Chapter Text
Rooster has had nightmares his entire life. Even before he joined the navy and made his way through flight school, before high school bullies turned his soft outer shell rigid, before the accident that took his father’s life, he’d never slept well throughout the night. From the moment he could dream, he had nightmares. None he remembered, anyways, but it was still debilitating, especially on the nights that he’d wake up sobbing nonsense with his mother and Mav rubbing his back and arms, trying to calm him down enough so he could sleep enough before school the next day.
Mom always blamed it on Dad’s detailed stories of flying with Mav, Dad on his inherent active imagination, but Rooster knew it was something deeper. Somewhere, in the core of his being, the threads sewn together to make him, there was something rotten. He was rotten.
Nothing embarrassingly dramatic ever happened to him as he got older, like screaming in his sleep while in the barracks, although he was quick to attack when being woken up out of pure instinct. Once, after a particularly nasty night of thrashing, Rooster kicked Fanboy so hard in the crotch that he walked with a limp for a week straight. The platoon thought it was funny. Fanboy, not so much. They started waking him up with a yardstick after that, and it worked, since Rooster swung at nearly every person who tried to stir him.
For a long time, he could live with the nightmares. Rooster became a master at counteracting the terror. Valium, chamomile, the occasional beer or two. He slept less and tired himself out so much while out in the field that, when he bolted up sweating buckets and near tears, exhaustion would take him out just as fast. Eventually, the nightmares were just inconveniences at most, and it wasn’t like he could be haunted by them when he was awake.
Until Mav was shot down, and Rooster took a missile for his surrogate father.
It was as if he was dreaming in the dark for years, and suddenly a light switch was turned on. He remembers everything now. Every gruesome detail etches itself into his retinas so, hours after he wakes up, he sees it there in his mind’s eye, an afterimage of fear. They never leave. Now, he’s truly haunted.
Rooster is in a plane, he’s too slow, and everyone he loves suffers for it. Mav dying. Dad dying. Mom dying. Phoenix, Bob, Payback, Fanboy, Coyote, Hangman, all the others waiting for their planes to return in one piece. The one thing he’s supposed to be the best at—being a damn pilot, saving people, coming home— is turned against him by his own mind.
He wonders if this is why Mav pulled his papers in the first place. If he knew somehow Rooster would hit his breaking point sooner rather than later and shatter into thousands of unrecognizable pieces, with the edges so sharp reassembly is impossible. The cracks have already begun to form in his psyche. Rooster feels them, and he doesn’t know what to do except wait for himself to snap.
Sunlight is barely breaking over the ambient waves when Rooster jerks out of a nightmare of him ejecting from the f-14 while Mav’s seat doesn't, and the ensuing crash into the rough dark waves of the Indian Ocean. Sweat rolls down his back like dragging fingers, cutting into his skin and making him shiver despite the heat pulsing off his skin. He might be crying, but the salt of tears is indistinguishable from the sweat. Rooster dries his face on the bottom of his shirt. In the distance, he hears what had woken him: the insistent digital chime of an alarm.
On his nightstand, his phone screen glows. 5:15am.
When he was a kid, just old enough that he understood Dad was dead but still too young to realize that dead meant forever, Mav told him a story from when he was stationed on the USS Enterprise, before he got lucky and landed in Top Gun. Cougar, one of the best damn pilots the navy never saw, broke while chasing off some hostile MiG-28s. He had a wife, a daughter, and snapped after getting a missile locked on him, quitting on the spot. It was a loss for the navy, but also a loss for himself.
Maverick told Rooster that story again right before the mission, with just as much urgency as he did the first time. He always speaks low and slow, like every word is thought out, no matter how reckless the things he says may seem.
“You cannot break the way he did,” he told Rooster, sternly cradling the back of his neck the way he used to before their fallout, as if looking into his eyes deeply enough would get the message across.
Rooster had nodded along at the time, thinking he understood what Mav meant. The mission was suicidal at best, borderline impossible at worst, but they could do it with Mav as team leader. They were the best god damn pilots to ever graduate Top Gun. Impossible was just an excuse to point a middle finger at yet another disbelieving admiral, and to the foreign powers now missing an F-15 from their decrepit secret bunker.
They wouldn’t crack in the air, even with Rooster coming scarily close to doing so at the beginning. And they didn’t. Everyone came back alive, somehow.
He thinks he understands better now what Mav was really trying to tell him. It’s not the fear during the mission that he should worry about—it’s the fear that lingers long after his heart rate has returned to normal, following him like a swarm of gnats on a sticky-hot summer day.
After exchanging his sweatpants for running shorts, shirt for a tank top, Rooster walks out to the small porch of his hostel, sitting on the stairs to tie his sneakers snugly to his feet. He’s only running on three, maybe four hours of unsolid sleep, but his veins buzz with the energy collected from his nightmares. The only way he knows how to burn it is running. That, and flying, but it’s not like he can just walk onto base and take a plane for a joyride because he’s feeling too much at once and needs to stop feeling. If only he was as reckless as Maverick.
If he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t dream. An easy plan, at least for the first 48 hours. They’re conditioned not to need a lot of sleep as soldiers, but as pilots, sleep is their most valuable resource. He can’t keep this up for long. Still, they have a few weeks—a month or two if they’re lucky—left in the area before the team is scattered across the oceans for missions of their own. Rooster can skip a few nights of sleep.
Who knows. Maybe Rooster will follow in Maverick’s unsteady footsteps, ask to become a teacher at Top Gun. He thinks he’d like that. The manual for their planes is practically engraved into the deep grooves of his brain, he could recite it easier than Bible passages.
He runs the perimeter of their off-base housing, sneakers pounding on the tilted, sandy planks of the narrow boardwalk, aviators pressed into the bridge of his nose so they don’t fly off his face. The air is refreshingly chilled from its time at sea, salted wind burning his lungs, grains of sand picked up from the beach peppering his bare arms. Cresting sunlight turns the ocean a deep orange, exposing lines of blue as the waves break and crash against the wheat-colored shore.
Bodies dot the sand, some lounging along towels with books, others doing their own exercises. The world is slowly waking up, but Rooster has been up for hours.
A mile and a half into his run, he sees a silhouette stretching on another hostel’s concrete porch. As Rooster gets closer, details sharpen, and he begins to recognize that damned head of straw-blond hair cropped close to the scalp, a bare chest of sun-touched skin that stretches over thick wires of muscle, broad shoulders. He pretends like he doesn’t see Hangman stretching his calves against the porch’s railing, and almost gets past him without any recognition himself, until their eyes lock. Rooster internally groans, getting a few feet away before hearing a whistle directed at him.
Not stopping but slowing, he looks over his shoulder to see Hangman fake a salute his way.
“Morning, Lieutenant,” Hangman says, and even from the growing distance, Rooster sees him smile, tight in the corners of his mouth, pearl-teeth on blinding display.
“Fuck off, Bagman,” Rooster calls, though it retains no venom.
There’s been a shift in the air between them since Hangman shot down that fifth gen over the sea. It was as undeniable as it was unidentifiable, an amalgamate of years of rubber band-tight tension between suddenly stretched further, but changed into something Rooster untruthfully calls hate. He wanted to leave it to die, but with the downtime they earned, a reward for their success, Rooster has a bad feeling a confrontation is inevitable.
When Rooster and Mav had landed alive and in one piece, he locked eyes with Hangman as he hovered at their side, eyes squinted in a way that Rooster knew he was smiling. However, it wasn’t as pompous as he’d thought it would be. Hangman was relieved. Rooster never thought he would be happy at the assurance of his safety. If anything, he was convinced Hangman would leave him out to dry the first chance he got.
He didn’t. He saved them both.
Behind him, Rooster hears a second pair of sneakers join him on the boardwalk, then sees Hangman at his side, unwittingly pushing him to the edge of the wooden path.
“So, this is why they call you Rooster,” Hangman says. “Here you are, awake at the asscrack of dawn.”
“So are you,” Rooster shoots back.
“Fair enough.”
Rooster thinks about telling him off for interrupting his lone run, forcing him to run somewhere else, but the tension in his shoulders loosens a little bit faster with Hangman at his side. He decides to let it slide this once. It can’t be helped that they’re both early birds.
Neither say anything for a long time. Rooster feels almost peaceful, having someone at his side without speaking. It distracts from the rot in his head spreading through his veins. Hangman doesn’t try and fake conversation, though he throws a few heatless quips his way every now and then.
“That is one fat fucking seagull.”
At the sight of the round bird fighting another for a stray pizza crust beside an overflowing trash can, Rooster bites back a smile.
“Hey, Roo, maybe we should do wall climbing. I’m sure I’d kick your ass at it.”
Roo. Nobody’s called him that before. He hates it.
“Christ, pace yourself. You run like you’re being chased.”
He shoots back, “maybe you’re just slow,” but slows down to keep in time with Hangman.
Hangman grins at him, the cat who ate the canary, and Rooster wonders what he thinks he’s won.
After a few more loops around, they make it back to Rooster’s hostel, and he slows to a stop. His skin burns from the sand and salt, the tips of his shoulders close to a sunburn. Hangman almost stops, too. He hesitates as Rooster climbs the steps of his hostel, looking as though he’s going to ask a question. Rooster waits for him to.
Instead, he says, “good run, Slow Ride.”
Rooster doesn’t respond, but there’s a hidden grin on his face as he shuts the door. That fucking idiot.
Phoenix calls it trauma. Rooster calls it annoying.
Because being shot out of the sky and almost dying at sea can be mentally damaging, apparently, Cyclone forces both Mav and Rooster to therapy. Neither want to attend, but in order not to piss off a vice admiral this time, they reluctantly agree.
Rooster doesn’t see the point of lamenting over shit in the past. Sure, sleep comes as easily as pulling teeth, but he can handle it. He’s fine.
Despite the implication of his callsign, Rooster isn’t much of a talker. Any question the therapist asks, he answers honestly, but with few words. There’s not much to say. His dad’s dead. His mom’s dead. He was bullied. Mav was an asshole, now he’s not. He almost died. That’s all there is.
But then he slips up, mentions the nightmares in passing before he can stop himself. His therapist seems to perk up at that piece of information. She seems very keen to unpack that, when there is nothing at the end in that little thread she’s determined to pull. Rooster denies how they bother him, tiny prickles of mental pain like cactus needles, always there but not severe.
He can handle it. He’s fine.
Try as he might to burn off the memories like calories, they’re trapped inside of his head. When Rooster falls asleep standing in the shower, nearly punching out the glass door when he wakes up seeing Mav’s plane crashing into snowy terrain after being shot out of the sky, his therapist diagnoses him with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Most soldiers have it, she says. He’s not broken. There are people who can help.
She tries to even tell him he has some other shit too. During the end of a rough session, Rooster pulls back as she tries to pat his hand, and her eyes seem to glow. Label after label starts to line his file: touch-aversion. Trust issues. Soon enough, he’ll have enough diagnoses to be the DSM 5 himself.
The true line is crossed when she tells him to open up to someone, find a person who can relate to what he’s gone through that isn’t Mav.
“One of your teammates, maybe,” she says. “Like Phoenix, or Payback, or Hangman. You seem to talk about him quite often.”
Rooster starts skipping his sessions after that.
Even with the strict and habitual nature of his job, Rooster isn’t a fan of routine. He likes spontaneity, new experiences, being allowed to be as wild and free as he can be outside of the by-the-book naval life he chose. Any chance he gets, he deviates from the given path. Road less taken, all that jazz. It’s Mav’s influence on his life.
But with Hangman, routine becomes comfort.
Rooster starts his run, and a mile and a half later, Hangman joins. At the end, Rooster goes back to his hostel, and Hangman keeps going to his own. The second morning, Rooster was even more surprised to see him waiting than he was the first time, but by the fourth day, he came to expect Hangman.
The expectation of seeing that blonde idiot waiting for him along the horizon gives him something to look forward to in the morning past the dreadful night terrors. It’s not quite a routine yet, but the beginning of one carving a place in Rooster’s mind.
When they’re running, there’s no broken eject handles, no bullet-riddled planes, no tones alerting them that their end is near. Rooster is present, with his feet in the sand and a man beside him that he could almost call a friend. Hangman, for some ungodly reason that not even Rooster can fathom, becomes his safety net, even if it’s all unsaid.
He will never admit it, not even to Phoenix, who caught them two running together a few times and decided to tease Rooster with a photo taken through her window text accusing him of turning to the dark side. She’s been pestering him to go back to therapy, but there’s no point when all they’re going to do is give him drugs he doesn’t need or—and this is his worst case scenario after all the work he’s done to get to where he is today—kick him out of the program by deeming him unfit to fly. Rooster would rather have been blown up than watch the career he fought for be stripped away at his peak because Mav decided to get his plane shot down protecting him.
With the frustration of nightmares and that feeling creeping up his spine, settling there like a cat on a perch, comes anger. It’s not survivor’s remorse since nobody died during the mission, but there’s a different flavor of guilt that fills him. If he hadn’t lagged those few seconds behind in the valley, if he’d somehow dodged those SAMs and hadn’t put Mav in the position to stupidly sacrifice his plane to protect him, Rooster wouldn’t be here, sprinting across the boardwalk, blame bubbling in his throat like bile. He would still be okay. Not the chipper little boy he was—God knows where that kid went—but close enough to normalcy that Rooster wouldn’t watch the way people’s eyes drop to the floor at the mention of flying again.
None of that matters, he has to remind himself. They came back together, alive. Now, all he has to do is move on.
Bold words for a man who’s all crow, no action. Rooster’s never been one for moving on, his therapist has made that much clear.
Their morning runs get longer as they spend more time walking in between their miles. Hangman fills the silence between them while Rooster listens. He finds mindless topics at first, like small interactions throughout his day or how he really hates Tex Mex. Today, he rambles on and on about Coyote’s failure to get Phoenix to go on a date until she finally confessed about her and Bob’s secret to get him off her back.
Rooster had been there when it happened, cackling from Phoenix’s couch as she shouts, “I’m sleeping with Bob, you fucking moron. Why don’t you hook up with that pretty girl who works at the bar down the boardwalk?”
It was like a lightbulb went off in his head. Rooster had never seen someone so clearly have an epiphany.
“Did you know about them?” Hangman asks. “Phoenix and Baby On Board?”
“Of course I knew about Nat and Bob. She’s my best friend. We tell each other all about our sexual exploits,” Rooster responds.
“Huh. Good to know.” There’s an odd thrill that runs up his spine at the contemplation in Hangman’s voice, especially when he feels those green eyes rake over him like a magnifying glass.
“Don’t ask,” Rooster warns, “or you’ll lose your running buddy privileges.”
Hangman makes a pained face, hand over his heart. He’s running backwards to face Rooster while he talks, the overconfident showoff. “You wound me, Brasdhaw, you really do. And here I thought we were finally getting somewhere in our friendship.”
Friendship.
It’s the first confirmation of what Rooster had been thinking about. He doesn’t know when he started seeing Hangman not as public enemy number one, but something akin to an equal. Maybe he always saw him that way. Rooster can hate him and also admit the only person rivaling his skill in the pilot’s seat was Mav.
As Rooster rolls the small victory around in his mouth like a jawbreaker, Hangman suddenly shoulders him off the boardwalk and begins to sprint.
“What the—you asshole!”
Rooster takes off after him, but, just like in the air, he can’t catch up fast enough. Hangman’s a whirl of sun-blessed skin, the whistling wind carrying his laugh through the air.
They collide when he stops, Rooster coming in too fast to avoid him. Hangman, who’d been mid-turn to say something to Rooster, falls on his back. Rooster catches himself with his arms before he could crush him under his weight, hands planted on either side of his head, knees hitting the boardwalk hard. Their foreheads knock together.
After a beat of recovery, Rooster realizes that Hangman is staring up at him, red permeating his cheeks, smiling. It’s not that forced grin he wears when flirting with tourists in The Hard Deck, or when he’s saying something that he knows is bound to get his teeth kicked in. This is an honest to god smile, soft and wide that shows the beginning of crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes, the smile lines that compete with his dimples.
He laughs, hovering his hand over Rooster’s face. There’s a moment where the thought crosses his eyes, then the decision. Hangman cups Rooster’s jaw. doesn’t know if he wants to jerk away from or lean into the burning touch.
Rooster can’t breathe for a moment. Why is Hangman looking at him like that? He finds himself leaning into the weight of Hangman’s hand, self-assured and slightly sweaty.
“I see you’re finally not lagging behind,” Hangman says, giving it a little smack.
It burns. It’s a comfort. Rooster wants more, but he turns his face, the hand slipping to the ground with a sand-softened thud.
“I told you your ass was reckless,” he replies.
“Ah.” Hangman clicks his tongue. “You’re funny.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Rooster sits up to give Hangman space to stand, finding small scrapes on his knees and palms. Not enough to break skin, but enough to sting at Hangman helps him to his feet.
This time, when he makes it to his hostel, he almost asks Hangman to come inside. The imprint of his hand lingers on Rooster's skin.
“Clean those scrapes,” Hangman says, his hand flexing at his side.
“I wouldn’t have scrapes if you weren’t suddenly cosplaying Usain Bolt.” Rooster’s voice cracks. He slams the door closed, but hears Hangman’s laugh through the thin wood.
In the shower, Rooster can’t scrub the touch away. A part of him wants to leave it there, watch what happens, see if Hangman will touch him again, somewhere else.
He stands, chest heaving, as his hand slips between his legs. It’s just to get rid of pent up energy. Rooster doesn’t think of anyone as he jerks off. Nobody. He doesn’t try to capture the image of tan skin, sun-lightened hair, square shoulders. His mind is blank, save for the thought of broad hands all over his body, that damned mouth around his cock.
Rooster comes in a shuddering moan, and the shower washes away his shame as easily as the sand imbedded in his hands.