Chapter Text
Something rearranges itself, the day they rescue the Layton. Ice can’t pinpoint exactly what, but sometime between the dizzying relief of touchdown on tarmac and the even more dizzying all-night party that follows, something changes. He feels a little off-kilter, like he’s two inches from his center and he doesn’t know how to reorient himself. There’s been a shift, somehow, without him noticing when or where, and the shittiest part is he doesn’t even know what changed.
Ice tries to sort himself out the morning after the party in slow, methodical steps. He blinks awake to a skull-pounding hangover headache at 0600 thanks to the smuggled Absolut the flight deck crew let loose sometime between dinner and lights-out.
Ice doesn’t even like vodka.
He crosses out the hangover from the Why Do I Feel Like This list; Ice has been hungover many a time in his life–he’s never felt like this. He marvels at Slider’s empty cot for a bit, surprised that he’s up and out of bed so early, and then he shuffles out of their quarters and into the hall, trudging towards the showerrooms. Maybe he just needs a goddamn rinse, Christ.
Ice did not just need a goddamn rinse. He’s squeaky clean and shining, in uniform and heading for the mess hall, and the headache’s quieted down from an insistent banging to a calmer rattling, and something is still—
Not wrong, exactly. But not quite right, either.
Everything is as normal as it can be after a night of non-regulation celebrating, and something’s still not quite right, and all Ice really wants right now is a cup of coffee in his hands. He goes through the motions, accepts the back-slapping and returns the head nods, lines up for a mug of coffee and three slices of toast. He zeroes in on Slider hunched over, head down and arms sprawled at a table tucked close to a corner and knows instantly what might make himself feel better.
“Ron!” he says, right in Slider’s ear.
“Jesus–! Fucking Christ, Kazansky, it’s too early in the goddamn morning to be an asshole.” Slider, jolted from his pitiful drunken haze, aims a vicious elbow at Ice’s groin. Years of dodging Slider’s pointy elbows under his belt, Ice side-steps and moves to the seat across him.
“Never too early to fuck with you, Kerner.” He grins and takes a sip of his coffee. “You look like shit.”
“On that, we can agree on,” someone says, behind him and to his right.
Mitchell. Maverick, with a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of coffee, banana tucked precariously between his chin and his chest.
“Mitchell,” Ice says in greeting. He takes the banana from Maverick and sets it on the table. “‘Least you don’t look as shitty as Slider.”
He snorts and settles down next to Ice, immediately peeling the banana and dropping chunks of it into his oatmeal. “No one looks as shitty as Slider. Not even while hungover, just in general. Takes the cake every time.”
Slider doesn’t even deign to respond, just slumps back over, pillowing his head on one arm and flipping them both off with the other. Ice smiles and starts in on his toast, and everything feels correct again. Like his insides have just righted themselves in his body and he can proceed with his day like usual. The mess hall is starting to fill up, and early-morning conversations are starting to bounce off the walls.
“Oh, by the way,” Maverick says between bites of banana-oatmeal, “I’m going back to TOPGUN.”
Ice blinks. In front of him, Slider tilts his head until his cheek’s pressed flat to his arm, looking at Maverick lying down. “You’re what?” Ice asks, dumbly. Like he didn’t just hear what he heard five seconds ago.
“Going back to TOPGUN,” Maverick repeats. “Tomorrow, actually. Think I’m gonna try my hand at teaching.” Casual. No-biggie.
And it is no-biggie. Or at least, it should be. They all have their own assignments, their own things they want or need to do, as is how the Navy goes. You complete a mission, you move on to the next, so on and so forth. If you’re lucky, you get to pick what you move on to, and both of them got to pick. It’s just that they picked differently, Maverick heading back to Miramar and Ice staying on the Enterprise. He has no idea why he’d thought otherwise, has no idea why his brain just assumed they’d— that they’d move on together.
Get your shit together, Ice. Maverick and Slider are looking at you like you’ve lost your damn mind, probably because you’ve been staring at Maverick for far too long in complete and utter silence.
“Oh,” he says, because what the fuck else is he supposed to say. Even he doesn’t know why he feels the way he feels right now, surprised and off-balance. “Good for you, Mitchell. God help your future students, though.”
“Now I wanna come back to TOPGUN, just to watch this shitshow unfold,” Slider says, snickering.
“You know what, fuck you both actually. I’m gonna be the greatest damn teacher that school’s ever seen, asshats, just watch me. Hey, Hollywood!” And he waves Hollywood over, who’s dodging and weaving between tables. “I’d make a good teacher, right?”
Hollywood grins at them cheerily, approaching their corner. “Absolutely not!”
Maverick scowls and pouts his way through breakfast.
They bustle their way through morning chores and rag on Maverick well throughout the day, and it’s all jokes and shittalk but that not-quite-rightness is back in full-force, settling in Ice’s gut like lead. The sky overhead darkens to a deep blue and then to a black, and dinner comes and goes in even more shittalking, and suddenly Ice is in bed, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. The propellers are a steady thrumming below deck, enough that he can feel it in his bones. Farther out, the ocean, lapping at the Enterprise’s hull. If he focuses in on the noise, he can hear everything: the low chatter of people in their quarters and in the hallways; the groaning, creaking metal of the ship; booted footsteps above and below deck. He loses himself in the sound and sifts through the day like he does every night, stops to examine that not-quite-rightness along with the events of his morning, and realizes something. Something he wishes he didn’t realize just then.
Oh.
Oh shit.