Chapter Text
MAVERICK
I want it back.
CHARLIE
What?
MAVERICK
Yesterday. I want him in there. Here.
Maverick goes to sleep on July 30th and does not wake up on July 31st.
This isn’t to say that he does not wake up at all. It can’t be said: “Maverick does not wake up.” He does wake up, but not on July 31st. He wakes up to the sound of his radio alarm clock — Whitney Houston, significantly different from yesterday morning’s Pet Shop Boys. Of course by yesterday it is meant July 28th. July 30th, by all accounts, should be yesterday, but as it stands, July 30th is not yesterday. July 30th is not even today.
Maverick does not realize any of this yet. He, for several blissful moments, lies in bed, still drifting on the dream-fog that weighs down your limbs when you awaken.
Whitney Houston again? The clouds in his skull begin to clear, and he rubs at his eyes. Not complaining.
And the day — July 29th, two-days-ago-yesterday-today — has started (again), and Maverick does not realize a thing.
It begins with Goose. As most everything does.
There’s a knock on the door that leads to the courtyard. Maverick, instinctively, feels a lump in his throat. Goose would knock on that door, he thinks — because he is not yet capable of having an experience he can’t tie back to his friend. Everything has Goose’s fingerprints on it. Maverick presses his face into the pillow and yells out a muffled, “Who is it?”
In lieu of an answer, the person lets themselves in. Maverick’s back is to the door; he doesn’t see who it is. He hears the door close behind them with a soft click. Then he hears: “You sleep well?”
A power surge of something rushes his chest. He sits upright like someone’s lit a firecracker under him.
Goose, casual as ever, is leaning against the door with a forlorn look on his face. His very much alive face — attached to a very much alive body, with a chest that moves.
“Oh my God,” Maverick says, and then he fights an urge to throw up in the trash can. The temporal abnormality has caught up with him. But he is an educated man, and he knows things like ghosts and time travel and necromancy are quite impossible. So his neurons and his synapses — in the fraction of a second — make a decision. “I dreamed you died.”
At some level, perhaps his brain knows that the events of July 29th (the first round) and July 30th were no dream. But if it does, it has buried the knowledge very, very deep.
“Not dead.” Goose pushes himself off of the door and strolls over to the bed. “Promise.”
Maverick knows: Goose is alive. At this moment, Goose is alive, and if Goose is alive at this moment, then he could never have been dead for any moment. Maverick knows: Goose is alive. Goose never died.
He takes a shaky breath and throws his arms around Goose anyway, because God if it didn’t feel so damned real.
“Hey now,” Goose says, surprised into Maverick’s ear.
“You were dead.” Maverick swallows the tide of emotion. Within his chest, his panic-breaths are bugs that fill his lungs. “It felt real. You… There was a problem with the plane. With the hop…”
But the details are already growing fuzzier, and he concedes, pulling away. Goose looks down at him with concern.
“There’s not gonna be a problem with the hop.” Goose ruffles Maverick’s hair. His hand is warm, heavy. It weighs Maverick down to Earth.
Maverick huffs. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
But it comes to pass that several hours later, three planes are up in the air, and all Maverick can see through tunnel vision is Jester’s A-4. Sweat beads at his hairline, under his helmet; he feels it trickle down his face.
“I’m off,” Ice crackles over the radio. “Shit.”
Maverick almost gets a weird sense of déjà vu. It looms behind him: something he does not see, nor sense, necessarily, but he knows is there nonetheless. Walking home in a dark city and having your blood cool inside your veins. Someone is following you in the shadows. They make no noise, but they exist, and if you are not careful they will pounce.
As before, this runs through Maverick’s head in an instant. An instant is all the time it takes for Ice’s jet wash to choke the starboard engine of Maverick’s Tomcat and induce a flat spin.
Goose begins to shout. Maverick begins to shout a split second later. The first July 29th, there was no delay; Maverick does not know this. It is another minuscule difference that drifts down onto the pile. He tries, fruitlessly, to recover from the spin. But meanwhile, Goose is shouting and the déjà vu is only getting worse.
As he floats in the Pacific this time, cradling Goose’s broken body, all sounds fade away.
“You used to tell me that we’d run away together…”
Maverick wakes up. It is not July 31st. It is not even July 30th. It is the morning of July 29th, and Whitney Houston’s voice plays from his radio alarm clock. He bolts upright.
Goose is dead, he thinks. He hears Viper say it: “Goose is dead.”
Goose is dead. Goose cannot be dead, but Goose is dead.
Maverick stands on unsteady legs and goes to the door facing the courtyard. When he opens it, Goose stands on the other side with a fist poised to knock.
“I didn’t even knock, how’d you—”
“Goose,” Maverick croaks, and then he passes out.
He awakens to Goose’s face inches away from his own. “Thank God,” says Goose, leaning back on his haunches. “I thought you were dead.”
Maverick closes his eyes again. A thundering symphony is exploding against the inside of his skull. Once again, the temporal abnormality is having its way. Brains are not designed to be yanked back and forth through time. Maverick’s, in particular, is suffering. He opens his eyes and sits up. “I thought you were dead.”
Goose looks down at himself. “I’m not,” he says at last, eyes wide and earnest. “Are you?”
“No.”
“Good.” Goose rests a hand on Maverick’s knee. His eyebrows knit together in a deep furrow. “Now, care to tell me what in the Sam Hill that fainting business was all about? You had me about ready to call the doctor on you, Pete. I’ve never seen you do a thing like that before.”
The incessant ache in Maverick’s skull grows angrier. He avoids eye contact. “I don’t feel good. I can’t fly today.”
Goose could say: But we’re two weeks ‘til graduation! Goose could say: Are you sure? Goose could say: I don’t think Viper would let you skip.
But Goose is Goose, and as he helps Maverick up, he says: “Aw, honey.”
Maverick leans into him. Miraculously, the pain in his head ebbs out and disappears entirely. He gulps back whatever fool thing he was about to say before he can say it. On his back, Goose’s hand is white-hot, heavy as iron.
Dreams do not stay this long in a person’s head. Maverick knows this. He knows that as the day goes on, their minute details will flake away until all that remains is a skeleton. But he can still feel the weight of Goose’s body in his arms. The shouts — Altitude eight thousand, seven thousand! — echo within him, and he remembers the sickening quiver in his heart, the cold that swallowed his skin like it was never going to leave.
“Why don’t you eat something first? Then we can see how you feel,” says Goose.
Maverick lets himself be led to the small table in the kitchen. “I don’t want to fly. I just don’t want to fly.”
“Maverick Mitchell doesn’t want to fly?” Goose pours a bowl of corn flakes and sticks a spoon in it. He only puts a little bit of milk — just the way Maverick prefers, because the cereal would get soggy otherwise. “Well, now I’m real concerned. What happened? What’s got you all messed up?”
For a long time, Maverick doesn’t say anything. He just takes slow bites of the cereal until the churning in his stomach calms down enough for him to think straight. “I dreamed you died,” he tells Goose, “twice.”
“Twice?”
“One after the other. Same way both times.” Maverick puts the spoon down. With mild bemusement, he notes the red marks on his palm where he had been gripping the handle like his life depended on it.
Goose hums and sits down. “It spooked you, huh?” His voice is gentle. Far gentler than Maverick deserves.
The clarity in which Maverick sees the events happen is like an old movie. Fuzzy, yet unmistakably real. It cannot be real, and he knows this, but it is real all the same: Iceman’s jet wash chokes the engine. They go into a flat spin. He asks Goose to punch them out. No — begs. He begs Goose to punch them out, and Goose dies for it.
The awful, awful, searing crunch of Goose impacting the canopy. A scream cut short. A life cut short.
Blood leaking from Goose’s mouth, nose. Maverick’s pleas lost to the roaring of the waves.
“It was just a dream,” says Goose.
Maverick has more reasons to believe him than not.
He ends up in the locker room. All roads lead there.
Later, as he straps himself into the cockpit, he does not know that the script has already been written. He does not know that the path has been worn deep into the ruts of the dirt road. All he knows is that he cannot let Iceman win.
“I’m off. Shit.”
G-force pulls all of the blood from Maverick’s head. He fights to remain conscious, but more than that, he fights to hold on to whatever sense of reason he has left.
The frames from his dream play out with an evil accuracy, and the scared part of his brain finally allows himself to realize that something is very, very wrong. This has happened before. Every molecule of it, every breath — from the blaring of alarms to the blinding blue of the sky that drives nails into his skull.
Maverick Mitchell has arrived.
He clutches Goose’s body tighter. Numb.
A scream cut short. A life cut short. Perhaps, Maverick thinks, the first time was a premonition, and the second was to prepare him. Only this time was the reality. It was his first and final chance to get things
right.
Before he can entertain that thought, everything falls apart.
“You used to tell me that we’d run away together…”
There is something interesting to be said about the vivid mixture of terror and relief that washes over him. With absolute certainty, he knows that Goose is alive. But with equally absolute certainty, he knows that Goose is going to die before the day is over.
Will the day ever really be over?
Maverick runs through the sequence in his head — puts everything in its proper order. It’s more difficult than he anticipated. Each event is cloaked in shadow; not enough to erase it, but just enough to smudge the edges so he really has to think. He wakes up to Whitney, goes to have breakfast. No — no, he wakes up to Whitney, and then Goose shows up at the door.
With the ferocity of a dying man’s last stand, Maverick makes it to the door and pulls it open just as Goose is raising a hand to knock.
“I didn’t even knock, how’d you—”
“I don’t want you to fly with me today.”
Maverick’s eyes are closed, but he can still feel the way Goose flinches. It tears him apart right to his rotten core.
There’s a pause, and then Goose speaks. “What?” There’s something cracked behind his voice. Something hurt. Why wouldn’t there be? By all accounts, Goose and Maverick are partners for good; he has no reason to believe otherwise. “Why not?”
Maverick tries to shut the door. But he’s powerless against Goose — he always has been, even now, even when the weight of three deaths presses down onto his shoulders like he’s Atlas, and all he can hear is a scream and a crunch — so, pathetically, he lets Goose push his way into the room.
“I know that look. Something’s up. What is it?”
“No.” Pathetic.
“Mav,” says Goose, and now he’s got a warning tone. “Talk to me.”
If Maverick opens his mouth again, he will throw up. One of his hands twitches at his side. Electricity crackles across his skin, falls short when it reaches the ends of his fingers with nowhere to go. He aches to reach out and touch Goose. To erase the memory of dead weight in his arms — rewrite it with warmth. “I can’t.”
Goose has the gall to laugh at that. Although it isn’t so much a laugh as it is a scoff. The idea of Maverick holding something back is so preposterous to him that he can’t help but show it. “You can tell me anything, and you know it. C’mon, dear. What’s got your feathers all ruffled?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
Again, Goose scoffs.
“You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
Maverick wilts. He’s so close to Goose. Body heat connects them, and Maverick thinks, Alive. He’s alive. “A few days ago — or, I don’t even know what to call it. A few days ago… I woke up on July 29th, and you died.”
Silence. Goose swallows. One hand comes up, palms the back of his neck. “What do you mean I—”
“It was my fault. The next day happened like normal, but when I went to sleep, I woke up on July 29th. Again.” His eyes burn; how long has he gone without blinking? He forces himself to look up at Goose. “I thought it was a dream, but everything happened the same. You died. And when I went to sleep, I woke up on July 29th.”
Goose is quiet for a few moments. Then, tentatively, he says, “What happened that time?”
The scream plays on a loop in Maverick’s head. Desperate. Pained, and jagged at the end, getting cut off when Goose’s neck snapped against the canopy. “You died,” he says, “again,” and with an angry swipe at his eyes he realizes he’s crying.
“Jeez.” Goose puts an arm around Maverick’s hips and leads him over to the bed, where they both sit down. “How many times did you say this happened?”
“Three so far. This is… this is the fourth.” Maverick presses the heels of his hands to his face — tries to quell his choking breaths. He can’t break down like this. Not now, and not in front of Goose. Not when Goose is set to die in less than four hours.
Whitney Houston is still crooning from the alarm clock. There’s a click, and then it stops, and Goose’s hand returns to Maverick’s side. “How do I die?”
The screams in Maverick’s head grow louder until they’re deafening. He digs his fingers into his skin in an attempt to make the noise stop. It doesn’t work. “We’re flying,” he says. “Hop 31. We’re up against Ice. He cuts me off. I’m following him, and when he pulls away, we get caught in his jet wash. We go into a flat spin.”
He can feel the drop in his stomach, feel the way his intestines get all knotted up and then unravel. He feels the control panel against his face and tastes the blood from his bitten lip. It is not as if these events have happened to him for the past three days. It is as if these events, these sensations, are all laid out in a neat row — simultaneous with the present moment. As if somehow they never stopped happening.
“We eject, but the canopy doesn’t get out of the way in time, and you—” Maverick gulps down bile. “You break your neck.”
More silence. Were it not for the sound of Goose’s breathing and the weight of his hand, Maverick would feel alone in this room.
“You believe me, right?”
“I can tell when you’re fucking with me,” Goose says at last. “So unless you suddenly got real good at lying overnight, I think you’re telling the truth.”
Tension seeps out of Maverick’s body like air from a flat tire. He sags against Goose. “I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know why this is happening. Feel like I’m going crazy.”
“You’re not goin’ crazy.” Goose rubs up and down Maverick’s arm. “You wanna know what I think? I think you’re stressed to the nines and your brain’s looking for some way to process it all.”
“Process it all?!” Maverick moans, launching himself to his feet. “I thought you said you believed me! I’m not making this up!”
Goose holds up his hands — placating. “I do. I do, I believe you dreamed three days worth of memories. But Mav, I’m just trying to think of the most logical explanation here. You’re talking about time travel. That stuff just doesn’t happen in real life.”
“I know that,” Maverick mumbles. “Don’t you think I know that? But it feels… God, it feels so real. I knew you were gonna be at the door before you even knocked. I knew Whitney Houston was gonna be playing on the radio.”
With a sigh, Goose stands, and wraps Maverick in a hug. “Tell you what,” he says against his hair. “Why don’t you walk me through how you think this day is gonna go, and we’ll just see how it plays out? That way, if you’re wrong, you’ll know I’m not gonna die.”
It’s Maverick’s turn to scoff. “Yeah? What if I’m right?”
“If you’re right, I’ll turn you over to the Feds, and they’ll send you to Area 51 so they can study the first human who ever traveled through time,” says Goose. He sounds deathly serious.
Maverick frowns up at him, and receives a hair tousle in return, which he ducks away from.
“Love you, honey.”
Despite himself, Maverick smiles. It’s only a little bit forced. “Love you too, dear.”
They grab breakfast from the vending machine in the common area to avoid the early morning chaos of the mess hall. Goose picks a granola bar; some crumbs get stuck in his mustache. Staring at them, Maverick is lost. Dead people can’t get crumbs stuck in their mustaches. Dead people can’t do anything except sit and rot.
“Sundown comes in next,” Maverick whispers.
“Mmm.” Goose’s mouth is full of granola bar. He swallows, and motions at the unopened packet of crackers in Maverick’s lap. “You gonna eat that?”
Maverick shakes his head. “Not hungry.”
So Goose, taking a hint that Maverick isn’t even sure he gave, snatches the crackers and happily starts to chow down. Maverick can’t find it in him to be irritated. All he can think is: Only living people — real, breathing, full-of-life people — can do things like use a vending machine and steal crackers and get crumbs stuck in their mustaches.
Sundown strolls into the lounge. As he approaches the vending machine, Maverick hisses to Goose, “It eats his dollar.”
Intrigued, Goose watches. Sundown feeds a dollar bill into the machine and makes his selection. The machine whirs, beeps, and falls silent — Sundown’s dollar firmly in its belly, no food in the tray.
“I mean,” says Goose, voice low. “It’s a finicky machine…”
Sundown kicks the base of it.
“It worked for us.” Maverick feels the gnawing pit of hunger open up in his stomach, and at once he wishes that he had eaten the crackers. “Look. Chipper’s got a dollar. It won’t even take his.”
Sure enough, the machine spits out Chipper’s dollar immediately. Chipper smooths it out and retries; it still won’t work. Now both men are cursing at the machine and leaving to go find another one.
Goose tips his head up. “I see.”
“Just watch,” says Maverick.
A few seconds tick by. Then, clunk. Sundown’s bag of trail mix falls into the receptacle.
Goose’s lips are parted. He doesn’t look away from the vending machine, or the wire coil that slowly pushes a new bag of trail mix into the empty spot. The crumb in his mustache chooses this moment to fall out. It would be comedic if Maverick didn’t currently feel like throwing up.
“Sundown, your food’s here,” he hollers towards the hall. There’s a twisting deep inside his guts. Cold. Fear. He’s too aware of the watch looped around his wrist, of the fact that Goose is breathing borrowed air.
“Please tell me that you’ve become a master liar and this is all your idea of a joke.”
Maverick cannot bring himself to smile. “I’m sorry.”
Shaking his head, Goose groans. “I just don’t see how….”
“I know.”
“It’s not real.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to die.”
Maverick’s mouth tastes acrid. He picks at the peeling leather on the armrest. The scream is so loud, so loud and so terrified, and it scrapes the walls of his ears. “I don’t want you to,” he says. A sob threatens to push its way out of his chest; he swallows it down, please, God, breathes through it, shuts his eyes until it passes.
“It’s gonna be okay.” Goose nods, maybe to himself, because his gaze is trained on the vending machine still.
“Yeah,” says Maverick. It leaves his mouth in a croak.
Goose’s breaths are heavy. The tail ends tremble, like he’s running out of energy to hold himself together. “What… next?” He starts to bounce his leg — shakes the couch with the force. Dead people can’t shake couches. Dead people can’t ask questions. Goose isn’t dead. So far, Goose isn’t dead. “Before the, the crash. What else?”
Suddenly, all Maverick wants to do is hug him.
(Dead people can be hugged. Maverick knows this, because he hugged Goose to his chest as they floated in the water. Goose had been dead then. Holding a dead person feels different than holding a living person, and Goose had felt very, very dead.)
“We get in our flight suits. Hollywood’s zipper gets stuck, and he bitches about it.”
A flight suit is what Goose died in. He will get in the flight suit, and never get out again. Maverick’s chest hitches and he leans back against the couch as phantom water laps at his sides.
“He’s always bitching,” says Goose, offhand.
“He starts telling Wolfman about some girl he was with last night. About how— she had a thing for the flight suit, and…” Maverick frowns. He couldn’t forget if he tried. Each loop is as clear to him as if it had happened moments ago, such is the way of these things. “She wouldn’t stop playing with the zippers.”
Goose makes a face. “Weird.”
“Gross.”
“He coulda told you this before. Maybe you dreamed about it and it screwed with you.”
Maverick’s eyes close. He listens to the oceanic rhythm of Goose’s breathing. “Wolfman puts him in a headlock and gives him a noogie. And that’s when Jester comes in and tells them to knock it the hell off and get to the runway.”
“Just sounds like regular Wolf and Wood to me.” Goose’s tone is light, and to his credit, it would sound normal to just about any listener. But Maverick is not any listener. Maverick has known Goose for thirteen years, and he hears fear.
“Come on, Goose,” whispers Maverick. “That specific?”
Instead of answering, Goose rises. The couch squeaks as he stands up, and Maverick sinks further into it, like Goose was the only thing keeping him afloat. “Let’s just get ready.”
Not forty minutes later, it happens. The threads of time merge into a braid once more.
“She was kinky for flight suits,” Hollywood brags, hoisting the straps of his over his shoulders.
Goose perks up at his locker. His hand freezes from where it’s halfway inside, rooting around for one thing or another, and Maverick notices the slightest twitch of his mustache. Almost imperceptible. Not obvious to anyone unless they’re searching for it. And Maverick — Maverick is searching for it.
“You know, she’d never seen so many zippers. At least not on any of her nursing scrubs. She played with them all night.” Hollywood unzips the zipper on his chest and then zips it again as if to demonstrate.
Maverick’s eyes are trained on Goose. Subtly, so as not to arouse suspicion, but glued nonetheless.
Goose glances at him, unease all over his usually smiling face. It’s foreign. Maverick also detects confusion, and doesn’t blame him; on what planet would this ever make sense?
“What’d you do?” Wolfman asks.
At that, Hollywood laughs. “Shit, I was so tired by then, I just went to sleep ‘til she found the right zipper!”
The men both giggle. Out of nowhere — except it is not out of nowhere, not really; it has been worn deep into the rut of things and no matter how little a person is aware of the fact, they will fall right into it — Wolfman lunges and gets his arm around Hollywood’s neck.
“You bastard!” cries Hollywood, trying to get away to no avail.
“Yeah, I’m the bastard.” Wolfman grinds his knuckles into his friend’s scalp. “I hope your dick falls off!”
They are interrupted by Jester’s sharp shout from the other side of the room. “Knock it off, gentlemen. Get your butts to the runway before I drag you there myself.”
Wolf and Wood fall over themselves trying to get apart. “Yes, sir,” they’re saying, and “Sorry, sir.” As they leave, they continue to bicker; Hollywood blaming Wolfman and Wolfman blaming Hollywood.
Maverick forces down the lump in his throat. The hands on the clock, no matter how much he wills them to, do not stop moving.
Abruptly, Goose slams his locker door. His hands quiver. One of them flies to the cross necklace around his neck; he moves his lips silently, eyes tipped up to the tiled ceiling, and his mustache ruffles with every uneven breath.
“Goose,” Maverick starts, and can’t think of how to finish it. On some level, he understands that he has just lost Goose already. They aren’t even up in the air yet — but Goose is far gone. Maverick licks his lips and stares helplessly.
Goose sinks down onto the bench. A pallor has fallen over his face, turning him into a ghost.
“I’m sorry.” Maverick cannot say it enough. “It’s… It’s gonna be okay.”
Slider adjusts the straps on his flight suit. “You scared to face us, Mother Goose?”
In response, Goose hunches, turtling into himself. His shoulders hike up by his ears. He’s still moving his lips — reciting something that Maverick can’t make out.
Slider’s face pinches into a frown. He softens his voice. “Hey, you okay, man?”
“He’s fine.” Maverick attempts to herd Slider towards the door, but he isn’t tall enough to be intimidating. “Can you just— Can you give us some space, please? He’s fine. I need to talk to him. I’ll see you out there.”
“He’s—”
“Go on and kick everyone’s asses,” says Maverick, exasperatedly. “Just get outta here. We’ll be out in a minute. Tell Jester I’m taking a piss. Okay?”
Slider blinks shocked. Maverick can almost hear the gears turning in his head. At last he relents. “...Yeah. Whatever. See you out there.”
Maverick watches him like a hawk to make sure he’s really gone. As soon as he can, he whirls around to face Goose.
Goose, who has shot to his feet and is staggering towards Maverick, slack-jawed.
“Are—” Maverick tries, but then Goose’s hand is around his wrist and he’s being shoved forward until his back bumps against the lockers. A choking pulse starts hammering in his throat. Of all the ways Goose could shove me against the lockers, he thinks wildly, tamping down the heat that rises in his stomach.
“Tell me I’m not gonna die.”
Goose’s breaths are warm against Maverick’s face. They smell like the apple-cinnamon granola bar he scarfed down for breakfast. The fear of a thousand lifetimes is swimming in his gaze, and his grip tightens on Maverick’s wrist, pleading.
Maverick closes his eyes. Dares himself to imagine a flight where nothing goes wrong and they land safely on the runway with enough points to earn the trophy. But inevitably it gets poisoned — a scream seeps in, and a crunch, and his vision is stained with blood. He opens his eyes. “I’m going to protect you.”
Visibly relaxing, Goose exhales. He takes Maverick’s hand in both of his. “You know what’s gonna happen now, right?” he says, nearly confident. “You know what not to do. You can stop it.”
Terror still looms in his gaze. Maverick can’t stop looking at him.
“Yeah,” he lies. “Yeah, I can.”
The past and the present battle valiantly for Maverick’s attention.
He grips the flight stick, sweating bullets. Iceman has cut him off again. He knows it’s foolish, but a kernel of him had hoped that maybe things would begin differently this time.
“This is it, Mav,” Goose calls from behind him. His voice is wrenched up high and tight. Even through the deafening roar of the engine, Maverick can sense cracks of fear forming underneath Goose’s surface, and he wonders what is worse: Goose not trusting him, or Goose trusting him?
“Come on, come on,” he snaps. His tongue tastes bitter. “Jesus Christ, Ice, take the shot.”
This is the fourth time he has said these words. In a wind tunnel of uncertainty, it provides a balm of relief to fall back on the script. That’s all he really is: an actor, performing. None of this is real. It is just a puppet show that goes around and around until they come apart at the seams.
Goose’s words rise above the noise: “Be careful.”
“I am,” Maverick assures him. The plane holds steady.
“Please, God.” Goose is talking, but Maverick doesn’t know to whom. “Please, God.”
Iceman says he’s too close for missiles. Iceman switches to guns. Iceman remains in Maverick’s way, just like the yesterdays that weren’t yesterday, and the air in the cockpit grows heavy.
Goose’s pleas worm into Maverick’s chest: “I can’t die, Mav, I’ve got a family.”
“I know.”
“I gotta see Bradley grow up. I gotta be there for him.”
“I know, Goose, I know. You will.” Maverick’s lips form the words, but it sounds like a lie, even to his own ears. On the flight stick, his hands slip. Why isn’t he wearing gloves? Four repeats, and he can’t even think to wear gloves?
Iceman still doesn’t move. He isn’t even blocking Maverick — from this angle, Maverick could easily take the shot, score the point, get the whole thing over with. It’s cruel. Tantalizing. More than anything, though, Maverick is furious that Iceman doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand what it’s like to have someone die in your arms. He doesn’t understand why making it through this hop is the most important thing in Maverick’s universe.
“I need another twenty seconds, then I’ve got it!” Ice calls.
Twenty seconds. Twenty seconds until the jet wash, until the flat spin. Twenty seconds until the scream that Maverick will never forget.
Goose is reaching forward and gripping Maverick’s seat. His hand (gloved, because he has always been smarter than Maverick) is locked onto the back, in a death grip.
Not death. Not yet.
The worst part — the evil part — is that Maverick remembers Goose’s hand in death more than he remembers it in life. Limp, unmoving, clutched in his own. He had peeled off one glove and tossed it in the bottom of the raft so he could grasp Goose’s still-warm fingers. As if it would make any difference. As if Maverick’s body heat could help at all.
Panic, hot and cloying, fills the cockpit. Maverick can tamp it down — it is his fourth go-round. But Goose chokes on it.
“Please,” he cries again. “Please, Mav.”
Not God anymore. Mav. After everything, he trusts Maverick to save him.
Iceman’s voice crackles over the radio: “Just ten more seconds, then I’ve got him.”
Please, Mav meets the scream echoing in Maverick’s head. Joining forces to torture him eternally. He squints at the controls, blinks away sweat and tears in his eyes.
From the backseat, Goose is gasping. Deep in the throes of a panic attack like Maverick assumes Cougar must have been. A yawning pit opens up at the base of Maverick’s stomach: for the first time in his life, he doesn’t want to be in the air. He would rather be anywhere else. At sea, stuck in a traffic jam, hell, even in line at the DMV. Just let him and Goose get out of this alive, please.
“I’m gonna…” Goose tears off his oxygen mask. “I’m gonna be sick. Forget Iceman, we gotta land this sucker.”
Took the words right out of my mouth, Goose, thinks Maverick.
Over and over in his brain: Please, Mav and the scream. Simultaneous. Neverending. Intermingled with the roar of the engine and the desperate, ragged breaths coming from Goose.
“Five more seconds,” Iceman says.
Goose makes a strangled noise. It adds to the cacophony in Maverick’s head. He can barely hear Ice. Not that he needs to; he knows front and back everything that’s going to come out of Ice’s mouth.
Maverick doesn’t have time to take another breath before—
“I’m off. Shit.”
Everything starts shaking like an earthquake. It shoves Maverick forward, and he bites his tongue with the force of it. The taste of metal fills his mouth as alarms go haywire. “Goose,” he tries, but the breath has been knocked out of his lungs.
“Our father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name…” Goose’s recitation drowns out everything else, somehow. Even though logically it should not be able to. Even though Maverick’s ears are swimming with water, he still hears Goose praying, clear as day.
“Goose!” He claws through the terror. “Goose!”
Goose’s prayer jaggedly cuts off. “Tell me you’ve got it. Tell me you’ve got it!”
“I can’t—”
“Tell me you can control it, Pete!”
An ugly, acrid cry pushes out of Maverick’s throat. He forces the flight stick in every direction, but it won’t work, it won’t. In his head is the scream. The Please, Mav. Dialogue upon dialogue — all clambering on top of each other, overlapping with the noise of the engine and the wailing of the controls. “I’m trying. I’m trying.”
His hands feel sticky-wet with blood, but they’re clean. Still the phantom sensation crawls all over his skin.
“We’re gonna have to eject,” he says, swallowing back his heart.
“No,” moans Goose. “The canopy!”
Maverick is pinned against the control panel, like the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. Was there ever a first time, or has he been experiencing some version of this forever? “I know.”
“We’re at nine thousand feet, Mav, we gotta think of something fast.”
“I know,” Maverick says again. “We— have to eject. It’s the only way. I can’t recover.”
“But—”
“Either we eject, or we drown.”
“I’m gonna die anyway.”
Maverick rams his fist into the control panel hard enough to split the skin on his knuckles. A vise squeezes his chest, his lungs; he inhales through his tears. “I can’t reach the handle, you need to punch us out.”
It isn’t really a response to Goose’s statement. Hell, Maverick doesn’t know how he could respond. It’s probably true and he knows it. The only thing he can do now is hope time resets again so he gets a fifth chance.
“Six thousand!” Goose cries. It breaks away into something that might be a sob. “I won’t remember this, will I?”
“No.” Maverick’s answer is immediate. “You’ll wake up all new.”
Without saying anything else, Goose lunges forward and pulls the ejection handle.
Please, Maverick thinks, in the eternities between seconds. Please. Please.
There’s a scream. Then, a horrible, final crack.
Maverick is crying out for Goose before he even hits the water. The moment his feet break the surface, he’s stretching, reaching out for the fabric of Goose’s parachute — yanking it towards him with one hand as he triggers the raft with the other.
“Goose, oh God, oh God. I’m so sorry. I’m so…”
His face is wet. He can’t tell how much of it is tears and how much of it is water. Some of it might be blood; his forehead smarts where he banged it against the control panel. But it all pales in comparison to Goose.
Goose, whose mouth is slack, lips and mustache painted red. Whose eyes are open.
They were closed the last three times. Maverick knows it better than he knows his own name.
Goose doesn’t make any noise as Maverick hoists him into the raft, but fuck, his eyes are open. Maybe that’s enough.
“Shit,” breathes Maverick. One hand comes up to cup Goose’s cheek. “Goose. Hey. Talk to me.”
No answer. Goose does blink, though, and his lips move like he’s trying to say something. What could he possibly have to say? What do you say to the person who told you they’d protect you and then flew you to your death?
“You’re gonna be fine. Look, SAR will be here soon, okay? I remember… first time around, they got here in fifteen minutes, tops.” Maverick doesn’t know whether or not this is a lie. He remembers every detail up until the ejection, but from the moment of Goose’s death, most everything is a blur. As they floated in the water, time seemed to last for eons. There’s no way Maverick could begin to decipher it.
Still, Goose doesn’t speak. Maverick realizes he can’t. Breaths leave his lips in burbling wheezes, so quiet that they are almost inaudible over the wind. His skin is rapidly cooling. Even through the fog in Maverick’s veins, he knows that spells imminent death.
“I’m so sorry,” he gets out, petting Goose’s face with trembling fingers. “I’ll do it right next time. I swear to you. I swear.”
Goose just stares. One of his pupils, Maverick notices with a distant horror, is bigger than the other one.
“Just go to sleep, Goose, and when you wake up—”
A tremor runs through Maverick’s body. He drops his forehead to Goose’s helmet, tries to ignore the rising nausea. All he can smell is blood.
“When you wake up, you won’t remember any of this. I know what to do this time. I’m not gonna let you die again.”
Goose’s eyelids slip closed.
“You used to tell me that we’d run away together…”
Maverick is out of bed before Whitney can finish the lyric. Every second is precious in more ways than one, and there is absolutely no time to waste. He throws open the door, bounds across the walkway to Goose’s, and knocks.
His knuckles sting. A glance down reveals that the skin is scabbed over. But he doesn’t have time to consider this because—
“Jeez, Mav, you’re loud enough to wake the dead.”
With one hand, Goose rubs at his eyes; the other still clutches the doorknob. It’s not enough to keep him upright as Maverick slams into him with a gasp.
“Whoa! What’s the big idea here, honey?” Goose’s arms come up and loop around Maverick’s torso.
Seconds — precious seconds — tick by, and Maverick spends them inhaling the sleep-warm smell that lingers in Goose’s shirt. All of his synapses have been disrupted. Slowly, with every beat of Goose’s heart, they repair themselves. “Nothing,” he says, finally. “Just… A nightmare. You died.”
The lie rolls off his tongue smooth as anything. Scary good. Goose pulls away, but his hands stay on Maverick’s hips. “Well, I gotta tell ya — that was a real nice way to be woken up.” There’s a dopey smile on his face. It tears Maverick to pieces.
Behind him, Maverick catches sight of Carole and Bradley, still snoozing in bed. The remaining tension in his muscles melts away. He returns his gaze to Goose. “Hey, they’re giving out chocolate muffins in the lounge. If you hurry, there might be some left. I bet Carole and Brad would love ‘em.”
Another lie. But it’s the only thing he can think of to get Goose out of the room, and fast. This loop will be different. This loop, he has a plan.
“Bradley loves chocolate!” Goose pats the top of Maverick’s head. “Thanks for the hot tip. Hey, I’ll be back before you know it!”
Yeah, Maverick thinks glumly. That’s true in more ways than one.
As soon as Goose is out of sight, Maverick races to the bed. “Carole,” he hisses, shaking her shoulder. “Carole.”
“Mmm?” Her face scrunches up. God, she’s beautiful.
“I need your help.”
Carole opens one eye. When she registers Maverick standing over her, she opens the other one, brows furrowed. “Maverick? Wh… What? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Maverick assures her. Lie number three. He sits down on the bed, careful not to jostle it too much for fear of waking Bradley. “Goose is getting breakfast for you guys. I need to talk to you. It’s private.”
There’s a pervasive ache inside his head. His brain is fighting hard to sort through four timelines — to organize them neatly, and not get them mixed up with each other. To keep the fifth one elevated and prioritized so Maverick can have an easy time following it.
Carole sits up a little. Her curls are mussed; she’s wearing one of Goose’s t-shirts. “Well, alright. I’m always here to listen, Pete. Talk away.”
“I know this will sound… just absolutely insane. But I’ve lived this day before. Four times. I keep going to sleep and when I wake up, it’s today all over again. You need to trust me. Goose is gonna die if I don’t stop it.” As the words leave Maverick’s mouth, derision creeps through his blood. He is so acutely aware of how ridiculous it sounds. None of this should be possible at all. None of this can be possible. Yet somehow, it is.
Carole’s baby blues clear up at once. They’re filled with concern — but Maverick can’t read much further. “Are you pullin’ my leg?”
“I wish,” mutters Maverick.
“Well, what do you mean?” Carole asks, and then rubs a hand down the side of her face with a yawn. “You saying you’ve… what? Time— time traveled?”
“I’m not crazy.” Maverick’s teeth are gritted.
Carole squeezes her eyes shut, pinches the bridge of her nose. “Maverick—”
“Carole, please.”
“Sweetheart… I think you had a nightmare.”
Maverick stands up and paces the room. Any second now and Goose could come back in, and then what? Would Carole blow his cover? Surely not, but there’s something he needs to get from her first. “Tell me a secret.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone before. Just— humor me. Please.”
Carole looks so worried. It kills Maverick that he has made her like this, because it’s the last thing he wanted. He loves her, for God’s sake. He loves her.
She licks her lips and folds her hands in her lap. “Why?”
“So next time… The next loop, you’ll believe me right away.” Maverick kneads his throbbing temples. When he sneaks a glance at the door, it’s still closed. He still has time. Exactly how much time, he isn’t sure — but he doesn’t even have to convince her. This conversation isn’t life or death. It’s a failsafe.
A few strands of hair fall in front of Carole’s face. She tucks them back behind her ear with slender fingers, nails painted salmon. “Honey—”
“I’m serious. You know me, Carole, I wouldn’t ask for this if I didn’t…” Maverick feels the telltale weight of tears threatening to spill down his face. Tears do not help a person’s cause at all, and Maverick knows that, yet he can’t stop himself. Goose’s desperate scream resounds in his consciousness. Pressing hands to his ears does nothing, of course; the sound is internal, sprouting from timelines that only Maverick remembers.
Carole reaches out and touches his wrist. “You’re worrying me something awful,” she says earnestly. “Alright. I’ll tell you.” A look passes over her face — shadowy yet ever poignant. “I was a candy striper in high school. Thought I wanted to be a nurse, but one day, I saw this older gentleman — God, he must have been in his nineties. Code blue. Someone was on top of him, giving him CPR.”
How long does it take to get to the lounge and back from here? Maverick gets the urge to chew on his nails. He hasn’t done that since he was in the sixth grade, when he used to nibble them down to the quick. But now it’s an impulse. He balls his hands into fists instead and focuses on Carole.
“CPR isn’t like it is in the movies. They go real deep.” Carole sniffs, pulling the sheets further up her body. “His ribs snapped like matchsticks, Maverick. It was awful.”
Maverick hears the crack of Goose’s neck breaking against the canopy. He can imagine. “Shit, Carole. I’m so sorry.”
“I walked right down to the front desk and quit.” Carole yawns again. This time it’s longer, but she seems more alert than ever. “Even Goose doesn’t know that story. Honey, are you alright? Really.”
Maverick can sense the burning at the edge of his eyes, and he knows he probably looks two seconds away from breaking down. But that doesn’t matter right now. He got what he needed, and in case he cannot save Goose this time, at least he will be able to get Carole in on everything tomorrow. “I’m fine. Thank you, Carole, really. I promise everything is going to be okay.”
He’s outside and waiting when Goose comes back.
“There weren’t any muffins,” pants Goose, hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath.
Maverick shrugs. “Sorry. Guess they ran out.”
In his head, he makes the mental note that it took Goose five and a half minutes to get there and back. That’s five and a half minutes that Maverick can have alone with Carole on the next loop if he plays his cards right.
But he resolves that he won’t have to. This loop will be the last one.
Goose can’t die in an ejection accident if they don’t go up flying at all.
During pre-flight, Maverick reaches one arm low, out of view of anyone on the ground. The screwdriver he’d slipped up his sleeve pokes against his wrist; he slips it out. He’s got a good grip on it this time — he remembered gloves. But they do nothing to stop his hands from shaking.
His shoulder is on fire as he accesses the wiring of the control panel. Gently, he tugs on one that he knows powers the comms system. It doesn’t budge. Why would it? These jets are tens of millions of dollars, and they can withstand most anything because they have to. Malfunctioning in the air could mean death. Maverick knows that firsthand.
Now, though, he needs to break it. Not irreparably — just enough to make it unusable for the time being so he and Goose can’t go up in the air today.
Down on the ground, Goose circles the plane, performing all the required checks of the external weapons systems like the perfect RIO he is. It isn’t strictly necessary for this flight — it’s just training, and no missiles will be deployed — but it is routine nonetheless.
Maverick tugs harder on the wire. It gives, a little. Sweat stings his eyes. If he’s too harsh, and it can no longer pass as just natural wear and tear, he’ll go on trial for tampering with a Navy aircraft. That could mean prison time. It would mean prison time, no doubt. But he can worry about that later. The most important thing right now is saving Goose.
With a final tug, the wire comes half loose. Some of the coppery ends poke from the sheath from where it has popped out of its slot.
Holding his breath, Maverick ducks down just long enough to grab the screws from where they dropped on the floor. Then he re-affixes the cover. The muscles in his forearm hurt when he’s done, angry at the strain. He tucks the screwdriver back up his sleeve and makes sure it’s secure.
When he attempts to radio the crew chief, he is met with crackly static. Thank God. Can’t fly with a busted comms system.
“Goose!” he calls. “The radio’s shit. I can’t get it to work. Can you come take a look?”
He swaps places with Goose. From the ground, he watches intently as Goose hems and haws and finally deboards. “Peculiar,” says Goose. “I’ll get Jester.”
Jester can’t solve it either. With a glance at his watch, he curses under his breath. “We’re short on time. I’ll get someone to fix it, but I don’t want you men going up in the air like this.”
“We can’t fly today?” Maverick swallows down relief that isn’t even remotely hampered by the look of disappointment on Goose’s face.
But Jester just hardens his gaze. “Not in that jet. In the interest of fairness, I’m going to send you up in a different one. Follow me.”
Shit.
Maverick follows Jester across the tarmac. Trepidation bubbles in his stomach. Perhaps the delay changed things — a shift of a few minutes was all he needed, and they won’t go into a flat spin at all. He narrows his focus until all he’s thinking about is the current timeline. It’s nearly impossible with the way that his mind keeps attempting to shift tracks, but he resists.
Save Goose. That’s the main goal.
Everything else can wait for another day.
Maverick and Goose do not go into a flat spin. In fact, they do not even have the chance.
The jet into which they are ushered is a beauty in all ways except for one: its engines. By pure luck — bad luck — they were improperly maintained. Maybe the mechanic responsible for repairs was overtired and missed a fatal flaw. Maybe there was an error on the maintenance schedule that ended up being overlooked. Maverick will never know.
Happenstance. Really, when all is said and done, everything comes down to happenstance.
“Shit, we got a flameout, Mav!” Goose shouts over the screeching of alarms. “Engine one is out! Engine two is out!”
The original timeline seeps into this one in any way it can, including in Goose’s words.
“Eject!” Maverick says it aloud even though he is the one who is punching them out this time around. His body is not pinned to the control panel by the force of a flat spin, and he has given up on trying to control the plane. He sucks in frantic breaths until he’s sure his lungs will burst. One hand scrabbles for the ejection handle, finds it; he yanks it with a final yell of “Watch the canopy!”
There’s a scream.
But there is no crack. There is no crunch.
No, after the scream, Maverick hears nothing at all.
But he does see the telltale red of Goose’s helmet, still strapped into the falling aircraft as it flames toward the ground.
Maverick is unable to speed up his landing. All he can do is scream himself, and watch:
Watch the plane tilt mid-air. Watch Goose go with it. And watch both of them hit the ground and become engulfed by a ball of flames.