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When he hits the ground he feels his ankle break in three different places, the pain spiking up his leg to jab into his hip. It's only later that the other pains come, and he realises that it is a good sign, and that he is alive. The forest is a strange mottled green above him, the sunlight coming in short sporadic bursts through the leaves. He can hear the thrum of a recovery party breaking their way through the forest, drawn to the wreckage of his plane. He calls for his RIO and gets silence in response. By the end of the day he's given up on calling, and is having a heated debate with Iceman, who is telling him in a great deal of detail all the ways he handled the spin wrong.
"What do you know," Maverick tells him sourly, "you couldn't even handle Iraq." He's sorry the moment he says it.
Iceman glares at him and shuts up, his eyes hardening and his mouth thinning. No amount of cajoling on Maverick's part can get him to speak again.
The recovery team finds the crash less than two hours later, Maverick unconscious and pale with blood-loss a few hundred metres away.
*
They're evacuating by inches. There's a little kid begging by the side of the road as their convoy crawls past and Maverick cranes his neck to look. The child's clothes are ragged and dirty, with rust-coloured blotches sprayed across the front. Its face is smeared with dirt and tear tracks, and it is holding out its little hands and running alongside the convoy, "hranu, molim, molim, hranu."
It could be a face out of a thousand different appeal pamphlets, anonymous in its misery. It is so bruised and smudged that Maverick can't figure out how old it is, or if it's a boy or girl."I don't have any food," he tells it instead, his hands already automatically patting down his pockets to see if this is true. He gave away his one and only chocolate bar a few clicks back, trying to get through a road block peacefully. "Nemaju hranu," he says when the child keeps running, and finally finds the folded-over wad of cash the Marine Lt. had stuffed into his pants before they set off. "Dollar," he calls out, and fligs a few bills at the child as the jeep picks up speed, not turning to see the small figure chase after them in the dust.
"How much did you just throw out the window?" The marine next to him shouts, straining to be heard above the clacking of the tires over the broken asphalt.
"Dunno. Coupla hundred." He's staring out of the window again. It's dusk, the sun hanging low and bloody over the horizon.
"What's the kid gonna spend a coupla hundred dollars on out here?"
He has no fucking idea. "A coffin," he says instead, just to watch the beefy commando blanch and shut up. His leg aches in a dozen places, the temporary stitches giving way to ruddy his bandages. His collarbone is almost certainly shattered, and there is a sun that blooms across his left eye if he moves his head too quickly. The remanants of his parachute clasp - the bit that wouldn't yield even when his marine rescuers sliced into it with their KA-Bars - bite into his abdomen with every jolt from beneath. There was a road here once, but the tarmac had long since surrendered to the constant air strikes and all that was left was the jagged edges of blast holes.
He stares straight ahead for the rest of the drive, not flinching when the gunfire grows louder and brighter in his peripheral vision. Somebody else's blood is splashed across his neck, and he can feel it drying into crust, little flakes rising in the air like ruddy soot.
Behind him, Sarajevo is on fire.
*
He gets on the waiting list to be put on the first available transport out. It means a few days' wait, because he's not a medical priority. The resident doctor - pale-faced and sweating from overwork - looks like she might want to yell about that, but there's not a great deal to be done and, anyway, it's not so bad. He hunkers down in the barracks and puts his feet up, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and wondering if it's a good idea to be bunking down in such a visible location.
"They're not gonna bomb us, hotshot," his bunkmate says. The guy's built like a mountain, all shoulders and no neck to speak of. No left leg below mid-thigh, either, which is why he's laid up waiting for transport rather than out there, standing by uselessly while civilians get hacked to pieces. Given his size, he's of course known as 'Tiny'. It's a rare day when he can say for certain that his nickname is less stupid than the next guy's, and he says this to Tiny, mustering up a smirk.
"I thought 'Maverick' was a callsign, not a nickname," Tiny says, and manouvers himself onto one side. He has a threadbare blanket tucked carefully around him to minimise movement until the med-evac, and a copy of the Bible in Cyrillic script on the bedside table.
A hotel, Maverick wonders, or some sort of religious order. Someplace that would have Bibles by the boxload and that wouldn't be bombed to smithereens in the first wave.
"Hey." Tiny smacks the side of his bed, the steel springs creaking at the impact. "You listening?"
"Yeah," he says, and closes his eyes. He can see the sea beneath his eyelids, and the slowly spreading blush of dawn and blood across the water. He can still hear his own ragged breath as he clung to Goose and chocked down panic. He hasn't seen this nightmare for months, and wonders why it's come to mind now, where there's no sea to speak of and the forest stretches for miles around, ringed by ragged tarmac and killing fields.
There's no sea here, and it hadn't been like that with Iceman. Not even a little bit.
*
The med-evac flight will take eight hours, and he has to be strapped in to a total harness the entire time. The medics clip him into the contraption like a child in a high chair, straps across him to keep his injured limbs still. In his pocket is the still-crisp jacket he received just prior to getting on the flight. Only one word really matters amidst all the formalities.
Reassigned.
The medical sign-off on his file that won't let him in the air again, not after this.
In a cold, abstract way, he knows that the crash was not his fault, and that any court martial he might have to undergo will bear this out. This crash wasn't his fault, and Goose's death had not been his fault, and Iceman...
("Military affairs don't last," Charlie had told him the night she left. "You need to look outside the base to find someone to cry over you, Pete Mitchell.)
Hell, he hadn't even been in the air when Iceman was shot down.
The sun rises up to greet him, splashing across the horizon in mottled shades of gold and red. Dry-eyed, Maverick curls his hands around the clasps of his medical harness and hangs on.
*
fin