Chapter Text
I won’t send those children out to die, is what he never says. He doesn’t have to say it in so many words: it’s in the tremble of his jaw and the grief-guilt twist of his face which has never changed. His eyes well up when he thinks about it for more than a second.
These kids – he has to choose six of them to die.
Oh God.
“Goose, what am I doing?” Mav turns his eyes desperately up at the stars. “That’s our boy, in there.” He won’t send him to die. Not Bradley, his miracle, the gift he didn’t ever want. Not if it meant Goose was gone, which it had. He’s so – lonely. Maverick – Pete – is lonely, right down to the marrow of his bones. Loneliness is like a sickness, isolating him further as he forgets how to make new friends and loses the old ones one by one as the years grow crueller. He misses his miracle gift of a nephew turned son.
He makes himself go back to bed, where he lies awake, haunted by Goose his best friend and the echoes of him when he’d seen Rooster in the bar. How is he supposed to lose his boy, his son, like this?
“Please God,” he prays as dawn colours his room pink and orange, “please God let me not have to lose my son.”
Maverick thought he knew pain. He thought he knew loss. He thought, when he clung to Goose and sobbed in the cold ocean, it could never get any worse. He’d thought he couldn’t keep living after they buried Carole, when Bradley had screamed that he hated him and he wished he’d died instead and he wished he’d never met Goose because then he’d still be here and –
He’d thought he must die, been so sure of it that he’d tidied his life into boxes and labelled them in shaking marker through endless tears. That pain, that loss, it never went away. Sometimes he still can’t move for it.
Then he’d seen Bradley as Rooster and broke his heart all over again, and he’s buried his wingman, his Iceman, his anchor, but nothing, nothing in the history of grief, has ever felt like watching his beloved boy fall out of the sky in a burst of flames.
Mav races through the trees, lungs throbbing, head pounding. His tears leave freezing trails down his cheeks and he’ll have a bruise from his helmet bouncing off his thigh but he can’t slow down. He mustn’t slow down. That is his son, that plume of black smoke, but he saw the chute. Bradley is alive.
He’ll lay down and die right there, if the alternative –
Legs burning, Mav finally sees a staggering figure under a silken trail. He doesn’t stop running until he’s right in front of him and he wants to scream and throw his arms around him and he wants to throw up, but he doesn’t, he feels his relief turn into that parental desperation he didn’t understand until three months after Goose when Bradley had first disappeared.
“Ow!” cries his son from the snow. “What the hell?”
Don’t ever do that to me again, he wants to say. “What were you thinking?” He wants to apologise for the shove, for so much, but -
Bradley stares at him. “You’re always telling me not to think!”
Oh, he looks so much like both his parents now as he throws his arms to the sides. Mav thinks he’s going to collapse. They’re at an impasse, knowing nothing Mav can say will keep the tone of his anger without sounding like the worst of hypocrites.
He can’t look away from his son’s face. “Bradley.”
Bradley looks at him quizzically.
He breathes carefully. He thinks, now he’s slowed down, that he might have broken a rib. Maybe two. “Why?”
“Why what?”
Mav wants to cry. He feels his eyes welling up and his cheeks dithering. Not yet, he scolds himself, don’t cry yet. “Why, Bradley.”
Bradley puts his hands on his hips, looks up at the sky, twists his head just like Carole always did and bites his lips and eventually he looks at the floor like Goose used. “You know why,” he says finally, quietly, the snow and trees and distant planes threatening to smother his words.
“I know why I want,” manages Mav. Please. Tell me the truth. Don’t push me away.
His son folds his arms tight. “Why did you pull my papers?”
Thankfully, the rage has gone, and there’s just aching desperation left in Bradley’s voice. They’re too exhausted for that anger. For a moment, Maverick can’t find his voice. He wants to sit down. “You weren’t ready,” he croaks. Don’t cry. Goose, talk to me.
Bradley’s face twists. “Tell me the truth.” He reaches out, twists his hand back to his side. Mav feels like he’s twisting his heart.
“I promised,” he croaks. No more. Don’t ask me any more.
There’s a long pause as Bradley searches his face and Mav wipes the tears out of his eyelashes. “Okay,” he sighs. He rolls his shoulders and puts his game face on. “What now?”
Now, thinks Mav, they need a plane.