Work Text:
THE photo front and center on the mantle is of Mav and Iceman, both in their dress whites. They are standing in the garden of Slider's old house by the beach under a wedding arch, staring straight into each other's eyes like they are the only two people in the world.
There are others, of course. Hollywood and Wolfman arms around each other, smiles wide as anything in front of an F-14, Sundown with his wife and kids in matching pj's in a Christmas card. The only picture of Mav and his father, a little crumpled, on a frame he vaguely remembers making during art class. Sarah and Ice, terribly young, posing serious. Slider with his arms around Ice's shoulder on deployment, and with his wife during their first dance, and with his dad among a gaggle of young men at the academy. Penny and Amelia on a sailboat. The Top Gun class of summer '86. Goose and Carole outside the city hall in Annapolis.
And Bradley, peppered into their midst at all the stages of his life.
A newborn in Mav's arms, two years old perched on his dad's shoulders, arm in arm with his mom on the pier the weekend before she had told them about the cancer. The photo from his high school graduation, Mav and Ice bracketing him, smiling proud. His first official photo from Navy. The one out of focus selfie Ice had taken with his phone the first night Bradley had gone for dinner at their house after everything.
He thinks of the wasted years between those photos, when his anger burned so bright it turned every bridge into ash, scorched the earth. He understands it better now than he did at eighteen, at twenty-five, at thirty-two. What it had taken to make a promise like that, and what it took to keep it.
When he was young he thought only of the flying, of crossing they skies like his dad, like Mav. Of the pride and the glory he would bring them.
Funny enough, he never thought of the dying. Or of those who were left behind.
But he has lived enough now, been to funerals and wakes, and retirement parties filled with ghosts. Carried caskets empty or otherwise, of men and women he can't help but think were too young to be laid to rest, regardless of their age. He sat by Mav during Ice's final hours, through the revolving door of well meaning friends, until the machines had gone silent in the early hours of the morning.
Still he doesn't know how to do it, pack an entire life away in boxes. Can't imagine how Mav managed it either, to reduce everything Ice was, all their lives together, to just the photographs on the mantel and a few books and trinkets in the corridor shelf.
Bradley wants terribly to keep everything as is. Beers on the fridge and coffee mug on the sink, a half finished project on the garage, a book on the history of aviation at the bedside table. As if Mav has just stepped outside for a minute and might come back through the kitchen door telling him how nice it is outside and won't he come join him on the back-porch for a bit?
For a moment the years he has lived are all to much.
He just wants to be eight, with his head on his mom's lap on a lazy Sunday afternoon, while they listen to Ice and Mav give them the abridged version of their latest exploits, warm and known and safe.
He can't remember when his father died, doesn't even really know when the idea solidified itself for him, but he remembers his mom's passing clearly and Ice's firm and steady hand on his shoulder the whole time, and when Ice had died he'd held onto Mav, or Mav had held onto him until they had both made it through.
Right now he wishes he could have it still. His mother's encouraging smiles, Mav's determination, Ice's unwavering faith. But now all those things are alive only in his memories, fading all the time.
He can hear the clinking from the kitchen. Of Natasha packing away the fine china that only came out for Thanksgiving dinners, and the myriad of little thematic glasses from all around the world.
He had been across the country when he'd gotten the call from Slider. No explosions or dramatic car crashes, just, death.
Pure and simple.
He hadn't known how he was going to come home and he hadn't known how to plan a funeral, so he had called her first.
Because he knew Phoenix would answer, and because even after all this time he trusted her the most at his wing in the air or on land. And when everything was said and done he hadn't had to ask, she'd just told him to tell her when and that she would come.
And she had.
She'd rented a truck, and she'd brought the cardboard boxes and the bubble wrap, and no one else to help them with the task ahead, and when he'd gotten stuck by the old jacked left hanging on the hook by the entrance, she'd squeezed his shoulder lightly, and told him she would be in the kitchen if he needed her.
Then he had gone into the living room once he could make himself move again, oddly comforted by the symphony of opening and closing of cabinet doors and drawers.
And now he is here, sitting on a rug that had seen three moves, and might live to see yet another one, back to the coffee table, half filled cardboard box to his right, a pile of old VHS tapes half organized to his left, stuck holding onto a photo of his dad and Mav neither of them older than 26.
He is older than both of them right now, twice as old as his father ever got to be.
It's hard not to think that everything has been put into perspective.
He doesn't really know Goose outside of other people's memories of him, doesn't really know about his hopes and regrets and unfinished plans, can only extrapolate from the pictures and the stories he's been holding onto greedily since he was a child.
But he thinks he knows Mav.
A life lived asking for forgiveness (sometimes) instead of permission. Facing the consequences instead of dwelling on the what-ifs.
He is certain Mav had regrets, things he would have done different on a second time around, but who doesn't? Bradley has a thing or two or twenty he would like to change, things he would have said differently or not at all, but… he looks back at the photos, friends and family across the years, all the love that just seems to carry on from one moment to the next ad infinitum.
All this life that's been left behind suddenly, no explanation, just a stumble, a stutter before time continues on and on and on.
And how he has to go on as well, with just the jacket by the entrance, and the home videos, and the photo albums.
And the love, all enduring permeated through all of it.