Chapter Text
Jake watches the door slam.
There were certain lessons you didn’t look away from. He intended to remember this one forever.
–
It goes a little like this—there once was a little kid down in Texas, blue eyed and tow-headed, dressed in Levi's and plaid and tiny leather cowboy boots, exuberant on the back of his ma’s favorite mare, sun in his eyes as his dad’s too-big Stetson slipped backwards off his head, gap-toothed grinning at the both of them as the camera shutter snapped shut, the Seresin family homestead behind them in the distance. It’s the last photo they take before his ma dies and his dad follows, ten years a ghost before his heart physically gives out along with his liver, and that little boy is a young man on his own in the world.
Sad story, but everyone’s got one.
He refuses to let his define him so he packs that photo away with the rest of his things, sells the ranch to the neighbor, and heads north to Annapolis.
He doesn’t look back.
–
The Naval Academy is exactly what he needed, but it’s also a joke. He’s one of the youngest in his cohort, barely turned eighteen when he arrives, and he’s appalled by what a disaster his so-called peers are. The ghost of his ma’s voice whispers that not everyone grew up with the demands of a farm and father to teach them responsibility, but every damned person here still had to sit before a board of state representatives and military brass answering pointed questions about patriotism and discipline to receive their nomination. Forgive him, ma, for thinking that’d weed out the folks who couldn’t manage to show up to morning PT on time.
He does meet Javy though, and that’s something.
By the time his second year starts, the worst of his cohort has washed out, he’s got a room with Machado, and he’s top of his class in mechanical engineering. The hours are long, and the nights are longer, but he’s settled in a way he hasn’t been since he was seven years old on the back of his ma’s horse.
He’s twenty-two when he graduates first in his cohort and packs his bags for Pensacola, Javy in tow. He’s going to be a pilot, just like his dad and granddad before him.
–
He touches down in Florida and the lessons start immediately, though they’ll take the better part of two and a half years to complete. The flight indoctrination course is only six weeks long, then it’s straight into the aircraft pipeline to earn his wings of gold.
He falls ass-over-tea-kettle in love on day one. His head’s in the clouds, exactly where it was meant to be, crammed full to bursting with instrumentation readings and control tower jargon and flight velocity metrics.
There’s also the small matter of Bradley Bradshaw.
–
As with most things, Seresin men loved with reckless abandon. If they weren’t careful, it’d put them in the ground. Given that reckless was very much the opposite of careful, they’d been six feet under for generations. Any hopes for survival rested squarely on the shoulders of the folks marrying into the madness.
Thing is, his dad wasn’t a mean drunk after his ma died. He wasn’t an anything drunk. He was just marking time, one last responsibility (Jake, always Jake) before he could follow her over to the other side. He talked about her every now and again, absently fond, like she’d just gone ahead on a trip into town and he’d catch up when he could. He kept up her rosebushes, brushed out her horse, and cooked her favorite meal every Sunday night, regaling Jake with stories of how he’d pursued her for months with a charm offensive so brashly aggressive that she’d slapped him twice before realizing what he actually wanted was to take her to dinner (and maybe a chapel, but even a love-drunk Seresin man knew when to keep his mouth shut).
It took Jake years to realize it was all tinged with a bone deep grief.
Seresin men have always been a bit of a mess where love was concerned.
–
Jake quickly learns he’s not the exception.
They’re in the air on day three of flight indoctrination and half the class has already washed out if the number of half-full barf buckets is any indicator. Jake hops out the side of the plane he’d just gone up in and grins as his instructional pilot loudly thanks him for not vomiting during the inversion. Another candidate pukes on the tarmac twenty feet away.
“And here I thought this was going to be a competition,” he says, swinging onto the bench to watch the rest of the circus side show. Javy’s up next and Jake intends to heckle him mercilessly if he loses his lunch.
“Pretty sure that’s not the point of this exercise,” the guy beside him comments, and Jake sucks in a breath because oh, this one’s gorgeous, all California-tan and sweat-slicked skin, hair roughed up from the helmet sat between his feet and eyes a honey-brown that he instinctively knows are going to ruin him. The mustache is a bit unfortunate, but even that’s rapidly growing on him. Jake, no stranger to desire, is slammed with an unparalleled wall of want.
Distantly, he registers the sound of another classmate getting acquainted with a barf bucket. Both men pull faces at each other. Jake falls a little in love with the way the other man’s nose scrunches.
“Christ, they’re worse than my basic training platoon after our first 10k forced march.”
“You were enlisted?” Jake asks, grabbing onto his downfall with both hands.
“Yeah, just finished my OCS conversion last month,” he says, and offers him a hand. “Bradley Bradshaw, at your service.”
It’s a stupid fucking name and he loves him already. “Jake Seresin. The pleasure is all mine.”
–
For all their auspicious beginnings, Jake is still his father’s son and coming on too strong is something of a genetic predisposition. Unfortunately, that means Bradley rapidly recategorizes him from new friend to insufferable asshole.
–
“So, pipeline?” Jake asks, dropping his tray down next to Bradley in the mess that evening. Javy rolls his eyes skyward and elbows his way in next to him, along for the ride as always.
“Fighters.”
“Mm, so I do have some competition around here. Hope you can keep up.”
“You’re very cocky,” Bradley says, clearing his plate with the ruthless efficiency of a former enlisted sailor.
“I’m very good.”
Javy mutters something unflattering under his breath that Jake magnanimously elects to ignore. Bradley leaves before Jake can continue his charm offensive.
–
“Come on, Bradshaw. It’ll be fun!”
“We have underwater inversion testing on Monday.”
“And it’s Friday night, which means we have liberty we’re meant to be taking advantage of,” Jake says, wheedling. “Come on, you can even wear one of those neon monstrosities you call a shirt.”
“I don’t dance, Seresin.”
“Clubbing, Bradley. It’s less dancing and more strategic gyrating with a side of alcohol.” Jake shamelessly waggles his eyebrows, leaning against the doorway of Bradshaw’s dorm room and canting his hips forward in a maneuver that’d probably get him cited for public indecency in seven states. These jeans do wonderful things for his thighs. Bradley doesn't even have the courtesy to look down. “Alternatively, if that’s too racy for you, grandpa, I know a great little bar—”
“Another night.”
–
When he does finally coax Bradley out to the aforementioned bar (and fine, it was Natasha who got him to come, and fine, maybe Jake invited himself along), he spends the entire evening flirting with a brick wall.
The man did not take well to losing at pool as it turns out.
Natasha finds the entire thing hilarious, because of course she does. “You’re as whipped as one of those bastards holding his angry wife’s purse at the mall,” she says, wiping an actual tear away from the corner of her eye after she’s finished laughing at his misery. “We’re going to end up calling you Bagman if you don’t pull your testicles out of Bradshaw’s handbag soon.”
Javy, the asshole, pats his shoulder and tells Natasha about his failure to lure Bradley in with promises of clubbing and sex pants the prior weekend.
Jake is surrounded by traitors.
-
“Late night run?” Jake asks, eyeing the other man as he steps into the communal bathroom at 2145. “Really pushing curfew.”
Bradley grunts and walks back out before he can ask if he wants company on the next one.
“Dude,” says Garcia around a mouth full of toothpaste.
“Don’t bother trying to talk sense into that one, Mickey,” Javy says. “Jake’s a goddamned lost cause.”
–
“Third place, huh? Not bad, but you’d have been right behind me in second if you’d pushed the throttle a little—”
“I will punch you, Seresin.”
–
It’s their last night before they’re shipped off to Corpus Christi for primary flight training when things finally come to a head.
“Do you enjoy poking at me or is this all some fucked up version of foreplay for you?” Bradley asks, looking furious and exhausted and ready to snap in the empty hallway leading back to the dorms, nothing but Jake’s unwavering attention for company.
“Well…” Jake shrugs. In for a penny and all that.
“...you’re joking,” Bradley says, the words sounding like they physically pain him. It’s very possible they do. Jake hasn’t been trying for subtle so finally getting hit with this particular clue bat has to hurt. “Jesus christ,” Bradley finally says, and he obviously isn’t pleased.
“I prefer Jake,” he offers, attempting to salvage some semblance of bravado before he goes to lick his wounds in private. Six weeks of increasingly volatile brush offs is enough to bruise even his ego. He can, in fact, take a goddamned hint.
“Please, for the love of god, shut up,” and then Bradley’s shoving him up against the wall, mouth hot and insistent against his own, and Jake thinks he’s won the lottery.
–
Bradley presses him into the bed, takes Jake apart with his hands and his mouth, biting into his neck until Jake whines, and groans when Jake flips them over to return the favor. He sighs when Jake presses open-mouthed kisses along his jaw line, moans obscenely when Jake ghosts his lips over his cock, grips his hips tight enough to bruise when Jake licks up the underside of his shaft, and tells Jake to stop acting so damned coy when he’s the one who’s been shamelessly chasing Bradley straight into insanity for weeks on end.
Jake is only too happy to oblige. Bradley gives as good as he gets, maybe more, and god help them all if Bradshaw flew the way he fucked because sweet baby jesus—
When he comes, he says Bradley’s name like a prayer.
They lay there for long minutes afterwards, shoulder-to-shoulder, panting softly as the sweat cools on their skin. Jake turns his head to nuzzle against Bradley’s neck, presses another kiss there and hums, satisfied. He smells like sandalwood and summer heat and Jake wants to crawl inside of him and stay there forever. Bradley reaches up to card a hand through his hair absently and Jake positively purrs, basking in everything finally coming together.
He’s nearly dozed off when Bradley sits up, swinging out of bed and reaching for his clothes before Jake is fully coherent again. He’ll swear on his mother’s grave that he didn’t squawk, but the hand looped possessively around Bradley’s wrist is definitely his own.
“I’m not done with you,” he grumbles.
“Want another round, do you?” Bradley looks good like this, smug and glowing and a little too cocksure for Jake’s heart to handle.
“I want you to stay.”
Bradley has the audacity to look poleaxed.
“The hell did you think this was, Bradshaw?” So sue him, he’s a little indignant. He hasn’t spent weeks trying to get the other bastard’s attention just to be left after a spectacular blowjob and a disappointingly short cuddle. “I’ve spent the last six weeks wooing you, so get the fuck back in my bed and go to sleep, asshole.”
“You,” Bradley says, “are very bad at this,” but he slides back in beside Jake anyway, arms curving around him and pulling him close. Jake curls around him like a cat, comfortable and sure. He’ll let that slide. Orgasms make him charitable like that.
–
It’s as natural as breathing once Bradley figures out that Jake has been flirting with him the whole time.
“Pulling on my metaphorical pigtails is more like,” he mutters, taking a long pull off his beer a few nights later. Jake leans against him and grins, all cat that got the cream.
“It was tragic,” Natasha says, forever a traitor. “I still say we should call him Bagman. I don’t think you fully appreciate the extent to which you own his balls, Bradshaw.”
They learn each other in between flight sessions and plane manuals, memorizing birthdays and personal calendars of grief, mapping bad habits and Landmines They Do Not Discuss. Bradley snores at the volume of a tornado warning, refuses to put towels in the hamper, and is categorically incapable of walking past an unoccupied bar piano. Jake cooks a mean steak and potatoes, but he otherwise burns water even when supervised, and he stress cleans like he expects an inspection from the fleet commander himself.
Neither of them wants to hear shit about any of it, thank you very much.
When Bradley stumbles out of the G-force simulator and spends an hour paying tribute to the porcelain gods, Jake sits beside him, quiet murmurs of darling, baby, sweetheart, I’ve got you. Bradley always repays the favor, hands gliding slowly up and down the ridges of Jake’s spine as he heaves. By now, both of them are all too familiar with the shaking, swearing mess of an adrenaline crash.
–
Jake spends a week making jokes about the size of Bradley’s dick when he finally settles on Rooster as his call sign.
He hasn’t chosen his own yet and, no Natasha, Bagman isn’t an option.
-
It’s all so perfect that he’s tempted to gloat. Hell, if Javy is to be believed (and Mickey, and Natasha, and Reuben, and—), gloating is all he does. He prefers to think of himself as proud of his accomplishments. He’s top of his class with a partner hot on his heels and together they’re leaving everyone in the dust. He’s twenty-four years old and on top of the world.
They'd spent six months in Corpus Christi, all of it a blur of training exercises and G-forces and sleeping like the dead in one of their apartments, falling into sync so perfectly that Jake can only conclude Bradley was made for him. They didn’t bother with separate places when they were sent forward to Mississippi for the next nine months and they had a serious discussion about just buying a house by the time they were sent back to the final leg of flight training in Kingsville.
“It’ll be nicer than base housing.”
“And a helluva lot harder to look after when we’re gone,” Bradley countered, chucking his collection of horrible, awful, obnoxiously attractive Hawaiian print shirts haphazardly into his duffle. The neat freak in Jake despaired. “Besides, if you wanted to stay in Texas, you wouldn’t have sold your damned farm.”
Bradley was irritatingly right, but more than a year of living in each other’s pockets will do that. For all Jake inherited his father’s reckless streak, he’d also inherited just enough of his mother’s care. She was a woman with a plan at all times and Jake’s own plans had back up plans to their back up plans. He wasn't in the business of making decisions he’d have cause to regret later. “Fine, but we’re getting a house somewhere when we get stationed. I’m entirely done with base housing. The water pressure is shit.”
“Whatever you say, sweetheart.”
Jake threw a particularly offensive Hawaiian shirt at Bradley’s head and vowed to smother him with it the next time the asshole woke him up with his chainsaw impression. His dearly beloved made sure to splash extra water on the bathroom counter five minutes later.
Fucker.
–
It’s not entirely perfect all the time, of course. They’re both headstrong, Jake stubborn and Bradley dug in even deeper, but they never fight about the important things.
Jake pushes Bradley to be less careful, less methodical. Flying is half training, half instinct, and they’re both at the level where instinct needs to become the driving force instead. Bradley has always been the one to fly a little slower, take the turns a little more carefully, and Jake knows that comes from losing his father to jet wash and an ejection malfunction but it’s still infuriating. His course accuracy rating blows even Jake’s out of the water, but the rest of his scores lag just far enough behind that he’s constantly vying for position in the top five instead of the top two.
“You’d think I’d have fucked that perfectionist streak out of you by now,” Bradley says, utterly unfazed by another of Jake’s carefully constructed pep talks—“nagging, Jake, you’re a nag”—just puts his feet up on the coffee table, ankles crossed, and settles his head on Jake’s shoulder, eyes never leaving his F/A-18 manual. His goal was always to be a great pilot, not the best pilot. Jake envies that outlook sometimes.
“Class rank determines who gets first dibs on duty stations. We’re going to Germany together.”
“Naval need determines duty station. We’ll go where they send us.”
“And the openings list says Germany needs two pilots, so you’d better make damned sure you’re next to me on the list to snag those slots before anyone else can.”
Bradley sighs and presses a kiss to the side of his neck, like he’s the long-suffering one in this relationship. “You know I will, sweetheart.”
Jake leans into him and hums, satisfied for the time being. They’re closing in on final flight exams, weeks away from receiving their wings, and they’re going together damnit, because Jake won’t live without this man. He’s a Seresin man through and through, helplessly devoted to the very end.
And besides—there’s a ring in the back of their closet with Bradley’s name on it. Spousal priority for duty stations isn’t his driving motivation, but he won’t pretend it isn’t one of the lesser ones.
That’s for after they graduate though.
–
They don’t make it that far.
–
“Dude, what the hell was that? Fucking Crater and Screw were beating your ass out there,” and Jake’s furious, slamming through their front door with all the force of a missile because, yeah, today’s exam scores count, but far more importantly—
“Don’t even start, Jake.” There’s defeat etched into the lines of his shoulders, the corners of his mouth, knuckles white where they're clutching the phone he’s been ignoring since it rang an hour before reveille, area code San Diego all Jake saw before the call was viciously declined. All the coaxing in the world didn’t get him to say who it was.
Bradley’s rattled to hell and Jake’s a mess running on a cumulative eight hours of sleep in three days, and that’s before he had to sit next to a hawk-eyed four-star admiral doing a surprise inspection and watch his partner nearly slam into the side of a mountain while going slower than a geriatric four days before graduation.
“Tell me what’s going on. Now.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” and that tone screams Landmine They Do Not Discuss if ever there was one.
Jake couldn’t give less of a shit.
“Bradley.”
“Don’t.”
“You almost died!” Jake snarls, every word born of the terror trying to claw it’s way out of his throat, pressing him relentlessly forward. “You flew like a newbie with a death wish, like you weren’t ready to be in a simulator let alone a plane, and it damn near got you killed in a training exercise!”
The silence is deafening.
Slow. Measured. Quiet. “The fuck did you just say to me?”
Warning. Pull up.
“You’re flying like you don’t deserve wings.”
Bradley moves so fast Jake doesn’t see the punch coming. It lands just to the left of his head, fist embedded in the drywall.
“We’re done,” Bradley says, and he means it.
Jake watches the door slam. Bradley doesn’t come back.
–
Seresin men love with reckless abandon. It’s put every man before him in the ground.
Jake refuses to be buried.
He flies his exams like he has nothing left to lose (he doesn’t), a one man army (he is), leaving everyone else in the dust (so they don’t leave him). The visiting Admiral Kazansky claps him on the shoulder, says he expects great things from him, and Jake’s smile is feral as the rest of his flight school cohort looks on in disbelief.
Hangman, they all say, like Jake’s entire personality was a long con, and he ranks first in class.
Rooster doesn’t look at all.