#she was one of the kids™️ before everbody expect rooster

[pollyna]

Out of all the Dagger squadron Callie is the one who knows Admiral Kazansky the longer and, even before Top Gun, she was already eating at his table one every seven days. Just without Maverick around, even if she knew he was married. After every piece just fits where it should.

She was twenty-seven when an imposing dude, a Lieutenant Commander, asked her to be the attache during a conference with some Chinese delegation. Callie had accepted so fast she almost fell out of the chair for the enthusiasm and the Lieutenant had left her room laughing under his breath because oh this kid. In the end she had to do very little because Admiral Kazansky knew exactly what to say and how to say without her help, but he offered her a job because he knew her knowledge was going to be useful sooner than later. Callie had worked for two whole years with the man, in briefings, war rooms she theoretically wasn't supposed to be, over breakfast at the Admiral house with other ten people and over dinner in gala she hated but not how much the Admiral did. She worked for him and with him, learning as much as she could, translating during the Admiral's bad days when his fingers where as fast and hard as the things he would have liked to say but couldn't. When she got called in Top Gun, for the first time, she was barely thirty and the Admiral had hugged her and said you're for the skies not for boring politics. After it was a deployment after another, flying, flying and flying a little more, always to be the best alone and with her WSO.

The second time around Top Gun the Admiral wasn't around to say goodbye or to hug her but he sent a mail with enough big words in it to let Callie understand how important the mission was.

So, when at the end of it all, the squadron starts going around the Admiral, please Callie call me Tom or Iceman at which she answered just if you start calling me Halo Admiral, and the Captain's house she remembers where most things are and she starts making breakfast most of the mornings they stay over to sleep and Bradley himself looks a little lost the first time he has to find a cup in the immensity of the kitchen cupboard. Everybody looks at her like she grown a third head but Mav puts a photos of a younger Admiral and Halo in their whites, in front of the ONU's building. She was the second kid before every single on of you, Bradley excluded the Captain says a shirt two size to big over his pj's pants and Ice hugging his wrist. Fitz almost burns a stack of pancakes, Harvard's glass shatters on the ground and Phoenix murmurs to Bob holy shit I need that photo you see how cute Halo was.

That was a day Tom signs and Halo laughs because yes, yes that was a day she answers before going back to cutting the fruits and ignoring the one hundred questions they all have.

(The weirdest person to be around is Maverick, at the end of the day, because she knows the Admiral but his husband is the wild card. But, in the end, they bond over on too many breakfasts and all the crazy and wild things Tom did for Pete when he was searching for a present for his birthday.)