FIC: That's All I Want (Top Gun, Iceman/Maverick, PG-13)
TITLE: That's All I Want
RATING: PG-13
FANDOMS: Top Gun
PAIRINGS: Pete "Maverick" Mitchell/Tom "Iceman" Kazansky
SUMMARY: It's hard for Maverick to think of Ice as fragile.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Written for slashthedrabble prompt #530: Past Prompts Revisited. I chose prompt #297: fragile.
It's hard for Maverick to think of Ice as fragile. He's just … Iceman. He's ice cold perfect, unflinching, steady. He's a fulcrum, a law of classical mechanics, a crucible. Iceman Kazansky is a goddamn perpetual motion machine of keeping one's shit together.
And maybe part of it is that the change happens so gradually that he doesn't notice until a small problem is a big problem. Or maybe it's that life has just gone so fast. One day Maverick looks up, and they've been together ten years in the small ways they can: phone calls from halfway across the world, fervent letters written at three a.m., shore leave a few times a year.
And when Maverick looks up, he sees Ice, and Ice looks him in the eye and says, "Maybe I don't want to go back this time."
It's a conversation they've had before, and Maverick says so, laughing. But Ice isn't smiling, and he says, "I mean it." He's said that before, too, but this time, he adds, "I think maybe I need to get some help."
Two days later, Maverick is sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room while Ice is in the office talking to the doctor, and all the pieces he's failed to put together assemble in his head. Ice waking up with nightmares, moving in his sleep. The way he freezes, blanks out-like he's leaving his body-when he hears sirens or fireworks. That night on the phone after the air raid on his ship, where he had been unable to speak and Maverick had just listened to his shaky breaths for almost an hour.
The answer is now a neon sign in Maverick's frontal lobe, and he hates that the job has done this to Ice, but he also hates himself for not seeing it sooner. For not stopping it, not helping Ice before that icy facade cracked in a way that's devastating and permanent.
Ice comes out of the office, finally, and Maverick stands to meet him. They walk out together, taking the stairs.
They're almost to the car when Maverick says, "Shit, Ice. What can I do?"
The corner of Ice's mouth quirks up. "You can take me home."
"I'm serious."
"Me too." Then, softer, "That's all I want. It's all I've wanted for a long time now."
Maverick opens the door for him, and then he takes him home.