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It had been fairly obvious from early on in his Academy career that Wolfman was going to be a backseater. Not that he hadn't had his moment of airheaded stubbornness about the numerous recommendations from his instructors and even some peers, thinking he was being shafted out of the pilot's seat and that it was a testament to some imagined misdeed or inadequacy of his, but it'd worked out well enough in the end, all things considered.
He'd taken a lot of courses on navigation — learned about stars and their apparent motion throughout the sky, throughout the year; how to use this knowledge to navigate; learned about the Sun and how to use it, too, as a guide; learned about the celestial sphere and the different coordinate bases, and how to use a manual flight computer even though more of that was packed into integrated circuits behind the plane's dash, transistorized year after year according to Moore's law. It never hurt to know how to get your bearings if you were without a fully functioning plane — or, arguably worse, without a fully functioning pilot.
Mostly he liked the bits about the Sun — they didn't really get into solar weather, except how flares and CMEs could damage satellites and other sensitive communications equipment, but he appreciated seeing the graphs of seismic activity in the far side of the Sun, even if they weren't actual pictures. It was nice to know there was a real, tangible concept after which the idea of sunspots and solar flares (as they applied to humans) had been named.
Science might not be able to totally explain the whole soulmates thing, let alone explain it in a way that was satisfactory to the more skeptical of souls, but it could offer an anchor to cling to. Even if that anchor was more of a metaphor than anything else, it was still something — still a kind of sense that could be made of it all. Every human alive had observed the Sun, all the way back to prehistory. Even if they didn't have eyes to do it, even if they were blind — you could still feel its warmth on your skin, the radiation sending those little particles within you into their excited states, telling you just how alive you were.
All in all, the Academy gave him good training — and a hell of a good pilot, in Hollywood.
They flew well together. That was the part the Navy liked: the telepathic linkage, that was an asset. It meant that when their bird was shot down defending the Layton, their ejection was textbook-clean and their synchronization so flawless they could have been at least bronze medalists in the summer Olympics for the way they desperately swum to one another, clinging with such fervor you'd have thought they'd only just flared with that grab of heavy hands, sodden gear weighing them both down. They'd each done the requisite hours in the dunk tank, treading water in full gear until their fingertips were wrinkled beneath the gloves and all four limbs fighting worth their weight in lead.
It wasn't easy the same way playing a sonata with no sheet music or bench pressing your own weight weren't easy — but it was muscle memory, just like those other things were.
And it was both of them, minds in perfect radio-controlled chronometer sync until the moment they hit the water and then it was a crash of interference, did he go under I need to get to him is he safe is he safe is he safe until finally, finally they clung to one another, shifting into a floating position that balanced their respective centers of mass, as they'd been taught. This, too, was muscle memory.
The PRs had to pry them apart to get them into the rescue helo.
The part the Navy didn't like, or, well, strictly speaking the part the Navy tolerated, and to which it turned a blind eye when necessary to avoid openly contradicting itself: they needed each other in the most physical sense. Linked soulmates would be squadmates if possible; a pilot-RIO pair was even better. bunking together was a no-brainer. So it was politely accepted that each pair could request a double-bed assignment if they were the white-picket sort whose soulbond was strictly platonic — or, if they desired, and here was the part where the Navy pretended it didn't see, they could request only one bed.
Oh, they both desired, alright. After that first touch, then the second fateful one immediately thereafter that had cemented their bond — both of them drawing back in surprise at the sudden rush of heat, then pressing forward into it; both of them choosing this, throwing themselves into it headfirst because this was what they wanted the same way the sky was what they needed — they were inseparable.
Of course the link made them a force of nature in the air. But they were both talented, disciplined pilots of their own accord, and it wasn't some inexplicable magic that allowed them to fly together. No, it was just that there was also that little something which was impossible to put a name to but which stuck at the corner of your awareness like the itch of a mosquito bite after the calamine lotion, the incalculable force that took something which was already there and... and refined it, tempered it like the titanium in their airframes.
Leo was a damn menace with his hands, and Rick — well, he didn't even need to touch his partner to see effect. He'd level him with a heavy-lidded gaze from across the room and have the other man melting in his flightsuit.
Hollywood, for his part, enjoyed his RIO's touchiness, especially the attention Wolfman paid to his mark — his claim, literally, the imprint of his hand wrapped larger than life around Hollywood's left shoulder.
Wolfe had clapped him on the shoulder instead of giving a handshake, when they'd first met. The shock of the sudden heat rushing through his body where previously there'd only been a still, innocuous cool in that particular spot had frozen him where he stood, his own hand reaching out to steady himself against his new pilot's arm as if he'd suddenly been overcome by dizziness on the spot, palm smeared in a watercolor sunset against Wolfe's bicep.
The circuit, completed.
Where previously there'd been only a faint smudge like a faded tattoo, their sunspots were glorious things after the flare. Brilliant, almost seeming to glow from within when they touched, when Holly's hands were on Wolfe and Wolfe's hands were on Holly and they were so perfectly in sync it almost hurt, not the thing itself but the knowing that there had been, was, could be an existence without it, so terribly fractured.
Well, of course they feared losing it. Of course they clawed for it like they'd been fighting for it from the very first breath either man had drawn; they had been, even if they didn't have the language for it. Everyone had that itch; maybe it drew you to the sky, or the sea, or to spiral around another man just like yourself but not. Maybe it gave you a platonic soulmate, and maybe it gave you something no men (nobody at all, in fact) had devised the right words to describe — maybe it showed you a space yet unmapped in consciousness, yet undescribed by language.
Maybe it gave you this.
A mote of dust in the blue, then two; the lobes of a binary star, ever elegant in their dance of mass exchange.
The first night had been incredible. They told you it'd be amazing, whatever kind of physical intimacy you found with your soulmate, even only bare proximity if that was more your speed.
It wasn't, not for them. Wolfe was one of the most tactile people Hollywood had ever met, and Hollywood had that possessive streak it seemed all pilots were prone to. Wolfe would always remember the open wonder and attraction in his pilot's eyes, hands splayed over his hips, pulling him down into the bunk that was only supposed to fit one of them.
Always, always, when he was lonely (not that he could ever fathom such a thing anymore, not truly, not when there was always another welcome presence resting just at the periphery of his awareness — one he could reach out and touch at less than arm's length, brush up against whenever he pleased) he'd find himself reaching for that memory. That night. the low honeyed grind of Rick's voice rolling over his throat, teeth scraping his stubble, inquisitive tone always wanting to know what was good for him, what he liked and what wasn't so interesting, what he was thinking and feeling.
Hollywood — Rick — was an attentive lover, gentle but not too shy to show Wolfe a good time, and Wolfe wasn't afraid to admit that even in a world where people didn't flare like stars to signal the singular potential of a bond between them, he thought he'd still have found himself charmed into his pilot's bed.
Wolfe had crested his peak to the warmth of chapped lips on his neck and a firm, calloused hand pulling two sets of hips flush together like interlocking puzzle pieces. Shuddering apart to Rick's fingers threading through his hair, letting him gasp ragged and broken, calling him Leo and good boy and Wolfie.
They'd decided to requisition a bed for two pretty quickly after that.