Tagged by @sanguinarysanguinity to share the last line I wrote. Thank you!
I passed 90 pages of So Wild and Blue (provisional) this morning. (90 pages! I've never written anything so long in my life!) A few lines to lead into it...
Near midnight, Kazansky hears the front door slam, and for a moment he thinks he can hear Maverick's footsteps outside his room. Come in, he wants to say. Talk to me. Tell me you feel this ache too. Instead, he closes his eyes and waits for sleep.
I just passed 35,000 words on my long fic so here’s a little snippet to celebrate! If you need to catch up, check out here, here, or here.
—
Something between them eases after that, and for the next few days it feels like they’re back to where they were as young hotshot instructors. The kids are still struggling — and they are kids, even though many of them are older than Kazansky was in 1988 — but under Maverick’s demanding instruction, they’re getting close.
“We don’t have enough time,” admits Maverick on the morning of the fourth day as he pours them both coffee. “If we had another week, maybe two…”
“Yeah,” says Maverick, leaning back against the kitchen counter. “I just wish…”
“I know,” says Kazansky again. He peers into the depths of his coffee, finding no answers. “You care about them,” he says.
“Of course I do,” says Maverick tersely. “They’re my responsibility.”
“Is that why you nearly killed yourself by pushing past Mach 10 with the Darkstar?”
“Jesus, Kazansky, you aren’t my shrink,” snaps Maverick.
“You don’t have a shrink,” says Kazansky. “And Hondo filled me in on the particulars of your little stunt yesterday. You kept the project alive by pushing yourself to the breaking point. Are you going to do that with this team too?”
Maverick glares at him. “I’ll do what I have to,” he says, and Kazansky knows better than to argue with him.
But it’s clear by the next day that no matter how hard Maverick pushes himself, no matter how hard he pushes his team, they just can’t do it. The team is demoralised, unable to complete the ingress run in time, unable to hit the target successfully, unable to climb out of the valley. They’re pushing themselves and their aircraft to the breaking point. Nothing seems to be working.
From my 34k+ long fic that I'm trying to finish before the end of June, in which a 28 year old Iceman wakes up almost 30 years in the future to find himself an admiral and Maverick returning to Top Gun one last time to lead a crucial mission. As Iceman tries to figure out what's going on, he starts to suspect that his relationship to Maverick has changed in ways he could never have imagined.
—
That night Kazansky dreams of flying. It’s the same dream, always is, sickening in its familiarity. He’s 40,000 feet in the air, burning across the regulation blue Southern California sky, Maverick and Goose on his wing, Slider in the backseat. Clear skies above, clear seas below. He’s got the enemy in his sights, his finger on the trigger, but he can’t get the angle, he can’t, he’s always too slow, and…
The lonesome notes of a bugle rouse him to attention. He raises his head. A coffin, draped in a flag, lies before him, surrounded by rows upon rows of identical white headstones. Beyond the cemetery, the sea stretches to infinity, as blue as the sky above.
Not many people have shown up for the funeral. A few stony-faced members of the brass from North Island, the men and women of the strike team, Hondo Coleman, Penny Benjamin, a few others Kazansky doesn’t recognise. All standing in orderly lines at a respectful distance. Only Kazansky and Rooster are standing off to the side where family usually stands. Rooster’s face is impassive, but his eyes are shadowed with grief. The flag is taken up, folded, placed in Kazansky’s arms. He hands it to Rooster, who takes it in his hands like it’s a sword to throw himself upon. And Kazansky knows then, he just knows, that Maverick sacrificed himself to bring the team home. There’s no body here, nothing but an empty casket to bury, but it still matters. He steps forward.
He’s standing in Maverick’s kitchen, bleary-eyed and drunk and barefooted. It’s dark outside. Maverick’s standing by the sink, illuminated by the streetlight, and he’s young, God, he’s so young. His hair is a mess and he’s dressed in a white t-shirt and sweatpants. It softens him somehow, gentles him, and Kazansky wants to touch him so badly, if only so that old familiar ache in his chest will ease at last. He crosses the kitchen in two steps and grabs Maverick by the arm and kisses him before his fear can get the better of him. And Maverick’s kissing him back, more tenderly than Kazansky would have guessed possible, and then his hands are in his hair and it’s like the first time Kazansky flew all over again, that heady rush of uncertainty and fear he’d felt on realising that up and down no longer meant what they did on the ground.
Stars Above by goldenhart
Fandom: Top Gun (Movies)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Characters: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Penny Benjamin, Background & Cameo Characters
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Fusion, Mars, The Martian (Andy Weir), Alternate History, Developing Relationship
Summary:
Twelve hours. Twelve hours to reach the Hab before they were dead. Walking through a dust storm on a tether like a pair of kindergarteners on a field trip. It was ludicrous, absolutely insane, as any idea from Maverick usually was, but Ice had agreed to it anyway, because either way they were both going to die.
My first Top Gun fic! Based on @astolat's brilliantly fun Ever Higher, which sees Iceman and Maverick realising they have feelings for each other while injured and stranded on a hostile planet (realistically the only way they'd get it together).
Photo cred: NASA. The bright star is Earth, as seen from Curiosity!
Stars Above by goldenhart
Fandom: Top Gun (Movies)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Characters: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, Penny Benjamin, Background & Cameo Characters
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Fusion, Mars, The Martian (Andy Weir), Alternate History, Developing Relationship
Summary:
Twelve hours. Twelve hours to reach the Hab before they were dead. Walking through a dust storm on a tether like a pair of kindergarteners on a field trip. It was ludicrous, absolutely insane, as any idea from Maverick usually was, but Ice had agreed to it anyway, because either way they were both going to die.
My first Top Gun fic! Based on @astolat's brilliantly fun Ever Higher, which sees Iceman and Maverick realising they have feelings for each other while injured and stranded on a hostile planet (realistically the only way they'd get it together).
Photo cred: NASA. The bright star is Earth, as seen from Curiosity!
*since this is my Top Gun sideblog, it's all going to be TG related
So Wild and Blue: 30k+ (and counting) of time travel fic. 28 year old Iceman Kazansky, fresh off a summer of being a TOPGUN instructor, wakes up in 2016 to find himself a four star admiral and his former homoerotic rival/friend/fellow TOPGUN instructor/whatever Pete Mitchell, callsign Maverick, returning to TOPGUN to oversee a very dangerous mission. As Kazansky tries to figure out what's going on, as well as ensure the success of the mission, he starts to suspect that his relationship to Maverick Mitchell has changed in ways he could never have imagined, amely, that they're a hell of a lot closer than they used to be. But with the pressure of the mission mounting, the need to uncover the truth over their relationship becomes ever more urgent, even if it comes at the cost of shattering everything Kazansky thought he knew about himself.
Stars Above: Cheeseball sequel to Astolat's brilliant Ever Higher, a Martian AU in which Iceman and Maverick are astronauts on a Mars mission and wind up stranded, injured, alone, and with a lot of shit to sort out between them. My story picks up a little while after Astolat's finishes, with Ice and Mav having to face the reality of fooling around in a cave on Mars and coming to the painful realisation that neither of them want this to be a one time thing. Tl;dr: Iceman has to talk about his feelings, and he's pretty pissed about it.
Top Gun 1942 (provisional title): Top Gun during the War in the Pacific, set aboard the USS Enterprise San Diego. After the death of his gunner, Goose Bradshaw, in the Battle of Midway in June 1942, former dive bomb pilot Maverick Mitchell struggles to find his place as the newly appointed squadron commander of VF-6, and to understand his evolving relationship to his former bomber squadron commander, Lieutenant Commander Kazansky.
Untitled post-TGM fic: Based on Muccamukk's brilliant Patching Up Holes in a Life which is about Rooster trying to reestablish a relationship with a Maverick who was captured after saving Rooster's life and was tortured and imprisoned for several years after. In my story, Ice's cancer wasn't terminal, but rather that he was put into intensive care and was near death, and so when Maverick was captured after saving Rooster's life, he assumed in the intervening years that Ice was dead. Ice, meanwhile, refused to believe the reports that Mav was dead, but eventually came to accept that his survival was unlikely. Both eventually came to accept that they had shared something more than friendship, and both regretted it had never been anything more. Now, they have a chance to begin again, but the road ahead is long and difficult.
If anyone reading this wants to join in, do so and tag me!
I think some of yall forget that Iceman lowkey a bitch. Every single disagreement in the original Topgun movie between Iceman and Maverick was instigated/started BY ICEMAN!!!! He’s just as cocky and arrogant about his talents as Maverick bro. The only difference is that Maverick’s talent for flying is raw and passion driven while Iceman’s was carefully crafted and based in determination.
Oh is passion and determination the same thing??? Am I just using synonyms and don’t know it?? NO!!!! THEY HAVE DIFFERENT CONNOTATIONS NITWIT!!! Passion is unruly and cannot be tamed while determination is a driving force that prevails. Do you see what I’m saying?? Do you get it??? Iceman and Maverick are two sides of the same coin but they’re different but they’re actually not that different…….but they are.
people try and frame Kazansky as this machine that is oh-so no nonsense BUT THATS WRONG!!!!!!! He’s just as human as Maverick and he fucks around just as much as him too!!!! They’re BOTH annoying, one can just ‘hide’ it better.
anyway, basically the point of this is that Thomas ‘Iceman’ Kazansky is a bitch — and that’s not a bad thing — so stop trying to take away his cunt factor
a continuation of Astolat's Ever Higher fic, which is a Top Gun x The Martian fic.
Twelve hours. Twelve hours to reach the Hab before they were dead. Walking through a dust storm on a tether like a pair of kindergarteners on a field trip, relying on their battered extravehicular activity suits to keep them alive. It was ludicrous, absolutely insane, as any idea from Maverick usually was, but Ice had agreed to it anyway, because either way they were both going to die.
“So…” shouted Maverick over the gusting wind, because of course he wanted to talk about this now. “Are we gonna talk about it?”
“No,” said Iceman, trudging along beside him. The visibility had reduced to all of five feet, only the EVA suit’s computer, linked to the rover’s beacon, indicating they were headed in the right direction.
There’s a moment’s pause. “You’re pissed with me,” said Maverick.
Ice shook his head. “No,” he said. “But I’m commanding this mission. I can’t let my personal feelings interfere with my responsibilities.”
“But you do have feelings,” said Maverick, smugly. Asshole.
“So do you,” said Iceman. “You kissed me first.”
There was nothing but silence for a minute. Nothing but the sound of dust pinging off their faceplates. “So we are gonna talk about it,” said Maverick.
“What’s there to talk about?” said Ice. “I drove an eighty million dollar rover into a hole and nearly killed us both. We’re hiking through a Cat 3 dust storm on a fucking tether so I can piggyback off your EVA and not die. Oh, and in between those two events, you and I messed around, using up valuable minutes of breathable air.”
“You know we’re the first people to fuck on Mars,” said Maverick.
“Beck and Johanssen on the Ares 3 mission—“
“Didn’t fuck on Mars. Probably fucked on the Hermes, but not Mars. We did it, baby—“
“Don’t call me that.”
“—We did it, fellow astronaut. We christened this planet. Y’know, they should send a pair of lesbians to Venus next. Pretty sure I watched a porno with that premise.”
“I hate you,” said Ice. “I can’t believe you talked me into what we did back there.”
Maverick slowed. “If it really bothers you that much, don’t overthink it. We were desperate and stressed. You know as well as I do that sex is good for stress relief. There’s still a solid chance that you and I don’t make it back to the Hab. And if the worst happens, at least I took a chance on something I’ve wanted for a lot longer than I want to admit.”
It wasn’t a good romantic speech by any definition, but it worked. Maybe it was the concussion talking, but Ice wanted nothing more than to grab Maverick by his sturdy shoulders and kiss him the way they’d kissed back in the crevasse. Stupid Mars, stupid EVA suits. Instead he grabbed Maverick’s hand.
“I wanted it too,” he admitted. He’d never held a man’s hand before like this. It was alien to him, but hey, Mars. Seemed like there was a first time for everything on this planet.
From my World War II AU where Maverick and Iceman are naval aviators based on the (fictional) USS San Diego (*cough* Enterprise). Both are squadron commanders, with Maverick commanding F6F Hellcats and Iceman commanding SBD Dauntless dive bombers, though this may change with research. Maverick previously flew a Dauntless but retrained after he lost his plane and Goose at the Battle of Midway.
