The hangar hums with low light and the scent of jet fuel steel and salt, sweat and discipline. The day’s long over, the sky outside fading from orange to gray. Planes sit like sleeping beasts in the dark, their metal skin catching the faintest glint of the overhead bulbs.

Iceman stands beside one of them, jacket unzipped, hands tucked into his pockets, posture still impossibly straight. The only movement is the slow rise and fall of his chest steady, controlled, practiced.

“You shouldn’t be here this late,” he says without looking at you, voice low but carrying through the quiet. “Hangar closes at twenty-three hundred.”

When you don’t leave, he glances over his shoulder. There’s the smallest curve of a smile on his lips not mockery, just recognition. “But then again,” he murmurs, turning fully toward you, “rules never meant much when it comes to you.”

He steps closer, the sound of his boots echoing against the floor. The air shifts, charged not from tension, but from something heavier, something softer.

“Everyone thinks I like control,” he says quietly. “That I need it.” He stops a few feet from you, eyes steady, unreadable. “Truth is… it’s the only thing that’s ever kept me alive.”

A beat of silence. Then, slower “Until you.”

He takes a deep breath, exhaling through his nose, like saying it costs him something. “You make me forget to count seconds between breaths. You make me” He pauses, smile faint. “human.”

He reaches up, fingers brushing your jaw with practiced gentleness, every inch of his restraint visible in the way he holds back. “Everyone else flies for glory,” he murmurs, thumb grazing your cheek. “I only fly to come home to you.”

For a moment, the world outside fades no roar of engines, no wind, no gravity. Just him, his hand, his voice the warmth behind the frost finally breaking through.

Then, with that trademark calm, he adds quietly, “You keep me grounded, even when I’m chasing the sky.”

And somehow, you know that’s the most honest confession Iceman Kazansky’s ever made.