Archive of Our Own ^beta

The call comes in a little after 1700.

It’s an ordinary afternoon in early July. Rooster’s crossing the tarmac after his last flight of the day, his sweat-crumpled flight suit bunching awkwardly under his arms, the heat of a day’s worth of sunlight radiating up through the soles of his boots. He can feel the moisture and grit caked into his hairline as he reaches up to run his nails across his scalp, and he’s not thinking about much but the sequence of the evening: piss, take five minutes to scrub the grime off, rejoin his crew to eat obscene amounts of greasy food, then hit the bars—that is, if he hasn’t passed out into his onion rings halfway through the meal. Even so, Payback and Fanboy would probably eat the rings out from under him, and Phoenix would bully him out the door and to the nearest pool table without so much as waking him up. That woman with a goal in mind is one of the few things Rooster is afraid of, which would embarrass him a little if he thought he were the only one.

He’s headed down the hallway towards the showers when he hears the creak of a door swinging open behind him. The door to his CO’s office. Goddamn it.

“Bradshaw. A word.”

Rooster tries not to sigh too obviously as he pivots on his heel and trudges back down the hall.

“Ma’am?”

The vice admiral isn’t at her desk; instead, she’s standing at the window, her profile limned by the late-afternoon sunlight. Behind her, Rooster can see the last of the aircraft headed in towards the hangar, pilots and ground crew looking cartoonishly small against the enormous building, the cacophony of voices and engines muffled by the double-reinforced glass.

“At ease, Brashaw. A call came in for you, just now. Name of Penelope Benjamin.”

“Penny?” Rooster says, cocking his head. “What was it, ma’am?”

“I’m real sorry to be the one to tell you this,” she says, turning from the window to face him. The light makes a halo out of the few gray hairs escaping her braids, Bradley notices, with the ten percent of his brain that hasn’t fallen into a deadly silence. The taut skin of her face seems to have developed new wrinkles since he saw her this morning; they sit heavily under her cheeks and across her brow. “Maverick Mitchell was out on a routine test flight off the coast this afternoon when base lost contact with him. Distress signal went out at 1430, and the craft went down a few minutes later.”

The world has gone very quiet. Rooster clears his throat. “Have they recovered him?”

“No, they haven’t,” the vice admiral says. “It looks like there was a mechanical issue with the ejection hatch—only deployed partway. He got clear of the aircraft, but by the time they got to him, there probably wasn’t anything left to find. Still, they’ll continue the search into tonight.”

Rooster can feel his pulse along the inside of his wrists, beating slow and steady. He takes a breath in. The skin on his face feels leaden, muscles pulling down on the bone, like he’s burning 6Gs standing in the middle of this quiet office.

“I’m sorry, son,” she says, looking at him with something like sorrow—or worse, much worse, pity—in her eyes. “I know you two were close.”

If speaking was an effort before, Rooster doesn’t know what this is. Sisyphus pushing a boulder up the inside of his throat. He resists the sudden urge to say something hopelessly juvenile and revealing, petulant—don’t call me son. Don’t you dare. “May I go?”

“If they don’t find him, it will be a few weeks before they change his status. But if you submit a leave request before then, I’ll approve it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She scrutinizes his face a moment longer, then turns away, back to the window and the sunlight that won’t fade for another few hours. “You’re dismissed.”

A better pilot would salute her; a better man would thank her. Rooster is out the door before she gets to the second word.

He hangs up his flight suit in the locker room, manages that much, but when he turns the handle of the showerhead he finds himself stepping into the spray in his undershirt and boxer briefs. The water is freezing cold, raising trails of goosebumps along his entire body. Rooster just raises his head into the spray, feeling the hammering impacts of the water along the planes of his face.

It’s three weeks before Command changes Mav’s status from “Missing” to “Missing, presumed dead,” and another two weeks after that before Penny calls him about the funeral.

Rooster eats, mechanically, when somebody tells him to. He sleeps fitfully and doesn’t dream. He stands under the water as it cycles from cold to hot and back to cold, scrubs the garbage standard-issue shampoo through his hair with a little too much force, so it pulls on the roots with a sharp, real sting.

He tries going out with the team, once. He doesn’t do it again. Payback and Fanboy are a little too quiet, Bob a little too loud. Phoenix, horrifyingly, looks like she’s going to pull him aside to talk about his feelings, which would be nauseating even if it weren’t clear that’s the last thing she wants to do.

Rooster waits until Phoenix and Payback escape the table to grab more shots from the bar and makes some excuse about the bathroom. In other circumstances, he’d at least pretend to head for the back; instead, he just gets up and walks out the front door. He doesn’t look back. He makes it all the way back to the barracks before he has to stop, rest his head against the warm brick and suck in deep breaths of the still, humid air.

The only thing he can still do is fly.

There’s not necessarily joy in it, the way there was before—Mav is too close, the echo of his voice in the headset, the ghost of his steady hand whenever Rooster pulls into a spin that’s the shady edge of too reckless. Still, it’s focus and a roar of white noise. Rooster doesn’t have to think beyond the straining, teeth-rattling pull at the bottom of the next dive. Even the Gs pushing him down into his seat are kind of comforting—like a palm shoving him down, somebody’s hands on him that aren’t going to be too gentle, that will crush his outsides into something that matches the whimpering pathetic thing in the back of his head.

He can still fly. That’s what matters.

When Penny calls with the funeral details, the team has mostly stopped trying to talk to him, although it has taken most of the five weeks to make that happen. Stubborn bastards. Still, it makes it easier, makes everything easier, and he’s proud of how steady his step is when he knocks on the door of his CO’s office.

“Ma’am.”

The vice admiral glances up from the paperwork on her desk—piles upon piles, but neatly stacked. He can see the tips of her reading glasses poking out of a hastily-closed drawer.

“Bradshaw. What can I do for you?”

“Funeral’s in a week. I’m putting in my request for two days of leave.”

“Two days?” She pushes back in her chair, rubbing at her temples with an ink-stained hand. “That’s not very long, son.”

“It’s enough for me.”

She gives him a once-over, assessing. Rooster resists the urge to hunch his shoulders. The few times he’s managed to glance in a mirror, he can tell he’s lost weight—visible, significant weight—but he just had his physical in May, so he doesn’t figure it’s anyone’s business but his own. She lets out a sharp sigh. “From the look of you, I should approve that leave starting today.”

“No!” he says, too sharply. She gives him a quelling look. “I mean—I would prefer not, ma’am.”

“Doesn’t seem like you’re doing so well.”

Rooster bristles. “My flight numbers have stayed consistent, ma’am. I haven’t heard any complaints.”

“You know I’m not talking about your flying, son, so don’t pull that act with me.”

“I can’t—please. I can still do my job. I need to be in the air.”

The vice admiral levels a look at him. “U.S. Navy aircraft are some of the most sophisticated, advanced, expensive miracles of engineering on the planet. Joe Taxpayer funds them, and they build them, and we put them in the air to defend this country. Not to help flyboys like you run away from your problems.”

Rooster is a goddamn professional, so he doesn’t flinch. It’s a near thing.

She scribbles out a few sentences on a slip of paper with faint scrapes of a pen, then slams down a stamp. “Here’s your leave. 26 days, starting today, and you are not to show yourself on base, much less set foot in a cockpit, until that time has passed.”

“Ma’am—”

“That is final, Bradshaw,” she says. It would be easier to hate her if her voice were a little less gentle. “Go back home. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

A slap would have been easier to take—would have left him with some dignity. Rooster stifles the urge to argue some more. Go home? Home drowned in a hospital bed when he was 17; home slammed into the glass of a spiraling canopy over open ocean, twice now, and left him alone.

He doesn’t say that. He walks out of the room, grabs his things, and makes it all the way to the barracks before he turns and punches the wall with enough force to split the skin of his knuckles like a ripe peach. Blood smears across the back of his hand. He sags against the wall, sinking down to cradle his knees and hide his face.

Penny’s the one to pick him up at the airport. He hadn’t released his white-knuckle grip on the arm rest the whole time—every drop from the turbulence, with a stranger piloting the plane, had felt like a trust fall with no one waiting to catch him—and catching sight of her drawn face among all the other happy reunions just makes him feel worse.

She doesn’t try to talk to him too much, thank God. She does offer to put him up in the same hotel she and Amelia are staying at, but Rooster tries to imagine it—being that close to a mom and her daughter, another family bisected, vivisected—and has to rest his forehead against the glass as the gorge rises in his throat.

Penny’s good people: she accepts his halfhearted excuse and drives him out to the old hangar, the sun just slipping below the hills as they pull up out front. Rooster half expects Mav to come sauntering out of the mouth of it, and he doesn’t glance over at Penny to see whether she’s picturing the same.

“Thanks for the ride,” he says, shorter than he’d like, and slides out the door.

“Keep in touch,” Penny says, raising her voice. “I’ll be in town until a few days after the service. We should talk about the will—doesn’t need to be this week or even this month, but don’t stand me up.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, sliding his duffel out the back. He should paste on half a smile, he knows, but instead he just slams the trunk shut, waves half a goodbye, and stumbles towards the door. The spare key is warm in his hand, teeth biting indentations into his palm. If there were any logic to the world, it wouldn’t unlock the door, but it does. Rooster steps forward into the darkness.

He has nearly a week to kill before the funeral, and not much to fill the time with. Normally, he’d take the Mustang up for a spin, but that is a whole bundle of hell no—he’s walked over to it a few times, because he’s many things but not a coward, but he can’t even reach up to rest his palm against the chassis.

Instead, he takes long walks through the prairie. Putting one foot in front of the other helps remind him to take a breath, then another. The number of breaths and steps required to make it to the funeral seem uncountably vast, so he just takes the next one. He heats up instant oatmeal on the stove, drives into town for groceries and booze, ignores the bowl of unripe peaches on the counter. One step after another.

The service is perfectly nice, as these things go.

Rooster’s dress uniform is just a bit too large; he thinks it probably would have fit him, a month and a half ago. Now, it falls strangely on his arms and itches the back of his neck. The sun is slanting down on the cemetery as the jets roar by overhead. Missing-man formation, of course—just like for the Iceman, a few years earlier.

It’s easier to look up at the formation than at the people around him: Penny, tears glinting in her eyes but statuesque as ever; Amelia, white-faced and furious; the rest of the TOPGUN crew, mostly stoic but with sniffles here and there. Tears had been sliding openly down Bob’s face, and Rooster had felt a sharp twist of envy in his throat, so powerful he struggled to breathe for a second. Whatever—eyes up, face betraying nothing, until the empty, flag-covered casket has been lowered and people start to walk away.

He stands there until the last white tendrils of the contrails fade into the soft evening sky.

Rooster is walking back to the cars when Phoenix waves him over. There’s a whole huddle of them, the old group reunited. He tries to pretend he doesn’t see them, keeps walking.

“Come on, asshole,” Phoenix hisses, and actually comes striding over to dig her fingers into his arm and drag him over by force. He winces and does as he’s told.

It’s a circle of somber faces, almost all of them looking over at him with various degrees of sympathy and pity. Only three of them aren’t focused on him: Bob is offering a cloth handkerchief to Coyote, which—who even carries handkerchiefs anymore? And why is Coyote taking it?—and, of course, Hangman, who’s exhibiting his customary grace and tact by squinting down at his phone.

“Well, that was fucking depressing,” Phoenix says, not releasing her grip on his arm.

Payback snorts, humorless. “You can say that again. Who wants to go drink about it?”

Everyone, as it turns out, wants to go drink about it. Rooster thinks there must be a point in these proceedings where he could make a graceful exit, or even an uncoordinated stumble towards the off-ramp, but it appears that it passed in the few glorious seconds before Phoenix spotted him.

If he were really all there, Rooster would protest more at getting shoved into the middle seat, Fanboy leaning over him to talk to Yale on the other side. But being ignored is a lot more comfortable than the alternative.

The bar is too loud, too bright, even this early in the evening, like an itch at the back of his eyes. Rooster barricades himself in the corner, too exhausted to even try to put on a front, and when Phoenix slides the first shot in front of him, he tips it back without hesitation.

Fuck it, right? He’s a grown-ass man, and it’s not like there’s anyone left to cuff him upside the head when he stumbles in at three in the morning.

Time stretches, after that. He’s there for all of it—he knows how much to drink to black out, and he’s just with it enough to know that’s not a good place to be, not tonight—but he’s not all there. The numbness he was already working with has burrowed deeper inside him, divorced him from reality enough that he can get up from the table, line up shots at pool with exaggerated care and miss two-thirds of them without caring, dance with one arm slung around Fanboy and the other around Phoenix, without any active input at all. He can even take the cuffs and squeezes to his shoulder, the sidelong looks from the other pilots who don’t seem to quite know what to say to him. It doesn’t bother him. He can take it. He’ll swallow it like he swallows the next shot, burning down the line of his throat.

It must be late, by now. Rooster’s got his elbows on the table, following the pull of gravity into the edge of the table. His knuckles are scabbed over by now, and it pulls at the healing skin as he drops his head into his palms.

Most of the rest are dancing, or were the last time he looked. The maudlin drunks went home hours ago.

The seat creaks with the weight of another person dropping down beside him.

“Whadd’ya want,” Rooster mumbles, not raising his head.

“D’you believe me if I said the pleasure of your company?” Hangman asks. He sounds revoltingly sober.

“No.”

“Good call. You look like shit, by the way.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Mm,” Hangman says. He lets out a long contemplative breath. “You know what’s funny?”

“How little I give a fuck?”

“I see we’ve got ourselves a comedian,” Hangman says. Rooster can’t see anything but the light of the bar through his interlaced fingers, but he knows Hangman is folding that toothpick up into his mouth. “What I was going to say is, for a long time, I would have done anything—and I do mean anything—for my old man to bite it. And here you’ve managed it twice in four decades.”

Rooster isn’t aware he’s moving until he feels his fist smash across the side of Hangman’s face. There isn’t enough force behind it to break anything, he doesn’t think, but it’s enough to send the toothpick skittering across the wooden floor, into the sudden hush.

“You motherfucker,” he grates out, shaking.

“There you are,” Hangman says, and has the nerve to give him half a smile, red blooming across the side of his cheek.

In the far outside of his awareness, Rooster can tell that most of the bar is looking at them, the frantic dance number from the jukebox still beating out its pointless rhythm, but he doesn’t particularly care. His eyes are fixed to the smear of blood shining on Hangman’s lower lip. He feels the urge to chase, to rend, to tear something real out of Hangman to replace the parts of him this miserable shitfest of a summer has taken away. He needs that blood. He wants to taste it.

Phoenix has picked her way over to them by now, and is saying something to Hangman in a low voice, casting urgent glances over to the long expanse of the bar.

Rooster shakes his head like a dog, trying to clear it. All that does is send the world spinning around him. “I should—”

“What we should do,” Hangman says, grasping him by the arm and wrenching him to his feet, “Is follow the lady’s advice and take this outside.”

Somehow, he eels around the elbow to the ribs this earns him from Phoenix while supporting half of Rooster’s weight—seriously, the man must be half cat—and they stumble together towards the front door, the motion and noise of the club slowly picking back up behind them.

They make it all the way out to a truck Rooster doesn’t recognize, where Hangman flips the lock and eases open one of the rear doors. Rooster thinks he should resist more as Hangman slides a hand behind his head to keep him from slamming it against the frame, then settles him across the wide backseat, but the parking lot hasn’t quite stopped moving. The numbness is creeping back across his chest.

“You gonna fuck me, or something?” Rooster says, lolling his head back and closing his eyes. If he weren’t in the truck, he could see the stars. Too bad. But more comfortable.

Hangman snorts a laugh, swinging Rooster’s legs up so they’re resting in the footwell. “Man, I’m not sure if you could jack off alone in your room right now without an assault charge. That’ll be a no from me.”

Rooster cracks an eye at him, a dark shape across the open car door. “Huh. Thought you wanted to, you know. Back then.”

“Well, we all have our fits of delusion,” Hangman says. “Given how pathetic you look right now, I won’t hold it against you.”

“Fuck off.”

“Likewise,” Hangman says, but he eases the door shut instead of slamming it.

Through the curved window, Rooster sees him exchange a few words with somebody—Bob, maybe, as passing headlights from the road reflect faintly off his glasses—and then Hangman’s swinging up into the driver’s seat.

Rooster means to stay awake, to say something sharp about where Hangman is taking him and why, but the thrum of the motor and the kaleidoscopic flash of the streetlights trigger some deep instinct in his brain, and he’s asleep before they even hit the freeway.

It’s late morning when Rooster wakes up again. He’s still wearing his uniform pants and undershirt, sprawled across the creaky old bed in the back of the trailer. His back hurts, his eyes are gummy, and the sharp ache in his head is reminding him that it’s been two decades since he could drink like that without repercussions.

He pries open his eyes and goes up on one elbow, taking half-awake inventory: late morning light through the hangar doors, the rest of his clothes piled on the chair in the corner. Quiet. Rooster blinks once, twice, and the events of the previous day come crashing back in on him—the humiliation of his ill-fated conversations with Hangman, sure, but that has nothing on hole opening up beneath his ribs.

Missing, presumed dead. And now there’s nothing left to do but move on.

It’s so fucking selfish, is the thing. He knows what he should be pissed about. A few hours after Mav had gotten himself and Rooster back aboard the carrier, after the roar of celebratory noise and the pictures and back-slapping, almost combative hugs, Rooster had gone to track him down in his quarters. The tells hadn’t been obvious—if Rooster were the clueless flyboy he played on TV, he wouldn’t have even noticed—but there was a tremble to Mav’s shoulders as he turned towards the door, a kind of shadowed blankness at the back of his eyes, and his knuckles were turning white around a crumpled, well-worn picture of him and of the Iceman.

Mav had spent so long clawing himself out of that abyss, pretending the whole way that it was just a drainage ditch, a stumble on the road. It had been almost a year before his smiles lost their shaded edges, or at least, before he figured out how to hide them a little better. After all that, the man deserved time—with Penny, with Rooster, to figure out what life looked like without constant dick-measuring contests with his own mortality. If Mav was even capable of a life like that.

So if Rooster were a good person, that’s what he’d be pissed about. What Mav missed out on, when that plane went down. But he’s not—deep into the curdling, shriveled core of him, he’s not.

He’s so fucking angry that he can feel the scabs on his knuckles cracking open again as his fists clench and unclench—that much is true. But the stone he can’t swallow is that Mav left him. Took his dad, pulled his papers, earned his trust through bloody fingernails and sheer unrelenting nerve, and then just walked away.

He knows it wasn’t on purpose. He’s not a four-year-old boy anymore. But he’s fucked up enough times to know that intentions end up mattering jack shit, especially when they’re weighed against pain. And jesus fuck, does this hurt.

It’s his own fault, he knows—it hadn’t felt like a choice to trust Maverick. It felt like an inevitability, dropping blind towards a target he couldn’t afford to miss. But it was a choice. It was a mistake he had promised not to make, and dove into anyway. Rooster’s too selfish to mourn and too greedy not to, and his rage at the whole twisted mess of it drives him up out of bed and out the trailer door.

He staggers down the stairs, and he’s really just trying to make it out into the open. The sunlight outside is too bright, but anything’s better than being trapped here, frissons of pain and rage running down his nerves with every step.

Rooster’s halfway to the doors when he stumbles, bare foot catching on something rough and woven. He bends down, the hangar swaying around him, to pick it up—it’s the corner of the cloth covering Mav’s motorcycle. He yanks on it, careless, sending the fabric crumpling to the floor in a puff of dust, motes floating as though suspended in the sunlit air.

The machine itself looks just like it did the last time Rooster was here. Maybe a little shinier. Mav had given it a new coat of polish the afternoon he left—the man lived in a grimy old trailer in the corner of his hangar, let dirty clothes pile up and the dishwasher sit full of clean dishes while he ate off 75-cent paper plates, but god forbid he come back to a motorcycle that didn’t perfectly reflect his stupid fucking grin.

Rooster walks over to the tool bench. Ten steps. Distantly, he can see his hand shaking as he reaches for the socket wrench in the corner—a few cobwebs stretch and break as he picks it up, but it’s a good weight in his hand, solid, reliable. His breaths catch in his throat. They seem too loud in the silence of the hangar.

Nine steps back.

The first impact of the tool against the shining chassis sends a shock vibrating all the way up his arm and into the bones of his shoulder. Again. Once again. One of the mirrors goes skittering across the floor. The headlight shatters, sending shards of glass flying. Metal crumples and twists under relentless blows from the spanner, each one further numbing Rooster’s arm and making him feel less present, less like it’s his hand gripping the tool, his blood running down the handle and smearing across the head.

He can’t tell how long it’s been when the wrench finally slips from between his numb fingers and clatters against the ground. Sweat is dripping down his back and pooling above his collarbones. The world feels very far away.

He barely makes it to the bucket on the toolbench, half-dirty washrag still slung over the side, before he vomits. It feels a lot like wrecking the motorcycle. It does not feel good.

When Rooster finally pivots back around, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he sees Hangman sitting on the steps of the trailer. It looks like he’s been there a while.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Rooster grates out.

“I’d say, same as you, but that looked like a limited-time opportunity,” Hangman says. “Here, catch.”

He swings his arm up in a wide arc, and Rooster just manages to snag the water bottle out of the air before it hits him in the face. He squints at it for a second, baffled, and then unscrews the lid and drains it in three swallows.

“It’s warm.”

“Yeah, well. Take it up with the staff.”

Rooster picks his way around the expanse of glass and metal on the concrete floor, taking a broad half-arc that puts him back at the steps to the trailer. He jerks his chin to the side—get out of my way—and Hangman picks himself up with an easy grace that doesn’t seem natural for a guy with that much bulk on him.

The door doesn’t shut quite fast enough; Hangman saunters in behind him like he has an engraved invitation. Rooster makes the conscious decision that he doesn’t care. He heads back down the hall to the bedroom, barely clearing the door frame before reaching back to pull the undershirt over his head.

Hangman follows him to lounge in the doorway, because apparently he’s never seen a boundary he didn’t take as a personal challenge.

Rooster lets out a sharp breath. “I’m serious. What are you still doing here?”

“Nothing better to do.”

“Hangman.”

“I have a few days off for the funeral, that’s all. Thought I’d hang around.”

“Lucky me,” Rooster says, reaching for a clean shirt. “How many days did you take? Two, three?”

“Thirteen.”

Rooster pauses, shirt halfway on his arm, and turns to face him. Hangman’s eyes are unreadable as he leans against the door frame.

“Thirteen days.”

“Yessir.”

“What the hell, man? That’s all of your family leave.”

“Well, look at that,” Hangman drawls, “He knows how to read an employment contract. Be still, my beating heart.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rooster says, and strips out of his pants, fast, just to prove a point. He doesn’t turn around until he’s fully clothed, though—it’s not exactly that he minds Hangman’s eyes on him, but it’s not something he can process right now. “Just—why did you take that much time?”

“It’s my time to take.”

“To spend in a moldering old hangar with a half-broken, middle-aged fuck-up?”

“Well, I did get a hotel. And I didn’t see anyone else lining up for the job.”

“Go to hell,” Rooster says, shouldering past him to the bathroom and running his hands under the water. The water sluices between his fingers and leaves red streaks on the white porcelain. “Don’t you need to save that time for your folks?”

“Not like there’s anyone left to use it,” Hangman says, light.

Rooster shuts off the water and stands there for a moment, head bowed beneath the harsh, buzzing bathroom light. Something about this—the blood, the motorcycle lying twisted outside, Hangman with his unreadable eyes and bared throat—is driving him out of his skin. He tightens his hands on the sides of the sink.

“Well, I didn’t ask you to spend it on me, alright? Why don’t you just leave me alone?”

There’s a long pause. “I will if you want me to.”

Rooster glances up from the basin, meets Hangman’s eyes. That always kicks his pulse up a few notches, but right now it just feeds into the nausea.

“You know what? I do.” He doesn’t know it’s a lie until it leaves his mouth, but the bathroom is spinning slightly, and he just wants to be done. “Thanks for the ride and the water, and all, but we’re not friends and we’re sure as hell not family. We didn’t need you for the Dagger team just like I don’t need you now, and no amount of pretending you’ve grown a heart is going to make me love you like your sad, rich little family clearly didn’t. Now get the hell out.”

About half of that was a shot in the dark, but Rooster has had a pretty good run with those. He sees each phrase land with the incremental tightening of Hangman’s jaw, his cheek washing pale under the tan. He more than half expects Hangman to take a swing at him. He’s not going to turn into the blow—pain has never worked that way for him—but the thought of the jarring, reality-snapping impact of it, having somebody’s hands on him again, is almost blissful.

He doesn’t want to seem like he’s waiting for it, so he turns away, deliberately cutting, and bends to splash cold water in his face. By the time he stands back up, Hangman is gone.

Rooster goes through the motions of the rest of his day—shower, food, dishes. It doesn’t eat up as much time as he’d like, nor take up the room in his head he needs it to, so he digs some old exercise gear out of his suitcase and goes for a long run.

He wouldn’t say he enjoys the sun in his eyes, exactly, nor the way each footfall sends a judder up through his bones. He’s barely a quarter mile from the hangar before he’s drenched in sweat, the air too hot and too still for it to even be a relief. What does feel good is the way the strain of it drives everything out of his head but the ache in his calves and the next hundred feet of hard-packed earth.

Rooster makes it all the way through the doors of the hangar before his eyes fall on the wreck he made of the motorcycle—still gleaming in the evening sun, despite everything, but its reflections scattered and dim—and reality writes itself back onto the slate he’s scrubbed clean.

He knows, looking at it, that he should feel some shame about the way he lost control, the pointless destruction of that beautiful machine. But instead, the twisted metal just makes him think back to Hangman, tossing him that water bottle across the hangar, and the sick blanch of his cheek in the sallow light of the bathroom.

The mechanic in town figures, after twenty minutes of careful examination and the use of various angle-based tools, that the motorcycle is totaled.

“If this weren’t a sentiment thing,” she says, “I would say to just toss it on the scrap heap out back. That tractor really did a number on it, huh.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rooster says, and avoids eye contact.

The mechanic—Alice, he reads on her nametag—pulls a cloth out of her back pocket to wipe her hands clean, nudges her glasses a fraction of an inch higher on her crooked nose. “It’s half a miracle that the frame’s in as good shape as it is. Just a degree or two out of alignment, and I can get that fixed up this afternoon. You said you wanted to repair her yourself?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You ever fixed something like this before?”

Rooster glances up, tries to paste on one of his old smiles. It’s not Alice’s fault this is the second-worst day of the worst week in recent memory. “I fix planes sometimes—figure the difference is two wings and a couple fewer switches.”

She eyes him over but reserves comment, walking to her desk and scribbling something on a slip of paper. “Come back at four and I’ll have her ready to go. Plus a few extra parts in case you try to screw on an aileron by mistake.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, and feels the pressure behind his ribs loosen, just for a moment.

The repairs on the bike are more fiddly than truly difficult, as it turns out. Although the damage he’d done looks awful, and his store of back pay is still smarting from the bill he got from Alice, Rooster had managed to mostly avoid the parts of the motorcycle too complex for him to repair.

In any case, there are fewer of those than you would think. He’s always been handy. Or at least, he has been from the time he was very young, when his mother had taught herself everything she previously hadn’t needed to know about home repair, with her five-year-old son as a fascinated observer and toolbox-rummager. When Mav talked him through maintenance on the Mustang, the elegant curve of the aircraft’s body gleaming in the sunlight, that’s always what came to Rooster’s mind—Carole Bradshaw, curly hair wild and a smudge of grime across the set of her jaw, stark in the wan light of the kitchen. She had leaned back under the broken old sink the same way she did everything else: with the sort of undaunted optimism rarely supported by fact. At age five (age ten, age seventeen), Bradley had believed in that optimism, in her, with a fervor that bordered on religion.

It was the same way he’d believed in Mav’s invincibility, now that he thinks about it. Then he very determinedly doesn’t think about it for the rest of the drive home.

He starts on the repairs less than an hour after he pulls into the hangar and unloads the truck. He’d borrowed it from one of Mav’s more distant neighbors, which was barely worth her claims about how terribly sad she found the whole situation, not to mention the entreaties for more details and the attempts to find out whether Rooster was Mav’s illegitimate son or his scandalously young lover. By the time he’s successfully surrendered the keys and makes it off the property, he’s startled to find himself holding a plate of slightly burnt banana bread. It puzzles him all the way back to the trailer, where he remembers that just as she was asking how often he’d been to stay at the old hangar, and isn’t it nice how much privacy that much land affords you, but less than you’d think, really, you’d be shocked at the things I’ve seen over the years, but maybe then again not all that shocked, she’d taken advantage of his instinctive recoil to press the crystal plate into his hands.

And now Rooster will have to go return the plate before he leaves, because he was not raised in a barn nor an old run-down hangar, and she’ll have another opportunity to pump him for information. Devious. They should have sent her in on foot instead of the Dagger team; she probably could have talked the fifth-gen pilots into firing on their own munitions plant, just to get her to change the subject.

Compared to that, the repairs seem almost blissfully easy, and it takes him the rest of the day to notice he isn’t really getting anything done at all.

It’s mid-afternoon of the next before he really feels like throwing his tools against the wall.

The work isn’t difficult, exactly; it just takes a modicum of know-how, focus, and steady hands. Rooster has the first. The second is more of an issue: the waves are less predictable now but no less strong, something less emotional than physical, clenching his throat and twisting in his gut. He’ll slot a delicate part into place and find he’s waiting for Mav’s approving, fleeting grip on his shoulder, and he’ll have to set his tools down and convince his body he can get up and walk away, take deep breaths like a reasonable adult, rather than crumpling to the ground and keening like a child who’s lost his favorite toy.

He could manage to have steady hands, probably, if he could sleep. But when he closes his eyes, all Rooster can see is the stricken look on Hangman’s face. The knowledge that he’s behaved badly—the shame of it—itches at him like the seams of a shirt two sizes too small, and leaves him staring up at the dark ceiling of the trailer with aching, sleepless eyes.

At the end of the second useless day, Rooster goes to bed with no more hope of rest than he entertained the night before. It’s actually only an hour or two before he closes his eyes, but he sleeps fitfully, and wakes three hours later out of a dream where Hangman was lounging in the doorway of the bedroom, oblivious to the danger of something in the darkness behind him, and utterly unmoved by Rooster’s frantic apologies and entreaties to just come in and shut the door. The look on Hangman’s face as the thing finally grabbed him—color draining out of his cheek, eyes frantic—was just familiar enough to startle Rooster awake, and he’s rolling over to his phone and searching for the right contact before his brain is even fully online.

The phone rings, startlingly loud. It keeps ringing. Rooster is distracted enough by Hangman’s custom voicemail message—recorded by Carl Kasell? What the hell?—that it’s a few seconds after the beep before he realizes he needs to come up with something to say.

“Uh, I—” he croaks, then swallows. “I didn’t really think this far ahead, but…”

There’s a merciful click on the other end of the line as Hangman picks up. Rooster’s gratitude for being rescued from that looming disaster of a voicemail message is replaced by renewed terror.

“Hello?”

Hangman’s voice is rough with sleep, and Rooster feels something like vertigo. The last time he heard an audio transmission from Hangman, he realizes, was strapped into the F-14, seconds from a fiery death. In that moment, Hangman’s voice had been some combination of a cool hand on his forehead and the gift of life itself. That must be why it unspools something in him now.

“Hello?” Hangman repeats.

“Ah, yes, sorry,” Rooster says. “This is Rooster.”

There’s a pause. “Yes?”

“I just—listen, what is up with your voicemail? What do you do when someone too cool for NPR—a group, which, to be honest, I would have thought included you—what do you do when one of them calls you?”

“Well, in that case, I usually pick up,” Hangman says, with an audible yawn. “One question: did you seriously call me at, one moment, 0313 on a Saturday to ask me about my voicemail?”

“No, I—let me just—” Rooster sits up, scrubbing at his eyes. “I’m sorry for calling you so late. And I’m also sorry about—about, you know, the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“When I—”

“Oh,” Hangman interrupts, sounding decidedly more awake. “Actually, I do remember you calling me heartless and unnecessary, and saying my family never loved me. Could that be it?”

“I—yes,” Rooster says. “That. I was having a really shitty day, and I took it out on you, and that was…unfair. I shouldn’t have said any of it. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, so you should have just thought it.”

“I didn’t—I don’t think…that,” Rooster says, low.

“I’m sure. Well, as touching and meaningful as this has been, skin this flawless does require a certain amount of shuteye, so I’m going to—”

“I know I don’t have the right to—,” Rooster interrupts, and can’t quite get his mouth around the end of that sentence, to ask you to come back. “I don’t have the right to ask you to spend any more of your leave on me. You’re probably back home by now anyways. I just—” need you here, “—don’t mind. When you’re around. I’m sorry I screwed that up, and I’m sorry I hurt you.”

There’s a long silence. “You were pretty spectacularly shitty to me, I’m not going to deny that.” Hangman pauses, lets out a long breath. “But—if Javy had dropped me every time I was awful to him, when we were younger, I don’t think I’d be standing here today.”

“Lying down, I imagine,” Rooster says, and immediately wants to smack himself upside the head.

“Oh, my mistake,” Hangman says. “Here I thought a friend was apologizing to me, but all this time you were looking for the phone sex line! It ends with a seven, not a three. Don’t worry—it happens to the best of us.”

“Oh, shut it,” Rooster says, warmth rising in his cheeks and from deep inside his chest.

“As I was saying, with surprising tact and vulnerability, before I was so rudely interrupted—you fucked up. It happens.”

“I really am—”

“Nope, we’re done with that. I happen to still be in town, as a matter of fact, so I’ll see you in—one moment—just about four hours exactly, for a gym run.”

Rooster flops back onto the bed and briefly considers smothering himself with a pillow. “Before 0800? On a Saturday morning?”

“I’ve seen you shirtless recently, man, and you won’t always have the pretty face to distract from those pathetic excuses for biceps. Not to mention the delts. My God.”

“I’ve been in mourning, if you haven’t noticed,” Rooster points out, torn between preening and petulance.

“I’d be mourning the loss of your muscle definition, if I were you,” Hangman says. “See you at 0730,” and he clicks off without another word.

What an irredeemable ass. Rooster has no excuse for the smile pulling itself across his face, nor the deep and dreamless sleep he falls into a few moments later.

They work out, spot one another, and even though Rooster can’t quite work up the nerve to ask, Hangman follows him home.

He doesn’t seem inclined to help with the motorcycle, not that Rooster particularly wants him to—the bike was something Rooster broke, and something of Mav’s, both of which make him feel just on the sharp edge of possessive. Instead, Hangman lounges around the hangar, working his way through a procession of books he seemingly conjures from his gym bag, classics mixed randomly with thrillers and a few of what Rooster half-disbelievingly recognizes as the kind of regency romance he used to pilfer from the bookshelf in his mother’s room, the better part of three decades ago. Hangman sets the books down, now and then, to do a few pushups or stretch out for a quick nap in the sun. Every once in a while, he’ll saunter out of the hangar to take a phone call, words lost in the distance between them but the tone of his voice—relaxed, with a confidence that verges on cockiness—coming through just fine.

But generally, Hangman is quiet—there, but just on the edge of awareness, on Rooster’s nine o’clock when he’s bending over the motorcycle and taking measurements. He’s like a barn cat someone fed, and given the way half the banana bread disappears when Rooster makes a run into town for more welding gear, Rooster suspects that’s not that far from the truth.

Hangman stays quiet, even, when one of the waves hits and Rooster has to step away from the motorcycle, or from a conversation, and take deep breaths in and out, try to convince his threat alert systems that the call is coming from inside the house. Anyone else would try to reach out to Rooster, or avert their eyes, and he’s really not sure which would be worse. Hangman just watches, face neutral, expression unreadable.

There’s something crushing Rooster’s chest as he leans against the wall, trying to catch his breath, and it’s made more real but somehow less threatening by having someone to bear witness.

In the evenings, they don’t talk much either. Rooster puts in more effort, making dinner, than he would on his own; he still doesn’t go fancier than grilled cheese, but he sautés tomatoes, fries eggs seasoned with garlic and onion powder, layers on the cheese. He’s not sure whether it’s the company or the increase in protein, but everything seems a little sharper afterwards, more in focus—they work companionably through the food and then through the dishes, counter to sink to dishtowel to cabinet, a smooth continuum of motion.

The first two nights, Rooster had lost track of time working out in the hangar, and it’s late enough by the time the last dish is put away that Hangman claps him on the shoulder, squeezing for the briefest moment, before he heads out to his truck. Rooster stands just inside the shadowed entrance to the hangar and watches his taillights disappear into the darkness.

He actually remembers to quit on time on the third day. It’s still light out, though the sun is low on the horizon as Hangman scrubs the last of the caked-on fried rice from the bottom of the pan, and Rooster abandons it to drip dry on a dishtowel by the sink.

Hangman shuts off the water and reaches down for a towel to dry off his hands.

“Let’s grab a beer, sit outside for a while,” Rooster says, before he can think better of it. “Unless you need to rush back into town.”

“It’s a nice evening,” Hangman says, casting him a look. “I don’t have anywhere to be.”

“You don’t have to drive back, afterwards, if you don’t want to,” Rooster says, then blushes before he can finish the thought. Is he a grown man or a fumbling teenager? “That is, you can take the bed, I’ll change the sheets and sleep on the couch.”

“You sure?”

“It’s not any trouble. I used to—” Rooster’s voice cracks, but he presses on, “—used to sleep on the couch for weeks during the summer, before.”

“Alright,” Hangman says. “Works for me.”

Rooster turns away to the fridge, partially to hide his face, and he’s grateful for the wash of cold air. He grabs two beers off the lowest shelf, tosses one to Hangman.

It is a nice evening, as a matter of fact. The heat from the day is still radiating up from the concrete, but the air is cooling off fast enough that Rooster checks the radar on his phone—sure enough, storm cell moving in from the northwest.

They hop up on a concrete wall near the hangar, swinging their legs over the side and looking out over the fields, where the sun’s just beginning to set. It illuminates the clouds in a spectacular palette of warm tones, with the occasional flash of brilliant, distant lightning.

“Well, isn’t that a sight to see,” Hangman drawls.

“Sure is,” Rooster says, kicking his heels idly against the wall. “Storms out here can get pretty intense—you should hear the rain on the hangar roof. Gets to where you can barely hear yourself think.”

“Huh, I’d imagine so,” Hangman says. “Do you get storms like that often, out here, this time of year?”

“Now and then. I do remember one time—” Rooster chuckles, “A woman from the neighboring property—divorced mom, I think, Mav was always popular with that crowd—she hadn’t gotten the memo about Penny, I guess, and she came over with a broken lawnmower maybe ten minutes before a big storm hit. That’s ‘broken’ in quotes, by the way; I’m pretty sure she’d just drained the gas tank.”

“Oh yeah?”

“For sure. Not a scratch on it, not a bolt out of place. Anyway, I was never quite sure whether Mav clocked her—I think so, but you never know—but he decided to take her through the repairs he was doing on the Mustang at the time. The walls are shaking with rain and thunder, this lady has engine oil smeared up her white linen sleeve, and Mav’s covered with grease and dirt, talking about engine specifications like there’s nowhere he’d rather be.”

Hangman chuckles. “As opposed to her.”

“Yeah, she hightailed it out of there the moment the rain stopped,” Rooster says, taking a long sip of his beer. “You should have seen the plume of mud her tires kicked up.”

“I imagine she didn’t try that again.”

“Nope, sure didn’t,” Rooster says, pausing deliberately. “Her twenty-five-year-old son did, though.”

Hangman barks out a laugh. “You’re kidding.”

“The very next day.”

“Broken lawnmower again?”

“Wouldn’t you know it, the damn thing was running on empty, two days in a row,” Rooster says. “Don’t know how you guessed it.”

“I’ll take another shot in the dark: Mav caught on to this one.”

“Don’t know how he could have avoided it,” Rooster says, “but who knows, with him. What he did do was make the kid disassemble and reconstruct the lawnmower, clean out all the parts and explain what they did. By the time it was back together, I’m pretty sure that whole family was about ready to move out of state.”

“Can’t blame ‘em for trying, I suppose,” Hangman says, chuckling. “Did they clamp onto you, too?”

“My leave was unpredictable enough that I could dodge them, mostly. Thank God.”

Hangman elbows him, not too hard. “Didn’t enjoy the fanclub?”

“I mean—it is kinda nice, at times. Getting to know people.”

“Oh, is that what they call it.”

“Maybe that’s what you call it,” Rooster says, elbowing back a little harder. “Lech.”

“Liar.”

“Smart-ass,” Rooster says, taking another drink. The clouds are pulling closer as the sun sets, cool tones blending with the warm.

“Please, like ‘Great Balls of Fire’ doesn’t pull.”

Rooster cocks an eyebrow, glancing over at Hangman. “What, would it have pulled you?”

“In your dreams, maybe,” Hangman says, a little color rising in his cheeks. “But I saw you after that little number—or rather, didn’t see you.”

“I’ll have you know I sing that to honor my dad,” Rooster says. “It’s a very respectful tribute to his memory.”

“That so.”

“Also, it pulls,” Rooster admits, and Hangman tilts his head back in a laugh.

They sit in companionable silence for a few minutes, watching the clouds roll in across the darkening sky. Rooster can see the faint haze of rain in the distance.

“I always loved this kind of storm, as a kid,” Hangman says eventually.

“You did?”

“Yep. There was an outcropping of roof outside my bedroom window, about yea big,” Hangman shapes an area the size of a small table, “and when a rainstorm came through, you wouldn’t believe the noise it made. Like a steel drum. When the power went out it was like a snow day—everyone gathered around candles in the kitchen, and my dad would stay home in case the flooding went over the roads.”

“Sounds nice.”

Hangman shrugs. “Less so as I got older, but so it goes. One time my older sister and I snuck off to get an early start on carving the pumpkins for Halloween. You should have seen my mom’s face when she caught us—she was sure one of us would slice off a finger and have to swim to the hospital.”

Rooster laughs. “Sounds like you were a handful.”

“But unbeatable at carving jack-o’-lanterns, let me tell you. No triangle eyes and snaggletooth mouths here.”

“Not on your jack-o’-lanterns, maybe,” Rooster says, and Hangman shoves at his shoulder in mock outrage.

“And here I thought impaired vision was supposed to keep people out of the cockpit.”

“Guess you thought wrong,” Rooster says. He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “Mav and I used to sit out here and watch the storms roll in, sometimes.”

Hangman glances over at him. “Oh yeah?”

“Yep. I think he might have been a storm chaser, if he hadn’t flown—knew all the technical terms for the types of clouds, how the weather patterns interacted. We’d sit out here and he’d commentate like a sports announcer or something—alternate between that and these unbelievable stories about the old days.”

“Were they true?”

“Before I saw him fly, I’d have said no way,” Rooster says. “Afterwards? Seems like I’d be a bigger fool to disbelieve him.”

“I’ll second that,” Hangman says, taking a drink. “You really think he’d have chased storms?”

“Oh, yeah. For the adrenaline alone. Although maybe if he’d been riding straight towards a tornado, I could have convinced him to wear a helmet.” Rooster knows his voice twists a little harshly on that, and he wishes all at once he could pull it back, stick to something safer.

Hangman sets his beer down. “You think he wasn’t careful enough.”

Rooster’s laugh feels sour in his throat. “You kidding? Mav, taking stupid goddamn risks? You’re right, I don’t know where I would have gotten that impression.” He can feel his pulse picking up, pounding in his throat. “We’ve both pulled off some foolhardy stunts in our day—god knows, I have—but that man turns self-destruction into an art form. And let me tell you: he doesn’t give a single fuck what he’s leaving behind.”

Hangman doesn’t say anything, and Rooster can’t bring himself to look at him.

“Left—what he left behind,” Rooster says, voice cracking as he slips off the wall to turn away from Hangman, clasping his hands behind his neck and staring out at the horizon. “I know the goddamn tense.”

“I know you do,” Hangman says, quiet.

Rooster can feel the tension in his knuckles as he carefully doesn’t let his hands shake. He squats down in the short, dry grass and tries to control his breathing.

He’s not sure how long he stays there, only that it’s fully dark by the time he picks himself back up and turns around. Hangman is outlined by the faint light from the front of the hangar, but Rooster can’t see his face. Small mercies.

He’s still a little light-headed, but he manages to walk back over and lean against the wall. For some reason, this time feels different from the others—he’d been doing so well. It had been going so well. Humiliation creeps up his throat like bile.

“Want to play two truths and a lie?” Hangman says eventually, lazily, like he hasn’t just spent the better part of twenty minutes waiting for Rooster to pull himself together.

Rooster manages a weak laugh. “What are we, in sixth grade?”

“Oh, come on,” Hangman says. “You got a better idea?”

“Oh, by all means. Go ahead.”

“Okay,” Hangman says, pushing himself off to stand next to Rooster, leaning against the wall. “Let’s see. I did ballet for ten years as a kid. I’d broken seven bones by my eighteenth birthday. And you could absolutely have pulled me with ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ if you’d wanted to.”

Rooster glances over, startled, but Hangman’s face is still in shadow. He clears his throat. “Uh, I don’t know—the last one?”

“Nah,” Hangman says. “It was eight bones, as a matter of fact.”

“Clumsy kid?”

“Something like that.”

Rooster clears his throat again. He knows the path he should take here, the innocuous truths he should share—it would probably be healthier, fairer to Hangman, less likely to end in loneliness and disaster. He knows what he should say. He’s just not sure he cares.

“My turn,” he says, stalling. The truth is that this isn’t a conscious decision any more than he chooses to bear down on the throttle, pull into a dive—it’s all habit, instinct, seeing the gap open up and taking it in the next breath. It’s what Mav had finally taught him how to do.

“Yep,” Hangman says. “Your turn.”

“I’ve never flown before. I don’t know why you came back. And if I’d known that last part back at the bar, that night would have ended a little differently.”

Hangman turns to him, his smile widening, pulling the shadowed lines of his face into sharp relief. “You know, I’m not sure that’s how the game is played.”

“Seems to be working fine to me,” Rooster says, and he’s just about to close the space between them when the first fat droplets of rain hit his head, spattering across his arms and hands.

Hangman glances up, thoughtful. Then all at once, he reaches across and shoves Rooster, not hard enough to send him to the ground but enough to knock him off balance, before he swings himself up over the wall. “Race you back to the hangar!” he calls, and the sky opens up above them.

Rooster curses, half-disbelieving. The rain is coming down in sheets, and by the time he clears the wall, he can see Hangman already halfway to the doors, sure-footed even as the dirt gets churned up into slick mud. Rooster’s not eager to twist an ankle, so he takes it a little slower. By the time he clears the doors, he’s soaked through to the skin.

He pauses just inside the doorway, pulling his dripping shirt off and shaking out his hair. He tosses it to the side and looks over, sees Hangman leaning against the wall a few feet away, laughing so hard he’s nearly doubled over with it.

The dim light from the trailer and the hammering rain on the metal roof lend the whole thing an air of unreality—maybe that’s why Rooster closes the distance between them so fast, backing him up against the wall, one hand on Hangman’s chest and the other braced behind him.

“You think that was funny, huh?” he asks. Normally he’d have to raise his voice to be heard, but not when they’re this close.

Hangman’s eyes are sparkling. “Absolutely—you should have seen your face. You know what else?”

“What’s that?”

“I won.”

“Is that so,” Rooster says. Hangman’s skin is warm through the thin fabric of his shirt. There are water droplets caught in his eyelashes, and they’re so goddamn long. “What are you planning to do about it?”

“I was planning on leaving that up to you,” Hangman says, a deep rasp in his voice, and at that point it’s more instinct than a conscious decision for Rooster to drop to his knees.

He’s half been thinking about it, he realizes as he opens Hangman’s belt with surprisingly steady hands—has half been thinking about it since he met Hangman’s eyes across the pool table those years ago, lips wrapped around that goddamn toothpick. Looking at him, Rooster had realized all at once, with a jolt in his gut, that the thing simmering between them during their first time at TOPGUN hadn’t gone away.

It’s lived in the back of his head for years now, welling up late at night or early in the morning, when he knew he’d be alone in the showers for a few more minutes—but that couldn’t compare to the reality of it, the hot line of Hangman’s cock against his cheek, the strangled note in his voice as he curses and tips his head back against the wall.

It drives everything else out of his head—the weight and heat and taste of it, the way Hangman’s hand comes up to cradle his jaw. His own dick is pressing uncomfortably against his fly, but Rooster loses himself in the mechanics of it, the flat-tongued motion, lets Hangman fuck into his mouth until he’s a breath away from choking, lets the sounds Hangman is making vibrate their way into his bones.

When Hangman’s hand tightens on his jaw and he chokes on a gasp, Rooster grips his hand tighter across Hangman’s hip and rides the shuddering wave of it with him.

It’s only a few moments later that Hangman finishes catching his breath, pulls Rooster back up to his feet and twists them around. Rooster is braced against the wall. Hangman is pressed into his back, breath hot on the nape of his neck. He’s murmuring praise into Rooster’s shoulder, and Rooster’s not even sure what he’s saying but it’s shaking him apart, dismantling him as completely as the warm hand on his cock.

It’s an embarrassingly short time later that his breathing begins to fray. Hangman bites him on the crease between his neck and shoulder, just gently enough to avoid breaking the skin, and Rooster trembles against him with a full-body shudder and spills into his hand.

His knees threaten to give out. Hangman tightens his other arm around Rooster’s midsection and drops his forehead onto Rooster’s shoulder.

Rooster can just hear the deep rise and fall of his breaths above the hammering of the rain. He leans against the wall, into the arm holding him up, and lets his mind go blank.

They can’t stand there forever, of course. Hangman goes in to shower while Rooster washes his face and hands in the kitchen sink, brushes his teeth. He’s in the middle of stripping and remaking the bed when Hangman walks in, wet hair curling across his temples.

Between them, they pull the fitted sheet taut, tuck the top sheet in and shake out the comforter. Rooster glances up to toss him a pillow and pillowcase, and catches Hangman watching him.

“You good?” he asks, flushing hot.

“Sure am. You?”

“Yep,” Rooster says. “Look, I—you know I’m not at my best right now. This—it doesn’t have to mean anything. Might be better if it didn’t.”

“If that’s what you want,” Hangman says, low and serious. “Listen—we could do it again tomorrow, or we could never talk about it again, up to you. But you should know—that’s not why I came back. And unless you tell me to go, I’m not leaving. Either way.”

Rooster blinks at him. The silence stretches on a bit too long before he blurts, “Alright—thanks,” tosses the pillow to him, grabs the sheets, and leaves the room before he can say anything he’ll regret.

Rooster hasn’t managed to process any more of that by the next morning, when he wakes up to the smell of frying bacon and the kitchen light shining through his eyelids.

“Blergh,” he manages, sitting upright to squint at Hangman as he cracks eggs into a pan, looking altogether too cheerful for this unholy hour of the morning.

“Welcome back,” Hangman says, tossing the eggshells into the garbage in a wide arc. Showoff.

“Thanks. Smells good,” Rooster mumbles, getting up from the couch and running a hand through the unruly mass of his hair.

“Who says I made enough to share?”

“Fair point,” Rooster allows, and walks over to come up behind him, intending to glance into the pan, check for himself—but then Hangman turns around, his hair smelling like Rooster’s shampoo, and they both seem to realize at the same moment just how close Rooster is standing.

If he’d thought about it, Rooster would have put the likelihood of “never talk about it again” a hell of a lot higher than “do it again tomorrow.” As it is, they barely manage to turn the stove off in time, and the bacon is cold and slightly soggy by the time they get around to eating it.

Hangman still doesn’t offer to help fix the motorcycle, and Rooster doesn’t ask. Before lunch, Hangman even sits at the same distance, reading his book with a flush still resting high on his cheeks, a mark to rival the one on Rooster’s shoulder rising on the tan column of his neck.

He sits closer after lunch, though—near enough that Rooster starts asking him for tools out of the toolbox, which Hangman hands over with a kind of aloof disinterest that Rooster can absolutely tell is a front. He even has enough happy chemicals left in his system to find it charming that Hangman doesn’t seem to know the difference between a ratchet and a wrench, rather than finding it completely unbelievable.

“Hey, they pay me to fly ‘em,” Hangman says, when Rooster finally cracks and asks, “Not to know how to put ‘em together.” He stretches, tipping his head back to expose the long line of his throat. “We have people for that, you know?”

Rooster just manages to keep from throwing a washer at his head. Hangman keeps passing him tools all afternoon.

A few days go by like that. Not comfortable, exactly—despite all the work and adrenaline and orgasms, Rooster’s still a little too prickly in his own skin to feel at ease—but bearable. Not an unbroken numbness anymore; instead, numbness punctuated by brief moments of levity and distraction.

The motorcycle starts coming back together. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the table of parts Rooster has been keeping—sorted and labeled with taped-down notecards he’d bought at the local office supply store—starts to empty. He’s putting tools away instead of setting them aside.

It’s the middle of the afternoon when he runs out of things to do. He’s put everything away, washed and polished every curve of the motorcycle until it gleams. It leaves him standing there blankly, rag dangling from a nerveless hand.

Rooster had thought, perhaps stupidly, that this would feel—big. Momentous. Instead it just fills him with a nameless terror.

Hangman glances up at his face and sets his book aside. “Is it done?”

“I don’t know,” Rooster says. “I think so. I just—I don’t know what’s next.”

“You take it for a test ride?” Hangman suggests.

“I guess.”

“You guess?”

“It’s just—what if it doesn’t work?”

“Then you’ll keep on fixing it.”

“And what if it does?”

Hangman pauses. “I don’t know. I guess you’ll have to figure that out.”

Rooster’s on the verge of objecting to that, although he doesn’t know on what grounds, before he checks himself. Hangman isn’t his therapist, nor his lover. The self-pitying shit can wait.

“Alright, then,” he says, tossing the rag aside. He’s suddenly impatient, full of nervous energy. “You ready?”

“Am I?” Hangman says, eyes following Rooster as he strides over to the cabinet to retrieve a helmet and protective gear. “Remind me of my role in all this?”

“Come and watch,” Rooster says. “Laugh at me if I fall over. Give a witness statement if I explode.”

“You think that’s likely?”

“Not terribly,” Rooster says, kicking up the stand and rolling the motorcycle towards the open hangar doors. “If it happens, you can call me an idiot in my obituary, though.”

“Very funny,” Hangman says, but follows him across the threshold.

It’s a cloudless summer day, the sun just on the kind edge of baking, heat radiating up from the pavement beneath their feet. Rooster pulls on the helmet and swings his leg over the motorcycle as Hangman leans against the hangar wall, in the foot or so of shade cast by the overhanging roof.

The motor comes to life, easily enough—maybe not exactly the same purr it always gave Mav, but good enough for Rooster—and he pulls out of the driveway slowly. Cautiously. After a few moments of good behavior, he gives it more gas, gets up to a respectable speed, leaning into the curves with growing ease. The wind is whipping through his clothes, pebbles shooting up from his tires to either side of the road.

It’s like flying—not exactly, but comforting in the familiar physicality of it, demanding enough of his focus that it pushes everything else to the side. The ground could drop away on either side of him, and he wouldn’t be all that surprised, the roar of the wind sweeping the real world away, the way it’s scrubbed out everything in his head.

He doesn’t get too far before he pulls a wide turn, through an abandoned driveway and back down the road. Rooster’s feeling confident enough at this point to even give a little extra gas as the hangar comes back into view, showing off a bit with the flashy turn into the driveway.

Nothing he hasn’t done before. The issue is that he looks up at the hangar. When he sees the figure leaning against the wall, it’s a bit too tall—built differently, the wrong clothes, an unfamiliar cast to its face—and Rooster realizes with a sickening jolt that he’s looking for Mav. He’s expecting the clap on his shoulder, the barely-leashed pride in Mav’s eyes—an expression he’s just gotten to know and won’t see again, and that knowledge hits him with a near-physical blow, the yawning gulf of endless empty mornings opening up in front of him. No more trips out to the hangar. No one to call when he needs advice. No one left who remembers his mom and dad, who knows Rooster as more than the lonely, too-quiet kid they left behind.

And it’s in that frozen, awful moment—falling into that chasm, rather than cringing away from it—that the grips twist beneath his hands and the motor dies with a sputter. In an instant, the motorcycle goes into a sharp skid and falls, sending Rooster sliding across the pavement to a stomach-lurching halt.

The world is tilted at a strange angle. Rooster closes his eyes and lets the helmet thunk down onto the pavement. He doesn’t think anything is broken, but in the initial shock of it, he wouldn’t necessarily know.

He’ll just keep lying here for a little bit longer.

It’s only a few moments, though, before he feels the vibrations of footsteps on the pavement—Hangman, running down from the hangar. He’s tugging off Rooster’s helmet, checking the dilation of his eyes. Strong, warm hands are patting him down, checking for obvious injuries, broken bones or abrasions.

“Rooster?” he’s saying, low and urgent. “I need a status report, now. Tell me how you’re doing, come on. Rooster?”

A fractured collarbone, a concussion—these things would be understandable, excusable. What isn’t is the way the dusty road and the unexpectedly serious expression on Hangman’s face start swimming, growing blurry and indistinct.

“Fuck,” Rooster says, wholeheartedly. He has time to wish that Hangman had just left his helmet on or had left him sprawled there in the dust before he pushes himself to his knees, shuffles the two staggering steps towards Hangman, and collapses into his shoulder.

He feels, distantly, Hangman bringing one arm up to support his back, the other gripping hard across the nape of his neck. One thumb is smoothing across the base of his hairline, rhythmically, with a gentleness that Rooster might have flinched away from if he weren’t sobbing too hard to speak.

It’s tearing, animal—like something he’s kept leashed for most of two months that is finally clawing its way out. It’s the way he cried at four and didn’t at seventeen, that piercing wail of it’s not fair scraping at the inside of his throat. There’s no containing it at this point, he realizes. Tears and snot and pride are getting all over Hangman’s shoulder, as he crouches there in the dust by the side of the road. There’s nothing to do at this point but fist his hand in the side of Hangman’s shirt and hold on—hold on as long as he can until Hangman gets tired of it, pulls away.

But Hangman doesn’t pull away. He stays there, solid, warm, his thumb moving over Rooster’s hairline, until the tears and shaking slowly run dry.

Even when Rooster’s just kneeling in the dirt with his head tipped onto Hangman’s shoulder, face wet and mind and body exhausted, Hangman doesn’t move.

“Why did you come back?” Rooster finally manages, his voice hoarse with strain.

Hangman doesn’t seem to think it’s an odd question, or at least, doesn’t show it, although his hand falters slightly on Rooster’s neck. “I haven’t always needed an excuse to be a jackass to the people who care about me,” he says, finally. “But I’ve had one, more than once. And I didn’t want this place to eat you alive.”

When Rooster finally pulls away, peeling off his gloves and running his hands sharply over his face, Hangman settles himself cross-legged by the side of the road—dust covering his absurdly expensive jeans, shoulder wet, looking as comfortable as he does in a cockpit or on the low-slung seats at the bar.

“Water?” he asks, picking up a water bottle that had rolled to the side when Rooster lurched into him.

Rooster nods, reaches out a grateful hand. He drains most of it in a few swallows, pouring some into his hand to scrub across his face, get rid of the tears and mucus. He feels raw, scraped-out; he feels like he’d be ashamed, if he had the energy left for it.

Hangman helps him to his feet without comment; he supports the scuffed motorcycle as Rooster wheels it back to the hangar. He leans against the doorway as Rooster washes out the few scrapes he got from the fall, lets the blood and bits of gravel slide down the drain, watches the flow of clean water spill over his arm and into the sink. He doesn’t look away, and Rooster is pathetically, graspingly glad.

“Congrats, Mr. Bradshaw,” Alice says, when he rolls the motorcycle into her shop the next morning. “It’s not totaled.”

“Thanks,” Rooster says. His smile surprises him.

“What are you looking for, then? One last tune-up?”

“Kind of.” Rooster rubs the side of his neck. “It’s almost finished, but there’s still something I haven’t fixed, or messed up along the way—I took it for a spin yesterday and ended up in the dirt.”

“I’ll take a look at it,” she says, eyeing the motorcycle over. “I can be done by tomorrow, if you want to hand it over now.”

“Would it be possible to go over it together?” Rooster says. Alice raises an eyebrow, and he flushes. “I just—it was important to my—” he falters for a moment, but for once it’s over terminology and not flying through the jetwash of something he can’t even name, “—to Mav. I thought I could fix it on my own, but I can’t.”

Alice’s eyes soften a degree. “Seems like you’ve done a half-decent job, flyboy.”

“Not on everything,” he says, and if his smile is a little shaky, she’s kind enough not to mention it.

“I can’t just let you start tinkering,” she says, after a pause. “Workplace safety, and all that. But if you want to stick around, I’ll talk you through what I’m doing and why, so you’ll know how to do it next time.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Rooster lets out a breath. “Although, to be perfectly honest, I’m hoping there won’t be a next time.”

“Don’t we all,” Alice says, and keeps a thoughtful eye on him as he rolls the motorcycle up to the workbench.

By the time Alice declares the motorcycle road-worthy at last, it’s late in the afternoon of the second day, and she’s left off the “Mr. Bradshaw” in favor of “Rooster,” and on one or two occasions when he’s fucked up particularly badly, left off the “Rooster” in favor of “dumbass.”

None of his mistakes are disastrous—lowering durability instead of causing fiery explosions, generally—but she spots so many things he doesn’t, and takes the time to walk him through them, that he suspects the bill should end up quadruple the initial quote, for work-hours alone.

Alice still tries to halve her rate at the end of it, when the motorcycle is sitting out in front of the shop, perfectly calibrated and gleaming in the sun.

“My shop, my rules,” she says, when he argues. “Besides, I knew Mav pretty well—he was a sweetheart, in his own way. Used to take my wife and daughter flying every Christmas. I always used to tell him, if she grew up to be a crop duster or a fighter pilot, he’d be in for it.”

Rooster braces himself for the awful, paralytic wash of grief, but it doesn’t come. His throat doesn’t clench closed, his guts twist around themselves; instead, something gentler rises in his chest. “What did he say to that?”

“Oh, he just laughed,” Alice says, familiar smile-lines deepening at the corners of her eyes. “Said she’ll fly or she won’t, but that everybody deserves a chance to find out for themselves.”

“He used to go flying with me too, when I was a little kid,” Rooster says, his voice a bit scratchy. “Drove my mom half up the wall.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that,” Alice says, recoiling in mock-horror. “And especially don’t tell my daughter.”

“Scout’s honor, ma’am,” Rooster says, and she laughs. “Although—” he hesitates, “I don’t blame you for wanting to keep her out of the cockpit.”

Her eyes are a little too keen. “I appreciate you saying that.” She tucks her pen into her pocket, dusts off her pants. “She pushes back—I’m sure you did too—but I figure it’s important to have someone worrying about her.”

Rooster leaves an extra couple of fifty-dollar bills under a wrench at the far end of the table on his way out.

The motorcycle purrs to life just like it did for Mav.

Rooster had asked Hangman to drop him off at the garage this morning, half out of cautious optimism and half for the simple pleasure of the time spent in the truck together, mock-arguing over something inconsequential or really arguing about what album to put on for the last two minutes into town.

Now, he sends Hangman a text saying that he’s done at the garage and won’t need to be picked up—Hangman will know what that means—and straps his helmet on.

The late afternoon sunlight turns telephone pole shadows into long stripes across the road, a flickering old film reel in slow motion. The pattern of it stirs an answering emotion in him—not the pervasive numbness or brief exhilaration of the past few weeks, but a sharp kind of contentment, something that curls up in his chest with its claws still extended.

The roads are almost empty, and Rooster isn’t in any particular hurry—he takes the long way home, out on the one-lane roads past the old farmhouses, lifting a hand in greeting to the neighbors as he passes by, kids in the front lawn and fields of knee-high sweetcorn stretching out to either side. He passes a fruit stand selling late-summer peaches and the last of the cherry crop by the side of the road and pulls in on a whim. He doesn’t have a bag to carry any home, but he winks at the woman selling them and she rolls her eyes and tosses him a peach for free.

He takes another peach to wrap in a plastic bag and tuck into his pocket, slides a five-dollar bill across the counter after all, and goes to sit in the shaded grass just down the way.

Rooster had half-thought his feelings would have calcified, over the months he’d been denying them; that now that he’d managed to name his grief, it would be a long, slow process of chipping away at the layers of them, naming and identifying each one before moving on to the next. Instead, they seem to bubble up readily, without warning, as though clamoring for his attention.

He bites into the peach; juice slides summer-bright across his tongue.

He misses Mav.

Mav had always brought Carole peaches when they were in season, when he visited from out of town. It had never done any good for his tough-guy image, the brash flyboy with a net-bag of peaches dangling from his fingertips, but Carole had developed a taste for them while she was pregnant and hadn’t ever lost it. Long after she’d died—in the last few years—Rooster would walk into the trailer to find a bowl of peaches on the counter, fragrant in the late-summer heat. No milk or eggs in the fridge, but peaches on the counter, even if there wasn’t anyone left who remembered the family recipe for cobbler, or who would smack his arm for forgetting to bring them by. But then again, that was Mav—rock-solid dependable, right down to the core of him, for all he tried to convince you he was just a flash in the pan.

Rooster takes another bite and lets it sweep through him: partly for Mav, partly for himself, tears running down his face as juice dries sticky-sweet in the creases of his hands. He’d depended on Mav, and Mav is gone, and he misses him. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

He sits there under the tree and cries until the last bit of flesh has come away from the pit. Then he gets up, scrubbing his forearm across his cheeks, and turns and tosses it into the wooded area off the road. It traces a wide arc through the trees and clatters against a far-off branch, falling into the vegetation and out of sight.

Rooster pulls on his helmet and gets back on the motorcycle.

It’s a long arc of road, another ten or fifteen minutes, before the blocky shape of the hangar comes into view.

The air is warm on his skin, even at speed; the last rays of sunlight are coming in across the hills, casting the landscape in a reddish-yellow glow. The wheat to either side of the road rustles in patterns unrelated to the whoosh of the motorcycle as it passes by.

Rooster’s more than half-tempted to pull the same flashy maneuver coming into the driveway as before, but he already thinks Alice has seen deeper into him than he’s ready to deal with, so he slows down and rides a more cautious arc across the turn and onto the old pavement.

It’s a damn good thing he does, because when Rooster glances up at the hangar, the bottom drops out of his stomach all over again.

Not for the same reasons, though. When Rooster glances up this time, the figure doesn’t seem too tall anymore, the hair too light, shadows at odd angles across his face—because this time, he’s expecting someone different. The man leaning against the wall, cocky half-smile on his face, is exactly who Rooster’s hoping to see, and the answering swell of emotion would send him head over teakettle if he were going even the slightest bit faster.

It’s anything but calcified, even after lying buried this long under uncertainty, then fear, and then grief. It’s volcanic, cataclysmic. It doesn’t change anything at all—except for Rooster’s sudden understanding, a lens clicking into place. Two bottles of water, half a dozen late nights. A handshake on an aircraft carrier. A man who learned how to stop leaving people behind, and the one who couldn’t figure out how to get rid of him. The one who didn’t want to—who wanted, more than anything, for him to stay.

He pulls up in front of the hangar. Hangman peels himself off the wall, saunters over as Rooster takes off his helmet. He stands next to the handlebars, arms crossed, stance relaxed.

“Is it done? All fixed up?”

“I don’t know,” Rooster says, honestly. “But I think it’s as good as I can manage.”

“She’ll be fine,” Hangman says, light. “I’m sure of it.” The wind ruffles through his hair as he tosses Rooster a grin and turns back towards the hangar.

“Jake,” Rooster says.

Jake stops in his tracks, tilts his head as he turns towards Rooster. “Yeah?”

The words Rooster intended to say die in his throat. He tugs the peach out of his pocket instead—thankfully un-crushed—intending to toss it to Jake, but he hasn’t actually gotten too far. Instead, Rooster just holds it out like an offering.

Jake takes a step back towards him, another. His fingers close around Rooster’s.

He’s standing very close; his eyes are so green. He hasn’t let go.

“Jake,” Rooster says, half-sure he’s about to get punched in the face, “Can I kiss you?”

“Bradley,” Jake says, voice catching, and the peach goes rolling away across the pavement.

The call comes in a little after 1800.

It’s an ordinary evening in early September. Rooster’s just tossing his jacket into the passenger-side seat and pulling up a playlist on his phone for the short drive to the restaurant—it’s his turn to pay again, thanks to a text from Hangman near the end of the last pool game that had made him miss three shots in a row. From the glint in Phoenix’s eye, she’d sent a message across two time zones just to get that edge. Conniving wretch.

“Effective conniving wretch, who’s not on the hook for seven orders of onion rings,” Phoenix had said, winking at him from across the table as Payback and Fanboy roared with laughter.

Rooster’s double-checking for his wallet when his phone rings. Penny, looks like. Maybe she wants to iron out some last details about the will? He disconnects from the speakers and picks up.

When the call ends, he drives to the airport in silence, fifteen miles over the speed limit.

The rise and fall of Mav’s chest is as miraculous at the end of the fourth hour as it was after the first.

Rooster’s sent Penny and Amelia home to get some sleep, by convincing each of them it was for the other’s good—they’d been the first call when Mav had turned up, since they lived so much closer, and they’d been standing vigil for all the hours Rooster had spent trying not to curse at various stressed-looking airport employees. They’d finally made it out the door an hour and a half ago, leaving Rooster alone in the quiet room—a private room, age and rank having their privileges—to sit by the bedside and hang on to Mav’s hand.

He can’t tell that he’s falling asleep, but it’s dark by the time he wakes to a hand on his shoulder. A bright line of artificial light slants in under the door.

“Bradley,” Jake says, and Bradley turns to bury his face in his hip, fisting his other hand in the side of Jake’s shirt and clutching hard. Jake smooths his hand across the back of Bradley’s neck, thumb rubbing gently across the base of his hairline.

When Bradley finally leans back, tears still prickling at his eyes, he looks up to meet Jake’s eyes. “You came.”

“I brought you water and food—didn’t know if you’d eaten,” Jake says. “Why don’t you go take a walk around this block of rooms and I’ll sit with him a while.”

“But—”

“Nope,” Hangman says, tossing himself down into the other chair. “Look, I’m comfortable now. If you don’t leave soon, I’ll start singing something loud and obnoxious—Tequila, maybe.”

“The song with only one lyric?” Rooster asks, blankly.

“I have a very short attention span,” Hangman says. “Go on, get.”

When Rooster gets back, feeling not quite steady but like his inner organs have sorted themselves out, Hangman’s sitting by the bed, watching the rise and fall of Mav’s chest just like Rooster had. He’s not even on his phone.

He does stand up when Rooster comes in, though, brushing an absent-minded kiss across the side of his mouth. “I’m going to go outside to make some calls and book hotel rooms, alright?” he says. “I called Phoenix, and most of the team will be here by tomorrow—I’ll get us a block of rooms down the road. Then you’re getting some sleep. Tonight.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Rooster says, and Hangman chuckles.

“I do mean that, alright?” he says, submitting to another hug—Hangman’s ribs all but squeaking audibly, for how tightly Rooster wants to hold on—before he leaves the room.

Rooster reclaims his seat by the side of the bed. Mav’s still breathing—he can’t stop checking, although the machines to his right would probably make some dramatic noises if that had changed—and when Rooster looks up to his face, his eyes are open.

Rooster nearly jumps out of his skin and narrowly avoids crushing Mav’s hand in surprise.

“You and Hangman, huh,” Mav says, more rasp than voice, and the most beautiful thing Rooster has ever heard. He slides his eyes over to Rooster, clearly feeling the drugs but with a gaze still sharp enough to cut. “Well, I guess some things do run in the family.”

Rooster thinks, irrationally, of a 35-year-old photo tacked up on the hangar wall—handshakes on aircraft carriers, and what they can mean. He’ll have to interrogate that later, and finally work up the nerve to return that crystal plate.

For now, though, all he can do is grip Mav’s hand tightly in his own, bend over the quiet, dim hospital bed, and laugh until he cries.