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Bradley Rooster Bradshaw X Reader - Blog Posts
Look Me in the Eyes (Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw x Reader)
*GIF not mine*
Summary: During naval training, your jet crashed and burned, taking your memories with it. But the lieutenant who saved you seems to know you better than he lets on. The only issue is that he refuses to tell you his name.
A/N: pfft half yall don’t read this anyway so imma just say rooster’s hot, oreosmama out *drops mic*
Word count: 3345
It’s not the pervading scent of antiseptic and boredom that has carved its way into your skin, nestling deep into the creases of your brow and your sneering upper lip—
It’s his unflinching gaze.
The lieutenant hovering over you, with a spoonful of green, gelatinous “dinner” posed over your lips, mumbles, “Open the hatch, the F-18 needs to land.”
He’s a staunchly built man ornamented in the same naval jacket he’d been wearing when you first came-to in the hospital room, his lofty shoulders embellished in unfamiliar patches. Over the last two days, most of which have consisted of him lording himself over you or sitting back in the chair beside your bed, his five o’clock shadow has thickened, and the wrinkles underneath his teasing eyes darkened a shade.
The F-18 bumps against your sneer, and he chortles to himself.
You know why you’re here.
Well, sort of.
You know that it must’ve hurt. Like a falling-unconscious-due-to-pain kind of hurt. Black and blue splotches paint your temple and upper left cheek, and each time you force a smile, it aches. The rest of your body looks the same. In the first shower you’d been allowed, you twisted and turned as much as your burning abdomen could handle and had come to the conclusion that you were glad you didn’t remember much of what had happened.
The only real issue was that you didn’t remember much of anything.
The story you had been told was haphazardly crafted, not unlike if a toddler had drawn a house with crayons and passed it to you, insisting it looked exactly like the one you lived in.
It goes something like this: you were flying your jet when the engine stalled, and when you ejected, your head smacked against the windshield. You were lucky—you were unconscious when you had crumpled in on yourself, snapping five of your ribs like pencils, and when you’d landed on the ground, face in the dirt—you were so, so lucky.
But the lieutenant says differently.
When he found you, you were awake. You were echoing his name into the stagnant desert air, screaming and sobbing in ways that still keep him up at night.
You know because he sleeps with folded arms on the edge of your mattress, and he rattles the metal skeleton each time he flinches. And the times when he thinks you’re too buried in exhaustion and slumber, his hand finds yours, fingertips light as air against your skin.
These are the only times the lieutenant bares that part of himself to you.
In the mornings, when you can look him in the eyes and see the guilt buried underneath, he winces a smile onto his lips and asks if you remember anything yet.
You don't.
And he winces again. “Back to the drawing board, huh?”
The lieutenant is a nice-enough man when he wants to be. The only issue is that he doesn’t seem to want to be.
“Tell me your name,” you snipe, dangling over the precipice of flinging Jell-O across the room.
This is a game he never wants to play, despite how often he wins. He has the whole naval base’s hospital staff refer to him as Sir or Lieutenant-no-last-name, and each time you ask, he’ll give you the same response.
“You know my name.”
You don't. He’s a complete stranger. He can hold you hand and feed you Jell-O and help you hobble to the bathroom; he can brush the hair from your sweat-crusted face in the mornings and, on some rare occasions where he thinks he’s woken up before you, he’ll graze a feather-soft kiss on your bruised temple.
And you still haven't got a clue.
Because whoever the lieutenant is, the tight grip he has on your heart is completely foreign to you. It’s a grip that says you and him aren’t just something definable—you were a we in this life; the pair of you have formed a way of living in tandem, your own intrinsic tango to which nobody else knows the steps. It’s not just like or a passing fancy. It’s not just hot static running through veins.
This is fully fledged; this is oxygen now. The rise and fall of your chest is the rise and fall of his. The absence of it must be suffocating.
So you don't know why he doesn’t like this game. He makes a question-answer into a back-and-forth, and then he winds and winds you up until you’re ready to snap.
It’s not fair. God, it’s not fair. You deserve to know his name. Doesn’t he know it’s not just a tickle in the back of your mind anymore? If he was the one whose name you were screaming, didn’t you deserve to know what it was?
“Why do you keep doing this?”
You watch his lips purse, the color bleeding out of them and into pink patches on his neck and cheeks. The spoon rattles against the tray, and the glob of green wavers in its curve. He refuses to hold your gaze like always. Self-inflicted torment disguises itself as burnt-sienna irises. The life you’ve forgotten is bowing his shoulders, and your crash, no matter the fact that he saved you, is eating away at him.
Then the lieutenant smiles, in the fractured way—the way someone might laugh at a funeral.
“Because knowing my name wouldn’t help you. You never called me by it, anyway.”
This, oh God—this is the closest you’ve ever gotten, and you’re still wading in the darkness. A name you’d never even call him by, what a wonder that does to your psyche.
A name was a start; it was a first impression. There was a lot in a name.
So you’d never called him by his name… so what?
So what, only lovers knew each other by more than a name? So what, he never called you by yours? So what, you didn’t want to ever call him by his name, never felt the urge, but felt it was rather proper considering you didn’t know what to call him at all?
He keeps you doggy-paddling for it.
The hospital room is polluted with silence for the rest of the night. Slowly, you finish the Jell-O as he sits back in his chair, watching, yet not quite seeing you. You missed when his staring felt like a buzzing fly. Now it’s a thunderstorm hanging over you, foggy and dampened, and you’re struck every few seconds with a shiver.
He doesn’t reach out for your hand when you pretend you’ve fallen asleep. Twenty minutes past lights out, he stands and heads into the bathroom, slowly creaking the door closed and locking it before the shower faucet turns on and stays on for a long, long time.
Where his hand should be is where he laid his jacket, one sewn patch erroneously rough against your palm. With another glance at the light underneath the bathroom door, you haul the leather jacket up into your lap, tracing the ridges and folds. You trails your fingertips along the jacket, searching for… something. Anything.
Cold metal, a zipper slips underneath your fingers, and you sit up straighter despite the outcry of pain in your ribs.
A pocket, and inside is a small plastic card—his ID.
That, and a small, velvet box.
No…
No, you won’t open it.
No, no, because he shouldn’t even have that here.
Why—dear God—why did he have that here?
It’s not for you. That’s for sure. You don’t even want to open it. No.
It’s not yours. It’s not yours to have, especially since he hasn’t offered it to you, and it’s not yours to wear, and it’s not yours to look at, to watch, iridescent, crystal devotion reflecting the moonlight from the room’s lone window.
But when you lift the cover and curse the stars that the man whose name you don’t even know knows you so well, knows how beautiful it is in your eyes, and even worse, how well it fits on your finger, you know it’s yours.
Well, not yours.
It’s hers. The one before the crash’s.
That’s her ring on your finger, and that’s her lieutenant grieving in the bathroom.
This is her life, not yours. All you own anymore is the absence pulsing in your chest.
You own the spasms in your veins, the brief and lasting panic of who am I, really?, the deficiency of life and past and love; the frail hold on this reality, on that man, on this ring.
The rest is not yours, so you should let it go.
Then, ideally, you should be able to float away, free from these junctions to a girl you don’t know. The man who loves her loves your face. He loves your body, and your voice, and each of the words falling from your lips, perhaps in the wrong order, yes, but he’ll rearrange them in his mind so that it matches hers.
Ideally.
Ideally, it’s not this drowning feeling, a weight like a hand pressing hard against your chest, shoving you deeper and deeper under the current. She’s the one who breathes, not you. You don’t need to breathe. You’re an accident in this world.
The I.D. slips from your grasp and falls to the floor.
You’ve read it. You saw the name, the rank, the naval symbol. In the dim moonlight and the single glowing strip underneath the bathroom door, his not-really-a-smile smiles up at you from the vinyl floor.
And now you see it, chrome duct tape peeling off the jagged stitches of a patch, the one over his heart. Another of his games: his missing call sign.
It… fits him. Strangely enough.
Is this what you called him?
The hospital room floods with a subdued yellow light carried out by the steam of the lieutenant’s shower. He emerges with a towel wrapped around his lower body, a sheen of wet on his cheeks you’re not certain was caused by the shower.
Like you, this is his third shower in this room, but unlike him, he’s not wearing a smirk when he exits, bare feet padding along the cold tiles. He doesn’t spare you a glance while he pilfers through his black duffle bag, the one seated on the only other guest chair in the room—the one that never moves.
Maybe it was a good thing he didn’t look, because you hadn’t thought to take off the ring. It was a plan as half-baked as when you’d first decided to put it on. Some barbaric, frenzied part of you, the same one that had slipped it on and hugged it close to your heart, refused to yank it off. It was another you—not her nor you, but a new one that had fallen in love with him, Rooster, without memory or qualms, the one that had no issue with him lingering in every corner of your mind; no, in fact, she preferred it.
You don’t listen to her when the lieutenant pivots back to face you, a fresh pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and the rest sourced from the duffel bag in tow, one fist curled into his towel at his waist. His eyes land on yours, and your fingers slicken with the sweat of your palms, tremble like the thumps beneath your ribcage.
At the worst moment possible, you notice, in the hazy yellow light of 10:07 PM, that Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw’s eyes are achingly akin to whiskey. It’s the dark, thick kind that coats your tongue and hits you five seconds after you sip it like a freight train; heady, terribly intoxicating, and in large doses, coaxes out the worst side of yourself at an even worse moment.
The ring clinks against the bed’s metal framework before shuddering against the tile floor, and his eyes leave yours to watch it rattle. The skin of your left ring finger burns from the swift twisting and tugging you’d employed in a state of tipsy panic—your plan had been to slip the ring unnoticed beneath his leather jacket, the same place you’d stuffed the velvet box.
A breath tears itself out of the lieutenant’s chest. Tan skin rises and falls once, and his grip goes white-knuckle on his towel.
Then he pads back toward the bathroom without a word and disappears behind the slammed door. Somehow, in some terrible way, it is even harder to breathe with him not in the room after that.
But he bursts through the door a second later, completely negligent of the violent pacing of your heart, donned in clothes wrinkled and stretched in odd places from frantic dressing. He covers the distance with three long strides and slackens back into the plastic hospital chair, the heavy creases under his eyes never having looked so deep-seated.
You see it now. The damage this whole experience has done to him. He’s been hollowed out, rigorously gutted to the point that one last revelation might finally crack him in half and let the despair pour out.
You’re afraid to tell him all that you don’t know. That even though you had slid that ring on and off your finger, you still don’t know him. But, God, you want to tell him that you love him, despite knowing it won’t be enough. It’s not even enough to you, and it’s all that you have.
Usually, he wears this sheen layer of tenderness over his face; it slips off every night when you close your eyes, and he smooths it back on in the mornings in the mirror. Some days he layers it on so thick you never even notice the grief hidden underneath.
It must have gotten too heavy to bear.
The silence hangs just as heavy. He runs both hands down his face, pressing hard enough that his skin emerges pink, and folds his hands, knocking them against his lips. Veins in his eyes grow redder by the second, and your heart begins a slow crawl up your throat at the watery levels of his eyelines, waiting to spill. The ring sits on the floor untouched.
“Do you,” he faltered, clearing his throat. “Do you… remember anything?”
He’s looking at you so intensely that your skin is searing. Shame washes over you, grasping your shoulders and burying you deeply into its chest. You want to cry.
“Nothing.”
The lieutenant stares at you a second longer, stretching it out until you’re trembling. Then he looks away, down, before reaching and retrieving the ring from the ground. He observes it for just a second, the way it glimmers in night’s imperfect lighting, and his eyes squeeze shut.
Lieutenant Bradley Bradshaw, you’ve learned, will draw things out until the perfect moment has come. He will wait until the ache swells and culminates, with a tolerance so inexhaustible you wonder if, in all your time loving him, you ever bothered to wait up. He’s noticed how the darkness has swallowed both of you wholly, and only now does he offer reprieve.
Bradley tells you your name.
And he tells you that he’s been in love with you since the first second he saw you.
He tells you that he can’t bear the thought of losing all that you’d had, and that his world had been crumbling apart before his own goddamned eyes ever since your jet’s engine had sputtered and died. He tells you that he’s so, so fucking sorry he couldn’t save you, sorry that your life ever got entangled so messily with his in the first place, and even more sorry that he’s so useless to help you find your way back, that you can’t seem to find your way back to him.
And when you began to cry, he bolted up from his seat and held you, whispering apologies into your hair, and you cried a little harder, because you had found your way back to him, but he wouldn’t ever care, because it wasn’t the same path you’d taken before.
You cry because it hurts to hold him, and even more because it hurts him to hold you. You want all of the I-love-yous he’s ever said to be for you, and you want that damned ring too.
You want that goddamn ring on your finger right now because he’d promised you that it would be yours. That first moment he’d ever seen you, stumbling drunk in a crowded Hard Deck and spilling his beer half on his Hawaiian shirt, half on yours, that he’d make up for it by putting a spendy ring on your little finger right there, despite not actually knowing where right there was. The only one I’ll ever buy, he’d hiccuped, it’ll be yours, darlin’.
“Rooster,” you croaked into his chest. “Roo.”
A provoked sob tore from your throat, your arms and ribs aching from how tightly you clung to him, even after he froze. You surfaced from the curve of his shoulder, hands sliding past his sides, over his thrumming chest, and up to cradle his damp jawline before drawing his face down to yours. He mumbled your name, whiskey eyes potent as ever, and you smothered the rest of his question against your lips.
You couldn’t tell who was crying anymore. Your cheeks’ dampness was his, just the same as his lips pressed against yours so harshly, so numbingly you couldn’t quite tell where yours ended and his began. It must have been somewhere close to where his tongue met yours, making up for lost time as he fought hard and fiercely for everything he’d been starved of for three, going on four, unbearable days. His hands left their leverage against the bed and latched onto your hips, rough fingertips familiarly caressing the soft slopes of your sides, and when you offered an airy moan to him, he accepted eagerly with a tightening grip.
You separated from him with a small cry, ribs twinging. Bradley pulled away in horror, and his dilated pupils struggled to sober up to join. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, larger hands now grappling at yours and trying to remove your grasp. “You need—ice, I’ll go get you some ice–”
“Roo, no,” you mumbled, refusing to let go of him.
He paused, and his body shivered under your touch. The familiarity of his name from your mouth seemed as comforting to him as it was to you. His lips twitched and curled, and he breathed a small sigh. The hard lines of his face grew tender as he slid his hands down to your wrists, turning and pressing a kiss to each palm.
His heart jumped and throbbed against your fingertips, and you had no doubt he could feel the same from yours. The heat of his damp cheeks had grown infinitely warmer under your touch, and for all the nights you’d spent with just a grasp on his hand, the change was more and more welcome.
“Don’t leave me again,” he pleaded against the skin of your palm, voice thick and bittersweet, like honey seeping through your ears. “I don’t think I can handle that again.”
He steeled himself against your mattress with one hand when you tugged his forehead down against yours, lips just whispering against one another. You smiled.
“Was it all the Jell-O that did you in, or…?”
“Yeah, actually,” he nodded, tongue pressed against his cheek. “It was. I hope you know we’re never having Jell-O in our house ever again.”
“Not even lime?”
“Especially lime.”
You huffed, “Fine.” You pulled away, despite how desperate Bradley was to follow you. He let you fall back against the pillows with your hand still in his grasp, and he settled onto the edge of the mattress, letting his spare hand find home in the pliant skin of your thigh. Your eyes rose to the ceiling. “But it’ll cost you.”
Soft lips brushed the back of your left hand before cold metal slipped around your finger. “One of these?”
“Exactly.”
Bradley hummed. “Gladly.”
Rant time of the day.
So , I was running late to pick up this Lady that I babysit kid’s and I had to pick up one of her kids at the field house because she has practice for a sport there. I told her that I would be running twenty minutes late at first and she’s like and i quote “that’s not good.” I was hoping she’d atleast understand because you know, life. Because of that, I was like, okay I’ll be there in ten minutes then and hope I don’t run over anyone tonight because I’ll be flying. I typed in where I thought I was going to go and I was like okay, I should be there in about four minutes. I told her that and she’s like okay. So I go to where Google Maps tells me to go and then I was like, I’m in the dark and I’m by a bunch of apartments, this doesn’t look right. She calls with her daughter on the line and I was like i think i’m here, but I’m having trouble finding where it’s and she’s like, just look up the fieldhouse, they should have it on Google. I was like, okay. I unknowingly was like okay and then looked it up, turns out I went the wrong place and it was going to take me atleast six more minutes than I’d promised her. So I was like, okay; I’ll just need to drive really fast. Mind you, this was like at 7 at night and where I live is very dark at night-you’ll need to know that for later reference. So I go over to the actual destination. To make a long rant short, she kept calling me and asking if I was there yet, while I was driving. I mean, this lady had no chill. I was like chill out and calm down, I’ll pick up your kid when I pick up your kid. Im not going to abandon her like some idiot. I keep following where Maps was taking me and she like literally calls five minutes later and is like where the heck are you? You’re now going to be late to pick up so and so… and you need to plan ahead when you’re picking up children. I was like I know I’m sorry and life just gout in the way and I really can’t control that. I didn’t say that to her, it I was like I’m sorry. And so I keep driving around this dark area and hope I don’t hit anyone, all the while while I’m talking to her and she’s like gettin impatient with me, like really impatient with me. I even told her I was following Google maps and telling her it was telling me I was three minutes away and I even told her what freaking street I was on. Then she’s like and very rudely, I might add just go to the high school, can you do that? Drive to the High School. I was like, okay I can do that. So I drive to the high school because I at least know where that is in the dark corner of the town. I drive over there, but I don’t know how to get to the field house because I saw it(finally). Also, this lady is horrible at describing things and telling people where things are, so that was partly the reason why it was hard to figure out where the field house was. She never said anything about the field house being on school property and was all like it’s across from the high school. So I literally thought it was across from the high school. Also, again, Google maps was leading me somewhere entirely different. At this moment, I was like maybe ten minutes late picking up her daughter and she was being no freaking help and getting frustrated with me. Anyways, I go into school parking lot and I wait at the front. She freaking calls again and is like are you there yet? I was like, I’m in the parking lot, but like I can’t see her. Then she had the audacity to be like in a rude way go inside and go get her. She’s not going to know that you’re outside. That caught me off guard and then she started saying all these other things to me and at that moment, I was just ready to give up and tell this sassy and stuck up lady that I was done and she can pick up her own freaking child. Like atleast she should be grateful that I’m taking time out of my day to pick up your child who is probably spoiled because of you. I park and go inside and knock on the gym door because atleast they could help me a little better. A guy comes out and I was like, do you know how I get to the field house?
He didn’t really know, but if he could remember from previous times, there was a road that led to it and then he told me it was really new. That caught me off guard because she didn’t tell me and I had this thought that the reason why maps was leading me a different way because maybe they hadn’t updated the address to the NEW field house yet. That kind of made me frustrated and I was already frustrated because she was yelling at me and calling me every five minutes to see if I picked up her kid yet and the things she yelled at me were not very nice.
I literally broke down in front of this guy and told him about how I was going to be late to pick up someone. Atleast he had the compassion to tell me that he hopes my night gets better and I was like thanks. Anyways; after a few minutes of driving around trying to find a road in this dark area, I finally find a road and just go with it. She calls me a few more times and I just ignore it because I’m done dealing with her right now and she’s not helping me feel better about anything at all at this point.
I pick up the daughter and we finally pick up the son. While like back at the situation, all I’m thinking now is why couldn’t she just send her daughter’s number over SO HER DAUGHTER could give me instructions on where it’s actually at. That night too, to ease the pain on the children( I bought them McDonald’s with a card I had no money on. All the while, I kept thinking about the situation and it was just bad. I have never had anyone, except my mom get mad at me the way she did. Like she was treating me very disrespectfully and saying all these terrible things to me and making me feel stupid, when alone the place was dark and maps and wasn’t leading me the same way. It was a really bad night for me. I quit that job today and told her that my work basically needed me to start working on Fridays which is the day she usually has me watch her kids and that I couldn’t watch her kids anymore.
I literally don’t need that negative energy ever time she gets “a little” stressed(her words, not mine. Her: I was just a little stressed. Me: a little???? Girl….) in my life at the moment. Like I’m already stressed enough trying to get my Bachelors in Elementary Education, working one job and trying to find another job and working for Uber and Lyft just trying to make ends meet as it is and I have to pay freaking bills. I don’t need some stuck, blonde(forgive me. I’m not saying all blond haired people are mean. She particularly was.) haired crazy person to make me feel more stressed either. I also get it, when it comes to your kids, you want the best, but getting frustrated and getting mad at someone because you’re late picking up their kids and they aren’t doing it the way you want it is pretty ungrateful. Atleast I wasn’t going to abandon them and it’s not like I was just going to leave them there. They can wait for a little while while I try to find the place they are at so I can actually pick them up. When I was young, I had to wait like forty minutes or longer for my mom to pick me up because she was a registered nurse and let me tell you something, I lived and I turned out just fine and grateful even that my mom even picked me up. My mom is strict and sometimes when we missed the bus, she wouldn’t even pick us up and because she worked so much,sometimes she would forget and we had to find our own rides. Atleast your daughter didn’t have to find her own ride and knew exactly that I was picking her up.
She just made me mad and frustrated. Also, she has kids in their senior year of high school and you would think that she wouldn’t need a babysitter anymore for her younger ones because her older kids can watch them, but no. She lets her older kids do whatever the heck they want and they’re all out until atleast 11 to 13 almost every night doing heaven knows what, while I stay home and watch her younger kids and the house is always a mess when I come to watch her kids and she not only expects me to watch her kids, but freaking clean up after them too. These kids are old enough to clean up after themselves and I’m expected to clean up after them. They are between the ages of seven and fourteen. When I was six, my mom made me clean up after myself and if I didn’t, she’d spank me and show me some good, hard lovin’. Did. I mention most of her kids talk back to her too and she lets them? If I talked back to my mom, I would get slapped. That’s what I meant by her kid being spoiled. It makes me wonder if her parents spoiled her when she was a kid to act out and lash at me the way she did. Anyways, sorry for the rant.
Also, nothing against white people, but since this sour moment with her in my life, she gave me the impression that a bunch of white people are superficial, but like they get mad easily and don’t have patience at all. Tell me I’m wrong. I hate having that biased notion. (If you didn’t guess, she’s white.) Because of this, the years that I spent and built up my trust in white people had crumbled and it’s kind of hard for me to trust white people again and look at them as an equal, like I used to. I really hope people are understanding and don’t take that last sentence the wrong way.(For anyone asking, Im apart of The Indigenous American tribe, called The Navajo Tribe/Diné Tribe)
Also, I’m back! And I’m writing again!!!!
I love helping out other fanfic writers!
I haven’t actually posted here in so long, but I have so much interest in writing for the top gun Maverick fandom, including reader inserts, and ships
Submit requests so I can get started!!!
Please reblog so I can find the right audience!!!
Fixing His Broken Heart Taglist
Hey y'all! There are so many people asking if they can be tagged in my new Hangman fanfic! To be honest, I never thought that this story would get this kind of recognition, but here we are. Thank you all so much for the likes, reblogs, and wonderful comments that you all left on my new fic! It means so much to me! So, in honor of that, I finally created a taglist for Fixing His Broken Heart. If you want to be added just click the link(hopefully it works; fingers crossed!) and sign yourself up. I also promise that I'll at least have the new chapter up by Sunday. If not, then Monday! So sorry about that! I just got home from college and am trying to unpack and get a new job to earn money to go back at the moment. My mom also wants to get me a new car, which I'm going to name "Hangman" because I'm in love with the godlike creature who plays him.
Link for Fixing His Broken Heart:
Anyways, while y'all are waiting, here's a gif of the devil himself.
A/N:(you didn't need to know this, but oh well) My computers name is Rooster 2.0 too; Rooroo for short.
