Only The Good Die Young (Top Gun fanfic)

When I Call Your Name

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You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

John Green

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Mary Seresin is not a kind woman.

She knows what she left her children wasn't a gift. She could have let it all end with her, but she was too stubborn, too proud, too defiant to lay down and die.

She's not natural gifted at anything, but she works hard.

She gets that from her mother.

Rebecca Smalls grew up down the road from John Seresin, one of the many small, family-owned ranches protected by the Seresin umbrella. She'd known since kindergarten that she was going to marry him, though it took him a while to come around.

Boys are slow like that, she always told Mary. Make sure you pick one worth waiting for.

Mary never had her mother's patience, though.

And no matter how many times her father insisted she lives her life to make herself happy, she could never put the family curse completely out of her mind.

She grew up angry and hard, a barbwire princess her grandfather called her. With her red curls and freckles, she'd always thought she looked like Raggedy Anne when she looked in the mirror.

How she hated that doll.

Nothing like the beauty queens Texas seemed to prize.

She'd been too young then to realize that what Texas really prized was that vicious will to survive that women had nurtured and shared among their gender.

No lines, no limits, nothing so far out of bounds that a woman wouldn't do it if it meant living another day.

Men don't understand.

They're obsessed with the idea of an honorable death, but there's really no such thing.

Who cares once they're dead?

No one.

If you're not alive, then nothing matters, and Mary has never been such a good person that she can overlook that her family dies by forty because of some fool generations before.

Male or female, if Mary had a chance, she'd go back and kill them herself.

Painfully.

Slowly.

Make them really feel it. Make them cry and beg forgiveness that's never going to come because they've cut so many lives short.

Cut them off at the knees before they ever really got the chance to live.

Add maybe it wasn't that bad before, in those early generations, because so few people, in general, lived that long, but now....

Now it makes a difference.

Mary's brothers had barely lived at all when they went, telling themselves as long as it was an honorable death, it was okay.

Acceptable.

Seresins die fighting, they said.

Seresins die protecting, they said.

But they're all still dead in the end.

And Mary can't think of a single fight, a single person that's worth what it cost.

It's just her by the time she's a teenager.