#RDML stands for rear admiral lower half

[pollyna]

After he dies, someone in the Navy starts to play with the idea of making a biography of Iceman's life. Annapolis, Pensacola, Top Gun, the Gulf, all the missions, all the secret missions he took part in, and his stellar career in the Admiralty, all crowned by the four starts on his shoulders. And how to pass the possibility of finally having answers to all the voices about his private life? About a wife who wasn't really a wife, kids who aren't his own and used to call him uncle, the kid of another dead naval aviator who still calls him dad and all the torrid affair, supposedly, with captain Mitchell?

What they give Daniel to start somewhere is the address of a place lost in the desert and a house two hours from the nearest Naval base. The woman who lives in the second place takes one look at him and says "You can tell the Navy they can all fuck themselves and if someone tries to publish a single word on Tom I'm going to sue everyone for so much money they're going to start to have to pay everyone in candies and I'll be able to solve the food problem of the world and still fuckin' rich" before closing the door on his face. The man of the first address, now RDML Mitchell, offers him a glass of water in a hangar full of planes, bikes and spare parts with enough grief written all over his face that Daniel doesn't have the strength for asking a single damn question.

"It's not your story, or theirs, to tell." Mitchell says, smiling softly, touching the wedding ring around his finger. By the time Daniel finds himself leaving, the man is already moving around, moving this and that part, searching for something. He notices it, just before leaving the hangar: a panel of pictures with a young, tall, and blond guy hugging a kid, kissing a shorter brunet aviator, in another his arm around a guy taller than him and then the same guy growing in his adult features, still kissing a now older brunet aviator, a wedding pics, graduations and Christmas, the woman who threats to sue the Navy dancing with another woman, and so many more pictures Daniel doesn't know if a day will be enough to see them all.

"It's not your story to tell," he repeats to the Admirals two days later "his ex-wife threatens to sue the Navy for enough damage to make you close the whole hovel around here."

"Someone else will write it if you won't." One of them says.

"Let them try. I don't think they're going to receive the same hospitality, next time."