𝘚𝘰𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 | A Top Gun Fanfiction

Chapter 40: 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘵𝘰 𝘔𝘦, 𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘦

𝘈/𝘕: Thank you all so much for your patience, Senior year and personal issues have really thrown a wrench in my schedule, but I'm finally getting this chapter out to you! It is incredibly long...13 K words *phew* I tried to find a way to break it in half but it just wasn't working, so here's this gloriously long chapter for my lovely readers! 

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Everything is the same, except for the sky. Hollywood can say what he wants about it being the same huge-ass dome of aerospace that encases our planet. The cockpit is stifling as always, and the air we get isn't much different from the stale, recycled fumes you get flying coach, but I swear there's an electricity in the wisps I catch. It isn't the sweet sort of foreign air you'd expect from an exotic island. Really there's nothing attractive about the smell of the air at all. It's a feeling. A hair raising sense of uncertainty. I would say uncharted waters, but base camp has an entire system rigged to map our location and the surfaces we traverse. Unfamiliar territory, I amend. A thrill runs through me, but it leaves a biting aftertaste. The sudden shift in emotion fries my circuits, like someone screwed with the water pressure while you were in the shower. The hot water rains down cold and your whole body reels unexpectedly. For a second there, the danger was almost...

Appealing.

In that split second, I forgot Maverick's tear stained face and the best friend whose life is in my hands.

This isn't a game, Stirrups.

It isn't fun.

You could die.

Anyone and everyone could die.

I think of Vixen, Goose, and...

Maverick's father?

Wow, I haven't thought of that conversation in ages. After the instructors chewed him out for his risky maneuvers and ditching his wing-man, Maverick snapped. I had never seen him so upset...but that was months before we lost Goose, and since then it's...it's felt like he's permanently upset. Maverick told me he needed space, so I gave him as much space as he needed. In the end, he came to me. To talk about how Goose had confronted his reckless behavior. That was when Duke Mitchell came up. A highly esteemed pilot I'd heard stories of during my early days in the Navy, but never realized was related to my Mitchell.

"You said it yourself..." Maverick had admitted, "Good pilots come home...he didn't come home. And every time I'm up there, I feel like I have to try harder, and be the best, be better than just good or I'll end up like him. I fly like it's real, because when it is real, I can't do what he did."

I swallow hard. Cold sweat fills the gaps between my fist and the joystick.

"I want to come home. I want to come home to you. I can't do that to you...I've been so stupid."

"Shhh, Pete...Everyone makes mistakes. It's ok to be angry at your father, it's ok to feel betrayed and confused and to want to know what happened. But you're right...You can't let ghosts blind you to what's in front of you...You can't look behind and ahead."

Behind and ahead. I set my eyes on the horizon, but the rest of me reaches as far behind as it can, blindly feeling through the Middle-Eastern sky for Maverick, as if my subconscious could really take hold of him from such a distance.

"I want you to come home too, baby."

"I will," He promised, "I will. I won't let you down."