Chapter Text
Maverick is pretty sure he’s dead.
Actually, he’s pretty sure he passed dead about three excruciating head throbs ago and is well on the way to decomposing. He hasn’t felt this bad since his sophomore year of high school, when his cousin Michael threw a party while his parents were away and dared him to drink the jungle juice his friends had made in the upstairs bathtub. He’d woken up the next day in the backyard in nothing but his underwear, which — naturally — had done nothing to endear him to his aunt and uncle once they found him there, puking in the peonies.
Maybe he is too old for this shit now, as Ice would say. Then again, Ice was right beside him and Carole at the bar last night, joining them in keeping their shot glasses full and raising them high to toast Goose’s memory. Thirty years had lessened the pain a little, made the grief less sharp when it hit him out of nowhere, but it still hurt sometimes to look in the mirror and find himself the old man that his best friend never got to be.
He doesn’t feel like the old man he is at the moment — then again, he doesn’t feel much beyond the headache and the nausea and the coating of fuzz on his tongue. And then, there, knocking against his ribs, something else. Regret. Guilt. I wish I could have another day with him, and you wouldn’t understand, Ice, you don’t understand, and the flash of hurt in his husband’s eyes before he left early, leaving Maverick and Carole alone at the table with the last bottle of vodka.
Carole must have gotten him home at some point, Maverick reasons, from where his face is half-buried in his pillow. Funny how even his sheets and his pillow feel unfamiliar when he’s hungover — the fabric is too smooth, less worn from use. It even smells different, and Maverick frowns slightly, confused. Did Ice switch fabric softener brands again?
“Baby.” He reaches out, fumbling blindly for Ice’s shoulder. “Hey. Did you switch fabric softeners?”
“Go back to sleep, Pete,” comes the soft (somewhat irritated) voice, and Maverick’s eyes shoot open, his body tensing up so tightly that he can physically feel his muscles straining from his scalp to his toes.
The pounding of his heart against his ribs is the only thing that’s keeping him from fainting, because that isn’t his husband’s voice. He’s not in bed with his husband. He’s in bed with someone else, a female someone else. He can see a lacy bra on the bedspread, a pair of high heels next to the door, and he’s under the covers in nothing but his underwear, and his chest is heaving and his left arm is tingling like he’s going to have a heart attack.
This can’t be real. He would never. He could never—
“Pete?” The woman turns over to face him, brow furrowed in confusion, and Maverick’s heart stops beating entirely.
“Charlie?”
“Last I checked,” she says, with the same cool amusement she always has when she talks to him. No. Had, not has, because the last time they even spoke — on much better terms than the first time they parted — was on Christmas, and the last time they saw each other in person was at the wedding, at his wedding, and her hair was shorter and she wore horn-rimmed glasses and flirted with Ice’s sister during the reception and she looked a damn sight older than she does now. “What’s the matter? Did you drink too much last night?”
Last night. She can’t have been with him last night — last he checked she was in the Cayman Islands, posting pictures of the ocean on her private Instagram. Or was it the Bahamas? Either way, she can’t be in Nevada, and she sure as hell can’t be in his bed, looking exactly the same as she did when they first met.
Maverick scrambles out of bed, throwing the covers off himself and taking off down the hall, ignoring Charlie’s confused Where are you going? before skidding to a halt in the bathroom. Charlie’s bathroom. This is Charlie’s house, he knows that now. He splashes cold water on his face from the sink, squeezes his eyes shut and reopens them, but nothing changes.
His reflection stares back at him from the mirror, and his stomach gives a painful lurch. Like Charlie, he’s younger. His face is fuller, his hair darker and shorter. The laugh lines around his eyes are gone, as are the creases between his eyebrows. Only his eyes are the same. He hangs onto the sink, nails digging into the porcelain so his legs won’t give out from under him. He’s young again. He’s young just like Charlie is, and this is Charlie’s bathroom, and the last time he and Charlie were young and in the same house was…
No. No, this isn’t real. This can’t be happening.
Maverick throws the bathroom door open and tears down the hall again, knocking past Charlie (wrapped in the silk bathrobe he remembers all too well) on his way to the front door. It’s all just the same as he remembers; the floor to ceiling windows, the hardwood floors, the too-clean furniture and mahogany dining table, the kitchen sink empty of all but two wine glasses.
He pulls the door open and staggers outside, his legs trembling, and then trembling even more as he takes in the sights. He can smell the ocean from the front porch, can see the palm trees swaying in the early morning sun and the civilians with big hair and neon shorts jogging by. His motorcycle’s parked on the driveway — his old motorcycle. He crashed that bike fifteen years ago, tore his ACL and got road rash all over his back and stomach and ass in the process. Couldn’t fly for almost a year. Ice bought him a new bike for his fortieth birthday, and he’d carved I + M in a little heart on the fuel tank.
Terrified, Maverick grabs the newspaper off the welcome mat and tears the thread off, tearing it open. There’s a story about the nuclear reactor that exploded in Ukraine in April, and another about the death of Ted Lyons. Ronald Reagan is the president of the United States, the Cubs beat the Dodgers last night 9-4, and Aliens is the number one movie in America.
The newspaper is the San Diego Union. The date is July 26, 1986.
Maverick clamps a hand over his mouth and barely makes it back in the house in time to fall to his knees and vomit into the toilet. Bile burns the back of his throat; his stomach clenches and heaves painfully as he tries to make sense of the impossible. He squeezes his eyes shut again, trying to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth, wishing Ice was there to put a cool hand on the back of his neck and soothe him through this.
Ice. God.
“I think you should go home,” Charlie says, from behind him. He can’t see her, but she sounds like she’s wrinkling her nose. “You look awful.”
Maverick gulps down air, almost coughs half of it back up. “You know,” he rasps, “I think that might be a good idea.”
Charlie doesn’t let him leave until he downs a bottle of water and can walk in a straight line without losing his balance — which, honestly, is a lot more than he expected from her. The her of 1986, anyway, because the her of 2016 isn’t all bad, now that they’re…well, not friends, exactly. Civil. The kind of civil where they exchange texts on birthdays and holidays and send each other Pinterest moodboards and interesting articles on Facebook. He misses that Charlie.
You’ll see her again in thirty years, whispers a snide voice in the back of his mind, and Maverick’s heart starts pounding again so badly that he almost crashes his bike into a palm tree.
This isn’t real. It can’t be real. It’s all a dream — a very intense, vivid dream. Any minute now he’s going to wake up at home, in Nevada, with his husband, in the body of his fifty-four year old self, and blame this hallucination all on his hangover and Carole’s insistence on finishing the bottle of Grey Goose they’d bought. Thirty years ago he was a stupid, stubborn kid determined to prove himself to the world if it killed him, and ended up getting his best friend killed instead; he’s not—
I wish I could have another day with him.
Maverick hits the brakes.
The motorcycle skids to a screeching halt in the middle of the (thankfully empty) street, nearly sending him flying over the handlebars and onto somebody’s front lawn. He plants both feet on the road automatically, his heart racing at a hundred miles an hour and his mind clear for the first time since he woke up in Charlie’s bed with a headache the size of Reno.
July 26, 1986. The twenty-sixth.
Maverick shoves the clutch lever down and roars off down the street, the houses (and the stop signs) passing by in a blur of color. He’s off the bike the second it comes to a complete stop — he might be losing his mind, but the last thing he needs is to end up in a motorcycle accident — and sprints towards the front door. He’s debating whether or not he should stop to knock or just use his shoulder as a battering ram, but the door swings open before he can do either, and a tiny blond blur slams into him and hugs him tightly around the knees.
“Uncle Mav! Uncle Mav!”
Bradley’s grinning up at him. There’s syrup smeared on the corners of his mouth, a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, and he’s clutching the same model airplane that he played with until he was seven and it broke on an ‘underwater expedition’ at a swim lesson. The same model airplane that Maverick bought him thirty years ago.
Maverick’s breath is coming in short, sharp gasps, his chest heaving with the effort to draw enough air into his constricted lungs, and his ears are starting to ring. Is this a side effect of time travel? Back to the Future never mentioned this.
“Uncle Mav?” Bradley’s grin starts to fade, and he tilts his head back, frowning. He tilts his head back. Because Maverick is taller than him. Maverick hasn’t been taller than Bradley since Bradley turned fourteen and grew six inches and also the beginnings of the mustache he still has now. But here Maverick is, taller than Bradley, because it’s July 26, 1986 and his nephew is four years old. “You look funny.”
“C’mere, little buddy, give him a minute to breathe,” and Maverick’s eyes slide back up and over to the door, to the source of the all too familiar laugh. He feels like he’s moving underwater as his eyes finally land on the man leaning against the doorframe, grinning fondly at him. Bradley runs back over to his father, who hoists him up and balances him on his hip. “Hey, Mav. We’ve got leftover pancakes inside if you want some — Carole’s cooking, not mine, so don’t worry.”
Blood is rushing in his ears, a white noise that reminds him all too well of the days he spent in the hospital and in the air afterward, knowing no matter what anybody told him that it was all his fault, that Goose’s blood was on his hands. Of the days that hadn’t actually happened yet.
“Mav?” Goose frowns, concerned, and takes a step forward. “Hey, you okay?”
It’s the last thing Maverick remembers hearing before the ground rushes up to meet him, and everything goes dark.
“Is Uncle Mav gonna be okay?”
“Sure he is, baby. He’s just not feeling good right now, it happens to everybody.”
“Honey, get me another pillow, will you? I think he’s coming around...”
Maverick’s eyes shoot open and he shoots straight up — and knocks his head against someone else’s, sending him right back onto the pile of pillows with a groan. “Ow.”
“You’re telling me,” Goose groans, rubbing his hand against his forehead. Bradley’s got his hands over his mouth, and Carole looks like she’s torn between laughing and cooing in sympathy. “Jesus, Mav. I think you might’ve knocked some of my brains loose.”
“Aww, come here.” Carole presses a kiss to his forehead, and then to Maverick’s. Maverick can’t make himself move to stop her. He can barely make himself keep breathing. “Well, both of you seem right as rain to me. Bradley, come on, let’s see if we can find Uncle Mav some ginger ale and crackers.”
“Okay!”
Bradley scrambles off the other end of the couch and leads Carole into the kitchen, leaving Maverick alone with Goose. With Goose. For the last thirty years, he’d have given up a limb for another moment like this, another conversation with his best friend, the chance to share a joke or a smile with him, and now he’s too busy launching himself forward and sobbing into Goose’s shoulder to appreciate any of it.
“Hey.” Goose’s voice is soothing, as steady as his hand on Maverick’s back, but Maverick can hear the undercurrent of what the fuck is going on all too clearly. A hysterical, watery laugh tears free, because God, can he relate. “Hey, Mav, it’s okay. You’re okay.”
“You’re okay,” Maverick tries to say, but it gets lost in an explosive sob, and he clutches the back of Goose’s shirt tightly to keep his balance, buries his face in the fabric. Jesus, he forgot all about Goose’s fucking Hawaiian shirts, anything that matched Carole’s brightly colored wardrobe. And Goose’s aftershave — not Old Spice but Aqua Velva, the brand coming back to him like he’d never forgotten at all. The years had gone on and on and he’d fucking forgotten everything that made Goose who he was. Who he had been. “God. I’m so sorry, Goose. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Why? What do you have to be sorry for?”
Everything. He chokes on another sob. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Sure I would,” Goose says. “Come on, try me.”
You died thirty years and three days ago and it’s all my fault. I couldn’t take my eyes off the prize and get my head out of the clouds until I lost you and I’ve regretted it ever since. You trusted me to keep you safe up there and I couldn’t, you died because of me and your son grew up without you, I’m so sorry, Goose, I’m so sorry, I wish to God I could have saved you, I wish this was real, I—
But this is exactly what he’d wished for, isn’t it?
The thought stills his heart, pauses the flow of tears. Yes. A second chance, another day with Goose, wished for desperately in the parking lot of a bar thirty years from now. The jury’s still out on how real this all is — it’s got to be a dream, a hallucination brought on by all that vodka — but he can enjoy it before everything goes back to normal.
Yeah. A dream. He can work with that.
(Admittedly, Maverick feels a little pang of dismay that Ice isn’t right beside him to experience this hallucination, but — well. One miracle at a time. He figures he can manifest his husband into existence later.)
“Mav?”
“Sorry.” Maverick’s voice is hoarse, and he clears his throat, tries for a wry laugh as he releases Goose’s shirt and draws back to look at him properly. The concern has spread its way across Goose’s entire face like a bad sunburn. Maverick fights the urge to touch Goose’s cheek, his mustache, just to ground himself a little more. “Sorry, I just…sorry.”
Ice would have said something like yeah, you’ve mentioned, wry but worried. Goose just waits, like he knows Maverick will tell him whenever he’s ready. At this moment, Maverick doesn’t know which he appreciates more.
“There’s just...a lot going on right now,” Maverick finally says, settling on a half-truth that’s somehow also the understatement of the century. “TOPGUN, and Charlie, and the competition…” And this whole thing where you’re dead but not yet because I wished for another day with you and somehow got it.
Goose reads between the lines, somehow, and slings an arm over Maverick’s shoulder. Maverick forgot how good he was at that. (At reading between the lines, not hugging. He’d never forgotten the latter.) “Well,” he says lightly. “Seems to me the best way to get our minds off things is a day of fun in the sun, and we’ve got a space in the car if you don’t mind Bradley sitting on your lap.”
Maverick cracks a smile. “You sure?”
“Hell yeah.” Goose offers his palm, and — blinking back a sudden rush of tears — Maverick high-fives him. Just like they used to.
Bradley comes running back into the room with a can of ginger ale clutched between his tiny hands, and plops himself onto Maverick’s lap so he can make sure that Maverick finishes the whole thing. Like father, like son. “You okay now, Uncle Mav?”
Maverick rests the still-cool can against his forehead, takes in the sight of his four year old nephew and Carole standing behind Goose, her hands on his shoulders. “Yeah,” he breathes. “Yeah, little buddy, I’m okay.”
The beach is crowded with people, even for a sunny Saturday afternoon, so it takes an hour to find a parking space (on top of the hour it took them all to drive there). Bradley sits on Maverick’s lap the whole time, zooming his airplane around while he babbles and points excitedly at people walking by. Maverick buys an overpriced pair of disposable swim trunks from a kiosk near the public toilets, and lets himself be dragged into the ocean, lets himself enjoy the sun beating down on his back and the sound of Goose and Carole’s happy voices in his ears. He carries Bradley around on his shoulders and builds sandcastles with him, joins an impromptu volleyball game with Goose halfway down the beach and trounces the other team, helps bury Carole in the sand while Bradley shrieks with laughter.
Maverick falls back into bantering with Goose like he’d never stopped, exchanging jokes and grins as easy as breathing. Not that it isn’t just as easy making Ice smile these days, not after almost twenty-six years together, but he’d missed his and Goose’s instantaneous connection — the way that they could nod at each other, raise an eyebrow, and immediately be on the same page. He’d missed Goose.
Whatever the reason, he’s glad he got to have this dream.
Around one o’clock, Bradley starts asking when they’re going to have lunch, so Maverick throws on a shirt and offers to pay for a few burgers from the snack shack by the main parking lot. There’s a decent-sized crowd waiting at the counter to order, so Maverick squeezes into an empty space and waits for one of the workers to notice him.
“You come here often, sailor?”
Maverick can’t help but laugh at the girl leaning into his personal space and touching his arm, wearing a skimpy orange bikini and a matching floppy hat. He’s a little flattered by the attention — she’s practically young enough to be his daughter — but he figures he ought to cut this off at the pass before she gets the wrong idea. “I’m sorry to sink your boat, ma’am, but I’m a happily married man.”
Her pretty mouth forms a pout. “Funny, I don’t see a ring.”
Maverick’s laugh turns to ashes in his mouth.
Right. July 26, 1986. He’s twenty-four, not fifty-four, and he’s not married yet. Gay marriage won’t be legal anywhere for another twenty years.
Ice doesn’t even love him yet.
Funny how much that thought hurts, even though this is all a dream.
He manages to put all of that out of his mind until later that evening, after they all return to Goose’s base housing, drinking beer and eating cold pizza, Bradley passed out on the couch from the day’s excitement. Carole had left to take a quick shower, wash the ocean out of her hair, and Goose leans forward in his chair, his voice low. “Hey,” he says. “How’re things with you and Charlie?”
Maverick doesn’t choke on his beer, but it’s a near thing. “Fine.”
“Did something happen between you two last night?”
Maverick reads between the lines this time: something that would have made you come to my house at eight in the morning looking like the walking dead and cry into my shirt. He can’t blame Goose for asking; if his calculations are correct, last night would have been the day that he took Charlie to meet Goose and Carole and Bradley. The last day he and Charlie had really been happy with each other. “No,” he says. “Nothing happened last night, I swear.”
Goose nods slowly, unconvinced. “You’d tell me if anything was up, right?”
“With me and Charlie?”
“In general.”
Maverick’s throat locks up. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah, of course I’d tell you.”
“Alright,” Goose says, and smiles, like it’s that easy. For a long moment, Maverick is tempted to blurt out the whole story, tell him exactly what’s up — that Goose will die because of him in three days’ time, that he hadn’t brought Charlie with him today because he’s from the future and married to Iceman Kazansky, a fact that still rocks him to the core every single day — but he keeps his mouth shut. He’d wanted a day with Goose, and that’s exactly what he’d gotten; no more, no less. He won’t ruin what’s left of it by making Goose think he’s crazy.
The evening winds down after that. Carole leans against Goose’s shoulder, resting her head there; Goose smiles down at her and taps his fingers absentmindedly on the table like he’s playing piano. Maverick keeps mostly quiet, just watches the two of them while nursing his last beer, wishing a little that Ice was there to put an arm around him and hold him close too.
At a quarter past eleven, Maverick hugs Carole goodbye, trying to put a thousand unsaid things into the embrace — you’ll be alright, I’ll be there for you and Bradley, everything will be okay, I promise — and Goose walks him to his bike. “Carole wants to drive up to LA tomorrow,” he says. “See the sights, take Bradley to the Hollywood sign.”
“Right.” Maverick remembers that. Goose hadn’t gotten back until early Monday morning, when the morning and afternoon hops had been cancelled because Jester had to take his daughter to the hospital. He’d been pissed about that. He swallows hard, his mouth dry as dust. “Have a good time.”
“I’ll bring you back a T-shirt,” Goose promises, his eyes twinkling, and Maverick’s laugh comes out a little watery. Goose pulls him into a quick hug, and Maverick tries not to cling to him. “See you Monday, Mav.”
“Yeah.” Maverick’s jaw aches from the pressure of keeping his smile on his face. “See you then.”
After a long shower, Maverick turns off the lights and lies back in bed, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. Maybe it’s the beer, or the pizza, or the long day at the beach, but his wish keeps ricocheting in his head like a sunbeam in a hall of mirrors. He’d wanted another day with Goose, and he’d gotten it. One perfect day, full of laughter and warmth.
You can’t change the past, Mav.
I wish I could. I wish I could have another day with him. I wish I could have saved him.
Yeah. Yeah, I know you do.
No, you don’t know. You can’t know. You wouldn’t understand, Ice, you don’t understand—
The clock on the wall strikes midnight. Maverick rolls onto his side, closes his eyes, and falls into an uneasy sleep.