Hours ago...

The knock on the door of the bungalow was unexpected and Carol Bradshaw paused in folding the laundry, casting a glance her son was curled up, asleep on a chair with a blanket drawn over him. She sighed and trudged to the door, opening it to find LCDR Heatherly and a man she didn't find familiar, and a woman behind him with a baby in her arms. Carole blinked, startled. "Hi?"

Jester motioned to the man with the regulation haircut beside him, and she didn't miss the fact that he was in plain clothes. "Carole, this is Bill Cortell."

"Cougar," Bill supplied helpfully when she continued to frown.

Now it made sense as she finally recognized him from when the squadron had deployed months ago, and Carole stepped aside to allow them in, smiling at the baby as they passed her and she shut the door. "Bradley's sleeping in the arm chair." She smiled at the baby, glanced at the woman. "Connie?" The woman, Connie, nodded and handed the baby girl off to her. "Oh!" The baby gurgled happily up at her, and Carole smiled down at her. "And what's your name, little one?"

"Georgia," Bill told her happily, then sobered and peered at Bradley. "I'm sorry I wasn't here for the funeral, Carole. I didn't even know until someone from VF-1 got a hold of me on Sunday."

Carole hugged the baby and then handed her back to her mother, glanced at Jester, who nodded. "You called someone from their squadron."

"Yes."

Bill sighed, and then blinked when Carole was suddenly hugging him. He froze, but only for a moment, and then hugged her back just as fiercely. "I..."

"Don't," Carole told him, and let him hear how raw she felt inside. "You're here, Cougar. That's all that matters."

"Doesn't feel like enough," Bill muttered into her hair. "Where's Mav?" Slowly, Carole pulled away to look at him, glanced at Jester, and then pulled the message out of her pocket and showed him. He read it with a thoughtful frown. "Oh. Is it good or bad that he's on the Enterprise right now?"

"Little of both," Jester admitted. "Viper wouldn't tell me who the pilot-less RIO was."

"It's Sam," Bill told him with a smile. "Mine. And if I know Sam, he'll take one look at Mav and give him a hug without being told what's wrong."

Carole stared at him. "He's in good hands?"

"The best, Carole." Bill nodded to Bradley. "Can I meet him?"

Carole smiled and went over to wake her son. He could nap later.

Now...

They were silent for a few minutes as Merlin helped Ice get Maverick situated on the bunk again. After that kind of an admission, clearly classified while also being traumatic, Ice no longer minded so much about staying right where he was. Merlin met his gaze and motioned to Turner, who had pulled a notepad out of his pocket and was making notes while going thru a breathing exercise, clearly disturbed but managing to cover it extremely well. Ice nodded and bent his head to study Maverick's face intently until he was satisfied that Mav was truly sleeping and not about to have another flashback.

He wasn't sure he could take another of those right now, and Turner was clearly spent emotionally. They all were, really.

["Of all the stupid things,"] Turner muttered in Spanish to himself, unaware that Ice, at least, understood him. ["Who tells someone how their parent died like that? Especially this kid, in these circumstances? Damn it."]

Ice looked beyond the Corpsman to Slider, who nodded, for they'd taken the language class together. "Corpsman?"

"In a minute," Turner said, this time in English as he put the notepad back in his pocket and began the breathing exercise again, this time counting to ten with his fingers.

Ice shifted his gaze again to Slider, then to Hollywood who still appeared angry, and Wolfman was watching his pilot with an expression of concern. "No, I think you need to take a walk. Take Wood and Ron with you."

"Scuttlebutt," Hollywood snarled suddenly, then shook his head when Ice glared at him. "I mean-"

"I know what you mean," Ice told him with a glance down at Maverick's sleeping face. "But we can't do anything from here, Rick. And we can't talk about it. Not right now. If it was as classified and redacted as I think it was, that it made into scuttlebutt the way it did as some kind of gremlin aviation story, then... no. Viper probably risked his career even saying word one, no matter how it came out."

"Nam was a geopolitical quagmire," Turner muttered in agreement, still counting on his fingers, and the emotional undertone caused Hollywood to really look at him. "What?"

"Oh. Come on, Doc. He's right. Let's go for a walk." Hollywood got to his feet, glanced down at his RIO, who waved him off as he picked the cards up off the deck and shuffled them. "Leo?"

"Get," Wolfman told him. "Or I'm hauling you to the hanger and telling the crew to let you play with mechanical things until you calm down for real."

Turner looked to Merlin, who motioned to the hatch. "All right. We'll go for a walk. Probably bring back that water that Ron forgot, too." He stood up and grabbed the bag at his feet.

"Hey," Slider said as he stood up. "We went to the Gym, not the Mess."

"And now you get to come with me to medical," Turner told him with a wan smile. "I'd be remiss if I didn't give them a sample we paid the price for."

Ice watched them leave, then looked at Wolfman. "Play with mechanical things?"

"Minor in Mechanical Engineering," Wolfman explained with a shrug as he stood up, tossed the deck of cards onto Slider's bunk, and then realized Merlin was holding a set of dog tags. He stared at them for a moment. "When did he drop those?"

"I think when Ice hauled him up onto the bunk," Merlin said. "I'm not sure where to put them."

"In your pocket, Sam," Ice told him. "Give 'em back when he wakes up, whenever that'll be."

Wolfman took the chair while Merlin sat down on a bunk again, and he studied Ice as he looked down and then put a hand on Mav's arm. "You're upset, too."

"We all are," Ice told him with a visible shudder. "And that flashback state happened so fast that one minute he was letting Turner tell him what to do with the Urinal, and the next he was asking where his mother was. And then he was on the far side of the bunk and crying. I never want to see that again." He stared down at Mav. "I can guess what happened, but... damn it."

Merlin winced. "Like you told Wood: we can't do anything from the Indian Ocean. Best we can do is support him here, and we are."

"Feels like we're just watching him suffer nightmares and flashbacks," Ice muttered darkly, and Wolfman nudged him on the knee. "What?"

"You're looking at it wrong." Wolfman handed a scrap of paper to him that he'd pulled out of a pocket, and Ice took it, frowning at the phone number and the name. "That guy? He'd have been at graduation if he hadn't been stuck in Fort Worth with a crisis times four or five. He warned us. He didn't have to. I'm not sure what he said to Viper, but... it's not SOP to send new graduates on deployment when we're supposed to go back to our own squads and teach, and SOP would be to deal with the problem with people already in the area. Where are we, Tom? What kind of risk did Viper take sending Mav out at all? And he sent the four of us along, why? We were not stationed on the Enterprise. We had our own assignments."

Ice stared at the phone number some more, letting all of that sink in. "He did, didn't he? Someday, I want to meet this guy. And you're right. It's not SOP."

"I'm glad you're all here, though," Merlin put in. "SOP, or not... very tired and worn out aviator included. Makes me feel not so useless." Wolfman glanced at him in question. "I didn't even know Cougar had turned in his wings until after. He didn't speak to me about it. Didn't let me help. At all. Also, he was supposed to be sleeping it off in medical and escaped them."

A knock at the hatch, and an unfamiliar man to both Ice and Wolfman poked his head in, then winced. "Sorry."

Merlin shook his head. "It's fine, Bert. Need something?"

Bert frowned at the sight that Ice made with Maverick sleeping on his lap, then shook his head. "No. I have a message for you, actually." He passed it to Merlin. "What... why-"

"Stress reaction," Wolfman told him, and Bert nodded in understanding. "Sam?"

Merlin smiled. "Cougar was in Miramar to see Carole and Bradley, with Connie and their baby. Thank you, Bert."

Bert smiled back. "My pleasure." He nodded to Ice and Wolfman, and then left them to it.

The message: "Tell Mav that Carole and Bradley miss him and that we're fine here, and Carole got to meet Connie and Georgia. Fair winds and following seas, Sam."