Prologue
4:50 PM, 8 September, 1990
Somewhere over southwestern Poland
How had it come to this?
He was a falling star, caught in a ball of flames plummeting to earth. As his vision blurred, and as the world spun and twisted through the dirty, cracked glass bubble he sat in, a tinny voice crackled through the radio.
"Alpha-green! Alpha-green! Come in! Alpha-green! For fuck's sake, fratello, come in!"
Slow-moving fingers probed a bloodied leg, in the general area of a torn hole in the skin. No pain. No feeling, in general. Either he had been hit in the spine by one of the heavy bullets from an enemy fighter, or he was too far gone to feel any pain.
His hands, covered in sticky red liquid and rapidly losing their feeling as well, shakily fumbled with the strap on his face mask. The rubber mouthpiece came away, and while the air the pilot breathed was thin and freezing, it tasted far sweeter than the chemical-tainted oxygen he had been sucking since his Tornado fighter had taken off early that morning.
The familiar voice continued to squawk, getting more and more hysterical. "Jesus Christ, Feliciano, pull the fuck up! Feli! Come in! Colonel Feliciano Vargas, you are not fucking dying on me!"
Lips chapped and bleeding from the cold formed a tired smile. "Ve, language, fratello," he weakly muttered into the radio. "Nonno taught us better than that."
"You're falling out of the fucking sky, and you're worried about my fucking language?" The last word was said as a sob.
Why was Lovino crying? the pilot thought. Why weren't the other fighter pilots in their squadron breaking in over the radio to give reports? And why was the ground chasing him? It was coming so... close...
"Fratello! Are you listening to me! Fratello!"
The buzzing voice in his ears slowly began to fade, as blood loss and G-force combined to begin eating away at the edges of his vision.
"Hey, Lovi," he choked out.
"What? What?"
"Stop cursing at Toni."
"What the fuck? What are you-"
The crackly voice faded away, along with all other sounds of the dying jet. The ground was rushing closer, as the plane's nose stabilized and shot towards the stony mountain. In the last seconds before impact, Feliciano Vargas felt he was no longer flying, but sitting on a cloud, like he had always dreamed of.
He was a boy again, sitting in his nonno's lap, listening to stories of Jupiter and Apollo and Minerva and all the other Roman gods, and then laughing and saying he wanted to make a bed of clouds like the ancient dieties had on Mount Olympus. He was listening to his grandfather laugh louder than him and say, "You will, Feli. I know you will."
Feliciano Vargas smiled and closed his eyes, thinking: Mission Accomplished.
He didn't even feel the crash.