We Die Like Men

It goes on so long, that they’re having a group meet up when Ice storms in, and everyone is like… uh…why is Admiral Kazansky here and why is he mad?

And Ice is just like, “guys, you’re great and I love that you all see Mav as your dad, but I haven’t had a date with my husband for TWO MONTHS so I need to steal him back now, okaythanksbye.” And drags Mav out of the room, leaving everyone dumbfounded (apart from Rooster because he knew they were together and was just being a little shit and seeing how long Mav was going to let it all go on for).

Both of them constantly try to introduce each other to people as ‘my husband’ people see Mav at formal events and two minutes into the conversation he casually asks if they’ve all met his husband and usually the last thing people expect is for him to whip an admiral out. 

Ice is much more subtle about it, he’ll just casually drop mid-conversation something about 'my husband' and no one really knows what to expect from him either, but it is also not Captain Pete Mitchell, because if you haven’t heard of him you at least have a friend of a friend who could tell you some batshit story about him.

Of course, all of the officers who have known them for longer are very aware they’re married and Maverick will still start the ‘my husband this’ and ‘my husband that’ as soon as he gets the chance. Everyone does their best not to roll their eyes.

Maverick enjoys getting to hang off of Ice's arm just a little bit too much because Ice secretly loves having Maverick hanging onto him for everyone to see and also because it's best not to try to cause a scene with him in public by trying to get him to stop.

Ice hates Maverick’s bike, thinks it's a deathtrap, and has to be baited onto it every time they go somewhere on it. 

When they first started dating, Maverick would pick him up on it and definitely not drive a little bit too fast just to see if he could get Ice to hold onto him tighter and, “really come on Ice, you’re telling me the top pilot of his class is afraid of going five over the speed limit?”

When they’re older, Maverick teaches at Top Gun and whenever he gets a particularly unruly batch of kids he starts casually threatening that they should really be on their toes because you never know when higher-ups and Admirals might be visiting, and to be specific do you really want to look like a shit head in front of the Commander of the US Pacific Fleet?

Some of them assume it's all talk until said Admiral is sitting quietly in the corner of the mess hall on a random Wednesday afternoon across from Maverick talking over lesson plans and suddenly class on Thursday morning is very well behaved. 

Because there's one thing worse than having Maverick ride your ass for doing something stupid, it's a disappointed look from Admiral Kazansky.

Maverick likes to stake out a corner of Ice’s office because “Ice, it's so much bigger than mine, what are you even going to do with all this space anyways?” and while it's not entirely conducive to Ice getting work done, he has found a significant decrease in the number of people that demand to have meetings with him when they find out Maverick is laid across the couch doing his own reports.

Maverick claims he’s more productive with Ice around, Ice thinks he's full of bullshit but he doesn’t want to jinx the fact Maverick is actually doing paperwork for once so he decides to put up with it.