headcanon asks for Maverick: 4, 9, 13, and 20 + Goose?
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i remember reading a fic once quite some time ago (for the life of me i cannot find it or remember what it was called or who it was by) where post-reconciliation mav and bradley need to go somewhere in kind of an emergency and mav gets into the drivers' seat of the bronco. and bradley is like woah. hold on. i thought mom always said you couldn't drive??? and mav is like, no, she said i shouldn't drive, which is Different (tm). and then proceeds to give bradley the most harrowing ten minutes of his life. and boy if that doesnt summarize my thoughts on mav's ability to drive, then tbh, what does 😅
no but seriously. he does probably drive kind of terrible. not like, unsafely, or in a way that is like. Actively Harming people or something, but if you are a passenger in a car maverick is driving then you are aware of the 'oh shit' handles and you are using them. he's always liked to go fast and he's always felt Pretty Confident in his own reaction times and ability to maneuver and he is not going to prioritize a few minor traffic laws over Doing What He Wants.
also, he taught himself how to drive when he was a teenager because no one else was doing it, probably in a vehicle owned by a foster parent whose car he was not authorized to be driving and he definitely got into trouble for this and paid for it later. due to this, he didn't actually get his license until much later than that- after meeting goose, in fact. my personal favorite take is that goose had to help mav with actually getting his license (stuff like when to signal and when to check your mirrors for merging and what types of turns/parking/etc the instructor was going to ask him to perform during the driver's test), though mav new how to drive physically just from getting into a car and figuring that shit out. i like to headcanon that mav had a permit for his motorcycle before this, though i'm not sure that it makes much sense realistically, because i know that most states these days require you to have a driver's license before you can even consider having a motorcycle permit (let ALONE a motorcycle license), but hey, i don't really know how to find out about the motorcycle permit laws in the late 70's in california or wherever they were at the time, so. i have taken creative liberty, lol
⇢ 9. general physical contact headcanon
hands down, in my opinion, mav is a physical person. he spent the majority of his childhood without it, and he gained somewhat of an aversion to it when he was young. outside of the context of the occasional romantic escapade, he did not experience any physical contact after his mother passed that wasn't negative, except for a few nice foster families that he didn't have the blessing of staying with, and even then, those are bittersweet memories, because they were brief and padded by worse things, and it's a little melancholy to think of what ~could have been~. so, admittedly, he's relatively opposed to the idea of physical affection of any sort by the time he meets goose. in fact, he's pretty much opposed to all affection by the time he meets goose. it's what defines their initial meeting and their first few flights together. mav is determined to shake goose off of his tail, to fly so fast that he loses him somehow, even though they're strapped into the same aircraft. he's cynical and certain that the entire world is out to get him, and goose is just the opposite.
goose is a sling-an-arm-around-your-shoulder, sit-on-the-couch-leg-to-leg-close with your friends, ruffle your hair in a slightly-annoying-but-also-endearing way as a greeting, hug-you-tight-before-you-say-goodbye-even-if-we're-both-men-and-it's-the-80s kind of guy. it's just another thing that initially makes mav raise his hackles and lash out. it's not because mav is diametrically opposed to this kind of affection. in fact, arguably, he craves it, and he's never had it, and physical touch is one of his primary love languages (platonically and otherwise). but goose is persistent and kind and fierce, and he's the kind of guy to find a lost kitten on the side of the road and decide right then that he's keeping that cat forever, no matter how much work it is, without even considering what it's like to raise a cat- only in the context of goose's life, the cat is Maverick and the rest is history. goose breaks down maverick's trust issues and fear and loneliness slowly and determinedly by just being himself and treating mav how he would want to be treated because that is his nature, and because he doesn't give up. mav learns to be a good friend and a dedicated member of a ~family~ from goose, and it's because mav already is a good person who has love to give, and goose is the first person to encourage and not punish him for it.
in the context of life, even after everything- after goose dies, through bradley's childhood and teenage years, through his developing friendship with the flyboys and being woven continuously into the family by carole and later the others as well, even after losing bradley, after meeting hondo- mav remains a tactile person. it's one of his primary ways of showing affection. you can see this in the movies- how often he and goose sling an arm around each other, grab each other's shoulders or arms, the way he sits with his arm around carole in the diner, the hug to ice at the end. and in tgm, too; in the hug for sarah and for ice, the hand on ice's leg and the laying with penny and talking and the (of course!!) multiple hugs to bradley at the end. it goes both ways, too; it's one of the more important things that the others can do for mav, that he'll process and understand.
plus, mav can find a way to misinterpret or talk himself out of even the most direct affection/compliment/etc, but he will understand a hug, or a hand on his shoulder. it's the primary thing that used to calm him down in the midst of a panic attack or after a nightmare, the first thing he'd reach for in greeting getting home off a deployment, the primary language that he speaks in relationships. in a way, he passed this along to bradley, too, by participating in making the bradshaw-and-company family so tactile, though perhaps it's a little less natural for bradley due to his own years of self isolation. but he was always sure to make certain bradley knew he was loved, in words and in actions. he never wanted bradley to grow up unsure of such affection, like he himself did.
there's a long span of time when mav is alone, for the most part. after bradley leaves, before the mission. he has the flyboys, but they are all scattered and confined to just letters and phone calls most of the time. more consistently, he has ice, but there is the distance and the lack of postings nearby and the increasing business of his wingman's life as he is moving upward through the ranks and meeting and marrying sarah and having kids. there is hondo, with whom he becomes very close, but hondo is not the most physically affectionate person, and mav knows how to respect others' boundaries in that regard. it's not until post-mission and post-reconciliation that he is fully able to unpack his ways of thinking and loving, to begin living a life where he gets to love and be loved consistently again.
with bradley, with the daggers, in his rekindled friendship/brotherhood with the other flyboys, many of whom are retired or moved on to other careers but who are happy to catch back up with the little found family they'd built over the years. maverick is a hang-off-your-shoulder-why-he-tells-you-a-story, hugs-in-greeting-and-goodbyes, rest-a-hand-on-your-arm-or-at-your-back, squeeze-your-hand kind of person, because he always has been, and also because it's the love language that makes sense to him, that he's always known how to speak and understand, that he learned from the other half of the single most influential relationship of any context (other than being a parental figure to bradley but that is Different) he's ever experienced, the one that still defines so much of his adult life even three plus decades later. it works out very well for bradley, who is desperately touch starved after fifteen years of self-isolation, and who is still reveling in the concept that it turns out mav loved him the entire time and the whole mess was of his own creation, and lives in disbelief of that love and affection all the time. he can overthink and twist-into-anxiety anything that mav says, just about, but there's only one way to interpret a hug. he and mav have that in common- as it turns out, much to his chagrin and also his comfort, they have a lot of these things in common, after all.
mav is not necessarily the type to give new nicknames to people he knows, but he is absolutely the type to use people's nicknames. always ice, never iceman and almost never tom, usually sli instead of slider and never ron, care instead of carole. he's full of even more nicknames for bradley, though, and that came from goose, actually- goose was absolutely the originator of all the nicknames and terms of endearment. it was honey and hotshot and kaz (a nickname for ice that ice "hates" but does in fact allow with minimal glaring). goose is the creator of half the names that bradley gets- baby goose and brads and gosling. mav just keeps using them, and more of them, of his own creation, eventually sneak into his vocabulary, because he learned how to love and be loved via goose, initially, at one of the lowest points in his life, during the time that he was still formatively figuring out how to transition from a child to an adult, and their friendship shaped him forever. inadvertently, it means goose helped to shape bradley, too- since mav was there, and goose didn't get to be.
as far being called nicknames, he's alright with that. as long as he knows that it doesn't come from a place of making fun of him, or of distaste. if he senses that its in good fun or as an expression of friendship/good faith/etc, he'll lean into it. slider has long since bullied him with things like shortstack and trouble, for example, and he's allowed it. if it were a stranger and the tone were just a little different, well, he's started fights over much less. besides, mav is a nicknames sort of person, when it comes to his identity. he's never felt much like peter. "pete" was a scared, skinny kid with no designs on his own future, shuffled around with little to no positive experiences, defined by negative experiences and being duke mitchell's kid, the one who got thrown out of the academy and beat up in school and locked in the closet at the boys' home and chased out the front door of a foster home or two. he never did like pete very much.
maverick, though it started as an insult-turned-callsign-that-stuck, is dangerous and confident and sure of himself, capable and strong and cool. maverick is something that he became on purpose, that gave him agency. he pushed himself to become maverick and make the insult something of his own, to finally take control of his own narrative, because he couldn't control what people said but he could control what it meant- and that's been the name he prefers for a very long time now. very few people in the movies- even of the people who are civilians and not fellow officers- refer to him as pete. he is almost exclusively maverick or mav, and that is 100% by his preference.
⇢ 20. relationship with/thoughts on: goose
goose is and always will be mav's brother.
i read a post recently about how we as readers/writers/etc can do a disservice to the different kinds of platonic love and relationships that exist by trying to shoehorn all platonic relationships into a "they're siblings!!" archetype when there are so many other options out there, and i 100% agree with that- so i want to make it clear that when i say mav and goose were brothers, i mean that intentionally. mav and ice were best friends, ride-or-die, dedicated and as close to each other as anything, but goose was mav's brother in all but blood, maybe even moreso than if they had shared dna. goose was genuinely the first person in the context of mav's adult life (and by that i mean after he finally got into the navy, which to him is the defining line between his ~childhood~ and adulthood) to treat him with respect and love and kindness. mav learned much of what he knew about life and relationships and how to express and understand himself through goose, his older brother, the one who swooped in to protect him and teach him and stick by him, and he didn't even have the privilege of knowing goose that long- as we know. they met and they fell into their relationship fast. it took a while for mav to warm up to goose, of course- but setting even that aside.
and, well, we all know how mav feels about goose, these days. i know someone, in real life, who did lose a sibling when they were both young, and it really is much the same thing. goose still defines a lot of the things about mav, and the memories of him and their time together are still some of maverick's favorite. he still looks at something and thinks "goose would love that", he still has an experience and wishes he could tell nick about it, he still lives his life with the concept of goose right there by his side, even though the man has been gone for thirty some odd years. of course everyone handles grief and loss differently, but it makes me think of the experiences and people i have seen and encountered/read about who have lost siblings, too- the permanence of brotherhood, even in the wake of the impermanence of life.
