Archive of Our Own

When he’s this far out at sea, Pete always has trouble distinguishing the ocean from the sky. As a pilot, this is a problem; as a person, this is delightful. There’s usually a moment where he thinks that he could just point the nose of his plane in any direction and it wouldn’t matter; the blue would just take him, and blue’s always been his favorite color.

He closes his eyes against the rays of the sun, just for a moment, and just lets the roar of the engine fade into that lovely, deep blue -

Until a voice in his ear interrupts.

“Lando, you’re drifting to port. Level wings.”

Right on time.

Pete sighs, making it loud and dramatic, all while a smile splits his cheeks. “I was in control.”

“I know you’re in control, I’m just telling you that you needed to level out. Still do, actually.”

Pete tilts his joystick just a hair to the left and the wings level out. “Better, Mom?”

Behind him, he swears he can hear Patrick grinding his teeth. God, this is the best part of any mission. “Yes. Thank you. You are the world’s greatest pilot. What on earth would we do without Lando leveling out his wings?”

“Is this a part of the training exercise?” That’s a new voice, nervous and awkward, coming from the plane that’s just to Pete’s left. He looks over, sees them in position, right where they’re supposed to be. It’s cool that the Royal Malaysian Air Force is still flying A-4 Skyhawks; Pete hasn’t seen one of them since he and Patrick got to fly one during Top Gun.

“Negative, Mega,” Patrick says over the radio. “Just some…conversation. Continue on course.”

“Yeah, this is just how Ziggy and I communicate,” Pete says. “When we communicate verbally, that is. Like all great pilots and their WSOs, I can actually hear his thoughts.”

He can, actually, but that’s just because at this moment he can guarantee that Patrick’s thoughts are a steady stream of whatthefuckJesusChristPetecanyoushutupandfocusonthefuckingmission. They’ve been flying together for so long, he knows exactly what Patrick would be saying if they weren’t on radio.

“Oh?” The Malaysian pilot next to them says politely, probably just trying to be a nice guy. Weird to do when they’re 80,000 feet in the air, but still.

Pete stretches in his seat, adjusts his sunglasses, makes sure that the aircraft carrier is still below them. To their left, the curve of the Somali coast stretches out like a brown ribbon, too high up to make any details. “Oh, yeah. See, the United States Navy takes compatibility very seriously. Whenever you pass flight school and it’s time to pair you with a WSO, they have to make sure that your brain waves wiggle at the same frequency – “

“Lando.”

Patrick’s voice is completely different; low, serious. One word is enough to make Pete shut up and sit up.

“I’m picking up a bogey,” he continues. Pete’s heart immediately spikes. “Tack south-southwest, bearing 845-23.”

“Single?” Pete says, eyes scanning around.

“Affirmative.”

“Do you have a visual?”

Pete hears the dull thump that means that Patrick is swiveling around in his seat, lightly banging his helmet on the canopy in an attempt to see the plane. “Negative. Mega, did you copy that?”

“I copy,” says the Malaysian pilot next to them. “I do not have visual either.”

Where the hell is he? And how the hell did they get a plane? Pete thinks. This is supposed to be an anti-piracy initiative; Pete and Patrick are providing air support to the boats of Carrier Strike Group One down below who are patrolling the Somali coast and intercepting pirates. This whole deployment is supposed to be extremely boring for the naval aviators, since it’s not like the pirates have an air force; so boring, actually, that their commanders have invited various smaller countries to ride along, get a taste for how the US Navy operates. A training exercise, fluffy and silly, just playing at combat.

Except now there’s a rogue plane out here, somewhere in the skies over Africa, and it’s Pete and Patrick alone with just a rookie Malaysian pilot next to them who’s barely been in combat.

Pete’s first thought is, Shit.

His second thought is, Hell yeah.

“Ziggy,” he says, “Can you get us in touch with the boat?”

The rapid sound of flicking switches tells Pete that Patrick’s been trying this for a minute already. Which means he’s not surprised at all when Patrick says, “Negative, they’re out of range.”

Pete expected this; when they’re too far away from the aircraft carrier, communication gets pretty limited.

“Well, you know what that means,” he replies. “We gotta get closer. Mega, let’s take her down, get close to the Carl Vinson and get some directions.”

“Lando,” Patrick says, his voice tight, “when there’s enemy aircraft in the area, regulations say we have to get higher, to minimize the potential of casualties.”

“Yes, but we don’t know it’s enemy aircraft, do we? Could be the Swedes or something, someone that they invited to fly along and just didn’t tell us. I’m going down,” he says, angling the joystick down. The nose of his F-18 points down at the ocean, and the rest of the plane follows.

The swoop in his stomach when they dip is still one of Pete’s favorite parts of flying, even years and several thousand flight hours into it like he is now. At its best, this job is like getting to ride rollercoasters all day, every day. As their plane gently glides down, details become clearer: the scrubby Somali coastline, the deep blue waters of the strait, the brown coastline of Yemen off to his right. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, with a half dozen smaller ships surrounding it, floating like a kid’s bath toy right in the middle.

As he gets closer, Pete hears Patrick’s triumphant little grunt as he gets something working, and then his voice, low and rapid-fire. “Command, this is Stinger One, I’ve got a bogey on radio, heading southwest. Confirm visual and provide directives.”

Pete doesn’t hear their reply; this is the WSO’s job, to handle communications, weapons systems, fuel levels, and all the other minutiae of keeping their multi-million dollar airplane up and running. Pete’s only job is to fly the damn thing and occasionally press the button that shoots the missiles. Pete’s often thought it was very unfair that he’s a Lieutenant and Patrick’s a Lieutenant Junior Grade; Patrick’s job seems a lot harder. Pete couldn’t fucking do it, that’s for sure.

Patrick finally says, “NCVV confirms the visual. They’re unable to identify the plane. We have permission to engage, but only if we are fired upon. Stay close to the boat, but maintain high altitude.”

“You got that, Mega?” Pete says, making his voice soft and friendly. “We’re gonna be just fine, but we gotta stay by the boat. I’m gonna climb back up; you stay on me. Don’t worry about anything. You just do what we say, okay?”

“Copy,” says the poor kid. Jesus, he’s in there on his own, no WSO in his ear to talk to. Pete can’t even fathom that.

Pete calmly points his nose back up, squints against the sun as they steadily climb in altitude. He switches his radio to a private channel, one that the Malaysian pilot can’t hear. The brass hates them using this channel, because then the boat can’t radio them, but fuck ‘em, he needs to talk to his backseater for one second.

“Patrick,” he hisses, “who the fuck could it be?”

“Iran,” he says immediately. “Worst case scenario. Everyone else is the area is in this operation with us.”

“Iran can’t get the fuck way over here!”

“Yes, they can, Pete, look at a map some time! They’re just on the other side of Oman, they’ve got a big coastline, they’ve absolutely got aircraft carriers in this area.”

Shit, that’s not good. That might mean an actual dogfight. “They wouldn’t actually fire on us, would they?” Pete says. “I mean, with a NATO ship here?”

“I don’t know,” Patrick says, his voice tight. If hearing Patrick’s nagging voice is one of the best parts of this job, not being able to see him has to be one of the worst. When they’re up in the air – when Pete relies on Patrick for literally everything, from providing directions to communicating with the ship to priming his missiles for him – it’s the worst time to not be able to see his face. “I really don’t know.”

“Okay. Okay.” There’s nothing else to say. “I’m gonna switch back over.”

“Copy,” Patrick says, and Pete switches back to regular radio and calls out, “Doing okay, Mega?” in his sunniest voice.

“Alright,” the kid says, nervous but keeping it together. “I don’t understand how we don’t have a visual though?”

“Could be a lot of things,” Patrick says. “Differences in altitude, differences in satellite. Could be that our radar is busted. They could be far enough out that we won’t see them for a few minutes. They’re still heading for us, though.”

“It’s alright, though,” Pete says. “Because you’re not up here with just any scrubs from the United States military. Ziggy Stardust and I graduated #1 from Top Gun, baby, so you’re up here with the best!”

This time, Patrick’s eye roll is audible. They graduated second in their class, after an absolute clusterfuck of a mid-air ejection over San Diego, but this kid doesn’t need to know that.

“I’ve got ‘em,” Patrick says suddenly, and Pete’s attention snaps back into line. “Tally one, five o’clock low, starboard.”

Pete whips his head around and –

There he is, a sleek little black jet in the sky. Not a bomber like Pete’s F-18, which is basically a flying fortress; a stealth jet, spycraft.

With the Iranian flag painted on the side.

“He’s heading right for us,” says the Malaysian pilot. “I’m going to roll – “

“Negative,” Pete barks out, gripping his throttle tight. “Look at him, he’s not a fighter. Don’t move.”

“Command wants to scramble the rest of the strike group,” Patrick says.

“No, negative. Look at him, this isn’t an attack! Tell them to stand down or we’re going to have an incident.”

“Command, do not scramble,” Patrick says emphatically. “Repeat, do not scramble, it’s spycraft, it’s not a fighter jet.”

“Lando, he’s not moving,” says the Malaysian pilot, and shit he’s right, the Iranian jet is still streaking right for them. “We’re going to crash, he needs to move, what do I – “

Every so often, Pete is the lucky recipient of a lightning strike of true clarity. A moment where all the fuzz in his brain goes quiet and he can see every piece on the chess board in 4D vision. A rare moment where he knows exactly what to do.

This is one of those times.

“Mega, you do not move, you stay on him,” he says, left hand already reaching down for the afterburner. “I got this.”

He jerks the joystick, angles his nose right on the Iranian plane, and then pulls the throttle on his afterburner. Immediately several hundred pounds of jet fuel dump onto his engines. The effect is like a drag race; Pete gets knocked back into his seat with a thud, and he can hear Patrick hiss and swear behind him, a little “Fuck” in his Chicago accent, as they hurtle straight towards the Iranian pilot at several thousand miles an hour.

There’s a split second where Pete thinks, Ah shit, they’re not gonna move –

But the Iranian plane scrambles so fast it would be hilarious otherwise, executing a sloppy-ass barrel roll to get up and out of Pete’s way. Pete kills the afterburner, pumps the throttle with his foot, and pulls the joystick all the way into his belly. Their plane rolls up after the Iranian plane, a full curlicue in the air bringing them fully upside down, Pete’s stomach swoops as he hears Patrick’s helmet bang against the canopy and Patrick whispers, “Jesus fucking Christ – “

From his inverted position, Pete can see the exact second that the Iranian pilot makes the same call he did; pinned between Pete’s feral bullshit up above and the Malaysian pilot still doggedly coming for him, he banks dramatically left and speeds back out into the open waters. Pete lets his plane drop out of inversion, turns fully to watch him speed back off the coast of Yemen, so fast that he’s barely a black smudge on the horizon.

“Command, they’re bugging out,” Patrick reports into his radio, still a little breathless. “Repeat, they’re bugging out.”

The sun burns as hot as Pete’s smile; he feels like his lips are going to split open at the seams. He whoops in his radio, surely blowing out both Patrick’s and the kid’s ears. “That’s how we do it, baby!”

“They’re gone?” says the Malaysian pilot. God, Pete needs to get a drink with him after this; too bad he’s got his own aircraft carrier, can’t come back and party with them on the Carl Vinson.

“They’re gone, and you nailed it. Me alone might not have been enough to scare him, but together? That’s how it’s done.”

“Good job, Mega,” Patrick says calmly. Pete can hear the smile in his voice, even if the other guy can’t. “You stayed very calm, well done.”

“Where’s the nearest city? Where’s our next shore leave? Drinks are on me, boys, calling it now. Ziggy, where’s the nearest city?”

“The nearest metropolitan area is Djibouti,” Patrick says, long-sufferingly, which is justified because Pete starts laughing before Patrick’s even finished his sentence.

“Hear that, boys? Hear that? Drinks are on me at Dji-booty!”

“Lando, we are being ordered to return to the ship,” Patrick says. “Thank God,” he adds under his breath.

“Ziggy, what are you talking about?” Pete says, as he tilts the joystick and the plane responds immediately, slicing through the gorgeous air. God, he loves his fucking job. “We’re heroes, baby. You ready to graduate from Ziggy to Starman?”

“That’s not really how Bowie – “

“Oh, shut up,” Pete says, steering directly down towards the boat, the one speck of black in a sea of clear, clear blue.

Patrick doesn’t say anything. But Pete knows he’s smiling anyway.

Down on the Carl Vinson, Pete gets to relive the night he was elected Homecoming King all over again. There’s cheering from the flight crew when he climbs out of his plane; breathless questions from fellow pilots about what the Iranian plane looked like; a debrief with the commanding officer, who congratulates them on the foresight to avoid an international incident; and then telling the story all over again when they finally get down to mess and wolf down a late dinner. Pete’s still in his flight suit, sweaty and sticky, when he finally stands up and begs off to hit the showers. Patrick’s refilling his water bottle down at the end of the hall; all Pete can see is the pale curve of his neck, short red-brown hairs tacky with sweat at the base of his skull.

Heat zips up Pete’s spine. He claps another pilot on the shoulder and follows Patrick out of the mess hall.

Finally, it’s blissful silence as they navigate through the below decks maze of an aircraft carrier. White-washed walls crowd in tight on both sides, and there’s an ever-present humming that fills the air. Every so often the whole boat shakes, for just a second, when a pilot touches down on the landing strip up on the top deck.

They pass the junior officer bunks, huge rooms with dozens and dozens of bunks stacked on top of each other and no privacy. Pete remembers those, back when he first got his wings and got sent on carrier duty. But he’s been a naval aviator for five years now; he doesn’t have to share big open rooms now. Most pilots get four-man staterooms.

For whatever reason – maybe it’s cause Patrick’s dad’s an admiral, maybe because they’re just special – Pete and Patrick have one of the rare two-man staterooms. No roommates.

The door’s barely closed behind them when Patrick starts rummaging around in his bunk, pulling out his shower stuff.

“What are you doing?” Pete asks.

“What does it look like I’m doing, genius? I actually do want to shower.”

“So do I!” Pete says, stepping closer. His hands reach out, catch on the rough material of Patrick’s flight suit. “Just…you know.”

Patrick straightens up, looks at him, face inscrutable behind his glasses.

“If we’re going to get all sweaty again, we might as well shower after,” Pete says, voice low.

This is the face that he misses when he’s up there, when there’s no way to turn around and see Patrick without crashing the plane. LTJG Patrick ‘Ziggy’ Stump is a perfectly normal looking guy; square face, square glasses, pale Irish skin, big blue eyes, fairly chubby, regulation-short hair that’s a weird mix of red-brown-blonde. He’s short, like Pete – like most naval aviators – with clever twitching fingers and pale blonde eyebrows. Any other day, Pete would say that he’s fine, good-looking, nothing much to write home about.

Here's the thing, though – Patrick Stump looks good in a flight suit.

There’s something about it, something that catches Pete’s famously wandering eye, something that makes him reach out his hands even now, to catch on the rough fabric over Patrick’s hips and dig and knead until he can feel jutting hipbones. Patrick’s objectively a dork – he’s pretty much memorized their NATOPs, he can tell you what every single bolt on their F-18 does – but you’d never tell he’s not a fighter in his flight suit. Something about the way it fills out his shoulders but cinches in to a tiny waist, the way that his powerful thighs press against the fabric. His boots are half-undone right now, and that just turns Pete’s crank like nothing else, the idea that this dorky little guy wears fucking combat boots, and wears them like that.

Patrick’s flight suit is old; scuffed up in the knees. Pete remembers how they got so scuffed up.

Right now, Patrick sighs, his eyelashes fluttering closed. Pete presses closer. Like this, he can see every one of Patrick’s tiny blonde eyelashes. “Pete,” he murmurs. “Come on, I don’t really…”

“Are you kidding me?” Pete whispers back. “You’re not hopped up on adrenaline right now?” He reaches up and fingers the patch on Patrick’s chest; his callsign, right underneath the Naval insignia. He runs a fingernail over the embroidery. “I’ve been half chub since we landed.”

“Well, that’s just you,” Patrick says, with no heat in it. “Meanwhile, my head hurts, cause some stick jockey threw me upside down with no warning – “

“You want me to throw you upside down?” Pete says, leaning in. He fits his teeth to Patrick’s ear, feels a shudder run through the other man. This close he can smell the sweat where it’s collected in Patrick’s hair and the collar of his flight suit, laying tacky against his skin. “All you had to do was ask, baby.”

Patrick sighs, lets his head drop to Pete’s shoulder. One arm reaches up to grab Pete’s bicep, and Pete knows he’s in. “We have to be quiet, Pete,” he murmurs, and Pete’s dick jumps in his flight suit.

“Always am, kid,” Pete says, and nudges his face over until he’s sealing his lips over Patrick’s.

Pete almost doesn’t want to take the flight suit off; some part of him wants to fuck Patrick with both their suits still on, cocks out, feeling the rough scrape of sweaty canvas with every thrust. But the allure of Patrick’s skin is even better, and Pete gets busy unzipping and yanking Patrick’s suit off all while his mouth stays glued to Patrick’s. He finally gets the flight suit off his shoulders and almost comes where he’s standing; the image of Patrick’s bare chest, dog tags laying silver over his heart, while his suit bunches up around his hips never fails to get Pete going. Instead of jizzing in his pants, Pete reaches into the damp heat of Patrick’s hips and squeezes his cock through his briefs, and he’s rewarded with Patrick hissing through his teeth and throwing his head back to expose the pale column of his neck.

Patrick reaches behind him for the mattress and flings it onto the miniscule patch of ground next to them. Aircraft carrier bunks are far too small for any sex that isn’t spooning, and Pete knows that’s not how this is gonna go down. He doesn’t want gentle, tender spooning; he wants pressure, bruises, friction. He wants to take and be taken. He wants to fuck Patrick like an animal, press words into his skin that he can’t say up in the sky. He wants to pull Patrick’s hair, make it so hard for him to stay quiet that he bites blood into his lip.

He pushes Patrick down, hard, and thank God Patrick’s on the same page, because he drops to his knees like the world’s hottest porn and yanks the rest of Pete’s flight suit off his hips. Patrick immediately nuzzles his head to Pete’s cock, wasting no time before pulling his briefs down over his thighs and licking his dick in one long line from base to tip. Normally this is a pretty great way to spend an evening – Patrick is a champion cocksucker, truly legendary, usually Pete has a plethora of jokes about how Patrick spent his time at boot camp – but that’s not what they’re doing tonight. Pete gently fits his hand in Patrick’s hair and tugs, and Patrick pulls off with limpid blue eyes.

“Hands and knees, baby,” Pete whispers, and Patrick grins loosely and turns over.

The mattress is thin, the floor underneath pressing up against Pete’s knees as he runs a hand over the round swell of Patrick’s ass. He wishes they could put on some music, something to break up the fucking eternal buzzing of the boat around them, something to help build the tension as Pete fits one, two, three fingers inside Patrick, working him open until Patrick’s letting out tiny moans and pressing back insistently.

But they have to be silent. They have to be completely silent, even when Pete slams his cock in to the hilt and Patrick throws his head back like a racehorse. They have to be completely silent, even when Pete fits his hands to Patrick’s squishy hips and lets loose, fucking him in jarring, rabbity thrusts. They have to be completely silent, even when Patrick takes it like a goddamn champ, dropping down onto his forearms and pushing his ass out and whimpering through the quietest little moans that Pete’s ever heard.

They have to be completely silent because this – fraternization not only between officers, but between a pilot and a WSO – is completely and utterly against regulations. This is so beyond Navy policy that it enters a new class of unallowed. And while technically the Navy is perfectly cool with gay officers, Pete knows damn well that it wouldn’t help their case. If they were caught, this is an instant trial, a court-martial, a dishonorable discharge. Their whole careers, done in a single minute; all those years of basic training, flight school, officer school, five years on different aircraft carriers without even a post office box to call their own – all of it for nothing. At best, at best, the Navy would keep them in the service but break them up on completely different postings. Patrick would be locked in some office somewhere running numbers on F-18s, and Pete would be demoted to helicopter duty or something else lame, all alone in the cockpit with no Patrick in his ear. The Navy would keep them so far apart the only time they’d see each other was if World War 3 broke out and they called up even their disgraced gay pilots to serve.

So they’re quiet at this, and Pete’s gotten really good at swallowing the noises that want to erupt from him. He lets it out in other ways instead. He grabs Patrick’s hips so hard that he can feel the bruises form, blood breaking under the skin. He fucks from his sacrum, from the base of his spine, switching his tempo to hard, syrupy drags that he knows are Patrick’s favorite, watches the younger man tense underneath him and bite his own arm to stay quiet. After a few minutes of thrusting he reaches out, grabs a handful of Patrick’s fluffy, sweaty hair, and yanks him up so they’re both on their knees. Up close like this the angle changes, make Patrick’s breath hitch, so Pete reaches up to pinch and tug at his rosy nipples. Patrick keens, just barely, and Pete can’t see his face but he can see the straining tendons in Patrick’s neck, and he wraps his arms around Patrick and tries to swallow him whole, tries to press their skin so close together that Pete subsumes him completely.

He bites down on the sweet juncture where Patrick’s neck meets his shoulder, feels the tendon and muscle jump in his mouth, listens to Patrick’s gasping, sobbing breaths, and finally takes pity on him. His hand trails down the sweaty plane of Patrick’s soft stomach until he grabs his burning hot cock. His grip is tight but not bruising, just like Patrick likes, and it’s only a few strokes before Patrick comes with a tiny gasp, cum shooting up his chest and bubbling over Pete’s hand.

Patrick shudders through the aftershocks and then flops, boneless, face-down on the mattress, only catching himself on his forearms at the last moment while his dog tags clink. That’s all Pete needs; the angle is just right to really screw in and chase his release, and if he does it quick then he knows Patrick won’t mind how rough he is. So he anchors himself with both hands on Patrick’s hips and just lets go, a truly mindless fuck, no finesse or rhythm to it, just screwing into that tight-hot-tight-wet-tight, feeling the heat build and build and build as his fingers hold on tight enough to break bone, and –

Release feels just like doing an inverted dive. Pete’s stomach swoops, his mouth drops open, and for a minute all the fuzz in his brain is replaced with blissful nothing.

When it’s done Pete collapses next to Patrick on the bed, pressing his face to Patrick’s skin in mute gratitude. He nudges and pokes until Patrick flips over onto his back so Pete can cuddle up under his arm, press his face to the soft rise and fall of Patrick’s sticky chest. Patrick’s arm flops down over Pete’s back, and his fingers start tracing meaningless circles. The smile that spreads over Pete’s face is entirely involuntary.

Because this, these little moments – Pete really has it all. The perfect job, the perfect life. What he’s got going with Patrick is special. It’s everything Pete wants and nothing that he doesn’t.

They’re not dating, is the thing. They can’t, for one thing, and they don’t want to. They established that, all those years ago when they started fooling around after one too many looks on deck and one too many long nights on deployment. Pete goes on dates on shore leave, hooks up with guys and girls when they’re on land, and so does Patrick. Pete doesn’t have to do the conversations and the planning and all the nightmares that have come with his (relatively few) long-term relationships; he can have the greatest sex of his life, with someone he knows so well they can practically hear each other’s thoughts, and when it’s over they get to go their separate ways and Pete doesn’t have to make promises he knows he won’t keep. It’s perfect.

He nudges his way up Patrick, pressing hard toothy kisses anywhere he can reach, only stopping when he jostles Patrick’s head against the hard floor and he winces.

“You okay?”

Patrick huffs. “I’m fine, it’s just…you, like, really hit my head when you did that inversion. My helmet hit the canopy pretty hard.”

Pete frowns. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” He pauses. “But if you can’t handle hitting your head, how did you get through flight school?”

“I can handle it,” Patrick says, calm as ever. “Believe it or not, I’ve been in a fighter jet before. I would just like a warning next time. I would’ve tightened my harness, made sure I wasn’t going to go flying. You know if I hit my head too hard, I can’t radio the boat?”

“You’d find a way,” Pete says confidently, dropping his head back down on Patrick’s chest. Patrick wheezes again. “You always find a way.”

Patrick sighs. His arm goes back around Pete, wrapping over his shoulder blades. Calm, and strong, and easy; the same way he acts in the sky. Back at flight school they would call boys like Patrick a 2-10-2; a 2 before going to sea, a 10 on the boat, and a 2 when back on land. Pete’s not going to say that out loud, but it’s pretty true. But so what if Patrick’s not too much to look at? So what if he’s not as hot as Pete’s other conquests – a little too chubby, a little too nerdy, a little too insecure? So what? He’s got something special.

Pete had heard about Patrick Stump long before he met him. An admiral’s kid, but he wasn’t on the pilot track – going to be a weapons system officer instead. All the pilots had no idea what to do with this information. What kind of Navy brat wouldn’t want to be a pilot? People got weird when asked about Patrick Stump; the ones who didn’t know him had made him into this boogeyman, and the ones who did know him usually didn’t want to talk about him, just gave Pete these weird throaty chuckles and winks, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. When Pete was told Stump was going to be his backseater, he came up with all sorts of crazy theories about what the guy was like. Maybe he had a massive chip on his shoulder about washing out of the pilot track and he’d be a fucking nightmare to work with. Maybe he was too stupid to be a pilot but they couldn’t flunk the admiral’s son, so they stuck him as a WSO and he was going to be a liability up in the air. Maybe he was some kind of weird savant who wanted to fuck the planes and would sit up all night stroking the F-18 and muttering under his breath.

Patrick Stump was none of those things. He was a dork, yeah – the Bowie-inspired callsign was a pretty big give-away – and he was, actually, kind of a savant. But he was just an aviator who couldn’t be a pilot because his eyesight wasn’t good enough and didn’t want to be one anyway.

“I’m better in the backseat,” he said easily, and Pete at 24 years old could not comprehend the quiet confidence it took to admit that. Everyone Pete had known up to that point had been hypermasculine pilots who would rather be shot dead than admit that there was anything else they could be good at (or better at) than flying planes. The second pilots entered flight school, piloting became their identity; Pete didn’t understand how anyone could turn that down.

But his first time up in the air with Patrick, suddenly it all made sense. Patrick could be a prissy little bitch about his coordinates and he had very specific ways he wanted his plane flown. But when Pete wanted to go off the rails, when he wanted to pull insane barrel rolls and cobra maneuvers in the sky, Patrick took it on the chin and didn’t scream at him about breaking regulations. And when one late night, after way too much bathroom hooch, Pete leaned forward and kissed Patrick hard enough to bite – well, he took that on the chin too.

“I just want you to tell me things,” Patrick says softly. Pete can feel his soft lips moving against Pete’s sweat-tacky hair. “I don’t want to cramp your style, Pete. But if you tell me things then I can help keep you safe. That was really fucking scary out there today.”

“We got through it.”

“Yeah, we did, because you took two seconds and you thought before blasting your missiles. Imagine how much better you could be if you tell me what you’re gonna do before you do it.”

“You don’t really have time to think up there,” Pete replies. The words feel like syrup coming out of him. “I don’t – it’s not a conscious thing. I have to act on instinct or else I’m dead.”

After a pause, Patrick says, “I get that.”

Pete shakes his head, and Patrick continues, “No, I do. I mean, I get that I don’t get it. Pilot’s instincts, they’re real. You think I don’t know that? I’ve flown with a lot of pilots who aren’t you, Pete, I know you have something special. But just…” He bites his words off, sighs. “Never mind. Just – don’t forget the guy in the backseat, okay?”

“How could I forget you? You’re like the world’s most annoying internal monologue.”

Patrick huffs out a laugh and wiggles. “Jesus, I’m sticky. Now I really need to shower.”

“Me too. Go use the one down by the big barracks, I want this one.”

“Fuck no, it’s your cum dripping out of my asshole, I get the smaller bathroom. You can shower with all the shitty baby seamen.”

“No, Patrick, you – you need to use the big one because – because – “ Pete’s laughing too hard to get it out, and Patrick sighs again. “Cause it’s semen – around the seamen! Get it? Get it?”

“Do I get it?” He replies, deadpan. “Do I get the most entry-level Naval joke of all time? Do I get the same fucking joke I’ve been hearing since the Naval Academy? Yes, Pete, yes, I think I get it.”

Pete can’t even make a comeback, he’s laughing too hard, hard enough that he’s shaking Patrick and making all the little bits of chub on his body shake. Eventually Patrick laughs too, and he looks funny when he laughs because it makes his limp pink dick shake, and that sets Pete off again until Patrick literally rolls Pete off him and walks out with his shower stuff. Later, when Pete finally gets up and grabs his towel and shampoo and stuff, he goes to the little bathroom by them and finds it empty. Patrick used the big bathroom after all.

He really does have the perfect life.

When civilians ask Pete about his time on an aircraft carrier, there’s one fact that he’s always beyond excited to share.

“There’s an elevator! Just for the planes! Like, it moves the planes from the lower levels up to the flight deck! Isn’t that insane?”

This never gets quite the reaction that Pete’s expecting. People think it’s cool, yeah, but not mind-blowing. Pete doesn’t get it. The plane elevator is easily one of the greatest things on the whole aircraft carrier, and Pete’s including the nuclear missiles in that tally.

That’s where the afternoon sun finds him, a few days after the incident with the Iranian spy plane. He and Patrick are on midnights for the next few weeks, so he really should be getting some sleep, but he knows for a fact that falling asleep isn’t in the cards for tonight. So he’s standing here in one of the few places on the ship where you can see out, blinking lazily into the sun as it reflects off the water, watching the planes go up and down on the big open-air elevator. It’s as close to meditation as he’s going to get, and if he’s lucky, eventually this will lead him to enough of a trance-like state that he’ll be able to go back to his room and grab an hour of sleep.

He's got an eye out for his F-18, tucked in the back with his and Patrick’s names spray-painted on the side – making sure the fucking E-nothing junior seamen don’t bang it when they’re moving the other planes – when he hears footsteps besides him. He turns around with a grin on his face, positive that it’s Patrick.

But it’s not Patrick. It’s Admiral Kressler. You know, the guy in charge of the whole fucking ship.

Pete’s heels clack together and his hand snaps up into the kind of salute that his drill instructors at basic would be proud of. Admiral Kressler squints against the sun, his heavy-set face giving nothing away. The stars on his collar wink harshly in Pete’s eyes. “At ease, Lieutenant.”

Pete’s hand comes down to clasp his other hand behind his back. “Sir.”

“What are you doing out here?” He doesn’t sound mad.

“It’s one of the few quiet places on the ship, sir,” Pete says. It’s true, in a way; the elevator itself is loud as fuck, but when it’s not moving, the only sounds are the lapping of the waves and the ever-present hum of the ship.

Admiral Kressler smiles. “Fair enough. I’m glad I found you, I wanted to talk to you.”

Pete’s heartrate spikes in a heartbeat. “All ears, sir.”

“That was some impressive flying against the Iranian pilot,” the Admiral continues, and Pete’s shoulders relax down his back. “And excellent instincts. We listened back to the tape and heard you counseling your fellow pilot to stand down. The international community appreciates that kind of discretion.”

“Thank you, sir.” Would it make him look like a dick if he smiled right now? Pete’s not sure.

“You didn’t seem at all surprised to see an Iranian pilot above Somali waters.”

“Well,” Pete says, feeling preemptively guilty, “Iran’s not far away, sir. I figured there would be Iranian aircraft carriers patrolling the water. We just happened to get a long-range patrol.”

Admiral Kressler nods, impressed, and Pete feels guilty again. Okay, so the credit for that knowledge should go to Patrick, but – seriously, the Navy’s never going to know about their private conversation up there. Besides, Patrick doesn’t need the goodwill from the brass. He’s the Navy’s golden boy; he’s got about as many commendations as it’s possible for a WSO to get. Pete spent half his career racking up demerits and write-ups before being paired with Patrick and cleaning his act up; he could use a little boost to his reputation.

“Well, see, I’m so glad to hear you say that, because I have a proposition for you,” Admiral Kressler says. “I got a call from a fellow admiral who’s got a pilot sent off for a medical discharge. He needs a replacement, stat, and it can’t just be anyone. It’s got to be someone with good instincts, a fair amount of knowledge about modern combat and international relations.”

“Why’s that, sir?”

Admiral Kressler might not like that question; his nostrils flare, just slightly, when he replies, “It’s Carrier Strike Group Eight.”

Jesus. That’s the aircraft carrier assigned to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They’re in the Mediterranean, ready to move into the Black Sea and defend Ukraine. Aside from Strike Group Two with the Houthi War, this is the group that’s seen – or about to see – the most actual combat. Pete swallows.

“The USS Harry S. Truman, sir?”

“That’s the one. As you can understand, for this posting, I can’t just send some Top Gun hotshot who’s just gotten their wings. I need a pilot who’s done this before, who won’t send us into World War 3 for the sake of his ego. You understand? I need someone with restraint.”

Since when has Pete Wentz ever been the pilot with restraint? Maybe he’s finally growing up. He lets his chest puff out a little, replies, “I understand, sir.”

“I hope you do,” Admiral Kressler says, making direct eye contact. Christ, that late afternoon sun is bright against the ocean; Pete should have brought his aviators out here. “Because this is no easy deployment. This is what you’ve been training for. This is the kind of mission that won’t be easy, or fun. And it could be a while; I know you haven’t worked with the Sunliners before, but this could be long-term. A year, or even more. Are you prepared for that sacrifice?”

“Aye, sir.” The more the Admiral tells him about this, the more Pete wants to go. Isn’t this what he’s been working for, his whole fucking Navy career? Isn’t this why he joined, back when nobody believed he would even make it through boot camp? When all his friends laughed, said that punkass Pete Wentz was the last person the United States Navy would want? Hasn’t he earned this, after keeping his nose clean for years and years, slogging through every long deployment on every shitty airline carrier they stuck him on? Hasn’t he earned his chance to be counted among the greats, the ones they tell stories about at Top Gun?

Admiral Kressler must like what he sees, because he stares long and hard into Pete’s earnest gaze before nodding. “I believe you. I’ll check with your WSO tomorrow, make sure he’s on board – “

“Patrick’s on board,” Pete jumps in, and then checks himself. “Sir. Uh. Lieutenant Stump will be on board, I promise. He’s ready for the next challenge. Plus,” he says with a grin, “I promise he’d be thrilled about a posting in the Mediterranean Sea.”

The Admiral furrows his brow. “Are you sure? This strike group in particular…”

“I promise,” Pete says, thinks, Don’t you dare take this away from me. “Sir, we’re ready. He was just telling me last night how excited he is to go somewhere new, work with a new squadron.”

He most certainly was not – Patrick spent a good portion of last night waxing poetic about Elvis Costello’s collaboration with the Roots and how it requires “actual attention, Pete, you have to pay attention to get it and to understand it” while Pete made paper footballs and tried to get them to land between Patrick’s wildly gesticulating hands, much to the amusement of the mess hall. Pete has no idea how Patrick feels about the Mediterranean, but fuck it.

“Just go ahead and put the paperwork in now, sir,” Pete says easily. “I wouldn’t want anything to delay the Navy’s readiness to respond to the world’s needs.”

That seems to finally do the trick; Admiral Kressler smiles, a short stubby smile, and says, “Well put, young man. I’ll get that paperwork in right away; expect to be deployed in the next day or so. Can I trust you to tell Lieutenant Stump?”

“I’ll get on it right away, sir,” he says, and reaches out to shake his hand. “Thank you for thinking of me, sir. I’m excited to live up to your expectations.”

“We’ll be watching,” the Admiral says, shaking Pete’s hand back.

Bring it the fuck on, Pete thinks, only allowing himself to grin once the Admiral has turned his back to Pete and walked away.

He all but sprints up to the mess hall, hoping it’s late enough that Patrick is awake from his nap (he could wake Patrick up, but that usually ends in a lot of drama. For all his years in the Navy, Patrick has never adjusted well to an early wake-up call).

He finds Patrick in the mess deck, sitting with some of the other aviators, eating an early dinner. Pete tries to tamp down on his obvious grin and slow down his half-jog into a respectable speed, but it doesn’t work – Patrick clocks him from halfway across the hall and narrows his eyes at Pete.

“What’s got you in such a hurry?” He says, as Pete swings his leg over and crowds in next to them. “You can’t be that excited about mid-watch patrols.”

“No, but I am excited after a conversation with Admiral Kressler.” All the pilots and WSOs at the table sit up a little straighter. Pete doesn’t want to come across as braggadocious, but the truth is he is proud that they were the ones that got asked, and desire to tell Patrick as soon as possible is outweighing any graciousness he might possess. “He got a call from Strike Group Eight out in the Mediterranean, asking for a flight team to go out and replace one of their pilots who got medically discharged, and he wants me.”

The other pilots cheer and clap Pete on the back and generally enough of a ruckus that the other tables turn to look at them. But Patrick’s already pale face gets even more pale, his blue eyes huge behind his glasses. Once all the congratulations and cheering die down enough to get a word in edgewise, he says, very seriously,

“Pete,” he says, “Carrier Strike Group Eight? You’re sure?”

“Yeah,” Pete replies. “The Harry S. Truman.”

“He specifically said that ship?”

“Yes, why are you being so weird?”

“Pete, what did you – did you say yes for both of us? Or just for you?”

“Both of us, obviously! I can’t do it without my best backseater.”

This only serves to make Patrick madder. Because he is mad, Pete can see that now. Patrick has a hell of a temper when you get him going, and this is clearly gearing up to be a full explosion.

“Pete, you goddamn fucking asshole,” he spits out, and the whole table falls silent. “After I just asked you to not do shit without telling me. Did he already put the order in?”

“I think so,” Pete says, heart sinking. “I told him he could go ahead and put it in right away. He says we’re going to ship out soon.”

“Fuck,” Patrick says feelingly, dropping his head into his hands. His fingers curl and grasp through the short red strands, and Pete feels a little defensive.

“Look, I know I should have checked with you, but it’s a huge opportunity for us, and Admiral Kressler thought of me specifically, and just – why would you join the Navy if you don’t want to go into warzones?”

Patrick raises his head slowly, so so slowly. Pete can taste the electricity in the air the same way that dogs can tell when a storm is coming. He has just said – unequivocally – the wrong thing.

“You don’t even know what you did,” Patrick growls, “you colossal fucking jackass.”

And he stands up with a slam of his hands on the table, rattling the metal legs, and stalks off through the mess hall at an astonishing clip for such a short guy.

Everyone turns to look at Pete – half grins, half grimaces. Like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

“Trouble in paradise?” says Ryan, one of the other pilots. He’s got a shit eating grin on his face.

“Apparently,” Pete says. “I’m gonna – “ He jerks his thumb awkwardly in the direction that Patrick’s gone. “Go. Uh. Figure out what that was.”

“Go kiss and make up,” says Brendon, and the tables laugh good-naturedly. Pete smiles at them, but it’s awkward, ill-fitting. As he walks away, he’s absolutely dreading what’s waiting for him back in their bunk. The walk through the bowels of the ship feels like marching to his death.

What could Patrick possibly be so mad about?

To add insult to injury, Patrick’s in the middle of putting on his flight suit when Pete walks in. He feels like he’s been hit with whiplash when the first thing he sees is Patrick’s broad back in his white undershirt, shrugging his flight suit up over his shoulders. When he hears the click of the door closing behind Pete, he turns around to glare at him with his suit unzipped in the front, a hint of chest peeking out the top. The last thing Pete needs is to be horny while he gets his ass chewed out by Patrick.

Although that kinda sounds like a great night.

“Patrick, I – “

“Shut the fuck up,” Patrick spits. “You don’t even know what you were going to apologize for. You never fucking think, Pete, and now you’ve ruined fucking everything like the wrecking ball you are – “

“What did I ruin? What did I ruin, by doing my job and going where I’m sent? They wanted a pilot to go on that carrier, they wanted it to be me, how did I ruin anything by saying yes?”

“The Harry S. Truman is my dad’s ship,” Patrick says, with his fists clenched, and Pete stops in his tracks.

“What?”

“My dad,” Patrick says, shooting every word out like a bullet, “is the fucking admiral in charge of the USS Harry S. Truman.”

Oh, shit. This explains some of Admiral Kressler’s hesitation about sending Patrick. “How did I not know that?” Pete asks.

“I’m sure I told you at some point but you never fucking listen to me, do you?”

“You never talk about your dad, how was I supposed to know?”

“And you didn’t think there’s a reason for that? Jesus Christ, Pete!” He turns around, drops his head against the top bunk with a dull thunk, and Pete’s still scrambling to get his act together. So much for those pilot’s instincts.

“Okay, so – so you don’t like your dad that much, okay. Well, an aircraft carrier is a big place, and you know, it was bound to happen someday. And we’ll just – “

“You don’t get it,” Patrick says, and shit, it sounds like he’s crying. He turns to Pete and doesn’t make eye contact, just sniffs and puts his hands on his hips. “You – this is a pretty good posting here, Pete, I don’t think you know how good it is. All the guys who know that we’re, you know, hooking up or whatever, and they don’t really care? Just kind of laugh about it?”

“Yeah,” Pete says, thinking about kiss and make up from Brendon in the mess hall.

“It’s not like that on the Harry Truman,” he continues miserably. “Because my dad really, really cares about Naval regulations in a way that Admiral Kressler doesn’t.”

“Okay, well, we haven’t been caught yet! We’ve been quiet, we’ve kept it under wraps, no one could prove anything – “

“My dad’s a homophobe, Pete,” Patrick says, finally making eye contact. “And I’m not out.”

Pete’s heart stutters in his chest. He drops into the lone chair in the room.

“You’re not out?”

“How could I be?” Patrick says quietly.

“But – but you told me you go on dates when you’re back home, you’re telling me – do you tell him those are girls?”

“I don’t tell him anything,” he says, shoulders slouching. “He thinks I’m a weird little fuck who just – doesn’t pull girls, or something. I was closeted all through high school and college and boot camp and officer training school and flight school and this was – the first time in my life that I could be a little free, and maybe we couldn’t get caught but it was still worth the risk, and now I have to go live on a ship with that man again and I just – “

“Fuck, Patrick,” Pete says, as the sheer gravity of his colossal fuck up finally hits him. “Okay, okay, let me go tell Admiral Kressler, he’ll pull the request, we’ll call it off – “

“No!” Patrick yells, as Pete stands up. “No, are you kidding? That looks suspicious as fuck, Pete! And now my name’s on it, my dad’s going to know that I’m refusing to be deployed to his ship, he’ll call me with questions and it’ll be a whole thing! No, it’s way too late.” He pushes his glasses up, rubs at his eyes. “If you had just told me, I would’ve told you to go by yourself, and I would’ve come up with some lie for Kressler that had nothing to do with my dad. You said all they needed was a pilot, right? They didn’t need a WSO, I would’ve just stayed here and flown with someone else.”

But then I would have had to fly without you, Pete wants to stay, but stops himself at the last second. This isn’t the time to say something so selfish, not when that’s the exact thing that’s gotten them in this situation.

“How long did he say the posting was for?” Patrick asks, as he starts to zip up his flight suit.

“Um.” Oh, God, Pete wishes he could jump into the fucking ocean. It’s right outside, he could do it. “Like. A long posting. He said…it could be a year. Or more.”

The devastation in Patrick’s eyes will haunt Pete until the end of his days. He can’t think of the last time he hurt someone this badly. There’s no defense for this, no shield. This is all Pete’s fault because he was cruelly, fundamentally selfish.

Patrick slowly leans down and picks up his helmet. Pete helped him decorate it, a few years ago, back when first realizing that Patrick had the perfect aesthetic callsign. Now it’s got red lightning bolts and black stars all over the shiny surface, painstakingly plastered on over a long night of making Patrick crack up.

All that trust that’s built up…gone in an afternoon.

“We need to get to the plane,” Patrick says dully, and leaves without looking back.

Pete deserves that. And when Patrick barely speaks to him as they’re packing and shipping out to the Mediterranean, Pete deserves that too.

Prior to joining the Navy, Pete would have assumed that pilots just fly their own planes wherever they wanted to go. But that’s wildly inaccurate, especially now that Pete knows how many millions of dollars it costs to keep the F-18 flying for even an hour at a time. The Navy has a lot cheaper ways to get its sailors across the world.

So Pete and Patrick will be assigned a new F-18 when they land on the Harry Truman, and they get there by taking a regular little transport plane over the Arabian peninsula and into Europe. The terrain shifts from brown to green, and Pete watches the waterways outside his little window. Everything looks so peaceful from the air.

Prior to joining the Navy, Pete assumed a lot of things that were wrong. But he had this part right – the part where they just pick you up and move you, no questions asked, no chance for back talk. When he was a teenager, that thought horrified him. For teenage Pete, taking away his autonomy would have been considered worse than death. And in his circle of teenage punks, having long talks about how much they hated authority while rolling their own cigarettes and listening to bootleg Fugazi albums, they all felt the same. Someone joining the military was someone joining up to be a cog for the rest of their lives.

But at some point when he was wasting his parents’ money blowing off his college classes, Pete started to like the idea of being a cog. They had a word now for what made him so impulsive – bipolar disorder – and a list of medications that, when taken regularly, mostly worked. At that point, it sounded pretty good to be told what to do. He was getting pretty tired of saying ‘no’ without any reason, just because it was a pattern. He thought it might be nice if the option of ‘no’ just wasn’t there anymore.

Not to mention, the perfect off-campus apartment he no longer lived in; the appointments at jewelers that he had to cancel through a voice thick with tears; the unanswered texts and the late-night cigarettes and the cold space next to him in bed.

All the signs seemed to pointing to run away, Pete, just run away. Let someone else call the shots.

He had an uncle in the Navy who he always thought was pretty cool, so that was the recruiting table he stopped at. It was too late for the mess of shitty tattoos he’d picked up both legally and illegally, but the recruiter assured him that those didn’t matter. And his grades didn’t matter too much either – as long as he graduated with a degree, he could go to officer training school.

“We like guys like you,” he said with a smile, “the ones who aren’t afraid. Those guys become our SEALs or our pilots.”

“Pilot,” Pete said without hesitation, and the recruiter smiled and nodded.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”

He thinks about that now, when he’s in a transport plane over the Mediterranean Sea, watching the side of Patrick’s face. He thinks about how happy he was at 22 to stop saying no, to just jump in and do whatever someone else told him to do. Maybe if he’d stopped for a second – maybe if shitty punk Pete had taken back over his brainstem – maybe they wouldn’t be in this predicament.

The Harry Truman looks like every other aircraft carrier – bigger than a city, but somehow also far too small to be a safe landing place for even their little transport plane. Pete and Patrick are unloaded in a manner not dissimilar to all the supplies and food that they also flew with. The bored warrant officer with a clipboard assigns them a berthing, and they pull their duffels out and trundle along behind a line of other exhausted Navy folks newly assigned to this ship. The weather’s hotter than Pete ever imagined; he thought nowhere would be as hot as the Somali coast, but right now he can feel the heat rising from the sea. They’re too far out to see the land, and from the top of an aircraft carrier all oceans look the same, but Pete can feel the difference nonetheless.

He's too busy staring around to notice the ripple of salutes that rocks through the top deck, and it’s only after he takes Patrick’s elbow to the gut that he manages to drop his bag and fling his hand up in time. Some head brass is coming for them, stars on his collar and heavy embroidery on his sleeves, wearing sunglasses over his pale skin and blonde-ish hair –

Oh, shit.

Pete stays in full salute even as Admiral Stump walks right up to them. “Lieutenants,” he says, and his voice is deep and gruff.

“Sir,” Pete and Patrick chorus in unison. All the other seamen on deck are watching this with unbridled curiosity.

“Carry on,” the Admiral says, and everyone unclenches and resumes their tasks. Pete and Patrick step back into parade rest, and the Admiral reaches out and pulls Patrick into a hug. After a minute, Patrick reaches up and fits his hands to his dad’s shoulderblades.

“Hi, son.”

“Hi, dad,” Patrick says, his voice muffled in the shoulder of his dad’s uniform.

The Admiral steps back and puts his hands on Patrick’s shoulders, beaming at him. Patrick smiles weakly back. “Welcome to the USS Harry S. Truman.”

“Thanks.” Patrick doesn’t look fully relaxed, and it’s not hard to see why: all around them, everyone else does their tasks with one eye on the reunion happening in front of them. Admiral Stump is basically painting a target on his son’s back, telling everyone on board to not let their guard down in front of this guy.

The Admiral gives him an up-down. “You look good, son! Looks like you didn’t gain much weight back on the Vinson.”

The only thing stopping Pete from looking over at the Admiral in horror is many years of Navy training. A younger Pete would’ve thrown hands. He’s certainly gotten in fights for a lot less.

“I’m not sure when I would have had time to put it back on as an active-duty Naval aviator,” Patrick says wearily.

“Well, I know you spend a lot of time sitting as a WSO,” he replies, with a weird chuckle, and then turns to Pete. “And this must be your pilot! Lieutenant Wentz, correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Pete says, and they shake hands. He has the same wispy blonde eyebrows as Patrick; it’s totally throwing Pete off.

“I’m glad you’re here; when my pilot got medboarded home, I wasn’t sure I was going to find someone on such short notice. You’ve got glowing reviews, Lieutenant Wentz.”

“It’s all because of Patrick, sir,” Pete says, and catches Patrick’s warning look out of the corner of his eyes. He ignores it, because of course he does. “Best WSO the Navy’s got. He’s my biggest asset in the air.”

“I know, I’ve read his reports,” Admiral Stump says, smiling at his son in a way that almost resembles a normal parent. “Looks like we’ve got the dream team here. Come on, I’ll show you to your berthings.”

They bend down to grab their duffels. Pete tries desperately to make eye contact with Patrick, to have one of their silent conversations they’re usually pretty good at, but Patrick won’t look at him, completely hidden behind his glasses. They trundle off behind Admiral Stump in silence.

“I know Kressler runs a bit of a looser ship,” Admiral Stump says as they descend below deck. “But we like to keep things up to regulations here. Infractions like non-regulation hair or contraband don’t get a pass here. Our motto is that the President of the United States could visit this ship at any minute, and we need to be ready to show him the Navy at its best.”

Pete didn’t realize that Kressler ran a loose ship. Pete thought Kressler was a fucking hardass who once chewed him out for not tying his boots properly. This ship is going to be tighter than that?

Also – even though there’s literally no fucking way that Admiral Stump could know about them – a shiver still runs down Pete’s spine at the end of his speech. He trails behind Patrick as they weave their way through the ship, and like clockwork, his eyes are drawn to Patrick’s ass in his fatigues. He keeps snapping his eyes up, like Admiral Stump is going to see him ogling his son through the back of his head; but after a few seconds, his traitorous little eyes keep getting pulled back down.

“We’ve had to give you Brown’s old bunk,” Admiral Stump says, finally pulling up outside a tiny four-man stateroom. “But should be plenty of room.” He knocks on the metal door.

Oh, fucking great. Roommates. Pete’s been so spoiled; they’ve had their own room for two years on the Vinson. How the fuck is he going to share his space? How is he going to get any alone time with Patrick, let alone sexy time?

But when the door opens, it reveals a short young pilot with dark curly hair, as well as the first genuine smile Patrick’s had in days.

“Joe? Are you kidding?”

“Patrick? Oh my God! Admiral Stump, sir,” the pilot says, firing up a salute. Admiral Stump just smiles.

“At ease. You know each other?”

“We went to flight school together! Oh, man, are you my new roomie?”

“Looks like it,” Patrick says, beaming. A flare of irrational jealousy swamps Pete for a moment – Patrick’s only supposed to smile like that at him.

You jackass, he reprimands himself. Pete’s the one who forced Patrick onto his shitty, homophobic father’s boat; the least he could do is not be jealous that Patrick has an actual friend here.

“Alright, well, I’ll let you settle in.” Admiral Stump claps a hand against Patrick’s shoulder; Pete wonders if anyone besides him notices Patrick’s miniscule wince. “You get tonight to sleep off the jet lag, but tomorrow you’re up in the air.”

“Yes, sir,” Patrick says, and his dad grins in response and heads back down the hall. Pete and Patrick edge their way into the room with their duffels that now seem comically large.

Immediately Patrick and Joe break out in a long, back-slapping hug, so genuinely adorable that Pete can do nothing but smile at them.

“Holy shit, dude,” Joe finally says, breaking away, “how the hell did you get posted on your dad’s ship?”

Patrick sighs. “Well, Joe, I’d like you to meet Pete Wentz.”

Pete holds out a hand, grimacing. “Hi, I’m Pete. I’m the fuckup reason we’re here.”

Joe shakes his hand, eyes darting between Pete and Patrick. “So, what – this is punishment?”

“No, no,” Patrick says. “Just a misunderstanding. Look, maybe it was bound to happen. There aren’t that many aircraft carriers, maybe I was always going to have to work with him.”

“Is he as bad as he sounds?” Pete asks, and Joe shrugs.

“I mean…yes? Like he’s a total hardass, but it’s not like he’s abusive. He just, I don’t know, sleeps next to the regulations every night and strokes them like a baby.” Joe’s got the tiniest lisp and this lovely, drawling way of talking. Pete likes him already. “I don’t know. Maybe you have to be a hardass with this posting. I feel like we see a lot of action for a nation that officially hasn’t taken sides in this war.”

“Okay, yeah, tell me what’s going on here,” Pete says, sitting down on one of the empty bunks. “What is, like, happening in this region?”

Joe stares at him for a moment, and then laughs loudly, tipping his head back. Patrick joins in laughing too, all while managing to stare at him, which appears to be a Patrick-specific skill. Pete finally laughs too, like he was in on the joke all along.

Note to self, he thinks, follow up with Patrick next time you’re alone, figure out what’s going on here.

But God, when will they be alone again? There’s no more privacy, no more tiny room that’s just theirs. No more late night music sessions, no more Pete waking up Patrick five minutes before reveille with a kiss and a smack on the ass, no more easy nakedness without worrying about whether or not it could perceived as gay. The true gravity of what Patrick said earlier is just now sinking in, now that it’s far too late. They really did have it easy on the Vinson. Every single tiny thing is about to be harder on this ship.

Joe gets them settled in and then leads them down to mess. Pete tries to get a read on him all throughout dinner. He’s certainly friendlier with Patrick than any new person Pete’s ever seen; Patrick’s perfectly friendly, but he usually lets Pete take the lead on introductions and trying to charm people. How much does he know, though? Patrick said he was closeted all through flight school, but there’s no way he meant, like, the whole time. No one can live like that for almost 30 years. So someone had to know, if only the other guys Patrick hooked up with in the Navy. Is Joe one of them? When Joe’s not looking, Pete stares at the side of his head like he’s trying to X-ray him.

Patrick’s friendly with Joe, but he gets quiet again when a new guy walks over to sit with them – short but frighteningly muscled, with tattoos on his hands and neck, a short red-gray beard and shockingly perceptive eyes.

“Ah, perfect timing,” Joe says, slapping the guy on the back. “So this is my Patrick. Andy Hurley, call sign ‘Sandman’, best WSO in the game.”

“Patrick’s the best WSO in the game,” Pete says, still feeling defensive of Patrick after that fuckshit with his dad, “but it’s nice to meet number two.” He reaches out with a grin and shakes Andy’s hand.

Andy’s smile is a little too knowing as he shakes back. “You must be Lando. I’ve heard of you.”

Pete’s heard that one before; through his whole career, actually. He didn’t go to the Naval Academy at Annapolis like a lot of the legacy kids, and had to serve his four years before making it to officer candidate school while folks like Patrick got four years of service just for attending the Academy and went straight to officer. So his whole career, he’s been at least four years older than most of his peers. Plus, anyone can tell by the plethora of shitty tattoos that joining the straight-laced, buttoned-up Navy was not in his original career plan. When he first enlisted, he had a massive chip on his shoulder about it, spent years trying to prove that he was just as good as these stuck-up little pricks; now, he’s a bit more chill about it. There’s something nice about being a mustang, being a little older and wiser than the rest of them, with actual life experience. Pete has explained the stock market to more than one fellow pilot.

Patrick snorts at Andy’s words, and Pete can’t even be mad because it’s the first sign of life he’s gotten out of him in a while.

“This is Patrick Stump,” Joe says, with a meaningful eyebrow raise. It’s about as subtle as a wrecking ball. Andy doesn’t take the bait.

“Nice to meet you, Patrick.”

“Ziggy and I went to flight school together,” Joe supplies, and Pete jumps in.

“Tell me about Patrick in flight school! How nerdy was he? By how many points was he the top of the class?”

Patrick’s curled his shoulders in, hunching over his meal in a way Pete doesn’t like. “Oh, he fuckin’ hated flight school,” Joe says easily. “Everyone kept thinking he was a narc because he was the admiral’s kid. And one time his dad did a surprise inspection during drill, worst hour of my life, man. It took him walking in on two guys smoking weed and promising not to tell before anyone would believe he wasn’t a total brownnoser.”

“That was you, Joe,” Patrick says weakly.

“So it was,” Joe replies with a grin. “But Stumpy held it down nonetheless. So then we were friends, but then flight school ended like two weeks later and we shipped out and haven’t seen each other since.”

This whole evening Pete’s felt like a spelunker, digging deeper and deeper into the cave of Patrick’s trauma. He thought his WSO was an ordinary, if neurotic, average-looking little guy. Instead, every time he turns a corner, the cave gets deeper. Because if he’s reading this right, Patrick made one (1) friend during flight school and then promptly didn’t see him again for five years. How many other friends has he made as an aviator?

He doesn’t get a chance to ask, because the mess hall fills up with more voices and bodies and the conversation turns boring. Patrick stays quiet and withdrawn, barely picking at his food. Pete’s so desperate to talk to him that when Patrick goes to the head, he makes up a shitty excuse and follows him only a few minutes later.

Pete walks into Patrick standing at a urinal, eyebrows raising as Pete walks in and proceeds to look under all the stalls. “We’re alone, thank God,” Pete says, slumping against the wall. “Dude, oh my God, are you good?”

“I’m trying to piss,” Patrick grits out, refusing to make eye contact.

“I’ve seen your dick before,” Pete points out. “And you know what else has seen your dick? The back of my throat. Stop being fake shy.”

“Pete,” Patrick hisses, eyes skittering around. “Shut the fuck up! Are you kidding me?”

“Dude, we’re alone, it’s fine. I just wanted to check on you.”

Patrick sighs and apparently gives up on pissing, as he tucks his dick back into his pants and zips. “I’m fine,” he says dully as he walks to the sinks.

“You are so not fine, man. You look like someone shot your dog.”

“Can you blame me?” Patrick washes his hands without making eye contact.

“What was that stuff with your dad? Is he always like that?”

“Yep.”

“What was – why was he talking about your weight? That was so weird.”

“I was a fat kid,” Patrick says, and his flat, quiet voice is so difficult for Pete to hear. His Patrick is loud, and funny, and sassy, and has never backed down from a fight with Pete, whether it’s over music taste or how much barbecue sauce sucks. Hearing him beat-down and surrendered to an invisible opponent is torture. “Dad always hated it, had me trying all sorts of diets and doing sports I sucked at. The weight finally came off when I did my plebe summer at Annapolis. It’s, like, this boogeyman for him, he’s terrified I’ll get fat again.”

“I’m starting to understand why you can’t come out,” Pete says. His voice is as low as it can go, but Patrick still shudders and looks around the empty bathroom again.

“Seriously, Pete, stop. We can’t fucking risk that here, I’m so serious.”

“I’m just trying to – “

The door opens and an ensign comes in, one of the deck crew judging by his green vest, and Patrick shoots Pete a look that says See? He nudges his way past Pete and Pete follows a few minutes later. He tries a new tactic throughout dinner and bedtime – keeping up a steady stream of commentary that hopefully strikes the right balance between entertaining and douchebag, in an effort to keep attention off of Patrick and let him stew in silence. He’s not sure if it’s working or if Joe and Andy just think he’s a dick.

But right when the lights are out, as he’s settling into his bottom bunk with his phone to doomscroll until reveille, Patrick’s hand shoots out from the darkness of his top bunk to grab Pete’s hand and squeeze. Pete squeezes back, as hard as he can, for one glorious second until Patrick lets go.

Pete never thought he’d have to settle for scraps, but here he is. Squeezing Patrick’s hand is enough to make him not dread the new day.

On one hand, the Harry Truman is just another aircraft carrier, and Pete’s days are not fundamentally different than they were before. He wakes up, sometimes at weird hours; he hits the gym; he flies; he fills out paperwork and performs other Naval officer duties; he spends his downtime either hanging out with the guys in the rec room or annoying Patrick. The food is a lot better here, that’s for damn sure – Joe tells him that due to the amount of NATO allies in the region, they’re able to source fresh food. It’s been a long time since Pete’s had a vegetable that wasn’t broccoli.

But in other, subtle, often substantial ways – life aboard the Harry Truman is foundationally different.

Pete could feel it in the air, the first time he went out on patrol. They went up with Joe and Andy, so that Pete and Patrick could get a sense of the area; usually, Pete and Patrick will be out alone. Pete’s busy marveling at how blue and green everything is when he looks over and sees the big, sparkling Black Sea off to his right. From his plane, Pete could angle his nose over and be there in a few minutes; from the sea, it looks completely inaccessible except through a teeny tiny little channel that doesn’t even look big enough to fit an aircraft carrier.

“That’s the Bosphorus?” He asks.

“Yeah,” Joe radios in. “Istanbul on either side of it.”

“Gotcha,” Pete says. He switches to the private radio channel and asks, “And we…get along with Turkey? What’s the deal there?”

“Officially, yes,” Patrick replies. “Unofficially, it’s complicated. Their president doesn’t like us that much. We have to be very careful here.”

“What about everyone else in this region? Eastern Europe?”

“We’re good with pretty much everyone else, yeah.”

“Have we ever taken an aircraft carrier through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea?” Pete genuinely doesn’t think the floating city of an aircraft carrier could get through this narrow passage. And he didn’t even make a joke about ‘narrow passages’, so Patrick should know he’s serious.

“We can,” Patrick replies. “And we have. But Russia and Turkey won’t like it.”

“So the pilots are here to see what’s going on in the Black Sea, since the boats can’t get through here.”

“You got it,” Patrick almost sounds proud.

The US Navy’s here to watch the Black Sea; but so is every other country’s navy, apparently. It’s been a while since Pete’s seen so many military boats at once. They’ve even seen two other carriers just on this morning’s patrol, a sight that Pete hasn’t seen since the naval station at Norfolk.

“Is all of NATO here?” He asks on the public radio.

“Yes,” Andy says shortly, and yikes.

They make a few low, lazy laps and then head back towards the ship. Pete takes his plane a little lower as they make the return flight to get a look at the flags on the aircraft carriers. Italy, he recognizes; after some quiet conferring with Patrick, the other flag is identified as Romania. Pete stays quiet as he focuses on steering his plane into the sun, radioing in for landing, hooking the cable on the first try. He got comfortable back in Somalia, knew what he was doing most days up in the sky. This is the first time he’s felt out of his depth in a while, and it’s not a comfortable feeling.

Neither is dismounting from his canopy and seeing the Air Boss walking over to their plane.

“Shit, Pete, what did you do?” Joe whispers.

“I have no fucking clue,” Pete hisses back. He immediately turns to look at Patrick, who looks just as perplexed as he does. Well, if Patrick didn’t see anything wrong that he did, then no one else fucking should!

They all salute when the Air Boss arrives. “At ease. Lieutenant Wentz, can you explain why you broke formation?”

“No, sir, because I’m not aware that I broke formation,” Pete says, unable to keep a little bit of whatthefuckness from creeping into his voice.

“You dipped below your partner’s altitude.”

What, that little thing? “Sir, I was just interested in getting a closer look at the flags of the other ships,” Pete tries. The way that Air Boss puffs up, that was clearly the wrong answer.

“Lieutenant Wentz, we – “

“Pardon me, sir,” Patrick jumps in. He’s standing right next to Pete, sweaty in his jumpsuit; Pete wants to press his face to Patrick’s neck and slump over until their bodies crash in together. “Lieutenant Stump, WSO. Lieutenant Wentz wasn’t more than 50 feet below the altitude of our partner’s plane. We were well within satellite range and if any belligerents in the area had made visuals, they would have assumed we were just caught in a strong breeze. I was monitoring the action the entire time.”

The Air Boss doesn’t like that answer, that much is obvious from his prissy face. But he doesn’t say anything in response. Pete has to fight to keep the smile off his face. Did Patrick just flex on this guy? Drop a casual name to make sure the Air Boss knew he was reprimanding the admiral’s son?

“I know you just came from the Somali Coast,” the Air Boss finally says. “I know that it’s practically the wild west out there, and you’re shooting pirates left and right like Wyatt Earp. But this is the most active military combat zone in the world right now. Anything less than absolute textbook perfection, and we could trigger a world war. Do you understand me, Lieutenant Wentz?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Pete replies, and he’s not smiling now. The Air Boss dismisses them and they head below decks.

Pete takes his opportunity when he sees it – during the few short moments where he’s right behind Patrick on the stairs down. “Patrick Stump,” he whispers, “did you just fucking name-drop to get me out of trouble?”

The grin Patrick throws over his shoulder is quick and blinding. “Glad it worked,” he whispers back. “There was just as much of a chance that he came down on us even harder.”

“I’ve never gotten chewed out for flying a little too low, what the fuck,” Pete says, as they all wind their way to the ready room. “Fifty feet! What the fuck was that?”

“I think this is going to be a very long posting,” Patrick says softly, and Pete doesn’t get a chance to reply – I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please don’t hate me, I can’t do this without you – before they’re back in the ready room and Pete has to log his flight hours and his fuel levels and all the boring ass shit that comes with flying the coolest jet in the world.

The good news is that Joe and Andy are really chill. Pete could do a lot worse with roommates. Joe’s got a similar temperament as Pete, and he’s always down to play games in the rec room or pull pranks on the E-1s. He’s a little younger than Pete so his flying’s not as smooth, but he’s got great instincts and keeps his cool out in the field. Joe pretty quickly starts treating Pete as a big brother figure, and Pete has two younger siblings back at home so the dynamic feels familiar.

Pete thought that Andy was gonna be a total hardass square, but he’s not a square at all. He swears a blue streak and has a healthy distrust for authority and sometimes participates in Joe and Pete’s shenanigans. Andy’s just that rare person who’s on his own path and doesn’t feel the need to convince others to join him or even agree with him. He manages to uphold a vegan diet – which is insanely hard on a Navy ship – and he’s more dedicated to the gym than anyone’s Pete ever seen. As a WSO he’s quiet but focused. But when he’s not on in the air he can be incredibly funny, even if he says one word for every ten of Joe’s.

So Joe and Andy are great. That’s not the problem. The problem is that they’re always around.

Pete didn’t realize just how annoying it would be to have someone permanently in his space (that isn’t Patrick, who doesn’t count as people). He feels like a fresh ensign again, sharing a room with twenty other people. Except at least that room was big; this stateroom is tiny, with no room to move around. Only one person can really be out of their bunk at once with any room to move. Joe’s boots never seem to stay in his locker. Andy gets up to ass o’clock in the morning to work out and wakes Pete up. There’s always someone talking.

Pete can’t even jerk off in peace anymore. Or if he does, he has to wait until he’s positive everyone’s asleep. It used to be that he could pretty much whip it out whenever, and either Patrick would say, “Jesus, man,” and leave him to it, or throw down a helping hand or mouth or ass if he was feeling generous. But now, Pete’s dying. He’s completely full up. And jerking off just doesn’t hit the same, now that Pete’s been spoiled by four years of constant, incredible sex.

He's horny, like, all the time. Which is a problem, because the missions are both very particular and very boring. They spend a lot of time tracking Russian ship movement and reporting it back, which is a lot less about the ships and a lot more about potential submarines that might be under the ships. So it’s the worst combination of extremely technical flying – trying to get close enough to these relatively small ships to report back on their precise locations – and extremely boring flying, since there’s no other planes and not really any maneuvers. Just fly out, hover low and fly back, all while with Patrick’s slow and steady breathing fills his ear.

It’s a weird headspace to be in. Pete hasn’t felt like this – not just horny, but pent-up, boiling over, teeth-grindingly frustrated – since he was a teenager. Pete had a pretty privileged childhood, something which almost never comes up because no one would ever believe it. Between the scarred knuckles, the shitty tattoos and the punk rock vibe, everyone assumes that Pete grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.

But Pete grew up in a bougie little Chicago suburb called Wilmette with two attorney parents and a brand-new car at sixteen. He had everything he wanted – money for records, for video games, epic birthday parties – and none of it was ever enough. There was a deep insecurity at the core him, some part of him that could never let go of the ballast and stand on his own. At every moment, he knew, fundamentally, that it would all come crumbling down.

Late one night on the black, black water, Pete’s bored and lonely and frustrated enough that a memory bubbles up to the surface. His sixth birthday, sitting in his closet with the door closed, as dark and swampy as the view from outside his cockpit right now. His parents had broken up that day; his dad had taken a bag and drove away while his mom placed Pete’s cake into the fridge with tears streaming down her face. Pete didn’t know what to do; the closet seemed safe, with his thick winter coats, only pulled out when making snowmen with his brother and sister. Everything was okay, in the winter. Christmas always made everything better.

And it did get better – his parents got back together not long after that – but the fear didn’t leave. Every time his parents would sit him down after that, Pete’s first thought was that they were breaking up. He still thinks that, actually; a weird, stunted little part of him rears up every time he goes to dinner with his parents and they look at each other a little too long before turning to him, and he thinks, This is it, they’re breaking up again, what did you do this time?

God, is it any wonder he joined the Navy? You don’t really have to grow up in the service. Someone always tells you what to do. It’s so easy. You never have to really do anything. Just wait in the closet and wait for someone to tell you to step forward.

“Lando? You’re drifting a little.”

Pete snaps back in, looks down at his coordinates – oh, damn, Patrick’s right, he’s off course – and quickly rights the plane with a neat little swoop. He shakes his head, squints forward. Drifting off in these planes is dangerous. Pete’s usually afraid to even sneeze in the cockpit. If you get into a flat spin and can’t recover, that’s dangerous. Good pilots have been lost that way.

“Thanks. Ziggy,” he says, suddenly, “why did you join the Navy?”

“Is that a normal question to ask at oh-dark-nothing in the middle of the Black Sea?” Patrick sounds amused at least. There’s a little click that Pete recognizes as Patrick switching them to the private channel.

“I don’t know, humor me. For example, I joined so that I could fly fast planes and fuck pretty boys.”

“Original. Wow. No other pilot in the history of aviation has ever said that.”

“Did you join because your dad wanted you to?”

“Jesus,” Patrick huffs. “No, not really. I mean, I’m sure it influenced the decision. My grandpa was Navy too.”

“And neither of your siblings joined the Navy, meaning you were the last chance to carry on the tradition.”

“You are putting a lot of words in my mouth there, Pete. I can’t join the Navy because I wanted to fly fast planes, just like you?”

“Patrick Stump, nerd extraordinaire? I doubt it.”

Patrick sighs. “I’m not just a nerd,” he mutters. “I know that fuels your She’s All That fantasy with me, but…”

“But what?” Pete’s suddenly wide awake. “I don’t have a She’s All That fantasy with you, man, what the fuck.”

“We shouldn’t be having this conversation,” Patrick says, and Pete can feel the chance slipping away from him – they’ve got maybe five seconds before Patrick switches them back over.

“Well, when else are we going to talk?” Pete asks desperately. “We never get to talk anymore.”

“I’m always right here, Pete,” Patrick says, and Pete can’t decipher the tone of his voice. God, he wishes he could just turn around and look at him. “I’m not hard to find.”

With a final click, he switches them back onto the public channel, and there’s nothing Pete can do. Patrick will always have final control over the radio. He sighs, loudly, enough that Patrick can hear it, and keeps flying into the blackness.

Pete finds the plane elevators on the Harry Truman, and it once again becomes his quiet spot in the midst of the chaos. The views from the Mediterranean are better, because it’s a narrower strait; he can stand with his hands against the railing and watch as countries shimmer by out in the distance. The planes get loaded onto the elevator and ascend with a deep buzz. It’s not quite the peace of his own room, but it’s as close as he can get. He has to find a way to survive this insanely long posting.

God, he didn’t think he’d be signing up for another year or two. They’re close to shore leave, but that’s still six months away. At a certain point the Navy will force them both to take time off, but they can get around a lot of the required rest regulations by pointing out (correctly) that Pete and Patrick volunteered for this posting knowing full well how long it could be. The only good news is that Pete’s logged a lot of hours in active combat zones; there’s a pretty penny’s worth of hazard pay waiting for him once he gets back stateside and has somewhere to spend it.

Or someone to spend it on. He’s got a few off-and-on flings back in Chicago, people who know the deal – Pete flies into town like a whirlwind, wants a few months of incessant sex and joyful dates, and then flies out again. It’s taken him a few years to find the perfect combination of people who are both okay with that particular arrangement and meet Pete’s pretty high requirements of hotness. Pete knows he’s a fine piece of ass, okay, he doesn’t have to settle for scrubs, and there’s usually no shortage of aspiring models and singers and general hot people who are willing to fuck a Navy man. Patrick’s even met some of them, since they grew up pretty close to each other and both call Chicago home base. Pete’s tries to arrange double dates with Patrick and whoever he dates when he’s back home, but Patrick’s weirdly private about that and always manages to wiggle out of it.

Pete’s legs start to cramp from standing, and he knows he should go down and get started on his paperwork. He pushes off from the railing, saying goodbye to the quiet for today, and makes his slow way back into the bowels of the ship. Long corridors, lined with doors and doors and –

Open doors.

Pete pauses in the middle of an empty hallway, where a line of closed doors stretches out on either side of him except for one open door just to his right. Doors usually aren’t open on an aircraft carrier.

He peeks inside, and then walks fully over the threshold and flicks on the light. It’s a storeroom, mostly empty. A couple of boxes are stacked in the corner. A few thin plastic mattresses lean against the wall. He thinks he can tell what the problem is; this close to the plane elevator and the open ocean, there’s a faint smell of salt. This room probably gets wet pretty often, so they can’t put anything too important in here.

Pete looks at the mattresses – a little waterstained, but clean enough – and starts to get an idea.

He walks back out into the hallway and pulls the door closed behind him. There’s a chance that it automatically locks, or that it requires a keycode to get in, or any number of things.

But no. It swings open once again, easy as pie. There’s no security on this door.

Pete closes it shut again, as quietly as possible. Looks left and right down the long, empty corridor. No one here. No one at all except the whir of the plane elevator and the far-off calls of the deck crew handling the elevator.

Pete starts off by walking at a normal, sedate pace. About halfway down the hallway, he breaks into a jog.

He bursts into their stateroom half-panting, finds Patrick lying down on his bunk absentmindedly flicking through his phone while Andy reads a comic book. “Yo,” Patrick says without looking up.

“Patrick,” Pete pants, and Patrick looks up at him in alarm. “The, uh.” He gulps. “The plane.”

“What about it?” Patrick sits straight up in bed, or as much as he can sit up in these tiny-ass bunks. “What, did someone else fly it? Did they fuck up the settings?”

“Yes,” Pete says, grabbing on to this story like a lifeline. “Yeah, they adjusted your seat.”

“Motherfuckers,” Patrick hisses, dropping down from his bunk, furious in half a second. “I swear to God, what’s the point of having your name on the side of the plane if they’re just going to let any fuckass WSO sit in it? Come on, show me.”

And then he’s the one bullying Pete out of the room. Oh, this is perfect.

Patrick’s fury makes him all but levitate down to the planes. He is more particular about their plane than anyone Pete’s ever met; he’s pretty sure the McDonnell engineers who made the damn thing don’t care about the controls the way Patrick does. And adjusting his seat is the worst sin of all. Usually Pete finds it pretty funny, loves to laugh at Patrick for having legs so short that he needs a booster seat in a fucking fighter jet; today, since it’s all a lie, it’s even more hilarious.

“Patrick,” he says, already half-laughing, as they finally make it to the still-empty hallway. “Patrick, it’s – oh, God, this is so funny – “

“What’s fucking funny?”

“They didn’t. They didn’t touch your seat. I was lying.”

Patrick groans and throws his head back. “For fuck’s sake, Pete, are you kidding me? You got me all down here, is this some sort of stupid prank? Do I look like I’m laughing?”

“No, no, I’m sorry, but I had to get you out of the room – here, look.” Pete grabs him by the wrist and pulls him into the empty storeroom. He closes the door behind them and plunges them both into darkness before he finds the light switch.

“Ta-da!” He throws his hand out dramatically over the room.

“Wow,” Patrick says, deadpan. “A storage room. I sure have never seen one of these before.”

“Yeah,” Pete says, putting inflecting into his voice. “An empty room.”

“You dragged me out of my comfy bunk to show me an empty room? Pete, I’m not in the mood for your weird shenanigans today, can you just go back to letting me chill – “

“Patrick,” Pete says, and finally his voice makes Patrick look right up at him. After all these years, Patrick knows him, and knows when Pete’s trying to tell him something important.

“Look,” he says, pointing at the mattresses on the wall. Slowly, he can see comprehension dawn on Patrick’s face.

“No.”

“Wait, no, don’t say no – the room’s not locked, nobody’s using this room, nothing’s in here that they need urgently, there’s no reason anyone would come in here.”

“Except that this an aircraft carrier, and they wouldn’t make a room that no one uses! There’s going to be someone using this space, Pete, I know there is.”

“Well, not right now there isn’t – “

“Pete.” His voice is low, furious. Pete’s crossed a line. “I’m not going to have sex with you just because you found an empty room on my dad’s boat. I’m not some wind-up toy, I won’t drop my pants for you just because you’re in the mood.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete says, automatically, “that’s not what I – ah, shit,” he says, the last part to himself, because Patrick has stormed out of the room.

That didn’t go as planned. Good thing Pete Wentz is nothing if not persistent.

See, because he knows Patrick has to be horny. They went from sex a few times a week to none at all, cold turkey. Patrick might pretend that he’s evolved past base needs like orgasms, but Pete knows better. Patrick is just like every other guy. Actually, for all that Pete was the one who started this thing, Patrick’s the instigator at least half of the time. Patrick’s often the one jumping Pete’s bones, barely waiting for the door to lock shut behind them before he’s on Pete with his hot mouth and quick fingers, desperate for it like a virgin on prom night. Patrick Stump actually has an extremely high sex drive, though Pete’s not sure how many people know this. Anyway, Pete knows that Patrick’s horny; Patrick’s just always had better self-control than most people.

So Pete turns it into a game. He takes his time, doesn’t make it too obvious. They’re still in the Navy, after all. He just…maybe takes a little longer taking off his flight suit at the end of the day. He doesn’t get dressed right after the shower if he knows Patrick’s in the room, and he walks back wearing just a towel and a few stray droplets of water that he didn’t bother drying off. If Joe or Andy aren’t looking, he reaches out and just…touches. Anywhere on Patrick he can reach. The back of his arm; the nape of his neck; the side of his hip. Once, he drags his fingers over the curve of Patrick’s ear.

The first time, Patrick’s just annoyed. The next couple of times, he stiffens but doesn’t react.

After about a week, Patrick starts shivering at Pete’s touch.

Pete steps it up. One night, as all four of them are lying in their bunks, he starts a conversation about the best songs to fuck to. Andy rolls his eyes but does contribute some heavy metal bangers; Joe eagerly tags in with all sorts of bullshit suggestions like Smash Mouth and the Macarena.

“I always thought Elvis Costello had some good baby-making bangers,” Pete says easily, not fighting the grin on his face. “There was this beautiful girl I was fucking back home – legs for days, tiny waist – and all she wanted to listen to was Elvis Costello singing ‘Alison’. What do you think, Patrick?”

He can feel Patrick’s frustration, heavy and tangible in the room. “I don’t know.”

“I actually don’t play music during sex very often,” Pete muses. “It’s a rare occasion. But the silence is nice too – just hearing the other person’s breath, listening to their noises, giving it to them harder or slower, just based on what sounds they’re making…”

He can hear Patrick shift in the bunk above him, and there it is.

“You just need to get some,” Andy says easily. “Call up a hooker, put it on the Navy’s tab, see how Admiral Stump likes that.”

No, no, no, goddamn it, mentioning Patrick’s dad is the quickest way to make Patrick’s legs close like Fort Knox. “No one needs to know,” Pete says, having a whole different conversation than the one Andy thinks they’re having. “There are ways to be discreet.”

“There are also ways to shut the fuck up,” Patrick says, and shit, that’s it for the night. “Pete, we’re wheels up at 0500 tomorrow.”

I’m gonna get you, Stump¸ Pete thinks, staring up at the underside of Patrick’s bunk above him.

Pete’s a fighter pilot, so let it never be said that he can’t seize the opportunity when it’s presented to him. Because he’s surveyed his enemy, okay. He understands the terrain. And there’s one weak spot in Patrick’s usually bullet-proof armor.

Pete refers to it in his head as the Atsugi Incident, but really it goes back further than that legendary night while they were stationed in Japan. Pete’s noticed it since they first started hooking up; the one thing that never fails to make sure that Pete’s getting his dick wet that night. The one thing that dumps jet fuel on the fire and turns the heat up. The afterburner, if you will.

Patrick Stump is a huge slut for ear stuff.

There’s some larger metaphor about this – about how Patrick is driven by music, about how he derives joy in this world through his ears – and Pete’s tried to bring that up, only to be shot down by Patrick about how “I don’t have an ear thing, Pete, Jesus.”

But he does. He really does. Ears and nipples. When Pete does it right, he can turn his capable, bossy WSO into a shivering mess in his lap.

Pete finds his opportunity after a particularly boring hop. His mind was wandering and he knows Patrick’s was too; he has even less to do in the air on these boring flights than Pete does. Pete lingers during their post-flight checkup, watching quietly as Patrick takes notes on their fuel gage and thermals before hopping down from the canopy.

“What’s up?” He asks Pete, raising his eyebrows. God, the flight suit. Those fucking boots.

“Think we need to adjust the strap on your helmet,” Pete says, and he’s proud of how steady his voice is. “You’ve got a little – “

He reaches out, incredibly slowly, to run his fingers through the short hair around Patrick’s hair. His fingernails catch in the tacky hair, gently scratching. He stretches out two fingers and runs them down the shell of Patrick’s ear with agonizing slowness.

A full body shiver runs through Patrick like a waterfall. He literally shakes his head at the end of it. “Pete,” he says, his voice a low rumble. “Stop it with the ear stuff.”

“Okay,” Pete says agreeably. With a quick glance around – the deck crew are on the other side of their F-18, where the fuselage is – he scrapes his fingers down the side of Patrick’s neck, following the collar and then the zipper of his flight suit, dragging his fingers over to Patrick’s left chest and running blunt nails over the peaked button of his nipple.

Patrick’s knees actually buckle. “Pete,” he snaps.

“You told me to stop with the ear stuff,” Pete says with a grin. “You didn’t say other body parts were off limits.”

“All of me is off limits,” Patrick says, but it’s weak. There’s a high flush in his cheeks and damn if it isn’t a good look on him.

Pete takes one deliberate step closer – still plausible deniability if anyone sees them. The salty wind off the Mediterranean sweeps over the flight deck and cools the sweat on his skin. “I’ve been checking that room every day,” he says under his breath. “No one’s been in it for two weeks.”

“Today’s gonna be the day.” Patrick’s breathing fast. Pete’s so close. He’s got him in his crosshairs.

“Let’s go check it out,” he says, and reaches down to run his nails on the inside of Patrick’s wrist. Patrick stutters out a breath. “Just to see. If someone’s in there we’ll go back to the bunk and pretend this never happened.”

“No.”

“Come on, one time I fucked this twinky little male model in the coat room of a club, and no one was the wiser. People don’t notice things they’re not looking for, Patrick, we’re going to be fine.”

“We can’t,” Patrick says, and yet he does nothing to stop Pete as he gently tugs him below decks and down to the hallway. He does nothing to stop Pete when he opens the door to the storeroom and sees that no one’s there. He does nothing to stop Pete when he closes and locks the door behind them.

Heat has crawled up through Pete’s veins in a heartbeat. He feels like a teenager again. The cradle of his hips is burning where he’s trapped in his flight suit; it’s almost animalistic. He’s so excited, so turned-on, so desperate for it that he’s almost light-headed. Fuck, it’s been so long.

Patrick feels the same way – Pete can tell by how hunched over he is, how his breaths are coming in quick little drags. But Patrick still looks up at him with wounded eyes and says,

“We really – Pete, my career, my family – I mean, we really can’t – “

“We won’t,” Pete promises, walking over until Patrick’s back hits the wall with a gentle thud. “Okay? We won’t get caught.”

He leans in, planting his hands on either side of Patrick’s shoulders. This close he can feel the way that Patrick’s chest pushes into his with each breath, see the big wet blue of his eyes, the way that his plush pink mouth is parted just a little. Pete leans in and gently fits the swell of his thigh against Patrick’s crotch and knows just what he’ll find – warm bulging heat, just like his own. With a lazy smile, he leans down and fits his teeth to the shell of Patrick’s ear and exhales one hot breath.

That’s all it takes.

Patrick slams up into the kiss so fast that Pete’s almost worried for his teeth. Desperate little fingers strip Pete’s flight suit. Patrick shoves a hand in Pete’s underwear and squeezes his cock hard enough to skirt the edge of hurt.

“You’re such an ass,” Patrick growls, and it’s incredibly hot how low his voice can get, that this little guy has such a deep voice. “Teasing me all week, fucking desperate for it like the slut you are. I’m going to ride you into the ground.”

Oh my God, is this heaven?

Pete barely has time to get one of the mattresses under them; Patrick’s on a tear like he’s never seen. He kicks his boots off and undoes his flight suit in record time, doesn’t even give Pete a chance to fully take his suit off as he’s pushing Pete onto his back on the mattress. He just shoves the canvas off Pete’s shoulders, enough leverage to get the zipper down over his hips and push Pete’s boxers under the swell of his ass to free his dick. He shoves his fingers into Pete’s mouth and commands, “Suck.”

Pete sucks. God, he’s dizzy with arousal. How is this the hottest fucking thing he’s ever lived through?

“Been putting me through hell for weeks,” Patrick grunts, swinging a leg over and settling his naked ass into the bowl of Pete’s hips. The pressure on his dick makes Pete moan around Patrick’s fingers. “Getting me hard in the middle of flight simulations, talking about fuck music in front of Andy and Joe. The least you could fucking do is get me ready, least you could do is get my fingers wet so I can take your fucking dick.”

“Let me eat you out,” Pete begs, when Patrick takes back his dripping fingers. “I’ll get you ready – “

“You have to earn that,” Patrick snaps, reaching around with his fingers and hissing as he stretches himself. “You have to earn that back, you asshole. God, I’m so mad at you – “

“So why are you fucking me?” Pete fires back, because there’s only so much abuse a man can take.

Patrick laughs, a weird high laugh, almost loud enough that Pete shushes him. “If you have to ask,” he says, cryptically.

And then he curls his hand around the base of Pete’s dick and sinks down until all Pete can feel is hot, wet, lava, tight.

For a moment Pete’s vision almost blacks out, and it takes everything in him to not finish that very moment. But when he manages to hold off – by breathing deep slow breaths and digging his nails into the meat of Patrick’s hips – he opens his eyes and is rewarded with the most gorgeous sight of all: Patrick Stump, flushed and pink and naked, neck thrown back in ecstasy as a vein on his neck jumps, plush thighs spread open around Pete’s hips. There’s a splotchy little birthmark, high up on the inside of his thigh, that Pete never gets to see except from this angle. He wants to bite it.

“That’s it,” Patrick whispers, and slowly starts to move.

He starts slow, with deep little grinds, and unfortunately Pete genuinely thinks he could come just from that. But Patrick has never been afraid of speed. Pretty soon he’s rocking up and down, hands anchored on Pete’s chest as he levers himself up with his powerful thighs. And then he’s bouncing on it, with incredible, aggressive thrusts and punched-out little breaths, biting his full, pink lip, his dog tags bouncing and clanking. God, he’s incredible, where did he learn to ride dick like this? Is this what Patrick’s been doing back on shore leave? Pete always pictures Patrick sitting in a library somewhere re-reading the F-18 NATOPS; is he actually running around getting his guts rearranged?

“This isn’t going to last long,” Pete gasps out, already fighting with everything in him to not shoot off. God, it’s been so long, and even longer since they’ve done this, the kind of sex where Pete has no choice but to sit in the backseat and take it.

“So do it,” Patrick whispers, his breath jagged. “Do it. Fill me up. I want to feel you drip out of me. Make me waddle back to our room with your spunk leaking down my leg, make it so I smell like you for days, make it so obvious that everyone asks and I have no choice but to confess that I let you blow my back out – “

Aaaand that’s it.

Frankly, Pete thinks from a very distant place, awash in the middle of the greatest orgasm of his life, he should be commended for lasting as long as he did in the midst of that dirty talk.

“What the fuck, Patrick,” he says when he comes back to Earth, panting.

“Finish me off, you fucker,” Patrick hisses, still grinding down on Pete’s soft cock.

“Well jump off, I’ll suck you – “

“No,” he says, blushing as he looks somewhere over Pete’s shoulder. “With you inside me. Come on, quick.”

So Pete reaches out a clumsy hand and fists Patrick’s magma-hot dick, and Patrick sucks in a breath through his teeth and keeps grinding down. Pete’s reaching the point of overstimulation but he’s not going to deny Patrick this, especially when he finishes only a few strokes later and shoots off with a choked-off cry.

Jesus fucking Christ. The sound of their panting breathes echoes in the empty spaces of the room. Was this what they were missing, having regular sex all the time? Should Pete have been holding out this whole thing, drawing out their sessions, if they’re going to be explosive like that?

“That was too loud, we need to be more careful,” Patrick whispers, easing off Pete’s dick with a hiss.

“What – how are you forming words right now? How are you worried about noise? Patrick.”

“Yes, Pete?” The blush on his cheeks and tiny smile on his lips gives him away.

“Patrick. What the actual fuck.”

“Glad you enjoyed it, you little monster, you put me through hell to get it. I could either punch you or fuck you and I figured this way we both had fun.” He sits up on his knees with a smile, reaches out and runs a proprietary hand over Pete’s stomach and legs.

“That was – incredible. Holy shit.”

“I do what I can,” Patrick says, all false modesty, big blue eyes wide and smiling.

“Oh my God, Patrick, shit. You just put everyone else in my little black book to shame. We’re going to have to link up on shore leave, because nobody back in Chicago has run me through like that.”

Patrick’s face falls, and he looks down at the mattress and clears his throat. “Yeah. Sure.”

“I mean, I don’t know who you learned that from, but seriously, my compliments to the chef. You were even better than the guy in Chicago with the world’s tiniest ass and no gag reflex – “

“We get it, Pete, you finally got your dick wet. Come on, we have to get back to the room.”

“What? Cuddles! Patrick, cuddles!”

But he’s already up and moving, yanking his flight suit back on over his legs, covering up all those miles of creamy, jiggling skin. Pete has no idea how he’s functioning; his own muscles have been replaced by Jell-O.

“We should probably stagger our exits, just to be safe, we were making a lot of noise and someone could come looking.” He shrugs the flight suit back up over his shoulders and zips it up, shoves his feet back into his boots. “I’m gonna tell the guys that we had a longer flight debrief than usual and that you’re already in the shower, so you gotta go straight there. Play along.”

“But, Patrick – “

“Coast is clear,” he says, poking his head out and looking around the hallway. “I’ll see you back there.”

And he’s gone. Walked away just like that.

But did we do it? Pete thinks, still too fuck-stupid to even sit up. Is my spunk dripping down your leg right now? Are you going to be thinking of me the way I’m thinking of you?

And then, as he finally sits up and casts around for his flight suit – Is it normal that my throat misses the taste of you?

The Russians fuck up. They had to, eventually. They don’t refuel one of their submarines and it pops up right next to Ukrainian soil, desperate for fuel. They refuel it and get it back underwater quickly, but not before Joe and Andy spot it on patrol and radio its location back to the Harry Truman. This is what the brass has been waiting for – proof that the Russians have submarines in the Black Sea, which is not, strictly speaking, their territory.

The boat goes onto high alert, which doesn’t make any sense to Pete. They all knew this was happening, right? This isn’t a surprise to anyone? What else are we doing here, if not trying to figure out where the Russians are?

“It’s not that we didn’t know, but now we can take action about it,” Patrick says on the private channel, late one night on patrol. “We still have treaties, there’s still the UN, we can’t just go blasting Russia because our intelligence says they have submarines in the Black Sea. We need to know for sure before we can act.”

“Yeah, but do what?” Pete says, gesturing even though Patrick can’t see. “The same shit we’ve been doing? Patrolling, all day, every day?”

“Did you ever think about what we would do if we ever found something?” Patrick says, and the tone of his voice makes Pete go quiet. “Joe and Andy weren’t authorized to engage when they found that submarine. Now we are.”

Pete knows this. He was in the briefing. All the baby pilots who just got their wings were tweaking out, or muttering amongst themselves, or high-fiving like douchebag football bros – a wide swath of reactions to hearing the words ‘permission to fire’ for the first time in their naval career. Pete and Patrick, having been posted in several active combat zones before, shared an amused look.

So the patrols jump up in intensity. Pete and Patrick are logging more flight hours than they have in years. There are also a lot more birds in the air, from all different countries, which makes the flying even more complicated. The Italian and Greek pilots are good but they’re also different, they have different callsigns and different movements, and Patrick’s pretty good at translating with his freaky gift for languages but there’s only so much he can do while he’s also trying to do his job of keeping Pete in the air. Pete gets pretty good at tuning it all out – he has to, if he has any hope of keeping the plane level within the very specific parameters he’s been given – but it’s a shame, because Patrick’s voice in his ear is usually one of the best parts of his job.

But that’s okay. He’s got another way to hear Patrick’s voice in his ear.

After that first epic encounter in the storage room, Pete expected Patrick to revert to his old hesitation, to swear up and down that that’s the last time he’s doing that, no seriously Pete, it’s too risky. Pete wouldn’t even mind; the build-up created sex so explosive that he wouldn’t mind stoking that fire for another few weeks. But turns out that underneath it all, Patrick Stump is still just a man. And he needs good, regular sex just as much as the next guy.

So they fall back into patterns – Pete will look at him sideways, right when they’re climbing out of their plane, or over the mess table; or when Patrick’s come back from the gym, wearing his little PT shorts. And Patrick sighs and nods and they take different paths to the storage room. By definition it is less frequent than it could be back when they shared a room, and they come up with elaborate lies and explanations in case someone asks them where they were. Patrick makes them stagger their exits, makes them switch up what time of day they go to the storage room, keeps track of when they go so he can make sure there isn’t a discernible pattern.

But – very importantly – he keeps going. Keeps slinking in to that storage room.

Most of the time they’re so paranoid about getting caught that they don’t even talk. They’ve been doing this for long enough that usually they can get what they need with only a muffled ‘Harder, Pete’ or ‘So close’. Pete knows that they’ve been sneaking around this whole time; but there’s something about doing it under Patrick’s homophobic father’s nose that heightens the tension to fever pitch levels. He tried mentioning this to Patrick and got furiously shut down, but it’s still the truth; this is extremely hot. Every time he sleeps with Patrick, it’s like the first time all over again.

There are brief moments where Pete thinks that Admiral Stump knows. He certainly comes to watch Pete and Patrick take off more than he does the other pilots, and he follows up with them about their missions all the time. He seems to watch Pete, to follow him with pale eyes. Pete doesn’t say anything to Patrick, but Patrick’s plenty happy to bitch about his dad alone in the room, in snatched moments where Joe and Andy are out. Patrick blames it on his dad’s micromanaging, on his fundamental distrust that Patrick is actually a grown man and naval aviator, on him trying to find fault in Patrick’s flying. He goes to dinner with his dad one night and comes back ranting and furious about all the weird little jabs that the Admiral got in about Patrick’s weight and flying ability and voting record. But somehow, Patrick never mentions Pete’s number one fear – that Admiral Stump knows that they’re gay and will have them thrown out of the Navy without letting them pack their bags. Maybe the boiling kettle of Patrick’s perpetual fear is too full to even entertain this, the greatest fear of them all.

So Pete doesn’t say anything. And he keeps sticking his dick and his fingers and his tongue in Admiral Stump’s precious straight son. And the Harry S. Truman keeps making slow circles of the Mediterranean Sea.

The United States Navy doesn’t like it when all of its pilots are in the same room together. They try to avoid that at all costs. Sending pilots to Top Gun even makes them nervous; they get around it by only sending the top 1% of pilots at any one time.

So when Pete and Patrick are summoned to the ready room along with every other F-18 team onboard the Harry Truman, they both know this can’t be good.

It isn’t. “They’re building SAMs,” Admiral Stumps says bluntly. Patrick sucks a breath in through his teeth, and Pete winces. No one else reacts.

“Seriously? Surface-to-air missiles,” the Admiral elaborates. “Targeted anti-aircraft systems, all along the coast of the Black Sea.”

Still, very few other pilots in the room react.

“They have targeting systems,” Pete speaks up. “Like, the same ones we have onboard. They are guided missiles that will aim for you and your plane.”

Finally, that gets a reaction.

“Keep it down,” Admiral Stump yells over the hubbub. One of the junior pilots raises his hand.

“Sir, isn’t that in violation of treaties?”

“Technically, no,” the Admiral admits, “since it’s on their own land. But it’s certainly making our allies nervous, and it’s not a good sign.”

“Well, then, let’s do the damn thing,” says Carrot, the hotshot idiot in the back. “Show them what the US Navy can do to their precious missiles!”

There’s a brief moment of idiotic whooping that dies down almost instantly at the look on the Admiral’s face.

“Lieutenant Murphy,” he says, his voice dry as a bone. It makes the hairs stand up on the back of Pete’s neck; the Admiral really sounds like Patrick right now. “You know those submarines we’ve been having you carefully track, and log? The extremely expensive sonars we’ve been having you drop into the Black Sea, so we know exactly where the submarines are?”

Carrot nods.

“Why exactly do you think we are having you do that?”

“So we know where the submarines are,” he says confidently.

“Why do we want to know where the submarines are?” Admiral Stump says, in a voice of measured calm.

The kid has no fucking clue. Pete locks eyes with Joe and they smirk at each other.

“So…we know where they are?” He says. Jesus, how did this kid get through officer school?

Patrick coughs into his hand and says, “Bombs.”

“Wait, but the submarines don’t have bombs, do they?” Carrot says, and Admiral Stump explodes.

“Of course the submarines have bombs! They have anti-aircraft carrier missiles that will sink this entire ship and kill all 50,000 servicemen on board! That is why we are having you track them, so that we know if they leave the Black Sea and move into our territory! That is why we cannot simply shoot down the SAMs, because the second that we do, the submarines will shoot back! I have no interest in losing one of my pilots over disputed territory, but it sounds like that’s a fate that appeals to you! Does it, Lieutenant Murphy? Is that how you would like to end this tour of duty?”

“No, sir,” Carrot says, and it’s smartest thing this kid has said.

Admiral Stump takes a deep breath, looking out over the silent room. “This is a dangerous war we have put you in, gentleman. And we are asking for your restraint alongside your intuition. While you have permission to fire if fired upon, we have to understand the stakes. This is the closest that we have come to world war since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and as always, the responsibility rests on the Navy. Our allies look to us as leaders in this region. Your country looks to you as leaders. Understand the responsibility that you have, and act accordingly.”

Pete thought it was a pretty good speech, and so did most of the other aviators; they’re all solemn and serious as they make their way to mess. It’s a rare night where all four of the roommates are off patrol at the same time, so by unspoken agreement, they all make their way to the mess decks and find a table in the corner with their dinners. Everyone’s quiet, and Pete’s half thinking about the mission and half thinking about how great it is to have fresh spinach, when he realizes that Patrick’s silence is not the same contemplative silence as everyone else. His silence – judging by the way he stabs potatoes into his tray – is mad.

“What’s up?” He asks Patrick.

“Nothing.”

“I mean, you kind of look like someone bit your dick off,” Joe says, and it makes Pete smile. “So, I think something’s up.”

Patrick frowns a little, looking down at his tray of food. Pete sets down his fork. The gentle rumble of conversation in the mess hall fills the silence.

“I’m not…mad,” Patrick says, his voice low. “I mean. Yes. I am very mad. My dad’s not telling the whole story.”

Pete immediately leans in. “Holy shit, are you going to tell us state secrets?”

“What? No, I don’t know any state secrets. Does he look like the kind of guy who would tell his kid classified stuff?” Patrick smiles briefly, but it falls off his face. “No, it’s not that dramatic. Just…um. All this stuff about ‘permission to fire’, it doesn’t mean what these pilots think it means. It doesn’t mean they’re authorized to start a war. This is a really sensitive geopolitical area, and we’re actually fairly low priority in the greater plan of not starting a war.”

“So if ‘permission to fire’ doesn’t mean what people think it means, then what does it mean?” Andy asks.

“It means you can absolutely fire on the Russians,” Patrick says. “It just means that we might not provide backup.”

Pete rears his head back. “What? We have, like, 800 planes and helicopters, and our allies each have like 800 planes and helicopters, and they’re all right here. Why would they not provide backup? Isn’t that the whole reason we’re here?”

“You’re thinking Somalia, Pete,” Patrick says, with a little smile. “That’s different. We can engage in all-out warfare with the pirates all we want. But Russia? We can’t go to war with Russia, not when the United States’ entire foreign policy for the past 70 years has been about not going to war with Russia. They’re a nuclear superpower, there’s no way this doesn’t end with both of our countries getting blown up in a fireball. So, yeah, individual pilots can fire, but we’re going to sweep that under the rug, we’re just going to say that it was a lone pilot acting erratically and we don’t claim responsibility for him. That’s worked great for foreign policy for many, many years.”

Pete remembers, with a flash of clarity, that Patrick was an international relations major at the Academy, and has often talked wistfully about going back for his master’s when he’s done with active duty.

“So, what, you’re saying they – they won’t help us? If we get in a firefight? They won’t send other planes?” Joe says.

“Yes, exactly. And that’s what pisses me off.” He drops his voice. “He’s saying all this stuff about how you need to exercise restraint up in the air, but he’s not saying why. He needs to be honest with these pilots – all these kids, really, some of them just got their wings and they’re desperate to fire – he needs to tell these kids that if they fire, they might be all alone up there. They think they’ve got the whole US Navy on their back, but the brass won’t risk an international incident. They’ll just quietly sweep it under the rug.”

Suddenly this mess hall feels too small. Pete feels like someone’s watching him. Joe and Andy keep sending each other looks.

“This is why you can’t rely on the military to save you,” Patrick says easily, either blissfully unaware of the turmoil that he’s thrown his fellow aviators into, or so used to living in this particular stress that it doesn’t even register to him the level to which Pete is freaking out. Especially after that fucking sentence. “If something happens in the air and you don’t die immediately, you can’t wait for the Coasties or the Navy to come get you. You have to be smart, figure out somewhere safe to go. The more you make noise, the more they’re going to find you.”

“You don’t want them to find you?” Pete asks.

“I want the Navy to find me, but only if they find me first.” Patrick stabs another potato. “Otherwise, I’d just lie low and walk back to America at that point.”

“Is this what you think about?” Joe asks incredulously. “Like, all the time?”

“It’s called anxiety,” Patrick says, and he grins. “That’s my secret, Captain. It’s what makes me such a great WSO.”

Now that Patrick’s cracking Avengers jokes, Pete knows they’re in the clear. Andy shifts the conversation over to lighter topics, but Pete throws an eye over the rest of the mess hall.

How many of these kids are in trouble, just because they don’t know what Pete now knows? How many of them are in trouble because they don’t have a Patrick?

For once, Pete’s not to blame. He wasn’t even in the area this time. He’s all the way over Sparta, participating in some combat exercises with the Greek naval aviators, when he notices Patrick get very quiet and very clicky in the back.

“Everything okay, Ziggy?” He asks, keeping his voice purposefully calm.

“Yeah. Maintain current mission parameters.”

Well, that doesn’t tell him much. But then Patrick follows up –

“I’m on private, can’t stay long. There’s something going on back in the Black Sea. Someone had a run-in with a SAM.”

“Jesus,” Pete hisses. “But also, how do you have a ‘run-in’ with a missile? They’re not reporting any casualties?”

“Not yet. All surface-level stuff. I gotta jump back, they’re probably gonna call us back soon.”

They do, under the guise that their plane needs refueling, even though Pete doesn’t need a WSO to tell him that they could fly for another few hours at least. They land safely back on the carrier and immediately get ushered into a briefing, and Patrick doesn’t even put up a fight about his usual post-flight checklist.

“We think it was a rogue missile,” the Air Boss says bluntly, standing at the front of three pairs of aviators in a dark, crowded room. This room’s not that different from their usual abandoned storage room; it’s fucking with Pete’s head. “Strategically, a malfunctioning missile makes a lot more sense. Our pilot wasn’t even near their airspace.”

“Were there casualties, sir?” Pete asks, his throat dry and sticky, tense with nerves and too exhausted after flying to stand on formalities.

Fortunately, Admiral Gutierrez doesn’t waste time reprimanding him. “No. Our pilots deployed evasive maneuvers and the missile caught flares. It exploded out in the middle of the Black Sea and no one will be the wiser except the guy in Russia who counts missiles. But it was a closer call than we’re used to.”

“Who was it, sir?” Patrick asks.

“Trohman and Hurley,” Gutierrez replies, and Pete and Patrick both gasp. “We just wanted to let you know. Continue with your missions like before, but know that their payload is live and operational.”

Pete barely hears the rest of the briefing, and as soon as they’re dismissed, he and Patrick are all but running down to their room. Patrick holds him back at the last minute so they don’t bang open the door, and he’s glad they did; the room is dark, with Joe curled up in his bunk, and Andy sitting on the ground, quiet like he’s been meditating.

“We just heard,” Patrick whispers, setting his helmet down gently. “Holy shit, are you okay?”

Andy nods. “Joe did great,” he whispers back. “Rolled out of there immediately, deployed flares, caught the missile in its spread. Whole thing lasted maybe 30 seconds.”

“Oh, thank God,” Pete says, and means it. That’s one of the best things about the military; for a kid who spent most of his life surrounded by surface-level friends, the deep and profound attachments that form between squad members has healed a part of Pete he didn’t know was missing. If something happened to Joe and Andy, Pete would be devastated. “Okay, well, is he – is something – “

“He’s sleeping it off,” Andy says. “The missile was quick, but then there was maybe an hour of debrief with Admiral Stump and everyone in the mess freaking out. He just needs some quiet time.”

Patrick nods like he knows exactly what Andy’s talking about. Is this a thing? Pete wonders. Do WSOs just know exactly what their pilots need? The thought leaves him a little bereft; does he know Patrick well enough to provide that level of support?

“Are you okay?” Patrick asks.

Andy nods. “This is what I signed up for,” he says calmly. “I’m just glad it happened to us and not one of the kids who would have fired back.”

Pete snorts, and Patrick smiles. “Those dumbasses probably would fire on a stationary missile,” he says. “Here, Pete and I will clear out, give you some quiet time.”

Andy grins. “Thanks, guys.”

Pete manages to drop his helmet but otherwise leaves the room wearing his entire flight suit. Still on edge from hearing the news, he’s vaguely thinking through showering and then putting his sweaty flight suit on – gross, but far from the first time he’s done it – and wondering what’s for dinner, and Jesus, what if Joe and Andy had died today, when there’s a hand in his.

He doesn’t really recognize it until the hand squeezes, and he looks over at Patrick, who’s slipped his hand into Pete’s.

Pete raises his eyebrows. “Hey.”

“Hi,” Patrick says quietly. His eyes dart around the hallway. There are a few seamen over down at the far end, not paying attention to them. He squeezes Pete’s hand again; Pete squeezes back on instinct.

“What’s up?”

Patrick rolls his eyes. “I never thought I’d have to give Pete Wentz instructions on flirting,” he murmurs under his breath.

Pete’s alert in a heartbeat. “That’s what we’re doing?”

Patrick makes calm, direct eye contact. God, his eyes are so, so blue. “I could use a little comfort, couldn’t you?”

“Hell yeah,” Patrick says, and leans in on instinct. Patrick clicks his tongue and ducks from Pete’s kiss.

“Meet me there in five minutes,” he whispers, and then hustles off down the corridor. Pete watches the sway of his ass, listens to the tap of his combat boots, closes his eyes and thinks, Comfort.

 The light never changes in the storage room; the same jarring fluorescent lights burn Pete’s retinas whether it’s bright daylight outside or pitch black. Usually he and Patrick just flick the lights off. Harder for any passing seamen to see the hint of light under the door and decide that there’s something in there worth checking out; easier to make it feel like it’s just the two of them, alone together in the middle of the ocean.

Tonight’s one of the times where Pete doesn’t know the real time; here, in this room, with Patrick, he’s in a separate little universe. They take it slow, gentle, rocking, like the waves that break against the gigantic hull of the aircraft carrier. Chest to chest, Patrick’s hot-damp breaths right in Pete’s ear, Pete’s usual range of motion restricted to a slow grind, like he’s pressing Patrick’s hipbones flat into his own. Thank God for Patrick’s chubby hips, thank God for the boyish meat that still lingers there no matter how many hours Patrick puts in at the gym, thank God for that softness when all that’s between them and the metal floors are two thin, waterproof mattresses, stacked together and sliding apart. Patrick loops his legs around Pete’s waist, a sweet little slide of skin, and Pete could swear that he’s in deep enough to reach Patrick’s heart.

“Jesus, Pete,” Patrick whispers, like a prayer, like the Catholic boy he was raised to be. “So good.”

“Yeah?” Pete’s usually pretty proud of his sexual prowess, but tonight he wants to hear that validation.

“Yeah,” Patrick says on a sigh. Pete can barely see his face through the darkness of the room, but when he reaches out to kiss Patrick’s lips, he finds closed-shut eyes and pressed-together eyelashes. “God, don’t you dare put me through today.”

“What?” The orgasm is building in Pete’s sacrum; he’s not going to be able to handle coherent conversation for much longer.

“Don’t make me afraid for you,” Patrick whispers, and Pete’s stomach goes cold. “I couldn’t handle it, Pete.”

“I won’t,” Pete says, pressing open-mouthed kisses to Patrick’s throat. He’s speeding up, growing erratic with it; he would swear to anything right now. “I swear.”

Patrick sighs out a little laugh; his cheeks curl up under Pete’s lips. “Stick jockey,” he says, gentle and fond as he runs a hand through Pete’s hair, and Pete finds the spot, pistons in, and releases.

Patrick’s a good sport as Pete rides the waves of his orgasm, letting him gasp and shake up against Patrick’s ear, and only starts twitching from oversensitivity towards the end. Pete slips out and then fists a clumsy hand up against Patrick’s belly. He’s still pressed up close, so close that when Patrick comes with a grunt, his come spills all over both of them.

“We need to start stashing towels in here or something,” Pete whispers, with an awkward handful of come.

“Oh yeah, that’s the number one priority,” Patrick whispers back. Still shaking from his orgasm, he’s finally letting his head rest on the thin mattress. “That’s the part of this we should be most concerned about.”

Pete laughs quietly as he wipes his hand on the inside of his flight suit, but as he starts to get himself together, he realizes that Patrick isn’t laughing along. He takes a chance and flicks on the lights; once both of them stop blinking and adjust to the brightness, Pete sees that Patrick’s sitting cross-legged on the mattress, his eyes unfocused as he does his flight suit back up.

“Everything okay?” Pete asks softly. This isn’t new, the way that Patrick comes over with melancholy after orgasm. But it’s definitely happening more often on this ship than before.

Patrick turns to Pete and smiles, this weird brittle smile. “Yeah. Sure.”

Alarm bells are ringing, but Pete doesn’t know what lever to pull to make this particular alert go away. Then he figures it out. “Oh. Oh. Dude, I’m sorry, I’ve been so stupid.”

Patrick’s whole face opens up, expressive eyebrows rising high above his glasses, mouth opening up into the beginning of a smile.

“It’s been forever since I’ve let you come first,” Pete says. “Totally selfish dick activity on my part. I promise, next time, it’s blowjobs and rimjobs for days. I’ll make you a shivering mess and not even touch my dick.”

Wrong lever. Patrick’s face falls, and he pulls his lips in over his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut for just a moment. Pete braces himself for a dose of that legendary Stump temper – which is not an exaggeration, considering that when they were younger, Patrick literally threw a punch over how Pete radioed the tower – but instead all he gets is Patrick’s neutral voice saying,

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Patrick, what did I do?” He asks, but Patrick’s already standing up.

“Nothing.” He smiles again, totally wrong on his face. “Come on, let’s go back, I need a shower.”

As Patrick once again walks away from him, Pete thinks that he can’t fight a war on two fronts.

For as much as Pete talks about how he never wants to be without Patrick’s voice in his ear, there is exactly one time that he really doesn’t. Fortunately, Patrick is very good at shutting up during those times.

It’s when he’s landing the plane on the ship at night.

Pete’s been doing this for years, and he’s generally considered pretty good at this part of the job. But God, there is nothing quite like it. The sea at night is dark, and if it’s a moonless night, like tonight – well, it’s just a sea of blackness. Then it’s just Pete, squinting against his canopy, trying desperately to find the two tiny strips of light that mark the runway. Some nights, he exits the plane with a blinding headache from how hard he had to look to find the boat.

The worst part is that Patrick can’t help with any of it. He can give Pete the coordinates of the ship, but after that he’s useless, can’t even see out the front of the plane, blind in the front like a prey animal. They learned a long time ago that the best thing Patrick can do for Pete during night landings is shut the fuck up. Which is its own kind of torture, because then Pete has to land the plane on this tiny darkass ship in the middle of the night with Patrick breathing quietly in his ear, reminding him of everything he has to lose if he doesn’t get this right.

Tonight, it’s already feeling tough. Pete and Patrick have been in the air for almost ten hours already – Patrick told him they were low on fuel a while ago, but brass told them to stay up there. Pete’s blinking with tiredness, muscles cramping after being stuck in the cockpit for a full day, stomach clenching with hunger after having nothing but protein bars all day. He’s ready to get the fuck out of this plane, eat whatever they’re serving for midrats, and pass out until next week.

“Got it,” he says quietly, when he finally spots the runway lights. He banks a little to the left, feels the low swoop of the plane as it levels up, and then raises the flaps. His eyes flick over to the horizon gauge on his left. Line’s perfectly centered. This should be easy.

And then the left side of the runway lines go dark.

“What?” Pete says.

“Foul deck,” Patrick says immediately, a flurry of clicks firing up as he starts readjusting his controls.

“Foul deck,” says the tower over Pete’s radio, a half step behind Patrick as usual. “You are authorized to initiate a go-around while we fix this, Lando.”

Pete grits his teeth. He doesn’t want to do a fucking go-around. He doesn’t want to circle in the air for however long until they get this fixed. He wants to be in bed.

“Are there technicians on the deck? Or is the problem electrical?” He asks the tower.

“Electrical, they’re down underneath.”

“Is the cable still intact?”

“Lando,” Patrick says, with a note of warning in his voice. He’s already figured out what Pete wants to do.

“Cable is intact,” Tower says, starting to sound suspicious.

“Okay, well, I’m gonna land it,” Pete says, cutting his engines.

“Lando, disengage, you are authorized to initiate a go-around – “

“I’m out of fuel for that,” Pete snaps back. “I can’t stay in the air much longer without a refuel, and I trust my skills for landing this plane way more than I trust getting a mid-air refuel from a Growler in the middle of the night. I’ve got it, just clear the runway.”

“Lando,” Patrick says, his voice quiet and full of double-meaning on this public channel. “You sure?”

“Yeah. You trust me?”

Patrick grits out a sigh. “I do. Just – hook it on the first try, please. We really are out of fuel.”

Pete knows, but he’s entered a zen state of focus. He’s so desperate for sleep that he could land this bird with no runway lights at this point. He got a good sense of the full runway for a few minutes up there, and he’s done this plenty of times. The desire for sleep has fully overridden any fear.

Pete deploys the arresting gear as he slides in for impact. He angles his wing tips to cover the right runway lights, right up into his plane’s armpit, and gently eases the throttle down. They hit with a tiny bump at first, and then a satisfying catch-drag as the tailhook on the bottom of the plane snags on the cable laying across the landing deck and bolted down deep in the bowels of the ship. Pete hears a satisfied sigh from Patrick behind him as their plane slows to a stop, and it’s greater than any commendation medal.

A runway tech with handheld guidance lights manages to scramble up and get Pete’s F-18 off the runway and tucked in its little parking spot right on the edge of the boat. After that, even Patrick rushes through the post-flight check list, and they stumble downstairs for the worst, sleepiest meal of their lives before finally, finally getting to collapse – gross and sweaty and all – into their respective bunks. By the end of it, Pete’s operating on about two brain cells, and he doesn’t have any time to think about what just happened.

But the next morning – post-shower, now that Pete’s finally feeling like a human again – the next morning is when it gets fun.

“Yo, did you seriously land on the deck in the dark?” Joe says, when he slams his tray down next to them in the mess.

Pete rolls his eyes over his coffee. “It wasn’t – “

“Yeah, he did,” Patrick says, and when Pete looks over his blue eyes are dancing behind his glasses, cheeks pushed up in a smile. “It was sick.”

“Incredible,” Joe says with a nod. “Well done, my good sir.”

“How did that happen?” Andy says. “Surely they would have told you to do a go-around.”

“They did,” Pete says, cautiously. Patrick might be giving him permission to embellish a little, but he can’t go too overboard here. “But, you know. We were so fuckin’ tired, Patrick had been warning me for an hour that we’re low on fuel cause, you know, he’s a great WSO like that – “ Patrick raises his coffee cup in a little salute. “And, yeah. Fuck it we ball, you know?”

“Fuck it, we ball,” Andy says solemnly, and it’s so funny in his voice that Pete and Patrick both start laughing – Pete with his donkey cackle, Patrick with his high-pitched little giggle.

All laughter dies when Admiral fucking Stump sits down next to them with his own mess tray.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” he says, swinging a leg over the bench. “At ease,” he says calmly, which is an asshole thing to say except that Pete kind of did need to hear it. He’s sitting up so straight that the muscles in his back are starting to protest.

“Admiral,” Patrick says, with a low thread of fury in his voice, “what are you doing here?”

“I forgot that you’re new to the USS Harry S. Truman, you’ve probably never had an admiral join you for breakfast before. But this is a part of my management style, to make sure that I understand the men that I’m trying to lead, and that means joining you in your downtime.” He easily picks up his fork and says, “Ask Rifter and Sandman, they’ll confirm.”

Pete doesn’t want to be so obvious, but his eyes do flick over to Joe and Andy. Joe makes a helpless little shrug, as small a gesture as he can. Well. Guess this is normal here.

“I heard about your midnight landing on a foul deck,” Admiral Stump continues. “Incredibly impressive flying, Lando.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pete says cautiously.

“Why didn’t you want to just do a go-around?”

“I really just wanted to land the bird quickly and safely, sir,” Pete says, a little too honestly, and then recalibrates. “Plus, Patrick had helpfully reminded me that we were almost out of fuel. He knows how dangerous it is to fly an F-18 on low fuel for too long.”

“Yeah, he’s always been a bit of a stickler for the rules,” Admiral Stump says, looking up and smiling at his son. Patrick flushes bright red and looks down at his coffee. “You should have seen him as a little kid. Such a teacher’s pet, always wanting to make sure everyone else was following the rules. You were a – what, a hall monitor, right, Patrick? In middle school?”

“Yeah,” Patrick grits out, not looking up from his tray. Pete’s heart aches for him, for the embarrassment that’s pouring off him and flooding the air around them. He wants to reach over and hold his hand.

“Very cool kid thing to do,” the Admiral says. Jesus Christ, what parents teases their own son?

“It got me extra credit,” Patrick says, all but whispering now. Pete wants to protect him, wants to hiss Your son breaks plenty of rules when he’s fucking me on your own ship. But that’s not exactly going to help matters.

Admiral Stump just shakes his head. “Well, I’m glad you were able to take the plane down safely. We need pilots with good instincts like yours. God knows it’s a rare enough thing, even in the Navy.”

“Sir, were you an aviator?” Joe asks, trying to steer the conversation. “Before you were a flag officer?”

“No, I was a SEAL,” Admiral Stump says, with barely concealed pride, and across the table Patrick’s shoulders stiffen. “I was grateful for our aviators, of course, but I wanted to do something that actually got my feet wet.”

Everyone laughs awkwardly, but Patrick can only manage a smile. Pete doesn’t like where this is heading.

“SEALs are tough,” Pete says, like a dumbass. “I always liked working with them, back on the Vinson.”

“USS Carl Vinson,” the Admiral corrects, like he’s Pete’s fucking kindergarten teacher. “Yeah, it’s a wonderful group of men, I loved my time there. It felt like…a true return to the wars of our fathers. The energy there, it was amazing. You didn’t have to worry about offending someone, you didn’t have to worry about saying the right thing – you just needed to get the job done.”

Now it’s Pete’s turn to go stiff. Joe and Andy sense it too. Pete’s breathing is coming just a little bit shallower.

“I’m grateful for the Navy’s modernization, I really am,” the Admiral continues, carefully cutting his breakfast steak like he hasn’t put all four men on high alert. “The more men and women we have able to serve our country, the better. But I’m only disappointed that we had to do it at the expense of the Navy’s formerly high standards. It used to be that social deviants had to find other ways to serve their country, because the Navy would only take the best of the best.”

Oh Jesus. Pete doesn’t even know what to say. Patrick’s shoulders are curled over his tray, hunched and defensive. Joe’s breathing shallowly, staring at some point over the Admiral’s shoulders, while Andy is breathing deep, almost like he’s meditating away the anger. The ‘social deviants’ label could apply to everyone at this table – Joe’s Jewish, and Andy’s vegan – but there’s no way the Admiral could know that, any more than he would know about Pete and Patrick being queers. Or does he know? Is this just the ramblings of an conservative old man, or is this the crossbeams of a target slowly focusing in on them?

“I mean, hell, they’ve got me celebrating Pride Month on the ship,” Admiral Stump says with a shake of his head. Pete almost chokes on his next bite of food. Fuck fuck fuck. “Can you believe it? Our grandfathers who fought the Nazis would have a heart attack.”

Thanks to Patrick’s exhaustive lectures, Pete knows that the WWII GIs were pretty fucking fruity, and the Navy actually turned a blind eye to a lot of the queers they caught on their boats because they needed all the men they could get. But Admiral Stump is clearly not the target audience for a woke gay history lecture. Pete could be off, but he’s at least getting the sense that this isn’t a targeted lecture – he’s just venting off steam. There’s nothing pointed in his words, no long lingering eye contact. He doesn’t know they’re gay; he’s just a dick.

“Did you have family who served, sir?” Andy says, mercifully jumping in, and Admiral Stump probably can’t tell how off his usually calm voice sounds.

“Yes! Patrick can tell you all about it. We come from a long line of Navy men.” He throws his son a smile, and Patrick drags up a smile made of needles. “My grandfather fought at Leyte Gulf, the largest naval engagement in human history! It’s a shame you didn’t get to meet him, Patrick, the stories this man could tell. I knew I wanted to enlist the second I turned eighteen.” He looks down at his watch. “Well, the stories will have to wait, I’ve got an 0900 meeting. Thank you for letting me join you for breakfast, gentlemen.”

“The pleasure was ours, sir,” Pete says, forcing the words out, and Admiral Stump nods and smiles before striding away.

The quiet at the mess table has the ringing, reverberating quality that Pete associates with a firing squad after everyone’s discharged their rounds. Or the quiet of a training field after they’ve practiced firing their bombs. The quiet of an aftershock.

“Well,” Patrick says, voice low, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m feeling very hungry anymore.”

He stands up without waiting for a response, heading over to drop his mess tray off. Pete is, in fact, still a little hungry, but he eats as fast as he can and then hurries off to find Patrick, with Joe and Andy hot on his heels.

Clearly Patrick was waiting for them to come find him; he’s pacing around their tiny stateroom, taking three steps in one direction then three in another direction. He’s always had a touch of the dramatic, which Pete thinks no one but him has ever really figured out. But this is clearly not the morning to poke any fun at his tiny, drama queen WSO; Patrick’s words are on a whole other level.

“It’s not just him,” he says, low. He won’t make eye contact with any of them, using his glasses as a shield. “That’s to be expected, almost. He’s been talking like that since I was a kid. At home he didn’t use such politically correct language.” The laugh that punches out of him is low and harsh.

“I’m sorry, man,” Joe says, easing around Patrick’s fury to climb into his bunk. “I don’t even…he’s your dad, but you also have to take orders from him. It’s fucked up.”

“But that’s just it! He’s not the outlier, he’s the norm. That’s what all these old-school Navy flag officers think. And they’re surrounded by it, all the fuckers on the Senate Armed Services Committee are just as dickish so they all just get together and wish that they never had to let gays in the military at all. And I’m just – “ He raises his hands to his hair, runs fingers through the short strands. Pete aches to touch him, to soothe him, to massage out the knots in his shoulders.

“I can feel it, all around me,” Patrick continues, and Pete doesn’t like where this is going. “That sounds crazy. But it’s – do you guys know that this is a deeply homophobic part of the world? Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Bulgaria, at best their governments are dismissive, at worse they’re openly hostile. Greece is the only one that even has a modicum of social tolerance. I feel like – I know it sounds crazy, but I swear I can feel it when I’m flying, like all these countries down below are just watching me, waiting for me to eject out so they can tear me apart.”

“Patrick,” Pete says, alarmed, “did you – how long have you been feeling like this?”

Patrick laughs, wrongly. “Oh, yeah, no, this isn’t new. Somalia was a great posting for an anxious, closeted gay. And the worst fucking part – “ Oh God, there’s a worse part? Pete wasn’t prepared for there to be a worse part. “The worst part is that I wish I was the demonic queer they all thought I was! I wish I was – I don’t know, tearing apart marriages by luring straight men away from their wives, I wish I was, you know, twerking it out at Pride Parades and doing drag at kindergartens and being in a – I don’t know, a five-way polyamorous relationship where we never have kids and just adopt anacondas and shit! I wish I was like that, because then it might feel like there was a reason for them to hate me, but I’m just not. The truth is that all I want is a relationship that looks like theirs, with a cozy little house and maybe a few kids and someone who wants to be with me, wants to kiss me in public and bring me to dinner parties and doesn’t say I’m too much of a – “ He breaks off, chest heaving, as Pete struggles to keep up, Patrick’s words coming too fast for any of them to hit home. “Sorry,” Patrick says, shoulders dropping, rubbing at his eyes. “Sorry. I just – I know their hate doesn’t discriminate. I know that they’re going to hate gays even if you’re the perfect little queer in their eyes. My dad’s made that very clear. I just – this morning, he’s talking about those WWII GI’s, and I just wanted to ask him – didn’t you ever think that all they wanted was what you have? What you take for granted?”

He sniffs again, says, “Sorry,” the word barely making a ripple in the stormy ocean of their little stateroom.

“It’s okay,” Andy says, finding his voice first. “You never have to apologize for sharing with us.”

“Too much of a what?” Pete says, because this is the part that’s stuck in his mind. “Someone who doesn’t think you’re too much of a what? What were you going to say?”

Patrick hits him with a look so wounded, so hurt, that Pete knows immediately that this was the wrong part to focus on.

“Nothing,” he mutters. “I’m going to the gym.”

He grabs a few articles of PT clothing out of his bunk and stomps out before anyone can say anything else.

Joe whistles through his teeth. “That’s been building for a long time.”

“Did you know?” Andy asks Pete. “That he was feeling like that?”

“No,” Pete says, feeling like a miserable pilot and worse friend. He knows that at any given moment, Patrick could say what was bothering Pete with at least 80% accuracy. Meanwhile Patrick’s been on the verge of a meltdown for close to a year with Pete none the wiser. “No, I had no idea.”

“Does he not date very much?” Joe asks. “When he’s on shore leave?”

“I mean, I think he’s pretty selective,” Pete says, hazarding a guess. “But I thought he did alright. I don’t know, though, he’s never let me meet any of the guys.”

Joe shakes his head. “Poor guy. Sounds like he really needs to get off this boat, get some fresh air.”

“Sure,” Pete says. “When’s the next shore leave again?”

“Six months,” Andy replies.

“Well,” Pete says, staring at the door like Patrick’s going to be on the other side of it, “that’s…not what you want to hear.”

If someone had told college-age Pete that he would regularly be indulging in sneaky, forbidden sex in the middle of the afternoon, college-age Pete would probably have a sleazy grin and a high five waiting. Modern-day Pete is disappointed to be so disappointed. This is what he’s wanted for years. Why does it feel so empty?

“Pete,” Patrick whispers, his voice shaking, “come on, man, ease up.”

“Sorry,” Pete says, releasing some of his hold on Patrick. They’re spooning today, rucked up together as close as possible, Pete holding up one of Patrick’s strong thighs in one hand while the other wraps around Patrick’s chest in an admittedly tight hold. The angle’s not too great – Pete can’t really thrust like he wants, can’t get a lot of leverage – but God, he’s in deep, and this way he can press kisses to Patrick’s shoulder, not even a millimeter of space between their bodies, can feel the push-pull of air of Patrick’s lungs under his open hand.

Patrick huffs out a tiny laugh. “You’re, like, an octopus today. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Pete says, grinding deep. Patrick’s breath stutters. “Is it – I just want to be close to you.”

Patrick reaches a hand up, pats the back of Pete’s hand where it’s pressed over his heart. “I’m right here, Pete. I’m always right here.”

Then why does Patrick feel so far away? Pete can use his mouth to count the moles on Patrick’s neck, so why does it feel like they’re on separate planes, a micro-thin piece of glass keeping them apart? He’s inside Patrick, his cock surrounded by the warmth and pulse of him, physically joined in a primal way – why does he feel like Patrick’s slipping from his grasp? Is there another position, is there another way to get even closer? Pete will do it, he’ll contort himself anyway he can, he’ll invent a brand new sex position that even the Kama Sutra hasn’t heard of, if it means that Patrick will really be here. All he wants is to see the look in Patrick’s eyes that he had when they first started hooking up – blue eyes wide and joyful, the way he couldn’t stop grinning, the way that he looked at Pete like he was all of Patrick’s dreams come true. What position does he need to get that Patrick back? Pete’ll do it, right now he’ll do anything –

Footsteps echo down the hall, getting closer. Pete freezes, a practiced stillness. This time in the afternoon is always a little riskier. People walk by this hallway all the time, but it’s always on the way to the flight deck and they never stop.

But then the doorknob turns.

Pete leaps up like he’s never moved before, and Patrick scrambles onto his hands and knees before staggering upright. Pete yanks his flight suit up with harsh hands, rough canvas dragging against his dick, and watches as Patrick does the same thing before running to the light switch. Pete drags the zipper all the way up to his throat and Patrick flicks the lights on one split second before the door opens.

“ – oh, Lieutenant,” mutters the seamen, looking up from his clipboard. “Uh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you guys had already been sent down here.”

“That’s alright, Ensign,” Patrick says, and Pete’s not sure if anyone else can hear the catch in his voice, the way it shakes. “Upstairs must have gotten wires crossed. What were you sent here to look for?”

“Um, the, uh – the paddle switch? I’m not – “

“Paddle switch?” Now there’s no shaking in Patrick’s voice. “Paddle switches wouldn’t be stored here, they’d be stored with other emergency braking gear down with the airedales. Why do they need a paddle switch, are they upgrading all the other emergency equipment for the F-18s?”

“Patrick,” Pete says under his breath, looking at the terrified ensign in front of them.

“Uh, I’ll just go check there,” the ensign says. He has clearly figured out – either through Patrick’s encyclopedic knowledge of the F-18, or maybe through the fucking name on Patrick’s flight suit – exactly who he’s dealing with, and he’d obviously like to get as far away from the Admiral’s scarily intelligent kid as soon as possible. “Sorry to interrupt, Lieutenants.” He salutes and all but sprints out of the room. Once the door has closed and the footsteps have retreated down the hall, Pete bursts out laughing.

“Jesus Christ, man, his face! Well fucking done, there’s no way anyone’s going to come near this room again, you’ve terrified the entire junior officer class, we should be in the clear now – “

“Are you kidding?” Patrick takes his glasses off, rubs at his face, brushes his bangs to the side. “We are never fucking coming in here again. That was way too close.”

“What? What do you mean? That went perfectly, the only reason he was in here is because he’s too much of an idiot to think that we’d store backup F-18 parts here. The techs are gonna chew him out for not knowing and we’ll be totally in the clear, they obviously weren’t even looking for this room in particular.”

“Yeah, and they still found us,” Patrick hisses. His hands are balled into fists down by his thighs. Pete knows the exact shape of those thighs; there’s a good chance his right thigh still has the bruises from Pete’s fingertips, high up near his birthmark. “They found us, and maybe the kid says something about how he ran into Wentz and Stump’s kid in the empty storeroom, and then they start talking and realize that there’s no way they would send two aviators on a fucking recon mission for broken parts, so there must be some other reason they were in there! No, no fucking way, this room is dead to us now, salt and burn it.”

No, no no no, they’re on opposite planes of existence again – only this time the thin piece of glass has become a wall. How did this all go wrong? Pete’s chest fills with the cold void of despair. This is just like the sex. He’s two feet from Patrick but there are chasms in between them. “Patrick, no,” he whispers, and doesn’t care if his voice sounds wrecked. “No, you can’t – this is our only place!”

“We shouldn’t have had it in the first place,” Patrick replies. He can’t make eye contact with Pete. “This – this was a bad idea from the start. Maybe it’s better if we make a clean break. I shouldn’t have let it go on this long.”

“What the fuck are you saying? Are you – Patrick, no, we’ve got a good thing here, you don’t need to blow it all up, we’ll find another room – “

“No, we can’t.” Patrick finally makes eye contact for one fleeting moment, before whatever he finds in Pete’s eyes forces his gaze back down to the floor. “It’s way too risky. I’m sorry, Pete, I know this was a good thing to keep you sated until you could get back to shore leave with your army of hot skinny fuckbuddies, I’m sorry you’ll have to wait a little longer to get your rocks off.”

“That is not what this is,” Pete snaps back, and Patrick – a weapon systems officer to his core – gets Pete in his crosshairs and fires.

“Isn’t it? That’s what you’ve always said it was.”

And then he stuffs his feet in his boots and walks away, the clink of his untied laces sounding like raindrops.

There’s a massive clock, down in the mess deck, set to the Naval Observatory Master Clock. One of those clocks that shows time down to the milliseconds, where the furthest digit always changes so fast that you can never see the number it’s supposed to be showing. Sometimes, when he’s on mid-watch and sitting in the mess, Pete lets his eyes go unfocused until the whole clock is blurred just like the millisecond marker. Just a big, blocky, neon blur of candy-apple red, alone in a sea of gray.

The master clock is accompanied by a digital master calendar, that says the date and day of the week in big letters. It seemed stupid when Pete first got deployed, but now it’s his lifeline. Otherwise he truly would have no idea what day of the week, or even what month it is. And it’s far worse out here in the Med. Back in Somalia, you could feel the change of seasons; there were two distinct rainy seasons, creating flash floods that Pete could see from his plane as the parched land couldn’t absorb the amounts of rainfall and instead sent it gushing in brown waves over the flat land. But here, it’s sunny and gorgeous every single day, no matter the season. Pete’s starting to feel like he’s in the Truman Show. Especially for a native Chicago boy, used to the bite and sting of winter. When the master calendar ticks over into October, something in him just feels wrong when there’s no yellow leaves dropping down, no cold wind blowing off Lake Michigan. He stands by the plane elevator, trying to get a hint of chill, but there’s nothing – this close to the equator, the weather is fucking perfect every day. It’s making him sick.

Or maybe that’s just because it’s been a while since he got laid.

This is worse than when they first came to this ship, all those months ago. Back then, Pete figured that it was a temporary thing, that they’d figure out some way to be together, and they did. The problem back then was a matter of opportunity, not a matter of Patrick’s willingness. But now, it’s so much worse. Pete walks around the ship and sees a hundred thousand dark little corners and empty rooms and perfect places for shenanigans. But when he finds Patrick alone to tell him about it, there’s only stony silence. Patrick’s not even taking easy opportunities, the lowest of risks. Joe and Andy go out on mid-watch for a week, meaning that Pete and Patrick have the dorm all to themselves the entire night.

“I’ll be quiet, I swear, you won’t hear a single fucking sound from me, you can gag me if you want – “

“No.” Patrick doesn’t even look at Pete. He’s bundled up so tight in his bunk it looks like he’s preparing for a posting in the Arctic.

“They’re gone for hours, and I gotta tell you buddy, this won’t last more than five minutes the way I’m feeling. I promise, I will have you home before curfew, nothing bad will happen – “

“I said no, Pete.”

And there’s nothing Pete can say to that. If Patrick is saying no to the safest possible configuration of sex that exists on a Navy ship, then almost getting caught really must have spooked him.

At least, that’s what Pete thinks, until one night in the shower an even more horrifying possibility occurs to him.

What if Patrick’s not saying no to the sex? What if he’s saying no to Pete?

Pete almost drops the soap (and wouldn’t that be hilarious, really hitting all the Navy stereotypes at once). Jesus Christ, that’s it, it’s got to be him. Patrick’s taken much bigger risks for the sake of their sex life, and he has for years. The problem isn’t the ship; that hasn’t changed. The problem is Pete. But Pete hasn’t changed, has he? He racks his brain, tries to think of something that he’s done differently. He’s been a good pilot, a good fuckbuddy, a good friend, hasn’t he? He’s listened to Patrick, hasn’t he?

Pete wouldn’t be a fighter pilot if he didn’t believe in aggressive action. So when he walks back into the stateroom and finds Patrick reading alone in his top bunk, he takes aim even though he’s still naked and dripping wet.

“Is it me, then?”

“Is what you?” Patrick says, looking over the top of his book.

“The reason you won’t have sex. Is it because of me? Not the boat?”

Patrick folds his lips in, picks up a bookmark to mark his page. For some reason this makes Pete irrationally angry. This fucking nerd using a bookmark. “No, it’s not you, Pete. It’s just not safe anymore. We could get caught.”

“We could’ve gotten caught for years,” Pete fires back. “Years we’ve been doing this, and suddenly you stop. So it doesn’t seem like it’s the boat, it seems like it’s me.”

Patrick sits up, awkwardly ducking his head forward so he doesn’t hit it on the ceiling. He scoots forward, folded in half. He’s wearing his US Naval Academy t-shirt, soft red sweatpants, bare pink feet. His hair is soft and lanky, falling over his forehead. Pete wants to run his fingers through it.

Patrick huffs out a little laugh. “Would you believe me if I said it’s not you, it’s me?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean? If you are – Jesus, Patrick, if you’re breaking up with me, I at least deserve to know why – “

Patrick’s hands are up. “Calm down, stick jockey. Jesus. It’s – “ He sighs. “It’s nothing. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the…I’m the idiot here. I’m the one who should’ve stopped this a long time ago.”

“Is this about – is this about that thing, a few times ago? About me not making sure you come first?” Pete’s scrambling his memories, trying to find the thing he did wrong, trying to find some explanation that’s not it’s not you it’s me. “Cause I thought I was doing better about that, but I can’t read your mind, but I’ll do it, I’ll suck your dick right now – “

“Pete!” Patrick’s eyes dart wildly towards the door. “Keep your voice down.”

“I don’t care! I’ll do it! I’ll do it right now, I’ll do it in the mess hall – “

“Yeah, because you have nothing to lose!” Now Patrick jumps down from his bunk to fully stand, back pressed to the wall. “And besides, no, you won’t. You fucking – you don’t actually want to be seen with me, you never have.”

Pete blinks, because now there are two charges levelled against him, and Patrick’s chest is heaving so clearly they’ve hit upon something real here. He decides to start at the top. “I have just as much to lose as you do, actually, court-martials don’t care who tops – “

Patrick laughs, a horrible low laugh, so far from his usual fluttery giggle. “I don’t mean like that. I mean – you’re a fighter pilot. The Navy’s always going to need you. You get in trouble, they’re not going to like it, but there’s a chance they claw you back. Me, they’re just looking to get rid of WSOs. You know the new F-35s don’t even have a backseat? It’s a single seater, all of them. They’re phasing out WSOs, they don’t need us anymore. If they could kick one of us out rather than having to awkwardly figure out what to do with us, they’d be ecstatic.”

Pete did not know that, actually. “Well, I mean…yeah, but they’re gonna fly the F-18 until the wheels come off, they’ve spent too much money on these birds. So you’re safe for a while – “

“I’m safe, but I’m a relic. They don’t need me like they need you. What happens when you get transferred to an F-35 squadron? Then you’re off getting to play with the new and shiny toy, and I’m the guy who’s stayed loyal for all these years with nothing to show for it.”

“What? Patrick, I’d never let them – “

“You wouldn’t have a choice and we both know it,” Patrick says in a low voice. “They jump, we ask how high, that’s how this goes, that’s what we signed up for. I’m just the idiot who keeps forgetting the rules of the game. I’m the one who keeps staying loyal even though I’m not what they’re interested in.”

“Is that referring to me?” Pete says. He is uncomfortably aware of his nakedness, the water droplets on his skin cooling and making him shiver, so he drops the towel and awkwardly fishes out some boxers. “Because, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought I was a pretty generous lover, I thought I made it clear that I was very interested in fucking you – “

“Exactly! In fucking me!” Patrick’s voice bursts into the tiny stateroom. “And that’s all it ever was! I was just a convenient hole in between your shore leave!”

“That’s what we agreed!” Pete feels like he’s going crazy, jamming his legs through his boxers. “All those years ago! We could date other people on leave!”

“No, that’s what you agreed, that’s what you wanted. I just said yes.”

“But – don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it too, you dated on shore leave too – “

“I didn’t,” Patrick says, eyes flinty behind his glasses. “I never have.”

Pete freezes in the act of pulling on a t-shirt. “What?” He asks, his mind whirring. “But – I mean, you told me about those – those dates you went on – “

“I mean, you asked about it, and I lied.” Patrick fiddles with the hem of his t-shirt. “I just…you kept talking about all the hot people you were fucking back in Chicago, and you assumed I was dating too, and I just…lied a little. To save face.”

“Save face?” Pete’s such a fucking idiot. Patrick never introduced him to any of the guys he dated. Not once, in all these years. “Patrick, what…why would you…”

“Why do you think?” Patrick huffs, rolls his eyes. Does his voice sound thicker? Pete can’t tell, he’s having trouble understanding what’s happening, he wants this whole awful conversation to stop. “So I could pretend I’m not the idiot sitting around waiting for you to call me, like the lonely kid on prom night. So I could pretend like this was as casual for me as it was for you.”

Oh, God. Oh fuck. Now it’s Pete’s turn to back up against the door, to put some space in between their bodies. “I don’t understand,” he says, even though he is – horribly – starting to understand.

“Don’t make me say it,” Patrick begs, looking down at the floor. “It’s – there’s only so much humiliation one guy can take. All these years, all those hot fuckbuddies you talked about back home, all the times you reminded me that I’m short and chubby and nerdy and not your usual type but I was the best possible option at sea.”

“Patrick – “

“No, it’s my fault, because I was still the one who said yes!” His voice breaks. “It’s all my fault, because you’ve never been anything but clear with your expectations. I’m the fucking – the fucking idiot who fell for the guy who just wants a warm body – “

Fell for? Oh, Jesus –

“And even though it might have cost me my job and my family and the respect of my fucking father, it was still worth taking that chance, because it was you. And it’s…it’s always been you.” Patrick sniffs, rubs a hand under his nose. “But… self-preservation has to kick in at some point, and almost getting caught on this homophobic boat in this homophobic part of the world was the wake-up call I needed. So, yeah.” His eyes flick up, just for a moment, and then back down, like Pete’s too painful to look at. “It’s not you, it’s me,” he says, with an awful, sad quirk of his lips. “You haven’t done anything wrong. I just – I’m doing what I should have done in the first place, only I was so happy that you were finally looking at me, that I finally got to touch you. I shouldn’t have said yes, all those years ago. You didn’t…you didn’t mean to hurt me, but I was always going to get hurt. That’s how this goes. That’s what happens when chubby, nerdy guys get a chance to go out with the prom king. You can’t blame the prom king for following the rules,” he finishes on a mumble. “You can only blame the nerd for not understanding them. You know. She’s All That.”

Getting shot down in a plane can’t hurt this much. The gaping wound in Pete’s chest is a physical thing, making his eyes water, every heartbeat just pumping more pain through his body. “Patrick – “ He says, stepping forward, but Patrick steps back, even though there’s nowhere to go. His arms go up, cross in front of his chest. Defensive; protective.

“Don’t,” he says, looking down at the ground. “Don’t pity me, I’m not in the mood. Just let me lick my wounds in peace. It’s – it’s just a broken heart, I’ll be fine. Hell, maybe it’ll be a good thing if they send you to an F-35 squadron. God knows I haven’t been able to look at anyone else since I first saw you, maybe when I can’t see you every day I’ll have a chance to build something real for the first time, with someone who wants to be seen with me in public.”

“Fuck,” Pete says, tears welling up. The bullets just keep coming, don’t they? “Patrick, that is not – I want you, I want to – “

At that fucking moment, the door opens into Pete’s back.

“Oh, shit dude, I’m sorry,” Joe says, as Pete staggers forward, hissing in pain. “My bad, my bad. Don’t know why you were standing with your back to the door, though.”

Andy walks in after him, helmet in hand. “Everything okay?” He says mildly, looking around at the scene.

“All good,” Patrick says, voice wobbly. He dredges up a smile, and it sends pain lancing through Pete’s chest. “How was recon?”

“Honestly, I feel bad for the fishes,” Joe says, dropping his helmet with a clatter and furiously itching his thick, curly hair. “The amount of sonobuoys we’re dropping in this fucking lake have got to be killing wildlife. Do you think if we call PETA that we’ll get off this stupid posting?”

“I don’t know that PETA has jurisdiction in the Black Sea,” Andy says with a grin.

None of this conversation means anything to Pete. He watches, mute and stupid, as Patrick excuses himself from the conversation to climb up into his top bunk and bundle the blankets around his body. He rolls away, facing the wall, and Pete can’t have this conversation in front of Joe and Andy, can’t say all the things he wants to say. Can’t begin to own up to his massive, monumental fuckup, when Patrick doesn’t even want the fuckup said out loud.

Or does he? Does Patrick really want someone who will hold his hand in public now? No, he can’t, he can’t want that, not on his dad’s boat. God, what a fucking mess, what a fucking monumental fuckup.

It’s Pete’s turn to fall into his bunk and bundle up tight enough to keep the air out. His pillow quickly grows damp from his wet hair.

At least he thinks it’s his hair.

Pete wakes up from a fitful night of sleep and resolves that today he’s going to talk to Patrick. What he’s going to say, he doesn’t know, but he’s going to make Patrick see that even if he’s not ready for a commitment yet, that Patrick means so much more to him than a ‘convenient hole’. Even Pete’s not that much of an asshole.

Except they get woken up from sleep and immediately shoved on a plane. One of the pilots on morning duty isn’t feeling well, so Pete and Patrick get called up with just enough time to grab a protein bar for breakfast as they jog up to the plane. During the dark, cold pre-flight – when Pete really should be focusing on his multi-million dollar aircraft – he finds an opportunity to lean into Patrick.

“Hey, about last night – “

“Seriously?” Patrick hisses back over the noise of the flight deck. “This is so not the time.” He’s got a clipboard out, taking notes.

“Okay, so – “

“You need to be doing pre-flight,” Patrick says, and then walks to the other side of the plane. Well, that’s that.

In the air, the pink sunrise of morning warming the left side of Pete’s cockpit, he switches to the private channel and tries again. “Patrick – “

The line goes dead. Patrick’s switched it off. Pete tries again. “Come on – “

Again, the static fades out. Pete growls. “Come on, stop messing around.”

“What?” Patrick says mildly, well aware that they’re now on the public channel and the boat can hear everything they’re saying. “What’s that, Lando?”

Pete sighs. “Nothing.” He’s at a loss here. Patrick’s got final say over their radio. His control will always override Pete’s. The only thing Pete can do is have this conversation right here, on the public channel.

And he’s…he’s just not willing to do that. So does that mean Patrick’s right about him? Is he as much of a coward as Patrick thinks he is? But there’s no way Patrick wants him to out them in front of the whole fucking Navy, right? Patrick doesn’t want to lose his wings, doesn’t want to lose his career. How the fuck do they get out of this?

Pete’s so distracted that he almost misses the tiny Russian boat, tucked along the Ukrainian coast.

“Ziggy, you seeing that?” He murmurs, in a totally different tone of voice.

“Yeah,” Patrick says slowly. “Yeah, that’s weird. Can we get closer?”

“Not really,” Pete says, thinking of the last time he dipped down and got his ass chewed out by the air boss, “but I can get above them at least.”

He brings the plane around to port, keeping his altitude while slowly circling closer. It’s not an aircraft carrier, that’s for sure – just a small Russian vehicle, drifting idly out at sea, a good distance away from the port city nestled into narrow strip of land. At first glance, the Russian boat seems…disabled. Injured.

“What city is that, Ziggy?”

“Should be Ochakiv,” he replies. “Port city. Shipping. It’s been hit pretty hard by the war.”

“Do you think it’s normal that a Russian vessel would be disabled like that and not taken in for repairs?” Pete asks, voice calm even as his heart starts to pick up speed.

“No, I do not think that’s normal,” Patrick replies, in a very similar voice.

“What’s the boat say?”

Pete waits while Patrick makes the call, reporting a disabled Russian vessel doing absolutely nothing.

“They say to drop sonobuoys,” Patrick replies.

“Copy that,” Pete says, angling the F-18 lower – nowhere close to the boat, but close enough that the buoys won’t cause a giant splash when they hit. Patrick easily launches the buoy, Pete pulls the plane up with a swoop, and he climbs up to get altitude while Patrick reads the results.

“Oh shit,” he says, and Pete knows that it’s bad. Patrick has never sworn in the cockpit before.

“What? What is it?”

“Lando, it’s – there are three submarines under that vessel. Not moving, just waiting.”

The truth hits Pete quick and fast. “It’s a trap. They’re waiting for a Ukrainian vessel to come out and investigate, and then they’ll launch missiles.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

Pete’s eyes dart around, jaw clenched, hand staying perfectly steady on his joystick. The sun’s still barely risen over the horizon, gentle morning light flooding the massive sea beneath them and turning the surface to glitter. This was clearly something set in the dead of night, something done completely underneath the Navy’s nose. Any minute now, the Ukrainians are going to discover this, they’re going to fall right into this trap.

“I don’t – I don’t like the idea of leaving this as it is,” Pete says, like an idiot. “I kind of think we need to do something now – “

“We can’t fire on them, they’ll fire back!”

“I know that!” Pete snaps. “I know we can’t fire, I know that’s a World War waiting to happen. But I don’t – we can’t just go back to the boat, can we?”

“It’s 0600, the Ukrainian military will be coming out on patrol any minute now,” Patrick says. “They’re gonna – shit, they’re going to run right into this.”

“Aren’t we authorized to act independently?” Pete says desperately. “They said we were permitted to fire – “

“If we were fired upon, but there’s no way you and I are surviving in an F-18 against three subs with guided missiles!” Patrick replies, and shit, he’s right. Pete’s one man with a plane, and even if he launches every missile in this flying fortress, there’s no way that fight ends without him and Patrick on a burning plane, dropping straight into the Black Sea.

“I have an idea,” Patrick says, and his voice is tense and thrumming. “We’ve got underwater pyrotechnics loaded. Not missiles, just underwater flares, we used them to help the Turkish Navy find those old WWII mines, remember? And we’ve got those acoustics, for knocking out their sonar. I think – if we deploy those together, it’ll sound like a bomb, but it won’t be. It’ll scare the subs away.”

“Those pyrotechnics require a pretty low approach,” Pete says slowly, his mind spinning. “I’m gonna have to get down to – shit, like, 100 feet above the water to deploy that. And you’ll have to guide it in.”

“My laser guide’s working fine, I can launch the packages right in between the subs, I’ve got their coordinates. You just need to slide me in right by the boat.”

“Okay, well – they’ll fire, won’t they, when they hear and see a bomb? See me flying away?”

“Not if we haul ass,” Patrick says, and despite himself Pete chokes out a laugh. “No, I think the Russians will just call us and yell at us, and our guys will tell them that it was just some dumb pilots letting off steam. They won’t want to admit that they had subs that close to Ukrainian soil, and they’re not going to fire once they see that there’s no actual damage to anything.”

Shit, this might work. At least, it’s the only plan that does something now, before some poor Ukrainian military vessel – or God, a shipping vessel, with civilians – stumbles into this. “What does the boat say?”

The all-familiar sound of clicking fills the cockpit. God, Pete wishes he could turn around and look at Patrick.

“I, uh. I can’t get in touch with the boat. We’re out of range,” Patrick says.

Which means they’re on their own.

“Can you do it?” Pete asks quietly. “Can you really guide and deploy them both at the same time? Without hitting the boat?”

“If you get me close enough,” Patrick says, his beautiful voice steady and calm, “then yes, I can.”

When Pete says nothing, Patrick continues – and this time Pete can hear his shaky smile – “Best WSO in the game, right? Trust me.”

Pete smiles, even though Patrick can’t see it, even though he’s smiling at the rising sun.

“Best in the game,” he says. “Let’s do it.”

Patrick goes quiet, and pretty soon Pete can hear the whirring as the plane prepares to launch the pyrotechnics. Pete eases up on the throttle, takes a quick look to determine the best approach.

“I’m gonna have to come in on the starboard side of the ship. I won’t have more than a few seconds that low, so you’ll need to have the laser ready before I even get down there,” Pete says.

“Copy that.”

“Okay.” Pete swallows, fights down on the weird urge to send up a prayer. “Strap in, I’m taking her down.”

He tips the joystick down and the plane responds instantly, nose tipping down and aimed straight for the sparkling blue water. Pete hits the throttle, just a little, just enough to feel the thrusters engage behind him, feel the plane roar and rumble under his seat. They pick up speed fast, swooping down like a rollercoaster.

“Is it ready?” Pete barks, muscles in his wrist straining as he holds the joystick steady.

“Ready,” Patrick says. “Laser code 0157-dash-894.”

“Okay,” Pete says, and pulls the joystick up. The F-18 slides up and levels out, skimming just over the surface of the water like a seagull, speeding towards the Russian boat. “Ziggy, we’re there in three – two – one – “

“Bombs away,” Patrick calls, and Pete jerks the stick to the right, rolling them up and over just as he hears twin splashes underneath them and the water kicks up underneath their wake. The Russian boat passes by so close to their cockpit that Pete can see the insignia on the side of the plane, see the dark gray hull against the blue of the sea.

Then he hears the boom. The lake fills with ripples – slowly, then picking up speed, the whole surface breaking into choppy waters and scattering the light.

“Lando, get us out of here!”

“Hold on,” Pete says, reaching down to flick the throttle switch by his left hip. The plane responds in an instant, jerking forward like it’s been hooked, and Pete speeds away from the rumbling sea.

He hears the thunk of Patrick’s helmet hitting the canopy as he spins in his seat to look. “Oh my God, it really looks like we dropped a bomb in there.”

“No other vessels?”

“No, none that I can see.”

“Jesus, did that actually work?” Pete says in disbelief.

“Well, let’s not stick around to find out,” Patrick says with a choking laugh. “Come on, tack two degrees to the southwest, the Truman is down by Thessaloniki right now.”

“Copy that, increasing speed,” Pete says, and underneath him, the plane soars through the clouds.

They speed back to the boat three hours early and several hundred pounds lighter than when they left, so Pete’s not surprised that the Air Boss is waiting for them on deck, storming over to their plane before they’ve even jumped down from the canopy. What surprises him is what the Air Boss says.

“What the hell was that?”

“Sir – “ Pete tries.

“Did you dump an unauthorized pyrotechnic on a fleet of Russian submarines without getting clearance? We were trying to radio you the entire time, we didn’t hear a goddamn peep!”

Pete stiffens. Trying to radio them? But Patrick said –

“That was my fault, sir,” Patrick jumps in. “I realized when we were flying back that we were on the private channel the entire time.”

Pete’s eyes flick over, sees Patrick calm and steady, chest still heaving inside his jump suit. His helmet’s dangling loose from his fingers. He’s looking a little too chill for someone getting a public dressing down from his commanding officer.

“And you didn’t think,” the Air Boss growls, “to switch back over to public and radio for commands?”

“Heat of the moment, sir,” Patrick says, sounding only half contrite. “I thought if we couldn’t hear you then that meant we were out of range. I didn’t even think to check to see what channel we were on. It was a rookie mistake, I’m sorry.”

And that’s bullshit. That’s the moment Pete knows that Patrick’s lying through his fucking teeth. Patrick has never, in four years of flying, made a rookie mistake. And he has definitely never lost his cool in the heat of the moment. He’s fucking lying.

Which means that he hid that whole conversation from the brass on purpose. But why?

“Did it work?” Patrick asks instead. “Sir? We had to get out of there too quickly to stick around.”

The Air Boss frowns, crossing his bull-like arms. “We sent a Comanche up there to check out what was going on after we saw you gunning it out of there,” he says gruffly. “They reported what you must’ve seen – three subs, clearly setting a trap under that disabled ship.” He sighs. “Your fuckass plan worked. All three subs bugged out immediately, and the Russian ship miraculously fixed itself and hightailed it out of there not far behind.”

Pete can’t help but grin, elation filling him down to his boots. No loss of civilian life, no disaster in the early morning sun. He could sing.

“What Admiral Stump and I would like to know – “ At this point it’s obvious that every tech on deck is straining to hear what’s going on. Pete can see more than the usual amount hovering in the shadow of his F-18. “Is whose idiotic idea it was to drop those payloads like that?”

“Lieutenant Wentz, sir,” Patrick says, once again jumping in before Pete can keep up with the conversation. “It was all him. He wanted to avoid civilian casualties and minimize the chances of an engagement.”

And now Patrick’s throwing him under the bus? What the fuck? Pete opens his mouth, prepares to defend himself and explain what really happened –

The Air Boss sighs, shakes his head, and then holds his hand out to Pete. “Excellent work, Lieutenant Wentz,” he says, and watches as Pete scrambles to catch up and shake his hand. “Beautiful flying, beautiful thinking on your feet. You avoided an incident and managed to protect not just the US Navy, but also potential loss of civilian life. Well done.”

“Thank you, sir,” Pete says automatically. The whiplash of this conversation is killing him, he can barely keep up. He does know one thing; that is the second time in this conversation that Patrick has taken a bullet meant for Pete. “But – but Lieutenant Stump – “

“I know, you pilots always want to defend your WSOs. Look, it worked, but it can’t come at the cost of the structure of the entire goddamn Navy, you understand? A WSO who can’t tell the difference between a private and a public channel when it really counts, I mean – “

Pete can’t help it, turns in dismay to Patrick. But Patrick’s standing there as easily as ever, filling out that flight suit like a fucking dream, only a slight tightness around the jaw that would give away how he really feels. Oh God, is this it? Is this the moment that Pete becomes a good friend, a good pilot, and can finally tell what his WSO is thinking? Now that it’s too late?

“Lieutenant Wentz, you’re dismissed, but be on the lookout for a commendation soon.” The Air Boss winks, and it’s a dagger in Pete’s heart. “Lieutenant Stump, pass your pre-flight checklist to the tech and come with me. The Admiral needs to see you.”

“Aye, sir,” Patrick says, firing off a salute before turning back to the plane.

“I, uh, I forgot, uh, my,” Pete stammers, before realizing that the Admiral is talking to someone else and doesn’t care. He half-sprints back to the plane, where Patrick is passing his clipboard to an E-2.

“Patrick, what the fuck?” He hisses, ducking under the wing of the plane. The E-2 looks at his face and scuttles off. “Why did you – “

“You can’t afford another mark on your record,” Patrick whispers. Under the shadow of the wing, Pete can’t see his eyes. “I knew they’d never authorize it, so I just…switched us onto private when I got the idea. It’s okay, it was the right thing to do.”

“Except for you, what are they – “

“I’ll be fine,” he says, with a quick, lopsided smile up at Pete. Fuck, another dagger, right to the chest. “Dad’ll scream at me but I’ll be fine. My record can handle it. Besides, it’s worth it if they get to see what a great pilot you are,” he says, so soft Pete almost misses it in the rumble of the aircraft carrier.

“Patrick – “

He throws out a hand and squeezes Pete’s wrist for half a second, and then breaks the contact and jogs over to the waiting Air Boss. Pete is left standing, staring at his retreating figure, hollowed out and bereft even as the techs all come up to shake his hand, congratulate him on his ingenuity now that the gossip has started to spread.

If this is how it feels to be loved by somebody…well, Pete might feel a little bit better about having avoided it all these years.

It’s even worse than he thought. Pete waits on eggshells all morning – hovering around the mess, the ready room, their bunk, anywhere that Patrick might be – until Andy takes pity on him and makes Pete accompany him to the gym. The gym helps in a big way, forces Pete to turn off his brain and focus on the screaming of his muscles. (It doesn’t hurt that Andy’s a fucking beast and makes Pete hit a few new PRs.)

Except that when they’re done, they go back to the stateroom to find Patrick packing his things.

“They’re throwing you out?” Pete screams, not caring who can hear them. “Fuck that, I’m going to Stump right now, I’m going to the fucking President – “

“Pete!” Patrick says, but he’s laughing. “Jesus Christ, calm down. No, they don’t dishonorably discharge WSOs for one fuckup, oh my God.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“They’re splitting us up,” Patrick says with a sad twist, and Pete’s heart falls to the floor. “My dad, uh. He made it clear that my previous commanding officers have been a little too soft with me. Says that this isn’t summer camp with my friends, that I’m having too much fun and need to be reminded that I signed up to support and defend the United States Constitution. Like I could ever forget my oath,” he says under his breath, throwing a shirt into his duffel with a little more force than necessary. When he looks back up again, his smile is firmly back in place. “So, uh. He says that they’ve let us be together a little too long, and they’re going to put me with one of the newer pilots. He’s not wrong, this is actually fairly standard, it’s good for pilots and WSOs to fly with different partners – “

“Who the fuck is he pairing you with?” Pete demands.

Patrick grimaces. “Carrot.”

Even Andy says, “Fuck.”

“Carrot? Carrot? He’s a fucking idiot, he barely graduated OCS and he can’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground!” Pete’s seeing red. “You’re wasted on an idiot like him!”

“Actually, it’s the other way around.” Patrick zips up his duffel bag and turns to them. “I’m wasted on a pilot of your caliber, Pete. According to my dad, you deserve someone who knows the difference between a public and private channel, which was ‘covered in boot camp for Christ’s sake.’” He adds air quotes, which only serves to make Pete feel more wrong, on the back foot in this bizarro world where Patrick doesn’t fly with him, where he has to hear someone else’s voice in his ear.

“Well, it’s not for – it’s just for a bit, right?” Pete says desperately. “It’s, like, just to teach you a lesson for, like, a week or two, right?”

Patrick quirks a smile. “I don’t think so. I think this is it.”

Tears well up in Pete’s eyes and he doesn’t even care that Andy can see it. “Patrick, why the fuck did you do that,” he says, voice thick with tears. “Why did you take the fall for this? We could’ve – they didn’t have to – ”

“I don’t regret it,” Patrick says, hefting his duffel bag over his shoulder. Dog tags glint at his throat, in the vee of his chest above his unzipped flight suit. This is the cruelest moment. “I’m glad you’re getting your flowers. Andy, I’ll see you in mess, okay?”

“Been an honor,” Andy says, like Patrick’s dying, like he’s leaving them forever.

Pete can’t move from his spot by the door, can’t budge an inch. If he moves then the spell will be broken, if he moves then this will be real.

Patrick brushes against him when he goes to open the door. Fuck these stupid, small bunks. “It’s okay,” Patrick says again, so so quiet. He leans in, shoulder brushing against Pete’s, the canvas of their flight suits rubbing together. “Maybe a little space will help me.” He looks up under his eyelashes at Pete, all pink cheeks and blue eyes and gorgeous lips, and smiles in the saddest way.

“Patrick,” Pete whispers. God, he was going to have this conversation this morning, he was going to tell Patrick –

But it’s too late for whatever conversation Pete was too cowardly to have, whatever half-assed words Pete was going to drag up to try and keep Patrick happy, whatever declarations of love and commitment Pete wasn’t going to be able to get past his throat.

Patrick – like he’s known all along that this is the best Pete can do – Patrick squeezes his arm just once and then walks away.

The hits just keep. Fucking. Coming.

“Hi!” The new WSO bounds into the stateroom with all the energy of a chihuahua on speed. “Hello there! I’m your new WSO!”

Pete – moping in his bunk – can barely muster the energy to look up. They aren’t just making him fly with someone new; they’re making him live with the interloper? God, the Navy is fucking cruel.

“Nice to meet you,” Joe says levelly. “What do they call you, kid?”

“Wash,” he replies. He looks about 12, but not in the cute way that Patrick does; this guy has the chin acne of a much younger man, raggedy brown hair that needs a trim, and the shoulder breadth of a toothpick.

“Well, that’s a nice, normal call sign,” Joe says, with a little grin. “How’d you get that?”

Wash manages to frown at this, as he sets his duffel down. “Well, it started as WOS,” he said slowly.

“So what’s that stand for?” Joe says patiently.

“Waste of Space,” the kid finally admits, and Pete barks out a laugh.

“Ah, that reminds me of flight school,” he says. “One poor bastard got stuck with Pornstache. His fault for not shaving that fucking dead raccoon on his face.”

“Oh, I flew with Pornstache out of Lemoore!” Andy says. “Great guy.”

“I’ve always been jealous of yours,” Wash says to Pete, creeping forward. “Lando, like Lando Calrissian, right?”

“Obviously,” Pete replies, not looking up from his phone. When Patrick first heard his call sign, there was none of this obsequious dicksucking; Patrick just grinned and said, Went with the second-best Star Wars pilot? Hope this means you can fly well enough to not lose our Falcon in a game of sabacc. At that point it had been years since Pete had met someone as nerdy about Star Wars as he was; he and Patrick then spent the next hour bickering about minute Star Wars facts. Pete hadn’t appreciated it enough at the time. Fuck, he misses Patrick.

“I heard what you did with the sonobuoys,” the kid tries again. “That was so cool, I’m really impressed you were able to get that close to the Russian ship. Do you think we’re going to get that chance again?”

At this, Pete gets out of the bunk and stands to his full (unimpressive) height. Wash is actually taller than him but he shrinks a little under Pete’s unimpressed gaze.

“What exactly do you think we’re doing here?” He grinds out. “You think we’re here having fun? We’re here to get close-up looks at cool Russian ships? This is war, you dipshit. There are lives at stake. You better fucking hope we don’t get that close to a Russian ship again, because if that happens, it’s because they’re firing on us.”

Wash looks terrified, absolutely scared out of his mind and clearly believing every word that Pete’s said, and all Pete feels is…exhausted. Empty. There’s no joy in making this kid terrified of war; not when it’s something Patrick has been trying to drill into Pete’s head for years. Pete’s learned the lesson enough that the student is now the master, and all he feels is despair.

Even worse, he still sees Patrick on the ship – an aircraft carrier is big, but not that big. And he looks fine. His new pilot – Carrot, unoriginally, is named for his easy-to-spot bright red hair – is still a fucking idiot, asks all the wrong questions during briefings, but apparently he’s funny enough to make Patrick laugh when they’re boarding their F-18 while Pete watches jealously from across the tarmac. The sight of Patrick’s name and call sign spray-painted under his window without Pete’s next to it sends him into such an uncontrollable rage that he pounds a sandbag at the gym for almost an hour. When he does make eye contact with Patrick, he gets a little smile and a wave. Like they’re less than friends; nothing but acquaintances. The same kind of nod that you would give someone you once knew in college.

I know how your ass tastes, Pete wants to scream, but even that’s not quite right, doesn’t fully cover it.

I’ve felt your heartbeat while my dick rearranged your guts. Not that, either.

I’ve left myself inside of you.

And isn’t that true, on several levels.

All Pete wants is a real smile, a genuine Patrick giggle, but he doesn’t get it. Pete’s made a whole life plan out of never going through a breakup, never feeling this particular pain again. All those quick hookups, all that joyful shore leave sex, all those years of Patrick – all of that trouble, and he still gets his heart broken. He’s right back in that awful college dorm, cancelling calls to the jeweler, like he’s 22 all over again. It’s cosmic torture, wrapped up in Navy blue and white.

The shiny commendation medal that he got for the sonobuoy incident was presented to him in front of the whole regiment. All the aviators clapped and Pete had to shake Admiral Stump’s hand. He could barely make eye contact with the man. And when he was finally dismissed into parade rest and he could lock eyes with Patrick tucked in the back of the room, all he saw was a gentle little smile. Because of course Patrick wouldn’t even have the basic human decency to begrudge Pete his unearned commendation. Of course he would be nothing but proud of Pete getting this award.

Because Patrick was in love with Pete – for years, apparently – and Pete was, is, too much of a selfish asshole to do anything about it. And now it’s too late. They’re trapped in a cage of their own making.

It’s made Pete’s flying distracted. He doesn’t even care if they track all the subs anymore. What’s the point? He’s reached a point in this tour of duty that usually doesn’t come until much later – an all-encompassing desire to get off this fucking boat that’s best compared to an animal chewing itself out of a trap. Pete’s been going to the gym so much it’s starting to affect his sleep. The Harry S. Truman is his fucking prison, and at this point the light at the end of the tunnel is nothing but a pinprick. It’s so bad that Pete’s looked up his service record to see how long he’s got left on his commission, something he’s never done before. Fuck, this is torture.

“Lando,” Wash says from the backseat, and Pete realizes that he was zoning out while flying over the Black Sea. They’re drifting slightly, the wings of his plane tipping to the left.

He straightens out the joystick, checks the gauges to make sure it’s even. “Sorry, Wash.”

“No, uh, it’s not that.” The kid sounds nervous, but then again he always sounds nervous. “We’re being ordered back to the ship. CANEX.”

Cancelled Exercise. Pete frowns, looks out the canopy at the bright, clear sky around them. “We’re not scheduled to be off reconnaissance for another few hours.”

“I know,” Wash says. “But there’s – there’s an incident. We have to get back.”

“Incident?” Pete tips the F-18 back down, starts the glide back to the boat. “What kind of incident?”

“I’m not sure, they’re not saying.”

Pete’s got a sense for these things. He’s been flying too damn long not to. And right now every hair on the back of his neck is standing at attention.

“I’m increasing speed,” he says, without waiting for a reply, and books it back to the ship.

He comes in for the landing, hooks the cable, gets hustled off to the side with insane urgency to make way for the planes behind him, circling the sky as they wait to land. The deck is busy, far busier than Pete’s ever seen it. Admiral Stump and the Air Boss huddle in a tight scrum by the mast, but in his F-18 Pete’s too far away to see any other details.

He pops the canopy and takes his helmet off, breathing deep, and that’s when he sees Joe and Andy jogging up to the plane.

Pete scrambles out of his bucket seat and all but swings himself over the side of the plane, not caring when he almost decks Wash on his way down. “What?” He says breathlessly, as soon as his boots hit the ground. “What, what, what?”

Andy looks as serious as he always does, but Joe – fucking Joe –

Joe reaches out an arm and grabs Pete’s bicep. His dark eyes look like they’ve been carved out of stone.

“What?” Pete says, his voice breaking.

“There – there was a fire,” Joe says quietly. “On board Patrick’s plane. An engine malfunction.”

“A fire,” Pete says dully. “A fire – okay, so, so he punched out. Parachuted out. The plane went down but they got out.”

“Carrot did,” Joe replies. “Coasties picked him up a half hour ago.”

“Carrot did, but…Patrick?”

Joe’s face breaks, ducking his eyes. Distantly, Pete can hear the thump of Wash jumping out of the plane behind him. It sounds like it’s coming from another planet.

“Where’s Patrick?” He asks desperately.

And then – the worst possible fucking answer – the single worst thing –

“We don’t know,” Andy says.

Pete isn’t fully aware of himself; not the way that he throws a hand out behind him to steady himself against his plane, not the way that Wash reaches out to hold him up, not the way that Joe’s voice tries to say easy, come on, stay steady, stay with me. His eyes go unfocused, go fuzzy, blinded by the Mediterranean sun; all he can do is look out over the deck, over the heat haze of the tarmac and the ant-like scuttle of the techs over the blacktop, looking out for an F-18 with the wrong set of names painted on the side, looking for a stocky blonde WSO laughing at a pilot who’s not Pete, looking for a short, beautiful man in a flight suit and combat boots holding a helmet decorated with lightning bolts, put painstakingly in place by Pete’s bitten-down fingernails.

He doesn’t see that. He can’t see anything. He’s sunblind and desperate, and rapidly going down with this ship.

Patrick.

The truth is both better and worse than Pete feared, once he’s hustled off the blistering hot deck and down into the bowels of the ship, once Joe and Andy have shooed away Wash and all but waterboarded Pete in an attempt to get him to rehydrate.

“Didn’t you hear me? We don’t know,” Andy says, fingers gripping tight into Pete’s shoulder. “So he might be okay.”

“What – what happened?” Pete says. He feels one minute from crying. People would ask him, back when he enlisted, how he thought he would react, should the worst happen and he’s called up to war. When that happens, my training and the adrenaline will kick in, he would reply, young and arrogant and cocksure, such a slimy little fuck. I’ll be fine. I’m good under pressure.

So much for that. Pete’s as close to a meltdown as he’s ever been. He’s amazed he’s not sobbing on the floor.

“Engine overheated, it’s so fucking hot out here,” Joe says, speaking quickly for Pete’s strung-out nerves. “Some tech didn’t do their job, whatever, we’re figuring it out. Anyway, there was a fire in the engine when they were way south, down by Turkey. They punched out, both parachutes deployed – “

“They’re sure?” Pete demands. “Both parachutes deployed?”

“Carrot confirmed, both deployed,” Andy says.

“He confirmed Patrick came out of the canopy okay, said Patrick was yelling something on the way down. But there was a wind gust, Carrot got sent over the Thracian Sea, we picked him up there. Patrick – he doesn’t know where Patrick went.”

“We don’t know,” Pete says, as Andy’s words finally sink in. They both nod. Pete becomes aware of his surroundings for the first time. They’re tucked in a corner of the ready room, by the big monitor and the whiteboard and the corkboard with tacky Navy recruiting posters. Pete’s slumped in an armchair, clammy with sweat.

“We don’t know,” he repeats, and then a second wave of realization sinks in. “Fuck, we don’t know if he’s dead or alive? We don’t even know where he is?”

Joe and Andy shake their heads. “They’re trying to figure it out. His ESAT’s turned off, we can’t get a signal from him. They sent the Marines out in the helicopters, there was no dye in the water anywhere around the crash site.”

“Okay, so he’s not at sea,” Pete says. The float coats they fly with come with an acid-green dye that deploys once they hit the water; it’s a bitch for anything stealth, but it helps them be spotted by the Coast Guard and Marines who do rescues at sea. “But he’s – fuck, is he on land? Could he have been blown into Turkey?”

“We don’t know,” Andy replies, for the twentieth time. “No one knows. We’ve been trying to get in touch with him, but – “

“Without a signal, there’s nothing,” he realizes. It’s not like he and Patrick fly with their personal cell phones in the cockpit. “Oh my God. How good are our parachutes on land? They never think a Navy guy is gonna wind up with feet dry.”

“I have no idea,” Joe says. “I don’t know anything. I only know this much because I was hiding in the head and heard Admiral Stump’s personal secretary on the phone with the fucking Commander of the Atlantic Fleet.”

Admiral Stump. Jesus Christ. His kid is missing in action. How the fuck is he handling this? “Fucking shit, what do we even do?” Pete whispers.

“We do what we can, and we do what we’re told,” Andy says. “But we can’t do either of those things when we’re not at our best. You can’t pour from an empty cup. So right now we shower, and we get some rest, and we get ourselves ready to do whatever we can.”

Orders. Those are orders. Pete likes orders. Pete’s a United States Navy Officer. Orders are good.

“We do what we can, and we do what we’re told,” he repeats, and gets a smile from Joe and Andy.

“You got it, dude,” Joe says.

Pete trudges behind them back to their stateroom, dodging whispers and looks on all sides as the news of what happened spreads through the boat. Pete’s grateful for the orders, but there’s a growing sense, deep in his gut, that lets him know the way out of this isn’t going to be that easy.

Do what he can, yes, absolutely, whatever is necessary. Do what he’s told? If he’s told to sit down, stand by, be content with inaction? When Patrick is on the line?

Well. He’ll tear down the entire fucking Navy before that happens.

It’s a sign of just how serious this incident is that when the Air Boss invites the aviators to an update briefing at oh-dark-thirty the next day, absolutely everyone is up out of their bunks and rushing over. Pete’s supposed to be wheels up at 0600 that morning, but he wasn’t getting any sleep anyway.

Admiral Stump isn’t there, which Pete finds odd. That is, until the Air Boss waits for everyone to quiet down before saying tensely,

“The Russians have captured Lieutenant Stump.”

A ripple of sound rocks through the room. Pete’s stomach clenches. At least you know he’s alive, he thinks. The thought brings no real comfort.

“Admiral Stump is working with Washington right now on a prisoner swap. There’s a Russian spy that we’ve had in custody for many years; that’s likely our best bargaining chip. This does not affect your mission parameters at all. The Russians did not fire upon our planes, after all; they merely took advantage of an unfortunate situation.”

Carrot shifts awkwardly in his seat. Pete read the mission report; this idiot waited way too long before punching out, and by that point he was too far from sea. Pete has resisted the urge to scream at him, trying to remind himself that he needs to be a better person for Patrick’s sake.

(Which is bullshit, because Patrick was – is – a bitchy little fuck who wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to scream at a WSO who was doing it wrong. And besides, Pete thinks desperately, I know how to eject from a burning airplane, Patrick and I did it over San Diego for fuck’s sake, if it was me at the stick we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess, if it was me in the front seat I would have brought him home safe.)

“Lieutenant Murphy will receive a WSO from reserves and will continue reconnaissance missions,” the Air Boss continues. “None of the rest of you are to divulge this information to anyone else. This is a top-secret negotiation that is being handled by the Pentagon. We will update you once we have more information. Dismissed.”

The sound of scraping chairs fills the room as Pete stands up and shuffles to the door with everyone else.

“Captured by the Russians, at least that’s good,” Joe whispers under his breath.

“Is it? Do the Russians do torture?” Pete whispers back.

“Not to an Admiral’s son, they wouldn’t,” Andy says, joining in. And shit, that’s right, Pete didn’t think about that – Patrick’s a lot more valuable of a bargaining chip than any of the rest of them.

“His poor dad,” Joe says, and even Pete’s stony heart has to agree.

“How do we know that they’ve got him? Like what proof do they have?” Pete asks, as they squeeze through the narrow door and out into the equally narrow hallway.

“I heard they sent a photo,” Joe replies, and Pete’s blood runs cold.

A few hours later, as he’s distractedly running through pre-flight, Wash sidles up to him. “How are you holding up?”

God, he looks stupid in his flight suit. Like a kid wearing his dad’s suit. Pete tries to remember to not be a jackass to this poor guy. He drags up a smile and he’s sure it looks deranged. “I’m glad he’s alive, at least.”

“Yeah, me too,” Wash says, as Pete ducks down to check that the landing gear is looking alright.

Wash leans even closer, and Pete resists the urge to snap, Why are you so obsessed with me? Patrick would think that was funny, at least. “So I went to basic with the Admiral’s secretary,” he whispers. “He shared with me the photo that the Russians sent over. Do you want to see it?”

Pete pops up so fast he almost hits his head on the wing. “Show me right the fuck now.”

Wash pulls out his phone – what the hell is this kid doing with his phone? Does he bring that the thing into the cockpit? Jesus Christ – and navigates around for a minute. “Here,” he says, holding the screen out. He makes a small noise when Pete snatches the entire phone from his hand.

It’s – oh, God, it’s not good. Pete bites his lip. It’s Patrick, naked and kneeling, staring straight into the camera. Someone’s taken off his glasses, so there’s nothing to cover up his pink skin except for the dog tags resting on his chest. His hands are tied and bound in front of his dick, so at least there’s some preservation of his modesty, but…God. It’s awful; the defeated look on Patrick’s beautiful face, the way his hair is lank and sweaty, the generic gray background speaking to some awful holding cell, the wide spread of his knees…

Pete frowns and zooms in. Then zooms in. Then zooms in.

“Holy shit,” he whispers, staring down at the pixelated image.

“What?” Wash asks, but Pete’s mind is spinning, his heart’s racing, he feels like he did back in college after snorting an entire line of coke.

“I’m keeping this for a second,” Pete says, and then claps Wash on the shoulder. “You don’t even know, kid, thank you so much.”

And then he takes off sprinting.

“Hey!” Wash yells behind him. “We – I need a pilot to fly this thing!”

“Call Carrot!” Pete yells, already sprinting below decks.

Thank God for those hours in the gym – Pete’s never ran like this before. He knocks over a half dozen people on his way down to the Admiral’s offices (these hallways are barely meant for one person, and definitely not a madman sprinting). There’s a stitch in his side but he doesn’t stop until he gets to the locked door, and then he pounds on it like he’s trying out to be the drummer of a punk bank.

“This is highly inappropriate – “ The Air Boss says, when he opens the door and dodges one of Pete’s still flying fists. “Lieutenant Wentz, go – “

“It’s not Patrick,” he yells, and the Air Boss’s eyes widen. “In the picture. It’s not Patrick. They don’t have him.”

The Air Boss wrenches the door open. “Admiral, listen to this.”

Pete steps over the threshold and into a scene out of a movie. All the brass standing around a tiny conference table that wasn’t built to hold them, a sheaf of papers spilling over the surface, at least three men in stiff embroidered jackets on the phone. Admiral Stump is in the center, looking even more pale than usual, his blue eyes sunk into his face.

“Lieutenant Wentz,” Admiral Stump says, and his voice is no longer whip-sharp. He sounds like he’s on a different planet.

“Sir,” Pete says, because the consequences of this action are suddenly clear to him. This is…well, this will ruin everything. This is, potentially, the end of his Naval career. He’s not even sure if Patrick would want him to divulge this information. This is admitting something that they’ve worked a long time to keep a secret.

But maybe this can be his one last selfish act. Maybe this – bringing Patrick home – is the last selfish thing he’ll ever do.

Maybe this is the moment where he finally grows up.

“It’s not Patrick, sir,” he says. “In the photograph. That’s not him.”

Admiral Stump’s eyebrows furrow down. “Are you saying I don’t know my own son?”

Pete grimaces, walks up. He holds up Wash’s phone. “It’s not him. It’s an AI image. They don’t have him.”

“And how do you know this, Lieutenant Wentz? I know that pilots like to say they know their WSOs – ”

“Patrick has a birthmark, sir,” Pete says, sealing his fate. “Right there.” He points with his fingers to the zoomed-in part of the picture, high up on the inside of his thigh, clearly visible the way that he’s kneeling in the picture with his knees spread wide. “There’s no birthmark in this picture.”

Everyone leans in, sees that there’s nothing. “It’s a dark birthmark, and pretty big,” Pete says, babbling. “You would – you would see it. In a photo like this. If this was a real photo.”

“How do you know this?” One of the other brass asks.

I’m sorry, Patrick, Pete thinks.

“Because I love him,” Pete says, and isn’t it poetic that this it the first time it’s been true? Isn’t it poetic that when he finally comes to the realization, he’s saying it to everyone except Patrick? “We’ve been together for, like, four years.”

Several admirals blink; several mouths drop open. Admiral Stump rears back like he’s been burned.

One decrepit old guy says, “I don’t understand – “

“They were sleeping together, Collins,” the Air Boss snaps. “They’re queers.”

Yikes, but fair. Pete can’t deny that.

But Admiral Stump is looking down at the picture again, and a new expression crosses his face. “He’s right,” he says, quietly. “Patrick does have a birthmark there. I remember, when he was a baby. I’d change his diapers and always worried that I’d missed a spot.”

Pete nods. “I think this is an AI picture. Because they don’t have him, but they want us to think they do.”

“How does it look so good otherwise?” Admiral Stump says, squinting into his face. “I could have sworn…”

“Patrick’s a millennial, sir, there are a million pictures of him on the internet. Actually – “ Pete says, pointing to the face. “I think I know what Instagram picture this was taken from. He had waited all night to see this band and they were terrible, so he’s in the background of someone’s picture making this face. Besides,” he continues, forgetting his decorum but totally on a roll, “our names are painted on the side of the plane. If the Russians saw the accident, saw the order that they ejected, know that we picked up the pilot and not the WSO, and then recovered the plane, they’d know which servicemember was missing. Sir.”

“It is a very generic background, sir,” one of the techs in the corner says. “Look at how it’s more pixelated than the rest of it. I think he’s got it right.”

Admiral Stump looks up at Pete like seeing him in a new light.

“Everyone get out,” he says, “except for Lieutenant Wentz.”

The brass don’t even hesitate at the weird order; they all hustle out of the room like they’re on fire, leaving Pete alone with the homophobic father of his gay lover, nothing but the constant rumble of the aircraft carrier and the periodic thump of a plane landing down topside.

“Later, I will have a lot of questions for you,” Admiral Stump says slowly. “About how long this has been going on; about why you both lied to me; about how you could think this is appropriate behavior for Naval officers; why my son never told me this information himself. But right now, the only question I have for you is – “ His face breaks open, and Pete thinks, horribly, that he’s about to see this great man cry.

“Do you know where he is? Is he safe?”

Pete swallows.

“I don’t know, sir,” he says.

Admiral Stump ducks his head, and Pete is grateful for it. He can’t bear to watch this man cry. Not when they’re both mourning the same person, who they didn’t appreciate enough when he was here.

“Look, this opens up a whole lot of other risk factors,” Admiral Stump says, his voice low. “I’m glad he’s not in a Russian prison, I am. But now we have confirmation that the Russians are only pretending to have him. Which means that when we make that prisoner swap – “

“Are you going to make the prisoner swap?”

“For my son? I was going to hand over the whole fucking Cabinet,” the Admiral spits, and Pete feels a shiver travel down his spine. “Yes, they were going to make the prisoner swap. If for nothing else, this spineless administration is terrified of the PR of keeping an American soldier imprisoned in a foreign country during an election year.” Admiral Stump must be truly freaking out; this guy would never be so transparent with Pete under any other circumstances. “But when they make the swap, and Patrick’s not the guy we trade for? Now that is cause for a world war. That’s an inciting incident. And Moscow knows that damn well, which means – “

“They’re also looking for him,” Pete realizes, with a pit in his stomach. “They need to get him in time for this prisoner swap. Or else they’ve started something they don’t want to finish.”

Admiral Stump nods heavily, as though his head weighs twenty pounds. Fuck, why didn’t Pete think of this? Now there’s a whole new twist on this whole shitty situation. But this is Patrick’s area of expertise, he’s the one who knows the intricacies of this area, he’s the one who warned them all –

“Oh, shit,” Pete says, and it’s a sign of the times that Admiral Stump doesn’t even scold him for swearing, or for dropping his sirs. “Patrick knew this. He knew all of this. He warned us all, forever ago, that you don’t want to risk getting picked up by an enemy country, in case you’re shot down. I think he’s gone underground.”

“If he’s alive,” Stump tries, but Pete shakes his head.

“He’s alive. I know he is. He knows how to parachute out of a burning plane. We already did it once.”

“So you’re saying that he’s the one who turned off his ESAT? He doesn’t want us to find him?” Admiral Stump asks.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. He knows both us and the Russians are looking for him, and he doesn’t want them to find him first. So he’s making it difficult for both of us.”

“That doesn’t help me find him, kid.” The Admiral straightens up, points at the gigantic map of the region that takes up one of the bulkheads. “You might have noticed from the air, but this is a pretty big region of the world. And my kid somewhere out there with no support, hiding from a foreign nation that’s trying to kidnap him, isn’t giving me a lot of hope.”

Pete can’t argue with that. He slowly walks over to the map, the pit in his stomach still gaping and pumping noxious adrenaline through his body. The whole of the region spills out in front of him in garish ink – the massive sea, the countries lined up around it like sentinels, a powder keg about to explode. There’s a little red X down in the south of Turkey, by the sea.

“That’s where the plane malfunctioned?” Pete asks. Admiral Stump nods.

Pete runs his callused fingers over the map, remembers suddenly that he’s still wearing his green fingerless flight gloves, still wearing his whole fucking gear because he’s supposed to be up in his plane right now with someone who isn’t Patrick. The plane exploded way south of Istanbul, down on the southern curve of Turkey, away from the tourist areas. God, Turkey has got to be the last place Patrick wants to hide out. That’s one of the countries he named, right? Turkey, Russia, Ukraine –

He can hear Patrick’s voice, like they’re up in the cockpit together, like Patrick’s right in his ear.

Greece is the only one that even has a modicum of social tolerance.

Pete’s whole body snaps to attention like he’s just spotted a bogey. The plane exploded in a non-tourist part of Turkey – but directly across the Aegean Sea from Athens.

“Is it easy? To get to Greece from Turkey? Down here?” Pete asks, incomprehensibly, tapping the map.

Admiral Stump frowns. “Yes, usually. The two countries are close enough that there are several ferry lines that operate.”

Pete slams his hand against the map, making the Admiral jump. “He’s out of Turkey, I can tell you that,” Pete says, his heart and words picking up speed. “Admiral, your son is a well-educated, closeted gay man. He knew exactly how tolerant all of these countries were of homosexuality. He knew that Greece was both the friendliest to the United States and the friendliest towards gay men. I can guarantee you the first thing he would do is get the hell out of Turkey.”

“He doesn’t have a passport – “

“He’s got a gift for languages and a resourceful mind, he would have found a way out,” Pete says, tripping over his words. See, Patrick, I listened, he wants to crow. I always listened to you. “He would have smuggled himself onto a ferry boat somehow, made his way into Greece. I can guarantee you that he’s making his way towards Athens right now, and he’s going to check himself into the American embassy there. That’s the safest way to get home.”

“You’re serious,” Admiral Stump says, a hint of hope in his voice for the first time. “You think he’s safe, and he’s underground in Greece.”

“I know that’s where he is. He talked about it, he said Greece was the only one that had a modicum of social tolerance.” The Admiral’s eyes go wide; apparently even he can hear Patrick’s words in Pete’s voice. “And he can speak a lot of these languages, he was translating with the Greek and Italian pilots who were up in the air with us. He’s not perfect, but he’s good enough to hold a conversation. He can absolutely get out of Turkey.”

Admiral Stump grins, and it’s so different from Patrick’s sunny smile but they both have the same chin, and Pete’s going to get his boy back, this is it, he’s finally making himself worthy of Patrick –

“Hold on,” the Admiral says, and Pete wants to groan. “Look, if we’ve done these calculations, the Russians have too. They might not know Patrick, but they can make a good guess that an American servicemember would want to get away from Turkey, and assume that Greece is the closest and easiest country to get to. Plus, they’ve got a head start on us. They’ve had almost thirty-six hours since the plane crash, twenty-four since they sent the photo, where they’ve been checking Turkey for American soldiers. When they don’t find anything, Athens will be the next place they look. I don’t want to wait for Patrick to get to the embassy, not when Athens is inland and he’s got a lot of ground to make up before he gets there. I don’t want to take the chance on not going after him.”

“You can’t make a big fuss,” Pete says urgently. This is where he’s glad that he’s older than the other officers; he feels like his words have more weight. “You can’t send the fucking Marines in there, that’ll just tip them off – “

“I know that,” the Admiral snaps. “I know I can’t send the jarheads, I know this requires stealth. I’ll get on the horn with Washington, they’ll send someone over, they’ll send a CIA guy over – “

“That’ll take too long! Besides, Patrick could be hiding in plain sight, he could be blending in with a tourist group, he could have ditched his flight suit and all his gear and just look like a normal guy. Sir, he’s not going to be found if he doesn’t want to be found. Not unless – “ Electricity spreads through Pete’s chest, sparking in his bones, the tips of his fingers. “Not unless he trusts the guy who’s sent to find him. Sir, you’re going to send me.”

“What?”

“Send me,” Pete says urgently, resisting the urge to grab him by the shoulders. “You’re going to send me, with backup ready offsite, and I’m going to make contact and get him out of there. He trusts me, he’s going to let me find him. I’m the only one.”

“How are you going to make contact with him?” Admiral Stump clearly wants to believe this desperate plan, but thirty years in the military are making him doubt Pete’s insane genius, and they don’t have time for this.

“I don’t know, I’m going to figure that out, but I’m going to find him, and I’m going to bring him home safe, I promise you that. Admiral,” Pete says, and this time he does grab him by the shoulders. “I am going to get your kid home,” he says, as serious as when he took his oath of office. “Because I love your kid. And I already lost him once. So you can trust me when I say I’m not going to lose him again.”

Admiral Stump wants to believe. He wants to. Pete can see it in his eyes. There’s no time to get a better plan, not when they’re racing against the clock like this. Not when his son is alone and scared in a foreign country, just trying to get home.

He sighs, reaches up a hand to pat Pete’s hand. “Patrick was a weird kid,” he says, his voice soft, melodic. “I didn’t – I didn’t understand him. His brother and sister, they wanted to run around and scream; Patrick just wanted to read. I bought him toy planes and he didn’t want to pretend to fly them, he wanted to take them apart. He didn’t make many friends in middle school and high school, he never went to prom or homecoming, I thought something was wrong with him.” The words spill out, desperate and hopeless. “I was – God, I was so mean to him. I thought I was doing him a favor, trying to make this fat little weird kid into someone normal. I thought that would make him happier, I thought life would be easier for him. I thought when he enlisted that this was it, he’d finally be someone I could relate to, someone I could understand, but then he wanted to be a WSO, and I didn’t understand that at all. He’s always done his own thing and he’s never tried to explain it to anybody. I couldn’t fathom that.”

Admiral Stump runs a hand over his face. “I Googled asexuality, you know. I tried. I figured that he was just not that kind of guy, the kind of man who felt urges. And how do you relate to that? How can you understand that?” Easily, Pete thinks, but now’s not the moment. “I thought – I’m never going to be able to have a real conversation with him, if he’s not the kind of man who feels love and connection the way that I do. How could he not want the kind of thing I have with his mother? But it turns out that he does want that. And he had it, it sounds like, with you.”

Some old part of Pete wants to deny it, still wants to preserve himself. He has to swallow and drag up some courage before he can admit it for the second time. “He, uh. You’re more on the nose than you know. Patrick wanted a commitment from me, wanted a steady, normal relationship. He wanted someone who would hold his hand in public.” Pete grimaces. “But I was the fuckboy – sorry, sir – I was the dirtbag who just wanted someone to sleep with while I was at sea.”

The Admiral winces, because no father wants to hear that.

“And that was a mistake,” Pete rushes to say. “That was the biggest mistake of my life. Maybe we couldn’t have been out on the boat, with the fraternization policies, but I could’ve held his hand in Chicago. I could’ve loved him the way he deserved. And I ruined that all by being selfish and cowardly. But when I get him back – I’m done with that shit. If he’ll take me back, I’m holding his hand and kissing him in front of the fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

Improbably – inexplicably – that declaration of absolute treason is what makes Admiral Stump finally smile.

“Your son is a marvel, sir,” Pete says. “I’m done pretending I don’t know that. Let me get him back for you and we can all go out to dinner and you can grill me all you want about how I’m not good enough for him.”

“You’re not,” Admiral Stump says easily. “But you’re good enough to go after him.”

It’s a jolt, right to Pete’s gut. “Seriously?”

Admiral Stump nods, and the awful fluorescent lights in the room light on his pale blonde eyebrows. God, when Pete sees Patrick again, he’s never going to stop kissing his fucking eyebrows.

“Come home safe,” he whispers. “The both of you.”

Athens is bright and sunny, the scent of orange trees and cheesy pastries heavy in the air. Pete tips his aviators lower and tries to breathe through the constant drumbeat of his heart. He hasn’t had a normal resting heart rate since Patrick’s plane was shot down, and he doesn’t think it’s going to slow down any time soon.

He starts to make his way through tourists taking pictures and locals sitting outside and enjoying the October sun, looking down at the scuff of his boots on the sandy limestone paths. He feels more than sees the two SEALs behind him, trying to look inconspicuous with twenty pounds of bulletproof vests, radios, ESATs and firearms. They’re the one who are actually in charge of getting in touch with the Harry S. Truman when they make contact with Patrick; Pete successfully convinced Admiral Stump that they didn’t all need to dress like they’re storming the beaches, so as not to arouse suspicion from the Russians who are certainly in the area. So Pete’s in civvies for the first time in months, wearing his favorite black jeans and a t-shirt borrowed from Joe underneath his leather jacket, no equipment on him but a tiny radio and his service pistol. He feels naked without his helmet, but there’s nothing for it. He reminds himself that Patrick – if Patrick is still alive, if this crazy plan works – will also be walking around with almost nothing on him.

Pete and the SEALs make their slow way into the center of town, as the ruins on the outskirts start to make way for modern buildings and apartments, all shadowed by the Acropolis towering over everything else right in the center of the city. On their way in, they checked and made sure an incredibly specific billboard was standing, right as you enter the city from the west, visible on any number of paths into the city. The billboard was huge, Navy blue with lightning bolts and black stars, and block letters saying:

GRADUATE TO STARMAN: THIS FRIDAY AT THE APEIRO CAFÉ

Those nine words represent about 8 hours of work between Pete and the Pentagon guys, trying to come up with a saying that will mean something to Patrick and only Patrick, while being vague enough to not arouse too much suspicion. As it is, this was the best that they could do; the Russians will absolutely be able to see it and figure out that something’s fishy, but hopefully once they make contact with Patrick, they’ll run as far away from the Apeiro Café as possible and no one will be any the wiser.

The Pentagon guys resolutely shot down listing any specified time, so here they are bright and early, getting ready to sit down as soon as the café opens and camp out there all day. Pete climbs up the cobblestone street and blinks against the sun in his eyes. He has no idea how he’s going to pretend to be normal, pretend to be calm, sit and drink coffee while he’s not scared out of his mind.

But he’s going to. He doesn’t have a choice.

When the café opens at 8 am, Pete and the SEALs are first in line, grabbing a pastry and a pot of strong Greek coffee. Then they sit outside at the rickety tables, Pete in one and the SEALs in the other, to wait. None of them brought a book, which would have been smart; as it is, they just look like idiots. Pete pulls out his phone, but he can’t concentrate on it for more than a second. His eyes keep scanning the crowded street around them, catching on the alleyways and tiny shop doors, in the crowds of tourists with sensible shoes, all the places that Patrick could be hiding in plain sight.

He sighs and drinks the coffee. It was a bad call. He should’ve had tea, slow his heartrate down.

Patrick loves tea. Drinks it all the time.

Jesus Christ, he has to come home.

Pete settles his butt in on the metal chair and forces himself into stillness.

After about an hour the shop owner realizes that these three weird Americans must be the ones who put up the sign directing people to his shop, and are therefore responsible for all the confused questions he’s gotten about ‘Starman’ throughout the day from tourists and locals alike. He comes out to yell at them, but Pete’s Greek isn’t exactly up to snuff, so he uses the translator on his phone to point out that this is quite a lot of business for a random Friday morning and maybe he should be thanking them. The shop owner only relents when Pete promises that the billboard will be coming down tomorrow, and then begrudgingly gives Pete a free refill on his coffee.

Pete’s grinning to himself, thinking how funny a story this will be to tell Joe and Andy when this is all over, when he sees a flash of pale skin over the rim of his coffee cup.

He snaps his head up, trying not to look too obvious. Halfway down the street, lingering in the doorway of a bookshop with his back to them, is a short man wearing an ill-fitting shirt and pants, with short red-brown hair and –

Combat boots. Navy issued combat boots, tucked under the legs of his dark pants.

Pete’s spine is ramrod straight, and the SEALs behind him have noticed. Pete doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe too deep, waiting for Patrick to make the move.

Finally Patrick turns around, cautiously, skittishly, and makes eye contact with Pete.

The smile that spreads over his whole face is something Pete will never forget.

He’s up and out of his seat in a moment, all but knocking over tourists in his haste to get to the bookstore. The SEALs come rushing up behind him, and no sooner has Pete made it to the doorway of the bookshop before they’re grabbing both men by the shoulders and hauling them off down the street, making a much bigger scene than Pete would by just walking up to Patrick, in his humble opinion.

But none of it matters, because while they’re being hurried along by the SEALs, Pete reaches down to grab Patrick’s hand and squeezes like it’s a lifeline.

They walk for almost a mile in complete silence, until they’re in a different part of the city, standing by an entirely different café. The SEALs finally let go and one of them mutters,

“Stay here and don’t move. We’re going to contact the ship.”

“Okay,” Pete says, unable to take his eyes off Patrick. Now that they’ve finally stopped, now that he can catch his breath, now that he can see Patrick’s eyes behind his glasses – this is a level of elation Pete didn’t know he was capable of. Nothing in his life compares to this moment.

“You found me,” Patrick whispers, awestruck. “You listened. Pete – “

Pete swoops in and kisses him.

It’s barely for a second before Patrick pushes him away, ducking his face and grinning. “Pete, come on.”

“You can’t tell me not to,” Pete whispers back. He’s grinning so hard his cheeks hurt from the motion. “Jesus Christ, Patrick, I thought you died.”

“Please, I know how to eject out of a burning plane.” Patrick rolls his eyes and Pete is so in love. “I kept my back straight, saved me from a lot of the bruises we got after San Diego.”

“Babe,” Pete says, easing himself down to sit at a new rickety outdoor table. The SEALs are conferring quietly a few feet away; after a moment of looking around warily, Patrick sits down too. “What happened? How did you get here?”

“Well, it sounds like you figured it out,” Patrick says, with a smile that doesn’t quite stick. “The cooling system in the jet malfunctioned, we had to punch out. Carrot got enough altitude to keep us safe but didn’t account for wind shear. So he landed in the water, but I got blown off course. I had a water landing, but it was only about two miles or so from the beach in Turkey. Tourists looked at me like I was crazy, so I had to ditch most of my gear in the water.”

“You swam two miles into shore?”

“I’m a United States Navy Officer, I’m pretty good at swimming,” Patrick says, smiling down at his fingers. “But it meant that the only way I could stay under the radar was to ditch my ESAT, my helmet, all of it. I’ve got my service pistol and that’s about it.”

“And your dogtags,” Pete says, because he can see them glittering under Patrick’s shirt. “Can’t believe you kept those on.”

“Well, that’s for identifying my body.” Patrick swallows, and Pete traces the motion of his neck. “Still a pretty good chance of that happening.”

“And you made it from Turkey into Greece? How?”

Patrick looks guilty, reaching up to fuss with his hair. Finally he says in a low mumble, “I found the tourist who looked most like me and stole his bag.”

“Patrick!” Pete’s delighted. When they get out of here, this is going to be ammunition for years. “You thief! This is conduct unbecoming of an officer!”

“I know!” He moans. “What else was I supposed to do? I feel so guilty. I know he’ll just chalk it up to European pick pocketers, but I needed money, I needed an identity. I’ll mail it back to him when I’m done, I swear, but I couldn’t see any other way to get into Greece without a passport.” He gestures to the strap of the fanny pack that Pete can see is slung protectively under his shirt. “Thank God he was French, that’s a language I can work with. So I bought the ferry ticket and then withdrew a bunch of cash before he could call his company and cancel the card. I got some cheap clothes and then I’ve just been spending my money on buses up to Athens with barely anything left for food. I’ve had, like, chips or a single pastry for most of my meals. I’ve barely had any protein for four days.”

Yeah, Pete figured; Patrick looks thinner, his face a little more gaunt, his skin sallow instead of rosy and dewey like usual. He’s moving gingerly too, not lifting his shoulders more than he has to.

“You’ve got bruises, from ejecting?” Pete asks quietly, and Patrick nods.

“Not as bad as San Diego, but yeah, pretty bad. My legs are the worst, I hit the water pretty hard.” He scrubs at his hair and frowns. “I’m still all salty from the seawater, haven’t had a shower since I got here. I’m just – Jesus, I am so happy you found me.” He looks over at Pete like he hung the moon. “I didn’t – I figured you guys were just going to wait until I turned up, I didn’t know anyone was looking for me.”

“Are you kidding? Your dad has been freaking the fuck out. Especially since – “ Here Pete lowers his voice, glancing around. “The Russians sent a doctored photo of you in captivity, trying to arrange a prisoner swap.”

“Oh my God,” Patrick whispers back. “Seriously? For me?”

Pete nods. “Your dad was gonna do it, they were on the phone with Washington, but I stopped it and told them it wasn’t you.” When Patrick raises his eyebrows, Pete has to fight a blush. “Yeah, uh, you should probably know. The commanding officers of the Harry Truman – actually, probably most of the Navy brass at this point – they know you’re gay and that we’ve been sleeping together.”

Patrick blanches. “What? How the fuck do they know that?”

“The Russians sent a picture of you naked and kneeling, and I, uh. I told them they were missing the birthmark on the inside of your thigh.”

The blush that spreads up Patrick’s chest and over his entire face is a sight to behold. Pete wishes he were recording. “Oh,” Patrick says quietly.

“Yeah,” Pete says. “And I would do it again, a hundred times over, if it meant getting you back home safe.”

“Pete,” Patrick says, looking down at his lap and ducking behind his hair. “Jesus, man. I don’t even – I just figured I was going to make it to the embassy and you all were going to say, ‘Oh, Patrick? We forgot all about him.’”

“Embassy, huh?” Says a new voice.

And then a massive, toned arm comes out of the sky, pressing against Patrick’s windpipe and hauling him backwards out of his chair.

Pete shouts and leaps up, knocking the rickety metal table over with a clatter. The noise alerts the SEALs, who come running over and force the Russian to unhand Patrick, who collapses onto the floor, gasping for air. Tourists shout around them, especially when another couple of burly guys Pete doesn’t recognize materialize through the crowds of tourists and run towards the scrum.

Pete does the only thing he can think of. “Run,” he yells, grabbing Patrick’s arm and taking off at a sprint.

He doesn’t look behind him, can barely spare a glance for whoever might be following them as he and Patrick race and dodge through the streets of Athens. The noise is deafening – the pounding of his boots on the cobblestone, the yells of indignation as they push people aside, the ever-present slamming of Pete’s heart urging him go, go, go.

“Pete,” Patrick says, gasping behind him. “My legs – we gotta stop.”

Pete looks around, finds a tiny little alley between two shops, and pulls Patrick inside. His palm is sweaty when he finally releases it from Patrick’s forearm. Patrick slumps to the ground, back against the wall, grimacing in pain as his hands go to rub his legs. Pete ducks his head out, looks around, and doesn’t see anyone after them; it looks like they landed in a quiet part of town, just dentists and business offices around them.

“I think we lost them,” he says, his chest ballooning with air.

“We also lost the SEALs,” Patrick grits out. “You know, the people who could get us back to the boat?”

“Yeah, that’s not good,” Pete acknowledges. “Well, okay, we can still make our way to the embassy, they’ll catch up.”

“I’m not going back to the embassy, are you crazy? They heard me say that, if they manage to slip the SEALs that’s the first place they’ll look.”

“Ah, shit.”

Pete slumps down next to Patrick, his mouth dry from the sprint. He wants water desperately. He looks over at Patrick, with his pink face shining with sweat, his big blue eyes.

“What do we do?” He asks.

Patrick shakes his head. “I have no idea.”

Pete drops his head back against the brick wall with a little thunk. It’s peaceful here, at least, in this tiny little alley. He could go to sleep right now and sleep for a hundred years.

“God, this got so fucked up,” he whispers.

“You should’ve just let them take me,” Patrick says. “They were going to take me alive, we know they were, and you would’ve gotten me back in the prison swap.”

Pete opens his eyes, expecting to find some trace of joking on Patrick’s face. Instead, he’s totally serious.

“Are you fucking serious?” He replies flatly. “After I just did all that? After I had to beg your dad to let me come get you? You think I would’ve been able to fucking hand you over to the enemy? Jesus, Stump, they told me you were the smart one.”

Patrick rolls his eyes, but he looks pleased as punch. “Okay, well, it still doesn’t get us out of this situation.”

“Yeah, I know,” Pete admits. “I’m fucking useless without a plane.”

Patrick says nothing, chewing on his lip. Pete can’t even begin to think of a plan until his heartrate calms down; he sits there, willing his breathing to even out, trying to think of all the times he’s had to push himself to the limit. Officer training school, flight school, Top Gun, the time he ran a marathon because his sister guilted him into it. How did he get through any of those? How is he going to get through this?

“What if I can get you a plane?” Patrick asks.

Pete turns slowly to him. “What?”

“The Navy used to have a base here, in Athens,” Patrick says, his usual encyclopedic knowledge of the Navy spilling out. “They decommissioned it in like the 80s, and then it turned into a commercial airport, and then that got decommissioned a few years ago. But I’ve seen pictures online. It’s a boneyard, they left a bunch of the planes there.”

“Patrick,” Pete says, because this cannot be the kind of conversation they’re having. “Are you saying we go steal a fucking abandoned plane? Are you serious?”

“Obviously I would prefer if we had any other options, but I don’t really see any.” Patrick’s got this weird feral look on his face, and Pete remembers that even though he’s the one with the reputation for bullshit, Patrick is still the kind of guy who would willingly sign up to be thrown around in the back of a fighter jet for years on end. That is not the behavior of a sane person. “I don’t have any better ideas. But you said you wanted a plane. I’m telling you where I think I can get you a plane.”

“And then we – we fly home?”

“And then we take it all the way back to the boat.”

Pete stares at him. “This is like if the nerdiest kind in class leaned over and offered you street heroin,” he says, and a laugh punches out of Patrick.

“Who says I haven’t done street heroin?” He says, with a loose little grin, and Pete chokes on his spit. “Jesus, I’m kidding. Look, if you’ve got other ideas, I’m all ears. But I really think we need to get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible.”

“You got enough money for a taxi cab to wherever we’re going?”

Patrick pulls the fanny pack out from his shirt and rustles around inside. “My last euros, yeah.”

Pete heaves himself to his feet and pulls Patrick up with a groan. “Alright, sailor. Let’s turn and burn.”

Patrick grins at him, and Pete knows he never really had a choice.

If the cab driver thinks it’s weird that two Americans have requested to go to an airport that by definition no longer flies planes, he doesn’t say a word. Maybe this is actually super normal and the old Ellinikon Airport is actually a very common tourist destination.

It is creepy, though. After days of being surrounded by frantic conversations and loud cities and months on a crowded, noisy aircraft carrier, the deserted airport sends shivers up Pete’s back. The whole place feels fundamentally wrong; there are still old mannequins up in the stores, wearing tacky 80s fashions, and the old school flightboard with the flipping letters still reads Departing Now for Paris at Gate C8. It’s like Pete has stepped into uncanny valley, or a mushroom circle; this is not a place where he is supposed to be.

It is, however, blessedly deserted. Which means he doubts they were followed here. If only they can find a plane, this insane plan might actually work.

They have to break in through the padlocked side door to get into the boneyard, but one well-placed shot of Pete’s service pistol breaks it open.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever fired that outside of target practice,” he says shakily, as Patrick hauls open the rusty gate with a horrible squeaking grind.

“Let’s hope it’s the last time,” Patrick replies, and they duck through the gate and into the sun.

The first thing they see is an abandoned Boeing 737, rusty but intact, sitting right on the runway, like it’s just waiting to take off. Several abandoned trucks and carts lie in its shadow, like baby ducklings sitting under their mother.

“Can you fly a 737?” Patrick asks.

“Can I fly a – are you fucking kidding me? No, I can’t fly a 737! At least,” Pete pauses and thinks. “I don’t think I can? Besides, what would we do with it if we got it? We can’t go back to the Harry Truman and land this on the runway, it would swamp the boat!”

Patrick just hums, like Pete’s being the unreasonable one here. “Alright, well, let’s see if we have any other options. If not, good use for that commercial pilot’s license.”

“I don’t have a commercial pilot’s license, Patrick!”

“Maybe you should get one after this,” Patrick replies, already off and moving through the rest of the runway. Pete groans and jogs off after him.

There’s another 737, a slightly smaller passenger plane, a lovely little Cessna that unfortunately is too rusted to be airworthy.

“Why are these all still here?” Pete asks, squinting his eyes against the hot sun as they slowly round the corner of a building. “Why didn’t they take them away?”

“They might be waiting for the hobby pilots and collectors to come get them,” Patrick replies. His voice sounds shaky; if Pete’s been running on adrenaline for the past few days, he can’t even imagine what Patrick’s been going through. “These things will still sell.”

“Patrick, what’s our fucking backup plan?” Pete says, jogging a little more until he pulls even with Patrick. “What do we do when none of these planes will fly? How do we get the fuck out of Greece?”

“We swim.”

“Dude, that is not funny – “

“Yes, it was, and look.” Patrick’s face breaks into a grin. “Pete, look.”

He points to a huge bulky shape, tucked into the shade of the building. Pete draws closer and sucks in a breath.

It’s an A4 Skyhawk. A fighter jet.

“Just like Mega was flying, back in Somalia,” Patrick says, still grinning. “Pete, you can fly an A4, we flew it in Top Gun!”

“Yeah, three years ago,” Pete says, nerves setting in. “It’s got totally different controls than the F-18, it’s not like it’s one-to-one – besides, will that thing even turn on?”

“It’s still got the fuel pump hooked up! And look – “ Patrick, ever a WSO, has jogged over and is checking out the undercarriage. “Look, it’s still got a Sidewinder missile!”

“One missile? We are not firing a missile from this thing, what the fuck – “

Patrick unhooks the ladder from the side and scrambles up to raise the canopy. Pete gets a sick feeling, deep in his stomach, like he’s never had before while flying a jet, as he sees Patrick grin like a kid in a candy store.

“This is not safe,” he says, which is something he’s never said before. “This is – this is a terrible fucking idea, we need to lay low and find another way to get in touch with the Navy.”

Patrick’s head pops up, holding two helmets stashed in the cockpit. His brows furrow. “Dude, where is this coming from? Back on the Carl Vinson you tried to steal a Marine helicopter to go get illegal booze on shore, why are you so scared now?”

“Why am I scared now? Maybe because I just got you back, and I don’t want to lose you because I’m not a good enough pilot and I’ll crash this museum piece into the fucking Mediterranean?”

Patrick’s whole face softens, and he clambers back out of the cockpit and hops down to the ground. “Pete,” he says, walking over. He reaches up, runs his hands soothing down the outside of Pete’s arms. He looks up at Pete through this blonde eyelashes, smiles easily and calmly. “I want you to hear me when I say this. I’ve flown with a lot of people over the years. You are, easily, the best pilot I have ever flown with. You might need to do a better job of communicating, but I have never, not once, felt unsafe in the plane with you.”

“What?” That sentence floors Pete. He doesn’t think he heard it right. “You never – you felt safe with me?”

Patrick smiles and nods. “Every time.”

“But we – we’ve been in combat, we’ve taken fire, we’ve flown in active war zones. There’s no way you…”

Pete’s words trail off, silent in the face of Patrick’s still smiling face.

“Every time,” he reiterates. “I knew you would get me home. It takes a lot of trust, when you become a WSO. They warn you about that, in flight school. All the backseat bitching in the world doesn’t make up for that fact that I can’t fly that plane, and if we’re in trouble there’s very little I can do. So you really have to trust your pilot to take care of you. Carrot?” He shakes his head. “Fuck no. I knew as soon as we were hit that we were in trouble. But if you were behind the stick, I would have gotten home safe.”

“I said that,” Pete says, nodding like a bobblehead doll, drunk on the trust Patrick’s placed in him. “I said that. That was the first thing I said. I would’ve gotten you home, I would’ve made sure you were safe.”

“See? You got me,” Patrick says.

“But there’s – there’s still got to be an easier way, there’s got to be a more rational way to get back to the boat, this cannot be – “

“Who are you and what have you done with my stick jockey?” Patrick pops up onto his tiptoes, presses a quick kiss to Pete’s slack lips. “Come on, I’m starving, I want to get back to the boat. Let’s fire up this bird and go home.”

And he takes Pete by the hand and leads him over to the plane, and Pete has no choice but to follow.

Once he settles into the dusty cockpit and lowers the canopy, it feels like he’s in a carnival funhouse. Everything is just slightly off, all the controls that he’s used to suddenly in totally different places. But he finds the master switch, down by his left hip, and flicks it on. The plane starts up with a rumble.

“How does it look back there?” He asks, pitching his voice up over the engine. “Once we’re airborne, can we get in touch with the boat?”

“Not sure,” Patrick says. “Honestly, it’s all in Greek.” Somehow this produces a chuckle. This man must be genuinely delirious.

“Okay. Okay. Okay.” Pete breathes deep, takes a look around. This is – this is getting familiar. He got a few hours of instruction on the A4 back in Top Gun, when he and Patrick won a speedtime competition and got a chance to pilot the classic Cold War aircraft. It’s a lot lighter, a lot faster than the F-18; Pete’s going to have no problem getting this thing in the air, but a lot harder time fighting against any wind shear. His brain starts running calculations as he finally finds the throttle cage and shifts the plane into idle. The engines come alive with a deep growl that shivers its way up Pete’s spine.

“Pete,” Patrick says, and suddenly it’s his WSO voice. “Raise the canopy.”

“What?”

“Raise the canopy, now.”

“Okay, shit, fuck, where is it, I just had it – “ He ducks around, finds the lever, pulls and holds it. “Why do you want – Patrick, holy shit, no!”

Three tall men, wearing black, are sprinting towards them like missiles. Somehow, someway, the Russians found them. “No, I need to lower the canopy – “

“No!” Patrick barks. “Raise it!”

Trust goes both ways, Pete supposes, and keeps pulling the lever. The canopy levers up, agonizingly slowly, with a horrible creaking noise. The men come closer, pulling firearms out from their belts –

Patrick stands up from his seat, arms straight out in textbook firing stance, and fires three quick shots from his service pistol.

Pete winces away from the noise but still sees one, two, three drop to the ground.

“Patrick, what the fuck – “

“I only killed one,” Patrick says, and yeah, at least one of them is already moving, hands going to his bleeding leg. “We gotta get airborne, they’re going to call their people, we need to get to the boat before there’s a dogfight.”

“Ah, shit. Okay.” Pete jams the helmet on his head, and it’s stale and smells terrible but at least it’s a helmet, and pretty soon he can hear the static buzz of Patrick’s own helmet and communication systems on and active. He lowers the canopy once more. “Alright, you buckled up?”

“I’m in. Cleared to launch.”

Jesus Christ, Pete thinks, and eases the throttle forward.

Taking off is no problem – the plane weighs half of what his F-18 weighs, and this runway is about three times as long as the aircraft carrier and completely empty (except for three maybe-dead Russians). Pete takes them up, watches the altimeter climb, peeks out his window to see Athens shrinking underneath him. The problem becomes clear as soon as he’s in the air.

“Talk to me, Ziggy, where am I going?”

“Uh – “ Rustling and clicking starts up from behind him. “Oh, boy. Well, you were on the ship last, you tell me!”

Pete frowns and tries to think, which is difficult to do when he’s piloting an unfamiliar plane. This thing is so light that normal gusts of wind move it side to side; he’s gripping onto the throttle for dear life. “Uh, um – that big Navy base, on that big island.”

“Crete? You guys were anchored at Crete?”

“Yes! Yeah, that one.”

“Okay, Crete is southeast, tack southeast.”

Pete finds the compass and brings the plane around, starts heading out for sea. The Acropolis is small below them, a children’s toy box of sandy white structures, looking imminently fragile.

“Lando, what’s the weapons system on this? I can’t tell back here, do you have flares or guns?”

“Yes to both,” Pete says after a moment, locating them. “250 rounds on my gun.”

“Not a lot.”

“No,” Pete agrees. “Do you have a firing system on that Sidewinder?”

“Trying to get it up and running. Help make sure I don’t need to use it.”

“Do my best,” Pete grunts, once again having to wrestle this plane back into submission after an unruly gust off the water. “Jesus, it’s like steering a paper airplane.”

Patrick huffs a laugh behind him.

“It’s been a while, what’s my – Ziggy, what’s the attack envelope on this aircraft, do you remember?”

“I think it’s, like, 50 yards. Something like that.”

“Shit,” Pete swears. If they have any chance of that missile hitting home, Pete has to get the A4 within 50 yards of the enemy aircraft. That’s not exactly a lot of wiggle room.

It’s not a relief, when they leave Athens airspace and reach open ocean, with nothing but scattered islands underneath them. Nobody would dare to attack them over civilian airspace; that’s just a war waiting to happen. But out here? Out here, they can get away with a hell of a lot more. Pete increases the speed on his A4, feels like he’s forcing this little plane through the sky.

He’s not surprised one bit when Patrick’s uber-calm WSO voice says, “Lando, I’ve got two bogeys, on your six.”

Pete doesn’t turn to look; there’s no point. Sweat pools underneath his jacket. He’s not even wearing a flight suit, for fuck’s sake. If there’s a water landing, he has no flotation devices, no parachutes, no nothing. If they hit the water, that’s it, he’s going down. “Think we can probably upgrade these from bogeys to bandits,” he says wryly, and Patrick chokes out a laugh.

“Yeah, okay. I’ve got two bandits, Su-35s, on our six.”

Russian planes. They’re here.

“Ziggy, I’m – “ Pete takes deep, gulping breaths. “I’m gonna have to do some shit right now, I can’t – probably going to do evasive maneuvers, I don’t want to hurt you – “

“You won’t,” Patrick says quickly. “You won’t. I’m in, I’m strapped in. Do what you do best.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God –

“Come on, Lando, give ‘em a dogfight.”

Fuck, he thinks. I’m so sorry, Patrick.

And then he barrel rolls to the left.

The adrenaline swoop punches right in his stomach as he jerks the whole plane around. The Russian planes try to follow, but they’re infinitely less maneuverable than Pete’s tiny little Skyhawk, and he hooks around behind them, up on the knife edge of his wing. He swings in behind one, gropes around until he finds the unfamiliar trigger, unloads the rusty machine gun hidden on his underside until he watches the plane’s engines burst into flame.

“Splash one,” he says, as he speeds away from the ejecting pilot.

Patrick cheers behind him, but Pete’s not celebrating. The other pilot’s already coming around on his tail, trying to get Pete within his weapons envelope. And this A4 is a fucking bullet sponge, if he gets hit there’s no salvaging it and they’re too far from the boat to be picked up.

“Ziggy,” Pete says, still dodging, taking the plane in wide zig zags in the bright sky, “I’m gonna have to invert, you should watch your head – “

“I’m strapped in, cowboy, just punch it!”

Pete grins helplessly, stupidly, as he relaxes his grip on the throttle one degree and hooks it right into his belly while gunning the engine.

The plane swoops up and over, completely dodging the Russian plane, Pete’s helmet knocking into the canopy as he swings all the way around. The glittering ocean is underneath him now, the Russian plane struggling to get high enough.

“Lando,” Patrick says, his voice only a little breathless considering he’s upside down, “I’ve got two more bandits, closing in fast, two o’clock high, tack northeast.”

“Fuck! Three?”

“Yeah, we gotta get out of here! Come on, Lando, do some of that pilot shit!”

Pete stops thinking, stops telegraphing his motions – he’s figured out his little plane now, knows all her little quirks and curves, and starts moving on pure instinct. The first thing he does is fucking gun it, steers the joystick with his right hand while his left slams the throttle as far forward as it’ll go. The plane jerks forward like a rollercoaster, as fast as he can get without his afterburner. There’s nothing but the expanse of ocean now, but he can use that to his advantage; he takes the plane high, flies right into the sun, squints his eyes up until he’s almost blind but knowing that this’ll fuck up the Russian pilots too.

At the apex, when the sun’s burning and he knows the other guys have to be as blind as he is, he kills the engine, drops into free fall, tanks his plane towards the ocean. At the last fucking second he jerks the throttle back up, hears Patrick’s punched out gasp, and then pulls up behind the tailing pilot and fires another deafening round of bullets.

“Splash two!” Patrick cheers, as another plane goes down.

“Yeah, but there’s still two more,” Pete says, already having to bob and weave as the planes figure out his strategy and start chasing after him. “I’m running out of bullets for this shit, I don’t have much ammo left – “

“Oh, well, good thing we got fuckin’ plenty.”

For a brief second Pete thinks he’s hallucinating – but when he turns his head and sees the F-18 streaking towards them, relief floods through him immediately. “Rifter?”

“In the flesh, with missiles.” Joe’s easy drawl coming over his radio has never sounded so good. “Sandman, how’s my laser?”

“Laser code verified, lasers are a go,” comes Andy’s voice, as calm as if they were back in their stateroom. “Fire at will.”

“Lando, get out of the way,” Joe orders, and Pete swoops down towards the ocean as a laser-guided missile drops from under the F-18s belly and streaks towards the Russian plane. The whole thing explodes in a shower of sparks; no chance of ejection there, Pete thinks. Splash three.

Pete dodges out of the debris field and pops up back towards the horizon. One left, he thinks, and sees that they’re heading for the boat at a terrifying speed.

“Jesus, do you think he’s trying to kamikaze this?” Joe barks, as he pulls his plane around to chase after the Russian pilot. Pete’s faster and much closer, but with barely 20 rounds of bullets left there’s not much he can do.

“Ziggy, tell me you’ve got good news,” he begs, as he angles the plane in the right direction.

“I do, I’ve got my targeting system up and running,” Patrick says breathlessly. “We’re a go, get to 50 yards.”

“Strap in,” Pete says, and reaches for the afterburner.

The engine comes alive with a roar as the jet fuel dumps, and the throttle almost jerks out of Pete’s hands as he jumps forward like he’s on a horse. They’re closing in fast, streaking for the Russian pilot, and Pete calculates distances until he’s close enough to yell –

“Hundred – seventy-five – get ready, Ziggy – now!”

“Bombs away,” Patrick yells, and Pete feels and hears as the missile shoots off from them, propelled forward by the heavy push of the airplane, and as it streaks towards the Russian plane Pete has the belated thought that Fuck me, that’s really close to the ship –

The ancient missile makes contact with a deafening boom, and from the deck of the Harry S. Truman the exploding plane probably looks like the Fourth of July.

“Splash four! Splash four!” Joe yells in his ear, and Patrick starts laughing – or maybe he’s crying, hard to tell – from behind Pete.

“Ziggy, are there – where are they – “

“There’s no more,” Patrick says, and yep, it’s a combination laughter-cry, Pete can hear it in his thick voice. “Skies are clear. You did it, babe.”

The endearment slips out and they’re clearly on public radio by now, but Pete can’t even be worried. He did it? He got his boy home? The adrenaline slides out of him so fast he’s worried he’s going to lose control of the plane.

“We did it,” he says instead, and thinks he can hear Patrick smile.

“I mean, I think we did it,” Joe says, and Pete laughs like a madman. “Okay, we’ll go down first and clear the way – I assume there’s no landing gear on that dinosaur you’re flying?”

“I assume not,” Pete says cheerfully. “There usually isn’t when you steal a plane from an abandoned airport.”

“What?”

“Rifter, tell them we’ve got a foul deck, please and thank you,” Patrick says.

“Copy that, I’ll see you two on deck.”

Joe and Andy touch down easily on the boat while Pete makes lazy circles in the sky, killing time while they raise the barricade and prepare to catch them with a plane that has no landing gear. He briefly considers buzzing the island – what are they gonna do, yell at him? He’s a hero – but he’s reprimanded by Patrick’s easy “No.”

God, he’s never taking that voice in his ear for granted again. “I’m taking her down,” Pete says, and eases the stolen Skyhawk down for her last flight.

The barricades catches them easily, a giant steel and mesh net that stops them from skidding off into the sea. And with one last shudder of the engine he’s home, they’re home. Pete takes his shaking hands off the throttle and feels all the adrenaline slump out of his body, as he seriously thinks that he could pass out in the cockpit.

He’s the only one, though – they are promptly and immediately swarmed by the entire deck crew, other aviators, the fucking Air Boss, everyone running up and cheering and shouting, helmets in the air. Pete pops the canopy and waves his hand in a lazy loop, and he’s greeted by a deafening cheer.

Patrick pops up too, and Pete finally can turn around to look at him as he pulls his helmet off to reveal his grinning, flushed face. His smile is blinding as he waves down to the cheering crowd, and he gently shoos them away with his hand as he ducks under and pulls out the ladder.

Pete watches Patrick’s handsome face change, and Pete sits up straight, ready to – he doesn’t know, fire at a guy, it’s been a long day.

But Patrick’s just seen his father, pushing aside the crowds in his haste to get to the plane. Patrick unfolds the ladder, almost braining a tech on the way down, and then scrambles down to the deck. When he finally reaches his dad, they collide together with an audible thump, and Admiral Stump’s arms reach out and hold his son tight enough to squeeze.

It’s too much, it’s too fucking much after a day like they’ve had, and Pete has to sniffle and rub his own eyes. From where he’s sitting in the cockpit he can’t hear them – nobody can, since the cheering is still going on – but he can see the back of Patrick’s head as he furiously nods into his father’s shoulder, and he can see the Admiral’s painfully closed eyes, the way that his mouth barely stops moving. When they finally break away the Admiral breaks all his previous decorum and leans in to kiss Patrick on the top of his head, and Pete knows without looking that Patrick’s ducked his head and trying not to cry.

“Lando,” someone yells, and Pete drags himself out of his fuzzy head to look down. It’s the tech crew lead, grinning up at him. “You wanna jump out of this fossil so we can figure out what to do with it?”

“Oh, yeah,” Pete says, and the guy laughs at Pete’s devil-may-care drawl but Pete knows that it’s just exhaustion and adrenaline and gratitude slowly leeching away the bones holding him up. He could sleep for a fucking week. He gingerly climbs out of the cockpit, leaving behind the borrowed helmet, and climbs down the ladder to hit the deck with a renewed wave of cheering.

Pete makes his way through the deck shaking hands and getting his back slapped like a newborn, grin slowly spreading back over his face. “You’ll tell your fucking grandkids about this, man,” Joe yells as he hugs him, and yeah, shit, Pete will. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. This is a legendary moment.

He looks across the deck, sees Patrick smiling at him from underneath his glasses, and just like up in the air, he moves on pure instinct.

He crosses the deck in five long strides, grabs Patrick by his broad waist, and dips him.

Patrick’s blue eyes go wide with shock and his mouth drops open.

Pete takes the shot.

The deck erupts first in gasps, then in cheers, as Pete kisses him with all the force in his body. He’s two feet from Patrick’s homophobic dad and his hand between Patrick’s shoulder blades is all that’s stopping him from dropping the most important person in life several feet to the hot metal deck and Patrick’s still not kissing him back, so this isn’t exactly a win –

But then Patrick’s arms raise up to drape over Pete’s shoulders, a sweet heavy weight, and his lovely leg raises up to hitch over the jut of Pete’s hip, and he closes his eyes and smiles against Pete’s mouth as he kisses him back.

Take it all back. This is the moment he’ll tell his grandkids about.

Pete lets him go when the shaking in his muscles tells him they’ve had too much bullshit today to be playing these kinds of games, and he better ease up or he’s gonna drop Patrick. He surfaces, triumphant and grinning; Patrick’s blushing and bashful, muttering, “Pete,” as he smiles down at the deck.

“About goddamn time!” Joe yells. Pete could kiss this guy too. “About goddamn time!”

The deck lead shoos away his men, tells them to get back to work. One of the medical team comes up and assesses them; Pete tells them that Patrick’s got it worse than he does and needs an IV of fluids at minimum, so with one last fond look, Patrick heads below decks. Pete’s swaying a little where he stands but he knows he needs to give a mission report, so he doesn’t complain when Admiral Stump makes eye contact and beckons him across the deck.

But Admiral Stump just sighs, and without making eye contact, presses something cold and metal into Pete’s hand.

“I’m going to need a full mission report in the morning,” he says under his breath, so quiet Pete has to duck in to hear him over the noise of the deck. “And I’m fairly sure a lengthy apology will be due to whatever private collector just had his Skyhawk stolen by the United States Navy. But I can give you sixteen hours, at least, to decompress.” He nods down at Pete’s hand.

When Pete opens his fingers, it’s a small metal key. Just like his housekey back in Chicago.

“It’s for room D47,” Stump says, still quiet. “It’s the guest suite. We keep it for when the COMLANTFLT visits, so it’s got a private head, and no one will disturb you.” He lets out a shaky gust of air. “If they don’t need to keep Patrick in sick bay, it’s yours for tonight.”

Pete’s head snaps up and he’s sure his mouth is gaping open like an idiot, because he can’t be implying what Pete thinks he’s implying, right?

“I don’t get your lifestyle,” he says, and wow, okay, yikes. “And I don’t know how much I want to know. I don’t – this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and I’m still very sure that you’re not good enough for my son, and I’m still furious at both of you for lying to me. But,” and he finally makes eye contact, underneath those familiar wispy blonde eyebrows. “You did what you said you would do. You brought him home safe. You’re a man of your word, and I can’t help but respect that. And I know that if I went through whatever the hell you two just went through, I would want time alone with my wife. That’s within my power to give you, so it’s yours.”

Pete feels drunk with whiplash. He was pretty sure when he was kissing Patrick on the deck that he was adding an extra flourish to his discharge papers. “Thank you, sir,” he replies quietly.

Stump sticks out his hand, and Pete quickly moves the key to his pocket to shake it. The gesture is infinitely better than a hug. It’s a sign of respect.

“I’ll hold them off,” Stump says. “Go get him.”

Now it’s Pete’s turn to slip below decks. He all but sprints to the med bay.

It’s a bed. An actual bed.

The bed haunts Pete for the next several hours. He went and took a peek inside the room while Patrick was finishing up in the med bay and he wishes he didn’t. Because while the room is lovely and peaceful the way they never are on aircraft carriers, it’s the queen-sized bed that sticks in his mind. All through dinner, he’s thinking about the bed. All through Patrick’s shower, he’s thinking about the bed. All through Pete’s own brief shower (because showers are all of three minutes on an aircraft carrier), he’s thinking about the bed.

He has never slept with Patrick on an actual bed. Not once in the four-ish years they’ve been doing this. The thought of it has him dizzy. And this time, Patrick doesn’t have to walk away.

Pete comes out from the attached bathroom, luxuriating in being able to walk into the room naked and not be seen by a dozen seamen, to see Patrick in a similar state of glee. He’s running his hands over the plush bedspread, smiling softly to himself.

“This is really nice,” Patrick says quietly. He’s wearing pajamas, for some fucking reason. How does he not get what they’re doing here?

“It is. Hey, do you remember what day we first hooked up?”

Patrick frowns. “No. We were in Korea, I remember that, but I have no clue the day. Why would you want to know that?”

Pete knee-walks onto the bed, his dog tags clinking on his chest, to fall down next to Patrick. “It’s our anniversary, of sorts. I’m sad that I don’t know.”

Patrick blushes, and when his skin is already pink from the shower, it’s entirely too much for Pete. “That’s rather romantic of you, Pete. Want to be careful there.”

“Be careful of what?” Pete doesn’t understand why they’re having this weird ass conversation when there is an actual bed. The things he could do to Patrick in an actual bed.

Patrick reaches out to grab Pete’s hand. “You don’t have to make, like, grand declarations about our anniversary or stuff. It’s okay. We can just…go back to doing what we did before.”

Pete frowns down at him. “Wait, are you – do you think I did all of that just so we could go back to being fuckbuddies?”

“Well, we – “

“Do you think I outed myself to your admiral father, begged him to let me save you, went into another country and stole a plane and shot down an enemy plane, kissed you on the deck of an aircraft carrier in front of half the fucking Navy – so we could go back to being fuckbuddies?”

“It’s what you wanted,” Patrick says stubbornly, his face so red it’s on fire. “It’s what you’ve always said you wanted.”

“Yeah, and I was wrong.” Pete leans over into Patrick’s space, grabs both of his hands. “Patrick, when you were shot down – before that, even, when they reassigned you and you weren’t my WSO anymore – all I could think about was that I had fucked up the greatest thing in my life. And if I ever got you back, I was done being a halfassed little coward. You know how I convinced your dad to let me go get you? I told him that I loved you.” A soft little noise punches out of Patrick’s mouth. “And it’s so fucking true. I love you and I want to be with you, all the gross stuff, all the soppy stuff, all the boyfriend stuff. Holding your hand in public and taking you to dinner parties and the house and kids and everything you want.”

“Oh my God,” Patrick whispers, like this is fucking news to him. Like Pete went undercover into enemy territory for platonic dude-bro reasons.

Or maybe this isn’t news to him. Pete’s stomach sinks. “If you don’t feel the same way, though, that’s totally fine, you don’t have to – “

“Pete, you goddamn idiot,” Patrick says, and surges up to kiss him.

This time, when Patrick knocks him down and climbs in his lap, Pete’s head isn’t hitting hard metal floors covered only by a thin plastic mattress. This time, when Patrick sits up to pull his shirt off and throw it to the other side of the room, the shirt doesn’t hit another bunk. They’re on a bed, and it’s big and soft, and Pete would run his hands over the mattress if he was capable of moving them from their designated spot on Patrick’s soft hips.

“I’ve been in love with you for years,” Patrick says, and Pete grins so hard it hurts.

There is a promise that is due, though. When Patrick finally wiggles out of his pajama pants, Pete flips them over so Patrick’s back hits the soft mattress, and he swallows him down with barely a few licks of preparation. Patrick groans, throwing his head back so Pete can see the gorgeous tendons in his neck strain and pull. Pete’s not usually very good at sucking cock, but tonight he trots out every trick in the book – creating a rhythm, gently rolling Patrick’s balls in his hand, teasing and petting over his hole as he flicks his tongue over and around the slit. Patrick’s gorgeous noises above him drown out the noise of the aircraft carrier, help to quiet the buzzing that’s taken up residence in Pete’s head since he was a child.

Right when Patrick’s panting Pete pulls off and rolls him over, tucking Patrick’s rosy knees underneath him to show his lovely hole and now-famous birthmark. He tries to make up for four years worth of neglect with every sweep of his tongue, with every twitch in Patrick’s generous thighs and every bit-off sigh out of his mouth. The room narrows into a single point of focus, the complete opposite of every study session Pete’s ever attempted. I think this is it, he thinks like a madman, as he laves his tongue over and inside Patrick. I think I finally grew up.

“Pete,” Patrick murmurs. “I’m ready, come on.”

“No, I want to make you come like this!”

“No, nonono, I like it when you’re inside. Makes me feel close to you.” Patrick wiggles his ass, throws a saucy look over his shoulder that almost kills Pete right then and there. “Come on, stick jockey.”

Pete reluctantly has to let Patrick win this one, but – “Not like this. I want to see you.”

“Pete – “ Patrick says with a laugh, but Pete’s not laughing.

“After the day we fucking had? I can’t not look at you.”

Patrick sighs, but when he turns around to face Pete, he’s smiling. His glasses are abandoned on the beside table (an actual bedside table! Not the floor!) and it makes his face so much more open. Pete feels like he can read every little twitch, every microexpression, every flavor of smile.

“Come here.” Patrick beckons him with a hand, and Pete follows. Patrick arranges Pete so he’s sitting back against the headboard, legs straight out in front him, knees slightly bent. Pete feels silly with his rock-hard cock sticking straight up in his lap until Patrick throws a smooth leg over his hips, plants one hand on the headboard. Immediately Pete’s overwhelmed with the sight – Patrick’s marble throat, the pulse jumping under his pale skin, his chest covered with fine dark hair, his dog tags nestled in between his pecs, the quirk of his generous pink lips.

“How’s this?” Patrick whispers, reaching behind him to guide Pete inside.

“It’s – oh,” Pete moans, as his neglected dick finally slides home into lush velvet. Tears spring up, unbidden, as he’s completely overwhelmed with the solemnity of this moment. What an absolute fucking honor, that Patrick lets Pete inside of his body. That for those few scant inches, they are as close as two people can be. And Patrick hasn’t been with anyone else, not in years and years. This is a privilege only granted to Pete, in all his flaws and all his fuckups.

“Patrick, I love you,” he says, voice thick.

“I love you too.” Patrick sighs as he starts to rock, both hands slipping upwards to rest on Pete’s shoulders. “You’re right,” he says, eyes closed, chin tilted towards the ceiling. “This is better.”

He finally opens his blue eyes and doesn’t move them, even as he rocks back and forth, using his powerful abs and thighs to bring them closer in pulsing waves, lined up with the rocking ocean beneath them. Pete has no leverage to thrust, can do nothing but sit and take it, and that’s exactly how it should be. As Patrick speeds up and starts to thrust back on it, rising up and down on his knees with his gorgeous cock sliding against Pete’s stomach, Pete grabs tight to the sweaty skin of his back and wishes this moment could stretch, endless, only ending when he’s finally had enough and not when his traitorous body decides for him.

“Inside me,” Patrick whispers, his face inches from Pete’s. “It’s my favorite. Feeling you, in my body, leaving a part of yourself behind.”

Well, shit, there’s no way Pete’s lasting long after that.

“Patrick,” he whispers, like a prayer, and he knows Patrick can hear it by his loose, joyful smile.

“Sweetheart,” Patrick replies, running a hand through Pete’s dark hair. He’s not one for endearments; the word hooks right in Pete’s gut. “Come on, babe, you can let go.”

Pete shakes his head. “Don’t want it to end.” But it has to – he’s holding off his orgasm by the skin of his teeth. It’s building, deep in his sacrum and the join of his hips, even as all he wants to focus on is the stretch of Patrick’s skin, the grind of his ass, his plush bottom lip. He can’t look away.

“Don’t you get it? It’s not going to end.” Patrick plants his hands on Pete’s shoulders for leverage, starts a devastating bounce, ratcheting up the heat with the perfect amount of friction and pressure. “We’re in it now, right?” He says, every breathy word punched out of his stomach. “So it’s not going to end. You got me, Pete Wentz, I’m all yours.”

And that – Pete sobs when his release floods out of him, blacking out from the sensation, throwing his head back and hitting the padded headboard so hard he sees stars. Patrick rocks him through that, gentle hands petting over Pete’s face and shoulders and stomach, wiping away his tears.

“It’s okay, babe,” he whispers. “I’m here. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. Come on, let it out, you’re okay.”

“You’re too good to me,” Pete says, his words loose and open, like his lips can’t quite close around the vowels.

“It’s what you deserve.” Pete can hear the moment that Patrick’s grin turns wicked. “Just like I deserve to come, so let’s go, hot shot.”

And that’s – God, how does he always know exactly what Pete needs? The tiny laugh is all Pete needs to feel human again, to drag him back from the edge of drifting in a sea of drunk gratitude. He reaches a hand down to find Patrick’s burning-hot dick, and he strips it with just-tight-enough strokes that have Patrick thrusting up and grunting. When Patrick finally releases, he sighs as he paints Pete’s chest and neck and hand.

“Always better when you’re inside me,” he says, completely unselfconscious about it, and when he drops his head to Pete’s shoulder, Pete leans over and presses a kiss to the sweaty hair above his ear, and for a brief moment, everything awful in the universe shudders into stillness.

And it’s been wonderful, this past hour has already been top five experiences of Pete’s life – culminating in this, right now, having Patrick Stump limp and sighing in his lap, pressing kisses to his hair. But what pushes this over the edge into number one?

Patrick stands up and walks on shaky legs into the bathroom to grab a wet washcloth – and then he comes back. Pete’s watched Patrick walk away a hundred times, running out of storerooms and bunks and wherever else they’ve managed to stash themselves. Pete’s grown accustomed to the exact way that Patrick looks from behind when he’s running off down a hall.

This look – Patrick walking towards him, naked and smiling – this is a new one. And Pete doesn’t think he’ll ever get enough.

“Let me,” he says, reaching for the washcloth.

“Okay,” Patrick says easily, and flops back on the bed. While Pete cleans him up with slow sweeps, Patrick stretches out, rolling his shoulders into the bed, kneading like a cat. “God, having a bed is incredible.”

“I know. I can’t believe your dad let us use it.”

“Don’t talk about my dad,” Patrick groans, throwing a hand over his eyes. “I’m trying to forget his role in this entire thing.”

Pete finishes cleaning Patrick, rubs the washcloth over his own belly with a few cursory swipes, and throws it into the head with a wet splat. He leans over Patrick, his heart leaping at the way Patrick’s face curls into a smile automatically, and leans in like he’s going to kiss him.

Instead, he whispers right in Patrick’s ear, “Your dad wants us to fuck.”

“Pete!” He pushes him away, giggling all the while. “Jesus Christ.”

“Your dad literally told me to go have hyper-nasty, sodomy sex.”

“Who calls it sodomy sex?”

Pete grins and leans over to a side cabinet. He’s got a hunch that he knows what’s inside, and he’s rewarded when he pulls out a dusty bottle of champagne.

“Do you think two Navy heroes get to pop the Dom?”

“Oh, shit.” Patrick sits up and reaches out for it. His eyes are hungry as he turns it over. “Oh, we’re going to get in trouble if we drink this.”

“At this point I can’t tell if we’re dishonorably discharged or if we’re getting the Medal of Freedom, so we might as well go down with the ship.”

Patrick wants it, Pete can tell. Alcohol is very strictly regulated on an aircraft carrier. Every once in a while, they’ll do a Beer Day, where they’ll give out two cans of lukewarm Bud Light as a reward for good behavior and then make the sailors drink them in front of their CO’s to prevent beer hoarding. A bottle of champagne, all theirs for the taking, with no Big Brother watching over them? This is unheard of an aircraft carrier.

“Go see if there’s any glasses,” Patrick says, like Pete knew he would.

There aren’t, but that doesn’t stop them; Patrick pops the bottle right there on the bed and they pass it back and forth, giggling like teenagers. The champagne is room temperature and sticky sweet on Pete’s tongue, so drastically different from his usual Navy-approved diet that he’s getting drunk just on the variety.

He would like to blame it on the champagne, but the truth is this question begs to be asked, regardless of sobriety. “So…you had a crush on me when you first saw me?” Pete asks, unable to stop the smile on his face.

Patrick groans and tips head to the side. “Of course you picked up on that part.”

“How could I not?”

“Fair enough,” Patrick says with a laugh. “I mean…yeah, Pete. They introduced you to me and said you were gonna be my pilot and I thought, God, I’m in trouble. I spent that whole first day torn between praying you were straight and praying you were very far from straight.”

Pete preens, because he’s not a saint. “Was I the first Navy guy you hooked up with?”

Patrick snorts. “No.”

“No? Really? Even with the risk of being caught?”

“No, definitely not.” Patrick takes a swig of champagne, and he looks unfairly hot with the bottle pressed to his lips. “Honestly I kind of figured that you knew that, and that’s why you went for me.”

“Knew what?”

“That I was a slut at Annapolis.”

Pete rears back like he’s been shot. “What?”

Patrick shrugs easily, even as he won’t make eye contact with Pete. “I had – have – a reputation, I’m surprised you haven’t heard about me. I got around a lot at the Naval Academy. I didn’t see a lot of action in high school, so when I got to college, I went a little…overboard. I was skinny-ish for the first time in my life, surrounded by hot guys who had similar interests as me and weren’t going to make fun of me for wanting to study. It was pretty easy to get a little drunk on it. Plus, there were plenty of people willing to fuck an Admiral’s son. I think they got off on it.”

“I had no idea,” Pete says, although now that he’s said that, some comments about Patrick now make a lot more sense. There have always been people who were very interested in Pete’s relationship with his WSO, but Pete always figured it was the Admiral’s son thing. “I didn’t go to the Academy, though, so I’m not sure when I would have heard.”

“So, yeah. You made a move, I figured this was just you hearing about Slutty Stumpy and wanting your chance to take a ride on the class bicycle – “ Holy shit, Pete can’t even comprehend that, “and besides, you made it plenty clear that you didn’t want anything else. I knew it was a bad idea, I knew I was going to get in too deep with you, and besides I’d never slept with someone I worked with as closely as my pilot, someone I had to see every day. But what was I supposed to do, say no? I’d been staring at you for months at that point, I was about to explode.”

Pete remembers that first time they hooked up, how charged it felt, how percussive. He swears he had bruises on his hips for weeks. “After that first time you had trouble sitting in the cockpit,” he says with a leer.

Patrick bites down on his lip. “Yeah, I did, you asshole. And I liked it, obviously, but I started getting daydreams about us being together, about waking up for pancakes and coffee back stateside, and…those weren’t exactly productive dreams. I’m not getting any younger, and you had never seemed to take a second look, and I thought, You’re just signing yourself up for heartbreak, Stump.” Patrick shakes his head. “Still took me years to break it off, though. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for being a big boy and breaking up with you – feeling very shitty as well, I cried so hard that first night in my new bunk – but proud of myself nonetheless, and then my plane blew up and you came and rescued me.”

“Patrick,” Pete says, because he needs to make sure this is crystal clear, “you are gorgeous. And I was a fucking idiot for not seeing that. I want that, I want pancakes and coffee and a house and kids and all of that with you, if it’s still on offer. I’m sorry it took me so long to see that.”

Patrick’s got stars in his eyes when he reaches out and fits a hand to Pete’s cheek. “It is very much still on offer,” he says softly, “but, Pete, you know you’re not a bad guy for not wanting that. I don’t know if you knew that. I don’t want you to beat yourself up over that when it’s a perfectly okay thing to want if both parties agree to it. I was never that mad at you for not wanting me, I was mostly mad at myself for wanting more.”

Pete leans into the hand, rubbing himself against it like a cat. “Did I ever tell you why I joined the Navy?” He says, words slipping out before he has a chance to consider them.

“No, not really. I know you enlisted after college.”

Pete nods. “You know, the adventure and the structure and all of that shit – that was appealing. I was a punk rock kid as a teenager, someone telling me what to do sounded pretty good. But I also…there was a guy.”

“Okay,” Patrick says slowly.

“We got together sophomore year, we were living together by senior year. He was…” Pete swallows. “He was amazing. I thought he was the one, you know? I was picking out rings, we were talking about a spring wedding, the whole shebang.”

The look on Patrick’s face says that he knows how this story ends.

Pete forces himself to keep going. God, how long has it been since he talked about Mikey? “Look, I mean, it was both of our faults, and we don’t need to get into all of it. Bad communication, and all that, bad form on both of our parts. Just didn’t take the time to really understand each other and have the hard conversations. Sounds familiar, right?” Patrick grants him a smile. “Anyway, long story short, he got the apartment, I cancelled my appointment at the jewelers, I crashed on a friend’s couch for the two months before graduation.”

“Oh, Pete.”

Pete blushes, unwilling to accept pity for something that was at least 60% his fault. “Yeah, so. I hadn’t quite figured out what to do with a polisci degree anyway when I saw the recruiter. And honestly, I knew about the military homophobia, I knew that they wouldn’t tolerate dating. And that was at a point in my life where not dating sounded like the right call anyway. And if it was forbidden on the boat, and almost impossible on land because of the boat – well, that was the dream scenario.”

Patrick nods. “That makes sense.”

“I put up all these hurdles in my way so I couldn’t date, and I was twenty-two and stupid so it made a lot of sense.” The words flow out of Pete. “And then I go back to Chicago on my first leave and I rock up to the bar in my Navy whites and I get more ass than a toilet seat, and I think, Oh, this is perfect. Get my dick wet and no chance of getting my heart broken again. Thriving career, cool job, plenty of tail, heart stays out of it.”

“I mean, it does honestly sound like the perfect set up.”

“It was. And then my WSO’s plane blew up and I thought I was having a heart attack on the deck. That’s when I realized that there might have been a few flaws in my perfect plan.”

Patrick grins and settles back into the pillows. “How the mighty fall in love,” he says.

“Ooh, I like that. Sounds like it should be a song.”

“I mean, there are still a few flaws in our perfect plan.” Patrick reaches out for the champagne bottle. “I mean, my dad might turn a blind eye to a lot of stuff, but this is still fraternization between two officers in the Navy. I don’t know how much he’s going to be okay with that, and if we get transferred to a new ship, we’ll have to start from scratch again. It might be a long time before the pancakes-and-coffee fantasy comes true.”

“Well, not that long,” Pete says. “My commission is up at the end of next year. How about yours?”

“A few months after that,” Patrick says with a frown. “But I figured you were going to re-enlist.”

Pete shrugs. “Yeah, if there wasn’t anything else more compelling. I might’ve found something more compelling.”

“But, Pete – “ Patrick sits up, the folds of his stomach bunching up, holding the half-empty champagne bottle close. “You can’t – you can’t quit the Navy for me.”

“Well, sure I can.”

“But you love being a pilot.”

“I sure do. But it’s not everything I am. Right now the thought of finding a different job where I’m not shot at every day sounds pretty good. Besides, I just stole a Skyhawk and shot down an enemy plane with it, I really feel like I’ve hit the pilot lottery here. Not sure it’s ever going to get better than this.”

Patrick takes a slow swig of champagne, and Pete can practically hear the gears in his head turning. “I could go to grad school,” he says. “Use the GI bill and get my master’s. Do consulting, something rich and stupid.”

“No one knows more about this stuff than you,” Pete says, and watches as Patrick smiles.

“You should’ve seen my grades in high school,” he brags. “God, I was such a nerd, no wonder no one wanted to fuck me.”

“Your dad said you didn’t have a date to prom.”

Patrick groans, loud and agonized. “Jesus Christ, Dad, what the fuck? Also, he’s wrong, Kristi Carver asked me but I said no. I didn’t want to get my dad’s hopes up that there was a chance I could be straight. I figured it was easier for him to think I was a weird loner.”

“Is that why you joined the Navy? So you could date in secret?”

Patrick giggles. “You’ve asked that before – do you think that just because you have a sob story, that everyone else does? You can’t join the military for normal reasons?”

“Are there normal reasons for joining the military?”

“Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” Patrick says. “A lot of people think I joined cause of my dad, and my grandpa, and the Navy reputation. A lot of people think I joined so that I could be a part of the gayest branch of the armed forces. Some people think I joined so I could be a bossy little know-it-all and they’d pay me for it. And all of these people are half right. But at the end of the day, I joined the Navy,” and here Patrick grins, slow and easy, “because flying fighter jets is cool as fuck, and it’s all I wanted to do ever since my dad told me about Top Gun when I was a kid.”

Pete leans over and kisses him, hard and fast. “Patrick Stump, you adrenaline junkie!” He crows. “You have everyone thinking that you’re a nerd; but you just want to fly fast planes and fuck pretty boys!”

“I want to fly fast planes and fuck pretty boys,” Patrick says, words curling out of his plush mouth like smoke. “You got it.”

Pete comes back to earth pretty quick. “But you don’t want to give that up. You would re-enlist, if you got that chance.”

“Well, it’s like you said.” He puts the champagne bottle down on the bedside table, rolls over into Pete’s space. He pillows his head on Pete’s thigh and smiles up at him. “I’ve gotten to fly a lot of fast planes, and I’m currently fucking a very pretty boy. So you know, I’m not sure it’s ever going to get any better than this in the Navy.”

Pete reaches down and intertwines his fingers with Patrick’s. “Do you want to find out what life is like after the Navy?”

“With you?” Patrick replies. “I want to find out everything with you.”

Pete hauls him up, and Patrick comes up giggling and sits in Pete’s lap, leaning forward to press hot, searching kisses to Pete’s lips. They’ve got eight more hours in this room; six months left on the Harry S. Truman; another fourteen months in the Navy.

After that? The future stretches out in front of them, as bright and glittering and limitless as the horizon over the blue ocean.