Today, I offer you: Icemav who are very close in the years after Top Gun, with Goose and Layton and being instructors really bringing them together, but they become distant as their career aspirations take them to different places. Ice is chasing promotions, Mav is chasing adventure, it's really no wonder that they grow distant. They don't have as much time to keep in touch, not many opportunities to meet up, it was predictable, really.
Point is, with all of that, Mav has no idea about everything that Ice does for him. About all the favors he's constantly collecting and trading in, the pissed off brass he keeps dealing with because of him.
Maybe the way he finally figures it out is some bitter pissed off Commander making some remarks in a meeting with him. After being dismissed, he goes straight for the phone and dials the last number he remembers Ice having.
Maybe he's kinda pissed off at first - maybe because the Commander called him "Kazansky's pet project" and that's the last thing he wants to be. And Ice isn't exactly happy either because he wasn't really planning on Mav ever actually finding out, so it throws him off - maybe because he never quite figured out how to explain himself, how to say that he cares about Mav so much (loves him, even) and that it's clear to him that Mav needs to fly maybe more than he needs to breathe and he just wants him to be happy.
That one phone call is nowhere near enough for everything that needs to be said between them, but it does help them reconnect. They agree to meet up, they have dinner and talk about it, and they both realize that they never want to not have this - each other - ever again.
