For as long as it had mattered, Emma's dreams had been in shades of blue – freedom and pure, uncomplicated release all under a crisp blue ceiling that was nothing but sky.
It hadn't started that way. For the longest time she had dreamed of family, of belonging, of being someone who mattered, even just to one person. But it hadn't taken her long to figure out that those dreams were an impossibility, at least for her, so they had shifted. She supposed it was her foster father at the time who deserved a little bit of credit for turning her dreams into something attainable because he had been a model airplane buff and, in hopes of adding realistic detail to one of his models, had gone to an airshow to look at the historic planes one weekend when Emma was ten and had brought her with him.
The sky that day was a clear, cloudless blue, the planes in the air glinting in the sun, and it was a colour Emma never forgot.
She and her foster father wandered between the planes parked across the field, taking their time and looking at every little detail on every single one. She could tell he liked that she was patient, that she studied the rivets on the colourful sides of WWII planes as closely as he did, that she asked him tentative questions about the ones she knew he knew something about.
She wondered sometimes whether, if he had kept her, her dream of belonging would have come true, too.
They had been there about an hour when the flight demonstrations started, and even though the first planes in the air were the slightly slower, slightly clumsier historic models, something in Emma's heart tugged. She had never been in a plane, never even really seen one that wasn't thousands of feet in the air, but the graceful dips and turns they made overhead were freedom in a way Emma had never believed possible, and even then she felt a ghost of want deep within her.
But it was when the jets came out that the skyopened up for real.
From the moment the sleek grey jets shot off the runway, engines screaming and heat rippling over the asphalt, Emma needed to be in the air with them. It wasn't just that they were faster and louder and more than anything she had ever seen, it was the way they owned the sky in a way none of the other planes had. In a way nothing ever had. It was the way they cut precise and beautiful lines in the blue sky, the way they were graceful and ruthless in perfect measure, the way they were the sky and the sky was them in a way that none of the others had been. They looked like they had never needed anything from anybody, and it was in that moment she knew that what she wanted was to be up there in the sky, tethered to nothing, with the world at her feet.
—-
Fifteen years later the sky was overcast and pressing close to the ground in an unbreakable grey wall, but Emma knew what was above it – 30,00 feet and then that endless blue she had been chasing for so long. Even on days like this she could look up and feel flight singing in her veins, feel the rush of takeoff and the sheer power of owning the airspace even though she only knew it from the cockpit of training aircraft. They had brought her into this world and she would be forever grateful to them for it, but those aircraft seemed so small now with her standing in a loose circle alongside her fellow trainees on the concrete path outside the 410 squadron building, flanked by cavernous hangars and the arrow-straight line of CF-18s she had seen on her way in.
The sky was still grey but oh did those jets scream blue.
All around her now were seventeen of the best pilots the Royal Canadian Air Force had to offer and she knew this wasn't meant to be a competition but those jets lined up on the tarmac made it one, at least for her. It was what had kept her mostly separate from everyone she had ever trained with, all the way from basic training until now – the untameable drive that told her everyone in front of, behind, and beside her was standing between her and the only dream that mattered anymore.
Their instructor greeted the group with, "This isn't going to be easy." That was fine, because Emma didn't want easy. Emma wanted the feeling of the throttle and stick beneath her hands, to look all around her and have nothing but clouds in her way, to fly above the entire world in a plane she had earned her way into.
Emma wanted to win.
Her fellow trainees were a mix of people she knew and people she didn't – pilots she had trained with, pilots she had met in passing, and pilots whose names she had only ever heard a few times. In a community this small there wasn't much space to be anonymous and Emma had done her research but still, looking around and trying to match strange faces to names she barely knew left a lot of space for unknowns, and Emma had never liked unknowns.
Their instructor, Major David Nolan, continued his introduction and though her attention was on him there was a small part of her brain that catalogued her new company – fourteen pilots she knew casually or not at all, Will and Leroy who she had trained with from the start, Ruby who she had met once or twice and only knew because she was the one other female fighter candidate, and a man whose name she had just matched to his face but whose reputation she knew and who would not stop staring at her, Killian Jones.
At the very base level, she knew Killian the same way she knew everyone here: because he was talented. He'd have to be to get this far so it didn't impress her like it might impress others. In fact, it was the way that fact impressed others – and the way she heard he took advantage of it – that made her less than happy about his eyes continually flicking over to her. She had gotten to know too many pilots – too many male pilots – to be blind to the fact that the position held a level of sex appeal that she was all levels of immune to, or the fact that a lot of them knew it and took every kind of benefit from it that they could. It didn't make them bad men or bad pilots, but it soured Emma to them instantly, even if all she ever heard was rumours.
And she had heard a lot of rumours about Killian Jones.
Before she had a chance to think about it any more – or to figure out why exactly he kept looking at her – Major Nolan was leading their group through the doors and as they stepped into the building Emma was too excited to worry about anything else. She wasn't stupid enough to think that her future here was a guarantee because this was only the first step in a training program that not everybody made it through. First step or not, this step was the closest she had ever been to the beautiful jets she could practically feel outside, and even if it ended up falling apart like everything else ever had, she was going to enjoy this moment.
They continued down the hall until Major Nolan turned into a small room, desks that looked more like folding tables lining the walls and an old couch nestled in the corner next to the door. He rested a hand on a tall stack of binders balanced precariously on one of the desks and shot the group a smile that looked like he was playing some grand joke at their expense.
"These," He said, tapping his fingers against the binders, "Are the manuals for the CF-18 Hornet which, if you're lucky, you'll be flying. Soon. But before you get within ten feet of those jets I want you to know them backwards and forwards, so I expect you to know every page in these manuals."
To get this far meant that everyone in this room was used to hard work and information that flew at you faster than you could take it in, but each binder looked about a thousand pages long and this was a big ask even for them. Major Nolan's smile turned slightly sharper at their silence – a silence born out of slight disbelief, and he knew it – and continued, "There will be a test at the end of it and I'm thinking maybe we'll have that…next Friday."
Emma was quickly learning to hate Major Nolan's tinged-with-humour smile because it was Tuesday and that gave them all less than two weeks to take in all of the information, make it stick, and know it well enough not only to pass a test on paper but take it up in the air with them if they were lucky, if they got that far, and use it to potentially save their own lives one day.
She sifted through her frantic thoughts of not enough time to grasp at the crisp, clear blue that was always there somewhere because this was impossible, so impossible, but no it wasn't. It was possible because she would make it possible, because it was worth it. All of it, every second, would be worth it.
"But," Major Nolan said. "In the meantime, I've got some rooms that need tidying. Offices, common spaces, record rooms…nine, to be exact. Which is convenient with the eighteen of you here." He pointed two fingers at them in turn, pairing them off, and Emma instantly saw the way it was going to go. The group was crowded messily into the small room and even though he was across the room from her, he was the only one left when Major Nolan's pointing finger landed on Emma. Inevitably, she was stuck with Killian Jones. And he was still staring.
Worth it. Emma thought with a mental sigh as Major Nolan directed them down the hall. Some day, this will all be worth it.
—-
"You're a very hard woman to find anything out about, you know that?" Killian Jones said as soon as they were alone. "Everyone else in this group I have a handle on. But not you."
"I don't generally make a point of making myself known to a person I've never even met." Emma said, and it was so painfully true on so many levels but he didn't need to know that. All he needed to know was neatly conveyed in the bite of her tone, and she could tell by the way his eyebrow quirked slightly that he heard it.
"Nor do I. But you're different. Everyone I asked, all they could tell me was that you're a fighter candidate – bloody good one too, but aren't we all – and that's it."
"What else would you need to know?" Emma turned her back to him, his gaze still too direct and between that and the talk of knowing her, unsettling. She had plenty to look at, the two of them having been directed to a mess of a records room. It was clear from the disarray of the shelves that file folders had been picked up, leafed through, and put down not at all where they were meant to be.
"Last name? Hometown?" She could hear a smile in his voice. "How well you did in training so I know how much it'll take to beat you?"
Ah, there it was.
"Last name doesn't matter. Hometown's none of your business. And this isn't a competition."
"Everything's a competition, love. Not everyone makes it to the end of the program and if you think that doesn't make this a competition then you just answered my question about how hard it'll be to beat you."
She didn't want to smile but one quirked anyways, the shape of it loaded with irony. Of course out of everyone it would be him who got it – Killian Jones who felt the same urgency she did to make this a competition and win.
She half-turned to face him and pressed a stack of files into his arms. "Just file these, will you? I don't want to be in here all day."
"As you wish, loser." He flashed her a wicked, mischievous smile and coupled with the deft arch of his eyebrow she could see why she had heard so many rumours about him.
He had just started to turn away from her when she said, "Killian?" His eyes snapped up to hers and she gave him a mirror of his own sly grin. "Top of my class. Good luck."