Only The Good Die Young (Top Gun fanfic)

Tennessee Whiskey

***

Who we are is what comes out when shit goes bad. You can't tell anything about a person when things are great. If you want to really know someone, be there when everything goes to hell.

Eileen Cook

***

Neil Vikander, callsign Omaha.

Steady, ready for development.

Neil's callsign was a silly thing, though he was proud of it. Nebraskan born and raised, he'd gone to school in Omaha all the way up until the Naval Academy. The first day of class, they'd all been asked to give a short elevator pitch about themselves and where they were from.

Most of his classmates hadn't believed Nebraska was a state, let alone where it was on a map of the US.

It had turned into a joke, with Neil insisting it was a real place and his classmates refusing to believe him.

Sure thing, Omaha.

Until one of the instructors had overheard and as, he told the class, lost a bit of his faith in the human race. He'd pulled up a map and made them all memorize it, and they've called Neil Omaha ever since he stood up and laughed at his fellow classmates when they'd been proven wrong.

He meet Callie in the Academy and it only took about two seconds for an all-consuming crush to erupt, which was exactly how long it took her to lay him out in the hallway for an inappropriate joke.

Given what he knows about her sense of humor now, he knows she over-reacted, but he's never wanted to embarrass her by bringing it up again.

There were no girls like Callie around where Neil grew up. She loud and bright and worked her ass off to be one of the best. She was aggressive in the sky, sometimes too much so, but she was always ready to listen and help.

He's been in love with her ever since.

Not in a weird way.

In a comfortable, this is a fact of life way, that he has no intention of ever acting on.

He thought about it before, when they were at the Academy and then in flight school. Watching the others fumble their way through romantic entanglements had gone a long way to convincing him it was terrible idea.

Bradley and Natasha and Jake and Javy and the mess that was the four of them was definitely a giant, blinking warning sign.

In neon.

Callie brings it up sometimes, when they're relaxing together and she just needs to talk.

Neil's always been better at listening than talking himself, so it's easy to go through the motions of cooking and cleaning while Callie attempts, and sometimes succeeds, to help while keeping up a running commentary about everything that's going on.

Neil's not blind, but he likes hearing about it from her point of view.

Callie's convinced there's going to be a wedding before the year is out. Jake had told her he'd never ask because of his family curse, which is still weird to say seriously, but she had it on good authority, Nat and Bob, that Bradley had gone to the bank that held his parent's old safety deposit box.

Bradley had kept it after his mother had died and stored a few precious family heirlooms in it.

Including his parent's wedding rings.

They weren't anything really special. Cheap gold dulled with age and wear. His parents had married impulsively in Vegas with just Pete as a witness and the rings had been the cheapest the chapel offered.