He wasn't here for glory, or blood. He was here to do a job, plain and simple, and he was going to do it as well as he knew how.

Following through on that would have been a lot easier if second year had been safe and familiar like first year, but it wasn't. He was still allowed to keep up with his history classes, for which he was extraordinarily grateful, but everything else had changed completely.

There was sim time. And training missions. And common bunk rooms, which was perhaps the most difficult thing of all to get used to. Their instructors had said something about fostering togetherness or some such rot. Lee was of the opinion that they would all get along much better if they didn't have to live on top of each other. Although perhaps that was just him being bitter because he hadn't been put together with Kara.

Instead, he ended up bunked with three other second years. It almost drove him crazy the first few weeks, before he learned to cope. He'd never had roommates before. He'd never realized how incredibly fortunate he'd been.

He'd thought at the beginning that he might have a bit of trouble with his two male roommates. History lessons meant that he didn't have time to party, and they'd given him a hard time about it at first. Then Kara had taken them out for a night. Lee had no idea what she'd said to them, but it clearly left an impression, because they stopped ribbing him. She must have mentioned something about that day in hack and triad games, because both men had privately asked him for betting advice on more than one occasion.

His female roommate, Sam, was a different story. There was certainly no danger that she was going to heckle him. She was tiny, and bubbly, and perhaps a bit airheaded as well. Not at all a stereotypical viper jock, but she had quick reflexes and incredibly sharp eyes. She also had a bit of a crush on him. It was flattering the first few days, and then increasingly annoying after that.

The best way to establish the illusion of privacy in the bunkroom was to treat the flimsy bed curtains as if they were unbreachable, soundproof barriers. If your curtains were drawn, no one disturbed you. If for some reason they absolutely had to tell you something, yelling outside the curtain was acceptable. Opening it was not. Sam kept on opening his curtain. He'd tried, politely, to ask her to knock, but she'd just giggle and ignore him. He mentioned it to Kara, and she said something about him being a big boy, and more than capable of dealing with 90lb girls.

The next day though, after their pyramid game, she disappeared instead of waiting in line for the showers. Lee didn't think much of it until, finished with his own shower, he padded back to his bunkroom and opened the door to find Sam holding back his bedcurtain, and staring at his bunk in shock.

"Hey," came a low, inviting voice from his bed. "Looking for a good time?"

Lee broke out in goose bumps. Sam turned a deep red, squealed in horror, and almost ran into him in her haste to exit.

As soon as she was gone, he had a clear view of Kara, still sweaty from the match, lying on his bed nothing but shorts and a sports bra. He had intended to say "huh?" but the sound that came out of his mouth was stunned and garbled.

When she sauntered out of the room (he was fairly certain that was just to rile him up… she didn't normally walk like that did she? Or was it just that her stride looked different when her legs were barely covered?) one of his roommates gave a low whistle.

"I don't get it. You never go out. You don't even talk that much. How is it that you keep on getting all the girls?"

Lee might have protested, but his mind was still stuck on all that skin. "Just lucky, I guess" was the best that he could come up with.

It was the truth though. He was lucky. Especially since Kara wasn't just putting in a good word for him with the boys, or scaring off girls with lesbian innuendo, she was also helping him in the sims. And he needed it. Desperately.

-----------------------------------

Against all odds, she turned out to be a steady and patient teacher. Or, well, perhaps 'teacher' wasn't the right word, since she wasn't instructing so much as she was proselytizing: slowly and carefully revealing the sacred ways of flying. She loved to fly, put everything she had into it. Most other things she did, she did with bravado, shielding the fact that underneath she wasn't quite sure of herself. But flying was different. When she flew, she was sure. As if whatever it was that had given her reason to doubt herself (and after meeting Socrata Thrace, Lee had his suspicions) sloughed off her the moment she broke free of gravity.

Furthermore, she was devoted. He had expected her to fly by instinct, and look down on the mechanics and particulars as of little importance, but she said the words 'Pitch' and 'Yaw' with the same reverence and intimacy that she'd used when she recited the names of the gods. By midterm exams, he knew every part of a viper by heart.

He was still having trouble flying though. He wanted a steady point of reference, which was something that was hard to come by when he was flipping about in zero gravity. One day as he was failing at a simple obstacle course, Kara crammed herself into his sim cockpit so that she could see exactly how his hands were moving. She'd yelled, "bank left!" and he'd run right into an asteroid.

"Which left?!?" He'd yelled, frustrated and desperate. This course was on their midterm practicals, and he'd yet to get through it successfully.

"You only have one left, Lee."

"But then I flip over or switch directions, and it changes."

"No, it doesn't. Your left hand is still your left hand, no matter what position you happen to be in. This isn't Caprica. This isn't even a heliocentric universe. You can't fly with a compass. You're your own point of reference, Lee. You're standing still. Everything's revolving around you."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"There's no gravity. Direction at all makes no sense, so just bear with me here. You're standing still. You're pulling and pushing the world outside, bringing it forward and back, until you get where you want to be. Don't think of it as flying an obstacle course, think of the course as coming to you."

"I repeat, that doesn't make any…"

"Just try it."

And he had. And it had worked, after a fashion. His reaction times were still a little slow, and he mostly got through the course by following Kara's shouted instructions, but still. It was a hell of a lot better than anything he'd done up until that point.