Work Text:
Funny thing, but Pete never really thought of "Mitchell" as a being common last name. It wasn't Smith or Jones or Johnson (there had been four Johnsons in his class back in high school, and two of them were "Eric"), and yeah, it might not have been exactly unique -- there had been other Mitchells in school, just never in his year -- but he didn't run into other Mitchells all that often. Even if there were likely other Mitchells in college -- big state school, so the odds were more than fair -- they weren't in NROTC and he never ran into any in his classes, and then there were none in flight school and none in any of his squadrons. Of course, there were more Mitchells in the Navy -- at least five at every base he'd ever lived on, according to said bases' phone books -- but bases weren't exactly small, and again, "Mitchell" wasn't exactly unique. Just -- not common.
Or so he'd thought.
And then Miramar had been deeded over to the Marines, and he'd been forced to trade sunny and clement San Diego for sunny and inclement Ass-End-Of-Nowhere, Nevada.
And then it got weird.
Granted, Ass-End-Of-Nowhere was a good 350 miles from South-Sandy-McBumblefuck, where the Air Force lived, but when you cut through all the posturing and the rivalry and the bullshit you're left with a bunch of guys (and not a few girls; quite a few more, in recent years) whose lives only make sense from upwards of 30,000 feet, whose checks are all cut with the same rubber stamp and who like as not have all mostly been in (or above) all the crapass shitsvill pushpins on the map, and there's a certain brotherhood in that. (And sisterhood? Whatever; tomayto and tomahto and marriage might have made him more PC but damned if it made him any more articulate.) There's a sense that you can just walk into a bar, in jeans and tees and tags -- leather jacket optional -- and have someone clear a space for you, have someone ask after your bird of choice and no, they do not mean your girlfriend.
And Pete's been down to Nellis and Nellis has been up to him, and he's kicked zoomie ass in darts and had his own ass handed to him on the end of a pool cue, has had zoomies buy him a beer because they remembered his name from a decade before, and he's bought beer for the zoomies whose names he didn't recall (because he's always been shit with names) but who had eyes that said they'd needed one. (Lotta weird shit out at Nellis, lotta pilots who'd let their flight quals go for want of time while working on something -- else; something that stank of intelligence.) And sure, a bar is a bar is a bar and an OC is an OC is an OC, and the first time someone up at Nellis asked if he was related to some other Mitchell he'd shrugged it off. And the second and the third and the forth.
By the fifth though, it was starting to get a little irksome. Especially when the questions started coming from his own people, too.
Apparently there were a lot of Mitchells in the Air Force. And apparently a lot of them were pilots (apparently predating the formation of the Air Force, stretching as far back as World War One and, possibly, the early innovations of the airplane -- and apparently the zoomies are all well up on their history, or at least the ones in Nellis are very, very bored). And apparently the fact that he was a pilot named Mitchell and not related to any branch of this mythic family of fliers (of vets, really, because it seemed that the Mitchells served in every branch, even the Coast Guard (Rory Mitchell, flies a helo out of Miami, and are you sure you're not related? Because really, you look just like him--) and the Air Force might have gotten the lion's share but there were soldiers and sailors and marines in the mix there, too).
By the seventeenth, Pete was beginning to wonder if he should start wearing a nametag -- one with some other guy's name. True, he didn't mind it when a zoomie offered to buy him a drink, but cashing in on drinks owed to other Mitchells had felt rather skeevy, once he'd sobered up again and realized that half the shots he'd downed had been in someone else's name. Well, first name.
At one point Charlie (yes, he and his wife almost always refer to each other by call-sign, and no, that isn't weird, and no, he will not divert onto the tangent wherein he Explains Their Reasoning) had made noises about researching his family tree, because hey, maybe these were a bunch of long-lost cousins or something, and while that was kinda fun to contemplate (because it's not like he's got any other living family (blood family) and at least this would be family where they've got something in common) between their jobs and the kids and her family -- and just about everything else in their lives that they barely had time for as it was -- the idea hadn't exactly gained momentum beyond the initial thought.
It was nice though, to have a silly little private daydream wherein everyone else was right and he was wrong, where his grandfather had been the black sheep who'd run away to join the circus (or The Circus, hey, because every boy's secret family fantasy always involved at least one spy) and they hadn't known he'd had a kid who'd had a kid, hadn't known that he'd died in 'Nam and that his wife had followed so soon after, hadn't known that they'd left a little boy behind who had to be remanded to state care (not that his foster parents hadn't been decent, but then he'd died while Pete was in college and then she'd followed before he was out of flight school (and the reasons he'd let them chain him to a desk after Nick was born were ones he never let himself examine closely) and as the foster kid the extended family, which hadn't been all that much to begin with, hadn't been all that interested in him since he outgrew being cute). That they hadn't known because -- if they did -- then they would have done something about it, and maybe he could have gone without some of the more interesting scars on his psyche. (And maybe he would still be flying.)
That there was this whole big family of servicemen and women -- so many of them pilots, like the need to touch the sky wasn't just in his blood but in his genes, laid down into his very bedrock before he was even a glint in his daddy's eye -- and at any point he could hitch a flight back east (he knew they were East, just a bit fuzzy on the where of it) and ring the bell, say "hi, I'm Pete, I used to be a Navy pilot and my grandfather was Philip Mitchell" -- and they'd put the two and two together and take the rest of it as read, and invite him in with open arms.
One day, maybe, it would be true.
One day, maybe, but not today.
And likely not tomorrow either.
(It was a really good dream.)
-fin-