Chapter Text
Don’t think, just do.
Let’s face it, Mav is not—has never been, really, although he can pull out the skill when necessary in formal situations—much of an analyst.
Rooster is.
Funny, you know, in his own mind he’s Rooster when he’s on pilot duty, Bradley when he’s not. When he thinks of his dad’s best friend, it depends on the role. In a cockpit, he’s Maverick. In Bradley’s oldest memories, he’s Uncle Pete. He was Uncle Pete right up until the Academy disaster.
Hangman would undoubtedly say that Rooster over-analyzes. Maybe that’s true, especially in the air. It’s a flaw in his flying skills, yeah, and Rooster would be the first to admit that he doesn’t fly the way Maverick does.
But then nobody flies quite the way Mav does: on pure instinct, his reactions so natural, subconscious, and lightning-fast that even Mav can’t follow the decisions his brain and body make in an airplane.
It’s easy for Rooster to see why Maverick would have struggled as a Top Gun instructor his first go-round, because every pilot processes the flow of information slightly differently but most of them do need to process certain pieces of information consciously. Which pieces seem to depend on the individual pilot. For example, for Hangman it’s the positions and movements of the other planes in his flight group. For careful, competent Phoenix it’s the possible actions in any emerging, nonroutine situation. It’s not that she can’t think through them; it’s that she has to think through them and it takes her a split second to do so.
For Rooster, it is the instinctive consideration of safety that hinders his reaction time. To be frank, conservatism is traditionally part of US Navy mindset: at the Battle of Midway, which every naval ensign studies, commanding Admiral Chester Nimitz was said to have followed a policy of “Rock ‘em and sock ‘em, but don’t lose your shirt.” That is, do all the damage to the enemy that you can without losing your men and materiel.
Rooster never struggled with that concept. But Maverick?
As a pilot, Maverick’s mindfulness of personal safety is so low that it barely registers on his internal radar at all. Rooster still wonders, sometimes, if Mav’s fearlessness played any part in the accident that killed Rooster’s dad. The Investigation Board report says not. The fact that the official bailout procedure for the F-14 was altered after Goose’s death would indicate that the failure of the canopy to clear the aircraft was due to the uncontrollable flat spin, not Maverick’s flying.
It was just an accident. Everybody says.
Bradley has come to (yes, consciously) adopt a less conservative habit of acting on his own instincts. It occurs to him that it’s just a restatement of Obi-Wan’s advice to Luke Skywalker to trust his feelings.
Well. It hasn’t changed Bradley’s natural inclination to—unlike Uncle Pete, who spends pretty much everything he makes—put savings in the bank and research interest rates before buying anything. (Which is why, when Bradley’s in San Diego, he still drives the ancient blue Bronco he bought secondhand, years ago.) But the new habit has shored up his confidence in his own abilities and sped up his decision process. Definitely in the air, anyway.
The funny thing is, back when Bradley’s Naval Academy application got pulled, he didn’t think it through. If he’d stopped and really considered his options for getting where he wanted to go, he’d have realized that the Academy wasn’t his only shot for getting to flight school.
And he wanted to fly.
Needed it, actually.
Ever since Uncle Pete took him up in a Tomcat for a sneaky joyride on his eleventh birthday (said joyride ending up costing Maverick yet another promotion), Bradley knew what he wanted. There has never been anything like it.
Flying was the dream.
The need—the emotional need, which he’s only recently begun wrapping his head around—was doing it exactly like his dad. Which meant the Navy. No way around it.
True fact: it’s not absolutely necessary to go through the Academy. Even Mav hadn’t gotten in, back in the day. The name recognition and the personal contacts are helpful, though, when every pilot spot is limited, and Bradley had put three full fucking years’ worth of work into his application. All the way through high school, there had been the academic grind, the extracurriculars, the volunteer work, the cross-country and soccer, the constant resumé updating, the physical fitness tests, the medical and vision exams, the letters of recommendation, the interviews with senators, the essays, the whole damn package.
He'd had a good chance at getting in. The USNA accepts less than 10% of its applicants, even after they fulfill all the necessary requirements, so it hadn’t been a given, but still. He’d had a shot.
Bradley’s backup plan had been to attend one of the three universities in San Diego on his dad’s GI Bill benefits plus a naval ROTC scholarship, but none of those three had offered scholarships. Bradley suspects now that Mav went around and had private chats with the ROTC guys, although nobody would confirm that.
If Bradley had continued to pursue options, he could have attended any university in the country with a Navy ROTC program. There are dozens of them. He could have done an end-around run, dodged the barriers Maverick put up, and made it to flight school right on time. It wouldn’t have been humanly possible for Mav to block every single ROTC option in the entire United States.
But Bradley had just been in such a blind rage at the betrayal and the waste of time and his helplessness that he’d done something completely unlike himself. He’d marched straight down to the Navy recruitment station and enlisted. It had taken him a lot of grunt work and stellar performance as a sailor to get sent to Officer Candidate School, and only after that was done had he managed to get to flight school.
Now he’s sitting on four years of enlisted service and fourteen years as an officer, and it occurs to him that maybe that one significant instance of not thinking had messed with his mental processes, and thus his flying.
Hard to combat all those years of caution, but he’s doing it.