@oh-surprise-its-me
Yes, I wrote on a bus during all the unholy hours my ass had been sitting there, but it's not checked enough to go on ao3, I'll check and fix it (and expand it) when I'm back.
But, the accident. And a bit of the aftermath.
Summary: Ice calls goose I'm the aftermath of the worst accident ever.
(The accident is foreshadowing what will happen again. With a very different outcome)
When Goose arrived at the base hospital, Slider is still in surgery. Iceman looks pale. No, scratch that. He's ghostly white, drenched. He didn't even get out of his flight suit.
He looked ready to throw up, and something told Goose it wouldn't be the first time.
"I'm here." He said, his voice soft, a whisper as he stepped closer to Iceman as he brushed his fingers on his hunched shoulders. "Ice, I'm here."
"Gone." Ice muttered, it sounds choked, barely human. "He's gone, goose. He's gone."
Goose frowned, his hand hovering by his shoulders. What the hell? No, Slider was in surgery, not gone. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ice stopped him. Ice looked up, eyes red, and glassy, tear streaks down his cheeks, and a bruise on the side of his face, he tries not to move his left shoulder too much either.
"Got us out of the water. In the chopper. Gone." His words are fragmented, and suddenly Goose understood.
"Fuck." He breathed out, slowly. He sat down next to Iceman and held his head in his hands, pulling at his hair. "Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. He's gonna be alright."
Because let's be honest, what else could he say at this point? Ice just told him that one of his closest friends died.
"Fucking hell. How?"
It takes Goose almost 30 minutes before actually asking. It takes at least one more hour before Ice can force words out of his mouth.
"Dunno... our Cat went down in flames. There was smoke and heat everywhere, I-- I dunno. I couldn't reach ejection, Ron pulled it for me."
Goose sucked in a breath. Damn, he knew how loyal Slider was, he flew with him before, when Slider trained as a pilot and Goose was his Rio. They didn't work out, Slider wasn't cut to be a pilot, Slider was dangerous and unpredictable.
Goose felt like a hypocrite, flying with Maverick, but they didn't know Maverick. (Mav was everything Slider had been at his age. The one big difference was that Goose was older now. It wasn't Slider's fault like he had painted at the time. And maybe he missed the chance to tell him so.)
Slider was loyal to a fault.
"Too much smoke, you know? I think I was losing consciousness. Next thing I know, I'm in the air, and I see Ronnie's chute a little further from me. But he's hanging there like a broken doll."
Once Iceman started, he could not stop anymore. Goose could see his eyes becoming distant, lost in the midst of what happened barely hours before.
"We're in the water. He doesn't move. I swim over to him. I held him, you know? The way I hold him all the time."
Goose knew what he means, he saw the way they held in each other.
"He was in my arms. There was blood all over his face, in the water, and his helmet cracked. He hit the canopy, somehow. Because--" Ice's breath itched in his throat and goose wanted to reach out and hold him. It's not his job--
"Cause he got me out first, and he wasted time."
"He saved you. It's not a waste of time."
"He got me out and wasted the momentum to eject himself safely." He repeated, his voice low and choked.
Goose closed his eyes and prayed not to hear anything else. He knows, he can guess what's about to come, and he's not sure he could take it. but Iceman needed to get it out.
Iceman pressed his fingers on his neck, Slider's head was reclined against his shoulder, and the chopper can't get to them fast enough. Ice's fingers dig into the skin and feel-- nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Silence.
He pressed deeper, it would leave a bruise, maybe, but he needed to hear it, the soft thumping under his--
It's not there. No gentle thud.
Silence.
There's no warm exhale against his cheek when Ron breathed. because there was no breath left in his body.
"Let me take him."
No. No, no-- he doesn't want to let go.
"Sir, let me take him."
He wants his Ron back. He needs him back. Ron's gone because he was such a poor excuse of a pilot and couldn't even elect himself.
"I need you to let him go, sir. We can't lift him if you hold him like that."
He let go just a tiny little bit, and they lift Ron's broken body away from him.
Gone. His Ronnie is--
He throws up in the water.
When he finally is lifted out of the water and into the chopper too, they have cut open his flightsuit. They're pushing down his chest with so much strength that he's sure he will bruise and even break something.
Who cared, after all? Ron was gone anyway.
They force air into his lungs.
Tom never saw him lay so still in all the years he had known Ron. He did see him in a hospital bed his fair share of times because apparently living outside a home for a couple of months and still going to school like nothing happened, can easily end up with a nasty cold and persistent cough. And that could easily turn into pneumonia. And Tom would wake up in the dead of the night to Ron wheezing in ways he was not supposed to.
But this was different. Ron was unnaturally still. Or moving, that depended on how Tom would see things.
He was gone.
He was dead.
He was dead under their expert hands as they tried to get him back. As they worked so hard, so fucking hard for his heart to beat again. Tom swears that if Ron died, so would he. He couldn't imagine a life where Ron is not right beside him. He would never be able to fly, ever again.
It doesn't look like a good rhythm when the monitor shows a tiny change, but it's a rhythm nevertheless. Well, kind of.
"They said so many things. Things I don't understand. Things I forgot. All I know was that his heart stopped. He wasn't breathing, even as we arrived here, he wasn't. And his skull was fractured."
Goose felt sick. Iceman wasn't even blinking anymore, he realized, he was staring blankly, unemotional.
Ice cold.
Slider survived.
He remained in a coma for an unholy time, Ice remained right at his side. He pleaded.
He prayed.
Goose never saw him pray. Goose didn't even know he was religious.
Ice himself didn't know who he was praying to. He just was praying.
Goose took out the small cross he always carried around his neck, the one his mother gave him, he gave it to Ice without a word. He had the one Carole gave him. Right now, Ice needed it more.
"Slider! How are you doing man? I thought you wanted to be a pilot. What happened?"
Goose was smiling, goose was, maybe, just a bit intoxicated, not too much just a little.
Slider's smile was strained, he tried to sound casual, he tried not to say that Goose knew exactly what the fuck happened. Still, he smiled.
"So, flying with the Iceman, mh?"
"It's Mr. Iceman to you."
Ice was, perhaps, a little intoxicated too, if the way he leaned on Ron's shoulders said anything. But Goose knew a different reason for him leaning so close, a very different reason why Ice's fingers carded through his hair on the back of his head.
Goose knew there was a scar there, where his head cracked open.
Goose knew Slider was a miracle in two feet.
It was a miracle he survived. (He almost didn't.)
It was a miracle he woke up.
It was a miracle he recovered to the point he was allowed back into an F-14.
Ron was a miracle himself, Goose is not sure how, but he's so damn happy it went this way.
Goose knew he waited one instant too long.
Goose knows that is the last thing he will ever know. but he sees Mav, and Mav is safe.
Suddenly, he understood Slider.
That's the last thing he knows.
The papers felt heavy in Mav's hands as his eyes scanned through them thoughtfully.
For a moment, he thought Tom mistakenly gave him Goose's medical papers. Everything, well, most of it, matches terrifyingly. The injury, injuries, multiple. The accident. His head struck the canopy. There's a small, black-and-white picture of a cracked helmet, Tom had the decency to remove every other picture describing the injuries. (Tom removed more than just a few pictures. He squeezed a piece of paper in his hand so much that he almost tears it. Maverick doesn't need to know.)
Mav is still half convinced he's reading the report from goos--- Roland Yaakov Kerner. "Slider".
"If you want to go to Texas now--"
"No... they need time alone. They deserve it." A beat, Tom inhales sharply, his hands still shaking. "Don't talk about that. To no one. Chris must never know. Deal?"
Mav nods.
"Deal."
