Come Fly With Me

Communicate

Many thanks to Ehcimocs for looking this over for me. <3

I hope you're all doing okay, or at least manageably poorly, in this clusterfuck of a timeline we're having. This fic is blessedly set in a different one.

"How's it going with First Officer Sexy?" Esther asks a month later, after a United 737 is cleared to land.

The airport is about as quiet as Mitch has ever seen it, weirdly so, but it's giving them some time to chat while Mitch listens in to the last five minutes of Vincint's shift on Tower, so he knows what's happening when he takes over.

"Things still good?" Esther adds.

"Great, actually." Even with how much fun he's been having with Scott, he's still somewhat surprised that he means it. It really has been going great. Relationships never go great for Mitch, so this is something of a revelation.

"Really?" Esther sounds as surprised as he is. He shoots her a look, and she shrugs, lowering her voice somewhat before adding, "I only ask because a lot of pilots tend to be...how shall I say this?"

"Egotistical assholes?" Mitch guesses.

She snaps and points at him. "That."

In the general sense, she's not wrong. "Scott isn't. He's been really sweet."

They listen to Vincint clear a UPS cargo flight for takeoff, call for maintenance to check out reported debris on Alpha, and then reassure a private pilot that everything was fine with their readback, before Esther asks, "It's getting serious then?"

He considers not telling her for a moment, but then concedes, "I think I might be falling for him."

"Wow," Esther says, and he decides to take that as a compliment. "I'm happy for you."

Mitch can't help but smile because, yeah. He is too.

***

"Come fly with me," Scott says one day, out of nowhere.

Mitch laughs. "Let's float down to Peru?"

Scott frowns at him. "I'd planned on renting a plane, sightseeing around town, and then maybe showing off for a bit if the skies are clear enough before landing." He tilts his head, considering. "But I could probably arrange Peru with some warning. Lima is nice."

Lima. Is. Nice. "Okay, first of all, I'm ashamed of wasting an ancient but completely on point reference on you. Second, you want me to, what? Go to an airport small enough the tower can just yell directions out the window, climb into a Cessna and let you hotdog around with me on board?"

"Okay, first of all, no one under eighty says 'hotdog', which probably explains why I didn't get your Peru reference. Second, there is no tower. I appreciate towers. Your tower in particular is awesome, especially when you're running it. But thousands of small airports manage without one every day."

Oh, great. "I love that you think that's reassuring."

"You don't trust me?"

"I don't trust general aviation. It's full of amateurs. By definition."

"I don't know if you've noticed," Scott says, lips pursed and eyebrows furrowed, "But the world's largest airline lets me fly hundreds of people around at a time in their quarter of a billion dollar airplanes." He waves a hand around in a loose circle. "It's almost as if they think I'm a professional."

Maybe it's the pout. Maybe it's the logic. Maybe it's the fact Scott's been off work for five days, so his stubble is starting to turn into a sexy scruff, which enhances the pout and makes Mitch forget the logic. In any case, Mitch finds himself agreeing, which is why he then finds himself at what's technically an airport the next day, sitting in a Cessna 172L Skyhawk that's almost twice as old as he is, while Scott does a walkaround inspection and talks to the airport manager like they're old friends, which Mitch supposes they are.