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It starts with his bike’s engine chugging this side of two loud when he turns the key in the ignition, but the beer he’d had is warm in his belly and the music of the bar is still ringing in his ears, blocking out all other sounds that threaten to rear their heads and ruin the night, so he ignores it.
It ends with the bike spluttering out a loud, stuttering, choking gasp in the middle of the road, with only the too-bright lights of the street lamps and the cookie cutter off-base houses for company.
Maverick falls forward until his forehead presses the speedometer and stares down at the dial through the dust-covered glass (he’s been meaning to give his lady a clean, but time’s the number one thing he’s been lacking in Miramar).
“Come on, sweetheart,” he whispers, ignoring the hoarseness of his own voice, as he presses down on the ignition, his breath clouding the glass even more, though not enough to hide the fact that the dial stays firmly at zero.
There’s not even a sound from the engine this time.
Within an instant, the high he’d been riding dips, and he can feel the spiral towards rock bottom. He swallows, the lingering aftertaste of beer at the back of his throat turning sour, and places both feet firmly on the tarmac. A moment passes, only disturbed by the distant rumble of cars traversing the road that runs behind the houses, and the occasional caw of a seagull overhead, before he lets out a gust of breath. Then, he swings his right leg up and over the seat of the bike so that he’s standing upright.
There’s no choice for it - he’s walking.
Rolling his head back, he blinks up at the inky black sky. It’s a nice night for a walk at least, quiet - even for a Friday, he thinks as he starts wheeling the bike alongside him. It’s balmy out and the smell of the sea over the horizon is carried by the light breeze. It’s the sort of night that Goose would say was perfect for wooing a lady (Carole, specifically). Next week, the newest TOP GUN recruits will start piling in, but for now, there’s something almost peaceful about Miramar that Maverick hasn’t had much of a chance to appreciate, too busy with endless reams of paperwork and meetings and the odd chance to go on a hop.
This strange, late night tranquility doesn’t do much to fix his ride, but he figures it could be worse.
Every house that he passes, each one occupied by another lieutenant or captain or maybe someone higher up, stuck at Miramar for reasons he’s been told are classified, is eerily alike in that military way. Not one blade of grass is out of place, the paint on the walls is the same pigment, and he thinks he’d get a haemorrhage if he tried searching for a sign of personality.
More than once, Maverick has thought of doing something different with his own, even as simple as getting some tacky lawn decorations from the local hardware store to make it stand out amongst the plain crowd. The idea of doing that, of making a change to the house that marks it as his (so long as the Navy allows), makes his skin itch in a way he doesn’t like all that much, however. And it’s not like he’s got all that much free time in the first place to go shopping for cheap garden decor.
He wheels his bike by the next house, a touch more familiar simply by its owner, and notes that Ice (he’s not sure when he dropped the -man suffix in his brain) hasn’t done anything with his place either. Though, that’s hardly surprising; the guy probably gets off to military procedure and correctness. It’s something that, even in spite of the few weeks they’ve spent together at TOP GUN, both as students and now instructors, Maverick’s still struggling to wrap his head around.
That doesn’t stop him from slowing down a step, delaying how long it takes for him to put one foot in front of the other, as he passes by Ice’s lawn, to give himself enough time to search for a sign of individuality.
Just in case.
Because Ice had called him his wingman, and Maverick had called Ice his wingman and that counts for something he thinks.
It’s pointless, there’s nothing beyond the simple fact that Maverick knows this house belongs to Ice to give away anything about its occupant, not a plant or piece of lawn decor - hell, even the car parked neatly outside lacks any bumper stickers or figurines on the dash that could give something away. And that leaves him feeling strangely hollow. He tears his eyes away from the front door, from the light that slips out from between the mostly shut blinds, and forces them to the black tarmac beneath his feet. The road is still warm from the day’s sunshine, and it radiates through the soles of his shoes.
He wipes his clammy hands on the bike’s handles.
“Get a hold of yourself, Mav,” he whispers, unsure why he even needs to, but he does it all the same because it’s ten to midnight and he’s standing at the cusp of Ice’s lawn staring at his front door as though it might give him an answer he suddenly, desperately craves.
He misses the click of the door opening and closing.
“Maverick, what the fuck are you doing?”
Maverick jumps, nearly out of his skin. Ice stands halfway out the front door, dressed in sweats and a tee, with an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. The gel has been brushed from his hair, leaving a few strands falling over his forehead and the rest soft. As he steps out fully from the doorway, his skin somehow manages to still look golden, even under the stark light of the streetlamps.
Maverick notices all of this, then he notices that he noticed all of this, and he chokes on the reply that worms its way up his throat.
He coughs a couple of times.
“Bike broke down,” he spits out after too long a moment. He recovers by tapping the side of the front wheel with his boot. “I gotta wheel it home.”
Ice’s brow furrows and his lips purse around the cigarette as he walks out, bare foot, over the concrete path that leads from the door to the road. He twists and twirls a silver lighter between his fingers, the glint of it visible as it passes between each digit.
He’s not wearing his ring, that shiny, gaudy thing, and it makes his hands look naked without it.
He comes to a stop a foot or so away from Maverick, and gives him a once over, before turning his head back in the general direction of the bar - far in the distance and little more than a glow on the horizon. Maverick twists over his shoulder, following Ice’s line of sight, wondering if there’s something he sees there, or on him, that Maverick doesn’t.
“And you couldn’t have just left it there? Collected it in the morning?” Ice asks, like it’s the simplest solution in the world and Maverick’s an idiot for not thinking of that idea first. “‘Cause there are such things as cabs, you know.”
He keeps the cigarette balanced on his bottom lip, and it bounces in a near hypnotic motion with every word he speaks.
Maverick takes a deep breath through his knows in an effort to flatten down the hackles that Ice seems to know better than anyone how to raise. “It didn’t happen at the bar, and I’m not leaving it in the middle of the damned street.”
The warmth of the booze is wearing off too quickly, and leaving him with that feeling he’d been trying to ignore at the bar in the first place.
“So now you’ve gotta walk it home - you’re such a gentleman. Though at this rate, you’ll miss curfew.” Despite himself, Maverick can’t help but guffaw at the shitty joke. “Seriously, though, we’ve gotta be up at 06:00, so you might want to pick up the pace.”
And just like that, the hackles are raised again. “Says you. What the fuck are you doing up?”
Ice gestures to the cigarette in his mouth. “This.”
“Right and are you gonna smoke that, or do you just like the feel of it?”
Maverick’s not entirely sure what he means by the insult, the words spitting out from his mouth before his brain has fully gotten a chance to formulate, but he feels his cheeks flame red hot and one of Ice’s eyebrows arches in a way that makes his disapproval perfectly clear.
(He thinks he sees a flush on his cheeks all the same, but it’s always hard to tell.)
With a sigh, one that’s more like a huff, Ice twists his attention to the opposite side of the street, where, somewhere in the hazy distance, Maverick’s assigned housing unit is. Then, he turns his wrist and glances down to the face of his watch. Finally, with another sigh, he looks back to Maverick, who’s still wondering why his feet remain firmly planted to the road.
A gentle, warm breeze kisses Maverick's skin, just then, smelling of the sea, warm asphalt, and, maybe he’s imagining it, the burning scent of jet fuel.
It ruffles Ice’s hair, brushing it further out of place.
“Come inside.You’ll be all night walking back to your place,” Ice says - orders, really - and something flickers across his face as he speaks, like he might be as caught off by the words as Maverick is. “Come on,” he repeats, as if to defeat that notion. “You can leave your bike in the garage.”
Without looking over his shoulder to check if he’s being followed, Ice turns on his heel and heads towards the garage, its white-washed paint faded from the sunlight enough that the bare sheet metal is starting to peer through.
Ice is hauling the door up, the workings of his muscles visible even through his tee, by the time Maverick snaps back to reality and starts wordlessly steering his bike down the length of Ice’s drive. He ducks beneath Ice’s raised arm as he holds the door open, muttering his thanks as he does so, and stops in the centre of the garage, which is neatly empty, before kicking out the stand and letting the bike rest.
Maverick savors a moment to take in the garage - it’s mostly empty with Ice’s car parked out front, but there’s a few boxes, and a Navy-issued tool box that matches the one Maverick had thrown beneath his sink.
The sound of the garage door sliding shut draws him back as Ice closes the door behind him, plunging them into a momentary dark. It’s warmer in here than it was outside, but Maverick’s not sure if he’s just imagining that or not.
“It’s just through here,” Ice says as he steps closer to, then around, him, to the door that leads into the house’s exterior (in the exact same place as it is in Maverick’s).
“Yeah,” Maverick replies, because his mind is still trying to catch up with the fact that it’s midnight now, and Ice has invited him into his house - apparently to stay the night. “Thanks.”
The light inside is orange and warm, coming from the overhead light that dangles over the kitchen table. It’s enough of a shocking contrast to the streetlights outside that Maverick needs to blink in it, and it only serves to make Ice look even more golden - and help Maverick really appreciate how he looks with the frosted tips not pointing sky-high for once.
He looks good, like always - too good for him to go for what should be an easy joke, but he bites the inside of his cheek to keep from saying anything all the same.
So instead he says, “nice place,” and makes no secret of how he noses around what he can see of the house from the kitchen.
Just like the outside, the interior is Naval perfection, nothing out of place with the off-white linoleum tiles along the floor, matching the off-white paint on the walls. There’s the odd photo - generic, of the sea or a city - dotted around the place, but other than that, he can’t see anything that gives away a hint that Ice is the one who lives here. It shouldn’t be surprising, and it certainly shouldn’t make him feel anything, but it is and it does.
In the next room over, a cool light, nearly blue, flashes intermittently from what must be the television set, interrupting the monotony of the place, and raising more questions at the back of Maverick’s mind.
Maybe he is intruding on something, for all that Ice invited him in.
“Yeah? The Navy decorated it for me - they really understand how to make it homely,” Ice replies, throwing his unsmoked cigarette on top of a half-empty pack that rests next to the sink, and placing the lighter more carefully on the countertop beside it.
Maverick follows the movement, tracing a path from the crumpled carton of Marlboros to the empty pizza box on the opposite side of the sink, filled with crumbs, tissues and plastic cutlery. It feels, stupidly, embarrassingly, like a revelation, because the idea that Ice of all people would leave empty food cartons lying around the kitchen clashes so strongly with his perception of the guy he gets at TOP GUN that it feels like he’s been let in on some secret, not just invited into his temporary Navy-assigned housing.
In fact, so do the Marlboros.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” he blurts out, not even getting the chance to think if it would be polite (from Ice’s perspective, he thinks most other people wouldn’t care) to ask.
Ice shrugs with one shoulder, tapping his hand on the countertop in an uneven rhythm before turning to face Maverick, and slouching against the countertop - a first for him. “I shouldn’t - I’m trying to quit but…you know.” He punctuates the statement with an eyeroll.
Maverick doesn’t know, not really, because for all the nasty habits and vices he’s picked up along the way, smoking somehow isn’t one of them. He nods along regardless.
“Yeah, I think so.” There’s probably plenty of things he does that he should quit, even if cigarettes don’t count among them. He remembers countless nights out, though, at the O-bar or on the deck of the Layton after the rescue when the alcohol that shouldn’t have been there but was, appeared, and he’d never once caught Ice smoking. Not that he was ever looking. “If you manage most of the time, what’s different tonight?”
He’s hedging his bets, pushing at the envelope of their friendship (can it be called that?) asking the question, he knows it just by the way Ice’s posture turns ramrod straight, and how he purses his lips together. But, for all Ice’s questioning about what the fuck Maverick was doing up, Ice had been awake too.
“Just…couldn’t sleep,” Ice says, his teeth nearly clacking as he speaks. He taps his fingers against the counter in a beat that Maverick almost recognises, speeding up the rhythm from before. Then, he tilts his head to the side, just slightly, and stares at Maverick like he’s something to study. “Were you really going to just walk all the way back to your house?”
The sudden turn-around catches him off-guard. “It’s not that far of a walk.”
“It’s far enough.”
Maverick throws his arms out, letting them quickly fall back against his sides. “What else was I meant to do? Go back to the bar and call someone?”
He watches as Ice works his jaw, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth as he fixes his gaze on the tiles at his feet, before shrugging. “You know where I live.”
That makes Maverick’s brain trip and stumble to a halt.
Since that moment on the Layton, it’s the closest thing to an admission that they’re friends and something clicks into place - being invited inside, Ice entertaining his questions, even revealing the fact that he’s struggling to drop smoking, even though he knows he should.
(With the way Ice looks now, soft in the late night, it’s hard to keep his thoughts solely friendly, but he pushes those ones down.)
So, Maverick nods. “Yeah, I do. I’ll give you a shout next time.”
There’s a beat, where they stand in the soft light of the kitchen looking at each other, and Maverick’s not sure how best to move forward, but, like always, he’s realising, Ice has him covered.
“Next time?” Ice’s voice is incredulous and he pushes himself off the counter, crossing the gap so that there’s suddenly only a miniscule amount of space between them. There’s that look, goading and happy, on his face that Maverick’s coming to recognise as well as the back of his hand. “If this is gonna become a routine, Mitchell, you should start taking better care of your ride.”
“I do! She just gets temperamental sometimes, you know how it is.”
“Jesus,” Ice scoffs, shaking his head even though there’s a glint in his eyes that tells Maverick, with a certainty that should be shocking, that he finds it funny. Then, Ice steps away, just barely, and claps him on the shoulder. “You want coffee?”
Maverick blinks, watching as Ice takes another step back and heads towards one of the cabinets, already pulling out a small jar. “Isn’t it a bit late for that?”
Ice throws him a disparaging look over his shoulder and it should be more insulting, but the way his hair flops over his face at the movement ruins it. “Do they not have decaf where you’re from?”
He makes sure to roll his eyes enough that Ice will pick up on it.
“Yeah I’ll have a cup if you’re making some.”
While he waits, he props himself up against the counter, taking up the same position Ice had held moments prior. They don’t talk, and neither of them seem that desperate to fill the late night silence that’s fallen over them, so he takes the chance to admire Ice as he moves around the kitchen, watching as he turns the knob on the stove several times before the flame clicks to life, watches him go through the motions of filling the glass coffee pot and boiling it until the smell of coffee fills the air, filtering out all else. That done, Ice reaches towards a different cabinet to take out two mugs, both different colors. Maverick can’t help but wonder if Ice picked them out despite their not matching (unlikely), or if they were something taken from home, wherever that happened to be.
“Hey, Ice,” he says, as that thought suddenly grabs a hold of him and refuses to let go, “where are you from anyway?”
Because for all that he’s pretty certain he could recognize Ice out of a fleet of planes, high in the sky, he’s not actually all that certain where the guy’s from; what he did before all of this.
And if he gets some satisfaction out of the way Ice seems to nearly startle at the sudden question, who’s to know.
Ice throws him a look, one that’s all furrowed brow and pursed lips, over his shoulder before he answers. “Pasadena. You?”
“New York.”
“Do you take sugar or cream?”
“Yeah, I do.” It’s a simple question, not even a funny one, but he feels the corners of his lips quirk upwards of their own volition anyway as he watches Ice make the coffee to his preference.
It’s complete with a huffed, “‘course you do,” but he decides to ignore that.
Coffee made, Maverick follows Ice unquestioningly - a habit he’s suddenly taken a shine to - when he jerks his head towards the living room, where the tv still flickers and flashes as late-night news reels play silently.
The room is on the opposite side of the house to where it is in Maverick’s, a perfect mirror. Other than that difference, though, it’s decorated with the same plain, utilitarian furnishings. Just like with the kitchen, Maverick scans the room in search of the few things that could possibly be out of place enough to reflect the fact that Ice lives here, instead of it being just a place where he rests his head between flights and lessons. He thinks he finds it in the form of two glasses, one empty and one half-full, at the foot of the couch, and the familiar TOP GUN trophy decorating the mantlepiece.
Maverick doesn’t care for it - the trophy - hasn’t since Goose died, but it’s easier than usual to ignore the way the glass flickers in the light thanks to the sudden cut to an infomercial, which plays like a strange, surreal silent movie on the television set. He turns towards Ice, who stands beside the couch, hovering, and raises an eyebrow, letting that ask the question for him.
Ice scratches the side of his neck, the movement of the muscle on his forearm visible under the blue light from the television screen, then he shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says, his voice sounding softer than Maverick thinks he’s ever heard it. Ice sits down, and Maverick does too, mimicking him when he puts his feet up on the squat coffee table because it’s clearly allowed, even with his boots on. “Sometimes after flying it can be hard to come down,” Ice continues, after a beat of silence.
And Maverick, he gets that. More than anything else about Ice, he understands the feeling of having electricity thrumming through his veins, and having to try and rein it in once his feet hit the ground.
It’s why he was singing himself hoarse with the rest of the bar earlier at karaoke, why he stayed out many more hours than he’d planned, if he could even say there’d be a plan in the first place and not just a hungry, base instinct to move.
“I know how you feel,” he mutters, and this time he really does, he’s not just being polite.
Ice’s shoulders slump, almost as if from relief, and his lips, distracting most times, curl into a soft smile. Maverick’s not sure if that’s what warms him, or if it’s the first sip of coffee, which is made to near-perfection, even for decaf.
They sit, then, side by side on the corduroy green couch. Ice turns the volume back up on the television, not so loud that it’s disruptive, but enough that the silence is always broken comfortably, and they’re close enough that he can feel the warmth that radiates from Ice’s body (hot despite his name) but not enough to touch.
It takes a second, but eventually they start talking, first about their students and bitching about lesson plans, and then about his bike and Ice seems genuinely curious about it and what’s possibly wrong with it, which leads to Maverick retelling the time he’d first met Carole Bradshaw - Matthews, then - and had been under sworn oath by Goose not to mess it up for him, only for the front wheel of his bike to puncture right as he was turning the corner to the diner they were meeting at.
They’d ended up spending most of the day at the hospital to get a doctor to look at his sprained arm, but he’d somehow endeared himself enough to Carole that she hadn’t been scared off by Goose’s friend.
There’s a weird, but familiar, aching pain in his chest, right in the centre of his ribcage, as he tells the story, but his cheeks are starting to strain from smiling, and Ice is ducking his head to his chest, body near curling with laughter even though the story’s not that funny, and for once it’s enough to keep the pain, the worst of it, at bay.
“God, Mitchell,” Ice says, shaking his head even as his smile is all teeth and blinding, “you’re ridiculous.”
Maverick sits up on the couch, tucking one of his legs beneath himself. “As if you’ve never done anything stupid, Ice,” he counters, leaning forward.
“At least you know it’s dumb. First step is admitting you have a problem.”
“Dodging the question.”
“Didn’t realize it was one.”
He shoots Ice a look that he hopes conveys how he feels - or, at least how he wants him to think he feels, because in reality, the back and forth, which lacks the spitting venom it had once upon a time, is actually nice.
On the television, a man silently advertises a new mop.
Ice sucks his teeth, tilting his head like he’s really thinking. “I don’t know. One time…shit, it was just after Slider had just been made my RIO and we had this real pain in the ass colonel who wouldn’t get off our fucking backs and during one hop, God I’d really had it with him and I figured I’d try something to show him we weren’t a bunch of kids playing dress-up, you know?” Maverick nods, encouraging Ice to continue, while he takes in the way Ice’s voice sounds, how his lips form around words. “Thing is, I’d never flown that plane before and it didn’t like going inverted, so we got caught in a tailspin and I swear to God I was cleaning Slider’s sick out of the cockpit for weeks.”
Like his own, the story’s not all that funny, but Maverick finds himself laughing anyway.
They keep talking, swapping stories that come easier and easier, and Maverick only realizes that they do it until they pass out when he’s dragged awake by the ringing of an alarm clock through the ceiling overhead.
Maverick’s eyes weigh a tonne and are impossible to open, despite the greatest efforts of the shrill alarm and the, now noticed, quickening pounding in his right ear. It’s only when his mattress and pillow start shifting beneath him that he blinks.
Directly across from him are two mugs that it takes him a second to recognise as not belonging to him, and the television is awash with static, the programming long having ended. Outside the window, which is at the opposite side to him than he immediately expects, the (very) early morning lights streams through the half-closed blinds.
With groggy, aching limbs that are punishing him for sleeping on the couch, he pushes himself upright.
Ice grunts softly as he moves and it hits Maverick with the force of a plane going supersonic what his pillow was. His arms start to shake even more against the couch, which seems to give far too much beneath their combined weight, making it all the harder for him to remove himself from Ice’s chest.
Overhead, the alarm still rings dutifully.
Ice screws his face and reaches out blindly with his right hand, which had been trapped beneath Maverick’s body, and blindly fumbles along the coffee table. He makes another noise, this one of annoyance, as his fingers brush against the mugs, then he finally opens his eyes.
Maverick swallows, even though it does little to wet his parched mouth, or change the fact that his tongue suddenly feels clumsy and too big.
Ice blinks and his lips form a small ‘o’, though he doesn’t say anything. He just stares up at Maverick, who’s staring down at him. He realizes, like this, that Ice’s eyes are somewhere between green and blue - it’s hard to tell exactly. There’s the imprint of creases the length of his cheek, and Maverick’s fingers twitch at the sight.
“Morning,” he whispers, digging his nails into the corduroy back of the couch instead of letting his hand wander like he wants.
He can see the bob of Ice’s throat as he swallows.
“Morning,” he replies, his voice rougher than usual from sleep. Ice sits up, placing one hand on Maverick’s back to keep them both balanced as they right themselves. Even in the lowlight, he can see the pink coloring his cheeks. “Must’ve fallen asleep,” he mutters and his eyes tear away from Maverick’s to stare up at the ceiling, where the ringing still continues.
Maverick focuses on untangling their legs, and flops down onto the couch, which (again, he’s aware of the irony) seems freezing in comparison to the comforting heat of Ice’s body that’s he's all too certain he’ll never, ever forget.
“Must have,” Maverick says, coughing into his fist to clear his throat, then nods up to the clock through the ceiling. “What time d’you have that thing set for, anyway?”
Ice huffs and runs a hand through his hair. “Too fucking early,” he says, before standing upright and stretching his arms above his head high enough that Maverick can hear the sounds of his muscles popping.
He makes sure not to be caught looking at the sliver of his bare stomach that appears as his shirt rides up.
“I’ll go turn that off,” Ice mutters, scratching at his cheek before silently padding out of the room.
Maverick sits in silence for half a second, before it gets too much and shoves himself to his feet. “D’you want coffee?” He calls after Ice, already moving to turn off the television and retrace his steps from last night back into the kitchen.
He hears Ice grunt his assent, then start climbing the stairs.
In the kitchen, Maverick starts rooting around the same cabinets he remembers Ice grabbing the coffee and mugs from last night, taking a moment to sift through the too many bags of coffee he has, to find one that’s already open that isn’t the decaf they’d had, and two mugs. Then, he sets about cleaning out the coffeepot and refilling it with water to boil.
It’s relaxing, making coffee, even more so to make it for someone else - something he hasn’t done since Charlie skipped town to return to DC, and for a moment it’s easy to forget that he’s got a class he needs to teach in two hours (Ice has a clock in the kitchen which is enough to tell him that Ice really does set the alarm way too early).
Ice comes downstairs a moment later, stifling a yawn into his fist.
It’s surreal, seeing Ice bathed by the cool light that streams through the window, even more so to catch the way he starts making breakfast for two without asking, and how, despite the fact two is far too many cooks to be in a kitchen (in Maverick’s opinion), they manage to move about the space with ease. Maybe it’s the early morning or maybe he’s caught a strain of something poetic during the night, but it reminds him of their flying.
And that thought sets his heart at a steady beat and cools the fire in his veins more than any other.