#Bradley & Mav

[sdrose93]

TG 1986 and TGM 2022

Pete and Bradley ❤❤

[halestrom]

part 1 of my favorite top gun maverick quotes series

[enthyrea]

movie night 🍿

(halfway through a star wars marathon. bob and mickey are having a great time! the rest of the daggers… well.)

[vannral]

icemav's ways to flirt: banter and longing looks

[onehoplessromantic]

rooster is the epitome of are you fucking serious

[took-my-breath-away]

the people have chosen…. and they have chosen death icemav

thanks for participating in the poll! according to the other votes, my next drawings will be; MORE catdad mav, old man mav doing old man things and some kiddo rooster / mav wholesomeness (though the above kinda infers this).

please submit any ideas you have to my asks box, I love scribbling. for freeeee!

[iceiceicecold]

thinking of making a top gun polaroid series out of this 😋

[cirr0stratus]

something something rooster and hangman at the academy

[military-newsboys]

Goose: I wonder if different brands of shampoo taste different Mav: They do Goose: Ice: Slider: Mav: Wait, ask me again and I'll hesitate before answering this time.

[paxdracona]

Goose and Carole absolutely made it their mission to love on Mav so hard he'd be too bowled over to even attempt to put on a cocky flirty persona for them (most of the time). Add little Bradley to the mix and Mav never stood even the tiniest chance ♥

(i'm decreeing that this is an Everyone LIVES au and a few years later Mav brings a slightly bewildered Ice into the fold because I love everyone loving each other okaY)

[pollyna]

au in which Mav speaks a lot about their child, and Rooster gets insanely jealous of someone he doesn't know because he is supposed to be their only kid, okay?!

At least until Mav doesn't invite all the daggers to his home, and Ice is sleeping with said kid on Bradley's favourite armchair. But instead of a human child between the Iceman's arms, there's a cat. The cutest fucking cat ever seeing on the face of the planet but still, a cat.

Months later, Uncle Slider is still teasing him for being jealous of a cat while Ice pats his curles and "as if we would ever replaced you, baby goose."

[spankmespence]

boyfriend!bradley, boyfriend!bradley, boyfriend!bradley 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

[luxu1230]

So I don't know how many people will remember this

And then a prompt comes to me.

So it's a few years before Top Gun: Maverick and the darkstar project has gone as far as let's build a fast plane and it's just came across Iceman and Maverick radar...

So Javy and Jake are room mates and Jake is smart like 157 IQ smart. He goes out for a drink and comes back sloshed and begs Javy to give him paper as he's got an 'awesome' idea. Javy then proceeds to watch Jake draw and calculate an entire fucking plane which '"can go Mach 9 Javy Mach fucking 9" and then proceeds to go help his best friend once he falls unconscious face down in a the paper.

So here's the thing Javy keeps his social media on private and the only people who have access are close enlisted friends and one or two admirals he's served under. Javy completely forgetting this post it on his private twitter never realising what he's about to unleash.

Come a week later Javy and Jake get called to a meeting with Admiral Iceman and Capt Maverick. They come out with Jake getting an in on a top secret project the you guessed it darkstar.

Fast forward a few years Jake's been all but adopted by Pete and Tom who are surprisingly good at hiding the fact they're married.

Jake finds out he's being recalled to top gun and it's the same except ice has also recruited him to try and make rooster and Mav make up.

The mission is a success and Bradley kisses him on the flight deck and Mav knows he's already in deep shit with Iceman about this mission so he finds it the best time to tell Jake that the plane he's been working on may or may not have gotten destroyed and that was the opening ice needed to push him and Bradley together was due to that.

So Mav may have spent two weeks in the sofa one week punishment from ice and the other week a punishment for both Mav and ice from Jake.

[the-ace-with-spades]

(another unfinished post i found on the way to glasgow - that was the longest train ride in my life - I'm sorry in advance)

When Ice finally passes away, at the age of 73, in his sleep, Bradley moves Mav into their house the same day.

He gets the call in the morning, while trying to simultaneously cook Jake's breakfast and try to make their daughter put on a rain jacket. It's not Mav, but someone from the hospital. Jake doesn't know this — Bradley's face twitches only for a second and then he's back to the nagging, relaxing tone and telling their daughter it's raining and it won't stop. Jake only finds out when he comes back home from the school drop-off and Mav is already there on their couch. Jake doesn't even get the full explanation until that night, just a quick, "Ice passed away overnight."

There's only their three youngest living with them at the time — their 18-year-old daughter who attends UC San Diego, and their 15-year-old son who is still in high school, and their 7-year-old daughter — so Mav takes one of the vacant bedrooms.

The first few nights, Bradley sleeps in the same bed with him. Neither of them looks like they get much sleep. They don't really eat, either, just drink coffee and nibble on the crackers.

The kids start coming back home, and their oldest helps Jake arrange most of the things for the funeral, at least for the first few days. Mav is... numb, not really there, and Jake understands — he would, too, if he woke up one day and his husband died in his sleep next to him. Bradley is silent, mostly, the way he usually rambles to fill out the silence, the way he hums, the way he sings at any given time when there are no words spoken, it's all gone and Jake doesn't know how to fill out the silence either, how to ask, how to make it better without asking.

Bradley doesn't cry, or at least not the way he knows Mav does — he can see Mav's red eyes every morning — but there's something empty in his gaze, in the way his eyes follow Mav and in the way he melts whenever Mav is around, always close, always brushing against him. Mav spaces out a lot, doesn't talk much, doesn't—well, doesn't do much. Every time he tries to help with something, paperwork, the funeral arrangements, the hospital bills, even just sorting out the kids' school leave or Jake's own work leave, he fumbles a bit, not really able to focus on anything for long, and it's like his mind is completely scrambled. Jake doesn't know how to help him — doesn't know if they even can.

The kids, well, did not take it well, as expected. The oldest two try to be brave and help Jake with everything, keep the house going, but their youngest daughter doesn't really understand why her pops isn't back, the middle kids don't understand why now — Ice was in remission, in good health, would go hiking with them once a month, play with them in the backyard, talking about plans for the future with them, nothing that would tell them to expect their pops passing away. Mav and Ice had taken care of all of them for years, while Jake and Bradley were still deployable, and helping out as much as they could. Ice was a huge part of their lives, since the very beginning.

Bradley is certainly not doing any better but one couldn't be able to tell if they didn't know him well enough. He's always been more for packing his feelings into a tight neat box, compartmentalizing until there is too much and it all overflows in some explosive way. His focus is mostly on Mav and the kids, trusting Jake to take care of anything he can't.

Jake can't even ask him how he's doing until the night before the funeral.

Mav tells Bradley he wants to be alone that night and Bradley lands in their bedroom.

He acts normal — checks the kids are in bed, checks on Mav, prepares stuff for breakfast in the morning, has a shower. Only when he sits down in their bed, their dress blues, cleaned and pressed sitting on the hangers hooked up on their wardrobe, right in front of him—only then he freezes, a blank stare still on the uniforms.

Jake sits down next to him on the bed. "Talk to me, Bradley."

"I knew it was going to happen at some point, I just," "I just thought we would have a few more years."

Bradley sleeps curled up on his chest — he sleeps the whole night, soundlessly, and Jake is almost settled.

Almost. Mav is a couple doors down, alone.

Ice's been—had been retired many years now, but he had been high enough in the ranks that the Navy still insists on making a military funeral. Jake tried to take away as much of the flashy bullshit as possible, but there are still things leftover — the sailors with the flag, the flyover. But there's no one who wasn't close with the family at the ceremony, there's no speeches, and no one tries to hand either Mav or Bradley a flag.

The wake has an even smaller amount of people, all packed in their house — Mav hasn't been at his own house since — and thanks to Slider, mostly, and his 'the bastard wouldn't want us to mope around', it's less sad and quiet.

Mav eats two slices of cake, which is the most Jake's seen him eat since, and even laughs at some stories about Ice people are exchanging.

Ice had a good life. A big family. A big happy family that loved him.

But life goes on without him. Jake goes back to work first, then the kids have to go back to school, then Bradley has to back to work. After a couple of days alone at their house, Mav starts bringing up moving back to his own house.

He's not really doing great. He's still quiet, still spaces out more often than not, still forgets himself sometimes, still freezes whenever he tries to say something and the we he uses is one person short. He's—lifeless, for a lack of better word, and seems like he's noticing it now that Bradley isn't with him most of the waking hours.

"That is our home," Mav tells them. "I can't abandon it forever, I'd be abandoning him, too, if I—"

Jake—Jake gets it. He doesn't like it, but he gets it.

Bradley's been fielding off any suggestions of Mav moving out but he's pretty sure that soon Mav is going to pack his stuff and up and leave without asking for permission.

"If he wants to move back home, we can't exactly hold him here. against his will."

"Jake," Bradley says. "I feel like—if we let Mav go back there alone, he's going to die of a broken heart and I won't have either of them anymore."

"Sweetheart—"

"I know it's selfish," he interrupts, "but I can't lose him, too. Not now."

Jake can't make Mav stay with them — so he finds the best solution he can and instead, they all move in with Mav. Hell with it, he's going to try to get everyone to live their lives to the end. They'd done it before, Mav, Ice, Bradley, Jake and their two kids under one roof, when their oldest two were their only two kids.

The two of them and two of their youngest; two of their kids move into their house so they don't have to sell it.

Mav lives on. They try to occupy his mind by throwing their youngest at him — ask him to take her to school, pick her up from school, take her to her gymnastics class, do her homework with her, teach her how to play piano. The other kids pick up on it, too, and their high schoolers would wrap Mav into doing math workbooks with them, or ask him to drive them to their friends' house, and the kids that have moved out ask Mav to go to lunch together or call him to ask him things about car and house repairs that don't exist.

Mav gets brighter every day. Never as bright as before, but no longer so numb.

Their daughter ends up never moving out and so do they.

They all get older but Mav holds up pretty well. He does break his hip when trying to wash the windows, had a limp and terrible back ache ever since, had to stop driving because he can't see shit, had to stop piloting even sooner, and his memory is also shit, but Jake is pretty sure his cholesterol is lower than his own and he has better blood pressure than Bradley. Bradley and Mav are the ones cooking after all, Jake is the one eating all the tasty but not healthiest food, and Mav's life revolves around spoiling his cute great-grandkids and Bradley's is filled with the constant stress of managing Navy's top flying school.

For his ninetieth birthday, Mav flies a fighter jet as a passenger, the oldest person to ever do that — his youngest granddaughter is the one to take him up in the air, a junior grade lieutenant herself. They have a birthday party held at their house, Mav falls asleep in the armchair, Bradley makes fun of him and promptly falls asleep on the couch, too. Jake loves them both so much and still kind of can't believe he has this — house full of grown-up kids and grandkids of his own, his graying husband of over thirty years, his father-in-law coming to an age he wanted to see his mother at.

They're cleaning up, their two daughters who still don't have kids and didn't need to go home helping, and Mav tells them he's going to get some fresh air on their veranda. "I've got a terrible headache," is all he says.

Half an hour passes, they've packed all the clean and dirty dishes, and Bradley huffs to himself. "He fell asleep on the bench again, didn't he," and goes outside.

Bradley shouts for him in less than a minute. The ambulance is there in eight. Within the half-hour and a CT scan in the hospital, the neurologist tells them Mav is too far gone to survive the day. Within six hours, every single person from their family has come to say goodbye. When they pass the seven hours mark, Jake stands up from the plastic chair behind Bradley — he's not about to tell Bradley he should rest, but he's been holding Mav's hand since the minute they admitted Mav to the ward and hasn't eaten or drunk anything all day. He tells him he'll go grab them a coffee and bagels and gets a little nod and a smile.

Jake comes back twenty minutes later and Bradley doesn't even look up from where he's gripping Mav's hand.

"Can you get the nurse for me?"

[sdrose93]

The fact that the bar scene where Mav's watching from the window wasn't even in the script, makes it that much more touching 😭😭💔

[took-my-breath-away]

art idea: icemav in the stands at one of bradley’s baseball games (elementary, middle, or high school — i feel like he played for a while). i would love to see them in baseball caps, cheering, with sodas and hot dogs and the whole nine yards.

i love icemav doing different activities (especially on romcom esque dates), so if that jogs anything either, i’d love to see it! thanks for making such great art.

he struggled for months to hit it right, nerves wracking through him.

but this time he waited... for the right moment. it finally came.