Chapter Text
As soon as Rooster saunters in through the doors of The Hard Deck, all suave swagger, broader and brawnier than Jake had remembered him to be, Jake knows he’s in trouble.
Jake spots him instantly, even while leaning against the bar countertop waiting for his beers courtesy of the hapless old timer trying to chat up Penny, gaze always inexplicably drawn to Rooster whenever he’s within radius.
They haven’t seen each other since that transient summer. Jake had kept tabs on him, through the navy grapevine that rivals his grandmother’s gossiping, just enough to hear of Rooster’s competence and capabilities.
When this special assignment had come through, and he had been recalled to TOPGUN, Jake had already known he’d be seeing Rooster here again. Hangman is the best amongst their current generation of aviators, unquestionably, but Rooster and Fritz are never too far behind. It keeps Jake on his toes, energized and eager, precisely the way he likes it.
Word had it that Rooster continues to be slow to act, when and where it counts. While unsurprising, it had still managed to disappoint Jake. Same old Rooster, he had thought, sullenly, scornfully.
He pauses by the jukebox, beer bottles in hand, and punches in a number from muscle memory. It’s a song he knows Rooster hates. Even Jake himself isn’t sure if he’s doing it to piss Rooster off, or as a droll nod to what they’d once had.
Maybe it’s both.
“Bradshaw,” he then calls out, the first to make a move, the first to control the ebb and flow of dialogue between them. Rooster can be infuriatingly slow, even in this, and Jake marvels firsthand at how some things don’t change. “As I live and breathe.”
The name sounds careless and comfortable on his tongue, and he’s grateful that he hadn’t slipped up and said Bradley instead.
It doesn’t escape him that Rooster deliberately calls him Hangman in return, clearly delineating the terms of their relationship to one another, in front of a curious horde of onlookers.
Their attempt at conversation starts out relatively inoffensive, as they circle around a tried and tested pattern of teasing and taunting one another, but rapidly turns sour.
“You’re snug on that perch, waiting for just the right moment that never comes,” Jake says, and he’s not only talking about work.
Then, because he has never been able to bite his tongue when he should, he adds with a widening smirk, “I love this song.”
The sedate and faintly amused veneer on Rooster’s face cracks, for a moment, and it is infinitely satisfying. Jake leaves, first in this too, before their interaction can become any uglier, any more vindictive.
When the music abruptly stops, Rooster yanking the plug out at the wall socket, it feels like an intentional affront. It’s a slap in the face, a rejection, a metaphor for how he evidently feels about their mutual history.
He’d never silenced the jukebox, before, no matter how often he’d bitch and moan about Jake’s taste in song selection.
Even the delicate sound of the piano isn’t enough to soothe the sting.
Penny jangles the bell above the bar, sparking a frenzy of chaotic glee, interrupting his brooding. Thankful for the distraction, he walks over to her in deference to the deal they had made that one summer. She smiles, a little soft on Jake from the day they met, jerks her head meaningfully from the guy seated in front of her to the doors. It’s the same old geezer she’d singled out earlier to buy everyone a round.
“Overboard! Overboard!” the crowd chants in unison, and Jake is more than happy to oblige.
As he shuts the doors decisively on the unlucky sod now sprawled on the sand, the tempo of the music changes.
“You shake my nerves, and you rattle my brain,” Rooster sings, in that low and husky voice Jake had been unable to forget, his fingers certain and confident upon the piano keys. “Too much love drives a man insane.”
His voice is throatier in this song, its cadence alternately swooping and soaring in harmony with the melody.
Jake promptly steps back outside, viscerally unable to endure being so close to Rooster when he looks like this – golden-skinned and godlike, radiant under the overhead lights. It doesn’t help that the words grate, the lyrics striking a chord, verging on discomfort.
Through the half-open side doors, he still has an unobstructed line of sight to Rooster hunched over the piano. He’s playing to the crowd, peering up at them from over the rim of his Ray-Bans, and they’re eating it up out of the palm of his hand.
They’d picked out their sunglasses together, Jake remembers, Wayfarers for him and Caravans for Rooster. Or Bradley, as he had been then. It had seemed harmless at the time, a coincidental meeting in a store downtown on a day-off.
Now, he wonders at how far they’d managed to stray from ‘casual’ and not even comprehend it until too late.
With effort, Jake averts his eyes. He stares out towards the skyline, although the blistering image of Rooster at the piano remains branded into his mind’s eye, fights down the sudden lump in his throat and the prickling warmth at his eyes.
“Hey.” It’s a voice he knows well, dearly beloved.
It’s not the voice Jake wishes it was.
“Hey,” he replies, not needing to turn around to know that it’s Javy.
“You got out of there pretty quickly.”
“It just started to hurt a bit, you know,” Jake says, in quiet admission. He’s never been good at hiding much from Javy, unable to keep him in the dark and at arm’s length like Bradley insists on doing with Phoenix.
“I know,” Javy replies, stepping closer until they’re standing shoulder to shoulder. There’s a depth of vast understanding in those few words, a lifetime of shared experiences underscoring the lifeline of trust between them.
He slings an arm around Jake’s shoulder, pulls him in close. Jake goes, willingly, without hesitation. It’s something he doesn’t ask for, physically unable to form the words or make the overture. It’s something Javy habitually offers, without censure or judgement.
Rooster’s voice wafts out to them, crisp against the stillness of the evening, and Javy’s grip tightens.
Jake shudders out a heavy sigh, only once, a long and slow exhale laced with regret for what he once had and likely never will again.
***
As the howls and cheers subside Bradley scans the length of the room, unable to help himself, fully expecting to see a familiar figure lingering cautiously at a distance.
He gradually comes to realize that Jake isn’t in the bar, at all.
Tash hands him a beer and he takes a long swig, to conceal the tremble of his fingers.
Bradley had thought they were playing at their standard spiteful game of one-upmanship; it had to be the reason Jake had chosen that particular fucking track on the jukebox. He had assumed that bookending their dreadful encounter with a song, one that he knew Jake had heard him play on the piano here before, might serve as a peace offering and hesitant truce.
Of course, part of his rationale had been purely selfish. Bradley can acknowledge that he revels in the applause and attention, too.
Now, he wonders whether they were ever on the same page at all.
On a hunch he makes his way through the mass of bodies toward the side doors, ignoring the unknown and unsought hands that touch him – slapping him on the back, patting his shoulders, some furtively running over the muscles of his arms.
They want him, in one way or another, but he doesn’t want them.
Not tonight. Not when Jake had been so close, close enough to touch.
He sees them, then, through the doors, standing outside on the sand.
The two silhouettes are facing away from him, looking out towards the darkening horizon rather than the bar, but Bradley recognizes them regardless. Coyote’s arm is draped around Jake’s shoulder, and Jake has curled a hand around his hip.
Their faces are turned toward each other, close enough to touch. He can’t make out their exact expressions, due to the angles and shadows.
It’s both innocent, and incredibly intimate.
Bradley can tell, though he has nothing quantitative to back it up, that Jake and Coyote aren’t together. Jake, in paradox to his outwardly projecting persona, had been notoriously private about this type of thing in public. He had never touched Bradley, when other people were around, not even offhandedly or innocuously.
He supposes that could have changed in these months that they’ve grown apart but somehow he just knows, bone-deep and definite, that his intuition is correct.
They’re not together.
That’s not what this, the shard of sharpened hurt in his chest, the blackening bruise of his heart, is about.
It’s more that, he can see unequivocally, that there’s no room for him at Jake’s side.
There once was. Maybe there won’t ever be, again.
The weeks of intensive training at TOPGUN that follow, conducted by goddamn Maverick himself in what feels like another immense cosmic joke at his expense, only seem to further reinforce that fact. They still bicker belligerently in the classroom and try to outdo each other in the sky. This time around however, Bradley goes home alone and the breadth of his bed seems especially lonely. Sometimes his doorbell rings, but it’s never Jake.
He spends a night, here and there, with someone he meets either at The Hard Deck or out on the town. He always goes back to their place, rather than his own.
It feels good, but never right.
Bradley knows the solution, the way to address some (though not all) of the bleak and yawning emptiness inside of him, is to take Jake aside and talk to him. There’s just never the right time. Jake is hardly ever alone, always with Coyote. There are sparse opportunities, once or twice, but often Jake has spent the entirety of that day being such a bastard that Bradley reconsiders whether he wants a do-over, at all.
Between getting their asses handed to them by a man thirty years their senior, unending bouts of pushups, and grappling with the pervasive specter of his dad’s death every time Maverick orders them to push past what they have been taught and told up until now, at the end of each day Bradley is not only silently seething but also utterly exhausted.
The calendar continues to roll over, the clock continues to tick down.
“That’s no time to be thinking about the past,” Jake says, succinct and self-satisfied, during yet another discussion in the classroom that had started out abysmally and is only progressively worsening with each passing minute.
It takes a moment for the words to seep in through the tumult of tangled thoughts in his head, slicing through the tension of having to deal with Maverick and Jake simultaneously.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bradley asks tersely, voice taut. He thinks, perhaps illogically, that Jake is referring to them.
The reality turns out to be far worse.
“You son of a bitch!” Bradley spits, struggling against the bodies holding him back, and he truly means it. He’s incandescent, foaming over with rage, at the insinuation.
“I’m cool, I’m cool,” Jake says, shaking off Fanboy, and he is. He’s calm, unruffled, not a hair out of place and smirk firmly fixed.
A part of Bradley knows that he has risen to the bait, that Jake is doing this on purpose for whatever reason – whether it be malevolent pleasure or some misguided sense of righteousness. Everything he says is carefully considered, after all. Jake is as strategic with his words as he is at guiding his Super Hornet in the sky.
Things turn frosty between them, after that. Maverick’s ruse with the dogfight football match thaws some of the chill, but not completely. Jake no longer swivels around in his seat to snipe at him throughout class, and Bradley tells himself he doesn’t miss it.
Then, all at once, the clock stops.
Bradley strides across the flight deck, on autopilot, head down. The Vice Admiral's parting words echo in an endless loop.
Come home safely, he had commanded, with an ominous finality. Bradley wonders if Simpson believes it to be possible.
There’s someone standing in his path, as if waiting for him. Bradley slows to a halt, caught off guard but ultimately not all that surprised. It feels inevitable, almost theatrical, that this should be the arena for one last exchange.
He ransacks his muddled brain for the right words, but Jake beats him to it as usual.
“You give ‘em hell,” he says, almost shouting to be heard above the rumble of engines and ocean and men. His voice is strained, a little hoarse. He’s squinting against the glare and there’s something in the slant of his face that Bradley recognizes, having seen it in his own.
It’s regret.
Hangman is rarely gracious in defeat, but sometimes Jake is.
There is something else, something more, that must be said between them, but the clock has reached zero and they’ve run out of time.
Jake walks on, and Bradley has to let him go.
He tries very hard not to think about how he may never see Jake again, may never have the chance to speak to him or the occasion to touch him, and is mostly unsuccessful.
Forget the book, Maverick had said to him on that one awful evening following a day of near disaster. Don’t think, just do.
Bradley has never had the book, in the first place, when it comes to Jake.