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There were a lot of differences between Iceman and Maverick.
There were the obvious ones, height, hair colour, build. But deeper down there was more to see. The attitude, the confidence, Ice’s sure, steady calm against Maverick’s frenetic energy, the fear of not being perfect against the unshakeable certainty that he was, the caution against the complete lack of it. Maverick smiled easy and Iceman didn’t. Iceman carefully chose every word that left his mouth and Maverick didn’t.
Ice was careful and Maverick wasn’t.
Which made it a bit of a surprise when the first one of them to slip up was Ice.
It was funny how supposedly grown men, fully qualified and drilled naval aviators, the best of the best, still turned into a bunch of kids when they were in the locker room.
Maverick and Goose already practically fell through the doors, pushing and shoving the way they always did, tumbling into some chaos already in progress. It was a little hard to tell what was going on, with all the shouting and steam and slap of bare feet on tile.
“The hell is happening here?” Mav hummed, jumping deftly to the side as Slider and Hollywood sprinted past them and hopping over the bench to reach his locker.
Goose, tall enough to see over the mist, made an exaggerated gesture, miming listening to his radar in the backseat of their plane, “Hmm…sounds like an unwarranted act of aggression, a stealth mission across borders, intentional destabilisation…”
“What?” Maverick snorted, aiming another elbow at his ribs.
“Looks like Hollywood stole Slider’s clothes when he was in the shower,” Goose gave as good as he got, more effectively with the longer reach.
“Ah,” Mav grinned, rubbing his side and smirking when a pained yelp sounded from behind the lockers, Slider clearly having finally run down his prey, “See what happens when we’re not here to keep the peace, Goose?”
His best friend shot him a lopsided smirk, “That’s only because when we pull shit like that, we don’t get caught.”
Maverick grinned at that, shooting him a wink before burying his face in a towel, eager to get the prickling sweat off his face. They’d pushed it hard today and now he was back on the ground, adrenaline burning off, he was starting to feel it. Shaking hands, that tense feeling in his stomach, gravity settling back into his bones with a vengeance, like it was annoyed at Maverick slipping its grip for a while. All he wanted right now was a quick shower and to wolf down as much food as humanly possible before he crashed out on the nearest flat surface.
Though Maverick did have some preferences as to which one he spent the night on.
“Thomas!” Goose broke off the tune he’d been whistling to call over the top of Maverick’s head.
“Nicholas,” he heard Iceman return in a flat, unimpressed tone.
They’d always greet each other like that, apparently it had been a thing since flight school. Maverick suspected the only reason Goose got away with it was because, underneath it all, Ice actually, genuinely liked him. His RIO tended to have that effect on people, even people as cold and hard and closed off as Tom Kazansky.
Trying to look casual, Maverick peered over the top of the towel and back a little. Ice had a towel slung low on his hips, holding it with one hand while the other combed through his sodden hair, teasing it up the way he did. His sharp gaze was fixed intently on the mirror in the back of his locker door, on his own reflection, like he had a picture of himself in his mind that he was trying to match.
Maverick pulled his gaze back, clearing his throat and focusing on unbuckling his flight gear. He could feel Goose trying to catch his eye but he pointedly ignored him.
“Told ya that move would work, Iceman,” he called instead, defiant and sharp, as if to answer that sideways glance from his RIO.
“Excuse me?” Ice shot him a cool glance.
“That rolling one I came up with in class and you called, and I quote, ‘a one way ticket to crashing, burning and losing a leg’,” he tried a passable impression of Ice, deepening his voice and jutting out his chest before smirking over at him, “Just pulled it off up there and it worked like a dream. With everything right where it should be.”
Iceman arched an eyebrow, “Congratulations. Did you take down Commander Heatherly?”
Mav hesitated, his flight suit halfway down his arms, “Not technically. But the move worked.”
Ice gave a dry laugh, turning back to his mirror, though his shoulders stayed tense. Very obvious, with no clothes in between the hard angles of his body and Maverick’s gaze. A lot was obvious, looking at him like this.
He could feel Goose looking at him again. He quickly shifted his eyes back to twelve o’clock and focused on kicking free of his flight suit. Shower, food, crash out.
Things were never quiet in the locker room for long. Not five seconds later, a sharp wolf whistle cut through the low hum of chatter and the sound of running water.
“Well, would you look at that! Someone sure got tone on you, huh, Iceman?” Wolfman hollered.
The crowing, teasing tone was not unusual but the target was not. Normally Ice held himself a little above their locker room antics, staying behind his dark glasses and tight jaw, rarely in the centre of it. He was a little like Maverick in that, respected more than liked, a little out of step with the easy, natural way that the other guys talked. Another person who’d clearly not had a lot of friends as a kid, who found the intricate mechanics of an F-14 easier to navigate than a social interaction.
It showed on Ice’s face now, as he stood there looking at Wolf with an expression like a rabbit caught in headlights.
“What?”
Still grinning, Wolfman pointed, indicating something just above the line of Ice’s towel, “You’ve been bit to hell. So either the mosquitoes here are bigger than I thought or…”
Maverick spun hard. There were two dark, dusky purple marks on Ice’s hip, stark against the paler skin usually hidden under his clothes. Quite distinctly in the shape of a mouth.
Ah shit.
Ice hiked his towel higher, as if that would undo the damage, a ferocious blush washing across his face and down his chest.
“I didn’t…that’s not…” his eyes darted from side to side like he was looking for an exit as if he could flip some switches, yank back the throttle and leave this situation in his jet stream, all of his usual calm in pieces around his bare feet.
And, as usually happened when Ice’s composure cracked, salvation came in the form of Slider, even if he was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and carrying his reclaimed clothes in a bundle in his arms.
Without even hesitating, he grinned and loudly bulled over Ice’s frantic stammering, “Yeah! That girl you met at the O Bar must be a firecracker in bed, huh?”
Ice swallowed hard, smiling like he was trying to mimic Slider’s, “Uh…yeah, I guess so?”
The locker room erupted in wolf whistles and cheers. Loud enough that no one seemed to notice that Maverick wasn’t joining in, that he was hiding a smirk behind his towel.
“So one of the girls throwing themselves at you finally stuck, huh?” Hollywood laughed, looking rather unbothered by the red impression Slider’s arm had left across his chest and the mess the taller man had made of his beloved hair.
Ice cleared his throat, suddenly looking very invested in fixing his watch back onto his wrist, ‘Well. You know. You can only give the excuse of an early hop the next day so many times…”
“Which one of your frequent admirers was it?” Sundown started counting on his fingers, “The red haired one, the lady from the radar department, the girl behind the bar, the blonde who kills it at karaoke every week…”
“Alright, alright,” Ice cleared his throat, hunching his shoulders a little, “Um, no, this is…kind of a new face…”
“Well go on then?” Wolfman slapped Iceman’s shoulder as he passed before collapsing on the bench, putting his chin on his hands to listen attentively, “Let’s hear it. What’s she look like? What’s her name? You give as good as you get?”
Maverick was starting to realise that whenever Ice got that smug, lopsided smile, it was because he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his face. Because behind it, he was uncertain.
Slider stepped in again, moving to his own locker, like he was putting himself between Ice and the rest of them, “Look, the man’s not running a goddamn lecture. Not that it would help you, Wolf, a lost cause is a lost cause…”
“No, go on. Let’s hear it.”
Maverick was almost as surprised as anyone to hear the words come out of his mouth. Maybe a little less surprised than Ice, who shot him a wide eyed look that slipped back behind his smug armour after a moment.
He shrugged, a playful smile pulling at the edge of his mouth, “C’mon. When’s the last time someone melted your heart, Iceman? I’m interested, she must really be something.”
“You jealous, Mitchell?” Ice shot back.
Maverick shrugged lazily, shifting onto his hip, “Let’s see?”
Goose made a sound that might have been a groan and might have been a hurried cough. Maverick struggled to keep that smile off his face.
Ice cast a glance around all the eyes on him, the nervousness again only obvious to someone who knew how to map that way his jaw tightened, the way he set his shoulders, the wary tilt of his head.
“Well…um, y’know. Dark hair. Kind of blue, kind of green eyes. On the short side,” Ice hummed.
“She cute?” Hollywood asked.
Ice kept his eyes fixed down on his nails, a colour rising on his cheeks that had nothing to do with the California sun.
“Yeah. Beautiful, actually.”
Slider rolled his eyes, flicking Ice in the temple, “Fuck, if I knew you were gonna get sappy about her, I’d never have brought her up.”
Ice swatted at his hand like a fly before yanking his shirt over his head, “Alright, jeez…”
Maverick pulled his head out of his locker, where he’d been hiding a grin behind grabbing his shampoo, the one he used because the standard issue stuff ruined his hair, no matter how much Goose laughed at him for it.
“What did you expect?” he hummed teasingly, jumping onto the bench and walking along its edge like he was on a tightrope, “You think Iceman’s gonna entertain a girl who's less than completely perfect?”
He could tell Ice didn’t like looking up at him, there was that crease in the bridge of his nose.
“I wouldn’t say that,” he only let their eyes meet for a heartbeat, “She’s got a hell of a mouth on her.”
Mav gave him a wink, “Well the hickeys say that much, Kazansky.”
Ice scowled at the wolf whistles that earned, slamming his locker door shut and turning to Maverick, “I mean she never shuts up. She’s cocky as all hell, she’s a smartass, she drives me up the goddamn wall half the time.”
That smile was fighting to get back on his face again and Mav knew he had to fight it. Words could duck and dive as easily as their planes but that smile would say way too much.
“But you still put up with her?” he tilted his head.
“Yeah…guess I do.”
Maverick was a pilot, he liked to think he had good eyes. And right now, he could have sworn Ice was fighting a smile himself.
Maverick always took longer in the shower than he should, he felt like some of the chatter in his brain only ever shut up when he was standing under the running water or up in the air. He always made sure he went last after the squad so no one bitched at him for those extra ten minutes he wanted to spend resting his forehead on the wall and enjoying the wash of it down his back. Goose knew not to hang around, to meet him back at the house so he could at least have a beer while he waited to make fun of him for it.
Though he hadn’t been bothering to wait up lately.
So Maverick wasn’t surprised when he walked out, dripping hair and towel around his hips, to an empty locker room. But he was surprised when after a moment, he noticed Ice leaning against the back wall, winding his watch.
That smile broke through clear as day, “What story did you give them for why you were hanging back so late?”
Ice was too intent on the task at hand to glance up but those teeth he was so mystifyingly awkward about showed, “Doing my hair for my big date, of course.”
“Well then,” Mav closed the distance between them, rising up to press a kiss to his nose, eager for his attention, “You weren’t really lying were you?”
That got his chin up, a pair of surprisingly soft lips against his own, ones he could feel were upturned in a smirk.
“I don’t think drive through on a motorbike, eating it on a beach and back to your place to fuck is much of a date…”
“Alright, you princess,” Maverick nipped at his lip lightly as he drew away, “Be nice or I’ll give you more hickeys to show off.”
“Oh god, don’t,” Ice groaned, standing and throwing an arm around Maverick’s shoulders, here where they could get away with that, “I’m never living that down. And I couldn’t even pull the fucking towel any higher or they’d see all the ones on my thighs.”
Maverick laughed, nudging Ice with his hip, though something gentler surprised him, rising in his chest, “So. Is this where you ask me to be your girlfriend, Kazanksy?”
Some of Tom softened Iceman’s smile, “Well. If you want, Mitchell?”
Maverick hummed, threading his fingers through Ice’s where they draped over his shoulder and kissing through his knuckles, “You know what, I think I’d like that.”
It didn’t matter if it was only for them, it still felt good. And Maverick had always been one for chasing what felt good, whether it was sensible or not.
If this was what happened when Ice slipped up, Maverick hoped he had a lot more fuck ups left in him.