1824 hours, and another Cylon attack. Lee's not sure which number this is, and he wonders if he should be alarmed that it's all routine by now. Expected. Sisyphus knowing that any minute now the rock is going to fall.
Scramble the Vipers, send out planes and pilots that've been stitched and patched together too many times. Sometimes he goes, sometimes he doesn't, depending how many bodies they need out there and how many are available. Thin line of succession for CAG, and it's weird, thinking his life is important beyond one firefight.
He goes this time, skips rungs on the ladder to jump into the cockpit. Fastens his helmet as the crew fastens the cockpit hatch – hiss of pressurized air – and he's wheeled out onto the strip to wait the few seconds of eternity for launch.
Not long into War College he'd tried to imagine life in another place, in the private sector, with taxes and a dog, and coming home in the evening to complain about the government.
He never could, never wanted to; he'd lived for the moment they pinned those Viper wings on his chest. Lived and breathed and bled for it, and he'd won them.
Dimly he hears the countdown start, and his heart falls into the cadence of the slow one-second rhythm, down from ten.
But this is really the moment he's lived for, in the dark recesses of his mind where he doesn't go too often, he thinks at Second Six: sighting down the launch tube, space a black dot at the end of it.
He wishes briefly his brother could have felt this, the dilation of the moments before launch, before going out to where the enemy waits. For him it's a traitorous thrill, curling low and hot in his gut, adrenaline sweet in his dry mouth, and he knows Zak would have embraced it.
But he never will, and it doesn't frakking matter that his father hadn't pulled strings for Zak, because the mere fact that the father owned the name William Adama was string enough.
And Lee, omnipotent older brother, couldn't call Zak back from that one launch, and too late he'd seen at the other end of the tunnel that maybe things didn't have to be the way they were. That had only made him angrier at his father, though; the bitterness had set in long before, when Zak had gotten into flight school and Lee – omniscient older brother – had known he shouldn't be there.
One a voice says over the intercom, and he's gone. He can feel the force of gravity pressing on him, pushing him back, a familiar hand on his chest and face, forceful, intimate, can imagine the howl of speed as the concentric triangles of the launch tube blur until in a heartbeat that snaps time back into a place where seconds are seconds again, he drops out into open space, winging away from the gravity well of Galactica and his father.
One of the earliest memories that had meant something to him had come from when he'd been eavesdropping on his mother talking with his Aunt Berenice, and Aunt Berenice – whose husband was an accountant – asked her sister if she wasn't afraid that Bill would die out there on one of those missions.
His mother had laughed at the question, but it was the tired, resigned laugh she had whenever her husband had done something – again – to disappoint her.
"Adama men don't die, honey," she'd told Aunt Berenice.
"They fly away."
His comrades are fanned out, Vipers dull white against the darkness. Starbuck, Hot Dog, and Strut (a recent ex-nugget and named that not because of his walk, but because of an unfortunate encounter with the drydock mounting of a Raptor), four of them against two Cylons, and he can see those, starlight silvering along the blades of the wings.
Before a mission there's always fear and uncertainty – am I really good enough – because he knows now that flying isn't in the blood. It's somewhere deeper, something elemental.
The heat of anticipation cools and settles down into calculation as he works out strategy in these last few blips before engagement. He calls out orders; for once, Starbuck makes a comment that's both sarcastic and agreeable, and Strut and Hot Dog call back their acknowledgments.
He's not like Kara, who blows smoke in death's face and prays to the gods in the same breath. She's found that deep place inside herself, that lets her do that.
Bright fire lances through his field of vision. He banks sharply, twisting over to port. Stabilizers keep him from pitching too dangerously, but giddy almost, he hangs at the point where his Viper could tip over into an out-of-control tumble to capsize or be blown to pieces, a bit of stellar wreckage.
The Viper hangs tough, and his fake tumble is enough to draw the Cylon in. He fires from the port wing, clips the Cylon hard enough to knock it off its stride, and in less than a heartbeat Kara's moving in for the kill, weapons a blaze of glory across Lee's canopy, and then the Cylon is nothing but fire and a puff of smoke and Starbuck's shriek is ear-splitting in his helmet mike.
"That's my boy!" she shouts, so loud the mike jitters with static.
Scary how she knows him, knows him at some level he doesn't even acknowledge to himself.
Calculated risk, he breathes into the echo of Starbuck's victory whoop, as his Viper rolls back to fly steady again. He wants to find his way back to steady, solid Lee Adama – who, suddenly, isn't so solid anymore.
But.
A few breaths separate him from the turn back to chase down the surviving Cylon, and the rush of survival and outdancing the enemy is still there, and he rides the dangerous edge of exuberance, balanced on the cliff looking out into that deep place, where he's certain what he is.