Auggie Anderson disliked a lot of things (dryer lint, jury duty, Coke Zero), but nothing so much as flying. Specifically, flying to and from Iraq. The first time he'd flown into Iraq, he'd been sick as a dog. Motion sickness, food poisoning, a stomach virus, he didn't know what, but he'd spent the entire time with his head in a paper bag. The last time he'd flown home was a few days after his accident.

Today, he sat in the window seat, headphones on and Mingus cranked up, a mile in the sky with nothing separating him from his thoughts.

He thought about previous flights. The flight to Barcelona with Annie, when he'd gotten her to play I Spy for a full three minutes and forty-two seconds before she'd remembered who she was playing with, and fallen asleep on his shoulder. The flight from Barcelona to Eritrea, when he'd been a bundle of nerves, with Parker's engagement ring burning a hole in his jacket pocket. The flight home after the incident with the pirates, when he'd been so nervous about his relationship status that he'd actually engaged in conversation with the woman in the seat next to him just to get his mind off the events of that trip.

Parker loved airplanes. She always said she couldn't complain about something that allowed people to float in midair without needing wings or having their eyeballs pop out of their heads. She viewed planes as a marvel. A miracle. Auggie mentally added this to the list of reasons they wouldn't have worked out anyway, above "leaves her socks lying around where just anyone can slip on them" and below "dumped my sorry ass." That list had gotten him through some tough times. He guessed it was about 75 items long now, but he couldn't be sure.

Annie, on the other hand, was a vocal lover of travel and hater of airplanes. She always said it was not the getting there that was important and meaningful, it really was the destination, and she didn't like trains or cars or boats any better. She blamed the fact that not even blind people let her take window seats. At the time, Auggie had been sitting in the window seat, and had gestured toward the window. "Look at that!" She'd been so out of it that even after the I Spy thing, she'd looked. That earned him a punch in the arm.

He thought about his Proper Exit Battle Buddy, and the wife who said he was a different man after coming home from war. They were all different men. They all needed help, and friends and lovers and lives after going through what they went through. Auggie had gone through the list in all different orders. He'd started with lovers, then a life, then friends and finally, help. He was happier now than when he was bagging a different woman every night, because, and he meant this with minimal irony, after awhile they all started to look the same to him. He wondered what it would have been like if he hadn't been such a dog before he left for war. He had been this lively, buff, all-American guy before everything, and he didn't settle down. He didn't foresee the incident in Iraq, didn't think Superman would ever have to come home and learn how to be Clark Kent all over again. He wondered if he did have a wife before he left, what she'd think of him after he came back. He was such a bastard back then, she probably wouldn't have stayed. The wives rarely did.

He wondered if he was still a bastard, in his Clark Kent form. He hoped not. He thought about his purple heart. Where it was now. The specific location didn't matter... Maybe what he did was dumb or careless in the opinions of others, but he knew it was where it belonged. He had a feeling he was where he belonged.

He lay his head back and listened to the dulcet tones of Mingus and thought, as he often did, of the people he cared about. One topped the list. He hoped, for a fleeting but fervent moment, that this plane didn't go down on the way back to Dulles, because he never did get to tell her that thing he wanted to tell her in person. And it was time.

Boy, oh boy was it time.