cowardly to ask. “And then what?”
His father smiled at him and for the first time in years the sight of that smile put a lump in Maverick’s throat. “You always were the most impatient kid,” he said with a laugh. “And then you go on, Pete.”
He wanted to press for more but he restrained himself. From the way his father jostled his shoulder with a grin, he knew anyway.
“And you’re the first person?” He asked.
“I’m your first person,” his father agreed.
Maverick didn’t know where to start. His father hadn’t shaped him in the usual way that he had seen fathers shape their sons, but his absence had moulded the very clay of his life. So many of his early years had been spent first trying to fill the void of his father’s absence and then trying to live up to it. He’d thought about it when he was a kid, what he’d say to his dad if he could have seen him just one more time. The game had lost its appeal as he grew older and people began to forget to lower their voices when they talked about Duke Mitchell. Still, sometimes he’d wonder.
Except he couldn’t think of a damn thing now with the man stood in front of him.
“I don’t know how much you see up here but…I hope…”, he started haltingly, before sighing, “I hope I made you proud. That was what I was trying to do.”
The sun was beginning to cast long shadows and Maverick found it easier to watch the lengthening shadow of the old oak tree that they were sat against rather than his father’s expression. He wanted to scrub a hand across his own face. He was almost sixty, for fuck’s sake. It should have been easier than this.
He almost jumped when he felt his father’s hand take his.
“Pete,” His father said, looking at him intently, “you made me proud every day of your life and then some. You made it further than I ever did. A captain! Look at you, look at everything you’ve done, and all by yourself.”
Once more it was hard to speak. “I wasn’t always by myself,” he managed.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there, son. I’m sorry I left, sorry I died and sorry for all the trouble it caused you. I don’t think we’re meant to have regrets up here but if I could do it all again we’d have never left this garden. I know it wasn’t easy for you.”
It seemed so long ago now that his career had been defined by his father’s name, by men who had known his father and thought they’d known what he’d done. He’d reached a point in his own naval career where people dreaded having to deal with him in his own right but it was surprisingly easy to recall all of the hushed conversations he wasn’t supposed to have heard, the doors that were closed in his face, sometimes literally.
“Viper told me what happened,” he said instead of trying to find the words to express that particularly tangled nest of emotion. “I know you didn’t…”
His father smiled again. “I always liked Mike.” He said, “But that wasn’t what I meant. I don’t just mean I’m sorry that people would see you and hear my name. I’m sorry I died, Pete, and I’m sorry your mother didn’t carry on like she should have afterwards.”
“She tried, I think and…you don’t have to be sorry for that. Got me where I needed to be in the end.” It sounded trite aloud, like a platitude and a brush off wrapped up in a single sentence, but he was surprised to find he actually meant it. Whether it was age, death or perspective those early years seemed much further away than they had the last time he had properly taken the time to think about them. The sting of righteous indignation had bled away, the bitterness faded, and the incessant need to push had ceased. Overhead, the sun began to set. “Is that our time up?” He asked as the sky began to bleed orange. He watched it, mesmerised. It looked like a watercolour, colours seeping together, fast enough that he could track the change from daylight to gathering dusk.
He turned to look at his father fully.
“It can be,” his father said. “You’ve got people waiting on you. Just one more thing.”
“Yeah, dad?”
“You don’t need to make me proud, Pete. You don’t need to compare yourself to me. You outgrew me years ago.”
He didn’t want to cry in front of his father, not after all this time. Not when his father was sitting across from his, half his age, still with a hand on his arm. Maverick sniffed, cleared his throat and tried to focus. The stars overhead were beginning to appear in the night sky, stars he didn’t recognise, but stars nonetheless.
“I don’t think sons ever outgrow their fathers,” he said eventually. He darted a glance at him. “Not really.”
“Maybe not,” his father allowed, “And although I don’t know how much it means to you now, just know that I’m real proud of you.”
Maverick startled when he felt a calloused hand against his cheek, turning his face until their eyes met.
“My son,” his father said fondly.
“My dad,” he said thickly in return.
For a moment, it felt like he would never be able to move away from this one spot, never be able to walk away but something had shifted within him, an insistent tug pulling him forward.
“I think…I think I have to go now,” he said and, before he could think better of it, pushed himself to stand.
His father smiled up at him and propped one of his knees up. “I think I’ll stay here a little while longer. I’ll see you around, kiddo.”
Maverick had had enough goodbyes to last him a lifetime and he didn’t have it in him for another. He turned and left his father sitting beneath the shadow of that great tree and he didn’t turn back to see if he faded along with the garden as he passed through it. He followed the garden path, passed the turned soil of the empty flower beds and continued up towards the house. The lights seem to gather in the windows as he approached, the structure becoming more complete as he drew close. He didn’t know why he had chosen this direction apart from the fact it was the only path he had seen, but he knew he was getting closer to whatever came next. He felt it in his chest. He reached the house and laid his palm flat against the door frame for a moment.
He took a breath, released it and pushed the door open.