William "Husker" Adama dominated the skies in his Viper. Although still labeled a "rook" by Fleet standards, he turned more Cylons into space dust than any other pilot. He would be the hot-shot Viper jock drinking from Galactica's Top-Gun cup after this battle.

The battle raged around him. A thousand explosions pin-pricked the sky and their fire eclipsed the twinkle of distant stars. He knew his duty: find the enemy. They were at war. Insane or not, that was his mission. So he whipped the nose of his Viper around in a sharp one hundred eighty degree turn to check his six. Shoved backwards in his seat by the intensity of the g-forces, he could barely breathe. Only a rare Viper pilot could pull off the maneuver at full speed and not spin out or pass out from the intense force of inertia on the body. To Husker it was almost euphoric. The thrill, the speed, the power it all made him feel like Zeus. He sunk into a trance-like state, letting instinct take over.

His comm unit chirped to life and a woman's voice struggled to break through the static. His wingmate, he assumed, because his gut told him to trust her. Her familiar warm voice promised to stay beside him. He knew she'd been a good wingmate to him because he relied on her without a single doubt. What was her name?

Without thinking, he dodged the bullets flying his way. It would only take one lucky bullet against his fuel tank to turn him into part of the growing debris field around him. Lining up in his sights the Cylon Raiders who were harassing some Search-and-Rescue Raptors, he felt a tingling thrill race through his body all the way to the tips of his fingers gripping the trigger. He blew the Cylon SOBs to hell, more casualties of another battle.

What battle was this? He'd seen so many, and after experiencing over a hundred engagements, they blurred together. He'd lived through so much fighting and he lacked the clarity to bring each battle into focus. Looking out from his cockpit he noticed the reflection of the face of a young, unscared, brown-haired "rook" in the haziness of the cockpit's canopy and wondered how hundreds of battles weighed on such a young man. He felt burdened by so, so many things and it was easier to clear his head and chase Cylons through the skies. He ran from everything; he flew away from his life on Caprica and the father who didn't understand him, the wife who didn't love him, the sons who didn't forgive him, and a President who didn't survive for him. He frowned, trying to make sense of his thoughts and knowing he needed to remember something.

He listened to the comforting voice of his wingmate over the comms again. "Hold on."

He refocused—distractions got many a good pilot killed. To the left, a squadron of four Raiders barreled toward him as if they sensed the danger Husker posed. He twisted to port, bringing them into his crosshairs while dancing out of their firing solution. Those Cylons became part of the endless explosions in the orange and yellow cacophony outside his cockpit. He dodged around the debris with ease.

He handled his plane as if born to be a pilot, like flying was in his blood like cheap wine. Distracted for a moment, he frowned, trying to remember where he'd heard that line before. His lapsed concentration allowed a Cylon to saddle up behind him. Bullets whizzed past him.

"Someone's just trying to show me a good time," Husker drawled as DRADIS showed the Raider closing in on him, spraying bullets in his direction that forced him to bob and weave through the skies. "Well, I can dance too," he grinned. His alert gaze exuded focus as he oriented his bird and decided how to deal with his little buddy. They zigzagged past the mangled remains of enemies and comrades alike. Bullets rained past his Viper. Husker's world narrowed to himself and the machine trying to knock him off the board. The dogged pursuit pushed them to the edge of battle. 'Frakkin' toasters think they're getting clever—,' Husker mused, 'almost human.'

A few bullets ripped a hole in his wing and he swore up a storm in Tauron. He experimented with moving his stick, assessing the damage and noting some of his maneuvering ability had been shot to hell. Playtime's over, he decided. Sweat gathered in his flight suit as he let the Cylon close in on him. He arched his Viper out of the enemy's fire, all the while letting the distance between them shrink. The Cylon remained on his tail like a bad rash, promising death and vengeance for all the perceived wrongs humans inflicted upon its mechanical brethren, but he wasn't fated to die by a Cylon's hand.

Close enough. Husker cut the engines for less than half a second before firing them up again and spraying bullets into his would-be killer. The shots flew true. His friend exploded. A cloud of shrapnel and molten metal erupted in front of him, bigger than Husker expected and far too close. The shockwave smacked into his ship and the concussive force knocked him off balance, sending him spiraling toward the planet below. As his vision greyed out from the g's, he managed to fight the effect long enough to grab the ejection handle.

"Don't leave me!" his wingmate begged. Husker's body was thrown from the cockpit, and as the parachutes unfurled above him, he fell unconscious.

…

Husker struggled to consciousness from where he lay sprawled on the ground and pushed off his helmet with a grunt. Around him the icy wind bit into his face, spreading its cold to him. His flight suit protected him from most of the cold, but he shivered as snow fell against his neck and each breath of freezing air stung his lungs.

Not one of his finer landings, he decided, sitting up. Pain throbbed around his skull and there was a ringing in his ears, but if he walked away with nothing more than a concussion he'd count his lucky snowflakes. Cutting himself free from the deployed chute, he stood on unsteady legs. The crash must have done a number on his head, he realized, blinking a few times to bring the world into focus.

He observed his surroundings. A rook he might be, but whether in a Viper, Battlestar, or on foot, he knew that situational awareness remained one of the most important elements of military combat. As his instructors drilled into him: there was no use in being a sharpshooter who could hit the flashing red eye on a Centurion if its sneaky devil of a buddy snuck up behind and knocked him on his sorry human ass. Not today motherfrakkers, Husker thought and looked all around. Already humbled enough at having his Viper shot down, he wouldn't become easy target practice for Centurions.

He found no sign of an active Cylon presence, but the large buildings he crashed down beside seemed an immediate point of concern. He unholstered his gun, but no clanking metal came out to greet their uninvited guest.

This brought Husker to another element of military combat: good soldiers should commit all pre-flight briefings to memory even when preoccupied with eyeing the pretty blonde Raptor pilot. Hadn't he decided he preferred opinionated redheads. Husker cleared his head of redheaded distractions and recalled the information his CAG relayed from Fleet Intelligence. They believed there to be a Cylon research facility located on the surface of this hunk of ice that passed as a planet dedicated to creating a superweapon. Twelve years of brutal war later, the Twelve Colonies united with the signing of the Articles of Colonization, and the united Fleet developed Battlestars that turned the tide of war in the human's favor.

The idea of Cylons working on a superweapon made everyone's heads spin with doomsday scenarios. Husker knew their enemy would never be content to just wreck havoc on their worlds; they wanted humanity eradicated. A next-generation weapon system of that potentially devastating severity, worried Picon Fleet Headquarters who became hell-bent on ripping the planet out of Cylon hands.

Looks like these bastards are mine, Husker thought as he studied at the building - one of the uglier structures he'd seen. Cylons must have built the large structure out of the dullest concrete they could find. How could their logic algorithms conceive beauty? They lacked any appreciation for the detailed work of an artist, or the soft curves of a woman. Cylons lacked humanity—for now. Feeling a shudder run up his spine, he unclipped his handheld comm unit from his belt. As he studied the building, a headache throbbed between his ears and his sense of reality warped. For a moment, everything seemed not quite right, but something clicked. The creeping sense of familiarity was powerful, like a dream half-remembered. He'd lived through this moment before and seen this building. The sensation passed and Husker shook his head, he held up his comm unit.

"Galactica, Husker, come in," he said into the comm. He tried to raise his ship a few more times but only received cracked static in reply. Putting his ear closer to the speaker, he caught the feminine voice of his wingman breaking in and out of the static.

"...save him, doctor…"

"...can't promise…will work…" another voice said, rough and deeper than his girl's voice. Signals must be getting crossed, he assumed, and his comm was picking up on his wingman mounting a rescue effort. He chuckled. She'd rip the planet and any experimental Cylon labs on it apart in order to bring him home.

The building with its haunting familiarity called to him as if it dared him to come inside. Husker recalled the third thing the Fleet had taught him: when things evolved from a SNAFU to a TARFU, he needed to pull his boots up and still get his gods-forsaken job done. Crash landing behind enemy lines, in Husker's cocky opinion, did not constitute a full blown FUBAR for him. He could handle whatever lurked in that Cylon lab. He headed there. The Fleet needed to know what was inside.

Creeping through the building, the air pressed in from all directions as if telling him he should probably get out of there before he became another human spirited away by machines. He walked over the brown spots on the water-stained concrete floor. From above came an orange-hued light, which cast shadows on the abandoned equipment. He walked through the corridor, his gun raised and ready. He was going to find it, whatever the Cylons were working on. He edged closer and closer.

He stopped when he came to a doorway and looked around the large cage that barred him from entering. There were more cages inside and some bunks with chains welded to the wall beside them. A draft of air from the room caught him in the face and it reeked of fear and panic. He choked on the whiff of foul air and felt bile collecting in the back of his mouth. Then the rage hit. Holding his breath, he checked for survivors but found none. His eyes lingered on the stains faded to a rust-red in the room. His comm sparked to life again.

"...prognosis is grim…"

"...Cylons are built slightly better to endure than…blood also be blessed with heightened resistance to disease…"

"...have Sharon's permission to use Hera's blood…"

The three voices over his comm, not clear enough to understand fully, were enough to drag his focus away from the nightmarish room. He tore himself away from the door and moved down the hallway, stepping over fallen pipes and crushing broken glass under his boots. He guessed that the Cylons abandoned the place in a hurry and ripped whatever was useful out with little care to the building. He found more rooms, many of them labs with examination tables and restraints. Repulsed by the sight, he didn't enter a room with what looked to be human organs preserved in jars. Cylons had begun taking prisoners, a divergence from their earlier standard of leaving no survivors. His skin crawled. What the hell could they be working on, Husker wondered, appalled and angered at what he saw. White-knuckled from gripping his gun too hard, he gritted teeth and kept moving. All the while anger raged in him like acid, burning, slicing, potent.

One lab caught his attention and he moved in, doing a visual sweep of the room to confirm the lack of hostiles. His trigger finger twitched because after what he'd seen, he itched to put a few holes in some unlucky Cylons. The room offered him no targets. Instead computers lined the wall, their screens showing data picked up from the sensors and probes aimed toward the center of the room. There stood a pedestal with metal prongs clearly designed to hold up a small artifact. Now empty, Husker figured the Cylons must have grabbed it when they abandoned the facility. Well-lit and unstained, the room hummed with what seemed to be a different energy than all those previous labs, and Husker circled the central pedestal and gleaned what information he could.

It offered nothing remarkable, just a way to hold up whatever fascinated the Cylons, but the computers suggested that it once held something incredible. Data on the screens noted that whatever they'd been studying defied conventional analysis. It resembled no known form of energy and was made with an unknown substance. Possible research for their superweapon, he realized. He pulled a data disk from one of the many pockets on his uniform and pushed it into an access terminal.

"I hate computers," he muttered as he set the program to rip the computer's data over to his disk. Fleet Intelligence would love this. As the data downloaded, he looked around and noticed papers scattered on one of the desks. Most of them looked like printed data entries but there was a map marking out a place on Geminon and a scanned page from what looked like an old book. An illustration of a mythical-like figure surrounded by billowing mist rising from cracks in the ground. The woman raised her hands to the sky and seemed possessed by a power greater than her mortal form. He needed to remember something.

"...still might not remember, Madame President…"

"He's a fighter. He'll come back."

"Laura?" he whispered. For a moment, it hurt to breathe. He snatched the data disk from its terminal and moved out of the room before the walls seemed to close in around him. He stumbled through the hall and over its debris, putting distance between him and that room. The floor felt like it was falling out from underneath him. He moved down the hall, further away from the room. For a moment, he wondered if he was dreaming.

He entered the heart of the facility and his heart pounded in his chest but his blood ran cold. His eyes travelled from the vivisected, amputated limbs of humans to the tables and the cages. His stomach curdled like he'd swallowed sour milk. The air felt heavy and hot. Sweat gathered on his brow and dripped into his eyes, but the sting couldn't cause him to look away. It was a room of horrors, and for a moment he could see the people and hear the tortured screams of prisoners. The echo faded.

He edged forward toward the center of the room. He stood over a basin that contained water that was tinged with red. Compelled by a force he didn't understand, he reached into the liquid but there was nothing there. He looked around the room again and a human hand burst from the goo and grabbed onto him with an iron grip.

Husker struggled to break away and an old man sat slowly up from the liquid. He appeared ancient, but the man's grip remained unbroken. He looked at the tubes protruding out from the man, where metal and flesh fused together. He felt disgusted at the Cylon abomination clutching him. He brought his sidearm up and took aim, but when he squeezed the trigger nothing happened.

"What is this?" he demanded.

"Memory, reality, and dream—all the same, all different, all together. Don't you remember?" Husker felt like he should, and strained to reach for the hazy images at the edge of his mind. He pulled against the hand gripping him. As the memories took shape he stopped struggling as confusion took over.

"I've been here before."

"And you've returned again, William Adama. I've been waiting for you a long time."

"You told me something." Husker tried to remember, but it didn't make sense—a voice from a man there but not there and echoes of the past. His head hurt.

"'All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.' And so you live the Cycle again. I can see it all as the stream turns into the river and becomes the sea, always flowing. The pain of revelation brings new clarity. In the midst of loss you find her again and in the midst of confusion you find what you seek."

Below the surface of the water, a light glowed where the old man clutched a sphere in his hand. Husker stared at the orb as the man continued to speak.

"On the day you have everything you remember when you had nothing. You have a question to answer, Adama, one of the oldest in the universe, one I asked you before. You know the answer. Did you make the most of loving her?" the Hybrid challenged.

Adama felt his heart constrict in his chest when he thought about the question. He heard the woman's voice over the comm again, gently pleading for him to come back.

"Yes," he admitted softly. He knew, on some instinctive level, that he'd loved her as she deserved. He may not remember the details, but yes all the same. Yes to her. Yes to their children. Yes to their life and this unknown future he'd been gifted, even if he never fully understood how it came to be. Yes, because he knew how grateful and peaceful he felt every time her voice came over the comm.

The Hybrid closed his eyes and the room began to fade around them. "There's laughter in an autumn breeze, and a smile in the sun. Moments captured in amber, and memory locked in the heart. In the mountains there's a stream of water clear as glass, and a small cabin built there. The water is lapping with low sounds by the shore. There's peace there. Wake up Adama, and tell her what you remembered."

...

Something burned through his veins, and Bill awoke twisting in agony. He was surrounded by beeping, voices, and alarms. Bright lights blinded him to his surroundings.

An urgent voice penetrated through the fog, "Damn, he's convulsing. Get me 10cc of Ketracel!"

Someone screamed for a nurse.

"Admiral, you are in sickbay, please try to relax. You are safe. We found a cure."

He tried to speak, wanting to know what happened. His body felt like a Viper landed on it. Panic arose again in him. More beeping. What was in his blood? It burned.

"We need to stabilize his heart rate! Admiral, please try to breathe."

"Doctor, he's going to go into cardiac arrest!"

"Get me…"

A shadow fell over the bed, blocking the unforgiving light.

"Bill," the familiar voice spoke. He felt warm fingers interlacing with his, anchoring him. "Everything is going to be alright, I promise." She would not lie to him. He trusted her. He loved her.

He held tightly onto her hand. In his mind he remembered how her face looked, set with determination as she told him they needed to run. He watched her lead the Quorum with dignity and grace. He stroked her newly bald head as she cried in his arms. She wore a red dress and laughed. He saw a grave. Darkness encroached once again.

"Rest Bill, I'll be here when you wake up," she promised, still holding him. His fingers tightened. His saw his fingers intertwined with hers, resting on each side of her head as she grinned from under him. Her arms held a small infant up for him to take. Images flashed through his mind: three boys, first steps, birthdays, shoreleaves, boxing, pillow forts, books, candlelit dinners, then another newborn in the arms of her weary mother who rested against him in a Raptor—bringing forth life in the place she'd once died. He remembered how they found their way from the lonely places they'd been, through trauma, loss, and danger, into this life. His heart warmed as he remembered everything miraculous in this lifetime. Comforted, he relaxed and let the sedatives do their work.

She was here. When he awoke, all would be well.

...

Bill woke up gradually. The stinging odor of antiseptic gel filled his nose when he inhaled. Underneath that, the stink of cigarette smoke was vaguely nauseating—the smell of Galactica's sickbay. He carefully opened his eyes and found the lighting subdued and his head significantly clearer. It must be the night shift. Much of his body throbbed with a dull ache, but the searing agony had left him.

He tried to wriggle his fingers to feel for his wedding ring, but there was something on top of his left hand. With small, careful movements he looked up to see what caused the pressure on his hand. He was met with the sight of unruly red hair tumbling around where a woman slept on his hand.

"Laura," he breathed, and then he remembered the facts he'd recited over the past few days. One, he'd been very sick; two, they'd gone back in time; three, he'd had amnesia; and four, he'd married Laura Roslin.

She must have dozed off keeping watch over him. Her head rested, at what looked to be a very uncomfortable angle, against his midsection. Even in her sleep, she looked exhausted with shadows under her eyes. He raised his free hand to touch her, and gently brushed his thumb across her cheek. He traced the path of dried tears.

She stirred and blinked awake. Her green eyes met his blue ones.

"Bill?" There were a hundred questions in his name. Are you alright? Do you remember? Are we still a family? Do you still love me?

She leaned up and kept herself composed and he admired her strength. Bill decided there could be no version of reality in which he doesn't come to love this woman. He smiled at her, one of his rare tender smiles, and he watched as her breath caught in her throat.

"I'm here, Laura," he promised and let her see the truth in his eyes. He threaded his fingers through her hair, guiding her cheek to his chest so he could wrap his arms around her. She slid her hand over his chest to rest above his beating heart. Settled against him, he held her tight and let her feel how loved she was.

"I'll never be free of her, nor do I want to be. For she is what I am, all that is, should always be," he said in a soft gravelly voice. He felt her fingers curl into his shirt as she held on for dear life.

"Laura, I remember everything. And I know where the orb is."

…

Author's note: First, a big thank you to my guest reviewers! I can't reply to you personally like I try to with signed-in reviews, but I love seeing your reactions. Second, I'm getting back on a faster posting schedule. So the disease/coma/amnesia kinda had to happen because it brought Adama, in his mind, back to the Hybrid and Operation Raptor Talon. I hope ya'll enjoyed Husker.