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A long, long time ago, when they were all fresh-faced boys crammed together like sardines in their ship’s berthing, they’d told stories. Some, greeted by whistles and catcalls and jeers, were of conquest, the speaker puffing out his chest like a peacock as the crowd ate up every dirty detail with their tongues hanging out. Others had them rolling in their bunks, their ribs and cheeks sore. Stories of their families were kept private, rarely spoken aloud, the ache of their long months at sea too near and too sharp to let the words pass their throats.
But some, whispered from bunk to bunk, long after curfew, left a chill in their bones. Those were the ones where the whites of their eyes shone despite the darkness blanketing them. The ones no one could properly explain. The eerie. The not-quite-right.
The ghost stories.
Peek-a-Boo swore up and down he’d heard footsteps clanging out of an empty hallway. Match told them of his Nana’s house, where the curtains moved without wind and the creaking frame sounded like angry groans. Some stories were obviously made up and were met with jeers and relieved laughter. Thank God it’s not true, their hushed guffaws said. We’re too old to be afraid of monsters under our beds. Other stories left them curled up in their bunks with their blankets around their ears. Hillbilly’s story was one such story: a deer walking around his house in the Appalachians, its head lolling unnaturally from its broken neck.
He even had proof. A photo of his porch lights illuminating the front of the deer. Its eyes glowed red, as was common in those old photos when the lighting was weird, but combined with the highlighted bulge where the broken spine pushed against the deer’s pelt made it the perfect nightmare fuel for them - too-young minds pretending to be prepared for war with too much time to think.
Slider had heard them all and scoffed at them all. It’s a parasite, he’d said. The deer’s dead, sure, but it’s not haunted - just a host. The deer, the houses, the ghosts - none of it phased him… But there was one story that succeeded in making his hair stand on end. Just the one.
The Ghost Ship.
This one is an old sailor’s story, told so many times in so many ways, that no one truly knows when it was first spoken. Empty sails became silent engines, a sonar tech at his desk replaced a barrelman up in the crow’s nest, barnacle-encrusted wood became steel plating - the ships changed but the story did not.
One ship spots another in the distance, by eye or by instrument. The first ship attempts communication with the second, but shouts, flags, lights, flares, radio transmissions, telegrams - all go unanswered. Sometimes there is a heavy fog, sometimes the sky is clear. No matter how strong the wind blows into the first ship’s sails, no matter how high the waves lap at its sides, the sea and sky go dead as the two ships meet. All colour is leeched from the sky and sea, any amount of blue fading into sickly grey. The second ship remains unresponsive, not a crewman to be found.
The captain of the first ship sends a boarding party. They find no trunks, no boots beneath the hammocks or the bunks, there is no clothing set to dry. The food stores are empty, as are any boiler rooms, technician’s rooms, or engine rooms the second ship may have. If there are doors or hammocks or curtains, they swing about listlessly as if pulled by the rocking of the waves - except there are no waves, the sea is dead. The boarding party searches each deck, and find not a single soul nor sign that the ship was ever inhabited - not even bilge rats or their corpses can be found on the lowest decks.
The anchor lines are cut. If there are rudder chains, they too are cut. The ship is left to bob aimlessly wherever the sea may steer it. The party finds no flag or denomination of nationality and there is no name painted or carved into its hull. The ship may as well not exist.
When they report to their captain, an old God-fearing salt who’s spent too long at sea to not believe in the ghosts beneath the waves, he orders them to scuttle it. But before the order can fully leave his mouth, a gust of wind heaves into their sails and a great wave knocks them back.
NO, the wind howls. The waves and winds never touch the second ship, pale and grey and dead in the way that no ship truly is. The wind blows harder and harder, the waves get bigger and bigger, and it takes everything the crew has to wrestle their ship out of the sudden Hellstorm. As soon as their ship is far enough away from the ghost ship that their weapons can’t touch it, the wind and waves still again, as if their fury had never been invoked.
The captain and his crew watched silently as the ghost ship drifted to the horizon, moving without purpose or direction.
That was the only ghost story that ever got under Slider’s skin. Something about the inky darkness of the ocean depths under his feet, the lack of solid ground, left him just this side of knife’s edge that was “uneasy”. It’s why he chose to fly off of ships, not sail ‘em. It’s why he took as many groundside assignments as he could, once Ice traded a cockpit for a desk. As much as he tried to forget it, the story of the ghost ship lurked in the back of his mind.
When he looks at Pete - not Maverick, not with those empty eyes - after the funeral, Ron can’t help but be reminded of that ghost ship. Pete Mitchell’s body is there, sure, but his grief has turned him into a shell of himself. There’s no smile on his lips. His cheeks, normally pulled up by the crinkling of his crow’s feet, sag on his face. He moves when prompted, speaks in monosyllabic sentences (if he speaks at all), but…
Pete and Tom’s house is large. A big garage where Mav could tinker on his house-bound projects (the lawnmower that refused to start, Tom’s Jeep every time it failed to turn over, the Roomba Merlin got them as a gag gift four years ago) and enough space to entertain Ice’s fellow Admirals and their wives meant a lot of square footage with Tom embedded into every floorboard.
Ron’s best friend was everywhere: in the window frames he repainted every spring, in the lightbulbs he changed because Pete couldn’t reach and refused to use a ladder, in the kitchen he’d spent hundreds of hours cooking with Pete - Tom’s presence in the house was inescapable.
Pete refuses to sleep in his own bed. Their bed, where Tom had laid down for his final nap. Their bed, where Pete had tried to wake his husband in vain. Pete didn’t say so, but his avoidance of their bedroom as a whole said enough. He couldn’t face that bed, couldn’t escape the phantom of Tom’s arms holding Pete tightly to his chest. He couldn’t escape the lazy mornings or the desperate nights when they couldn’t keep their hands off each other or the pre-dawn kisses when one of them had to leave the other with the echo of their body heat. Their wedding night had been in that bed. They’d nursed each other back to health in that bed.
Tom had died in that bed.
Ron’s best friend was dead, but two ghosts haunted this house which had once been bursting at the seams with love and life.
Ron did what he could. He took the knives out of the butcher’s block, combed through the entire house for scissors, razors, anything sharp. He took Pete out into the sunlight as often as he could. He prayed that the birdsong and the wide-open sky would reanimate this shell that had once been one of his dearest friends.
No such luck.
One bright, sunny day, three months after Tom had gone from “is” to “was”, Ron succeeded in getting Pete out of the too-big, too-empty house. The sky was clear, not a single cloud marring the blue above them - which is why they both had no trouble seeing the pair of jets arcing through the air far to the south.
Pete stiffened and Ron tried to block his view of the planes, but he knew it was all for naught when they heard the delayed sonic boom.
Pete fell to pieces. He clutched at Ron’s jacket with weak hands and sobbed, his small frame jerking with the force of his gasping breath.
“I want him back,” Pete moaned into Ron’s shoulder. “I WANT HIM BACK!!”
And shit, what could Ron say to that? How could he try to cross that infinite gorge? Tom was his best friend and he’d known the man for well over a decade before they met Maverick at TOP GUN, but Pete was the man’s soulmate. They were each other’s complementary halves, their lives so entwined that Ron and the other flyboys once joked that they “never knew when one of ‘em ended and the other started!”.
They knew now. They knew because Pete’s soul had been ripped in two, forever reaching for a man who no longer walked among them.
“I know,” Ron said, his own tears carving fiery trails down his cheeks, because what else could he say? “I want him back too.”
What else was there to say? What else was there to do? Tom was gone, ne’er to return.
In the back of Ron’s mind, a terrified voice whispered, how long until Pete leaves too? He’s already a ghost.