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When Charlie first told him she knew more classified information than he did, Maverick had assumed she was talking about technical specs from downed enemy fighters. The details of experimental flight programs. Maybe even the truth about what had happened to his father.
Not aliens.
Charlie, it turned out, in addition to being an astrophysicist, was also something of an expert in the technology of the race of beings known as the Ancients, something she’d entirely failed to mention to Maverick over the three-month course of their doomed relationship. It hadn’t been until two weeks after they’d broken up that Maverick had visited her bungalow with the intent on congratulating her on her recent promotion—a promotion he later learned would take her a whole lot further away than Washington D.C.—dragging Ice along with him to make things less awkward. Only then had he stumbled on the truth.
He’d picked up what looked like some kind of bizarre paperweight, then freaked the fuck out and dropped it when it lit up with a blue glow in his hands, and then watched as it lit up again when Ice picked it up from the floor, and then finally turned to Charlie, who had been staring at both of them with more excitement on her face than Mav had ever seen, even in their conversations about MiGs.
A week and a stack of signed NDAs later, Maverick and Iceman had both been offered positions in another galaxy. It hadn’t taken long for Maverick to decide: the Navy brass were unhappy enough with his methods that he already knew he wouldn’t keep his spot as a Top Gun instructor much longer, and at least on another planet, he wouldn’t be surrounded by constant reminders of Goose.
So. Other planets. Other galaxies. Spaceships that Maverick could fly with his mind. Aliens.
Go figure.
“Rock, paper, scissors, shoot,” Mav said, thrusting his clenched fist out in front of him. “Ha!” He tapped Ice’s scissored fingers in triumph.
“Whatever.” Ice dropped his hand to his side. “I get to fly on the way back.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mav agreed, unable to keep a grin off his face as he slipped into the pilot’s seat of the puddlejumper.
“Hey, Mav,” Jimenez began. “If one of you is going to fly there, and one of you is going to fly back, why does it matter who gets to fly first?” Jimenez, the fourth member of their gate team, was a good-natured Marine a few years older than Maverick himself, and also one of the few people on Atlantis who had taken to calling Maverick by his call-sign, for which Maverick had loved him immediately.
“It doesn’t matter,” Charlie chimed in from her own seat. “But they can’t whip ‘em out and measure ‘em with you and I here, so…”
Mav didn’t need to turn in his seat to picture her unimpressed expression. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he corrected her. Giving the puddlejumper a mental nudge, he guided it upward through the hanger doors, hovering in front of the stargate.
Even after almost six months on Atlantis, Maverick wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to it—the blue glow of the stargate as the wormhole wooshed into being, the electric thrill as he urged the ship forward through the gate and out into the blackness of space above planet P8A-113. As always, his breath caught at the sight: the endless stars stretching out in every direction, the unfamiliar oceans and continents of an alien world.
As always, he thought: Goose would have loved to see this.
He forced himself to exhale, to turn his attention to steering the puddlejumper down towards the surface of the planet. No jet he’d ever flown on Earth could match the responsiveness of the jumper, the way it could accelerate into the infinite sky with nothing more than a thought. (If anything, sometimes the flight was a little too smooth for Maverick’s tastes, but Charlie had gotten pissed at him the last time he disabled the inertial dampeners, and he wasn’t stupid enough to try that again—at least, not with her along for the ride.)
Glancing over to the co-pilot’s seat as he brought the jumper into the atmosphere, he found Iceman looking right back at him. Ice’s gaze was piercing, inscrutable, and not for the first time, Maverick was struck by the sheer improbability of being here with Ice, together in another galaxy—how unlikely it was that he and Ice would happen to share the gene which would bring them to another galaxy and make it possible for them to fly honest-to-god spaceships.
But the idea of being here without Ice seemed more impossible still.
With a jolt, Maverick realized that he’d been staring too long. But Ice was staring back, his handsome face as unreadable as ever. Trying to ignore the tingle running across his skin, Maverick turned back to the controls.
Their destination was a settlement near the ocean of the planet’s only inhabited continent. Maverick landed the puddlejumper about half a mile from the town, and slipped on his sunglasses as he emerged into the bright mid-afternoon glare. The weather on Lantea stayed pretty much the same all year long, but here, it was summer: hot and humid, the planet’s sun blazing away above them.
The grass crunched as Ice walked up beside him. “Think we’ll be able to teach these guys anything?” Ice asked.
Though Maverick himself had never visited it before this mission, he knew Atlantis had been negotiating with this particular planet for months—with their stargate inaccessible to them in orbit, and their technology stunted by Wraith attacks to the point where they had never managed to develop flight, the inhabitants could only trade with societies technologically advanced enough to visit them. They had requested that Atlantis teach them to design rudimentary aircraft, in exchange for food and metal ore, so that they could begin working towards the spaceflight that would bring them into contact with the rest of the galaxy.
When the inhabitants had discovered an abandoned Ancient outpost and begun offering access to that, the negotiations had gone much more quickly, and as it turned out, assessing the technology and helping the inhabitants figure out what aircraft designs were possible with their tools and materials was a job Maverick’s gate team happened to be particularly well-suited for. “Sure, why not?” Maverick answered. “Doesn’t sound like these guys are stupid.”
Charlie walked past them, jamming a baseball cap onto her head as she squinted against the sun. “I think he was questioning our teaching ability, not their learning ability. Should I be insulted, Kazansky?”
The corners of Iceman’s mouth curved into a smirk as he fell into step behind her. “It’s not your teaching skills I’m questioning.”
Maverick resisted the juvenile urge to stick out his tongue. Ice’s own brief stint as a Top Gun instructor had gone over with rather less controversy than Maverick’s, though Maverick liked to think that his methods would have proven equally effective, if he’d just been given the chance to prove it.
At least by leaving to join the Atlantis expedition, he’d managed to avoid being shitcanned for insubordination, which by end, he’d been kind of expecting.
At first glance, the Ancient outpost looked to Maverick…a lot like the other abandoned Ancient outposts he’d explored since coming to Atlantis. Maverick walked around the room Charlie had assigned him to, dragging his hand over the consoles built into the wall. Nothing lit up under his touch; the ZPM powering the station had probably been dead for centuries. A few odd gadgets and devices lay scattered across the consoles; those, he swept into his backpack for Charlie and the other scientists on Atlantis to examine later.
Wandering out into the hallway, he poked his head into the room across from the one he’d been exploring, and was met by the sight of what looked like a barracks, occupied only by the bottle-blond back of a head he’d recognize anywhere. “Find anything interesting?” he asked, and Iceman jerked around, a strange expression on his face and his own backpack clasped in his hands.
“Jesus, Mitchell,” Ice said, his expression relaxing into neutrality. “Someone should put a bell on you.”
Maverick grinned at him. “You’re welcome to try.”
Ice rolled his eyes.
“Seriously, you find anything interesting?” Maverick asked him. Walking forward, he craned his head to see what was in Ice’s backpack. “I found some weird-looking shit, but I have no idea what it is.”
Ice yanked the zipper of his backpack closed. “No,” he said hastily. “Nothing. Let’s go find Charlie.” And with that, he swept from the room.
The mayor of the town had put them up in a pair of cabins not too far from the ocean—nothing fancy, but positively spacious compared to the cramped living quarters on an aircraft carrier. Maverick tossed his backpack onto his bed in the cabin he was sharing with Ice. “Wanna check out the beach?” he asked Ice.
Ice shook his head. “Gonna write up my mission report.”
Maverick stared at him, incredulous. “We’ve only been here for a day. It can wait!” Ice was a stickler for the boring parts of their job, but he wasn’t usually that much of a stickler.
Ice shrugged. “Have fun on the beach.”
Shaking his head, Maverick turned and left. Even with the sun slipping towards the horizon, the sweltering heat remained, and he stripped off his shirt as he headed down towards the water. Charlie and Jimenez had clearly had the same idea as he had—Charlie was lying on the sand holding a paperback, and Jimenez had waded into the tide.
It wasn’t quite like being on the beach in San Diego; the sand was a reddish color, and the planet was just enough smaller than Earth that the horizon line seemed a little too close. But it was close enough to bring back memories: watching Bradley splash in the shallow water under Carole and Goose’s close supervision, playing volleyball with the other Top Gun students, sitting side-by-side with Ice after a long day of teaching, and sharing an exquisitely comfortable silence as they watched the golden rays of the sun dancing across the water as it slipped beneath the horizon.
Maverick glanced back at the cabins, in case Ice had come to his senses. But the door to their cabin stayed firmly closed. Closing his eyes, Maverick tried to let himself sink into the sensation of the sand under his toes, the warm ocean breeze blowing across his face. If Ice didn’t want to have any fun, he told himself, that was his own prerogative. Not Maverick’s problem.
Still—it would have been nice to have him.
Returning to the cabin as the sky darkened, Maverick kicked the sand from his shoes before pushing open the door.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Sorry, I’ll, uh, leave you to it.” Backing away, he quickly slammed the door closed, blinking rapidly as he tried to process what he’d just seen—or just thought he’d seen, or possibly just hallucinated..
“No, wait!” Ice’s voice issued from inside the room. “Maverick, dammit, get back in here.”
Maverick cracked the door open a few inches. “Go back in?” he called through the gap, incredulous.
“You heard me!”
Maverick coughed. “You looked like you were kind of busy.” Although he’d only seen inside for a few seconds, the image was still burned into his mind: Ice, on his back on the bed nearest the door, his cargo pants and boxers rucked down to his ankles, arching his hips off the mattress as he fucked himself on a large dildo. It wasn’t exactly how he’d ever pictured Ice masturbating—not that he spent a lot of time picturing Ice masturbating—not never, but you spent enough time camping out on alien planets with a guy, you tended to overhear a few things that would make anyone start to wonder—anyway, it would have been one thing to catch Ice jerking his dick, but Maverick would have expected him to sound way more mortified at being caught with something up his ass.
“Maverick,” Ice growled. “Get. In. Here.”
And if whatever Ice wanted to talk about was serious enough that he was willing to stop masturbating to tell Maverick about it, then it was probably serious enough that Maverick should stop thinking about his teammate’s jerk-off habits and go listen to him. He pushed open the door, expecting to see Ice sitting up on the bed, buttoning up his jeans and radiating implacable composure like nothing had happened.
What he saw instead: Ice, still flat on his back, a dildo grasped tightly in his hand as he slid it in and out of his ass.
Maverick sputtered. “Christ! Can you…can you stop doing that while you’re talking to me?” What was this, some kind of joke? A prank, maybe, only Maverick couldn’t figure out the ‘gotcha’. Why would Ice be doing this in front of him? Wanting Maverick to see it? He couldn’t—
“No,” Ice ground out through his teeth. “I can’t.” He let out a breathless gasp. “Maverick, I…” Ice trailed off, moaning; Maverick’s blood pumped hot through his veins, his face warm with—with embarrassment on Ice’s behalf, and nothing more than that. “Maverick, I literally can’t, I can’t stop, it’s some kind of weird Ancient sex toy, I found it in the outpost, it’s doing something freaky to me, okay?”
Maverick blinked. Slipping into the room, he stared carefully at the ceiling as he closed the door behind him. “The, uh, the dildo, you mean?” There was a water stain on one of the ceiling boards that looked a bit like the state of Florida; he hadn’t noticed that before. “The dildo is doing something to you?”
“Yes, goddammit!”
Here was the thing about staring anywhere but at his teammate: it didn’t stop him from hearing the hitch in Ice’s voice as he fucked himself from five feet away. But—a freaky piece of Ancient tech doing something really fucked-up. That was normal, at least for them. The world tilted back onto its axis. “Okay,” Maverick said. “Okay. What’s it doing to you?”
Ice let out a noise that was halfway between a groan and laugh. “Pretty sure you got a nice fucking eyeful of what it’s doing!”
Maverick flushed. “Right,” he said. “But, uh, is it just that you can’t stop, or is it doing anything else? What does it—” He tried to keep his voice neutral, clinical. “What does it feel like?”
“It’s—fuck,” Ice said, and Maverick couldn’t help it; his eyes tore away from the ceiling as if by their own accord, flickering over to where Ice was rocking onto the toy, then up to Ice’s face, then back to the toy, to Ice’s hole. “It’s, it doesn’t feel good. I need it, but when I use it’s not enough. S’like a tease. But when I’m not using it, it’s worse, it hurts, I want to die unless I can get it back in. Maverick, I can’t put it down. I can’t.”
Maverick forced his gaze back up to Ice’s face (red, glistening with sweat, eyes scrunched as he bit his lip—God!). “Okay,” he said again. This was a mission, he told himself. A mission like any other. “If you can’t put it down, then I’ll take it from you. I’ll go throw it in the ocean or something.”
“Do it,” Ice grunted.
Maverick took a breath. From this close range, he couldn’t help but notice all the details he hadn’t been able to see from across the room: the opened tube of lube lying on the sheets near Ice’s hips, and the slick sheen on the dildo proving Ice had used it; the way Ice bit his lip as he fucked himself; the curve of his bare ass; the dildo itself, on the thick side of average as dick-sizes went, stretching Ice’s hole open as it slide in and out, in and out, in and out—
Professionalism, Maverick reminded himself. “Okay, I’m gonna grab it,” he announced, and then immediately thought better of it. “Wait, did it start as soon as you touched it?” A vision flashed through his mind of himself, yanking the dildo away from Ice, only to end up in the grips of whatever compulsion Ice was experiencing: flat on his own back, fucking himself open as Ice watched…
“No,” Ice gasped. “Not till I—not till I put it in.”
Which meant that he had taken it from the outpost deliberately, meaning to use it on himself, that it wasn’t just a compulsion that had led him to bring it back to the cabin. That he’d slid it into himself of his own free will, even if he’d planned to be done long before Maverick returned. It meant that Ice liked to be fucked, at least with silicone (or whatever fancy material the Ancients used for their sex toys).
Maverick swallowed.
“All right,” he said aloud, and leaned over the bed, reaching for the toy. The moment he touched it, it lit up, and an electric tingle raced up through his arm.
Beneath him, Iceman gasped, arching his back. “Shit! Maverick.”
Maverick circled his fingers around it, and tried to pull, though he found himself having a strangely difficult time with it, like the electric buzzing across the surface of the toy was paralyzing his muscles. “Did that hurt you?” he asked.
Iceman laughed, a strangled sound. “Hurt? Uh, no. But it’s. It feels different now. Feels good.”
Maverick swallowed again, his throat as dry as if he’d been up in an F-14 for hours with no chance to drink. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe this is what you’re supposed to do with it.”
“Have sex with the sex toy?” Iceman gritted out through his teeth. “No shit.”
“I could help you,” Maverick offered, trying to keep his voice casual. Just helping a teammate, he tried to convey, definitely nothing he’d ever fantasized about after catching a glimpse of Ice’s ass in the locker room at Miramar…
“You’d better,” Ice snapped, and then winced, making eye contact with Maverick for the first time in several minutes. “No, sorry, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. We can figure something else out.”
Figuring this was probably not a good time to explain why the ‘if you don’t want to’ part of that sentence was perhaps not entirely true, Maverick decided to forgo a verbal response, and gripped the dildo harder, this time pushing it gently into Ice’s body rather than trying to pull it out. It went easily, but after a few seconds, the electric feeling sparked along Maverick’s skin, and he pulled his hand back reflexively, only for his muscles to lock into place. It was like the toy was guiding him, he realized—in and out, in and out, as Iceman moaned, his eyes scrunching shut and his usually perfectly-coiffed hair flopping sweatily across his forehead as Maverick fucked him with the toy.
“Still feels good?” Maverick asked, and was embarrassed by the breathlessness of his own voice, but Ice didn’t seem to care, his head bobbing up and down in a jerky nod. Now that Maverick was getting used to it, the push and pull of the toy felt less like an electric shock and more like the waves of the ocean, a rhythm sweeping him along.
“Mitchell,” Ice gasped. And then, his hips thrusting up more urgently: “Maverick.”
Maverick had never watched another man orgasm before. Not outside of fantasies, and no fantasy could match the sight of Ice’s expression—for once, entirely unguarded as he collapsed back onto the bed.
The dildo slid out of Ice. Averting his eyes from Ice’s face, Maverick looked at it, at the moisture streaking the glassy blue-ish surface. Though it had the same aesthetic as any other Ancient artifact he’d ever seen, it was also anatomically correct enough that there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was.
“We are never,” Ice said, “ever talking about this again. You understand that, Mitchell? This never happened.”
Maverick looked at him. Ice had yanked the blankets on the bed to cover himself up to his shoulders, and the momentary vulnerability Maverick had seen earlier had left his face in favor of a haughty mask that couldn’t quite cover the flush still in his cheeks.
“Okay,” Maverick said. And he should have left it there, he knew he should have, but his erection was pressing against the inside of his pants, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the look in Ice’s eyes when he’d gasped Maverick’s name. “Or,” he said, against his better judgment. “Or. We could test it again. For scientific purposes.” Ice opened his mouth, but Maverick cut him off. “Test it on me,” he clarified quickly. “You know, make things even.”
Ice’s mouth closed, and he eyed Maverick consideringly for a long moment as Maverick’s cheeks heated under his scrutiny. “You want me to use it on you,” Ice drawled, eventually. “For science?”
“And archaeology,” Maverick added, with as much confidence in his voice as he could muster. “We’re learning things about the Ancients that I’m pretty sure not even Charlie knows about.”
Iceman’s eyes flicked to the dildo, then to Maverick, then back to the dildo. “Well,” he said. “When you put it that way…”
In the spirit of scientific exploration, they did test it again—several times, on each of them. And despite Iceman’s usual meticulousness, none of their results ended up in the mission report.