FIC: The Boys of Summer (Top Gun, Iceman/Maverick, PG-13)
TITLE: The Boys of Summer
RATING: PG-13
FANDOMS: Top Gun
PAIRINGS: Pete "Maverick" Mitchell/Tom "Iceman" Kazansky
SUMMARY: They’re in their fifties now. Things catch up. Written for slashthedrabble prompt #532, sunburn.
Ice’s skin is very dark for someone with naturally light hair and eyes, with warm undertones. He’s a spring, and Maverick is a winter, and Maverick learns all of this at the Macy’s makeup counter buying concealer for the scar on his forehead. Ice comes with him, but he just busies himself nearby, poking through the tester cosmetics and sniffing at fragrances he doesn’t intend to purchase. He’s there for emotional support, and he hasn’t made any sort of jab at Maverick for wanting the makeup in the first place, probably because, despite his reassurances that it’s no big deal, this shit happens, Maverick getting a carcinoma sliced off his face scared him more than it scared Maverick.
They’re in their fifties now. Things catch up. When they were younger, Ice made fun of him for burning in the sun, something that never happened to Ice. “You’ve got that pink, Irish peasant skin,” he would say, and laugh. Ice’s heritage was never an acceptable topic of conversation, but Maverick bet even back then that it wasn’t all European, and by this time, Ice checks other or mixed race on forms. It’s sentimental more than anything. His mother is long dead, but eventually he forgave her. She’d had him young, and somehow it took getting older to understand what that meant.
The girl behind the counter isn’t that young, but she’s young, the same age he and Ice were when they met, maybe. She helps Maverick pick out the right style and color concealer for his skin, and then shows him how to apply it. She sells him a brush; he’d assumed he could just glop it on with his finger, but this is probably better. His default has always been to come in hot, but restraint, he’s learned, can be a good approach, too.
“You won’t even need it that long,” Ice says, leaning against the glass counter beside him, right in front of the sign asking him not to do exactly that. “Scars fade.”
Some do. Maverick thinks of the scars on Ice’s hip and back from when his plane was shot out of the sky; those are still there, fifteen years later, because some scars are forever. But Ice is probably right; this one, the little one on his forehead where the dermatologist cut off his cancer, it’s just temporary.
Maverick pays the girl behind the counter, and Ice entwines their fingers, taking Maverick’s hand. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll buy you lunch. And some fucking sunscreen.”
Maverick can’t quite laugh, but Ice is smiling at him, that quirk of the corner of his mouth that would be half a smile, at best, on anyone else. Ice isn’t anyone else, though, and Maverick is old enough now to know which things are temporary and which things are forever, and this-him and Ice-that’s forever. And maybe Ice is a spring and Maverick’s a winter, but somehow every day, even the worst days, they all feel like summer.