FIC: I go and go. To you, beloved. (Top Gun, Iceman/Maverick, PG-13)
TITLE: I go and go. To you, beloved.
RATING: PG-13
FANDOMS: Top Gun
PAIRINGS: Pete "Maverick" Mitchell/Tom "Iceman" Kazansky
SUMMARY: If you want me, I'm your country.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Written for slashthedrabble prompt #539: scars. Title from Paul Celan's poem, "Crowned Out." Summary from the Cardigans' "You're the Storm."
Ice was shot down in ’93, and he took a serious injury to his right hip. He had multiple surgeries to rebuild his pelvis and the head of his femur. He healed up all right, all things considered, though he will always have a limp, and it’s enough of an impairment that he got a Purple Heart out of the deal. Maverick’s not sure how Ice feels about that last part, really, but he knows that the medal is packed away in the footlocker in his closet with a bunch of other stuff Ice has no use for but isn’t ready to part with yet.
He also has scars from the ordeal. They are flat and a bit silvery, and for this reason, they remind Maverick of shark skin. The scar tissue starts at the inside of Ice’s right hip, and wraps around his right side, going as far up as his last rib and as far down as the top of his buttocks. He doesn’t like to be touched there. Maverick has asked if it hurts, and Ice is never able to explain properly. It’s not really pain, he’ll say, but it’s too sensitive. Maverick understands that. He has felt like that, just not in his body. There have been times where he’s felt everything too much. In the days after Goose, yes, but also years earlier, when he was a child with no family and no direction except the desire to run.
He’s done running away. For years, now, he only runs towards. Towards Ice, usually, the same way the compass needle always finds north. I go and go. To you, beloved.
In bed, laying next to Ice, eye to eye, lips to lips. Maverick runs his fingertips over Ice’s body, skirting the edge of the scar tissue. He knows it by muscle memory, now, knows the country of Ice’s body as well as the canyons he flies over day after day, year after year, at TOPGUN. The peaks and valleys of his ribs, the basin of his stomach. The desert that is the shark skin scar tissue all along his right side. He would know Ice anywhere. He’d know him blind. Ice is his nation, the home he never imagined he would find. He spent a long time running just to find this country right there waiting for him to come home.
Every road leads to you.